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My Y Combinator experience

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Re: My Y Combinator experience

#131

Post by graeme »

david927 wrote: post #127
nostrademons wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did fund DropBox, which is also in the category of "There is a lot of X, there is no clear market for X, but here's a new way of doing things that may or may not work technically." Granted, I've heard that they almost turned him down (twice!), but they were at least open to the possibility of it working. I suspect that a lot of that is because Drew actually went to the trouble of building a video and getting a f…

I used to think of Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the future in revolutionary terms -- what Peter Thiel refers to as going from 0 to 1. Doug Englebart, Alan Kay and Xerox PARC, etc. Now when Silicon Valley talks about innovation, it's about making it so much easier to store files on a server and metrics to gauge product/market fit. There is nothing about DropBox that changed the world. Simply and sadly nothing .…

>There is nothing about DropBox that changed the world. Simply and sadly nothing.

This seems narrow minded. Dropbox completely changed how I use my computer. I use it every day and it's incredibly valuable. None of the competitors I looked at offer a similarly simple experience.

It's like wheels on a suitcase. Not a large innovation, but completely changed how people travel.

Gigantic innovations are great too, but there's no need to disparage things which radically change how people use devices.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#132

Post by nostrademons »

david927 wrote: post #127
nostrademons wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did fund DropBox, which is also in the category of "There is a lot of X, there is no clear market for X, but here's a new way of doing things that may or may not work technically." Granted, I've heard that they almost turned him down (twice!), but they were at least open to the possibility of it working. I suspect that a lot of that is because Drew actually went to the trouble of building a video and getting a f…

I used to think of Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the future in revolutionary terms -- what Peter Thiel refers to as going from 0 to 1. Doug Englebart, Alan Kay and Xerox PARC, etc. Now when Silicon Valley talks about innovation, it's about making it so much easier to store files on a server and metrics to gauge product/market fit. There is nothing about DropBox that changed the world. Simply and sadly nothing .…

You're moving the goalposts - your initial post was about hard technical innovation. Very often, the change in the world happens decades after the initial technical innovation, and is done by a different person or company.

You don't actually use a mouse or web browser made by Doug Engelbart, do you? Do you get paid to program in Smalltalk? And I bet your laptop says "Apple" and not "Xerox".

It took 20-40 years for these innovations to actually "change the world". Check back in a couple decades on the status of YC companies and see what the world looks like then.

(A bit more personally - I used to think of Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the future in revolutionary terms. Then I realized that I was wrong - not about Silicon Valley, but about how innovation happens. There's no such thing as a revolutionary invention made by a lone technical genius, a priori. Instead, there are environmental changes, often years after the fact, that make the original tinkering of someone who dared to be a little different seem amazingly prescient. You can't predict what these changes will be, but you can tinker and you can capitalize on the tinkering of others.)

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#133

Post by FeloniousHam »

david927 wrote: post #117
yuncun wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there such things as incubators for innovation? Example?

Yeah. In Europe there are incubators that are based, not on market demand but on technical innovation, and offer public money; no equity is taken.

What is the "success rate" (growth or just survival after the program) of these products/companies/ideas after incubation?

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#135

Post by jl »

nickbauman wrote: post #115
beambot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true... YC funds plenty of inventive companies (sometimes based on idea alone). Still, the onus is on the founders to articulate why they're the ones to pull it off and how their inventions could plausibly become billion dollar companies.

Can you name an example?

Bikanta, Ginko Bioworks, Helion, 20n, Farmlogs, uPower...

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#136

Post by jl »

sama wrote: post #87

first of all, we do care about great products. a lot. though we still try not to fund great products that we don't believe will become great businesses (there are many, many reasons why this might not be the case). it's critical to us you have some specific ideas about who your first customers will be. second, we often ask questions that are already covered in your application. the way you explain what you do is incr…

P.S. Carolynn Levy was in the interview and she is a 44-year-old woman. I'm not sure how she was mistaken for a young boy.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#137

Post by nickbauman »

nickbauman wrote: post #115
beambot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true... YC funds plenty of inventive companies (sometimes based on idea alone). Still, the onus is on the founders to articulate why they're the ones to pull it off and how their inventions could plausibly become billion dollar companies.

Can you name an example?

Still, these are unusual, not the typical YC, no?

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#138

Post by Mz »

I mostly skimmed. (I am supposed to be working right now.) My general impression of a lot of it: Wow, a whole lot of ego. Also: "Can you say Duke Nukem Forever?"

However, the closing list of YC frequently asked questions looks potentially useful:

  Y Combinator’s FAQ
  1.What are going to do?
  2.Potential Users?
  3.Obstacles in your path?
  4.What’s wrong with existing options?
  5.How you’ll overcame the barriers that allow existing options to stay bad?
  6.Who needs what you’re making?
  7.How do you know they need it?
  8.What are they doing now?
  9.What makes you different from existing options?
  10.Why isn’t someone already doing this?
  11.What obstacles will you face and how will you overcame them?
  12.How will customers/users find out about you?
  13.What resistance will they have to trying you?
  14.How will you overcome that resistance?
  15.What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
  16.What part of your project are you going to build first?
  17.Who is going to be your first paying customers?
  18.If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
  19.Why did you choose this idea?
  20.What have you learned so far from working on it?
  21.Six months from now, what’s going to be your biggest problem?
Edit: Whoops! Formatting

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#139

Post by dxbydt »

Can I ask you what is the point in airing this dirty laundry ? Even as a learning experience, it comes off pretty sour. Do you really want to be known forever as "creo ? oh those guys who trash talked yc ?" , because that's what happens.

Lemme air some clean laundry instead that might actually be useful to you guys.

2012 - am driving with a company co-founder who has just been accepted into YC. He points at an elephant logo on a building and says - "those guys! ridiculous! they have a billion dollar valuation! what did they do - put Notepad on the web ? what we are doing is a million times more complex."

He was ofcourse pointing to Evernote.

I gently told him that his company may be solving a problem million times more complex, but how many people wanted such a complicated solution ? 10 ? 1000 ? 1000 ? Maybe 10,000 ? There is a ceiling on any supercomplicated niche product you are building. Its now 2015, his company has about 5000 customers. So in 3 years they got to 5000. But Evernote has upwards of 100 million users, with its supersimple Notepad on the web product. So this yc company has now pivoted to building a specialized social network, and they already have a million+ users on that front. They'll probably keep the 5000-user supercomplicated business running, because its good money, but the focus will be on now growing the supersimple million user social network business.

A long time ago, we had a guest from Microsoft visiting our compiler theory class. He bemoaned that more people were using something called Microsoft Flight Simulator, which was just a stupid toy, compared to what his team was working on - the Microsoft Visual C Suite, which was such a sophisticated state of the art compiler.

Once again, how many people have a need for such a compiler, versus how many people want to just play video games ?

Focus also on customers, not just on the complexity of your technical problem space.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#140

Post by cmstoken »

charlesnw wrote: post #102
arethuza wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like "(Eclipse Holy God, you really just said Eclipse??)" really come across as pretty negative to me and I'm no big fan of Eclipse. All the questions asked seemed pretty reasonable to me - after all the person asking the questions is looking at it from a business rather than a technical perspective. If someone who is running a company can't adapt to the type of person asking the question then I would see that…

I actually would of reacted the exact same way. It's clear that this is a completely new dev environment and an intentional divorce from xcode/eclipse etc. The people interviewing couldn't get that. They showed zero understanding of the problem space. They were clearly stupid.

The people interviewing want to be educated on why the current solutions aren't good enough. Being snarky or dogmatic isn't a good way to educate someone who wants to learn. The founders could have done a better job.
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