My Y Combinator experience

I remember seeing Steve Jobs giving demos of Interface Builder at NeXT -- hey, drag and drop connections between objects! -- and, years later, nobody has solved it yet.

But as says, there may be many reasons why people could be reluctant to switch to your environment. You created a new programming language? I don't care about programming languages as much as having a good collection of libraries -- will I be able to find or convert the ones I need? How about the equivalent of ones like Beautiful Soup, or PIL, or even massaging UTF-8 strings? For reference, CPAN has over 144,000 Perl modules available.

Do I need your build servers to create an app, meaning if your company goes out of business, I'm out of luck? If Apple changes APIs, how long until you support them? Etc. Open sourcing will help.

I understand you're pre-release, and that the site is a placeholder. But you may want to address some of these questions in a FAQ. In any case, I applaud your effort. You're trying to create something new and powerful. Very few people have the courage and fortitude even to try.

UPDATE: I watched part of the video and it seems very GUI-based, so my question about programming languages and libraries doesn't seem relevant.

YC openly talks about how validating your idea and growing the business are big signals to them that you are worth the investment. But while that's the most common path, there are clearly alternatives. They are just giving advice on what might maximise your chances with them.

The creators should've treated YC like potential customers, not hoped for a technical endorsement or validation of their concept.

I made an effort to clarify there wasn't anything criminal about going from 1 to n, or with the companies that do that (such as Apple and potentially some of the YC companies). Sure, that can be part of the cycle. There's nothing wrong with "tinkering and ... capitalizing on the tinkering of others." There's a lot of money in that -- and YC is quite clear that that's what they're about. It's an accelerator for making money.

But it's not an incubator for innovation. It's not for those attempting to do something in the 0-to-1 space. But without those people, the 1-n's can't do much. Alan Kay famously asked on StackOverflow, "Has there been any new innovation since 1980?" and the answer was no.

Then we have to ask ourselves, "What happened in 1980?" Right? Where did it go wrong? I suspect that it is, at least partly, when the money exploded in a distributed way. There suddenly was a huge volume of customers asking to "get something working today, it doesn't matter how." Fast forward to today and we have -- at this moment -- hundreds of thousands of the developers, including some of our top minds, writing applications in HTML/CSS/Javascript, etc. And no one is laughing. Almost every app written today is on a huge, ludicrously stupid stack. And we smile and work hard to optimize it, without questioning the stack as a whole. Everyone is still trying to get 'something working today' because that's where the money is. At the last StrangeLoop there was only one presenter from the pre-1980's: Joe Armstrong. His talk? "We can do better" Everyone else's talk? "How to optimize or manage this part of the stack."

Doug Englebart's kids found out about his innovation from newspapers. He never talked about it. He said it was never about money or fame. Alan Kay is relatively unknown and relatively poor compared to people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who invented nothing but were better at marketing, and I don't think Alan cares. And isn't that the adult way? You give kids rewards: "Clean your room and you get a cookie." But as an adult, you just clean your room.

I think that before 1980, we got 0-to-1 revolutionary innovation because it was done for the reasons we do true science or art. It's not about childish rewards of money or fame. Artists/scientists don't do it for glory or gold. They do it because the mountain stands before them. Because they see a better world, they see something beautiful, and it pulls them forward.

1-Make something (a large enough number of) people want.

What YC wants to hear in the interview: who are these people?(show us you made an effort to find them) do they need what you are building?(show us you made an effort to find out) what are they doing now to get what they need?(show us you made an effort to find out) how is your solution much much better at helping them?(showing us who is begging you for your solution)

2-Make something that a small number of people absolutely love. (as apposed to something that a large number of people merely like)

What YC wants to hear in the interview: -Show us a small set of users that would absolutely love to use your solution.(i.e. who would get upset if you stopped building your solution)

3-Teams (and execution) matter more than ideas

What YC wants to hear in the interview: -Less focus on the technical merits of your idea/product and more focus on how you are getting users and the market you are targeting. If you did not give the right answers to items 1 and 2 above then clearly you are not the right team according to YC.(Note: If the product is highly technical you do need to show that you have a technical founder with the right skills. But that is not really the same thing as focusing on the technical details of the product)