271–280 of 757 posts
Does more than 1 partner review an application? and how do you maintain quality in screening applications and interview teams? Is recommendations from current partners have weight-age in the screening process (from instacart application hack)?
What is the ratio between the businesses that YC funds that have revenue and don't have revenue? What about having a significantly large amount of traction (i.e. few thousand users in the first week of beta)
This answer by Adam D'Angelo on Quora blows my mind: "What was hot in Silicon Valley in March 2013?" http://www.quora.com/What-was-hot-in-Silicon-Valley-in-March... Every one of those blew up. So I ask you the same question: What is hot in Silicon Valley in March, 2015?
Adam is super smart. In fact, I asked him for an updated list at dinner a couple of weeks ago and I predict he will be right again. I'm not going to share my list because I've found that people put too much stock in it. I don't mind talking about things like nuclear energy or biotech, because people are either going to start those companies or not. But I don't want to cause founders to start or stop working on specif…
Hey Sam, can you give please tell us about the time you, sama, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage?
Side question, mostly just for fun, have people's answers to that question ever been blatantly illegal?
Should people who have done 1, or 2, or 3 other programs still apply?
With you recently leading a round of investment for reddit, it seems you are quite optimistic about its success but as of late 2013 (and maybe now too), Reddit remains in red even after nearly a decade of its inception[1]. Reddit CEO once said, that ads are the reasons Digg failed[2], so I believe the site would be wary of using ads to the fullest. How do you think Reddit would become profitable and would be able to…
Also, if you don't use Alien Blue (the mobile app for Reddit) then you might not know they have been testing "Sponsored" posts. It didn't take a genius to know people would complain, but the ads are getting A LOT of pushback from users. I supposed you can put this in context and look at how Facebook gets crap for changing anything, but is this really the most creative idea Reddit can come up with to generate more rev…
I run Ad Block, but reddit ads are the least of my worries. Maybe I just don't use reddit as seriously as some other people do.
Hey Sam, can you give please tell us about the time you, sama, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage?
The competitor was a much larger and better funded company that had been around for years. I was a 20 year old CEO. Most big companies do not like to make risky decisions, so this was not entirely surprising.
We got this news at about 11 pm. The next morning at 6 am, I was on a flight to Orange County. I sat in the lobby until the guy responsible for the deal on their side walked in. He was polite but said the decision was made.
I convince him to look at our demo (in the past few days, we'd done some research to figure out exactly what features he really cared about). As soon as he saw it I knew we had a chance.
Ended up hanging around for about two weeks. Eventually, the other company overplayed their hand and we got the deal, and then the deals with every other major US telecom company.
This answer by Adam D'Angelo on Quora blows my mind: "What was hot in Silicon Valley in March 2013?" http://www.quora.com/What-was-hot-in-Silicon-Valley-in-March... Every one of those blew up. So I ask you the same question: What is hot in Silicon Valley in March, 2015?
Adam is super smart. In fact, I asked him for an updated list at dinner a couple of weeks ago and I predict he will be right again. I'm not going to share my list because I've found that people put too much stock in it. I don't mind talking about things like nuclear energy or biotech, because people are either going to start those companies or not. But I don't want to cause founders to start or stop working on specif…