hello sam How do you get the (gut) feeling that you should definitely invest in a particular idea (or company)? (how do you make such a decision)?
One thing I always think about is if I would take the CEO job at the company if they offered it to me.
I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
551–560 of 757 posts
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a personal choice for workers. If you're an engineer and you want a guaranteed $250k per year, go work for a financial firm. Nothing wrong with that decision. Everyone gets to make his or her own. Engineers at startups make $100k+, sometimes much more. I don't think people are being asked to subject themselves to unreasonable financial strain. It is indeed "maybe-someday" competition. When you work at a startup,…
>Engineers at startups make $100k+, sometimes much more. I don't think people are being asked to subject themselves to unreasonable financial strain. Is $100k enough for a person to live without roommates within 20-30 minutes commute from said startup? Eat healthy food? Pay student loans? Have health insurance and build savings? I'm not from the Bay Area- this is a serious question.
You can't do all these without roommates in San francisco (unless you have rent control pre 2011 or so) or Silicon Valley without roommates, but with roommates its manageable to a degree. Keep in mind "start up" can mean pretty radically different sizes with pretty radical mixes of base salary vs equity, later stage, bigger start ups (maybe more aptly, post product market fit, fast growing, privately held technology companies) can pay experienced engineers closer to $150k+ a year which even in an expensive area is a good amount of money. Even pretty small start ups tend to offer decent health care these days.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#553With 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…
I am an extremely patient investor. I just invested in a company that I believe will take 20-30 years to work. If reddit gets to a billion users, which I believe it will, the company will have many, many interesting monetizations opportunities. It's on its way to become one of the great monopolies of the web.
Why did Reddit's board appoint Ellen Pao as CEO when it was already known she had a high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit with Kleiner Perkins to deal with?
Many capable people could lead Reddit so why choose someone with highly visible distractions? For example, Ellen's husband has been accused of running a $140 million Ponzi scheme!
> "Users lash out at Reddit boss for ‘deleting’ posts on hubby’s lawsuit"
"Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher ran a hedge fund, Fletcher International, that is now bankrupt. He owes millions in unpaid legal bills and tax liens and the bankruptcy trustee described it as a Ponzi scheme.
Fletcher still owns several apartments in the storied Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side while his defunct fund owes more than $140 million in court judgments."
http://nypost.com/2015/03/18/users-lash-out-at-reddit-boss-f...
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#554Question re solo founders: "A startup is too much work for one person" and if you can't convince even one friend to join you, that doesn't speak well for your idea! On the other hand, a bad hire/partnership can ruin the company. YC gives signal it really prefers to look at teams than individual applications. Q: Do you have have advice or rules of thumb re how much time a solo founder should put into finding partner(s…
Please don't let the lack of a cofounder discourage you from applying. It's definitely a huge help to have a good cofounder, but we accept great founders regardless. There's a tendency for people to want to reduce the world to black-and-white rules like, "yc doesn't accept single founders", but it simply isn't true. We are specifically looking for outliers, so any such rule would be a huge mistake (because the big hi…
Thank you for that! What makes you believe that someone or something is an outlier? How much of it is a gut feeling versus observable data, for example?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#555Was there any instance where you based your judgement to fund a startup based on gut feeling (due to great founders or whatever...)?
I understand most applicants are great so it might be difficult to differentiate
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#556[deleted]
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a personal choice for workers. If you're an engineer and you want a guaranteed $250k per year, go work for a financial firm. Nothing wrong with that decision. Everyone gets to make his or her own. Engineers at startups make $100k+, sometimes much more. I don't think people are being asked to subject themselves to unreasonable financial strain. It is indeed "maybe-someday" competition. When you work at a startup,…
>Engineers at startups make $100k+, sometimes much more. I don't think people are being asked to subject themselves to unreasonable financial strain. Is $100k enough for a person to live without roommates within 20-30 minutes commute from said startup? Eat healthy food? Pay student loans? Have health insurance and build savings? I'm not from the Bay Area- this is a serious question.
Apartments in SF now are $1800 / studio - $2200 / 1br.
so...
$100k:
- $30k taxes
- $24k rent
- $12k food and misc
-------------
$34k
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#558Hi @sama,
Seeing the recent developments in driverless car, do you think human driving startups (ours is making money while making roads safer) are not interesting for the long term even if worldwide users adopt it today (96 countries after a Buzzfeed article only)?
Thanks.
Eduard.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#559[deleted]
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#560Could you comment on why start ups with remote teams anecdotally do poorly but many open source projects with very remote teams succeed? Do you see any tools on the horizon to help people coordinate remotely at a new level?
Most closed-source products have very different management styles than open-source products.
If you're interested in the topic, check out the book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" - it talks at length about the different styles of building products (Cathedral generally being closed-source stuff, while Bazaar is generally open-source)