Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 757 posts

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#601

Post by nostrademons »

kzhahou wrote: post #592
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convincing arguments have been made that it's usually a better idea that co-founders get equal equity than not, to prevent arguments about said split which are much more likely to doom your startup. It's like that point about arguments in a relationship: would you rather be right or be together? http://avc.com/2011/04/how-to-allocate-founder-and-employee-... Edit: I see you added that second paragraph after I wrote t…

Thanks for the link. > The founders should end up with about 50% of the company, total. Each of the next five layers should end up with about 10% of the company, split equally among everyone in the layer. This is the typical, and exploitative , arrangement in silicon valley! In today's climate, the founders often get money very early and start hiring right away. They have no real personal risk in the venture, and eve…

If you believe it's exploitative, why not take the other side of the trade? Go become a startup founder yourself.

Lots and lots of people in Silicon Valley do that, and ultimately, that's what's causes market correction. If there are way more startups out there than talented engineers capable of building products, then the engineers can negotiate a much better deal for themselves. Or they don't and go out of business, but if that's the case, then your initial assumption that they have no real personal risk in the venture doesn't hold.

I know a senior engineer (Boston area, not Silicon Valley) that's made multiple millions multiple times as an early employee. She comes in to startups after they've fucked up their v1 so badly that they can't bring it to market, negotiates a very sweet equity package, fixes the product, and then cashes out when they IPO or get bought.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#602

Post by encontreumnerd »

Hi Sam,

I have a startup in Brazil which is a marketplace for technical assistance. Within 5 months we have over 2k geeks (in 102 cities) and over 200 clients and we're only on MVP. Unfurtunately I cannot find my aquisition channel (also I'm not sure about the profile of my clients since they are very random). All the investors say's they'll invest only when we find this acquisition channel. Would you recommend me any cheap way to test my channels? We're running out of cash (which we have almost 0).

Thanks in advance

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#603

Post by [deleted] »

paul wrote: post #533
mbym wrote: post #207

Question 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…

[deleted]

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#604

Post by throwaway41597 »

abeppu wrote: post #407
sama wrote: post #349

Earlier 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,…

> When you work at a startup, you're acting like an investor but investing your time instead of your money. True, except: (a) An employee can probably only work for one startup at a time, and begins vesting after a year. That's like asking an investor to bet on at most 1 company per year. (b) Employers tend to give substantially less detailed information about their business, financials, etc to prospective employees…

Regarding (b): I think an employee working day to day gets a much better picture than investors. It requires time on the job, but my point is that it's not as one-sided as you make seem.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#605

Post by [deleted] »

hollerith wrote: post #215
sama wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counting companies that have raised with SAFEs but not equity rounds, probably about 250-300.

I hope this is not a dumb question, what method are you using the estimate the worth of the ones that have raised with SAFEs? If the answer is that you made guesses not backed by calculations, then how long have you been writing down your guesses, then going back periodically to compare them with valuations calculated from exits and equity rounds?

[deleted]

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#606

Post by revorad »

sama wrote: post #428
revorad wrote: post #183

Some of the advice YC partners give seems harmful because of survivorship bias (Basic for the Altair -> Microsoft). I've seen some people criticise you for it, but I've never seen any of you address it directly. Do you mind doing so now?

Most startups don't work--everyone understands the odds are long. What makes it worth it is that when they work, they really, really work. So we try to give advice about how to maybe become a huge company.

I understand your motivation. My point is that your advice on how to become a huge company seems a bit flawed - specifically because it ignores all the companies which failed even after following that advice.

Anyway, there is so little data on the topic that I don't feel anyone has good advice on it.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#607

Post by getsat »

physcab wrote: post #557
latj wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 $34k is about what you have to play with for investing, transportation, entertainment, fitness, saving, student loans, other debt

1br is around $3,000 now: https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...

100k = 25% marginal tax rate for Fed, but effective rate of 17.3% + 6.8% State tax rate = 24.13% = $24130 (assuming you are single)

  $100k:
  - $24.1k taxes
  - $36k rent
  - $12k food and misc
  -------------
  $27.9k
So you basically have $2,325 left over after expenses each month to play with.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#608

Post by hootener »

jpmcglone wrote: post #399
sama wrote: post #349

Earlier 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,…

I interviewed for a company once that had different kinds of offers, ranging from low-salary/high-equity, to high-salary/low-equity. I thought that was an interesting idea :D They had 5 options total, and the middle option wasn't awful. I'd like to see more of this in the valley.

We do this, but use a sliding scale. The middle of the scale is what's locally considered to be a fair salary and fair equity compensation for whatever role we're hiring for. The equity / salary offered at each end of the scale tends to fluctuate depending on the impact of the role.

So far it's worked out well. I think potential hires like the flexibility because it lets them optimize for larger short term gain (a higher salary) or a potentially larger long term gain (more equity if the company sells, IPOs, etc.)

Anecdotally it tends to make negotiations easier for us. We basically end up presenting the entire solution space we're willing to offer for the ''what's my salary and equity'' problem. With the extents known, negotiations tend to settle around some point within that solution space. Your mileage, of course, may vary, though.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#609

Post by arfliw »

lquist wrote: post #429

We are a bootstrapped ~2.5yr old company that is doing $5M in Revenue and ~$2M in PBT. We have fallen into a bit of a funk in the past 6-12M or so growth-wise and basically flat-lined. We are talking to a few funds to raise a ~$10M round (mostly secondary) to bring the PBT down to 0 and really swing for the fences. We've thought about applying to YC but the 7% seems high for us at this stage. Is YC interested in co-i…

sama said they don't do that but they actually did do exactly that with Quora. I guess they made an exception.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#610

Post by kirsty »

awalGarg wrote: post #243
sama wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course. We reimburse travel expenses for everyone who comes to interview with us, and I think it's shameful when other accelerators don't. I probably would not have interviewed at YC if I had to pay for the trip--I was super poor at the time.

Also, what if we cannot arrange for the trip initially...?

We never want there to be a situation where a founder doesn't come to an interview because of money (or any other) concerns. Contact us directly when we invite you to interview and we will do our best to help you.
Post reply on HN