Paul Graham: Handling Investors (talk at Stanford 11 April 07)

YOU WROTE: "When I did my app, I really liked the last question which was to tell about something 'surprising' or 'amusing' that you had discovered. So I asked if they had had many good answers to that one. Paul said that there were some really good ones, but that inexplicably many had left that question blank! Then he chuckled and said "Actually, there was a guy who submitted this wonderful algorithm for wiping his ass.""

My co-founder and I answered the question as follows. "timach notes that time is expanding between The Big Bang and The Advent of Human Consciousness. These are the opposite poles of existence. This means that the mathematical model of physical time using the complete ordered field of real numbers is a misleading metaphor. What is great about mathematics is that it is a tinkertoy of metaphor, and thus offers unlimited possibilities for new metaphors. Rigor is the window through which intuition shines.

erdos2 discovered an enumeration formula for a class of combinatorial objects (the "almost-injective" functions) with the following decomposition: the formula is a sum of two terms, the first of which has a closed form representation as fixed sum of generalized hypergeometric functions and which is asymptotically significant; the second is provably not representable in closed form (hence there is no closed form enumeration formula for the almost injective functions), and asymptotically negligible. Moreover, the significant term is asymptotically equivalent to a simpler hypergeometric function, from which a limit probability distribution for the almost injective functions can be derived."

I wonder if these responses are far less memorable than a high quality ass wiping algorithm.

Sorry to threadjack, but what does this mean:

"timach notes that time is expanding between The Big Bang and The Advent of Human Consciousness. These are the opposite poles of existence."

I don't understand what you're trying to say by "time is expanding". It also seems to me like a rather anthropocentric view of the universe to put human consciousness at one "pole of existence". We've only observed a thin slice of existence thus far. If you could explain this, maybe I'd understand your following assertion that "the mathematical model of physical time using the complete ordered field of real numbers is a misleading metaphor".

I don't understand erdos2's discovery either, but I'll chalk that up to my complete ignorance when it comes to math.

Sure, that's (arguably) true within our observation. But I don't think you can claim to know what's going on outside the observable universe -- or even in the galaxy next door. Your statement is also not self-consistent because of this... we don't know what all the products resulting from the Big Bang are. Sure, we do know that our consciousness is a part of that. But even if you were to union together the observations and insights of every human consciousness that's ever existed, it's still only observed one thin slice of the products of the Big Bang (well, existence really). Don't fall prey to an anthropocentric view of the universe! And if we are going to rank the "interestingness" of events, I'd put the happy accident that started this evolutionary process that stumbled upon a fitness gradient giving human consciousness as higher than human consciousness itself. After all, at that point it's "just" a matter of using the fitness metric to wander through the state space.

Anyway, thanks for the explanation! I'm not going to respond to this thread further since this isn't the proper forum for philosophical flamewars. :)

"I'm debating whether it means there was something fundamentally wrong with my app or if it's something fixable."

The only way to know, for real, is to build it and see if people come. No investor, nor even an entrepreneur, can tell whether an idea will work just by looking at an application. They can only judge which ones are likely to work.

The point he was making there was that while VC's claim team quality is the highest priority, it's not (and most VC's are unable to accurately evaluate team quality anyways).

Regardless: Are you claiming that all VC funded companies have revenue at the time of funding? To my knowledge VCs fund many pre-revenue companies. That would indicate that at least for those deals revenue was not an important factor. A lot of laundromats have more revenue than many early stage startups and VCs aren't knocking on their doors.