111–120 of 120 posts
> "PG knew exactly what I wanted to do, it was the quickest anyone has grokked my idea. I could almost see this divide conquer algorithm working in his brain as he traversed the idea space, it was spectacular to behold." These PG hagiographies are getting good.
tl;dr; 1. Spent lots of time and money(thousands of pounds) trying to meet with CEO of hedge fund just to get one of the domains in their portfolio. 2. Failed. 3. Explained that he is co-founder of twillio europe. 4. Used above story as some kind of self proof of ability 5. Decided that he failed YC interview because of a silly mistake 6. Drew lots of lessons and conclusions. yawn
I'm kind-of amazed at how much this person was willing to spend at the drop of a hat. I see someone carelessly jumping on planes, spending thousands of dollars without blinking, and I start to wonder if the person may be bipolar and experiencing a manic episode.
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I'm kind-of amazed at how much this person was willing to spend at the drop of a hat. I see someone carelessly jumping on planes, spending thousands of dollars without blinking, and I start to wonder if the person may be bipolar and experiencing a manic episode.
I don't know why you were downvoted. It's obviously wrong to play pop psychologist from an internet article, but that could be an explanation - I know firsthand, several family members are bipolar and have done similarly money-disregarding stuff during a manic episode.
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Successful people have certainly failed, but spectacular failure isn't a particularly good sign of future success. You should only embrace failure if you are learning things . Successful people treat failures as the price of learning. I admire this guy's persistence, but not his incredible arrogance ("swaggadocio", "sound my huge balls made as I sauntered"), his poor risk/reward assessment, or his lack of lateral thi…
Failure as part of the hustle is not a learning process in the same way as a failed startup is. Sure, you can learn something, but if you aren't getting rejected often in sales, you're simply not trying hard enough.
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I guess the post can be seen as a cautionary tale about the dangers of spending too much time on your domain name and not enough on your product.
Not at all. As I state in the post, I think I spent too much time on preparing the product and not enough time on interview prep.
Your hypothesis seems to be that if only you had answered the one question right, then PG would have seen the beauty in your plan and let you in. But you followed up immediately with the answer. And then you sent them a link to an implemented feature, which they didn't bother to click on. Why would they ignore both followups if that was the one thing that kept out someone they otherwise saw as a promising candidate?
It would seem to me that the more plausible hypothesis is that PG still believes exactly what he told you: you haven't figured enough of the idea yet. And therefore, that it really wasn't about that particular question. I suspect you're fixating on that because it was the problem that you could see, and because it was a strong emotional experience.
When I've rejected job-seekers after interviews, it was never about them failing a particular question. It was about a pattern in the interview, generally a Dunning-Kruger failure in some key area. I think it speaks well of people when they follow up with, "Oh, I totally blanked on X, here's the correct answer." But that never makes a difference, because never blanking out for a moment is not one of the characteristics I'm hiring for, and the conscientiousness displayed in the followup was also visible in the interview.
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Good domains are valuable, so a few thousand pounds is a small amount to risk. Zap.com is a really good domain. His approach was smart. A billionaire is too busy to discuss the sale of a domain, but if you do manage to catch his interest, he may well give it to you free/cheap because it isn't an asset he spends time worrying about. I love the conservative objections here. Stunts like this only work if most people are…
> A billionaire is too busy to discuss the sale of a domain, but if you do manage to catch his interest, he may well give it to you free/cheap because it isn't an asset he spends time worrying about. From what I read, it was the hedge fund not the billionaire that had the domain. if that's the case, then the problem is that the fund is carrying the domain on their books for some value, say $100,000. If they give it a…
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> A billionaire is too busy to discuss the sale of a domain, but if you do manage to catch his interest, he may well give it to you free/cheap because it isn't an asset he spends time worrying about. From what I read, it was the hedge fund not the billionaire that had the domain. if that's the case, then the problem is that the fund is carrying the domain on their books for some value, say $100,000. If they give it a…
No real difference between the baller at his own hedge fund and the fund.
Remember the money isn't just the owners, it belongs to the limited partners, ie the people who put money into the fund.
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No real difference between the baller at his own hedge fund and the fund.
umm, I think you'd feel different if you were an investor in the fund and the principles just started giving your money away :) Remember the money isn't just the owners, it belongs to the limited partners, ie the people who put money into the fund.
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umm, I think you'd feel different if you were an investor in the fund and the principles just started giving your money away :) Remember the money isn't just the owners, it belongs to the limited partners, ie the people who put money into the fund.
He's already been investigated (or prosecuted, I forget) for expensing personal stuff at the fund. But really, it would be easy to consider it an investment, or buy the asset personally and then invest it personally. Whether or not a small asset like that is his personally or the fund's doesn't affect his decision making.
Are we still talking about the same thing here?
> or buy the asset personally and then invest it personally.
Yes he could obviously do this, but he can't just give part of hte funds assets away, which is what I was clarifying.
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Yes, though the problem they likely saw was he virtually has no product, business plan, nor seems interested in selling it as much as himself. Its a trope you see here in the post mortem after every YC season selection. "I hacked the process and all I got was this stinking blog post." Edit: This front-paging HN will more than likely land him a job somewhere, for better of for worse, and was likely his real goal in wr…
I'm not looking for a job.