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I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

news.ycombinator.com

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

#151

Post by DKnoll »

Alupis wrote: post #112

> I'm on a H1-b visa and I'm basically in prison I know this is an exaggeration, and I'm fully aware the current visa situation in the US could be better, but I really take issue with the sentiment of your statement. You're being afforded an enormous opportunity here, and should not compare it with being in a prison. Think about it -- you clearly decided your home country was not as conducive for building your future…

  Think about it -- you clearly decided your home country was not as conducive for building your future as the US may be
Hi, as a Canadian, I also take issue with your statement. Your ancestors came here for the same reason as him, and with far less scrutiny, same as mine, and were provided many benefits not recieved today, including land grants.

Why does a person migrating today deserve to be treated as second class?

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

#152

Post by elmar »

BrooklynRage wrote: post #90

When doing a hard tech startup, how can you show traction/product-market-fit to investors before your product is being sold? The cost of going from crude prototype to sellable product can easily be in the 6-figure range, so how do you break this Catch 22?

Personally I find that the application form is not adequate to "hard tech" companies.

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

#155

Post by kartayyar »

You mentioned that you are interested in AI.

Chris Dixon made an interesting post about how some AI ideas are better suited for bigger companies because of the data and compute needs.

http://cdixon.org/2015/02/01/the-ai-startup-idea-maze/amp/

What are your thoughts on what classes of AI problems are better for startups vs. big companies?

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

#156

Post by jackpirate »

sama wrote: post #142
Fede_V wrote: post #138

Hey Sam, semi technical question here. NIPS, ran an experiments a few years ago where for 10% of the papers they had two completely independent teams of reviewers assess papers and score them - the agreement between the teams was very low: http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html (barely better than chance, actually). Would you consider doing something similar for YC? Obviously, you already have multi…

We have multiple people review each application (except the very good/very bad ones) and we look at the cases where the assessments are very different. Some of the best companies have the most disagreement, which is why we have implemented our "strong yes" policy--if any single partner wants to fund a company, we fund it. It's much more important to our returns that we fund the next Airbnb than if we mistakenly fund…

This is a really uninformative answer. Every peer reviewed conference/journal also does this. The NIPS study was special because they did more. They ran a controlled experiment to determine the exact variance in acceptance rates and then published the results. The GP was asking you to repeat the NIPS experiment.

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

#158

Post by phibit »

Alupis wrote: post #112

> I'm on a H1-b visa and I'm basically in prison I know this is an exaggeration, and I'm fully aware the current visa situation in the US could be better, but I really take issue with the sentiment of your statement. You're being afforded an enormous opportunity here, and should not compare it with being in a prison. Think about it -- you clearly decided your home country was not as conducive for building your future…

+1 from someone who has been on H1-B, I recognize it as a great opportunity and privilege.

The option to return to my home country was never taken away from me, and at every step I knew I retained the freedom to simply quit my job and leave; I did not do that.

No, an H1-B does not afford you the privilege of switching jobs or careers easily. There's no reason to think it should, and that is made very clear during the application process.

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