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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

#164

Post by oplesoptimist »

johndoe42 wrote: post #144

Hello Sam, First, thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions. My question is about confidentiality of applications. Today I am working at a YC startup. I (and two other friends) have a project in mind. But what prevents me from applying to YC is the fear that my application would fall in the inbox of our founders. Obviously I would prefer our application to remain confidential until if they we get…

Oh man, I'm in the same situation, and I was kinda trying to not think about it! I'd assumed YC applications were a "safe" place? (No?)

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

#165

Post by sama »

mastratton3 wrote: post #131

In terms of "How will you make money", are you interested in the market for the initial product/use case or what we think the product can eventually grow into? ie: We think our total initial market has the potential to be around $30M/yr but can grow to take on other use cases.

Both. The best answer is something like "we have a path to be be doing enough revenue to cover our expenses in a year, but if things really work, here is how we could make $1B a year in 10 years."

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

#167

Post by RandomBK »

The YC application asks teams to discuss their current equity split / legal situation. What happens to teams who haven't figured that out, or are looking for advice on those matters from Ycombinator? Will an uncertain equity plan or organizational structure kill an otherwise exciting application, if they are open to advice?

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

#168

Post by dragonwriter »

sama wrote: post #142
suyash wrote: post #54

Hi Sama, You have a CS degree from Stanford and you're now running YC. Do you wish you had a MBA or management degree or some sort? How did you learn about management even at your previous startup? In general how do founders specially who come right out of college without business degree learn to manage team as a leader? Just wondering as I'm a programmer myself and would like to be in management role someday but don…

No, I don't (I don't have a CS degree either--I dropped out after two years). I'm skeptical about how much one actually learns in business school, and I think it's a bad investment of time and money. I think management is one of those things where you learn much more by actually doing it. That said, I don't manage much at YC. Part of what being a partner means is that you're at the point in your career where you don'…

> I'm skeptical about how much one actually learns in business school, and I think it's a bad investment of time and money.

From what I've seen (and I haven't myself gone to B school), I think the people who seem to get the most (in terms of apparent skill improvement) out of B school are the ones that do it while working in management; I think that the combination of theory and practice is probably valuable.

OTOH, a major purpose of B school (and this is true of many other areas of formal education) is credentialing, networking, and social signaling, which can be important to success independent of (even if it is taken by others as a sign of) actual skill development. So, it may be a mistake to assess the value to the student as simply being about what one actually learns.

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