Really interesting backstory, and congrats to @Greg and team for joining YC. Curious to know more how this worked out, since readme was gaining dev adoption pretty rapidly when they launched last fall.
Five Years’ Time
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Re: Five Years’ Time
#22This is a bit of a tangent, but I really wanted to comment on the product he is making. I have been using apiary.io, and I always felt that it was lacking in many aspects (versioning, ghetto note editor, parsing issues in the preview, etc...). I just discovered readme.io and played with it briefly and it has solved every issue that I had with apiary.io. I will definitely migrate over, but having to re-do all the docu…
We have had a very similar experience, and I was a paying customer the first day they launched. However, over the month of migrating documentation - we discovered a couple of areas really lacking:
1. Having to use JS too often and they only offered it in their higher plans,
2. surprisingly poor md support. I don't usually write markdown in visual blocks.
In the end, we built an aggregation of open-source tools to create something similar to the effect of readme - https://github.com/appbaseio/docbase. It uses github for markdown editing and versioning, flatdoc for rendering docs, and creates a beautiful single page routing for the doc. http://docs.appbase.io is using it.
Re: Five Years’ Time
#23Really interesting backstory, and congrats to @Greg and team for joining YC. Curious to know more how this worked out, since readme was gaining dev adoption pretty rapidly when they launched last fall.
It's going amazingly well so far. Demo day is this week!
Shoot me an email at greg@readme.io if you want to talk more
Re: Five Years’ Time
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people complain about privilege while others are out there putting in the hours. One gets to pick which group they belong to. He picked wisely.
Ha, talk to me when you are 34, have a CS undergrad, a Master in Software Engineering, spent every second of your life programming since 19 and have been working on your startup for over 7 years, then get rejected flat out from y-combinator.
So what have you learned from that? (genuinely asking, and besides the privilege bit)
Re: Five Years’ Time
#25Do these people not see how easy they have it? I am pretty sure no one would hire me at Mozilla with just php experience then get an interview with y-combinator without a product. I'm guessing he went to Stanford or some other Ivy League.
He went to http://www.rit.edu/ but I'm not sure where that fits on your exclusivity scale
Random side story: when I toured there when I was 18, my tour guide was severely depressed and told me not to go there. Before showing up we got pulled into a gas station and quickly left when we realized it was being robbed.
I never attended so I can't say if this is indicative or not of the school in general, but it's funny how much these first impressions completely changed my decision to apply!
Re: Five Years’ Time
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
He went to http://www.rit.edu/ but I'm not sure where that fits on your exclusivity scale
Random side story: when I toured there when I was 18, my tour guide was severely depressed and told me not to go there. Before showing up we got pulled into a gas station and quickly left when we realized it was being robbed. I never attended so I can't say if this is indicative or not of the school in general, but it's funny how much these first impressions completely changed my decision to apply!
I loved RIT, although a lot of people there really succumb to Seasonal Affective Disorder thanks to all the snow and cold.
The RIT I know is a bit more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHcIQgQnkU
Re: Five Years’ Time
#27The pedant in me wants to point out that the title should be "Five Years' Time".
This is one of those ones that everyone seems to get wrong - even otherwise very grammatical people. Even Hollywood gets it wrong: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313737/ (You'd think Hugh Grant, with an English degree from Oxford, would have known, noticed, or cared, but seemingly not...)
Re: Five Years’ Time
#28I appreciate the update on Phileas and Fogg! I remember seeing the launch on here a couple of years ago.
I'm curious about "idea factories are a dime a dozen, and nobody would want to work for one". I've turned down similar arrangements in the past because they felt vaguely sketchy, but didn't realize "idea factories" are common. What are the problems with them?
Re: Five Years’ Time
#29I appreciate the update on Phileas and Fogg! I remember seeing the launch on here a couple of years ago. I'm curious about "idea factories are a dime a dozen, and nobody would want to work for one". I've turned down similar arrangements in the past because they felt vaguely sketchy, but didn't realize "idea factories" are common. What are the problems with them?
I can only speculate, but here's a few of the issues I have with them:
* No incentive to see anything through, since there's always a "next idea"
* Lack of vision. Most of the good startups have someone with a general vision, which is impossible this way.
* Harder to recruit people since there's no core idea to get behind
* Since the only way these are funded is by a rich person (after all, no VC would ever invest in one), it's susceptible to the whims of said rich person.
* What happens if something becomes successful? How does equity/spinning out/etc work? And, if it spins out... all the revenue for the "factor" dries up.
Re: Five Years’ Time
#30This is a tremendously reassuring article for someone still in University wanting to build a company. There's always the question in the back of my mind "should I start now or get a few years experience?" and articles like this reassure that it's not too late if you need a couple of years to build skills.