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A New Venture Animal

paulgraham.com

31–40 of 64 posts

Re: A New Venture Animal

#31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much did your school pay your for your efforts there?

My grad school pays $25 per hour. I paid nothing for undergrad. This isn't atypical.

Not atypical but also not the majority. I don't think it's a stretch to say most people pay for grad school.

Re: A New Venture Animal

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My grad school pays $25 per hour. I paid nothing for undergrad. This isn't atypical.

Not atypical but also not the majority. I don't think it's a stretch to say most people pay for grad school.

It depends whether you're counting law school, business school, medical school, pharmacy school, nursing school, etc. as grad school. Among Hackers grad school is far more likely to be of the type "studying fractal patterns in African architecture while teaching two sections of introductory socio-cultural anthropology" Generally you pay through the nose for the first kind and they pay you (a little) to do the second kind.

It's amazing how few people know that if your PhD doesn't cost -$12,000 a year or less you really are not doing something right.

Re: A New Venture Animal

#34
I launched a start-up two months ago, and I can't agree more with Paul: it has become ridiculously inexpensive to do so. I considered chasing some VC funding, but then realized that all I need is a good idea and some time to focus on it; the VC's wouldn't have helped me with either one. As a matter of fact, even owning your own computing resources is unnecessary: check-out Amazon's cloud computing web services (our bill: <$100 / mth)!

Re: A New Venture Animal

#35
post #21
post #20

pg: But all it would have taken in the beginning would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the company could have died. Actually, it's even more interesting than that. Prior to AdWords (and, more importantly, the acquisition of Applied Semantics that gave them AdSense), Google did not have a real source of revenue. At all. Google Appliances were cute but negligible. Aft…

What was the idea of an intern? Ads were part of the plan from very early on. Also, AdSense predates the Applied Semantics aquisition.

OK, maybe not exactly an intern, but wasn't it some guy who would work for $.00?

Re: A New Venture Animal

#36
post #4

I propose "venture catapult" as a generic term for what YC does.

As long as we're naming things:

Y Combinator acts as a startup hearth — just a little bit of support from money, but included is an environment which promotes growth.

Re: A New Venture Animal

#39
post #21
post #20

pg: But all it would have taken in the beginning would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the company could have died. Actually, it's even more interesting than that. Prior to AdWords (and, more importantly, the acquisition of Applied Semantics that gave them AdSense), Google did not have a real source of revenue. At all. Google Appliances were cute but negligible. Aft…

What was the idea of an intern? Ads were part of the plan from very early on. Also, AdSense predates the Applied Semantics aquisition.

AdSense predates the Applied Semantics acquisition

That's not what your press release says: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/applied.html

What was the idea of an intern? The self-service approach to buying AdWords, IIRC. The mail-order lobster nonsense that led to the streamlining of the horribly broken logfile/MySQL system when it became popular. I may be confused -- 'intern' may be the wrong word.

But if you want an example of a 'tipping point' or a critical decision I can't think of much better than Google and their ad sales mechanism.

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