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Five Years’ Time

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Re: Five Years’ Time

#31

Post by pm »

dpeterson wrote: post #19
patio11 wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Okay.

Time does not equate to quality. Credentials do not equate to mastery. If shit's not working out for you, you're either ahead of your time or it's a shitty idea. Either way, the only person in control of your life is yourself.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#33

Post by [deleted] »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #7

Rejection letter from YC: > I’m sorry to say we decided not to fund you. We liked you as individuals but we had a hard time seeing how developer API documentation was the right beachhead. Perhaps I'm looking too much into it, it's just surprising to see, on the record, the polar opposite of what pg claimed on several occasions: people, not ideas. Or did I misunderstand it?

[deleted]

Re: Five Years’ Time

#34

Post by calpaterson »

gkoberger wrote: post #29
thebenedict wrote: post #28

I 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…

I work for an "ideas factory" and can confirm we have all of those problems.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#35

Post by [deleted] »

dpeterson wrote: post #19
patio11 wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: Five Years’ Time

#36

Post by btilly »

dpeterson wrote: post #19
patio11 wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Here is what I just heard from you.

I've done a lot of stuff that I think should give me what I want, and I don't have it yet. The world must be biased against me.

You just said that to a guy who managed to succeed in startups despite living in Japan, having an insane day job, AND whose CS credentials don't match yours. In short on every measure that you think matters, you're ahead of him. Except that he succeeded.

Now you have a choice. One choice is to continue moaning. The other is to start with articles he wrote like http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin... and see if you can figure out what actually matters instead of what you think should matter.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#37

Post by S4M »

dpeterson wrote: post #19
patio11 wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

What's your startup? How many users do you have? I you don't have any after 7 years, it's a bad sign - speaking as someone who has been working on his own startup for 8 months, without any user yet.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#38

Post by mechanical_fish »

bobbles wrote: post #16
dpeterson wrote: post #15

Do 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

Quite a few RIT grads have come through my employer's engineering teams. There seems to be, or have been, a program there in "network engineering" or something, which places a big emphasis on practical systems architecture and debugging. Its grads emerge full of stories about how hard it is to assemble and debug all the physical interconnects between the network switches in the server racks that you have to assemble before you graduate.

You want these people on your team.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#39

Post by smcl »

I'm impressed that an idea you had five years ago has sat there without anyone else thinking of it and delivering something in the meantime. Anything useful I get started on usually has someone launching a very slick VC-backed launch ~six months later and I just cannot compete (I don't have the time to dedicate to anything, nor the money to afford to not work for long enough)
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