I registered @paulg on Twitter and "vlad" on news.yc in 2007 when this website (news.ycombinator.com) was "Startup News". Besides flying to the US Naval Academy, my first domestic flight was to Y Combinator Startup School in 2007. As you can see in my video, it would be the day before my birthday. Also, I had an app-based business, and Max Levchin and Mark Zuckerberg were speakers.
Vladislav Yazhbin at Startup School with many early YC founders (Stanford, 2007):
https://vimeo.com/3170520
I don't know why I missed the talk by pg (Paul Graham) in 2005 when Y Combinator was founded, but I recorded videos in 2007 because I saw "Pirates of Silicon Valley" in high school about early days of Apple and Microsoft. It was obvious that my videos about Y Combinator could be valuable some day. And, I liked that Paul Graham studied art and programming with many people, while I had made a desktop product with paying customers all over the world. I even joined the companies that Y Combinator accelerated, Justin.tv in 2009 and DoorDash in 2020, to help them succeed.
I visited Boston in 1995 (to get an award in the Governor's Office for winning a poster design contest judged by reporters, politicians, and art critics). I visited Boston again in 2002 after 9/11 (September 11) for my US Citizenship. I applied to the US Naval Academy and was nominated by U.S. Congress, although I was already attending a two-year technical community college. I focused on programming, similar to MrBeast making videos while attending a community college. My college is where George Washington built the first federal armory for United States, but they did not have student email accounts.
In 2002, sitting in my Student President's office, I came up with the idea that I could verify students with the .edu domain name and I could make a website for my college. I was already Student President and already started a printed newspaper. Although each issue was funded with Student Activity fees, Student Activities Office wanted to review each article. However, an employee showed me she used "Black Planet" to share news, and MySpace and Facebook had not been invented yet. Unfortunately, I didn't want Student Activity Fees to be spent to buy server hardware and software because student had free personal @aol.com and @yahoo.com accounts already. I might have mentioned to a friend at Harvard University. Also, I worked as a high school volleyball official, therapeutic recreation aide at a nursing home (entertaining residents who have alzheimer's and dementia), and the campus police department on weekends. I also attended monthly meetings with other Student Presidents of Massachusetts public colleges.
In late 2003, I launched "assfirm" to find and watch items and pay later for merchants on eBay, Yahoo! and Overstock. It was a bootstrapped, paid app for middle-age users who bought physical items on their computers. This allowed me to market and support a product for people older than students but younger than nursing home residents.
In spring 2009, Sequoia was interviewing YC founders in the Mountain View office. I attended this event after arriving from the airport. I stayed in a Hacker House with some YC founders. I met new founders who were excited that I had "assfirm" as a company to buy physical products from merchants. I explained I wanted a name with A in the phonebook. I talked with Max Levchin (founder of PayPal and Slide) in the street in Palo Alto the same week. His next company was named "affirm" years later.
Apple liked the user experience design of my Windows app in 2008. My company "assfirm" was selected by Apple to be the first to make native apps for the App Store in March 2008 before App Store existed. (At Startup School 2008, I don't think anyone else had been selected). I joined UMass Amherst for degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. I proposed iPhone app designs for a Fortune 100 before I left to the four-year college, and built an app to track my phone's location as calendar events in university. I convinced the enterprise company and university to join Apple's corporate and education programs in 2008.
In summer 2009, I consulted at Justin.tv and co-founded "Hot Or Not Live" with Michael Seibel, Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Kyle Vogt. Michael Seibel said he wanted to partner with me for their first API hackathon but said he was CEO and had no other contribution except his idea of rating livestreamers. I had better ideas like live shopping, maybe as a future company. Employees loved the "hot or not" rails demo that I built in hours. It had a video embed and used the REST API to find the next channel. Within hours, Justin.tv founders hosted it as hornotlive.com, and a new hot-pink design and logo, making sure it was on the company's heroku account in case they need to take it down. It was launched very quickly, like investors ask for. This scared Paul Graham and investors when they heard about it via Hacker News, TechCrunch, and Mashable. Also, the HotOrNot company threatened to sue. About two years later, Justin.tv founders launched "SocialCam" for chat and "Twitch" for gamers in 2011.
Before I joined YouTube founders in 2012, I applied to Y Combinator with a mobile app to send messages and photos, and to sell stickers/emojis.
I came up with the idea of a chat app with self-deleting photos, plus the way it would grow quickly. At Startup School, I overheard Evan Spiegel talk about Picaboo. I decided to excitedly share my ideas to a group and walked with him for a bit. When I joined YouTube founders in late 2012, a coworker told me she used Snapchat.
At Startup School one year, Paul Graham smiled at me as I entered the building with a "Mohammed" nametag.
When I was at Startup School to watch Emmett Shear's talk, Justin Kan said "you didn't do anything!" about my three months at Justin.tv, which was completely not true. I noticed that Sam Altman was staring at me with a neutral face. I didn't know what to say. I thought that maybe Sam Altman thought I looked like Elon Musk, which I heard before from YouTube founders (who worked at PayPal with Elon Musk), Instacart founder (who said I looked like half-Elon Musk, half-Jimmy Fallon), co-workers, etc. In 2019-2022, I built a gym at my house in San Francisco and thought I could be a magician, singer, and do impressions as Elon Musk, Jimmy Fallon (I wanted to interview BTS for "Dynamite" while I was in South Korea in summer 2020), Dimash, Keanu Reeves (who filmed Matrix 4 in 2020 in San Francisco but I hadn't seen the movies), etc.
Another YC memory: I started a tech show on YouTube in April 2007 after Startup School. It's possible that I'm the first YouTuber to make videos to ask viewers to do things that help with algorithms (like leaving comments) while having almost no content about the topic. Also, an early usage of "Let's Go...!" Here's the episode about Justin.tv:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210109212744/https://www.youtu...