What are your thoughts are on the whole concept of living on Mars? How feasible is it; how important is the fact of sustainable life on another planet; how would you approach such a problem?
Thank you!
I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
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Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
#342Would you like to speak at HackingEDU (San Mateo, October 23-25), the world's largest education hackathon? http://www.hackingedu.co
Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
#343What are you looking for in block chain / bitcoin applications?
Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
#344Hi Sam,
Any tips on balancing uni, research there (pre-doc) and a startup (co-founder, CTO)?
Do you think it is necessary to give up one for another?
Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canada perhaps (specifically Kitchener-Waterloo)?
Vancouver might be better. It has less of a tech sector, but frankly nowhere in Canada has enough of a tech sector to matter much; however Vancouver has the important advantages of being much closer to the bay area (2.5 hours flying time to SFO, 7 flights/day each way), being large enough to have a tech boom without completely unbalancing its economy, and actually being somewhere people want to live.
I beg to differ. On the issue of tech sector, U Waterloo obviously puts out many great students. UBC isn't really known for it's tech streams. In addition, there's likely many smart tech people from RIM looking for jobs in the KW area.
As for the issue of where people want to live. Vancouver is likely even more costly to live than SV. KW (and southern Ontario in general) is a great place with warm weather 6 months per year and access to the 3rd largest city in North America.
In my opinion, KW would make a better YC V2 location.
Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
#346I think you mentioned somewhere that you are aiming for early-career researchers, not so much for established group leaders. Being an early-career researcher myself (postdoc), my first thought was that your program could easily turn out to be a trap. At first, it looks like a fantastic opportunity because freedom and independence, etc. However, I'm sure that you are looking for high risk / high reward projects. So th…
Well, that's fucked up about academia. All the more reason to create alternatives. Do you really want to be part of a system that does not allow for failure?
At a minimum, I expect YCR researchers to be turning down job offers from YC companies all the time.
Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
#347Hey Sam! A question about your career path. Can you think of a specific point in time when you made the decision to focus more on the business side of things and less on writing code? If so, can you describe why you made that decision?
In the very early days of Loopt, I sat down with @kogir and Alok and said "ok, who is going to do what?" I was definitely not the best coder for large projects on the team, although I can crush either of them in topcoder competitions 10 times out of 10 :D, and I seemed the best at the 'business' stuff, so I focused on that.
>although I can crush either of them in topcoder competitions 10 times out of 10 :D
Them's fightin' words.
Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
#348I currently have no 'unicorn'-ideas. Applying doesn't seem useful at this moment. Is there a list of startups that need help? If so, why did they get funded when the team isn't right yet?
Ideas do not start out as unicorn ideas. They start small and morph into something bigger.
Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
#349sama: Jacqueline Novogratz (CEO of Acumen) once said that a major challenge of building modern finance in developing nations is that developing communities often have lots of trust (within themselves) but not much accountability.
In your position at YC, founders and investors alike trust you with lots of information. You have a unique view of where money is flowing and how equipped companies are to compete with each other. I'm sure you'd have amazing answers for Peter Thiel's "tell me something you believe is true but nobody else agrees with" and you'd probably be right on a lot of the points due to information available uniquely to you.
As YC grows, what actions do you plan on taking to ensure its accountability? In particular, how do you plan to help founders who for whatever reason don't directly participate in YC?
Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
#350Hey Sam! What are you (and YC) doing to enable more founder diversity? Any initiatives to reach out to black/latino founders to invite them to apply?