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Five Years’ Time

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Re: Five Years’ Time

#41

Post by Lawtonfogle »

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?

My understanding is YC only has so many they accept. If they only accept 30, there will always be someone sitting as #31, with little objective difference between #30 and #31.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#42

Post by thebenedict »

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…

Looked at charitably these could be mitigated with good contracts and governance. E.g:

  * Well defined procedures for choosing what to work on and for how long
  * Agreement on what metrics to to base go/no-go decisions for continuing with an idea past the initial stages
  * Contracts to specify how spinoff equity is assigned. One interesting proposal I've heard involves a calculation based on developer hours worked over the initial development period.
Might be interesting outside of major tech markets where where VC funding is unlikely anyway, which could be an added benefit to the traveling idea factory/accelerator.

I appreciate that this is hard (if possible) to do in practice, and that lack of vision might be a fundamental problem. It also feels like it could be an excuse to treat developers poorly -- which was one of my concerns when I had the opportunity and seems to have happened in this case.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#43

Post by arohner »

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.

Your response gave the impression that you think you should get into YC because of your programming ability. Startups aren't about your code skill. It helps, but there are several things that matter more:

    - your personality & attitude
    - the idea
    - the size of the market
    - the skillsets of your cofounder(s), and your ability to communicate/work together

Re: Five Years’ Time

#44

Post by codezero »

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.

Why haven't you posted about your startup on hacker news before?

Re: Five Years’ Time

#45

Post by dlevine »

Congrats (so far)! The truth is that the route to a successful startup is often circuitous, and takes a lot of unexpected detours. I bet that a lot of the experiences you had along the way have made you stronger, shrewder, and better able to deal with the twists and turns. It's almost like, by not doing a startup right away, you were actually able to train individual muscles rather than just attempting to lift the boulder onto your shoulders. Once you got to the point where you were actually ready, it started to happen on its own.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#46

Post by vinceguidry »

> They kept pushing and changing the rules. Cutting salaries, forcing us to work on their pet projects, insisting I hire less-talented programmers for cheaper, cutting timelines, reducing investment, increasing their equity, and more.

I'm curious as to the exact take-away here. The author seemed a bit naive. The investors approached him with a bad idea that has numerous potentials for conflicts of interest, and he gave in, believing verbal promises would eliminate those conflicts.

I would guess that if you want to get into the idea business, you should probably fund yourself using your own ideas and your own implementations. It's a pretty abstract business model, one that can very easily devolve into "we will do anything for anybody who will give us money". So you need a pretty strong vision and leadership skills to keep that from happening.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#47

Post by tptacek »

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.

It is really OK that you didn't get into YC. People with absurdly successful companies today had to apply repeatedly to get in. And, of course, getting into YC is just one way to do it.

Gatekeepers bother me a lot too. You can bootstrap instead of appealing for financing, and sublimate your anger at the gatekeepers as motivation. Lots of successful bootstrappers do exactly that. Being pissed off at financiers worked really well for me for a bunch of years.

Ultimately, though: you're responsible for your own success.

Also: next time you bring up your startup in an eye-catching retort to someone lots of people follow on HN religiously, you should seize the opportunity to tell us about your startup. It's 7 years of your work! That's the most interesting thing you have to talk to us about; not "not getting into YC".

Re: Five Years’ Time

#48

Post by pnathan »

> My biggest two takeaways contradict themselves: I wish I had started sooner, but I’m so glad I waited. I had the idea from the beginning so it’s painful it took half a decade, however I never could have made it happen five years ago.

This is very inspirational, and very true: the ideas I had years ago I could never have brought to life, and I probably would have failed, badly, at the business side. Today, I can bring things to life, and I'm understanding more and more of how businesses run.

Re: Five Years’ Time

#50

Post by zzen »

dmak wrote: post #8

This 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…

(disclaimer: I'm the founder of Apiary) First things first - Readme.io is a great product and congratulations to Gregory for following his dream. I did so with my own, similar passion a couple years ago.

That passion was connecting developers - API builders & users. Documentation is just a part of this (interaction, collaboration, prototyping, and testing being others), which is why it’s a bit harder to be completely free-form. That said, we're aware that there's a lot room for improvement and we're working very hard to make Apiary better. Your feedback is really appreciated, I'd like to know more. @dmak, @special and @sidi would love if you could contact to me directly at jakub@apiary.io.  Thanks for speaking out and pushing us to improve.

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