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I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

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Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

#441

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

OmarIsmail wrote: post #373
brotoss wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cook all of your own meals. Don't buy drinks at the bars if you go out. Don't buy expensive shit, you don't need the newest iphone every year or name brand designer stuff. Get a roommate. Not rocket sciene

If you can get very efficient at it or you find the activity a source of leisure, then cooking your own food is a great cost savings. However, for someone in the tech industry the opportunity cost of not investing in themselves (i.e. coding, reading about code, meeting people, etc) for the same amount of time they are cooking (grocery shopping, food prep, cooking, cleaning, etc) usually isn't worth it. To me cooking…

In that vein, a friend once calculated whether the time saved by not brushing his teeth would be offset by the cost of dentist visits later.

I don't remember the conclusion, but after I reminded him that female attention would likely drop off in proportion to bad breath, he decided against testing the idea.

Seriously man, it's food. We all have to eat, what is so important that you can't give up a couple hours a week towards cooking good food and leisurely eating it. Your entire life doesn't have to revolve around the almighty Opportunity Cost.

Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

#442

Post by markkat »

biswaroop wrote: post #422
markkat wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a researcher, IMO you might be belittling the OP's concern. While the YC initiative is noble, it has yet to be tested. I have worked in research and tech startups, and in very many ways the two couldn't be more different. Some of the best biotech research comes from incremental and ponderous study of minutiae, not 'ends driven' processes. From the perspective of a biotech researcher in the US, the funding…

The age aspect is interesting. Although the age of Nobel laureates has been steadily increasing, so has the 'gap' between discovery and award. [1] It's partly due to the amount of learning needed to contribute meaningfully, so starting earlier is always better. It's not that hard to get access (perhaps not unfettered) to research labs in high school. In grade 10, I talked to a professor at UCLA and started coding phy…

Yes, the best most often start early. But unlike math and physics, disciplines like biomedical research are very resource intensive which leads to older talent as well. My BS was in physics, and I was coding for peer-reviewed research just over a year into my undergrad. In biotech, things are very different. It's typical for investigations that culminate in a scientific paper to take a couple of years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. We've had Seimen's Foundation Award winning high school students come out of our own lab, but these students aren't setting the course of the investigation. We don't have the money and they don't have the time. These students generally flesh out one aspect of an existing investigation. They do great work, but it would be extremely difficult for them to take a study from concept to completion.

I thought my PhD research was fantastic. It was good, but geez could I have wasted YCR's money at that point. :)

Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

#443

Post by staunch »

cperciva wrote: post #434
staunch wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5. You find a co-founder CEO to run Tarsnap, Inc. from Silicon Valley. The CTO remains in Canada. Lawyers handle the messy details. This is kind of what Oculus does. John Carmack is in Texas with a small team, while most others are in California. You retain absolute control over the core technology, but help your co-founder turn it into something more marketable and user friendly. Some of the Tarsnap GUIs authors mig…

The guy I'm paying to write the Tarsnap GUI is in Romania.

YC deals with lots of foreign founders but maybe it wouldn't work in this case. I still think it would be great if you had a team helping you like John Carmack does.

Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

#444

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

jsutton wrote: post #413
OmarIsmail wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can get very efficient at it or you find the activity a source of leisure, then cooking your own food is a great cost savings. However, for someone in the tech industry the opportunity cost of not investing in themselves (i.e. coding, reading about code, meeting people, etc) for the same amount of time they are cooking (grocery shopping, food prep, cooking, cleaning, etc) usually isn't worth it. To me cooking…

Is this Soylent advocacy just a running joke? I can't imagine eating all my meals via a plain, liquid, meal-replacement.

If it isn't, it damn sure ought to be.

Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

#446

Post by Hydraulix989 »

sama wrote: post #352
jrpt wrote: post #335

The cost of rent in the Bay Area is getting really high, both SF and down south. The archetypal startup in a garage in Palo Alto is not as affordable as it once was. For various policy reasons it's really hard for new people to move to the area without paying an arm and a leg in rent. Do you or YC have any thoughts on things you could do to help this, if any?

The bandaid is we increase the amount of money we give to teams. We do have some longer-term thoughts if the area can't get its act together and fix the problem.

Pre-YC startups could benefit from the Bay Area ecosystem while they are still building their MVP and getting initial traction to the point where they have something that they CAN apply to YC with.

I know very promising founders personally that were stuck working in parents' basements in the midwest because they did not yet have the resources to move to the Bay Area.

How can YC help during this critical "early development" (or should I say, exploration) stage for founders building companies? Is there a way it can help insulate early founders from learning the hard lessons the hard way? Traditional VCs would call these bets way too "risky."

Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

#447

Post by cperciva »

staunch wrote: post #443
cperciva wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy I'm paying to write the Tarsnap GUI is in Romania.

YC deals with lots of foreign founders but maybe it wouldn't work in this case. I still think it would be great if you had a team helping you like John Carmack does.

There is the start of a team: One employee and one contractor. There isn't a team with equity though.

Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

#448

Post by Hydraulix989 »

seeingfurther wrote: post #440
sama wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bandaid is we increase the amount of money we give to teams. We do have some longer-term thoughts if the area can't get its act together and fix the problem.

I see a YC Campus with dorms in the future!

BoostVC does this already by providing housing at Draper University.

Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

#449

Post by stbullard »

sama wrote: post #245
rdl wrote: post #237

Is there anything YC could do to help YC companies with housing? It's not trivial for teams during YC to get housing in SFBA, but they have enough upside to put up with a lot, and usually figure out something. It's really hard for employees 1-N, especially at sub-market salaries, but without 10% equity stakes, to move to SFBA. It pretty much restricts you to people already-here, people who will live college dorm styl…

Yes, I think we will have to do something here. I keep hoping the local governments will fix this and keep being disappointed. I was really excited by Campus, and hope we see a lot more startups with similar ideas.

As a non-YC founder living in SF, I'm really disappointed by this answer.

Above, you mentioned a "bandaid" solution of increasing funding for YC founders to account for skyrocketing rent - but this only exacerbates the problem for everyone else, including YC companies' employees and the entire ecosystem that supports them.

Tech workers' willingness and ability to pay ever-increasing rent, underwritten by salaries drawn from irrationally exuberant venture capital investment in tech (low interest rates elsewhere), is driving a housing bubble that, in a vicious cycle, is then further fueled by property investment justified by ever-increasing rents.

I guess I was looking more for YC to take a leading role here in proposing solutions, rather than passively hoping for a fix. The simplest, as it seems to me: open a bleeder valve by providing incentives for successful YC companies to "settle" other startup hubs, or even just acting as a broker for bidding by those locations. I'm sure there are smarter fixes, but I can't see the harm in enacting these.

Re: I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

#450

Post by pbreit »

lhfaria wrote: post #178

Hi Sam, I read a post of you guys saying that a lot of founders think they're too early to apply to YC. That's my case. We're just in our first thousands of dollars in revenue, and honestly when I think of YC - no matter how much confident we are with our business - I believe we don't really stand a change against other applicants. Any specific advice/thoughts on this?

I would be more concerned that you would think that vs that being your situation.
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