461–470 of 768 posts
I am not a partner or potential partner, I ask because sometimes I see people write well meaning things that make me wince for them if they are being judged.
Last March, you mentioned on twitter that you are a customer of/financially support Shanley Kane's organization, Model View Culture. Since since then (and before then too), she has made a variety of racially and sexually charged statements, such as, "fire some fuckin white guys to get it done" ( https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KtAdEv... ). Do you or Y-Combinator still patronize or support Model…
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Dude, that site is very difficult to understand. Just saying.
Thanks, what about homepage https://comment.ws ? What do you find difficult here? Would appreciate your or anyone else's feedback!
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Not necessarily their first startups, but: Dre (Beats), Larry Ellison, Travis Kalanick, Phil Knight (Nike), Jack Ma (Alibaba), Sam Walton, Wang Jianlin (Dalian Wanda). Mike Bloomberg and Amancio Ortega (Zara) were nearly 40.
I find it interesting which people you chose to label with their company and which you didn't.
Since HN is US- and tech-centric, I added the company name for non-tech or non-US companies. Walton was an exception because everyone knows Walton/Walmart, Bloomberg was an exception because the company's named after himself (and it is technically in technology), and Dre was an exception because (a) most people know him for his music, not Beats and (b) it's more of a fashion company than a technology company. I was on the fence with Ellison/Oracle, given how old the company is.
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There is a real gap in the market and it is not limited to just hard tech. There are an enormous number of great businesses out there that can’t raise funds until they have a product and they can’t make a product without funds. The solution is actually pretty obvious - investors have to start investing in businesses that are nothing more than a good concept, especially those of outsiders or non-serial founders. This…
The issue is that the risk of investing in a startup is extremely high even if you do limit investment to serial founders or post-product, post-traction businesses. It's already very hard to generate a positive return even with those conditions, and impossible to tell with certainty which will work out. Investing in random unproven founders with no product or traction (apparently) makes it practically impossible. Eve…
This is going to sound crass, but if a founder can't make the sacrifice to spend 3 months in SV for YC, are they really prepared to build the next billion dollar company?
Are you prepared to miss out on the next billion dollar company because they happen to have a family and a job while they're hacking away on a revolutionary project?