This is less interesting than the upcoming expansions to Tel Aviv and Bangalore.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/yc-is-hosting-interviews-i...
YC Interviews in NYC
51–60 of 79 posts
Re: YC Interviews in NYC
#52Are accepted companies expected to move to the Bay Area?
Yes, for the three months of the YC program.
Re: YC Interviews in NYC
#53Wow this is so sudden. Sigh. One of my cofounders can't move to the U.S. due to personal responsibility. I guess YC ain't for us! Good luck everyone.
That's not necessarily a deal-breaker. We often work within constraints like that - it depends on the details of your team.
Re: YC Interviews in NYC
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yes, I was also there! But I remember many people came out of that event hearing very different things from PG (there were also small presentations from YC alums hiring). I remember PG saying NYC had clearly overtaken Boston as #2 startup up in the US, partly because Boston investors were more risk averse and focused on the late stages. Then he asked whether NYC could rival the Bay Area for #1. I don't think he ma…
To me a bigger deal is that New York law by default grants copyright on work done in your spare time on your own equipment to your employer. Therefore if you try to grow a side hustle into a business, you can unexpectedly find that you don't actually have what you thought you had. I know multiple people, directly and indirectly, who have been caught by this. Knowledge of this problem contributed to my desire to move…
Do you have a reference for this? And are there similar or opposite laws affecting other states?
Re: YC Interviews in NYC
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yes, I was also there! But I remember many people came out of that event hearing very different things from PG (there were also small presentations from YC alums hiring). I remember PG saying NYC had clearly overtaken Boston as #2 startup up in the US, partly because Boston investors were more risk averse and focused on the late stages. Then he asked whether NYC could rival the Bay Area for #1. I don't think he ma…
To me a bigger deal is that New York law by default grants copyright on work done in your spare time on your own equipment to your employer. Therefore if you try to grow a side hustle into a business, you can unexpectedly find that you don't actually have what you thought you had. I know multiple people, directly and indirectly, who have been caught by this. Knowledge of this problem contributed to my desire to move…
As of last time I checked a few years ago, NY law was silent on rules for the copyright ownership scenario you describe.
That leaves the federal default in place of "creator keeps the copyright when there is no explicit assignment unless it qualifies as a work for hire." Only work done within the scope of employment would be employer-owned by default, not unrelated spare time projects.
However, indeed NY's legal silence on this point allows contracts to explicitly assign the category of work you describe to the employer, if they include wording to that effect, subject only to any case law that might seem something excessive (not sure what NY courts have said on this topic).
The difference with California in this regard is that they actually prohibit and refuse to enforce contractual assignment of unrelated spare-time projects to the employer. Far stronger than a default.
The attitude to post-employment non-competes is also very different: aside from a very narrow M&A exception, California flat out bans those. NY disfavors them and courts often limit or discard them as unreasonable upon examination, but they're not categorically banned. That has a significant chilling effect.
Note I'm not a lawyer, just a law-geek former law student layman. Pay for qualified legal advice with appropriate licensure if you need that (I do that too despite my legal interests).
Re: YC Interviews in NYC
#56I remember going to YCNYC nearly 10 years ago, and pg made the argument that anyone starting a company should just move to the Bay Area because it was that much better. I guess NYC has come a long way, or YC has, or both :)
you left out the possibility that the bay has gotten worse.
Re: YC Interviews in NYC
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not if you go by the parent comment instead of what your brain translated it to.
> And that NYC was too tainted by its banking culture and the drive to make money. Doesn't this imply fairly clearly that he believes the Bay Area is not plagued by these two things?
It implies he thinks it's less of a thing there than in New York.
Re: YC Interviews in NYC
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, if you were a foreign (but remote) startup looking to set up an office in the USA - would you recommend Boston? From the perspective of sales/finance, rather than technical, if that's important.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of setting up an office, but from just a talent perspective, Boston has the benefit of having a large concentration of universities: Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern, UMass... That's a lot of new unemployed talent that (potentially) is looking for a career start in Boston. It is also more affordable and public transit is decent.
Anecdotally, it seems fairly common for people to move between Boston and NYC.
Re: YC Interviews in NYC
#59Quick question: I don't see any field in the interview to indicate NYC as the interview city. Do all applicants who make the February 15 deadline automatically get considered for an NYC interview?
Yep!
If orgs apply before the deadline but are not accepted for NYC interviews, are they still considered for SF interviews?
Re: YC Interviews in NYC
#60I remember going to YCNYC nearly 10 years ago, and pg made the argument that anyone starting a company should just move to the Bay Area because it was that much better. I guess NYC has come a long way, or YC has, or both :)
pg wrote an article called "Cities and Ambition"[1] which greatly influenced my thinking on the importance of being around a critical mass of like-minded people, not just for the 1st-order effects of having the right networks and opportunities, but also for the 2nd-order effects of being subtly influenced by the intellectual energy around you. (Side note: Eric Weiner wrote a Malcolm-Gladwell-like book "The Geography…
Thank you for this; always reminded of my favourite paragraph from pg's article:
>A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping. At the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure, it can be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good quality eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to live? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you're among.