Do you think that startup ideas, in their general concept, can be confidential?
Or do you think instead that a global idea, without hard details, and most importantly before the hard work of execution is never confidential?
I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
621–630 of 757 posts
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was making $100k and was able to find a small apartment in SF AND save about $2k a month (granted, I've finished paying my student loans). Not needing a car, and the ability to walk / scooter / public transport everywhere for relatively cheap, is a huge money saver! My half of the rent each month, as of today in SF, is $1300 ($2600 for the whole apartment in SoMa), but you need to take into account the money I'm no…
So you get a small, shared apartment, dinners at work, no car, and $2k/month left to save. Honestly, that's not bad, but I'm guessing you're young. Consider you're slightly older and thinking of starting a family. Will your income cover: extra food and clothing for a child? day care or maternity leave? saving for college? saving for retirement? a larger apartment for your growing family? a down payment on a house or…
Great points. And for the record, I guess I'm young. I'm single with no dependents. :P
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was making $100k and was able to find a small apartment in SF AND save about $2k a month (granted, I've finished paying my student loans). Not needing a car, and the ability to walk / scooter / public transport everywhere for relatively cheap, is a huge money saver! My half of the rent each month, as of today in SF, is $1300 ($2600 for the whole apartment in SoMa), but you need to take into account the money I'm no…
So you get a small, shared apartment, dinners at work, no car, and $2k/month left to save. Honestly, that's not bad, but I'm guessing you're young. Consider you're slightly older and thinking of starting a family. Will your income cover: extra food and clothing for a child? day care or maternity leave? saving for college? saving for retirement? a larger apartment for your growing family? a down payment on a house or…
> the SV software industry has taken a unique stance that experience is actually a liability
I see this viewpoint often, but it always seems to be from people who either haven't used their time wisely or otherwise don't want to change their role. There's a bizarre belief that they should be paid more for the same type/amount of work. Apart from a few situations, the marginal value of very good code over simply adequate code is very small...it's not enough to justify the marginal salary of a very senior coder over a junior coder. And yet people believe that since they've got 20+ years of experience, they should be paid significantly more than someone with 2+ years.
Meanwhile, those that have used their time wisely and moved from engineer into architects or other leadership positions are both older and very well compensated. We realize that we can guide a team of junior engineers to produce something that's good enough to meet the needs of the business. It's not as good as it would be if I wrote every line of code myself or with a team of engineers with 20+ years experience each, but I know that none of it is a disaster and it was written for a fraction of the cost. My salary/comp has more than kept pace with my expenses as they've grown, but only because my contribution to the organization has grown similarly. I could have never grown that contribution if I'd stayed in a role where I was primarily responsible for writing code.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If reddit gets to a billion users What makes this number significant? Can you talk about some of those opportunities that aren't available to reddit now, but will be when they reach that scale?
reddit has the potential to unlock a lot of value if niche subreddits can achieve critical mass. There are quite a few subreddits that could support highly targeted and valuable advertising. Comment and voting quality also appears to improve dramatically with scale; compare the quality of comments on default subs to niche subs. If niche subs can get that dramatic improvement in quality, reddit would also be able to a…
In my experience, the comments on the niche subs are of considerably higher quality than the default subs. So much so that I'm puzzled what you could be thinking about. Can you give some examples?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If reddit gets to a billion users What makes this number significant? Can you talk about some of those opportunities that aren't available to reddit now, but will be when they reach that scale?
reddit has the potential to unlock a lot of value if niche subreddits can achieve critical mass. There are quite a few subreddits that could support highly targeted and valuable advertising. Comment and voting quality also appears to improve dramatically with scale; compare the quality of comments on default subs to niche subs. If niche subs can get that dramatic improvement in quality, reddit would also be able to a…
>Comment and voting quality also appears to improve dramatically with scale; compare the quality of comments on default subs to niche subs.
I hope you meant - worsen dramatically ... it's the reason I unsubbed from almost all the defaults.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#626Reddit is well on it's way to becoming a dominant monopoly on the web, however there's a (subtle but important) difference between being a platform for free speech, and promoting hate speech. If there are a billion users, but they're horrible people (eg /r/coontown), is that something you will look back on and consider as having been worthwhile?
This is what this account is for, after all, so: I am a regular poster on r/theredpill(which was recently "honored" by winning the bigotry category---but with low toxicity---in a recent sentiment analysis of reddit comments). There is a lot of what someone might call "hate speech." Some of that doesn't really deserve the title and is just "truths that polite society omits;" some reflects genuine, generalized anger ag…
The Red Pill an organization of freedom fighters? We're comparing feminists to ISIS now?
Genuine, generalized anger against women? What are you upset about, that it's fallen out of favor to feel up a woman at a bar without permission before you begin a courtship that ends with her in the kitchen as your property with your dinner on the table at 5:30? Upset that you can't give her two black eyes for finishing dinner at 5:31 and keep custody of the kids because judges are pretty much out of patience for male shenanigans? Mad because "alpha male" means something different today than it did throughout history, and you miss the old ways? Do you honestly look yourself in the mirror and say "I'm championing the causes of men by participating in a community that started as a haven for pickup artists and uses The Matrix references as pseudointellectualism?"
Stop me, I'm laughing so hard I'm getting lightheaded.
I would have never predicted someone who speaks positively of The Red Pill works in the subset of technology that made him aware of Hacker News, and all that does is make me rethink what I thought was a typical level of intelligence to work in this field.
Your organization grows because there are lot of pieces of shit in the male gender, and everybody likes validation that there are other pieces of shit like them. Why do you think Stormfront grew so quickly? "Yay, a whole forum of people just like me!" That's exactly why. Believe me when I tell you that I can't wait for the SPLC to list you, just like they did Stormfront, because you are just about as antiprogressive and awful.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#627What is the percentage of applications you accept that are not from the U.S.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#628Hi Sam
how many start-ups do you accept on average outside the U.S
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When you work at a startup, you're acting like an investor but investing your time instead of your money. True, except: (a) An employee can probably only work for one startup at a time, and begins vesting after a year. That's like asking an investor to bet on at most 1 company per year. (b) Employers tend to give substantially less detailed information about their business, financials, etc to prospective employees…
Diversification only lowers risk. The expected value doesn't change.
Would you rather have a 1% chance at a billion dollars or a guaranteed million? The former has a 10x higher expected value but I think most people would choose the latter.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
reddit has the potential to unlock a lot of value if niche subreddits can achieve critical mass. There are quite a few subreddits that could support highly targeted and valuable advertising. Comment and voting quality also appears to improve dramatically with scale; compare the quality of comments on default subs to niche subs. If niche subs can get that dramatic improvement in quality, reddit would also be able to a…
In my experience, the comments on the niche subs are of considerably higher quality than the default subs. So much so that I'm puzzled what you could be thinking about. Can you give some examples?
It's basically a mathematical guarantee. Reddit shows 200 comments by default, so if there are 20k comments, then you are roughly getting the top 1% of comments. If there are fewer than 200 comments, you are getting ALL the comments, basically unfiltered. I've also noticed that the best users make a greater effort on comments that may be read by a large number of users (granted, the average user probably does not)
Voting quality clearly goes up with scale. On a small subreddit, you can make a brilliant comment, and only one person votes on it and you are at score 0. On default subs, the voting tends to be more accurate (though with a populist/groupthink bias)
I think some are confusing comment quality with comment value. A really funny, but silly joke would be a high quality, low value comment. The default subs tend to be lowest common denominator subjects, like "cute" stuff and politics -- low value. Whereas niche subreddits are highly focused on your particular passions and interests. Niche subreddits have greater value to users, which is why they are also more valuable for advertising and monetization purposes.
At sitewide scale, the quality of existing niche subreddits would improve dramatically, and smaller niches that do not exist today as subreddits would gain sufficient scale to support independent subreddits. I think that these niche subreddits could support almost search keyword-like targeting (albeit with lower CPMs because no immediate indication of intent). Imagine native feed advertising volume with keyword-like CPMs.
Not that it's highly relevant, but I'm a developer of a popular reddit app for iOS.