71–80 of 168 posts
Perfectly encapsulated in this tweet: 18: Go to Harvard or Stanford for CS. 22: Work at FAANG companies. 25: Quit and raise millions for your startup. 26: Sell your company to a FAANG company/IPO 28: Join a VC firm, invest in people like you, and make predictions on Twitter all day. https://twitter.com/TheLexTimes/status/1105131411411886081
This is the cycle of Silicon Valley at play, and an example why despite the Exodus of many entrepreneurs and engineers SV is still the leader in software based start ups. Take the "PayPal mafia" for instance, out of one successful company spawned others -- SpaceX, LinkedIn, Facebook (via investment cash). These companies will spawn others, so on and so forth. It's a cycle that feeds upon itself and has been a success…
> It's a cycle that feeds upon itself and has been a successful model you just don't hear about the failures out there. I bet there's much more failures than there are successes. If it weren't, banks would've all lent out money to startups!
Sure there are, but a few successes can make up for a lot of failures. Ycombinator, for instance, has been doing its thing for quite a while now and appears to be doing quite well.[1]
[1]Not personally having looked into their financials
Earlier quoted context omitted.
YC is not typical. It provides you a pre-built network, so if you're not going this route, who you know already makes a huge difference.
But anyone can apply to YC, and I believe the application process is almost entirely meritocratic.
Most companies I’ve seen go through YC do not have any sort of revenue stream, nor a business plan or any other baselines metrics you could evaluate on a merit basis.
The only factors I can see them evaluating on are subjective in nature, not objective merit based items.
Nothing wrong with that, YC has produced some fantastic companies but just doesn’t seem to be a meritocratic process.
> The start-up world projects a meritocratic image, but in reality, it is a small, tightknit club where success typically hinges on whom you know. This is...so not true. My co-founder and I had hardly any network in SV. We applied to YC through the website, raised seed money after demo day. We ran on seed + revenue up to about 60 employees and we recently did a series A. If you don’t have a network, don’t be dissuade…
New York Times has had a consistently anti-tech slant the last few years. I don’t know the reason for it, but I find it very annoying
I regularly read NYT's technology section. It seems like most things have a negative slant towards them, especially when it pertains to Google, Facebook, YouTube, or other social media sites. Most of the positive pieces they run about tech serve to emphasize how different the subject is compared to the big bad tech giants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NIMBYs seems to be the new slur for "exerting property and voting rights". That's democracy and capitalism. There's a reason it's not in their backyard. It's their backyard.
If it was property rights, they'd be voting on what can be built on their own property. Instead, NIMBYs vote on what can be built in the surrounding neighborhood and beyond, as if the purchase of a home also includes a guarantee that everything around it can never change. It's elitist gatekeeping and deep selfishness masked as "wanting to retain neighborhood character".
Most of those you label "NIMBY" are just looking to maintain an existing community and civic service level.
The people you should be directing your ire towards is not your strawman "NIMBY" but the city planners and commercial developers who overzone and overbuild office space and under-zone housing.
This is the cycle of Silicon Valley at play, and an example why despite the Exodus of many entrepreneurs and engineers SV is still the leader in software based start ups. Take the "PayPal mafia" for instance, out of one successful company spawned others -- SpaceX, LinkedIn, Facebook (via investment cash). These companies will spawn others, so on and so forth. It's a cycle that feeds upon itself and has been a success…
I have a couple buddies who have started their own thing out of Uber and they’re doing well. The issue I see is it’s going to be pockets of companies around the gig sharing economy for Uber and similar items in rental/real estate for AirBnB.
Employees of both companies have solved some really tricky problems, and they know they can use their experience to solve another set of problems + make it easier to raise money for their venture.
Also - I do appreciate you qualified your post with SV being the lead in software companies. I think that’s still true and SV will be the lead for a long time but other cities will be cheaper + you don’t need to be in SV to find great talent anymore and you don’t need to be there to raise good capital. If you have an idea that’s solid and a decent team you’ll be able to find fundraising but it’ll be interesting to see if software stays in SV and we see the software related but more physical goods startups relocate out of SV.
SaaS businesses are so much less capital intensive than hard goods based businesses so I’d imagine those companies don’t start in SV so they can has less expenditures in areas that don’t matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But anyone can apply to YC, and I believe the application process is almost entirely meritocratic.
Can you elaborate? Most companies I’ve seen go through YC do not have any sort of revenue stream, nor a business plan or any other baselines metrics you could evaluate on a merit basis. The only factors I can see them evaluating on are subjective in nature, not objective merit based items. Nothing wrong with that, YC has produced some fantastic companies but just doesn’t seem to be a meritocratic process.
I think one of the most frustrating things for inexperienced founders is not understanding why investors say no, because founders believe so strongly in their vision it is hard for them to understand why someone might not be persuaded by their pitch and investors just want to make more money, right?
But ultimately the decision to invest, at least at the seed stage, is largely emotional. It's a question of feeling good about the team, the idea, and believing it will gain traction. Nobody has product-market fit at this point, so you have to use incredibly limited information to make a decision.
YC excels at this stage. They only have 10 minutes of face time to make a decision, so they're using that time to try to evaluate you and your company as quickly as possible. There is no magic rubrik for this decision, they just try to assess the founders and their idea and whether or not they think it will work.
When I say they're meritocratic, I don't mean there is some single metric you can use to compare all companies to make a perfectly rational decision. What I mean is they evaluate everyone based on that 10 minute conversation, not on their pedigree.
FWIW, I applied to YC and was accepted without knowing anybody. Maybe I just like to believe the process is meritocratic and I'm special.
> The start-up world projects a meritocratic image, but in reality, it is a small, tightknit club where success typically hinges on whom you know. This is...so not true. My co-founder and I had hardly any network in SV. We applied to YC through the website, raised seed money after demo day. We ran on seed + revenue up to about 60 employees and we recently did a series A. If you don’t have a network, don’t be dissuade…
In the same way that United is not a tech company, but they have a website that accepts reservation.
Tech companies create new Tech as part of their lifecycle: Intel, AMD, Google, etc etc. They create new Tech that didn't exist before, and this is core to their product.
I get that Silicon Valley shifted from Real tech 20 years ago to Futile WebApps that deliver pizzas faster, but it makes me sad that the new definition of tech shifted so much to pure business.
Airbnb or Uber are not really tech companies. They are business companies with a WebApp required as part of the execution. They didn't invent anything on the technical level, they brought some business ideas to existing tech (I mean Airbnb is literally a website with a DB) In the same way that United is not a tech company, but they have a website that accepts reservation. Tech companies create new Tech as part of the…