I've been driving 1-2h/day recently, and Bloomberg on satellite radio is one of the better parts of that. (BBC is nice too, and sometimes CNBC, but CNBC's quality varies greatly).
I listen to Bloomberg radio[1] most days at work. Lots of insightful interviews and analysis of business, economics, politics, and current events. [1] http://tunein.com/tuner/?StationId=17075& ;
The improve lives through startups meme is a valuable idea, but finding tunein.com has improved my life in a small but delightful way.
I felt he deliberately did not go into this topic. He was asked "How do you pick ~60 out of ~2000 applications?", and his entire response could be paraphrased as "We have practice". It made me wonder if it was because he thought it was too complex a topic for a quick TV show.
I wrote about how I read applications here: http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801739
I wasn't suggesting that you were unwilling to divulge this information. I meant that I felt you did not wish to discuss it in that forum.
Backstory as I understand it: David Cohen asked PG's permission to start a YC franchise of some sort in Boulder. He said no. David Cohen cloned YC in virtually every respect (down to copying the application form). Basically what Wimdu is doing to AirBnb. Still, it has been 5 years and YC has certainly not suffered. I'm surprised PG isn't a bit more magnanimous towards them.
Not really. TechStars is a franchise model, Cohen built a replicable model for seed accelerators while YC is largely driven by Paul Graham personally. You could remove Cohen from TechStars and TechStars would be the same, you couldn't remove PG from YC without changing it's nature substantially. TechStars was obviously derived from YC, but it's no more a clone than McDonalds was a clone of existing Burger bars.
They copied everything about YC as it originally existed down to the application form. If that doesn't count as a clone nothing does.
TechStars has only recently started trying to replicate their model on a wide scale. They're very far from proving that they can.
The fact that TS would be just as good without the founder isn't necessarily a positive sign.
Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. I don't think PG cares too much.
He didn't give that impression in the video. It's too bad, because Techstars seems like a pretty cool thing in its own right. To me, Boulder also sounds way more attractive than the Bay Area at this stage in my life.
Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. I don't think PG cares too much.
He didn't give that impression in the video. It's too bad, because Techstars seems like a pretty cool thing in its own right. To me, Boulder also sounds way more attractive than the Bay Area at this stage in my life.
I guess PG simply didn't want to be bothered with questions regarding his competitors.
I agree with your sentiment. Boulder seems more attractive than the Bay Area, and I'm rather young.
I specifically chose to talk about a scale, because I do agree that it is not black and white. There is however a difference between: earning money as a goal and improving lives as a means (improved quality of life being a byproduct) and wanting to improve lives (and as such quality of life) and earning money only being a requirement to sustain those activities. But perhaps startups are not way to go for the latter,…
This is the perennial theological question about charity: do you measure goodness based on charitable intent or on charitable results? Say getting money to poor folks in India is a charitable result with nearly-universal support here. It is doubtful Microsoft scores very high on the intent scale there, but they have probably done more for poor Indians this year than all active charities and all foreign government aid…
Honest question: how are phones for the poor such a huge win?
PG says the first iteration doesn't matter much as long as the founders are good and iterate quickly. Empirically, is this the case? Airbnb and Dropbox certainly didn't iterate on their concepts that much. Google's first shot was excellent. Facebook captured 90%+ from Harvard students before moving on to conquer the world. Are there real counterexamples, or even better, hard data? (If only YC recorded and aggregated…
Airbnb was iterating prior to being part of YC, they've given several interviews where they talked about how they'd gone through several launches and failed to take off and had to iterate on their model. For example they started out by only being an introduction service, but they found handling the payment in person was actually a major issue (socially awkward, no record of transaction, etc.) so the end up incorporat…
Handling all payments is absolutely critical because it leads to a review/rating system that is credible (which is critical for a service like Airbnb where strangers are offering and renting space to/from each other). As soon as the payment processing is gone you end with a review/rating system like Yelp. Namely one this is easy to game (for example business owners offering free things to people who give them a good Yelp review) and therefore carries little to no weight. I've used Airbnb three times now. The credible rating system was crucial for me to feel comfortable staying with a total stranger.
This is the perennial theological question about charity: do you measure goodness based on charitable intent or on charitable results? Say getting money to poor folks in India is a charitable result with nearly-universal support here. It is doubtful Microsoft scores very high on the intent scale there, but they have probably done more for poor Indians this year than all active charities and all foreign government aid…
Honest question: how are phones for the poor such a huge win?
It depends on the existing available methods of communication. If "the poor" have internet access, email, Twitter etc then adding phones doesn't help much. On the other hand if the poor don't have any internet access then just having a cell phone that lets you communicate with business partners across town could make a substantial difference. Imagine a simple business where one guy sells vegetables in a marketplace in an urban area and his business partner buys vegetables from farmers 10 miles away in a rural area. If the two can communicates via phone then they can coordinate buying, selling and transporting the vegetables (or any physical good) easily. They could even optimize purchases on a given day based on the "real-time" demand the one guy sees in the marketplace. In general the local economy could be optimized in ways that are a net win for everyone. Lack of phones and communication could hinder this.