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Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit

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Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit

#81

If YC is good at what it does, and I think it is, then being rejected by YC should cause you to lower your estimated probability that your start-up will succeed, at least a little. The question is how much.

"Attrition is a group statistic. It doesn't apply to me"

https://josephwalla.com/attrition-is-a-group-statistic-it-do...

Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit

#82
I highly recommend anyone doubting themselves to watch the g-eazy episode from Netflix's documentary series Rapture.

If you quit, you'll never make it ( and that's ok ) but if you keep working, keep honing your craft, you might just make it big. Take every failure as a lesson that something needs tweaking. When you play a game, you only get better by dying lots and lots and lots of times.

Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit

#83

I have a related question. I had an idea many years ago and I've poked at it irregularly since. I have kids and I've already had one startup fail, so I just kind of slow-rolled this one. I still believe the idea has merit, so I keep poking at it here and there. I spent money on design work and it's incorporated, but I don't have a partner or support mechanism. I had a BizSpark account, but I "graduated" in February,…

How does this beat the results you would get from Google search?

If you use Google to search "I need clothes for college", what do you get? Is it actually helpful? Google doesn't know what school you go to, who you like to hang out with, what you do for fun, if you're male or female (well it does, but it's not used in search results that I can tell).

It's all about context. A system of advice and recommendations curated from a social network, heavily moderated and limited to short Twitter-sized pieces of text could help people solve problems in under a minute.

As it is now, you often have to "manage" your search process because you have to wade through all of the subjective material or you really don't know the right question to ask or what your root need is.

How about this? "I need SSL on my stage website."

Good luck finding the answer on google if you can't get SSL to work and you didn't know there was a load balancer stripping it out.

Quora and Yahoo Answers are a bastion of redirected content, incoherent answers, and they're really just entertainment. They provide a largely hit or miss solution.

With Wizely, for each Topic, the network gets to continually add context they see relevant.

The proposed business model is that there could be ads found contextually. "I need to replace a patio door" could lead to ads from Home Depot, Lowe's, and Menard's. There would be an opt-in click-through to advertisers websites with hard warnings about being tracked. All ads would be heavily moderated (no 100% self-serve advertising).

Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this beat the results you would get from Google search?

If you use Google to search "I need clothes for college", what do you get? Is it actually helpful? Google doesn't know what school you go to, who you like to hang out with, what you do for fun, if you're male or female (well it does, but it's not used in search results that I can tell). It's all about context. A system of advice and recommendations curated from a social network, heavily moderated and limited to short…

Also, your external searches will have no impact on what you do within the Wizely network and vice versa. So if you look "I need to buy a car" and traverse the Q&A tree, you won't later see car ads all over your browser (for those not using adblock). One of the core ideas is to flip the ad model so it disproportionally benefits the user, not the advertisers.

Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit

#85
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some examples of people plugging away on a 'failed' project for decades and eventually striking it rich.

Indeed, and that is the lure. And, when we read stories like that we get motivated to press on and never give up. But who writes the stories of someone who worked on a failed project for 20 years and never got anywhere? If we persist what are the odds that we will be the one for whom it works out? The question of when to persist, how long to persist and how to pay the bills while you persist are very personal to me.…

Timing sometimes matters a whole lot.
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