That obituary question is a bit morbid for my taste - but this sounds like an interesting event. Reminds me of yc startup school but more personal.
Book dust jacket bio might be a better framing of this question.
YC 120
81–90 of 145 posts
Re: YC 120
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
People eventually get tired of giving useful feedback to unhelpful people. Maybe that's a piece of advice someone should share with sama sama.
You may not owe Sam or any individual better than this, but you do owe quite a bit better to the community you're participating in here.
Re: YC 120
#83The real question is, do I want to be in a room with 99 other people who wanted to be selected for this so much that they produced a video with answers to these questions? This whole thing is self-selecting for they type of person I'd rather not be having dinner with. YC produces a ton of great resources that are very helpful, but this is one that makes me scratch my head.
What type of person is that? I'm honestly at a loss because it asks for nothing more than a simple narrative for why this opportunity fits the candidate, where the complexity of the video can be "turn on my phone's front camera and recorded for 60 seconds".
Is that a type of person? Is it a bad type of person? I don't understand the insinuation.
Re: YC 120
#84The real question is, do I want to be in a room with 99 other people who wanted to be selected for this so much that they produced a video with answers to these questions? This whole thing is self-selecting for they type of person I'd rather not be having dinner with. YC produces a ton of great resources that are very helpful, but this is one that makes me scratch my head.
It’s just a 60 second video answering 3 fairly straightforward questions. What’s so difficult about that?
Re: YC 120
#85somewhat unrelated:
This is YC's mission statement: "Y Combinator provides seed funding for startups. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It pays your expenses while you’re getting started."
Re: YC 120
#86I think what we all want is a lot more more Elon Musks to push the world forward more quickly. But he was only able to create Tesla and SpaceX because he gained a massive windfall from PayPal. That payout could have easily been an order of magnitude smaller, or even gone to zero. He wasn't even involved in the company so he got super lucky with that. Even though he had a network of powerful friends, virtually all of…
I am not sure I would focus on the money as a factor for Musk's success. There are a lot of rich, including newly rich, people who aren't Musk. The reason he isn't one of them is because he didn't want the money more than doing something real. Chances are that if he didn't end up with that money he would still have tried. As far as I know the plan wasn't really to build a company the size of SpaceX in the first place. But it was still to create a real company. Once he had literally shown up to the launch pad, opportunities presented themselves.
This is in many ways counter to current models for success. Where everyone wants a quick fix. Zero to hero. Where substance is a liability. Because if you have to accomplish something in particular, what is the angle? "Oh, a physics degree would be useful? Well, that is clearly unreasonable I want to be successful".
You want another Musk you get 'real' companies, doing 'real' work, selling 'real' technology. And where that is the main purpose. If it isn't, there is no need to work on technology that you sell. It becomes a disadvantage in an endless quest of prototypes and promises to please investors.
And yes, it is sort of ironic, but at the same time not, that one of our most celebrated entrepreneurs had a lot of backing of the US government and already existing industries. I don't think it makes much sense to critic that as such though.
Re: YC 120
#87First let me say I think this is a great idea even just the marketing and publicity angle alone. [1]
That said I always love the arbitrary numbers they assign such as '100' or similar those '30 under 30'. And so on. Heinz of course popularized 57 varieties of ketchup (not sure I have seen that duplicated).
Why not say 'roughly 100'. Give yourself the flexibility to go up or down if needed.
[1] This is what happens when money meets creative ideas.
Re: YC 120
#88The real question is, do I want to be in a room with 99 other people who wanted to be selected for this so much that they produced a video with answers to these questions? This whole thing is self-selecting for they type of person I'd rather not be having dinner with. YC produces a ton of great resources that are very helpful, but this is one that makes me scratch my head.
> do I want to be in a room with 99 other people who wanted to be selected for this so much that they produced a video with answers to these questions?
No value to meeting any of these people? Even if just for future contacts that could be beneficial or ideas? I am not seeing much downside to this at all. If I had the time I'd fly out on my own dime and just hang around and 'press the flesh'.
Re: YC 120
#89I mean, I'd love to go...I live in Boulder too
Re: YC 120
#90"a return to fact-based debate"
When was this fact-based debating era?