Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a partner do you really need the startup 'help'? Don't you already have all the connections you need?
If you see a $100 bill on the ground. Would you not pick it up? *edit cuz i'm bda at spelling
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Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
91–100 of 123 posts
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#92"Sam Altman, president and co-founder of Y Combinator." Uhh, they clearly didn't do their homework if they thought Altman co-founded YC.
That said, YC could make all of this easier to grok with two sections in "About":
- Structure of the entire org, with the head of each
- History of the org (just the major announcements)
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the conflict of interest? Being a partner at YC is certainly a unique qualifier that would basically guarantee acceptance. There is nothing wrong with that. It is awesome, in fact.
Well, it could also mean that someone else who isn't a YC partner was rejected to let him in. Of course, I don't know whether or not that is the case, but this is where a conflict of interest could potentially arise from.
You are alleging bias, not a conflict of interest.
YC accepted into their program as a founder someone who was a partner. Does that really sound like bias to you? If a former professor at a university applied to be a grad student, would you accuse the university of a conflict of interest?
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#94the position is probably pointless and is why he left.
it's cool that yc experiments with shit like this but didn't work out and now he's doing something else.
hardware is hard.
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I learned that when there was a natural gas explosion in the building I worked in in the 80s (nobody was hurt). I recorded several TV news broadcasts on it, and every one got the basic facts wrong in different ways. Things like one called the building a warehouse (it was an office building). There were no political issues nor agendas nor money at stake, the news reporters just didn't make any effort to be correct. I'…
Story time. I build an app and I got interviewed by a local newspaper: "Is the app secure?" "Nope, but it's in my plans to start encrypting user's data at some point" The next week (she didn't ask me for a review or anything) the newspaper printed: "[me] built an app encrypting all of its users' data"
> Story time. I build an app and I got interviewed by a local newspaper:
I built a web app and got interviewed by a newspaper too. The article wasn't factually wrong, but it was poorly written and the tone was bizarre at a few points. The journalist chose to take many long quotes directly from my response emails. I didn't know I would be quoted verbatim so heavily, otherwise I would've written more formally. He also interviewed a professor about my app (a professor in a related field), but the professor hadn't heard of my app and clearly didn't even bother to check it out.
So a little disappointing, but all in all I was happy to get the press. Unfortunately this newspaper also had a policy of not printing links / URLs in their online articles, so anybody reading would have had to search for my site on their own via keywords.
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#96Hardware development requires a lot of spare resources, it doesn't pair well with startups.
The development cycles are much less predictable compared to software, you never know how many prototypes you have to burn through until you reach the production stage. Small changes become hugely expensive once you've finalized the designs, and even a minuscule error like a tolerance mismatch can cause hundreds of thousands in damage and ruin a startup almost instantly. I'm always wary of a HW startup, unless the lead engineer is well known and has experience.
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it could also mean that someone else who isn't a YC partner was rejected to let him in. Of course, I don't know whether or not that is the case, but this is where a conflict of interest could potentially arise from.
You are alleging bias, not a conflict of interest. YC accepted into their program as a founder someone who was a partner. Does that really sound like bias to you? If a former professor at a university applied to be a grad student, would you accuse the university of a conflict of interest?
Firstly, other comments have disproven my claim already as I was under the assumption that YC accepted a fixed number of startups per batch.
> You are alleging bias, not a conflict of interest.
I'm not sure I understand the difference.
> YC accepted into their program as a founder someone who was a partner. Does that really sound like bias to you?
Yes, if and only if the decision resulted in another equally strong application being rejected, either directly or indirectly.
> If a former professor at a university applied to be a grad student, would you accuse the university of a conflict of interest?
Perhaps, because the committee that decides whether or not to accept a student consists of professors who likely know the former professor, which will likely introduce bias (positive or negative).
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having read basically every news article ever about the startup I was involved in, they get the most basic, easily checkable facts like: What year was it founded? What does the company do? Who is the CEO? wrong at least half of the time. And they get the more complicated facts wrong much more often, but that is because they generally directly printing either what the founder tells them or something they think that is…
Almost every time the mainstream media covers a subject I have some level of expertise in, the coverage is laughably inaccurate or misleading, and almost everyone I've talked to about this says the same thing for their own field, and yet inexplicably it still takes a conscious effort to remind myself to bear this in mind when they cover subjects I'm ignorant of.
I had intimate knowledge of an Act of Congress and some DOJ seizures that resulted from it years ago, and that's the first time I really experienced what you just described. The basic inaccuracy and sensational bias in the reporting and the level of discourse it generated was truly eye-opening, and I'll never see the news (or people reacting to the news) the same way again.
Every time they cover a subject I know well, it's been the same story, even among major reputable news outlets. No facts are safe, not even basic high-level details.
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#99I don want to sound like a jerk, but Trevor Blackwell has always filled the ycombinatoe hardware 'slot' from my perspective.
Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months
#100TL;DR -- Luke Iseman, YC's hardware focused Partner founded a hardware startup, which he's now taking through YC as a founder, after having set up a bunch of deals and processes to help hardware startups as a YC Partner. Seems like pretty good evidence YC is now great at helping hardware startups that he's choosing to go through the program himself.
Oh cool, Luke was a Maker personality in Austin for a while. I remember when he was making his own pedicabs. http://austinpedicab.org/2008/10/06/austin-cronicle-intervie...
Austin, eh? I wonder if he's friend or foe with the Kasita guy (ie. Professor Dumpster)...