Justin Time
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
I think it's worth pointing out that Justin.tv led to the two largest YC exits to date, Twitch (Justin.tv pivot), and Cruise (founded by Justin.tv cofounder Kyle Vogt and Justin's brother Dan).
In 2008, Justin.tv co-founder Michael Seibel found Brian Chesky crashed on the floor of a hotel in Austin, offered him space in his room, began coaching him on how to build a startup, introduced him to the rest of the Justin.tv team, and ultimately brought them into YC! (and look where he is now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP6TH3pBPi8)
I look forward to more of the same :)
I know that Twitch was sold, but I heard that it was completely separate from Justin.TV
From my perspective at least, Twitch was essentially a re-branding. Basically, they saw that gaming content was popular on Justin.tv, so Emmett decided to move that on to a dedicated site. Ultimately Twitch far eclipsed the justin.tv site, so they shut that down to focus entirely on the Twitch side.
Interesting. Is there a part of the democatic process that guarantees electing extremely smart people?
Being president requires you to manage so many different things; it couldn't be done by someone who wasn't smart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvknGT8W5jA
I think Dubya talked down to avoid alienating a voters suspicious of intelligent people.
The combination of both is a very rare skill that correlates well with intelligence. Note that it requires both emotional & analytical intelligence: you need to understand what motivates people, and you also need to understand the numbers & segmentation well enough to make sure that you're empathizing with the right group of people.
CEO, BTW, requires a similar skillset. I used to think that CEO was a do-nothing role that you got through political favors, and maybe in a couple dysfunctional companies that's still the case. But in a functioning, market-leading company, being CEO requires that you first understand many different perspectives, and that you can synthesize those into a course of action that avoids pissing off any one core constituency too much.
If you take the dual roles that a President embodies: that of "managed to out-politician every other politician"; and that of "is believed by the technocrats of their party to be capable of negotiating foreign policy, trade agreements, and military conflicts"—you end up with a fair proxy for that particular 'evolutionary' measure of intelligence.
It would be difficult for an unintelligent person to get that far without screwing up and making a bunch of mistakes.
I'm not sure if you mean to refer to only American Presidents or national Presidents globally, but there can be a wide range of them, as far as I can tell. Unless you've looked and found that leaders of even the most far-flung of nations are as described?
On that very page a picture description reads "U.S. President Barack Obama and aides Carol Browner, David Axelrod and Jon Favreau working on a speech (...)".
On a tangential but related note, does anyone recommend any good follows on Snapchat, particularly anyone discussing tech/entrepreneurship? (There are obviously tons of entertaining celebrities, athletes, musicians, etc, but that's not really relevant here.)
Mark Suster (msuster on snap) of Upfront Ventures/bothsidesofthetable is good for at least a few 'snapstorms' a week covering a wide variety of VC topics. I've also really been enjoying the stories from Bobby Kim (bobbyhundreds), co-founder of seminal LA streetwear label The Hundreds, which tend to be a mix of standard day-in-the-life Snapchat fare as well as more introspective reflections on life and business. Bobby's a smart guy with diverse interests, even if you don't care about skateboarding or which overpriced, limited-edition collaboration is responsible for today's line out the door somewhere on Fairfax, it's still worth checking out Bobby's snaps.
He keeps promising that he's saving them and will release them, and I can barely wait.
Don't have any other good suggestions, unfortunately, thanks for the suggestions of bobbyhundreds.
It is interesting that Snapchat is developing in a direction where people are promoting it for use in communicating with them in a business context. When calling people to follow someone on Snapchat you should include their username or QR code though.
I've interacted personally with him (he may not remember) and I would say he is quite thoughtful and effortlessly able to empathize and interact excellently.
My buddy in this YC batch has nothing but good words to say.
The YC network is a defensible asset I believe PG never saw coming.
Congratulations Justin!
What's his username?
Edit: It's being suggested that the original article as posted didn't have the username, and it was added afterwards. So I've removed my snarky comment.
Apologies.