Y Combinator When No One Cared
foundersatwork.posthaven.com
foundersatwork.posthaven.com
I remember reading Joel talking about it in his blog, but never knew it was on YouTube!
I remember when Fog Creek first announced that series and it cost a jillion dollars. A Fog Creek sales rep at the Fog Creek World Tour in 2010 in Atlanta gave me an "extra" copy of the DVD set and I felt like I had stolen something.
Me and my dad would always talk shit about it though, horrible for insulation purposes. Looks great though.
(An example of this sort of mass production is pg's advice to incorporate as a Delaware C corp. Advice like this can save your fledgling startup from a week of legal research. Having 'mass-produced' shortcuts to these sorts of managerial microdecisions can make or break a startup.)
When you can share the same overhead costs over 10 startups and expect 9 of them to fail, that's more palatable than spending the overhead 10 times for each individual company.
And it's not just monetary costs: you can get more done when you have all the companies demo day together, simply by having to arrange fewer meetings individually, and less time travelling/setting up etc.
At a push, I'd go with - Investing in stocks:Vanguard :: Investing in companies : Random funds that will only invest if you have a brand-name lead investor
Sequioa, Accel, Kleiner, and NEA for example have all made a similar amount of (or more) investments in startups than YC. I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that YC is more comfortable than most VC firms. You just don't hear about the other ones' failures because they're less publicized.
YC experimented with pushing it back even earlier in the gestation process, to pre-idea (pre-conception, if you will), and just backing team-quality. But that didn't work out well.
Perhaps not being able to come up with an idea is a crucual indicator of team-quality? A start-up isn't just one idea, but requires thousands of ideas along the way, like a movie. Or maybe passion for a specific idea rallies people round.
The details vary slightly (as the other response said, music studios typically take the rights to the album in exchange for royalties, rather than directly becoming a part-owner of the artist) but the basic model looks very similar to me.
I'd wager for every person helped by YC, another 1000 were helped by HN. There are lots of us programmers in the diaspora whose closest encounter to Silicon Valley is virtual, in places just like this.
Yea, yea, I know. There are lots of founders, investors, and celebrities in SV, but please don't forget about the rest of us, who just keep building and posting...for years.
A bit of background: We were a group of Harvard CS-ish undergrads, had been readers of PG's essays, and also noticed a fellow classmate's startup taking off (The Facebook!). The Summer Founders Program, as it was called, was actually pretty well advertised in our community. And, from our vantage point, it seemed to be both a great opportunity and prestigious (which of course tickled our over-achieving prestige-seeking 20-year-old selves). In fact, I turned down an internship after I'd accepted the offer, to do YC (and, amusingly, after we left YC a couple of weeks in, somehow got the internship again). I remember PG asking a lot of very good questions, and poking some pretty big holes in our pitch. I'm guessing they picked us because they figured we'd pivot into something more reasonable than the idea we started on. This being the pre-smartphone era, our idea of doing something cell-phone-specific (and algorithmically focused no less) probably seemed a bit dubious.
While no one (or relatively few) may have cared in the broader investment world at the time, we -- the young hacker / startup wannabes -- definitely noticed. PG, Jessica and the rest of the team did a great job attracting our attention and interest. And that, I'd venture to say, was a key element of YC's future success that was there from the very beginning.
Jessica's article really did take me back to those quieter days in 2005!
I feel like this is one of those SV bubble things, that a place has to have a "scene" in order to have startups (and only SV has a "scene"). There are thousands of successful businesses everywhere, even ones that would be considered "startups". The only difference between SV and any other city is people are willing to throw money at ideas with no chance of ever turning a profit which isn't really a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
I wonder how many people who say "you need to be in Silicon Valley to run a successful startup" use MailChimp (Atlanta) or RunKeeper (Boston), or Venmo or Squarespace (NYC) or Duo Security (Ann Arbor, MI) or Dwolla (Des Moines, Iowa).
Whenever I hear "startup scene", I think of Juicero and wonder if that kind of company could ever actually ship a product if they were based anywhere but Silicon Valley. And I wonder how much that actually says about the "startup scene".
According to WalletHub, SF rates pretty darn far down the list of best places to start a business: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-business/22...
Maybe the number of success stories coming from SF has more to do with the sheer number of businesses that are started there? If 100 businesses are started in SF and only 5 in Tulsa, even if only 10 of the startups survive in SF while all 5 survive in Tulsa, people would still say "SF has twice the number of successful startups" even though 100% succeeded in Tulsa vs just 10% in SF.
I grew up in the Boston area as well, thought I would stay there my whole life, and a lunch conversation with Drew was actually instrumental in changing my mind about moving to Silicon Valley. The reason is precisely that: the Boston business climate is so conservative that you really can't get resources unless you're working on something that has made money for other people. I actually don't think I'd start a company in the Bay Area now if I didn't already live here and have a wife with family here - there's usually a long period of learning your market before you have anything fundable, and it's better to spend that in a region where rent won't cost you a fortune. But the Bay Area remains the best place, bar none, to scale a business, and it's quite likely that if your nascent business has any serious growth potential, it'll be fodder for a Silicon Valley competitor with $100M in funding.
And some off then even work? like Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber etc.
Looking back to the time they where funded all these ideas look like sure lossers.
The local scene matters. Most importantly, it affects the rate of people starting companies. If there are other startups around you, you can learn from them. You may not think things like accelerators, meetups, and startup-related college talks matter, but that stuff is really key for creating first-time founders.
As far as investors, it matters in angel + seed rounds, but matters far less past that (because you can fly to your investors). But having a way to access those early investors (when founders are still learning how to talk to investors, and trying to raise the money to run a company full-time) is very important.
I think it's probably a lot easier for a second-time founder to start a company outside of a "scene". But even in that case, having a larger talent pool is nice, and the convenience of being closer to investors.
All of the cities you mentioned (besides Des Moines, Iowa) have at least some sort of startup scene that I've heard of. It's a power-law distribution, but for most founders the value of moving from Des Moines to NYC, or from Boston to SV, is pretty compelling.
Also troubling about Boston startups is the frequency with which the best get bought by SV companies. Seems to me that this also tends to limit local growth. So not bad at all, but not what might have been either.
Looking back at old emails takes some heart, I'm afraid of the idea as I'd probably cringe too hard.
My Reddit account just had it's "cakeday" which means I'm in the "9th year club" and the idea I have comments from 9 years ago still publicly available kind of scares me. Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back.
Old comments on HN I'm not so scared of as I tend to put more effort to only post competent/civil comments here. Plus you can't delete them even if you wanted to.
Please don't. I used to write a diary with meaningless essays when I was in the second grade. When I rediscovered it as an adult, I found them so embarrassing that I threw it away. It's hard to say how much I wish I hadn't done that. Those idiotic essays could have been my good memories; little reminders of how I thought in the past. Same happened with the old applications I wrote when I was starting out programming.
I still have an embarrassing history intact on various internet forums. I wanted to obliterated it some time back, but I realised there is nothing to feel humiliated about your past idiocy, it's in fact a great reminder to keep of how much you have grown.
And when they do, any little thing in your past can and will be used as a social cudgel against you.
But when writing that scrubbing script you may as well make it save a local copy.
The main difference with a personal diary and online comments is that the former is something only you and your closest companions have access too, versus the whole world for online comments in a public forum
No one knows all of the countless purposes those comments could be used for in future decades. The extent to which such mundane daily interactions are now preserved is a totally new dynamic in human society, and I don't think a bit of caution is unreasonable
> motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back.
Interesting that HN doesn't allow deletion of older comments; your account here appears to be roughly that same age.
It has also become a thing recently to cleanup Twitter history: I just deleted 36K tweets | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13731227
I wonder how many people have > 10k karma in HN.
There are a few navel-gazing discussions; they are usually flagged by the moderators.
Top 100 Users on Hacker News by H-Index | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512455
By users, more likely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858395
When HN itself is involved it's a little bit different, because the hypnotic power of all things meta causes HN upvoters to go into an upvoting trance.
Here's the thing: No one cares what you posted nine years ago. Unless it was overly offensive and you became famous enough to get people to snoop, no one's going to look at your stuff. Yeah it's embarrassing, but you will get over it.
I'm going to take a contrarian view that this is not necessarily something that we need or want to keep associated with ourselves. There are groups like Archive Team and IPFS who talk about how ethereal components of the web cause vanishing history and a lost cultural heritage, while neglecting to note that the web is first-in-its-kind because it makes pedestrian, routine conversations to be transcribed and accessed from all over the world.
In olden times, even personal letters would generally include significant news or interesting updates, and these were never intended for a non-personal audience. The high cost of committing information to a fixed medium like paper, as opposed to the ethereal domain of air in which conversation naturally abides, would cause self-selection that made for only the elements considered most significant by the authors or artists to be committed. I am not convinced that archiving every comment or writing that gets published is a necessary or even beneficial part of preserving a cultural heritage. In some cases, like Geocities, the benefit is obvious, but I doubt the value of treating every conversation or exchange as a prized historical artifact.
There are several reddit auto- and back-deleters already. Check out shreddit [0], which I've used with some success in the past, and which can be configured to retain certain high value posts (posts above a user-specified score threshold or that have been awarded gold). I think it's good to keep this running on a continuing basis so that unless the comment is exceptional, only the last few months of comments are available.
This is particularly important/valuable if you have any slightly controversial opinions on anything. Over the years, it's easy to accidentally leak a little information here, a little there, and when a psycho decides to go on a vendetta against you because you insulted the species of grass they just installed in their front yard, it's too late to go back and plug those little leaks.
Just be aware, there are moderators that if they catch you doing that: you will be banned. (It's bad on the sub because it makes seeing your history impossible. [Hard to determine if you're a serial troller/sh*tposter])
Just so people know, although HN doesn't do bulk deletion, we're usually happy to help with deleting or redacting specific comments when you email us links (hn@ycombinator.com).
I'd love to know more about this. Does anyone have insight into why YC changed on this point? Maybe it's just the obvious "people lose focus." But I'd like a confirmation.
See, it's points like that that irk me. As though somehow leaving SV is abandoning your business!
Amazing how much people will pay lip-service to remote work and to the importance of other startup communities and then balk at people pursuing their ideas in "flyover country".
If you are moving back for other reasons and the startup continuing is a secondary thing then it sounds bad. Moving in itself doesn't sound bad.
Moving to Minnesota is fine. By if you moved to SV to start a company, what changed that made you realize SV wasn't a good idea? The declaration has "but" in the middle; what are you running away from?
Rent maybe? There are lots of good reasons to run a startup in SV, NYC, etc. Direct access to capital, certain types of talent, and so on. There are also reasons to not run a startup in places like that. Cost of living as it relates to runway length being the biggest one. Some startups simply need a place to sit and a reliable internet connection.
If you've come to the realization that you don't need any of the things big cities have to offer as it relates to your business, moving back to Minnesota or wherever is exactly the right call.
Early on, I thought about doing one fairly close to MIT to get talent from over there. Many businesses come outbof that school. So, I figured a bunch of other people are doing it already.
Successful web startups are based in SV because to be a successful web startup, you need LOTS of money to burn on marketing and promotion. To get lots of money to burn, you must get investors with the appetite for watching their money burn up. Those investors have built out SV as their nexus not due to any magical qualities of the place, but primarily for personal convenience (traveling sucks, etc.).
The VCs in not-SV do not allow startups to run anywhere near the same way as the SV guys do, despite their attempts to imitate the YC model (most of which are, IMO, outright fleeces on naive locals). Non-SV VCs are just used to doing much more traditional deals, not seed-stage tech financing.
The people who want to start VC-backed companies thus have to trek out to SV, and then once they're established, they stick around because that's convenient for them too.
If you can decouple from the VC ecosystem, or if you can find good local VCs that know the field (and you probably can't), there is every reason to NOT start in SV.
Everything YC does should be viewed through the reality that YC is an investor. Their interests are not necessarily aligned with the interests of founders, and as the party with the leverage, they can mandate that people move to SV solely based on their personal convenience.
I personally see starting in SV as more of a detriment than a benefit, but then, I'm not trying to start a company that depends on venture capital. In non-SV locations where I know some startup people, VC-backed startups would routinely fly out to SV for pitches and the like, and many had an easy time finding investors after being roundly rejected by the VCs in their particular area.
Investors really don't seem to realize the treasure trove that could be available to them if they broadened their horizons a little bit, but maybe that's because there's really no incentive for them to disrupt what they have going on now. Everything is quite convenient for them with SV as the nexus.
Also, there are plenty of investors that realize this, you just have to look for them. For example, Drive Capital in Columbus, OH was founded by ex-Sequoia in 2013 and has raised over $500M since.
It's interesting that acqui-hiring (as alluded to in the email) actually became a trend; even though it was later recognized to be bad idea (E.g. Yahoo's acqui-hiring tactics have failed miserably).
It seems like there was a false idea that tech talent was extremely precious and limited. It wasn't, but that didn't matter; acqui-hiring still became a thing and companies (and some foolish young founders) still profited from it.
I also wouldn't say it's a bad idea, or that tech talent isn't extremely precious & limited. Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. Companies will still pay lots of money for, say, deep learning or drone or self-driving car experts.
And not necessarily even by hiring anyone - a lot of the stuff that a decade ago you needed a reasonably competent programmer for, have become commoditized in the form of services or even opensource solutions. For example, you needed at least a programmer and a designer to build a website for your company, or had to buy those services from another company. Whereas nowadays you can set up a wordpress site, buy a nice looking template, set up a medium blog, or a shopify store for a few bucks a month. Of course, if you want custom stuff, you have to pay someone to customize it but it no longer requires as much of the knowledge you needed to build a site from scratch.
I predict the next generation of YC will be a scalable crowdfunding company. It will look more like a startup-focused Kickstarter than seed-stage Sequoia.
Yeah, it was limited to "accredited investors" in compliance with SEC and tax laws in the US, but even that is changing, at least on paper [2].
[1] https://fundersclub.com [2] https://www.cooleygo.com/can-you-raise-money-from-unaccredit...
There is a reason many companies aim to stay private.
It should be possible to make it beneficial for the users and the company. The company gets money and committed users, and the users get $100-$1000 equity.
Almost no one in Silicon Valley believed in Oculus or Tesla, but users did.
IMO this model will rarely work because of all the non-capital benefits that good investors provide. It's an overly simplistic view of what (good) investors bring to the table. Random people crowdfunding (assuming non-accredited) don't bring the same level of diligence or value.
....so there's hope for me!
I don't want to start an ageism war in this thread, but it would be nice if the vetting process concentrates more on ideas and business viability, and now includes experience as well as youth and energy.
Not much different than how I see startup process described here. Difference is yours creates other startups and will likely last a while. I've always thought of it as a combo of a fraternity style, boot camp, and mass production ideas all rolled into one thing. Also, you select for founders much like the fraternities at Yale, Harvard, etc select for and create business or political elites. Similar methods but opposite effect in innovation.
I also appreciate the fact that the URL still works! Well done making sure Cool Urls Don't Change.
"Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News" | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535210
Quite the opposite. That email is really well written. Analyzing it carefully, it has pretty much everything important for a pitch email.
I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of good.
I don't know. Sometimes it just feels like you and pg stopped believing in us. Which I guess is understandable. One year it went from HN feeling like a part of the community to feeling like we're an adversary. After all, we -- the internet at large -- are small-minded reactionaries, right? Why bother?
But it's a perception worth changing. The old guard is still here. HN grew up, so there are more voices now -- there's more to sift through. But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here.
Setting all that aside, though: have a nice day! And thanks for everything you've built.
Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react to any post or comment : talk trash. Examples of the latter : tptacek, dguido and other secuity professionals. If you read some of the security related threads where tptacek takes part, you will notice that he is literally talking to a wall, people refuse to listen to the guy or try to understand the reasoning behind his comments, though he is respected in the security community and is always right on security related topics. Especially on security related threads there is dangerous advice floating around. Eg- use Tor or some stupid suggestion on how to trick the CBP at the border.
I also noticed the rise of anti-semiticism and just generally hateful comments when the topics of religion, nationality or Trump are brought up. This issue is only getting worse and god help the moderators who have to read these comments on a daily basis.
Though this might be controversial, the general quality of discussion has gone down over the years. I think this is inevitable : as the community grows, quality of discussion goes down. HN is doing incredibly well on this count, the discussions are still the best on any public forum, but IMO the quality is going down. As the community grows, veterans generally tend to become inactive.
(Before people point out that my account is only 159 days old, I've been part of HN for much longer under different handles.)
That has its own issues but has been really nice for me to keep in touch with the old familiar faces.
this applies to all sorts of things, and PG is no exception. PG is an expert on programming and on founding VC funded companies. he is certainly not an expert on most other things but would frequently comment on those things as if he was, and then act very defensive and shocked when he was criticized for things he was wrong about or tone-deaf about.
really this applies to ANYONE in this community. there is lots of very intelligent, well-reasoned discussion, but nobody ought to get a pass on things because of their reputation. we ought not defer to authority. we ought to discuss the arguments as presented.
is the problem one of diversity? Writing for a diverse audience is hard, especially at internet scale, it's a lot easier to write to people who agree with you. Writing for people who don't agree with you is way harder but also way more valuable. It's a shame that most people just give up. I see this not just on HN but also in other elite communities that over time begin to mainstream. A lot of the clojure discussion forums died once the language grew enough that it wasn't just elites. The people who know the most just don't say anything in public anymore. All the discussion is on slack now which is a shame.
Regardless of his exit, it's nice that hacker news has somehow stayed more or less the same for so many years - just like yc