Ask PG: Please reply here or write an essay on:

1. A lot more experienced. Before YC, the only startups I knew about were the ones started by me and by friends. Now I know which of their qualities were essential to their success, and which were incidental.

2. This answer will sound useless, but it's the same reason anyone is good at anything. There's no single secret. There are about 20 different things we have to do, from recognizing talent to talking about product ideas to matching people up with VCs, and we try hard to do them all well.

3. By accident. When we first started YC, we didn't know what to do, so we started with a summer program. Most college students regard summer jobs as disposable anyway, so we figured no one would mind if the experiment was a disaster and all the companies failed. As it turned out, that batch did remarkably well.

4. This one I already did write about: http://ycombinator.com/about.html

5. That it's not as easy as it looks. A lot of people think investing is like betting on horses: you pick, they race, and if they win you get money. Actually it is a lot more active than that. And the earlier the stage, the more work it is. If you want to invest at this stage, you need to have the same qualities you'd need to be a successful founder.

follow-up question to #1: which qualities are successful to the startup's success? I've read essays where you say determination is more important than intelligence; would you add anything else to that?

Determination, solid friendship between the founders, flexibility, intelligence, honesty, design sense, experience, in that order.

Ask PG: please make me a sandwich.

Edit: In all seriousness, you can probably find answers to most of these in his existing essays.

sudo Ask PG: please make me a sandwich.

Can we "pls" leave the expression "pls" on Reddit and Digg?

I started with Slashdot, got disillusioned, then went over to Digg, then Reddit, and now I'm here and have a better appreciation for Slashdot. This experience prompts me to formulate a law:

When you start wishing social news site X won't become like social news site Y, it's probably inevitable at that point.

Slashdot went bad differently than Digg and Reddit. Digg and Reddit went bad by appealing to too many people, and making commenting too easy.

Slashdot is bad because people post the same fucking diatribes over and over. I guess this happens on Reddit and Digg too, but to a lesser extent. You could roll Slashdot back to 1999 and it would be the same people with the same views talking about the same thing. We get your point, enough already :)

Oh well, at least there's still Lambda The Ultimate.

> Oh well, at least there's still Lambda The Ultimate.

Sssshhhh! The others will hear you.

L:tU is scary enough that most of the unwashed masses take a look at it and then go away. They've done a really good job at keeping the bar high.

"You could roll Slashdot back to 1999 and it would be the same people with the same views talking about the same thing. We get your point, enough already :)"

1) Roll Slashdot back to 1999 2) ?????????????? 3) Profit!

"Oh well, at least there's still Lambda The Ultimate."

Hmmm. How about I start a site called "Lambda teh Ultimate" which does nothing but promulgate bad programming practices, procedural spaghetti code, and Farkish stupitrivia that's somehow still too nerdy for the mainstream?

There will be a regex filter that introduces bad grammar, misuse of homophones, to instead of too, their instead of they're, etc... Also bots that the markov chains to post schizophrenic sounding manifestos promising to revolutionize all programming by subsuming everything with GOTO and DB tables.

There will be auto-moderation, giving certain users bonus points, implemented by running StupidFilter in reverse.

To become a moderator, you first have to prove that you spend more than 9 non-sleeping hours alone in your room a day, and that you still live with your parents.

The site will be ad supported, but all ads will be required to be pop-ups that install plugin EXEs. If there are not enough ads, they will be randomly generated from emails in my Spam folder.

All of the web design will be generated by using genetic algorithms operating on the corpus of MySpace profiles for users aged 16 or younger.

The commenting will be modeled on YouTube from early 2007 and before.

Nah, this will stay good. Why?

1-pg's financial interest is not impressions, it's the number of smart hacker readers he can attract to YC, and for that he needs high signal-noise.

2-pg retains ownership. He has control and can judiciously change the system or deputize people at any point and in any manner to filter content.

#1 is the best part. Personally, I'd be glad to host a forum without ads just because the conversation is worth the $20/month that a slicehost costs. My life is more about enjoying existence than having a high bank account balance.

But hey, since pg wants to pay for it, that's fine with me :)

Well, I'm sure it wasn't invented on Reddit or Digg. However, I think in general "pls" is a pretty poor abbreviation. Those little words we use in order to sound polite are not the place where we should try to save keystrokes.

It's a way of saying to somebody "Hi, I'm asking you to write an essay for me! But I've decided to save myself three keystrokes in the process."

What abbreviations are acceptable here? I've used btw. I've even seen PG use btw. Anything else?

Here's a rule of the thumb I follow: abbreviating well-known phrases is ok, abbreviating words is not. I try not to be picky with other people's comments, but it's hard to take comments seriously when they use abbreviation unnecessarily.

Im glad u r sayin sumthin bout this. 4 real.

k thnx bi

Kinda demanding, especially since you are saying the purpose of the information is to help YC competitors.

YC competitors will fail if they don't have honest soul to help others to grow. Also YC model looks easy from outside but if you try to know the nity-gritty of their business model then you will realize that its a hard work and the passion behind it has to be genuine otherwise there would have been hundreds of clones all over world. I see YC as a social entrepreneurship than just a money making machine and hence if Pg can share something that can help other entrepreneurs and countries then it would be like an adding jewel to his legacy crown.

"Benevolent" != "do all the work for your competitors". Besides, if you're not smart enough to figure out how to improve on the YC model on your own, why should entrepreneurs come to you for advice?

Because he's smart enough to ask?

funny how most commenters strike down the person for asking, yet PG actually replies to 4/5 questions. why not either a) try to answer the questions or b) let PG answer them, because he seemed pretty willing.

Part of 2) is that YC has made raising (seed) capital like applying to college, something that most people just coming out of college already know how to do. Previously it involved meeting rich people and smooth talking them out of their money, something that very few people just coming out of college know how to do.

Reading the essays will answer the meaningful questions here.

probably too self serving for PG, along with all the other reasons