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123 pointsniico34 comments

I think part of PG's success in working with entrepreneurs is due to the fact that he comes across as extremely approachable.

I always remember a tweet that he sent out:

http://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/29256073985

So true.

It is a very good question that pg asked while just joking around something that I guess all entrepreneurs should have an immediate answer to, 'Why doesn't this already exist?'

Definitely. And it will make you think about possible barriers to entry if you were to create the idea.

It is a great question. However, I look at some of the YC funded companies(including justin.tv) and I wonder what the answer would be?

Off the top of my mind, I can think of hipmunk,1000memories etc and would like to know how the founders would answer.

It is a much more piercing question than What are users forced to do today when your product does not exist.

Justin.tv (neither an online streaming live show of some guy's life, nor a streaming platform for live video) didn't exist before we were funded, fyibtw.

Justin, I totally agree that what you did with Justin.tv was novel and didn't exist before. However, how would you have answered Why doesn't it already exist?

Ah, sorry, reading comprehension fail.

Why didn't the platform exist pre-Justin.tv?

1) Bandwidth prices were much higher in 2007, and have plummeted in the past few years, making the economics more attractive.

2) There were no good, stable streaming servers commercially available. Flash streaming in FMS 2 was a joke (it would fail constantly) in 2007. Fast forward a little while and you had Red5, FMS 3, and Wowza all with video streaming to a Flash client.

3) Video advertising market grew significantly starting around 2007, providing a monetization model.

Hope that explains it!

Could you really have provided these answers back when you were at the interview stage of getting funding? These all seem accurate in hindsight, but the kind of things you never would have known up front...

Edit: This isn't meant to be critical; I'm just curious how you would have answered back in a 2k7 interview?

Doubtful. We didn't even have the idea of the platform when we came up with Justin.tv. Our pitch was more along the lines of "Here's something we're passionate about that is cool" -- PG believes in funding people and believed in funding us. We figured the rest out as we went along.

Boy, it surprised me how much like a real interview that seemed!

This is pretty off topic but it interested me so I thought I would share:

This video more than anything got me interested in socialcam (of which I had never heard of before), so I did a little reading and decided to sign up for updates to the product. After I signed up the page refreshed and informed me I was ranked last (4000 and something) on their list because I hadn't gotten anyone else to sign up yet. Instantly my competitive juices started flowing and I wanted to get higher up on the list.

It just struck me as a really original interesting way to encourage sign ups (presumably for eventual beta testers).

(also you can help my ranking if you click here: http://socialcam.com/?referred_by=BEA3CDhw )

I don't know why you can't see it, but frankly they are playing you for a fool. What they do is a classic pyramid scam, albeit with signups instead of money.

Except instead of fooling people into thinking they're going to get rich and stealing from them, it's a free game where everyone involved wins an invite!

I think you may be confusing viral marketing for a pyramid scheme. Given, pyramid schemes are a form of viral marketing, but exponential growth through sharing is necessary without being sufficient.

In this case it works out fine for both parties. I signed up because I was interested in beta testing and socialcam gets to choose their potential beta testers by how social they are.

For what it's worth the system may not be very effective yet. I have one referral and I've moved from #4000 to #600

And it's not exactly original. Streakly used it few months ago and I remember its author saying that he in turn borrowed it from some other webapp.

He's not losing anything, except a few minutes' time to sign up, so how is he being made a fool? For being excited enough about their product to want to be invited to use it? There's nothing foolish in that, especially if they have an interesting product.

If you don't find the product interesting I'll refund all your money!

He is being used as a tool to do their marketing for free.

I don't know about you, but I find it extremely tacky to use friendships to sell stuff (and he is selling your time and attention to that company for an invite) even if it doesn't involve money directly.

And that causes me to lower my opinion of both him and (especially) the company. Use sleazily marketing => you are a sleazy company.

But hey thats apparently just me.

'[...] I find it extremely tacky to use friendships to sell stuff '

Why? Most of the good products I hear about, I hear through friends. Much better than "traditional" advertising.

I'm guessing if the product itself wasn't any good, no one would bother "playing the game". The game is only there to encourage people even more.

Personally, I find cold-calling people out of the blue and trying to pitch them a product when you only have minimal indications of interest from them (if any) to be the sleaziest way to sell a product.

This would make for some good mental preparation and visualization. Sit back and stare at PG asking you questions over and over again and perhaps it'll help reduce your nervousness come time to interview.

His face I can handle, it's making sure I've covered my bases that worries me.

Get the invitation first, then worry about the rest.

I assumed my advice would be heeded by those with invitations. Didn't think I needed to spell that part out.

premature optimization alert

I know it's a short, light-hearted video, but that's what I imagine the YC interview to be like for some reason. Probing questions, asked politely and framed in a way to see what your response is, not just ticking questions and answers off of your mental tick sheet.

I'm based in the UK and am a single-founder, but this sort of thing just makes YC look like an even more compelling experience - all for an under 2 minute, friendly video. Good job!

socialcam holds the record for fastest interview ;)

Just a heads up - the Blue Coat web filtering service has classified socialcam.com as "pornography"

Maybe some guys who already had interviews with PG, could tell more questions?

Really, I'd say this is really accurate. Any further questions grew organically from answers to the questions in this video.

For us, they made a big point of knowing that our market really existed, even though no company was targeting it yet. In fact, our lack of solid evidence of the market is the main reason for our rejection (W11). However, maybe this was only such a large focus because it was our biggest weakness, and other interviews focus on other things.

Keep in mind that the interview is only 15 minutes, so there don't need to be many questions...

I can't remember if it was asked or not, but I've had several investors ask the question 'What keeps others from copying you quickly?'

You've got a few grammatical mistakes in there. Anyway, very cool video!

Thanks, I fixed them. We've been working late :)

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