Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Hey, pg ... does that include our application by any chance?

I realize you don't have to answer this, but I am just curious:

It seems on the surface that our company is much closer to what you say YC is looking for, than many companies you had in W10, S10, etc. Let me just illustrate a couple points:

1. You emphasize resilience: we got rejected by YC in the past and went ahead and raised funding, launched and already have 70k (and counting) users since 3 months ago. The vast majority of our reviews are 5 stars.

2. You care about companies with huge potential. We're building a next-generation, distributed social network which gives users control over their data, and helps their social lives in the real world instead of online.

3. You want to see founders who did extraordinary things: I went to college at 14, played in Carnegie hall when I was 7 years old. (http://magarshak.com/piano) My co founder can father a small child just by looking at a woman... (http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7203877/fundraising)

4. You care about a capable team that has been together for a long time: http://qbix.com/about . We have made websites such as this: http://blurts.com which is now worth over $5 mil.

etc.

So I am curious why YC didn't even want to interview us, but then again, your rejection letter doesn't leave many clues :)

"My co founder can father a small child just by looking at a woman"

Hilarious.

With great power comes great responsibility...

And great alimony?

The fathering comment is an in-joke with our batch: http://adgrok.com/?p=666

From the first footnote on that blog post, this has got to be the best non-computer hack I've read so far:

One of the Y Combinator questions asked you to name one non-computer system that you’d hacked in some interesting way. My answer concerned a man-in-the-middle attack I once did on Craigslist personals. I placed an ad as a woman seeking a man, and as a man seeking a woman, and then simply crossed the email streams by forwarding mail from one to the other, and vice versa. Most Craigslist personals didn’t even have photos back then, so the switch went undetected, even after the couples had met. I handed off the relationship by telling one that the other’s email address had changed, from my fake one to the real one, and likewise vice versa. For all I know, those couples are still together and having kids. They probably don’t know to this day what happened or what brought them together.

I hate to be a killjoy but neither party ever asked why the e-mail address was changed resulting in the other one jumping in and saying "I never changed my email address, you changed yours!!"? And thus opening up an investigation as they show each other the emails from the past. Secondly, neither party ever asked "Was this the first time you posted an ad on craigslist?" and finally neither party ever said "I don't usually respond to ads on craigslist but..." (people say this out of insecurity not because they actually mean it, this is just to make themselves look good).

I know this because I use to do this all the time in college over skype , record long awkward conversations between distant aquaintences and roll on the floor laughing daiwa try to figure out who called whom and who they are. This was actually a lot of fun, it was an exercise in psychology, we would try to predict how crazy explosive weird conversations could get and see what happens based on people's personality profiles.

My point is that they would have to be really really stupid to not know that somebody else connected them...

Never heard of blurts, but that color palette totally gave me a Vonage vibe.

> My co founder can father a small child just by looking at a woman

Hilarious! I'm going to have to remember this.

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