Advice from YC founders and partners | Hacker News Reader

Advice from YC founders and partners

quest.audio

102 pointsrobertgaal28 comments

I couldn’t get past the first few seconds of each speaker repeating the question and their slow inefficient speaking. What an infuriating way to consume information, what’s wrong with just plain text? Especially since some of these people basically repeat the same things. What’s next, a video version so we can waste bandwidth on their pointless hand gestures and facial expressions? Respect people’s attention spans.

Most speakers on Quest haven't published their answers anywhere else before because it's easier to create something sincere and personal using audio. Since people already listen to audio advice in for instance podcasts, we think it works.

Anyway, I'm genuinely sorry for your frustration. I hope your day progresses smoothly otherwise.

What does being sincere and personal add to their message? This is business, not life advice.

Dude come down, if you don’t like it move on, no body is forcing you to listen to them. Stop being so entitled, if you think you know more and are better than the people on Quest go on and build your successful business on your own.

Is this soundbites for the aspirational crowd? The twitter of voice perhaps.

Hi, founder of Quest here. Yeah I guess it is! We're building an audio Q&A app where experts answer questions in short audio clips. We're starting with career advice and are already hosting 100+ speakers so far.

FYI, your about/jobs/policy page is broken.

Thanks! Hotfixing...

Good luck building!

How do you go about meeting them? Or how do they reach you?

Thanks! We just get in touch over email and make it super simple to answer remotely.

Do you have any plans to make this content accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing?

This seems like a podcast but with more steps.

You're not wrong

lol, would love a 1-click button but love the information density and specificity relative to a podcast.

Short, dense podcasts aren't unusual. Scientific American's "60 Second Science" is a good example. "NPR News Now" is just a few minutes long and updated hourly.

The button has the pause icon, but it doesn't pause it stops and when play is hit again, it starts from the beginning. There is no pause behavior.

It would be nice if I knew how far along the individual clip one is. The background for the currently playing segment should be highlighted.

Since this is a multiparty QA, it would be nice to be able to listen to just one person's answers.

Ouch, that first one is definitely a bug. As for duration, that's definitely something that's missing and we can fix it by showing a proper timeline. You can already click on someone's profile to listen only to their answers, but we could make that easier to find and do as well.

Thanks for this!

A podcast of a duration I want to listen to.

Two things I'd like to see 1) show me the progress of the clip I'm listening to. You've got the length of the clip, but I have to listen to the whole thing, I can't skip through it. I can barely get through the first clip which is only 1:30 2) let me play at a faster rate. I'd easily listen to this at 1.25x or 1.5x

Both things we should absolutely do. Thanks!

Is there any backstory? How did you convince all of them to answer the question?

We just reached out and made it super easy to contribute with just a few minutes of their time

Are there transcripts?

If you like snippets in text consider the unix fortune tradition, I maintain https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup which produces bitesized memes in glorious ANSI color. Some startuppy, mostly software architecture/design focus, some more broad anthropology/history. Aim is a high signal to noise ratio and consistently inspirational/curveball thinking. Looking for more OS package maintainers.

Soon!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748374

This isn't really obsessively following. It's just 78 minutes of background noise that may have something good. So, listen while doing something else.

Only drives his point further.

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