Welcome Garry and Aaron | Hacker News Reader

Welcome Garry and Aaron

ycombinator.posterous.com

281 pointspg34 comments

Garry has always been one of my favorite YC founders, and not only because he bought me a large quantity of gin shortly after Posterous got funded. Aaron made a huge impact on my life through his gutsy blog post on RSI [1]. Congratulations, guys, and thanks for being awesome.

[1] http://aaroniba.net/articles/tmp/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain.htm...

What software does YC write for itself again? I've heard a bit about the software for collecting and analyzing applications to YC but I'd like to hear more. Is the HN software mostly written by pg and volunteers or do other hackers at YC do a significant amount of it? Is there anything else?

HN is mostly written by me and Rtm, but Garry and Aaron have already started building new things. Garry made a sort of private Facebook for founders in the current batch, and Aaron has started in on the problem of doing statistical analysis of YC applications and has already made some interesting discoveries.

>> doing statistical analysis of YC applications

What an awesome idea. You must have over 25,000 applications to-date, correct? That's enough to tease out some interesting, statistically significant correlations. Looking forward to hearing more about those results.

It would be awesome if you could share some of those discoveries.

In their position I wouldn't: it'd lead to indicators being gamed and losing their usefulness.

As an investment fund, your trading algorithms are essential IP. I realize YC does a lot more than simply put money in companies but the statistical analysis used to determine what early stage startups to bet on is probably something they'll keep close to their chest.

PG or Aaron: Could you de-identify YC applications data and make it publicly available for others to analyze?

[EDIT:] Or maybe you could make a prediction challenge using the YC application data? You could host the challenge on http://www.kaggle.com/ or http://tunedit.org

Note to self: There is actually a very sparse body of literature that talks about data driven approach to VC, e.g., http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4621..., this one seems interesting (predicting exits): http://www.springerlink.com/content/w024ku34221u3258/

It would probably take them a lot of thought to fully de-identify the data and once they did it might be disappointing. A lot of so-called "de-identified" data out there actually contains things that could be used to identify people.

I would assume that it would be just about impossible to de-identify YC applications, as they are all fairly unique and there is generally a lot of information online about each startup. So if an app had a story about a previous product and then that story shows up again in their blog or when they are doing publicity it makes it pretty easy.

They could release it like this: pick a small number of fields like number of founders and age, and release each of them as separate arrays. Ex: {"founders": [3, 2, 2, ...], "ages": [31, 22, 27, ...]} (the size of the founders array and the ages array would be different because the first is per-startup and the second is per-founder) Just to get an idea of how vague de-identified data might be. And I'm not even sure that would be de-identified enough.

Congrats! I knew Aaron at Google, and he was one of the smartest engineers around.

He also built one of the coolest pieces of software I've ever seen (Robocraft). It was a Starcraft clone where users had to code up AIs for each of the units (and then those AIs battle each other). MIT uses it as the foundation for a programming competition that they run every January. I think it was done by him and one other person.

(https://www.battlecode.org/info/)

(http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...)

Looks amazing. I'd be interested to see what HNers could do with this.

Trying to make a competitive AI for Battlecode is uncannily similar to trying to create a successful startup (and much, much less intimidating.) Aaron deserves a lot of credit for starting it (the other founder is David Greenspan, who also did Etherpad with Aaron.)

Most of that software has been rewritten several times over now, but the competition lives on (it's called Battlecode now)! We actually open sourced a bunch of the code base last year if you're interested in checking it out [1].

Additionally, the competition has since been opened to outsiders so you can participate even if you're not at MIT. We never publicized that fact very well, but I imagine it would appeal to much of the HN crowd. I also recommend checking it out if you've got some time to kill [2].

[1] https://github.com/battlecode/ [2] http://www.battlecode.org

What's the role of a venture partner at YC? For instance, are all partners present at interviews? Do different people do different stuff? Or does everyone kind of do a bit of everything?

Everyone does everything, though some people have specialties (e.g. Garry for design).

On a scale of 10, how much do you rate the default design of posterous?

I personally, (and many others) think tumblr has a far better design.

Sincere question: Will they be advising YC on how to invest the existing funds, or will they be joining YC and adding some of their money as well?

They're not investing any money. They'll advise us how to invest existing funds in the sense that like all of us they read applications and participate in interviews. But the main thing they (and we) do is advise people we've funded.

Garry's an extremely helpful design and product guy, as well as a genuinely nice individual. YC is super lucky to have his full attention.

Garry and Aaron are fantastic advisors and mentors. I'm so glad they're going to continue to work on and grow YC.

Congrats, guys! I had an opportunity to meet Garry and Aaron on a few occasions, and I was blown away with how smart, driven, genuine, and kind they are. Of course real experience building successful products helps too.

Being able to grab office hours with these guys is a massive boost to YC companies. Keep on rockin'!

Congrats Garry and Aaron!! You guys were super helpful during our S11 batch.

Great to hear it! Garry and Aaron were fantastic advisors during our batch.

Looking forward to seeing what new tech they'll build.

I have worked with Aaron a bunch on Etherpad and he is a top bloke! Glad he joined YC

Both truly awesome! A fantastic addition to YC!

Garry and Aaron are awesome and great additions to YC!

Congrats Garry and Aaron!

Garry and Aaron are both awesome, excellent move. Congrats guys.

congratulations Garry and Aaron!! YC gets stronger each year!

Congrats Aaron and Garry

Congrats guys!

Congrats!!!

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