The House Y Combinator Should Have Built | Hacker News Reader

The House Y Combinator Should Have Built

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114 pointsdariusmonsef72 comments

People occasionally suggest we should provide housing. I think it's a mistake for the same reason having founders work out of our space would be a mistake.

E.g. it probably is encouraging for the weakest startups to have some kind of shared workspace they have to come to every day. But for the best startups it's not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Larry and Sergey would not have been better off in some kind of shared workspace. Their garage was the ideal place for them.

The arguments pro and con for shared living space seem to be more extreme versions of the arguments for shared workspace.

If we have to choose between helping failures become small successes and helping successes become big successes, we'd prefer to work on the latter.

But did you see those pictures?! If there ever is a YC house, you guys should use those plans :)

I understand your point though.

But to clarify my idea, I don't mean an office space people come into... but rather if you had a live/work space, it's like the same thing of a startup getting a house together and banging away for 3 months... but they happen to be next door to other batch-mates. I wasn't in the Y Scraper, but what I can see of the successes from those batches are that it worked pretty well for them to all be in close proximity to each other.

I've seen pictures of that building before, and I like it a lot.

I know you mean living space rather than office space. It just doesn't seem an urgent problem. I think we've succeeded in making happy hours non-lame this batch, now that Garry Tan has taken over as social director. It may be that is the best way to bring founders together outside YC.

If we have to choose between helping failures become small successes and helping successes become big successes, we'd prefer to work on the latter.

I have a lot of respect for this viewpoint, and the clarity with which you state it, though it is almost exactly the opposite of what I would say myself. You should write an essay on this if you can find time. It would be incredibly interesting, at least to me.

I'd wager that this is pretty much just business mentality.

YC isn't a charity, after all, beyond the public forum for discussion they provide in HN--and even that is arguably a chance to promote their own startups and scout talent. :)

The big successes do make more money, but if you knew us you'd know that's not our top priority. The reason we want to fund the most successful founders is that they're the most fun to work with. It's exhausting trying to pep up founders who aren't really cut out for startups, whereas talking to the best founders is net energizing.

Ah, fair enough. That additional insight (along with, say, anecdotes about cases on both ends of the motivational spectrum you've encountered running YC) would be a very interesting read.

I was under the--obviously mistaken--impression that pure profit motive was involved here, and thus was curious if a blog entry would be stating the obvious. Now that you've given some more info there, I agree with my parent poster--please do a writeup!

It's a concise description of the difference in incentives between investors and founders. But I'm not sure if it isn't a false dichotomy. Larry and Sergey are asserted to have been better off in their garage; how do we know that they wouldn't have been even bigger starting in a shared space? Maybe they could have attracted some other very bright sparks that reduced the size of their engineering-oriented blind spots.

I know because before I was an investor, I was a founder. We'd never have wanted to work out of an investor's space. It would have been distracting and demoralizing.

I agree...you would end up spending most of your productive time trying to appease investors when you should be off on your own trying to make customers happy.

When people are having to move to the Bay Area just to be in YC, finding a place to stay etc. is distracting, not to mention stressful.

I think framing matters. If it's presented as "when you take my money, you must live on my land, be overseen by me" etc., it's almost feudal, and of course no-one with free choice would choose that kind of environment. But if it's "if you want to be mentored by me, I can host you for a short while along with a bunch of other ambitious folks", it seems different.

> When people are having to move to the Bay Area just to be in YC, finding a place to stay etc. is distracting, not to mention stressful.

Sounds like the thing to do would be to eliminate that friction by helping people quickly and easily locate places of their own, then.

I totally agree with this. At Twilio we worked out of the Founders Fund offices for about 5 minutes after our angel round, but it wasn't a good idea. We ended up happier texting each other with a coffee shop choice for the day. We did it for 6 months (and they did it for a YEAR before I joined). Its okay to be alone.

Disagree. What makes it investor's place? If the investors are always around. It would help in connecting with each other. It does not need to be free..

An odd aspect of that comparison is that Larry and Sergey did a lot of their early work in a shared space--- the Stanford grad-student offices. They only moved into a more "private" setting (the garage office) around two years after starting work on Google, when many of the major problems had been solved and it had already started gaining traction.

I dont think you should provide housing, however I do believe it would be beneficial if there would be the opportunity for new companies/teams to live with each other if they choose so. Clearly, for some people, that is contraproductive (you mentioned Larry and Sergey), however I think for especially smaller and newer teams, having this community that lives and works together can be great.

In some senses, it is like on and off campus housing: Sure for some people off campus is less of a distraction, cheaper or just totally sufficient, but it is arguable that the on-campus philosophy of American colleges has contributed to Americas success.

I do believe it would be beneficial if there would be the opportunity for new companies/teams to live with each other if they choose so

What's stopping them from doing so?

They often do in fact.

I'm not saying they aren't, but I wonder whether it would be helpful to facilitate it from YC's perspective (granted, I do not know what accepted candidates actually do)

I love this mentality about YC, but I'm curious: if you had unlimited resources to build any kind of environment you want, is it possible to build a space you would support YC founders working out of, even just post-YC but pre-Series A? We didn't want to work out of our apartment when we got our first hire, and had to go to an office space, since we wanted privacy that most coworking spaces didn't offer.

I agree about the need to build you own culture, etc, but there are some undeniable benefits to being near other YC startups and sharing resources such as a kitchen (which seems pretty rare in a ~5 person closed-off office space) or food delivery. The YScraper in SF does seem to be pretty popular for this stage, but I imagine there's a better hypothetical option.

The limited resource is not money but attention. We could raise much more money than we do now. But if we got into the real estate business, we'd have to have people to oversee it, which would change both the size and character of YC.

Plus we have no particular expertise in real estate. We have some insight about what startups need, but I suspect it is more than counterbalanced by our ignorance of real estate. It's better if we stick to what we're good at.

Here is where Zencoder was born: http://yfrog.com/09x7fsj.

We went a little outside of the Mountain View area and got a house in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was great. Three desks, three computers, three bedrooms, a nice kitchen, and a hot tub - perfect for those cold February days. There was a country store up the road, but not much else for miles around. Nothing to distract us except for redwoods, wild animals (turkeys, mice, deer, a scorpion), and the occasional storm. But still, we were only 30 minutes from Mountain View and 40 minutes from Palo Alto - closer than if we had lived in San Francisco.

Those were the 4 most productive months of my life.

Wow, that looks (and sounds) fantastic. I'm curious now: how does that kind of thing compare price-wise to an urban or suburban place, on a startup budget? Do you pay much of a premium for the idyllic location?

Building something like this has been my dream for the last 6 years or so.

"Hacker Hostel" (That name is already taken, though).

The "I'm an accentric billionaire" fantasy of mine is basically to build this, except to run it as an invite-only non-profit.

Makes me happy to hear that I'm not alone in this thinking :) (Because it does sound a bit like I'm wanting to build a hippie commune when I describe this to people).

To expand on the fantasy a little bit:

"To apply to hacker hostel, send us a puzzle, that's your application. It doesn't matter if you've never touched a computer before, or if you just finished your PhD.

If you get accepted, you can come out and live here for 1 semester, during which time you're free to create whatever you want. We'll fund the supplies, we've got a workshop, just build, and share whatever knowledge you have with the other people that are here.

If, while you're here, you build the next big thing, and are suddenly swimming in cash, good for you! We don't own your IP, although if you would donate to our trust, we'd really appreciate it."

Personally, I see a problem with the current cycle of:

go to school -> go to college -> get a job -> CAT PICTURES/Financial Services/Advertising!

I hate that. If I have have the means, I plan on breaking it.

And stuff I'm doing now: I keep a server that doesn't get any of my personal projects on it. Any time one of my friends posts to facebook or tells me that they want to learn to program computers, or that they have an idea they want to do, I give them an account on the box, and offer to build it with them, or to teach them python [the language that I know].

(Now I'm ranting, it's the tea I had for lunch, I think).

It makes me really sad that I can sit here and look at this computer with an almost total understanding of what is happening with it, and how to make it do whatever I want, and that the majority of my friends can't.

We [programmers] are all supermen. I've noticed that in the last year, a lot of us are trying really hard to give that gift to everybody else (code academy, khan academy, etc.), and that really makes me happy :).

Well, you do realize it is a hippie commune, just for people interested in building companies and cool technology. I mean, SF gave us hippies, and then it gave us silicon valley. Next step would be to have a silicon valley commune.

Haha, this is a good point. I guess the difference is that we'd be living in converted shipping containers instead of cabins in the woods.

> I mean, SF gave us hippies, and then it gave us silicon valley

SF didn't produce silicon valley.

Fred Terman and Bill Shockley did.

Sounds like a more fun version of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where they threw the greatest minds in science into one location with no responsibilities, and it was, according to Richard Hamming, a disaster.

What if instead, your co-inhabitants were musicians, sculptors, writers, scientists, designers, mathematicians, philosophers, economists, architects, dancers, and so on, connected by their abundant creativity, passion, intellect, and curiosity?

PS: nice architecture. PUMA also did some cool stuff with shipping containers a few years ago. http://inhabitat.com/prefab-friday-puma-city-container-archi...

I think the concept of having other creatives nearby is an interesting one, but there are unique experiences that early startup founders face and having a peer group of others solving the same problems is more helpful, imho.

Musicians, sculptors, writers, philosophers, economists, architects, and dancers have nothing special to contribute to companies like Parse, Heroku, or Dropbox to name a few.

What is a dancer going to tell me about running my startup? The whole point of startups moving to SF is so that they can be around other startups.

I've learned a lot from ballet. I appreciate the coordination and the discipline. Making something simple is very difficult.

    - Jack Dorsey

Art, science and invention are closely related. As Albert Einstein said, "After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well", but you could probably throw inventors in there too. Samuel Morse was a painter before he invented the telegraph. So was Robert Fulton, before he created the first viable steamship.

Creativity is something that should be valued, regardless of whether it's expressed in code or in movement.

This is a great house. It's spacious, it's airy, it's well laid out. It would be a great house to have a party in.

However, it's in Maine.

And that means that since the insulation is almost nonexistent and the windows are huge, the heating bills are going to be horrendous. When you come in from the foot of snow (which is not uncommon in Maine) you will be trekking slushy dirt all over the suddenly frigid main room.

Maine houses have mudrooms, covered porches, or other systems like airlocks to prevent too much heat from escaping while you bring in your groceries and take off your boots.

Shipping containers are great for packing full of stuff, but dreadfully proportioned for living space -- less than 8' ceilings (before insulation and finishes); less than 8' wide (before insulation and finishes); and forty feet long with a door at only one end (horrible for circulation and functional zoning because you have to walk through one space to get to another).

Just because a shipping container worked for Stewart Brand when he put together the Whole Earth Catalogs, doesn't mean they make good habitable spaces. The length was useful for laying out lots of pages in a production line and the steel walls allowed him to use magnets for 'pinning up' pages. These are not features particularly relevant to most activities including software development. [See Brand's How Buildings Learn].

The predominate feature of shipping containers is that they make great archiporn images of the sort shown in the article - a high road building masquerading as a low road building (something Brand also talks about in How Buildings Learn).

BTW, it's probably a summer house given that it has no garage, which is even harder to imagine as a design decision for a Maine winter.

He did say that were it up to him he'd build it in Hawaii, which would if anything have the opposite set of problems.

Interestingly, you describe in your dream list what I would say many top business schools do: shove people together on intense projects after vetting them. The idea is that the 'cream' has already risen, so bonding is critical. And also, your IP belongs mostly to you in the YC model, that's nice, and sometimes lucrative.

It's interesting to think of you running a business school, pg.

It's interesting to think of you running a business school, pg.

It just hit me: he has been running a business school; or rather, an entrepreneurship school, for the last x years.

YC is probably the top business school in the country by market cap created.

What is the right ranking metric for business schools, and what does the top 10 look like?

The best way to drive the reinvention of higher education will be to rank new approaches side by side with the old guard.

> YC is probably the top business school in the country by market cap created.

Biz schools aren't all that good at creating market cap.

Consider Stanford. It has a top-ranked biz school that focuses on startups.

Still, the CS department laps the biz school in "market cap created". I think that EE does as well, and there are probably a couple of other departments that have created more market cap. (Bio-tech is the obvious candidate.)

I think that a biz school that creates more market cap than the top technical departments is evidence that the technical departments are failing.

There are several parallels I see between the YC experience and college fraternities. A group of people (often men) with a similar interest, with a powerful alumni network.

Unfortunately, I found living in a fraternity house very distracting for my school work. There were always people doing "downtime" activities like gaming, drinking, etc. I certainly participated in these activities more than I would have if I had been on my own. It was great for my social network, bad for my studies.

I imagine a similar thing could happen in a house with too many YC founders... It would be especially detrimental because there's only 3 months to get YC done right, versus 4 years of college.

I imagine Drew Houston would have some good input on this, having been in both a fraternity and YC.

What Tim Draper is planning on doing with Draper University, which is a former hotel in San Mateo, may end up being pretty awesome. http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_1984021...

I think the rise of "hacker houses" is indicative that people really care about community and like living with like-minded people who they can collaborate with, be inspired by and socialize with.

I think there is potentially room for a hybrid residential university and incubator model. I don't think making housing required but making it optional for those who want it would be awesome.

As a guy who lives in a house with 5 Bain consultants (not hackers I know, I know, but smart, driven people) I can tell you that living in a house with other people you work with is absolutely awesome. Surrounding yourself with driven, talented people really helps creating new ideas, meeting new interesting people and in general creating an awesome environment. While I would love to have a "Hacker House" my MVP of having a consulting house is working out wonderfully and I highly recommend you try it.

"Heavily curated community"? I'm beginning to loathe that buzzword because it's so hollow. Of course YC is selective - anyone not stark raving mad would be selective when handing out thousands of dollars of their own (and their investors) money.

A few words that would work better to describe YC (going with just the positive ones here): elite, choosy, discerning, elect, exceptional, exclusive, select, restrictive, hand-picked and so on... 'dict' is your friend.

Sorry. Is there another word to describe "curation", that tickles your hate nerve less?

And it's not just in selecting startups for batches, but as I mention, communication between founders, etc.

Not a bad thing, just one approach to creating a community experience.

No, not a bad thing at all, it's the natural state of pretty much anything where a person selects a set of things from a larger set. Which, given the finite nature of a great deal of that which surrounds us, is... well, a lot of stuff!

"Most of the people in our office were curated by my old boss before he moved to another division"

"The few, the proud, the...curated"

"I curated my wife from amongst those on offer in the mail-order catalog"

"Curate" (verb) is one of those words that has lost most of its meaning, due to people using it in order to steal its cachet. Previously it was associated with art museums and libraries, institutions of supreme cultural importance. Now that anyone can make a list and put it on the internet, anyone can be a curator, which means you don't get much information about someone if you learn that he is a "curator".

> Now that anyone can make a list and put it on the internet

The funny thing is that is what Yahoo was in the very beginning, 15+ years ago.

Very nice design, the layout, with common areas below meeting areas, reminds me of Pixar's headquarters http://www.bcj.com/public/projects/project/39.html

I remember hearing in the excellent pixar documentary that one of the intentions behind this layout was to facilitate random interactions among employees, all sharing a common, open walkway.

I'm sure YC is well aware that they could be like Google (which has all but the kitchen sink where housing is the kitchen sink). I'm glad they chose a more meetup-y route instead.

https://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg2z5whw_41cb322p

Besides being a less well-rounded experience, it would be setting up for a more difficult transition out of YC.

I've off-and-on dreamed about that as a revitalization for the old millionaire's neighborhood I live in. Lots of huge 1880's brick houses (including mine) chopped up into squalid little apartments for drunks and dumpster divers, when they'd actually be absolutely perfect for living/working spaces. Big ballrooms and so forth would be great for working in. And dirt cheap.

Great article with great insight, but this makes YC sound like a frat house, imo. What startup founders want to hear is that they will be successful. They don't want to hear about how it is going to help their networking and how they are going to become great friends with people, even if that is really what is important. It is, btw.

I would argue that some of the most successful people are where they are because of the powerful networks they belong to... The YC network is an amazing resource of driven, talented and super smart people... wouldn't you want to be great friends with these people?

I like the idea of the ranch in Hawaii. I agree with you--my experiences traveling when I have couchsurfed or volunteered have been orders of magnitude more memorable than when I stayed in a hotel.

What's your plan re: ranch?? Sounds like a fun project to build.

Hmm. Plan might be a stronger word than where I'm at with this :)

It's a 3-5yr vision.

I just left Hawaii (to move back to Austin) after 8 years.

Hawaii is beautiful, but it's never going to be hacker heaven.

Probably not... but I'll settle for Hacker Holiday.

I would participate in this, but not given away to folks for free.

I think having startups work/live in one really cool space can be really interesting and valuable, but they'd all have to pay rent. A "frat house" but for startups & geeks? I dig.

Back before I knew of YC, I schemed on the idea of having a startup frat. Where pledges bust ass to build products, apps, etc. The profits are shared with those that built them, but also heavily reinvested back into the frat... But then I never went back to college. :)

PG made a good point that YC is focused on the good founders on the margin of being great. A few guys who go to school with me here at Berkeley are focused on the flip side of that. People who are starting something smaller, and need just a bit of a push. They call is Agora House, where founder live in a the House, after serious vetting. Check it : https://www.facebook.com/AgoraHouse

Its everyones’ dream to live in a good house. But one thing that draws people back is that they don't have time to put ideas together and do research. At YC its the place everyone would die for mmmmmhhhhh I like the whole idea

How about curating a list of startup friendly houses on Airbnb. Could be a good marketing approach for the landlords to say "startups X, Y and Z started here". I'm sure they'd be popular outside of YC seasons too.

Yeah, that's probably good marketing for some houses.

How is the power supply, I see places to sit and all but did not really see power outlets. And I think people will need those everywhere (until we have super batteries that last forever).

Maybe I am thinking to far ahead :P

I'd prefer a place that is less perfect. Where you can dig things into the wall, change the furniture or paint your room. Give a place but don't take my freedom.

Besides, it looks amazing! I just didn't want to move in:)

I personally think this would make a much cooler hacker space:

http://founderscastle.com/

...what is this? Seems like it's just four links to four houses on Realtor.com

Care to elaborate?

Building friendships and sharing experiences is a great thing, but can't too much on those things bring down productivity?

Sure. So don't spend all your time socializing :)

How serious are you about building in hawaii? :)

What island?

You had me til Hawaii

No love for the Islands huh?

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