Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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)

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?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com