The Start-up Guru: Y Combinator's Paul Graham
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I love that he added that last sentence! No one would've known what he meant otherwise. ;)
Note that most of the fan boys that are cultishly obsessed with pg and yc are actually NOT in YC. That's just such an important distinction. I get this impression just by tracking the most ridiculous comments on YC during the acceptance notifications, and noting the source.
In my experience, YC startup founders are far more likely to say they're sick of his slop (literally) after a few weeks than gush over him.
That is NOT TRUE! It's so frustrating people think this. He popularized one particular algorithm, which is great. But he did not invent it, not by a long shot.
Not to be facetious but who invented them, depends on your definition of "spam filter". I know you mean email filter, but when you put it that way, it makes me think of the generalized problem of filtering.
Put that way, I don't think a who invented it. It was more like it was discovered by a what.
A Plan for Spam: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
There were effective spam filters before "A Plan for Spam," most notably CRM114, but that worked differently. And there were a couple papers published that had the words "Bayesian" and "spam filter" in the title, but the algorithms they described were different, and in fact quite useless.
Well, that was below the belt.
No way. For one thing, I'm convinced that "What You Can't Say" will be read in a hundred years and long beyond. Imagine if someone had written essentially the same essay centuries ago. Wouldn't we still read it?
And here we are today a few short years later in another epic downturn.
This interchange with pg makes almost anyone want to jump up and do something:
"But what you really should do is start a start-up," he says. He stops and thinks for a moment. "You know what? You should do a news website for finance. You could be like Bloomberg, but you'd be just one person." His mind is going faster than his mouth. "What about Blogberg as a name? Is Blogberg.com taken?" Before I have a chance to respond, he flips open his MacBook to check, using a clever domain-name search tool developed by another Y Combinator founder, Beau Hartshorne.
Sam Altman's quote about hard work pretty much sums it up:
"The start-ups that do well are the ones that are working all the time."
Good to see he didn't miss the most important thing of all:
"We learned quickly by paying attention to the users," Graham says.
Thanks, Max. How about a follow-up article about Hacker News? Paul Graham & Y Combinator's influence goes far beyond 145 start-ups.
Is there something I'm missing?
And be sure to mention that all we talk about is erlang innards. :-)
Is nothing sacred? ;-)