davidbalbert

I love it. Don't know why I didn't think of this. nicholasbs started riffing off of this idea and I have some good ideas.

I still think a more general list is probably worth it, but I'm going to start by building this :)

For which category?

Cool! Would love to hear any thoughts and suggestions you have along the way.

We'll try to make it relevant. It's still evolving in our heads now. Probably a combination of programming meetups, hackathons, and possibly a cool party or two. Depends on what people want to hear about.

Going to try to swing more towards tech things and away from businessy things.

What kind of stuff do you want to see on the list?

Hopefully both :). In reality, I just needed to make the headline more concise.

There's also a twitter account for more up to the minute things: twitter.com/linkedlistnyc

To be honest, I kind of like the tone of Techcrunch. The fact that many of the writers on Techcrunch have their own voice makes Techcrunch more fun to read than other tech blogs.

If you're looking to build a competing startup news blog, I think creating a unique voice for yourself is a good way to build your brand.

The same thing happened to me on Delta/North West last winter: I missed my flight and booked a new one without telling customer service. Seems pretty par for the course overall. The difference is I was able to apply what I had spent on the canceled round trip to book my flight home once I found out that they had booted me.

I see how this might look a bit ironic ;). The reason we're shutting down HireHive and launching something new is precisely because of what we've learned in the past 8 months working in the hiring space. The only way to find out if there's market opportunity is to come up with a hypothesis and test it. So we've done that once, learned a bunch of stuff about hiring, and are pivoting to what we think is a bigger problem (still in hiring).

I doubt there's a business minded co-founder who could have told us the direction we should be going in without learning what we did about hiring first.

I definitely agree that 50/50 is nowhere near a hard and fast rule. The split depends on how long the company has been around, how much progress has already been made, etc.

The larger point I was trying to get across is the discrepancy between the amount of value many businessy types ascribe to technical skills and the actual value (at least from my perspective).

If the only progress you've made on your company is the initial idea, I really do believe that the you'll up your chances of success significantly if the split is close to 50/50. The odds that you're even going to end up succeeding with the same idea is pretty low. At that stage, you really want to build a team of equals, not get employees.

I think business plan may have not been the right words to use there. Feel free to replace it with "user acquisition strategy" or something like that.

At the end of the day if you're making something that people want, you aught to be able to make money out of it, but it's not as simple as just making something good. Unless you're super lucky/awesome (read: Rapportive http://blog.rapportive.com/the-accidental-launch), you're probably going to have to use significant elbow grease to get users on board.

Thanks! We're pretty excited.

I think it was even more helpful considering we weren't already in the valley, but I think most of the benefits apply even if you are already here. This is from asking much more established co's. FWIW we were coming from NYC.

Our startup is HireHive. Totally forgot to put it in the profile.

The money is probably the least valuable thing we've gotten out of YC. When we came here, we had no network and no connections to the valley. As part of YC, we've gotten:

1) Contacts - we can sit down with just about anyone we can think of.

2) Alumni - the YC alumni network is pretty huge and the alums have been super helpful. We've gotten advice, design feedback, encouragement when we were having darker days, and we've used them as product guinea pigs.

3) Brand name - being able to say "We're a YC company" makes people instantly pay attention to you.

4) Advice - yc has seen a whole bunch of startups. They were able to to save us from going down a bunch of bad paths, even when we didn't want their advice. It's hard to quantify, but I feel like I have a better understanding of how to build something that people will actually use because of yc.

4) A support structure - Office hours with pg, jl, harj, et al are indispensable. These are now available to us forever.

Before getting accepted into yc, my cofounder and I had a bunch of discussions about how much of the company we were willing to give up. We were nervous and thought the upper bound (around 10%) seemed really high. In retrospect 10% would have been a totally reasonable price to pay for what we've gotten in return.

We (HireHive) applied 4 days after the deadline. This was the first time that YC had officially accepted late applications. We weren't planning on applying until the winter (if at all). We were just filling out the application as a way to firm up our understanding of the business and then we said "what the heck".

In retrospect this was clearly a great decision.

I'm a big fan of alternative client side languages (would love to see a ruby version of this project). The problem is wide spread adoption will take forever. You wouldn't be able to use another language in the browser until all vendors ship it and those browser versions become baseline.

What would be cool is if browser vendors implemented client side VMs with a standard bytecode. Then new languages could be developed and delivered over time.

Doesn't yet have access to AWS websites which makes it not totally useful yet. The most important thing for me is to give multiple people access to the AWS management console. Still a useful feature though.

For the record, parent is my cofounder, was unschooled, and is certainly no more awkward than I am.

That's a very fair point. The argument is not that Palo Alto should be making Foursquare. It's more that with all of our iThings and Droids, we're at a place where these local/mobile apps are starting to matter more and it seems the most obvious place for these to spring up is in large cities. This is not a reason New York is fundamentally better as much as it seems that New York might be better for the times. 

I have no doubt that these types of apps will be used all over the country in towns big and small. It's just easier to get critical mass in the cities. 

Well his words were a bit stronger than New York isn't "the ideal environment for tech start ups" ;).

I think the real advantage that the valley has right now is mindshare. This won't change without some prodding. The argument has to be made strongly for New York if this is ever going to change. 

That's why we plan on moving back. A little writing doesn't hurt though. I think a bit of pride and cheerleading can push New York to be better.

IIRC, Resistor has open hack nights every Tuesday or Thursday. If you hang out and make stuff, you won't get turned away. I totally agree though. I wish space wasn't at such a premium in New York. The whole community would do well with a more open Resistor.

Because it's kind of fun ;). 

But really it's hard to have a friend attack my hometown like this and not respond. I just answered in kind.

Also,  I think these types of things are probably much older than 15 years. 

Just added Disqus and Opzi to the list.