dbul

I remember hearing this on NPR a couple days ago. It's actually 35.[1]

To all who write blog posts: please cite your stats.

[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/07/the-rising-age-gap...

http://web.archive.org/web/20120203092942/https://www.cia.go...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Also, from my experience smoking seems to be rare both in Tokyo and the countryside, so I'd like the see some statistics about Japanese being "smoking fiends" before I assertTrue().

Why? I'd guess because the blog post refers to celebrity hackers bullying another hacker. The community -- more than just these few guys -- can't even behave civilly. It's a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Edit: if you happen to seriously be confused by what I've written, please visit the url and ctrl/cmd f for the quote. Then, take a look at what is below. That is,

  curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/credits \
    -d amount=10000 \
    -d description="Math lesson" \
    -d bank_account[name]="Johann Bernoulli" \
    -d bank_account[account_number]=9900000001 \
    -d bank_account[routing_number]=121000358 \
    -d bank_account[type]=checking \
    -u 7b7a51ccb10c11e19c0a026ba7e239a9:

I'm confident that these six new Pinboard/Ptacek/A16Z companies will have excellent return on investment.

Humor aside, there are many smart founders but being brilliant and being money-minded are orthogonal.

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial-robots/rethink-...

In college I had studied Japanese and a friend introduced me to the anime cartoon Initial D. His copy had the original Japanese with English subtitles, and so I could assess the translation to some degree -- it was very good. On Netflix you can watch Initial D, but after 2 minutes I had to turn it off because the English dubbing really failed to capture the characters.

As someone noted in this thread, the presenter's synthesized voice in the linked video doesn't seem to reflect his own. If he could have said something like "Wo hui shua putonghua" and had the machine output say the same, it might have been more convincing.

If you would like a glimpse into my position and haven't already watched the PBS documentary China Blue, I recommend it.

I hope this becomes a mainstream designer brand. American Apparel had their own target audience. But I just couldn't understand why no one was able to develop aesthetically pleasing clothing made in the US on par with other designers you may find in Saks.

It's "FINE-UHL clubs" not "FINE-UHLZ clubs."

And he shockingly did not understand why information privacy might be a controversial issue.

And then

He had been searching the houseSYSTEM Facebook for the twins' profiles

So much for privacy.

Aside from the Facebook, the sites had overlapping features for course schedulers, photo albums, message boards, digital posters for student groups, and eventually exchanges for buying and selling on campus and mapping your network of friends.

Irrelevant. People only used Thefacebook for obvious and simple things: connecting with people they knew, poking, messaging, and photos. No one used mapping your network of friends (which sucked, incidentally, and also was faily most of the time) and no one even used the course scheduler. To state the obvious, facebook was not successful for its features, it was successful because how it was executed!

This was claimed to have been written for historical significance, but I know that every time an article is written by this author and about this subject dozens of people are thinking the same thing: move on. Create a successful company first, then retire and write about this topic. I'd love to see blog posts regarding Think Computer's technology. As it stands, this blog post gained a lot of attention but there isn't even a a sidebar with "Hi, I'm Aaron Greenspan and I'm the CEO of Think Computer. We have this product, click here to learn more." It's a marketing failure to not capitalize on such an opportunity.

This is my kind of application. This is similar to TechStars's application question "Why should we accept you?" which is great since you can candidly answer why you are a good investment.

Second, your account is over 1900 days old and it seems you are making personal attacks? Is this true, or have I mistaken "you" for a you general.

Third, my original comment was rhetorical. If someone thinks it is hard to touch base with 500 Startups then it doesn't mean anything other than the person thinks it is hard to touch base with 500 Startups. There are plenty of good investors out there, and if you are going to invest in technology then it only makes sense to, you know, use technology to make it easy to collect potential investments (which as I pointed out, 500.co sucks at doing).

Then why do you make it so hard to touch base?[1]

[1] http://500.co

Another reason: marketing. People don't get that.

This is partially why I think the YC application process is flawed. If you think about the idea for 20 seconds or so, what good is that? You may be wasting 20 seconds trying to rectify an idea you can't logically determine to be good.

A better process is a continuous one: you'll get an excellent stream of actual data and not just made up answers to "What is your best non-computer hack?" The YC partners could start out the morning looking at their Twitter-like feed of what have potential startup teams done today? At some point a partner would say, "We have to pull these guys into our next batch."

Incidentally, this would be better for startup teams looking to break the threshold of project to startup. By updating this proposed feed, the startup feels obligated to not only continue to put out data, but good data. Eventually the team would realize they can't cut it or they will keep mutating teams or changing ideas until one has great prospects.

EDIT: I'll buy someone a smile and a coke if the above hypothesis is implemented and tested. The following is exactly why: Instagram is the one we'd most likely have missed. It all depends when we'd talked to them. They were a kind of overnight success in traffic. If we'd talked to them even a day after they launched we would certainly have said yes. But before that it might have seemed too speculative.[1]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497561

That they are "ex-Googlers."

It may be disingenuous to say that other applications do the same thing; it's as if you were saying ConnectU and Thefacebook do the same thing. In any case, they are simply launching their product. It's the first step in a long journey.

It's sometimes difficult to notice a great startup unless you've launched. For example, Groupon was a much more modest "tipping point for change" type of startup before they realized they could apply the same concept to small business commerce.

That's the advantage.

That's from the linked canonical article on the issue: http://blog.canonical.com/2011/10/28/white-paper-secure-boot...

I can't count how many times I've seen this debate. I think last week there was a thread debating the triviality of web apps and similarly mentioned Musk.

Elon Musk may very well have developed a cat picture social network to gain the wealth required to fund his companies, but he instead worked on X.com/PayPal. Do you really believe Musk would be where he is today if he didn't gain considerable wealth from that venture? He'd likely be drawing rockets in a sketchbook while working as VP of Advertising at Google.

The Instagram founders are only wealthy enough at this point to have great credit, who knows what great investments they could make post-close?

I'm a fan of taking the simplest, reasonable route to wealth, then investing in something of greater importance, something that critics would agree improves humanity.

Dalton later pivoted out of PicPlz and is now building an exciting new service called App.Net.

If the App.Net concept was on the alternative idea list (likely considering the generalist nature of the entrepreneur [music, photos, whatever app.net does]), maybe the pivot would have happened sooner.

You forget your dreams

Never. I live for my dreams.

ignore your family

Out of college the first startup concept I attempted was a family social network (family tree, photos, blog). How great would it be to use tech to possibly keep families together? I learned that women and new families loved it, but men seemed to be apathetic. "You spend time with your family?" "Of course" "Good, because a man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man."

suppress your feelings

I try to keep people around me who don't mind listening to how I feel. Don't be a complainer, but don't hesitate to express yourself.

neglect your friends

The president of my high school class surprised me when he told me he has to make such an effort to get people to hang out. It is a challenge to know if you have a healthy friendship if you are always initiating the get-togethers.

forget to be happy

Of all, this seems to be the most difficult. If you aren't making progress with the other four, certainly this point will be true.

Why say this? This post is fine explaining the preference to get to know entrepreneurs well and the apparent mistake entrepreneurs are making by approaching investors whom don't know the entrepreneur at all. But it seems to me that Demo Day is just another opportunity to hear an angle on a product as well as getting to know the entrepreneurs behind it.

And why was he having a conversation with Christina from USV if he wants to get to know entrepreneurs better? Then, why let the entrepreneur finish? Put on the Tom Hagen face and tell him "Now, wait just a minute" and start grilling the entrepreneur with questions to get to know him better. Maybe there is something I'm missing about why as an investor you wouldn't play this to your advantage. (As for the point about learning whether the investor is an asshole, this is Y Combinator: don't be an asshole or it is unlikely you'll have the opportunity to invest again.)

The investor is usually the veteran, the entrepreneur is usually the freshman. School him. That's the duty of the veterans in the game.

For example, there are people who would pay to be part of YC and also fall in the gray area where it seems they aren't bad investments but it isn't clear that they are likely good investments. A handful of those people may be invited to participate in YC with the exception that their investment is conditional: a don rag would be held half-way through, and if they weren't doing considerably well, they would be cut (otherwise, they would earn the investment).

An argument against that example may be that the applicant ought to prove worthiness beforehand, but that's just the point: maybe all the applicant needs is the right environment (YC) to dominate.

"One might be tempted simply to take the best individuals and ignore the other. However, that would lead to a quick loss of diversity. Those individuals currently not doing as well as the others may have properties that will prove superior in the long run." Understanding Intelligence (ch. 8.2 / pg. 239; Pfeifer & Scheier)

You instead see "frighteningly ambitious" and assume your own term which is in the realm of science fiction (cyborgs, personal robots, &c.). Robotics, incidentally, may be a frighteningly ambitious endeavor but only if you are considering something like autonomously scraping and repainting ships or actuation in camera pills: personal (autonomous) robotics won't happen in the near future (see iRobot Corp).

So, assuming the author's definition of "frighteningly ambitious", search and email are important because they are problems people have now. If search weren't a problem, Union Square wouldn't have funded DuckDuckGo, and more to the point, DuckDuckGo wouldn't be growing. (I also have the exact problems the author describes with Google -- for the past 2 years I've had a problem with Google.) If it hasn't been shouted by Fred Wilson and Paul Graham enough: they have pain from dealing with email. They would throw their money at you if you offered a way to make email less painful. Maybe instead of spending two hours every day with email they could spend one hour with new/email and they could have a spare hour a day with their kids -- how valuable is an extra 14 whole days a year to these guys? How many people hate spending so much time on email who have means? Probably enough to make it worth investigating the problem. For what its worth, I'm frugal as Franklin and I would actually pay for email (i.e I wouldn't accept any common free email service because they aren't even worth $0.00 to me for a variety of reasons).

Paul's example would better be supplemented by other stories like the telecom startup which was having a rough time, got in touch with Ron Conway who was an investor or FoF, Ron replied that he knew a telcom exec, and the company was saved.

You can absolutely create a scalable startup elsewhere but you have to be the right person with the right business.

  A call to WePay's customer service department quickly
  sorted out the problem. Plus, the company gave him $20
  for the inconvenience.

Bing images (where I found that) and Bing maps have been a great resource for me. Google is still empirically top for web search, though.