Hacker News Reader

dhoustonon To all those guys who took the conservative banking jobs

does this guy really that the economy tanking is somehow any better for startups than it is for bankers?

dhoustonon Announcing The TechCrunch50 Finalists

thanks ian!

dhoustonon Secretive Storage Company Dropbox (YC Summer 07) Took Sequoia Funding in 2007

thanks wayne!

dhoustonon Secretive Storage Company Dropbox (YC Summer 07) Took Sequoia Funding in 2007

thanks adam :) bummed im missing the show tomorrow, but we'll catch another!

dhoustonon Ask YC: Single founder company with prototype, how do I improve my odds of being accepted.

make a (short -- 3-4 min) screencast. pg et al are probably not going to have time to play with your app to the extent that you'd like (or perhaps at all), plus you get to show your idea/prototype in the best possible light.

if you're feeling lucky, submitting it to news.yc can get some additional attention.

i was a single founder, did this and it helped me 1) bring on a great cofounder and 2) get accepted into yc.

dhoustonon Fuck the VCs (or not fuck the VCs)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

dhoustonon Reaching the $5 Million Club Takes an Open Mind

as max levchin said (and probably someone before him), money's how you keep score.

there are many examples of entrepreneurs hitting it rich, buying some stupidly large house and not even ending up moving in -- it's more about making the big leagues than having more toys.

(whether this is a worthwhile or virtuous endeavor is another discussion, but the point is competitiveness is probably a bigger driver than wealth for its own sake.)

dhoustonon Ask HN: how do i move 5 GB of photos?

http://getdropbox.com

(granted, we don't let people buy additional space yet, but ping beta@getdropbox.com and we can hook you up :P)

dhoustonon Why Exceptions Suck

any kind of cleanup -- especially releasing locks/other shared resources, and also closing sockets, files, memory, etc.

dhoustonon Ask YC: Advice after receiving seed funding offer?

http://venturehacks.com/term-sheet-hacks

start reading :)

dhoustonon Programmers At Work - Bill Gates (1986)

he was only talking about the next 5 years or so. the internet wasnt terribly useful (at least to the masses) in 1986, nor for the next 9 or so years until mosaic/netscape came out. until the early-mid 90s you could only really access the internet by logging into a BBS or some mainframe (the first TCP stack for windows emerged around 93 or 94.)

i'd say history showed that focusing on productivity apps and the OS from ~1986-96 was a winning strategic move :)

dhoustonon Ask PG: Correlation between frugality and startup success?

like anything else, it's a matter of balance. i used to be a hardcore bootstrapper and would pride myself on getting something to market on a $x,000 budget, or saving a few bucks on an SSL certificate, laptop, office space, tax deductions, etc. but the result is i'd waste a lot of time and emotional energy on shit that didn't really matter to our core business.

but there are two things to remember:

- your time is a lot more valuable than you think (as others have pointed out)

- often money, wisely allocated, (i.e. hiring a couple engineers or investing in a good work environment, not all-around extravagant spending) can help you get to market and achieve your goals faster

and since speed is a startup's only real advantage, this is often the difference between a 1 or 0 outcome.

dhoustonon Ask YC: Accepted YC and regret it?

nope, totally worth it (dropbox, summer 07)

dhoustonon Architecture astronauts take over

that's because no one's made it really easy/reliable. our users (esp business users) love the easy folder sharing and many have stopped windows file servers as a result

dhoustonon Architecture astronauts take over

we beg to differ that sync/sharing isn't a killer app ;)

dhoustonon [dead]

we beg to differ that sync/sharing isn't a killer app ;)

dhoustonon GPL'd Source Code

this is just wrong; if you're talking about LGPL code (not GPL), this is correct

dhoustonon Matt Maroon - Oblivious to Obvious (Corp)

matt -- add images from doingitwrong.com to each post and that uncov gig should be in the bag :)

dhoustonon BusinessWeek: Tech's Best Young Entrepreneurs

thanks, though my cofounder arash deserves equal mention here. (we sent them a pic of the two of us but apparently after the deadline, so it should be corrected soon)

dhoustonon One Response to Rejection

if you have a great idea, build a prototype. that's the great equalizer -- if you have working code, or better yet, traction, then most concerns about being a "proven" team evaporate.

if your code isn't quite ready, build a screencast, then submit it to news.yc. doing this was probably instrumental in our eventual YC acceptance. (this lets you convey the cool parts of your idea in a way you can control even if there are a lot of missing pieces.)

otherwise, if you've only got a team and a hunch, you're in this _giant_ pile of "eh who knows if it'll work, who knows if they're good, but maybe" applications (many of which ultimately fail), and it's basically a crapshoot. yc gets enough apps w/ 1) amazing people 2) amazing products or 3) amazing traction to avoid having to place these kinds of shaky bets.

the more risk (product risk, people risk, market risk) you can eliminate on your own, the better you'll look to _any_ investor (and the more equity you'll keep for yourselves.)

obviously, there's a catch-22 that to prove some of these things you need initial capital, but for most software startups it just means locking yourself up and hacking out a prototype and letting it rip to a few people.

then just apply next cycle -- mercifully, it's not like college admissions where you (generally) only get one shot. (my first yc app was rejected a year before ultimately getting in.)

dhoustonon The Fine Art Of Doing Something

see also 'fire and motion' by joel spolsky:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

dhoustonon Google putting up fence and gate to keep execs from leaving

at least in my experience @ mit, google has become the safe post-college default, like microsoft was before it. hell, facebook has even started to take that crown.

the cycle will continue -- google may have perks and comfort, but not much upside anymore (that stock ain't goin to 1000 anytime soon). even facebook has hundreds of employees, and a strike price and recent track record that doesn't quite have the luster it did before.

the best hackers i know are either starting or joining startups (including a bunch that left google to do so.)

dhoustonon Software Startup Lessons (Part 1): The Basics

"Additionally, we sidelined as male strippers at bachelorette parties, to pay for our university studies."

i don't think i've had a sentence in a news.yc-posted article take me more by surprise :)

dhoustonon Tahoe: A Secure Distributed Filesystem

what's the latency like? there's no way these things can feel like local filesystems.

dhoustonon Dropbox launches (YC summer 07)

yeah, it's a local folder that gets watched and synced

dhoustonon Dropbox launches (YC summer 07)

binary diffing (rsync-like algorithm) and compression is built into the protocol.

i've been using it to sync my 3gb development VM across my computers; also works great with photoshop files, big documents, etc.

dhoustonon Bringing OpenID To The Masses: Clickpass (YC summer 07)

great writeup -- congrats peter and immad!

dhoustonon Dropbox launches (YC summer 07)

we've got a new screencast up too, which isn't linked to from the tc article:

http://getdropbox.com/screencast

shameless reddit/digg plug:

http://reddit.com/info/6boh3/comments/

http://digg.com/software/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_MIT...

dhoustonon Ask YC: Should I work for a startup?

if in that 'extreme example' you're putting the wheels in motion to create that value (i.e. creating a business out of nothing that otherwise wouldn't have existed), you arguably deserve the equity. turns out it's usually not that simple in practice, and most successful founders have to work their asses off and take significant risk.

that said, no one's stopping you from starting something and dishing out equity however you want :)

dhoustonon Biographicon (YC Startup) Wants To Be Wikipedia For The Non-Notable Masses

congrats ethan & daniel!