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freddier

1,601 karma · joined July 4, 2009

Founder of Platzi YC W15.

Platzi is the biggest tech education effort in Latin America. It has trained 500K programmers, designers and marketers in all hispanic countries.

ES: www.platzi.com/home/

EN: courses.platzi.com

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freddier··on Electric vehicle sales are booming in South America – without Tesla
Colombians are asking that question too. My guess is that Tesla is selling them at a loss to compete against BYD. They may be sending unsold inventory from the US/Mexico market as well.
freddier··on Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency
I love how techmeme rewrites headlines. It removes the clickbait, gives you a clear idea, attaches tweets, reddit and hn links and saves so much time. It's the first thing I see in the morning, every morning.
freddier··on Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
He seems to have hyperphantasia, judging by every example of mental images he described. It's not a requirement, as the example from the other person on the beach didn't need it to feel that level of self-feeding joy.

But I wonder if aphantastic people have a harder time with this? Or maybe easier with less mental distractions?

freddier··on 36B solar mass black hole at centre of the Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens
They very rare great HN joke.
freddier··on Dreamhost Shared Hosting Has Been Down for 3 Days
*Colombia

And it may be too harsh to judge a whole country and its talent just because a company whose servers are down hire talent there. What about the AWS engineers in those countries? Or Airbnb, Stripe, Twilio, etc?

freddier··on Launch HN: Litnerd (YC S21) – Teaching kids to read with the help of live actors
This is super interesting. What do you think the shape of this project would look like if you were to scale to more people outside of the US? The problem, worldwide, is dramatic.
freddier··on The ungentle joy of spider sex
If hyper evolved kinda-realistic spiders are your thing and their first contact with a highly evolved humanity, I strongly suggest Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".

It also introduced to me the concept of software archeologists.

freddier··on Show HN: Tara – A free Jira alternative, now with Gitlab
The website mentions in the pricing popup:

>We are working on functionality for teams that provides visibility and predictability in product development. Features may include automation around sprints and multi-team workflows. This will be part of our premium plan, and is where the AI comes into play.

I've also been hurt by free tools that disappear after we commit to them but since Tara did AI stuff for PM in the past maybe they already have it in the roadmap.

freddier··on SoftBank has walked away from startups, months after submitting term sheets
This is definitely not true. It's extremely rare for a term sheet to be pulled.
freddier··on Autodesk to Acquire PlanGrid (YC W12) to Accelerate Construction Productivity
From an iPad App that made it easier to read blueprints to $875M. Amazing.

I had the fortune of listening to Tracy Young while at YC and the story of the company and her other founder was inspiring. I wonder if this is the shape of what will happen with other companies like Remix (former TransitMix).

freddier··on Astronauts escape malfunctioning Soyuz rocket
Does this mean we're out of options to get humans to the ISS?

SLS is nowhere near, Dragon is coming next year. Soyuz has been extremely reliable but with two incidents they'll surely ground flights for a while.

Is there any other option?

freddier··on Open Application for YC Growth Program
For some years now the average YC batch size has been 100+ companies. With so many companies, it's inevitable to select and support competitors. My experience is that conflict of interest is not a thing at that stage.

If you feel like you're competing with other companies at seed/A stage, maybe your market is too small?

In short: Yes, they'll select you.

freddier··on Spectre Attack
The interesting thing about this is that Spectre seems to work in AMD and ARM as well as Intel. (Meltdown is the one that seems to be Intel-only). This contradicts what AMD said today and also contradicts the Intel press release.

ARM did a security advisory but nothing so far from AMD.

freddier··on Ask HN: What should I ask Elon Musk for HTBTF?
What's his worst and best case scenario for the future? Specially regarding energy, transportation and the social effect things like solar, self-driving cars and cheap access to space will bring.
freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
We're considering opening it up to certain third parties. If you're interested, f at platzi.com
freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
I didn't find any particular strong bias against me due to my race/ethnicity compared to my batchmates. There were ocasional subtle moments of doubt from certain people at first, nothing too obvious.

But I think fundraising was as hard for me as it is for most founders at similar stages. The fact that our company was profitable at Demo Day helped, I guess.

freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
Thank you. Japan is amazing.
freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
My cofounder went for the O1, I'm in the process of getting an L1.

A tourist visa is a good start as long as you know the rules and limitations. It's 100% legal to start and own a company in the US with a tourist visa.

freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
To be fair, discrimination exists and it happened to me occasionally while raising post Demo Day. In subtle ways.

But there's people like that everywhere so I used it as a filter for good people.

freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
I know some YCF companies. They loved it. I wanted to move to Mountain View and do the full three month program. But if I couldn't, YCF is a great deal.
freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
At YC? Nothing. They have no reason to do that. It'd defeat the purpose of YC.
freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
I never lied about metrics but I've seen startups that do outside YC. Most of them don't do it out of malice but due to bad math. It's easy, for example, to miscalculate CAC in the early days of your company.
freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
I'm the author of the article. After being part of YC, I had a lot of things I wish I knew before doing it, from common mistakes to humble reminders. Specially being an "international founder".

Happy to answer any questions.

freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
OK,

Most (all?) startups have broken things. Mine did and I tried to hide them at first. But I guess YC is at a point that, after thousands of startups, they've seen most of the patterns and just want to help you fix them. They'll help you no matter in what shape your company is.

Also, some startups plainly lie about their metrics, but those rarely get accepted to YC, from my limited experience.

freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
Indirect experiences and anecdotes. Also, it's inevitable sometimes to feel ashamed of certain things in your startup, so you actively avoid talking about it.

But they know. And you end up talking about it, which is a good thing.

So... yeah, I tried lying and failed?

freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
Of course! We did our first technical live class in English thanks to you guys <3
freddier··on YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley
Thank you so much for that, Ramiuz. I hope you still learn from us now that we're Platzi.
freddier··on TeaBOT (YC S15) Makes Customized Cups of Tea with the Touch of a Button
I tried this at Coupa Cafe. It's really clever. The lid in the cup has a filter, so it can brew while staying inmediate and portable.

I got Earl Grey + Lavender. Cheap and great. I kept the filter lid :)

freddier··on College Is (Almost) Obsolete
Wow. We were mentioned in 6 bytes, steego.

At Platzi, we just launched in English. We've been doing this for the Spanish-speaking world for two years (switch from EN to ES in the header to check it out), with more than "7 classes".

I understand why you might think what you do, but you seemed to infer A LOT from a single link the author gave to us.

Without that link, would you think differently about the article?

freddier··on DemocracyOS
I love that it's not about goverments but governance. Open Source projects can use this. Apartment buildings.

Obviously getting modern tools to shitty politicians is always going to be the focus with things like DemocracyOS, but I'm really excited to see this for deciding stuff on the small communities I'm a part of.

The one weird thing is that they're non-profit, open source. I hope they survive on that model. Is it only donations?

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