govindkabra31

.. large number of people..

There are lot of people who fall for the encouragement from PG and such and take risks without being aware of the expected financial impact. Read through comments here and there are some first hand anecdotes.

It is hugely more efficient for someone to take into account this research result, rather than learn that after years of toiling, the hard way.

Perhaps, it was not as insightful to you personally. But not every piece has to be valuable to everyone for it to avoid being classified as devoid of value.

I find it wrong that the author is using other successful companies as examples that they were built on "belief".

No, airbnb founders did not believe. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg did not believe either. Nor did Larry page.

They got there by learning from user, questioning their "belief" and iterating.

Nate: '... so I at this point decided to move to Boston. Had other priorities in my life. And pace suddenly slowed down .... Have you told Michael that I am working on other things?'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya0I6oz7q9U&fea...

Mark: '.. well, it does not have to be anything more than a college friend website. That is a great product.' https://youtu.be/aQ5otpv6kTw?t=252

Larry page: ... tried multiple times to license their technology and later sell the company for a few millions and later for a few billions. The gap in their asking price and market offer kept them going.

Can you elaborate? I am not questioning your commentary, but genuinely interested to know more about what you mean there.

The dates in this dataset are "decision" date, not the application date.

In that year, there was a fast forward movement in backlog of India's GC application... Green cards have a per country cap-- at the end of fiscal year, USCIS can use the "unused" GC quota of other countries for the backlogged countries. This is why you see that "priority date" for India stays at a fixed place (e.g., 2005 for EB2 India) for most of the year, and then suddenly moves forward at the end of fiscal year.

How do you define "sell"? Adsense and Adwords - can very well be argued as selling the distilled gist mined from troves of data collected from your search history, email, photos, android app usage.

Wouldn't high-quality-CMS be important to bring down the cost of publishing-- to the point of determining the sustainability of the publication itself?

The established media companies are struggling, if I had to describe in one line, because contemporary revenues cannot sustain their traditional cost structure.

You would otherwise need staff to coordinate between photographer, and onsite attendee and social media curator finding tweets to go with that story, and generally different parts being curated by different team members.

You also want to optimize the "review" workflow, to maximize the page views by landing the story quickly vs. other publications.

Here is direct quora link: http://www.quora.com/I-just-joined-an-early-stage-startup-as...

In jest, this is what I was thinking of sharing: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22You+should+get+out+of+Dodge.+I%27ve+...

Have you considered diversifying your skills? Mobile and big data, for example, are areas with lot more demand than there is supply.

The allocation of visas for exceptional talent is surprisingly skewed. Only about 6% of 1 Million green cards issued each year are issued to people who are here for their skills. Rest goes to family based immigration.

This specially hurts engineers on H1B from India and China the most, because of per country limits, they have to wait for close to a decade. e.g., someone from India, who qualifies for the definition of "Exceptional" for EB2 bucket, should have applied in 2005 to get visa this month.

This is recognized as a problem, and is an issue that immigration reforms attempt to address.

Every company ends up competing on "H1B lottery" with large body shops. So a startup with 1-2 application has very little chance of making it through compared to others with lot more lottery tickets.

I will also point out a closely related issue. The craziness that full 100% quota of the H1B visas for the year gets disbursed on one day in the year (practically speaking, on April 1. Though full approval process takes a few months). This makes it hard for a startup that wants to hire someone in December, but has to wait 4 months to apply (April 1), and 8 months for the new hire to actually start working (Oct 1).

And therefore, there is a need for a reform here of the current regulations.

That is NOT an accurate analogy.. to make it analogous, you need at least two fixes: a) the person needs not simply see from window, but to get into your basement from breaking a double-panned window, and go up into your bedroom. b) Also the charge needs to be for 'intrusion'

Plus, using 'murder' and 'family' and 'dead' etc. are too dramatic and personal and unnecessary to convey your point about internet security.

many congrats. i got curious what you do.. visited your site, browser threw a security exception. http://cl.ly/image/263R2V1o100F

Did anyone understand why logging calls on only problem machine had different fsync behavior than normal machines?

A good alternative for YC to consider is to change to a 'continuous' mode.. where you incubate companies on 1st Tue of every month. The companies in a batch are already in variety of stages, some just starting with an idea, some with some market validation done, some may even have raised $500K round before.

This is very much unlike a college or a vocational class, where all participants are in more or less same stage.

no doubt you can build lots of interesting things (including recommendations), if people are giving you UGC.

question above comment was asking was why would people generate that content for you.. incentive needs to be there for each piece of content produced.

but look at our personal expense.. how little do we spend on life insurance premium vs. entertainment? That's a reference point for what we would consider as value of protecting a human race wipe out event vs. a messaging app.

My favorite nextdoor story is when it helped neighbors find chicken poop https://twitter.com/kabragovind/status/483721368710963200

that is how it begins.. early signs of FB was killing MySpace was back when it was a thing that kids in a handful of colleges used. These early signs are important to recognize and highlight for incumbents as well as participants.

To be fair, that's not caste system.. better phrase would be income inequality or unskilled labor.

There are some major differences.

1) Increased pool of unskilled labor-- manufacturing industry tanked, increased immigration.

2) Proliferation of internet connected, smartphones.

3) Avoiding obvious mistakes: no free deliveries for a bottle of coke, like in webvan days.

4) Doing direct store to consumer deliveries, avoiding warehouses, getting 20-25% cut from retailers (who see this as savings in marketing cost and reduced in-store staff cost)

Or, they get 20-25% discount from retailers (coming out of stores marketing budget and reduction in store staff cost).

EDIT: The discounts come from the cost savings stores will see from delivery companies, to clarify to people commenting margins are not that high in grocery business.

1) These delivery services are become sales and marketing channel for stores.

2) Cut down time it takes for cash register scanning each product and bagging them, pick up guys do that for stores.

3) Bulk pickups-- e.g., if I can have delivery company gather milk directly from back store, my store staff does not have to spend time replenishing the shelves.

You should actually ask this question before making decision.. and if your take it is that you would renegade on the decision, than you should delay making that decision.. and wait to find out if that dream job with higher pay actually came around.

Your current best offer will be willing to stretch out their offer for a week. And the other company will be willing to accelerate their decision process, so as to bridge this two weeks gap.

But once you made your decision, you should stick with your decision... at least for a year, all things other than this 'dream job' being equal. The dream company and the dream job-- if you got in today, you are likely going to get that again in a year.

I want to add a clarification note that visa issues are harder to bring someone to US for the first time. Once someone is here, doing transfers from company to company is relatively easier. I say this because I know some companies that will outright stop talking to otherwise great candidates because someone told them dont get into visa stuff.

wow.. so did you wonder, in each statement in those 3 years, what that money being put in your account is for?

people pointed out that it was probably sold for much higher amount.

even so, $1.6million is 'never work again rich'-- at modest 10% return, with capital gains taxes, you would be making enough to pay your family's expenses.

A very well thought out article.. however, of the future markets that the author dismissed, "moving services" does not look as unbelievable. (article says-- "Uber could extend its reach into other businesses such as car rentals, moving services and even driverless cars, but I don’t see evidence")

Ton of companies-- amazon, google, postmates, insta cart-- are looking for viable local logistics. And Uber can have a play in that; initial experiments in New York seemed encouraging.

I am not doing a startup, so take all these suggestions fwiw.

1. You website looks great. Looks like functionality is not fully done though? I was clicking on "Book Now" but it didnt do anything. Maybe it was because I did not sign in. Maybe make that clear in error box.

2. YC keeps repeating the advice to do things that do not scale; focus on week at a time. Your vision is ambitious-- which is great, but on execution, scale down to bare minimum. e.g.,

2a) Website is designed for search anywhere, but drop down is only for Phoenix. It is totally fine to focus on Phoenix only initially. In fact, go more aggressive, remove that screen altogether, make it clear that this is only for Phoenix. In fact remove the search form too. Directly list the 8 results you have on the page.

2b) The result page has airbnb like feeling.. but you have only 8 listing so far. Can you make that result page more catchy, remove the need to click through into each listing. Design it more like Pinterest, large picture, title, brief description, and book now link, all in that page. No need to click through to detail page. FWIW, airbnb in its early days went to each one of their hosts home, took pictures, and edited descriptions manually. Totally worth it.

2c) Why ask for account? You need that only for repeat users.. for one time bookings, just give them a form with email/phone, etc. fields. An account is a high barrier for intial adoption. Dont force it until you must. PG hated even a service like quora for a long time, because it forced an account creation.

3) Who is your target user? Initially, you do not need internet to promote this type of service. Do something old-school, like physical banners, with a phone number. People will call you, and you tell them on phone which doctors are available for what price. And do the booking on phone. Put your fliers in walgreens/cvs (dont worry about policy, you only need to convince the store manager). Put flier infront of walmart or wholefoods or target-- depending on demographic of your intial users.

4) Dont beat yourself for not getting into YC. They have two goals-- a) do good in the world, and b) make money. I can see you are early enough that signal is not clear for making money aspect. Fix that-- show some intial traction by doing things that do not scale.

5) Their feedback email tells you clearly that the issue is founders have varying commitments. Fix that. You do not need four founders-- two great ones, who are on board full time or with significant commitment in time or money-- is sufficient. Talk with them, ask them to leave if they are not on board fully. It is even fine to do this alone-- you are passionate enough, and you will have no excuse then.

6) If you need help with programming, I can offer some of my free time. Tweet me: @kabragovind

Quite the opposite actually.. we wanted to do many things for the two use cases, but were holding back, trying not cram features in a bundled app. Now with two apps, we can go full steam ahead with all the ideas for each of the two use cases.

Swarm does both of those things, and more for the use case of keeping up and meeting with people.

The two apps will also work seamlessly with each other, for the moments when you are making a plan for dinner with friends in Swarm app, you can click an icon which takes you to Foursquare app for search. And many more such interfaces.