idiopathic

Paul, thank you for adding your point of view, and I understand that it was a bad surprise to hear the bad news to late.

But if I understood correctly:

1. he was not planning on applying to YC, you asked him to 2. he had a good living situation and local contacts, and you asked him to move to SV 3. he had a functioning company wit income and co-founders, and you asked him to do something (move to SV) that blew up the company

As he makes all these sacrifices, in a very short schedule, you decided that you no longer wanted to fund him, as he turned up, suitcase in hand.

It is fine that you did not want to fund him into your group, and that you have well-tested criteria about co-founders.

But the guy made sacrifices for you and YC, and from what I understand, you / YC dumped him in the last minute.

To me, relationships are built on moments of truth. (Not my phrase, I heard it from the CEO of a health insurance company.) What do you do when things are going badly, rather things are going well.

Perhaps you are being modest, but I cannot see any mention of anything you did to help him, now that he was in a foreign city with no connections and no co-founders, trying to follow your instructions. "Apply for the next YC" does not count as help, and the ability to mention that you had accepted him previously does not count as help either (although I am sure he used it in his self-introductions).

Good on him for finding funding, and of course he is a good entrepreneur for picking himself up and continuing, and you are a good spotter of entrepreneurs for selecting him in the first place. But to me, this story does not reflect well on YC.

His one-liner was "ideas are worthless", and "great ideas are worth their weight in gold". I interpreted the latter as "great ideas are worth zero".

So unless I misinterpreted the last part, his comment was the first with witty put downs.

Good ideas are valuble and worthwhile. And it may take many years of hard work to come up with them. This is why the patent system was created: to allow people who come up with these ideas to have them valued as worthwhile, and compensated as such.

I understand there are some people who just have an idea that is shallow, and then do nothing with it. But the original comment said all ideas were worthless.

People who say ideas are worthless have never had a worthwhile idea.

This starts off well but then he damns them with faint praise. What is wrong with thinking the weak are right because they are weak? It is far better than everyone else's heuristic that might right. And if covering the viewpoints of those who have no power is AlJazeera's "despotism" then its employees should feel nothing but pride.

No, it's because they were given a huge budget and told to spend it to hire and resource the best journalists. This started with the exodus of Arab journalists from the BBC world service, who downsized (Blair should have severely regretted this for what it unleashed in factual reporting on his fantasy dossiers) and continued with a deliberate attempt to hire the troublemakers from around the world - real journalists who cared about injustice rather than ratings.

The disregard for ratings is of course possible because they are funded by an oil rich dictator. He is not benign - no such dictator exist - but if the only good thing he ever did was create AlJazeera, then I would still be forever grateful.

Of course, in the true spirit of Make Something People Want, the disregard for simple ratings is what is causing AJ's growth in viewers around the world. A good chunk of people want real news, and these were the same people who propelled CNN to dominance, back when they had invested in news.

You know Al Jazeera is reporting the truth because every side is complaining it is against them. Every Arab country - including my own, Bahrain, has thrown out Al Jazeera at one point or another, for being "anti".

For the record, for the Israeli side, I gather they actually (privately) like the station because it was the first Arab station to interview them. Whenever they report about an Israeli issue, they actually get an Israeli to talk about the Israeli point of view.

The problem is not with Al Jazeera, it is that it is the only station with global reach that actually speaks truth to power, challenging those with power on any side. They alone remember that the journalist's role is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

(The one exception is Qatar, which they never report on, but frankly nobody cares about that.)

I think the original comentor meant that - beyond Egyptian government's own Twitter / social media blocking - the US government will not allow the Egyptian government to fall as it is a big supporter of regime. I agree with this assessment, but hope that I am wrong.

If someone has "what it takes to be a success in America", they should spend their time and talent on being a success at home rather than trying to convince US government officials that 1) they are not taking Americans' jobs, and for us Arab muslims that 2) they are not a terrorist.

Please note that the problems are 1) you have to do this when your competitors do not, and 2) your explanations have to go though a government official, ie you will waste many years and the process has nothing to do with logic or facts.

I say this as someone who left the USA even after my employer and my wife's both offered to convert our H1B visas to greencards. But I decided that 6 years (our H1B time in the USA) was already too long that I delayed my startup, and waiting for the green card again was not worth it.

I think your real problem is not that you are not in the USA, it is that you are in Egypt. Bahrain, my country, has problems, but Egypt is something else.

So I think you should really go to Dubai. (I want to say Bahrain, but Dubia is our Silicon Valley, so go there my friend.)

Also, while in Egypt, or Dubai, or anywhere else in the Arab world... apply to Seedcamp. In my year, Talasim from Jordan won, as did my own company, although I applied from Cambridge, UK. But now I am in the Gulf, pursuing clients, and I can tell you that I have access to some here who are more sophisticated than any I saw in the USA. So use what have, go where you can work quickly, because that is what you need for success, not being in the USA.

If they are anything like me, they are taking notes. Not only is this better than paper for taking down everything, but taking down everything helps me remember.

You might be right that government can not do better than business, but this particular story is an example of where they can.

If there really "are plenty of companies that are not selling insulin, so they would be interested to be able to sell diabetes cure", none of them has come forward. This might be because the chances of developing are not good enough, but it sounds to me like you are starting from an assumption ("private sector would jump on this is if it was a good idea") and working your way backwards ("therefore this cannot have been a good idea").

Personally, my belief is that the best funding approach is multi-polar. In other words, there should be some government funding, some private sector, and some non-profit foundation funding. Each of these funders has blind spots, and is frightened by some research while others embrace it. The combination allows the entrepreneurial scientist to push their research forward at each stage.

We are hiring. We want people with either backend J2EE and EJB expertise, or front-end expertise in Struts 2. We love developers who know hot work remotely. Drop me a line on mohammad@patientsknowbest.com.

The founders at our company are all remote, with developers spread across India, UK and USA. We are doing well, having won Seedcamp last year.

It still amazes me the visceral reaction people have against remote working. This would be fine as a principle, if the same people did not also complain to me that doctors do not embrace technology. But given that our platform is designed for doctors and patients to work together online (including online consultations) it behooves us to practice what we preach.

I will give the following tips: - You need different habits to work online. In my case, I have a lot of experience in setting up teams to work together virtually based on all my previous IT projects, including writing software for medical students to share their education across hospitals using Palm Pilots, and migraiting 300 employees to use a wiki. I also worked as a management consultant in a company that took pride in working with 2,700 hospitals but without traveling to the hospitals - all research was through phone and email. - You have to teach the rest of the team these habits, few people know them already. For example, in a telephone conference, you have to explicitly laugh when you would have smiled, as you cannot rely on visual cues for bonding. - Make use of wikis and document every meeting you have, as you have it, with everyone seeing what you type as you type it. - my co-founders were either people I knew, or people I got to know in person through volunteer work I would ask them to do over coffee meetings before I asked them to join the company.

By far the biggest saving we have is time. It is not being cheap and cutting costs of office space, it is about slashing the time we spend on commuting and meeting, and I would definitely say that we would never have achieved as much as we did, as quickly as we did, if it was not for working virtually.

As an acaedmic and an entrepreneur, I find it disappointing when people keep on saying that "ideas do not matter, only execution does". In my experience, it takes a long time and a lot of effort to do the research that generates a good idea, but it takes very little time and effort to steal that idea.

Yes, I know execution matters a great deal, and I have done a lot of work executing on my ideas. But my point is that people who say ideas are the easy part often mean that it is very easy for them to take someone else's idea and that they have no need to do the difficult part of coming up with an idea in the first place. This is why the patent system was created, and the patent system was a key contributors to the West's rise to prominence. (I say this as an Arab who grew up watching the effects of piracy, and the crippling effects on a society of not respecting intellect.)

In the longer term, I do believe that ideas matter, and that dismissing the work of academics is dangerous to the competitiveness of Anglo-Saxon societies.

I agree, the devil's advocates irritate me the most. It's not just the combative nature of the questioning (does no one know about the other five hats of de Bono!?), it's the underlying assumption by the "advocate" that they are doing me a favour by bringing this new point of view to my attention.

In fact, they are saying the first superficial thing that comes into their head, which is pretty much the same thing every other person before them had said. If I am trying to close a sale, then great, I love a challenge. But when I am trying to relax, it is just tiring to have to run the gauntlet again without any benefits.

With the (welcome) move to web architecture, free software is not as important as free data, i.e. the freedom to move your data to another provider. We may all be slaves, but we should have the freedom to choose our master.

Like you, I would also rather that website owners had real incentives to please their users. I disagree on the solution: data lock-in _removes_ the website owner's incentive, instead they can just rely on the fact that you are stuck with them, rather than pleased with them.

I have heard many people say this. But to me it means one of two things: either the VCs are very good at taking credit for work done by the entrepreneur, or the entrepreneur is failing at their job. As a founder, it is my job to be the best in the industry, and to have others in the industry introduce me as such to potential customers. VCs are a distant second in importance (but not self-importance).

What about using the other investors to blackmail management and then selling out these investors when management paid him off? When someone is this smart, the responsibility to be good is even more pressing and the condemnation for being bad should be more loud. And yes, I am judging.

> Americans have become accustomed to cheap product, and gas, while at the same time turning a nose up at menial jobs

I understand that cheap gas is bad for environment, but why are the other items in your list bad? Everyone who is doing a menial job wishes they could afford to turn a nose up it, and cheap products are great. Even cheap gas is good for Americans (apart from the environmental damage) because it means freedom of movement as transportation is so affordable.

I don't know their reasoning for this awesome offer, but I do know that the company's founders are regularly invited as speakers because the company is an exemplar for recruiting and retaining good people. This seems like another innovative way for them to do this - not so much from the founders that participate as from the goodwill and publicity this effort generates.

I don't understand the value of failing students in this way. At medical school I failed some exams but was allowed to retake them, and received coaching for one of the re-takes. (Relax, I had to prove I'd learned the material before I could work with patients.)

At my brother's economics PhD, however, the school (can you guess which it is) took pride in failing 50% of the class. Why? And when the students are going into so much debt, why is this appropriate? Pick students who can pass your exams in reasonable numbers, reject those who cannot, and then invest in teaching the ones you chose.

Bravado over failing students to demonstrate how difficult your course is is a waste of human talent.

Exactly. The real distinction is republished with permission, and republished without permission. The beauty of GPL is that you explicitly give permission. On a wider rant, the open source movement is not for people who want to ignore copyright, it is for people who value intellectual property so much they go to great lengths to explicitly share and build only on the work of others who have shared.

Posting your content in RSS means you allow anyone to read it. It does not mean you have granted permission for it to be copied and reposted - as the copyright holder, others have to ask you for the right to copy the content. The fact that it is easy to copy does not mean it is legal.

Er... do these lawyers still exist? Fortunately I never met one, and if I did, I could never afford their inefficiency. Every lawyer I ever worked with used Microsoft Word for all their documents.

They understand revision control because it is built into Word... But my previous lawyer would send the document to me and to my CFO, each of us would make changes and I would talk to the lawyer on the phone. Soon there were three versions of the document, so there were threads going back and forth around "which is the latest document".

As for EchoSign, they authenticate that the person who signed the document must have at one point clicked through a link which went to their e-mail address. This is much better than the authentication of written signatures, i.e. that someone could scribble something on a piece of paper in the same way that you did it.

Exactly, I thought the allegations were not that they made up the numbers but that they swapped around one candidate's votes for another.

Very cool law though, it will come in useful in the future.

Thank you for this list - I liked reading The Knack so will explore the others.

I disagree with you about your examples of exceptional circumstances. Anyone can raise 350k or be stuck in a lift with Jeff Bezos if they do the hard around it. Focus on building something amazing and you can build your own luck around. For example, 18 months ago I did speak to Bezos - I did not have anything to talk tom about (apart from asking him sign my Kindle!) so nothing happened. But this year I really do so I will find another way to talk to him (and everyone else).

That is not to say that are not exceptional circumstances. For example, only a handful of people around the world in the 1970s had the priviliges of Bill Gates, ie a childhood growing up in a school with a mainframe. But it is not worth worrying about such things - each of us has to look for the unusual advantages we have and work with those. In my case I have a genetic illness which meant most of my childhood was spent ill or in hospital. I survived long enough to train as a physician and a programmer so this year I founded a company that builds software to help patients work online with their clinicians.

I think it's supposed to be Gregor Mendel, the Belgian monk who did experiments on peas to identify heritable traits. Pair a tall bean with another tall bean, you get a long offspring bean. This is where the phrase mendelian genetics comes from, and that's what I thought they named the company after.

> "feminists are about as useful as slavery abolitionists would be today in western societies"

In other words, very useful and laudable pursuits:

http://www.antislavery.org

The article is very good. Incomplete, but very good. Your response is disappointing because it dismisses the suffering of many people: women and slaves. Just because some university professor came up with a good explanation for the origin of suffering, it does not mean that the suffering is good, or that we should tolerate it.

Actually, it sounds more like a restatement of the Theory of the Leisure Class:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class

(This is a wonderful book by the way, and it was recommended to me by a Chief Marketing Officer. Reading it on his recommendation was the first time I realized he was actually quite smart.)

I don't about this case, but in general all the book contracts I signed have clauses for the rights of a book to go back to the author. A typical condition is the author's request to write a new edition and the publisher's refusal to do so (eg from low sales).