jaf12duke

I may predate you! We were shared an office with Heroku back during their/our YC days.

Fun memory - James and bitscribe helped me with my prior startup. I remember them brainstorming a 'collaborative IDE' while they helped us set up our servers.

You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?

Heroku <feedback@heroku.com> Tue, Nov 6, 2007, 1:03 PM to jason

Hello -

You've been invited to the Heroku beta by your friend james@heroku.com.

They included this message: -------------------------------------------------- So we're up and running, and can officially talk about our YC funding now. You are probably outside of our audience, but feel free to kick it around and send me any feedback you have. Going to invite Colin and the Bracy's too.

--------------------------------------------------

Heroku lets you create web applications right in your web browser. Follow the link to activate your account, then create Rails apps instantly:

http://heroku.com/core/invitation/accept/6d1c4cdb60

To learn more about Heroku, check out our public website:

http://heroku.com/

Have fun, and don't hesitate to drop us a line with your comments or questions.

- James, Adam, and Orion

You have the dynamic mostly correct, but the motivations reside more at the partner level than the VC firm level. Individual partner IRRs are determined by the mark up they can report for the specific deals on which they have attribution.

When a VC pushes for a faster burn which then necessitates a new VC firm to fund the next round (perhaps prematurely relative to the founder's perspective), it's so that that individual VC can mark up their personal IRR.

Which may be relevant to their firm and the firm's fundraising plans to LPs. But could also be even more relevant if that partner is thinking about changing firms or starting his/her fund own. Individual IRR, based on deals with attribution, is the resume of a VC.

The effect of this is, junior partners push for this type of behavior more than senior partners that are already set with an impressive personal IRR.

I've been so impressed by the ambitions of YC since sama took over, as well the team that's been built to support it.

pg's biggest contribution to YC may be finding sama and giving him the reins.

This is such good news for YC!

Really excited to see this launched! Congrats on shipping Aaron and Jen!

We're alums (YC W12 and S09). We do mock interviews every batch. If you're interested, reach me at jason at 42floors.

I wrote a post on how to defeat delayed sleep phase disorder. The key is light regulation. See HN thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1409107

My mistake--typo fixed. Thanks!

It's actually less of question of whether you're right or wrong. Since most of us are usually wrong most of the time.

Really good engineers don't want to be told what to do, because they want to run experiments and see the result for themselves. The best can do so very quickly.

Thus, they have strong opinions, weakly held.

you could grab sortofobstreperous.com though...

Thanks! Fixing it now.

Man, I wish it was a runaway success. Absolutely nothing has come easy. But we're getting there.

One of the reasons I wrote that post a year ago was that I had to own up to the fact that we looked better than we actually were.

Actually, I'm explicitly saying don't worry about that stuff when you come to me for 30% feedback. I don't want you to have to worry about whether you're being respectful of me. I simply want to be helpful, and I'm giving you freedom to deal with those typos, misaligned pixels, unformatted images, broken links on your own schedule.

Good! We'll be doing it again. To anyone that gets an interview invitation, contact me at @jasonfreedman and we'll be happy to do a mock-interview. Several alumni did mocks for us when we were applying and we found it massively helpful.

So stoked for you guys. I watched you guys apply and get rejected each time. And then emerge more determined. It felt obvious to me not only that you would get in, but that you would be one of the startups most likely to succeed.

And now you're proving me right. Which rocks.

Built: reddit, hipmunk, breadpig

Wrote: 2 books

Invested: in dozens of companies

Advised: hundreds of founders as a partner in YC

Alexis is an investor in 42Floors. Easily one of the nicest, most supportive, most helpful investors/peers/role models I've ever come across. And yes, he's an activist! So he self-promotes. Explicitly for the cause of an open internet. And I'm so incredibly grateful that he promotes a cause I care so much about, but over which I have so little influence.

It's actually none of those.

The best intros come from entrepreneurs that recommend a startup to their own investors. It's much easier to get meetings with entrepreneurs, especially if you approach the non-yet-famous ones. Often, just asking for advice works.

It's harder if you don't live in a startup hub, because you'll meet fewer fellow entrepreneurs socially.

Actually, entrepreneurs receive tons of negative feedback on their ideas. Regardless of the industry, most senior leaders in that industry will proclaim that some innovation won't work (otherwise, it would've already been tried). At FlightCaster, we received loads of strategic feedback--all of which was fairly wild speculation.

Challenging an entrepreneur on the validity of an idea is actually a form of nice feedback. It seems like it's saying, "I believe in you but I have found some concrete roadblock that will cause this to fail." That's almost always bullshit, because startups change forms throughout their life, shifting strategies and tactics to avoid such roadblocks.

Really, that feedback is saying "I don't think you have what it takes to get around roadblocks."

Both of these points are predicated on the patent insurance program becoming successful first. At which point, people will try to stop it or it will become seamingly unstoppable.

I would be okay with those problems compared to my current risks.

The important comparison is not the cause but the outcome. I've lived in Boston, New Hampshire, Scotland, and San Francisco. And in each, I've suffered from seasonal depression.

A winter depression in any city is no vacation.

OP here. I'll give a qualified yes.

It's hard to actually know which action I take has the most effect. Vitamin D, bright lights, exercise all play a role. I've found it's important to try everything and hope for the best.

If I were to pick just one thing to do though, it would be the bright lights in the morning. I know for sure that those work. Not only for myself, but for many other people who have given it a try.

I was living in Colorado, which has 300 days of sunshine a year. But the same thing happened. It was cold in the winter, even if sunny. So whenever I was out in the sun, my skin was covered completely,

Jason here. Sorry about that! I'm emailing you now...

They used to really to get to me. Now, they only kind of get to me. More like a mosquito bite than a bee sting in that it's annoying but not painful.

However, once I looked past the snarkyness of his delivery, I had to admit his question was valid. And I've now had the conversation with other entrepreneurs who wonder if they should do more blogging on their startup blog or stick to product updates. This post is my answer.

This system works for us, but may not work for others. Either way, I don't think it produces burnout. Empirically, this hasn't been the case. We're 2 years in and I've never had burnout been an issue. For a few reasons:

The people on our team like work to have an ebb and flow. There are times when we're pushing 100% and times we're reflecting. The 100 day horizon is actually quite long so there's time to refactor, vacation, and reflect.

We do our goal planning bottoms up. Almost every one of our goals has originated from the engineering team. 100 Day planning sessions are an opportunity for individuals to lobby for their project. It feels great to push your own project and it feels great to pitch in on someone else's.

We do unlimited vacations (which everyone says) but our team actually takes advantage. We don't have a culture of martyrdom, so people don't feel bad. I've found more people take time off in the beginning of 100 day segments than the end.

Jason (OP) here.

Yep, know that feeling. Well.

Would love to have you over to the office to chat. Ping me offline. jason at 42floors

OP here.

I can't remember what the exact figure was--but it was in the 5 figures. Which for me felt like a potential life-saver.

I don't think what I promised my users was actually that relevant. It would've been super easy to change our terms of service to include the ability to sell or rent user data. I could have written it in a way no one would have understand. Of course, no one would have ever seen the change anyways.

The real issue was that I knew it was wrong. Even if legal.

One of the powerful parts of the HN application of this age-old teaching is that it includes lots of super smart hackers, who by their very nature are skeptical and inquisitive. This crew doesn't miss details.

So in those times when your discipline is failing you. It's actually helpful to know that the HN crowd will catch you. For our industry overall, it's a very healthy self-policing mechanism.

They really have. When I look around the current batch of YC companies, I find that virtually every one has a built-in business model from the beginning.

I think the craze of 2007 was that you could make something that would become popular. Popular felt so much better than not popular. Max Levchin once called it blowing up a balloon. They get big fast, but they're just full of air.

I was in YC W12 and S09 for for-profit companies. But I've also run started several nonprofits. I'd be happy to meet with you.