kansando

You seem to be implying that breaking up the VC cartel in Silicon valley with money that was potentially stolen from russian peasants maybe OK. I understand that Ycombinator companies need their $150K, but this seems contrary to Valley values. Or maybe you meant something else?

I came to the US 20 years ago too and in my experience, the wait-times are nothing like what my employees from Indian and China face. I got a PhD in 6 years, then applied for a GC 2 years into my job and got my GC within 1 year. The total time was 9 years, which while long was nothing compared to the mess today. Fast forward to today. We have PhDs from Stanford and MIT whose application has been stuck since 2005, meaning even if you adjust for the 6+2 = 8 years to apply, the total time to GC will end up being more than 15-16 years at least.

I should point out that the system specifically disadvantages Indians and Chinese relative to say Mexicans, Canadians and everyone else. This coincides with an increasing level of opportunity in these countries relative to 1991 in India. To compare the two is making a fact-free argument, since even in a rational scenario, the relative attractiveness of the US has diminished over time.

I think asking that Vivek return to India is an unnecessary ad-hominem attack. There are many reasons that people choose to stay here including personal ones (wife, kids, etc. don't want to go back) not all of which are driven by relative opportunity.

As a lapsed superconductivity physicist, I hate to burst the bubble. In the community there has been a long-standing joke about USOs, Unidentified Superconducting Objects, and it is well known that just because you see "Signs of Superconductivity" does not prove that something is superconducting.

There are really three questions at hand: 1> Does the sample show the Meissner effect, 2> Does it show zero resistance, and 3> Is it stable under addition of impurities. It turns out that for most ceramic compounds, even if 1 is true, 2 and 3 are often not true. For example, the Cuprates (the first to cross the 77K mark) actually have a higher resistance close to the critical temperature than copper. Point 3 is especially damning as sensitivity to impurities also means you can't draw these things into wires (certainly not wires you can bend) as the very act of bending may introduce defects that change local concentration of ingredients and hurt the superconductivity.

So the burden of proof remains very high, and the small blurb is very underwhelming.

Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Peter Thiel (Paypal), Mark Pincus (Zynga)

I mean is this even a serious question?

Right. And allow the economy to go into a long-term depression with 25%+ unemployment. A government "for the people" does not have a choice in this matter. The real problem is that bankers/speculators have so much power on the outcome for people who are not at all related to the industry.

Run like hell, Say no firmly and forever.

It seems to me that the core dilemma in the AI community has always been - is intelligence a "systems" problem or is it a "general" problem. It seems people first tried a series of general approaches and did not make much progress. Now that people are taking a series of bottom-up approaches in individual domains they are making a lot more progress. So maybe the AI winter is still on for the "general" approach but the thaw is well on its way for the "systems" approach.

Thank god for physicists.

VCs are clearly exaggerating their contribution but it is easy to forget that they are the only long-term investors in the current financial system. Who else will commit to eight years of involvement with an unknown entity? Do they need to restructure - yes, but their disappearance will not be good for startups.

Yes, but some previously lousily governed countries like China and India have become much better options than they were even ten years ago. The goal is not to have "some kinds of immigrants", it is to have the best.

On the 28th day - we crash.

This article and all others on the topic seem to confuse two different trends: 1> That there is a real incentive for the very best to return to India and China because they are self-confident and know that they can thrive anywhere, and 2> That the current H1-B regime (read indentured labor) is abused by corporations, especially IT outsourcers to bring in bodies. In my case, after a PhD at a top 5 engineering school and a 7 year wait at a Fortune 500 company, I finally got a Green card. I started a company within a month of that, we have over 100 employees (all in the US) and we are hiring today. The generation of PhD's before me used to get their Green Cards in three months. I see a lot of my friends now contemplating a return to India and China. I think this is bad for the US and bad for Silicon Valley. It basically comes down to this, in intellectual fields, the most productive workers are 10X better than the median. Multiple that with a 10X tolerance for risk (which a lot of immigrants with much lower fixed costs and lower expectations from life tend to have) and you are talking about losing someone who is 100X more valuable (in economic terms) than the average worker. If we don't figure out who these people are and insist on having them wait in the H1B line along with everyone else, we are doing ourselves a great disservice. BTW my cofounder is American, also falls in the 100X category - so this is not a statement about "all Chinese/Indians are superior to all Americans". His daughters are learning Chinese as a backup plan. By mixing legal with illegal immigration (due to the relative strength of some of the lobbies) and uber-skilled with somewhat skilled immigration, we are creating a mess.

Autism is more complex than that. See for example http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-a.... One of the big mysteries is that Somali immigrants to the US and Sweden have a much higher rate of autism than their native counterparts. Other factors implicated include increasing parents age at time of birth(mother's and father's), more frequent ultrasounds, more chemical environment, etc. Once you start to think through each factor, the N^2 effect of geeks marrying other geeks is unlikely to explain the 5-10X increase in autism over the last 20 years.

College is a place where you learn to learn, or should be...

Yet another blah article generalizing about entire countries based on experiments done on 30 people at a time under lab conditions.Go NY Times.

It goes back to the specialist vs. generalist question. An MBA experience will help you become more of a generalist, you will interact with people who are different from you and solve problems differently. It will also open up career options you may not have today, hedge funds, investment banks, consulting - some of which are intellectually interesting and pay well. Even if you decide to do a startup later, you will have friends working at VCs & operating companies that you can get help from.

If on the other hand you have decided that you want to live the rest of your life as a hacker, maybe it is not such a good idea. In any case, don't consider schools beyond the top 5 (Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Chicago and maybe MIT).

If you help them save money in a direct demonstrable way in a short period of time, you could have a shot. A good example is ITA software that powers the online pricing engines for a number of airlines as well as travel sites. They have grown nicely while the industry itself has been in turmoil.

Unfortunately all these discussions are too filled with obnoxious generalizations to be useful. In my experience good business people are rare and when you find them you should keep them. I am a science PhD with my own company and my first business development person (MBA dropout - employee number 5) is worth his weight in gold. He brought a customer focus and an outward orientation that few hackers are capable of. On the flip side, I have found some of my hackers to be prima-donnas who think they are special just because they know functional programming.

The real discussion should be about how to find the right business person for your startup. Here is what I look for: 1> outgoing but pleasant to be around, 2> good listener, 3> cares about technical details, is curious, 4> has a broad range of interests, 5> has geek/hacker friends, 6> can conceptualize a business as a systems problem.

On 2, we are a company founded by a combination of CS/Physics people. We have found that pairing a physics person with a CS person leads to the best outcomes.

I think you should emphasize the things you are good at (probably modeling and data analysis) and not worry too much about the CS gaps There are a ton of opportunities out there for your skill-set.

You are right to ask for a precise definition. I mean the Fortune 5000. What you are describing (usually called the mid-market) definitely will be a play for Web X.0.

Dump and run.

When I was in grad school, I went through exactly what you are experiencing. My advisor sat down with me and said:

"Take a month off. Go hang out with family and friends. Don't think about work. Eat well & exercise. Then we will talk."

It was the best advice I ever got. I realized while I was away that I was working on the wrong problem, and that with some reframing there was a way out. You can't get that perspective while you are in the middle of things.

"Real innovation is one thing that that the current crop of enterprise software is largely missing."

Based on what? You don't think virtualization is real innovation? Spend some time learning about Netezza, Endeca, ITA, BladeLogic, Scalent, VMWare... before making blanket statements that are blatantly inaccurate.

And you think the people who started VMWare, ITA software, Akamai & Ab Initio were dumb, stupid, second-rate hackers? Obviously by your definition these were never a startup because people would have bought stuff from IBM anyway.

Like a lot of other people in this group you are confusing web startups with startups.

Here is a list of Boston area Enterprise startups that went public this year: Airvana, Starent Networks, Bladelogic, Netezza, AcmePacket . They could not have done so without real customers and real revenue (not traffic, not unique visitors).

All Enterprise companies need sales forces. In a post SOX environment, you can't just get adoption by setting up a viral chain. Then there is the large subset of enterprise world which is infrastructure and that will never look like Web 2.0.

As for Bill Gates, that is an old example. If you look at even the last 15 years, the most successful enterprise companies (VMWare, Siebel, SalesForce, ...) were founded by seasoned, college-educated founders.

Do you have examples to back your assertion?

I think PG and this group are too focused on Web 2.0 companies. So all his talk of superiority of the valley ecosystem is probably right in the consumer-web space. Boston stills kicks ass for enterprise software and biotech.Unfortunately you can't build those with college dropouts.

Unfortunately his analysis is not right. He is confusing revenues with earnings. P/E of 60 is not the same as Price/Revenue of 60. If you are only doing $1M/month and your margins are say ~10%, you will end up with a value of $60M not $600M.

You know the Boston area VCs insist on replacing the founding CEOs. Are they nuts?