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108 karma · joined May 6, 2007
1 year will get you through every day life, but trying to communicate on a business level or even listen to the news on TV will be very difficult. It's possible to be fluent enough to do business in 2 years but you'll need to get a Chinese girlfriend. After 3-4 years you'll start to lose the "accent."
this post had nothing to do with getting into YC funding, the funding cycle reset idea was simply a suggestion of adequate time to reset.
for the record, i am not applying to YC next cycle or any other cycle. just wanted to help the site.
But, I read below that you're doing a Rails idea.
It benefits you to outsource if you need a lot of C++ or Java work done cheaply. Examples of this would be if your idea requires multi-platform support or porting.
1) You're developing a game that would benefit from a wide array of desktop and hardware suppor (osx, windows, linux plus the different graphics cards and shaders languages and versions)
2) Or you needsoftware support for your new Dodgeball Cellphone app on a wide array of smartphones.
3) You need to port large existing codebase to another platform. Itunes from Mac to Windows.
4) You need a lot of artwork done to support conceptual artwork that you already have.
For a rails idea, since you're working at such a high level, you should be doing this work yourself or closely with another person that you have a good relationship with. It sounds more like you need a solid co-founder or you need to learn rails or django (it only takes a couple days to get started). Most of the time, we get stuck on little design decisions (what kind of validation should I do on my logins etc etc?). This is stuff you need to figure out yourself. It's hard to pay people to think for you.
Going to China pays big when you're looking for early stage employees or when you need to temporarily outsource a piece of your company (at 20% cost) that you see yourself replacing with a better solution later.
If you're prototyping ideas for YCombinator, and if you have a good idea, someone will join you as a partner.
maybe the total accumulated points of all time are also kept. YC doesn't erase any data. its just writing a new database query.
old query: Points = "select count(votes) where user.id = 123"
new method: "select votes, date where user.id = 123" and do some heuristic magic in the model or results datastructure.
also because semiconductor "startups" have higher capital costs than your typical software company.
The downside is that its hard to defend the empire that you've conquered using horse archery.
Alexander the Great reputedly defeated Scythian horse archers, but he left no records as to how this is was achieved. He probably used his companion cavalry to chase the horse archers against a river or into a forest. Like what the romans did to Hannibal's father. I think the Egyptians were able to beat the Mongols ONCE but only with superior numbers and a lot of preparation.
Anyway, it is USUALLY true that winning a war is about who's side has stronger will to fight. Who said that? Xenophon?
But tactically, horse archers that always run away cannot be beat. They rain arrows down upon you, burn your farms and supply lines, and taunt your huge 200,000 man armies out to be crushed in a simulatenous attack on all sides by 5 different columns of Horse Archers all arriving at the same time. They are will-breakers. Like startups picking away at slow thinking corporations.
This is similar to how the Athenians eventually defeated the Spartans by never engaging them in close combat and raining arrows and spears on them. Tactics. Not exactly the bravest thing, the Spartans would have called this Womanly fighting.
With the advent of gunpowder, artillery, and combined arms. You can't pull this off anymore. Thank god.
Lesson: Mongols only fight pitched battles they've already won.
Although for us startup guys, the point that PG might be impressing is that, its the company with the most determination that wins. Not the one with the most money/people.
kingkong here is implying that tactics and adaptive thinking is the key, not just having a hard head and tunnel vision.
Although there are some other incentives to outsourcing in China. I was told that in some major cities like Xian, the Chinese government is offering free office space and subsidizes the salary of each of your employees if an american startup or company decides to hire employees there. Xian has particularly good tech schools (they would be like the UW of China), but they have 50% white collar unemployment.
engineering school ranks: http://www.asu.edu/chinainitiatives/documents/unv_rank_eng.p...
(sorry can't find the link for the government program right now... that tip was given to me by a senior partner at a private equity firm... I'll try to find it guys. although, I would much rather recruit top grads from #1 universities than save a few thousand dollars a month by setting up operations in some average place with subsidies)
So I am definitely looking into China or India for my startup. But, I would not recommend going to China unless you or one of your co-founders speaks chinese. The major problems as other people have noted, are quality control and communication. Otherwise, your outsourcing has just about as much success as saying that you plan to move to Hawaii and live off the ocean by asking dolphins to fish and pick up sunken treasure for you.
I think a great startup idea would be to help American companies utilize idling chinese programmers by providing middle management, oversight, and translators (and job training + good pay for your Chinese employees).
I've met a couple guys our age in China (25-26) who have already sold their company for $20-30 million (US dollars) and walked away with $6-10 million. All they did was copy a popular idea in the US like Pandora or Last.FM, hire some cheapass programmers for $1k a month a pop, clone the idea completely, sell it to a larger company. These guys probably sat next to you in class at Berkeley or UCLA. I also know of a few US startups that already finished a Series A ($7 mil) and have a majority of employees outsourced to China. Solo founder.
more info if you guys want it
Introvert = you get your motivation and energy from your own creativity and thoughts.
Extrovert = you get your motivation and energy from the people around you.
They're both good things.
Introvert != Troll.
Developing new languages is a great exercise in creating new tools to solve specific problems. Rails really kicked the status quo and made programming so much easier for a bunch of us. But is it possible to ever create a language that will make all the different kind of programming problems equally easy? It always seems like there is a tradeoff, programming abstractions vs performance. As another case, all of us know english, but how many of us are great writers? (not I! haha)
Great link though. Look forward to the day when game programming is as easy as brainstorming out loud to our computers.
If any of you Silicon Valley guys have time, try a little joint called Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in SF Mission. It's on Virginia Ave. Eat there all the time, Spaghetti and Meatballs is killer.
Has good visual examples and step by step thought processes for designing the type, layout, and visual effects that we place on text to convey an overall design message.
Drop by san mateo some time. Drive up 101 and get off the 3rd Avenue exit heading West. Check out the area around 2nd to 4th Avenue, and B Street to El Camino. Got a movie theater, a Japanese Tea Garden and Central Park that hosts Free Concerts and Outdoor Shakespeare events, Caltrain station, and Ramen shops galore. Not to mention there are/were a bunch of techs that made it big time here. Youtube and Napster to name a few.
Sunnyvale got its wide variety of low cost rent places and decent Indian and Cheap and good Asian food places. El Camino Real is basically a mobius loop of America e.g. McDonalds, Starbucks, Ethnic Zone, repeat. Sister used to live in Mountain View off 85 by the Albertsons. Personally, if you're gonna live in Mountain View, somewhere close to downtown Castro Street would be cool to get food and beers and that kind of stuff. A bunch of startups (Meebo?) are around that area too.
Foster City is quiet. They have a bunch of golf courses and a Costco going for it. San Mateo is just about in the middle of everything, I like it because of the laid back downtown and being 5 min from the airport, 15 min from SV, 20 min (no traffic) from the city. That being said, San Mateo dies after 9pm. So if you're one of those party types lookin for a midnight saturnalia, the city is your only hope.
http://www.myspace.com/eyalgever
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