251 karma · joined August 11, 2011
https://ai.stanford.edu/~maurizio/
- Yu Deng: IMO gold [1]
- Jacob Tsimerman: 2x IMO gold [2]
- John Pardon: 3x IOI gold [3]
Fun fact: Tsimerman and Deng both overlapped with Peter Scholze (another Fields Medal recipient) at the IMO
[1] https://www.imo-official.org/results/contestant/8824/
- A 3Blue1Brown video on a particularly nice and unexpectedly difficult IMO problem (2011 IMO, Q2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M64HUIJFTZM
-- And another similar one (though technically Putnam, not IMO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkmNXy7er84
- Timothy Gowers (Fields Medalist and IMO perfect scorer) solving this year’s IMO problems in “real time”:
I thought it would be useful to the HN community given its high signal-to-noise ratio:
1) You can get a quick birds-eye view of the general trends / topics that are currently being taught at the Stanford CS department.
and
2) You're one click away from learning more about each topic if you wish to do so, considering all of the courses listed have publicly accesible websites.
- Researching what your options are / what's already out there.
- Comparing different alternatives.
- "Hopping on a call" with a sales rep to get a product demo (there's this super annoying trend where many SaaS companies' landing pages don't explain what they do and the only option they give is to "schedule a demo").
For CRUD-like internal tools or simple 3rd party integrations, my experience has been that it's often much faster (typically < 1 hour) to build a production-ready app on Retool (https://retool.com) than it is to even get started with SaaS vendors.
e.g.
Wayback machine:
- Airbnb (2008): https://web.archive.org/web/20080310025433/http://www.airbed...
- Uber (2010): https://web.archive.org/web/20101126114649/http://www.uberap...
- Twitter (2006): https://web.archive.org/web/20061127012643/http://twitter.co...
Show HN:
- Analytics.js / Segment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076
- Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- Momentus: $1.2B IPO (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/momentus-the-latest-space-st...)
- Segment: acquired for $3.2B (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735414)
- MessageBird: reached a $3B valuation (https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/08/messagebird-series-c/)
More generally:
- 15-20 YC companies are now worth $1B or more.
- 100ish YC companies are now worth $100M - $1B. A good number of those (and others currently worth less than that) are growing very rapidly and will likely reach unicorn status in the next year.
So it seems like one can reliably expect 2-3 unicorns to come out of each YC batch. Those 2-3 unicorns likely more than make up for the costs associated with running each batch (including all of the ~$150K investments). Seems quite good to me.
Admittedly, there hasn't yet been a Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft-scale company that has come out of YC yet. I think it's only a matter of time until that happens -- anecdotally it seems like at least a handful out of the recent batches could become massive home runs, as well as other more established companies like Stripe that seem to be growing quite well.
> assuming I got in [to YC] I would not get sucked into raising a huge amount on Demo Day.
> I would raise maybe $500k, keep the company small for the first year, work closely with users to make something amazing, and otherwise stay off SV's radar. In other words, be the opposite of a scenester.
> Ideally I'd get to profitability on that initial $500k. Later I could raise more, if I felt like it. Or not. But it would be on my terms.
> At every point in the company's growth, I'd keep the company as small as I could. I'd always want people to be surprised how few employees we had. Fewer employees = lower costs, and less need to turn into a manager.
(https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1132012625527750661)
Probably a good example of a confident, competent founder (Founders who raise too much capital are acting out of fear rather than acting out of confidence. // Confident, competent founders should take the risk of running out of money vs. the certainty of over-dilution.) as described on this essay :)
1) Shipping-and-iterating is uncomfortably hard. Putting your product out there in front of users is painful. It's a lot easier to just constantly brainstorm ideas or hide in the coding cave.
2) As a founder, it's tempting to think that your startup is unique: what you're building is uniquely challenging, important and highly non-trivial.
Anecdotally, I've seen far too many founders (including my own past self) use 2 as an excuse not to do 1: most of the time, those never even launch. And not just in the hardware space, but also in: health-tech, bio, fin-tech, gov-tech, legal-tech, insur-tech, prop-tech, food-tech, logistics, and even B2B SaaS ("what we're building is hard and needs enterprise-grade robustness / security").
There may be ways to build massively successful companies that don't involve rapid shipping-and-iterating cycles, and in general there may be ways to build successful companies while ignoring or even doing the exact opposite of what YC advises.
But YC would know a few things about hard-tech from having funded possibly hundreds of such companies, including several massively successful companies. In fact, the top 3 YC companies of all-time as of 2020 are all in highly-regulated spaces: Stripe, Airbnb and Cruise [1]. Cruise in particular is a hardware company (self-driving cars) whose billion-dollar success was largely due to their ability to ship-and-iterate much, much faster than pretty much every other self-driving car company out there.
Yes, but the payout gets distributed among a larger number of companies. Increasing the pool size lowers the variance, but the expected value remains the same. Lower variance might be desirable for some people (more predictability -- at the limit it's as if you're investing 1% of your equity into an "ETF" of early-stage startups), whereas some people might prefer higher variance (higher potential upside if they join a pool with the next Stripe).
My concern is that if founders contribute 1% of their equity (not 1% of the entire company at exit), the expected value itself is quite small -- on the order of $150K under reasonably optimistic assumptions -- for something like FounderPool to make sense.
On the flipside, increasing the 1% by an order of magnitude might make more sense from a utility maximization point of view, but even less sense from an emotional standpoint.
> You contribute 1% of your equity into your pool.
My understanding is that if a founder owns 30% (say) of the company when they join the pool, they would contribute towards the pool a number of shares corresponding to 1% of that 30%, i.e. 0.3% of the company. Which will presumably get further diluted by the time the company exits.
Having founders contribute X% of their equity at the time they join the pool is more reasonable from a practical execution standpoint than having founders contribute X% of the company the time of exit.
How did you choose the 1% number (percent of their equity that each founder contributes) as well as the pool size of < 25?
My quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:
Expected payout to each member would be:
1% * avg_valuation_of_companies_in_pool * avg_percent_ownership_at_exit
[1] Modeling should be somewhat doable leveraging public data. For example, you can use YC company data in https://ycombinator.com/topcompanies https://ycombinator.com/companies and simulate what the payouts would be if you were to choose 25 companies from a given batch at random.
[2] $100M is likely in the right ballpark. According to https://www.ycombinator.com/ :
> Since 2005, we've funded over 2,000 startups.
> Our companies have a combined valuation of over $100B.
the average valuation of YC co's would be ~$50M; if you exclude half of those that are in recent batches (haven't had time to realize their value and don't really contribute towards the $100B total) it might be closer to $100M.
Under a FounderPool model, an example of this would be a pool of 20 co's in which 2 companies end up exiting for $1B each and the rest essentially $0.
This is the wrong way to look at it.
Instead, ask yourself: would you exchange 7% of your company to join the YC community and be able to leverage their resources forever?
The answer should be a resounding yes if you think your company will be > 7.5% more valuable if you join YC [1]. Which it should [2]. The $125K is just the cherry on top and just one of many perks of joining YC (albeit a useful one for companies that have no funding/revenues so they can focus 100% on building their product instead of having to worry about paying for housing/food/servers/SaaS).
The vast majority of us who have gone through YC would've done it even if it wasn't for the monetary investment.
[1] See PG's Equity Equation essay: http://paulgraham.com/equity.html
[2] You'll likely even make up for the 7% almost immediately because you'll likely raise your seed round at a significantly higher valuation (> 7.5% higher for sure) than if you hadn't gone through YC. But it's very likely that your company will intrinsically be worth significantly more than that too.