paul

My brother-in-law quit a traditional job to drive for Uber, so he must think it's better. (also, he told me that for the first time, he's excited to work in the morning) It's a pretty competitive market -- if a service doesn't provide enough work, they won't be able to retain drivers (plus many people drive for multiple services, especially Uber/Lyft drivers).

I've talked to the drivers for a lot of different services, and they seem to enjoy the work. In particular, these on-demand services offer a lot more flexibility than traditional jobs where you are expected to show up every day and sit in a chair for 8 hours.

Time will tell :)

In that case you should assume that FedEx will put them all out of business. There's a lot more going on than "delivery".

Many things look similar from a 1000 miles away. At the actual business level, Uber and DoorDash are different in almost every way. This is one advantage that investors close to these companies have, and one reason why it can be so hard to understand any of this just by reading blog posts. DoorDash has a great business, in many ways better than Uber's.

And which of these products do you have actual experience with? My guess is "none of them".

I was also told by the HN crowd that Facebook is a fad that would never make any money :)

The best investments always take a long time. Fortunately we are very patient investors, happy to fund "crazy" things like nuclear fusion and cancer treatments.

Care to give a few specific examples? Also, these are companies, not "projects" -- it's important to understand the difference.

No two are the same, but generally a good sign is if they have outlier behavior in their past. For example, if you won a gold medal in the Olympics, there's a good chance that you would at least get an interview -- the level of determination and persistence required to accomplish something like that would definitely be helpful in founding a startup. (that said, I don't know that we've ever actually funded an Olympian) A more common example would be creating a popular open source project (e.g. the creator of Sails.js is in the current batch).

Please don't let the lack of a cofounder discourage you from applying. It's definitely a huge help to have a good cofounder, but we accept great founders regardless. There's a tendency for people to want to reduce the world to black-and-white rules like, "yc doesn't accept single founders", but it simply isn't true. We are specifically looking for outliers, so any such rule would be a huge mistake (because the big hits are, by definition, exceptions).

http://www.livblends.com/ and http://www.soylent.me/ are both YC companies.

This article is delightfully thoughtful. Her other post is also worth reading: https://medium.com/@maradydd/okay-feminism-its-time-we-had-a...

It makes me wonder though how much nerd culture is driven by forms of autism. Those wishing to end oppression women should be careful that they are not instead perpetuating the oppression of autistic people.

I hope not! Many of our best startups are disliked by hn...

I believe there is truth to what you say. It's very difficult to prove of course, but I've definitely noticed that certain founders seem to face a lot more skepticism than others.

The great part about this business is that I can make money by investing in those that others are missing :)

One of the problems we have in the tech world is that there is a lot of respect for the analytical "left brain" skills (which is great), but a great deal of doubt and skepticism directed towards the more subjective "right brain" skills. I think this is why the "neckbeard" crowd has often dismissed Apple's success as being the product of slick marketing. My opinion is that their success has a lot to do with Job's ability to combine both analytical prowess and creative genius. People who try to be entirely analytical about everything are rarely good founders.

I'm talking about the very early days, so there was no stock to tank, the company was largely unknown and not yet "successful".

That definitely makes it harder, especially since norms for what is or isn't honest or ethical are far from universal (e.g. what kind of copying is ok and what kind is stealing). This is another reason why it's beneficial to have a culturally diverse team.

This is a fair question, but like most things with humans, almost impossible to answer in a definitive way.

There was once an accidental control group though. Jessica missed about half of the interviews and PG, RTM, and Trevor were left to decide on their own. I would estimate that the error rate without her was about 2x-3x as high.

The other thing to remember is that we keep track of the startups that we interview, and for the ones that we accept, we end up working with them for many years. We make a point of studying our mistakes (and successes), so there is a feedback loop, and I believe that we're getting better at it every time. But of course there are about a million other variable in play, so it's very difficult to be certain about anything (which is part of what makes this business so interesting).

Exactly. We're painfully aware of our mistakes.

Culture is one of those factors that is very difficult to quantify, yet incredibly important for success.

At companies with great cultures, employees are eager to show up and get things done because they genuinely care about the team and mission. That was very much my experience at early Google.

Companies with bad cultures try to motivate employees with fear and intimidation, or simply fail to motivate them at all, and everyone wastes their time playing video games or whatever. Not surprisingly, those rarely do well.

In my estimation, most startups have weak to poor culture, which is one reason why you read so many startup horror stories. My advice to anyone looking to join a startup it to pick a place where you are excited about showing up and contributing every day. I think that's a much better predictor of happiness and success than trying to follow the social media hype or hotness signals.

How large is the market for short term housing, and how close is airbnb to saturating it?

I didn't say you were astroturfing, but I am curious what motivates you to create an account for the purpose of commenting on this story.

Or an understanding of exponential growth rates.

I also notice that you created your account just now, presumably to comment on this post. Who do you work for?

Fascinating that neurons derived from stem cells derived from nuclear transfer exhibit the same dysfunction as his actual brain. It's not obvious when the two twins diverged though. If they have always had different personalities, maybe it's because Jack always produced less dopamine?

There are many other immigrant populations that are not nearly as successful and usually end up in very low-paid positions wherever they land.

Also, your explanation doesn't do much to explain why Chinese control 60% of the economy in the Philippines.

OoPs :)

I would fix, but the edit link is gone :(

It's difficult to explore this question without being accused of racism, but I'd like to better understand why some cultures are so much more economically successful than others. The Chinese are such a great example of this. Wherever they go, they seem to end up being very successful. For example, in the Philippines it's claimed that Chinese are 1% of the population, but control 60% of the economy (http://opinion.inquirer.net/31223/ethnic-chinese-dominate-ph...).

Everyone has the odds stacked against them. Successful founders are by definition outliers. If we didn't accept solo founders, we wouldn't bother having them apply.

And also fewer partners reviewing applications. He was turned down for a previous batch because he applied with a bad idea (SAT test prep), not because he was a single founder. If we would now pass on DropBox, something has gone very wrong. I can't believe I have to argue this point...

Drew Houston applied as a single founder with no product or traction, so yes :)

Hundreds of millions of dollars in sales doesn't count as success? Which non-yc hardware companies started in the last several years would you count as successful?