portLAN

I'm not sure what you mean by "sharing" in this context but I did note your mini-autobiography above:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47588

Here's an example of what I mean by there being no generic "good" team:

Give me the top 5 athletes in the world. Maybe you pick Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Roger Federer, LaDainian Tomlinson, and Wayne Gretzky. Or maybe you pick Barry Bonds; or a top marathoner or sprinter or a boxer. Then I tell you we're playing basketball. And you get beaten by Venezuela.

> Again, thanks for sharing your experience.

I think you're taking what I'm saying the wrong way.

I'm pointing out that if you don't care what you work on, your results won't be as good. Thus, you should figure out what you do care about, and work on that.

I agree with nostrademons. Make YC a sideline, not a destination or starting point. There's great power in taking charge for yourself.

If you don't feel compelled, it's because your goals aren't inspiring you. You need bigger goals. Possibly getting accepted to possibly work with unknown people on an unknown web app is not interesting enough to capture your imagination.

You have to think of something you really want, something that grabs you, especially if you don't know if you could do it or if it's even possible at all.

As for 5), have you heard of Pollground?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator

That said, some great ideas seemed stupid to "experts" at the time; just trust your own gut feeling, not anyone else's. If you don't have a gut feeling, then you probably don't understand what people want in that area and should switch to another one (or steep yourself in the original a lot more).

"What I'd like" isn't the same as, "here's how I can make money for you". That's what it boils down to with almost all investors; minus ones who are okay with sinking in money regardless of profit to scratch a personal itch (of course they're probably going to micromanage in that case).

> it is more important to have a good team, than a specific idea or a specific market

Ideas are certainly easier to come by; executing is the hard part. But there's no such thing as a generic "good team". If they don't have a feel for the particular idea then they are not going to execute as well.

If there is a lack in passion there is a lack in results.

All personal evaluations are subject to whims. An investor does or doesn't like the idea; does or doesn't like the people. Cisco was turned down by 70 or 80 VCs. Nobody has a crystal ball, and at the end of the day, you guess; the dealmaker or breaker is frequently some arbitrary factor.

> Can we apply as single hackers who don't care about which project we take on?

Not to be YC specific, but just in general, who would want to invest in someone who doesn't care?

Why wait for someone else's approval? Don't leave your fate up to someone else's whim.

And don't forget there are many, many other investors.

[Edit: Also don't forget you can set up Google ads on your own; or have actual paying customers. You may not need any investment at all.]

Wait, you marked it as "Dead" so now it's invisible on the NEW list to people other than myself? If I'm not logged in the submission text disappears and just says "dead".

That's pretty underhanded, pretending something is there for the user but killing it off for everyone else, for obvious non-spam. At least 3 people upmodded my comment before you deep-sixed the thread so nobody else would see it.

> Do the HackerNews Readers have any constructive critism for us? anything is good.

I do. Don't put all the "The" bands under "T".

> There was a rash of startups doing this to get attention a few months ago.

That will kind of solve itself as most of them go nowhere and nobody ever hears about them again.

It is a reject.

Do you want bugs under Feature Requests too?

If they weren't rated at all, all that would be needed to keep order would be a "spam" flag.

IMO comments shouldn't even be rated this way. Posts full of useful information score less than one-liners of opinion; controversy is an automatic point-killer. I'd just turn it off, or separate it into categories, like "agree with sentiment", "insightful", "funny","troll", etc., a bit like Slashdot. A score of 1 could mean anything from "nobody has read it" to "controversial"; it could be flamebait or very useful.

Voting stories up or down is also much less helpful than it could be. Some are a little bit useful, some are great, but you can only give them 1 point regardless.

Imagine IMDB: "103823 people liked this movie." "892 people liked this more obscure movie." A better rating system would make a lot more sense.

> The fact is that the startup process is able to do what big companies are simply incapable of doing.

They aren't incapable of it, they do it too. They just have different priorities. A company's goal is to grow as large as possible. They want to shut out competition.

Both of those reasons explain why they acquire start-ups -- one, to feed the beast. Two, to stop any threat to their gluttonous expansion.

Microsoft's core is still Windows, Word, and Excel. Google's is still the search they started with when they were a start-up (every big company was once a start-up), not any of the start-ups they've since acquired. The core products pay the bills; the rest is filling up the cracks.

The numbers game is of crucial importance because large companies externalize the cost of the selection process. Google will pay a little for dedicated people and a lot for a big audience to sell ads to. Everyone's just still stuck on the old paradigm of either some time-wasting interview process ("what are you interviewing for?" "A job!" "To do what?" "I don't know exactly!") or buying a start-up with a self-selected people/problem combination that already seems to work.

> Why doesn't intense determination to develop something great qualify as a methodology?

I think we're getting a little carried away here with hyperbole. There are few "great" ones, that's not a methodology, although self-deception might qualify. Steve Jobs had an intense determination to develop something great -- the Mac. Hardly anyone falls into that category. Most start-ups now are excited kids who mainly want to make some quick bucks.

And I note the Mac was created BY a gigantic company, by someone who was already rich (and a bunch of engineers on minimum salary -- hey, it's Jobs). It's WHO, not WHERE, and I note design-by-committee-with-endless-meetings has been recognized as a mistake for a long time (Apple III).

And yes, the code does matter.

> Can you spot the contradiction?

No, it's 5 am, I'm up because my neighbor was crashing around, I don't even know what I'm writing. I seem to be talking myself into agreeing with PG.

I didn't mention Microsoft -- I would not hold them up as a shining example of software development.

>startups are the best way anyone has found to develop great new software

YC's program is 10 weeks. The time ALONE means they aren't developing great new software that other people can't make. Back to your Microsoft example, they were notorious for having people demo for them, then stealing the idea and developing it in-house. (Remember how start-ups were all scared of going into a market segment Microsoft might want?) A start-up isn't even a good way of getting an audience, which is what Reddit, YouTube, etc. were bought for, because chances are your start-up will fail. The reason start-ups collectively work is there are so many of them, a big company can just acquire the winners.

Focusing on only the hits and ignoring the misses is a hallmark of pseudoscience, so if we're going to trumpet the winners let's compare that to the vastly larger deadpool. Start-ups are 10x more effective in producing stuff that goes nowhere. Big companies are automatically better at producing stuff people use than 90% of start-ups for that reason alone.

> I'm just claiming they're better at producing new great stuff and that big companies suck at it.

I think this is a case of "the overwhelming majority of great developers do not work at YOUR company". Numbers alone mean that more great ideas will come from outside your company than from within. More new stuff will always come from everyone not at company X than at company X.

Working at Google doesn't seem to stop people, hired or acquired, from coming up with good stuff, so once again we're back to start-ups being an advertisement of who's dedicated rather than a superior development methodology. I mean there are only so many ways you can just sit there and code, there's nothing magical about doing it in a cramped apartment. And it's demonstrably worse to do it on ramen than on free gourmet health food.

The reason Joe Kraus and others romanticize it is because they were young, it was new and exciting, and they were doing it with a bunch of their friends. That's a good recipe for getting something done, but the code's going to be a mess if you're inexperienced, and worse if you're rushing to a demo. Out of large numbers of people getting something done, some of those will be a lot better than others. It's a numbers game. VCs fund, what, way less than 1%?

Great chutzpah setting the record straight in front of everyone. Note for presenters: Have a contingency plan if your demo breaks that involves something other than insulting a guy who's doing you a favor. Good restraint saying "I wasn't seeing any video" rather than "their demo was unrehearsed and the product didn't work".

Cambridge sounds even worse than I thought. YC should do everything in SV and just have a trip out to Boston for demo day -- although from the sound of it there's not much point, if the Boston investors are such that the East Coast bunch has to move to SV for funding anyway. Good for warmups for the SV investors, though.

If you want to give your start-up the best shot, why spend all that time in the distant-second place (Boston is #2) when you could be in #1?

> In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

> When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.

That's not an out-of-body experience. That's called "oh shit I can't see my hand and he's about to smash it with a hammer!"

Just write a Lisp program to transcribe it for you.

If someone wants to claim "very small companies are more likely to try something legally dubious because they have very little to lose," that's a completely different argument. Not to mention, YouTube and then Google had to pay up in order to square things away and neutralize the risk. Big companies are more comfortable playing fast and loose with the rights of individuals, while individuals and very small companies are more comfortable antagonizing powerful corporations.

Start-ups are NOT the best way to develop software. Start-ups are inherently inefficient. On top of doing the development, you have to take care of all the paperwork and technicalities of running a business. YC makes you move, which is a big interruption (you should only be moving if you NEED that interruption to leave behind all the distraction; some people are already coding like crazy and having to rearrange their lives like that just gets them off-track). You are trying to market yourself. The list goes on and on; I can't find the thread but somewhere PG said he only spent 20% of the time actually coding (my memory may be faulty, it might be 50%).

By contrast, working at Google you don't even have to cook -- they try to take care of all the minutiae. It's really no surprise that whatever they buy, the vast majority of the work is done post-acquisition.

The real purpose a start-up serves is as an advertisement that these people are very dedicated on that project -- when they are bought they are paid EXTRA to work on whatever they already wanted to work on anyway. [1]

THAT is the key difference. Most employees are hired to do some job they don't care about for some crummy wage, so no surprise productivity isn't high. If Google bought up start-ups and then reassigned everyone to other projects, nothing would get done. You don't get dedicated "in general", you are dedicated ONLY to what you're very interested in.

Hiring isn't obsolete; hiring people based on generality to do some unspecified thing for average pay is obsolete. It's simply a quirk that there are currently two models -- the useless traditional one and the "find people at another company who are already doing something and then pay them MORE to keep doing what they want to do ANYWAY" one.

It has always been obvious that letting people choose what they want to do and paying them more money for it yields better results than telling people to do something they probably have little interest in and paying them less money to do it.

Start-ups are a bad model for actual development because of the overhead. They are a good model for picking a certain type of people. I think PG just has this reversed.

[1] As a caveat, not everyone is dedicated to their technical ideas; they are dedicated to making a lot of money. Once they make the money, they stop working on the idea or anything like it. This seems to be what happened with ViaWeb, and would explain a couple of things: One, why PG is so insistent on "flexibility" and steering a lot of people away from their initial idea (because that's what he did -- except he wasn't passionate about the art gallery thing in the first place, so it's a lot easier to switch gears). Two, having steered applicants away from their initial idea, if they were dedicated to that, you've now turned them into people who are dedicated to the new thing for money only, and this could explain why YC's picks haven't been more successful. Your spirits also flag more when you're working on something you don't really believe in, which is why having a co-founder to lean on is more important. Plus there's the overhead -- how many of these start-up groups have a "business guy" as one of the co-founders? It's an inefficient ratio; imagine if every time Google hired a programmer they also had to hire a "business guy" for him.

I think it's pretty clear YC is much more compelling to PG than Yahoo! Store ever was. He could make a lot more money at it, too, if he doesn't steer the dedicated people away from what they are dedicated to.

Everything they buy they do a huge amount of work on, and they don't merely scale; they add features. Google Video was already easily superior to YouTube for the player alone (actual random access); they bought YouTube for its audience. YouTube got so big because unlike GV, it was very lax at policing commercial content. Its poor video quality, lack of download facility, lack of fast-forward, and short clip length limits should not be confused with the killer feature of giving other people's stuff away.

Froogle a failure? It's a search engine for product prices.

No, they aren't.

Everyone wants to get acquired by Google, and yet it doesn't stop them doing their own stuff in-house. Unless AdSense, GMail, Calendar, News, Froogle, Video, Finance, etc. were bought instead of built.

Not to mention all the work that happened after they bought Keyhole et al.

Whee, let's resubmit the entire PG archive. Free points!

It reads like a marketing pitch to acquirers -- "don't build, buy! Look at this one, a 2.0 webby thingamajig, ain't she a beaut? Only nine ninety nine nine nine nine ninety-nine. Hardly any miles!"

Google sure seems to have a lot of success developing apps in-house, and due to integration requirements this makes a lot more sense in many cases. An outside party would simply be unable to provide an optimal solution in those instances. E.g., Kiko.

With that price tag?

"Although a single unit sold for $16,000, a typical office would have to purchase at least 2 or 3 machines along with a file server and a print server. Dropping $50,000 to $100,000 for a complete installation was not an easy sell."

"Or maybe we're hairball paste you feed a cat so a hairball won't get stuck. They're cats and the hairballs are all the little problems that crop up. But you've got to lick yourself anyway, right? Just don't choke. Programmers are a lot like cats, actually. We're like magical cat-herding Unicorns."

Actually that's fairly indicative of personal letters of the well-educated of that era. People often used such terms when writing about those they had met who they were on friendly terms with or admired. The world was smaller then, and every person you met took on more significance.

It is not at all surprising that a prodigy and professor of mathematics would have a high opinion of another professor or scientist who impressed him with his intelligence or character, whether famous or not.

I know, he's a regular Einstein.

> Ideas have tons of value. In my opinion, ideas are insanely important.

Ideas are also a dime a dozen and everyone has great ideas. Execution is the hard part. And if you don't learn how to do it yourself, you will always have to rely on someone else.

Why would Steve Jobs be freaking in 1981 when he already saw it back in 1979?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star

Also Folklore.Org says the same thing: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

"This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where I most wish that Bill had dated them. It's tempting to say that the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Bill thinks that the windows predated that, although he can't say for sure."