Jeff Bezos once described John Doerr as the center of gravity in the Silicon Valley :)
483 karma · joined February 23, 2007
I am interested in just about everything: Applied Mathematics, Engineering, Programming, Technology, Astronomy, General Science, Neurology, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Books, Military Strategies/Tactics, Politics, Business, Marketing, Economics (Game Theory), Finance/Investment, History, and Art. There is something interesting in everything. I try to steer myself in whatever direction my ignorance leads.
Contact me anytime: Email: jawad.php@gmail.com Phone: 1-416-879-4659
pg, why don't you ask us to contribute code to the site? We are all geeks and could probably code in parallel without straining your workload. I tried something similar on my "social network for geeks" and it worked wonders. Now I've more time to spend on building a business instead of just the product.
Moreover, as an Electrical Engineering student, I understand that a Search Engine for electronic components is certainly a product in much demand. To top it off, they also managed to extract specifications of the parts in .gif/pdf formats which is absolutely essential when buying IC's or Transistors.
Congratulations to the founders and YCombinator. Great work guys!
42. Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, and Jessica LivingstonFounders, Y Combinator
Rather than sinking a whole lot of money into a handful of companies that may (or may not) turn into the next big Google, venture capital firms like Y Combinator dole out smaller sums to potential mini-Googles. Y Combinator commits to two rounds of funding and dispenses less than $20,000 (expense money, really) to coders so they can work, work, work on a prototype to parlay into more funding. In exchange, Y Combinator asks for 2 to 10 percent of the company's stock. Startups that these guys have funded include Reddit (acquired by CondeNast), Kiko, and Weebly. The names sound funny, sure, but do you remember the first time you heard the name YouTube?
For instance, why did Yahoo 360 do terrible while other social networks gained market share? Because other social networks were intensely focused on their market, Yahoo wasn't.
"The other reason it's hard to start a company before 23 is that people won't take you seriously. VCs won't trust you, and will try to reduce you to a mascot as a condition of funding. Customers will worry you're going to flake out and leave them stranded. Even you yourself, unless you're very unusual, will feel your age to some degree; you'll find it awkward to be the boss of someone much older than you, and if you're 21, hiring only people younger rather limits your options." - How to start a Startup
I just turned 22 today :)
"Microsoft: When Todd Proebsting, director of Microsoft's Center for Software Excellence, tested a prediction market internally, managers quickly gave it their blessing.
The goal: to have 25 members of a development team predict when a Microsoft product would ship (this was an internal product, not one sold externally). The prediction market was set up in August 2004, and the product that "had been in the works for a long time" was scheduled to ship in November 2004.
Each "trader" received $50 in their account to start with, and was told that the more accurate their prediction, the more money they would make. The market opened with an initial price of on-time delivery set to 16 2/3 cents.
"The price of 'before November' dropped to zero right away," Proebsting said. "The price of 'on time' in about two to three minutes dropped to 2.3 cents on the dollar." Translated, that's more than 30-to-1 odds against on-time delivery.
Then the woman who was responsible for scheduling started trying to convince her colleagues who were buying and selling future delivery dates. "She was able to talk (on-time delivery) up to around 3 cents," Proebsting said. "People really enjoyed moving the price...They loved this."
"The next day the director comes into my office and said, 'What have you done?'" Proebsting said. But further investigation showed that the product actually was behind schedule, even though nobody was telling management, and it eventually shipped in February."
It is amazing what the crowds are capable of! Often times, groups can be smarter than the smartest individuals in them.
It is, however, an interesting tool for observing on going patterns. Here is a trend I tried with "Web 2.0" and "Digg": http://google.com/trends?q=Web+2.0%2C+Digg&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
- Jawad Shuaib
Whatever we do here will eventually be lost in time. And those who do remember our dream, they too will inevitably perish. To me, creating something of great value to others is the only reason why we even matter. Besides that, our worth is simply that of the atoms that make us.
Put simply. a startup is my opportunity to change the world.
I also loved this other research paper I read yesterday on collaborative intelligence, "Item-based Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms" available at http://www.paulperry.net/notes/cf.asp
- Jawad Shuaib
The key is to resist the temptation of copying features off their larger competitor (Wesabe) and build something different. I think a great lesson we have all learned from Reddit is that a startup can survive in the face of tough competition merely by filling the gaps left by their larger competitor. So far Buxfer seems to have done a great job at it :)
- Jawad Shuaib
That said, I think all similar startups should hold off until Facebook or LinkedIn go for their IPO. Bebos valuation would sufficiently increase or decrease depending on how other players in this market perform.
They have an amazing collection of research papers based on their products. Personally, I recommend "Evaluating similarity measures: a large-scale study in the Orkut social network" as a preliminary mathematical introduction to user interfaces.
Let me know if you need help with any of these. They probably require less than 20 minutes to implement.
I am a developer of a social network myself, and I can vouch for the wisdom of crowds. In our case, the users are actually coding large parts of the network themselves (i.e, http://shuzak.com/Replies.php?ID=6344&Topic_ID=1).