unono

Hackers can make huge money in psychology/psychiatry (both prescientific fields). Life logging and it's analysis - quantified self. Positive psychology would be the better angle to play it, unregulated, big money in the self-help culture. Mobile apps are the right medium for it. There was recent doc on it 'Monitor Me' by bbc horizon.

edit: to replyers, it didn't want to post links for everything, so

google 'monitor me bbc horizon youtube', 'quantified self', 'self help industry', 'positive psychology'

The 'rich' in this case are middle and upper middle classes (wealth in homes), not the uber rich (wealth in stocks), so they don't actually have that much clout (doctors, teachers etc) on the international level, and they already are losing out. Doctors are relatively poorer than in the 60s/70s.

Deskilling benefits everyone, is leads to more equitable wealth distribution. The people inventing the assembly lines (hackers) will be paid more than the assembly line worker (cloud laborers), but that's a fair reward for the effort. They won't be much richer (just like mechanical engineers who invent factory equipment) because fierce competition will prevent it (there aren't network/platform effects that lead to gates/zuckerburg).

I have to disagree about being the middle man. Deskilling the workforce into an assembly line is a value creating activity, it's what engineers basically do. The typical middle man is simply there to skim some money because there are communication bottlenecks.

Yes, you're totally right - land will get devalued. The older generations in richer countries will lose the most relatively. This is not a bad thing fundamentally (it reverses the rich get richer trend), and is actually what's already happening, but people don't feel it. Every story that is heard about poverty reduction in China is also a story of westerners getting relatively poorer - though in absolute terms everyone is getting better quality of life.

Yes.

Mobile apps offer a superior experience. Reading on mobile is better (e-readers) and that was the main thing that pushed the web forward. Apps are also superior, not just the speed/polish, web will get that too, but because of the limited screen space, apps are forced to become more utilitarian, and hence better for the user.

Here's a talk explaining this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjE_Or4VIlU

Mobile, expecially tablets, bring back many of the superior experiences, like books, 90s style cd-rom apps, physical newspapers, that the browser pushed aside for many people. 'Long form' longer attention span activities will predominate.

The losers in this - aggregators such as search engines (google - replaced by wikipedia app etc.) and private social networks (facebook - replaced by peer to peer mobile apps)

the winners - creators - writers, artists, productiviy software developers, and game developers

A new type of app - hybrid between book-documentary-game-todolist, will become particularly important (a gamification of work).

Oh sure, it will equalize wages across the world, with some rich worlders losing in the short term, but I think that's a good thing, why should poor worlder's suffer.

Higher pay rates exist for two reasons, unfair monopoly positions (e.g. bill gates and the OS monopoly of the 90s, actors/athletes), and because there is complex work that hasn't been deskilled yet. Not much can be done about the former except regulations, the latter is where programmers can change the situation. Demand is everywhere - whether it's fulfilled by cloud labor, or by specialized labor - is the question.

Either way, I think we can agree that immense opportunities exist for startups to profit from this space.

You're totally correct when it comes to skilled work, they get snatched up when they've proven their worth. However, this cloud labor is for unskilled work.

So yes, they are commodities, but if they are a lot of them, and a lot of work to go around, wages rise. We saw this with the industrial revolution, especially assembly lines. Mid 20th century you could live pretty well as an unskilled assembly line worker, but then the work dried up.

Most modern work, knowledge work, hasn't been turned into assembly line yet. Many would argue that's because it can't be, but I disagree with that, much of enterprise software is about turning it into that (workflows,processes). It just requires more of the same. There are actually very few cloud labor startups (mturk, crowdflower, mobilworks) with at most a 100 programmers, one reason being that it doesn't have the network effects moat that VC's look for. Robotics is another casualty of that. How do you defend your cloud labor,robotics company from competition? That's why it will have to be built from the ground up by bootstrappers.

The reason for that is because there's far too little work being placed in them. These types of places need to scale 1000x and you'll see wages rise to middle class level.

This is also a much bigger opportunity for startups than traditional eyeballs model. A startup that can pull it off could easily be worth a -trillion- dollars. Apple, Microsoft, Google grew large just by taking $100-200 a year from a billion users. Imagine a mechanical turk that grew to a billion users - it could be taking $500 a month from users while paying them $5000 a month. Truly immense potential.

Hackers can solve this problem

- cloud labor, mechanical turk style. Hackers need to turn the tasks done in businesses into small bite size chunks that can be done by masses of unskilled workers. This is purely a software task that hackers relish.

- training workers cheaply and effectively, khan academy/udacity/coursera style.The business model for this should not be charging students (an evil practice carried out by colleges) but instead charging businesses for access to those workers.

- decentralizing production. Making what is produced by large factories produceable in the home. 3d printers, home robots, and so on. These are also mostly software problems of controlling mechanical parts.

That there is joblessness is mostly because hackers are not thinking creatively and working hard enough. Help will not come from other segments of society, they are incapable of doing so because they lack the key skill of which we hackers are famous for - inventiveness.

PG has stated multiple times that they key to success is being relentlessly resourceful and pivoting. There are a lot of people with that mindset, most of whom are not Stanford/MIT graduates. Encouraging more applicants from a wider selection pool might increase the quality of YC batches.

PG is always innovating, I'm sure the current process he's created is not the global maximum. He might be interested in matching founders, giving initial ideas, codifying more of his process into apps - anything that might increase ROI he will try as a rational businessman.

There might be a lot of capable founders, such as older people with a lot of experience in other industries, who are filtered out by that. You might be a 50 year old guy who doesn't get computers but are a killer sales guy, making it easier to select an idea and proceed might be a good bet for YC. Maybe even match up that killer sales guy with a young programmer type.

That would be a good idea for an android app. I thorough list of hundreds or thousands of ideas we'd like to fund. Aspiring startups can go through the list, select which ones they like, max of 5, and submit an application to YC right then and there. I wonder if PG's thought of doing that.

edit: what's with the downvotes? that's puzzling

Thanks for that insider perspective, that will be useful to hackers attacking the space.

An approach would be completely abstract the process. I believe the ownership model is a completely broken process that's pushed by the nefarious banks (It's easy for them to just conjure up money from thin air and indebt us for 30 years - reserve banking. This is the root cause for the relentlessly growing, but almost entirely useless, home ownership industry).

Hotel 2.0 revolution is needed. Airbnb, but with professional, heavily computerized, management of much larger property portfolios.

All-you-can-buffet movies/tv and now books is done. That same for home renting, car renting, vacationing, plane flying, private schooling, food eating needs to be done. Huge profits for hackers that can do it.

Good story, great lessons for entrepreneurship.

The big thing I couldn't help noticing was how inefficient the real estate industry is. There's so much regulations and people taking a huge slice out of the consumers pocket.

Even the notion of ownership by consumers is at odds with modern times, after all, we hackers are finding it too onerous to even maintain physical servers and off-loading that to the cloud, while most people are still plopping down huge sums of money and mortgages to lay claim to small patches of land, in a clumsy procedure where we fork over almost a tenth of that large sum to people who provide little value (real estate agents, lawyers, city fees).

PG should put out a call to kill real estate like he did with hollywood. There's huge profits for hackers if we wrestle it away from the current players (bank, agent, lawyers), and a lot of good for consumers.

AirBnb's a good start, further steps might be to unify it with Uber, Shopify, SpoonRocket, Exec, and Mechanical Turk and reduce consumers experience down to a few button presses. There's a big opportunity for a company to offer complete life management in an app.

They won't, out of politeness and not wanting to make enemies. I will, as an anonymous coward on the internet.

The machine learning/statistics crowd. Some names - Judea Pearl, Tom Mitchell, Pete Norvig, Andrew Ng, Geoff Hinton, John Langford, Jeff Dean. Of course there's many more than that, but these have gained some fame through textbooks/open sources/popular press etc. More generally the approaches taken by Google, like vector space models that power search engines. If Google's doing it it's likely not wacko because they have a low tolerance for tomfoolery down there.

I'm a big believer in utility-style pay by sip business. The employer-employee relationship is inherently prone to abuse and to mispricing, usually in the employer's favor. I've never hired anyone and never intend to.

I think we're coming from different angles - you're talking about life satisfaction, I'm talking about life purpose.

The startup life might be harder, in the short run, but I think it bestows a grander life purpose because at the minimum you are not helping the already rich get richer.

aah ... I think you should holding off throwing around labels like maturity, that's a bad way of making arguments.

Of course you're using a third party for branding/funding, however, as I mentioned in my original comment, corporations exist to reduce the transaction costs of collaborating and distributing - costs which are greatly reduced with widespread internet access.

This means you can have a 'virtual corporation', wherein you have much more freedom to decide your course of action.

In the end the customers is your boss - true, but you have much more say in what the product is (and this is good or bad, depending how skilled you are and your risk tolerance).

I'm not even that concerned about getting rich. It's more about doing exactly what I want, when I want, and making a big impact (in terms of helping people) - without giving the billionaires any more power and money.

As Jesus said - It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.

I'm an atheist, but there's a solid truth in that saying. If you can't make a living on your own, it's OK to join that corp, but otherwise, it's the modern version of dealing with the devil.

As usual, PG is 100% right, fighting for us hackers.

The article, and others like it, are nefarious corporate PR pieces put out by Microsoft, Google, Apple and others designed to trick us into not realizing the tremendous power we now hold. With the advent of internet,, the transaction costs that first led to the corporation have almost disappeared. This is 'The Age Of The Virtual Corporation'.

Work for The Man and you'll just make Larry Ellison, Steve Balmer, Tim Cook richer.

Patrick Winston is a disciple of Marvin Minsky. They're considered wackos these days.

'General intelligence' is wacko amateur thinking that reasonable people in AI don't believe in. You're shooting yourself in the foot mentioning that.

The consensus amongst competent people in AI is that of building practical systems.

The latest moto X has always listening chip inside. That's pretty significant. There's robocars, ibm watson, siri/gnow. The CEO of the quantum computer recently said that machine learning is progressing faster than people think, having seen some of the secret internal stuff brewing up at big G. Microsoft is developing improved versions of the kinect internally as chips.

Who cares if we don't know how the brain works in detail, we still haven't built bird-like machines that flap, but we do have machines that soar through the sky faster and higher than birds. Same is happening with AI.

About time.

More startups should realize that they could increase developer adoption of their products if also published shell script interfaces to their product. In fact, your startup should really start off as command line accessible and add the gui after.

On the contrary, I think we're now in 'the age of the great underestimation'.

Well, I don't know about that. A lot of that is based on the PG brand, which the other incubators don't have. PG and Buchheit's connections come in to play when selling shares at first round and after. Their handshakes count more than whether the startup's based in beijing, boston, or bangalore.

I see your point, PG could focus on relentlessly increasing the quality of each batch - if his aim is too just establish a high quality brand for no other reason than he likes to (the elite college model).

However, from a purely profit perspective, PG would stand to make a lot more profits from scaling. After all, Walmart is younger than Harvard by hundreds of years, but makes a lot more money.

Could linkedin use it's data for nefarious purposes? Yes.

Could some professionals ask to be compensated for being on the network? Yes.

Have the professionals on linkedin realized the above? No.

I'm saying this politely - so don't bite my head off - but

a.) you would say that, wouldn't you, you'd like as much of PG's attention as possible

b.) it's quite presumptious to state that the 1000s of others would be lower quality. Are the less than 1000, mid 20s, mostly male, mostly american, applicants to YC the best candidates on earth?

There are probably 1000x, if not more, capable founders of all age groups, nationalities, and genders that PG could get a slice of. He's built a brand and should seek to capitalize on it before someone establishes a superior brand.

Off course, this all about what PG does for fun, he's already rich enought to never work again. It might be that he enjoys mentoring a few founders a couple of times a year and doesn't have global ambitions.