287 karma · joined August 9, 2015
The ironic part is that I face this exact problem with the thing I am formally trained in -- writing. The blank page paralyzes me in a way blank vim never does.
You're not going to get the first unless you're Facebook or Amazon or God, but maybe you can build a smarter algorithm. You are up against an army of some of the smartest computer scientists and mathematicians ever assembled -- but what you have going for you is a complete lack of inertia or legacy. You could try crazy things that Google might not, because they won't think it'll work. If you get lucky, one of those blows up. But you have to get very lucky (this is the Innovator's Dilemma in a nutshell).
Anyone want to give it a shot?
Dear OP, please ignore all this sage advice from people in cushy tech jobs telling you what you should do with your baby. Life is hard. We never know if we're making the right decisions. But it sounds like you have a clear vision that is driving you - that is priceless. Don't sell it away for the smart "business" move, when you already know what you should be doing.
The real issue here is that self-driving cars are probably the wrong place for that to happen in AI. At best, a solo project creates a crappy prototype where there was no product before (again, see Woz/Apple). The expectation for driverless cars is too high – they need to be 100% good, because your life is on the line, not 80% good.
What's the AI project that would blow people away, even if it was a shadow of a working prototype? I think that's the real question.
I don't know if Sprig hires cooks as contractors but that doesn't necessarily mean they have the same freedom contractors usually have. See the lawsuits that brought Honejoy down, and the class action one against Uber.
I actually think this is the biggest argument in favor of Josephine, that the author didn't bring up. Sprig needs to standardize user experience, so has to walk the line between enforcing policies on their cooks and still treating them as contractors. Josephine is literally a marketplace, where your interaction is directly with that contractor. Much better, from a legal risk question.
Or go the other way, and train a searching algorithm based on a data set of actively maintained open source projects on Github, with things like commit history/contributors/etc as features.
A great point, that I haven't seen in too many places. I sometimes feel like we're seeing too many people who "want to have a startup" for the supposed fame and fortune, and not enough who are truly passionate about an idea. Believing in an idea will get you through, not dreams of gold coins.
Sam, I noticed you didn't mention watching cash burn or unit economics. Is that a later section you might add? Too many founders don't realize the importance of that until it's too late (speaking from personal experience)
There are 20M+ repos on there. Which leads to a serious discoverability + signal/noise problem around 'true' open source projects. As someone who wants to put up an open source project for collaboration (with willingness to maintain), it's hard to get the right eyes on it. Too often, it seems like no one cares. Conversely, as someone who wants to contribute to open source projects, it's a little hard to find small early ones where I feel like I can make a meaningful contribution (yes, the big ones maintained by well known companies are easy to find, but I much rather work on something put up by an individual programmer).
How do you cut through the noise on GitHub to find projects you actually want to work with (and want you too)?
In 2000, it was easy to gauge investor sentiment – you just had to look at stock prices, which are real-time, precise indications of how investors as a whole feel. That meant it was easy to tell when the bubble started to burst (arguably on March 10, 2000, when the Nasdaq peaked).
What's hard today, and maybe why there's a lot of these "is it a bubble or not?" stories, is that investors don't know what other investors are thinking. Sam and YC have consistently been open, but they're more the exception that proves the rule. The vast mass of investors are holding their cards close to their chest.
The net effect is to prolong an increasingly unsustainable situation. I think it's highly likely that most investors already secretly think we're in a bubble. And that they also believe that other investors haven't realized it (everyone assumes they're the smart one). So we're stuck in this phase of "make my last buck before all the other idiots realize what's going on."
The problem is that a computer comes in without knowing anything about tangential phenomenon. So it needs lots of data to catch up to me and my years of forming associative connections about other handwriting I've seen.
If I showed you alien (ie not human) handwritten samples, you'd probably stuggle too.
Then why doesn't the statement say what these facts are?
This reads more like an attack on the former employees who spoke up than a scientific rebuttal of the article. Which leads me to think even more that the article is right.
But maybe stopping at a reasonable midpoint without, like a subfunction, is a good idea. What kind of midpoints do you use?
Until now, the rise and of tech companies has been determined by the double-edged blad of innovation. Someone makes something new that works better, gets big, and then someone else makes something newer and displaces them. Repeat cycle over and over. It's why in tech, we specialize in the art and business of innovation.
What we don't know how to do is navigate murky political waters. We're really, really bad at it. Can you imagine another $10BN company even letting this kind of bill happen, that would kill their largest market if it passed?
Airbnb isn't alone. Uber hired Obama's campaign manager because they realized they're biggest existential threat is a political one too. But see their ongoing lawsuits and outright bans in other countries – they haven't figured how to solve the political question either.
Meanwhile, car companies with a lower market cap, like GM, could figure out how to get a bailout from the government – right after it bailed out another huge industry, banks.
Those guys are just better at it. They have been for a long time. They get things like "don't optimize to something that solves problems. Optimize optics." Or that real deals get done behind closed doors, because you can control what happens there. That by the time it becomes a public debate, you've already lost the game.
We in tech have a disgust for politics. Rightfully so. It's useless at best and harmful more often. It doesn't follow the clear, hard and fast rules that the rest of tech does. But if we don't hold our nose and figure out how to play the game, or better yet, reinvent it, we'll get outplayed on the biggest board of them all.
People find it depressing, but it tells me not to waste my (limited) time.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, since spontaneous conversation encourages creativity. The real problem is signaling what state you're in. Everyone looks the same on a computer, so it's hard to tell who's in the zone and who's available.
What if we took a huge glass conference room and dedicated it as a 'quiet do not disturb room'? No talking at all, and the only movement is entering/exiting. When people see you in there, it's a giant visible signal that you're probably not responding to Slack/email/etc because you're doing something and don't want to be disturbed.
Short answer: burn rates will continue to be high until too late into the down cycle. So current levels matter, a lot.
I don't think the measure of working hard is counting how many hours you're at the office. I think the signal of working hard is how often you let yourself get into your comfort zone and coast.
I think working hard means pushing yourself out of your comfort zone - continuously. It means forcing yourself to ask the hard questions about your business you're scared to ask. It means figuring out how to do things you're not good at, like hiring or selling. It means identifying the most important problem for your company today, and tackling it, even if it's not what you want to be doing.
I'd guess that during YC, the partners and the community act as a force to keep people asking the hard, honest questions about their business. And I'd guess that after YC, without those outside forces, people revert to their default comfort zones, with things that feel nice. Getting press feels nice. Going to conferences feels nice. But what's true early is true later too: it's the work that doesn't feel nice that usually matters most.
You could spend 40 hours a week in the office doing the right things, or 100 hours doing the wrong ones. One of those will lead to growth, the other one won't. And it doesn't have to do with the hours.
Obviously that's easier said than done, but at least feasible, compared to a pure NLP solution.