errands

The founder of this site was at startup school. I met him. He was excited about his idea. I lose my phone a lot, so I thought it would be a nice toy.

At risk of starting a lot of crank calling:

http://phonemyphone.com/

I think Mark largely pulled his "two points" out of his ass honestly. Did anyone else get that impression? Of the entire startup school, the aspect I was most dissappointed with was the fact that he simply did not give a flip about preparing a speech for 650 people, many of whom (myself included) traveled from far to attend the school. I honestly think he walked up on the stage and started talking about the first two things that came to his head.

Other than that the school was great. And if anything Mark served as an example of what not to do when giving a presentation.

A group of people who copied someone else's funding idea verbatim are supposed to be good at picking original ideas?

Paul, the Henry Potter reaction is understandable... this certainly could be interpreted as blatant plagiarism of your ideas. But the other way to read it is as a validation of the vision behind YC. The new model for startup investment that you all have pioneered is clearly in line with the current trajectory of innovation on the internet. You figured it out first -- everyone reading this knows that -- and it almost seems like it'd be MORE worrisome if other investors didn't jump on the same bandwagon right about now.

I mean, at the end of the day, "who's committed and who's merely involved?" -- as Dharmesh put it -- is a pretty damn important thing to know when making the decision to invest in a team. Is it that surprising that other investors are asking the same question?

Point is, techstars just proves that you guys are on to something. And, considering the growing buzz around YC -- not to mention the rockstars who post here at news.yc, speak at your events, and contributed to Jessica's book -- well, seems like Harry Potter's got a pretty serious first-mover advantage. =)

Yes. I didn't want to just dismiss these guys, it looks like they are new, going through some growing pains, and trying something interesting. However, the mix of Y Combinator hacker talk with bright flashy graphics is just disconcerting. That quote was the most over the top part of the site.

I look forward to seeing in the future to see if they can evolve into a niche besides YC or decide to directly compete.

My favorite part is this: "To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job." As an entrepreneur, I'm happy to almost be in the same category as a criminal. ;)

I also love the 0% dissatisfaction idea, whether or not the result is a success. The experience of launching your own project just can't be replicated. Any of the points you mentioned, even if the result is complete failure, is well worth the expense of time & risk.

Those are the reasons why I'm moving to malaysia to create my startup....

1. Living cost are cheap

2. good internet access

3. lots of people speak english there so you can go on your daily life with english (good for attracting employees from other countries)

4. While I don't discount the usefulness of the networking effect in the bay, it's much more useful if you need investors... Since I plan to bootstrap my company, this is not such a problem....

5. Nice weather, smiling people makes for a place where people are not depressed....

6. I strongly believe that the best employees for a startup are curious and adventurous, an employee that is willing to relocate to malaysia display those qualities

I agree. Being a few years older than mark, I actually didn't find myself offended by his comments.

Just as PG said that adulthood is a stage, not an age, I took mark's comments (though quite less elegant), to mean that there's a mindset of youth that helps in starting companies: simple life, willingness to take risks, lack of corruption of the complacency of the workplace, etc.

Maybe I give him too much credit.

As I've gotten older, one thing I've learned is that some thoughts are best kept to yourself (or those you trust), even if they are true. :)

Publicly suggesting that you hire based on age isn't especially brilliant.

In Mark's defense, I thought that he might really be trying to say that younger people are systematically undervalued, and so hiring them is a bargain. (the market has under-priced their work) Of course I'm sure that others think that the opposite is true and that older people are under-priced. Obviously those people should hire the under-priced old people and build a competing social network. :)

are there any plans on putting up the videos for start-up school on the YC site?

I have been following Brad Feld's blog longer than any other blog. For sure TechStar has a solid lineup and I am sure the entrepreneur pool is larger than what YCombinator and TechStar can support together meaning there shouldn't be any lunch stealing between the two.

My biggest problem at the moment with TechStar is their 5% non-negotiable valuation. I understand they want to keep it simple and totally respect that. But that does not take away the unfairness of things when you give the same valuation to a start-up that is already operating and a start-up that is only an idea. I am sure going forward they will adjust that.

-Zaid

Excellent. The essay and talk together produced several surprises. The essay cleared up things things that the video obscured (couldn't see the visuals), like the "not-so-smart" / "enterprise software" connection (I was thinking he just meant the competition was dumb so you'd have the one-eyed man / land of the blind advantage).

The big surprise is that YC hasn't seen an order of magnitude increase in applicants from their first round. You'd think this impossible: Paul announced the first YC program only about a week before its deadline and they got something like 250 applications. Now they are all over the tech news and they still haven't cracked 1000? Maybe PG's new speaking approach (memorize, practice, use visuals) is an effort to get more people fired up?

Paul, regarding this new speaking style: you could make yourself into a Steve Jobs dynamo of a speaker, but I think you shouldn't. Your usual wordsmith style is probably better for attracting nerds.

Question: Paul, it sounds like you've mostly swung in the direction of encouraging people to look at their own lives for problems to solve. Whereas in "Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas" you were saying the opposite, like in the two paragraphs starting with "Reading the Wall Street Journal for a week should give anyone ideas... " Trevor says something similar in the footnotes. But it looks like YC has been placing all its bets on the first sort of ideas. There's a good reason: all the huge software successes come from the "build it for you and your friends" model because those are the problems you fully understand. But it's more common to find software companies making solid profits on products they built for others' problems. Am I overlooking YC companies building products designed for other people? Is the problem that there just aren't enough potential founders like the Octopart guys: people deeply involved in some non-computing world who also happen to be good programmers? If so, maybe the richest source of ideas and cofounders would be cruising web forums for the near-programmers (people who build things like MS Access half-solutions to their companies' problems) to listen to what they would like to build if only they knew how. Maybe YC should be recruiting there, too. Thoughts?

Don't worry, this is like being sued by Viacom-- it will only happen if you get really big.

personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable telling my ideas to people who copy others so obviously. maybe they hoped nobody would see?! or make it easy for those submitting to YC?

but news.YC is building a community and others seems to missed the train on that..

Right now it's the number of good applications. That number appears to be increasing fairly rapidly, though. Then it will be our attention.

wow. this is a serious amount of [non-blog] press for 9 days out.

I've often wondered whether you could make a lot of progress by bringing together hackers with, for example, doctors or lawyers. These are people who use computers every day but probably don't spend much time thinking about how to hack a solution to their computing problems.

As a scientist I've had a lot of success looking for the simple yet groundbreaking problems that occur at the boundaries between very different disciplines. It can be difficult not to make 'stupid' mistakes in a discipline with which you are unfamiliar...but it's a lot easier than trying to work faster and smarter on the exact same problem as everyone else!

Surely interdisciplinary collaboration could be just as valuable in startups.

--Ten years ago, such a venture would have cost roughly $5 million to $10 million just to get the technology, such as servers and a fleet of software developers, before an entrepreneur could get an Internet company off the ground.

Typical mass media ignorance. PG said somewhere that Viaweb spent about $2m in its entire existance. All that's changed is that the tools have improved and dedicated web hosting with decent bandwidth costs are in the hundreds instead of the thousands of dollars. It's always been possible to start a web business off a credit card or a digging into a modest nest egg - the only difference is, back then, most people saw little reason to when someone would gladly give them $5-10 million bucks (which needed to be spent) to get the site off the ground.

Of course, this isn't new to anyone reading this, so please excuse my audienceless rant. :)

I'm sure they did a hardcore PR push to coincide with their launch. The real question is how much attention they'll have 60, 90, or 120 days out.