19 ms·

Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

• benjaminwootton 10y ago
  I never realised that Dotcloud/Docker was a YC project. That will be another home run for YCombinator.
  • gragas 10y ago
    They also have at least part of CoreOS (S13).
• DrNuke 10y ago
  The most, we are here to understand where to put our technological hands in order to succeed, this because SV (and Y Combinator as one of its coveted stars) still has the gist, the money and the ability to deliver. If we in Western Europe could have something similar in Berlin or Amsterdam, now that London is going, I would be even happier.
  • sharpshoot 10y ago
    YC alumni are in all those cities and YC only requires relocation for the 3 months of the program. So YC is already global.
• intended 10y ago
  Wth, the no asshole rule is the only way to keep out posers and assholes. The expansion plans don't work because if you build a community which includes a few assholes they eventually overpower the system and being an asshole becomes the norm. The last 3 paras of that article are worrisome.
• thpalmear 10y ago
  It's all about real AI today (not based on words and rules - lookup CTM - the real bots have this and its based on vector space). Get the companies and groups that are making very small breakthroughs in this area. The days of regurgitated cut-n-pasted text entry boxes and js (geocities, friendster, myspace, facebook) are over. Time for the new Googles of the world that will solve things bigger than SpaceX like extending human lifespan which is a requirement for space travel.
  • rohan_ 10y ago
    +1 on the CTM stuff. I recommend Jeff Hawkin's book "On Intelligence" if you're looking for a quick read.
    • bbctol 10y ago
      Hawkins' memory-prediction concept is quite more specific than general CTM, and not borne out by evidence.
  • stingraycharles 10y ago
    To save everyone else a few clicks, here's an explanation of CTM: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/
  • cftm 10y ago
    You do realize that we're still dealing with the world of models that need be trained. Models are only as good as the data that is given to them, and data is only as good as those who collect it. Neural Networks aren't even close to real AI, they're black-box models - believe them blindly and catastrophe will follow. An excellent example I recently read pertains to a hospital attempting to use a neural network in determining whether to send pnemonia patients home or have them stay in hospital for treatment. The model told them to send asthmatic patients home. Why you may ask? Well, asthmatic patients were always triaged to the ICU, thus the results told the hospital to send this group home. We don't even understand cognition in the human brain, how can we expect to stumble upon it with digital systems?
• cushychicken 10y ago
  Thinking democracy's success is tied to economic growth is a pretty dim worldview. I hope he's wrong about that.
  • internaut 10y ago
    The logic behind it, I think game theory, is simple and does not just apply to democracy but any system of corporate or state government. It goes like this: Suppose there exist 2 parties to a conflict of interest. I want Z, but you also want Z, and this is a rival good, only one of us can have it at one time. Then it is possible for 1 party to play ball with the other party, but IFF there is a different, separate conflict of interest where the trade can be reversed. So I win A, but only if I allow you to win B. 'the next time' This logic only can work if we allow each other to be winners. Suppose our economic incentive was to 'defect' in game theory parlance, and defect always. Why would this be so? Perhaps because we're in a zero sum game instead of a positive sum game. Perhaps I must win or I will die, in which case my non-cooperation with you is non-negotiable. "I want Z, but you also want Z, and this is a rival good, only one of us can have it at one time." sama, and Thiel, believe technology solves this by turning a potential rival good into non-rival goods. Or put more simply; if everybody can have stuff they are happy. There can be exceptions to this logic, like a mother choosing her child's survival over her own in a pregnancy gone wrong. But in a world without growth, without those potential negotiations 'violence' becomes selected for. The important realization is not the trivial 'more stuff makes people happy'. It does, but the real reason why growth is a big deal is that in the long run it selects for outcomes which don't lead to deadlock leading to violence. Where I part company with Sam, is the belief that democracy is worth saving. It is worth saving representation, each entity's self interest in a system must be recognized yes, but not democracy. Ironically equal voting must lead to unequal outcomes. Right from the initial premise it does not hold up against physical reality. Like genetics, circumstance, and all of history. There are other systems in G-space that have the potential to be much better at governing. That includes systems in which people would feel much more represented than they do in our current system. Equality of votes is like a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. I mean even the NSDAP had policies on the environment and health most people agree with in the present. What does that say about our ability to select? tldr; The relationship is close to axiomatic in game theory and democracy when looked at in the cold light of day is a pretty dim worldview to start with.
• contingencies 10y ago
  I found the most interesting point in the whole article the publicly stated consideration of establishing a China presence. It would appear to make a lot of sense given current capital availability in China, world-leading mobile payment penetration, and US/SF issues with visas, overheads, component sourcing. Get over here!
  • plinkplonk 10y ago
    Easier to get to China from India than the USA.So, yes please. I've always wanted to visit China.
  • l33tbro 10y ago
    How is China with 'innovation' though? The portrait we seem to get so often in the West is that China excels at imitation and fails at original thinking. Maybe innovation isn't needed for domestic success, but it is for creating things that penetrate the rest of the world (and, these days, dare I say universe?).
    • contingencies 10y ago
      Well we have perfect mobile payment penetration, the only significant electrical vehicle fleet in the world, and the world's most successful social networking platform. None of these things are copies. What's stopping these things penetrating the west? For payments, mostly incumbents. For e-vehicles, mostly protectionist levels of government regulation that make small vehicles too expensive to approve as roadworthy or illegal to drive, and foreign SNS platforms have outright announced they are planning on emulating WeChat.
• loeber 10y ago
  This was a pretty good article -- certainly one of the better portraits I've read of SA. However, I usually see better writing in the New Yorker. Take "as a result, the once nerdy Y Combinator is now aggressively geeky." What the hell does that mean? (Nothing.) OTOH, a few memorable quotes: > Growth masks all problems. (Steve Huffman) > Despite having raised a robust $1.6 million after Demo Day, the founders were ridden with angst. Fredrik Thomassen said that they wanted to make their war chest last forever, and Sondre Rasch mentioned that he’d frugally chosen to live in a twelve-entrepreneur collective in a nearby forest.
  • n72 10y ago
    and "upload"? "what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion."
    • loeber 10y ago
      Yep -- this one puzzled me so much that I assumed I was in the wrong, because surely there's no way that a writer for the New Yorker would make a mistake that egregious. I must have read that sentence twenty times.
    • ealexhudson 10y ago
      I read it as somewhere between "skim" and "learn" - it's probably a term sama used himself in the interview. If you think of yourself as a machine it's probably a term than makes sense; it doesn't feel particularly aspirational to me :)
      • n72 10y ago
        Even so, wouldn't you use download?
  • anewhnaccount 10y ago
    Nerds are obsessive about and skilled at one thing. Geeks are good at academics in general.
• johnwheeler 10y ago
  The brilliance of YCombinator, IMO, is HackerNews. It's turned YC into a self-perpetuating machine by getting smart people to congregate and talk about news YC itself partially generates. I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.
  • muse900 10y ago
    Makes sense. I personally read some of the comments before jumping into an article, mainly because comments most of the time loop me in on something that I am completely clueless or have little aware of. Also to see if the article is worth reading into because obviously if you read 20 people saying "The author of the article doesn't know what he is talking about" then its more possible that indeed the author has written about something he doesn't know or understand. Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say.
    • ptero 10y ago
      Great point, now that you wrote it I realize I often do the same -- use HN comments as a signal on whether the article is worth reading. Coupled with the "do not be nasty" tone overall (a rarity online) it gives a very positive prior to YC.
    • pault 10y ago
      > Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say. I couldn't agree more, on both counts. It's such a thrill seeing a link to a research paper or exceptionally well written essay, and have the author answering questions in the comments. I can't even estimate how much general science, history, and literary education I've received this way, almost by accident. No doubt I am a much more well rounded person as a result. I rarely read TFA. I'm here for the discussion, and if the discussion is extraordinarily interesting, I'll read the article for clarification. To me, HN is the "guild" that teaches fundamentals, and keeps me abreast of the state of the industry (and many, many unrelated topics that are equally interesting!). Normally this level of access to illuminating dialog would be restricted to universities, but I can get it here for free, in my underwear. I've spent a good part of my life geographically isolated from centers of learning and industry, and being able to remain in the loop is priceless. I doubt my personal and professional growth over the last 10 years would be a fraction of what it is if I hadn't had this resource. Yes, I am a fanboy.
• patatino 10y ago
  I had to change the font so I was able to read the article.
  • DanBC 10y ago
    I agree, and it's very frustrating that most articles are unreadable unless I change their font or colour choices. I should have to have an extension installed that makes text readable. And, unless people speak up the people who create these broken designs will never know that they are choosing to say "fuck you" to a sizeable proportion of their audience. But: it's about the least interesting thing that can be said about this article. And whoever is responsible at the New Yorker will never see these comments. I think dang has said these kind of comments are off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236332#9238739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236332#9238739 I personally don't think "The choices you've made exclude part of your audience, and may not be compatible with laws around accessibility" is bike-shedding, but I have stopped commenting on design choices.
    • patatino 10y ago
      I can understand dang's comment. It was just my very first impression and it annoyed me but I agree that it doesn't add any value. How should the extension work? Maybe a simple blacklist of fonts so the fallback font kicks in?
• Artoemius 10y ago
  > two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.
  • superplussed 10y ago
    One of them is obviously Musk. I could guess on the other, but it would only be based on the "wildness" of the other billionaire's imagination.
    • Artoemius 10y ago
      Musk strikes me as an imaginative but a very rational person who deeply thinks about stuff, so this is confusing to me. His argument that our world is most likely a simulation does seem logical given our current knowledge. However, breaking out of the simulation is completely another matter, more in line with Hollywood thinking than with anything that scientists can be engaged to do, at least currently.
      • psyc 10y ago
        Nick Bostrom's argument.
      • jonnathanson 10y ago
        It's completely wacky, but if you've got a few mil to drop on wacky ideas, it starts to seem a bit less wacky in the grand scheme of things. It's basically a wager: "There's a small, but perhaps nonzero chance I'm living in a simulation. I've got the throwaway cash to fund an escape attempt. This investment has a massive chance of being completely wasted, even if this is a simulation. But if there is even a tiny chance of figuring something out, I might as well take it."
        • wyldfire 10y ago
          What would it even mean to 'escape' a simulation? In my mind I'm imagining when I write code to model a real process and even at some super high-fidelity simulation I can't imagine an 'escape'. Maybe if the simulation were so self-aware it could conduct local privilege-escalation attacks and replicate itself like a worm/virus? EDIT: aside -- "Microcosmic God" [1] was a great short story along these lines [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God
• Artoemius 10y ago
  Other than being very interesting, this article provides one of the funniest instances of the crazy humor generated by the Cloud To Butt Plus extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...): > “The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into my butt. I’d love that,” he said. I had to disable the extension to verify that it was its work and not the actual quote.
• pesenti 10y ago
  This quote from a YC Partner: > It’s all about founders. Facebook had Mark Zuckerberg, and MySpace had a bunch of monkeys. The kind of ubermensch/Ayn Rand rhetoric that makes me cringe.
  • lincolnq 10y ago
    Do you think it's wrong?
    • pesenti 10y ago
      To call people monkeys because they didn't accomplish as much as Mark Zuckerberg? Yes it's very wrong! And ironic given that MySpace had a much better exit and impact than FriendFeed (the company created by the partner quoted)
      • uola 10y ago
        It's particularly unfitting when you're asking people to run startups with an uncertain future. It might boost moral in the short run, but doing so on other peoples expense always comes back to haunt you. To quote the article: > Graham wrote an essay, “Mean People Fail,” in which [...] he declared that “being mean makes you stupid” and discourages good people from working for you.
    • mruniverse 10y ago
      Doesn't seem true. Sounds like nerdy trash talk.
    • bbctol 10y ago
      Yeah. It's a post hoc explanation of something better explained by luck. Tom Anderson of Myspace really is a spooky-smart hacker with great intuition, and no one was calling Zuckerberg a visionary until truly recently.
    • sidlls 10y ago
      Yes. It's the hacker/CS version of clique-based exclusionist and bullying.
• lvs 10y ago
  Radiation hormesis is one of those junk science topics that persists in the literature despite many thorough efforts to debunk it.
  • apsec112 10y ago
    Could you support that with references?
    • consz 10y ago
      Isn't the null hypothesis sufficient?
      • JabavuAdams 10y ago
        What about the building with the recycled radioactive girders showing a decrease in resident cancer incidence?
  • witty_username 10y ago
    Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis I see a mix with no consensus.
• n72 10y ago
  I do admire all the ambition. But does it really have to be mixed in with views such as "Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail. And I have to think that YC is hugely important to that growth." I'm sure Sam (and other SV types) is well aware of the complexity of reality and that YC, as one company, cannot be hugely important to that growth. In other words, if YC simply stopped functioning tomorrow, I can't imagine the GDP growth of the United States would be at all affected. Guys, what you're doing is very, very impressive, but, c'mon, let's get off the idea that you're instrumental in saving democracy for all of us (and all the other delusions of grandeur).
  • greenleafjacob 10y ago
    Not currently at least.
  • smoyer 10y ago
    And if you think about it, most of these disruptive companies are not offering real growth. Both Über and Air BNB, for instance are diverting dollars from the legacy provider. And they're doing this by offering better service and/or lower prices. There is no value creation to see here.
    • patrickk 10y ago
      Well they are funding very ambitious stuff like nuclear power startups and AI initiatives, which most others usually shy away from. This is potentially extremely disruptive and a massive boon to the economy. And your assessment of Airbnb of just "diverting dollars from the legacy provider" is wrong in my opinion, it turns an unused space into cash (creating a new market/enabling an underserved market), just like early-eBay turned unwanted stuff in your house into cash. I'm not fully sure where I stand on Uber, but they're certainly offering a much better customer experience than traditional taxis.
      • smoyer 10y ago
        AirBNB turns my unused space into cash but also keeps me from staying at a hotel. These businesses are certainly adding value for their shareholders and customers. They are not generally expanding the economy. I should also admit that many existing business models should be disrupted.
• bambax 10y ago
  > At Graham’s table, he [Altman] and others discussed how to stop Donald Trump > If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel Is this true? How does it work? Thiel is a very vocal supporter of Trump and yet he's Altman's friend, a friend so close they would want to spend the rest of their life alone together, in the event of a catastrophe. Altman can certainly have all the friends he wants; but he shouldn't get to pretend he opposes Trump at the same time.
  • dang 10y ago
    Friends can disagree. Pretty sure it's as simple as that.
    • camillomiller 10y ago
      Of course, but we're talking about opposite world views here. I actually read a bit of an insinuation to the fact they're both gay, but maybe I'm overreading into the article.
      • dang 10y ago
        You guys surprise me. Obviously friends can disagree, including about important things. I'm trying to think of a sublime historical example but I'm tired and all that comes to mind is Camille Paglia and Rush Limbaugh. Oh well.
        • bambax 10y ago
          If the article is to be believed, this is not just "some friend", it's someone Altman would want to spend the rest of his life with in the event of a catastrophe: it's his favorite human being on the planet. And it's not just one's opinions or even party affiliation; Thiel is working very hard and very publicly to get Trump elected.
    • bambax 10y ago
      It's not just politics, like one would be a little more conservative and the other a little more liberal. A Trump presidency would be an extinction-level event (for example -- and this is just one small example -- he doesn't "believe" in global warming, and would dismantle the EPA). How far can friendship go? The only way to explain this is, Altman doesn't think Trump is that big of a threat. Which makes me question his judgement very much.
• yrahmed 10y ago
  I love Sam and just wish they would have used a different metaphor than "Manifest Destiny". Isn't manifest destiny what led to the genocide of native american populations?
  • snowwrestler 10y ago
    Don't Sam and other YC folks thinks that technological innovation will put most people out of a job, necessitating a "basic income" which makes them permanent government dependents?
    • witty_username 10y ago
      Aren't we all government dependents? You can't live without the government.
  • bbctol 10y ago
    I think it's definitely intentional. This profile isn't meant to be purely congratulatory--the undercurrent that some of this is creepy and undeserved that other commentors have picked up on is deliberate.
  • Hoasi 10y ago
    It's either an unfortunate or unflattering choice of words indeed.
  • MarkMc 10y ago
    That's iteresting. I was not aware of such a connotation - to me the term manifest destiny just meant "a destiny that can be clearly seen and that cannot be changed" [1]. Maybe the article's sub-editor was equally ignorant of 19th century US history. [1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manifest%20destiny http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manifest%20destiny
    • pesenti 10y ago
      No way. That's a deliberate choice of words and the parallel is actually pretty striking. From Wikipedia: > In the 19th century, manifest destiny was a widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny: The special virtues of the American people and their institutions The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty
• superbag 10y ago
  Sam Altman is an inspiration and a genius. YC is in great hands.
  • dang 10y ago
    Personal attacks aren't allowed here. You poison HN by doing so, and we want this place to be better than that. I'm sure you know that. Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with. Edit: In case anyone is confused, the parent comment has been edited several times. This has crossed into outright abuse, so we're going to ban the account.
  • apsec112 10y ago
    I think this would be more convincing if it were less acidic. If you really need to make a negative comparison between Altman and someone else, for example, literally almost anyone would be less distracting than Trump. I don't have any insider knowledge, but I think YC is structured as a partnership, and I assume the other partners could throw Altman out if he were obviously screwing up.
• DavidWanjiru 10y ago
  This is neither here nor there: I'd never read about Sam Altman's sexuality before this article, but when watching him interview Mark Zuckerberg a few weeks ago on the making the future series, it crossed my mind and I wondered if he's gay. Something in the body language. A certain type of light on Sam's face. So reading this, I've loudly exclaimed to myself, "I thought so!"
  • napsterbr 10y ago
    My gaydar had already told me, but I did not know he was out. I'm guessing it's not easy at all being an openly gay VC within this small community in the Valley. Kudos to Sam, I already had a great respect for him; much more now. I hope he can disrupt minorities and bigotry too.
    • S4M 10y ago
      The city of Paris used to have a gay mayor and a gay man is the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, so I'd say bigotry is largely disrupted already.
      • lubonay 10y ago
        "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
      • theoh 10y ago
        Actually, homophobia is on the rise worldwide. The apparently approved YC company attitude of utter naïveté about social reality anywhere other than your own back yard (consider the negative impacts of airbnb, for example) is distressing. As I read it, the New Yorker piece makes it abundantly clear that YC is unfit to be leading the changes it thinks are appropriate, "creating the future" etc. What's the size of the overlap between YC-involved people and those involved with Black Lives Matter? I'd love to be proved wrong on this but everything I've seen suggests it's more or less non-existent, and if so, this is a massive elephant in the room and a disgrace. For the privileged people who think they have a mandate to create the future to be so apathetic when it comes to huge sections of society...
• n72 10y ago
  "Altman, who will personally oversee this initiative, believes [Startup School] is the fastest, easiest way to bring ten thousand new founders a year into the network." In the YC scenario, once its network hits a certain size it ceases to become a useful network and is just the world.
• apsec112 10y ago
  I continue to be impressed by the quality of The New Yorker's reporting. This is so far above and beyond most media coverage about Altman and YC.
  • camillomiller 10y ago
    Golden quote: "Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist."
    • athesyn 10y ago
      Anyone who was aware of startups before 2010 already knew this.
      • matthewowen 10y ago
        Lots of people weren't aware of startups before 2010. This article isn't aimed at you.
    • Ericson2314 10y ago
      That's ridiculous. Everything powerful that startups "try to disrupt" (GM, government, Wall Street, etc) now has their own incubators. Only to one's immediate family might the work-life balance and low chance of success raise eybrows.
      • burkaman 10y ago
        Yeah, that's what "gone conformist" means.
        • Ericson2314 10y ago
          Oh! I'm very glad I read that incorrectly.
  • DanielRibeiro 10y ago
• n72 10y ago
  "The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift." I think that circuit exists and is functioning quite well. It seems to me there's a lot of glory embedded in YC's plans.
  • kristianc 10y ago
    "The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift." ... opined Altman in his New Yorker PR piece.
    • OpenDrapery 10y ago
      Attention everyone! Attention! I just wanted to make sure that you all know that I don't care what you think of me. As you were.
    • gcb0 10y ago
      i would have expected this to be on wired. but i guess he picked new Yorker when he compared prices.
  • agumonkey 10y ago
    He said people, not the medias.
    • sidlls 10y ago
      Who do you think the media's audience is? Perhaps he should have said "most people" instead of what he did say.
      • agumonkey 10y ago
        I was half kidding. But sometimes all you care about is media validation, not what people actually think. You have your face in the press and get broadcast and that's it.
  • 10y ago
• Denzel 10y ago
  I've been trying to put my finger on what bothers me about Sam Altman ever since he was named President of YC in 2014. Now I know. It's less to do with him; more to do with this narrative of Sam Altman as some visionary, world-saving, future-builder. The story just doesn't fit the character. There's no comparison between him and true visionaries like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc. Unlike Sam, these guys can dive deep into whatever industry they choose with a very obvious clarity of thought. Watch any of their interviews for examples. Even though Steve Jobs wasn't "technical" he was able to speak about the technical aspects in detail. On the other hand, Sam seems to stand at a very high, superficial level. I have yet to see him dive deep into any of the frontiers he's focused upon: AI, energy, biotech, etc. But it's not just that, these visionaries let their track record speak for itself. I don't seem to understand Sam's track record. A Stanford dropout whose claim to fame is selling Loopt for $43M (at a loss to investors) after raising $30M in total at a $175M valuation, and pocketing $5M for himself? Then goes on to tout YC's runaway success as due, in part, to his leadership when >60% of YC's portfolio value is due to ~15 companies from pre-2014 YC batches. To top it off, as proof of his ambition, a silly comparison between YC's portfolio value being 14% of Alphabet's market cap is made. That's apples-to-oranges. Bottom line, the results we see today are largely due to PG & friends. I wish people would stop forcing this narrative of Sam Altman as a visionary. Right now, he's more Tim Cook, less Steve Jobs. There's nothing wrong with being an operational genius. YC, the company, has a manifest destiny.
  • angersock 10y ago
    An interesting analysis. Let us see if the mods let you keep it up.
  • Gatsky 10y ago
    I don't get it... This is just a bunch of your feelings about famous people you haven't met? Where's the content? I just lost a minute reading this, and another replying.
    • lhnz 10y ago
      You seem irrationally perturbed. Aren't all comments below articles about tech heroes generally people's opinions on people they've never met? I know that negativity might look rude, but the hero worship (while more socially acceptable) isn't any better.
• superbag 10y ago
  Not to mention it allows them to control negative comments/articles through implicit threats/incentives and direct (and hidden) moderation/manipulation. There's an annoying fakeness about YC/HN that gets old after a while. Lots of founders willing to tell YC folks whatever they want to hear and YC folks happily slurping it up like it's authentic. Genuinely gamed. And worse they treat anyone who isn't a sycophant (people like @pinboard/idlewords) as crazy assholes who they actively seek to filter out of YC/HN as possible. It would be really good for the world if HN was replaced by a neutral platform.
  • dang 10y ago
    Although we banned this account for abuse elsewhere in the thread, I'm unkilling this comment because it's so patently untrue. It doesn't resemble the Hacker News I look at, and I look at HN a lot. It's also factually incorrect, both re idlewords (whose latest piece spent most of the day at #1 on HN) and everyone else who uses this site in the intended spirit. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625852 and marked it off-topic.
    • n72 10y ago
      "It doesn't resemble the Hacker News I look at, and I look at HN a lot." Given your position, do you think that you can look at HN objectively?
      • kefka 10y ago
        It would not be wise to argue with someone who can hellban you. Even if it is purely logical and factual in nature. Lobste.rs is also a good HN-alt. A bit more groupthink on common topics, and less groupthink on VC stuff.
        • n72 10y ago
          If I get hellbanned for that, I'd prefer not to hang out here anyway. edit: and thanks for lobste.rs! I've been looking for something similar to HN without all the SV gossip.
• rl3 10y ago
  I hope the Silicon Valley writers are paying attention, there's some really good material in this article.
  • paulcole 10y ago
    The scurvy thing stands out to me.
• plan6 10y ago
  Congrats, Sam! That's a really nice article. Now, please ignore it, and go about your business. The worst thing to happen to a person's acceleration would be belief in having success. The only person you race in life is yourself, and you always need to catch up.
• untilHellbanned 10y ago
  Reid Hoffman makes clear like I suspected that SV power players are skeptical about Sam Altman. YC is becoming Jack of all trades master of none. Jury is still out on YC under Sam's leadership. By 2020 I think we'll start to see the wheels fall off.
  • n72 10y ago
    It does seem there's a lot of flailing around. As someone mentioned, this http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ went from 6 under Graham to 21 under Altman. Altman mentions laser like focus at time when referring to how startups should function. The same doesn't go for YC? It's really easy to get fame and plaudits by associating yourself with a cornucopia of big ideas, it's a lot harder to actually follow through.
    • snarf 10y ago
      While I respect that they claim not to be about accumulating wealth (and it does feel as if this is genuinely true compared to more traditional VCs), this looks a bit like the Google X of VC. I suspect that they have generated enough returns from their seed investments that they no longer have outside LPs for a lot of the stuff they do, allowing them to freely pursue off the wall ideas (the exception here is probably their continuity fund). I'm not sure how sustainable this is in the long term. They would have to keep churning out Airbnbs, which is not guaranteed.
    • anondon 10y ago
      > Altman mentions laser like focus at time when referring to how startups should function. The same doesn't go for YC? It does. Sam mentioned in an interview (can't remember which one) he sees YC as a meta company, like Alphabet. So it makes sense to broaden the type of companies YC is interested in. Note that YC itself is not directly working to solve the problems mentioned in the RFS. They are funding companies that solve them. So the laser like focus exists at the individual startup. TL;DR It makes sense to expand focus, being a meta company.
  • flylib 10y ago
    the facts on the ground don't support your theory, Reid is one of the people helping fund OpenAI (Sam is one of the founders) more that he is pissed that the YC Continuity fund is starting to compete with him on deals at Greylock which the article alluded to that it's a threat to other VC's
• te_chris 10y ago
  This is a strange profile of the sort of hero and status/wealth worship that only seems to have currency in the USA. The more I read the article the less I came away thinking of Altman as a genius and more of a babysitter and teacher. I'm not really looking to attack Altman's character or competence, he seems to have both in spades, but the whole thing was just...creepy. And cultish.
  • grandalf 10y ago
    Totally agree. I had to stop reading as the cult worship stuff started to get thicker and thicker.
    • lkozma 10y ago
      Are you sure that you are in disagreement with the article's author? I think both you and te_chris may have missed some of the irony in the article.
      • grandalf 10y ago
        This is a thought provoking question. I didn't miss it, but I didn't read it as irony, I read it as a sort of awe-struck breathlessness on the part of the author... or at least, the slightly emotionally distant (aloof, not really ironic) version of that that the New Yorker is very good at. The idea of writing this sort of piece about someone whose grand ambitions have not yet been realized is both to make the reader aware of the grandeur of the ambitions, and also to draw a line in the sand so that his accomplishments can be judged later, aided by the glimpse into his unfettered idealism. This is not a criticism of the New Yorker (I love it). Just a phenomenon of the unique genre of personal profiles that the magazine produces. The same tone would also work if writing about an artisanal butcher in Maine, for example.
        • lkozma 10y ago
          I think you describe the tone quite precisely -- it is the same tone the author may have used to describe someone who built an Eiffel tower out of matchsticks -- the premise being that we get an objective description of a subculture (SV technologists) somewhat alien to the main readership of the magazine. But I do think that this objective tone is somewhat fake, because by the choice of examples and their juxtaposition the author does seem to occasionally take sides and actively (and subtly) parody certain attitudes. It is telling how many in this forum seem to have missed this and saw the article as unilaterally flattering.
• n72 10y ago
  So, Sam's been at this for 2 years, inherited an extremely well oiled machine, and hasn't, as far as I know, accomplished anything extraordinary. Not sure why there's an entire New Yorker piece on him, instead of, say, I dunno, a few paragraphs in the Talk of the Town section. Has there been a New Yorker piece on PG? I googled and didn't find anything. He's the one that put all this together and seems far more deserving of such a thing.
  • snowmaker 10y ago
    Actually, YC has expanded radically under the 2 years Sam has been running it, and all the expansion is purely Sam's doing. If you read the article, it discusses all this in detail.
    • n72 10y ago
      I did read the article. I'm sure Sam has done good things. I still don't see anything which warrants a piece in the New Yorker.
      • tim333 10y ago
        It's more the ambition than the prior stuff: >“unlike Google, we grow faster as we get bigger. We could catch them in ten years.” trying to be the biggest tech group in the world can be interesting even if he fails.
  • anondon 10y ago
    > So, Sam's been at this for 2 years, inherited an extremely well oiled machine, and hasn't, as far as I know, accomplished anything extraordinary. What accomplishments did you expect in 2 years? Working towards OpenAI, YC Research, the upcoming MOOC, basic income project, the private city project seem very impressive to say the least. After he has taken over, YC is expanding into new areas, mentioned above, whereas earlier they were focussed on getting the startup program right and expanding to accomodate larger batches.
    • 10y ago
• hyperknot 10y ago
  Can someone explain what is referred as "Golcondan wealth"?
  • hobo_mark 10y ago
    > By the 1880s, "Golkonda" was being used generically by English speakers to refer to any particularly rich mine, and later to any source of great wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golkonda#Diamonds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golkonda#Diamonds
• dave_sullivan 10y ago
  > Only twenty per cent of the Inc. 500, the five hundred fastest-growing private companies, raised outside funding. I thought this was an interesting statistic. "80% of the fastest growing private companies did not need to raise capital to become one of the fastest growing companies."
  • n72 10y ago
    ...which makes this statement seem awfully silly: "Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail. And I have to think that YC is hugely important to that growth."
    • richmarr 10y ago
      Yeah, if companies are homogenous then that's fair, but it's not a stretch to believe that certain types of companies require VC funds more than others... in which case losing VC as a funding option would mean up to 20% of new companies fail at the concept stage, or have a harder time. Based on that I think "awfully silly" is a bit unfair.
      • n72 10y ago
        Sam's contention, as far as I can tell, is that YC is hugely important to economic growth. Startups are a small fraction of growth. Of that small fraction, a fraction (20%) require VC funds. Of that fraction, another fraction may not have made it but for YC. So, we're looking at a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that YC is involved with. I'd say that suggesting that YC is hugely, or even just important, to economic growth is absurd (and reflects the massively outsized view SV has of itself).
        • skndr 10y ago
          I read it as "...I have to think YC [can someday be] hugely important to that growth," not that it already was. That said, although VC funding might be a small percentage of investment overall, it has a leveraged impact on the economy as a whole [0]: "According to a study conducted at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, 43% of U.S. public companies founded since 1979 were funded by venture capital. These companies now comprise 38% of all employees, 57% of the total U.S. market capitalization, and account for 82% of all R&D spend — a proxy for further innovation growth — in the United States." [0] http://a16z.com/2016/09/11/vc-economics/ http://a16z.com/2016/09/11/vc-economics/
• kordless 10y ago
  > "Most people want to be accepted, so they won't take risks that could make them look crazy." This is a highly dissonant statement, so it's not surprising it's coming from a VC. Innovation is exploring the crazy and coming back with something that can be shoehorned into reality without upsetting reality's tea cart too much. The problem with VCs is that their jobs consist of spending time investing in crazy things that have far reaching drawbacks that nobody sees until everyone is using the product and the founders and investors have already exited their position.
• pdog 10y ago
  > Nothing came of Paul Graham’s plan for tech to stop Donald Trump, but Altman, after brooding about Trump for months, recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote. Looking at the election as a tech problem—what’s the least code with the most payoff?—Altman and his three co-founders concentrated on helping young people in nine swing states to register, by providing them with registration forms and stamps. Doesn't this confirm that VotePlz is mostly just a smokescreen to "get-out-the-vote" for a favored candidate?
  • malmsteen 10y ago
    Yes it's implied, but the point of the sentence is that altman's approach is more effective than graham..
  • jedberg 10y ago
    Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats, because the young and poor tend to be the ones who don't vote and tend to vote Democrat. Back in the 90s MTV had "Rock the Vote" (actually it was a progressive non-profit who partnered with MTV) and their goal was the same.
    • pdog 10y ago
      > Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats What? This is only true if you believe that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations are exclusive to Democrats.
      • daveguy 10y ago
        That should have read: Non-targeted get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats.
        • rat87 10y ago
          Still wrong there are Republicans not registered / not voting. Its just a different demographic target.
• SandersAK 10y ago
  Go get em' Ahab!
  • jayjay71 10y ago
    Now that is an interesting parallel.
• moron4hire 10y ago
  Altman worked so incessantly that summer that he got scurvy. You have got to be kidding. So much food has enough vitamin C in it to avoid scurvy that you have to be eating pretty much nothing but ramen noodles to get it. I don't need to be rich that badly.
  • tim333 10y ago
    Seemed to have happened. I guess diet's not something you think about when otherwise distracted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314804
• sanj 10y ago
  Has anyone identified the Rickover quote that is alluded to at the end of the article? "At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean."
  • hmsln 10y ago
    > I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_to_.22sink_them_all.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Willingness_...
• nathan_f77 10y ago
  My favorite part of the article (so far): > “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” Hahaha, that's so awesome.
  • paulcole 10y ago
    > "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” Imagine this coming from an ultra rightwing prepper nutball. Do you still love that quote?
    • nathan_f77 10y ago
      Haha, I do. I'm just one of those people who enjoys thinking about apocalyptic scenarios. Left-wing, right-wing, it doesn't really matter when the virus spreads and the bombs start falling.
    • sremani 10y ago
      I love that quote even it comes from a lunatic mule. Being prepared and being able to see the alternative endings is not a disability, but being completely obsessed and held hostage by that thought is. There is a difference. I am not predicting impending doom, but when it hits the fan, better to have a plan than not.
    • Alex3917 10y ago
      > Imagine this coming from an ultra rightwing prepper nutball. Keep in mind the official government recommendation is that everyone should be a prepper.
  • 10y ago
• tptacek 10y ago
  Why two McLarens?
  • lisper 10y ago
    Because he can.
    • tptacek 10y ago
      He can do lots of things. Why that thing?
      • lisper 10y ago
        Oh. I thought you meant: why two MacLarens. But you meant: why two McLarens. The answer to that is: because McLarens are awesome. :-)
  • icpmacdo 10y ago
    Why the iPhone SE?
    • tptacek 10y ago
      Because it's a great phone, and it's not super expensive? I have an SE.
      • icpmacdo 10y ago
        Sama does not need to be concerned with the price of the phone, I was wondering is it because of the smaller form factor or another reason. The article talks about him powering through hundreds of emails a day and Im curious if the SE works for that amount of typing
        • tim333 10y ago
          If he's powering through hundreds of emails I doubt he's doing it on the phone.
• zxcvvcxz 10y ago
  Interesting article giving more of an inside look to the organization and its people. Some choice quotes and comments from a random dude on the internet: > After conferring with the accelerator’s sixteen other partners, Altman launched an initiative to support startups even earlier in their life span, and a fund to continue investing in them as they grow. > “Sam said, ‘Take all the “M”s and make them “B”s.’ ” Badass. Reminded me of "Drop the 'The'". > A 2012 study of North American accelerators found that almost half of them had failed to produce a single startup that went on to raise venture funding. It's very much a "me-too" endeavor, almost political at the universities local to where I live, aimed at appearing to "foster innovation" and justifying huge continued government loans for their "customers". > YC provides instant entrée to Silicon Valley—a community that, despite its meritocratic rhetoric, typically requires a “warm intro” from a colleague, who is usually a white man. Yes the meritocratic aspect of networking is far overblown. Intros or bust in my experience, unless someone gives you a lucky break. If they do, be grateful and be damn sure to impress that person. > All the early arrivals at the party were men; the batch’s female founders were attending a presentation on the challenges of being a female founder. Anyone else find this kind of ironic and counterproductive? > “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” This is funny, he almost sounds like one of those awful Trump supporters! :P > In 2012, he and the other founders sold the company for forty-three million dollars—a negative return for their V.C.s. This isn't as bad as it sounds. Losing a few million dollars vs. around $50M is a huge difference. In fact I'd say it's harder to salvage a failing company that exit a successful one. > “you want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts the company will be hugely underpriced.” Value investing, absolutely. I tend to apply this principle on a smaller scale, to individual people. For example, I've had the opportunity to hire and work with extremely intelligent and hardworking people who simply lacked some basic English skills, and had shit cover letters. But who cares if they can program a robotic system the way I need. > “hard things are actually easier than easy things. Because people feel it’s interesting, they want to help. Another mobile app? You get an eye roll. A rocket company? Everyone wants to go to space.” So incredibly true. I have a startup with very few resources but no problem recruiting because the field is exciting hard tech. > “Most people do too many things. Do a few things relentlessly.” The best advice for life success, hands down. > “What’s it looking for?” I asked Altman. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s the unsettling thing about neural networks—you have no idea what they’re doing, and they can’t tell you.” Well I find this response - which someone in the domain would tell you isn't even correct - to be unsettling. Yes, we can see what lots of neural networks are doing, and understand it [but you often need a PhD]. > “Sam’s program for the world is anchored by ideas, not people,” Peter Thiel said. “And that’s what makes it powerful—because it doesn’t immediately get derailed by questions of popularity.” But "Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?" > Paul Graham cheerfully acknowledged that, by instilling message discipline, “we help the bad founders look indistinguishable from the good ones.” This would make me a little unsettled as an external investor but I understand the incentives and dynamics at play. > So we used accounts protected, a number that showed roughly thirty-per-cent growth through the course of YC—and about forty per cent of the accounts were YC companies. It was a perfect fairy-tale story.” Yeah this never made too much sense to me. As an investor I'd be wary of a startup using alumni connections to secure a large portion of their customers, because that eventually runs out - meaning the acquistion strategy is still essentially untested. As a founder though, I really like this strategy and would readily replicate it. > The truth is that rapid growth over a long period is rare, that the repeated innovation required to sustain it is nearly impossible, and that certain kinds of uncontrollable growth turn out to be cancers. I forgot exactly where I learned this, but I like the story of "multiple S curves" over a single "J" curve. Businesses innovate and attach new markets, launch new product lines, secure new customer segments, etc. > Peter Thiel, the forty-eight-year-old libertarian who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, secretly funded the lawsuit that drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy, and has sought to extend his life span by taking human growth hormone. Damn so is Thiel gonna get jacked? This makes me feel less bad about wanting to do a steroid cycle when I'm older. > The fear is that YC will soon provide cradle-to-I.P.O. funding for so many top startups that it will put a lot of V.C.s out of business. Well this is why I find them remarkably pro-founder: they are creating competition at the VC level even if the later stages. > two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation. Who knew, even billionaires get high and watch The Matrix. > recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote. Encouraging youth voting will absolutely be partisan, let's not kid ourselves here. Why not just pay people to vote, or give them deals at retail stores? I'm sure these things will happen. > As I considered this, he said that he’d sacrifice a hundred thousand. I told him that my own tally would be even larger. “It’s a bug,” he declared, unconsoled. It's a feature. > the cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. Here's my controversial theory: a "great life" only exists relative to others. Once all needs are provided for and people don't need each other (and here's the real controversial idea: most women won't need most men, something that I would understandably expect Altman to miss), they won't be incentivized to create and maintain strong family units. We won't love like we used to. But maybe they see this as a "bug" too. Maybe I'm wrong and a few centuries of tech will solve the problems of human nature created by a few million years of evolution. > More generally, he observed, “The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift. Most people want to be accepted, so they won’t take risks that could make them look crazy—which actually makes them wildly miscalculate risk.” A gift and a curse that I wrestle with constantly. > “At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There’s something worth thinking about in there.” This was a great read and it made me think a lot, it was a pleasure.
• vonnik 10y ago
  There are great insights in this piece into how Sam thinks about AI and the future of YC. But getting profiled in The New Yorker bears a risk, and the risk is that other media organizations try to tell the "down" story, because the down story is the only new thing to say after a subject is painted with such grandiose brush strokes. Example: Marc Andreessen gets profiled in The New Yorker and a year later the WSJ publishes a hit piece on Andreessen Horowitz's returns. That's how journalists think: "what can I say that's different?" The whole industry plays a kind of ping pong, with one reporter telling an up story so the next can tell the opposite. It's a strange form of job security in an insecure profession. In a sense, you know you made it when they're publishing hit pieces about you. A New Yorker profile is as good as it gets, and in a sense represents peak exposure, at least for someone in tech. (The Kardashians have other benchmarks...) It's doubly risky because at peak exposure, you get journalists who a) don't know much about tech because they don't specialize in it and therefore b) don't care if they get little things wrong, or subtly damage their source, in the telling of their story. They will move on to other profiles. This comes out in small ways: 1) These sentences about Google and Facebook show that the reporter has misunderstood something fundamental about Google's history as it relates to the rest of the industry: "In the nineties, before the accelerator era, startups were usually launched by mid-career engineers or repeat entrepreneurs, who sought millions in venture capital and then labored in secret on something complicated that took years to launch. As the price of Web hosting plummeted and PCs and cell phones proliferated, college and grad-school dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page and Sergey Brin could suddenly conjure unicorns on their laptops." Google was building its own racks in the 1990s. And for that matter, Facebook didn't need an accelerator. 2) This passage will alienate most readers, because they simply can't relate to a world where a cushion like this somehow equates with a sacrifice: "Leery of tech’s culture of Golcondan wealth, in which a billion dollars is dismissed as “a buck,” he decided to rid himself of all but a comfortable cushion: his four-bedroom house in San Francisco’s Mission district, his cars, his Big Sur property, and a reserve of ten million dollars, whose annual interest would cover his living expenses. The rest would go to improving humanity." 3) And this will piss off the DOD: "He added, “A friend of mine says, ‘The thing that saves us from the Department of Defense is that, though they have a ton of money, they’re not very competent.’ " Obviously there are positive passages in the profile, but a reporter like Tad Friend will report the negative passages with a straight face knowing that they will spark controversy, outrage or derision. He will tell a larger story of mad scientists and investors creating technology beyond their ken that spells doom for humanity. He will let his subjects hang themselves, subtly, because he can afford to do that kind of damage and pretend he had no part in it. Drop some little bombs, move on.
• JabavuAdams 10y ago
  How do we avoid becoming McNamaras and Rumsfeldts in our hubris?
• ScottBurson 10y ago
  “We’re good at screening out assholes,” Graham told me. “In fact, we’re better at screening out assholes than losers. All of them start off as losers—and some evolve.” I find this oddly reassuring.
• qwrusz 10y ago
  I have no connection to YC (except for reading HN daily) and I don't know Sam personally. These longer profiles invite assumptions, praise and critique based on a sentence or two and they are often way off base. My takeaway and you may disagree, without getting too heavy: Sam Altman is one of a very small handful of people in the history of the world who has the resources, the awareness, the intelligence and maybe the motivation to do important, mankind-changing things. Sound exciting? Actually to most people who get what that really means, that is very very scary and a bit sad. This group of people is not limited to SV, but for comparison: Elon and Zuck are also in this handful of people with Sam. Musk has chosen his "inter-planetary species on planet Mars" and he has a plan. Zuck (and his wife LLC) seem to have chosen eradicating all diseases ASAP - his plan is starting now. I don't think Sam has found his "Planet Mars" yet and that can be really hard on someone. He knows the odds of finding it and the odds of success even if he does find it. I also think the YC startup thing that pg and Jessica started is of secondary importance here. Sam has the skills to run YC of course, but I'm not sure that's why pg handed it to him... Sam might have office hours and can spit off advice like "talk to your paying customers more" or "understand the problem being fixed" which new, lost founders always seem to need to be told. This stuff is so easy for someone like Sam and most natural entrepreneurs it's almost laughable and might even get annoying after a while... I think pg handed YC to Sam not for YC's sake. Many people could have taken over YC. I think one reason that pg did it was to give Sam something else to work on so Sam's search for meaning, for his "Planet Mars", didn't consume him to the point that it broke him and the promise he has. He did it to save Sam's life. These are all assumptions and personal opinions. As someone familiar with earning a relatively large amount of money at a young age and then wanting to do something more important to me than just make more money, but not knowing what to do, Sam is among those I look to and I am following his career. I wish him a lot of success and happiness.
• _andromeda_ 10y ago
  I'm not convinced Sam Altman is as brilliant as claimed to be. I've not seen anything particularly outstanding that he's done. Not hating. Facts only. I think this is simply hype and it reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes.
  • sireat 10y ago
    I too am wary of too much gushing praise onto someone still rather young with a limited track record. The difference from Holmes is that Altman does not have to be particularly brilliant at something specifically, he just has to be the soul of the YC, ie life of the party. From all accounts he is very good at that and that is of huge value to YC. Being a big ideas guy is an important and valuable position for an organization such as YC. Holmes couldn't be such a generalist and life of party. She had to execute on a specific niche and failed very very late(I'd say about 10 years late). Holmes epitomizes the "fake it until you make it" taken to the extreme. If Holmes had admitted defeat earlier maybe she could have been such a life of a party person at Draper's firm.
• _andromeda_ 10y ago
  >Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist. This right here amounts to false equivalence. Suffice it to say that it is relatively easier to launch a start-up today, this doesn't change the fact that it is just as hard to keep one alive. The risks associated with launching a startup are all too real and I think they will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Call it conformist, I call it hard and as such, not for everyone.