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Startup School 2017 First Lecture
- inputcoffee 10y agoThis is an interesting talk, but it is substantially similar to the previous one that was already out there. Which makes me think: it would be interesting to have a diff tool for videos, but it diffs a representation of the content not specific video frames. Customers might include all the students of Udacity, Coursera, EdX and Startupschool.
- bootload 10y ago" it would be interesting to have a diff tool for videos" videoA -> transcriptionA | V videoB -> transcriptionB | V diff
- rahimnathwani 10y agoThat seems too granular, as an additional 'uh' or 'and' would cause a sentence to be seen as different. It might work well if you can first pair up the similar sentences from A and B, using word-level edit distance, or mapping to a lower-dimensional space using sentence embedding?
- bootload 10y ago"seems too granular," Probably right. I used the term diff as a concept not implementation.
- ChajusSaib 10y agoCould you link the other one, thanks!
- tim333 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI transcript: https://genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-1-how-to-start-a-startup-annotated https://genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-1-how-to-start-a-start...
- garysieling 10y agoCan't help with the diff tool concept, but I built a search engine for talks, which semi-randomizes the results to force a variety in the search results. For business talks, you can see it here: http://findlectures.com/?p=1&type1=Conference&talk_type_l2_Conference=Business http://findlectures.com/?p=1&type1=Conference&talk_type_l2_C... This includes the older startup school talks, plus a few good software business conferences. For the next phase, I want to highlight talks that are most unique to the category (using word lists in the transcript/captions, not video diff)
- CalChris 10y agoA couple of the slides are titled: Getting your first 100 users. I think that's probably a strong attraction/benefit for YC. Its alumni seem almost to be a keiretsu from the outside, offering connections and first sales to their newly hatched brethren.
- Gargoyle 10y agoTrue. But when I was reading the Techcrunch reports on these last Demo Days, every time I read one of the batch had some dozen or two customers I couldn't stop thinking "How many of those are just other YC companies?" In other words, there's a bit of a discounting in effect now too.
- rhizome 10y agoMy impression is that basically all VCs try to generate network effects from incestuous cross-pollination among their fundees.
- mrkurt 10y agoThis is half true, but yc network companies are a _lot_ more discerning about what they'll try these days. There are 5-10x more yc startups than there used to be, and no one has time to use them all. It's actually more valuable for early user feedback than showing traction for investors. yc network companies are usually willing to spend more time poking through stuff than some company you don't know, help with pitches, etc.
- dang 10y agoSomething else that's just out is the list of future speakers: https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-online-first-lecture-and-speaker-list/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-online-first-lec... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14045559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14045559)
- throwathrowaway 10y agoThe startup school's About page says there are office hours every week > Class Office Hours will also be held each week to give live advice and feedback to the class. but that schedule only has office hours planned for weeks 2, 5 and 9. Is one an update of the other? Are there any office hours the first week?
- sandslash 9y agoSorry about that. Initially we were going to have on-stage office hours every week, but we have since changed the format for the course. Those office hours in the most recent blog post are current; we'll update the site now. Apologies for the confusion!
- dang 9y agoI don't know but I'll ping sandslash for you.
- TuggaRoo 10y agoGreat resource - looking forward to future videos. It does feel like there's an assumption that everyone who wants to build a startup is trying to build the same kind of startup. Lifestyle businesses and social entrepreneurship ventures are kind of glossed over, but are legitimate - they require passion and hardwork without the hope or promise of big payoffs. I'm wondering if this series will be appropriate for people who are interested in those types of startups - I guess we will see.
- arikr 10y agoThis lecture series is definitely aimed at the "startup = growth" type of startup, so much more relevant to companies that want to get huge.
- mifeng 10y agoAs a former founder I do think there's truth to Altman's advice to tackle big/hard problems rather than small/easy. Rationale: - you develop unique expertise and skills that are more valuable (ie more acquihire rationale) if things go south - easier to fundraise and recruit - optionality: downshifting to solving a smaller problem is easier than leveling up to solving a bigger one
- TuggaRoo 9y agoBut not all huge problems have to = huge financial gain
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nhorob67 10y agoInteresting how Moskovitz just glosses over a "lifestyle" business. I started a business 2 years ago, am the sole employee, and it'll make $400-500k in revenue in 2017 with 20-40% net profits. I don't think I recreated the wheel here. I'm making a software product that businesses want to buy.
- BukhariH 10y agoIf you don't mind me asking. What's your business?
- nhorob67 10y agoFarm accounting software. Boring to most, exciting to me! Just maybe that's a key
- Baeocystin 10y agoNow if you could expand that to John Deere hacking software...
- deskamess 10y agoI enjoy developing new stuff, especially if it involves new learning, but I find I am also happy working with the mundane with incremental changes. Toggling between the two is kinda perfect for me. I just have not found a mundane niche that I could monetize - any tips on how to look for what others would consider boring?
- nhorob67 10y agoTry to simply keep your eye open for problems people are having. Ideally, one that is in a B2B space. Wish I had more insight for you.
- jps359 10y agoHow were you able to identify that there is/was a need for farm accounting software?
- xiaoma 10y agoI see there's now an update form in the MOOC now. It has four fields—metric, value, growth and notes. Are there any pages on the site offering guidance on how to get the most out of the MOOC? In what cases should the primary metric be "other"?
- compumike 10y ago(Advisor for #group87 here!) You should talk to your advisor (possibly one-on-one) about selecting the right metrics. Many groups are not focused on the right things at the moment, and that's OK but something we should talk about and fix! If you have revenue>0, you probably want it to be revenue. Similarly, if you have revenue==0 && users>0, you probably want it to be active users. (Not cumulative registered users, but daily or weekly actives, for example.) You should probably only be using "other" if those two don't apply. Think of it this way: at the end of the 10 weeks, what metric will you really care about showing 10 weeks of growth in? For example, having 10X-ed your revenue is much more impressive than 10X daily active users, which itself is much more impressive than 10X people manually seeing a demo of your prototype!
- xiaoma 10y agoUnfortunately I wasn't selected, which is why I've asked here. I know I had some poor focuses in the past (e.g. trying to do a collaboration with an offline business in my industry to bootstrap an online one) and I'm trying to get some advice here on HN. I have a free product launched (and then pulled because my API provider dramatically increased prices). I'm about 3/4 of the way to building a paid content-based product to ideally fund development of the free one. So basically my most promising avenues I see are to 1) focus 100% on the paid product 2) eliminate the API provider as a dependency and go all out on the primary free product (risking running out of cash in a couple of months) 3) try to raise 12k in funding so the runway extends to the end of the year. My current choice is to focus 100% on the paid product. It's not clear how to put that into a growth goal though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14048063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14048063
- searchhn 10y agoTeams actively pursuing a startup and who have been chosen for founders track get split into groups, with a group advisor and a Mattermost room. It will be of great help for the folks who applied and did not get selected to have access to an official 'Mattermost' room to build a community of like minded individuals keen on entrepreneurship to share information and motivate ourselves.
- xiaoma 10y agoI was wondering what the acceptance rates were for this MOOC. I understand it's difficult to deal with large numbers of applicants and that it's just not feasible to give every single applicant personalized feedback. From the other side, I've been working on my goal for much of the past year and a half if I include collaboration attempts with offline businesses in my market that ended with job offers but no collab. I understand the long time span looks bad. I understand that it's minus that I'm a solo founder. It's just that I've gone a long time without a real salary or even insurance, I deeply believe in the value of what I'm working on and am beginning to have an idea of how much longer and harder the path is without mentorship from people who have done it before. I see a tremendous value in YC and have already benefited from its free content. That said, estimating the EV of applying, has to include an assessment of likelihood and the costs of time and distraction as well as the tremendous upside. Knowing the acceptance rate would be helpful in calibrating how to approach future applications, both for me and others who weren't selected.
- searchhn 10y agoTotally agree and I personally am interested in this too. I understand it is difficult to mentor everybody but an official 'Mattermost' room or better a discourse community will be very helpful too.
- jaoued 10y agoWe've applied along with 50k applicants (http://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-online-registration-and-deals/ http://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-online-registrati...) and we are in this batch along with 3000 other startups coming from all corners of the world (startup founder track). In our case, we've built MyAppConverter about three years ago, starting from native iOS to native Android code conversion and now building an online mobile application porting platform. We've applied and we feel so privileged to have been selected because it costs us nothing except our time we have to put in (watching lectures, online group sessions, tutor/advisor sessions and assignments). We do not have to move to SV (as yet) and yet benefit from shared valuable experiences amongst YC fellows as well as from other entrepreneurs.
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- good_vibes 10y agoThanks for the rejection. I realized I didn't need this after all.
- klunger 10y agoDoes anyone know if they will be doing this again? We found out about it too late to do try and apply. I looked through the FAQ on the website, but did not see anything about whether this was a one-off or if they would do it again.
- giarc 9y agoTry searching HN history. They did some Q/A type sessions about it. I believe they wanted to see how this went and were hoping to make this a regular thing.