14 ms·

Y Combinator When No One Cared

388 points by tomhoward 10y ago

colmvp 10y ago
On the topic of small beginnings, does anyone know if PG still reads HN? I recall when I first joined the site which, wow, was a long time ago, it seemed like he was a lot more active on it.
- jl 10y ago
  He does not. He stopped at the same time he announced his retirement from YC. (He'd at this point transitioned the running of HN to dang.)
  - walterbell 10y ago
    He's on twitter, https://twitter.com/paulg https://twitter.com/paulg
  - sillysaurus3 10y ago
    I miss pg. He was really cool. I understand why he left, I think, but... I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of good. I don't know. Sometimes it just feels like you and pg stopped believing in us. Which I guess is understandable. One year it went from HN feeling like a part of the community to feeling like we're an adversary. After all, we -- the internet at large -- are small-minded reactionaries, right? Why bother? But it's a perception worth changing. The old guard is still here. HN grew up, so there are more voices now -- there's more to sift through. But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here. Setting all that aside, though: have a nice day! And thanks for everything you've built.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - aswanson 10y ago
      Yeah, they built a great thing...I think they sparked a revolution and empowered founders making vcs play fair. But, they're parents now and life is short, as the essay says....
    - ploggingdev 10y ago
      > But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here. Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react to any post or comment : talk trash. Examples of the latter : tptacek, dguido and other secuity professionals. If you read some of the security related threads where tptacek takes part, you will notice that he is literally talking to a wall, people refuse to listen to the guy or try to understand the reasoning behind his comments, though he is respected in the security community and is always right on security related topics. Especially on security related threads there is dangerous advice floating around. Eg- use Tor or some stupid suggestion on how to trick the CBP at the border. I also noticed the rise of anti-semiticism and just generally hateful comments when the topics of religion, nationality or Trump are brought up. This issue is only getting worse and god help the moderators who have to read these comments on a daily basis. Though this might be controversial, the general quality of discussion has gone down over the years. I think this is inevitable : as the community grows, quality of discussion goes down. HN is doing incredibly well on this count, the discussions are still the best on any public forum, but IMO the quality is going down. As the community grows, veterans generally tend to become inactive. (Before people point out that my account is only 159 days old, I've been part of HN for much longer under different handles.)
      - hkmurakami 10y ago
        Some forums I frequented 10 years ago have avoided the veteran retirement by having a private forum for veterans. That has its own issues but has been really nice for me to keep in touch with the old familiar faces.
  - pm90 10y ago
    I remember pg replied to my comment once, and it felt pretty strange, like something I could brag about to future engineers or my (future) kids.
- ab4570 10y ago
  Yeah, I recall him sending me an angry email about something I said here :D Regardless of his exit, it's nice that hacker news has somehow stayed more or less the same for so many years - just like yc
- sjtgraham 10y ago
  PG had anonymous alt accounts even before he split. I'd say he still dips in from time to time. You could probably find his current alts by doing stylometric analysis on the corpus of HN comments.
  - omarchowdhury 10y ago
    Let's do it.
- __2__ 10y ago
  Maybe ask pvg? He is in this thread.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dmix 10y ago
Reminds me of that old Dropbox "ShowHN" post. Looking back at old emails takes some heart, I'm afraid of the idea as I'd probably cringe too hard. My Reddit account just had it's "cakeday" which means I'm in the "9th year club" and the idea I have comments from 9 years ago still publicly available kind of scares me. Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Old comments on HN I'm not so scared of as I tend to put more effort to only post competent/civil comments here. Plus you can't delete them even if you wanted to.
- shubhamjain 10y ago
  > Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Please don't. I used to write a diary with meaningless essays when I was in the second grade. When I rediscovered it as an adult, I found them so embarrassing that I threw it away. It's hard to say how much I wish I hadn't done that. Those idiotic essays could have been my good memories; little reminders of how I thought in the past. Same happened with the old applications I wrote when I was starting out programming. I still have an embarrassing history intact on various internet forums. I wanted to obliterated it some time back, but I realised there is nothing to feel humiliated about your past idiocy, it's in fact a great reminder to keep of how much you have grown.
  - 3131s 10y ago
    I made and distributed about 500 copies of an underground heavy metal zine when I was 18. It was pretty cringe-worthy, but it is what is, and fortunately given the obscurity of the topic I don't think anyone will ever connect it to my IRL identity.
  - snerbles 10y ago
    As a personal reminder, I agree. No one else cares, until they do. And when they do, any little thing in your past can and will be used as a social cudgel against you.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
rexreed 10y ago
What's also telling is that the program started in Boston and moved to Silicon Valley pretty quickly. In my own experience, it seems that the Boston startup scene is dying. Unless you're in life sciences. The ecosystem there seems to have given up on supporting early stage non-life sciences companies.
- freehunter 10y ago
  >the startup scene I feel like this is one of those SV bubble things, that a place has to have a "scene" in order to have startups (and only SV has a "scene"). There are thousands of successful businesses everywhere, even ones that would be considered "startups". The only difference between SV and any other city is people are willing to throw money at ideas with no chance of ever turning a profit which isn't really a sign of a healthy ecosystem. I wonder how many people who say "you need to be in Silicon Valley to run a successful startup" use MailChimp (Atlanta) or RunKeeper (Boston), or Venmo or Squarespace (NYC) or Duo Security (Ann Arbor, MI) or Dwolla (Des Moines, Iowa). Whenever I hear "startup scene", I think of Juicero and wonder if that kind of company could ever actually ship a product if they were based anywhere but Silicon Valley. And I wonder how much that actually says about the "startup scene".
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I'd like to see a listing of all the billion dollar IPO's or acquisitions in past decade with location on it. Both where it started and where it spent most of its time. That mighy help settle the question.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      I think it might suffer from confirmation bias. Say Dropbox started in Milwaukee, WI, but was convinced they needed to move to San Fransisco to be successful. Maybe they would have been successful in Milwaukee, too, but now we'll never know. So now they're contributing to the startup successes that come from SV, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SF was what made them successful. Maybe the reason the parent thinks Boston's startup scene is dying is because people who create startups are leaving to move to SF because they think they have to. According to WalletHub, SF rates pretty darn far down the list of best places to start a business: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-business/2281/ https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-business/22... Maybe the number of success stories coming from SF has more to do with the sheer number of businesses that are started there? If 100 businesses are started in SF and only 5 in Tulsa, even if only 10 of the startups survive in SF while all 5 survive in Tulsa, people would still say "SF has twice the number of successful startups" even though 100% succeeded in Tulsa vs just 10% in SF.
edw519 10y ago
I cared. Still do. Been here over 10 years. I'd wager for every person helped by YC, another 1000 were helped by HN. There are lots of us programmers in the diaspora whose closest encounter to Silicon Valley is virtual, in places just like this. Yea, yea, I know. There are lots of founders, investors, and celebrities in SV, but please don't forget about the rest of us, who just keep building and posting...for years.
- rokhayakebe 10y ago
  Been here for almost 10. I think HN is terribly underutilized. It could be used in more practical ways to help the community at large. Currently the most direct way is to do a ASK HN or the monthly Ask Who's Hiring, however I would love for YC to push the same tools they built for their program (to help founders and companies) to HN and its userbase.
  - sillysaurus3 10y ago
    They tried. I hope they try again. It was unfortunate how Pinboard took the opportunity to dance around making fun of the whole thing.
    - idlewords 10y ago
      They ended up giving a bunch of money to charity, so I think it worked out great.
  - elmar 10y ago
    I think they are trying to do it with StartupSchool by replicating some of the features of the program on a larger community.
  - Maken 10y ago
    I think being underfeatured is part of the reason why HN works.
    - hliyan 10y ago
staunch 10y ago
And yet it felt completely obvious to many of us that were around since the beginning. YC, reddit, HN, and Dropbox are among the companies I definitely would have invested $1000 into, had the opportunity been available. I predict the next generation of YC will be a scalable crowdfunding company. It will look more like a startup-focused Kickstarter than seed-stage Sequoia.
- guiambros 10y ago
  Didn't you just describe FundersClub's [1] business model? Basically a crowdsourced investment platform for startups. Yeah, it was limited to "accredited investors" in compliance with SEC and tax laws in the US, but even that is changing, at least on paper [2]. [1] https://fundersclub.com https://fundersclub.com [2] https://www.cooleygo.com/can-you-raise-money-from-unaccredited-investors/ https://www.cooleygo.com/can-you-raise-money-from-unaccredit...
  - staunch 10y ago
    Yeah, there are dozens of startups working on crowdfunding. AngelList should have been able to make something work by now, but it will probably be someone else.
- cobookman 10y ago
  Why would you want 1000 investors over a single entity. There is a reason many companies aim to stay private.
  - staunch 10y ago
    You can group 1000+ investors into a single entity on the cap table, as one reasonable solution. It should be possible to make it beneficial for the users and the company. The company gets money and committed users, and the users get $100-$1000 equity. Almost no one in Silicon Valley believed in Oculus or Tesla, but users did.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Equity crowdfunding is one of those ideas that sounds super ideal and meritocratic on paper but doesn't really work in practice. IMO this model will rarely work because of all the non-capital benefits that good investors provide. It's an overly simplistic view of what (good) investors bring to the table. Random people crowdfunding (assuming non-accredited) don't bring the same level of diligence or value.
jtraffic 10y ago
"For example, we thought it would be ok to work on your idea each summer and go back to school in the fall." I'd love to know more about this. Does anyone have insight into why YC changed on this point? Maybe it's just the obvious "people lose focus." But I'd like a confirmation.
- DenisM 10y ago
  [...] Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble. Bob's going to grad school, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're taking on some consulting projects, but we're going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to "we're giving up on the startup, but we're not willing to admit that to ourselves," because that's what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can't be preceded by "but." [...] http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
  - angersock 10y ago
    > We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. See, it's points like that that irk me. As though somehow leaving SV is abandoning your business! Amazing how much people will pay lip-service to remote work and to the importance of other startup communities and then balk at people pursuing their ideas in "flyover country".
    - usegolang 10y ago
      I suspect that the phrasing conveys a lot of the intent here. "We are moving to Minnesota to work on our startup because ..." Or "We are relocating our startup to Minnesota" don't sound bad. If you are moving back for other reasons and the startup continuing is a secondary thing then it sounds bad. Moving in itself doesn't sound bad.
    - trjordan 10y ago
bmccormack 10y ago
Back in 2005, Fog Creek produced a documentary called "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks", about their internship program. There are lots of great interviews in there, including Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from the early days of Y Combinator (as well as interviews with Aaron Schwartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman). https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946 https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946
- Alex3917 10y ago
  This is amazing. Even as someone who has been vaguely around for a while (e.g. attended the first couple Startup School events), it's easy to forget that this is how it was. It really puts a lot of things in context.
  - theparanoid 10y ago
    This was around the nadir of tech in general. The dotcom crash was only a few years earlier.
- runevault 10y ago
  I have the DVD from when they sold it back when, every time I see the thing it feels weird realizing how LONG ago it was.
- peternicky 10y ago
  Thanks for posting this!
- wdr1 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing this! I remember reading Joel talking about it in his blog, but never knew it was on YouTube!
  - bmccormack 10y ago
    The entire 6-DVD Making Better Software series, which was produced after Aardvark'd, is now free on YouTube as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXZ75Ds5vOs&list=PLXOSex6PRPFN48McdqRkGMLFd9-pov0Fe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXZ75Ds5vOs&list=PLXOSex6PRP... I remember when Fog Creek first announced that series and it cost a jillion dollars. A Fog Creek sales rep at the Fog Creek World Tour in 2010 in Atlanta gave me an "extra" copy of the DVD set and I felt like I had stolen something.
jondubois 10y ago
It's still pretty amazing that Y Combinator worked out as well as it did. Like a lot of very successful companies, it seems like the world just fell into perfect alignment with the vision. It's interesting that acqui-hiring (as alluded to in the email) actually became a trend; even though it was later recognized to be bad idea (E.g. Yahoo's acqui-hiring tactics have failed miserably). It seems like there was a false idea that tech talent was extremely precious and limited. It wasn't, but that didn't matter; acqui-hiring still became a thing and companies (and some foolish young founders) still profited from it.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Acqui-hiring was a trend long before YC. Companies have been buying startups because the founding team has expertise in a new technology that they want to get into since the MS-DOS days. I also wouldn't say it's a bad idea, or that tech talent isn't extremely precious & limited. Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. Companies will still pay lots of money for, say, deep learning or drone or self-driving car experts.
  - pilsetnieks 10y ago
    > Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. And not necessarily even by hiring anyone - a lot of the stuff that a decade ago you needed a reasonably competent programmer for, have become commoditized in the form of services or even opensource solutions. For example, you needed at least a programmer and a designer to build a website for your company, or had to buy those services from another company. Whereas nowadays you can set up a wordpress site, buy a nice looking template, set up a medium blog, or a shopify store for a few bucks a month. Of course, if you want custom stuff, you have to pay someone to customize it but it no longer requires as much of the knowledge you needed to build a site from scratch.
- tedmiston 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vonnik 10y ago
It's useful to think about Jessica's comment under the original message, that YC is "mass production of startups." What it really means, I think, is that YC is comfortable with more failure than other investors. They are spreading their bets wide by making many small investments, and as they have said many times, only a small percentage of those bets need to be right. That's quite different from how most VCs invest at any level. Most VCs are trying very hard to be right while making very few bets that are fairly large relative to their fund. And as the Kaufman report shows, that doesn't work. Most of those VCs are failing to show ROI to their LPs. YC's approach -- making many small bets and tripling down on what works -- is similar to some biological processes. Consider how mammals manufacture antibodies, for example. When an antigen is detected, we start to make tons of different types of antibodies, not knowing which ones will successfully attack the pathogen. Most of those antibodies turn out to be useless, but a few succeed, and their success is reported so that the body makes more. That is, massive, parallel failure is the precondition of success here. YC is like that. But instead of manufacturing antibodies, they're manufacturing startups. Those startups are attacking lots of different problems rather than just one. And it's hard to know in advance which ones will succeed.
- tedsanders 10y ago
  I don't see the subtext that connects mass production and comfort with failure. In fact, I see mass production as a way to reduce failure rates. The idea behind mass production is to take a process that's done in a low-volume, idiosyncratic way and replace it with a process that can be reliably repeated at scale. With Y Combinator, that means replacing the rocky solo founder journey with a community full of of advisors and partners who can advise on topics like incorporation, financial planning, customer testing, investor relations, hiring, etc. There's no reason for a new founder to re-invent the wheel when the Y Combinator collective has already manufactured 1,000 wheels and gotten it down to a science. Founders should focus on their customers and their product - everything else should be 'mass produced' to the extent possible. (An example of this sort of mass production is pg's advice to incorporate as a Delaware C corp. Advice like this can save your fledgling startup from a week of legal research. Having 'mass-produced' shortcuts to these sorts of managerial microdecisions can make or break a startup.)
j_s 10y ago
OP is now bookmarked next to this one from 2015 under HN > history: "Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News" | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535210
theprop 10y ago
"Laboring away in obscurity, as frightening as it feels at the time, is the way a lot of good things happen. Maybe the way most good things happen." ....so there's hope for me!
Sohum 10y ago
Curious question. If YC started today, with the exact same manifesto but in the current environment as opposed to the one in 2005, could they still have been as successful?
- zeroer 10y ago
  I'll let you know in 12 years.
TenJack 10y ago
What was the dating site I wonder?
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Sounds like YC was just another startup in the beginning. Doing a pitch for something that would change a bit later as often with creating new markets or segments. Started with small number of customers (founders). After some experimenting, you seemed to have scaled up. Not much different than how I see startup process described here. Difference is yours creates other startups and will likely last a while. I've always thought of it as a combo of a fraternity style, boot camp, and mass production ideas all rolled into one thing. Also, you select for founders much like the fraternities at Yale, Harvard, etc select for and create business or political elites. Similar methods but opposite effect in innovation.
Nition 10y ago
Love the page width on that Summer Founders Program[1] link. I also appreciate the fact that the URL still works! Well done making sure Cool Urls Don't Change. [1] http://old.ycombinator.com/sfp.html http://old.ycombinator.com/sfp.html
- elmar 10y ago
  "We know India and China are full of smart people who'd like to come and contribute to the growth of the US economy, but our government won't let us bring you here to do it."
cyberferret 10y ago
Nice. But I wonder if the focus is still on "young startups" these days, as it seemed to be back then. I don't want to start an ageism war in this thread, but it would be nice if the vetting process concentrates more on ideas and business viability, and now includes experience as well as youth and energy.
strangeloops85 10y ago
After lurking for many years, I finally decided to create an account to comment on this. We were one of the companies in that first group -- alas, for various reasons, we ended up leaving after a couple of weeks (sigh). But I do remember the interview process, the first meal or two, and meeting the rest of the founders. Looking back, it's pretty cool to have (very briefly and inconsequentially) been part of that formative time in YC's history. A bit of background: We were a group of Harvard CS-ish undergrads, had been readers of PG's essays, and also noticed a fellow classmate's startup taking off (The Facebook!). The Summer Founders Program, as it was called, was actually pretty well advertised in our community. And, from our vantage point, it seemed to be both a great opportunity and prestigious (which of course tickled our over-achieving prestige-seeking 20-year-old selves). In fact, I turned down an internship after I'd accepted the offer, to do YC (and, amusingly, after we left YC a couple of weeks in, somehow got the internship again). I remember PG asking a lot of very good questions, and poking some pretty big holes in our pitch. I'm guessing they picked us because they figured we'd pivot into something more reasonable than the idea we started on. This being the pre-smartphone era, our idea of doing something cell-phone-specific (and algorithmically focused no less) probably seemed a bit dubious. While no one (or relatively few) may have cared in the broader investment world at the time, we -- the young hacker / startup wannabes -- definitely noticed. PG, Jessica and the rest of the team did a great job attracting our attention and interest. And that, I'd venture to say, was a key element of YC's future success that was there from the very beginning.
- santiagobasulto 10y ago
  Did you build your startup after all? These stories are really interesting, you should write more and share it.
  - strangeloops85 10y ago
    Glad to hear it's (at least somewhat) interesting! We did not build that particular startup for personal/ founder conflict reasons that were related to why we left the SFP. But I ended up having a great internship experience with a small Boston-area company that summer, and after graduating the next year, worked at a big tech co. for a little while. Then, not following what pg's advice would have been I'm sure, I decided to go get a PhD in physics/ engineering of all things. I now run a small cleantech startup based on that work, and do look back enviously at how 'simple' a software startup can be (I know, I know.. we all face The Struggle). Jessica's article really did take me back to those quieter days in 2005!
santiagobasulto 10y ago
> I admit that I was never very good at PR. Quite the opposite. That email is really well written. Analyzing it carefully, it has pretty much everything important for a pitch email.

388 points by tomhoward 10y ago

On the topic of small beginnings, does anyone know if PG still reads HN? I recall when I first joined the site which, wow, was a long time ago, it seemed like he was a lot more active on it.

jl 10y ago
He does not. He stopped at the same time he announced his retirement from YC. (He'd at this point transitioned the running of HN to dang.)
- walterbell 10y ago
  He's on twitter, https://twitter.com/paulg https://twitter.com/paulg
- sillysaurus3 10y ago
  I miss pg. He was really cool. I understand why he left, I think, but... I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of good. I don't know. Sometimes it just feels like you and pg stopped believing in us. Which I guess is understandable. One year it went from HN feeling like a part of the community to feeling like we're an adversary. After all, we -- the internet at large -- are small-minded reactionaries, right? Why bother? But it's a perception worth changing. The old guard is still here. HN grew up, so there are more voices now -- there's more to sift through. But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here. Setting all that aside, though: have a nice day! And thanks for everything you've built.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - aswanson 10y ago
    Yeah, they built a great thing...I think they sparked a revolution and empowered founders making vcs play fair. But, they're parents now and life is short, as the essay says....
  - ploggingdev 10y ago
    > But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here. Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react to any post or comment : talk trash. Examples of the latter : tptacek, dguido and other secuity professionals. If you read some of the security related threads where tptacek takes part, you will notice that he is literally talking to a wall, people refuse to listen to the guy or try to understand the reasoning behind his comments, though he is respected in the security community and is always right on security related topics. Especially on security related threads there is dangerous advice floating around. Eg- use Tor or some stupid suggestion on how to trick the CBP at the border. I also noticed the rise of anti-semiticism and just generally hateful comments when the topics of religion, nationality or Trump are brought up. This issue is only getting worse and god help the moderators who have to read these comments on a daily basis. Though this might be controversial, the general quality of discussion has gone down over the years. I think this is inevitable : as the community grows, quality of discussion goes down. HN is doing incredibly well on this count, the discussions are still the best on any public forum, but IMO the quality is going down. As the community grows, veterans generally tend to become inactive. (Before people point out that my account is only 159 days old, I've been part of HN for much longer under different handles.)
    - hkmurakami 10y ago
      Some forums I frequented 10 years ago have avoided the veteran retirement by having a private forum for veterans. That has its own issues but has been really nice for me to keep in touch with the old familiar faces.
- pm90 10y ago
  I remember pg replied to my comment once, and it felt pretty strange, like something I could brag about to future engineers or my (future) kids.
ab4570 10y ago
Yeah, I recall him sending me an angry email about something I said here :D Regardless of his exit, it's nice that hacker news has somehow stayed more or less the same for so many years - just like yc
sjtgraham 10y ago
PG had anonymous alt accounts even before he split. I'd say he still dips in from time to time. You could probably find his current alts by doing stylometric analysis on the corpus of HN comments.
- omarchowdhury 10y ago
  Let's do it.
__2__ 10y ago
Maybe ask pvg? He is in this thread.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dmix 10y ago

Reminds me of that old Dropbox "ShowHN" post. Looking back at old emails takes some heart, I'm afraid of the idea as I'd probably cringe too hard. My Reddit account just had it's "cakeday" which means I'm in the "9th year club" and the idea I have comments from 9 years ago still publicly available kind of scares me. Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Old comments on HN I'm not so scared of as I tend to put more effort to only post competent/civil comments here. Plus you can't delete them even if you wanted to.

shubhamjain 10y ago
> Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Please don't. I used to write a diary with meaningless essays when I was in the second grade. When I rediscovered it as an adult, I found them so embarrassing that I threw it away. It's hard to say how much I wish I hadn't done that. Those idiotic essays could have been my good memories; little reminders of how I thought in the past. Same happened with the old applications I wrote when I was starting out programming. I still have an embarrassing history intact on various internet forums. I wanted to obliterated it some time back, but I realised there is nothing to feel humiliated about your past idiocy, it's in fact a great reminder to keep of how much you have grown.
- 3131s 10y ago
  I made and distributed about 500 copies of an underground heavy metal zine when I was 18. It was pretty cringe-worthy, but it is what is, and fortunately given the obscurity of the topic I don't think anyone will ever connect it to my IRL identity.
- snerbles 10y ago
  As a personal reminder, I agree. No one else cares, until they do. And when they do, any little thing in your past can and will be used as a social cudgel against you.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

rexreed 10y ago

What's also telling is that the program started in Boston and moved to Silicon Valley pretty quickly. In my own experience, it seems that the Boston startup scene is dying. Unless you're in life sciences. The ecosystem there seems to have given up on supporting early stage non-life sciences companies.

freehunter 10y ago
>the startup scene I feel like this is one of those SV bubble things, that a place has to have a "scene" in order to have startups (and only SV has a "scene"). There are thousands of successful businesses everywhere, even ones that would be considered "startups". The only difference between SV and any other city is people are willing to throw money at ideas with no chance of ever turning a profit which isn't really a sign of a healthy ecosystem. I wonder how many people who say "you need to be in Silicon Valley to run a successful startup" use MailChimp (Atlanta) or RunKeeper (Boston), or Venmo or Squarespace (NYC) or Duo Security (Ann Arbor, MI) or Dwolla (Des Moines, Iowa). Whenever I hear "startup scene", I think of Juicero and wonder if that kind of company could ever actually ship a product if they were based anywhere but Silicon Valley. And I wonder how much that actually says about the "startup scene".
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I'd like to see a listing of all the billion dollar IPO's or acquisitions in past decade with location on it. Both where it started and where it spent most of its time. That mighy help settle the question.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    I think it might suffer from confirmation bias. Say Dropbox started in Milwaukee, WI, but was convinced they needed to move to San Fransisco to be successful. Maybe they would have been successful in Milwaukee, too, but now we'll never know. So now they're contributing to the startup successes that come from SV, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SF was what made them successful. Maybe the reason the parent thinks Boston's startup scene is dying is because people who create startups are leaving to move to SF because they think they have to. According to WalletHub, SF rates pretty darn far down the list of best places to start a business: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-business/2281/ https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-business/22... Maybe the number of success stories coming from SF has more to do with the sheer number of businesses that are started there? If 100 businesses are started in SF and only 5 in Tulsa, even if only 10 of the startups survive in SF while all 5 survive in Tulsa, people would still say "SF has twice the number of successful startups" even though 100% succeeded in Tulsa vs just 10% in SF.

edw519 10y ago

I cared. Still do. Been here over 10 years. I'd wager for every person helped by YC, another 1000 were helped by HN. There are lots of us programmers in the diaspora whose closest encounter to Silicon Valley is virtual, in places just like this. Yea, yea, I know. There are lots of founders, investors, and celebrities in SV, but please don't forget about the rest of us, who just keep building and posting...for years.

rokhayakebe 10y ago
Been here for almost 10. I think HN is terribly underutilized. It could be used in more practical ways to help the community at large. Currently the most direct way is to do a ASK HN or the monthly Ask Who's Hiring, however I would love for YC to push the same tools they built for their program (to help founders and companies) to HN and its userbase.
- sillysaurus3 10y ago
  They tried. I hope they try again. It was unfortunate how Pinboard took the opportunity to dance around making fun of the whole thing.
  - idlewords 10y ago
    They ended up giving a bunch of money to charity, so I think it worked out great.
- elmar 10y ago
  I think they are trying to do it with StartupSchool by replicating some of the features of the program on a larger community.
- Maken 10y ago
  I think being underfeatured is part of the reason why HN works.
  - hliyan 10y ago

staunch 10y ago

And yet it felt completely obvious to many of us that were around since the beginning. YC, reddit, HN, and Dropbox are among the companies I definitely would have invested $1000 into, had the opportunity been available. I predict the next generation of YC will be a scalable crowdfunding company. It will look more like a startup-focused Kickstarter than seed-stage Sequoia.

guiambros 10y ago
Didn't you just describe FundersClub's [1] business model? Basically a crowdsourced investment platform for startups. Yeah, it was limited to "accredited investors" in compliance with SEC and tax laws in the US, but even that is changing, at least on paper [2]. [1] https://fundersclub.com https://fundersclub.com [2] https://www.cooleygo.com/can-you-raise-money-from-unaccredited-investors/ https://www.cooleygo.com/can-you-raise-money-from-unaccredit...
- staunch 10y ago
  Yeah, there are dozens of startups working on crowdfunding. AngelList should have been able to make something work by now, but it will probably be someone else.
cobookman 10y ago
Why would you want 1000 investors over a single entity. There is a reason many companies aim to stay private.
- staunch 10y ago
  You can group 1000+ investors into a single entity on the cap table, as one reasonable solution. It should be possible to make it beneficial for the users and the company. The company gets money and committed users, and the users get $100-$1000 equity. Almost no one in Silicon Valley believed in Oculus or Tesla, but users did.
tedmiston 10y ago
Equity crowdfunding is one of those ideas that sounds super ideal and meritocratic on paper but doesn't really work in practice. IMO this model will rarely work because of all the non-capital benefits that good investors provide. It's an overly simplistic view of what (good) investors bring to the table. Random people crowdfunding (assuming non-accredited) don't bring the same level of diligence or value.

jtraffic 10y ago

"For example, we thought it would be ok to work on your idea each summer and go back to school in the fall." I'd love to know more about this. Does anyone have insight into why YC changed on this point? Maybe it's just the obvious "people lose focus." But I'd like a confirmation.

DenisM 10y ago
[...] Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble. Bob's going to grad school, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're taking on some consulting projects, but we're going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to "we're giving up on the startup, but we're not willing to admit that to ourselves," because that's what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can't be preceded by "but." [...] http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
- angersock 10y ago
  > We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. See, it's points like that that irk me. As though somehow leaving SV is abandoning your business! Amazing how much people will pay lip-service to remote work and to the importance of other startup communities and then balk at people pursuing their ideas in "flyover country".
  - usegolang 10y ago
    I suspect that the phrasing conveys a lot of the intent here. "We are moving to Minnesota to work on our startup because ..." Or "We are relocating our startup to Minnesota" don't sound bad. If you are moving back for other reasons and the startup continuing is a secondary thing then it sounds bad. Moving in itself doesn't sound bad.
  - trjordan 10y ago

bmccormack 10y ago

Back in 2005, Fog Creek produced a documentary called "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks", about their internship program. There are lots of great interviews in there, including Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from the early days of Y Combinator (as well as interviews with Aaron Schwartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman). https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946 https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946

Alex3917 10y ago
This is amazing. Even as someone who has been vaguely around for a while (e.g. attended the first couple Startup School events), it's easy to forget that this is how it was. It really puts a lot of things in context.
- theparanoid 10y ago
  This was around the nadir of tech in general. The dotcom crash was only a few years earlier.
runevault 10y ago
I have the DVD from when they sold it back when, every time I see the thing it feels weird realizing how LONG ago it was.
peternicky 10y ago
Thanks for posting this!
wdr1 10y ago
Thanks for sharing this! I remember reading Joel talking about it in his blog, but never knew it was on YouTube!
- bmccormack 10y ago
  The entire 6-DVD Making Better Software series, which was produced after Aardvark'd, is now free on YouTube as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXZ75Ds5vOs&list=PLXOSex6PRPFN48McdqRkGMLFd9-pov0Fe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXZ75Ds5vOs&list=PLXOSex6PRP... I remember when Fog Creek first announced that series and it cost a jillion dollars. A Fog Creek sales rep at the Fog Creek World Tour in 2010 in Atlanta gave me an "extra" copy of the DVD set and I felt like I had stolen something.

jondubois 10y ago

It's still pretty amazing that Y Combinator worked out as well as it did. Like a lot of very successful companies, it seems like the world just fell into perfect alignment with the vision. It's interesting that acqui-hiring (as alluded to in the email) actually became a trend; even though it was later recognized to be bad idea (E.g. Yahoo's acqui-hiring tactics have failed miserably). It seems like there was a false idea that tech talent was extremely precious and limited. It wasn't, but that didn't matter; acqui-hiring still became a thing and companies (and some foolish young founders) still profited from it.

nostrademons 10y ago
Acqui-hiring was a trend long before YC. Companies have been buying startups because the founding team has expertise in a new technology that they want to get into since the MS-DOS days. I also wouldn't say it's a bad idea, or that tech talent isn't extremely precious & limited. Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. Companies will still pay lots of money for, say, deep learning or drone or self-driving car experts.
- pilsetnieks 10y ago
  > Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. And not necessarily even by hiring anyone - a lot of the stuff that a decade ago you needed a reasonably competent programmer for, have become commoditized in the form of services or even opensource solutions. For example, you needed at least a programmer and a designer to build a website for your company, or had to buy those services from another company. Whereas nowadays you can set up a wordpress site, buy a nice looking template, set up a medium blog, or a shopify store for a few bucks a month. Of course, if you want custom stuff, you have to pay someone to customize it but it no longer requires as much of the knowledge you needed to build a site from scratch.
tedmiston 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

vonnik 10y ago

It's useful to think about Jessica's comment under the original message, that YC is "mass production of startups." What it really means, I think, is that YC is comfortable with more failure than other investors. They are spreading their bets wide by making many small investments, and as they have said many times, only a small percentage of those bets need to be right. That's quite different from how most VCs invest at any level. Most VCs are trying very hard to be right while making very few bets that are fairly large relative to their fund. And as the Kaufman report shows, that doesn't work. Most of those VCs are failing to show ROI to their LPs. YC's approach -- making many small bets and tripling down on what works -- is similar to some biological processes. Consider how mammals manufacture antibodies, for example. When an antigen is detected, we start to make tons of different types of antibodies, not knowing which ones will successfully attack the pathogen. Most of those antibodies turn out to be useless, but a few succeed, and their success is reported so that the body makes more. That is, massive, parallel failure is the precondition of success here. YC is like that. But instead of manufacturing antibodies, they're manufacturing startups. Those startups are attacking lots of different problems rather than just one. And it's hard to know in advance which ones will succeed.

tedsanders 10y ago
I don't see the subtext that connects mass production and comfort with failure. In fact, I see mass production as a way to reduce failure rates. The idea behind mass production is to take a process that's done in a low-volume, idiosyncratic way and replace it with a process that can be reliably repeated at scale. With Y Combinator, that means replacing the rocky solo founder journey with a community full of of advisors and partners who can advise on topics like incorporation, financial planning, customer testing, investor relations, hiring, etc. There's no reason for a new founder to re-invent the wheel when the Y Combinator collective has already manufactured 1,000 wheels and gotten it down to a science. Founders should focus on their customers and their product - everything else should be 'mass produced' to the extent possible. (An example of this sort of mass production is pg's advice to incorporate as a Delaware C corp. Advice like this can save your fledgling startup from a week of legal research. Having 'mass-produced' shortcuts to these sorts of managerial microdecisions can make or break a startup.)

j_s 10y ago

OP is now bookmarked next to this one from 2015 under HN > history: "Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News" | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535210

theprop 10y ago

"Laboring away in obscurity, as frightening as it feels at the time, is the way a lot of good things happen. Maybe the way most good things happen." ....so there's hope for me!

Sohum 10y ago

Curious question. If YC started today, with the exact same manifesto but in the current environment as opposed to the one in 2005, could they still have been as successful?

zeroer 10y ago
I'll let you know in 12 years.

TenJack 10y ago

What was the dating site I wonder?

nickpsecurity 10y ago

Sounds like YC was just another startup in the beginning. Doing a pitch for something that would change a bit later as often with creating new markets or segments. Started with small number of customers (founders). After some experimenting, you seemed to have scaled up. Not much different than how I see startup process described here. Difference is yours creates other startups and will likely last a while. I've always thought of it as a combo of a fraternity style, boot camp, and mass production ideas all rolled into one thing. Also, you select for founders much like the fraternities at Yale, Harvard, etc select for and create business or political elites. Similar methods but opposite effect in innovation.

Nition 10y ago

Love the page width on that Summer Founders Program[1] link. I also appreciate the fact that the URL still works! Well done making sure Cool Urls Don't Change. [1] http://old.ycombinator.com/sfp.html http://old.ycombinator.com/sfp.html

elmar 10y ago
"We know India and China are full of smart people who'd like to come and contribute to the growth of the US economy, but our government won't let us bring you here to do it."

cyberferret 10y ago

Nice. But I wonder if the focus is still on "young startups" these days, as it seemed to be back then. I don't want to start an ageism war in this thread, but it would be nice if the vetting process concentrates more on ideas and business viability, and now includes experience as well as youth and energy.

strangeloops85 10y ago

After lurking for many years, I finally decided to create an account to comment on this. We were one of the companies in that first group -- alas, for various reasons, we ended up leaving after a couple of weeks (sigh). But I do remember the interview process, the first meal or two, and meeting the rest of the founders. Looking back, it's pretty cool to have (very briefly and inconsequentially) been part of that formative time in YC's history. A bit of background: We were a group of Harvard CS-ish undergrads, had been readers of PG's essays, and also noticed a fellow classmate's startup taking off (The Facebook!). The Summer Founders Program, as it was called, was actually pretty well advertised in our community. And, from our vantage point, it seemed to be both a great opportunity and prestigious (which of course tickled our over-achieving prestige-seeking 20-year-old selves). In fact, I turned down an internship after I'd accepted the offer, to do YC (and, amusingly, after we left YC a couple of weeks in, somehow got the internship again). I remember PG asking a lot of very good questions, and poking some pretty big holes in our pitch. I'm guessing they picked us because they figured we'd pivot into something more reasonable than the idea we started on. This being the pre-smartphone era, our idea of doing something cell-phone-specific (and algorithmically focused no less) probably seemed a bit dubious. While no one (or relatively few) may have cared in the broader investment world at the time, we -- the young hacker / startup wannabes -- definitely noticed. PG, Jessica and the rest of the team did a great job attracting our attention and interest. And that, I'd venture to say, was a key element of YC's future success that was there from the very beginning.

santiagobasulto 10y ago
Did you build your startup after all? These stories are really interesting, you should write more and share it.
- strangeloops85 10y ago
  Glad to hear it's (at least somewhat) interesting! We did not build that particular startup for personal/ founder conflict reasons that were related to why we left the SFP. But I ended up having a great internship experience with a small Boston-area company that summer, and after graduating the next year, worked at a big tech co. for a little while. Then, not following what pg's advice would have been I'm sure, I decided to go get a PhD in physics/ engineering of all things. I now run a small cleantech startup based on that work, and do look back enviously at how 'simple' a software startup can be (I know, I know.. we all face The Struggle). Jessica's article really did take me back to those quieter days in 2005!

santiagobasulto 10y ago

> I admit that I was never very good at PR. Quite the opposite. That email is really well written. Analyzing it carefully, it has pretty much everything important for a pitch email.