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I was writing code at ESPN two hours down the road from Cambridge when the summer founders program launched. I had been following pg and his essays for a while

I was writing code at ESPN two hours down the road from Cambridge when the summer founders program launched. I had been following pg and his essays for a while and thought he was the real deal. So I tried to convince a co-worker to apply with me as we were batting around business ideas. He wasn’t up for it and I didn’t end up applying. I don’t have many professional regrets, but not applying is one of them!

neilv 7y ago
FWIW, I don't know how likely it is that any team that applied would've been selected, anyway. I think it was that first summer founders event, when a team of four of us Lisp-ish hackers in Cambridge/Boston applied. We were mostly young (mostly early-mid 20s, though I think one guy was 30+), but already had a little experience, and university affiliations like PG might value, had done some early Web stuff already, and PG had talked about Lisp and hackers and such, and at least I was ready to go all-in on a startup with subsistence funding... so I thought we had a good chance, but I don't recall we even heard back. PG might've already been looking for only college kids. Although we were young, some of us started working/school unusually young, and might've looked older on paper than we were. Or maybe it looked like we already had career starts we might not want to risk. And/or probably our proposal sucked badly, because I don't remember a single thing about what it was, and there weren't so many VC courtship conventions to tell us what to do then. (Incidentally, the young thing was something PG was pushing around that time (e.g., encouraging people to interrupt college to do a startup, when they supposedly have few obligations, and perhaps are very malleable). But I don't recall ever hearing of favoring hiring 20yos in software or Internet industry before. What I'd seen in industry was both skill and experience being valued, and a good amount of meritocracy that didn't care about things like university degrees if you could do good work. It was only later that I'd start to hear things like a certain dotcom CEO saying publicly that they only wanted 20yos, and the industry-wide institutionalization of hiring processes that appeared designed to select for currently or fresh out of undergrad, preferably from Stanford. PG seemed immensely influential on startups, perhaps even moreso then than in new ideas now, and I wonder how much the current recent-grad emphasis is because of ideas he first planted.) I wish that early startup team had gotten funding. With that initial disappointment, we each ended up doing other things. I was totally ready to rapidly build out innovative and working dotcom tech, like not many startups then could; just didn't know how to get funding for living expenses and servers&pipes. Thankfully, many years later, I'm working in a fresh startup team, of very skilled and nice people, all working on something constructive.

neilv 7y ago

FWIW, I don't know how likely it is that any team that applied would've been selected, anyway. I think it was that first summer founders event, when a team of four of us Lisp-ish hackers in Cambridge/Boston applied. We were mostly young (mostly early-mid 20s, though I think one guy was 30+), but already had a little experience, and university affiliations like PG might value, had done some early Web stuff already, and PG had talked about Lisp and hackers and such, and at least I was ready to go all-in on a startup with subsistence funding... so I thought we had a good chance, but I don't recall we even heard back. PG might've already been looking for only college kids. Although we were young, some of us started working/school unusually young, and might've looked older on paper than we were. Or maybe it looked like we already had career starts we might not want to risk. And/or probably our proposal sucked badly, because I don't remember a single thing about what it was, and there weren't so many VC courtship conventions to tell us what to do then. (Incidentally, the young thing was something PG was pushing around that time (e.g., encouraging people to interrupt college to do a startup, when they supposedly have few obligations, and perhaps are very malleable). But I don't recall ever hearing of favoring hiring 20yos in software or Internet industry before. What I'd seen in industry was both skill and experience being valued, and a good amount of meritocracy that didn't care about things like university degrees if you could do good work. It was only later that I'd start to hear things like a certain dotcom CEO saying publicly that they only wanted 20yos, and the industry-wide institutionalization of hiring processes that appeared designed to select for currently or fresh out of undergrad, preferably from Stanford. PG seemed immensely influential on startups, perhaps even moreso then than in new ideas now, and I wonder how much the current recent-grad emphasis is because of ideas he first planted.) I wish that early startup team had gotten funding. With that initial disappointment, we each ended up doing other things. I was totally ready to rapidly build out innovative and working dotcom tech, like not many startups then could; just didn't know how to get funding for living expenses and servers&pipes. Thankfully, many years later, I'm working in a fresh startup team, of very skilled and nice people, all working on something constructive.