5 ms·
Exactly! People fail to factor how yc companies evolve - how fast, and how far. I made this mistake twice in my life. These days I just stfu. 3 years back, I m
by dxbydt 12y ago
Exactly! People fail to factor how yc companies evolve - how fast, and how far. I made this mistake twice in my life. These days I just stfu.
3 years back, I met with the poundpay team. They knew zero about handling fraud, and they said so. They said they'll figure it out over time. The cofounder said he was "reading a bunch of machine learning papers over the weekend" on combating fraud. I found that amateurish & scary.
2 years back, I met with the interviewstreet founder. The founder did not have any technical chops to speak of, and was actually quite misinformed about scalability challenges, algorithms & programming languages. I couldn't see how this guy could take on topcoder.
Today, 3 years hence, Balanced has processed over a half billion in payments, & Hackerrank has signed up a half million developers & both are well on their way towards a billion dollar market cap. Both are great companies to work for - in terms of actual tech & the potential for ipo riches.
What Cruise is right now is a useless datapoint. Think about what it'll be 2 years from now. Use your imagination. There are tons of low hanging features they could iterate on & completely dominate the space. Enough said.
- stcredzero 12y agoThe underlying message I'm getting is that HN applicants tend to find the "actual" problem they can tackle to make their fortunes while initially trying to solve a different problem.
- GFischer 12y agoWell, that's exactly what all the "lean startup" types say :) , the theory goes: - 1) release an MVP - 2) get actual feedback - 3) pivot - 4) repeat 1, 2 and 3 until you find the actual pain point to solve, or run out of cash - 5) profit :)
- stcredzero 12y agoI was thinking of the "schlepping" thing, which is pg's observation that the actual pain point is often your own.