paul

7 ms·

31.
by paul 10y ago
It's BS speculation. (and false)
32.
by paul 10y ago
Only if the world were zero-sum, which it's not. Remember how only rich people used to have cell phones, and now billions of people have them? The price of most goods is close to the marginal cost of production, which means that giving
33.
by paul 10y ago
"under certain conditions". There is an enormous amount of unimproved land in the world, and most of it is quite inexpensive. I do like the idea of a land tax though, and believe that it's a good way to fund BI (along with ca
34.
by paul 10y ago
I have them fairly often. I think it's an interesting metaphor for life too -- how many parts of ourselves have we simply forgotten about?
35.
by paul 10y ago
I wonder when Google will do a writedown on this deal? $3.2B seems like a lot to pay for a thermostat company.
36.
by paul 10y ago
That assumes a fixed supply of housing, which is only true in deeply dysfunctional places like SF. In most of the US, housing cost is close to replacement cost, so if landlords try to raise rents, people can just move someplace cheaper, esp
37.
by paul 10y ago
Yes, exactly. The body language is often more telling than the words :)
38.
by paul 10y ago
Read the post. Jeremy was never a part of YC, and did not make any meaningful contributions to the company. If this action scares other people like Jeremy away from YC companies, that would be wonderful :)
39.
by paul 11y ago
The good news is that by the time they are finished, the whole thing will be obsolete. Self-driving technology is going to completely change urban transportation.
40.
by paul 11y ago
Yeah, I was super impressed as well. Obama understands AirBnb better than many people in tech do.
41.
by paul 11y ago
Yes. I was one of the first Justin.tv investors. I think my final return was about 97x, so that's pretty good. From my perspective at least, Twitch was essentially a re-branding. Basically, they saw that gaming content was popular on J
42.
by paul 11y ago
Yes! Fixed.
43.
by paul 11y ago
Justin doesn't just work with the media. Justin IS the media. I think it's worth pointing out that Justin.tv led to the two largest YC exits to date, Twitch (Justin.tv pivot), and Cruise (founded by Justin.tv cofounder Kyle Vogt a
44.
by paul 11y ago
Yes
45.
by paul 11y ago
Yes, the SAFE is designed to make seed funding very cheap, easy, and fast (and it has proven very successful at doing so).
46.
by paul 11y ago
Does nuclear fusion count as a "hard problem"? http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-in...
47.
by paul 11y ago
Accelerators are actually a terrible business because you only make money if you get a big hit (which most won't), and even then it can take 10 years or more to realize the gains. I predict most will disappear in the next 5 years.
48.
by paul 11y ago
This is a good example of how bad many accelerators are, but extrapolating based on that experience to thinking that he knows anything about YC is a major error. This is a bit like saying, "I had a bad time drinking bleach, therefore y
49.
by paul 11y ago
Most common is just wasting their time with low-ROI things such as meeting with a large number of low-value mentors. We try to keep startups focused on talking to customers and building product. A crazy one I remember was telling a pre-prod
50.
by paul 11y ago
There are hundreds of accelerators with more appearing all of the time (plus significant management turnover in many of the programs). Evaluating them all would be a full-time job for several people. I'd rather put that effort into fin
51.
by paul 11y ago
A simple way of thinking about this is that acceleration only helps if you are pointed in the right direction! One of the common problems with many accelerator programs is that they are run by people who are not themselves experienced found
52.
by paul 11y ago
I agree. This is part of the reason that we are making more of our advice freely available online (e.g. http://startupclass.samaltman.com/ and http://playbook.samaltman.com/ ). The problem with a bad acceler
53.
by paul 11y ago
If AirBnb was such an obvious win, why didn't anyone want to invest? https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-7d894cbaa084 One of the challenges with this business is that our decisions look foolish at the time, a
54.
by paul 11y ago
It's all easy with hindsight. It was much less obvious at the time: https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-7d894cbaa084 AirBnb was almost dead when they got into YC. Nobody would fund them, and Nate had moved to
55.
by paul 11y ago
YC funds approximately 0% of the new companies started every year, so it's not like there's a shortage of other options :) As for returns, the average value of YC companies that are more than two years old is over $100M. I'm
56.
by paul 11y ago
Actually, I did fund it. I personally invested shortly after the ZP pivot :) (and it still wasn't clear they would be successful) Nevertheless, the fact that yc invested pre-pivot only reinforces my point, as ZP wouldn't even exis
57.
by paul 11y ago
ZenPayroll was far from an obvious winner when we funded it. This job is so much easier with hindsight. If you can actually pick the winners better than we can, there's a giant fortune awaiting you :)
58.
by paul 11y ago
Taking fewer risks and only investing in "sure things" is in neither our interests nor the founders. The "safe" option is to not fund them at all, like a bank or other conservative organization would.
59.
by paul 11y ago
They are exceptionally good at getting things done. A regular person could spend hours or days researching the best way to get something done, Magic already knows. There are real scale effects here.
60.
by paul 11y ago
I actually have a personal assistant, but for many tasks, Magic+ is simply better (and completely responsive 24/7, which I would never demand of an employee).

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