sama

30 ms·

361.
by sama 11y ago
In the very early days of Loopt, I sat down with @kogir and Alok and said "ok, who is going to do what?" I was definitely not the best coder for large projects on the team, although I can crush either of them in topcoder competit
362.
by sama 11y ago
I took a stab at this here: http://startupclass.samaltman.com I'm working on a sort of startup playbook. It's long but will hopefully be helpful.
363.
by sama 11y ago
I think there is a great startup waiting to be started to figure out a new way for people to live in cities.
364.
by sama 11y ago
The biggest correlation is that teams that met recently fall apart much more often. The shared history seems to be valuable for keeping teams together through the very though times of a startup.
365.
by sama 11y ago
It's so hard to answer this generally. It really depends on the situation of each particular startup. We have funded many startups from Paris specifically with teams there; I'd reach out to some of them and see how it worked.
366.
by sama 11y ago
What about it do you find scary?
367.
by sama 11y ago
We've funded a number of startups working on this and I expect we'll fund more.
368.
by sama 11y ago
They seem to get trained well to think of new ideas. They also get a very solid engineering education.
369.
by sama 11y ago
The only universal job description of a CEO is to make sure the company wins. We look for people who are going to make their company win--compelling vision, clear communication, determination, intelligence, "good at business", et
370.
by sama 11y ago
Honestly yes, that's a negative. It'd be possible to overcome with a really good answer on how you will get the technology built, but it's harder than ever to be an entirely non-technical team--recruiting engineers is just s
371.
by sama 11y ago
Yes, I think we will have to do something here. I keep hoping the local governments will fix this and keep being disappointed. I was really excited by Campus, and hope we see a lot more startups with similar ideas.
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by sama 11y ago
This sounds obvious but "have a good startup". If you can show us you're making great progress as a solo founder, we're much more willing to believe you can handle it going forward.
373.
by sama 11y ago
We like that. We are looking for impressive people. I think intelligence is somewhat fungible--if you were great at one thing, you can probably learn another thing.
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by sama 11y ago
reddit by a lot.
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by sama 11y ago
The relentless progress of domain-specific machine learning over the past year.
376.
by sama 11y ago
I don't really think you can learn this from books--you need to just jump in and do it. You might find some of these videos helpful: http://startupclass.samaltman.com
377.
by sama 11y ago
Sort of complicated. The short answer is yes, we do have some outside investors.
378.
by sama 11y ago
Yes. Though I'll remind everyone that literally anyone can apply to any YC program. One of our biggest differentiators is that you don't need an intro to talk to us.
379.
by sama 11y ago
Interesting. It feels like people disagree with me all day! I've noticed that the best founders are the most likely to disagree (and have well-reasoned arguments). I really hope I never get to the point in life where people stop disa
380.
by sama 11y ago
View my donation as seed capital. I expect we'll commit $100M+ to some projects over time. We do have plans for collaboration with some institutions for our first group. Open to anyone great! No PhD required.
381.
by sama 11y ago
You have to learn how to do this. If you can't get good at explaining what your product does, you will struggle in all aspects of your business. Make this your number one priority (though also consider that if people have a hard time
382.
by sama 11y ago
We know moving is hard, but startups are hard. So much of the value of our program comes from in-person interactions. As you said, there are lots of other options for people who don't want to move, so I don't feel that fixing th
383.
by sama 11y ago
Philz Philharmonic, made into espresso.
384.
by sama 11y ago
Every batch, we fund some people with just an idea. And lots and lots of people with just a prototype. The bar is higher but it's clearly possible.
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by sama 11y ago
This seems to be getting better not worse...
386.
by sama 11y ago
Selling to government is just very slow, and the NIH problems are often intense. I do think it's getting much better though. We've become very interested in startups producing software for government.
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by sama 11y ago
Well, per the announcement, this is a question for dang not me :)
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by sama 11y ago
a) Definitely not. b) It's possible if something was deeply wrong in an application we wouldn't even watch the video, but the counts never seem to work. Sometimes if an application is clearly a no after watching the video and rea
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by sama 11y ago
I'm coming to visit soon! We fund more and more Indian companies (they come here for 3 months and then go back to India).
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by sama 11y ago
The best things you can do there are meet great potential cofounders, and get better at writing software. Also don't get sucked into living an expensive lifestyle when you get that high-paying job--this has killed many people's on

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