skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, the secret is a high bohemian ratio?? Man, I've gotta start eating organic. :P

But I totally agree, you've got to be a certain personality type to start a startup, and that kind of eccentricity usually finds a way of conglomerating together. That culture certainly does propagate itself; I know where I live, it's almost a taboo to start something yourself. I've never been to SF yet, but I get the feeling that it espouses a completely different kind of philosophy?
You can't say that without linking to a source or two :P
It probably depends a lot on which college you go to. MIT? No question - that'll do good things for your entrepreneurial spirit.

However, I agree with the idea in two situations:

1. It does not really FOSTER entrepreneurial spirit - you must cultivate a seed of that elsewhere, and

2. Only a very limited set of colleges do NOT completely kill it.
yeah, let's face it. You ALWAYS have to assume there is someone else out there doing the same thing you are doing. That shouldn't sway you though. The point is to do it better than them. Reading pg's book has great (and funny) commentary on dealing with the competition...
If Ooma wins this battle, does that mean I never have to watch/hear that annoying Vonage commercial ever again? Quick Ooma, come to Canada, let's fight this battle together!!
Most of the time it is made up..

The theory is that the market will grow and/or you will
exhibit exponential growth. Take for example Google which is valued by the outstanding shares value (market cap) which is driven mostly by public perception of market growth and Google's operation with respect to real and perceived growth..

So apply this to your startup.. get VCs to bid on it.. If you have revenues then you can go to a bank and
see what type of credit line your business qualifies for.
But since most startups don't have revenue then you really don't know.

Essentially your initial idea is worth $0... this is why angel investors are nice to have. They make the first real
valuation.
Disqus (YC) to launch new commenting features
My $.02:

1. Facebook is next to meaningless to me... it's cute, a cool way to share photos and waste time, but the connections have no real value, they either existed before or will remain confined to the medium. I'd imagine this is not true for those in college, but accurate for an older user such as myself.

2. There is already a perfectly acceptable and available medium for tv - TV! The market of people who have access to the internet but not TV is rather small - again, an idea that might play better with a college crowd who exist in a world exactly as I described.

3. The key to the holy grail of news sites in my mind is the dunbar number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number), as Davidw points out in his comment. I think if you can find a way to create a site that can harness the strength of this principle, you'll win here.
Good points. Actually I did the same thing with "Da Vinci Code". After like 3 years of avoiding reading it, I finally broke down to read just because it stuck around so long.

"How To Get Rich" by Felix Dennis is another good read related to what Godin is saying. He is in the magazine business, and recommends anyone looking to start something to start it in a growing industry not already entrenched with leaders. "Ride the wave" is his suggestion
Let me suggest a new strategy -- copy someone else's idea, make it seem like you're totally legit, and THEN partner with them :). Maybe you could start a new search engine and just partner with Google:

"Yo, Larry & Serg, we SO need to work together!"
heh, well, you can, but you'd be missing a huge part of the puzzle.
Feel like writing a book?
MySpace to Make $800 million+ in FY2008
Preezo Battles PowerPoint - Google, Zenter Too
Spock Serving 400 Pageviews Per Second at Launch
This is essentially the Blue Ocean argument:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy.
can't wait to hear how thing go guys! I didn't get to meet all of you, but I think this is easily the most impressive group so far. blow them away.
Who Is Cloning Who? Business2.0, try again
When I finished high school I spent a few years working then I started my own business. I ran the business for 10 years before selling it two years ago. Recently I joined the worker bees/cubicle side of things ~ from my perspective working as a cubicle slave sucks! I can't wait till my new business can support my life! At any rate the other slaves (almost all college educated) really do live their lives for that two week vacation. But I know the unedamkaed bees (like me) live for that vacation too. So was it college or just a case of the pareto principle in action ~ 80% of the people are worker bees and 20% are entrepreneurs?
It depends where you go. My school wasn't like that either, but from what I've heard about a lot of places, it seems pretty accurate.
I'm thinking they already do this.
Startups: We're assailed by doubts, mortified by our own shortcomings...
snip:<p>Ways a startup can feel deeply flawed without really being flawed at all:<p>True believers go nuts at small provocations
Startups are freak-catchers
Good code takes time
Everybody has to rebuild
Fearless leaders are often terrified
Competition starts at $100M in revenue
The 38th Signal: 37signals parody (off-topic, but funny)
Yeah, but I found that even with the addiction, I wasn't interested in tasteless delivery devices. :) Diet Mountain Dew is fine, and Lipton's Diet Green Tea (which has less caffeine) is fine, but given that it doesn't really help me much, pills are too much trouble.

Also, it only took me about 3 days to feel normal, and a coupla weeks to not really want it very much, after 5 years of averaging between 3 and 4 2L Diet Mountain Dew a day. It helped that my wife was very vocal about how much less stressed I seemed; after I was off of it, she suggested I just stay off even when I can afford it, so I'm doing that for now.
Ugh, I'm near the Pittsburgh area and I certainly agree - it's not the best place for entrepreneurs. It's like the whole area is a "danger zone stay out" for investment money.

Why is this? There are plenty of good Universities in the area - what is Pennsylvania doing to hamper startup companies? Are people just drawn away to other areas like DC?
Didn't Paul Graham already cover this in his essay "How to Be Silicon Valley" (http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html)?
This is almost exactly what happened in a Brazilian company called Semco. Ricardo Semler discusses it in his book "Maverick!" about how they developed a completely new corporate culture. Great book and I highly recommend it.
Looks like it. Still, something I had to write from my own perspective working at the center of the Montreal startup scene (or trying to!) and comparing that to the Valley.
'YC company' is the new google
Anyone Interested in Turning this Technology into a Web Application?
I think it would be a fun project / business but I'd like some help. Any takers?
Well I'm not cloning this grammar. Humph.
Apple's Numbers like Trapeze, but 20 years later
It looks like good ideas will never die.
build from scratch. There are too many headaches with open source software...people making buggy modules that you have to wait for them to fix, finding hacks or ways around you getting things done add up to slow, clumsy websites :(
80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design
The most guaranteed payout would be getting a job at a big company... So if we were betting on success of a company versus the stake you hold, would that be the way to go?
I saw this guy at Siggraph.. very cool. His other paper (Photo Clip Art http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/photoclipart/) was also pretty awesome.
Developer Platform on Google Apps for Domains?
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Thanks!

Yeah, it's pretty nasty what he accomplished :( Now things are gonna get just a lot more complex.
Widgets, Spotlight Coming to iPhone?
Breaking down the Apple announcements
I've worked with Joomla's social networking features in the past. Avoid.
How about something like "empty planet"? I'm thinking of taking photographs of famous places that are very busy (like Times Square) and digitally removing all the people.

I think seeing pictures of places that are very familiar, but devoid of people would be quite profound.

Maybe it's just a feature and not business, though.
Scott Berkun's a great public speaker. Has anyone read his new book "Myths of Innovation"? I'd be interested to see what you guys think of it before buying it myself.
Collaboration is Hard, Part III
Fox News and The Onion: The Most Trusted Names in News, together at last
Netscape bigger than Digg?  (including forced netscape.com startpage users)
I wish I could be there, but say Hi to Dexter and Monty for me!
It's great seeing erowid as a cited source. Thanks for the info.
Watching Songkick Demo At Y Combinator
Green tea with fresh mint.. trust me folks it works and doesn't ruin your already exhausted nervous system.
Working Together ... When Apart
That looks cool too. Maybe do both then.
It's not clear whether you meant to say "live under the fear" or "understand the fear". If the former, no, because they're just another competitor, if so. If the latter, then sure, because some YC companies have kicked ass.

Statistically, though, it's still somewhat unlikely that any given YC company will succeed, and only if they were going to succeed were I not in the marketplace would I need to worry about them particularly.
That link above no longer works, for anyone wanting to check this out its a good read:

Google cache:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:V_HlOsNVc8UJ:www.doxpar...
keep 'em coming, it looks like they are in pg's basement, nice.
Patent issues... make sure you license it from them!
I think this would actually be really interesting for Google StreetView.
Really? They're patented? I thought it was like academic research?
If you have no competition, there might not be a market for what you want to create, so competition can actually help you out.

It's also possible to address similar sets of needs in different ways. digg and reddit are both successful. Live and let live. Namaste.
This sort of thing should be an "industry standard" among programmers. We'd all be happier if we had the freedom to dice up our work and play time (and locations) anyway we wanted.

It looks like some people at Best Buy have been reading (or should be reading) Paul Graham's "What Business can learn from Open-Source" essay. It definitely makes the list of my favorite readings.
Why social networks use bidirectional links even though unidirectional links are probably better
Billionaire M&A Deal-maker Training
Learn how to become a billionaire through M&A.
isn't that what I said?
Meetup Launches Facebook Application
Pittsburgh sucks mightily. I don't know anybody who would stay there given the choice to move somewhere real, like the Bay Area or Boston or New York or LA or San Diego or Chicago or Philadelphia or pretty much any kind of real city, especially one near a coast. The only people I know of who choose to stay there have been there so long that they've forgotten the taste of real food (i.e. food that is not drowned in grease and has not been sitting in a warehouse for three months) and the feeling of living in a real city with real culture.

Now, people who invest generally have money. People who have money generally have a choice of where to live, and are aware of what it's like to live in a real city. Thus, they do not touch Pittsburgh with a ten foot pole.
I want to go see the robots

If not, food is good too - My wife and I could bring some extra food if you want so more ppl could come
If you don't, try to convince yourself that you should. I've found paranoia to be a very effective way of beating procrastination.
Wal-Mart Hawks Wares On Facebook
Does anyone have any links (video/audio/notes/articles) for Ycombinator, PG, or any of the startups?
I've got the start-up itch and i'm looking to meet some potential co-founders for this or any project. email me at ltibbets [at] gmail [dot] com
If you haven't seen it already Microsoft (yes Microsoft)has a similiar scene completion technology and the demo is pretty cool: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
I'd like to come.
This is rather interesting: $10 million on revenue of $550.
Anything that leads to facebook becoming self-aware is a bad idea.
That's the north cambridge office. The photo makes it look more drab that it is. It has this funky 2nd floor kitchette thing -- looks like Fred took the photo from teh stairs going up to it.
Are You a Ninja or a Pirate Personality Test
Yesterday I explored the two main personality types: Pirates and Ninjas. Now you can take the questionnaire that will tell you what kind of person you really are.
College may not be the one actually killing your entrepreneurial spirit. Most colleges just put a contract out on you. Societal hivemind thinking (which begins when you're a child) and the face-time-driven workplace are the actual hitmen that take you out.
Their demo at the top of the page looks nice, but I'm a little skeptic about the versatility of their algorithm to determine an image as "semantically valid" or not. I can see that being the RHP (really hard problem).
I tried something similar a while back.

Results were quite lackluster.

Perhaps these companies make the service much more enticing by providing necessary training on the other side of the world?

From my experience:

Was paying an Indian guy $10/hour to find potential advertisers for one of my sites. (not rocket surgery by any means) It took the guy 1 hour (or so he says) to do what I could do in 15 minutes. That's a real rate of $40/hour, quite expensive for an entry-level American of course.
Sure far33d, take all my karma points. ;)
Viagra, is there any other????
"Right now, 6 of the 10 richest people in America are proud college dropouts. The other 4 inherited their wealth. Hell, Dakota Fanning has made more money than most people will make in a lifetime and she's still in middle school."

Source?
Veoh Sues Universal Music
It's the more important number that everyone seems to be quickly glancing over.
Its going to be pretty interesting to see if anyone can turn a profit on a $400 phone.
Consumers Not Down With Video Downloading
AdSymetrix Tracks Ads Online & Off
Yeah, you could accept responsibility for all the bad things that happen to you, or you could just enjoy being yourself and realize that if someone else has a problem with that, its their failure as a human being :P
I wanna see the robots! So I'm coming. I can also pitch in for food if that would help.
Edward Tufte on How to Moderate Forums
"Our view is that every contribution to Ask E.T. should advance the analytical quality of the thread."

This is exactly my approach on Venture Hacks.

Nivi - http://venturehacks.com
US universities patent almost everything. Look at how Stanford operates... they get HUGE amount of revenue from research. Heck, even Google had to give a piece to Stanford.
Well that's sucky. Well I hope my tax dollars didn't fund their research then. Then I'd be mad.
That's right, although I believe as an entrepreneur you should worry sometimes. Well at least for me it helps sometimes.
I haven't heard of a single university in US/Canada that does not have a technology transfer office. Read more:

http://www.google.com/search?q=university%20technology%20tra...
This thing is going to be a Power Plant.
I wish I could go.
10 Designer's Checkpoints To Be Aware Of
Prediction: YC's IPO is in the works.
While we all waiting for the next YC startup to go public or get acquired, we forget about YC itslef as a company. I think there is an IPO somewhere down the line.
i definitely don't encourage the use of prescription drugs, but if you find yourself getting distracted often at work Aderral is amazing for staying focused and working long hours.

Talk to your doctor. Side effects include launch parties and series B funding meetings.
Not a pharmacist.
http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/photoshop_cs3s_automatic_peo...
and songkick has michelle
Seems kind of lame to change your argument to be about profit because you were wrong about revenue...

What if MySpace is just reinvesting a lot right now. Or they're an incompetent non-technology company that doesn't know how to run things efficiently. There's no reason they couldn't be making a lot more profit. That's probably just not the main goal this early, although maybe it should be given the rise of Facebook.
That doesn't make any sense to me - why do you think that? It seems like taking in a lot of cash from wall street would put pressure on them to become more like a traditional VC.
Your Face To The World
Good article on home-page design. I'm sure we can all agree on the importance of the home page, but the article goes into depth of the why and the how of it.

Some summarized points (lots more in the article):

"A home page's impact on a company's bottom line is far greater than simple measures of e-commerce revenues.
The home page is your company's face to the world. " - Jakob Nielsen

There are only two important functions for a home page:
The home page delivers the content to [users] that they are seeking (such as the top story on CNN ) or
The home page provides strong scent to those pages that contain the content the user seeks.

What Do Customers Want?

When customers visit your home page, their attention span is limited. They are busy and want to find answers quickly.
They don't want unnecessary distractions and will immediately leave and go to another site if they cannot find what they
want on your home page. They do not want to wade through marketing messages.

When customers arrive at your home page, they expect to find what they want quickly.
After all, the promise of the Web is to provide an efficient, alternative channel that
complements other channels like bricks-and-mortar shops and corporate customer support.

When customers visit a home page (whether for the first time or as repeat visitors) they might want to
satisfy an information need quickly
look for contact information like a phone number or email address
autonomously complete a task, without needing customer support
solve a problem
* buy a product
When you take pills, you get however many milligrams of the substance are in the pills. You're probably thinking of flax oil and other sources of ALA, which your body must convert itself into EPA and DHA. Yes, one of the reasons to get it from algae directly is you avoid the environmental pollutants that accumulate in the marine ecosystem as you go up the food chain (PCBs, dioxins, mercury, etc.).
There's a balancing act here -- trying to maximize your output today can cost you in your output tomorrow. Everyone knows you can overdo things physically; you can also burn out mentally.

If I stay up until 6 am chasing this one bug, either tomorrow I will be too tired to concentrate or I'll sleep in and mess up the rest of my schedule... been there a lot.
An IPO wouldn't make any sense at all for YC. An IPO, just like venture capital, allows a company to convert equity into liquid cash; but YC has no shortage of cash. Instead, YC is limited by the supply of good candidates and by how much time pg et al. have -- neither of which will be affected at all by an IPO.
> Or they're an incompetent non-technology company that doesn't know how to run things efficiently.

That's pretty clear from the way things at MySpace break all the time. It's also the reason I trust them more than Facebook.
Preezo is going to have a mighty hard time defeating our ol' Zenter boys now that they're part of Google Docs and backed by Google Wallet.
IPOs accomplish two things: they raise money for the company, and give the founders a way to sell some of their shares. We don't want to raise money or sell any of our YC stock, so there would be no point.

But it's misleading even to answer as if it were an option. You need massive revenues to go public, on the order of $100m/year, which we are nowhere near. It takes 4 or 5 years on average for startups to generate returns. The only money we make now is from random early acquisitions. We can't even guess how much we'd make ongoing.
"... I think there is an IPO somewhere down the line. ..."

Evidence? So why bother going to the market for more capital, less control & greater risk?

- more employees? (you can't scale pg, jl with more employees)

- more money? (yc spreads the risk by using micro-capital & attracting top candidates)

- more advertising? (thats how the internet and successful candidates demonstrating product).

Does not compute. What makes more sense is to bust open the VC market using less capital, less people creating the best VC coy. that grabs the cream of an untapped market. Sort of an iteration of the startup pattern applied to a different, but related industry.
I have put a lot of thought into this. I was going to apply to the next YC class, and have had much encouragement to do so from my friends at google, however, I just got accepted to law school, and plan on continuing my project from there, maximizing the free legal advice I get from peers / professors.

Basically, from what I have read / researched / been told by people who-know-what-they-are-talking-about, competition in this field is actually a good sign:

1. It means that someone else has decided your product/service is worthwhile enough to actually spend the time and energy to develop it. 'No competition' is very often a good indicator of 'Bad idea' or 'No market.'

2. The market -- the internet market, anyway -- is vast.
Facebook has 15M users, myspace 35M, linkedin 12.5, bebo 12.5... (plus or minus, who can even keep track anymore?). There is plenty of room for companies with competing services, especially if their products are marked by substantially different features and/or payment methods (or lack thereof).

3. Motivation: if I found out tomorrow that a YC company was doing exactly what I was doing, I would probably sleep less and try to get my product to market faster. Currently, there are a few competitors, but their services are either targed outside my demo or are, well, crappy. It is precisely the lack of the service that I am trying to provide that is my main motivation for working to bring it to market: I want to use it! Competition would validate that other people are thinking like me, and would also go a long way -- by using their product -- of understanding exactly what it is I am getting myself into.
Upvoted for combining multiple relevant sources including Douglas Adams into one post.
The first thing on my list after I make some money is moving.
This article depressed me.

First, 'bad' college will make you despair of life, much less the entreprenurial spirit.

Second, education in this country is so sorely lacking that to crusade AGAINST getting educated is profoundly depressing.

Third, you get what you give. If you go to college and take a bunch of crap courses and cruise your way through, you are not going to learn anything. You can go to Hicksville State and come out with a deep and profound understanding of mathematics, if you put your back into it, and you can go to Harvard and come out a total loser -- which should really shock no one.

Fourth, and most importantly, I found at college I was surrounded with impassioned people who desperately wanted to make a change in the world and to chase their dreams. The depression sunk in when I entered the working world and got a cube job and watched those hopes and dreams shrivel. So I quit, and I decided to start programming this service. Hopefully, something will come of it, and I'll be able to get a private beta going in the next few weeks before law school starts (which I am attending in the hopes it will help me understand my business better...)

Basically, this makes me sad about whatever college this poor guy went to, obviously it was not very good.
"great scientists" Spock search returned 1 result
It's not even Einstein!
How do you like our new way to fund software by teaming up? (microPledge public launch)