skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We often think about that. We could hire assistants, so we didn't have to do everything ourselves. Or we could make YC work more peer-to-peer. Or we could build a robot that would walk around telling everyone "don't make users register," "delete half the text on your frontpage," "face the audience when you're presenting," etc, and I could just hang out in the next room with a book and a cup of tea.
Case Study: Why CompUSA Is Losing The Battle For Computer And Electronics Sales
At first I was thinking, Wikipedia is great as is. Besides, why compete with a free product? Once I actually visited the site and read the philosophy, however, I have to concede that it's at least worth a shot. This idea is clearly the result of someone saying, "What is wrong with Wikipedia, and how can we fix it?" The main problems, as I see it, are:

1. Defacing of high-profile articles.
- This is potentially solved by requiring the use of real names, and also by the oversight.

2. Perceived inaccuracy.
- While Wikipedia does at times have inaccuracies, the reality is that the media and others who do not often use it have an exaggerated view of the extent of the inaccuracy. By adding expert oversight, this should quell some of the cries regarding lack of reliability.

The only potential problems I see is that Wikipedia already has a lot of inertia, which includes a much better name. Citizendium is just too hard to say to become a buzzword. It will also see much slower growth, and I posit that it will never be able to reach the size of Wikipedia, because its growth function is inherently less steep.

That said, one could contend that the majority of quality articles on Wikipedia are submitted by a very small minority of the users. If even some of these authors move to Citizendium due to frustration with the constant maintenance of their articles or the incorrect perception of inaccuracy, then Citizendium truly has a chance. But someone still needs to change the name.
Anyone interested in trying out my book understanding prototype? We could focus on Founders at Work say.
If you are interested in trying it out, please send an email to amichail@gmail.com.

This is sort of like a closed beta but the prototype is pretty preliminary. Nonetheless, it is already quite functional.
I've often wondered whether you could make a lot of progress by bringing together hackers with, for example, doctors or lawyers. These are people who use computers every day but probably don't spend much time thinking about how to hack a solution to their computing problems.

As a scientist I've had a lot of success looking for the simple yet groundbreaking problems that occur at the boundaries between very different disciplines. It can be difficult not to make 'stupid' mistakes in a discipline with which you are unfamiliar...but it's a lot easier than trying to work faster and smarter on the exact same problem as everyone else!

Surely interdisciplinary collaboration could be just as valuable in startups.
Great essay, I sure wish my reason was because of #10 (wealthy) and not #9 (family to support), so true, so true.

An alternative to starting a consulting business is to build your stuff on the side. Possibly draining? Yes, but if you're determined, I believe this is better than getting distracted by a consulting business. Time will tell if this is wise though.
Scaling YC: What's the limiting factor?
Minor edits: under #4, the second paragraph, "Any in any case..." should be "And...". Also, I personally think that the previous sentence could use a little work, because "you probably are" could mean "you probably are not smart enough".

Feel free to delete this comment after changes are made.
Paul's recent mentions about scaling Y Combinator have prompted me to give some thought to the matter myself, but the first thing I realized is that I don't really know what's preventing it from scaling. What's the current limiting factor?

Amount of money available to invest?

How much attention you can pay to the people you fund?

The number of applications that don't suck?

And given an unlimited supply of the current limiting factor, how much bigger could you get before running up against one of the other two?
Great interview. 10/10

I love how Woz described his relationship with Steve Jobs. What a great story of how Apple got started.
My favorite part is this: "To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job." As an entrepreneur, I'm happy to almost be in the same category as a criminal. ;)

I also love the 0% dissatisfaction idea, whether or not the result is a success. The experience of launching your own project just can't be replicated. Any of the points you mentioned, even if the result is complete failure, is well worth the expense of time & risk.
Agreed. And yet the founders need to have worked together already, at least a bit. The big problem is that non-programmers can't help out with the programming in the early stages of a startups when that's about all that's happening.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=6716
I don't think he's asking how long until people stop caring about viral marketing, but how long until people stop caring in general, i.e. about humanity. I think the problem lies not in viral marketing itself, but in Nissan's implementation of viral marketing. I think that the methods of these different types of viral marketing are analogous to the goals of white hat and black hat hackers. A practice that may be generally good and clever can be thoroughly spoiled by those who take advantage of it for the wrong reasons.
Right now it's the number of good applications. That number appears to be increasing fairly rapidly, though. Then it will be our attention.
I have to agree with the writer of this article, except I think it would be better to remove the "Viral" tag altogether. I think that marketing in general has gone too far. Certainly appealing to the generosity of people and then throwing it back in our faces is beginning to go too far, and I think the author of the article does a good job of thoroughly describing where Nissan went wrong, so I'll just shut up now.
Valid Identity:

'... Were these attacks made in the comments or were they first-class posts? ...'

Good point. Would a solution be only having comments if you supply an openId? [0] The idea being you have to ID yourself to comment. Would validation of identity be one way to help solve this?

'... Bloggers aren't responsible for things said in their comments. ...'

I wonder how the legals would view that? How much due care do you have to take? The thing with comments is, if you allow anyone to comment without limits, it's your reputation that will be smeared. If you have control or ownership of a system you are responsible. So it pays to control, restrict who and what comments are made. This is one of the key points allegedly made ... why do reputable sites allow such posts to persist?

Post Restriction:

I've seen a variety of techniques from timed or posts delayed until authorised to the extreme of no comments. They work to some degree but do not scale well. My personal idea is to have a blog that has no comments that points to a system requiring login (overhead, time and effort & identity) to comment.

'... Bloggers aren't responsible for things said in their comments. ...'

I wonder how the legals would view that? Was enough due care taken? The thing with comments is if you allow anyone to comment without limits it's your reputation that will be smeared. So it pays to control, restrict who and what comments are made.

I've seen a variety of techniques from timed or posts delayed until authorised to the extreme of no comments.

Reference

[0] No because OpenID is not a trust system. Maybe I should have read more about it before I posted ~ http://openid.net/about.bml
apologies, I tried looking but couldn't find anything in the newest and figured this story was new enough. Is there a better way of checking for duplicates where url is unlikely to hit?
I'm still doubtful about the "Revenue is not important" thing. Maybe right now you can get acquired with no revenues, but that probably won't last. People said revenue didn't matter during the Web 1.0 IPO bubble, and that turned out wrong. To be convinced otherwise I'd have to see the accounting for these web deals showing a return on investment. And if the profits are predicated on web advertising call me skeptical about the sustainability.

To my knowledge the "revenue-less liquidity event" route to riches is new circa 1998, e.g. The Globe and other such IPOs. This route is probably a symptom of the global liquidity bubble rather than a lasting development. We are still in a global liquidity explosion that measurably started around 1995. It has fueled all kinds of bubbles and weird business practices and now it's fueling acquisitions, just like it's fueling Private Equity deals and stock buybacks. We are in financially anomalous times.
With all the coverage of Justin.tv, it's surprising that this is the first time I've seen anyone raise the issue of Justin (et al)'s personality. Of course, valleywag (being valleywag) brought it up in a gossipy obnoxious way, but still, shouldn't that have been one of the first and most obvious questions to ask?
Sounds like what Yahoo and other portals tried to do and didn't really succeed. Facebook is like the same play coming from a different angle, except this time they own all your friends :-).
Your best bet is to make something that is useful enough that you won't have to rely on tricks to get people to use it.
Just another live node on the network?

meaningful conversation in twitter is like explaining debugging code to some interested people, in a noisy pub. lots of talking going on, but not much listening. If you are capturing all this on a blog with the snippets or highlights pulled back via RSS, then maybe yes.

'... the way I currently use computer technology improves my life? ... technology sets me free? technology enslaves me? ...' [0]

As you have an insight it gets posted to twitter, then you pull it on your blog and you can read stuff in context. But twitter is suffering from 'continuous partial attention' [1]. everyone will listen one second and switch to Winer or Scoble the next.

Reference

[0] ITConversations, Linda Stone, "Continuous Partial Attention"

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail739.html

[1] ITConversations, Linda Stone, "Continuous Partial Attention", Ibid.
To sound more positive, it shows that there is no age limit. Craig Newmark for inspiration!
"produce something specific for yourself."

This excludes any sort of capital good like an accounting package, or his own example of groupware.

You'd never get most of the good product ideas targeted at businesses without industry experience, which sort of contradicts his advice not to work before starting a company.
Out of curiosity, what do you think of the work done at the MIT Media Lab? Would you fund those sorts of things?

http://www.media.mit.edu/research
Seattle, at the UW. I already have a great cofounder, but I'd like to meet up for coffee.
"Always willing to meet for coffee, though."

Me too. What are you doing after work today? I'm on the Ave right now. See my profile for contact info.
That sounds like it puts you in approximately the same boat as traditional VCs.
Part of the reason the number of applications isn't that much higher than it was the first time is that we've changed our approach to founders. Initially we pitched YC as a substitute for a summer job for students. Then we realized that we wanted people more committed than that-- that it was actually bad to fund people still in school, in fact, because it's so easy for them to give up.

We will fund people still in school. (The founders of Weebly were.) But they have to be serious about starting a company.
I don't understand -- how are accounting packages or groupware examples of goods that don't solve a problem for oneself?

If I need to manage my money and taxes, I can build software for that.

If I need to develop some kind of collaboration tool to help me work better with teams at school, or on an open-source project (both not inherently business domains), I can build software for that.

Business tools are merely extensions of these. Unless I missed it, PG never mentions good product ideas targeted at businesses, so I am unclear as to where there is a contradicition. His mantra is to go for a wide user base, which typically requires mainstream business ideas, i.e., business-to-consumer, not business-to-business.
Paul, I really liked your point about the change in the business world. I also feel that the current model is shifting into a more favorable situation for individuals.

I think it might be the change in perception. My parents, and people around their age, seem to have a different perspective on what a job means. They see work as a smaller role in their life. "Work just pays the bills". But most younger generations seem to put more of an emphasis on their careers. They see work as the main part of their life. It could be due to the amount of money that we pay for college tuition. I know I don't want to waste my degree and years of my life doing someone else's work. I'd rather have the comfort and responsibility to be left alone to do my own work. Maybe I'm just speaking about my own situation.
Great point.. since I'm just getting started with it, I'll see how it goes this week then look at pulling it back to the blog. It'll be a fun experiment anyway.
I guess. Not something I relish being on the far side of 30, but freedom of association being what it is, it seems so.
From Oxford to Silicon Valley, part two
ATTN: The user "msgbeepa" Is a Spammer Submitting Paid Posts Do Not Upvote
I hope I'm a target for kidnapping and billion-dollar lawsuits someday.
No biggie. I've done it too. Someone created a search tool for the YComb news. Check it out.

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/
I think PG's essays and YCN can be a huge boost to scaling YC itself. He wrote of attempting of Huffman coding in the "hardest lessons" essay, perhaps he could also reference comment IDs as well. Maybe something more forum-like is necessary though, where topics can be marked "sticky" forever.

If each group of founders leaves behind their answers in a permanent form it seems like that would help with most of the common questions, leaving only the tricky new questions to be answered.
I'm from Austin as well. Plenty of entrepreneurs, plenty of engineers, and enough funding sources. All the pieces are there - I think what we're missing is a real tech startup community.
In my mind there is no question that the limiting factor is Paul's time. The amount of time Paul spends with his portfolio of companies is the integral of the number of companies he funds with 50% decay to account for companies that quit. There is obviously a physical limit at 24 hrs/day.
This is the paper where the "43% of facebook messages are spam" claim originates, something which I am inclined to dispute. Other than that its a great look at user habits. The graphs speak for themselves.
Joe Kraus Interview Nov 2005 -- "I love the relationships that you build with people when you're in the trenches trying to make something from nothing."
Paul, there is nothing to the amount of attention given to applicants after acceptance?
I don't find it entirely impossible. After Startup School I talked to Adam D'Angelo about spam on facebook (largely because I'd never seen any); he said that there is a lot of spam activity, but that internal safeguards prevent most of it from ever being visible. If the researchers were using internal, pre-filter datasets, their claim is reasonable.
There will be more startups over time, but eventually this growth will hit a limit. There are only so many people who can participate in a startup. Eventually the startups grow and merge with big companies and that's where most of the people will spend their life working. Startup will always remain an adventure fit only for the elite.
Judgment in U.S. v. Robert Tappan Morris
Saw them @ startup school as well, and I could see it being useful. I'm not sure what the business model is, I wouldn't have called it "stupid"

I imagine they put the IP warning up in response to the techcrunch press. The real solution would be a message when someone picks up telling them to "Press 1 to stop this service from calling you in the next hour. Press 2 disable it permanently"
Tricks like Nissan's are better-described as just "left-field", not "viral". I don't see how leaving phony keyrings lying around encourages people to pass on a message.
Question to Paul: First of all I've to tell you I'm a big fan of all your essays. But a lot of things which you say in your essays seem to work really well only if you're developing Web 2.0 sites. Version 1 of any Web 2.0 app can be built with 3 people in 3 months with very less capital needs (especially if the founders are fresh grads, all you need to do is to feed them for the three months). So as an investor, I would assume that you don't have to care much about revenue models, business experience & age of the founders, etc because in the event the startup tumbles, you don't stand to lose a lot?

But what about bigger projects? Projects which need maybe 10 people working for an year? Hardware? Would your views change when you are asked to invest in projects of these kind? The reason I ask is because I'm a final year CS student in Singapore and I've developed a 360 degree video camera along with a couple of my friends and we've been talking to a lot of angel investors here. They all love the idea and are amazed by the demo but most of the time their major cause of concern is that we don't have business experience and we're very young (21). How would you evaluate an idea like this one (hardware+software)? Would you be interested in seeing something like this sent to YC? Or do you prefer sticking to web 2.0 sites?
A student's guide to startups
Yahoo Mail Announces Unlimited Storage
I'm only partly covered by this list. It's true that I don't really have an immediately viable potential cofounder, but it's also true that if I had one, I still don't think I would start a startup in the near future. My main problem is that I'm most interested in machine learning and robotics, and neither of those seem particularly friendly to starting a startup. (Alexa doesn't run on robots, so I can't bypass the need for revenue, and selling robots to people other than the government has so far been a fairly limited market.) Grad school is much more friendly that way, and that's what I'm planning to do at the moment.

This may change in the next few years, but it doesn't seem like robotics will ever be as low-capital an operation as the Web.
Need a startup idea?
Good point. I was concerned that the researches might be counting messages to groups as spam.
The problem scaling YC is definately time, it sometime sucks that we only have 24hrs/day!...I had a few friends that were VCs and they worked like dogs. A few VCs shuffle you off to a Jr. Associate, which has some negatives, the biggest being that if you had any experience at all, you knew more about running a business than they did.

If I was in PG shoes and I had to scale the business, I'd definately recommend getting some Sr. Operational folks with a like-mind to work very closely with the portfolio companies.
Adobe just announced the new version of Flash Lite which includes support for streaming video -- no coincidence
Google already has them beat:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/strategicpause/434015378/in/set-72157600026714867/
Is this really 'leapfrogging' reliable services that offer 2+gigs for space? I don't know about other people's email usages, but gmail has a ceiling I will not be sneaking up on anytime soon. I guess it is nice to know that you do have unlimited space, but I don't think this announcement is nearly as cool as gmail's 1 gig.
It's not like anyone upvotes her now.
I was particularly interested in the reversal Paul made with his opinion on working for a company right after school (before founding a startup).

This was something I've always debated myself. I can see how the companies he's funded have shown that working first is probably not necessary. I also understand his argument that trying and failing can teach you more than working for a company would anyway. But I think it really depends on the company. Not all larger tech companies suck. And I'd still argue that working in the corporate environment (even for just a short while) teaches you a lot of valuable lessons.

I guess my view is weigh the options. Some larger companies (mainly the people you work with there) can teach you new and diversive things you simply cant learn on your own. Looking back 10 months to when I just graduated, I definitely feel I've learned a lot about accountability and being responsible from the corporate work environment. It also modivates the hell out of you to break free of the mandatory work hours and start something on your own..
How can they detect abuse without violating your privacy?
Just looks like a lame self-promoter, not a spammer per se. I echo pg's comment but if something comes along that's actually worth reading, I don't think anything sinister will happen if you upmod it.
There is a distinction between "revenue is not important" and "if lots of users love you, you can probably figure out how to make money out of it (if you arn't acquired first)".
Y Combinator application deadline ambiguity: is it end of day April 1 or end of day April 2?
Hey, I said something before PG did! Compare footnote 2 with http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=635

I'm sure I wasn't first, but it's cool nonetheless.

Startup idea: supporting geographically collocated open source projects to help potential partners get to know each other. It might start out similar to http://prehacked.com -- allow people to enter projects they're interested in and their geographic location, and cluster similar interests together to show them potential partners. Allow people to say x is similar to y when the system can't figure it out (I always thought reddit should accept hints like x is related to y or not related to y).
News Corp. Exec: "You know, it may turn out that social networks have been, not overhyped, but underhyped."
"Bloggers aren't responsible for things said in their comments."

Sure they are! It's their site, & they have moderation control. Bloggers always delete comments, either spam, off-topic or otherwise.
Is it an abuse or unfair advantage for established companies to apply to YC?
It does generate some amount of ad revenue from the clicks. Just bothers me, perhaps it shouldn't. I don't mean to blow it out of proportion.
Forget IQ and EQ, Best Entrepreneurs Have High BQ
End of April 2nd: "... by midnight PST on Monday, April 2, 2007"
I'll admit my mistake.

This isn't really a case of viral marketing as much as Compassion marketing, which is targeting a new market.

This would have been viral if instead of simply leaving keys on the ground, it encouraged you to "see if you can trick your friends" with the same set of keys, or a similar action element for you to push.

Mea culpa, but the point of the article still stands. I apologize for sidelining the conversation with a poor title.

To ask a (hopefully) better question, although I fear it may be too late for conversation in this thread- Is there a point where people start becoming less engaged in the world, because they're afraid that every action has a marketing angle behind it..

To quote Futurama-

LEELA: Didn't you have ads in the twentieth century?
FRY: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio... and in magazines... and movies, and at ballgames, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written in the sky. But not in dreams, no sirree.

I worry that as people get more and more used to seeing an ad behind every action, they'll stop caring about the actions, and stop investigating..

Look at the ATHF scare.. Imagine if that were more common, but if it were actually a fake bomb, as the Boston Police had suggested..

As you go to open it, it screams "BOO! Too bad you didn't have life insurance. Go to Omahalife.com to get some"