skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about emailing people at some of the popular ezines that are in your target demographic. They could post about it and you'd probably get a lot of traffic and artists interested in signing up.

I also agree that going to shows and introducing yourself to bands will help. Any personal interaction like that would get me to try out the service over a junk spam message on myspace.
There was some study - I think it was linked to on Dharmesh Shah's blog (onstartups.com) a month or so back - that indicated the success rate for first time entrepreneurs in VC-funded tech startups was 18%. For entrepreneurs with a previous failure it was 20%, and for entrepreneurs with a previous success it was 33%.

I suspect that the success rate is somewhat higher for bootstrapped tech startups, because you're given the option of failing and trying again with the same company, different idea. Usually if you fail with a VC's money, they liquidate the company. If you fail with your own, you can take the assets you have and try to redirect them to a new line of business.

I thought I saw another study somewhere that said that the average number of failures a bootstrapped startup goes through is 4. That squares with the success rates for VC-funded startups above, if you assume that each failure simply means the entrepreneur tries a new idea. You have a 18% chance of succeeding on the first try, a 33% chance of succeeding by the second try (82% * 82% = 67.24% chance of failing), a 45% chance of succeeding by the third try, and a 55% chance of succeeding by the fourth try, for an average of 3-4 attempts necessary before success.
Shared services mean that mistakes made by any other client on that machine are very likely to damage you. Also, without root access, you are often stuck not being able to set a configuration well. For a hobby site, or a sandbox, shared hosts are fine and cheap. I would never deploy a real web application on one though. Many places will sell you a Xen VPS slice for $20-30/mo.
Social Networking Niches
He speaks humorously with a good point (Go do it!). I don't think someone just starting up should be in the same state of confidence as he is, but his attitude towards working hard is noteworthy. He can speak whatever he wants, how he wants. That's a nice freedom. Picking up his book on Amazon with Founders at Work. Even if I don't learn something from him, I'll at least be amused, http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0091912652/ref=dp_olp_2/103-9496918-3879027
I've been trying to spend a lot of time on graphic design lately, and the link to the free icons will be very helpful. http://www.iconbuffet.com/freedelivery/packages
Very interesting for those of us playing the YC home-game to get a glimpse on occasion. Thank you.
(iPod + pandora + wifi + satrad == slacker)??
This is really a great question. It's tough being isolated and tiny. At this stage you would rather be hated than ignored, but one even cares enough to hate you.

For your first users I think you have to do it "the hard way", by really _selling_ the product. Go manually find the low-hanging fruit for your product. Find the early adopters -- the people who will be delighted to learn your product exists and immediately understand its utility.

Bug all the people you know and get them to use your product where it makes sense.
Find customers using a crappy solution to the problem you have a good solution to. Help them move to your solution.
If the success rate for VC funded startups is 18%, then I could easily believe the overall rate is 10% or lower, because angels fund more startups than VCs, and they are less selective.
I suppose the sincerest form of voting would be merging others' ideas into your working copy. The system could track that and maintain a leaderboard of most-assimilated specs.
python_kiss "If you don't know where you're going, you will end up somewhere else."

I prefer "Wherever you go, there you are"

python_kiss "Startups should always have a week long tactical plan and a rough strategic goal stretched upto three months."

It doesn't matter how well you plan, you're going to run into brick walls. Most startups run into one and say "Oh damn, I guess we lost, let's go home." (secretly relieved to be giving up) -- other startups say "Brick wall? Where's my sledge hammer, this thing is toast!"
That was a good post. All of the recent big "winners" have not only shrunk markets but redefined their industries altogether.
far33d -- are your interests mainly with entertainment+technology? i've picked up a pattern via your posts.

sounds like we might have similar interests. are you going to startup school?
AI, Higher level languages. Greenspun's idea to have a formal description for websites so you don't need to keep reinventing the wheel, Quantum computers, chemical computers, gesture interfaces, robotics, and so on.
i don't see why biz week mentions myspace and friendster first -- facebook whoops friendster's ass as far as #s are concerned, and is gonna be overtaking myspace pretty soon in terms of %returning users/day.
Wouldn't it be in YC's interest to take some equity WITHOUT providing any funding in return of advice, Guidance, and a platform and connections.
If startups are going to compete with big companies, they need to do it on innovation, not price. Big companies have the upper hand on price because they have economics of scale.
How is the lack of password confirmation working out on YC News?
Many accounts that never get logged into again?
Anyone emailing because they entered a funky password?

It feels right but still scares me; I'm always mistyping things.

Who else doesn't confirm passwords?
MSPW?
Meanwhile on my terminal:

svn ci -m "no password confirmation"
Mark Fletcher's History of ONElist ("The ONElist File")
make something people want
TheFunded.com: The Resource for Entrepreneurs (a place to research/rate VC firms with first-hand experiences)
TechCrunch preview:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/14/reckoning-day-for-venture-capitalists/
RaiseCapital.com
I gotta love a fellow buckaroo.

As far as a typical outline or long term goal, from my experience with YC's quite a few of them have goals way off in the horizon.

I do have to agree that a certain extent of the whole plan should not center around one solid idea, but an idea that can easily be remolded. This industry changes so fast, and it has no room for others that cannot change with it.

Personally, I had a sledgehammer going into this from the get-go. I'm just waiting for those walls to finally use my shiny new hammer on.
If I could prove what could still be done in CS I'd do it myself and become rich and famous ;)

As for something I saw recently that blew my mind was video of a presentation at google. The premise was figuring out how to have a system automatically compress, decompress, and predict based on arbitrary data. I wish I could find the link. Very neat stuff.

No matter what, there's always more to learn and discover.
White-collar pride in workmanship
One Calendar to Rule Them All
Sticky News In Sticky Notes
New "Meta" Comparison Shopping Engine - RoboShopper.com
SXSW: Why Marketers Need To Work With Social Media
It would be nice if I could do something without having an account. Take a tour or play with a demo perhaps.
Forest fires and influence
Oh my bad sorry! I was sleepy last night and didn't noticed it.
MySpace Bans Searches for 69 Year Olds
The future is Mobile VoIP
Whoah, this is very similar to a mobile app I'm currently producing for my final project at University.
Reddit, Del.icio.us, Slashdot, and Digg in cartoons (Social Media Websites Illustrated)
Use of parallel processing is still in its infancy. Virtual reality is still in its infancy. Speech processing is still in its infancy. Wait ... was that comment a joke?
The 53,651 meme
E: textmate for windows
Online video service Vmix lands NBC deal
http://intype.info/home/index.php

Check out intype too. Found it through Digg. Not as polished as E-Text Editor though.
Well, it's been a while and I still haven't had to confirm my password. I think this feature is working well.
I met my current co-founder at the first startup school. We've been working together for over a year now. Our first (self-funded) startup hasn't really taken off, but we managed to meet an angel investor in in the SF Bay Area with similar ideas to our own and are now working on a new site - so don't give up hope on getting funding.
More selective doesn't necessarily mean a higher success rate, if VCs can't pick the winners at a higher rate than their general frequency in the population. Wasn't there just an article on here about how VC-funded "A teams" do no better, and often worse, than VC-funded "B teams". And I thought your "Unified Theory of VC suckage" mentioned this too, though rereading it, it seems more about how VCs take winners startups and make them fail rather than how winners avoid the VCs to start with.

That said, my high school math teacher and first employer was an angel investor, and he said his success rate was *well* under 10%.

A lot also depends on your definition of failure. When Ludicorp shut down Game Neverending and launched Flickr, would that count as a failure? If they had taken millions in VC funding, would they have been able to shut down GNE and say "We're going to build a photo-IM client"? I'm currently working for a (profitable) startup with 4 products. Only one of them is generating any revenue. If that had been VC-funded, it likely would have been 4 separate companies, 3 of which were failures.
FOCUS:Mobile-Only Operators Fear VoIP Value Destruction
I love the simplicty of YC News, but it's hard for me to read  -- Just me?
Three Elements of Marketing
I've had similar thoughts; a sort of business that is "open source" in the sense that the users determine what gets built and can look at (modify, even?) what's going on...

extantproject at gmail dot com
We're going out Friday morning, back on Sunday evening. Ping me, eh? There's a surprising amount of startup stuff happening in Miami. Carlos at Bueno period organization-tld
Hot piece of tech...would love to see this develop in the near future.
Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: VC Performance by Quartile and Vintage Year
I love YC News, and definitely appreciate PG's minimalist tendencies (which made reddit so great). But there's something about this site that makes it hard for me to read. I've been browsing with "View->Page Style->No Style" which helps.

I'm thinking it's something trivial like the gray visited links and small fonts.

Anyone else find it hard to read?
Amichail, there is a site that was a proto-version of what you're describing called The Business Experiment. It seems to be down right now, but here's an article about it:

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2005/08/the_business_ex.html

The original site is:

http://www.thebusinessexperiment.com/

http://www.thebusinessexperiment.com/
Ahh SOC what's a Java monkey to do?
Considering that what the partners do is the most valuable aspect of YC, I don't see this scaling without adding more partners. This begs the question of what YC is: is it a company that forms more companies, or is it an angel-firm that creates more angel-firms?

The latter can work only by forming these new angel-firms in different startup-beds. There are only a limited number of startup-beds, and a limited number of connections that can be used by partners. When these resources are used up, the only choice is to move to another area and start again.

The former is what YC already does, within the limits of the partners. Adding new partners could increase the number of companies funded each year, but only to a limited extent. Finding a partner is hard because it needs to be someone that won't disturb the current dynamic and who will bring in new connections/resources that aren't currently represented.

Frankly, I don't see any way to truly scale what YC does. Encouraging startups to form is limited by its very nature to within bounds formed by the market. These bounds have not yet been reached, but still exist.
Mobile VoIP is on the march
I'm wondering if this reply is a joke because none of those areas are still in their infancy, especially parallel processing and speech processing. If you really meant to say that their potential hasn't been realized, then is it possible that expectation levels were too high to begin with? Same thing with higher level programming languages. How long have people been working on ML, Haskell, LISP, etc? What you really mean is natural language programming languages, like English, Chinese, etc. as programming languages.

The flip side is that some problems that were thought to be easy to solve may, in fact, be unsolvable (practically or theoretically). Computer vision is a good example of this.

I'm not trying to start a war or play devil's advocate for the sake of playing. My comments come from a real place. I have a PhD in computer science and was a professor in the field at a top university in the US. As sobering as it is to think about, I have serious concerns about CS because the problem landscape looks a little flat. The first mountain was computation (e.g., microprocessors), then usability, then networking/communications. What's next? I believe a big breakthrough in established fields like AI, VR, etc. are low probability using existing computational models, the weak proof being that a lot of very bright people have been working on these hard problems for a very long time and advances appear to be small and incremental. I don't know if QC will hold any promises in this area, maybe so.
Yeah I agree. I visit the site a few times a day. Its hard to read, and hard to tell if I missed a good post too! Perhaps organizing posts by date might help.
The feature set you have put together might be very useful to some potential users who aren't bands. You might be in one of those "we built it thinking of market X but ended up filling a need for Y" sort of situations.
Its usually fine. The user pages are a bit cluttered with all the history of a certain user. And yep, small fonts and grayed out links that blend into the background are small gripes on my part as well.
Just buy a Mac and use the real thing. :)
Lessons from the Field (A Top-10 List)
I'm ok with it but I have to increase the text size to read it. This isn't exclusive to YC news, I have to increase font size on most webpages due to my poor sight and mac os' irritating support for external monitors.
Wanting to start a startup
jmiao - definitely and yes.
This is an article some may find interesting about Charles Saatchi and his latest stunt
"The Funded" - A New VC Resource For Entrepreneurs
Charles Saatchi back as the king of online marketing
I love it, it reminds me of Guy Kawasaki's article about avoid stupid things that slow users down..

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_top_ten_stu.html

very refreshing to not have to type extra crap in.
Raising funding without a plan or powerpoint
I've got a mac :) just for all the tempered souls who are waiting for leopard to come out and have persuaded themselves not to switch... (like my cofounder..shh)
EC2 is intriguing; however. it is only available to a limited number of beta testers. The waiting list appears to be lengthy... I'm not counting on gaining access any time soon.
Where, Life is full of random surprises!
BBC May Be Stifling Startups, BBC Jam Shuttered Following Complaints
This is an interesting problem that I've wondered about myself. We all talk about Web 2.0 not being a bubble but maybe that's just because the 'average joe' doesn't know anything about what's going on. Other than a few stories about MySpace and YouTube most people never hear about any Internet startups. How do you cross that divide without spending alot of money on TV commercials? During the first bubble they were great at getting people's attention but bad at software, it seems like now things are exactly the opposite.
Twitter: What are you doing?
Any one on YC use twitter? I'm twitter.com/pixelm on there
If speech processing is not in it's infancy, why can't my laptop tell how I'm feeling by listening to my voice? I seriously doubt you think there's no way to accomplish that.

Perhaps we are not talking about the same thing? The tone of the article was that students were being turned away from CS as a major because they felt nothing new was happening. In response to that I'm talking more about applications of these technologies. The applications of parallel processing haven't even begun to be tapped out. Same with the applications of speech processing.

I once used gp to create a soccer bot for the robocup. It took hours to train it to even kick the ball on my iMac running Mandrake. With more advanced use of parallel processing I could have trained a much more sophisticated bot -- but that was not available to me at the time.

As for the theory of computation, perhaps that field is completely tapped out. I have no idea -- you would probably know better than I.

Perhaps you're right. Maybe all the programs have been written (theoretically). Perhaps there's nothing left to be done.

Then again, computer science has only been around since the mid 20th century. Chemistry and physics have been around much much longer. It just seems that it's a bit too early to call.
I've been contemplating a mac laptop for a while - textmate was almost what put me over the edge on my decision. Guess I can stick to Windows for a bit longer now :)
Why is textmate interesting?

I've been using Eclipse for java development and have been very happy with it.
Making Userinterfaces FEEL responsive
What VCs love about Skype, Myspace, and Flickr
"But if you actually watch that ticker it's increasing so slowly that it probably isn't costing them any more money"

Multiply the increase by the amount of users that receive it and the number doesn't seem so small - and can never be considered 'no cost'. The trade off is that with the more mail they can index per user, the more relevant advertisements they can display and the more people they can lure with their gimmick. Of course, they're also taking advantage of the 10% rule when it comes to offering that large amount of storage.
FYI: The win32 version of gvim is very good.
This graph contains pretty dramatic news: the lowest quarter of VCs used to make small positive returns up till 1997, and since then they've consistently lost more and more money. It looks like a lot of dumb money arrived in 1997.
Vote this up if you want the fonts bigger and visited links darker.
I think it's reasonable to design for the 53,651. What they use, others will later. The Apple II was designed for the 53,651.
I run emacs over cygwin. Seems the feature set is nothing new. Am I missing something ?
Video: Where is the Web Going?
Prediction: MySpace fails within two years - users move to something similar, but less restrictive. I'm not sure trying to create that something is a good bet for a startup though; there seems to be more random chance involved in determining the success of such a service than anything. That's not to say it's impossible. To anyone thinking of building a similar service: make it flexible, easy to use and free of arbitrary restrictions. Pay special attention to the social interface (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html).
Seems odd to witness a lot of business-type people arguing (or at least leaning) in favor of copyright infringement.

I mean, we could argue for a while about whether some kid should be allowed to download songs off of bittorrent. That's just some kid. But then, you have a huge corporation doing almost the same (okay, okay, with all due equivocations, like: They're only hosting/distributing, not uploading). Well, google isn't distributing video out of a love of the artform. I mean, person X builds/owns something, and person Y profits from it, or at least tries to. See no problem there? It might come down to "might makes right" here, if google has sufficiently expensive lawyers.

The seemingly obvious solution is to tack a 15-second advertisement on the videos and then share the proceeds with the owner.
Or if you prefer things the way they are, vote this up.
Firstly, based on the design of the rest of myspace, do you think the users care what it looks like?

Second, Most myspace users havent heard of digg, reddit, etc. To them this is going to be a wonderful new thing.
All business start off as micro-niche. Friendster's demographic was considered a niche just four years ago. Now it is considered "mainstream".

The one thing startups do risk for aiming small is VC investment. Venture Capitalists are reluctant to write a 7 figure check to a startup aiming for the 53,651 audience.
Honestly tough to answer this. It's one of those things where you just have to use it for a while to realize how supportive it is of programming. All of the bundles (mostly developed by third parties) certainly helps. You can basically automate/script the application any way you like. There are bundles for different frameworks/libraries that can speed up common development tasks.
I know the article says to ignore the trends after 2003 (too soon to tell period), but the downard slope of both quartiles is still interesting and I wonder why it's there. Lot of web 2.0 investments tanking perhaps?
TechCrunch has 351k feed subscribers not 53,651. I remember when Mashable covered mainstream startups but, in face of competition, positioned itself towards a smaller niche (covering social networks). Today Mashable has close to 80k subscribers.

There is nothing wrong with aiming small.
I'm not sure I understand the motive behind the linkjacking. If ze is after a higher pagerank then ze should have noticed that YCnews uses rel=nofollow. If its karma then ze should have spotted that there is only karma gains when its a direct link. If its click throughs on the referal links then I'm pretty sure that the kind of people who read YCnews already have a paypal account and dont want to join payperpost.

Am I missing something?
I wonder if user numbers are quantized at the Early Adopter number, or if successful sites smoothly cross that threshold (like the paid user quantization). For instance, did myspace or youtube have a user population stall around the 50k mark before becoming more widely successful?
Search Engines go to blogs first, websites second (your business should have both)
The downward slope is almost certainly due to the increase in money being put into VC funds. Without a corresponding increase in the number of promising startups, the returns have to fall.

The graph is a visual illustration of the standard VC complaint: too much money chasing too few deals.
But is it better than Eclipse in terms of sophisticated language support? For a dynamic language, maybe that's not so important. But for a verbose statically typed language such as Java, it's critical.

BTW, if you have not checked out Eclipse lately, see:

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.2-200606291905/new_noteworthy/eclipse-news-all.html
Microsoft buys Tellme for over $800 million
This looks like a pretty cool device. I'm not sold on that sort of popular recommendation service system like last.fm though. It tends to be great for casual music listeners but I always feel like it recommends me the obvious handful of bands that I already know about.
It's not a matter of aiming small or finding a safe niche. Build something good and don't be afraid to aim big with broad appeal -- as long as focus isn't scattered. The market for early adoption may start off small, but that's frequently the case.

Consider HD TVs and displays. Years back, it was the enthusiasts who were the early adopters. But I can assure you HD is no niche market and the companies behind them were not aiming small.
Apparently VCs put $238 million into Tellme. That is a lot of funding.
fonts are fine (that's an easy change for browser users to make because we have shortcuts), but visited links should be darker (more of a pain to change for just one site)
Charming splash page they set up: http://www.tellme.com/