skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I missed it when they went to start-up school. That would have been awesome! I am growing in my level of interest in justin.tv - mostly as a fascinating experiment.
Hello. I am Aur Saraf.

And I don't like this.

Why?

Because flirting is about communication. Perhaps it's the journalist's mistake, but it seems like communication plays secondary role here to a currency based trading system.

Is that a way to show value? "I answered more questions and logged in more, and I believe I'll win your heart, so here, I'm bidding 25 points on you, sweetie"? Even MORE competition? How objectified can a poor sweet lovely girl BE?

No.

I really don't think so.

I agree, dating sites suck. They are a badly implemented meat market.

I just think this amplifies the problems instead of fixing them.

The good dating site still isn't public.

We'll have to wait.

BTW an invite to prove me wring would be appreciated.

Aur
Funnily going by these standards most big corporations today should have died a long time ago.

I think the key is to keep this list in the background - not go paranoid about getting every point on it right at once.
Do you think this is any better? :)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17723921
It doesn't matter how well you bid since love and attraction cannot be bought. Woman will pick who she finds attractive, not someone who outbids the other guy.

PS: Feminists will be all over this one.. I can just see it: "you mean, you're bidding on women?!"
Did anyone find it bizarre that some of the responses given by founders are extremely long?
BTW, feel free to share your favorite bits of the book here:

http://72.36.160.114
Well, you state that 0% of your startups had a bad experience. But of course these were the ones that got funding - they are already winners, even if they later failed to make it big.
What about the 400-odd that didn't get funding? It takes much more than a couple of weekends in a cafe to put together a decent startup proposal, often the startups have made considerable sacrifice, not to mention putting their hopes and dreams on the line, even to get face time with potential investors.
I signed up and began playing with it a couple days ago. I love the look and character of the site. Everything about the presentation oozes charm.
Heart-rending story about how a blind entrepreneur's mind adjusts to suddently restored sight
There doesn't appear to be one. There wern't any earth shattering revelations. It was a standard (although enjoyable) interview of a recent author.
To the JumpBox guy.
Interesting idea.
You need to come right out with what you're doing, on the home page, or in the first sentence of the 'about' page. I don't want to read a paragraph of crap about automobiles, before coming to what you're all about.
Also, I'm sure LAMP components (ie the various tiers of web server) would be a hit - ie seperate VM images for apache, database, etc.
Essay great, as usual from PGraham. Quibble is: should rightly be called "Not reasons not to start a startup".

Your friend,
Julie
No doubt, hacking is a way of life.

What I wonder is if Bell Labs were still in its heyday, would you have been an entrepreneur? When AT&T was a monopoly, they provided exactly the kind of unprofitable environment that geeks love (and they had the spare cash for them to buy toys, too!). Think of the programming languages you could have developed!

Google has some of its spirit and has hired some of their best, but I don't think anything today is the same sigh

I believe in their hearts of hearts geeks would prefer a Bell Labs environment over a startup any day. The kids who are starting web-based companies are only entrepreneurs due to the misfortune of not having such opportunities.
Women can bid on men. Or women can bid on women. Or men can bid on men.
Patent applications will now receive even less scrutiny.
IMHO - I don't think there is a very good way to "tell" someone you are a visionary.

Nor do I think there is any good way to know of yourself that you are a visionary to the tune of Steve Jobs. People say that the ideas that Jobs has that seem to "change the world" come to him as clear solutions to obvious problems. So you likely think your ideas seem fairly simple and makes perfect sense, only assuming that others could come up with them just as well.

I think the mentality of "something is obviously broken and if no-one else can see this seemingly obvious solution, then I'll just do it myself" is common among great inventors.

Steve and Woz shared this inventor's mentality, however Woz was content building stuff for fun to show friends. Jobs (being a visionary) saw the business potential and wanted to lead the technology into changing the future.

So to answer your question: All that you can show PG (especially in these applications) is that you have a cool idea, and that as a visionary you have plans for a real business that will make sense (aka have value) to people.

If you have an idea that will change the future, or just improve people's general quality of life... it is your responsibility (as Jobs) to mold that idea into your vision for a business that will make you and your co-founder(s) some money.

Woz created the Apple computer, but SJ convinced Woz and investors that they had a greater market than DIYers, and that "personal computers" was the way of the future.

Hopefully your vision works out as well as the Personal Computer, and then whether your start is with PG or not - people will be able to see you for the visionary that you are.
is this thing more weird than anything else?
Post some invite codes here for us, please.
vlad-

in keeping with the theme:

A startup is like being a mosquito trying to fly a hanglider-boat while waking on your hands... simultaneously trying to negotiate the wind to keep you up in the air and convince your teachers to get in your boat rather than fail you.

;-)
That hotornot story is priceless. It was my favorite part of the Founders at Work.
We have had some late night white boarding sessions formulating both incredibly simplistic and overly complex algorithms. The middle of those two is the hard thing to get to.

The most recent white board session ended in me deciding I need to write a letter to my 9th grade math teacher. I think i gave her crap about how algorithm homework was a big waste of time, but she made me do it anyway.

The idea of considering replies is interesting. On digg however, I find the comments tend to be 98% worthless. I miss /. comments.

Probably the best/easiest thing to do is plan to be adaptive to how the community uses your site. Your algorithm will likely need to change over time.
I just posted it on my site if you don't want to download it:
http://www.ijigg.com/songs/CGE40FAP0

--Zaid
Python 3000 or Perl 6 first--bet on Inkling (YC company)
Correlation between taking a break from school and startup success?
The worst thing to me about the rise of the NDA is the return of the colloquial phrase, "i could tell you... but i'd hafta kill you"

:-P
Particletree - The Top 10 Questions Investors Asked Us
Startups are all about dedication/motivation. Also about creating dedication and motivation where it is necessary, when we do not care for it anymore. That explains why even when we're sick of our startups, we keep pushing onwards.

Could this mean that founders who can create motivation can also create motivation to finish at least an undergrad degree?

You guys may have noticed a common theme in my posts...
Yeah, but from the user's point of view, when I hear that I think I'm going to be zipping presentations to people instead of email, and looking at an inbox of presentations people have sent me. That can't be right, can it?
It will be interesting to see who uses the site!
I have rather the opposite problem. I'm like a machine when I get a decent idea (wrt implementing it etc), but I can't seem to find one that makes other people care about it.
kenny sanders. i'm just a frosh studying compsci
For some reason I just cant agree with you.
While motivating yourself to accomplish your goals is pretty much the entire purpose of life, what makes a degree automatically one of those goals?

If college is needed to accomplish your future then by all means run headlong into it, and make the decision to enjoy every minute of it. But I think it is a mistake to confuse a college degree with the ability to motivate yourself to do what you decide you want.
It does? Seems to work just fine... everyone uses it, unless they use macs.
sometimes an analogy works just way too well.
Having a person coming out of Google would be great not only because you know they have some skills, but that they are completely committed and determined to get it done. What a great coworker they would be!.
FYI: You can get a free dynamic dns hostname off http://yi.org
It helps to get out of the closet to tell your family and friends. Their support helps a lot plus there's no turning back once you've tld those around you. If you don't tell anyone it's easy to go back to school or work when things get tough and no one will be none the wiser.
The name is horribly long but so good I think it could really work. Hope they do well.
Great read, but the biggest things that stop me from starting a startup aren't really on your list.

It's a combination of factors, including (1) need for savings and planning for the [non-startup-rich] future, (2) supporting a girlfriend who refuses to live a grad student lifestyle, (3) expensive cost of living in the area I want to live.

I fully realize that most of those sound like excuses more than reasons, but there is definitely a huge chasm between investing money for retirement, buying decent furniture, being able to pay rent and utility bills, etc.; and throwing caution to the wind for a probable failure and extremely strenuous social, economic and physical ordeal.

So I think my answer to why more people don't start startups is rather simple: it's not easy to leap that chasm into poverty, seclusion and exhaustion for a glint of a chance at huge success.

Of course I'll continue hacking on my side projects and hoping my equity in the startup I'm working for affords me the opportunity to take a risk of my own in the near future.
"[2] The best kind of organization for that might be an open source project, but those don't involve a lot of face to face meetings. Maybe it would be worth starting one that did"

Mitch Kapor's OSAF (profiled in the excellent book Dreaming in Code) is an example of the pitfalls of doing this. I'd say the primary pitfall is the lack of hard deadlines which it itself caused by the lack of 'hunger' because profit/existence is not the ulimate motive. This seemed to have wreaked havoc on the schedule for Chandler at OSAF..
Wow. Very innovative service. I don't have time for it though but then again that's what I said about facebook but I'm a facebook regular.
0% of the startup founders hate startups these people: Paul selected out of a pool of people having advanced ahead enough to consider funding. Sounds a lot like - making 100000$ per year is an easy problem - just go to Stanford Univ everyone who goes there makes 100,000$.

Drive is probably the hardest thing to maintain. I worked at a startup for 3 months. Highs are higher and lows are much much lower.
Yah, I think alpha geek crowd is getting diluted. It's beginning to reflect the tastes of the broader population. I think they need to work on their recomendaton engine to cater for individual preferences
Steve Yegge hinted about the next big language. I think he meant javascript. Arc has some serious competition. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html
Thanks to Doug Cutting you don't have to write a search engine. You just use Nutch and Lucence and Hadoop.
'... Let a potential user tell you what they want ...'

good point. harnessing user intelligence not eyeballs ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=5886
Y Combinator's "No Strings Attached" micro-funding model
TripSync quietly launches
Good day.

No. Do you?

I don't think that a club only made up of "hot people" is any less of a meat market, especially since females tend to pay very little attention to physical attractiveness compared to other qualities (men DO tend to judge a lot by physical attraction, sadly, though I'm an exception).

So what will we have? A group of hot women pursued by a group of blatant men feeling really good about themselves since they managed to "get in", but probably are only slightly better in average than the average guy at pleasing women. Of course there will be successes, even a bit more, relatively, than in a normal dating site, but the mechanism will be 100% the same, so there's no REAL filtering done. The social game will be the same one. Nothing REAL gained (except for the good feeling of superiority from rejecting people, yuck).

Tell me, how do you meet women? Do, and I'll give you a better idea for a dating site.

Aur Saraf
Either you didn't read the article carefully or have not used the site. There is a lot of communication tools built into the site. The main point of the for the point system is to put a barrier to entry in establishing relationships. On most dating or Social network sites, people can easily cast a wide net of people they want to get in touch with. But with IILWY, the points make it too costly to do the same approach. In other words, your relationships are more special. Once a game is finished, the person who put on the game and the chosen player establish a connection like in other social networking sites. They can message each other, or even have it call the other user's cell phone (safely without revealing each others phone numbers). And there is much more coming.
An intelligence-based version of that site would be great.

You know, for geeks. You have to be smart enough to get in.

In fact, you can do it for a lot of criteria that people value in relationships.
I doubt the question answering will be just for points. Eventually they can build up a profile of you and perhaps secretly change the weighting of points, or change the kinds of "goods" you get to see. That would create a pretty interesting quickdating service. What I find most intriguing is the point system. Joining = 100 questions answered; it looks like a rather arbitrary number.

If it takes 6 seconds to answer a question that's 10 minutes per 500 points ("ideal" case). Looks like the baseline will be high enough that new users need to spend significant time answering questions to make useful bids. Looks like a great platform for a popularity war, i.e. MySpace crowd and not Facebook crowd.
you need to know the secret handshake, [0] ... but it does not want to work with FOX 2.0.0.3 :(

Reference

[0] Firefox addon, 'The User Agent Switcher - allows you to spoof various browser user-agent strings'

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/59
Anybody remember yesnomayb.com? They should join forces.
The cofounder requirement is always going to be a huge deal for a lot of people. I spent lots of time in college doing extracurricular projects to try to find smart, hard-working people to be around. Most of the best of that bunch ended up working for large technology companies for lack of any better ideas. My experience suggests that meeting cofounders at school is a pretty chancy thing.
I wonder if the best way to purposely meet potential cofounders isn't to work at startups in the first place, where people won't be stuck in the big-company mindset.
Haha, this thread has captivated me.
http://www.datesmartpeople.com
These guys spammed several schools when they launched. The forum is pretty empty. No I did not join.
Study: The Myth of the Short Online Attention Span
I quit my job and went to grad school because of Paul Graham. At the first Startup School (Cambridge), Paul's speech casually mentioned that grad school was a good way to meet co-founders. I wasn't specifically looking for co-founders (although like he predicted, I found some here) but decided that it was the right time to get a master's. In the next nine months, I quit my job, moved to Silicon Valley and started full-time grad school in CS. So far it's been one of the best decisions of my life. Thanks, Paul!
Sergey Brin
I can see why google's UI is so minimalistic.
"Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page."

That's just awesome.
Bootstrapping Tip: Use teaching to create passionate customers
Maybe he could resurrect the COPS system to help out YouTube a bit?
"Error establishing a database connection ... internal-db.s2462.gridserver.com."

I highly recommend avoiding Media Temple's "Grid Server" which is a conceptually horrible idea and has been predictably plagued with issues.

Google was kind enough to provide a cached copy:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:particletree.com/notebook/the-top-10-questions-investors-asked-us/
I happen to know that iPowerWeb was totally unscrupulous and oversold way beyond what anyone would consider reasonable. They were greedy and didn't care anything for their customers. They were just out to make a quick buck and it showed.

I love this question and I think every company should poll their users and graph the response over time. What better way to make sure you're doing things right. Probably a great way of solving internal debates: "Let's see what the customers think"
The education system is in a sad state, when people have to drop out of good schools like Harvard and Stanford to start billion dollar companies... and yet, they still can't afford to go back to college.

Another example is his resume. "1993 to Present." He's been working on his PhD for 14 years now! Wow, Stanford is really taking him for all he's worth!

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/resume.html

Clearly, Bill Gates and Sergei Brin will never work in emerging fields like actuarial science at a large insurance company.
Hi, I'm 50. I tried to apply PG advices to become rich. I left my job and went back to grad to find a cofounder. I also divorced to get rid of wife and kids. I applied for rejuvenation camps, plastic surgery and many othere expensive treatments because PG said we better start young. Since Cobol and Fortran are useless, I had intensive courses to learn lisp, visual basic, php, .net and ruby.

There are still a few details left to smooth, but I think I am very close to be able to apply to YC. I still have no idea of what my startup would do, but PG said this was not important...

Could there be something I misunderstood in PG talks ?

PS: This is all fake, of course, and ment to be humorous.
There is only one thing that matters and PG was very clear on this. It is to come up with something that people will want and will be ready to pay for in some way (accept to view ads for instance). Wether you'r old, married & dad, have no technical skills in CS, etc. won't stop you from succeeding if you found a gold vein. It will just be a little bit more difficult to start, that's all... and maybe YC is not the VC to go for. ;-)
online sample:
http://www.zenter.com/ed/view.html?id=226
I started my second company in Austin...and moved it to the Bay Area for WFP2007. The Bay Area is better. And not just by a little bit. My first company was started in Houston and moved to Austin for the better tech environment, but it turns out there's just not much really going on in Austin when you compare it to Silicon Valley. A few users groups and small conferences (plus SXSW, which is worth noting) does not a tech industry make.

I miss Austin for the things that make Austin wonderful, but I don't think I'll ever go there to start a technology startup (unless things change remarkably in the future). And Mountain View and San Francisco are both great places to live, even if they aren't as cool as Austin.
How much is photobucket worth?
Sounds interesting, any idea where to get the invite codes? I'm curious about the 'points economy' being used.
Last.fm is used by real people rather than just us internet peeps :)
Here's another naysayer on Paul Graham and the YC experience, in a bit more serious tone: http://www.raydeck.com/2006/10/paul-graham-is-hurting-the-children/
I think a bigger problem than not being smart is having more than one idea over time; the new one supplants the old.

I once struggled to explain to a top-notch guy what I did for the company we knew. "Ah", he said, "you're a problem solver", and he was right. Then it varied from people popping their head round the door with a question to larger scale performance issues. Now it means after solving the problems of how to do one good idea I'm attracted by the problems of the new one rather than persevering with bringing idea #1 to completion.
I agree with you. Whatever breakthrough they might have made technologically (and I don't know anything about streaming video, so maybe what they're doing is not so special), the actual product is rather uninspiring.

Some exhibitionists might take to it, but who's watching this stuff?

When the novelty fades, it'll go back to being just another toy.
If everyone's "lifecasting", who's watching?

One Justin gets an audience (now, in the short term).

One thousand (or even one hundred) Justins are not so interesting.
I get the Valleywag concept (be the E!, People, Page 6, etc.) of Silicon Valley, but Valleywag is worse than those rags because the people it's profiling (and subtly mocking at the same time) are more than just targets of gossip or adulation.

Nick Denton is going to have a lot to answer for.
Well you can just start a startup that works on hard problems, instead of one which revolves around your ajax code rendering correctly on various browsers.
You can solve a hard AI problem with a couple of good hacker friends, just as you could do that at Google. True that it'll probably take you more time than building another website around social networking.
"don't make users register"
Funny that I had to register to post here :)
Darn it, Ya'll beat me to the unicycles :)
It's actually a static IP. I still need to think of a better name for the service. I'll buy a domain name after I do.
I like it for two reasons:

1) It's completely fresh and original.

2) The submit buttons make a pleasing sound when you mouse over them.

I suspect the bidding system will result in lekking and other malsocialized behavior, but I could also see it driving up use. I'm really fascinated to see what happens though, and I can't wait to start playing with it (even though I already have a gf who I asked out on facebook).
Paul,
Great article, I found it extremely helpful and encouraging. I did have one question though around point # 9. Family to support. When you started Viaweb, did you have a family? If not, what about when you founded Y Combinator? The reason I ask is that I feel that having a family is a huge motivator for success, not a detractor. Now it is extremely risky especially if you are the sole provider for the family, but the reward is extremely high. If you have the confidence, determination and the right support (money, good business partners, etc.) your chances of success are increased. That would be like saying that it is not wise to be an extreme sports athlete or even a race car driver if you have a family because it is too risky. Calculated risks have great potential.

Will
Incorporation options with non US partners?