skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2 main ways.
- consumer pays $5 to upgrade viewer to editor because it is a useful tool.
- banner advts where media player is playing.

Theoretically if only 0.1% upgrade, and you have a website that is 1% of youtube traffic - 660K unique visitors per month, then you would have about $1.6M per year for that website.
Of course, I am mindful of the "China Coke problem" - where
we pick large enough market numbers to get overly optimistic projections.
Are all the developers you ever worked with, competent?
:)

(It is likely there are people in my past who didnt think I was).
Lack of startup experience is completely not a problem.

Being in your 30s is not a problem. Read PG on that subject.

The important thing is: what have you built?
Very impressive. Kudos to Adam and Matt.
passion is emotional. It is necessary.
Unfortunately, brains and talent are also required and are innate.
As an alternative, I humbly submit:

http://www.websitegrader.com

Provides more useful information and the server is still running.
does one have to do meaningful work only when you are a wise old man/woman?
A couple follow ups-

8. No, I didn't know 70 founders, I didn't even know one. But having a friend in the industry who didn't even work for a startup let me know the private details of 2-3 companies a day. This was standard dinner conversation- who's doing what, etc.

6. We're all in the same pond. I'm saying that your chances of beating Bay Area companies is better if you are not in the Bay Area. Most of the best people in the world do not live in the Bay Area.

5. Thailand is probably not a bad place... recruiting bright engineers right out of college is probably easier. Who wants to go live in a cubicle in a generic tilt up rather than a bungalow on a beach in a small town? Cutting these costs means you can pay people more, means you can hire better people, etc.

4. IF this is true, that's even worse. With the dramatically higher cost of living, that means your employees are having more trouble making ends meet (or sharing houses, 2 to a bedroom.)

Anyway, don't want to debate it to death, and was talking tongue in cheek to some extent. Locality is much less important than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. And past success has made the bay area somewhere I'm increasingly less interested in even visiting.
I think Austin is an excellent location for a startup. You have good high tech infrastructure, a good college that (at least in the 1990s) put out CS students who actually had a clue, a very supportive community, low cost of living (again at least it was), etc. And a large number of very intelligent engineers.

Also, I wonder if something like the effect that we see in the Windows shareware market vs. the Mac shareware market isn't also happening with investors. Mac shareware authors make more money because the mac market is smaller. While the windows market is larger, the proportion of shareware authors is even larger, crowding out your product. So, its more profitable to target the smaller market.

VCs in Texas are more likely to fund a company in Texas... there may be more VCs in California than there are in Texas but there are a lot more startups in california competing for the funding.
It is true that saying "Working for a company is bad. Come work for my company" doesn't make sense, but so what? I don't see people saying exactly that. Where did your question come from and where are you going with it?
How about JBOss?
No. And please don't use "Intellectual Property" generically unless you know what you're doing.

Trademarks have nothing to do with your question.

Copyrights have nothing to do with your question.

Patents are always a risk, but you're no more or less liable by knowing it was someone else's idea. You're only more liable if you know somebody else got a patent.
Paul and I are describing the same scenario... and that incentive only exists when it looks like there's a possibility for the one in a million payoff. Otherwise Liquidation Preferences mean that even a successful sell results in no return to the founders.

"But being forced to try things more quickly than you might otherwise may help you discover problems and their solutions before others do, like a fast forward button."

I could write code sitting here with a loaded gun on a timer, pointed at my head. I'm sure I would find problems in that code faster and "get it done" faster so that I could reset the timer.... but the code would not be as high quality, and it certainly wouldn't be more innovative.

And if I reached the point where I knew there was no way to get it done in time, then I'd spend the time looking for an exit. I'd have no motivation to get the code done, and a lot of motivation to get out of there.
And yet so many companies are still be founded here. I wonder why?
You answered your own question, and I'm not talking about YC anyway. I'm talking about VCs, and in particular the strings that come with them.

My purpose is to point out the disadvantages, because the assumption seems to be that its always a good thing to get VC funds.
Strange in my application I was never asked where I went to school.
:-)

Actually, I don't think that's much of a problem -- it's the same underlying issues as to why there aren't more people starting startups.
That's cool - I respect your reasons, and to each his own.
Having lived in/near hartford... don't do it. There's nothing to do. Go to Providence, RI instead (the only other non-bayarea city I've lived in).
Sites that depend upon users to somehow benefit other users (most web2.0), can be faced with a chicken-or-egg situation when starting up.

Where do these first users come from? These tricks aren't "ruthless" at all. Often, it is necessary to use unconventional means to get the ball rolling.
Good point. But companies should be built to last, not built to flip. If the corporate culture becomes "don't hire anyone over 30," will it be possible to change in a few years when you're no longer a startup?
Wow, quite a lot of money to raise for a YC company, isn't it? Vinod Khosla is a million percent more knowledgeable than I, so obviously they've got it going on at Xobni. But why a $4M first round?
From my experience, I want to add that customer satisfaction increases as the price you charge increases.

You may think you've "launched" a product by removing the word "beta" and finding a lot of publicity. However, if a customer sees you are charging only $5 a month for something incredibly disruptive which saves your users thousands of dollars per year, they will consider you still in beta, and will not take you seriously.

Customers will feel much more at ease when you charge them a lot of money, which shows confidence you know what you're doing and that you want to be around the next day. I would imagine this will also increase the value of the company during a take over.
New Web 2.0 Links For Sunday
Why big companies like AOL are so painfully sluggish
the URL is: http://valleywag.com/tech/aol/powerpoint-paralysis-247173.php
Was from Valleywag...may be they redacted it.. but here's the text and the instructions on how to get the the PowerPoint:

3/26/2007 1:07:09 PM
"Ever wonder precisely why big companies such as AOL are so painfully sluggish? Here's an insight. AOL recently launched an enhanced search service which, alongside search results from Google, showed capsule reviews, videos and other content from AOL itself. Straightforward enough. Splice in the different databases, slap a name on the product, pray. Not for AOL. The company engaged a top-tier naming agency, evaluated 120 different options, tested the finalists with focus groups in Denver and Chicago, checked on the meaning in 16 languages -- and the brand strategy group explained its process in a laughably belabored 20-slide presentation. After all that preparation, they forgot to remove the Powerpoint file from the website. Read on, for the screenshots, and a window into the corporate hive mind."

To get the full AOL Powerpoint, paste this in Google:
fullview site:aol.com filetype:ppt
ColorJack: Automatic color chooser for complementary colors.
"I feel kind of like Spock here, watching people laugh at a joke..." (:
just testing the YCN bookmarklet (please disregard)
aren't you missing the funny side?
I've seen a number of articles here about how to "go it alone" and why it's better, although maybe I notice them more because that's pretty much the only avenue open to me, so I keep an eye out for it.
7th textbox down: "For each founder, please list: YC username; name; age; year, school, degree, and subject for each degree..."
And it's not even a good name! We could come up with something better than that in 5 minutes. Ouch.
I know of a Y Combinator company founded by someone who didn't attend college.

Also, it turns out that lots of smart people go to Ivy caliber schools (who would have guessed)
Two factors:
1. Its not as disproprotionate is it seems due to the amplifiction effects of mainstream media.
2. In the 70s, most of the problems I have identified didn't exist, and so it was a good place to form high tech companies. Now, four booms later, not so much.
They are wrong. Ga Tech is the MIT of the south :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_in_popular_culture

Not sure why we are proud of being qualified by "of the South" though.
You like truck pulls and pit bar-b-que
"From what I see most are made up of young male geeks who could be brothers."

If your universe of startups is just YC funded companies, then sure, but even there, I think you're excluding some.
At that stage they're mostly lowball offers, never more than about 2 million. No one took one.
This is pretty cool. Wish I'd implemented a save feature already...
You're confusing selection for objectivity. Startups founded by "hot wiz kids" get more media attention to the fact that they are young. Companies founded by older people do not have that hook, so there is less emphasis in their age when the media writes them up.
I certainly agree..

I find this particularly useful for my own designs, as I care quite a bit about design principals, and want to try to build applications with simple yet beautiful UIs, but I tend to fall flat on Color.

Part of the problem may be that I have a color deficiency- Greens and Greys blur together in particular, but more so, I tend to identify color primarily by intensity, then by hue, which means that I get them mixed up on occasion.

Something like this allows me, and other design challenged individuals to experiment, and look at sets of colors that often go well together.

While there isn't a Save feature for the website itself, it does allow you to download a color set to use with prominent applications, or to create a bookmark to upload..

I also love that this is available as a Widget, so you can run it locally in Dashboard.
You might want to hire a real videographer. The production quality was just too low to tolerate. Sorry.
Where will you learn more?

Four years of college will teach you some things.
Four years of starting a business will teach you more.

Given a 22 year old applicatant for a job, I will take the one who never went to college and started a business over the newly minted degree, generally.

There is a third path-- drop out to join a startup that's just gotten funded. You learn a lot, reduce risk of not geting your idea off the ground after you drop out, and you will earn money rather than increase your debt burden.
And they ended up with FullView? ...Nice one.
I am in Columbus, OH...:D

Yes, yes, I know... Definitely a shortage of risk takers here... Currently working on a few ideas for a startup, and all the while, looking for something interesting to work on if somebody else has one...
Music in an Abundance Economy
I find it pretty useless-- color is a 3-dimensional space, and this site seems to have left off a dimension (saturation is missing --degree is hue, radius is color).

I find http://www.colorschemer.com/ much more useful, though non-free. In particular they have a cool feature that lets you extract color schemes from photos.

Also cool/useful:

http://kuler.adobe.com/
Great Summary of the Highlights of StartupSchool
Gainesville, FL
Open YellowPages Data for Everyone - iBegin Source Launched
I work for IBM, from my perspective it looks like AOL works at LIGHTSPEED! We can't keep up with those new Internet companies ;)
This was the same sort of view that Michael Arrington had(http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/21/good-news-cd-music-sales-down-20-from-2006/)
I don't think the 'give away the music and sell the show' is the answer though.

I don't think that the problem is based around people refusing to buy music. I see the current model for selling music being out of wack. ITunes is a really horrible situation for musicians. It still goes through the major label filtering before artists even see a penny. For bands not on a label it takes 35% of each song sold.
http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/index.html
Moving from London to the Bay Area actually halves costs. A fantastic reason in addition to the obvious network effects which makes it worth moving there,
Y Combinator Startup School 2007 Notes
2007 Startup School Notes:
A rough transcript
Facebook gifts and the Economics of abundance
I downloaded the actual PowerPoint just to check the "notes" section..here's one beauty:
"...A very strong name - since we probably don't have any PhDs in Linguistics in the audience today, I'll give you a few nuggets from them about FullView - Interestingly, Full and View are both very recognized English words in many language worldwide. They are easy to pronounce and clearly understood. Some interesting facts about Full, in particular, are that the word has positive connotations - in Quebec French, for instance, can translate to "totally"; in Turkish, esp amongst poker players - means good luck. And even in Chinese, Full correlates to Fu which means Rich".
International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Technical Program (paper pdfs available)
Look for alternatives to conferences - meetups for example, like the one in Boulder:

http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/001932.html

I've been to a few Technology Meetups like these where 3-5 founders get to present each month and there's usually no fee's involved, other than perhaps a small entry fee to help cover the meeting location if it's not sponsored.
Security Alert For WordPress 2.1.2 Users!
I suspect as the popularity of streaming high-bandwidth content to cell phones increases there will be less control over this by carriers.

In the early days of broadband many ISPs would have clauses like this. With everyone now bittorrenting and streaming media theres really nothing the ISPs can do, except some cheap stuff like traffic shaping (not so much in the US though). I think its only a short matter of time when cell carriers are forced to give in and just allow it. Otherwise the ones who don't will start losing customers to the ones who do...
Of Men, Women, and Computers:  Data-Driven Gender Modeling for Improved User Interfaces (pdf)
"Men and women have unique sensibilities for information, which can be tapped to create gender-sensitive user interfaces that appeal more specifically to each sex. Building on previous research in gender psychology and also in user modeling, we take a data-driven approach to understanding gender preferences by mining a large corpus
of 150,000 weblog entries -- half authored by men, half by women. This paper reports two kinds of contributions. First, we employ automatic language processing, semantic analysis, and reflexive ethnography to articulate gender preferences for several dimensions of gender space will provide valuable insight to user interface designers -- time, color, size, socialness, affect, and cravings. Second, we employ
statistical gender models to build GENDERLENS -- a novel intelligent news filtering system that customizes news based on the gender of its reader. A user evaluation found that GENDERLENS successfully predicted men and women's preferences for news, with statistical significance for four out of five news genres tested."
Video Tutorials on how to use the Firebug Extension
Quickie question: What's MSPW? The only thing I found on google was that it's "Midwestern state pro wrestling"

By inference, I can only think of, "Make Shit, Prove Worth".

On the topic of leveling, it's simply a game mechanism (as you mentioned with WoW)...it's part of what makes games fun. Of course, learning any skill is continuous--even playing video games, but the introduction of levels is simply to give tangible, albeit artificial, goals. It makes the gamer/user/learner feel good that they achieved another level. There are other gaming mechanisms employed in web applications, such as collections. Pokemon comes to mind. This is also pretty apparent in Friendster and MySpace.

I'm not sure that there's exactly anything wrong with employing game mechanisms to make something previously tedious a bit more fun for humans, but I can see how having "the wrong metrics to measure level" would encourage people to optimize on the wrong things (climbing ladders), instead of actually focused on getting better at the game/their careers/their job.
I realize everyone's situation is different, but I would strongly discourage leaving school early (or at least as an undergrad). In the big scheme of things I think it is too important of a milestone to throw away. There is more to life than becoming rich as soon as possible... While I benefited most from my CS classes, I also learned a great deal from non-major classes. I really think many of them have made me a more well rounded person. In addition, I learned a great deal about social situations and self confidence that I probably would have missed out on had I quit early. These are life lessons you don't get from writing code.

In fact, I'm glad I got a job right after school. I've only been working for 6 months and I'm definitely ready to leave and start my own company, but I've learned quite a few invaluable things. I think when you've actually "seen" the working life it drives you even harder to build a startup. It focuses your drive. Again, everyone is different, just my personal advice... "Be cool, stay in school"

BTW, statistically an extended "leave of absence" has a very low probability of turning into a degree. It was said but as you get older it becomes harder and harder to go back to school... Something to keep in mind I guess.
Hi there, this is a "me too"; I'm in Waterloo, ON just between you guys. While I think of some contribution here I can be contacted at startup.canada at gmail
near Columbus, GA. Currently working on a tenant griping site (launching later this week; I'll probably post about it), and trying to figure out this whole "revenue" thing. :)
I met Adam yesterday and he seems to be doing what he needs to be doing. Good luck to you guys!
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, how much value does Y Combinator give to schooling?

What about age?
You can also be crazy and do both school and a startup at the same time. Not that I would recommend that option. :-)
I love the search page... "Words to look for".
here's the powerpoint:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19386/Search-Naming-aol-powerpoint
here's the powerpoint:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19386/Search-Naming-aol-powerpoint
Yes... Bay area is terrible... very expensive, crowded, rude. Please, don't move here.

My favorite beach was packed with 10 other people there last weekend. It was awful. ;)
This guy seems to have a bit of a problem with lust. He picks on Bittorrent, Hotornot and Youtube for using porn and near-porn to attract users. I think the way all three services handle sexual content is entirely appropriate for their intended audience and social interface.
How NOT to recruit for your startup
The following email got spammed to everyone in my CS department this morning:

Subject: UF Student looking for Computer Science Assistance

I am in need of a programmer who can build an intricate social networking site. Without revealing too much information, I am in the process of obtaining an LLC for this venture, which should turn out to be extremely successful. Hopefully someone within your college could assist me in the formation of a website and a
fee would be paid for such assistance.

Let's play "count the red flags".
"I could write code sitting here with a loaded gun on a timer, pointed at my head."

In most startups the proposition is metaphorically identical: succeed before money runs out or die. The kind of intense pressure that exists in all of the competitive startups I've seen. It's a marathon race, not a stroll through the park.

The founders motivation is ownership and the potential payout that ownership provides. If you take so much investment that you can't sell your company for enough to profit from it then you may as well close up shop (which happens frequently).
From YC's current FAQ:

Q:Our group has two ideas. Can we submit two applications?

A: Ok. Just submit them from the YC accounts of different founders.

From a version of the same page from last year on archive.org:

Q: Our group has two ideas. Can we submit two applications?

A: Ok, but no more than two.
thanks for the post :)
Can't you do continuations in Ruby? Anyway I'm sure you could do it with simple RoR sessions.
Forgot about that awesome Marissa Mayer slide.
Thanks for the feedback, Ryan. Seems like it was a great time this year.
Wow, that is an amazing amount, I will be very interested to see what they can accomplish with this amount, I checked out their site and it makes me very hopeful!
Citizendium: A new Wikipedia competitor with more contributor responsibility
Marketing Tricks for Web 2.0
Web 2.0 Startups in Seattle
Jeez, that name is terrible.

Making that contribution system closed is going to kill a lot of the appeal that made Wikipedia so popular.
Ustream was described as a "poor version of Stickam" in the post :-)

We launched over a year ago on Stickam and have done mobile broadcasts at Techcrunch, Sundance, with Paris Hilton, etc.

We're actually excited about Justin.tv though. It's helping to bring attention to the concept and there's room enough for at least a few big players. We're also very friendly and open to working together -- unless Justin guys feel they need an artificial nemesis :-)

I also personally love it since I'm a big YC fan, enjoyed using Kiko, and generally love streaming technology.
Yeah, if I have learned anything from watching various startups and the like is that bureaucracy kills you, better to give a small team of developers with concise goals some money and have someone keep them on track. If they need more people then let them explain why, and how they are going to use them.
Interesting, I especially liked the idea of interconnecting already popular applications to increase overall functionality.
Adding iCal would have been trivial compared to the amount of traffic it must have garnered.
From the blog post:

==

"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," he stated. If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise.

"Young people are just smarter," he said with a straight face. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know," he answered. "Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family." In the absence of those distractions, he says, you can focus on big ideologies. He added, "I only own a mattress." Later: "Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what's important."

==

Isn't age discrimination illegal?
haha yeah not so catchy as Wikipedia. I think the restrictions will turn off a lot of people also. Seems like you have to prove that you're a professional in your field. I wonder how they'll regulate that without tediously screening every person on the site.
msgbeepa: go spam on Digg.
MusicPlusTV.com - Broadcast TV for Web Era
Paul Buchheit: Did anyone else notice that TechStars and Y-Combinator have the same application?
Yes which was odd. Their video was also rather scary. They do have a few interesting people involved in the project.
No, you control the saturation with the radius.
The YCombinator motto: "Make Something People Want".