skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you very much. You are right. There might be lot of changes after launch and thats when we will find out what users want us to deliver.
(old - nov 2005) Techcrunch - Companies I'd like to Profile but don't exist
Some are still interesting ideas.
But surely you can throw some logic in there too to increase your odds...there are some very legitimate reasons for thinking some ventures will fail.

I liked Paul's post, but it comes off as encouraging people to fly by the seat of their pants so to speak.

Entrepreneurship is about taking risks, certainly. But not just any risks. It's about taking calculated risks.

I don't pretend to be the know-all experienced entrepreneur, but that came from Reid Hoffman and if I trust anyone I trust him.
He did follow up on this post:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/25/a-year-later-the-companies-i-wanted-to-profile-but-didnt-exist/
nice pics!
Are people still prepared to pay for software?
Exactly my point. The hacker clique was born in college, and it will take something to break into it once it has been established and relocates to SF.

My point is this--I suspect that relocating yourself to San Francisco with an idea but without hacker friends that already live there (or ones that plan to) isn't going to get you very far. It would seem that everyone in the valley is very focused on their idea and bringing it to fruition and doesn't have any intention of letting you in on their venture just because you happen to also now live in the Bay Area.

Maybe I'm wrong, though; maybe there is a place where post-college hackers in the bay (PCHITB) freely mingle such that newcomers sans partners/friends can enter into their startup, which is otherwise a closed (intentionally so) society; maybe this is a part of the essence of things like Y-Combinator dinners, super happy dev house, etc. Just thinking outloud at this point. :-)
Yes, absolutely you should try to improve the odds. I hope it doesn't seem like I'm suggesting that we should be completely random. My point is more that new things are all inherently risky -- I had very legitimate reasons for thinking that Google would fail, for example.

As you say, this is about taking calculated risks. In my example, I tried to show how just a 20% chance of success could be very profitable (vs no profit from the 10% chance of success that you might get from being more random with your investments).

Let me know if you have a suggestion for how this should be made clearer.
I'm guessing NewRoo?
pg, so if in 2 months news.ycombinator had a 20% chance of making you rich, whats the lowest offer you'd take? :) jokes
"You should never plan on being acquired. Remember that getting bought for $1.65B (or even $5M) just isn't likely for 99.9% of web apps. Profitability should be your #1 goal."

A variation of this comes up all the time, and I would claim that it means he's not really talking about startups. At least not in the Paul Graham, "How to Make Wealth" (http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html) sense of the term. Presumably a startup taking investment is working toward liquidity for its investors, which in practical terms means acquisition.

Not that I feel this necessarily invalidates his advice (a lot of it had nothing to do with this). He never claims to be talking about startups. Web applications that are not startups can still make money.

It's just that I hear this often enough it's hard not to feel like I'm drinking the kool-aid on this one. What gives? Is there and unspoken "you can go for acquisition, but we need to to pretend it's really profitability you're after" thing going on? Certainly VCs would rather the former. Am I just bat-shit-crazy? Not that that's going to dissuade me from shooting for acquisition...
such a duplicate posting. already had this a while back, but for those that missed it - watch it again and again
Let's just settle this and agree that quality music production has become more accessible.
There is another thread, a debate why MySpace is so "ugly" contrary to Virb
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=5802

I believe its not about looks as its about UI. If the end-user experience is bad, then the looks will be ignored in an instant. If the UI has flow, is functioning and it gives what users came for and it doesn't cause that many problems in user experience, then the looks is only something that can be neglected if thats not too bad.

There can be times that the UI is something that wins user over other sites. The known cases of Flickr (that blended good looks too) and GMail.

But I've never seen a fancy looking site win users over others, just for that... and I will be a little hard now, and say that, users will not switch over to Virb just for looks (and I don't see anything new or fresh)...maybe new users will pick it over MySpace (if they like it more) but see masses of existing users moving to it, i don't see it happening..
Apollo's Competition
I looked at their site (Slingshot) and although the framework seems interesting, there's a catch. To use it free you have to host on their "Joyent Accelerators." Bah... no thanks. I'll just Apollo or XUL.
Joyent Slingshot: Allows you to port rails applications which converge between the web and the desktop
Good points, but I'd urge paying off the mortgage before (4). Paying it off twenty years early saves a wad in the long run. And not having mortgage payments as a recurring monthly drain makes (4) easier.
Any takers? I'm not after names, but numbers.
8 Ways to get VC attention from Guy Kawasaki
I wonder if there's going to be a change in traffic (# or composition) at the end of the YC application process.
It feels like the "Truman Show", except the lead character knows he's being watched.
LogoStore rips off Logo design, then claims they made it in the first place.
Yuk, Selling (Fractals of Change/Nerd CEO blog)
Starting as a Sole Practitioner
70K net, if the alternative is a 20% chance of getting rich after a couple of years. 70K is below YC's average initial valuation, as I understand it. I wonder how much it would bother them...
70K is enough to live like a student for 10 years in a low-cost region, to learn and work on just about anything.
Mossberg Should Lead Copyright Fight
What amuses me about all these books is that they showcase a group of over-brainy already-successful people, and then sell these books to the rest of us averagers. Telling us we can do it too.
And we lap it all up, not seeing the gaps.

You know what would really succeed?
Finding out how an averager can achieve breakout success and then selling it to all the other averagers. And I'm not talking weird concepts and books like Psycho-cybernetics etc.
It turns out that a large percentage of people who visited eser.org were getting error 500's.

I just now fixed this bug.

I had written my own single-process event-driven HTTP server using Linux epoll, and my code improperly handled a boundary case where the HTTP request header was split up amongst more than one read operation from the open socket.

Specifically, if the code did not see a \r\n\r\n within the first chunk of bytes it read from the socket, that specific client connection would hang and go unanswered. The front-end load balancer would see this and report an error 500 to the client, which is what people were seeing.

I should have tested this more thoroughly, but the whole thing is only a few days old since conception. Hopefully, I've got all of the major bugs out of it ;)

eser.org
thanks - it seems quite complex - what time period to vest over, how to do the contracts.
Purple Cow Redux
Fascinating story. Really liking interesting marketing / distribution strategies now days.
Another way of looking at this (actually just a rephrasing of what you've said) is that the mathematical expectation of a strategy is the sum of (the profit of each event multiplied by the probability of it happening.) That is

expec = sum(prob(x)x)

For an $ investment, $expect = sum(prob(x)x - invest(x))

Say we have two strategies: One invests nothing and is right 90% of the time, but pays 0 when it's right; the other invests $50,000 and is right 10% of the time. When it is right it pays 10x, or $500,000.

exp(strategy 1) = prob(x)x - 0x = (0.9)0 - 0 = 0

exp(strategy 2) = prob(x)x - x = (0.1)10 -1 = 0

So if we only have a 10% success rate and a 10x payoff, we might as well be sipping tequila on the beach. But if we are smart, or hard working, and increase our probability to 20%:

exp(strategy 2) = prob(x)x - x = (0.2)10 -1 = 1

which is a positive expectation, which is a good thing. Increasing the probability OR increasing the payoff increases the expectation.
I second Paul's recommendation to read Taleb's Fooled by Randomness; however, one should be aware that Taleb has been on "sabbatical" from his fund for well over a year. His analysis was good, but the markets apparently didn't read his book and he went under.
I didn't mean to suggest that there are no programmers who can do good design -- I'm sure there are many. I suspect that most programmers (like most bus drivers, or most doctors) aren't good designers, though. But unlike bus drivers or doctors, programmers are often pressed into design work: sometimes by their boss, sometimes by their ego. :)
What is a web 2.0 developer?
Someone I work with just got back from a Gardner conference on Portals. Apparently they discussed Blogs, Wikis and the Social Web heavily. At one of the sessions someone apparently mentioned that people should watch out for developers that call themselfs Web 2.0 developers. I pride myself being a web 2.0 developer and I was wondering what your thoughts are on what a web 2.0 developer is and why its a bad idea branding yourself as one.
Top 10 things 10 years of professional software development taught me
Google AdSense: Facts, FAQs and Tools
Users always pay for software. And I don't mean in some abstract, "pay with screen real-estate" way - they pay with dollars.

Advertising models will result in users paying more for the advertisers' products, either by increasing volume or tolerating an increased price. If it does not, the advertisers will stop advertising and the software will go away. And every other business model (go ahead! Try me! :) can be similarly reduced to money flowing from users' pockets to yours.

Choosing an advertising model is not a good fall-back strategy for a product idea that people won't pay for: it's useful only as an optimization strategy - that is, worth pursuing if the advertisers will pay more than the users.

But if you don't think people will pay real dollars for what you're building -- I say stop building it and go to a movie.
Guys, when formulating your magic number in your head, not forget to include taxes...that's up to 50% gone right there. So your $1M is now $500K. I speak from experience on this. It's a good story over a beer.

btw - Did you know the SEC is going to pass a rule that no longer considers people with $1M in assets "rich", they are changing the bar to $2.5M...this was in last week's wall st. journal.

This is a tough one to answer since I am committed to my idea, and while money is important I want to see it through. To an investor though, their goals are to get out as soon as they can with as much as they can. Obviously you can't have a $100M company in 3 months, but you could have something that gains A-round valuations from a VC.
Startup failure can be good?
For news.YC. idea-team matchmaking. The shore is crowded; get into the boats!
Why Combinator? Should You Join Paul Graham's Gang For The Gifted?
Hmm... read some links in the comments too. http://valleywag.com/tech/venture-capital/the-curse-of-guy-kawasaki-230871.php
Coding By Dogma
You guessed right
There are lots of super intelligent, but dissatisfied, hackers that work at 500+ employee companies in the bay. However, they have a different problem. Somehow you have to convince them to ditch the gold-plated handcuffs and take a big risk to do something with you. This is hard, but maybe not as hard as breaking into a 2 person venture....
"7. Projects vs. Businesses: Personally, I think YC is... not really concerned with selecting what may... become "real" companies... I think YC leans a bit too heavily towards the "build it and they will come" model..."

I'm not sure he understands the YCs' insight that startups with lots of happy users almost always succeed financially, one way or the other - the only things that kills them are founder fights, and major blunders, etc.
"I think YC leans a bit too heavily towards the 'build it and they will come' model and for inexperienced entrepreneurs (just about all of the YC founders), this can distort reality."

MSPW != field of dreams.

What YC actually says is that MSPW is more important than monetization.
I do agree that one of the great things that YC brings to the table are early users, who are willing to try thing sout and point out the problems.

The people who are spending time following YC companies are the ones who are more likely to give the site a shot- They're also often people who CARE about UI, Ease of use, and the other features that teams often Need reminding about.

Having 10 e-mails in the morning yelling that the new change makes things tougher, or that the background color causes eye-bleeding helps to avoid a Myspace-like situation.

Having the "Right" first users is crucial, and YC helps bring them (As does Reddit, if you're up to making it there, but that's a tough crowd at times.)
or more precisely, harder
Well, I could argue (and will) that the two are not mutually exclusive. Startups that think at least a wee bit about how to build a business may earn themselves more runway and hence have higher chances of ultimately building something users will love.
"Teams vs. Individuals: YC leans strongly towards selecting startups that two or more founders. I'm a strong advocate of this myself as I believe that having two or more founders in an early-stage startup significantly improves the chances of success. By explicitly stating this requirement, YC forces early-stage entrepreneurs to find co-founders. This is a good thing as if there's a problem with finding a co-founder, that's an early signal of a problem (either with the founder or the idea or both), and everyone's better off knowing that sooner rather than later."

I am trying to understand why he is trying to discourage single founders in contrast with YC that is not doing that. If someone is determined to commit to his ideas, then not founding a co-founder will not discourage him. And its better than leaving your ideas completely.

We know it's hard more than anyone who hasn't experienced it. I just don't understand the absolute attack towards single founder from his side. He should know that if someone decided to take the single founder route he is absolute aware of the effects of the choice.

And if it's hard to be single founder, its better than finding someone who you are not aware of his real character and passions.

I dont like it that in order to differentiate themselves or not, from the fear of copying themseleves (some "journalists") and from saying the exact
word of someone, they use some point of reference to later exagerate it. And I am reffering to the phrase
"explicitly..." who is contrary to what YC sais i think..

I don't really like the writer's attitude attacking his readers -- am I the only one here?
As the writer, I'll take full responsibility. Apologies if my attitude seems overly harsh (not intended to be).

Also, here's a direct quote from Paul Graham:

"This is one reason Y Combinator has a rule against investing in startups with only one founder. Practically every successful company has at least two. And because startup founders work under great pressure, it's critical they be friends."
All these folks are missing the bigger picture: the launch of a stereotypical web2.0 website by a couple 20 year olds is only the BEGINNING.

Chances are if some kid launched a web2.0 mashup at 20, at 25 he would be bored and paying with more mature ideas(which some could argue isn't inherently a better thing).
"I don't really like the writer's attitude attacking his readers -- am I the only one here?"

Surely you're being a bit sensitive because this topic hits so close to home. Try not being so defensive, sometimes the last thing you want to hear is just what you need.

You may be discouraged, but I don't think he's trying to do that. He just happens to agree with almost everyone I've heard from on this issue. Feel free to prove yourself as an exception, no one has said it's impossible.

Maybe collecting a list of single-founder companies would be inspirational for you? Here's some off the top of my head: Brad Fitzpatrick/LiveJournal, Markus Frind/PlentyOfFish, Mark Fletcher/ONElist.
Gang for the gifted? I kinda thought of Y Combinator as a School of Rock for web entrepreneurs. ("One great website can change the world!")
How Do I Compete With *THAT*? - Interesting discussion thread
Where do get that info about Taleb? I searched around a bit, and while there seems to be a lot of speculation, I couldn't find any real evidence that his fund ran into trouble.

An older version of his web page (cached on Google) says that he's done with his sabbatical and book writing (new book out next month) and back to work:

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:1nVmMgBra40J:www.fooledbyrandomness.com/%3Fref%3DSevSevil.Com+taleb+sabbatical&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=15&gl=us

"I took a one year sabbatical to finish The Black Swan (which lasted 2 1/2 years). Now I am back but will not discuss my business activities -- only my literary and technical ideas on the philosophy of chance uncertainty, & probability. In a way I am back in business taking a rest sabbatical from thinking."
Question for YC Applicants: What's the lowest offer you'd take after *zero* months?
The discussion in the "What's the lowest offer you'd take" thread gave me an interesting idea for a related question:

Suppose you've just been accepted to the SFP. In addition, you have someone else offering each founder $N to turn down YC and abandon the startup. You're allowed to go straight on to starting some other startup, but you're not allowed to work on any related idea or work with any of your current cofounders. What's the lowest value of N you'd take?

I have three things going for me and my startup right now: a good idea, a great cofounder, and a uniquely low opportunity cost because I'll be graduating from college right before I start. Together, I value those things at about $250k. Having YC's offer in hand would increase that but only by maybe $100k, because I reason that if I can get accepted once, then I can probably get accepted a second time given a similarly good idea and cofounder.
been done:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowdsourcing_million_heads.php
"I think there's some value to actually thinking about business models earlier in the process. Simply identifying market opportunity (i.e. how do you make money)"

I think at least it's a valuable exercise to imagine that you're not going to have a free version of your product. Imagine that you're actually selling it to a real customer. Would you be embarrassed to say it costs money? How would support work differently? How about uptime? Who would actually pay?

I'm not sure that's necessary in all cases, but it does seem to raise a lot of interesting questions useful for self-examination.
And burn them when you get there!
Private Equity Goes Public
Hmm, I think with that argumentation you'd get a slippery slope argument. "If you take 19 Million Dollars, would you say "no" to 18999999$ ?" Of course not, and this argument can be continued. Therefore the value one can state is surely one that gives a rough sense of the amount of money that one would take for the company, a fuzzy value. Of ocurse most people would be willing to take a lesser amount, but when they state the lesser amount, they'd probably take even then a smaller sum again.

And of course if an investor would be willing to invest 19 million than he would probably be willing to invest 20 million as well... after having established the rough amount of money one would take the outcome seems to depend on negotiation skills. And to betray the actual lowest amount one would take might weaken one's own position ;-)
Apple TV rocks
This makes all the hoopla around video sharing sites more urgent. The more easily web video gets off the PC and onto your normal TV, the more people will watch during non-work hours, and the longer the format can become (at work, you watch youtube clips, not 30 minute shows, and only nerds watch TV in front of a computer).

If this becomes as mass market as the iPod, the market for higher quality web content will explode.
I was honest responding to an honest attack.

I can't believe he wasn't aware and expecting single founders would read the article.
I accept opinions. I don't accept misrepresentations of opinions.

I prefer sounding hard than being silent.

circa 2007
"The ideal company would have two or three founders. We'll consider those with four or five. We're very reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have accepted a couple." http://ycombinator.com/s2007.html
True. But we're not encouraging anyone to go work at those companies just to meet dissatisfied hackers, are we? :-) Incidentally, that's how I met my co-founder--although that's not why I joined the company in the first place (that was because I was needed a job). :-)
I'd say that not the amount of time spent on the development of the software is the crucial question but the expected earnings. If the idea is really novel or promising and the expected revenue huge than an investor is paying for the idea and probably the team and not for the work done in these three months. If the team consists of gifted inviduals and a great idea than it seems to me not to utopian to accept only a very high sum because it is rather rare to have a very promising idea and gifted people together.
I must be missing it. To help me understand the error in my ways, can you:

a) identify specifically the part where I attacked?

b) cite where my position on the issue tried to be a statement of fact that was wrong.

Truth is: I do believe (as do many others) that having more than one founder increases of success. PG has gone on record as saying he won't fund startups with just one founder. Neither of these is factually incorrect. I could be wrong to believe it, but the statement of fact that I believe it is true.
The "gifted" is a little misleading. We're pretty explicit that we think succeeding in a startup depends more on determination than intelligence. Oddly enough, though, "gang" is on the mark. One of the unexpected consequences of funding large batches of startups is that they form a fairly tough peer-to-peer mesh to help one another.
a)the use of "explicitly": means absolutely--categorically

"there's a problem with finding a co-founder, that's an early signal of a problem (either with the founder or the idea or both),"

b) the fact that YC states they funded single founders is contrary to what you refer to

I never said that is not better to have more people.
Dear Clown Co.: Name This Thing Fast Before It's Too Late
Got it. Fair enough.
I agree, but an issue to think about is how would a startup fit into this equation? Venues like AppleTV and XBOX 360 are generally closed, proprietary systems that have some extent of control over what content flows through their pipes.

Fareed, I'm so glad to see posts like this as I was starting to think that every person going to Startup School was interested in making some sort of social network/photo/"web 2.0" site.

We should definitely hang out. =)
What a strange question, perhaps I've missed the point.

"If you were accepted to the SFP how much money would it take for you to turn it down?"

For me SFP isnt about money, its about the experience. I want to build something great and be a part of a community of people who enjoy doing this. After seeing the YC dinner on Justin.tv and talking to people I've met on news.yc I'm more certain than ever that this is what I want to do. If I was offered a place in the SFP, no amount of money would stop me.
Google As Dictator: 5 Most Devious Things It Could Do, If It Were Evil