Its easy to create perceptions of yourself that are simply not true. I was one of the people who got that mail. I really thought about shooting an upset sounding email to Paul. But thought the better of it -- amazing that every other person on that list did the same. Only when I met the YCombinators on the interviews to a subsequent cycle did I figure that they were nice people (inspite of not making it). Absolutely no hard feelings, though. Looking back, I simply was not prepared enough to do a startup. I eventually got around to realizing that I did not need money to built a product -- just a committed co-founder -- and so thats what I did. Yesterday's rejection did not sting at all.
For an experienced team -- probably not. A bunch of 26 year olds will definitely have a crisis of credibility -- even with a functional product (which is the case with us). To a very large extent, a group like YC will give us the kind of credibility we need to approach the Indian angel/VC community. Not to mention the fact that the Indian press will love it :)
"Acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so."
"I can guarantee that you won't go in the order or at the pace you expected. You will need to adapt the pace of the presentation to the needs of the VC."
-- This is something I can relate to based on our YC interview last year in Boston. We actually prepared a pitch thinking we'd actually have time to parrot it out. How wrong we were :) Well, at least we know what to expect if we get called again.
Startups that make what people really want are likelier to survive the downturn when it does come. For example, Peter Lynch has said that downturns are a good time to invest in companies that make breakfast cereal -- people don't ever stop buying that. A case in point are the Indian outsourcing companies that saw their stock skyrocket during the last recession -- at a time when American companies were using them as a means to cut costs.
Its interesting to see Google try and accomplish the same goals (marketshare in the online office space) through much smaller acquisitions (writely, zenter).
Its interesting to note that given the usability constraints of captchas people will almost always go for a "more usable" and algorithmically complex alternative if one is available. The use of akismet to stop comment spam in blogs in a case in point.
There are 2 cases to look at:
1) Personal email IDs: Most people used some form of web-based email. For those of us that use Gmail for example, I dont know if spam is that big of a problem anymore. Some spam (at least for me) makes its way through the gmail filters -- but its at a level where I can live with it. I would imagine that Google's recent Postini acquisition will end up making the Gmail anti-spam solution better.
2) So that leaves us with enterprises. The solutions proposed in the article will not work for enterprises. DKIM for example, will not work in the botnet case. CAPTCHA based solutions have usability constraints -- they cannot be mandated upon customers and others who frequently mail people within the organization. So most enterprises are forced to rely on gateway based antispam solution thats basically a cat and mouse game.
Dubai is run by folks with vision. Folks who realize that oil is a finite, non-renewable resource and they need to spend their petrodollars preparing for the day that it runs out. Apparently, its quite the tourist destination. Indoor skiing, snorkeling and duty free shopping just a 4 hr flight from Frankfurt.
"Read this instead: 'The Prince' by Niccolo Machiavelli.
Why: It will provide you with the precise moral foundation you'll need to be successful on the corporate ladder."
I dont recall PG ever bringing this up in his essays. But I think this is why a lot of hackers gravitate towards startups. They cant get themselves to follow the advice in that book.
Well written. As someone who works for a major IPS vendor - I can point out one more area in which Gartner was way off. Namely, the market sizing for the IPS industry. We are #1/#2 in the industry in terms of market share and by extrapolating from sales graphs and such it seems that IPS is nowhere close to the billion dollar market that Gartner said it would be. Another distinction that is obvious to an engineer but not to an analyst/VC type is that IPS is just a marketing buzzword. IPS = IDS with the option to drop packets and block flows. As for your comments on ncircle, I agree that they are limping. But I am not so sure they're addressing a niche any longer. The vulnerability assessment people (worked for one of those as well) are busy going after the compliance market -- which doesnt seem like so much of a niche given the kind of $$ enterprises are spending on SOX.