I like Pandora a lot but a couple of months ago I switched to last.fm because it gave me more variety. Maybe it's time to check out Pandora again -- though last.fm is still 100% free.
I worry about people using the work 'hacker' so broadly that it becomes meaningless. Is a football player a hacker because he's 'hacking' his body to optimize the actions that would lead to a touchdown?
Please let's stick to 'hacker' as a person who creates innovative technology.
You can't ignore growth though. In many cases it's much more important than current active users. A product with 1mil active users and a 10x growth rate is much more valuable than a product with 5mil users and a 2x growth rate. The same calculation applies to stock valuations. A stock isn't priced by current earnings, but by expected future earnings.
He didn't say that criticism of Israel is anti-semitism. He just said 'No Politics. No anti-semitism.' I agree with him that HN should have no politics and no anti semitism or any racism for that matter. Don't you?
I agree with Paul's point, but it seems like the flip side of the equation is that most startups these days don't have the kind of big exits that internet giants like Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo and Google had (or even the mass market penetration that MySpace and Facebook have gotten for that matter). If a these new startups truly had the potential to capture huge markets, they would need the funding, because 3 guys in an apartment simply can't go after a $5bil opportunity. I think the phenomenon Paul describes is the result of 2 trends, not just one: 1) it's cheaper to start companies and 2) most startups are going after small markets (or whatever is left from big markets that bigger companies have already captured).
Smart money seems to be in great scarcity these days. Those so called smart Wall St firms are the first to line up for tax dollar handouts. Those firms that should be in chapter 11 right now for their stupidity are the ones you and I are now involuntarily working for by proxy of our government.
I don't get your reasoning. He and his cofounders built a product that people wanted. The product spread mostly virally by word of mouth. This is the classic definition of succeeding by one's efforts, not privilege. How does an allegedly elite rolodex (at the time when he was 19, no less) factor into the equation?
facebook.com was originally owned by someone else.
The incubator is the new meta-startup. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, you spread them over multiple startups to maximize the probability of scoring big. And you don't have to the dirty work involved in running a product company. It's a great idea for those who can pull it off.
This essay is just silly. It makes it sound as if our generation is the first to invent entrepreneurship. Millions of our parents' generation own their own businesses. Entrepreneurship isn't a new discovery. My dad started a software company in the 70s. He didn't have hacker news and y combinator. He wasn't even in silicon valley. And guess what, he did have access to information. Maybe he wasn't inundated by it like we are today, but sometimes I question the value of spending so much time everyday consuming internet "wisdom".
Matt advocates working for oneself is an undisputed ideal, as if it would be better to be an independent owner of a pizza shop than an early (or even not so early) employee of Google.
I think it's likely our generation will have to work harder than our parents and for much less rewards. We have quite a mess to clean up. We'll have to pay for a 10 trillion dollar debt, endless wars, and a generation of retired baby boomers to support in social security and medicare. All this with a declining manufacturing industry and a totally dysfunctional financial system. Contrary to Matt's conclusions, our parents have had it relatively easy.
Starting your own company is an awesome thing to do but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're privileged geniuses for doing so.
And I thought the democrats were the good guys... Now I really don't know whom to vote for. Wall St will get rich, but the political system has gone bankrupt.
Buffet mentions a crisis of confidence in the markets as a reason for the bailout. But what is the cost to society of the loss of confidence in the government? What will happen to people's faith in our political system if this bill passes despite the opposition of the American people? What will be the effect on the people once the realization sets in that their government only represents the ultra rich?
I think it'll be much worse than letting the current "crisis" play out without instigating the biggest coerced transfer of wealth in history from American taxpayers to a few people on Wall St.
I'm a fan of YC and I don't need convincing that YC provides great value to a young startup -- more than the 6% equity it takes. However, I just don't believe that PG & co are capable of separating the potential winners from the losers based on a short application and a 10 minute interview. So many factors affect the success of a startup and I don't think that anyone can have such predictive abilities based on so little input. Maybe YC knows is good at filtering out the lowest 40% or so, but between the teams that have some viability I believe it's simply impossible to call which will succeed and which won't using YC's selection method.
The only way to measure YC's ability in picking winners is to to have PG & co rate a bunch of non-YC founding teams at the early stage of their startups, wait a few years, and see how well their predictions held up against more or less random predictions. The experiment must involve non YC startups is that YC enhances their startups' chances of success, which can create the likely false impression that YC excels at picking successful teams rather than at guiding the teams it happens to pick to success.