I've done four years Japanese. 1-2 years Chinese + 3-4 months immersive Chinese at Beijing University. My chinese is way better than my japanese, so immersive study definitely works. Chinese is very hard because it works on tones. In English and Japanese, you can put the emphasis on the wrong syllables or speak in a monotone and still make sense. In chinese, not using proper inflections makes you say something else.
1 year will get you through every day life, but trying to communicate on a business level or even listen to the news on TV will be very difficult. It's possible to be fluent enough to do business in 2 years but you'll need to get a Chinese girlfriend. After 3-4 years you'll start to lose the "accent."
does anyone ever want to click on the leaders link on top? its pretty static. most of us follow your example nick, we contribute cause its fun and interesting. thanks man!
this post had nothing to do with getting into YC funding, the funding cycle reset idea was simply a suggestion of adequate time to reset.
for the record, i am not applying to YC next cycle or any other cycle. just wanted to help the site.
For one of the companies, founder is a really nice guy. It's a software startup. He's been working hard on his company for 6 years. Can't say much more.
But, I read below that you're doing a Rails idea.
It benefits you to outsource if you need a lot of C++ or Java work done cheaply. Examples of this would be if your idea requires multi-platform support or porting.
1) You're developing a game that would benefit from a wide array of desktop and hardware suppor (osx, windows, linux plus the different graphics cards and shaders languages and versions)
2) Or you needsoftware support for your new Dodgeball Cellphone app on a wide array of smartphones.
3) You need to port large existing codebase to another platform. Itunes from Mac to Windows.
4) You need a lot of artwork done to support conceptual artwork that you already have.
For a rails idea, since you're working at such a high level, you should be doing this work yourself or closely with another person that you have a good relationship with. It sounds more like you need a solid co-founder or you need to learn rails or django (it only takes a couple days to get started). Most of the time, we get stuck on little design decisions (what kind of validation should I do on my logins etc etc?). This is stuff you need to figure out yourself. It's hard to pay people to think for you.
Going to China pays big when you're looking for early stage employees or when you need to temporarily outsource a piece of your company (at 20% cost) that you see yourself replacing with a better solution later.
If you're prototyping ideas for YCombinator, and if you have a good idea, someone will join you as a partner.
I have to agree with kingkong here. Organized Horse Archers cannot be beat by any pre-gunpowder army. People like to the label the mongols as "The Horde." But a Mongol Army of 25k consistently beat armies 5 times its size. It basically comes down to the fact that they have faster horses than you, and their composite bows have 150% the distance of even the English Long Bow (and can be fired from the saddle). If your army had these two qualities, what would you do?
The downside is that its hard to defend the empire that you've conquered using horse archery.
Alexander the Great reputedly defeated Scythian horse archers, but he left no records as to how this is was achieved. He probably used his companion cavalry to chase the horse archers against a river or into a forest. Like what the romans did to Hannibal's father. I think the Egyptians were able to beat the Mongols ONCE but only with superior numbers and a lot of preparation.
Anyway, it is USUALLY true that winning a war is about who's side has stronger will to fight. Who said that? Xenophon?
But tactically, horse archers that always run away cannot be beat. They rain arrows down upon you, burn your farms and supply lines, and taunt your huge 200,000 man armies out to be crushed in a simulatenous attack on all sides by 5 different columns of Horse Archers all arriving at the same time. They are will-breakers. Like startups picking away at slow thinking corporations.
This is similar to how the Athenians eventually defeated the Spartans by never engaging them in close combat and raining arrows and spears on them. Tactics. Not exactly the bravest thing, the Spartans would have called this Womanly fighting.
With the advent of gunpowder, artillery, and combined arms. You can't pull this off anymore. Thank god.
Lesson: Mongols only fight pitched battles they've already won.
Although for us startup guys, the point that PG might be impressing is that, its the company with the most determination that wins. Not the one with the most money/people.
kingkong here is implying that tactics and adaptive thinking is the key, not just having a hard head and tunnel vision.
I just got back from a business development trip to China. China programmers are cheap. Their monthly salary is $1,000 for the top of their graduating class programmer. Their work ethic is impeccable. Unfortunately, their english is not. This is where Indian outsourcing shines, their english language skills and eventual ability to meet spec is 10-15 years ahead of the Chinese as a society.
Although there are some other incentives to outsourcing in China. I was told that in some major cities like Xian, the Chinese government is offering free office space and subsidizes the salary of each of your employees if an american startup or company decides to hire employees there. Xian has particularly good tech schools (they would be like the UW of China), but they have 50% white collar unemployment.
(sorry can't find the link for the government program right now... that tip was given to me by a senior partner at a private equity firm... I'll try to find it guys. although, I would much rather recruit top grads from #1 universities than save a few thousand dollars a month by setting up operations in some average place with subsidies)
So I am definitely looking into China or India for my startup. But, I would not recommend going to China unless you or one of your co-founders speaks chinese. The major problems as other people have noted, are quality control and communication. Otherwise, your outsourcing has just about as much success as saying that you plan to move to Hawaii and live off the ocean by asking dolphins to fish and pick up sunken treasure for you.
I think a great startup idea would be to help American companies utilize idling chinese programmers by providing middle management, oversight, and translators (and job training + good pay for your Chinese employees).
I've met a couple guys our age in China (25-26) who have already sold their company for $20-30 million (US dollars) and walked away with $6-10 million. All they did was copy a popular idea in the US like Pandora or Last.FM, hire some cheapass programmers for $1k a month a pop, clone the idea completely, sell it to a larger company. These guys probably sat next to you in class at Berkeley or UCLA. I also know of a few US startups that already finished a Series A ($7 mil) and have a majority of employees outsourced to China. Solo founder.
I like the mental model description. I think programming (like other skilled arts) requires constant evolution of programming mental models or memes.
Developing new languages is a great exercise in creating new tools to solve specific problems. Rails really kicked the status quo and made programming so much easier for a bunch of us. But is it possible to ever create a language that will make all the different kind of programming problems equally easy? It always seems like there is a tradeoff, programming abstractions vs performance. As another case, all of us know english, but how many of us are great writers? (not I! haha)
Great link though. Look forward to the day when game programming is as easy as brainstorming out loud to our computers.
Nice movie plot for Jet Li perhaps, but they don't actually explain how to kill yourself in all universes. So, unless you're a cat or Solid Snake, you can get out of that box now.
Probably an equity question too. If you demo in March and look for funding, your answer is your valuation. Write $4mil, VC gives you 2mil, they get 50%.
When that dude up there said "you get either food or success. forget food." I was secretly thinking, "if only Hannibal Lector knew that." But yah, that boca burger with hummus and pita thing is vegan and PG's N-based recipe would be vegan if u switched the beef bullion out for veggie stock. Gotta try it.
Despite all the questionable spaghetti we've all whipped up in college, well made spaghetti and meatballs is a true dish.
If any of you Silicon Valley guys have time, try a little joint called Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in SF Mission. It's on Virginia Ave. Eat there all the time, Spaghetti and Meatballs is killer.
Has good visual examples and step by step thought processes for designing the type, layout, and visual effects that we place on text to convey an overall design message.
I haven't actually gotten around to trying this out and getting it working, but Enomalism.com claims to have open source software that lets you to manage your VMs and ease deployment between VMWare and AWS EC2. Seems too good to be true.