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Comment by david927 | Hacker News Reader

This fits with what I'm now sensing about YC: that they're not as interested in innovation as with what sounds good. Personally speaking, CouchDB is better than a lot of the companies that they have funded, and it's truly innovative.

If Steve Jobs didn't have Woz, he would be a used-car salesman right now. Woz essentially invented the PC. He could find a thousand people like Jobs in any MBA program. Sure marketing is important, but it's frosting on the technology cake. If you get the technology right, the marketing will follow.

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And if Woz didn't have Jobs, he'd still be at Hewlett Packard. A thousand people like Jobs at any MBA program? You've got to be joking.

I have no particular love for YC, but let's be fair. They are interested in things people can use, especially web apps. Things it might be possible to make money off, one day. While I love CouchDB and use it every day now - it's not an end user kind of thing. I'm not really sure what it is. Apache is a pretty good home for it, IMO.

Of course it's not an end-user sort of thing. The market is technical, which doesn't respond well to marketing and early adopters tend to resent it. So why in the world would they want a Jobs co-founder? I don't know but my best guess is that it's because Paul & co. don't really know what they're doing. There are situations where it works, but certainly not here. You wouldn't want one here -- just a single technical founder (or two).

In fact, all the great, innovative startups were a Woz or Woz/Woz combination. Ok, except for Apple, but again, Jobs really only added value later by playing VC. The seed level was a pure Woz play.

no offense but 'end user kind of thing' isn't always where the money is at, b2b is the real money.

of course you are right there aren't a thousand people like jobs, you'd be lucky to find 1, but the point of it is that there are plenty of people to fill his position, you just want to find half his brilliance. however, if your product is abysmal crap nothing will save it, not even Jobs. In fact part of the reason Jobs is so good is he'll cut your product, and you, for doing a crappy job.

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