DilipJ

it's weird that it's because of SOPA that people want to transfer away from GoDaddy. Their incredibly misogynistic ads should have been enough...

I'm really hopeful the kid will be a force for change. He was educated outside the country, and so was exposed to different cultures and ideas..he must have taken something positive away from that

i wish this means the end to that regime, or at the very least some sort of Khrushchev type loosing of control will occur. I dont think there is any other group of people on the planet that have been suffering for such a continuous period of time as the North Koreans. It's the greatest tragedy of our age

A 385 feet wingspan! amazing. It's about time someone beat the Spruce Goose.

an incredibly profound post. The rarity of life really is what makes it so precious

do you consider the "mac vs. pc" ads effective? Apple made the PC guy look stuffy and naive (although I found him endearing).

I guess we would no longer need passports or any government id. Just one look at us by the authorities and that's it.

isn't that why most people leave small towns, to go to a big city and be anonymous. To be able to get away from their past?

I know that was in jest (if not, you may be turning into a supervillian), but the actual implications of having facial recognition built into contacts is immense. It will be a Minority Report type world, where anonymity would be completely gone.

I guess it would mean no criminal outlaws or parole violators walking around, but for a common man to not be able to walk anywhere without everyone around him knowing everything there is to know about him....that's scary

It will be interesting to see if an aggregator like Yipit can succeed. I have used their services and they do help reduce the clutter that subscribing to multiple daily-deal sites tends to produce.

I thought it was great when I read it. For one, it shows that YC is a true meritocracy, where connections does not necessarily get you in. Second, it shows that this new round of YC startups is really going to be amazing, if someone with this level of pedigree (and intelligence) couldn't get in.

that's interesting. But I guess it's missing that fun factor...there has to something else to it to attract the attention of kids

That's a great point. It is certainly possible to teach history through interactive gaming.

The question is, can we do this for science/engineering/math? Is there a way to make learning STEM material through interactive gaming? Perhaps a 3d gaming world where you put together atoms, or a minecraft-type game where you learn about physics or civil engineering principles...the options are endless, and it could do a lot of good in getting kids interested and skilled at the more technical subjects

that's true, but that's also why I love Fast Company. If you want harder-hitting business journalism, it's better to stick with Fortune or Businessweek. There you can read about the underbelly of business,the Madoffs/Goldmans/oligarchs etc.

Fast Company and Inc. are both owned by the same firm, and they try to portray a more humanistic view of business, ie. social capitalism, the belief that entrepreneurs can one day solve all of the ills in the world. Its a very uplifting philosophy, and I for one find it encouraging.

I've never heard of the term entreporn though, if you coined it then congrats! I like the term, and maybe it is apt. Maybe that's precisely what someone is curious but hesitant about entrepreneurialism needs.

oh I see. For some reason I thought Jason Fried and pg were completely on the same wavelength when it comes to startup methodology

that's very well put. there certainly are people who cause others to commit suicide (such as an abusive spouse or parent), but they are precisely the sort of people who wouldn't feel any guilt over the suicide anyway.

You're making the mistake of thinking that wealth is correlated with suicides. In fact, the countries with the highest per-capita suicide rates tend to in Northern and Eastern Europe.

I can't explain why. I think the people there are more melancholy by nature. They also have some of the highest IQs in the world, so maybe there is a correlation there.

Sorry for the tangent, RIP Ilya.

fascinating article. It looks like Color raised a lot of money, then launched and found out why customers didn't want it, and now they are trying to pivot. Basically the opposite of what YC and 37signals recommends.

amazing! I can just imagine someone reading this a hundred years ago, not knowing all that was to transpire over the coming century. Who knows what the world will be like in 2111?

pg has also gotten into bed with Yuri Milner and his DST firm. You will notice that both Zynga and Groupon are recipients of DST funds, so it's no surprise that pg is promoting Pincus and Mason. In fact, I have no doubt that if any of the new batch of YC startups were to become successful and IPO, this sort of behaviour that Pincus is trying to pull may be emulated. When you lie with dogs you get fleas, etc.

maybe if YC were acquired by another VC firm, he might be able to get a large multiple off of his ownership stake.

either way, that would be cool to see pg become a billionaire. I wonder how he would shake up philanthropy? He might be able to find a better charity model than what currently exists today..

I think YC has a very strong brand among first-time entrepreneurs, in that pg has removed a lot of the intimidation surrounding VC firms. There's a lot of goodwill out there in the startup community for YC. Plus YC may just be the most succesful VC firm out there from the last few years, save for Accel

maybe some combination of an IQ or programming test plus a Myers-Briggs analysis. That would probably be a great way to screen. Or just recruit at MIT/CMU/Caltech...

I hope so too! Thiel definitely seems like the most visionary of the billionaires in the world, he probably will end up having a greater positive impact than anyone else on the Forbes list.

such as?

You don't need to spend a lot for kids to learn the basics. Public school budgets in the US need to be gutted, they are way too bloated as it is.

The issue today is that the federal government in the US has made it a priority that every kid go to college, including the ones in the lower half of the bell curve. That's a recipe for diluting the value of a college degree, which historically only the top quartile of students would receive.

No, a touchscreen tv would be horrible. That goes back to the RCA days where you had to get up and go to the tv to change the channels using the knob.

There's nothing wrong with the remote, just that it is starting to get very confusing to use (too many buttons). If Apple can find a way to make the modern remote less complex that would be a step in the right direction.

sure, but the success of the ipad, to me, shows that Apple is now more of a luxury marketer than anything else. People would buy an Apple TV for the same reason people pay more for a BMW. If Apple were to come out with a stylish looking TV, built in DVR and Bluray player, with easy WiFi connectability, and cloud storage of favorite shows/movies, and a streaming service for any movie or tv show you want to watch (which Apple can do with content providers because of its heft), and make it so simple your grandma could do it, then I am confident it would be such a success that their TV unit would become their greatest revenue generator by far.

"The reason VCs don't like Yuri is that he is disturbing the cosy world they formerly inhabited by offering more founder friendly terms."

I greatly respect and admire you pg, and god knows you're far more intelligent than I am, but surely you can't be so naive as to think that Milner is doing what he is doing out of some altruism for founders?

He is spending outlandish amounts on startups for the same reason Abramovich spends hundreds of millions on yachts, why the Sultan of Brunei spends millions on cars, and why the Saudi princes spend millions on trips to the Riviera. Because he never worked hard for the money, and so he doesn't care about throwing it around.

When a man works hard, he is loathe to spend it carelessly, because he knows the sacrifice in time and effort it took to acquire the money. In the words of the great Milton Friedman: "Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own". This applies not only to government officials but to the criminal element as well, from hoodlums to ponzi schemers and everything in between.

People like Milner and others associated with Russian oligarchs spend lavishly because the money they have came with no sacrifice on their part. The sacrifice came from all those miners working in subzero temperatures in the Kazakh steppe for kopeks a day, their bodies broken down prematurely, with the share of wealth that was promised to them stolen away. And instead of those who betrayed them being brought to justice, they instead depart to the West where they are greeted with applause by those who mistake cunningness with intelligence.

The Valley doesn't care about a person's ethnicity, as long as they generated their wealth through legitimate means. Milner, on the other hand, is nothing more than a frontman for Alisher Usmanov, who basically accrued everything through wholescale theft of state resources. Basically, Milner is a crook, and if there was any justice in the world he and Usmanov would be in jail for what they have done. But there isn't, and there are people in the Valley who are willing to overlook ethics if you have enough money. The fact that Milner is now working with YC is a sad testament to that fact.