aclimatt

> So, the real question is if you can build a prototype, gain traction and make revenue, why is it still frown upon that you are a solo founder.

I believe the reason is because the odds of you taking this product and turning it into a company are less in your favor than if you had others to consult in your business practices. It's less about "startup cost" and more about having two or more heads in the problem space. There's a reason that critical applications often have multiple people running the show -- it's too easy to make a mistake and it usually requires more than one head to get right. It's not impossible, just hard.

So from an investor's perspective, think of it this way:

You're approached by 10 companies. (Or in YC's case, hundreds.) Many of them have a "prototype, traction, and revenue". They all look reasonably appealing. So which do you choose? The ones with multiple very smart founders? Or the ones with a single smart founder? Which of those will be more successful? Which will be able to more effectively hunker down around the whiteboard and come up with some new brilliant ideas when the times get tough?

OK, how about a harder one: You have one company with a bunch of smart founders but only a concept, and you have another company with one founder but a "prototype, traction, and revenue". Now which do you choose? This gets more difficult, but I'd argue the former choice will have a better chance at success, given equal capability of the founders. The former has validation in the form of N people believing in their company, and the latter has real customer validation. But the former has better /potential/ in terms of coming up with something valuable, whereas the latter has more potential to fail at scaling their business. This of course depends on a lot of factors though, and maybe the latter's prowess in building a prototype, gaining traction, and making revenue is convincing enough that they can make it through the long haul.

Case in point though is that for a VC, it's a numbers game. And with all else being equal, if you can invest in 4 smart people instead of 1, your odds of return are higher.

Also, to your first point, after you're making real revenue and/or have funding, nobody cares about how many "co-founders" you have. This is true. They care instead about how many people are on your team. Ends up really just being a semantic distinction based on your company stage :P.

> And I think the ease of technology has gone down so much that the amount of effort it takes in writing a book is almost the same as writing a basic web app.

That I agree with. Well, I agree as much as I can, because I haven't written a book, but I have written a few web apps (and have started a company). Let's say for the sake of discussion they're reasonably similar, even if perhaps they aren't.

Yes, creating technology is a lot easier than it used to be. Marketing is probably easier as well. But I don't believe whatsoever that building a web app is the same as building a billion dollar business. There are a few examples of business which got lucky, fine, but having started a startup myself, I can say (in line with many others, pg included) that running a company is so much different -- and so much more difficult -- than just hacking up a web app.

Steering a company to massive success requires so many difficult decisions and skills that often have nothing to do with your core competencies (unless you're one of those mythical creatures who can 'do it all'), that you need the support of at least one other person who is either A) better at it than you are, or B) can work together with you to figure out how. Those mythical creatures are the 11% in the pie chart, but the other 89% of us need more manpower behind the wheel.

Whipping up a Rails app in a weekend is not the same as running a company.

OK, no. I appreciate the support for single founders, but this isn't a supporting argument.

> If books can be written by one person and become successful. Why can’t startups?

Because books and startups have nothing in common? Lots of successful endeavors are done by a single person, but that doesn't put the efforts of a single person vs. a team on the same footing, /especially/ as the problems increase in difficulty. Here's a better example:

"If children can be raised by one person and become successful, why can't startups?"

Sure. There are many children who have been raised by single parents and have become very successful. But that doesn't mean /statistically/, this is as easy as having both parents.[0]

The point that is being made counter to this is very simple: Yes, starting a startup can be done by one person. As can a lot of things. But statistically speaking, there are more successful startups that have multiple founders than single founders. You already provided the pie charts in support of this argument! Now to be fair, correlation does not prove causation, but the point is generally: Starting a startup is hard. Understanding the needs of your customers and both developing a solution to meet these need and reserving time to convince them that you've met their needs (selling) is very, very hard.

One of Ryan Carson's arguments (#2) was in essence that having no co-founders means you can top-down dictate leadership. I don't know about you, but I'm not always right. I've never actually met anybody who's always right. Having a team who's on equal footing with you allows you to vet concepts before they catastrophically destroy your company.

To paraphrase Chris Rock: Yes, you can do it without a [co-founder], but that doesn't mean it's to be done.

A good co-founder will almost always make your business more successful. And that's all there is to it.

[0] http://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/outreach/upload/parentalcon...

No, that's illegal and he was in the wrong.

> 2. Right turn. Begin and end the turn in the lane nearest the righthand curb. Do not swing wide into another lane of traffic.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/turns.htm

What? First, I'm pretty sure you're the creator so you don't have to be noble about it.

Second, the word "Helvetica" is trademarked in reference to a font or a software program relating to fonts. So unless he plans on selling a font called Helvetica, he can write the word as much as he pleases. It's the Latin name for Switzerland.

Third, until you trademark the term Helveticards and he starts offering a product in a similar likeness, this discussion is between him and Linotype. Stop trying to peddle your own product. Too bad, because I actually like your cards!

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We're a team of three that work together with the coherence of one. Latest projects include writing BART's parking system [1], co-founding a mobile transaction and data security company [2], helping jumpstart a web malware and anti-virus plugin [3], and working on a web-based property manager [4].

Let's work together!

http://www.bitmatica.com/

http://www.bitmatica.com/BitmaticaResume.pdf

[1] www.select-a-spot.com/bart/ -- BART's online parking reservation system (we wrote it from scratch in Django)

[2] www.claveo.com -- Mobile and transaction and data security with a scalable web service and strong cryptographic mobile clients (we were co-founders)

[3] www.getcocoon.com -- In-browser malware and anti-virus protection (we built part of the web interface, server back end, and front-end clients)

[4] www.appfolio.com -- Web-based extremely intuitive property management (front-end interface, back-end, and server deployment and continuous integration management console)

A valid goal, but I think you're misunderstanding your market: in your words, people don't use 2FA because it's hard to use -- not hard to implement. Organizations who have IT teams are fully capable of implementing reasonable APIs like what Duo or Google offers. But you'll realize that enterprises don't even care about the architecture, because they'll be paying you to implement it anyway.

No, the reason nobody (in and only in the US) uses 2FA (because nearly every other country in the world uses it widely) is because it's a pain to use for the end user. No enterprise is going to invest their time and energy into a solution unless they're either required to by regulations or is truly better, easier, more secure, or whatever than competing solutions to make it a compelling sale.

If this were a hobby project then I'd be cheering you on -- why not make a token 2FA with a slightly better API? But as a YC-funded company whose likely avenue of success will be through the enterprise market, you NEED to develop a product that is better, faster, easier, more secure, etc than your (rather formidable) competition.

Trust me, I'm familiar with this market ;).

Seriously? Another (virtual) token-based 2FA solution? What is your competitive advantage against Duo, Authentify, Entrust, and the thousand other SMS or virtual token 2FA solutions out there?

I'd say there should be two different pages: one for end-users, and one for developers. In his defense I'd argue the users of Java are developers, in which case they need to know specifically what it is. For end users who need it installed on their machines, the description should be "Java is a necessary plugin to make many of your favorite applications work correctly."

In the case of other tools, a lot of companies focus on useless buzzwords like "it's a cloud-enabled multi-tier architecture et cetera" instead of focusing on what the person using it cares about: "it's a content management system for blogs." OK, got it.

Venture Capital doesn't generally work that way unfortunately. VCs typically shoot for 10x over 5 years with the fund's total lifespan being approximately 10 years (from initial investment to return). So it's hard for VCs to make longer-term investments in companies like Google which took 14 years to get where they are today. (Sure, in the case of Google they could have flipped it sooner, but even a few years ago it wasn't worth what it is today.)

Indeed, and it already seemed like this was definitely on their to-do list from the Glass keynote. I don't know how you could build a product like Glass and /not/ do that (other than it perhaps being an extremely difficult problem ;P).

More than that, microphone + reasonable speech recognition = everybody you talk to is instantly subtitled. Also an extremely difficult problem, but one I'll bet will be commonplace in 15 years.

SEEKING WORK - Remote / San Francisco / Santa Barbara

- Web app development: Python, Ruby, PHP, Java (backend) and HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, ExtJS (frontend)

- Mobile development: iOS and Android

- Server/infrastructure: Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL, open source (no Microsoft)

- Well-versed in every framework under the sun: Django, Rails, WordPress, 3rd Party APIs, et cetera

We're a team of three that work together with the coherence of one. Latest projects include co-founding a mobile transaction and data security company [1], helping jumpstart a web malware and anti-virus plugin [2], and working on a web-based property manager [3].

Let's work together!

http://www.bitmatica.com/

http://www.bitmatica.com/BitmaticaResume.pdf

[1] www.claveo.com -- Mobile and transaction and data security with a scalable web service and strong cryptographic mobile clients (we were co-founders)

[2] www.getcocoon.com -- In-browser malware and anti-virus protection (we built part of the web interface, server back end, and front-end clients)

[3] www.appfolio.com -- Web-based extremely intuitive property management (front-end interface, back-end, and server deployment and continuous integration management console)

SEEKING WORK - Remote / San Francisco / Santa Barbara

- Web app development: Python, Ruby, PHP, Java (backend) and HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, ExtJS (frontend)

- Mobile development: iOS and Android

- Server/infrastructure: Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL, open source (no Microsoft)

- Well-versed in every framework under the sun: Django, Rails, WordPress, 3rd Party APIs, et cetera

We're a team of three that work together with the coherence of one. Latest projects include co-founding a mobile transaction and data security company [1], helping jumpstart a web malware and anti-virus plugin [2], and working on a web-based property manager [3].

Let's work together!

http://www.bitmatica.com/

http://www.bitmatica.com/BitmaticaResume.pdf

[1] www.claveo.com -- Mobile and transaction and data security with a scalable web service and strong cryptographic mobile clients (we were co-founders)

[2] www.getcocoon.com -- In-browser malware and anti-virus protection (we built part of the web interface, server back end, and front-end clients)

[3] www.appfolio.com -- Web-based extremely intuitive property management (front-end interface, back-end, and server deployment and continuous integration management console)

That's missing the point of the article, which his update was added to clarify.

This article is NOT saying "why is everybody angry at Google for being evil? We can't forget about all these other evil companies!" That's the common problem a lot of articles like this one run into, but not this one specifically.

Tim's point is that "Google is /not/ evil. Google is doing something that may seem evil, but is in fact not. Google could do something in the future that may end up as evil, but that has yet to happen. To compare, let me show you an example of actual evil. [Enter Apple.]"

Apple is used to demonstrate what, in his opinion, actual evil looks like and how that differs from what Google is doing, therefore making Google's actions not evil. The Apple example (which could be Ford or Monsanto, doesn't matter) does not serve to to excuse Google.

On one hand I want to say it's "evil" because we've grown up in a place where ads != content. And even though I feel as if I should object to ads being "hidden" among normal content, I don't.

The purpose of going to a website is to seek out a certain type of content. If somebody then paid to have that content delivered to you, what makes it inherently more "evil" than any other content? If it fulfills your need, what does it matter whether or not it were paid to be placed there? In fact, why must we know that they're ads at all?

"Cheating" would be placing a listing that does not accurately represent the content behind it. So if I click on your ad and it isn't what it claimed to be, that's misinformation. But an ad for a free trial of a Bingo Card Creator among other software listings seems equally legitimate, whether or not it was paid to be placed.

It's akin to product placement in movies. A scene requires somebody to be drinking a soda, so a beverage company approaches the director and says "well, while you're in the market for people drinking soft drinks, might we recommend Coca-Cola." The viewer ends up getting advertised to, sure, but the ad still fulfills the role of any other item that would have been there otherwise--it just happened to be paid for.

They claim to also be able to perform the attack on other applications using TLS (such as VPNs), not just web browsers.

Here's a little more explanation on how it works: http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/new-attack-breaks-confiden...

They still require access to your browser to, I'm assuming, modify certain data in some way such that they can actually perform the chosen plaintext attack on the encrypted cookies.

I don't think you quite grasp the amount of variation there is in the Arabic alphabet relative to the Latin alphabet. Sure, there are few letters that look slightly different in cursive depending on how you write them, but they don't even compare to the fact that in Arabic, every single letter has a completely different form depending on whether it's written as an isolated, initial, middle, or final letter (four forms). Sometimes these forms are completely different, /and/ there are very specific rules that specify which form to use depending on the letter it follows. (That is to say, not only are there 4 forms, but they're not even uniform. You will either write the initial form or the middle form of a letter depending on the letter it follows). This is a good order of magnitude above Latin.

Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Table_of_basic_...

The main point of the article is not that Arabic has a list of things that are impossible to find in any other language. It is that Arabic has many intriguing features that are in contrast to what a native English speaker might be used to. (This is about native English speakers learning Arabic, not Arabic vs. The World.)

When English speakers look to learn an "exotic language", the general go-tos are Chinese and Japanese, which have comparatively very simple grammars. Thus in the exotic language category, as the author points out, Arabic is a very intriguing choice. (And while many Indo-European languages may share a few related grammar rules, using the Latin alphabet hurts your candidacy as an exotic language.)