2,493 karma · joined April 2, 2008
Co-founder of Mux. Previously, co-founder of Zencoder. YC W16 and W10. SF.
Today, we're focused on the performance side of things: errors, startup time, rebuffering, and video quality. Over time, we'll go more places.
As for the most impressive features: we're still early (just coming out of beta), and so some of the things we're most excited about are coming down the pipe. As a preview, though, one of the challenges we're tackling is extracting meaning out of streams of data, and so we're working hard on things like alerting and dashboards that surface the most important information (while also making it easy to do your own explorations). That's also why we've spent a lot of time on our interface; we think a good UX is really important to a product like this.
The YC way is "Make something people want." Fundraising is a distraction that is occasionally necessary.
I would much rather send healthy kids to a state school or liberal arts college than unhealthy kids to Stanford.
Full disclosure: I say this as a founder of a higher-level cloud service (Zencoder) that Amazon decided to compete with head-on. We're doing just fine, thanks (growing quickly, differentiated product), but Amazon is aggressively expanding upstream and is going to continue to do so.
Sell your company for $360M. Join the new company as CTO, and sell for $3.4B. IPO your next company. Get millions in VC. Foolproof.
You only have so much time. Building a great company is the most effective way to get into YC.
While were reminiscing... In 1994, the web felt like technology. You typed in "http://" and it felt exotic. You were connecting to a server. Literally: _a_ server. You wondered what would happen if you hit the same address with gopher or (more likely) telnet.
As often as not, something would happen.
I'm also not sure what that has to do with this article (which doesn't hang on any particular definition).
Zencoder transcodes millions of videos each month for a thousand customers like Khan Academy, IGN, NFL, and Amazon. We're a small team of really talented engineers solving hard problems and making developers happy. Great product, office, team, and perks.
We also have opportunities in Boston for engineers at Brightcove (who acquired Zencoder last year): http://www.brightcove.com/en/company/careers/open-positions
1. Our larger customers don't pay more than this already.
2. Paying 33% less doesn't necessarily mean getting 33% more value.
We'll be writing up an analysis today. Off the record (ahem), we've known about this for a long time, and we aren't worried.
In 2007, Gladwell took up the financial industry’s cause. He argued that Enron’s investors were to blame for their losses, rather than accounting fraud, which he dismissed. His "analysis" was debunked and mocked by U.C. Berkeley Economics Professor Brad DeLong.
That same year, 2007, Gladwell hailed ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson’s move to head the Treasury Department, praising him for being among those “self-selected toward public service. . . ” Gladwell did not mention that Paulson saved himself roughly $100 million in taxes by moving straight from Goldman Sachs to Treasury.
He's a contrarian. Maybe wrong, maybe even stupid. But that is different than corruption.
Network obviously isn't; the numbers here include about a dozen test runs. We should make that more clear. Even a dozen isn't enough to be a scientific test, so hopefully we (or someone else) will do more benchmarking in the future.
The question is whether Instagram can eventually contribute enough to Facebook's bottom line to justify the $1B valuation. Its current (lack of) revenues obviously don't get it there, but it's the future that matters.
That is an elegant solution to the problem.
Hiring is one of the most important things for any company, at any stage, that it is worth doing right. If interviewing 100 people instead of 50 will increase overall talent, it's worth bending over backwards to do this. Even if it means sacrificing in other areas.
Ultimately, everyone ends up using heuristics at some level. But it is worth being very careful what heuristics you use, and the article does a great job of demonstrating this. Do you really want to exclude excellent developers who didn't major in CS? Do you really only want to hire engineers who self-identify as rockstars? Maybe - but be conscious about what you're doing.
We went a little outside of the Mountain View area and got a house in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was great. Three desks, three computers, three bedrooms, a nice kitchen, and a hot tub - perfect for those cold February days. There was a country store up the road, but not much else for miles around. Nothing to distract us except for redwoods, wild animals (turkeys, mice, deer, a scorpion), and the occasional storm. But still, we were only 30 minutes from Mountain View and 40 minutes from Palo Alto - closer than if we had lived in San Francisco.
Those were the 4 most productive months of my life.