knarf

Konstanz, Germany

Anyway: yc is a great thing and I am thankful just for being able to watch it grow and congratulate everybody who makes it in. So no harm intended.

Thanks for all the replies and feedback and sorry for replying so late - I'm currently travelling through south east asia and don't have internet most times. That's the reason I haven't been working on my own startup as well. Last fall for me it was "maybe get chosen by yc and start working on the thing than or do a 6 month sabbatical first (after 3 years working for the man) and than start on my own. So right now I think it will probably be 2starting on my own but working on something else2 :( I completely agree with everybody that stated that the team is usually more important than the idea and that execution trumps everything. Still the timing of the whole affair feels really bad to me. Having had this idea in mind for quite sometime (besides lots of others), finally quitting the job, submitting it to yc and now see it implemented by someone else from just that cycle where I was turned down I must say I kinda feel fucked - to be that blunt.

Everybody saying that I can still do it (or similar) is right in principle, but to me the most important part of yc has always not been about the funding money but the mentoring and networking and actually beeing in the valley. Coming from germany of course I can start here as well, but pg himself is the first to tell you about how much of a difference this is. So looking to go against an now established player with all those advantages on his side doesn't seem like that good of an option and the best my startup could achieve would probably be to be taken as "the lame german rip off" (there are a lot of them actually) by the public.

So in the end - not trying to read to much into it: the best conclusion I can come up with now is that apparently yc thinks that I and my team suck so much that, even when we come up with an idea like that, that is worth funding when someone else does it, we still stand no chance. So sadly I must say that I will probably not apply next time as I don't see how I could much improve on that situation.

BTW: Here is a part of my yc application so you can better understand where I'm coming from and judge for yourself.

What is your company going to make? Create a plattform to supply existing online networks with casual flash games which integrate into their social tree. Core business will not be in game development but in providing the service in form of customizable widgets to the social network site owners and users and ... Think "distributed kongregate"

For big plattforms like facebook and myspace that allow their users to integrate widgets of there own this means simply to create game widgets according to their api (i.e. facebook apps) and allow users to add those to their profiles. But unlike other simple games on facebook/myspace we want to make these games aware of the underlying social plattform by doing things like showing only the scores of the users friends in the high score table.

For smaller plattforms which don't allow user widgets (think NINQ and small self-developed local portals) we will market to the plattform owners to integrate a free full grown casual game portal in their site in form of a big widget which will occupy a whole page that they can then call THEIR game section. This big arcade widget will display games in different categories, most played games and most succesfull players - FOR THAT SOCIAL SITE ALONE.

...

Sorry if I am coming over as offensive, but I just need to share that it feels kind of weird when you submit a business idea like that, get rejected and than 5 months later read about how yc chose somebody else (who had already in the program before) to create a business - which is just your idea - and he had it like 3 to 4 months ago.

Of course the idea for such a thing will always be born in many heads at the same time so it was probably just choosing the better team - and this happens probably a lot of times. And of course if you believe in a thing you don't need someone like yc to approve it when you can just go out and build it on your own. Still I feel kind of bad right now. I don't want to blame anybody of misbehavour or s.th., but it would have been nice to at least get a rejection mail that says s.th. like "We already have another team for a similar product" so you don't end up like me wondering about the timing of things later.

Anyway all the best of luck with this thing - I truly believe it's a great idea.

Great article. Read it some time ago too and decided to do just that - so right now I'm at Bangkok :). Thanks for reminding me on that link.

I'm already in Thailand since a month and am planning to do what you describe. Sill at the moment I am more into travelling around - Next month I'm going for Laos and Kambodschia. You definitly don't need a working visa if you work on your own startup code. Best to get a 2 or 3 month tourist visa which you can even renew two times by making a visa run to the border. If you come without a visa you'll get sort of a visa on arrival which used to last one month but seems to be now only 2 weeks! Best go to an cheap island resort with wifi or a nearby restaurant with wifi (where you can stay all day and use the net while ordering a coke every 2 hours). $10-20 seems pretty high to my standards. I've seen rooms for $5. I would say you get an okay room for $8-14 but you might have higher standards. My current room is $25 and I have wifi by the hotel but I could easily go with less luxery and have wifi from somewhere over the street (often times you get an open wifi signal from next door). If you have any questions, mail me.

Check your Spam folder in Gmail http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348377

It's an interesting idea but it kind feels like cpu robbery to me..

I like the idea that your business should be about helping other people make money. At least two ideas I submitted in my application to ycombinator actually build on that scheme.

but it comes with a table of contents. ;) maybe he should always include one

Since reddit offers JSON I thought one might put this to use.. After some JS hacking and getting lost in details for quite a while this is the first version I dare making public. Any suggestions?

Has anybody thought about talking to the people who post this stuff?

He talks about "Grand Theft Auto IV" as though it were a Software Dev Management Training course. Towards the end he talks about outstanding games and how there should be re-makes of those.

uhmm.. where? or is it online?

I think you should state more explicitly that results are gouped and contain links to specialiced searches. When I searched for Python i.e. I had no idea that clicking on "Python (genus), a group of snakes" would generate more results - I thought it would bring me directly to wikipedia.

Now that I know it I see that you ask me to choose a topic, but I totally didn't see it the first time. Perhaps you could do s.th to the topic links to make it more clear for first time users that they bring you so to a search for that topic.

some other thoughts:

-Yes the font is too big first, but after using it a bit I actually like it..

-Yes the name is awful first but "duck duck it" is great and I just added it to my firefox searches :)

Congratulations! You took a freakin duck and did the unimaginable and beat google with it!

Wow! Some guy finally invented Web 3.0..

One could also use an email with the "will" to a special mailbox as a switch to activate some processes that could do all kind of stuff..

I would argue that Adobe knows very well which parts of the web it owns. And yes suprisingly the killer app for flash is video (or was in 2005 ;) ).

or yelling at people and throwing chairs..

Congratulations and good luck Shawn. I'm on the same journey but two months behind you. Yet the end of the tunnel is in sight :)

I love those old Joel posts. It's a pitty he stopped writing about anything interesting once he sold enough copies of FogBugz..

"After all, frameworks, as we know them now, are just a few years old and the web is about 15 years old."

I stopped reading there. I know he means mvc web frameworks but I'm not sure if he knows that their exist others. Why is this bullshit on place 2?

Standard Compliance Enthusiasts will not stop until everything that would be done in flash by a sane person is ported to some strange js+html+css solution. :D

li tags transformed to this instead of just one embedded srolling.swf?! I can think of almost nothing (except full games) where a plugin would be better suited.

Still I admit it's cool!

Thanks. Didn't lnow about those.

I read it and absolutely had no idea if the joke was on PHP or .Net.. (I'm a .Net developer btw - least at my current work)

I didn't like that thing neither. Was a bit too copycat without any innovation. Still it would be good to have s.th. similar in Europe (London,Berlin,Zürich?)

Awesome! Yes it seems that was the link I was referring to. Thanks a lot for all that stuff.

How's YEurope doing btw? If you're from Innsbruck you might have thought about goin there too..? From what I see on their site it seems rather dead.. :(

Thought so. But had to try ;) Thanks though. Founders from austria sounds really intersting. Maybe they will read this and can contact me..

I should probably add that in my case all founders would be from outside US! So the problem is not only in getting visas for some of the founders but also incorporating in the US as I figure PG has no interest in 6% of a germany based company. The link I remember contained descriptions of both (visas and incorporating at the same time).