leelin

Thank you! I was worried no one would bring this up. I had to reload the page at least 5 times because of all the ways attempting to scroll seemed to push me to another article. On top of that the "chat interface" widget was slow to load each time.

Thankfully the content was great and worthwhile; otherwise I would normally give up by the 2nd redirect.

I usually just manually type "1.00" or "1.50" as tip for a short city fare (under $15), And "5.00" for a long trip (airport). I guess I'm cheap.

I would also be interested in a histogram of raw tip amounts to see if people cluster at 1.00, 1.50, or 2.00 as well. We could even bucket by fair sizes.

It would also be very cool if we had metadata on the credit card, for example, do corporate cards tip a lot better than consumer cards. Presumably company-paid travel leads to better tips.

It looks like your convertible note math is off. Given the $1M minimum trigger, the $100K note will not equal 10% of the company unless we plug in absurd numbers ($100K premoney Series A with a note discount).

Based on this Quora answer, the cap is $3M with a 20% discount. http://www.quora.com/What-are-Techstars-convertible-notes-te...

Say you raise $1M on a $3.9M pre-money. The $1M investors wind up with almost 20% (a little less because the note investors pay the $3M price), the note investors about 2.6% (they get $130K worth of Series A plus interest), and the remaining ~77.4% is your former cap table, including TechStars, diluted by the $1M and note conversion.

> 2.) Some famous YC alum are stuck up. Never met anyone as stuck up as the non-technical reddit co-founder.

I highly disagree. The "non-technical reddit co-founder" is both humble and awesome -- but if it's the same event I'm thinking, you might have misinterpreted his joke about serving orange-colored kool aid at the event.

Also, June 2014 was the first NYC Startup School. You might be talking about the "YC in NYC" event in September 2011. That was more of a talk by PG about how NYC had overtaken Boston as a clear #2 startup hub, followed by what makes a startup hub work (basically startup and investor density, which creates more chance encounters). Other founders spoke, but those were hiring pitches, not really the same kind of advice talks you get at startup school.

> but if you want to build a big tech company, you should move out west. In fact, it's one of YC's indicators of success after going through the program.

Fascinating! Is this something the YC partners have mentioned recently? In my batch of 26 companies (that was 5 years ago), I can definitely see a huge correlation between leaving the bay area and failing. I just always assumed it was just randomness or that some left because no investors were forcing them to stay (in our case it was both lack of investors and NYC housing our entire customer base).

In Steve Wozniak's interview with Emily Chang, he says "I loved Pirates of Silicon Valley... but it wasn't more truthful."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6ciNXc_4OQ (at approximately 12:10)

For the MIT alums out there, I remember a 6.170 exam that had the question: "When is it appropriate to use the waterfall model of development?"

The answer was any time you are developing software for the government! The professor specifically mentioned it in lecture once, so that alone was enough for full credit on the question (other reasonable answers were fine too).

Later I TA'ed the class twice and made sure to eliminate these pure lecture-attendance-check questions.

Is there a stream that includes 2 screens; video of both the speaker and the slides? I remember previous years had it.

I've heard picking a lot of high numbers is a better strategy than picking pseudo-random numbers.

The logic is, sharing the prize greatly hurts the expected value (when N people win with the same numbers, they split the jackpot 1/N). Certain people like to play numbers corresponding to their birthday, anniversary, or other meaningful dates that range from 1 to 31. In the big US lotteries (Mega Millions and Powerball), the numbers range as high as 59, so picking a bunch of numbers in the 40s and 50s greatly reduces the chance of having to share the prize.

Another interesting story I've heard (no source sadly): one time the winning numbers were exactly the same as the "lucky numbers" printed on the back of a fortune cookie. An inordinate number of winners shared the prize, all Chinese food eaters who received the same fortune that week.

The comments from Senator Liz Krueger buried in the third section are very interesting and I almost missed it!

Unlike most articles blindly debating the pros and cons of the sharing economy, Krueger claims many hosts are professionals who arbitrage by leasing or buying long-term apartments and filling them nightly as a distributed hotel. It seems the money earned hosting -- (cost_of_operation * nightly_rate * occupancy_rate) -- is greater than signing a one year lease.

I used to offer my home on weekends when I was out of town for travel. Eventually, a guest offered to pay for the full month for significantly higher than my mortgage payment (and I contemplated various ways to spend a month away)! Sadly, our co-op board discussed and decided paid nightly guests violate our policies, ending my short hosting stint.

I'm torn. I love Airbnb and have used both sides (host and guest), and I like the idea that some people can use a space more efficiently than others. I'm less worried about taking a rental unit off the market and more worried about the intangible and hard-to-quantify side effects (safety, insurance, tax enforcement, neighbors' rights, etc).

Very cool, is that documented somewhere by any chance?

I've noticed the same, the only time I can ever "keep up" with the green lights on my folding Dahon is on 5th ave, the very down-hill portion from 40th street to about 23rd.

There are some special streets though which are not in sync with the other lights: 42nd, 23rd, 14th (maybe 34th)... so as long as I catch each leg within one green light I consider that successful.

I think Symmetry and I might recall the same event, in April 2003; a shooting near Random Hall that resulted in death (not a student).

http://tech.mit.edu/V123/N17/17shooting.17n.html

The worst part is it happened during pre-frosh weekend, when admitted high school students were invited to visit and experience MIT for a few days.

I believe 2004 was the turning point when the audience was very engaged -- that was the first year spectating was lots of fun, 34-101 was packed, cheering all around, etc.

In 2001 and 2002, spectating was not fun at all, partly due to technical issues mid-contest. To make things more entertaining, Prof. Daniel Jackson asked Guy Steele to get up and talk about the new features in Java 1.4, and discuss when generics in java.util would be fully supported. Not joking....

Now I feel old! I participated in the first two Battlecode's ever, but that was back when it was simply 6.370. The first year was a board game and we stared at ASCII graphics all IAP long. By my M.Eng year, Aaron Iba and co. turned everything around and kicked off the golden age of 6.370.

Amazingly, they still have the final prizes posted from 2002 and most years in between. Our team won the hilarious gag prize: "greatest design mismatch between document and code." First place that year was $500. Last year when I went, some of the gag prizes were $1000, including prizes like "last team to submit a jar before the submission deadline"

http://web.mit.edu/ieee/6.370/2002/web/bracket.shtml

As documented in Mike Grynbaum's NY Times article, the five taxis probably weren't lying about the shift change.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/nyregion/12taxi.html

It seems irrational at first, but changing shifts at the same time makes drivers and cars more interchangeable. More importantly, it makes day-shift vs. night-shift approximately equal in profit opportunity. It's a shame the shift changes coincide with after-work rush hour and a popular time for night life to wind down.

Wasn't Jeff Bezos a fairly senior and well-respected quant at D. E. Shaw just before founding Amazon? I would guess he would have had a fairly easy time raising money purely for capital purposes. Maybe he was strategically trying to get non-tech people in the book industry to invest and that was the root of the difficulty?

  Each time you get a new article you get a spike, and then 
  a downturn, but each one leaves your baseline higher. Now
  we get many times the traffic we got in a spike at
  announcement every day.

I've noticed this higher baseline effect and it seems to hold true even though I am 3+ years into my startup. Others have spoken about it too (David Rusenko of Weebly quite recently). I find it fascinating.

Why is the baseline higher? Is it link juice from SEO? Is it some mysterious equilibrium of new users and returning users but more of them find you through the article? Is it simply that X out of 1,000,000 people have heard of you, and X gets incremented by a small amount and therefore your daily base traffic increases?

To be honest our traffic has been very predictable, both in the weekly steady state and the year-over-year growth. I'm shocked the daily variance of visits isn't a lot more.

Funny, that's exactly what I thought 3 years ago...

I think the root of the problem is there are too many available apartments but most of them are a waste of your time to view. A great broker previews every listing and only shows the best deals.

Similarly for the landlord, most renters who come see the apartment will not take it, so having brokers do the showings saves the landlord a lot of time and effort.

Hey, this is Lee from RentHop.

One thing that isn't very clear from the writeup: we went through a LONG trough of sorrow before finding our current pivot. That's a story for another day...

"Save Padmapper" seems to be selling the company short given the diverse set of data sources and partnerships they have. I hope Craigslist comes around but my bet is PadMapper will be more than fine regardless.

I was Summer intern at Microsoft in 2001 and back then the interns went to Bill Gates's house for a bbq near the end of the Summer. One of the interns asked "what other names did you think of before coming up with .NET?"

To the best of my memory, Bill's answer was something like:

  I didn't actually like the name .NET.  It makes people 
  wonder if we are finally just starting to learn about the
  Internet.  Sadly, the other proposed name was even worse.
  Our mission statement at the time was 'work Anywhere,
  Anytime, on Any device,' so the proposal was AAAWare.

There should be lots of AL users who can produce the exact email plea asking them to

  1.) Read and comprehend complex / sketchy instructions
  2.) Take the trouble to vote
  3.) Not instinctively click the confirmation link
  4.) Actually forward a personalized, coded email back to AL?!?

That also means AL is not disputing that a huge number of confirmation requests ultimately came from their own machines.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- certainly the burden of proof is on them!

(Edit: so far the only AL user to step forward created a new account 3 minutes ago)

Hi there, I'm one of the RentHop founders.

For now we had to seed our initial reputation using priors from our data partners and our NYC models. We'll be sure our scoring gets smarter and better fit to Boston over time.

Hi, I'm one of the RentHop founders. We love what Eric's done with PadMapper. Our focus is primarily sorting on quality. We see most of the messaging and scheduling activity so we can reward the responsive and trustworthy managers while penalizing bad behavior. For example, if an apartment is still available after 15 renters have looked at it over two weeks, that's a terrible sign.

For now we had to seed our initial reputation using priors from our data partners and our own observations about a firm's listings. As time passes the scores should differentiate based on individual activities, similar to our NYC rankings.

Heh, I'll chime in as the lone orphan connected to this glorious network as a "video game buddy." Someone from FC wanted me to confirm a few connections and the relevant part of my original response is below (I imagine most people ignored FC and a lot of replies were trimmed -- all mention of my co-founder is gone!):

=====

It turns out three YC company founders used to all play in the same corporate basketball team back in Microsoft around 2004-2006! It was [redacted] and myself (RentHop). At the time we were all working on Windows Phone 6.0 and Blackberry was our biggest competitor (pre-iPhone days), so the name of our team was the RimBusters; a pretty deceiving name since our entire team consisted of short Asian guys averaging out at about 5'7". We didn't all leave at the same time though, but certainly knowing just a few other people go the risky founder route made the task seem more manageable.

Also, Lux Chen (Anywhere.fm), Anson Tsai (CardPool) and I used to all be connected on a team as well, though this one less athletic and physical, more nerdy and virtual. We were all fairly bored at our software jobs and had plenty of free time for video games. We've joked about this many times but I increasingly believe it is true: playing competitive video games might be a good test of whether someone is a suitable co-founder. Not only do you see someone's raw competitive ability and persistence, but you gain a lot of insight into how they behave and treat others during moments of stress and low morale. I also learned quickly that a person's raw ability in solo playing is not nearly as important as how well the two of you mesh as a team, hence it's better to partner up with a compatible friend than simply the most skilled person you can find. You probably think I'm over-dramatizing here but I've got an incredible number of both positive and negative data points; I almost want to do a Starcraft trial now before I ever agree to partner up with someone! Imagine a future where investors insist on your founding team reaching Master League before they will fund you.

=====

Congrats! So after Mayor Bloomberg graduates from CodeAcademy in Dec'12 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434509) he can be part of Hacker School batch #6! :P

Measurement & Leverage?

My experience in sales is tilted almost exclusively to real estate transactions, but I'll say PG's How To Make Wealth Essay offers an explanation (http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html).

There is large variance in skill when it comes to many jobs, but in sales it is huge. Fortunately we can measure and properly attribute the more skillful salespeople, and those people have a pretty clear impact on the firm's revenues. All the negatives mentioned in the post are certainly true, although in real estate the mitigating factor is that the biggest source of leads for good brokers are referrals from past happy clients (enterprise SAAS is probably less viral).

Sadly there is also large variance in programming skill, but it's far harder to quantify or justify or transport to the next employer. In real estate, if you suck and sold no houses in 2 years as a broker, or if you were awesome and sold 30 houses, that's easy for a future employer to notice and verify. When I interview for hacking gigs, no one really knows whether I did a good job, I can only say what I generally worked on and have them take my word for it as a 1/N contributor. Self-employed programmers seem to be able to sidestep some of these problems.

Wait, isn't $2500 very cheap for a violin? I seem to remember the rather mediocre violin I had as a kid costing more than that (such hopeful tiger parents).

Wait, Bill Clerico from WePay was on Millionaire Matchmaker... that's gotta count!

I'll admit I'm never a huge fan of other founders asking me how my startup is going as a conversation starter. There are often three scenarios:

1.) Nothing new or exciting has happened since last time, in which case I feel pretty crappy.

2.) Something cool has happened, but I don't feel particularly boastful nor do I want to get into a long discussion of why that thing is cool.

3.) Something very amazing has happened, but I'm actually not allowed to talk about it.

I do notice when I return the question, I almost always hear the answer this article suggests ("awesome, best month ever, crushing it"). I guess that's why people always gave me funny looks when I used to give an honest assessment.

Now I just always answer, "Good good, we're pretty close to (some lofty feature or pseudo-pivot that is months away)". It's a convenient way to change the subject. Keep in mind this primarily applies to casual meetups with people I see regularly every 1-3 months but don't consider close friends.