lquist

Anybody know how these stand up to earthquakes?

Bad news. Tiny will be investing in growing Meteor and taking it out of (basically) maintenance mode.

This is why I am on Hacker News. Technology can be such a terribly helpful thing.

PS If this is a PR placement, this is masterful.

Few comments: * As rightly pointed out below, YC's investment used to be $20k for 7%, meaning they had a 10000x return on AirBnb and Stripe (so far) * YC has funded increasing numbers of companies over time. Of the 2000+ companies that have been funded, the majority (75%) have not reached maturity. * Yes there is dilution to the 7% stake, but it is not as significant as mentioned, especially for the most successful companies. I would estimate their stake at closer to ~3% after dilution, not 1%.

Take all these together and you are looking at a much higher fund multiple than 5x. My estimate would be at least an order of magnitude higher.

YC (and probably Ron Conway) are apples to oranges with a16z. Spray and pray works when you are looking at 10000x multiples on your best investments. It doesn't when you are deploying billions and don't come near that order of magnitude for your best bets.

I've heard talk about this from VCs for years. Their reputation and results don't match.

What length of course? I can't imagine that completion rates are the same for a 50 hour course vs a 200 hour course. Can't seem to find this data.

Gmail? Google maps? Chrome?

As an employer (100+ people), I prefer folks that code outside of work in the same way that I prefer marketing people that study/practice marketing outside of work. For the simple reason that it correlates highly with performance.

Why shouldn't they be allowed to charge? Not sure I understand this provision.

This is such an elegant solution! Previous discussions about how to solve this issue revolved around putting a camera in the center of the phone behind the screen!

Yes! This is so awesome to see! And it has nothing to do with the researcher being 13. We are constantly bombarded with loud noises (don't get me started on motorcycles and construction noise) that do long-term damage to our ears. I hope that one day we can regulate these noises in public spaces. Today it starts with study.

Bingo! Stewart knows how to play the (VC) game and doesn't want to dilute a new idea more than he has to. As for Accel, they don't want to have to write down an investment until the last possible minute. Doing so would depress their mark to market for the fund.

Unfortunately the reality is that you will almost definitely not have a bulletproof idea from the get go. And even if you do achieve product market fit, you may (read: probably will) lose it after x months/years. Good enough is what you are going for here. And then just ship. My company is currently at tens of millions in revenue and we still don't have a bulletproof, defensible product. But we have the space and time to iterate towards it.

Honest question: Why does Google's experimentation with products get termed "killing" products vs Amazon/etc.'s gets framed as "experimentation"

I have a fair number of friends in this boat. Most find their way back to the startup game in some form (investor, startup studio, etc). They just can't stay away. I find below myself entering a similar phase (raising money at a late enough stage that there is $10m of secondary on the table or going with a strategic and selling the whole thing) and the fear of complete freedom is a little bit terrifying tbh.

Ah I see! Thanks for the explanation

Thanks for the heads up I was wondering what was going on! In the future, linking to a company's status page (almost always located at status.companyurl) is even more helpful! https://status.slack.com in this case.

Google has so much gas in the tank it’s ridiculous. YouTube, Maps, Waze, Gmail etc are hilariously undermonetized. See the recent move to monetize Maps a bit more. They can flip revenue switches all over the place.

If you want SF to have a bright future long term, we need to build and not just housing but infrastructure as well.

The heuristic for this is can you make the product 10x better (along a dimension that matters) for some subset of consumers? The subset can be equal to the set: Zoom makes video conferencing 10x better on reliability for the whole market. That said, that case is much rarer. It is often much easier to deeply understand the needs of a subset of users and make a tailored solution that delivers a 10x outcome to that set of users. Examples here are CRMs that specialize on industry verticals vs Salesforce. A pharmaceutical CRM is functionally very different than a one size fits all CRM. PS Also, stop looking for big markets. Look for a small market that you can dominate quickly and logically extend from there. PPS Most ideas here stolen from Thiel

This might be Minerva (https://www.minerva.kgi.edu/)

+1

To NIMBYers: The "character" of your neighborhood is more important than cheaper housing for everyone--disproportionately helping lower income people?

We aren’t planning on serious research in the space but it is becoming increasingly obvious that an expert system is the right approach for our business going forward fwiw

Wait so you’re telling me that increasing real estate supply can help control rent inflation!? SF take note

Many startups that raised in 2015 did so at very high valuations and either never were able to raise again or took some time to meet the lofty expectations set by 2015 prices

Genuine question: Did customers ask you to make this? I ask because to me (and it appears others in this thread) Events is one of FB’s best features because they own the social graph and I have no interest in a competing product unless if you own a better or equivalent graph.

I was recently grabbing dinner with a group of CEOs and the unanimous sentiment was that they would never take money from a16z (3 founders had already and one other had a terrible experience with them during the pitch). It seemed to come down to how combative and unhelpful the partners were. I am sharing because it was a bit of a surprise to me (bootstrapped) and I think it’s important to share insight into VCs—-there is so much opacity for such an important decision.

My usual response to launching a startup is congrats but this seems a really cynical value extraction tool that actually probably destroys more value than it creates as it charges a vig along the way. For shame YC

I don’t think this really addresses his criticisms of your startup...