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I just had to reply to that one!

Most folks who churn already have a mortgage or some don't care about maintaining a really high credit score. I was mostly talking about what you can do, what people do, not what you maybe should do.

American Airlines and Citicards right now will give you between 75,000 and 100,000 miles for opening a new card. That's a free round trip business class ticket to europe/asia/south america. $10,000 in flights for opening a card.

Mostly people churn to try and get life time status, it's how people get status without BIS, Butt In Seat miles flown.

I personally get status mostly by flying crazy routes, Uruguay to South Africa via New York and London. I also focus on purchasing tickets which will earn me maximum miles, but for flights i'd fly anyway.

Studying might be interesting, find a community and activity you're passionate about and can connect with people. Our jobs play a major social role in our lives. Not needing a job means you need to have that social community some other way.

Maybe try volunteering? Code for America? Geeks Corps? Try going to school and getting a phd in something which interests you. It's important to be engaged in meaningful activity to lead a rich and full life.

I sometimes wonder how many people do startups focused on helping other startups. Or build applications that help people who build developers of applications. Yes you are scratching your own itch. But you're also building something for people who could build it themselves. You're asking to have lots of competition.

You're also taking on things where there is the least need. There are millions of markets and people who have problems. Most people can't code, they can't solve their problems, they can't build something of elegance and utility.

Focus on something you know well, but which isn't startups or programmers do for themselves.

Post emails / insider info on the founding of now super successful startups. In my case Twitter. Worked wonders. I also found that it's pretty easy to get posts about YC itself, and how it relates to startups and fundraising.

The first email i've got from jack, saying he's got a prototype running on his laptop is from March 14th 2006. He called the app "twttr stalker" in that email. I remember it being "friend stalker" as a joke name thrown around as well.

Yes, the twatter thing, wasn't something we thought of, but many other people had it pop right in to their heads. It was, unfortunate.

Ev started his first company when he was a teen, and kept starting them over and over again. Biz had founded Xanga, many years before. Sure, they were over 30, i think Jack and Noah were too, when twitter got started. All of them had started earlier companies in their teen's and 20's.

Ev had a bundle of pre-IPO google stock, so he could afford it. Also Odeo stil had cash in the bank, but he didn't want to buy the vowels until he was sure there was something to the idea.

Obvious was supposed to be a company which hacked out many ideas, a kind of incubator. The problem was one of the first batches of ideas turned in to a major run away success.

Nobody liked the word tweet. It was a term created by the user community, and only slowly accepted by the team.

Mind you, these aren't paying clients or anything, just a 160 twitter accounts. At the time you had to have it created FROM a mobile phone, so the onboarding process was clunky. We were showing it to our friends, tell them how cool it was. A team of 10, with 3 months to pressure their friends and family in to using the service, got 160 users.

Two things, one, a $10 Million valuation for an angel round is really high. I'm suspecting that the real statement was something more like "one of the YC companies even got a $10 Million pre-money valuation" rather than the average.

Second, Paul Buchheit is investing in some of the YC companies in addition to his participation as a partner? Will that create signaling issues? I know he knows the YC companies better than other startups, but if he doesn't invest, it means he passed? Same thing happened with VC's doing angel rounds then if they don't follow up, they're leaving the startup in the lurch?

Yeah, i thought i had it back up, went in to a meeting, came back and it's down. When i went in and looked at it there were a ton of apache2 processes. It's my blog server, so i don't pay a lot of attention to it, i probably should.

I dropped down the number of preforked apache processes, we'll see if that helps. It's also where i run some rails experiments, so we'll see. Load's back up to 7...

I had no idea hacker news got a lot of traffic.

It was always PRONOUNCED twitter, but we did write it twttr, everywhere, back in the day.

The hard drive filled up and mysql corrupted a table. It's fixed now.

Not sure what happened, sshing in to the server and poking around.

I had the same problem looking for recurring payment providers and payment gateways in Latin America. I think it's much easier to open a subsidiary company in the US remotely than to process them outside the US/UK/Canada.

This is the kind of question which should be asked over in Quora, because you can have a wiki edited list of schools.

It'd be interesting to see. African Americans and Latinos* make up about %28 of the US population, but are very under represented in startups. East Asians, South Asians, Arabs and Jews are over represented in tech based on over all population. What's more, most of the black programmers i've worked with at startups were born in Africa or the Caribbean.

I suspect that YC would be wise to try and recruit diversity, having different perspectives, backgrounds and world views among founders at the the dinners and other places, would probably make all the startups stronger.

Latinos or Hispanics are an ethnic group, not racial, there are white, black, native american, and asian latinos.

Learn to code. Even if you aren't able to code well enough to build your own thing, if you have not built an application and launched it, you will never be able to manage a team to do it. Much less be able to do with with an outsource provider.

Why not apply to development companies as a programming intern. Explain you're a business guy, teaching yourself coding, you know you'll never be great, but you need to learn.

At my consulting company, we've got a guy who is quitting his job at a VC and working as an intern with us for three months. We do pair programming, so he'll rotate through projects and be on the development team. We won't bill him out to clients obviously. Our developers get to learn about his business experience, and he learns how to code, and probably run a development team.

I tell clients who have an idea and have never built a website to go get a job at a startup. If you're a not a developer, don't do a startup without having worked in one.

I submitted half a dozen edits after the deadline, fixing stuff i found while re-reading the application. Now they've shifted it around so it says "The application deadline for this cycle has passed. You can still submit a late application, though the chances of getting funded are lower."

I suspect the real close was at around midnight, not 8pm.

I think this is a good point. Right now YC avoids using social proof as an evaluation tool. They look at the team's ability to work together, that they can ship, and their idea. As YC grows they need to make sure they don't look at who recommends them, how much influence they have, if they're famous.

They can get a %50 success rate, because they have developed a model of evaluating. As the value of getting in to YC increases, the ability to game the model does as well. Every blog post which tells you how to apply, shifts the companies accepted towards those who are able to win at that game.

Every applicant who goes in to that interview knowing it's not a presentation, but a demo followed by 10 minutes of rapid fire questions / brainstorming, has a big advantage. Every applicant who can get current or former YC founders to review their application has an advantage. Every applicant who spends time reading each and every 'applying to YC' blog post, has an advantage.

The big question is, are those advantages things which correlate with being a good startup founder. In some cases yes, in some no.

This is the real signal to noise problem that YC faces. Not that there might be 2000 startups applying each cycle, but that applicants learn how the theater works. They know the game, and are actors which present the perfect YC application. Then YC has to figure out, are these guys and gals really good at what they do, or are they telling me the story I want to hear.

That said, i bet even with the noise, YC has a better way of evaluating the potential future of startups than the 'who else invested, who's the advisors' model many angels use.

The best way to learn a language is to go to the place they speak it, and fall in love with somebody. Seriously, dating a native speaker, and having them commit to speaking to you in their language.

If you're willing to move, and emerse yourself, learning a language only takes a couple months. It's extreme, but unlink almost all other ways of teaching a language, it works.

Do you require the whole team come in for the interview? Flights are expensive, $6500 just for an interview?

this is the kind of question you should do on quora...

Ah, if i could only down vote. Come on folks, you discover something which was created eons ago and think it's new.

Yep, i worked on TxtMob, and at Odeo when we came up with Twitter. The idea of twitter came from a hackday project of Jack, Noah Glass, and Florain Webber. But they were all aware of TxtMob as we'd done a presentation and evaluation of TxtMob a few days earlier.

At the time, you could only use twitter via sms. It's since become much less tied to SMS. I'm not even sure if you CAN do the whole signup and user creation via txt message alone anymore.

The problem with txtmob was the group creation process was always clunky. If you could solve that, make it easy to create groups and start participating, then it might still take off. At one point we even had a version of txtmob which let you sign up and sign off via asterisk, using voip. Looks like pretty much what you did. That was after twitter launched, so we never really put a lot of work in to making it stable.

I still think it's a good idea, i say go for it! Hosted VOIP as a service makes it MUCH easier to do this today, than in 2004-2006.

All hipmonk did was provide ITA's Matrix time bar interface with the ability to book tickets. Brilliant, and they added some marketing. It wasn't hard or innovative. Most people simply didn't know about that UI.

For confused noobs or folks who don't spend too much time on hacker news, you need 500 karma points to be able to downvote.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853529

Yeah, i've got 290 karma and have never seen a downvote button, not that i mind really.