rottendoubt

looking forward to this. =)

Ya, agreed. The second one was nowhere near as good as the first. Also have been wondering when new courses will come out. I finished the first two in two days (one each day) and was disappointed there weren't any more. It's been about a month since I last used it and there haven't been any new courses added.

Pretty interesting how many he got right or close....

I wonder if this could be used for a game somehow...

Just curious if Dropbox had a MVP? If so, what was it? Was it ready and launched by Demo Day? Was it a purely free model, or were they already going with the freemium model at launch?

Just read through the whole interview. Wow. Had no idea he did all that. That is just amazing.

Make one or two of them co-founders. Until you see traction, you have no choice but to keep the team extremely small and bootstrap like crazy.

Downloading now. Will give it a try. Thanks!

Diablo 2 gave me RSI (repetitive stress injury). =/

What I do is give my brother my password for Steam and not keep a copy for myself. When I am busy, I just log out of Steam and I can't play any games until I ask my brother for the password.

Cut your costs down to just rent plus servers. Keep only the technical people plus yourself. Have everyone work for free in exchange for equity until you see traction. The ones that believe in the company and the idea enough will do it.

Ya, I read about that and I really, really, really respect him for that.

kaffeinecoma - Google "The Woz Plan" for more.

Thanks for the clarification. So it has to be some sort of verbally transmitted code (ie. a phrase) since it's used over the radio? That pretty much takes out almost all the guesses posted here so far.

I hope I never have to smell either (dead mouse or dead human). =/

Someone posted on the original article that "You cannot recall smells..." That is one possibility. Pandarus could give Manelaus a bottle of a very specific perfume that Pandarus was familiar with. If Pandarus smelled the perfume in the future, he would know it was Manelaus. But if captured, he would not be able to remember the perfume's smell -- at least not in a specific enough way to reproduce it.

Ya, I'm wondering that myself. Or it could mean that Pandarus gave Menaleus a way for Menaleus to identify himself (Menaleus) to others. If so, then it could be something unique to Menaleus such as his finger print. Menaleus could use his finger print as an identity check and Pandarus would have no way to remember Menaleus' finger print.

If I were Google, I would have done it. Offered $2B and taken the 2-year deal with Hulu. Match it up with YouTube, grow it as big as possible, and completely dominate online video to the point of creating a monopoly. At that point, you'd have leverage to negotiate with the studios -- yes they have the content, but you'd have the distribution (think iTunes and record labels). If they don't deal with you and try to launch something separate, they'd have no traffic. And there'd be no real competition on bidding from third parties as they'd likely already have been wiped out by the YouTube/Hulu combo.

I usually ask to meet up in a very central place for coffee. And to save on time, I usually group a bunch of meetings back to back at the exact same spot.

Love it! Great words of wisdom.

New York Times story on one of the guys mentioned in the article (Joe Engressia): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/us/20engressia.html

The article itself could be the basis for a movie.

Not sure if you all have seen this. One of the co-founders of YC, Jessica Livingston, wrote a great blog post on this exact subject: www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2011/01/what-stops-female-founders.html

Oh, I agree. I'm the same way (I'm 37). It's just that differences in biology force women to consider the issue earlier than men. I'm guessing that societal pressure also plays a part as well -- ie. parents may push a woman at 30 to get married/have kids much harder than a man at 30.

From the Atari article someone linked to a few days back about Steve Jobs, his boss said he contracted hepatitis when he made a spiritual journey to India. If it's true, it explains all the health issues Steve dealt with later in life. Hepatitis is linked to increasing the risk of pancreatic cancer. It also attacks the liver and was very likely the reason for his needing a liver transplant in 2009.

I'm living abroad and put on my to do list to make sure my vaccinations are current. For those of you traveling to third world countries, make sure you do the same. =/

I was just having dinner with a female friend that was an EECS major (electrical engineering computer science) from UC Berkeley and she brought up another point. She said whenever she took classes and needed a partner, she'd always have guys come up to try to help her and that usually they were among the smartest guys in the class.

As far as the marriage/kids issue goes ... I think I read that the average age of the people at YCombinator is 26; and as far as my own observation goes, that's right around the time that my female friends started seriously thinking about the marriage/kids issue. I think the discrepancy is really driven by the biological clock. Men can have kids well into their 50's, but it's pretty dangerous for women to have kids past 40.

My thoughts:

1) As jlees mentioned below, you need to look at the "subset of women hackers who also have some entrepreneurial drive" when looking at something like YC. The 4% doesn't really surprise me at all.

2) My observation is that women tend to be on a timeline about 5 years "faster" than men because of their biological clock. As in, they'll start thinking seriously of marriage and kids late 20's, early 30's whereas men will deal with this issue more like early to mid 30's. So their window for doing a startup is smaller.

3) This is a bit of a generalization, but the dynamics are really different when you have all-guy co-founders versus mixed versus all-female co-founders. With mixed sometimes personal relationships develop which can make things messy. And when you have a couple of alpha-females together, sometimes that can also lead to problems (for example, see the all-female startup in the TechStars Reality show). [These are just my own observations. Please don't flame me for this!]

This is great. Thanks for sharing and please keep it coming! =D

This article was a little bit before my time (I was born in 1974). I found it fascinating, though! Pre-computer hackers. I wish I had seen some of the books you mentioned when I was younger. =)

"Apparently, he had hepatitis or something and had to get out of India before he died," Alcorn told historian Steven Kent. "I put him to work again. That's when the famous story about Breakout took place."

Hepatitis attacks the liver and was very likely the reason for his needing a liver transplant in 2009. It's also linked to increasing the risk of pancreatic cancer. I wonder if his spiritual trip to India was both a source of enlightenment AND eventual cause of death? =/

Break big tasks into lots of small ones. Add a "carrot" that you reward yourself with each time you complete a small task.