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I'm sure that many others could write much better informed or detailed additions to Sama's post.

All I will say is that I worked at Stripe very briefly -- for about three months -- when the company was about thirty people (before I went on to go through YC). Greg was incredibly generous with his time in explaining and working with me as a non-engineer.

I don't think he had been named CTO yet (Stripe was quite title phobic at the start) but it was clear that he was both a technical and non-technical leader of the company. He spent time to explain code and architecture to me, while also chatting through cultural norms and various organizational tensions Stripe was experiencing as it grew.

I think the acculturation to Stripe that he very deliberately supported in me was critical for what (little) success I had with Standard Treasury.

This is all to say that Sama’s post is spot on in my experience. Greg exhibited every one of the mentioned characteristics (except recruiting, I didn’t interacting with him on that) even when working with someone with which he didn’t have to be so generous.

I don't like big banks, but that doesn't mean finance has been bad for NYC.

There is nothing inherent about finance that makes New York and London any different than a lot of other cities, other than inertia.

It could be otherwise than it is, that's sort of the truth of network effects, but it's difficult.

Thanks! I know SPUR well, I'm actually on their housing policy board.

(I'm the author)

Prop 13 is a problem, no doubt. It would deserve a very long essay -- some of them exist as sub-essays within Kim-Mai Cutler's writings. I tried to focus on policy ideas that, more-or-less, San Francisco could implement themselves.

(I'm the author)

Even putting aside the ethical and moral arguments, which carry a lot of weight for me: (1) There are network effects in urban environments. (2) Globally, specific industries often concentrate in specific cities. A lot of tech has concentrated in the Valley up to the San Francisco. The effects are getting stronger as that migration occurs. That's a great thing: it allows for people to move between companies easily, allows ideas to be shared, etc, etc.[1] That effects is and will continue to be hard to replicate elsewhere. (3) Destroying that seems like a gigantic waste. (4) We are destroying it through our current public policies -- housing and other. (5) I believe there are political solutions, just not ones that have been well-organized.

[1] Urbanism has a lot of other benefits too, if done right: like less traffic, and a lower per capita carbon footprint.

(I'm the author).

You make excellent points, and I don't mean to minimize the regional issues.

Sure, if I had a magic wand then I'd increase housing being built across the Bay Area. In fact, I'd like consolidate the jurisdictions in the Bay Area, but that's a whole other argument.

I don't quite know how to play out the claim that demand is infinite. One, I don't believe that. And, two, it seems like an argument that has us throw up our hands and do nothing. It's large problem that needs a large solution -- I've heard estimates in the 100-200 thousand unit range -- but I'd rather shoot for that goal than do nothing at all.

(I'm the author).

Traffic is a big problem -- as is parking. Public transit investments do have to correspond with building housing, but too often the lack of one is used as an excuse not to expand the other. We have to start somewhere.

As I said in the post, public transit deserves it own analysis -- I was already in the thousands of words just on housing! -- maybe that will be next.

I'm the author: I agree with you. I believe there are political solutions. Putting ideas out there to see if anyone agrees with me is the first step, hopefully not the last.

I am just a guy who sometimes whines, so I wasn't offended.

Every system has fraud and abuse. I doubt that most fraudsters would opt to get close regulatory scrutiny, but I take your point.

The culture that exists between companies and founders in YC seems a better measurement of YC's success than the culture that exists inside any one of those companies. They run YC after all, not the companies themselves.

I have seen some difficult divorces between founders (with various combinations of technical and non-technical), and although some might suggest that YC should arbitrate those disputes more proactively, I think their policy of being willing to talk things through but not vote their shares is the right balance for their relationship with the companies.

But YC's success at fostering a positive, supportive culture between companies makes me quite optimistic that they can create a great environment when it's their responsibility.

This is a much needed service! At Standard Treasury we set up a 401k (no matching, we're a poor startup) through Zenefits, which ended up connecting with https://www.myubiquity.com/ (formerly theonline401k.com). Ubiquity has an unpleasant and unintuitive user interface, poor support, etc. I'm really glad to see a YC company taking on this space, it's worthy of attack.

CRISPR for gene editing:

"Since 2013, the CRISPR/Cas system has been used for gene editing (adding, disrupting or changing the sequence of specific genes) and gene regulation in species throughout the tree of life. By delivering the Cas9 protein and appropriate guide RNAs into a cell, the organism's genome can be cut at any desired location."

(From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR)

Edit: Hear a recent Radiolab episode on the topic (http://www.radiolab.org/story/antibodies-part-1-crispr/)

When I started reading it, I actually thought it was written recently! I didn't realize the truth until he mentioned the tuition for Dartmouth Tuck...

Couldn't agree with this comment more. This hit home for me when I read Grimmer and King's "General Purpose Computer-Assisted Clustering and Conceptualization" (http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/201018067_online....), which looked at every text clustering/classification alogithm they could find at the time (as summarized http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/discov-supp.pdf). They basically end up clustering in the space of clustering algorithms...

Completely understand your perspective. I don't subscribe to the calories in < calories out = weight loss philosophy. I think calories are are pretty blunt instrument and that people's body respond to different foods differently.

That is, one of the key ideas of the study is that different people respond to foods differently. Let's imagine that everyone had, for example, two responses to sugar: one where your insulin spikes and then comes down immediately and another where it spikes, plateaus, and then comes down later. (This is roughly true).

One theory is that if you have one of those profiles your body will respond better (in a weight loss sense) to a low carb diet and if you have another profile then you'd response better to low fat diet.

I don't know if that's true -- hence the study! But I think it makes some intuitive sense that our bodies burn calories, pass calories through, etc, differently and that those differences are partially based on the interaction between what we eat and our bodies (genetic) proclivities.

Thanks Brandon.

Ya, well, when you're trying to eat fewer than 20 grams of carbohydrates a day, one becomes quite familiar with how many grams there are in broccoli. Sorry that my vagueness offended.

I don't really want to keep writing about myself in this thread because I'm not really that interesting...

We raised the money from friends, neither Dan and I are really financially capable of making investments ourselves. So, we're both privileged in that we've hustled and got people to have faith in us; however, both of us came from humble backgrounds (my mom and dad were a waitress and a postman, respectively) and neither of us have done that well for ourselves...yet.

(1) Neither Dan or I went to Stanford.

(2) Dan and I are part-time angels really, with very small checks given to a very small number of companies. Also, as sama mentioned, we basically stopped investing at all once we got into YC. We still make an investment from time-to-time but mostly in people we know already. We don't have meetings, way too busy on Standard Treasury.

(3) We felt like an underdog when we applied to YC. I think we were underdogs when we applied! We didn't know them and certainly didn't have much of a reputation outside of financial technology (still don't?). We felt very fortunate when we got in. YC was amazing for us and has always been supportive of our mild madness.

What I often do is sign up for any Cousera class that I could conceivably be interested in. I do nothing when the course is live, since I don't care about the certificate (paid or unpaid). Having signed up for the courses, though, I have access to the content in the future and can pick and choose what to watch. I then come back to the course and can consume it rapidly and with a focus on the materials I care about.

For example, https://www.coursera.org/course/money . I had no idea what in this course and its sequel were important to me. But then a bank mentions how Standard Treasury should understand repo markets, and then I watched the lectures on that topic.

So the idea of consuming courses in modules is very appealing to me, and honestly how I consumed most classes in college: the material prescribed was basically incidental to what I ultimately learned about the topic. I'm the type of person who gets really focused on some applied problem and then teach myself the, for example, CS, stats, measure theory, machine learning, etc, to do what I want on the problem.

Tangent: My only compliant so far is that the (pure) math I can find in MOOCs goes exactly to the point I stopped: advanced calculus and theoretical matrix algebra. I don't expect it to have the types of statistics classes I'd like (I majored in the topic) but I'm annoyed that I can't really find an analysis course...

I'm actually a participant in the Gardner study -- they're testing for a ton of other factors, including microbiota.

This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list, but it does have some holes I'd point to primarily in (1) Consulting / services, (2) Enterprise, (3) Hardware / manufacturing. On the first you have time and materials, fixed fee, etc. On the second you have on-premise solutions, enterprise licenses, etc (Think Oracle, tons of security companies), and the third is, well, I'm not sure anyone needs examples: you make physical stuff that does something and you sell it.

Ya, can't underline this sentiment enough.

I think that making money or fame have to be incidental goals to the things you care about.

I guess I wouldn't call it a disadvantage because saying "boo hoo, my friend and I from YC up vote ourselves too much and we get hit by the voting ring detector" is obliviousness by omission. I assume my links do well on HN because I went through YC and have written about going through YC.

My real point is to highlight: (1) There is no advantage on HN to going through YC. The only changes are (a) You have access to the part of the site that lets you book office hours (b) You can see other YC users and (c) You can post jobs. I know of no other benefit. My co-founders can't, for example, down vote comments because they don't have the karma. (2) A significant percentage of active users are YC alums, YC alums that know me, or people who know me personally, so once something I post hits the front page I ask my co-workers and my friends to NOT up vote me. I do that because historically my items have gotten thrown off the home page and I write blog posts so people will read the posts.

Other than "jobs" we get no help promoting content.

I actually think being a YC company can hurt you because all your YC buddies vote for you and then it appears that your cohort is a voting ring. I actually have to tell people NOT to vote for my posts sometimes, lest I trigger the HN Gods' wrath.

It's actually more so we don't get into unnecessarily acrimonious arguments with one another.

Yes! Kevin is amazing. He gave me a sneak peak of the design last week, but it's really amazing. I love all the wonderfully thought out but small details, like how good the FAQ page is.

Here at Standard Treasury, for awhile we had exactly six people. We played a bunch of Diplomacy games on http://www.playdiplomacy.com/ (terrible site). It was really fun, but terribly time consuming. We eventually stopped because six games over six months with the same six people is a little much.

The campaign for north africa is a little much. It's two teams of five people -- and the five people each have roles if you're doing it right. Logistics officer, etc.

I'm more a fire in the east type guy: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8993/fire-in-the-east