Excellent. The essay and talk together produced several surprises. The essay cleared up things things that the video obscured (couldn't see the visuals), like the "not-so-smart" / "enterprise software" connection (I was thinking he just meant the competition was dumb so you'd have the one-eyed man / land of the blind advantage).
The big surprise is that YC hasn't seen an order of magnitude increase in applicants from their first round. You'd think this impossible: Paul announced the first YC program only about a week before its deadline and they got something like 250 applications. Now they are all over the tech news and they still haven't cracked 1000? Maybe PG's new speaking approach (memorize, practice, use visuals) is an effort to get more people fired up?
Paul, regarding this new speaking style: you could make yourself into a Steve Jobs dynamo of a speaker, but I think you shouldn't. Your usual wordsmith style is probably better for attracting nerds.
Question: Paul, it sounds like you've mostly swung in the direction of encouraging people to look at their own lives for problems to solve. Whereas in "Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas" you were saying the opposite, like in the two paragraphs starting with "Reading the Wall Street Journal for a week should give anyone ideas... " Trevor says something similar in the footnotes. But it looks like YC has been placing all its bets on the first sort of ideas. There's a good reason: all the huge software successes come from the "build it for you and your friends" model because those are the problems you fully understand. But it's more common to find software companies making solid profits on products they built for others' problems. Am I overlooking YC companies building products designed for other people? Is the problem that there just aren't enough potential founders like the Octopart guys: people deeply involved in some non-computing world who also happen to be good programmers? If so, maybe the richest source of ideas and cofounders would be cruising web forums for the near-programmers (people who build things like MS Access half-solutions to their companies' problems) to listen to what they would like to build if only they knew how. Maybe YC should be recruiting there, too. Thoughts?
I've often wondered whether you could make a lot of progress by bringing together hackers with, for example, doctors or lawyers. These are people who use computers every day but probably don't spend much time thinking about how to hack a solution to their computing problems.
As a scientist I've had a lot of success looking for the simple yet groundbreaking problems that occur at the boundaries between very different disciplines. It can be difficult not to make 'stupid' mistakes in a discipline with which you are unfamiliar...but it's a lot easier than trying to work faster and smarter on the exact same problem as everyone else!
Surely interdisciplinary collaboration could be just as valuable in startups.
Agreed. And yet the founders need to have worked together already, at least a bit. The big problem is that non-programmers can't help out with the programming in the early stages of a startups when that's about all that's happening.
Part of the reason the number of applications isn't that much higher than it was the first time is that we've changed our approach to founders. Initially we pitched YC as a substitute for a summer job for students. Then we realized that we wanted people more committed than that-- that it was actually bad to fund people still in school, in fact, because it's so easy for them to give up.
We will fund people still in school. (The founders of Weebly were.) But they have to be serious about starting a company.
I remember meeting someone during the WFP interviews that was still employed. What constraints do you have on people still working at tech firms like Google or MS?
The big surprise is that YC hasn't seen an order of magnitude increase in applicants from their first round. You'd think this impossible: Paul announced the first YC program only about a week before its deadline and they got something like 250 applications. Now they are all over the tech news and they still haven't cracked 1000? Maybe PG's new speaking approach (memorize, practice, use visuals) is an effort to get more people fired up?
Paul, regarding this new speaking style: you could make yourself into a Steve Jobs dynamo of a speaker, but I think you shouldn't. Your usual wordsmith style is probably better for attracting nerds.
Question: Paul, it sounds like you've mostly swung in the direction of encouraging people to look at their own lives for problems to solve. Whereas in "Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas" you were saying the opposite, like in the two paragraphs starting with "Reading the Wall Street Journal for a week should give anyone ideas... " Trevor says something similar in the footnotes. But it looks like YC has been placing all its bets on the first sort of ideas. There's a good reason: all the huge software successes come from the "build it for you and your friends" model because those are the problems you fully understand. But it's more common to find software companies making solid profits on products they built for others' problems. Am I overlooking YC companies building products designed for other people? Is the problem that there just aren't enough potential founders like the Octopart guys: people deeply involved in some non-computing world who also happen to be good programmers? If so, maybe the richest source of ideas and cofounders would be cruising web forums for the near-programmers (people who build things like MS Access half-solutions to their companies' problems) to listen to what they would like to build if only they knew how. Maybe YC should be recruiting there, too. Thoughts?