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A comment on The House Y Combinator Should Have Built. Parent comment

Re:The House Y Combinator Should Have Built by barrkel on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @06:41PM (#3650289)
It's a concise description of the difference in incentives between investors and founders. But I'm not sure if it isn't a false dichotomy. Larry and Sergey are asserted to have been better off in their garage; how do we know that they wouldn't have been even bigger starting in a shared space? Maybe they could have attracted some other very bright sparks that reduced the size of their engineering-oriented blind spots.
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Re:The House Y Combinator Should Have Built by pg on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @07:33PM (#3650425)
I know because before I was an investor, I was a founder. We'd never have wanted to work out of an investor's space. It would have been distracting and demoralizing.
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Re:The House Y Combinator Should Have Built by barrkel on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @09:43PM (#3650698)
When people are having to move to the Bay Area just to be in YC, finding a place to stay etc. is distracting, not to mention stressful.

I think framing matters. If it's presented as "when you take my money, you must live on my land, be overseen by me" etc., it's almost feudal, and of course no-one with free choice would choose that kind of environment. But if it's "if you want to be mentored by me, I can host you for a short while along with a bunch of other ambitious folks", it seems different.

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Re:The House Y Combinator Should Have Built by davidw on Thursday March 01, 2012 @04:11AM (#3651467)
> When people are having to move to the Bay Area just to be in YC, finding a place to stay etc. is distracting, not to mention stressful.

Sounds like the thing to do would be to eliminate that friction by helping people quickly and easily locate places of their own, then.

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Re:The House Y Combinator Should Have Built by dmor on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @09:51PM (#3650718)
I totally agree with this. At Twilio we worked out of the Founders Fund offices for about 5 minutes after our angel round, but it wasn't a good idea. We ended up happier texting each other with a coffee shop choice for the day. We did it for 6 months (and they did it for a YEAR before I joined). Its okay to be alone.
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Re:The House Y Combinator Should Have Built by leeskye on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @08:20PM (#3650541)
I agree...you would end up spending most of your productive time trying to appease investors when you should be off on your own trying to make customers happy.
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Re:The House Y Combinator Should Have Built by zupa on Thursday March 01, 2012 @04:23AM (#3651484)
Disagree. What makes it investor's place? If the investors are always around. It would help in connecting with each other. It does not need to be free..
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Re:The House Y Combinator Should Have Built by _delirium on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @11:37PM (#3650934)
An odd aspect of that comparison is that Larry and Sergey did a lot of their early work in a shared space--- the Stanford grad-student offices. They only moved into a more "private" setting (the garage office) around two years after starting work on Google, when many of the major problems had been solved and it had already started gaining traction.
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