I could care less what Larry, Sergey, or anyone else thinks. I'd rather have respect from myself.

I wonder: a) Where else YC advertised. b) If they stopped after "News from the Front".

We advertised in Facebook once. We never met anyone who saw either this ad or the FB ad, so we never bothered again.

Is this meant to be a double entendre?

People that work for big companies, don't earn Larry and Sergey's respect "in the morning". So big company employees == sluts.

PLEASE SOMEONE TELL ME, HOW CAN I GET A JOB AT THE BIGGEST COMPANY ON EARTH?

"PLEASE SOMEONE TELL ME, HOW CAN I GET A JOB AT THE BIGGEST COMPANY ON EARTH?"

Just walk into any Wal-Mart[1]; I'm sure they've got applications lying around somewhere.

[1]http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/perfo...

I guess the catholic church is bigger. At least is the biggest employer in Germany according to official statistics.

Okay I get it, the joke was a bit of a reach. can i keep some of my karma?

I gave you back some... but it was still a pretty crappy attempt at a joke :-).

If people need to be coerced or prodded away from a cube job, they are not startup material. Maybe GOOG is the YC entrance exam.

Your upbringing has a big influence on the type of career that you'll consider. Someone who is "startup material" might simply not have been exposed to the right stimuli.

If they haven't been exposed, in the area where that ad was posted (Stanford) they are comatose or clueless. In either case, who has time to "stimulate" in a startup context? My guess is a person like that would end up being a net drag on moving quickly and executing.

You would be surprised how few people at Stanford have any idea what's going on in the tech world.

Most people are so caught up in studying for the next exam or finishing the next problem set that they let all these opportunities pass them by.

You have shattered my illusions of Mecca.

In my opinion, this is true at Berkeley as well.

Is anyplace in Cali sacred? I feel like Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz. Pull back the curtain on these places, and there's nothing there...

No no, I'm not saying California isn't a good place to be. Let me elaborate.

I've been in the Bay Area for about 18 years and I absolutely love it here. If I wasn't raised here I probably wouldn't have gotten interested in startups. You read about this stuff every day in the newspapers, and when you drive around on the highways you pass by the offices of hundreds of companies. As a programmer and an aspiring entrepreneur, I don't think I'd be happy anywhere else.

SoCal is also great. I was in a high school business club and we used to go down there all the time for conferences. Santa Monica, San Diego, etc. all kick ass. The way I think of it is, NorCal is where you go to work, and SoCal is where you go to vacation.

Like I said, I really don't see myself living anywhere else in the world besides California. I just wish Berkeley students were more enthusiastic about startups.

seconded.

If so, Wozniak was not startup material.

Ah, I knew the Woz would be on the way. I agree, but in his case Jobs had incontrovertible evidence that he could execute: the Apple I, teletype terminals, and probably dozens of other things that he had built. He also had evidence of a large market: the inferior Sol computer was selling at 1000 a month. I am talking about the situation that YC is in, where you don't have great evidence of superior skill and craftmanship and a proven large market.

The evidence is only visible to those who know how to look...

Most people are not 'startup material'. When you're searching for low-probability events it helps to cast the net as wide as possible.

So rather than try to second-guess why every source of people (GOOG offers to Stanford) is unlikely to give you what you want, give every source the chance to stand up and grab an opportunity.

Right. All I am saying is, if a 20 to 22 year old with no commitments is given a) A chance to hit it out the park and get rich or b) Become employee #21,765 at a market rate wage and equivocates, why try to push it any further? You can lead them to the water, but if they don't drink....whatever.

At the end of the day it's YC's call and really none of my business. But every now and then I get on my soapbox...

Ah, I think I see where you're going.

The choice between the two is not nearly as obvious as you think. Otherwise we should all play the lottery, no? The reasons why a is a pretty good idea can get pretty nuanced and sophisticated, and whether a 20-year old knows them all has more to do with who he's talked to recently than any actual ability.

The only reason I'm in a startup now is that I read a few of PG's essays many years past the age of 20, and started having conversations like this on reddit and news.yc. I think it's worth the minor investment in time/effort to reach out to me/them if you're a seed firm.

Yeah. I made the mistake of projecting my own life attitudes/experiences into the other person. In which case I made the assumption that the decision the other person would make is 'Based on all available data at your disposal, which is the best course of action'.

The other person does not have all the data that I have and probably has not projected future possibilities of the optimal outcome. In that case, they may equate a startup in the same neighborhood of probability as a lottery win.

Or, they may look at the startup world as a closed gig for insiders only, and not realise that all you need to do to get in the game is to start playing (and play your hardest, but i digress).

The ad makes it clear that there are people who will be willing to help you in if they think you've got what it takes, so that it's clearly not as closed as it might seem otherwise.

Are you really looking at it from the point of view of running a angel investment firm, or from the point of view of a someone not wanting more competition either for YC places or in the startup world?

green, not sure what you are asking here.

Sorry my comment wasn't really very clear. If you were running a YC clone, how would you feel about encouraging people to join startups? I think you're a little quick to dismiss people who aren't initially very keen on startups. Just questioning if perhaps your opinion comes from a place where you don't really want others to see the startup light.

I wish EVERY technical person would see the startup light. It would be a great boon to the economy. It escapes me how they can't, as statistically they probably report to someone who is not as intelligent as they are (a suit). All I am saying is that if they have such a low level of testosterone that they would choose reporting to a boss over being their own, you probably shouldn't waste your time.

Steve Ballmer was prodded away from an MBA.

They should not have prodded.

why not? seriously.

I've seen that way too many times. :) I did say seriously...

There's 1% of chance an entrepreneur would look forward for a job.

Being an entrepreneur type (at least I like to think so), I can't stand working for someone else. I hate it, I absolutely can't stand to sell myself short, which is what I feel working or someone else is. That said, before I started reading PG's essays, I had no idea of the "other option". I hadn't even considered web startups or not working for someone else. I didn't even know what it was that bothered me about working for other people; I always just thought it was the "daily grind" getting old. Of course, I realize now that I just felt like I was getting all I could out of my abilities, like I (hopefully) could in a startup.

So while I may not have been "looking forward" to getting a job, that was all I ever considered. I think that may be true for a lot of people. Now, of course, I don't even consider it, except as a last resort. I can't even stand being tied to the work associated with my Fellowship (for grad school), and that is much more open-ended.

I guess my point is that advertising like this is definitely valuable. There are individuals out there like myself who have the drive and the talent and simply aren't aware of any opportunities outside of the status quo. Thank goodness I took that random Lisp course....

I didn't think of it from that perspective, but I can see how that would work in your case. Maybe I'm just looking at it from the wrong angle. I took it as someone who knew the deal and just didn't want to do it because of a job offer from a cube farm.

Wow... a couple bad typos in that comment; I'm surprised I even got any upvotes. Some corrections:

  s/working or someone else/working for someone else/;
  s/like I was getting all I/like I wasn't getting all I/;

p.s. I don't typically use Perl, but it definitely has its uses, and quick and dirty text replacements are certainly one of them.

If you think you can do it (i.e. build a successful company), you probably can do it regardless of your status (in school, unemployed or while working for another company). Actually there are numerous examples of people who have done it and each one has their own story. You really can't generalize or conjecture statistics for the future so 1% stat including margin of error is moot. I would rather rephrase your statement as "An entrepreneur is more likely to be passionate about his/her ideas and opening his/her company than building a successful career in another company".

is there no way to get funded by ycombinator in between the winter and summer founders programs?

Is this real or a photoshop job?

It's real. We made this in the winter of 2006. Graphic design by Kevin Hale of Wufoo.

real... look at the deformation and ridges and translucency

Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.

The pixels are off. I can tell. I look at pixels a lot.

xkcd reference ftw!