gline

"because we can" seems like a pretty good answer. Also, a thing that's interesting to me about campaigns like this one is there are so many iphone users. Even if a small fraction of them actually want to jailbreak their phones - for carrier reasons, to install some goofy skin, whatever - there's a lot of value in getting it done. How much value? I'm not sure - but I don't think $50,000 or even $100,000 would be surprising...

Given that "No one ever talks about Stripe or Coinbase" is obviously not a good basis for an argument, I assume he means "People don't seem to connect these various businesses and observe that 'financial services' as a whole is having a moment?"

I think YC takes mid single digit percentages in some form early on? So you figure they get diluted down over time and maybe they have, as a firm, 1-2 percent of the total, so, maybe, 150-250mm? And then PG certainly has a big chunk of that - a quarter? A third? He was already pretty rich because he got Yahoo stock (in substantial amounts!) for selling Viaweb, and then Yahoo stock went on to increase by a factor of more than 10 to its peak - if he had 20% of Viaweb at sale (10mm on the day of the transaction) and got out at a reasonable time he had, say, 75mm by the early part of last decade...

All of which is to say, it's true that YC has been very successful for all parties, and PG is probably much richer now than he was when he started it, but I suspect he'd say the money wasn't the important thing to him and based on these numbers I'd be inclined to believe him.

Edit: incidentally, I think PG has probably been underpaid for his YC work - I suspect most investment firms do not add substantial value to the companies they invest in, but the YC brand is clearly enormously influential and, given the enormous amount of noise in startup-land, I bet the brand - which PG has worked on very carefully for years - is responsible for a meaningful percentage of the value of the portfolio.

Australia, man - gets me every time (at least when there are no visible cars driving on the left)

There's a clearing price for hotel rooms in NYC based on the built number of hotel rooms. If everyone viewed airbnb and hotels as fundamentally interchangeable then the range of prices for airbnb units would be similar to the range of prices for hotel rooms at that time - but this would be lower than the current range of prices for hotel rooms, as the supply of available rooms will have increased.

Having said that, I think the airbnb market in NYC is reasonably close to clearing with the hotel market. Probably some listings for very nice apartments and also some for relatively mediocre apartments are underpriced, but the truth is that a night in a decent airbnb apartment is in general commensurate with the cost of a hotel room in the same neighborhood.

The catch, of course, is that there are many airbnb listings in places without hotel rooms at all - Harlem, the far Upper East Side, etc - and in those areas the airbnb prices appear low but of course we don't know the appropriate hotel room clearing price.

But to your basic point, I agree there's probably some discount right now for the general sense that airbnb is "weird" or "idiosyncratic" to the average traveller.

I'm conceptually in favor of airbnb and its peers. However, in NYC there's definitely an odd dynamic right now - renters are the main proponents of the service, because they can turn around and re-rent their apartments and recoup some of their housing costs (I know some people who are turning a net profit), but I'm pretty sure this is short-sighted. NYC is underserved by hotel rooms (maybe for zoning reasons?), so hotel space trades at a premium to residential space. If apartments become eligible to earn income as "hotel rooms", it's landlords, not renters, that will ultimately benefit - the rental market will reset at a higher rate and we'll all be forced to rent out our apartments when we're not around to make up the difference. I see this already in the form of friends renting larger apartments or paying higher rents because they expect to benefit from airbnb income; that behavior has to be driving up rents. Half my building (literally) is for rent on airbnb, as well as a third of the building next door.

This may be 'net beneficial' economically but I'm pretty sure most of the benefit will ultimately accrue to property owners, not renters.

And of course, although owners may come down hard for liability reasons if they find out about airbnb operations in their buildings, they have every incentive to turn a blind eye: if they can plausibly claim they didn't know and blame the tenant, surely their liability is at least somewhat reduced and in the meanwhile they benefit from rising rental income.

I'm not totally sure it will have been the right choice in retrospect but it was effectively this blog post:

http://corner.squareup.com/2012/04/building-analytics.html

that lead me to prototype using ember. I believe Square's analytics platform - not a "full" web app but a pretty substantial one - is still in production deployment based on ember. Of course, they're probably using whatever version of ember was around 18 months ago, and there have been radical changes since...

It feels very likely to me that these javascript frameworks represent a substantial component of the future of this kind of development. People smarter than I am seem to feel that angular is 'better technology' than ember, or at least that in looking like extensible html it has more in common with the eventual future than ember does.

I'm actually surprised, in this spate of MVC framework posts, that Meteor hasn't gotten more of a mention. In some ways it's younger than the others, and it has some idiosyncrasies (it doesn't actually require that the client and the serve both be written in javascript but you'd never know if from the web site). But the meteor team is incredibly smart and the company is well financed - and they're spending a lot of time and energy on one of the most interesting aspects of the problem, something ember and angular have not worked out: how to synchronize models and data between the client and the server. Meteor has a special protocol for handling this, such that when deployed properly if the data changes in a database the model in the client automatically updates to reflect this.

As someone building a complicated analytical engine with computations done in a python / C++ back-end and structure results visualized in javascript, the idea of being able to reuse models in both places is appealing and the idea that I wouldn't have to spend as much time on data synchronization is almost enough to try to make the switch...

There seem to be two schools of thought here, both interesting to me. The author seems to think that his failure has something to do with problems associated with the "lean startup" model and other commenters (lean startup adherents, apparently) seem to hink his failure has something to do with failing to properly follow the tenets of the philosophy.

I suspect actually that the author adhered about as closely to "lean startup" as many self-identified "lean startups" who have succeeded in the past, and made a pretty average number of mistakes in the process. I don't think of 'lean startup' as a way to guarantee success, I think of it as a way to fail gracefully if you don't succeed. The author came pretty close to this, actually - it doesn't sound like they burned through enormous piles of venture capital money, it seems like they learned a lot in the process, it seems like they didn't spectacularly fail to make payroll causing half a dozen family-bound engineers to suddenly lose their livelihoods. The only less-than-graceful element of their failure was that it took two years, which is probably a little (though not a lot) on the long side. Frankly late in the process they came pretty close to scoring what sounds like it would have been a pivotal investor, and that combined with lessons learned could have produced a true MVP, product market fit, and a viable startup...

So, I think the author successfully followed a good chunk of lean software advice, made some mistakes, got unlucky, and failed. This is what most startups do - even most lean startups - and there should be no shame in it. Paul Graham himself has remarked he wishes he were able to bring himself to invest in more likely-to-fail black swans because that's the way you get to own enough vol to have a real winner in your portfolio - we all should be more comfortable with the risk of failure.