jl

Joshua, Delicious/popular was mentioned a bunch of times in the podcast as a main inspiration. I'll send you a transcript someday if I can arrange it :)

Thanks Breck!

"But remember that making something for yourself is just a heuristic to guide you in finding an idea. In the actual execution, you need to focus on users. You need to understand what they want, and be fanatically dedicated to making them happy."

This point aside, I haven't written anything in 2 years, so it's possible I'm out of shape :)

This is a big deal: this is by far the biggest acquisition of a YC startup with a female founder/CEO.

If you want to get an idea of how formidable Tracy Young is, watch her talk at the 2015 Female Founders Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKR212H5vQ

Oh shit.

Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

We thought they'd be successful, but it's very rare for a company to be this successful.

He does not. He stopped at the same time he announced his retirement from YC. (He'd at this point transitioned the running of HN to dang.)

I was giving a talk to 800+ women (most of whom were not affiliated with YC in any way) who attended the Female Founders Conference last April in SF. A majority of them have already started a startup, so of course I'm hoping they will become successful someday.

"But if a university really wanted to help its students start startups, the empirical evidence, weighted by market cap, suggests the best thing they can do is literally nothing." This is an important insight and will be totally counterintuitive to universities.

Actually, I "blamed" myself for that because I never set up any formal parental leave program at YC back in 2009, which I would have been responsible for doing.

No, there's no connection with this essay and the last one. He's been thinking about writing about this topic for a long time. In fact, one of the things Paul and I talk most about is that life is short and we need to savor time with our kids and do things that are meaningful to us. So trust me when I say that, as PG's wife, I believe you are mistaken.

Don't worry, he won't stop writing essays.

I was going to expand this thought but when I thought what some of the responses might be, I thought, "Life is too short!" and left it as is :)

Now arranged by categories.

Fixed using "pre-order" category.

I hear you, though some folks will feel as if you are dismissing the impact of their products (e.g. Watsi). If it helps, check out (to name just a few randomly):

http://www.helionenergy.com/ http://bikanta.com/ http://ixchelsci.com/ http://www.standardcyborg.com/ https://www.detroitwaterproject.org/ http://www.oolusolar.com/ http://bagaveev.com

For sure in time for Hanukkah!

Rather than responding to everyone's complaints about the site: I whipped this together in less than a day, I was mostly focused on content, no one at YC who usually makes beautiful designs was available to help, I can't program, I'm using Strikingly, this is version 1.

I'm happy to get feedback, but please go easy on me. We will plan much further in advance next year and make it easy to scroll through ideas and look beautiful and not be annoying in the countless ways it seems to be currently :)

It was my (Jessica Livingston) idea. I'm giving one of these as a gift to someone who will love it and am simply printing a picture of it. Not as great as the real thing on Christmas Day for sure, but I'm hoping they'll still be pleased.

fixed

I know! Next year we'll be more planful.

Thanks. I adjusted the text slightly. Hopefully, it's more clear.

Sorry, not sure what happened but right after I launched this, my computer crashed! My blog post: https://blog.ycombinator.com/holiday-gift-ideas-from-y-combi...

This was a lot of fun and came together really fast given the time constraints. Colleen was amazing and did the write-ups quickly. I've been working frantically to get this out. Still needs work though. Please send comments. But first, I need to go drink some water as I haven't left my desk in many hours.

UPDATE: as I suspected, my inbox is exploding with emails from other YC startups with gift ideas. Will update as fast as I can.

I only know the backstory of Dropbox, but I'm certain Drew Houston would tell you that it was a painfully distracting process to obtain dropbox.com. I suspect if he could have done it all over again, he would have spent the 30 minutes and few hundred dollars to buy something different. Of course, there were a lot more options back in 2007.

It's true, not all ideas are good and it's important to be flexible-minded about these things. But as I mentioned, the Airbnb founders knew from their own experiences using their product and from their user base (albeit small at the time) that Airbnb felt like a good idea. I've seen founders give up based on the equivalent of these 7 rejections from investors so I wanted to remind people to persevere. I'm sure glad the Airbnbs did.