wiwillia

Really interested in how accuracy improves with the scale of the data set. Non-invasive thought-to-action would be a whole new interaction paradigm.

Founding and being the CEO of Shopify, a $48bn company and one of the best-performing stocks of the last few years, isn't "the top"?

Different people have different styles that work for them. Some people love to work 60+ hours and are productive doing it, others get more and better work done when they limit themselves to 40 and take time off. What works for you/Tobi/John doesn't universally work for others.

I'm not sure I agree that quality isn't a major driver of success.

Two counterpoints: - Shopify came in and dominated Magento and others via a much better quality product (later they built network effects with app store, but originally it was just an easier platform) - Slack came into a workplace communication space where there were (arguably) free alternatives in IRC and others and won with a better, simpler product.

I think product quality is extremely important in determining success. I think it was less important 10-15 years ago as the web was establishing itself, but today consumers expect a polished, feature-complete experience.

Welp let me be your first counterexample. I work downtown and I LOVE the dockless scooters. I usually walk or take Muni, but I've found myself using these pretty frequently to go all or part of the way. I've also found them super fun to use with friends, when going to get lunch at a place that's a little farther away than walking distance etc.

I'm not sure why bikes never appealed to me, I like biking but it feels less casual. I just feel like I can grab a scooter and go.

I disagree about the public nuisance as well, of all the things that challenge San Francisco I think electric scooters on the streets are the least of our worries. The public safety concern I agree with you to an extent about, but I see people biking without helmets and boosted boarding without helmets regularly as well. Riding on sidewalks is annoying, police just need to start issuing more tickets.

Unfortunately this wouldn't really work. If you're selling insurance, you're going to have a strong incentive to play it safe. If you run a business, you're going to be furious if legitimate customers are rejected (which is unavoidable at some level, but no matter what level that is you're going to make the business furious when they discover a legitimate charge being rejected).

Yep you're totally right, sorry.

My fault. I totally misunderstood. Sorry.

That's a pretty uninformed opinion. YC is a collection of smart people trying to build things...

That "fancy apartment" is the cheapest place you can find in Mountain View with 4 people stuffed in, half sleeping on the floor.

How many YC founders go on to business school? I've heard of none, but I'm sure there are a few... But do you have anything backing up that people go to YC for that reason?

I think I went to one party during the course of YC. In fact, all I really did was build product and talk to users. It's one of the mantras of YC and anyone not following that advice certainly isn't seen as a "cool kid".

Probably not worth trying to change your opinion, but you're 100% wrong on every point (except the first if you define "cool kids" as people working hard trying to build things).

I hear what you're saying, but I'm not sure I agree with the argument that this approach is not in their interest (I also use an ad blocker by the way, not preaching just being practical). I would bet that ~50%+ of people are choosing to disable their ad blocker to view Forbes content once they got stopped (I did), and that that the value driven by that increase in ads served outweighs the cost of not having the small % of users who refuse to turn off ad blockers not share their links.

I can also 100% guarantee they split tested this, before rolling it out, to make sure it was the right cost/benefit choice.

Really interesting, thank you for sharing. Discovered resdet which is something I've been searching for a long time!

Have you considered trying another way to monetize? Selling merchandise, especially if you have an engaged audience, tends to have a higher effective CPM ($20-100+ in our experience) and can be run simultaneously with ads.

Teespring (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder and t-shirt addict) can be an effective tool for doing just this. We ship hundreds of thousands of products each month, you get retail quality products and margins as though you were paying up front.

Absolutely no risk and no costs. You'll never pay us a penny, we only make money if you do.

Purely a donation

Just wanted to say that we're excited to be a part of the non-profit side of YCombinator.

It's been humbling to have Watsi working with us in our office and watching the amazing things they achieve on a daily basis. I have no doubt that amazing non-profits will continue to emerge from YC.

It's always amazing to see people travel the world and make an impact. It's easy to be hyper-focused on growth metrics and silicon valley that you can lose sight of the bigger picture.

I see what you're trying to say, but money is often not the issue - it's the connections and expertise that are so valuable. In my humble, and admittedly limited, opinion the network and community and shared experience/expertise that YC brought far outweighed any million dollar investment we could have taken (and no investor would have even considered giving us millions).

We ended up raising millions (about $22M in the last year), and I don't know if it would have been possible without YC. All our investors and intros came through the network we built while in the program.

Hope that makes sense, of course this is all my opinion and you can evaluate and come to your own conclusion - I just wanted to share my experience and perspective!

Hi Nawitus. I completely understand that line of thinking, and it should have been especially true for us given that we'd been running for about 1 year and had $1m in sales at the point where we joined YC.

What I can tell you is that we thought about in the same way as bringing on a co-founder or superstar employee. The value of YC isn't measured in their investment, but rather the value they bring.

Even in terms of the boost to our valuation alone from the validation, beyond everything else, YC more than paid for itself. If you look at our growth graph there's also a sharp inflection that starts shortly after we joined the program. That could be unrelated, but it's my strong belief that it was the value of the program that helped us accelerate.

Thanks for posting this Sam!

If anyone thinking about YC has any follow up questions, happy to answer them here. It truly was an amazing experience for us.

Exciting stuff - love watching Stripe evolve.

I refer to myself as the non-technical co-founder all the time. I'm a male, and the CEO of our company. In my personal experience, I've never heard anyone equate "non-technical co-founder" to a term used only by female founders.

I also find that many of the entrepreneurs and founders I meet are incredibly humble (disarmingly so - the founders of Dropbox and Airbnb have zero ego). I don't know if there's any YC alumn who would say that Jessica is anything less than essential within YC.

I agree the penalty is brutal, If they had dropped 5 ranking vs. 5 pages I think the punishment would suit the crime (provided that Google didn't look at their links and find that their were other egregious violations). I think part of that is that the abuse was exposed so publicly and not really fully denied/remove by RG, and part of it is that RG has a big reputation and everyone has heard of them. For Google, it's a great time to make an example of someone and help push the risk:reward ratio in their favor, so more startups think twice about trying black/gray hat tactics.

I'll be 100% honest, I've been approached more than a few times by people with approaches to SEO that are somewhat black/gray, and I've been really tempted to work with them because of the promise of additional traffic/business. It's always the fear of a JC Penny style backlash that kept me from engaging. If the punishment was more of a slap on the wrist, there would be a certain point at which it would be worth it for startups to try and game the system (how many startups are currently trying to game the system? I would argue a good %, just most don't end up with it out in the open like this.

From everything I've been told, however, they'll be able to get the penalty lifted as soon as they remove the bad links and get back to even footing. Shouldn't be more than 2-4 weeks.

Also re: your P.s., it doesn't matter if they were only retweeting blogs they interested in or supported. They were asking people to add links (for SEO) that had zero relation to the article, in exchange for a tweet (which they wanted the blogger to write for them).

Does this interview about YOG$ have any relation to Justin Beiber? http://hiphophundred.com/yog-explains-his-new-mixtape-everyd....

Again - I'm a huge fan of RapGenius, and I think their superior quality will bring them to the top again in no time (look at their growth over time, they are clearing winning on quality already), but there's zero question that this was a terrible move. You can't fault Google for this.

Come on man, this whole thread/article is pretty ridiculous.

I'm a fan of RapGenius as well, but the whole underlying theory of Google is that the more people that organically link to something, the more valuable that content will be for someone searching key terms. You and I don't define what's "optimal" for everyone's search results, that's supposed to happen organically via legitimate link sharing (and it's the reason Google has grown to be the leading search engine, and that all major search engines now use similar logic).

To say that Google is doing something wrong for enforcing it's rules about organic links, just because you (or I) believe the results are more valuable, does not make that true for everyone.

Who do you expect to police this? Who is going to say what sites are breaking the rules for the sake of "optimizing everyones search results" and which ones are breaking them to optimize their revenue/valuation?

I'm a big fan of RapGenius, and I'll continue to use their service, but this was a shady SEO technique that backfired on them and I believe they know that. They'll be penalized for a week or two, remove the shady links, then have the penalty removed and be fine. I hope that other lyrics sites that are engaging in similar behavior get punished as well so we can try to maintain the quality of search.

Kitten cotton (sustainably sourced of course) sounds like a billion dollar idea if I've ever heard one

About a year! I wrote about the first nine months at http://wiwillia.com/post/41810471731/our-path-to-1m-in-sales

Walker from Teespring here. Wanted to jump in and say I was also confused by this, and Evan is on a well-deserved vacation right now so he's not around to clarify.

This was a real-time interview, and I was the one who edited for grammar because Evan had already left. I'm assuming this didn't come out the way he intended it to. I can't imagine (though I could be wrong I suppose) he is under the impression Postgres doesn't work with PHP.

When he gets back I'll have him chime in!

Really cool.

Don't tempt us