great and inspiring read! find ourselves in the same spot as when drew started - when he walked in to YC unprepared. Well we blew our YC 2014 application, it was so poorly written. So with a common starting point looking forward to cracking the code to success by - solving a problem that we have ourselves, and improving on things that are already around!
end after 35? i am touching 39 and getting ready to start my real startup. My partners are all few years older than me. I never wanted to be in a job and have been running my services company for the last 12 years. While the current business is doing fine, past few years I had this increasing urge to break out from the services mould and "create" something of our own. Couple of months back I took the decision to take this plunge. We have structured our existing business so that it would continue to run in the hands of my partners while I am venturing out and doing our thing. So yes, to outsiders or even friends and family it might feel a little late to start out afresh I am all loving it and living every moment of it!
In our case we have followed the path of identifying features/ enhancements/different approach to doing things in existing products that we are using ourselves. We looked at stuff that we use in our personal life as well as products/processes that we used or developed in the professional life. This really gave us a lot of options. From these, our final selection was based on
a. Our conviction that this would work
b. size of the opportunity
c. we would have fun working on it
I believe the same offering as 2005 from YC is still fair. There is no magical formula to weigh the mentoring and quality of advice received with equity. The track record of YC companies however is a clear metric to judge this proposition as being fair. With so many more years of experience nurturing startups, the value proposition of YC’s mentoring and the alumni community seems clearly much higher than it was in 2005. So the deal doesn’t get worse each year as the article states, but gets better and justifies keeping the same offer as 2005.
as Sumang already pointed out BaaS is "backend as a service". BaaS vendors provide the most common backend features for web and mobile apps such as user signup, social integration, notifications, storage etc. in a managed cloud. They have easy to use APIs for each platform thus making it very easy to launch quickly and across multiple platforms (ios, android, web...)
Nod in agreement. I guess its about getting that loooooooong stretch of uninterrupted time. The day is good for getting the usual things done and brainstorming. But yes, when I am working on something new and exciting, i start at about 11:00 pm and my thought process peaks between 3 and 4 am