Without a regulatory body it would be too easy for an unqualified person to pose as an electrician, doctor, dentist or lawyer. Do you really want someone with no experience or training wiring your house, pulling your teeth, operating on your knee, or defending you at trial?
Consider what this guaranteed $150k will do to other incubators. YC is going to be so much more attractive to other incubators, the best startups may not bother to apply to other incubators.
Sure, there will be winners that go through other incubators, or no incubator at all, but this is definitely going to tilt the field towards YC.
Manpacks is hilarious, super well done, and the undies are good too. I can't wait for them to start sending me shampoo, soap and all that stuff in my manpack. I hate shopping.
I've ran into this problem so many times I've developed a workaround using various applications.
Google maps on the iphone gets me the phone number. If I have to see a menu, UrbanSpoon or Yelp works sometimes. I don't even bother with mobile browsers.
I used to play high limit poker and it is quite common in the poker world for the best players to "share" themselves in a tournament or, more likely, in a game where the stakes are huge.
Being able to self-fund isn't always reason enough to self-fund. In this case, Joel may want to expand into 10,000 niches, but may worry whether the venture will be profitable. I'm just speculating. If there is VC willing to take some of the risk with him, for an equity share that he accepts and thinks is a good deal, is it still wrong for him to accept it? I don't think so.
This is a touching piece of writing. I think anybody who has lost someone close can relate to this. It is tough being pulled between continuing and mourning. You never know what to do, and no matter what you do you're no closer to the one you lost.
This is great. I came to the same conclusion some time ago. Of course, I never articulated it so elequently.
Anyway, anytime I bring new stuff into my house I take the same amount of stuff and put it in a box. About four times a year I call the Salvation Army and they pick up the box.
Before buying something new, I have to think about what old stuff is going in the box. Normally it isn't hard. On Christmas, when I get a lot of new stuff, it can be a challange. The worst is when someone gives me something I will never use and I have to put it right in the box, which seems ungrateful. Other than that, the box is liberating and putting stuff in it feels great.
I've done the sober equivalent to this (coffee shops). Not only did it point out some usability issues, like, "oh, he thinks THAT'S a button," it also proved to be a great way to generate ideas. Most of the input we received was dead wrong, but we had to think about why it was wrong, and that got us thinking in ways we hadn't thought before, which led to good ideas. I suspect the drunken version would be more fun and just as useful, assuming you are producing a consumer product. As for B2B, if your domain is specific, this might not be the most valuable use of your time.
In a small startup the analog to this is turning on a wide-scale Google adwords campaign with no site optimization, no keyword optimization, and no idea about what your customers/potential customers want, and watching Google charge you $2000 in a week.
This is what Facebook would be if instead of having friends, every day you were thrown in with a group of 100 strangers and there was a video feed. Some people (especially men) act strange when they are in front of a bunch of strangers for a short period of time, with little chance of meeting them later.
If you aspire to do something great, you need knowledge of what you are good at, a love for what you are good at, and you need to be good at something many people care about, but few people are good at.
I would love Apple to create a Photoshop competitor. As powerful as Photoshop is, there is a ton of room for simplification. You know there is a problem when software provides five different ways to perform a task, yet users have to have 5 years experience, or Google, to remember how to implement it.