In spite of the gospel around here that everyone needs co-founders, if you look at the monumentally successful people in this business, they were all doing both the business and the hacking at the same time until they were well past making FU cash. You just learn more that way. And I have an argument for why:
To be a good hacker, you have to be a jack of all trades and a renaissance person by definition. You're faced constantly with figuring out what logic drives real-world problems and then reversing it into a piece of code that gets the right answer every time. So much of hacking itself happens without a roadmap, that there's a lot of debate about whether coding can even be successfully taught in college. Certainly the self-taught seem to excel at it.
Suppose a defense lawyer came to you, a hacker, with a question like: I'd like a program that determines the probability of this or that criminal getting this or that amount of jail time, based on these parameters. Tough thing to figure out how to code, but it's not impossible. To do it, you'd sit down and learn everything you could about what makes which decisions more likely under which circumstances; and then you'd build a machine that could learn from its mistakes and pare down the possibilities within the boundaries you'd given it.
So your job as a hacker is already to learn the boundaries of problems and then fill in as much information as possible, which means learning it, to create a system of logic that then runs by itself. Business is just another system full of complex and sometimes contradictory arguments; the good news is, it's already bounded within a certain set of well-defined functions, and you just need to figure out the proper inputs. Trial and error is as good as anything when learning a new language.
The point is, you learn more by doing it yourself, and I think that idea is given extremely short shrift around here, possibly because they'd have it that no hacker can do it alone. Nonsense. The rolls of Fortune 500 Founder/CEOs clearly proves otherwise.
Yeah, but what they don't mention on Ycomb. is that this is all, 100% hype, and none of these ideas has a profit model. The rent around here is paid out by trust funds and the last dregs of the second web VC hysteria.
There are only two guaranteed ways to make money with an internet startup: Porn, and gambling. Ironically, the only two things YC won't invest in. So wholesome, they are.
"There is no such thing as luck, serendipity or synchronicity. Those are illusions. Luck is the outcome of good planning; the other two exist only in your brain and only affect how you choose to look at things. Hard work is the only thing that can make you both successful and happy. People who have to struggle harder to get somewhere enjoy it more when they arrive."
Also:
"There is no such thing as a selfless action."
"Question authority."
"Don't believe anything you hear unless you can empirically prove it."
I think that's the responsible approach. Not telling people to accept chance and fate, which if you think about it is tantamount to telling them to just be happy with their lot. Nice, coming from a billionaire.
Yeah, I know. Meanwhile, there's now an industry built on telling children their dreams really can come true if they accrue enough ycombinator karma. Way to harness that aptitude, baby.
edit: yeah, rate me down for telling you what you didn't want to hear. I'm not the one who throws $18k at a time down a well just to get a high school kid to suck up to me and think I'm a god.
I actually had this idea when I had dropped out of web design and became a taxi driver for a few years in 2001. It's a natural. However:
"Taxi dispatchers make money on tips..."
is an incorrect statement. Taxi dispatchers make money on BRIBES. Drivers do not tip out dispatchers. Nor do drivers' tips go to the company. What dispatchers euphemistically refer to as "tips" are actually bribes paid to them by some cab drivers to refer the best fares to those drivers - usually at the expense of the passenger, who has to wait outside longer for their cab because a closer driver was not dispatched.
The exact reason why UberCab or similar services ARE such a good idea is that they can improve the customer experience by cutting out dispatcher corruption.
Meh. Lucky people always love to talk about how easy it is if you just do what they did - though they usually have a hard time explaining exactly what it was that they did.
How does he explain all the happy-go-lucky young fliberdygibbits who ended up serendipitously taking their first job offer in 1998 from Pets.com? Or those of us who labored under the impression that "as soon as DataPower takes off" there'll be bonuses raining from the sky?
Right time, right place. Right age group. Right skill set. 25% of the above are things you can plan for.
Okay, but networking a thousand jihadists makes a stronger jihad, while doing nothing to make them better or less violent people. Networking a million cancer survivors makes people feel better but doesn't do much to cure cancer. Where is the proof that networking millions of apathetic people is going to make them one iota less apathetic, as opposed to just reinforcing their preexisting condition?
I don't know. Facebook users didn't even have the power to roll back the outrageous TOS changes, they all know exactly how many of themselves there are. You're telling me they have the power to overthrow the Ayatollah? If so, where's the proof that they've made any positive social changes in the last few years that they've been around? Sure, they helped elect Obama, but that can also be read to mean that social network groups can be just as easily manipulated as any other mass of people.
Been doing the same thing - Argentina, then later Thailand and Vietnam - while working on my startup and turning flash projects to pay the bills. Telecommuting from the third world is where it's at.
Made the arguable mistake of spending 9 months in Australia on my way to S.E. Asia and it ripped my pocketbook to shreds. That was when the AUD was almost 1:1 with the USD.
How can targeted advertising be a service? It would only be a service if you wanted to buy something but you didn't know what until you saw an ad for it.
I think it's bizarre that anybody who grew up after the '50s would buy anything based on an ad... and yet... I make a living in advertising because it's true.
I know that's the positive view of the situation... but if it makes governments less relevant and makes Facebook more relevant, all it's doing is shifting the power locus somewhere else, not actually enabling people. Spreading the word is worthless without power parity and trust. I.E. social networks don't threaten governments any more than a mob of people in the street would; empirical evidence in Iran does suggest that the rest is hype. After all, it's not like the US population started pressuring their government to invade and save the Iranian resistance -- or the Darfurian resistance, or anybody else for that matter.
And empowering Facebook isn't such a hot idea, is it? Facebook isn't a democracy, either; it seems to care as much about the will of its constituents as does the Iranian gov't.
The decentralized, anonymized web definitely helped get those videos out...but I don't know whether the social networks really had much effect. Even if they had, you're assuming that the Iranian gov't cares what a mass movement of its citizens thinks, which by all indications it doesn't. Things like Wikileaks, Cryptome and YouTube, which are not social networks in the sense that "social" is understood by the Valley, have far more potential to influence events on a government-to-government level -- or between other parties with power parity. The social nets are just a bunch of squawking parakeets that governments like North Korea and Iran are free to ignore at will.
You can make distractions for the masses or you can consume them; ya can't do both. If you have a thousand telephones that won't ring, then social networks are a great way to get suckers to sell your garbage to each other with as little effort as possible. They're the internet equivalent of reality TV: The content creates itself, so it's cheap to run; product placement through aspirational, voyeuristic relationships are the paradigm; topics are vapid, memory is fleeting. Gen X mostly understands this, but we're basically irrelevant to the marketers -- actually, in most cases now we ARE the marketers, which might explain why we have a better handle on it. But Gen Y seems to have an impossible time grasping the idea that they're being used by all these neat little tweets and likes. They've got an insatiable appetite for short-attention-span candy. It's easy fishing if you want to profit off it; they're like a bunch of trained goldfish in a perfectly transparent tank. Total advertising saturation has apparently done to our culture what it was intended to do: Replace genuine interaction with a series of tailored sales pitches, in a Truman-Show-like fashion.
I guess the question now is, what do we do with 30 million kids who can't write a complete sentence? And the correct answer is: War.
SD tries to handle things like child objects dispatching events up the display chain and implementing an AS3-style pseudolanguage...