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Ask HN: Should Diaspora apply to Y Combinator?

16 points by cubes ↗ HN
Should Diaspora apply to Y Combinator? At present Diaspora has over $175K pledged on Kikcstarter so, clearly, they don't need the money. That said, I believe they would benefit significantly from the advice and community that Y Combinator has to offer.

I'd like to see Diaspora succeed, but I worry that the guys doing it seem smart but also a little green. Would Y Combinator help them find more mature developers, and, in particular, security and cryptography experts to help round out the team?

30 comments

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jgrahamc
What Diaspora should do is ignore everyone, stop talking to the press, and write some code. Then we'll see what they've got.
cubes
I agree that I would like to see some code, but don't underestimate the importance of funding when running a startup. Even if Diaspora is not, strictly speaking, a startup, it's worth talking to press while the story is hot because it likely translates into more funding, and more funding can't hurt their chances of success.
samd
There are more than a few arguments that say more funding does hurt their chances of success.
cubes
I'd be less interested in arguments than seeing hard data that analyzes the correlation between funding and successful outcomes. Money buys you time and resources. Yes, there are famous examples of startups that have burned through scads of cash, and failed, but I think there's a selection bias in those stories; it's less remarkable when a well funded startup succeeds.
pg
The empirical evidence strongly favors taking funding. If you try making a list of successful startups, without thinking about whether they took funding or not, you'll find practically all the companies on your list took funding.

The fact that the few who succeed without raising money tend to be famous on that account is evidence of how rare that combination is.

samd
It's not that simple though, funding comes in many forms and at different times. Maybe large amounts of money upfront without any product is bad, but large amounts of funding after having built something and gotten traction is good.

If money were of no concern and you were solely interested in maximizing their chances of success would you give each Y Combinator company 10 or 100 times as much money?

pg
Yes. They do get 100x as much money when they raise series A rounds, and I don't consider the ones that raise series A rounds to be headed for disaster as a result. Nor empirically do they seem to be.
samd
I think there is something powerfully motivating about having such a limited amount of time and money to build your product.

There probably is no ideal solution, different teams flourish under different conditions.

teaspoon
Unless it's no-strings-attached funding like Kickstarter, it can absolutely hurt their chances of success and of personally reaping the benefits of success.
ErrantX
I think it can hurt them.

You see I thought 10k was a good idea - a little cash to keep them going over the summer while they build something.

I mean, I don't think they have entirely the right solution - but it's interesting enough that I would happily have funded them 10k to see what comes of it.

Several hundred thousand is another matter - that can become a distraction. Look at other startups that recieve disproportionate funding and lots of hype then peter out.

abyssknight
I have to agree. After watching the Kickstarter video I was left with a bad impression. I heard a lot of buzzwords and ideas, but utopian ideas like this one just warrant a show and tell. You can't just say you're going to break the mold of the social web, ask for money, get the money, and then do a bunch of photo ops and expect to succeed. There will come a time when everyone who donated will ask, "Where is it?". Of course, the attention span of the Internet is so small, by the time the app comes out it may well have already been forgotten.

Unfortunately, I think this is a case of "I'll believe it when I see it."

Applying to Y Combinator might be good for them, if for no other reason than the support and drive to actually complete the project. Maintaining that level of visibility while getting things done would crush the team, but I think YC could help with that.

what
They claim to have a " rudimentary prototype of Diaspora running on [their] machines" which "includes GPG encryption, scraping Twitter and Flickr, awesome design aesthetics, and the initial stages of connection infrastructure (“friending” other Diaspora instances)." Wonder why they haven't done a show and tell with that?
jgrahamc
What they ought to do is implement just one of their core features (eg the friending protocol) and release that. With core functionality in place others can help them innovate. If they did that plus scalable status updates it would already be big.
what
I was trying to be a little bit subtle. They claim to be so passionate about this idea that they gave up other opportunities to work on it. All I've seen is a passion for talking about it. Talk is cheap, just get to work and show us something. I'm not even sure their hand wavy ideas are very well thought out.
DenisM
Do they have a business model? YC is not a charity.
jhuckestein
There's plenty of YC startups that don't have or haven't had a business model in the beginning.

Diaspora on the other hand has an obvious business model. Selling turnkey hosting.

DenisM
To whom?! To all the same people who purchased their own email servers for personal use? That should be about zero people total.
cubes
How about all the people who pay for Wordpress and MovableType?
DenisM
Consumers? I'd say abut zero, too. A small business type would pay for wordpress to get his word out, but a regular person with a day job? I don't see this happening. And I don't see Diaspora being appealing to small business types, unlike wordpress.

There is currently no way to make money in social networks. Maybe someone could invent one, that would be interesting to see.

rokhayakebe
Are you affiliated with Diaspora? Did they express an interest in Y Combinator?
cubes
Nope, but I imagine they read Hacker News, and would like to see them succeed. I think Y Combinator could potentially help with that.
jacquesm
I thought so too, so I mailed one of the founders a couple of days ago.
krschultz
I've never seen so much unsolicited advice before. Why is everyone telling Diaspora what to do? Because they are young? Because everyone else knows better? This doesn't seem like the typical reaction to a startup's announcement.

A lot of these people just want Diaspora to succeed because they want someone to keep Facebook honest. The real solution is not to all cross our fingers for Diaspora and hope. Instead maybe this is a sign several startups need to take Facebook head on. A lot of them will fail, but something will succeed. Sure Facebook has a massive network advantage - but so did MySpace. People will adapt.

The unwillingness of people to tackle head on competition is understandable. At first glance it would appear to make it more likely to fail. With a social network, maybe because of the network effects that is true. In general having competitors is a good sign that the market has money in it, and finding the market is at least as hard as making a product and selling it.

cubes
Sure, but Diaspora, by virtue of the interest on Kickstarter has a priori traction. I'd rather see a bunch of people interested in this problem work together, and form Voltron as it were, than a bunch of different groups try and fail.
jhuckestein
Can we please give these guys some credit already?!

Thus far, they are doing great. They had an idea, published it and built a community. Whatever they build, thousands of people are going to test it, allowing them to make it even better.

What if all this was a legit ploy to edge their way into the startup scene? Mission accomplished!

And talent-wise it's too early to know but they do seem to have a good feel for community, design and architecture. They have a great mentor, too. Let's just wait and see.

In the meantime we can congratulate them for their success so far. If anything, they helped publicize Facebook's privacy problems.

Gee, cynicism and skepticism are NOT the same guys!

pg
We could introduce them to people, certainly. In fact Rtm knows a bit about security and cryptography. But our top priority if they applied to YC would be to encourage them to figure out what to build first, and build it.

They are in a dangerous position. They have a large number of people who like them in a vague way-- who like not what they've built, but the general idea of what they plan to build. In a startup you want the exact opposite: you want a small number of people who like you a lot, not a large number who like you slightly.