Is HN soon going to act as the product development group of the big guns like google, facebook? Or maybe pg has convinced facebook to port over to arc ?
In what universe does this drivel merit a single upvote, much less 9?
1) HN is not a product development group, it's a message-board. In the same way that the community bulletin-board at the grocery store is not a think-tank for the "Big Agro", "Mainstream Media", or the "Military Industrial Complex".
2) Port everything to Arc? Riiiight, because the raison d'être of YCombinator is to further PG's closet lambda cause and preach the merits of his pet Lisp dialect.
1) I did mean YC. Sorry about the initial mistake. YC companies seem to do a great job of turning ideas into products. I guess it happens because there is no corporate redtape, infinite market sizing, or corporate apathy in a YC startup that exists in larger companies. I believe YC is much more efficient at turning ideas into products than large companies. Which is why I feel that YC can act as the fast throughway where the best and the brightest from google/ facebook etc depart temporarily for a year or two and return to the fold with a successful product. Large companies have a lot of policies meant to push the average employee up which end up holding their best employees back. Working in an autonomous setting within YC or another group would allow the best and the brightest from the larger companies to create products quickly. All this being said - my comment was definitely armchair analysis - I am not related to either the large companies or to YC.
2) Porting to Arc was meant to be a joke.
Some investitors complained at Angelconf 2010, or maybe on a press coverage of it (don't really remember), about angels financing Facebook's expensive "selection program" (buying startups as a means of hiring people). Wonder how this will be seen those who made such claims...
If I recall correctly, they feel like startups sell too early to Facebook, foregoing the oportunity to get bigger. Pg said this is good, because the founders are instantly removing all risk for what is alredy a lot of money. Investitors are not so thrilled, because they are not getting that much money, and would be willing to take the risk.
However, founders don't have 100 companies they are investing, so the risks are not felt the same by founders and angels.
I'm pretty sure YC wants their companies to IPO more than almost anyone else. YC is in the same boat as angel investors. The difference is that YC is sympathetic to founders when they want to cash out vs shoot for the stars.
If it is not explicitely said, (too many essays/videos/interviews about the subject), this is certainly the tone on Hiring is Obsolete: http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
I've got zero sympathy for investors in this situation. If you look at the numbers, most of those talent acquisitions end up making investors 2 or 3 times their money in 12-24 months.
If investors don't like that return, then they should set their liquidation preference high enough to make whatever profit they want.
Of course, founders would be free to ignore anyone who's money is too expensive, too....
A quick question: Is instant personalization just removing a click that is otherwise required by an application to access all this data? Is there any new data that I can't access via the api, that is coming here.
Maybe devs who work with FB connect more often can clarify.. Thanks in advance.
There's a big difference between HN and YC. HN is people who like startups, YC is a mentor/investor. The HN community might not like what Facebook has been up to, but YC knows that being friends with FB is good business.
Step 1. They'll announce that Facebook is going to invest in any Y Combinator companies that want to make their products work well with Facebook.
Step 2. They'll announce that Facebook will pre-acquire any Y Combinator companies without going through the trouble of demo day, angel investment, etc.
Step 3. Getting accepted to Y Combinator will mean automatically being acquired by Facebook. All Y Combinator founders will have guaranteed jobs at Facebook with 4 year vesting lockup.
Step 4. Paul and Jessica realize that there's no glory in being Facebook's unpaid campus recruiters, but unfortunately, their own vesting deal will require them to hang around pretending to be friends with Mark Zuckerberg for another 13 months.
Whoever owns that better keep an eye out behind them. I wouldn't touch a startup or project that had any hint of a social media platform and included the name face and/or book until that whole TeachBook thing gets sorted out.
That teachbook thing is almost a foregone conclusion unless they have a very large amount of money in the bank or get a big sponsor.
If I were them - and I'm not a wuss - I'd change names pronto. You pick your battles, and in a case like this the downside is considerable for very little upside, already 'teachbook.com' has had a bunch of free publicity, more than they could hope to get otherwise.
If a steamroller the size of FB aims for you and you're not 100% in the clear (and I really don't see how they could make the case that they came up with the name independently and were not aware of the facebook brand and website) then you fold.
The person behind facecombinator.com is a wuss too, because they registered the name through an anonymizer, that speaks of 'bad faith' to me. If you've got nothing to hide and you're above board, don't hide.
I was considering registering it myself and it was available when I checked. Then I decided against it because I wasn't actually going to do anything worthwhile with it (for reasons other people specified here).
What remains to be seen is how many who would otherwise apply feel the same way. The sense I get in the community is that a lot of people think he is, and this may adversely affect the quality of applicants.
That's actually good to hear and I meant Mark although obviously Mark != Facebook.
When I say "not a jerk" I'm thinking a strong respect for liberty (individual rights / respect for the rights of others). However, and a lot of this is influenced by allegations, Mark has done the following wrong by my reckoning, enough to question whether he is safely "not a jerk":
1. Been trusted with source code and market insight from a group he worked with, told them it was useless and then used it to develop his own site.
2. Shown little respect for privacy or IP concerns of users until market pressure forced him.
3. Been dishonest with users by changing terms and using the data of users for Facebook business purposes without explicit permission (now largely rectified).
4. Copied the look, feel and features of early competitors while litigating those who attempt the same with Facebook.
5. Allegedly (unlikely perhaps) given away a share of the company as part of overdue project complications and not advised future investors.
While a lot of this is probably untrue, it's enough for me to question the man's integrity, honesty and ability to be trusted.
Meh, personally I dislike the idea of building a business on top of someone else's platform. Facebook/Twitter/etc are good ways to reach out to people and spread your message, but it's too easy for them to block you or reimplement your idea.
Agreed 100% and came here to say just this. Perfect recent example would be Tweetmeme. Plus you do not know how long these platforms are going to last there just here until someone comes up with something better. When they fold you fold unless you can adapt like those companies that made applications for Myspace and then moved on to Facebook.
Tweetmeme isn't a great example. They didn't get steamrolled—they now power the official Tweet Button, and they'll power (they are?) DataSift, which is going to give people crazy querying capability against real-time twitter data.
hmmm... I read either on mashable or techcrunch that tweetmeme was changing focus to analytics since twitter decided to do the retweet. Never saw anything about them working with Twitter.
I do see mentioning of an agreement with Twitter but it is my understanding that Twitter has a licensing agreement to use the tweetmeme technology not that tweetmeme will be powering everything.
I generally agree, but this arrangement makes it a little different. Working closely with facebook like this, you're kind of on the inside. They're not going to block someone they are partnering with, and with an advanced look at the beta features, you're not going to be hit with broken apps with the api changes.
As far as reimplementing goes, I think they'd just buy you first. They've already invested time and resources to help you develop your app/site, so it will be natural for them just to aquire you.
It's perfect for YC (extra high chance for the startups to be bought by FB) and good for FB (people doing cool, interesting social things they can incorporate). I am still not a fan, but I guess I'm not a huge fan of Facebook anyways.
> Working closely with facebook like this, you're kind of on the inside.
Sure, but there is a risk/benefit analysis to be done here. If you bet your business on one big company like that, you not only are you betting that the company won't choose to squish you, you are also betting that the company will remain strong enough to support you for as long as it matters.
If you are aiming to build a modest company whose service is fundamentally tied into a currently dominant big player and probably looking for an early exit, that might not matter all that much. On the other hand, if you have a neat general idea and the big company just happens to be the dominant platform in a relevant field today, that doesn't mean they will still be so tomorrow, and your idea might fit with competitor platforms just as neatly.
Personally, of all the companies in the world I would not build my business around today, Facebook is one of the top three. The others are Google and Apple. All three have a demonstrable history of trying stuff and then backpeddling, so if you get taken over, you might get a bit from your options but your idea and future development are hardly secure. All three have a track record of screwing the little guy, sometimes without even noticing, so if you're just building on their platform independently, you're highly vulnerable. And worst of all, I expect all three to take a severe legal and/or market-driven beating within the next couple of years.
For Google or Facebook, it will probably be on privacy grounds. You just can't go around making the arrogant statements their execs keep making, and presuming to collect and sell that kind of personally sensitive data, in a world where the public is increasingly concerned about these things and serious crime built around data loss and ID theft is rising fast. Both companies have already been hit hard by privacy watchdogs in several countries.
For Apple, it will probably be because the walls around their garden aren't strong enough but their corporate arrogance makes them think they are. Steve will probably just wake up one morning and suddenly realise that Android phones or a resurgence from a player like Palm or Blackberry has taken most of his market share, without even noticing how it happened.
Plus of course there are always the basic business threats. Facebook only needs enough people to start leaving that it can no longer function as the de facto standard way for friends to share stuff and it's toast, just like other social networks before it. Google only needs someone else to come up with a better way to do search and it's toast, just like other search engines before it. Apple... Well, they have a prestige brand in the middle of the worst financial crisis in two generations, so you do the math.
To avoid going down with the ship, if I were building a new on-line tool today and needed to work with a big player for platform support, I would definitely want to be working on portable, open standards as much as possible. That is exactly what big players like Facebook do not have, and will try to their dying financial statement not to introduce since it would be anathema to their business model.
They're not going to block someone they are partnering with
Facebook is a business. They'll do whatever is in their business interests. If it is "block and copy such and such app" and they can do it without significant reputational damage (which is really the only protection YC startups will have), they will do it.
If you're not providing services to others and all you do is SEO then by definition I think you are gaming the system. So yes, that's almost certain to be very closely coupled to Google specifically.
A lot of it is fundamentals, stuff that would still apply if every search engine were wiped out in a plague and were replaced with clean-room substitutes. Stuff like using semantic html as much as possible, using sensible text for urls and hyperlink text, ensuring the most useful content shows up with javascript/images/css turned off, ensuring important links can be reached other than through search, etc.
Or building your business on your government's "platform".
At some point the stability, openness, and size are enough to reduce the risk to a very low level. I'm sure it's safe to bet on: Windows, OSX, and Google. I really don't think Facebook is there yet. Not given how quickly we went from Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook.
I think the key here, besides stability, is really whether you own the users or not - similar to the iPhone, the rules can change pretty fast and it is easy to be left holding the bag on a lot of time and energy with nothing to show for it.
It's no exception. We're always building on platforms. It just depends on how risky/unstable/new the underlying platforms are. Without platforms, we wouldn't be able to build skyscrapers.
That statement is too general. Obviously it's a good idea for desktop software developers to build on the Windows platform. I build websites on the "IE platform" in that I rely on IE for distribution. Does Facebook have a history of cutting off services that use their API's?
Also, Facebook can implement your idea even if you're not on their platform. Look at FB Places. I don't see how using the FB platform makes it any more likely that they will move into your space.
But if you're dependent on Facebook it can also cut you off, or at least not support you anymore. It's not about preventing competition, it's about your supplier becoming your competitor.
If you build on any platform that you don't control (which every software developer does), you can be cut off. The question is whether or not Facebook has a history of doing this. I'm not aware of one.
A platform becoming your competitor is fair game, and doesn't imply they will do anything sneaky like making their platform any less accessible to you. Microsoft is in the Operating System business, but MS Office is a fair competitor to other office suites that run on Windows.
I understand the concern about Facebook though, because they aren't (yet) a platform like Windows is. Microsoft started out making the platform, and then built some nice user facing applications to go on top of it. MS Office uses the same OS system calls that are available to every Windows developer.
Facebook started out as a user facing product (facebook.com) and then pushed down into the stack. The issue with that is that facebook.com and other Facebook products are based on leaky abstractions. They don't just sit on top of the Facebook platform. They can do things with the social graph that no 3rd party application can do. This is where Facebook can have an unfair advantage, and why people are worried about building on top of them.
The good thing is that Facebook is working on sealing off the abstraction barrier between their platform and their products. Look at the evolution of their API's. MUCH better social applications are going to pop up once we can all build the same user-facing products that Facebook can build. The great thing is that it's in their best interest. Facebook is much more powerful as Windows than as MS Office.
FB just bought ChaiLabs who responded by "pausing" their beta API. My first thought (well after thinking "crap, there goes all my work") was that they wanted to absorb the ChaiLabs API into the FB platform. So, while they might seem sensitive to the concern, I'm not quite sure it's mitigating the very real "walled garden"/AOL quagmire.
Joking aside, this is an interesting development, it means that anybody looking to disrupt FB or something affiliated with FB is now going to avoid applying to YC unless they intend do be acquired.
I can't be the only one that finds this makes YC less attractive. I looked at YC as mentoring and a leg up for interesting ideas, not a sausage factory for Facebook Apps.
This sounds great for YC startups that are building anything married to facebook. Also, really great move by facebook, they get a pre-approved pool of third parties to expand their world of facebook. It sounds like a win-win.
Unless facebook would like to put their fingers all over YC's, including those that aren't related to facebook in any way - e.g. "Pg says we MUST have facebook integration like this, we have this document we got from facebook on how and what to put into our product. Do it bro - he'll shoot us in the face. Here he comes, I can hear the lambda keychain. Just do it!".
66 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] thread1) HN is not a product development group, it's a message-board. In the same way that the community bulletin-board at the grocery store is not a think-tank for the "Big Agro", "Mainstream Media", or the "Military Industrial Complex".
2) Port everything to Arc? Riiiight, because the raison d'être of YCombinator is to further PG's closet lambda cause and preach the merits of his pet Lisp dialect.
2) That was a joke. Though I definitely would have rather coded in Arc than PHP when I was at Facebook.
There is a reason I am not at Slashdot.
PS: You need to chill out.
However, founders don't have 100 companies they are investing, so the risks are not felt the same by founders and angels.
Angel conf presentations say a lot more: http://justin.tv/ycombinator
Also, pg explicitely mentions founders not willing to take a safe exit now instead of an uncertain big exit in a possible future may not be such a good idea (http://paulgrahamsidebar.heroku.com/guidetoinvestors.html#gm...)
But my question was not regarding YC, but more about angels.
If investors don't like that return, then they should set their liquidation preference high enough to make whatever profit they want.
Of course, founders would be free to ignore anyone who's money is too expensive, too....
Maybe devs who work with FB connect more often can clarify.. Thanks in advance.
Curious if anyone else has the same opinions that I do - not mature enough to trust just yet...
Step 1. They'll announce that Facebook is going to invest in any Y Combinator companies that want to make their products work well with Facebook.
Step 2. They'll announce that Facebook will pre-acquire any Y Combinator companies without going through the trouble of demo day, angel investment, etc.
Step 3. Getting accepted to Y Combinator will mean automatically being acquired by Facebook. All Y Combinator founders will have guaranteed jobs at Facebook with 4 year vesting lockup.
Step 4. Paul and Jessica realize that there's no glory in being Facebook's unpaid campus recruiters, but unfortunately, their own vesting deal will require them to hang around pretending to be friends with Mark Zuckerberg for another 13 months.
(Disclaimer: I loathe facebook)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/upstart-attacks-fac...
Maybe I'm just a wuss.
If I were them - and I'm not a wuss - I'd change names pronto. You pick your battles, and in a case like this the downside is considerable for very little upside, already 'teachbook.com' has had a bunch of free publicity, more than they could hope to get otherwise.
If a steamroller the size of FB aims for you and you're not 100% in the clear (and I really don't see how they could make the case that they came up with the name independently and were not aware of the facebook brand and website) then you fold.
The person behind facecombinator.com is a wuss too, because they registered the name through an anonymizer, that speaks of 'bad faith' to me. If you've got nothing to hide and you're above board, don't hide.
FWIW, I spoke with Zuckerberg today. He certainly didn't set off my "jerk detector" in any way.
When I say "not a jerk" I'm thinking a strong respect for liberty (individual rights / respect for the rights of others). However, and a lot of this is influenced by allegations, Mark has done the following wrong by my reckoning, enough to question whether he is safely "not a jerk":
1. Been trusted with source code and market insight from a group he worked with, told them it was useless and then used it to develop his own site.
2. Shown little respect for privacy or IP concerns of users until market pressure forced him.
3. Been dishonest with users by changing terms and using the data of users for Facebook business purposes without explicit permission (now largely rectified).
4. Copied the look, feel and features of early competitors while litigating those who attempt the same with Facebook.
5. Allegedly (unlikely perhaps) given away a share of the company as part of overdue project complications and not advised future investors.
While a lot of this is probably untrue, it's enough for me to question the man's integrity, honesty and ability to be trusted.
Found the link: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/12/twitter-tweet-button/
I do see mentioning of an agreement with Twitter but it is my understanding that Twitter has a licensing agreement to use the tweetmeme technology not that tweetmeme will be powering everything.
Edit: You could be right about the Tweet Button. DataSift will be run on TweetMeme's servers drawing data from the firehose.
As far as reimplementing goes, I think they'd just buy you first. They've already invested time and resources to help you develop your app/site, so it will be natural for them just to aquire you.
It's perfect for YC (extra high chance for the startups to be bought by FB) and good for FB (people doing cool, interesting social things they can incorporate). I am still not a fan, but I guess I'm not a huge fan of Facebook anyways.
Sure, but there is a risk/benefit analysis to be done here. If you bet your business on one big company like that, you not only are you betting that the company won't choose to squish you, you are also betting that the company will remain strong enough to support you for as long as it matters.
If you are aiming to build a modest company whose service is fundamentally tied into a currently dominant big player and probably looking for an early exit, that might not matter all that much. On the other hand, if you have a neat general idea and the big company just happens to be the dominant platform in a relevant field today, that doesn't mean they will still be so tomorrow, and your idea might fit with competitor platforms just as neatly.
Personally, of all the companies in the world I would not build my business around today, Facebook is one of the top three. The others are Google and Apple. All three have a demonstrable history of trying stuff and then backpeddling, so if you get taken over, you might get a bit from your options but your idea and future development are hardly secure. All three have a track record of screwing the little guy, sometimes without even noticing, so if you're just building on their platform independently, you're highly vulnerable. And worst of all, I expect all three to take a severe legal and/or market-driven beating within the next couple of years.
For Google or Facebook, it will probably be on privacy grounds. You just can't go around making the arrogant statements their execs keep making, and presuming to collect and sell that kind of personally sensitive data, in a world where the public is increasingly concerned about these things and serious crime built around data loss and ID theft is rising fast. Both companies have already been hit hard by privacy watchdogs in several countries.
For Apple, it will probably be because the walls around their garden aren't strong enough but their corporate arrogance makes them think they are. Steve will probably just wake up one morning and suddenly realise that Android phones or a resurgence from a player like Palm or Blackberry has taken most of his market share, without even noticing how it happened.
Plus of course there are always the basic business threats. Facebook only needs enough people to start leaving that it can no longer function as the de facto standard way for friends to share stuff and it's toast, just like other social networks before it. Google only needs someone else to come up with a better way to do search and it's toast, just like other search engines before it. Apple... Well, they have a prestige brand in the middle of the worst financial crisis in two generations, so you do the math.
To avoid going down with the ship, if I were building a new on-line tool today and needed to work with a big player for platform support, I would definitely want to be working on portable, open standards as much as possible. That is exactly what big players like Facebook do not have, and will try to their dying financial statement not to introduce since it would be anathema to their business model.
Facebook is a business. They'll do whatever is in their business interests. If it is "block and copy such and such app" and they can do it without significant reputational damage (which is really the only protection YC startups will have), they will do it.
At some point the stability, openness, and size are enough to reduce the risk to a very low level. I'm sure it's safe to bet on: Windows, OSX, and Google. I really don't think Facebook is there yet. Not given how quickly we went from Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook.
Also, Facebook can implement your idea even if you're not on their platform. Look at FB Places. I don't see how using the FB platform makes it any more likely that they will move into your space.
A platform becoming your competitor is fair game, and doesn't imply they will do anything sneaky like making their platform any less accessible to you. Microsoft is in the Operating System business, but MS Office is a fair competitor to other office suites that run on Windows.
I understand the concern about Facebook though, because they aren't (yet) a platform like Windows is. Microsoft started out making the platform, and then built some nice user facing applications to go on top of it. MS Office uses the same OS system calls that are available to every Windows developer.
Facebook started out as a user facing product (facebook.com) and then pushed down into the stack. The issue with that is that facebook.com and other Facebook products are based on leaky abstractions. They don't just sit on top of the Facebook platform. They can do things with the social graph that no 3rd party application can do. This is where Facebook can have an unfair advantage, and why people are worried about building on top of them.
The good thing is that Facebook is working on sealing off the abstraction barrier between their platform and their products. Look at the evolution of their API's. MUCH better social applications are going to pop up once we can all build the same user-facing products that Facebook can build. The great thing is that it's in their best interest. Facebook is much more powerful as Windows than as MS Office.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172025
;)
Joking aside, this is an interesting development, it means that anybody looking to disrupt FB or something affiliated with FB is now going to avoid applying to YC unless they intend do be acquired.
Unless facebook would like to put their fingers all over YC's, including those that aren't related to facebook in any way - e.g. "Pg says we MUST have facebook integration like this, we have this document we got from facebook on how and what to put into our product. Do it bro - he'll shoot us in the face. Here he comes, I can hear the lambda keychain. Just do it!".