how should we fill out YC application if we don't have an idea that we are really into? how can we solicit PG's ideas, and still prove we are hungry animals?
OK, I think you're missing the point of the "the idea doesn't matter much at this stage" assertion by pg.
I'm not the keeper of pg's mind on this stuff, of course, but I'm pretty certain that pg and Co. would like to know that you are capable of having good ideas--even if it later proves to be unworkable, unmarketable, or otherwise wrong. Having no ideas at all is probably a danger sign.
You have to be able to recognize problems in order to solve them...so if you can't think of a single problem in the world today that needs solving that the skill set of your team would be uniquely qualified to solve, then you're probably not quite ready to do a startup. You clearly haven't seen enough of the real work world, if you can't think back on a hundred and one things that you or coworkers did in inefficient ways because there was no good alternative.
The note about the idea being fungible is just that--it's early, and you may end up changing your idea through the program, or YC might say, "This is stupid, but you seem pretty smart, anyway...how about we sit down and come up with something else?"
YC wants you to be hungry _and_ smart.
In short: If you want into YC, I'm pretty certain you should find some kind of idea.
We did once try introducing a group with good programmers and a bad idea to one with a good idea and no programmers in the hope they'd merge. They didn't, and in retrospect it was stupid even to try. The people are the foundation of a startup.
With all due respect, WTF?!? You maintain that people are the foundation. Seems like in this case the people were not up to it. Either the "idea guys" had an idea which was not compelling enough to motivate the programmers to overcome their personal conflicts, or the "programmer guys" were acting like a bunch of immature, childish, egotistical amateurs and let their personal opinions and the emotional sparks inherent in any high-pressure environment cloud their professional judgement.
Honestly even if your name was David Heinemeier Hansson and you were in my startup and I found you sitting on your rear end and doing nothing because you had a personal conflict with somebody in the company ... well maybe if you were David I'd toss the other guy out. But anything short of that I'd have to have a serious pow-wow with both sides and lay the smack-down; too much money at stake these days and too much much-needed world changing to let shyness and immaturity get in the way.
So it seems like the idea was not THAT great, or the programmers not too mature, or the leadership completely lacking the ability to establish a vision strong enough and roadmap clear enough to get people to redirect their focus from the obstacles to the opportunity at hand.
So idea guys, programmers, lack of leadership - clearly all "people problems" .... how then do you make the leap in logic that the general idea itself was "stupid even to try."
That's like saying, "Should architects get together with masons to figure out how to build houses more efficiently? Well, we tried that once and the foreman and the architect got into an arguement, so it was stupid even to try."
No, it wasn't stupid to try. The outcome was stupid and that was because the trial components were stupid. Doesn't mean the experiment design was stupid.
On the other hand, what is the implication of your argument, that only programmers can have ideas worth executing and that the rest of the world just sits on its collective rear end and wait until some programmer somewhere thinks up solutions to all the world's ills?
"Honestly even if your name was David Heinemeier Hansson and you were in my startup and I found you sitting on your rear end and doing nothing because you had a personal conflict with somebody in the company ... well maybe if you were David I'd toss the other guy out."
That's what they did, it's just that they "tossed the other guy out" by not getting together in the first place. That's much less messy than a nasty breakup/firing later on.
Personality conflicts are not something you can work around by force of will. Maybe if all parties are disciplined, you can make the situation tolerable. But in a startup, it has to be more than tolerable. If you don't like the people you're working with, you're not going to be doing your best work.
ONE THE ONE HAND, in my experience drama seems to go hand in hand with lack of strong leadership and ability to light a fire under people's rear ends by painting an inspiring "end result of our hard work" mural. It's like that show on National Geographic Channel, "The Dog Whisperer." Strong presence and ability to focus the group, no problems. Lack of strong presence and ability to manage group focus ... dog pack gets nervous and soon all anxiety gets released by individuals blowing up at each other for the most ridiculous slights, real or (in most cases) perceived. Same thing in monkeys.
I'm not saying people are dogs or monkeys but we are mammals and that aspect of individual/group dynamic behavior seems to have been ingrained in our genetics as a result of who knows how many years.
Strong leaders with big visions and the ability to communicate clear plans to people so well that people think it was their own idea can crush petty squabling instantly; I've seen it too many times to not believe it's a repeatable skill and obviously one of value (who knows where that startup you mention might have went if the participants learned to grow up and work together?).
"Personality conflicts are not something you can work around by force of will."
I think it depends on the individual maturity and the power of the idea and the money at hand to figure out if you can work around pesonality conflicts at will.
Don't tell me if you didn't get along with someone but I came and told you, "If you guys can shutup and work together and finish this feature by the end of the week, Google will buy us for $10,000,000,000" that you wouldn't immediately shutup and make friends and get to work.
Of course you would - so it's a question of mental attitude, not operational impossibility.
What's more important, your ego or the company. I'd hope ALL founders would say, "The company, because if the company takes off I benefit more than being right and makign the company flop."
Honestly I'd rather work hard with someone I couldn't stand personality wise and score and then spend the rest of my life upgrading my "WhySo-And-So-Is-Stupid" blog than arguing and cancelling the startup.
Anything else is amateurish and childish. I mean if your coworker fed kittens to Rottweilers or something horrible like that, well that's one thing. But unless it was something like that,please. Grow up. There are millions of smart programmers all over the world who'd cut a leg off for an opportunity to work in a possibly very successful startup where the biggest issue is "I don't like the guy sitting on the other side of the room."
As for your assertion that "If you don't like the people you're workign with, you're not going to be doing your best work."
I disagree. Maybe YOU're not going to be doing your best work but I've been in a startup situation where I loved eveyrbody and I met some unbelievably talented technical guy who wanted me to jump ship and join him instead. He was a certified genius but possibly one of the rudest pricks you can imagine. Every day long after I stopped communicating with him, for like 3 months, he would send me long emails along the lines of, "Let me tell you why you're messing up and what you're doing wrong and what opportunities you're missing and how you can improve this and you should stop that because that feature is stupid." and so on.
Funny how easy it is to confuse "I like my cofounders and they like me" with "we're making incredible progress ridiculously fast."
At first I thought it was a no-brainer to pass on working with genius guy because he was such a jerk I thought it would be impossible to come to work with him every day, even if he personally wanted to invest the first million out of his first pocket.
"No thanks, I have VC interest, I have a team that I get along with, stop emailing me please."
As I've grown older I've come to realize that that guy was like the character "Mickey" in Rocky: He's nasty, he's mean, he's rude, he's abrasive, he makes you hate to go to the gym ...
I'm pretty sure PG's implication was that merging people who were not already close and simply expecting them to mesh was a bad idea, not that one group was hackers and the other was not.
I think too many people underestimate the importance of a strong prior relationship with your co-founders. I would like to see an example of a successful startup where the founders did not know each other very well prior to starting the company.
Ah, yes. Now that you mention it, I remember it clearly (OK, not really clearly, but I do remember it). Of course, that makes me wonder how much can be gleaned from the application without an idea. But pg knows his business far better than I do.
If you're a smart person with a record of implementing great things, have the skills we need (see
http://www.crunchboard.com/item/22635744-Banquet-needs-a-PHP... ) but no idea of your own, join our idea - which is less of an idea and more a product at this point.
Email is mike.maccana PANTS gmail PANTS com. I'll be flying to the US on November 1-5 via LA and Boston provided we make it to the Cambridge YC meeting. Otherwise, we'll be continuing on as usual - our main coders based in California, we're looking for people who can move to SF if necessary.
I think last time me and my buddies applied, I left the main idea part blank, then threw like 15 into the "anything else" section. Didn't get an interview, but did get a little bit noticed.
20 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 27.6 ms ] threadI'm not the keeper of pg's mind on this stuff, of course, but I'm pretty certain that pg and Co. would like to know that you are capable of having good ideas--even if it later proves to be unworkable, unmarketable, or otherwise wrong. Having no ideas at all is probably a danger sign.
You have to be able to recognize problems in order to solve them...so if you can't think of a single problem in the world today that needs solving that the skill set of your team would be uniquely qualified to solve, then you're probably not quite ready to do a startup. You clearly haven't seen enough of the real work world, if you can't think back on a hundred and one things that you or coworkers did in inefficient ways because there was no good alternative.
The note about the idea being fungible is just that--it's early, and you may end up changing your idea through the program, or YC might say, "This is stupid, but you seem pretty smart, anyway...how about we sit down and come up with something else?"
YC wants you to be hungry _and_ smart.
In short: If you want into YC, I'm pretty certain you should find some kind of idea.
Honestly even if your name was David Heinemeier Hansson and you were in my startup and I found you sitting on your rear end and doing nothing because you had a personal conflict with somebody in the company ... well maybe if you were David I'd toss the other guy out. But anything short of that I'd have to have a serious pow-wow with both sides and lay the smack-down; too much money at stake these days and too much much-needed world changing to let shyness and immaturity get in the way.
So it seems like the idea was not THAT great, or the programmers not too mature, or the leadership completely lacking the ability to establish a vision strong enough and roadmap clear enough to get people to redirect their focus from the obstacles to the opportunity at hand.
So idea guys, programmers, lack of leadership - clearly all "people problems" .... how then do you make the leap in logic that the general idea itself was "stupid even to try."
That's like saying, "Should architects get together with masons to figure out how to build houses more efficiently? Well, we tried that once and the foreman and the architect got into an arguement, so it was stupid even to try."
No, it wasn't stupid to try. The outcome was stupid and that was because the trial components were stupid. Doesn't mean the experiment design was stupid.
On the other hand, what is the implication of your argument, that only programmers can have ideas worth executing and that the rest of the world just sits on its collective rear end and wait until some programmer somewhere thinks up solutions to all the world's ills?
I think not.
That's what they did, it's just that they "tossed the other guy out" by not getting together in the first place. That's much less messy than a nasty breakup/firing later on.
Personality conflicts are not something you can work around by force of will. Maybe if all parties are disciplined, you can make the situation tolerable. But in a startup, it has to be more than tolerable. If you don't like the people you're working with, you're not going to be doing your best work.
ONE THE ONE HAND, in my experience drama seems to go hand in hand with lack of strong leadership and ability to light a fire under people's rear ends by painting an inspiring "end result of our hard work" mural. It's like that show on National Geographic Channel, "The Dog Whisperer." Strong presence and ability to focus the group, no problems. Lack of strong presence and ability to manage group focus ... dog pack gets nervous and soon all anxiety gets released by individuals blowing up at each other for the most ridiculous slights, real or (in most cases) perceived. Same thing in monkeys.
I'm not saying people are dogs or monkeys but we are mammals and that aspect of individual/group dynamic behavior seems to have been ingrained in our genetics as a result of who knows how many years.
Strong leaders with big visions and the ability to communicate clear plans to people so well that people think it was their own idea can crush petty squabling instantly; I've seen it too many times to not believe it's a repeatable skill and obviously one of value (who knows where that startup you mention might have went if the participants learned to grow up and work together?).
"Personality conflicts are not something you can work around by force of will."
I think it depends on the individual maturity and the power of the idea and the money at hand to figure out if you can work around pesonality conflicts at will.
Don't tell me if you didn't get along with someone but I came and told you, "If you guys can shutup and work together and finish this feature by the end of the week, Google will buy us for $10,000,000,000" that you wouldn't immediately shutup and make friends and get to work.
Of course you would - so it's a question of mental attitude, not operational impossibility.
What's more important, your ego or the company. I'd hope ALL founders would say, "The company, because if the company takes off I benefit more than being right and makign the company flop."
Honestly I'd rather work hard with someone I couldn't stand personality wise and score and then spend the rest of my life upgrading my "WhySo-And-So-Is-Stupid" blog than arguing and cancelling the startup.
Anything else is amateurish and childish. I mean if your coworker fed kittens to Rottweilers or something horrible like that, well that's one thing. But unless it was something like that,please. Grow up. There are millions of smart programmers all over the world who'd cut a leg off for an opportunity to work in a possibly very successful startup where the biggest issue is "I don't like the guy sitting on the other side of the room."
As for your assertion that "If you don't like the people you're workign with, you're not going to be doing your best work."
I disagree. Maybe YOU're not going to be doing your best work but I've been in a startup situation where I loved eveyrbody and I met some unbelievably talented technical guy who wanted me to jump ship and join him instead. He was a certified genius but possibly one of the rudest pricks you can imagine. Every day long after I stopped communicating with him, for like 3 months, he would send me long emails along the lines of, "Let me tell you why you're messing up and what you're doing wrong and what opportunities you're missing and how you can improve this and you should stop that because that feature is stupid." and so on.
Funny how easy it is to confuse "I like my cofounders and they like me" with "we're making incredible progress ridiculously fast."
At first I thought it was a no-brainer to pass on working with genius guy because he was such a jerk I thought it would be impossible to come to work with him every day, even if he personally wanted to invest the first million out of his first pocket.
"No thanks, I have VC interest, I have a team that I get along with, stop emailing me please."
As I've grown older I've come to realize that that guy was like the character "Mickey" in Rocky: He's nasty, he's mean, he's rude, he's abrasive, he makes you hate to go to the gym ...
I think too many people underestimate the importance of a strong prior relationship with your co-founders. I would like to see an example of a successful startup where the founders did not know each other very well prior to starting the company.
Email is mike.maccana PANTS gmail PANTS com. I'll be flying to the US on November 1-5 via LA and Boston provided we make it to the Cambridge YC meeting. Otherwise, we'll be continuing on as usual - our main coders based in California, we're looking for people who can move to SF if necessary.
Just ask yourself "What are the major pains in the ass I deal with on a regular basis, and can any of them be solved with technology?"
It's probably better to go in with a high-concept, far-fetched idea than no idea at all. Just see what you can come up with.
That's another good strategy.