It depends on how you use this site. You might've noticed how the top users tend to post articles and spark interesting discussions while new users tend to post news. As a startup founder, you are more interested in analytical articles rather than news. For news, you might be better off subscribing to other sites for a larger scope (i.e. TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, and KillerStartups). There is no shortage of news.
Good analytical articles, however, require that users swipe through their rss feeds, find an interesting piece, and post it here. The value of yc.news, in my opinion, is in the articles that other startup founders find interesting. And that alone makes this place worth your time.
YC is much more useful to bring up things that you might not have thought of, or to hepl you understand the larger issues, rather then the minutiae of what's going on in 2.0 News.
One of the uses I've found is going back through the articles I've upvotted, and used that as a source of links to send to the team, so we're all on the same page about things, such as UI elements and the like..
While I get a lot out of the site individually, beign able to point to a study, or other people who have written about some of the issues is a persuasive tool, and one that helps to ensure that we have a better product all around.
And why is it good to know about trends and competitors?
I for one successfully raised startups, being very very focussed and not caring about competitors at all. Until know, people often ask me how my products compare to the main competitors and all I can say is: I dont know. I never looked at the other products.
"Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time." - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I keep a very close eye on my competitors. I follow their rss feeds, coverage on blogs, and features that make them better than us. I am surprised this is even up for a debate.
Ok everybody, split into to equal groups. Now, group 2, you're going to have to stop reading. Check back in a year and we'll see which group does better.
Edit: On a less snarky note... I don't see how reading different viewpoints about startups could be a bad thing.
Im kind of a startup person. I run a young company. Lately im reading the news here on a regular basis. Apart from being fun, i dont know if its of any use. What do you think? Did you ever learn something that had a positive impact on your business by reading stuff on the net? Is reading of any use? Or is it all about acting?
When I'm learning something new I tend to switch back and forth between practice and study. Neither alone seems foster growth as fast as the combination. I think working on your startup counts as practice and this site counts as studying.
I know because I am consistently running up against real issues that involve things I've learned. It has been very helpful, even in the minimal case of providing a frame of reference for making decisions.
Joe Kraus' emphasis on "make what you measure" convinced me to start measuring some specific metrics in more detail. The end result was boosted numbers in some of my performance/growth stats.
The most valuable things I've learned from other entrepreneurs are principles and methodologies. I apply them over and over again as I face specific issues.
Reading and keeping up with the news is kinda odd. 99% of what you read is absolutely useless. It will never make a difference in what you do, and you'll probably never use it. However, that remaining 1% can save you *huge* amounts of time or open up massive opportunities.
Just a couple examples where procrastination has changed my life.
When I was 16, my family went shopping at the Tanger 2 supermall in Riverhead NY. I hate shopping. So, I did what I normally do: I found a bookstore, grabbed an interesting book, curled up on the floor, and read half of it by the time my parents got back. On that particular occasion, the book was "Learn Java 1.0.2 in 7 days" or some other tripe like that, the year was 1997, and the Java wave was just taking off. One book led to a second and third, and then a whole shelf full, and eventually an internship at MITRE corporation.
While on the job, I was asked to learn Perl. A couple years later, immediately after high school graduation, my math teacher's wife was starting a company and had an immediate need for some Perl programming. In the year I spent at that company, I got to experience a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers, 3 different business plans, all the tribulations of a startup, and eventually an ugly VC takeover.
While slacking off at that company because I had no work to do, I found Fanfiction.net and the Harry Potter fandom. I read a whole bunch of fics, then my workload picked up again and I promply forgot about it. I went back to it during college, and ended up joining FictionAlley.org, which was just starting at the time. Over the 4 years that I volunteered for FA, I saw it grow from 2,000 registered users to 100,000 registered users, from one machine to three, had my first experience managing teams of software developers and got to take my first major project from conception to completion.
Separate thread - at an internship after my freshman year, I was goofing off at work and reading Ward's Wiki. I ended up getting pretty involved in housekeeping there after the internship ended, and struck up a few friendships. One of them led *directly* to the startup I'm currently employed at, via a couple of internships.
Now that I'm co-founding a startup of my own, I'm finding that all the different internships and threads and so on pull together. I know what to expect in terms of growing a community. I've had experience with 2-3 different technology stacks (and found they all suck ;-), but at least that led me to one I'm reasonably happy with). I know all about scaling concerns and breaking an app out over multiple boxes. I've got some experience in judging whether a business model will fly or not. (I think our business model sucks, BTW, and really doubt it'll get us off the ground, but we've gotta start somewhere.)
All of this came, in some way or another, from procrastination.
Incidentally, running a startup seems much the same way. The vast majority of stuff you do is worthless, but the 1% that pays off really pays off big. Unfortunately, you have no way of knowing what that 1% is until you try it. People talk about how Bill Gates got lucky with the IBM deal - the thing is, Microsoft had a zillion balls in the air at the time, and if they hadn't gotten lucky with IBM they might very well have gotten lucky elsewhere.
Well, this is a manifesto to do stuff. You give examples, how stuff can lead to other stuff. Thats fine. But its not specific to reading startupblogs, is it?
Probably the worst (= most overdone) business idea in the history of the planet: internet games + social networking. Well, second worst. Worst would probably be "Find gold in California."
Reading opens your mind to new things. Just because you can't see the direct effect reading has on your thoughts doesn't mean it has no effect. It gives you better perspective so you can see things from a different point of view.
Reading has different values other than perspective as well, it gives you conversation capital so you can better relate to others.
Obviously for reading to be valuable in these ways you have to read the "right things." I tend to prefer books over blogs if I'm trying to learn something specific (but blogs are great for keeping up on current events and getting different perspectives than the mainstream media), because it gives you focus and a single thing to remember. How many blog posts can you remember from a month ago?
Like everything, it's a balance, right? All study and no practice is just as bad as all practice with no study. And sometimes, if you internalize something that you read, you won't often remember where you read it from, so you think you came up with it yourself.
That said, I think it's good to keep yourself in check, since we all probably are pretty voracious readers, and will keep reading, even if it's stuff we already know, just because it's a new article. My recent motto is to produce more than you consume (if it's quality stuff).
Not true. Practicing incessantly will make you excellent in one category. Reading, learning and continually evolving will make you better across several.
I can stick my head in the sand and keep programming PHP, but thanks to the web and reading, I have an interest in design, AJAX, and most of all Ruby on Rails. You can choose to be insanely good at one thing, or just good at several. I'll take the latter since its more flexible.
Being excellent in one thing is often cited as a key factor to success. For example by Google:
www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
"It's best to do one thing really, really well"
What insights do you have to proove the makers of the most successful tech startup wrong?
Raises your chances of success? Don't leave your success to chance. Hardwork and perserverance. Sure, a lil luck wouldn't hurt, but don't count on it.
As for this site, its fun to read. Keep a critical mind though, because there simply is no magic formula, no hard and fast rules. As Morpheus might say "The rules can be bent, sometimes broken".
