What's your problem with property ownership? You want to make it so that if people actually work hard then everything gets taken from them anyway?

You're not talking about evening the score, you're talking about inhibiting people from ever getting ahead again.

Indeed.

Oh I see, jealousy will solve all economic problems.

Hah. That's an oddly specific match for our dilemma. Have you ever used it?

I am at the same juncture now.

There are many talented designers on there. I asked for a bid for logos a while ago and got 15 bids that were up and down the line for quality. I just don't know how many designers on there are willing to work for equity.

1. If your parents make 100k+ but don't want to spend it on your education, you're screwed.

2. If you're not a spoiled only child and your parents have to divide that money up then you're screwed.

#1 angers me especially. Parents I know don't do that anymore, especially when colleges rape us with such obscene tuitions while doing relatively little to improve the education.

or

3. If your parents make 100k+, but through financial stupidity, have nothing saved up for your education and no disposable income.

Happened to me. Here is a financial tidbit for anyone out there... don't buy a $40k car every two years. They tend to depreciate severely and leave you with nothing to show for it and a big monthly car payment. </bitter>

"1. If your parents make 100k+ but don't want to spend it on your education, you're screwed."

With tuition and expenses running 40k+ a year, I think that could put a crimp in the budget of a family making a little more than 100k+.

I don't know how much you paid for your school -- but with math like that I'm sure you paid too much.

But anyway, how the heck can you blame the kid if the parents are tight with their money?

Assuming you'd be expected to pay full tuition and board, which you surely would not.

I did after the first two years.

In case #1, were you better off before this change?

It is possible to become not-a-dependent through paperwork-fu, also, in which case a student would qualify if they make under $100k (likely).

If your parents make $101k, they don't charge you full price.

"2. If you're not a spoiled only child and your parents have to divide that money up then you're screwed."

Financial aid calculations typically take siblings into account.

Didn't for several of my sisters, FYI.

Did for my family, again FYI. My sister's financial aid package nearly doubled when I went to college, and mine dropped off fairly significantly in my last year when she graduated. Rice and Amherst.

Lets say your dad makes 55k and your mom makes 55k, I think your family would save a ton overall by having your mom or dad take an early retirement.

From what I can tell, those sites are totally different as far as first impressions. Plus, hotornot got the most brandable domain in the history of the internet.

edit: archive.org confirms it. You've got to be kidding me if you think those sites are remotely similar except for one tiny feature.

The main concept is the same, isn't it? The execution and branding vary widely, but that's exactly the point. Like Youtube vs. Google video, this example shows that, even here, first mover advantage doesn't count for too much.

You can't really call vastly different sites the same idea. This train wreck totally misses the "I would show this to my friends design" aspect of the idea:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010202080600/http://amihot.com/

And you've got to admit that the basic idea alone totally carried the hotornot site.

Damn, I was going to say hotornot, but you already did. There have been thousands of other startups though that have had first mover advantage work for them in a huge way.

i agree with the article -- first mover advantage only carries you once in a blue moon. The biggest successes today were nowhere near the first ones, they just did it better. Google came YEARS after yahoo, lycos, alta vista, and facebook came way after friendster. doing it better is more important than doing it first.

When an execution is as incredibly simple as hot or not -- that counts as part of the idea!!

Hell yeah the more the merrier. There's no way tiny yc can support the huge number of capable people out there who's talents are going to waste. That's becoming more obvious every cycle.

Edit: unless they really screw it up and scare away investors. Still, I am impatient to see angel funding to less well-connected people expand at a higher rate. Even risks considered, I welcome the yc clones.

That's not true so far. We've never rejected a group because we didn't have room. If we keep getting more good applicants each cycle, we'll keep accepting more, till something breaks. Then we'll fix that and keep going. (This m.o. freaks out Jessica, but Rtm and Trevor and I keep assuring her that this is how you scale systems.)

There could be people who belong to the set "talents are going to waste" and who might make a go of it that, however, don't belong to the set that you consider "really good". At least logically it makes sense that, being human, your judgment is not infallible and that some good ones might have slipped between the cracks. Having some other places to go, even if they're not as good as the original is good, and validates the original idea. I think the only thing to worry about might be that if there were so many really bad ones out there that it taints the whole lot by association, but that doesn't seem highly likely to me.

I was replying specifically to "There's no way tiny yc can support the huge number of capable people." I'm not saying there are no advantages to having multiple sources of seed funding, just that our inability to scale isn't one of them.

Engineers needed to know more math where I went to school.

I'm sure the mathematicians among us may disagree with my definition of "math."