Regardless of YC involvement, you can still be demoing to investors in March. It takes a little more effort--and you'll have to do the demo about 30 times to reach the same number of investors--but you can actually start a company without YC. ;-)
YC's value, as is repeated often, is in the advice and contacts. Finding 30 investors that will sit through your demo is something most developers don't know anything about. GGP is conspicuously silent on how to pull off that trick without YC.
> There's a difference between "Getting into YC would help my business" and "I need to get into YC to start my business".
"YC's value, as is repeated often, is in the advice and contacts. Finding 30 investors that will sit through your demo is something most developers don't know anything about. GGP is conspicuously silent on how to pull off that trick without YC."
It's not as hard as you think. The difference YC offers is that you're already at stage two of the VC or angel process: Vetted candidate. You get to do a one hour presentation for one member of the VC firms, maybe a partner, instead of having a ten minute phone call to make your pitch. You still have to meet the investors you want to talk to...but they are actively looking for deals in the valley every day. Go to events and you will meet them. If you build something popular, some will even come to you (maybe the hungrier ones...Sequoia isn't Googling for new investment ideas).
"Are you suggesting in retrospect that you'd have preferred a different strategy?"
Not even a little bit. But we were moving full steam ahead whether YC was involved or not. As others mentioned, we were launched, we were selling products, and we were developing the connections we needed to get to where we wanted to be. YC just accelerated that, gave me the impetus I needed to get moved to the valley, and gave us a chance to hone our message and our product under the discriminating eye of a lot of smart people. Well worth the time, effort, and equity.
But there would still be a Virtualmin, Inc. without YC, and it would still be building products that people like.
A few alternate strategies, some taken from books I've read, others from people I know:
Build a prototype - of anything, really, as long as it's impressive. Show it to industry contacts. Have them tell you "this is interesting, but it's not really what we need right now. However, if you could solve this problem for us, we'd pay you money for it." Get them to pay up-front to fund development. Build the product with their money. Sell product to other customers. Reinvest the profits. (my day job, also Sun Microsystems and Franz Inc.)
Find a group of passionate enthusiasts. Write software for them, and charge money for it. Partner with a business that benefits from what you're doing. Always look for underserved markets, and then opportunistically go after them with cheap products. Iterate quickly. Take over the world. (Microsoft)
Build website. Convince friends to join. Serendipitously discover that friends tell all their friends about it. Overload servers. Charge money for premium features to keep servers running. Make modest profit off of it. (LiveJournal, Flickr).
Same as above, but provide ways for people to make money off your product (selling services to each other, for example). Take a cut of their revenues. (EBay, PayPal, Second Life, Microsoft).
Work. Go to trade shows. Hang out on Internet forums with people in your target market. Make friends with folks.
It doesn't work so well for me, because I'm 2 years out of college and not in a particularly client-facing job. However, the OP is 36 and in a big company. You ought to have some sort of professional contacts by then, right?
I appreciate that you mean well; it seems that you're advising people on how to do something you haven't done, however, which is the same situation as at the top of the thread.
My impression is that the best way to meet investors is to live in Silicon Valley. That sounds like it's leaving out a lot of steps...
"My impression is that the best way to meet investors is to live in Silicon Valley. That sounds like it's leaving out a lot of steps, however."
You'd be surprised how easy the "get contacts" step becomes when you're in the valley. I was. I fought it for years, as I loved living in Austin. But, events where you can rub elbows with investors happen every single week here...it's a world apart from anywhere else.
'"You can do it too!" works better when they aren't telling you to pursue a different strategy than they did with no specifics.'
I didn't think I needed to do so, since I assumed everybody here has read all of pg's essays, seen Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start, and read a few other useful books about startups. While everybody who's built a business (I'm on my second) has at least a few things to teach others in the same boat...I didn't want to clutter up the post with a bunch of random rants. I respond to posts here with specific advice whenever there's a question I feel qualified to answer.
"You haven't explained how your start-up succeeded without YC."
Nobody asked.
I'll take your response as somebody asking.
In both cases, I made myself a recognized expert on an Open Source project that I liked a lot and that I liked the people involved (Squid in the first case, Webmin in the latter...though the first also included a huge amount of Webmin-related work and inspired the second). And then I founded companies built on making some Open Source project easier to use, more powerful, better documented, and more popular. The first never really made it out of the "consulting business" stage, though I constantly tried to convert it to a product business...had I been in the valley, I would have been able to make it work the way I wanted it to. It was a hardware based business, and for that you need volume, which I didn't have the capital to deal with--closing a big sale in the server appliance industry can cost tens of thousands of dollars before seeing any cashflow from it. So, stay out of hardware if you don't have the capital to see it through. Even then, you probably ought to stay out of hardware. So, the first one did not succeed without YC, by my standards, but did buy me a 350Z and keep me in food and houses for 7 years.
The primary thing worth learning from the first business (which I built without not only YC but without any outside investment for involvement) was that you can't do it alone. Get a partner, get to the valley (I don't even bother saying get to a "startup hub" because nobody is doing deals in Boston), get to work.
As for the second, here's what I know so far:
1. Start or join, very early, an Open Source project.
2. Work on it for several years. Get millions of downloads and millions of users.
3. ...
4. Profit!
"> seen Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start
I hope you're kidding about that. "
Of course not. Guy's a great motivator. Can't start a business worth crap (see Truemors), but he has a lot of good stuff to say about marketing, salesmanship, morale-building, and lots more. Some accidental experts really do have good advice.
So in your opinion would YC be better off doing both batches in Silicon Valley? My impression is people would be better served living there and flying to Boston for Demo Day 2 than vice-versa.
> but he has a lot of good stuff to say about marketing, salesmanship, morale-building, and lots more
Yeah, I took that as smart ass sniping. If it was a sincere question, I'm glad I've now answered it.
"So in your opinion would YC be better off doing both batches in Silicon Valley? My impression is people would be better served living there and flying to Boston for Demo Day 2 than vice-versa."
Yes, and I've told pg as much (he asked everyone in YC their opinion on the issue a few months ago). But, I don't know as much about the startup business as pg, and I'm given to understand that pg likes living in Cambridge...he brings the money, he makes the rules.
"yada yada yada, Guy Kawasaki sucks, blah blah blah"
Who cares? Have you actually read his books, or watched him speak? If you're too stupid to know a good writer and an amazingly good speaker when you see one, I'm not going to waste time trying to convince you. At the very least perhaps you can learn how to speak to people in public without pissing them off.
you're trolling, and its annoying. You asked a question that was impossible to answer (at least succinctly since there are entire books written about the topic).
Getting into YC isn't even an answer in itself, other people here are just trying to tell you it is possible to do without YC. You know, people did start companies before YC.
The statements most commonly described as "platitudes" are short proverbs and aphorisms which are intended to motivate or encourage another person, but which are in reality overly-simplistic or cliche; for example, "You will succeed if you try hard enough"
> You asked a question that was impossible to answer
Wrong again -- funny, because he answered it above, describing what he actually did for years before YC.
It's disappointing how much knee-jerk reactionism there is when people perceive something as raining on their fantasy parade. Critical investigation will help people succeed. As a result of my not accepting the original platitude, the poster supplied much more informative answers.
Saying things the right way in dealing with people is an art. I'm mostly around computers... kind of like a lawyer who comes home and then deals with his family by continuing the cross-examinations! Thanks for pointing it out; I was thinking about it the other day -- multiple ways to phrase the same thing -- and it took me several iterations to get from "likely offensive" to "non-offensive and helpful". I don't have enough experience with humans to say things the right way right off the bat, so I may need to essentially run unit tests on everything beforehand until I develop my intuitive sense to a much greater degree.
With computers you tell them "here's exactly what's wrong with you." With humans you can actually rely on them to fill in the gaps and just state things a lot more diplomatically (not to mention, it's not about making people "wrong" anyway!). Something phrased very gently and ambiguously can get results, and is probably the only way to deal with people effectively in most circumstances. I appreciate the reminder!
"Wrong again -- funny, because he answered it above, describing what he actually did for years before YC."
I only answered after clarification on just what you wanted me to say. Your first post was merely a "then why didn't you pass up the opportunity to get advice from YC if it's so easy?!" jab.
I think it's clear that I think YC is a great opportunity for early stage startups--probably the best one going. We accepted funding from YC, and I've never hid that (why would I? it's good for business and for our odds of raising the money we've just begun to raise). But, I also thought it was clear that the steps you need to be successful are pretty well documented if you only pay attention to them, and actually do what you need to do to make things happen.
Moving to a startup hub (really, just the valley) is not really optional if you intend to raise money. Despite all the talk of VCs and angels doing deals elsewhere, more deals happen in a week in the valley than just about anywhere else in a year. If you want money, come to where the money lives. This is the sole reason my first business didn't go where I wanted it to go--I, too, lacked the "connections" to raise the money I needed to build the business I envisioned. I wrongly believed that because a few successful tech companies were started outside of the valley, one could do it entirely outside of the valley just as easily as in the valley. I was wrong, and I've admitted to that numerous times here at News.YC, on my blog, and in frequent conversations. I didn't have a pg essay to tell me otherwise. You do. I also managed to ignore the advice on how to actually get in touch with investors, even though I'd read many books that covered the topic.
You seem to be upset because the advice you're getting for how to get connections seems like hand-waving, because you're having trouble visualizing a world in which you can meet investors accidentally on a weekly basis. You're thinking, "I need someone to introduce me to these people", but you don't. It helps, sure, but so would a magical fairy that could wave your products and the money you need into existence...even having pg on my side doesn't mean I get to relax and let the money come to me[1].
So, what you're calling a platitude was merely encouragement. Encouragement to build a business, regardless of YC involvement. If you can't imagine yourself building a business without pg there to hold your hand[2], then you're not cut out for entrepreneurship, and that's OK, too.
BTW-My first business was a success by some people's definition. It kept me fed, reasonably well paid, and I got to work on my own terms most of the time. I wouldn't have chosen an office job over what I was doing with my previous business. I have larger ambitions than just "not an office job", but I learned a lot. As quite a few others have said, you learn more from trying and failing at running a business than you do working for someone else waiting for the perfect opportunity to start a business to come your way. You have to make your opportunities. This isn't a platitude--it's a fact of life.
Thank you for the thoughtful replies. I gather I need to (1) practice the art of diplomacy; and then (2) relocate. Probably wouldn't do to meet investors and still be overly brash!
"Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments (which he developed at the urging of Stevie Wonder, who was amazed by his OCR reading machine), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. He has founded nine businesses in the fields of OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art.
The inventor attributes his success in marketing technology products to being able to predict the arrival date of competitively priced components and match it to rollout of his designs, for example, the hand-held book reader built into a digital camera.[1]
Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.
He has also received scores of other awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and he received the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2000. He has received thirteen honorary doctorates, a 14th scheduled in 2007, and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included Ray as one of sixteen "revolutionaries who made America", along with other inventors of the past two centuries.[3]"
Yeah, I read that too -- I was looking up when he was born. I was figuring 2029 was also going to be "before I die" to him. He certainly looks like he'll make it to 81, but you can't expect a whole lot more, even with ten cups of green tea a day, so it seems like a personal goal to him. You can do it, Ray!
By the way, the first paragraph of that bio should be credited as being identical to the one on Ray Kurzweil's own site, which is considerably less plain than Jaron Lanier's (not that it means anything, in my opinion...):
Cf. heavier-than-air flying machines, walking on the Moon, the Internet, sub-4-minute-mile, summiting Everest, Deep Blue, the integrated circuit, Cold Fusion [1]
Oh piss off. It hasn't happened yet so acting like it's inevitable without giving a shred of reason why except people have been wrong in the past is unreasonable because people have been predicting the coming of strong AI for decades now and they've been the ones who were wrong.
I think what's much more realistic and almost certainly inevitable is things like brain implants and other hybrid human-computer stuff. I'd be the first to sign up for something like that. And by the time it's ready it'll be able to store most if not all of recorded human knowledge - the implications of implanting that in a child's head in lieu of putting them through school for 10-15 years is in itself amazing.
> It hasn't happened yet so acting like it's inevitable without giving a shred of reason why except people have been wrong in the past is unreasonable because
"Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men." -- George Bernard Shaw
You remind me of stock market speculators who fail to account for regime change: making a trading system based on past data incurs model risk in the form that things simply will never be like they were in the past ever again. Just because things worked a certain way in the past doesn't mean they will in the future, without good reason (the sun will rise tomorrow because that's how gravity works, not merely because it happened yesterday and the day before that).
If you can give a solid reason, with any actual logic to it rather than referring to past events, I'd be delighted. Just putting quotes and referring to totally different technological developments which many said were impossible indicates that you probably have nothing because you don't know any better than I do. Blind optimism is as unreasonable as blind pessimism.
I have some reasons: a lot of people who should care about machine learning and other fields related to AI who could benefit from it don't; research, even in a hot field like machine learning, moves slowly and it takes years to determine in retrospect that a given body of work made a significant, noteworthy impact. Papers go through months of review/revising and then get published months after that; by the time you read a journal paper the original work behind it might have been done 2-3 years ago. Things move on the scale of _years,_ and I don't see that changing anytime soon. That doesn't sound very singularity-ish to me.
Now, can you give anything based on actual reason/logic/evidence, or are you just going to give me another unrelated quote?
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
If you're looking at academic papers, no wonder you don't believe it.
If we are only talking about creating an artificial general intelligence, this should do: Nature created a general intelligence through natural selection, which is a less powerful process than what humans are wielding (if only because humans can implement natural selection with computers and in addition have intelligent tricks that evolution doesn't have). Hence, if the human brain follows the laws of physics, it should be possible to find out how it works and implement it without all the messy parts that are bound to have accumulated over the years.
If you believe the estimates for the computing power of the human brain, we only need a few more years of growth in the dollar/flops ratio to make the required computational horsepower available to smaller organizations. In fact, supercomputers being designed today already touch the lowest estimates of brain computational capacity. So if these estimates hold, we only lack the knowledge of how to copy this process artificially. Which certainly doesn't mean that it is right around the corner, but not looking into it would be stupid.
Then, of course, the regular pro-singularity lament goes like this: Once we have created one machine that faithfully copies what the human brain does best, the exponential growth in processor capability will ensure that we soon have an army of intelligent machines. This sentiment is easy to attack. But even if processors stop getting better overnight (which is a grossly conservative estimate) we can still find improvements to our algorithms to make our hypothetical artificial intelligences better. In nature, brain mass doesn't equate with capability. (This last sentence is anecdotal evidence, but I won't bother to dig up the papers to see whether it holds).
You cite the sorry state of machine learning/artificial intelligence to show that we aren't anywhere near what is required to implement strong AI. I agree that the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence are in a sorry state that barely make any effort at copying what biological brains do. But didn't you just warn against extrapolating future change from history? It is obvious to any young, ambitious scientist that our parents have been banging away at the wrong problems for the last 30 years.
This isn't a pro-singularity post, because I believe that what Ray Kurzweil and his cronies preach carries too much resemblance to a cult. They may or may not have ulterior motives, but as you say, things always look better on paper than they do in the real world. What I am trying to say is that is would be incredibly stupid not to investigate these things closer (not to _try_, throw our full weight on the problem), because the implications of successfully pulling this off would be profound.
Wait - first you say that there's no basis for AI because of the historical leadup to today ... then you state in this post that people (stock speculators) who act based on systems based on past variables don't think clearly because they fail to take into accounts new development (regime change) which loosen the deterministic grip the past has on the future. So which is it - there is no AI soon because nothing in recent history indicates that there will be, or ... just because recent history fails to indicate that there might be a basis for it, doesn't mean that it's not just around the corner? A bit contradictory??
Cal Newport graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 2004, and is currently a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Something about a buck fifty in late fees at the public library.
http://ycombinator.com/w2008.html