YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286939
It's amusing cos this is basically a huge list of why startups suck on a startup Incubator's website. Good read.
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@stillwater I skimmed that. It's genuinely refreshing to see that even so many HackerNews people are saying YCombinator's "you must move to the Bay Area" requirement is utter bullshit. Because it's utter bullshit. (It's also a convenient way to filter out people who aren't already wealthy. which might be why they do it. You live in a neighborhood in Detroit and don't have $100,000 in the bank? Fuck you! We don't care how good your idea is.)
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@blakeyrat said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@stillwater I skimmed that. It's genuinely refreshing to see that even so many HackerNews people are saying YCombinator's "you must move to the Bay Area" requirement is utter bullshit. Because it's utter bullshit. (It's also a convenient way to filter out people who aren't already wealthy. which might be why they do it. You live in a neighborhood in Detroit and don't have $100,000 in the bank? Fuck you! We don't care how good your idea is.)
The Bay Area is THAT expensive? I bet the prices went up just because of the silicon valley hype. Self fulfilling prophecy.
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
The Bay Area is THAT expensive?
It's ludicrous. It would be literally impossible for my theoretical founder from Detroit to move there without $100k in the bank, and even with $100k he better start earning money pretty quick if he wants to stay there.
@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
I bet the prices went up just because of the silicon valley hype.
There's a lot of reasons:
- Terrible zoning laws preventing new construction (literally anybody living within a huge distance of a proposed construction project can kibosh it)
- Proposition 13 (IIRC) which caps people's property tax at the level it was when they bought the property (plus I think a max of 2% increase per-year) with the following add-on effects:
- It makes the property tax skyrocket after a property is sold, making it way more expensive for house buyers
- It incentivizes people who own property to never sell or develop it or do any action that would cause the tax to be recalculated
Combine the two parent points there and you can see that virtually zero new housing construction happens, ever. The Bay Area can't even fix it because Proposition 13 is state-wide legislation.
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@blakeyrat said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@stillwater I skimmed that. It's genuinely refreshing to see that even so many HackerNews people are saying YCombinator's "you must move to the Bay Area" requirement is utter bullshit. Because it's utter bullshit. (It's also a convenient way to filter out people who aren't already wealthy. which might be why they do it. You live in a neighborhood in Detroit and don't have $100,000 in the bank? Fuck you! We don't care how good your idea is.)
Why not move to an area that has a large talent pool to pull from, especially if it's in a place like Detroit.
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@blakeyrat said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@stillwater I skimmed that. It's genuinely refreshing to see that even so many HackerNews people are saying YCombinator's "you must move to the Bay Area" requirement is utter bullshit. Because it's utter bullshit. (It's also a convenient way to filter out people who aren't already wealthy. which might be why they do it. You live in a neighborhood in Detroit and don't have $100,000 in the bank? Fuck you! We don't care how good your idea is.)
The Bay Area is THAT expensive? I bet the prices went up just because of the silicon valley hype. Self fulfilling prophecy.
The rent alone is $2500/month for a studio. You need $50k/year salary just to afford housing.
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@gąska said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@blakeyrat said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@stillwater I skimmed that. It's genuinely refreshing to see that even so many HackerNews people are saying YCombinator's "you must move to the Bay Area" requirement is utter bullshit. Because it's utter bullshit. (It's also a convenient way to filter out people who aren't already wealthy. which might be why they do it. You live in a neighborhood in Detroit and don't have $100,000 in the bank? Fuck you! We don't care how good your idea is.)
The Bay Area is THAT expensive? I bet the prices went up just because of the silicon valley hype. Self fulfilling prophecy.
The rent alone is $2500/month for a studio. You need $50k/year salary just to afford housing.
Only if you're in the slums. Or sharing with several people.
Put it this way, my 3bd/2bath 1400sf house on 8200sf lot cost 300K - 20 years ago. Comps in the neighborhood are selling between 1.5 and 2M. 500K over list is not unusual. Yeah, unless you're rich, you cannot afford a home in Silly Valley.
(or you meant that 50K/yr salary applied only to housing...)
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The term "cons" can also be short for "convicts". One of YCombinator's co-founders was Robert Tappan Morris, the infamous author of the Morris Worm, the original piece of Internet malware that brought approximately 10% of the Internet to its knees and was originally intended to do far worse. When it comes to being evil online the guy was decades ahead of his time; if it hadn't been for a bug in the code, he would have been able to use his worm to create the first botnet. (Of course, since it didn't work, he claims he had nothing but benign motives and it just got out of hand, but code analysis strongly suggests otherwise.)
Anyone with any sense of morals would be strongly advised to steer clear of YCombinator.
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@dcon said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
Only if you're in the slums. Or sharing with several people.
Or willing to put up with commuting an hour each way.
I haven't looked at the price of studio apartments, but it is possible to find 3-bedroom houses for $3500/month, but the selection is pretty limited. Whether it's possible to actually rent a house at that price is another question; as far as I can tell, it requires perfect credit and the clairvoyance to have submitted an application before the landlord even knew he wanted to rent it. Even then it takes a lot of luck, because 3847 people will have submitted applications ahead of you.
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@masonwheeler I think it's a tad bit too much to blame the whole of YCombinator for one bad apple. IMO, Sam Altman and Paul Graham seem like the kind of people who know what they're talking about and also walk the walk even if I don't agree with a few things they've said.
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@hardwaregeek said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
Or willing to put up with commuting an hour each way.
@hardwaregeek said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
Even then it takes a lot of luck, because 3847 people will have submitted applications ahead of you.
@dcon said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
Put it this way, my 3bd/2bath 1400sf house on 8200sf lot cost 300K - 20 years ago. Comps in the neighborhood are selling between 1.5 and 2M. 500K over list is not unusual. Yeah, unless you're rich, you cannot afford a home in Silly Valley.
What is a Comp?
@gąska said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
The rent alone is $2500/month for a studio. You need $50k/year salary just to afford housing.
@blakeyrat said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
and even with $100k he better start earning money pretty quick if he wants to stay there.
If things are this bad, what's the upside in finding a job where you have to make sure it pays tonloads only to spend a very significant part of it on Housing? A Chance to be in a state of bllissful caffeination working 2132133+ hours per week on something that has low odds of seeing the light of day? I don't get it.
Also, If everyone is coming into Silicon Valley, the population density must be through the fucking roof. I don't understand how people can do cognitively demanding jobs when they're in a densely populated city with all the shittery that comes with like Commute, Traffic, Noise etc.,
Now I think about it, Silicon Valley (The TV Show) probably showed a more saner version of the real SV.
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
What is a Comp?
Sales of "comp"arable properties.
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@stillwater Comp = Comparable. That is, a similar housing unit (house, apartment, etc) with a similar setup (number of rooms, age, layout, etc) in the same neighborhood that sold recently.
Realtors have all the data on what houses have sold for how much (since the deed transfers are public information). Sucks because spammers have those as well, and send mail for years that looks like it comes from your lender with dire warnings (that are actually ads for shady "insurance" products).
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TIL.
INB4 I could have googled it myself, Yeah I know I know In my defence I had too mnay tabs open already but yeah my bad.
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
Also, If everyone is coming into Silicon Valley, the population density must be through the fucking roof.
Not really. Population density for the area as a whole is surprisingly hard to google, but adding up the population and area of the central core cities of the valley gives a population density of about 5600/square mile (2160/km2). For comparison, San Francisco has a density of 18860/square mile (with parts of the downtown high-rise area with densities over 150000/square mile), London has 14500/square mile, Prague has 6742/square mile, Tokyo Metropolis has 16000/square mile, as does Mexico City, Mumbai has 53000/square mile, and New York City has an average density of 28500/square mile (Manhattan has an average density of 72000/square mile and peak similar to San Francisco). (These numbers may not really be comparable, because the information I can find isn't consistent in detail — i.e., I can find detail at the neighborhood level for the urban areas of SF and NYC, but only the average, probably including some suburbs for most of the other cities — and varies between sources.)
The population density of Silly Valley is fairly low because it is spread out over a large area. Most of the housing consists of single-family houses on decent-size lots or low-rise (mostly 2-story) apartments and townhouses. If you include the cities where rich people have bigger houses on bigger lots, the density is even lower than that given above. There is very little high-density, high-rise housing as seen in truly urban areas.
Other than housing cost due to high demand, the main problem with the large population is due, in significant part, to the low density, along with transportation infrastructure based almost entirely on personal automobiles (most carrying only one person). Getting people out of their cars and into public transit would help a lot with Silly Valley's problems, but that would require transit that went where people want to go, when they want to go there, reasonably efficiently; that, unfortunately, is bloody unlikely to happen.
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
Also, If everyone is coming into Silicon Valley, the population density must be through the fucking roof.
No; because (remember) they're not building any new housing. Like... since 1980. The density doesn't change, just the rent and the sprawl.
Increasing density would require high rises, and those don't happen for reasons posted above.
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@blakeyrat Yeah I assumed no new housing means more people sharing rooms and what not. My Idea of Silicon Valley is 25 people in a house hacking away with energy drinks and empty pizza boxes strewn all over the place.
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@stillwater 25 people in a single family house is still shit density compared to even a modest 10-story high-rise.
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
My Idea of Silicon Valley is 25 people in a house
Only immigrants from 3rd-world shitholes. We have a lot of those here, legal and otherwise, but even they don't usually pack quite that many people into as house. As far as I know.
@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
I assumed no new housing means more people sharing rooms and what not.
When I was looking for the population density info up-thread, I ran across a couple of things that said the population is dropping. I didn't read them, because that wasn't the information I was looking for, but I assume it was because people who can't afford to live here are leaving.
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We have our own silicon valley-ish city called Bangalore. The Pop. density is through the fucking roof. The prime reason seems to be the housing laws are fuck-all. There are Men's hostels popping out of every single corner, some operating out of highrise buildings too. Imagine that. Add subletting and sub-sub-letting to the mix. There are many places where the number of Men's hostels > number of houses. There are so many of them highly concentrated around the neighbourhoods close to the IT companies. Add impatient people on the road, Honking all the goddamn time esp. when it's not yellow, not green but goddamn RED!
If it was not for the super pleasant weather, people would go batshit crazy. :(
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
people would go batshit crazy.
I've dealt with people in Bangalore. Some of them already have.
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@hardwaregeek said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
people would go batshit crazy.
I've dealt with people in Bangalore. Some of them already have.
Oh yeah. You have to be
somewhat
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@hardwaregeek said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
probably including some suburbs for most of the other cities
The London figures include parts that are like this:
Getting good population density estimates for cities is hard because determining where the edge of a city is is hard, and very rarely corresponds well with census data.
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
the population density must be through the fucking roof.
SV is mostly huge houses and suburbia (i.e. rich people). SF isn't very dense either because most of the tall buildings you see in the downtown core (basically one street) are commercial and most people working there live outside of the city (downtown is deserted after 8pm).
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@hardwaregeek said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
Only immigrants from 3rd-world shitholes.
And crazy 20yos like that dude who prepped for a google job interview for over a year and made a blog about it
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@masonwheeler said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
hostels
In a few countries, such as the UK, Ireland, Nepal, India and Australia, the word hostel sometimes also refers to establishments providing longer-term accommodation.
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@hardwaregeek Yes, I know what a hostel is. I've just never seen it used specifically in combination with "Men's" and wondered if that had some additional meaning.
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@masonwheeler I don't know. I just assumed it meant that there are low-rent accommodations that cater specifically to men, since most of the tech workers, and therefore potential customers, are men.
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@masonwheeler said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@hardwaregeek Yes, I know what a hostel is. I've just never seen it used specifically in combination with "Men's" and wondered if that had some additional meaning.
My bad. Hostel means a different thing over here. I should have said something like Working Men's hostels. Even that doesn't make much sense. It is basically where you pay a monthly rent and share a room with 1 to 4 people and stay for as long as you want. As opposed to hostels where tourists stay or like backpacker hostels and what not.
The hostels am talking about are either only for Men or Women usually. Don't ask.
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@hardwaregeek said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@masonwheeler I don't know. I just assumed it meant that there are low-rent accommodations that cater specifically to men, since most of the tech workers, and therefore potential customers, are men.
You assumed right.
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I should probably be more conscious about what certain words mean over here when am talking in these forums.
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
I should probably be more conscious about what certain words mean over here when am talking in these forums.
But paying attention to your words is a barrier to rampant pedantic dickweedery.
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@masonwheeler said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
The term "cons" can also be short for "convicts". One of YCombinator's co-founders was Robert Tappan Morris, the infamous author of the Morris Worm, the original piece of Internet malware that brought approximately 10% of the Internet to its knees and was originally intended to do far worse. When it comes to being evil online the guy was decades ahead of his time; if it hadn't been for a bug in the code, he would have been able to use his worm to create the first botnet. (Of course, since it didn't work, he claims he had nothing but benign motives and it just got out of hand, but code analysis strongly suggests otherwise.)
Anyone with any sense of morals would be strongly advised to steer clear of YCombinator.
He is more than twice as old now as when he wrote the Morris Worm, and he did his probation and community service. Should we consider the possibility that he may have changed his stripes?
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@blakeyrat Hmm, I wonder if you're allowed to open a capsule hotel in the bay area... could be a short term business opportunity.
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
I should probably be more conscious about what certain words mean over here when am talking in these forums.
Eh, I understood you just fine, although the knowledge that hostels in some countries provide long-term accommodations is new to me. It didn't particularly surprise me, though; I've been living in a hotel for two years.
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@masonwheeler said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
I've just never seen it used specifically in combination with "Men's"
You might be more familiar in the context of those men being a specific age, and the hostel being associated with a specific religion.
I hear those ones are fun to stay at
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@hardwaregeek said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@masonwheeler I don't know. I just assumed it meant that there are low-rent accommodations that cater specifically to men, since most of the tech workers, and therefore potential customers, are men.
You assumed right.
So less Eastern European electronic music?
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Just ran across this FB post (talking about Silly Valley prices - specifically Palo Alto - so more like StoopidSilly Valle)
https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FFrankSomervilleKTVU%2Fposts%2F1899391910124127Yet another example of the crazy home prices in the Bay Area.
This home is 897 square feet.
There is also a detached studio that is 200 square feet.It’s on 128 Middlefield Road in Palo Alto not far from Stanford University.
And it's been put on the market for $2.6 million!The San Francisco Chronicle did the math and reports that if you put down $500,000, your monthly payments would run about $12,700 a month.
This sure doesn’t look like what I’d expect a $2.6 million dollar home to look like.
Then again this is 2018.
And this is the Bay Area.
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@dcon "Unable to connect to what.thedailywtf.com:8061..." so let's go to
the video tapeZillow for the image:
Totally a $2.6M house! </sarcasm>
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@twelvebaud said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
Totally a $2.6M house! </sarcasm>
Yeah. Palo Alto is one of those towns where a home's price goes up several million dollars because of the zip code.
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@dcon the text loaded before the picture and then I scrolled up lmao is this a fuckig joke.
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@tharpa said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@masonwheeler said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
The term "cons" can also be short for "convicts". One of YCombinator's co-founders was Robert Tappan Morris, the infamous author of the Morris Worm, the original piece of Internet malware that brought approximately 10% of the Internet to its knees and was originally intended to do far worse. When it comes to being evil online the guy was decades ahead of his time; if it hadn't been for a bug in the code, he would have been able to use his worm to create the first botnet. (Of course, since it didn't work, he claims he had nothing but benign motives and it just got out of hand, but code analysis strongly suggests otherwise.)
Anyone with any sense of morals would be strongly advised to steer clear of YCombinator.
He is more than twice as old now as when he wrote the Morris Worm, and he did his probation and community service. Should we consider the possibility that he may have changed his stripes?
What does Elon think?
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@dcon That is a fucking steal.
I really, really, really, really, really wish that wasn't the case.
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@mott555 said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
I should probably be more conscious about what certain words mean over here when am talking in these forums.
But paying attention to your words is a barrier to rampant pedantic dickweedery.
Besides which: we have other individuals who supposedly use english as their first language, who seems to have problems with the whole “words have meanings” thing.
So “you do you” and sometimes, we'll laugh and point and possibly
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@stillwater said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@dcon the text loaded before the picture and then I scrolled up lmao is this a fuckig joke.
Not unexpected. The first is a FB link. The text was copied-from-FB/pasted-in-post (I did that since some people won't touch FB - but I was too lazy to copy the image - successfully offloaded that work to @TwelveBaud!)
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@boomzilla said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@tharpa said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
He is more than twice as old now as when he wrote the Morris Worm, and he did his probation and community service. Should we consider the possibility that he may have changed his stripes?
What does Elon think?
Is there a reason Mr. Musk's opinion would be especially significant on this matter?
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@tharpa said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@boomzilla said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
@tharpa said in YCombinator's startup pros & cons thread:
He is more than twice as old now as when he wrote the Morris Worm, and he did his probation and community service. Should we consider the possibility that he may have changed his stripes?
What does Elon think?
Is there a reason Mr. Musk's opinion would be especially significant on this matter?
He has a lot of influence with Mr. Wheeler.
Hostel - Wikipedia
