A lot of people are evaluating too much based on the ideas, rather than the background of the founders and whether that background gives them the experience to execute the idea.
For example, I liked the Cadwolf idea because the founder has worked as an engineer in the kinds of organizations he wants to sell to. Many of these applications had no info about the founders that I could find. All in all, the vast majority of these apps gave little indication the founders have the necessary background to do their idea.
Just some examples: as far as I could tell, the founding team for Brodlist has no prior experience implementing the internals of database/distributed/operating systems. The Jury Board idea sounds really interesting, but it's an area where I'd like to see the founders have a lot of domain expertise (litigation experience?), and sadly the founder didn't provide any info on that.
Somewhat related, I think it's terrible to vote for Pinboard given the founder's stated dislike of YC (and the founder stating that this is a protest vote). The fellowship should go to founders that sincerely want to make full use of YC's resources for their startup.
Hi, I'm Alex from Gresham Dollar (Now Greshm Dollar). I am pretty much the opposite of what you would want in a founder. My background is very shaky and I don't have a college degree. I barely graduated high school. I used to hack together CRUD apps until I got bored out of my mind and just stopped.
I was the first Druid on my realm to level 60 when World of Warcraft came out though, so there's that. But I wasn't really a team player and I couldn't get into any of the good guilds. I also never had any gold because I was busy doing fun stuff instead of mining thorium or whatever.
From 2006 to 2008, I worked on a virtual reality headset with my father:
My father's health declined and our project never turned into anything. Well, that's not exactly true. Palmer Luckey used my father's lenses in the first prototypes for the Oculus Rift, but I had nothing to do with the development of those lenses.
Before I came up with the idea for Greshm Dollar, I briefly wrote a blog exploring some of the ways in which technology was transforming society:
I wasn't really trying to come up with an idea or looking for a way to make money. I just always assumed basic income was inevitable. For a while, I had known that a government could pay for a basic income through deficit spending (small leap from Post-Keynesian macroeconomics). But then when I was contemplating the crisis in Greece, I came up with an idea for how to smoothly introduce a new currency and it all clicked for me.
Everything I know about money, banking, economics, and finance, I learned through books and MOOCs.
Anyway, with my credentials, there's no way I'd get into Y Combinator or the YC Fellowship the normal way, so here I am!
When I first read your idea I thought this is the dumbest thing ever. Then as I read your responses and saw that you had an absolutely well thought out answer for every objection I questioned my own sanity. I think your experiment is worth a go, and I think you would make a good founder. Inface the only problem I see is how YC will make any money from you other than investing in future dollars (which anyone else can do). Perhaps I need to read your thread again to see if that was answered. But my point is you sound like you could make a good founder and I don't think there is a magic formula but desire, drive, ambition and humility will be up there in my opinion.
the only problem I see is how YC will make any money from you other than investing in future dollars (which anyone else can do). Perhaps I need to read your thread again to see if that was answered.
It wasn't answered. This is indeed a challenge. If we stick to the letter of the rules for YC Fellowship, I'm not sure how much YC stands to gain by taking 1.5% equity in Greshm Dollar.
One thing that might work is that we could underprice Future Greshm Dollars for YC. Or maybe we could issue call options on FGD that YC could exercise after the FGD price has risen.
Natural disasters are terrible. Voting for Pinboard is not terrible. I am certain that Pinboard sincerely wants to make full use of YC's resources, possibly in ways that will amaze and astound them. And I don't think that an unthinking cheerleader attitude to YC is a requisite here. If you like Cadwolf, vote for Cadwolf but - please - spare me the lecture on how I should vote.
The founder of Pinboard himself called voting for him a "protest vote:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441720. I can't believe someone is sincerely going to make good use of the YC fellowship if they say something like that.
Also, this is an online forum. I don't think HN is the right place to be if you want to avoid feeling like you're being lectured (not that I believe I'm lecturing anyone on anything - I'm just offering my argument and opinion).
He told one of the YC folks directly that if he wins, he has ideas that need resources, and will work with them in good faith. Can't find the link right now but it was here on HN.
Hi, I'm Gabriel, one of the co-founders of Casepad.
A bit of background on us. I'm a '14 college grad. I'm also a self-taught software developer. I worked for a bit under a year as a data analyst, writing R, SQL, and processing excel spreadsheets, at a startup in NYC. While I was there I also volunteered at a public defense firm, usually one afternoon a week, running documents to and from court, rebuilding their HR filing system, building small a web-app for them. After I left my job I also spent A LOT of time doing research on the market and specifications for the system.
My brother and co-founder is getting his CS degree, but would work on this full time if we received the fellowship, in Brazil. He has work experience building/maintaining ERP software and a POS credit-access platform.
NOTE: If any other founders want to reply to this comment I asked Dang and he said it would be fine (even though there is no question written into it).
NOTE2: I'd encourage everyone to read through all the applications if you plan on voting.
I would argue following conventional "bias" and "rules of thumb" is exactly the opposite from the goal. YC has already picked plenty of "great teams" with "lots of "experience in the field". I would see this as the 10% exploration of a multi-armed bandit problem. Not to say that is what they intended but exploring alternate theories could help the process.
It's in the best interest of HN to not mess this experiment up by picking great ideas that never go anywhere. Because if the experiment fails YC won't repeat it. I really do consider it obvious (e.g. unnecessary to explore) that the skills and abilities of the founders are extraordinarily important in judging potential startups. At such an early stage for these companies, the biggest killers of the startups are going to be the founders just giving up / not prioritizing well (e.g. not going out there and talking to users, etc.).
Vishal from WedWell here. This competition was a bit unstructured in general. So not surprised that many teams didn't talk too much about their teams, and spoke more about their ideas.
We're a small team lead by myself. I am technical (computer engineer by education), but have a more technical partner (full stack engineer) onboard, and my sister is helping as well. My sister has had to plan her own wedding from start to finish without a wedding planner. She's helping a lot with on boarding.
I have a background in building electronic trading businesses with a specialization in market structures. Marketplaces like Airbnb, and how they start are something that I love to study.
There are more details about me on my profile here. I think in the future, it may make sense to put a bit of structure to how people describe their idea/team.
I like the Cadwolf idea as well, but I'm unsure about the architecture and what the founder thinks is possible.
For example today I can say I'm.building AutoCAD in the browser - what does that mean? Am I implementing the CAD algorithms in Java on the server... Or am I somehow interfacing with AutoCAD running on the server through RPC?
The founder claims he's working on version control - this means that the state of the CAD tool can be captured in version friendly formats : what is that format? I get worried when people invent too many things at once
I understand your concerns and they are legitimate. Full fledged browser based CAD systems already exist in things like Onshape. Our algorithms will run partially on the server and mostly in the browser. However, CADWOLF isn't really about CAD in the browser but rather altering the way engineering is done. Instead of doing design, CAD, FE, and documentation separately, everything is done together. This drastically alters the engineering workflow. It will also let us create templates for structures like fittings and trusses so that users can pull them into their own structures without the need to do their own design and analysis. We can do for engineering what GitHub has done for coding and make a warehouse of templated structures available to anyone.
with all due respect - I understand what you are claiming. I am having doubts on how you are claiming you will do it.
Unless you have a demo already - which would be awesome.
The github analogy is not very accurate because github was built on git and ruby-git bindings. Its a product play that was clearly understood. What I'm not able to understand is how you are planning to execute your product.
Please understand why I'm asking this - if you are claiming to integrate with an existing CAD server software ... then that is something that I would completely understand and go for. But I dont know if such a thing (with API bindings exists). We can also debate about how you will version these things - since AFAIK these kind of software dumps into a barely readable binary format.
The alternative is that you would invent your own a) CAD software b) javascript UI c) snapshot format. That makes me a bit uncomfortable... unless you already have atleast one of these three.
The question really is - how far along are you ? its a standard YC question.
EDIT: btw your demo looks very very similar to a Jupyter notebook. If that's the case, then the innovation you are making is actually a CAD software on top of Jupyter (which like git and github is a well known analogy). That would seriously simplify this conversation a LOT.
thanks for that useful input. That is exactly what my question is. If there is clarity around these aspects, what the founder would become undoubtedly awesome.
I understand what you are saying. There is already a web based CAD system called onShape that I will likely use in my initial phase as the CAD system. They have APIs but I haven't delved too deeply into it. I will be writing most of the software myself and a great deal of it is already done.
If you want to get more into the details of how I make it work, it's mostly in how I store and process the data. Instead of storing files on a server and then calling them down, I store each equation/text block/plot/table/etc as a separate entry in a database. When the user loads a web page I pull down and order all of the items in that document.
This is what lets me connect all of the pieces. A user can pull in one equation from another document into any other document and use it as a variable. When the original variable is changed, I can parse through the database and find files/equations that use that equation and update them accordingly.
The MVP for the documents and for the part tree is already done and there are videos on the website.
I often hear people compare CADWOLF to Jupyter notebook. They are somewhat alike but vastly different in execution. Jupyter lets user create a web page using a programming language. This requires knowledge of programming as well as several other things like installing the software on a server. In CADWOLF, users simply interact with a gui to create a new document and add equations, text, etc. There is no "programming" and all you need to know are the commands for the built in function (sin,cos,FFT, etc).
Just one question - and that's the part that you are skipping over.
Are you building your own symbolic solver ? If you are "pulling" equations ... Are you also solving them or are you displaying equations?
I'm getting the feeling that you have built a document and reference management system for CAD users (kind of like latex) rather than a CAD software that solves the equations, right?
No, I have built a system that solves the equations and then displays them in the mathematically correct format. (Yes, it took forever)
Each equation can be thought of as a line of code. Each web page is both a document like Word and a program. The user adds an equation to the document via a gui and then double clicks on it to edit it. You can enter something like a=1+sin(0.5)/1 and then hit enter. My code parses this text out, finds the "sin" function, solves it, then solves the remaining equation, and then displays it as you would expect to see it on a formal document and gives that equation the name "a". Users can then reference the result of this using the name "a" in a later equation. When an equation changes, its dependents update as well.
I have a number of built in functions. There is everything from an FFT to a differential equation solver to an integral. It also tracks units like "mm" and "in" and does all the necessary math for this.
The code to do this in javascript was as painful and fun as it sounds. With the fellowship time/money I will build a python server side to solve large datasets and start the process of placing a CAD layer on top of it.
But Node.js would only allow me to run one thing at a time. I want to be able to run equations on the server while updating things on the DOM/Server as well. Am I wrong about that?
I didn't say that. You should evaluate both; as it stands most of the Apply HN apps have little info about the founders. It should be clear that evaluating a startup based on the idea alone (in the pre-traction phase) is untenable.
> A lot of people are evaluating too much based on the ideas, rather than the background of the founders and whether that background gives them the experience to execute the idea.
I don't want to accuse you of backpeddaling, but your point would have been more clear if you had said "overlooking the background" instead of "rather than the background"
Teams are important, but recent events have shown that we've been giving teams with bad ideas more credit than they deserve because of their credentials or alma matter. Maybe YCF will help someone with a great idea build a great team :)
> A lot of people are evaluating too much based on the ideas
I could have been more clear, but I think the original comment I made is still accurate, even from a pedantic point of view.
How have recent events shown that? I don't think recent events have shown that. Also, you can't build a great team if there's nobody good on the founding team from the start.
It's true that you can't polish a turd, but I'd suggest you're looking at the wrong thing.
A turd idea with a strong team won't succeed, but a strong team can abandon a turd idea and still be a strong team. There are plenty of great products that were built as the 2nd or 3rd ideas of a strong team.
A good idea with a turd team won't succeed. And when the idea fails, the team is still a turd.
For example, I liked the Cadwolf idea because the founder has worked as an engineer in the kinds of organizations he wants to sell to. Many of these applications had no info about the founders that I could find. All in all, the vast majority of these apps gave little indication the founders have the necessary background to do their idea.
Just some examples: as far as I could tell, the founding team for Brodlist has no prior experience implementing the internals of database/distributed/operating systems. The Jury Board idea sounds really interesting, but it's an area where I'd like to see the founders have a lot of domain expertise (litigation experience?), and sadly the founder didn't provide any info on that.
Somewhat related, I think it's terrible to vote for Pinboard given the founder's stated dislike of YC (and the founder stating that this is a protest vote). The fellowship should go to founders that sincerely want to make full use of YC's resources for their startup.