Exactly! People fail to factor how yc companies evolve - how fast, and how far. I made this mistake twice in my life. These days I just stfu.
3 years back, I met with the poundpay team. They knew zero about handling fraud, and they said so. They said they'll figure it out over time. The cofounder said he was "reading a bunch of machine learning papers over the weekend" on combating fraud. I found that amateurish & scary.
2 years back, I met with the interviewstreet founder. The founder did not have any technical chops to speak of, and was actually quite misinformed about scalability challenges, algorithms & programming languages. I couldn't see how this guy could take on topcoder.
Today, 3 years hence, Balanced has processed over a half billion in payments, & Hackerrank has signed up a half million developers & both are well on their way towards a billion dollar market cap. Both are great companies to work for - in terms of actual tech & the potential for ipo riches.
What Cruise is right now is a useless datapoint. Think about what it'll be 2 years from now. Use your imagination. There are tons of low hanging features they could iterate on & completely dominate the space. Enough said.
The underlying message I'm getting is that HN applicants tend to find the "actual" problem they can tackle to make their fortunes while initially trying to solve a different problem.
Well, that's exactly what all the "lean startup" types say :) , the theory goes:
- 1) release an MVP
- 2) get actual feedback
- 3) pivot
- 4) repeat 1, 2 and 3 until you find the actual pain point to solve, or run out of cash
- 5) profit :)
3 years back, I met with the poundpay team. They knew zero about handling fraud, and they said so. They said they'll figure it out over time. The cofounder said he was "reading a bunch of machine learning papers over the weekend" on combating fraud. I found that amateurish & scary.
2 years back, I met with the interviewstreet founder. The founder did not have any technical chops to speak of, and was actually quite misinformed about scalability challenges, algorithms & programming languages. I couldn't see how this guy could take on topcoder.
Today, 3 years hence, Balanced has processed over a half billion in payments, & Hackerrank has signed up a half million developers & both are well on their way towards a billion dollar market cap. Both are great companies to work for - in terms of actual tech & the potential for ipo riches.
What Cruise is right now is a useless datapoint. Think about what it'll be 2 years from now. Use your imagination. There are tons of low hanging features they could iterate on & completely dominate the space. Enough said.