I've never really understood Facebook from the business side at all. I generally like the service they offer (generally, though it is really lacking interesting and helpful aspects) but I've never understood their thinking on business moves. They've got a very popular software platform, one of the most visited sites in the world and rising, and some how 700 people can't figure out how to make a buck.
I agree with most of the other people here... Zuckerberg promises a business plan in 3 years? What the hell? I can see having your product and company out there and be selling things or providing a service and not necessary have the business plan down and taking some time to find one that really does work well, but when you have 700 people, corporate offices, and a widely popular product/service, a business plan seems to me to be something you put at the front of the line. Not: "hmm, we'll get to it later, lets just enjoy the fame!"
Most of what goes on at Facebook could be ran by 70 really good people. That's not including investors/shareholders at all. That's 70 people that are just in charge, server/network managers, system engineers, accounting (do they need one?), and marketing. It appears Facebook got the idea that it needed to have its own in-house Microsoft Research or something.
I like the concept. If it does whats advertised and without too many bugs it sounds like something a LOT of sports buffs would like. So it looks like a good idea with a lot of potential... beyond that I have not yet tried it myself, but I intend to.
Thanks. Please tell me if it lives up to its promise.
The hardest part is the game mechanics, pricing stuff, payouts, etc. Making it so people can advance, but not so fast that they get bored. Making them want to come back, but still giving them some stuff to do now.
It's a tightrope and has made me appreciate Mob Wars and other video games more.
That's important to note, I know specifically that some non-major service providers (meaning: not Verizon, Comcast, etc.), sometimes don't even show you what spam you get. So, if your using a smaller service provider and you still haven't got it and its also not in your "spam box" there's likely two things that happened.
A) You didn't put your email in your profile "email" box. I would direct you to pg's post last night but its gone now.
B) Your service provider may use a special filter in front of your mailbox which means not only was it marked as spam but it was marked before it actually reached your email and just got tossed overboard in cyberspace. Though, one would expect the number of people to suffer from this problem to be small but it does happen.
What's unfortunate is if that e-mail that got lost was an invite. =C
Even gmail, etc. will reject a fair amount of spam outright, and you'll never see it; however, for those messages, the mail server won't even accept responsibility for the email, and the sender will instead get a failure notice. YC should be getting bounces if that happens.
Recession and YC Rejection.... sounds like part of some hit new rap single for Wall Street.
It's been said a lot lately as a reminder, not only by people of this community but also by pg himself in the letters and in HN comments. Don't stop doing what you love because pg and co didn't have space for it out of the estimated (no official numbers) 700 applicants that applied at the same time. PG will tell you that they aren't exactly the best at necessarily "picking the winners" and neither are most other investors.
The important thing is to move forward. As the OP shows, you don't NEED YC to be a successful and thriving business, even in troubled times. YC is a stepping stone and sure shot at opening doors that most of us have to pry open ourselves. YC != Success... YC is the beginning, but it should not be the end.
Presumably they decided to use the email addresses entered into the YC application itself, rather than waiting for all main applicants to complete their HN profiles (which would surely have meant delaying the mailout).
Didn't make it but we're still moving forward. I mean, its not like PG and Ycombinator is the ONLY way to make a start-up work. What about those billions of them that came before YC existed?
oh well, onward and upward I suppose, can't let something like this knock you down. Like it was said many many times. Everyone who didn't make it, please, by all means, keep moving forward because this is not a death certificate.
Like it was said many many times. Everyone who didn't make it, please, by all means, keep moving forward because this is not a death certificate.
This is an important point. I would hate to think that we might be discouraging any of the startups we didn't invite to interviews. It's not just to make people feel better that we talk in the "no" email about how bad we are at judging startups. It's really true. The single biggest topic of conversation within YC is how we can get better at it.
In fact, as we often find ourselves saying to YC-funded startups when they're looking for their next round, practically all investors suck at judging startups. But we probably do worse than most, because we have to judge so many based on so little information.
I haven't gone looking for specific companies we missed, but there must be some by now considering that we've read thousands of applications and only funded 102 of them.
If startups funded by "YC clones" succeed, those are probably ones we missed, since most people who apply to them apply to us too.
Does this really make a difference? Are there any studies of gmail with addresses that are hidden vesus those with plain text email addresses for bots? The critical number is the false negative/positive amount, not the absolute number of spam. And surely spammers can already find ivan[at]tipjoy[dot]com
A good way to stop spam is using JavaScript to ROT13 encrypt the address. This way you can display it in plain text, but when a bot looks to search through the source on a page it just sees JavaScript jibberish.
TextMate can do this for you automatically.
For a site, you could just have a small back end script that looks for an email address in standard format and then encrypts it. You get something like this:
<script type="text/javascript">document.write(
"nneba\100nangbzlnqf\056pbz".replace(/[a-zA-Z]/g, function(c){return String.fromCharCode((c<="Z"?90:122)>=(c=c.charCodeAt(0)+13)?c:c-26);}));
</script>
I agree with most of the other people here... Zuckerberg promises a business plan in 3 years? What the hell? I can see having your product and company out there and be selling things or providing a service and not necessary have the business plan down and taking some time to find one that really does work well, but when you have 700 people, corporate offices, and a widely popular product/service, a business plan seems to me to be something you put at the front of the line. Not: "hmm, we'll get to it later, lets just enjoy the fame!"
Most of what goes on at Facebook could be ran by 70 really good people. That's not including investors/shareholders at all. That's 70 people that are just in charge, server/network managers, system engineers, accounting (do they need one?), and marketing. It appears Facebook got the idea that it needed to have its own in-house Microsoft Research or something.