For people who prefer reading to watching videos, I wrote a detailed account of my process for solving one of last year's IMO problems, along with thoughts on how this relates to AI:
I believe this list was compiled by Andrej Karpathy (director of AI at Tesla).
I thought it would be useful to the HN community given its high signal-to-noise ratio:
1) You can get a quick birds-eye view of the general trends / topics that are currently being taught at the Stanford CS department.
and
2) You're one click away from learning more about each topic if you wish to do so, considering all of the courses listed have publicly accesible websites.
+1. And I'd add to that that sometimes there's significant work in the pre-buy phase as well:
- Researching what your options are / what's already out there.
- Comparing different alternatives.
- "Hopping on a call" with a sales rep to get a product demo (there's this super annoying trend where many SaaS companies' landing pages don't explain what they do and the only option they give is to "schedule a demo").
For CRUD-like internal tools or simple 3rd party integrations, my experience has been that it's often much faster (typically < 1 hour) to build a production-ready app on Retool (https://retool.com) than it is to even get started with SaaS vendors.
I'm curious though: the AirBnB website is often presented as how unprofessional-looking an MVP can be, but contextually, it didn't look super horrible compared to the websites of the time. Here's a bunch of "professional websites" in 2008.
I think expectations have evolved and the minimum standards of aesthetics in 2020 presents a higher bar. I wonder if an MVP that looked like that would work in 2020? I'm guessing the bar these days is at least a Bootstrap UI.
Those websites are so cute, particularly Airbnb's :) It's always great to see fledgling companies distinguish their business proposition to a market that doesn't even know about them yet.
- 100ish YC companies are now worth $100M - $1B. A good number of those (and others currently worth less than that) are growing very rapidly and will likely reach unicorn status in the next year.
So it seems like one can reliably expect 2-3 unicorns to come out of each YC batch. Those 2-3 unicorns likely more than make up for the costs associated with running each batch (including all of the ~$150K investments). Seems quite good to me.
Admittedly, there hasn't yet been a Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft-scale company that has come out of YC yet. I think it's only a matter of time until that happens -- anecdotally it seems like at least a handful out of the recent batches could become massive home runs, as well as other more established companies like Stripe that seem to be growing quite well.
> assuming I got in [to YC] I would not get sucked into raising a huge amount on Demo Day.
> I would raise maybe $500k, keep the company small for the first year, work closely with users to make something amazing, and otherwise stay off SV's radar. In other words, be the opposite of a scenester.
> Ideally I'd get to profitability on that initial $500k. Later I could raise more, if I felt like it. Or not. But it would be on my terms.
> At every point in the company's growth, I'd keep the company as small as I could. I'd always want people to be surprised how few employees we had. Fewer employees = lower costs, and less need to turn into a manager.
Probably a good example of a confident, competent founder (Founders who raise too much capital are acting out of fear rather than acting out of confidence. // Confident, competent founders should take the risk of running out of money vs. the certainty of over-dilution.) as described on this essay :)
1) Shipping-and-iterating is uncomfortably hard. Putting your product out there in front of users is painful. It's a lot easier to just constantly brainstorm ideas or hide in the coding cave.
2) As a founder, it's tempting to think that your startup is unique: what you're building is uniquely challenging, important and highly non-trivial.
Anecdotally, I've seen far too many founders (including my own past self) use 2 as an excuse not to do 1: most of the time, those never even launch. And not just in the hardware space, but also in: health-tech, bio, fin-tech, gov-tech, legal-tech, insur-tech, prop-tech, food-tech, logistics, and even B2B SaaS ("what we're building is hard and needs enterprise-grade robustness / security").
There may be ways to build massively successful companies that don't involve rapid shipping-and-iterating cycles, and in general there may be ways to build successful companies while ignoring or even doing the exact opposite of what YC advises.
But YC would know a few things about hard-tech from having funded possibly hundreds of such companies, including several massively successful companies. In fact, the top 3 YC companies of all-time as of 2020 are all in highly-regulated spaces: Stripe, Airbnb and Cruise [1]. Cruise in particular is a hardware company (self-driving cars) whose billion-dollar success was largely due to their ability to ship-and-iterate much, much faster than pretty much every other self-driving car company out there.
I think being in a highly regulated market is orthogonal to the original point. Regulatory compliance is a checkbox and not a differentiating capability, even if it is an arduous checkbox. Hard/Deep tech is a completely different animal. None of the three YC companies you list fall under this rubric as they are essentially novel presentation layers on existing tech (yes, this includes Cruise, whose tech I am familiar with). The point isn’t about startups where the hardest thing you need to do is business execution and compliance.
Some kinds of hardcore tech, even deep software tech that has no compliance issues, has extremely steep engineering hurdles that must be cleared before you have the most minimal of MVPs that will have any currency with customers. How do you iterate fast when the most minimal demonstration of capability requires writing hundreds of thousands of lines of highly sophisticated code from scratch? Or requires physical engineering that necessarily takes years to complete? Many of these kinds of opportunities exist but almost all of the “ship-and-iterate” guidance is for companies that are using core tech, not creating core tech. That’s playing the startup game on easy mode.
If we end up in a place where a “tech startup” is defined as companies that are technically trivially to execute and amenable to rapid ship-and-iterate, which admittedly is most of them, then we might as well elide “tech” from the nomenclature. At that point, they are merely tech-enabled ordinary businesses, and what ordinary business isn’t tech-enabled these days? If deep tech problems could be solved by slapping together some open source and layering on clever marketing, they wouldn’t be problems.
It feels like we’ve redefined “tech startup” to exclude doing hard technical things, but aren’t honest about that change in definition.
Yes that is great advice for many startups most of the time, but my whole point in the grandparent was that when as a founder you find the hand-me-down wisdom doesn't fit, don't be afraid to leave it alone and think for yourself.
PS. If your criticism were right my coding cave is a 1000m2 factory, which has to be some kind of record. /s
> not much of the strategy content applies to hardware companies
While it's probably a good idea to not blindly follow every single piece of advice (by YC or anyone), saying that not much of the content applies is probably a bit of a stretch. Considering how many successful companies YC has funded in the hard-tech space, I'd be receptive to at least some of their advice / insights.
You also mention:
> you have this de-facto "ship and iterate" model from the SaaS world which just doesn't apply to nontrivial hardware projects.
Again, it may be a good idea to question the advice of "ship and iterate", but saying _it just doesn't apply to nontrivial hardware project_ is again a bit of a stretch. As the above commenter mentions, the success of Cruise is a good counterexample.
I think you are ignoring the reasonable point and splitting hairs. One might equally say few/none of the US examples would have been possible outside of the US market (where "ask for forgiveness" is not an option), or that Cruise never shipped.
Assuming an average valuation (in the literal sense, total exit value of all co's in the pool / number of co's) of $100M [2] and assuming that the founders own roughly 15% at exit, the expected payout would be only $150K excluding taxes, which seems quite low.
[1] Modeling should be somewhat doable leveraging public data. For example, you can use YC company data in https://ycombinator.com/topcompanieshttps://ycombinator.com/companies and simulate what the payouts would be if you were to choose 25 companies from a given batch at random.
> Our companies have a combined valuation of over $100B.
the average valuation of YC co's would be ~$50M; if you exclude half of those that are in recent batches (haven't had time to realize their value and don't really contribute towards the $100B total) it might be closer to $100M.
Under a FounderPool model, an example of this would be a pool of 20 co's in which 2 companies end up exiting for $1B each and the rest essentially $0.
1) Pools sizes are not fixed number and more over, founders can invite other companies to existing pool on a rolling basis
2) We have done modeling, obviously selection is the top determinant of payouts (20% avg. success rate vs 40% success rate) but bigger pool sizes ensure potential for a breakout company.
Happy to share if interested, contact us at contact at founderpools.com
> bigger pool sizes ensure potential for a breakout company
Yes, but the payout gets distributed among a larger number of companies. Increasing the pool size lowers the variance, but the expected value remains the same. Lower variance might be desirable for some people (more predictability -- at the limit it's as if you're investing 1% of your equity into an "ETF" of early-stage startups), whereas some people might prefer higher variance (higher potential upside if they join a pool with the next Stripe).
My concern is that if founders contribute 1% of their equity (not 1% of the entire company at exit), the expected value itself is quite small -- on the order of $150K under reasonably optimistic assumptions -- for something like FounderPool to make sense.
On the flipside, increasing the 1% by an order of magnitude might make more sense from a utility maximization point of view, but even less sense from an emotional standpoint.
Why would ownership at exit matter? If the founder only has 15% ownership then he will still have to give up 1% not 0.15% of total equity. This means the founder will be left with 14% equity.
> You contribute 1% of your equity into your pool.
My understanding is that if a founder owns 30% (say) of the company when they join the pool, they would contribute towards the pool a number of shares corresponding to 1% of that 30%, i.e. 0.3% of the company. Which will presumably get further diluted by the time the company exits.
Having founders contribute X% of their equity at the time they join the pool is more reasonable from a practical execution standpoint than having founders contribute X% of the company the time of exit.
Agree. Founders contribute a percentage of the equity they would fully own, if fully vested to the pool, not a fixed percentage of the equity of the company.
> The default YC valuation of $125k/0.07 = ~$1.8M is way too low for us
This is the wrong way to look at it.
Instead, ask yourself: would you exchange 7% of your company to join the YC community and be able to leverage their resources forever?
The answer should be a resounding yes if you think your company will be > 7.5% more valuable if you join YC [1]. Which it should [2]. The $125K is just the cherry on top and just one of many perks of joining YC (albeit a useful one for companies that have no funding/revenues so they can focus 100% on building their product instead of having to worry about paying for housing/food/servers/SaaS).
The vast majority of us who have gone through YC would've done it even if it wasn't for the monetary investment.
[2] You'll likely even make up for the 7% almost immediately because you'll likely raise your seed round at a significantly higher valuation (> 7.5% higher for sure) than if you hadn't gone through YC. But it's very likely that your company will intrinsically be worth significantly more than that too.
Would you exchange 7% of your company forever to join the YC community that might have diminishing returns after several years?
As my sibling poster posted: There is more than one path to success and you make it sound as if YC kinda guarantees success and that all of this is a total no-brainer.
- A 3Blue1Brown video on a particularly nice and unexpectedly difficult IMO problem (2011 IMO, Q2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M64HUIJFTZM
-- And another similar one (though technically Putnam, not IMO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkmNXy7er84
- Timothy Gowers (Fields Medalist and IMO perfect scorer) solving this year’s IMO problems in “real time”:
-- Q1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G1nySyVs2w
-- Q4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-vp4zGzwIs