

Would Twitter have made it as a YC applicant? - jeremyawon

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joshu
I wondered the same thing about Delicious, back in my day. I'm pretty sure the
idea sounded less interesting than the execution.

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pg
You certainly would have. Whether we got the idea or not, we'd have at least
interviewed you based on your resume, and once we talked to you in person we'd
have been convinced you'd do something good.

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pg
Yes. The most important thing to us (or to me at least) is what the founders
have built previously.

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wheels
That begs the question, what about Google? A couple of first-time student
founders taking on the hardest hitters in the industry with little more than a
some ideas about how web search could work to show. (Presuming this was before
they had a working prototype and even perhaps afterwards.)

Perhaps a better question: At what point in their development would Page and
Brin have been interesting? Or would a couple of Stanford PhD students have
gotten them an interview on that alone?

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pg
Being students in the CS PhD program at Stanford would have been enough to get
them an interview. We don't put that much weight on where people went to
college, but grad school admissions are a fairly meaningful test.

We wouldn't have counted it against them that they wanted to take on big
companies. That kind of courage is exactly what we look for. When combined
with rationality.

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rabble
I think it probably would have. Twitter was originally started as a side
incubator project within Odeo.com (it became obvious corp). Three guys, @noah,
@jack, and @csshsh (florian) were working on it day and night. They basically
lived at the office, focused on getting something working quickly, had a good
set of ideas and some examples of how it could work. From initial idea to
working prototype was just a few days. They even had a business model, which
was thrown out, to make money via sms from the carriers. Later as it grew, not
having a business model and focusing on the platform, tools, scaling, and
community made more sense.

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unalone
On the one hand, the idea is an intriguing one (especially if the demo was
already up and running), and the founder of Twitter had a stellar background
considering Blogger. On the other hand: revenue plan?

But the guys who made Twitter weren't planning to make it into a business. It
was just a cool idea that they had and expanded on.

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blinks
They've stated publicly that they _have_ a business plan, just not what it is.
Speculation abounds (as I'm sure you know), and many potential plans that have
been dropped online could work pretty well.

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adrianscottcom
ttrp, time to ramen profitable = ;)

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pclark
depends on who else applied.

