
Welcome Garry and Aaron - pg
http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-garry-and-aaron
======
mhartl
Garry has always been one of my favorite YC founders, and not only because he
bought me a large quantity of gin shortly after Posterous got funded. Aaron
made a huge impact on my life through his gutsy blog post on RSI [1].
Congratulations, guys, and thanks for being awesome.

[1] [http://aaroniba.net/articles/tmp/how-i-cured-my-rsi-
pain.htm...](http://aaroniba.net/articles/tmp/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain.html)

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benatkin
What software does YC write for itself again? I've heard a bit about the
software for collecting and analyzing applications to YC but I'd like to hear
more. Is the HN software mostly written by pg and volunteers or do other
hackers at YC do a significant amount of it? Is there anything else?

~~~
pg
HN is mostly written by me and Rtm, but Garry and Aaron have already started
building new things. Garry made a sort of private Facebook for founders in the
current batch, and Aaron has started in on the problem of doing statistical
analysis of YC applications and has already made some interesting discoveries.

~~~
zeratul
PG or Aaron: Could you de-identify YC applications data and make it publicly
available for others to analyze?

[EDIT:] Or maybe you could make a prediction challenge using the YC
application data? You could host the challenge on <http://www.kaggle.com/> or
<http://tunedit.org>

Note to self: There is actually a very sparse body of literature that talks
about data driven approach to VC, e.g.,
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4621...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4621115),
this one seems interesting (predicting exits):
<http://www.springerlink.com/content/w024ku34221u3258/>

~~~
robryan
I would assume that it would be just about impossible to de-identify YC
applications, as they are all fairly unique and there is generally a lot of
information online about each startup. So if an app had a story about a
previous product and then that story shows up again in their blog or when they
are doing publicity it makes it pretty easy.

~~~
benatkin
They could release it like this: pick a small number of fields like number of
founders and age, and release each of them as separate arrays. Ex:
{"founders": [3, 2, 2, ...], "ages": [31, 22, 27, ...]} (the size of the
founders array and the ages array would be different because the first is per-
startup and the second is per-founder) Just to get an idea of how vague de-
identified data might be. And I'm not even sure that would be de-identified
enough.

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dlevine
Congrats! I knew Aaron at Google, and he was one of the smartest engineers
around.

He also built one of the coolest pieces of software I've ever seen
(Robocraft). It was a Starcraft clone where users had to code up AIs for each
of the units (and then those AIs battle each other). MIT uses it as the
foundation for a programming competition that they run every January. I think
it was done by him and one other person.

~~~
DanBC
(<https://www.battlecode.org/info/>)

([http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-370-robocraft-programming-competition-january-iap-2005/projects/))

Looks amazing. I'd be interested to see what HNers could do with this.

~~~
sskates
Trying to make a competitive AI for Battlecode is uncannily similar to trying
to create a successful startup (and much, much less intimidating.) Aaron
deserves a lot of credit for starting it (the other founder is David
Greenspan, who also did Etherpad with Aaron.)

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stevenj
What's the role of a venture partner at YC? For instance, are all partners
present at interviews? Do different people do different stuff? Or does
everyone kind of do a bit of everything?

~~~
pg
Everyone does everything, though some people have specialties (e.g. Garry for
design).

~~~
scorpion032
On a scale of 10, how much do you rate the default design of posterous?

I personally, (and many others) think tumblr has a far better design.

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AznHisoka
Sincere question: Will they be advising YC on how to invest the existing
funds, or will they be joining YC and adding some of their money as well?

~~~
pg
They're not investing any money. They'll advise us how to invest existing
funds in the sense that like all of us they read applications and participate
in interviews. But the main thing they (and we) do is advise people we've
funded.

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coffeemug
Congrats, guys! I had an opportunity to meet Garry and Aaron on a few
occasions, and I was blown away with how smart, driven, genuine, and kind they
are. Of course real experience building successful products helps too.

Being able to grab office hours with these guys is a massive boost to YC
companies. Keep on rockin'!

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ajaymehta
Garry's an extremely helpful design and product guy, as well as a genuinely
nice individual. YC is super lucky to have his full attention.

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jasonshen
Garry and Aaron are fantastic advisors and mentors. I'm so glad they're going
to continue to work on and grow YC.

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PStamatiou
Congrats Garry and Aaron!! You guys were super helpful during our S11 batch.

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anandkulkarni
Great to hear it! Garry and Aaron were fantastic advisors during our batch.

Looking forward to seeing what new tech they'll build.

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Johnyma22
I have worked with Aaron a bunch on Etherpad and he is a top bloke! Glad he
joined YC

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jansen
Both truly awesome! A fantastic addition to YC!

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rdl
Garry and Aaron are awesome and great additions to YC!

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sharpshoot
Congrats Garry and Aaron!

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ryan
Garry and Aaron are both awesome, excellent move. Congrats guys.

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ericfrenkiel
congratulations Garry and Aaron!! YC gets stronger each year!

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immad
Congrats Aaron and Garry

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arasakik
Congrats guys!

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poppysan
Congrats!!!

