

Tell HN: Here's how my team got to the YC interview stage - TrevorBurnham
http://trevorburnham.com/2010/03/15/how-theoryville-reached-the-yc-interview-stage/

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maxklein
That's a great story. You guys are obviously smart and have a good idea. Your
weak points would be here:

\- Have you fought with your co-founders yet to find out if you could survive
such a fight? If all you've been in civil and polite, then you don't really
know each other yet

\- You have 'options'. Will you have the drive to really push through if
things do not go initially as expected?

The impression I am concerned about is that you seem a bit soft and nice, if I
may use those word. If I were you, I'd focus on making sure in conveying that
you have the capacity to be tough also.

~~~
TrevorBurnham
We've fought pretty hard over design details—we're all very passionate about
design and perfectionistic when it comes to the user experience, and sometimes
our aesthetics conflict. I don't anticipate any more serious fights, but I've
read enough startup stories to know that such things are always possible. I'm
not sure that what you're suggesting is right, though. Are you saying that a
startup that's been torn asunder by internal conflict and reunited by the
founders' convictions is stronger than one where work has proceeded smoothly
and uneventfully?

And yes, I do have that drive to push through. It's not every day that you get
the chance to change the world. I'm not throwing that away, no matter how
difficult things might seem.

As to "soft and nice"—well, thanks! I get what you're saying, but my
impression is that knowledge >> toughness in the startup world. Being tough is
mainly about understanding that you have other options, that you don't have to
accept everything that's put in front of your nose.

~~~
maxklein
When multiple intelligent people work together, there will be fights over
totally uneccessary things. With time, either the fights will get worse, or
there will be some type of resolution where everyone realizes that the fights
are hurting and compromises are reached to ensure that there are no more
fights.

Some people get to that compromise point, but some can't. If the fights are
resolved in a bad manner and resentment continues to brood, when money arrives
and people get greedy, those fights will come back, and this time they will be
worse.

So you have to get the fights over with at the start and everyone has to
accept their position and their status. Then you can work in a focused fashion
forward.

Changing the world is great, but I can likely do that by planting a bunch of
trees in the amazon. Very few business get to change the world - most just get
to make money. Would just making a lot of money also be enough for you, even
if you don't get to change the world?

~~~
TrevorBurnham
Yes: Making a lot of money => Ability to change the world. The converse is not
true. :)

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TrevorBurnham
Thought I'd share the story, especially for those who are outsiders to the
startup world, like myself. Please feel free to contact me if you have any
questions or, better yet, interview advice.

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lkozma
Their idea reminded of a similar concept I heard once: open source scientific
papers.

It works like this: you put up the .tex source, the data files, the R, Octave,
etc. scripts, and if people download and run the scripts, they get the exact
paper as a result, including all the graphs. This way one can check that the
graphs really show what is claimed in the paper and that there has been no bug
or "polishing" of the results.

~~~
TrevorBurnham
That would be absolutely _awesome_. Of course, in principle, there's nothing
preventing researchers from doing that now. I think that being able to
actually manipulate things on the same website that the data exists on will be
key to bringing "open source papers" into the academic mainstream.

~~~
lkozma
Yeah, I like the outline of your product idea. Looking forward to trying it
out.

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donna
Congratulations Trevor. Generous reflection you've shared. Much appreciated.

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sendos
Interesting idea. I wonder though, how big is the potential market, money-
wise?

~~~
TrevorBurnham
That's a good question, and figures are hard to find. Statistical analysis is
a huge market; SPSS, for instance, was recently bought by IBM for $1.2
billion, and SAS made $2.3 billion in 2009 alone. But while those companies
started out as humble makers of academic software, and continue to make
significant revenues that way, they both found the business analytics market
to be far more lucrative, so those figures largely reflect their sales of
large enterprise solutions. Companies that primarily sell to academics (e.g.
Stata, Minitab) are private and don't publish sales figures.

We think our most promising immediate markets are social scientists (of which
there are about 25,000 in the United States) and stats/science classrooms.
While the original concept was mainly aimed at researchers, we've been
shifting more toward classrooms recently, based on the feedback we've been
getting. The two products we envision—the research product and the educational
one—share the same core, as far as the interface and computational backend.
So, we believe that we can pursue both markets, much as Lingt (YC S09) has
both an individual product and a classroom product.

I should emphasize that my blog post is in no way intended as a pitch for
Theoryville reflecting our most up-to-date thinking about our product or our
business model.

