
Five Years’ Time - gdillon
https://medium.com/@gkoberger/five-years-time-6a6ae1157a66
======
jordanbrown
"One regret I do have: I spent too much time waiting for other people.
Investors, cofounders, mentors. I found that once I started actually building,
these things came naturally." \--

I had this same experience. It wasn't until I pushed something live that those
things/people just fell into place. Great article!

------
nothrabannosir
Rejection letter from YC:

> _I’m sorry to say we decided not to fund you. We liked you as individuals
> but we had a hard time seeing how developer API documentation was the right
> beachhead._

Perhaps I'm looking too much into it, it's just surprising to see, on the
record, the polar opposite of what pg claimed on several occasions: people,
not ideas. Or did I misunderstand it?

~~~
jamesk_au
Given the closing line was " _You guys are clearly great hackers and we’d be
happy to hear from you again in the future_ ," my impression was that YC's
answer was not so much 'no' as 'not yet'.

The OP says in his article: " _Looking back, I never could have started a
company without this [freelancing] experience._ "

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ntumlin
Just a note, clicking the link at "ReadMe.io has finally launched" sends me to
[http://%28http//readme.io/blog/product-hunter-becomes-the-
hu...](http://%28http//readme.io/blog/product-hunter-becomes-the-hunted/)
which is not a valid url as opposed to [http://readme.io/blog/product-hunter-
becomes-the-hunted/](http://readme.io/blog/product-hunter-becomes-the-hunted/)

------
dmak
This is a bit of a tangent, but I really wanted to comment on the product he
is making.

I have been using apiary.io, and I always felt that it was lacking in many
aspects (versioning, ghetto note editor, parsing issues in the preview,
etc...). I just discovered readme.io and played with it briefly and it has
solved every issue that I had with apiary.io. I will definitely migrate over,
but having to re-do all the documentation from ground up is a bit of a pain.

~~~
specialk
I'm also an apiary.io user. I must agree there is something lacking in the
hosted API docs space. What I find most lacking from apiary.io is features.
They have such a limited way of expecting APIs to behave that it can be hard
to represent some things inside the API docs system they have.

I wonder is it is possible to create an apiary.io to readme.io auto-migration
tool. Even if it does require me copying the markdown behind the apiary.io
docs manually into some tool that spits docs into readme.io. That would
honestly save me many hours, probably many hours for many folk too.

I've requested access to the open source pricing plan, after I hopefully get
approved it is probably something I'll look into in more detail. I'm in need
of a new (probably) needless automation side-project.

Edit: wow I completely missed the free trail. If you're an open source project
they'll upgrade you to the Dev Hub pricing plan. Ugh feeling so stupid for
missing that the first time around and not getting started 10 minutes ago.

------
dpeterson
Do these people not see how easy they have it? I am pretty sure no one would
hire me at Mozilla with just php experience then get an interview with
y-combinator without a product. I'm guessing he went to Stanford or some other
Ivy League.

~~~
bobbles
He went to [http://www.rit.edu/](http://www.rit.edu/) but I'm not sure where
that fits on your exclusivity scale

~~~
azinman2
Random side story: when I toured there when I was 18, my tour guide was
severely depressed and told me not to go there. Before showing up we got
pulled into a gas station and quickly left when we realized it was being
robbed.

I never attended so I can't say if this is indicative or not of the school in
general, but it's funny how much these first impressions completely changed my
decision to apply!

~~~
gkoberger
I loved RIT, although a lot of people there really succumb to Seasonal
Affective Disorder thanks to all the snow and cold.

The RIT I know is a bit more like this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHcIQgQnkU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHcIQgQnkU)

------
dlevine
Congrats (so far)! The truth is that the route to a successful startup is
often circuitous, and takes a lot of unexpected detours. I bet that a lot of
the experiences you had along the way have made you stronger, shrewder, and
better able to deal with the twists and turns. It's almost like, by not doing
a startup right away, you were actually able to train individual muscles
rather than just attempting to lift the boulder onto your shoulders. Once you
got to the point where you were actually ready, it started to happen on its
own.

------
smcl
I'm impressed that an idea you had five years ago has sat there without anyone
else thinking of it and delivering something in the meantime. Anything useful
I get started on usually has someone launching a very slick VC-backed launch
~six months later and I just cannot compete (I don't have the time to dedicate
to anything, nor the money to afford to not work for long enough)

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thebenedict
I appreciate the update on Phileas and Fogg! I remember seeing the launch on
here a couple of years ago.

I'm curious about "idea factories are a dime a dozen, and nobody would want to
work for one". I've turned down similar arrangements in the past because they
felt vaguely sketchy, but didn't realize "idea factories" are common. What are
the problems with them?

~~~
gkoberger
I can only speculate, but here's a few of the issues I have with them:

    
    
      * No incentive to see anything through, since there's always a "next idea"
      * Lack of vision. Most of the good startups have someone with a general vision, which is impossible this way.
      * Harder to recruit people since there's no core idea to get behind
      * Since the only way these are funded is by a rich person (after all, no VC would ever invest in one), it's susceptible to the whims of said rich person.
      * What happens if something becomes successful? How does equity/spinning out/etc work? And, if it spins out... all the revenue for the "factor" dries up.
    

There's a lot more, I'm sure.

~~~
thebenedict
Looked at charitably these could be mitigated with good contracts and
governance. E.g:

    
    
      * Well defined procedures for choosing what to work on and for how long
      * Agreement on what metrics to to base go/no-go decisions for continuing with an idea past the initial stages
      * Contracts to specify how spinoff equity is assigned. One interesting proposal I've heard involves a calculation based on developer hours worked over the initial development period.
    

Might be interesting outside of major tech markets where where VC funding is
unlikely anyway, which could be an added benefit to the traveling idea
factory/accelerator.

I appreciate that this is hard (if possible) to do in practice, and that lack
of vision might be a fundamental problem. It also feels like it could be an
excuse to treat developers poorly -- which was one of my concerns when I had
the opportunity and seems to have happened in this case.

------
icefox
> The problem is one of content generation, as opposed to lack of tooling.

I also have been pondering docs for many years and I agree with this
statement. The core value I was going to build my solution around was by
incorporating / generating examples from real code. Rather than being docs
that were published it would almost be close to a code search engine. While
the developers are lazy and rarely document you could bootstrap the
documentation by finding example usage in the wild and presenting it and from
there allow the users annotate it (and the developers if they ever get around
to it).

There are many problems with todays docs, another one that is missing has to
be analytics. If I own an API I want to know what users are constantly looking
at and discussing so that I can make that part better, less confusing, etc.
And conversely if there are no example usage and no one has ever looked at an
API that would be useful to know too as it could be code that could be ripped
out and no longer maintained. What api are users searching for, but never
find? There is more, but these are just a few off the top of my head.

By generating content rather than relying on the developers to sign up and
publish the site would explode in size and utility. Think Yahoo directory v.s.
Google ala 1998.

The idea that someone would generate static html files and put them somewhere
is almost barbaric compared to the richness that could be provided.

Unfortunately I don't really have a financial story to go with this idea. One
was to be free for open source projects and charge for commercial. But
honestly more likely would be that I would build it for a few years and then
someone like Facebook would just call me up and buy it out to shut it down and
solve their API documentation problems. Not saying that is bad, but I would
have to make it until that would happen and I would prefer to have found
another solution than a aquirehire end game.

------
pnathan
> My biggest two takeaways contradict themselves: I wish I had started sooner,
> but I’m so glad I waited. I had the idea from the beginning so it’s painful
> it took half a decade, however I never could have made it happen five years
> ago.

This is very inspirational, and very true: the ideas I had years ago I could
never have brought to life, and I probably would have failed, badly, at the
business side. Today, I can bring things to life, and I'm understanding more
and more of how businesses run.

------
kylec
I don't dislike goals, but I dislike rigidly holding yourself to goals when
your circumstances and desires change. I'm really glad that it worked out well
for the author, but not everyone is so lucky. I'm not where I thought I'd be
five years ago, for both better and worse, but I think I'd be less happy if I
measured my success today by my goals from back then.

~~~
tjradcliffe
"Five year plans" for my generation have a bad sound to them. They were the
basis for planning in the Soviet Union and were kind of a joke in the '70's
and '80's to mean "stuff that never gets done."

That said, goals aren't plans, and five years is a reasonable time-horizon for
a major goal. He did a lot of things right in his use of time, including
giving it a go too early, and then again getting sucked in to a startup that
didn't really work out. There is nothing like seeing things fail to teach you
the elements of success.

Part of that use of time should definitely be asking yourself "Am I pursuing
the right goal?" as you learn more, but a fair number of people get it right.

------
sidi
Really interesting backstory, and congrats to @Greg and team for joining YC.
Curious to know more how this worked out, since readme was gaining dev
adoption pretty rapidly when they launched last fall.

~~~
gkoberger
It's going amazingly well so far. Demo day is this week!

Shoot me an email at greg@readme.io if you want to talk more

------
javindo
This is a tremendously reassuring article for someone still in University
wanting to build a company. There's always the question in the back of my mind
"should I start now or get a few years experience?" and articles like this
reassure that it's not too late if you need a couple of years to build skills.

------
vinceguidry
> They kept pushing and changing the rules. Cutting salaries, forcing us to
> work on their pet projects, insisting I hire less-talented programmers for
> cheaper, cutting timelines, reducing investment, increasing their equity,
> and more.

I'm curious as to the exact take-away here. The author seemed a bit naive. The
investors approached him with a bad idea that has numerous potentials for
conflicts of interest, and he gave in, believing verbal promises would
eliminate those conflicts.

I would guess that if you want to get into the idea business, you should
probably fund yourself using your own ideas and your own implementations. It's
a pretty abstract business model, one that can very easily devolve into "we
will do anything for anybody who will give us money". So you need a pretty
strong vision and leadership skills to keep that from happening.

------
christop
The pedant in me wants to point out that the title should be "Five Years'
Time".

~~~
bshimmin
This is one of those ones that everyone seems to get wrong - even otherwise
very grammatical people. Even Hollywood gets it wrong:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313737/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313737/)
(You'd think Hugh Grant, with an English degree from Oxford, would have known,
noticed, or cared, but seemingly not...)

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kra34
Where do you want to be 5 years from now?

~~~
dsugarman
sitting atop the massive ReadMe kingdom I would assume

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manigandham
Nice article, just came across readme.io a few days ago when coming across
another product (GridGain) for the first time. Thought the makers of readme.io
had something really nice, interesting to read the history now.

Goals and plans, especially 5 years in the future, can be hard to keep up with
but the feeling of achievement at the end if truly amazing. I think even the
practice of just sitting down and setting goals and making realistic plans
goes a long way to helping you get there.

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ac360
Gregory,

I just signed up for readme.io last night and it is an incredible product. The
attention to detail is astounding. I've just become a big fan of yours. Never
wait again. Your execution is too good.

Good luck,

Austen

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ha8o8le
I was hoping the title was referencing the song :)

