

Ask YC: Is Y Combinator itself a startup? - mojuba

Having said so many things about startups, to what extent is it recursive?
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pg
We consciously try to operate as much like a startup as we can. Except for
Jessica, it's the side of the business world we have the most experience in
anyway.

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xirium
Is YC deliberately underfunded?

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pg
Yes, actually it extends even to that. Part of the reason we're not interested
in taking outside investment is that we worry if we had a lot of money it
might harm more than help us.

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ubudesign
who is giving negative points without even adding their own comments? It was a
question/comment and if you realy think about it developers do need people
that understand business as well.

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DaniFong
The prevailing wisdom around these parts is that, while hackers do need
someone with business sense to build a business well, hackers are basically
smart enough to acquire said experience. Having both the skill to build
something and the wisdom to know what to build in the mind of a single person
is much stronger than having 'business people' and 'developers'. Also, YC is
less concerned with developers in general; they pretty much have the pick of a
self selected lot that's already pretty entrepreneurial, so adding a business
person to the mix doesn't really tend to help all that much.

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nostrademons
"Having both the skill to build something and the wisdom to know what to build
in the mind of a single person is much stronger than having 'business people'
and 'developers'."

I very much disagree, though with the specifics rather than the general point.
It's _very_ difficult to keep a full mental model of both the technology
you're using and the problem you're solving in your head at once. Either you
veer over to the technology side, building something that's cool but not as
useful to users, or you veer over to the business side, coming up with great
ideas for users that can't be implemented in any feasible time period. This is
one major reason why startups can fail to build something people want.

You need at least _two_ people that trust each other to keep everything
centered - one to build things and one to critique what's been built and
suggest ways that it can be made more user-friendly. It doesn't have to be
hacker + businessperson: hacker + hacker with each of them writing code and
then looking at what the other has written for improvements is probably more
efficient, and gives you a swing person if you need something implemented
fast. But it's very rare that it can be done by a single person.

~~~
DaniFong
Speaking from my personal experience, the most valuable thing I seemed to gain
when we went from from one person to two is companionship. Having two people
on board made it much easier to keep up the momentum, because I now didn't
have as much need to put down work to hangout with my friends; I was already
working with a friend!

I've found that separating out the technology and business concerns (at least
in the companies that I've worked at) leads to, occasionally, bad solutions,
tension, and a lot of the creativity is squelched. Sometimes, good ideas look
uninspired from merely a business perspective, uninteresting from a technical
perspective, but in reality they're great ideas.

A good example is the DOS licensing deal. Making a CP/M compatible operating
system (poorly) isn't that bright. And from their business perspective, IBM
couldn't see it's platform being commoditized, because they failed to
understand how portable software would become. But Bill Gates understood.

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jraines
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reviewed by the Answer Board as part of the Quarterly Question/Answer
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