
Apply HN: Pinboard – Make Y Combinator Great Again - idlewords
A tremendous, huge opportunity to fund the Bay Area&#x27;s slowest-growing unicorn.
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tptacek
This is a funny thread, but if any of you are amused and hopeful about the
idea of Pinboard becoming a YC company, and you don't already have a Pinboard
account, go get one!

I was a bookmarking skeptic before I signed up for Pinboard. In fact, I think
I got my Pinboard account as repayment for a favor Erin and I did for Maciej.
But now, I have no idea what I would do without it. Pinboard has more or less
become a search engine for my life.

Part of what makes Pinboard great is knowing _it isn 't going to break_; it's
going to keep doing what it says on the label, pretty much the way it does,
and I'm never going to have to switch to some crazy iOS app or download an
Electron shell or really even click or scroll on anything.

If you're not already using something like Pinboard, I think you should
consider starting, right away, and probably the thing like Pinboard you should
use is Pinboard.

~~~
Alex3917
> Part of what makes Pinboard great is knowing it isn't going to break

If you're not following him on Twitter, you really should be.

~~~
uxp
I've yet to determine if I can cancel my HBO subscription that I keep around
for the show Silicon Valley and just read that account.

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kevin
I know you're ribbing us, but paying for a Pinboard account is like buying
shares in Berkshire Hathaway. It's for true believers. I think there's always
opportunity in concentrations of users like that.

Of all the partners at YC, I ran the startup that was the most different from
everyone else. And my approach might be more aligned with your values. If you
were seriously interested, I'd be delighted to work with you.

~~~
kenko
How is buying shares in Berkshire Hathaway for "true believers"?

~~~
tim333
A lot of the buyers believe Warren will keep doing well. Holder since '96\.
Though you can buy to flip if you want.

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snowwrestler
"Do Things That Don't Scale"

[http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

Since a hosted bookmarking service obviously scales well, that can't be the
heart of the Pinboard value prop. What does Pinboard do that no one does, that
seems totally nonscalable?

How about @Pinboard? He's just one man, hand-crafting tweets about the SF tech
industry in his spare time... it can't possible scale to every city and
industry, can it? (Can it?) And bonus: the Twitter handle is producing $0
revenue!

The answer is clear: $100 million of investment. $50 million for a machine
learning system that will ingest the @Pinboard snarky tweet corpus, and output
tweets adapted to other industries and localities. And $50 million for a
custom ad bidding system that injects subtle product placements into the
tweets at the ###### possible CPC.

###### - If you are an investor, please read this as "highest". If you are a
customer, please read this as "lowest."

EDIT - My numbers are all wrong. It should $20 million for the AI, $20 million
for the ad system, $55 million for marketing and signing bonuses, and $5
million for the cafeteria.

~~~
idlewords
Eliezer Yudkowsky made me swear on the Necronomicon never to feed the Pinboard
tweet corpus into any self-modifying learning algorithm.

~~~
varikin
But that won't stop the rest of us

~~~
Eliezer
Necronomicon oaths work even if you don't swear them.

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kasey_junk
'idlewords once demonized the last 2 industries I worked in, in a single
presentation and it was one of my proudest moments.

I feel like with proper funding he could hit all 5 and possibly call me out
for my high school indiscretions as well. I for one can think of very few
things that deserve funding more than that.

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wfn
What steps would you take to make sure Pinboard is taken to the next level?

Where would the money go? Would you consider investing, assuming you get the
funding, at least $1m into a $plashy landing page?

Finally, what is your strategy (and God help you if you do not have it)
towards convincing potential investors to give you $80m and not think about
the revenue?

~~~
idlewords
For Pinboard, the next level is 'get an office and a sysadmin'.

Spending $1M on a landing page sounds like a fun challege. If that pledge
makes people invest, I'm happy to make it.

I realize that having revenue makes many investors uneasy. If that remained a
stumbling block, I would consider moving to some kind of free plan.

~~~
slowernet
Now tell us how this would affect your plans for the next round of Co-
Prosperity Cloud awardees.

$41? $43? Sky's really the limit here.

"Co-Prosperity Cloud 2: the Trickle-Down"

~~~
idlewords
It's a delicate question. There's an irresistible temptation to spend lavishly
once you pass the $40 psychological milestone. I don't want to make the same
mistake YCombinator made.

------
catwell
I have been using Pinboard for five years, I have 3500 bookmarks in it. Along
with GitHub, it is probably the SaaS that has improved my life the most.

------
Mahn
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Pinboard is great for what it does, and it
obviously has a fan base, but in a world where Evernote and Pocket exist and
are massive, there is not a lot of room for a service like Pinboard to become
huge. If I were an investor I'd be wondering "how does this become a massive
internet consumer service" and I just don't see the answer to that question.

~~~
100k
Wait until Evernote and Pocket flame out and pick up the leavings? (It worked
with Delicious...)

~~~
idlewords
Evernote is doing a pretty good job of it right now.

It's not a glamorous business model, but with so many online services aiming
for the stars, one can make a decent living gathering up the wreckage.

------
aaronbrethorst
I am going to be very sad if Maciej does anything that keeps him from writing
prose as much as he wants to.

~~~
idlewords
I promise not to be seduced into a dead-end poetry career. But seriously,
thank you very kindly.

------
buss
How will you handle people that say "you mean pinterest?"

(btw, love pinboard!)

~~~
idlewords
Short term: raising awareness, clever ad campaign

Long term: acquired by Pinterest

~~~
rdl
ITYM "acquire Pinterest"

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lifenovueau
This is huge people! This is the one way to make YC great again.

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adn
_gets YC money_

 _immediately acquires delicio.us_

~~~
rmc
Surely you mean del.icio.us ?

~~~
adn
I honestly don't care about any startup (especially a dying one) enough to
remember where the periods are supposed to go if there is more than one.

~~~
wingerlang
Is this "still" a startup? It must have been around for decades.

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tekklloneer
I have been dumping my links into an email address for years - reading with
thunderbird. a long while ago, i was turned off by not being able to try it
for a few weeks (i'm slow to take something like this and integrate it into my
life)

alright pinboard, ill give you a shot.

~~~
tedmiston
Don't miss the reading list feature in Pinboard :)

Though I use Instapaper myself, I'd consider using it more in Pinboard if
there were support for a parse webpages into plain text service.

------
njamescouk
no point messing about with delicious, pinboard should take over yahoo.

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knd775
Wow, didn't expect to see this here. I'd love to see Pinboard go through YC.

~~~
idlewords
I will go through YC like a bowling ball through a python

~~~
YuriNiyazov
You are very hard to understand. You have many times criticized HN and YC for
many different things (the most memorable examples being objecting to how HN
uses the word "startup", and to PG hellbanning you), and yet here you are,
cleverly using "Apply HN" to raise awareness about Pinboard in the community
you dislike while having no intention of being part of YC.

~~~
idlewords
I am hoping to attract a certain protest vote of the silent majority who enjoy
this community, but are uneasy about the values of its founders and more
broadly, Silicon Valley.

As far as HN proper, I don't dislike this community at all, particularly since
dang took the reins. It's an interesting place and I've tried to contribute in
good faith for many years now, besides just making fun of it.

~~~
tombrossman
Let's say you attain this goal and the protest votes are in, signalling to YC
that a (no longer) silent majority feel this way. Now they get the message
that the community is "uneasy about the values of its founders and more
broadly, Silicon Valley". What's next? I imagine reading posts by the
community here does not play a huge role in day-to-day operations at the
company, they still have day jobs and financial pressures to deal with whether
we like them or not. Is there a plan or end game or is this pure trolling (or
maybe I put it more kindly and call it 'performance art' or something like
that)?

I'm pretty sure Silicon Valley are quite well aware that privacy is an issue
and a growing number of users are uncomfortable with the surveillance-as-a-
service business model, but it pays the bills so why would they change? How
can you create this demand so that the pro-privacy business model works?

I'm curious to see what you can make of the opportunity, if one even exists
here.

~~~
idlewords
I understand your point, but established Silicon Valley investors are not the
audience I'm trying to reach, or persuade.

I would call what I do 'impure trolling', since I run an actual business, and
have given an earnest series of talks calling for regulations on mass
surveillance.

Following in this earnest vein, I live a life of independence and fun, and
would like to encourage young technical people to live that life too, rather
than wasting their youth in pursuit of a one-in-ten-thousand shot at
plutocracy.

~~~
tedmiston
As a 20-something startup engineer, I'd love to hear you write a blog post
with more on that last bit.

~~~
idlewords
I gave a talk called "Barely Succeed - it's easier!" where I tried to make the
case. There's a video version here
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c)],
unfortunately I haven't transcribed it yet.

------
tedmiston
I* am curious about your growth.

Did signup conversion change when you switched from one-time fee to recurring?

Do you have any current weird channels for user acquisition? I mean, besides
those last few del.icio.us users...

*as a Pinboard customer

P.S. For anyone who hasn't seen, Pinboard's Twitter account is pretty amusing
startup satire.

[https://twitter.com/Pinboard](https://twitter.com/Pinboard)

~~~
idlewords
I think conversion changed, but I don't know. I don't do a very good job at
tracking it.

My weird channels for acquisition are a variety of publicity stunts and
Twitter drama. Something like IFTTT recently threatening to turn off their
Pinboard channel is manna from heaven for me.

~~~
zimpenfish
That was a heart-stopping day given how many Pinboard rules I have.

------
vs2370
i have a different take on this . I think buffer and pocket have done great
work in this year. Obviously pinboard as well. I am not sure if I am the only
one but I think the problem is bookmarking. On HCI terms, bookmarking is not
intuitive to how human brains work. Instead we just go through events and the
nature of events makes us AUTOMAGICALLY index them in our brain and when we
wish to retrieve them our brain just uses that index.

On those lines I think it should be more like log everything that I hit on all
my devices and make the search organized. Something similar using apriori
algorithm was my school project and I used it a lot until now when I have
slowly moved to pocket.

My 2 cents - "In short better to have a smart search and indexing instead of
bookmarking "

