
Ask PG: What is a good size for a YC idea? - drm237
When submitting your idea to YC, is it better to select something which has great potential but is almost certainly too large for the scope of 3 months, or to select a subset (ie one feature) and just submit that?
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SwellJoe
We (Virtualmin) got in and the problems we solve are big and take a huge
volume of code (though we had a 9 year jump on the problem when we applied, in
our Open Source projects).

Parakey got in, and their problem set sounded really big...but I didn't
understand what they were talking about most of the time, so I may have
misunderstood. They also had a leg up, by being Blake Fucking Ross and Joe
Fucking Hewitt.

Versionate is a big project, but they were well-started by the time of
application.

Octopart is a big project. They faked it until they made it, and did so
beautifully (their presentation was among the best on Demo Day for WFP07).

Loopt is a big set of problems, most of them non-technical, and pg considers
it the best thing out of YC to date (and I see why...Sam's kicking ass).

Zenter was hard. But they broke the rules and pretended like it was easy and
actually produced something that mostly worked in a few months.

So, yeah, while the majority of YC companies are pretty small ideas that can
be executed by a very small team, many success stories (or success stories in
the making) out of YC have been big ideas.

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alaskamiller
is there a way, any way, for us plebeians to have a look at the presentations
done on demo days?

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pg
I doubt we'd make them public, since (a) most of the startups haven't launched
yet by that time and (b) even the ones that have tend to describe future plans
they'd rather not have get into the hands of competitors.

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brlewis
One option would be to record them, then let the startups themselves decide
whether to distribute the videos or not.

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paul
That's a good idea, though the startups could just repeat the presentation
later in front of a camera, which might be a better idea (they can do multiple
shoots, etc).

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Tichy
While it sounds like a good idea, that seems unlikely to work. Why would they
put in the extra effort? I think it would be one of those good ideas that get
postponed indefinitely.

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SwellJoe
Yes on all counts. I wouldn't want our Demo Day presentation disseminated
because it kinda sucked. And I wouldn't do it again, because when I next
present I expect a big fat check to follow within a month or so. But maybe I'm
just lazy.

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alaskamiller
How can there not be any value in this? If not for the practice at least for
the fanatical viewing this particular audience will do. And I'm also surprised
at how little the companies communicate their product idea or vision. But
maybe I'm focusing on the wrong thing.

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paul
I tend to agree. People may be underestimating the benefit that the increased
awareness would give. Serendipity is powerful because "random" people often
know the "right" people.

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pg
We like big ideas. Just say what the end goal is and what you currently expect
to do first. There's always some core you can get done in 3 months, and we are
now quite good at figuring out what it should be.

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drm237
Sounds good, that's the answer we were hoping for.

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DanielBMarkham
What I'd like to accomplish: Become Master of Space and Time

What I expect to do first: Apply to YC

For some reason, I'm having some trouble with some of the steps in between.
(grin)

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falsestprophet
Consider a tag cloud.

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DanielBMarkham
I was thinking what I needed was a sock puppet, or maybe a website with a name
with too many vowels, like ooweblioo. I'm also considering a folksonomy of
avatars, or maybe a paradigm-shifting web 3.0 application that virtualizes
social dynamics in a new dimension.

Dang! That sounds great! I think I'll call the puppet Bob. Man, I'm almost
there.

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icey
Wow, it IS like 1999 all over again, isn't it?

I remember shopping for capital in '99, and we had quite a few problems
getting VCs interested because we weren't asking for enough money, had a CEO
who actually had 20 years C-level experience and a name that didn't start with
the letter e.

About 2 years after we shuttered and sold off most of the code to various
people, EMC implemented something very similar and made a few hundred million
dollars off of it :/

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DanielBMarkham
There's some similarity. Only this time, the big companies are buying up the
little fish early in the game and absorbing them into operations -- which is
probably a much saner thing to do than everybody betting they have the next
Google.

We're seeing the beginning of "retail startups", where we can spit them out
like six packs of Coke, fund them, get them bought up by Amazon or whomever.
The industry really wanted to get to this point in '99. They've made a lot of
progress since then.

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leahn
I think a good answer would be, "Anything that could be possibly scalated to a
'world domination' plan"

