As a 3 time early employee of a YC funded startup I'm going to go ahead and say that the first customers benefit is as much a problem as a benefit because it presents the illusion of having a viable business. A lot of early customers only joined because of my startup's ties to YC and it always hid a problem with acquiring new customers. In 2 out of 3 experiences it took years of our lives wasted to figure out that the company couldn't be a success all the while trying to replicate whatever growth we had initially when that really was just from that first YC based TC article.
Basically you need to know if you can be viable without YC before you want get those early YC customers because eventually you're going to need customers that come to you who don't know what YC is.
VeilEm, would you email me so I could ask you a few questions about your experience? Andrew@mixergy.com
You raised a counter-intuitive issue and I want to understand it.
I do interviews on Mixergy.com and I need to hear about experiences that contradict mainstream thinking so I can make sure what's taught in my interviews is true to reality.
Similar experience, different conclusion. We were not prepared to handle customers when getting into YC. However, the process told us in 3-4 months, what would have otherwise taken us at least a year.
Our customers were nowhere close to the "YC Crowd" either.
The problem you had sounds like the mistake that was made was in what you learned from those customers. It's not an acquisition strategy, it's a strategy to get early users who will give feedback on the product. Figuring out how to sell it into non-YC companies is a separate challenge, but it comes after building a useful product.
The products were already useful, there just wasn't a viable enough market for them. It's hard to know that this is a problem when you have 5% growth for a few months and think you've gotten something that works only to see it slowly trickle to flat growth over time that may end up paying your bills in 10 years from now.
If you are able to have growth before getting into YC you will be better off than depending on YC to jump start your growth. Do you not think that lots of people are signing up to YC to get that jump start in growth?
It's hard to know that this is a problem when you have 5% growth for a few months and think you've gotten something that works only to see it slowly trickle to flat growth over time that may end up paying your bills in 10 years from now.
This is a problem almost every project faces after launch (getting through the trough of despair) - finding enough customers/users almost always takes years of hard graft. Perhaps it is amplified a lot by joining YC though.
People use YC for a myriad of reasons. Some use it to raise capital so they can build a product that requires upfront capital. Some use it to jump start growth for a product they know is useful already. Some use it because they are complete noobs, are technically capable but have never built a product before. Those are all places YC is hugely helpful.
I pondered the same point. If YC community isn't your target market, then this benefit is also of limited use or worse, damaging via creating illusion of demand which evaporates when you hit your target market.
You need to think of it as product development. It's hard to get users to use a product that no one has heard of. The YC network will actually try it out. This is important because even if they aren't your target market, it's still use of the product - which will always teach you something.
If the things you learn from YC community usage is inapplicable to your target market, then that is not useful learning. It is useful for business if their use context overlaps with that of your target base.
On HN every day brings some new event that completely changes everything forever and deserves all our attention and capacity for outrage. Don't you ever find this exhausting?
It's analogous to building a 30+ person company around MS Office clip art circa 1995 or Print Shop banner designs circa 1985, only now the company is valued at $300m with $50m funding. For gif search. Because I need those memes and I need them fast?
I guess your critique is that Giphy doesn't have a clear, announced monetization strategy?
That sounds fair. I haven't done any research on the company, but that seemed vague in their recent funding announcement/valuation.
However, I think it's fair to say that Giphy has created something people want to use. Anecdotally, their Slack integration is very popular in the channels I frequent. Maybe the lack of public monetization plan means bubble to you, but it seems the business at least has some value. I don't know if they'll be able to turn that value into revenue, but it seems plausible to me.
I'm not really arguing against your opinion. I'm just trying to get clarity on exactly why you think Giphy is indicative of a bubble. Searching for funny gifs may seem frivolous, but it's something people value. If Giphy can capitalize on that value without losing users / destroying the brand, it seems like a reasonable foundation for a business.
What makes this indicative of a bubble is the combination of:
a. Business centered around an utterly frivolous endeavor
b. Seemingly far more employees than necessary to support (a)
c. Many millions of dollars raised in the pursuit of (a) and (b)
You're absolutely correct that people want to use it. But they sure as hell aren't gonna pay directly for it or put up with ads. This is not a business made to last. I know it, you know it, we all know it. Yet there are people out there willing to toss $55M into this folly.
Yeah, I guess I put less weight on your point a. Frivolity doesn't necessarily mean an inability to generate revenue. Things that seem frivolous at first or frivolous to certain people can turn into a Real Business™.
However, I agree that people wouldn't pay for it or put up with ads. As a casual Giphy user, I certainly wouldn't pay for it, and to your point, I wouldn't invest my own money in Giphy.
Anyway, thanks for spelling out your reasoning. Cheers.
Actually Giphy has a pretty sound business model. They are already integrated into most of the large communication services used in the US (facebook messenger, twitter, slack, kik). When a movie studio wants to promote their next film they are going to pay Giphy a lot of money to make sure their gifs are featured. It's not inconceivable that that Giphy and it's like (Riffsy, PopKey) become a massive advertising channel for movies and tv. $300m seems like a lot, but I don't think it's ridiculous.
Your (b) is a big one in my mind. The core of giphy could be run by one person. There's probably enough monetization potential here for a good healthy lifestyle business for 1-3 people.
I think it's more relevant that Giphy isn't providing any original content, whereas the clipart vendors were selling their own media. Giphy is merely providing hosting for users' content, much of which is copyrighted.
It's all about the tags. You have to work in the other direction. Find something well-tagged, then giphy the fully qualified tag that produces the same gif every time.
Granted, this is not a "search engine" type of use case, but the actual existence of some gifs, and the tags applied, force a degree of compromise.
I am not the one that got $50M in funding though, I just want to use their one line integration on slack. That's up to them to make it not work, not me.
Yes, in principle, absolutely. It wouldn't be practical though. The detectors are large, and sensitive to every kind of noise and interference, and you need to collect data, not just take a mere single reading. But, funny story, during commissioning the Chinese officials in charge of the nuclear plant were very conservative about what information they wanted to share with the experiment regarding the plant's operational status, I got to see them with some funny looks on their faces when the physicists told them, and showed them plots of exactly what was going on in the reactors and when.
Edit: Ok, let me not be so brief. In short, the current detectors for monitoring reactors are either HUGE (rooms and rooms full of highly purified water, and even those just look at nearby reactors and only get 1 count every 3 days). Or the detectors are very close to the reactor (7 meters i.e. https://www.iaea.org/safeguards/symposium/2010/Documents/Pap...). So signal to noise is the main issue first of all.
It's not insignficant. For one, the app icon looks completely different now. I had thought for a moment that I had uninstalled uber inadvertently before remembering their brand redesign in the tech press. For those not following the tech press, they probably had a harder time figuring out how to call an uber app.
They destroyed their brand in one fell swoop their new logo is entirely new. The good news for Uber is though that they are so essential and ubiquitous there's no danger of this impacting their business.
This is really bad news for us, and the tone of the announcement grated. Two weeks notice is very bad form, I'm having to come back from vacation to fix this.
When we evaluated options a year ago, kimono was the best fit. We'd happily have paid, and did ask. I don't understand what happened... Did they run out of funding?
Here is a statement that can give you some insight
"Kimono Labs explained that in the two years since launching, it wasn’t able to have the impact that it wanted, and that the acquisition by Palantir will give the team “unmatched support, resources, and the ability to work on things we could not tackle alone as a small startup.”"
from http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/15/palantir-acquires-kimono-l...
Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. My vote is for "wisps". So fragile, the slightest disturbance in its reality distortion field and it ceases to exist.
Any kind of JavaScript, iOS or Android engineer getting laid of will get a job within a month if they want. Competent backend developers, devops, ML engineers also will have no problems finding a job. I recently went through a job search in the bay area and only applied at places I wanted to work and got a job at the first place I applied with phone interviews and in person interviews scheduled at other places.
The job market is really great right now. If you're getting laid off, now is a good time.
I'm not seeing a great hiring market right now for engineers in the Bay Area, at least as a high demand JS engineer. I took a look at testing the waters within the past month, I found the offers/opportunities a little wanting, and I am now debating whether to stick around at my job for a while even with some of its faults. The market looked a lot better a half year ago.
Getting hired is not a problem - getting a really nice job though is much more difficult, especially due to all of the companies that like to talk a nice game but are disguising weak aspects of the company such as leadership/management, quality engineering, work-life balance, etc.
An aside, that popup iframe with video on the top as you scrolled down is one of the most annoying dark UX patterns I've encountered in a news site. It is one of a handful times where I used Chrome's element inspector to set display: none.
> I'm not seeing a great hiring market right now for engineers in the Bay Area, at least as a high demand JS engineer.
Can you explain this further? If by "high demand JS engineer" you mean "front end" and not just node (which is not bad or anything btw), and by "high demand" specifically you mean you are:
* you understand JS well, doesn't mean we get to grill you on all the weird corner cases - but you understand the language
* want to work with a modern stack (i.e. react, flux/redux/whatever, backbone, that sort of thing)
* are mature and want to help grow a team, can communicate with PMs and all that effectively
we'd kill to hire you (250-300 person company.) Every friend of mine that has started a company asks me every time they see me if I know a good front end person (that isn't busy counting their RSUs at Uber, etc and isn't going anywhere.)
Our company (in general) and team has more than one designer focused on bringing a good experience to the table, before it even gets to the code level. To translate, that doesn't mean our reqs go from sales person to "make it do this now, code monkey", but rather we want to make good, long lasting products, in a thoughtful manner. And still, finding someone is tough.
So I find it hard to believe the hiring market for what you describe isn't great.
Personally, my experience is all back end. I consider myself a good engineer in general, and feel I could ramp up to being a decent front end engineer in 3-12 months time depending on how much depth we're talking, but think that things are specialized enough now that that would be a waste of effort, and plenty of people would still be better than me. However, from what I've seen, being a F.E. eng that understands CSci and what's happening under the hood should make you SUPER in demand right now.
I'm not trying to make this a hiring post, but if you'd like a fun job with a decent company trying to expand its front end capacity on this coast, with a relatively green field project (i.e. you get to build new stuff), and at a place making real money, not just selling to other startups, and not in a moon shot social space, PM me. If not, I'd still be curious why you think being a "high demand JS engineer" isn't a good spot to be in in the current market.
I do Node.js as well, although it doesn't show nearly as strongly in my background due to every company I've been at wanting my frontend skills. I get pinged heavily due to being a major non-Google contributor in the Angular community (code contributions to Angular.js, Angular 2, Ionic, and am involved in the teams for Universal Angular, UI Bootstrap, and UI Router).
Finding a job is still pretty easy - I don't dispute that. Finding one that pays competitively, respects work-life balance, and focuses on quality of engineering & getting product right, even if it means pushing deadlines a little later is much harder I've found, unless you look to the Google/FB/Netflixes. My current job meets most of those bars (a little less on the salary side, but I was willing to accept that for everything else), but only dissatisfies me on wanting to move faster & having more influence on tech choices.
While there are no shortage of companies that want to hire, most haven't put their best foot forward I've found. The market is still good for software engineers, but it's noticeably not as compelling as it was just a half year ago - I feel like the balance has tilted a little more to the employer's side in the employee/employer dynamic.
I live on the east coast and one of my colleagues is being flown to the Bay Area to interview for a JS position at a very popular company. But that's just one data point.
That's interesting to hear. I've seen a very sharp drop off in unsolicited emails lately from recruiters (50 per month to ~2). I already have a job so I'm not looking, but the silence has been noticable.
Because they fired all the recruiters? Sorry that was mean.
I honestly hope these companies start culling these non essential employees. When I left the valley, they were one of the biggest reasons. They were affecting the local intelligence culture in a very negative way.
I feel like you are being harsh. Recruiting seems like a pretty essential part to a fast growing company. And to say they affect the “local intelligence culture”, well there’s a lot of locals in SF who say that about all of tech and there’s many a way to define intelligence.
As a developer, I appreciate the role recruiters play. Reaching out cold to people isn’t easy and the fact someone else spends time on this while I write code is great. And the fact that my LinkedIn has multiple leads from people about job opportunities should I want to move is fantastic. Are we so spoiled to scoff at people offering us jobs when so many people can barely find quality work.
Certainly there are some shady players, but not really more than I’ve seen on the Engineering side, and my main issues have been less with recruiters and more with the hiring managers who the recruiters work for. “Oh, your rocket ship hasn’t grown revenue for 6 months straight yet you told me 100% YOY growth.” It was two directors of engineering and not a recruiter that lied to me about growth at a well respected YC startup. I blame the people crafting the message more than the messenger.
I'm not speaking specifically on recruiters, whom I also believe play a valuable role (possibly second most valuable to actual engineers, given their importance on bringing in talent), more on middle managers, marketing and sales orgs. I had a general sense of ennui with the way they shaped self-obsessed materialism in SF, and their insistence on packing 5 at a time in apartments they couldn't afford, driving out families with fewer income earners per head just to be part of something they didn't help make. To me, that brand of person gives Baby Boomers a run for their money.
i would argue it takes a more special person to think perpetual growth and bloated companies are realistic. Nobody's wishing misery on others. Just natural culling cycles.
Good recruiters are essential for building a good team. I have been happy to know many of the great recruiters I have had the pleasure to be on the same team on. Hiring is a complex topic involving marketing the company, searching for candidates, understanding the needs of the company and the legal terrain and helping everyone through the process.
Possibly a timing issue? People often leave jobs after 2-3 months if it's not a good fit, otherwise they generally stay until they hit their year mark. Looks like you're at six months.
A sudden flood of engineering talent on the market has other problems. Salaries could go down and given how expensive The Bay Area is then that could be problematic.
Given how hard hiring has been, I doubt it. The current talent shortage could absorb a huge number of engineers. A lot of startups are well funded for many years anyway. People are predicting doom and gloom but I really don't see it. Home prices falling is also probably not a terrible thing, even on an engineer's salary homes are hard to come by, and rents are extreme. A small correction is probably a good thing. I bought my house at the bottom of the housing market in 2011 and its value has nearly doubled since then which is ridiculous to me. I also have enough savings to last me years. Lots of companies are also doing just fine. This really isn't the earth shattering dot com bust some of you want it to be.
The out-sized "demand" is largely coming from yield hungry investors and Chinese investors looking for a bolthole.
Both kinds of demand could easily be clamped down upon by raising property taxes - the victims of which would be wealthy foreign investors and people who have sat on one of the largest increase in property values in history.
Likewise, supply could be increased if local government were at all interested in doing so just by building 10,000-20,000 low income apartments.
If the government announced both, the cost of San Francisco housing would plummet within days.
You might try local Realtors (especially those who specialize as buyer agents) that advertise in Chinese (or that they speak Mandarin or Cantonese) to see if any recent transactions fit the bill.
Also, sales are open record - you might look at buyers with Chinese surnames that lack Americanized first names.
In the short run, sure. In the long run, what happens when many of the Chinese business owners who have been parking their wealth on the coasts of America face a liquidity crunch and suddenly need that money to keep their companies going?
We've been here before: back in the 80s, Japan was buying up most of the real, tangible assets in the U.S.
The cause was the same: strong export products, an undervalued currency, and easy-money policies. The first signs of trouble were the same: high inflation, crony capitalism, and poor transparency in the market. Let's see if the rest of history plays out the same way.
It's probably just like vancouver, lots of money, no place for it to go, you can launder foreign money basically legally into a house in the US. You should search for vancouver and see the ycomb story on it earlier this week.
They certainly did go down. I was personally at a company where the CEO came in one morning during late 2001 and announced a cut of 10% across the board. No-one left as a result either, until 2003.
"Average annual wages in high-tech rose sharply between 2001 and 2008 compared with overall average wages in the Valley. For the Silicon Valley, the average annual wage in high-tech industries rose from $97,344 in 2001 to $132,351 in 2008, an increase of 36.0 percent. (See table 2.) In comparison, average annual wages rose only 21.7 percent across all establishments in the area"
Good reference. But I wonder what the trend was between 2000 to 2003 inclusive, which is the time of interest. At most flat, probably. The Valley started to come back by 2004 and by 2008 was in good shape.
No, as an industry, wages absolutely did not go down. Your salary went down because your company and some others were in trouble, but most companies did not have salary cuts, and salaries were not cut whatsoever.
If a company goes bankrupt and it lays people off, it doesn't mean that salaries all fell, it just means those employees' salaries dropped to $0. This is what happened to you. I got modest salary increases during the same time.
"wages absolutely did not go down" being followed by "Your salary went down because your company and some others were in trouble" makes me wonder how well this line of logic was thought out.
Not sure what you mean. Anecdotal evidence is valueless. Sure, some companies cut salaries, but as a whole, the wages did not go down. It's not all of a sudden the going rate for a programmer went from 100k down to 85k in general.
As already pointed out this covers 2001 to 2008. I'm interested in 2001 to 2003/4 inclusive. Tech salaries obviously went up between 2001 and 2008, everyone in the Bay Area knows that.
If the data for this specific range is available, I'd love to see it. Perhaps I missed it.
This is not what happened to me. I kept my job, but my salary went down.
Various companies also enforced extended shutdowns (over Holiday periods). If you had no vacation left, you didn't get paid. This is effectively a wage cut.
I am aware that wages are "sticky" and companies would rather lay off than cut salaries. But the statement that "wages did not go down" is not correct.
Yeah, @pfarnsworth is stuck on some weird point. Wages in the tech industry went down during the dotcom crash for those that had jobs. And some people lost their jobs and couldn't get new ones. And there were some people who did not have their salaries change, like me. I was not in the bay area, that's probably why mine didn't go down. My stock went did go down in value :-)
No, as I said, as an industry, wages did not go down. Sure, some companies cut their wages, but that was the minority. The salaries for programmer didn't go for $100k to $85k for example. Either the companies died, or they survived and kept wages the same. The vast majority of companies that survived didn't cut wages. They either laid people off, or kept the status quo.
The reason why they didn't is because they didn't want to give an arbitrary pay cut to their best employees, who would leave as soon as things got better. They would rather cut the fat and get rid of employees they didn't want.
Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, etc, none of those companies instituted pay cuts, and wages did not go down in those companies. Some of them had layoffs but they cut salaries.
So we've reached the point where you say the (presumably average) salary for programmers didn't go down between 2000 and 2004. And I am at least one data point that shows that it did (and I know of plenty others).
I wish someone actually had data for the time in question, as opposed to anecdote. I find the question quite interesting, and would like to know the answer.
Seriously? You're going to use the impact on Silly Valley tech salaries that a glut of engineering talent would cause as an argument against minimum wage laws?
If technology professionals ever find themselves in a position where minimum wage regulations are relevant to their incomes, we'll have been through something far worse than a few layoffs.
The myopia of tech people is really mind-blowing sometimes...
Like, for example, corporations preying on people who have no choice but to take any job that's available, and offering wages that are below a starvation level?
There's a difference between getting any job and getting a "good" job, even in tech. There are tons of startups and other tech companies with enough funding to continue hiring, but I wouldn't personally waste my time in 90%+ bay area companies I see hiring these days.
Yeah, no. As someone who hires on the east coast, and has a pretty extensive network of professional peers in generally "high" positions -- all these general assumptions about applying the SF market to anywhere else in the country is complete non-sense. And rightly so.
No – significant preprocessing of photoreceptor cell signals occurs in the eye, in the retina. The "raw" signals from the three cone types are processed into luminance and two color-opponent channels before being sent to the visual cortex. (While there are around 130 million retinal receptors, there are only approximately 1.2 million axons bundled in the optic nerve.)
Actually they do, and beyond that, the retina contains neurons that do the basic processing before travelling down the optic nerve to the brain. The retina is also basically brain tissue and is part of the central nervous system.
Indeed, among other things, they detect edges, movement, and preprocess color from RGB to something conceptually closer to YUV (with color encoded along two contrast axes: red-green and blue-yellow).
To reinforce what you're saying, I just want to point out that the retina is actually a part of the central nervous system. It grows from the same tissue that the brain does during fetal development.
I would compare the kind of "eye" that these bacteria are more to the parietal eye: it detects light to allow movement toward that light (in the Cyanobacteria, to photosynthesize; in primitive animals, likely to find and eat the Cyanobacteria!)
I almost wonder if the genetic code for the parietal eye + pineal gland looks anything like the code for this bacteria's shell. There could be a continuous line of descendence, there.
Basically you need to know if you can be viable without YC before you want get those early YC customers because eventually you're going to need customers that come to you who don't know what YC is.