This is a beautiful comment, and I couldn't agree more.
There is only one standard of accomplishment and it's set by people like Mozart.
Accepting that is humbling, but it's required to know yourself and grow. My contributions probably won't amount to much, but Mozart (et al) have shown us what good looks like and it's fun to strive.
This was not my experience. I have no degree, I'm not American, and I applied back in October 2021 about 3 hours before the dead line and filmed my application video from a coffee shop. I didn't have a good network. I didn't have a product yet. I was accepted first time.
As you say, a lot of YC founders don't have a real business yet, but they're not there because they're well connected. They're there because YC thinks they fit the profile of someone who really wants to build a big business and might pull it off. They're wrong most of the time but it's a numbers game.
You're right that I didn't mean to communicate that, but it's a good point. I agree with you entirely that this is the big downside of YC and frankly all VC backed entrepreneurship. It is not the path of highest expected return for a founder. If you want a high expected return then a FAANG job or a bootstrapped SaaS product you can build yourself are good options. Some days that's what I wish I was doing to be honest.
I think a lot of VC backed founders aren't just in it because they want to get rich though. Sure, we all want that, but we're also all predisposed to irrationally believe that we're the exception. That trait (for better or worse) comes with implications, and many founders I speak to are simply compelled to try because it's hard, and it's theirs, and they're impatient.
I also very much agree with the sibling though. Getting rejected does not carry that much signal, because YC are wrong more than they're right. So just keep trying.
or still do it, but know that YC's incentives and yours are pointing in different directions. Sometimes taking their advice is good for both of you, sometimes it is only good for them.
I'm in the UK (Oxfordshire) and have a 1gb symmetrical connection at home. It's provided by Gigaclear - there's a handful of other similar operators that do fibre in more "rural" areas. It costs £79 a month, so it's not cheap to be honest, but I love it.
Ring em up and tell them you’re leaving, they’ll drop you down to the new customer pricing. I’ve got the 1G up and down for something like £38 a month now?
Don't overthink it, just get out there and talk to people. The more the better. In my experience, the limiting factor on day 1 is a lack of information, so your job is to learn until it's fairly obvious what to do. Thinking doesn't really generate new data, only action can, so walk into every restaurant you come across, write cold emails, etc.
As far as how to conduct these sorts of interviews goes, a few people have mentioned the mom test - it's v short and simple but it is indeed good. People, for the most part, avoid conflict and so don't give you honest feedback. Instead they tend to be complimentary, but non-committal. As a result, you need to be a little indirect in your line of questioning, and pay more attention to what they do than what they say.
When it comes to testing a product, try and deliver the value manually instead. Businesses don't buy software, they buy solutions to problems. Software is just a way to deliver the solution to many customers. If you can't convince someone to pay you to keep their menu up to date by hand, they won't pay for your software to do it either. Perhaps you convince them to give you the relevant credentials to update menus across platforms yourself, and then they email you when something changes, or you give them a google form, or you go into the restaurant every day and ask what's new. Not everyone is open to working with someone in a scrappy way like this, but you'd be surprised.
You can easily serve a handful of customers manually like this, which will give you the data you need to decide if it's worth it, and the data you need to build the product.
Congrats on the launch! It's a bit early for me to try out something like this but I'm keen on exploring a usage based pricing model for my product... I'll come knocking when the time is right :).
This is similar to what I do (although I use esbuild), however like an idiot I just run tsc manually so obviously I forget sometimes and it takes 10 minutes to realise the build failed.
Not great... I'm ashamed but it's just me on this project atm.
Appreciate where you're coming from re the detail. It can be hard to know where to draw the line when explaining projects and it depends on the target audience etc.
In this case, I would say it's ok that they don't explain what Wayland is on the project page. Wayland has pretty widespread adoption now and I reckon the vast majority of people that might be interested in projects like tiling window managers for linux will have heard of it (and that has probably been true for quite some time now, Wayland has been around for over a decade).
If you're keen to dig into it more, another popular project in the space is sway https://swaywm.org/.
This is probably really dumb but I'm interested to hear people's reactions to yet another amateur dark energy theory.
Could the observation that the universe is expanding actually be the result of a sort of gravitational lensing and not the result of space expanding or bodies moving through space?
My rough line of thinking is:
- We believe that gravity has a warping effect on spacetime.
- We believe that this warping can distort light.
- When we observe light from distant galaxies, it must first exit the gravity well of the source, traverse the universe and then make its way down into our gravity well.
- Therefore, the light must have been subject to some distortion. It traversed two regions of 'stretched' space time and so became 'stretched' itself.
- This 'stretching' is interpreted as redshift and is indistinguishable from if the light source had just been moving away quickly.
Naively, I would have thought this interpretation explains a couple of things quite well:
- Light would be redshifted in every direction as every bright and distant source (i.e. galaxies) resides in a large gravity well.
- It would explain a lack of redshift in nearby objects as we sit in a broadly similar part of the Milky Way's gravity well. As such the relative lensing effect would not be apparent.
Anyway, I obviously have no idea what I'm talking about and someone will have thought of this before - however I'm interested to know why the theory doesn't work.
Most likely I don't really understand gravitational lensing and it wouldn't distort the wavelength of light as I suggested. Alternatively, perhaps someone has done the maths and the impact of any such effect does not align with observations.
Light is indeed redshifted as it climbs through a gravitational well, but it is also blueshifted again when it travels down the gravitational well of our own galaxy. For distant galaxies, the total effect is negligible compared to the doppler redshift due to their velocity. Also, when you look in any direction in the sky, the redshift increases with distance, irrespective of galaxy or cluster masses. So the further they are away, the faster they are receding from us. This is also exactly what the Hubble constant measures.
> the further [galaxies] are away, the faster they are receding from us
I've heard this repeated many times as a surprising discovery. Why is this surprising? Let's say you have some number of objects moving at different speeds (relative to Earth). After enough time, the objects that move fastest should be farthest away, by the simple definition of speed!
Substitute "speed" (really, "velocity") with "acceleration" and your statement is true. So, you're pretty close in your reasoning - if everything is accelerating at the same rate, then things further away from us should be moving away from us faster.
So here's the problem: maintaining a constant velocity requires no outside force, but acceleration does. So, we're seeing everything accelerate away from us.... but why? Where does that force come from?
Amateur so I’m sure this is a stupid idea. What if they’re not accelerating away from us but space time itself is growing (because of the original Big Bang) and taking everything else along for the ride on top of the original exploding outward, resulting in acceleration of acceleration? Probably it’s growth rate would be decreasing which might be observable in the derivative of the derivative of acceleration? If that were happening, I wonder if virtual particles have some link to that process.
My reasoning here is that everything is accelerating from everything else since our position in the galaxy isn’t particularly special right? Then the only way for that really to be true would be for space time itself to be growing.
That's sort of what's happening. If you imagine space as a rubber sheet with the galaxies pinned to certain places, something is pulling the sheet apart, making it seem like the galaxies are accelerating away from each other. We know the math behind this mechanism thanks to general relativity (it only needs a certain energy density for empty space), but we don't know what causes it. So we just call it "dark energy." Without it, the original expansion of the universe caused by the big bang should be slowing down due to gravity. Dark energy causes it to accelerate instead.
Another amateur, but I think it's more likely the reverse. As we travel through time, us, and the atoms we are made of, shrink(or another way to look at it is 'being consumed', or using up its energy). And we shrink according to how fast we travel through time, and we move through time based on mass. The relative shrinking causes gravity. This would result in that same change in 'acceleration' that we observe, but really it's not that anything is moving, everything is simply changing sizes.
This must be wrong because it feels obvious and testable, simply make 2 satellites, send one to space, then confirm they are the same size when it gets back. And yet I can't find evidence either way.
One more question: How do we know that each galaxy is actually accelerating and not moving at a constant speed?
I'm seeing some circular logic. As I understand it, we think they are accelerating _because_ we see that galaxies that are farther away are moving faster away from us.
But we just agreed that we expect to see this same observation even if each individual galaxy maintains constant velocity. Apologies. It's a bit late. I'm sorry if I'm missing something incredibly obvious.
Possibly dumb answer: If everything else was moving at a constant velocity and we were slowing down, wouldn't the things on the other side of us appear to be accelerating towards us?
My understanding is that basically everything is moving away from us (presumably our reputation precedes us).
That seems like it would itself need an explanation. Why would the initial conditions be objects starting at the ~same place but moving with random velocity?
The CMB would also need explanation and I'm thinking the curves of galaxy speeds wouldn't match unless you tweak the initial speeds way too much, but I'm not sure how to formulate that right.
I’ve always wondered whether there might be some other large scale effect happening that causes light frequencies to shift. What if photons travelling through a vacuum just slowly lose energy and their frequency drops? Would that be distinguishable from expansion by any of the measurements we can do here?
Hope this is not off-topic but I just want to say that Kyriakos (the OP) is a great guy. He gave up some of his time earlier this week to help me and my co-founder prep for our YC interview.
We didn't know him before this so I can only conclude it was a genuinely kind act from someone looking to give back to the community.
There is only one standard of accomplishment and it's set by people like Mozart.
Accepting that is humbling, but it's required to know yourself and grow. My contributions probably won't amount to much, but Mozart (et al) have shown us what good looks like and it's fun to strive.