Lecture 2: How to Start a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec02/ <comment><USER3> as someone geographically & logically outside of the silicon valley bubble, working in the 'real economy' and a bit older than the y combinator target group it hurts me to see those kind of lectures / advice on startups.

from my perspective it all seems like one big circle jerk, especially considering the hive-mind mentality here on hackernews where working 80hours+ / week for some fun app startup seems like good guidance for young people and something to strive for.

the goal of a startup is to make money, not raising money. the SV scene seems to be concentrating on the latter since its influenced & guided completely by venture capitalists and their interests instead of market opportunities.

to be provocative: just throw thousands of teenagers at random things, give them some pocket money and hope something sticks. motivate them by giving them some grand illusion of being an independent entrepreuner. burnout is just something that comes with the game. give them lectures to clone them into perfect worker bees for VCs as traditional education would clone them into perfect big corp employees.

my advice to young people with drive is: go travel, see the world first. solve real problems. starting your typical SV startup is mostly an illusion and a bad proposition for you. young age is certainly good for coming up with disrupting ideas, but execution profits heavily from life experience - <USER2> of survivorship bias and don't be fooled by the few success stories.

<comment><USER4> > AirBnB spent 5 months hiring before they hired a person. Brian Chesky: > "Would you take the job if you had a medical diagnosis that says you only > have a year left to live?" \- culture of extremely dedicated people

I couldn't help but feel an extreme level of utter disgust at this. Somehow portraying that its heroic to work for a start up for the last 12 months of your life.

Really? Utterly fucking ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> It's not explicitly stated anywhere, but it hardly takes "reading between the lines" to see that the kind of "business" model being pushed is one that is _exploitative_ of youth in some cases, and of the culture that has grown up around software engineering and computer programming in general.

A lot of the themes in this lecture related to motivation and employee qualities are what I'd lump in the category of "dog whistles." They're meant to send a certain signal to people. If that's not what they are, then somebody has done a thoroughly unimpressive job of communicating various ideas.

<comment><USER6> Not to make this just a conversation about money, but if working 100 hours a week as the first hire at Airbnb (even for below market salary) is exploitation, then please exploit me! If you can identify a growth engine, and not have to take on the founder neonatal pre-funding risk, then that's a huge opportunity, not exploitation. You're probably not going to make that kind of money working at Google.

<comment><USER7> > Not to make this just a conversation about money, but if working 100 hours a > week as the first hire at Airbnb (even for below market salary) is > exploitation, then please exploit me!

OK. Imagine I come to you with this offer: "Hey, relecler, I am starting this company that does X. Would you like to be its first employee? You'll be expected to work 100 hours a week for a salary below market rate, but you will have some equities. If we get big you will become millionaire, but you will lose your job if we run out of money." Would you take it?

Don't forget that for one airbnb that succeeds, you have hundreds startups that fail and whose employee have worked a lot for nothing.

<comment><USER6> Maybe I'm doomed to repeat mistakes until I've learned my lesson, but I made a similar pact when I did my PhD (Absent any promise of being a millionaire), as I did for the next company I worked for. And now at my own startup that is certainly the case.

<comment><USER7> Well, if you think what the startup join join does is really awesome and you're passionate about it, by all mean go for it, passion is something I do respect. And same for your PhD, I always respect people who have one because they were passionate about something enough to do research instead of going for a well paid job (I don't have a PhD but I seriously considered doing one in maths when I finished my Msc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The advice about burnout isn't so helpful.

Yes, perseverance is important (particularly for undergrads, who have probably never worked on a project with a time horizon longer than a semester), but you can't fix burnout just by lowering your head and trudging forward like a packhorse.

I don't know if there's a single, quick fix for burnout, but taking a vacation is definitely a good idea -- even if it's only a few days. And if you can't take your mind off of what you're doing for a few days, something else is wrong.

Usually when people say "I can't take a break" they're engaging in catastrophic thinking. If for some reason they _really can 't_ take a break, it's time to take a good, hard look at how you're doing things, and see what it is that's causing that situation. In my experience, the root to your burnout will often lie in an honest exploration of that question, alone.

It's incredibly helpful to get an outside perspective on your situation when you feel this way -- this is what counseling is for. If you can't afford that, talk honestly with a friend you can trust -- a _friend who has no personal interest in the outcome_. That's critical. If you ask your co-founder what you should do, you have to realize that s/he'll be biased.

<comment><USER9> Marissa Mayer on burnout:

"Burnout is about resentment," she said. "It's about knowing what matters to you so much that if you don't get it that you're resentful."

[http://www.cnbc.com/id/49060108#](http://www.cnbc.com/id/49060108#).

<comment><USER10> There's a literature on burnout. Burnout is the qualitative word for stress induced sterility -- ie "Things are so bad that having a child right now would be disastrous"

(ie people reporting burnout are usually temporarily sterile, people who are "stressed but happy" are usually not sterile)

This is why burnout correlates so strongly with being overworked. Your body is rightly concluding it can't reproduce in your current situation, and gives you a strong prod toward fixing the problem.

Apparently Marissa's "resentful meter" correlates strongly with her body's "I can't reproduce in this situation meter". I don't think this is true for most people.

<comment><USER11> That's a very interesting theory, but quick googling doesn't bring up anything relating to this correlation you suggest. Do you have any evidence to back up your claim?

<comment><USER10> [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout+infertility](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout+infertility) and [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=stress+infertility](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=stress+infertility)

Both have very good data in the top 10 results. If you're looking for a pop sci writeup, I'm not sure if there's a good source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Burnout:

Whatever you do, constantly be looking for ways to actively mitigate it. Just working less is NOT the only way to prevent it. Everyone has had times when they've worked long hours on something, and still felt great. Think about what was special in those situations. Ideas:

1) Play a sport.

2) Party hard, roughly 1 night per week, maybe Friday. This works well for many extremely hard working professionals in NYC. Not sure how well it would work in SV...

3) When coding, try to break up tasks into self-contained chunks that you can start and finish within one day. Accomplishing a new tangible goal each day can have a great mental effect. Catching up on big half-finished tasks from the previous day can be stressful and mentally draining.

4) Be around people you love being around. You'll feel less stressed about escaping the office if the people you're looking forward to being around are inside instead of outside the office.

5) Notice how it's so hard to focus late into the evening at the office, but once you're home you feel awake again and can work? For the earliest stage startup, consider making your work environment more like a home, or literally work out of your home with your cofounder. Your girlfriend/boyfriend may look down at you for doing this, get used to it. Partners hate startups.

6) Go for walks twice per day, preferably outdoors, in a place where you're surrounded by lots of people - or alone in nature, whatever you feel like you're missing.

7) Kick out whining people, immediately.

<comment><USER13> > 2) Party hard, roughly 1 night per week, maybe Friday. This works well for > many extremely hard working professionals in NYC. Not sure how well it would > work in SV...

Probably one of the best comments I've seen on HN on some of the benefits of NYC over SV.

Back in 1999 my company needed servers set up at a colo in Sunnyvale, so I flew out to the Bay Area. Saturday evening I head over to Fry's Electronics, and unexpectedly run into a friend of mine who had moved out to the Bay Area. We agree to meet later for dinner, then he says let's head back to his office.

We walk in to his office at 9 PM and Saturday. The entire office is there, sitting at their desks. 90% male, if not more. This was their life.

The thing though was - this was not Facebook, this was not Google. I can see doing that amount of work in some years in order to get a payoff. This was a company which it was obvious to me at the time, was going nowhere. It raised about $60 million from Kleiner Perkins in 2000, and has hobbled along since then, with another $30 million of Kleiner money in subsequent years. Last year the New York Times said the company and business "remains something of a work in progress", was "lagging many earlier expectations" and was still a small business. I could easily foresee this at the time.

It's one of the problems. People at Facebook, Google etc. worked all hours in the early years, so every company feels they have to emulate that. But Google's don't come around every day - I was sending e-mail's to Google asking them to employ me back when they were still hosted at Stanford. It's obvious that many people would trade a few years of very hard work for the spigot of money early Facebook and Google employees got. But between such black swans, you want to have the ability to make a decent living working 40 hours a week, and live in a community where you can have a life beyond your tech job.

It's not working hard versus having a life, it's not wanting to work 60+ hours a week when you're just spinning wheels. I've worked at companies where people started staying until 6, 7, 8 PM for no real reason. Then I learn there is trouble at home with their marriage, they often get a divorce. They stay at work because they don't want to go home and spend time with their spouse. It's what bothers me about SV, work for works sake, everything beyond focused on tech. If you catch a ride on a black swan it's a great thing, but if you don't, there's not much good about it.

<comment><USER14> Those years don't make sense. Do you mean you were there in 2009 and they raised in 2000?

It's hard to know when you're at a company that will make it big. Ok, so you can probably tell if you're at a FB or Google and you're on your way up. Likewise, you should be able to tell when you're at a really BAD company. Most companies are somewhere in between, though.

That said, I'm not disagreeing with you. People shouldn't be working that hard unless there's a reason to. The goal should be to get to a point where the path to success is reasonable clear and makes those long nights useful. Otherwise it's better to fail fast (much easier said than done).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm sorry, everyone in this god damn thread is stupid if you think there is a recipe for this shit. This is all part of the propaganda machine to make YC relevant.

This is just a warning. Down-vote me to heaven.

<comment><USER16> YC has exactly shown there is a recipe. And that goes back before they were popular - the very first class in fact.

After all this time of YC doing things, why don't you have have actual criticism, instead of ad hominem. So why troll?

<comment><USER17> Read my response: I think the point is that a recipe implies perfect ingredients + perfect preparation = predictable results, which is far from true. You can follow the recipe to the letter and still fail. You can't judge a recipe by successes, but by its repeatability (I don't care about someone else's feast when I'm trying to make MY meal based on the recipe they followed)

<comment><USER10> Lecture one starts with Sam saying ``idea * execution * luck == results and the luck term is a random number between 0 and 10,000``

Deterministic recipes don't exist anywhere outside the hard sciences (and even there it's not _really_ deterministic -- chemical synthesis and experimental physics have an art to them)

Stochastic recipes on the other hand _do_ exist. I think YC's recipe is quite good.

Thiel's is cooler though :p

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In response to a question about identifying fast-growing markets:

"The good news about this is that this is one of the big advantages students have. You should just trust your instincts on this. Older people have to basically guess about the technologies...that young people are using. Because young people get older and become the dominant market. But you can just watch what you're doing and what your friends are doing and you will almost certainly have better instincts on fast-growing markets than anybody older than you."

Vivek Wadhwa conducted a fairly large study[1] on successful technology company founders and discovered that the median age when they started their companies was close to 40. This seems to be in direct conflict with Altman's statements, so I wonder what statistics he has to back them up.

Also, for all the talk about fast-growing markets and building huge companies, it's somewhat useful to look at who is actually making money and how much. In 2009, just 3% of all taxpayers who earned $1 million or more were under the age of 35 and of those reporting more than $10 million in adjusted gross income, only 409 were under 35[2]. Since a significant percentage of million dollar-plus earners are self-employed business owners, a lot of old farts running businesses are doing something right even if, according to Sam Altman, they have a harder time spotting fast-growing markets.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the- ca...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-case-for-old- entrepreneurs/2011/12/02/gIQAulJ3KO_story.html)

[2] [http://taxfoundation.org/article/who-are-americas- millionair...](http://taxfoundation.org/article/who-are-americas-millionaires)

<comment><USER19> actually i think younger founders have a lot more disadvantages, so it's very important to be aware of the advantages they do have. spotting market trends, stamina, and a relatively distraction-free life are at the top of the list.

<comment><USER18> Market trends? The meaningful market trends that offer entrepreneurs realistic, _actionable_ opportunities are typically industry-specific. It's not "Hey, everybody is sexting so let's build an iPhone app to share pictures that self-delete." It's more like, "Hey, consumers are increasingly showing an interest in unbundling financial services, so there may be an opportunity to do _x_ better than the large banks that have historically dominated the market." How do you spot those kind of market trends if you have never worked in an industry? You typically don't.

Stamina? What is that supposed to mean? That 35 year-old entrepreneurs are in bed by 9:00 pm?

Distraction-free life? You know what's distracting? Not knowing where the money to pay your rent and buy groceries is going to come from. Starting a business when you have stable finances and the moral support of a spouse is very helpful. Interestingly, many of the things that Silicon Valley pop culture tells us are distractions (like family, homeownership, etc.) are ironically correlated with wealth. For instance, well over 90% of millionaire households in the US are made up of married couples.

<comment><USER20> I think you're getting downvoted for a few reasons.

1) The kind of startup you're espousing is generally not easy to implement and test, and also very hard to rapidly grow. As a result, it fails the typical "good startup idea" test that SV applies. It's also at odds with this lecture series so far.

2) "Stamina" in this case means being able to throw yourself into something and work stupid hours fueled by ramen and passion until it's built. It _tends_ to be a lot easier to do this when you're younger than it is later in life. The flip-side is that the "35 year-old entrepreneurs" you refer to are often able to work more steadily toward goals, but again this isn't what SV looks for in hyper-growth startups eyeing a fast exit.

3) "Distraction-free" refers to being able to focus solely on your startup without having to split time with a family, or worry about making mortgage payments, or most importantly, being afraid of failing. When you're young it's easy to take a hit and start over. When you're older and have large responsibilities it's a lot more difficult.

Also to your earlier point, if your target market is HNIs, you're probably not in the startup business because that's a very small number of people to sell to. Please note that I don't disagree with you and think this is a valuable add to the discussion, but it's important to distinguish between the types of small businesses you're referring to and the types of startups that Ycom wants.

<comment><USER18> > The kind of startup you're espousing is generally not easy to implement and > test, and also very hard to rapidly grow.

How is talking to potential customers before you invest time implementing and worrying about growth "not easy"? It's the definition of easy.

> "Stamina" in this case means being able to throw yourself into something and > work stupid hours fueled by ramen and passion until it's built. It tends to > be a lot easier to do this when you're younger than it is later in life. The > flip-side is that the "35 year-old entrepreneurs" you refer to are often > able to work more steadily toward goals, but again this isn't what SV looks > for in hyper-growth startups eyeing a fast exit.

My post above refers to a study that looked at hundreds of founders of _successful_ tech companies. If you believe that eating ramen and working "stupid" hours improves one's odds of success, and that 20-somethings are most capable of living this lifestyle, why did the study find twice as many successful founders older than the age of 50 as it found successful founders younger than 25?

> "Distraction-free" refers to being able to focus solely on your startup > without having to split time with a family, or worry about making mortgage > payments, or most importantly, being afraid of failing.

Again, if you look at the study I referred to, and look at the demographics of the millions of millionaires in this country who are business owners, it becomes really difficult to keep repeating the argument that older entrepreneurs have too many distractions. This notion is simply not supported by the numbers.

> ...but it's important to distinguish between the types of small businesses > you're referring to and the types of startups that Ycom wants.

 _How_ you go about building your business can determine _what_ happens to your business. There are a good number of YCombinator companies that will never be billion-dollar companies but could have been highly-profitable small businesses if their founders didn't buy into the high-growth hype, apparently not recognizing that YCombinator's portfolio has a power law distribution not dissimilar to just about any venture fund.

As for "small business", it gets treated like a four letter word around here but ironically a lot of the people who have been convinced that owning a "small business" is the second worst thing in the world have never seen a bank account balance with more than a single comma in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One short remark: There was a lot of good in that lecture. But generally the theme is, that when have 2-3 founders and are growing to 10-15 people, the situation is, in just one word, _desperate_.

Let's consider that: Yes, the subject is a startup that is intended to grow to be worth $1+ billion. The field is information technology.

Okay, but at 2-3 people up to 15, whatever the potential is, what is there is, in two words, still a _small business_.

Now, what can we say about starting and running a small business?

Well, the US, coast to coast, border to border, in cross roads and villages up to the largest cities, is just awash in small businesses. We know about many of them quite well, e.g., grass mowing (the guys that mow grass in my neighborhood arrive with about $70,000 in capital equipment and 3-4 people), pizza shops, Chinese carry out shops, red/white checkered table cloth, red sauce Italian-American restaurants, auto body shops, auto repair shops, barber shops, kitchen remodeling, residential construction general contractors, suburban paving, masonry, a dental practice, a family medical practice, an independent insurance company, a SOHO law firm, a CPA accounting firm, and, actually, many more that are B2B and less well known, e.g., wholesale plumbing, manufacturer's representative, electrical engineering, and more generally a huge range of _big truck /little truck_ businesses.

With this background, I come to the main

Point: Now these businesses are often sole proprietorships, file taxes as a Subchapter S, are not Delaware C corporations, do not have a board of directors, have no one with an MBA, and have never watched a lecture such as Altman's. And, commonly they stay in business. And mostly there is usually no air of being _desperate_.

E.g., for one point of difference with Altman's lecture, one bad hire does not kill the company. And hiring a good person does not take nearly as long as a year.

Okay, once a company has done well and grown to, say, 10-15 people, fine; if then the company has promise of growing to $1+ billion and many employees, terrific; then let the growth begin. But first step, make it through the stage of a _small business_ , and that should not necessarily be wildly different from running, say, a pizza shop.

So, since I'm eager to learn, where is this little point wrong?

<comment><USER22> > Okay, but at 2-3 people up to 15, whatever the potential is, what is there > is, in two words, still a small business.

Couple problems:

1) The burn rate of a software business with 15 employees is likely to be at $1.5 mil a year. Engineers cost more than line cooks or lawn mowers. Can you think of a software company that reached $1.5 mil in year two?

2) While running this small business, in the Valley you're competing with rocketships, which are Square and Uber at the moment. A rational engineer considering your company versus one of the rocketships is going to sense there's more upside for him at a rocketship company than a company with small business vision.

Don't get me wrong, there's a bunch of software-based small businesses (consulting shops, hosting companies, Web design firms) that are successful, but employees know that very rarely anybody outside the founding team will hit it big money-wise.

<comment><USER21> My main point is:

Just why is an information technology startup with explosive growth potential, early on with just a few employees, as described so vividly in Altman's lecture, usually so different, say, in level of _desperation,_ from most of millions of US small businesses? That is, I'm not getting the solid reason for so much _desperation_.

On your 1) and a startup being a small business:

As a side point, for 1) your $100 K per employee per year might even be too small. I'd guess that in SV Google spends $300+ K per year per employee.

In your 1), you are assuming a lot of _burn rate_. Yes, I know; I know: Twitter long ran with rapid growth in usage, i.e., _traction_ , with low or no revenue but recently, from some VC Fred Wilson comments, worked on revenue and is doing well with it. Maybe SnapChat and Instagram burned a lot of cash with low or no revenue. And maybe Square, Uber, and some others have high burn rates. And recently VCs Bill Gurley and Fred Wilson, and, now, A16Z, are complaining about high burn rates. I know. Still, from nearly all I've seen, coast to coast, "pre-revenue" usually means $0.00 equity funding.

So, connecting with my point above, maybe the offices of Square and Uber have some high level of _desperation_ as described in Altman's lecture, but from all I can see for information technology startups with explosive growth potential and just a few employees, that such a high level of _desperation,_ so different from nearly all of millions of US small businesses, is necessary or usual seems difficult to believe. Instead, with just a few employees, in nearly all respects the level of desperation should be just ordinary for small businesses.

Then there is the issue of _burn rate_ and, thus, usually, VC funding:

from what I've seen, for a startup writing software and pre-revenue, about the best they can get from a VC is either "it appears that you are still in heavy development" (i.e., not a candidate for equity funding) or "when you go live with your service we'd like to 'play with it'" meaning that nothing prior to that is worth equity funding.

That is, VCs want to see at least a product ready for usage. That is, they don't want to pay for software development. That is, we get reminded of the Mother Goose story of _The Little Red Hen_ who got no help or interest from anyone until she had hot, fragrant loaves of bread fresh from the oven and lines of eager customers out front.

So, what is a founder of an information technology startup to do about equity funding? A big point here, at times also mentioned by VCs, is that now the expenses, at least the capital expenses, for an information technology startup can be so low that really, by the time VCs are interested, the startup should be within just some weeks of getting users, ads, revenue, earnings, and enough in earnings to have a nicely successful small business with plenty of cash for organic growth and low to no need for equity funding. So, from all I can see, usually by the time VCs are willing to meet, there's a profitable small business or nearly so.

E.g., Menlo Ventures told me that they want to see at least 100,000 _uniques_ per month. Okay, for my Web site that would be, say, for each _unique_ visitor, an average of, say, 8 visits a month with an average of 8 Web pages seen per visit, with an average of 5 ads per page. So, if take the Mary Meeker KPCB estimate of $2 revenue for each 1000 ads displayed, then get monthly revenue of

100,000 * 8 * 8 * 5 * 2 / ( 1000 ) = 64,000

dollars for my solo startup. Moreover they want that _traction_ growing quickly. At that time I'm looking for equity funding? I doubt it! Even if the $64,000 is too high by a factor of 10, still I'm not looking for equity funding; instead I'm profitable with plenty of cash for organic growth.

So, for equity funding, here is my

Point: For information technology startups of just a few people, nearly always, by the time the VCs are ready to write a first check, the company doesn't much need it. Then what's left for VC funding is _expansion stage_ or, maybe, some funding in pursuit of the company being acquired. Or, again, I'm not seeing as very common Altman's description of VC funded startups with desperation.

For your

> Can you think of a software company that reached $1.5 mil in year two?

I'm not sure what Microsoft, Plenty of Fish, etc. did already in year two. Still I'm lost on your point here: You seem to have an implicit assumption that an information technology startup with explosive growth potential must go at least two years burning a lot of cash instead of making at least a little in earnings, and I'm not seeing a very good argument for that.

For 2), maybe the company is not in Silicon Valley? Even if the company has only a few employees and level of desperation like most small businesses, it might still have explosive growth potential and a corresponding "vision".

You seem to be suggesting that there is high competition for good employees, say, in developing software. I very much do not see that at all: From all I can see, the US is just awash in highly motivated, highly talented, Bachelor's degree and higher graduates in STEM fields with some to a lot of software development experience who can send 1000 resume copies and get back only silence or at best some absurd questions about how many golf balls will fit in a school bus, a question "What is your favorite programming language?" with, apparently, only one acceptable answer, C++, or a requirement that the candidate have several years of experience with just the combination of software tools and infrastructure the company is using that day. Nonsense. I've seen very highly qualified and otherwise just excellent people in computer science and practical software go for years looking for jobs and be essentially totally unemployable.

E.g., there is the parody, too close to being true, "If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers" at

[http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...](http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac)

Indeed, some famous companies have a personnel policy for technical employees of promotion into management by age 35 or fired. The US is awash in people with 5-20 years of software development experience essentially totally unemployable in software. For such a person, they would have been better off, literally, at age 20 starting a lawn mowing service so that by age 35 they would have a nice business with, say, 8 crews, be immune from being fired, able to continue the business as long as they were physically able, and also able to involve their family members in the business -- make it a family business. Software developers do not have good careers, and the US is awash in highly qualified people at relatively low wages, e.g., not enough to buy a house and support a family.

The US is just awash with good universities with good STEM and computer science programs with highly talented, well educated, highly motivated students ready, willing, able, and eager to get going in a career in information technology and with no significant offers for months or years.

For my startup, I have no question that I can hire and, with minimal training, have people writing the necessary Visual Basic .NET code using the .NET Framework, ASP.NET, SQL Server, etc. E.g., they can write what is needed for customer service. They can also learn, especially with some good consulting, how to plug together servers and get them into standard racks, connect the cables, automate the software installation and configuration, set up and operate the server and network monitoring, management, and administration, develop reports on users, usage, errors, loads, etc. For the tricky, unique, difficult to duplicate or equal crucial core code, that's mine and already in good shape.

<comment><USER22> > technology startups with explosive growth potential and just a few > employees, that such a high level of desperation, so different from nearly > all of millions of US small businesses, is necessary or usual seems > difficult to believe

I see what you're saying, thanks for clarifying.

I think majority of small businesses are formed to serve pent-up demand, e.g. somebody opens up a pizza restaurant, just because there's no pizza joint in that specific neighborhood, but it's high on people with disposable income (and many franchise companies will actually run market analysis for you, should you decide to go that small business route). A lawn-mowing business might also start with a few friend-and-neighbor customers, and make some back of the envelope estimates on the demand and customer base.

With technology startups not only you have to build the product outright (your Mother Goose example), but then you have to acquire the customer base, so all along you're quite unsure that is achievable. As @sama mentions, you could spend a few years of your life building something, and then discovering the market doesn't need it. The realization of that weighs on founder, as by the time you've hired a few people (@moskov's quote from lecture 1), you also feel responsible for their time and opportunity cost.

It's hard to debate the point on over-supply/under-supply of software engineers without concrete data, but I think as far as your point on them being experienced in a completely different stack, a lot of startups would tend to follow the Python Paradox - [http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html) \- " if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job".

Your point on being able to assemble a team quicker/cheaper/more efficiently on relying on .NET stack is also valid nevertheless. I was just trying to guess _why_ a certain company would choose a specific language and a specific set of tools, and require proficiency in it.

<comment><USER21> Yes, recently I was asked about Python. So, the original version was based on C and is sometimes called C Python. The usual version is interpretive and, thus, ballpark 10 times slower than a compiled language.

And the person asking wanted me to have experience using Python in a "production" environment. That's like asking if I've used a Toyota to haul hot asphalt, bricks, sand, and gravel. I wouldn't want to face a factor of 10 times slower in speed in a production environment.

Next I wondered, K&R C has no threading. Yes, Posix does, but, when building on very standard, portable C, there is no standard threading infrastructure. So, I looked: Right, from what I saw, on a fast look, C Python has problems with threading. No surprise. So, on a processor that can run 8, 12, 16 threads or a server with two such processors, I want to use a language that has no threading, in production? Bummer.

Otherwise as I looked at Python a little, I saw a bottle of a blend of mostly very old wine. I saw next to nothing new.

Then I found that much of the interest in Python is some _packages_ following some _package_ functionality (back at least to Ada). Some of the packages are good for getting and parsing Web pages as an alternative to _screen scraping_ \-- good to know in case I need to do a lot of screen scraping.

So, maybe some of the packages are nice.

So, Python looks like a promising one-shot project or scripting language. Okay. However, I'm writing production code.

Then I saw Iron Python, on Windows, apparently with good access to the .NET Framework. Okay. But Windows already has a scripting language with good access to the Windows APIs, their Power Shell. The scripting language I've been using is Mike Cowlishaw's Rexx. I've gotten a lot of good from it, but, really, I should convert over to something closer to Windows, likely Power Shell. Here I agree with Altman -- focus and don't get distracted. Well, for now, Rexx is just fine, and converting to Power Shell would be a distraction. Same for Iron Python and C Python.

For evaluating programmers by their eagerness to learn Python, sorry PG. I've learned a lot of languages. Net, net, I see that more than the language, or whatever flavor of syntactic sugar is there, is important. On Windows now, what's really important is their work for _managed code_ , memory management (with automatic garbage collection, apparently mostly good enough for production -- "Look, Ma, no C++ memory leaks!"), their _common language run time_ (CLR) and it's benefit in permitting programs in different languages to work closely together, and their .NET Framework. To me, those are more important than anything about C Python, and without even mentioning a programming language.

I chose Visual Basic .NET because it looks verbose, easy to write, easy to read, easy to teach and learn, integrates nicely with ASP.NET (surprisingly nicely, even without Visual Studio), compiles fast, has good compiler error messages, and is about as powerful in access to the CLR and the .NET Framework as anything on Windows. And it is essentially compiled. And it has thread support. And so far I may yet to have found an error in the compiler -- good.

Sorry, I don't want my background in computing evaluated by my enthusiasm for Python. Sorry PG --- I really like a lot of your essays but not that one.

When I teach a class in programming, I'll start with the basics -- define places to put data, allocate (and if necessary free), expressions and assignment, If-then-else, Do-While, call-return, try-catch. Then I'll teach the Visual Basic .NET versions of these.

I'm regarding programming languages not just for curiosity but as tools for another purpose, a successful business that provides as a service that improves the lives of 1+ billion people and that they like a lot, that makes money enough to do nice things, e.g., add a wing to a local hospital, help a private school, provide stable jobs, let employees put down roots in the community and improve it, pay the employees enough to have a nice house, one parent, likely the wife, stay at home with the kids, as many kids as they want, puppy dogs and kitty cats, nice vacations, private schools for the kids if desirable, college for the kids, late model cars, nice backyard parties for friends, sports, time for the family to be together, and a nice retirement. For that goal, I see Visual Basic .NET as a fine programming language.

For the guy asking about Python, I also sent him some code for two nice, original at least for me, algorithms. And I sent them a nice paper in computer science, published in _Information Sciences_. He and his buddies were more concerned about Python! No, I don't want to work with them. And, no, I won't hire like that.

> I was just trying to guess why a certain company would choose a specific > language and a specific set of tools, and require proficiency in it.

The HR people and the _suits_ have contempt for technical people and, really, are afraid of them and are really unable to evaluate technical people. So, as in the parody, they have little check boxes.

In information technology where software, etc., is "eating the world", the HR people and suits are total losers and in line to gather like dead flies on a window sill, fall like stalks of wheat before a John Deere combine, etc.

Thus, the opportunity is for technical CEOs. And that's why I watched Altman's lecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Enjoying seeing these lectures.

One thing sticks in my craw that Sam mentioned as common with these young founder startups:

 _" Learning just a little bit of management skill, which first time CEO's are terrible at goes a long way"_

Sam goes on to discuss how shit management is kind of par for the course in young startups.

It seems to me like getting this part wrong would be the death knell for any company and Sam went on to mention an example of someone who had multiple turnovers/"massive team churn."

As someone who has been a front line supervisor for almost 7 years these are absolutely basic fundamental day 1 skills that any manager should have, like giving credit and taking blame. Yet investors don't give a shit about these types of things and basically assume they don't matter - until they are causing problems.

I guess I just find it frustrating that teams with this management dynamic are getting serious money, especially with all we know about management.

<comment><USER24> I think shit management is kind of par for the course in a lot of businesses all over the place, from small startups to medium sized businesses to large corporations to government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did anyone else feel sad when Sam skipped over two pages of notes? I hope we'll get a chance to read them or hear them in a future lecture.

<comment><USER19> sorry about that. going to try to add to the last lecture of the course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why is it so bad to have a bad employee among the first employees ? I don't understand why it is that bad because it seems that if he/she is bad, you'll notice quickly and then can just fire him/her. Even here in Belgium where employee contracts protect more the employees than the company (at least that's the theory), at the starting period, firing can be done very quickly and I think it can be done even more easily in the US.

Also I think the best way to see if someone's good or bad is to put that person to work. This would e.g. mean that if you have filtered out candidates to 8 persons, you could get the one you prefer to work for 1 week. If your choice was bad, you try the second. In the worst case, you have made a very deep assessment of 8 candidates in two months. I mean that I don't understand the point of recruitment processes that take weeks with all kind of proxy metrics for how a candidate would fit in a very small team.

If you can't find out in a week that the person is bad, how can a recruitment process be better ?

Edit: I'm surprised by how the 1 (paid, in my mind) work week is perceived in the (so far) 3 answers below. It happens all the time to have phone interviews, HR interviews, technical interviews, possibly pseudo-psychological tests, and technical tests in a recruitment process. All that time without being paid (sometimes well before you know what the salary could be). It's all about trade-off, I'm not talking about ditching the selection process and instead hire-and-fire liberally. My question was really just about why is it so damageable to get a bad hire.

<comment><USER27> I don't know how bad the job market is for employees in Belgium, but any self respecting job hunter here in the US would balk at the idea of such a scheme. Would you be paid for your week of work? What in god's name would you do for just a week? You'd still be getting your log-ins and payroll sorted out. Say you are the 5th choice, what are the odds that you'll have found a job already, one that will pay you for more than a week of work? What about, you know, laws that say you must have cause to fire someone (yes, CA is not a state that has those). If you get sick, does that disqualify you, a car accident?

Suffice to say, if an employer does this scheme to you, run.

Also, maximizing the time sunk into finding employees and the payoff for a good one is a solved problem, known as Optimal Stopping theory or the Secretary problem: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem)

<comment><USER22> Yeah, this scheme is highly effective in attracting candidates that few other companies want to interview.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Lecture 2 Slide Deck PDF:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/f1xgbo6c976di06/Lecture2.pdf?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/f1xgbo6c976di06/Lecture2.pdf?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER29> Now that the knowledge of how to start a high growth startup has become so well distributed it's amazing how few seed deals Silicon Valley firms actually do. Even YC only invests in dozens of companies per year.

Only a tiny fraction of would-be founders actually attempt to jump through the hoops to raise money. Only a fraction of those succeed. And yet just about any team of hungry and determined tech workers has a chance at creating something of immense value in the world. Advances in technology have created many more opportunities than we can deal with.

A single VC firm could fund 10,000 teams at $100k/each reasonably easily. Based on something as simple as LinkedIn profiles maybe.

<comment><USER30> Think the series A crunch is bad now, imagine if a fund did this clearing out its entire capital with no ability to follow-on...

<comment><USER29> The "series A crunch" suggests that VCs don't have enough money to invest in all the startups that they want to. But almost all VCs have much more money than they know what to do with. They raise huge funds to rake in millions per year through management fees.

The problem is that traditional VCs can't manage very many investments. So only a handful of series A VC deals can happen per year.

But there is a nearly infinite supply of money just waiting for another way to invest in startups that isn't VC. Things like Kickstarter from the bottom up and AngelList from the top down are the harbingers of doom for most VCs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some comments on conferences.

When Sam talks about founders spending all of their time at conferences, I assume he means attending conferences rather than speaking/moderating, because these have totally different dynamics. We have an investment marketplace for agriculture & agtech (AgFunder) and so our success is measured by having thousands of investors rather than millions of users. For these kind of high- touch clients, speaking/moderating at conferences is the best way we've found to source new deal flow, investors (our customers), and potential channel partners outside of having major media coverage. Our deal team gets crushed when I return from a run of back-to-back conferences. I could imagine it would be the same thing for enterprise sales and healthcare IT.

In cases like ours, if you can speak/moderate at a conference you have the social proof to pitch to your customers horizontally rather than pitching up. Moreover, once you get one or two speaking/moderating gigs under your belt it's really easy to get more (Point to previous track record) as conference organizers are typically sourcing speakers/moderators from previous conferences. I also watch for new conferences like a hawk, and fire off emails offering to speak/moderate for anything that looks like it will have our audience. And the best thing about it is that you won't have to pay. Final tip, if you have a content marketing channel (We created AgFunderNews.com) you can offer to promote the conference in exchange for some media placement of your own. Again, a big $$ saver.

</comment><comment><USER31> Timestamped notes for lecture 2: [https://timelined.com/how-to-start-a- startup/lecture-2-how-t...](https://timelined.com/how-to-start-a- startup/lecture-2-how-to-start-a-startup)

</comment><comment><USER32> I understand the cynicism about YC and silicon valley. I think it's great to have some critical thoughts about the why and how.

However these lectures are pretty good. I would highly recommend to watch them even if your skeptical about all things silicon valley. Some of the lessons and points of Lecture 2 about focus and intensity also apply to small businesses and large businesses as well.

I thought the ending quote from Henry Ford was great.

"The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time"

</comment><comment><USER33> Some notes I made. Might include minor errors or misinterpretation on my side.

-> how do you identify markets that are growing quickly?

      trust your instincts

      students: watch what you're doing or your friends are doing

-> how do you deal with burnout as a founder?

      it's real life. you just have to get through it. canonical advice: go on a vacation. almost never works for a founder. you just keep going. you rely on people. you need a support network. address the challenges and things that are going wrong.

3\. Team

A. Co-Founders

-> Co-Founder relationships are among the most important in a company. #1 cause for early death: co-founder blowups.

-> Choosing a co-founder is a very important decision

-> Do not choose a random co-founder or someone who you're not friends with.

-> YC batch where 9 startups choose a random co-founder and all 9 fell apart

-> A good way to meet a co-founder is in college. Next best thing is to work at an interesting company (e.g. Facebook/Google)

-> It's better to have no co-founder than having a bad co-founder

-> Top 20 most valuable YC companies: all have at least 2 co-founders

-> "Be relentlessly resourceful" \- look for this in potential co-founders. You need someone that behaves like James Bond. Smart, tough and calm

-> You really want a technical co-founder

-> Software companies should be started by software people. Not great non-technical managers.

-> 2 or 3 co-founders is ideal

B. Try not to hire

-> Try not to hire. It sucks to have a lot of employees (high burn-rate, complexity, tension, slow decision making, ...)

-> Be proud of what you can do what a small number of employees

-> In the early days, only hire when you desperately need to

C. Get the best people

-> AirBnB spent 5 months hiring before they hired a person. Brian Chesky: "Would you take the job if you had a medical diagnosis that says you only have a year left to live?" \- culture of extremely dedicated people

-> Make sure everyone believes in your mission

-> Pick a company that's already working, but that not everyone has noticed yet. Breakout trajectory.

-> Spend about 25% of your time hiring, once in hiring mode

-> "Mediocre engineers do not build great companies". A few bad hires can kill your startup

-> Get person referrals to hire

-> Look outside of the valley

-> For most of the early hires, experience does not matter that much. Go for aptitude

-> Are they smart, do they get things done, do I wanna spend a lot of time around them?

-> Try to work together on a project, instead of doing a formal interview

-> Care about projects and focus on references

-> Look for good communication skills, manic determination, animal test and someone you'd feel comfortable reporting to if the roles were reversed (Mark Zuckerberg)

D. Keep the best people around

-> Aim to give 10% of the company to the first 10 employees. Vested over 4 years. If they're successful, they'll increase the company by way more than that

-> Fight with investors to reduce the amount of equity given. Be generous with employees

-> Don't tell your employees they're fucking up every day, cause they will leave.

-> Give your team all the credit for all the good stuff. Take responsibility for the bad stuff that happens.

-> Daniel Pink: "Autonomy, mastery and purpose"

E. Fire Fast

-> Fire fast. Everyone hopes that an employee will turn around.

-> How do you balance firing people fast and making employees feel secure? Everyone will screw up once, twice or more. You should be very loving, not take it out on them. If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act. It'll be painfully aware to everyone.

-> When should co-founders decide on equity split? Not a discussion that gets easier with time. Set this very soon after you start working together.

-> How do you know if someone is not going to scale up to a role if they're inexperienced? Smart people almost always will find a role within the company.

-> What happens when the relationship with your co-founder falls apart? Every co-founder (including yourself) has to have vesting. You pre-negotiate what happens when someone leaves. Normal is 4 years. Try to prevent dead weight.

-> What about co-founders not working in the same location? Don't do it. Skeptical about remote teams in general. Communication and speed outweigh everything else. Video-conferencing and calls don't work that well.

4\. Execution

-> Being a founder means signing up for this years long grind on (good) execution. Everyone gets modeled after the founders. Work hard, be frugal, focus on customers, etc.

-> Only executing well is what adds/creates value

-> 5 jobs for a CEO: Set the vision, Raise money, Evangelize, Hire and manage, Make sure the entire company executes

-> 1\. "Can you figure out what to do?" 2\. "Can you get it done?"

-> Focus. One of the hard things about being a founder: 100 important things to do every day. A lot of things that look important do not matter. Identify the two or three most important things and do these. Say no a lot (97 out of 100 times).

-> Set overarching goals for the company. Everyone in the company should know these. These are the key goals. Repeat them. Put them up on the walls. Talk about them in meetings.

-> Communicate. You can't be focused without great communication.

-> Meet every week. Focus on growth and momentum. Have to right metrics. Don't let the company get distracted by other things. You can easily get excited by your own PR.

-> Be in the same space with your co-founder.

-> The secret to startup success is extreme focus and extreme dedication. Not the best choice for work/life balance. Outwork your competitors

-> Have a high execution speed. But be obsessed with quality at the same time. Focus on quality for everything you do (e.g. buying computers/gear).

-> Be biased towards action. "I could do this great thing". Every time you talk to the best founders, they have done something new.

-> Do huge things in small incremental pieces. There's almost always a way to break complexity down into smaller projects.

-> Be quick, do whatever it takes, show up a lot, don't give up and be courageous.

-> "When I was running my own company, we felt we were about to lose a deal. Critical deal for first customer in the space. We called them saying we had a better project/deal. We drove to the airport and showed up in person. We got to their office at 6am. They told us to go away. Junior guy wanted to meet. Then senior guy wanted to meet. Within a week, we had an agreement."

-> Always keep momentum in growth. It's the lifeblood of startups. You want your company to be winning all the time. A winning team feels good and keeps winning.

-> If you lose momentum, most founders try to get it back in the wrong way (rally troops with speeches). You have to save the vision speeches for when you're winning. Sales fixes everything in a startup. Figure out where you can get small wins.

-> Fights will break out when losing momentum.

-> When Facebook's growth slowed down: Mark created a growth group. Small fixes got the curb pack up. Most prestigious group. One of Facebook's best innovations that turned around the dynamic.

-> Ship product, launch new features, review metrics and milestones

-> Do not care about competitor noise in the press. Don't worry about them at all until they're beating you with a real shipped product.

<comment><USER34> I've kept my notes on my blog because it's easier for me to find later (and it's open to everyone else at the same time): [http://jonalmeida.com/posts/2014/09/25/htsas- lec02/](http://jonalmeida.com/posts/2014/09/25/htsas-lec02/)

How can I prettify your notes? I find it hard to read.

<comment><USER33> I don't know. I just keep them for my own and thought I'd share them cause they might be helpful to other people. Maybe you can add some Markdown to them and keep them in that format.

<comment><USER34> Done: [http://markdownshare.com/view/ce6982fb-87f3-489e-af93-ec448f...](http://markdownshare.com/view/ce6982fb-87f3-489e-af93-ec448f344858)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This advice is honestly unappealing.

I genuinely expected to hear some new insights or information. Instead this is ALL re-purposed information. Nothing new here folks.

I certainly will not be listening anymore of these lectures. I'm very disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER36> I found this lecture much more helpful than the first one - the first one had some good content, but seemed very generic without specific advice.

Here there was some incredibly useful, detailed advice, for example:

\- Even for really complex projects, break them down into chunks \- Don't worry about PR/marketing/word of mouth \- Management is an important skill and not easy for technical people

Those are maybe obvious no brainers for people with more start up experience, but from someone who is outside the bubble, there was a lot of very good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER37> Just in case, here is a fully annotated Lecture 2: Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part II [http://tech.genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-2-ideas- products-t...](http://tech.genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-2-ideas-products- teams-and-execution-part-ii-annotated)

</comment><comment><USER38> What should I do if I think I am just a mediocre engineer? Just working for well established companies?

<comment><USER39> I'd apply the same principles if it's a start-up or an established company: The nature of the job, work environment, wages, benefits, etc.

What I would take away from the lecture is not to weed yourself out of the market because you perceive yourself to be mediocre. Instead, I'd consider what common threads seem to run among companies that perceive themselves to be start-ups and decide if you'd enjoy working in that kind of environment. Note in particular the comment that start-up founders tend to be terrible managers.

Also, "startup" is a buzzword, and any small company could call itself one. This is another reason to carefully consider the particulars of each situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Notes: [http://chintanparikh.github.io/blog/2014/09/25/how-to- start-...](http://chintanparikh.github.io/blog/2014/09/25/how-to-start-a- startup-lecture-2-notes/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Don't lose momentum."

So glad Sam brought this up. Whether it's selling, shipping, or hitting deadlines, it's really difficult to keep moving fast if the energy is low and momentum slows.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm loving these. How many lectures will there be in total?

<comment><USER42> It seems 20.

[http://startupclass.samaltman.com/](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> My favorite line from this lecture:

A major indicator for a successful startup is "Every time you talk to them, they've gotten new things done."

</comment><comment><USER44> Way better than the previous one. I really like the fact he has statistics. I wish YC would publish it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Does anyone know if non-Stanford students can drop in or is this for students only?

<comment><USER46> The lecture hall seats are for enrolled Stanford students only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Start up. Cash in. Sell out. Bro Down.</comment>


Gov't Contractor abuses legal system to attack Open Source Developer - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131022/13260324972/govt-contractor-uses-copyright-fear-hackers-to-get-restraining-order-against-open-source-developer.shtml

<comment><AUTHOR> How judges can be so ignorant and ready to do the bidding of the establishment, is beyond me.</comment>


Kubernetes 1.11: a look from inside Google - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/07/kubernetes-1-11-a-look-from-inside-Google.html <comment><USER2> Hi all; I wrote this article and would love to hear your feedback (and invite you to listen to our podcast!)</comment>


Public News Server - <AUTHOR> https://news.aioe.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> >"Aioe.org hosts a public news server, a USENET site that is intentionally kept open for all IP addresses without requiring any kind of authentication both for reading and for posting."</comment>


Apache webserver updated to ignore Do Not Track settings in IE 10 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/09/apache-webserver-updated-to-ignore-do-not-track-settings-in-ie-10/

<comment><USER2> "The only reason DNT exists is to express a non-default option," Fielding wrote in a post defending the change. "That's all it does. It does not protect anyone's privacy unless the recipients believe it was set by a real human being, with a real preference for privacy over personalization."

Seems to me that it is better to default to privacy, and opt-in to personalization.

<comment><USER3> DNT breaks down if advertisers don't participate. As long as it's not a law, what are the chances they will respect DNT if it's opt-out rather than opt-in?</comment></comment>


California tries to Mandate Retirement Savings for Private Workers - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/25/california-tries-to-mandate-retirement-savings-for-private-workers/

<comment><USER2> The Fox News story is not true. The plan at issue [1] is not mandatory, it is individual worker opt-out. [2]

[1] [http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...](http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201120120SB1234) [2] [http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/07/26/fox-falsely- claims-c...](http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/07/26/fox-falsely-claims-ca- workers-will-be-forced-in/195082)</comment>


How I found 100 highly targeted leads in 60 seconds - <AUTHOR> https://find70.wordpress.com/2016/11/14/how-i-found-100-highly-targetted-leads-in-60-seconds/ <comment><USER2> This is an ad. You're selling here! That's not what this site is for!</comment>


Spamhaus Nightmare: Domain Shut Down, No Notice, Over A Million Pages Down - <AUTHOR> I am writing this here on HN, because at the moment you cannot access our blog. Our domain name was shut down this morning, and I'm trying to get it back. Here's what happened...
Our company provides tools to help people put together pages for their businesses. Our free tool has been used to create over million page tabs on Facebook. Unfortunately but predictably, sometimes bad people use our app. Like spammers.
Overnight, our domain was blacklisted by Spamhaus because one of our pages contained spam. (Anybody want a free iPad?)
We run our infrastructure on Heroku, and use Bluehost for domain names. Well, as soon as Bluehost recieved notice from Spamhaus, they shut off the DNS for our domain. All million plus pages, gone in the blink of a DNS propagation.
Thankfully we were able to switch over to [appname].heroku.com for now and most of the pages are back, but we have paying customers who are in the dark because they rely on our custom domain name.
Our product, that over a million people rely on, suddenly ceased to exist. No advance notice. Nothing we could have done to stop it. Because of ONE bad apple.
This kind of thing will happen in SOPA world, if we let ourselves get there. But instead of being able to call my registrar and yell at them, I would have had to call the government, and oh-by-the-way they might fine or imprison me for having hosted spam.
Let me end with a practical, really-important-to-me-right-now question: is there any possible way to not get randomly nuked by Spamhaus? <comment><USER2> The Spamhaus people are bad guys. I gradually realized that during the time I worked on spam filters. They presumably started out with good intentions, but the position they're in has corrupted them.

It's true of a lot of the guys running blacklists. And more generally, of a lot of people in the position of police. You tend to become a mirror of whatever bad guys you're fighting. Your tactics have to match theirs, and pretty soon your principles start to as well. I suspect this tendency is so universal that you have to make a conscious effort to avoid it.

<comment><USER3> Oh my, same old Paul. Just can't stop holding a grudge. Seems he forgot to mention the reasons why he still feels the need to badmouth Spamhaus (other than perhaps nothing better to do these years, lack of new ideas?).

Firstly, Paul's grand "A Plan for Spam" method of using Bayesian filters to stop all spam ("I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it."). Uh, so, how'd that work out? Spammers quickly figured out how to make a mockery of Bayes based solutions. And who is still out there filtering spam using IP addresses & domain names? Spamhaus.

Then, what really got his goat was back in 2005 (yes, long grudge holding, one wonders what he feels about the mail-carrier who lost a letter of his back in '78 ;-) when his vanity site, shared-IP-hosted at Viaweb which had become Yahoo! Stores was blocklisted at Spamhaus. Back then, Yahoo, and Yahoo Stores were a spammer-hosting cesspool and Paul's page was wallowing in the center of it. Rather than get to the bottom of it, Paul just got on a high-horse and ranted about the evils of Spamhaus. A good take on the rant can be read here: [http://www.circleid.com/posts/we_hate_spam_except_of_course_...](http://www.circleid.com/posts/we_hate_spam_except_of_course_when_its_inconvenient_to_do_so/)

So, multiple biases. How often people forget to mention those when they post attacks. Now one must ask, who is the "bad guy" and is "corrupt" here?

But the Spamhaus people should be happy with the irony in Paul's hypocrisy. How so? Well, his paulgraham.com's email is filtered by Spamhaus, as is his ycombinator.com's email. As are the emails of most of the social/blog sites he's on (posterous.com, etc.) One wonder how many of these still use "A Plan for Spam"? Okay, that was rhetorical.

Lastly, the pop-psychology in his posting attests that Paul's degrees are in philosophy, not psychology.

<comment><USER4> You could have pointed out said hypocrisy without the ad hominem attacks, in fact I wouldn't have felt compelled to down-vote you if you had. Instead your comment reads more like a petty tantrum based on some grudge you (apparently, continue to) hold against Paul.

<comment><USER5> Totally off topic, but the markup for a down voted comment actually drew my attention to it. Kind of a "nothing to see here" sign.

I do agree that the rant is quite unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My recommendation would be to run your own DNS on your own IP addresses. Even with the IP shortage, you should be able to get a small block delegated to you that you can use for your mission critical apps. Once you've got that arranged for, its a fairly trivial task to find a registrar with policies more complimentary to your business.

If its mission critical for your business, then you can't afford to think like a victim. Take charge of your infrastructure where you have to. Relying on third parties is lean, but not always effective - a small amount of fat in the right areas can give you a lot of flexibility (and insurance) that you might not get when you rely on a third party.

<comment><USER7> Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if you run your own DNS servers, can't your domain name registrar still decide to take away your domain name?

<comment><USER8> This is unusual, and it would likely only happen with a respectable registrar if there was a dispute with ICANN.

<comment><USER9> ...or an ICE/DHS seizure conducted independently of your registrar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "is there any possible way to not get randomly nuked by Spamhaus?"

I guess the first step is to set up better monitoring services to prevent your system from being abused by even one bad apple. Try to catch the abuse as quick as possible so you won't raise red flags.

Additionally you should possibly work on segmenting out your customers. If your paying customers are important to you, use a different system for them. If this has the possibility of happening again you don't want to hurt those customers from a similar thing happening again.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I guess the first step is to set up better monitoring services to prevent > your system from being abused by even one bad apple.

I'd love to, but when you have the volume we do there are going to be false negatives. Bad apples will slip through. And if somebody slips through, we're vulnerable for getting blacklisted.

> If your paying customers are important to you, use a different system for > them.

This is a very good plan. I'm definitely looking into that...

<comment><USER10> > I'd love to, but when you have the volume we do there are going to be false > negatives. Bad apples will slip through. And if somebody slips through, > we're vulnerable for getting blacklisted.

This doesn't mean you have to auto-ban people - but you could easily setup listings that you can quickly glance at to see what your monitoring found. If you are picking up too many false positives, then you can refine your monitoring. Yes - you can't prevent all of them, but once your system starts getting abused you have to assume that others will do it as well. Additionally, you could very well be losing money in service costs due to these people (I don't know your business model so it's just an assumption) - you want to protect that as well.

<comment><USER11> Right, that works really well for YouTube. The great problem that is created when one tries to apply rules in this way is that, look, big companies won't suffer, and small ones will unduly.

The internet is full of user-generated-content sites and the core objection to SOPA is that we cannot police every posting. We do not currently have a legal obligation to do anything other than respond to complaints.

Further, as a veteran of the hosting industry, I'm really disappointed in BlueHost for taking action against a paying customer's domain name. Be sure to read the SLA and TOS when you sign up for services.

<comment><USER10> I am against SOPA just like everyone else; however that does not mean we don't have a duty to police our own sites. In this case, someone misusing a service caused the whole service to suffer - including paying customers. This has nothing to do with SOPA but with making sure your business runs properly, and won't affect or cast a bad light on your service.

As for the disappointment at BlueHost - they should have probably let the customer know before taking action - but other than that I think they did the right thing. As a veteran of the hosting industry, if one of your customers wordpress blog was hacked and hosting a phishing site, would you not disable the site and let the customer know right away that they need to clear things up? That's just a random example, but any sane company will protect their servers via a TOS - if they didn't I would be quite concerned about the service they are offering. Just my $0.02 on this..

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry, DNS/Registration is NOT the same as an exploited website.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about DNS that it needs to be turned off; the OP has already said they were using different hosting.

BlueHost was in no way vulnerable, and in no way needed to protect itself, as the only traffic was DNS requests. GoDaddy tries to pull the same thing with disabling DNS[1].

I feel like we need a Chris Crocker video about DNS systems this month.

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Daddy#Suspension_of_Seclists...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Daddy#Suspension_of_Seclists.org)

<comment><USER10> You are correct - this is different since they were only providing DNS, too many hours had passed when I replied that I forgot that part of the story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I'm sorry this happened to you, and I'm as anti-SOPA as anyone (have called my congress(wo)man, called Boehner and Canter when it looked like they were going to sneak the vote through last week), this has nothing to do with SOPA, and trying to invoke the name for something that you should've been better prepared for is kind of a discredit to the cause.

<comment><USER14> I agree. I am anti-SOPA, but this is not censorship so much as an overzealous attempt to stop spam, executed poorly. Did they do a wildcard block/hold/whatever on a top level domain of yours *.mydomain.com so all your sub domains got blocked? I'm guessing some goober at bluehost just went one step farther than he should have in just removing the one DNS entry, and they definitely should have contacted you. Sounds like poor customer service.

<comment><USER15> And if SOPA passes you will see suspiciously simil overzealuos attempts to stop piracy. Same song, different verse but this time you get the federal government involved which is a whole new level of fun.

<comment><USER8> This is true, and it makes me thing of all of the private sector solutions that are already available. The market creates the solutions and does not need government interference slowing it down or making dispute resolutions more complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately there's no guarantee that anyone would escape Spamhaus' "love" - they and other RBLs do more damage than spammers, in my opinion. The real WTF in this story is Bluehost's reaction: shutting down DNS on one notice from Spamhaus, really!?

<comment><USER17> More damage than spammers? I see you've never run a mailserver. I have and I know that Spamhaus are one of the good guys doing a hard thankless job, risking lawsuits and threats, in order to keep email as a useful tool. Spamhaus' RBL is the most reputable of all of them, thanks to years of hard work and sacrifice.

The only people who don't like Spamhaus, in my view, are those ISPs who were happy to make money from selling connectivity to spammers while pretending in public that they hated spam. Them, and people who don't understand what Spamhaus do, like the author of this article, and who think Spamhaus are to blame for their troubles.

<comment><USER18> The GP is correct.

As one who has worked in the trenches as a mail admin (small potatoes, granted: a few small clients and a couple of small hosting companies), my observation has been than customers bitch _way_ more about the MX servers which reject mail from our servers than the amount of spam in their own in- boxes. They don't give a shit that the _recipient_ is rejecting _legitimate_ mail -- they blame _us_ for their problems. All because some asshat with a copy of TheBat! signed up and managed to send out a couple hundred "Russian bride" spams before we were alerted and nuked the account. I could probably fund a semester of college for some random kid with the time I've been paid to waste on de-listing and convincing idiot admins that one of their customers _really_ wants to get mail from one of mine.

Sure, 99.9% of email hitting the typical in-bound relay is spam, but CPU, RAM, and disk I/O are _cheap_. Do per-inbox statistical filtering and let the _user_ decide what spam is. Better yet, let client-side filters do the work. Do you think any person would stand to allow a US Postal carrier decide what was junk mail and then not deliver it? People just need to buck up and put in a little of their own effort.

I haven't used an RBL (even if its just one in a battery of weighted tests, such as with Spam Assassin) due to my loathing for the vigilante nature of the RBL scene as a whole. If you operate an RBL -- fuck you. If you are an admin that rejects mail based solely on being listed in RBLs, then fuck you, too. I know I sound like an asshole myself here, but the existence of RBLs has caused me and various mail end-users way more pain than any spammer has.

Bitter? Nah.

As a mail admin, I want to throw SMTP out the window. It wasn't spammers that killed the protocol, but rather the growth of use of RBLs.

Rant aside, I do have a question to contribute to the discussion: Has one of the larger RBLs _ever_ listed one of the huge mail providers (Gmail, MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo?) for any length of time? I know I've gotten spams and scams from all three.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So its time to add Bluehost to the list of companies too unreliable to do business with.

<comment><USER20> Funnily enough, I just got my Dreamhost bill for the next year and was thinking of switching to Bluehost due to cost. Not any more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _Overnight, our domain was blacklisted by Spamhaus. Nothing we could have done to stop it. Because of ONE bad apple._

Because of major internet infrastructure run at whim by 3rd party blacklists, you mean.

 _is there any possible way to not get randomly nuked by Spamhaus?_

Spamhaus _and every service like them_.

</comment><comment><USER22> >Bluehost I'd sue them for damages. WTF do they delete your domain from their name server?! Get a more reliable registrar/name server. Spamhaus or similar black listers can always accidentially list you. Go to their site and remove your domain. No sane person/comapny should immediately assume anything but a accidential listing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Have you tried using Spamhaus's Blocklist Removal? <http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup.lasso>

</comment><comment><USER24> This doesn't sound right. Since when does Spamhaus police site content? I'm pretty sure they primarily go after folks sending out spam email, not after websites containing spammy pages.

<comment><USER10> They also go after places that enable spammers - such as when they blocked Google Docs [1]

[http://news.softpedia.com/news/Spamhaus-We-Blocked-Google- Do...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/Spamhaus-We-Blocked-Google-Docs-Not- Gmail-153093.shtml)

<comment><USER17> They added Google Doc ip addresses to their RBL, so that SMTP traffic from those IPs would be blocked by those who chose to run Spamhaus' blacklist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Of course, you could just go to Spamhaus itself and attempt to remove your domain from the DBL: <http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup.lasso?dnsbl=domain>

It could be your registrar is just running an automated process based upon that.

</comment><comment><USER26> No one besides the particularly clueless should use spamhaus and similar services as a black or white answer on whether to block, as they don't care about friendly fire and are run by neckbeards.

Spamhas should be used as part of a body of evidence, like in spamassassin scores.

</comment><comment><USER27> Spamhaus normally collect evidence of abusive activity on their site. Look there first at the accumulated evidence. I'd have a look myself, but I don't know who you are, what domain you are using, what domain is being used to spamvertise. Perhaps you can post the spamhaus evidence file and we can take a look?

Also, Spamhaus makes recommendations. Third parties use their lists to filter spam. It sounds unusual for a Spamhaus listing to result in a domain name shutdown, unless the DNS provider did that based on a listing. So this is not really Spamhaus' mistake (if indeed their evidence listing shows a history of hosting spamvertised websites - then there is no mistake on the listing. You could be listed either because your site/host/network has a solid history of not dealing with spam/abuse reports quickly, or because a big spam operator has landed on using your services. Are you sure it was just one site (and just advertising a free ipad)?)

Yes, I understand you run a facebook static html tab content site. But that isn't a million miles away from bog standard cheap/free hosting solutions that form the bulk of spamvertised websites. Might be worth investing some time looking at the parallels and how good cheap webhosts approach dealing with spamvertised websites and spammers.

So I'd suggest finding the evidence file, dealing with the problem(s) listed, then contacting Spamhaus with details of what you've done, and what's in place to reduce future abusive activity (if it's more than one site offering a free ipad). Then do something about your web hosting solution - that seems like a very weak link - either build up a better relationship with them, or move.

</comment><comment><USER7> "is there any possible way to not get randomly nuked by Spamhaus?"

As any email administrator will tell you, "no". The best you can do is take measures to prevent abuse coming from your domain name/IP, but bad things still do happen. You are still at the mercy of spamhaus (and other rbl providers).

</comment><comment><USER28> If my host did that then reversed the decision I would still be moving out of there as fast as possible.

There's absolutely no reason to be giving second chances to online services with so much competition about, on what is, essentially, a commodity.

</comment><comment><USER29> Boycott Bluehost?

<comment><USER30> No need for a boycott. If they're so unreliable, customers will move away themselves.

<comment><USER31> I'm up for renewal in february with them, could you suggest a better host?

<comment><USER32> I use linode but I was happy with slicehost before also. Granted I've never run popular apps/websites on these so I am not sure how they'd treat abuse complaints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As a fellow Facebook tab provider (My Tab) I feel your pain. I'm concerned about how SOPA and ProtectIP will impact this class of service as it would be impossible to police all content added via tools like ours. It's already been said, but you can run your own DNS or even contract for DNS services from a wide variety of places. I would move your name and SSL certificates to a trusted registrar ASAP. Glad you were at least able to work around the issue by pointing directly to the app.

</comment><comment><USER34> "is there any possible way to not get randomly nuked by Spamhaus?"

Get the list (like the level1) of "evil" corporations/governments ip ranges and show a picture of a pink elephant to them instead of your real content.

</comment><comment><USER35> For the next time, have your blog at blog.example.com, and point it to another hosting provider different than the one for example.com. That way at least you prevent the blog from going down.

<comment><USER36> Doesn't work if the person pulling the site down is the registrar, and they do it by hijacking your DNS. Your pointer to the other host goes away too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> So do we just invoke "SOPA" for any little hiccup now? Spam blacklists are not exactly a new issue on the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER38> Can we get your app name, and a link to the spamhaus listing? It'd be nice to hear the other side of the story.

</comment><comment><USER17> I cannot ever recall seeing a more misleading and manipulative posting attempting to garner undeserved sympathy by falsely trying to associate one's case with bad legislation. This has nothing to do with SOPA, it is not remotely related to anything SOPA, and at worst, these kinds of false analogies only serve to weaken the case against the very real harm that SOPA will do.

Spamhaus are not the villains here. First of all, you make the absurd complaint that Spamhaus "blacklisted" your domain. That is a lie. Spamhaus runs an SMTP blacklist of ip addresses that some other SMTP providers use, not all. There is no way for Spamhaus to blacklist anyone's domain.

So what actually happened? Spamhaus detected a spammer website hosted on your company's ip addresses, and they did the responsible thing. They reported the spam website to the ISP hosting it.

As for your claim that Bluehost shut off the DNS, why aren't you ringing up Bluehost to demand that they restore it? You might find that a better use of your time than making these absurd allegations and trying to win sympathy by making comparisons to SOPA where none exist.

<comment><USER39> The point here is the removal of due process. His DNS was shut off by Bluehost without any warning -- in this case there was actually abuse, but what if it were a false positive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Use a reputable host, you may have to pay more than a few dollars a month. I've dealt with numerous spamhaus complaints, they generally result from idiotic users who send messages to spamhaus instead of clicking unsubscribe. If you spend an hour creating a really detailed form letter response it makes the AUP tickets go away quickly. When I sign up for hosting I detail exactly what we do and pay appropriately, most 'cheap' hosting places exist solely to pick up the remainder of the months service fee from a dubious spam complaint. If you spend $100 - $200 per month it's pretty easy to find a hosting provider that will let you run a single opt-in list, especially if you detail this up front in writing and refer to this in your response to any spam complaints. Web marketing shouldn't be a problem for any real hosting provider, unless you have extremely dynamic load I'm not sure why you'd bother with heroku. It's only a couple hours work to setup your own infrastructure. A quad-core server for $130 a month will run circles around what heroku provides for $130 per month.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is this your problem? Seems you do have a spammer plastering crap on facebook.

 <form name="redirect_form" action="<https://statichtmlapp.heroku.com/tab/1/show> method="post"> <input type='hidden' name='signed_request' value='fJSfey7ELpgNY4r3gZFT5DyXp0MoW4TF2DsNQWwcoTY.eyJhbGdvcml0aG0iOiJITUFDLVNIQTI1NiIsImlzc3VlZF9hdCI6MTMyNTM1ODI1NywicGFnZSI6eyJpZCI6IjI4MjczNjc1ODQxMjg4MCIsImxpa2VkIjpmYWxzZSwiYWRtaW4iOmZhbHNlfSwidXNlciI6eyJjb3VudHJ5IjoidXMiLCJsb2NhbGUiOiJlbl9VUyIsImFnZSI6eyJtaW4iOjIxfX19' ></input> </form>

<comment><USER42> Would you mid deleting (or editing) this comment? You're breaking the page.

<comment><USER41> Not sure how, can't find an edit or delete button. (except for this reply, it has both. But the higher level one does not)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> You mean this crap being shot all over folks comments?

<https://www.facebook.com/FreeiPAdd2>

action="<https://statichtmlapp.heroku.com/tab/1/show> method="post"

value='fJSfey7ELpgNY4r3gZFT5DyXp0MoW4TF2DsNQWwcoTY.eyJhbGdvcml0aG0iOiJITUFDLVNIQTI1NiIsImlzc3VlZF9hdCI6MTMyNTM1ODI1NywicGFnZSI6eyJpZCI6IjI4MjczNjc1ODQxMjg4MCIsImxpa2VkIjpmYWxzZSwiYWRtaW4iOmZhbHNlfSwidXNlciI6eyJjb3VudHJ5IjoidXMiLCJsb2NhbGUiOiJlbl9VUyIsImFnZSI6eyJtaW4iOjIxfX19'

<comment><USER42> Would you mid deleting (or editing) this comment? You're breaking the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> www. facebook. com/ FreeiPAdd2

Like that spam site being plastered all over the place?

</comment><comment><USER43> First suggestion: get an ip address people can remember. Not very practical I know, but I guess that is the only way to get by without DNS at the moment.

Also: you've emailed your customers the new address yes? Even if it is only temporary? Maybe buy a new domain and point them towards that:"Please use [FINGSOPA].com while we get everything back to normal."</comment>


I built a deep learning-powered emoji Slackbot - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/how-i-built-a-deep-learning-powered-emoji-slackbot-5d3e59b76d0 <comment><USER2> The title is compelling, but I can't read it because of Medium's obnoxious paywall ransom ([https://i.imgur.com/sJWoFM8.png](https://i.imgur.com/sJWoFM8.png)). Out of curiosity -- as an author, is this how you hope that Medium would treat your content? I don't know much about how people try to monetize their blogs, but the folks I've talked to who want to monetize their content seem to prefer something like Substack, which has a much more honest business model (in that they're up front about it all).

Anyways, sorry for the first comment on your submission to be a complaint about Medium, but it's really annoying to discover another domain pointed to their paywall.

<comment><USER3> Hey icey, thanks for the comment! I don't normally post there but my AI friends said this is the place to post! Anyway, here is the friend link that you can use by bypass the paywall: [https://towardsdatascience.com/how-i- built-a-deep-learning-p...](https://towardsdatascience.com/how-i-built-a-deep- learning-powered-emoji- slackbot-5d3e59b76d0?source=friends_link&sk=b72bceb44de2523857b6ece689bd1e4a)

Have fun!

<comment><USER2> Thanks! This is pretty cool. Interesting that you had to spend so much time on the infrastructure side of things (both wrestling with Sagemaker, and with Slack's API rules). Seems like a lot of people end up in that same spot when trying to ship models into production.

Either way, I appreciate the non-paywalled link!

<comment><AUTHOR> I also just disabled the paywall for the original link. Either one should work now hopefully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fascinating work. I wish it were possible to try out something similar with Whatsapp but they don't seem to have an API.</comment>


German automakers who once laughed off Elon Musk are now starting to worry - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-0419-tesla-germany-20160419-story.html <comment><USER2> This is typical Europeans. I as a european hear this from my fellow countrymen all the time. Uneducated fat americans, no style, no quality, they know nothing, europe is 100times better.

Yet most of the major/minor innovations comes from the US these days, then it's Asian, Israel and the last is Europe.

You can counter argue that there's a big brain drain but whose fault it is ?

Europeans are just cocky too busy posturing.

<comment><USER3> I am European as well and also think innovation is not something happening a lot here (fragmented region, risk averse culture, many rules, many languages, focus on government grants as a solution for everything).

However, this article could be just as well be on traditional car makers anywhere else in the world ? Seems to me that Ford, Toyota, etc are in exactly the same spot as these German car makers ?</comment></comment>


Technique makes more efficient, independent holograms - <AUTHOR> http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2017/04/technique-makes-more-efficient-independent-holograms <comment><USER2> In my teens (90's) there was a holographic arcade. I don't remember the name, but if I recall correctly, it was about a time-traveler cowboy. The game mechanic was basically a duel, quick aim and shoot when each phase started. The holograms were real life actors.

It was beautiful, very fun, interesting and the game mechanics were very much connected to the hologram feature (unlike current 3D movies that, for some reason I can't understand, are a commercial success). I never understood why I never saw this or evolutions of this kind of arcade anymore. It was the future, a smart, not utopical or "only good in theory" future.

The only problem it had was that it was very expensive to play and very short/easy to die. It was basically a sequence of quick interactions intermediated by cut scenes, and it gets harder and harder. But these are problems that are not that hard to fix.

EDIT: Found the game.

Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_\(video_game\))

Gameplay video: [https://youtu.be/ZI6h0Sg73yw](https://youtu.be/ZI6h0Sg73yw)

<comment><USER3> Hate to wreck your childhood, but Time Traveler used a CRT combined with a concave mirror to create the 3D effect. No holograms involved at all.

[https://www.google.com/patents/US4776118](https://www.google.com/patents/US4776118)

<comment><USER2> Yes, I kind realized that reading the wikipedia article. "Holographic" effect as an illusion. :(

Any games were ever created with real holograms?

<comment><USER4> As far as I am aware no one has ever made a proper holographic game, as in a game with parallax on the display.

Most true holographic displays are still under lab conditions with high power lasers, expensive optics and precision setup. Maybe someone at a lab has hacked together a game of sorts though.

You could probably create a sort of holographic game with a lenticular display. You would have slight parallax with a couple of views, it would be quite rudimentary though but a fun project.

<comment><USER5> Lenticulars generalise to full parallax with tiny circular lenses instead of cylindrical ones. The only thing preventing this from being a viable "holographic display" is the resolution/DPI required of the active display technology. When this eventually comes to pass (and it will) it will be a revolution like VR, but better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome, I am thinking this could be used to create an animated hologram by quickly changing the polarization of the indcident light on the hologram.

That would be very impressive to see.

<comment><USER5> You can already do that quite well by recording two different holograms on the same plate with different reference beam incident angles. You select the image by varying the angle of the replay light. You can fit at least 4 images on a plate that way (left, right, up down).

This technology is very cool, but sadly like many holographic research projects it's a) impractical and b) not in demand.</comment></comment>


New creative environment for your business - <AUTHOR> https://konstruktor.com <comment><AUTHOR> Konstruktor is a part of our real life, which significantly facilitates and simplifies business processes, materialization of creative ideas and constructive cooperation. The main mission of the project is to unite creative and active people, to implement ideas from simple and in demand to incredible and fantastic, that can shape our future. Konstruktor is a creative environment and a starting point for developing, searching and implementing new creative opportunities as well as professional and personal growth. Konstruktor is a unique system of Internet services for business. It includes complete product line of integrated online services such as project planning with multi-level allocation of tasks and areas of responsibility, personal and project time planning, managing both clients and co-workers relationships, ability to manage and share files, ability to attract investments in projects, creating company's knowledge portal, searching for partners and contractors for doing project and operational tasks, a chat with the ability for co- workers to exchange information quickly, IT infrastructure, unlimited data storage and simple access to it, allocation and control of both personal time and finances and other. What is more, there is a mobile application that is accessible in 70 languages for users all over the world. The application will be available on 3 platforms: iOS 7+, Android 4+, Windows Phone 8.1. The mobile version is provided with all the same functions as the regular version of the website.</comment>


The Story of How McDonald's First Got Its Start - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-how-mcdonalds-first-got-its-start-180960931/?no-ist <comment><USER2> Despite the tone of the article, Kroc did not just swoop in and capitalize off of the Brothers' genius. If anything, they were an albatross around the company's neck, as their contract specified that Kroc basically wasn't allowed to change anything. Fortunately they got "creative" to get around these restrictions.

If you are interested how McDonald's became a company that is recognized around the globe, I would highly recommend the book _Behind the Arches_. A very interesting corporate study.

One of my favorite anecdotes: 80-year old Kroc's favorite pastimes was flying around in a prop plane with a highway map scouting out potential McD locations.

<comment><USER3> According to the Wikipedia article on Kroc, soon enough you won't have to read his story because Michael Keaton will be playing him in the movie The Founder coming out in December. Really interesting guy though. I had no idea about all the positive things he did while he was in control of McDonald's

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The brothers seemed like the typical startup style hustlers of today.

What struck me most however was this quote:

"Soon, they believed, the work week would shrink to under four days, leaving Americans with abundant leisure time in which to tool around in their cars—and stop to eat."

I didn't realize this idea was so old and we're not really any closer.

<comment><USER5> You can fit your work into a fraction of a typical workweek and still maintain a 1950s-esque lifestyle. But the job market frowns on people working less than 40 hours per week, so if you want to go this route, the thing to do is work full time, save, live frugally and retire early. It's not the easiest thing to do, but it is possible. I know because I did it, retiring at 34.

<comment><USER6> How many of us do you think could work 32 hours a week on a single income to support a family, a home loan, a car, etc?

<comment><USER7> This is why I made my money before having a family. The downside to this is I'm going to be in my 60's when my first kid graduates highschool. But in the meantime I have plenty of time to spend with the most important people in my life.

<comment><USER8> My parents did this. They will be around less of my life but were around more of my life. I'm glad for it.

<comment><USER9> My children will have parents and grandparents for a very long time. On top of that, we couldn't really have spent more time with them, what with a stay at home wife and all. I'm sure they're glad for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is more like the corporate legend of McDonald's. It actually has very little to do with what McDonald's became when Ray Kroc got his hands on it, and that's literally only introduced in the last line of the article.

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure the author is aware of this, since this is an excerpt from her upcoming book about Ray and Joan Kroc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'Grinding It Out' by Ray Kroc is without a doubt the best business founder autobiography I have ever read.

</comment><comment><USER13> Mark Knopfler wrote a great song about this story - Boom, Like That.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvj4svKcjl0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvj4svKcjl0)</comment>