They're made to look bad by how easy it is to apply. If you make a website offering people money if they fill out a form, a lot of people will fill it out. But the odds for a good team are not as bad as they might seem. At least a third of the applications are egregiously broken: 13 year old founders, people who want to "telecommute" from India, people who want us to fund their plumbing supply store, etc...

Hey guys, there is this really amazing article written by this Paul Graham guy. You probably haven't read it, right? Anyway, I really like what he has to say! Hope you like the article.

...okay, so tell me what is wrong with this picture? I can't quite figure it out. Oh well, I'm off to tell a group of biblical scholars about this nifty book called the New Testament.

i think they only care what you build, and if you're smart. the idea of blacklists, or pg holding grudges, etc., is pretty silly.

they're pretty clear on this: if you make something people want (or have a demo that shows that you will), you should be fine for the app.

Thank God my one public stock recommendation worked out right.

(I followed it myself, fortunately, and I'm still not selling. I think Apple has a lot more world left to take over.)

45-50

This is just our experience interviewing last season. We applied with two ideas, both with prototypes. The discussion was pretty much exclusively about the idea - how new it is, how easy it is, how interesting it is, whether or not it's porn/music related (either category is probably not a good idea btw).

We had a good response to both our prototypes, but ultimately we were told our idea didn't seem different enough. The impression I got from our interview was that the idea is actually pretty important.

It kind of makes sense, since you're competing against other amazing hackers with good ideas. It doesn't matter as much if you're good -they all were-, you really do need a great idea to go with your team.

If we have a formula, no one told us. The current group of founders range from 19 to 35, average 25. Their ambitions range from selling for a couple million to going public. Some are very unworldly hackers; others are business guys who don't know how to program. Their projects range from frivolous social networks to deep infrastructure.

I was about to say that all they have in common is that they all work really hard, but even that isn't universal. There are some slackers in each group.

A startup is going to compete for the attention of users against many thousands of other companies. Competing against a few hundred, most of which are probably hopeless, doesn't seem that scary to me.

Just because they spent the whole time asking you about your idea doesn't neccessarily mean they were mostly interested in your idea...getting someone to talk about their prototype is probably a much better way to guage who they are and how they think than asking "Who are you?, and how do you think?"

Of course I wasn't there, so I don't really know what happened.

One of the worst is schools. Public schools in the US are not very good. Rich people tend to go to private ones.

Pretty near zero representatives' and senators' kids go to DC public schools, for example. Whether they're liberal or conservative, they seem to draw the line at that. And there seems to be an unwritten rule they won't criticize one another about it.

In theory this inequality ends at college, because the best colleges will take you for free if you're poor. But in practice it doesn't, because (a) the good colleges do "legacy admissions" and (b) the private schools are much better at coaching their students to get into good colleges.

Thanks for that clarification - the odds are getting a bit better :) . I'm curious: how many teams were interviewed in person to arrive at the final 20?

I don't think I'll be applying. Looking through my comments, I see at least 2 instances where pg has answered quite irritated towards me. The rest of my comments are me attacking other potential founders on their poor implementations. I'D not pick ME if I was on the team.

Anyways, let me give a few areas for potential applicants:

1. Organize bookmark tags right. Del.icio.us is nice and all, but things tend to get disorganised

2. iPhone app for public transportation

3. Firefox/IE plugin that makes financial information from bank websites accessible in a global unified format. By financial info, I mean payin/payout history.

4. Debt pay-off site - site that organises the credits of people into a manageable format and tells them what to set aside to get it done with. Include retirement fund as a side option

6. Collaborative website for writing episodes for TV-Shows. Will take fan fiction to the next level. Scriptwriters will like the feedback, and obsessive fans will pay to be part of the inner circle

7. Religious books discussion site. Mix up the religions and abstract the discussion

8. And of course, the favorite of a snappy gentleman like myself - Let people upload pictures of themselves and dress them up in latest purchasable fashion. Find alternatives to expensive designer clothes.

As they say, ideas are cheap. Each has potential if implemented the right way.

I won't be applying, but good luck to all those who will be!

I was wondering when these super conservative groups, such as the Heritage Foundation, would start using the "inequality is good" argument. There's a lot to like about an utopian society based solely on meritocracy. But the truth is there are large numbers of people who cannot compete on equal footing due to circumstances that are/were out of their control. It's like taking a Chinese class with a bunch of Chinese students and you're the only one who doesn't know the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese.

Using the Google founders as the example of "inequality being good" is ridiculous. Most people don't have a problem with rewarding innovative work; people have problems with not providing a baseline for those who can't. In a pure pay for performance society, those who can't perform, won't get paid. Is this fair? On the surface, well yes, maybe. But what if the REASON for their non-performance is based on systematic oppression and lingering effects thereof? Is a pure pay for performance system still fair?

What about the handicapped, depressed, and otherwise ill affected?

The pay for performance (or inequality is good) argument is fine when no one gets hurt, when the low performers, say, will get a 1% instead of 10% bonus. But when we're talking about the lower levels of society, where people can literally go homeless or die of untreated disease, then it's not so easy to come up with these fantasy theories.

"And open and good is what Macs are again"

I can understand "good", but "open" is stretching it...

Then don't argue against it. Say, "This article is true in and of itself, but I think the heritage foundation is presenting it in order to..."

Like all things, though, some moderation is probably a good idea. Even if this argument makes perfect logical sense, it makes apes unhappy to see other apes getting way more bananas than they are, and if you start to talk politics rather than simply economics, this has practical consequences. Better to balance things out a little bit before things get out of hand and the apes with few bananas vote in someone with truly bad ideas about redistributing wealth.

I once saw a not-really-serious idea by a center-left economist that having money is good and just, as the article says, but perhaps what should be taxed are the very visible bananas (fancy cars, "bling") that the better off apes use to flaunt their wealth.

His analysis makes a lot of sense.

I wonder if ads "make the web suck" enough for general users to switch if some browser made ad blocking a priority out of the box. It seems likes a pretty powerful feature, but people are conditioned to have ads surrounding everything they see so they might not care.

Unfortunately Firefox is probably the only existing candidate for turning on ad blocking as a default and there's no way they have the balls for that given their relationships with advertisers (I'm thinking mainly of Google, but am guessing there are more).

Watch the Mozilla CEO skirt the question: http://apcmag.com/6043/why_theres_no_inbuilt_adblocker_in_fi...

Who are you targeting with this site - people who already use Kratom but are actively searching for a better price? How many people are searching for Kratom? I know I've never heard of it.

Frankly, I think this is a bit of an ill conceived plan. You're basically trying to catch people who are already using and are familiar with a niche incense, by promising to sell it at a discount. How price sensitive are people using niche incense going to be? Versus trusting a new supplier off the internet? So lets run through it - right now your page would convert someone that:

1) Uses Kratom 2) Sees your advertising 3) Is concerned about saving, er, actually, looking at your site, maybe a few percent on something that costs next to nothing 4) Is concerned enough about that saving to buy off of a new one page site on the internet

All while you are presumably running razor thin margins and paying for the advertising. Razor thin margins could work when you are making up for it at a large volume, but I don't think the market is big enough for that. My father is working on a site that does exactly what you're doing, but for 10,000 products instead of 1 and attempting to catch organic search traffic. Many products haven't ever been sold, and individually the traffic per product is very little, but it's the area under the curve that counts. It's very Web 0.2, but when selling to average people, that doesn't matter.

You might want to consider turning the site into a Kratom info page that only incidentally sells it. Make comparison pages with whatever else is similar to it (types of incense I guess?) that will show up in organic search under other terms. Pages of info or uses or whatever that'll show up in organic search. Your page rather snarkily tells me to learn how to search the internet. I'm sorry, but if I don't take the time to research the product you are selling and find out if I want to buy it, that's not _my_ problem, that's _YOUR_ problem. I clicked on the Wikipedia link and I still don't know what it is... I mean, I know that it's some plant from Asia that can be burned as insence... but I don't know why I would care (sell me on the benefits and maybe I'd try it).

There's another thing you could try, and it'll cost money and probably won't work (but if it does it'll be passive income for a long time). It'll only have a chance of working if Kratom is relatively obscure (one supplier in the world, I'm presuming it is). You'll also have to track things well.

But what you could do is stop selling it at a discount, and bid on ad words for words like incense, pointing to a page saying exactly the problem you're facing. Say how good it is, and that you've got the ability to supply Kratom and nobody really knows about it, but you believe in it so much that you'll personally send out a sample to anyone in the US that wants one. Full instructions how to use it etc. Fulfill 100 or 200 orders and run the numbers. You've paid maybe 1000 x 10 cents to get those people to fill out the form, maybe $100. You've paid for the samples of Kratom, maybe $5 per person. X of those people loved it and will become customers - you've got to work out the gross and net value of each customer, that is, average sale price x frequency of sale x time they stay customers (could be a hell of a long time). There is obviously a bit of guess work here. So there you'd have a $x of advertising expenditure gets you y customers who will on average bring in $z profit each. If you make decent margins (to pay for your time), keep doing this for years and you'll make a reasonable amount from the site. If you don't, try something else a bit radical, or ditch the whole thing and try something else (recommended).

We have a VERY distributed team. Is it ok if only 1 of us move to the Bay area?