We really enjoyed having everyone out. We'll be having these bi-monthly from now on, so expect another in late january.
I'll also try to do other nice things for members. For instance, we will have a free lottery for an after-hours secret showing of the movie "Hackers" at The Roxie.
> Temporary files usually start with a dot or a dollar-sign.. to make sure that Nginx never serves any files starting with either of those characters...
Have these disputes changed YC views regarding single founders?[0]
I think YC has always favored founding teams with a dominant leader[1], but I wonder if these break-up experiences have pushed it a bit further towards single founders with strong teams.
I guess there is no change, since the advantage YC sees in multi founders is probably only for the time interval before these disputes, at which point they are already doomed. But what I may be missing: could amicable breakup ever help a company avoid the dead pool?
Another thing I find missing from the discussion: is this move also meant to push new founders to profitability faster? PG seems to be mentioning it more lately ([2], [3] etc.).
[0] Honest question- I hope it does not spark another single vs. multi founder debate.
I find it interesting that they awarded the prize to Shapley after Gale's death[0]. I always thought that there was some rule that prevented them from awarding the Physics Nobel Prize to Aharonov after Bohm died[1].
In this case, it is simply the post title being misleading, as it's not the Nobel prize these folks won, but the Nobel memorial prize in economics, which is a relatively new prize which is not part of the 5 Nobel prizes which had been given by Nobel's estate for more than a century.
Edit: oh I see they didn't reward a dead in this case, misread your comment..
Several Nobels have been given out after a collaborator's death - probably the most famous being Watson and Crick's prize four years after Rosalind Frankin's death.
While I may agree that the US should do more to encourage immigrant entrepreneurs, I do not think that the author chose a good openning example.
The author points to statistics about tech companies started by immigrants and presents Desai as part of the team that developed new technology, but Desai studied MBA and he was only doing an administrative job at IR Diagnostyx[0].
Moreover, the openning example does not seem to be precise; the author claims that Desai was not given an opportunity to start his business, which does not seem to be aligned with Desai being affiliated with IR Diagnostyx from 2009 to Feb 2012[1]. Furthermore, upon graduation in 2009, the US did give Desai 12 months of OPT[2], for which self-employment does qualify. In fact, if Desai had studied Science/Tech/Engineering/Math, he would have been give
an an extension of 17 months of OPT[3], for a total of ~2.5 years to work on his business.
He's just refuting Khosla's agument and pointing out that if VCs were really repelled, then the valuations could not be high (since these are determined by the demand of the market).
IMHO, it's best to prototype in Octave and then build in python. I find that the Matlab/Octave syntax is too focused on linear algebra, so it's better for small prototypes (and for people coming from non-SW fields). For big projects, I prefer the 0-based arrays, more than one function per file, and all the rest of the python goodies. I estimate that 70% of my time is usually spend preparing the data (e.g. parsing xml, or some other files, etc), for which I find python more suitable.
In fact, I usually work with them side by side, testing ideas in Octave, then implementing these pieces into a large python project.
Edit: this has also been discussed here before, e.g.
