Came to post the exact same thing. With 20-30% going to insurance/benefits, taxes, misc costs - that's an amazingly low number....even more so considering they're in SF.
I'd say, having never really thought about it, you learn quality by coding the same thing repeatedly and optimizing it each time. So you can learn in that way.
Where to find friends who can review my code?
All of my friends don't know anything about programming or they don't code in there spare times like I do.
It is really hard to find someone who can explain what is bad about code design and what should I do about it or what should be "best".
That is when joining a OS project makes same. Then you will have a whole mailing list reviewing your patches, and discussing all kind of architecture decisions.
It is possible to build an app that does exactly what you want and is completely unmaintainable in the future. If you don't know anything about code quality, it is rather hard to pick up on your own. It helps if you have someone more experienced to look at your code and go "No, you're doing it wrong. You don't need to subclass for x, just use y instead."
Two dozen is only about 10% of the 208 YC startups to date. I'm surprised that that few have done a Series A. I would have thought it would be a much higher percentage.
YC has a history of funding companies with nearly identical ideas too. I remember asking PG about it, and he says it's more about the founders than the idea since the idea is likely to evolve.
There's quite a few airports around the world where you'll run into this sort of scam. In Guadalajara, I've had to pay a "fee" to board a flight that I already had a seat on. In Bangalore I had to pay another fee so that my luggage would not go missing or be damaged.
I didn't get that feeling from the article at all. My brother actually has multiple myeloma as well; he's checked every 3 months to see if the blood levels have spiked and a skeletal survey is done every 6 months. It's almost a certainty that the cancer to start eating away at your bones and you not know it between the skeletal surveys.
"So every year Martin would get his blood checked, fearing the 1% to 2% chance that the marker had spiked.
It never did, and Martin slipped into a routine that included juggling long hours at the office, raising three teenage boys, racing cars, skiing, and cycling."
After reading the "slipped into a routine..." part I took it to mean that he stopped getting the annual tests, thinking that he'd done it long enough to satisfy himself that he wasn't going to get the disease. Sounds like I read it the same way sliverstorm did.
Certainly not, but the idea behind contracting is that you make enough to fund yourself, and therefore not require YC money in the first place. Most YC amounts are around the $20k range, which you can easily make with a few months of contracting.
