Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mkeblx 4828 days ago
Perhaps the whole idea of the noidea app set the stage for the disaster that was S12. Even though only one noidea app was accepted strictly speaking perhaps both a signal sent that the 'idea bar' was lowered and and a lowering of standards. This seems to me to hold a lot of explanatory power, much more so than the idea that multiplying 66 by 1.27 would be the key thing in turning something that works into something unmanageable.

I read the post S12 (post noidea) essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html) as a (if unacknowledged) reaction of someone trying to understand and elucidate why ideas are actually very important (going against the common refrain that 'execution' is all that matters) after having recently seen poor ideas get by a selective process.
2 comments
pg 4828 days ago
much more so than the idea that multiplying 66 by 1.27 would be the key thing in turning something that works into something unmanageable

Ever run into an n^2 algorithm?

link
kami8845 4827 days ago
I think the noidea idea was quite good, but quite possibly what struck me as the worst thing about it was the philosophy it implied "oh you don't need an idea to be an entrepreneur, just start a company anywayy!lol". I know that's not the whole truth of it and that many people wind up changing their idea, but that's the feeling it gave me (and I feel many others).
link
Locke1689 4827 days ago
Out of curiosity, what makes you think that managing YC is n^2? Certainly everyone would need to communicate with you -- that's n. The question is whether or not each YC pair would need to communicate with each other. That is n^2 and seems like an excessively high level of message passing.
link
argonaut 4827 days ago
Human memory is not linear. The difference between having 10 teams and having to remember their names and their ideas and their challenges and remembering 20 teams is more than a 2x increase in difficulty.
link
pg 4827 days ago
In its then form, every partner had to know what every startup was doing, and the number of partners was a function of the number of startups.
link
tptacek 4826 days ago
So n log n.
link
pg 4826 days ago
The number of partners you need is not the log of the number of startups. It's more like n/15.
link
maximz 4828 days ago
I remember there were some organizational issues - is that what you mean by "the disaster that was S12"?
link