mauriziocalo
Joined 15 years ago
Karma
253
Submissions
19
Member since
Aug 11
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 months ago
*Two IMO gold medal winners. Three ISO gold medal winners. Six ISO gold medals collectively :)
- Yu Deng: IMO gold [1]
- Jacob Tsimerman: 2x IMO gold [2]
- John Pardon: 3x IOI gold [3]
Fun fact: Tsimerman and Deng both overlapped with Peter Scholze (another Fields Medal recipient) at the IMO
[1] https://www.imo-official.org/results/contestant/8824/
Comment · 1 year ago
Related — these videos give a sense of how someone might actually go about thinking through and solving these kinds of problems:
- A 3Blue1Brown video on a particularly nice and unexpectedly difficult IMO problem (2011 IMO, Q2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M64HUIJFTZM
-- And another similar one (though technically Putnam, not IMO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkmNXy7er84
- Timothy Gowers (Fields Medalist and IMO perfect scorer) solving this year’s IMO problems in “real time”:
Comment · 5 years ago
I believe this list was compiled by Andrej Karpathy (director of AI at Tesla).
I thought it would be useful to the HN community given its high signal-to-noise ratio:
1) You can get a quick birds-eye view of the general trends / topics that are currently being taught at the Stanford CS department.
and
2) You're one click away from learning more about each topic if you wish to do so, considering all of the courses listed have publicly accesible websites.
Comment · 5 years ago
+1. And I'd add to that that sometimes there's significant work in the pre-buy phase as well:
- Researching what your options are / what's already out there.
- Comparing different alternatives.
- "Hopping on a call" with a sales rep to get a product demo (there's this super annoying trend where many SaaS companies' landing pages don't explain what they do and the only option they give is to "schedule a demo").
For CRUD-like internal tools or simple 3rd party integrations, my experience has been that it's often much faster (typically < 1 hour) to build a production-ready app on Retool (https://retool.com) than it is to even get started with SaaS vendors.
Comment · 6 years ago
Two other great examples where you can get a peek of early versions of companies/products that ended up being huge: Wayback Machine and Show HN.
e.g.
Wayback machine:
- Airbnb (2008): https://web.archive.org/web/20080310025433/http://www.airbed...
- Uber (2010): https://web.archive.org/web/20101126114649/http://www.uberap...
- Twitter (2006): https://web.archive.org/web/20061127012643/http://twitter.co...
Show HN:
- Analytics.js / Segment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076
- Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Comment · 6 years ago
Just this week:
- Momentus: $1.2B IPO (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/momentus-the-latest-space-st...)
- Segment: acquired for $3.2B (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735414)
- MessageBird: reached a $3B valuation (https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/08/messagebird-series-c/)
More generally:
- 15-20 YC companies are now worth $1B or more.
- 100ish YC companies are now worth $100M - $1B. A good number of those (and others currently worth less than that) are growing very rapidly and will likely reach unicorn status in the next year.
So it seems like one can reliably expect 2-3 unicorns to come out of each YC batch. Those 2-3 unicorns likely more than make up for the costs associated with running each batch (including all of the ~$150K investments). Seems quite good to me.
Admittedly, there hasn't yet been a Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft-scale company that has come out of YC yet. I think it's only a matter of time until that happens -- anecdotally it seems like at least a handful out of the recent batches could become massive home runs, as well as other more established companies like Stripe that seem to be growing quite well.
Comment · 6 years ago
Relevant PG tweet:
> assuming I got in [to YC] I would not get sucked into raising a huge amount on Demo Day.
> I would raise maybe $500k, keep the company small for the first year, work closely with users to make something amazing, and otherwise stay off SV's radar. In other words, be the opposite of a scenester.
> Ideally I'd get to profitability on that initial $500k. Later I could raise more, if I felt like it. Or not. But it would be on my terms.
> At every point in the company's growth, I'd keep the company as small as I could. I'd always want people to be surprised how few employees we had. Fewer employees = lower costs, and less need to turn into a manager.
(https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1132012625527750661)
Probably a good example of a confident, competent founder (Founders who raise too much capital are acting out of fear rather than acting out of confidence. // Confident, competent founders should take the risk of running out of money vs. the certainty of over-dilution.) as described on this essay :)
Comment · 6 years ago
Two observations:
1) Shipping-and-iterating is uncomfortably hard. Putting your product out there in front of users is painful. It's a lot easier to just constantly brainstorm ideas or hide in the coding cave.
2) As a founder, it's tempting to think that your startup is unique: what you're building is uniquely challenging, important and highly non-trivial.
Anecdotally, I've seen far too many founders (including my own past self) use 2 as an excuse not to do 1: most of the time, those never even launch. And not just in the hardware space, but also in: health-tech, bio, fin-tech, gov-tech, legal-tech, insur-tech, prop-tech, food-tech, logistics, and even B2B SaaS ("what we're building is hard and needs enterprise-grade robustness / security").
There may be ways to build massively successful companies that don't involve rapid shipping-and-iterating cycles, and in general there may be ways to build successful companies while ignoring or even doing the exact opposite of what YC advises.
But YC would know a few things about hard-tech from having funded possibly hundreds of such companies, including several massively successful companies. In fact, the top 3 YC companies of all-time as of 2020 are all in highly-regulated spaces: Stripe, Airbnb and Cruise [1]. Cruise in particular is a hardware company (self-driving cars) whose billion-dollar success was largely due to their ability to ship-and-iterate much, much faster than pretty much every other self-driving car company out there.
https://ai.stanford.edu/~maurizio/