schoudha

You’re 30, you have your whole life ahead of you and you greatest achievements are likely going to come from work you haven’t even thought of yet.

Identify what you truly enjoy, people you like to be with and set goals you want to aspire to. Make sure you spend your next 10 years focused on those things.

Pretty poor analysis of today's events.

1. Misunderstands the 1st rule of breakthrough consumer internet companies. The challenge is always getting users and almost never monetizing a loyal user base. This happened with Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Facebook...strange that people still bring up this argument.

With a flip of a switch the Instagram team could put a banner ad and make >$10M/year but they decided to pursue a more native business model that will take time.

2. Myspace didn't fail because of some inherent problem with their model, they failed because their team was unable to compete with Facebook.

It's true that Instagram could suffer a Myspace fate but the data so far suggests they're more like the Facebook of their space then the Myspace.

3. This is the worst point. Every startup has a random success multiplier but Instagram was big enough that the high order bit was their hardwork (persistence) and talent.

I highly encourage you to matriculate to Uchicago, you will learn and grow more in your 1st year at college than coming to Silicon Valley straight out of high school. There's no rush.

With that said, it might be a great experience to come out to SV this summer before you start college.

Wow, great call by YC and patience by the founders.

Sam, did you guys raise any additional money besides what's listed in Crunchbase? It says you guys were backed by Maverick capital as well?

Congrats on the sale!

You don't have to use Windows. The best way to protest is by using another product.

Claiming that you have the moral authority to pirate it is just wrong, doing so re-enforces the need for MSFT to have even stricter anti-piracy measures.

As soon as you start doing calculations like this to determine how many co-founders you should have it's almost a guaranteed you're not going to be successful.

Build something people want with people you love to work with. The rest will work itself out.

Nice, my first credit on hacker news :)

Google's goal: 1 Query => 1 visit

Facebook's goal: 1 visit => 1000 page views

This statistic is meaningless when put in context of the function of the two sites.

I doubt Justin.TV sees this as a solution, it's piracy.

This break the economic model for books. It works with libraries because of limited quantity.

This could work if we had a fixed number of digital library books per a zip code.

5mbps, encoded at 720p, with a decent h264 decoder will far exceed DVD quality with audio and video. Apple TV is a good example of this.

10mbps will approach blu-ray.

I intern'd at Apple and I would say that Apple's engineering talent is a level below Microsoft and Google. Apple combines good (but not incredible) engineering with the best product management (manager maybe...) on the planet. Microsoft and Google have much strong engineering teams but their much weaker on the PM side.

No, the answer is not both.

Google has organic results and ad results, they are clearly distinguished in the UI and are generated by two distinct systems.