move, at least temporarily, to Silicon Valley. For three months, they would have regular skull sessions with the Y Combinator partners. They also had tomeet once a week with big names in the tech world at off-the-record dinners. (Its name was wordplay familiar to those who had wandered deep in the arithmetical forest: the Y combinator is a mathematical function that generates other functions, and Y Combinator was a company that generated other companies.)
The next cycle of the Y Combinator camp would run from June through August, and the application was due at the beginning of March. The Diaspora guys gathered on the final Sunday in February to work on it.
Name. Company name. Phone number. Link to a one-minute video introducing the founders.
They did have a company name, although they were hardly a company. They were four nerds. Or, when their self-esteem was cresting, four dudes.
Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (noncomputer) system to your advantage. Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this start-up that each founder has built or achieved. How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
The application form was a blizzard of provocative questions, twenty-seven blank spaces to fill in, most of them requiring responses to three or four deep queries. As a whole, the inquiries were perfectly reasonable, considering that they were designed to figure out if it was a good idea to hand over twenty thousand dollars to complete strangers with little to no history of running a business.
How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If so, how much? If youâre launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users or revenue or both)? If youâre not incorporated yet, please list the percent of the company you plan to give each founder, and anyone else you plan to give stock to. (This question is as much for you as for us.)
âMan, all these questions,â Max said. âWeâre four smart kids.â
Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)
There were easily another fifty questions along those lines. Within a few minutes of looking over the application, they bagged it. June was still three months off. Something might come up. In the meantime, they would continue writing code. Unlike the application, it was too interesting a problem to let go of.
â
In February 1997, a piece of dismal news reached the online message board of the Freaks, the fans of a British and Irish progressive rock band known as Marillion. Their record label had gone broke. The keyboard player, Mark Ryan, wrote that the band would not be touring North America with their new release.
In Bedford, Massachusetts, this seemed outlandish to Jeff Pelletier, a fan of Marillion. They might not have been the Rolling Stones, but plenty of people were devoted to the group; the bulletin board hummed with news and conversation about it. So Pelletier put the idea to the online Freaks: why donât we raise the money so they can tour? The band members were dubious, and said it would take thirty thousand dollars to cover their touring costs. Even so, they assigned a friend to oversee whatever money did arrive so that the well-meant efforts of Pelletier did not turn into a fiasco.
In short order, small contributions began to roll in, from all around the world. âPeople were giving money just to see this happen, because it was such an amazing thing,â Pelletier later told the
Chicago Tribune
. All told, the Freaks raised about fifty thousand dollars. Marillion toured triumphantly, rewarding their backers with autographed DVDs. The market, or the street, got to vote.
Five years later, Perry Chan, who had worked as a day
The next cycle of the Y Combinator camp would run from June through August, and the application was due at the beginning of March. The Diaspora guys gathered on the final Sunday in February to work on it.
Name. Company name. Phone number. Link to a one-minute video introducing the founders.
They did have a company name, although they were hardly a company. They were four nerds. Or, when their self-esteem was cresting, four dudes.
Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (noncomputer) system to your advantage. Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this start-up that each founder has built or achieved. How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
The application form was a blizzard of provocative questions, twenty-seven blank spaces to fill in, most of them requiring responses to three or four deep queries. As a whole, the inquiries were perfectly reasonable, considering that they were designed to figure out if it was a good idea to hand over twenty thousand dollars to complete strangers with little to no history of running a business.
How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If so, how much? If youâre launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users or revenue or both)? If youâre not incorporated yet, please list the percent of the company you plan to give each founder, and anyone else you plan to give stock to. (This question is as much for you as for us.)
âMan, all these questions,â Max said. âWeâre four smart kids.â
Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)
There were easily another fifty questions along those lines. Within a few minutes of looking over the application, they bagged it. June was still three months off. Something might come up. In the meantime, they would continue writing code. Unlike the application, it was too interesting a problem to let go of.
â
In February 1997, a piece of dismal news reached the online message board of the Freaks, the fans of a British and Irish progressive rock band known as Marillion. Their record label had gone broke. The keyboard player, Mark Ryan, wrote that the band would not be touring North America with their new release.
In Bedford, Massachusetts, this seemed outlandish to Jeff Pelletier, a fan of Marillion. They might not have been the Rolling Stones, but plenty of people were devoted to the group; the bulletin board hummed with news and conversation about it. So Pelletier put the idea to the online Freaks: why donât we raise the money so they can tour? The band members were dubious, and said it would take thirty thousand dollars to cover their touring costs. Even so, they assigned a friend to oversee whatever money did arrive so that the well-meant efforts of Pelletier did not turn into a fiasco.
In short order, small contributions began to roll in, from all around the world. âPeople were giving money just to see this happen, because it was such an amazing thing,â Pelletier later told the
Chicago Tribune
. All told, the Freaks raised about fifty thousand dollars. Marillion toured triumphantly, rewarding their backers with autographed DVDs. The market, or the street, got to vote.
Five years later, Perry Chan, who had worked as a day
Similar Books
