1. re: the first part, many people want something plug and play. and even if they were plug and play, the problem is that the user experience (on windows at least) with online drives generally sucks, and you don't have disconnected access.

windows for sure doesn't hide latency well (CIFS is bad, webdav etc. are worse), and most apps are written as if the disk was local, and assume, for example, accessing a file only takes a few ms. if the server is 80ms away, and you do 100 accesses (e.g. the open file common dialog listing a directory and poking files for various attributes or icons) serially, suddenly your UI locks up for _seconds_ (joel spolsky summarizes this well in his article on leaky abstractions.) ditto saving any file; you change one character in your 20mb word file and hit save, and your upstream-capped 40k/sec comcast connection is hosed for 8 minutes. sure for docs of a few hundred k it's fine, but doing work on large docs on an online drive feels like walking around with cinder blocks tied to your feet. anyway, the point of that rant was that dropbox uses a _local_ folder with efficient sync in the background, which is an important difference :)

2. true, if you're both not at your computer and on another computer without net access, this won't replace a usb drive :) but the case i'm worried about is being, for example, on a plane, and dropbox will let you get to the most recent version of your docs at the time you were last connected, and will sync everything up when you get back online (without you having to copy anything or really do anything.)

3. there are some unannounced viral parts i didn't get to show in there :) it'll be a freemium model. up to x gb free, tiered plans above that.

Premise is right, headline is wrong. If you look at the businesses that made people billionaires, the other point they have in common is that the owners aggressively pursued opportunities. So yes, Bill Gates slaved away for 6 years, with a variety of other products, before IBM came knocking. However, if he had turned them away, or been out of the office flying his plane like Gary Kildall, we'd be talking about the "Digital Research Monopoly" instead.

My startup initially wasn't going to apply to yCombinator. We have a solid team, a product that I really want to see exist, and we're making steady progress implementing it. But I figured that if we have a decent chance of success without yCombinator, we'll have an even better chance of success with yCombinator. So why not spend 4 days or so putting together an application and see if they accept us?

If they turn us down, fine, we go back to our original plan and keep working on the product. But if they don't, great! It's advice, connections, a set timetable for when I leave my day job and work full-time on the startup (for me, this is a question of when, not if: yCombinator would just make the decision for me), and a cool hacker environment where you get to bounce ideas off other equally-smart people.

nope. informally came up with and tossed around 6 or 7 ideas at the same time -- not so much coding as investigating/talking to potential customers and bouncing them off other friends and entrepreneurs. this was crucial -- ideas don't really fall out of the sky, they evolve.

there were several times where i'd get really excited about one idea -- like pacing in my living room at 5:30am excited -- and then 5 days later find out (via a different set of search terms or something) there were 3 other people doing the same thing, with a head start and more money.

ultimately they say scratch your own itch -- this was a problem (syncing a 3gb file across several computers efficiently) i routinely had working on a prior company i had started and i was frustrated that no one had solved it well, and it turned out to be more promising than my original company :)

If YC is for losers, then Robert and Trevor and I are losers ourselves, because we modelled it on how we started Viaweb. We took $10k in seed funding from our friend Julian, who (since he was a lawyer) also set us up as a company.

For us, Julian's help was both a necessary and sufficient condition of getting launched. Nothing has changed since then about life in the seed stage. Sure, maybe you can get to the next stage on $200k instead of a $2m series A round like in the Bubble, but initially you still need at least a few months' living expenses.

I only skimmed that [what should I call it? article?], but I did notice one other thing that's mistaken. We don't judge people by their karma on news.yc, but by the quality of their comments and submissions. Surely that is a reasonable test.

Of his reasons, 1 and 2 are mistaken. If a startup with a single founder looks especially promising, we don't simply reject them; we get them to find one. And we have no bias toward consumer apps. Two of the most successful startups we've funded (neither is launched yet) are doing stuff for businesses. The reason we fund more consumer apps is simply that more apply.

BTW, we're soon going to announce a third plan B, which we hope will be a better alternative to this or Techstars: to work for a YC "alumni" company. While some (e.g. Loopt) are quite established, others are so new that you could be the first hire, which is very much like being a founder.

We got 421 applications. That's more than past cycles, maybe because we're getting better known. This will be the last time we disclose application numbers though. Now that we have competitors (or at least imitators), we don't want to get into a number-of-applicants contest. It's easy to inflate that number, by encouraging undergrads and single founders to apply, but we don't want to go there.

The big difference this time is the increase in the number of applicants from overseas. Otherwise the people and the ideas are like previous years.

We're always trying to push the limits. Probably not the youth limit, because we started out pushing that, and know pretty well where the edge is. But we may, for example, accept a large number of groups this time. We'll see how many are good.

PG,

What would be cool is if we could access the Application Page still and possibly see a status of the Applications (eg. Unread, Read, Reviewed, Rejected, Considered, etc) - and if Rejected, maybe a 1-2 liner from the YC Team.

It would take a little bit more time on YC's part, but from past experiences, the more communication that can be had between the entrepreneur and VC, the better - even on failed pitches there is something to be learned.

The content has the highest signal to noise ratio of any other social content site out there. This is likely because the audience is more focused.

There are so many failed assumptions made that this doesn't even stand as a valid opinion piece.

A valid point to make would have been: Accepted into the program or not, a good startup will learn from the experience and continue on.

Then stop there; everything else was either superfluous or unfounded.

I've noticed that a number of the recent YC companies have some pretty slick web 2.0-style graphic design (loopt, Wufoo, i'm in like with you, and Scribd, just to name a few).

I'm guessing folks aren't doing the design themselves? If not who is?

Wufoo and Likewithyou are doing it themselves. They have design backgrounds. Loopt is now a big co and presumably paid a good design firm. I think Scribd has an outside designer too.

You missed his point. Yes, what you are doing is replicating the situation that worked for you. And this program is probably a good one for students who are still in college and want to build a company over the summer.

But anyone who has left college and is working for a living should be able to save up one months living expenses every month. (EG: make 25 an hour, gross $4k, $3.6k after taxes, live on $1,500 a month or so.) Thus if you work for 6 months as a contract programmer (or better yet as an employee for a startup) you will then have 6 months of expenses to build your business. Thus there's no reason that not getting YC funding should be an impediment to strting a business.

The strong impression I get from people who post here, and the people who attented startupschool is that they are focused on getting funding. They want to go to YC, or move to the bay area for connections to funding. Landing a VC deal is seen as the end goal.

This is not an entreprenurial focus. Were you focused on VC funding for viaweb, or were you trying to build a business?

The original poster is right-- build a business-- that should be the focus. Not getting funding. Not worrying about what you're going to do if you don't get into YC. YC should be seen as a possible opportunity, but not critical to success.

And since YC only happens twice a year and is limited in the number accepted... waiting for the next round of YC indicates that building the business or product is not the number one priority.

As an investor, I'd rate highly someone who was living off of their own savings to build their product-- they have shown the gumption and have even more skin in the game.

Here are a few resources for spiffing up your "artist" and "seller" hats:

=== The Artist ===

. The Non-Designer's Design Book, by Robin Williams. This short, easy read details four essential design principles that will help you consciously communicate better visually. It's also available on O'Reilly's safari service.

. Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design. This book will help you build your design vocabulary and better understand concepts in design that you likely haven't thought of. It will help you describe the ways in which this page - http://www.sandstromdesign.com/nav.html - sucks (it lacks external consistency and it contains interference effects, to begin with). The book has a great format, describing a topic on one page with visual examples on the following page. The descriptions are short of enough that you can read them in about 4 minutes.

. http://www.hallwaytesting.com - this is actually my own site. You can post your site for usability feedback and give usability feedback. Live usability tests allow you to get more details, but the users on my site also give valuable feedback, and it doesn't cost you any money or nearly as much time. I try to give feedback for as many sites as possible and am usually pretty thorough about it. Users have told me that the site has helped them a lot.

=== The Seller ===

. http://www.marketingexperiments.com . This site is absolutely the best web development resource I've found, ever. It contains articles on developing a unique value proposition, doing competitive analysis on the Internet, and of course actually marketing your site using PPC, SEO, and other online marketing techniques. Perhaps the most valuable thing I learned from this site is that online marketing is online testing.

. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. For a long time I didn't want to read this book because I thought doing so would make me a sleaze ball. Instead it's made me a more effective communicator. When you think about it, honing our skills in most areas involves learning how to communicate with other humans better. As The Tech Wizard it's essential that you communicate the purpose of your code. As The Artist it's essential you communicate the purpose of a site and each of its elements. As The Seller you must know how to communicate value. Dale Carnegie's book will show you how to effectively communicate value.