Reddit. I remember when PG posted on comp.lang.lisp about this startup that he'd funded that was using Lisp. Checked it out, thought it was lame, because it was just a bunch of links with voting arrows, and the links all seemed to be submitted by the founders, spez's girlfriend, and PG. Came back a couple months later when they added comments, and stayed ever since.
HN. I joined the day after it opened for public use (it had been in beta for YC founders for about 6 months previous).
FictionAlley.org. I started lurking when they had a couple hundred members, and joined as user 1881. Joined the staff a couple months later, when we were at around 2500 registered users, and when I left the staff 3 years later, we had over 100,000.
Dropbox. Like you, I remember being super impressed by Drew's little demo on the HN forums. I actually had lunch with Drew, Arash, and Aston right after they got their Sequoia funding to discuss joining the company as employee #2. Had my own startup at the time and wouldn't leave my cofounder; I keep wondering if this'll be one of those decisions I'll regret forever, but OTOH the failure of my startup afterwards led me to Google, and that's been a pretty good experience too.
FaceBook. In September of 2004, a couple of my friends were all excited about this new social network that had just expanded to Amherst from the Ivy League. The founders had apparently just moved out to Silicon Valley, gotten some angel funding, and were shopping the company around to acquirers and VCs. I joined, found it kinda "meh", but friended all my friends (and a few people I met just once or twice at parties). At the time, they had profile photos, contact info, and the Wall, but nothing else. No private messaging, no chat, no photo-sharing, no apps, no events, no groups, etc.
Avici (remember them? They sold the massive routers that Enron Broadband and many of the major ISPs of the first dot-com boom used). Sometime in the summer of 1995 or 1996, we were sitting by the pool with the family of one of my friends from middle school, and talking computers. My friend's father said he and a bunch of his coworkers from BBN were founding a new company. They'd wanted to do these multi-terabit/second routers for years, and given how the Internet was exploding, it was now or never. They IPO'd at a market value of over a billion dollars in 2000, my friend's dad cashed out as soon as the lockup was over, and then the company promptly tanked.
Akamai. I was in a support group for gifted & talented kids with Reid Barton, the 4-time IMO gold medalist, when I was a teenager. Sometime around 1998, my dad was talking with his mom about what he was up to. He'd been working on the Cilk programming language at MIT, and one of the professors in the department was leaving to found this Akamai startup. Reid was going to join him as an intern. The irony is that I waited until the dot-com bust, after Danny Lewin was killed on 9/11, then picked up a whole bunch of Akamai shares on the open market at a price lower than the strike prices of virtually all the employees. That pretty much funded my first startup.
I'm good at looking at the right horse early. I suck at picking the right horse early, otherwise I'd be far wealthier than I actually am. I tend to move far too slowly, even once I think I know where the right place to be is, and get in just as it's becoming popular (and get out just before it crashes - I was telling my sister, before I took my latest job, that I've been a part of almost every major bubble of the 21st century. Was at an all-teenage dot-com in 2000, a financial software startup in 2005-2007, and a web 2.0 startup in 2007-2008. I hope that's not reflective of Google's future prospects...) Makes for a comfortable living, but for real wealth you need to take a few more risks than I tend to...
Some things that I've been looking at that seem quite interesting to me now, though:
- LikeALittle.com
- Android. I think that long-term, it has more potential than iOS. The mobile phone space in general has the potential to be huge.
- OCR, computer vision, and other applications of machine learning to imaging problems.
- YCombinator. I think PG's generally right about their being a trend toward startups in the future, and startups that serve startups will become quite big.
I also have the stinking suspicion that the next world-changing tech revolution is in the garage now, and not one of the startups founded from 2004-2010. I, of course, do not know what it is. But there've been a bunch of enabling technologies recently developed - mobile phones and cloud-computing come to mind. And there's also a bigger concentration of brainpower in a smaller volume than we've seen before, with the rise of Google/Facebook/Twitter/Palantir and supporting universities and startups in Silicon Valley. I'm somewhat wondering what will happen when Google ceases to be a nice place to work, because for the last 10 years, they've been recruiting the best minds from all over the planet, putting them 5-to-a-cube in a handful of buildings, and working really hard together. Much of what they learn is probably applicable to a wide range of problems, but because the company is so focused on search, I doubt we've seen all the developments that could come out of that.
Comments
Reddit. I remember when PG posted on comp.lang.lisp about this startup that he'd funded that was using Lisp. Checked it out, thought it was lame, because it was just a bunch of links with voting arrows, and the links all seemed to be submitted by the founders, spez's girlfriend, and PG. Came back a couple months later when they added comments, and stayed ever since.
HN. I joined the day after it opened for public use (it had been in beta for YC founders for about 6 months previous).
FictionAlley.org. I started lurking when they had a couple hundred members, and joined as user 1881. Joined the staff a couple months later, when we were at around 2500 registered users, and when I left the staff 3 years later, we had over 100,000.
Dropbox. Like you, I remember being super impressed by Drew's little demo on the HN forums. I actually had lunch with Drew, Arash, and Aston right after they got their Sequoia funding to discuss joining the company as employee #2. Had my own startup at the time and wouldn't leave my cofounder; I keep wondering if this'll be one of those decisions I'll regret forever, but OTOH the failure of my startup afterwards led me to Google, and that's been a pretty good experience too.
FaceBook. In September of 2004, a couple of my friends were all excited about this new social network that had just expanded to Amherst from the Ivy League. The founders had apparently just moved out to Silicon Valley, gotten some angel funding, and were shopping the company around to acquirers and VCs. I joined, found it kinda "meh", but friended all my friends (and a few people I met just once or twice at parties). At the time, they had profile photos, contact info, and the Wall, but nothing else. No private messaging, no chat, no photo-sharing, no apps, no events, no groups, etc.
Avici (remember them? They sold the massive routers that Enron Broadband and many of the major ISPs of the first dot-com boom used). Sometime in the summer of 1995 or 1996, we were sitting by the pool with the family of one of my friends from middle school, and talking computers. My friend's father said he and a bunch of his coworkers from BBN were founding a new company. They'd wanted to do these multi-terabit/second routers for years, and given how the Internet was exploding, it was now or never. They IPO'd at a market value of over a billion dollars in 2000, my friend's dad cashed out as soon as the lockup was over, and then the company promptly tanked.
Akamai. I was in a support group for gifted & talented kids with Reid Barton, the 4-time IMO gold medalist, when I was a teenager. Sometime around 1998, my dad was talking with his mom about what he was up to. He'd been working on the Cilk programming language at MIT, and one of the professors in the department was leaving to found this Akamai startup. Reid was going to join him as an intern. The irony is that I waited until the dot-com bust, after Danny Lewin was killed on 9/11, then picked up a whole bunch of Akamai shares on the open market at a price lower than the strike prices of virtually all the employees. That pretty much funded my first startup.
Since you seem to be good at picking the right horse early, what are your favorite new sites/companies right now?
I'm good at looking at the right horse early. I suck at picking the right horse early, otherwise I'd be far wealthier than I actually am. I tend to move far too slowly, even once I think I know where the right place to be is, and get in just as it's becoming popular (and get out just before it crashes - I was telling my sister, before I took my latest job, that I've been a part of almost every major bubble of the 21st century. Was at an all-teenage dot-com in 2000, a financial software startup in 2005-2007, and a web 2.0 startup in 2007-2008. I hope that's not reflective of Google's future prospects...) Makes for a comfortable living, but for real wealth you need to take a few more risks than I tend to...
Some things that I've been looking at that seem quite interesting to me now, though:
- LikeALittle.com
- Android. I think that long-term, it has more potential than iOS. The mobile phone space in general has the potential to be huge.
- OCR, computer vision, and other applications of machine learning to imaging problems.
- Functional programming languages, particularly Haskell
- YCombinator. I think PG's generally right about their being a trend toward startups in the future, and startups that serve startups will become quite big.
I also have the stinking suspicion that the next world-changing tech revolution is in the garage now, and not one of the startups founded from 2004-2010. I, of course, do not know what it is. But there've been a bunch of enabling technologies recently developed - mobile phones and cloud-computing come to mind. And there's also a bigger concentration of brainpower in a smaller volume than we've seen before, with the rise of Google/Facebook/Twitter/Palantir and supporting universities and startups in Silicon Valley. I'm somewhat wondering what will happen when Google ceases to be a nice place to work, because for the last 10 years, they've been recruiting the best minds from all over the planet, putting them 5-to-a-cube in a handful of buildings, and working really hard together. Much of what they learn is probably applicable to a wide range of problems, but because the company is so focused on search, I doubt we've seen all the developments that could come out of that.