NYT on Paul Graham's YCombinator Bootcamp
prostoalex writes "The New York Times tells the story of Paul Graham's YCombinator - a venture firm that specializes in funding early stage startups that's famour for startup bootcamps conducted twice a year in Silicon Valley and over on the East Coast. YCombinator's boot camps apparently attract a lot of employees out of major software companies, who are still young and want to run a software startup."
I enjoyed Startup School, it was a great experience. I managed to connect with quite a few people doing different things up and down the coast. Despite my travel problems (noted on another post), I would happily go again.
Y Combinator isn't targetting people like you. Or me, for that matter. They're quite up-front about this.
Does that mean that Paul Graham is a bad person or Y Combinator is a bad choice for the people they _are_ targetting? Not at all.
I wasn't able to be there in person (it's a bit far from England) but the MP3s of the talks were very informative.
Here is the link to the recordings. (Coralised)
I have some other associated bookmarks.
http://blog.grcm.net/
Ideas for Start ups -- An entertaining talk by Paul Graham on how entrepreneurs get ideas for start ups.
Hackers and Painters -- Another entertaining and informative talk by Paul Graham. Unlike architects (who figure out what to build) and engineers (who figure out how), great hackers and painters do both. Who makes a good hacker and how can you identify a good hacker/programmer in a job interview? Why is empathy an important skill for programmers? As a hacker who also studied painting in Europe, Paul may be uniquely qualified to write a book entitled Hackers and Painters. If you leave your day programming job only to get home and write more code, this is a great book for you.
What business can learn from open source -- Paul Graham, popular author and Lisp programmer, discusses what business can learn from open source. According to him, it's not about Linux or Firefox, but the forces that produced them. He delves into the reasons why open source is able to produce better software, why traditional workplaces are actually harmful to productivity and the reason why professionalism is overrated.