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."

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Paul Graham

[pHatidic]

If you don't know, there are some amazing talks given by Paul Graham that can be downloaded on the net. I will paste the links below, but all of these are copied from my lens on start ups (see my sig), where there is a good mix of free start up goodness and amazon link referral whoring (because the only thing worse than tricking Americans into reading is tricking Americans into reading while raising money for charity).

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.