I know the sample size is small, but how did the +30 people compare to their younger peers, in terms of productivity/execution, dealing with adversity, etc? Any noticeable difference in character due to age?
Lots of talk about 'healthy white males' and 'guys' on news.yc tonight. I understand women are in the minority, but we do exist.
Correction: I just re-checked the other post I was referring to and they said "healthy young male" not "healthy white male". My apologies for the misquote.
Thanks. Just to be clear: this isn't about my 'feelings.' It's actually about having a successful startup: one major reason people fund startups is because they think the founders have the right characteristics that will make them succeed. They're looking for a certain type of person, not just an idea. Through its posts and comments, this community shares a mental model of what type of person makes a successful founder. Having that image be of a particular gender negatively impacts those of us who happen to be women or who have women in their startup team.
This example from Founders at Work struck me: Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, related an anecdote where she and her partner, who was also her husband, met with a VC firm. Caterina didn't fit the VC's mental model of a founder. After the meeting the VC told her husband 'not to bring his wife to VC meetings.'
I guess that's true in most industries - women had to work much harder than men just to get their foot in the door, but eventually perceptions change - when there are enough women there to change the (mostly unconscious, I think) perception.
I think that there's a good chance for a change here. I know very few female hackers, but they tend to be really good - I guess it takes being way above average to be able to penetrate a group that's predominantly the other gender/race/views/whatever. However, if you do have the ability, and the tenacity to survive in such hostile environment, you probably have a better-than-average chance of success.
Ha! It was me who wrote the "white males" comment.
I write the way I code. Start with as big a generalization as possible and fix my edge cases at runtime...
Alas that a female news.ycer is an edge case. Even when they punch holes in my unified theory of all male startups, they are infinitely more pleasant than bus errors.
heh. Sometimes I wish. i mean, since i was 18 (and was in college) I've known kids 21 and up....So if we wanted a six pack it was there. But only once did we ever get into a club, and I never was desperate enough to dish out $100 for a fake
If I would have had the spare $1300 for the printers + magnetic strip reader/writer plus an oddly calibrated internal risk calculus I would have really been in business.
I have a friend who almost got a felony conviction b/c of fake ids. But that was the 80s. These days, I don't think you'd get a plea.. identity crime is a way bigger deal.
Well my beer drinking varies by season. I'm in Atlanta and it's hot right now, so Heineken fits perfectly. In a couple months I'll move to other stuff.
Don't underestimate that green bottle though. Some of my best work has been with its help.
The first was a group of college friends who wrote software for handhelds. It was really fun, and made enough to keep us above the grad student poverty line. We also always had nice(ish) computers. Given my low expectations, I count Scrawl as a success.
It was (effectively) cannibalized to start PatientKeeper. We raised ~$70M in venture and our software is now in use at an amazing number of hospitals. Though it hasn't had (I love this euphemism) liquidity event, I count it as a success. We employ ~90 people and touch thousands of physicans and hundreds of thousands of lives.
At the risk of being a tease, I'm not ready to talk about the third.
Before architecture: Victoria Bicycles (startup @ 17), Moondog BBS @17 (Used a commodore 64's random access floppy drive to create a dbase sytem), Business Design Consultants (Used an IBM PC w/ Watson soundcard and Dbase to create touch tone ordering system) @ 22
"We used to have a joke in college, that the definition of a college man was somebody who couldn't count up to 70 without laughing." -- Don Knuth, after recommending a 69-bit processor design
.......The Austrian team encoded their qubits using a property of light particles, also called photons, known as polarisation. This property describes the direction in which they oscillate.
Quantum teleportation relies on an aspect of physics known as "entanglement", whereby the properties of two particles can be tied together even when they are far apart. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance".
