This is really great - refreshing to have something that's instantly useful, with no need to signup/login. Really fast, immediately helpful - this is wonderful.
So, I'm back. I recommended it to a few colleagues, they're gonna try it as well. Let me take back a few things I said: I'd pay for this, but not that much. But, agencies and PR firms (obvious) could actually get a lot of value out of something like this.
If this is true, maybe there's something particularly interesting about the '84/'85 generation.
These people were about 10 years old when the Web happened and 15 years old when Napster and digital cameras took off, so they probably haven't written too many snailmail letters, bought CDs or taken photos on film.
Perhaps that gives them a perspective that's more "digitally native" than older people, yet they have more experience than the '90s-born generation.
(I'm one of those "old" people I guess, being born in 1980...)
There probably is nothing unique about he '84/'85 generation.
There is an unconscious bias when reviewing applications (especially during interviews) to vote/side with people that look/act/know the same references/same point in life/etc like you. Since previous YC graduates both recommend and (some) decide who gets in, they match what they know.
So I was born in '84 and I've been following YC since it launched in 2005. I think there are actually a few unique things about this generation:
- Grew up reading Slashdot, steeped in the values and beliefs of the OSS community.
- Were coming of age during the golden age of blogging ('05-'06) when people with a lot of industry experience were making their insights widely available for the first time. E.g. during the beginning of college when we were all trying to figure out what to do with our lives, suddenly the knowledge of how and why to do a startup became available.
- Coming of age when not suddenly it became possible (but before it easy) to build software that reached a billion people and changed the world.
- Coming of age during the birth of marketing 2.0 -- The Cluetrain Manifesto, Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra, Hugh McCleod, etc.
- Coming of age during the birth of Web 2.0, when suddenly every web business needed to be rebuilt around new design principles, technology (AJAX), and promotional techniques.
- Around for the birth of Y Combinator and The Facebook.
- Impossible to get a job with any possible upward mobility when graduating.
Most of this was happening our sophomore/junior year in college, when suddenly we knew all of this really important world-changing stuff that almost no one with established careers was paying attention to yet.
So yeah, I'm sure our generation isn't unique and wasn't the only one affected by these things, but I do think they probably had a disproportionate impact on us.
My theory - people in this age group entered college at a very low point in the software development market. This was both because of the dot-com bubble crash, and because outsourcing had just begun and quality outsourcing was far cheaper than it is today. C, Java, and horrible APIs dominated at the time. Javascript and browser compatibility were a mess. It was a far less glamorous industry than it's become now over the past 15 years.
Few people who began training for a development career at this time were in it just for quick money.
It'd be nice to see this data as a distribution. Would tell us a lot more than a median. This might help older founders decide if it's a good fit, or if we'd be outliers there.
Why would you not assume the opposite? I would assume the most experienced people with the most knowledge, contacts, and money to be in their 40s and 50s.
Warning, I'm about to make a couple of massive generalisations...
I would guess that most 40-50 year olds who already have knowledge, contacts and money don't apply to YC, probably because they don't feel that they need it.
I expect that founders at that age are more likely to be coming from a position of experience within their target industry, i.e. solving a problem that they've seen/experienced. They may not be trying to become "X for Y" but solving problem Z that a limited number of clients will pay good money to have solved.
Older founders may have more to risk, so the "go big or go home" model may not be as attractive to them.
As I said, this is a huge generalisation with a lot of guesswork thrown in. I would love to see some more detailed data so that we could draw some conclusions.
Not to mention the fact that it's probably quite a bit harder to convince a group of 40-50 year olds to move to SV for 3 months for $18k than it is a group a 21 year olds.
It's $120k now but yes, one 40 year old engineer working full time makes that in 9 months. Why doesn't YC offer more attractive investment, say $500k, and allow non-SV offices? Is it just the presumption that this won't lead to large returns? Is there any data to support that?
Silicon Valley culture is inherently ageist. The median age is by far the most surprising statistic to me. I would have thought it'd be at least 5 years younger. To me the ageist aspect is part of the idea that only young people should be building products for young people.
This is perhaps an insight into the types of companies YC is funding. They may just have a larger pool of B2B and enterprise companies this session.
Well, a big point of YC is that it provides the "contacts and money". And of course anyone who is further along in their career has more at risk by going to a startup.
In my case (I'm 48) I've been applying to YC (third time lucky) because I have plenty of experience, but don't have the contacts. I suspect most people outside Silicon Valley or the US don't have the kind of contacts that YC can provide, or the kind of money that is necessary to scale their business.
I think the median age reflects the types of companies in the batch. I think in general, younger entrepreneurs take on Consumer, maybe marketplace, and perhaps some dev tools and hardware.
The remaining categories will likely have older, more experienced people
I'd like to know more about the biomedical companies. There's a lot more of them than I would have imagined. They have to be relatively capital intensive to get going, at least compared to a software startup.
That would have been my guess as well. For many B2B problems you kind of have to understand the right hand side B which means some industry experience. Same for something like aerospace and finance I'd guess.
That being said I also intuitively assumed a younger age. Most certainly bias on my side since it's the youngest founders I tend to read about online.
After installing the extension, open the extensions menu, find it and click "Inspect views: background page", then check the JS file that it references.
Submarine has a slightly different approach to Highrise - it focuses on minimising data entry, so emails with a contact are automatically stored without having to remember to bcc the app. Similarly, it also auto-archives conversations you have with contacts over Twitter, which I don't think Highrise does.
It's got quite a big focus on search too, so you can run reasonably complex searches like "journalist twitter followers > 2000 covered:yes last emailed more than (1 year ago)", which will show you (as you might expect) all the journalists that have more than 2000 twitter followers, who've previously written about you but that you haven't spoken to over email in more than a year. There are other commands too, and I'm planning on adding more over time.
Finally, I think the Chrome extension is pretty cool - the image on the homepage does a better job of showing it than I can explain, but it gives you a little button in Chrome that, when clicked, pops up with a contact's details if you're on their website (or Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc profile).
Hi HN - I've just shipped the first iteration of Submarine, a CRM that's built to store all your team's marketing contacts. It auto-archives conversations over email and Twitter, and has a Chrome extension that brings up contact data if you're on a contact's website (or Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, G+ or Pinterest page).
I'd love some feedback on the landing page, and on the app itself (there's a free 30 day trial, and you don't need a credit card to try it out).
