Y Combinator
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2014–2016
31:26 · 35K views · Oct 25, 2013
Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.
HN recalls it as a well-liked talk from a respected founder, cited on startup ambition and on how few servers StackOverflow needed.
3 comments from Hacker News
> Startups are overdosing on ambition these days > Not every billion dollar business starts with a billion dollar idea. Not everything unfundable by VCs is unworthy of doing. It's interesting the author is being a VC is understandably blinded by the bubble that never reports on such businesses. The vast majority of businesses created in the world, i.e. almost all small businesses, are exactly that. It's been done before and it's being done now, in large quantities. It's just so common that people don't feel writing medium posts about it and you don't tend to call them startups per se without the VC-funding and fast growth factor[1]. If you restrict the definition of a startup to this, then almost by definition you need such ambitious visions. [1]: [LINK] I remember Joel Spolsky talked at Startup School a few years back on this subject and he was spot on[2]. [2]: this video
Joel is a class act. He spoke at YC's Startup School, which brings out his unique perspective - this video
Actually, performance is quite important for scalability. A lot of sites written in Ruby / PHP have big scalability pains if they get popular. Twitter had to be re-written from Ruby to Java. Facebook had to completely rewrite PHP's compiler to make it close to a compiled / statically typed language. Joel Spolsky mentioned how StackOverflow only needed 3 servers to run it for a really long time, because it was coded in a compiled language. [1] [1] this video