This whole article seems to be based on a misunderstanding of why Reddit succeeded. It looks so simple; therefore it must have succeeded merely because I promoted it. But everything simple looks easy in hindsight. If it was so easy, why didn't anyone do it before? Technically it was possible to build 10 years ago.

(And no, Reddit didn't copy Digg. The founders of Reddit didn't know about Digg when they started, and the two derive from different sources. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of editors. Reddit is Del.icio.us/popular driven by voting instead of bookmarking.)

I really like this article. It has an opinion, bit sarcastic and tells a good story and totally misses the point. Lets start using the music industry analogy.

Firstly all the guys trying out in the contest are mostly musicians. Musicians that can firstly have enough skill to play instruments, have the youth, energy and attitude to create their own tunes and sound. They come from a different era of their predecessors. Turned off by the gimmicky clothes, fancy hairdo's and makeup of binary boys of the 80's and 90's.

More important they are students of music. They have a band, can play their own music but are missing something. Not talent, not ideas (well mostly) but the knowledge and chance to play a good gig and record and commercialise. Do they sell out and re-create the cheesy sounds of the middle of the road Windbag Recording studios? Do they defect to the artsy experimental Sol Records?

No. They know in their heart there is a new sound. More importantly they know there is a growing audience that is looking for a new sound. A new sound that says, "screw you record companies. we can do it for ourselves. we don't care what you think... %$ush off &!@(^@!!! " And so begins the bad-boy image.

Now lets look at the exec. He's a Rollins type guy. Had quite a few hits way back and understands the music industry. More importantly whats wrong with it. There is a gap. A big gap. All the suits are funding bands with mega-dollars for wardrobe, explosions and experimental albums with 27 minute guitar solos.

So along with a few other band members and roadies they create a company and hatch a plan to blow the other record companies and distributors out of the water. By reducing the cost to sign, nurture and release unknown bands and make some profit at the same time nurturing talent. Something the big boys have seem to have forgotten.

Thats right unknown bands. Untested, talented, raw and more importantly ones that want to succeed at all costs with an attitude that makes the older more established bands sneer at the youngsters. With their clunky looking instruments, ripped t-shirts and shorts and attitude. They sneer also because they realise, these youngsters can do what they cannot do. Faster, with less money still managing to listen to their audience and evolve where required.

Then one has a hit. Others in the label start getting serious airplay. The suits take notice and a new sound is created.

Sound fanciful? Well I'm really just re-telling the story of punk-music. A movement that smashed the pomposity of the glam-rock 70's and while short lived and patchy allowed a core group of musicians to succeed where they otherwise they could not have. In the process giving us Lou Reed, Pretenders, Romones, Blondie, Pattie Smith, Talking Heads etc.

YC is that anti-establishment incarnation of punk music in software. Long live 'minimalism, speed, and arrogance' ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_music#Early_history

http://www.socialparking.com/

"If you had the power to control hundreds of thousands of unique Internet visitors each and every day, where would you send them?"

It looks like he's planning to create content for domain name squatters. He's also done search engine optimization before under Zen Marketing, and chinese translations under yet another "startup".

Ethics aside, I thought that it was interesting to see that someone can manage a startup while being in China. I'd love to do that, although I'm not sure that the YC model would work. Funding would be a problem.

And it IS a pain to adapt to all possible screen sizes - granted, it might be a problem of designing the application, but as I was working on games, the design was often based on fixed size images. Especially as font support is crap with J2ME. Maybe flash for mobiles does a better job, haven't tried it.

Another thing that used to suck with J2ME: there is no standard for text entry, so it is difficult to integrate text entry nicely into your application. The only standard way is to switch to a blank screen that supports your phones text entry method, so you can't integrate it into your design.

Another problem, which I currently face: even if you know what phones you support, how can your customer know? Phones are usually not labeled with their technical name, so if you say "Nokia 6230i supported", it might mean nothing to your customer.

I wouldn't say it is impossible to make money with mobile applications, though. It seems also the price for mobile networking is falling.

Edit: the mobile games company I was working for was and is very successful and also in the meantime was bought by a big international entertainment company (think the Coca Cola of Entertainment). When I was there it was a 7 people company, so I think it qualifies as a successful startup (I think now they have 50 employees).

I hear Google has some of these guys answering support email!

Maybe if they spent the time writing software instead of practicing rap music. Talk about wrong time, wrong place.

Once you have thousands of employees, each one is now given a role that is replaceable. Do this specific task, every day. If you quit, we find somebody else. The job becomes boring, just so the company can easily replace you.

In other words, startups just care about the product. But big companies have the same mentality towards their own employees. They no longer limit a system to product development, but systemize employees as well. Employees are no longer there to innovate, but to be a cog.

That's why the same companies that start out being created by visionaries, suck to work at when they are huge, because now they are looking for cogs. Hiring is just part of a system to replace some previous cogs.