Psssh... He wrote an OpenOffice clone in a programming language he himself designed with syntax like vector calculus.

Seriously, Word?!

Bite your tongue. Folks with far less to show are regularly promoted to sainthood here.

Marc climbed up from grad student to monster IPO, rode out huge corporate stuff at Netscape/AOL, left and started another company, raised huge money, built a huge business during the dot-com winter, and piloted the ship home through a dizzy chain of IPO/merger/acquisition. He is now blogging the best stuff about entrepreneuring you can read anywhere on the net right now.

You should listen to this guy...

Any time someone mentions "ability", you should ask "... to do what?"

If you're looking for ability to find new algorithms and prove their correctness, I probably win. If you're looking for ability to build a robust application (which is a key point to me -- I'm working on online backups, and the central point of backups is that they do NOT lose data, even if hardware failure occurs) I might win. If you're looking for ability to create an engaging Web 2.0 site, I definitely lose.

I'd assume that what YC means by "ability" is "ability to create whatever you've said on the application form that you intend to create" -- which in my case was an efficient, robust, and secure online backup system, but for most applications would be an engaging Web 2.0 site.

EDIT: Incidentally, it didn't even occur to me to mention the Putnam on the YC application form. For the "high level of ability" question I pointed towards my BSDCan'05 paper concerning stealing RSA keys on Intel CPUs with HyperThreading via an architectural side channel.

We're doing Adwords, plus a couple of other pay-per-click services. We spend about $500/month with Adwords, and haven't had trouble finding keywords to sit on for about $2-$3 (we avoid competing with our customers for keyword placement, which rules out a large pile of really expensive hosting-related terms)...keywords are expensive and getting moreso from adwords, so I'm putting most new spending on other options.

AdBrite is pretty good. You can buy full-time placement on quite a few sites, which is probably better for long-term effectiveness and brand awareness than per-click...I'm experimenting with that now. Sometimes it turns out really expensive though--I picked a few design-related sites, thinking web designers are also often webmasters, but so far, I've paid like $23 per click from one of them (from about 100k impressions)...I still have some time left on the ad, so it could drop a bit more as the ad has time to work, but I'm thinking I'll pick the best performers from the CPC ad list to buy full-time placement on in the future, rather than guessing about what fits.

TextLinkAds are too expensive and are kind of iffy on the "don't irritate your potential customers" scale, so I've signed up, but haven't bought any links yet.

Our best marketing tools are our various informational websites--we get 50% of our clicks from our Open Source project website, and another 10% from our documentation wiki (which contains our two published books on the topic of our Open Source project and gets quite a lot of traffic).

One interesting thing to note: Adwords clicks are stickier than any of the other types. Folks stick around for nearly 5 pages after finding us through Google Adwords, while Adbrite clicks stay an average of 2 pages (though some are better--very closely related pages tend to produce much better stickiness), and the other sources are somewhere in between. So, I suspect Adwords clicks are better qualified than those from the other sources, and thus worth more.

Of course, if you can't find keywords that you can competitively spend on, then you can't really make good use of Adwords. But, I'm surprised. I've used Adwords in two fields that were pretty competitive (in my previous business I was butting heads on one side with CDNs, and on the other with various types of server appliance vendors and proxy software vendors...while my current business sits along-side the highly competitive hosting industry, which has some of the highest per-click rates that I'm aware of), and never had trouble finding some less trodden territory to live in. Are you sure you're not going overly broad or trying to buy ads that would better serve your business partners or your customers? You obviously want to sit on the same spots as your competitors, if you can afford it, plus if you can come up with some alternatives (like for people who don't know what your product is normally called but know what they want to accomplish) that's a good way to capture customers that no one else has first access to.

So, it really depends on your industry, how wide a range of keywords would be useful to you, and whether you've got to fight with a dozen other companies or just one or two.

And, of course, Adwords is not the only kind of marketing that exists. It's just the easiest. You can advertise in all sorts of strange places--just figure out where your customers go, what they read, etc. and get your ads into those places via whatever means necessary.

BTW-Google's syndication network is a huge ripoff, in general. Do not let them run your ads on the whole network (it's enabled by default). It was eating our budget in a few hours each day for worthless clicks, and leaving no money for far higher quality clicks from the search engine results.

"followed by Cambridge/Boston" -- really? When I lived there, it was very very hard to find technical people that were not "corporate drones". I new maybe of only one or two startup (I am not sure they ended up anywhere). Most other companies are "enterprise oriented", such as VM-ware types.

I remember attending few session at an incubator close to MIT campus. The speeches were given for people that had build products like "scanners" for airports, and government etc.. not software oriented One thing I remember, this guy from HBS, with a very smug attitude ( maybe b/c he got into haavad he thought he was better than everybody). Not a hacker friendly atmosphere at all. Most people there were the "business" types, that had "ideas" and buzzwords, but very low on concrete implementation and treated technical skills just as a commodity that could bought off in India.

Boston is not "eccentric" and "whacky" enough to support an environment with lots of startups with crazy and novel ideas. Here is few facts:

You don't see naked people in the streets on Boston's fairs. It is mostly family/9-5-er or young students, which tells you about the general population of the place. If you are in your mid 20s, and out of school, it is not a good place to be.

You can't buy alcohol on Sundays You can't have wine/beer in a coffee place (Puritanism at max)

Most coffee/food places around Harvard sq. and Davis sq (the artsy part) closed by MIDNIGHT!!! WTF? Most good programmers I know are most efficient at midnight, and having things/places to get "fuel", (coffee and food) and some re-energizing is very important.

For many reasons, I think NYC would be a better place for a startup, if it wasn't so damn expensive, which kills ideas that have no business model right away. But as a place is very vibrant, lots of stuff to do, good looking women, and lots of money around, which are motivators for people to try harder and make it happen.

The only thing that the Boston/Cambridge are has is it's student population. -- which not surprisingly moves out somewhere else after school, and that it is a very walk-able city. You can walk to places, take the T (subway), which is very cool.

Personally, I like SF a lot, but I would never live in the South Bay. All those seas of parking lots and the "drive everywhere" culture is very depressing and soul drenching. Efficient for big corporations like HP and Yahoo, but I can't see it being good for a small start up. My preference for startups: SF beats them all. NYC second (if it wasn't so damn expensive), but it has bonus point for being so close to the old media advertising, then Cambridge/Boston (for having so many college kids around).

I think, Eastern Europe is going to become more prominent in the IT world. You have lots of smart and well educated people at sciences, still cheap, and with a good sense of entrepreneurship (unlike India or China, which see life more as a career, eastern europeans are new to capitalism, and view this time as a great opportunity). It will take a decade or so, but you will see more things coming out from places like Hungary, Croatia, Romania etc. I doubt it will ever be a single large European "hub".

Edited for spelling, and adding some content.

It seems to me that the strategy was to loosen some panties and inspire some laughter. I enjoyed the fruits of both efforts.

Not including China and India (which I don't know well enough to talk about), roughly: SV, Boston, {Seattle, Austin, NYC, London}.

Now that's a great reply that adds value. Unlike this one.

Will giving you a bunch of money allow me to "Work at HOME! and earn $5000 a week!"?

Jokes aside... Can you elaborate on just what "this" and "it" is? Cause "this and "it" sound like giving your company money without provisions so that you can continue to remain in its employ.

Superfluous disclosure: I have no idea if I speak for anyone else here.

GoDaddy is fine, until you have problems. I did a consulting gig once in the same office complex as them, and I had better luck getting an issue fixed by asking random smokers out front of their building if they could change something for me than I did calling their support number and going through the escalation procedures.

God damn, this is the most incoherent crap I've read in a long while. Can we get a downmod arrow?

If you're in europe, London is definately the place to be.

But bring a big suitcase, pack a suit and a tie and stuff the remaining space with money ;-)