Y Combinator: Boot Camp for Startups

by Steven Levy

The Y Combinator offices sit at the dead center of Silicon Valley, in Mountain View, on a street called Pioneer Way. Outside, the traffic hums along CA-z85 headed either south to Cupertino or north toward Google headquarters. Inside, the decor of the main room combines modern office (big whiteboard, bright orange noise-dampening panels) with camp dining hall (long trestle tables). Y Combinator shares space with a company called Anybots—which makes robots that can be controlled remotely—and occasionally a droid will motor through the room on a Segway-style base.

On this November day, the Terminator itself could be roaming around the main room and the young men (and the occasional woman) gathered here wouldn’t notice. They are attending Interview Day, a chance to compete for a spot in what has become the tech world’s most prestigious program for budding digital entrepreneurs. The interviewees include former product managers at Google, a Midwestern accountant, and a 17-year-old high school student. They hail from Philadelphia, Minnesota, Greece, Russia, England, Spain, and San Francisco. And like would-be starlets flocking to Hollywood, they have come to Mountain View in the hope that Y Combinator will turn them from nameless coders into Silicon Valley celebrities.

Technically, Y Combinator is a launchpad for startups, but that description doesn’t quite capture the experience it provides or the influence it wields. Twice a year, the company—under the tutelage of its founder, Paul Graham—hosts a three-month boot camp. Each team that’s accepted receives seed funding—$11,000 for the group, plus $3,000 more for each member of the founding team. In exchange, Y Combinator gets a small stake in the startup, usually 6 or 7 percent. But the seed capital is almost beside the point. “Really, the money is just for living expenses,” Graham says. “Like a scholarship to go to college.” The program’s real draw is an unmatchable entrée into the otherwise closed world of high-stakes Internet entrepreneurship. Over a period of 13 weeks, enrollees hobnob with some of the industry’s most powerful investors and innovators as they attempt to turn their embryonic ideas into full-fledged businesses. And, at the end of their tenure, they get to participate in Demo Day, a kind of funding free-for-all during which they present their plans to the world’s most respected venture capital firms and angel investors.

Anyone accepted to Y Combinator joins a group that includes many of the elite startups of the past five years. The founders of Dropbox, Reddit, Loopt, and Scribd were all discovered and nurtured by Graham. Indeed, his picks have been so prescient that getting chosen by Y Combinator has become a geek version of the Good Housekeeping Seal. Tech blogs always cover the launches of Y Combinator companies. Angel investors clamor to fund them. Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb—a breakout Y Combinator startup that matches travelers with private lodgings—compares Graham to legendary music producer John Hammond. “Just as Hammond found Bob Dylan when he was a bad singer no one knew, Graham can spot potential.”

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Brutal

[ed.  No other way to describe it, this is a terrible place to be.  Usually you can find a little trap door at the bottom that allows you to slip under and come up behind a wave as it rumbles over the top.  Not here. That second little curl near the base kills that option.  With the wave starting to throw and everything closing out behind, I'm guessing this unfortunate person had maybe half a second before they got flipped, churned and thoroughly crushed.]

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Rejected

by A. Barton Hinkle

Dear Congress, your credit application has been turned down.

The Honorable _________
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

The Honorable _________
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Mr. or Ms. _______,

Thank you for your interest in the American Public Trust's Gold Card credit program. Rest assured your application has been given thorough and careful consideration by the American people.

After reviewing the information provided in your application as well as your credit report, we regret to say that we are unable to extend you further credit at this time. The reasons for our decision are as follows:

(1) Inadequate income.Our records indicate that your annual income for the 2011 taxable year was $2,170,000,000,000. You have requested a credit limit of $17,000,000,000,000. These figures exceed the American Public's debt-to-income guidelines for credit issuance.

(2) Excessive spending. The receipts you provided indicate your annual expenditures for the 2011 fiscal year total $3,820,000,000,000, or $1,650,000,000,000 more than your total income for the year. The American Public prefers that its members of Congress maintain a positive or neutral rather than a negative cash flow.

(3) High debt utilization. Your credit report indicates that you have a credit limit of $14,300,000,000,000, and of that amount you have utilized $14,300,000,000,000, for a debt utilization ratio of 100 percent. Consumer banking industry guidelines recommend a debt utilization ratio of no greater than 30 percent for standard creditworthiness, and 10 percent for exemplary creditworthiness. A debt utilization rate of 100 percent meets our classification of "You're *&^%$#@! kidding, right?"

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Shades of Grief

When does mourning become a mental illness?

by Virginia Hughes

Sooner or later most of us suffer deep grief over the death of someone we love. The experience often causes people to question their sanity—as when they momentarily think they have caught sight of their loved one on a crowded street. Many mourners ponder, even if only abstractedly, their reason for living. But when are these disturbing thoughts and emotions normal—that is to say, they become less consuming and intense with the passage of time—and when do they cross the line to pathology, requiring ongoing treatment with powerful antidepressants or psychotherapy, or both?

Two proposed changes in the “bible” of psychiatric disorders—­the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—­aim to answer that question when the book’s fifth edition comes out in 2013. One change expected to appear in the DSM-5 reflects a growing consensus in the mental health field; the other has provoked great controversy.

In the less controversial change, the manual would add a new category: Complicated Grief Disorder, also known as traumatic or prolonged grief. The new diagnosis refers to a situation in which many of grief’s common symptoms—such as powerful pining for the deceased, great difficulty moving on, a sense that life is meaningless, and bitterness or anger about the loss—­last longer than six months. The controversial change focuses on the other end of the time spectrum: it allows medical treatment for depression in the first few weeks after a death. Currently the DSM specifically bars a bereaved person from being diagnosed with full-blown depression until at least two months have elapsed from the start of mourning.

Those changes matter to patients and mental health professionals because the manual’s definitions of mental illness determine how people are treated and, in many cases, whether the therapy is paid for by insurance. The logic behind the proposed revisions, therefore, merits a further look.

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Remains of the Day

“The scattered tea goes with the leaves... and every day a sunset dies.”

~ Djuna Barnes

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Super Heavy

by Andy Greene

For the first time since the Rolling Stones formed nearly 50 years ago, Mick Jagger is part of a new band: Super Heavy – featuring Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and Indian film composer A.R. Rahman. The band has quietly been recording together over the past 18 months, with their debut LP planned for sometime around September. "It's different from anything else I've ever been involved in," Jagger tells Rolling Stone. "The music is very wide-ranging – from reggae to ballads to Indian songs in Urdu."

The group got its start two years ago when Dave Stewart called Jagger from his home in Jamaica. "I live in Lime Hall right above St. Ann's Bay," says Stewart. "It's kind of the jungle, and sometimes I'd hear three sound systems all playing different things. I always love that, along with Indian orchestras. I said to Mick, ‘How could we make a fusion?' We were talking about an experiment, and then we started talking about voices. It was all born from that conversation."

Jagger loved the idea, and after lots of brainstorming and phone calls around the world, they settled on Stone, A.R. Rahman and Marley - whose rhythm section helped flesh out the band. "We wanted a convergence of different musical styles," says Jagger. "We were always overlapping styles, but they were nevertheless separate."

About 18 months ago, the band gathered in a Los Angeles studio. None of them had prepared any music. "We didn't know what the hell we were doing," says Stewart. "We were just jamming and making a noise. It was like when a band first starts up in your garage. Sometimes Damien would kick it off and then Joss would sing something on top of it. We might have a 22 minute jam, and it would become a six minute song."

The loose method was inspiring for Jagger. "One of the beauties is that, just speaking as a vocalist, I did other things," Jagger says. "I played guitar and harmonica, but there's four vocalist on the album. Not everything was reliant on me.” The band’s name came from some improvised vocals by Marley. "He was just singing 'Heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy, super heavy,'" says Stewart. "We thought that sounded good and it sort of stuck with us."

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All In the Family

Healthcare, schools, police, tax breaks: which would you keep, slash, or cut? The axe has to swing, so where, if you were the lumberjack, would you aim it? It's the central, polarizing question in this age of austerity.

by Umair Haque

Or is it? Maybe relying on cuts to reboot prosperity is a bit like starting a diet to treat Alzheimer's: probably not going to work.

Consider an allegory: a household racking up debt not just because they have easy credit, but because they're a dysfunctional family to begin with. Meet the new Joneses: they're a little less Cleaver and little more Soprano.

Dad Jones is the CEO of Toxico, a major, blue-chip energy corporation. He's an imperious millionaire, but he's stingier than Scrooge McDuck. Though he rakes it in, he flat-out refuses to contribute much, if anything, towards basic household costs--and when the family sets up rules to make him, he quickly finds loopholes. In fact, last year, instead of contributing to the household purse, he managed to find a way get a net contribution from it.

Then there's Grandma Jones. She's not elderly by today's standards, and she's got plenty of years ahead of her. But even now, she demands nothing but the best of care, even when she might not need it. Worse, she won't hear of taking out of her own retirement account to finance it.

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Spamalytics

by John Markoff

For years, a team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, the billions of unwanted e-mail messages generated by networks of zombie computers controlled by the rogue programs called botnets. They even coined a term, “spamalytics,” to describe their work.

Now they have concluded an experiment that is not for the faint of heart: for three months they set out to receive all the spam they could (no quarantines or filters need apply), then systematically made purchases from the Web sites advertised in the messages.

The hope, the scientists said, was to find a “choke point” that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. And in a paper to be presented on Tuesday at the annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, Calif., they will report that they think they have found it.

It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies.

The researchers looked at nearly a billion messages and spent several thousand dollars on about 120 purchases. No single purchase was more than $277.

If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, “you’d cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,” said one of the scientists, Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego, who worked with colleagues at San Diego and Berkeley and at the International Computer Science Institute.

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Whose Failing Grade Is It?

by Lisa Belkin

Since the subject today is schooling, let’s start with a quiz:

1. A third grader in Florida is often late for class. She tends to forget her homework and is unprepared for tests. The teacher would like to talk to her parents about this, but they fail to attend parent-teacher conferences. The teacher should:

a) fail the student.
b) fail the parents.

2. A middle-school student in Alaska is regularly absent, and his grades are suffering as a result. The district should:

a) fail the student.
b) fine the parents $500 a day for every day the student is not in school.

3. A California kindergartener has been absent, without a doctor’s note or other “verifiable reason,” 10 times in one semester. The district should:

a) call the parents.
b) call the district attorney and have charges brought against the parents.

The answer, under state laws that have been proposed (No. 1), or recently enacted (No. 2 and No. 3), is “b” on all counts: If a student is behaving badly, punish Mom and Dad.

Teachers are fed up with being blamed for the failures of American education, and legislators are starting to hear them. A spate of bills introduced in various states now takes aim squarely at the parents. If you think you can legislate teaching, the notion goes, why not try legislating parenting?

It is a complicated idea, taking on the controversial question of whether parents, teachers or children are most to blame when a child fails to learn.

But the thinking goes like this: If you look at schools that “work,” as measured by test scores and graduation rates, they all have involved (overinvolved?) parents, who are on top of their children’s homework, in contact with their children’s teachers, and invested in their children’s futures. So just require the same of parents in schools that don’t work, and the problem is solved (or, at least, dented), right?

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Saturday Night Mix

The Charms of Eleanor

by Russell Baker

In 1918, during the fourteenth year of their marriage, Eleanor Roosevelt, age thirty-three, discovered that Franklin, age thirty-six, was in love with her young social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Long afterward, Eleanor told her friend Joseph Lash that the discovery was devastating, that the bottom seemed to have dropped out of her life. Yet as her subsequent history persuasively testifies, it was also her liberating moment, a life-changing event that opened a world of glorious possibilities for a woman not too timid to explore them.

Until then she had been bound to a stifling marriage in which her life was spent in unobtrusively loyal service to Franklin’s gaudy ambition and in childbearing. There had been six pregnancies in the marriage’s first twelve years; sex, she later told her daughter Anna, was an ordeal to be borne.

It was a marriage under constant surveillance by Franklin’s mother, the omnipresent Sara Delano, a live-in mother-in-law out of a Gothic soap opera. Sara cast an authoritative shadow over household operations, child rearing, and, worst of all, over Franklin. He was her only son, and she adored him but seemed determined to keep him her boy forever. This desire to clasp him in unending maternal embrace may have accounted for her refusal to surrender her tight control of the family’s considerable wealth.

The discovery that he was having some sort of affair with another woman produced a family crisis fraught with great pain for Eleanor and great danger for Franklin. To those who now think of them as giants at ease on the world stage, their behavior in this moment of emotional turmoil may seem astonishingly youthful in its innocence. Yet they were certainly not young, and the year, after all, was 1918, a time when philandering husbands were a Washington commonplace that capital society shrugged off as part of the local culture.

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Low Voltage

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What Did Jesus Do?

by Adam Gopnik

When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? This curious criterion governs historical criticism of Gospel texts: the more improbable or “difficult” an episode or remark is, the likelier it is to be a true record, on the assumption that you would edit out all the weird stuff if you could, and keep it in only because the tradition is so strong that it can’t plausibly be excluded. If Jesus says something nice, then someone is probably saying it for him; if he says something nasty, then probably he really did.

So then, the scholars argue, the author of Mark, whoever he was—the familiar names conventionally attached to each Gospel come later*—added the famous statement of divine favor, descending directly from the heavens as they opened. But what does the voice say? In Mark, the voice says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased,” seeming to inform a Jesus who doesn’t yet know that this is so. But some early versions of Luke have the voice quoting Psalm 2: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” Only in Matthew does it announce Jesus’ divinity to the world as though it were an ancient, fixed agreement, not a new act. In Mark, for that matter, the two miraculous engines that push the story forward at the start and pull it toward Heaven at the end—the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection—make no appearance at all. The story begins with Jesus’ adult baptism, with no hint of a special circumstance at his birth, and there is actually some grumbling by Jesus about his family (“Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house, is a prophet without honor,” he complains); it ends with a cry of desolation as he is executed—and then an enigmatic and empty tomb. (It’s left to the Roman centurion to recognize him as the Son of God after he is dead, while the verses in Mark that show him risen were apparently added later.)

The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith. The more one knows, the less one knows. Was Jesus a carpenter, or even a carpenter’s son? The Greek word tekto¯n, long taken to mean “carpenter,” could mean something closer to a stoneworker or a day laborer. (One thinks of the similar shadings of a word like “printer,” which could refer to Ben Franklin or to his dogsbody.) If a carpenter, then presumably he was an artisan. If a stoneworker, then presumably he spent his early years as a laborer, schlepping from Nazareth to the grand Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris, nearby, to help build its walls and perhaps visit its theatre and agora. And what of the term “Son of Man,” which he uses again and again in Mark, mysteriously: “The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” As Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in his new, immensely ambitious and absorbing history, “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years” (Viking; $45), the phrase, which occurs in the Gospels “virtually exclusively in the reported words of Jesus,” certainly isn’t at all the same as the later “Son of God,” and may merely be Aramaic for “folks like us.”

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Cruise Control

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Tale of Two Explosions

by Jesus Diaz

55 years ago today, the United States tested a hydrogen bomb over Namu island, in the Bikini Atoll, Pacific Ocean. The 15 megaton bomb exploded at 15,000 feet, causing a four-mile fireball, 500 times brighter than the Sun.

It was the first airborne test of the hydrogen bomb—created in 1951 by Edward Teller and Stanisław Ulam—and yet another nuclear test of the long Bikini Atoll series. By then, another kind of atomic weapon was already being tested in beaches all around the world, one of the most fascinating pieces of garment ever devised by humankind: The bikini.

The origin of the bikini

It was in May 1946 when Louis Réard—a French car engineer who at the time was running his mom's lingerie shop in Paris—introduced two small pieces of clothing, advertising them as "the smallest bathing suit in the world." Simultaneously and unknowingly, fashion designer Jacques Heim was working on a similar design.Réard named his invention the bikini because of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests. He thought that everyone would be shocked by the risqué display of curves and belly buttons. He was right. During many years, the bikini caused more surprise than any of the nuclear tests conducted by the United States and the Soviet Union. The joke at the time was that that the "bikini" split the "atom", because it was introduced right after a tiny single-piece bathing suit called the Atome.

The bikini was so explosive that even American bathing suit queens disapproved, as the Los Angeles Times writes in 1949:

The bathing beauty queen-blond Bebe Shopp, 18, of Hopkins, Minn.-got an enthusiastic welcome in Paris, but she said she hasn't changed her mind about French swim suits. ... 'I don't approve of Bikini suits for American girls,' Bebe told her French interviewers. 'The French girls can wear them if they want to, but I still don't approve of them on American girls.

Little could she imagine the tiny g-strings to be used only a decade later.

The real origin of the bikini

But while we should all rejoice for the invention of the bikini, the car engineer and the fashion designer were only rediscovering it. In fact, the two piece bathing suit was already being used in the greco-roman world, back in the third century AD.

 

This mosaic—discovered in Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily—is good proof of that. Its thousands of colored tiles show women in bikini playing and exercising by the beach. Habemus Pamela Anderson.

This wasn't the only display of bikinis at the time. In Pompeii, archeologists discovered several statues of the goddess Venus wearing a bikini. And only six hundred years before this, the greek philosopher Democritus formulated his atomic theory of the cosmos, which explained that our world was made of tiny, invisible particles that were in constant motion.

Yet another confirmation that there's nothing new under the sun.

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Agreeing on Groupon

by Joshua Gains

Harry Truman famously begged for a one-handed economist. Why? He was sick of his economic advisers saying "on the other hand." Charles Schultz expressed similar frustration here. The idea that economists hedge their bets or disagree constantly with one another is a feature of the discipline. We see it today over issues such as the deficit and health care reform.

But right now, there is one issue on which every economist I know of actually agrees (and in an unqualified way): that Groupon (a) should have accepted the purported $6 billion bid from Google when it had the chance; (b) that Google was insane to have offered it; and (c) that Groupon is pretty much doomed or, at least, will have fleeting glory. Put simply, the new coupon industry is following a path common to so many new markets, with a leader with initial success, a flurry of entrants (at last count some 400 competitors) and, finally, a big shakeout.

Of course, Groupon could be left standing after the shakeout, as Amazon and eBay were in days of old. But even if it makes the cut, the notion that it could earn persistently high profits seems far-fetched. Economists want to see what Groupon uniquely controls. The baseline idea — heavily discounted coupons delivered to inboxes — is easy to copy. The costs Groupon faces are not the low marginal costs of an Internet business but a business-by-business costly sales effort. Thus, there do not appear to be scale economies that could keep competitors at bay.

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Artificial People

How new advances in science rekindle old myths and fears.

by Michele Pridmore-Brown

Philip Ball
UNNATURAL
The heretical idea of making people

In the years leading up to the birth of the first baby produced by IVF, tinkering with life was routinely decried as Promethean hubris, Faustian ambition or sorcery. But once a real, squalling baby named Louise Brown arrived, on July 25, 1978, in Oldham Hospital, Manchester, courtesy of a great deal of tinkering, it became awfully hard to denounce her. Her “lusty yell” reverberated “round the brave new world”, announced Newsweek in a sentence that managed to sprinkle joy with a dash of unease by way of Huxley’s dystopia. One American comic famously quipped that perhaps one ought to send a card not to the parents but to the Dupont chemical company. The Vatican, faced with the reality of a life, perforce had to wish the family well, but frowned sonorously at the “unnatural” means that had brought this life about.

It took 4 million more babies like Louise Brown, and thirty-two years, for Patrick Steptoe, who had made Brown’s life possible, to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. His partner, Landrum Shettles, was long dead. Yet even then, a Vatican spokesman on bioethics declared the prize “out of order”. Philip Ball’s book can be read as an excavation of this complex debate.

Unnatural is not about assisted conception per se, but rather about our relationship to what Ball calls “anthropoeia”: the making of (artificial) people. In particular, it is about our fear of the unnatural, why tinkering with nature brings on thoughts of Prometheus’ eagle-pecked liver: of hubris punished, or, worse yet, of Frankenstein’s monster. IVF babies are of course very widely accepted now, but each time a fresh innovation – genetic engineering, cloning, synthetic biology – comes up the pipeline, an allied set of tropes is deployed. Prometheus, Frankenstein and Brave New World serve as a kind of unreflective shorthand. Ball’s book is a determinedly reflective account of how these myths are channelled through history: how they tell us about ourselves, about the human imagination, about our ever-evolving definitions of life, and about our fraught relationship to science and technology.

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Feel Good

Michael Franti & Spearhead:  Say Hey (I Love You)

United Steak of America

(..with a side order of Alaska and Hawaii)

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