I find it quiet surprising that none of these startup classes teach how to do market research and market sizing. Yet when a new batch of startups demo every six weeks, the first thing they talk of is, size of opportunity. Market opportunity is one of the things to consider before deciding on a problem to work on. Please consider adding this info to your classes.
Also, None of them teach how Sam or any YC partner or any VC would approach or start thinking whether a startup is worth investing in or not. That would be hugely beneficial to some of us as it will help us in channeling our thoughts.
Lets say you have an ecommerce firm. When a user is browsing an item(diapers?), at a mimimum he/she expects to see images, description, reviews, cost, tax, delivery dates, promotions, related items. In addition to what you see on frontend, in the backend, there may be jobs run for analytics, revenue reconciliation, warehouse management optimization, carrier management, fraud checks, item data setup and a host of other activities. Each of these tasks has its own complex business logic and typically has its own team. Each team runs a service, possibly in the form of a REST API call. You can call them microservices.
I believe Quora and Facebook tried it in various forms though there you could reach out just about anybody. I assume 21.co will do same thing going forward.
The feedback is not relevant at that stage ("not pick up your resume"). It is something like - not enough experience, we found a better candidate, we hired someone we know, not a great fit, etc.
Feedback becomes relevant only when you start the hiring process. They thought you were able to do the job but ended the process. This means you weren't good enough.
An easy way is to walk up to a QA or engineer, tell him "We are reviewing some sessions by customer and we keep getting this error". can you please help me replay customer sessions? This is an executive escalation?
1) The market ain't perfect. There are employers willing to pay but employees don't know about them. They can't get in touch.
2) If there is a very limited supply of people (I believe that's real for a lot of complex stuff), a single person can only be at a single place, it only take a few employers to get all of them and that's it!
It gets worse... because then people can't catch up and train. Training need time and mentoring, time is slow, mentoring is hard because the mentor are stuck in a few selection organizations with impossibly high standards.
After some time, yes. But there is lag in the system, while people get educated and while culture changes to value engineers as much as doctors or lawyers were values in the past.
There is bigger question here. How many people are still make money from selling compiler/language tools? Like, write a static analyzer, or php optimizer or sell a Swift library for linux application or a language-X to language-Y transpiler. So, far, I have found this industry to be opaque, unlike web industry! And if they make money, how much?
Btw, there was YC company which sold PHP server optimizations. Anyone knows the name? (I think they are closed now but I am not sure)
There are a few major players that I can think of that makes money in the compiler/language tools category (JetBrains and Embarcadero are the two that comes to mind but I'm sure there are many more). But I think for a small player it would be hard
Also, None of them teach how Sam or any YC partner or any VC would approach or start thinking whether a startup is worth investing in or not. That would be hugely beneficial to some of us as it will help us in channeling our thoughts.