> For me, an even better outcome would be to have Startup School cut down to 100 developers and gaining a technical focus
Interesting you should say that. We've tossed around the idea of HN sponsoring a hackery summit a la Startup School but with a purely technical focus. It might complement Startup School well.
The YC/HN world has always had both technical and entrepreneurial hemispheres, if you can call them that, and some people identify more with one than the other. Cross-pollination between the two is beneficial (which is one reason why we've always resisted the idea of splitting HN into sub-communities) but yeah, it can be frustrating when you find yourself in a local optimum for the side you don't find interesting. We hear similar complaints about HN pretty regularly even though we try to keep both sides well-stocked.
We've tossed around the idea of HN sponsoring a hackery summit a la Startup School but with a purely technical focus.
I wouldn't want to attend a "hackery summit" which simply consists of people writing code; I can do that better at home, since having people around is distracting.
On the other hand, a "hackery summit" with technical talks from people who have built cool things would be very interesting.
One of the advices I've heard at the 'Istanbul Startup 2014' event was the following:
*Design of the app comes first! (don’t lose too much time on engineering on early stage).*
Some people took the advice to the extreme[1].
On the bright side though, the Winner of the Challenge was a startup called 'Connected2Me' (IM mobile app) which was run by 2 guys: A Python developer (seemed to be the hardcore kind) and a DevOps guy who recently jumped up probably to handle the load and sys-admin. The startup had more than 2M users in Turkey alone. They both seemed (dress, talk, etc.) more like pure geeks more than business people.
[1] About a month ago I've seen a bio-informatics startup on HN (can't recall if it was about fighting a disease e.g. HIV or about genetic modification). The team was made by 7 members, 6 business oriented people (CEO, CTO, this and that manager) and ONE biologist with IT background. Seemed extremely ridiculous!
Interesting you should say that. We've tossed around the idea of HN sponsoring a hackery summit a la Startup School but with a purely technical focus. It might complement Startup School well.
The YC/HN world has always had both technical and entrepreneurial hemispheres, if you can call them that, and some people identify more with one than the other. Cross-pollination between the two is beneficial (which is one reason why we've always resisted the idea of splitting HN into sub-communities) but yeah, it can be frustrating when you find yourself in a local optimum for the side you don't find interesting. We hear similar complaints about HN pretty regularly even though we try to keep both sides well-stocked.