I think the issue that people are picking up on is that if that is how you spend your own money, it is likely that you will spend company money in the same way making you a riskier investment.
I know my comments haven't been full of praise but I enjoyed your post and it seems you have the personality that is needed for success.
But the more valuable it is the more unlikely it is that it will be given away. Is spending time and money on the extremely small chance of getting hold of zap.com smarter than using those efforts to get hold of zap.co or zap.me? How much more is zap.com worth to your business over other alternatives?
If a few days and a few thousand pounds isn't worth much to him then I understand but if resources are scarce, using them on long shots that might not even pay that much over the alternatives is not good business.
For a startup, time and energy are always scarce. Payments are a hard space to break into. Putting even 1 second into a particular name is a mistake if that isn't the highest priority.
And given that Paul Graham turned Stevie Graham down for not having thought things through, rather than for lack of a good domain name, then I'd say the time and money was wasted. With those resources he could have conducted 20 user tests against prototypes. If PG was wrong about his concern about the business model, Stevie Graham would have had real evidence from real users. And, if as is more likely, PG was right, then Stevie Graham would have discovered the problem before he was pitching somebody so important to the future of his company.
To what do you vehemently disagree? That it is a slim chance of securing the domain name? If so, why does the rest of your comment discuss how important YC is to UK programmers?
I disagree with CaveTech's summation that the process was all about securing a domain. It was about the author doing everything he could to bring his intentions for his product to fruition and the original article was about the significant effort the author made to get accepted into YC only to blow it on a single question. I believe a lot of folk aren't quite grasping how or why one guy would go to such extremes with such ridiculously low odds of succeeding.
I'm not persuaded that the interview flub was the problem.
Your hypothesis seems to be that if only you had answered the one question right, then PG would have seen the beauty in your plan and let you in. But you followed up immediately with the answer. And then you sent them a link to an implemented feature, which they didn't bother to click on. Why would they ignore both followups if that was the one thing that kept out someone they otherwise saw as a promising candidate?
It would seem to me that the more plausible hypothesis is that PG still believes exactly what he told you: you haven't figured enough of the idea yet. And therefore, that it really wasn't about that particular question. I suspect you're fixating on that because it was the problem that you could see, and because it was a strong emotional experience.
When I've rejected job-seekers after interviews, it was never about them failing a particular question. It was about a pattern in the interview, generally a Dunning-Kruger failure in some key area. I think it speaks well of people when they follow up with, "Oh, I totally blanked on X, here's the correct answer." But that never makes a difference, because never blanking out for a moment is not one of the characteristics I'm hiring for, and the conscientiousness displayed in the followup was also visible in the interview.
Inspired, I hacked out the feature that was the answer to the flunked question and used it on the partners.
If it was such an easy feature to add and so important that you had several strong answers to the issue that required the feature, why wasn't it already part of your product?
edit: If the feature was already present in your product, it would have been almost impossible to have gone blank.
I felt like that at first but I think the issue is that the potential employee wanted his normal salary in addition to equity. He would not undertake any risk for that equity and that can definitely lead to problems in company camaraderie.
Having said that, I think that the post has a slightly angry tone which I do not like. People can ask whatever they want in exchange for their work. If they are not worth it, don't hire them. If they are, get them on board. No need to write a blog post about it though.
The risk is in abandoning your good job at a stable firm working for a known, reasonable entity for a pot shot that could be just about anything and statistically will most likely fail, taking you down with it since you're being paid $60,000 below market according to the owner's own admission.
It's amazing that people don't think that is worth considering.
Yes but according to the article, he wanted his normal salary and the equity. So the only part of your comment that applies is leaving a stable job for an unstable one.
This is a risk but not a big risk at all if the engineer was "one of the best engineers in his area" because he would be able to find another job easily.
Besides the conflict of interest, I find the fact that a significant portion of their articles are about themselves, or other tech journalists, extremely irritating. Like when a documentary is about the filmaker making the documentary instead of the subject matter.
It is frustrating how the American government is trillions of dollars in debt, waging pointless/dangerous wars and quickly turning America into a police/welfare state but instead of worrying about foreign and monetary policy, the most important issues seem to be abortion and gay marriage (things the government shouldn't even involved in).
I feel that the four day work week is the sweet spot for productivity and I will institute this when I start hiring. 28-32 hours of work a week is better than 15-20 hours of work and 20 hours of facebook and lolcats.
Why can Facebook only come up with monetization strategies that take advantage of its users?