Honestly I don't get it. While the story is cool, it really just seems like you're comfortable blowing several thousand dollars on what, lets be honest, is a very, very unlikely chance at securing a domain name.
I know this story speaks of SV culture in some way; huge risk, huge rewards and the idea that no one can stop you. If the venture pays off, it makes you a hero. If it doesn't, well you get a cool story. But you're aiming to be head of your own company, you need to make wise business decisions. This doesn't look like one, and just shows (me) that you're willing to make large gambles for a chance at winning the lottery. Where do you draw the line?
...you're comfortable blowing several thousand dollars on what, lets be honest, is a very, very unlikely chance at securing a domain name.
Considering the context I have to vehemently disagree.
Steve's really well known in the UK tech scene. He's a regular attendee & speaker at the Hacker News London meet-ups. Acceptance into the YC program would have vindicated his ambitions.
YC is seen as almost mythical in this part of the world as it's a huge ask to move to the opposite side of the world to go through a program to gain funding when there are an insane number of VC's & angel investors in the UK. YC is essentially 'Tech Hollywood' as far as most UK hackers are concerned. You can make yourself a household name as an Actor based in the UK but most Actors would jump at the chance to make it in Hollywood. The appeal of YC is a microcosm of that analogy.
EDIT: I appreciate CaveTech is referring to the zap.com situation but the entire trip was a guy doing everything humanly possible to make his dream a reality. I stand by my point.
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.
...when there are an insane number of VC's & angel investors in the UK.
The constant gripe of U.K. based talent is that nothing ever gets funded there.
At least not at the rate or the fluidity with which it does in the valley.
Besides this maverick ex-con of an angel, Xavier Niel, who claims to have invested in some 700 startups to the tune of almost $150,000 a pop, who are these angels and VCs you talk about?
It's certainly harder to get funding but by no means impossible. The likes of Stefan Glaeznar in London is a good example of someone with the capital, experience and willingness to invest in early stage start-ups.
Good domains are valuable, so a few thousand pounds is a small amount to risk. Zap.com is a really good domain. His approach was smart. A billionaire is too busy to discuss the sale of a domain, but if you do manage to catch his interest, he may well give it to you free/cheap because it isn't an asset he spends time worrying about.
I love the conservative objections here. Stunts like this only work if most people aren't willing to try (EDIT - thanks).
EDIT: Outlandish stunts are the best way to improve your hustling abilities. If you have the time and money to try it, you win either way.
As someone who deals in this space both as owning "really good domain names" and helping people buy "really good domain names" for many many years there was nothing smart about what he did and how he spent the money from a quick read of the story.
One thing I can tell you is that we frequently get approached by people who have some kind of an idea that someone is going to let go of an asset because somebody really wants it and tells a good story. That approach is actually quite common. And anyone who owns even 1 good domain has almost for sure been approached by someone with a story about why they need the domain but don't have any money to spend.
Even though the owner of this domain isn't in the domain business they still have some idea of the value. They aren't just going to let the domain go because some guy shows up from London. In fact, how do they even know that's the truth? That he flew in from overseas just to do this transaction? And not for some other reason? This is not "Bud Fox" in "Wall Street".
I'm currently working on a deal trying to purchase a domain for someone which is owned by a non-profit Fortune 500 company. They don't need the money even though the amount the person is willing to pay ($50,000) is a good number for this domain.
The approach that I will try after being turned down by the usual suspects at the company is to simply work my way up to the board of directors at some point and perhaps make a case that as a non-profit the $50,000 can do some good and the domain isn't being used bla bla bla.
Find an angle that matters. (Note same angle probably wouldn't work with a for profit but it's worth a try with a non-profit ..)
This sounds like something you only see in movies: Billionaire hedge fund manager signs over really valuable asset to persistent little whipper-snapper then utters some cliché phrase like "You've got spunk, kid!". Hedge fund managers didn't get rich by giving things away to the first person who asked nicely, and they still have business partners to answer to.
I'm surprised that calculating risk before investing large amounts of time and money now qualifies as 'conservative'. If that's a common attitude in SV these days, the bubble may be worse than I thought...
"I'm surprised that calculating risk before investing large amounts of time and money"
The OP made a point of saying how he thought he had a good story to tell YC. The fact is something like this could backfire and show how naive you are and be easily viewed as stupid.
> A billionaire is too busy to discuss the sale of a domain, but if you do manage to catch his interest, he may well give it to you free/cheap because it isn't an asset he spends time worrying about.
From what I read, it was the hedge fund not the billionaire that had the domain.
if that's the case, then the problem is that the fund is carrying the domain on their books for some value, say $100,000.
If they give it away for "free/cheap" then they report a loss of $100,000 to not only their investors but also themselves, presumably they are invested in their own fund:)
no one is going to let someone else at the fund just give away $100,000 of gains.
He's already been investigated (or prosecuted, I forget) for expensing personal stuff at the fund. But really, it would be easy to consider it an investment, or buy the asset personally and then invest it personally. Whether or not a small asset like that is his personally or the fund's doesn't affect his decision making.
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.
As someone pointed out earlier, Zap.com is a publicly traded company, with a 5.5m market cap. The odds of this being given away for anything less than 5.5m is about as close to 0% as you can get.
The real history is a lot more colorful than that. In the first dot-com boom, Zapata was a natural gas and fish meal company that tried to take over Excite (a major portal at that time) by rebranding itself with the name Zap.com [1].
They got widespread mockery and bad press coverage for that, and no longer use the domain.
It's not so much the quest for the domain name, it's the energy spent at this stage on it.
A domain name won't make or break your business. But all that time and energy spent on this problem could probably have been spent better on something else.
Spot on. Seem to have forgotten to address the 'to your advantage' bit in the question. It's a bit rash jumping on the first plane out before even sending out a speculative email to find out if they'll disclose a price tag for it, which can be budgeted for at a later date.
Obviously send an email to /dev/null, er I mean the proxy email address on the whois, but is me adding that worthy of your time? Also the post states I tried contacting people via LinkedIn and telephone before jumping on a bird. Did you read it?
Quite a lot of people seem fixated with the money aspect. Not that I feel the need to defend myself and how I spend my own money, but I used the trip as a holiday too. After reading some of these comments I wish I went to the beach instead!
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.
I recently read through a cliche list of attributes of successful people, one of them was 'don't have a backup plan'. I think while this is cliche, it is also true in a lot of ways. To me this sounds like your backup plan became having an awesome story to share, and your persistence transitioned from trying to obtain zap.com to trying to amplify the entertainment value of the story.
I'm with you on this. Marc Andreessen was the closing speaker at the Lean Startup conference yesterday. One of his key points was that the pendulum of SV culture has swung too far in favor of failure for failure's sake.
His quote, via Gigaom: "We joke around the office that the worst is the fetish for failure. You want to preserve the good of the idea when it comes to pivoting, but you don’t want people to be intentionally encouraged to fail. Maybe it’s time to add a bit more stigma."
Just because he was not successful (yet) does not mean it was a foolish effort. It's attitudes like yours that make hustling work, simply because so few people are willing to even send an email to somebody because they think it's unlikely they'll get an affirmative response. Getting rejected is like ketchup on french fries.
He flew from London to NY and showed up at their office uninvited only to find out the CEO was in Aspen. After spending countless hours stalking the guy and hundreds (or thousands) on a plane ticket, he missed by 2,000 miles...
If that happened to me, I'd be too embarrassed to repeat that story even to a group of close friends, let alone tout it as my proudest "life hack".
If that happened to me, I'd be too embarrassed to repeat that story even to a group of close friends, let alone tout it as my proudest "life hack".
I wouldn't. I think it shows exactly what he is trying to show: a tremendous amount of "hustle", indomitable fortitude, drive and passion... sometimes if you really want to make something happen, you have to take some chances and go a little over the top. And more importantly, it shows that this is a guy who doesn't just sit around and wait for things to come to him; he takes action and makes (or at least attempts to make) things happen.
Most people would agree you with you. But that doesn't make you, or them, correct. You should learn to embrace failure as a completely normal and natural part of success, instead of fearing it. This story, and the fact that he is proud of it, is evidence that he gets that.
I have no idea who this guy is but if I could buy stock in his future right now, I would. I can't say the same for anybody who reads this and thinks he's foolish.
Successful people have certainly failed, but spectacular failure isn't a particularly good sign of future success. You should only embrace failure if you are learning things. Successful people treat failures as the price of learning.
I admire this guy's persistence, but not his incredible arrogance ("swaggadocio", "sound my huge balls made as I sauntered"), his poor risk/reward assessment, or his lack of lateral thinking skills.
His behavior only makes sense if having name "zap" is the riskiest thing in his current business plan. If everything hinges on him having a specific fancy domain name, then I doubt he'll be delivering sufficient customer value to his users to build a real business. And if that wasn't the riskiest thing, then he's just wasted a lot of time and money in a poorly planned exercise to get something that was a shiny distraction.
That sort of behavior is a great example of why solo founders are dangerous. Startups are endlessly distracting, and a good partner can keep you from taking off like a missile at something that, in the end, isn't core to what you're up to.
Failure as part of the hustle is not a learning process in the same way as a failed startup is. Sure, you can learn something, but if you aren't getting rejected often in sales, you're simply not trying hard enough.
That view isn't totally unreasonable in the context of an established product with proven product-market fit. But it is incredibly dangerous when what you're selling may have no value at all. This guy is definitely too early in the process to be testing the hypothesis, "Hey, maybe I'm just not enough of a dramatic stalker." And if he did want to test that he shouldn't start by doing it with such a high-value target.
I would not. Not all failure is created equal. Failing is fine. Even failing big is fine. But the risk has to be worth the reward. His reward was a name. That's it - not the success or failure of the project he wanted to start, but just the name. Sure, names are important, but spending this much effort on the name and not the project itself does not, to me, indicate good judgement on where one's efforts are best spent.
"Learning to embrace failure" is not an excuse to avoid basic cost analysis.
"I have no idea who this guy is but if I could buy stock in his future right now, I would. I can't say the same for anybody who reads this and thinks he's foolish."
I would think a more impressive effort at hustling would be to find a (more readily) available domain name, then focus on building such a great product that it works anyway.
IMO the story shows great hustle but poor prioritization. Domains don't matter that much. One of YC's most successful graduates is airbnb after all. That domain is basically nonsense, but the product is so good, now it's their own special nonsense.
I know this story speaks of SV culture in some way; huge risk, huge rewards and the idea that no one can stop you. If the venture pays off, it makes you a hero. If it doesn't, well you get a cool story. But you're aiming to be head of your own company, you need to make wise business decisions. This doesn't look like one, and just shows (me) that you're willing to make large gambles for a chance at winning the lottery. Where do you draw the line?