Haven't finished your book yet (excellent work though!), but I've noticed that some of the startups interviewed no longer exist (Djangy and Blippy, specifically). Were there any indications during the interviews that the startups were going to tank? I'm asking because in your interviews, everything sounded fine. Then again, appearance can be deceiving.
This was a mystery for me for the longest time, because it was so far out of my comfort zone I couldn't conceive of it working. Here's the whole secret, ready for it? Email people and ask them for what you want. There are a range of possible outcomes to this. Them giving it to you is quite likely, particularly when you describe it as in their interests. Them sending out a company wide letter saying that you are a bozo who had the unmitigated temerity to send an email to the CEO of a company you did not work at is also possible, but that is extraordinarily unlikely to happen.
I need a button for this when I go to conferences, since some people (not too dissimilar to a younger me) think that it is an imposition to come up and introduce themselves at an event I am explicitly attending to meet people. I have had folks apologize for introducing themselves. That's crazy. I run a wee little spec of a company and transparently love talking to people. In the event that I'm not interested, I'll just mail back a sentence to that effect or (more likely) just put it on my todo list and forget about it.
There are many, many, many tech CEOs who are that open or more. Heck, Steve freaking Jobs famously answers mails sent by individual Apple customers. Getting an interview with a startup founder is not difficult. Just ask.
He actually wrote an interesting post a while ago about persistence. From what I recall he emailed many of them daily for a defined set period of time about his project and asking if they would meet with him for an interview.
We're YC S11. AnyAsq is our weekend side-project that was accidentally launched a week ago when Harj (without knowing that AnyAsq was by a YC company) started "I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything", and someone posted it to HN. We've had several other interesting people start AMAs as well, and we're excited about the response so far. We've had 25,000 visitors.
Hm -- can't seem to post to anayasq in either Safari 5 or Firefox 5. So thought I'd post one here:
I love and appreciate how transparent you've been about your recipe and process for the book. That's super cool and it's totally inspired a few ideas of my own. You shared some revenue figures after the first week, but would you be willing to update on revenue to date since then?
