ObsoleteMailMan

YNAB (You Need a Budget) is fantastic

This is a bit nuanced, but i'll try to be brief:

- housing in the bay area is substantially more expensive now, so you need to already be pretty qualified in your role to justify your cost - this partially goes against Paul Buchheit's old point that startups allow you to do work you'd otherwise be unqualified to do - because startups work on building (rather than maintaining) products, the tech skills that startups want are different from the tech skills engineers in big companies are using - universities aren't really making up the difference

Options: - YC makes its own university for engineers/scientists

This goes along Alan Kay's point about not relying on vendors. If there's a particular skillset that YC cos want early engineers to have and people don't have it (at the scale YC collectively wants), it may make sense to teach it.

How do you know if you're technical enough to build great products?

Hey Michael, thanks for the post. It seems like most big companies started out of projects people were making for themselves in the early days.

Why do some projects evolve into behemoths, and when do you advise people building projects to start talking to users?

Have you considered hosting these on Facebook Live? Could get Live feedback from the audience to source questions according to what gets brought up.

YES regarding Mike Bloomberg. Epitome of relentlessly resourceful in the early days of Bloomberg LP

- Hard tech founders

- Kyle Vogt from Cruise Automation (specifically interested in how he became such a good engineer), he hardly has any interviews that talk about this

- Nothing really public from Helion Energy, could be interesting

- What did founders do in the early days to develop technical chops while remaining frugal? This seems to be more than just learning syntax and really worth discussing.

- If great companies start as projects, have an entire discussion about that and what shape those take (if it's just a side project, do you do user interviews? Etc.)

- How to pick growth metrics in hard tech startups

- President of University of Waterloo or Eric from Pebble and what about the school creates such great engineers/founders and how Americans can emulate that

- FarmLogs Founders: Jesse Vollmar and Brad Koch

- A discussion on blending strategy with acting quickly and developing really great, original ideas (and how they evolve from small projects)

- Anything with Qasar again, that guy is the real deal

- "The best founders may be working on things that seem small but get them done extraordinarily quickly" - discussion on this

- Mike Duncan from BankJoy

- Adam D'Angelo from Quora

- Rob Rhinehart from Soylent

- FLEX Fits

How can we become the best engineers?

How did you learn to communicate so well? Any book recommendations?

What do you recommend to get great at building products? Any recommendations for college students? Engineering courses don't seem to do justice.

(21, in college)

Transistor man!