Greplin: The First Y Combinator Company To Get Me Excited

Image via CrunchBaseDon't get me wrong. I am and have been huge on Paul Graham and Y Combinator. Recently I read the name of a friend - 19 years old - in a magazine article. She apparently had graduated from Y Combinator and had just raised a million dollars in funding. I emailed her. Hey, is that you? Yes, it is me, she said. You should also raise money, right now is a great time to do so.

Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC

But I have said at this blog a few times that I don't see any iconic company emerging out of Y Combinator. Y Combinator has had a propensity to produce middling companies. A $200 million exist is not impressive.

Greplin

And let me make it very clear I have not been reading up on Y Combinator companies. There must be gems being spewed out every few months. But I only read about companies that show up in the news.

There Is No Cloud OS

Image via Wikipedia

Paul Buchheit: The Cloud OS: The basic idea is that apps and data all live on the Internet .... Apple is lame for not allowing a native Gmail app on the iPhone -- email is the one place where Android really outshines the iPhone for me ...... One way of understanding this new architecture is to view the entire Internet as a single computer. This computer is a massively distributed system with billions of processors, billions of displays, exabytes of storage, and it's spread across the entire planet. Your phone or laptop is just one part of this global computer, and its primarily purpose is to provide a convenient interface. The actual computation and data storage is distributed in surprisingly complex and dynamic ways, but that complexity is mostly hidden from the end user. ..... the development of this global super-computer is one of the most important technological advances in history. ..... the design target of ChromeOS. They are building laptops that run the Chrome web browser and approximately nothing else. ..... ChromeOS assumes a mouse/track-pad while Android currently assumes a touch interface ... and ultimately everything may end up with a touch screen anyway.

There is the cloud. But the OS resides firmly on your laptop. It is thin. It only runs a browser, and that browser takes you to the cloud, but the OS is not in the cloud. So the term cloud OS is misleading.

Google: Best Company Its Size

Image by Robert Scoble via Flickr

Paul Buchheit: Four reasons Google is still Awesome: Google is probably still the best company of its size, and I really enjoyed my time there. ..... They take big risks ..... Google has enough big successes, such as Chrome and Android ..... Google's weapon of choice is more often open source and open standards. ..... Cultures that don't laugh at themselves are cults.

I am a Google fanboy. So I really liked this post by Paul Buchheit. Google really is the best company its size. And Paul points out Android and Chrome. I have said at this blog before that those two alone are two separate Google size companies. They are big.