Y Combinator: Conveyor Belt StartUping?

English: Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of reddit, as he speaks about his experience getting reddit from a startup to one of the top competitors in User-rated news and networking. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not really. It is not like they get in the way of creativity. I don't think of them as a boot camp either. It is just that early stage startups have much in common. And so perhaps it makes sense to go to school together.

I wonder if the concept can be applied to entrepreneurship in other or possibly all industries.

Reddit really is special.

Y Combinator’s first batch: where are they now?

the unbelievable drive that the young would-be founders had. Without something like Y Combinator – without money, support and guidance – this creative ambition and energy can be dissipated and become unfocused. ...... “They care, and they want us all to succeed in a way that isn’t unlike a parent.” ..... While not every startup born in that experiment back in 2005 is still going today, their founders have arguably all found success. ..... Reddit is arguably the most famous of all of Y Combinator’s success stories. .... “at its core it’s just a list of headlines.” ..... The fact that the idea for Reddit didn’t even come from Steve and Alexis (it was Paul’s idea) ....... (Alexis initially had a tough time to talk Steve into leaving his job and joining him in applying for the YC program). ..... Something like Y Combinator throws up opportunities in mysterious ways. Following the Summer Founders Program and the early death of memamp, Chris’ co-founder and roommate Zak Stone moved up the street to Harvard grad school. This left Chris with two spare rooms, just as the reddit co-founders were in need of a new apartment. ..... recognizing that sometimes things don’t work and ideas shift and change and die and are born – not following some rigid road of rules. ..... Perhaps the most straightforward road to success to arise from the Y Combinator First Batch is that of Loopt, the location-based mobile service founded by Sam Altman and Nick Sivo. ..... “I always say that without YC I would have taken the job offer I had and become a consultant, and I’d probably be chained to a desk somewhere in an office park” Justin Kan tells me ....... idea of live-streaming his life. Justin.tv was born and generated a lot of media interest. The site is now the world’s largest live-streaming community, with a reported number of over 40 million registered users, and is still ran by original co-founder Shear. ..... From the simple beginnings of a man with a camera permanently taped to his baseball cap, a massive network and several spinoff companies have been born, including Socialcam (which has recently been sold to Autodesk for $60 million), and TwitchTV (a dedicated video game broadcasting community that Kan described to me as “ESPN for gaming”). ....... The least obviously financially successful member of YC First Batch has been Jesse Tov, whose startup Simmery Axe closed down immediately after the Summer Founders Program. After a short stint with the U.S. Navy Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center, Jesse returned to academia and is now a postgraduate fellow at Harvard

Related articles

• Y Combinator's first batch: where are they now?
• 10 Y Combinator startups that didn't make it, but should've
• What I Learned From My Internship at a YC Startup
• How Has Y-Combinator Helped Kippt?
• Paul Graham: Y Combinator Companies Have Raised More Than $1 Billion
• Interview with Mailgun (YC W11) CEO Ev Kontsevoy
• Paul Graham: Y Combinator Startups Have Raised More Than $1B
• TechStars, FounderFuel, & YC startups to get free customer support from Desk.com (exclusive)
• First-Time Startup Entrepreneurs: Stop Fucking Around
• Conveyor Belt Blogging

Grum

How a botnet works: 1. A botnet operator sends out viruses or worms, infecting ordinary users' computers, whose payload is a malicious application — the bot. 2. The bot on the infected PC logs into a particular command and control (C&C) server (often an IRC server, but, in some cases a web server). 3. A spammer purchases access to the botnet from the operator. 4. The spammer sends instructions via the IRC server to the infected PCs, causing them to send out spam messages to mail servers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spam fighting is not just an issue of the good folks ending up with vastly superior technology. Basic law enforcement has to go hand in hand.

Grum: Inside The Takedown Of One Of The World’s Biggest Spam Networks

Grum sent over a quarter of the world’s spam and was one of the most ingenious botnets ever created. But, with savvy, a lot of luck, and cooperative ISPs, the Grum botnet dried up and died last month. ..... Like a biological virus primed to thrive in a certain type of medium, the Grum virus was susceptible to defeat if someone knocked out each of those CnC IP addresses. ..... Like Microsoft or Apple pushing out OS patches, the Grum makers were upgrading their virus regularly, adding new features and fixing problems. ...... The Grum botnet was one of the most robust and powerful in the world. ..... the system worked without peer and slowly began spamming the world, mostly with poorly worded pharmaceutical emails. ...... – for half a decade. ..... Spamming isn’t very lucrative. .... most major spammers hover at around $150 million in a good year. In the bell curve of spammers, however, most end up on the side of making very little. ..... set up in 2006 by someone who walked into a WebMoney office in Moscow and presented a Russian passport #4505016266. The name on the passport was a 26-year-old named Nikolai Alekseevich Kostogryz. ...... Around the world, sysadmins were watching the Grum takedown with interest. In Moscow, a response team from Group ID was at the ready to begin taking down the Russian and Ukrainian servers. Van Straten volunteered to assist in contacting various authorities. ..... 5 years, 3 months, and 17 days after the first emails began spewing out of the Grum botnet, the last server was dead..... The Internet got just a bit quieter

Related articles

• Grum: Inside The Takedown Of One Of The World's Biggest Spam Networks
• Grum botnet briefly revived, killed by authorities yet again
• Grum Botnet Dies Taking a Fifth of the World's Spam with It
• Cybercriminals no longer control the third largest spam botnet, researchers say
• Band of Botnet Busters Grounds Grum
• Grum takedown: '50% of worldwide spam is gone'
• Huge spam botnet Grum is taken out by security researchers
• Officials attack Grum: World's third largest botnet (18% of spam)
• How the world's largest spam botnet was brought down
• Spam Halved With Grum Takedown