YC Interviews in India(blog.ycombinator.com) |
YC Interviews in India(blog.ycombinator.com) |
I'm a big fan of pg's essays. From my pov, it was the "golden age" of blogging^. Essays like "black swan farming," "high res-society" were fascinating, and tied abstract ideas aabout startups, investing and the world to the parcticalities of how YC works. I found it fascinating.
PG did address startup hubs, why "YC of _place_" was a problematice idea and other reasons why YC is centralized where it is.
But... PG wrote about a lot of ideas. Some might lead you to the opposite conclusion, maybe increasingly as the startup industry has grown.
Ramen profitable, for example, could be a totally different proposition in India. "High resolution" is an idea that I think at some scale needs to happen outside of SV.
Since those essays, YC has scaled. That could put new possibilities on the table. Many of the reasons startups hub are fixable with scale.
I realize this is just interviews, but I reckon that "just" is not just a just.
^Another great example was joel on software and the stack overflow podcast. You could watch Joel and Jeff's abstract ideas about (eg) "social user interface" and such be implmented in software.
My own experience across the visa spectrum is some want to move here permanently, some want to make their stake here and return back to their home country, some want to come here and build new businesses.
I don’t mean it as A discussion about immigration but more about one of innovation.
We keep hearing, despite obvious growth in other regions, SV is still ground zero for new companies.
Then there's getting an EB-1 approved ... I don't how you managed to get it, but kudos to you on that. From what I've read, it's incredibly difficult, and usually an order of magnitude more difficult than getting an O-1. Immigration guides often say you need win the Nobel Prize in order to qualify for it. But I've also heard luck plays a huge factor -- in terms of who your adjudicating officer is. Anyways, there's very little info out there (on the interwebs) that talks about how to succeed with an O-1 or EB-1 application. (It would be great if you could write about it.)
part political climate, part living cost in sf/bay, part network becoming more global etc
[0] https://trak.in/india-startup-funding-investment-2015/ (URL says 2015, but the data is latest)
Imho, to make most out of YC demo day, you'd have to have something concrete ready, and so it helps to have started working before having interviewed with YC.
Not everyone is supposed to talk about the big problems like climate change all the time. That's kind of boring.
My two cents though.
Even in India people would probably say "Rome" instead of "Roma", "Moscow" instead of "Moskvá".
And it's not only in English, Italian would say "Tolosa" instead of "Toulouse", German would say "Mailand" instead of "Milan", French would say "Cracovie" instead of "Kraków" an so on...
Also, I think this is unrealistic. Do you expect others to properly use the names of all cities ? For example : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozhikode. The 'zh' sound is not present outside of a few South Indian languages. It is OK if others call it Calicut IMO
EDIT: It seems the OP has edited the comment to make it more polite. Thanks OP.
Putting my personal opinion aside, it's definitely not catching on: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Bengaluru,bangalo...
I still call it Bangalore in any formal setting.
It is a relic of colonization that is worth leaving behind. This battle is completely worth fighting. If Ireland officially lists Dublin as Baile Atha Cliath for addresses, the airport, and for international English references, I will use that. This is not about two different languages, but of erasure.
However, they should probably at least correct the "Banglore" misspellings in the FAQ.
Bangalore: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=IN-KA&q=bangalo...
Bengaluru: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=IN-KA&q=bengalu...
Bangalore: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=IN-KA&...
Bengaluru: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=IN-KA&...
This is a post-colonial battle still being fought, and India's wish to shed its colonial shackles deserves to be respected.
(Even closer to home, do you say 'naaii dillii'?)
Moreover, there's also the fact that it's practically impossible to move to the U.S. as a founder of a company (there's no visa for founders). People from a select few countries (that the US has trade treaties with) and who have $100k in savings just lying around might be able to self-sponsor a E-2, but I'm most YC-funded founders probably don't qualify for this either. Especially not founders from India, since India is not a E-2 visa treaty country.
My understanding is if you tried to immigrate 8+ years ago, it was relatively certain and less of a distraction, even if it still took ~12 months to be done. It has gotten gradually harder every year, until it went up asymptotically in 2016 (I finished applying for my EB-1 in 2015).
Unfortunately IANAL + immigration landscape is evolving constantly, + the complexities and options of immigration vary wildly with the differences in personal circumstances (from passport to education and work history), so anything I write will be quickly obsolete, and most people would find it either too generalized, or not applicable to them.
Feel free to DM me, I'm happy to share some advice with anyone who thinks immigrating will be important for their career.
Though Bangalore is a relatively new name, it has been deeply ingrained in recent collective memory and literature. So it needs some time to change. Other cases in point, Bombay -> Mumbai. Madras -> Chennai, Calcutta -> Kolkata. While these changes have been adopted in some circles, the anglized form is still in use in many places. Especially, places and instances that have history pertaining to the past few centuries.
Also, in IT field, Bangalore symbolizes more than the city. It is a standin for the Indian IT industry and it's boom in general. It has a certain connotation and degree of recognizability that may be lost when using Bengaluru. Still with time, it too would change.
I am overall rather tired of the city-renaming craze. It seems like expensive bike-shedding at best. You end up with ridiculous scenarios like renaming 'Madras' to 'Chennai', where 'Madras' in fact is a native, historic Tamil name for the city, and 'Chennai' is the name of Telugu collaborator with the British.
Calling it a 'battle' that is being fought and 'shackles' being shed and all is a bit bombastic. And kindly do not purport to speak for all Indians.
What's next? Are you going to fight the battle to call Patna Pataliputra? Rajasthan Rajputana? How far back in history do the really real names lie?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=IN-KA&...
They city can become respected by having a reputation of being topmost liveable city in the world, that is far more respectable instead playing silly games like changing names which waste taxpayer money.
If the time range is increased to the time when Bengaluru was not yet a familiar term then it is quite obvious that this new name would trend upwards to the current time.
Certainly several locals will prefer the name they grew up with. Some find it rolls off the tongue better when speaking English, or just because they used Bangalore for many years already. No such change will ever have 100% coverage in such a short time, yet I think it's worth consciously respecting. Locals will use both interchangeably because it's often used informally, but I think for anything official, it's important to use the correct and official name, which is Bengaluru. Such as here, this is not an informal post by YC but an official announcement.
It costs the ex-chequer a lot of money to fund such renames. In the midst of 600,000,000 people living below the income of $2 a day, funding renaming cities to rid of British heritage should be least of India's problems. Such vitriol has never done anyone any good and is a sign of society embroiled in misplaced priorities, imo.
Who made it official? On what authority? The name in English is the name people use in English. Maybe Bengaluru is now the name in Indian Official English?
Until today, if I read something about Bangaluru, I wouldn't even know it's Bangalore.
Should the name India be changed to Hindustan or Bharat as well?
Instead of wasting tax payer money on changing names maybe the govt should focus on actual issues.
So why use a European name, shouldn't it be an "Indian" name.
This is a complicated initiative, but it's clear that most people do not recognize the impact or meaning of a choice like this. It is considered equally hostile and rude to, for example:
- refer to a divorcee by their ex family name after an official name change
- refer to a transgender person by the name they had previously after an official name change
It's up to the individual what their name is, and making a name official is clearly indicating what they would like to be referred to. It really shouldn't be that much trouble for outside entities to respect that.
Many of these cities/towns indeed had pre-British names but for better or for worse, its the British that made them into the cities that they are, for example Calcutta, it was 3 not very notable villages prior to the British.
The argument for renaming will carry a lot more heft if these were notable names prior to the British. In some cases they were but not all.
No I dont agree, I still call Mumbai as Bombay most of the times because that was the city I grew up in.
I think its disrespectful to the people of Bombay/Bangalore that the govt wastes money changing names instead of fixing actual issues
> So why use a European name, shouldn't it be an "Indian" name.
It's difficult to answer. I think Indians usually don't have much problem with foreign words. The day-to-day Hindi is somewhat influenced by Persian and even the word for the majority religion (Hindu) has a Persian origin. But in case of English worded cities, it quickly becomes problematic as they were named during the colonial period.
Please stop bringing up taxpayer money, it's not like taxes can only be used for a singular issue at once. I could say the US taxes shouldn't be spending trillions on military before fixing other problems like homelessness in SF, but that's not how taxes or governments work.
I dont think its inappropriate, that is how names change over time. Just embrace it, dont fight it.
> Please stop bringing up taxpayer money
Why? Shouldnt you say something if the govt is wasting money on frivolous activities?
> I could say the US taxes shouldn't be spending trillions on military before fixing other problems like homelessness in SF, but that's not how taxes or governments work.
I agree, the US should be spending less on military and more on the welfare of its citizens.
I don’t see a single reason why it is inappropriate, other than it offending you. Nobody needs permission to use words from anybody else. If anything is offensive, it is this type of gatekeeping.
Keep carrying on like this with talk of how outsiders should behave, and Bangalore will lose the competitive advantage it enjoys as IT workers will find friendlier places to move to.