Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. It was all PHP. I just kept asking like, how do I do this? He’s like, just to learn MySQL. After the semester, I learned all this different stuff. I'd been able to build this app from scratch. I thought it was amazing. I didn't know anything about this stuff. Now, I can make my own web app. I applied for YC and, of course, got rejected. A really cool thing happened, because there weren't that many Facebook apps and because I think people were just looking for stuff to write about, a bunch of these small tech publications just wrote about it. Crazy MIT genius figures out a way to put Gmail inside of Facebook. We scanned it to look like Facebook. It barely even worked. It was super crappy but it was really easy to get the press to write about you. You can do a really simple thing that takes a semester even for a total beginner. If it’s creative and unique and people haven't seen it before, you’ll get attention. That was a good experience even though I got rejected That was an error, too, where they were so few web products, where when you did one and you made a new website, it could stand out because there just wasn't a lot of noise. I remember you flood back so many memories there. When I was in college, it’s funny, yours was Fmail, mine was called Hacker Follow and it was Twitter for Hacker News. I want to be able to follow people on Hacker News and have a timeline view of when they updated. My buddy and I built Hacker Follow. Similarly, I learned PHP and MySQL to be able to store the stuff in the database. That's what everybody did then. That's even what Facebook was written in. David, as you mentioned, the web felt like a small place. Yeah, it really did. I think to some degree, it always feels like that in hindsight. I think 10 years from now, people will look back, like the quaint times of 2020 when you could do anything and it would get attention. To some degree that's true. Very few people have the time to sit down and just think creatively about ideas. One of the easiest ways, if you want to come up with any creative idea, you just take two or three things and combine them. Once you do these combinations, you instantly start getting to ranges where no one has ever done that before. If you type like the dog into Google, you're going to get like 10 billion results. If you typed the dog left, you're going to get 1 million results. If you typed the dog left the store with a bone, there’s going to be like no results. It would be a sentence that no one has ever said before in the history of the world. The same thing is true with ideas. I think there's always this framework you can use to come up with interesting ideas. We both found the same one. Let's take this one thing and put it inside this other. That was enough to stand out. I think that's still true today.…

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