This was an interesting point in the context of comparing YC to a large company:
Comparing himself to an air-traffic controller, Graham says much of his time is spend making introductions and helping the YC community solve problems within the network
Most of the large companies I've worked with are missing somebody in the "air-traffic controller" role. It can be very difficult for individual employees to understand all the resources that are available within the company, or who they should contact with a particular question. YC might actually have an advantage in this area.
> Most of the large companies I've worked with are missing somebody in the "air-traffic controller" role.
I've worked for 3 large companies, and have had the opposite experience. The problem is that everyone is trying to be an air-traffic controller. So much so, that honest work is being avoided.
Deep corporate hierarchies encourage politics and associated power struggles. Part of moving up in that environment is to have others perceive you as an "air-traffic controller" of a segment of the company, a master of your domain. This sometimes results in people in "manager" roles with 1 or 2 direct reports, where the "manager" does no actual work, but spends inordinate amounts of time coordinating with other teams or politicking. Honest work avoided.
I'm not excusing that behaviour but if you've spent enough time at a big company, you'll see motivations for it.
Contrast that to pg's air-traffic controller role in the YC network, providing value to all the startup people he connects.
It will be interesting to see how well pg's positive influence scales as YC continues to grow.
One reason for this is that many companies review and reward employees based on their "influence" or "visibility" -- what better way to maximize both than be in the air-traffic controller role?
I can attest to this firsthand at both Microsoft and IBM.
We're also working on software to make this process better. Garry built a private version of Facebook for YC founders which is tremendously useful. We have ideas for more software to make the knowledge contained within the alumni network more accessible.
I'm curious about the software, because in my experience these kinds of things are doomed projects.
Yahoo had at least four internal websites devoted to companywide skill-sharing. Google had a couple of these too. I don't recall them ever being useful.
They are started by naive new engineers who get frustrated because they can't get anything done. They think everyone's going to be thrilled to create a profile, say publicly what they are good at, and to answer questions from effective strangers. But it never works.
A year later they have personal relationships within the company, and know how to use those instead. And this is what motivates people to really help.
So do you think software is going to work better within the YC community? Maybe there's some communal spirit there that can overcome that tendency, due to all the dinners together or everyone knowing the YC partners. Or maybe your network is just small enough, and has higher-than-average quality people, so people would care about their reputation for helping strangers.
Agreed. Seen so many of these initiatives come and go at various companies.
The only thing that worked, and people reverted back to wasn't the "sexiest" of solutions - An email list. Data gets pushed to you, you don't have to be logged into a specific application or site to view it.
Setup some tags in the subject header, and some rules to filter on those tags.
Github in a way solves a lot of these issues of finding the right person because it revolves around the work (i.e. code) and skills and not the person and position.
Comparing himself to an air-traffic controller, Graham says much of his time is spend making introductions and helping the YC community solve problems within the network
Most of the large companies I've worked with are missing somebody in the "air-traffic controller" role. It can be very difficult for individual employees to understand all the resources that are available within the company, or who they should contact with a particular question. YC might actually have an advantage in this area.