Comment by cj
3 years ago
This reminds me when I was going through the YC accelerator in 2012.
We were building a web-based email client, and PG didn’t like the idea. He pulled our team aside during one of the batch-wide Tues night dinners and suggested we pivot to building something that could take single threaded programs and quickly/easily make them multi-threaded.
No one on our team knew anything about threading (none of us had even graduated college). So we kept working on the email client, now defunct.
PG brought us in a back room where the Stripe founders were waiting (I think they were speaking that night). We were brainstorming ideas with them, and one of the brothers recommended we build something having to do with phones and calling people (don’t remember the idea anymore).
PG was not very happy when he heard we weren’t going to pivot and kept on working on a new email client :)
OTOH PG suggesting that some young people with zero experience with multithreading pivot to searching for the grail is, just, daft. A topic which computer science PhD's have failed to find a solution to, despite decades of research. Not sure the world needed another web-based email client, but at least that project had some non-zero chance of success.
That's such a random suggestion. To switch from building a user application to building a tool for devs...that is in no way related to what you were working on?
It sounds to me that pg had realised there wasn't a future in their web-based email, but thought they had good programming chops and would be able to produce something useful.
If you had something in 2012 that could magically convert a single threaded program to a parallel one, it would be pretty useful. Seems incredibly difficult to build, though.
Do you think a Philosopher's Stone might have some value, too? I think Y Combinator should look into it. Maybe an Elixir of Immortality?
An automatically parallelizing compiler that works in general is one of the holy grails of computer science. They have been extensively researched for decades and we have little to show for it. If anyone managed to make one it would instantly render the entire computer industry obsolete.
We have systems that work in specialized cases with a whole lot of manual intervention. Even then, the executable is often less efficient than the serial version.
I also think it is an unrealistic suggestion, in case that didn’t come through in my first comment! Haha.
But I’m sure the hoped-for result was just another one of those specialized tools, specialized for some Y Combinator niche. Which is also probably an unrealistic idea for a team that isn’t interested in that sort of thing, but at least isn’t totally ridiculously stupid.