Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q All right. You're working for this company and you're in high school. Um, and this has become like what you do throughout high school. Like you're not, Doing car washes, you're, you're working for this company, or you go work for other companies doing similar things?
A Well, it was a really important stepping stone, because, you know, my resume before that was babysitting, so having a programming job became a way in to get another programming job at a different local, a different startup that was local, so there was this, this startup called Soft Servo Systems, and What I did there was they had, they were running everything on Windows. I was like, hey, if you, if we can move this stuff over from Windows to Linux, which is free, then you could save even more cost on the hardware. Um, so, you know, I'm like figuring out how to move all this stuff. And these were just, it was just kind of one interesting project after another.
AI assessment note: “having a programming job became a way in to get another programming job”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q So you start to build it out. And what does that mean? I mean, are you guys, because you and Arash had already been pulling all-nighters for like months and months and months to get to this Phase. Now, does it slow down a little bit, or does it actually accelerate?
A It accelerates, because at every point, you just have this expanding circle of things you need to take care of, because you have From a product standpoint, you have this prototype, but then you need it to get it ready for prime time. You need users. And so we kept doing all of these unconventional things to try to get attention based on what had already worked before. So the same kind of video that I put together to put on Hacker News, we did another one that was a little more oriented around a broader audience, um, that we put on Reddit and Dig in March, We were placing bets on how many people were going to get on here. I think the high watermark was maybe 10,000 people.
AI assessment note: “It accelerates, because at every point, you just have this expanding circle of things”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Um, the idea here was to enable people to Share files seamlessly across different, their computer, their laptop, and this is when iPhones just started to come out, and smartphone revolution is about to begin. What was so complicated about it? Why was this so hard?
A Well, people had bitten off little pieces of the problem, but we were trying to do something bigger, and what was really challenging was how do you Basically build a hard drive large enough to be everybody's hard drive. So there's a whole server and infrastructure component of it that's very complicated. Um, there's a algorithmic component, which is hard, meaning how do you make it so that you can verify the correctness of the system? So how do you, how do you design something that doesn't stomp on people's baby photos or, you know, tax returns? Getting under the hood, that's a pretty hard Uh, engineering problems. So same, for a lot of the same kinds of reasons that, uh, You know, a Google search, it's like you type words into a text box, and you get links to web pages. How hard can it possibly be? It's actually pretty hard. So it's that kind of problem. And then there was a design element of, how do you make this really simple and accessible for normal people? And then we wanted to work with all platforms.
AI assessment note: “there's a whole server and infrastructure component of it that's very complicated.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q It's not, ok. So did the idea just kind of, did it just kind of fizzle out?
A Well, we had constraints, like, right, so he was not gonna leave his teaching job, and neither of us were really ready to kind of throw in completely, and we got it reasonably far along, and we had customers, we had income, we had at least the rudiments of a working product, but, um, I mean, it was a nice, Good kind of side income, but it's seasonal, right? So there's only a couple months a year where you're really going, and then it's hard to keep momentum. And so I started getting really distracted. And then another one of my friends, uh, Adam Smith, his, he started, um, he runs a company called Kite now. He started a company called Zobni, but, uh, he got into YC and it was just this amazing experience. And I actually.
AI assessment note: “it's hard to keep momentum. And so I started getting really distracted.”
