Entries for March 2005
Rejected!
Well, our group received a rejection from Paul Graham's Summer Founders Program today. For those of you who don't know, his new company is offering to host 6-10 startups in Cambridge this summer, take care of all the paperwork, and pay each member $6,000–$10,000 for the summer. The reply is reminiscent of your standard college rejection letter (albeit more humble):
We're sorry to say that we can't accept your proposal for the Summer Founders Program. We were surprised by the high quality of the applications, and wanted to accept more. But since this is the first year, we decided we'd better force ourselves to keep the program small enough to manage.
A lot of the proposals we rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the applicants. For example, we were very reluctant to accept any proposals with only one founder, or only one who could come to Cambridge, because we think starting a startup is too much work for one person. We also rejected a lot of proposals simply because we didn't understand the problem domain well enough to judge them, or because the project seemed too big to start on only three months of funding.
It's quite likely, in fact, practically certain, that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email making fun of us; we want to learn from our mistakes.
If this summer works out, we're probably going to fund more startups. (Check our site for announcements.) If we do, we encourage you to re-apply in the future.
Thanks
Y Combinator
The reply came about a week earlier than expected — I wonder if that means we were ruled out early, or if they're just fast?
Anyway, this means I'll be spending another summer in Cleveland, which is good news to Patty, but I was kinda disappointed. Despite all of our team members being younger than what Mr. Graham considers ideal, our application was packed with cool project experience. I'll talk more about that in future posts, in my crusade to make our Computer Science department less homework- and exam-based and more project-oriented — just wait till you see how my would-be startup members from another school stack up against our equivalent Case CS major, especially keeping in mind that we are essentially competing against one another in the job market.
As for what I'll be doing for cash in the approaching months instead of this or my normal routine, that's for another post.
Edit: As if my day weren't ruined already, they gave me barbecue sauce for my chicken nuggets at Wendy's instead of sweet & sour! I hate barbecue sauce!
Banking 101
I actually thought my blog looked pretty cool with the whole no-posts thing going on, but I actually have a story you might find useful, so hey...
The other day I received an e-mail from my grammy telling me that my Fifth Third bank account was $80 overdrawn. I checked online and saw that the last transaction caused me to overdraw by two dollars (due to the ATM fee). Two days later my balance was at negative $80 thanks to overdraft fees.
Naturally, I wasn't happy. This has happened a number of times before — the ATM gives me money and the receipt still says I have a positive balance. I started looking around on the Fifth Third site to see what I could do to prevent this kind of thing. They advertise a few kinds of Overdraft Protection, but they're all scams which require you to sign up for another type of account with them — overdrawn funds will just be withdrawn from your other account.
So I called their Customer Service number and simply asked, "Is there any way to make ATMs not give me money when they shouldn't, and instead just tell me I have INSUFFICIENT FUNDS?" After lecturing me about how it is my own responsibility to keep track of my account balance (What?! This is America! I'm not responsible for anything!), the woman told me (rudely) that I could go to my local branch and tell them to "remove The Matrix from my account." After hearing and processing this for a moment, all I could say was, "...and that's all I have to do?" She said, "That's all." This was certainly news to me. I also found out that this cushion allowance is not entirely controlled by the bank — whether or not it will let you overdraw, and by how much, is ATM-dependent.
I was planning on walking up to the bank anyway to deposit a check that would bring me to a positive balance, so I decided it wouldn't hurt to try. I wasn't sure I could ask the teller anything about "The Matrix" while keeping a straight face, so first I mentioned my above experience to various people to see if this was common knowledge. None of them had heard of this "matrix" before, so they all just laughed, and said the banker was probably just trying to make me look stupid, which I also suspected. Ian suggested asking the teller "If I do this, will I not be able to enjoy steak anymore?"
I also searched the web for anything related to bank accounts and matrices. The term is not hard to find on banking sites, but it never appeared in this context. Even searching the Fifth Third site for just "matrix" returned nothing. It seemed to make more sense for my account to be part of a matrix, instead of the other way around — so should I ask to "remove my account from The Matrix" instead? I at least decided that it would be more intelligent and less embarassing to refer to it as "The Overdraft Matrix."
I walked to the bank and after depositing my check, I smoothly asked the teller "if it would be possible to remove The Overdraft Matrix from my account." I expected her to just look at me weird or laugh, but she just said "Okay!" and typed some stuff on her computer. I was a little stunned by her terse response and asked "...so am I all set?" Apparently doing this was no big deal, and she just said "Yep!"
I also asked if there were any other side effects to doing this besides the ATM thing, and she just said that, logically, my checks could actually bounce now instead of being accepted even when I'm overdrawn. I've only ever written a single check in my life (I'll let you figure that one out) so I wasn't too worried about that.
Patty told me that her bank account works the smart way by default, and she's never overdrawn. Everyone else I've talked to says that ATMs will indeed allow them to overdraw, causing large fees to build up. So I encourage everyone to follow my lead — down with The Matrix!