- The individuals are building a multiplayer programming game for teaching coding
- The game involves writing code to kill enemies and progress through levels
- The game has been launched in beta and received a high amount of traffic, causing server issues
- The founders were inspired to create the game after realizing their previous startup was successful because it felt like a game
- The game focuses on teaching core programming concepts, with plans to add more advanced concepts later
- Beta users have provided feedback and helped identify areas for improvement
- The founders have sought advice from game designers to improve their game
- The game is currently set in a fantasy world, but there are discussions about adding robots in the future
- The team consists of two programmers and one person managing the servers
- The founders met in college and decided to start a startup to avoid traditional jobs
- The business model is focused on recruitment, with the game serving as a way to identify potential employees for companies
- The founders have received positive feedback from recruiters and others in the industry about the potential value of their game
- The founders are surprised to learn that they were being interviewed for Y Combinator during the conversation

- Giveit100.com is a video site where users can sign up, choose something they want to get better at, and share a video of their progress every day.
- The most common use case currently is dancing, as the founder made a video of himself learning to dance and it went viral.
- The site is currently in private beta with 50 users, but there is a waiting list of around 4,300 people.
- Users can learn a variety of skills, such as walking, coding, unicycling, and languages.
- The site currently has engagement stats and plans to add social sharing features before launching.
- Videos are hosted on the site, but the plan is to also use YouTube as a marketing channel.
- The founder wants to see compelling stories of people overcoming challenges and struggles.
- The most popular content for third parties to watch may include babies learning to walk.
- Users are encouraged to stick with the challenge through community support and encouragement.
- There is a feature to make videos private or share them with a select group of friends.
- The startup Flexport is a licensed US customs brokerage that helps importers clear products through customs.

- The video discusses the process of importing goods into the US and the role of customs brokers.
- Customs brokers are specialized individuals or groups who handle the paperwork and filing required to clear goods through US Customs.
- These brokers are heavily licensed and trusted by the government, which allows them to streamline the process.
- The video introduces a startup that aims to disrupt the customs brokerage industry by offering an online dashboard and software to simplify the process.
- The startup plans to collect and organize the necessary documents for customers and file them electronically with the government.
- The goal is to make importing goods into the US easier and more efficient, eliminating the need for traditional customs brokers.
- The startup already has three customers and a waiting list of 300.
- The founder of the startup has experience in the industry and has imported thousands of containers in the past.
- The existing customs brokerage industry is highly regulated, making it difficult for startups to enter the market.
- The startup plans to expand beyond customs brokerage and offer additional services such as freight, warehousing, and inspections.
- The potential profitability of the customs brokerage business is estimated to be around $30 million per year.
- The startup is considering hiring salespeople to acquire new customers, but the founder wants to avoid the challenges of managing a large sales team.

- A multiplayer programming game for teaching coding has been launched in beta and received high traffic, causing server issues.
- The game focuses on teaching core programming concepts and plans to add more advanced concepts later.
- Feedback from beta users and advice from game designers are being used to improve the game.
- The founders aim to use the game as a recruitment tool for identifying potential employees for companies.
- Giveit100.com is a video site where users can share videos of their progress in various skills.
- The site is currently in private beta with 50 users and has a waiting list of around 4,300 people.
- Flexport is a startup aiming to disrupt the customs brokerage industry by offering online tools to simplify the importing process.
- The startup plans to expand beyond customs brokerage and offer additional services.
- The potential profitability of the customs brokerage business is estimated to be around $30 million per year.

Office Hours at Startup School 2013 with Paul Graham and Sam Altman

CodeCombat: George Saines, Nick Winter

100: Karen Cheng and Finbarr Taylor

Flexport: Ryan Petersen

Admiral Rickover would not stand for this.

So we are building a multiplayer programming game for teaching people how to code.

So you just beat more and more levels until you're an awesome developer.

So you sort of get points somehow for it.

Yeah, so the first level you got your guy, you write code to move him around and you kill another guy.

So it's like right in the middle that you're killing dudes.

Yeah, instead of, you know, what is your name, what's the length of your name as a string, yeah, okay, that's cool, but no, I kill that ogre.

It is, actually, we launched it yesterday.

Did you launch because we told you you were gonna be in office hours actually no We

it is so unfortunate because we didn't have time to prepare the launch went crazy.

But they were I got home from the from the dinner last night and I get on a hangout with these guys and they're just At the server terminal control seeing and restarting the server because it's under so much load.

We can only serve a certain fraction of the traffic that we're getting, and that's been going on for 24 hours.

I wanted to learn to code about a year or 2 ago.

I had been a semi-technical co-founder at my first startup, and I tried Codecademy, I tried a whole bunch of these, and I just couldn't stay, stick with it.

And so, these guys, my 2 co-founders were like, hey, why don't we actually make a game?

They thought you can't keep motivated using existing stuff, we'll make a game where you can kill people.

Our first startup, the customers kept coming to us and saying, we keep using your your company, your product, because it's like a game.

It's a company to teach people Chinese characters.

And so we thought, well, if we can do that inadvertently, what would happen if we actually made a game?

So How far can you learn how to program by like how much can you teach people right because I can remember the kind of crappy Programming I did when I was in high school Where I didn't really understand what I was doing

So if you look at the stuff that's on, you know top code or a hacker How

can you force people to learn advanced concepts when all they really need is to have the right library calls, right?

Can you make advanced concepts, produce advanced weaponry?

So the software engineering part of learning to be a developer, That's something we

can add later, focusing on core programming for now.

Because you get motivated enough, it's like, okay, now I want to build this app.

you have to get through different levels, right?

Presumably you get more and more sophisticated.

you could get more and more sophisticated just by writing more and more code and getting access to the right library functions without actually learning any more about programming, right?

How can you force them to learn more about programming in order to make more powerful weapons?

So you can have things like, okay, your code needs to run this fast, in this 1 you need to learn how to use recursion, This is the only method available to you in this 1.

You need to figure out how to do a non-honest function passing method here.

And generally, if you make the levels hard enough, which you're able to do when they have a reason to complete it, they try really hard, then you can get them to do harder and harder stuff as a natural progression of the game.

Well, the first thing that went wrong was that we started at too high a bar, because I had worked in kind of a semi-technical role in my first startup.

We assumed a whole bunch of prior knowledge that was totally untrue for our beta users.

So we started out writing for loops, which we were like, oh, well, that's simple.

And then we got people with no programming background and they didn't even know how to complete a line.

concept of formal notation is the single biggest obstacle.

What's the most advanced concept you're teaching now?

So far we have some dev levels where it was like, okay, you're going to need to figure out the targeting strategy for your artillery, so you're going to fire into the center of a group of dudes, and your soldiers, backed up by the artillery, have to avoid your shots, So you have to make sure that they don't chase into your line of shooting.

So it's a web game and you're doing everything in JavaScript.

So you're a wizard And you're casting spells to control your soldiers and your heroes and that sort

There's no Apache helicopters or anything like that.

It's when fantasy you can make up anything yeah, right

how many users did you guys get yesterday?

So we we maxed out the server at 15,000 people we had 200 concurrent But we really don't know because we were actually people were just getting 404s

Why not just spin up a bunch more servers

we weren't architected that way we didn't think we get nearly this much traffic We just posted it to reddit.

We we posted it to reddit, and we got swamped

We actually people on the Reddit threads were just, they were repeated things.

They were saying, oh, the hug of death, hug of death, hug of death, and 404 not working.

So they were scrambling all last night to do that.

Do you know if it's people that didn't know how to program before that are mostly doing this, or if it's just people that want to play a fun game?

So the people that know how to program already, they're like, OK, when's it on GitHub?

We had like 20 people yesterday, oh, lurking, like, oh man, I want to help out.

Yeah, so we're thinking open sourcing in the next couple months to really capitalize on the interest.

But most of the people, yeah, they're on the learn programming subreddit, they're like, I don't know any programming, this is great.

And they beat all our levels, and we're like, crap, we need more levels.

guys know anything about the gaming business?

We're learning, is the quick answer there.

Okay, because there's probably certain best practices in the gaming business, and probably whatever they do would be the starting point.

So if you're just wondering how much to open source, I don't know how much they open source things in their world, but whatever they do is probably the default thing to start with.

Yeah, we actually, that was the first thing we did when we started the company was we realized, wow, none of us are professional game designers, let's find and talk to game designers.

So we've got this kind of core group of people that are advising us, mostly just telling us when we've built sucks, but it's been very helpful thus far.

Is there anything they told you that changed what you were doing?

They said make robots and said people understand robots.

Because when you have like controlling your units via code, people think okay that's natural if you're robots.

When you say oh it's a spell, you're a wizard, you're adding to the fantasy and it's a little bit hard to understand.

I know you guys are not just going to create as much content as you can while people are-

So now the hope is we can finally turn out 3 levels a week using our awesome live coding drag and drop thing as opposed to like hard coding all the coordinates and be like, ah, does it work

No, we have 1 guy that's manning the servers right now.

This is the same team from the first startups.

We've been working together for 6 years now.

So I was his roommate, and I lived down the hall for my co-founder.

Did you guys study, were you guys programmers?

Yeah, so Scott and I did CS, and George is the econ film guy.

And then we graduated, and we're like, oh, let's not get jobs, that's going to suck.

And then we did the startup, and then 3 months later, the crash.

A lot of the reason people start startups is because they don't want jobs.

If we're looking at someone's application and they worked for a long time for a large company, that's actually bad to us because the best startup founders probably could not stand that.

3 months that IBM did me in, it was like sophomore year, like no, no more.

How are you guys going to make money with this?

The leads that we generate through the coding challenges provide us with the opportunity to qualify people before we even get in touch with a potential company.

Can you possibly train these people good enough to make them valuable employees?

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Office Hours at Startup School 2013 with Paul Graham and Sam Altman