At work last week, a co-worker asked me what I thought of Y Combinator and if it was a good idea for starting a company.

I shouted back, “Shit, if you need the money that bad, let’s walk down to WaMu and start three Y Combinators right now.”

For some reason, the other people in the office laughed.

[The Combinator metric after the jump.]

Measurement

My freshman year, the introduction to C programming class was a quarter course with ten labs. If you attended class, you only had to complete nine of them. Each of them built on the previous so by the last one you basically had written MacDraw for the HP Bobcat.

By the start of finals week, I had completed lab one. It consisted of asking you for your name, responding “Hi %name%, what is your height in inches?” and then saying how many you it would take to reach the top of the Empire State Building.

I’ll leave that class for another article. I just want to explain why I have a new habit…

Combinator measurement

I’ve started to talk about expensive stuff in terms of how many Y Combinators it costs. For instance, my car cost four Combinators new; my checking account has three Combinators in it (I definitely should put two of them in savings); my newest camera and lens cost a Combinator; my laptop was half a Combinator; my chair was a fifth of a Combinator.

I wish I knew more rich people. Then I could get them to say shit like, “Damn! I blew four Combinators throwing that party.”

Try it!

(My dream is one day being about to tell people, “Hosting a Lunch 2.0 costs way less than a Combinator.” It does already, but nobody would understand if I said it.)