Lora Kolodny:

Though the first one hasn’t even come off the production line yet, the makers of a new “telepresence” robot called the “Double” attracted more than $1 million worth of preorders within three weeks.

“It’s a Segway for your iPad,” quipped David Cann, founder and chief executive of Miami-based Double Robotics, at Y Combinator’s Demo Day in August, where he showed off the robot’s capabilities to investors.

Connecting an iPad to the Double turns it into a roving telepresence device. The first edition Double features an aluminum base, urethane and plastic wheels, custom control systems and iOS software that lets a user remotely drive the robot, video chat with those who it encounters, and peer into the spaces where it roams.

Paul Graham:

I’ve done several types of work over the years but I don’t know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.

The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.

The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn’t really grasp till it happened to us. The total value of the companies we’ve funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.

In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don’t know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.