[HN Gopher] What I've learned from users
___________________________________________________________________
What I've learned from users
Author : sginn
Score : 359 points
Date : 2022-09-20 13:13 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| gerdesj wrote:
| "The first thing that came to mind was that most startups have
| the same problems. No two have exactly the same problems, but
| it's surprising how much the problems remain the same"
|
| I'm out.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> At first I was puzzled. How could things be fine at 60
| startups and broken at 80? It was only a third more. Then I
| realized what had happened. We were using an O(n2) algorithm. So
| of course it blew up._
|
| This is neat, but isn't actually right. Each partner has to know
| each startup, which is, yes, O(n2) relationships. But there's no
| one who needs to do work proportional to the number of partner-
| startup relationships: each partner only has O(n) startups to
| keep track of. So probably the reason it blew up was just
| ordinary linear growth outstripping capacity: 60 startups was an
| amount most partners could keep track of, and 80 wasn't.
| pavon wrote:
| Unless the number of partners also grew in proportion to the
| number of startups. Then the partners had 33% more startups to
| learn, but they were scheduled for 33% fewer meetings with each
| startup, so the total number of meetings needed for all the
| partners to learn all the startups was O(P*S) which is O(N^2),
| since P&S are both proportional to N, so it took quadratically
| longer for that familiarity to occur.
| chalst wrote:
| This is basically right, but to hairsplit, it's an O(mn)
| algorithm, which is significantly different from an O(n)
| algorithm in that you can't help manage the number of startups
| by adding partners.
| jkaptur wrote:
| Yeah, the tech-nerd chestnut to bring out here is Dunbar's
| number.
|
| Not that that's necessarily the mechanism, but it's the thing
| to mention.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Appealing to Dunbar's number for org sizes is a strong signal
| for me I should de-weight whatever the person is saying.
| They're just parroting pop-science with reasoning that
| doesn't hold up to a second of critical thinking.
|
| If humans evolved to hold about 150 relationships in our
| minds, to say that an org has a tipping point of 150 people
| assumes the members of the organization know 0 people outside
| of the organization. Maybe this is approximately true for
| Amish communities. It is not close to true for startups
| doubling in size every year. The available "relationship
| slots" for your company is probably more like 10-25.
|
| If you want to say "things get weird at about 150+", sure,
| maybe that's true. But no need to bring up theories that
| extrapolate primate cranial capacity.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| My experience is that one can have multiple 100-150 person
| contexts and keep track of the people in them, i.e company,
| football community, friends etc. But it is harder when they
| get bigger.
| jollybean wrote:
| Is anyone bothered by the consistent lack of YC/PG's ability to
| coherently articulate all of these lessons pedagogically?
|
| Almost all of their advice, even Siebel, is in the negative:
| 'don't do this' etc.
|
| Siebel does give specific advice, and it's great, but a bit ad-
| hoc.
|
| Even if startups are counter-intuitive, there should be a way to
| write this book, with 'How To' lessons, even if it's very 'case
| based'.
|
| There are enough examples of YC companies that they could grab 10
| examples for each specific foray, to demonstrate what works, what
| does not and why.
|
| There's enough experience and data that someone should be able to
| write the high level rules, and then discuss a ton of field-level
| tactics that work for things like brand, direct sales,
| communications, marketing etc. etc..
| fairity wrote:
| More of a meta discussion, but it's interesting that pretty much
| all HN threads on PG's recent essays have a strong, negative
| sentiment. My guess is that this is explained by 3 factors:
|
| 1) The quantity and quality of new ideas in PG's essays is
| declining.
|
| 2) Readers' expectations of quality in PG's essays is increasing.
|
| 3) The pool of disenfranchised readers is growing.
|
| The quantity and quality of new ideas is decreasing because PG
| naturally wrote down his best ideas a long time ago.
|
| Readers' expectations increases because YC's power and influence
| grows.
|
| And, the pool of disenfranchised readers grows as more people try
| to join YC's ranks unsuccessfully.
|
| I feel badly about this because anyone who has interacted with PG
| irl knows he's as kind-hearted as people come. But, then again, I
| get the sense this doesn't bother him too much .
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Is there a single example of someone who is highly regarded for
| an extended period of time that doesnt end up having a strong
| group of people who dislike them?
|
| It's hard to tell if there is just enough commenters on HN that
| dislike PG or if tech folks in general actually have decided to
| dislike PG.
|
| Regardless, almost every single public figure reputation takes
| a downturn given enough time. PG is no exception.
| tash9 wrote:
| Giannis Antetokounmpo. He's been great for almost a decade
| and everybody still loves him. Growing up dirt poor for most
| of his life probably helps w/ being a great guy, though.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| My personal impression of this site is that it's generally very
| negative. I'm sure the response is to say that's just me
| noticing the negativity and not the positivity. Maybe so. I'd
| like to see some cold, hard numbers on it, though.
| eslaught wrote:
| The scope of pg's posts have narrowed dramatically.
|
| Back in the _Hackers & Painters_ days, it seemed like he was
| writing about a wide variety of topics. Startups were among the
| things he wrote about, but it wasn't exclusively about them.
| There were things about management styles, programming
| languages, even why nerds are not popular in high school.
|
| At some point, I think around the time YC started to become
| really successful, that changed, and pg started to write
| basically exclusively about startups. I can understand why, but
| his essays have been a lot less interesting ever since.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| If you look at the list of essay titles at
| https://paulgraham.com/articles.html, I think there are a lot
| of interesting topics that are a lot broader than startups -
| e.g. "heresy", "putting ideas into words", "how to work
| hard", "donate unrestricted", which are all from Feb 21 or
| later
|
| pg actually reminds me of Eliyahu Goldratt, who developed the
| "theory of constraints"("TOC"). Dr Goldratt was a physicist
| who then tried to apply the logical problem-solving approach
| from physics to business problems initially, but whose work
| has been also used for interpersonal conflict resolution [1].
| I get the same vibe from pg's essays, just trying to apply
| the same critical thinking skills to new areas from first
| principles, and just trying to see where it leads regardless
| of what the "established" wisdom is.
|
| If anyone is interested in learning more, most people start
| by reading "The Goal", which is application of TOC to
| manufacturing, but if you're interested in how to think about
| how to apply new technology to existing human systems in a
| way that _actually_ brings benefits, "beyond the goal" by
| goldratt is an audiobook that you should really listen to.
|
| Fyi I have no financial interest in TOC :) But if anyone is
| interested in discussing how TOC thinking might apply to the
| problems startups face, I'd love to chat, please get in
| touch! (Contact info in profile)
|
| [1] https://www.tocforeducation.com/yanibook.html
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| TOC is quite interesting and not as mainstream as something
| like SCRUM, but could be a better option.
|
| I like that it is more evidence-based and thought out.
| However I think applying this is challenging - for the same
| reason as scrum - because methodologies like this require
| leaders to let go of their control-ego and trust the
| system. And systems like TOC which require a lot of
| thinking, understanding and are easily corrupted by
| misunderstanding it are fragile to the reality of a
| hierarchical team structure where the bosses personality
| can dominate processes more than the process. As such I
| believe (may not be true) that taking good principles from
| TOC would be better.
|
| I have seen TOC tried to be applied in a software job and
| it turned into the typical "JIRA-style" nightmare of
| estimations, pressure, short term thinking and so on. I
| don't think that is what TOC is about, but what it can end
| up with when it hits the ground. SCRUM has the same issues
| of course. Because these methodologies are not meant to be
| an al a carte menu of options, where the ones that make the
| bosses eyes light up are chosen. But they are complete
| systems. Like it might be fun to only do bench presses at
| the gym and nothing else, and still eat badly, but that
| won't work - you need to do the whole regime!
|
| That is why in reality I prefer systems that can be offered
| al-a-carte. Maybe TOC can be I am not an expert and haven't
| read the book. But I like for example if someone comes to
| lead a team and sees how things are done and slowly tweaks
| things towards a long term goal. For example come in and
| get people work as a team not individually so that work is
| delivered sooner and there is less WIP.
|
| A bit rambly but those are my thoughts!
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I liked this one a lot better than I usually do of PG's blog
| posts!
| sbdncuvh wrote:
| Or the IT industry is just full of participation trophies and
| the new grey beards just cbf participating in a toxic community
| that can't handle a single opinion outside their own narrative.
| [deleted]
| nvr219 wrote:
| I was gonna upvote this comment but then I realized it's not
| clear who you're saying is the toxic community that can't
| handle the opinion.
| barrysteve wrote:
| That's the genius of it.
| nvr219 wrote:
| Brilliant.
| csa wrote:
| I would lay out a fourth possible option:
|
| 4. PG is thinking about YC at a high level of abstraction
| (e.g., making it a productive place for thinkers and makers
| like Xerox PARC was) while also having Inside Baseball-level
| knowledge [1] of YC strategy and tactics (both successes and
| failures) in ways that most people don't understand well and
| don't really appreciate.
|
| Based on my personal experience and on the experiences of
| people I know well, most people are fundamentally perceiving
| the challenges of elite performers vastly different than those
| elite performers do.
|
| As a simple example in my personal life, I was once a top tier
| online poker player. Trying to talk about hand histories with
| lower stakes players, even if they were winners, was an
| exercise in futility. The things that they had to focus on in
| their main games was very different what I had to focus on in
| my main games. Hand reviews that I thought were works of art
| that showcased high-level thinking were semi-regularly panned
| by the peanut gallery.
|
| I remember one post in particular where multiple small stakes
| players were trying to tell me and another winning pro about
| how bad we were for recommending and explaining a line he took
| in a medium-stakes live game. We both thought the line was
| sound both strategically and tactically (although not at all
| obvious), and all we got were comments like "I wish I was
| bankrolled for you game... I would clean you out by [insert a
| strategy that would cause them to be repeatedly violated in
| those games, even by the "bad" players]".
|
| I've seen similar examples in sports, business, and research.
|
| I think many parts of the HN peanut gallery would probably be
| well-served by focusing on being more curious and less certain,
| especially when dealing with people who have been wildly
| successful in their field of choice.
|
| Note that I'm not saying that 4 is the "right" answer, but I
| wanted to throw it out there as another possibility.
|
| [1] Inside Baseball is a tv show that goes super deep and super
| technical into details of baseball-related topics.
| jollyllama wrote:
| It could just be part of a broader trend of negative posting.
| Maybe some sentiment analysis could be applied.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > I feel badly about this because anyone who has interacted
| with PG irl knows he's as kind-hearted as people come.
|
| Irrelevant even if it is true.
| [deleted]
| JL-Akrasia wrote:
| Caveat - The best type of mentors for founders are other
| founders. VCs, Incubators, are not optimal mentors, rather those
| are key folks to have in your pocket.
|
| My suggestion for all founders - find a mentor who is a founder &
| builder.
| halfjoking wrote:
| Let's say you're one of the hundreds of thousands of solo
| devs/founders making some money - but less than $1000/month on
| your SaaS startup.
|
| You don't want VC, you just want growth and the ability to do
| your startup full-time. Why would someone mentor you in that
| case? What's the benefit to them?
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| "paying it forward"? Getting personal satisfaction from
| helping others? E.g https://www.indiehackers.com/ ? I haven't
| spent a lot of time there but it seems to be a community of
| exactly the kind of founders you describe trying to help each
| other out.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Lots of people simply enjoy helping others when they can.
| jedberg wrote:
| Pretty much every YC partner is a founder and builder.
| whiddershins wrote:
| The article makes this point as well.
| jeffshek wrote:
| In defense of YC, many of them are previously founders of
| startups.
| VinLucero wrote:
| I think best when walking.
|
| Does anyone know if these essays are available in Audiobook
| format?
|
| I can obviously do text to speech per URL, but would be awesome
| if Paul, or someone else, just hosted them on Spotify or
| elsewhere!
| maverickJ wrote:
| "Focus is doubly important for early stage startups, because not
| only do they have a hundred different problems, they don't have
| anyone to work on them except the founders. If the founders focus
| on things that don't matter, there's no one focusing on the
| things that do."
|
| Paul hits the nail on the head with this.
|
| I like to think of this as the idea of everything is not for you.
| It's very important to know what the goal is and ignore every
| other thing that does not align with it.
|
| The article below helps provide a framework of focus and the idea
| that everything is not for you.
|
| https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/everything-is-not-fo...
| flavmartins wrote:
| PG has reached a status where it's difficult to publish
| thoughts/blog posts that don't have every minute detail
| scrutinized.
|
| It's also HackerNews so it's a higher level audience too.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| I thought this article was about what PG learned from users but
| he just wrote about how good he is at identifying startup
| problems because they are all the same but actually not so same
| when it comes to replacing his job with an automated FAQ.
| soneca wrote:
| Yeah, it was odd.
|
| The learnings:
|
| 1. The number of companies of a batch affect how YC should work
|
| 2. Bad founders don't understand what problems they have (or
| miscalculate its relevance)
|
| 3. Founders don't listen
|
| None of those come from listening to founders. Number 1 not
| even came from founders, it was an internal realization that
| didn't affect founders.
|
| It was kind of interesting to read, just odd due to its title
| and hook.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I had the same impression. After item 3, there is then a
| tangential (ironic, even?) ramble about focus. I wonder if
| Paul decided on the title before or after writing the
| content!
| ekidd wrote:
| > how good he is at identifying startup problems because they
| are all the same
|
| I have never been an investor, but I have been a consultant who
| focused on short-term, strategically important projects for
| startups. So I got to see a lot of companies, both successful
| and unsuccessful.
|
| After a while, patterns really do become obvious. When you've
| seen some winners, and some doomed companies, and some that
| will just muddle along forever, you start to notice things.
|
| One thing is that when your customer base is truly energized,
| they'll practically crawl over your desk to write checks. With
| other companies, you'll need a sales team to push things
| uphill. But those companies can still win, if the sales
| department is humming. Other companies have poured their heart
| into their product, but they've never figured out how to sell
| it, or even how to talk to customers. (I can fix product
| problems, but I can't fix teams that don't talk to their
| customers.)
|
| Sometimes all it takes is a 5 minute phone call with a founder,
| and you can tell which is which. I've turned down pretty
| generously funded projects because it was clear that no amount
| of software would help a particular company connect with its
| market.
|
| Now, a successful investor has seen _far_ more companies than I
| ever saw. I imagine the best investors can filter quickly and
| surprisingly well.
| mrhektor wrote:
| I think he's referring to startups as his "users". In that
| context, I guess he's saying he's learnt the common patterns of
| why startups fail.
| blast wrote:
| FTA: _What have I learned from YC 's users, the startups
| we've funded?_
| yashap wrote:
| This was a surprisingly bad essay (and I generally enjoy PG's
| essays). It claims to be about "what PG has learned from YC users
| (startup founders)", but basically just says "founders are wrong,
| YC is amazing," then descends into a YC elevator pitch.
|
| There's really nothing concrete about what he's learned from
| users, other than "they have similar problems" (with zero
| information about what those problems are) and "they're wrong
| about what's important for their businesses" (again with zero
| details). If anything, this reads like an essay of someone who
| aggressively DOESN'T listen to his users.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My take was the opposite. Here he is talking about something he
| knows something about which isn't always the case.
| zigman1 wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one.
| metadat wrote:
| Life is a journey. I remember when I first encountered and read
| one of Paul's essays circa 2012. They were like a breath of
| fresh air! The clever, apparently data-driven analysis and
| freely imparted wisdom, wow. His writing came across as so
| intelligent and I concluded he must be a nice and decent person
| - just like me, maybe even a better version. For a twenty-
| something who'd already worked at a slew of startups, the
| essays contained some useful advice for life. Then over the
| years, over time, something changed. What used to read and be
| interpreted in a way I deemed "correct" now comes across as
| arrogant, elitist, dismissive, and overly broad. I no longer
| find the essays informative. It's kind of like the Polar
| Express holiday story; the bell no longer rings for me.
|
| https://polarexpress.fandom.com/wiki/Silver_bell
|
| Paul, thank you for inspiring me, your writing helped me in my
| twenties. Sometimes things were right for a certain period of
| time and then inevitably become dated as new wisdom and
| revelations unfold and the landscape changes.
| metacritic12 wrote:
| Interestingly, I found his essays in the early 2000s, and
| thought the same about it back then, when I was a teenager.
|
| Part of it is that pg's essays are inspiration-porn adjacent,
| and I think teens and twenties have the highest affinity for
| such items.
|
| Part of it is that pg used to be able to comment on anything
| he wanted to in society freely. His followers were all fans
| and bought into his style of thinking. There were no haters
| because pg wasn't sufficiently famous for them to score
| points by dunking on him.
|
| It's a shame he's achieved such silencing status. I wish he
| could post his deeper thoughts and observations under one or
| more pen names.
| majani wrote:
| I've gone through the same process with pg's essays. Might be
| the fact that I've come to realize that the reality of the
| Silicon Valley VC scene is so far removed from the rest of
| the world that I need to take any advice coming from there
| with a pinch of salt. Also might just be me growing bored of
| someone -\\_(tsu)_/-
| brk wrote:
| I don't entirely disagree, but I think the takeaway is that the
| right path is not always intuitive, experience matters, and
| that it is hard for founders to trust advisors at times.
|
| This one probably could have been 50% shorter, which would make
| it 200% more effective in communicating the message. PG needs
| an editor :)
| jseliger wrote:
| _Another related surprise is how bad founders can be at realizing
| what their problems are. Founders will sometimes come in to talk
| about some problem, and we 'll discover another much bigger one
| in the course of the conversation_
|
| This is also true of undergrads, who often come in to office
| hours thinking they have one problem, but they in fact have
| another, or several others. I suspect that mentorship is useful:
| https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-pr...
| because good mentors often see the non-apparent problems.
| gaul_praham wrote:
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The thing that leaps out is "fund lots of small startups, the
| lessons are repeatable".
|
| I occasionally bang on about "Million Startups". Some back of the
| envelope maths and I reckon one could finance a literal million
| startups with what SoftBank might call a bad year (around 30
| billion). When YC started they funded people with 5k per founder.
|
| I am not saying fund the next fusion machine, but put momentum
| into cities and groups across the globe.
|
| And if what pg says is true (there are few new problems) then
| guiding those startups must be more feasible then "million"
| sounds. Yes 60 to 80 is a big leap but 80 to a million is only
| slightly bigger :-)
|
| Anyway - saying more startups on HN is very much preaching to the
| choir so Inwill stop now.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Maybe rebrand UBI as the government funding a few million
| startups? That and universal healthcare probably would free up
| enough people to start their passion project. Enough to cover
| the ones that want to be artists, caregivers, or just go
| surfing/play video games.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The thing that fascinates me about UBI (apart from the right
| wing capitalists promoting socialist utopias) is the effect
| it (presumably) will have on salaries and companies. I mean
| HN is populated by people who mostly enjoy their STEM related
| work, but even so if we did not have to pay mortgages
| tomorrow I suspect 75% would hand in their notice and go
| something else - still working but working on their own start
| ups or the like.
|
| I cannot see a way to bring it in without collapsing the
| economy basically.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| A group of restaurants where I live decided to collectively
| go 'tip-less' autogratuity with health insurance cost
| added. I was ok with the experiment and to support the
| cause. Well by my account it failed. Within about 6 months
| the quality of service and food dropped so bad I stopped
| going to those restaurants. I'd say by the parking lots
| other people are following my lead.
|
| I suspect UBI would have similar but wider reaching
| results.
| mdorazio wrote:
| The B in UBI is pretty important and seems to be at odds
| with what you're thinking. It's meant to be a _basic_
| income that guarantees you won 't starve or be homeless
| _somewhere_ in the country. That 's it. A backup to fall
| upon or a subsistence if you don't want to/can't work or a
| life booster for low income earners. No fancy cars,
| apartment in a coastal city, big house, vacations, meals
| out, etc. How many HN readers would quit their jobs
| tomorrow and move to Alabama to live on $20k/year?
|
| Anyone talking about UBI as though it would be a
| significant income source and fund a "fun" life is an idle
| dreamer - that will never work.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I think the biggest impediment to UBI is the 'U'niversal
| part. It can only be one way, at 18yo you start getting a
| monthly UBI check, no questions no conditions.
|
| It will never be that way, it will always be muddied by
| some conditions. Like income restrictions bonuses based
| on various protect group clauses and million other
| details.
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| My favourite brainwave on UBI was to brand it a negative
| income tax. Would stymie a lot of the more traditional fiscal
| conservative arguments (albeit not going to counter the drive
| for regressive rates).
| vecter wrote:
| > We learned that the hard way, in the notorious "batch that
| broke YC" in the summer of 2012. Up till that point we treated
| the partners as a pool. When a startup requested office hours,
| they got the next available slot posted by any partner. That
| meant every partner had to know every startup. This worked fine
| up to 60 startups, but when the batch grew to 80, everything
| broke. The founders probably didn't realize anything was wrong,
| but the partners were confused and unhappy because halfway
| through the batch they still didn't know all the companies yet.
|
| I was part of the S12 batch. I certainly knew it was broken a few
| weeks in. Every week when we had office hours, it was always with
| a new partner and we spent the entire time getting them up-to-
| speed on just our background and context.
|
| Still loved the experience and would do YC again.
| ahmadss wrote:
| I was curious to see what companies were part of the S12 batch,
| and who were the most notable. Among the 80 or so in that
| group, big winners were Coinbase, Instacart, and Zapier.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/yc-demo-day-s12/
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| With Coinbase ipo'ed and Instacart about to ipo, that's not a
| bad batch from a purely investment perspective.
| killerdhmo wrote:
| Coinbase? they're down 80% since their IPO (I am a
| shareholder); I suppose if the checkbox is "they IPOd" then
| sure.
| kojeovo wrote:
| Shareholder since IPO vs when YC invests
| mcguire wrote:
| Is YC _still_ an investor?
| platelminto wrote:
| I mean, that's a pretty big checkbox regardless.
| lejohnq wrote:
| Down 80% from IPO but with a market cap above 10 billion.
| Compared to when YC invested I think that's still pretty
| good
| PeterisP wrote:
| Investors generally cash out at IPO, so if IPO price was
| 5x the real/current value, then that was a very, very
| profitable deal for the early investors.
| NhanH wrote:
| I adore pg's essay. But this time something is tripping my spider
| sense, so I had to take a closer look (at my spider sense, and a
| bit on the essay too).
|
| This is the first time an essay feels like a sale pitch.
| Specifically, a sale pitch for YC. I've read pg's essay about YC
| for about 15 years, and this is the first one I have that
| feeling.
|
| This one is a bit too abstract. I'm getting the idea that YC can
| help founders tremendously, that their knowledge is specialized
| and hard to get elsewhere. But I'm eagerly waiting for one
| concrete example, and none are to be found. Normally I'd expect a
| real set of examples from startups, instead of the analogy in
| horror movies. I still remember the essay where pg described how
| he came up with Jessica the idea of YC, while walking somewhere,
| explaining very concretely what he thought at the time.
|
| For any other writer or organization, I'd just guess they are
| trying to "keep their secret recipe". That is neither pg or YC's
| MO.
|
| So yeah, this feels strange.
| yashap wrote:
| Strongly agree, this is one of PG's worst essays IMO (I'm also
| generally a fan of his essays). On top of it feeling sales-y,
| it really gives the vibe of someone who DOESN'T listen to
| users. There's essentially nothing concrete that he's learned
| from users in this essay, despite that supposedly being the
| topic, just "they have similar problems and don't know how to
| prioritize."
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| He could have spilled the beans about what the top problems
| founders have. These are probably covered in the online
| startup course YC runs though - so not a "secret" but maybe
| he didn't want this to be a startup advice piece, but more
| abstract.
| drc500free wrote:
| It definitely is strange to repeat over and over that startups
| are counter-intuitive, and that the best advice isn't easily
| believable, and not give even a single demonstrative example.
|
| Agree, this sounded like a Tony Robbins style pitch where you
| don't get to hear any of the magic until you've paid for the
| seminar.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _But I 'm eagerly waiting for one concrete example, and none
| are to be found._
|
| Well not in essay, but there are plenty examples in the real
| world, surely?
|
| "Paul Graham gave us a series of advice that changed our
| business forever." -Brian Chesky, https://archive.is/xvx31
|
| "One big thing that YC did for me is it was an ambition
| multiplier. Pre-YC I thought it'd be cool to make software that
| could just pay my bills. A year post-batch and I find my
| default state is much more ambitious than before."
| -u/CoffeePython (YC S21),
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32556060
|
| "I have to say though - while the success rate of these YC-only
| funds is likely good enough to make them quite profitable, none
| of them come even close to what I observed with PG's ability to
| pick the winners (which makes sense, since a lot of other
| people have tried to build accelerators and none of them come
| even close to YC)." -u/aerosimle (YC),
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381893
|
| ...
| NhanH wrote:
| That is exactly why I single out this essay as being unusual.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| > But I'm eagerly waiting for one concrete example, and none
| are to be found.
|
| Were you looking for testimonials embedded in the essay to meet
| your expectations?
|
| Of course, this wouldn't be acceptable as it would turn the
| piece unmistakably into a sales pitch for his product cementing
| your suspicions about the nature or motives behind authoring
| this post, a viewpoint which by the way I don't necessarily
| share.
|
| This type of reporting that you're specifically looking for is
| best served with other formats like featured stories or in-
| depth analyses done by news organization; where they get to
| interview YC partners, alumni and startup founders, and solicit
| their opinions and thoughts about their experience with the
| organization, but even this reporting needs to be balanced and
| informative otherwise it will be mistaken for an advertorial
| or, as you guessed, a sales pitch.
| insightcheck wrote:
| Testimonials, despite carrying the baggage of being a
| marketing term, are a legitimate form of evidence, especially
| if the people giving testimony are named in full. It affects
| their reputation if either they or the company they are
| testifying for are disreputable.
|
| It's true that independent reporting will be more likely to
| provide a balanced and objective assessment, but at the same
| time, opinionated articles like the submitted essay are more
| valuable with the provision of stronger evidence.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Testimonials in general are like these cheesy or sleazy
| infomercials on home shopping channels, fake and worthless
| and that's why they earned the bad reputation that they
| have.
|
| Also, it is not even that the essay itself is totally
| bereft of real world examples to support his thesis, when
| he actually cited Airbnb as a case of coming around, and
| applying the practical advice given to the founders by YC
| to deliver value.
| insightcheck wrote:
| To clarify, I maintain that testimonials from people who
| give their full names (and thus can be contacted after)
| are perceived as solid evidence. A common real-life
| example of named testimonials seen as credible by
| recruiters are written LinkedIn endorsements from named
| people who are connections on a person's profile.
| However, I agree that nameless or semi-anonymized
| testimonials are less valuable and give the entire term
| of "testimonial" a poor reputation, because their
| truthfulness can't be verified.
|
| On the second point, what you wrote is true, but the
| Airbnb mention was pretty short; your comment is probably
| around the same length as Graham's mention. The Airbnb
| mention in full consists of: "[4] The Airbnbs were
| particularly good at listening -- partly because they
| were flexible and disciplined, but also because they'd
| had such a rough time during the preceding year. They
| were ready to listen."
|
| I could find no mentions of other named companies
| involved with YC in the article, and the Airbnb mention
| was quite brief (the assertion was that they listened to
| YC's advice, and the implication is that this was the
| reason behind its success).
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| 1) As you said, these LinkedIn *testimonials" are more of
| professional endorsements than anything. In my opinions,
| testimonials on the web have become totally discredited,
| and the moment I see one in the wild, the first thing
| that pops on my mind, it's a commercial with an identity
| crisis.
|
| 2) I totally agree with you that details are scarce and
| left much to be desired but maybe this narrative is more
| suitable to other media like books or podcasts where they
| have the space to expand on points and let us all on the
| juicy details.
|
| I pretty much would have appreciated to hear the full
| story on Airbnb struggles in the beginning and how they
| managed to turn it around.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Of course YC has some secrets in their recipe.
| jedberg wrote:
| I wouldn't consider that a given. YC is very generous with
| their information. They put all their trainings online, and
| even all their legal documents.
|
| They realize that their value is in the people, not the
| artifacts.
| mcguire wrote:
| Well, PG did just say out loud that founders were YC's users.
| And, as a user, if you aren't paying for the product, you are
| the product...
| wilde wrote:
| I suspect part of it is that he'd need to go and chase down
| permission for a bunch of the anecdotes since YC office hours
| have an expectation of privacy. But maybe there's a version of
| this essay with a tic more detail you'd prefer?
| bullen wrote:
| It's important to get the right users.
|
| Focus on repelling bad users; stay poor, stay happy.
|
| Success is way harder than failure!
| deepsun wrote:
| No HTTPS, in 2022?
| karlzt wrote:
| pg is outdated :(
| KennyFromIT wrote:
| Off-topic, but I wonder how much traffic is lost on PG's site due
| to not having a valid TLS certificate for his domain.
| ajkjk wrote:
| probably.. like.. 5 readers. Maybe 10.
| skellyclock wrote:
| i've got an ultrawide screen
|
| god i wish he'd centre texts
| dilap wrote:
| used to be bothered by the same thing but have since adopted
| one of those "quickly position window" utilities -- so e.g.
| you can quickly move the whole window to a reasonable column-
| width in the middle of the screen
|
| i use "rectangle" for the mac, but there are lots of
| alternatives on lots of platforms. very nice QOL improvement.
| seanw444 wrote:
| My browser never exceeds 40-50% of my total screen width in
| my tiling window manager. Keeps my eyes from shooting all
| over the place. For websites that are properly optimized, you
| don't really lose out on anything. And for the websites that
| aren't, a quick keybind to go fullscreen for a bit is nice.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| Two monitors. One in landscape orientation for media
| content, one in portrait orientation for text content.
| cercatrova wrote:
| I use Stylus which let's me inject custom CSS. I used it on
| his site to center the content.
| deepnet wrote:
| How ?
|
| https://stylus-lang.com/
| cercatrova wrote:
| Stylus the Chrome / Firefox extension
| marssaxman wrote:
| I wonder why reader mode doesn't work here.
| m_t wrote:
| Maybe because everything is in tables?
| ape4 wrote:
| And not mobile-friendly
| kiddz wrote:
| Funny, we're literally launching a new project today that allows
| for distributed focus groups. We haven't changed over the DNS --
| here's the Heroku link (https://opinion-graphs-
| website.herokuapp.com)
|
| How we got here: for a while we had been struggling with breaking
| through on another project that user voice input to measure
| sentiment for office space.
|
| Last week, we took a step back and thought that having a tool
| that could allow start-ups to ask opened ended questions where
| people could just "talk" and what they said is analyzed for
| sentiment would be valuable. So that's what we're building with
| OpinionGraphs. IMHO this is directly in the vein of PG's points
| about learning from users.
|
| With whatever you're building, if you're interested in trying a
| new way to connect to users or targeted customers along the lines
| of PG's advice, please dm me or just leave a comment here and
| I'll reach out.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > The educational system in most countries trains you to win by
| hacking the test
|
| How can we raise a generation of kids that, as a rule, don't hack
| the test?
| avg_dev wrote:
| I've read a few of pg's articles over the years. I believe it was
| one about nerdy kids and their relationships and worldviews that
| first brought me to this site. At some point, I read the article
| "Hackers and Painters" and I felt like pg's essays didn't
| resonate with me anymore. I even read a response called "Dabblers
| and Blowhards" that I resonated strongly with. I thought to
| myself, pg is distanced from reality, and that perhaps I was or
| had been as well.
|
| Over the past year or so I've been trying to make sure that my
| opinions are mindfully and consciously held. I've worked on
| debugging them: I test and evaluate my beliefs when the
| opportunity arises. I try to make sure I still feel what I think
| I feel and that I understand what is going on in my head and my
| heart, and that they act congruently.
|
| For instance, I know now that I dislike many, many things that
| Amazon has done and how it treats its workers. But I think that
| the people who worked on my Kindle Oasis have the utmost respect
| for their users. It makes me somewhat comfortable with the
| ambivalence that for me goes along with using it. For I surely
| love my Kindle and I surely am happy to purchase books on the
| Kindle store while I simultaneously am disgusted by the treatment
| of factory workers, delivery drivers, software developers, and
| other real human beings who work for Amazon. I could say the same
| about my iPhone. Sometimes I think hard about the slave labor
| that went into the manufacturing of the device that I am typing
| this message into. Should I stop using it? Maybe so. Maybe not.
| At the moment, I consciously choose to continue using it. It is
| quite possible that history will judge me quite harshly for this.
| But I believe that there is empathy and soul (and blood and
| inhumanity) in these things.
|
| This morning I had a feeling of revulsion when I saw that pg had
| written another article and that it was on the front page of one
| of my favorite websites. I readily see the hypocrisy in this. But
| as I mentioned at the outset, I wanted to determine if I felt the
| way I most recently felt about reading his essays. So I read it
| with as close to an open mind as I could.
|
| I believe that on this subject, pg knows more than I likely ever
| will. His users are early stage startups and he has clearly
| identified wide classes of issues and the ability to suss them
| out in the course of a brief conversation. He is able to envision
| founder habits changing, and recidivism of said changes. He is
| able to approach each situation with the mindfulness and presence
| that it deserves by understanding that as much as these issues
| fall into buckets, the circumstances surrounding them are unique,
| and the people involved are individuals. He is able to relate
| these and understand them in the context of one of the most near
| and dear things to my heart: cutting edge software development.
| He is able to see when a founder is incorrectly assessing their
| own situation, and he is able to guide them to a course
| correction. He is able to ask the founders key questions that
| they themselves can evaluate to understand their predicament. He
| is able to understand their humanity.
|
| And he has built a whole team of partners with this ability.
|
| Going against the grain of my prejudices and my expectations, I
| thought this was a fine article. I have considerably more respect
| for YC and pg than I did before I read it. I am more comfortable
| browsing this site as a result.
| malodyets wrote:
| Really appreciate this thoughtful take. Thank you.
| debacle wrote:
| Paul, if you're reading, this the color on your footnotes is very
| light on my screen and they're very easy to miss.
| avg_dev wrote:
| I could be wrong but I got the feeling that was by design. They
| are meant as supplements and not to distract or detract from
| the core message.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's why you make something a footnote. But that's not a
| reason for making the mark invisible.
| t3estabc wrote:
| Oh cool a new essay from Paul.
| breck wrote:
| Amazing essay.
|
| The only weak spot I could find was "It took me a long time to
| figure out why founders don't listen."
|
| I think sometimes their advice is packaged in a data backed,
| falsifiable way. For example, JL's: "I don't know of a single
| case of a startup that felt they spent too much time talking to
| users".
|
| But sometimes it's just "Because I said so".
|
| In the latter case it would be better if they showed their CSV
| backing their advice, or took the time to reformulate into a
| testable, falsifiable piece of wisdom.
| fbanon wrote:
| This guy is very smart!
| O__________O wrote:
| Oddest part of this post to me is that the author founded HN, but
| largely abandoned it because dealing with the users was a huge
| mental sinkhole for them; not able to find the quote, but clearly
| recall him saying this, though might be wrong.
|
| As it relates to HN, PG what have you learned from the users? If
| HN was a startup, would it make it into YC?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Totally depends on the ambition; perhaps it was never PG's
| ambition to completely understand and "own" the target audience
| of HN, but rather wanted to delegate that responsibility, to
| focus on YC's core users instead.
|
| It may be precisely because of a tendency to understand and
| improve, that it is a mental sinkhole.
| O__________O wrote:
| Found the PG quote I mentioned:
|
| ____________________
|
| >> Here's a little known fact about the history of Y
| Combinator. The single biggest source of stress, for me at
| least, was not picking startups or advising them or Demo Day or
| even fighting with people on the startups' behalf. It was
| running HN.
|
| >> Don't start a forum.
|
| ____________________
|
| Above was posted to Twitter Jul 11, 2020 -- please see link
| below for additional context:
|
| - https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1282052801347100675
| barrysteve wrote:
| PG is great. What would we do without him? We want a PG in the
| arena at all times.
|
| This article doesn't hit the mark. Startup people don't listen,
| because they're trying to create something new, that nobody else
| understands (or people who understand are a 'parallel thought
| threat' like Newton and Liebniz). Counter-intuitivity is in the
| ballpark, but not quite "it".
|
| Really what an inventor/entrepreneur does is to specialize in a
| direction or idea no-one else gets or no-one else will understand
| the way to make it, until it's in MVP or prototype stage. How can
| that person slam the breaks on the train and start doing
| rational, sensible things that could extinguish the light of
| discovery/creation? Not saying that's a good thing, it's what it
| is.
|
| There's a weird trend online to keep blaming school for poor
| thinking. It's a cool rhetorical device. Doesn't work for me
| though. I went to a good school that challenged me to open my
| mind and is also the basis for faith and way of thinking that
| gets me to discovery. The patterns I see that others don't, is
| partially because I hold a tiny candle flame for an older way of
| thinking that is sorely needed in some spaces.
|
| There's also a quiet truth that there's now two truths. One truth
| for the established and comfortable, another truth for the man
| battling for his soul's light. They point mostly in different
| directions and they don't understand each other so much. It's
| physically painful to try and synthesize those two truths into
| one.
|
| More transparency in communication is the way to go. Everyone
| needs to admit only the old wisdom and knowledge is firm and
| stable. The more we can admit we don't know what's going on as we
| go forward, the more we can relate... my probably-wrong 0.02c
| hinkley wrote:
| It's a chicken and egg problem though. Is the idea new because
| I am a novel, intelligent person gifted with foresight, or is
| the idea new because I'm a contrarian and am more concerned
| with changing the world than having a really compelling reason
| to do so?
|
| We talk about people 'losing their way' as Reality chips away
| at their original idea. And while I'm sure this really does
| happen to some people, how often is it just a pretty story the
| person tells themselves that makes them feel good, helps them
| get through the day, helps them sleep at night? It's much
| easier to compromise on something you didn't hold that dearly
| to begin with. Anything else that helps you sleep at night
| (like not worrying about payroll) makes a fine substitute,
| especially if you don't look at it too closely.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Nobody is made from one divine moment. There are many good
| ideas. Lose one and another comes.
|
| Executing on them is difficult if the charging bull has to be
| asked to serve two gods. Can you lash reigns to the bull
| without keeping the bull from it's target?
| contingencies wrote:
| _YC founders aren 't just inspired by one another. They also help
| one another. That's the happiest thing I've learned about startup
| founders: how generous they can be in helping one another._
|
| This goes both ways. A few years ago a group reached out to me
| from HN who wanted to start up in the same sector we're working
| in. They were a small group of guys from a famous US university
| who arranged to call me and pick my brains, which I was happy to
| do for over an hour. I was all like "welcome to the space" and
| gave them some strategic pointers. I had done online YC and met
| some of the YC partners and felt these people being from a decent
| university and engaged with HN should have been, err, of
| reasonable ethical stature. Later on these people totally blanked
| me, are presenting my insights freely shared as their own, and
| have since secured YC funding. I am not worried in the slightest
| - in fact I can see them struggling and their mistakes are clear
| to me from afar, but I just wanted to note clearly that there is
| no code of honour that will not be broken, and this place is not
| immune.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| One of the goto success stories of our generation, Facebook, is
| based on a university student acting extremely immorally as he
| stole the idea from people he agreed to build said idea for.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Prompted by the negative feedback that this essay received,
| ranging from being a sales pitch in disguise, to being a word
| salad going in all directions without answering the central
| question posed by the author right in the opening paragraphs, I
| had to go and re-examine the piece and see if these concerns are
| valid or not, and unexpectedly the second reading reaffirmed my
| initial positive reaction that this is actually a good piece,
| maybe not the best, but still good.
|
| In spirit of open discussion and intellectual curiosity here, I
| share my insights in the following order matching that of the
| post:
|
| 1) PG opens with the best advice that he could dispense to
| prospective applicants which is "what you've learned from users".
|
| 2) He proceeds to ask himself the same question.
|
| 3) He then informs readers that his users; startup founders,
| usually face the same set of problems across the board.
|
| 4) Since these problems are the same, he thought of automating
| the solution to scale his business (dogfooding in some sense).
|
| 5) That blew up in his face spectacularly that he had to rework
| the plan and concede that his solution won't scale.
|
| 6) But these same problems are not recognized uniformly by
| founders as they sometimes face difficulties identifying them in
| the first place, that's where the YC partners' role come to fill
| this unmet need.
|
| 7) Even when people are good at identifying problems, some are
| bad at determining the severity or urgency that these problems
| pose, cue again the YC partners' role.
|
| 8) Even when they're good at risk assessment, some are bad at
| risk mitigation, and won't listen to the advice given by the
| partners but it is not made clear what he means exactly by "not
| listening", dismissing/not acting on solutions proposed by YC
| staff, or not acknowledging that there's a problem to begin with?
|
| 9) Getting down to business to solve these problems warrants
| focus, and how this focus is tied into speed, and how YC can help
| with that.
|
| 10) Startup colleagues are more important than YC partners when
| it comes to realizing success with their feedback, guidance and
| even practical help, and how YC is the best in class in this
| regard.
|
| Even though the marketing language, esp the value propositions in
| the piece is a bit stronger for my taste, but I can't say with
| honesty that it overpowered the core message of the essay nor was
| it incoherent or disjointed in anyway that made following or
| understanding impossible as some have claimed here.
|
| Verdict: 8/10
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > without answering the central question posed by the author
| right in the opening paragraphs
|
| I love that it doesn't and how it doesn't. I also find it
| hilarious that we have been so trained by SEO and modern day
| marketing gurus to expect The Answer (either roughly 90% down
| the page or alternatively within a list of 10 short, bulleted
| paragraphs) that an open question makes people uncomfortable.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Maybe PG should listen to his users, in this specific case
| his readers, and provide a summary at the top of the article
| on each post for people running on a busy schedule.
|
| I for once felt like returning to the days of college when I
| finished writing this comment where I'd prepare summaries for
| lecture notes for me and my friends, very nostalgic times.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree, and this is coming from somehow who's been relatively
| disillusioned with pg's essays of late - I made this comment
| about another pg essay about a year ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28951278
|
| While I still think many of those points apply to this essay
| (yes, whether or not it's a sales pitch "in disguise", it's
| still a sales pitch), they don't bother me as much here because
| pg is specifically talking about his experiences in YC and
| startups in general. If there is one person who I think has
| earned the title of "expert on early stage startup experiences
| and lessons learned" it is Paul Graham.
|
| Yes, he touches on a lot of different points, but I still found
| it to be a useful read. If anything, I'd be interested in some
| more pointed follow-up, e.g "Here are some of the top common
| problems startups hit", with specific examples, or "Here are 5
| times founders ignored our advice, and what happened".
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| While I don't agree with your view regarding the
| classification of this piece as a sales pitch -- it's infused
| with variable value proposition statements, it doesn't
| detract from the core message -- I share your sentiment that
| PG is one of the leading experts in the world of startup
| accelerators.
|
| Regarding your suggestions, I don't think that this listicle-
| heavy Buzzfeed type of writing suits PG. I'm more drawn to
| his abstract and enigmatic writing style.
| vaylian wrote:
| > YC founders aren't just inspired by one another. They also help
| one another. That's the happiest thing I've learned about startup
| founders: how generous they can be in helping one another.
|
| Synergy is a powerful thing.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| God, even as an open source maintainer, all of these insights
| SCREAM incredibly relevant.
|
| In fact, what is worse is that you don't realize your focus is
| totally wrong because you're not losing revenue. You might be
| losing eyeballs or growth and adoption, but that's easier to
| gloss over considering it's a factor of advertising.
|
| I constantly ask myself when looking at some of the de facto
| solutions in open source spaces what the hell the maintainers are
| doing, because what they are focused on is completely irrelevant.
|
| The same could be said about large companies who have so much
| revenue that can continue to make mistakes until someone
| challenges them.
| kevstev wrote:
| With open source, the incentives from a maintainers view might
| look a lot different than what you would think. A friend of
| mine has a very popular JS framework out there, gets about 500k
| downloads a week off of NPM.
|
| There are lots of user requests that he just outright ignores.
| He doesn't even care about his stats, or trying to "compete"
| with another more popular framework- to him its just more
| headaches. He built what he wanted, pushed it out for the world
| to use, and plenty of people did, enough that even 10x'ing that
| number is unlikely to really burnish the resume any further. He
| even tried to make it a full time job, but he found the Patreon
| model just way too much begging and inconsistent. Offering a
| support contract, a few people bit, but not enough that he
| could really hire people so he could offer 24/7/365 support
| that that implies.
|
| So he refactors, adds features he wants, and tells everyone to
| go Fork themselves if they whine about their pet feature not
| getting implemented. Of course PRs are welcome, and its
| actually more of a community based project now, but he has
| retained BDFL status for the core of it.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Ultimately, I found that basically no one makes any money off
| Patreon or GitHub Sponsors. I mean statistically. Sure there
| are big names you and I know of out there, but the income of
| OnlyFans creators is orders of magnitude higher.
|
| But of course, I doubt they'd ever share the distribution of
| income for users off those platforms. You'd realize there's
| no point.
| clairity wrote:
| this is why _fair_ competition is so important in markets (not
| "free"). it's literally what makes markets efficient, not
| omnicient capitalists, as they'd love for you to believe. the
| market works because mistakes become directly apparent in the
| catchall metric that is price (and its derivatives, revenue and
| profit).
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds
| me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience.
|
| I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it
| averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people
| sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000
| cars for over $100 million.
|
| (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these
| benefits would come from 2 years)
|
| I made close to 50,000 phone calls, leaving probably 20,000
| voicemails. I closed atleast 1000 deals purely on the phone.
|
| I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections over
| 10,000 times.
|
| I've seen thousands of married couples discuss if they should go
| ahead with spending $30-100k. I've seen how they interact while
| waiting. (Nothing pains me more than couples, or moreso one
| party, playing games on their phones ignoring each other).
|
| While there is a lot more to modern tech sales than just closing
| incoming leads, I think car sales is an accelerator course for
| interacting with, reading, and closing people.
| paxys wrote:
| While what you are saying is historically true, the internet
| has made the car salesman role pretty much irrelevant. I expect
| the job (and dealerships themselves) won't exist a decade or
| two from now. There are enough pictures, videos, spec sheets,
| expert reviews and forum discussions available online that the
| word of a sleazy salesman is worth nothing. More and more
| customers today walk into dealerships only because they have to
| by law, but know exactly what they want and what price they are
| willing to pay.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| People have been saying this for 20 years. Yet car
| salespeople are more important than ever from what I've seen.
| But let's ignore that because you could argue it's just
| opinion.
|
| My favorite example/rebuttal to this is: Imagine a car sales
| evolves to basically vending machines. You walk up to the
| box, pick a car, swipe your card, and a roll-up door opens
| and your car pops out. Amazing! No salespeople needed. Every
| town just gets a few vending machine!
|
| Then one day, one vending machine owner decides to pay a
| bright kid to stand next to the vending machine in case the
| people have questions. Sales would go up at that vending
| machine. Soon all vending machines have a salesperson
| standing next to them helping people. And we're back to where
| we started.
|
| (Unless you think a smart helpful person standing next to the
| vending machine would make sales go down I suppose... But
| this is against everything I've seen selling thousands of
| cars)
| wizofaus wrote:
| A smart helpful person is one thing. Someone whose pay
| cheque depends on convincing people to buy a car even if
| it's not the right one for them is something else entirely.
| bluGill wrote:
| In most industries salesmen are rewarded long term for
| selling you the right thing even if it isn't the most
| profitable today. However in the case of cars you buy one
| and odds are the next one will be a different brand and
| thus new dealer, even if it is the same brand you can
| choose a different dealer.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| Dealerships try to hire smart helpful people that can
| sell 30+ cars a month like I did. They don't always
| succeed, just like most companies can't hire the best
| programmers consistently either.
| Kye wrote:
| Even the grocery stores with good self-checkouts have
| someone there to resolve issues and answer questions. I
| wouldn't use a self-checkout that didn't since I'd have to
| hope someone working the day I had trouble was trained on
| the system.
| paxys wrote:
| Who was saying this 20 years ago? eCommerce was barely a
| thing back then. Smartphones, YouTube and Twitter didn't
| exist. The only people who knew about new cars and their
| features were enthusiasts who got a dozen magazine
| subscriptions.
|
| The difference is that today there are actually companies
| successfully following this model, Tesla being the most
| prominent example. All other manufacturers want to cut down
| on the mandatory middlemen fees (and have publicly said it
| - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629075106/https://www.ny
| tim...). It's a matter of when, not if, they will get to
| it.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| People have been saying this since dealerships stared
| buying internet leads. I started in 2008. Even then
| internet departments were fully built out and everyone
| was worried about the end of salespeople for several
| years. So yes, even back in 1999 you could email a
| dealership and work multiple salespeople against each
| other. And that made people talk about the end of
| salespeople, negotiated prices, and dealerships.
|
| Even Tesla has a lot of salespeople, at corporate and at
| the showcase stores. You just can't get a discount from
| them.
|
| If someone built a car vending machine, it would only be
| a matter of time until someone noticed you can make sales
| go up at the vending machine by putting someone standing
| next to it.
| pyb wrote:
| Car salespeople still exist for the same reason recruiters
| still exist, despite Linkedin.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Similarly I waited tables for 5 years. That experience has been
| a massive boost to putting myself in end users' shoes when
| designing systems.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| I think any work that puts you in direct personal contact
| with thousands of people is going to be valuable.
|
| I sometimes used to think how fun being a waiter could be
| compared to car sales, because the interaction in nowhere
| near as tense and adversarial. In the best of sales, you
| quickly become and stay friendly with people, but the bottom
| 25% are mini wars and that beats on you after a while.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Yeah waiting tables almost always ends well. And there's
| something satisfying on a primal level about feeding people
| and watching them leave happy and full.
| lnwlebjel wrote:
| Interesting. I rank buy a car from a new car salesman as _the_
| worst consumer experience of my life. So much so that I 've
| since bought used cars and in the future hope to buy a Tesla in
| large part to avoid that experience. I understand that it could
| greatly benefit the salesperson in understanding the social
| psychology of the consumer ... but never again will I subject
| myself to that process.
| tenpies wrote:
| > in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid
| that experience
|
| And see Tesla knows this, which is why the margin on their
| cars is higher than most.
|
| You may have disliked that sales experience with a dealer or
| used car salesperson, but it quite likely got you a slightly
| better deal than had you tried to negotiate yourself.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| If you buy a Toyota following the Tesla model, where you
| call and say "I'd like to buy the car you have, for the
| price you have listed", you will also have a generally good
| experience.
| panopticon wrote:
| My Toyota experience was okay, but I still needed to sit
| at a dealership for almost two hours to deal with the
| paperwork, wait for financing, etc. Tesla allowed me to
| take care of all of that from the comfort of home.
|
| Buying a Ford was the worst experience I've had with a
| new car, but that could have been entirely on the
| dealership.
| no-such-address wrote:
| Yes, they are there all day, until closing time, or
| longer. Usually, the longer you stay, the more likely you
| are to buy their car, or give them more money. They
| control the situation and the incentives are in their
| favor. This is one reason we loathe car shopping.
| christophilus wrote:
| The margin might simply be from cutting out the middleman
| while keeping the middleman price. So, the buyer is not
| necessarily better or worse off. But not having to go
| through a pushy salesman is a big win. It's why I love
| Carmax (and would probably like Carvana).
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Tesla was supposed to pass some of those cost savings
| onto the end customer not to pocket it all like this but
| I'm aware that it's a corporation that's looking to
| maximize profits to their shareholders and extract as
| much value as possible from their clientele.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Tesla, like every other publicly traded company, sells
| their product at a price they feel they can get away
| with, in order to maximize profits. Any cost savings in
| the process only affects the floor price, which they're
| probably not selling at.
| NSMutableSet wrote:
| In the current market, most figurative Tesla dealers
| would be charging $7k+ over MSRP, which is what you can
| currently make immediately flipping any newly-purchased
| Tesla, even the base Model 3s. I'm sure there are some
| who would stick to MSRP out of "professionalism", but it
| wouldn't be the majority.
|
| This obviously won't last, but just something to
| consider.
| dento wrote:
| They are likely selling all cars they can produce. Why
| would they sell them at cheaper price point?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Entirely this. The main reason why I've only purchased one
| new car in my life is because dealing with car dealers (new
| or used) is about as fun and rewarding as pulling out my
| fingernails.
| ejb999 wrote:
| I'd rather go get a cavity filled, then buy a new car. Do it
| as infrequently as possible (hoping to get another 10 years
| out of my 11 year old Toyota).
|
| Every time I visit a new car dealer I feel a need to take a
| shower, just to get the stink off of me.
| vl wrote:
| BTW, apart from fixed price online sales, there are fixed
| priced dealerships. They advertise price on the website and
| don't negotiate. You just show up and get car at this
| price. Very smooth.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| You can do this at any dealership.
| dangrossman wrote:
| You'd like to think that, but no, there are plenty of
| dealers that will TELL you they're happy to negotiate
| everything by email/phone and then you just show up and
| get the car, but once you're there they want to change
| the deal and will still make you sit in a little office
| with someone that tries to add-on warranties, paint
| protection, prepaid services, etc.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| You mentioned you liked dealers that don't negotiate. So
| I mentioned you can buy without negotiating at any
| dealership. The advertised price is pretty fair at 90% of
| dealerships.
|
| Beyond that, their advertised specials are spectacular
| deals usually. Who spends money and attention advertising
| specials that don't even compete with the competition?
| adriand wrote:
| The problem is that you feel like a chump if you don't
| negotiate. No one wants to feel like they didn't get a
| deal especially on a used car. But the last time I bought
| one it was from a dealership that didn't negotiate, a
| fact I discovered when I started negotiating. And then to
| see if it was true I started pushing pretty hard and they
| stood firm and the end result was great, I left very
| happy with my purchase.
| bluGill wrote:
| Unless you have a trade in as this is one area where they
| can still get you.
|
| Do those fixed price dealers count their various add-ons
| (rust proofing, extended warranty...) in the fixed price
| or not. These add-ons are how most dealers make money
| (that and warranty work)
| flavmartins wrote:
| > I'd rather go get a cavity filled
|
| WITHOUT anesthesia
| btbuildem wrote:
| I've only ever bought used cars, from individuals. Paying
| extra for the overhead of a dealership and some salesperson's
| bonus seems absurd to me. You're pretty much guaranteed to
| get taken advantage of by a professional.
|
| Local classifieds, private sellers, take the car to a trusted
| mechanic for an inspection.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's my policy. The only two cars I've purchased that I
| deeply regretted were one new one and one from a used car
| lot.
|
| I've never had any issue from a private sale.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| Op here, selling 3000 cars.
|
| I've never bought a car at a dealership, and neither has
| anyone in my family in 25 years. But then again, I know
| cars inside and out (even from before my car sales career)
| so I feel pretty safe not accidentally buying a scammers
| car from Craigslist.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| As opposed to buying a(n always more expensive) scammer's
| car on purpose at a used car dealership?, the choice
| seems easy.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| Very few franchise dealerships would ever sell a car with
| problems knowingly. It does happen, because people trade
| in cars with intermittent problems without telling the
| dealership.
|
| Compared to Craigslist where there is no shortage of
| people selling cars directly with current problems,
| intermittent problems, hidden problems, and massive
| paperwork issues that can stop you from registering the
| vehicle all together until resolved.
| punnerud wrote:
| That's why you always ask to take the car to a well known
| 3.party that don't benefit on the sale, and check the car
| for you for any hidden problems.
|
| So you still can buy from Craigslist without the risk.
| zamfi wrote:
| > my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience
|
| Pretty sure the parent means "best" as in the best way to get
| experience doing sales _for the salesperson_.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| That's why they said:
|
| > I understand that it could greatly benefit the
| salesperson
| xapata wrote:
| Used car salespeople are even worse! Are you buying from
| individuals or from a dealership?
| nuclearnice3 wrote:
| It sounds like a heck of a training course. What are some of
| the things you learned?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This is interesting because as a car buyer, the only experience
| I want is car sellers quoting me prices until I get the lowest
| one. All via email.
| arecurrence wrote:
| Bought a car via carwoo back when it was in business. The
| service let you message dealership salespeople and get quotes
| back. I met the guy that sold me my car for about 15 seconds
| total in the entire process.
|
| By far the swiftest and best large product purchasing
| experience I ever had. I was sad to see them close.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| I would get many of these type leads. The better you are, the
| more of these you can close. They're not anyone's favorite,
| but if I have a car we can't sell because it's an ugly color,
| or weird options configuration, or in general we need to move
| some cars, I'd play along. I'm just kidding a bit.
|
| In reality, even very desirable cars can have this game
| played on them. I once sold a car $25k over MSRP, and the
| customer was thrilled because that was the lowest markup he
| could find.
|
| When it comes to used cars, finding the lowest price is
| usually a terrible plan I could go into for longer than a PG
| blog post.
| foobarian wrote:
| Sir I wish to subscribe to your newsletter (or blog or
| youtube channel or what have you).
| asah wrote:
| best podcast ever:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=this+american+life+129+cars
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Fortunately our local dealership is no-commission. So the folks
| are honestly trying to help you figure out what's right for
| you.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| To be honest, so was I. Selling you something stupid is a lot
| more work, and riskier, than selling you what you want and
| works well.
|
| I personally had more leads than I could handle, because I
| didn't burn my leads. So if you came in wanting a vehicle for
| the snow, and all I had was SUVs with the sports package and
| performance tires, I didn't lie to you or try to downplay it.
| Sure I mentioned you could have a winter set of wheels and
| swap, and get the best performance year round, but I didn't
| say "don't worry, these tires work just fine in snow". It
| burns leads that know better.
|
| Thus if I couldnt really help you, I'd make the best of the
| situation if possible and move on. I had enough people to
| email and call back waiting on me, that spending an hour
| lying in hopes of a sale really wasn't worth it.
| mannymanman wrote:
| For someone employed in tech, does anyone have recommendations
| for how to improve sales skills? Assuming I can't leave my
| current job.
| sgustard wrote:
| One thing I learned about the industry is that dealership
| salespeople are hired from the same pool as, say, McDonalds
| employees. These are not college graduates who have white-
| collar job offers. They join with no existing skills at low
| wage. Turnover is massive, the average sales agent leaves
| within a year. Meanwhile, the whole industry is pushing hard to
| adopt Tesla's model of fixed pricing and replacing people with
| software.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| I went to a top US university in a stem degree. My coworker
| was a med student that couldn't pass the Mcats, but wasn't a
| bozo. Basically everyone had a degree, and everyone made
| atleast $100k. I personally made about $225k but as I said, I
| was pretty good. I know a person in Bay area car sales making
| $300k+. I assume there are many others.
|
| I assume you agree a McDonald's employee is not going to
| close accountants and doctors and lawyers and programmers on
| a car as often as an engineering grad would... And if that's
| true, why would a car dealership hire McDonald's type
| employees instead of slightly failed but still intelligent
| university stem grads? They don't cost more, since it's all
| pay for performance.
| vl wrote:
| It looks like it was luxury brand dealership?
| yitianjian wrote:
| Roughly $45k/car could be luxury depending on what years,
| yeah. A decade of car selling likely puts it in the
| 2000's at the earliest.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| A German brand luxury dealership yes, but honestly just
| about everything applies the same at a Chevy dealership.
| The pay per vehicle is less on average, but the vehicles
| and customers are so much easier to deal with that you
| sell more per hour worked in my opinion.
| conductr wrote:
| Bought a new car recently and it was a joy, the market being
| what it is you go in knowing you'll pay MSRP. Yeah it feels
| expensive, and is, but removing the negotiation was great UX
|
| Also helped that the dealership was pretty empty. A few of the
| dealerships I went to were madhouses and I just wanted to leave
| immediately as it was a chaotic environment
| geph2021 wrote:
| In my experience[1], interacting with the salesperson and
| agreeing on the cars' price is about 25% of the sale process
| (and hassle). The salesperson nails down price, model/unit,
| with the customer, which already involves all manner of sleazy
| games on pricing.
|
| After the "sale", there's a much longer gauntlet of pitfalls
| and traps to navigate: extended warranties, add-ons (roof
| racks, floor mats, etc...), financing, trade-in value, anti-
| theft, pre-paid maintenance, etc, etc... (it goes on and on,
| it's exhausting).
|
| I'm going to guess, just based on the amount of manhours the
| dealership spends on the initial sale agreement, versus all the
| other crap, that the true money is not made by the dealership
| on the actual car sale, but on all these add-ons after the
| sale.
|
| [1] - fairly limited, bought 3 cars over the ~15 years, 1 used,
| 2 new, and it's been about 8 years since my last purchase, not
| sure how much its changed since then.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| I agree, the "finance person" that technically does your
| paperwork and pitches you all those aftermarket products is
| the biggest crook in the industry (right next to the service
| advisors that tell you what service your car needs and the
| price).
|
| I would sometimes fill in for finance on a rainy day, and
| even though I was top 0.3% in the country when it came to car
| sales, I Couldn't sell that garbage even with a gun pointed
| at me. I just can't lie like that.
| shard wrote:
| It seems somewhat simple to just stand firm with the
| finance person and refuse all the add-ons, but how does one
| figure out what services are actually needed when the
| service adviser comes to you with a list of issues?
| bluGill wrote:
| Everyone checks KBB, edmunds, and all the others before
| buying a car. Thus everyone knows exactly what the dealer is
| paying for the car before walking in. Nobody is willing to
| leave the dealer a reasonable profit margin or the salesman a
| living wage. There are plenty of other dealers and nobody is
| loyal so odds are they won't see you again no matter how good
| the experience is (if you are a corporation buying for a
| fleet you get different service). As such dealers look to
| other places to make money.
|
| If people would decide to allow the dealers a reasonable
| profit margin things could change. Right now though dealers
| just see a sucker when someone does that though. I'm not
| hopeful things will change, but that is the first key.
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| I personally don't think what the dealer paid matters. If a
| car is desirable, a few are available, we're going to sell
| for as much as possible.
|
| If a car is undesirable, and many are available and we need
| to move them, we will sell them for a loss.
|
| I don't blame people for buying cars we sell for at a loss
| (although sometimes I wonder why these people don't stop
| and wonder why this car is so heavily discounted). And they
| shouldn't blame us for charging more for something many
| people want and is in short supply.
| peterkos wrote:
| I recognize that it _could_ be a helpful and rigorous
| experience in sales, but most car people I 've gone to across
| dealerships have tried to guilt trip and lie to me to get me to
| spend more money than I have. As a student paying full in cash,
| I was pushed ruthlessly despite firmly saying no, and
| ultimately I got my car somewhere else.
|
| It reminds me how Best Buy used to have horrible customer
| experience, it was all commission-based, and you would be
| hounded when first walking in the store. Then Apple came along
| with the model of "don't force someone to do anything, and the
| right product for them might not be in the store, and that's
| fine". (Notably, Best Buy seems to have gotten better since.)
| phpthrowaway99 wrote:
| I was about top 1% in the country. So buying from me would be
| a different experience. Maybe you landed on someone in the
| bottom 50%, at a bad dealership too.
|
| The owner of our dealership was a Cal grad, the sales manager
| was a Jewish accounting major, I had an engineering degree,
| my favorite coworker completed medschool but couldn't pass
| the MCATS, and everyone else had a degree too.
|
| When I went to work for a Penske dealership (a public
| company), corporate was in town one day and had a meeting
| with me to ask how the owner at my previous dealership did
| things. So maybe it wasn't your typical car dealership.
| m-ee wrote:
| The MCAT is for admission into med school. How did they
| complete it without passing?
| Khoth wrote:
| Different experience how?
|
| > I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections
| over 10,000 times.
|
| Sounds like you were also trying to guilt trip people who
| then struggled to find a socially acceptable way to
| disengage
| tchock23 wrote:
| Alex Hormozi was on a podcast recently talking about how you
| should learn high volume sales skills in a scenario like a gym
| chain, car dealer, etc. Do that for a few years and then take
| those skills to sell the most expensive thing you can to make
| "real" money with better quality customers. Seemed like
| reasonable advice and aligned with your experiences...
| baxtr wrote:
| Super interesting. Super stupid question from someone not
| really versed in sales: what's your key takeaway about how to
| be good at selling something?
| ghiculescu wrote:
| It's in the comment:
|
| > an accelerator course for *interacting with, reading*, and
| closing people
|
| (Emphasis mine)
| kytazo wrote:
| This is something I've been speculating about long and something
| that I dread a lot. To be honest I have a pretty bad feeling
| about big CDNs like cloudflare. I think they will play a critical
| role in upcoming outages from alleged cyberattacks or even worse
| further down the road denial of service based on social status
| akin to social credit systems in the east.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| > Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. YC improves focus.
|
| Couldn't you substitute YC for mentorship, coaching, advisement,
| etc? Or even peers trying to accomplish shared goals/vision?
|
| Surprisingly this article has little to even say about users, but
| more about YC users (i.e. founders in the program).
|
| I was hoping to read something applicable to how little companies
| actually talk to users and how practicing zero-distance between
| them will make you successful regardless of how much money you
| raise. Instead, this read like an ad for YC.
| hinkley wrote:
| Isn't that kind of the point of YC?
|
| Consultants are everywhere. Some are bad, some are just a bad
| fit. But the checks flow in one direction the entire time. YC's
| schtick seems to be that the checks flow in the other direction
| at first, when the listening often matters the most.
|
| Basically YC has found a way to profit off of consulting as a
| value add.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I just thought the title was misleading. It read to me that
| of the value add of YC to its users. Not to the value add
| that YC companies bring to their users.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I think I very much understand the hate this article is getting,
| and perhaps it's a thing endemic to the entire concept of
| "investment."
|
| People around here like "solving problems," and I'd go further to
| say that this is perhaps the most fulfilling thing one can do.
|
| VC doesn't do that. VC is "just greed." This is not to say that
| VC's can't invest in companies that solve things. If they do,
| great. But what's perhaps irksome is, here we are watching money
| try to chase more money, and whether or not a problem is solved
| is irrelevant.
|
| For those of us who have actually solved problems by means of a
| business -- watching this particular flavor of a mistake by
| wealthy (or wanna-be-wealth) people e.g. "oh, I wouldn't buy the
| product myself" is just _annoying_.
|
| To those of us that solve problems -- we're now hearing about
| obviously just a complete f**ing idiot chasing money -- and
| worse, a space that still might give to him despite this.
|
| I understand that this it just how it is sometimes, but I'm not
| surprised that this catches backlash.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Good article, there are still startups out there (some in late
| stages) choosing mistaken strategies that don't allow them to get
| or incorporate user feedback.
| dsr_ wrote:
| "[2] When I say the summer 2012 batch was broken, I mean it felt
| to the partners that something was wrong. Things weren't yet so
| broken that the startups had a worse experience. In fact that
| batch did unusually well."
|
| When something unusual happens (every partner needs to keep track
| of more startups) and the result is unexpectedly more success
| instead of less, doesn't that suggest that the partners were
| counterintuitively wrong about feeling wrong?
|
| An experiment might be in order.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Came here to point this out too. Maybe try to break it again?
| gnicholas wrote:
| Is this what VCs want when they ask what you have learned from
| your users? It sounds like most of the learnings are about what
| his users do wrong, and why. There's surprisingly little in the
| way of "our users told us X and we realized we need to do Y".
|
| I assumed that when people ask what you've learned from your
| users, they're not asking you to list how lousy your users are at
| doing various things, and why they just need to listen to you
| more.
|
| I would actually be interested to read a post about what a VC has
| learned from his/her users, in a constructive sense.
| tlb wrote:
| What YC's users want most of all is for their startups not to
| fail, so the essay talks about learning what makes startups
| fail and how to help founders avoid it.
|
| Founders ask for other stuff from YC too: a hangout lounge in
| SF, comfier seating, shared office space. But helping their
| startups succeed is 100x more important than all those frills,
| as any founder who has succeeded or failed will confirm.
|
| Markets where customers only care about one thing are rare, so
| people aren't very familiar with them. They're unlike commodity
| services like dentists, where you care about convenience &
| frills, and more like heart surgeons where you want the one
| that will give you the best chance of not dying.
|
| I suspect that not providing the frills helps YC attract better
| founders, because the best founders care only about their
| startup succeeding, while the scenesters care more about the
| frills. Also, it sets a good example of focusing on the most
| important thing, as startups should. Most importantly, by not
| spending much time on other stuff, YC can focus its energy on
| helping startups succeed.
| inglor wrote:
| It's a literary device.
|
| What he's telling you is that he learned:
|
| - That founders don't believe YC-partners often because their
| advice is counterintuitive. The underlying message is that it's
| important to not only give advice (sell your service) but also
| understand if it's being taken (your service is being actually
| used).
|
| - That founders (sers) come with presumptions and those affect
| how they apply your advice (use your product). In his "hack the
| test" example he emphasizes how important it is to persist in
| your advice (educate your users) so they unlearn old habits.
|
| etc..
|
| He skips directly spelling out the conclusions to encourage you
| to read more than headlines which makes the reading (IMO) more
| interesting.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I guess that's one way to put it.
|
| But skipping the conclusions means that we don't know what,
| if anything, they are doing differently to solve these
| issues. Just telling someone "trust us, you'll regret it if
| you don't follow our advice" isn't exactly a compelling
| argument.
|
| I'ma also not sure PG is trying to use a literary device, as
| you suggest. His normal writing style is very candid, so it
| would be surprising if he were all of a sudden burying
| (omitting?) the lede here.
| lisper wrote:
| This essay is getting a surprising amount of hate, and I must
| confess that my first impression on reading it was that it
| sounded an awful lot like a Robert Kiyosaki book [1]. But then I
| followed the two links in the essay [2] [3] and that put it into
| perspective: the thing that Paul learned from his users is that
| they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for
| how to succeed, and there is no such formula. It's like Goedel's
| incompleteness theorem, except that it's not a theorem. People
| come to YC and buy Robert Kiyosaki's books hoping to find an
| Answer that simply doesn't exist.
|
| The difference between Paul and Robert is that Paul is up-front
| about this while Robert is cagey and deceptive and makes his
| money by stringing people along thinking that The Answer can be
| found by buying one more of his books. But I think a lot of the
| hate here is driven by disappointment that Paul is honest, and
| that his answer is that there is no Answer. It can be frustrating
| to hear that (which is also something that Paul explicitly points
| out).
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-
| Middle/dp/1612680...
|
| [2] http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
|
| [3] http://paulgraham.com/before.html
| iamwil wrote:
| Yeah, I think it's a combination of some of this stuff is
| common knowledge now, rather than surprising, and people were
| looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so
| they can avoid it themselves)
|
| Rather, this is an essay about what was surprising to him about
| startups in YC. And I think it's fair to say that these were
| all surprising, and I wouldn't have inferred them if someone
| told me about YC as an idea back in 2005.
|
| Or put in another way, if someone came to you and told you
| about the idea for creating YC back in 2005, when the only
| model of investing in startups was how large institutional VCs
| and angels invested in startups, would you have been able to
| tell them the following insights about how it would work and
| what the value add of the advice is? Remember, when YC started,
| lots of people thought 7% for $15k (I know they give more now)
| was a joke. - Most startup problems are the
| same, but in different forms. It makes advising tractable for a
| single person to do. - Advising a lot of startups in
| batches has the advantage of learning about all these problems
| faster. - And yet, startup advising has to stay
| individualized (presumably to keep things concrete), so in
| order to scale, they had to shard. Limit was somewhere between
| 60 and 80 per individual advisor. - Identifying
| problems and ranking their severity are two different skills.
| You'd think they're the same, but they're not. As an advisor,
| if you can help startups do only these two things, it'd go a
| long way. Lots of advisors try to help with other things, but
| these are the two most important, because if a startup died,
| all other problems are moot. - Despite this, founders
| don't listen to advice about how not to die. And they don't
| listen because the advice is counterintuitive. It's like how
| there are more skiing instructors than running instructors.
| Skiing is more counterintuitive. - A big headwinds to
| advising startups on how not to die is that due to the
| educational system, founders have all learned how to hack the
| system. The skills that got them to where they are stops
| working when trying to build a company. - Beyond
| helping startups not die, advisors likely know less about the
| product/strategy in any domain, but they can increase focus,
| which increases speed of iteration, which indirectly helps
| startups with their product/strategy through iterative greedy
| algorithm. - A follow-on value-add of YC is the alumni
| network. Like clusters of painters in Paris during the
| impressionist period or musicians in Vienna, and Xerox Parc,
| lots of great work is done when great people do it in clusters
| along side each other. At the time, people thought the price of
| independence of is loneliness, but turns out it's not true.
| felideon wrote:
| > people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes
| startups made (so they can avoid it themselves)
|
| Which he has written about before:
| http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
|
| My first impression was that the title was somewhat vague,
| but it was actually just very literal. This is what PG
| himself has learned from his users, not an essay on how to
| learn from users or how to build a successful startup.
| iamwil wrote:
| I had to run before I finished, but to wrap it up:
|
| Going back to the initial set up of the piece, he was trying
| to help startups get into YC. Basically he was helping them
| sell themselves to YC, by having them answer "explain what
| you learned from users"
|
| If it's any effective at all, then by answering this
| question, you can make your startup very compelling to YC.
| Would it work? One way to judge that is to apply it to what
| he knows (YC) and see if it's appealing to startups both now
| and back in 2005.
|
| So the complaint about how this piece feels sales-y is
| missing the forest for the trees, because that's the point of
| the exercise!
|
| By the very nature of the intent of the question, of course
| it's going to sound like a sales pitch for YC. That's the
| whole purpose of the exercise to begin with. It's a question,
| when answered, begates a sales pitch for getting into YC.
| ericmay wrote:
| > and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes
| startups made (so they can avoid it themselves)
|
| Is this even possible or useful? I mean there are obvious
| things but they're so obvious and generalized as to be
| seemingly useless when you are at a serious stage in starting
| a company. It kind of reminds me of when people talking about
| something being "priced in" in the market as a related
| concept.
| tech_tuna wrote:
| PG is pompous as all get out. Anything out of his mouth is
| going to generate a certain level of criticism, which may or
| may not be deserved.
|
| The dude's shit doesn't stink. In his view.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _The dude 's shit doesn't stink. In his view._
|
| Isn't that true for most people? I mean "from their own
| view". We all tend to assume that we're right more often than
| not, no?
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| > We all tend to assume that we're right more often than
| not, no?
|
| That is not what that phrase means.
|
| It means someone thinks they're _better_ than everyone
| else. It's a lack of humility. It's arrogance.
|
| It's the aristocracy looking down on its citizens. It's the
| software developer looking down on the men who pick up
| their garbage.
|
| It is not simply about thinking you're right most of the
| time.
| enobrev wrote:
| Mine doesn't either.
| robocat wrote:
| > Robert is cagey and deceptive
|
| It is good to be skeptical, I but I would counsel anyone to
| avoid becoming deeply cynical and missing out on the value
| because you don't like the messenger. I learn as much from
| arseholes like Thiel as I do from PG who looks to me to be one
| of the good guys (disclaimer: haven't met Paul, disagree
| strongly with some of his theses).
|
| Rich Dad Poor Dad is a very worthwhile book IMHO - it costs you
| a few dollars and a few hours. I read it and later became a
| moderately successful founder. I think that book had some
| positive influence on that success: my guess is that I got high
| $10's of thousands value for $10's of input. Good knowledge is
| like that: you can get 1000x return or more. Of course that is
| offset by the other shit I have read that didn't give good
| return ($0 return is OK, highly negative returns are the real
| risk).
|
| This link TLDR's some of the value:
| https://sergioschuler.com/rich-dad-poor-dad-tl-dr-version-3e...
| ProAm wrote:
| > Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The
| Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and
| there is no such formula
|
| I agree, I also think this is the message that YC sells to
| founders. You are giving up a lot of equity for
| access/membership to an organization that will make you
| successful (Im clearly summarizing a bit). It's a bit of a MLM
| scheme (not that they are ripping you off) but if you get into
| the club the other members will help you be successful and,
| then it will repeat every batch constantly filling the pool
| with new members and the network continues to grow. And it
| works for the most part, so do MLMs for the most part. Most
| companies in the US, if successful are around for about 20
| years, extremely successful maybe 40, the few rare last longer.
| YC is getting to the 20 year mark and maybe some of the rough
| edges are starting to show, cracks in the foundation as the
| original people that powered the machine start to move on.
| hinkley wrote:
| And the whole thing with VC is that they've somehow figured out
| how to make money while being wrong 90% of the time. With those
| sorts of numbers, are you really doing much better than random
| chance?
|
| I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer, but
| to identify who's _lying_ about it. With those sorts of volumes
| of money you 're going to attract fraud, and fraud can quickly
| break "throwing darts at a board" as a selection strategy.
|
| If you can just select for people who are earnest and aren't
| lying to themselves too energetically, you can call it a day.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| "being wrong 90% of the time."
|
| They are not wrong 90% of the time. They place correct bets
| on correct companies, 90% of which will fail. This does not
| make them wrong, it makes them excellent gamblers. If I'm
| getting 100:1 odds to roll snake-eyes (two 1's), that's a
| great bet, and a correct one, and I am not wrong to take it,
| even though I'll lose money the vast majority of the time.
| s_dev wrote:
| >I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer,
| but to identify who's lying about it.
|
| "Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they
| have found it."
|
| -- Andre Gide
| golemiprague wrote:
| hinkley wrote:
| > Not that founders listen. That was another big surprise: how
| often founders don't listen to us. A couple weeks ago I talked to
| a partner who had been working for YC for a couple batches and
| was starting to see the pattern. "They come back a year later,"
| she said, "and say 'We wish we'd listened to you.'"
|
| I have a theory I've shared a few times that one of our main
| problems is Exceptionalism, and stuff like this go into the
| evidence pile. My first thought on reading this paragraph was,
| "Someone needs to watch more Gordon Ramsay shows."
|
| PG's observation is practically the thesis of GR's Kitchen
| Nightmares. Owners think their business is in trouble, not that
| _they_ are in trouble, and so any advice that touches their
| identity is abruptly and sometimes aggressively dismissed. One
| guy was so invested in the fact that he 'd bought some fancy
| french stove that Ramsay had to bully him into selling it. Even
| used the price versus a stove more appropriate for the business
| was enough cash to keep the owner afloat for an extra 3-6 months.
| It seemed like Ramsay thought that if he hadn't bought it in the
| first place, the restaurant wouldn't have gotten on his show at
| all.
|
| Most of the computing problems in software were solved in the
| 70's and 80's. The new solutions trickle in just fast enough to
| keep things from getting tedious. Most of what we spend time on
| are 'process' or 'style' issues that are really people problems,
| ranging from cognition to group dynamics. But we don't want to
| face that because, as someone once put it, some of us were drawn
| to computers because we thought we could avoid interpersonal
| dynamics, and instead what happened is that we spent years
| looking at computers while our peers were practicing
| interpersonal skills, putting us several years more behind, and
| then we find out the job is substantially about interpersonal
| skills. We don't want to look at it because it both breaks the
| illusion and suggests that we made a mistake, and we can't make
| those, can we.
|
| Everybody has these problems to some degree or another. You can
| learn how to deal with them by watching other people do it. On
| TV, doing hobbies (with or without social groups), volunteering,
| heck even exercise comes down to getting the emotional part of
| your brain to allow the objective part to low-grade torture you
| so that you feel better the rest of the time.
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