[HN Gopher] How to Start Google ___________________________________________________________________ How to Start Google Author : harscoat Score : 349 points Date : 2024-03-19 15:36 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (paulgraham.com) (TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com) | hiddencost wrote: | "If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally | get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting | their own companies." | | "Of the 137 people in the global study who achieved billionaire | status in the 12-month study period, 53 of them inherited $150.8 | billion collectively, more than the $140.7 billion that was | earned by the 84 new self-made billionaires in the same time | period, the UBS study says.Nov 30, 2023" | seu wrote: | And still not taking into consideration that the majority of | those "self-made" billionaires anyway inherited many privileges | from their parents that helped them to "self make". | temporarara wrote: | It also doesn't hurt to inherit just a few millions and | combine it with hard work and luck if the alternative is just | hard work and luck. | IncreasePosts wrote: | Maybe merely having a billion dollars isn't what pg was | thinking of when talking about "the richest people". If you | look at the top 100, like he quotes in his article, only 27 | inherited their fortune. | IllIlIIllI wrote: | Maybe only 27 inherited large fortunes, but many more started | at a much more privileged position than anyone in the rooms | Paul is talking to. Maybe they're not from billionaire | families, but almost all of them come from families the top | 1-3% in terms of wealth. | IncreasePosts wrote: | Who was he talking to? I have no idea what kids pg was | talking to, but if it was to peers of his own kids, chances | are they are already firmly in the 1%. In any case, to go | from top 1-3% to the top 0.0000001% is still incredibly | rare and noteworthy. Just because it is easier to do that | than go from the top 50th% to the top 0.0000001% doesn't | mean it is actually easy. | DavidSJ wrote: | _" Of the 137 people in the global study who achieved | billionaire status in the 12-month study period, 53 of them | inherited $150.8 billion collectively, more than the $140.7 | billion that was earned by the 84 new self-made billionaires in | the same time period, the UBS study says.Nov 30, 2023" _ | | The citation for this quote appears to be | https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/11/30/new-bil... | , but I don't believe that limits to those "that occasionally | get published in the press". | CPLX wrote: | He left out the part about starting your company at a unique | point in history where a generational technology shift was taking | place that _also_ happens to be a time when antitrust laws had | recently been enforced (making your main competitor wary) but | were about to be completely ignored for the next 20 years, so you | could exploit your initial market position and engage in anti- | competitive behavior to grow huge. | vehemenz wrote: | Or the part where your parents are professors and provide the | educational opportunities and financial freedom to take risks | that 99% of people don't have. | | I don't mean that to even sound bitter or cynical, but it's | just a fact if you look at most founders, even the ones that | fail miserably. | twosdai wrote: | Take the risks you can with what you have. | brigadier132 wrote: | > where your parents are professors | | There is always an excuse. The parents are professors, or | upper middle class dentists, or your mom does charity for | United Way and managed to become the leader of the charitable | organization and managed to meet some exec from IBM. Given | how diverse these professions are and that they basically | describe a slightly upper middle class family, im gonna guess | their children account for more than 1%. | shafyy wrote: | > _It 's more exciting to work on your own project than someone | else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the | standard way to get really rich. If you look at the lists of the | richest people that occasionally get published in the press, | nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies._ | | People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically | getting rich is the most important thing is one of the reasons we | got into this late-stage capitalism nightmare in the first place. | Fuck this. | | Edit: Sorry, to update after my rant. So many things wrong with | this advice. For most people, starting a company is not the best | path to happiness. Sure, if you have a job, there's a "boss" that | tells you what to do as Graham notes, but if you think for a | second you can do whatever the fuck you want when you start your | own company, you're dead wrong. Of course, Graham knows this. | ericd wrote: | He's telling kids that they don't have to get a job, and one of | the key objections is obviously going to be "but how will I get | money". The emphasis in the essay is not getting rich, it's | that it's a much more interesting path. And it is. | scarface_74 wrote: | And then they hit the reality that thier startup is going to | fail, even if they get funding in a non zero interest rate | environment and they would have been better off just | "grinding leetCode and working for a FAANG" (tm | r/cscareerquestions) or even just working as a | CRUD/Enterprise Corp dev and still be able to make the median | household income in the US a couple of years out of school | ericd wrote: | They might have been better off financially - | statistically, they probably would've been. But even my | failed startups were more rewarding experiences _by far_ | than working in large companies. | | And it doesn't preclude you from going and getting paid too | much at a big tech co afterwards if it doesn't work. This | field has been so lucrative recently that you can generally | afford to not be earning at peak potential for a bit, so | why not roam free for at least a bit, and let your interest | take you where it will, rather than doing something you | describe as a grind, just to earn the privilege to go sit | in meetings for most of the day and count the years till | you can afford retirement? | scarface_74 wrote: | I bet you had parents or some other financial nest egg to | fall back on to support your addiction to food and | shelter. | | Yes most people would rather not work to support those | addictions I mentioned. But that's what most people have | to do. | ericd wrote: | Yes, I am blessed to have wonderful parents who would let | me move back in. Fortunately, I only got to the "crashing | on friends' couches and at my girlfriend/now wife's | place" phase. Great way to tell if someone's worth | marrying, by the way, partly moving in while appearing to | have slim financial prospects. | | Obviously it's not right for everyone, nothing is. But | it's right for more people than the number who do it, and | it's worth letting the others know it's an option. A | similar talk by PG at my university is why I realized | that this was a realistic option, and I'm incredibly | grateful he gave it. | scarface_74 wrote: | So the secret of being able to fail at a startup is being | able to sponge off of other people who do have jobs at | the types of companies you want to avoid working for? | ericd wrote: | Well, I didn't fail in that case, the company started | making money, and they were repaid handsomely. But yeah, | having a familial, social, or financial safety net is | pretty important. If you never want to have to depend on | anyone, or can't for whatever reason, then sure, play it | safe. Sounds like you'd judge yourself harshly for taking | this sort of risk. | scarface_74 wrote: | You just admitted that in no case whether you succeeded | or failed were you in any danger of being homeless and | hungry because you were being supported by people who | were willing to "grind it out" in corporate America. | | You were never not "safe" | rabbits77 wrote: | When Paul Graham is saying this is a talk he gives to 14 and | 15 year olds, let's think of who those kids are exactly. | There is zero chance he is giving this advice to a general | audience at some arbitrary high school, much less students | from even a modestly disadvantaged background. People at | those places don't know or, even if they did know, wouldn't | care who Paul Graham is. No, he's at the school his kids go | to. The students are all in the same affluent circles as he | is. | | This is a pep talk for trust fund kids who can afford to mess | around with start ups. It's probably lousy advice for most | people outside the affluenza bubble. | CPLX wrote: | It's even worse than that. Not only is he saying that, he's | parroting the bullshit idea that "starting your own company" is | the relevant skillset, rather than "absolutely ruthlessly | exploiting every moral and legal grey area to hoard as much | value for yourself as possible with extreme urgency." | | But I mean this is the guy that foisted Sam Altman onto the | world, so clearly he already knows that. Which makes an article | like this understandable as the propaganda that it is. | | You don't write an article like this to influence kids, you | write it to rationalize the giant pile of money you find | yourself sitting on. | noufalibrahim wrote: | I think you're being overly harsh. | | 14 year old need good role models (preferably from their | trusted social circles). These people should, ideally before | the child turns 14, give him or her a strong moral framework to | judge advice that they might come across. | | On the topic of being rich (which can be a good goal if pursued | along with a strong moral compass), it's much better to take | advice from a Paul Graham rather from some grifter selling | courses on "how to be a rich as me" on the net. | scarface_74 wrote: | So in that case he might as well show lottery winners as good | role models. | | He could tell the truth instead about how most startups fail | miserably and the founders see nothing. | | Not to mention that the only way this works is if you have | parents as a financial back stop. | noufalibrahim wrote: | Yes. I think this is genuinely under emphasised. However, | when one's risk tolerance is high, there's a lot to be | gained from even a failed startup. There's not much to be | gained from repeatedly buying and losing at the lottery. | scarface_74 wrote: | Knowing that worse case you get to go back home to live | with mom and dad or ask them for money is not having a | "high risk tolerance" | noufalibrahim wrote: | It is in a way. I couldn't jump into the startup world | because I had financial commitments that necessitated an | income. Several of my friends who didn't have that burden | started companies. | random3 wrote: | Genuinely curious to understand your line of reasoning. | | - Concretly what's the late-stage capitalism nightmare? How do | you define it and what do you compare it against? | | - What do you define what PG is concretely telling kids and how | that's related to what you describe as capitalism nightmare. | | Finally, would you care to share some examples of better | scenarios that could inspire advice for 14-year olds? | ToValueFunfetti wrote: | He said "more exciting" at the beginning of your quote. And if | the 14-year-olds somehow don't already want to be rich, how is | Paul Graham telling them how to do it going to teach them that | it is the most important thing? | JR1427 wrote: | If people often give advice about how to do a certain thing, | pretty soon you are going to think that the thing is | important. | ToValueFunfetti wrote: | Many people seem to survive 7 hours of advice on how to | write properly, solve math problems, and understand history | and science for 175 days a year over 12 of their most | impressionable years without thinking any of those things | are important. That doesn't give me a lot of cause for | alarm over a 15 minute Paul Graham talk | surgical_fire wrote: | It's still good to call out bullshit when you see it. | fakedang wrote: | Exactly. | | >In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. | | No. The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good | career that pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got | "rich" by working at Wall Street, law or Congress. Getting rich | through business is a lottery. | | I would have attributed this article from Graham to relative | inexperience had he written this early on, say in the 2000s. | But him writing this now is just bad-faith preaching intended | to give VCs another lottery ticket with a very low success | probability of forming a unicorn. | | And for the record, 14 and 15 year olds, the best way to get | rich is still Wall Street, Congress or law. | rmah wrote: | _> The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good | career that_ | | _> pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by | working at_ | | _> Wall Street, law or Congress_ | | I'm afraid this isn't really true. Through most of the | industrial revolution and after (i.e. after the early | 1800's), professionals (lawyers, bankers, accountants, | doctors, etc.) made a smaller multiple of unskilled labor | wages than they do today. In America at least, _the_ way to | get "rich" has always been to start your own business. | | This was true in the 1800's and it's true today. There have | been repeated waves of change as new technologies spread: | textile mills, cotton production, mining, railroads, telecom, | electricity, appliances, automobiles, department stores, | advertising, aviation, broadcasting, computing, etc, etc. | Each wave of innovation saw the creation of thousands of new | businesses. Sure most eventually fail, but hundreds did | pretty well and a handful got insanely wealthy. | | American culture and laws (usually) rewards this sort of | risky behavior. One can debate whether it's, moral, just, or | good for society. But generally speaking, not much has | changed wrt this facet of our culture over the last 200 | years. | fakedang wrote: | How many businesses succeed enough to make you millions? | Most businesses are loss making entities, still more are | just subsistence businesses. The ones which make you "rich" | will still only make you worth a few millions, not what | Paul Graham is referring to as "rich". You could get that | same level of "rich" by working in Big Tech in a cushiony | job, Wall Street, law or Congress (lobbyist or | Congressman). Getting to what PG calls rich is just a | lottery game in the big picture of things. | | I've started one of the "small rich" businesses before, and | made a few millions out of it when I was too young. Those | millions enabled me to make certain bets that, though | risky, would still have a huge upside. That huge upside | allowed me to make very good money, the kind of "rich" that | PG actually means, without the risk that comes with | starting up a business that your VCs want to push to | unicorn status. That's basically what most sensible rich | folks in America have done, even the ones that you | celebrate in your comment. And yet they'll all send their | kids to Harvard and Stanford to attend MBAs and grad school | because they don't want to put their kid's futures to the | whims of a lottery. | | "Making your first million is the hardest, so start with a | second million." - Arnold Schwarzenegger | AnimalMuppet wrote: | > People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically | getting rich is the most important thing is one of the reasons | we got into this late-stage capitalism nightmare in the first | place. | | I don't think that's a fair summary of the article. Yes, he | says you can get rich. But he also says, and says _first_ , | that it's less annoying and more fun (and also more actual | work). | | Then for the rest of the article, he doesn't harp on "you can | get rich". He talks about getting good at some technology, and | doing projects because they're interesting, and finding other | people to do things with. | anonzzzies wrote: | > but if you think for a second you can do whatever the fuck | you want when you start your own company | | I know too many people born rich who think exactly this. And in | their experience it works like that; they have no money stress | anyway, take a little bit more risk and if it fails, well, they | just fold and brag about 'at least I tried' and then try again | or, you know, sit on the boat and get slobbered. Same thing. | The rest of us don't quite have this and especially | bootstrapping your own company is hard, really hard; you will | be doing a great deal of things that have nothing to do with | what you want or set out to do and those probably turn out to | be more important than what you started it for. | elwell wrote: | > But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of | mere determination and resourcefulness. | | So Leetcode is actually a good way to hire? | bryanlarsen wrote: | Sure, if your company is as prestigious as Stanford or MIT. | prisenco wrote: | Leetcode style interviews were always a reasonable option for a | particular type of company. But they became a trend for | companies that weren't a good fit. | DonsDiscountGas wrote: | Sadly, yes, at least for a certain type of job. Probably not | the best, but considering the effort involved on the part of | the employer (ie very little) combined with the result, it's | pretty good. Anything better requires a ton more effort (work | trials) and/or doesn't scale well (personal referrals). | zen928 wrote: | If you consider that >10 years ago there were blog posts | talking about how hard the "FizzBuzz" question was to implement | when asked in-person as a way to demonstrate how you approach | solving problems, there's definitely a reasonable assertion | that these types of interviewing methods help weed out | applicants unable to write basic compound statements. Might not | be the best way as a single pass/fail criterion though. | vouaobrasil wrote: | >It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone | else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the | standard way to get really rich. | | > You might have thought I was joking when I said I was going to | tell you how to start Google. You might be thinking "How could we | start Google?" But that's effectively what the people who did | start Google were thinking before they started it. | | We shouldn't be telling young people to start companies like | Google or to aim for being really rich in the first place. We | should be teaching children how to be more sustainable. Companies | like Google are a net harm to society and the really rich like | Sergey Brin and Larry Page are parasites, promoting the | unsustainable ruthless capitalism that has caused the immense | climactic problems of the world today. | nfin wrote: | - I agree that we shouldn't tell young people to aim for | companies like Google / aim to get really really rich | | - I agree that we should tell young children to aim for | sustainable companies | | - I at least partially disagree with warning against the | unsustainable ruthless capitalism in case your sustainable | ideas do get really big. Some companies would get really really | big, and I would prefer to see those reaching there to be those | who had a (comparatively) caring mind (the others would not | listen anyway) | | - but I would agree to explain young children that what and | where they buy does impact climatic problems. And that | supporting small-medium sized companies (or creating one) is | the most beneficial for our future | suyash wrote: | Ok, so I am having a hard time buying the idea that just make a | fun project if you want to create a something like 'Google'. | Startup 101 teaches us that you need to solve a painful problem | that lot of people have, that is the best way to create 'Google', | so isn't the advise contradictory? | tomhoward wrote: | His advice is: | | - Work on a personal project that is motivating to you | (obviously you won't work on it if it's not motivating to you) | | - It's a good sign if the project you're motivated to work on | solves a problem that you and your friends care a lot about, | because there's a good chance many more people will also want | that problem solved and will buy/use your product. | | Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, | but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school. | suyash wrote: | I didn't see the 2nd point but yes overall this clarifies. | daveguy wrote: | > Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different | paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high | school. | | And neither was Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page both hold | masters degrees in Computer Science from Stanford. | tomhoward wrote: | He's giving advice to school kids on what to do during | their remaining school years or early college years. | tomhoward wrote: | Also, Larry was 23 when PageRank was first published - | that's not much older than "barely out of high school", | even if we have to be so literal about everything :) | makerdiety wrote: | As long as Paul Graham doesn't tell the truth that most | if not all school kids won't ever make the next Google, | then I'm okay with influencers (like Paul Graham, for | instance) lying about the possibility of enormous | opportunities being available to people. | daveguy wrote: | Yes. I was reinforcing your point. Not even the example | he uses is directly applicable to the audience. Just out | of highschool and 6 years in one of the most rigorous CS | programs are _very_ different. | lordswork wrote: | I don't think there is a contradiction. The argument is that | building fun projects helps you gain expertise to the point | where you can more easily recognize painful problems to solve. | etothepii wrote: | This advice is for 14/15 year olds. I think the advice would be | different for 22-year-olds. It would be different still for | 35-year-olds. | | 22-year-olds have a hard time selling to enterprises, 14-year- | olds will find it impossible. Whereas if they build something | cool that they and their friends love they will gain many of | the skills that might be useful later on. | | PG has made the point many times that the superpower 22-year- | olds have is that they can live on ramen and work 16 hours a | day. The superpower that 14-year-olds have is that (in many | cases) they don't even need to find the $1,000 a month to | survive. | mindwok wrote: | I think the message is more about not getting caught up in | external sources of what to build. Basically, don't follow the | hype, follow your nose. | benzible wrote: | > So Mark Zuckerberg shows up at Harvard in 2003, and the | university still hasn't gotten the facebook online. [...] But | Mark is a programmer. He looks at this situation and thinks | "Well, this is stupid. I could write a program to fix this in one | night. Just let people upload their own photos and then combine | the data into a new site for the whole university." So he does. | And almost literally overnight he has thousands of users. | | Kinda, but this skips over the whole Facemash thing | https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creat... | lupire wrote: | You are too kind. It's a complete lie, or worse, utter BS | fabricated to back up the OP argument. Zuckerberg stole photos | (and the website name!) from the already existing online | facebook. | | Facebook was actually based on something he was hired by | Winklevoss to create, and he decided to keep it for himself | instead of delivering it. That's the "naughtiness" that YC | seeks out in its Founder application process. | | Note, by the way, in the recent "cancellation" of President | Gay, the false claim that behavior like this would get a | Harvard student expelled (although Zuck did end up "expelling" | himself.) | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | While I agree with a lot of the criticisms that have been posted | here (first and foremost that it is _exceedingly bad advice_ to | _take_ advice on being successful from someone who is like six | sigmas to the right of the curve on how their efforts were | rewarded - it 's like reading from Taylor Swift or Simone Biles | or Usain Bolt about "to succeed you just need hard work and to | believe!". As it's taken many, many years of therapy for me to | internalize, if you get the majority of your self-worth through | what you _do_ , you're gonna have a bad time...) I think it's | also a good idea to keep in mind the general HN guideline of | "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what | someone says." | | In that sense, I _do_ strongly agree with the overall conclusion, | "That's it, just two things, build stuff and do well in school." | Building stuff for your own edification, and soaking up as much | knowledge and relationships while you're in school, is really | sound advice that works regardless of your end goal. | pavel_lishin wrote: | > _soaking up as much knowledge and relationships while you 're | in school_ | | A family friend was recently admitted to a magnet school - it's | not like an Ivy League level institution, but it's fairly | prestigious in the area, and not easy to get to. I need to make | sure to remind him that while it's good that he's feeling | academically challenged, he should also focus on building | friendships with people who are statistically likely (much as | he is, tbh) to be successful in life - they can help pull him | up when he's down, and he can do the same for them. | | I didn't get _that_ much out of college, academically - but the | relationships I built there got me my first two jobs, and I | still treasure the friends I made there. | w10-1 wrote: | Aristotle said friendships were the best example of happiness | in life - not fame or success which rarely lead to happiness | or even social benefit. Friendship is the best example | because that's the only way to not only exercise your | curiosity and virtues, but do so in knowing concert with | people who understand and appreciate what you're doing, who | are entirely different beings. I would hope that even high- | achieving friendships can be built not on mutual utility but | on common interest and expression. | DonsDiscountGas wrote: | > I think it's also a good idea to keep in mind the general HN | guideline of "Please respond to the strongest plausible | interpretation of what someone says." | | "strongest" is highly subjective. I also don't think we should | make things up and pretend the other person said them, which is | much more commonly used to strawman, but steelmanning involves | the same process. | kdfjgbdfkjgb wrote: | you can steelman and still be explicit that you're | steelmanning and how you're interpreting what you think they | meant | eloisant wrote: | Also "the standard way to get rich"... It's much easier to get | rich by getting hired at a FAANG than starting your own | company. | | You only get rich by starting your own company if you win the | startup lottery. Otherwise you're better off getting a high | paid job. | jjackson5324 wrote: | That depends entirely on your definition of rich. | | PG's definition of rich is probably 100x what yours is. | joshuahutt wrote: | There are very different definitions of "rich." | | Take the old comparison between Gates and Jordan. "If Jordan | saves 100% of his income for the next 450 years, he'll still | have less than Bill Gates has today." | | You can become wealthy and comfortable working for a salary. | But, the canonical way to get "FU money" is to win the | lottery. | bombcar wrote: | It's all about managing yourself and expectations. | | Can a janitor save enough money to rival Gates? No. Not | even close. | | But the same janitor could save enough money to have "FU | money" later in life, and only continue working as a | janitor if he chose to do so. | beedeebeedee wrote: | > But the same janitor could save enough money to have | "FU money" later in life, and only continue working as a | janitor if he chose to do so. | | That is exceedingly doubtful | brigadier132 wrote: | I agree, and the reason is housing. If housing in this | country wasn't fucked up I think it would be possible. As | of now, to do this as a janitor you would need to live | with roommates or family. You would also need to avoid | smoking, alcohol, gambling, and any other money sinks. | Then you would need to invest all your savings for years. | bombcar wrote: | Housing cost is the single defining factor in | retirability now and if you're a janitor, you seriously | need to consider where you are living, because moving | from a VHCOL state to a lower one could be all you need. | | Sure the pay is lower, but the housing costs are | substantially lower. | FrustratedMonky wrote: | Survivor Bias anyone? | | Bill Gates, Zuck, Jobs, etc.... | | Students should quit school. -> (?) -> profit | ponector wrote: | Yes, one should choose rich parents to start with. | lupire wrote: | Steve Jobs biological parents were rich, but he didn't get | their money. They did choose good parents for him, though. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs | Scubabear68 wrote: | This essay glosses over the fact that most startups die a | horrible death and earn little to no money for the founders. | | Somewhere in this essay it needs to say "99% of you who try this | will fail". | verelo wrote: | if i had a 1 in 100 shot of becoming google I'd just do it 100 | times. I'm pretty sure its more like 99.99999% | jamil7 wrote: | That's... not how that works. | bombcar wrote: | Even if you can "try to be Google" once a year you'll still | be over 80 on average when you hit ... | verelo wrote: | ^^ this. As I've said to others, the math lines up | looking promising, but now adjust for available time. It | looks very different. | evrimoztamur wrote: | It's closer to 63% (binomial distribution of 1% chance with | 100 trials, P(X>=1) is 63.4%). | mahogany wrote: | Fun fact, this converges quickly to 1-1/e ~ 0.632. | | If you had a 1 in a million chance of winning something and | you tried a million times, the chance of winning once is | about 63.2%, not much different from when n=100. | lnxg33k1 wrote: | I always wondered why people would ask to analyse the chances | of a coinflip during logical interviews, according to you, | after 2 flips you have both result happening? Its not like | that, if you have 1 in 100 chances of making it, each time | you re try you have a 1 in 100 chances | Keyframe wrote: | right, parent probably isn't aware of complement rule. | Sibling comment properly calculated 63.4% probability of at | least one success in 100 trials where each has 1% of | success. | mitthrowaway2 wrote: | I think each earnest attempt would probably occupy about 3 | years of your lifespan, so you probably can try at most 20 | times. If these are independent, then it's still an 82% | chance of failure. But successive attempts after repeated | failures might also make it harder to attract confidence from | investors, not to mention loss of your own self-confidence. | And if you finally succeed in founding Google when you're 80, | you might find that you don't have that much use for the | money anymore, nor much interest in running Google. | kelnos wrote: | Conversely, repeated failures can give you the experience | needed to increase the odds that your next attempt could be | successful. | iamleppert wrote: | Ask anyone who has ever failed at a startup before, how | easy it is to get funding again. VC's would rather take a | chance on someone they don't know vs. rip open old | emotional bags with a failed founder. | verelo wrote: | As someone thats on startup #7 and is ~37 years old I can | attest to this: I have had 5 flat out failures, 1 break | even experience and 1 life changing experience (I don't | own a private jet unfortunately). I'm fucking tired. I | really hope theres something huge in the future, but the | reality is I struggle to believe I have enough left in me | to finish this one, let alone more. | | Also, I'm just more interested in family and enjoying the | mobility of the youth I have left, much more than chasing | down unlimited resources. | teucris wrote: | Apart from the math being off there, who do you know who has | the time and resources to try and start 100 startups? Most | people barely have the time and resources for 1. | verelo wrote: | Yeah so i didn't put it well, but that was literally my | point. Feels very "developer brain" of us to say "thats | technically possible, heres the math and you're thinking | about it wrong" and not consider the human aspect. | rmah wrote: | You're mixing up percent that succeed (a statistic) with | percent chance of success (a probability). IOW, the fact that | 1% of businesses succeed does not mean that a particular | business has a 1% chance of success. The reason is that | business success is not a function of pure random chance | (like a die roll). Sure there are random factors but there | are also non-random factors (which, IMO, dominate). The | problem is that there is no way to determine what your | business's chance of success actually is. | takinola wrote: | The thing is you don't start with a 1:100 shot of becoming | Google. You, hopefully, level up each shot you get. Your | first shot, you'll probably make something no one wants. The | second time, you can't figure out how to get anyone to pay | attention to you. The third time, you can't get enough people | to hand over their cash for it. The fourth time... | | Each time, you learn and get better, your odds go up. Now the | real question is whether your odds are going from 1:1000 to | 1:100 or from 1:100 to 10:100? | jvanderbot wrote: | I wonder, over the course of a career in startups, what is the | probability that you'll either found or be an early employee at | one that makes up (financially) for the rest? Not hugely rich, | but better than "normal" career. | | Given it's a repeated game, and you gain knowledge at each | round, I'd say the odds are probably pretty good that the | highly dynamic / fast learning environment of early companies | yields returns over a lifetime. | candiodari wrote: | Well you can calculate that somewhat, right. If you're | "top-1%" in skill, enough to get hired at Google (even if you | did it for the badge), then did you or did you not start a | business? | | Google: 180,000 employees. Let's say including ex-employees | 250,000 | | These started 1,200 companies, according to the only source I | could find. These collectively apparently made their founders | ~20 billion. Let's say (heh) that it's a power law, let's say | the top 10 got 1 billion each. | | So we're talking the odds for an "average" software engineer | to get to 1 billion is about 0.1% * 10/180000 = 0.000005556%, | or about 1 in 18 million. | | Odds for a current or ex-Google engineer: 1 in 18,000. | jvanderbot wrote: | This calculates the odds an ex-googler makes a billion | dollars. That's not really what I asked, but is a good | Fermi question nonetheless! | gizmo wrote: | The number of billionaires yc has produced in 4000 or so | startups (with many future billionaires in the pipeline) | suggests your numbers are off by, what, 100x? If we assume | that a Google Engineer is as qualified as a yc founder, | which isn't quite true but still. | kevindamm wrote: | The challenge here is not simply being in the right startup | but having the right combination of startup founders (& | contributors) for that particular idea at that particular | time. Now, it's not like there's only one great fit for each | role, but it's far from rolling a d100 too. | Kranar wrote: | I agree most startups fail, but no they don't die a horrible | death nor do the majority of them earn no money for their | founders. Many founders could have made _more_ money through | traditional employment, but you 'll find very few startup | founders are actually poor or become poor due to a startup. | | There is an opportunity cost to starting your own company, but | it's not some kind of horrible experience that will drive you | to bankruptcy unless you're part of the 1% who manages a | spectacular exit. | eddieroger wrote: | I was sad to search for the word "luck" and come up empty. You | can do everything right and still fail. You can do everything | wrong and win. Sometimes you're just in the right place at the | right time, and that external factor is completely out of your | control and can be the difference you need. | duggan wrote: | I don't disagree that luck is a factor, but what can you do | with that information other than console yourself when it | doesn't work out? | dingnuts wrote: | use the knowledge that your plans may not succeed despite | your best efforts to set expectations so that you are not | emotionally devastated if this happens, and so that you are | prepared in other ways as well. | | take the shot, but have a back-up plan, basically. | teucris wrote: | Learn how to manage bets. Some people have the resources to | fail many times and keep going. Others do not. Knowing that | a huge portion of starting a business is luck, you can | better weigh your options and hopefully select different | opportunities depending on your situation. | | And, in the unfortunately common case, recognize when you | cannot take any bets and instead focus on getting yourself | to a place where you can, rather than betting everything | and losing everything. | j7ake wrote: | Not over leverage yourself such that if you fail you would | be unable to recover. | kelnos wrote: | You can decide not to do it in the first place. | | A 15-year-old hearing this talk from Graham as-is might | take from it, "wow, if I learn programming, work on things | that interest me, do well in school, and go to a good | university, I'm guaranteed to build a Google-scale | successful startup!" | | Telling that kid that there's also a component of luck | involved, and that the vast majority of startups fail, | would temper that enthusiasm in a much more honest way. If | that means fewer kids decide to start companies, that's | obviously a negative in Graham's book, but may not be a | negative for those kids themselves. | nezaj wrote: | I think it's a jump to assume the kid will believe there | is a _guarantee_ | | If the kid is motivated from this essay to learn | programming, work on things that interest them, do well | in school, and go to a good university -- I think they're | well setup for success in their life. | psnehanshu wrote: | But not if you put "starting the next Google" as the | criteria for success. | bananapub wrote: | you can do a lot! | | - discount the useless advice you get from people who got | lucky and are unaware of this fact | | - target trying to be in the right place at the right time | and have a plan B if you don't get lucky, rather than | waking up at 0400 every day to eat raw eggs or whatever | | - respect yourself and your employees more | | - be more generous with what luck brings you | | etc etc etc | | a much better question is why do YC and co not talk about | luck and connections more? why do they pretend it's all | some imaginary meritocracy rather than hugely dependent on | going to the right school / being born into the right | social class, and then hugely advantaged by having YC's | name recognition and tame lendors attached? | duggan wrote: | Just to follow up, we're discussing advice to young | teenagers here. | | I think it's reasonable to inspire more than hedge. They'll | presumably already hear lots about what the least risky | things to do are from many, many sources -- that's the | default. | brigadier132 wrote: | It's luck in the same way that poker is luck. | palata wrote: | Do you not know poker at all? | brigadier132 wrote: | Yes, ive played professionally. To be charitable I'll | explain it to you. In poker you play a massive number of | hands and if you are good you play a preplanned strategy | and sometimes when following that strategy you lose but | over the long run, assuming you are playing a winning | strategy, you make money. | | The luck is seen in the short term fluctuations but over | the long run when executing your strategy there is no | luck. | | This requires proper bankroll management among other | things. | | Also starting a business is easier than poker, poker is | zero sum (more often negative sum due to rake). | | Business is positive sum. What this means is people will | gladly hand you money if your product generates more | value for them than holding that money does. In poker, | every single hand is like a fist fight because there is | always a loser in every hand. | rrdharan wrote: | In this analogy, the VCs are playing poker. The hands (or | the cards dealt to the VC player in that hand) are | individual startups. | | Yes you can win if you are a VC. Less clear what to do if | you're just a card. | brigadier132 wrote: | Founders can take multiple shots too. Everyone is playing | poker to an extent. VCs are playing cash games and | founders are playing tournaments. | takinola wrote: | Poker is actually a good analogy. It is luck in the short | term but skill over the long term. You can't confidently | predict that you will win any specific upcoming hand but, | given a particular set of opponents, you can reasonably | predict whether you will be up or down over a number of | hands. I may beat Chris Moneymaker on a hand or two but | he's going to take all my money over the long haul. | | The insight here is to only play in games that you have | the advantage (or are at least evenly matched) and be | very, very careful not to put yourself in a position to | go bust on any one hand. | waprin wrote: | I completely agree with the sentiment, and as someone | who's mostly focused on a startup for pro poker players | to study game theory more effectively | (https://www.livepokertheory.com) , I find countless | parallels between poker and entrepreneurship. | | Also, people don't realize that startups aren't one | single event. There's a million events and each one has | its own luck. For example, you make a piece of content | marketing there's luck in whether it performs well, but | that luck can be managed and the risk spread across many | events by doing lots of small pieces of content | marketing. | | I also wrote a blog post about how a popular psychology | book oriented towards poker pros (The Mental Game of | Poker) can be easily reframed for entrepreneurs: | | https://writing.billprin.com/p/the-mental-game-of- | entreprene... | | With all that said, it's highly ironic you picked | Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he's famous | in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player | who got extremely lucky at the perfect time . It's a bit | like talking about the importance of hard work and deep | technology skills for founders, and using Adam Neumann | and WeWork as your example of that. | timerol wrote: | The problem with this is that attempting a startup takes | 2-10 years, while a poker hand takes a few minutes. Poker | would be a lot more luck based if you only played 20 hands | and then stopped. | dade_ wrote: | "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." -- | Seneca | fuzzfactor wrote: | Even if you build a system that has no reliance whatsoever | on the existence of good fortune, it can still be felled by | a run of bad fortune. | financltravsty wrote: | Maybe don't start a startup, because you do not have the | connections or resources necessary to make it successful. Same | with any other "speculative" venture: it's dominated by | insiders who know how to minimize risk to a point it no longer | becomes speculative. | | Maybe start an actual, scaleable business that makes money. | It's not sexy, but it's within the realm of possibility to get | it off the ground yourself; and usually those within the gilded | class are not interested in such things. | | If you're a regular schmuck, maybe take a page from the | countless immigrants in the U.S. that start various businesses | (trade, real estate, etc.) that make them enough money to allow | them to live like kings back in their home countries. | | There's something to be said about the severe glaucoma of | understanding class in the U.S. Very few (notably the middle | class) are willing to internalize they're serfs, whose current | comfort is more a product of luck than anything more. It's a | precarious situation, and any notions of aspiring to "life | satisfaction" or other leisure-class values is just foolish, in | my opinion. | seanhunter wrote: | Agree but he doesn't do this because he makes money because | people try this. Like other vcs he doesn't really care if the | vast majority fail as long as he makes bank on a few who dont' | fail. | | That's a prism it's really worth applying to all advice given | by VCs: What's the outcome for me if I fail vs what's the | outcome for them if I fail? | photochemsyn wrote: | This article only mentions Stanford once, so here's some | additional information: | | https://new.nsf.gov/news/origins-google | | > "The National Science Foundation led the multi-agency Digital | Library Initiative (DLI) that, in 1994, made its first six | awards. One of those awards supported a Stanford University | project led by professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry | Winograd... Around the same time, one of the graduate students | funded under the NSF-supported DLI project at Stanford took an | interest in the Web as a "collection." The student was Larry | Page.... Page was soon joined by Sergey Brin, another Stanford | graduate student working on the DLI project. (Brin was supported | by an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.)" | | Under a rational and fair approach to patents, anything created | with taxpayer funds would be available to all American businesses | under a non-exclusive licensing program. However, in the 1980s, | Bayh-Dole was pushed through which allowed exclusive licensing of | those inventions to private parties. This is nothing but theft | from the taxpayer, the entity who funds the NSF, which funded | this research effort, which generated PageRank. | | As a result, Google didn't face market competition for some time, | and was able to create a monopolistic situation, and as with all | monopolies, this resulted in the degradation of their product, | which is why, as everyone seems to agree, Google search results | are much worse today than they used to be. | | [edit: contemplate the outcome if Brin & Page had instead | invented PageRank as Apple or Microsoft employees - would they | have been able to run off with the IP and found a company?] | DonsDiscountGas wrote: | The PageRank patent expired 5 years ago, and frankly a lot of | other search engines were copying the method a long time before | that. Search results have been deteriorating since "SEO" became | a thing. | photochemsyn wrote: | If PageRank had been available to all US companies who wanted | to build a search engine around it at the time of | publication, then we might have a half-dozen major search | engine-based companies right now, which would be a | competitive situation that would drive innovation (and | solution of the SEO problem), which is how free market | capitalism theory works IIRC. | | Since universities are publicly funded by taxpayers, their | inventions should be thrown to the capitalist wolves who will | compete to provide the best implementation of the idea to the | consumers. If the corporations want to instead finance their | own research centers, then they'd own all the patents | outright - but it's cheaper to steal from the public. | taneq wrote: | I love the opening because the mission statement of my company | has always been "make sure taneq doesn't ever have to go back to | a real job". Don't get me wrong, at most points a 'real job' | would have been easier but easier wasn't the mission. | w10-1 wrote: | This is entirely fair in its goal and perspective. | | It's not about starting Koch Industries or Disney. | | It's not about some ideal world where connections and funding | don't matter. | | It's about a kind of productive problem solving that creates | value for other people by solving problems they just accept as | friction in their lives. | | It's insightful in focusing on how projects you love can end up | helping others. | | But it's a little misleading in that people are listening not | because they are doing what they love, but because they want to | be successful - ideally to take what they love and turn it into | success - according to this plan. | | Let's say each year 10,000 people would love to become | professional football players, 500 make it to the NFL, and 5 | become household names - success stories. | | There's no real accounting for the time wasted by the 9,500 doing | the extra required not out of enjoyment of the game but to become | successful (leaving aside any actual costs like TBI). It's at | least an exported cost. But it might have other downstream | effects, making someone less confident in their judgement, less | likely to engage in making a better world of whatever sort. | | One of the Buddhist precepts is not to sell the wine of delusion | (in some translations). But it's also soul-killing to tell | someone how likely they are to fail; who says that at a wedding? | What benefit is that? | | Paul Graham made a success of helping others be successful. | That's a really good model to consider: to do _and_ teach _and_ | help. So I would take this as good teaching for teens. | ckozlowski wrote: | Fully agreed. | | I was the first graduating class from one of the first public | high schools in the country with an IT magnet program. | | I remember the program coordinator telling us and our parents | in a big presentation that we could be making $70-80k out of | high school. He was really selling it. | | I was not making anywhere near that out of high school. =P | | But I wasn't doing bad either. In fact, I'd had two jobs with | tech companies before I even graduated. I had a job lined up in | the engineering department of an OEM prior to receiving my high | school diploma. That same administrator was always encouraging | us, cheering us on with our various projects, helping where he | could. | | I never thought for a moment I'd been mislead that my salary | wasn't that high or that I didn't make it "rich". Any kid who'd | sat through a school fundraiser presentation in middle school | knows that those awesome prizes of a computer or game console | or whatnot is just meant to hype you up. But you might be able | to land a CD player. (My age is showing here. =P ) | | I expect any 14-15yo he's talking to will get the gist. The | kids are not stupid. They get the pitch. And I think they | intrinsically know the odds too. Those 9,500 football players | are not all going to see it as a loss, even if they didn't | achieve their ultimate goal. People turn losses into wins and | salvage the good from a failed attempt all of the time. | | My son is 3, and already has fun mashing computer parts | together and wanting to see how things work. I'm excited to see | if he wants to do this as well. Will I tell him "Dude, that guy | said I'd be making $90k and that was B.S." Nah. I'll give him | simple version of Paul's advice. Even if he doesn't go into | entrepreneurship, it'll set him up well if he follows it. | confoundcofound wrote: | It's so deflating to see both YC & PG focus their content almost | solely on the younger generations. As someone who came to tech | later in their mid-30s, it's not hard to feel like expired goods | when the "thought leaders" of tech are unabashedly gunning for | younger minds with little to no acknowledgement of those who may | want to start ventures during later stages of life. | | The more I try to plug myself in, the more it seems like starting | a company at this age is borderline schizophrenic delusion. | mbgerring wrote: | Average age of successful startup founders is 35-45. YC likes | young founders because they're impressionable and exploitable. | autonomousErwin wrote: | That makes them sound a bit more predatory than the reality | of it but I get what you mean. When you're younger, by | definition, you've got more shots on goal, you don't have | other responsibilities (mortgage, kids, partners etc.) so you | can take more riskier decisions, and you more have to rely on | first principle thinking instead of experience (because you | don't have any). | | Saying that, I would like to see the advice for higher age | ranges as I have a feeling more _successful_ startups tend to | be around there. | pylua wrote: | Can you elaborate on this -- or any evidence? | user_7832 wrote: | I think it's partially because of the nature of VCs (which | is partially why I'd never use a vc but rather bootstrap | and fail). If your parent organisation's goal is a 100x | return you don't mind 9/10 startups burning up in an | attempt. | | YC in that sense is a full "all guns blazing" thing. It's | generally younger folks who don't mind eating ramen and | don't have to take care of a large family, and hence are | more likely to go into a startup full time. Combine these | two and I think you see what I mean. | | Btw this isn't a new criticism of YC/VCs, it's something | that's been around for a while. | codingdave wrote: | Don't be deflated - it is not a negative statement on you. For | most people, going the startup route is bad advice. Older | people know that and take much more care to set up safety nets | for themselves before going into the VC world. I don't want to | go so far to say that YC & PC are exploiting the naivety of | youth... but they certainly know which demographics will | embrace the risk vs. which will not, and they speak | accordingly. | pylua wrote: | I had the same sort of reaction, even though I felt like the | article was not intending to invoke that. | | Looking back, when I was the age in the article I was way too | insecure and nervous to be able to take this advice. Looking at | it now I think it is great and want to set my children up with | that way of thinking. | | I am 34 and found the message inspiring. | advael wrote: | I know people mention that this advice smacks of survivorship | bias, and I think that's pretty obviously going to be a part of | any advice given about economic outcomes whose odds of working | out are perhaps a whole order of magnitude better than lottery | tickets | | I think it's more important to note how talks like this use | "children" as an excuse to present a very sanitized version of | the history being discussed. I think a massively underappreciated | mechanism by which American culture distorts history is by its | very lax and sometimes supportive norms about fudging the truth | and sometimes even outright lying to children | kelnos wrote: | The biggest thing missing from this talk -- something that | would have been easy to include, even for a younger audience -- | is that the majority of startups fail, and even many startups | that do well enough end up making their founders less money | than if they went to work for another company. | | It feels irresponsible to tell kids how they can build the next | Google, without also telling them how likely it is they won't | succeed at it. | | Granted, most people in their early 20s have very little to | lose, so a failed startup may not be much of a problem, outside | of the stress and emotional effects. | advael wrote: | I mean, like most advice from my generation and prior ones, | the notion that people in their 20s can't fuck up too badly | because they have little to lose applies considerably less | well to all but the fairly affluent people in their 20s | today. For many, taking risks means being gated out of the | financial system by bad credit, being behind in an | unforgiving job market, and possibly even destitution if they | don't have a safety net of some kind | | To be clear, this was always true to some degree, but | inequality is higher, industries have more power and thus | workers have less, and safety nets that don't come from your | parents being well-off are weaker (and fewer people's parents | are well-off) than when I was a kid, and this has actually | been true for a few subsequent generations of kids | seanhunter wrote: | The best advice to give children is that they should be born to | rich, influential and well-connected parents. That will give | them a huge advantage in all walks of life including if they | want to start a startup. Larry and Sergei had the benefit of | rich, influential and well-connected parents, as did Peter | Thiel, Elon Musk, and Paul Graham himself. | lupire wrote: | Why do think this is an "American" thing? | | The author is British, for one. | dekhn wrote: | Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew | google was going to be huge from the beginning. His brother Carl | was already a multimillionare in tech and taught him everything | required to set up a future successful company. Larry made it | clear to me that he always planned Google to be a large cash- | generating cow to invest in long-term AGI and there were only a | few times at the beginning when he truly feared that wouldn't | happen. | zeroxfe wrote: | > Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew | google was going to be huge from the beginning. | | Nobody can know such a thing -- especially turning around a | billion-dollar business, a thing with a near-zero prior | probability. It's more reasonable to say that Larry had the | drive, the aptitude, and the resources to maximize his odds | (which would still be low.) | shubhamjain wrote: | Do you have any sources for this? If he knew it was going to be | this huge, why were they looking for an acquisition for north | of a million dollars? On AGI: are you referencing this clip? | [1] To me, it seems like an ordinary vision when you stretch | your imagination. He didn't have any realistic idea how Google | might achieve AGI, just something that could happen in the | future. And this was in 2000. Google, I imagine, was pretty | successful by then. | | Larry Page's original ambition was to digitize books and | knowledge in the world [2]. | | > Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, | the student project that eventually became Google--a "crawler" | that would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against | a user's query--was actually conceived as part of an effort "to | develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and | universal digital library." | | [1]: | https://twitter.com/jam3scampbell/status/1608270969763729415 | | [2]: | https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t... | dekhn wrote: | my source is larry himself- I used to work there and | volunteered at SciFoo, which he attended and I chatted with | him about it. The digital library is basically building a | corpus for training AGI. | | His dad was a computer scientist and larry read a lot of AGI | sci fi as a kid, so it's not really that hard to extrapolate | 1980s technology to 2040s outcomes. | actionfromafar wrote: | It's only in hindsight that training with a huge corpus of | text is going to give AGI. | | (Still not obvious if you ask me.) | dekhn wrote: | I'm the same age as Larry and started working in machine | learning in the early 90s, and to me, it seemed pretty | obvious at the time that AGI would ultimately need a | large corpus of text (and video) to be useful. What's | kind of funny is the models I worked with at the time- | hidden markov models of (biological) text anticipated the | validity of this approach, although by design, they don't | work with long contexts. | jimkoen wrote: | His dad wasn't "just" a computer scientist, he was a | professor for computer science and artificial intelligence | at Michigan State. Sergey Brin's father was equally a | professor in mathematics at the University of Maryland. | | > It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for | a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. | | It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn | well near as engineered with data as it could be. They also | were _insanely_ well connected through their and their | parents academic career. Both Sergey and Larry had obtained | their PhD prior to starting the company. I can also | remember reading that they obtained significant amounts of | funding through connections Larry's dad had into the | industry. | | You can ignore the rest of my comment, what follows is just | my take. | | Their success story is imo one of the most blatant examples | on how privilege really does give you a boost in life. I am | not arguing that anyone could have done it, but I do wonder | how the world would look like if we were all kids of | academics with a successful career, with a relatively safe, | secure and stable childhood home and a family background | that really incentivizes learning and academic success over | succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income | at some point. | dekhn wrote: | I don't think larry or sergey got their phd - larry got a | masters and I think sergey left before he got any degree. | | Don't forget that Larry's older brother Carl went through | the whole VC process with egroups and gained extreme | experience with how to maximize his position in | negotiation. | | But yes, I agree completely that kids of academics raised | in an environment that incentivzes learning is a reliable | way to transform the future. | jimkoen wrote: | So to correct my original statement: Both have a masters | degree and both were pursuing PhD's before they focused | on Google. But I consider them more than halfway there, | afaik both have published papers separate from the paper | that eventually lead to Google. This is taken from their | own testimonials from their paper [0] | | The rest of my statement is true. | | [0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf | nostrademons wrote: | The timing is a little muddled here - Scott Hassan (who, | interestingly enough, wrote most of the original code for | Google) founded eGroups with Carl Page in 1997, _after_ | working on BackRub /Google. The two should be viewed as | parallel projects - Google actually started first, but | eGroups raised money first. It's true that Larry got | valuable experience through having his brother raise | capital first, but much of that also came from having | supportive angels like (Sun founder) Andy Bechtolsteim, | (Stanford professor and Granite Systems founder) David | Cheriton, (Junglee and Netscape exec) Ram Shriram, and | (Amazon founder) Jeff Bezos. | bronco21016 wrote: | > Their success story is imo one of the most blatant | examples on how privilege really does give you a boost in | life. I am not arguing that anyone could have done it, | but I do wonder how the world would look like if we were | all kids of academics with a successful career, with a | relatively safe, secure and stable childhood home and a | family background that really incentivizes learning and | academic success over succumbing to the pressure of, you | know, having an income at some point. | | I recently read something that played out a thought | experiment about "imagine the world could only hold | 10,000 people". It may have been a comment somewhere on | HN honestly. The idea was that if the world could only | hold 10,000 people, there never would have been enough | division of basic duties for any one individual to dive | so deep that they could invent semi-conductors (insert | any modern tech really). I mean we likely wouldn't even | have mastered locomotion by now if that was the case. | | Lets assume we're "all kids of academics with a | successful career, with a relatively safe, secure and | stable childhood home and a family background that really | incentivizes learning and academic success over | succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income | at some point." Most of us will still just be working on | the basic societal problems of producing food and taking | out the trash. | jimkoen wrote: | > I recently read something that played out a thought | experiment | | With all due respect, the world isn't a thought | experiment and the dynamics of a system with 10.000 | people is not comparable to that of 7 billion. | | My argument was pointing at the fact that it may be | pointless to compare your own plans to success against | someone elses success story, when they had completely | different starting variables in life and people who | refuse to at least consider this are either trapped in | the Silicon Valley hustle culture or are, sorry, | completely ignorant, bordering on idiotic. | | With that same logic ala "Not everyone can be X" I can | justify almost all of human suffering in the world. I | refuse to believe that you follow an ideology like this | if you're on this site, because if you did, you were | already rich by means of some criminal enterprise | exploiting humans far beyond what tech startups are | capable of. | | This isn't some appeal to idk, introducing communism and | making everyone equal but this argument is as dumb as | making a healthy runner compete in the paralympics. | kla-s wrote: | It was on HN, this comment: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39746742 | ilrwbwrkhv wrote: | This is what all these blogs don't really mention and I | have seen this over and over and over again. You need a | fundamental place in society: really high up to attempt | to do any of this. | nostrademons wrote: | Also worked at Google in the 00s, and have spoken personally | with several people who worked on Google when it was still a | Stanford grad project. | | To hear Larry tell it, his original idea for Google was to | download the whole web and throw away everything but the | links, and he was inspired by academic notions of citation | indexes. It wasn't specifically (or really at all, until | Google books came out) about books - that sounds like a cover | story to get grad student funding for his actual idea, | because you can't really go to a university and say "I want | to download the whole web and throw away everything but the | links" without telling them why or connecting it to some | plausibly useful idea. | | The acquisition offer is often cited, but I don't think Larry | and Sergey were ever really serious about taking it. They | didn't, after all. But if you're living on a grad student | stipend (which was like $20k in the 90s), a million bucks is | a lot of money. | | And they absolutely knew it would be big, they just didn't | know _how_ it would be big. It was quite popular within the | Stanford lab as well...it's interesting, looking through the | early CVS commits for Google, how much work was done by | people who ended up not actually becoming employees of Google | or having a major part in its story. I think the real genius | of Google was treating the web as an object that could be | studied and manipulated, and not as some amorphous thing you | were part of. That was exciting even if people didn't know | how it would be. | inerte wrote: | In the "Measure What Matters" book the author talks about | investing in Google in early 1999, and the founders were | indeed projecting billions of dollars in revenue, using ads. | lupire wrote: | Digitizing all the books in he world was an is an essential | component of modern AI, a full two decades later. | | I don't know what point you are trying to make. | | Googles mission was always to know _everything_ for | _everyone_. | alexsereno wrote: | You know I remember hearing this way back in the early 2000s | but forgot about it, Carl is pretty low key, no Wikipedia / etc | dekhn wrote: | I chatted with him several times. One thing I've noticed is | that Larry and Carl both have some behaviors that are | consistent with ... inflexible thinking ... that I recognize | in myself and have worked to correct. | | Anyway ,we chatted about his latest company, which I can't | find now. The idea was this: industrial facilities often | return really noisy signals on the electrical supply lines, | and the electrical company has to do a lot of work to clean | it up (hey, I'm not an EE). Like, motors, etc, all severely | distort the waveform. So his company made and I guess sold a | product that you'd put at your electrical service panel that | "cleaned up" the signal before it went back to the power | company. In response, the company would give you cheaper | power prices. | | I was reminded of this when Larry Page met with Donald Trump | early in the Trump administration and brought up one of his | favorite plans- to rebuild the US electrical grid around DC | distribution. He's truly made for another world. | ignoramous wrote: | (tls) mirror: https://archive.is/zCEbG | humbleferret wrote: | This essay isn't a step-by-step guide to building 'Google', | rather, a call for young people to consider entrepreneurship as a | fulfilling alternative to traditional careers. | | To maximise their chances of success, Paul suggests: | | 1. Become a builder: Gain expertise in technology or other fields | you're passionate about. (Does not have to just be coding, | either!) | | 2. Start personal projects: Build things you and your friends | find useful. Paul suggests this is the fastest way to learn and | potentially discover startup ideas. | | 3. Collaborate: Work on projects with like-minded people. This | fosters skill development and could lead to finding potential | cofounders. | | I liked how Paul also emphasises the importance of good grades in | order to access top universities, where you'll find other bright | collaborators. | | There are obviously many other paths, but if I wish I had this | advice at 14 or 15. | suyash wrote: | So, can we then say the title is 'click bait'? | omoikane wrote: | It might have been better if Paul Graham used one of the | companies founded by YCombinator instead, but that would be | less impressive to 14 to 15 year olds since those 4000 or so | startups are not quite Google-scale yet. | ckozlowski wrote: | This is the best take I've read yet. | | I don't disagree with Paul's choice to focus on | entrepreneurship and getting rich here. If you're looking to | excite people, tell an exciting story. Captivate imagination. | No one gets pumped up (especially at that age) at the mediocre | story. | | What I find great about his advice is that it is by no means | limited to entrepreneurship. Working on passion projects, doing | well in school, and learning how to build relationships is | valuable even if you're working for someone else. | | There's a big space in tech jobs between the "grinding away at | code/help desk" and "startup bro" that I feel doesn't get | described enough. And that's one thing I'd tack on to Paul's | advice, notwithstanding the need to sell the message above. | That advice he espouses can also lead to being a really | standout contributor at a tech firm, and probably with a higher | rate of success than getting a startup to stick. One doesn't | have to form a startup to contribute ideas, and there's good | money to be made in that space. | | I think your choice of wording above is important to call out: | The advice "maximizes" the chance of success; but it doesn't | guarantee it. | | Overall, completely agreed. =) | humbleferret wrote: | > "I think your choice of wording above is important to call | out: The advice "maximizes" the chance of success; but it | doesn't guarantee it." | | This is a great observation! | | I agree that Paul is framing an inspiring narrative, | especially when targeting younger people. You're spot on, | suggesting that this advice sets people up for success in | general, whether they become entrepreneurs, standout | employees, or something else entirely. | | We need more narratives about those successful 'in-between' | tech roles. | | Paul's giving the ingredients for good outcomes, but the | recipe is up to the individual. | memset wrote: | I am baffled by the criticisms of this essay. I can't identify | any statements here which are false. We're on hacker news, which | is a site about programming and startups and capitalism. There | theoretically couldn't be a better audience. | | I suppose the strongest criticism would be that pg's advice | outlines necessary conditions to start the next Google but are | not sufficient. Yes, the stuff you "make" needs to feel like a | fun project, but without the "...something people want" then your | company will not make you rich. As with any advice, there there | will always be exceptions ("do you really need a cofounder?") but | as far as "here is some advice to achieve x", where x is "create | a billion-dollar company" this isn't a bad start. | nkjnlknlk wrote: | It's misleading and poor advice to children. You see this issue | a lot in certain immigrant communities where the equivalent | "talk" might be: "How to become a Doctor [and be rich and | successful]". Becoming a doctor is orders of magnitudes more in | an individual's control but even _then_ we observe the plethora | of issues that occur. | alismayilov wrote: | I'm wondering if there is a research about which percentile of | these two groups became rich: People who started a company vs | People who worked for Tech companies. | tomhoward wrote: | Unless you're very early (and/or very lucky), you can't get | "rich" (i.e., can choose never to work again and can invest in | many other things) as an employee (though of course a highly- | paid employee can become very well off and comfortable). | | Yes you need to be lucky to get super-rich as a founder too, | but you have a lot more control, i.e., you make the primary | decisions that determine whether the company will make good | products that people will use/buy. | sahila wrote: | While agreed the chances are still low, if you joined Tesla | or Nvidia in the last 10 years and especially before 2020, | you very well and likely are rich if you're still working at | either and kept all your stock. | | Hell if you joined Facebook last year and got in when the | stock was around 100, your initial equity grant just 5x. | tomhoward wrote: | I edited the parenthesised part of the first sentence from | "and very lucky" to "and/or very lucky" to make allowances | for your objection. And sure, you can always point out | exceptions. | | The real point is that it's misguided to try and compare | percentages of tech company employees with percentages of | founders; they're very different things. | | Of course, out of all the founders of all the companies, a | relatively tiny percentage will be vastly rich. And out of | all the employees of all the tech companies, most will be | quite wealthy and comfortable, and a small percentage will | be vastly rich. | | But that doesn't tell you anything about what is the most | reliable path for any given individual to get vastly rich; | it entirely depends on whether you're the kind of person | you are how well you can learn how to build successful | products and companies. | screye wrote: | You could have been investing in Nvidia the whole time. | | Decision inertia means that employees often don't sell | vested stock, and end up being lucky. Similarly, external | investors aren't willing to put 30-50% of their networth | into one bet and therefore miss out on the kind of luck | that can set them up for life. | | There is nothing that a lowly engineer at Tesla or Nvidia | knows, that can't be found out by an external investor. | They are operating in the same information landscape, but | different outcomes when they give into decision inertia. | | It's not about joining Tesla or Nvidia early. It's about | betting on them. | logifail wrote: | > It's not about joining Tesla or Nvidia early. It's | about betting on them. | | It's also possible to bet on Tesla/Nvidia and lose. | Badly. | candiodari wrote: | Tesla has a VERY bad reputation on that front, as does | SpaceX. | munificent wrote: | I live in Seattle. There are plenty of early Microsoft hires | around here who are "fuck you money" rich. | naniwaduni wrote: | How rich do you insist on being? The bar to "can choose never | to work again" is _surprisingly low_ , it just requires a | high savings rate which is _quite achievable_ in this line of | work. | tomhoward wrote: | In the context of this article we're talking about the | difference between the kind of rich you become from | founding a hugely successful ("unicorn?") tech company, vs | working hard for a salary for years and saving hard. It's | more a qualitative thing than a specific number of dollars | saved from a salary. | | I'm well aware that the definition of rich can be very | different in other contexts. I'm talking about the context | of this article. | vundercind wrote: | "Never work again" money is crazy-high for younger folks | (like, not already close to qualifying for Medicare) in the | US, on account of the costs and financial risks of our | healthcare system. | | Most of the FIRE bloggers who bother to account for this-- | like MMM--have a (perhaps implicit) fallback plan of | returning to work somewhere with decent health insurance if | they or a family member becomes very sick, but that's quite | a gamble. | | (Never mind that a bunch of those sorts _have jobs_ and | couldn't remain comfortably "retired" without them--god I | really hate that part of the blogosphere, "look it's so | easy you dumb idiot" but then you start reading between the | lines and realize how much of it's just a bit) | toast0 wrote: | > "Never work again" money is crazy-high for younger | folks (like, not already close to qualifying for | Medicare) in the US, on account of the costs and | financial risks of our healthcare system. | | Exchange plans are fine enough, and like, they're not | that cheap, but they're also not that expensive either. | Depending on how much you make from investments on your | never have to work again horde, you may be able to | qualify for rate subsidies, and then it's even less | expensive. In my county, if I were 64 years old, assigned | male at birth, I'm looking at about $17,000/year for a | Blue Cross Bronze plan (less costly options available), | with $9,200 out of pocket max. Budgeting $26,000/year for | healthcare means less than $1 M should cover you for life | (assume 3% perpetual withdrawal rate). Rates are lower | for younger people, but budgeting based on current costs | for the oldest people should help the numbers work. | Double the budget if you have a spouse; do some math if | you have kids you need to cover until they become | independent. Definitely make sure you work until you have | earned Medicare eligibility, cause it'll be handy when | you reach that age. | | Is $1-2 M crazy-high? Kind of, but depending on what your | annual withdrawal rate target was, maybe you can just say | if you've got enough to pull $100,000/year, you're good | on healthcare too. Hopefully most years you won't hit the | out of pocket max. | vundercind wrote: | > maybe you can just say if you've got enough to pull | $100,000/year, you're good on healthcare too. | | You'll be exposed to tens of thousands in risk _per year_ | on top of (low) tens of thousands in premiums per year | for a family Exchange plan. You'll be burning nearly half | of that (and spending all your free time trying to keep | hospitals and insurers taking even more) if one of you | gets cancer--or, if it's you who gets cancer, you better | hope someone else can handle that. | | You also can't withdraw at as high a "safe rate" as | people planning for an ordinary retirement at ~65 do, | because your fund needs to last a lot longer despite | inflation and such. $2m isn't "retire at 35" (... or 45) | money. It might be "take a big gamble and _maybe_ get | lucky... for a while" money. Or semi-retire money. | | [edit] at constant 2% inflation (ha!) you need a _very | safe_ source of consistent (not average!) 6% returns to | retire with 80,000 /yr income on $2m, without eating into | principal. Anything goes wrong ("whoops, 'safe' wasn't as | safe as I thought!" or "whoops, we had a year of 7% | inflation and my investments didn't benefit from that!") | and you can find yourself burning principal _while your | account value is already down_. It won't take a lot of | that before $80k is no longer your safe-withdrawal | amount. A couple such years and you may be back to work. | 30+ years is a long time... | | [edit edit] also damn under $10k max out of pocket on a | family plan at the _bronze_ level for $17k? I gotta get | out of my shithole state. That's better than our Gold | plans (also our plans tend not to cover like 2 /3 of area | providers, which may include 100% of area specialists for | certain situations) | toast0 wrote: | My budget includes the premiums and the individual out of | pocket max. If that's not good enough, what number am I | supposed to be looking at? My with a spouse budget is | just 2x the individual budget, family out of pockets are | usually around 2x individual in my neck of the woods, so | that doesn't make a big difference; if there's kids, then | it would, but the modelling there gets tricky because | you've got to figure out what age you're kicking them off | the plan (assuming they don't have a debilitating | condition that leaves them dependent on you for their | whole life... that falls outside my plan). | | > You also can't withdraw at as high a "safe rate" as | people planning for an ordinary retirement at ~65 do, | because your fund needs to last a lot longer despite | inflation and such. $2m isn't "retire at 35" (... or 45) | money. It might be "take a big gamble and maybe get | lucky... for a while" money. Or semi-retire money. | | The $2 M is the budged accumulation only to pay for | premiums and out of pocket until you hit Medicare; and | that's assuming a spouse. Budgeting that based on | perpetual withdrawl rate gives yet another buffer, | because it only has to last until Medicare eligibility | age. Yeah, there's unknowns, but whatever. I'm not saying | $2 M is enough to accumulate for early retirement. It | could be, but a lot of people want to spend more money | than that. $2 M doesn't generate that much income, so | you'll likely qualify for health plan subsidies, which | would help a bit too. | | Edit: I used zipcode 98110, birthday for illustration | 01/01/1960. Going into the less expensive side of my | state, zipcode 99336; there's no blue cross out there, | but the most expensive bronze plan for that birthdate is | $14,000 / year with the same $9200 out of pocket max. And | yeah, limited networks suck ... I'm not going to shop for | hypotheticals there --- I'm pretty sure if there's no | reasonable in network doctors, you can fight your | insurance to get covered at a reasonable doctor, | regardless of the insurance and state, and if you're | early retired, you'll have time for it. | lupire wrote: | Some people think that if you can't spend a million | dollars a year on healthcare for 50 years, you are poor. | In a sense they are right, because nothing is more | valuable than life, but if you lower your expectations | beyond the tippy top 0.1%, and take up a nice hobby like | skydiving or motorcycling, you can get by with a lot | less. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Threshold for wealthy enough to "never work again" is | actually _very_ high if you have a mortgage and a couple | kids you want to put through school, and are thinking about | living past 75. Even here in Canada where healthcare is not | really a cost, retirement and nursing homes constitute a | huge expense that could go on for _years_ in your last | phase. | | I'm sitting on the accumulated wealth of 25 rather up-and- | downish years in this industry, 10 years at Google, an | almost paid-off mortgage, and a decent lump sum I got from | when Google bought my employer, I turn 50 this year, and | there's no way I can retire. Not without selling my home | and moving somewhere a lot cheaper (hard to find here). | | Maybe I've made some bad financial choices (not that many), | but mostly it's that compensation packages in our industry | are set just high enough to keep people on the upper side | of comfortable middle class. | | If you don't own capital -- haven't invested in rental | properties or starting your own business --getting out of | the job market isn't really a thing before 65 for most | people even in our very well compensated industry. | | If I were single or it were just me and my wife, sure. | | I've been through tldroptions, and looked at enough options | agreement given out by startups in the last few years, to | know that as an IC engineer... even if you are lucky enough | to be part of the very few startups that have a liquidity | event... you're likely gonna get $300k, $400k USD tops. | | Unless you're 25 and can shove that in the bank without | touching it at all... that's not the life changing event | some people think it is. Once the gov't takes their share, | it's enough for a house downpayment or a very nice car, and | you're certainly not going mortgage free with it. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Even very early these days won't get you much. Just a bit of | a lump sum you could apply to your 401k/RRSP or whatever and | inch you ahead by 5-10 years on retirement. _If_ you got it | early enough in your life (20s, 30s) that it can gain | interest. VCs and founders are writing stock option | agreements these days with very low ownership stakes for even | very early employees. | | Back in the early y2ks, and late 90s, yes, you could get rich | and be up and out if you were lucky and played your cards | right. Those days are done. | adrianN wrote: | A SF engineer pulling something like 300k can definitely | retire before the age of 60. | lupire wrote: | What is "rich"? | | There are tens of not hundreds of thousands of people who | could retire comfortably after working at Google, Facebook, | Apple, MSFT for a decade during their growth years. How many | startup founders can do that? | | Sure, becoming a billionaire is a different story but who | cares? | takinola wrote: | My guess is that it is much easier to get rich from working at | a tech company and rising through the ranks. Being a FANG | middle manager for a couple of years and managing your money | well should put you in a very comfortable position. However, if | you want to be private island rich, you need to do your own | startup. | ttul wrote: | Certainly in my own circle, people who were fortunate enough | to work at FAANG during the right window of time became | comfortably rich. Many of my own investors just worked as | engineers at Microsoft for the right decade and are worth | tens of millions. They worked really hard and sacrificed a | lot, but they got paid every step of the way. | | Predicting which big tech company will do well enough in | future to give you that big stock reward over time is a big | gamble, but certainly a smaller gamble than doing a startup. | | I know plenty of people who have joined half a dozen | startups, none of which yielded any gain. And many | entrepreneurs who worked super hard many times and have | nothing to show for it but scar tissue. | | Whatever you do, the best advice is to ensure you are | enjoying the journey. Don't waste your life just to be rich. | That path nearly always yields a Pyrrhic victory. | rguzman wrote: | it really depends on what you mean by rich: the surest path to | end up with $2-5M over ~10 years is job at ~FAANG, do it well | to get promoted, and manage your savings/investments well. that | path is very unlikely to get you to $10-100M in the same 10 | years, and starting a startup seems to be one of the best ways | to do that. | ilrwbwrkhv wrote: | You forget the higher up you go in these companies, the | politics get nasty. Not many people have the appetite for | that. | lupire wrote: | You don't need to be a higher up; you just need to be a | good cog. | alexchantavy wrote: | Not research, but here's this popular Dan Luu essay | https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ | YossarianFrPrez wrote: | PG is remarkably consistent in his advice; much of his writing is | about developing a nose for "what's missing" and having the chops | and resources to attempt a solution. | | Also, I think 'Google' in this instance is more for motivation | rather than a literal comparison. He's leaving out the part that | Google was founded by graduate CS students a) looking for a | thesis, b) into node-link graphs, and c) inspired by academic | citation metrics. Would PG advise anyone to go to grad school to | learn how to find scientific-discovery-based startup ideas these | days? | cmrdporcupine wrote: | This is what is fundamentally missing from most talk about | "tech" startups by VC types these days. They're not actually | interested in the nerdy stuff, just in the "disruption" stuff. | | L&S _were_ , and they hired other people who were. They didn't | start with a business idea, but with a technical one. They | filled in the blanks on the business side after they survived | the .com crash. | | I didn't get to Google until 2011, but it became clear to me | after joining that in the past they had gone on a very nerdy | mission to hire all the nerdy people and collect them into one | place to do nerdy things. | | (Unfortunately that nerdy thing ended up being selling ads | really efficient, but that's another story.) | | My fundamental point is that the Google story is very unlike | the kind of stories that YCombinator or a16z like. It started, | like you said, as a set of intellectual/technical interests. | The other stuff, that VCs today like, came later. | | In a way they did the opposite of the usual advice. They | started with the hammer (the tech) rather than the nail (the | business problem.) They certainly didn't start with a "Like X | but for Y" statement like seems to be desired by VC today. And | they didn't look like the typical .com story at the time (which | was usually: give us lots of VC $$ so we can sell something on | the web that is currently not sold on the web, but we'll just | use the $$ to buy customers and make no profit...) | | I would posit that if today's Google came to YCombinator today | they'd be shown the "no thanks" door. | YossarianFrPrez wrote: | Very interesting to hear your thoughts and experience. | | I wonder if we really shouldn't make a bit more out of the | fact that there are different types of startups: those that | pick off low-hanging fruit really well, those that combine | novel technology with novel problems (for instance, the | recent YC LLM meeting note-taking / transcription service), | those that are scientific-discovery based (see, for example | the NSF Small Business Innovation Research program), etc. I | am not experienced enough to create an ontology of startup | ideas, but I think it'd be an interesting exercise. | theGnuMe wrote: | The nsf program basically exists to fill the gap between | research and product market fit. Except They focus on | commercialization plans which we know that in reality is | subject to change (aka meaningless). | light_triad wrote: | Hopefully 2 Stanford CS PhD students hacking on their project | would be funded by YC today :) | | You bring up a good point about starting from the tech rather | than the problem. Usually the advice from VCs is to start | from the problem and iterate on the tech until you solve it. | What was very fortunate for Google is that the tech | translated into a great business problem. Open up any CS | textbook and 'Search' is always a major section. It was also | a great business because the problem is important, frequent, | and had not been properly solved by the big players in the | mid 90s. | | "And then we realized that we had a querying tool..." (Page) | cmrdporcupine wrote: | But that's the thing. "Search" was _not_ a great business | problem. It still isn 't. I used Google for years before | their IPO and people were always like "how is this thing | going to make money" and believe it or not there was a | _lot_ of skepticism even at IPO time that they even had a | possible reasonable business model. (Same for Facebook at | their IPO, too.) | | Search is not a good business. _Ad sales_ over top of | search turned out to be. AdWords is the thing that | catapulted Google towards (insane) profitability. And for | the first few years, Google didn 't really sell ads, or | market themselves as even _aiming_ to sell ads. But AdWords | could only be successful because they had already captured | the market on search, and so had a captive audience to show | ads to (and relevance information based on their searches). | | AdWords rolled out in 2000. Many of us had been using | Google as a search engine since before the company had even | been founded (1998). | light_triad wrote: | Totally agree. What I mean is many research topics can be | very interesting from a technical perspective but don't | translate into solving problems that are frequent and | important enough to build a business around. In the case | of Search many business gurus didn't understand at the | time that you can make a fortune with a free product. | What matters is who has the traffic and who they're | selling it to = eyeball meets ad. Page and Brin initially | "expected that advertising funded search engines will be | inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from | the needs of the consumers" (foreshadowing). Also they | tried to sell to Yahoo for $1M so it took time to see the | full potential, as you describe. | neilv wrote: | When Google started, you didn't need a business model for | a "dotcom" (as we called them, before "tech stocks" | became the "tech" that we now call ourselves). | | We already realized the necessity of finding information | amongst the exponentially growing wealth of Web servers | (sites). | | And Google obviously worked _much_ better than the | existing crawler-based search indexes and curated | directories. | | And lots of people thought a "portal" was a good place to | be, if you could manage it. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | > And Google obviously worked much better than the | existing crawler-based search indexes and curated | directories. | | Funny thing is I recall using Google from the very day I | first saw it come across Slashdot -- probably late 1997 | -- before they were incorporated even... but I also | recall that at some point around 1999 I actually switched | back to using AltaVista or something similar for a bit. | Because I preferred the search results I got. | | It was actually a more competitive situation than people | might remember in hindsight. | | The big difference is that Google made it through the | .com crash filter better than anybody else. That and they | kept the good will of their customers by keeping minimal | and straightforward and (for a while) ad free. | neilv wrote: | > _Hopefully 2 Stanford CS PhD students hacking on their | project would be funded by YC today :)_ | | Around the dawn of YC, IIRC, when PG did the "summer | founders" or something like that, a group of 4 of us Lisp | hackers applied as a team. No response. | | We were mostly in grad student-like lifestyle modes, and | not tied down, were energetic, and already had various | applicable experience. | | But I think PG was mostly looking for barely-20 year-olds | to drop out of college, rent an apartment in Harvard Square | together, and sit around hacking in towels. | | Since that's what he wrote in one article. Which I guess | trumped the article in which he said Lisp hackers are great | for startups. | | Now his latest article says he's going after 14 and 15 | year-olds. :) | eastbound wrote: | I always wonder about the success rate of _advice_. Do we | have _any_ student from this talk of PG who succeeded | later in life? Joined an ivy league school? Proceeded to | create a startup? Had success with it? | | Don't get me wrong. This folklore is extremely important, | if not just to raise the grades of one student. But as a | founder, when I give advice, out of inflated ego | generally, I also have vertigo from the height of | everything that could go wrong about being mistaken about | my advice. | holmesworcester wrote: | I feel that worry too, but I can validate his advice, | somewhat. | | I'm 44 and spent most of my career working individually | and with my closest friends on projects that felt | interesting, and it went really well for us in all of the | ways. I also met these friends at a selective school, | though it was a state-funded high school | (massacademy.org), not a university. | | Also, someone once came to my very conventional | elementary school in 5th grade on career day to talk | about a very unconventional career path (being a full- | time peace activist) and this had a huge impact on me, | both because it validated activism as a career and | perhaps more importantly because it validated not having | a normal job. | | Getting a very short lecture in school from an | interesting non-teacher can be at least very memorable | and perhaps life-changing. | theGnuMe wrote: | Maybe? YC seems to have an inconsistent view on things that | are research vs product. But it's probably more nuanced than | that. Search was a market though at that time. If you pitched | an AI LLM before chat-gpt what would the odds have been? | cmrdporcupine wrote: | I dunno, I toyed with the starting phase of YC application | a couple years ago, and started working my way through what | was involved in their application process and reading their | materials, even watching some YouTube content, etc. | | I didn't really see how a business that was starting from a | more R&D angle would make it through. | | And a lot of it seemed _really_ pitched to the bizdev | "hustler" founder personality, not to engineers/nerds. | paulpauper wrote: | _They 're not actually interested in the nerdy stuff, just in | the "disruption" stuff._ | | I disagree. The AI stuff seems pretty nerdy. Same for GitHub | and other levels of abstraction. The disruption talk is just | the branding by the media. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | The foundational $$ that has gone into the research to make | the LLM stuff happen... was _inside_ the existing big | corporations (Google, FB, MS, etc.) and only left there | once it had been proven. | | Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI) for example was employed inside | Google doing that kind of work and only left when he ran up | against the limits of what he felt he could get done there. | But the fundamental R&D had already been done. When I was | at Google I saw some of it from a distance before I ever | heard of OpenAI. | | The VCs have come along at the _tail end_ of the R &D cycle | on this stuff in hopes of cashing in. Same as they did with | crypto and N number of trends before. They're trailing, not | innovating. | | They're primarily interested in successful business models | capitalizing on existing technology, not the actual | development of new technology. Unless one has distorted the | meaning of "technology" significantly. | downWidOutaFite wrote: | The real trick that made Google possible, and the following | web 2.0 era startups, was that linux and commodity hardware | was all that was needed at the time so engineers could strike | out on their own. Comparing it to the current ML era where | you need many millions of dollars of data and many millions | of dollars of hardware to compete, the guys that wrote the | transformers paper are stuck in bigcorp and aren't going to | be the next Larry and Sergey. OpenAI might be one of the few | new big companies but it's run by a VC/CEO, not the engineers | that figured the stuff out, and he had to sell half the | company to Microsoft anyway. | nsguy wrote: | These things always happen at intersections. There are lots | of smart people with ideas. The magic happens at the | intersection of ideas, time (what technology is available) | and luck. Apple Newton was too early. Apple iPhone was just | right. Doom 3D was just at the right time when commodity | hardware could do what the amazing software needed it to | do. | downWidOutaFite wrote: | The point I was trying to make is what are the situation | where an independent small startup can make it big. Your | examples are instructive, engineers were able to make id | Software big because you didn't need a lot of hardware to | invent 3D shooters, but Jobs gets the credit for the | iPhone because the engineers needed hundreds of millions | of dollars in capital to pull it off. | | pg is giving advice based on him getting rich from that | period of time where the small startup could make it big. | But those conditions are probably rare going forward. | fragmede wrote: | maybe. right now, if a startup has a new ML training | technique or whatever, for a specific niche, cloud and VC | capital will let them make a model that does way better | for their niche than repackaging well funded models from | OpenAI. | pixl97 wrote: | >is what are the situation where an independent small | startup can make it big. | | Yes, there are also all kinds of completely unrelated to | your idea things that can succeed or kill your business. | | Happen to launch your idea the day before a global | economic collapse, well, better be exceptionally lucky. | | Happen to launch when interest rates drop though the | floor and banks are handing out money to anyone. You're | going to have a harder time failing. | ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: | Wild to think that potentially the most innovative company | of the last five years, and next five, was run/founded by a | VC. It goes against all of the VC hate | JohnFen wrote: | I think there's a connection here to the old adage that | "small companies make it possible, big companies make it | inexpensive". | | The purpose of VC can be viewed as trying to take a company | from nonexistent to big while skipping the small stage, but | small is where the action really is. | pixl97 wrote: | Yep, unless some new thing is acquired in a buyout, or if | an entire group is spun off with almost no oversight, large | companies are horrifically bad at creating new things. It's | nearly impossible for them to do it in the case where the | new product would affect existing revenue streams. | paulpauper wrote: | Google in 1999 had the the fortuitous alignment of every | possible factor: brains, Stanford connections, timing, | extremely scalable and lucrative business model, funding, etc. | fuzzfactor wrote: | Even more fortuitous was having no ads or anything else that | the small number of early Googlers would have considered evil | in any way. | Karrot_Kream wrote: | Huh? Did we ask forget about the era of pop-up ads on the | Internet? | fuzzfactor wrote: | That's what I mean, when Google became generally | available they had none of that on their site. | | For quite a while at least before they joined the crowd. | fuzzfactor wrote: | >go to grad school to learn how to find scientific-discovery- | based startup ideas these days? | | Nope, ended up going to scientific-discovery-based-startup- | ideas-R-us instead, by client demand. | bbor wrote: | He should! As I hope to convince people of next month, there's | a wealth of classical AI knowledge that's just begging to be | applied to modern systems. That's not to speak of the wizardry | happening in neuroscience and drug discovery right now... | | Isn't "you shouldn't focus on science to start a good tech | company" a good indicator that our conception of "tech" company | is completely broken? That we're really talking about ways to | milk money from gambling billionaires, not change the world | with successful products? | HMH wrote: | > You need three things. You need to be good at some kind of | technology, you need an idea for what you're going to build, and | you need cofounders to start the company with. | | So no word about funding from the CIA and NSA. If you want to | build something that changes the world in such a profound way as | Google did, you can not possibly expect the powerful not having a | word with you. I am inclined to believe that these days you will | need influential "friends" with aligned interests at some point. | ak_111 wrote: | Am surprised PG gave this talk at a UK school without mentioning | an important assumption that they will need to migrate to the US | in his opening paragraph. | | All the examples he mentioned Google, himself and the Irish | Stripe founders had to do the same for their startups. | | Sadly in the UK all the current unicorn "startups" are a bit | iffy: XTX (high frequency hedgefund), betfair (betting company), | tripledot studios (Zynga like company). | | Unfortunately mega success in startups doing soemthing innovative | is non-existent in Europe and UK in particular. Mistral stands | out to how exceptional it is to the rule, and the closest other | one I can think of is BioNtech. | | Sadly the highest expected route to fortune in the UK remains | quant trading in finance. Including starting your own hedge fund. | zeroxfe wrote: | > Am surprised PG gave this talk at a UK school without | mentioning an important assumption that they will need to | migrate to the US in his opening paragraph. | | Seems kinda reasonable for a motivational speech not to mention | it (even assuming it's entirely true.) | ak_111 wrote: | No I think it was so obvious to him that he forgot to mention | it, or he doesn't think it should be a problem for many young | people to move to the US. | | It would be dishonest if he intentionally left it out since | for some (arguably a minority of _young_ people) it is a deal | breaker. | munificent wrote: | You say all this like it's a bad thing, but maybe it's | ultimately better for a society if there isn't a financial | lottery that enables a small number of people to become | insanely wealthy and powerful. | | I'd rather a government that enables a thousand mid-sized | companies with moderately well-paid executives and employees | than one that enables a single monopolistic mega-corporation | with billionaires whose power rivals states and whose | incentives are not aligned with most of the world. | palata wrote: | This. It's the US system that is broken, not the European | ones. | ak_111 wrote: | Of course it is a monumentally bad thing for the UK economy | it doesn't have any big tech companies! I actually don't | understand your point at all. | | To say nothing of the lost revenue from tech export do you | think it is better for the UK that it depends on AWS cloud | for running the majority of its public services, Apple for | almost 70% of the phones used by it's citizens, Google for | the other 30%? | | Which midsize company is going to be able to compete with AWS | on offering cloud computing services, Apple on developing | smart phones or Nvidia on GPUs? | | Actually the UK has the worst of both worlds: US big tech | opens office here leading to well-paid executives and | engineer, while all revenue (and none of the taxes) from | selling the products these engineers develop goes to the US. | munificent wrote: | Is there truly nothing you can imagine that might be more | important than maximizing revenue? | mike_hearn wrote: | Yes, and of course you cannot just move to the USA especially | if you're a young guy in the UK. I know, I faced the same | issue. 2006, recruited by Google before I'd even graduated. I | wanted to go to California but... they hit the H1B cap that | year and I wasn't important enough to get one. So I ended up in | Switzerland. | | If Google in 2006 wasn't powerful enough to get someone as | culturally unthreatening as a Brit into the USA, it cannot be | easier to do so as a startup founder. | | That said I did know someone later who was able to make it in | and become a startup CTO there (a German guy). Hilariously he | did it by making a viral YouTube video. And by "make" I mean he | hired an agency to make it. This was sufficient to get him in | on an artist visa, which was easier than getting in on an H1B. | suyash wrote: | Not anymore, London is the biggest startup hub in Europe and | top AI companies like Google Deep Mind and Stability AI were | founded and HQ is based in London. These days all you need is | talent and funding, once you have that you can do it from | anywhere. | bearjaws wrote: | Paul Graham sounds like a boomer telling their kids to go apply | in person or go door to door for jobs. Especially talking about | Software startups, which will increasingly have a lower and lower | barrier to entry (aka lower profitability) | | Theres simply no way to get away with what Google, Facebook or | Uber did today. You will not sneak your software into enterprise | customers, you will not be able to skirt regulations. | | Hell the big money pot of getting acquired may be dead too, e.g. | Figma. | | For most startups, you will fail. For the top 1% of companies you | can hope to at best make a comfortable living at a multi-million | dollar valuation. Only the .0001% will become a Google. | gist wrote: | Entirely and obviously self serving in that not only is this | probably the only 'business' world that Paul has been exposed to | (he started a tech company) but Paul also benefits (as do VC's | and angel investors) from the entire eco system of young people | taking chances with a small chance of success. The investor (and | YC) wins with lots of people trying regardless of how many fail. | | And note that the chances of founders and companies that have | passed and been anointed with money is below (how much? I don't | know) companies that haven't even made it to that round (to be | potentially winnowed out). And have spent time and perhaps family | money. | | Will point out that I benefit from all of this (let's call it | 'pick axe' for short) but I would or could never with a straight | face and conscience write or give the same advice to kids in high | school. Shoot for the moon? Risky. Sure if you have family money | to fall back on possibly take the chance. | | Especially and in particular 'how to start google' (meaning | something with huge potential). | | Oh yeah back in olden times I started a company right out of | college and did pretty well and sold it (with ZERO investor | money). | | Lastly the joke that existed back and forever was someone saying | 'find a good lawyer' as if doing so is a matter of knowing you | had to do it not the specifics of how to do it. | jameshart wrote: | The blindness to privilege that's tied up in the part about why | you 'need' to go to a good (by which he means highly selective) | school... | | > if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the | best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders | are... | | > The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where | the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty | much the same as the list of the most selective universities. | | Is it at all possible that the people who are able to take a | gamble on founding a startup rather than getting a job are also | disproportionately drawn from the wealthy class that is also able | to afford the privileges necessary to get their kids over the | admissions humps needed to get into highly selective schools? | | Because in spite of the suggestion that getting into these | schools is a matter of 'doing well in your classes', Graham knows | and acknowledges in his footnote that he knows full well that's | actually not what these schools are selecting for anyway: | | > US admissions departments make applicants jump through a lot of | arbitrary hoops that have little to do with their intellectual | ability. But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a | test of mere determination and resourcefulness. | | 'Mere determination and resourcefulness'? Or the background, | finances and support and time necessary to make the grade in | terms of non academic achievements, volunteer work, experience, | extracurriculars, etc? | | But even if you get in through academics plus determination and | resourcefulness... will you also have the resources to take a | risk on turning a project into a startup? | | This is cargo cultism. Yes, successful founders are | disproportionately drawn from high end selective schools, because | they are disproportionately drawn from the community of people | who come from a background of privilege, and are academically | bright. Such people naturally tend to end up at Stanford or MIT | or wherever. | | But _getting in to Stanford or MIT_ doesn't magically make you | into a member of that privileged class. | drcongo wrote: | I find most of his posts over the last few years to be an | exercise in ignoring privilege. It's a very long time since I | read one that felt grounded. | lupire wrote: | I think you changed more than he did. | 93po wrote: | The overwhelming influential factor of people who start | successful businesses is that they have a tremendous amount of | resources relative to the average person. I would guess that | easily over half of all successful medium to large size | businesses started with someone who had a big leg-up. | lupire wrote: | That's what he said. "Resourcefulness". Money is a resource | as much as brainpower or grit or creativity. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Yep | | > 'Mere determination and resourcefulness' | | ... is actually really a test of _class position_. Your | motivation to pursue and pass those artificial goalposts is in | most cases going to be directly co-related to the values and | expectations that the people who surround you have. Mommy and | daddy and their friends at the country club expect it. | | CS education is good all over the place, not just Stanford or | MIT. And CS education pulled out of books and through self- | reading is also great. But knowing that said person went to | Stanford is a signifier to the VCs that said person is | acculturated into the class and culture of capitalist | administration. | | More mind boggling is seeing them _admitting_ to the "cargo | cultism" (which I'd just call "class bias") instead of the | usual ideological cover of entrepreneurialism and the "American | dream." | berkes wrote: | In "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America" Barbara | Ehrenreich poses that universities are (in my words) merely a | fictional moat, "invented" by the new class that became rich | through education and work, rather then before through | ownership and capital. | | "Education" nor "work" can be passed through generations. If I | am a very gifted lawyer, this is not something I can pass on to | my daughters or suns (but a castle or land can be). Yet you can | employ your network and power to get your daughter or suns into | "highly selective" universities. Where, once they are in, being | smart (e.g being a gifted lawyer) matters less than "being in". | | So, indeed, "cargo cultism" and privilege. | | And, I would add, a problem and cause of why the startup world | is so shortsighted, monoculture (non-diverse) and dogpiling on | similar problems, yet ignoring others entirely. (disclaimer: I | too, however, am the typical priviliged bearded white male that | "does computers" since late eighties though) | jdthedisciple wrote: | I like your poetic metaphor of sons as bright stars ... | dmurray wrote: | > But getting in to Stanford or MIT doesn't magically make you | into a member of that privileged class. | | The essay (intentionally, no doubt) doesn't pick a side in this | fight. | | It's very clear on why you should go to the best university: | not because it will make you the best founder, but to meet the | best co-founders. | | > And if you want to start a startup you should try to get into | the best university you can, because that's where the best | cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are. When | Larry and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all | the smartest people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a | real advantage for them. | | It doesn't matter whether elite universities are meritocratic | or terribly unfair: either way, they've been the source of very | many successful companies over the last 30 years, and Paul | Graham is betting on that continuing to be the case. (Unlike | Peter Thiel, for example, who is telling kids to drop out). | jameshart wrote: | Yes, I know PG isn't picking a side in that 'fight'. He's | pretending it doesn't exist. He's suggesting that _anyone_ | with the resourcefulness of a founder, who has access to that | college network, could have an equal opportunity to find the | magic combination of cofounders and ideas to make a Google. | | My point is that his empirical evidence and continued | willingness to bet on startups that _emerge_ from that path | does not justify his claim that that path is the open for | everyone to take. | | If you are among the stratum from whom startup founders and | cofounders will most likely be drawn, then sure, 100%, these | schools are a networking opportunity which will help you on | that path. Great place to meet cofounders. | | If you aren't, going to these schools will not make you | magically able to take the financial risks needed to become a | founder; they might make you among the smartest people some | founders know, and get you a gig working for one. | lupire wrote: | Not unlike Peter Thiel. | | Gates, Jobs, Dell, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg are all dropouts. | dasil003 wrote: | You're right that PG ignores the privilege and selection bias | at play in all stages on the funnel to Google-scale success. | I'm okay with that though, because calling out all the | statistical realities does not lead to actionable advice for | young people; it tends to devolve into hand-wringing and | complaining about what "we" as a society should do, but very | few are actually empowered or incentivized to address. And, at | the end of the day, if you're looking for a single place to | find good co-founders, it's hard to argue there is any better | place than Stanford or MIT. I think Paul's advice on balance is | decent, even for folks starting from less privilege. | | That said, I think the biggest risk for ambitious young people | reading this is black and white thinking about getting into the | right school. Successful founders are relentlessly resourceful, | so while it's a decent plan to target a top school, I believe | that how you handle rejection and refocus your ambitions says | more about your long-term entrepreneurial prospects than being | accepted would have. Focus on what you can control, play to | your strengths, and on balance you'll get better outcomes. | ilrwbwrkhv wrote: | Ya that is the main one. If you are born in midwest usa or god | forbid, nigeria, please forget starting google. | mempko wrote: | Exactly, it's not that good technology gets funding, it's that | technology that gets funding gets good. | | People often get this the wrong way around. They believe you | just need a good idea. No, you need social circles that can | invest in your idea. Investment improves things over time. | | Alan Kay talks about this. That the quality of the project is | the quality of the funders. | | You can have good ideas, but if you don't have access to | funders, your good idea will not have the resources to become a | great idea. | hoosieree wrote: | Jumping through arbitrary hoops sounds an awful lot like "push | hard, the door sticks". | ttul wrote: | Most startups end up failing. The ones that don't fail succeed | only a little and end up as lifestyle businesses. Nothing wrong | with that, but it should be acknowledged. | | If you want to play the "next Google" game, get ready to be | disappointed by Lady Luck. | mike_hearn wrote: | There's a lot to like about this speech, but if a 15 year old | heard it and then asked me for more detail I'd have to point out | a few things that were glossed over: | | 1. 15-25 year olds who do programming passion projects are often | attracted to video games. Video game companies are not "startups" | in the sense pg means here. You will not get rich by indulging a | passion for the entertainment industry. | | 2. You do in fact need capital to do a startup, and there is a | lot more to getting that than just having cofounders and | something you're interested in. | | 3. "What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is | something your friends actually want." This isn't really true, is | it. I thought there is another pg/ycombinator essay somewhere | that warns people away from specific types of startup pitches, | and one of them is something like "an app that tells you about | events in your local community". Supposedly this is one of those | things that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to work on, | but which never turns into a successful startup. | | There are actually a lot of things that your friends might want | which are not startup material anywhere except Sand Hill Road, | mostly because there are lots of things people want but won't pay | for. A sad example of this is developer tools. If you take pg's | advice literally and learn programming, hang out with other | people who do that and then do projects with them, soon you will | see lots of sticky doors that look like missing bits of | infrastructure. Unfortunately startups that do dev tooling aren't | a good way to get rich. Developers generally don't or can't buy | things, so you have to sell to their CTOs and thus all the money | accumulates in companies like Amazon or Microsoft. Example of | what happens if you try, even with great PMF: Docker. | | Most kids with ideas in the world don't have the contacts or work | visas to raise money from US VC firms. They need a project that | people will pay money for immediately. Unfortunately, one of the | side effects of the size of the US VC ecosystem is that if | someone comes up with a good idea that takes off and they try to | grow like a normal company, and they _aren 't_ taking VC money, | then they will be immediately outcompeted by someone who does, | simply because whoever does have that access will engage in | market dumping until there's nobody else left except other VC | funded startups. One of the US funded companies will end up | taking the entire market even if they are burning money with no | hope of ever balancing the books, but that's OK because one of | the VC's other investments can always be persuaded to give a | clean exit. | | Example: DailyMotion (European) vs YouTube (US). At the time | YouTube was bought they didn't have a hope in hell of ever being | a standalone business and didn't even care to try, but they were | down the road from Google and were scaring Larry/Sergey/Eric with | their success. Buying a company if you can just jump in your car | to go visit them is easy, if you need to constantly do trans- | Atlantic flights, not so easy. It doesn't make sense to bet on | the "grow like crazy and wait for an exit" strategy elsewhere. | WhatsApp is another example of an MTV based company that had no | strategy beyond grow-and-exit. I actually made a WhatsApp-like | app a few years before the smartphone revolution hit, and my | friends thought it was awesome, but I had no illusions that it | could ever be a business. And indeed none of these messenger apps | ever have been. In the world of "startups" (vs small businesses), | you don't necessarily need to care. | jimkoen wrote: | Thank you. This is a much more informed post than the article. | | There is imo so much wrong with PG's post, but as an European | the whole proximity to tech thing feels very real. I remember | seeing a talk by Craig Frederhigi where he also made fun of the | fact that at least 50% of his success came from just being | present in Silicon Valley / Cupertino at the right time. | gordon_freeman wrote: | > "But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with | a job, including a boss telling you what to do." | | Isn't this a bit misleading and can only be true for companies | that don't take VC money or never go public (ex: Basecamp/37 | Signals)? For VC funded or public companies, ultimately you'd | have to be responsible to answer to your shareholders. | Kwpolska wrote: | Exactly: instead of a boss, you get venture capitalists, plus | you probably don't have that pesky work-life balance either. | rvnx wrote: | Not a problem. You don't need work-life balance when you are | living in a garage in San Francisco eating ramen on debt that | you got from vulture capital. | quatrefoil wrote: | Right, and from all my friends who did take VC money: it's an | incredibly demanding period of your life, a large proportion of | which isn't about delivering on your vision. You're gonna learn | a lot about office space leases, accounting, fundraising, | customer pitches, etc. You're gonna have impatient VCs on your | board, with the power to fire you, breathing down your neck. | You won't be relaxing much and won't be spending that much time | with family and non-work friends. | | It's a valuable experience with a lot of potential upside in | the long haul - but let's not pretend that it's less taxing | than a cozy 9-to-5 tech job where your boss might ask you to | update your OKRs once in a while. | bootsmann wrote: | Usually by the time VCs have the power to fire you, you have | so many different investors that they cannot really do it | without some massively difficult political manouvering, at | least in software. | hobobaggins wrote: | Someone better tell that to Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Sean | Parker, and Jack Dorsey. | lupire wrote: | Tell me more about poor billionaires who suffered the | cruel fate of losing their jobs. | | Every one of those people was incredibly successful | before and after getting fired. | romeros wrote: | Yes, but the VCs trust you to a large extent and they can't | delve into the nitty-gritty of daily operations. If they do | they will develop a bad reputation. | | Your boss's job is to oversee the minutiae of your day-to-day | activities. Like in most workplaces, you can't choose to just | chill for a few days, work only at night, or choose to avoid | meetings for a few days, etc. | | You will have a level autonomy and the ability to change | directions/features, etc. that you cannot have working for | others. | nostrademons wrote: | A good manager is going to trust you to a large extent and | not delve into the nitty-gritty of daily operations. With | typical reporting loads in knowledge industries, they can't - | a manager with 10 reports realistically has 1-2 hours/week to | spend on their projects once all the team overhead is taken | care of. | | My reports absolutely can chill for a couple days, work only | at night, or skip meetings. My job is to get them promoted, | which can't happen until they land projects that demonstrate | business impact. | lupire wrote: | But what a report can't do is change the direction of a | company or org leadership that is making bad decisions that | lead to impossible demands governed by politics as ultra | short-termism. Having the freedom to fail any way I want, | but not be empowered to succeed, is a uniquely "employee" | problem. | nostrademons wrote: | Sure, but there are many ways that VCs can force | companies into incentive structures that put them in a | failing position. If you include stupid executives and | poor long-term decisions in the corporate model, you also | have to include stupid VCs or board members and poor | long-term decisions in the startup model. | immibis wrote: | That's true, and since Paul Graham's in the role of VC | shareholder or something closely related, he would prefer you | didn't realize that. | oblio wrote: | Are you telling me that this blog entry is... marketing?!? | Oh, my! | | :-p | paulpauper wrote: | _> "But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come | with a job, including a boss telling you what to do."_ | | Yeah but that boss is paying you mid 6 figs or even 7, plus | comp and other stuff, then maybe it's not so bad. Why else are | these tech companies inundated with so many job applications if | having a boss is supposed to be so bad. I think this guy is | still stuck in a '90s or early 2000s 'Dilbert' mindset when | salaries were way worse and bosses had more leverage and | employees were closer to being like slaves. A lot has changed. | . | oblio wrote: | I agree with you overall but the impression I'm getting is | that comp is taking a nose dive for premium jobs. Probably | 10% of those pay what they used to, 3-4 years ago and the | competition is 100x worse, and it was bad before. | lupire wrote: | Getting mid 6 to 7 figures as a employee is almost exactly as | hard as founding a successful startup. | | The vast majority of employees at the largest, most | successful companies, do not earn that much. | antisthenes wrote: | This reads like it was written by an LLM trained on self-help | books. | | Is this the guy that a lot of HNers look up to? | pclmulqdq wrote: | Yes, sadly. If you read between the lines and take his advice | more as "understanding the psychology of VCs" rather than as | actual advice, his essays are very useful. He has long passed | the phases of a manager's life where he has to be right - he is | surrounded by yes men who tell him that he is right no matter | what. | | Matt Levine, as usual, has a great take on the phases of life | of a partner/founder of a hedge fund (which a VC fund basically | is), and PG is deep in phase 3: | https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-07/bridge... | | I will say that unlike GPT-4 he is an objectively good writer | (ie has very good style) most of the time, so the essays tend | to be somewhat entertaining to read. | ngd wrote: | I'm generally interested if people here think that to a 14-15 | year old, do those companies sound tremendously cool and does the | premise of their value stir exciting thoughts and motivations? My | slightly younger kids don't really what Google, Apple or | Facebook/Meta means. If I explained this essay to them, I'd at | least say "the iPad", "YouTube", "the Oculus" to make it more | relatable. | | To my mind, to immediately relate to kids in the UK, I would need | to say TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Oculus, iPhone, iPad, and | such, and not the company name. | keiferski wrote: | "Learn to code and surround yourself with smart people" is good | advice, but it's kind of funny that Google was used as the | example of peak success for a group of 15 year olds. I'm fairly | willing to bet that most of them think of Google as boring and | old, and not exciting or innovative. How to start TikTok or | Minecraft would have probably been a more inspiring example. | Mr-Frog wrote: | The story of Minecraft was an awesome inspiration for my peers | and me, much more relatable than Google or any SV startup. | Markus Persson did not come from a family of academics or | engineers; he was just a poor blue-collar kid who liked | videogames and coding (unfortunately his political views have | stained his image). | lokimedes wrote: | I literally remember following his progress as he posted on | Reddit. I imagine following Linus Torvald's posts on Usenet | must bring similar memories to the slightly more matured | people around here. | | With fully 2 datapoints, I conjecture that this odd | Scandinavian combination of being highly advanced nations yet | isolated from the action in and around Silicon Valley | increases the probability of public social Communication, as | we (Scandis) are used to not having peers physically around | us. The chi^2 is good with this one. | LarsDu88 wrote: | Folks underestimate how incredibly skilled Notch was and is. | Unfortunately ludum dare has taken down its historical compo | pages, but I remember that he had several games built from | scratch in 24 hours which were mind boggling impressive. | | One had a full 3d rendering engine implemented in Dartlang | written in 48 hours. Another was a minecraft top down rpg | clone. | | Dude is the Bobby Fischer of tech | bearjaws wrote: | He also wrote Wurm Online with Rolf Jansson, all in Java | OpenGL. Was a bit of a mess of a game but it still has an | engaged community. | evilai wrote: | Yes, I completely agree, I always fondly remember his game | "drowning in problems"[1] because of the notable creativity | behind it. Despite barely having an interface, it managed to | entertain me until the end. | | [1]http://game.notch.net/drowning/ | Pannoniae wrote: | Yup.... if you look at Minecraft Classic or one of the | similar early versions' code..... it's quite advanced. It's | conceptually fairly simple but the game just has so many | small nice things which are taken for granted but are not | trivial to implement. | | It's no surprise that almost all of the iconic things about | Minecraft was created in the first few years by Notch.... | everything else afterwards is just polishing it and adding | fluff. | rightbyte wrote: | Notch was a great hacker, but not a good coder. His code is | hacks upon hack all the way down. | dpflan wrote: | I am curious how this ethos of the 3 things you need and | playfulness/not-intended-to-be-a-startup startups project is in | enacted per batch. Like YC's now numerous sales | operations/software companies in the past batches: 19-22 years | are making email-based-crms for their friends? (I guess a batch | and other batches are "friends" so goalposts shift and magically | appear). The growth in sales saas companies out of YC seems less | of fun project and more of this is a business opportunity for the | enterprise. Probably for other spaces as well. Is there | dissonance between the tenets of this essay and actually YC | companies of late? Does someone have better analysis, would be | much appreciated? | | """ What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is | something your friends actually want. """ | dpflan wrote: | Here is a launch front-page today: Okapi (YC W24) -- A new, | flexible CRM with good UX | | Nothing about friends, nothing about fun projects. Mainly just | looking at Salesforce, knowing its the DB for business-side of | the house, and that the UI/X of SFDC is not good, so here is a | better UX (much appreciated). | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39755927 | lupire wrote: | As a VC (purchaser of startup) pg's main interest is in driving | up supply of premoney startups in order to drive down price. | gumby wrote: | > If you look at the lists of the richest people that | occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did | it by starting their own companies. | | Actaally if you look at those lists, the largest number made it | by choosing their parents correctly. | petesergeant wrote: | Certainly a few, but a quick scan of lists makes it look more | like 25% inherited in the top 20 or so | namdnay wrote: | I think it depends where you set the limit between "self | made" and "inherited". I don't think it's black or white | | Would Gates have made it if Mum wasn't on the board of IBM? | Would Bezos have made it without 200k from mum&dad ? | importantbrian wrote: | The real problem with those lists is that they only include | people whose wealth is known and can be reasonably valued | based on public sources. It's often not easy to trace the | net worth of old-money families. It also means you won't | find people from countries with very low transparency or | dictators on the list. For example, you won't find Putin or | any of the Saudi royals on the Forbes list even though they | are among the wealthiest people in the world. Perhaps even | competing for #1 depending on what estimate of their wealth | you find to be the most reliable. | | It's impossible to draw any firm conclusions from those | lists because they aren't representative samples of wealthy | people. They're a sample of wealthy people with public | assets, and of course that's going to skew heavily towards | people who founded large publically traded companies who | live in countries with high degrees of financial | transparency. | secstate wrote: | Which makes one feel even shittier when you realize that | even with that skewing, the list STILL contains a lot of | inherited-wealth or comfortable-highly-educated-wealth | people. | Aunche wrote: | > Would Bezos have made it without 200k from mum&dad ? | | Bezos was already the youngest Senior Vice President at DE | Shaw before he started Amazon, so he wouldn't have any | problem finding other investors. His mom had Bezos as a | teenager, and his adoptive dad was a young Cuban refugee. | His grandfather was rich though. | YetAnotherNick wrote: | I would consider someone who has made >1000x what they were | given as self made without any doubt. Yes $200k or being in | IBM's board or being US citizen or being able to afford | Stanford is not a small thing for many, but saying that | those were the biggest determining factor in making them | richest is just being cynic on their progress. | martinohansen wrote: | > [...] you need to do well in your classes to get into a | good university. | | Isn't this also mostly inherited: do most get into the good | universities because of their grades or their connections? | Can most get good grades without an "inherited" support | system? | sarimkx wrote: | Inherited wealth did see an increase in 2023 in the UBS | Wealth Report. | | https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page- | ndp/en-2023... | | https://fortune.com/europe/2023/11/30/billionaire-heirs- | over... | paulpauper wrote: | Except for Waltons or the occasional Saudi, there is much | more tech wealth compared to inherited wealth. | LarsDu88 wrote: | Parents who started companies. Lookin' at you Walton kids! | wilshiredetroit wrote: | "choosing their parents correctly" - yes.. having great parents | doing their best is probably one of the main indicators of | success. (mileage definitely varies) A child can learn a lot | from their parents.. things like prudence, patience, work | ethic.. a lot of folks think its about "inheritance". imho | gist wrote: | > If you look at the lists of the richest people that | occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did | it by starting their own companies. | | And actually it's a stupid point to begin with; making a point | by choosing the absolute top percentage as if there is nothing | other than 'really' rich (forget whether that is even a good | thing I'd argue it's not a plus to have that much money and | notoriety). There is of course 'lots of money' or | 'comfortable'. | | Irony also that Paul is probably not on that list but even if | he was it's not because he 'built a google' but rather he | decided to be an investor and incubator spreading bets over | many potential winners. | | Also ironic that Paul had decided rather than making more money | he'd rather spend time with his family. | paulpauper wrote: | I am sure he has at least a billion. That is really rich | feedforward wrote: | Of course you're correct, but forget about that - two thirds | of the team that started Viaweb and then Y-Combinator | crashed, according to then contemporary reports, 10% of the | machines on the Internet for the fun of vandalism or a prank | or whatever. The one who was charged did no jail time - | Graham wasn't even charged. | | He then goes on to exploit young techies to put himself in a | very prime position in the relations of production. Nowadays | he tweets minimally veiled racist tweets about the supposed | biological superiority of his brain compared to the rest of | us, especially other races. Talk about privilege. | user_7832 wrote: | > Nowadays he tweets minimally veiled racist tweets about | the supposed biological superiority of his brain compared | to the rest of us, especially other races. | | I'm curious, what are you referring to? | hintymad wrote: | I guess luck plays a big role in one's success. That said, pg's | points still hold, as he is telling us how to maximize our | chance of success despite of what we are born with. | paulpauper wrote: | If the goal is to maximize your chances it would not be to | start a company. It would be get a degree from decent school | + white collar work for 10-20 years (whilst paying off | student loans) + diligently investing in index funds and home | ownership. That is how guys are getting rich on Reddit 'FIRE' | subs at 30-40-years old, not start-ups. | bdangubic wrote: | That can get you rich - not wealthy | paulpauper wrote: | depends on definition of wealthy | paulpauper wrote: | It's n=1 and huge survivorship bias. There is not that much | useful or applicable in this essay. Yeah starting a company is | one way to get rich, but the odds are not that good and start- | up costs are higher than ever. Nothing is getting cheaper, | whether it's advertising, labor, or developing the product. | | The $ offered by YC wouldn't even cover a typical salary for a | single coder or an adverting budget, although being chosen by | YC does help to some degree in the latter though. Same for | Thiel Fellowship: Not much $ either. You need a lot more than | being offered by these incubators, which is a pittance. Back in | the '90s it was easier to get decent funding, plus costs were | way lower even adjusted for inflation. Now it's huge | competition for bread crumbs, plus huge expenses. | | On Reddit investing and 'FIRE' subs, way more young and middle- | aged people getting rich (as in 7-8 figures) with lucrative | white collar jobs or being early in a start-up, plus investing | in stock market and real estate, than creating actual | companies. | | _You can do well in computer science classes without ever | really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a | degree in computer science from a top university and still not | be any good at programming. That 's why tech companies all make | you take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of | where you went to university or how well you did there. They | know grades and exam results prove nothing._ | | Yeah, theoretical computer science is not the same as coding. | The guys who did theoretical AI work seem to do okay though. | oli5679 wrote: | https://www.forbes.com/consent/ketch/?toURL=https://www.forb... | | If I look here, top 20 are 17 founders and 3 heirs (2 Waltons - | Walmart, and one Bettencourt - L'Oreal) | feedforward wrote: | So Musk whose father owned diamond mines is not an heir. | | Arnault whose father owned Ferret-Savinel is not an heir. | | Gates father was a prominent lawyer, his mother was an | heiress who was on a board with the chairman of IBM. | | Even looking at those who are not classified as heirs - | Zuckerberg's high school currently costs over $50,000 a year. | Buffett's father was a congressman and his family owned | grocery stores. Not billionaires, but people with more wealth | and connections then even our minority of upper middle class | people. | d--b wrote: | Inspirational talk for 14 year old to engage into extremely risky | ventures for the sake of becoming the richest person in the | world. | | How irresponsible. | petesergeant wrote: | The actual advice given is "learn to program and then pursue | projects that interest you", which is great advice for a 14 | year old. | d--b wrote: | Yeah right that's definitely what 14 year olds will take away | from this. | n0us wrote: | In the YC Youtube videos it's amusing that they (Jason and the | other guy) almost always reference Google and Facebook despite | the fact that neither of those companies were YC companies and | none of the YC companies out of 4000+ funded (not even Stripe) | come close to the scale or valuation of either Google or | Facebook. | | https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/valuation | paulpauper wrote: | Google and Facebook had 2 decades. Even the most successful of | YC companies had a little over a decade. Not a valid | comparison. And $100+ billion for Coinbase, Stripe, Dropbox is | still huge. | asfasfo wrote: | While thats true they did fund Airbnb which is 100B. So while | they haven't funded anyone that big yet, they have come 1/10 of | the way. | mattlondon wrote: | I dislike this sort of advice for teenagers. You may as well tell | them to be rock stars or professional sports people. | | Tell the kids to study, don't sell them an unobtainable dream | smokel wrote: | The amount of survivorship bias ignored in the article is | appalling. Why? | duderific wrote: | Because PG is a survivor, and he's biased. | hbn wrote: | It's like all the successful rappers who go on about how "I | wanted to be a rapper when I was a teenager, and my guidance | counsellor told me it's not realistic, and that I should | settle down with a safe, normal job. Now look where I am!" | | Your guidance counsellor told hundreds of kids the same | thing, and it was good advice for basically all of them. For | every guy who made it rich with some crazy risky stock trade, | there's hundreds of guys who lost everything. For every | business that was about to go under but managed to pull | through, there's hundreds that were in the same position and | failed. The attitude of following in the footsteps of the | lucky few just seems like it's teaching kids to double down | on failure. | | Everyone can spot the issue when someone is wasting their | money in a casino, thinking they're one more pull on the slot | machine away from becoming rich. But for some reason it's | encouraged when it's reframed as "following your dreams." | echelon wrote: | We're all already dead in geologic time. Why not shoot for | the stars? | | There's a big difference between a casino and actively | throwing yourself at problem gradients, learning, adapting. | smokel wrote: | By the same nihilistic reasoning, why not aim for the | path of least resistance? | | (I would not even be surprised if some of the survivors | did precisely that -- copy behavior of their successful | parents, or try to prove their worth in terms of money, | lacking other means to receive confirmation.) | swader999 wrote: | Shooting for the google Star and falling short into a mid | programming career is a lot better than missing the NBA | with not much more than busted knees to show for it. | duderific wrote: | To be fair, he does tell them to study. But only because you | have to get into a good college to find other people to found | startups with. | arbuge wrote: | Good enough reason I think. Actually it might provide some | further motivation for them to do so if they were considering | not doing it previously. | paulpauper wrote: | That is just generic advice. Who would advice against | studying. I think this essay is intended to be more | inspirational than practical, which is fine. | mocamoca wrote: | The core advice is to _produce_ instead of _consume_. And the | second one is to study. | | However, packaging it under a "being a mere employee is lame" | mantra... Is lame! | | But I'm curious. Why do you think that doing something which is | maybe not study related is a bad idea? | | ("Maybe not" because ie. john Mayer is both a rockstar and a | Berkelee grad) | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | Totally insane. | | 99% or more of the people who enable Google to do what Google | does are employees of Google. Same with every other company. The | odds of being the founder of a successful company are probably | worse than being a professional sportsball player (if only | because they turn over more frequently). | | Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they | will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder | rather than an employee? | | Does anything good come from encouraging people to ignore the | actual situation that the overwhelming majority of the population | finds itself in, and instead focusing on some essentially | impossible pipe dream? | | Obviously, every successful company _does_ have founders. But so | does every unsuccessful company. And what actually powers every | successful company are its employees, not its founders. | | The absolute worst of SV thinking, personified. | ornornor wrote: | If you're a prominent VC that's exactly what you want to happen | though, it will let you spread your bets even more. | | But like you said, this is peak SV. Luckily there is a whole | world outside of SV where the rest of us operate :) | volkk wrote: | > Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that | they will manage to sail through life as a successful business | founder rather than an employee? | | I would imagine dreaming big is pretty good for children. | | A big reason for why I'm optimistic in life is because I have | hope for achieving something. I truly can't imagine a life | where my father/mother would only hammer in the fact that I am | just an average joe and should stick to climbing the corporate | ladder. Such an uninspiring take, this one. Depressing. | jimkoen wrote: | > I would imagine dreaming big is pretty good for children. | | I would rather have my children dream of becoming astronauts | than becoming the next Steve Jobs. | volkk wrote: | i'd argue that's entirely up to the child to dream how they | see fit, and up to the parent to support them, build them | up and keep a pulse on what the thing is they're focusing | on | slimsag wrote: | Most kids want to be social media influencers. | | But I do not think most kids today, once adults, will be | very happy with their parents if they just blindly | support them in that dream, neglecting other realistic | career possibilities in blind faith that their kid will | be a star. | | I'm not saying you should tell your kid 'no! you can't | be, I won't let you.' - but like, maybe nudge them in the | right direction, have them meet influencers and hear how | hard the job actually can be, hear how lucky/unfair who | becomes popular and successful can be - then if they are | comfortable with and understand those risks, support them | in any way possible after that. | Apocryphon wrote: | To be fair, becoming a social media influencer isn't all | that conceptually different from becoming a movie star, a | professional athlete, a famous musician, or other type of | celebrity entertainer. Maybe even marginally more | attainable. | | Funny enough is successful people like pg themselves | become essentially social media influencers after they've | achieved things. Fame and following are the next pursuit | after wealth. | volkk wrote: | i was hoping it's obvious that as a parent you should | still keep guardrails around them but i also specifically | mentioned | | > and keep a pulse on what the thing is they're focusing | on | pickledish wrote: | > I truly can't imagine a life where my father/mother would | only hammer in the fact that I am just an average joe and | should stick to climbing the corporate ladder. Such an | uninspiring take, this one. Depressing. | | That is depressing! But also not what the parent comment said | -- you seem to have accidentally taken a much more severe | meaning from that comment (than I did, at least). | | The top-level comment is just talking about being pragmatic. | It's hard to walk the line between having idealistic visions | and knowing that most of them won't pan out, and probably | harder still to teach walking that line to your kids. I think | that's what the comment was talking about -- not advocating | for falling entirely on the latter side of that line -- | which, as you say, would be super depressing! | landryraccoon wrote: | The fundamental disagreement I have with the post is the | idea that you're foolish for doing something because it | probably won't pan out. | | So what? Why be so terrified of failure? I think it's | better if kids learn to be brave, and pick themselves up in | life after they stumble. Living life in utter fear of | failing at anything seems like a terrible way for your | children to start off life. Besides for which few things | are better learning experiences than trying to start your | own company. | | And who knows. They might even succeed beyond their wildest | dreams, as some do. | feedforward wrote: | I find the level-headed realism and appreciation of those of | us who work in OP's post refreshing, and the solipsism and | wishful thinking of your post depressing. | volkk wrote: | what a weird comment. my entire drive to want to be a | business owner is fueled by the desire to be free from | inept senior leadership, bad managers and bloated hierarchy | mixed with building something people love that stems from | my own head. not sure how that translates to solopsism. | also, optimism and desire to think big (even if i fail) is | depressing to you? you should probably seek therapy, dude | amelius wrote: | If everybody became an entrepreneur then we wouldn't have | scientists working on our biggest technological problems. | amelius wrote: | (for most research you need a lot of money and people, so | out of reach of startups) | surgical_fire wrote: | Eh, maybe it is good to learn that you're not destined to | anything grand early on. It gives you resilience, and builds | character. Teaches you to value the small things in life. | | It can be a lot more depressing to learn you are a loser well | into your adulthood, after a long time of thinking very | highly of yourself. | mdgrech23 wrote: | That is such a good point. It distracts us from thinking about | what our industry really needs right now which is unionization | and regulation. The risk of off shore outsourcing and AI and | imminent. These kind of posts provide false promises of riches. | | I also want to point out it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone | that most founders come from well off backgrounds. Their | parents can essentially foot the bills while they're getting | things off the ground combined w/ the natural access to capital | growing up in wealthy circles provides. | csa wrote: | > Does anything good come from encouraging people to ignore the | actual situation that the overwhelming majority of the | population finds itself in, and instead focusing on some | essentially impossible pipe dream? | | If one is trying to recruit future Sergeys Larrys, then it's | prudent to write to a very narrow audience. | | This article addresses that audience perfectly well, imho. | | > The absolute worst of SV thinking, personified. | | ... or maybe the best. | | This is not "general life advice from pg". It's highly targeted | and narrow. | | That's ok. That needs to be ok. It's one of those things that | makes SV unique and uniquely strong, imho. | | Edited to add the following: | | The advice goes from broad (you don't have to get a job, you | can start your own company) to very specific (how to start a | hypergrowth startup), with lots of other (good, imho) advice in | between. | | This will resonate with some folks in the (ostensibly high | school) audience, many of whom may be unfamiliar with startups, | the startup world, and maybe even the tech world in general. It | will fall on deaf ears for most of the rest, because that's not | the life or lifestyle they are looking for. | ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: | The odds are actually pretty reasonable if you go to a school | like MIT or Harvard. I know its hard for outsiders to grasp, | but this is the reality. PG even explicitly calls it out. | zrm wrote: | Startups are high-risk high-reward. That doesn't necessarily | mean they're a bad idea. Expected value can be positive even | when probability is low. Moreover, a lot of young people can | afford to take a chance on something. If you spend a few years | living with your parents and attempting to create something, | and you fail, you still have several decades of your life to go | punch a clock at Big Corp. | | And even if you fail to become Google, you might still make a | living. Some people would gladly make a modest income doing | something they love, with the possibility of making more, | rather than working for someone else making three times as much | but doing something they hate. | | As for what good comes of it, just think about it. Where do new | companies come from? Should we have no more of them? What would | happen then? | khazhoux wrote: | > Startups are high-risk high-reward | | In SV, if you're a founder then it's medium-risk, high- | reward. You'll be propped up by investor funding, have | acquihire>exec as escape route, and in the slim chance of | actual success you'll range from rich to mega-rich. | | For non-founders (employees) it's high-risk medium-reward. An | acquihire will make you a rank-and-file employee, and if the | startup is a true success you might still only bag a moderate | sum, thanks to your tiny sub-percent of equity. Only huge | IPOs bring wealth to non-founders. | jakjak123 wrote: | I think one should argue that starting a business is high | risk, mediocre reward. Most businesses just kinda trudge | along, not leaving with the fairy tale returns of FAANG. | Those are unicorns for a reason. Most of the businesses I've | worked for, some of the founders are still working there and | while they are pretty well off, they either havent sold yet | (no big payday) or they made a meager sale netting them a | very good pay, but probably averaged less than an engineer in | SV on a 10 year horizon. | zrm wrote: | It's expecting the high reward which is high risk. Creating | a small business that can trudge along and pay you a modest | salary is fairly common. | paulpauper wrote: | The idea behind VC is to lessen the individual financial | risk. VC can work but it takes a lot more money than | typically offered. | amelius wrote: | > Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that | they will manage to sail through life as a successful business | founder rather than an employee? | | Yes, VCs flourish by it. | mhb wrote: | It doesn't matter, though. If you follow that advice, you'll | probably be more successful as an employee. | richardw wrote: | If 10000 more kids shoot for the moon they'll build a lot of | skills that the equivalent lifers won't. He's saying things | like: | | - Get good at tech - Build projects that you want - Get good | grades and into the best university you can | | I really hope my kid does that. I tried incredibly hard at | projects I loved. That built me untold skills. Who cares if | they start Google, or fail and get a job or get aquihired, | they'll be fine. They'll know what their boss wants. They won't | just sit and bitch about parking. And at the back of their | minds they might remember that this isn't the only way to live | so maybe they'll be braver than they would otherwise. | clukic wrote: | This is a very strange comment to make on the Y combinator link | sharing site. A site started as a space for a community of | founders and aspiring founders to share their inspiration, | ideas and stories. And you're responding to an article written | by the founder of that community. | Apocryphon wrote: | This community's relationship and attitudes towards its | founders have varied and shifted wildly since its founding. | The content shared on this site have also changed over time. | paulpauper wrote: | _99% or more of the people who enable Google to do what Google | does are employees of Google. Same with every other company. | The odds of being the founder of a successful company are | probably worse than being a professional sportsball player (if | only because they turn over more frequently)._ | | Depends on the size of company. A small company maybe is more | probable than being a top athlete. | landryraccoon wrote: | I can't disagree more. | | I've founded failed startups. I don't regret a single one of | them. I've worked at failed startups and big companies and I | learned more and had more fun at the startups than I ever did | at a big company. | | The point is, if you try to found a company, you don't have to | make a billion dollars to consider it a success. In terms of | personal growth it's easily the equal of any big company job. | akulbe wrote: | One thing I'd add to this, as a Business Management | graduate... college won't teach anywhere near as much about | business as starting a business will. | | You'll get FAR MORE practical and useful knowledge doing it | yourself, and being exposed to other businesses. | | Most of what you'd get from college can be had reading a | handful of well-written books on the subject. | unraveller wrote: | To observers it looks like they missed but observers don't | really want to put themselves in the shoes of him who is about | to take the shot. In that moment the observer can only win by | onlooking, either be reassured that failure is near certain and | all risk folly or the observer can be surprised and glad to see | the consuming world birth another product. | | From a psychological standpoint not aiming high would have been | a bigger miss to the person taking the shot. They clearly chose | risk no matter how they sulk afterwards. | | The ratio of posts about "work-purpose porn" for employee bees | and pipe dream madness for misfits is never going to satisfy | everyone on HN. | _cs2017_ wrote: | I think your argument is flawed. By the time a company is | successful, it has around 100-1000 employees. If those | employees are all sampled from the same statistical population, | any individual randomness in employee quality will wash out | when averaged over 100+ people. So how come a successful | company A has better employees than a failed company B? | | Maybe a big part of the founders' skill is to actually hire the | right management which in turn is capable of hiring the right | employees. In which case, the credit goes to the founders after | all. | | Or maybe the quality of employees does not vary that much | (after controlling for the the obvious factors like location / | funding / business area). In which case, the company's success | is explained by something else. Again, founders' skill? Or | maybe something else? | | I tend to think that it's a combination of founders' skill and | being lucky to start the right business at the right time. I'd | understand if others put greater weight on the founders or | greater weight on luck. | csallen wrote: | Starting a successful company is not an essentially impossible | pipe dream. There are literally millions of businesses in the | US that are generating millions in revenue. | | Sure, they aren't all mega behemoth tech companies, but what of | it? Setting your ambitions high when you're young is still | worth it. It can be a major difference maker in motivating you | to learn the skills necessary to build a successful business, | and it turns out that those same skills are helpful for landing | good jobs, too. | | Most of the people I know who are doing well now dreamed | relatively big when they were young. And many of the people I | know who stress about making ends meet never had anyone telling | them to aim high when they were young. | | If you believe you can, you might try, and you might make it. | If you believe you can't, it's madness to true, so you won't | try, and you won't make it. These are basic building blocks of | motivation and success. | | Your pessimistic message could be applied to anything. Why try | to build the next Google? It's impossible! Why try to build a | smaller business? The odds are against you! Why try to get a | high-paying job? Most people work average jobs! Why go for an | average job? You're competing with the vast majority of the | country! Why get a less-than-average job? It's so stressful and | barely worth it. | rmason wrote: | I just posted on X that every high school in Michigan should | spend a day discussing startups, even if it truly reaches one | kid in fifty the payoff would be immense. | | Currently Michigan's idea of business development is to write | big checks to folks who promise thousands of jobs. | | Yet when the automobile industry got started in Michigan no one | wrote them any government checks yet it became our largest | industry. We can do much better and more startups is the | answer. | bigthymer wrote: | > Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that | they will manage to sail through life as a successful business | founder rather than an employee? | | I think it probably has a lot to do with the US being the | number 1 economy in the world so yes, it does appear to have | society-wide benefits. Does it have personal benefits? I think | this is probably more controversial. I suspect some people push | themselves too hard and would have been happier otherwise, | whereas others do indeed benefit from this advice. I suspect | that the users of HN probably fall in the latter category. | advael wrote: | I think this distills the crux of the equivocation inherent | to this kind of reasoning | | Being "the number 1 economy in the world" (Actually kind of | debatable by some metrics, but that's beside the point) is a | measure of the power of the few that hold it, not the general | living conditions of the populace. "Society-wide benefits" | being the same as having the richest aggregate economy is to | say the least pretty dubious | zild3d wrote: | The essay isn't called "How to optimize your likelihood of | retiring comfortably" | | > You can't know whether it will turn into a company worth | billions or one that goes out of business. So when I say I'm | going to tell you how to start Google, I mean I'm going to tell | you how to get to the point where you can start a company that | has as much chance of being Google as Google had of being | Google. | croisillon wrote: | when i was the kids' age, a teacher told us "aim at the stars, | you might at least reach the moon" and i always found it | motivating | sarimkx wrote: | > If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at | programming. That has been the source of the median startup for | the last 30 years, and this is probably not going to change in | the next 10. | | Did not expect this tbh. So many people here worried about the | future of programming but PG believes we're safe! Alas, something | positive! | a_n wrote: | lol why do so many people here have such a loser/average mindset, | you can literally achieve anything, literally anything, just | because you don't want to work hard, you don't gotta be so | discouraging to other people, well I guess people who wanna | achieve great things probably don't care about the stupid lazy | people, so it's whatever But the fact is you can literally do | anything, you just gotta give it your all... | sarora27 wrote: | IMO most folks find it easier to point to the million reasons | why something wont work/why someone is speaking from a point of | affluence/how luck/finances/etc play a role in success than to | just do the thing, learn from their mistakes, and grow. It's | probably because doing the latter is hard and forces you to | face ambiguity & hard personal growth on a daily basis. | swader999 wrote: | I suffer from this at times. To be fair though, that's sort | of my day job. Find holes and flaws in ideas and make them | stronger. I don't do it with people anymore at least, I try | hard to assume they have the best intent. | paulpauper wrote: | To say I can do literally anything means I can have a 5x body | weight deadlift or run a 4 minute mile. There are limits. | latentcall wrote: | A lot of opportunities are locked behind a massive paywall and | the system isn't intended for your average Joe to get through | that paywall. If it were, you'd have less people to serve you | coffee or deliver your meals or advertise to in order to | increase shareholder value which the ruling class do not want. | Do not be dense. | | Pretending like all 8 billion people have the same opportunity | to be the next Jeff Bezos/Elon/Jobs is misleading. | | My advice for the 99% is to the best you can and foster family | and friend relationships, work less, and get out of the | mindless consumerist game. | therealdrag0 wrote: | I also don't get why people care so much about what OTHER | people do. Will some people fail? Yes of course. But it's good | for society to have a ton of people busting their ass and | trying new things. And it's good for society if bloggers | encourage that. | | If you personally want to be an employee, fine, but a cultural | value for entrepreneurs is a good thing to have and should be | supported. | malthaus wrote: | because most people have something called life experience or | come from a culture not brainwashed by the american dream. of | course YOU can do anything, but whether you are successful with | that or not is up to a million factors you cannot control, no | matter how much of your all you give. | | go to a casino, throw your life savings on one number. if you | win, tell everyone how you gave it all and you manifested it by | pure will. if you lose, nobody will ever hear from it. | | in addition, pg is so heavily biased on this and should never | be taken as gospel. | gizmo wrote: | The belief that luck is the dominant factor in success is | false and harmful to the extent that it keeps people from | trying. I mean trying for real as opposed to giving up after | a bunch of setbacks. | antisthenes wrote: | Yeah, those pesky setbacks like getting injured, working | yourself to death and running out of money so you can't | feed yourself. | | If only people tried for real. | | In my experience people most likely to write this are trust | fund babies who neglect to mention they're getting | essentially a stipend from their parents to take care of | all their life necessities, so they can "try for real". | Whatever that means. | gizmo wrote: | What I have seen is that people who don't quit eventually | become pretty successful. Some people have to quit | because of health reasons or other unfortunate | circumstances. But in the overwhelming majority of cases | people just get demoralized. | | 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but today I | don't. | htsb wrote: | * [X] Viable ideas | | * [X] Skills to build those ideas | | * [ ] Runway to develop those ideas | | * [ ] Someone to help find money to provide runway | erickhill wrote: | This has probably been mentioned before on previous posts to Mr. | Graham's site, but I find the 1998-ness of the underlying HMTL | and simple (if fuzzy) front end (with image map!) that even my | PowerBook Pismo can render and appreciate a total blast of fresh | air. A mild shame it is running HTTPS so more vintage hardware | can't access it, but I understand why. | | Anyhoo, props to 1998 era web design. Sincerely. | tcgv wrote: | Finally his blog is using HTTPS :) | elektrontamer wrote: | > But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a | job, including a boss telling you what to do. | | I hear things like this a lot and I'm sick of it. There's nothing | wrong with working for someone, in fact it's the best way to | improve your skills as a beginner since you're going to be | mentored by people much more experienced than you. I still call | my first boss to this day. | swader999 wrote: | In fact most knowledge work that's above average really feels | like you are working 'with' someone. Self leading teams etc. | jordanpg wrote: | People like PG are at the apex of this weird fawning worship of | entrepreneurs and getting rich that particularly affects the | tech world. This culture places great intrinsic _real value_ on | not having a boss. | | But of course this is all made up. Nothing has any _real value_ | in this sense. We just each get 100 years on Earth and we each | get to decide how to spend that time. Those are the facts. | | The entrepreneur worship culture is simply about making people | who make those choices feel better about those choices. And as | another commenter has observed, most of us are no more likely | to make it as an entrepreneur than we are likely to play for | the Lakers. | | So, yeah, "a boss telling you what to do" is fine if it works | for you and gets you what you want out of life. Some of us just | don't give a shit and don't want to spend a lot of time | thinking about things like market fit and business transactions | and valuation blah blah blah. | kleiba wrote: | _...including a boss telling you what to do._ | | You leave that to your customers and stock holders instead. | BogdanPetre wrote: | Start a company to work on exciting projects and potentially get | rich, by mastering technology, creating based on interests, and | finding like-minded cofounders | walteweiss wrote: | I'm following this advice for about two decades, and I'm not even | close to being rich. I'm rather poor at the day. | | One of the reasons is my background, besides 'building my stuff' | I was very busy fighting the obstacles most of the people in a | developed country would never meet. Or most of the people having | parents would never meet. | | Life got me in the middle of building a very nice thing, giving | me obstacles I couldn't manage. Then, when I was climbing out of | it, there was the pandemic, which messed many things in my life. | | I just migrated to Ukraine back then, and you all know what | happened next, the Russian full-scale invasion. That's only the | public events, I'm ignoring all the personal stuff here. | | Saying that, for me, it was about five years, at least, I paused | with my projects. Some of them are slightly irrelevant, some are | not. There are ones I still believe are very good, even now when | I'm older and more experienced. I got a huge load of non- | professional experience over these years, and it helps me to | understand the world so much better now. Will I ever find my | resources for building my ideas? Nobody knows. If I'll survive | the war, I think I will. | | During this half a decade I juggled stupid jobs (won't mention | why to save time, personal life events) because for a regular job | I'm either too qualified or have a very different experience, | non-applicable to local market. And I'm way too expensive when I | work as an employee. I'm more the founder / employer type than | the employee type, unemployable, as they used to brag in the | Valley. | | And my point is. I regret I never took my time to explore the | professional life I despised all my life. This stupid CV/resume | and LinkedIn idiocracy. When I had no resources, I could easily | manage any enterprise job. I'm very good at stupid politics if | needed, but I don't enjoy it. And I'm very good with the software | tools, so I can do your average enterprise employee workday for a | couple of hours time. That proved my previous years as a | freelancer, building my company, and interacting with the people | I know from the corporate world. | | In time of my need, I was just contemplating others earning way | too much for their skills. When I didn't even have a stupid | resume, but was usually overqualified for a senior position, not | to say a junior one. And no resources to learn the things I | missed from this corporate thing. | | Now it's getting better due to my personal life changes, but I | just lost some years of professional development. Plus loads of | money I could earn on a stupid job (I won't burn out type, as I | don't give a flying duck type). | | While I'm not arguing about the point, especially as a piece of | advice for teenagers, I would recommend learning other options, | and get as much different life experience as you can, while | you're very young. That experience is much more valuable than all | the money you can get. I got loads of money and all of that money | is burned by now. I could earn more (loss less) if I would be | better prepared for personal stuff in my life. As it took way too | much energy and affected my work way too much. | | Also, I don't believe you build Facebook or Google when you are | super young. I would say that is more of a luck thing. I believe | you build something valuable when you understand what is around | you and how the World works. You can build your super project at | 50, why not? | | And as the P.S. the Zuck story is a pure manipulation. We all | know that wasn't even his idea. | babl-yc wrote: | I couldnt finish reading the essay because I was distracted by | the generally smug tone of it. | | 99.99% of people who read this article are not going to start the | next Google. Being a successful entrepreneur requires an | incredible amount of luck, timing, skill, and risk taking. | | If you choose that path, great, but that in no way devalues the | skill building, network building, and predictable income of | working for someone else. | echelon wrote: | Perhaps you're not the intended audience. | | There are certain people that deeply desire this and that | understand their chances of success are low. Nevertheless, | these people want to try and find encouragement in these types | of essays. | | You don't need to be upset that this isn't for you. There are | all sorts of shapes of people in the world. We benefit by | having curious people at all strata of society, exploring | various sorts of ideas and problems. It keeps us from deadlock. | pepve wrote: | > You don't need to be upset that this isn't for you. | | The person you're responding to does not seem upset to me. | | You add an interesting perspective that some people want to | find encouragement in these types of essays. And the personal | jab just isn't necessary. | echelon wrote: | > The person you're responding to does not seem upset to | me. | | I don't think we're reading this the same. | | To quote OP, | | >> I was distracted by the generally smug tone of it. | | The definition of "smug": | | > smug /sm@g/ adjective. having or showing an excessive | pride in oneself or one's achievements. | | > contentedly confident of one's ability, superiority, or | correctness; complacent. | | This is why I responded. If you don't like the tone of the | article, you don't need to suggest that the author has a | superiority complex. | | > And the personal jab just isn't necessary. | | "smug" is a personal jab. I didn't make one. | gizmo wrote: | The tone isn't smug. pg simplified his language for a teenage | audience. Simple arguments made simply can come across as smug | because they lack caveats and polite hedging, but I don't think | the accusation of smugness sticks in this case. | | I also disagree about the incredible qualities entrepreneurs | need and hardships they have to endure. Many incredible | businesses are just good product + good distribution. Many kids | think starting a startup is practically impossible, and pg | correctly points out that it isn't. | lupire wrote: | It's a little easier if you are a PhD study at Stanford, or, | in pg's case, friends with a famous genius at MIT. | | Starting is trivial. Succeeding is in fact practically | impossible. | gcr wrote: | When I was a teen, I had a strong aversion for being talked | down to, and was resistant to attempts to patronize even if | they were well-intended and even if they benefited me. | | Paul's leaving a significant fraction of the intended | audience on the table here IMO: teens who are resistant to | being told what to do and how to do it. :) | mkoubaa wrote: | That sounds like a disability to me | newyankee wrote: | I mean even basic math cannot uphold the thesis. | | All the money and power in the world keeps consolidating | upwards with the people closer to the apex of the pyramid | deluding others that consistent climbing will help others reach | there. | | A tale as old as time, but due to exponential growth of tech | playing out much faster. | jankovicsandras wrote: | Another point of view: | | https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... | | https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-... | | (I don't know how truthful these articles are, but found them | interesting to read.) | fuzzfactor wrote: | If you reduce it to a very certain first principle that can be | applied similarly today, at Google they made electronics do what | other people weren't doing so well, ideally things that had never | been done before. | | Same thing as Packard & Hewlett when they got the ball rolling . | . . | | Worked for Edison too, he really got in on the ground floor when | it comes to electrons. | paulmd wrote: | you could never start google today. when you go to the VCs and | make the pitch they say "that business already exists, it's | called google". | quadcore wrote: | [deleted] | sgu999 wrote: | > this is the standard way to get really rich | | The standard way for a young 15yo to get rich, is to be passed on | wealth by their parents. But starting a company can probably | work, occasionally enough that we can use it as a smoke screen. | jp57 wrote: | _The trick is to start your own company. So it 's not a trick for | avoiding work, because if you start your own company you'll work | harder than you would if you had an ordinary job. But you will | avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including | a boss telling you what to do._ | | This is literally true, but it's disingenuous. Not every job has | a boss _telling you what to do_. Many jobs hire people for their | expertise and pay them to solve problems for them, and in these | kinds of jobs the employee collaborates with her boss on deciding | what kinds of problems you will work on. Of course, it will only | be enjoyable if the company 's problems are aligned with the | employee's interests. | | If you are a technical expert with the kind of ability and acumen | needed to run a successful start up, I would argue that it is at | least as easy to find a company whose problems are aligned with | your interests as to find investors who will truly let you pursue | your own interests with their money. | | "Making it" as a startup founder should be seen in the same class | of success as making it as a rock star or an actor. There are | lots of aspirants and hardly any of them succeed. Even though | some manage to become wildly wealthy, the prior expected payoff | is negative. | pdonis wrote: | _> the employee collaborates with her boss on deciding what | kinds of problems you will work on. Of course, it will only be | enjoyable if the company 's problems are aligned with the | employee's interests._ | | And that's a _huge_ if. PG 's view of regular jobs might be | colored by his own experience (working for Yahoo after they | bought Viaweb--of course it's going to jar when the thing you | built is now owned by someone else that you now have to work | for), but it's still the case that even the best case regular | job (and of course most regular jobs _aren 't_ the best case) | is going to give you significantly less autonomy than owning | your own company--because you don't make the final business | decisions for a company you don't own. If you're the type of | person that's going to jar (and I suspect PG _is_ that type of | person), you 're not going to like even the best case regular | job. | | _> "Making it" as a startup founder should be seen in the same | class of success as making it as a rock star or an actor. There | are lots of aspirants and hardly any of them succeed. Even | though some manage to become wildly wealthy, the prior expected | payoff is negative._ | | This is probably true if you take VC funding, since VC outcomes | are basically bimodal: either "huge win" or "tank". I'm not | sure all startups actually need to take VC funding, however. | xanderlewis wrote: | > ...get good at programming. That has been the source of the | median startup for the last 30 years, and this is probably not | going to change in the next 10. | | Interesting comment; seems at odds with what a lot of others seem | to think at the moment. But time will tell. I suspect he's right. | abhayhegde wrote: | While I absolutely agree with PG here on identifying a missing | link and solving it with technology as your own project is a good | way to own a startup, I also feel most of his examples are | reminiscent of survivorship bias. | | For every one of these giant trillion dollar companies, there are | also thousands of companies that couldn't make it. Also, just by | the distribution of it all, not every company _can_ be a Google. | Not trying to be pessimistic here; everyone should be able to try | solving some problem as a project and have fun meanwhile. | However, expecting a Google out of it could be a bit too | demanding. | justsocrateasin wrote: | I think he answers the second point of "not every company _can_ | be a Google " though. He says this will get you to the point | where your company _could_ be a Google, but makes no promises | that it _will_ be one. | | I agree with the first point. I do think that the experience | would nonetheless be valuable, though, to pilot a failed | company. | paulryanrogers wrote: | Why even bring up 'Google' when the odds are (and always | were) so long? It's like saying your bet could be the | Powerball winner. I mean if his audience is only soon-to-be | lottery winners, then it's kind of embarrassingly narrow and | niche. And what advice is there to say except be rich enough | to buy a lot of tickets? | xeonmc wrote: | "Not every company can become a Google; but a Google _can_ | come from anywhere." | | Peter O'Toole, probably. | ijidak wrote: | Agree. Although, de does mention that a barber shop counts. | | I think when someone like him shows up, kids want to hear about | the extreme end of financial success. | | Hopefully those kids get to hear from other types of business | people as well -- those who can talk about more of the middle | of the road. | codethatwerks wrote: | Yes he tells you how to increase your odds in the lottery from | 1E-11 to 1E-6 perhaps. His advice assumes you won the birth | lottery already. Really you can't be motivated by being the | next Google because it (approximately) won't happen. Be excited | by the other things on the way. | difflens wrote: | It's interesting that this piece mentions "to get really rich" as | one of the primary motivators. Especially to high school | students. I wonder if that's good advice or if society is better | served by motivating students to start companies that make the | world better. | heyoni wrote: | I feel like there was a moment where "love was all you needed" | and people just followed their passions with real careers as a | backup. Hollywood pressed that view (or echoed it) into the | zeitgeist and I'm not sure what the turning point was, but | people started getting filthy rich. Almost as if the dormant | culture combined with the internet made it possible to amass an | absurd amount of wealth. Since then, whenever that is, it feels | like it's socially acceptable again to do be driven by earning | potential and nothing else. | | I agree with you, wanting to become "filthy rich" is abhorrent | given all of the known implications that comes with. At the | very least people should have some shame and keep that to | themselves. | codethatwerks wrote: | What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the | programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university | cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection | to most young people. I'll be the old guy. And this assumes I can | afford the loss of income. | | I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. | | I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people | problems. Like how sucky accessing all kinds of "adulting" things | are from aged care to dealing with myriad systems with kids | schools or any other problems that have inevitably been chucked | at you. Some of these "startups" might actually be | lobbying/political work for the good that doesn't make money, | some might be startups. | | Also being older I don't care about making a unicorn. I see that | as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an | investor. | Animats wrote: | 1. Get into Stanford just as Stanford is getting into the VC | business. | | 2. Use Stanford bandwidth for your web crawler. | | 3. See how AltaVista does it; they're in downtown Palo Alto. | | 4. Get 100K from the guy who founded Sun. | | 5. Move into the space above the bike shop in Palo Alto. (9 major | startups began there.) | | 6. Get more funding from the guy who founded Amazon. | | 7. Sell search ads. | | 8. Profit! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2024-03-19 23:00 UTC)