[HN Gopher] A relatively small amount of force applied at just t...
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A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
Author : jseliger
Score : 53 points
Date : 2023-07-13 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tonykulesa.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tonykulesa.com)
| bfrog wrote:
| Please don't equate DoorDash and Stripe with the laser and
| transistor.
| sonicshadow wrote:
| DoorDash was the laser that cut the razor-thin margins of the
| small mom-and-pop restaurant to nothing, and Stripe
| "transitioned" the banking industry to a world where...they
| just do the same thing but a little better.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article
| or post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| tlb wrote:
| Most outsider analyses of YC are total nonsense. But this article
| focuses on the right things.
|
| One thing it gets wrong:
|
| > Despite Paul Graham's assertion that startups should not co-
| locate, many of the YC startups of this period did live together
| (and still do today). This created a social community around YC
| startups that also attracted new recruits, such as Justin Kan's
| brother, Dan Kan, who went on to found Exec (W12) and Cruise
| (W14).
|
| PG has talked about not starting your startup in co-working
| spaces, because the startup will take on the ambient culture
| instead of developing its own, and the ambient culture in co-
| working spaces is pretty bogus. But living with and being friends
| with fellow founders is great. Being a founder can be lonely,
| because there are parts of the struggle you can't share with the
| rest of the company. Being friends with people going through the
| same process is one of the best things you can do for the company
| and yourself.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| It sounds good. But it kind of reminds me of High School Football
| or Basketball Players (choose a high paying professional sport).
| Who bank their whole future on focusing on one thing that is
| Super-Low-Percentage-Of-Success-High-Paying-Job.
|
| How many football players skip their education, and then DON'T
| make it? Where do they end up.
|
| Now, think Joe Blow Computer Science Major, is NOT going to be a
| Millionaire, but a decade later when they are applying for some
| middle tier IT Job, they will damn well need to show a degree..
| btilly wrote:
| The hit rate in the article is almost 1/4. That's a lot better
| than high school sports.
|
| The fallback if you don't succeed is called "programmer". And
| no, programmers don't need college degrees if they have real
| world experience. I've known a lot of very successful
| programmers with no college degree at all.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Not if the denominator is all Computer Science students who
| may think of dropping out of school when seeing these success
| stories.
|
| And
|
| The days of hacking something together and getting a job are
| kind of dwindling if not gone. The days of self learning, and
| showing skill isn't really as prevalent anymore. Sure, it was
| like that during 90-2000's. But these days, not so much.
| mattlondon wrote:
| There are often posts on here showing that it is better to
| spend say 10 or even 5 years doing 35-40 hour weeks at a FAANG
| where your total comp will end up being $2-5,000,000 over that
| time, than risk it at a startup working 80+ hour weeks for a
| chance at the big time but ultimately leave with nothing apart
| from exhaustion and an unheard-of failed startup on your
| resume.
|
| I think there is a lot of truth in that.
|
| And yeah I went to school with a bunch of kids who had semi-
| success as a teenager at sports or music, only to then _not_
| make it big when they needed to at 16 or 17 etc. Perhaps they
| all ended up at successful unicorns or are L7-FAANGs, but I
| doubt it
| JohnFen wrote:
| But that's also a false dichotomy. There are many options
| aside from those two.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| It can look like a false dichotomy because we are posting
| short blurbs on the internet, not the pros/cons of a
| thousand different life stories so we can categorize them
| into a dozen possible outcomes so we have more than two
| examples.
|
| But it is very much a common theme in High Earning/Low
| Success Rate roles, to have a lot of people shoot for them,
| fall short, and be in a worse position than if they had
| studied and stayed some more mundane course.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Yep - one could say that "a relatively small amount of
| force applied in just the right place" is enough for
| people to make bona fide _bad decisions_ both career-wise
| and financially by chasing unrealistic dreams that have
| ultimately done them a huge disservice.
|
| At best they can dust themselves off after a few years
| and "catch up" to where their potential should have been,
| at worst they are financially ruined and laden with debt
| as they tried to boot-strap their crap startup idea while
| PG et al laugh all the way to the bank at these poor
| impressionable people's expense.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| LOL. Yeah, like my friend gently nudged me to do some
| meth, now I'm living in a ditch.
| tqi wrote:
| The economics of the Bay Area really distorts things. If you
| make 2M over 10 years, you will almost certainly have enough
| money to live a good life (never go hungry, able to travel,
| etc), but you will absolutely not have enough to buy a house
| or start a family. I think this realization is what drives
| folks to take a third path, which is starting at established
| Big Tech companies before moving to early stage startups.
| sonicshadow wrote:
| I almost fell for the trap a few years ago, someone was
| trying to convince me that making 200k in the Bay Area for
| 5 years and then "retiring" back to my mid-size city was
| far more profitable than just staying put near my family
| and friends and making a "measly" half of that, in a place
| where houses costs a third as much and the lifestyle is
| healthier.
| angarg12 wrote:
| It drives me nuts when people point at engineers making $1M
| on a startup exit, without counting the average income over
| their tenure.
|
| If they worked in the company 5 years with a 100k base
| salary, the income averages to about 300k per year. Sure,
| that's a healthy income, but it's about on par with a big
| tech salary, with the difference that big tech is more stable
| and predictable, and not heavily backloaded.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| Kind of wish hackernews would screen newly registered domain
| names and tell people to post again when their domain is over 30
| days old...
| dang wrote:
| We'd need to go over the list of submissions from such domains
| in order to see how many good ones were in there.
|
| As frustrating as the mediocre median is, it's more important
| to not lose good articles than it is to avoid bad ones.
| Fartus wrote:
| [dead]
| anileated wrote:
| I want to start a company, but will not. The main reason why the
| existence of YC does not change this is because I know my idea,
| even if I go all in, does not promise explosive growth on par
| with Airbnbs of this world, and therefore is not attractive to
| investment. It does have the potential to eventually become a
| lifestyle business, though, which would be good enough for me.
| Unfortunately, I guess it will have to wait until I have some
| more spare time (ah, the age old excuse).
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Why do you need investment? If you can build it on your own and
| there is a real niche with people willing to pay money for what
| you build then you can make a lot of money as an individual.
| tiedieconderoga wrote:
| Simple: capex and economies of scale.
|
| Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market
| research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not
| $50/.
|
| I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which
| would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
|
| Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a
| large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're
| looking at 7-8 figures.
|
| If you aren't independently wealthy, neither option is really
| feasible, and the former option will almost certainly end in
| tears if you try to stretch and bootstrap with your own
| money.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which
| would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
|
| I wasn't thinking of this from the perspective of a
| hardware startup but a software startup which doesn't
| require either of those things. I should qualify my
| original post with that. You don't need to be independently
| wealthy to launch a software business on your own provided
| you have the ability to build it yourself.
| groby_b wrote:
| Kind reminder that starting a software business still
| requires you to, you know, live and stuff :)
|
| Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people
| runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a
| few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of
| months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think
| about shutting down.
|
| If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your
| business might be a good idea. (You'll still have
| depleted a good chunk of your savings, and it's not like
| the world comes with profit guarantees)
|
| Investment buys runway, opex, and scale. Some businesses
| need that, some don't. Software work reduces the opex
| load (for many attempts), but scale and runway might
| still be necessary.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| If you're really sure, you do that first run and lose
| money, then show a bank/investor the explosive popularity
| and get money for manufacturing at scale. Relatively
| speaking it's close to the easiest type of funding you can
| get.
| [deleted]
| anileated wrote:
| I can't because I need money to survive, and this will not
| provide that money for months until the thing is written,
| deployed, and has an established enough paying user base...
| And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by
| whatever calamity in meantime!
| jstanley wrote:
| If it will be a matter of mere _months_ until this thing is
| making enough money to pay for you to live, then it shouldn
| 't take you too long to save up to start? Maybe a bank
| would even lend you the money? Maybe even a credit card
| would be enough?
| imilk wrote:
| If you have the ability to program you can find time around
| your day job to make a little progress each day until you
| have something ready to market. Because it just sounds like
| you're lazy and are throwing up random excuses.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Fwiw my web app costs like $80/mo in hosting fees, and
| could be done for even less. I forget how much we paid to
| register our company but it wasn't much. The startup costs
| aren't that much, it's mostly time.
|
| I wouldn't be so optimistic on a few months to start
| generating cash tho unless it's a simple yet novel idea.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| have you considered that some people would pay you up-front
| to build this because they need it so badly?
| jononor wrote:
| Sell it first, build it after. Helps with this conundrum -
| but more importantly it forces you to focus on the customer
| and their problem, finding what people are willing to pay
| for. And that is what successful business is made of.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes!
|
| If your goal isn't to build a kind of empire or to shoot for
| unimaginable riches, but instead to start a solid small
| business that lets you do the sort of work you enjoy and
| provides enough income to live in your preferred style, then
| it's never been easier than it is today.
|
| All you really need is to find a niche that has a small
| market. How small is OK depends a lot on the specifics of a
| business, but if we're talking a one-person software shop,
| you can probably live decently with a customer base of a
| handful of thousands. Even less if your niche supports very
| high profit margins.
|
| And, as an old mentor pointed out, if you're fishing in the
| pool of the entire world (which the internet allows at low
| cost), then you can just nail two boards together and find a
| thousand or two who are willing to buy it.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| My app is attracting a lot of Australians. It was built for
| US and Canada but I won't say no to AUD.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| As you point out, not all VCS are right for all businesses, nor
| should anyone expect them to be. Some businesses aren't
| suitable for Venture Capital at all.
|
| There's a lot of friction and transaction costs around finding
| capital for even suitable Investments. Reputation is one way to
| overcome this but it's difficult to bootstrap reputation.
| JohnFen wrote:
| VC money is essential for certain, specific sorts of
| businesses. If what you have in mind is not one of that type,
| then I argue VC money is something you want to actively avoid.
| That's not to say you should avoid investors -- there is a
| dizzying array of different kinds of investors outside of
| venture capital.
|
| > Unfortunately, I guess it will have to wait until I have some
| more spare time (ah, the age old excuse).
|
| In my experience, such a time will never arrive. You need to
| consciously prioritize starting a business (although that
| doesn't mean you can't hold down a day job at the very start).
|
| How does the old saying go? The best time to plant a tree was
| 20 years ago. The next best time is now.
| KArgos wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| basementdev wrote:
| [dead]
| prions wrote:
| Comparing YC to Bell Labs, which had deep ties to academia,
| misses the entire philosophy of YC and Paul Graham. He constantly
| talks about academia being a hive of orthodoxy, and positions
| "smart people" as those who can think around it.
|
| By his logic, Bell Labs would be one of the largest hives of
| orthodox thinking to ever exist, and its the complete antithesis
| of vc heterodox thought
| eshack94 wrote:
| Feels like someone's trying to sell me something.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Most things are ads, but especially this.
|
| I like the list of sites in as success stories. I find the
| majority of them absolutely awful for humanity.
| mistermann wrote:
| As long as the stack of cash keeps getting higher, all is
| well. No need to overthink things. :)
| sonicshadow wrote:
| > If Bell Labs' scientists invented the transistor, the laser,
| Unix, information theory, etc, then YC's "economic research
| scientists" invented OpenAI, Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash,
| Dropbox, Reddit, and many more.
|
| Interesting, comparing core scientific research and output by
| Bell Labs to just techi-ifying existing industries and not really
| adding much new value (other than OpenAI).
| tom-_- wrote:
| I think people are reading this line the wrong way. The author
| isn't implying Instacart is as important as the transistor,
| that would be ludicrous.
|
| He's simply drawing an analogy between the output of
| laboratories like Bell Labs that produce breakthrough scientic
| research and "economic labs" like YC that produce breakthrough
| businesses.
|
| Yes, AirBNB, Instacart etc are breakthrough businesses in the
| sense that they disrupted long-standing and deeply entrenched
| business models. The ideas themselves are not extraordinary but
| building and scaling a business from zero often against much
| better financed competitors is no easy feat and takes a unique
| amount of persistence (and often good timing) to succeed.
| xigency wrote:
| Actually seems like a prescient comparison to me. Relevant here
| is 'economic research' which is developing new methods in
| business, not technology. If YC isn't a function which
| transforms startups, then at least it's a transistor which
| amplifies VC capital.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| Funny how you just picked out OpenAI, maybe Stripe and the
| others create value too?
| adventured wrote:
| OpenAI shook the planet with something fairly groundbreaking.
| It's closer to the iPhone in the rapid impact it had, moving
| a lot faster than the iPhone did, than the extension of a
| payment processor made easier (which is what Stripe is).
|
| Stripe, Airbnb, Doordash, Uber etc. They're services that add
| value by extending existing concepts to the Internet or in a
| slightly better way. There's nothing revolutionary or earth
| shaking about them. They're eBay, taking auctions and putting
| it online; it's not revolutionary, it's modestly
| evolutionary. They certainly add very real value (although
| Airbnb's value add at this point may be going backwards; most
| services peak in value creation at some point before heading
| south).
|
| The connected world took notice of GPT extremely rapidly.
| Only a few tech lightning strikes have been like that in the
| past 50 years, and only a few have moved very fast.
|
| Downplaying the dramatic impact of GPT 3 / 4 would be silly,
| frankly. And we're only in the first or second inning. It has
| set off a remarkable chain reaction that is reverberating
| globally. It's a eureka moment the likes of which you only
| see a few times in a lifetime if you're lucky.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| yeah sure, they just packaged Google's research and put it
| behind an API
|
| you can make comments like this for just about any product
| taken to market and downplay the value of the making it
| mass market, affordable, usable, etc
| bagacrap wrote:
| Openai hasn't really proven itself to be a profitable
| business so the economic research is at best incomplete.
|
| I'm sure AI has real value, but what percent of that comes
| from LLMs and what contribution OpenAI will wind up making
| to the business of AI is not very clear. I don't really
| think the world will be different in ten years than it
| would have been without openai.
| sonicshadow wrote:
| Naw I'm not trying to get VC funding so I don't feel like
| brown-nosing them too.
| efficax wrote:
| lol, imagine telling Bill Shockley: "oh, you invented the
| transistor? well I built an iPhone app that dispatches a pizza
| order". The only thing here even close to a real invention is
| OpenAI and even they didn't invent the core tech (neural nets,
| transformers, linear regression, gpu farms) but just threw a
| bunch of money at applying it in a new way.
| adventured wrote:
| You're overly downplaying the role of combination in
| creation, which is what most creation consists of (including
| inventing the transistor, although to a lesser degree).
|
| Imagine downplaying the iPhone by saying they merely combined
| some things that already existed, as they didn't invent most
| of the core tech in the first iPhone.
|
| Apple just threw a bunch of money at combining tech that
| already existed by that premise; and they definitely didn't
| invent the smartphone. And SpaceX didn't invent rocketry
| either. And Tesla didn't invent the electric car. It'd be
| absurd to downplay these things and how difficult they were
| to bring into routine existence. And Netscape didn't invent
| the Web browser, and Google didn't invent the search engine,
| and Amazon didn't invent ecommerce, and Atari + Nintendo
| didn't invent the video game, and Ford didn't invent the
| automobile.
|
| Impact also matters a lot more than just being first.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Yeah I think there is a lot of sentiment that these
| ideas/founders are somehow unique and that if those people
| didn't do anything with those ideas then something like Airbnb
| or Reddit or Dropbox wouldn't have ever happened.
|
| I think people need to be realistic - none of those are
| particularly ground breaking ideas, as evidenced by the fact
| that there are countless competitors and in many cases even
| predecessors that were not in the right place at the right
| time. These people just happened to be born to the right
| parents in the right country at the right time to have the
| privilege to have someone throw money at a not very original
| idea that could have been anyone's. Great for them, but I think
| it is worth staying grounded and realise that they're not
| visionaries and had they not even been born, someone would have
| thought up the same idea anyway. Monkies and typewriters and
| all that.
|
| So maybe we'd not have "Reddit", but we'd no doubt have
| something largely identical that would fill that same niche.
| Equating any of these trivial things with something like the
| transistor is just absolute arrogance.
|
| </unpopular-opinion>
| fragmede wrote:
| But by that argument, we'd no doubt still have transistors if
| the transistor hadn't been invented. The traitorous eight,
| Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner,
| Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts
| shaped our world in a way that no one else could. Same with
| Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We'd no doubt still have
| computers, and smartphones, but the landscape would be much
| different and we'd be poorer without them.
|
| The larger picture is to say that _you_ can have an effect on
| the world. Even if it is just being in the right place at the
| right time, what you do, and how you do it matters. If Elon
| Musk hadn 't bought Twitter, there would still be a Twitter,
| but with less Elon Musk brand of shittery. Maybe a different
| brand of shittery, but it would be that other person's brand.
| mattlondon wrote:
| The point I was trying to make is that just ordering take
| out food on a computer or storing files on a computer on
| the network or sharing URLs and comments on a public
| website are not ground breaking ideas - these are trivial
| ideas that I am sure anyone here could have come up with.
|
| But the transistor? Or the laser? Are these things that
| were thought up by the layman independently on a regular
| basis? (i.e. like the ideas for a lot of the y-combinator
| startups have been thought up independently many times over
| by laymen) I don't think so. I feel like these scientific
| endeavours require years of hands on scientific _research_
| and hard work before they ever become anything meaningful,
| and not just an idea for an app that pops into your mind
| while sitting on the toilet one day.
|
| I think articles like these and the recent "how to do great
| work" one recently shows quite how out of touch and how
| much of an over-inflated sense of importance people in the
| tech industry can often have - to even begin to think that
| booking a taxi on a computer is _anywhere_ close to
| something like inventing the transistor is just absurd.
| sonicshadow wrote:
| Until I joined HN I wasn't aware that all these tech
| companies deserve the same rareified air as core scientific
| research. The real world barely thinks about Airbnb and how
| it's "revolutionized the world for a narrow slice of remote
| tech workers that want to rent a house in Mexico for a
| month".
| raincole wrote:
| If anything "the real world" (read: average people) don't
| care about core scientific research either. Maybe when they
| or their parents get ill they care about medical research,
| but that's all. Try to pick any Nobel physics nominees in
| past 50 years and explain why their work is important to
| average people.
| adventured wrote:
| > These people just happened to be born to the right parents
| in the right country at the right time to have the privilege
| to have someone throw money at a not very original idea that
| could have been anyone's
|
| You elaborated precisely that not just anyone could have
| implemented the ideas, which is in fact the single most
| important thing. Having an idea is not very meaningful, as
| nearly all ideas are close to worthless. It's a common
| mistake to think ideas are what have a lot of value.
|
| The thing that primarily matters is who can and or is willing
| to act on an idea, who can bring it into existence (whether
| in a tangible sense of a product/service, or in terms of
| reaching a community to spread an idea (such as an idea in
| the field of published science)).
|
| Those ideas only come into existence as a thing because some
| people were in the right place at the right time to make them
| happen and acted on it (with several other critical factors
| being required, some of which you listed). Not just anybody
| can bring an idea to fruition; literally millions of Internet
| users could easily have the idea for a subscription Internet-
| based Photoshop (circa 10-15 years ago) - now try making it a
| thing and try making it successful.
| scrozier wrote:
| lol...I came to post this EXACTLY. Having been in, or on the
| periphery of, the startup world for a long time (ending about
| ten years ago), I've come to see it as pretty vapid,
| unimaginative, and even downright destructive. If a bunch of
| young-ish guys (and a few women) with elite upbringings want to
| have an incestuous little money party, well, good on them, I
| guess. But all the eloquent words trying to obscure the theme
| of "I want to make a whole bunch of money" is wearing thin on
| me.
| sonicshadow wrote:
| I'm not in the startup world and live in a city that Silicon
| Valley considers "tech-adjacent". I excitedly attended a
| start-up event a few months ago where people pitched ideas,
| and I was massively disappointed by how unoriginal every
| single idea was. Everyone proposed creating an app that does
| xyz pointless service that they think will make money. I also
| hated how many people showed up thinking they could con some
| hyper-intelligent but obviously socially retarded dev to
| "bust out an app" for them over the weekend, presumably for
| free.
| mistermann wrote:
| I wonder if our Brightest Young Minds pursuing
| solely/overwhelmingly _financially_ rewarding undertakings
| has anything to do with the persistence of the various
| "unsolvable" problems humanity constantly whines about.
|
| I suspect we will never know.
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