[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!
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