Caveat - The best type of mentors for founders are other founders. VCs, Incubators, are not optimal mentors, rather those are key folks to have in your pocket.
My suggestion for all founders - find a mentor who is a founder & builder.
Let's say you're one of the hundreds of thousands of solo devs/founders making some money - but less than $1000/month on your SaaS startup.
You don't want VC, you just want growth and the ability to do your startup full-time. Why would someone mentor you in that case? What's the benefit to them?
"paying it forward"? Getting personal satisfaction from helping others? E.g https://www.indiehackers.com/ ? I haven't spent a lot of time there but it seems to be a community of exactly the kind of founders you describe trying to help each other out.
I thought this article was about what PG learned from users but he just wrote about how good he is at identifying startup problems because they are all the same but actually not so same when it comes to replacing his job with an automated FAQ.
I had the same impression. After item 3, there is then a tangential (ironic, even?) ramble about focus. I wonder if Paul decided on the title before or after writing the content!
> how good he is at identifying startup problems because they are all the same
I have never been an investor, but I have been a consultant who focused on short-term, strategically important projects for startups. So I got to see a lot of companies, both successful and unsuccessful.
After a while, patterns really do become obvious. When you've seen some winners, and some doomed companies, and some that will just muddle along forever, you start to notice things.
One thing is that when your customer base is truly energized, they'll practically crawl over your desk to write checks. With other companies, you'll need a sales team to push things uphill. But those companies can still win, if the sales department is humming. Other companies have poured their heart into their product, but they've never figured out how to sell it, or even how to talk to customers. (I can fix product problems, but I can't fix teams that don't talk to their customers.)
Sometimes all it takes is a 5 minute phone call with a founder, and you can tell which is which. I've turned down pretty generously funded projects because it was clear that no amount of software would help a particular company connect with its market.
Now, a successful investor has seen far more companies than I ever saw. I imagine the best investors can filter quickly and surprisingly well.
used to be bothered by the same thing but have since adopted one of those "quickly position window" utilities -- so e.g. you can quickly move the whole window to a reasonable column-width in the middle of the screen
i use "rectangle" for the mac, but there are lots of alternatives on lots of platforms. very nice QOL improvement.
My browser never exceeds 40-50% of my total screen width in my tiling window manager. Keeps my eyes from shooting all over the place. For websites that are properly optimized, you don't really lose out on anything. And for the websites that aren't, a quick keybind to go fullscreen for a bit is nice.
> YC founders aren't just inspired by one another. They also help one another. That's the happiest thing I've learned about startup founders: how generous they can be in helping one another.
I adore pg’s essay. But this time something is tripping my spider sense, so I had to take a closer look (at my spider sense, and a bit on the essay too).
This is the first time an essay feels like a sale pitch. Specifically, a sale pitch for YC. I’ve read pg’s essay about YC for about 15 years, and this is the first one I have that feeling.
This one is a bit too abstract. I’m getting the idea that YC can help founders tremendously, that their knowledge is specialized and hard to get elsewhere. But I’m eagerly waiting for one concrete example, and none are to be found. Normally I’d expect a real set of examples from startups, instead of the analogy in horror movies. I still remember the essay where pg described how he came up with Jessica the idea of YC, while walking somewhere, explaining very concretely what he thought at the time.
For any other writer or organization, I’d just guess they are trying to “keep their secret recipe”. That is neither pg or YC’s MO.
> But I'm eagerly waiting for one concrete example, and none are to be found.
Well not in essay, but there are plenty examples in the real world, surely?
"Paul Graham gave us a series of advice that changed our business forever." -Brian Chesky, https://archive.is/xvx31
"One big thing that YC did for me is it was an ambition multiplier. Pre-YC I thought it'd be cool to make software that could just pay my bills. A year post-batch and I find my default state is much more ambitious than before." -u/CoffeePython (YC S21), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32556060
"I have to say though - while the success rate of these YC-only funds is likely good enough to make them quite profitable, none of them come even close to what I observed with PG's ability to pick the winners (which makes sense, since a lot of other people have tried to build accelerators and none of them come even close to YC)." -u/aerosimle (YC), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381893
I suspect part of it is that he’d need to go and chase down permission for a bunch of the anecdotes since YC office hours have an expectation of privacy. But maybe there’s a version of this essay with a tic more detail you’d prefer?
Strongly agree, this is one of PG’s worst essays IMO (I’m also generally a fan of his essays). On top of it feeling sales-y, it really gives the vibe of someone who DOESN’T listen to users. There’s essentially nothing concrete that he’s learned from users in this essay, despite that supposedly being the topic, just “they have similar problems and don’t know how to prioritize.”
He could have spilled the beans about what the top problems founders have. These are probably covered in the online startup course YC runs though - so not a "secret" but maybe he didn't want this to be a startup advice piece, but more abstract.
> But I’m eagerly waiting for one concrete example, and none are to be found.
Were you looking for testimonials embedded in the essay to meet your expectations?
Of course, this wouldn't be acceptable as it would turn the piece unmistakably into a sales pitch for his product cementing your suspicions about the nature or motives behind authoring this post, a viewpoint which by the way I don't necessarily share.
This type of reporting that you're specifically looking for is best served with other formats like featured stories or in-depth analyses done by news organization; where they get to interview YC partners, alumni and startup founders, and solicit their opinions and thoughts about their experience with the organization, but even this reporting needs to be balanced and informative otherwise it will be mistaken for an advertorial or, as you guessed, a sales pitch.
Testimonials, despite carrying the baggage of being a marketing term, are a legitimate form of evidence, especially if the people giving testimony are named in full. It affects their reputation if either they or the company they are testifying for are disreputable.
It’s true that independent reporting will be more likely to provide a balanced and objective assessment, but at the same time, opinionated articles like the submitted essay are more valuable with the provision of stronger evidence.
Testimonials in general are like these cheesy or sleazy infomercials on home shopping channels, fake and worthless and that's why they earned the bad reputation that they have.
Also, it is not even that the essay itself is totally bereft of real world examples to support his thesis, when he actually cited Airbnb as a case of coming around, and applying the practical advice given to the founders by YC to deliver value.
To clarify, I maintain that testimonials from people who give their full names (and thus can be contacted after) are perceived as solid evidence. A common real-life example of named testimonials seen as credible by recruiters are written LinkedIn endorsements from named people who are connections on a person's profile. However, I agree that nameless or semi-anonymized testimonials are less valuable and give the entire term of "testimonial" a poor reputation, because their truthfulness can't be verified.
On the second point, what you wrote is true, but the Airbnb mention was pretty short; your comment is probably around the same length as Graham's mention. The Airbnb mention in full consists of: "[4] The Airbnbs were particularly good at listening — partly because they were flexible and disciplined, but also because they'd had such a rough time during the preceding year. They were ready to listen."
I could find no mentions of other named companies involved with YC in the article, and the Airbnb mention was quite brief (the assertion was that they listened to YC's advice, and the implication is that this was the reason behind its success).
1) As you said, these LinkedIn *testimonials" are more of professional endorsements than anything. In my opinions, testimonials on the web have become totally discredited, and the moment I see one in the wild, the first thing that pops on my mind, it's a commercial with an identity crisis.
2) I totally agree with you that details are scarce and left much to be desired but maybe this narrative is more suitable to other media like books or podcasts where they have the space to expand on points and let us all on the juicy details.
I pretty much would have appreciated to hear the full story on Airbnb struggles in the beginning and how they managed to turn it around.
It definitely is strange to repeat over and over that startups are counter-intuitive, and that the best advice isn't easily believable, and not give even a single demonstrative example.
Agree, this sounded like a Tony Robbins style pitch where you don't get to hear any of the magic until you've paid for the seminar.
I am guessing you started reading PG when young, and are now becoming cynical about the world after 15 years. Perhaps PG has stayed the same and you have changed?
The first “sales pitch” I noticed was 10 years ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html (it isn’t a sales pitch for YC, instead it is a sales pitch for founding a startup).
I also suspect you are mistaking his passion for a pitch. I would bet PG is happy to see all startups succeed, whether YC is helping them or not. It isn’t like PG needs to try and succeed with more status and more money. Disclaimer: I don’t know PG and I don’t know similar people that might help me stereotype him correctly.
Funny, we're literally launching a new project today that allows for distributed focus groups. We haven't changed over the DNS -- here's the Heroku link (https://opinion-graphs-website.herokuapp.com)
How we got here: for a while we had been struggling with breaking through on another project that user voice input to measure sentiment for office space.
Last week, we took a step back and thought that having a tool that could allow start-ups to ask opened ended questions where people could just "talk" and what they said is analyzed for sentiment would be valuable. So that's what we're building with OpinionGraphs. IMHO this is directly in the vein of PG's points about learning from users.
With whatever you're building, if you're interested in trying a new way to connect to users or targeted customers along the lines of PG's advice, please dm me or just leave a comment here and I'll reach out.
I’ve read a few of pg’s articles over the years. I believe it was one about nerdy kids and their relationships and worldviews that first brought me to this site. At some point, I read the article “Hackers and Painters” and I felt like pg’s essays didn’t resonate with me anymore. I even read a response called “Dabblers and Blowhards” that I resonated strongly with. I thought to myself, pg is distanced from reality, and that perhaps I was or had been as well.
Over the past year or so I’ve been trying to make sure that my opinions are mindfully and consciously held. I’ve worked on debugging them: I test and evaluate my beliefs when the opportunity arises. I try to make sure I still feel what I think I feel and that I understand what is going on in my head and my heart, and that they act congruently.
For instance, I know now that I dislike many, many things that Amazon has done and how it treats its workers. But I think that the people who worked on my Kindle Oasis have the utmost respect for their users. It makes me somewhat comfortable with the ambivalence that for me goes along with using it. For I surely love my Kindle and I surely am happy to purchase books on the Kindle store while I simultaneously am disgusted by the treatment of factory workers, delivery drivers, software developers, and other real human beings who work for Amazon. I could say the same about my iPhone. Sometimes I think hard about the slave labor that went into the manufacturing of the device that I am typing this message into. Should I stop using it? Maybe so. Maybe not. At the moment, I consciously choose to continue using it. It is quite possible that history will judge me quite harshly for this. But I believe that there is empathy and soul (and blood and inhumanity) in these things.
This morning I had a feeling of revulsion when I saw that pg had written another article and that it was on the front page of one of my favorite websites. I readily see the hypocrisy in this. But as I mentioned at the outset, I wanted to determine if I felt the way I most recently felt about reading his essays. So I read it with as close to an open mind as I could.
I believe that on this subject, pg knows more than I likely ever will. His users are early stage startups and he has clearly identified wide classes of issues and the ability to suss them out in the course of a brief conversation. He is able to envision founder habits changing, and recidivism of said changes. He is able to approach each situation with the mindfulness and presence that it deserves by understanding that as much as these issues fall into buckets, the circumstances surrounding them are unique, and the people involved are individuals. He is able to relate these and understand them in the context of one of the most near and dear things to my heart: cutting edge software development. He is able to see when a founder is incorrectly assessing their own situation, and he is able to guide them to a course correction. He is able to ask the founders key questions that they themselves can evaluate to understand their predicament. He is able to understand their humanity.
And he has built a whole team of partners with this ability.
Going against the grain of my prejudices and my expectations, I thought this was a fine article. I have considerably more respect for YC and pg than I did before I read it. I am more comfortable browsing this site as a result.
I had an engineer-employee-type response to some of Paul’s hackers-and-painters essays (2004), and I still think there is a lot of wrong in some of his cherished opinions[1].
However my colleagues and I founded a company about the same time as ycombinator was founded (2005). I have a lot more respect for his opinions after watching the wild success of YC over the years: he has proven again and again that his opinions are valuable.
That said, I want to quote from the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32917643 : “I never hear pg talk about really any of the downsides or regrets about the startup ecosystem that he helped unleash.” . Paul’s article is a bit rah-rah (making the world better by helping found startups), and it is definitely one-eyed without the balance of what the costs are. I am definitely not arguing against progress, but I would appreciate some humble reflection on the costs to others of that progress.
I admit it is very hard for me to have the self-awareness to know if I am just trying to cut down a tall poppy, or whether I am just knocking down a success, or am I subconsciously railing against somebody due to their well endowed ego.
Regardless, there is a lot to learn from the essay, and I rate the knowledge he has shared as highly valuable (even if the knowledge shared is difficult for me to apply, given that I don’t run an incubator!)
The most unfortunate part is that I think that the quality of comments on HN about this particular essay have been low. I suspect I am adding more low quality comments myself.
[1] Example I disagree with “Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis of the dominance hierarchy” from http://paulgraham.com/smart.html — a couple of jems but mostly hard disagree with his points in that essay. Perhaps he has a different definition of intelligence, but dominance and intelligence are distinct variables (even if correlated). Maybe related to a generic comment about other programmer essay writers “you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.” — https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm — although that trends too far towards psychological diagnosis by comments which is really not productive (and I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end!).
Thanks very much for the reply and the links and comments. I hadn’t read Beyond Smart before and I just gave it a read. I too disagree with many of the things in that essay. Almost everything, it seems, from the premise (which seems to be that having good new ideas is “the thing most to be desired”) to the importance of new ideas to the point you made which includes the words “dominance hierarchy” which taken at face value seem incredibly short-sighted. Has he heard of cooperation? Life is far from a zero-sum game. We as a species are capable of much, much more.
Nonetheless, I couched my language in my original post:
> I believe that on this subject, pg knows more than I likely ever will. His users are early stage startups…
I stand by my original words. I just probably won’t bother reading anything pg writes unless it is on the topic of startups.
> At first I was puzzled. How could things be fine at 60 startups and broken at 80? It was only a third more. Then I realized what had happened. We were using an O(n2) algorithm. So of course it blew up.
This is neat, but isn't actually right. Each partner has to know each startup, which is, yes, O(n2) relationships. But there's no one who needs to do work proportional to the number of partner-startup relationships: each partner only has O(n) startups to keep track of. So probably the reason it blew up was just ordinary linear growth outstripping capacity: 60 startups was an amount most partners could keep track of, and 80 wasn't.
Appealing to Dunbar's number for org sizes is a strong signal for me I should de-weight whatever the person is saying. They're just parroting pop-science with reasoning that doesn't hold up to a second of critical thinking.
If humans evolved to hold about 150 relationships in our minds, to say that an org has a tipping point of 150 people assumes the members of the organization know 0 people outside of the organization. Maybe this is approximately true for Amish communities. It is not close to true for startups doubling in size every year. The available "relationship slots" for your company is probably more like 10-25.
If you want to say "things get weird at about 150+", sure, maybe that's true. But no need to bring up theories that extrapolate primate cranial capacity.
My experience is that one can have multiple 100-150 person contexts and keep track of the people in them, i.e company, football community, friends etc. But it is harder when they get bigger.
This is basically right, but to hairsplit, it's an O(mn) algorithm, which is significantly different from an O(n) algorithm in that you can't help manage the number of startups by adding partners.
Unless the number of partners also grew in proportion to the number of startups.
Then the partners had 33% more startups to learn, but they were scheduled for 33% fewer meetings with each startup, so the total number of meetings needed for all the partners to learn all the startups was O(P*S) which is O(N^2), since P&S are both proportional to N, so it took quadratically longer for that familiarity to occur.
Couldn't you substitute YC for mentorship, coaching, advisement, etc? Or even peers trying to accomplish shared goals/vision?
Surprisingly this article has little to even say about users, but more about YC users (i.e. founders in the program).
I was hoping to read something applicable to how little companies actually talk to users and how practicing zero-distance between them will make you successful regardless of how much money you raise. Instead, this read like an ad for YC.
Consultants are everywhere. Some are bad, some are just a bad fit. But the checks flow in one direction the entire time. YC's schtick seems to be that the checks flow in the other direction at first, when the listening often matters the most.
Basically YC has found a way to profit off of consulting as a value add.
I just thought the title was misleading. It read to me that of the value add of YC to its users. Not to the value add that YC companies bring to their users.
"[2] When I say the summer 2012 batch was broken, I mean it felt to the partners that something was wrong. Things weren't yet so broken that the startups had a worse experience. In fact that batch did unusually well."
When something unusual happens (every partner needs to keep track of more startups) and the result is unexpectedly more success instead of less, doesn't that suggest that the partners were counterintuitively wrong about feeling wrong?
This was a surprisingly bad essay (and I generally enjoy PG’s essays). It claims to be about “what PG has learned from YC users (startup founders)”, but basically just says “founders are wrong, YC is amazing,” then descends into a YC elevator pitch.
There’s really nothing concrete about what he’s learned from users, other than “they have similar problems” (with zero information about what those problems are) and “they’re wrong about what’s important for their businesses” (again with zero details). If anything, this reads like an essay of someone who aggressively DOESN’T listen to his users.
I don't entirely disagree, but I think the takeaway is that the right path is not always intuitive, experience matters, and that it is hard for founders to trust advisors at times.
This one probably could have been 50% shorter, which would make it 200% more effective in communicating the message. PG needs an editor :)
Life is a journey. I remember when I first encountered and read one of Paul's essays circa 2012. They were like a breath of fresh air! The clever, apparently data-driven analysis and freely imparted wisdom, wow. His writing came across as so intelligent and I concluded he must be a nice and decent person - just like me, maybe even a better version. For a twenty-something who'd already worked at a slew of startups, the essays contained some useful advice for life. Then over the years, over time, something changed. What used to read and be interpreted in a way I deemed "correct" now comes across as arrogant, elitist, dismissive, and overly broad. I no longer find the essays informative. It's kind of like the Polar Express holiday story; the bell no longer rings for me.
Paul, thank you for inspiring me, your writing helped me in my twenties. Sometimes things were right for a certain period of time and then inevitably become dated as new wisdom and revelations unfold and the landscape changes.
Interestingly, I found his essays in the early 2000s, and thought the same about it back then, when I was a teenager.
Part of it is that pg's essays are inspiration-porn adjacent, and I think teens and twenties have the highest affinity for such items.
Part of it is that pg used to be able to comment on anything he wanted to in society freely. His followers were all fans and bought into his style of thinking. There were no haters because pg wasn't sufficiently famous for them to score points by dunking on him.
It's a shame he's achieved such silencing status. I wish he could post his deeper thoughts and observations under one or more pen names.
I've gone through the same process with pg's essays. Might be the fact that I've come to realize that the reality of the Silicon Valley VC scene is so far removed from the rest of the world that I need to take any advice coming from there with a pinch of salt. Also might just be me growing bored of someone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The thing that leaps out is "fund lots of small startups, the lessons are repeatable".
I occasionally bang on about "Million Startups". Some back of the envelope maths and I reckon one could finance a literal million startups with what SoftBank might call a bad year (around 30 billion). When YC started they funded people with 5k per founder.
I am not saying fund the next fusion machine, but put momentum into cities and groups across the globe.
And if what pg says is true (there are few new problems) then guiding those startups must be more feasible then "million"
sounds. Yes 60 to 80 is a big leap but 80 to a million is only slightly bigger :-)
Anyway - saying more startups on HN is very much preaching to the choir so Inwill
stop now.
Maybe rebrand UBI as the government funding a few million startups? That and universal healthcare probably would free up enough people to start their passion project. Enough to cover the ones that want to be artists, caregivers, or just go surfing/play video games.
My favourite brainwave on UBI was to brand it a negative income tax. Would stymie a lot of the more traditional fiscal conservative arguments (albeit not going to counter the drive for regressive rates).
The thing that fascinates me about UBI (apart from the right wing capitalists promoting socialist utopias) is the effect it (presumably) will have on salaries and companies. I mean HN is populated by people who mostly enjoy their STEM related work, but even so if we did not have to pay mortgages tomorrow I suspect 75% would hand in their notice and go something else - still working but working on their own start ups or the like.
I cannot see a way to bring it in without collapsing the economy basically.
The B in UBI is pretty important and seems to be at odds with what you're thinking. It's meant to be a basic income that guarantees you won't starve or be homeless somewhere in the country. That's it. A backup to fall upon or a subsistence if you don't want to/can't work or a life booster for low income earners. No fancy cars, apartment in a coastal city, big house, vacations, meals out, etc. How many HN readers would quit their jobs tomorrow and move to Alabama to live on $20k/year?
Anyone talking about UBI as though it would be a significant income source and fund a "fun" life is an idle dreamer - that will never work.
I think the biggest impediment to UBI is the 'U'niversal part. It can only be one way, at 18yo you start getting a monthly UBI check, no questions no conditions.
It will never be that way, it will always be muddied by some conditions. Like income restrictions bonuses based on various protect group clauses and million other details.
We have welfare systems at the moment that achieve this - and it's not really working. Yes, Europe is full of "generous welfare" systems - from actual cash to nationalised health services. They are expensive but do not break the dependance on shitty jobs to pay the rent.
When I hear UBI I do not hear "welfare system that is just about enough to get by in cheapest area of the country." That we already have in most of Europe. And what happens is the cheapest area of the country turns into a wasteland where no-one wants to put a business and the local doctors get the worst set of long-term health cases anywhere.
What I hear when I hear UBI is "lets try a new equilibrium to solve the problem of fairness."
And as your friendly neighbourhood Software Socialist, I would like to try and explain, poorly, with barely any context.
We, the people, conceive of a form of Venture Capitalism, called government. We shall, since more or less 1945, invest in our main resource, babies, feeding them, educating them, and providing basic infrastructure such as contract law, and bridges. And they shall achieve great things. They shall find ways to organise space engineers in ways that NASA could not, or start political parties the way legacy parties cannot, and will build new capabilities. And as VCs we shall find a way to exit our investment, ready for new investments. We shall call these exits Taxation.
And we shall use these exits to invest in the new set of babies - and because of the veil of ignorance, we do not know which ones will be the next valuable entrepreneurs so we will invest in them all, equally. Fairly.
Lets see what the back of the envelope figures look like
US Adults- 250M
US GDP - 23 Trillion Dollars (!)
GDP per adult is 92,000 dollars. (The global version of that calculation is ~10,000 dollars)
To me UBI is an expression of democracy. We do not live in 'idiocracy'. We all know on a basic level we need to work to produce. Its just that the choice of where and how and who with to do that work is not a free choice. The choice of who to vote for is (kinda) free. But if we imagine democracy not as 'where do you put your vote' but 'where do you allocate your sliver of the total capital allocation' we get a different, interesting question. Why can I not vote to allocate my capital each day as I go to work? I would vastly prefer to have my capital allocated to the solar energy transition. So would many folks. That is barely a choice on most ballot papers. But it is a choice in the market place.
UBI is somewhere around there.
Today the question is "why do I have to do the shitty work for shitty pay?"
Current but unsatisfactory answers include :
- your parents were not wealthy
- you have not invested 20% of your income over thirty years in the stock market
- you or your parents were not able to invest in real estate
- we really need someone to do the shitty job and have built a social underclass for that reason.
But if we break those traps, the question is "where is my work best allocated". There is a lot to figure out. But the current system is unlikely to be what we need to cut our current gordian knot
Replying to myself it's worth noting that (IMO) the Invisible Hand is a efficient allocation mechanism, not a strategic goal. The Hand has no mind nor any goal in mind - direction is given by the choice - by the opportunity cost left behind.
A group of restaurants where I live decided to collectively go 'tip-less' autogratuity with health insurance cost added. I was ok with the experiment and to support the cause. Well by my account it failed. Within about 6 months the quality of service and food dropped so bad I stopped going to those restaurants. I'd say by the parking lots other people are following my lead.
I suspect UBI would have similar but wider reaching results.
This is something I've been speculating about long and something that I dread a lot. To be honest I have a pretty bad feeling about big CDNs like cloudflare. I think they will play a critical role in upcoming outages from alleged cyberattacks or even worse further down the road denial of service based on social status akin to social credit systems in the east.
This essay is getting a surprising amount of hate, and I must confess that my first impression on reading it was that it sounded an awful lot like a Robert Kiyosaki book [1]. But then I followed the two links in the essay [2] [3] and that put it into perspective: the thing that Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such formula. It's like Goedel's incompleteness theorem, except that it's not a theorem. People come to YC and buy Robert Kiyosaki's books hoping to find an Answer that simply doesn't exist.
The difference between Paul and Robert is that Paul is up-front about this while Robert is cagey and deceptive and makes his money by stringing people along thinking that The Answer can be found by buying one more of his books. But I think a lot of the hate here is driven by disappointment that Paul is honest, and that his answer is that there is no Answer. It can be frustrating to hear that (which is also something that Paul explicitly points out).
Yeah, I think it's a combination of some of this stuff is common knowledge now, rather than surprising, and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves)
Rather, this is an essay about what was surprising to him about startups in YC. And I think it's fair to say that these were all surprising, and I wouldn't have inferred them if someone told me about YC as an idea back in 2005.
Or put in another way, if someone came to you and told you about the idea for creating YC back in 2005, when the only model of investing in startups was how large institutional VCs and angels invested in startups, would you have been able to tell them the following insights about how it would work and what the value add of the advice is? Remember, when YC started, lots of people thought 7% for $15k (I know they give more now) was a joke.
- Most startup problems are the same, but in different forms. It makes advising tractable for a single person to do.
- Advising a lot of startups in batches has the advantage of learning about all these problems faster.
- And yet, startup advising has to stay individualized (presumably to keep things concrete), so in order to scale, they had to shard. Limit was somewhere between 60 and 80 per individual advisor.
- Identifying problems and ranking their severity are two different skills. You'd think they're the same, but they're not. As an advisor, if you can help startups do only these two things, it'd go a long way. Lots of advisors try to help with other things, but these are the two most important, because if a startup died, all other problems are moot.
- Despite this, founders don't listen to advice about how not to die. And they don't listen because the advice is counterintuitive. It's like how there are more skiing instructors than running instructors. Skiing is more counterintuitive.
- A big headwinds to advising startups on how not to die is that due to the educational system, founders have all learned how to hack the system. The skills that got them to where they are stops working when trying to build a company.
- Beyond helping startups not die, advisors likely know less about the product/strategy in any domain, but they can increase focus, which increases speed of iteration, which indirectly helps startups with their product/strategy through iterative greedy algorithm.
- A follow-on value-add of YC is the alumni network. Like clusters of painters in Paris during the impressionist period or musicians in Vienna, and Xerox Parc, lots of great work is done when great people do it in clusters along side each other. At the time, people thought the price of independence of is loneliness, but turns out it's not true.
> and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves)
Is this even possible or useful? I mean there are obvious things but they're so obvious and generalized as to be seemingly useless when you are at a serious stage in starting a company. It kind of reminds me of when people talking about something being "priced in" in the market as a related concept.
My first impression was that the title was somewhat vague, but it was actually just very literal. This is what PG himself has learned from his users, not an essay on how to learn from users or how to build a successful startup.
I had to run before I finished, but to wrap it up:
Going back to the initial set up of the piece, he was trying to help startups get into YC. Basically he was helping them sell themselves to YC, by having them answer “explain what you learned from users”
If it’s any effective at all, then by answering this question, you can make your startup very compelling to YC. Would it work? One way to judge that is to apply it to what he knows (YC) and see if it’s appealing to startups both now and back in 2005.
So the complaint about how this piece feels sales-y is missing the forest for the trees, because that’s the point of the exercise!
By the very nature of the intent of the question, of course it’s going to sound like a sales pitch for YC. That’s the whole purpose of the exercise to begin with. It’s a question, when answered, begates a sales pitch for getting into YC.
> Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such formula
I agree, I also think this is the message that YC sells to founders. You are giving up a lot of equity for access/membership to an organization that will make you successful (Im clearly summarizing a bit). It's a bit of a MLM scheme (not that they are ripping you off) but if you get into the club the other members will help you be successful and, then it will repeat every batch constantly filling the pool with new members and the network continues to grow. And it works for the most part, so do MLMs for the most part. Most companies in the US, if successful are around for about 20 years, extremely successful maybe 40, the few rare last longer. YC is getting to the 20 year mark and maybe some of the rough edges are starting to show, cracks in the foundation as the original people that powered the machine start to move on.
Indirectly, YC quite possibly are ripping most founders off financially, even though the average company return is high (power-law — few winners and many losers[1]). It is hard to find good figures, because we have reliable dollar estimates for the companies that win, but a paucity of information about the founders that lose, or what individual founders made[2].
When YC only selects the best 1 of ## applicants, it is hard to remove selection bias from any later analyses of returns for founders.
Value and opportunity-cost are messy, so measuring the returns for “loser” founders is really difficult. I am unsure if founders’ own self-assessment would be trustworthy information.
And the whole thing with VC is that they've somehow figured out how to make money while being wrong 90% of the time. With those sorts of numbers, are you really doing much better than random chance?
I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer, but to identify who's lying about it. With those sorts of volumes of money you're going to attract fraud, and fraud can quickly break "throwing darts at a board" as a selection strategy.
If you can just select for people who are earnest and aren't lying to themselves too energetically, you can call it a day.
They are not wrong 90% of the time. They place correct bets on correct companies, 90% of which will fail. This does not make them wrong, it makes them excellent gamblers. If I'm getting 100:1 odds to roll snake-eyes (two 1's), that's a great bet, and a correct one, and I am not wrong to take it, even though I'll lose money the vast majority of the time.
VC isn't just about placing "correct bets." This article pitches it as actually the opposite: what happens after the bet is more important than before, so fund lots of them and help them.
But even more generally outside of the YC-model VCs compete on their networks and influence as well. The more connected you are, the better you'll do - it's a feedback loop.[0]
Look at the evolution of VC companies. If the skill was just "making correct bets" wouldn't that look like making fewer, but likely larger, bets over time? You grow, on the other hand, if you have some significant influence on the odds or can't tell the odds between companies you select that well. If "success" is 1/10 odds, and "phenomenal success" is 1/100, and you don't think that you are capable of digging deeper to instead find just the ones with 1/20 phenomenal odds, you have a better shot of huge returns if you place 100 bets instead of 10. Then you get more knock-on influence of having a bigger network over time, too!
Of course, trying to control the odds is a classic old gambler move too, but if you're caught doing it in a casino "excellent gambler" may not be the label they apply to you.
[0] to a certain type of tech enthusiast, the huge political aspects here are very frustrating.
It is good to be skeptical, I but I would counsel anyone to avoid becoming deeply cynical and missing out on the value because you don’t like the messenger. I learn as much from arseholes like Thiel, as I do from Paul Graham who appears to me that he is one of the good guys (disclaimer: I haven’t met Paul, & I disagree strongly with some of his theses).
Rich Dad Poor Dad is a very worthwhile book IMHO - it costs you a few dollars and a few hours. I read it and later became a moderately successful founder. I think that book had some positive influence on that success: my guess is that I got high $10’s of thousands value for $10’s of input. In particular the idea of designing a money machine, versus selling hours for dollars. Good knowledge is like that: you can get 1000x return or more. Of course that is offset by the other shit I have read that didn’t give good return ($0 return is OK, highly negative returns from crap knowledge is the real risk).
The only weak spot I could find was "It took me a long time to figure out why founders don't listen."
I think sometimes their advice is packaged in a data backed, falsifiable way. For example, JL's: "I don't know of a single case of a startup that felt they spent too much time talking to users".
But sometimes it's just "Because I said so".
In the latter case it would be better if they showed their CSV backing their advice, or took the time to reformulate into a testable, falsifiable piece of wisdom.
More of a meta discussion, but it's interesting that pretty much all HN threads on PG's recent essays have a strong, negative sentiment. My guess is that this is explained by 3 factors:
1) The quantity and quality of new ideas in PG's essays is declining.
2) Readers' expectations of quality in PG's essays is increasing.
3) The pool of disenfranchised readers is growing.
The quantity and quality of new ideas is decreasing because PG naturally wrote down his best ideas a long time ago.
Readers' expectations increases because YC's power and influence grows.
And, the pool of disenfranchised readers grows as more people try to join YC's ranks unsuccessfully.
I feel badly about this because anyone who has interacted with PG irl knows he's as kind-hearted as people come. But, then again, I get the sense this doesn't bother him too much .
Or the IT industry is just full of participation trophies and the new grey beards just cbf participating in a toxic community that can't handle a single opinion outside their own narrative.
My personal impression of this site is that it's generally very negative. I'm sure the response is to say that's just me noticing the negativity and not the positivity. Maybe so. I'd like to see some cold, hard numbers on it, though.
Is there a single example of someone who is highly regarded for an extended period of time that doesnt end up having a strong group of people who dislike them?
It's hard to tell if there is just enough commenters on HN that dislike PG or if tech folks in general actually have decided to dislike PG.
Regardless, almost every single public figure reputation takes a downturn given enough time. PG is no exception.
Giannis Antetokounmpo. He's been great for almost a decade and everybody still loves him. Growing up dirt poor for most of his life probably helps w/ being a great guy, though.
I was wondering if anyone was going to put specific people in here.
While Giannis was the two time NBA MVP and seems relatively universally loved... Many actual basketball fans hate him al la, "I wish I was 7 feet tall and could just dunk every time" - James Harden, and he has not been famous for all that long. He was mvp in 1029. Before that he wasnt really all that well known outside of basketball.
He is 27. He hasnt been famous since he was 17. Maybe since he was 25. Give him a few years. It's almost certain that he has some controversy over the next ten years or he fades into obscurity due to injury, see Greg Oden.
The scope of pg's posts have narrowed dramatically.
Back in the Hackers & Painters days, it seemed like he was writing about a wide variety of topics. Startups were among the things he wrote about, but it wasn't exclusively about them. There were things about management styles, programming languages, even why nerds are not popular in high school.
At some point, I think around the time YC started to become really successful, that changed, and pg started to write basically exclusively about startups. I can understand why, but his essays have been a lot less interesting ever since.
If you look at the list of essay titles at https://paulgraham.com/articles.html, I think there are a lot of interesting topics that are a lot broader than startups - e.g. "heresy", "putting ideas into words", "how to work hard", "donate unrestricted", which are all from Feb 21 or later
pg actually reminds me of Eliyahu Goldratt, who developed the "theory of constraints"("TOC"). Dr Goldratt was a physicist who then tried to apply the logical problem-solving approach from physics to business problems initially, but whose work has been also used for interpersonal conflict resolution [1]. I get the same vibe from pg's essays, just trying to apply the same critical thinking skills to new areas from first principles, and just trying to see where it leads regardless of what the "established" wisdom is.
If anyone is interested in learning more, most people start by reading "The Goal", which is application of TOC to manufacturing, but if you're interested in how to think about how to apply new technology to existing human systems in a way that actually brings benefits, "beyond the goal" by goldratt is an audiobook that you should really listen to.
Fyi I have no financial interest in TOC :) But if anyone is interested in discussing how TOC thinking might apply to the problems startups face, I'd love to chat, please get in touch! (Contact info in profile)
TOC is quite interesting and not as mainstream as something like SCRUM, but could be a better option.
I like that it is more evidence-based and thought out. However I think applying this is challenging - for the same reason as scrum - because methodologies like this require leaders to let go of their control-ego and trust the system. And systems like TOC which require a lot of thinking, understanding and are easily corrupted by misunderstanding it are fragile to the reality of a hierarchical team structure where the bosses personality can dominate processes more than the process. As such I believe (may not be true) that taking good principles from TOC would be better.
I have seen TOC tried to be applied in a software job and it turned into the typical "JIRA-style" nightmare of estimations, pressure, short term thinking and so on. I don't think that is what TOC is about, but what it can end up with when it hits the ground. SCRUM has the same issues of course. Because these methodologies are not meant to be an al a carte menu of options, where the ones that make the bosses eyes light up are chosen. But they are complete systems. Like it might be fun to only do bench presses at the gym and nothing else, and still eat badly, but that won't work - you need to do the whole regime!
That is why in reality I prefer systems that can be offered al-a-carte. Maybe TOC can be I am not an expert and haven't read the book. But I like for example if someone comes to lead a team and sees how things are done and slowly tweaks things towards a long term goal. For example come in and get people work as a team not individually so that work is delivered sooner and there is less WIP.
4. PG is thinking about YC at a high level of abstraction (e.g., making it a productive place for thinkers and makers like Xerox PARC was) while also having Inside Baseball-level knowledge [1] of YC strategy and tactics (both successes and failures) in ways that most people don’t understand well and don’t really appreciate.
Based on my personal experience and on the experiences of people I know well, most people are fundamentally perceiving the challenges of elite performers vastly different than those elite performers do.
As a simple example in my personal life, I was once a top tier online poker player. Trying to talk about hand histories with lower stakes players, even if they were winners, was an exercise in futility. The things that they had to focus on in their main games was very different what I had to focus on in my main games. Hand reviews that I thought were works of art that showcased high-level thinking were semi-regularly panned by the peanut gallery.
I remember one post in particular where multiple small stakes players were trying to tell me and another winning pro about how bad we were for recommending and explaining a line he took in a medium-stakes live game. We both thought the line was sound both strategically and tactically (although not at all obvious), and all we got were comments like “I wish I was bankrolled for you game… I would clean you out by [insert a strategy that would cause them to be repeatedly violated in those games, even by the “bad” players]”.
I’ve seen similar examples in sports, business, and research.
I think many parts of the HN peanut gallery would probably be well-served by focusing on being more curious and less certain, especially when dealing with people who have been wildly successful in their field of choice.
Note that I’m not saying that 4 is the “right” answer, but I wanted to throw it out there as another possibility.
[1] Inside Baseball is a tv show that goes super deep and super technical into details of baseball-related topics.
I'd agree with this. Those who think at a high level of abstraction often come to conclusions that almost sound like cliche to those who are not: "what the users want", "think counterintuitively", "because smart people cluster," etc. The advices sound hollow, almost like a bad sales pitch. The weight comes from the one giving the advice. It may be an issue of writing technique, but not an issue of credibility.
> We learned that the hard way, in the notorious "batch that broke YC" in the summer of 2012. Up till that point we treated the partners as a pool. When a startup requested office hours, they got the next available slot posted by any partner. That meant every partner had to know every startup. This worked fine up to 60 startups, but when the batch grew to 80, everything broke. The founders probably didn't realize anything was wrong, but the partners were confused and unhappy because halfway through the batch they still didn't know all the companies yet.
I was part of the S12 batch. I certainly knew it was broken a few weeks in. Every week when we had office hours, it was always with a new partner and we spent the entire time getting them up-to-speed on just our background and context.
I was curious to see what companies were part of the S12 batch, and who were the most notable. Among the 80 or so in that group, big winners were Coinbase, Instacart, and Zapier.
Investors generally cash out at IPO, so if IPO price was 5x the real/current value, then that was a very, very profitable deal for the early investors.
YC founders aren't just inspired by one another. They also help one another. That's the happiest thing I've learned about startup founders: how generous they can be in helping one another.
This goes both ways. A few years ago a group reached out to me from HN who wanted to start up in the same sector we're working in. They were a small group of guys from a famous US university who arranged to call me and pick my brains, which I was happy to do for over an hour. I was all like "welcome to the space" and gave them some strategic pointers. I had done online YC and met some of the YC partners and felt these people being from a decent university and engaged with HN should have been, err, of reasonable ethical stature. Later on these people totally blanked me, are presenting my insights freely shared as their own, and have since secured YC funding. I am not worried in the slightest - in fact I can see them struggling and their mistakes are clear to me from afar, but I just wanted to note clearly that there is no code of honour that will not be broken, and this place is not immune.
One of the goto success stories of our generation, Facebook, is based on a university student acting extremely immorally as he stole the idea from people he agreed to build said idea for.
Another related surprise is how bad founders can be at realizing what their problems are. Founders will sometimes come in to talk about some problem, and we'll discover another much bigger one in the course of the conversation
This is also true of undergrads, who often come in to office hours thinking they have one problem, but they in fact have another, or several others. I suspect that mentorship is useful: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-pr... because good mentors often see the non-apparent problems.
Good article, there are still startups out there (some in late stages) choosing mistaken strategies that don't allow them to get or incorporate user feedback.
338 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadMy suggestion for all founders - find a mentor who is a founder & builder.
You don't want VC, you just want growth and the ability to do your startup full-time. Why would someone mentor you in that case? What's the benefit to them?
The learnings:
1. The number of companies of a batch affect how YC should work
2. Bad founders don’t understand what problems they have (or miscalculate its relevance)
3. Founders don’t listen
None of those come from listening to founders. Number 1 not even came from founders, it was an internal realization that didn’t affect founders.
It was kind of interesting to read, just odd due to its title and hook.
I have never been an investor, but I have been a consultant who focused on short-term, strategically important projects for startups. So I got to see a lot of companies, both successful and unsuccessful.
After a while, patterns really do become obvious. When you've seen some winners, and some doomed companies, and some that will just muddle along forever, you start to notice things.
One thing is that when your customer base is truly energized, they'll practically crawl over your desk to write checks. With other companies, you'll need a sales team to push things uphill. But those companies can still win, if the sales department is humming. Other companies have poured their heart into their product, but they've never figured out how to sell it, or even how to talk to customers. (I can fix product problems, but I can't fix teams that don't talk to their customers.)
Sometimes all it takes is a 5 minute phone call with a founder, and you can tell which is which. I've turned down pretty generously funded projects because it was clear that no amount of software would help a particular company connect with its market.
Now, a successful investor has seen far more companies than I ever saw. I imagine the best investors can filter quickly and surprisingly well.
god i wish he'd centre texts
https://stylus-lang.com/
i use "rectangle" for the mac, but there are lots of alternatives on lots of platforms. very nice QOL improvement.
Synergy is a powerful thing.
This is the first time an essay feels like a sale pitch. Specifically, a sale pitch for YC. I’ve read pg’s essay about YC for about 15 years, and this is the first one I have that feeling.
This one is a bit too abstract. I’m getting the idea that YC can help founders tremendously, that their knowledge is specialized and hard to get elsewhere. But I’m eagerly waiting for one concrete example, and none are to be found. Normally I’d expect a real set of examples from startups, instead of the analogy in horror movies. I still remember the essay where pg described how he came up with Jessica the idea of YC, while walking somewhere, explaining very concretely what he thought at the time.
For any other writer or organization, I’d just guess they are trying to “keep their secret recipe”. That is neither pg or YC’s MO.
So yeah, this feels strange.
Well not in essay, but there are plenty examples in the real world, surely?
"Paul Graham gave us a series of advice that changed our business forever." -Brian Chesky, https://archive.is/xvx31
"One big thing that YC did for me is it was an ambition multiplier. Pre-YC I thought it'd be cool to make software that could just pay my bills. A year post-batch and I find my default state is much more ambitious than before." -u/CoffeePython (YC S21), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32556060
"I have to say though - while the success rate of these YC-only funds is likely good enough to make them quite profitable, none of them come even close to what I observed with PG's ability to pick the winners (which makes sense, since a lot of other people have tried to build accelerators and none of them come even close to YC)." -u/aerosimle (YC), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381893
...
They realize that their value is in the people, not the artifacts.
Were you looking for testimonials embedded in the essay to meet your expectations?
Of course, this wouldn't be acceptable as it would turn the piece unmistakably into a sales pitch for his product cementing your suspicions about the nature or motives behind authoring this post, a viewpoint which by the way I don't necessarily share.
This type of reporting that you're specifically looking for is best served with other formats like featured stories or in-depth analyses done by news organization; where they get to interview YC partners, alumni and startup founders, and solicit their opinions and thoughts about their experience with the organization, but even this reporting needs to be balanced and informative otherwise it will be mistaken for an advertorial or, as you guessed, a sales pitch.
It’s true that independent reporting will be more likely to provide a balanced and objective assessment, but at the same time, opinionated articles like the submitted essay are more valuable with the provision of stronger evidence.
Also, it is not even that the essay itself is totally bereft of real world examples to support his thesis, when he actually cited Airbnb as a case of coming around, and applying the practical advice given to the founders by YC to deliver value.
On the second point, what you wrote is true, but the Airbnb mention was pretty short; your comment is probably around the same length as Graham's mention. The Airbnb mention in full consists of: "[4] The Airbnbs were particularly good at listening — partly because they were flexible and disciplined, but also because they'd had such a rough time during the preceding year. They were ready to listen."
I could find no mentions of other named companies involved with YC in the article, and the Airbnb mention was quite brief (the assertion was that they listened to YC's advice, and the implication is that this was the reason behind its success).
2) I totally agree with you that details are scarce and left much to be desired but maybe this narrative is more suitable to other media like books or podcasts where they have the space to expand on points and let us all on the juicy details.
I pretty much would have appreciated to hear the full story on Airbnb struggles in the beginning and how they managed to turn it around.
Agree, this sounded like a Tony Robbins style pitch where you don't get to hear any of the magic until you've paid for the seminar.
The first “sales pitch” I noticed was 10 years ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html (it isn’t a sales pitch for YC, instead it is a sales pitch for founding a startup).
I also suspect you are mistaking his passion for a pitch. I would bet PG is happy to see all startups succeed, whether YC is helping them or not. It isn’t like PG needs to try and succeed with more status and more money. Disclaimer: I don’t know PG and I don’t know similar people that might help me stereotype him correctly.
How we got here: for a while we had been struggling with breaking through on another project that user voice input to measure sentiment for office space.
Last week, we took a step back and thought that having a tool that could allow start-ups to ask opened ended questions where people could just "talk" and what they said is analyzed for sentiment would be valuable. So that's what we're building with OpinionGraphs. IMHO this is directly in the vein of PG's points about learning from users.
With whatever you're building, if you're interested in trying a new way to connect to users or targeted customers along the lines of PG's advice, please dm me or just leave a comment here and I'll reach out.
Over the past year or so I’ve been trying to make sure that my opinions are mindfully and consciously held. I’ve worked on debugging them: I test and evaluate my beliefs when the opportunity arises. I try to make sure I still feel what I think I feel and that I understand what is going on in my head and my heart, and that they act congruently.
For instance, I know now that I dislike many, many things that Amazon has done and how it treats its workers. But I think that the people who worked on my Kindle Oasis have the utmost respect for their users. It makes me somewhat comfortable with the ambivalence that for me goes along with using it. For I surely love my Kindle and I surely am happy to purchase books on the Kindle store while I simultaneously am disgusted by the treatment of factory workers, delivery drivers, software developers, and other real human beings who work for Amazon. I could say the same about my iPhone. Sometimes I think hard about the slave labor that went into the manufacturing of the device that I am typing this message into. Should I stop using it? Maybe so. Maybe not. At the moment, I consciously choose to continue using it. It is quite possible that history will judge me quite harshly for this. But I believe that there is empathy and soul (and blood and inhumanity) in these things.
This morning I had a feeling of revulsion when I saw that pg had written another article and that it was on the front page of one of my favorite websites. I readily see the hypocrisy in this. But as I mentioned at the outset, I wanted to determine if I felt the way I most recently felt about reading his essays. So I read it with as close to an open mind as I could.
I believe that on this subject, pg knows more than I likely ever will. His users are early stage startups and he has clearly identified wide classes of issues and the ability to suss them out in the course of a brief conversation. He is able to envision founder habits changing, and recidivism of said changes. He is able to approach each situation with the mindfulness and presence that it deserves by understanding that as much as these issues fall into buckets, the circumstances surrounding them are unique, and the people involved are individuals. He is able to relate these and understand them in the context of one of the most near and dear things to my heart: cutting edge software development. He is able to see when a founder is incorrectly assessing their own situation, and he is able to guide them to a course correction. He is able to ask the founders key questions that they themselves can evaluate to understand their predicament. He is able to understand their humanity.
And he has built a whole team of partners with this ability.
Going against the grain of my prejudices and my expectations, I thought this was a fine article. I have considerably more respect for YC and pg than I did before I read it. I am more comfortable browsing this site as a result.
I had an engineer-employee-type response to some of Paul’s hackers-and-painters essays (2004), and I still think there is a lot of wrong in some of his cherished opinions[1].
However my colleagues and I founded a company about the same time as ycombinator was founded (2005). I have a lot more respect for his opinions after watching the wild success of YC over the years: he has proven again and again that his opinions are valuable.
That said, I want to quote from the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32917643 : “I never hear pg talk about really any of the downsides or regrets about the startup ecosystem that he helped unleash.” . Paul’s article is a bit rah-rah (making the world better by helping found startups), and it is definitely one-eyed without the balance of what the costs are. I am definitely not arguing against progress, but I would appreciate some humble reflection on the costs to others of that progress.
I admit it is very hard for me to have the self-awareness to know if I am just trying to cut down a tall poppy, or whether I am just knocking down a success, or am I subconsciously railing against somebody due to their well endowed ego.
Regardless, there is a lot to learn from the essay, and I rate the knowledge he has shared as highly valuable (even if the knowledge shared is difficult for me to apply, given that I don’t run an incubator!)
The most unfortunate part is that I think that the quality of comments on HN about this particular essay have been low. I suspect I am adding more low quality comments myself.
[1] Example I disagree with “Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis of the dominance hierarchy” from http://paulgraham.com/smart.html — a couple of jems but mostly hard disagree with his points in that essay. Perhaps he has a different definition of intelligence, but dominance and intelligence are distinct variables (even if correlated). Maybe related to a generic comment about other programmer essay writers “you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.” — https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm — although that trends too far towards psychological diagnosis by comments which is really not productive (and I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end!).
Nonetheless, I couched my language in my original post:
> I believe that on this subject, pg knows more than I likely ever will. His users are early stage startups…
I stand by my original words. I just probably won’t bother reading anything pg writes unless it is on the topic of startups.
This is neat, but isn't actually right. Each partner has to know each startup, which is, yes, O(n2) relationships. But there's no one who needs to do work proportional to the number of partner-startup relationships: each partner only has O(n) startups to keep track of. So probably the reason it blew up was just ordinary linear growth outstripping capacity: 60 startups was an amount most partners could keep track of, and 80 wasn't.
Not that that's necessarily the mechanism, but it's the thing to mention.
If humans evolved to hold about 150 relationships in our minds, to say that an org has a tipping point of 150 people assumes the members of the organization know 0 people outside of the organization. Maybe this is approximately true for Amish communities. It is not close to true for startups doubling in size every year. The available "relationship slots" for your company is probably more like 10-25.
If you want to say "things get weird at about 150+", sure, maybe that's true. But no need to bring up theories that extrapolate primate cranial capacity.
Couldn't you substitute YC for mentorship, coaching, advisement, etc? Or even peers trying to accomplish shared goals/vision?
Surprisingly this article has little to even say about users, but more about YC users (i.e. founders in the program).
I was hoping to read something applicable to how little companies actually talk to users and how practicing zero-distance between them will make you successful regardless of how much money you raise. Instead, this read like an ad for YC.
Consultants are everywhere. Some are bad, some are just a bad fit. But the checks flow in one direction the entire time. YC's schtick seems to be that the checks flow in the other direction at first, when the listening often matters the most.
Basically YC has found a way to profit off of consulting as a value add.
When something unusual happens (every partner needs to keep track of more startups) and the result is unexpectedly more success instead of less, doesn't that suggest that the partners were counterintuitively wrong about feeling wrong?
An experiment might be in order.
There’s really nothing concrete about what he’s learned from users, other than “they have similar problems” (with zero information about what those problems are) and “they’re wrong about what’s important for their businesses” (again with zero details). If anything, this reads like an essay of someone who aggressively DOESN’T listen to his users.
This one probably could have been 50% shorter, which would make it 200% more effective in communicating the message. PG needs an editor :)
https://polarexpress.fandom.com/wiki/Silver_bell
Paul, thank you for inspiring me, your writing helped me in my twenties. Sometimes things were right for a certain period of time and then inevitably become dated as new wisdom and revelations unfold and the landscape changes.
Part of it is that pg's essays are inspiration-porn adjacent, and I think teens and twenties have the highest affinity for such items.
Part of it is that pg used to be able to comment on anything he wanted to in society freely. His followers were all fans and bought into his style of thinking. There were no haters because pg wasn't sufficiently famous for them to score points by dunking on him.
It's a shame he's achieved such silencing status. I wish he could post his deeper thoughts and observations under one or more pen names.
I occasionally bang on about "Million Startups". Some back of the envelope maths and I reckon one could finance a literal million startups with what SoftBank might call a bad year (around 30 billion). When YC started they funded people with 5k per founder.
I am not saying fund the next fusion machine, but put momentum into cities and groups across the globe.
And if what pg says is true (there are few new problems) then guiding those startups must be more feasible then "million" sounds. Yes 60 to 80 is a big leap but 80 to a million is only slightly bigger :-)
Anyway - saying more startups on HN is very much preaching to the choir so Inwill stop now.
I cannot see a way to bring it in without collapsing the economy basically.
Anyone talking about UBI as though it would be a significant income source and fund a "fun" life is an idle dreamer - that will never work.
It will never be that way, it will always be muddied by some conditions. Like income restrictions bonuses based on various protect group clauses and million other details.
When I hear UBI I do not hear "welfare system that is just about enough to get by in cheapest area of the country." That we already have in most of Europe. And what happens is the cheapest area of the country turns into a wasteland where no-one wants to put a business and the local doctors get the worst set of long-term health cases anywhere.
What I hear when I hear UBI is "lets try a new equilibrium to solve the problem of fairness."
And as your friendly neighbourhood Software Socialist, I would like to try and explain, poorly, with barely any context.
We, the people, conceive of a form of Venture Capitalism, called government. We shall, since more or less 1945, invest in our main resource, babies, feeding them, educating them, and providing basic infrastructure such as contract law, and bridges. And they shall achieve great things. They shall find ways to organise space engineers in ways that NASA could not, or start political parties the way legacy parties cannot, and will build new capabilities. And as VCs we shall find a way to exit our investment, ready for new investments. We shall call these exits Taxation.
And we shall use these exits to invest in the new set of babies - and because of the veil of ignorance, we do not know which ones will be the next valuable entrepreneurs so we will invest in them all, equally. Fairly.
Lets see what the back of the envelope figures look like
US Adults- 250M
US GDP - 23 Trillion Dollars (!)
GDP per adult is 92,000 dollars. (The global version of that calculation is ~10,000 dollars)
To me UBI is an expression of democracy. We do not live in 'idiocracy'. We all know on a basic level we need to work to produce. Its just that the choice of where and how and who with to do that work is not a free choice. The choice of who to vote for is (kinda) free. But if we imagine democracy not as 'where do you put your vote' but 'where do you allocate your sliver of the total capital allocation' we get a different, interesting question. Why can I not vote to allocate my capital each day as I go to work? I would vastly prefer to have my capital allocated to the solar energy transition. So would many folks. That is barely a choice on most ballot papers. But it is a choice in the market place.
UBI is somewhere around there.
Today the question is "why do I have to do the shitty work for shitty pay?"
Current but unsatisfactory answers include :
- your parents were not wealthy
- you have not invested 20% of your income over thirty years in the stock market
- you or your parents were not able to invest in real estate
- we really need someone to do the shitty job and have built a social underclass for that reason.
But if we break those traps, the question is "where is my work best allocated". There is a lot to figure out. But the current system is unlikely to be what we need to cut our current gordian knot
I suspect UBI would have similar but wider reaching results.
The difference between Paul and Robert is that Paul is up-front about this while Robert is cagey and deceptive and makes his money by stringing people along thinking that The Answer can be found by buying one more of his books. But I think a lot of the hate here is driven by disappointment that Paul is honest, and that his answer is that there is no Answer. It can be frustrating to hear that (which is also something that Paul explicitly points out).
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[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680...
[2] http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
[3] http://paulgraham.com/before.html
Rather, this is an essay about what was surprising to him about startups in YC. And I think it's fair to say that these were all surprising, and I wouldn't have inferred them if someone told me about YC as an idea back in 2005.
Or put in another way, if someone came to you and told you about the idea for creating YC back in 2005, when the only model of investing in startups was how large institutional VCs and angels invested in startups, would you have been able to tell them the following insights about how it would work and what the value add of the advice is? Remember, when YC started, lots of people thought 7% for $15k (I know they give more now) was a joke.
Is this even possible or useful? I mean there are obvious things but they're so obvious and generalized as to be seemingly useless when you are at a serious stage in starting a company. It kind of reminds me of when people talking about something being "priced in" in the market as a related concept.
Which he has written about before: http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
My first impression was that the title was somewhat vague, but it was actually just very literal. This is what PG himself has learned from his users, not an essay on how to learn from users or how to build a successful startup.
Going back to the initial set up of the piece, he was trying to help startups get into YC. Basically he was helping them sell themselves to YC, by having them answer “explain what you learned from users”
If it’s any effective at all, then by answering this question, you can make your startup very compelling to YC. Would it work? One way to judge that is to apply it to what he knows (YC) and see if it’s appealing to startups both now and back in 2005.
So the complaint about how this piece feels sales-y is missing the forest for the trees, because that’s the point of the exercise!
By the very nature of the intent of the question, of course it’s going to sound like a sales pitch for YC. That’s the whole purpose of the exercise to begin with. It’s a question, when answered, begates a sales pitch for getting into YC.
I agree, I also think this is the message that YC sells to founders. You are giving up a lot of equity for access/membership to an organization that will make you successful (Im clearly summarizing a bit). It's a bit of a MLM scheme (not that they are ripping you off) but if you get into the club the other members will help you be successful and, then it will repeat every batch constantly filling the pool with new members and the network continues to grow. And it works for the most part, so do MLMs for the most part. Most companies in the US, if successful are around for about 20 years, extremely successful maybe 40, the few rare last longer. YC is getting to the 20 year mark and maybe some of the rough edges are starting to show, cracks in the foundation as the original people that powered the machine start to move on.
Indirectly, YC quite possibly are ripping most founders off financially, even though the average company return is high (power-law — few winners and many losers[1]). It is hard to find good figures, because we have reliable dollar estimates for the companies that win, but a paucity of information about the founders that lose, or what individual founders made[2].
When YC only selects the best 1 of ## applicants, it is hard to remove selection bias from any later analyses of returns for founders.
Value and opportunity-cost are messy, so measuring the returns for “loser” founders is really difficult. I am unsure if founders’ own self-assessment would be trustworthy information.
Here is an analysis from 2014 on YC founder returns: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-much-do-y-combinator-foun...
I would expect early employees to have worse odds of good payouts.
[1] startup valuations tend to fall along a steep power law curve and YC startups fall along one nearly perfectly: https://medium.com/swlh/on-300b-of-y-combinator-startup-succ...
[2] company returns are easier to find than individual founder returns.
I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer, but to identify who's lying about it. With those sorts of volumes of money you're going to attract fraud, and fraud can quickly break "throwing darts at a board" as a selection strategy.
If you can just select for people who are earnest and aren't lying to themselves too energetically, you can call it a day.
“Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.”
― André Gide
They are not wrong 90% of the time. They place correct bets on correct companies, 90% of which will fail. This does not make them wrong, it makes them excellent gamblers. If I'm getting 100:1 odds to roll snake-eyes (two 1's), that's a great bet, and a correct one, and I am not wrong to take it, even though I'll lose money the vast majority of the time.
But even more generally outside of the YC-model VCs compete on their networks and influence as well. The more connected you are, the better you'll do - it's a feedback loop.[0]
Look at the evolution of VC companies. If the skill was just "making correct bets" wouldn't that look like making fewer, but likely larger, bets over time? You grow, on the other hand, if you have some significant influence on the odds or can't tell the odds between companies you select that well. If "success" is 1/10 odds, and "phenomenal success" is 1/100, and you don't think that you are capable of digging deeper to instead find just the ones with 1/20 phenomenal odds, you have a better shot of huge returns if you place 100 bets instead of 10. Then you get more knock-on influence of having a bigger network over time, too!
Of course, trying to control the odds is a classic old gambler move too, but if you're caught doing it in a casino "excellent gambler" may not be the label they apply to you.
[0] to a certain type of tech enthusiast, the huge political aspects here are very frustrating.
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the bottom?
Isn't that true for most people? I mean "from their own view". We all tend to assume that we're right more often than not, no?
That is not what that phrase means.
It means someone thinks they're _better_ than everyone else. It's a lack of humility. It's arrogance.
It's the aristocracy looking down on its citizens. It's the software developer looking down on the men who pick up their garbage.
It is not simply about thinking you're right most of the time.
It is good to be skeptical, I but I would counsel anyone to avoid becoming deeply cynical and missing out on the value because you don’t like the messenger. I learn as much from arseholes like Thiel, as I do from Paul Graham who appears to me that he is one of the good guys (disclaimer: I haven’t met Paul, & I disagree strongly with some of his theses).
Rich Dad Poor Dad is a very worthwhile book IMHO - it costs you a few dollars and a few hours. I read it and later became a moderately successful founder. I think that book had some positive influence on that success: my guess is that I got high $10’s of thousands value for $10’s of input. In particular the idea of designing a money machine, versus selling hours for dollars. Good knowledge is like that: you can get 1000x return or more. Of course that is offset by the other shit I have read that didn’t give good return ($0 return is OK, highly negative returns from crap knowledge is the real risk).
This link summarises some of the value of the book: https://sergioschuler.com/rich-dad-poor-dad-tl-dr-version-3e... (edits: minor improves).
The only weak spot I could find was "It took me a long time to figure out why founders don't listen."
I think sometimes their advice is packaged in a data backed, falsifiable way. For example, JL's: "I don't know of a single case of a startup that felt they spent too much time talking to users".
But sometimes it's just "Because I said so".
In the latter case it would be better if they showed their CSV backing their advice, or took the time to reformulate into a testable, falsifiable piece of wisdom.
1) The quantity and quality of new ideas in PG's essays is declining.
2) Readers' expectations of quality in PG's essays is increasing.
3) The pool of disenfranchised readers is growing.
The quantity and quality of new ideas is decreasing because PG naturally wrote down his best ideas a long time ago.
Readers' expectations increases because YC's power and influence grows.
And, the pool of disenfranchised readers grows as more people try to join YC's ranks unsuccessfully.
I feel badly about this because anyone who has interacted with PG irl knows he's as kind-hearted as people come. But, then again, I get the sense this doesn't bother him too much .
Irrelevant even if it is true.
It's hard to tell if there is just enough commenters on HN that dislike PG or if tech folks in general actually have decided to dislike PG.
Regardless, almost every single public figure reputation takes a downturn given enough time. PG is no exception.
While Giannis was the two time NBA MVP and seems relatively universally loved... Many actual basketball fans hate him al la, "I wish I was 7 feet tall and could just dunk every time" - James Harden, and he has not been famous for all that long. He was mvp in 1029. Before that he wasnt really all that well known outside of basketball.
He is 27. He hasnt been famous since he was 17. Maybe since he was 25. Give him a few years. It's almost certain that he has some controversy over the next ten years or he fades into obscurity due to injury, see Greg Oden.
Back in the Hackers & Painters days, it seemed like he was writing about a wide variety of topics. Startups were among the things he wrote about, but it wasn't exclusively about them. There were things about management styles, programming languages, even why nerds are not popular in high school.
At some point, I think around the time YC started to become really successful, that changed, and pg started to write basically exclusively about startups. I can understand why, but his essays have been a lot less interesting ever since.
pg actually reminds me of Eliyahu Goldratt, who developed the "theory of constraints"("TOC"). Dr Goldratt was a physicist who then tried to apply the logical problem-solving approach from physics to business problems initially, but whose work has been also used for interpersonal conflict resolution [1]. I get the same vibe from pg's essays, just trying to apply the same critical thinking skills to new areas from first principles, and just trying to see where it leads regardless of what the "established" wisdom is.
If anyone is interested in learning more, most people start by reading "The Goal", which is application of TOC to manufacturing, but if you're interested in how to think about how to apply new technology to existing human systems in a way that actually brings benefits, "beyond the goal" by goldratt is an audiobook that you should really listen to.
Fyi I have no financial interest in TOC :) But if anyone is interested in discussing how TOC thinking might apply to the problems startups face, I'd love to chat, please get in touch! (Contact info in profile)
[1] https://www.tocforeducation.com/yanibook.html
I like that it is more evidence-based and thought out. However I think applying this is challenging - for the same reason as scrum - because methodologies like this require leaders to let go of their control-ego and trust the system. And systems like TOC which require a lot of thinking, understanding and are easily corrupted by misunderstanding it are fragile to the reality of a hierarchical team structure where the bosses personality can dominate processes more than the process. As such I believe (may not be true) that taking good principles from TOC would be better.
I have seen TOC tried to be applied in a software job and it turned into the typical "JIRA-style" nightmare of estimations, pressure, short term thinking and so on. I don't think that is what TOC is about, but what it can end up with when it hits the ground. SCRUM has the same issues of course. Because these methodologies are not meant to be an al a carte menu of options, where the ones that make the bosses eyes light up are chosen. But they are complete systems. Like it might be fun to only do bench presses at the gym and nothing else, and still eat badly, but that won't work - you need to do the whole regime!
That is why in reality I prefer systems that can be offered al-a-carte. Maybe TOC can be I am not an expert and haven't read the book. But I like for example if someone comes to lead a team and sees how things are done and slowly tweaks things towards a long term goal. For example come in and get people work as a team not individually so that work is delivered sooner and there is less WIP.
A bit rambly but those are my thoughts!
4. PG is thinking about YC at a high level of abstraction (e.g., making it a productive place for thinkers and makers like Xerox PARC was) while also having Inside Baseball-level knowledge [1] of YC strategy and tactics (both successes and failures) in ways that most people don’t understand well and don’t really appreciate.
Based on my personal experience and on the experiences of people I know well, most people are fundamentally perceiving the challenges of elite performers vastly different than those elite performers do.
As a simple example in my personal life, I was once a top tier online poker player. Trying to talk about hand histories with lower stakes players, even if they were winners, was an exercise in futility. The things that they had to focus on in their main games was very different what I had to focus on in my main games. Hand reviews that I thought were works of art that showcased high-level thinking were semi-regularly panned by the peanut gallery.
I remember one post in particular where multiple small stakes players were trying to tell me and another winning pro about how bad we were for recommending and explaining a line he took in a medium-stakes live game. We both thought the line was sound both strategically and tactically (although not at all obvious), and all we got were comments like “I wish I was bankrolled for you game… I would clean you out by [insert a strategy that would cause them to be repeatedly violated in those games, even by the “bad” players]”.
I’ve seen similar examples in sports, business, and research.
I think many parts of the HN peanut gallery would probably be well-served by focusing on being more curious and less certain, especially when dealing with people who have been wildly successful in their field of choice.
Note that I’m not saying that 4 is the “right” answer, but I wanted to throw it out there as another possibility.
[1] Inside Baseball is a tv show that goes super deep and super technical into details of baseball-related topics.
I was part of the S12 batch. I certainly knew it was broken a few weeks in. Every week when we had office hours, it was always with a new partner and we spent the entire time getting them up-to-speed on just our background and context.
Still loved the experience and would do YC again.
https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/yc-demo-day-s12/
This goes both ways. A few years ago a group reached out to me from HN who wanted to start up in the same sector we're working in. They were a small group of guys from a famous US university who arranged to call me and pick my brains, which I was happy to do for over an hour. I was all like "welcome to the space" and gave them some strategic pointers. I had done online YC and met some of the YC partners and felt these people being from a decent university and engaged with HN should have been, err, of reasonable ethical stature. Later on these people totally blanked me, are presenting my insights freely shared as their own, and have since secured YC funding. I am not worried in the slightest - in fact I can see them struggling and their mistakes are clear to me from afar, but I just wanted to note clearly that there is no code of honour that will not be broken, and this place is not immune.
This is also true of undergrads, who often come in to office hours thinking they have one problem, but they in fact have another, or several others. I suspect that mentorship is useful: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-pr... because good mentors often see the non-apparent problems.