> There's a variant of going full stack where you eat your way gradually through the customer by doing all their hardest work for them.
One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack.
One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.
In my experience it depends on the nature of that client. A drawback to having a dominant client is that they have a lot more leverage in roadmap, prioritisation, and product fit. That can seriously impact the internal coherence and maintainability of the product. Too many bits of business logic lodges in weird places because the client didn't want to write custom behaviours, and no time to tidy it up because they're always demanding their next wishlist feature to be deployed yesterday.
Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd.
Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify.
It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
Here is an article on this topic, which comes to a mixed conclusion.
"The article suggests that more musicians rather than fewer might now be able to earn money from recorded music than in preceding recorded-music systems. But it also proposes that the current system retains the striking inequalities and generally poor working conditions that characterised its predecessors, and that better debate requires greater transparency about usage and payment on the part of streaming services and music businesses."
Here's an article about Germany, which claims streaming is not worse
"However, the current streaming-dominated music market does not fundamentally perform worse compared to the former CD market: in 2023, more than twice as many music creators earned revenues above the basic tax-free allowance compared to 2002."
Maybe you don't remember how bad it was. They weren't giving $500k of $1000k, they were giving $500k of $100k, ending in massive debt that could only be resolved by making more music for the same label (they wouldn't collect it as long as the revenue was still coming in), sometimes eventually breaking even but usually ending up in some kind of bankruptcy. Of course the record label would charge you another $500k for your next song that would make $100k of repayment on the first debt. I'm probably exaggerating the 5:1 difference but it was really really bad, and you'd have to pay the massive fixed fee even if nobody ended up liking your song, which isn't how Spotify works.
Given the impact some YC startups are having on society at large I think a better question than "How" is "Why". Do we really want Flock to become even more powerful?
Even in the cases where the answer is "yes"; I believe that working backwards from the why could provide a more elegant path to accomplishing said goal.
I’m glad there’s a lot of people commenting negatively below to PGs modus operandi (rationalizing maximum greed in seemingly thoughtful measured essays that make him seem like a kindly philosopher instead or digital robber barron)
Like Ayn Rand, and PT Barnum before them VCs and Tech Bros will be looked at with great hostility in next years as having destroyed society with their brand of hyper-capitalism all in the name of “disruption”
A part that rubs people wrong is that they have no choice and competition doesnt exist outside the vc ecosystem. VC can subsidize a non profitable model for a decade often with an ipo that isnt profitable for another decade of net zero value creation. It isnt capitalism.
It is a pay to play game where if you are not in the club, you have little chance of playing let alone winning.
The cherry on top is the culture of cheating, lying, stealing, and all kinds of other “disruptive” tactics is actively encouraged and cheered on. This is while claiming to be altruistic too.
The public is growing a strong deep hatred of sv, whose only response seems to be calling everyone poor and laughing. It is sad, because I still think technology is a force for good.
I think he specifically speaks against maximum greed here? "create more value than you capture", "have the best product", "Being generous makes you more powerful" etc.
I think its a wolf in sheep's wording - PG is a master of reasonableness to amplfiy greed behind nice sounding words -
Meanwhile he moves his family to England and Europe to take advantage of small town life, more govt protection less screen time for his kids etc
Its all about extracting every ounce of profitability in any situation not about caring for employees, customers etc with the expectation that trickle down disruption will benefit society
We’ve had 20 years of this in the us -are we better off?
I am not surprised that Silicon Valley researchers say they cannot solve the alignment problem... Here the leading voice in the region publishes an article about how to be more powerful without any other mention of alignment but "users".
For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?
How do we prove alignment? Often times, large regulatory bodies. Who supports that? Does the regulatory body actually have enough power to enforce those standards? (Hint: look at modern America). That's an example of power questions sneaking in even when you didn't want to.
Even "mere Darwinism" is less extreme because it pretends like there is some objective criterion called natural selection that will filter out bad candidates, when it's often the case that the bad candidates are the ones that weren't proactive to define the selection process themselves. Sitting back and optimizing for an externally imposed standard is worse than being able to impose said standard yourself.
(If this point was complicated - my point is that yes, Darwinism makes sense, but when applying it, you can get a mis-skewed definition of what "natural selection" really entails. I am calling out that caveat).
Of course, my hope is that that isn't the end all, be all solution. Philosophy doesn't end with Nietzche, hopefully. But the world does sure looks bleak right now...
For example, if you opt in, we'll tell you how you're doing compared to other users. The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others.
The vanilla one? Is this the pg Malcolm Gladwell arc, where he's retelling some real concept but warped by misunderstanding to the point of incoherence? Who's getting hobbled running on "vanilla models", do we have examples?
If it won't make the model worse when you opt out, then you have to find a way to make sure it makes the model worse, so they'll opt in.
It's like how LG TVs make you consent to recording and uploading everything you say in the vicinity, or else you can't have voice commands, which they explain is because it would be illegal to analyze sound inputs for the voice commands without that consent. It's not true, of course, but it sounds true and it makes you want to consent.
I read the article and kept wondering what the author is trying to convey. It reads like a checklist compiled into an essay with no wisdom nor rationale baked into it. mostly vague and generic -- like a human transform applied to an llm output.
> There are a lot of different variants of this question, depending on the type of company. Is there a way to transform the company from a mere component supplier into the one that owns the relationship with the customer? Or the related question: is there a way to make the money flow through it? It's always good when money flows through you
PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore.
For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.
I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible. The cliche advice for years was that if your first shipping MVP wasn’t embarrassing in some way, you probably weren’t shipping fast enough.
That led to a long period where startups were shipping things that barely worked and would fall apart if you deviated from the happy path at all.
Companies and consumers alike got tired of paying to be alpha testers and do market research for startups. It was really bad when you’d start using a startup product, spend a lot of time working with them to identify bugs, and then they would pivot to some other idea they had.
> I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible.
Nope. They did, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that VCs moved way too much in the direction of "take over the world or go home" and don't allow companies that take investment to be just successful anymore.
The only ones I've seen are AI grifters (not even useful AI) and Polymarket/Kalshi, which makes me cynical; although I've seen some decent startups that are small (i.e. non-powerful) but nonetheless profitable.
Isn't Anthropic and OpenAI still startups? Even though they have big revenue, their business model isn't proved yet and there is a big chance they gonna fail and so most of the AI startups.
We really need a change in mindset around what success means. Concentration of power, concentration of resources, concentration of market share are some measures of success. Out competing your rivals until you grind them into dust is some measure of success. This is the Peter Thiel and Bezos and to a large extent the ycombinator and PG philosophy of success. It's dressed up as "just innovation bro" whereas the truth is, innovation in a rapidly increasing technological society is certainly both broadly useful to everyone, but also, left unchecked, just a tool to be successful in ways that are, sometimes extremely, detrimental to society as a whole. "Disruption and Innovation" could go well past the lines that AirBnb and Uber crossed and achieve a lot more success.
Just on PG as a persona, I was never a fan or non fan I've barely read his blogposts and only know of him incidentally from knowing this forum, but on the general area of "thought leaders" and the increasingly asymmetry one-to-many relationships we have been getting used to for decades I came across this very interesting and well put together video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU , give it 5 minutes if you do decide to watch it its a bit of a slow burn.
I realize posting youtube videos that appear to be about 'creator beefs' at first glance may be considered low brow content for all the Jane Street or Palantir aspiring employees around here but such is life, you can lead a horse and all that. The world is made up of a bigger bubble than you are in but its still just a larger bubble with a lot of symmetries
> We really need a change in mindset around what success means.
How?
Wealth and power is all that society obsesses about and there's an endless list of suckers for people that appear to be wealthy or powerful. Hell, even this board is filled with rat races spamming how to climb the pyramid in companies I vomit just thinking about "oh, this is how I got promoted to L17 from L16" or bs like that.
Nobody's getting interviewed and hailed for saving the most lives in an Indian hospital or risking its life reporting in Gaza under constant Israeli bombs and shooting.
But sure there's endless content of how this or that startupper created yet another unicorn with some pointless B2B saas.
People want to hear and reflect and empathize with winners who have all, not with the "real" heroes impacting the world positively through sacrifice and pain.
It doesn't need need to be tied to some mystical god, "music is my religion" is a phrase that has been used and is understood easily, and you can replace music with many other nouns, games, science, family, dog grooming, whatever.
You can kind of see this in the rise of weird internet cults around celebrities and obviously many IRL cults over the years, and I don't know if the frequency of weird cults has increased in the last 3 decades but I would take wild guess and say it has.
"Make religions cool again" is a bit of a hard sell considering worldwide events but unless we can come up with a better word for a shared value system where people sacrifice things they can gain, for the good of the group, I don't think there is a stronger word.
This is only true in America. American culture has become one where your worth as a person is based on money. If someone has alot of money, they must be better, smarter, etc, than everyone else who has less.
I dont think this holds as strongly in other countries. Other countries do not have the religious like worship of money that is the usa. Having a Phd is seen as higher status than making millions on legal scamming.
My Indian coworkers talk more about people in their country helping other than who is richest in India where the us folks talk about nothing but stonks and what car they will buy next.
You really think China and India are full of people who want to do good for society instead of wishing to get rich at any cost? I think their human rights record and treatment of the less privileged point at a very different direction.
"cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape.
i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management."
Is open source still viable these days for a business model that relies on a single large customer and anyone else that also happens to need that solution?
I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his issues changed. It's tempted to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed.
Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.
I would hazard a guess that the people attending a YC event (!) to watch Sam Altman (!) talk with Garry Tan (!) would regard Paul Graham well irrespective of how the rest of the world sees him.
I think that's their point. HN used to be a much smaller community, centered around YC -- similar to the audience for that talk. Now it's a much broader cross-section of tech and society as a whole.
> Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed.
I don't think that a change in the composition of HN users is sufficient to explain it. To start with, a lot of the original user base which came over from main Reddit and /r/programming still seems to be active here.
I think people have now become extremely wary of VC, startup and Silicon Valley because at some point there was a boiling frog shift from helping people and enabling new things to viciously eating anyone not participating.
What's wrong with Coinbase? Sure they're in the crypto realm, but it's not like they're actively damaging the ecosystem. Coinbase has been far more reserved than Binance or the n number of crypto exchanges outside the US.
In this tweet he appears to support the racist POS who "outed" Jason Arday:
> "How should universities respond to the Arday scandal? Should they crack down on plagiarism and academic fraud? Ghent University's response, apparently, will be to fire the person who reported it."
This is an incredibly shitty thing to say. Nathan Cofnas is a proponent of "scientific racism" who thinks human races 1/ exist and 2/ have very different intellectual capabilities. (Unsurprisingly, his own "race" is at the top of this hierarchy.) He was fired from Ghent not because of the "Arday scandal", but because of his theories. This was the second time he was fired from a university. (He had previously been fired from Cambridge.)
People rushing to his defense can only do so for one of two reasons: they have a knee-jerk feeling that he's right and his victim is wrong, and are too lazy to research the facts, or they truly agree with his ideas on a fundamental level.
According the the University it was for "Ghent University is shocked by the death of Professor Arday....recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter"[1] and as discussed on that page he was not fired (yet?) but was "imposed a disciplinary measure on a member of its research staff for a period of three months. A preliminary inquiry is also under way to determine if further disciplinary action is warranted."
So perhaps you appear to the one "too lazy to research the facts"?
If I remember correctly, Paul talked a lot about things that are ‘unsayable’ but his support for those going further than he was prepared to suggested at the things that he would to be able to say without losing status or power
Yes, he wrote a whole essay about it, in which he says:
> What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for. (...) The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
What are those statements that "might be true"? It's hard to come up with better candidates than Cofnas' theories.
(As an aside, Graham likes to talk a lot about Galileo (in this essay and many others); he makes him a hero of truth. But Galileo didn't get into trouble because of his theories! But because of his attitude. He would ridicule the papacy, in writing, repeatedly. What you couldn't say wasn't that the earth moved, but that the Pope was a clown.)
> But all these strategies for making startups more powerful have one thing in common — or more precisely, have to obey one constraint. They all have to make things better for the customer. You can't add network effects or make the money flow through you or go full stack just because you'd like to. You can only do these things when the result is better for the customer. Otherwise you won't have any uptake.
Good thing we have venture capital to alleviate that constraint by enabling selling a dollar for 50 cents and just giving them away in the beginning!
It's almost as if they go hey, if we give away dollars for nothing, then for 50 cents and then when we're the only ones left, start giving dollars away for 5 bucks - we could make a killing!
It's almost as if that's the entire venture capital industry that Paul Graham writes so poetically about 'improving' the world.
Paul Graham's 'logic' is how you arrive at people like Mr Beast, onlyfans, gambling and vape pens. Just making life better for the customers guys!
Playing for the long game is good. But that sentence is too lossy to decipher the meaning unless you know what it means.
Instead of making the company more powerful, I would recommend making the company more aligned with truth and the real world which has a nice side effect of being resilient.
Add to that, preparing for scale.
We have dedicated an entire year for nothing but architecture, correctness, distributedness and scaling.
The economic perspective of the same would be reducing the cost of software development (not in the LLM massive code generation way but the opposite with architecture).
Its been 5 years since we have been building Slyp and SlypBusiness along with the plethora of technologies around it.
I don't know whether we are powerful as per the author's definition but we are damn resilient.
The comments here are taking a very uncharitable definition of “power”. If I take that definition I can see how people are being so negative. But just a slightly more positive definition and this all seems like reasonable dialogue to have with an early stage startup.
In India we have company that enable gig workers - maids, drivers, beauticians, fixing aircons etc. Company charges so much that people try to cut way from the aggregator. Instead a fixed number and vision to reduce that further would these companies much bigger.
> Being generous makes you more powerful. As Tim O'Reilly said, you should create more value than you capture. Many hard-headed business types would write this off as idealistic hippy stuff, but in fact this is the route to becoming really rich.
> Hired CEOS take the power of the companies they run for granted, whereas founders remember the days when the company was so weak that it had to delight users to survive.
I've always instinctively followed the generosity path, and have experienced that when customers are delighted and that when frictions are removed (or not added in the first place), good things will follow.
However, I have not always been able to convince others to trust in and follow this path. Can anyone offer any advice or experiences on talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?
before the pandemic hit and most of the world was quarantined, we decided to give loom away to students and teachers for free and made the service 50% off indefinitely. this was generous but also strategic. we made the simple deduction that, should people be locked inside, they would naturally see their sons/daughters using loom as students. or their spouse or roommates as teacher/staff.
This depends on what you are building and what your goals are. What pg is referring to is how to build transformative companies, unicorns if you will.
There's plenty of businesses where you are simply optimizing a funnel, and driving more revenue at all costs is fully aligned with the goals of the company
I'm nearly always building early stage companies, where even the dev and operational overhead of charging for some added extra is not guaranteed to be paid for by the money collected.
My sense is that it's context dependent. If you've got VC backing (or could soon) and are making deals in SF, the generosity path makes a lot of sense. Limited downside, infinite upside. You can afford generosity.
If you're starting with $2000 and bootstrapping a textiles business out of Kolkata, it's a terrible idea, you're likely going to immediately get burned and never recover.
(take with a grain of salt as I have no experience, just stating my observations)
Generosity is not "giving stuff away for free when it hurts you badly to do so." Neither the giver nor the receiver are comfortable when generosity hurts the giver, and dignity may be compromised as well. Generosity that is disrespectful of comfort and dignity is worth very little.
A company with $2000 in its first few days need not give away $1000 to act generously.
> Can anyone offer any advice or experiences on talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?
Yes. Lend them many more pennies, removing the necessity for short-term profit taking and allowing them to run at a loss until they decimate the competition, capture the market and then start raising prices to the point that they are more profitable than had they taken the short-sighted approach.
As a startup with deep pockets, you think you can afford to be generous, without realising it is made possible due to borrowed time and money. When the bills come due, generosity ends and enshittification onsets.
People are more sympathetic to pg retaining a sense of purpose (than Terry Tao) because they rightfully imagine that's it's easy to obtain the virtues that he has (the generosity, the optimism, the agency,the lack of worry, the curiosity, the faith in all sorts of humanity)
> always instinctively followed the generosity path
> experienced that when customers are delighted and that when frictions are removed
Charlie Munger:
When other companies find ways to save money, they turn it into profit. [Costco] passes it on to customers. It’s almost a religious duty. [They] sacrifice short-term profits for long-term success”.
> talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?
I'd say this is a wrong framing. It isn't the people; it is the systems & environs they are in, the incentives they operate under.
Economists have a term they call "willingness-to-pay", using which some business might optimize for "consumer surplus" (low price), some for "producer surplus" (high margin).
Exactly what I came to say. This 100% is hippy dippy head in the clouds stuff. Sure if your product is 100% digital you can "be generous" in so far as it costs you nothing. Real products, real services. Hell no. You will get robbed blind if you give people too much slack or come off as willing to easily pay out.
Never be generous with the product itself. In consulting, the product is your time - you can't give that away. In textiles the product is the physical textiles - you can't give that away. In tech start-ups the product is a growing userbase - you can't give that away.
Who ever wants to manipulate the user using their PII and associated metadata - Retail, Marketers, Political and Security Apparatus... the world is your dystopian oyster in that regard.
You should read the essay. It is mostly about pivoting towards an outsized outcomes for founders & leveraging various avenues available to their advantage.
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[ 401 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadOne of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack.
One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.
Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify.
It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
"The article suggests that more musicians rather than fewer might now be able to earn money from recorded music than in preceding recorded-music systems. But it also proposes that the current system retains the striking inequalities and generally poor working conditions that characterised its predecessors, and that better debate requires greater transparency about usage and payment on the part of streaming services and music businesses."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820953541
Here's an article about Germany, which claims streaming is not worse
"However, the current streaming-dominated music market does not fundamentally perform worse compared to the former CD market: in 2023, more than twice as many music creators earned revenues above the basic tax-free allowance compared to 2002."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5474735
Even in the cases where the answer is "yes"; I believe that working backwards from the why could provide a more elegant path to accomplishing said goal.
Like Ayn Rand, and PT Barnum before them VCs and Tech Bros will be looked at with great hostility in next years as having destroyed society with their brand of hyper-capitalism all in the name of “disruption”
It is a pay to play game where if you are not in the club, you have little chance of playing let alone winning.
The cherry on top is the culture of cheating, lying, stealing, and all kinds of other “disruptive” tactics is actively encouraged and cheered on. This is while claiming to be altruistic too.
The public is growing a strong deep hatred of sv, whose only response seems to be calling everyone poor and laughing. It is sad, because I still think technology is a force for good.
Meanwhile he moves his family to England and Europe to take advantage of small town life, more govt protection less screen time for his kids etc
Its all about extracting every ounce of profitability in any situation not about caring for employees, customers etc with the expectation that trickle down disruption will benefit society
We’ve had 20 years of this in the us -are we better off?
For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?
How do we prove alignment? Often times, large regulatory bodies. Who supports that? Does the regulatory body actually have enough power to enforce those standards? (Hint: look at modern America). That's an example of power questions sneaking in even when you didn't want to.
Even "mere Darwinism" is less extreme because it pretends like there is some objective criterion called natural selection that will filter out bad candidates, when it's often the case that the bad candidates are the ones that weren't proactive to define the selection process themselves. Sitting back and optimizing for an externally imposed standard is worse than being able to impose said standard yourself.
(If this point was complicated - my point is that yes, Darwinism makes sense, but when applying it, you can get a mis-skewed definition of what "natural selection" really entails. I am calling out that caveat).
Of course, my hope is that that isn't the end all, be all solution. Philosophy doesn't end with Nietzche, hopefully. But the world does sure looks bleak right now...
The vanilla one? Is this the pg Malcolm Gladwell arc, where he's retelling some real concept but warped by misunderstanding to the point of incoherence? Who's getting hobbled running on "vanilla models", do we have examples?
It's like how LG TVs make you consent to recording and uploading everything you say in the vicinity, or else you can't have voice commands, which they explain is because it would be illegal to analyze sound inputs for the voice commands without that consent. It's not true, of course, but it sounds true and it makes you want to consent.
Ah yes, more companies rent seeking, thanks pg.
For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.
That led to a long period where startups were shipping things that barely worked and would fall apart if you deviated from the happy path at all.
Companies and consumers alike got tired of paying to be alpha testers and do market research for startups. It was really bad when you’d start using a startup product, spend a lot of time working with them to identify bugs, and then they would pivot to some other idea they had.
Nope. They did, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that VCs moved way too much in the direction of "take over the world or go home" and don't allow companies that take investment to be just successful anymore.
The only ones I've seen are AI grifters (not even useful AI) and Polymarket/Kalshi, which makes me cynical; although I've seen some decent startups that are small (i.e. non-powerful) but nonetheless profitable.
Anthropic launched only 5, but was built from connections to OpenAI
seems to be doing well (https://x.com/paulg/status/2095997934584160647)
Just on PG as a persona, I was never a fan or non fan I've barely read his blogposts and only know of him incidentally from knowing this forum, but on the general area of "thought leaders" and the increasingly asymmetry one-to-many relationships we have been getting used to for decades I came across this very interesting and well put together video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU , give it 5 minutes if you do decide to watch it its a bit of a slow burn.
How?
Wealth and power is all that society obsesses about and there's an endless list of suckers for people that appear to be wealthy or powerful. Hell, even this board is filled with rat races spamming how to climb the pyramid in companies I vomit just thinking about "oh, this is how I got promoted to L17 from L16" or bs like that.
Nobody's getting interviewed and hailed for saving the most lives in an Indian hospital or risking its life reporting in Gaza under constant Israeli bombs and shooting.
But sure there's endless content of how this or that startupper created yet another unicorn with some pointless B2B saas.
People want to hear and reflect and empathize with winners who have all, not with the "real" heroes impacting the world positively through sacrifice and pain.
It doesn't need need to be tied to some mystical god, "music is my religion" is a phrase that has been used and is understood easily, and you can replace music with many other nouns, games, science, family, dog grooming, whatever.
You can kind of see this in the rise of weird internet cults around celebrities and obviously many IRL cults over the years, and I don't know if the frequency of weird cults has increased in the last 3 decades but I would take wild guess and say it has.
"Make religions cool again" is a bit of a hard sell considering worldwide events but unless we can come up with a better word for a shared value system where people sacrifice things they can gain, for the good of the group, I don't think there is a stronger word.
I dont think this holds as strongly in other countries. Other countries do not have the religious like worship of money that is the usa. Having a Phd is seen as higher status than making millions on legal scamming.
My Indian coworkers talk more about people in their country helping other than who is richest in India where the us folks talk about nothing but stonks and what car they will buy next.
Maybe asian cultures are different.
i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management."
-- https://web.archive.org/web/20260615024403/https://alphavill...
https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38
Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.
I don't think that a change in the composition of HN users is sufficient to explain it. To start with, a lot of the original user base which came over from main Reddit and /r/programming still seems to be active here.
> "How should universities respond to the Arday scandal? Should they crack down on plagiarism and academic fraud? Ghent University's response, apparently, will be to fire the person who reported it."
https://x.com/paulg/status/2090439693334937963
This is an incredibly shitty thing to say. Nathan Cofnas is a proponent of "scientific racism" who thinks human races 1/ exist and 2/ have very different intellectual capabilities. (Unsurprisingly, his own "race" is at the top of this hierarchy.) He was fired from Ghent not because of the "Arday scandal", but because of his theories. This was the second time he was fired from a university. (He had previously been fired from Cambridge.)
People rushing to his defense can only do so for one of two reasons: they have a knee-jerk feeling that he's right and his victim is wrong, and are too lazy to research the facts, or they truly agree with his ideas on a fundamental level.
Both options are very, very bad.
So perhaps you appear to the one "too lazy to research the facts"?
[1]https://www.ugent.be/en/news-events/updates-case-postdoctora...
> What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for. (...) The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
https://paulgraham.com/say.html
What are those statements that "might be true"? It's hard to come up with better candidates than Cofnas' theories.
(As an aside, Graham likes to talk a lot about Galileo (in this essay and many others); he makes him a hero of truth. But Galileo didn't get into trouble because of his theories! But because of his attitude. He would ridicule the papacy, in writing, repeatedly. What you couldn't say wasn't that the earth moved, but that the Pope was a clown.)
When you are signalling to the latter, you need to be cruder with your approach or the signal may be lost. There needs not be any wisdom in it.
Good thing we have venture capital to alleviate that constraint by enabling selling a dollar for 50 cents and just giving them away in the beginning!
It's almost as if they go hey, if we give away dollars for nothing, then for 50 cents and then when we're the only ones left, start giving dollars away for 5 bucks - we could make a killing!
It's almost as if that's the entire venture capital industry that Paul Graham writes so poetically about 'improving' the world.
Paul Graham's 'logic' is how you arrive at people like Mr Beast, onlyfans, gambling and vape pens. Just making life better for the customers guys!
Playing for the long game is good. But that sentence is too lossy to decipher the meaning unless you know what it means.
Instead of making the company more powerful, I would recommend making the company more aligned with truth and the real world which has a nice side effect of being resilient.
Add to that, preparing for scale.
We have dedicated an entire year for nothing but architecture, correctness, distributedness and scaling.
The economic perspective of the same would be reducing the cost of software development (not in the LLM massive code generation way but the opposite with architecture).
Its been 5 years since we have been building Slyp and SlypBusiness along with the plethora of technologies around it.
I don't know whether we are powerful as per the author's definition but we are damn resilient.
> Hired CEOS take the power of the companies they run for granted, whereas founders remember the days when the company was so weak that it had to delight users to survive.
I've always instinctively followed the generosity path, and have experienced that when customers are delighted and that when frictions are removed (or not added in the first place), good things will follow.
However, I have not always been able to convince others to trust in and follow this path. Can anyone offer any advice or experiences on talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?
before the pandemic hit and most of the world was quarantined, we decided to give loom away to students and teachers for free and made the service 50% off indefinitely. this was generous but also strategic. we made the simple deduction that, should people be locked inside, they would naturally see their sons/daughters using loom as students. or their spouse or roommates as teacher/staff.
There's plenty of businesses where you are simply optimizing a funnel, and driving more revenue at all costs is fully aligned with the goals of the company
If you're starting with $2000 and bootstrapping a textiles business out of Kolkata, it's a terrible idea, you're likely going to immediately get burned and never recover.
(take with a grain of salt as I have no experience, just stating my observations)
A company with $2000 in its first few days need not give away $1000 to act generously.
Yes. Lend them many more pennies, removing the necessity for short-term profit taking and allowing them to run at a loss until they decimate the competition, capture the market and then start raising prices to the point that they are more profitable than had they taken the short-sighted approach.
> experienced that when customers are delighted and that when frictions are removed
Charlie Munger:
> not always been able to convince othersMany different ways to conduct business. "Lean Enterprise" might be in line with your thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_enterprise
> talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?
I'd say this is a wrong framing. It isn't the people; it is the systems & environs they are in, the incentives they operate under.
Economists have a term they call "willingness-to-pay", using which some business might optimize for "consumer surplus" (low price), some for "producer surplus" (high margin).
See also, The Economics of Customer Businesses, Michael Mauboussin et al, https://www.eatonvance.com/insights/consilient-observer/the-... (2021).
Or Bezos' "Create more than you consume": https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2020-letter-to...
https://youtu.be/Z1sTs8wkAbw
Exactly what I came to say. This 100% is hippy dippy head in the clouds stuff. Sure if your product is 100% digital you can "be generous" in so far as it costs you nothing. Real products, real services. Hell no. You will get robbed blind if you give people too much slack or come off as willing to easily pay out.