<< Yet if someone like that came to a top venture capitalist’s office, he or she could very well be turned away. Start-up investors often accept pitches only from people they know, and rely heavily on gut feelings, intuition and what’s worked before. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg,” Paul Graham, co-founder of the seed investor Y Combinator, once said. >>
Paul was right - this meme just won't die.
<< People will probably still repeat that quote, but now if someone does it will be proof that either (a) they didn't do their research or (b) they have an ideological axe to grind. >>
From the link you posted: As if anyone would think it did. Could anyone be so naive as to think that resembling Zuck would be enough to make a founder succeed? And is it plausible that we, of all people, who'd interviewed thousands of founders, would think such a thing?
This undermines the argument. Clearly very many people, in very many areas of our society, filter those they do business with based on appearance. It would be naive to think otherwise about society and the business world (though applying the generality to a specific person, such as Paul, is a mistake).
I thought the original quote represented Paul well -- it demonstrated awareness of the very human weakness in all of us, to instinctively prefer people like ourselves. Having the instinct doesn't mean Paul acts on it, or that it's his only instinct; being aware of it is what enables people to control it (or control for it).
1. PG claims he was joking, and doesn't actually believe what he said.
2. The article quotes him as if he truly believed this, when in fact he believes the opposite.
3. You claim that if PG's argument for why he doesn't believe it is wrong, then the quote is likely to be true even if PG didn't mean it, and therefore it's accurate to quote PG as if he did mean it. That last part makes no sense.
> 3. You claim that ... the quote is likely to be true even if PG didn't mean it, and therefore it's accurate to quote PG as if he did mean it. That last part makes no sense.
I didn't say that or even talk about those issues (other than saying that to speculate on PG's actual thoughts would be "a mistake"). Maybe that's why it makes no sense to you.
Who wants to be Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg anyway?
Of course we all do, but that's pure ego. Each one of them was brilliant, there is no discounting that, but you also can't ignore the role that luck played. You can't just be brilliant and you can't just be lucky, you really have to be both to have the kind of success they did. It's not surprising that they are anomalies, hoping to recreate their success is like hoping to find a winning lottery ticket.
We shouldn't put any of them on a pedestal anyway. The empires of each of them was built on locking people into their closed systems at any cost. Jobs did some remarkable things, Zuck seems like he's going to do positive things with his fortune, and Gates might eliminate the world of a lot of disease, but you only have to look at past cutthroat titans like Andrew Carnegie to know that redemptive actions like that leave behind at best an ambiguous legacy.
There was a great piece on Grantland this week talking about Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and Microserfs. It had this bit which I thought was really interesting:
"The moment reads two ways. Either it’s about Zuckerberg, for all his billions, being Just Like Us — a slave to the same digital toy to which we’ve subcontracted management of our memories, our personal interactions, and our sense of self-worth — or it’s about how Facebook, born of Zuckerberg’s sense of exclusion, has made us just like him. The notion that the tech visionaries whose inventions colonize our daily lives are actually uploading the virus of their personalities to the global unconscious is an idea that floats through The Social Network; it’s the engine that powers Alex Gibney’s forthcoming documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which stops just short of postulating that every iPhone includes a fragment of poor angry uncharitable emotionally stunted Steve’s immortal soul, like a sliver of wormwood from Mordor."
It's pretty telling that everyone wants to be the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but very few want to be the next Niklaus Wirth, Alan Kay or Gary Kildall.
Far fewer are interested in computing so much as a gold rush that happens to use computing as its backdrop, which is overwhelmingly heading towards web-based media companies.
> gold rush that happens to use computing as its backdrop, which is overwhelmingly heading towards web-based media companies.
Yet Gates' and Jobs' gold came from edge clients, not web media. Clients have never been more powerful, why is there no modern gold rush in client software? Is it merely that SaaS/hosted software does not suffer from piracy?
I think is part of it. It's hard to pirate something you can't get a copy of.
Other things is that the web is more universal. Say I have a great client app. It works perfectly on a client Windows machine. If I want to tap the larger market I have to have an OS X version, an Android version, iOS (depending if I didn't target both when doing the OS X version), and a Linux version. To keep all of these people happy, the versions should be pretty much the same. That's hard to do with client software on multiple targets.
The web targets the lowest common denominator: browsers. Fortunately as those go, the VM that is the browser is pretty powerful. Sure I might not be in my preferred language, but I can get things done. If done right, powers are added as the device becomes more capable my leveraging existing frameworks like Bootstrap, etc.
I think there are two other factors as why web apps are dominating client apps. The first is distribution cost. Even with AppStore and Android market, it's still very hard to get your app to the users. People browse to hundreds of different websites everyday, but very few try out tens of apps in their phone. The second factor is that the web is intrinsically a lot more connected. One web page/app can easily link to another with, doh, a link. The linking/back button semantics are well understood by all the users.
Gates and Jobs are pop-stars of technology. A few hundred years into the future, we're more likely to see Charles Babbage and Alan Turing in text books than Gates and Jobs. Those text books are unlikely to be read by humans in the same physical form we exist today (unless something catastrophic happens), and the class of intelligent beings dominating that period will trace their lineage directly to inventors and scientists than businessmen.
It's often the people who popularize ideas that are remembered for them (however unjustly), so I wouldn't care to predict who will turn out to be important to folks hundreds of years hence. If it's like today, there'll probably be popular figureheads and a bunch of academics trying to belittle them in favor of a pet forerunner, just as we can argue about whether, say, Alan Kay or Douglas Englebart should be the person people bring up to claim Apple didn't invent the GUI, or Smalltalk or Simula should be worshipped (or ridiculed) as the first OO language.
How does it matter whether it's humans or uploaded humans or pure AIs that we're talking about. You think that AIs will necessarily be driven by pure logic and all agree on the fundamental root of any given idea?
I love how computer scientists seem to decide they've "solved" AI because neural nets can sorta- kinda- do something that we do unconsciously (like see) and blithely assume that we just need a bigger net to get "thinking". When have we ever built something more complex than, say, a bunch of rocks piled on each other, without understanding its basic workings?
What are you going on about? You seem to have a hot button about strong AI being impossible, but no one here was talking about AI. The OP was talking about future changes to biological humans.
> I love how computer scientists seem to decide they've "solved" AI because neural nets can sorta- kinda- do something
Citation needed. It turns out there are exactly zero computer scientists who have ever said anything even remotely like that.
> Those text books are unlikely to be read by humans in the same physical form we exist today (unless something catastrophic happens), and the class of intelligent beings dominating that period will trace their lineage directly to inventors and scientists than businessmen.
Sounds like assumed strong AI to me.
> Citation needed. It turns out there are exactly zero computer scientists who have ever said anything even remotely like that.
Why cite, you've apparently done the lit search.
From memory there's:
"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
That was in 1993 -- so we've got almost ten years left. Phew.
Now he's a math professor, although his profession is currently "computer scientist" but I expect it to be very easy to find many other computer scientists who've said similar things, even going back to before neural nets. They may not be computer scientists you (or I) respect but...
I think some computer scientists spoke with similar confidence about LISP, but can't be bothered to find citations. (Obviously hard, since there aren't any, right?)
For really off-topic assumptions of this kind that push my button -- slower-than-light travel to other stars is often discussed as though it's a solved problem (e.g. Fermi's Paradox) despite the fact that it would require a really complex machine that was able to work flawlessly for hundreds or thousands of years. Again, something we're ludicrously far away from.
That's not a very good example. He did not claim anybody had solved AI, he predicted that somebody would, based on trends at the time. You can't fault people for being optimistic about the future.
I've seen this agrument before, and I doubt it. It hasn't happened in any other industry, why would computing be different? Say computer chips, people think Moore, not Pfann. Say airplane, people think Wright, not Bernoulli. Say car, people think Ford, not Otto. In the future, saying computers will almost definitely make people think Gates, not Babbage.
It turned out that Bill Gates is a kind of Robin Hood: in a sense, he robbed the rich (those who could buy a computer or who owned a software company) and gave it to the poor.
Unless you believe that richer people should be richer because they deserve it and poorer people should be poorer because they deserve it, I think that he made a positive impact on the world at this point by redistributing wealth.
the only way you could compare Gates to Robin Hood is if you've never heard of his letter to the Homebrew Computer Club[0]. But now you have, so you have no excuse anymore.
Gates made a career stealing from not just the poor, but the charitable[1]. Then he pioneered new ways to destroy competing markets[2] He'll have to cure cancer to offset the damage he's done.
I don't know all the facts, but I know a lot about this particular case. I'm certain that Gates' impact on the world has been almost entirely transfer of wealth from less wealthy to more wealthy.
Microsoft's legacy been technologically bad (as in buggy lousy software), actively hurting (explicitly fighting against) the free software movement which aims to empowers regular people, and bullying governments around the world (literally taking taxpayer money). The elites of Microsoft took home among the greatest amounts of wealth of any company, and employees spend absurdly lavishly on all their business trips etc.
Microsoft is a good example of how richer people do NOT deserve their riches, so we're in agreement about the injustice of the system. Your idea that Bill Gates is on the right side of this is, well, almost completely backwards except that some of his philanthrophy is postive today. On the other hand, the Gates Foundation is a major pusher of Common Core testing in education, which is, by many accounts and perspectives, destructive and terrible policy. So, I'm not even sure that the Gates Foundation is all that positive, even there it's a mix.
> Asking whether a programmer in Silicon Valley plans to start a company is a bit like asking a waiter in Hollywood about his or her acting ambitions.
I wonder if many of these programmers don't really like coding, just like the waiter doesn't really like serving people.
Maybe it is just because I live outside the Silicon Valley filter bubble but I have no plans to ever start my own company. I like to architect really nice systems, and turn them into well coded implementations. I don't ever want to have to touch a pitch deck, or deal with investors, or worry about making money, or burn rate.
I'll be the first engineer at someone else's startup, but I don't want to be a businessman first, engineer second. To me coding is not a gateway to getting rich by creating the next Facebook/Snapchat clone. Instead coding is the destination, and I'm at that destination, doing the thing that I enjoy every day.
I'm an "engineer", went through Web dev, lead dev, CTO, and now Senior Technical Architect. But I don't like coding much, I'm good at it, but it's nothing more than a mean to an end for me, which is solving problems.
Same goes for the business side actually, most of it is pretty boring/unchallenging, but it's a mean to an end, and if I want to meet that end I must do the best I can to be great at all those aspects.
Or hire someone that will fill that in for me. But in early stages, I'll give my fullest on all angles.
I confirm. I don't like coding and I'm a founder, 0 employees. When I took my first intern I thought "Thank god I have coded hard in the best environments during my 7 years of career so I still have something to teach him". Former colleagues say envy my position, but since they like coding better, they have a better compensation than I had. Truth is, I sell a very replaceable product, and even though I believe I offer a cute service to customers, I would take no offense if I were told I'm a con artist ;)
"Business can be intellectually fascinating. As I’ve learned with age, new product development, microeconomics and game theory, and interpersonal interactions are just as rich in cognitive nutrition as compiler design or random matrix theory."
Go look at the portfolio page for your average Venture fund. The overwhelming majority of the companies are doing really boring stuff, like compliance management, lead generation, staff management, sales tracking etc...
And most of the founders are older guys who are also boring, they don't do exciting movie star CEO stuff. They just found a super specific niche and are filling it really well and making great money doing it.
So when I go and talk to these same investors, it is clear that most of them don't really care about moonshots or big market shifting ventures, despite what they say. They want cash flow positive companies who might have a reasonable chance of being acquired and don't really need that much work - because make no doubt, all of those unicorns or whatever you want to call them take a ton of work from the investors.
But I have no desire to be a part of one of those companies. They generally aren't particularly ambitious at global scale - they aren't trying to change human behavior or move markets like airbnb, uber, facebook, google etc...they just want to make good money, and are generally pretty good at it. Might as well go work for Oracle at that point.
These are some bizarre categorizations! By whose POV are they sliced and sorted?
eg. Uber and Lyft are "On-Demand" not the more natural, "Transportation"; Spotify and Evernote are "Internet Software and Services", not "Media" and "Productivity" respectively; another is denoted "Greentech" not "Energy".
Sorry to reply to myself, but I got a reply from Louis Lucero II at the Times:
Thanks for your email. I'm confident that most readers will understand that the line was tongue in cheek, however. The idea that a co-founder of Y Combinator could be persuaded to part with seed funding simply by dint of the solicitor's wearing a hooded sweatshirt is, of course, preposterous. At any rate, there is nothing to "correct," so to speak, as Mr. Graham did in fact say those words.
Not surprisingly I disagree with his assertion, but apparently he won't change the article or issue a correction.
Things like this explain why public figures have to be canny when dealing with the press: the desire to willfully misinterpret is strong, and, even when pointed out, often isn't corrected.
Yeah. You have to be careful not just about what you say, and what context it could be taken in, but what any distinct set of N consecutive words will sound like when isolated between quotation marks.
You can't just ["]Abuse drugs and alcohol when you're young["] and think it won't catch up with you
Mark and Bill are not so anomalous being Harvard students that dropped out to purse an already promising opportunity. Jobs is the closest to most people's idea of a "college dropout".
This is typical of politicized reporting that really really wants to push diversity.
First, the article says
Many people think they know what the founder of a tech start-up looks like: a 20-something man who spent his childhood playing on computers in his basement and who later dropped out of college to become a billionaire entrepreneur.
And then refute this with the more "diverse" reality that
The average founder is 38, with a master’s degree and 16 years of work experience.
Note no mention of the gender of the average founder. Next, they consider the study by Bloomberg Beta that the article implies refutes the "myth in our heads of what the prototypical start-up founder is, and that myth is an early- to mid-20s white male who studied computer science at an elite school and dropped out"
But the methodology of the study is to create a machine learning model that uses the "backgrounds" of people (which seem to include which companies a person worked for, and I would guess also which school) to predict which people will become a founder. They then define the people who the machine learning model scores highly, as "potential founders" and examine the demographics of potential founders. The results quoted are:
While only 12 percent of current founders are women, when they searched for potential founders based on the other characteristics of successful founders, 20 percent of the people they found were women.
“If you look at just the professional histories of the people who got funded, then it suggests people who share those histories are much more diverse than the people who get funded,” Mr. Bahat said.
Only 53 percent of founders have technology backgrounds, indicating that a computer science degree is not a requirement. Of potential founders, 8 percent of those with technology backgrounds are women.
So in the strange logic of the author, the machine learning model's validity is not called into question even when the difference in gender bias between "potential founders" and actual founders is mediated by highly relevant information, such as a technology background. To be specific about the problem with this logic, if the machine learning model selects a completely different looking population (ignoring gender) from existing founders, that is evidence that the VCs are biased, but it is also evidence that the machine learning model is wrong. The high level problem with this approach is that the same variable they are trying to show is biased (being an actual founder) is the one they are using to train the model which selects "potential founders" in order to prove the bias.
> […] Venture capital still relies heavily on referrals. “Show me another industry where the way you find your customers is to wait for your friends to introduce them to you,” Mr. Bahat said.
The deep irony of the consumer-focused venture industry—for all its talk of technology and transparency—is that it still operates with the shrouded obscurantism of a medieval guild.
-“Show me another industry where the way you find your customers is to wait for your friends to introduce them to you,” Mr. Bahat said.
Illicit drug industry sounds like one. Am I taking this quote out of context, are startup founders customers of VC's? Did not realize that was the hierarchy if that is the case.
The analogy is imprecise, so it's not clear who the customer in the quote is, but it could also mean VCs are customers of startups. They are seeking to buy opportunity. (Also, one usually gives the sales pitch to the customer, not the other way around.)
People find more likely what they they recall more easily and vividly, so this is like adjusting a linear model only considering the outliers (top or under stellar), so the fitted model don't represent the general population of founders whose life is more mundane and less interesting that a film star.
> The average founder is 38, with a master’s degree and 16 years of work experience.
If we want to predict what the next MZ is going to be like, shouldn't we restrict our training data to the set of successful unicorn founders instead of the set of all founders?
Most startups fail, so it seems this data is most useful for predicting who won't be the next MZ.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 96.2 ms ] thread<< Yet if someone like that came to a top venture capitalist’s office, he or she could very well be turned away. Start-up investors often accept pitches only from people they know, and rely heavily on gut feelings, intuition and what’s worked before. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg,” Paul Graham, co-founder of the seed investor Y Combinator, once said. >>
Paul was right - this meme just won't die.
<< People will probably still repeat that quote, but now if someone does it will be proof that either (a) they didn't do their research or (b) they have an ideological axe to grind. >>
http://www.paulgraham.com/tricked.html
This undermines the argument. Clearly very many people, in very many areas of our society, filter those they do business with based on appearance. It would be naive to think otherwise about society and the business world (though applying the generality to a specific person, such as Paul, is a mistake).
I thought the original quote represented Paul well -- it demonstrated awareness of the very human weakness in all of us, to instinctively prefer people like ourselves. Having the instinct doesn't mean Paul acts on it, or that it's his only instinct; being aware of it is what enables people to control it (or control for it).
EDIT: Added a few sentences.
1. PG claims he was joking, and doesn't actually believe what he said.
2. The article quotes him as if he truly believed this, when in fact he believes the opposite.
3. You claim that if PG's argument for why he doesn't believe it is wrong, then the quote is likely to be true even if PG didn't mean it, and therefore it's accurate to quote PG as if he did mean it. That last part makes no sense.
Not to mention he had fucked up before talking against women and accents... The guy shows all the signs.
I don't know him, he looks like a nice person... But I have no interest or encouragement into knowing him.
Yeah, sure, data is on my side too, being a white nerdy male (look like Zuck) would do good on you guys' ghetto.
I didn't say that or even talk about those issues (other than saying that to speculate on PG's actual thoughts would be "a mistake"). Maybe that's why it makes no sense to you.
Of course we all do, but that's pure ego. Each one of them was brilliant, there is no discounting that, but you also can't ignore the role that luck played. You can't just be brilliant and you can't just be lucky, you really have to be both to have the kind of success they did. It's not surprising that they are anomalies, hoping to recreate their success is like hoping to find a winning lottery ticket.
We shouldn't put any of them on a pedestal anyway. The empires of each of them was built on locking people into their closed systems at any cost. Jobs did some remarkable things, Zuck seems like he's going to do positive things with his fortune, and Gates might eliminate the world of a lot of disease, but you only have to look at past cutthroat titans like Andrew Carnegie to know that redemptive actions like that leave behind at best an ambiguous legacy.
There was a great piece on Grantland this week talking about Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, and Microserfs. It had this bit which I thought was really interesting:
"The moment reads two ways. Either it’s about Zuckerberg, for all his billions, being Just Like Us — a slave to the same digital toy to which we’ve subcontracted management of our memories, our personal interactions, and our sense of self-worth — or it’s about how Facebook, born of Zuckerberg’s sense of exclusion, has made us just like him. The notion that the tech visionaries whose inventions colonize our daily lives are actually uploading the virus of their personalities to the global unconscious is an idea that floats through The Social Network; it’s the engine that powers Alex Gibney’s forthcoming documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which stops just short of postulating that every iPhone includes a fragment of poor angry uncharitable emotionally stunted Steve’s immortal soul, like a sliver of wormwood from Mordor."
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-hal...
If you want to be like Zuck, what is it about you that you are going to infect the world with?
Far fewer are interested in computing so much as a gold rush that happens to use computing as its backdrop, which is overwhelmingly heading towards web-based media companies.
Yet Gates' and Jobs' gold came from edge clients, not web media. Clients have never been more powerful, why is there no modern gold rush in client software? Is it merely that SaaS/hosted software does not suffer from piracy?
Other things is that the web is more universal. Say I have a great client app. It works perfectly on a client Windows machine. If I want to tap the larger market I have to have an OS X version, an Android version, iOS (depending if I didn't target both when doing the OS X version), and a Linux version. To keep all of these people happy, the versions should be pretty much the same. That's hard to do with client software on multiple targets.
The web targets the lowest common denominator: browsers. Fortunately as those go, the VM that is the browser is pretty powerful. Sure I might not be in my preferred language, but I can get things done. If done right, powers are added as the device becomes more capable my leveraging existing frameworks like Bootstrap, etc.
Gates and Jobs are pop-stars of technology. A few hundred years into the future, we're more likely to see Charles Babbage and Alan Turing in text books than Gates and Jobs. Those text books are unlikely to be read by humans in the same physical form we exist today (unless something catastrophic happens), and the class of intelligent beings dominating that period will trace their lineage directly to inventors and scientists than businessmen.
Whom should we remember: Gödel, Turing, or Cohen?
http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec3.html
Unfair, that is not an answer to what he actually said:
> Those text books are unlikely to be read by humans in the same physical form we exist today
You're talking humans, he is not.
I love how computer scientists seem to decide they've "solved" AI because neural nets can sorta- kinda- do something that we do unconsciously (like see) and blithely assume that we just need a bigger net to get "thinking". When have we ever built something more complex than, say, a bunch of rocks piled on each other, without understanding its basic workings?
> I love how computer scientists seem to decide they've "solved" AI because neural nets can sorta- kinda- do something
Citation needed. It turns out there are exactly zero computer scientists who have ever said anything even remotely like that.
But again, that's wildly off topic.
Sounds like assumed strong AI to me.
> Citation needed. It turns out there are exactly zero computer scientists who have ever said anything even remotely like that.
Why cite, you've apparently done the lit search.
From memory there's:
"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
That was in 1993 -- so we've got almost ten years left. Phew.
http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge
Now he's a math professor, although his profession is currently "computer scientist" but I expect it to be very easy to find many other computer scientists who've said similar things, even going back to before neural nets. They may not be computer scientists you (or I) respect but...
I think some computer scientists spoke with similar confidence about LISP, but can't be bothered to find citations. (Obviously hard, since there aren't any, right?)
For really off-topic assumptions of this kind that push my button -- slower-than-light travel to other stars is often discussed as though it's a solved problem (e.g. Fermi's Paradox) despite the fact that it would require a really complex machine that was able to work flawlessly for hundreds or thousands of years. Again, something we're ludicrously far away from.
"If you are giving back, it means you took too much." See http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a...
It turned out that Bill Gates is a kind of Robin Hood: in a sense, he robbed the rich (those who could buy a computer or who owned a software company) and gave it to the poor.
Unless you believe that richer people should be richer because they deserve it and poorer people should be poorer because they deserve it, I think that he made a positive impact on the world at this point by redistributing wealth.
Gates made a career stealing from not just the poor, but the charitable[1]. Then he pioneered new ways to destroy competing markets[2] He'll have to cure cancer to offset the damage he's done.
0. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_...
1. http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-...
2. http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html
Microsoft's legacy been technologically bad (as in buggy lousy software), actively hurting (explicitly fighting against) the free software movement which aims to empowers regular people, and bullying governments around the world (literally taking taxpayer money). The elites of Microsoft took home among the greatest amounts of wealth of any company, and employees spend absurdly lavishly on all their business trips etc.
Microsoft is a good example of how richer people do NOT deserve their riches, so we're in agreement about the injustice of the system. Your idea that Bill Gates is on the right side of this is, well, almost completely backwards except that some of his philanthrophy is postive today. On the other hand, the Gates Foundation is a major pusher of Common Core testing in education, which is, by many accounts and perspectives, destructive and terrible policy. So, I'm not even sure that the Gates Foundation is all that positive, even there it's a mix.
I wonder if many of these programmers don't really like coding, just like the waiter doesn't really like serving people.
Maybe it is just because I live outside the Silicon Valley filter bubble but I have no plans to ever start my own company. I like to architect really nice systems, and turn them into well coded implementations. I don't ever want to have to touch a pitch deck, or deal with investors, or worry about making money, or burn rate.
I'll be the first engineer at someone else's startup, but I don't want to be a businessman first, engineer second. To me coding is not a gateway to getting rich by creating the next Facebook/Snapchat clone. Instead coding is the destination, and I'm at that destination, doing the thing that I enjoy every day.
Same goes for the business side actually, most of it is pretty boring/unchallenging, but it's a mean to an end, and if I want to meet that end I must do the best I can to be great at all those aspects.
Or hire someone that will fill that in for me. But in early stages, I'll give my fullest on all angles.
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/11/28/on-the-suppo...
And most of the founders are older guys who are also boring, they don't do exciting movie star CEO stuff. They just found a super specific niche and are filling it really well and making great money doing it.
So when I go and talk to these same investors, it is clear that most of them don't really care about moonshots or big market shifting ventures, despite what they say. They want cash flow positive companies who might have a reasonable chance of being acquired and don't really need that much work - because make no doubt, all of those unicorns or whatever you want to call them take a ton of work from the investors.
But I have no desire to be a part of one of those companies. They generally aren't particularly ambitious at global scale - they aren't trying to change human behavior or move markets like airbnb, uber, facebook, google etc...they just want to make good money, and are generally pretty good at it. Might as well go work for Oracle at that point.
They're overwhelmingly in "fintech", "big data", and productivity software.
https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies
eg. Uber and Lyft are "On-Demand" not the more natural, "Transportation"; Spotify and Evernote are "Internet Software and Services", not "Media" and "Productivity" respectively; another is denoted "Greentech" not "Energy".
I suppose $1B can call anything anything.
Everybody has to adopt the click-bait tactics now or be left behind.
“I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg,” Paul Graham, co-founder of the seed investor Y Combinator, once said.
Graham already pointed out that this is a joke and that the quote was taken out of context: http://www.paulgraham.com/tricked.html
Thanks for your email. I'm confident that most readers will understand that the line was tongue in cheek, however. The idea that a co-founder of Y Combinator could be persuaded to part with seed funding simply by dint of the solicitor's wearing a hooded sweatshirt is, of course, preposterous. At any rate, there is nothing to "correct," so to speak, as Mr. Graham did in fact say those words.
Not surprisingly I disagree with his assertion, but apparently he won't change the article or issue a correction.
Things like this explain why public figures have to be canny when dealing with the press: the desire to willfully misinterpret is strong, and, even when pointed out, often isn't corrected.
You can't just ["]Abuse drugs and alcohol when you're young["] and think it won't catch up with you
First, the article says
Many people think they know what the founder of a tech start-up looks like: a 20-something man who spent his childhood playing on computers in his basement and who later dropped out of college to become a billionaire entrepreneur.
And then refute this with the more "diverse" reality that
The average founder is 38, with a master’s degree and 16 years of work experience.
Note no mention of the gender of the average founder. Next, they consider the study by Bloomberg Beta that the article implies refutes the "myth in our heads of what the prototypical start-up founder is, and that myth is an early- to mid-20s white male who studied computer science at an elite school and dropped out"
But the methodology of the study is to create a machine learning model that uses the "backgrounds" of people (which seem to include which companies a person worked for, and I would guess also which school) to predict which people will become a founder. They then define the people who the machine learning model scores highly, as "potential founders" and examine the demographics of potential founders. The results quoted are:
While only 12 percent of current founders are women, when they searched for potential founders based on the other characteristics of successful founders, 20 percent of the people they found were women.
“If you look at just the professional histories of the people who got funded, then it suggests people who share those histories are much more diverse than the people who get funded,” Mr. Bahat said.
Only 53 percent of founders have technology backgrounds, indicating that a computer science degree is not a requirement. Of potential founders, 8 percent of those with technology backgrounds are women.
So in the strange logic of the author, the machine learning model's validity is not called into question even when the difference in gender bias between "potential founders" and actual founders is mediated by highly relevant information, such as a technology background. To be specific about the problem with this logic, if the machine learning model selects a completely different looking population (ignoring gender) from existing founders, that is evidence that the VCs are biased, but it is also evidence that the machine learning model is wrong. The high level problem with this approach is that the same variable they are trying to show is biased (being an actual founder) is the one they are using to train the model which selects "potential founders" in order to prove the bias.
The deep irony of the consumer-focused venture industry—for all its talk of technology and transparency—is that it still operates with the shrouded obscurantism of a medieval guild.
Illicit drug industry sounds like one. Am I taking this quote out of context, are startup founders customers of VC's? Did not realize that was the hierarchy if that is the case.
People find more likely what they they recall more easily and vividly, so this is like adjusting a linear model only considering the outliers (top or under stellar), so the fitted model don't represent the general population of founders whose life is more mundane and less interesting that a film star.
Edited: To clarify.
If we want to predict what the next MZ is going to be like, shouldn't we restrict our training data to the set of successful unicorn founders instead of the set of all founders?
Most startups fail, so it seems this data is most useful for predicting who won't be the next MZ.