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How to Start Google

• Scubabear68 2y ago
  This essay glosses over the fact that most startups die a horrible death and earn little to no money for the founders. Somewhere in this essay it needs to say “99% of you who try this will fail”.
  • verelo 2y ago
    if i had a 1 in 100 shot of becoming google I'd just do it 100 times. I'm pretty sure its more like 99.99999%
    • jamil7 2y ago
      That’s… not how that works.
      • bombcar 2y ago
        Even if you can "try to be Google" once a year you'll still be over 80 on average when you hit ...
        • verelo 2y ago
          ^^ this. As I've said to others, the math lines up looking promising, but now adjust for available time. It looks very different.
    • evrimoztamur 2y ago
      It's closer to 63% (binomial distribution of 1% chance with 100 trials, P(X>=1) is 63.4%).
      • mahogany 2y ago
        Fun fact, this converges quickly to 1-1/e ~ 0.632. If you had a 1 in a million chance of winning something and you tried a million times, the chance of winning once is about 63.2%, not much different from when n=100.
    • lnxg33k1 2y ago
      I always wondered why people would ask to analyse the chances of a coinflip during logical interviews, according to you, after 2 flips you have both result happening? Its not like that, if you have 1 in 100 chances of making it, each time you re try you have a 1 in 100 chances
      • Keyframe 2y ago
        right, parent probably isn't aware of complement rule. Sibling comment properly calculated 63.4% probability of at least one success in 100 trials where each has 1% of success.
        • verelo 2y ago
          Parent here :) Yeah i am, but i think the thing few consider (although some did provide the remark here) was that while the chances are good (given infinite time), the reality is no one has that. So yeah, give someone 500 years, hopefully they keep going at it and the odds play out...but in the lets call it 50 productive years I feel I probably have been given, plus a few distractions along the way, there are maybe 5-10 serious bets one can place? Feels like that needs to be considered in conjunction with the mathematical probability "just keep trying" misleads us to believe. 10 coin flips can happen in less time than it took to type this reply. Those odds are a little more predictable because of the time span involved.
    • mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      I think each earnest attempt would probably occupy about 3 years of your lifespan, so you probably can try at most 20 times. If these are independent, then it's still an 82% chance of failure. But successive attempts after repeated failures might also make it harder to attract confidence from investors, not to mention loss of your own self-confidence. And if you finally succeed in founding Google when you're 80, you might find that you don't have that much use for the money anymore, nor much interest in running Google.
      • kelnos 2y ago
        Conversely, repeated failures can give you the experience needed to increase the odds that your next attempt could be successful.
        • iamleppert 2y ago
          Ask anyone who has ever failed at a startup before, how easy it is to get funding again. VC's would rather take a chance on someone they don't know vs. rip open old emotional bags with a failed founder.
          • verelo 2y ago
            As someone thats on startup #7 and is ~37 years old I can attest to this: I have had 5 flat out failures, 1 break even experience and 1 life changing experience (I don't own a private jet unfortunately). I'm fucking tired. I really hope theres something huge in the future, but the reality is I struggle to believe I have enough left in me to finish this one, let alone more. Also, I'm just more interested in family and enjoying the mobility of the youth I have left, much more than chasing down unlimited resources.
    • teucris 2y ago
      Apart from the math being off there, who do you know who has the time and resources to try and start 100 startups? Most people barely have the time and resources for 1.
      • verelo 2y ago
        Yeah so i didn't put it well, but that was literally my point. Feels very "developer brain" of us to say "thats technically possible, heres the math and you're thinking about it wrong" and not consider the human aspect.
    • rmah 2y ago
      You're mixing up percent that succeed (a statistic) with percent chance of success (a probability). IOW, the fact that 1% of businesses succeed does not mean that a particular business has a 1% chance of success. The reason is that business success is not a function of pure random chance (like a die roll). Sure there are random factors but there are also non-random factors (which, IMO, dominate). The problem is that there is no way to determine what your business's chance of success actually is.
    • takinola 2y ago
      The thing is you don't start with a 1:100 shot of becoming Google. You, hopefully, level up each shot you get. Your first shot, you'll probably make something no one wants. The second time, you can't figure out how to get anyone to pay attention to you. The third time, you can't get enough people to hand over their cash for it. The fourth time... Each time, you learn and get better, your odds go up. Now the real question is whether your odds are going from 1:1000 to 1:100 or from 1:100 to 10:100?
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    I wonder, over the course of a career in startups, what is the probability that you'll either found or be an early employee at one that makes up (financially) for the rest? Not hugely rich, but better than "normal" career. Given it's a repeated game, and you gain knowledge at each round, I'd say the odds are probably pretty good that the highly dynamic / fast learning environment of early companies yields returns over a lifetime.
    • candiodari 2y ago
      Well you can calculate that somewhat, right. If you're "top-1%" in skill, enough to get hired at Google (even if you did it for the badge), then did you or did you not start a business? Google: 180,000 employees. Let's say including ex-employees 250,000 These started 1,200 companies, according to the only source I could find. These collectively apparently made their founders ~20 billion. Let's say (heh) that it's a power law, let's say the top 10 got 1 billion each. So we're talking the odds for an "average" software engineer to get to 1 billion is about 0.1% * 10/180000 = 0.000005556%, or about 1 in 18 million. Odds for a current or ex-Google engineer: 1 in 18,000.
      • jvanderbot 2y ago
        This calculates the odds an ex-googler makes a billion dollars. That's not really what I asked, but is a good Fermi question nonetheless!
      • gizmo 2y ago
        The number of billionaires yc has produced in 4000 or so startups (with many future billionaires in the pipeline) suggests your numbers are off by, what, 100x? If we assume that a Google Engineer is as qualified as a yc founder, which isn’t quite true but still.
    • kevindamm 2y ago
      The challenge here is not simply being in the right startup but having the right combination of startup founders (& contributors) for that particular idea at that particular time. Now, it's not like there's only one great fit for each role, but it's far from rolling a d100 too.
  • Kranar 2y ago
    I agree most startups fail, but no they don't die a horrible death nor do the majority of them earn no money for their founders. Many founders could have made more money through traditional employment, but you'll find very few startup founders are actually poor or become poor due to a startup. There is an opportunity cost to starting your own company, but it's not some kind of horrible experience that will drive you to bankruptcy unless you're part of the 1% who manages a spectacular exit.
  • eddieroger 2y ago
    I was sad to search for the word "luck" and come up empty. You can do everything right and still fail. You can do everything wrong and win. Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time, and that external factor is completely out of your control and can be the difference you need.
    • duggan 2y ago
      I don't disagree that luck is a factor, but what can you do with that information other than console yourself when it doesn't work out?
      • dingnuts 2y ago
        use the knowledge that your plans may not succeed despite your best efforts to set expectations so that you are not emotionally devastated if this happens, and so that you are prepared in other ways as well. take the shot, but have a back-up plan, basically.
      • teucris 2y ago
        Learn how to manage bets. Some people have the resources to fail many times and keep going. Others do not. Knowing that a huge portion of starting a business is luck, you can better weigh your options and hopefully select different opportunities depending on your situation. And, in the unfortunately common case, recognize when you cannot take any bets and instead focus on getting yourself to a place where you can, rather than betting everything and losing everything.
        • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
          Managing "bets" with capital that you can afford to lose is utterly different to managing "bets" with your time and labor.
      • j7ake 2y ago
        Not over leverage yourself such that if you fail you would be unable to recover.
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  • financltravsty 2y ago
    Maybe don't start a startup, because you do not have the connections or resources necessary to make it successful. Same with any other "speculative" venture: it's dominated by insiders who know how to minimize risk to a point it no longer becomes speculative. Maybe start an actual, scaleable business that makes money. It's not sexy, but it's within the realm of possibility to get it off the ground yourself; and usually those within the gilded class are not interested in such things. If you're a regular schmuck, maybe take a page from the countless immigrants in the U.S. that start various businesses (trade, real estate, etc.) that make them enough money to allow them to live like kings back in their home countries. There's something to be said about the severe glaucoma of understanding class in the U.S. Very few (notably the middle class) are willing to internalize they're serfs, whose current comfort is more a product of luck than anything more. It's a precarious situation, and any notions of aspiring to "life satisfaction" or other leisure-class values is just foolish, in my opinion.
  • seanhunter 2y ago
    Agree but he doesn't do this because he makes money because people try this. Like other vcs he doesn't really care if the vast majority fail as long as he makes bank on a few who dont' fail. That's a prism it's really worth applying to all advice given by VCs: What's the outcome for me if I fail vs what's the outcome for them if I fail?
• ignoramous 2y ago
  (tls) mirror: https://archive.is/zCEbG https://archive.is/zCEbG
• deleted 2y ago
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• hiddencost 2y ago
  "If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies." "Of the 137 people in the global study who achieved billionaire status in the 12-month study period, 53 of them inherited $150.8 billion collectively, more than the $140.7 billion that was earned by the 84 new self-made billionaires in the same time period, the UBS study says.Nov 30, 2023"
  • seu 2y ago
    And still not taking into consideration that the majority of those "self-made" billionaires anyway inherited many privileges from their parents that helped them to "self make".
    • temporarara 2y ago
      It also doesn't hurt to inherit just a few millions and combine it with hard work and luck if the alternative is just hard work and luck.
  • IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Maybe merely having a billion dollars isn't what pg was thinking of when talking about "the richest people". If you look at the top 100, like he quotes in his article, only 27 inherited their fortune.
    • IllIlIIllI 2y ago
      Maybe only 27 inherited large fortunes, but many more started at a much more privileged position than anyone in the rooms Paul is talking to. Maybe they're not from billionaire families, but almost all of them come from families the top 1-3% in terms of wealth.
      • IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Who was he talking to? I have no idea what kids pg was talking to, but if it was to peers of his own kids, chances are they are already firmly in the 1%. In any case, to go from top 1-3% to the top 0.0000001% is still incredibly rare and noteworthy. Just because it is easier to do that than go from the top 50th% to the top 0.0000001% doesn't mean it is actually easy.
• CPLX 2y ago
  He left out the part about starting your company at a unique point in history where a generational technology shift was taking place that also happens to be a time when antitrust laws had recently been enforced (making your main competitor wary) but were about to be completely ignored for the next 20 years, so you could exploit your initial market position and engage in anti-competitive behavior to grow huge.
  • vehemenz 2y ago
    Or the part where your parents are professors and provide the educational opportunities and financial freedom to take risks that 99% of people don't have. I don't mean that to even sound bitter or cynical, but it's just a fact if you look at most founders, even the ones that fail miserably.
    • twosdai 2y ago
      Take the risks you can with what you have.
    • brigadier132 2y ago
      > where your parents are professors There is always an excuse. The parents are professors, or upper middle class dentists, or your mom does charity for United Way and managed to become the leader of the charitable organization and managed to meet some exec from IBM. Given how diverse these professions are and that they basically describe a slightly upper middle class family, im gonna guess their children account for more than 1%.
    • tech_tuna 2y ago
      Yep, he's basically preaching to a subset of young people who can help him make more money and tech fame. I mean, it's not the worst thing he could do but it would be great if he at least acknowledged the privilege filter once in a while.
• shafyy 2y ago
  > It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies. People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically getting rich is the most important thing is one of the reasons we got into this late-stage capitalism nightmare in the first place. Fuck this. Edit: Sorry, to update after my rant. So many things wrong with this advice. For most people, starting a company is not the best path to happiness. Sure, if you have a job, there's a "boss" that tells you what to do as Graham notes, but if you think for a second you can do whatever the fuck you want when you start your own company, you're dead wrong. Of course, Graham knows this.
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  • ericd 2y ago
    He's telling kids that they don't have to get a job, and one of the key objections is obviously going to be "but how will I get money". The emphasis in the essay is not getting rich, it's that it's a much more interesting path. And it is.
    • scarface_74 2y ago
      And then they hit the reality that thier startup is going to fail, even if they get funding in a non zero interest rate environment and they would have been better off just “grinding leetCode and working for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) or even just working as a CRUD/Enterprise Corp dev and still be able to make the median household income in the US a couple of years out of school
      • ericd 2y ago
        They might have been better off financially - statistically, they probably would've been. But even my failed startups were more rewarding experiences by far than working in large companies. And it doesn't preclude you from going and getting paid too much at a big tech co afterwards if it doesn't work. This field has been so lucrative recently that you can generally afford to not be earning at peak potential for a bit, so why not roam free for at least a bit, and let your interest take you where it will, rather than doing something you describe as a grind, just to earn the privilege to go sit in meetings for most of the day and count the years till you can afford retirement?
• elwell 2y ago
  > But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of mere determination and resourcefulness. So Leetcode is actually a good way to hire?
  • bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Sure, if your company is as prestigious as Stanford or MIT.
  • emseetech 2y ago
    Leetcode style interviews were always a reasonable option for a particular type of company. But they became a trend for companies that weren't a good fit.
  • DonsDiscountGas 2y ago
    Sadly, yes, at least for a certain type of job. Probably not the best, but considering the effort involved on the part of the employer (ie very little) combined with the result, it's pretty good. Anything better requires a ton more effort (work trials) and/or doesn't scale well (personal referrals).
  • zen928 2y ago
    If you consider that >10 years ago there were blog posts talking about how hard the "FizzBuzz" question was to implement when asked in-person as a way to demonstrate how you approach solving problems, there's definitely a reasonable assertion that these types of interviewing methods help weed out applicants unable to write basic compound statements. Might not be the best way as a single pass/fail criterion though.
• vouaobrasil 2y ago
  >It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. > You might have thought I was joking when I said I was going to tell you how to start Google. You might be thinking "How could we start Google?" But that's effectively what the people who did start Google were thinking before they started it. We shouldn't be telling young people to start companies like Google or to aim for being really rich in the first place. We should be teaching children how to be more sustainable. Companies like Google are a net harm to society and the really rich like Sergey Brin and Larry Page are parasites, promoting the unsustainable ruthless capitalism that has caused the immense climactic problems of the world today.
  • nfin 2y ago
    - I agree that we shouldn‘t tell young people to aim for companies like Google / aim to get really really rich - I agree that we should tell young children to aim for sustainable companies - I at least partially disagree with warning against the unsustainable ruthless capitalism in case your sustainable ideas do get really big. Some companies would get really really big, and I would prefer to see those reaching there to be those who had a (comparatively) caring mind (the others would not listen anyway) - but I would agree to explain young children that what and where they buy does impact climatic problems. And that supporting small-medium sized companies (or creating one) is the most beneficial for our future
• suyash 2y ago
  Ok, so I am having a hard time buying the idea that just make a fun project if you want to create a something like 'Google'. Startup 101 teaches us that you need to solve a painful problem that lot of people have, that is the best way to create 'Google', so isn't the advise contradictory?
  • tomhoward 2y ago
    His advice is: - Work on a personal project that is motivating to you (obviously you won't work on it if it's not motivating to you) - It's a good sign if the project you're motivated to work on solves a problem that you and your friends care a lot about, because there's a good chance many more people will also want that problem solved and will buy/use your product. Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school.
    • suyash 2y ago
      I didn't see the 2nd point but yes overall this clarifies.
    • daveguy 2y ago
      > Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school. And neither was Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page both hold masters degrees in Computer Science from Stanford.
      • tomhoward 2y ago
        He's giving advice to school kids on what to do during their remaining school years or early college years.
        • tomhoward 2y ago
          Also, Larry was 23 when PageRank was first published - that's not much older than "barely out of high school", even if we have to be so literal about everything :)
• benzible 2y ago
  > So Mark Zuckerberg shows up at Harvard in 2003, and the university still hasn't gotten the facebook online. [...] But Mark is a programmer. He looks at this situation and thinks "Well, this is stupid. I could write a program to fix this in one night. Just let people upload their own photos and then combine the data into a new site for the whole university." So he does. And almost literally overnight he has thousands of users. Kinda, but this skips over the whole Facemash thing https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-board-the/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creat...
  • lupire 2y ago
    You are too kind. It's a complete lie, or worse, utter BS fabricated to back up the OP argument. Zuckerberg stole photos (and the website name!) from the already existing online facebook. Facebook was actually based on something he was hired by Winklevoss to create, and he decided to keep it for himself instead of delivering it. That's the "naughtiness" that YC seeks out in its Founder application process. Note, by the way, in the recent "cancellation" of President Gay, the false claim that behavior like this would get a Harvard student expelled (although Zuck did end up "expelling" himself.)
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  While I agree with a lot of the criticisms that have been posted here (first and foremost that it is exceedingly bad advice to take advice on being successful from someone who is like six sigmas to the right of the curve on how their efforts were rewarded - it's like reading from Taylor Swift or Simone Biles or Usain Bolt about "to succeed you just need hard work and to believe!". As it's taken many, many years of therapy for me to internalize, if you get the majority of your self-worth through what you do, you're gonna have a bad time...) I think it's also a good idea to keep in mind the general HN guideline of "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says." In that sense, I do strongly agree with the overall conclusion, "That's it, just two things, build stuff and do well in school." Building stuff for your own edification, and soaking up as much knowledge and relationships while you're in school, is really sound advice that works regardless of your end goal.
  • pavel_lishin 2y ago
    > soaking up as much knowledge and relationships while you're in school A family friend was recently admitted to a magnet school - it's not like an Ivy League level institution, but it's fairly prestigious in the area, and not easy to get to. I need to make sure to remind him that while it's good that he's feeling academically challenged, he should also focus on building friendships with people who are statistically likely (much as he is, tbh) to be successful in life - they can help pull him up when he's down, and he can do the same for them. I didn't get that much out of college, academically - but the relationships I built there got me my first two jobs, and I still treasure the friends I made there.
    • w10-1 2y ago
      Aristotle said friendships were the best example of happiness in life - not fame or success which rarely lead to happiness or even social benefit. Friendship is the best example because that's the only way to not only exercise your curiosity and virtues, but do so in knowing concert with people who understand and appreciate what you're doing, who are entirely different beings. I would hope that even high-achieving friendships can be built not on mutual utility but on common interest and expression.
• FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  Survivor Bias anyone? Bill Gates, Zuck, Jobs, etc.... Students should quit school. -> (?) -> profit
  • ponector 2y ago
    Yes, one should choose rich parents to start with.
    • lupire 2y ago
      Steve Jobs biological parents were rich, but he didn't get their money. They did choose good parents for him, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
• photochemsyn 2y ago
  This article only mentions Stanford once, so here's some additional information: https://new.nsf.gov/news/origins-google https://new.nsf.gov/news/origins-google > "The National Science Foundation led the multi-agency Digital Library Initiative (DLI) that, in 1994, made its first six awards. One of those awards supported a Stanford University project led by professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd... Around the same time, one of the graduate students funded under the NSF-supported DLI project at Stanford took an interest in the Web as a "collection." The student was Larry Page.... Page was soon joined by Sergey Brin, another Stanford graduate student working on the DLI project. (Brin was supported by an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.)" Under a rational and fair approach to patents, anything created with taxpayer funds would be available to all American businesses under a non-exclusive licensing program. However, in the 1980s, Bayh-Dole was pushed through which allowed exclusive licensing of those inventions to private parties. This is nothing but theft from the taxpayer, the entity who funds the NSF, which funded this research effort, which generated PageRank. As a result, Google didn't face market competition for some time, and was able to create a monopolistic situation, and as with all monopolies, this resulted in the degradation of their product, which is why, as everyone seems to agree, Google search results are much worse today than they used to be. [edit: contemplate the outcome if Brin & Page had instead invented PageRank as Apple or Microsoft employees - would they have been able to run off with the IP and found a company?]
  • DonsDiscountGas 2y ago
    The PageRank patent expired 5 years ago, and frankly a lot of other search engines were copying the method a long time before that. Search results have been deteriorating since "SEO" became a thing.
    • photochemsyn 2y ago
      If PageRank had been available to all US companies who wanted to build a search engine around it at the time of publication, then we might have a half-dozen major search engine-based companies right now, which would be a competitive situation that would drive innovation (and solution of the SEO problem), which is how free market capitalism theory works IIRC. Since universities are publicly funded by taxpayers, their inventions should be thrown to the capitalist wolves who will compete to provide the best implementation of the idea to the consumers. If the corporations want to instead finance their own research centers, then they'd own all the patents outright - but it's cheaper to steal from the public.
• taneq 2y ago
  I love the opening because the mission statement of my company has always been "make sure taneq doesn't ever have to go back to a real job". Don't get me wrong, at most points a 'real job' would have been easier but easier wasn't the mission.
• w10-1 2y ago
  This is entirely fair in its goal and perspective. It's not about starting Koch Industries or Disney. It's not about some ideal world where connections and funding don't matter. It's about a kind of productive problem solving that creates value for other people by solving problems they just accept as friction in their lives. It's insightful in focusing on how projects you love can end up helping others. But it's a little misleading in that people are listening not because they are doing what they love, but because they want to be successful - ideally to take what they love and turn it into success - according to this plan. Let's say each year 10,000 people would love to become professional football players, 500 make it to the NFL, and 5 become household names - success stories. There's no real accounting for the time wasted by the 9,500 doing the extra required not out of enjoyment of the game but to become successful (leaving aside any actual costs like TBI). It's at least an exported cost. But it might have other downstream effects, making someone less confident in their judgement, less likely to engage in making a better world of whatever sort. One of the Buddhist precepts is not to sell the wine of delusion (in some translations). But it's also soul-killing to tell someone how likely they are to fail; who says that at a wedding? What benefit is that? Paul Graham made a success of helping others be successful. That's a really good model to consider: to do and teach and help. So I would take this as good teaching for teens.
  • ckozlowski 2y ago
    Fully agreed. I was the first graduating class from one of the first public high schools in the country with an IT magnet program. I remember the program coordinator telling us and our parents in a big presentation that we could be making $70-80k out of high school. He was really selling it. I was not making anywhere near that out of high school. =P But I wasn't doing bad either. In fact, I'd had two jobs with tech companies before I even graduated. I had a job lined up in the engineering department of an OEM prior to receiving my high school diploma. That same administrator was always encouraging us, cheering us on with our various projects, helping where he could. I never thought for a moment I'd been mislead that my salary wasn't that high or that I didn't make it "rich". Any kid who'd sat through a school fundraiser presentation in middle school knows that those awesome prizes of a computer or game console or whatnot is just meant to hype you up. But you might be able to land a CD player. (My age is showing here. =P ) I expect any 14-15yo he's talking to will get the gist. The kids are not stupid. They get the pitch. And I think they intrinsically know the odds too. Those 9,500 football players are not all going to see it as a loss, even if they didn't achieve their ultimate goal. People turn losses into wins and salvage the good from a failed attempt all of the time. My son is 3, and already has fun mashing computer parts together and wanting to see how things work. I'm excited to see if he wants to do this as well. Will I tell him "Dude, that guy said I'd be making $90k and that was B.S." Nah. I'll give him simple version of Paul's advice. Even if he doesn't go into entrepreneurship, it'll set him up well if he follows it.
• confoundcofound 2y ago
  It’s so deflating to see both YC & PG focus their content almost solely on the younger generations. As someone who came to tech later in their mid-30s, it’s not hard to feel like expired goods when the “thought leaders” of tech are unabashedly gunning for younger minds with little to no acknowledgement of those who may want to start ventures during later stages of life. The more I try to plug myself in, the more it seems like starting a company at this age is borderline schizophrenic delusion.
  • mbgerring 2y ago
    Average age of successful startup founders is 35-45. YC likes young founders because they’re impressionable and exploitable.
    • autonomousErwin 2y ago
      That makes them sound a bit more predatory than the reality of it but I get what you mean. When you're younger, by definition, you've got more shots on goal, you don't have other responsibilities (mortgage, kids, partners etc.) so you can take more riskier decisions, and you more have to rely on first principle thinking instead of experience (because you don't have any). Saying that, I would like to see the advice for higher age ranges as I have a feeling more successful startups tend to be around there.
      • walteweiss 2y ago
        As someone of a higher age, I would suggest that we don’t really need any advice. I read all his essays long ago, when I was young, and it sounded persuading to me. I think it even influenced me here and there. Now, somewhat a decade or two later, I take it with a grain of salt, and don’t get it as it is. Some things are just quite manipulative. I can read them as someone’s point of view, but not as someone I would even listen to, not to say follow the advice. I know much better for myself and what’s around me. E.g. a man like me would never go to a VC, it’s a waste of my time and energy, and I can easily earn all the money I need to run my idea till the production. Why would I want anyone like him, to give me money and help grow my idea infinitely? People like him are interested in Unicorns, that’s how he multiplies his money, that’s how the system works. People like me are interested in steady, reliable businesses that actually deliver. Personally, I’m very disappointed with most of the unicorns I used before. They’re non-existent to me. Hence, I wouldn’t listen to people who follow the Unicorns. I think that’s why we don’t have any advice for a higher age.
• advael 2y ago
  I know people mention that this advice smacks of survivorship bias, and I think that's pretty obviously going to be a part of any advice given about economic outcomes whose odds of working out are perhaps a whole order of magnitude better than lottery tickets I think it's more important to note how talks like this use "children" as an excuse to present a very sanitized version of the history being discussed. I think a massively underappreciated mechanism by which American culture distorts history is by its very lax and sometimes supportive norms about fudging the truth and sometimes even outright lying to children
  • kelnos 2y ago
    The biggest thing missing from this talk -- something that would have been easy to include, even for a younger audience -- is that the majority of startups fail, and even many startups that do well enough end up making their founders less money than if they went to work for another company. It feels irresponsible to tell kids how they can build the next Google, without also telling them how likely it is they won't succeed at it. Granted, most people in their early 20s have very little to lose, so a failed startup may not be much of a problem, outside of the stress and emotional effects.
    • advael 2y ago
      I mean, like most advice from my generation and prior ones, the notion that people in their 20s can't fuck up too badly because they have little to lose applies considerably less well to all but the fairly affluent people in their 20s today. For many, taking risks means being gated out of the financial system by bad credit, being behind in an unforgiving job market, and possibly even destitution if they don't have a safety net of some kind To be clear, this was always true to some degree, but inequality is higher, industries have more power and thus workers have less, and safety nets that don't come from your parents being well-off are weaker (and fewer people's parents are well-off) than when I was a kid, and this has actually been true for a few subsequent generations of kids
  • seanhunter 2y ago
    The best advice to give children is that they should be born to rich, influential and well-connected parents. That will give them a huge advantage in all walks of life including if they want to start a startup. Larry and Sergei had the benefit of rich, influential and well-connected parents, as did Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Paul Graham himself.
• dekhn 2y ago
  Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew google was going to be huge from the beginning. His brother Carl was already a multimillionare in tech and taught him everything required to set up a future successful company. Larry made it clear to me that he always planned Google to be a large cash-generating cow to invest in long-term AGI and there were only a few times at the beginning when he truly feared that wouldn't happen.
  • zeroxfe 2y ago
    > Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew google was going to be huge from the beginning. Nobody can know such a thing -- especially turning around a billion-dollar business, a thing with a near-zero prior probability. It's more reasonable to say that Larry had the drive, the aptitude, and the resources to maximize his odds (which would still be low.)
    • programjames 2y ago
      If you're one of the smartest people in the world, working in one of the most impactful areas... the posterior probability is more like 90% than near-zero.
      • dekhn 2y ago
        Depends- for example, duirng the time that Google started up, I was in grad school with a great deal of support for starting biotech companies, but when I looked... even the geniuses were struggling because at the time, biotech companies could take a decade or more to be profitable or fail. It was clear, as we were exiting the late 90s dot com crash that the economy and money for tech was going to come back, and companies that took advantage of rapidly increasing specs on cheap machines (versus buying expensive Suns, DECs, or SGIs) were going to be able to scale to immense amounts of traffic, and deliver ads for profit.
        • programjames 2y ago
          I don't think at that time biotech could be considered very impactful. After all, search engines were literally impacting billions of peoples' lives within a few years, but a new drug would take a decade to get to market, and impact "only" millions of people.
• humbleferret 2y ago
  This essay isn't a step-by-step guide to building 'Google', rather, a call for young people to consider entrepreneurship as a fulfilling alternative to traditional careers. To maximise their chances of success, Paul suggests: 1. Become a builder: Gain expertise in technology or other fields you're passionate about. (Does not have to just be coding, either!) 2. Start personal projects: Build things you and your friends find useful. Paul suggests this is the fastest way to learn and potentially discover startup ideas. 3. Collaborate: Work on projects with like-minded people. This fosters skill development and could lead to finding potential cofounders. I liked how Paul also emphasises the importance of good grades in order to access top universities, where you'll find other bright collaborators. There are obviously many other paths, but if I wish I had this advice at 14 or 15.
  • suyash 2y ago
    So, can we then say the title is 'click bait'?
    • omoikane 2y ago
      It might have been better if Paul Graham used one of the companies founded by YCombinator instead, but that would be less impressive to 14 to 15 year olds since those 4000 or so startups are not quite Google-scale yet.
  • ckozlowski 2y ago
    This is the best take I've read yet. I don't disagree with Paul's choice to focus on entrepreneurship and getting rich here. If you're looking to excite people, tell an exciting story. Captivate imagination. No one gets pumped up (especially at that age) at the mediocre story. What I find great about his advice is that it is by no means limited to entrepreneurship. Working on passion projects, doing well in school, and learning how to build relationships is valuable even if you're working for someone else. There's a big space in tech jobs between the "grinding away at code/help desk" and "startup bro" that I feel doesn't get described enough. And that's one thing I'd tack on to Paul's advice, notwithstanding the need to sell the message above. That advice he espouses can also lead to being a really standout contributor at a tech firm, and probably with a higher rate of success than getting a startup to stick. One doesn't have to form a startup to contribute ideas, and there's good money to be made in that space. I think your choice of wording above is important to call out: The advice "maximizes" the chance of success; but it doesn't guarantee it. Overall, completely agreed. =)
• alismayilov 2y ago
  I'm wondering if there is a research about which percentile of these two groups became rich: People who started a company vs People who worked for Tech companies.
  • tomhoward 2y ago
    Unless you're very early (and/or very lucky), you can't get "rich" (i.e., can choose never to work again and can invest in many other things) as an employee (though of course a highly-paid employee can become very well off and comfortable). Yes you need to be lucky to get super-rich as a founder too, but you have a lot more control, i.e., you make the primary decisions that determine whether the company will make good products that people will use/buy.
    • munificent 2y ago
      I live in Seattle. There are plenty of early Microsoft hires around here who are "fuck you money" rich.
    • sahila 2y ago
      While agreed the chances are still low, if you joined Tesla or Nvidia in the last 10 years and especially before 2020, you very well and likely are rich if you're still working at either and kept all your stock. Hell if you joined Facebook last year and got in when the stock was around 100, your initial equity grant just 5x.
      • tomhoward 2y ago
        I edited the parenthesised part of the first sentence from "and very lucky" to "and/or very lucky" to make allowances for your objection. And sure, you can always point out exceptions. The real point is that it's misguided to try and compare percentages of tech company employees with percentages of founders; they're very different things. Of course, out of all the founders of all the companies, a relatively tiny percentage will be vastly rich. And out of all the employees of all the tech companies, most will be quite wealthy and comfortable, and a small percentage will be vastly rich. But that doesn't tell you anything about what is the most reliable path for any given individual to get vastly rich; it entirely depends on whether you're the kind of person you are how well you can learn how to build successful products and companies.
• memset 2y ago
  I am baffled by the criticisms of this essay. I can't identify any statements here which are false. We're on hacker news, which is a site about programming and startups and capitalism. There theoretically couldn't be a better audience. I suppose the strongest criticism would be that pg's advice outlines necessary conditions to start the next Google but are not sufficient. Yes, the stuff you "make" needs to feel like a fun project, but without the "...something people want" then your company will not make you rich. As with any advice, there there will always be exceptions ("do you really need a cofounder?") but as far as "here is some advice to achieve x", where x is "create a billion-dollar company" this isn't a bad start.
  • nkjnlknlk 2y ago
    It's misleading and poor advice to children. You see this issue a lot in certain immigrant communities where the equivalent "talk" might be: "How to become a Doctor [and be rich and successful]". Becoming a doctor is orders of magnitudes more in an individual's control but even _then_ we observe the plethora of issues that occur.
• deleted 2y ago
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  • mistermann 2y ago
    Not to mention numerous competitors with billions of dollars to burn "outcompeting" startups, with political and other ties if that fails. It's a great story though.
• YossarianFrPrez 2y ago
  PG is remarkably consistent in his advice; much of his writing is about developing a nose for "what's missing" and having the chops and resources to attempt a solution. Also, I think 'Google' in this instance is more for motivation rather than a literal comparison. He's leaving out the part that Google was founded by graduate CS students a) looking for a thesis, b) into node-link graphs, and c) inspired by academic citation metrics. Would PG advise anyone to go to grad school to learn how to find scientific-discovery-based startup ideas these days?
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    This is what is fundamentally missing from most talk about "tech" startups by VC types these days. They're not actually interested in the nerdy stuff, just in the "disruption" stuff. L&S were, and they hired other people who were. They didn't start with a business idea, but with a technical one. They filled in the blanks on the business side after they survived the .com crash. I didn't get to Google until 2011, but it became clear to me after joining that in the past they had gone on a very nerdy mission to hire all the nerdy people and collect them into one place to do nerdy things. (Unfortunately that nerdy thing ended up being selling ads really efficient, but that's another story.) My fundamental point is that the Google story is very unlike the kind of stories that YCombinator or a16z like. It started, like you said, as a set of intellectual/technical interests. The other stuff, that VCs today like, came later. In a way they did the opposite of the usual advice. They started with the hammer (the tech) rather than the nail (the business problem.) They certainly didn't start with a "Like X but for Y" statement like seems to be desired by VC today. And they didn't look like the typical .com story at the time (which was usually: give us lots of VC $$ so we can sell something on the web that is currently not sold on the web, but we'll just use the $$ to buy customers and make no profit...) I would posit that if today's Google came to YCombinator today they'd be shown the "no thanks" door.
    • YossarianFrPrez 2y ago
      Very interesting to hear your thoughts and experience. I wonder if we really shouldn't make a bit more out of the fact that there are different types of startups: those that pick off low-hanging fruit really well, those that combine novel technology with novel problems (for instance, the recent YC LLM meeting note-taking / transcription service), those that are scientific-discovery based (see, for example the NSF Small Business Innovation Research program), etc. I am not experienced enough to create an ontology of startup ideas, but I think it'd be an interesting exercise.
• HMH 2y ago
  > You need three things. You need to be good at some kind of technology, you need an idea for what you're going to build, and you need cofounders to start the company with. So no word about funding from the CIA and NSA. If you want to build something that changes the world in such a profound way as Google did, you can not possibly expect the powerful not having a word with you. I am inclined to believe that these days you will need influential "friends" with aligned interests at some point.
• ak_111 2y ago
  Am surprised PG gave this talk at a UK school without mentioning an important assumption that they will need to migrate to the US in his opening paragraph. All the examples he mentioned Google, himself and the Irish Stripe founders had to do the same for their startups. Sadly in the UK all the current unicorn "startups" are a bit iffy: XTX (high frequency hedgefund), betfair (betting company), tripledot studios (Zynga like company). Unfortunately mega success in startups doing soemthing innovative is non-existent in Europe and UK in particular. Mistral stands out to how exceptional it is to the rule, and the closest other one I can think of is BioNtech. Sadly the highest expected route to fortune in the UK remains quant trading in finance. Including starting your own hedge fund.
  • zeroxfe 2y ago
    > Am surprised PG gave this talk at a UK school without mentioning an important assumption that they will need to migrate to the US in his opening paragraph. Seems kinda reasonable for a motivational speech not to mention it (even assuming it's entirely true.)
    • ak_111 2y ago
      No I think it was so obvious to him that he forgot to mention it, or he doesn't think it should be a problem for many young people to move to the US. It would be dishonest if he intentionally left it out since for some (arguably a minority of young people) it is a deal breaker.
  • munificent 2y ago
    You say all this like it's a bad thing, but maybe it's ultimately better for a society if there isn't a financial lottery that enables a small number of people to become insanely wealthy and powerful. I'd rather a government that enables a thousand mid-sized companies with moderately well-paid executives and employees than one that enables a single monopolistic mega-corporation with billionaires whose power rivals states and whose incentives are not aligned with most of the world.
    • 2y ago
• bearjaws 2y ago
  Paul Graham sounds like a boomer telling their kids to go apply in person or go door to door for jobs. Especially talking about Software startups, which will increasingly have a lower and lower barrier to entry (aka lower profitability) Theres simply no way to get away with what Google, Facebook or Uber did today. You will not sneak your software into enterprise customers, you will not be able to skirt regulations. Hell the big money pot of getting acquired may be dead too, e.g. Figma. For most startups, you will fail. For the top 1% of companies you can hope to at best make a comfortable living at a multi-million dollar valuation. Only the .0001% will become a Google.
  • julianozen 2y ago
    While you are right, the trick is to find the new unturned stone. Google, Facebook and Uber developed playbooks for their respective environments. One cannot replay their playbook and expect it to work
• gist 2y ago
  Entirely and obviously self serving in that not only is this probably the only 'business' world that Paul has been exposed to (he started a tech company) but Paul also benefits (as do VC's and angel investors) from the entire eco system of young people taking chances with a small chance of success. The investor (and YC) wins with lots of people trying regardless of how many fail. And note that the chances of founders and companies that have passed and been anointed with money is below (how much? I don't know) companies that haven't even made it to that round (to be potentially winnowed out). And have spent time and perhaps family money. Will point out that I benefit from all of this (let's call it 'pick axe' for short) but I would or could never with a straight face and conscience write or give the same advice to kids in high school. Shoot for the moon? Risky. Sure if you have family money to fall back on possibly take the chance. Especially and in particular 'how to start google' (meaning something with huge potential). Oh yeah back in olden times I started a company right out of college and did pretty well and sold it (with ZERO investor money). Lastly the joke that existed back and forever was someone saying 'find a good lawyer' as if doing so is a matter of knowing you had to do it not the specifics of how to do it.
• jameshart 2y ago
  The blindness to privilege that’s tied up in the part about why you ‘need’ to go to a good (by which he means highly selective) school… > if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are... > The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as the list of the most selective universities. Is it at all possible that the people who are able to take a gamble on founding a startup rather than getting a job are also disproportionately drawn from the wealthy class that is also able to afford the privileges necessary to get their kids over the admissions humps needed to get into highly selective schools? Because in spite of the suggestion that getting into these schools is a matter of ‘doing well in your classes’, Graham knows and acknowledges in his footnote that he knows full well that’s actually not what these schools are selecting for anyway: > US admissions departments make applicants jump through a lot of arbitrary hoops that have little to do with their intellectual ability. But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of mere determination and resourcefulness. ‘Mere determination and resourcefulness’? Or the background, finances and support and time necessary to make the grade in terms of non academic achievements, volunteer work, experience, extracurriculars, etc? But even if you get in through academics plus determination and resourcefulness… will you also have the resources to take a risk on turning a project into a startup? This is cargo cultism. Yes, successful founders are disproportionately drawn from high end selective schools, because they are disproportionately drawn from the community of people who come from a background of privilege, and are academically bright. Such people naturally tend to end up at Stanford or MIT or wherever. But getting in to Stanford or MIT doesn’t magically make you into a member of that privileged class.
  • drcongo 2y ago
    I find most of his posts over the last few years to be an exercise in ignoring privilege. It's a very long time since I read one that felt grounded.
    • lupire 2y ago
      I think you changed more than he did.
• ttul 2y ago
  Most startups end up failing. The ones that don’t fail succeed only a little and end up as lifestyle businesses. Nothing wrong with that, but it should be acknowledged. If you want to play the “next Google” game, get ready to be disappointed by Lady Luck.
• mike_hearn 2y ago
  There's a lot to like about this speech, but if a 15 year old heard it and then asked me for more detail I'd have to point out a few things that were glossed over: 1. 15-25 year olds who do programming passion projects are often attracted to video games. Video game companies are not "startups" in the sense pg means here. You will not get rich by indulging a passion for the entertainment industry. 2. You do in fact need capital to do a startup, and there is a lot more to getting that than just having cofounders and something you're interested in. 3. "What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want." This isn't really true, is it. I thought there is another pg/ycombinator essay somewhere that warns people away from specific types of startup pitches, and one of them is something like "an app that tells you about events in your local community". Supposedly this is one of those things that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to work on, but which never turns into a successful startup. There are actually a lot of things that your friends might want which are not startup material anywhere except Sand Hill Road, mostly because there are lots of things people want but won't pay for. A sad example of this is developer tools. If you take pg's advice literally and learn programming, hang out with other people who do that and then do projects with them, soon you will see lots of sticky doors that look like missing bits of infrastructure. Unfortunately startups that do dev tooling aren't a good way to get rich. Developers generally don't or can't buy things, so you have to sell to their CTOs and thus all the money accumulates in companies like Amazon or Microsoft. Example of what happens if you try, even with great PMF: Docker. Most kids with ideas in the world don't have the contacts or work visas to raise money from US VC firms. They need a project that people will pay money for immediately. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the size of the US VC ecosystem is that if someone comes up with a good idea that takes off and they try to grow like a normal company, and they aren't taking VC money, then they will be immediately outcompeted by someone who does, simply because whoever does have that access will engage in market dumping until there's nobody else left except other VC funded startups. One of the US funded companies will end up taking the entire market even if they are burning money with no hope of ever balancing the books, but that's OK because one of the VC's other investments can always be persuaded to give a clean exit. Example: DailyMotion (European) vs YouTube (US). At the time YouTube was bought they didn't have a hope in hell of ever being a standalone business and didn't even care to try, but they were down the road from Google and were scaring Larry/Sergey/Eric with their success. Buying a company if you can just jump in your car to go visit them is easy, if you need to constantly do trans-Atlantic flights, not so easy. It doesn't make sense to bet on the "grow like crazy and wait for an exit" strategy elsewhere. WhatsApp is another example of an MTV based company that had no strategy beyond grow-and-exit. I actually made a WhatsApp-like app a few years before the smartphone revolution hit, and my friends thought it was awesome, but I had no illusions that it could ever be a business. And indeed none of these messenger apps ever have been. In the world of "startups" (vs small businesses), you don't necessarily need to care.
• gordon_freeman 2y ago
  > "But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including a boss telling you what to do." Isn't this a bit misleading and can only be true for companies that don't take VC money or never go public (ex: Basecamp/37 Signals)? For VC funded or public companies, ultimately you'd have to be responsible to answer to your shareholders.
  • Kwpolska 2y ago
    Exactly: instead of a boss, you get venture capitalists, plus you probably don’t have that pesky work-life balance either.
    • rvnx 2y ago
      Not a problem. You don't need work-life balance when you are living in a garage in San Francisco eating ramen on debt that you got from vulture capital.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • quatrefoil 2y ago
    Right, and from all my friends who did take VC money: it's an incredibly demanding period of your life, a large proportion of which isn't about delivering on your vision. You're gonna learn a lot about office space leases, accounting, fundraising, customer pitches, etc. You're gonna have impatient VCs on your board, with the power to fire you, breathing down your neck. You won't be relaxing much and won't be spending that much time with family and non-work friends. It's a valuable experience with a lot of potential upside in the long haul - but let's not pretend that it's less taxing than a cozy 9-to-5 tech job where your boss might ask you to update your OKRs once in a while.
    • bootsmann 2y ago
      Usually by the time VCs have the power to fire you, you have so many different investors that they cannot really do it without some massively difficult political manouvering, at least in software.
• antisthenes 2y ago
  This reads like it was written by an LLM trained on self-help books. Is this the guy that a lot of HNers look up to?
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Yes, sadly. If you read between the lines and take his advice more as "understanding the psychology of VCs" rather than as actual advice, his essays are very useful. He has long passed the phases of a manager's life where he has to be right - he is surrounded by yes men who tell him that he is right no matter what. Matt Levine, as usual, has a great take on the phases of life of a partner/founder of a hedge fund (which a VC fund basically is), and PG is deep in phase 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-07/bridgewater-had-believability-issues?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcxMDg3MTc4MywiZXhwIjoxNzExNDc2NTgzLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTM1JPOURUMEFGQjQwMSIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI2REU0NzkyMUZBRTE0QTdBODg0NDMxQjMxRDQ0QzQwQiJ9.fPddi5sbsP5zxCQeQbOeaSGOkT8Xtm5LoN26_fMi_gU https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-07/bridge... I will say that unlike GPT-4 he is an objectively good writer (ie has very good style) most of the time, so the essays tend to be somewhat entertaining to read.
    • lupire 2y ago
      This is great. What Bridgewater did for Dalio's popularity rating is the same thing Twitter did for Musk's Tweet reach (and what Trump's pollsters did for his ratings).
      • pclmulqdq 2y ago
        Yeah, I hadn't thought about it that way, but Musk and Trump are also examples of people who are deep into stage 3 of this process.
• jonthepirate 2y ago
  [flagged]
• ngd 2y ago
  I'm generally interested if people here think that to a 14-15 year old, do those companies sound tremendously cool and does the premise of their value stir exciting thoughts and motivations? My slightly younger kids don't really what Google, Apple or Facebook/Meta means. If I explained this essay to them, I'd at least say "the iPad", "YouTube", "the Oculus" to make it more relatable. To my mind, to immediately relate to kids in the UK, I would need to say TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Oculus, iPhone, iPad, and such, and not the company name.
• keiferski 2y ago
  “Learn to code and surround yourself with smart people” is good advice, but it’s kind of funny that Google was used as the example of peak success for a group of 15 year olds. I’m fairly willing to bet that most of them think of Google as boring and old, and not exciting or innovative. How to start TikTok or Minecraft would have probably been a more inspiring example.
  • Mr-Frog 2y ago
    The story of Minecraft was an awesome inspiration for my peers and me, much more relatable than Google or any SV startup. Markus Persson did not come from a family of academics or engineers; he was just a poor blue-collar kid who liked videogames and coding (unfortunately his political views have stained his image).
    • lokimedes 2y ago
      I literally remember following his progress as he posted on Reddit. I imagine following Linus Torvald’s posts on Usenet must bring similar memories to the slightly more matured people around here. With fully 2 datapoints, I conjecture that this odd Scandinavian combination of being highly advanced nations yet isolated from the action in and around Silicon Valley increases the probability of public social Communication, as we (Scandis) are used to not having peers physically around us. The chi^2 is good with this one.
  • LarsDu88 2y ago
    Folks underestimate how incredibly skilled Notch was and is. Unfortunately ludum dare has taken down its historical compo pages, but I remember that he had several games built from scratch in 24 hours which were mind boggling impressive. One had a full 3d rendering engine implemented in Dartlang written in 48 hours. Another was a minecraft top down rpg clone. Dude is the Bobby Fischer of tech
    • bearjaws 2y ago
      He also wrote Wurm Online with Rolf Jansson, all in Java OpenGL. Was a bit of a mess of a game but it still has an engaged community.
• dpflan 2y ago
  I am curious how this ethos of the 3 things you need and playfulness/not-intended-to-be-a-startup startups project is in enacted per batch. Like YC's now numerous sales operations/software companies in the past batches: 19-22 years are making email-based-crms for their friends? (I guess a batch and other batches are "friends" so goalposts shift and magically appear). The growth in sales saas companies out of YC seems less of fun project and more of this is a business opportunity for the enterprise. Probably for other spaces as well. Is there dissonance between the tenets of this essay and actually YC companies of late? Does someone have better analysis, would be much appreciated? """ What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want. """
  • dpflan 2y ago
    Here is a launch front-page today: Okapi (YC W24) -- A new, flexible CRM with good UX Nothing about friends, nothing about fun projects. Mainly just looking at Salesforce, knowing its the DB for business-side of the house, and that the UI/X of SFDC is not good, so here is a better UX (much appreciated). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39755927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39755927
  • lupire 2y ago
    As a VC (purchaser of startup) pg's main interest is in driving up supply of premoney startups in order to drive down price.
    • dpflan 2y ago
      The YC network is quite useful for survival and evolution of startups, an economic safety net.
• gumby 2y ago
  > If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies. Actaally if you look at those lists, the largest number made it by choosing their parents correctly.
  • petesergeant 2y ago
    Certainly a few, but a quick scan of lists makes it look more like 25% inherited in the top 20 or so
    • namdnay 2y ago
      I think it depends where you set the limit between “self made” and “inherited”. I don’t think it’s black or white Would Gates have made it if Mum wasn’t on the board of IBM? Would Bezos have made it without 200k from mum&dad ?
      • importantbrian 2y ago
        The real problem with those lists is that they only include people whose wealth is known and can be reasonably valued based on public sources. It's often not easy to trace the net worth of old-money families. It also means you won't find people from countries with very low transparency or dictators on the list. For example, you won't find Putin or any of the Saudi royals on the Forbes list even though they are among the wealthiest people in the world. Perhaps even competing for #1 depending on what estimate of their wealth you find to be the most reliable. It's impossible to draw any firm conclusions from those lists because they aren't representative samples of wealthy people. They're a sample of wealthy people with public assets, and of course that's going to skew heavily towards people who founded large publically traded companies who live in countries with high degrees of financial transparency.
        • secstate 2y ago
          Which makes one feel even shittier when you realize that even with that skewing, the list STILL contains a lot of inherited-wealth or comfortable-highly-educated-wealth people.
• d--b 2y ago
  Inspirational talk for 14 year old to engage into extremely risky ventures for the sake of becoming the richest person in the world. How irresponsible.
  • petesergeant 2y ago
    The actual advice given is “learn to program and then pursue projects that interest you”, which is great advice for a 14 year old.
    • d--b 2y ago
      Yeah right that’s definitely what 14 year olds will take away from this.
• n0us 2y ago
  In the YC Youtube videos it's amusing that they (Jason and the other guy) almost always reference Google and Facebook despite the fact that neither of those companies were YC companies and none of the YC companies out of 4000+ funded (not even Stripe) come close to the scale or valuation of either Google or Facebook. https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/valuation https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/valuation
  • paulpauper 2y ago
    Google and Facebook had 2 decades. Even the most successful of YC companies had a little over a decade. Not a valid comparison. And $100+ billion for Coinbase, Stripe, Dropbox is still huge.
    • n0us 2y ago
      So why don’t they use those companies as examples instead?
  • asfasfo 2y ago
    While thats true they did fund Airbnb which is 100B. So while they haven't funded anyone that big yet, they have come 1/10 of the way.
• mattlondon 2y ago
  I dislike this sort of advice for teenagers. You may as well tell them to be rock stars or professional sports people. Tell the kids to study, don't sell them an unobtainable dream
  • smokel 2y ago
    The amount of survivorship bias ignored in the article is appalling. Why?
    • duderific 2y ago
      Because PG is a survivor, and he's biased.
    • hbn 2y ago
      It's like all the successful rappers who go on about how "I wanted to be a rapper when I was a teenager, and my guidance counsellor told me it's not realistic, and that I should settle down with a safe, normal job. Now look where I am!" Your guidance counsellor told hundreds of kids the same thing, and it was good advice for basically all of them. For every guy who made it rich with some crazy risky stock trade, there's hundreds of guys who lost everything. For every business that was about to go under but managed to pull through, there's hundreds that were in the same position and failed. The attitude of following in the footsteps of the lucky few just seems like it's teaching kids to double down on failure. Everyone can spot the issue when someone is wasting their money in a casino, thinking they're one more pull on the slot machine away from becoming rich. But for some reason it's encouraged when it's reframed as "following your dreams."
      • echelon 2y ago
        We're all already dead in geologic time. Why not shoot for the stars? There's a big difference between a casino and actively throwing yourself at problem gradients, learning, adapting.
        • smokel 2y ago
• PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Totally insane. 99% or more of the people who enable Google to do what Google does are employees of Google. Same with every other company. The odds of being the founder of a successful company are probably worse than being a professional sportsball player (if only because they turn over more frequently). Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder rather than an employee? Does anything good come from encouraging people to ignore the actual situation that the overwhelming majority of the population finds itself in, and instead focusing on some essentially impossible pipe dream? Obviously, every successful company does have founders. But so does every unsuccessful company. And what actually powers every successful company are its employees, not its founders. The absolute worst of SV thinking, personified.
  • amelius 2y ago
    > Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder rather than an employee? Yes, VCs flourish by it.
  • ornornor 2y ago
    If you’re a prominent VC that’s exactly what you want to happen though, it will let you spread your bets even more. But like you said, this is peak SV. Luckily there is a whole world outside of SV where the rest of us operate :)
  • volkk 2y ago
    > Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder rather than an employee? I would imagine dreaming big is pretty good for children. A big reason for why I'm optimistic in life is because I have hope for achieving something. I truly can't imagine a life where my father/mother would only hammer in the fact that I am just an average joe and should stick to climbing the corporate ladder. Such an uninspiring take, this one. Depressing.
    • awesomeMilou 2y ago
• sarimkx 2y ago
  > If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at programming. That has been the source of the median startup for the last 30 years, and this is probably not going to change in the next 10. Did not expect this tbh. So many people here worried about the future of programming but PG believes we're safe! Alas, something positive!
• paulmd 2y ago
  you could never start google today. when you go to the VCs and make the pitch they say "that business already exists, it's called google".
• a_n 2y ago
  lol why do so many people here have such a loser/average mindset, you can literally achieve anything, literally anything, just because you don’t want to work hard, you don’t gotta be so discouraging to other people, well I guess people who wanna achieve great things probably don’t care about the stupid lazy people, so it’s whatever But the fact is you can literally do anything, you just gotta give it your all…
  • sarora27 2y ago
    IMO most folks find it easier to point to the million reasons why something wont work/why someone is speaking from a point of affluence/how luck/finances/etc play a role in success than to just do the thing, learn from their mistakes, and grow. It's probably because doing the latter is hard and forces you to face ambiguity & hard personal growth on a daily basis.
    • swader999 2y ago
      I suffer from this at times. To be fair though, that's sort of my day job. Find holes and flaws in ideas and make them stronger. I don't do it with people anymore at least, I try hard to assume they have the best intent.
  • paulpauper 2y ago
    To say I can do literally anything means I can have a 5x body weight deadlift or run a 4 minute mile. There are limits.
  • latentcall 2y ago
    A lot of opportunities are locked behind a massive paywall and the system isn’t intended for your average Joe to get through that paywall. If it were, you’d have less people to serve you coffee or deliver your meals or advertise to in order to increase shareholder value which the ruling class do not want. Do not be dense. Pretending like all 8 billion people have the same opportunity to be the next Jeff Bezos/Elon/Jobs is misleading. My advice for the 99% is to the best you can and foster family and friend relationships, work less, and get out of the mindless consumerist game.
• htsb 2y ago
  * [X] Viable ideas * [X] Skills to build those ideas * [ ] Runway to develop those ideas * [ ] Someone to help find money to provide runway
• erickhill 2y ago
  This has probably been mentioned before on previous posts to Mr. Graham's site, but I find the 1998-ness of the underlying HMTL and simple (if fuzzy) front end (with image map!) that even my PowerBook Pismo can render and appreciate a total blast of fresh air. A mild shame it is running HTTPS so more vintage hardware can't access it, but I understand why. Anyhoo, props to 1998 era web design. Sincerely.
• tcgv 2y ago
  Finally his blog is using HTTPS :)
• elektrontamer 2y ago
  > But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including a boss telling you what to do. I hear things like this a lot and I'm sick of it. There's nothing wrong with working for someone, in fact it's the best way to improve your skills as a beginner since you're going to be mentored by people much more experienced than you. I still call my first boss to this day.
  • swader999 2y ago
    In fact most knowledge work that's above average really feels like you are working 'with' someone. Self leading teams etc.
  • jordanpg 2y ago
    People like PG are at the apex of this weird fawning worship of entrepreneurs and getting rich that particularly affects the tech world. This culture places great intrinsic real value on not having a boss. But of course this is all made up. Nothing has any real value in this sense. We just each get 100 years on Earth and we each get to decide how to spend that time. Those are the facts. The entrepreneur worship culture is simply about making people who make those choices feel better about those choices. And as another commenter has observed, most of us are no more likely to make it as an entrepreneur than we are likely to play for the Lakers. So, yeah, "a boss telling you what to do" is fine if it works for you and gets you what you want out of life. Some of us just don't give a shit and don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about things like market fit and business transactions and valuation blah blah blah.
• kleiba 2y ago
  ...including a boss telling you what to do. You leave that to your customers and stock holders instead.
• BogdanPetre 2y ago
  Start a company to work on exciting projects and potentially get rich, by mastering technology, creating based on interests, and finding like-minded cofounders
• walteweiss 2y ago
  I’m following this advice for about two decades, and I’m not even close to being rich. I’m rather poor at the day. One of the reasons is my background, besides ‘building my stuff’ I was very busy fighting the obstacles most of the people in a developed country would never meet. Or most of the people having parents would never meet. Life got me in the middle of building a very nice thing, giving me obstacles I couldn’t manage. Then, when I was climbing out of it, there was the pandemic, which messed many things in my life. I just migrated to Ukraine back then, and you all know what happened next, the Russian full-scale invasion. That’s only the public events, I’m ignoring all the personal stuff here. Saying that, for me, it was about five years, at least, I paused with my projects. Some of them are slightly irrelevant, some are not. There are ones I still believe are very good, even now when I’m older and more experienced. I got a huge load of non-professional experience over these years, and it helps me to understand the world so much better now. Will I ever find my resources for building my ideas? Nobody knows. If I’ll survive the war, I think I will. During this half a decade I juggled stupid jobs (won’t mention why to save time, personal life events) because for a regular job I’m either too qualified or have a very different experience, non-applicable to local market. And I’m way too expensive when I work as an employee. I’m more the founder / employer type than the employee type, unemployable, as they used to brag in the Valley. And my point is. I regret I never took my time to explore the professional life I despised all my life. This stupid CV/resume and LinkedIn idiocracy. When I had no resources, I could easily manage any enterprise job. I’m very good at stupid politics if needed, but I don’t enjoy it. And I’m very good with the software tools, so I can do your average enterprise employee workday for a couple of hours time. That proved my previous years as a freelancer, building my company, and interacting with the people I know from the corporate world. In time of my need, I was just contemplating others earning way too much for their skills. When I didn’t even have a stupid resume, but was usually overqualified for a senior position, not to say a junior one. And no resources to learn the things I missed from this corporate thing. Now it’s getting better due to my personal life changes, but I just lost some years of professional development. Plus loads of money I could earn on a stupid job (I won’t burn out type, as I don’t give a flying duck type). While I’m not arguing about the point, especially as a piece of advice for teenagers, I would recommend learning other options, and get as much different life experience as you can, while you’re very young. That experience is much more valuable than all the money you can get. I got loads of money and all of that money is burned by now. I could earn more (loss less) if I would be better prepared for personal stuff in my life. As it took way too much energy and affected my work way too much. Also, I don’t believe you build Facebook or Google when you are super young. I would say that is more of a luck thing. I believe you build something valuable when you understand what is around you and how the World works. You can build your super project at 50, why not? And as the P.S. the Zuck story is a pure manipulation. We all know that wasn’t even his idea.
• babl-yc 2y ago
  I couldnt finish reading the essay because I was distracted by the generally smug tone of it. 99.99% of people who read this article are not going to start the next Google. Being a successful entrepreneur requires an incredible amount of luck, timing, skill, and risk taking. If you choose that path, great, but that in no way devalues the skill building, network building, and predictable income of working for someone else.
  • echelon 2y ago
    Perhaps you're not the intended audience. There are certain people that deeply desire this and that understand their chances of success are low. Nevertheless, these people want to try and find encouragement in these types of essays. You don't need to be upset that this isn't for you. There are all sorts of shapes of people in the world. We benefit by having curious people at all strata of society, exploring various sorts of ideas and problems. It keeps us from deadlock.
    • pepve 2y ago
      > You don't need to be upset that this isn't for you. The person you're responding to does not seem upset to me. You add an interesting perspective that some people want to find encouragement in these types of essays. And the personal jab just isn't necessary.
      • echelon 2y ago
        > The person you're responding to does not seem upset to me. I don't think we're reading this the same. To quote OP, >> I was distracted by the generally smug tone of it. The definition of "smug": > smug /sməɡ/ adjective. having or showing an excessive pride in oneself or one's achievements. > contentedly confident of one's ability, superiority, or correctness; complacent. This is why I responded. If you don't like the tone of the article, you don't need to suggest that the author has a superiority complex. > And the personal jab just isn't necessary. "smug" is a personal jab. I didn't make one.
  • gizmo 2y ago
• jankovicsandras 2y ago
  Another point of view: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-nsa-2a80584c9c1 https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-... (I don't know how truthful these articles are, but found them interesting to read.)
• fuzzfactor 2y ago
  If you reduce it to a very certain first principle that can be applied similarly today, at Google they made electronics do what other people weren't doing so well, ideally things that had never been done before. Same thing as Packard & Hewlett when they got the ball rolling . . . Worked for Edison too, he really got in on the ground floor when it comes to electrons.
• sgu999 2y ago
  > this is the standard way to get really rich The standard way for a young 15yo to get rich, is to be passed on wealth by their parents. But starting a company can probably work, occasionally enough that we can use it as a smoke screen.
• jp57 2y ago
  The trick is to start your own company. So it's not a trick for avoiding work, because if you start your own company you'll work harder than you would if you had an ordinary job. But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including a boss telling you what to do. This is literally true, but it's disingenuous. Not every job has a boss telling you what to do. Many jobs hire people for their expertise and pay them to solve problems for them, and in these kinds of jobs the employee collaborates with her boss on deciding what kinds of problems you will work on. Of course, it will only be enjoyable if the company's problems are aligned with the employee's interests. If you are a technical expert with the kind of ability and acumen needed to run a successful start up, I would argue that it is at least as easy to find a company whose problems are aligned with your interests as to find investors who will truly let you pursue your own interests with their money. "Making it" as a startup founder should be seen in the same class of success as making it as a rock star or an actor. There are lots of aspirants and hardly any of them succeed. Even though some manage to become wildly wealthy, the prior expected payoff is negative.
  • pdonis 2y ago
    > the employee collaborates with her boss on deciding what kinds of problems you will work on. Of course, it will only be enjoyable if the company's problems are aligned with the employee's interests. And that's a huge if. PG's view of regular jobs might be colored by his own experience (working for Yahoo after they bought Viaweb--of course it's going to jar when the thing you built is now owned by someone else that you now have to work for), but it's still the case that even the best case regular job (and of course most regular jobs aren't the best case) is going to give you significantly less autonomy than owning your own company--because you don't make the final business decisions for a company you don't own. If you're the type of person that's going to jar (and I suspect PG is that type of person), you're not going to like even the best case regular job. > "Making it" as a startup founder should be seen in the same class of success as making it as a rock star or an actor. There are lots of aspirants and hardly any of them succeed. Even though some manage to become wildly wealthy, the prior expected payoff is negative. This is probably true if you take VC funding, since VC outcomes are basically bimodal: either "huge win" or "tank". I'm not sure all startups actually need to take VC funding, however.
• xanderlewis 2y ago
  > …get good at programming. That has been the source of the median startup for the last 30 years, and this is probably not going to change in the next 10. Interesting comment; seems at odds with what a lot of others seem to think at the moment. But time will tell. I suspect he’s right.
• abhayhegde 2y ago
  While I absolutely agree with PG here on identifying a missing link and solving it with technology as your own project is a good way to own a startup, I also feel most of his examples are reminiscent of survivorship bias. For every one of these giant trillion dollar companies, there are also thousands of companies that couldn't make it. Also, just by the distribution of it all, not every company can be a Google. Not trying to be pessimistic here; everyone should be able to try solving some problem as a project and have fun meanwhile. However, expecting a Google out of it could be a bit too demanding.
  • justsocrateasin 2y ago
    I think he answers the second point of "not every company can be a Google" though. He says this will get you to the point where your company could be a Google, but makes no promises that it will be one. I agree with the first point. I do think that the experience would nonetheless be valuable, though, to pilot a failed company.
    • paulryanrogers 2y ago
      Why even bring up 'Google' when the odds are (and always were) so long? It's like saying your bet could be the Powerball winner. I mean if his audience is only soon-to-be lottery winners, then it's kind of embarrassingly narrow and niche. And what advice is there to say except be rich enough to buy a lot of tickets?
      • adventured 2y ago
        Because it's drastically more exciting and interesting to a young audience, whose attention he's trying to acquire to get various points across. You won't get and keep their attention easily. Inspiration matters. Attention matters. Teenagers are not inspired by: you could start a little business that de facto operates as a medium paying job (but is far more stressful and risky to your future, your potential family, and your long-term finances), and it'll be miserably difficult, and you really shouldn't even try it because the likely rewards are so tiny that you should just go work for Microsoft instead for the fat (and easier) paycheck. Even if you try to sell that with a passion premise (the reward is in the love of the craft), the sell is so ugly you shouldn't even waste the young audience's time (they'll just come away depressed at best). Why do people ever aspire to anything that's exceptionally difficult?
• difflens 2y ago
  It's interesting that this piece mentions "to get really rich" as one of the primary motivators. Especially to high school students. I wonder if that's good advice or if society is better served by motivating students to start companies that make the world better.
  • heyoni 2y ago
    I feel like there was a moment where “love was all you needed” and people just followed their passions with real careers as a backup. Hollywood pressed that view (or echoed it) into the zeitgeist and I’m not sure what the turning point was, but people started getting filthy rich. Almost as if the dormant culture combined with the internet made it possible to amass an absurd amount of wealth. Since then, whenever that is, it feels like it’s socially acceptable again to do be driven by earning potential and nothing else. I agree with you, wanting to become “filthy rich” is abhorrent given all of the known implications that comes with. At the very least people should have some shame and keep that to themselves.
  • paulddraper 2y ago
    Getting rich and making the world better are not incompatible, or even unaligned in general. You get rich by offering a good or service that society desires.
    • int_19h 2y ago
      No, that only makes you well-off. You get filthy rich by capturing as much of the market as possible by whatever means necessary and killing off competition - including user lock-in, artificial bundling, using successful past products to subsidize non-profitable new ones just to screw competitors etc.
      • Karrot_Kream 2y ago
        Now this is going to be a fruitful conversation.
      • paulddraper 2y ago
• codethatwerks 2y ago
  What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income. I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like how sucky accessing all kinds of “adulting” things are from aged care to dealing with myriad systems with kids schools or any other problems that have inevitably been chucked at you. Some of these “startups” might actually be lobbying/political work for the good that doesn’t make money, some might be startups. Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor.
  • xyzelement 2y ago
    // Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn You can use that term as a proxy for delivering large impact to the world. It's approximately the same thing. If you do something like "aged care" and "dealing with kids schools" in a way that helps millions of people, you'll end up a billionaire whether you want to or not. I don't use the term "unicorn" but I think keeping score in financial terms helps because that's how you know you've delivered something people want and at scale. If you remove money out of the equation it's easier to fool yourself thinking you're making some difference and you're not.
    • waveBidder 2y ago
      But unicorns and the people who fund them are all about disconnecting from actual returns today, and caring about projected returns in 10 years. Accidentally becoming very popular is great. Aiming for that as the goal distorts the business into something unsustainable and inevitably leads to enshittification.
    • mewpmewp2 2y ago
      But perhaps he doesn't want to make THAT much impact. Some decent impact would be fine, of course. It seems a lot of responsibility to have impact on millions of people, might lead you down the road of drugs and alcohol, killing your health to be able to handle it. If I have a business that impacts millions of people, then every hour I spend on it, would have huge influence, and if I don't spend the hours on increasing that percentage, I'm also letting down millions of people.
• Animats 2y ago
  1. Get into Stanford just as Stanford is getting into the VC business. 2. Use Stanford bandwidth for your web crawler. 3. See how AltaVista does it; they're in downtown Palo Alto. 4. Get 100K from the guy who founded Sun. 5. Move into the space above the bike shop in Palo Alto. (9 major startups began there.) 6. Get more funding from the guy who founded Amazon. 7. Sell search ads. 8. Profit!
  • dpbriggs 2y ago
    In the zero interest rate environment it was easier to get good advice and orders of magnitude more more money. A lot of those companies are crap. Google had good timing but importantly, a good product and market fit. Prior search engines sucked in comparison with obnoxious monetization.
    • zerr 2y ago
      I think the UX was the main reason people flocked to Google - an empty white page with a single search text entry and a button.
      • anigbrowl 2y ago
        No, that was a gimmick, it actually turned most people off the first time they saw it, along with the name and the clown color letters. It was the quality of the search results using pagerank being way ahead of the best curated alternatives. Then the quirky UX suddenly became a great brand for a product that Just Worked. For their first 5-10 years they hardly put a foot wrong, everything they did was something nobody had ever seen before.
        • wepple 2y ago
          IIRC a copyright notice was added to the bottom of the site, because in early user testing, people thought the page was still loading because it was so barren
    • tech_tuna 2y ago
• gfsincere 2y ago
  [flagged]
• justina20 2y ago
  [dead]
• codelord 2y ago
  How to start Google? You can't. That holds for 99.999999% of the people. The rest 0.000001% aren't wasting their time reading Paul Graham's essays.
  • ramraj07 2y ago
    This essay is for kids. Many successful founders have likely listened to inspiring talks like this when they were kids. In places like Stanford or the prestigious high schools they come from. The people who read here can read it for clarity and the chance that they can show this article to a smart nephew to inspire them. Like I just did.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • rgmerk 2y ago
    You're overestimating the importance of talent and underestimating the importance of luck. Not saying Larry Page and Sergey page aren't talented - clearly they were/are very talented people. But they were also extraordinarily lucky. To take another example, if Gary Kildall had been a slightly more ruthless businessman and IBM had had a little more foresight, Bill Gates would not be a billionaire.
    • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
      Agreed, BG actually come across as fellow less smarter than several people I know, he does not have profound insights, and keeps repeating trite stuff.
• enlightenedfool 2y ago
  Any chance for me at 45 and without stellar academic background? Or just hope for better chance next life?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • keiferski 2y ago
    There are many entrepreneurs that got started late in life. They might not be running the most cutting edge technology companies, but there is more than one industry in the world.
• deleted 2y ago
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• xyst 2y ago
  The cost of failure is way too high in this country for people to take a risk and venture out on their own. This is a privilege that has been reserved for the wealthy. Larry. Sergey. Mark Z. Steve. All of these people were born into families where both parents either had advanced degrees or were well off due to their success in the field. Failure for these people does not mean much. Maybe just a hit to their egos. But otherwise they keep living life, just not as the billionaires of today.
• swang720 2y ago
  I was really excited to open this thinking it would be a thought experiment on how to restart all of Google's services if they ever went down all at the same time. Was mildly disappointed to find that this was about starting the next Google.
  • cpill 2y ago
    yeah, I had an idea for a new search engine and was hoping to get an idea of how to do it :(
    • firtoz 2y ago
      Well, just give it a try.
• gen220 2y ago
  I wonder if there are some other companies that would be better to hold up as paragons to high schoolers. Apple, Patagonia (and its predecessors), WhatsApp (pre-FB), Trader Joe’s (pre acquisition), Yahoo! (pre-‘99) are some that come to mind for me. Any others?
• bustling-noose 2y ago
  I am sorry but this is a terrible write up. Because the gist of it all is 'do what you are good at and help people' but giving examples of billion dollar companies in 90% of the write up shows - but also look at these billionaires its so cool. You could start a sewing business with few clients at most. Thats still a start up and will make you just as successful and happy and content and will help your local community and if you are good at it become bigger over time. This is how humanity has evolved. These big tech startups are a thing since the last 20 years maybe. But businesses have existed for centuries and they all start with small projects. But this writeup focusses on these billionaires and tech startup culture so much that it misses to focus on the part - 'do your thing and it might not be programming'. Now being a founder of Y combinator might make you biased to look at only programming and tech companies but it's a shame because tech companies only show up as giants in share value. The tangible world of businesses is vastly bigger and includes millions of startups serving billions that such people will miss completely maybe because they don't have a website or a ticker in NASDAQ. Such a sad hustle world we live in that we forget your local falafel vendor is also a startup who probably will expand to multiple falafel carts over time.
• deleted 2y ago
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• dools 2y ago
  YMMV The happiest entrepreneurs I know got advanced degrees, had a solid career, developed plenty of contacts, then launched something in their 30s or 40s with substantially less risk than taking a punt on knowing what problems were worth solving while at University, or taking a punt on finding the right person to start a company with while at University, or taking a punt on having the wide range of skills required to actually make a company work without ever having any work experience. This is the sort of hype that drew me in when I was younger and I think it's damaging. The real way to start Google is to be smart, hard working and incredibly lucky. IMHO the best way to start a company is to be smart, hard working and patient.
  • justforasingle 2y ago
    What is YMMV?
    • xeonmc 2y ago
      Young Mutant Mercenary Viper
    • electrondood 2y ago
      Yeenage Mutant Minja Vurtles. Or at least that's how I always read it in my head.
    • ojbyrne 2y ago
      Your Mileage May Vary.
    • luigi23 2y ago
      your mileage may vary, meaning that point from the essay doesn't apply uniformly
    • xenonite 2y ago
      You might check the urban dictionary for such questions.
      • justforasingle 2y ago
• radicalriddler 2y ago
  Wanting to read PG articles while working was one of the reasons I started up a project called WebToSpeech[0]. It's not a startup, it's more just a project I created so I could listen to articles while working. I thought about making it a startup, hence the dicky landing page, but didn't have time. It's not open to sign ups or anything (blocked in Supabase), so this isn't really trying to be a marketing exercise, the idea about joy projects just resonated with me. If you want to listen to the generated audio (really it just custom parses a web page and sends it off to azure), I've uploaded it to a public Cloudflare R2 bucket[1]. It's not perfect, I haven't fully configured the SSML to treat quotes correct, and I'm adding weird breaks in between normal text and anchors, but... it's a project :). [0] https://www.webtospeech.app/ https://www.webtospeech.app/ [1] https://publicmedia.webtospeech.app/b3dc8034-c2f4-4835-afe8-2d8bdab489d7.mp3 https://publicmedia.webtospeech.app/b3dc8034-c2f4-4835-afe8-...
  • radicalriddler 2y ago
    Funnily enough, the fact that PG's website is archaic actually pushed me to parse a lot of legacy tags that I'd never had to use in that way.
• ranman 2y ago
  > Don't try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most. This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.
  • _xivi 2y ago
    > This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes. I don't get your comment. Are you saying PG is trying to deter and throw off teenagers so they don't compete in the space he invested in?
    • jamwil 2y ago
      No. Survivorship Bias.
    • killerdhmo 2y ago
      No, they're saying 1000 bets on random foundational technology means PG is more likely to have a startup to invest in that's a winner, then necessarily giving good advice to the individual founder who doesn't have 1000 turns at the wheel.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • resonious 2y ago
        This does make sense. I think it's also possible that most of the successes PG sees are people doing something interesting to them. So the argument would be more like: among success stories, true interest is more common than trend chasing. Of course YC funds tons of ChatGPT wrappers so dunno.
      • muzani 2y ago
        The founder who tries to do something boring and profitable ends up doing things like making another CRM or some kind of SaaS pipeline from one thing to another. These tend to be things that get built anyway by the people with more funding. There's so many CRMs built on top of vtiger open source, and these may be better than vtiger for a while, but in the long run they fall behind. Paradoxically, avoiding risks makes people more likely to take the riskier options.
• AIorNot 2y ago
  This advice is horrible for 14 year olds - it’s the equivalent of saying hey kids go become a movie star, rock star, sports champion or rapper
  • titanomachy 2y ago
    The advice boils down to “work on projects that interest you” and “do well and school” and maybe “if you don’t know what you’re interested in, try programming”. Even if they don’t make a startup, at least following the advice would make them more employable.
  • klabb3 2y ago
    I think most of it is good advice focusing on creativity, independence, crafting and tinkering – which traditional schooling is bad at. What’s toxic is the extreme rush of it all. You don't need to be successful business owner at 22. In fact, sounds like a good way to distort your perspective on life, and business. Incubators seem to like young people because they are gullible and investors can offer them less and get more control. If it was so important to be young in business, then how come they should listen to advice from those old farts? That’s the part that bugs me, it seems exploitative. Another reason to play it slower is you can work and save for financial security beforehand, and you can build your network without going to MIT or Stanford. You’ll meet plenty of people working from all kinds of backgrounds. You’ll get to practice financial decision making. You’ll be a more well-rounded person who can empathize with different walks of life, (isn’t understanding people gospel in VC land?).
  • shp0ngle 2y ago
    really? at the end of the day it just says "study well and have your own projects" which is a great advice in any way?
• necovek 2y ago
  I don't see any mention of being ready to completely pivot from your original, lofty mission ("best search with no ads") to exactly the opposite ("ads are money"). Google was a successful, unsustainable search engine before it was a successful business. Facebook was a successful social network waay before it was a successful business. Reddit was... You can see where I am going with this.
  • freediver 2y ago
    In a way, it became a pivot from "organize the world's information" to "organize the world's ads".
    • mettamage 2y ago
      Ads pay. Anything that gets eyeballs will be paid for by ad placement. I think that's the "dirty" (open) "secret". Many industries are paid for by ads, not just tech companies. Though, tech companies have taken a huge chunk out of the entertainment industry as YouTubers, Instagrammers and TikTokkers (etc.) are now creating that entertaining content for the tech companies. All in an effort to capture eye balls. And Hacker News is no different. Everyone who's on here long enough will slowly learn about Y Combinator. HN is an ad placement site for YC and YC affiliates. HN is much more than that of course, and that is why the ad placement works so well. Personally, I find the way HN is doing it tasteful. Moreover, it's not the only reason why HN exists, it's a synergy thing. With that said, there's still the same dynamic in there. It's because ads pay, one way or another.
      • necovek 2y ago
        I never disputed that (I think I actually said "ads are money" ;). Google story is peculiar because their founders started with "ads are evil" mantra. If it wasn't for that (and support for free software communities), us geeks would not have recommended Google to everyone and their dog over Altavista, Yahoo or whatever else was there at the time. We certainly would not have gotten our non-techy pops and grandmas to use the Google of today. At some point, I was proud to wear a Google shirt I got from them during the early days.
• gsky 2y ago
  Even top ranked projects here won't r receive more than a dozen users 2 days later. That's the reality.
• benreesman 2y ago
  I have mixed feelings about this, mostly because the stakes on giving people persuasive advice with an enviable track record in hand might be at its highest in a room full of 14/15-year olds. This is exactly the kind of thing that made me dramatically more ambitious and harder working when I started reading pg essays (pushing 20 years ago now), so I have a huge soft spot for the feeling/nostalgia that I got when I just let it wash over me. And it’s ultimately why I think it nets out constructive in spite of some real problems: if I heard this at 15 I would have started working really hard at 15 and not 22 or 23, and I would have started cultivating relationships with people who were going to be powerful at 15, instead of arguably antagonizing powerful people until, well maybe still today [1]. It’s got some serious problems though: the way most people get rich is by having wealthy parents, though at the apex it’s having wealthy parents who raised you to work hard and manage relationships with powerful people well [2], so given that by 15 most of that already has or hasn’t happened, I think we can generally regard pg saying that as a “useful fiction”: outcomes will improve at the mean for 15-year olds who believe him about this, or such is my prediction. The advice about university is extremely dangerous in 2024 for anyone without a privileged upbringing because university is a far inferior place to learn things than YouTube videos aggregating all the best university lectures in history with the even more effective education style pioneered by Grant with 3blue1brown. And while trying to achieve at a level where you go to Stanford without a mountain of uniquely nasty debt [3] is strictly a good thing in high school / primary school, actually going to university via debt is an extremely dicey proposition if you miss and that distinction is tough to sell to that audience. Better advice would be to start learning from the best educators in the world via a YouTube Premium subscription concurrent to high-school studies (and making them whiffle ball on a curve compared to peers that don’t), try to get a scholarship to an Ivy or Cal or something, but go to community college or directly into the workforce (Work for a Startup™) if you miss and don’t have graduate study on the agenda. Mostly the feeling I get is that pg and his essays these days sit in the Venn between “well intentioned”, “aspirational/idealistic” and “not true”. It’s a fine line sometimes between “aspirational” and “false”, it gets finer yet in light of Sinclair’s Maxim [4]: what might be dismissed in a low-effort way as “out of touch” or even “self-serving” is trivially unfair to pg. He has his own family he could be spending time with instead of speaking to young people, he doesn’t need or seem to want any more money. He’s just past the point where he can de-leverage his intellectual and emotional investment in a world that doesn’t exist anymore: he’s the LTCM of serious intellectuals in technology. The book about that is called “When Genius Failed”, and John Meriwether is a brilliant man who lived by an admirably robust ethical code in a very rough neighborhood. [1] The most significant glitch in pg’s firmware is that he says “smart and hardworking” when he really means “good at becoming powerful”, a direct quote [5] about his protégée illustrates this very clearly. [2] Pick a list of very rich people and click on all the links, a fine starting point is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires. [3] Yes there have been some modest reforms, no it’s not fixed: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67546893 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67546893 [4] At the top, a man’s living can be about intellectual as well as financial capital: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge... [5] I’ve known too many YC alumni too well for too long to even engage with any hatchet job on a piece that if anything understates the reality: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma..., please don’t prey on my worst instincts by tempting me to cite documented examples and credible primary sources.
• wiradikusuma 2y ago
  I want to offer a slightly contrarian view. Unless you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, the best (safest, surest) way to start your entrepreneurial journey is to work for someone else. The goal is to learn everything about the rules of the trade and expand your network—these two things you don't get from school—while being paid to do that. On the side, do what PG says to keep your entrepreneurial spirit and avoid "comfort zone" i.e pursuing your career (which is actually fine, but we're talking about starting a business right). Probably you won't end up building Google. But hey, maybe with this approach, you can give a silver spoon to your offspring.
• BMSR 2y ago
  What I want to know is how to become an individual that is able to obtain the kind of things that provide leverage. I already have the machines, I just don't have the platform to move around exciting events and I simply stay in my room. I don't even have a bank account afaik. My paypal account insists on using chinese language (it's cursed). I'm waiting for github to implement a currency I can use. Then again, maybe there's nothing I would do differently.
  • dgellow 2y ago
    I would recommend to look at local hacker spaces and just befriend people there. Chat around, listen to others, show interest. That’s a good starting point
• idkdotcom 2y ago
  [dead]
• sidcool 2y ago
  I am glad he did not mention "Ensure you are born in California".
• ArunRaja 2y ago
  Summarised : * as many(interested projects) -> tech -> product ideas * Grades -> top college -> co-workers
• red_admiral 2y ago
  Paul Graham is second to no-one in understanding the startup ecosystem, but there's some points here that only tell one side of the story. Before I get to the complaints though - am I the only one with the feeling there would be a huge market niche for a search engine that gave as useful results as Google did in its earlier days? It sometimes feels like half the results for non-tech-related searches these days lead to low-quality AI-generated SEO-optimised fake content. > If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at programming. We tried this with unemployed former coal miners in Appalachia. It turns out, the real secret sauce here is "be the kind of person who can get good at programming". I'm with Freddie deBoer here, as he says in his book The Cult of Smart: we need to accept that not everyone has the same intellectual abilities. Once we do that, we can start thinking about how we make a world that works for the half of the population below the median on this dimension. > ... facebook ... The other story I heard about Zuckerberg is that he got his first 1000 users by scraping everyone's profile picture off the university "facebooks", then making a page where you could rate the women as "hot" or "not". I feel like missing this part out gives a rather one-sided picture of the story - especially if there were any young women in the class that PG originally gave this talk to. That's a shame because PG makes a very different point in "Why it's safe for founders to be nice" [1]. > (US uni admissions are done badly) I agree with footnote 3 that determination and resourcefulness are important, but you also need to be able to program and reason mathematically if you want to start the next google. There are a lot of incredibly determined and resourceful students on liberal-arts or law degrees who might go far in the world, but they're not the person you want as a _technical_ co-founder. [1] https://paulgraham.com/safe.html https://paulgraham.com/safe.html
• nostrademons 2y ago
  > If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at programming. That has been the source of the median startup for the last 30 years, and this is probably not going to change in the next 10. The challenge with programming as a career now is that most of the solely technical problems have been solved. If you're looking for the YC playbook, start a SaaS that solves a specific problem that people will pay you for, those niches have been very carefully picked over for the last 15 years, and there are few that are very profitable remaining. Most of the big remaining problems are ones of incentives - they are cases where a whole system is fractally fucked up, with lots of human actors all doing what is individually best for themselves but with a sum result that is a net negative for humanity. If you study the housing crisis, for example, you end up with municipalities that need ever-rising housing prices and ever-restricting supply to balance their budgets; residents who depend on their rising home prices to fund their retirement; developers who need to work within the local regulations that are explicitly designed to make their lives difficult; and young people who can't move out because a second mortgage that requires their parents' ever-increasing home equity was used to fund their college education. Finding a better way to build houses doesn't help here; you need to work around all the people who actively don't want you to find a better way to build houses. There is room for software here, but often in subtle and what seems "evil" ways. Your problem is other people; software is useful to the extent that it lets you work around other people. Technical skills are table stakes for this, but understanding people and their incentives is critical for this work.
• dirkc 2y ago
  This seems to be the main message. And it's followed with such a sweet lacing of irony in the associated footnote > The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as the list of the most selective universities.
• meigwilym 2y ago
  I didn't realise PG is a rugby fan.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  "It really matters to do well in your classes, even the ones that are just memorization or blathering about literature, because you need to do well in your classes to get into a good university. And if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are. When Larry and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a real advantage for them." Opinions may differ but to me this sounds really pathetic. "[B]lathering about literature." Maybe he is addressing a room full of social outcasts. Yes, there is so much money that has flowed through Google, it's truly astounding, but nevertheless, beyond fortuitous circumstances, this has only persisted because of dissemination of online ads and anti-competitive conduct. Is there is any kid who is thinking, "My dream is to put ads on every screen and collect more data about peoples' lives that has ever before been collected. Settle all the lawsuits against us for violating peoples' privacy, pay off all the regulators, fire people by the thousands, let harassment run rampant amongst our managers, and destroy eveidence so the government cannot catch us breaking the law." All they see is the money and hype and, during ZIRP, lack of comparable alternatives in terms of opportunity and compensation. Silicon Valley VC telling kids that learning how to program is more important than getting an education, advising them to go to university not for the education but to find "cofounders" and employees. Hard to rationalise how this would be healthy advice for anyone.
• KETpXDDzR 2y ago
  PG forgot two very helpful requirements: * Have a rich family to get you into an elite university and to give you the financial independence to start a startup * Be lucky. Only ~1% of all startups succeed.