6 ms·

Making Startups Powerful

221 points by tosh 3d ago

justonenote 3d ago
We really need a change in mindset around what success means. Concentration of power, concentration of resources, concentration of market share are some measures of success. Out competing your rivals until you grind them into dust is some measure of success. This is the Peter Thiel and Bezos and to a large extent the ycombinator and PG philosophy of success. It's dressed up as "just innovation bro" whereas the truth is, innovation in a rapidly increasing technological society is certainly both broadly useful to everyone, but also, left unchecked, just a tool to be successful in ways that are, sometimes extremely, detrimental to society as a whole. "Disruption and Innovation" could go well past the lines that AirBnb and Uber crossed and achieve a lot more success. Just on PG as a persona, I was never a fan or non fan I've barely read his blogposts and only know of him incidentally from knowing this forum, but on the general area of "thought leaders" and the increasingly asymmetry one-to-many relationships we have been getting used to for decades I came across this very interesting and well put together video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU , give it 15 minutes if you do decide to watch it its a bit of a slow burn.
- justonenote 3d ago
  I realize posting youtube videos that appear to be about 'creator beefs' at first glance may be considered low brow content for all the Jane Street or Palantir aspiring employees around here but such is life, you can lead a horse and all that. The world is made up of a bigger bubble than you are in but its still just a larger bubble with a lot of symmetries
armchairhacker 3d ago
What are some recent powerful startups? The only ones I've seen are AI grifters (not even useful AI) and Polymarket/Kalshi, which makes me cynical; although I've seen some decent startups that are small (i.e. non-powerful) but nonetheless profitable.
franzcoughka 3d ago
[flagged]
jchonphoenix 3d ago
PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore. For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.
- redanddead 3d ago
  What’s the solution
  - deleted 3d ago
    [deleted]
  - kevindamm 3d ago
    Prioritizing something other than 7% week over week growth. This doesn't appeal as much to venture capitalists so we may have to try it with some bootstrapped products first.
  - CalChris 3d ago
    Understanding the problem before attempting the solution is always a good idea.
    - CharlieDigital 3d ago
      I think this is a very classic "waterfall" world view. In many cases, the problem can only be understood through many failed solution attempts. It could be because the actual problem is novel. It could be because there is a different way of thinking about the problem that is not apparent studying only what a customer does today with the limitations of the software that they have right now. The point of "move fast, break things" is to address this fallacy that anyone can fully understand a problem before attempting the solution; it is often the case that in attempting a solution, one comes to understand the actual, valuable problem.
taylorfinley 3d ago
[flagged]
youoy 3d ago
I am not surprised that Silicon Valley researchers say they cannot solve the alignment problem... Here the leading voice in the region publishes an article about how to be more powerful without any other mention of alignment but "users". For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?
- sigbottle 3d ago
  To a first approximation, everything is power. How do we prove alignment? Often times, large regulatory bodies. Who supports that? Does the regulatory body actually have enough power to enforce those standards? (Hint: look at modern America). That's an example of power questions sneaking in even when you didn't want to. Even "mere Darwinism" is less extreme because it pretends like there is some objective criterion called natural selection that will filter out bad candidates, when it's often the case that the bad candidates are the ones that weren't proactive to define the selection process themselves. Sitting back and optimizing for an externally imposed standard is worse than being able to impose said standard yourself. (If this point was complicated - my point is that yes, Darwinism makes sense, but when applying it, you can get a mis-skewed definition of what "natural selection" really entails. I am calling out that caveat). Of course, my hope is that that isn't the end all, be all solution. Philosophy doesn't end with Nietzche, hopefully. But the world does sure looks bleak right now...
  - popalchemist 3d ago
    Counterpoint: Love is not power. "Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." -Jung
AIorNot 3d ago
I’m glad there’s a lot of people commenting negatively below to PGs modus operandi (rationalizing maximum greed in seemingly thoughtful measured essays that make him seem like a kindly philosopher instead or digital robber barron) Like Ayn Rand, and PT Barnum before them VCs and Tech Bros will be looked at with great hostility in next years as having destroyed society with their brand of hyper-capitalism all in the name of “disruption”
mirmor23 3d ago
I read the article and kept wondering what the author is trying to convey. It reads like a checklist compiled into an essay with no wisdom nor rationale baked into it. mostly vague and generic -- like a human transform applied to an llm output.
- well_ackshually 3d ago
  "Vapid" is the best description of the slop that comes out of paul graham's website.
themgt 3d ago
For example, if you opt in, we'll tell you how you're doing compared to other users. The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others. The vanilla one? Is this the pg Malcolm Gladwell arc, where he's retelling some real concept but warped by misunderstanding to the point of incoherence? Who's getting hobbled running on "vanilla models", do we have examples?
ahgqw 3d ago
Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd. Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify. It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
- deleted 3d ago
  [deleted]
- tarr11 3d ago
  Here is an article on this topic, which comes to a mixed conclusion. "The article suggests that more musicians rather than fewer might now be able to earn money from recorded music than in preceding recorded-music systems. But it also proposes that the current system retains the striking inequalities and generally poor working conditions that characterised its predecessors, and that better debate requires greater transparency about usage and payment on the part of streaming services and music businesses." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820953541 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820953541 Here's an article about Germany, which claims streaming is not worse "However, the current streaming-dominated music market does not fundamentally perform worse compared to the former CD market: in 2023, more than twice as many music creators earned revenues above the basic tax-free allowance compared to 2002." https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5474735 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5474735
- CPLX 3d ago
  I'm shocked to read that Paul Graham is only 61. His writings lately sound more like late 70s in terms of age and worldview. References to record labels? How much do record labels have to do with people discovering and catching on to music artists in 2026? What does a multi-billion-dollar 17 year old tech conglomerate like Stripe have to do with startups at this point? I maintain that one of the hardest things for people to really internalize is when the group that they are in goes from being an insurgent to being the establishment. I can think of very few examples of people successfully adapting their worldview to that fundamental change in their identity. The next class of YC founders is no less a product of the financial/tech ruling elite than the next batch of Goldman Sachs summer interns.
arionhardison 3d ago
Given the impact some YC startups are having on society at large I think a better question than "How" is "Why". Do we really want Flock to become even more powerful? Even in the cases where the answer is "yes"; I believe that working backwards from the why could provide a more elegant path to accomplishing said goal.
bob1029 3d ago
> There's a variant of going full stack where you eat your way gradually through the customer by doing all their hardest work for them. One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack. One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.
- tacostakohashi 3d ago
  [flagged]
  - collingreen 3d ago
    The arrogance of this comment detracts from the kernel of good, which is that banks are very complicated and lots of the complication is regulatory and finance, not just software.
- n4r9 3d ago
  In my experience it depends on the nature of that client. A drawback to having a dominant client is that they have a lot more leverage in roadmap, prioritisation, and product fit. That can seriously impact the internal coherence and maintainability of the product. Too many bits of business logic lodges in weird places because the client didn't want to write custom behaviours, and no time to tidy it up because they're always demanding their next wishlist feature to be deployed yesterday.
ossamameta1 3d ago
[flagged]
deleted 3d ago
[deleted]
smashburger 3d ago
Is open source still viable these days for a business model that relies on a single large customer and anyone else that also happens to need that solution?
raincole 3d ago
I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
- walt_grata 3d ago
  Once YC companies started having a negative impact on people and communities. Airbnb and gig worker stuff seems to be the start of it.
- ViktorRay 3d ago
  Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed. https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.
akk0 3d ago
[flagged]
thinair0x1rty6v 3d ago
Sometimes communication from “powerful” people are often signals to others who are, or aspire to be, “powerful”. When you are signalling to the latter, you need to be cruder with your approach or the signal may be lost. There needs not be any wisdom in it.

221 points by tosh 3d ago

We really need a change in mindset around what success means. Concentration of power, concentration of resources, concentration of market share are some measures of success. Out competing your rivals until you grind them into dust is some measure of success. This is the Peter Thiel and Bezos and to a large extent the ycombinator and PG philosophy of success. It's dressed up as "just innovation bro" whereas the truth is, innovation in a rapidly increasing technological society is certainly both broadly useful to everyone, but also, left unchecked, just a tool to be successful in ways that are, sometimes extremely, detrimental to society as a whole. "Disruption and Innovation" could go well past the lines that AirBnb and Uber crossed and achieve a lot more success. Just on PG as a persona, I was never a fan or non fan I've barely read his blogposts and only know of him incidentally from knowing this forum, but on the general area of "thought leaders" and the increasingly asymmetry one-to-many relationships we have been getting used to for decades I came across this very interesting and well put together video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU , give it 15 minutes if you do decide to watch it its a bit of a slow burn.

justonenote 3d ago
I realize posting youtube videos that appear to be about 'creator beefs' at first glance may be considered low brow content for all the Jane Street or Palantir aspiring employees around here but such is life, you can lead a horse and all that. The world is made up of a bigger bubble than you are in but its still just a larger bubble with a lot of symmetries

armchairhacker 3d ago

What are some recent powerful startups? The only ones I've seen are AI grifters (not even useful AI) and Polymarket/Kalshi, which makes me cynical; although I've seen some decent startups that are small (i.e. non-powerful) but nonetheless profitable.

franzcoughka 3d ago

[flagged]

jchonphoenix 3d ago

PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore. For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.

redanddead 3d ago
What’s the solution
- deleted 3d ago
  [deleted]
- kevindamm 3d ago
  Prioritizing something other than 7% week over week growth. This doesn't appeal as much to venture capitalists so we may have to try it with some bootstrapped products first.
- CalChris 3d ago
  Understanding the problem before attempting the solution is always a good idea.
  - CharlieDigital 3d ago
    I think this is a very classic "waterfall" world view. In many cases, the problem can only be understood through many failed solution attempts. It could be because the actual problem is novel. It could be because there is a different way of thinking about the problem that is not apparent studying only what a customer does today with the limitations of the software that they have right now. The point of "move fast, break things" is to address this fallacy that anyone can fully understand a problem before attempting the solution; it is often the case that in attempting a solution, one comes to understand the actual, valuable problem.

taylorfinley 3d ago

[flagged]

youoy 3d ago

I am not surprised that Silicon Valley researchers say they cannot solve the alignment problem... Here the leading voice in the region publishes an article about how to be more powerful without any other mention of alignment but "users". For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?

sigbottle 3d ago
To a first approximation, everything is power. How do we prove alignment? Often times, large regulatory bodies. Who supports that? Does the regulatory body actually have enough power to enforce those standards? (Hint: look at modern America). That's an example of power questions sneaking in even when you didn't want to. Even "mere Darwinism" is less extreme because it pretends like there is some objective criterion called natural selection that will filter out bad candidates, when it's often the case that the bad candidates are the ones that weren't proactive to define the selection process themselves. Sitting back and optimizing for an externally imposed standard is worse than being able to impose said standard yourself. (If this point was complicated - my point is that yes, Darwinism makes sense, but when applying it, you can get a mis-skewed definition of what "natural selection" really entails. I am calling out that caveat). Of course, my hope is that that isn't the end all, be all solution. Philosophy doesn't end with Nietzche, hopefully. But the world does sure looks bleak right now...
- popalchemist 3d ago
  Counterpoint: Love is not power. "Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." -Jung

AIorNot 3d ago

I’m glad there’s a lot of people commenting negatively below to PGs modus operandi (rationalizing maximum greed in seemingly thoughtful measured essays that make him seem like a kindly philosopher instead or digital robber barron) Like Ayn Rand, and PT Barnum before them VCs and Tech Bros will be looked at with great hostility in next years as having destroyed society with their brand of hyper-capitalism all in the name of “disruption”

mirmor23 3d ago

I read the article and kept wondering what the author is trying to convey. It reads like a checklist compiled into an essay with no wisdom nor rationale baked into it. mostly vague and generic -- like a human transform applied to an llm output.

well_ackshually 3d ago
"Vapid" is the best description of the slop that comes out of paul graham's website.

themgt 3d ago

For example, if you opt in, we'll tell you how you're doing compared to other users. The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others. The vanilla one? Is this the pg Malcolm Gladwell arc, where he's retelling some real concept but warped by misunderstanding to the point of incoherence? Who's getting hobbled running on "vanilla models", do we have examples?

ahgqw 3d ago

Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd. Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify. It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.

deleted 3d ago
[deleted]
tarr11 3d ago
Here is an article on this topic, which comes to a mixed conclusion. "The article suggests that more musicians rather than fewer might now be able to earn money from recorded music than in preceding recorded-music systems. But it also proposes that the current system retains the striking inequalities and generally poor working conditions that characterised its predecessors, and that better debate requires greater transparency about usage and payment on the part of streaming services and music businesses." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820953541 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820953541 Here's an article about Germany, which claims streaming is not worse "However, the current streaming-dominated music market does not fundamentally perform worse compared to the former CD market: in 2023, more than twice as many music creators earned revenues above the basic tax-free allowance compared to 2002." https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5474735 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5474735
CPLX 3d ago
I'm shocked to read that Paul Graham is only 61. His writings lately sound more like late 70s in terms of age and worldview. References to record labels? How much do record labels have to do with people discovering and catching on to music artists in 2026? What does a multi-billion-dollar 17 year old tech conglomerate like Stripe have to do with startups at this point? I maintain that one of the hardest things for people to really internalize is when the group that they are in goes from being an insurgent to being the establishment. I can think of very few examples of people successfully adapting their worldview to that fundamental change in their identity. The next class of YC founders is no less a product of the financial/tech ruling elite than the next batch of Goldman Sachs summer interns.

arionhardison 3d ago

Given the impact some YC startups are having on society at large I think a better question than "How" is "Why". Do we really want Flock to become even more powerful? Even in the cases where the answer is "yes"; I believe that working backwards from the why could provide a more elegant path to accomplishing said goal.

bob1029 3d ago

> There's a variant of going full stack where you eat your way gradually through the customer by doing all their hardest work for them. One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack. One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.

tacostakohashi 3d ago
[flagged]
- collingreen 3d ago
  The arrogance of this comment detracts from the kernel of good, which is that banks are very complicated and lots of the complication is regulatory and finance, not just software.
n4r9 3d ago
In my experience it depends on the nature of that client. A drawback to having a dominant client is that they have a lot more leverage in roadmap, prioritisation, and product fit. That can seriously impact the internal coherence and maintainability of the product. Too many bits of business logic lodges in weird places because the client didn't want to write custom behaviours, and no time to tidy it up because they're always demanding their next wishlist feature to be deployed yesterday.

ossamameta1 3d ago

[flagged]

deleted 3d ago

[deleted]

smashburger 3d ago

Is open source still viable these days for a business model that relies on a single large customer and anyone else that also happens to need that solution?

raincole 3d ago

I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.

walt_grata 3d ago
Once YC companies started having a negative impact on people and communities. Airbnb and gig worker stuff seems to be the start of it.
ViktorRay 3d ago
Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed. https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.

akk0 3d ago

[flagged]

thinair0x1rty6v 3d ago

Sometimes communication from “powerful” people are often signals to others who are, or aspire to be, “powerful”. When you are signalling to the latter, you need to be cruder with your approach or the signal may be lost. There needs not be any wisdom in it.