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Why Toys?

blog.ycombinator.com

111–120 of 211 posts

Re: Why Toys?

#111
post #49

This is a really good post but it is disappointing that nowhere in the post it mentions Chris Dixon's post on this: http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...

Eight years on and I'm not sure that essay, while confident, has been borne out by time.

You could add substance to your comment by listing some things that became big after 2010, and saying whether or not they seemed like toys early on.

One example: Bitcoin (2009, but few had heard of it before 2010), cryptocurrencies and blockchains. I think these support cdixon's claim.

Another: Snapchat (2011) and other ephemeral messaging apps. These certainly seemed like toys.

Re: Why Toys?

#112
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I believe you can only do that distinction (business vs toy) after the fact. So it offers no guidance at all. Was Dropbox a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Google a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Uber a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Was Airbnb a toy in the beggining? You can argue. Unless, of course, you're talking about the famous SOCIAL NETWORKS. In which case they were -- and…

It is worth noting that Dropbox took a bundle of business problems that already had been solved in one small community and solved it for a much wider community. Specifically, the problems of "cloud" file storage were being solved by AFS in MIT's Project Athena. So, to argue at Dropbox's founding that it was a toy would require first arguing that businesses didn't have problems that resembled "All the folks working on…

[deleted]

Re: Why Toys?

#113

The best dichotomy I've heard for this is: Are you building [Ice Skates] or are you building [Ear muffs]? Ice skates allow you to do something new that you didn't even know you had a demand for. Ear muffs solve a problem that you were already solving poorly (with your hands). [Business vs toy] is an insanely counterproductive mental framework which will create a false sense of security in founders who are actually bu…

What does it say about me that I'd rather build ice skates than ear muffs?

That you're probably more a designer than a pragmatic engineer.

Re: Why Toys?

#114
Closely related is the adage that great ideas often look like bad ones. I think it's worth thinking about all these nuggets of wisdom in terms of efficient markets:

Given that there are so many entrepreneurs building startups the best sounding ideas are already taken and what's left are the bad and seemingly bad ones. The market-economy is very good at picking low-hanging fruit. If you dropped a $20 bill in Grand Central station chances are it'll be taken in minutes, while if you dropped it in a random alley somewhere, you can probably go back the next day and find it.

So for you to find a good idea that the market hasn't picked up yet it needs to be somehow hidden in plain sight -- a crumbled $20 bill that looks like a piece of garbage.

A similar concept that I've been thinking a lot about in the context of my startup is a "scaling bottleneck". For you to get big and service everybody you have to first service a demographic that is often thought of as a dead-end in terms of making money. Say kids, or a hobbyists in a certain field. I think the Facebook example applies here too: it was hard to see how this toy could scale beyond college students. Worded as a statement about efficient markets: good ideas for startups that will initially service and grow on a potentially non-monetizable demographic will not attract entrepreneurs and therefore will be available for ones that have that insight.

Re: Why Toys?

#115
post #69

Ironically, it's overloaded. Text only, cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QrUx_pA...

Huh. Guess you guys don't understand the word 'Ironically'.

Irony: "happening in a way contrary to what is expected, and typically causing wry amusement because of this."

The site is a ycombinator.com site, and ycombinator is all about helping tech startups, yet the site was offline due to too much traffic.

Hence, the irony.

Re: Why Toys?

#116
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To solve inequality?? I don’t think that’s the business YC is in. But we can do a lot. We can drastically reduce the potential financial rewards for extracting value from millions of people. We can set a max income of $300k per person and the rest goes to elevating the poor. It would pretty much destroy the VC industry though.

Let's rephrase that: it would destroy capitalism. Somehow I don't think you'd have a problem with that.

I don't know if maybe you think capitalism is the only reason people don't just lie in bed all day, but theory has been soundly disproven.

Re: Why Toys?

#117
post #39

Cute title but this is actually just an extension of “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer”. Facebook had TIME to be a toy because Mark Zuckerberg had a rich family, and plenty of skills to get a job if it didn’t work out. “Making a toy” is only possible with the resources of money and time. People who need to make money need to focus earlier on making money, which stunts growth in the long run. This is true…

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Re: Why Toys?

#119
post #39

Cute title but this is actually just an extension of “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer”. Facebook had TIME to be a toy because Mark Zuckerberg had a rich family, and plenty of skills to get a job if it didn’t work out. “Making a toy” is only possible with the resources of money and time. People who need to make money need to focus earlier on making money, which stunts growth in the long run. This is true…

HN should ban the adjective "cute" from all posts. Does using this adjective make you feel superior? Also, it's kinda amazing how this issue gets brought up so many times on HN and is proven to be false (there are tons of examples where extremely successful entrepreneurs came from poor upbringing, and in many cases the bad condition was what motivated them to push further) and yet you keep seeing the same argument ov…

Bitching and doing something are not mutually exclusive activities.

Some successful people being from poor upbringings does not make it commonplace.

If your claims were true, by definition we would not have inequality.

Re: Why Toys?

#120
The third thing that goes wrong when you take your toy too seriously is that you immediately start optimizing on the things that you believe serious businesses should – profit and margins. While these things are important in the long run, focusing on them too early injects an impossible set of things for an early startup to do.

How is this not in direct contradiction to http://paulgraham.com/aord.html?

Can somebody shed some light on this? I don't necessarily disagree with Aaron but its tough to make any sense of it when one YC person tells you one thing and another YC person tells you pretty much the exact the opposite.

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