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A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

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Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#101

Post by peteforde »

bing_dai wrote: post #5
peteforde wrote: post #4

It's bothering me that Geoff introduced Paul as "the founder" and Paul just kind of went with it. It was a small moment but these sorts of details matter because they can contribute to unintended historical revisionism. A YouTube annotation overlay might be appreciated by the other founders.

I completely agree. It bothered me as well.

It's fascinating and a little sad that anyone who spoke up about this point was downvoted into oblivion... even though my point is entirely valid and easy to verify.

I don't think PG would disagree with my suggestion, and he certainly doesn't need people to defend him.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#102

Post by peteforde »

d0m wrote: post #69
peteforde wrote: post #4

It's bothering me that Geoff introduced Paul as "the founder" and Paul just kind of went with it. It was a small moment but these sorts of details matter because they can contribute to unintended historical revisionism. A YouTube annotation overlay might be appreciated by the other founders.

Also, when you're being interviewed, how much should you interrupt the interviewee and nitpick on everything? I'd say Geoff made a mistake here and said "The founder" instead of "A co-founder" but was it worth interrupting the flow, etc?

I'm sorry, are you asking if Paul Graham is comfortable interrupting people and making clarifying statements?

https://techcrunch.com/video/paul-grahams-office-hours-tips-...

Jump to 6:20 and tell me with a straight face that PG is concerned about interjection. He literally could have just chuckled and helpfully offered, "well... co-founder!"

Here's the thing: I'm a PG fan and I'm not trying to be pedantic. Jessica has frequently written about how her role is misunderstood and unfortunately minimized, even though it's clear to anyone with life experience that she is the heart and soul of the operation.

http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/grow-the-puzzle-around-y...

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#103

Post by JesseAldridge »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #62
JesseAldridge wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure I'll pay $10. So like Paypal or what?

Sorry I fell asleep :) In the future, if I was serious about accepting an anonymous person's money for this service, I would have made an email address solely used for this purpose that is linked to paypal or venmo or whatever :) Thanks for the offer. I have free time today so if you are dying for this synopsis I will do it for free just because I find it so funny that someone wants this

I am not dying for a synopsis.

But I would still like one.

Mostly because I've been trying to stick all of my knowledge into draw.io diagrams. And the first step of doing that is getting a textual version of the information.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#104

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

danenania wrote: post #96
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is the point of operating your own company if not to accomplish your goals of what the company should be? I mean, I get it, you have to make customers happy in order to have a business. But this seems like something different. It seems like saying your goal should be to make money a priori and that defining vision based on feedback is a good way to do that. But what if that’s not your goal? What if your goal…

I think this is something that’s ridiculously hard in the beginning when your sample size is low, but as you get more users giving feedback, you will probably start to see some clear patterns emerge in what they like, what frustrates them, what features they ask for, etc. While individual pieces of feedback are often all over the place, with more data points, the solution that they all hover around starts to emerge.…

> “I think the issue is just that truly solving an important problem for lots of people is so absurdly hard that very very few entrepreneurs can manage to achieve it“

But many businesses don’t try to make products for lots of people, just for very small, focused sets of customers.

> “People might love that your company is financially transparent and socially responsible, but that won’t get them to use your product. So thinking much about these things before you start seeing product-market fit feels like putting the cart before the horse.”

But what if your goal is not to find product-market fit unless it also satisfies other constraints like sustainability or financially ethical behavior? What if, in the absence of those, your preference is to go out of business and shut down?

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#105

Post by thecleaner »

redshirtrob wrote: post #75
Razengan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be a user of your own product to really make it good. Look at Apple. Most of how they got where they are is by Jobs, Ive et al. making what they wanted to see, and nitpicking at everything until they were satisfied. Also: "people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Of course you have to address customers' frustrations, but relying on just "data" and marketing feedback all the time often…

This sentiment really bothers me. It's frequently used to disadvantage candidates from positions because they're not users of the service or product. It's just not generally true, but it's often repeated as though it were. It's demonstrably not true that you must be a user of a product to build a good product. To pick a random example: I doubt all pacemaker firmware developers have heart conditions that require pacem…

The pacemaker example doesn't resonate with me. Its a very well-posed problem - don't let the patient die. You don't have to be user to understand how to make things better. For things like personal computing its a bit different. Problems are very ill-posed and often the question is what to make. In the second category its better to start with a map of the future and refine it with user feedback. However often users don't know what they want and then you need folks like Jobs.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#106

Post by tim333 »

braindead_in wrote: post #78
tim333 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a look but the YouTube transcript is more accurate. Compare: "Why combinator has the people who wrote a mail and email?" from that and "Y Combinator has the people who wrote Yahoo Mail and Gmail" from the YouTube transcript for example.

Yeah, our language model needs some work. We're constantly improving our engine though. Since we are manual transcription service, we can feed back the hand-made changes by humans back into our model and re-train it. Thanks for checking it out!

No worries. You do punctuation better than youtube. I was wondering if you could do a hack which kind of combined the two results. Youtube must be doing something kind of sophisticated to get things like "Paul Buchheit" correct like doing a pre search of people connected with Paul Graham.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#107

Post by redshirtrob »

thecleaner wrote: post #105
redshirtrob wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentiment really bothers me. It's frequently used to disadvantage candidates from positions because they're not users of the service or product. It's just not generally true, but it's often repeated as though it were. It's demonstrably not true that you must be a user of a product to build a good product. To pick a random example: I doubt all pacemaker firmware developers have heart conditions that require pacem…

The pacemaker example doesn't resonate with me. Its a very well-posed problem - don't let the patient die. You don't have to be user to understand how to make things better. For things like personal computing its a bit different. Problems are very ill-posed and often the question is what to make. In the second category its better to start with a map of the future and refine it with user feedback. However often users…

Perhaps I should have quoted the specific point I was responding to:

> You have to be a user of your own product to really make it good.

That doesn't say anything about product or market. It's a very general statement that I happen to find rather dangerous in terms of hiring/employment practices. I tossed out pacemakers as a very obvious counter-example. I could come up with plenty of others--some from my own work experience.

I did try to couch the comment a bit. I do think there's value in being a user of your own product. I do not think it's a necessary precondition though. And treating it as such unnecessarily constrains the candidate pool. That's the point I was trying to make.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#108

Post by goshx »

cardimart wrote: post #98
goshx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of CEO’s that use the Steve Jobs argument to justify their approach of thinking they know what customers want. Chances are you are not really building a product that is reinventing a market and creating new solutions for previously non existing problems, like the iPhone. Then you fall into the hole of thinking you can imagine how people want to solve a well known problem and end up finding out later t…

"creating new solutions for previously non existing problems, like the iPhone." I have a problem when I hear things like that. The problems are always there, the needs are always there. They're just satisfied better by the new technology. But the latent needs were there to begin with.

Apps marketplace for cellphones?

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#109

Post by dang »

peteforde wrote: post #101
bing_dai wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. It bothered me as well.

It's fascinating and a little sad that anyone who spoke up about this point was downvoted into oblivion... even though my point is entirely valid and easy to verify. I don't think PG would disagree with my suggestion, and he certainly doesn't need people to defend him.

Perhaps it's because you/they are focusing on some minuscule act of wording instead of on anything significant in the video. We don't need to play the internet gotcha game on HN. In fact, it's off topic by the site guidelines, since it isn't done out of intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
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