141–150 of 588 posts
TLDR: The way to succeed in school is by gaming the system, but the way to succeed in business is by making a great product. But PG is wrong. Startups can, and do, game the system. By showing unsustainable, artificial growth with no real value behind it, they can fool investors long enough to make a lucrative exit by IPO or acquisition.
I'm glad he made the leap from school tests to funding tests, as it seemed to be a thinly veiled analogy from the start. I'm disappointed, though, that he didn't take the final step and admit that money itself is also a poor, hackable test. Funding, growth, usage -- these are all still one level removed from something worthwhile or beneficial. Cigarettes have amazing usage numbers even in 2019. I'm waiting for the en…
I believe this is the role of the nonprofit sector.
> The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great. That is wrong – or, at the very least, incomplete. "Build it and they will come" is the dream and misconception of every programmer who's talented at software development but not at sales. Hell, this is the number one advice of every business how-to book ever: You can't rely on people finding out about your great product by chance, you need to put i…
Or, in other words, a lot of successful business - including startups - is exactly the "test hacking" PG urges founders to unlearn.
I'm honestly surprised by this essay arguing that "hacking the test" is the wrong approach in startups/business. "Hacking the test" is essentially what your marketing is supposed to do. These "non-authoritarian" tests like selling things are just as hackable as school tests; you just have to discover how the system really operates.
The whole authoritarian/non-authoritarian split doesn't carve reality at the joints, IMO. Football match is really an authoritarian test - it tests who wins under the game rules, which are given from the top. It may be hard to hack, but that's because passing that test is usually synonymous with the terminal goals of the test takers - i.e. they want to win the game. You'll note however that, once money gets involved, people are sometimes made to deliberately lose games; in these scenarios, there are usually other people involved who are absolutely hacking the test.
The best way I've found to carve the reality at the joints is to talk about terminal and instrumental goals. Learning useful things isn't the terminal goal for most students, getting a good career is (and/or not pissing off parents by getting bad grades).
So I'm ultimately surprised that PG argues that building good things, not hacking the test, is how you win the startup game - I would think most of the startups have products as instrumental goals; the exit is the terminal goal. And building a great product isn't the best way to achieve that goal.
> I would explain that what makes a startup promising, not just in the eyes of investors but in fact, is growth. Growth is like cancer. Eventually a company will get big enough to bully others for the sake of growth. Last night I had dinner with a friend who is building a (yet another) language learning app. Simple fact about language learning, or learning in general: You must practice almost every single day. Even i…
Good grades = Passing well paying jobs resume filter = startup initial capital for 90% of the population without access to the bank of mom and dad or a large inheritance. PG starting to lose touch with regular joe.
Yeah, I had a similar take. A lot of what he writes seems to come back to keeping the YC pipeline full. Half way through the essay I was thinking, surely this can't be the first time PG has realized the idea of "playing the game", which is what I've known it as all my life. But then at the end of the essay he uses that exact same phrase to hit home the point that "playing the game" is antiquated now if one desires to…
I'm not being normally someone to comment on such things ( why bother with the effort?). I am making concrete efforts to get noticed by identifying groups/people who might align with my own thoughts/beliefs for my own vested interests.
> The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great. That is wrong – or, at the very least, incomplete. "Build it and they will come" is the dream and misconception of every programmer who's talented at software development but not at sales. Hell, this is the number one advice of every business how-to book ever: You can't rely on people finding out about your great product by chance, you need to put i…
My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…
> it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance I am curious, is this about some particular kind of homework? From my own experience, I would think that exercising a subject alone (which is what most homework was in my school system at least) is a very good way of understanding it better. I of course remember not wanting to do homework many times, and I remember excessive or idiotic…
I've got two kids, and so I can attest from limited anecdotal evidence, that it's completely unpredictable how each kid will relate to homework.