The Lesson to Unlearn

This is literally all of open source software. The problem here is that you're waiting for an entrepreneur to say this, which is the wrong kind of person to expect this from.

IRL most interesting and important questions are not anywhere close to that.

Does pg argue that they simply should ignore this test grade?

> No, I would explain, that is not how to get lots of users. The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great. Then people will not only use it but recommend it to their friends, so your growth will be exponential once you get it started.

Ironically enough, if there is one thing I've heard from HN, it is to not believe in the "if you build it, they will come" myth. That no matter how good a product you build as an engineer, it is all pointless if you aren't willing to hit the ground and start aggressively marketing and selling it. That a mediocre product with great marketing/sales, will win over a better product with poor marketing/sales.

I've heard this directly from YC partners themselves, when they keep telling early-stage founders to market themselves via "do things that don't scale". At Reddit, one of YC's early successes, the founders were literally spending their time spamming their own site with fake posts and comments using sock-puppets, in order to create the illusion of activity. As someone who loves building products, I hate the idea of spending time and energy on tactics like that. I'd love to spend all that time and energy on making my product better. But I've learnt grudgingly from YC that product development is pointless unless I'm using guerilla tactics to hawk my product in front of users.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've actually had the opposite experience as what PG describes in his essay. Back in school and University, I did study very hard to ace tests. But the way I studied was to genuinely learn and understand the material as well as possible. Not to "hack" it in some way. Whereas once I graduated, and especially once I tried out entrepreneurship, I realized that just building a great product was insufficient. I now had to "hustle" and use "street smarts" and "growth hacking" in order to get people to notice what I'm doing. The lesson I had to unlearn from school was that the quality of your work will speak for itself, and will win the day. I never needed marketing and sales in school, but it seems indispensable in the real world.

Less extreme variant of it would be - OK, you went to college - but show me what you did on your own (personal projects, small attempts at startups etc.) during that time. That's what the game dev industry is doing. If the answer to this question is "nothing", then you're probably facing a person who's happy to take directions and land himself a cushy job in some large organization, where he will use his intelligence to navigate towards maximum pay and minimum workload.