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I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

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Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#181

He later goes on to claim he's "never read a pitch deck". https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1492696791434731529?s=20&t=... What an eye roll.

I love the man's essays and he is clearly a genius, but he's getting carried away a bit on Twitter.

I'm no particular fan of pg and for sure I'm not all that knowledgeable when it comes to VC, but it is my understanding that at the very early stages of investment pitch-decks are pretty much useless, it surprised me when I saw all those people attacking pg for this particular issue.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly one of you must be wrong or lying

Maybe if I had written unit tests my companies would also sell for over a billion

It sounds like you did quite well!

I'd be curious to learn more about your experience, would you be open to a chat on sqwok.im? I'm somewhere in the middle with moderate unit tests and e2e for critical paths.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#183

Seems like a lot of people are missing the point of this one. PG/YC invest at the earliest stages. The information they need is pretty much: 1. What are you doing? 2. Do people like it? 3. How big is the market? 4. What are you/team like? Could you cover all of those in a formal business plan? Sure, but you can also do so in a short-form application that's 1/20 the length or in a 10-minute back-and-forth conversation…

Gotcha. YC Continuity, otoh, surely evaluates go-to-market / business plan?

There’s a difference between business plan and Business Plan, so to speak - a formalized document with a pretty standardized format you used to have if you, for example, wanted to get a loan from a bank.

It’s mostly gone away, but there used to be endless arguments about whether a startup should have a formalized written business plan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan. Business schools taught all the MBAs to write them, and everyone used to argue about whether a startup ought to have them.

Today I’m not aware of any VC or investor that requires/wants a Business Plan, almost everyone has settled on a standard pitch deck if anything (though one-page ‘memos’ are becoming a thing, and some investors even eschew those). A few business schools somehow still tell you to create a business plan if you want to raise VC. I invest in ~100 startups/yr and will see a handful of Business Plans sent to me, but not many. I don’t read any.

YC Continuity today would likely look at a deck and definitely ask questions, but still wouldn’t require a Business Plan.

PG probably wouldn’t ever even look at a deck.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#184

Seems like a lot of people are missing the point of this one. PG/YC invest at the earliest stages. The information they need is pretty much: 1. What are you doing? 2. Do people like it? 3. How big is the market? 4. What are you/team like? Could you cover all of those in a formal business plan? Sure, but you can also do so in a short-form application that's 1/20 the length or in a 10-minute back-and-forth conversation…

As a teacher, I would rather examine my students orally. Shorter and to the point. Much fairer.

In that sense, what he says is normal.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#185
post #174
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro-tip for social media: be controversial.

And assertive. No ifs, buts or maybes

Slight tangent: I wish there were legitimate threats to kill social media as it stands today. Any threat to the current business model, from anywhere.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#186

Seems like a lot of people are missing the point of this one. PG/YC invest at the earliest stages. The information they need is pretty much: 1. What are you doing? 2. Do people like it? 3. How big is the market? 4. What are you/team like? Could you cover all of those in a formal business plan? Sure, but you can also do so in a short-form application that's 1/20 the length or in a 10-minute back-and-forth conversation…

As a teacher, I would rather examine my students orally. Shorter and to the point. Much fairer. In that sense, what he says is normal.

It’s also a bit of an IQ test to see how you can hit balls back across the net with zero preparation.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any plan will certainly be wrong, so there no point wasting time making one. There's a famous Eisenhower quote that goes something like, "Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." The point being that any single plan is likely not to pan out because of unknowns and surprises, but by going through the process of planning, you have "cached" knowledge about your domain like what the opportunities and threats…

A plan is very different compared to a business plan. The type of forecasting required in a business plan is good for something predictable, like a McDonald's franchise. Can you imagine trying to forecast the first 10 years for the first version of Google's search engine? It would be ludicrous.

I bet they had one, Apple did

https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/5125

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#189
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all just semantic nonsense. YC has no more profound understanding of the noun "business plan" than anyone else in the business world. Don't overthink it

To be fair, there is a pretty concrete idea of what a traditional business plan looks like. Traditional business plans are needed if you want a small business loan from a bank. If you try to get a small business loan from the bank with a YC application, you'll get laughed out of the bank. A YC app is quite different from a business plan and most people would not see it as the same thing.

In a prior life as a regulator I read formal business plans (legally required) which probably looked quite different from what you're talking about. It's a generic noun used in various business contexts.

The business plan for a startup pitching to a VC will look different than the plan an SMB submits to a bank

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#190

Seems like a lot of people are missing the point of this one. PG/YC invest at the earliest stages. The information they need is pretty much: 1. What are you doing? 2. Do people like it? 3. How big is the market? 4. What are you/team like? Could you cover all of those in a formal business plan? Sure, but you can also do so in a short-form application that's 1/20 the length or in a 10-minute back-and-forth conversation…

As a teacher, I would rather examine my students orally. Shorter and to the point. Much fairer. In that sense, what he says is normal.

Fair? Some people do much better in writing due to anxiety etc.
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