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It is nice to read some sober thinking on the economy... PG has it exactly right. Startups are HARD and there are so many factors that are more important than the state of economy. The odds of success are low enough with a startup already that the economy shouldn't really change the decision making process.
I also agree strongly with the consequences of fear, and how everyone else seems to be cowering in the corner. I am on the tech train and I have it almost entirely to myself. I recently attended some security functions, and it suddenly hit me how this field is begging for innovation. Of all the products and all the big name providers, it was nothing but me-too and do-it-again in a different package. Everyone I talked to from sales to tech, wanted one thing and one thing only - to play it safe and keep their job.
pg was a lot more fun when he used to talk about other things than making money all the time.
I like making money, and PG is an authority on the subject, so I enjoy it.
But back onto Mr. Graham: Since I'm a "hacker", I already know a lot of stuff he knows about software development, and in fact it's clear that I also know a lot that he doesn't address in his essays and probably isn't even aware of. I mean, I'm a video game developer who writes in Java on Windows machines, and I've got good reason to be such. Why should I pay attention to Mr. Lisp here who scorns Windows and has never used Java, and who doesn't even mention playing games, let alone programming them?* I'm sure I could learn some things from him, but he is ignorant of my world, however much he may know about his own kind of software development.
He is far from ignorant, however, about startups. And he's got interesting things to say about various other, non-technical subjects too. So let him talk about those!
* I suspect there are plenty of Mac fans and Lisp fans and C++ fans among this site's readers who could snappily answer this question. I do not have time to armor this comment against techie criticism; that would itself require an essay. Suffice to say that I claim I could if I wanted to. :)
myteev.blogspot.com
pg was a lot more fun when he used to talk about other things than making money all the time.
One of the strange consequences of writing about several mostly unrelated topics is that you pick up readers with quite different interests. Then whatever you write next, the ones not interested in that topic complain that you've jumped the shark. I doubt I've written a single essay since about 2002 when someone didn't say something of the form "pg was ok when he was writing about x, but I wish he would stop writing…
That's a really bad place to put yourself. My business ideas are pretty far from what I see discussed here, but I still get a lot of useful knowledge from hanging around. I'd say that the fact that the startups here are different from what I'm likely to do is valuable in its own way: forces me to see the common technology from another perspective and that itself generates further ideas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html , Paul writes So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life. So writing about startups is always implicitly about making money. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
But "solving the money problem" is about gaining the freedom to do what you love, without having to worry about putting food on the table. The problem is really a problem of freedom, which it just so happens can be solved by acquiring a load of dosh. So it's only about making money as a means to the end of freedom.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But "solving the money problem" is about gaining the freedom to do what you love, without having to worry about putting food on the table. The problem is really a problem of freedom, which it just so happens can be solved by acquiring a load of dosh. So it's only about making money as a means to the end of freedom.
Why would you gamble with your freedom? Most of Paul Graham's fans could easily do 3 years of lawschool at a top tier school and could then work 5 years and retire for life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_firm#Salaries
Typically, you're about $160k in debt from law school, so the first year is spent paying that back. The next 4 years taken together is only $795k, nowhere near enough to retire for life. All the associate years together is only about $1.6M, still not enough to retire after 11 years.
Then you have to make partner; if you don't, you're out of the firm and usually have to set yourself up as a sole proprietor. If you do make partner, you're set for life, but at 11 years getting there, the road is nearly as long as becoming a tenured professor and usually longer than becoming a successful entrepreneur.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It felt like Paul was going to make a hard statement like that, but edited it. But I was thinking, "If the economy is stopping you, you're not the type to start one."
I never said it in the essay, but we have actually been thinking it at YC. One of the hardest things we have to do in the selection process is filter out people who are smart but uncommitted. (Smartness is much easier to judge than commitment in a 10-minute interview.) And now the economy is going to be doing it for us. So frankly I'd prefer to be operating in a mild recession. Unfortunately this one sounds like it i…