> is there a way to make the money flow through it? It's always good when money flows through you.
Ah, yes! The dream of being rent seeking middleman! The first thing that come to mind when I think “hacker” ;)
Making Startups Powerful
31–40 of 152 posts
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#32We really need a change in mindset around what success means. Concentration of power, concentration of resources, concentration of market share are some measures of success. Out competing your rivals until you grind them into dust is some measure of success. This is the Peter Thiel and Bezos and to a large extent the ycombinator and PG philosophy of success. It's dressed up as "just innovation bro" whereas the truth…
I realize posting youtube videos that appear to be about 'creator beefs' at first glance may be considered low brow content for all the Jane Street or Palantir aspiring employees around here but such is life, you can lead a horse and all that. The world is made up of a bigger bubble than you are in but its still just a larger bubble with a lot of symmetries
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#33> Another thing I'm always looking for is tails that could wag the dog. The history of startups is full of these. Paypal started out doing security for hand-held devices. They created Paypal as a demo of their security software. But then eBay sellers started using it to take payments, and after a couple months the founders acknowledged that this was the business they were now in, even though they hadn't meant to be.…
> I never understood why anybody would pay for Slack when its based on IRC and IRC is free, but whatever.
Comparing IRC vs Slack maybe made sense when Slack was very young, and it was like buying a Honda Civic vs a Ferrari, where one is obviously nicer but the other still accomplished the same thing with less frills.
These days it's the choice between buying a Honda Civic vs a Boeing 747. They both get you from one place to another (communicating between employees) but that's where the similarities end now. Slack has way too many API integrations, historical search, features for everything from compliance message archiving to embedding images to dumb GIF searches that people seem to like. The fact that it has irc-like channels and chatting isn't really the point of the platform anymore.
Yes you could code this all yourself using IRC bots, but at that point IRC is no longer free, it's costing you time. If you get to that point, Slack does it better and cheaper.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#34PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore. For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked s…
What’s the solution
You can't say it here
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Understanding the problem before attempting the solution is always a good idea.
I think this is a very classic "waterfall" world view. In many cases, the problem can only be understood through many failed solution attempts. It could be because the actual problem is novel. It could be because there is a different way of thinking about the problem that is not apparent studying only what a customer does today with the limitations of the software that they have right now. The point of "move fast, br…
Waterfall means designing and building everything before rolling it out to users. Researching a problem before you start tackling it is just general good advice. You can be more effective while moving fast and breaking things while still taking some time to know where to move and what is ok vs not ok to break.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#36[deleted]
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#37I am not surprised that Silicon Valley researchers say they cannot solve the alignment problem... Here the leading voice in the region publishes an article about how to be more powerful without any other mention of alignment but "users". For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?
To a first approximation, everything is power.
How do we prove alignment? Often times, large regulatory bodies. Who supports that? Does the regulatory body actually have enough power to enforce those standards? (Hint: look at modern America). That's an example of power questions sneaking in even when you didn't want to.
Even "mere Darwinism" is less extreme because it pretends like there is some objective criterion called natural selection that will filter out bad candidates, when it's often the case that the bad candidates are the ones that weren't proactive to define the selection process themselves. Sitting back and optimizing for an externally imposed standard is worse than being able to impose said standard yourself.
(If this point was complicated - my point is that yes, Darwinism makes sense, but when applying it, you can get a mis-skewed definition of what "natural selection" really entails. I am calling out that caveat).
Of course, my hope is that that isn't the end all, be all solution. Philosophy doesn't end with Nietzche, hopefully. But the world does sure looks bleak right now...
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#38PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore. For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked s…
I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible. The cliche advice for years was that if your first shipping MVP wasn’t embarrassing in some way, you probably weren’t shipping fast enough.
That led to a long period where startups were shipping things that barely worked and would fall apart if you deviated from the happy path at all.
Companies and consumers alike got tired of paying to be alpha testers and do market research for startups. It was really bad when you’d start using a startup product, spend a lot of time working with them to identify bugs, and then they would pivot to some other idea they had.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#39Is open source still viable these days for a business model that relies on a single large customer and anyone else that also happens to need that solution?
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#40I am not surprised that Silicon Valley researchers say they cannot solve the alignment problem... Here the leading voice in the region publishes an article about how to be more powerful without any other mention of alignment but "users". For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?
To a first approximation, everything is power. How do we prove alignment? Often times, large regulatory bodies. Who supports that? Does the regulatory body actually have enough power to enforce those standards ? (Hint: look at modern America). That's an example of power questions sneaking in even when you didn't want to. Even "mere Darwinism" is less extreme because it pretends like there is some objective criterion…
Counterpoint: Love is not power.
"Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." -Jung