I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
Making Startups Powerful
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Re: Making Startups Powerful
#42I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
Once YC companies started having a negative impact on people and communities. Airbnb and gig worker stuff seems to be the start of it.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#43[flagged]
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#44I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed.
Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#45Sometimes communication from “powerful” people are often signals to others who are, or aspire to be, “powerful”.
When you are signalling to the latter, you need to be cruder with your approach or the signal may be lost. There needs not be any wisdom in it.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#46PG 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…
> I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible.
Nope. They did, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that VCs moved way too much in the direction of "take over the world or go home" and don't allow companies that take investment to be just successful anymore.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#47Sometimes communication from “powerful” people are often signals to others who are, or aspire to be, “powerful”. When you are signalling to the latter, you need to be cruder with your approach or the signal may be lost. There needs not be any wisdom in it.
Agree with what you're saying, but what are you ultimately driving at?
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#48I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed. https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.
I would hazard a guess that the people attending a YC event (!) to watch Sam Altman (!) talk with Garry Tan (!) would regard Paul Graham well irrespective of how the rest of the world sees him.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#49I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
I think people have now become extremely wary of VC, startup and Silicon Valley because at some point there was a boiling frog shift from helping people and enabling new things to viciously eating anyone not participating.
Re: Making Startups Powerful
#50[flagged]