Making Startups Powerful • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#51

Post by Cider9986 » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #41

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.

OpenAI Airbnb Stripe Coinbase DoorDash Scale AI Dropbox Reddit Instacart GitLab Kalshi Replit Twitch

These are the companies advertised on ycombinator.com. The only one I like is GitLab which I'm neutral about. All other are companies I dislike.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#52

Post by leoc » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 8:38 PM UTC

walt_grata wrote: post #42

raincole wrote: post #41

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.

Once YC companies started having a negative impact on people and communities. Airbnb and gig worker stuff seems to be the start of it.

His reaction to the 2011 Dropbox password incident was an early concern, IIRC.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#53

Post by walt_grata » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 8:43 PM UTC

leoc wrote: post #52

walt_grata wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once YC companies started having a negative impact on people and communities. Airbnb and gig worker stuff seems to be the start of it.

His reaction to the 2011 Dropbox password incident was an early concern, IIRC.

Very much so in my recollection

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#54

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 8:46 PM UTC

mzajc wrote: post #48

ViktorRay wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#55

Post by alexashka » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 8:47 PM UTC

> But all these strategies for making startups more powerful have one thing in common — or more precisely, have to obey one constraint. They all have to make things better for the customer.

Good thing we have venture capital to alleviate that constraint by enabling selling a dollar for 50 cents.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#56

Post by elendilm » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 8:52 PM UTC

I would say, the author does have a point.

Playing for the long game is good. But that sentence is too lossy to decipher the meaning unless you know what it means.

Instead of making the company more powerful, I would recommend making the company more aligned with truth and the real world which has a nice side effect of being resilient.

Add to that, preparing for scale.

We have dedicated an entire year for nothing but architecture, correctness, distributedness and scaling.

The economic perspective of the same would be reducing the cost of software development (not in the LLM massive code generation way but the opposite with architecture).

Its been 5 years since we have been building Slyp and SlypBusiness along with the plethora of technologies around it.

I don't know whether we are powerful as per the author's definition but we are damn resilient.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#57

Post by fhub » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

The comments here are taking a very uncharitable definition of “power”. If I take that definition I can see how people are being so negative. But just a slightly more positive definition and this all seems like reasonable dialogue to have with an early stage startup.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#58

Post by danvoell » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 9:10 PM UTC

I feel like the basis of this post is that in the current state of software development, SaaS alone holds very limited power.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#59

Post by Animats » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

danvoell wrote: post #58

I feel like the basis of this post is that in the current state of software development, SaaS alone holds very limited power.

if so, are Salesforce and Oracle in trouble yet?

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#60

Post by dqh » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 9:17 PM UTC

> Being generous makes you more powerful. As Tim O'Reilly said, you should create more value than you capture. Many hard-headed business types would write this off as idealistic hippy stuff, but in fact this is the route to becoming really rich.

> Hired CEOS take the power of the companies they run for granted, whereas founders remember the days when the company was so weak that it had to delight users to survive.

I've always instinctively followed the generosity path, and have experienced that when customers are delighted and that when frictions are removed (or not added in the first place), good things will follow.

However, I have not always been able to convince others to trust in and follow this path. Can anyone offer any advice or experiences on talking people out of trying to prematurely squeeze out every last penny?