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Making Startups Powerful

paulgraham.com

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Re: Making Startups Powerful

#121

Post by mitxela »

popalchemist wrote: post #40
sigbottle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And yet we have the saying "all's fair in love and war." Adultery, experienced in xx% of relationships, is a blatant power struggle. It's normal to edit your dating app pictures (or was back when people actually used dating apps) to look more attractive, or to get cosmetic surgery. There's custody battles and all that.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#122

Post by mitxela »

bobthepanda wrote: post #49
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.

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.

"at some point the water shifted from cold to hot"

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#123

Post by mitxela »

themgt wrote: post #13

For example, if you opt in, we'll tell you how you're doing compared to other users. The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others. The vanilla one? Is this the pg Malcolm Gladwell arc, where he's retelling some real concept but warped by mis…

If it won't make the model worse when you opt out, then you have to find a way to make sure it makes the model worse, so they'll opt in.

It's like how LG TVs make you consent to recording and uploading everything you say in the vicinity, or else you can't have voice commands, which they explain is because it would be illegal to analyze sound inputs for the voice commands without that consent. It's not true, of course, but it sounds true and it makes you want to consent.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#124

Post by mitxela »

dools wrote: post #67
ignoramous wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read the essay. It is mostly about pivoting towards an outsized outcomes for founders & leveraging various avenues available to their advantage.

I don't mean less powerful relative to startup founders, I mean less powerful in terms of how we allocate resources in the economy.

Investors are, by definition, the people who control resource allocation in a capitalist economy. Making investors less powerful is the same thing as making the economy less capitalist, which is obviously bad.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#125

Post by mitxela »

ahgqw wrote: post #3

Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd. Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify. It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop…

Maybe you don't remember how bad it was. They weren't giving $500k of $1000k, they were giving $500k of $100k, ending in massive debt that could only be resolved by making more music for the same label (they wouldn't collect it as long as the revenue was still coming in), sometimes eventually breaking even but usually ending up in some kind of bankruptcy. Of course the record label would charge you another $500k for your next song that would make $100k of repayment on the first debt. I'm probably exaggerating the 5:1 difference but it was really really bad, and you'd have to pay the massive fixed fee even if nobody ended up liking your song, which isn't how Spotify works.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#126

Post by chadgpt1 »

epolanski wrote: post #82
justonenote wrote: post #27

We 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…

> We really need a change in mindset around what success means. How? Wealth and power is all that society obsesses about and there's an endless list of suckers for people that appear to be wealthy or powerful. Hell, even this board is filled with rat races spamming how to climb the pyramid in companies I vomit just thinking about "oh, this is how I got promoted to L17 from L16" or bs like that. Nobody's getting inter…

[dead]

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#127

Post by chadgpt5 »

epolanski wrote: post #82
justonenote wrote: post #27

We 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…

> We really need a change in mindset around what success means. How? Wealth and power is all that society obsesses about and there's an endless list of suckers for people that appear to be wealthy or powerful. Hell, even this board is filled with rat races spamming how to climb the pyramid in companies I vomit just thinking about "oh, this is how I got promoted to L17 from L16" or bs like that. Nobody's getting inter…

[flagged]

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#128

Post by brabel »

earnesti wrote: post #103
iterance wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generosity is not "giving stuff away for free when it hurts you badly to do so." Neither the giver nor the receiver are comfortable when generosity hurts the giver, and the dignity of both may be compromised as well. Generosity that is disrespectful of comfort and dignity is worth very little. A company with $2000 in its first few days need not give away $1000 to act generously.

So the generosity rule is more like "if you have lots of money you can make lots of money"

The VC backed model in a nutshell.

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#129

Post by b345 »

Ouman wrote: post #110

Graham says the constraint is that becoming more powerful has to make things better for the customer, but several of the strategies he recommends are exactly how companies eventually acquire the ability to stop caring quite so much about customers

Correct. If you're powerful, you already have several advantages over your competitors unrelated to customer/consumer success (like network effect, owning the path the money flows through etc.)

Re: Making Startups Powerful

#130

Post by jayanmn »

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.

In India we have company that enable gig workers - maids, drivers, beauticians, fixing aircons etc. Company charges so much that people try to cut way from the aggregator. Instead a fixed number and vision to reduce that further would these companies much bigger.
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