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Before the Startup

paulgraham.com

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Re: Before the Startup

#41

Post by fsloth »

sanxiyn wrote: post #36
fsloth wrote: post #33

A very nice read as always. Footnote [4] is a bit off-putting though "[4] What should you do if your true calling is gaming the system? Management consulting." Management consulting probably has more opportunities for gaming the system than startups do, and I concur. However, my friends who work at management consultants, from what I can tell based on anecdotal evidence, mostly perform value adding work for their cli…

You can add value by gaming the system. Gaming the system is a mean, not a goal.

Good point, I hadn't thought of it in that way but very true. Most systems have pathologies and you just need to work around them somehow. I agree: Gaming for personal profit and gaming for some higher goal are two different things.

Re: Before the Startup

#42

Post by [deleted] »

sanxiyn wrote: post #36
fsloth wrote: post #33

A very nice read as always. Footnote [4] is a bit off-putting though "[4] What should you do if your true calling is gaming the system? Management consulting." Management consulting probably has more opportunities for gaming the system than startups do, and I concur. However, my friends who work at management consultants, from what I can tell based on anecdotal evidence, mostly perform value adding work for their cli…

You can add value by gaming the system. Gaming the system is a mean, not a goal.

[deleted]

Re: Before the Startup

#44

Post by atmosx »

strlen wrote: post #37

Can this advice be generalized to other creative endeavors in general? There's an interesting article by Scott Alexander, "Negative Creativity" http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/05/negative-creativity/ "It is said that one of the highest-level and most awe-inspiring of rationalist skills is Sitting And Thinking About Something For Five Minutes. The sitting part isn’t that difficult. It’s not even that hard to…how sho…

I find it much more natural to walk/run and think about a problem. I don't know what you need to do when you need to keep notes and look at numbers while approaching the problem, you can't do that on your iPhone while walking, but generally speaking running/walking disconnects my brain from my body very effectively. So all I need to do is focus on the problem, but doesn't take as much as effort as it would take if I did it while sitting on a desk.

Re: Before the Startup

#45

Post by davmar »

apsec112 wrote: post #14
TheUnPedant wrote: post #9

> Yet when it comes to startups, a lot of people seem to think they're supposed to start them while they're still in college. Is PG seriously implying he doesn't know where college students got the idea that they should be founding startups instead, after spending the last ten years telling them to?

"The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads? (...) The less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission of investors to do it. So a lot of people will be able to start companies now who never coul…

PG is a living man. the essay is a dead document.

Re: Before the Startup

#46

Post by ProAm »

atmosx wrote: post #44
strlen wrote: post #37

Can this advice be generalized to other creative endeavors in general? There's an interesting article by Scott Alexander, "Negative Creativity" http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/05/negative-creativity/ "It is said that one of the highest-level and most awe-inspiring of rationalist skills is Sitting And Thinking About Something For Five Minutes. The sitting part isn’t that difficult. It’s not even that hard to…how sho…

I find it much more natural to walk/run and think about a problem. I don't know what you need to do when you need to keep notes and look at numbers while approaching the problem, you can't do that on your iPhone while walking, but generally speaking running/walking disconnects my brain from my body very effectively. So all I need to do is focus on the problem, but doesn't take as much as effort as it would take if I…

It's referred to as 'dissociative thinking'. The back burner of your mind... similar to waking in the middle of the night with an answer to a problem that has been plaguing you for days

Re: Before the Startup

#47

Post by IsaacL »

So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on. [2] But that doesn't work with startups. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is whether your product does what they want. Startups are as impersonal as physics. You have to make something people want, and you prosper only to the extent you do.

The bootstrapper crowd (Amy Hoy, patio11, etc) often level this as a criticism of VC-backed startups -- that they are a gameable system, a series of hurdles from accelerator to series A to series B to acquihire. Whereas (they say) bootstrapping isn't gameable, it relies on making something users want, and it teaches you to deal with raw reality head-on. [1]

Maybe they are only looking at a dysfunctional subset of VC-backed startups though? One common pattern seems to be that a person enters a particular field, notices that many people around them are unimpressive and focused on perception, "networking" and system-gaming -- and concludes that the field is corrupt.

But in actuality, they'd only seen the bottom tier of the field, and the higher tiers have more genuine talents who also despise bullshitters.[2]

[1] http://unicornfree.com/2012/why-blacksmiths-are-better-at-st...

[2] I'm thinking specifically of academia as another example of this pattern. Since bullshitters do manage to reach the higher tiers of both startups and academia, there's a genuine question as to whether the bullshitters will someday come to dominate both of these areas, and whether this has already happened. By definition, a field that has been taken over by bullshitters is not going to let you know that this has happened.

Re: Before the Startup

#48

Post by schoolixer »

IsaacL wrote: post #47

So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on. [2] But that doesn't work with startups. There is no boss to trick, on…

It is curious that people spend so much time considering games to avoid actual work rather than figure out work that they can enjoy; or at least feel a sense of progress.

Re: Before the Startup

#50

Post by ghshephard »

jforman wrote: post #32
ar7hur wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, PG built that not by giving advice to founders, but by selecting them.

How did he get into a position where he has his choice of founders? He built the empire by offering mentorship, money, and community (which is peer-to-peer mentorship). In the beginning, the draw wasn't money because they didn't offer much of it.

In his essay, he says that most people ignore his advice, so it's unclear how value there is in the mentorship. The money though, is pretty important when your young - it pays for travel, 2-3 months of food and rent. Another very important element these days is the opportunity to pitch at demo day, as well as having the YC cachet associated with you.

I would argue (and I'm sure that a lot of people would disagree), that one of the most important things that YC does is give budding entrepreneurs a chance to just get away from everything else in their life and completely focus on their startup.

He also caveats a lot of his points by saying that honestly, he really is never particularly certain which startups or set of founders is really going to take off.

At the end of the day, it's really up to them.

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