i found it a bit jarring that pg has bought into the idea of "known boring ideas" - there is little that is not interesting to somebody. i would cheerfully read books on literary theory, for instance, and i'm sure that doing middle management cleanly and efficiently involves challenges that are interesting to people who are intrinsically interested in group dynamics and effort-to-result optimisation.
Before the Startup
61–70 of 169 posts
Re: Before the Startup
#62"So strangely enough the optimal thing do to in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational version of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the classic version of college as education for its own sake. If you want to start a startup after college, what you should do in college is learn powerful things. And if you have genuine intellectual curiosity, that's what yo…
Some of the things I've learned at university are pretty interesting and fun to play with. Now, notice the "fun to play" with part. Some thing require a lot of investment (both money and time) in order to be learned. So, I believe it's not unfeasible to want to start a company so that you can fund your curiosity and learn the new things. The company itself might fail, or might not, but I believe as long as the purpose was to learn something new, failing is not as bad. If you start a company thinking this is the future, and you put value in making money as opposed to learning, then failing is losing.
Re: Before the Startup
#63"So strangely enough the optimal thing do to in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational version of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the classic version of college as education for its own sake. If you want to start a startup after college, what you should do in college is learn powerful things. And if you have genuine intellectual curiosity, that's what yo…
Some of the things I've learned at university are pretty interesting and fun to play with. Now, notice the "fun to play" with part. Some thing require a lot of investment (both money and time) in order to be learned. So, I believe it's not unfeasible to want to start a company so that you can fund your curiosity and learn the new things. The company itself might fail, or might not, but I believe as long as the purpos…
In an ideal world, that would be possible, yes. But a company does need to make some money, even if only to pay its founders for their time. That money can come from investments, but if you start a company just to learn new stuff you'll have a hard time finding those.
Re: Before the Startup
#64> 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(...) 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 som…
I don't believe this is true. I think the startup ecosystem actually learned how to game "making something people want". After all, startups are companies, companies need to profit, and "making what people want" vs. "making what people will pay for" are similar, yet not perfectly aligned goals.
Re: Before the Startup
#65So 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…
How do you bootstrap a company that requires significant R&D before an MVP can be shipped? Or for that matter one that has initial infrastructure costs, or one would only be affordable if there's an economy of scale? This is armchair quarterbacking, of course, I'm not an entrepreneur and do not pretend to be one. Patio11 has a lot of interesting and relevant things to say, but I would hate to live in a world where en…
> How do you bootstrap a company that requires significant R&D before an MVP can be shipped?
First you bootstrap something less ambitious. Then you can use that money to start more R&D heavy companies.
Re: Before the Startup
#66one guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology—to cause yourself, as Paul Buchheit put it, to "live in the future." When you reach that point, ideas that will seem to other people uncannily prescient will seem obvious to you. You may not realize they're startup ideas, but you'll know they're something that ought to exist. I thin…
Interesting insight.
I think the internet, which sometimes serves as its own geographical place, can foster the same sort of clusters.
You can see that with bitcoin/blockchain communities, all kinds of inventive ideas coming out of the online communities there. It's a cluster of people who are living in a certain subset of the future already, and the community is centered online.
Which implies that a smart incubator would want its own online geography to cluster people living in the future. HN isn't quite that. I'm not sure exactly how it misses that target, but it does somehow.
Hmmmm.
Re: Before the Startup
#67pg wrote, "Batch after batch, the YC partners warn founders about mistakes they're about to make..." My question would be "what are the mistakes"? It would be amazingly interesting if PG, Sam or someone else from YC can start to list some of these warnings / common mistakes in one of the classes. Obviously, some advice is company specific, however starting to compile this list of advice would be a valuable additional…
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups by Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Re: Before the Startup
#68I like the term "playing house". Seems like there are a lot of similar activities. I don't make it to many "startup" type events, but when I do, I always wonder why everyone there is spending so much time hanging out with each other instead of going to the events their customers go to.
Yep. Even in my area I could go to 2-5 startup events a week but so much of it just feels so fake and full of hanger-ons that just want to be associated with startups. It is nice to get out once in a while, but I get a lot more out of virtually hanging out with my group of other indie app developers that actually sell.
Re: Before the Startup
#69> 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(...) 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 som…
The 'gaming the system' section gave me insight into both why 'growth hacking' is such a popular idea and why I hate the term.
Founders know they need growth, so they ask themselves "How do we...", and "Hire a Growth Hacker!" is an easy response. It sounds like a way to game the system. After all, growth is right there in the job title, and we all know hackers game systems.
The appeal of a 'hacker' for growth is that it sounds like it solves the hard work of growing by building something people like. We'll just game around it with our hacker!
I don't think that's the conscious intent, but I do think it's the subconscious intent. And both why the term is appealing to founders and why it bugs the hell out of me. It's the subliminal implications of gaming the system.
Re: Before the Startup
#70> 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(...) 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 som…
I don't believe this is true. I think the startup ecosystem actually learned how to game "making something people want". After all, startups are companies, companies need to profit, and "making what people want" vs. "making what people will pay for" are similar, yet not perfectly aligned goals. When startups do what they're supposed to do (making things people want), that's not gaming the system. That's being industr…
The important distinction is between what people want and what people are prepared to pay for. So when your startup is making something people want, but few are prepared to pay for, you can get a massive user base that make it look like you have a very solid startup which you manage to sell for huge amounts of money, while the company only has a tiny chance to ever make a profit. Then you have gamed the system.