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Before the Startup

paulgraham.com

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Re: Before the Startup

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

ak39 wrote: post #79
TeMPOraL wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could Quora be such example?

Yeah. I think so. Found this while Googling for Quora's valuation: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/09/quora-forever/

Yup, that's what I was thinking about. It was brought to my attention by @idlewords. From the article that is probably the most linked thing in comments this year, [0].

Take the case of Quora. Quora is a question-answering website. You type a question and a domain expert might answer it for you.

Quora's declared competitor is Wikipedia, a free site that not only doesn't make revenue, but loses so much money they have to ask for donations just to be broke.

Recently, Quora raised $80 million in new funding at a $900 million valuation. Their stated reason for taking the money was to postpone having to think about revenue.

Quora walked in to an investor meeting, stated these facts as plainly as I have, and walked out with a check for eighty million dollars.

That's the power of investor storytime.

So yeah. No one games anything here.

[0] - http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm

Re: Before the Startup

#82

Post by patkai »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77
jaoued wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you on academia, as the checks & balances plus the peer review system for worldwide recognised published research kill and destroy bullshitters. I am not saying there aren't any but having been in both academia & corporate, the latter is infested with them. In startup world, they get also eliminated quite rapidly as they will just fail. Success of any startups is not to raise funds but to get customer…

Well it is already painfully visible that "checks & balances plus peer review" is barely managing to hold science together. Research has already been thoroughly gamed on a systemic level. Scientific funding and the whole "publish and perish" culture pretty much promotes bullshit over real research nowadays. And while solutions are easy to name (increase rigor for statistical significance, publish negative results, ma…

Exactly, but if you are a member of the cult you can't admit this.

Re: Before the Startup

#83

Post by nl »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #66
nl wrote: post #5

one 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…

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.

I agree, but I think it's difficult to achieve this deliberately.

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.

There have been some attempts to do this (NReduce) but no outstanding systematic successes that I know of.

I think it's an interesting area.

Re: Before the Startup

#85

Post by jacques_chester »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #74
waterlesscloud wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly, with fierce hatred I hate that term. It basically means "word 'hacker' sounds cool, so let's make marketing cooler by renaming it to 'growth hacking'". Seriously, just look at the Wikipedia article[0] and see how meaningless this term is. The whole text is just basically pile of buzzwords. But you're right. Growth is hard, and if you're a hacker at heart, focused on developing your idea/product, someone spe…

The people being "hacked" by the title "growth hacker" and the folks who do the hiring.

Re: Before the Startup

#86

Post by 3pt14159 »

strlen wrote: post #52
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…

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…

You can easily start a company that requires significant R&D: start with consulting; then one day sell the product you want to make with the right license and timeline, then make it and sell it to everyone. Look at Space X, they were making money wayyy before they were igniting rockets.

Re: Before the Startup

#87

Post by joeyspn »

Another great essay by PG... I would just add (in the All-Consuming part) that startups are all-consuming either if you make it or you fail... at least that is what experience has taught me. It's important to know when you have to pull the plug.

Re: Before the Startup

#88

Post by johnward »

adrianhoward wrote: post #56
strlen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Or for that matter one that has initial infrastructure costs, or one would only be affordable if there's an economy of scale?" You can't — obviously. And folk like Amy Hoy @patio11 freely admit that. The key word there though is "requires". I've encountered lots of companies that have spent silly amounts of money, often their…

Yeah part of bootstrapping is identifying a business that is capable of being bootstrap. Super high R&D costs would rule it out as a viable option.

Re: Before the Startup

#89

Post by johnward »

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.

I thought he kind of built the empire by winning the startup lottery with viaweb?

Re: Before the Startup

#90

Post by dnissley »

Patient0 wrote: post #78
dkural wrote: post #26

"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…

I found this ironic given that he was saying this as a guest lecturer for Sam Altman's "startup" class at Stanford.

I didn't find it ironic because those are people who are quite likely to go out and do the opposite, which is to focus on money or some other extrinsic motivation.
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