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Poll: In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the early 2000's compared to now?
Feels that way to me. For example, I had a basic website on a billion dollar industry and we were page rank 1 for years for that industry keyword with zero extra effort.
Well, it was 2005. Poll: In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the early 2000's compared to now? Feels that way to me. For example, I had a basic website on a billion dollar industry and we were page rank 1 for years for that industry keyword with zero extra effort.
Looks like it was but a lot of goodwill has been burned since. PG writes "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. They don't care if the person behind it is a high school kid." But today every sane person would ask "Why should I depend on your service? Where is the guarantee that you won't go out of business or get acquired in six months with your service sunsetted?"
Well, it was 2005. Poll: In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the early 2000's compared to now? Feels that way to me. For example, I had a basic website on a billion dollar industry and we were page rank 1 for years for that industry keyword with zero extra effort.
Or maybe give people time to live before they decide to participate in "the economy". Not everything is jobs. Actually I would argue that hiring is, or should be soon, obsolete because of a gradual change on mindset that clarifies what jobs really are, schemes. There's no reason to dedicate most of your waking life working on selling products where the end product is just maintaining frivolous life styles. And if hav…
People have jobs because they need things that can only be got via human labor. This is not a bigger issue at a root level, it is a basic fact that you are trying to deny.
Shorter PG: hiring is hard due to market informational inefficiencies, acqui-hiring is the future! > What's an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess you…
> I wasn't expecting Paul Graham to recite orthodox Marxism. This paragraph is only missing the word "exploited", because he's effectively saying that young good workers are undervalued because a large employer makes more money from them than they are paid. No, the point was that at a big company you get paid the average value of the work your and your peers does, while when you work for yourself you get paid the val…
Well, it was 2005. Poll: In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the early 2000's compared to now? Feels that way to me. For example, I had a basic website on a billion dollar industry and we were page rank 1 for years for that industry keyword with zero extra effort.
> In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the early 2000's compared to now? Looks like it was but a lot of goodwill has been burned since. PG writes "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. They don't care if the person behind it is a high school kid." But today e…
I’ve also experienced a number of cases in my own work where pretty great services were passed over for exactly those reasons. As somebody who has founded startups in the past, this makes me sad because it means my next attempt will be much tougher (and it’s already hard), but on the other hand, I’ve also learned that I don’t really want to run a venture backed startup anymore and would rather run a smaller lifestyle business that’s in it for the long term. I suppose it comes down to how that’s communicated to the potential customers.
Shorter PG: hiring is hard due to market informational inefficiencies, acqui-hiring is the future! > What's an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess you…
At the very least, if the employer strictly loses money on all employees, the business shouldn't be sustainable (if it depends on employees, and they're not just a frivolous "inefficiency" economically speaking).
There is also this idea that a company, or a firm is a miniature socialism and the compensation structure is flattened in relation to the real value produced. Funny that this type of thinking kind of forces us to use some notion of value not directly tied to market, since the labor you do when working for yourself (and presumably, taking money for that directly from the market) is not the same labor you would do for an employer. The latter also provides you with a host of things (accounting, infrastructure...) that you would have to organize yourself if you weren't working for them. This doesn't even account for more financial stability and fixed work hours that you should get under enforced labor laws. So there is definitely value you get from an employer apart from the monetary compensation, if we are to compare that with the theoretical scenario of own business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the early 2000's compared to now? Looks like it was but a lot of goodwill has been burned since. PG writes "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. They don't care if the person behind it is a high school kid." But today e…
That last point makes me very wary of using a startups services these days. Too many startups fail and out of the ones that don’t, a huge amount get shutdown after acquisition. Too risky. I’ve also experienced a number of cases in my own work where pretty great services were passed over for exactly those reasons. As somebody who has founded startups in the past, this makes me sad because it means my next attempt will…
Well, it was 2005. Poll: In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the early 2000's compared to now? Feels that way to me. For example, I had a basic website on a billion dollar industry and we were page rank 1 for years for that industry keyword with zero extra effort.
> In your opinion was is far easier to gain traction and scale in the early 2000's compared to now? Looks like it was but a lot of goodwill has been burned since. PG writes "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. They don't care if the person behind it is a high school kid." But today e…
Or store passwords in plaintext then lose them.