11–20 of 142 posts
An alternative to starting a consulting business is to build your stuff on the side. Possibly draining? Yes, but if you're determined, I believe this is better than getting distracted by a consulting business. Time will tell if this is wise though.
Feel free to delete this comment after changes are made.
I also love the 0% dissatisfaction idea, whether or not the result is a success. The experience of launching your own project just can't be replicated. Any of the points you mentioned, even if the result is complete failure, is well worth the expense of time & risk.
Excellent. The essay and talk together produced several surprises. The essay cleared up things things that the video obscured (couldn't see the visuals), like the "not-so-smart" / "enterprise software" connection (I was thinking he just meant the competition was dumb so you'd have the one-eyed man / land of the blind advantage). The big surprise is that YC hasn't seen an order of magnitude increase in applicants from…
I've often wondered whether you could make a lot of progress by bringing together hackers with, for example, doctors or lawyers. These are people who use computers every day but probably don't spend much time thinking about how to hack a solution to their computing problems. As a scientist I've had a lot of success looking for the simple yet groundbreaking problems that occur at the boundaries between very different…
Question for Paul: if you believe that more people will startup in the future, but success requires lots of hands-on help, coaching, etc, surely you need a way to scale YCombinator, right? How?
We often think about that. We could hire assistants, so we didn't have to do everything ourselves. Or we could make YC work more peer-to-peer. Or we could build a robot that would walk around telling everyone "don't make users register," "delete half the text on your frontpage," "face the audience when you're presenting," etc, and I could just hang out in the next room with a book and a cup of tea.
To my knowledge the "revenue-less liquidity event" route to riches is new circa 1998, e.g. The Globe and other such IPOs. This route is probably a symptom of the global liquidity bubble rather than a lasting development. We are still in a global liquidity explosion that measurably started around 1995. It has fueled all kinds of bubbles and weird business practices and now it's fueling acquisitions, just like it's fueling Private Equity deals and stock buybacks. We are in financially anomalous times.
great article paul. i especially love number 7: produce something specific for yourself. this forces you to notice problems and noticing your own problems and overcoming them with technology is a subset of noticing problems of others and using technology to help them, which is the job of startups and companies... so IMHO, noticing and solving your own problems is a fundamental skill people in startups need to have. t…
This excludes any sort of capital good like an accounting package, or his own example of groupware.
You'd never get most of the good product ideas targeted at businesses without industry experience, which sort of contradicts his advice not to work before starting a company.
Excellent. The essay and talk together produced several surprises. The essay cleared up things things that the video obscured (couldn't see the visuals), like the "not-so-smart" / "enterprise software" connection (I was thinking he just meant the competition was dumb so you'd have the one-eyed man / land of the blind advantage). The big surprise is that YC hasn't seen an order of magnitude increase in applicants from…
We will fund people still in school. (The founders of Weebly were.) But they have to be serious about starting a company.
great article paul. i especially love number 7: produce something specific for yourself. this forces you to notice problems and noticing your own problems and overcoming them with technology is a subset of noticing problems of others and using technology to help them, which is the job of startups and companies... so IMHO, noticing and solving your own problems is a fundamental skill people in startups need to have. t…
"produce something specific for yourself." This excludes any sort of capital good like an accounting package, or his own example of groupware. You'd never get most of the good product ideas targeted at businesses without industry experience, which sort of contradicts his advice not to work before starting a company.
If I need to manage my money and taxes, I can build software for that.
If I need to develop some kind of collaboration tool to help me work better with teams at school, or on an open-source project (both not inherently business domains), I can build software for that.
Business tools are merely extensions of these. Unless I missed it, PG never mentions good product ideas targeted at businesses, so I am unclear as to where there is a contradicition. His mantra is to go for a wide user base, which typically requires mainstream business ideas, i.e., business-to-consumer, not business-to-business.
I think it might be the change in perception. My parents, and people around their age, seem to have a different perspective on what a job means. They see work as a smaller role in their life. "Work just pays the bills". But most younger generations seem to put more of an emphasis on their careers. They see work as the main part of their life. It could be due to the amount of money that we pay for college tuition. I know I don't want to waste my degree and years of my life doing someone else's work. I'd rather have the comfort and responsibility to be left alone to do my own work. Maybe I'm just speaking about my own situation.