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How Not to Die (2007)

paulgraham.com

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Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#111

Post by pascalxus »

Paul Graham usually writes some really good stuff, but this is highly misleading: "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." There are soo many projects that can continue in obscurity on a shoe string budget, never to amount to anything. You could continue to invest in those businesses great effort and money all for nothing. ProductHunt is filled to brim with failed projects. Even, Google one of the world's most successful companies, has countless projects that didn't work out. Were they supposed to keep pouring 100s of millions of dollars in projects that could never succeed?

Furthermore, it's misleading because it implies that things are within your control. That, all you have to do is the right thing and you'll be successful. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you have a bad idea that didn't work out because of lack of consumer demand (the #1 reason why software startups die), then, after you've tried everything, there's not much else to do. It's better to shut down or pivot to something where there is demand.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#112

Post by philwelch »

peruvian wrote: post #95
philwelch wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point where you stop trying to pivot into higher and higher growth opportunities and accept your fate as a sustainable but small business could be classified as a form of “death” (perhaps “undead”) if your original goal really was to get rich.

Imagine how much better the tech industry would be (in countless ways) if more business owners were content with "small but sustainable".

That’s all well and good, but I think pg is writing more for founders who want to go big. And just like on StackOverflow, it’s not necessarily helpful to derail conversations around “how to do X” with arguments over “whether you should want to do X in the first place”.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#113

Post by slededit »

CPLX wrote: post #92
maxlamb wrote: post #58

I think this essay was valid for the year it was written (2007) where much fewer people were doing startups, lots of good ideas had not been executed yet, mobile was about to take off. Just like the belief in 2007 that "real estate prices can never go down" lead to the real estate bubble/crash that eventually invalidated that statement, if everyone starts beleiving if they start a company and never give up they will…

Yeah exactly. Things were really really different then. Youtube was two years old, Facebook had only been open to non students for less than a year. Things like making databases of electronic parts or other less sexy B2B style ideas were often still wide open green fields with almost no competition. Plus just making websites work was tough, the cloud existed but just getting servers to work and stay up was a non triv…

2007 was In the shadow of the post 2000 crash. People were still debating with me if going in to Computer Science even made sense (aren’t they sending all those jobs to India?). The financial crisis would happen just a few months later and take almost 10 years to recover.

There’s a bias when looking at the past. We tend to assume the future was both inevitable and easily predictable. Not like these uncertain times today.

Now pre-2000s was a little different. VCs were taking to me on the phone about my “robotics” company. I was 10.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#114

Post by Wowfunhappy »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #101
nothrabannosir wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild guess but I'd be remiss not to express this saturnine suspicion: probably because it's Doreen. She posts a lot, mostly solid content like the above post, some of which hard hitting. Some people take offense, she's often greyed out for no reason and regularly gets pretty harsh criticism. I would be shocked if she doesn't have some auto downvotes for every post. Unfortunately. I recognise it's not constructive to…

There's probably an element of truth to that, but it's also a large forum that gets about 5 million unique visitors per month and I'm a demographic outlier on multiple axes, so I simply express myself differently from the way most people here do. (I also focus on things that would never occur to most people here, which can easily be perceived as irrelevant.) I suspect a high percentage of the downvotes I get -- and I…

> Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why my comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not redacting this comment cuz reasons. But this is all off topic.

I have to say, I don't have an issue with downvote discussions when they are initiated by someone other than the original poster. Such conversations frequently lead somewhere interesting, as this one did, whereas the opposite type (in which the original poster complains) never does.

I sometimes come across fully grayed out comments that I simply cannot imagine why anyone would ever downvote. I upvote these, but I'd very much like to know why they were downvoted in the first place. Did the author get their facts wrong? Is there an angle I'm missing? Could the comment be construed as offensive?

I've heard it suggested that no one should downvote comments without leaving a reply on why they downvoted. This strikes me as completely unreasonable, but allowing users (who aren't the OP) to ask "hey, why was this downvoted" in cases where they're legitimately confused seems like a good compromise.

I do also see how this might get out of hand if it was officially allowed... but maybe worth a try?

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#115

Post by [deleted] »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #114
DoreenMichele wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably an element of truth to that, but it's also a large forum that gets about 5 million unique visitors per month and I'm a demographic outlier on multiple axes, so I simply express myself differently from the way most people here do. (I also focus on things that would never occur to most people here, which can easily be perceived as irrelevant.) I suspect a high percentage of the downvotes I get -- and I…

> Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why my comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not redacting this comment cuz reasons. But this is all off topic. I have to say, I don't have an issue with downvote discussions when they are initiated by someone other than the original poster. S…

[deleted]

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#116

Post by renew0account »

nexuist wrote: post #29

>A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups. There is now a whole neighborhood of them in San Francisco. If you move there, the peer pressure that made you work harder all summer will continue to operate. Funny how much that single sentence changed what life was like on the West Coast. Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for st…

what's the neighborhood he was referring to? I'm interested to know if it still exists or if it's just been assimilated into the greater Bay Area tech scene.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#117

Post by [deleted] »

peruvian wrote: post #95
philwelch wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point where you stop trying to pivot into higher and higher growth opportunities and accept your fate as a sustainable but small business could be classified as a form of “death” (perhaps “undead”) if your original goal really was to get rich.

Imagine how much better the tech industry would be (in countless ways) if more business owners were content with "small but sustainable".

[deleted]

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#118

Post by diego »

pbecotte wrote: post #105
diego wrote: post #22

I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop. It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to e…

If you have taken enough VC that the only way to get any value at all is through a huge exit, this statement is true. If you run a normal business, it is not true :)

No, I'm talking about companies that didn't even get to take VC funding in some cases. Building a stable business doesn't mean you get rich. The world is filled with middle class folk running stable businesses.
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