111–120 of 681 posts
PG is remarkably consistent in his advice; much of his writing is about developing a nose for "what's missing" and having the chops and resources to attempt a solution. Also, I think 'Google' in this instance is more for motivation rather than a literal comparison. He's leaving out the part that Google was founded by graduate CS students a) looking for a thesis, b) into node-link graphs, and c) inspired by academic c…
I'm wondering if there is a research about which percentile of these two groups became rich: People who started a company vs People who worked for Tech companies.
Unless you're very early (and/or very lucky), you can't get "rich" (i.e., can choose never to work again and can invest in many other things) as an employee (though of course a highly-paid employee can become very well off and comfortable). Yes you need to be lucky to get super-rich as a founder too, but you have a lot more control, i.e., you make the primary decisions that determine whether the company will make goo…
This is entirely fair in its goal and perspective. It's not about starting Koch Industries or Disney. It's not about some ideal world where connections and funding don't matter. It's about a kind of productive problem solving that creates value for other people by solving problems they just accept as friction in their lives. It's insightful in focusing on how projects you love can end up helping others. But it's a li…
I was the first graduating class from one of the first public high schools in the country with an IT magnet program.
I remember the program coordinator telling us and our parents in a big presentation that we could be making $70-80k out of high school. He was really selling it.
I was not making anywhere near that out of high school. =P
But I wasn't doing bad either. In fact, I'd had two jobs with tech companies before I even graduated. I had a job lined up in the engineering department of an OEM prior to receiving my high school diploma. That same administrator was always encouraging us, cheering us on with our various projects, helping where he could.
I never thought for a moment I'd been mislead that my salary wasn't that high or that I didn't make it "rich". Any kid who'd sat through a school fundraiser presentation in middle school knows that those awesome prizes of a computer or game console or whatnot is just meant to hype you up. But you might be able to land a CD player. (My age is showing here. =P )
I expect any 14-15yo he's talking to will get the gist. The kids are not stupid. They get the pitch. And I think they intrinsically know the odds too. Those 9,500 football players are not all going to see it as a loss, even if they didn't achieve their ultimate goal. People turn losses into wins and salvage the good from a failed attempt all of the time.
My son is 3, and already has fun mashing computer parts together and wanting to see how things work. I'm excited to see if he wants to do this as well. Will I tell him "Dude, that guy said I'd be making $90k and that was B.S." Nah. I'll give him simple version of Paul's advice. Even if he doesn't go into entrepreneurship, it'll set him up well if he follows it.
Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew google was going to be huge from the beginning. His brother Carl was already a multimillionare in tech and taught him everything required to set up a future successful company. Larry made it clear to me that he always planned Google to be a large cash-generating cow to invest in long-term AGI and there were only a few times at the beginning when he truly fe…
Larry Page's original ambition was to digitize books and knowledge in the world [2].
> Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, the student project that eventually became Google—a “crawler” that would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against a user’s query—was actually conceived as part of an effort “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library.”
[1]: https://twitter.com/jam3scampbell/status/1608270969763729415
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
Am surprised PG gave this talk at a UK school without mentioning an important assumption that they will need to migrate to the US in his opening paragraph. All the examples he mentioned Google, himself and the Irish Stripe founders had to do the same for their startups. Sadly in the UK all the current unicorn "startups" are a bit iffy: XTX (high frequency hedgefund), betfair (betting company), tripledot studios (Zyng…
You say all this like it's a bad thing, but maybe it's ultimately better for a society if there isn't a financial lottery that enables a small number of people to become insanely wealthy and powerful. I'd rather a government that enables a thousand mid-sized companies with moderately well-paid executives and employees than one that enables a single monopolistic mega-corporation with billionaires whose power rivals st…
Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew google was going to be huge from the beginning. His brother Carl was already a multimillionare in tech and taught him everything required to set up a future successful company. Larry made it clear to me that he always planned Google to be a large cash-generating cow to invest in long-term AGI and there were only a few times at the beginning when he truly fe…
Do you have any sources for this? If he knew it was going to be this huge, why were they looking for an acquisition for north of a million dollars? On AGI: are you referencing this clip? [1] To me, it seems like an ordinary vision when you stretch your imagination. He didn't have any realistic idea how Google might achieve AGI, just something that could happen in the future. And this was in 2000. Google, I imagine, w…
His dad was a computer scientist and larry read a lot of AGI sci fi as a kid, so it's not really that hard to extrapolate 1980s technology to 2040s outcomes.
> It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies. People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically getting rich is the most important thing is one o…
Exactly. >In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. No. The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good career that pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at Wall Street, law or Congress. Getting rich through business is a lottery. I would have attributed this article from Graham to relative inexperience had he written this early on, say in the 2000s. But him writing this…
> pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at
> Wall Street, law or Congress
I'm afraid this isn't really true. Through most of the industrial revolution and after (i.e. after the early 1800's), professionals (lawyers, bankers, accountants, doctors, etc.) made a smaller multiple of unskilled labor wages than they do today. In America at least, the way to get "rich" has always been to start your own business.
This was true in the 1800's and it's true today. There have been repeated waves of change as new technologies spread: textile mills, cotton production, mining, railroads, telecom, electricity, appliances, automobiles, department stores, advertising, aviation, broadcasting, computing, etc, etc. Each wave of innovation saw the creation of thousands of new businesses. Sure most eventually fail, but hundreds did pretty well and a handful got insanely wealthy.
American culture and laws (usually) rewards this sort of risky behavior. One can debate whether it's, moral, just, or good for society. But generally speaking, not much has changed wrt this facet of our culture over the last 200 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was sad to search for the word "luck" and come up empty. You can do everything right and still fail. You can do everything wrong and win. Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time, and that external factor is completely out of your control and can be the difference you need.
I don't disagree that luck is a factor, but what can you do with that information other than console yourself when it doesn't work out?
A 15-year-old hearing this talk from Graham as-is might take from it, "wow, if I learn programming, work on things that interest me, do well in school, and go to a good university, I'm guaranteed to build a Google-scale successful startup!"
Telling that kid that there's also a component of luck involved, and that the vast majority of startups fail, would temper that enthusiasm in a much more honest way. If that means fewer kids decide to start companies, that's obviously a negative in Graham's book, but may not be a negative for those kids themselves.
Am surprised PG gave this talk at a UK school without mentioning an important assumption that they will need to migrate to the US in his opening paragraph. All the examples he mentioned Google, himself and the Irish Stripe founders had to do the same for their startups. Sadly in the UK all the current unicorn "startups" are a bit iffy: XTX (high frequency hedgefund), betfair (betting company), tripledot studios (Zyng…
You say all this like it's a bad thing, but maybe it's ultimately better for a society if there isn't a financial lottery that enables a small number of people to become insanely wealthy and powerful. I'd rather a government that enables a thousand mid-sized companies with moderately well-paid executives and employees than one that enables a single monopolistic mega-corporation with billionaires whose power rivals st…
To say nothing of the lost revenue from tech export do you think it is better for the UK that it depends on AWS cloud for running the majority of its public services, Apple for almost 70% of the phones used by it's citizens, Google for the other 30%?
Which midsize company is going to be able to compete with AWS on offering cloud computing services, Apple on developing smart phones or Nvidia on GPUs?
Actually the UK has the worst of both worlds: US big tech opens office here leading to well-paid executives and engineer, while all revenue (and none of the taxes) from selling the products these engineers develop goes to the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if i had a 1 in 100 shot of becoming google I'd just do it 100 times. I'm pretty sure its more like 99.99999%
I think each earnest attempt would probably occupy about 3 years of your lifespan, so you probably can try at most 20 times. If these are independent, then it's still an 82% chance of failure. But successive attempts after repeated failures might also make it harder to attract confidence from investors, not to mention loss of your own self-confidence. And if you finally succeed in founding Google when you're 80, you…