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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Start Google

#121

Post by brigadier132 »

palata wrote: post #110
brigadier132 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's luck in the same way that poker is luck.

Do you not know poker at all?

Yes, ive played professionally. To be charitable I’ll explain it to you. In poker you play a massive number of hands and if you are good you play a preplanned strategy and sometimes when following that strategy you lose but over the long run, assuming you are playing a winning strategy, you make money.

The luck is seen in the short term fluctuations but over the long run when executing your strategy there is no luck.

This requires proper bankroll management among other things.

Also starting a business is easier than poker, poker is zero sum (more often negative sum due to rake).

Business is positive sum. What this means is people will gladly hand you money if your product generates more value for them than holding that money does. In poker, every single hand is like a fist fight because there is always a loser in every hand.

Re: How to Start Google

#122

Post by mike_hearn »

ak_111 wrote: post #90

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…

Yes, and of course you cannot just move to the USA especially if you're a young guy in the UK. I know, I faced the same issue. 2006, recruited by Google before I'd even graduated. I wanted to go to California but... they hit the H1B cap that year and I wasn't important enough to get one. So I ended up in Switzerland.

If Google in 2006 wasn't powerful enough to get someone as culturally unthreatening as a Brit into the USA, it cannot be easier to do so as a startup founder.

That said I did know someone later who was able to make it in and become a startup CTO there (a German guy). Hilariously he did it by making a viral YouTube video. And by "make" I mean he hired an agency to make it. This was sufficient to get him in on an artist visa, which was easier than getting in on an H1B.

Re: How to Start Google

#123

Post by bearjaws »

Paul Graham sounds like a boomer telling their kids to go apply in person or go door to door for jobs. Especially talking about Software startups, which will increasingly have a lower and lower barrier to entry (aka lower profitability)

Theres simply no way to get away with what Google, Facebook or Uber did today. You will not sneak your software into enterprise customers, you will not be able to skirt regulations.

Hell the big money pot of getting acquired may be dead too, e.g. Figma.

For most startups, you will fail. For the top 1% of companies you can hope to at best make a comfortable living at a multi-million dollar valuation. Only the .0001% will become a Google.

Re: How to Start Google

#124

Post by tomhoward »

sahila wrote: post #101
tomhoward wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While agreed the chances are still low, if you joined Tesla or Nvidia in the last 10 years and especially before 2020, you very well and likely are rich if you're still working at either and kept all your stock. Hell if you joined Facebook last year and got in when the stock was around 100, your initial equity grant just 5x.

I edited the parenthesised part of the first sentence from "and very lucky" to "and/or very lucky" to make allowances for your objection. And sure, you can always point out exceptions.

The real point is that it's misguided to try and compare percentages of tech company employees with percentages of founders; they're very different things.

Of course, out of all the founders of all the companies, a relatively tiny percentage will be vastly rich. And out of all the employees of all the tech companies, most will be quite wealthy and comfortable, and a small percentage will be vastly rich.

But that doesn't tell you anything about what is the most reliable path for any given individual to get vastly rich; it entirely depends on whether you're the kind of person you are how well you can learn how to build successful products and companies.

Re: How to Start Google

#125

Post by financltravsty »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #23

This essay glosses over the fact that most startups die a horrible death and earn little to no money for the founders. Somewhere in this essay it needs to say “99% of you who try this will fail”.

Maybe don't start a startup, because you do not have the connections or resources necessary to make it successful. Same with any other "speculative" venture: it's dominated by insiders who know how to minimize risk to a point it no longer becomes speculative.

Maybe start an actual, scaleable business that makes money. It's not sexy, but it's within the realm of possibility to get it off the ground yourself; and usually those within the gilded class are not interested in such things.

If you're a regular schmuck, maybe take a page from the countless immigrants in the U.S. that start various businesses (trade, real estate, etc.) that make them enough money to allow them to live like kings back in their home countries.

There's something to be said about the severe glaucoma of understanding class in the U.S. Very few (notably the middle class) are willing to internalize they're serfs, whose current comfort is more a product of luck than anything more. It's a precarious situation, and any notions of aspiring to "life satisfaction" or other leisure-class values is just foolish, in my opinion.

Re: How to Start Google

#126

Post by rmah »

verelo wrote: post #38
Scubabear68 wrote: post #23

This essay glosses over the fact that most startups die a horrible death and earn little to no money for the founders. Somewhere in this essay it needs to say “99% of you who try this will fail”.

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%

You're mixing up percent that succeed (a statistic) with percent chance of success (a probability). IOW, the fact that 1% of businesses succeed does not mean that a particular business has a 1% chance of success. The reason is that business success is not a function of pure random chance (like a die roll). Sure there are random factors but there are also non-random factors (which, IMO, dominate). The problem is that there is no way to determine what your business's chance of success actually is.

Re: How to Start Google

#127

Post by cmrdporcupine »

YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #70

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…

This is what is fundamentally missing from most talk about "tech" startups by VC types these days. They're not actually interested in the nerdy stuff, just in the "disruption" stuff.

L&S were, and they hired other people who were. They didn't start with a business idea, but with a technical one. They filled in the blanks on the business side after they survived the .com crash.

I didn't get to Google until 2011, but it became clear to me after joining that in the past they had gone on a very nerdy mission to hire all the nerdy people and collect them into one place to do nerdy things.

(Unfortunately that nerdy thing ended up being selling ads really efficient, but that's another story.)

My fundamental point is that the Google story is very unlike the kind of stories that YCombinator or a16z like. It started, like you said, as a set of intellectual/technical interests. The other stuff, that VCs today like, came later.

In a way they did the opposite of the usual advice. They started with the hammer (the tech) rather than the nail (the business problem.) They certainly didn't start with a "Like X but for Y" statement like seems to be desired by VC today. And they didn't look like the typical .com story at the time (which was usually: give us lots of VC $$ so we can sell something on the web that is currently not sold on the web, but we'll just use the $$ to buy customers and make no profit...)

I would posit that if today's Google came to YCombinator today they'd be shown the "no thanks" door.

Re: How to Start Google

#128

Post by takinola »

palata wrote: post #110
brigadier132 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's luck in the same way that poker is luck.

Do you not know poker at all?

Poker is actually a good analogy. It is luck in the short term but skill over the long term. You can't confidently predict that you will win any specific upcoming hand but, given a particular set of opponents, you can reasonably predict whether you will be up or down over a number of hands. I may beat Chris Moneymaker on a hand or two but he's going to take all my money over the long haul.

The insight here is to only play in games that you have the advantage (or are at least evenly matched) and be very, very careful not to put yourself in a position to go bust on any one hand.

Re: How to Start Google

#129

Post by scarface_74 »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #109
scarface_74 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in that case he might as well show lottery winners as good role models. He could tell the truth instead about how most startups fail miserably and the founders see nothing. Not to mention that the only way this works is if you have parents as a financial back stop.

Yes. I think this is genuinely under emphasised. However, when one's risk tolerance is high, there's a lot to be gained from even a failed startup. There's not much to be gained from repeatedly buying and losing at the lottery.

Knowing that worse case you get to go back home to live with mom and dad or ask them for money is not having a “high risk tolerance”

Re: How to Start Google

#130

Post by kelnos »

advael wrote: post #36

I know people mention that this advice smacks of survivorship bias, and I think that's pretty obviously going to be a part of any advice given about economic outcomes whose odds of working out are perhaps a whole order of magnitude better than lottery tickets I think it's more important to note how talks like this use "children" as an excuse to present a very sanitized version of the history being discussed. I think…

The biggest thing missing from this talk -- something that would have been easy to include, even for a younger audience -- is that the majority of startups fail, and even many startups that do well enough end up making their founders less money than if they went to work for another company.

It feels irresponsible to tell kids how they can build the next Google, without also telling them how likely it is they won't succeed at it.

Granted, most people in their early 20s have very little to lose, so a failed startup may not be much of a problem, outside of the stress and emotional effects.

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