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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Start Google

#141

Post by tomhoward »

tomhoward wrote: post #106
daveguy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school. And neither was Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page both hold masters degrees in Computer Science from Stanford.

He's giving advice to school kids on what to do during their remaining school years or early college years.

Also, Larry was 23 when PageRank was first published - that's not much older than "barely out of high school", even if we have to be so literal about everything :)

Re: How to Start Google

#142

Post by screye »

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.

You could have been investing in Nvidia the whole time.

Decision inertia means that employees often don't sell vested stock, and end up being lucky. Similarly, external investors aren't willing to put 30-50% of their networth into one bet and therefore miss out on the kind of luck that can set them up for life.

There is nothing that a lowly engineer at Tesla or Nvidia knows, that can't be found out by an external investor. They are operating in the same information landscape, but different outcomes when they give into decision inertia.

It's not about joining Tesla or Nvidia early. It's about betting on them.

Re: How to Start Google

#143

Post by actionfromafar »

dekhn wrote: post #116
shubhamjain wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

my source is larry himself- I used to work there and volunteered at SciFoo, which he attended and I chatted with him about it. The digital library is basically building a corpus for training AGI. 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 only in hindsight that training with a huge corpus of text is going to give AGI.

(Still not obvious if you ask me.)

Re: How to Start Google

#144

Post by ttul »

Most startups end up failing. The ones that don’t fail succeed only a little and end up as lifestyle businesses. Nothing wrong with that, but it should be acknowledged.

If you want to play the “next Google” game, get ready to be disappointed by Lady Luck.

Re: How to Start Google

#145

Post by omoikane »

suyash wrote: post #65
humbleferret wrote: post #48

This essay isn't a step-by-step guide to building 'Google', rather, a call for young people to consider entrepreneurship as a fulfilling alternative to traditional careers. To maximise their chances of success, Paul suggests: 1. Become a builder: Gain expertise in technology or other fields you're passionate about. (Does not have to just be coding, either!) 2. Start personal projects: Build things you and your friend…

So, can we then say the title is 'click bait'?

It might have been better if Paul Graham used one of the companies founded by YCombinator instead, but that would be less impressive to 14 to 15 year olds since those 4000 or so startups are not quite Google-scale yet.

Re: How to Start Google

#146

Post by candiodari »

jvanderbot wrote: post #41
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”.

I wonder, over the course of a career in startups, what is the probability that you'll either found or be an early employee at one that makes up (financially) for the rest? Not hugely rich, but better than "normal" career. Given it's a repeated game, and you gain knowledge at each round, I'd say the odds are probably pretty good that the highly dynamic / fast learning environment of early companies yields returns ove…

Well you can calculate that somewhat, right. If you're "top-1%" in skill, enough to get hired at Google (even if you did it for the badge), then did you or did you not start a business?

Google: 180,000 employees. Let's say including ex-employees 250,000

These started 1,200 companies, according to the only source I could find. These collectively apparently made their founders ~20 billion. Let's say (heh) that it's a power law, let's say the top 10 got 1 billion each.

So we're talking the odds for an "average" software engineer to get to 1 billion is about 0.1% * 10/180000 = 0.000005556%, or about 1 in 18 million.

Odds for a current or ex-Google engineer: 1 in 18,000.

Re: How to Start Google

#147

Post by rguzman »

alismayilov wrote: post #62

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.

it really depends on what you mean by rich: the surest path to end up with $2-5M over ~10 years is job at ~FAANG, do it well to get promoted, and manage your savings/investments well. that path is very unlikely to get you to $10-100M in the same 10 years, and starting a startup seems to be one of the best ways to do that.

Re: How to Start Google

#148

Post by dekhn »

actionfromafar wrote: post #143
dekhn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my source is larry himself- I used to work there and volunteered at SciFoo, which he attended and I chatted with him about it. The digital library is basically building a corpus for training AGI. 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 only in hindsight that training with a huge corpus of text is going to give AGI. (Still not obvious if you ask me.)

I'm the same age as Larry and started working in machine learning in the early 90s, and to me, it seemed pretty obvious at the time that AGI would ultimately need a large corpus of text (and video) to be useful. What's kind of funny is the models I worked with at the time- hidden markov models of (biological) text anticipated the validity of this approach, although by design, they don't work with long contexts.

Re: How to Start Google

#149

Post by ttul »

takinola wrote: post #135
alismayilov wrote: post #62

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.

My guess is that it is much easier to get rich from working at a tech company and rising through the ranks. Being a FANG middle manager for a couple of years and managing your money well should put you in a very comfortable position. However, if you want to be private island rich, you need to do your own startup.

Certainly in my own circle, people who were fortunate enough to work at FAANG during the right window of time became comfortably rich. Many of my own investors just worked as engineers at Microsoft for the right decade and are worth tens of millions. They worked really hard and sacrificed a lot, but they got paid every step of the way.

Predicting which big tech company will do well enough in future to give you that big stock reward over time is a big gamble, but certainly a smaller gamble than doing a startup.

I know plenty of people who have joined half a dozen startups, none of which yielded any gain. And many entrepreneurs who worked super hard many times and have nothing to show for it but scar tissue.

Whatever you do, the best advice is to ensure you are enjoying the journey. Don’t waste your life just to be rich. That path nearly always yields a Pyrrhic victory.

Re: How to Start Google

#150

Post by vundercind »

naniwaduni wrote: post #112
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…

How rich do you insist on being? The bar to "can choose never to work again" is surprisingly low , it just requires a high savings rate which is quite achievable in this line of work.

“Never work again” money is crazy-high for younger folks (like, not already close to qualifying for Medicare) in the US, on account of the costs and financial risks of our healthcare system.

Most of the FIRE bloggers who bother to account for this—like MMM—have a (perhaps implicit) fallback plan of returning to work somewhere with decent health insurance if they or a family member becomes very sick, but that’s quite a gamble.

(Never mind that a bunch of those sorts have jobs and couldn’t remain comfortably “retired” without them—god I really hate that part of the blogosphere, “look it’s so easy you dumb idiot” but then you start reading between the lines and realize how much of it’s just a bit)

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