151–160 of 681 posts
The blindness to privilege that’s tied up in the part about why you ‘need’ to go to a good (by which he means highly selective) school… > if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are... > The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as…
1. 15-25 year olds who do programming passion projects are often attracted to video games. Video game companies are not "startups" in the sense pg means here. You will not get rich by indulging a passion for the entertainment industry.
2. You do in fact need capital to do a startup, and there is a lot more to getting that than just having cofounders and something you're interested in.
3. "What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want." This isn't really true, is it. I thought there is another pg/ycombinator essay somewhere that warns people away from specific types of startup pitches, and one of them is something like "an app that tells you about events in your local community". Supposedly this is one of those things that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to work on, but which never turns into a successful startup.
There are actually a lot of things that your friends might want which are not startup material anywhere except Sand Hill Road, mostly because there are lots of things people want but won't pay for. A sad example of this is developer tools. If you take pg's advice literally and learn programming, hang out with other people who do that and then do projects with them, soon you will see lots of sticky doors that look like missing bits of infrastructure. Unfortunately startups that do dev tooling aren't a good way to get rich. Developers generally don't or can't buy things, so you have to sell to their CTOs and thus all the money accumulates in companies like Amazon or Microsoft. Example of what happens if you try, even with great PMF: Docker.
Most kids with ideas in the world don't have the contacts or work visas to raise money from US VC firms. They need a project that people will pay money for immediately. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the size of the US VC ecosystem is that if someone comes up with a good idea that takes off and they try to grow like a normal company, and they aren't taking VC money, then they will be immediately outcompeted by someone who does, simply because whoever does have that access will engage in market dumping until there's nobody else left except other VC funded startups. One of the US funded companies will end up taking the entire market even if they are burning money with no hope of ever balancing the books, but that's OK because one of the VC's other investments can always be persuaded to give a clean exit.
Example: DailyMotion (European) vs YouTube (US). At the time YouTube was bought they didn't have a hope in hell of ever being a standalone business and didn't even care to try, but they were down the road from Google and were scaring Larry/Sergey/Eric with their success. Buying a company if you can just jump in your car to go visit them is easy, if you need to constantly do trans-Atlantic flights, not so easy. It doesn't make sense to bet on the "grow like crazy and wait for an exit" strategy elsewhere. WhatsApp is another example of an MTV based company that had no strategy beyond grow-and-exit. I actually made a WhatsApp-like app a few years before the smartphone revolution hit, and my friends thought it was awesome, but I had no illusions that it could ever be a business. And indeed none of these messenger apps ever have been. In the world of "startups" (vs small businesses), you don't necessarily need to care.
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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.
It's luck in the same way that poker is luck.
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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.
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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”
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> 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.
The blindness to privilege that’s tied up in the part about why you ‘need’ to go to a good (by which he means highly selective) school… > if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are... > The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as…
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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 obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time.
It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn well near as engineered with data as it could be. They also were _insanely_ well connected through their and their parents academic career. Both Sergey and Larry had obtained their PhD prior to starting the company. I can also remember reading that they obtained significant amounts of funding through connections Larry's dad had into the industry.
You can ignore the rest of my comment, what follows is just my take.
Their success story is imo one of the most blatant examples on how privilege really does give you a boost in life. I am not arguing that anyone could have done it, but I do wonder how the world would look like if we were all kids of academics with a successful career, with a relatively safe, secure and stable childhood home and a family background that really incentivizes learning and academic success over succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income at some point.
The blindness to privilege that’s tied up in the part about why you ‘need’ to go to a good (by which he means highly selective) school… > if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are... > The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as…
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…
I wonder if we really shouldn't make a bit more out of the fact that there are different types of startups: those that pick off low-hanging fruit really well, those that combine novel technology with novel problems (for instance, the recent YC LLM meeting note-taking / transcription service), those that are scientific-discovery based (see, for example the NSF Small Business Innovation Research program), etc. I am not experienced enough to create an ontology of startup ideas, but I think it'd be an interesting exercise.