Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 681 posts

Re: How to Start Google

#161

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jameshart wrote: post #139

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…

Yep

> ‘Mere determination and resourcefulness’

... is actually really a test of class position. Your motivation to pursue and pass those artificial goalposts is in most cases going to be directly co-related to the values and expectations that the people who surround you have. Mommy and daddy and their friends at the country club expect it.

CS education is good all over the place, not just Stanford or MIT. And CS education pulled out of books and through self-reading is also great. But knowing that said person went to Stanford is a signifier to the VCs that said person is acculturated into the class and culture of capitalist administration.

More mind boggling is seeing them admitting to the "cargo cultism" (which I'd just call "class bias") instead of the usual ideological cover of entrepreneurialism and the "American dream."

Re: How to Start Google

#162

Post by berkes »

jameshart wrote: post #139

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…

In "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America" Barbara Ehrenreich poses that universities are (in my words) merely a fictional moat, "invented" by the new class that became rich through education and work, rather then before through ownership and capital.

"Education" nor "work" can be passed through generations. If I am a very gifted lawyer, this is not something I can pass on to my daughters or suns (but a castle or land can be). Yet you can employ your network and power to get your daughter or suns into "highly selective" universities. Where, once they are in, being smart (e.g being a gifted lawyer) matters less than "being in".

So, indeed, "cargo cultism" and privilege.

And, I would add, a problem and cause of why the startup world is so shortsighted, monoculture (non-diverse) and dogpiling on similar problems, yet ignoring others entirely. (disclaimer: I too, however, am the typical priviliged bearded white male that "does computers" since late eighties though)

Re: How to Start Google

#163

Post by daveguy »

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.

Yes. I was reinforcing your point. Not even the example he uses is directly applicable to the audience. Just out of highschool and 6 years in one of the most rigorous CS programs are very different.

Re: How to Start Google

#164

Post by gordon_freeman »

> "But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including a boss telling you what to do."

Isn't this a bit misleading and can only be true for companies that don't take VC money or never go public (ex: Basecamp/37 Signals)? For VC funded or public companies, ultimately you'd have to be responsible to answer to your shareholders.

Re: How to Start Google

#165

Post by cmrdporcupine »

tomhoward wrote: post #69
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.

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…

Even very early these days won't get you much. Just a bit of a lump sum you could apply to your 401k/RRSP or whatever and inch you ahead by 5-10 years on retirement. If you got it early enough in your life (20s, 30s) that it can gain interest. VCs and founders are writing stock option agreements these days with very low ownership stakes for even very early employees.

Back in the early y2ks, and late 90s, yes, you could get rich and be up and out if you were lucky and played your cards right. Those days are done.

Re: How to Start Google

#166

Post by advael »

kelnos wrote: post #130
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 su…

I mean, like most advice from my generation and prior ones, the notion that people in their 20s can't fuck up too badly because they have little to lose applies considerably less well to all but the fairly affluent people in their 20s today. For many, taking risks means being gated out of the financial system by bad credit, being behind in an unforgiving job market, and possibly even destitution if they don't have a safety net of some kind

To be clear, this was always true to some degree, but inequality is higher, industries have more power and thus workers have less, and safety nets that don't come from your parents being well-off are weaker (and fewer people's parents are well-off) than when I was a kid, and this has actually been true for a few subsequent generations of kids

Re: How to Start Google

#167

Post by seanhunter »

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”.

Agree but he doesn't do this because he makes money because people try this. Like other vcs he doesn't really care if the vast majority fail as long as he makes bank on a few who dont' fail.

That's a prism it's really worth applying to all advice given by VCs: What's the outcome for me if I fail vs what's the outcome for them if I fail?

Re: How to Start Google

#170

Post by dekhn »

awesomeMilou wrote: post #158
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.

His dad wasn't "just" a computer scientist, he was a professor for computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. Sergey Brin's father was equally a professor in mathematics at the University of Maryland. > 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…

I don't think larry or sergey got their phd - larry got a masters and I think sergey left before he got any degree.

Don't forget that Larry's older brother Carl went through the whole VC process with egroups and gained extreme experience with how to maximize his position in negotiation.

But yes, I agree completely that kids of academics raised in an environment that incentivzes learning is a reliable way to transform the future.

Post reply on HN