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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Start Google

#171

Post by awesomeMilou »

mike_hearn wrote: post #152

There's a lot to like about this speech, but if a 15 year old heard it and then asked me for more detail I'd have to point out a few things that were glossed over: 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 ne…

Thank you. This is a much more informed post than the article.

There is imo so much wrong with PG's post, but as an European the whole proximity to tech thing feels very real. I remember seeing a talk by Craig Frederhigi where he also made fun of the fact that at least 50% of his success came from just being present in Silicon Valley / Cupertino at the right time.

Re: How to Start Google

#172

Post by seanhunter »

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 best advice to give children is that they should be born to rich, influential and well-connected parents. That will give them a huge advantage in all walks of life including if they want to start a startup. Larry and Sergei had the benefit of rich, influential and well-connected parents, as did Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Paul Graham himself.

Re: How to Start Google

#173

Post by bronco21016 »

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…

> 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.

I recently read something that played out a thought experiment about "imagine the world could only hold 10,000 people". It may have been a comment somewhere on HN honestly. The idea was that if the world could only hold 10,000 people, there never would have been enough division of basic duties for any one individual to dive so deep that they could invent semi-conductors (insert any modern tech really). I mean we likely wouldn't even have mastered locomotion by now if that was the case.

Lets assume we're "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." Most of us will still just be working on the basic societal problems of producing food and taking out the trash.

Re: How to Start Google

#174

Post by rrdharan »

brigadier132 wrote: post #121
palata wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

In this analogy, the VCs are playing poker. The hands (or the cards dealt to the VC player in that hand) are individual startups.

Yes you can win if you are a VC. Less clear what to do if you’re just a card.

Re: How to Start Google

#175

Post by Kwpolska »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #164

> "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.

Exactly: instead of a boss, you get venture capitalists, plus you probably don’t have that pesky work-life balance either.

Re: How to Start Google

#176

Post by ngd »

I'm generally interested if people here think that to a 14-15 year old, do those companies sound tremendously cool and does the premise of their value stir exciting thoughts and motivations? My slightly younger kids don't really what Google, Apple or Facebook/Meta means. If I explained this essay to them, I'd at least say "the iPad", "YouTube", "the Oculus" to make it more relatable.

To my mind, to immediately relate to kids in the UK, I would need to say TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Oculus, iPhone, iPad, and such, and not the company name.

Re: How to Start Google

#177

Post by pclmulqdq »

antisthenes wrote: post #168

This reads like it was written by an LLM trained on self-help books. Is this the guy that a lot of HNers look up to?

Yes, sadly. If you read between the lines and take his advice more as "understanding the psychology of VCs" rather than as actual advice, his essays are very useful. He has long passed the phases of a manager's life where he has to be right - he is surrounded by yes men who tell him that he is right no matter what.

Matt Levine, as usual, has a great take on the phases of life of a partner/founder of a hedge fund (which a VC fund basically is), and PG is deep in phase 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-07/bridge...

I will say that unlike GPT-4 he is an objectively good writer (ie has very good style) most of the time, so the essays tend to be somewhat entertaining to read.

Re: How to Start Google

#178

Post by quatrefoil »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #164

> "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.

Right, and from all my friends who did take VC money: it's an incredibly demanding period of your life, a large proportion of which isn't about delivering on your vision. You're gonna learn a lot about office space leases, accounting, fundraising, customer pitches, etc. You're gonna have impatient VCs on your board, with the power to fire you, breathing down your neck. You won't be relaxing much and won't be spending that much time with family and non-work friends.

It's a valuable experience with a lot of potential upside in the long haul - but let's not pretend that it's less taxing than a cozy 9-to-5 tech job where your boss might ask you to update your OKRs once in a while.

Re: How to Start Google

#179

Post by light_triad »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #127
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…

Hopefully 2 Stanford CS PhD students hacking on their project would be funded by YC today :)

You bring up a good point about starting from the tech rather than the problem. Usually the advice from VCs is to start from the problem and iterate on the tech until you solve it. What was very fortunate for Google is that the tech translated into a great business problem. Open up any CS textbook and 'Search' is always a major section. It was also a great business because the problem is important, frequent, and had not been properly solved by the big players in the mid 90s.

"And then we realized that we had a querying tool..." (Page)

Re: How to Start Google

#180

Post by iamleppert »

kelnos wrote: post #120
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Conversely, repeated failures can give you the experience needed to increase the odds that your next attempt could be successful.

Ask anyone who has ever failed at a startup before, how easy it is to get funding again. VC's would rather take a chance on someone they don't know vs. rip open old emotional bags with a failed founder.
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