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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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181–190 of 681 posts

Re: How to Start Google

#181

Post by rvnx »

Kwpolska wrote: post #175
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.

Not a problem. You don't need work-life balance when you are living in a garage in San Francisco eating ramen on debt that you got from vulture capital.

Re: How to Start Google

#182

Post by keiferski »

“Learn to code and surround yourself with smart people” is good advice, but it’s kind of funny that Google was used as the example of peak success for a group of 15 year olds. I’m fairly willing to bet that most of them think of Google as boring and old, and not exciting or innovative. How to start TikTok or Minecraft would have probably been a more inspiring example.

Re: How to Start Google

#183

Post by dpflan »

I am curious how this ethos of the 3 things you need and playfulness/not-intended-to-be-a-startup startups project is in enacted per batch. Like YC's now numerous sales operations/software companies in the past batches: 19-22 years are making email-based-crms for their friends? (I guess a batch and other batches are "friends" so goalposts shift and magically appear). The growth in sales saas companies out of YC seems less of fun project and more of this is a business opportunity for the enterprise. Probably for other spaces as well. Is there dissonance between the tenets of this essay and actually YC companies of late? Does someone have better analysis, would be much appreciated?

""" What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want. """

Re: How to Start Google

#184

Post by adrianN »

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…

A SF engineer pulling something like 300k can definitely retire before the age of 60.

Re: How to Start Google

#185

Post by romeros »

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.

Yes, but the VCs trust you to a large extent and they can't delve into the nitty-gritty of daily operations. If they do they will develop a bad reputation.

Your boss's job is to oversee the minutiae of your day-to-day activities. Like in most workplaces, you can't choose to just chill for a few days, work only at night, or choose to avoid meetings for a few days, etc.

You will have a level autonomy and the ability to change directions/features, etc. that you cannot have working for others.

Re: How to Start Google

#186

Post by jvanderbot »

candiodari wrote: post #146
jvanderbot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

This calculates the odds an ex-googler makes a billion dollars. That's not really what I asked, but is a good Fermi question nonetheless!

Re: How to Start Google

#187

Post by cmrdporcupine »

light_triad wrote: post #179
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maj…

But that's the thing. "Search" was not a great business problem. It still isn't. I used Google for years before their IPO and people were always like "how is this thing going to make money" and believe it or not there was a lot of skepticism even at IPO time that they even had a possible reasonable business model. (Same for Facebook at their IPO, too.)

Search is not a good business. Ad sales over top of search turned out to be. AdWords is the thing that catapulted Google towards (insane) profitability. And for the first few years, Google didn't really sell ads, or market themselves as even aiming to sell ads. But AdWords could only be successful because they had already captured the market on search, and so had a captive audience to show ads to (and relevance information based on their searches).

AdWords rolled out in 2000. Many of us had been using Google as a search engine since before the company had even been founded (1998).

Re: How to Start Google

#188

Post by gumby »

> If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies.

Actaally if you look at those lists, the largest number made it by choosing their parents correctly.

Re: How to Start Google

#189

Post by dmurray »

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…

> But getting in to Stanford or MIT doesn’t magically make you into a member of that privileged class.

The essay (intentionally, no doubt) doesn't pick a side in this fight.

It's very clear on why you should go to the best university: not because it will make you the best founder, but to meet the best co-founders.

> And 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. It's also where the best employees are. When Larry and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a real advantage for them.

It doesn't matter whether elite universities are meritocratic or terribly unfair: either way, they've been the source of very many successful companies over the last 30 years, and Paul Graham is betting on that continuing to be the case. (Unlike Peter Thiel, for example, who is telling kids to drop out).

Re: How to Start Google

#190

Post by dpflan »

dpflan wrote: post #183

I am curious how this ethos of the 3 things you need and playfulness/not-intended-to-be-a-startup startups project is in enacted per batch. Like YC's now numerous sales operations/software companies in the past batches: 19-22 years are making email-based-crms for their friends? (I guess a batch and other batches are "friends" so goalposts shift and magically appear). The growth in sales saas companies out of YC seems…

Here is a launch front-page today: Okapi (YC W24) -- A new, flexible CRM with good UX

Nothing about friends, nothing about fun projects. Mainly just looking at Salesforce, knowing its the DB for business-side of the house, and that the UI/X of SFDC is not good, so here is a better UX (much appreciated).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39755927

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