What I’ve learned from users

I’ve read a few of pg’s articles over the years. I believe it was one about nerdy kids and their relationships and worldviews that first brought me to this site. At some point, I read the article “Hackers and Painters” and I felt like pg’s essays didn’t resonate with me anymore. I even read a response called “Dabblers and Blowhards” that I resonated strongly with. I thought to myself, pg is distanced from reality, and that perhaps I was or had been as well.

Over the past year or so I’ve been trying to make sure that my opinions are mindfully and consciously held. I’ve worked on debugging them: I test and evaluate my beliefs when the opportunity arises. I try to make sure I still feel what I think I feel and that I understand what is going on in my head and my heart, and that they act congruently.

For instance, I know now that I dislike many, many things that Amazon has done and how it treats its workers. But I think that the people who worked on my Kindle Oasis have the utmost respect for their users. It makes me somewhat comfortable with the ambivalence that for me goes along with using it. For I surely love my Kindle and I surely am happy to purchase books on the Kindle store while I simultaneously am disgusted by the treatment of factory workers, delivery drivers, software developers, and other real human beings who work for Amazon. I could say the same about my iPhone. Sometimes I think hard about the slave labor that went into the manufacturing of the device that I am typing this message into. Should I stop using it? Maybe so. Maybe not. At the moment, I consciously choose to continue using it. It is quite possible that history will judge me quite harshly for this. But I believe that there is empathy and soul (and blood and inhumanity) in these things.

This morning I had a feeling of revulsion when I saw that pg had written another article and that it was on the front page of one of my favorite websites. I readily see the hypocrisy in this. But as I mentioned at the outset, I wanted to determine if I felt the way I most recently felt about reading his essays. So I read it with as close to an open mind as I could.

I believe that on this subject, pg knows more than I likely ever will. His users are early stage startups and he has clearly identified wide classes of issues and the ability to suss them out in the course of a brief conversation. He is able to envision founder habits changing, and recidivism of said changes. He is able to approach each situation with the mindfulness and presence that it deserves by understanding that as much as these issues fall into buckets, the circumstances surrounding them are unique, and the people involved are individuals. He is able to relate these and understand them in the context of one of the most near and dear things to my heart: cutting edge software development. He is able to see when a founder is incorrectly assessing their own situation, and he is able to guide them to a course correction. He is able to ask the founders key questions that they themselves can evaluate to understand their predicament. He is able to understand their humanity.

And he has built a whole team of partners with this ability.

Going against the grain of my prejudices and my expectations, I thought this was a fine article. I have considerably more respect for YC and pg than I did before I read it. I am more comfortable browsing this site as a result.

My browser never exceeds 40-50% of my total screen width in my tiling window manager. Keeps my eyes from shooting all over the place. For websites that are properly optimized, you don't really lose out on anything. And for the websites that aren't, a quick keybind to go fullscreen for a bit is nice.

I could be wrong but I got the feeling that was by design. They are meant as supplements and not to distract or detract from the core message.

Of course YC has some secrets in their recipe.

> how good he is at identifying startup problems because they are all the same

I have never been an investor, but I have been a consultant who focused on short-term, strategically important projects for startups. So I got to see a lot of companies, both successful and unsuccessful.

After a while, patterns really do become obvious. When you've seen some winners, and some doomed companies, and some that will just muddle along forever, you start to notice things.

One thing is that when your customer base is truly energized, they'll practically crawl over your desk to write checks. With other companies, you'll need a sales team to push things uphill. But those companies can still win, if the sales department is humming. Other companies have poured their heart into their product, but they've never figured out how to sell it, or even how to talk to customers. (I can fix product problems, but I can't fix teams that don't talk to their customers.)

Sometimes all it takes is a 5 minute phone call with a founder, and you can tell which is which. I've turned down pretty generously funded projects because it was clear that no amount of software would help a particular company connect with its market.

Now, a successful investor has seen far more companies than I ever saw. I imagine the best investors can filter quickly and surprisingly well.