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After Credentials

paulgraham.com

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Re: After Credentials

#21

Post by retyred »

jbert wrote: post #9

If large organisations are less efficient: - why do they survive? - if they survive despite all, why do we permit them? If the market was regulated to set a cap on the size of a single company's workforce (or some other metric, perhaps market capitalisation), we'd also avoid the 'too big to fail' problem we have at the moment. Not to mention quasi-monopolistic practices like large chains killing off small local compe…

this entire "lots of small firms are the future" meme is probably just wrong. paul graham knows a lot about websites but very little about the rest of the economy. show me the ten person company that can produce the equipment to generate and transmit electricity. or food production. where are all the ma and pa grocery stores? and banking...we have fewer banks now than ever and the number is still dropping. and PCs...making a PC is easy....so what happened to the 10,000 strip-mall PC makers?

show me real examples outside of the web industry that this theory is even remotely correct

Re: After Credentials

#22

Post by justindz »

meterplech wrote: post #7

I think that in the United States a lot of the pressure on students to succeed on entrance exams are in terms of getting into more prestigious schools has more to do with desired prestige and college experience than future success. Few parents would unequivocally claim that going to Harvard over Big State University = more success for their kids. For parents and their kids I think its more of matter of wanting the pr…

I think it's effectively like buying an advertising and PR firm to work for you in the job market. Word of mouth and demonstrable talent substitute for the expense to the degree to which you stay in the (sadly) smaller circles who aren't significantly influenced by PR and advertising.

Re: After Credentials

#23

Post by gaius »

pg wrote: post #10
aristus wrote: post #4

I think Paul is treading ideas with some interesting implications for him, personally. He is the head of an organization that funds companies on the basis of a written & oral exam, whose principal selling point is the transmission of "credentials" upon the kids they pick. Part of it is the kids' merit, but part of it is YC's past success. People go to YC for many of the same reasons people went to Stanford -- past se…

Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…

College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did.

I'm not sure that's true - in the UK at least, universities often issue press releases when one of their alumni does something notable (like becoming the Prime Minster of Thailand for example, which Oxford is crowing about at the moment).

Re: After Credentials

#24

Post by pg »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #20
pg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…

The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those a startup quickly dies. It would be interesting to see numbers on that. Informally, I noticed that back when reddit was good, anyone who was asked had either heard about it because it was YC-funded, or heard about it from someone who heard about it that way. I'm not certain, but I would probably bet that the submitters of, say "Man senten…

Reddit's a unique case because their initial user base (like News.YC's) consisted of other YC founders. And since they couldn't afford any form of promotion that cost money, news of the site spread mainly from those users.

Re: After Credentials

#25

Post by rokhayakebe »

the transmission of power between generations is also happening within the startup environment. How? Successful entrepreneurs are funding their friends or friends' friends. Furthermore, VCs are known to fund people within their close network. Power Bloggers are known to cover their friends' startups or their friends friends'.

Luckily technology is fairly cheap, learning how to do stuff is free and only requires commitment and time so we can still turn our ideas into products and put it in front of millions of people without bloggers, angels, vcs.....

Re: After Credentials

#26

Post by cstejerean »

pg wrote: post #18
cperciva wrote: post #8

PG claims that a shift towards smaller companies results in people being judged on their performance rather than based on factors which do rather poor jobs of predicting said performance; my experience with tarsnap indicates otherwise. I have a small number of customers -- somewhere between 10% and 20% -- who are using tarsnap based on a recommendation from another tarsnap user; but the vast majority of tarsnap users…

Initially the users of a new product will have random motivations. They can't all come from recommendations when you've only just launched. But a year from now the number of users you have will depend mainly on how good tarsnap is.

Certainly, once you get some momentum your startup will survive or die based on how good it is. But if I hear cperciva correctly, had it not been for his credentials lots of users might not have even tried tarsnap to begin with, and I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now, even though the product would be the same.

Re: After Credentials

#27

Post by pg »

cstejerean wrote: post #26
pg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially the users of a new product will have random motivations. They can't all come from recommendations when you've only just launched. But a year from now the number of users you have will depend mainly on how good tarsnap is.

Certainly, once you get some momentum your startup will survive or die based on how good it is. But if I hear cperciva correctly, had it not been for his credentials lots of users might not have even tried tarsnap to begin with, and I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now, even though the product would be the same.

I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now

That's the mistake. The number of users you get long term depends more on the "interest rate" than the size of the initial seed. E.g. Google.

Re: After Credentials

#28

Post by rsheridan6 »

smanek wrote: post #13

I honestly don't think that 'cram schools' are particularly effective. I taught for the Princeton Review for a while ($20+/hr when I was 18 sounded pretty good). In my experience, the average student would only gain about an extra 50 points the SAT (relative to what they would have gained studying on their own). If memory serves, a standard deviation (on the old 1600 point test) was usually in the neighborhood of a 1…

Applications to top schools are extremely competitive; I could easily see 50 SAT points making or breaking an application. I was under the impression that these days your application has to be more or less perfect to even have a chance to get into an Ivy League school, unless you're a legacy or a URM.

Re: After Credentials

#29

Post by rsheridan6 »

"History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly."

Can we assume that pg is in favor of restoring the estate tax?

Re: After Credentials

#30

Post by whatusername »

gaius wrote: post #23
pg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…

College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did. I'm not sure that's true - in the UK at least, universities often issue press releases when one of their alumni does something notable (like becoming the Prime Minster of Thailand for example, which Oxford is crowing about at the moment).

And most universities make a big deal about any Nobel prizes.

And I've seen in Australia a follow-up 6-12 months later to see if you got a job / further study. But I've never seen a substantial follow-up of the average population of a uni.

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