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

211–220 of 681 posts

Re: How to Start Google

#211

Post by light_triad »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #187
light_triad wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally agree. What I mean is many research topics can be very interesting from a technical perspective but don't translate into solving problems that are frequent and important enough to build a business around. In the case of Search many business gurus didn't understand at the time that you can make a fortune with a free product. What matters is who has the traffic and who they're selling it to = eyeball meets ad. Page and Brin initially "expected that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" (foreshadowing). Also they tried to sell to Yahoo for $1M so it took time to see the full potential, as you describe.

Re: How to Start Google

#212

Post by gist »

gumby wrote: post #188

> 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.

> 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.

And actually it's a stupid point to begin with; making a point by choosing the absolute top percentage as if there is nothing other than 'really' rich (forget whether that is even a good thing I'd argue it's not a plus to have that much money and notoriety). There is of course 'lots of money' or 'comfortable'.

Irony also that Paul is probably not on that list but even if he was it's not because he 'built a google' but rather he decided to be an investor and incubator spreading bets over many potential winners.

Also ironic that Paul had decided rather than making more money he'd rather spend time with his family.

Re: How to Start Google

#213

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

rguzman wrote: post #147
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.

it really depends on what you mean by rich: the surest path to end up with $2-5M over ~10 years is job at ~FAANG, do it well to get promoted, and manage your savings/investments well. that path is very unlikely to get you to $10-100M in the same 10 years, and starting a startup seems to be one of the best ways to do that.

You forget the higher up you go in these companies, the politics get nasty. Not many people have the appetite for that.

Re: How to Start Google

#214

Post by nostrademons »

shubhamjain wrote: post #114
dekhn wrote: post #37

Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew google was going to be huge from the beginning. His brother Carl was already a multimillionare in tech and taught him everything required to set up a future successful company. Larry made it clear to me that he always planned Google to be a large cash-generating cow to invest in long-term AGI and there were only a few times at the beginning when he truly fe…

Do you have any sources for this? If he knew it was going to be this huge, why were they looking for an acquisition for north of a million dollars? On AGI: are you referencing this clip? [1] To me, it seems like an ordinary vision when you stretch your imagination. He didn't have any realistic idea how Google might achieve AGI, just something that could happen in the future. And this was in 2000. Google, I imagine, w…

Also worked at Google in the 00s, and have spoken personally with several people who worked on Google when it was still a Stanford grad project.

To hear Larry tell it, his original idea for Google was to download the whole web and throw away everything but the links, and he was inspired by academic notions of citation indexes. It wasn’t specifically (or really at all, until Google books came out) about books - that sounds like a cover story to get grad student funding for his actual idea, because you can’t really go to a university and say “I want to download the whole web and throw away everything but the links” without telling them why or connecting it to some plausibly useful idea.

The acquisition offer is often cited, but I don’t think Larry and Sergey were ever really serious about taking it. They didn’t, after all. But if you’re living on a grad student stipend (which was like $20k in the 90s), a million bucks is a lot of money.

And they absolutely knew it would be big, they just didn’t know how it would be big. It was quite popular within the Stanford lab as well…it’s interesting, looking through the early CVS commits for Google, how much work was done by people who ended up not actually becoming employees of Google or having a major part in its story. I think the real genius of Google was treating the web as an object that could be studied and manipulated, and not as some amorphous thing you were part of. That was exciting even if people didn’t know how it would be.

Re: How to Start Google

#215

Post by mattlondon »

I dislike this sort of advice for teenagers. You may as well tell them to be rock stars or professional sports people.

Tell the kids to study, don't sell them an unobtainable dream

Re: How to Start Google

#216

Post by IncreasePosts »

IllIlIIllI wrote: post #59
IncreasePosts wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe merely having a billion dollars isn't what pg was thinking of when talking about "the richest people". If you look at the top 100, like he quotes in his article, only 27 inherited their fortune.

Maybe only 27 inherited large fortunes, but many more started at a much more privileged position than anyone in the rooms Paul is talking to. Maybe they're not from billionaire families, but almost all of them come from families the top 1-3% in terms of wealth.

Who was he talking to? I have no idea what kids pg was talking to, but if it was to peers of his own kids, chances are they are already firmly in the 1%. In any case, to go from top 1-3% to the top 0.0000001% is still incredibly rare and noteworthy. Just because it is easier to do that than go from the top 50th% to the top 0.0000001% doesn't mean it is actually easy.

Re: How to Start Google

#217

Post by nezaj »

kelnos wrote: post #118
duggan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that luck is a factor, but what can you do with that information other than console yourself when it doesn't work out?

You can decide not to do it in the first place. A 15-year-old hearing this talk from Graham as-is might take from it, "wow, if I learn programming, work on things that interest me, do well in school, and go to a good university, I'm guaranteed to build a Google-scale successful startup!" Telling that kid that there's also a component of luck involved, and that the vast majority of startups fail, would temper that ent…

I think it's a jump to assume the kid will believe there is a _guarantee_

If the kid is motivated from this essay to learn programming, work on things that interest them, do well in school, and go to a good university -- I think they're well setup for success in their life.

Re: How to Start Google

#218

Post by zen928 »

elwell wrote: post #14

> But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of mere determination and resourcefulness. So Leetcode is actually a good way to hire?

If you consider that >10 years ago there were blog posts talking about how hard the "FizzBuzz" question was to implement when asked in-person as a way to demonstrate how you approach solving problems, there's definitely a reasonable assertion that these types of interviewing methods help weed out applicants unable to write basic compound statements. Might not be the best way as a single pass/fail criterion though.

Re: How to Start Google

#219

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Totally insane.

99% or more of the people who enable Google to do what Google does are employees of Google. Same with every other company. The odds of being the founder of a successful company are probably worse than being a professional sportsball player (if only because they turn over more frequently).

Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder rather than an employee?

Does anything good come from encouraging people to ignore the actual situation that the overwhelming majority of the population finds itself in, and instead focusing on some essentially impossible pipe dream?

Obviously, every successful company does have founders. But so does every unsuccessful company. And what actually powers every successful company are its employees, not its founders.

The absolute worst of SV thinking, personified.

Re: How to Start Google

#220

Post by smokel »

mattlondon wrote: post #215

I dislike this sort of advice for teenagers. You may as well tell them to be rock stars or professional sports people. Tell the kids to study, don't sell them an unobtainable dream

The amount of survivorship bias ignored in the article is appalling. Why?
Post reply on HN