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

221–230 of 681 posts

Re: How to Start Google

#221

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: How to Start Google

#222

Post by sarimkx »

petesergeant wrote: post #193
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.

Certainly a few, but a quick scan of lists makes it look more like 25% inherited in the top 20 or so

Inherited wealth did see an increase in 2023 in the UBS Wealth Report.

https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-2023...

https://fortune.com/europe/2023/11/30/billionaire-heirs-over...

Re: How to Start Google

#223

Post by bootsmann »

quatrefoil wrote: post #178
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…

Usually by the time VCs have the power to fire you, you have so many different investors that they cannot really do it without some massively difficult political manouvering, at least in software.

Re: How to Start Google

#224

Post by verelo »

iamleppert wrote: post #180
kelnos wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone thats on startup #7 and is ~37 years old I can attest to this: I have had 5 flat out failures, 1 break even experience and 1 life changing experience (I don't own a private jet unfortunately). I'm fucking tired. I really hope theres something huge in the future, but the reality is I struggle to believe I have enough left in me to finish this one, let alone more.

Also, I'm just more interested in family and enjoying the mobility of the youth I have left, much more than chasing down unlimited resources.

Re: How to Start Google

#225

Post by neilv »

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…

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

Around the dawn of YC, IIRC, when PG did the "summer founders" or something like that, a group of 4 of us Lisp hackers applied as a team. No response.

We were mostly in grad student-like lifestyle modes, and not tied down, were energetic, and already had various applicable experience.

But I think PG was mostly looking for barely-20 year-olds to drop out of college, rent an apartment in Harvard Square together, and sit around hacking in towels.

Since that's what he wrote in one article. Which I guess trumped the article in which he said Lisp hackers are great for startups.

Now his latest article says he's going after 14 and 15 year-olds. :)

Re: How to Start Google

#226

Post by LarsDu88 »

keiferski wrote: post #182

“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.

Folks underestimate how incredibly skilled Notch was and is. Unfortunately ludum dare has taken down its historical compo pages, but I remember that he had several games built from scratch in 24 hours which were mind boggling impressive.

One had a full 3d rendering engine implemented in Dartlang written in 48 hours. Another was a minecraft top down rpg clone.

Dude is the Bobby Fischer of tech

Re: How to Start Google

#227

Post by jameshart »

dmurray wrote: post #189
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 tha…

Yes, I know PG isn’t picking a side in that ‘fight’. He’s pretending it doesn’t exist. He’s suggesting that anyone with the resourcefulness of a founder, who has access to that college network, could have an equal opportunity to find the magic combination of cofounders and ideas to make a Google.

My point is that his empirical evidence and continued willingness to bet on startups that emerge from that path does not justify his claim that that path is the open for everyone to take.

If you are among the stratum from whom startup founders and cofounders will most likely be drawn, then sure, 100%, these schools are a networking opportunity which will help you on that path. Great place to meet cofounders.

If you aren’t, going to these schools will not make you magically able to take the financial risks needed to become a founder; they might make you among the smartest people some founders know, and get you a gig working for one.

Re: How to Start Google

#228

Post by importantbrian »

namdnay wrote: post #203
petesergeant wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly a few, but a quick scan of lists makes it look more like 25% inherited in the top 20 or so

I think it depends where you set the limit between “self made” and “inherited”. I don’t think it’s black or white Would Gates have made it if Mum wasn’t on the board of IBM? Would Bezos have made it without 200k from mum&dad ?

The real problem with those lists is that they only include people whose wealth is known and can be reasonably valued based on public sources. It's often not easy to trace the net worth of old-money families. It also means you won't find people from countries with very low transparency or dictators on the list. For example, you won't find Putin or any of the Saudi royals on the Forbes list even though they are among the wealthiest people in the world. Perhaps even competing for #1 depending on what estimate of their wealth you find to be the most reliable.

It's impossible to draw any firm conclusions from those lists because they aren't representative samples of wealthy people. They're a sample of wealthy people with public assets, and of course that's going to skew heavily towards people who founded large publically traded companies who live in countries with high degrees of financial transparency.

Re: How to Start Google

#229

Post by sarimkx »

> If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at programming. That has been the source of the median startup for the last 30 years, and this is probably not going to change in the next 10.

Did not expect this tbh. So many people here worried about the future of programming but PG believes we're safe! Alas, something positive!

Re: How to Start Google

#230

Post by neilv »

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…

When Google started, you didn't need a business model for a "dotcom" (as we called them, before "tech stocks" became the "tech" that we now call ourselves).

We already realized the necessity of finding information amongst the exponentially growing wealth of Web servers (sites).

And Google obviously worked much better than the existing crawler-based search indexes and curated directories.

And lots of people thought a "portal" was a good place to be, if you could manage it.

Post reply on HN