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What I’ve learned from users

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I’ve learned from users

#231

Post by robocat »

ProAm wrote: post #68
lisper wrote: post #45

This essay is getting a surprising amount of hate, and I must confess that my first impression on reading it was that it sounded an awful lot like a Robert Kiyosaki book [1]. But then I followed the two links in the essay [2] [3] and that put it into perspective: the thing that Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such form…

> Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such formula I agree, I also think this is the message that YC sells to founders. You are giving up a lot of equity for access/membership to an organization that will make you successful (Im clearly summarizing a bit). It's a bit of a MLM scheme (not that they are ripping you off) but…

> not that [YC is] ripping you off

Indirectly, YC quite possibly are ripping most founders off financially, even though the average company return is high (power-law — few winners and many losers[1]). It is hard to find good figures, because we have reliable dollar estimates for the companies that win, but a paucity of information about the founders that lose, or what individual founders made[2].

When YC only selects the best 1 of ## applicants, it is hard to remove selection bias from any later analyses of returns for founders.

Value and opportunity-cost are messy, so measuring the returns for “loser” founders is really difficult. I am unsure if founders’ own self-assessment would be trustworthy information.

Here is an analysis from 2014 on YC founder returns: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-much-do-y-combinator-foun...

I would expect early employees to have worse odds of good payouts.

[1] startup valuations tend to fall along a steep power law curve and YC startups fall along one nearly perfectly: https://medium.com/swlh/on-300b-of-y-combinator-startup-succ...

[2] company returns are easier to find than individual founder returns.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#232

Post by yourapostasy »

baxtr wrote: post #138
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #94

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would c…

Super interesting. Super stupid question from someone not really versed in sales: what’s your key takeaway about how to be good at selling something?

Same as with how to be good at coding: perform a lot of it, in as many different contexts as reasonably feasible.

The finance arms of sales teams however, like the teams that assemble “no interest” parts of the deals, I was no fan of. There ain’t no free lunch, and the linguistic gymnastics they went through were a waste of my time to parse.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#234

Post by CAPSLOCKSSTUCK »

batch12 wrote: post #227
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about top 1% in the country. So buying from me would be a different experience. Maybe you landed on someone in the bottom 50%, at a bad dealership too. The owner of our dealership was a Cal grad, the sales manager was a Jewish accounting major, I had an engineering degree, my favorite coworker completed medschool but couldn't pass the MCATS, and everyone else had a degree too. When I went to work for a Penske d…

> the sales manager was a Jewish accounting major One of these things seems out of place when listing qualifications

I'm glad I'm not the only one who found it odd.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#235

Post by themodelplumber »

tchock23 wrote: post #137
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #94

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would c…

Alex Hormozi was on a podcast recently talking about how you should learn high volume sales skills in a scenario like a gym chain, car dealer, etc. Do that for a few years and then take those skills to sell the most expensive thing you can to make “real” money with better quality customers. Seemed like reasonable advice and aligned with your experiences...

Selling stuff is an extremely outward-focused career though, and it's its own thing. You have to be really careful due to the creeping boiler room effect. You can lose track of who/what you are inwardly very easily, due to almost no attention given your own values, and in effect a strong counter-incentive for attending to your own stuff.

I have career-coached a lot of top sales people and most of them have been very clear that time spent convincing other people is exactly that much less time spent on personal goals, education, etc. For introverts, the #1 complaint is that it focuses you on your weakest side as your career foundation.

Most also ended up gradually substituting sales education for specialty education, without realizing what they were doing, or that they had a choice. So you get people with tremendous, but less-interesting people skills hitting their '40s and going to tech boot camps because that's where their heart was all along.

I had similar experience myself and if I could go back in time I think people skills learned in basic IT work were plenty. Let sales people be sales people, hire them to do sales, and stick to one's own favorite things...otherwise yeah if you like sales, knock yourself out.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#237

Post by maroonblazer »

ejb999 wrote: post #128
lnwlebjel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I rank buy a car from a new car salesman as the worst consumer experience of my life. So much so that I've since bought used cars and in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience. I understand that it could greatly benefit the salesperson in understanding the social psychology of the consumer ... but never again will I subject myself to that process.

I'd rather go get a cavity filled, then buy a new car. Do it as infrequently as possible (hoping to get another 10 years out of my 11 year old Toyota). Every time I visit a new car dealer I feel a need to take a shower, just to get the stink off of me.

I once dated a girl whose dad's idea of a fun Saturday was to spend the day at a car dealership to see how low a price he could negotiate for a car. He'd always walk away, regardless of how low they went. I thought that was hilarious.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#238

Post by robocat »

NhanH wrote: post #18

I adore pg’s essay. But this time something is tripping my spider sense, so I had to take a closer look (at my spider sense, and a bit on the essay too). This is the first time an essay feels like a sale pitch. Specifically, a sale pitch for YC. I’ve read pg’s essay about YC for about 15 years, and this is the first one I have that feeling. This one is a bit too abstract. I’m getting the idea that YC can help founder…

I am guessing you started reading PG when young, and are now becoming cynical about the world after 15 years. Perhaps PG has stayed the same and you have changed?

The first “sales pitch” I noticed was 10 years ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html (it isn’t a sales pitch for YC, instead it is a sales pitch for founding a startup).

I also suspect you are mistaking his passion for a pitch. I would bet PG is happy to see all startups succeed, whether YC is helping them or not. It isn’t like PG needs to try and succeed with more status and more money. Disclaimer: I don’t know PG and I don’t know similar people that might help me stereotype him correctly.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#239

Post by majormajor »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #196
hinkley wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the whole thing with VC is that they've somehow figured out how to make money while being wrong 90% of the time. With those sorts of numbers, are you really doing much better than random chance? I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer, but to identify who's lying about it. With those sorts of volumes of money you're going to attract fraud, and fraud can quickly break "throwing darts at a board"…

"being wrong 90% of the time." They are not wrong 90% of the time. They place correct bets on correct companies, 90% of which will fail. This does not make them wrong, it makes them excellent gamblers. If I'm getting 100:1 odds to roll snake-eyes (two 1's), that's a great bet, and a correct one, and I am not wrong to take it, even though I'll lose money the vast majority of the time.

VC isn't just about placing "correct bets." This article pitches it as actually the opposite: what happens after the bet is more important than before, so fund lots of them and help them.

But even more generally outside of the YC-model VCs compete on their networks and influence as well. The more connected you are, the better you'll do - it's a feedback loop.[0]

Look at the evolution of VC companies. If the skill was just "making correct bets" wouldn't that look like making fewer, but likely larger, bets over time? You grow, on the other hand, if you have some significant influence on the odds or can't tell the odds between companies you select that well. If "success" is 1/10 odds, and "phenomenal success" is 1/100, and you don't think that you are capable of digging deeper to instead find just the ones with 1/20 phenomenal odds, you have a better shot of huge returns if you place 100 bets instead of 10. Then you get more knock-on influence of having a bigger network over time, too!

Of course, trying to control the odds is a classic old gambler move too, but if you're caught doing it in a casino "excellent gambler" may not be the label they apply to you.

[0] to a certain type of tech enthusiast, the huge political aspects here are very frustrating.

Re: What I’ve learned from users

#240

Post by throwaway2037 »

phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #94

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would c…

You must have been a top seller. These are incredible stats! That means your average car price was about 45K (I assume: USD). Wow. What brand of cars were you selling? Did other dealers try to buy you away... or did your own dealership give you huge bonuses for these revenues?

About buying a car: As I understand, it is the most expensive "consumable" product that most people buy in their life. And they buy at least one every 10 years, so about 6-12 in their life. Compare a house: Many people only buy one or two in whole life. When selling cars, you are seeing the pinnacle of retail sales. I agree: The experience must be incredible. What do you do now? I hope you are doing B2B sales in software or pharma (where the markup is crazy)!

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