Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

themacro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 292 posts

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#261

Post by tim333 »

JamesBarney wrote: post #167
tedmiston wrote: post #49

Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working. > Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?" > Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on i…

Donating to a http://www.givewell.org/ recommended charity is probably a more scalable way to make the world a better place.

Trouble with giving to charities is it's not very personal. Ok you may increase the world's anti malaria budget from $1.5bn to $1.50001bn but you can't turn around and say look at this cool thing I built.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#262

Post by jomamaxx »

Animats wrote: post #238
jomamaxx wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendster was a clumsy product. MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface. Neither had talented people. Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social. Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment. But in the end - forget culture -…

MySpace had a record label - "Myspace Records". Founded in 2006, ended somewhere around 2012.

MySpace had a record label - but they also got their start in music.

MySpace started out as a way for bands in LA to post gigs.

So their initial user-base/NDA was musicians, LA culture.

Facebook was a little more academic/ivy league.

It's hard to change one's genes :)

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#263

Post by foldr »

mpbm wrote: post #250
dkarapetyan wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I do see a staggering amount of waste though. Duplicated effort across the board, re-invention of the same basic building blocks re-packaged and re-branded, billions spent on patent suits, billions spent on lobbying, etc. Competition in basic innovation does not make sense. In fact I'm not even sure how much of those "trillions" contributed to actual innovation. I suspect a proper analysis would reveal an…

LOL, you see "a staggering amount of waste" in commercial entities and thing the way to find efficiency is to look to the government? Like government-sponsored research is going to be more efficient? That's a good one.

Basic research is exactly the kind of thing that markets are bad at doing, so it really wouldn't be surprising. Which country do you see as a model of the success of privately funded research? As far as I can see, all countries that are making significant contributions to science are spending lots of government money on it.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#264

Post by tim333 »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #168
tedmiston wrote: post #49

Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working. > Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?" > Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on i…

Okay so I don't agree with "don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working" part. Airbnb example comes to mind where all the founders exhausted all their credit cards to fund user acquisitions and when that did not work kept trying other innovative means to keep the company afloat. If they would have followed this advice, there would not have been an AirBnB. I agree with the part that says " en…

I'm not sure the AirBnB guys with hindsight would have followed that policy again. They may have been better tweaking the model till it seemed to work rather than maxing the credit cards on a non working model perhaps. They were kind of failing and losing money till joining YC so the pre YC strategy may not have been great.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#265

Post by zouhair »

janvdberg wrote: post #97
zouhair wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also be extremely lucky.

In this [1] Tim Ferris podcast Peter Thiel states about Zuckerberg (paraphrasing here): "the more time you spent with him the more you realise it is not luck." [1] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/

I'd call him being born in the US in a kinda wealthy family a huge amount of luck. I never said that what he did is a small feat, but let's be real if he was born in the slums of India none of his smart would have been useful.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#266

Post by zouhair »

eatkinson wrote: post #107
zouhair wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also be extremely lucky.

"I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. H…

Imagine how much science would have Einstein done if he was sent to the camps. Of course luck is not everything but it is still a huge part of the equation. Just being born where he was born helped Pasteur a lot.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#267

Post by zouhair »

dntrkv wrote: post #155
jomamaxx wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of luck in Facebook, even if Zuck is a particularly talented individual. Also - if Harvard is a great school - how the F does someone find time to do the work and make a product at the same time? When I did Engineering, I didn't have time to take a shower.

You can say that about any successful person/company. Sure, luck may have played a large role in Facebook's initial success. But that was over 10 years ago. Many companies experience that initial success and then go nowhere, e.g. MySpace. Facebook, on the other hand, has continuously surpassed everyone's expectations. It's not until recently that people have began to accept that Facebook is here to stay. Discounting…

Of course it is luck. When they decide to do something new they never know if it's gonna work. If it doesn't work out or if it does work out tons of people come afterwards with tales of "they were stupid if they thought that was the answer" or "These people are smart and they surely knew what they were doing".

I am not trying to lessen his feat but just saying that luck is a big part of it.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#268

Post by tedmiston »

davidivadavid wrote: post #259
tedmiston wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless. > —PG, Ideas for Startups (2005) http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html

I think that view is a little simplistic in more ways than one. The first is that, erm, yes, there's a huge market for startup ideas. It's called the get-rich-quick-scheme industry. Sells billions of dollars worth of goods every year trying to teach people what business ideas will make them rich. The second is that it depends what you mean by "idea." If you mean some generic one sentence pitch about some vague idea (…

I think when Peter Thiel talks about "secrets" in Zero to One, he's referring to truths you hold that aren't (yet) generally accepted.

> What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

> Recall the business version of our contrarian question: what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world‐changing companies yet to be started.

The text of that chapter is on Genius: http://genius.com/Peter-thiel-zero-to-one-chapter-8-secrets-...

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#269

Post by z3t4 »

ben_jones wrote: post #124
z3t4 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it takes 100 years for one man, it will only take a month for a company or community ... Some problems can't simply be fixed by one man alone. And it's better to own little of something then all of nothing ... Look at for example Elon Musk. He only owned like 5% of the companies he started once they where sold. Also Facebook only had a few thousand users when Zuckerberg started to bring more people in to work on i…

In the case of Elon Musk (and for the record others like Mark Cuban) something tells me you don't make billions of dollars without a (from a modern perspective) massively disproportionate ownership share. Zuckerberg gets off from this because FB is an outlier in terms of it's value, he didn't need as large a percentage to make as much, but Musk does not.

Musk owned like 11% of Paypal once it sold for 1.5B, while Zuckerberg owned around 20% of Facebook when it IPO:ed for like 5B. The takeaway though is that it's better to own 10% of one Billion then 90+% of nothing. And great things can only be achieved while working together.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#270

Post by davidivadavid »

tedmiston wrote: post #268
davidivadavid wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that view is a little simplistic in more ways than one. The first is that, erm, yes, there's a huge market for startup ideas. It's called the get-rich-quick-scheme industry. Sells billions of dollars worth of goods every year trying to teach people what business ideas will make them rich. The second is that it depends what you mean by "idea." If you mean some generic one sentence pitch about some vague idea (…

I think when Peter Thiel talks about "secrets" in Zero to One, he's referring to truths you hold that aren't (yet) generally accepted. > What important truth do very few people agree with you on? > Recall the business version of our contrarian question: what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are…

Yep. And presumably such secrets (or "ideas" for some value of the word "idea") are incredibly valuable.

Which, of course, is not to say that ideas in and of themselves build companies. But that point is so obvious it seems a little stupid to have to point it out.

That's the thing with "ideas don't matter, it's all about execution." It's either true by definition (every company has to execute something at some point to even exist), or incredibly shallow and wrong (as long as you execute something you'll get great results).

Post reply on HN