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Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
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Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
#32Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
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Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, that's fairly consistent for pg. As he notes later in the interview, he believes that a startup's founders matter more than the idea as good founders will improve upon or drop a bad idea. I think that was exactly the heuristic pg used in this case. He may not think GroupOn is best company in its current form, but he believes that Andrew Mason's smart and driven and is thus capable of evolving GroupOn into a…
I think betting on the founder breaks down as a company grows to a certain point. Steering a small startup is one thing. Steering a 10k person public company is entirely different. I doubt Steve Jobs at age 26 could have saved Apple from impending doom in 1996. Even at age 41, with all his additional skill/experience, it was far from easy for him.
Maybe, maybe not. I honestly don't have enough info to feel I can make an assertion either way. My gut does say, however, that many of the same traits are required of both startup CEOs and 10k employee public company CEOs. The challenges are indisputably different, but a CEO who's tenacious, intelligent, creative and driven will find ways to surmount any challenge whether it's hiring the first employee or executing a billion dollar take-over.
Fair questions: would Apple be facing impending doom in 1996 if Jobs hadn't been ousted and instead been allowed to lead his company? Would that Apple be as successful today?
Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
#35'Improving lives' is ambiguous, it centralizes around solving problems that people have. However if you scale these problems from 1st world to 3rd world problems it seems to me that improving lives in this context is aimed more at 1st rather than 3rd world problems. Which makes sense from a business standpoint, but the title somewhat implies that is about making the world a 'better' place. I am not criticizing pg bec…
I don't think improving lives only mean going out and saving lives.
Hipmunk is improving life by making us get rid of ad-ridden travel sites.
I think when he says 'improve life', he mean create something which is better than what we already have. It can be any market or niche and may target a small user audience too but as long as it's better than what we currently have, it's improving the overall standard of life.
Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
#36I loved this quote (I'm paraphrasing)
Reporter: What kills young startups?
PG: The back button
Brilliant
Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I specifically chose to talk about a scale, because I do agree that it is not black and white. There is however a difference between: earning money as a goal and improving lives as a means (improved quality of life being a byproduct) and wanting to improve lives (and as such quality of life) and earning money only being a requirement to sustain those activities. But perhaps startups are not way to go for the latter,…
This is the perennial theological question about charity: do you measure goodness based on charitable intent or on charitable results? Say getting money to poor folks in India is a charitable result with nearly-universal support here. It is doubtful Microsoft scores very high on the intent scale there, but they have probably done more for poor Indians this year than all active charities and all foreign government aid…
hmm, interesting, and I don't deny that 'commercial' companies can have good (unintentional) effects. But I am sure there is a space between charity and 'actual' companies, along the lines of what Fábio Barbosa[1] is doing. Which makes me wonder if it is viable for startups to take such an approach?
Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
#38PG says the first iteration doesn't matter much as long as the founders are good and iterate quickly. Empirically, is this the case? Airbnb and Dropbox certainly didn't iterate on their concepts that much. Google's first shot was excellent. Facebook captured 90%+ from Harvard students before moving on to conquer the world. Are there real counterexamples, or even better, hard data?
(If only YC recorded and aggregated key metrics from their startups, it would be so much easier to answer such questions)
Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
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Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives
#40PG says the first iteration doesn't matter much as long as the founders are good and iterate quickly. Empirically, is this the case? Airbnb and Dropbox certainly didn't iterate on their concepts that much. Google's first shot was excellent. Facebook captured 90%+ from Harvard students before moving on to conquer the world. Are there real counterexamples, or even better, hard data? (If only YC recorded and aggregated…
Data would be helpful, I agree.
But sometimes in iterations, you end up totally changing the product. So you might be thinking this is the first iteration of Groupon but it wasn't, the first iteration was The Point which really didn't work out and no one knows about it.