Please don’t equate DoorDash and Stripe with the laser and transistor.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
31–40 of 131 posts
Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
#32Kind of wish hackernews would screen newly registered domain names and tell people to post again when their domain is over 30 days old...
We'd need to go over the list of submissions from such domains in order to see how many good ones were in there.
As frustrating as the mediocre median is, it's more important to not lose good articles than it is to avoid bad ones.
Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
#33> If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented OpenAI, Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit, and many more. Interesting, comparing core scientific research and output by Bell Labs to just techi-ifying existing industries and not really adding much new value (other than OpenAI).
lol...I came to post this EXACTLY. Having been in, or on the periphery of, the startup world for a long time (ending about ten years ago), I've come to see it as pretty vapid, unimaginative, and even downright destructive. If a bunch of young-ish guys (and a few women) with elite upbringings want to have an incestuous little money party, well, good on them, I guess. But all the eloquent words trying to obscure the th…
I'm not in the startup world and live in a city that Silicon Valley considers "tech-adjacent". I excitedly attended a start-up event a few months ago where people pitched ideas, and I was massively disappointed by how unoriginal every single idea was. Everyone proposed creating an app that does xyz pointless service that they think will make money. I also hated how many people showed up thinking they could con some hyper-intelligent but obviously socially retarded dev to "bust out an app" for them over the weekend, presumably for free.
Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
#34It sounds good. But it kind of reminds me of High School Football or Basketball Players (choose a high paying professional sport). Who bank their whole future on focusing on one thing that is Super-Low-Percentage-Of-Success-High-Paying-Job. How many football players skip their education, and then DON'T make it? Where do they end up. Now, think Joe Blow Computer Science Major, is NOT going to be a Millionaire, but a d…
The hit rate in the article is almost 1/4. That's a lot better than high school sports. The fallback if you don't succeed is called "programmer". And no, programmers don't need college degrees if they have real world experience. I've known a lot of very successful programmers with no college degree at all.
Not if the denominator is all Computer Science students who may think of dropping out of school when seeing these success stories.
And
The days of hacking something together and getting a job are kind of dwindling if not gone. The days of self learning, and showing skill isn't really as prevalent anymore. Sure, it was like that during 90-2000's. But these days, not so much.
Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
#35> If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented OpenAI, Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit, and many more. Interesting, comparing core scientific research and output by Bell Labs to just techi-ifying existing industries and not really adding much new value (other than OpenAI).
lol, imagine telling Bill Shockley: "oh, you invented the transistor? well I built an iPhone app that dispatches a pizza order". The only thing here even close to a real invention is OpenAI and even they didn't invent the core tech (neural nets, transformers, linear regression, gpu farms) but just threw a bunch of money at applying it in a new way.
You're overly downplaying the role of combination in creation, which is what most creation consists of (including inventing the transistor, although to a lesser degree).
Imagine downplaying the iPhone by saying they merely combined some things that already existed, as they didn't invent most of the core tech in the first iPhone.
Apple just threw a bunch of money at combining tech that already existed by that premise; and they definitely didn't invent the smartphone. And SpaceX didn't invent rocketry either. And Tesla didn't invent the electric car. It'd be absurd to downplay these things and how difficult they were to bring into routine existence. And Netscape didn't invent the Web browser, and Google didn't invent the search engine, and Amazon didn't invent ecommerce, and Atari + Nintendo didn't invent the video game, and Ford didn't invent the automobile.
Impact also matters a lot more than just being first.
Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are often posts on here showing that it is better to spend say 10 or even 5 years doing 35-40 hour weeks at a FAANG where your total comp will end up being $2-5,000,000 over that time, than risk it at a startup working 80+ hour weeks for a chance at the big time but ultimately leave with nothing apart from exhaustion and an unheard-of failed startup on your resume. I think there is a lot of truth in that. And y…
But that's also a false dichotomy. There are many options aside from those two.
It can look like a false dichotomy because we are posting short blurbs on the internet, not the pros/cons of a thousand different life stories so we can categorize them into a dozen possible outcomes so we have more than two examples.
But it is very much a common theme in High Earning/Low Success Rate roles, to have a lot of people shoot for them, fall short, and be in a worse position than if they had studied and stayed some more mundane course.
Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I think there is a lot of sentiment that these ideas/founders are somehow unique and that if those people didn't do anything with those ideas then something like Airbnb or Reddit or Dropbox wouldn't have ever happened. I think people need to be realistic - none of those are particularly ground breaking ideas, as evidenced by the fact that there are countless competitors and in many cases even predecessors that w…
But by that argument, we'd no doubt still have transistors if the transistor hadn't been invented. The traitorous eight, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts shaped our world in a way that no one else could. Same with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We'd no doubt still have computers, and smartphones, but the landscape would be much different…
The point I was trying to make is that just ordering take out food on a computer or storing files on a computer on the network or sharing URLs and comments on a public website are not ground breaking ideas - these are trivial ideas that I am sure anyone here could have come up with.
But the transistor? Or the laser? Are these things that were thought up by the layman independently on a regular basis? (i.e. like the ideas for a lot of the y-combinator startups have been thought up independently many times over by laymen) I don't think so. I feel like these scientific endeavours require years of hands on scientific research and hard work before they ever become anything meaningful, and not just an idea for an app that pops into your mind while sitting on the toilet one day.
I think articles like these and the recent "how to do great work" one recently shows quite how out of touch and how much of an over-inflated sense of importance people in the tech industry can often have - to even begin to think that booking a taxi on a computer is anywhere close to something like inventing the transistor is just absurd.
Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
#38It sounds good. But it kind of reminds me of High School Football or Basketball Players (choose a high paying professional sport). Who bank their whole future on focusing on one thing that is Super-Low-Percentage-Of-Success-High-Paying-Job. How many football players skip their education, and then DON'T make it? Where do they end up. Now, think Joe Blow Computer Science Major, is NOT going to be a Millionaire, but a d…
There are often posts on here showing that it is better to spend say 10 or even 5 years doing 35-40 hour weeks at a FAANG where your total comp will end up being $2-5,000,000 over that time, than risk it at a startup working 80+ hour weeks for a chance at the big time but ultimately leave with nothing apart from exhaustion and an unheard-of failed startup on your resume. I think there is a lot of truth in that. And y…
It drives me nuts when people point at engineers making $1M on a startup exit, without counting the average income over their tenure.
If they worked in the company 5 years with a 100k base salary, the income averages to about 300k per year. Sure, that's a healthy income, but it's about on par with a big tech salary, with the difference that big tech is more stable and predictable, and not heavily backloaded.
Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you need investment? If you can build it on your own and there is a real niche with people willing to pay money for what you build then you can make a lot of money as an individual.
I can’t because I need money to survive, and this will not provide that money for months until the thing is written, deployed, and has an established enough paying user base… And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by whatever calamity in meantime!
If it will be a matter of mere months until this thing is making enough money to pay for you to live, then it shouldn't take you too long to save up to start? Maybe a bank would even lend you the money? Maybe even a credit card would be enough?
Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
#40I want to start a company, but will not. The main reason why the existence of YC does not change this is because I know my idea, even if I go all in, does not promise explosive growth on par with Airbnbs of this world, and therefore is not attractive to investment. It does have the potential to eventually become a lifestyle business, though, which would be good enough for me. Unfortunately, I guess it will have to wa…
Why do you need investment? If you can build it on your own and there is a real niche with people willing to pay money for what you build then you can make a lot of money as an individual.
Simple: capex and economies of scale.
Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not $50/.
I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're looking at 7-8 figures.
If you aren't independently wealthy, neither option is really feasible, and the former option will almost certainly end in tears if you try to stretch and bootstrap with your own money.