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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Start Google

#361

Post by echelon »

pepve wrote: post #333
echelon wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you're not the intended audience. There are certain people that deeply desire this and that understand their chances of success are low. Nevertheless, these people want to try and find encouragement in these types of essays. You don't need to be upset that this isn't for you. There are all sorts of shapes of people in the world. We benefit by having curious people at all strata of society, exploring various s…

> You don't need to be upset that this isn't for you. The person you're responding to does not seem upset to me. You add an interesting perspective that some people want to find encouragement in these types of essays. And the personal jab just isn't necessary.

> The person you're responding to does not seem upset to me.

I don't think we're reading this the same.

To quote OP,

>> I was distracted by the generally smug tone of it.

The definition of "smug":

> smug /sməɡ/ adjective. having or showing an excessive pride in oneself or one's achievements.

> contentedly confident of one's ability, superiority, or correctness; complacent.

This is why I responded. If you don't like the tone of the article, you don't need to suggest that the author has a superiority complex.

> And the personal jab just isn't necessary.

"smug" is a personal jab. I didn't make one.

Re: How to Start Google

#362

Post by waprin »

takinola wrote: post #128
palata wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not know poker at all?

Poker is actually a good analogy. It is luck in the short term but skill over the long term. You can't confidently predict that you will win any specific upcoming hand but, given a particular set of opponents, you can reasonably predict whether you will be up or down over a number of hands. I may beat Chris Moneymaker on a hand or two but he's going to take all my money over the long haul. The insight here is to only…

I completely agree with the sentiment, and as someone who’s mostly focused on a startup for pro poker players to study game theory more effectively (https://www.livepokertheory.com) , I find countless parallels between poker and entrepreneurship.

Also, people don’t realize that startups aren’t one single event. There’s a million events and each one has its own luck. For example, you make a piece of content marketing there’s luck in whether it performs well, but that luck can be managed and the risk spread across many events by doing lots of small pieces of content marketing.

I also wrote a blog post about how a popular psychology book oriented towards poker pros (The Mental Game of Poker) can be easily reframed for entrepreneurs:

https://writing.billprin.com/p/the-mental-game-of-entreprene...

With all that said, it’s highly ironic you picked Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he’s famous in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player who got extremely lucky at the perfect time . It’s a bit like talking about the importance of hard work and deep technology skills for founders, and using Adam Neumann and WeWork as your example of that.

Re: How to Start Google

#363

Post by inerte »

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…

In the “Measure What Matters” book the author talks about investing in Google in early 1999, and the founders were indeed projecting billions of dollars in revenue, using ads.

Re: How to Start Google

#364

Post by lupire »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #213
rguzman wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it really depends on what you mean by rich: the surest path to end up with $2-5M over ~10 years is job at ~FAANG, do it well to get promoted, and manage your savings/investments well. that path is very unlikely to get you to $10-100M in the same 10 years, and starting a startup seems to be one of the best ways to do that.

You forget the higher up you go in these companies, the politics get nasty. Not many people have the appetite for that.

You don't need to be a higher up; you just need to be a good cog.

Re: How to Start Google

#365

Post by lupire »

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…

Not unlike Peter Thiel.

Gates, Jobs, Dell, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg are all dropouts.

Re: How to Start Google

#366

Post by antisthenes »

gizmo wrote: post #346
malthaus wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because most people have something called life experience or come from a culture not brainwashed by the american dream. of course YOU can do anything, but whether you are successful with that or not is up to a million factors you cannot control, no matter how much of your all you give. go to a casino, throw your life savings on one number. if you win, tell everyone how you gave it all and you manifested it by pure wi…

The belief that luck is the dominant factor in success is false and harmful to the extent that it keeps people from trying. I mean trying for real as opposed to giving up after a bunch of setbacks.

Yeah, those pesky setbacks like getting injured, working yourself to death and running out of money so you can't feed yourself.

If only people tried for real.

In my experience people most likely to write this are trust fund babies who neglect to mention they're getting essentially a stipend from their parents to take care of all their life necessities, so they can "try for real". Whatever that means.

Re: How to Start Google

#368

Post by psnehanshu »

nezaj wrote: post #217
kelnos wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can decide not to do it in the first place. A 15-year-old hearing this talk from Graham as-is might take from it, "wow, if I learn programming, work on things that interest me, do well in school, and go to a good university, I'm guaranteed to build a Google-scale successful startup!" Telling that kid that there's also a component of luck involved, and that the vast majority of startups fail, would temper that ent…

I think it's a jump to assume the kid will believe there is a _guarantee_ If the kid is motivated from this essay to learn programming, work on things that interest them, do well in school, and go to a good university -- I think they're well setup for success in their life.

But not if you put "starting the next Google" as the criteria for success.

Re: How to Start Google

#369

Post by downWidOutaFite »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #127
YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #70

PG is remarkably consistent in his advice; much of his writing is about developing a nose for "what's missing" and having the chops and resources to attempt a solution. Also, I think 'Google' in this instance is more for motivation rather than a literal comparison. He's leaving out the part that Google was founded by graduate CS students a) looking for a thesis, b) into node-link graphs, and c) inspired by academic c…

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…

The real trick that made Google possible, and the following web 2.0 era startups, was that linux and commodity hardware was all that was needed at the time so engineers could strike out on their own. Comparing it to the current ML era where you need many millions of dollars of data and many millions of dollars of hardware to compete, the guys that wrote the transformers paper are stuck in bigcorp and aren't going to be the next Larry and Sergey. OpenAI might be one of the few new big companies but it's run by a VC/CEO, not the engineers that figured the stuff out, and he had to sell half the company to Microsoft anyway.

Re: How to Start Google

#370

Post by sgu999 »

> this is the standard way to get really rich

The standard way for a young 15yo to get rich, is to be passed on wealth by their parents. But starting a company can probably work, occasionally enough that we can use it as a smoke screen.

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