How to Start Google

Post by nsguy » Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #369

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by lupire » Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 9:40 PM UTC

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…

Post by kevindamm » Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 9:42 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #41

Scubabear68 wrote: post #23

This essay glosses over the fact that most startups die a horrible death and earn little to no money for the founders. Somewhere in this essay it needs to say “99% of you who try this will fail”.

I wonder, over the course of a career in startups, what is the probability that you'll either found or be an early employee at one that makes up (financially) for the rest? Not hugely rich, but better than "normal" career. Given it's a repeated game, and you gain knowledge at each round, I'd say the odds are probably pretty good that the highly dynamic / fast learning environment of early companies yields returns ove…

Post by lupire » Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 9:43 PM UTC

93po wrote: post #159

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…

The overwhelming influential factor of people who start successful businesses is that they have a tremendous amount of resources relative to the average person. I would guess that easily over half of all successful medium to large size businesses started with someone who had a big leg-up.

Post by Karrot_Kream » Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 9:46 PM UTC

fuzzfactor wrote: post #323

paulpauper wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google in 1999 had the the fortuitous alignment of every possible factor: brains, Stanford connections, timing, extremely scalable and lucrative business model, funding, etc.

Even more fortuitous was having no ads or anything else that the small number of early Googlers would have considered evil in any way.