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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

381–390 of 808 posts

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#381
This is article comes at a good time. I feel like the tech sector over the past 10 years has been focusing mostly on very safe bets.

It's been shocking for me to see how terrified multi-millionaires are to invest even $100K into a risky but potentially transformative project; instead preferring to pile onto the latest hot startups which other big investors are dumping their money into... Like a herd of sheep. This behavior underlies a lack of self-confidence.

When you have a lot of money, your odds of success are much better, so why waste it and act like a sheep? Is it because a lot of wealthy people nowadays come from lower classes and they've struggled to shake off the herd mentality which is so pervasive among the lower classes of society? They think they're playing the same game as before; with all odds stacked against them, but this mindset is counterproductive to a wealthy person. Once you have a lot of money, the game is rigged in your favor, not against you; there is no excuse to act like a sheep anymore.

If the majority of rich people keep acting like sheep, the system will collapse under its own weight from the sheer inefficiency. Capitalism doesn't tolerate deadweight; it shakes it all off sooner or later.

Now investors are realizing that if they want to only make safe bets, then they should just invest in Bitcoin or some other scheme with high network effects... Maybe now is a good time for investors to actually judge investments based on their disruptive potential instead of just looking to other investors to outsource decisions. If you just want to participate in a social scheme; just invest in crypto. If you want to invest in a business, then you can't avoid taking risks!

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#382
post #224

The problem I immediately see is that you have to qualify your domain experts. If it's someone you personally know, perhaps it would apply - otherwise you're opening yourself pretty wide to domain experts out to scam you.

Right. Examples of ideas that seemed crazy, were initially treated as implausible, and nevertheless worked out are plentiful, but so are examples of ideas that seemed crazy, were initially venerated as the miracle way of the future, and turned out to be complete BS founded on deception.

And because the second group fails (or were outright scams) the record of all of them is lost. We know about the HUGE venture capital failures like pets dot com, but there were thousands more in the $1-10m range nobody cares to even document. Similarly throughout history. The "crazy ideas that actually worked" are talked about because of how rare they are.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the first I’d heard of this axiom. Can you give an example of that in a real architecture? I think about a central server with multiple terminals on a network. There the node is the beefy boi and the terminals are just I/O devices. Kind of similar to what MightyApp is doing - except with fewer privacy concerns :)

But no one uses that architecture anymore. To the extent that you have a terminal on a remote server, you use it to configure the server, from your own thick client.

Is it true that chromebooks outsell other laptops?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#384
It seems people often have a weird "anti-bias" to believe that everything that goes on to be wildly successful was originally dismissed as ridiculous or impossible. First of all, it's not true. There are plenty of examples of ideas that seemed good to begin with and turned out to be good in practice. So something seeming ridiculous doesn't really count as an important quality in predicting success. Secondly, even if it were somehow true that all successful ideas seemed ridiculous, that still says nothing about how likely something is to succeed. What percentage of failed ideas originally seemed ridiculous? It's also an important question, but I guess one you don't need to answer if you're a billionaire and have a large audience of worshipers.

Sometimes a stupid idea is just that.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#385
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the disconnect seems to be that Mighty is advertised for people who essentially use their browser as an OS (I see Figma mentioned a lot), rather than people who just want to do basic browsing. I think Mighty has unfairly taken the brunt of a lot of growing discontent with bloat on the web. I'm not ready to fork over $30+ for faster browsing, but I'm glad someone is working in this space, because I genuinely…

> I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a step in that direction. Can't you already do that pretty easily on AWS or Azure?

At minimum it seems like I’d have to choose an instance size, an OS that was compatible with my software, install the editing software, mount a common storage location with my footage, etc.

What I’d like to see is a service that let me add my credit card, click a button, and launch a video editor on a high-RAM machine that I pay for the hour (including the software license fee).

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#386
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Personally I don’t think PG is defending mighty app because he has skin in the game. I would think he is at a point where he doesn’t need to. - Also IMO we should let mighty app (or for that matter other crazy ones) play out. We all know little about the capabilities of individuals and what the future holds. So why to ridicule and prematurely declare certain death.

Couldn't disagree with you second point more: you shouldn't let dangerous tech "play-out". It's much easier to kill snakes just as they've hatched. Basically every bad thing about web and software in general was born as "play it out" and then it grew to big to be killed.

Hold it. I agree with you, but I'm having a language nerd moment. This feels like one of those "catch more flies with honey than vinegar" things, where although the point is made clearly, the metaphor is literally false (vinegar is incredibly good bait for catching flies).

> It's much easier to kill snakes just as they've hatched.

Aren't a ton of itty bitty snakes going to be harder to kill than one big snake? I've never tried to kill snakes of any age myself, so I could be way off.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#387

HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success. "It's too expensive" or "Nobody needs it because we have X" on a project lead by a domain expert is not constructive criticism or conservatism, it's pure envy. PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase because he has skin in the game, but because he knows what the teams have achieved and what they could potentially achieve. I don't…

People always bring Dropbox to these discussions as an example of a startup that was dismissed by HN but turned out to be huge, but turns out there are examples of the opposite thing happening too! Does anyone remember Color Labs? Go read this thread and marvel at the similarities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364463 . A stellar team backed by top VCs who invested (extraordinary at the time) $41M sets out to…

I am really surprised that you didn't choose the more obvious line of reasoning, which would be to bring up examples of companies that PG predicted to be breakout successes and then they failed. PG marveled about Instacart and Flexport well before anyone else, including myself (I know members of the founding teams in both companies very well, and think very highly of them... but even so, I didn't see their companies as the type of breakout successes that they became until PG made his case for them). The constant hate against PG is really starting to get tiring, especially when you see such sloppy reasoning. Why judge his reasoning based on what other VCs thought? Saying PG = VC industry is a really stunningly poor argument IMO.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#388
Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in.

I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome.

The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

Blogs: couldn't you just update a web page?

Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page?

social media: couldn't you just set up group view preferences and use RSS?

youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search?

twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??

Honestly, I've overlooked almost every one of these things, because I failed to understand how removing small bits of friction can cause a technology to explode.

Sure, some ideas are crazy new, but some sound too underwhelming to be revolutionary. but they are, there's no question about it, all those things I listed above changed the world, in ways both good and pretty damn awful.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"Recent case in point: public health authorities telling the public that masks are useless and even harmful during the pandemic (presumably to avoid shortages) and then reversing their stance when masks became abundant." I agree with your general point, but my interpretation of those events has additional axis: 1. Masks are in shortage, and may not protect you, and public doesn't know how to use them and will proba…

The problem is they lost all credibility with the public for that very obvious deception.

Which deception? I did not indicate one in my post so reference to " that very obvious deception" is not clear to me.

note: "Evolving understanding/new facts" or "new/differing priorities" are not the same as "deception" to me. e.g.:

* Thinking A and Saying A; then changing mind and Thinking B and Saying B; are not a deception

* Saying "Because of X, A"; then later "Because of Y, B", because Y became more important than X, is also not deception to me

* Thinking A but Saying B is a deception to me (for reasons and intents that I may or may not agree with)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#390
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically parodied as "One day the world will understand my true genius. And then you'll all be sorry!" It's trivially easy to disprove. Just read some vintage issues of Byte to see an impressive number of not entirely crazy novel ideas from established domain experts which crashed and burned. Of course some of these ideas - a minority - turned out to be successful. But a little digging shows success was not about…

I don't think most crazy ideas crashing and burning is good enough to disprove the thesis. Even if 1 in 100 ideas that can bring about 10x change in important areas are all that succeed, we need those ideas to improve things. I think if you look for marketing you'll find it, so even ideas that win on technology can look like monopolist strong-arming if that's what you're looking for. Also not all ideas that win on te…

>> Even if 1 in 100 ideas that can bring about 10x change in important areas are all that succeed, we need those ideas to improve things

Even by your own math this is a bad idea, with 1 in 100 leading to a 10x improvement we'd be better to stick with what we've got.

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