Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 681 posts

Re: How to Start Google

#391

Post by eastbound »

neilv wrote: post #225
light_triad wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully 2 Stanford CS PhD students hacking on their project would be funded by YC today :) You bring up a good point about starting from the tech rather than the problem. Usually the advice from VCs is to start from the problem and iterate on the tech until you solve it. What was very fortunate for Google is that the tech translated into a great business problem. Open up any CS textbook and 'Search' is always a maj…

> Hopefully 2 Stanford CS PhD students hacking on their project would be funded by YC today :) Around the dawn of YC, IIRC, when PG did the "summer founders" or something like that, a group of 4 of us Lisp hackers applied as a team. No response. We were mostly in grad student-like lifestyle modes, and not tied down, were energetic, and already had various applicable experience. But I think PG was mostly looking for b…

I always wonder about the success rate of advice. Do we have any student from this talk of PG who succeeded later in life? Joined an ivy league school? Proceeded to create a startup? Had success with it?

Don’t get me wrong. This folklore is extremely important, if not just to raise the grades of one student. But as a founder, when I give advice, out of inflated ego generally, I also have vertigo from the height of everything that could go wrong about being mistaken about my advice.

Re: How to Start Google

#392

Post by cmrdporcupine »

naniwaduni wrote: post #112
tomhoward wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're very early (and/or very lucky), you can't get "rich" (i.e., can choose never to work again and can invest in many other things) as an employee (though of course a highly-paid employee can become very well off and comfortable). Yes you need to be lucky to get super-rich as a founder too, but you have a lot more control, i.e., you make the primary decisions that determine whether the company will make goo…

How rich do you insist on being? The bar to "can choose never to work again" is surprisingly low , it just requires a high savings rate which is quite achievable in this line of work.

Threshold for wealthy enough to "never work again" is actually very high if you have a mortgage and a couple kids you want to put through school, and are thinking about living past 75. Even here in Canada where healthcare is not really a cost, retirement and nursing homes constitute a huge expense that could go on for years in your last phase.

I'm sitting on the accumulated wealth of 25 rather up-and-downish years in this industry, 10 years at Google, an almost paid-off mortgage, and a decent lump sum I got from when Google bought my employer, I turn 50 this year, and there's no way I can retire. Not without selling my home and moving somewhere a lot cheaper (hard to find here).

Maybe I've made some bad financial choices (not that many), but mostly it's that compensation packages in our industry are set just high enough to keep people on the upper side of comfortable middle class.

If you don't own capital -- haven't invested in rental properties or starting your own business --getting out of the job market isn't really a thing before 65 for most people even in our very well compensated industry.

If I were single or it were just me and my wife, sure.

I've been through tldroptions, and looked at enough options agreement given out by startups in the last few years, to know that as an IC engineer... even if you are lucky enough to be part of the very few startups that have a liquidity event... you're likely gonna get $300k, $400k USD tops.

Unless you're 25 and can shove that in the bank without touching it at all... that's not the life changing event some people think it is. Once the gov't takes their share, it's enough for a house downpayment or a very nice car, and you're certainly not going mortgage free with it.

Re: How to Start Google

#393

Post by suyash »

ak_111 wrote: post #90

Am surprised PG gave this talk at a UK school without mentioning an important assumption that they will need to migrate to the US in his opening paragraph. All the examples he mentioned Google, himself and the Irish Stripe founders had to do the same for their startups. Sadly in the UK all the current unicorn "startups" are a bit iffy: XTX (high frequency hedgefund), betfair (betting company), tripledot studios (Zyng…

Not anymore, London is the biggest startup hub in Europe and top AI companies like Google Deep Mind and Stability AI were founded and HQ is based in London. These days all you need is talent and funding, once you have that you can do it from anywhere.

Re: How to Start Google

#394

Post by pdonis »

jp57 wrote: post #384

The trick is to start your own company. So it's not a trick for avoiding work, because if you start your own company you'll work harder than you would if you had an ordinary job. But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including a boss telling you what to do. This is literally true, but it's disingenuous. Not every job has a boss telling you what to do . Many jobs hire people for their ex…

> the employee collaborates with her boss on deciding what kinds of problems you will work on. Of course, it will only be enjoyable if the company's problems are aligned with the employee's interests.

And that's a huge if. PG's view of regular jobs might be colored by his own experience (working for Yahoo after they bought Viaweb--of course it's going to jar when the thing you built is now owned by someone else that you now have to work for), but it's still the case that even the best case regular job (and of course most regular jobs aren't the best case) is going to give you significantly less autonomy than owning your own company--because you don't make the final business decisions for a company you don't own. If you're the type of person that's going to jar (and I suspect PG is that type of person), you're not going to like even the best case regular job.

> "Making it" as a startup founder should be seen in the same class of success as making it as a rock star or an actor. There are lots of aspirants and hardly any of them succeed. Even though some manage to become wildly wealthy, the prior expected payoff is negative.

This is probably true if you take VC funding, since VC outcomes are basically bimodal: either "huge win" or "tank". I'm not sure all startups actually need to take VC funding, however.

Re: How to Start Google

#395

Post by fuzzfactor »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #379
fuzzfactor wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Huh? Did we ask forget about the era of pop-up ads on the Internet?

That's what I mean, when Google became generally available they had none of that on their site.

For quite a while at least before they joined the crowd.

Re: How to Start Google

#396

Post by abhayhegde »

While I absolutely agree with PG here on identifying a missing link and solving it with technology as your own project is a good way to own a startup, I also feel most of his examples are reminiscent of survivorship bias.

For every one of these giant trillion dollar companies, there are also thousands of companies that couldn't make it. Also, just by the distribution of it all, not every company can be a Google. Not trying to be pessimistic here; everyone should be able to try solving some problem as a project and have fun meanwhile. However, expecting a Google out of it could be a bit too demanding.

Re: How to Start Google

#397

Post by nostrademons »

dekhn wrote: post #170
awesomeMilou wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His dad wasn't "just" a computer scientist, he was a professor for computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. Sergey Brin's father was equally a professor in mathematics at the University of Maryland. > It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn well near as engineered with data as it…

I don't think larry or sergey got their phd - larry got a masters and I think sergey left before he got any degree. Don't forget that Larry's older brother Carl went through the whole VC process with egroups and gained extreme experience with how to maximize his position in negotiation. But yes, I agree completely that kids of academics raised in an environment that incentivzes learning is a reliable way to transform…

The timing is a little muddled here - Scott Hassan (who, interestingly enough, wrote most of the original code for Google) founded eGroups with Carl Page in 1997, after working on BackRub/Google. The two should be viewed as parallel projects - Google actually started first, but eGroups raised money first. It’s true that Larry got valuable experience through having his brother raise capital first, but much of that also came from having supportive angels like (Sun founder) Andy Bechtolsteim, (Stanford professor and Granite Systems founder) David Cheriton, (Junglee and Netscape exec) Ram Shriram, and (Amazon founder) Jeff Bezos.

Re: How to Start Google

#398

Post by dekhn »

alexsereno wrote: post #388
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…

You know I remember hearing this way back in the early 2000s but forgot about it, Carl is pretty low key, no Wikipedia / etc

I chatted with him several times. One thing I've noticed is that Larry and Carl both have some behaviors that are consistent with ... inflexible thinking ... that I recognize in myself and have worked to correct.

Anyway ,we chatted about his latest company, which I can't find now. The idea was this: industrial facilities often return really noisy signals on the electrical supply lines, and the electrical company has to do a lot of work to clean it up (hey, I'm not an EE). Like, motors, etc, all severely distort the waveform. So his company made and I guess sold a product that you'd put at your electrical service panel that "cleaned up" the signal before it went back to the power company. In response, the company would give you cheaper power prices.

I was reminded of this when Larry Page met with Donald Trump early in the Trump administration and brought up one of his favorite plans- to rebuild the US electrical grid around DC distribution. He's truly made for another world.

Re: How to Start Google

#399

Post by mindwok »

suyash wrote: post #18

Ok, so I am having a hard time buying the idea that just make a fun project if you want to create a something like 'Google'. Startup 101 teaches us that you need to solve a painful problem that lot of people have, that is the best way to create 'Google', so isn't the advise contradictory?

I think the message is more about not getting caught up in external sources of what to build. Basically, don't follow the hype, follow your nose.

Re: How to Start Google

#400

Post by justsocrateasin »

abhayhegde wrote: post #396

While I absolutely agree with PG here on identifying a missing link and solving it with technology as your own project is a good way to own a startup, I also feel most of his examples are reminiscent of survivorship bias. For every one of these giant trillion dollar companies, there are also thousands of companies that couldn't make it. Also, just by the distribution of it all, not every company can be a Google. Not…

I think he answers the second point of "not every company can be a Google" though. He says this will get you to the point where your company could be a Google, but makes no promises that it will be one.

I agree with the first point. I do think that the experience would nonetheless be valuable, though, to pilot a failed company.

Post reply on HN