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Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives

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Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives

#41

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Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives

#42

Post by brandnewlow »

ntoshev wrote: post #38

PG says the first iteration doesn't matter much as long as the founders are good and iterate quickly. Empirically, is this the case? Airbnb and Dropbox certainly didn't iterate on their concepts that much. Google's first shot was excellent. Facebook captured 90%+ from Harvard students before moving on to conquer the world. Are there real counterexamples, or even better, hard data? (If only YC recorded and aggregated…

Airbnb's first iteration was presented as being much more about actually renting air mattresses and couches in people's home. They iterated into ebay for spaces.

Dropbox's first iteration was a one-guy team working on the problem. The founder iterated into a two-founder team based on feedback. I'd say that's a significant iteration.

If you read The Facebook Effect, Facebook was simply the latest in a line of "fun hacks" Zuckerberg unleashed on his fellow students at Harvard, each one building on the next.

Sounds like every one of these projects involved iteration. It's fun to think awesomeness springs fully-formed from one's forehead, Zeus-like, but I don't that happens to often in practice.

Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives

#43

Post by ig1 »

ntoshev wrote: post #38

PG says the first iteration doesn't matter much as long as the founders are good and iterate quickly. Empirically, is this the case? Airbnb and Dropbox certainly didn't iterate on their concepts that much. Google's first shot was excellent. Facebook captured 90%+ from Harvard students before moving on to conquer the world. Are there real counterexamples, or even better, hard data? (If only YC recorded and aggregated…

Airbnb was iterating prior to being part of YC, they've given several interviews where they talked about how they'd gone through several launches and failed to take off and had to iterate on their model. For example they started out by only being an introduction service, but they found handling the payment in person was actually a major issue (socially awkward, no record of transaction, etc.) so the end up incorporating payment handling into their service. That was likely a critical iteration.

Google's primary business is Ads which wasn't what they started with.

Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives

#44

Post by bjelkeman-again »

qF wrote: post #21
gibybo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While making the world a better place may not be sufficient to build a successful business, I don't think it's fair to say only organizations focusing on the third world are improving quality of life. Companies usually don't make money unless they are helping someone, and that help often leads to an improved quality of life, first world or not.

I specifically chose to talk about a scale, because I do agree that it is not black and white. There is however a difference between: earning money as a goal and improving lives as a means (improved quality of life being a byproduct) and wanting to improve lives (and as such quality of life) and earning money only being a requirement to sustain those activities. But perhaps startups are not way to go for the latter,…

We have ta taken our startup down the route of wanting to improve lives. We work with a number of others like us. It works.

Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives

#45

Post by brlewis »

ntoshev wrote: post #38

PG says the first iteration doesn't matter much as long as the founders are good and iterate quickly. Empirically, is this the case? Airbnb and Dropbox certainly didn't iterate on their concepts that much. Google's first shot was excellent. Facebook captured 90%+ from Harvard students before moving on to conquer the world. Are there real counterexamples, or even better, hard data? (If only YC recorded and aggregated…

Prior to September 2006, Facebook bore little resemblance to today's newsfeed-centric iteration.

Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives

#46

Post by loumf »

ntoshev wrote: post #38

PG says the first iteration doesn't matter much as long as the founders are good and iterate quickly. Empirically, is this the case? Airbnb and Dropbox certainly didn't iterate on their concepts that much. Google's first shot was excellent. Facebook captured 90%+ from Harvard students before moving on to conquer the world. Are there real counterexamples, or even better, hard data? (If only YC recorded and aggregated…

PG had a line recently like -- "we're looking for teams building BASIC for the Altair" -- an obvious reference to Microsoft. And Gates and Allen had a business before that analyzing traffic data or something.

Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives

#49

Post by stdbrouw »

brandnewlow wrote: post #42
ntoshev wrote: post #38

PG says the first iteration doesn't matter much as long as the founders are good and iterate quickly. Empirically, is this the case? Airbnb and Dropbox certainly didn't iterate on their concepts that much. Google's first shot was excellent. Facebook captured 90%+ from Harvard students before moving on to conquer the world. Are there real counterexamples, or even better, hard data? (If only YC recorded and aggregated…

Airbnb's first iteration was presented as being much more about actually renting air mattresses and couches in people's home. They iterated into ebay for spaces. Dropbox's first iteration was a one-guy team working on the problem. The founder iterated into a two-founder team based on feedback. I'd say that's a significant iteration. If you read The Facebook Effect, Facebook was simply the latest in a line of "fun hac…

Replace "iterate" with "kept working on and improving" and your comment makes just as much sense: any company, old or new, evolves and tries out new things and abandons other things that don't work — in that sense, saying iteration is crucial to startups is pretty much just a tautology.

I think PG was hinting at the fact that for startups, iterating often means pivoting, so your first iteration doesn't necessarily lock you into path dependency. Which is a lesson that doesn't really apply to Facebook or Dropbox or Google, because they got the general direction right the first time.

Re: Y Combinator's Graham Says Startups Must Improve Lives

#50

Post by dzlobin »

ihodes wrote: post #4

I'm reminded every time I watch Bloomberg I'm reminded just how high quality they are, and how intelligent their anchors are relative to any other large media corp. Additionally, Paul, thanks for being frank and great. It makes me so happy to see you as the face of not only YC, but increasingly of tech startups in general. When I get around to implementing a good idea, I've got you to look to not only for interesting…

We'll show pg & co. what they missed out on! :-)
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