How to earn a billion dollars

Phew this guy hasn't had a new idea in a long time.

> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

- Paul Graham, "What We Look For in Founders"

I also want to add my own characterization.

It is my personal experience with YC founders that YC has coached them in business practices and philosophy that could be characterized less than charitably as "how to con people and get away with it."

I understand the PG doesn't believe this himself and every partner has different advice. But there is a consistent pattern of dishonesty and manipulation that is not innate to founders but taught to them directly by YC partners and it is impossible for me to square this essay with how those founders PG has coached over the last 20 years behave.

Maybe it's possible to become a billionaire without cheating. But all I know is YC won't teach you how.

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Aside, it deeply bothers me how tone deaf pg is politically. There is a meta to AOC's messaging that he's not reading, which is that wealth is unattainable for the masses and there are oligarchs in our society manipulating our systems to empower and enrich themselves. You are making a rhetorical error by attempting to debate a single sound bite instead of addressing the systemic problems that AOC and progressive democrats are voicing.

Certainly not fictional. You just haven't heard of the company that doubled every month for a year, which obviously they did because why wouldn't you?

> A couple days later I was talking to the founder of a startup I'd funded. I began by asking, as I usually do when I meet a founder, what her growth rate was. 93% last month, she said. I pointed out that this meant her net worth was also growing at 93% a month. She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate.

This is such a weird statement to see. The idea that a startup founder whose company is growing at 93% month-over-month has a net worth growing at the same rate is just so logically wrong that it's bizarre to see someone stating this.

Even putting aside the fact that "growth" can be tracked by various metrics (revenue, customers, registered users, etc.), the idea that any given "growth" rate tracks 1:1 to the paper valuation of illiquid equity in an early-stage private company is so naive to be silly.

> And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.

Delve, anyone? Startups can lie, cheat and steal, and their customers "love" them until they find out they've been duped. And let's not forget that more than a few have been accused of lying about how much "love" they really have (by misrepresenting their traction). Fake it until you raise it.

Also, this reasoning is very narrow. A company's customers might love it because it allows them to benefit from something that has external costs that disadvantage other groups, if not society at large. Cheap outsourced labor, regulatory capture, network/monopoly rents, tax shenanigans, etc.

A lot of companies also try to hack referrals, which sometimes involves using dubious tactics to get users/customers to sign up for something under questionable pretenses. In other words, people recommend products and services to their friends not solely because they love them but because they're given a personal incentive to. These can be really effective even when it's pretty obvious people are doing something that won't benefit their friends.

You would not get a billion dollars from that. Someone else would see your mill and make their own mill. A thousand other people, in fact, if there was a billion to be made, so each would get a million, or less. The intense price competition would also bring your profits to near zero.