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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Start Google

#441

Post by lupire »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #177
antisthenes wrote: post #168

This reads like it was written by an LLM trained on self-help books. Is this the guy that a lot of HNers look up to?

Yes, sadly. If you read between the lines and take his advice more as "understanding the psychology of VCs" rather than as actual advice, his essays are very useful. He has long passed the phases of a manager's life where he has to be right - he is surrounded by yes men who tell him that he is right no matter what. Matt Levine, as usual, has a great take on the phases of life of a partner/founder of a hedge fund (whi…

This is great. What Bridgewater did for Dalio's popularity rating is the same thing Twitter did for Musk's Tweet reach (and what Trump's pollsters did for his ratings).

Re: How to Start Google

#442

Post by waveBidder »

xyzelement wrote: post #434
codethatwerks wrote: post #416

What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income. I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like h…

// Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn You can use that term as a proxy for delivering large impact to the world. It's approximately the same thing. If you do something like "aged care" and "dealing with kids schools" in a way that helps millions of people, you'll end up a billionaire whether you want to or not. I don't use the term "unicorn" but I think keeping score in financial terms helps because…

But unicorns and the people who fund them are all about disconnecting from actual returns today, and caring about projected returns in 10 years. Accidentally becoming very popular is great. Aiming for that as the goal distorts the business into something unsustainable and inevitably leads to enshittification.

Re: How to Start Google

#443

Post by xhrpost »

codethatwerks wrote: post #416

What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income. I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like h…

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

Re: How to Start Google

#444

Post by emtel »

dekhn wrote: post #431
Animats wrote: post #422

1. Get into Stanford just as Stanford is getting into the VC business. 2. Use Stanford bandwidth for your web crawler. 3. See how AltaVista does it; they're in downtown Palo Alto. 4. Get 100K from the guy who founded Sun. 5. Move into the space above the bike shop in Palo Alto. (9 major startups began there.) 6. Get more funding from the guy who founded Amazon. 7. Sell search ads. 8. Profit!

Stanford was in the VC business long, long before. It's been told many times but Frank Terman set up much of the infrastructure to enable this back in the 1950s, building Stanford Research Park which housed Varian (microwaves and other RF), HP (some digital electronics stuff), and Lockheed (some bomb stuff). And that work built off the incredible investments into California infrastructure by the US military during WW…

Jeff Dean joined in 99, although perhaps his impact was so great as to be retro-causal.

Re: How to Start Google

#446

Post by mewpmewp2 »

xyzelement wrote: post #434
codethatwerks wrote: post #416

What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy. And this assumes I can afford the loss of income. I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too. I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like h…

// Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn You can use that term as a proxy for delivering large impact to the world. It's approximately the same thing. If you do something like "aged care" and "dealing with kids schools" in a way that helps millions of people, you'll end up a billionaire whether you want to or not. I don't use the term "unicorn" but I think keeping score in financial terms helps because…

But perhaps he doesn't want to make THAT much impact. Some decent impact would be fine, of course. It seems a lot of responsibility to have impact on millions of people, might lead you down the road of drugs and alcohol, killing your health to be able to handle it.

If I have a business that impacts millions of people, then every hour I spend on it, would have huge influence, and if I don't spend the hours on increasing that percentage, I'm also letting down millions of people.

Re: How to Start Google

#447

Post by dpflan »

lupire wrote: post #408
dpflan wrote: post #183

I am curious how this ethos of the 3 things you need and playfulness/not-intended-to-be-a-startup startups project is in enacted per batch. Like YC's now numerous sales operations/software companies in the past batches: 19-22 years are making email-based-crms for their friends? (I guess a batch and other batches are "friends" so goalposts shift and magically appear). The growth in sales saas companies out of YC seems…

As a VC (purchaser of startup) pg's main interest is in driving up supply of premoney startups in order to drive down price.

The YC network is quite useful for survival and evolution of startups, an economic safety net.

Re: How to Start Google

#448

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

zild3d wrote: post #308
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #219

Totally insane. 99% or more of the people who enable Google to do what Google does are employees of Google. Same with every other company. The odds of being the founder of a successful company are probably worse than being a professional sportsball player (if only because they turn over more frequently). Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful…

The essay isn't called "How to optimize your likelihood of retiring comfortably" > You can't know whether it will turn into a company worth billions or one that goes out of business. So when I say I'm going to tell you how to start Google, I mean I'm going to tell you how to get to the point where you can start a company that has as much chance of being Google as Google had of being Google.

... and that chance is essentially extremely close to zero.

People seem to think that Google is some sort of existence proof that there's a non-zero chance (and perhaps even quite a good one) of starting a company with this level of success.

And they are correct.

However, this is not the same probability at all as the chance that your company will turn out like that.

Re: How to Start Google

#449

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

zrm wrote: post #273
jakjak123 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one should argue that starting a business is high risk, mediocre reward. Most businesses just kinda trudge along, not leaving with the fairy tale returns of FAANG. Those are unicorns for a reason. Most of the businesses I've worked for, some of the founders are still working there and while they are pretty well off, they either havent sold yet (no big payday) or they made a meager sale netting them a very goo…

It's expecting the high reward which is high risk. Creating a small business that can trudge along and pay you a modest salary is fairly common.

PG's post was called "How to start Google"

Re: How to Start Google

#450

Post by dangus »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #395
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google had ads (AdWords) since 2000, only 2 years after it started existing.
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