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How Not to Die (2007)

paulgraham.com

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Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#51

Post by capitol_ »

burtonator wrote: post #44
perfunctory wrote: post #21

> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I g…

Commitment device... they're really interesting but they can also cause you to do stupid things. One example of a commitment device is to tell your friend something like "I'm going to write a book and get it published in six months and if I don't I'll give you $5k" ... the problem is, what if you legitimately decide that writing a book is just not for you?

Then you accept that and pay your friend the $5k. No need to loose a friend just because you don't want to write a book.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#53

Post by samatman »

burtonator wrote: post #44
perfunctory wrote: post #21

> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I g…

Commitment device... they're really interesting but they can also cause you to do stupid things. One example of a commitment device is to tell your friend something like "I'm going to write a book and get it published in six months and if I don't I'll give you $5k" ... the problem is, what if you legitimately decide that writing a book is just not for you?

$5k is a high strike price, but this is the point of a commitment device.

By putting a cost on failure, you can sort between "I genuinely no longer want to do this" and "I'm getting akrasia because doing things is hard and quitting is easy".

If you've made the cost of walking away higher than the expected value of the commitment (five grand would be a lot of money to make on many books), you should have some strong, intrinsic reason for it.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#55

Post by kbenson »

andygcook wrote: post #26

For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you. When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death. Can someone at YC comment on if this is still a good proxy for startup failure? From a personal perspective, we'v…

> but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors

I think that's a lot of your answer right there. The companies that don't respond, don't articulate a plan and get feedback on it, or perhaps additional help. It's not that companies that keep communication open won't fail, but the ones that don't keep it open do (according to this).

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#56

Post by bennyelv »

jessmartin wrote: post #3

I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup ( https://first.io ). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!" In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"

It's a pretty meaningless piece of advice if you're not going to be able to pay your rent/mortgage this month because the funding has run out.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#57

Post by cdelsolar »

MetalGuru wrote: post #30

The biggest issue with the article is clearly correlation vs. causation. He admits to it. I think this advice can be dangerous for someone sacrificing a great deal for a startup that has a extremely low probability of success because “PG says I’ll be a millionaire as long as I just don’t let my startup die”

I mean, pivoting is a thing, it doesn't mean you gave up.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#58

Post by maxlamb »

I think this essay was valid for the year it was written (2007) where much fewer people were doing startups, lots of good ideas had not been executed yet, mobile was about to take off. Just like the belief in 2007 that "real estate prices can never go down" lead to the real estate bubble/crash that eventually invalidated that statement, if everyone starts beleiving if they start a company and never give up they will become rich even if their idea is bad, will end up invalidating that very belief.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#59

Post by bitL »

perfunctory wrote: post #21

> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I g…

That could work only in certain parts of the US; in Europe or Asia a single failure is often terminal.

Re: How Not to Die (2007)

#60

Post by excalibur »

> When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper.

This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of Silicon Valley.

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