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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

501–510 of 681 posts

Re: How to Start Google

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This advice is for 14/15 year olds. I think the advice would be different for 22-year-olds. It would be different still for 35-year-olds. 22-year-olds have a hard time selling to enterprises, 14-year-olds will find it impossible. Whereas if they build something cool that they and their friends love they will gain many of the skills that might be useful later on. PG has made the point many times that the superpower 22…

What's the super power of 35-year-olds? Arthritis?

Reduced arrogance.

Re: How to Start Google

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to my 25 and 15 year old self, my 35 (now 40) self is a lot wiser in terms of dealing with people, applying humility and being crisp on the wide gulf between "what I find is worth doing at the moment" and "what's valuable." I think these are all hugely valuable and serve me well.

LLMs are increasingly good at your 40 year old soft social skills like humility, so don't bank on that being worth much very long.

Man even once AI takes all our jobs or whatever there's still gonna be 8 billion people wandering around. We're still gonna need to talk to each other.

Re: How to Start Google

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor. Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside. Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now. No…

Creating something from scratch is so much easier today than it ever was, and I’ve been creating crap for decades now. All the fancy JavaScript crap is purely optional. You can still write something in CGI if you want. My last prototype I wrote with Vue and JQuery and as pure html and .js files. It was an absolute blast! And the users loved it! Have you tested streamlit? FastAPI? Everything is so easy now.

I agree.

I think the parent poster was referring to how much noise there is, and I'd agree. The moment you start learning, just the fanciest stuff is shoved down your throat. So you just assume its the best and roll with it.

I find myself tinkering more with PHP now that I've been using js for the past 7 years.

Re: How to Start Google

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's giving advice to school kids on what to do during their remaining school years or early college years.

As long as Paul Graham doesn't tell the truth that most if not all school kids won't ever make the next Google, then I'm okay with influencers (like Paul Graham, for instance) lying about the possibility of enormous opportunities being available to people.

I think high schoolers are smart enough to know that he's not literally saying "do this and you'll start the next Google".

Re: How to Start Google

#505
post #499

YMMV The happiest entrepreneurs I know got advanced degrees, had a solid career, developed plenty of contacts, then launched something in their 30s or 40s with substantially less risk than taking a punt on knowing what problems were worth solving while at University, or taking a punt on finding the right person to start a company with while at University, or taking a punt on having the wide range of skills required t…

What is YMMV?

Re: How to Start Google

#506
post #499

YMMV The happiest entrepreneurs I know got advanced degrees, had a solid career, developed plenty of contacts, then launched something in their 30s or 40s with substantially less risk than taking a punt on knowing what problems were worth solving while at University, or taking a punt on finding the right person to start a company with while at University, or taking a punt on having the wide range of skills required t…

What is YMMV?

Your Mileage May Vary.

Re: How to Start Google

#507
post #499

YMMV The happiest entrepreneurs I know got advanced degrees, had a solid career, developed plenty of contacts, then launched something in their 30s or 40s with substantially less risk than taking a punt on knowing what problems were worth solving while at University, or taking a punt on finding the right person to start a company with while at University, or taking a punt on having the wide range of skills required t…

What is YMMV?

your mileage may vary, meaning that point from the essay doesn't apply uniformly

Re: How to Start Google

#508
post #431

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…

> Stanford was in the VC business long, long before...

Not at scale. In the 1980s, Stanford's biggest IP revenue came from FM synthesis for musical instruments. In 1991, Stanford started up the Stanford Management Company to manage the endowment. Offices were on Sand Hill Road, out by the venture capitalists. That worked out very well. Enough so that SMC became the tail that wagged the dog. But that's a long story.

Re: How to Start Google

#509

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…

Same boat here.

I would suggest using your network and consider a path of least resistance such as building a side-business while working that either solves niche enterprise problems or makes enterprise capabilities more manageable for small businesses.

Starting a business is really easy. The bullshit that every business needs to do isn't particularly magical or mysterious. Don't get too invested in the bureaucratization process, but also be sure to implement what needs to happen just in time.

Find cofounders from your friends and coworkers, and go to startup events. Find people who you respect and who respect you, have integrity, and are the most fun. It's important to find people who don't turn into arrogant SOBs or raging sociopaths when large sums of money become involved. Honesty, awareness, navigating/prioritizing ambiguity, and conflict resolution skills are damn important.

Avoid external funding if at all possible unless it unblocks time-to-market that would otherwise miss market time or grow too slowly to survive. (Growing slower is often easier and more sustainable!)

Have sensible cost controls that are pennywise and poundwise.

If not changing the world or building a startup per se, focus on building a business that something people want. ;@] Expect it to take 20x longer, 50x more effort, and 4x more money than you think.

Re: How to Start Google

#510

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. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor. Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside. Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now. No…

> Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

The Oxide route is one of the better approaches for backend. "Apple" of enterprise OSS, but I think their ambitions are too small. Prefab containers full of seamless and modular amounts of each food groups: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, HDD, interconnect, and uplink all in and managed. Not rack-up but dirt-up and totally managed offering IAM, VMs, 12factor PAAS, serverless, volumes, and object storage with multitenancy, accounting, security, data lifecycle, config management, appropriate redundancy, and other cross-cutting concerns harmonized in a way that is necessarily managed but sufficiently customizable.

Frontend, the trick is standardizing on the least fragile tools that are widely used enough. Churn on tools and dependencies is a distraction and a time waster.

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