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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Start Google

#511

Post by antisthenes »

gizmo wrote: post #405
antisthenes wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, those pesky setbacks like getting injured, working yourself to death and running out of money so you can't feed yourself. If only people tried for real. In my experience people most likely to write this are trust fund babies who neglect to mention they're getting essentially a stipend from their parents to take care of all their life necessities, so they can "try for real". Whatever that means.

What I have seen is that people who don't quit eventually become pretty successful. Some people have to quit because of health reasons or other unfortunate circumstances. But in the overwhelming majority of cases people just get demoralized. 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but today I don't.

> 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but today I don't.

On that point, I'll agree with you. 20 years ago I would have said you're flat out wrong, but today, I'd say you have a valid point in that too many people give up after the first few failures (or never even try enough to get to a failure point)

Re: How to Start Google

#513

Post by Solvency »

adventured wrote: post #479
Solvency wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not every company can become a Google, but a Google can come from any incredibly wealthy, well-connected, elite nepo baby."

> but a Google can come from any incredibly wealthy, well-connected, elite nepo baby A math teacher and researcher's son, a middle class immigrant from third world Soviet Russia. Or: the middle class son of a professor of computer science and an instructor of programming. Such privilege. /s "Elite nepo baby" applies to anyone that ever accomplishes anything these days huh.

Quoting Jim Koen:

"His dad wasn't "just" a computer scientist, he was a professor for computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. Sergey Brin's father was equally a professor in mathematics at the University of Maryland. > It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn well near as engineered with data as it could be. They also were _insanely_ well connected through their and their parents academic career. Both Sergey and Larry had obtained their PhD prior to starting the company. I can also remember reading that they obtained significant amounts of funding through connections Larry's dad had into the industry. You can ignore the rest of my comment, what follows is just my take. Their success story is imo one of the most blatant examples on how privilege really does give you a boost in life. I am not arguing that anyone could have done it, but I do wonder how the world would look like if we were all kids of academics with a successful career, with a relatively safe, secure and stable childhood home and a family background that really incentivizes learning and academic success over succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income at some point."

Re: How to Start Google

#514

Post by landryraccoon »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #456
landryraccoon wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental disagreement I have with the post is the idea that you're foolish for doing something because it probably won't pan out. So what? Why be so terrified of failure? I think it's better if kids learn to be brave, and pick themselves up in life after they stumble. Living life in utter fear of failing at anything seems like a terrible way for your children to start off life. Besides for which few things are…

My call was not that you're foolish for doing something because it won't pan out. It was that it is foolish to tell/teach/encourage people to expect that things like "start Google" have any reasonable likelihood of succeeding. And it is even worse when that encourages people to fail to organize, vote, protest, push for better work and better working conditions for everybody who are not founders of unicorns.

> And it is even worse when that encourages people to fail to organize, vote, protest, push for better work and better working conditions for everybody who are not founders of unicorns.

You've lost me here. How does working at a startup make it any more difficult to do this than working at a bank or hospital? For that matter, would you discourage someone from pursuing basic research at a university or a doctorate degree because that doesn't directly advance a political agenda?

Re: How to Start Google

#515

Post by Dalewyn »

dools wrote: 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…

>The real way to start Google is to be smart, hard working and incredibly lucky. IMHO the best way to start a company is to be smart, hard working and patient.

Reward requires effort, but effort does not guarantee reward.

It's a fact of life that we really should teach our kids instead of the nonsense that effort will be rewarded.

Re: How to Start Google

#516

Post by ojbyrne »

adrianN wrote: post #184
tomhoward wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're very early (and/or very lucky), you can't get "rich" (i.e., can choose never to work again and can invest in many other things) as an employee (though of course a highly-paid employee can become very well off and comfortable). Yes you need to be lucky to get super-rich as a founder too, but you have a lot more control, i.e., you make the primary decisions that determine whether the company will make goo…

A SF engineer pulling something like 300k can definitely retire before the age of 60.

Many of them might be on their second or third layoff by 50.

Re: How to Start Google

#517

Post by ojbyrne »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #165
tomhoward wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're very early (and/or very lucky), you can't get "rich" (i.e., can choose never to work again and can invest in many other things) as an employee (though of course a highly-paid employee can become very well off and comfortable). Yes you need to be lucky to get super-rich as a founder too, but you have a lot more control, i.e., you make the primary decisions that determine whether the company will make goo…

Even very early these days won't get you much. Just a bit of a lump sum you could apply to your 401k/RRSP or whatever and inch you ahead by 5-10 years on retirement. If you got it early enough in your life (20s, 30s) that it can gain interest. VCs and founders are writing stock option agreements these days with very low ownership stakes for even very early employees. Back in the early y2ks, and late 90s, yes, you cou…

That whole extended ZIRP thing wasn’t great for interest on savings.

Re: How to Start Google

#518

Post by swyx »

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!

> 9 major startups began there

which?

Re: How to Start Google

#519

Post by nicoburns »

llm_trw wrote: post #492
ramraj07 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Today if I were to write a cgi script it would have to send json payloads to the JS front end because round trip latency on phones is between 100 to 500ms to hit a dns server. I was getting lower latency on dialup in 1996. On my desktop it's 2ms on a bad day. You can't just use HTML because browsers have mutated to fat clients for a X like protocol which is a mishmash of html, css, js, and whatever else someone's dec…

You absolutely can just use HTML. You're writing this on HN that just uses HTML and is one of the more responsive websites on mobile connections.

You can't make as rich an interavtive experience as you can with JS, but you never could.

Re: How to Start Google

#520

Post by radicalriddler »

Wanting to read PG articles while working was one of the reasons I started up a project called WebToSpeech[0]. It's not a startup, it's more just a project I created so I could listen to articles while working. I thought about making it a startup, hence the dicky landing page, but didn't have time.

It's not open to sign ups or anything (blocked in Supabase), so this isn't really trying to be a marketing exercise, the idea about joy projects just resonated with me.

If you want to listen to the generated audio (really it just custom parses a web page and sends it off to azure), I've uploaded it to a public Cloudflare R2 bucket[1]. It's not perfect, I haven't fully configured the SSML to treat quotes correct, and I'm adding weird breaks in between normal text and anchors, but... it's a project :).

[0] https://www.webtospeech.app/

[1] https://publicmedia.webtospeech.app/b3dc8034-c2f4-4835-afe8-...

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