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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#561

Post by jasode »

dang wrote: post #540
bmmayer1 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?

Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years. I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that com…

>, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

I appreciate your defense of that comment as it made me re-read it as charitably as possible.

That said, I think you're still overlooking some of the reasons that cause the eyerolling of it that's separate from hindsight bias.

First was the "quite trivially" phrase in the comment. That type of verbiage automatically triggers the perception of haughtiness. Imagine if someone did a Show HN of a new webcam security doorbell and a commenter said, ", you can already build such a system yourself _quite trivially_ by getting some components from DigiKey and soldering them yourself". Can you see how that sounds really dismissive?

Second, it was overlooking the idea that the YC app(lication)s are not intended to create products for Linux power users like BrandonM who can string together curlftpfs with CVS/SVN.

So for him to avoid that comment required stepping outside himself to see the perspective of non-techies. He could still dismiss Dropbox... but for different reasons related to not meeting needs of the end user mass market rather than purely base an opinion off his personal skillset.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#562

Post by [deleted] »

gustavo-fring wrote: post #431
graeme wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn’t put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a fast computer, but I’d still like to try, as there is room for surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc This may or may not work but there seems to be…

Yeah but if you found out a quicker and more efficient way to stop people from reading HN, every business would want it because their workers would stop bloviating 4 hours a day for those who know what it is, and the rest of the world would continue on ignorant of it as it always has. But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC. They're like gollu…

[deleted]

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#563

Post by thisisbrians »

borski wrote: post #274
thisisbrians wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I started my company in my early 20s and had no clue how much work it would be due to my own naïveté. Indeed, we broke the problems down and worked through them one-by-one until we had a functioning business model. On the one hand, it would be a lot harder to start over knowing what I know now about how much work it takes. On the other, it would be a lot easier because I got a lot better at problem solving and…

Yeah, I have absolutely less than zero interest in starting my last company again. That was hard, and I had no idea all of the problems I was going to run into. I'm super excited to start my next thing, though, which is surely going to be way easier! ;)

Godspeed, soldier.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#564

Post by dang »

jasode wrote: post #561
dang wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years. I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that com…

>, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here. I appreciate your defense of that comment as it made me re-read it as charitably as possible. That said, I think you're still overlooking some of the reasons that cause the eyerolling of it that's separate from hindsight bias. First was the "quite trivially" phrase in the comment. That type of ver…

Even with all of that, it's not a great example of what pg used to call a middlebrow dismissal, especially when there are so many millions of worse examples. "Quite trivially" sounds terrible out of context, but (a) he scoped it to Linux users, (b) it's clear from the downstream reply that he was speaking from experience, and (c) he immediately agreed with Drew that even that solution had drawbacks and thanked him for the technical correction. That's the behavior of someone making good conversation, not someone being haughty. A haughty dismisser would have seized the opportunity to up the snark.

> it was overlooking the idea that the YC app(lication)s are not intended to create products for Linux power users

I don't think that's an accurate reading. His Linux point was only one of three, and the other two were about the mass market. Given that he had implemented the Linux solution himself, I think the fact that he led with that point was probably more out of geeky exuberance than overlooking non-technical users.

It seems to me that in the context of 2007 all three of those points could easily have popped up in Dropbox's YC interview. Don't forget that back then, YC would sometimes fund a startup even though they didn't much believe in the idea (Airbnb famously so), because of the personal impression made by the founders. That's still the case today, and it was the case back then as well :)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#566

Post by walleeee »

UncleMeat wrote: post #283
walleeee wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Historians do history because they love their topic so much that they are willing to suffer an abusive career and low pay. Yes, incidentally people like this are probably not easily swayed by the minimally researched thoughts of a venture capitalist I hope he talks to some historians but I fear he may intuit this and avoid it, consciously or not I hope your historian friends have a habit of sharing their work with…

> I hope your historian friends have a habit of sharing their work with engineers! They do! There are growing collaborative projects between the humanities and software all over the place today.

That's cool! Always thought that would be fun to work on.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#567

Post by rmason »

One area PG missed is someone, exceedingly bright, who gets interested in a totally new field where they have little or no expertise.

Using first principles they announce a bold and crazy idea. Say like Elon Musk and rockets. Sure he read some books and recruited people with domain expertise.

If you remember his story he tried to buy Russian rockets, they didn't take him seriously because he lacked the domain experience. So he was forced to take an even greater risk and build his own rocket. Doing something previously the province of only large nation states. Still he was able to pull it off.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#568

Post by ta_ca »

merwanedr wrote: post #225

HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success. "It's too expensive" or "Nobody needs it because we have X" on a project lead by a domain expert is not constructive criticism or conservatism, it's pure envy. PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase because he has skin in the game, but because he knows what the teams have achieved and what they could potentially achieve. I don't…

there are lots of links to casey's twitter account but the real gem is[0]. it reads like the famous jurassic park quote: 'Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should'

[0]https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#569

Post by catears »

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

This is something I have thought about before when it comes to Docker. "It's just a fancy chroot" is what people often say.

While there is some truth to that statement, the real "innovation" is getting millions of people to share and collaborate using the framework. How do make it easy to share and collaborate? Making the technology as frictionless as possible.

I don't see Dockers rise to prominence as a result of some spectacular technical innovation. It's a group of technologies which already existed but now with a great UX around it.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#570

Post by quickthrower2 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #170
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of attitude seem to be very common among 'ambitious' founders, especially the YC crowd.

Historically parodied as "One day the world will understand my true genius. And then you'll all be sorry!" It's trivially easy to disprove. Just read some vintage issues of Byte to see an impressive number of not entirely crazy novel ideas from established domain experts which crashed and burned. Of course some of these ideas - a minority - turned out to be successful. But a little digging shows success was not about…

The word “idea” might be the problem. “Business plan” or “business strategy” might be better? Even “mission strategy”?

That encompasses the idea and how to get it executed and what resources are needed to get it to be sustainable, over what timescale.

This applies to business but also charity, non profit, political efforts etc.

Notice I didn’t mention profit or even revenue. These days ideas can go a long time being supported by investors who see the strategy.

For example I am thinking of YouTube, Tesla etc.

But there needs to be a strategy. Like a rocket launch or starting a campfire there might need to be different stages where the idea to the uninitiated looks very different at each stage, but it’s all part of the same master plan.

For example. Uber was a taxi firm + app at first. Peer to peer came later.

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