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How to Start Google

paulgraham.com

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581–590 of 681 posts

Re: How to Start Google

#581

Post by solatic »

ranman wrote: post #527

> Don't try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most. This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.

Depends on how you measure individual outcomes. Arguably, a life lived passionately is the best individual outcome, even if it doesn't result in you becoming rich. Maybe that's a privileged thing to say, and certainly if someone following their passions is staring down the barrel of poverty then they might want to rebalance in favor of their financial health, but in the absence of dire financial circumstances, passion is a good compass to follow. Certainly many people volunteer their time for causes they are passionate about, with no expectation of financial reward, and are happier for doing so.

What PG is noting is that sometimes (even if rarely), what an individual is passionate about can also be good for investors. But the passion comes first.

Re: How to Start Google

#582

Post by keiferski »

benreesman wrote: post #575
keiferski wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching videos on YouTube is in no way comparable to going to a quality university, being around likeminded ambitious young people, and interacting with professors and researchers directly.

That's not the comparison I was making. I said consuming a meticulously curated list of the best university lectures on any topic delivered by an extremely rare breed (unparalleled research professors who are also competent as educators) is a better way to consume university lectures and requires a phone and $15.99/month. I furthermore said that Grant of 3Blue1Brown fame and others inspired by him (Richard Behial, Se…

The advice about university is extremely dangerous in 2024 for anyone without a privileged upbringing because university is a far inferior place to learn things than YouTube videos aggregating all the best university lectures in history with the even more effective education style pioneered by Grant with 3blue1brown.

I was replying to this. I don’t find this “offensive”, I find it misleading and untrue. Maybe some tiny percentage of people will prefer sitting at home watching YouTube videos to the experience of attending a top college. For everyone else, the university is a better choice, not least because you’ll build a better network.

Not everyone wants to sit at home alone and watch videos. I’m not sure why that is difficult to understand.

Re: How to Start Google

#583

Post by eggdaft »

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…

Sounds like you might want to start a lifestyle business. You should read and listen to everything by Rob Walling, especially his “stair step approach”. Wish someone had told me this at your stage.

For meeting founders, find someone in the area you’re interested in and build stuff with them. Also consider using the YC founder network, but they may be too ambitious for you.

Lifestyle businesses are probably less dependent on cofounders for success.

You’ll need to work hard at your tech skills if they’ve atrophied. The good news is, this part is incredibly fun.

Re: How to Start Google

#584

Post by fuzzfactor »

dangus wrote: post #450
fuzzfactor wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those were the best years.

Re: How to Start Google

#586

Post by [deleted] »

bruce511 wrote: post #528
emseetech wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less startup, more starting a business. The older I get the less I want to build a startup and more I want to start a business. Something that takes a little bit of capital, lots of hard work, gets some customers and provides goods or services, without venture capital firms and 100x returns and everything that comes with that, just a standard business. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1SLHEC98I

As you get older it becomes harder to start a business, simply because of financial concerns. As a just-graduated poor student I was used to living on practically nothing. By 40 I had a mortgage, kids, wife etc. The penalty-for-failure at that age is substantial. When I stopped getting a salary in my 20s my wife was earning so we just lived on her salary. That lasted a few years until the new business found its niche…

[deleted]

Re: How to Start Google

#587

Post by epolanski »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #578
bruce511 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you get older it becomes harder to start a business, simply because of financial concerns. As a just-graduated poor student I was used to living on practically nothing. By 40 I had a mortgage, kids, wife etc. The penalty-for-failure at that age is substantial. When I stopped getting a salary in my 20s my wife was earning so we just lived on her salary. That lasted a few years until the new business found its niche…

This is true if you require the same amount of income to maintain your lifestyle, but if you've been working in tech for 20 years, you have savings. I'm not in my 40s yet, but it's much more viable for me to take a risk now than it was when I was just starting out because I can afford to fail for a couple years without, you know, becoming homeless.

This so much.

I'm 36 and I can afford to not work for many years with my savings.

It's definitely easier now for me.

Re: How to Start Google

#588

Post by ToJans »

esalman wrote: post #565
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…

I agree, it is damaging especially when you don't have a wealthy relative to fall back on. I spent 3 years trying to keep a startup afloat after graduating from college. Most of my peers own a (some of them multiple) house now. I have 75k in my savings.

I have a somewhat comparable history: I've taken a decade to get to the point where my bootstrapped SaaS ARR income is about to surpass my full-time consulting income.

It has taken about a decade of switching back and forth between consulting and working on the SaaS until I run out of money. Some consulting stints took a few months, others a few years, depending on our needs.

As I grew older, our needs and risk aversion in the family increased, so I just took on longer or more financially interesting consulting assignments, to grow a bigger buffer and allocate some extra assets.

I'm quite sure that, if I had just been consulting the last 15 years, I would already have been able to retire (owning more real estate and other assets).

However, my life would have been very different, and every single time I took on an ad interim assignment, I noticed the impact of my SaaS building experience was a big plus for my consulting assignments...

I'm not saying it's all rainbows & unicorns - building a SaaS is romanticized a lot, but IME it's an infinite game that requires a lot of grit, and as you grow you move the goal posts, so you're always in "hard" mode -, but I beg to differ that it has led to a more interesting life for me personally, as I tend to get bored quickly.

I have a few friends that built, sold, and could retire, but every single one of them has started building something new...

You need to love playing the game and be willing to sacrifice things, as the odds are typically against you.

To quote Simon Sinek "The only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself." [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/simonsinek/status/1433808001375277080?t=...

Re: How to Start Google

#589

Post by benreesman »

keiferski wrote: post #582
benreesman wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the comparison I was making. I said consuming a meticulously curated list of the best university lectures on any topic delivered by an extremely rare breed (unparalleled research professors who are also competent as educators) is a better way to consume university lectures and requires a phone and $15.99/month. I furthermore said that Grant of 3Blue1Brown fame and others inspired by him (Richard Behial, Se…

The advice about university is extremely dangerous in 2024 for anyone without a privileged upbringing because university is a far inferior place to learn things than YouTube videos aggregating all the best university lectures in history with the even more effective education style pioneered by Grant with 3blue1brown. I was replying to this. I don’t find this “offensive”, I find it misleading and untrue. Maybe some ti…

This remains a bundling of two levers that we at one time tangentially related, but have sharply diverged: learning difficult topics in a deep and time-efficient way, and building a potent network.

It's all but universally acknowledged that technology represents the highest-leverage tool in the arsenal of getting things done in a leveraged way and this includes learning difficult topics in a time-efficient way.

The best universities (in the modern sense of the word) face and pretty much always faced a stark tradeoff between a faculty that were exceptional regarding novel research, and faculty that were chosen on the basis of educational outcomes, there's even a term for it: "teaching professor". Excellent researchers at the cutting edge of their field are only competent educators by coincidence, they're at a minimum different competencies, and arguably pull in opposite or at least different directions. Many of the best academic researchers in the world teach in some country where they learned the language they teach in late in life: every undergraduate in STEM has professors they struggle to even understand via verbal communication (people that smart can generally master written communication in another language far more easily than verbal communication).

There are better lectures (even restricting the field to e.g. MIT OCW) online and social interaction in a lecture is, with a few exceptions, disruptive and frowned upon. And even if someone wants to listen to a university lecture in person, universities generally have a formal or informal mechanism for non-students to attend them without any acceptance criteria or a staggering bill at the end.

The networking that happens at a top school is difficult to the point of being nearly impossible to achieve any other way.

I'm only interested in having this conversation if you're willing to address those points individually rather than as an atomic unit: they are not an atomic unit.

Re: How to Start Google

#590

Post by _xivi »

ranman wrote: post #527

> Don't try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most. This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.

> This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.

Actually, PG advice is solid. Trying to guess the next big thing is not a winning strategy. More so for teenagers who lack a lot of skills including good judgement. Even if their guess was guaranteed spot-on, and the universe was rooting for you, once the cat is out of the bag, what advantage would a 15 years old have? They don't have any war chest or connections to survive.

If the goal is to optimize the individual's outcome, outside working towards a stable 9-5 career, their best bet is indeed building projects they're passionate about and utilizing the skills they gain in their next endeavour.

One way to waste your life is being constantly distracted by which industry is more profitable or has more potential, doubting yourself and switching context.

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