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A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

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Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#61

Post by raincole »

sonicshadow wrote: post #21
mattlondon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think there is a lot of sentiment that these ideas/founders are somehow unique and that if those people didn't do anything with those ideas then something like Airbnb or Reddit or Dropbox wouldn't have ever happened. I think people need to be realistic - none of those are particularly ground breaking ideas, as evidenced by the fact that there are countless competitors and in many cases even predecessors that w…

Until I joined HN I wasn't aware that all these tech companies deserve the same rareified air as core scientific research. The real world barely thinks about Airbnb and how it's "revolutionized the world for a narrow slice of remote tech workers that want to rent a house in Mexico for a month".

If anything "the real world" (read: average people) don't care about core scientific research either. Maybe when they or their parents get ill they care about medical research, but that's all. Try to pick any Nobel physics nominees in past 50 years and explain why their work is important to average people.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#62

Post by groby_b »

brigadier132 wrote: post #46
tiedieconderoga wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple: capex and economies of scale. Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not $50/. I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house. Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're looking at 7-8 figures. If you a…

> I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house. I wasn't thinking of this from the perspective of a hardware startup but a software startup which doesn't require either of those things. I should qualify my original post with that. You don't need to be independently wealthy to launch a software business on your own provided you have the ability to buil…

Kind reminder that starting a software business still requires you to, you know, live and stuff :)

Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think about shutting down.

If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your business might be a good idea. (You'll still have depleted a good chunk of your savings, and it's not like the world comes with profit guarantees)

Investment buys runway, opex, and scale. Some businesses need that, some don't. Software work reduces the opex load (for many attempts), but scale and runway might still be necessary.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#63

Post by timewasterthrow »

anileated wrote: post #5

I want to start a company, but will not. The main reason why the existence of YC does not change this is because I know my idea, even if I go all in, does not promise explosive growth on par with Airbnbs of this world, and therefore is not attractive to investment. It does have the potential to eventually become a lifestyle business, though, which would be good enough for me. Unfortunately, I guess it will have to wa…

I have used this excuse in one way or another for 15 years, over several iterations. I made great money in sales, so was able to step away every few years to tackle the great startup lifestyle businesses I have.

The #1 rule I have now, and advice I have for you is, if your idea does not pull at you so strongly to work on it on whatever 'spare time' you have (aka, time you make for it by ignoring other non main job related things), then DO not quit your job to make time. And do not think you will work on it when you retire. Most people just wont.

Unless your idea/business naturally grows to the point where you are spending SO much time on it that you can basically not function while having your job due to sleep deprivation, do not quit your job thinking you will do the work then or you'll have the skill/ability to get it to that point if only you had more time.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#64

Post by darkclouds »

> was a discovery about who could do great work, how to find them, and how to massively raise their ambition.

It sounds great, but life doesnt work like that, which is why besides finance, YC's main attribute, law and medicine also exists.

Some people get radicalised before they even start school, just watch the news every day to see whats going on and see where people are getting radicalised.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#65

Post by timewasterthrow »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #3

It sounds good. But it kind of reminds me of High School Football or Basketball Players (choose a high paying professional sport). Who bank their whole future on focusing on one thing that is Super-Low-Percentage-Of-Success-High-Paying-Job. How many football players skip their education, and then DON'T make it? Where do they end up. Now, think Joe Blow Computer Science Major, is NOT going to be a Millionaire, but a d…

Peoples say the odds are ultra low, and talk a lot of young people out of trying. I played freshman football. I was ok. I'm 6'4", smart enough to get into Cal MechE, decently capable physically and grow muscle easily and have never been injured in my life basically even though I ride dirtbikes. My dad got me to give up on football.

Later I found out that if you look at all highschool players that play all 4 years, the odds of making it are about 0.1% or 1 in 1000. That includes tons of players that are basically playing casually and not really physically the right body type to make it.

If you make it to college football, something that I could have somewhere with my academics and size, the odds are about 1 in 100. At that point you can argue that just about everyone is physically capable of potentially making it, just missing the skill. But take away those that are playing still just to play with no plans of going further and thus train about that way (I'd argue thats about half of them), that means that 1 in 50 serious football players at the college level can make it.

If my dad had told me that with my size and decent brain I had about 1 in 50 chance of making it, I would have stuck with it. Even if I failed, I would have learned a lot from the team work and gotten a lot of value from the comradery IMO. Instead I studied a lot more, passed some AP tests, and got some boring as hell mech engineering degree.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#66

Post by snapplebobapple »

dang wrote: post #32
snapplebobapple wrote: post #4

Kind of wish hackernews would screen newly registered domain names and tell people to post again when their domain is over 30 days old...

We'd need to go over the list of submissions from such domains in order to see how many good ones were in there. As frustrating as the mediocre median is, it's more important to not lose good articles than it is to avoid bad ones.

Yah I wasn't commenting on the quality of the post. I was just annoyed because I've been hit a bunch of times recently by seeing something I wanted to read and being blocked by work dns policies (since domains less than 30 days old make up a huge portion of malware/scam attack domains). Would rather wait 30 days to see it in my hacker news feed or see a link to a twitter summary that then links to the newly created domain website so I can at least get a longer form summary before I am disappointed by my inability to see it.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#67

Post by btilly »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #34
btilly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hit rate in the article is almost 1/4. That's a lot better than high school sports. The fallback if you don't succeed is called "programmer". And no, programmers don't need college degrees if they have real world experience. I've known a lot of very successful programmers with no college degree at all.

Not if the denominator is all Computer Science students who may think of dropping out of school when seeing these success stories. And The days of hacking something together and getting a job are kind of dwindling if not gone. The days of self learning, and showing skill isn't really as prevalent anymore. Sure, it was like that during 90-2000's. But these days, not so much.

If what you said was true, coding bootcamps would require you to have a college degree.

They don't require it. And still place people without degrees at all sorts of companies.

Maybe you are somewhere that it is required. But in general, it really is not.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#68

Post by dmvdoug »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #50
eshack94 wrote: post #18

Feels like someone's trying to sell me something.

Most things are ads, but especially this. I like the list of sites in as success stories. I find the majority of them absolutely awful for humanity.

Yet it got put in the same sentence as Bell Labs. First sign for me not to take it seriously.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#69

Post by tehsauce »

> If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit…

This comparison made me chuckle. It seems to highlight how yc is different from an organization focused on scientific research rather than how it is similar.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#70

Post by amelius »

tehsauce wrote: post #69

> If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit… This comparison made me chuckle. It seems to highlight how yc is different from an organization focused on scientific research rather than how it is similar.

The only principle they follow is: "if you throw a shitton of money at any given problem, you can corner a market!"
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