Paul Graham - The Record Label Executive

I really like this article. It has an opinion, bit sarcastic and tells a good story and totally misses the point. Lets start using the music industry analogy.

Firstly all the guys trying out in the contest are mostly musicians. Musicians that can firstly have enough skill to play instruments, have the youth, energy and attitude to create their own tunes and sound. They come from a different era of their predecessors. Turned off by the gimmicky clothes, fancy hairdo's and makeup of binary boys of the 80's and 90's.

More important they are students of music. They have a band, can play their own music but are missing something. Not talent, not ideas (well mostly) but the knowledge and chance to play a good gig and record and commercialise. Do they sell out and re-create the cheesy sounds of the middle of the road Windbag Recording studios? Do they defect to the artsy experimental Sol Records?

No. They know in their heart there is a new sound. More importantly they know there is a growing audience that is looking for a new sound. A new sound that says, "screw you record companies. we can do it for ourselves. we don't care what you think... %$ush off &!@(^@!!! " And so begins the bad-boy image.

Now lets look at the exec. He's a Rollins type guy. Had quite a few hits way back and understands the music industry. More importantly whats wrong with it. There is a gap. A big gap. All the suits are funding bands with mega-dollars for wardrobe, explosions and experimental albums with 27 minute guitar solos.

So along with a few other band members and roadies they create a company and hatch a plan to blow the other record companies and distributors out of the water. By reducing the cost to sign, nurture and release unknown bands and make some profit at the same time nurturing talent. Something the big boys have seem to have forgotten.

Thats right unknown bands. Untested, talented, raw and more importantly ones that want to succeed at all costs with an attitude that makes the older more established bands sneer at the youngsters. With their clunky looking instruments, ripped t-shirts and shorts and attitude. They sneer also because they realise, these youngsters can do what they cannot do. Faster, with less money still managing to listen to their audience and evolve where required.

Then one has a hit. Others in the label start getting serious airplay. The suits take notice and a new sound is created.

Sound fanciful? Well I'm really just re-telling the story of punk-music. A movement that smashed the pomposity of the glam-rock 70's and while short lived and patchy allowed a core group of musicians to succeed where they otherwise they could not have. In the process giving us Lou Reed, Pretenders, Romones, Blondie, Pattie Smith, Talking Heads etc.

YC is that anti-establishment incarnation of punk music in software. Long live 'minimalism, speed, and arrogance' ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_music#Early_history

By the time you get to the actual contract, the deal is a complicated 40-page mess that could very well be screwing the artists using a variety of different tricks. [2]

The YC teams can confirm or deny this, but from everything I've read, the terms are quite clear and straightforward. The basic exchange is funding and support for shares in the company, though there may be some relevant adjustments on an individual basis. Participants understand the deal before they have to agree to it, and so far basically always decide it's a win-win. PG is not a lackey for some larger organization, and doesn't try to confuse young companies and trick/coerce them into signing bad deals.

[1] http://negativland.com/albini.html - Semi-Rant about the situation from the guy who produced Nirvana's "In Uetero"

[2] http://www.music-law.com/contractbasics.html - Article about Music Contracts

This whole article seems to be based on a misunderstanding of why Reddit succeeded. It looks so simple; therefore it must have succeeded merely because I promoted it. But everything simple looks easy in hindsight. If it was so easy, why didn't anyone do it before? Technically it was possible to build 10 years ago.

(And no, Reddit didn't copy Digg. The founders of Reddit didn't know about Digg when they started, and the two derive from different sources. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of editors. Reddit is Del.icio.us/popular driven by voting instead of bookmarking.)