How to Avoid Distractions and Start the Right Company | Hacker News Reader

How to Avoid Distractions and Start the Right Company

atrium.co

123 pointsjustin53 comments

I honestly do not gain anything from articles like this. They are so abstract that when it comes down to an actual actionable information - it doesn't apply anymore. It is sort of like reading one of those fluffy "How to become a millionaire" advice books. Nothing of substance comes out of it and they do not work for me.

I recently watched Sam Altman's MIT lecture [1] on Youtube about startup advice for hard tech companies. It was such a waste of time.

Instead, I find it much more informative and educational to read and watch stories about how a specific company was formed. Each story is unique and the just goes to show that each startup has unique challenges. There is so much to learn from these stories and their mistakes. For example, watch the SolidWorks founder presenting at Harvard about their initial marketing/pricing phase [2]. It is absolutely fascinating.

Reading generalized abstract fluff bothers me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7HyWFJMAxg [2] https://youtu.be/t-EaWM8miHw

These think pieces are meant to reinforce Altman's image as a tech industry theorist a la pg. It's really just advertising. But he's not nearly as good at it as pg was.

All his stuff are fluff pieces, it's like listening to a pitch coach. I have no idea why people see him as an authoritative figure in this space, when all he had was 1 failed start up.

I know it's not his fault per se, but YC has had a horrible track record since he joined, too.

Do you think it would have been any different if pg was in charge? I don't.

I think it's rather that the 'low hanging fruit' are all gone. The whole mood has changed. It's become harder. Notice for example that YC places a lot of importance on growth when evaluating applicants, I think in early stages you could've had practically zero users of your product and they would have considered you -- now, not so much.

Secondly, there hasn't been enough time to see what his track record really is, we'll need a few years to really see.

That's fair. The seed industry itself has been really tough, and that's exacerbated since much of the growth since then has been in China. YC certainly has had a hand in a few of the companies that have done well, but it doesn't look good. I think people are mostly interested in hearing advice from very successful entrepreneurs and investors.

They are just part of the signaling echo chamber now. No gutsy calls. When I started reading HN in 2010, it was all information about early stage tech. PG was saying that founders can lead companies all the way and that founders should have the power.

Now they do... YC is just an average investor now with more scale. The next gutsy call or intuition is simply not there with the current team.

HN is a news site and I enjoy it for that, but the community has been moved to a private network and the current YC team is more focused on looking good than doing anything innovative.

What is the name of the private network?

IDK, all the CEOs of their companies have a separate platform.

It's called BookFace, and is a private social network-style platform for YC alumni.

In some ways they are more gutsy now. Under PG it was mostly people writing some software. Now they have supersonic jets and nuclear fusion. How that works out I don't know.

Also Flexport's good. Think they're under Altman?

The businesses they fund have been interesting (in flexport's case great), but far from gutsy given that they are only putting $150ksh per business.

What I mean by gutsy is having a view that is at least slightly contrarian and then executing on that view. There is nothing contrarian about making power law investments. That is standard for any large seed/angel/A series investor. The ones that don't do that don't make any money.

I don't know much about him.

What I do know is that listening stories directly from the founders is much more authoritative, informative and educational than listening to it from the investor's standpoint. Founders go through the stuff. Of course, investor's have their own stories which can be informative if they talk about specifics, not abstract things.

I just wish there was a way for people to share about their failed startups. Now, THAT would be truly educational. Majority of failed startups disappear without founders sharing their learnings and that knowledge is forever lost.

Because he has had a privileged view of more modern style tech startups than almost anyone else writing about the subject.

I like that he is willing to offer generalized advice, even though that is his job. He has one failure, that's one more failure than most of the people listening to his advice, and counts as experience.

The more and more I read on Altman, the more and more it feels like fluff and snake oil.

Stanford dropout, a major failed startup, pretty much kinda "failed" into the position he is in today.

He doesn't add value at all.

Edit: This was flagged as "a personal attack" apparently.

This is a pretty ridiculous series of statements, especially if you count YC as a mid-stage startup when he joined (which it was).

If you add up all of the successful YC companies since he started leading YC, it's a pretty breathtaking number (the count, the valuations, and the value created). YC was having pretty serious scaling problems when he took the reins-- from my understanding, he resolved those pretty effectively. YC's growth since he's been leading it (in a lot of directions) has been impressive-- full-stop.

That crosses into personal attack, and you can't post like that here. I work with Sam, so normally would intervene less in such a case—but you can't post like that here about anybody. Some rules need enforcing across the board and this is one of the main ones, so please don't do it again.

Edit: it looks like we've warned you repeatedly about making personal attacks in the past. That is the sort of thing we ban accounts for doing repeatedly, so please don't.

How exactly is this a personal attack? It's my observation plus publicly known information. No name calling or any harm mentioned toward him. I believe this content, and others, is empty, fluff, and of little actual value.

We're allowed to disagree with Altman, even on HN.

"He doesn't add value at all" is obviously a personal putdown.

(It's also obviously wrong, since there's no way Sam would be running YC after 4 years if it were true. But we don't moderate people for being wrong, only for breaking the site guidelines. Please (re-)read them at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

A lot of his talks and writing are like this. Fluffy, hand-wavy; but nothing you can actually do anything with. But that's not what he's good at - he's good at being an airbag. Which, while cynical is not an invaluable lesson what works.

I agree, I don't find much value in these things. I suspect that for a certain audience, however, there is a lot of value (perhaps for people that have rarely been exposed to such concepts).

Our of curiosity: is your real name Enrico Fermi, or are you simply a fan (that would be my guess) and decided to use it as your HN username?

I stay anonymous on HN. Not because I want to hide my personal views, but to ensure I can communicate freely without obstruction and personal liability.

The annoying pop-up over the content appeared just as I started reading "beware the distractions" so I closed the tab. Good advice.

I did the exact same thing...

Wait a second, you don't want more of this "high quality", "totally-not-retread", "seriously-not-trying-to-get-you-to-sign-up-for-our-lawfirm" content that Sam Altman assures us is as much of a must-read as Paul Graham's essays? What is wrong with you!?

Altman’s on point here: don’t follow a trend, focus on solving problems. And choose something hard. When money is growing on trees, pick a major problem with a huge upside should you solve it. Startups are hard; at least make it have a chance of being really worthwhile.

— Someone who picked a small problem.

If it's not too forward, what problem did you pick?

Well, once upon a time when I was young and stupid, I chose to make some very tiny improvement to spam filtering.

Application of Bayesian filters was not a tiny improvement.

"Fall in love with the problem, not the solution"

Where it gets difficult to answer the very real internal almost contemplative question of 'am I solving a hard problem?' is when one looks at the history of fluffy rhetoric used by companies solving seemingly easy problems, making it impossible to convince them or their supporters they aren't solving something hard. For example, a website with photo sharing and a forum like feature called a newsfeed claims to be connecting everyone. Can't fault them for having audacious goals, I guess, but then it makes it harder to know how to approach one's own hard problems. What's the MVP for a product that attacks world hunger, cancer, or energy scarcity, for example?

I always feel bad when I see startups come from a rich guy chasing fame or increasing the family wealth, they have a great and vital tool (money) but not a problem to solve nor an edge in the industry they are attacking. Kind of ironic, but hey throwing money to random ideas at least generates jobs and moves the economy.

"The journey is the destination" isn't the worst of motivations and/or inadvertent side-effects =)

Throwing money at unworkable ideas makes the world worse, because it employs people that could be working on good ideas instead. For example, Theranos was a tragedy not because investors lost money (it's part of the deal) but because hundreds of smart scientists and engineers spent years working on something that went nowhere. All that talent directed elsewhere could have built something great.

The 'unworkable ideas' can typically only be determined in hindsight. Pushing the cutting edge will always result in some paths that lead to nowhere.

Theranos was a good idea, the tragedy was rampant fraud.

A lot of sama hate in this thread for some reason, but the criticisms just come off as petty.

It's a less than 1000 word article giving a 30,000 ft ariel overview of making a startup. Not sure what people expected. If you have 10 years experience in graphic design, you are probably not going to find much of interest in a 1000 word article titled "Getting started in graphic design." Deal with it.

And everyone seems very glib to point out that his startup "failed," but I am not sure how that is relevant here. He's the president of Y Combinator and last time I checked they are doing fine. In art and science, some of the most accomplished figures are lousy teachers and vice versa. Any reason why this would be different in business?

Broadly disagree with ALL the points, except for the first one.

IMO this happens with a LOT of standard advice regarding startups. The problem is that there are as many ways to do a startup as there are founders and its too tempting for VC's to infer 'wisdom' from their immediate samples.

I suspect that this happens because as an observer its extremely hard to distinguish causation from correlation. Also, it seems that VC's tend to view 'emergent' success in terms of their own work ethics.

Sam's not the only one though. Paul Graham did this too with his two founder rule for startups.

From an investor point of view, correlation can be good enough. If startups with property X are measurably more likely to succeed, it doesn't matter whether X causes success or if X is caused by some other property Y of the startup that causes success but isn't easy to determine in an interview.

In your example, X = "has multiple founders", Y = "first founder is not impossible to work with". Clearly Y causes success, but X is easier for investors to determine.

From a founder point of view, you want to focus mainly on the real causes of success rather than appearances, but give some thought to appearances. Customers are far more influenced by appearances than investors (because they have less time to dig in), so when you devote time to appearances you should think mainly about customers. Customers tend to be skeptical of one-man shows.

The concern is that Sam is offering this advice for founders not investors - and many would lap it up given the authority he has and make suboptimal decisions about their startup.

I think YC is probably HEAVILY influenced by appearance. Wrestle with the data little bit, check all the right boxes, prep that video, get some intros and your YC MBA is set.

Customers largely couldnt care less about one-man shows and even if in any specific case they do, it is very easy to 'look' like a company on the internet or in real life.

Amazon has always been a one-man show - but maybe thats why they never made money.

50 likes and 2 comments over an hour seems like too little engagement to be second on the list. Are posts about Sam effectively sticked on HN? Is there any more information on how the front page works?

I'm a simple man: I see something by Sam Altman, I upvote and read it. I suspect many folks on HN (you know, being on a YC site) are the same.

This, and HN simply working based on an upvote algorithm, seems much more plausible than there being some kind of conspiracy to amplify Sam's posts.

I never for a second suggested it was a conspiracy, I'm not entirely sure where you got that idea from. I merely asked was there information about weighing his posts and posts about him higher.

Fair enough... sorry for taking your post uncharitably. To me that's a bit of a conspiracy, as it would be kind of dishonest to weigh his posts higher.

HN heavily biases towards new posts that have early traction. Keeps the page fresh.

Links posted by YC alum/admins appear different in color for them, this makes it a voting ring feature built in because of this.

Most likely they also have a different weight mechanic.

It probably gets favorable weighting, but I've learned tolerating Sam's writing and seeing a few too many plugs for YC alum companies is a very small price to pay for this place to exist.

> is a very small price to pay for this place to exist.

this place can exist elsewhere, too. Upvotes should be for quality, not servitude.

Something doesn't quite sit right with me about #5 "Think Bigger" and the example that a recruit might think "So what? Your company is just another enterprise software startup."

To me there are a lot of interesting opportunities in solving problems, that might initially seem mundane or tedious but could turn into successful, profitable businesses. #5 seems to sort of go against some of the sentiment in PG's article Shelp Blindness ( http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html ).

I suppose I might attempt to re-state #5 thusly: "The difficult and seemingly tedious work done in the early stages might show a path to providing solutions larger problems 1..n"

I'd like to be able to recruit people who are interested in a that journey more so than the end-state.

Distractions are everywhere, and one of the most insidious things in startups. Once you become a founder there is lots of "fun" stuff to do: go to conferences, have coffee meetings with important people, etc.

The discipline is to be able to say "No". To be honest it is still a skill I feel I haven't mastered yet, 7+ companies later :)

I recommend reading Essentialism, by Greg McKeown.

slightly offtopic, but startup related:

why Sam Altman would post on atrium.co website?

when checking their services, they provide incorporating and other legal services,

is it more custom legal service than clerky.com? any idea about pricing?

I'm looking to incorporate but slightly more complex than clerky standard templates

Atrium is a YC alum

I keep seeing Sam Altman tied to clickbaity 'How-to' articles, but never managed to apply any of the lessons to start and grow a successful company himself. Obviously from his position now, he has a lot of insights into what other companies do, so It'd be great to see factual data from his insights, rather than top-down advice that he wasn't able to apply to his own career.

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