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Comment by diego | Hacker News Reader

I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop.

It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode. You just don't hear about the rest.

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If you have taken enough VC that the only way to get any value at all is through a huge exit, this statement is true. If you run a normal business, it is not true :)

No, I'm talking about companies that didn't even get to take VC funding in some cases. Building a stable business doesn't mean you get rich. The world is filled with middle class folk running stable businesses.

When they said "this statement" I think they meant the statement you were talking about not the statement that you made.

That once you've taken on enough funding, your options are get rich or die. Not that if you build a non-vc stable business your options are get rich or die.

Definitely a selection bias going on, but also he did say that you might have to change what you're doing.

I think the point where you stop trying to pivot into higher and higher growth opportunities and accept your fate as a sustainable but small business could be classified as a form of “death” (perhaps “undead”) if your original goal really was to get rich.

Then it becomes a tautology. If you manage to avoid not getting rich, you get rich.

Some tautologies work. I think giving up is a more common failure mode than dying of old age while constantly trying to build a startup but never succeeding. Obviously it’s more reasonable to give up at some point, but that point is going to be later than most people emotionally assume it to be. I don’t think many people will try and follow pg’s advice and be constantly repivoting their startup for 40-60 years of their life.

Imagine how much better the tech industry would be (in countless ways) if more business owners were content with "small but sustainable".

Underrated comment.

A lot of the reason business owners aren't more content with "small but sustainable" is because it isn't compatible with the venture capital model. It doesn't "return the fund".

That’s all well and good, but I think pg is writing more for founders who want to go big. And just like on StackOverflow, it’s not necessarily helpful to derail conversations around “how to do X” with arguments over “whether you should want to do X in the first place”.

> only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode

And none of the companies that die do. Surviving gives you infinitely better odds of success than dying.

That said, for personal success it is often important to let bad projects die.

Infinitely better is not 100%, which is what his quote literally says. Say it's 0% vs 5%. That is my point.

>> Surviving gives you infinitely better odds

It's a false dichotomy. It's like comparing the chances of you living to the age of 60 given that a brick had fallen on your head yesterday to someone who didn't get that lucky yet (rephrasing as "what are the chances you are dead if you're already dead?").

You have to compare the odds before the fact.

I guess the idea is not to just "hang in there (but keep doing what you're doing)" but rather "hang in there (while innovating around your problem/change course, etc, until you get it right)".

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