Comment by jkuria | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkuria | Hacker News Reader

There's also a little bit of the "DARPA effect" where several key things align perfectly in time to create such an outcome i.e. The Economist did a study on numerous attempts to create another "DARPA" that would lead to break through innovations of the kind DARPA did. Not one has succeeded.

From what I've heard, In YC's case:

+ Paul was a successful technical founder with the money and reputation. He could rally the troops with "suits and MBAs don't matter, hackers rule the world" rhetoric.

+ Paul had a giant megaphone with his blog (not initially done to market YC)

+ He had a partner who was good at reading and sizing up people, crucial in picking the first batches whose success was crucial to the whole thing working.

+ The cost of doing a start-up had fallen dramatically

+ and so on. I am sure there a few others.

Similarly, everyone has tried to replicate the Kenya's mPesa, the world's most successful mobile money system. No one has succeeded because there hasn't been the same confluence of factors that led to mpesa's success:

I have absolutely no clue if this actually played any role, but pg is also one of the people credited with creating what's considered the first web app, and it seems plausible a vision of a future giant world of web apps could've influenced the startups he picked and the advice he gave. For example, the reddit co-founders say the site was his idea:

>The next morning, on the train back to Virginia, hung over, somewhere in the middle of Connecticut, I get a call from Paul. He says, "I'm sorry, we made a mistake. We don't like your idea, but we like you guys." We got off the train, and I was able to sweet-talk the Amtrak lady into not charging us to turn around. In our conversation, Paul said, "You guys need to build the front page of the Internet." That was all Paul, and that became Reddit.

(https://www.inc.com/magazine/201206/christine-lagorio/alexis...)

With this context in mind, can anyone elaborate on the similarities between Reddit and HN? Which one copied the other?

HN copied reddit.

> "[Graham] wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit felt in the good old days, when most of its community was made up of hackers." [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...

Wasn't Reddit just a slight iteration on Digg? If Digg hadn't self-destructed then we might all still be using it instead of Reddit.

It seems like a lot of YC's success comes down to luck. They happened to be in the right position at the right time.

Not just YC's success. Most successes. This is one of the reasons it is dangerous to listen to advice from successful people.

This reminds me of the Anna Karenina principle: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Reddit actually wasn’t much of a financial success. The anecdote merely shows PG/Jessica were right the two founders could make big things.

Removing Reddit doesn’t materially change yc financials.

> the reddit co-founders say the site was his idea

Reddit's cofounders, sans Aaron, planned to make a food order service with SMS before smart phones. PG rejected their idea, sent them packing. Meanwhile PG was also talking to Aaron and somehow got the idea for the "front page" thing. He called Steve and Alexis and said they should work on this new idea with another guy. They said sure.

That's what I remember from reading "We Are The NERDS" anyway.

In some ways it is sad because reddit was not Alexis/Steve's first idea, and that idea did go on to be big. Then again they probably just wanted to be tech founders.

I was going to write a similar comment, but yours is much better. I would add one thing though, just luck and some random accidents.

In general in life humans like to go back and understand why some things were successful, and do that to replicate them. Very often that one thing was luck and being at the right place at the right time.

This is in no way trying to take anything away from Paul and Jessica. They are probably super amazing people, and I could certainly never replicate what they have done or even try. I don't think they could replicate it if they tried either, even being the awesome people they are.

It was also the perfect moment in time. The .com gold rush was still in an early phase and the iphone hadn't yet happened. The tech industry is much more consolidated and mature now.

Tech industry was pretty consolidated back them with MS having an outsized sway over most of it.

There are probably companies created right now that will tower over IT in 30 years and we'll say "yeah but (that part of) industry wasn't consolidated back in '20".

In a similar vein, "You Are Not Late"[0] by Kevin Kelly is a great read.

[0]: https://kk.org/thetechnium/you-are-not-late/

There was no substantial argument anywhere in this to support his claim.

Wechat in China perhaps?

Other places have solutions which work well enough to prevent dominance. The combination of Contactless and Faster payments in the UK solves most uses cases. You can send payments to people via app instantly. I never carry cash any more. However, this requires everyone to have bank accounts and modern high availability payment/POS infrastructure.

Mpesa neatly solves the problem that many people don't have bank accounts, many places don't accept cards (let alone contactless) and there are rolling power outages. However, most people have a mobile phone and you can topup your mpesa account like normal phone credit. It's incredibly accessible.

Very long thread about How Darpa Works that was on HN a couple months ago, for those interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23670246

India's UPI is getting close. I've lived months without any cash in my wallet, even before COVID.

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