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Comment by guynamedloren | Hacker News Reader

pg comes off as a great guy during interviews and is clearly intelligent based on his success (YC + others) as well as his essays, but I always kind of wondered if he's just gotten really lucky spotting startup talent, or if he's just firing shots in a barrel hoping to hit something.

2 minutes into his first "office hour" and all of my doubts are out the window. pg really does know what he's doing. He asks questions that seem blatantly obvious, yet nobody else seems to be asking them. He doesn't let something go if he wants to know more - he keeps nagging. He understands how markets work and where people spend money, but also has the technological know-how. I am thoroughly impressed, and can't wait to gather his insight for the next 42 minutes of this video.

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It seems that the two top "tricky" questions to ask an entrepreneur pitching an idea are:

1. Who is gonna want to use this?

and

2. Yeah, but really, who is gonna want to use this?

A lot of ideas seem pretty half-baked. You sit there in front of a TV, you're not so sure exactly what you're watching, and you suddenly think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could point your iPhone at the TV and find out what you're watching?" And the answer is: yeah, sorta, kinda, occasionally, but multiply the number of people who want such a thing by the frequency with which they want such a thing by the amount they really care and you're looking at a pretty darn low care factor.

I don't care what anyone says about how ideas are cheap and implementation is hard. Good ideas are hard. That narrow Venn diagram overlap between "problems that people really want to solve" and "problems that are actually possible to solve" is really small.

Yeah its this set of questions that every entrepreneur has asked themselves and answered. Yet they are questions which are seemingly near impossible to answer honestly when asking oneself.

This entire clip gave me massive flashbacks to sessions with my PhD supervisor. His manner is incredibly similar as well.

I was really impressed watching the video. He's really into and has clearly spent a lot of time thinking deeply about what makes startup ideas work.

At one point in a previous life, I had a chance to get coaching from one of the very top screenwriters in Hollywood on pitching a particular movie idea. That conversation was very much like these office hours, down to the guy's demeanor. But what the writer kept asking us over and over, in several different ways was this "Yeah, but what is it about your idea that's cool enough that people will want to see it?" He kept poking and poking at it. Reminded me of pg in this video a lot.

Yeah, that video does make it clear how good pg is at pointing out important stuff and asking pertinent questions. The only thing that struck me as a little dodgy, was his tendency to ask a question, then cut the other person off before they had barely started answering. I mean, I understand that he wants to cut to the chase in the interest of time, and that some people will ramble if you don't cut them off... but a couple of times that I found myself thinking that the conversation would have flowed more smoothly if he'd let the other person continue an existing train of thought a little further.

But his methods seem to work, so who am I to quibble? :-)

i thought the same thing about cutting people off, but in some cases it seemed like he had gotten more information than it seemed initially. for instance, the guy that said he had a shopping platform, but he quickly deduced that he had a penny auction site.

I would guess he is also using questions to test/signal expertise. If you really know what you are talking about, no awkward pauses. The 10-years of experience guy with the video application startup...iirc no interruptions.

That's a fair point, but I think sheer nervousness can cause some of those pauses. I mean, hasn't everybody stumbled over an answer to a question - even when they knew the answer - at some point, just because of nerves?

And to be fair to pg and everyone, that was a fairly unique situation... doing office hours on stage in front of all those people, etc.

I too thought that the questions were blatantly obvious, yet wouldn't have asked (some of) them myself. This is an indicator of mastery, to make the difficult seem easy.

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