Schlep Blindness
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
From the Stripe example: "You'd have to make deals with banks." - I know quite a few people who would love nothing more than the challenge of getting big banks to sign on to a new payment service. Their passion is selling. The harder the sell the bigger the challenge. Just like good hackers want to work on hard technical problems great salespeople like to work on hard sales problems.
The real takeaway here is that you should find your personal schlepps and start a company with someone who is passionate about them. If a great hacker, a great salesman and a great fraud investigator started a company they would be able to start a company like stripe. And they'd all be doing stuff they were passionate about.
Similarly, while someone somewhere is probably excited to work on Stripe's fraud and security problems, I suspect there's a ton of paperwork that must be filed and waited-upon in order to operate such a service legally. I know plenty of lawyers and none of them consider that sort of thing fulfilling work.
You probably won't find many intelligent people that are particularly interested in standing in queues, driving a cab or waiting tables. That's because these aren't hard things to do. On the other hand you'll find surprisingly many intelligent people that are passionate about how ants build nests, how quasars work and how to solve a rubiks cube because these are hard problems.
So really a schlep is just a hard problem, one that the person considering it doesn't have the skills or know-how to solve.
It's easy to say that there is hidden value in these "schlep niches" but not if you don't have the slightest inkling of how to approach it. It'd be like me telling the average hacker to go start a farm.
It's about niches in the market, not about who fills them. For any given hard problem in a marketniche there's probably someone out there who is passionate about it. Hacker, MBA, farmer, or something entirely different.
Warren Buffett is more of an example of meta-enterepreneur, that is he is great at investing in companies with great entrepreneurs (and managers).
Your original point still stands.
If it's even possible, the entertainment and fashion industries may require even more schlepping than the banking industry. Instead of dealing with lots of regulation and paperwork, now you're frequently dealing with self-obsessed, anti-technology narcissists who are completely unwilling to help you do anything.
But we muddled through and did the work that everyone else doesn't want to do. And that's why we're launching this week.
[1] I wanted to buy my girlfriend the sunglasses that Bella was wearing in Twilight, but couldn't find them anywhere.
[2] Johnny Depp's sunglasses in Blow, a necklace from Real Housewives, etc.
It rolls up into the overall point which is not that everyone should try and do a payments processing system, but that most of the ideas that are probably worth doing are those that have a significant amount of difficulties involved. And that, to execute the worthwhile idea, you'll have to figure out the problem somehow, and not just switch off because you don't have x - whatever that is, whether a person, a skill, a contact or a social network.
If you want to find the fresh powder you've got to hike up the hill that nobody else can be bothered with because it looks too hard.
But not all the schleps a company undertakes are schleps simply in virtue of not being someone's specialty. You have to satisfy users' needs to make a successful company, and it is very unlikely that the stuff you have to do to satisfy users' needs also happens to be exactly what you'd most like to work on, even if you're the specialist in that problem.
On the other hand, an all passion company is likely to end up making inconsequential products, or failing to meet schedules, or having poor customer service, or otherwise just failing at being a grown up company. Perhaps the best companies are those that mix schlep and passion in the proper measure. Apple and Google definitely come to mind as examples.
I wonder if the word "hackers" ought to be replaced with "young hackers of the type to apply to YC"?
If you're fresh out of school, or have only worked in big silicon-valley companies doing specialized tasks, I can see it. I have a hard time believing someone with even a few years experience in smaller companies haven't come to grips with "schlepness".
>> Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
I don't think that's what the research shows:
""" Old guys rule. And they are far more likely to be the founder of a successful technology company than most of you understand. How do I know this? Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40. """
http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/when-it-comes-to-founding-s...
The research you quote is about moderately successful startups, not about the most successful of all. You can easily verify I'm right about the outliers by traversing the Forbes 400.
I have a feeling that's not what you meant when you said "young"...? Maybe you meant to restrict that to only founders that wrote the code their companies are based on? In which case, yeah, the founders of facebook, google, and Microsoft were all young when they started... I'd be careful drawing too many conclusions on that sample size, however.
Banks are a good example, though. What irritates me most about banks is not having to figure out how their merchant services work but that they bring a slow, ineffective communication factor into the equation. I would probably dislike dealing with banks for the same reason I dislike trying to make changes in a big company: everything's rolling on a different track from a hacker's viewpoint and the very communication that could bridge that together and bring everyone on the same track goes forward very, very slowly.
Dropbox is also a case of schlepp solving I think. It solved the problem of syncing, backup and history maintenance and did so by going all out on integrating into OS file system interfaces (findEr, explorer, whatever) with all their quirks.
Maybe we should start a "schlepp exchange" at HN where people posts their schlepps that they don't want to work on and whoever else does picks them up and runs with them.
Back during the first internet bubble, I was playing around calculating Pi and drew the attention of some VCs: "distributed computing" was big. After asking if I was interested in starting a company (I wasn't -- I was going off to Oxford to do my doctorate) one of them asked for my opinion on the technical feasibility of a business plan.
My advice (which I provided for free, being a foolish 19 year old) was "it is provably impossible to solve these problems as stated without transmitting information faster than the speed of light". They funded the company anyway, and $10M later the company died having never produced anything.
Be the guy who says "this is going to be hard, but I'm sure it's possible". Don't be the guy who says "I'm sure I can find a way to circumvent the laws of physics".
By the time I talked to this guy they had already raised something like $100 million dollars. When I mentioned that I thought their problem was impossible to solve he said "yeah, that's what we discovered too, so now we're winding down the business."
$100 million dollars on something I had doubts about in the first five minutes! And it's not like I'm some kind of computer genius. Anyone with a decent working knowledge of databases and analytics could have seen this.
Why be either guy? If you know that something really isn't possible, just say so. Hang onto your self-respect and reputation.
I know an entrepreneur who never bothers to check his business plans with even back-of-napkin calculations. He just makes Powerpoints. He is an "idea guy", you see.
So far he hasn't crashed and burned because he happened to start his first business during the 90s bubble, at the exact same time that other people were making business plans without doing back-of-napkin calculations. And he sold them a lot of stuff. His other terrible business ideas since then haven't yet returned his net worth to where it should be (zero, or negative) because he'd have to live several lifetimes for that.
I think this explains a lot about how mind-bogglingly stupid the world can be. Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book on this theme, "Fooled by Randomness".
Marconi went ahead anyway. This wasn't stupid. He already knew that radio propagation wasn't strictly line of sight. Nevertheless, radio waves don't follow the curvature of the earth well enough to get messages across the Atlantic. He was gambling that the laws of physics could be circumvented.
He won! Not for the reason that he gambled on, but by dumb luck. His radio waves headed off into space and bounced back from the ionosphere.
If I were clever I would know the moral of this story. It is either "Sometimes you can circumvent the laws of physics." or its "Watch out for the Marconi trap. He won the 1909 Nobel prize by trying to circumvent the laws of physics and succeeding. And what we have learned in the past hundred years is that people have been throwing their money away trying to repeat this ever since, with no success, so don't go fooling yourself and throw your money away too."
* SendGrid (bulk email sending)
* Twilio (easy to use telephony / sms)
* Zencoder (video encoding)
* MailChimp (mailing list management)
What others can you think of? Would love to see a list here :).
[disclaimer: my startup]
It's obvious people want it, but mere mortals shirk from the prospect of securing it.
PG had another gem some time ago along the lines of:
The best startup is the one you needed at your last job.
But I made the mistake of talking over the idea with someone who I looked up to at the time, who seemed older and wiser. They said 'there are already systems that do that, I would find something else'.
Now I'm not saying I had even the remotest chance of getting such a thing off the ground - but at the time, I was so ignorant that I thought I could - but the ignorance worked both ways in that I would blindly accept the word of someone else, who just highlighted the schlep involved and so I immediately gave up.
But that's just what the article says : when you're young ignorance can be a blessing, but you've got to be prepared to put in the hard work and not give up at even the tiniest hurdle. Getting that rare mix in a young person is the elusive part. But I'm convinced you can get young people to put in the hard work - you've just got to give them the encouragement to go ahead and fail big if need be.
Skills, talent, money, and ideas are a part of the puzzle, but you can also beat your competitors on work ethic.
From Stripe's home page: "you don't need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account."
The problem was - not schlepp blindness - but the fact that this problem was completely impossible to solve in 1997.
Sure, maybe our execution was lacking (I was just a junior programmer at the time) but what really killed it was the banks and especially the credit card companies.
Mastercard and Visa just said no. We will not allow this to happen. Whoever charges the card must be responsible for delivery. We pivoted to take this into account (digital content delivery anyone) but reality was. This schlepp was too hard at that time.
People have been banging on the 'making payment easy' door, for a long, long, time. The fact that Stripe is making progress now is more a fortuitous confluence of events than the fact that nobody else had tried.
The closest thing that comes close to solving it is Amazon's fulfillment services (http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....), but it doesn't quite work and is US only.
A hard problem to solve indeed (and one we've discussed).
A minor typo on your site:"If you are ordering NFC tags in bulk, need stickers pre-programmed..."
the pre-programming part isn't a problem, it's mixing skus to make an order.
when we started in June, we'd get like an order or two a day, and it wasn't too bad. the daily trip to the post office was almost a welcome break.
now, we get as many orders in a day as we used to get a month back then, and it's hard to scale. we've made a lot of the processes as efficient as possible, but the whole thing is still a pain in the ass.
Fulfillment as a service seems like it'd be a good business. No stressing about packaging, customer service etc etc
Sure, but is the pre-programming part a barrier to using a third party to do fulfillment?
Some of the newer operations have staff on site that has electronics expertise and offer troubleshooting of arriving items, etc. It seems that having them flash NFC stickers shouldn't be soo bad to teach them (but maybe expensive).
http://www.owd.com/ http://www.everlane.com http://http://photojojo.com/
Ones I worked with and would recommend: http://parcelport.net, http://amplifier.com/
Ones that I talked with but didn't have personal experience (yet)http://www.im-logistics.com, http://archway.com, http://www.capacityllc.com/
Each has their own pros and cons and it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
I have no relationship with them. I just read about them in an article.
As far as I know, good 3PL services are at best like Braintree, not like Stripe. That is, they work well but don't lower the barriers so that it's easy to start using them.
Sincerely and PicPlum are two more examples of companies that have to deal with this pain.
There are plenty of problems out there that people are trying to solve outside of the bubble area. Sadly it also seems that not moving to some 'hot spot' is a handicap these days.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. Quite the contrary. That's why I said it was a schlep. But some people's wives can only handle so much. :)
I can handle lots of saving, planning and sacrifice, as well as logistics. I cannot handle moving to the valley, without destroying a happy family life. That doesn't mean I shouldn't start a company, it means I shouldn't apply to YC or other things that require a move to the valley.
There's nothing WRONG with requiring that move, and I agree, it probably does considerably raise your chances of success. It is just not necessarily possible for everyone who would/could/should start a company.
Before incubators far fewer people had the opportunity to attempt to solve life's problems by starting a company. Hopefully things continue to evolve and new ways are created to expose as many minds as possible to the various business schleps in the world.
I love consumer energy and see a huge shift in the way people relate to their energy. I am solving my own problem because no one in the energy space has solved it for me.
That is just another schlep that you have to break through, all the people who laugh and say no, because there will be many who just don't understand.
Almost every new shopping/ecommerce startup is some clone of Pinterest or a Q&A site. Those are very attractive ideas, but I believe I'm working on the real schlep, which involves combing product feeds, crawling for furniture photos, etc. and making life for the average Joe easier.
What do you think?
I guess, In an effort to find a Google-able/SEO-friendly unique phrase, pg has overgeneralised the term.
"If you are one of those people who has always wanted DSTV, but never actually got down to installing it because it seems like such a schlep..."
"The first time I minced my own meat but it was such a schlep..."
"I'm getting all my books from Diesel e books and i just find it such a schlep to remove the drm's."
2. an arduous journey or procedure
Yes, Mahler writes all over his scores the instruction nicht schleppen -- don't drag
As it happens, in Yiddish, there is a one other use which is more related which is to describe someone as "a schlepper" (or that they "schlepped") which means they take a long time do something.
Edit: as far as I can tell the article always said "originally a Yiddish word" which serves to hold the case I am making.
Better elementary/middle/high school
Better voting (digital democracy)
Better government procurement system
Better prisons or prison alternativesThe people using your products (doctors) aren't necessarily the ones making the purchasing decisions, and in such situations you won't always win by providing the best product.
This is why EHR systems especially have a lot of fine grained reporting systems that let administrators spy on just about everything going on (they love this) and huge sales teams with budgets to lavish potential buyers with champagne and horrific user interfaces for doctors.
I did this once outside of my startup on a motorcycle trip to Panama, crossing the boarder into Mexico was a huge block for me and my riding buddy. We stayed in the US and drank beer for 2 days straight not realizing what we were doing. Then one night we had a moment of clarity, jumped on our bikes and headed for the boarder.
We just jumped right in!
In that moment of clarity I removed the fear and felt total freedom and the world became my oyster if only for a moment or two.
I think schleps are the reasons why many startups either fail or succeed, the ones that win hit the wall and learn to break through them.
I am in complete agreement with the section about "you can't start a startup by just writing code", and I think that concept could have expanded to become an entire and valid article.
But then it morphed from that into the idea that people (often subconciously) avoid "schleps" and pick easier tasks instead, which I think is both obvious and normal. I also think it is often a lot less subconcious than pg thinks.
To expand on the example of olympic athletes: I don't know about that specific example, but to expand to "professional athletes", an awful lot of people do think about being a football star, a top baseball player, whatever. But ultimately, even children with dreams have a basic understanding of risk vs. reward.
Saying that starting stripe involves a lot of schleps is one way of putting it, another way is to say that you're less likely to succeed.
Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking "should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?" and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.
Other than gut instinct is there any reason to believe this is the case? Those people also chose to start a recipe site over becoming journalists, or chefs, or working in fashion - nobody has ever, before starting either a career or a startup, gone through every possibility and ticked them all off, so why is it that in this case we should assign subconcious fear of hard work s the reason?
Personally I find it can often be the reason conciously, to the extent that I don't believe it has any need to be in my subconcious. Much like when I'm in a casino and think "let's bet fairly small" rather than "risk my entire savings to have a chance at getting crazily rich", when it comes to work I conciously think about how hard something will be, and what rewards it could bring.
Personally I work in content/publishing, and no it never occured to me to work on Stripe, but thinking about it now, if I could go back in time, I wouldn't try to build Stripe first, nor would I at this point in time consider a job in that kind of company. Maybe part of that can be assigned to the schelps involved, but I'm conciously deciding that.
Regardless, an interesting piece as food for thought.
edit: As a completely unrelated question that doesn't really merit creating an entire topic to ask, does anyone with showdead enabled have any idea what comments like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465559 are all about? I see them now and again, and can't work out any logic behind them.
One of his last sane comments were when he asked startup advice here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1782800 and got zero responses.
Sometimes it passes my mind that maybe someone on HN should help him. It's quite obvious he has lost his mental health.
A couple of years ago i stumbled upon this guy who was acting as the entire community of a pokémon forum all by himself. He was mentally ill, and often posted threads about his and Nurse Joys marriage. It was very sad, but he seemed happy in his own little world. It's interesting to see how technology/internet and mental issues interact. We get a small peek into their world. It's touching.
> I'm some kind of terrorist lab animal, in jail--shrinks abuse me and shit.
> All I can do is post to HN News and yell at my shrinks.
> I get fake downloads and no emails. Total terrorist lab rat abused by shrinks.
It is sad. I hope he does see those shrinks.
He developed an operating system by himself, spent a lot of effort in it.
Despite spending a large part of his life on this project, not many people are interested.
In despair, and alone, all he thinks about everyday is losethos, as you can see in each comment. In his mind, everything links back to losethos in someway.
`I could do USB but keyboard and mice aren't any better, possibly worse from a compatibility state. Memory sticks would be really nice. Now, we're in the domain of distinctive drivers for similar pieces of hardware. Can't do that. Might be able to.`
He seems to have related this article to how he didn't implement drivers for those accessories in his OS. (Schleps)
I am guessing he was sent to a clinic by his parents.
`I don't know. I don't even care. I don't care about one person. Parents are enemies. I pay them $600 they take care of me, but abuse me, I prolly abuse them. This is heaven -- argument clinic and I'm telling truth all the time, except for wild speculation. I don't know shit about reality.`
His frequent references to God suggests someone close has given him a bible, in an attempt to help him.
He is able to comment on HN probably because he still has access to his computer and internet.
Pouring your life into a project, only after finding nobody cares much about it, while living alone for years... I can see how I'd become mentally unstable too.
=(
`Frustration over my reality being bogus, sucks.` http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=K3sfeO8PZb
He was probably told that by doctors. Could it be caused by long-term denial?
Here's more of him elsewhere: http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=18514&sta...
If this guy was born long enough before the Internet age, he'd probably be a historical figure of computing. His seemingly lacking social abilities would have been mostly a non-factor.
It reminds me of the story of Craig George (http://insertcredit.com/2011/07/25/the-madness-of-craig-geor...): sad and unnerving.
The way I see it happen is that a lot of people start out with products they want to build. They would like to sit down and start coding, because that's the thing they know how to do. The t-shirt we mentors wear says "GET OUT OF THE BUILDING" because people are extremely resistant to the shlepping involved in talking to real people and seeing what problems they actually have.
I'm sure it's true, as you suggest, that some people didn't build Stripe because it was a project they really weren't competent to build. But I'm equally sure that plenty of people who could create something great jump into building a particular product because it seems safe and familiar, and then make themselves a little cocoon that insulates them from the fact that nobody is out there saying, "Gosh, I really need another recipe site." Until the money runs out, anyhow.
my version: life is suffering, so you might as well suffer meaningfully. Making something tedious into something simple can itself be extraordinarily tedious. But what a great thing to have done!
A problem is an opportunity.
Being a world-class athlete is essentially a full-time job. Most people quite consciously do decide not to work two full time jobs, or simply don't have the energy for it. Not the best example...
And you definitely have less competition. More shlep acts as barriers to entry. So does unique insight/expertise in a field outside of technology. Anyone can build the next Del.icio.us, or Pinterest, but not anyone can build the next software system that can help currency traders make money, or software to monitor diabetes patients. But most people just go after the low hanging fruit.
Or, as somebody wisely put it, "All good planning eventually degenerates into work."
In short, to schlep does not mean a tedious or unpleasant task, it means a tedious or unpleasant journey.
Did not seem to me that accepting payments on your website was so painful...
Give Stripe a try.
Just be sure to include the big profitable countries: Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Japan, Canada, France, UK among others.
Given the right set of circumstances of course this is exactly where the opportunity is with many things.
Take real estate as another example.
If you buy a nice looking, appealing, ready to go condo or home in a well know building or neighborhood, assuming values aren't rising, there is really no way to make a killing.
You make a killing by transforming something. By adding value. You take an unappealing piece of real estate and you transform it. Or you buy a piece of land and you build something on it ready to go. It's well known that people buy on an emotional level. And if they can't get attached to something they won't pay as much. (This is why homes are staged for example or cars are shined up at the dealer).
1) If you want to hang out with "cool startup people" and be involved in "cool startup culture" just about any startup will do. No need to do something difficult. That recipe aggregator will do just fine.
2) If you want to work on "interesting" problems, there are lots of those too. They might not serve many people (dev tools which do the same thing as many other existing dev tools and do not improve upon them) or change the world in really useful ways, they can still be /interesting/ to work on.
3) If you just want to make enough money so that you can stop stressing out every single day of your worry-filled life over having to work yourself to the bone for the rest of your life/becoming homeless/being able to afford food/shelter/health insurance, and you think just about any startup can give you that Startup Lottery Ticket, you don't need to work on the next Stripe. You just need a couple of million, then you could move into your one room studio/log cabin/pod and live the rest of your life sans the typical day-to-day worries about the basics and be just fine. The diminishing marginal utility of money seems like an excellent bulwark against trying to do those Schleppier things. If you're going to make at least as much from a RecipeAggregator472 as you would from a Stripe, the choice is easy.
As pg states, undertaking these sorts of endeavors requires ignorance for some, but I would also add some other possible useful motivators (ignorance may also become tougher "motivator" since so much useful data about failure is so readily available):
1) The need for big money for other goals. If you want to be a mega-philanthropist/cure cancer/finally solve immortality/whatever, you probably need BIG BUCKS. The number of people motivated to actually do this (or who even think it is possible) is probably not very large.
2) Fanaticism. You want to make this project happen because it's just your dream. The rewards are irrelevant. You will make it so that it's possible to create coffee from rain no matter what it takes, it's just that important to you. Probably not that many of these either.
3) Revenge. Everyone told you it could not, can not, and will not be done. Maybe they told you that you will never be the Coffee From Rain King. Whatever the reason, you live to prove them wrong and rub their faces in it. You want to get on the news and blithely tell the world about you invented this genius thing while making no mention of your detractors, but you secretly giggle with glee since you know you were Right, and they were Wrong. This one might actually be the easiest of the bunch, but still requires a delicate balance of just enough ridicule and scorn to motivate one, but not so much so that one one thinks said thing is truly impossible.
4) Reinforcing the Peltzman effect. Certainly not a panacea either, but it could certainly help: http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why-eco...
I think there are many industries that many talented engineers know nothing about, and therefore don't know where the problems lie. How can we facilitate this awareness to the people who want to create startups without it being happenstance?
Instead of a request for proposal we need a request for startup. But people want their solutions now because they have the need now.
The things I do that I find the most tiresome: commute by car, dishes, laundry, and flossing.
I find it funny that the solution to the first three if you have money are: 1. Hire a human driver (or move). 2. Hire a human maid. 3. Hire a human maid.
But all might be solved by technology: robot drivers, robot butler, robot butler, and "vaccines" against tooth decay and halitosis.
If I dug into the less important schleps, I bet I'd find that software is a solution.
As a result, Braintree is processing billion and billion of dollars a year.
"A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in."
It also helps to think of things like "making deals with banks", which can initially seem scary, in terms of the basic human actions they really stand for: "talking to a lot of people who work for banks". To me at least, that is both less boring and less scary.
That's exactly why Stripe is so valuable.
It should be noted that the world will never know how many tried and failed to do what Stripe succeeded in.
Wondering what Paul G. thinks of this.
I just wish I could come up with ideas, though. A lot of them are hard for me to relate to. I don't go out and do normal consumer-type things ( not that there's anything wrong if you do) or have any real friends, so social things are out.
I just can't relate.
Maybe you could start here at YC's requests for startups: http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html
"fixing payment processing" is not a problem that we subconsciously avoid — but rather one that we very deliberately stay as far away from as possible. Is there a more inglorious class of failed internet startups?
And boy howdy, is enterprisey full of schlepping. Talking with my dad, who has run his own small construction business for the last 20? years, this is just the nature with work in general.
+1, pg. +1.
Still struggling to see the difference between WePay and Stripe personally.
"Unconscious" should probably be "subconscious" in these two sentences...
How many, or which, of the companies that have had success with Y-combinator were companies that were, in a manner you could discern early on (such as in the application process), clearly addressing schleps versus those you took on simply due to the force of character of the founder(s) (by virtue of their relentless resourcefulness)?
And let's not forget stripe hasn't even launched in europe, yet. That's quite a market still waiting to be schlepped.
By the way, can someone explain to me what's the difference between paypal and stripe? In what paypal don't fix web payment?
They do that to save money. PayPal has very low losses due to fraud. Maybe if Stripe gets large enough to attract attention, or starts doing business across international boundaries, or in Eastern Europe, they'll start doing the same thing.
http://diegobasch.com/stop-the-presses-essay-shows-that-hard...
Edit: pg, don't downvote me :)