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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a flaw in the premise, namely that one persons schlepp is another mans passion.

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.

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I had a paragraph about this in an earlier draft, but I took it out because it was only half true and the true half seemed obvious. The obvious half is that one man's schlep is another man's interesting problem, and that once the company gets going you can hire experts in each of the schleps you need to deal with.

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.

>> Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software

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...

Old hackers still wish they could just program. The difference between old and young is that the old are more likely to know they can't have what they wish for in that respect.

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.

Ok... with correlation vs. causation out of the way, and a ridiculously small sample size to boot, it appears the average age of Forbes 400 tech company founders was almost 32 at the time of the founding their companies (http://goo.gl/iHAEe).

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.

Yin and yang perhaps. Companies that are entirely schleps tend to be self-limiting. In software I imagine the typical "enterprise trenches" of folks making software based on requirements set out by people who are themselves far removed from the customer as being the typical example of such "all schlep" work environment.

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.

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.

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.

I think Paul over simplified this one. The average hacker is attracted to things like recipe sites because these are solutions which can be accomplished entirely by code and execution. They are driven away by problem spaces which require foreign skills or unknown social networks, namely startups involving payment processing and banks.

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.

Startups aren't only for hackers, though you might easily be deceived into thinking so if you live in the Valley or spend a lot of time on HN. Ingvar Kamprad started Ikea, Richard Branson started Virgin and Warren Buffett started Berkshire Hathaway - all very successful entrepreneurs that wouldn't be able to code an if-then loop if their life depended on it..

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.

Sorry to nitpick, but Warren Buffett did not start Berkshire Hathaway, he bought an ailing textile manufacturing company in 1960s thinking he could turn it around. He could not, but Berkshire eventually became a holding company for most of his investments.

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.

The founders of Stripe didn't know any more about banking than farming when they decided to start the company. It was precisely their willingness to undertake alien problems (= schleps) that made them so effective.

It was the same way with my startup. I had no idea how Hollywood or fashion worked, but I had a problem [1] and when I asked people if they knew how to solve it, they just gave me back a similar problem they once had [2]. At that point, I figured this was a good company to build.

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.

Having to watch Twilight is a schlepp too far for me.

It's funny. "Starting a farm" seems like it'd be easier than my current schlep, which is figuring out how to market an app. Researching "how to start a farm" seems like a problem I could sink my teeth into a lot easier. To me that supports your thesis.

I know you use it as a general example, but do some very basic research on what it would take to start a farm... and not go broke within a year. You will feel differently.

The iTunes music store can be seen as a schlepp solved. Apple made tough deals with record labels and Bill Gates' comment "This time somehow he has applied his talents in getting a better licensing deal than anyone else has gotten for music." does seem like a symptom of schlepp blindness.

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.

I think you're mostly right, and your example (sales work with big companies) is well aligned with your theory, but there are plenty of schlepps that are not conceivably anyone's passion because they don't require any differentiated work. My personal favorite example is a service that will perform DMV operations on your behalf (where the primary work involved is standing in line). Whenever I need that service, I am ecstatic to pay the $50 or so that they demand rather than lose rand()*4 hours of my day.

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.

I think there's a strong correlation between hard problems and intelligent people being passionate about them.

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.

I've seen people post "Stand in line for me at the DMV" on TaskRabbit. I haven't tracked how many tasks, but it would be interesting to see growth over time. I wonder how that compares to the specialized services.

There are plenty of people who'd happily stand in line for $10. I'd do it; give me a usable queue computing device and I can do other stuff at the same time.

While I agree with your point, I think the deeper detail is that, in order to solve the difficult problem, you've just got to find the person that can deal with the banks. So in this case, the schlepp is not necessarily working out a deal with the bank yourself, but going through the work to understand the deal, and then going through the work to find the right person to make the deal happen.

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.

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