A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
tonykulesa.com
tonykulesa.com
One thing it gets wrong:
> Despite Paul Graham’s assertion that startups should not co-locate, many of the YC startups of this period did live together (and still do today). This created a social community around YC startups that also attracted new recruits, such as Justin Kan’s brother, Dan Kan, who went on to found Exec (W12) and Cruise (W14).
PG has talked about not starting your startup in co-working spaces, because the startup will take on the ambient culture instead of developing its own, and the ambient culture in co-working spaces is pretty bogus. But living with and being friends with fellow founders is great. Being a founder can be lonely, because there are parts of the struggle you can't share with the rest of the company. Being friends with people going through the same process is one of the best things you can do for the company and yourself.
This comparison made me chuckle. It seems to highlight how yc is different from an organization focused on scientific research rather than how it is similar.
I like the list of sites in as success stories. I find the majority of them absolutely awful for humanity.
> Unfortunately, I guess it will have to wait until I have some more spare time (ah, the age old excuse).
In my experience, such a time will never arrive. You need to consciously prioritize starting a business (although that doesn't mean you can't hold down a day job at the very start).
How does the old saying go? The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.
If your goal isn't to build a kind of empire or to shoot for unimaginable riches, but instead to start a solid small business that lets you do the sort of work you enjoy and provides enough income to live in your preferred style, then it's never been easier than it is today.
All you really need is to find a niche that has a small market. How small is OK depends a lot on the specifics of a business, but if we're talking a one-person software shop, you can probably live decently with a customer base of a handful of thousands. Even less if your niche supports very high profit margins.
And, as an old mentor pointed out, if you're fishing in the pool of the entire world (which the internet allows at low cost), then you can just nail two boards together and find a thousand or two who are willing to buy it.
I wouldn't be so optimistic on a few months to start generating cash tho unless it's a simple yet novel idea.
But the fact that you're posting on here while complaining that you don't have time tells me you just don't want to do it enough for it to ever be worthwhile.
I still have time to, say, occasionally exercise or have a walk or deal with life chores or get out with friends once in a while, but if I stop doing those things that would hurt my health/life and therefore my ability to work even further, as I know from experience.
As to HN, I read it mostly when I can’t sleep or in public transport.
I don’t watch or have TV.
Becoming ill is a sure way to be unproductive and make bad decisions, going broke and struggling to make ends meet is not going to help you focus on getting things done, dying early is not compatible with seeing your idea to success.
"Hustling" as you call it is pretty much the only way to start a successful business exactly for the people not born into "strong safety nets" and "privilege" as you call it. If you have those you can start your business and coast.
I don't know any business owner - including myself - who didn't have to make sacrifices to his or her well being to push through. That's the thing with having a business, there will be times were you just can't relax or take a day off. You are in fierce competition with the world, and as a founder you should work at a minimum twice as hard as somebody who is hired. It can and it will lead to partial or complete burn out, but one thing that I've noticed among myself and every other business owner is that they push through and simply don't get sick when they can't be sick. After it's over and they've pushed through a project or a season, they will get sick as dogs and disappear for a couple of weeks to lay on the sofa. The overload cannot be constant, you need to have some time to recover in the foreseeable future.
The human mind has an incredible force to resist becoming ill and for those who cannot channel this, starting a business is a bad idea. Being ill is mainly the body's reaction to fight the sickness, so it's somewhat under our control.
Having a business puts incredible pressure from all sides on a person, and you can't be a person who thinks about "tapping out" as an option. Especially in situations when other people's salaries depend on you.
Then you claimed “the human mind has an incredible force to resist becoming ill”. Tell your mind that while lying in a ditch with a few broken bones after an SUV crashed into you as you were walking half asleep after working for 18 hours straight and realizing you have no insurance or even a bank account because you failed to get or hold a job in pursuit of a moonshot startup idea.
The notion that starting a business automatically requires disregarding your life and people close to you is frankly some cool-aid fueled SV fever dream that doesn’t represent reality. Those startup founders with thousands to millions of YC funding, who pay themselves enough to live comfortably (with all the healthcare, dental care, good apartment and other things that many people struggle with) in one of the world’s most expensive places, are the prime example of the opposite!
People in my situation shouldn’t go all in on some new venture unless that venture can interest the likes of YC who can provide the required safety net. Not because we are mentally unfit to do it for the wild reasons you described, but just because the circumstances aren’t right.
Running even a small business is a great way to create more value for the world, but yes, it requires some sacrifices—and if you don’t have the leeway to make those sacrifices, ruining yourself is probably the worst way to go about it.
Take it easy!
Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not $50/.
I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're looking at 7-8 figures.
If you aren't independently wealthy, neither option is really feasible, and the former option will almost certainly end in tears if you try to stretch and bootstrap with your own money.
I wasn't thinking of this from the perspective of a hardware startup but a software startup which doesn't require either of those things. I should qualify my original post with that. You don't need to be independently wealthy to launch a software business on your own provided you have the ability to build it yourself.
Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think about shutting down.
If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your business might be a good idea. (You'll still have depleted a good chunk of your savings, and it's not like the world comes with profit guarantees)
Investment buys runway, opex, and scale. Some businesses need that, some don't. Software work reduces the opex load (for many attempts), but scale and runway might still be necessary.
I don't think it's particularly in touch to dismiss someone who works 50 hours a week to make an income and then Works another 50 hours a week on a startup that spends that income
I've worked hundred hour weeks and also supervised crews of Hispanic Americans that will work 100 hour weeks.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've known m&a lawyers that do the same to close deals at the end of the fiscal year.
100 hour week is roughly 14 hour days with no weekend break. 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. is pretty common for agricultural work during harvest season for big cash crops. You start while it's dark and you end while it's dark.
Agriculture is historically seasonal: you work a lot during some times, but the rest of the time you do completely nothing on the agriculture front. Not a luxury at most modern workplaces.
The claim that a long period of rest is always necessary in-between 100 hour work weeks is simply not true.
Creative innovative mental work? In these amounts it will fuck you up.
Yes, people do. It carries potentially huge personal costs, but if people are passionate enough, they absolutely will risk that. (Mind, I'm not saying this is a good idea, at all, but merely that it happens)
At least in the cases I did, it was usually a 9 month gruelling sprint at the end of a ~2.5-3.5 year project. Followed by people lollygagging about for ~3 months before they could do any reasonable work again. We sure got a lot of Age of Empires in during that time, though ;)
Are there people who just do not need any of those things? Maybe, but I would question it. (Too often what you think you need could be different from what you actually need.) Personally, even as someone who enjoys software engineering and would do it as a hobby, I think I would be quite miserable.
Here is what I think is reasonable: Someone would have an idea that is attractive for YC et al., raise money, and be able to comfortably afford all those things while working on a company. That is, I think, the promise of the leading quote in TFA. Unfortunately, the quote is phrased as if they are out there to help people start companies, while in reality it is about starting businesses with specific potential for explosive growth that are attractive to VC.
They are out there to help people start companies, just not all people and ideas in equal measure.
Yes. That would have described me very well at one point in my life. Coincidentally, it was at the time I was running my first (unsuccessful) business.
If it was just work, do you now think it was a good idea to ignore everything in life except work?
I.e., you thought you didn’t need those things and you actually didn’t need those things, vs. you needed them but you thought you didn’t and it caught up with you eventually.
I was just fine.
If your trust fund pays for rent and living expenses in San Francisco, and you don't even think of it as abnormal that your ENTIRE INCOME can be allocated to business bets, then yes -- you are indeed wildly out of touch.
Either way, the risk you can take without VC is limited by your wealth. Large bets without VC require independent wealth. We can quibble about what amount constitutes "independent wealth", but the fact doesn't change - VC allows you to dream bigger. (And I say that as a fierce critic of VC culture, but that is the upside of it)
There's a lot of friction and transaction costs around finding capital for even suitable Investments. Reputation is one way to overcome this but it's difficult to bootstrap reputation.
The #1 rule I have now, and advice I have for you is, if your idea does not pull at you so strongly to work on it on whatever 'spare time' you have (aka, time you make for it by ignoring other non main job related things), then DO not quit your job to make time. And do not think you will work on it when you retire. Most people just wont.
Unless your idea/business naturally grows to the point where you are spending SO much time on it that you can basically not function while having your job due to sleep deprivation, do not quit your job thinking you will do the work then or you'll have the skill/ability to get it to that point if only you had more time.
Academia has favored "the mind" over every other quality of a human being for a long time. Maybe this is useful for capital-d Discovery. Jury's out on whether it is more effective to train researchers to be founders rather than training founders to be research-oriented.
This industry is changing the world, but probably not for the better.
It sounds great, but life doesnt work like that, which is why besides finance, YC's main attribute, law and medicine also exists.
Some people get radicalised before they even start school, just watch the news every day to see whats going on and see where people are getting radicalised.
By his logic, Bell Labs would be one of the largest hives of orthodox thinking to ever exist, and its the complete antithesis of vc heterodox thought
How many football players skip their education, and then DON'T make it? Where do they end up.
Now, think Joe Blow Computer Science Major, is NOT going to be a Millionaire, but a decade later when they are applying for some middle tier IT Job, they will damn well need to show a degree..
I think there is a lot of truth in that.
And yeah I went to school with a bunch of kids who had semi-success as a teenager at sports or music, only to then not make it big when they needed to at 16 or 17 etc. Perhaps they all ended up at successful unicorns or are L7-FAANGs, but I doubt it
But it is very much a common theme in High Earning/Low Success Rate roles, to have a lot of people shoot for them, fall short, and be in a worse position than if they had studied and stayed some more mundane course.
At best they can dust themselves off after a few years and "catch up" to where their potential should have been, at worst they are financially ruined and laden with debt as they tried to boot-strap their crap startup idea while PG et al laugh all the way to the bank at these poor impressionable people's expense.
If they worked in the company 5 years with a 100k base salary, the income averages to about 300k per year. Sure, that's a healthy income, but it's about on par with a big tech salary, with the difference that big tech is more stable and predictable, and not heavily backloaded.
The fallback if you don't succeed is called "programmer". And no, programmers don't need college degrees if they have real world experience. I've known a lot of very successful programmers with no college degree at all.
And
The days of hacking something together and getting a job are kind of dwindling if not gone. The days of self learning, and showing skill isn't really as prevalent anymore. Sure, it was like that during 90-2000's. But these days, not so much.
They don't require it. And still place people without degrees at all sorts of companies.
Maybe you are somewhere that it is required. But in general, it really is not.
Aren't a lot of coding boot-camps going bankrupt and closing, and having various scandals for over-inflating their placement numbers?
Don't get me wrong, I really love the idea of picking up a book, teaching myself, and going and getting a job.
It's just that this is a quickly fading option.
Later I found out that if you look at all highschool players that play all 4 years, the odds of making it are about 0.1% or 1 in 1000. That includes tons of players that are basically playing casually and not really physically the right body type to make it.
If you make it to college football, something that I could have somewhere with my academics and size, the odds are about 1 in 100. At that point you can argue that just about everyone is physically capable of potentially making it, just missing the skill. But take away those that are playing still just to play with no plans of going further and thus train about that way (I'd argue thats about half of them), that means that 1 in 50 serious football players at the college level can make it.
If my dad had told me that with my size and decent brain I had about 1 in 50 chance of making it, I would have stuck with it. Even if I failed, I would have learned a lot from the team work and gotten a lot of value from the comradery IMO. Instead I studied a lot more, passed some AP tests, and got some boring as hell mech engineering degree.
Obviously that is not sufficient. And anyone who's playing in the NFL today was far better than "ok" at all previous levels of competition.
Also, your comment about the people that make it being obvious standouts during their first year of play is basically more of the type of thinking my dad told me to discourage me from playing. I honestly dont think its true that most professionals were obvious "This kid is going to make it to the nfl one day for sure!" kind of players, atleast not their first year.
Obviously, if this were a career path available to anyone who bothered to hire a coach, it wouldn't pay millions of dollars.
It's not a career path for anyone. But as an athletic 6'4" person who doesn't get injured easily, someone should have told me the odds were 1 in 1000 if I stuck with it in highschool, and 1 in 100 if I made it to college football. I wasn't told any of that.
Interesting, comparing core scientific research and output by Bell Labs to just techi-ifying existing industries and not really adding much new value (other than OpenAI).
Stripe, Airbnb, Doordash, Uber etc. They're services that add value by extending existing concepts to the Internet or in a slightly better way. There's nothing revolutionary or earth shaking about them. They're eBay, taking auctions and putting it online; it's not revolutionary, it's modestly evolutionary. They certainly add very real value (although Airbnb's value add at this point may be going backwards; most services peak in value creation at some point before heading south).
The connected world took notice of GPT extremely rapidly. Only a few tech lightning strikes have been like that in the past 50 years, and only a few have moved very fast.
Downplaying the dramatic impact of GPT 3 / 4 would be silly, frankly. And we're only in the first or second inning. It has set off a remarkable chain reaction that is reverberating globally. It's a eureka moment the likes of which you only see a few times in a lifetime if you're lucky.
you can make comments like this for just about any product taken to market and downplay the value of the making it mass market, affordable, usable, etc
I'm sure AI has real value, but what percent of that comes from LLMs and what contribution OpenAI will wind up making to the business of AI is not very clear. I don't really think the world will be different in ten years than it would have been without openai.
I think people need to be realistic - none of those are particularly ground breaking ideas, as evidenced by the fact that there are countless competitors and in many cases even predecessors that were not in the right place at the right time. These people just happened to be born to the right parents in the right country at the right time to have the privilege to have someone throw money at a not very original idea that could have been anyone's. Great for them, but I think it is worth staying grounded and realise that they're not visionaries and had they not even been born, someone would have thought up the same idea anyway. Monkies and typewriters and all that.
So maybe we'd not have "Reddit", but we'd no doubt have something largely identical that would fill that same niche. Equating any of these trivial things with something like the transistor is just absolute arrogance.
</unpopular-opinion>
The larger picture is to say that you can have an effect on the world. Even if it is just being in the right place at the right time, what you do, and how you do it matters. If Elon Musk hadn't bought Twitter, there would still be a Twitter, but with less Elon Musk brand of shittery. Maybe a different brand of shittery, but it would be that other person's brand.
But the transistor? Or the laser? Are these things that were thought up by the layman independently on a regular basis? (i.e. like the ideas for a lot of the y-combinator startups have been thought up independently many times over by laymen) I don't think so. I feel like these scientific endeavours require years of hands on scientific research and hard work before they ever become anything meaningful, and not just an idea for an app that pops into your mind while sitting on the toilet one day.
I think articles like these and the recent "how to do great work" one recently shows quite how out of touch and how much of an over-inflated sense of importance people in the tech industry can often have - to even begin to think that booking a taxi on a computer is anywhere close to something like inventing the transistor is just absurd.
I think the cult of pg is strong on this website, but it's important to strive for a bigger perspective.
For example, Bohr was recognized in 1975.
Some prizes for more recent discoveries:
2014: Blue LED 2009: fiber optics and they blue lcd.
You elaborated precisely that not just anyone could have implemented the ideas, which is in fact the single most important thing. Having an idea is not very meaningful, as nearly all ideas are close to worthless. It's a common mistake to think ideas are what have a lot of value.
The thing that primarily matters is who can and or is willing to act on an idea, who can bring it into existence (whether in a tangible sense of a product/service, or in terms of reaching a community to spread an idea (such as an idea in the field of published science)).
Those ideas only come into existence as a thing because some people were in the right place at the right time to make them happen and acted on it (with several other critical factors being required, some of which you listed). Not just anybody can bring an idea to fruition; literally millions of Internet users could easily have the idea for a subscription Internet-based Photoshop (circa 10-15 years ago) - now try making it a thing and try making it successful.
I suspect we will never know.
Imagine downplaying the iPhone by saying they merely combined some things that already existed, as they didn't invent most of the core tech in the first iPhone.
Apple just threw a bunch of money at combining tech that already existed by that premise; and they definitely didn't invent the smartphone. And SpaceX didn't invent rocketry either. And Tesla didn't invent the electric car. It'd be absurd to downplay these things and how difficult they were to bring into routine existence. And Netscape didn't invent the Web browser, and Google didn't invent the search engine, and Amazon didn't invent ecommerce, and Atari + Nintendo didn't invent the video game, and Ford didn't invent the automobile.
Impact also matters a lot more than just being first.
He's simply drawing an analogy between the output of laboratories like Bell Labs that produce breakthrough scientic research and "economic labs" like YC that produce breakthrough businesses.
Yes, AirBNB, Instacart etc are breakthrough businesses in the sense that they disrupted long-standing and deeply entrenched business models. The ideas themselves are not extraordinary but building and scaling a business from zero often against much better financed competitors is no easy feat and takes a unique amount of persistence (and often good timing) to succeed.
As frustrating as the mediocre median is, it's more important to not lose good articles than it is to avoid bad ones.