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Comment by _xivi | Hacker News Reader

> This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.

I don't get your comment. Are you saying PG is trying to deter and throw off teenagers so they don't compete in the space he invested in?

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No, they're saying 1000 bets on random foundational technology means PG is more likely to have a startup to invest in that's a winner, then necessarily giving good advice to the individual founder who doesn't have 1000 turns at the wheel.

This does make sense. I think it's also possible that most of the successes PG sees are people doing something interesting to them. So the argument would be more like: among success stories, true interest is more common than trend chasing.

Of course YC funds tons of ChatGPT wrappers so dunno.

The founder who tries to do something boring and profitable ends up doing things like making another CRM or some kind of SaaS pipeline from one thing to another. These tend to be things that get built anyway by the people with more funding. There's so many CRMs built on top of vtiger open source, and these may be better than vtiger for a while, but in the long run they fall behind.

Paradoxically, avoiding risks makes people more likely to take the riskier options.

And yet, what makes most people on average the most amount of money is working on boring problems, not sexy, new technology problems. That is what is mainly implied by the top level parent. For every Elon making rockets, many more are more likely to make a significant amount of money just building another CRM.

No. Survivorship Bias.

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