Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately the rust game engine idea (as much as it kills me to say this) is a perfect example of not YC material. Every VC, whether early stage or late stage, must fund companies that have a chance of growing by 5% every week. It’s remarkably hard to start anything that can maintain that growth. https://paulgraham.com/growth.html is worth internalizing.

But there’s a second caveat here: YC invests in people, not in ideas. From pg himself: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-reddits

> Their idea was bad though. And since we thought then that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected the muffins. And it seemed wrong to me to turn down the people we'd been inspired to start YC to fund.

So it might be worth applying with a particularly bad idea. Or at least it used to be; I have no idea whether YC ever encourages strong founders with a bad idea to re-apply with a better one, or if you get any feedback from the partners that they almost accepted you but rejected because of the idea. (One of my neat memories as a 19yo is getting a thoughtful email from pg saying we almost made it to the interview with an idea that was essentially “blackboard sucks; make better school software," but the biggest factors against us were my age and the fact that selling to schools was about as hard as selling to governments back in 2008.)

I know that. I just threw that in because I've been doing game work in Rust and the graphics stack suffers from too few devs.

Better school software is worth another go-round, now that we have large language models.

Somebody already emailed me offering to fund the MoneyNow idea. That's a bad idea for another reason. The big problem with money transfer is fraud. PayPal is mostly a fraud-management service. Money transfer and user interface are the easy part.

I’d be very curious to see what you’d choose to work on if you were forced to pick something with the highest probability of growing at 5% per week minimum.

I suspect you have a few ideas, but it becomes a different sort of question when you imagine yourself committing to one for the next 10 years. Which idea could you see yourself throwing all of your effort into growing each week till you’re today+10 years old?

> the highest probability of growing at 5% per week minimum

I don't think this is a helpful frame, because you can't know this in advance, and I'd hate for anybody to read something like this, feel "I have no idea what could grow 5% per week minimum", and close the page on getting started. No one knows this in advance.

What YC teaches is to start by making something a few people actually want, no matter how small it is or seems, and then iterate. It's much more important, for example, to work on something you're personally interested in than something you've persuaded yourself has a chance at growing "5% per week minimum".

That’s a good point. Thank you.

Happy one-decade anniversary, by the way. I just noticed https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over... was almost exactly 10 years ago.

The trouble with your frame is that you can’t know what people actually want until you try to get them to use what you’ve built. There’s a sort of chicken and egg problem here: you have to think of an idea first, before you build anything. "Choose what people actually want" begs the question.

It’s probably true that it’s better to work on something that you personally believe in (in the https://paulgraham.com/earnest.html sense), because you’re more likely to find ways to grow it. It’s hard to be earnest about an idea that only interests you because it might grow at 5% per week. But pg chose Viaweb, and he couldn’t have known ahead of time that anybody would actually want it, since it was the first webapp. Nobody even understood how to try it out, since this was the era of desktop software. All he had was a hunch that lots of people would soon want websites for their businesses.

So which frame would you choose, if you had to decide today? Suppose you and Scott were trapped in a room, and the door unlocks only after you pick something to build together. How would you decide, other than "X seems most likely to be something that people will actually want"? (Which is similar to "has a chance of growing at 5% per week," just phrased a little differently. pg originally thought museums would want websites; if he’d asked himself whether it might morph into an idea that could grow at 5% per week, he probably would’ve realized museums didn’t actually want that.)

I think your premise is flawed: > The trouble with your frame is that you can’t know what people actually want until you try to get them to use what you’ve built.

I would argue that if you’re building something in a vacuum, you’re wasting your time. You should find your customers first. Find their pain points in their industry. See how those could be fixed.

I would work on what I was most passionate about. Which btw is also the advice that pg and Jessica (specifically Jessica in this case) gave at their last YC talk, and you can't get more YC than that.

Did they?

It’s surprising because your description can’t possibly be a recipe for generating startup ideas. pg was most passionate about lisp. There must be more to it than what you said.

I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand, but this seems like bad advice for someone explicitly trying to become wealthy. It’s great advice for YC to be giving, because it would maximize YC’s returns over decades: if everyone works on what they’re most passionate about, YC would get a flood of applications from exactly the type of people most likely to be effective founders. But for every passionate founder that chooses to build Stripe, there are dozens who would choose to work on programming languages, or game engines. “Passion project" is practically synonymous with an artist not intending to make money.

Even if today you were most passionate about spreadsheets, would you really choose to build skysheet again?

It’s impossible to imagine pg writing "If I wanted to start a startup, I would work on what I was most passionate about, since it’s the most likely way I’d succeed." The sentence seems mistaken, so pg must have said something more precise.

I was probably too concise. What I mean is that if I had to choose between two different ideas for what people want, I would pick the one I was more interested in, even if it seemed smaller at first, over one that had a better cover story but which I was bored by. And yes this is what Jessica said, advising a particular founder who had grown weary of what he was working on.

I think the basic philosophy is that your starting point is not so important—you can get anywhere from anywhere, as long as you are (in pg's phrase) relentlessly resourceful. Given that starting point isn't so important, you're better off starting with something you have a lot of energy for. You're going to need it.

Of course I would work on Skysheet again! When did spreadsheets stop being the most important thing in programming?

No advice has a 100% success rate. The existence of failure cases doesn't inherently make the advice bad. The advice to pursue your passion as a startup idea is still relatively good advice. It's the best way to avoid the most trite and cliché ideas. I don't know what someone passionate about spreadsheets would create, but it would be more unexpected than building a generic AI writing app. Whether it succeeds or fails.

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