Comment by villageidiot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by villageidiot | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate you treating the question in the good faith in which it was intended. While the topic may be provocative, I felt it was relevant, based on my observations of YC. However, because I can only provide anecdote as evidence of my case, I asked the question to discover whether my observations about YC are shared or whether I am suffering from a delusion. Textually this may seem like trollish behavior but some of the responses to the question seem to belie this suggestion.

As for your point about Google, some ideas are so powerful that they fall outside the conventional expectations of business practice. The fact that Google's founders have, until lately anyway, been unassertive in the manner of Microsoft, does not indicate that Bill Gates' approach "is not worth much". Absent some ground-shaking idea like Google's, I would argue the assertive approach of Microsoft is the norm for a successful company and a key ingredient missing in the YC environment.

How "assertive" was Microsoft at first? It seems like they spent their first decade toiling along at standardizing programming across the many different OEMs and computer types of the day. It was probably another decade until they did anything that anyone would consider "ruthless".

They started off trying to build something people want (Basic for the Altair) just like any YC company. I wouldn't say that most YC startups display any less ambition than building a Basic interpreter.

Mircosoft was VERY assertive at first. Without laying out a detailed history, very early on gates had a keen business sense and was quite ruthless. They may have been 'building something people want', but the seeds of what microsoft would later become were without a doubt being planted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

I don't think asking people to pay for your product is ruthless.

Not ruthless but certainly assertive.

QDOS produced by Seattle Computer and purchased by Microsoft after Digital Research dragged their heels on their promises to deliever CP/M to IBM, was a rip-off of CP/M. We can argue about this point but it's documented by Gates' biographers.

Gates was hungry for that deal and beat Kildall to the punch, doing what he needed to, bending the rules/law to get his foot in the door at IBM.

The essay by pg about "doing good" mentioned by someone in this thread might ring true when the valves are open and VC funding is flowing freely but in the new financial reality that we are in, I am arguing that it is the companies that have this kind of ruthlessness that will be the ones who make it, not the ones who want to "do good". Microsoft is not an outlier in this practice. It is self-evident that this is the American way of business.

http://books.google.com/books?id=iPWjNoSS9vUC&pg=PA120&#...

And so you think YC startups are failing to negotiate well with IBM? I'm curious beyond some vague idea of ruthlessness, that really just seems like a fairly typical licensing deal magnified in importance by history, if there are any specific examples of a YC company not being ruthless.

I still go back to my original comment, which is that when you boil this whole question down, it makes no sense at all.

I mentioned QDOS and the IBM negotiations only because I was disputing your statement about Microsoft not being assertive early on. I think this is clearly not the case. The aggressiveness of their negotiating tactics and their willingness to potentially get sued for copyright infringement relate to the context of my question about whether YC startups lack grit.

You are asking me for "specific examples of a YC startup not being ruthless". But I am asking for the inverse - examples of aggressiveness. I haven't seen any at YC. Have you? Perhaps you don't believe it's necessary or important but that was the premise of my original question. I insist that this is not a troll but a sincere question and an important one in the current economic environment, even more especially for companies not privileged by YC funding.

Most negotiation goes on behind closed doors, so you wouldn't see it (and I doubt Matt would be at liberty to discuss specific instances).

The YC founders I've met in person have been plenty assertive, and when it comes to business, some are pretty downright ruthless. They are nice guys outside of business (which is probably why you don't see them as ruthless or assertive), but they have just as much killer instinct as any other entrepreneur I've met, and more than some. PG seems to select for that - perhaps that's why I was rejected 4 times. ;-)

When I saw the title, my first thought was "Umm, wow. People really think that?"

Only you and thinkcomp have actually provided the kind of (contradictory) subjective feedback I was initially looking for.

How would you define ruthlessness I guess? I mean, I can name a lot of YC startups that are crushing their competitors by relentlessly making better products. From my batch alone there is Disqus (whose product is significantly better and gained much more traction than their closest competitor, Intense Debate) and Dropbox. They've both taken a lead over a field of entrants in terms of innovation.

I mean, they haven't thrown any bricks through their competitors' windshields, but they haven't passed up any chances to make their competitors look half-baked.

I think this statement is mired in sample bias.

What companies are you comparing YC companies to? Other successful companies or a random sample of other startups that are non-YC? Particularly with the examples of Microsoft and Google, your analysis is historical. In their pre-public-company days you may have been lured into making the same type of statement in regards to them because any business they were involved in at the time was probably minimally visible from the outside just as it is with many YC companies now. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that you probably don't know about and thus cannot consider. That is the nature of private companies.

Can you please clarify what you mean by assertive approach? You continually use Microsoft as an example, but I don't really think spending half a decade in courts is assertive.

Or maybe you could use some mid sized companies as examples as Google and Microsoft are both anomalies.

My guess would be that he means, for instance, shipping IE for free and essentially destroying Netscape was ruthless and/or assertive. He's probably forgetting that that occurred in 1995, one decade after Windows first appeared, and two decades after Microsoft was founded.

It's funny that you two have taken up the question. When I first read that comment about lack of killer instinct, there were certain YC founders who immediately popped into my head as people whose faces I'd have liked to hear him say that to...

:)

Evil is only useful once you step outside of a competitive market. EX: Cable company's seem to be Evil because they make more money that way, but trying to be more evil than the next pizza delivery company is useless.

Today, the best way to compete is to focus on cooperation, not competition. The behavior you're admiring isn't very effective when looking to cooperate with others.

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