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Comment by dvrp | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once.

Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!

I'm having a hard time understanding the 'gotcha' quality of this comment and this subthread. There's no inconsistency; PG has always said that people should finish college before starting a startup—I heard him say this over 15 years ago, and he went on about it at length at his most recent YC talk.

Edit: I think I understand the problem now. PG's actual advice has always been "finish college before starting a startup". Somehow somewhere that got distorted into "don't start a company in your 20s", which is certainly not what PG has been saying (the average graduation age is somewhere around 23). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372572 quotes a representative passage, and if you read that essay you'll see that he's mostly saying "don't start a startup at 20".

(Edit: I deleted my last sentence which was irritable.)

I don't have a strong personal opinion on this, but the PG essay mentioned in the comment you link to advises people not to start a startup while in college and to do other things in their "early 20s", while Early Decision is targeted specifically at people who are currently college students and (mostly) in their early 20s. I don't think there's a 'gotcha' there, but there is at least a tension, no?

While you're correct that the comment you're responding to is a bit sloppy in summarizing what PG said ("20s" instead of "early 20s"), its basic point still makes sense.

YC is not the Church of Paul Graham, so I don't see any need to dive into Pauline exegesis and attempt to reconcile YC's current admissions process with everything PG has ever said. YC can do what it likes, and people can note what may or may not have changed since PG was in charge of it.

The early decision is for people who want to start a startup once they finish college. I don't see a tension between that and advising people to finish college.

The difference between "20s" and "early 20s" is huge; it's the difference between Google and not-Google (btw, that pg essay includes this information). Since not-not-funding-Google is, to a first approximation, the entire startup investment business, conflating the two is more than a bit sloppy, and the GP comment (imputing an inconsistency to PG that doesn't exist, with cynical implications), makes no sense once one adjusts for what pg really said. He's been consistent about this for many years! I'm being irritable again now though. but not with you!

You made me laugh with the Pauline bit!

As startup valuations have gone up quickly and the YC offer largely remains the same, YC has naturally moved downmarket. They have gone from being an exclusive, premium product aimed at people who have a serious chance of building a unicorn to a finishing school for venture-backed entrepreneurs. In my opinion, this is a great thing for YC because it's a more natural fit for their main value proposition, but it also means that the best time to do modern YC is essentially straight out of school.

I don't think this is a valuations vs. stagnant offer scenario. I think it has more to do with YC scaling up from dozens to hundreds and thousands of investments in a very competitive landscape. From a few early successes when no one was doing what they did, to having way more money to invest than there are good ideas and now it's spray & pray; trade on the YC name and with some luck hope there's a pay-off. If we start with the apocryphal "VCs look for 1 in 10 home runs", well the earliest YC classes only had like ten in a batch, so they had the time, energy and NEED to have a success. YC added a lot of partners who had a successful exit - or didn't - and surprise, they look like every other VC partner in the industry, at least minus the identical headshots in navy blue suits.

This was absolutely Paul's strategy -- read his essay reflecting on returns from their early portfolio (AirBnB and Dropbox). His take -- "we should have done another 1000 investments to get a third hit" (coinbase, it turns out. And he was correct).

The math for YC's seed stage returns is overall inexorably towards more checks being written - the checks are incredibly cheap. YC's IRR is currently roughly 176%, yielding an 81,000x return since 2005 -- another way to say it: a single $25k investment from 2005 could be deployed into 81,000 $25k investments in 2026. Or another way to say it, for every check they wrote, they're able to write another check off that investment every 8 months, compounding all the way back.

YC's main problem is that there aren't 81,000 even slightly viable startups in the world. It's true they've lost their "exclusive" vibe, but to be honest, when they started it was more "small and quirky" which briefly became "gold standard exclusive." It was never their original brand, and I don't think it was ever really part of the strategy.

For whoever wants to re-read one of the articles that mentions the idea, there you go: https://paulgraham.com/before.html#f7n:~:text=You%20can%20do...

What that article says is "don't start a startup in college". That is what pg has always said, and is not at all what the GP comment imputes to him.

More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45375715.

> Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once.

I've been lurking on HN since 2008 and can't remember a time where i got the vibe from pg to be like "live your life" instead of "start a company now and apply". Can you point to some specific essay you had in mind?

https://paulgraham.com/before.html

"Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Be a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and not be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start a startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life. And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.

You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. For unambitious people, this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the ambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration. If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never get to do it. [7]"

Totally disagree with Paul here. If you are growing up rich, you can take your time with no deadlines.

If you grew up with responsibilities, you cant ignore the ticking clock. You have to start working on a career path asap.

If there is a single advice i would give the young folks here: Don't listen to VC's. Live your life. Startup founder is more comparable to an olympic athlete in terms of what you have to give up to get there - by definition 99% of people who try no matter how brilliant won't walk this path successfully - but both will lose many things on this way without being much happier than before. This is also where most of this community is being very dishonest be it co-founder search or success stories: Only a very small percentage of people is mentally suited (e.g. extreme resilience) to go on with this gamble yet we encourage everyone to try it out here.

>extreme resilience

You misspelled narcissistic psychopath.

The Best of Gavin Belson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30WTWkFe910

The Best of Russ Hanneman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGy5SGTuAGI

This. I'd also add that, in general, you don't need a large sum of money in the early stages, as long as your basic needs are covered. For instance, living with your parents for a while can be a smart move. More importantly, use time wisely: with discipline you can do or validate a lot over several quarters. By contrast, if you take the VC route, the metronome ticks much faster, often in a way that can be counterproductive for your startup. As unintuitive as it sounds.

Doesn't PG actually argue for startups as the "surest" route to million dollar "success"?

Honestly I think there are two different audiences. The type of person that is open to traveling, exploring jobs, etc. in their twenties is different from the “institutional pipeline” track of good high school > good college > good job.

This early decision thing is functionally going to move a few pipeline kids from the corporate world to the startup world, which probably isn’t a terrible outcome. But it also reflects how YC has become a marker of institutional pipeline success for a lot of people.

it's unclear to me which track you think YC runs on - stuffy corporate or hip & edgy explorer?

I wouldn't use either of those labels, more like...it is becoming / is already tied into the institutional definition of success. 15 years ago, it was still kind of unorthodox to turn down a BigTech job and start a company instead. Nowadays it's starting to feel like another credential or routine path that smart tech-adjacent people take.

IMO if you're trying to decide between a well-paid job and starting a company...you probably aren't cut out to start a company. But...the infrastructure for choosing the latter option is becoming developed and safe enough that realistically speaking, it may actually be the optimal non-entrepreneurial career choice.

Whatever statement is more relatable at the time hence better for their business.

Gives me weirdo Thiel vibes who pays (or used to pay) kids to drop out of college and start a company for him.

In fairness, while I’m sure it didn’t work out for all of them, one of these students became one of the youngest self made billionaires in history

He did it to the smartest kid in our CS class. I feel bad now because I feel like he deserves a degree.

He'll receive plenty of opportunities regardless of degree so I don't see why you feel sorry for him.

He would have made a fantastic professor in my opinion. But I think also, certain opportunities just require a degree on a policy level.

A classmate of mine dropped out to do this. Failed, and ended up picking up later to finish the last two years of college. It really didn’t seem to have slowed them down, and finishing college a few years later (with some startup founders experience) seems to have been overall good. Unfortunately did end up going to Boston Consulting Group from on-campus recruiting, so not a great end to the story, but historically that’s a high-ish paying and hard to get job.

I get the feeling only very affluent and well-supported people follow this path, and they probably don't need THiel's money to do it. The vast majority don't have a few years at this stage of their life to play the lottery.

Yeah, I hung out with one of the early batches of these people (my former supervisor was involved) and would agree that they tended to be from better off families. How much of that was the Ivy league selection bias vs anything else I dunno though.

Doesn't mean that this was a good thing for them. For example, many kid actors who become rich and famous are not happy.

I mean... is it self-made if a billionaire helped you?

It seems kind of the opposite to me. YC is allowing you to finish school. You don't need to drop out.

Or weirdo Russ Hanneman vibes who bought a company called The Lady so he could use his phone as a parental remote control to raise his kid with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGy5SGTuAGI&t=217s

A company I'm funding, we call it The Lady.

I press the button, and The Lady tells Aspen when it's time for bed, time to take a bath, when his fucking mother's here to pick him up.

I get to be his friend, and she's the bad guy.

I've disrupted fatherhood!

another POV is two people who are willing to risk a lot of money on pre-seed stage companies - no traction, only people and an idea - have arrived at a lot of the same mechanics for such investing

the better question is: how do these two investors differentiate themselves?

First time he gave that advise it was not directly affecting his company profit chances. Second time though is different.

Another good example of expressing and exersiging values, how easy to construct appealing narrative regardless of underlying subject and something else what I can't pinpoint at this stage...

PG never gave that advice (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45375715), and has been completely consistent about the advice he has given.

Not that everyone should always be consistent, but you guys could not have picked a worse example to seize on.

I've had to explain this to several people: YC goals are not our goals. For YC, it would be great for lots of people to burn down their lives for even the slimmest chance at success.

Venture capital would love it if everyone worked overtime with no weekends to build “the next big thing.”

Your hobbies and interests should actually just be work and producing profit. Don’t spend the weekend taking a hike with your friends, you gotta get building.

The people doing that work are a probabilistic financial instrument to the VC system. The founders who fall for this trap instead of living a balanced life are just lowering the cost basis for the VC investors by giving away free labor.

In reality, you can build a startup while maintaining a work-life balance, but if everyone did that then VC firms would have to delay the purchase of their owners’ fifth yacht by a couple of months.

The only people who have the time and energy for the toxic startup founder lifestyle of thing are students and young people who haven’t yet established families and their optimism and interest is being exploited.

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