Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas | Hacker News Reader

Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

paulgraham.com

26 pointstransburgh21 comments

Here's a link to the Artix website (RTM & PG's first startup):

http://web.archive.org/web/19961226071744/http://www.artix.c...

This is apparently a year into their venture, but I think they'd already abandoned the idea at this point. Notice the ad on the top for Viaweb.

Holy shit. I had no idea that was still around. Pretty spiffy for 1995. That was before tables.

I notice our pitch to galleries

http://web.archive.org/web/19961227091110/www.artix.com/how....

has a lot in common with Viaweb's

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/bugbear/how.html

Paul, you were on the internet for 13 years before your sold your first startup? And you have five degrees? Yet you want 20-year-olds to succeed in 6 months if possible, even without a degree? That's insane (in a good way.)

We'd actually prefer if it took longer. If you succeed in 6 months, it was probably an early acquisition, and YC doesn't make very much from those.

As long as we're digging up forgotten Grahamobilia:

http://www.bugbear.com/

I came across that a couple years ago when it showed up in one of the headers of an email posted somewhere on paulgraham.com, which I can no longer find.

My favorite is Viaweb's last press release. We actually issued this, a few days before the Yahoo deal closed. It was the culmination of my press-release writing career.

http://www.bugbear.com/laspresrel.html

"Harvard University, founded in 1638, is the leading supplier of education and scholarship worldwide. Its flagship product, the Harvard University PhD degree, is the scholarship industry's leading enterprise-wide scalable information management solution. "

That's great. I hope someone published it.

http://store1.yimg.com/I/bugbear_1850_80296

This is most interesting to me;

"This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view:

"80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least one management person in the team at the start. The business person represents the "voice of the customer" and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on track."

This is, in my opinion, a crock. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started."

This is a simple case of specialization of labor. While a hacker may be able to hear the voice of the customer, it probably makes sense to have some folks that do more hacking and some more customer hearing. If you have two co-founders, it makes sense to have one on each side.

Whee, let's resubmit the entire PG archive. Free points!

It's mostly all been submitted, anything that hasn't been submitted yet is fair game.

You ought to let them have this one. I had no idea this existed myself.

He's talking about the 2005 article, but it seems you're talking about the artix site. Wrong thread. :)

Oops, yes. No need to submit stuff already on the Library link at the bottom of the site.

In a sense, pg, don't you think that you are perhaps still funding ideas that are in fringe markets?

In the future can we expect to see a fund for a) a standard search engine and b) a standard social network....

a) To beat Google will take a clever new technology/algorithm. I'm sure if someone came to YC with an idea for a fundamentally better search engine they would get funding.

b) Same thing here. It's hard to beat facebook as far as a general interest social network. There needs to be something unique.

Lazy people have the best ideas. Lazy people always try to cut the process short and find the easiest way to do things. Now this is a gift and a curse as they never act. This is how we all get to hear stories of someone saying "Oh I had this idea n months ago. They stole my idea"

pg, have you found that those accepted into the SFP are increasingly able to get past the bad idea stage?

They're usually pretty flexible, but that's because we try really hard to screen out inflexible people in the interview.

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