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I couldn't think of anyone who would be interested in joining me who wouldn't dramatically lower the average founder quality.

Quality is a vector, not a scalar. What's the average of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? I don't think that's a meaningful question. But the vector sum of their skills was a startup with amazing technical and artistic skill, product focus, business aspirations, charisma, and salesmanship.

And I'd like to help you become ramen profitable, so let me demonstrate what I mean by putting on my Steve Jobs hat [1] and telling you a story.

I'm in the market for something like tarsnap, so i was very excited to hear about it, for the first time, in this random HN comment 23 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458793

...because the product sounds great. I may sign up any day now. But I distinctly remember that, after reading this enthusiastic blurb, I spent several minutes trying to figure out if tarsnap had any kind of decent security model. I remember this because I literally laughed out loud when I finally managed to figure out the answer, after clicking through more than one link and reading a few blog posts -- tarsnap was designed by a cryptographer! Indeed, now (but only now) I learn that it's even better than that: You're the FreeBSD Security Officer, which presumably involves a great deal of practical expertise in reviewing and fixing insecure software.

Why isn't this information on the tarsnap homepage, next to a "buy it now" button?

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[1] It's not nice to go all Steve Jobs on someone without being asked, so I'm deliberately toning down my Jobs impression. This is like a 2 on the Steve Jobs bluntness scale.

Why isn't this information on the tarsnap homepage

Because the tarsnap web site sucks. (Hey, you did ask!)

Until very recently the vast majority of people interested in tarsnap were people who knew who I was, had seen my work on FreeBSD, and read my blog -- so putting information about tarsnap onto my blog was only natural. Now tarsnap is starting to gain recognition as something beyond "that thing which Colin is doing", it's probably time to revisit where and how information about tarsnap is presented.

maybe you don't need a co-founder but at least a contractor/employee to take care of this and all the other things you might not have had the time to take care of?

Quite possibly. If I was going to hire one person to do some contract work, I'm pretty sure that it would be a web designer.

Most likely I'll do this myself, though -- even aside from the issue of money, I find that doing tedious things like web design myself (a) is a useful learning experience, and (b) allows me to think about issues a bit more clearly.

You need a cofounder who can take care of the ramen goal so you can focus on what you love best. The point of your business isn't to do it all yourself, it is to do something you love. If you find founders with complementing skill sets, it's win win win.

I would say you could easily get a web/design/biz cofounder who could dramatically change your ramen and also enjoy a few of those tasks you have been putting off for a while :).

Not. easy.

Just because something isn't easy doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. In fact, it often means the exact opposite.

What's the average of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? I don't think that's a meaningful question.

I agree entirely. I did say that I was being a bit facetious. :-)

I learn that it's even better than that: You're the FreeBSD Security Officer, which presumably involves a great deal of practical expertise in reviewing and fixing insecure software.

cperciva has a bit of a history of surprising people with his credentials: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

From that thread, I wonder if create_account would change their advice now?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35277

You're smart. Very smart. But you're also arrogant. It shows in a lot of your comments here on HN. That's no barrier to success, of course, but I've found arrogance to be counterproductive.

From a personal perspective arrogance blinds you to opportunities and your own shortcomings. From an interpersonal perspective it makes otherwise excellent people less interested in working with you.

Who would you work with?

Who would you work with?

Someone who is smart; who doesn't hesitate to tell me if I'm wrong; and who doesn't get offended if I tell him that he is wrong.

If arrogance makes people more likely to speak up when they see something which is wrong or could be improved, I'd say that's a net positive. False modesty has merits in some circumstances; but a startup is not such a circumstance.

There's a difference between being arrogant and being plain-spoken. There's also a difference between being falsely modest and behaving in a way that doesn't make people feel worthless. (If your inclination is to say "That's their problem," I respectfully disagree.)

You're awesome. Your skill speaks for itself. Being arrogant gets you nothing except a reputation for being difficult to work with. That's all I'm saying.

Of course, YMMV. I'm just some guy on the internet.

That is a defensive line of thinking.

False modesty is not the opposite of arrogance. Arrogance is not defined as that thing which makes someone more likely to speak up when something is wrong.

Arrogance (or modesty for that matter) is more to do with the mind then the mouth. By most people's definition, arrogance is a sort of emotional weakness that impairs judgement in various ways. Very few people who use the term equate it with outward honesty. The contrary, many would probably equate it with inward dishonesty.

I am not accusing you of arrogance myself. I do agree that many of those things that people use to diagnose arrogance might actually indicate steadfastness, confidence, straightforward honesty or some other mostly positive attribute. But as the argument turns in on itself, people's ability to diagnose each others' emotions is actually fairly evolved. Failure to recognise the possibility that they might have a point, might be..arrogant.

I totally agree; arrogance is very important if you're an unrecognized badass. Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and held for ransom. He told them he was worth more than that ransom, so they obliged by raising it. Once he was free he pursued and executed the pirates.

Most people should not have that arrogance because most people are not Caesar. Thing is, if you are Caesar, you sometimes have to be arrogant to mediocre people (especially bureaucrats) because they will crush you if you're not. But it's hard to draw the line because it's so few people are true geniuses and it's hard to know for sure if you are one.

Being a genius (as far as I can tell, because I don't know if I am one) seems to be tough in this world. It's not like being a star athlete, because in that case the best know they're the best, say so, and bet their future on it. That is not the case with geniuses. You can't take out huge loans against your future wealth in order to buy status and get laid in high school, for instance. I'm sure there are Silicon Valley billionaires who wish they could get back a part of their nerdy lost youth, but it's impossible. On the other hand, it's much less likely for a genius to have the balls to bet on his brains, challenge the curriculum, and get people excited about his future the way athletes do. I guess it's because, at the end of the day, society doesn't like nerds as much as it likes athletes, and because people like to think they're better than others. In this case, it's old people who think they are better than young people, rationalizing that they are smarter.

"...but I'm working in an area where domain knowledge is extremely important..."

If you had a design/marketing/seo cofounder that was willing to hunt for sales/bizdev opportunities, domain knowledge for that person doesn't have to be THAT deep and would bring huge benefits.

"The vision behind tarsnap, from 2.5 years ago -- an online snapshotted backup service with a tar front-end, a heavy emphasis on security, and a linear pricing model -- hasn't changed at all."

Is that a good thing, do you think? I'm not saying it isn't, but I think founders who don't experiment/explore generally succeed more than those that don't. (See the 17 out of 26 stat here) http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2007/11/why_early_stage.h...

I think your rule #0 is dead on-- there are lots of exceptions and there's no formula. But I'm pretty convinced that your startup would be more successful if you hadn't broken the "rules" that you did.

If you had a design/marketing/seo cofounder that was willing to hunt for sales/bizdev opportunities, domain knowledge for that person doesn't have to be THAT deep and would bring huge benefits.

I think you might be overstating things here. I've found my domain knowledge to be very important when selling tarsnap -- being able to convincingly explain why tarsnap is secure and efficient (and why the competition isn't!) has gained me a lot of customers.

If you can explain it to your customers you should be able to explain it to others to help you sell it.

Although I agree with your comment, I must say that everyone (and I mean everyone), who is a startup entrepreneur, knows about HN, and reads all PGs essays knows that these are advices, opinions based on the experience from funding over 100 startups. Not rules, advices.

And although I applaud your efforts and accomplishments at Tarsnap, I must say that you base your argument on significantly less than 100 startups.

[everyone here knows that these are advice, not rules].

I wish I could agree with you here, but I'm afraid I've seen far too many comments along the lines of "you're violating pg's rule XYZ, so you must be doing something wrong". Yes, most people here probably understand that pg's guidance doesn't apply to every situation, but I still think it's worth reminding people occasionally.

And although I applaud your efforts and accomplishments at Tarsnap, I must say that you base your argument on significantly less than 100 startups.

I don't believe this sort of comment is helpful. For one thing, "X works" and "Y can work, too" are not two bits of advice which are in opposition to each other, and shouldn't be treated as such. (Even when X = "Startups should have multiple founders" and Y = "Actually, you can get by with one person if...")

For another thing, evaluating expertise by weight of incomparable circumstances is not logical. If it were, we'd all be taking advice from McDonalds on how to sell software, as the sum total of all customers of every startup company which has ever been mentioned on this site would not equal the number of cups of coffee McDonalds sold worldwide yesterday. Now there are many things to learn from McDonalds, but willy-nilly application of their ideas because they have mass on their side is a bad idea. (The sweet spot for pricing is below $5. Advertising is less about motivating people to buy in the near future than building your brand image for life. Literacy is a nice attribute to have in an employee but is not necessary if you exercise proper management.)

That made me curious. McDonalds sells about 50M cups of coffee / day. Some startups who I know participate on HN are (multiplying Alexa daily reach by 1G, to get order of magnitude estimates):

  Scribd: 5M daily uniques

  Justin.tv: 3M daily uniques

  last.fm: 2M daily uniques

Just those would equal McD's daily coffee sales in 5 days. So we're not so many orders of magnitude behind big public companies.

It might be satisfying to include some reference lines on your daily user graph, so you can celebrate when you serve more pages than, say, McDonald's sells fish sandwiches, or Wal-Mart sells Spiderman action figures, or whatever.

I'm guessing he wasn't counting a page impression as a customer. The actual number of customers of Scribd, Justin.tv, and last.fm is quite a bit less than the number of customers of McDonalds. It may be just a handful, if they contract out to an ad provider and then get all their revenue through that.

Of course, this is a meaningless comparison, because the number of people that Scribd or Justin.TV reach on a daily basis is more closely correlated to the number of users they have than the number of customers.

I'm terminally old-fashioned in a lot of ways. I hold open doors for ladies, take off my hat before entering buildings, and define customer as "someone who pays money for a good or service".

When speaking of expertise numbers matter. You can assume that the author is more knowledgeable than PG when it comes to encrypted data backup. As he says, he has sent a good 3 years working on his startups.

On the other hand, PG has also spent the past 3 years funding different startups and must have some decent idea about what is more likely to help a startup.

Same goes for you. I would assume that you are more experience in Bingo software then other programmers even if they are better programmers than you are. But in the field of Bingo, you would probably crush several highly talented developers.

Why?

"Weight of incomparable circumstances" probably.

We followed 4 of these (3, 7, 8, 13) and broke 7 (1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12) and ultimately failed. The interesting part is that right up until failure, we had checkmarks besides #1, 11, and 12, making 7 yes and 4 no, and then they rapidly fell into the opposite column. It's amazing how quickly they can change.

Those 3 are also quite related - while I still had cofounders, we'd kinda prop each other up during the low points, so we didn't get demoralized, so we didn't give up. But when my last remaining cofounder quit, I tried to keep it going for 2 months, but the emotional burden was far too much. I couldn't do it - if you can, good for you, but I think that there's a lot of truth in these rules.

Also - I think there's too much wiggle room in "Understand your users." I don't have it listed in either column for my startup, which tells me that we probably didn't, but most startups won't have the emotional distance to realize that. Even now, I'm not sure whether we did or not: since getting out to Silicon Valley, everyone I've told about my startup says "Oh, that's a cool idea, I wish you'd been able to finish it." Maybe we should've moved out west before quitting. ;-)

the emotional burden was far too much. I couldn't do [a startup without cofounders] - if you can, good for you, but I think that there's a lot of truth in these rules.

I think it would be very interesting to chart the success rates of sole-founder startups vs. whether or not the founder had a graduate degree: I get the feeling that the sort of struggles single founders often go through are very similar to the sort of struggles graduate students go through when they've been working for X years and still don't have a thesis in sight. If someone can work quietly in a corner and churn out a thesis after a few years, does that make them more likely to be able to churn out a startup by themselves?

That's actually almost exactly the same thing my former boss said (he has a Ph.D).

I think there's a lot of truth to it, but it can also be misleading. A lot of these solo-Ph.D startups just chug along for years at ramen or small-business profitability levels. They work, they provide a nice living for the founder and a few employees, but they don't grow. Whether or not they survive seems to depend on how independent-minded the founders are, because the financial returns are often less than the founders can get elsewhere. Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry.

There're a lot of other benefits to having multiple founders besides the "don't give up" aspect. Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people, since the dumb parts of the idea get weeded out and the clever parts get amplified. Other people tend to take you more seriously when you can say "we" instead of "I". You learn how to compromise and accept other's input early, which is absolutely crucial once you have employees. You get a stronger company culture, which always seems to evolve out of the interactions between founders.

Actually, you seem a lot like my old boss - both math Ph.Ds with an independent streak, except you're half his age. He was a good guy and very, very smart (finished a Princeton Ph.D in 3 years). But the startup I worked at for 2 years, which is now 8 years old, is still limping along and hasn't taken off. And I really think that if it'd had 2-3 equal founders instead of 1 majority and 2 minority founders, it would've done much, much better.

Anyone with a Ph.D that has the work ethic to run a startup ought to be worth at least a couple hundred grand a year in industry.

Ah, but that requires a completely different work ethic. To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich.

Ideas tend to become better when they're bounced off multiple people

That's what users are for. :-)

To an academic, living on ramen while solving interesting problems is far more interesting than getting rich.

But if that's your goal, then likely that will be what your startup gets. Interesting problems, few customers, and not much money.

There're lots of Ph.D-founded startups in that category. My previous employer was one. Symbolics is another high-profile example. Lots we haven't heard of, since they're working on interesting problems and not getting rich.

If that's what you want, go for it, as long as you're bootstrapping (it's irresponsible to take other people's money when you have no intention of making some yourself). Just be honest with yourself and any future employees about it. I'm still a bit bitter that I was sold on visions of Bloomberg and revolutionizing the financial industry while the reality was more about working on the boring parts of problems that were interesting to my boss and only vaguely interesting to customers.

Oh, my goal isn't to live on ramen. I gave that example simply to illustrate that the work ethic involved in running a startup is not quite the same as the work ethic involved in working for a big company.

Lots we haven't heard of, since they're working on interesting problems and not getting rich.

Partly because "we" (HN) are biased toward consumer-facing web startups, which are typically not the sort of companies started by academics, or people with extensive knowledge of a non-web industry. There are many startups out there that "we haven't heard of", but still end up solving valuable problems, and quite a few of them get rich as a result.

If someone can work quietly in a corner and churn out a thesis after a few years, does that make them more likely to be able to churn out a startup by themselves?

I doubt there's a strong correlation here. When you're working on a thesis, you're still within some academic community, have a rough deadline, and have a pretty good sense of what's going to fly or not. Moreover, the progress you make on a thesis is inherently satisfying. You can stand back and look at even a page or a paragraph of work with pride.

When you're working on a startup, you spend much of your time working on things that don't work yet or will look and feel like crap for a while. A lot of the problems you solve aren't going to be intellectually interesting, as they would be for a thesis. Which means that there are precious few rewards to be had from the pre-launch development process by itself.

I tried to go solo for a while, but found myself crushed by the lack of feedback. Then I paired up with someone (remotely), and if we weren't pair programming, we were at least showing each other what we'd done several times a week and giving feedback. Not only is this immensely helpful in terms of sustaining motivation, but merely having someone else who thinks of things you don't is incredibly valuable.

I agree with the last sentence of your comment. As for the rest, maybe you should add: rule #-1: be modest :-)

I am trying to write a post on my blog about what I call the "solo entrepreneur blues", which has to do with one of the biggest mistakes I have seen by entrepreneur friends: start alone and trust no one. I'll post a link once I have the tone right.

rule #-1: be modest

Touché!

start alone and trust no one

I'd say that's a bit strong to describe my situation. I started alone, yes; but it's more a matter of not needing anyone than it is of trusting no one.

From my limited experience, having cofounders helps with rules 11. Don't get demoralized and 12. Don't give up. Now, I'm not saying you can't abide by these rules without cofounders but having them around keeps the momentum going. One of us is always full-speed ahead.

It's always important to hear about the counterpoints. As an outside observer I'm not sure its obvious that your company wouldn't have been better off with a cofounder and a quicker release schedule. All I'm saying is: there are exceptions where its best not to follow these rules and then there are successes despite not following the best course.

Hi Colin, I referred to tarsnap and said it had a "good pedigree" on JWZ's blog. Yes, I was referring to your background and domain knowledge as FreeBSD Secuirity Officer. http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007641.html#comment-...

There seems to be some confusion among the HN user about the actual starup definition. Many people call a startup even outside projects and websites made for fun.

PG says "The essential task in a startup is to create wealth", that pretty well rules tarsnap out as a startup, I guess.

PG says "The essential task in a startup is to create wealth", that pretty well rules tarsnap out as a startup, I guess.

It does? That's weird -- I thought tarsnap was creating wealth.

Stating that the emperor has no clothes is not appreciated here.

I think plenty of the 'wannabe' startups here are a bit like kids 'playing house'. If you say hey, it's just a blanket and two couches they get mad at you for breaking the illusion.