Text of Y Combinator article in Inc Magazine | Hacker News Reader

Text of Y Combinator article in Inc Magazine

zgarbow.posterous.com

64 pointsgarbowza36 comments

"5. If you could go back in time and do one thing differently, what would it be?

I wish I had taken advantage of all the free time I had in high school and actually learned stuff, instead of spending so much time hanging out with friends."

Really? That seems to me to be a minority opinion. Most people wish they did more "high school"-type things than spend time studying. They're not exclusive, but surely spending all free time studying and not socializing is bound to rob you of valuable experiences.

grass is always greener. especially in high school.

That wasn't a verbatim quote. All the things in that list were boiled down from a long conversation.

What I really said was that I wished I hadn't wasted so much time in high school-- that I'd realized earlier that it was my responsibility to teach myself, instead of thinking that all I had to do was learn the stuff we were taught in classes. Then he asked me what I did spend my time on in HS, and I said basically the same thing as any other teenage kid: just hanging out with friends, doing nothing in particular.

Hm, the use of the "I" pronoun implied it was verbatim to me. I'd hoped the reporter did a better job at distilling the intent behind interview answers rather than providing third-grade summaries. Do you feel the article did yc justice?

The article was above average for accuracy. But average is not very high: newspaper and magazine articles tend to contain a lot of mistakes.

The most misleading thing in the article was the whole guru theme. Maybe it made the story seem more interesting, but there is very little dispensing of abstract wisdom at YC. 99% of the conversation I have with people is about the specific problems of individual startups. Car mechanic would be a more accurate metaphor than guru.

tbh, I didn't read the entire article; just that Q&A stood out.

And yeah, I know exactly what you mean based on the reporting on the security industry.

To me, one of the more interesting pieces of the article was when it talked about the years you spent from '91 - '95 in a kind of consulting/painting period where you would consult for a while then stop and paint until you ran out of money then repeat until eventually you decided it was time to make some "real money", which was apparently when you decided to start a company. My question is, were you considering other options at that time (such as just getting a regular job) or were you always dead set on starting your own company?

It's generally unsafe to assume that quotations indicate a high degree of correlation between the person being interviewed's intent and the text within. Very often reporters start with a point they're trying to make and then search for snippets to support that, freely editing to further that end.

It's also a reason that if you're being interviewed for publication that it's a good idea to ask for the right to review it before publication to make sure that you're not being misrepresented – at least not in any way that offends you.

Although I've never gone to journalism school, I have the impression that journalists' professional ethics forbid this, because it deprives them not only of the ability to misrepresent you but also of the ability to harshly criticize you. Clearly, for instance, the famous Wired hit piece on Ted Nelson never would have seen print if it had needed Ted's signoff. In the case of this story, when talking about ViaWeb, they mentioned the Morris worm (which pg never does voluntarily, as far as I can tell, even though it's by far Morris's most famous achievement) but they got the story wrong (or anyway this is the first time I'd ever heard the release was accidental, as opposed to the virulence.)

I guess the short version is that they value independence from sources more highly than accuracy.

It's different in an investigative story vs. an interview. If they're just cherry-picking quotes for a story, you probably won't get to review it. If they're trimming down an interview, then I don't see a real conflict since it's being presented as something representative of what you said.

Remember - who is in the best position to shape perceptions of the press? :) Most popular journalism has the same relation to truth as screenplays. Professional ethics has never really been a barrier to massaging the story.

A few journalists have even told me that when they really want to needle someone they will quote absolutely verbatim, down to every "um", "ah" and mistake but carefully out of context so as to make the subject come off like a raving idiot.

Speaking of mentioning the Morris worm, the YC partners page says the following of Morris:

"In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public."

In most any article of any significance I have been a part of, I get a call a couple weeks after the interview by a fact-checker that double-checks the spelling of my name, and generally asks me "would you say the following statements are true: ..."

so there's some level of accuracy checking, you just can't do it with the whole story otherwise you'd be having the subject writing the article to their exact liking, and that wouldn't be journalism anymore, it would be PR and promotion.

Hell, I wish I'd realized that during my undergrad :/. Fortunately I finally got a clue by the time I started my master's (6 months of not knowing what the hell to do after my bachelor's kind of woke me up in that respect).

"...I wished I hadn't wasted so much time in high school..."

Funny, I also went to Gateway and had a great time with my friends. After I read this

http://www.paulgraham.com/gateway.html

I often found myself saying, "I wish I had been more like Paul Graham and not wasted so much time in high school."

Now that I'm a lot older and a little bit wiser, I have a feeling that everything happened the way it did for a reason and it turned out OK. I suspect that's probably a little bit true for you too.

I flagged this. Surely this is a copyright violation. If Inc hasn't put the text up on their web site then it's because they don't want the text in that form, no doubt they want you to buy the magazine.

yes it is copyright violation.

EDIT: ah I didnt realize it was a scan PDF. Not so sure now. ;)

Agree - even though I'd like to read the article I think we should accept the choices and income models of fellow entrepreneurs and businesses.

As did I. And I will be going out to buy a copy (assuming it's on the newsstands already).

I subscribe to INC, so I read the article yesterday. It's worth a few bucks. Go out and buy it.

i forgot how cheap magazines can be now - I think my year of Inc was only $7, whereas buying one copy off the shelf would be like $5

maybe there should have been a "buy this magazine" link to: http://bit.ly/175fvY and also a link to this commentary, then it could be under Fair Use.

Oh no!

Rather than a link to a blog post with a link to scribd with a link to a pdf, here is a pdf:

http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/zgarbow/czK...

Kind of ironic that scribd isn't working right for this PDF in particular, I must say.

The picture is just like of Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"!

Heh, I thought it was a bit cheeky.

Yeah, that made me a bit nervous. I realized what they were up to as soon as I saw how they had the table set up. But I figured few readers would get it, and it would at least be a good composition.

The picture gives me a sense of the youthful inspiration and commotion much like the articles does. A great picture and a great article. Anybody in their 40s founding startups these days or have we just accepted our waterboarding?

So, does that mean Wattvision will betray PG/YC somehow?

My favorite quote:

"Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly. But working for a large company is like being waterboarded."

Not a terribly good analogy. Working for a big company is painful in a very different kind of, much more depressing and sluggish, way.

I was going to say the same thing... it's more analogous to being drugged.

I was thinking it's more like spending time in solitary confinement. No explicit torture, just the slow creep of insanity due to social isolation and routine.

They had to play the cult card didn't they.

Hate it or Love it, you want to be part of the gang.

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