What Kate saw in Silicon Valley
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
This is the hardest thing for me to explain to others. And still one of the hardest for me to get used to myself. It takes a lot of time working alone to get anything done.
It may also be one of the many reasons Hacker News is so popular. I don't know about you guys, but if I didn't have this place to break up the loneliness, I'd probably go nuts.
Lessons? Don't start alone. Pick your co-founders really well (think "marriage"). Make sure you have people you really want to work with who are ready to leave their jobs and work for less money because they really want to work with you.
I think the lesson here is that if loneliness is a big problem for you, you might not want to start your own company.
But ideally you've got some smart friends that aren't completely risk averse before you decide to start a company, and those are probably a good set of folks to bounce it off of. I'm always dubious of people "finding" co-founders through systematic searches. I'd known my co-founder for 3 years before we started our company, and it's amazing how much more you learn when the pressure is turned up. I can only imagine that a lot of startups fly apart at the hinges when there isn't some basic level of getting along that's preexisting.
My old friend, and first employee, is too risk averse to join a startup in a normal environment. But since the company he was working for went bankrupt and he wasn't able to find a job for months, he gladly came to work for me and it has worked out very well.
My point is: intensity introversion introversion inherently limits the the size of any useful social circle by requiring excessive emotional energy to grow beyond that. For me, that size is probably on the order of a couple dozen people, though that's well beyond the comfortable level of emotional expenditure, which is closer to only one dozen.
Filtering by technical aptitude (notwithstanding a disproportionately high ratio) and startup compatibility, reduces the number to zero.
What about introverted co-founders?
Well, that depends strongly on the person, doesn't it? :)
Apologies for sounding trollish, but I'm somewhat shocked at the reactions here. We have someone telling us that they work themselves into such a lonely place that the only thing keeping them sane is HN, and yet no one is suggesting he reorder his life and find a better balance so that he can find more enjoyment.
I don't think you're sounding trollish, but I do think you may not be treating this forum as a casual social setting in which people sometimes make statements to convey a feeling, rather than because they are literally true.
Edit: I forgot to say:
I also think that for a lot of people who hang out here, and to a lesser extent on proggit, etc, this online community really is one of the most fun, engaging things they have available to do. Conversation online with those who are interested in similar topics could easily trump conversation in person with those whose interests bore you. Even if we grant that being in the real world is an important attribute of "fun things to do", it's unlikely to be the most important.
Reason is, it is about locking yourself up, getting through alot of the problems on your own and working on the next one. The minute you have someone there (even if they are coding as well) and when your task is not integrating it becomes more of a distraction having someone there.
For me, youtube, hacker news and sydney morning herald get me through my lonliness when im hacking away, also the odd trip to subway to get myself a sandwich and the lady at the counter :)
Then again, that has its own challenges. I've tried to work with several different uni friends in last few months and it's astonishing how many things they have calling their attention leaving little to no time for the start-up.
What I do is lock myself deep inside a little library cubicle. Then when I need some fresh air, I chill out by the student union. Talk to buds. And return to work. It really helps that my product is hyper-focused for the college market.
I suspect that this observation has something to do with the last PG essay to hit HN about putting yourself in the centre.
If you take any list of characteristics that you apply to a group, it will tend to contrast them with the 'norm.' Invert it and you get their perspective on the rest of the world, especially if the list is self authored.
Imagine a group of Uzbeki expats in Rotterdam commenting on themselves. They'll come up with a list of traits that make them stand out from the crowd. Invert it and you have their perspective on the Dutch. The problem/advantage of this trick is that you might end up with a list of fairly marginal (in the eyes of a non-Uzbeki) or unremarkable traits.
Anyway, this might have something to do with it:
"By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the "normal" world. It's populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy."
That made me smile for about 30 mins. Awesome.
Not all investors are VCs. There are also angel investors, and we are much more like angels, both in our backgrounds and the part of the startup world we occupy. Angels don't have a lot of habits, either good or bad. They're mostly just individuals who got rich from their own startups; their personalities are not much affected by being investors.
The one thing that makes us different from angels is that we invest on such a large scale. We have a brand name and an office and a web site and all that. Would that engender any habits, though? I can't think of any.
I definitely don't think we have any of the habits of VCs that are mentioned in this list. The fact that VCs dress up and try to project an aura of power comes from being finance guys, not VCs per se; investment bankers are the same (and in fact are indistinguishable to me). And we don't have the luxury of being sheep, because we have to decide whether or not to invest in a company the same day we meet them.
Think of it this way: nobody would refer to Roger Federer as "scrappy". You could say that the opposite of "scrappy" is dignified, but you could also say the opposite of scrappy is "elegant." Dignity may be deadly, but I'm not sure that's the only thing you lose when you exude "scrappiness".
The "Founder" next door is like "The Millionaire Nextdoor".Keeping it simple, frugal, and staying cash-flow positive wins the game. This is why your millionaire next door and your founder next door are probably one in the same. Similar philosophies.
If this is really true (and I fully believe that it is), why not just interview individuals like a job interview rather than have them pitch ideas?
If you know the resulting product is almost certainly not going to look anything like what they're proposing, I would just try to swing some on-campus interviews at Stanford and UC Berkeley, hire the kids based on smarts & personality and then put them in a room and only then start talking about ideas.
Why bother reviewing their initial ideas at all (other than as an indicator of the aforementioned smarts & personality)?
There certainly is value in the effort one engages in when self-developing, self-formulating, self-revising, self-actualizing, self-motivating, self-preserving and finally self-sticking-your-neck-out, which is what the YC process is sort of about.
In Summary:
Being a doer aint easy.
In short: Interesting things happen when you put smart people in a room without any constraint and a little bit of funding.
Although I freely admit the IAS is fairly controversial and some people hate the model.
That is in fact about how we think of the idea, if it's still just an idea. Sometimes, as e.g. with a company like Bump, there's a real product to judge, but that's rarely the case.
Big difference between "about half" and "almost certainly not".
Shouldn't that be enough? Having an idea gives you a starting point from which to iterate.
http://croutonboy.typepad.com/photos/people_i_hate/scrappy.j...
Why would someone with a different opinion be embarrassing?
edit: One cannot control it. Move the slide show faster, slower, go back, stop, etc., which makes it time consuming and inefficient.
Although I believe there to be no "correctly," I do believe that this is a deplorable case of a word losing meaning, without a suitable replacement.
Although, honestly, it took me a moment to parse it that way, as opposed to "on a [pop-up window that you can't background] day, I see 0 people..."
Scrappy is getting by on the most minimal of necessities, does not ever involve a company doing one's laundry, and from everything I've been able to gather, requires actual bean counting.
To me, a "scrappy person" has always been someone who, when life or a situation knocks them down, they get back up and try again. I was not aware that this was a derogatory term.
Though PG cites the 'belligerent' meaning, I suspect Kate and others are likely to mean/hear the 'thrifty/tenacious' connotations.
Don't stop there, Paul. This "inversion" idea still has a lot more mileage in it. Just off the top of my head I'd add that the "normal" world is also full of large teams, scheduled meetings, integrated hierarchical social environments, and teams that never die.
"By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the 'normal' world. It's populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy."
And:
"Interestingly, while Kate said that she could never pick out successful founders, she could recognize VCs, both by the way they dressed and the way they carried themselves."
Examples of the kinds of things they talk, think, and work on quite deliberately (I am not making any of this up):
- How high should you hold your drink? (Correct answer: A little above waist high, somewhat at your side.)
- Details about ties, suits, shoes, shirts, pants, accessories, etc. The exact social niche that each possible choice puts you in.
- Should you ever apologize, even when you've done something wrong? (No consensus here, but a surprisingly large contingent say "no".)
- Exactly how to position your feet when standing casually, in order to demonstrate high status. (Sort of an L shape.)
- Which hole in your belt at which to place the buckle. (Correct answer: the third hole.)
As Paul Graham pointed out, most people spend pretty much all their time thinking about and practicing these things. Women work on this stuff much more than men, and they tend to notice your skill level at those social games very acutely. It might look like that stuff happens unconsciously, but it doesn't. It's practiced, discussed, refined quite deliberately.
It makes me think of programmers thinking about small things like how to name variable names (e.g. name arrays with a plural), when to use aggregation or inheritance, etc. You keep refining every little detail of a skill every day, and two things happen after a while: you get really good, and you can size up someone else's skill level very quickly and accurately.
I think the biggest difference between younger and older founders seemed to be the relative levels of confidence at various points in the game.
From PG: http://ycombinator.com/faq.html
What's the average age of people you fund?
About 25. A lot of people think it's younger because the press especially like to write about young founders.
I've since heard that Greg is one of the most "hacker-like" of VC's out there... which would go to further proving that point.