Golden Rule for Startups | Hacker News Reader

Golden Rule for Startups

paraschopra.com

25 pointstessro5 comments

Just a caveat to anyone who DOES want to start an "easy business"...

In Founders at Work (another great book from Apress), Paul Graham talks about starting Viaweb (which Yahoo bought to power Yahoo Stores):

Graham: "We had this angry phone conversation where he [co-founder Robert Morris] said something like, 'We’ve been working on this thing for a whole month, and it’s still not finished.' It’s funny in retrospect, because we were still working on it 3 years later. At the time, I was just thinking about how to get him to keep working on it for another month..."

In the same book, Max Levchin talks about starting Paypal:

Levchin: "It was pretty funny because we met with all these people in the banking and credit card processing industry, and they said, 'Fraud is going to eat you for lunch.' We said, 'What fraud?'"

Levchin ended up spending almost all of his time writing software to tackle fraud, which turned out to be Paypal's core competence. He now calls PayPal "a security company pretending to be a financial services company."

So, again, keep that caveat in mind when you're looking for an "easy" business. Letting people email money? What could be easier? Muahahahahahaha...

In theory I agree and a few years ago this were exactly my words. Now look at the successful web sites and acquisitions of the latest years and tell me if you think there is a match.

"Instead, given your skills, time and money investment and other constraints, you must choose the hardest possible business."

I'm not so sure about this golden rule. A lot of overly complicated ideas that consumers will never grasp seem to fit what you're describing.

I'd argue it's the easy to grasp ideas that are the ones that go viral and become successful. DropBox comes to mind. Posterous and Mint are also pretty straight forward. I don't know that these businesses were "hardest" thier founders could have chosen.

i didn't RTFA, but perhaps what that quote is trying to say is that you should choose something that's VERY hard to implement properly but easy for consumers to use. simple interface is key, but if the implementation is also super straightforward, then there will be tons of competitors or opportunities for scooping.

ideally, it would be something that you have special skills in implementing but other founders might not. one example is start-ups spun out of university research projects (e.g., VMWare, biotech start-ups).

See the idea can be simple (not overcomplicated), but the harder the implementation the better it is. Dropbox, Mint and Posterous are rather simple ideas, but I can guarantee those guys sat around for hours trying to figure how to implement what appears to be so simple to many.

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