Interview with Paul Graham at Imperial College London | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Paul Graham at Imperial College London

uk.intruders.tv

89 pointssharpshoot31 comments

It's amazing how easy Intruders.tv makes it to stop watching their videos. One erring click outside that god damned lightbox and the entire viewing experience grinds to a halt. Sheesh.

Fair point, but its nice to see quality video displayed at high-res, and streaming quickly.

Oddly, the thing I noticed most, having never heard pg speak much before, was that the accent does not correspond to what I thought it might be like. "Californian" comes to mind. "Like, you know, I mean". That's not a negative thing - I have a west coast accent myself and am certainly dot my own conversations with similar filler words - just a "first impression".

I'm right there with you on that feeling.

Not sure why... I guess my only real exposure to Boston is Good Will Hunting... so I imagine PG with the voice of Robin William's character in that movie.

Silly I know.

You will like this: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail188.html

Good talk, though I've heard/read most of the points already. Perhaps the vocal and receptive audience made it more entertaining and grounded in reality or something.

He sounds to me like a southern Ontarian who moved to southern California 15 years ago, and used his dot-com winnings to devote more time to surfing.

http://uk.intruders.tv/video/paulgraham.flv -- plays fine in most open-source players

This is useful... the video wasn't working on my Linux box.

The interview paints the ideal starting entrepreneur as someone aged 25, not 18. And the implication is that this is being generous...

The message is that anyone over 30, not to mention 40, need not apply. Of course this does not really bother me, but it makes the whole high tech start up thing sound like "Americas next top model." LOL!

"We want 'em young and fresh!" And yes 25 is young. Very young.

That said, I think PG comes off as a thoughtful and honorable person - which I already knew. I noticed some quibbling with the interviewer about if "creating wealth" was the right phrase. It's not important, but it is interesting to see that quibbling never ends no matter how successful one is.

As I've mentioned before, the average age of the founders of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft was 24. So judging from the evidence, 25 is not young for this kind of work.

From what I've seen, 21 is young, in the sense that there are a lot of people who aren't ready yet at that age. But by 25 the kind of people who make good founders are ready.

I suspect the phenomenon is more social than biological. The problem with the 21 year olds is that college tends to preserve some childish illusions about how the world works. So the reason 24-25 is the sweet spot is that it's far enough away from college for those illusions to have worn off.

Correct me if I am wrong, but both Google and Microsoft were founded by drop-out students. If they had actually finished, then there average age would have been higher. I am 28 now after finishing undergrad, grad school and working in the biotech industry for 2 years, and my start-up drive is higher than ever. I think age is irrelevent if you have the drive, commitment and maturity to succeed.

However, I do have the problem of finding like minded individuals at my age that are willing to take the risk of joining a start-up becuase they are used to the comforts of having a "secure" job. They tend to see doing a start-up as a bit of hobby, but this doesn't bother - I wouldn't want them to work with me anyway because I expect the same commitment to the project as I have.

Anyway, at 28, I am still going to apply for YC. Power to the old giffers!

Yes, I suspect that you are right. But it's depressing for a 40 year like myself who 'wasted his time' in academia.

Somehow academia/research was nice earlier and I had some luck getting tolerable positions, etc. But it's been tough keeping the wolves at bay lately. The average academic department is a real viper's pit. And crossing chasm from research to a product that people are willing to buy is not easy. Perhaps not even possible in my case...

It's OK. I never really aspired to be a big-time industrialist. I was always more interested in having an impact in a hard area. Lately I have come to the conclusion that the best thing for me to do would be to get back to publishing... If you try to role out a product as an academic, your publication rate fall off and the vipers come out and bite you (Usually in the form of giving you lots of bad teaching assignments and a variety of psychological warfare techniques).

But it's hard to convince oneself that most of what academics write has any effect. I suppose I could focus more on databases, but natural language interfaces seem to be where there are still fundamental problems. But our publications in that area are usually so dense that only fellow academics bother to read them...

It's not easy to change the world I suppose :-).

I wish for: http://ocw.ycombinator.com with speeches given by pg in YC-only dinners.

I don't speak much at the dinners. Most of the talking is done by the outside experts we invite. But what the speakers say couldn't be published; they say a lot of things that they're only willing to say because YC dinners are off the record.

Really? That's really interesting. I suppose that it makes for more open and honest presentations by the guest speakers. I'm really surprised that the presentations are off the record, however. I suppose that's why you hear zilch from the YC founders about the content of said discussions.

Do you have a NDA or just a gentleman's agreement?

iamelgringo .... check out the FAQ here: http://www.ycombinator.com/faq.html ... specifically the section "Will you sign an NDA? How do I know you won't steal my idea? "

Thanks, but I wasn't wondering if YC leadership would sign an NDA. I was wondering if all the founders had to sign an NDA for the dinner conversations, since they were "off the record".

I'm sure I'm being too nosy. It really isn't any of my business. I was just curious.

No, no one signs anything. The startup world is small enough that gentlemen's agreements work for most things.

Thanks. I understand that you can't publish what other people say. You have mentioned it earlier too.

I asked for OCW only because you said that it takes you three months to give your words of wisdom and even then you are not done.

"All you have to lose is your cubicle" Very nice.

I'm impressed that he managed to misspell "lose" in a spoken interview! ;-)

Edit: I sense an anomaly in the space-time continuum... :)

Very informative interview. It definitely shows PGs enthusiam for YC and does a nice job of explaining the rationale behind the company.

Question, for a YC funded company that gets picked up after demo day, what would the average salary of the co-founders be in comparision to someone with comparable experience working in industry (i.e. "in a cubicle)? adf471587879rzq

As founders you want your salaries to be as low as possible. You've raised x amount of money by selling some of your stock. Every dollar of that that you pay yourself in salary is a dollar that doesn't go toward making the company succeed. And the big payoff for you as a founder is in the company succeeding. People don't start startups to make money from salary.

Investors are usually fine with you making, say, 70% of what you'd make on the open market. But it's in your interest to take less if you can. At Viaweb I made less than half what the COO did.

What was the most cash intensive portion of Viaweb? It seems like you guys could have run in YC mode (cash wise) after buying the PCs.

People. It is for nearly all tech companies.

Does anybody have a transcript? I prefer to read things on my own time (i.e., at work).

Video isn't working for me... :(

Super! A video is worth a thousand words. Thank you.

Even if more than a thousand words are spoken in the interview? ;-)

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