Ask PG: How did you come to that conclusion? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: How did you come to that conclusion?

7 pointsjustkd7 comments

Hi :) In the book by Alexis Ohanian "Without their Permission" he writes something very interesting on page 108:

When it came to the question of DIGG being a competitor to Reddit, Alexis quotes you saying that "Digg wasn't going to defeat us (Reddit). We'd either defeat ourselves first or they would defeat themselves for us".

I find this soo smart, and I would love to know what parameter you looked at to foresee this development? Would you mind sharing it with us?

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[IANPG]

If we take the odds of a startup surviving as 1:100, then the odds of both Digg and Reddit surviving are 1:10.000. If we assume that either Reddit will crush Digg or vice versa, the odds of Digg crushing Reddit are 1:20.000. If we assume that the odds that the marketplace will support more than one company are 10:1 the odds that Digg will crush Reddit go to 1:200.000.

Even if the denominator us high by an order of magnitude, the first order problem is just surviving and that depends on luck and execution. All the other factors do as well.

The mistake is in confusing game theory with a Sport metaphor. Sport focuses attention on beating particular opponents. Game theory prioritizes a diversity of outcomes. Beating Digg isn't an objective measure of success. Reddit could beat Digg and not create value.

My apologies for just being a random person on the internet and being neither PG nor Alexis Ohanian.

Nice math but what pg said was probably just in the moment arrogance.

Disclaimer: IANAPG either.

My impression is that PG often says things that require unpacking. There's not a lot of meaningless fill. You might say that when he talks about startups, he's using a DSL. Since Ohanian has been talking startups with PG about as long as anyone except people like Morris, it would not be surprising if he was likewise fluent in the DSL.

To me this seems more likely than the hypothesis that PG said something stupid and Ohanian passed it along as a Pearl of Wisdom. I'd run some back of envelope calculations on why I hold that opinion about the likelihood, but I wouldn't want to bore you again.

I wasn't bored.

Alexis in person mentioned that they were told to "not worry about their competitors"-- I can't remember if that's in the book. He said they were worried about Digg's team at the time, which was much larger, but that ended up also hurting Digg and helping Reddit.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think the quote you used is actually pretty worthless and not smart on its own without the other discussions they were having together. If you ever have a chance to see him in person, you should. He has a lot of fun little anecdotes--like what the first downvote of reddit was.

It'd be great too if https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kn0thing popped in this thread as my memory is pretty fuzzy.

> We'd either defeat ourselves first

It's common knowledge that startups self-sabotage through either founder personality conflicts, running out of money, or not making something people want (then running out of money).

Rarely is a startup destroyed by "competitors."

Thanks to you all for commenting.

@brudgers thanks for your impressive comments. And I totally agree with you on "My impression is that PG often says things that require unpacking. There's not a lot of meaningless fill." Actually I keep wondering why not everyone who is into building/developing something users want, analyses his quotes to the bone.

@rubiquity PG had no reason for being arrogant.

@27182818284 Of course you are right. Alexis mentions in the book that this quote stayed with him until today. So the reader expects this quote to have a certain significance. And of course, the quote by itself has to be put into context. That is the reason I was asking for context :)

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