Reddit is a classic example of this approach.
When Reddit first launched, it seemed like
there was nothing to it. To the graphically
unsophisticated its deliberately minimal design
seemed like no design at all. But Reddit solved
the real problem, which was to tell people what
was new and otherwise stay out of the way. As a
result it became massively successful.
I'm not quite sure Reddit is exactly "massively successful." They just posted the other day about how they aren't making any money. In a capitalist sense, it's not very successful if they aren't making any money.
So how do you define success? Is Arc successful if you open a web page and then 30 minutes later try to submit a form and get "unknown link" or something to that effect. It seems massively broken to me.
I'm not trying to pick on pg. I'm trying to present the alternative which is this: survivor bias. pg may have been in the right place at the right time with viaweb. As an incubator, pg probably made money on reddit, but conde nast has almost certainly lost money on reddit, so I'm on the fence about that.
Continuing on, I think it isn't unsurprising that putting $15k or so into 118 startups over the past 5 years would lead to one or two successes. pg has the benefit of being the magnet, or is it magnate? All the best ideas come to him, but there have only been a small handful of "massive successes" turned out. With his social network and contacts, quite frankly, I expect more big successes than I've seen.
How successful is pg, really? Do we know?
I suppose, really, my point is this: If there was a science to this, then it should be repeatable. Since it doesn't appear that pg has repeated his viaweb success in over 10 years, I wonder where is the science? Is pg just someone we choose to listen to because it feels good? He makes hackers feel good and important and understood? He can empathize with us, so we lend him our ear?
But are we wasting our time?
I love hn, I love listening to pg on stage talk about startups. It's like chicken soup for the startup soul. But maybe I'm being misled. Maybe it's just feel good, irrational stuff that isn't practical or beneficial -- and perhaps even harmful.
How do we know we won't be listening to him and then 10 years from now, we find out he's lost all his viaweb money. He hasn't been able to keep the startup chuck wagon turning out profitable businesses or something like that and we wasted all this time trying to replicate his success because... well... he writes a lot and it feels good to read it...
This essay is mainly based on the common folk wisdom that you see everywhere, on iteration and solving the actual problem: 37signals. Steve Blank. Fred Brooks. esr. extreme programming. Moore. In Search of Excellence. Linus. [off the top of my head]
Reddit is successful, in that it's valued by many. It was successful for the founders [I'd dearly like to know how much they got, to an order of magnitude]. It's only 5 years old - it took Amazon 10 years to become profitable, google began in 1996 was incorporated in 1998, but didn't even start serving ads til 2000 - which accounts for almost all revenue today. So I think it's too early to call reddit "not very successful". [It would be interesting to have data on how long it typically takes for "successful" startups to become successful.]
I do disagree with pg that the essence of reddit was "to tell people what was new". Slashdot already did that and other news sites. Reddit's (and Digg's) innovation was that everyone could vote on comments. [But pg has far better information on reddit than me, so I'm left wondering why he thinks that...]
That's alway the question when listening to authors/bloggers: do they just write well? Or do they actually know what they're talking about? One of the reasons I love Stack Overflow was that it was a validation of many years spent listening to Jeff and Joel: turned out they do know how to create wonderful (and very successful) programs.
YCombinator does seem more successful than you mention though: they've turned out a lot of companies that, while not always huge, are making money. A few of them are even game-changers in their industries, like Scrib, Posterous, Justin.tv, Dropbox.
"... So how do you define success? Is Arc successful if you open a web page and then 30 minutes later try to submit a form and get "unknown link" or something to that effect. ..."
I observed this in 2007FEB22 , you can see it here ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/398269769/ and the classic response ... "... wouldn't have been a timeout; we probably restarted the server ..."
Though I wouldn't call a broken piece of a webapp (hackernews) a failure of Arc.
I agree, it's not Arc, it's the webapp. And it does seem bizarrely unprofessional (I often consider my comments for a long time, so I almost always get the timeout - I'm being punished for thinking!). There also had to be a substantial outcry before we got a "search" link.
Yet... HN grows and grows... it is reported widely... luminaries routinely post here... and here are you and I.
pg has said he is careful to focus on what matters (eg. spam; ranking), not what seems to. It appears to be working. And it exactly supports this essay's thesis, of working on looking professional vs. what's important. Maybe it's a bit like undergraduates handing in essays in a fancy folder?
Nice valid points you have made here. But, i still think looking for small overlooked problem to solve in what ever sphere of life can be a science that is repeatable. If you add good execution, good product marketing and the right company culture on top of providing the tool to solve the over looked problem.
Were there no mp3 players b4 Ipod. Was there no Lotus 1-2-3 b4 excel spreedsheet. Were there no other search engines prior to google. So really providing the best tool to solve the problem is not enough to guarantee success.
Well, he can only give his opinions, based hopefully on his experience. The best way to find out is perhaps to build your own experience, do your own trial and errors and see what works for you. Then maybe you are in a position to judge as to whether it is merely feel good talk or it actually has substance to it.
Is Arc a success on the same scale as Viaweb or Y Combinator?
In the academic sense ("was it a design that influenced others?") I think the answer is yes. pg's essays about Arc and the language itself got a lot of people thinking about how to improve Lisp. Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, was influenced to some extent by Arc.
In the practical sense ("is the community active and thriving?") I think the answer is no, so far. #arc on freenode is dead quiet and nearly empty, and there are only 20 new posts on arclanguage.org in the last 40 days. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not "on fire", that's all. Not yet, anyway.
But it's only fair to give it time. pg said:
"Number one, expect change. Arc is still fluid and future releases are guaranteed to break all your code. It was mainly to aid the evolution of the language that we even released it."
So it's not surprising that an active, thriving community of library creators hasn't sprung up yet.
I prefer it to Scheme or Common Lisp. But while I've spent a decent amount of time on news.arc, I haven't spent much lately on the underlying language.
It turns out I can do a maximum of 2 things at once. I can't work on YC, writing, and hacking. And since YC is a given, that means I have to choose between writing and hacking. Over the last couple years I've mostly chosen writing, but that might change.
Which reminds me, I really should do a new release of news.arc. It's significantly better now.
I'll be interested to see if having a child increases your capacity for simultaneous serious projects. It had that effect on me. I think it does that because you're forced to do lots of context switching, and eventually get better at it.
It turns out I can do a maximum of 2 things at once.
Huh. That reminds me of a rule I figured out a long time ago: you have two cards to play. As in: Job, school, family, startup, pick 2. (Though startup really wants both.)
I was just thinking about how much faster HN has been lately. It's pretty rare to get a timeout, or even have to wait for a page to load. It's one of those things that I guess you don't really notice until the other sites you visit start getting slow again (ahem, reddit).
> I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
By happy coincidence, I believe pg has coined a new term: fiterating: iterating until you find product-market fit.
"I'd noticed, of course, that people never seemed to grasp new ideas at first. I thought it was just because most people were stupid. Now I see there's more to it than that. Like a contrarian investment fund, someone following this strategy will almost always be doing things that seem wrong to the average person."
For me, this was the most important point. True entrepreneurial genius is being able to differentiate between ideas that seem wrong/impossible to the masses but are right and those that are plain wrong in the business sense.
People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it
I totally understand the difficulties reddit faced (chicken&egg) but I don't understand "pushing hard against the current" part. What current? People love wasting time online and keep looking for new ways of doing it. Yes, getting their attention (or even noticing you) may be hard, but pushing against the current?
A lot of people look at Reddit now and think "What current?", but it wasn't like that in 2005. The notion that cyberspace was some place you went to waste time was just getting started - Reddit didn't invent it, but they caught the early phases of the wave, and it wasn't at all obvious to everyone. There were no such things as FaceBook apps in 2005. FaceBook itself was limited to college students (or it had just expanded to high school students). There was no Twitter, and no Zynga, and YouTube was just getting started. Most people hadn't heard of Digg, and sites like StackOverflow or Hacker News were far off in the future. Casual games were around, but they didn't make headlines the way they do today.
Yes, there were people who wasted time online, but they were usually people in niche subcultures like fandom or gaming. Many of the early Web 2.0 successes still had a significant productivity bent to them, eg. del.icio.us was seen as a way to organize your bookmarks online, Flickr grew a large community of professional or semi-professional photographers, and blogs were often viewed as a way to increase your professional reputation.
People love wasting time online now, but that was not a mainstream view when Reddit started, and they are perhaps responsible for some of it. That's what PG means by pushing against the current.
I don't think that's really true. By 2005, online time-wasting was huge, mainstream big-business. MySpace was sold for $580 million in 2005. I mean, when even Rupert Murdoch thinks social media is the next big thing, it's not exactly a secret.
When I'm in the midst of a project, the current is easy to spot. All the people who wouldn't take a stake in the project are now telling me what I should do, that they wouldn't. That's the current.
As for pushing back, every day I wake up and face the battle. Not easy, not fun at times, but the key isn't some great scheme, or brilliant pattern, or ruleset; it's just getting up and fighting, over and over, each and every day.
Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
Ughh, easier to say than find! :) There are thousands of very, very, very smart people running around looking for "simple solutions to overlooked problems". I like to ask entrepreneurs what are their thoughts on this intense cutthroat competition. The best answer/advice I've got so far was "Watch those who almost succeeded and learn from them".
Now I need to learn to distinguish between "failed" and "almost succeeded". :)
Also, can this be related to "idea vs execution" question? Finding an overlooked problem is an idea (very hard) and coming up with a _simple_ solution is "execution". Both are overwhelmingly hard to crack.
> There are thousands of very, very, very smart people running around looking for "simple solutions to overlooked problems".
I don't think you have reason to be so pessimistic. Sal Khan, maker of Khan Academy, mentioned in an interview that while a lot of people were predicting that efforts like Khan Academy would spring up, in fact, there are very few of them that had. Sal is just one guy, who up until recently was working part-time and unfunded, who now has the largest private tutoring service in the world. This during a time when thousands of "smart" people funded by billions of dollars were ostensibly trying to do something similar. The number of people who actually start working on solutions is orders of magnitude smaller than people who are merely "looking for" solutions.
pg's modus operandi seems to be almost exactly opposite to the prevalent style in academia.
I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked
problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d)
deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a
very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
Yeah, that definitely shouldn't be underestimated. Even launching a simple web-site demands a fair amount of time in support and promotion and maintenance, which you just can't blow off.
So how do you define success? Is Arc successful if you open a web page and then 30 minutes later try to submit a form and get "unknown link" or something to that effect. It seems massively broken to me.
I'm not trying to pick on pg. I'm trying to present the alternative which is this: survivor bias. pg may have been in the right place at the right time with viaweb. As an incubator, pg probably made money on reddit, but conde nast has almost certainly lost money on reddit, so I'm on the fence about that.
Continuing on, I think it isn't unsurprising that putting $15k or so into 118 startups over the past 5 years would lead to one or two successes. pg has the benefit of being the magnet, or is it magnate? All the best ideas come to him, but there have only been a small handful of "massive successes" turned out. With his social network and contacts, quite frankly, I expect more big successes than I've seen.
How successful is pg, really? Do we know?
I suppose, really, my point is this: If there was a science to this, then it should be repeatable. Since it doesn't appear that pg has repeated his viaweb success in over 10 years, I wonder where is the science? Is pg just someone we choose to listen to because it feels good? He makes hackers feel good and important and understood? He can empathize with us, so we lend him our ear?
But are we wasting our time?
I love hn, I love listening to pg on stage talk about startups. It's like chicken soup for the startup soul. But maybe I'm being misled. Maybe it's just feel good, irrational stuff that isn't practical or beneficial -- and perhaps even harmful.
How do we know we won't be listening to him and then 10 years from now, we find out he's lost all his viaweb money. He hasn't been able to keep the startup chuck wagon turning out profitable businesses or something like that and we wasted all this time trying to replicate his success because... well... he writes a lot and it feels good to read it...