Most outsider analyses of YC are total nonsense. But this article focuses on the right things.
One thing it gets wrong:
> Despite Paul Graham’s assertion that startups should not co-locate, many of the YC startups of this period did live together (and still do today). This created a social community around YC startups that also attracted new recruits, such as Justin Kan’s brother, Dan Kan, who went on to found Exec (W12) and Cruise (W14).
PG has talked about not starting your startup in co-working spaces, because the startup will take on the ambient culture instead of developing its own, and the ambient culture in co-working spaces is pretty bogus. But living with and being friends with fellow founders is great. Being a founder can be lonely, because there are parts of the struggle you can't share with the rest of the company. Being friends with people going through the same process is one of the best things you can do for the company and yourself.
> If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit…
This comparison made
me chuckle. It seems to highlight how yc is different from an organization focused on scientific research rather than how it is similar.
I can’t say I know the truth, but the sentiment is that Welch divested from R&D, focused on “financialization” I.e. investing in financial instruments over adding real value, made big short term gains, and doomed the future of the company.
GE used to be an R&D heavy company that paid it's employee's well. Welch, proved and popularized the trend of firing large business areas and hollowing out R&D to pump up the quarterly stock price. This was a sugar hit of profitability at the expense of the future.
I want to start a company, but will not. The main reason why the existence of YC does not change this is because I know my idea, even if I go all in, does not promise explosive growth on par with Airbnbs of this world, and therefore is not attractive to investment. It does have the potential to eventually become a lifestyle business, though, which would be good enough for me. Unfortunately, I guess it will have to wait until I have some more spare time (ah, the age old excuse).
VC money is essential for certain, specific sorts of businesses. If what you have in mind is not one of that type, then I argue VC money is something you want to actively avoid. That's not to say you should avoid investors -- there is a dizzying array of different kinds of investors outside of venture capital.
> Unfortunately, I guess it will have to wait until I have some more spare time (ah, the age old excuse).
In my experience, such a time will never arrive. You need to consciously prioritize starting a business (although that doesn't mean you can't hold down a day job at the very start).
How does the old saying go? The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.
As you point out, not all VCS are right for all businesses, nor should anyone expect them to be. Some businesses aren't suitable for Venture Capital at all.
There's a lot of friction and transaction costs around finding capital for even suitable Investments. Reputation is one way to overcome this but it's difficult to bootstrap reputation.
Why do you need investment? If you can build it on your own and there is a real niche with people willing to pay money for what you build then you can make a lot of money as an individual.
Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not $50/.
I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're looking at 7-8 figures.
If you aren't independently wealthy, neither option is really feasible, and the former option will almost certainly end in tears if you try to stretch and bootstrap with your own money.
> I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
I wasn't thinking of this from the perspective of a hardware startup but a software startup which doesn't require either of those things. I should qualify my original post with that. You don't need to be independently wealthy to launch a software business on your own provided you have the ability to build it yourself.
Kind reminder that starting a software business still requires you to, you know, live and stuff :)
Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think about shutting down.
If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your business might be a good idea. (You'll still have depleted a good chunk of your savings, and it's not like the world comes with profit guarantees)
Investment buys runway, opex, and scale. Some businesses need that, some don't. Software work reduces the opex load (for many attempts), but scale and runway might still be necessary.
You can often found it as you go from a primary job and or a spouse's job. I have a friend who drops about 100K into his startup a year hoping for a big exit. Pretty much all startups or small businesses involve risk. Your other putting in time or money or both. The Only Exception is if you find deep pocket feces that are willing to pay you a good salary to work on your own project, which is especially rare
Sure, but that's still usually limited runway compared to getting funding. Yes, there are cases of spouses supporting a decade of work to get something off the ground. Yes, some people make enough to afford dumping it all into a startup (and a good chunk into a lawyer making sure they don't violate constraints from the existing job). But all these are several std.devs outside the normal "start a business" crowd.
Either way, the risk you can take without VC is limited by your wealth. Large bets without VC require independent wealth. We can quibble about what amount constitutes "independent wealth", but the fact doesn't change - VC allows you to dream bigger. (And I say that as a fierce critic of VC culture, but that is the upside of it)
That depends on what you mean by "having it to drop" . That's less than a median income in San Francisco. If you put 100% of your income into a startup, are you out of touch or do you just have skin in the game?
I don't think it's particularly in touch to dismiss someone who works 50 hours a week to make an income and then Works another 50 hours a week on a startup that spends that income
> That's less than a median income in San Francisco. If you put 100% of your income into a startup, are you out of touch or do you just have skin in the game?
If your trust fund pays for rent and living expenses in San Francisco, and you don't even think of it as abnormal that your ENTIRE INCOME can be allocated to business bets, then yes -- you are indeed wildly out of touch.
If you put 100% of income—remaining after paying life costs (how much is that? I hope you do not rent!)—into work, it means you: do not travel, do not go to any events that cost money, do not dine out much, do not have any other hobbies that cost money (sports? music? photography? LEGO? DIY?), do not date, do not need to support a family, do not have emergencies for which you pay out of pocket, etc.
Are there people who just do not need any of those things? Maybe, but I would question it. (Too often what you think you need could be different from what you actually need.) Personally, even as someone who enjoys software engineering and would do it as a hobby, I think I would be quite miserable.
Here is what I think is reasonable: Someone would have an idea that is attractive for YC et al., raise money, and be able to comfortably afford all those things while working on a company. That is, I think, the promise of the leading quote in TFA. Unfortunately, the quote is phrased as if they are out there to help people start companies, while in reality it is about starting businesses with specific potential for explosive growth that are attractive to VC.
I agree that there is a market for both, your do or die founder and your comfort focused founder with a good idea. the markets are just different and unequal.
They are out there to help people start companies, just not all people and ideas in equal measure.
> Are there people who just do not need any of those things?
Yes. That would have described me very well at one point in my life. Coincidentally, it was at the time I was running my first (unsuccessful) business.
Did you at least still participated in social media and such, or it was literally just work?
If it was just work, do you now think it was a good idea to ignore everything in life except work?
I.e., you thought you didn’t need those things and you actually didn’t need those things, vs. you needed them but you thought you didn’t and it caught up with you eventually.
Video Games industry survivor here, chuckling at the low number ;)
Yes, people do. It carries potentially huge personal costs, but if people are passionate enough, they absolutely will risk that. (Mind, I'm not saying this is a good idea, at all, but merely that it happens)
At least in the cases I did, it was usually a 9 month gruelling sprint at the end of a ~2.5-3.5 year project. Followed by people lollygagging about for ~3 months before they could do any reasonable work again. We sure got a lot of Age of Empires in during that time, though ;)
Which is maybe acceptable if it is your main job, but a bigger problem if you burn out from a side project and then can’t do much on your day job for some mysterious (to management) reason…
I agree it's not very sustainable, at least for your typical person in Western Society, but it's not unheard of either.
I've worked hundred hour weeks and also supervised crews of Hispanic Americans that will work 100 hour weeks.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've known m&a lawyers that do the same to close deals at the end of the fiscal year.
100 hour week is roughly 14 hour days with no weekend break. 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. is pretty common for agricultural work during harvest season for big cash crops. You start while it's dark and you end while it's dark.
It is not sustained/sustainable. I worked 100 hour weeks too, but then it took like a month to recover and during that time I could not properly work even 50 hours on my main job.
Agriculture is historically seasonal: you work a lot during some times, but the rest of the time you do completely nothing on the agriculture front. Not a luxury at most modern workplaces.
I do not know what you mean. What I described with regards to agriculture is how it worked historically with communities growing stuff for themselves or to sell at a local market. I encountered leftovers of that personally growing up. People could work hard in planting/harvest times during summer and in winter do mostly nothing except maintenance and such. I am not talking about commercial industries which may well be working people to the bone unsustainably (and illegally, if it was a developed country) with 12+ hour shifts. Barely a worthy example.
It's not all rare for certain workers to to spend 14+ hour days, 7 days a week, for multiple weeks straight, without any breaks. And they do this every year, year after year. And they can still live to their 80s.
The claim that a long period of rest is always necessary in-between 100 hour work weeks is simply not true.
I've met at least 1 person capable of doing 'creative innovative mental work' on a similar basis. Making categorical claims over billions of adults is simply incorrect.
If you're really sure, you do that first run and lose money, then show a bank/investor the explosive popularity and get money for manufacturing at scale. Relatively speaking it's close to the easiest type of funding you can get.
I can’t because I need money to survive, and this will not provide that money for months until the thing is written, deployed, and has an established enough paying user base… And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by whatever calamity in meantime!
If it will be a matter of mere months until this thing is making enough money to pay for you to live, then it shouldn't take you too long to save up to start? Maybe a bank would even lend you the money? Maybe even a credit card would be enough?
Yes, saving is the way to go, but with my salary and life costs to save enough to last even 6 months will take me about 1 year without much other spending. Like probably with most people, my job and this project are not the only things I care about, I have other hobbies and interests too. I want to buy a camera and travel a bit in meantime for example.
Fwiw my web app costs like $80/mo in hosting fees, and could be done for even less. I forget how much we paid to register our company but it wasn't much. The startup costs aren't that much, it's mostly time.
I wouldn't be so optimistic on a few months to start generating cash tho unless it's a simple yet novel idea.
I could spare that much, but the idea in question is a bit different. Without going into too much detail, each upload consumes some compute, equivalent of like 10 seconds on a M1 MBP with 16GB RAM when nothing else is heavy is running. So I think my costs will be a bit higher and I would need to start billing customers early on.
You should never found a business. If you are already thinking about becoming ill, then it's just not the path for you. A business founder has to be prepared and eager to sacrifice his personal well being for the business.
What you are describing seems like hustling and/or privilege. If your goal is to create value long term, the worst way to go about it is to not take care of yourself. For people who were not born into strong safety nets it is usually harder and includes finances.
Becoming ill is a sure way to be unproductive and make bad decisions, going broke and struggling to make ends meet is not going to help you focus on getting things done, dying early is not compatible with seeing your idea to success.
> For people who were not born into strong safety nets
"Hustling" as you call it is pretty much the only way to start a successful business exactly for the people not born into "strong safety nets" and "privilege" as you call it. If you have those you can start your business and coast.
I don't know any business owner - including myself - who didn't have to make sacrifices to his or her well being to push through. That's the thing with having a business, there will be times were you just can't relax or take a day off. You are in fierce competition with the world, and as a founder you should work at a minimum twice as hard as somebody who is hired. It can and it will lead to partial or complete burn out, but one thing that I've noticed among myself and every other business owner is that they push through and simply don't get sick when they can't be sick. After it's over and they've pushed through a project or a season, they will get sick as dogs and disappear for a couple of weeks to lay on the sofa. The overload cannot be constant, you need to have some time to recover in the foreseeable future.
The human mind has an incredible force to resist becoming ill and for those who cannot channel this, starting a business is a bad idea. Being ill is mainly the body's reaction to fight the sickness, so it's somewhat under our control.
Having a business puts incredible pressure from all sides on a person, and you can't be a person who thinks about "tapping out" as an option. Especially in situations when other people's salaries depend on you.
First you have moved the goalposts from complete disregard for oneself (ignoring the possibility of becoming ill) to “making some sacrifices”.
Then you claimed “the human mind has an incredible force to resist becoming ill”. Tell your mind that while lying in a ditch with a few broken bones after an SUV crashed into you as you were walking half asleep after working for 18 hours straight and realizing you have no insurance or even a bank account because you failed to get or hold a job in pursuit of a moonshot startup idea.
The notion that starting a business automatically requires disregarding your life and people close to you is frankly some cool-aid fueled SV fever dream that doesn’t represent reality. Those startup founders with thousands to millions of YC funding, who pay themselves enough to live comfortably (with all the healthcare, dental care, good apartment and other things that many people struggle with) in one of the world’s most expensive places, are the prime example of the opposite!
People in my situation shouldn’t go all in on some new venture unless that venture can interest the likes of YC who can provide the required safety net. Not because we are mentally unfit to do it for the wild reasons you described, but just because the circumstances aren’t right.
Running even a small business is a great way to create more value for the world, but yes, it requires some sacrifices—and if you don’t have the leeway to make those sacrifices, ruining yourself is probably the worst way to go about it.
If you have the ability to program you can find time around your day job to make a little progress each day until you have something ready to market. Because it just sounds like you're lazy and are throwing up random excuses.
Do you also have no time in the evenings or weekends? Spend the hours that you normally watch TV or browse social media/Hacker News working on your project.
But the fact that you're posting on here while complaining that you don't have time tells me you just don't want to do it enough for it to ever be worthwhile.
No time means no time in which I can do productive work.
I still have time to, say, occasionally exercise or have a walk or deal with life chores or get out with friends once in a while, but if I stop doing those things that would hurt my health/life and therefore my ability to work even further, as I know from experience.
As to HN, I read it mostly when I can’t sleep or in public transport.
Sell it first, build it after. Helps with this conundrum - but more importantly it forces you to focus on the customer and their problem, finding what people are willing to pay for. And that is what successful business is made of.
If your goal isn't to build a kind of empire or to shoot for unimaginable riches, but instead to start a solid small business that lets you do the sort of work you enjoy and provides enough income to live in your preferred style, then it's never been easier than it is today.
All you really need is to find a niche that has a small market. How small is OK depends a lot on the specifics of a business, but if we're talking a one-person software shop, you can probably live decently with a customer base of a handful of thousands. Even less if your niche supports very high profit margins.
And, as an old mentor pointed out, if you're fishing in the pool of the entire world (which the internet allows at low cost), then you can just nail two boards together and find a thousand or two who are willing to buy it.
I have used this excuse in one way or another for 15 years, over several iterations. I made great money in sales, so was able to step away every few years to tackle the great startup lifestyle businesses I have.
The #1 rule I have now, and advice I have for you is, if your idea does not pull at you so strongly to work on it on whatever 'spare time' you have (aka, time you make for it by ignoring other non main job related things), then DO not quit your job to make time. And do not think you will work on it when you retire. Most people just wont.
Unless your idea/business naturally grows to the point where you are spending SO much time on it that you can basically not function while having your job due to sleep deprivation, do not quit your job thinking you will do the work then or you'll have the skill/ability to get it to that point if only you had more time.
Perhaps a bit tangential, but the reason there aren't more bio-tech startups given the cited number of bio-tech PhDs is because graduate school / academia doesn't select for "entrepreneurship potential" (broadly defined), it doesn't nurture this potential over the course of one's graduate education, and it doesn't reward entrepreneurship.
Academia has favored "the mind" over every other quality of a human being for a long time. Maybe this is useful for capital-d Discovery. Jury's out on whether it is more effective to train researchers to be founders rather than training founders to be research-oriented.
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> was a discovery about who could do great work, how to find them, and how to massively raise their ambition.
It sounds great, but life doesnt work like that, which is why besides finance, YC's main attribute, law and medicine also exists.
Some people get radicalised before they even start school, just watch the news every day to see whats going on and see where people are getting radicalised.
Comparing YC to Bell Labs, which had deep ties to academia, misses the entire philosophy of YC and Paul Graham. He constantly talks about academia being a hive of orthodoxy, and positions "smart people" as those who can think around it.
By his logic, Bell Labs would be one of the largest hives of orthodox thinking to ever exist, and its the complete antithesis of vc heterodox thought
It sounds good. But it kind of reminds me of High School Football or Basketball Players (choose a high paying professional sport). Who bank their whole future on focusing on one thing that is Super-Low-Percentage-Of-Success-High-Paying-Job.
How many football players skip their education, and then DON'T make it? Where do they end up.
Now, think Joe Blow Computer Science Major, is NOT going to be a Millionaire, but a decade later when they are applying for some middle tier IT Job, they will damn well need to show a degree..
There are often posts on here showing that it is better to spend say 10 or even 5 years doing 35-40 hour weeks at a FAANG where your total comp will end up being $2-5,000,000 over that time, than risk it at a startup working 80+ hour weeks for a chance at the big time but ultimately leave with nothing apart from exhaustion and an unheard-of failed startup on your resume.
I think there is a lot of truth in that.
And yeah I went to school with a bunch of kids who had semi-success as a teenager at sports or music, only to then not make it big when they needed to at 16 or 17 etc. Perhaps they all ended up at successful unicorns or are L7-FAANGs, but I doubt it
It drives me nuts when people point at engineers making $1M on a startup exit, without counting the average income over their tenure.
If they worked in the company 5 years with a 100k base salary, the income averages to about 300k per year. Sure, that's a healthy income, but it's about on par with a big tech salary, with the difference that big tech is more stable and predictable, and not heavily backloaded.
The economics of the Bay Area really distorts things. If you make 2M over 10 years, you will almost certainly have enough money to live a good life (never go hungry, able to travel, etc), but you will absolutely not have enough to buy a house or start a family. I think this realization is what drives folks to take a third path, which is starting at established Big Tech companies before moving to early stage startups.
I almost fell for the trap a few years ago, someone was trying to convince me that making 200k in the Bay Area for 5 years and then "retiring" back to my mid-size city was far more profitable than just staying put near my family and friends and making a "measly" half of that, in a place where houses costs a third as much and the lifestyle is healthier.
It can look like a false dichotomy because we are posting short blurbs on the internet, not the pros/cons of a thousand different life stories so we can categorize them into a dozen possible outcomes so we have more than two examples.
But it is very much a common theme in High Earning/Low Success Rate roles, to have a lot of people shoot for them, fall short, and be in a worse position than if they had studied and stayed some more mundane course.
Yep - one could say that "a relatively small amount of force applied in just the right place" is enough for people to make bona fide bad decisions both career-wise and financially by chasing unrealistic dreams that have ultimately done them a huge disservice.
At best they can dust themselves off after a few years and "catch up" to where their potential should have been, at worst they are financially ruined and laden with debt as they tried to boot-strap their crap startup idea while PG et al laugh all the way to the bank at these poor impressionable people's expense.
Peoples say the odds are ultra low, and talk a lot of young people out of trying. I played freshman football. I was ok. I'm 6'4", smart enough to get into Cal MechE, decently capable physically and grow muscle easily and have never been injured in my life basically even though I ride dirtbikes. My dad got me to give up on football.
Later I found out that if you look at all highschool players that play all 4 years, the odds of making it are about 0.1% or 1 in 1000. That includes tons of players that are basically playing casually and not really physically the right body type to make it.
If you make it to college football, something that I could have somewhere with my academics and size, the odds are about 1 in 100. At that point you can argue that just about everyone is physically capable of potentially making it, just missing the skill. But take away those that are playing still just to play with no plans of going further and thus train about that way (I'd argue thats about half of them), that means that 1 in 50 serious football players at the college level can make it.
If my dad had told me that with my size and decent brain I had about 1 in 50 chance of making it, I would have stuck with it. Even if I failed, I would have learned a lot from the team work and gotten a lot of value from the comradery IMO. Instead I studied a lot more, passed some AP tests, and got some boring as hell mech engineering degree.
I actually think its better than rolling a 50 sided die. That was me just being nice about it. I think if you actually actively work with the goal of making it to the NFL, your odds are even better than 1 in 50. For example, sprinting times are atleast looked at. How often have you heard of a highschool or college athlete hiring a running and sprinting coach? I assure you its not very often. (my college gf of 7 years that went onto med school worked in medical services for our athletic department).
Also, your comment about the people that make it being obvious standouts during their first year of play is basically more of the type of thinking my dad told me to discourage me from playing. I honestly dont think its true that most professionals were obvious "This kid is going to make it to the nfl one day for sure!" kind of players, atleast not their first year.
A running coach is not going to turn you into Tyreek, it's just going to be a waste of money. All the people you claim just didn't want it bad enough were realistic enough to realize that.
Obviously, if this were a career path available to anyone who bothered to hire a coach, it wouldn't pay millions of dollars.
I didnt say they didnt want it bad enough. Im saying that most dont even TRY to improve seriously outside of going to practice, and even then some arent into it when there, even at the college level.
It's not a career path for anyone. But as an athletic 6'4" person who doesn't get injured easily, someone should have told me the odds were 1 in 1000 if I stuck with it in highschool, and 1 in 100 if I made it to college football. I wasn't told any of that.
The hit rate in the article is almost 1/4. That's a lot better than high school sports.
The fallback if you don't succeed is called "programmer". And no, programmers don't need college degrees if they have real world experience. I've known a lot of very successful programmers with no college degree at all.
Not if the denominator is all Computer Science students who may think of dropping out of school when seeing these success stories.
And
The days of hacking something together and getting a job are kind of dwindling if not gone. The days of self learning, and showing skill isn't really as prevalent anymore. Sure, it was like that during 90-2000's. But these days, not so much.
You wouldn't need a degree for the boot camp, you are saying a boot camp is a replacement for a degree. That these two options are equal for a company hiring.
Aren't a lot of coding boot-camps going bankrupt and closing, and having various scandals for over-inflating their placement numbers?
Don't get me wrong, I really love the idea of picking up a book, teaching myself, and going and getting a job.
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DoorDash was the laser that cut the razor-thin margins of the small mom-and-pop restaurant to nothing, and Stripe "transitioned" the banking industry to a world where...they just do the same thing but a little better.
> If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented OpenAI, Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit, and many more.
Interesting, comparing core scientific research and output by Bell Labs to just techi-ifying existing industries and not really adding much new value (other than OpenAI).
Yeah I think there is a lot of sentiment that these ideas/founders are somehow unique and that if those people didn't do anything with those ideas then something like Airbnb or Reddit or Dropbox wouldn't have ever happened.
I think people need to be realistic - none of those are particularly ground breaking ideas, as evidenced by the fact that there are countless competitors and in many cases even predecessors that were not in the right place at the right time. These people just happened to be born to the right parents in the right country at the right time to have the privilege to have someone throw money at a not very original idea that could have been anyone's. Great for them, but I think it is worth staying grounded and realise that they're not visionaries and had they not even been born, someone would have thought up the same idea anyway. Monkies and typewriters and all that.
So maybe we'd not have "Reddit", but we'd no doubt have something largely identical that would fill that same niche. Equating any of these trivial things with something like the transistor is just absolute arrogance.
Until I joined HN I wasn't aware that all these tech companies deserve the same rareified air as core scientific research. The real world barely thinks about Airbnb and how it's "revolutionized the world for a narrow slice of remote tech workers that want to rent a house in Mexico for a month".
If anything "the real world" (read: average people) don't care about core scientific research either. Maybe when they or their parents get ill they care about medical research, but that's all. Try to pick any Nobel physics nominees in past 50 years and explain why their work is important to average people.
But by that argument, we'd no doubt still have transistors if the transistor hadn't been invented. The traitorous eight, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts shaped our world in a way that no one else could. Same with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We'd no doubt still have computers, and smartphones, but the landscape would be much different and we'd be poorer without them.
The larger picture is to say that you can have an effect on the world. Even if it is just being in the right place at the right time, what you do, and how you do it matters. If Elon Musk hadn't bought Twitter, there would still be a Twitter, but with less Elon Musk brand of shittery. Maybe a different brand of shittery, but it would be that other person's brand.
The point I was trying to make is that just ordering take out food on a computer or storing files on a computer on the network or sharing URLs and comments on a public website are not ground breaking ideas - these are trivial ideas that I am sure anyone here could have come up with.
But the transistor? Or the laser? Are these things that were thought up by the layman independently on a regular basis? (i.e. like the ideas for a lot of the y-combinator startups have been thought up independently many times over by laymen) I don't think so. I feel like these scientific endeavours require years of hands on scientific research and hard work before they ever become anything meaningful, and not just an idea for an app that pops into your mind while sitting on the toilet one day.
I think articles like these and the recent "how to do great work" one recently shows quite how out of touch and how much of an over-inflated sense of importance people in the tech industry can often have - to even begin to think that booking a taxi on a computer is anywhere close to something like inventing the transistor is just absurd.
Storing file or sharing URLs aren't, y'know, the transistor but looking at say WeWork, or MoviePass, the companies that have succeeded at that says successful despite naysayers. I think it's overestimating their intelligence and under estimating yours (and mine) to think that you and I couldn't have come up with the transistor given the exact same set of circumstances, and over estimating yours (and mine) to think that our file or urls service cold be as remotely successful. We can agree to disagree, I suppose. The laser was preceeded by the MASER and was deemed to be a niche device, of no interest except maybe to a few. History proved otherwise, and I hope to be able to afford a 4k laser projector in the near future. It could have just sat in the dustbin of history like the memristor but the right set of people found it and brought us to the world today.
I don't think. credit card processing is curing cancer either, but the level of adulation some people have for others, and lack of respect for others, is either
worth calling out. Have a bigger perspective. I think you could have invented the transistor given the exact same set of circumstances, and I've never met you.
> These people just happened to be born to the right parents in the right country at the right time to have the privilege to have someone throw money at a not very original idea that could have been anyone's
You elaborated precisely that not just anyone could have implemented the ideas, which is in fact the single most important thing. Having an idea is not very meaningful, as nearly all ideas are close to worthless. It's a common mistake to think ideas are what have a lot of value.
The thing that primarily matters is who can and or is willing to act on an idea, who can bring it into existence (whether in a tangible sense of a product/service, or in terms of reaching a community to spread an idea (such as an idea in the field of published science)).
Those ideas only come into existence as a thing because some people were in the right place at the right time to make them happen and acted on it (with several other critical factors being required, some of which you listed). Not just anybody can bring an idea to fruition; literally millions of Internet users could easily have the idea for a subscription Internet-based Photoshop (circa 10-15 years ago) - now try making it a thing and try making it successful.
lol...I came to post this EXACTLY. Having been in, or on the periphery of, the startup world for a long time (ending about ten years ago), I've come to see it as pretty vapid, unimaginative, and even downright destructive. If a bunch of young-ish guys (and a few women) with elite upbringings want to have an incestuous little money party, well, good on them, I guess. But all the eloquent words trying to obscure the theme of "I want to make a whole bunch of money" is wearing thin on me.
I'm not in the startup world and live in a city that Silicon Valley considers "tech-adjacent". I excitedly attended a start-up event a few months ago where people pitched ideas, and I was massively disappointed by how unoriginal every single idea was. Everyone proposed creating an app that does xyz pointless service that they think will make money. I also hated how many people showed up thinking they could con some hyper-intelligent but obviously socially retarded dev to "bust out an app" for them over the weekend, presumably for free.
I wonder if our Brightest Young Minds pursuing solely/overwhelmingly financially rewarding undertakings has anything to do with the persistence of the various "unsolvable" problems humanity constantly whines about.
I think people are reading this line the wrong way. The author isn't implying Instacart is as important as the transistor, that would be ludicrous.
He's simply drawing an analogy between the output of laboratories like Bell Labs that produce breakthrough scientic research and "economic labs" like YC that produce breakthrough businesses.
Yes, AirBNB, Instacart etc are breakthrough businesses in the sense that they disrupted long-standing and deeply entrenched business models. The ideas themselves are not extraordinary but building and scaling a business from zero often against much better financed competitors is no easy feat and takes a unique amount of persistence (and often good timing) to succeed.
Actually seems like a prescient comparison to me. Relevant here is ‘economic research’ which is developing new methods in business, not technology. If YC isn’t a function which transforms startups, then at least it’s a transistor which amplifies VC capital.
I find it quite distasteful. Founders should just admit that they want to make the next big thing that explodes into huge money, a la "The Social Network". It's sad that they feel like they have to do this self-deception to try and convince themselves they are doing something noble
OpenAI shook the planet with something fairly groundbreaking. It's closer to the iPhone in the rapid impact it had, moving a lot faster than the iPhone did, than the extension of a payment processor made easier (which is what Stripe is).
Stripe, Airbnb, Doordash, Uber etc. They're services that add value by extending existing concepts to the Internet or in a slightly better way. There's nothing revolutionary or earth shaking about them. They're eBay, taking auctions and putting it online; it's not revolutionary, it's modestly evolutionary. They certainly add very real value (although Airbnb's value add at this point may be going backwards; most services peak in value creation at some point before heading south).
The connected world took notice of GPT extremely rapidly. Only a few tech lightning strikes have been like that in the past 50 years, and only a few have moved very fast.
Downplaying the dramatic impact of GPT 3 / 4 would be silly, frankly. And we're only in the first or second inning. It has set off a remarkable chain reaction that is reverberating globally. It's a eureka moment the likes of which you only see a few times in a lifetime if you're lucky.
Openai hasn't really proven itself to be a profitable business so the economic research is at best incomplete.
I'm sure AI has real value, but what percent of that comes from LLMs and what contribution OpenAI will wind up making to the business of AI is not very clear. I don't really think the world will be different in ten years than it would have been without openai.
I would be willing to bet a lot of money that OpenAi will change the world 10 fold more than Stripe, Airbnb, and all other YC companies combined in the next 10 years
yeah sure, they just packaged Google's research and put it behind an API
you can make comments like this for just about any product taken to market and downplay the value of the making it mass market, affordable, usable, etc
lol, imagine telling Bill Shockley: "oh, you invented the transistor? well I built an iPhone app that dispatches a pizza order". The only thing here even close to a real invention is OpenAI and even they didn't invent the core tech (neural nets, transformers, linear regression, gpu farms) but just threw a bunch of money at applying it in a new way.
You're overly downplaying the role of combination in creation, which is what most creation consists of (including inventing the transistor, although to a lesser degree).
Imagine downplaying the iPhone by saying they merely combined some things that already existed, as they didn't invent most of the core tech in the first iPhone.
Apple just threw a bunch of money at combining tech that already existed by that premise; and they definitely didn't invent the smartphone. And SpaceX didn't invent rocketry either. And Tesla didn't invent the electric car. It'd be absurd to downplay these things and how difficult they were to bring into routine existence. And Netscape didn't invent the Web browser, and Google didn't invent the search engine, and Amazon didn't invent ecommerce, and Atari + Nintendo didn't invent the video game, and Ford didn't invent the automobile.
Impact also matters a lot more than just being first.
Yah I wasn't commenting on the quality of the post. I was just annoyed because I've been hit a bunch of times recently by seeing something I wanted to read and being blocked by work dns policies (since domains less than 30 days old make up a huge portion of malware/scam attack domains). Would rather wait 30 days to see it in my hacker news feed or see a link to a twitter summary that then links to the newly created domain website so I can at least get a longer form summary before I am disappointed by my inability to see it.
One thing it gets wrong:
> Despite Paul Graham’s assertion that startups should not co-locate, many of the YC startups of this period did live together (and still do today). This created a social community around YC startups that also attracted new recruits, such as Justin Kan’s brother, Dan Kan, who went on to found Exec (W12) and Cruise (W14).
PG has talked about not starting your startup in co-working spaces, because the startup will take on the ambient culture instead of developing its own, and the ambient culture in co-working spaces is pretty bogus. But living with and being friends with fellow founders is great. Being a founder can be lonely, because there are parts of the struggle you can't share with the rest of the company. Being friends with people going through the same process is one of the best things you can do for the company and yourself.