This is a great point, but pg actually did touch on it in his essay:
Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. People can notice you've replaced email when it's a fait accompli.
I think there's some selection bias going on here. Companies which aim to do frighteningly ambitious things are less likely to launch, and most of us only ever hear about the YC companies which launch.
Just based on counting noses it's clear that there's a bunch of YC companies every year which vanish without a trace; I'm sure many of them were failed runs at frighteningly ambitious ideas.
Additionally, we only hear about what they've decided to launch with. If they start with a grandiose idea, start it and find it impossible, we only hear about the twitter app they salvaged from the wreckage. If they have a plan to get to world domination, but don't tell you, we only see a new calendar site.
And the idea that people who set out to change industries start with something that is not perceived as so is included in that same Paul Graham essay. i.e. AirBnB launched as a way to rent out airbeds and couches. They didn't launch saying they will revolutionize the hotel industry but that might the end result of their work.
There are a lot of launched YC companies with enormous ambitions that choose to not make them public.
I think that as a startup, pointing your bat to the stands is something best left for investor meetings and internal goal-setting. In the press, it might not go over so well.
Good point. Another interesting datapoint would be (and this is something that only PG or other YC founders can answer) to see what is the scope of the original vision (eg - change/revolutionarize industry XYZ) of the founders and where they end up (provided they stay in the same space). The original vision is of course going to change, but if a large number of founders are scaling down their original idea, that is an interesting data point. It may be possible that 3 months of iteration may not be sufficient time for certain types of startups. (Again, without any actual YC experience, I am simply speculating).
I'm not sure I'd want to use a search engine that was created in 3 months by 3 guys.
Maybe a 6 month version of YC where more money is invested could work, but I don't think YC is setup to support those types of ideas. I'm sure someone out there can surprise me though...
Something that bothers me about HN is a sort of a tactical assault on the front page between articles. The title is semi-inflammatory and stirs some controversy but the article doesn't feel researched. This article is no exception. It feels more like a post to garner publicity by loudly going against a more mainstream opinion. Perhaps if the author offered any analysis I might not feel so offended. Even a list of all the start ups funded last year and their topics would offer more insight.
This was one of the top stories a few minutes ago and suddenly it's on the second page. That's a shame, because it needs to be addressed.
Dear startups,
If you want to do something very innovative, don't apply to YC with it. YC is a three month program designed to make companies; it is not a research program. On the application, you will have to describe what you're working on in three sentences. That's not a design flaw; they're looking for things that can be described in a few sentences.
There have been exceptions -- people that went through the program who were (and are) working on hard problems -- but if you look at the numbers, they are clearly the exception.
YC is great. I'm glad it exists. But understand what it is, not what you want it to be.
I agree. It seems to me the essay came more from a place of wanting to see lots of big ideas come his way. And more of the people who are attracted to the big idea and can at the very least convince you they'd have a shot at actually pulling it off. Those are the people he'd love to see walk in the door.
I have my criticisms (or concerns to be more charitable) with PG and the YC model, but I don't think this is fair. In addition to people who have pointed out the survivorship / selection bias, as well as the number of companies YC has funded that are aiming very high, there's also the issue of YC only being able to fund what people apply for.
Though I guess they could convince people to drop a good idea for a pie-in-the-sky idea, but I think what happens more often is that they get them to drop a mediocre idea for a better one.
But anyway, YC gets like 2k apps per cycle, but most of those are going to be for non-devastatingly-ambitious ideas, and then the ones that are have to have great teams behind them. If you don't see very many coming out of YC, it might be because there weren't that many to start with.
geez, what is up with this spate of snide/cynical posts about PG and/or YC? it's not necessary the content. I mean, I love almost all of what PG says in his essays, but there are at times genuine questions and doubts (e.g., I've heard schlep as a verb more than a noun). Sometimes, these questions of a larger, fundamental discussion (e.g., copyrights & property). questioning is fine, and is necessary in order to attain greater understanding.
what I'm getting annoyed at is the tone I'm sensing -- it's sometimes downright sneering. i know it's been brought up very recently as well, and PG has said it's been happening gradually as the site has grown. i've read the essay on trolls, but this seems like it's something different. jealousy is also something that increases as a function of success, and when jealousy crosses a threshold, it morphs into resentment. just sayin'...
I am not trying to invoke Godwin's Law, but in the 1930s, somehow millions of Germans were convinced that Hitler was a good idea. In retrospect, he clearly wasn't.
Whenever a lot of people start getting really excited by someone or something, I think that there is a certain subset of people, myself included, that react by getting overly skeptical, by looking for the problems. Personally, I try to be thoughtful and present any negatives I find in a polite and well reasoned manner, but I am sure that there are others who simply have a knee-jerk reaction of the sort: "I can't believe you're drinking the Kool-Aid, you idiot."
It seems this argument is based on a misunderstanding of Paul Graham's essay.
> that the biggest opportunities for revolution often sound like the craziest ideas at first. Graham points out the flawed reasoning in investors’ so often shying away from projects trying to pull off these sorts of major revolutions, but Y Combinator itself mostly gravitates toward startups making relatively small, iterative progress on existing idea spaces
Graham is pointing out how frightening these startup ideas are because they are existing markets ripe for some innovation. Eg. search, universities, compilers.
And just how are compilers a business space in which innovation should take place? Most major compilers activity has long-since been displaced into open-source and academia.
If you develop a compiler that, say, parallelizes the hell out of code, you'll have a group of massive companies breaking down your door and throwing money at you.
Edit: Also, compilers to move code from mainframes to commodity servers, recompilers to switch architectures (e.g. Rosetta by Transitive), etc are big business. Are they going to make you a billionaire? Probably not. Can you make a couple million and a great ROI? Absolutely.
>If you develop a compiler that, say, parallelizes the hell out of code, you'll have a group of massive companies breaking down your door and throwing money at you.
I speak with some fair knowledge of compilers, PLs, runtime systems, and OSs when I say: massive companies will also throw money at me if I can turn lead into gold.
A compiler cannot transform an inherently stateful, sequential program into an inherently parallel program that can be easily parallelized-the-hell-out-of. This is why there has been actual interest in shifting over to functional programming among those who need lots and lots of concurrency.
There do exist systems that will, for example, guarantee the determinism of threaded applications -- making them more predictable and debuggable. But DThreads still won't take a fold and turn it into a map.
Given enough time and memory more things are possible. Heck you could probably add speculative execution to many programs for more speedup. You are right in that the easy stuff has already been done, but that doesn't mean the hard stuff can't be done - just that it is hard. The good news is that people are prepared to pay for hard stuff.
WRT to 1) you left out profiled feedback which would help with some of the analysis choices. Something else that can be done is to compile multiple versions of things and makes choices/switch things around according to circumstances at runtime (as pretty much every modern JIT does). We also still have a "waste not" mentality which is why I mentioned speculative execution which inherently wastes CPU in order to get quicker answers.
2) Not really. You've used current thinking to define your business model. Think disruptive instead. And worst case you'd end up spending Ycombinator money and end up with a better CV.
Some thoughts: It is possible now for a compiler to chew through terabytes of open source code to build up an information bank. Internal representation of code can be centrally submitted to see if anything matches and provides more compilation hints. Runtime profiling could submit back big O information. An organisation could run all the possibilities Seti-at-home style. ie rather than the compiler having to make more intelligent choices, it can just try all the choices.
1) OK, I concede this one, certainly we can use profiling to get an idea of what a given function's performance curve looks like. We just need some notion of how to vary the size of the inputs in a controlled way when profiling, and then we need to look at the curve and decide what kind of curve we're seeing, and then we need to actually run the statistical software to calculate the precise terms of the curve.
To my knowledge, the middle step is actually the hardest. I'm no statistician, but do we have math/software that can look at a curve and distinguish a logarithmic function with little error in the data from a linear function with lots of error in the data?
>2) Not really. You've used current thinking to define your business model. Think disruptive instead. And worst case you'd end up spending Ycombinator money and end up with a better CV.
The man-years here are the dominant cost. A SSC falls outside the start-up business model of releasing a "Minimum Viable Product" and all that jazz. You can't build a minimum SSC without building most of the whole thing.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't take someone's money to do it, but I'd be asking for a research-project budget, not an equity investment that has to be "ramen profitable".
Besides, I prefer home-made vegetable curry to ramen any day ;-).
You are still thinking "cathedral" as the project structure. I think "bazaar" is a better approach - try all the things, fling stuff against the wall and see what sticks. Use the terabytes of existing code to learn. I see the latter like spoken language translation. The approach used to be coming up with rules from experts which is very expensive. Nowadays they use statistical approaches which relies on having lots of data, uses humungous amounts of machine time to build the translation, but uses very few (expensive) people.
A YC startup doesn't have to be profitable or even come up with a MVP - it has to show there is merit to what they doing and some probability of success in the long run.
Another example from a favoured database - MongoDB. Rather than trying to come up with optimal query plans they try all pertinent ones concurrently. Whichever finishes first is noted and used in the future. Its performance results continue to be monitored and if they start diverging all are tried again.
This means not having to guess big O correctly, or access patterns or other stuff in advance. It is possible to add future optimisations and not worry about current ones since they just won't be used work inapplicable workloads.
>A YC startup doesn't have to be profitable or even come up with a MVP - it has to show there is merit to what they doing and some probability of success in the long run.
Then what's the point of a YC startup? Doesn't have to make a profit, doesn't have to build a product... basically, sounds like it doesn't have to build a company.
His page at Microsoft Research is gone, and Google Cache has got it the same day you posted this. I wonder what happened to him. Can anybody link to that research?
To Graham's point about the things we do that will appear ridiculous to future generations, I believe travel is one of the most obvious. Think about this- people pay three times the normal ticket price to fly "first class" and have a seat that is not uncomfortable to sit in for more than an hour, a drink that is served in a glass, and a meal. People are subjected to long lines, security screenings, and an archaic, drawn-out search for the cheapest tickets. And even with all this, the airlines are still losing!
I personally think it is a double edge sword, very few people are pursuing truly large ideas because the odds of finding funding to even get started just are not there and some ideas require funding to even get off the ground. As someone who pursued a very large scale idea, I know all too well that investors just don't seem to be interested in efforts that require large amounts of upfront work and infrastructure before they can even launch. I think Amazon was the last effort of that kind, that has been funded. Ideas like Facebook are more palatable because the infrastructure requirements scales with the company. With search you really are not afforded that luxury, to compete you have big data requirements from day one. Ultimately big data requirements is was what doomed my idea and to this day I have not found many investors that have an appetite for a start-up that has big data requirements from day one. In saying that, my experience is subjective and I am not playing ball in the valley, so take my post for what it is a personal observation.
"Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another."
I think many people are forgetting a key part, if not THE key part, in the selection process for YC companies, and that's the TEAM. The idea is second to the people behind it when PG and company make their selections (and in many cases, YC teams end up going with a totally different idea than what they applied with), at least most of the time.
There is far too much focus on selection bias around ideas in both this article and the comments, when in fact PG is simply putting faith in teams that happen to be passionate about certain ideas (that may or may not fall into his ambitious ideas categories).
Part of the reason for the essay is surely to encourage more ambitious YC applications. Likely no one is more tired of flavor of the day mashups than YC partners who have to wade through them.
"Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it."
I remember somewhere that AirBnB said they wanted to become the best marketplace for trading used goods. That's pretty ambitious, but they're attacking it sideways by letting people rent out rooms first.
I have nothing to do with YC and no reason to defend pg, but I will say that this article clearly misses one of his big points: it's very hard to be successful if your whole goal is to change the world from day 1. Even if it is your secret goal - you are probably going to run out of money before you get the chance to.
Well, to be fair, he does say that you need to take a novel (and niche) angle on doing such a thing (not to say your company doesn’t). To secure the investment on any extremely ambitious idea you would also need to be very effective in person; much more so than someone with a less ambitious, more realistic idea.
I understand what the author's saying and I think (not being as experienced as some on HN) that he's got a bit of a point. But boy, if you're gonna call out a man with metals on his jacket, you better have something to back it up.
Meh. If it was really revolutionary, you would have to spend a few pages explaining what the hell it is, or make people go read research work from 30 years ago to understand it.
It's a deceptively focused/small offering to start with but they have the key components required to become a credentialing system outside of the university/college system.
It's easy to look at YC startups and say they aren't pursuing massive visions but the truth is many of them are just starting with some tiny subset of a big problem.
"Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken."