Whenever I read statements like these I am torn because it's difficult to decide whether to cast it aside as "feel good rhetoric, but rhetoric nonetheless" or take it as it is. Do I simply gather the facts and make up my own truth of things, or do I listen to someone pen something like this up where there are so many self-admitted contradictions that you cannot help but wonder if these people are intentionally ruining social order, if they are just that ignorant of their actions.
It's absolutely dependent on investors. Hire, send investor updates, choose partner, view from angel investor etc.
Most of these only applies to invested startups and mostly in SV.
Bootstrapped startups cannot hire unless they have hit a certain profit mark and certainly not preemptively.
Not to trout a cliche around since plenty of HN has heard of this already, but David Sinclair’s book Lifespan talks about caloric reduction. Nothing crazy, skipping a meal here and there.
Running isn’t the only way to get cardio in. Tabata/HIIT, while making you feel like you’re on the verge of dying, are wonderful and most important safe for your knee joints. Long distance running will wear your meniscus out.
So for everyone here who says they don’t like to run - that’s fine, get on the stairmaster or pick up a kettlebell or medicine ball and do some swings and tosses and side movements. Running will seem like a walk in the park by comparison.
> Long distance running will wear your meniscus out.
Is there any research to back that? Everything I’ve ready says that it is not a fatality and that it is possible to run, for many years (life?) without destroying your joints.
It’s my understanding that your statement is as accurate as saying “driving a car will result in you getting in a car accident”. It’s extremely possible and it has happened to many people but it doesn’t mean it _has_ to happen
A physical therapist once told me that the number of runners (that is, people who have done it regularly for years) who have non-trivial knee problems is in the neighborhood of 75%. Don’t know the source behind that, but it’s stuck with me. And the reason I was there was because of the knee problems I had from running.
The research is mixed. Partly since the advent of modern running sneakers may actually be causing more injuries as a sibling comment pointed out. For a while I was doing PhD research in materials science and created a technique to do materials fatigue testing of the meniscus. Unfortunately that was the first ever such research for meniscus and the data wasn't able to conclude much, alas. The research can't say for sure what injuries are from form and conditions or underlying mechanical limits, or the effect of self-repair mechanisms. After that work though, my opinion is to run on the front of your foot and remain well hydrated as both reduce peak impact forces. Also pay attention to how you twist the knee while running (eg don't twist during land). Also 1/3 of meniscus injuries still appear to be unrelated to any specific injury or activities like running.
> that it is possible to run, for many years (life?) without destroying your joints.
I knew a few people who've done well over 200 marathons (a couple are well over 500, one is over 1500 IIRC, one did >250 in a calendar year) without destroying their joints. Now it might be that their running style (invariably "slow and easy") that lets them do that many marathons also contributes to them avoiding this issue.
I've seen a video where they recorded a runner running barefoot and in shoes. When running barefoot, you tend to step on a front of your foot and much less vibration go to your whole body this way.
I've bought barefoot shoes myself and it is true that I tend to step more on a front part of the foot as well.
I've never enjoyed running and never practised it on a regular basis.
I have chondromalacia which started (or rather had been diagnosed) in my early twenties. It doesn't prove anything of course, but probably some people are inclined to get joint problems anyway (although running might make it happen quicker probably).
>The author eventually puts some thought into it and subsequently adopts a public stance matching what was privately true all along—revealing how little they value the things they said they did.
I wouldn't chalk this up to irony just yet, but the lack of benevolent gatekeepers has allowed this to happen. And it will happen time and time again and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You've had a good run in your basement using something that the suits didn't pay much attention to, because they couldn't connect at the time how this seemingly boring machine called the computer could lead to money. But rest assured, your hard work has demonstrated it to them and has brought them over.
Slowly but surely you should make amends with some utopian idea of a decentralized, apolitical, and not-under-control-of-some-state web. Anything less than that is being delusional.
A free society has so many enemies from inside and outside who wish to force their hand upon everyone, that it's best to stay out of the way of the herd unless you believe getting trampled over is worth it.
When we were "battling" for net neutrality last time (or was it two times ago?) there was a good meme image floating around that showed a handful of different "packages" of websites you could have access to:
But if you really look, this has already started to happen. Netflix once had a decent library of movies, and then everyone caught up to them and now it's Netflix, Amazon, Hulu/Disney, HBO, and the list keeps growing.
Spotify, Apple, Google Music. Eventually this exclusivity card will be played by them in a much greater scale. At which point, the necessity of most people having to _ration_ what web they want to see will inevitably resemble having those packages up there.
So in closing, you're out-financed, out manned, and to make things worse, you've got so-called "leftists"/"liberals" as front line soldiers working free of charge (Mark Zuckerberg was right - they're not just dumb fucks, they're _gullible_ dumb fucks) for these corporations to further erode your chances of having any semblance of a decent internet.
As Morgan Freeman so eloquently put it in The Dark Knight: "Good luck."
Can someone pin point what is objectively wrong or out of touch with this article? Genuinely asking because the past three+ posts from pg have been met with negativity saying pg is a wealthy Londoner who doesn’t understand the prole struggle.
He starts his entire essay with a faulty premise, that in order to be a billionaire you have to be exploitative, and then goes on to argue why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true.
Look, not even 'prole defenders' agree with this. You don't have to be exploitative to be a billionaire, it's simply a byproduct. There are only several thousand billionaires on earth and you'd be hard pressed to find any one of them without some sort of scandal involving their workers or consumers.
Pinpointing what is 'objectively' wrong with a subjective essay is hard, which is why most people are attacking the subjectivity itself, and I think that's healthy to do.
>why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true.
I have a dim recollection of an article many years ago that Y Combinator asked applicants a time when they gamed the system and the answer to that was on of the most correlated to success. Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. They framed it as a positive. Finding opportunities and using them to your advantage. But a negative framing would be that they were looking for people that exploited whatever advantage they oculd find.
>Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet.
Are you sure you didn't just come up with that example yourself to suit the narrative? Until you know what all selected companies chose as an answer for that, aren't we just guessing as to what quality they were looking for?
To be clear, I'm not accusing you of making it up, as my memory of it is dim too, I just can't remember examples being given like lying on a resume.
That’s an interesting thread ..altho not enough comments to make it super interesting..
I guess ‘hacks’ are what we call as ‘loopholes’ in tax audits. This is how I understand hacking. Every system has its strength/weaknesses and boundaries. As long as we can rearrange the system from within the boundaries by exploiting the available strengths/weaknesses to create an entirely different model/system/agenda qualifies as a ‘hack’.
I'm glad you found it, but I don't really see those as really changing my point. They looked for people that beat the system. They're amusing anecdotes when it's a plucky college kid hustling for a job. But when it's a head of a billion+ company beating the system (i.e. laws protecting workers and/or the general populace) it's a different story.
I remember that(I applied twice. Won’t likely do it again because YC isn’t a good fit for me) and I wrote something to fill the blank..while thinking why on earth would I put that in writing here for the off chance that I might be get into an accelerator program.
I don’t expect anyone to answer that truthfully, but the ability to come up with a convincing and impressive response would score major points for creativity.
People have already minced words over "exploitation" and where to exactly draw the boundary between acceptable/tolerable and not. It strikes me personally as flimsy reasoning to harp on his writings.
If you're going to build a business and you hope to make money, you're going to have to EXPLOIT inefficiencies in markets, competitors, customers, processes, conventional modes of thinking, and so on. Doesn't matter if the business is making you a dollar or a million or a billion.
And also, this whole "scandal involving workers or consumers". YC's portfolio has plenty of companies who are making a killing with revenue who haven't had to do this.
Patrick Collison is a regular poster on here. Go ahead and tell him he's exploiting people and he's scandalous with workers and consumers. I'd like to see someone go to one of the successful YC alumni and say directly at them half the shit you people spout out into the nether.
As I have mentioned in a comment to the throwaway account in this thread - I sincerely think a lot of commenters on here either have no experience or no ambition in starting a business, never mind getting a healthy revenue stream. Hell, I wonder what the percentage here is who got as far to having to talk to clients.
I don't really think this is a new theme for pg's essays [edit: I mean, I don't think pg's style or content has changed that much], although I've also noticed this change [in responses here].
Usually, HN is the space where his essays are most heavily defended.
I am not sure where the bitterness comes, and to be honest, I would like to know. We are reading the same essays.
More and more I am starting to think that people who are decrying pg's writing should come clean and say whether or not they've started a business, and if so, what was the outcome. The outcome isn't as relevant, but I bet there are very few people out there who have reached, lets call it "Fuck You" money through running their own business who would read this essay and go "Hah he's so out of touch he doesn't even see it anymore" and toss some link about Dunning-Kruger or whatever.
For people who are in the business of making money through getting shit built, I think what he's saying will resonate just fine. But then again it's one of those things where the people who need it the most are the least likely ones to take it, and vice versa. It's akin to the "It's a good problem to have" crowd when you say how you're sick of dealing with clients on the phone even though you have a 200-person company, and they look at you sideways because they have no idea why you are complaining.
He's talking about billionaires and interviews in this one, and he starts off saying how the two threads are connected. But what he's really talking about is building-a-business-by-convincing-people-you're-not-full-of-hot-air.
And unfortunately, when I see people tearing his essays apart, their ramblings strike me as nothing but hot air.
I think it's HN who is out of touch more than pg is, because I don't think the vast majority are here to build businesses whatsoever.
"He's talking about billionaires but he's REALLY talking about something else that people in the right audience will get, and just filter out the noise" sounds fairly out of touch, if he can't see that the framing he's using is needlessly complicating the issue. Or if he wants to connect to a larger political discussion about global economic systems but only has substance to discuss related to a narrower "building a business" question.
Would be easier to just talk about what he's actually talking about, then.
To be fair this is another article/essay in a very, very long string of his that can be filed under some kind of a "Fundamentals of Business" type category. If you talk to owners, they will inevitably say the same things he's saying, sometimes verbatim. But these owners wouldn't speak in direct words either, because "speaking to customers/users" is too context dependent to get into in an HN comment. There's too much nuance to bash the person over the head with it when writing this sort of an essay.
That's mostly what tipped me off to not take his words at face value but to interpret them through his lens as a VC and someone who is trying to communicate business ideas (ideals?) to people who, I would at least hope, aspire to create a business of their own. Whether it's a million or a billion, it doesn't matter. Nearly everything he talks about applies to "lifestyle businesses," which is I think partly why YC offers some small bit of money to get the ball rolling rather than go gung-ho and throw massive amounts of money at people. I don't know if this has changed, I don't think it has. Obviously it doesn't hurt to get a leg-up from the counsellors and whatnot that YC provides through their alumni program.
I am not sure if he's spoken about it but I wouldn't doubt that one of his philosophies is that a diverse number of businesses can grow to a reasonable revenue (where the founders are happy and working away at it) with a bit of money to start with, and that way YC doesn't have to spend a fortune early on and everyone walks away happy even if YC doesn't turn a sizable profit. Some kind of a threshold where YC feels anything above that means they're pissing money in the wind and their ROI isn't any better, but at the same time they're helping the founders as best as they can.
So you have to take the times he talks about being Ramen Profitable and talks about building a Billion Dollar Business and find the underlying threads tying it all together.
pg can't tell you exactly what, how, when, where, why you should be doing the thing you need to be doing to build a business. His words sound like platitudes most of the time to me personally, which is why I take the side of "the people who need this the most won't take it, and vice versa", because the person who started a business and is profitable didn't have anyone like pg telling them this sort of stuff. Would someone read his words before starting anything and be inspired to? Perhaps, but it's a long journey and counting on such flimsy motivation to keep you going is to me silly.
For some, certain things might be common sense. For others, not so much. Plenty of founders, even those with serious business experience, still have it ingrained in them that "if you build it, they will come", and they neglect every other aspect of business. Yes, I'm talking primarily about engineering types. This essay is to remind you to focus on the users, and the rest will follow.
Aside: I'm grateful for the Startup School library. I think it's a great resource. It's got a nice mix of obvious and non-obvious advice in there. When people disparage pg's writing, they should take a moment and see what his company has built for people who wish to create a business before declaring him out of touch.
I've started a business, we were recently acquired for a nine figure sum, and I think PG is increasingly out of touch. My best guess is that he's been rich too long, but I feel the bitterness and have been quite successful in my tech career starting companies.
