12 ms·

How Not to Die (2007)

428 points by sellingwebsite 7y ago

Etheryte 7y ago
Could use a (2007) in the title. Previous discussion with the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163
jessmartin 7y ago
I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup (https://first.io https://first.io). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!" In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"
- Uehreka 7y ago
  Not a startup, and not necessarily dying, but here’s a personal anecdote of mine that goes against this: In 2016 I was working on a UX team, making improvements to components that were used across the entire front-end of the new platform we were building. One spring afternoon I was working on a new hierarchical selector widget while a quarterly executive town hall was playing on the projector in our team room. Midway through writing an AngularJS directive, our head of product surprise announced that we were pivoting and that the platform we had been building for the past year was going to be mostly thrown out. I basically closed my editor and never touched that component again. The upshot here is that in startups or big companies, change can come very suddenly. And when big problems with a strategy are only known to those at the top, it makes the sudden changes even more surprising for those down the ladder. If you’ve got a bad board, you might find out about a change that you need to make the day that you need to make it.
- codingdave 7y ago
  I do wonder if pg would write that again in 2019. We've seen many startups die while charging forward before finding product/market fit. Talking to customers comes before typing.
- bennyelv 7y ago
  It's a pretty meaningless piece of advice if you're not going to be able to pay your rent/mortgage this month because the funding has run out.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  It's interesting, because 'just keep typing' is often among one of the worst bits of advice you can give a software engineer. More code doesn't mean good code, nor does repeatedly slamming your head against a problem work towards actually solving said problem. I think a lot of what I see in this post is a mixture of survivorship bias/selection bias. We want to believe that the reasons startups succeeded was because they just kept trying, while not seeing the many that did die mid keystroke due to any number of reasons.
consultutah 7y ago
So did the Octopart guys ever become billionaires?
- arkades 7y ago
  Acquired a few years ago.
- CPLX 7y ago
  They were acquired in 2015, with 15 employees at the time, for an undisclosed purchase price. So probably not, though they didn't fail either.
- SimbaOnSteroids 7y ago
  Doesn't look like it but they exited, weather they got anything is a different story.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Acquired by https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/ALU:AU https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/ALU:AU Their market cap is 4b, so very unlikely. Probably ended up with a few million each, with a large chuck of it being some type of shares.
- tpmx 7y ago
  I feel like I can share this particular piece of gossip - hopefully it's useful to someone - I'm not particularly interested in going after this particular slice of business: So we just had a sales guy join from a large electronics components distributor - the kind that handles the interfaces between a) globally known consumer hardware brands both in "the west" and in PRC b) the hardware manufacturers (mostly PRC, some TW) c) the component manufacturers (mixed) I had been assuming they had been running some super sophisticated globally integrated software system. I was really curious about how this stuff actually worked, in real life. It turns out it's just excel sheets and phone-calls in the end. They are working to introduce ERP systems, but..no. This seems like something that's ripe for a software-based revolution.
  - 7y ago
Bostonian 7y ago
'Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble.' Since many start-up ideas are bad ones, it often will be rational for start-up founders to quit and do other things.
- ErikAugust 7y ago
  I don't know. Ideas are overrated. If the startup is able to execute on building things of unique value, I don't necessarily think it is rational to stop. So often however, the startups don't build anything unique, and many don't seem to build anything at all.
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    >I don't know. Ideas are overrated. A good idea doesn't mean you won't fail. A bad idea does mean you will fail.
    - ErikAugust 7y ago
      I still don't even believe that. A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset of value, is okay. You can move your asset to a more viable market. That is what a real pivot is. Pivoting is not "we have nothing but an idea, so we change our idea."
      - badestrand 7y ago
        > A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset of value, is okay. You can move your asset to a more viable market. Sorry but it sounds to me that you are not speaking from experience but just from reading many "startup culture" posts. In reality there just are many startups that have ideas and build products that never get to profitability. Most even have users that love the product but that doesn't help you if you can't get enough money. And ideas matter a lot. Some are just almost impossible to execute to profitability while others are a relatively easy win. I have seen both and no, you can not just "move the asset to a more viable market".
jpincheira 7y ago
I love this. I have read it a few times in the last years. This and Never Quit If [1] from Jason Lemkin have been essential for me to keep pursuing and never stop building my startup [2]. [1] https://www.saastr.com/never-quit-if/ https://www.saastr.com/never-quit-if/ [2] https://standups.io https://standups.io
randall 7y ago
My version of this story: I almost quit a year ago, exactly today, then my company got acquired. A story (with pictures! only on Twitter though, link at the bottom.) This is what I looked like last March 27. [horrible pic] One month prior... My dad passed away. I wasn't having a good month. But that wasn't what happened on March 27. I took a photo on March 27 because it was probably the worst I had felt in the last 5 years. Even worse than my dad's death. (We had a complicated relationship). So yeah. We were dead. Like dead dead. I got my cofounders together on Monday, March 26 (today) for our team meeting. I laid out our situation and that I was going to fire myself. [journal entry photo explaining the situation] I woke up a lot of days and worked as hard as I could. But honestly it didn't matter. My fate had actually been set in motion five to ten years prior. I didn't give up, and I didn't sit on my laurels. Ironically, I started reading a book called "Performing Under Pressure", and the entire premise of the book is basically: Act like you're not under pressure and you'll do your best work. https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-Matters/dp/0804136726 https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-Mat... See, this idea that I had been working on? I started working on the seeds for it in roughly 2008. It's the same idea I'm working on now. Here's me giving a talk about the idea in 2011, roughly 3 years before founding Vidpresso. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vYJ0w3UuM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vYJ0w3UuM0 As @justinkan and now my coworkers at Facebook know, I'm tenacious AF about this idea, and I know it's gonna happen. But last year, it didn't seem like it was going to happen. Not only that, it seemed like the entire last 7 years were about to unwind, and I was going to start back from scratch. Lots of entries like this one in my @dayoneapp. [Dead tired journal image.] And some like this one unfortunately. #openup #mentalhealth #suicide [suicidal journal image] But then, one week later. This entry hits my journal. [Wow, yesterday was insane. journal entry] Then my journal kind of goes silent because I got really busy for a while. But then this really cool thing happened. https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/facebook-vidpresso/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/facebook-vidpresso/ This isn't some sort of rags to riches story: I knew my idea was solid and I can have people vouch for me, I'm tenacious AF, don't give up, and really the issue with me was that my idea was / is too early (still!) But the other lesson is that for a certain subset of people: You'll probably always be happiest working on the problem you find most interesting, with your best friends, at a company who cares about your interests. Find that, and hold on to it. It took me a long time to get those things together, but I think I have all of them now. It's very, very surprising, but I've learned a lot and I'm very grateful. I now want to try to help others. If you're in your founder journey, feel free to DM! I'll try to help! It takes a long time though... it took me well over 10 years, and I'm still just getting started. Don't be in a hurry. Also an addendum: The timing is really what worked out. We happened to have the right tech at the right time with the right partners. I'm in love with my job at FB, mostly because I had been derisking it for years. When we joined FB, Interactivity had just become very important to FB. So it really was all about timing and persistence. We were in the game long enough for it to work out. --- It doesn't work out for everyone, but it did for me. :) thread: https://twitter.com/randallb/status/1110669172487286784 https://twitter.com/randallb/status/1110669172487286784
SandroG 7y ago
How prophetic. This was written just before the Great Recession of 2008.
throwaway35784 7y ago
> If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. Or end up a zombie startup. I'm not buying this stuff. It sounds more like an exploration of what works than a recommendation. Signs of success rather than suggestions for how to succeed. > keep typing Telling you about our progress leads to success? I believe you have your cause and effect out of order. > 90% of those who get into Newsweek would survive. Source? I see no evidence to support this is the survival factor. Why did those who got into Newsweek get there? It's comorbidity at best.
markstos 7y ago
Since Paul Graham is a vegetarian, I presumed the title was referring to a review of the book "How Not to Die". https://nutritionfacts.org/book/ https://nutritionfacts.org/book/
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Funny, I've invested in a start-up that makes food packs based on that book. They're doing very well, can just about manage their growth.
  - markstos 7y ago
    Link?
uptownfunk 7y ago
Epic post, love it.
pixelmonkey 7y ago
I wrote a 2012 reflection on this post, "Why Startups Die", that I think still holds up: https://amontalenti.com/2012/10/03/why-startups-die https://amontalenti.com/2012/10/03/why-startups-die
- ErikAugust 7y ago
  Any tips, strategies, ideas you have behind the "Bootstrapping Plan"? I am personally trying to balance Paul's advice of "the number one thing not to do is other things" with being able to bootstrap for an indefinite period of time.
  - pixelmonkey 7y ago
    I wrote a little about how I bootstrapped for a couple years via tech consulting projects here: https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-heart https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-hear... It wasn't easy, but it was necessary for me to get over the "rent and health insurance hump". I do agree that it's hard to reconcile bootstrapping/consulting with pg's advice to "not do other things". My main advice is: make sure consulting (or whatever "auxiliary income source" you are spending time on) is a means-to-an-end for you, and that it doesn't become the main thing. And also make sure to carve out time to actually work on the startup daily -- whether that's early mornings, "lunch breaks", or late nights. (In my case, it was all 3 :-) ...) Avoid the easy way out. During my multi-year consulting/bootstrapping journey, I got a lot of offers to join other startups or take on big consulting clients. But I knew that wasn't what I wanted, however tempting. Ultimately, I had to turn down lucrative short-term gain for taking a stipend salary on my startup when it finally landed seed funding. Pulling the trigger on that was tough, but worth it, in retrospect. This was only possible because I had already mentally convinced myself that consulting/bootstrapping revenue was a means-to-the-end for the startup. But yeah, life is messy, and we aren't all in the privileged position of being able to work without income for months or years on end, which unfortunately is often the vantage point taken by some of our "wise startup elders". One small piece of practical advice based on some mistakes I saw other founders make: don't use debt.
    - 7y ago
perfunctory 7y ago
> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I guess if people read Bertrand Russell [0] instead of Paul Graham, the world would be a better place. [0] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
- tlb 7y ago
  I find that when pursuing purely personal interests, publicly committing to a deliverable helps me get it done. I say I'm going do something by a given date as a way of putting myself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. People's motivation systems vary a lot, but it works for me.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    I feel the same way, but apparently there's some research to the contrary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21080132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21080132
    - tlb 7y ago
      The conclusion there is that "People who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen." But that's not a claim about causality. It can be explained by there being two kinds of people in the world: doers and blowhards.
      - shawnz 7y ago
        True, but still, I think there's an important point in that talking more won't necessarily make someone more of a doer. It could just make them more of a blowhard.
- burtonator 7y ago
diego 7y ago
I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop. It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode. You just don't hear about the rest.
- mtgx 7y ago
  I guess the idea is not to just "hang in there (but keep doing what you're doing)" but rather "hang in there (while innovating around your problem/change course, etc, until you get it right)".
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  Definitely a selection bias going on, but also he did say that you might have to change what you're doing.
- Swizec 7y ago
  > only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode And none of the companies that die do. Surviving gives you infinitely better odds of success than dying. That said, for personal success it is often important to let bad projects die.
  - diego 7y ago
    Infinitely better is not 100%, which is what his quote literally says. Say it's 0% vs 5%. That is my point.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    >> Surviving gives you infinitely better odds It's a false dichotomy. It's like comparing the chances of you living to the age of 60 given that a brick had fallen on your head yesterday to someone who didn't get that lucky yet (rephrasing as "what are the chances you are dead if you're already dead?"). You have to compare the odds before the fact.
mschuster91 7y ago
From the part about Octopart: > The distributors want to prevent the transparency that comes from having prices online. Some manufacturers are worse, they don't publish datasheets (looking at you, Intel VDSL chipset department, laptop keyboard manufacturers, Broadcom). It's almost as if there are companies that want to lock out anyone not a multi-million company to tinker with their products...
andygcook 7y ago
For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you. When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death. Can someone at YC comment on if this is still a good proxy for startup failure? From a personal perspective, we've sent out an investor update every single month [1] for our startup over the last four years. We also almost ran out of money at the end of 2017. The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out, but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors to get to profitability, which we pulled off [2] and are still going strong today. -- [1] The template we use for investor updates if you're curious: https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-template-rundown https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-tem... [2] The story about how we almost ran out of money but survived: https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-failing-to-profitability-part-1-a-brewing-storm https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-faili...
- kbenson 7y ago
  > but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors I think that's a lot of your answer right there. The companies that don't respond, don't articulate a plan and get feedback on it, or perhaps additional help. It's not that companies that keep communication open won't fail, but the ones that don't keep it open do (according to this).
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out The people who don't want to have those hard discussions are the ones that have their startup die. People who don't reply to emails are often people who are having negative feelings they don't want to deal with. Maybe they don't have answers and are afraid to give a status report that includes an admission that they simply don't know. Maybe they don't want to be the harbinger of bad news and are waiting until things get better. Neither of those is a constructive response. Neither of those fixes the problem. Avoidance tactics are usually about emotional reactions. They usually aren't actually tactical choices for effectively addressing a problem. There are exceptions. There are times when silence is golden or when it is the least worst option. I doubt that ever applies to dealing with an ongoing relationship with your investors. (I'm not someone with startup experience. I just know something about people.)
nexuist 7y ago
>A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups. There is now a whole neighborhood of them in San Francisco. If you move there, the peer pressure that made you work harder all summer will continue to operate. Funny how much that single sentence changed what life was like on the West Coast. Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups.
- compiler-guy 7y ago
  There have been mini Silicon Valley attempts for much longer than there has been a ycombinator. If this sentence changed anything, it is something very small. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers Scroll down to "Places with 'Silicon' names"
- rolltiide 7y ago
  > Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups. Without the culture to support it. A bunch of broke ideas people sitting in a wework or coffee shop with no angel investor in sight, no diversity in VC portfolios. There is a reason that interest rates are negative, because nobody wants to “stimulate the economy“ by giving broke entrepreneurs their money
- renew0account 7y ago
  what's the neighborhood he was referring to? I'm interested to know if it still exists or if it's just been assimilated into the greater Bay Area tech scene.
MetalGuru 7y ago
The biggest issue with the article is clearly correlation vs. causation. He admits to it. I think this advice can be dangerous for someone sacrificing a great deal for a startup that has a extremely low probability of success because “PG says I’ll be a millionaire as long as I just don’t let my startup die”
- cdelsolar 7y ago
  I mean, pivoting is a thing, it doesn't mean you gave up.
streetcat1 7y ago
The logical rule is quite simple: 1. Bootstrap 2. Reach cash flow positive asap.
azinman2 7y ago
> “In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich.“ Does this not appear to be really terrible to others? That the metric of success is just founders getting rich? At minimum, what about employees? But really, shouldn’t we be aiming higher where the companies are creating useful impact on the world and improving it? I understand he’s saying this as a contrast to the investors getting rich, but this train of thought and the people chasing it is what has caused SF to lose its soul IMHO.
- cyborgx7 7y ago
  You noticed how evil that sentence is, same as me. And you are getting downvoted, also like me. Start-up culture has no soul. They think having soul is a weakness. They are interested in getting rich, and nothing else. It's an empty, greedy culture.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    Thank you. I was surprised at my downvotes with no comments, reread what I wrote, and still agree with it. Sad that apparently this isn’t a common sentiment. Life is about so much more than just money, and given we have such a limited time on earth, we should strive to have some positive impact on the world.
briffle 7y ago
I know Paul Graham's legendary status, but someone needs to sit with him for 30 min, and get letsencrypt deployed to his webiste.
- mercora 7y ago
  Maybe invest some more time and fix the already present TLS setup by bringing it up to the current state of the art. If you try to connect via HTTPS Firefox stops me from proceeding with a warning about not being able to negotiate a common cipher (SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP).
ronilan 7y ago
Everybody dies, Sally. The thing is, to die well.
cyborgx7 7y ago
>because our definition of success is that the founders get rich The entire start-up industry is a get-rich-quick scheme and a cancer on society.
maxlamb 7y ago
I think this essay was valid for the year it was written (2007) where much fewer people were doing startups, lots of good ideas had not been executed yet, mobile was about to take off. Just like the belief in 2007 that "real estate prices can never go down" lead to the real estate bubble/crash that eventually invalidated that statement, if everyone starts beleiving if they start a company and never give up they will become rich even if their idea is bad, will end up invalidating that very belief.
- CPLX 7y ago
  Yeah exactly. Things were really really different then. Youtube was two years old, Facebook had only been open to non students for less than a year. Things like making databases of electronic parts or other less sexy B2B style ideas were often still wide open green fields with almost no competition. Plus just making websites work was tough, the cloud existed but just getting servers to work and stay up was a non trivial part of launching something. You can't just do the X + Software formula anymore and expect to get anywhere.
  - slededit 7y ago
    2007 was In the shadow of the post 2000 crash. People were still debating with me if going in to Computer Science even made sense (aren’t they sending all those jobs to India?). The financial crisis would happen just a few months later and take almost 10 years to recover. There’s a bias when looking at the past. We tend to assume the future was both inevitable and easily predictable. Not like these uncertain times today. Now pre-2000s was a little different. VCs were taking to me on the phone about my “robotics” company. I was 10.
excalibur 7y ago
> When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper. This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of Silicon Valley.
- chubot 7y ago
  Well maybe it was the reverse :) Silicon Valley producers had many consultants in Silicon Valley. And there was even a podcast I saw on YouTube where a former YC company founder worked for Silicon Valley after his startup shutdown. He moved down to LA as far as I remember. Oh yeah here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kk03M3XfVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kk03M3XfVY https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silicon-valley-on-hbo-ed-mcmanus/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silic... Or they could have just read PG's blog. The writers got a lot of stuff right so I wouldn't doubt it. Though I guess I was surprised there was no "ycombinator" in the show. There was Erlich and his hacker house / accelerator, who doesn't seem a lot like PG :)
- bumblebee4 7y ago
  As an investor, won't you pull this move just to get better conditions? The founders are fixated on closing the deal so they will put up with almost any condition that you throw at them?
  - excalibur 7y ago
    The investors in the series would.
aaroncray 7y ago
PaulGraham SHUT THE FUCK UP
sdoken123 7y ago
This article seems to contradict the advice given in the other too trending hacker news article right now which says: “Makers, don’t let yourself be forced into the ‘Manager Schedule’“ no?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
IGotThroughIt 7y ago
Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing! My most important takeaway.
elmar 7y ago
Personally I Think Paul Graham is very under appreciated, his legacy on the Startup ecosystem and zeitgeist will probably only be recognised many years on the future. It's a great pity that he doesn't write these wonderful essays for some time now.
- Riley 7y ago
  Read his book, Hackers and Painters. I don't think he's under appreciated. He was way ahead of the curve. And deserves to be happy with his family, or change the world some more..
- jimbokun 7y ago
  I am sure he can console himself with the Scrooge McDuck like vault of money to swim in he must be able to build at this point, with all of the successful YC exits. Which the essays did a lot to create. He became tech world famous through his essays, which then gave him the clout to launch YCombinator. (Are there public estimates of his current net worth?)
dang 7y ago
Previous threads for the curious: 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10009262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10009262 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163 2007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294
agumonkey 7y ago
fascinated by how much of this is emotional : - don't invent excuses - don't lose faith - talk to others a lot - keep making them happy
gfodor 7y ago
You can def be typing while your startup dies. Maybe it's the exception not the rule though. My last startup was firing on all cylinders, with addicted early adopters, and our team literally shipped features the last day we could pay them because they loved the project and team so much. It didn't matter much to the VCs who declined to invest further. If you can't pay your people, they can't eat, and they can't work on the startup any further. So if you're not profitable, you're always subject to investor sentiment and calculus to survive, and that can often be a totally separate question of if you still have the drive to push further and continue to reply to emails. In those scenarios where you have investors, you can't just go into 'hibernation mode' and get the founders back on the ramen lifestyle to keep going if you are hitting the trough, because on the way down you will be forced to sell or liquidate all the existing IP and other assets to help existing investors and debtholders recoup their losses. So you're left with nothing but the idea, and insofar as you want to continue to pursue similar ideas you run the risk of getting sued since you've sold the IP. So, its certainly possible for the market to 'correct' you out of existence, even if you have the deepest will to keep going and are willing to sacrifice almost anything to do so. The best thing you can do at this point is to move on and try to leverage what you've learned or the networks you've built into something you're similarly interested in.
JesseAldridge 7y ago
It should be stated that the flip side of not giving up is incurring the massive opportunity cost of years of lost compensation. That can easily be over a million dollars for a good software engineer. If you're a genius, then sure, not giving up makes a lot of sense. But if you're just pretty smart, you better think two, three, or four times before committing to do a startup. It's really easy to end up over thirty and broke.
haskellandchill 7y ago
Hm I was looking for some more practical advice on avoiding death.
mcguire 7y ago
"Don't take advice from the successful; they might just be lucky." -- anon
pascalxus 7y ago
Paul Graham usually writes some really good stuff, but this is highly misleading: "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." There are soo many projects that can continue in obscurity on a shoe string budget, never to amount to anything. You could continue to invest in those businesses great effort and money all for nothing. ProductHunt is filled to brim with failed projects. Even, Google one of the world's most successful companies, has countless projects that didn't work out. Were they supposed to keep pouring 100s of millions of dollars in projects that could never succeed? Furthermore, it's misleading because it implies that things are within your control. That, all you have to do is the right thing and you'll be successful. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you have a bad idea that didn't work out because of lack of consumer demand (the #1 reason why software startups die), then, after you've tried everything, there's not much else to do. It's better to shut down or pivot to something where there is demand.
- brudgers 7y ago
  This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. The audience was YC founders at the end of a YC batch. Probably after demo day. The entire audience had already been funded once (by YC at the start) and as a whole they had much better than average prospects for raising money. Some may have already raised or been close. I agree that it is questionable as generic advice. The August 2007 date suggests the Summer 07 batch. That's Disqus, Dropbox, and Twitch (among others). https://yclist.com/ https://yclist.com/
- nwsm 7y ago
  Read the whole article. >And however tough things get for the Octoparts, I predict they'll succeed. They may have to morph themselves into something totally different, but they won't just crawl off and die. They're smart; they're working in a promising field; and they just cannot give up. >All of you guys already have the first two. You're all smart and working on promising ideas. Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up. He admits that this speech is made for the startups in the room; ones that already passed the bar.
lamubanao 7y ago
that depends on your luck to be honest, although I think it's not true in any way but you can always think like that and you will have a better life
pragmatic 7y ago
Why did they add the terrible "read more" garbage? Et tu PG?
JoeMayoBot 7y ago
Sounds more inspirational than literal. He sets the scene as the last Y Combinator dinner of the Summer. Folks are probably taking the evening to relax and something too serious wouldn't fit the mood. Just reading this, I can see the humor, yet appreciate good advice cleverly mixed in to share a few meaningful tips.
mapcars 7y ago
>founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars Oh that's not the best factor to look for, as one can go beyond the fear of failure and this won't work anymore.
tabtab 7y ago
I can build a flowchart out of this article, but realized it has no end: it's an infinite loop. There has to be a point where you give up after get-user-feedback-tweak-and-try-again happens too many times. It's almost like a genetic algorithm where somebody forgot to put an upper limit on the regeneration loop count. Sure, tweak-and-try-again can keep going on until you eventually stumble on the right formula, since you'll eventually exhaust all possible related ideas, but it may be 2 years or 2 centuries until you hit it. Somebody may have to put a time limit on how long they'll try. For example, "I'll try for 4 years, and if nothing looks viable after 4 years, I'll get a real job or go to grad school."
ncmncm 7y ago
Graham essays are, as a rule, good. But for each mention of Lisp, they are half as good. Half as good can still be pretty good, but one mentioned Lisp more than two dozen times. There was very little good left. This one doesn't mention Lisp at all. It's pretty good.

Could use a (2007) in the title. Previous discussion with the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163

jessmartin 7y ago

I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup (https://first.io https://first.io). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!" In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"

Uehreka 7y ago
Not a startup, and not necessarily dying, but here’s a personal anecdote of mine that goes against this: In 2016 I was working on a UX team, making improvements to components that were used across the entire front-end of the new platform we were building. One spring afternoon I was working on a new hierarchical selector widget while a quarterly executive town hall was playing on the projector in our team room. Midway through writing an AngularJS directive, our head of product surprise announced that we were pivoting and that the platform we had been building for the past year was going to be mostly thrown out. I basically closed my editor and never touched that component again. The upshot here is that in startups or big companies, change can come very suddenly. And when big problems with a strategy are only known to those at the top, it makes the sudden changes even more surprising for those down the ladder. If you’ve got a bad board, you might find out about a change that you need to make the day that you need to make it.
codingdave 7y ago
I do wonder if pg would write that again in 2019. We've seen many startups die while charging forward before finding product/market fit. Talking to customers comes before typing.
bennyelv 7y ago
It's a pretty meaningless piece of advice if you're not going to be able to pay your rent/mortgage this month because the funding has run out.
fzeroracer 7y ago
It's interesting, because 'just keep typing' is often among one of the worst bits of advice you can give a software engineer. More code doesn't mean good code, nor does repeatedly slamming your head against a problem work towards actually solving said problem. I think a lot of what I see in this post is a mixture of survivorship bias/selection bias. We want to believe that the reasons startups succeeded was because they just kept trying, while not seeing the many that did die mid keystroke due to any number of reasons.

consultutah 7y ago

So did the Octopart guys ever become billionaires?

arkades 7y ago
Acquired a few years ago.
CPLX 7y ago
They were acquired in 2015, with 15 employees at the time, for an undisclosed purchase price. So probably not, though they didn't fail either.
SimbaOnSteroids 7y ago
Doesn't look like it but they exited, weather they got anything is a different story.
buzzkillington 7y ago
Acquired by https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/ALU:AU https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/ALU:AU Their market cap is 4b, so very unlikely. Probably ended up with a few million each, with a large chuck of it being some type of shares.
tpmx 7y ago
I feel like I can share this particular piece of gossip - hopefully it's useful to someone - I'm not particularly interested in going after this particular slice of business: So we just had a sales guy join from a large electronics components distributor - the kind that handles the interfaces between a) globally known consumer hardware brands both in "the west" and in PRC b) the hardware manufacturers (mostly PRC, some TW) c) the component manufacturers (mixed) I had been assuming they had been running some super sophisticated globally integrated software system. I was really curious about how this stuff actually worked, in real life. It turns out it's just excel sheets and phone-calls in the end. They are working to introduce ERP systems, but..no. This seems like something that's ripe for a software-based revolution.
- 7y ago

Bostonian 7y ago

'Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble.' Since many start-up ideas are bad ones, it often will be rational for start-up founders to quit and do other things.

ErikAugust 7y ago
I don't know. Ideas are overrated. If the startup is able to execute on building things of unique value, I don't necessarily think it is rational to stop. So often however, the startups don't build anything unique, and many don't seem to build anything at all.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  >I don't know. Ideas are overrated. A good idea doesn't mean you won't fail. A bad idea does mean you will fail.
  - ErikAugust 7y ago
    I still don't even believe that. A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset of value, is okay. You can move your asset to a more viable market. That is what a real pivot is. Pivoting is not "we have nothing but an idea, so we change our idea."
    - badestrand 7y ago
      > A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset of value, is okay. You can move your asset to a more viable market. Sorry but it sounds to me that you are not speaking from experience but just from reading many "startup culture" posts. In reality there just are many startups that have ideas and build products that never get to profitability. Most even have users that love the product but that doesn't help you if you can't get enough money. And ideas matter a lot. Some are just almost impossible to execute to profitability while others are a relatively easy win. I have seen both and no, you can not just "move the asset to a more viable market".

jpincheira 7y ago

I love this. I have read it a few times in the last years. This and Never Quit If [1] from Jason Lemkin have been essential for me to keep pursuing and never stop building my startup [2]. [1] https://www.saastr.com/never-quit-if/ https://www.saastr.com/never-quit-if/ [2] https://standups.io https://standups.io

randall 7y ago

My version of this story: I almost quit a year ago, exactly today, then my company got acquired. A story (with pictures! only on Twitter though, link at the bottom.) This is what I looked like last March 27. [horrible pic] One month prior... My dad passed away. I wasn't having a good month. But that wasn't what happened on March 27. I took a photo on March 27 because it was probably the worst I had felt in the last 5 years. Even worse than my dad's death. (We had a complicated relationship). So yeah. We were dead. Like dead dead. I got my cofounders together on Monday, March 26 (today) for our team meeting. I laid out our situation and that I was going to fire myself. [journal entry photo explaining the situation] I woke up a lot of days and worked as hard as I could. But honestly it didn't matter. My fate had actually been set in motion five to ten years prior. I didn't give up, and I didn't sit on my laurels. Ironically, I started reading a book called "Performing Under Pressure", and the entire premise of the book is basically: Act like you're not under pressure and you'll do your best work. https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-Matters/dp/0804136726 https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-Mat... See, this idea that I had been working on? I started working on the seeds for it in roughly 2008. It's the same idea I'm working on now. Here's me giving a talk about the idea in 2011, roughly 3 years before founding Vidpresso. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vYJ0w3UuM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vYJ0w3UuM0 As @justinkan and now my coworkers at Facebook know, I'm tenacious AF about this idea, and I know it's gonna happen. But last year, it didn't seem like it was going to happen. Not only that, it seemed like the entire last 7 years were about to unwind, and I was going to start back from scratch. Lots of entries like this one in my @dayoneapp. [Dead tired journal image.] And some like this one unfortunately. #openup #mentalhealth #suicide [suicidal journal image] But then, one week later. This entry hits my journal. [Wow, yesterday was insane. journal entry] Then my journal kind of goes silent because I got really busy for a while. But then this really cool thing happened. https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/facebook-vidpresso/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/facebook-vidpresso/ This isn't some sort of rags to riches story: I knew my idea was solid and I can have people vouch for me, I'm tenacious AF, don't give up, and really the issue with me was that my idea was / is too early (still!) But the other lesson is that for a certain subset of people: You'll probably always be happiest working on the problem you find most interesting, with your best friends, at a company who cares about your interests. Find that, and hold on to it. It took me a long time to get those things together, but I think I have all of them now. It's very, very surprising, but I've learned a lot and I'm very grateful. I now want to try to help others. If you're in your founder journey, feel free to DM! I'll try to help! It takes a long time though... it took me well over 10 years, and I'm still just getting started. Don't be in a hurry. Also an addendum: The timing is really what worked out. We happened to have the right tech at the right time with the right partners. I'm in love with my job at FB, mostly because I had been derisking it for years. When we joined FB, Interactivity had just become very important to FB. So it really was all about timing and persistence. We were in the game long enough for it to work out. --- It doesn't work out for everyone, but it did for me. :) thread: https://twitter.com/randallb/status/1110669172487286784 https://twitter.com/randallb/status/1110669172487286784

SandroG 7y ago

How prophetic. This was written just before the Great Recession of 2008.

throwaway35784 7y ago

> If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. Or end up a zombie startup. I'm not buying this stuff. It sounds more like an exploration of what works than a recommendation. Signs of success rather than suggestions for how to succeed. > keep typing Telling you about our progress leads to success? I believe you have your cause and effect out of order. > 90% of those who get into Newsweek would survive. Source? I see no evidence to support this is the survival factor. Why did those who got into Newsweek get there? It's comorbidity at best.

markstos 7y ago

Since Paul Graham is a vegetarian, I presumed the title was referring to a review of the book "How Not to Die". https://nutritionfacts.org/book/ https://nutritionfacts.org/book/

jacquesm 7y ago
Funny, I've invested in a start-up that makes food packs based on that book. They're doing very well, can just about manage their growth.
- markstos 7y ago
  Link?

uptownfunk 7y ago

Epic post, love it.

pixelmonkey 7y ago

I wrote a 2012 reflection on this post, "Why Startups Die", that I think still holds up: https://amontalenti.com/2012/10/03/why-startups-die https://amontalenti.com/2012/10/03/why-startups-die

ErikAugust 7y ago
Any tips, strategies, ideas you have behind the "Bootstrapping Plan"? I am personally trying to balance Paul's advice of "the number one thing not to do is other things" with being able to bootstrap for an indefinite period of time.
- pixelmonkey 7y ago
  I wrote a little about how I bootstrapped for a couple years via tech consulting projects here: https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-heart https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-hear... It wasn't easy, but it was necessary for me to get over the "rent and health insurance hump". I do agree that it's hard to reconcile bootstrapping/consulting with pg's advice to "not do other things". My main advice is: make sure consulting (or whatever "auxiliary income source" you are spending time on) is a means-to-an-end for you, and that it doesn't become the main thing. And also make sure to carve out time to actually work on the startup daily -- whether that's early mornings, "lunch breaks", or late nights. (In my case, it was all 3 :-) ...) Avoid the easy way out. During my multi-year consulting/bootstrapping journey, I got a lot of offers to join other startups or take on big consulting clients. But I knew that wasn't what I wanted, however tempting. Ultimately, I had to turn down lucrative short-term gain for taking a stipend salary on my startup when it finally landed seed funding. Pulling the trigger on that was tough, but worth it, in retrospect. This was only possible because I had already mentally convinced myself that consulting/bootstrapping revenue was a means-to-the-end for the startup. But yeah, life is messy, and we aren't all in the privileged position of being able to work without income for months or years on end, which unfortunately is often the vantage point taken by some of our "wise startup elders". One small piece of practical advice based on some mistakes I saw other founders make: don't use debt.
  - 7y ago

perfunctory 7y ago

> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I guess if people read Bertrand Russell [0] instead of Paul Graham, the world would be a better place. [0] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

tlb 7y ago
I find that when pursuing purely personal interests, publicly committing to a deliverable helps me get it done. I say I'm going do something by a given date as a way of putting myself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. People's motivation systems vary a lot, but it works for me.
- shawnz 7y ago
  I feel the same way, but apparently there's some research to the contrary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21080132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21080132
  - tlb 7y ago
    The conclusion there is that "People who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen." But that's not a claim about causality. It can be explained by there being two kinds of people in the world: doers and blowhards.
    - shawnz 7y ago
      True, but still, I think there's an important point in that talking more won't necessarily make someone more of a doer. It could just make them more of a blowhard.
burtonator 7y ago

diego 7y ago

I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true. I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee. They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever, investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get acquired, some closed shop. It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode. You just don't hear about the rest.

mtgx 7y ago
I guess the idea is not to just "hang in there (but keep doing what you're doing)" but rather "hang in there (while innovating around your problem/change course, etc, until you get it right)".
rossdavidh 7y ago
Definitely a selection bias going on, but also he did say that you might have to change what you're doing.
Swizec 7y ago
> only a small fraction of the companies that avoid dying manage to explode And none of the companies that die do. Surviving gives you infinitely better odds of success than dying. That said, for personal success it is often important to let bad projects die.
- diego 7y ago
  Infinitely better is not 100%, which is what his quote literally says. Say it's 0% vs 5%. That is my point.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  >> Surviving gives you infinitely better odds It's a false dichotomy. It's like comparing the chances of you living to the age of 60 given that a brick had fallen on your head yesterday to someone who didn't get that lucky yet (rephrasing as "what are the chances you are dead if you're already dead?"). You have to compare the odds before the fact.

mschuster91 7y ago

From the part about Octopart: > The distributors want to prevent the transparency that comes from having prices online. Some manufacturers are worse, they don't publish datasheets (looking at you, Intel VDSL chipset department, laptop keyboard manufacturers, Broadcom). It's almost as if there are companies that want to lock out anyone not a multi-million company to tinker with their products...

andygcook 7y ago

For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you. When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death. Can someone at YC comment on if this is still a good proxy for startup failure? From a personal perspective, we've sent out an investor update every single month [1] for our startup over the last four years. We also almost ran out of money at the end of 2017. The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out, but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors to get to profitability, which we pulled off [2] and are still going strong today. -- [1] The template we use for investor updates if you're curious: https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-template-rundown https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-tem... [2] The story about how we almost ran out of money but survived: https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-failing-to-profitability-part-1-a-brewing-storm https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-faili...

kbenson 7y ago
> but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors I think that's a lot of your answer right there. The companies that don't respond, don't articulate a plan and get feedback on it, or perhaps additional help. It's not that companies that keep communication open won't fail, but the ones that don't keep it open do (according to this).
DoreenMichele 7y ago
The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out The people who don't want to have those hard discussions are the ones that have their startup die. People who don't reply to emails are often people who are having negative feelings they don't want to deal with. Maybe they don't have answers and are afraid to give a status report that includes an admission that they simply don't know. Maybe they don't want to be the harbinger of bad news and are waiting until things get better. Neither of those is a constructive response. Neither of those fixes the problem. Avoidance tactics are usually about emotional reactions. They usually aren't actually tactical choices for effectively addressing a problem. There are exceptions. There are times when silence is golden or when it is the least worst option. I doubt that ever applies to dealing with an ongoing relationship with your investors. (I'm not someone with startup experience. I just know something about people.)

nexuist 7y ago

>A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups. There is now a whole neighborhood of them in San Francisco. If you move there, the peer pressure that made you work harder all summer will continue to operate. Funny how much that single sentence changed what life was like on the West Coast. Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups.

compiler-guy 7y ago
There have been mini Silicon Valley attempts for much longer than there has been a ycombinator. If this sentence changed anything, it is something very small. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers Scroll down to "Places with 'Silicon' names"
rolltiide 7y ago
> Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups. Without the culture to support it. A bunch of broke ideas people sitting in a wework or coffee shop with no angel investor in sight, no diversity in VC portfolios. There is a reason that interest rates are negative, because nobody wants to “stimulate the economy“ by giving broke entrepreneurs their money
renew0account 7y ago
what's the neighborhood he was referring to? I'm interested to know if it still exists or if it's just been assimilated into the greater Bay Area tech scene.

MetalGuru 7y ago

The biggest issue with the article is clearly correlation vs. causation. He admits to it. I think this advice can be dangerous for someone sacrificing a great deal for a startup that has a extremely low probability of success because “PG says I’ll be a millionaire as long as I just don’t let my startup die”

cdelsolar 7y ago
I mean, pivoting is a thing, it doesn't mean you gave up.

streetcat1 7y ago

The logical rule is quite simple: 1. Bootstrap 2. Reach cash flow positive asap.

azinman2 7y ago

> “In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich.“ Does this not appear to be really terrible to others? That the metric of success is just founders getting rich? At minimum, what about employees? But really, shouldn’t we be aiming higher where the companies are creating useful impact on the world and improving it? I understand he’s saying this as a contrast to the investors getting rich, but this train of thought and the people chasing it is what has caused SF to lose its soul IMHO.

cyborgx7 7y ago
You noticed how evil that sentence is, same as me. And you are getting downvoted, also like me. Start-up culture has no soul. They think having soul is a weakness. They are interested in getting rich, and nothing else. It's an empty, greedy culture.
- azinman2 7y ago
  Thank you. I was surprised at my downvotes with no comments, reread what I wrote, and still agree with it. Sad that apparently this isn’t a common sentiment. Life is about so much more than just money, and given we have such a limited time on earth, we should strive to have some positive impact on the world.

briffle 7y ago

I know Paul Graham's legendary status, but someone needs to sit with him for 30 min, and get letsencrypt deployed to his webiste.

mercora 7y ago
Maybe invest some more time and fix the already present TLS setup by bringing it up to the current state of the art. If you try to connect via HTTPS Firefox stops me from proceeding with a warning about not being able to negotiate a common cipher (SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP).

ronilan 7y ago

Everybody dies, Sally. The thing is, to die well.

cyborgx7 7y ago

>because our definition of success is that the founders get rich The entire start-up industry is a get-rich-quick scheme and a cancer on society.

maxlamb 7y ago

I think this essay was valid for the year it was written (2007) where much fewer people were doing startups, lots of good ideas had not been executed yet, mobile was about to take off. Just like the belief in 2007 that "real estate prices can never go down" lead to the real estate bubble/crash that eventually invalidated that statement, if everyone starts beleiving if they start a company and never give up they will become rich even if their idea is bad, will end up invalidating that very belief.

CPLX 7y ago
Yeah exactly. Things were really really different then. Youtube was two years old, Facebook had only been open to non students for less than a year. Things like making databases of electronic parts or other less sexy B2B style ideas were often still wide open green fields with almost no competition. Plus just making websites work was tough, the cloud existed but just getting servers to work and stay up was a non trivial part of launching something. You can't just do the X + Software formula anymore and expect to get anywhere.
- slededit 7y ago
  2007 was In the shadow of the post 2000 crash. People were still debating with me if going in to Computer Science even made sense (aren’t they sending all those jobs to India?). The financial crisis would happen just a few months later and take almost 10 years to recover. There’s a bias when looking at the past. We tend to assume the future was both inevitable and easily predictable. Not like these uncertain times today. Now pre-2000s was a little different. VCs were taking to me on the phone about my “robotics” company. I was 10.

excalibur 7y ago

> When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper. This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of Silicon Valley.

chubot 7y ago
Well maybe it was the reverse :) Silicon Valley producers had many consultants in Silicon Valley. And there was even a podcast I saw on YouTube where a former YC company founder worked for Silicon Valley after his startup shutdown. He moved down to LA as far as I remember. Oh yeah here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kk03M3XfVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kk03M3XfVY https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silicon-valley-on-hbo-ed-mcmanus/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silic... Or they could have just read PG's blog. The writers got a lot of stuff right so I wouldn't doubt it. Though I guess I was surprised there was no "ycombinator" in the show. There was Erlich and his hacker house / accelerator, who doesn't seem a lot like PG :)
bumblebee4 7y ago
As an investor, won't you pull this move just to get better conditions? The founders are fixated on closing the deal so they will put up with almost any condition that you throw at them?
- excalibur 7y ago
  The investors in the series would.

aaroncray 7y ago

PaulGraham SHUT THE FUCK UP

sdoken123 7y ago

This article seems to contradict the advice given in the other too trending hacker news article right now which says: “Makers, don’t let yourself be forced into the ‘Manager Schedule’“ no?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

IGotThroughIt 7y ago

Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing! My most important takeaway.

elmar 7y ago

Personally I Think Paul Graham is very under appreciated, his legacy on the Startup ecosystem and zeitgeist will probably only be recognised many years on the future. It's a great pity that he doesn't write these wonderful essays for some time now.

Riley 7y ago
Read his book, Hackers and Painters. I don't think he's under appreciated. He was way ahead of the curve. And deserves to be happy with his family, or change the world some more..
jimbokun 7y ago
I am sure he can console himself with the Scrooge McDuck like vault of money to swim in he must be able to build at this point, with all of the successful YC exits. Which the essays did a lot to create. He became tech world famous through his essays, which then gave him the clout to launch YCombinator. (Are there public estimates of his current net worth?)

dang 7y ago

Previous threads for the curious: 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10009262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10009262 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163 2007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294

agumonkey 7y ago

fascinated by how much of this is emotional : - don't invent excuses - don't lose faith - talk to others a lot - keep making them happy

gfodor 7y ago

You can def be typing while your startup dies. Maybe it's the exception not the rule though. My last startup was firing on all cylinders, with addicted early adopters, and our team literally shipped features the last day we could pay them because they loved the project and team so much. It didn't matter much to the VCs who declined to invest further. If you can't pay your people, they can't eat, and they can't work on the startup any further. So if you're not profitable, you're always subject to investor sentiment and calculus to survive, and that can often be a totally separate question of if you still have the drive to push further and continue to reply to emails. In those scenarios where you have investors, you can't just go into 'hibernation mode' and get the founders back on the ramen lifestyle to keep going if you are hitting the trough, because on the way down you will be forced to sell or liquidate all the existing IP and other assets to help existing investors and debtholders recoup their losses. So you're left with nothing but the idea, and insofar as you want to continue to pursue similar ideas you run the risk of getting sued since you've sold the IP. So, its certainly possible for the market to 'correct' you out of existence, even if you have the deepest will to keep going and are willing to sacrifice almost anything to do so. The best thing you can do at this point is to move on and try to leverage what you've learned or the networks you've built into something you're similarly interested in.

JesseAldridge 7y ago

It should be stated that the flip side of not giving up is incurring the massive opportunity cost of years of lost compensation. That can easily be over a million dollars for a good software engineer. If you're a genius, then sure, not giving up makes a lot of sense. But if you're just pretty smart, you better think two, three, or four times before committing to do a startup. It's really easy to end up over thirty and broke.

haskellandchill 7y ago

Hm I was looking for some more practical advice on avoiding death.

mcguire 7y ago

"Don't take advice from the successful; they might just be lucky." -- anon

pascalxus 7y ago

Paul Graham usually writes some really good stuff, but this is highly misleading: "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." There are soo many projects that can continue in obscurity on a shoe string budget, never to amount to anything. You could continue to invest in those businesses great effort and money all for nothing. ProductHunt is filled to brim with failed projects. Even, Google one of the world's most successful companies, has countless projects that didn't work out. Were they supposed to keep pouring 100s of millions of dollars in projects that could never succeed? Furthermore, it's misleading because it implies that things are within your control. That, all you have to do is the right thing and you'll be successful. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you have a bad idea that didn't work out because of lack of consumer demand (the #1 reason why software startups die), then, after you've tried everything, there's not much else to do. It's better to shut down or pivot to something where there is demand.

brudgers 7y ago
This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. The audience was YC founders at the end of a YC batch. Probably after demo day. The entire audience had already been funded once (by YC at the start) and as a whole they had much better than average prospects for raising money. Some may have already raised or been close. I agree that it is questionable as generic advice. The August 2007 date suggests the Summer 07 batch. That's Disqus, Dropbox, and Twitch (among others). https://yclist.com/ https://yclist.com/
nwsm 7y ago
Read the whole article. >And however tough things get for the Octoparts, I predict they'll succeed. They may have to morph themselves into something totally different, but they won't just crawl off and die. They're smart; they're working in a promising field; and they just cannot give up. >All of you guys already have the first two. You're all smart and working on promising ideas. Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up. He admits that this speech is made for the startups in the room; ones that already passed the bar.

lamubanao 7y ago

that depends on your luck to be honest, although I think it's not true in any way but you can always think like that and you will have a better life

pragmatic 7y ago

Why did they add the terrible "read more" garbage? Et tu PG?

JoeMayoBot 7y ago

Sounds more inspirational than literal. He sets the scene as the last Y Combinator dinner of the Summer. Folks are probably taking the evening to relax and something too serious wouldn't fit the mood. Just reading this, I can see the humor, yet appreciate good advice cleverly mixed in to share a few meaningful tips.

mapcars 7y ago

>founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars Oh that's not the best factor to look for, as one can go beyond the fear of failure and this won't work anymore.

tabtab 7y ago

I can build a flowchart out of this article, but realized it has no end: it's an infinite loop. There has to be a point where you give up after get-user-feedback-tweak-and-try-again happens too many times. It's almost like a genetic algorithm where somebody forgot to put an upper limit on the regeneration loop count. Sure, tweak-and-try-again can keep going on until you eventually stumble on the right formula, since you'll eventually exhaust all possible related ideas, but it may be 2 years or 2 centuries until you hit it. Somebody may have to put a time limit on how long they'll try. For example, "I'll try for 4 years, and if nothing looks viable after 4 years, I'll get a real job or go to grad school."

ncmncm 7y ago

Graham essays are, as a rule, good. But for each mention of Lisp, they are half as good. Half as good can still be pretty good, but one mentioned Lisp more than two dozen times. There was very little good left. This one doesn't mention Lisp at all. It's pretty good.