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It's because he doesn't believe getting into YC is the achievement. Creating a company with users / profitability / growth is. You can get into YC and still fai
by iamwil 7y ago
It's because he doesn't believe getting into YC is the achievement. Creating a company with users / profitability / growth is. You can get into YC and still fail with your company. And it's desirable for founders and YC to be more interested in building a successful company.
When he says, "Make a good product", I think he's trying to convey a core and fundamental principle of business that gets obfuscated by all the things you have to do be successful in a startup. That's necessary when teaching beginners.
But he's traditionally had a hard time conveying this seemingly simple concept, and he's always been puzzled by it. You can see it in the previous essays he referenced in this one--the high school one, and how founders over-complicate things.
Though he's talking about this topic as if creating the company is the goal, I'm not sure to what degree he realizes how YC contributes to the effect he's seeing.
Even after getting into YC, I was moderately surprised by how you're still being judged, sometimes explicitly, and other time implicitly. I had batchmates that didn't want to go into office hours, for fear of appearing weak and hence wouldn't get a follow-on recommendation to investors from a YC partner.
Of course, I think PG would say that's stupid. If you go into office hours and fix your problem, then by virtue of being a better startup, you'll be a more attractive investment. Trying to do it the other way is putting the cart before the horse.
That said, the effect is real. Like the Observer Effect in quantum mechanics, by virtue of being a conduit to further funding, founders will turn their attention to the tests. Because if you don't, it's easy to be written off and not be able to get the help that you need.
- coffeemug 7y ago> It's because he doesn't believe getting into YC is the achievement. But so much of YC felt (and probably does more so now) like you're being judged all the time. Which makes total sense to me, because seeking prestige is so fundamental to human nature. That co-evolved with social cooperation in a virtuous cycle. If pg really believed what he wrote in this essay, YC would be structured very differently. The moment pg allowed some companies/founders to have better access to him than others, or the moment he talked about how some founders are better than others, he implicitly set up a criteria for judging founders and their companies. And people will always naturally feel envy and try to hack that criteria. But a precondition for doing good original work is not feeling judged. So he should have gone on a crusade to completely eliminate all forms of favoritism if he wanted to maximize the odds of success for a modal company. But that's not what he actually ended up doing. At all. Now the question is, is the essay wrong or is the YC structure/culture wrong. If I were a betting man, I'd put all my money on the former every single time, and I think I'd never come lose that bet once.
- read_if_gay_ 7y ago> Now the question is, is the essay wrong or is the YC structure/culture wrong. I think that's a false dichotomy. > The moment pg allowed some companies/founders to have better access to him than others, or the moment he talked about how some founders are better than others, he implicitly set up a criteria for judging founders and their companies. It's correct that this creates a hackable test, but the losses incurred via that might be less than "going on a crusade to completely eliminate all forms of favoritism". This does not imply that hackable tests aren't bad, meaning the the essay is wrong, just that the pendulum can swing too far in the other direction too. Which isn't that striking of a realization.
- iamwil 7y ago> If pg really believed what he wrote in this essay, YC would be structured very differently Yes, I agree. I can't tell if he's ever thought about it. I would have thought Jessica, being the social radar, would have picked up on it. Maybe it just wasn't a high order bit on the list of priorities. I've come to think of PG as the disapproving father I never had.