14 ms·

Interview with Paul Graham

159 points by sprague 6y ago

dvt 6y ago
As a huge fan of pg (since my early 20s), it feels bad (but also good) to see him so disconnected these days. Most of his Tweets read like the musings of "some rich dude" in an ivory tower (which is quite literally where he lives), whereas back in the day YC and pg's essays were very much "where the rubber meets the road" -- apologies for being a bit metaphorical. Anyway, I think he's enjoying his well-earned money, life, and wonderful family (which is great), but as far as practical real-life startup advice? Paul Graham isn't that guy anymore.
- ishansharma 6y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. I read all his essays in my early 20s and became a huge fan. Not just startup advice wise, but general big picture stuff wise too. Then I saw his recent tweets and especially the essay about wealth tax, I was a bit disappointed. But as you said, his position is well earned. But I don’t see any useful real life advice from him anymore.
  - andrewprock 6y ago
    "Suppose you start a successful startup in your twenties, and then live for another 60 years." Yes, let's just assume this is true. Please!
  - elevenoh 6y ago
    >Then I saw his recent tweets and especially the essay about wealth tax, I was a bit disappointed. Why? He points out [the non obvious to many fact] that wealth tax kills compounding. And this is something to seriously consider.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      > Why? He points out [the non obvious to many fact] that wealth tax kills compounding. His analysis was deeply flawed to the point of being disingenuous. For one, it assumed that your wealth never grows once you get it. And for two, it completely forgot that there is a baseline on the wealth tax (the current proposal is at $50M). So no, it doesn't kill compounding, it just shrinks it a bit.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - cinntaile 6y ago
      He points out that a wealth tax compounds. It doesn't kill compounding, it just diminishes its effect in the same way that the TER for a mutual fund does.
      - clusterfish 6y ago
        > "wealth tax compounds" And that's a rather misleading way to characterize the effects of wealth tax. When you think of compounding you think of compound interest, where compounding means the actual interest ends up being MORE than what you might expect (numYears * annualInteredtRate * baseAmount) because baseAmount grows every year due to compounding. On the other hand, the wealth tax "compounding" works in the opposite direction, because baseAmount is reduced, not increased, by the tax over time, so the "compounding" aspect of the tax actually REDUCES the amount of tax you pay compared to a baseline where you didn't consider this effect, i.e. (numYears * annualTaxRate * baseAmount) I don't think this choice of words was accidental on PG's part, as he chooses his words very carefully. He just chose to weaponize his words this time to push his political opinion, to make wealth tax seem worse than it is, which is something I've sadly come to expect from his twitter, but never noticed leaking into his essays before.
    - ishansharma 6y ago
      It’s my opinion but that was a very one sided view. And I need to read more on this but I don’t think the way he pointed it out is how anyone is proposing wealth tax.
      - fossuser 6y ago
        What PG describes is basically what's proposed - the main difference is that most American proposals have a floor before it kicks in. That floor is pretty high depending on the proposal ($30-50 million), but that doesn't stop the problem of equity ownership being eaten away over time when a lot of your worth is tied up into a successful company (like Bezos). You also get other incentive problems with things like angel investing. If someone is at the wealth cap they're less incentivized to risk money when they'll either lose it because the investment fails, or lose it because it gets eaten by the wealth tax. Other proposals have low floors where you just have the problem of a lot of wealth getting taken. In general it's good for a society to incentivize wealth creation/growth and still protect the lower bound of society. A wealth tax dis-incentivizes wealth creation - and for what? It just comes across to me as a 'hate the rich' policy that creates perverse incentives. Disclosures so people don't think there's hidden motivated reasoning here: - I'm nowhere near the wealth cap and probably never will be - I think trump is an idiot and the republican party is a disaster - I voted for Hillary and will vote for Biden. I still think the wealth tax is a bad idea and bad policy.
        marcinzm 6y ago
        Why is disincentivizing the accumulation of massive wealth in a small subset of the population bad for society? What is the advantage to society of an individual accumulating tens of billions of dollars worth of wealth?
        fossuser 6y ago
        It's dis-incentivizing wealth creation in general and taking ownership away from people that build companies. There's a compelling argument that growth (that accounts for human rights and protecting the environment) is the best way to help the most people the fastest: https://press.stripe.com/#stubborn-attachments https://press.stripe.com/#stubborn-attachments. Policy that dis-incentivizes wealth creation creates perverse incentives that limit growth. We're better off with policy that limits how wealth can be leveraged into political power, and policy that helps protect and improve the lower bound of society. That said, I think it's likely reasonable to limit how wealth can be passed down generations (to prevent things like dynastic wealth, but that's a separate issue and I don't know enough to really comment on it). Wealth creation isn't zero-sum, just because someone builds a business and creates wealth doesn't mean they're taking it from others. We want a society where people are incentivized to create and grow wealth as much as they can (within bounds for environment protection and human rights), not just to some arbitrary cap before it gets taken by the government. All of the above ignores real modern examples that directly leverage their wealth to do things that would not be done otherwise (Elon Musk: SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring # Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin # Gates: Health and Public Policy). I think the general argument in favor of growth is better than these specific examples though because it's a more systemic argument about incentives for the structure of a society rather than relying on individuals and their choices. There's also the implementation issues (which are real), but I'm not going to argue that bit just because a lot of good ideas are hard to implement but still worthwhile. The wealth tax though I think is both a bad idea and hard to implement. The bad idea bit is more important.
    - cma 6y ago
      Unless our lightcone starts growing faster than polynomially, compounding can't happen for very long.
    - darthrupert 6y ago
      I wonder how he reacts to the knowledge of one of the wealthiest countries having a wealth tax. Switzerland. It's below 1%, progressive, though. 2-6% (as Sanders suggested, I think?) would probably be much more harmful.
- eloff 6y ago
  Because his deep knowledge about startups, from the perspective of running them, picking them, advising them, and investing in them somehow no longer applies? This is not the kind of knowledge that expires, like the JavaScript framework de jour. Perhaps he likes to talk and think about other things these days, but I'm sure he's still an expert in that area. Certainly he knows more about startups than just about any HN commenter.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    It's been React, Angular, and Vue pretty much for the last 5 years. Sure, there's Svelte and other libraries that target web components, but those haven't reached meaningful market share.
    - stjo 6y ago
      Off topic, please keep the discussion focused
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    The guy you're replying to isn't saying he doesn't have that knowledge. The guy you're replying to is saying he isn't giving us any of that anymore. It's kind of true.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      My read from dvt and ishansharma is that they're just being political. Basically when PG was writing about stuff they considered part of their in-group then it was great and wonderful. When he writes about stuff that's no longer aligns with their existing political in-group's beliefs (his arguments against the wealth tax [0], his essay about conformism [1], his essay about economic inequality [2]) - suddenly he's 'disconnected' and they're 'disappointed' in the essays. I thought those essays were great and the points were interesting/well argued. I liked his old essays too. I find the tribal responses to them (and the comments here) to be lame. [0]: http://paulgraham.com/wtax.html http://paulgraham.com/wtax.html [1]: http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html [2]: http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html
- ponker 6y ago
  He literally lives in an ivory tower?
- hkai 6y ago
  Perhaps the fact that a writer doesn't share a society's dominating ideology (in this case, democratic socialism and anti-capitalism) is what makes a writer's ideas original and interesting, as opposed to rehashing what the dominating ideology already tells us.
- ghgdynb1 6y ago
  What do you mean he quite “literally” lives in an ivory tower?
  - tim333 6y ago
    I was going to say that seems unlikely. He appears to live in a old farmhouse.
- tim333 6y ago
  He seems to have moved on a bit from startup stuff. Looking at his essays the most recent startup one seems to be "default alive or default dead" Oct 2015 which is fine in itself but a while ago.
chrisco255 6y ago
For me, this interview was disappointingly short. I'd love to see Eric Weinstein or someone similar do a long form interview with PG.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lowdose 6y ago
  But Eric Weinstein asks of his guests to practice difficult words listeners have to find in a dictionary. He practices difficult words with an ANKI spaced repetition system himself. What I find intriguing is that Peter Thiel has yet to appear on the Joe Rogan podcast while he clearly bankrolled that operation.
  - mslate 6y ago
    Interesting—-do you have a source for either of these statements?
    - lowdose 6y ago
      I'm going to find one for the first. It is in this https://youtu.be/_b4qKv1Ctv8?t=8071 https://youtu.be/_b4qKv1Ctv8?t=8071 The second one is pretty obvious, Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. With what we know of Peter Thiel I think the burden of proof is on you that he doesn't make use of the knowledge he has on specific network work effects of youtube. Just like he installed Donald Trump with Facebook in the White House.
      - jmeister 6y ago
        I’m baffled by the hostility and conspiracy theorizing Thiel provokes on this forum. Maybe people are intimidated by his intelligence and contrarian stances?
        6y ago
alextheparrot 6y ago
> But a few years after it's over, we'll be acting as if it never happened. We're good at that. So melancholy, a lot of the responses seem to gravity around a general accidentalism. I feel that’s true for a lot of people who have had great success, never really understanding how each of the pieces fit together to make their success and thus never feeling like they’ve owned it.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  that's a mature and very reasonable perspective. There's an incredible amount of circumstance and luck involved in success, the right ecosystem, the right people, and so on.
- MaysonL 6y ago
  Interesting that Asian countries, as a rule, learned from SARS lessons that we didn't. With a little luck, we will learn from this cluster….
elevenoh 6y ago
I'm hoping we don't continue to see yc turn into 'the old guard'. YC folks, startups & the people yc startup school attracts that I've personally spoken to in the past few years are more imitator-types. YC folks & startups of 2009 were more authentic & original types. Though I suppose it's tough to avoid this deterioration in culture following $-influx & 'success', in any domain.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  2009 era YC was epic. Literally once in a century. I was happy to be around, if not involved. Startup School afterparty at Anybots was a dream. Trevor even pinched me with his new robot (at my request). There were posers even back then, though. I remember one guy getting very drunk, saying “Ok, this is it,” and walking up to pg to pitch his startup. I’m not sure who I felt worse for, him or pg.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    I was at the 2010 after party and I will always remember trying to pitch Ron Conway and he just turned around and walked away. Scoble listened to me then said “You’re an idiot, RSS is dead” Fun times for a 22 year old nerd on his first trip to USA. I grew a thick skin fast. The fact that a random kid from Europe could even get a chance to show up and speak to all those amazing people ... priceless. Just wish I had had the chops to do more with the opportunity.
    - throwaway713 6y ago
      > he just turned around and walked away > You’re an idiot That seems awfully rude of them. They don't sound like very pleasant people.
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Some are. Most were nice. Some do that as a way of seeing whether a founder will get discouraged; if you know your idea will work, it’s easy to respond “Actually, that isn’t a problem anymore because X.” That tends to perk up the ears of VCs, since old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good.
Abhinav2000 6y ago
Honestly I never found PG’s writing that insightful and ANSI Lisp was a bit of a pain to read That doesn’t take away from any of his success, which has been immense (anybody who has made over a billion is obviously amazing and had the ultimate life) but he has become too much of a cult figure in comparison to others in that stratosphere
- justinator 6y ago
  Right place, right time, long days.
- yodsanklai 6y ago
  > he has become too much of a cult figure I didn't know who PG was until recently. I knew he was well respected on HN but I've never found that much value in his blog posts either. Maybe people like his writings in the light of his achievements, rather than for their intrinsic values.
  - Abhinav2000 6y ago
    That’s exactly it. Everybody would dream to have his life and his blogs do give a vivid imagery that makes you feel good and believe you can do the same (plus with YC actually giving some hope). But I’ve learnt a lot more from others, who are not nearly as successful.
    - whitepoplar 6y ago
      Who are some of the other people you've learned a great deal from? I'm curious!
      - mastazi 6y ago
        I'm not parent but - it might be people that are close to them IRL and not well known online. Personally, it was like that for me. However unlike parent, I also feel like I get a lot of value from reading PG
  - 6y ago
general_orr 6y ago
this is hardly an interview
BrianOnHN 6y ago
Once upon a time I saw pg as a guy that was leveling the playing field, and I think he succeeded because of that. As another comment pointed out, concerning his writing about the wealth tax, I think he's lost sight of the fact that's there's more wealth to be created that's outside the scope of what the wealth advisors for the uber-wealthy are familiar with.
- ghufran_syed 6y ago
  Could you expand on this a bit or give a link where I can read more? And why do you think he has "lost sight" of that potential wealth, as opposed to the idea that many businesses are simply not appropriate for equity financing?
  - BrianOnHN 6y ago
    No. And that's a strawman.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  I don't think you can expect anyone in the startup scene to support a plan which forces founders to give up equity. His objection wasn't about taxation as a concept, it was about a wealth tax on stock assets, which definitionally requires founders to give up control of their company as they liquidate shares to pay taxes. Not really sure how you extrapolate "there's more wealth to be created that's outside the scope of what the wealth advisors..." from that. His opinion is that it would sabatoge the wealth-creation mechanism he knows and has built.
samatman 6y ago
> But a few years after it's over, we'll be acting as if [COVID] never happened. We're good at that. I fear this prediction won't come true. There's a great risk that 'health theatre' will join security theatre as a durable if not permanent part of our existence. That years from now, we'll be getting temperatures checked, schools will be shutting down for worse-than-usual influenzas, and so on. I still can't bring an ordinary-sized yogurt on a plane, and have to remove my belt and shoes. Something made our society irrationally risk-averse, and I glumly suspect that COVID won't be the turning point in that trend.
- jkubicek 6y ago
  I don't think there's any chance at all this is going to happen. Security theater in airports is perpetuated by an agency that depends on fear to secure its funding and a government that depends on us fighting the "bad guys" (even if they aren't any close to as dangerous as they want us to think). COVID fear isn't being perpetuated by any government agencies at the national level. If anything, the federal government desperately wants us to forget that COVID exists. Once the actual risks are gone, we're going to go right back to normal, though hopefully we will have learned a lot of lessons about pandemic preparedness.
  - hkai 6y ago
    The federal government doesn't promote the covid fear only because of which party is in power right now. One of the presidential candidates promises a nationwide mask mandate, and, judging from the actions of authorities in NYC or other places, there will be other severe restrictions on freedom of business, assembly and travel. So yes, I also tend to agree that many people will continue supporting the health theater and fears for the foreseeable future.
    - specialist 6y ago
      What plan do you favor for ending the pandemic?
      - 6y ago
brian_foxx 6y ago
I never got the after popularity that this guy enjoyed after his major accomplishments. Look, Marrying your intern is one thing, but some of his more recent views are reflective of senility as one of my friends put it.
- dang 6y ago
  We moderate HN less when YC is the topic, but that's such a lie that moderating less still means banning the account.
  - brian_foxx 6y ago
    Lol and u call urself a freedom of speech platform. U r preposterous.
wombatmobile 6y ago
> 2. What's the future of what we now call journalism? Is it all Substack (a YC company)? Can we run the global-scale world with that model? I'm new to HN and was interested to read PG's answer, because I like the civility and on-pointedness of HN, which I think is a result of its rules of engagement. So, first I looked at Substack, which I hadn't heard of before. PG's answer suggests he values journalism, but I was surprised that Substack doesn't address the main problem of journalism, which is not a lack of "individual domain experts" - it's a lack of a viable business model to support people who practice journalism. Advertising is what used to pay for journalism when journalism was published on newsprint. Since advertising went to online, journalism has been decoupled from the business model. Now less than half the number of journalists are employed in USA and Australia than at the peak, less than 20 years ago. Can anyone point me towards attempts to find a new business model to sustain journalism?
- samatman 6y ago
  > I was surprised that Substack doesn't address the main problem of journalism ... a lack of a viable business model to support people who practice journalism. It... does, though? Substack is a way for writers to offer subscriptions for their content. Two friends of mine are benefiting from this, one has managed to pay her bills this way and the other is well on his way. I don't consider it a magic bullet, but it's clearly a step in the right direction.
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    Sure, Substack is what it is, and that's good. I'm looking for ways to repopulate newsrooms that send journalists out into the field to cover breaking news. That's a different set of logistics, scale, and costs.
armansu 6y ago
"There is one though that I regret rejecting because it was an idea I'd always wanted to fund. I'd been looking for this company for years, and finally it showed up". Out of curiosity: any guesses what this company might be?
- jchallis 6y ago
  Complete outsider guess : Airtable.

159 points by sprague 6y ago

dvt 6y ago

As a huge fan of pg (since my early 20s), it feels bad (but also good) to see him so disconnected these days. Most of his Tweets read like the musings of "some rich dude" in an ivory tower (which is quite literally where he lives), whereas back in the day YC and pg's essays were very much "where the rubber meets the road" -- apologies for being a bit metaphorical. Anyway, I think he's enjoying his well-earned money, life, and wonderful family (which is great), but as far as practical real-life startup advice? Paul Graham isn't that guy anymore.

ishansharma 6y ago
Couldn’t agree more. I read all his essays in my early 20s and became a huge fan. Not just startup advice wise, but general big picture stuff wise too. Then I saw his recent tweets and especially the essay about wealth tax, I was a bit disappointed. But as you said, his position is well earned. But I don’t see any useful real life advice from him anymore.
- andrewprock 6y ago
  "Suppose you start a successful startup in your twenties, and then live for another 60 years." Yes, let's just assume this is true. Please!
- elevenoh 6y ago
  >Then I saw his recent tweets and especially the essay about wealth tax, I was a bit disappointed. Why? He points out [the non obvious to many fact] that wealth tax kills compounding. And this is something to seriously consider.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    > Why? He points out [the non obvious to many fact] that wealth tax kills compounding. His analysis was deeply flawed to the point of being disingenuous. For one, it assumed that your wealth never grows once you get it. And for two, it completely forgot that there is a baseline on the wealth tax (the current proposal is at $50M). So no, it doesn't kill compounding, it just shrinks it a bit.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - cinntaile 6y ago
    He points out that a wealth tax compounds. It doesn't kill compounding, it just diminishes its effect in the same way that the TER for a mutual fund does.
    - clusterfish 6y ago
      > "wealth tax compounds" And that's a rather misleading way to characterize the effects of wealth tax. When you think of compounding you think of compound interest, where compounding means the actual interest ends up being MORE than what you might expect (numYears * annualInteredtRate * baseAmount) because baseAmount grows every year due to compounding. On the other hand, the wealth tax "compounding" works in the opposite direction, because baseAmount is reduced, not increased, by the tax over time, so the "compounding" aspect of the tax actually REDUCES the amount of tax you pay compared to a baseline where you didn't consider this effect, i.e. (numYears * annualTaxRate * baseAmount) I don't think this choice of words was accidental on PG's part, as he chooses his words very carefully. He just chose to weaponize his words this time to push his political opinion, to make wealth tax seem worse than it is, which is something I've sadly come to expect from his twitter, but never noticed leaking into his essays before.
  - ishansharma 6y ago
    It’s my opinion but that was a very one sided view. And I need to read more on this but I don’t think the way he pointed it out is how anyone is proposing wealth tax.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      What PG describes is basically what's proposed - the main difference is that most American proposals have a floor before it kicks in. That floor is pretty high depending on the proposal ($30-50 million), but that doesn't stop the problem of equity ownership being eaten away over time when a lot of your worth is tied up into a successful company (like Bezos). You also get other incentive problems with things like angel investing. If someone is at the wealth cap they're less incentivized to risk money when they'll either lose it because the investment fails, or lose it because it gets eaten by the wealth tax. Other proposals have low floors where you just have the problem of a lot of wealth getting taken. In general it's good for a society to incentivize wealth creation/growth and still protect the lower bound of society. A wealth tax dis-incentivizes wealth creation - and for what? It just comes across to me as a 'hate the rich' policy that creates perverse incentives. Disclosures so people don't think there's hidden motivated reasoning here: - I'm nowhere near the wealth cap and probably never will be - I think trump is an idiot and the republican party is a disaster - I voted for Hillary and will vote for Biden. I still think the wealth tax is a bad idea and bad policy.
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        Why is disincentivizing the accumulation of massive wealth in a small subset of the population bad for society? What is the advantage to society of an individual accumulating tens of billions of dollars worth of wealth?
        fossuser 6y ago
        It's dis-incentivizing wealth creation in general and taking ownership away from people that build companies. There's a compelling argument that growth (that accounts for human rights and protecting the environment) is the best way to help the most people the fastest: https://press.stripe.com/#stubborn-attachments https://press.stripe.com/#stubborn-attachments. Policy that dis-incentivizes wealth creation creates perverse incentives that limit growth. We're better off with policy that limits how wealth can be leveraged into political power, and policy that helps protect and improve the lower bound of society. That said, I think it's likely reasonable to limit how wealth can be passed down generations (to prevent things like dynastic wealth, but that's a separate issue and I don't know enough to really comment on it). Wealth creation isn't zero-sum, just because someone builds a business and creates wealth doesn't mean they're taking it from others. We want a society where people are incentivized to create and grow wealth as much as they can (within bounds for environment protection and human rights), not just to some arbitrary cap before it gets taken by the government. All of the above ignores real modern examples that directly leverage their wealth to do things that would not be done otherwise (Elon Musk: SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring # Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin # Gates: Health and Public Policy). I think the general argument in favor of growth is better than these specific examples though because it's a more systemic argument about incentives for the structure of a society rather than relying on individuals and their choices. There's also the implementation issues (which are real), but I'm not going to argue that bit just because a lot of good ideas are hard to implement but still worthwhile. The wealth tax though I think is both a bad idea and hard to implement. The bad idea bit is more important.
  - cma 6y ago
    Unless our lightcone starts growing faster than polynomially, compounding can't happen for very long.
  - darthrupert 6y ago
    I wonder how he reacts to the knowledge of one of the wealthiest countries having a wealth tax. Switzerland. It's below 1%, progressive, though. 2-6% (as Sanders suggested, I think?) would probably be much more harmful.
eloff 6y ago
Because his deep knowledge about startups, from the perspective of running them, picking them, advising them, and investing in them somehow no longer applies? This is not the kind of knowledge that expires, like the JavaScript framework de jour. Perhaps he likes to talk and think about other things these days, but I'm sure he's still an expert in that area. Certainly he knows more about startups than just about any HN commenter.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  It's been React, Angular, and Vue pretty much for the last 5 years. Sure, there's Svelte and other libraries that target web components, but those haven't reached meaningful market share.
  - stjo 6y ago
    Off topic, please keep the discussion focused
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- renewiltord 6y ago
  The guy you're replying to isn't saying he doesn't have that knowledge. The guy you're replying to is saying he isn't giving us any of that anymore. It's kind of true.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    My read from dvt and ishansharma is that they're just being political. Basically when PG was writing about stuff they considered part of their in-group then it was great and wonderful. When he writes about stuff that's no longer aligns with their existing political in-group's beliefs (his arguments against the wealth tax [0], his essay about conformism [1], his essay about economic inequality [2]) - suddenly he's 'disconnected' and they're 'disappointed' in the essays. I thought those essays were great and the points were interesting/well argued. I liked his old essays too. I find the tribal responses to them (and the comments here) to be lame. [0]: http://paulgraham.com/wtax.html http://paulgraham.com/wtax.html [1]: http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html [2]: http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html
ponker 6y ago
He literally lives in an ivory tower?
hkai 6y ago
Perhaps the fact that a writer doesn't share a society's dominating ideology (in this case, democratic socialism and anti-capitalism) is what makes a writer's ideas original and interesting, as opposed to rehashing what the dominating ideology already tells us.
ghgdynb1 6y ago
What do you mean he quite “literally” lives in an ivory tower?
- tim333 6y ago
  I was going to say that seems unlikely. He appears to live in a old farmhouse.
tim333 6y ago
He seems to have moved on a bit from startup stuff. Looking at his essays the most recent startup one seems to be "default alive or default dead" Oct 2015 which is fine in itself but a while ago.

chrisco255 6y ago

For me, this interview was disappointingly short. I'd love to see Eric Weinstein or someone similar do a long form interview with PG.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lowdose 6y ago
But Eric Weinstein asks of his guests to practice difficult words listeners have to find in a dictionary. He practices difficult words with an ANKI spaced repetition system himself. What I find intriguing is that Peter Thiel has yet to appear on the Joe Rogan podcast while he clearly bankrolled that operation.
- mslate 6y ago
  Interesting—-do you have a source for either of these statements?
  - lowdose 6y ago
    I'm going to find one for the first. It is in this https://youtu.be/_b4qKv1Ctv8?t=8071 https://youtu.be/_b4qKv1Ctv8?t=8071 The second one is pretty obvious, Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. With what we know of Peter Thiel I think the burden of proof is on you that he doesn't make use of the knowledge he has on specific network work effects of youtube. Just like he installed Donald Trump with Facebook in the White House.
    - jmeister 6y ago
      I’m baffled by the hostility and conspiracy theorizing Thiel provokes on this forum. Maybe people are intimidated by his intelligence and contrarian stances?
      - 6y ago

alextheparrot 6y ago

> But a few years after it's over, we'll be acting as if it never happened. We're good at that. So melancholy, a lot of the responses seem to gravity around a general accidentalism. I feel that’s true for a lot of people who have had great success, never really understanding how each of the pieces fit together to make their success and thus never feeling like they’ve owned it.

Barrin92 6y ago
that's a mature and very reasonable perspective. There's an incredible amount of circumstance and luck involved in success, the right ecosystem, the right people, and so on.
MaysonL 6y ago
Interesting that Asian countries, as a rule, learned from SARS lessons that we didn't. With a little luck, we will learn from this cluster….

elevenoh 6y ago

I'm hoping we don't continue to see yc turn into 'the old guard'. YC folks, startups & the people yc startup school attracts that I've personally spoken to in the past few years are more imitator-types. YC folks & startups of 2009 were more authentic & original types. Though I suppose it's tough to avoid this deterioration in culture following $-influx & 'success', in any domain.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
2009 era YC was epic. Literally once in a century. I was happy to be around, if not involved. Startup School afterparty at Anybots was a dream. Trevor even pinched me with his new robot (at my request). There were posers even back then, though. I remember one guy getting very drunk, saying “Ok, this is it,” and walking up to pg to pitch his startup. I’m not sure who I felt worse for, him or pg.
- Swizec 6y ago
  I was at the 2010 after party and I will always remember trying to pitch Ron Conway and he just turned around and walked away. Scoble listened to me then said “You’re an idiot, RSS is dead” Fun times for a 22 year old nerd on his first trip to USA. I grew a thick skin fast. The fact that a random kid from Europe could even get a chance to show up and speak to all those amazing people ... priceless. Just wish I had had the chops to do more with the opportunity.
  - throwaway713 6y ago
    > he just turned around and walked away > You’re an idiot That seems awfully rude of them. They don't sound like very pleasant people.
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      Some are. Most were nice. Some do that as a way of seeing whether a founder will get discouraged; if you know your idea will work, it’s easy to respond “Actually, that isn’t a problem anymore because X.” That tends to perk up the ears of VCs, since old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good.

Abhinav2000 6y ago

Honestly I never found PG’s writing that insightful and ANSI Lisp was a bit of a pain to read That doesn’t take away from any of his success, which has been immense (anybody who has made over a billion is obviously amazing and had the ultimate life) but he has become too much of a cult figure in comparison to others in that stratosphere

justinator 6y ago
Right place, right time, long days.
yodsanklai 6y ago
> he has become too much of a cult figure I didn't know who PG was until recently. I knew he was well respected on HN but I've never found that much value in his blog posts either. Maybe people like his writings in the light of his achievements, rather than for their intrinsic values.
- Abhinav2000 6y ago
  That’s exactly it. Everybody would dream to have his life and his blogs do give a vivid imagery that makes you feel good and believe you can do the same (plus with YC actually giving some hope). But I’ve learnt a lot more from others, who are not nearly as successful.
  - whitepoplar 6y ago
    Who are some of the other people you've learned a great deal from? I'm curious!
    - mastazi 6y ago
      I'm not parent but - it might be people that are close to them IRL and not well known online. Personally, it was like that for me. However unlike parent, I also feel like I get a lot of value from reading PG
- 6y ago

general_orr 6y ago

this is hardly an interview

BrianOnHN 6y ago

Once upon a time I saw pg as a guy that was leveling the playing field, and I think he succeeded because of that. As another comment pointed out, concerning his writing about the wealth tax, I think he's lost sight of the fact that's there's more wealth to be created that's outside the scope of what the wealth advisors for the uber-wealthy are familiar with.

ghufran_syed 6y ago
Could you expand on this a bit or give a link where I can read more? And why do you think he has "lost sight" of that potential wealth, as opposed to the idea that many businesses are simply not appropriate for equity financing?
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  No. And that's a strawman.
bpodgursky 6y ago
I don't think you can expect anyone in the startup scene to support a plan which forces founders to give up equity. His objection wasn't about taxation as a concept, it was about a wealth tax on stock assets, which definitionally requires founders to give up control of their company as they liquidate shares to pay taxes. Not really sure how you extrapolate "there's more wealth to be created that's outside the scope of what the wealth advisors..." from that. His opinion is that it would sabatoge the wealth-creation mechanism he knows and has built.

samatman 6y ago

> But a few years after it's over, we'll be acting as if [COVID] never happened. We're good at that. I fear this prediction won't come true. There's a great risk that 'health theatre' will join security theatre as a durable if not permanent part of our existence. That years from now, we'll be getting temperatures checked, schools will be shutting down for worse-than-usual influenzas, and so on. I still can't bring an ordinary-sized yogurt on a plane, and have to remove my belt and shoes. Something made our society irrationally risk-averse, and I glumly suspect that COVID won't be the turning point in that trend.

jkubicek 6y ago
I don't think there's any chance at all this is going to happen. Security theater in airports is perpetuated by an agency that depends on fear to secure its funding and a government that depends on us fighting the "bad guys" (even if they aren't any close to as dangerous as they want us to think). COVID fear isn't being perpetuated by any government agencies at the national level. If anything, the federal government desperately wants us to forget that COVID exists. Once the actual risks are gone, we're going to go right back to normal, though hopefully we will have learned a lot of lessons about pandemic preparedness.
- hkai 6y ago
  The federal government doesn't promote the covid fear only because of which party is in power right now. One of the presidential candidates promises a nationwide mask mandate, and, judging from the actions of authorities in NYC or other places, there will be other severe restrictions on freedom of business, assembly and travel. So yes, I also tend to agree that many people will continue supporting the health theater and fears for the foreseeable future.
  - specialist 6y ago
    What plan do you favor for ending the pandemic?
    - 6y ago

brian_foxx 6y ago

I never got the after popularity that this guy enjoyed after his major accomplishments. Look, Marrying your intern is one thing, but some of his more recent views are reflective of senility as one of my friends put it.

dang 6y ago
We moderate HN less when YC is the topic, but that's such a lie that moderating less still means banning the account.
- brian_foxx 6y ago
  Lol and u call urself a freedom of speech platform. U r preposterous.

wombatmobile 6y ago

> 2. What's the future of what we now call journalism? Is it all Substack (a YC company)? Can we run the global-scale world with that model? I'm new to HN and was interested to read PG's answer, because I like the civility and on-pointedness of HN, which I think is a result of its rules of engagement. So, first I looked at Substack, which I hadn't heard of before. PG's answer suggests he values journalism, but I was surprised that Substack doesn't address the main problem of journalism, which is not a lack of "individual domain experts" - it's a lack of a viable business model to support people who practice journalism. Advertising is what used to pay for journalism when journalism was published on newsprint. Since advertising went to online, journalism has been decoupled from the business model. Now less than half the number of journalists are employed in USA and Australia than at the peak, less than 20 years ago. Can anyone point me towards attempts to find a new business model to sustain journalism?

samatman 6y ago
> I was surprised that Substack doesn't address the main problem of journalism ... a lack of a viable business model to support people who practice journalism. It... does, though? Substack is a way for writers to offer subscriptions for their content. Two friends of mine are benefiting from this, one has managed to pay her bills this way and the other is well on his way. I don't consider it a magic bullet, but it's clearly a step in the right direction.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Sure, Substack is what it is, and that's good. I'm looking for ways to repopulate newsrooms that send journalists out into the field to cover breaking news. That's a different set of logistics, scale, and costs.

armansu 6y ago

"There is one though that I regret rejecting because it was an idea I'd always wanted to fund. I'd been looking for this company for years, and finally it showed up". Out of curiosity: any guesses what this company might be?

jchallis 6y ago
Complete outsider guess : Airtable.