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I've seen PG [1] say/write versions of this: "The Y Combinator founders who followed our advice succeeded. The ones who didn't, didn't." The advice is so simpl

I've seen PG [1] say/write versions of this: "The Y Combinator founders who followed our advice succeeded. The ones who didn't, didn't." The advice is so simple, it's hard for a lot of outsiders to believe it's worth anything. "Make something people want." "Talk to your users." "Do things that don't scale." "Keep typing and avoid dying." People hear about this and ask "You gave away 7% of your company for that?" No, you give away 7% of your company to join a network of people showing you what it really looks like to do that. My company got into the Winter 2009 batch of YC, the same batch as Airbnb. They weren't around for many of the dinners; they spent a lot of their time away from the Bay Area doing exactly those things that PG advised, mostly in NYC, where many of their most active users were. They just did that stuff, over and over, for several years. Now they have one of the most successful companies out of Silicon Valley in the last 15 years. (I saw PG tweet a couple of years ago that he'd recently dinner with them, and Brian would still write down PG's suggestions in a notebook.) During that batch, I was flailing about trying to find some magical trick to make our company work. I remember one office-hours session with PG, excitedly telling him some buzzword-filled story I'd dreamed up about how our company could be a brilliant success. "Just make a good website" he replied. It took me a while to work out how the Airbnb guys were able to follow the advice so effectively whilst we and so many others got stuck in the weeds, but looking back now it's pretty obvious. They were just very comfortable in their own skin. They didn't have ego issues around needing to seem like geniuses, needing validation all the time, fearing rejection or embarrassment. "Talk to your users" was easy, as they were sociable, likeable people who put on cool parties and who were naturally able to make everyone in their company feel welcome and valued, and everything else emerged out of that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)

clambordan 5y ago
Am I supposed to know who PG is? PolterGeist?
- hexis 5y ago
  Paul Graham, the creator of this website.
- cecilpl2 5y ago
  Paul Graham, the cofounder of YC, whose website you are on.
- betaby 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
- gus_massa 5y ago
  He is one of the founders of Y Combinator and the founder of Hacker News. pg was the moderator here for a long time. For example: "Challenge HN: build pg-bot" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598026 (148 points | May 30, 2011 | 39 comments) I never meet him, but apparently he repeat this kind of advice a lot, and someone of the first batches of YC made an image of a fake action figure of pg that repeats the advice when you press a button. I can't find the link :( .
- cercatrova 5y ago
  > Am I supposed to know who PG is? Yes, you are, if you're using the site he created (not to fault you for not knowing but often many HNers will reference Paul Graham by his initials so it's useful to know).
cudgy 5y ago
AirBnb provides a platform for people to break laws and covenants in their community. Maybe they got lucky that they were not shut down before they got big enough to fight back?
- tomhoward 5y ago
  This is mostly tangential to my point, but for what it’s worth, they’ve been engaging with local governments from very early on in their history, and they got to the position of being able to work with governments by starting out focusing on building something people wanted and talking to their users. I don’t dispute that there are negative externalities to what they do and that their existence and growth are not without controversy, but my comment has nothing to do with that controversy, it’s about the useful advice in building a financially successful company.
baxtr 5y ago
Thanks for being so upfront and transparent. Very inspiring comment.
jokoon 5y ago
Reads like standard survivor bias
- tomhoward 5y ago
  Yes, someone always has to be the person to point this out as if the commenter or other readers had never considered it before :) Do you have examples to share of companies who were as devoted to talking to their customers and making something people want as Airbnb, but who failed to build a successful company? That YC W09 batch had about 16 companies. They were all far less successful than Airbnb (though some of them did well and got solid exits, and others live on and are going OK, like mine). But none of the companies who did less well than Airbnb were remotely as engaged with their users as Airbnb was. It was blindingly clear, even in the first month of the batch.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > far less successful than Airbnb Airbnb probably made a bunch of people very rich, which could probably count as success, however we could also point out that they're a great example of the toxicity of VC funded startups: 1. They business model seem to be disrupting housing markets and regular neighborhoods, more than it's actually disrupting incumbents (Accor & co.). 2. 13 years after their launch, this is their bottom line: > Net income -$4.584 billion (2020) Which, yeah, is during the pandemic, but they've never been profitable. Though I guess these days success is measured by how much money you can get from investors, than building an actually profitable business.
    - tomhoward 5y ago
      You're the second person in the thread who has sought to diminish the point by tangentially invoking the controversial aspects of what they do. It's a non-sequitur. I'm not engaging with that part further, as I responded to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425675 As for financial losses, yes of course the pandemic year was hard, but it's completely false to say that Airbnb has never been profitable or that it is not a financially strong company. Indeed they have financial strength built into the foundations of the company; they were revenue-focused and profitable in their first few months, and the very thing that made them attractive to investors was that their unit economics (dollar margin per transaction) was so strong. And they have had several profitable periods in the years leading up to their IPO. Yes they may have ended up posting losses, because they've spent heavily on marketing/growth and expansion into new product categories, but that doesn't make them a weak company, quite the opposite. If you're trying to equate them to money-sinks like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, etc, you're mistaken; they are the very antithesis of those kinds of companies.
Angostura 5y ago
Could someone expand on "Do things that don't scale." - that seems somewhat counterintuitive.
- coder-3 5y ago
  It means doing things that you can do when you have 0 to a few users but that would not work beyond that. For example, Doordash validated their idea with posters and manually taking orders and delivering them themselves, no app, no drivers. It is counterintuitive at first but when you think about it actually makes a lot of sense. When you're getting started you should focus on doing things to get started. Worry about scaling when you're scaling.
- bulletsvshumans 5y ago
  When you only have 10 users, the easiest ways to please all your users is to do things by hand that make the experience of those users excellent, rather than worrying about creating systems that will only pay off when you have 100,000 users. When reddit started out and had almost no user base, they had employees each impersonate a handful of different users to give the site a sense of a pre-existing community. When Dwarf Fortress was starting out, their sole developer would create custom ASCII-art scenes to send to every supporter above a certain dollar threshold.
- rajangdavis 5y ago
  http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
- ozim 5y ago
  Sending out invoices for example. You can work on automating it and hooking various payment providers. Integration with payment providers is a lot of hassle and engineering work. So when you have 5-10 customers it does not make sense to automate that. Sending invoices manually does not scale of course - but that advice is given in specific context of company. Where you should focus on working on your product and not on automating invoices "because somewhere in the future it will be needed."
- qihqi 5y ago
egypturnash 5y ago
People hear about this and ask "You gave away 7% of your company for that?" No, you give away 7% of your company to join a network of people showing you what it really looks like to do that. I thought you gave away 7% of your company for the big pile of VC money that YC hooks you up with, so you have a few years of runway to find an intersection between "an idea you had" and "an idea people are willing to collectively spend a lot of money on".
- tomhoward 5y ago
  That outcome was not likely for anyone other than the top 2-3 companies per batch pre about 2011, and in 2009, due to the financial crisis, we were basically told “you probably won’t raise money at all”. We went to YC because it seemed like the best place to learn how to build successful companies and to be around others doing it.

clambordan 5y ago

Am I supposed to know who PG is? PolterGeist?

hexis 5y ago
Paul Graham, the creator of this website.
cecilpl2 5y ago
Paul Graham, the cofounder of YC, whose website you are on.
betaby 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
gus_massa 5y ago
He is one of the founders of Y Combinator and the founder of Hacker News. pg was the moderator here for a long time. For example: "Challenge HN: build pg-bot" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598026 (148 points | May 30, 2011 | 39 comments) I never meet him, but apparently he repeat this kind of advice a lot, and someone of the first batches of YC made an image of a fake action figure of pg that repeats the advice when you press a button. I can't find the link :( .
cercatrova 5y ago
> Am I supposed to know who PG is? Yes, you are, if you're using the site he created (not to fault you for not knowing but often many HNers will reference Paul Graham by his initials so it's useful to know).

cudgy 5y ago

AirBnb provides a platform for people to break laws and covenants in their community. Maybe they got lucky that they were not shut down before they got big enough to fight back?

tomhoward 5y ago
This is mostly tangential to my point, but for what it’s worth, they’ve been engaging with local governments from very early on in their history, and they got to the position of being able to work with governments by starting out focusing on building something people wanted and talking to their users. I don’t dispute that there are negative externalities to what they do and that their existence and growth are not without controversy, but my comment has nothing to do with that controversy, it’s about the useful advice in building a financially successful company.

baxtr 5y ago

Thanks for being so upfront and transparent. Very inspiring comment.

jokoon 5y ago

Reads like standard survivor bias

tomhoward 5y ago
Yes, someone always has to be the person to point this out as if the commenter or other readers had never considered it before :) Do you have examples to share of companies who were as devoted to talking to their customers and making something people want as Airbnb, but who failed to build a successful company? That YC W09 batch had about 16 companies. They were all far less successful than Airbnb (though some of them did well and got solid exits, and others live on and are going OK, like mine). But none of the companies who did less well than Airbnb were remotely as engaged with their users as Airbnb was. It was blindingly clear, even in the first month of the batch.
- oblio 5y ago
  > far less successful than Airbnb Airbnb probably made a bunch of people very rich, which could probably count as success, however we could also point out that they're a great example of the toxicity of VC funded startups: 1. They business model seem to be disrupting housing markets and regular neighborhoods, more than it's actually disrupting incumbents (Accor & co.). 2. 13 years after their launch, this is their bottom line: > Net income -$4.584 billion (2020) Which, yeah, is during the pandemic, but they've never been profitable. Though I guess these days success is measured by how much money you can get from investors, than building an actually profitable business.
  - tomhoward 5y ago
    You're the second person in the thread who has sought to diminish the point by tangentially invoking the controversial aspects of what they do. It's a non-sequitur. I'm not engaging with that part further, as I responded to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425675 As for financial losses, yes of course the pandemic year was hard, but it's completely false to say that Airbnb has never been profitable or that it is not a financially strong company. Indeed they have financial strength built into the foundations of the company; they were revenue-focused and profitable in their first few months, and the very thing that made them attractive to investors was that their unit economics (dollar margin per transaction) was so strong. And they have had several profitable periods in the years leading up to their IPO. Yes they may have ended up posting losses, because they've spent heavily on marketing/growth and expansion into new product categories, but that doesn't make them a weak company, quite the opposite. If you're trying to equate them to money-sinks like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, etc, you're mistaken; they are the very antithesis of those kinds of companies.

Angostura 5y ago

Could someone expand on "Do things that don't scale." - that seems somewhat counterintuitive.

coder-3 5y ago
It means doing things that you can do when you have 0 to a few users but that would not work beyond that. For example, Doordash validated their idea with posters and manually taking orders and delivering them themselves, no app, no drivers. It is counterintuitive at first but when you think about it actually makes a lot of sense. When you're getting started you should focus on doing things to get started. Worry about scaling when you're scaling.
bulletsvshumans 5y ago
When you only have 10 users, the easiest ways to please all your users is to do things by hand that make the experience of those users excellent, rather than worrying about creating systems that will only pay off when you have 100,000 users. When reddit started out and had almost no user base, they had employees each impersonate a handful of different users to give the site a sense of a pre-existing community. When Dwarf Fortress was starting out, their sole developer would create custom ASCII-art scenes to send to every supporter above a certain dollar threshold.
rajangdavis 5y ago
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
ozim 5y ago
Sending out invoices for example. You can work on automating it and hooking various payment providers. Integration with payment providers is a lot of hassle and engineering work. So when you have 5-10 customers it does not make sense to automate that. Sending invoices manually does not scale of course - but that advice is given in specific context of company. Where you should focus on working on your product and not on automating invoices "because somewhere in the future it will be needed."
qihqi 5y ago

egypturnash 5y ago

People hear about this and ask "You gave away 7% of your company for that?" No, you give away 7% of your company to join a network of people showing you what it really looks like to do that. I thought you gave away 7% of your company for the big pile of VC money that YC hooks you up with, so you have a few years of runway to find an intersection between "an idea you had" and "an idea people are willing to collectively spend a lot of money on".

tomhoward 5y ago
That outcome was not likely for anyone other than the top 2-3 companies per batch pre about 2011, and in 2009, due to the financial crisis, we were basically told “you probably won’t raise money at all”. We went to YC because it seemed like the best place to learn how to build successful companies and to be around others doing it.