4 ms·

Note: he means "good enough", not good. Which brings to mind patio11's constant reminders, that running a successful software business has very very little to

by edanm 15y ago

Note: he means "good enough", not good. Which brings to mind patio11's constant reminders, that running a successful software business has very very little to do with programming well. Which means that pg thinks that 6 months is the level you need to be at to be able to start a startup. This seems intuitively right to me, especially these days.

_delirium 15y ago
In fact the usual advice is that you shouldn't be doing something technically virtuosic in a startup. If your startup's critical path includes writing something as technically impressive as the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, you might have trouble... Though there are a few people around here who've built software businesses around things that are also nontrivial technical advances; cperciva comes to mind.
- edanm 15y ago
  I know that's a sentiment that's thrown around here, but I think it's simplistic. I live in Israel, where a very common path to an Exit is to build some sophisticated technology, then sell it after a few years to a larger company. So it is a very possible path you can take. It has its own advantages and disadvantages over the much more visible, much more HN-friendly, "Consumer Internet Startup".
  - bergie 15y ago
    The exit and valuation models for these two approaches are also different. In the former, some company buys you because they want to use your technology in their own products, in the latter, some company buys you to get your customers/users.
- gbog 15y ago
  It seems all or most pg's articles just say the opposite: a startup should climb the highest hills, and can do so faster the big corporations because they are light-weight. If I'm not mistaking, "climbing" here do not mean find a genius idea or a disrupting design for a search field, it means developping something hard in software. The conclusion should be that a startups that is not doing something technically hard should be considered in trouble (because so easy to clone).
  - Aga 15y ago
    I think it does not have to mean "developing something hard in software", but more like "finding an unsolved problem and using software to solve it." It does not have to be hard to solve in the software side. I guess the hardest part is finding the right problem to solve!
  - wnight 15y ago
    What I think, for what you may think it's worth, is that you should climb the highest hills, that you'll have to climb, right away. Best to know you can do it before wasting time. But, that you should look for the easiest way to success. It'll take months for a large company to have the meetings to acknowledge your niche, let alone try to serve it. The only thing you have to fear is another startup and you're at the advantage is that situation. Building huge walls or picking a niche with a large cost to serve, is like wasting time on DRM for your game, instead of working on marketing and having someone actually buy it.
- philwelch 15y ago
  The usual advice seems odd to me. There are two extremes: you can invent something technically trivial and take the market risk, or you can invent something that's technically challenging but with obvious marketability.
tspiteri 15y ago
Not exactly the same thing, but this does remind me of a quote from I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59: "I didn't trust Larry and Sergey as coders," said Craig Silverstein. "I had to deal with their legacy code from the Stanford days and it had a lot of problems. They're research coders: more interested in writing code that works than code that's maintainable." According to Jeff, one of the quirks in the early Stanford version of Google was that when something unusual happened the program would print out an error message without any explanation. The message read simply, "Whoa, horsey!"
- aangjie 15y ago
  7 years ago i would have called myself similar.Though i was just graduating and could have hardly called it research. But 3 years working in the industry with Big blue and i see i have got OCD with maintainability. Heck, i wouldn't even have noticed, if i hadn't quit and went to do a master's. But 4 years since, and i still haven't quite undone the OCD, mitigated yes, but not back to the get shit done passion....I keep working on it...so, i will qualify that 6 months to start a startup, with something about the type of product you aim to build. - May be something along the lines of the impact you expect to make with it.
enko 15y ago
> Which brings to mind patio11's constant reminders, that running a successful software business has very very little to do with programming well That may be appropriate for patio11. Not to demean the guy but let's be clear, he runs an online bingo service. It's my understanding that he makes much more money from consulting gigs leveraged from this modest endeavour. Rest assured that if your ambition is to write the next Dropbox or, hell, any YC company, at least 50% of your founding team will need to be very good programmers indeed.
- jcarden 15y ago
  What does "good" really mean here ?
- tptacek 15y ago
  In one of his three (3) lines of actual- money- earning- businesses, he managed to factor the "product programming" component down to a kind of minima, allowing him to channel all his effort into engineering his marketing systems. As a result, he was able to use a program that can charitably be described as "Hello World" hooked up to a random number generate to eclipse his full time salary. If you can't see the pure hack value in that, you may be commenting on the wrong message board. The conclusion you think you can draw about Patrick and "programming" from the nature of his first product: you can't draw that conclusion. I'm writing this not to offend Patrick (he could care less about threads like this), but because you are taking exactly the wrong lesson about what Patrick did and then broadcasting it to the rest of the community. Stop, please? :| I'm a systems programmer, since 1995. The list of YC companies that involve "real programming" to me is pretty short. Dropbox qualifies, but how many from the rest of their class would? Which is to say: "technical impressiveness is both subjective and a stupid metric for a business".
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]

by edanm 15y ago

_delirium 15y ago

In fact the usual advice is that you shouldn't be doing something technically virtuosic in a startup. If your startup's critical path includes writing something as technically impressive as the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, you might have trouble... Though there are a few people around here who've built software businesses around things that are also nontrivial technical advances; cperciva comes to mind.

edanm 15y ago
I know that's a sentiment that's thrown around here, but I think it's simplistic. I live in Israel, where a very common path to an Exit is to build some sophisticated technology, then sell it after a few years to a larger company. So it is a very possible path you can take. It has its own advantages and disadvantages over the much more visible, much more HN-friendly, "Consumer Internet Startup".
- bergie 15y ago
  The exit and valuation models for these two approaches are also different. In the former, some company buys you because they want to use your technology in their own products, in the latter, some company buys you to get your customers/users.
gbog 15y ago
It seems all or most pg's articles just say the opposite: a startup should climb the highest hills, and can do so faster the big corporations because they are light-weight. If I'm not mistaking, "climbing" here do not mean find a genius idea or a disrupting design for a search field, it means developping something hard in software. The conclusion should be that a startups that is not doing something technically hard should be considered in trouble (because so easy to clone).
- Aga 15y ago
  I think it does not have to mean "developing something hard in software", but more like "finding an unsolved problem and using software to solve it." It does not have to be hard to solve in the software side. I guess the hardest part is finding the right problem to solve!
- wnight 15y ago
  What I think, for what you may think it's worth, is that you should climb the highest hills, that you'll have to climb, right away. Best to know you can do it before wasting time. But, that you should look for the easiest way to success. It'll take months for a large company to have the meetings to acknowledge your niche, let alone try to serve it. The only thing you have to fear is another startup and you're at the advantage is that situation. Building huge walls or picking a niche with a large cost to serve, is like wasting time on DRM for your game, instead of working on marketing and having someone actually buy it.
philwelch 15y ago
The usual advice seems odd to me. There are two extremes: you can invent something technically trivial and take the market risk, or you can invent something that's technically challenging but with obvious marketability.

tspiteri 15y ago

Not exactly the same thing, but this does remind me of a quote from I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59: "I didn't trust Larry and Sergey as coders," said Craig Silverstein. "I had to deal with their legacy code from the Stanford days and it had a lot of problems. They're research coders: more interested in writing code that works than code that's maintainable." According to Jeff, one of the quirks in the early Stanford version of Google was that when something unusual happened the program would print out an error message without any explanation. The message read simply, "Whoa, horsey!"

aangjie 15y ago
7 years ago i would have called myself similar.Though i was just graduating and could have hardly called it research. But 3 years working in the industry with Big blue and i see i have got OCD with maintainability. Heck, i wouldn't even have noticed, if i hadn't quit and went to do a master's. But 4 years since, and i still haven't quite undone the OCD, mitigated yes, but not back to the get shit done passion....I keep working on it...so, i will qualify that 6 months to start a startup, with something about the type of product you aim to build. - May be something along the lines of the impact you expect to make with it.

enko 15y ago

> Which brings to mind patio11's constant reminders, that running a successful software business has very very little to do with programming well That may be appropriate for patio11. Not to demean the guy but let's be clear, he runs an online bingo service. It's my understanding that he makes much more money from consulting gigs leveraged from this modest endeavour. Rest assured that if your ambition is to write the next Dropbox or, hell, any YC company, at least 50% of your founding team will need to be very good programmers indeed.

jcarden 15y ago
What does "good" really mean here ?
tptacek 15y ago
In one of his three (3) lines of actual- money- earning- businesses, he managed to factor the "product programming" component down to a kind of minima, allowing him to channel all his effort into engineering his marketing systems. As a result, he was able to use a program that can charitably be described as "Hello World" hooked up to a random number generate to eclipse his full time salary. If you can't see the pure hack value in that, you may be commenting on the wrong message board. The conclusion you think you can draw about Patrick and "programming" from the nature of his first product: you can't draw that conclusion. I'm writing this not to offend Patrick (he could care less about threads like this), but because you are taking exactly the wrong lesson about what Patrick did and then broadcasting it to the rest of the community. Stop, please? :| I'm a systems programmer, since 1995. The list of YC companies that involve "real programming" to me is pretty short. Dropbox qualifies, but how many from the rest of their class would? Which is to say: "technical impressiveness is both subjective and a stupid metric for a business".
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]