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Dude, everyone knows that. Seriously. Nobody's missing the "important point" because everybody who's been on Hacker News for five minutes has heard Paul Graham

Dude, everyone knows that. Seriously. Nobody's missing the "important point" because everybody who's been on Hacker News for five minutes has heard Paul Graham make that point. Indeed, people have made jokes about startup business plans for decades. Literally everyone knows that those things don't matter for super early stage startups. The tweet, however, and very much like many of Paul Graham's latest essays and tweets, seems to purposely elude any context, make a very generic a debatable statement, and assert it with complete aplomb. For someone who just wrote an essay about putting ideas into words, if he can't see that this tweet will be interpreted as "balance sheets are useless", he needs to put in a bit more work. That's what people react to, because the only conclusion is that since he doesn't want to tweet bromides, he must be trying to say something "controversial." It's really bordering on trolling, which for a man with his age and reputation is kind of cringy, embarrassing, and frankly disappointing to people who enjoyed his past stuff.

tomhoward 5y ago
"Literally everyone knows that those things don't matter for super early stage startups." If literally everyone knows that then I don't need to be commenting, as my replies in this subthread are to someone insisting that balance sheets matter even before a company has a working product. Clearly they don't. It seems the people "reacting" are imagining some deeper intention or elaborate plot or some complicated character weakness behind it all. I just see him repeating what he's said for years: for early stage companies, you should just focus on making something people want.
- davidivadavid 5y ago
  Yes, the "character weakness" is a penchant for midwit /r/iamverysmart takes that are well below people's usual expectations. Surely we can agree the reaction is overblown, but as someone said, this is definitely eyeroll material.
  - tomhoward 5y ago
    I think perhaps the thing with PG is that people think the advice/wisdom he shares should be far more profound and complicated than it is. As someone who has frequently made the mistake of overcomplicating things, I don't see anything wrong with repeatedly telling early stage founders, in all kinds of different ways, to just focus on building a product that people want.

tomhoward 5y ago

"Literally everyone knows that those things don't matter for super early stage startups." If literally everyone knows that then I don't need to be commenting, as my replies in this subthread are to someone insisting that balance sheets matter even before a company has a working product. Clearly they don't. It seems the people "reacting" are imagining some deeper intention or elaborate plot or some complicated character weakness behind it all. I just see him repeating what he's said for years: for early stage companies, you should just focus on making something people want.

davidivadavid 5y ago
Yes, the "character weakness" is a penchant for midwit /r/iamverysmart takes that are well below people's usual expectations. Surely we can agree the reaction is overblown, but as someone said, this is definitely eyeroll material.
- tomhoward 5y ago
  I think perhaps the thing with PG is that people think the advice/wisdom he shares should be far more profound and complicated than it is. As someone who has frequently made the mistake of overcomplicating things, I don't see anything wrong with repeatedly telling early stage founders, in all kinds of different ways, to just focus on building a product that people want.