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Yeah, I think it's a combination of some of this stuff is common knowledge now, rather than surprising, and people were looking for concrete examples of mistake

by iamwil 4y ago

Yeah, I think it's a combination of some of this stuff is common knowledge now, rather than surprising, and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves) Rather, this is an essay about what was surprising to him about startups in YC. And I think it's fair to say that these were all surprising, and I wouldn't have inferred them if someone told me about YC as an idea back in 2005. Or put in another way, if someone came to you and told you about the idea for creating YC back in 2005, when the only model of investing in startups was how large institutional VCs and angels invested in startups, would you have been able to tell them the following insights about how it would work and what the value add of the advice is? Remember, when YC started, lots of people thought 7% for $15k (I know they give more now) was a joke. - Most startup problems are the same, but in different forms. It makes advising tractable for a single person to do. - Advising a lot of startups in batches has the advantage of learning about all these problems faster. - And yet, startup advising has to stay individualized (presumably to keep things concrete), so in order to scale, they had to shard. Limit was somewhere between 60 and 80 per individual advisor. - Identifying problems and ranking their severity are two different skills. You'd think they're the same, but they're not. As an advisor, if you can help startups do only these two things, it'd go a long way. Lots of advisors try to help with other things, but these are the two most important, because if a startup died, all other problems are moot. - Despite this, founders don't listen to advice about how not to die. And they don't listen because the advice is counterintuitive. It's like how there are more skiing instructors than running instructors. Skiing is more counterintuitive. - A big headwinds to advising startups on how not to die is that due to the educational system, founders have all learned how to hack the system. The skills that got them to where they are stops working when trying to build a company. - Beyond helping startups not die, advisors likely know less about the product/strategy in any domain, but they can increase focus, which increases speed of iteration, which indirectly helps startups with their product/strategy through iterative greedy algorithm. - A follow-on value-add of YC is the alumni network. Like clusters of painters in Paris during the impressionist period or musicians in Vienna, and Xerox Parc, lots of great work is done when great people do it in clusters along side each other. At the time, people thought the price of independence of is loneliness, but turns out it's not true.

ericmay 4y ago
> and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves) Is this even possible or useful? I mean there are obvious things but they're so obvious and generalized as to be seemingly useless when you are at a serious stage in starting a company. It kind of reminds me of when people talking about something being "priced in" in the market as a related concept.
felideon 4y ago
> people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves) Which he has written about before: http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html My first impression was that the title was somewhat vague, but it was actually just very literal. This is what PG himself has learned from his users, not an essay on how to learn from users or how to build a successful startup.
iamwil 4y ago
I had to run before I finished, but to wrap it up: Going back to the initial set up of the piece, he was trying to help startups get into YC. Basically he was helping them sell themselves to YC, by having them answer “explain what you learned from users” If it’s any effective at all, then by answering this question, you can make your startup very compelling to YC. Would it work? One way to judge that is to apply it to what he knows (YC) and see if it’s appealing to startups both now and back in 2005. So the complaint about how this piece feels sales-y is missing the forest for the trees, because that’s the point of the exercise! By the very nature of the intent of the question, of course it’s going to sound like a sales pitch for YC. That’s the whole purpose of the exercise to begin with. It’s a question, when answered, begates a sales pitch for getting into YC.

by iamwil 4y ago

ericmay 4y ago

> and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves) Is this even possible or useful? I mean there are obvious things but they're so obvious and generalized as to be seemingly useless when you are at a serious stage in starting a company. It kind of reminds me of when people talking about something being "priced in" in the market as a related concept.

felideon 4y ago

> people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves) Which he has written about before: http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html My first impression was that the title was somewhat vague, but it was actually just very literal. This is what PG himself has learned from his users, not an essay on how to learn from users or how to build a successful startup.

iamwil 4y ago

I had to run before I finished, but to wrap it up: Going back to the initial set up of the piece, he was trying to help startups get into YC. Basically he was helping them sell themselves to YC, by having them answer “explain what you learned from users” If it’s any effective at all, then by answering this question, you can make your startup very compelling to YC. Would it work? One way to judge that is to apply it to what he knows (YC) and see if it’s appealing to startups both now and back in 2005. So the complaint about how this piece feels sales-y is missing the forest for the trees, because that’s the point of the exercise! By the very nature of the intent of the question, of course it’s going to sound like a sales pitch for YC. That’s the whole purpose of the exercise to begin with. It’s a question, when answered, begates a sales pitch for getting into YC.