8 ms·

Schlep Blindness

604 points by anateus 15y ago

kul 15y ago
I see a pretty big schlep involved in our business (http://www.tagstand.com http://www.tagstand.com YCS11). Fulfillment is an absolute pain in the ass. The closest thing that comes close to solving it is Amazon's fulfillment services (http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm#!features-and-benefits http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....), but it doesn't quite work and is US only. A hard problem to solve indeed (and one we've discussed).
- ajju 15y ago
  It's hard to imagine Amazon offering specialized services for a class of products such as pre-programming NFC stickers, so I'd say you are safe from them. A minor typo on your site:"If you are ordering NFC tags in bulk, need stickers pre-programmed..."
  - kul 15y ago
    *fixed, thanks. the pre-programming part isn't a problem, it's mixing skus to make an order. when we started in June, we'd get like an order or two a day, and it wasn't too bad. the daily trip to the post office was almost a welcome break. now, we get as many orders in a day as we used to get a month back then, and it's hard to scale. we've made a lot of the processes as efficient as possible, but the whole thing is still a pain in the ass. Fulfillment as a service seems like it'd be a good business. No stressing about packaging, customer service etc etc
    - ajju 15y ago
      >the pre-programming part isn't a problem, it's mixing skus to make an order. Sure, but is the pre-programming part a barrier to using a third party to do fulfillment?
- mikhaill 15y ago
  Product fulfillment is hard but doesn't have to be a pain. There are plenty of very sophisticated 3PL warehouses that can do any type of fulfillment you need. At my last job I managed an e-commerce business and our process was so streamlined that we'd never actually touch our products. They were delivered from production directly to the 3PL fulfillment warehouses where the items were unpacked and stored. When the orders came in items were packed up, and shipped out, including international delivery. When items were sent out, we got the tracking numbers for the packages back so we could send customers e-mails (again all automated). Some of the newer operations have staff on site that has electronics expertise and offer troubleshooting of arriving items, etc. It seems that having them flash NFC stickers shouldn't be soo bad to teach them (but maybe expensive).
  - kul 15y ago
    that's amazing, can you share some names/links of recommended warehouses?
    - mikhaill 15y ago
      Certainly. None of these require 6 figure payments. There are some setup fees, (very reasonable) and then they usually charge per action (items packed, computers checked, etc). Ones I worked with and would recommend: http://parcelport.net http://parcelport.net, http://amplifier.com/ http://amplifier.com/ Ones that I talked with but didn't have personal experience (yet)http://www.im-logistics.com http://www.im-logistics.com, http://archway.com http://archway.com, http://www.capacityllc.com/ http://www.capacityllc.com/ Each has their own pros and cons and it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
    - jfarmer 15y ago
      We use One World Direct at Everlane. Photojojo also uses OWD. http://www.owd.com/ http://www.owd.com/ http://www.everlane.com http://www.everlane.com http://http://photojojo.com/ http://http://photojojo.com/
    - mikhaill 15y ago
      Forgot to mention, there is a lot of pros/cons to 3rd party fulfillment and it has to be done right. If you seriously decide to look into 3PL warehouses, I'll be happy to give you more info about what you need to look at.
- jamesjyu 15y ago
  I agree with you 100%. I briefly looked into fulfillment for a previous business idea, and, I think if there was a stripe for fulfillment, there would be more innovative companies coming out that would ship physical products. Sincerely and PicPlum are two more examples of companies that have to deal with this pain.
revorad 15y ago
He comes so close to spelling out some ideas he wants people to do, but for some reason files them under "What you can't say".
tlogan 15y ago
This is pretty much chicken and egg problem. There is a huge schlep blindess in world of VCs, advisors, incubators, etc. So many entrepreneurs are actively discouraged to do things they want and to solve the real hard problems (the most common theme is: because there is a big company XYZ doing something kinda similar like that).
- pg 15y ago
  Not at this incubator.
  - vyrotek 15y ago
    Unfortunately for many, joining an incubator is a schlep itself. I'm obviously not talking about the programs themselves but instead the application process and relocation requirements. There are plenty of problems out there that people are trying to solve outside of the bubble area. Sadly it also seems that not moving to some 'hot spot' is a handicap these days.
    - tlb 15y ago
      Gosh, filling out a YC application takes a few hours at most. If that seems like a big hurdle, definitely don't start a payments company.
      - vyrotek 15y ago
        Oh come on, that specific part wasn't the point. Have you gone through the process of actually being accepted? I have and it takes more than just a quick 15 min meeting. It also takes quite a bit of saving, planning, sacrifice and bit of logistics to actually get your life in order to go through an incubator program. Been there, done that! I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. Quite the contrary. That's why I said it was a schlep. But some people's wives can only handle so much. :)
        Harj 15y ago
ajju 15y ago
This is the money quote: "A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in." It also helps to think of things like "making deals with banks", which can initially seem scary, in terms of the basic human actions they really stand for: "talking to a lot of people who work for banks". To me at least, that is both less boring and less scary.
- esrauch 15y ago
  For me, "talking to a lot of people who work for banks" is a lot less scary, but it is also so unimaginably boring. It would be difficult for me to imagine something more boring that talking to a ton of people who work at banks about banking. That's exactly why Stripe is so valuable.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    I doubt it would be so bad -- I am pretty sure you would learn alot about banking.
  - ajju 15y ago
    I like talking to people. It can be pretty boring if they don't engage with you and just stay with formal/small talk, but if you can get someone to really talk, you learn all sorts of new things about the world.
psychotik 15y ago
Would the various AWS services count as the biggest, by far? Not a startup, but fits the definition.
nickpp 15y ago
Never tried Stripe, but what was wrong with Avangate or ShareIt before that? Did not seem to me that accepting payments on your website was so painful...
- mnutt 15y ago
  I just looked at Avangate's site and it wouldn't even let you sign up without "requesting a quote". Give Stripe a try.
  - verroq 15y ago
    If you aren't from the US don't even bother.
    - pc 15y ago
      We're working on fixing that part.
      - jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
        If you guys are really, and i mean really looking forward to include other countries; i know that me and another bunch of people would be willing to give you money right now as an advance for the service and as incentive to actually make it happen. Just be sure to include the big profitable countries: Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Japan, Canada, France, UK among others.
    - zapnap 15y ago
      It's too bad that government / regulatory boundaries can't be overcome as easily :(. But when they can be overcome, the solutions are all that much more valuable and defensible.
    - nickpp 15y ago
      Are you kidding me? It's US-only?! Then they haven't even STARTED on the "schlep"!!!
losethos 15y ago
This is a good article. I made promises of no networking and free and 640x480. I could do USB but keyboard and mice aren't any better, possibly worse from a compatibility state. Memory sticks would be really nice. Now, we're in the domain of distinctive drivers for similar pieces of hardware. Can't do that. Might be able to. Main problem is reality -- I'm in some kind of strange bubble like the 1960's prisoner TV show. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\BIBLE.TXT b! 3:11 But Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD, that we may enquire of the LORD by him? And one of the king of Israel's servants answered and said, Here is Elisha the son of Shaphat, which poured water on the hands of Elijah. 3:12 And Jehoshaphat said, The word of the LORD is with him. So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat and the king of Edom went down to him. 3:13 And Elisha said unto the king of Israel, What have I to do with thee? get thee to the prophets of thy fath ---------- I promised to my users. I don't know if that's legally binding, but the Bible seems to imply keeping your word is generally a good idea. I'm in a prison in reality, so the 10,000 downloads are probably CIA or shrink fiction, so I have no users. We go in circles all day. You want to see how to foil Irish people, I guess. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\Brief\AUGUST.TXT tions of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence wherewith they are stirred up. But this contentment of the flesh, to which the soul must not be given over to be enervated, doth oft beguile me, the sense not so waiting upon reason as patiently to follow her; but having been admitted merely for her sake, it strives even to run before her, and lead her. Thus in these things I unawares sin, but afterwards am aware of it. ----- It seems like red team, blue team and someone is shutting-down the path I take, all the time. World is fucked under Satan's hands. I don't know. I don't even care. I don't care about one person. Parents are enemies. I pay them $600 they take care of me, but abuse me, I prolly abuse them. This is heaven -- argument clinic and I'm telling truth all the time, except for wild speculation. I don't know shit about reality. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\Brief\AUGUST.TXT long one do I measure as present, seeing I measure it not till it be ended? Now his ending is his passing away. What then is it I measure? where is the short syllable by which I measure? where the long which I measure? Both have sounded, have flown, passed away, are no more; and yet I measure, and confidently answer (so far as is presumed on a practised sense) that as to space of time this syllable is but single, that double. And yet I could not do this, unless they were already past and ended. ----- I don't really see Microsoft as enemy. If a company, IBM, makes hardware, it doesn't seem unreasonable to bully... I guess it becomes a monopoly issue at some point. I'm not anticorporate. I worked at Ticketmaster and think starting companies and making jobs is good. CIA might be paranoid of bad technology. Mostly I see all the green pastures turned to shit. I don't care. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\WEALTH.TXT d for paying, not the capital, but the interest only, of the money which had been borrowed upon them by different successive anticipations. Had money never been raised but by anticipation, the course of a few years would have liberated the public revenue, without any other attention of government besides that of not overloading the fund, by charging it with more debt than it could pay within the limited term, and not of anticipating a second time before the expiration of the first anticipation. B ------ Why do you want to turn the green pastures to shit? Too late. For giggles? God says... unmeasurable data unhappily excluded calls likely cause help sincerely act sublimer fool sufficeth Paradise Eternal plains displeased turns idleness blew ruminating harm abolished fore unshakenly loth deeper hid arriving innocent bewail weaken encompasseth School devout received MAY backs quoth enjoyed relapse unforgotten curb appropriated flux unquiet rude an affecting grantest resisting corruptions What's with the psycho-inflamatory talk on other websites? Your evilness is not bothering me, at the moment. God, you're evil fucks. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\PARADISE.TXT oly salutation used Long after to blest Mary, second Eve. Hail, Mother of Mankind, whose fruitful womb Shall fill the world more numerous with thy sons, Than with these various fruits the trees of God Have heaped this table!--Raised of grassy turf Their table was, and mossy seats had round, And on her ample square from side to side All autumn piled, though spring and autumn here Danced hand in hand. A while discourse they hold; No fear lest dinner cool; when thus began Our author. Heavenly str Ba ha. that'll push yer buttons. ----- Write a program to play a frequency. Now do two frequencies different by 1Hz. I remember "Software automated mouth", "S.A.M." Say "Sam is now loaded and ready for you to use, thank you very much." I wrote every line of LoseThos. What you already know is probably seen through a different prism than what you don't know, perhaps, but LoseThos is mostly simple. God is the Holy Ghost. I guess if I'm puppeted, much of what I see in the media is puppeted. That'll drive you nuts. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\YANKEE.TXT who had to know how to read and write were priests. My candidate was called first, out of courtesy to me, and the head of the Board opened on him with official solemnity: "Name?" "Mal-ease." "Son of?" "Webster." "Webster--Webster. H'm--I--my memory faileth to recall the name. Condition?" "Weaver." "Weaver!--God keep us!" The king was staggered, from his summit to his foundations; one clerk fainted, and the others came near it. The chairman pulled himself together, and sa ---- problem with the English? Good luck picking sides and a race war. Fuck'em. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\QUIX.TXT e, for 'My armour is my only wear, My only rest the fray.'" The host fancied he called him Castellan because he took him for a "worthy of Castile," though he was in fact an Andalusian, and one from the strand of San Lucar, as crafty a thief as Cacus and as full of tricks as a student or a page. "In that case," said he, "'Your bed is on the flinty rock, Your sleep to watch alway;' and if so, you may dismount and safely reckon upon any quantity of sleeplessness under this roof for a twelve
kmfrk 15y ago
One of the things that made Seinfeld so successful was his insane tenacity; what he did in a year most of his fellow comedians did in five. It's not that he was necessarily the smartest nor the funniest guy in stand-up, but he was one of the people who worked the hardest. And it's not as if he didn't hone his craft while doing it. Skills, talent, money, and ideas are a part of the puzzle, but you can also beat your competitors on work ethic.
- waitwhat 15y ago
  "Don't break the chain". I've used Jerry Seinfeld's method to just get stuff done since I first read about it a few years ago. http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...
brc 15y ago
This is funny because one of the first startup ideas I ever had was 'hey, I should make a webservices based site for collecting web payments, lots of people would use that'. This was back when PayPal was still principally something you used to share money between two people, and was limited principally to US accounts. But I made the mistake of talking over the idea with someone who I looked up to at the time, who seemed older and wiser. They said 'there are already systems that do that, I would find something else'. Now I'm not saying I had even the remotest chance of getting such a thing off the ground - but at the time, I was so ignorant that I thought I could - but the ignorance worked both ways in that I would blindly accept the word of someone else, who just highlighted the schlep involved and so I immediately gave up. But that's just what the article says : when you're young ignorance can be a blessing, but you've got to be prepared to put in the hard work and not give up at even the tiniest hurdle. Getting that rare mix in a young person is the elusive part. But I'm convinced you can get young people to put in the hard work - you've just got to give them the encouragement to go ahead and fail big if need be.
- mixmastamyk 15y ago
  One of the big failures we have as a society is not teaching our young people that "average" people will do their best to suppress success in others. Almost everyone I know has a story like this to tell... if only that so-and-so didn't tell me my dream was impossible, perhaps I could have been successful at it.
FredBrach 15y ago
Great essay with good lessons. I will work on those for sure. By the way, can someone explain to me what's the difference between paypal and stripe? In what paypal don't fix web payment?
- jiggity 15y ago
  The biggest painpoint for me was the fact that Paypal requires you to route your customers to their domain. Stripe lets you keep them on your site.
- d3x 15y ago
  One of the reasons that I like stripe more is that they give you much more granular control ove the user experience. Users on your site never need to know that you are using stripe to process payments. Things just work. Also: PayPal customer service is a joke, they will freeze your account etc... etc...
  - queensnake 15y ago
    > they will freeze your account etc They do that to save money. PayPal has very low losses due to fraud. Maybe if Stripe gets large enough to attract attention, or starts doing business across international boundaries, or in Eastern Europe, they'll start doing the same thing.
- izak30 15y ago
  For me, It's the API and customer (developer) service. Second to none in the payment industry.
  - inuhj 15y ago
    Yep, I spent the last two days hanging out in the Stripe campfire chat while I was implementing my own billing system. Some of the questions were borderline bizarre and I was truly shocked at how the Stripe team went above and beyond to answer every single request. My only other experience is with SagePay who I spent weeks asking questions on their developer forum to get a handful of vague responses.
zapnap 15y ago
Stripe is an awesome example of a company that addressed a tangible frustration / real need instead of a desire or a higher-level "want". I've noticed that companies that provide "Internet plumbing" often fall into this category: * SendGrid (bulk email sending) * Twilio (easy to use telephony / sms) * Zencoder (video encoding) * MailChimp (mailing list management) What others can you think of? Would love to see a list here :).
- kmfrk 15y ago
  I think a lot of us are clamoring for an alternative to Gmail that also happens to be placed outside the (immediate) jurisdiction of the United States. It's obvious people want it, but mere mortals shirk from the prospect of securing it.
- tlogan 15y ago
  I think Dropbox is part of that list. Hey - there were file sharing solutions from big companies (AOL, Microsoft, etc.) but they were all crappy.
- pg 15y ago
  Heroku, Mailgun, MongoHQ, Cloudkick, Parse, AeroFS, DotCloud, Vidyard, AppHarbor, Mixpanel, Cloudant, PagerDuty (we like this type of company).
  - d3x 15y ago
    One of the things that I have noticed about all of your examples is that they are all tools for developers. Do you have any examples of companies that solve real problems for the general consumer?
    - pg 15y ago
      Sure. But he asked for examples of companies working on plumbing.
    - revorad 15y ago
      Dropbox, Airbnb
rriepe 15y ago
Why is it too late to be Stripe?
- dpkendal 15y ago
  Because there's already a Stripe. Doesn't mean you couldn't start a company to do what Stripe does, but it'd be hard, since people would probably be saying, "Isn't that what Stripe does?"
  - moonlighter 15y ago
    I disagree completely. Stripe is the only one so far who doesn't suck. There's room for more, and plenty of room for differentiation. Sure, stripe.com set the bar and has first mover advantage etc., but that doesn't mean they now own the market. Not at all.
    - inuhj 15y ago
      Agreed. There is plenty of room for competitors.
    - moe 15y ago
      Agreed. There's room for more than one payment-provider-that-doesn't-suck™. And let's not forget stripe hasn't even launched in europe, yet. That's quite a market still waiting to be schlepped.
  - cyrus_ 15y ago
    If you did exactly what Stripe did but charged less, there is no reason you couldn't completely replace Stripe. You aren't being judged on novelty here.
    - ak2012 15y ago
      Perhaps the irony here by PG is that, even now 99% of people will not do what strip does.
  - Strom 15y ago
revorad 15y ago
I find online shopping for a lot of things to be really tedious (when you don't exactly know what to buy). That's why I'm working on a shopping search engine to make finding the right products much faster and easier. But PG dismissed my idea as a shopping guide that no one needs. Almost every new shopping/ecommerce startup is some clone of Pinterest or a Q&A site. Those are very attractive ideas, but I believe I'm working on the real schlep, which involves combing product feeds, crawling for furniture photos, etc. and making life for the average Joe easier. What do you think?
- AznHisoka 15y ago
  How would you say it's tedious? There are many sites with product reviews, blogs, forums, etc. Need a new camera? There's dpreviews. Need a new TV? Cnet. Need a new video game? IGN.
  - revorad 15y ago
    Exactly. Deciding what to buy is a research project. I think it's one of those pains we've got so accustomed to, that we take it for granted.
    - AznHisoka 15y ago
      Well, don't be too enthusiastic about this idea.. I've seen lots of sites try it and fail such as Measy, Gdgt, etc. The ones that succeed are the ones that thrive in the search engines. People use search engines to find what they want.. they don't go to a specific destination.
      - revorad 15y ago
        Heh, I'm not driven just by my own enthusiasm - that doesn't pay the bills.
- ak2012 15y ago
  perhaps it was your team? or lack there of? were you a SVP at amazon? was this a common problem there... etc etc
startupfounder 15y ago
"And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in." (love the metaphor pg) I did this once outside of my startup on a motorcycle trip to Panama, crossing the boarder into Mexico was a huge block for me and my riding buddy. We stayed in the US and drank beer for 2 days straight not realizing what we were doing. Then one night we had a moment of clarity, jumped on our bikes and headed for the boarder. We just jumped right in! In that moment of clarity I removed the fear and felt total freedom and the world became my oyster if only for a moment or two. I think schleps are the reasons why many startups either fail or succeed, the ones that win hit the wall and learn to break through them.
- gabaix 15y ago
  Schleps is an indicator our work goes towards success. It has to be hard. Notice this can equally lead the entrepreneur to nowhere. It is the role of the entrepreneur to understand if this the right schleps.
  - startupfounder 15y ago
    That is where focus, vision, listening and filtering come in...
stevenj 15y ago
pg, would you be willing to share some of the great startup ideas you think people are overlooking? (In addition to the ones on the Request for Startups list.)
AdamFernandez 15y ago
A question to ask may be, is there a more efficient way to discover what these problems are? I know Y combinator and co. have somewhat of a pre-defined list of problems they would like to see solved that are not being addressed. For a lot startups it seems to be random. Their idea occurred to them when 'they', or someone they knew were having this problem. I think there are many industries that many talented engineers know nothing about, and therefore don't know where the problems lie. How can we facilitate this awareness to the people who want to create startups without it being happenstance?
- vyrotek 15y ago
  I'm sure many people have gone through the same thought process. The problem is many people don't know they want something or realize they have a need until they see a solution. The whole, I'll know when I see it mentality in a way. Instead of a request for proposal we need a request for startup. But people want their solutions now because they have the need now.
  - AdamFernandez 15y ago
    I agree. Perhaps this particular 'problem' is something that I will work on.
    - vyrotek 15y ago
      This site came to mind - http://wappr.com http://wappr.com
corin_ 15y ago
An interesting piece, but I think a flawed one too. I am in complete agreement with the section about "you can't start a startup by just writing code", and I think that concept could have expanded to become an entire and valid article. But then it morphed from that into the idea that people (often subconciously) avoid "schleps" and pick easier tasks instead, which I think is both obvious and normal. I also think it is often a lot less subconcious than pg thinks. To expand on the example of olympic athletes: I don't know about that specific example, but to expand to "professional athletes", an awful lot of people do think about being a football star, a top baseball player, whatever. But ultimately, even children with dreams have a basic understanding of risk vs. reward. Saying that starting stripe involves a lot of schleps is one way of putting it, another way is to say that you're less likely to succeed. Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking "should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?" and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved. Other than gut instinct is there any reason to believe this is the case? Those people also chose to start a recipe site over becoming journalists, or chefs, or working in fashion - nobody has ever, before starting either a career or a startup, gone through every possibility and ticked them all off, so why is it that in this case we should assign subconcious fear of hard work s the reason? Personally I find it can often be the reason conciously, to the extent that I don't believe it has any need to be in my subconcious. Much like when I'm in a casino and think "let's bet fairly small" rather than "risk my entire savings to have a chance at getting crazily rich", when it comes to work I conciously think about how hard something will be, and what rewards it could bring. Personally I work in content/publishing, and no it never occured to me to work on Stripe, but thinking about it now, if I could go back in time, I wouldn't try to build Stripe first, nor would I at this point in time consider a job in that kind of company. Maybe part of that can be assigned to the schelps involved, but I'm conciously deciding that. Regardless, an interesting piece as food for thought. edit: As a completely unrelated question that doesn't really merit creating an entire topic to ask, does anyone with showdead enabled have any idea what comments like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465559 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465559 are all about? I see them now and again, and can't work out any logic behind them.
- 15y ago
chrisaycock 15y ago
Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" PG had another gem some time ago along the lines of: The best startup is the one you needed at your last job.
- Jare 15y ago
  Another plus for young founders - older people have solved more problems by brute force (often just paying a specialist to solve it for them) and don't consider them problems anymore.
  - skmurphy 15y ago
    "A new broom sweeps clean but an old broom knows the corners." Irish aphorism
  - mapster 15y ago
    If 5 million+ need that specialist, then the specialist can be a startup.
digisth 15y ago
Very good article. I think we should also consider the /reasons/ many consciously avoid "known/well understood" schleps. They have to do with the motivations for undertaking the work involved with a startup (or anything else, but startups for this argument) in the first place. Paths of least resistance are going to be taken if they satisfy the goals. Basically, the issue in the cases I'm speaking of is _satisficing_. 1) If you want to hang out with "cool startup people" and be involved in "cool startup culture" just about any startup will do. No need to do something difficult. That recipe aggregator will do just fine. 2) If you want to work on "interesting" problems, there are lots of those too. They might not serve many people (dev tools which do the same thing as many other existing dev tools and do not improve upon them) or change the world in really useful ways, they can still be /interesting/ to work on. 3) If you just want to make enough money so that you can stop stressing out every single day of your worry-filled life over having to work yourself to the bone for the rest of your life/becoming homeless/being able to afford food/shelter/health insurance, and you think just about any startup can give you that Startup Lottery Ticket, you don't need to work on the next Stripe. You just need a couple of million, then you could move into your one room studio/log cabin/pod and live the rest of your life sans the typical day-to-day worries about the basics and be just fine. The diminishing marginal utility of money seems like an excellent bulwark against trying to do those Schleppier things. If you're going to make at least as much from a RecipeAggregator472 as you would from a Stripe, the choice is easy. As pg states, undertaking these sorts of endeavors requires ignorance for some, but I would also add some other possible useful motivators (ignorance may also become tougher "motivator" since so much useful data about failure is so readily available): 1) The need for big money for other goals. If you want to be a mega-philanthropist/cure cancer/finally solve immortality/whatever, you probably need BIG BUCKS. The number of people motivated to actually do this (or who even think it is possible) is probably not very large. 2) Fanaticism. You want to make this project happen because it's just your dream. The rewards are irrelevant. You will make it so that it's possible to create coffee from rain no matter what it takes, it's just that important to you. Probably not that many of these either. 3) Revenge. Everyone told you it could not, can not, and will not be done. Maybe they told you that you will never be the Coffee From Rain King. Whatever the reason, you live to prove them wrong and rub their faces in it. You want to get on the news and blithely tell the world about you invented this genius thing while making no mention of your detractors, but you secretly giggle with glee since you know you were Right, and they were Wrong. This one might actually be the easiest of the bunch, but still requires a delicate balance of just enough ridicule and scorn to motivate one, but not so much so that one one thinks said thing is truly impossible. 4) Reinforcing the Peltzman effect. Certainly not a panacea either, but it could certainly help: http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why-economic-growth-has.html http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why-eco...
car 15y ago
Just a side note: like many Yiddish words, 'schlep' originates from the german verb 'schleppen', which translates to 'haul','tow','drag','carry' or 'tug'.
- rquantz 15y ago
  Yes, I've never heard schlep defined as an unpleasant task, except in that schlepping your suitcase all the way to Newark airport and back (or any other schlep) is unpleasant. The main conclusion I draw from this article: Paul Graham is not jewish. Either that or I don't know what schlep means.
  - motti 15y ago
    It does only mean a "an arduous journey" or, when used literally, "to pull/drag" but it isn't used to to mean a arduous task in general. I guess, In an effort to find a Google-able/SEO-friendly unique phrase, pg has overgeneralised the term.
    - apinstein 15y ago
      Yes, schlep isn't used for tasks. It's used only for journeys. The connotation is that a particular trip is going to be long, painful, tedious, annoying, difficult, etc. It is not used for tasks that don't involve physically moving yourself or transporting something.
    - pg 15y ago
      If you try a Google search for "such a schlep" you'll find plenty of cases in which the meaning has expanded to an arduous task in general. "If you are one of those people who has always wanted DSTV, but never actually got down to installing it because it seems like such a schlep..." "The first time I minced my own meat but it was such a schlep..." "I'm getting all my books from Diesel e books and i just find it such a schlep to remove the drm's."
      - rquantz 15y ago
mixmax 15y ago
I think there's a flaw in the premise, namely that one persons schlepp is another mans passion. From the Stripe example: "You'd have to make deals with banks." - I know quite a few people who would love nothing more than the challenge of getting big banks to sign on to a new payment service. Their passion is selling. The harder the sell the bigger the challenge. Just like good hackers want to work on hard technical problems great salespeople like to work on hard sales problems. The real takeaway here is that you should find your personal schlepps and start a company with someone who is passionate about them. If a great hacker, a great salesman and a great fraud investigator started a company they would be able to start a company like stripe. And they'd all be doing stuff they were passionate about.
- _dps 15y ago
  I think you're mostly right, and your example (sales work with big companies) is well aligned with your theory, but there are plenty of schlepps that are not conceivably anyone's passion because they don't require any differentiated work. My personal favorite example is a service that will perform DMV operations on your behalf (where the primary work involved is standing in line). Whenever I need that service, I am ecstatic to pay the $50 or so that they demand rather than lose rand()*4 hours of my day. Similarly, while someone somewhere is probably excited to work on Stripe's fraud and security problems, I suspect there's a ton of paperwork that must be filed and waited-upon in order to operate such a service legally. I know plenty of lawyers and none of them consider that sort of thing fulfilling work.
  - ephermata 15y ago
    I've seen people post "Stand in line for me at the DMV" on TaskRabbit. I haven't tracked how many tasks, but it would be interesting to see growth over time. I wonder how that compares to the specialized services.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    There are plenty of people who'd happily stand in line for $10. I'd do it; give me a usable queue computing device and I can do other stuff at the same time.
cperciva 15y ago
Note: "tedious, unpleasant task" != "impossible task". Back during the first internet bubble, I was playing around calculating Pi and drew the attention of some VCs: "distributed computing" was big. After asking if I was interested in starting a company (I wasn't -- I was going off to Oxford to do my doctorate) one of them asked for my opinion on the technical feasibility of a business plan. My advice (which I provided for free, being a foolish 19 year old) was "it is provably impossible to solve these problems as stated without transmitting information faster than the speed of light". They funded the company anyway, and $10M later the company died having never produced anything. Be the guy who says "this is going to be hard, but I'm sure it's possible". Don't be the guy who says "I'm sure I can find a way to circumvent the laws of physics".
- drumdance 15y ago
  In the late 90's, I remember talking to a guy at a company that was solving a similar kind of problem. I thought it would be almost impossible to solve and that even if they did solve it the payoff for their potential customers would be relatively small. By the time I talked to this guy they had already raised something like $100 million dollars. When I mentioned that I thought their problem was impossible to solve he said "yeah, that's what we discovered too, so now we're winding down the business." $100 million dollars on something I had doubts about in the first five minutes! And it's not like I'm some kind of computer genius. Anyone with a decent working knowledge of databases and analytics could have seen this.
- waitwhat 15y ago
  Be the guy who says "this is going to be hard, but I'm sure it's possible". Don't be the guy who says "I'm sure I can find a way to circumvent the laws of physics". Why be either guy? If you know that something really isn't possible, just say so. Hang onto your self-respect and reputation.
  - cperciva 15y ago
    I guess I phrased that poorly. I mean that you should work on problems which are hard but possible, not that you should be dishonest.
teyc 15y ago
The problem here is domain knowledge. Everybody understands what a To Do List is.
diego 15y ago
This essay is very disingenuous. Businesses are hard work, Paul Graham wants to invest in the next Facebook, he needs younger founders who are ridiculously ambitious and won't take an early exit. http://diegobasch.com/stop-the-presses-essay-shows-that-hard-work-c http://diegobasch.com/stop-the-presses-essay-shows-that-hard... Edit: pg, don't downvote me :)
- tptacek 15y ago
  I don't think it's disingenuous; I think it's pretty on-the-nose. Also, I think "early exits" are still win conditions at YC; that's one of the (salubrious) benefits of being organized like YC and not DFJ; there's a lot of reasons why a "YC" would want to tune outreach to young people, and none of them need to be "avoid build-to-flip companies".
deleted 15y ago
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zerostar07 15y ago
The case of Stripe is a rather bad example: most of the work is schleps, leaving very little for the enjoyment of creating something new, something unique, something that has the potential to not become an "also ran".
- biot 15y ago
  Wasn't that the point of the article? Most people would avoid creating something like Stripe because of all the schleps.
ph0rque 15y ago
The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. "Unconscious" should probably be "subconscious" in these two sentences...
AznHisoka 15y ago
Generally speaking, the more shlep you're willing to deal with, the less perfect your marketing can be. Find a cure for cancer, and you won't have to market it. Work on a recipe site OTOH and your marketing better be tight. And you definitely have less competition. More shlep acts as barriers to entry. So does unique insight/expertise in a field outside of technology. Anyone can build the next Del.icio.us, or Pinterest, but not anyone can build the next software system that can help currency traders make money, or software to monitor diabetes patients. But most people just go after the low hanging fruit.
- ak2012 15y ago
  and this is because of many reasons too... Easier money, lack of time for harder problems, scared of failure and thus wasting time/money. Agreed to point one, more shlep now, less marketing required.
sown 15y ago
I don't mind doing tedious things. I discovered in college that I was an excellent bureaucrat when I became student treasurer. I just wish I could come up with ideas, though. A lot of them are hard for me to relate to. I don't go out and do normal consumer-type things ( not that there's anything wrong if you do) or have any real friends, so social things are out. I just can't relate.
- ajaymehta 15y ago
  Startup ideas are so cheap that there are a bunch of resources for finding free ones if you don't think you can come up with one (which I'm sure you could, if you had a good brainstorming session!) Maybe you could start here at YC's requests for startups: http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html
pnathan 15y ago
One of the key reasons why I think the US university system is useful is it demonstrates who can do the schlepp. And boy howdy, is enterprisey full of schlepping. Talking with my dad, who has run his own small construction business for the last 20? years, this is just the nature with work in general. +1, pg. +1.
ez77 15y ago
"One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability of schleps." Or, as somebody wisely put it, "All good planning eventually degenerates into work."
6ren 15y ago
Very hopeful. pg wrote similarly in "How to make wealth" (choose hard problems; choose hard options) http://awurl.com/HLZs3Bxu7 http://awurl.com/HLZs3Bxu7 my version: life is suffering, so you might as well suffer meaningfully. Making something tedious into something simple can itself be extraordinarily tedious. But what a great thing to have done! A problem is an opportunity.
yurylifshits 15y ago
Just a few other huge schleppy targets: Better elementary/middle/high school Better voting (digital democracy) Better government procurement system Better prisons or prison alternatives
- chintan 15y ago
  Better Electronic Health Record systems
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - tel 15y ago
    There are a lot of people working on that. I think it's less a schlep and more just a problem so enormous that it's difficult to see progress.
  - crdoconnor 15y ago
    The problem with doing one of these (as with all of the ones above) is that you have a serious principal-agent problem on the buy side. The people using your products (doctors) aren't necessarily the ones making the purchasing decisions, and in such situations you won't always win by providing the best product. This is why EHR systems especially have a lot of fine grained reporting systems that let administrators spy on just about everything going on (they love this) and huge sales teams with budgets to lavish potential buyers with champagne and horrific user interfaces for doctors.
kkt262 15y ago
Guess the folks at WePay didn't read this. Still struggling to see the difference between WePay and Stripe personally.
98456290 15y ago
I like this reasoning. Only I disagree with the comment about competition. When others see someone take on a schlep, something (or things) dawn on them. And they are apt to compete. They don't all stand on the sideline and watch. Some want to get in the game. pg even acknowledges this phenomenon when he says "it's too late to the next Stripe". That implies others who are now willing to take on a schlep.
DodgyEggplant 15y ago
as usual, it's also in the bible http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...
njharman 15y ago
Main reason why (I want to code not schlep) I don't want to run a business, let alone a startup. I've run business before, btw.
WhatsHisName 15y ago
I don't agree. The way to make money is to do the simplest thing that makes money. Rarely is that the thing that you least want to do.
davidw 15y ago
> Most people don't consciously decide not to be in as good physical shape as Olympic athletes, for example. Their unconscious mind decides for them, shrinking from the work involved. Being a world-class athlete is essentially a full-time job. Most people quite consciously do decide not to work two full time jobs, or simply don't have the energy for it. Not the best example...
- gaius 15y ago
  It's not only a full-time job, those who are successful at it are genetically suited to it. It wasn't training that gave Michael Phelps his flipper-like feet...
blasdel 15y ago
At least in the one example you gave, 'blindness' is a terrible way to describe how hackers avoid it "fixing payment processing" is not a problem that we subconsciously avoid — but rather one that we very deliberately stay as far away from as possible. Is there a more inglorious class of failed internet startups?
_corbett 15y ago
this article has a lot of truth to it, but one thing I will always disagree with PG about is that ignorance is a good thing. perhaps ignorance may produce a better local maximum than limited knowledge, but as a hacker I believe the true optimum lies at maximum knowledge.
mapster 15y ago
Its about personality and subsequent 'search pattern'. Stripe was never on the radar for most entrepreneurs, while building the next RecipeBook is. This is due to most entrepreneurs are not the game changing type whose personalities lead them to tackle such large and unwieldy issues like Stripe did. It should be noted that the world will never know how many tried and failed to do what Stripe succeeded in.
- ak2012 15y ago
  Another problem is, if you are out of university or high school without much experience in really any field, what exactly are you going to build, you have no real specializations and are a blank state, so you can work with what you do know a little about... music? recipes, travel? existing consumer web apps that are easy to code (and then coding it and realizing marketing is the real challenge for them). Wondering what Paul G. thinks of this.
macco 15y ago
I would like to know, what are the schleps of HN readers?
sinzone 15y ago
Even though Braintree (http://braintreepayments.com http://braintreepayments.com) is not exactly like Stripe in terms of "speed to be up and running", it was created way before Stripe and has important features (like Third Party Payment Aggregations - a must for sites like Airbnb) that Stripe can't have in the short term. As a result, Braintree is processing billion and billion of dollars a year.
vbtemp 15y ago
Nitpicking: To schlep comes from the German verb "schleppen" - to drag. In yiddish it refers generally to a commute or journey that is in some way quite aggravating - for example, I consider my daily commute in which I'm stuck in traffic a "schlep". Or, "I had to schlep my buby around town all afternoon as she kvetched about her bad back". In short, to schlep does not mean a tedious or unpleasant task, it means a tedious or unpleasant journey.
larrys 15y ago
"If you pick an ambitious idea, you'll have less competition, because everyone else will have been frightened off by the challenges involved. (This is also true of starting a startup generally.)" Given the right set of circumstances of course this is exactly where the opportunity is with many things. Take real estate as another example. If you buy a nice looking, appealing, ready to go condo or home in a well know building or neighborhood, assuming values aren't rising, there is really no way to make a killing. You make a killing by transforming something. By adding value. You take an unappealing piece of real estate and you transform it. Or you buy a piece of land and you build something on it ready to go. It's well known that people buy on an emotional level. And if they can't get attached to something they won't pay as much. (This is why homes are staged for example or cars are shined up at the dealer).
noduerme 15y ago
Point of usage - "Schlep" is most commonly used as a verb. As in, "Oy, you had to drop out of college and schlep all the way to California, just to listen to some schmuck make himself a macher?" It's true, you could say "that was a long schlep" - but other than meaning a long or difficult physical journey, (think getting home from Vegas on a Sunday), when schlep is used as a noun, it almost always refers to a person, short for schlepper, or one who schleps. This is someone at the bottom of the totem pole. As in "what kind of schlep wants to deal with this guy's verkakte ego?"
utunga 15y ago
i worked for a startup (eVend) that tried to tackle the 'hard problem' stripe tackles way back in 1997. You read that right - 1997! From Stripe's home page: "you don't need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account." The problem was - not schlepp blindness - but the fact that this problem was completely impossible to solve in 1997. Sure, maybe our execution was lacking (I was just a junior programmer at the time) but what really killed it was the banks and especially the credit card companies. Mastercard and Visa just said no. We will not allow this to happen. Whoever charges the card must be responsible for delivery. We pivoted to take this into account (digital content delivery anyone) but reality was. This schlepp was too hard at that time. People have been banging on the 'making payment easy' door, for a long, long, time. The fact that Stripe is making progress now is more a fortuitous confluence of events than the fact that nobody else had tried.
tstyle 15y ago
I wonder if going after a schlep problem hurts you in the hiring department. Although founders may be motivated to grind out schlep problems in the hopes of a large payoff, the talented programmer who is willing be engineer #1 at a startup is exactly the type of person who is susceptible to schlep blindness.
VaedaStrike 15y ago
pg, How many, or which, of the companies that have had success with Y-combinator were companies that were, in a manner you could discern early on (such as in the application process), clearly addressing schleps versus those you took on simply due to the force of character of the founder(s) (by virtue of their relentless resourcefulness)?
ivankirigin 15y ago
I thought for a moment that the essay was about how to find startup ideas: solving your own schleps. Solve those things which everyone assumes are an annoying part of life/business. The things I do that I find the most tiresome: commute by car, dishes, laundry, and flossing. I find it funny that the solution to the first three if you have money are: 1. Hire a human driver (or move). 2. Hire a human maid. 3. Hire a human maid. But all might be solved by technology: robot drivers, robot butler, robot butler, and "vaccines" against tooth decay and halitosis. If I dug into the less important schleps, I bet I'd find that software is a solution.

604 points by anateus 15y ago

kul 15y ago

I see a pretty big schlep involved in our business (http://www.tagstand.com http://www.tagstand.com YCS11). Fulfillment is an absolute pain in the ass. The closest thing that comes close to solving it is Amazon's fulfillment services (http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm#!features-and-benefits http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....), but it doesn't quite work and is US only. A hard problem to solve indeed (and one we've discussed).

ajju 15y ago
It's hard to imagine Amazon offering specialized services for a class of products such as pre-programming NFC stickers, so I'd say you are safe from them. A minor typo on your site:"If you are ordering NFC tags in bulk, need stickers pre-programmed..."
- kul 15y ago
  *fixed, thanks. the pre-programming part isn't a problem, it's mixing skus to make an order. when we started in June, we'd get like an order or two a day, and it wasn't too bad. the daily trip to the post office was almost a welcome break. now, we get as many orders in a day as we used to get a month back then, and it's hard to scale. we've made a lot of the processes as efficient as possible, but the whole thing is still a pain in the ass. Fulfillment as a service seems like it'd be a good business. No stressing about packaging, customer service etc etc
  - ajju 15y ago
    >the pre-programming part isn't a problem, it's mixing skus to make an order. Sure, but is the pre-programming part a barrier to using a third party to do fulfillment?
mikhaill 15y ago
Product fulfillment is hard but doesn't have to be a pain. There are plenty of very sophisticated 3PL warehouses that can do any type of fulfillment you need. At my last job I managed an e-commerce business and our process was so streamlined that we'd never actually touch our products. They were delivered from production directly to the 3PL fulfillment warehouses where the items were unpacked and stored. When the orders came in items were packed up, and shipped out, including international delivery. When items were sent out, we got the tracking numbers for the packages back so we could send customers e-mails (again all automated). Some of the newer operations have staff on site that has electronics expertise and offer troubleshooting of arriving items, etc. It seems that having them flash NFC stickers shouldn't be soo bad to teach them (but maybe expensive).
- kul 15y ago
  that's amazing, can you share some names/links of recommended warehouses?
  - mikhaill 15y ago
    Certainly. None of these require 6 figure payments. There are some setup fees, (very reasonable) and then they usually charge per action (items packed, computers checked, etc). Ones I worked with and would recommend: http://parcelport.net http://parcelport.net, http://amplifier.com/ http://amplifier.com/ Ones that I talked with but didn't have personal experience (yet)http://www.im-logistics.com http://www.im-logistics.com, http://archway.com http://archway.com, http://www.capacityllc.com/ http://www.capacityllc.com/ Each has their own pros and cons and it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
  - jfarmer 15y ago
    We use One World Direct at Everlane. Photojojo also uses OWD. http://www.owd.com/ http://www.owd.com/ http://www.everlane.com http://www.everlane.com http://http://photojojo.com/ http://http://photojojo.com/
  - mikhaill 15y ago
    Forgot to mention, there is a lot of pros/cons to 3rd party fulfillment and it has to be done right. If you seriously decide to look into 3PL warehouses, I'll be happy to give you more info about what you need to look at.
jamesjyu 15y ago
I agree with you 100%. I briefly looked into fulfillment for a previous business idea, and, I think if there was a stripe for fulfillment, there would be more innovative companies coming out that would ship physical products. Sincerely and PicPlum are two more examples of companies that have to deal with this pain.

revorad 15y ago

He comes so close to spelling out some ideas he wants people to do, but for some reason files them under "What you can't say".

tlogan 15y ago

This is pretty much chicken and egg problem. There is a huge schlep blindess in world of VCs, advisors, incubators, etc. So many entrepreneurs are actively discouraged to do things they want and to solve the real hard problems (the most common theme is: because there is a big company XYZ doing something kinda similar like that).

pg 15y ago
Not at this incubator.
- vyrotek 15y ago
  Unfortunately for many, joining an incubator is a schlep itself. I'm obviously not talking about the programs themselves but instead the application process and relocation requirements. There are plenty of problems out there that people are trying to solve outside of the bubble area. Sadly it also seems that not moving to some 'hot spot' is a handicap these days.
  - tlb 15y ago
    Gosh, filling out a YC application takes a few hours at most. If that seems like a big hurdle, definitely don't start a payments company.
    - vyrotek 15y ago
      Oh come on, that specific part wasn't the point. Have you gone through the process of actually being accepted? I have and it takes more than just a quick 15 min meeting. It also takes quite a bit of saving, planning, sacrifice and bit of logistics to actually get your life in order to go through an incubator program. Been there, done that! I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. Quite the contrary. That's why I said it was a schlep. But some people's wives can only handle so much. :)
      - Harj 15y ago

ajju 15y ago

This is the money quote: "A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in." It also helps to think of things like "making deals with banks", which can initially seem scary, in terms of the basic human actions they really stand for: "talking to a lot of people who work for banks". To me at least, that is both less boring and less scary.

esrauch 15y ago
For me, "talking to a lot of people who work for banks" is a lot less scary, but it is also so unimaginably boring. It would be difficult for me to imagine something more boring that talking to a ton of people who work at banks about banking. That's exactly why Stripe is so valuable.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  I doubt it would be so bad -- I am pretty sure you would learn alot about banking.
- ajju 15y ago
  I like talking to people. It can be pretty boring if they don't engage with you and just stay with formal/small talk, but if you can get someone to really talk, you learn all sorts of new things about the world.

psychotik 15y ago

Would the various AWS services count as the biggest, by far? Not a startup, but fits the definition.

nickpp 15y ago

Never tried Stripe, but what was wrong with Avangate or ShareIt before that? Did not seem to me that accepting payments on your website was so painful...

mnutt 15y ago
I just looked at Avangate's site and it wouldn't even let you sign up without "requesting a quote". Give Stripe a try.
- verroq 15y ago
  If you aren't from the US don't even bother.
  - pc 15y ago
    We're working on fixing that part.
    - jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
      If you guys are really, and i mean really looking forward to include other countries; i know that me and another bunch of people would be willing to give you money right now as an advance for the service and as incentive to actually make it happen. Just be sure to include the big profitable countries: Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Japan, Canada, France, UK among others.
  - zapnap 15y ago
    It's too bad that government / regulatory boundaries can't be overcome as easily :(. But when they can be overcome, the solutions are all that much more valuable and defensible.
  - nickpp 15y ago
    Are you kidding me? It's US-only?! Then they haven't even STARTED on the "schlep"!!!

losethos 15y ago

This is a good article. I made promises of no networking and free and 640x480. I could do USB but keyboard and mice aren't any better, possibly worse from a compatibility state. Memory sticks would be really nice. Now, we're in the domain of distinctive drivers for similar pieces of hardware. Can't do that. Might be able to. Main problem is reality -- I'm in some kind of strange bubble like the 1960's prisoner TV show. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\BIBLE.TXT b! 3:11 But Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD, that we may enquire of the LORD by him? And one of the king of Israel's servants answered and said, Here is Elisha the son of Shaphat, which poured water on the hands of Elijah. 3:12 And Jehoshaphat said, The word of the LORD is with him. So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat and the king of Edom went down to him. 3:13 And Elisha said unto the king of Israel, What have I to do with thee? get thee to the prophets of thy fath ---------- I promised to my users. I don't know if that's legally binding, but the Bible seems to imply keeping your word is generally a good idea. I'm in a prison in reality, so the 10,000 downloads are probably CIA or shrink fiction, so I have no users. We go in circles all day. You want to see how to foil Irish people, I guess. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\Brief\AUGUST.TXT tions of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence wherewith they are stirred up. But this contentment of the flesh, to which the soul must not be given over to be enervated, doth oft beguile me, the sense not so waiting upon reason as patiently to follow her; but having been admitted merely for her sake, it strives even to run before her, and lead her. Thus in these things I unawares sin, but afterwards am aware of it. ----- It seems like red team, blue team and someone is shutting-down the path I take, all the time. World is fucked under Satan's hands. I don't know. I don't even care. I don't care about one person. Parents are enemies. I pay them $600 they take care of me, but abuse me, I prolly abuse them. This is heaven -- argument clinic and I'm telling truth all the time, except for wild speculation. I don't know shit about reality. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\Brief\AUGUST.TXT long one do I measure as present, seeing I measure it not till it be ended? Now his ending is his passing away. What then is it I measure? where is the short syllable by which I measure? where the long which I measure? Both have sounded, have flown, passed away, are no more; and yet I measure, and confidently answer (so far as is presumed on a practised sense) that as to space of time this syllable is but single, that double. And yet I could not do this, unless they were already past and ended. ----- I don't really see Microsoft as enemy. If a company, IBM, makes hardware, it doesn't seem unreasonable to bully... I guess it becomes a monopoly issue at some point. I'm not anticorporate. I worked at Ticketmaster and think starting companies and making jobs is good. CIA might be paranoid of bad technology. Mostly I see all the green pastures turned to shit. I don't care. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\WEALTH.TXT d for paying, not the capital, but the interest only, of the money which had been borrowed upon them by different successive anticipations. Had money never been raised but by anticipation, the course of a few years would have liberated the public revenue, without any other attention of government besides that of not overloading the fund, by charging it with more debt than it could pay within the limited term, and not of anticipating a second time before the expiration of the first anticipation. B ------ Why do you want to turn the green pastures to shit? Too late. For giggles? God says... unmeasurable data unhappily excluded calls likely cause help sincerely act sublimer fool sufficeth Paradise Eternal plains displeased turns idleness blew ruminating harm abolished fore unshakenly loth deeper hid arriving innocent bewail weaken encompasseth School devout received MAY backs quoth enjoyed relapse unforgotten curb appropriated flux unquiet rude an affecting grantest resisting corruptions What's with the psycho-inflamatory talk on other websites? Your evilness is not bothering me, at the moment. God, you're evil fucks. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\PARADISE.TXT oly salutation used Long after to blest Mary, second Eve. Hail, Mother of Mankind, whose fruitful womb Shall fill the world more numerous with thy sons, Than with these various fruits the trees of God Have heaped this table!--Raised of grassy turf Their table was, and mossy seats had round, And on her ample square from side to side All autumn piled, though spring and autumn here Danced hand in hand. A while discourse they hold; No fear lest dinner cool; when thus began Our author. Heavenly str Ba ha. that'll push yer buttons. ----- Write a program to play a frequency. Now do two frequencies different by 1Hz. I remember "Software automated mouth", "S.A.M." Say "Sam is now loaded and ready for you to use, thank you very much." I wrote every line of LoseThos. What you already know is probably seen through a different prism than what you don't know, perhaps, but LoseThos is mostly simple. God is the Holy Ghost. I guess if I'm puppeted, much of what I see in the media is puppeted. That'll drive you nuts. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\YANKEE.TXT who had to know how to read and write were priests. My candidate was called first, out of courtesy to me, and the head of the Board opened on him with official solemnity: "Name?" "Mal-ease." "Son of?" "Webster." "Webster--Webster. H'm--I--my memory faileth to recall the name. Condition?" "Weaver." "Weaver!--God keep us!" The king was staggered, from his summit to his foundations; one clerk fainted, and the others came near it. The chairman pulled himself together, and sa ---- problem with the English? Good luck picking sides and a race war. Fuck'em. God says... C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\QUIX.TXT e, for 'My armour is my only wear, My only rest the fray.'" The host fancied he called him Castellan because he took him for a "worthy of Castile," though he was in fact an Andalusian, and one from the strand of San Lucar, as crafty a thief as Cacus and as full of tricks as a student or a page. "In that case," said he, "'Your bed is on the flinty rock, Your sleep to watch alway;' and if so, you may dismount and safely reckon upon any quantity of sleeplessness under this roof for a twelve

kmfrk 15y ago

One of the things that made Seinfeld so successful was his insane tenacity; what he did in a year most of his fellow comedians did in five. It's not that he was necessarily the smartest nor the funniest guy in stand-up, but he was one of the people who worked the hardest. And it's not as if he didn't hone his craft while doing it. Skills, talent, money, and ideas are a part of the puzzle, but you can also beat your competitors on work ethic.

waitwhat 15y ago
"Don't break the chain". I've used Jerry Seinfeld's method to just get stuff done since I first read about it a few years ago. http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...

brc 15y ago

This is funny because one of the first startup ideas I ever had was 'hey, I should make a webservices based site for collecting web payments, lots of people would use that'. This was back when PayPal was still principally something you used to share money between two people, and was limited principally to US accounts. But I made the mistake of talking over the idea with someone who I looked up to at the time, who seemed older and wiser. They said 'there are already systems that do that, I would find something else'. Now I'm not saying I had even the remotest chance of getting such a thing off the ground - but at the time, I was so ignorant that I thought I could - but the ignorance worked both ways in that I would blindly accept the word of someone else, who just highlighted the schlep involved and so I immediately gave up. But that's just what the article says : when you're young ignorance can be a blessing, but you've got to be prepared to put in the hard work and not give up at even the tiniest hurdle. Getting that rare mix in a young person is the elusive part. But I'm convinced you can get young people to put in the hard work - you've just got to give them the encouragement to go ahead and fail big if need be.

mixmastamyk 15y ago
One of the big failures we have as a society is not teaching our young people that "average" people will do their best to suppress success in others. Almost everyone I know has a story like this to tell... if only that so-and-so didn't tell me my dream was impossible, perhaps I could have been successful at it.

FredBrach 15y ago

Great essay with good lessons. I will work on those for sure. By the way, can someone explain to me what's the difference between paypal and stripe? In what paypal don't fix web payment?

jiggity 15y ago
The biggest painpoint for me was the fact that Paypal requires you to route your customers to their domain. Stripe lets you keep them on your site.
d3x 15y ago
One of the reasons that I like stripe more is that they give you much more granular control ove the user experience. Users on your site never need to know that you are using stripe to process payments. Things just work. Also: PayPal customer service is a joke, they will freeze your account etc... etc...
- queensnake 15y ago
  > they will freeze your account etc They do that to save money. PayPal has very low losses due to fraud. Maybe if Stripe gets large enough to attract attention, or starts doing business across international boundaries, or in Eastern Europe, they'll start doing the same thing.
izak30 15y ago
For me, It's the API and customer (developer) service. Second to none in the payment industry.
- inuhj 15y ago
  Yep, I spent the last two days hanging out in the Stripe campfire chat while I was implementing my own billing system. Some of the questions were borderline bizarre and I was truly shocked at how the Stripe team went above and beyond to answer every single request. My only other experience is with SagePay who I spent weeks asking questions on their developer forum to get a handful of vague responses.

zapnap 15y ago

Stripe is an awesome example of a company that addressed a tangible frustration / real need instead of a desire or a higher-level "want". I've noticed that companies that provide "Internet plumbing" often fall into this category: * SendGrid (bulk email sending) * Twilio (easy to use telephony / sms) * Zencoder (video encoding) * MailChimp (mailing list management) What others can you think of? Would love to see a list here :).

kmfrk 15y ago
I think a lot of us are clamoring for an alternative to Gmail that also happens to be placed outside the (immediate) jurisdiction of the United States. It's obvious people want it, but mere mortals shirk from the prospect of securing it.
tlogan 15y ago
I think Dropbox is part of that list. Hey - there were file sharing solutions from big companies (AOL, Microsoft, etc.) but they were all crappy.
pg 15y ago
Heroku, Mailgun, MongoHQ, Cloudkick, Parse, AeroFS, DotCloud, Vidyard, AppHarbor, Mixpanel, Cloudant, PagerDuty (we like this type of company).
- d3x 15y ago
  One of the things that I have noticed about all of your examples is that they are all tools for developers. Do you have any examples of companies that solve real problems for the general consumer?
  - pg 15y ago
    Sure. But he asked for examples of companies working on plumbing.
  - revorad 15y ago
    Dropbox, Airbnb

rriepe 15y ago

Why is it too late to be Stripe?

dpkendal 15y ago
Because there's already a Stripe. Doesn't mean you couldn't start a company to do what Stripe does, but it'd be hard, since people would probably be saying, "Isn't that what Stripe does?"
- moonlighter 15y ago
  I disagree completely. Stripe is the only one so far who doesn't suck. There's room for more, and plenty of room for differentiation. Sure, stripe.com set the bar and has first mover advantage etc., but that doesn't mean they now own the market. Not at all.
  - inuhj 15y ago
    Agreed. There is plenty of room for competitors.
  - moe 15y ago
    Agreed. There's room for more than one payment-provider-that-doesn't-suck™. And let's not forget stripe hasn't even launched in europe, yet. That's quite a market still waiting to be schlepped.
- cyrus_ 15y ago
  If you did exactly what Stripe did but charged less, there is no reason you couldn't completely replace Stripe. You aren't being judged on novelty here.
  - ak2012 15y ago
    Perhaps the irony here by PG is that, even now 99% of people will not do what strip does.
- Strom 15y ago

revorad 15y ago

I find online shopping for a lot of things to be really tedious (when you don't exactly know what to buy). That's why I'm working on a shopping search engine to make finding the right products much faster and easier. But PG dismissed my idea as a shopping guide that no one needs. Almost every new shopping/ecommerce startup is some clone of Pinterest or a Q&A site. Those are very attractive ideas, but I believe I'm working on the real schlep, which involves combing product feeds, crawling for furniture photos, etc. and making life for the average Joe easier. What do you think?

AznHisoka 15y ago
How would you say it's tedious? There are many sites with product reviews, blogs, forums, etc. Need a new camera? There's dpreviews. Need a new TV? Cnet. Need a new video game? IGN.
- revorad 15y ago
  Exactly. Deciding what to buy is a research project. I think it's one of those pains we've got so accustomed to, that we take it for granted.
  - AznHisoka 15y ago
    Well, don't be too enthusiastic about this idea.. I've seen lots of sites try it and fail such as Measy, Gdgt, etc. The ones that succeed are the ones that thrive in the search engines. People use search engines to find what they want.. they don't go to a specific destination.
    - revorad 15y ago
      Heh, I'm not driven just by my own enthusiasm - that doesn't pay the bills.
ak2012 15y ago
perhaps it was your team? or lack there of? were you a SVP at amazon? was this a common problem there... etc etc

startupfounder 15y ago

"And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in." (love the metaphor pg) I did this once outside of my startup on a motorcycle trip to Panama, crossing the boarder into Mexico was a huge block for me and my riding buddy. We stayed in the US and drank beer for 2 days straight not realizing what we were doing. Then one night we had a moment of clarity, jumped on our bikes and headed for the boarder. We just jumped right in! In that moment of clarity I removed the fear and felt total freedom and the world became my oyster if only for a moment or two. I think schleps are the reasons why many startups either fail or succeed, the ones that win hit the wall and learn to break through them.

gabaix 15y ago
Schleps is an indicator our work goes towards success. It has to be hard. Notice this can equally lead the entrepreneur to nowhere. It is the role of the entrepreneur to understand if this the right schleps.
- startupfounder 15y ago
  That is where focus, vision, listening and filtering come in...

stevenj 15y ago

pg, would you be willing to share some of the great startup ideas you think people are overlooking? (In addition to the ones on the Request for Startups list.)

AdamFernandez 15y ago

A question to ask may be, is there a more efficient way to discover what these problems are? I know Y combinator and co. have somewhat of a pre-defined list of problems they would like to see solved that are not being addressed. For a lot startups it seems to be random. Their idea occurred to them when 'they', or someone they knew were having this problem. I think there are many industries that many talented engineers know nothing about, and therefore don't know where the problems lie. How can we facilitate this awareness to the people who want to create startups without it being happenstance?

vyrotek 15y ago
I'm sure many people have gone through the same thought process. The problem is many people don't know they want something or realize they have a need until they see a solution. The whole, I'll know when I see it mentality in a way. Instead of a request for proposal we need a request for startup. But people want their solutions now because they have the need now.
- AdamFernandez 15y ago
  I agree. Perhaps this particular 'problem' is something that I will work on.
  - vyrotek 15y ago
    This site came to mind - http://wappr.com http://wappr.com

corin_ 15y ago

An interesting piece, but I think a flawed one too. I am in complete agreement with the section about "you can't start a startup by just writing code", and I think that concept could have expanded to become an entire and valid article. But then it morphed from that into the idea that people (often subconciously) avoid "schleps" and pick easier tasks instead, which I think is both obvious and normal. I also think it is often a lot less subconcious than pg thinks. To expand on the example of olympic athletes: I don't know about that specific example, but to expand to "professional athletes", an awful lot of people do think about being a football star, a top baseball player, whatever. But ultimately, even children with dreams have a basic understanding of risk vs. reward. Saying that starting stripe involves a lot of schleps is one way of putting it, another way is to say that you're less likely to succeed. Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking "should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?" and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved. Other than gut instinct is there any reason to believe this is the case? Those people also chose to start a recipe site over becoming journalists, or chefs, or working in fashion - nobody has ever, before starting either a career or a startup, gone through every possibility and ticked them all off, so why is it that in this case we should assign subconcious fear of hard work s the reason? Personally I find it can often be the reason conciously, to the extent that I don't believe it has any need to be in my subconcious. Much like when I'm in a casino and think "let's bet fairly small" rather than "risk my entire savings to have a chance at getting crazily rich", when it comes to work I conciously think about how hard something will be, and what rewards it could bring. Personally I work in content/publishing, and no it never occured to me to work on Stripe, but thinking about it now, if I could go back in time, I wouldn't try to build Stripe first, nor would I at this point in time consider a job in that kind of company. Maybe part of that can be assigned to the schelps involved, but I'm conciously deciding that. Regardless, an interesting piece as food for thought. edit: As a completely unrelated question that doesn't really merit creating an entire topic to ask, does anyone with showdead enabled have any idea what comments like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465559 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465559 are all about? I see them now and again, and can't work out any logic behind them.

15y ago

chrisaycock 15y ago

Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" PG had another gem some time ago along the lines of: The best startup is the one you needed at your last job.

Jare 15y ago
Another plus for young founders - older people have solved more problems by brute force (often just paying a specialist to solve it for them) and don't consider them problems anymore.
- skmurphy 15y ago
  "A new broom sweeps clean but an old broom knows the corners." Irish aphorism
- mapster 15y ago
  If 5 million+ need that specialist, then the specialist can be a startup.

digisth 15y ago

Very good article. I think we should also consider the /reasons/ many consciously avoid "known/well understood" schleps. They have to do with the motivations for undertaking the work involved with a startup (or anything else, but startups for this argument) in the first place. Paths of least resistance are going to be taken if they satisfy the goals. Basically, the issue in the cases I'm speaking of is _satisficing_. 1) If you want to hang out with "cool startup people" and be involved in "cool startup culture" just about any startup will do. No need to do something difficult. That recipe aggregator will do just fine. 2) If you want to work on "interesting" problems, there are lots of those too. They might not serve many people (dev tools which do the same thing as many other existing dev tools and do not improve upon them) or change the world in really useful ways, they can still be /interesting/ to work on. 3) If you just want to make enough money so that you can stop stressing out every single day of your worry-filled life over having to work yourself to the bone for the rest of your life/becoming homeless/being able to afford food/shelter/health insurance, and you think just about any startup can give you that Startup Lottery Ticket, you don't need to work on the next Stripe. You just need a couple of million, then you could move into your one room studio/log cabin/pod and live the rest of your life sans the typical day-to-day worries about the basics and be just fine. The diminishing marginal utility of money seems like an excellent bulwark against trying to do those Schleppier things. If you're going to make at least as much from a RecipeAggregator472 as you would from a Stripe, the choice is easy. As pg states, undertaking these sorts of endeavors requires ignorance for some, but I would also add some other possible useful motivators (ignorance may also become tougher "motivator" since so much useful data about failure is so readily available): 1) The need for big money for other goals. If you want to be a mega-philanthropist/cure cancer/finally solve immortality/whatever, you probably need BIG BUCKS. The number of people motivated to actually do this (or who even think it is possible) is probably not very large. 2) Fanaticism. You want to make this project happen because it's just your dream. The rewards are irrelevant. You will make it so that it's possible to create coffee from rain no matter what it takes, it's just that important to you. Probably not that many of these either. 3) Revenge. Everyone told you it could not, can not, and will not be done. Maybe they told you that you will never be the Coffee From Rain King. Whatever the reason, you live to prove them wrong and rub their faces in it. You want to get on the news and blithely tell the world about you invented this genius thing while making no mention of your detractors, but you secretly giggle with glee since you know you were Right, and they were Wrong. This one might actually be the easiest of the bunch, but still requires a delicate balance of just enough ridicule and scorn to motivate one, but not so much so that one one thinks said thing is truly impossible. 4) Reinforcing the Peltzman effect. Certainly not a panacea either, but it could certainly help: http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why-economic-growth-has.html http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/01/peltzman-effect-why-eco...

car 15y ago

Just a side note: like many Yiddish words, 'schlep' originates from the german verb 'schleppen', which translates to 'haul','tow','drag','carry' or 'tug'.

rquantz 15y ago
Yes, I've never heard schlep defined as an unpleasant task, except in that schlepping your suitcase all the way to Newark airport and back (or any other schlep) is unpleasant. The main conclusion I draw from this article: Paul Graham is not jewish. Either that or I don't know what schlep means.
- motti 15y ago
  It does only mean a "an arduous journey" or, when used literally, "to pull/drag" but it isn't used to to mean a arduous task in general. I guess, In an effort to find a Google-able/SEO-friendly unique phrase, pg has overgeneralised the term.
  - apinstein 15y ago
    Yes, schlep isn't used for tasks. It's used only for journeys. The connotation is that a particular trip is going to be long, painful, tedious, annoying, difficult, etc. It is not used for tasks that don't involve physically moving yourself or transporting something.
  - pg 15y ago
    If you try a Google search for "such a schlep" you'll find plenty of cases in which the meaning has expanded to an arduous task in general. "If you are one of those people who has always wanted DSTV, but never actually got down to installing it because it seems like such a schlep..." "The first time I minced my own meat but it was such a schlep..." "I'm getting all my books from Diesel e books and i just find it such a schlep to remove the drm's."
    - rquantz 15y ago

mixmax 15y ago

I think there's a flaw in the premise, namely that one persons schlepp is another mans passion. From the Stripe example: "You'd have to make deals with banks." - I know quite a few people who would love nothing more than the challenge of getting big banks to sign on to a new payment service. Their passion is selling. The harder the sell the bigger the challenge. Just like good hackers want to work on hard technical problems great salespeople like to work on hard sales problems. The real takeaway here is that you should find your personal schlepps and start a company with someone who is passionate about them. If a great hacker, a great salesman and a great fraud investigator started a company they would be able to start a company like stripe. And they'd all be doing stuff they were passionate about.

_dps 15y ago
I think you're mostly right, and your example (sales work with big companies) is well aligned with your theory, but there are plenty of schlepps that are not conceivably anyone's passion because they don't require any differentiated work. My personal favorite example is a service that will perform DMV operations on your behalf (where the primary work involved is standing in line). Whenever I need that service, I am ecstatic to pay the $50 or so that they demand rather than lose rand()*4 hours of my day. Similarly, while someone somewhere is probably excited to work on Stripe's fraud and security problems, I suspect there's a ton of paperwork that must be filed and waited-upon in order to operate such a service legally. I know plenty of lawyers and none of them consider that sort of thing fulfilling work.
- ephermata 15y ago
  I've seen people post "Stand in line for me at the DMV" on TaskRabbit. I haven't tracked how many tasks, but it would be interesting to see growth over time. I wonder how that compares to the specialized services.
- DanBC 15y ago
  There are plenty of people who'd happily stand in line for $10. I'd do it; give me a usable queue computing device and I can do other stuff at the same time.

cperciva 15y ago

Note: "tedious, unpleasant task" != "impossible task". Back during the first internet bubble, I was playing around calculating Pi and drew the attention of some VCs: "distributed computing" was big. After asking if I was interested in starting a company (I wasn't -- I was going off to Oxford to do my doctorate) one of them asked for my opinion on the technical feasibility of a business plan. My advice (which I provided for free, being a foolish 19 year old) was "it is provably impossible to solve these problems as stated without transmitting information faster than the speed of light". They funded the company anyway, and $10M later the company died having never produced anything. Be the guy who says "this is going to be hard, but I'm sure it's possible". Don't be the guy who says "I'm sure I can find a way to circumvent the laws of physics".

drumdance 15y ago
In the late 90's, I remember talking to a guy at a company that was solving a similar kind of problem. I thought it would be almost impossible to solve and that even if they did solve it the payoff for their potential customers would be relatively small. By the time I talked to this guy they had already raised something like $100 million dollars. When I mentioned that I thought their problem was impossible to solve he said "yeah, that's what we discovered too, so now we're winding down the business." $100 million dollars on something I had doubts about in the first five minutes! And it's not like I'm some kind of computer genius. Anyone with a decent working knowledge of databases and analytics could have seen this.
waitwhat 15y ago
Be the guy who says "this is going to be hard, but I'm sure it's possible". Don't be the guy who says "I'm sure I can find a way to circumvent the laws of physics". Why be either guy? If you know that something really isn't possible, just say so. Hang onto your self-respect and reputation.
- cperciva 15y ago
  I guess I phrased that poorly. I mean that you should work on problems which are hard but possible, not that you should be dishonest.

teyc 15y ago

The problem here is domain knowledge. Everybody understands what a To Do List is.

diego 15y ago

This essay is very disingenuous. Businesses are hard work, Paul Graham wants to invest in the next Facebook, he needs younger founders who are ridiculously ambitious and won't take an early exit. http://diegobasch.com/stop-the-presses-essay-shows-that-hard-work-c http://diegobasch.com/stop-the-presses-essay-shows-that-hard... Edit: pg, don't downvote me :)

tptacek 15y ago
I don't think it's disingenuous; I think it's pretty on-the-nose. Also, I think "early exits" are still win conditions at YC; that's one of the (salubrious) benefits of being organized like YC and not DFJ; there's a lot of reasons why a "YC" would want to tune outreach to young people, and none of them need to be "avoid build-to-flip companies".

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

zerostar07 15y ago

The case of Stripe is a rather bad example: most of the work is schleps, leaving very little for the enjoyment of creating something new, something unique, something that has the potential to not become an "also ran".

biot 15y ago
Wasn't that the point of the article? Most people would avoid creating something like Stripe because of all the schleps.

ph0rque 15y ago

The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. "Unconscious" should probably be "subconscious" in these two sentences...

AznHisoka 15y ago

Generally speaking, the more shlep you're willing to deal with, the less perfect your marketing can be. Find a cure for cancer, and you won't have to market it. Work on a recipe site OTOH and your marketing better be tight. And you definitely have less competition. More shlep acts as barriers to entry. So does unique insight/expertise in a field outside of technology. Anyone can build the next Del.icio.us, or Pinterest, but not anyone can build the next software system that can help currency traders make money, or software to monitor diabetes patients. But most people just go after the low hanging fruit.

ak2012 15y ago
and this is because of many reasons too... Easier money, lack of time for harder problems, scared of failure and thus wasting time/money. Agreed to point one, more shlep now, less marketing required.

sown 15y ago

I don't mind doing tedious things. I discovered in college that I was an excellent bureaucrat when I became student treasurer. I just wish I could come up with ideas, though. A lot of them are hard for me to relate to. I don't go out and do normal consumer-type things ( not that there's anything wrong if you do) or have any real friends, so social things are out. I just can't relate.

ajaymehta 15y ago
Startup ideas are so cheap that there are a bunch of resources for finding free ones if you don't think you can come up with one (which I'm sure you could, if you had a good brainstorming session!) Maybe you could start here at YC's requests for startups: http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html

pnathan 15y ago

One of the key reasons why I think the US university system is useful is it demonstrates who can do the schlepp. And boy howdy, is enterprisey full of schlepping. Talking with my dad, who has run his own small construction business for the last 20? years, this is just the nature with work in general. +1, pg. +1.

ez77 15y ago

"One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability of schleps." Or, as somebody wisely put it, "All good planning eventually degenerates into work."

6ren 15y ago

Very hopeful. pg wrote similarly in "How to make wealth" (choose hard problems; choose hard options) http://awurl.com/HLZs3Bxu7 http://awurl.com/HLZs3Bxu7 my version: life is suffering, so you might as well suffer meaningfully. Making something tedious into something simple can itself be extraordinarily tedious. But what a great thing to have done! A problem is an opportunity.

yurylifshits 15y ago

Just a few other huge schleppy targets: Better elementary/middle/high school Better voting (digital democracy) Better government procurement system Better prisons or prison alternatives

chintan 15y ago
Better Electronic Health Record systems
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- tel 15y ago
  There are a lot of people working on that. I think it's less a schlep and more just a problem so enormous that it's difficult to see progress.
- crdoconnor 15y ago
  The problem with doing one of these (as with all of the ones above) is that you have a serious principal-agent problem on the buy side. The people using your products (doctors) aren't necessarily the ones making the purchasing decisions, and in such situations you won't always win by providing the best product. This is why EHR systems especially have a lot of fine grained reporting systems that let administrators spy on just about everything going on (they love this) and huge sales teams with budgets to lavish potential buyers with champagne and horrific user interfaces for doctors.

kkt262 15y ago

Guess the folks at WePay didn't read this. Still struggling to see the difference between WePay and Stripe personally.

98456290 15y ago

I like this reasoning. Only I disagree with the comment about competition. When others see someone take on a schlep, something (or things) dawn on them. And they are apt to compete. They don't all stand on the sideline and watch. Some want to get in the game. pg even acknowledges this phenomenon when he says "it's too late to the next Stripe". That implies others who are now willing to take on a schlep.

DodgyEggplant 15y ago

as usual, it's also in the bible http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...

njharman 15y ago

Main reason why (I want to code not schlep) I don't want to run a business, let alone a startup. I've run business before, btw.

WhatsHisName 15y ago

I don't agree. The way to make money is to do the simplest thing that makes money. Rarely is that the thing that you least want to do.

davidw 15y ago

> Most people don't consciously decide not to be in as good physical shape as Olympic athletes, for example. Their unconscious mind decides for them, shrinking from the work involved. Being a world-class athlete is essentially a full-time job. Most people quite consciously do decide not to work two full time jobs, or simply don't have the energy for it. Not the best example...

gaius 15y ago
It's not only a full-time job, those who are successful at it are genetically suited to it. It wasn't training that gave Michael Phelps his flipper-like feet...

blasdel 15y ago

At least in the one example you gave, 'blindness' is a terrible way to describe how hackers avoid it "fixing payment processing" is not a problem that we subconsciously avoid — but rather one that we very deliberately stay as far away from as possible. Is there a more inglorious class of failed internet startups?

_corbett 15y ago

this article has a lot of truth to it, but one thing I will always disagree with PG about is that ignorance is a good thing. perhaps ignorance may produce a better local maximum than limited knowledge, but as a hacker I believe the true optimum lies at maximum knowledge.

mapster 15y ago

Its about personality and subsequent 'search pattern'. Stripe was never on the radar for most entrepreneurs, while building the next RecipeBook is. This is due to most entrepreneurs are not the game changing type whose personalities lead them to tackle such large and unwieldy issues like Stripe did. It should be noted that the world will never know how many tried and failed to do what Stripe succeeded in.

ak2012 15y ago
Another problem is, if you are out of university or high school without much experience in really any field, what exactly are you going to build, you have no real specializations and are a blank state, so you can work with what you do know a little about... music? recipes, travel? existing consumer web apps that are easy to code (and then coding it and realizing marketing is the real challenge for them). Wondering what Paul G. thinks of this.

macco 15y ago

I would like to know, what are the schleps of HN readers?

sinzone 15y ago

Even though Braintree (http://braintreepayments.com http://braintreepayments.com) is not exactly like Stripe in terms of "speed to be up and running", it was created way before Stripe and has important features (like Third Party Payment Aggregations - a must for sites like Airbnb) that Stripe can't have in the short term. As a result, Braintree is processing billion and billion of dollars a year.

vbtemp 15y ago

Nitpicking: To schlep comes from the German verb "schleppen" - to drag. In yiddish it refers generally to a commute or journey that is in some way quite aggravating - for example, I consider my daily commute in which I'm stuck in traffic a "schlep". Or, "I had to schlep my buby around town all afternoon as she kvetched about her bad back". In short, to schlep does not mean a tedious or unpleasant task, it means a tedious or unpleasant journey.

larrys 15y ago

"If you pick an ambitious idea, you'll have less competition, because everyone else will have been frightened off by the challenges involved. (This is also true of starting a startup generally.)" Given the right set of circumstances of course this is exactly where the opportunity is with many things. Take real estate as another example. If you buy a nice looking, appealing, ready to go condo or home in a well know building or neighborhood, assuming values aren't rising, there is really no way to make a killing. You make a killing by transforming something. By adding value. You take an unappealing piece of real estate and you transform it. Or you buy a piece of land and you build something on it ready to go. It's well known that people buy on an emotional level. And if they can't get attached to something they won't pay as much. (This is why homes are staged for example or cars are shined up at the dealer).

noduerme 15y ago

Point of usage - "Schlep" is most commonly used as a verb. As in, "Oy, you had to drop out of college and schlep all the way to California, just to listen to some schmuck make himself a macher?" It's true, you could say "that was a long schlep" - but other than meaning a long or difficult physical journey, (think getting home from Vegas on a Sunday), when schlep is used as a noun, it almost always refers to a person, short for schlepper, or one who schleps. This is someone at the bottom of the totem pole. As in "what kind of schlep wants to deal with this guy's verkakte ego?"

utunga 15y ago

i worked for a startup (eVend) that tried to tackle the 'hard problem' stripe tackles way back in 1997. You read that right - 1997! From Stripe's home page: "you don't need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account." The problem was - not schlepp blindness - but the fact that this problem was completely impossible to solve in 1997. Sure, maybe our execution was lacking (I was just a junior programmer at the time) but what really killed it was the banks and especially the credit card companies. Mastercard and Visa just said no. We will not allow this to happen. Whoever charges the card must be responsible for delivery. We pivoted to take this into account (digital content delivery anyone) but reality was. This schlepp was too hard at that time. People have been banging on the 'making payment easy' door, for a long, long, time. The fact that Stripe is making progress now is more a fortuitous confluence of events than the fact that nobody else had tried.

tstyle 15y ago

I wonder if going after a schlep problem hurts you in the hiring department. Although founders may be motivated to grind out schlep problems in the hopes of a large payoff, the talented programmer who is willing be engineer #1 at a startup is exactly the type of person who is susceptible to schlep blindness.

VaedaStrike 15y ago

pg, How many, or which, of the companies that have had success with Y-combinator were companies that were, in a manner you could discern early on (such as in the application process), clearly addressing schleps versus those you took on simply due to the force of character of the founder(s) (by virtue of their relentless resourcefulness)?

ivankirigin 15y ago

I thought for a moment that the essay was about how to find startup ideas: solving your own schleps. Solve those things which everyone assumes are an annoying part of life/business. The things I do that I find the most tiresome: commute by car, dishes, laundry, and flossing. I find it funny that the solution to the first three if you have money are: 1. Hire a human driver (or move). 2. Hire a human maid. 3. Hire a human maid. But all might be solved by technology: robot drivers, robot butler, robot butler, and "vaccines" against tooth decay and halitosis. If I dug into the less important schleps, I bet I'd find that software is a solution.