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 t

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.