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Ask HN: Are Paul Graham's Classic Startup Essays Outdated?

88 points by SunghoYahng 4y ago

Updates needed on Paul Graham's startup essays?

bmulholland 4y ago
This is an interesting question, but a bit vague and therefore hard to answer. Some of the articles that come to mind are quite timeless, such as Schlep Blindness. Do you have some particular articles in mind that you think are outdated? Which? Why?
epberry 4y ago
Startup = Growth is timeless, as are most of the essays. I did feel Hackers vs Painters was little outdated but the book is almost 30 years old at this point.
- osrec 4y ago
  30? I thought it was more like 20.
  - another-dave 4y ago
    Yeah,2004 according to Wikipedia so just under twenty.
eastbound 4y ago
I would change topics as: Is creating startups outdated? …making PG essays outdated. I’m serious. 1980-2020 was the hype of an undertaped market that was personal computing. Anyone in a garage could do something revolutionary because anything was already better than nothing. Even if it didn’t respect GDPR and leaked PII accounts like a sieve. That’s always like that in the start of a Schumpeter economic cycle, same happened with cars in 1900. Now, we’re in a consolidation phase. Or are we still in an “invention” phase? AI maybe?
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >Or are we still in an “invention” phase? AI maybe? I think AI will ultimately be the driver of consolidation. The innovation in software of the last 30 years was, as you said, from the ability of anyone with a laptop to dream up a big new idea. But with state of the art AI models costing prohibitive millions to train and deploy, the power has returned to the hands of capital.
  - marban 4y ago
    Zig When Others Zag.
  - slyall 4y ago
    On the other hand if AI is just an API call away it might allow lots of new products. Lots of bigger companies are offering AI Pixie dust, but pretty soon it might be something that every solo SaaS can also do.
- mamonster 4y ago
  I think the more important question is long-term interest rates. 1980-2020 is just a massive drill down in interest rates, which basically means that for the last 40 years you were incentivized to progressively take on more and more risk and bet on growth. If interest rates go back down in the near future, then DCF math will keep startups cool. If not, and we transition to a regime where you have maybe 4% interest rates as a floor, then startups as a culture will become outdated.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    Im not sure about that. Startups in a higher interest rate world just need to be more profitable ideas, and need less capital. I think that's probably a good thing, overall. But who knows right, we're in a very odd economy at the moment so we'll see I suppose.
- fhd2 4y ago
  I remember three events that created a massive amount of startups: Personal computing, the internet, and then mobile. What these have in common are new ways in which people use computers, combined with a large expansion in usage. AI by itself doesn't achieve that in my book, voice assistants maybe, but I'm sceptical that they don't just move usage around. Suppose that's why people invest into stuff like VR/AR and neural interfaces, hoping those are the next big things that massively expand computer usage. Though computers are already being used quite massively.
  - mmahemoff 4y ago
    Interesting way to look at it, but I think you could say the same thing about the internet, i.e., people still interacted with it using a PC. So I could still see AI having a similar impact without changing the physical form factor. That said, it might also be the case that incumbents have more to benefit than startups, in a world that rewards access to large proprietary data sets.
  - tuukkah 4y ago
    Massive move of usage to new services should be enough for a massive amount of startups that build those new services. No need for expansion, I think.
- lbriner 4y ago
  If we are in the consolidation phase, I wonder if people now understand the risks that software can create and will therefore push for much more professionalism in the industry. Currently, in most countries, literally anybody can write code for something and sell it without restriction. Most people don't like regulation but we can't keep on producing insecure junk without Governments starting to require some kind of formal certification. It is never perfect as anyone in a regulated industry knows, but it has to be better than nothing. For example, how many companies use applications written 30 years with no concern for security and are never forced to retire it (or prove that it is secure)? How many companies don't even have visibility of the 1000s of web servers that have been accumulated over the years of merges and divisions etc?
  - pooper 4y ago
    > professionalism One short story about how I got a rude email one morning at work saying we need to change all our connection strings in production (internal applications) because machinename1234.corporation.lan doesn't work anymore so they moved it to a new machine machinename1235.corporation.lan I still don't know how someone at one of the top five Internet providers in the nation thought it was acceptable to do that instead of renaming the new machine to the old one. It isn't like we were pinning certificates or something fancy. I am pretty sure the certificates were self signed, which is ok for on prem. > How many companies don't even have visibility of the 1000s of web servers that have been accumulated over the years of merges and divisions etc? I wish we had thousands of web servers. At one place I worked at it was the same set of few windows server boxes for everyone and everyone keeps tripping on one another's toes leading people to say well QA and preproduction are broken it will be fine once we are on production.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Forget 30 years ago, how many companies are running apps which are still being written that way? I think about this a lot in the context of open source. We’ve had a ton of great things happen from everyone being able to share code but there is a valid concern about vulnerabilities in code which has been orphaned or was written by someone who wasn’t familiar with secure coding practices. For example, businesses have seen billions of dollars in benefit from WordPress based on the cost vs. functionality / productivity of commercial CMS applications but WP plugins are a famous source of exploits and many of them are written by people who don’t even have the time or skills to secure them if they did. It feels like there should be some way to change that but it’s not clear whether any of the efforts to fund open source will get enough traction.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Through one of my acquitances in the start-up world in Germany, I learned that even big tech investors (from the US), are now saying that the time of "big vision" is over and their portfolio companies should look to increase revenue before looking at developing the next suoer cloud platfrom solution for their hardware products. Sounds like solid advice to me.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
I’ve been in and around startups since 2008. I feel that pretty much all of wisdom around startups has become outdated, especially the entire narrative around them. The biggest change I’ve seen is how startups are being seen as “risk free”. At my first startup, I was one of the early employees and I had to convince and cajole new grads to join a startup. Everyone wanted to join big tech co. for the job security. That’s changed now. New grads I’ve hired don’t see a startup as a risk event anymore, but rather, a normal career move. It also used to be that founders would forego a salary and early employees would assume they would get paid much less than a regular job. Founders were also driven to protect their equity share and would dread dilution. Of late, I’ve seen founders very eager to secure fat salaries and to get to liquidity events as fast as possible. The earliest startups I worked with, the founders would fret for days about bringing a VC onboard since that meant diluting their holding. Now, founders are driven to raise funding and sell some of their holdings to safeguard their future. I say all of this without judgment or bias - I truly believe your first priority should be to secure your family’s financial future. I just feel that the startup world is awash in so much funding (at least before 2022) that the riskiness and “courage” associated with startups - something most early startup essays would talk about endlessly - have been largely negated.
- aerhardt 4y ago
  Very interesting insights. I hadn't thought about it, but looking back, I've observed exactly the same phenomena regarding junior hires and founders.
- version_five 4y ago
  It's gentrified or become mainstream or whatever you want to call it. Like instead of living in a loft built in an abandoned factory in an obscure part of town, buying a new-build condo with exposed vents and some brick on one of the walls. A lot of startups are just outsourced corporate innovation, or a VC bet on the founders, more like the investors hiring someone for a role than an organic "invention in the garage". Not always true of course, but a shift overall
  - phkahler 4y ago
TimPC 4y ago
I think a lot of them are. A big change is that start-ups have started to stay private for obscene amount of time making a lot of options into toilet paper. This means unless you are happy to work for a start-up with your options being worth $0 you shouldn’t work for them. Even if they end up being worth something you might work for a company starting at 20 years old and get a windfall at 37.
macco 4y ago
If they are classic the are not outdated. Is Beethoven's 5th outdated?
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  OK, pretend that the title was "Are Paul Graham's Old Startup Essays..."
mg 4y ago
I read most of Paul Graham's essays and the core theories I associate with him are: 1: As a founder it is more important to be competent and productive than to seem competent and productive. 2: It is an advantage to trust your own competence and ignore common practices. 3: It is better to build something for real users than for imaginary users. 4: A great product is more valuable than great marketing. They still ring true with me. But maybe I am biased and just remember the thesis that I agree with.
- fluxinflex 4y ago
  Unfortunately (4) is probably not followed by most startups. At least that is my experience. Marketing makes mules to stallions.
  - mg 4y ago
    I talk to quite a lot of startups and most follow none of them. I think that is why PG brings these points up. It is what usually makes things go wrong. It is against human nature to follow these points. People want to impress and fit in. They don't want to sit and build a little thing for just one user.
    - fluxinflex 4y ago
      > People want to impress and fit in. Those that impress the most are those that fit the least.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> Marketing makes mules to stallions. Are they marketing a product or the company? If they're selling the company I like to stay away. Even places I've worked with legitimate product engineering kinda suck when management is distracted by prospective investors or buyers. It's a misalignment of priorities between the top and bottom.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Extreme marketing can work in a highly fragmented market where no dominant players have been established - basically the Goaddy model. I see similar things with Monday.com, asana, etc.
ergonaught 4y ago
“Outdated” implies a belief that some portion of some of his essays represented verifiable objective truth about reality which needs updating to reflect environmental changes. That belief is outdated.
cj 4y ago
Yes and no. There are classics like "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" which are absolutely timeless.
college_physics 4y ago
Startup culture is rebooting. It has reached an unseemly level of stereotypical, cut and paste, me too, lemming behavior that cannot be redeemed by any insights conceived by essays writen for a less absurd era.
pyrrhotech 4y ago
For the most part, all the low hanging fruit that the great startups of the last 30 years monopolized on has been picked. The next 30 years will look nothing like the last. I suspect we'll be seeing much fewer sub 50 year old self-made billionaires, a near total collapse in the number of inflation-adjusted unicorns under age 10, and a relative shrinking of what we think of currently as "tech" in proportion of total GDP. We may even soon to stop thinking of software companies as tech companies by default. Even looking at the last 10 years vs. the 10 years before that, the emphasis has already started to shift back the power to the celebrity content creator over the nerdy engineering tech creator. Before Web 2.0 really took off, websites and apps were all the rage because it was mostly nerds and other early adopters that could monopolize the power of the internet. Now the playing field has been leveled again, and it's those with strong personalities, marketing skills and other digital content production skills who have been making the big bucks. Mr. Beast's youtube channel was offered a $1 billion buyout. Engineers weren't thought of very highly before the personal computer revolution, and the money and power was all with the celebrities instead. I think the last 30 years was mostly an anomaly, but now that the internet is more democratized, the money and power will be returning to the celebrity content creator.
- Our_Benefactors 4y ago
  Weird take. I don't see software startups and Mr. Beast as being in competition at all.
kjellsbells 4y ago
Outdated may be a bit harsh. I'd say that almost everything we knew about modern startup culture was predicated on one thing: easy access to cash. That had huge impacts on ease of funding, length of runway before profit, safety to pivot, and so on. If the era of cheap money is truly at an end, then the whole edifice must be reconsidered.
- cj 4y ago
  > If the era of cheap money is truly at an end It’s important to remember the economy is cyclical. We’re in a funding drought. Probably for another year or so. We’re at one extreme at the moment. Things will eventually move back to usual once interest rates come down. I’d say in about a year. A lot of VC activity relies on using borrowed money. It’s very similar to how no one wants to buy a house right now because rates are too high, the same thing is causing investors to leverage their assets much less. Once interest rates move back to normal levels things will pick up again.
BigBalli 4y ago
I think although the tools and context have definitely changed, the foundational principles in his essays remain true: Ideas for startups often come from solving your own problems. A good startup idea should have at least one of three things: it's something you're passionate about, it solves a problem you have, or it's something you're good at. The best way to predict the future is to build it. Move fast and break things. A startup is a company designed to grow fast. A startup is a company that is confused about what its product is. The key to growing a startup is to learn as fast as possible. The ideal size for a startup team is around three to five people. The best startups are often started by people who are still in school or in their early 20s. Don't worry about competition. Worry about creating something that people love. Make something people want. A startup is a company that is trying to answer a question nobody knows the answer to. The most important quality for a startup CEO is determination. A startup is a company that is being run by a small group of people who are trying to discover how to build a scalable business. To be a successful startup founder, you need to be an expert in something. A startup is a company that is trying to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. Don't let your ideas be dragged down by the standard of what already exists. Don't scale too soon. Your job is to do what you do best and delegate the rest. Don't take VC money until you have to. If you want to start a startup, don't think too much. Just do it. To be successful, a startup has to be run like a cult. The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The biggest mistake startups make is not making something people want. Your first 10 users are more important than your next 10,000. If you're going to start a startup, you should know from the beginning that it's going to be hard. The best way to raise money for a startup is to not need it.
- uptownfunk 4y ago
  These are great notes, thanks!
- MrDresden 4y ago
  "The best startups are often started by people who are still in school or in their early 20s." Has this ever held true though? Yes, in case of unicorns probably. But case of general survivability of new startups, doees age really have any say?
adenozine 4y ago
Taking YC advice is sort of like getting cooking tips from customers coming out of a nice restaurant. They’ve eaten good food, but they may or may not know anything about starting a business. Paul Graham hasn’t started a company in several decades now. Just because he has proximity with a lot of people who have, doesn’t mean his advice is still sound. He was competing with Perl shops, for crying out loud! The scene has changed. A lot. Seek out lessons from success by yourself, directly. Ask local, search local, find the people successful near you in your industry and just ask them. Many will tell their tale over lunch, and then you’ve received personal, actionable advice for the price of a good meal.
fennekin 4y ago
it's already outdated when startups didn't use lisp and freebsd anymore
moomoo11 4y ago
I went to a couple startup events in Bay Area and I’m not being a hater but it was the equivalent of “glamping” with people dripped out in designer clothing and taking group photos than people interested in talking about solving any actual problems. Like I was hoping for people who want to leverage AI to do some cool shit or solve some difficult problem in some industry. You know, something actually useful. I wanted to talk about my scheduling software, or discuss some challenges in industry I don’t know shit about. Instead people were talking about their (yet another) copy of a copy of a wellness app.. Granted I’m fresh af to this game but I honestly felt so out of place. Nobody was talking tech and people were talking about their vacations to some exotic places and taking selfies. That’s fine, but nobody really seemed like an engineer or solver minded person. It was honestly bizarre and kind of depressing. I felt like I had better tech and ideation focused discussions in my tiny city that I left to move to Bay Area.
ravagat 4y ago
Outdated? Yes, and yet they are largely relevant because the culture around startups are largely the same from when they were written. There's a comment I read-- "The brain (culture) knows it -- but the heart (economy) hasn't caught up yet."[0] -- that applies to this. In general we can say startups have largely become a predictable path to take for anyone with the competence to go through with the process. This has , in one way, to coin it gentrified and/or mainstream it. I think this is actually a good sign as it means theres "slack" in our general ecosystem to allow such outcome. But it should not in any way allow anyone to ignore that it also means we should probably be working/concentrating on harder/ridiculous problems to solve. Yes, you could probably correlate this with low-interest rates and macro market trends but that's another story for another time. To conclude, I think we live in some of the best times to build and in general, especially if you are already here (on HN). Reading Paul's essays can still be of value and I'd bet there would be value in updating and/or revising the essays in general; just like author's revisiting/updating great books over time. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673325 EDIT: I'd like to add some links to some comments that had done a good job of listing some of the worthy information to revisit from Paul's essays. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34751744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34751744 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752781

88 points by SunghoYahng 4y ago

Updates needed on Paul Graham's startup essays?

This is an interesting question, but a bit vague and therefore hard to answer. Some of the articles that come to mind are quite timeless, such as Schlep Blindness. Do you have some particular articles in mind that you think are outdated? Which? Why?

epberry 4y ago

Startup = Growth is timeless, as are most of the essays. I did feel Hackers vs Painters was little outdated but the book is almost 30 years old at this point.

osrec 4y ago
30? I thought it was more like 20.
- another-dave 4y ago
  Yeah,2004 according to Wikipedia so just under twenty.

eastbound 4y ago

I would change topics as: Is creating startups outdated? …making PG essays outdated. I’m serious. 1980-2020 was the hype of an undertaped market that was personal computing. Anyone in a garage could do something revolutionary because anything was already better than nothing. Even if it didn’t respect GDPR and leaked PII accounts like a sieve. That’s always like that in the start of a Schumpeter economic cycle, same happened with cars in 1900. Now, we’re in a consolidation phase. Or are we still in an “invention” phase? AI maybe?

ramesh31 4y ago
>Or are we still in an “invention” phase? AI maybe? I think AI will ultimately be the driver of consolidation. The innovation in software of the last 30 years was, as you said, from the ability of anyone with a laptop to dream up a big new idea. But with state of the art AI models costing prohibitive millions to train and deploy, the power has returned to the hands of capital.
- marban 4y ago
  Zig When Others Zag.
- slyall 4y ago
  On the other hand if AI is just an API call away it might allow lots of new products. Lots of bigger companies are offering AI Pixie dust, but pretty soon it might be something that every solo SaaS can also do.
mamonster 4y ago
I think the more important question is long-term interest rates. 1980-2020 is just a massive drill down in interest rates, which basically means that for the last 40 years you were incentivized to progressively take on more and more risk and bet on growth. If interest rates go back down in the near future, then DCF math will keep startups cool. If not, and we transition to a regime where you have maybe 4% interest rates as a floor, then startups as a culture will become outdated.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Im not sure about that. Startups in a higher interest rate world just need to be more profitable ideas, and need less capital. I think that's probably a good thing, overall. But who knows right, we're in a very odd economy at the moment so we'll see I suppose.
fhd2 4y ago
I remember three events that created a massive amount of startups: Personal computing, the internet, and then mobile. What these have in common are new ways in which people use computers, combined with a large expansion in usage. AI by itself doesn't achieve that in my book, voice assistants maybe, but I'm sceptical that they don't just move usage around. Suppose that's why people invest into stuff like VR/AR and neural interfaces, hoping those are the next big things that massively expand computer usage. Though computers are already being used quite massively.
- mmahemoff 4y ago
  Interesting way to look at it, but I think you could say the same thing about the internet, i.e., people still interacted with it using a PC. So I could still see AI having a similar impact without changing the physical form factor. That said, it might also be the case that incumbents have more to benefit than startups, in a world that rewards access to large proprietary data sets.
- tuukkah 4y ago
  Massive move of usage to new services should be enough for a massive amount of startups that build those new services. No need for expansion, I think.
lbriner 4y ago
If we are in the consolidation phase, I wonder if people now understand the risks that software can create and will therefore push for much more professionalism in the industry. Currently, in most countries, literally anybody can write code for something and sell it without restriction. Most people don't like regulation but we can't keep on producing insecure junk without Governments starting to require some kind of formal certification. It is never perfect as anyone in a regulated industry knows, but it has to be better than nothing. For example, how many companies use applications written 30 years with no concern for security and are never forced to retire it (or prove that it is secure)? How many companies don't even have visibility of the 1000s of web servers that have been accumulated over the years of merges and divisions etc?
- pooper 4y ago
  > professionalism One short story about how I got a rude email one morning at work saying we need to change all our connection strings in production (internal applications) because machinename1234.corporation.lan doesn't work anymore so they moved it to a new machine machinename1235.corporation.lan I still don't know how someone at one of the top five Internet providers in the nation thought it was acceptable to do that instead of renaming the new machine to the old one. It isn't like we were pinning certificates or something fancy. I am pretty sure the certificates were self signed, which is ok for on prem. > How many companies don't even have visibility of the 1000s of web servers that have been accumulated over the years of merges and divisions etc? I wish we had thousands of web servers. At one place I worked at it was the same set of few windows server boxes for everyone and everyone keeps tripping on one another's toes leading people to say well QA and preproduction are broken it will be fine once we are on production.
- acdha 4y ago
  Forget 30 years ago, how many companies are running apps which are still being written that way? I think about this a lot in the context of open source. We’ve had a ton of great things happen from everyone being able to share code but there is a valid concern about vulnerabilities in code which has been orphaned or was written by someone who wasn’t familiar with secure coding practices. For example, businesses have seen billions of dollars in benefit from WordPress based on the cost vs. functionality / productivity of commercial CMS applications but WP plugins are a famous source of exploits and many of them are written by people who don’t even have the time or skills to secure them if they did. It feels like there should be some way to change that but it’s not clear whether any of the efforts to fund open source will get enough traction.
hef19898 4y ago
Through one of my acquitances in the start-up world in Germany, I learned that even big tech investors (from the US), are now saying that the time of "big vision" is over and their portfolio companies should look to increase revenue before looking at developing the next suoer cloud platfrom solution for their hardware products. Sounds like solid advice to me.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

I’ve been in and around startups since 2008. I feel that pretty much all of wisdom around startups has become outdated, especially the entire narrative around them. The biggest change I’ve seen is how startups are being seen as “risk free”. At my first startup, I was one of the early employees and I had to convince and cajole new grads to join a startup. Everyone wanted to join big tech co. for the job security. That’s changed now. New grads I’ve hired don’t see a startup as a risk event anymore, but rather, a normal career move. It also used to be that founders would forego a salary and early employees would assume they would get paid much less than a regular job. Founders were also driven to protect their equity share and would dread dilution. Of late, I’ve seen founders very eager to secure fat salaries and to get to liquidity events as fast as possible. The earliest startups I worked with, the founders would fret for days about bringing a VC onboard since that meant diluting their holding. Now, founders are driven to raise funding and sell some of their holdings to safeguard their future. I say all of this without judgment or bias - I truly believe your first priority should be to secure your family’s financial future. I just feel that the startup world is awash in so much funding (at least before 2022) that the riskiness and “courage” associated with startups - something most early startup essays would talk about endlessly - have been largely negated.

aerhardt 4y ago
Very interesting insights. I hadn't thought about it, but looking back, I've observed exactly the same phenomena regarding junior hires and founders.
version_five 4y ago
It's gentrified or become mainstream or whatever you want to call it. Like instead of living in a loft built in an abandoned factory in an obscure part of town, buying a new-build condo with exposed vents and some brick on one of the walls. A lot of startups are just outsourced corporate innovation, or a VC bet on the founders, more like the investors hiring someone for a role than an organic "invention in the garage". Not always true of course, but a shift overall
- phkahler 4y ago

TimPC 4y ago

I think a lot of them are. A big change is that start-ups have started to stay private for obscene amount of time making a lot of options into toilet paper. This means unless you are happy to work for a start-up with your options being worth $0 you shouldn’t work for them. Even if they end up being worth something you might work for a company starting at 20 years old and get a windfall at 37.

macco 4y ago

If they are classic the are not outdated. Is Beethoven's 5th outdated?

ElfinTrousers 4y ago
OK, pretend that the title was "Are Paul Graham's Old Startup Essays..."

mg 4y ago

I read most of Paul Graham's essays and the core theories I associate with him are: 1: As a founder it is more important to be competent and productive than to seem competent and productive. 2: It is an advantage to trust your own competence and ignore common practices. 3: It is better to build something for real users than for imaginary users. 4: A great product is more valuable than great marketing. They still ring true with me. But maybe I am biased and just remember the thesis that I agree with.

fluxinflex 4y ago
Unfortunately (4) is probably not followed by most startups. At least that is my experience. Marketing makes mules to stallions.
- mg 4y ago
  I talk to quite a lot of startups and most follow none of them. I think that is why PG brings these points up. It is what usually makes things go wrong. It is against human nature to follow these points. People want to impress and fit in. They don't want to sit and build a little thing for just one user.
  - fluxinflex 4y ago
    > People want to impress and fit in. Those that impress the most are those that fit the least.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> Marketing makes mules to stallions. Are they marketing a product or the company? If they're selling the company I like to stay away. Even places I've worked with legitimate product engineering kinda suck when management is distracted by prospective investors or buyers. It's a misalignment of priorities between the top and bottom.
osigurdson 4y ago
Extreme marketing can work in a highly fragmented market where no dominant players have been established - basically the Goaddy model. I see similar things with Monday.com, asana, etc.

ergonaught 4y ago

“Outdated” implies a belief that some portion of some of his essays represented verifiable objective truth about reality which needs updating to reflect environmental changes. That belief is outdated.

cj 4y ago

Yes and no. There are classics like "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" which are absolutely timeless.

college_physics 4y ago

Startup culture is rebooting. It has reached an unseemly level of stereotypical, cut and paste, me too, lemming behavior that cannot be redeemed by any insights conceived by essays writen for a less absurd era.

pyrrhotech 4y ago

For the most part, all the low hanging fruit that the great startups of the last 30 years monopolized on has been picked. The next 30 years will look nothing like the last. I suspect we'll be seeing much fewer sub 50 year old self-made billionaires, a near total collapse in the number of inflation-adjusted unicorns under age 10, and a relative shrinking of what we think of currently as "tech" in proportion of total GDP. We may even soon to stop thinking of software companies as tech companies by default. Even looking at the last 10 years vs. the 10 years before that, the emphasis has already started to shift back the power to the celebrity content creator over the nerdy engineering tech creator. Before Web 2.0 really took off, websites and apps were all the rage because it was mostly nerds and other early adopters that could monopolize the power of the internet. Now the playing field has been leveled again, and it's those with strong personalities, marketing skills and other digital content production skills who have been making the big bucks. Mr. Beast's youtube channel was offered a $1 billion buyout. Engineers weren't thought of very highly before the personal computer revolution, and the money and power was all with the celebrities instead. I think the last 30 years was mostly an anomaly, but now that the internet is more democratized, the money and power will be returning to the celebrity content creator.

Our_Benefactors 4y ago
Weird take. I don't see software startups and Mr. Beast as being in competition at all.

kjellsbells 4y ago

Outdated may be a bit harsh. I'd say that almost everything we knew about modern startup culture was predicated on one thing: easy access to cash. That had huge impacts on ease of funding, length of runway before profit, safety to pivot, and so on. If the era of cheap money is truly at an end, then the whole edifice must be reconsidered.

cj 4y ago
> If the era of cheap money is truly at an end It’s important to remember the economy is cyclical. We’re in a funding drought. Probably for another year or so. We’re at one extreme at the moment. Things will eventually move back to usual once interest rates come down. I’d say in about a year. A lot of VC activity relies on using borrowed money. It’s very similar to how no one wants to buy a house right now because rates are too high, the same thing is causing investors to leverage their assets much less. Once interest rates move back to normal levels things will pick up again.

BigBalli 4y ago

I think although the tools and context have definitely changed, the foundational principles in his essays remain true: Ideas for startups often come from solving your own problems. A good startup idea should have at least one of three things: it's something you're passionate about, it solves a problem you have, or it's something you're good at. The best way to predict the future is to build it. Move fast and break things. A startup is a company designed to grow fast. A startup is a company that is confused about what its product is. The key to growing a startup is to learn as fast as possible. The ideal size for a startup team is around three to five people. The best startups are often started by people who are still in school or in their early 20s. Don't worry about competition. Worry about creating something that people love. Make something people want. A startup is a company that is trying to answer a question nobody knows the answer to. The most important quality for a startup CEO is determination. A startup is a company that is being run by a small group of people who are trying to discover how to build a scalable business. To be a successful startup founder, you need to be an expert in something. A startup is a company that is trying to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. Don't let your ideas be dragged down by the standard of what already exists. Don't scale too soon. Your job is to do what you do best and delegate the rest. Don't take VC money until you have to. If you want to start a startup, don't think too much. Just do it. To be successful, a startup has to be run like a cult. The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The biggest mistake startups make is not making something people want. Your first 10 users are more important than your next 10,000. If you're going to start a startup, you should know from the beginning that it's going to be hard. The best way to raise money for a startup is to not need it.

uptownfunk 4y ago
These are great notes, thanks!
MrDresden 4y ago
"The best startups are often started by people who are still in school or in their early 20s." Has this ever held true though? Yes, in case of unicorns probably. But case of general survivability of new startups, doees age really have any say?

adenozine 4y ago

Taking YC advice is sort of like getting cooking tips from customers coming out of a nice restaurant. They’ve eaten good food, but they may or may not know anything about starting a business. Paul Graham hasn’t started a company in several decades now. Just because he has proximity with a lot of people who have, doesn’t mean his advice is still sound. He was competing with Perl shops, for crying out loud! The scene has changed. A lot. Seek out lessons from success by yourself, directly. Ask local, search local, find the people successful near you in your industry and just ask them. Many will tell their tale over lunch, and then you’ve received personal, actionable advice for the price of a good meal.

fennekin 4y ago

it's already outdated when startups didn't use lisp and freebsd anymore

moomoo11 4y ago

I went to a couple startup events in Bay Area and I’m not being a hater but it was the equivalent of “glamping” with people dripped out in designer clothing and taking group photos than people interested in talking about solving any actual problems. Like I was hoping for people who want to leverage AI to do some cool shit or solve some difficult problem in some industry. You know, something actually useful. I wanted to talk about my scheduling software, or discuss some challenges in industry I don’t know shit about. Instead people were talking about their (yet another) copy of a copy of a wellness app.. Granted I’m fresh af to this game but I honestly felt so out of place. Nobody was talking tech and people were talking about their vacations to some exotic places and taking selfies. That’s fine, but nobody really seemed like an engineer or solver minded person. It was honestly bizarre and kind of depressing. I felt like I had better tech and ideation focused discussions in my tiny city that I left to move to Bay Area.

ravagat 4y ago

Outdated? Yes, and yet they are largely relevant because the culture around startups are largely the same from when they were written. There's a comment I read-- "The brain (culture) knows it -- but the heart (economy) hasn't caught up yet."[0] -- that applies to this. In general we can say startups have largely become a predictable path to take for anyone with the competence to go through with the process. This has , in one way, to coin it gentrified and/or mainstream it. I think this is actually a good sign as it means theres "slack" in our general ecosystem to allow such outcome. But it should not in any way allow anyone to ignore that it also means we should probably be working/concentrating on harder/ridiculous problems to solve. Yes, you could probably correlate this with low-interest rates and macro market trends but that's another story for another time. To conclude, I think we live in some of the best times to build and in general, especially if you are already here (on HN). Reading Paul's essays can still be of value and I'd bet there would be value in updating and/or revising the essays in general; just like author's revisiting/updating great books over time. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673325 EDIT: I'd like to add some links to some comments that had done a good job of listing some of the worthy information to revisit from Paul's essays. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34751744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34751744 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752781