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Unfortunately the rust game engine idea (as much as it kills me to say this) is a perfect example of not YC material. Every VC, whether early stage or late stag

Unfortunately the rust game engine idea (as much as it kills me to say this) is a perfect example of not YC material. Every VC, whether early stage or late stage, must fund companies that have a chance of growing by 5% every week. It’s remarkably hard to start anything that can maintain that growth. https://paulgraham.com/growth.html https://paulgraham.com/growth.html is worth internalizing. But there’s a second caveat here: YC invests in people, not in ideas. From pg himself: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-reddits https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-reddits > Their idea was bad though. And since we thought then that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected the muffins. And it seemed wrong to me to turn down the people we'd been inspired to start YC to fund. So it might be worth applying with a particularly bad idea. Or at least it used to be; I have no idea whether YC ever encourages strong founders with a bad idea to re-apply with a better one, or if you get any feedback from the partners that they almost accepted you but rejected because of the idea. (One of my neat memories as a 19yo is getting a thoughtful email from pg saying we almost made it to the interview with an idea that was essentially “blackboard sucks; make better school software," but the biggest factors against us were my age and the fact that selling to schools was about as hard as selling to governments back in 2008.)

Animats 3y ago
I know that. I just threw that in because I've been doing game work in Rust and the graphics stack suffers from too few devs. Better school software is worth another go-round, now that we have large language models. Somebody already emailed me offering to fund the MoneyNow idea. That's a bad idea for another reason. The big problem with money transfer is fraud. PayPal is mostly a fraud-management service. Money transfer and user interface are the easy part.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  I’d be very curious to see what you’d choose to work on if you were forced to pick something with the highest probability of growing at 5% per week minimum. I suspect you have a few ideas, but it becomes a different sort of question when you imagine yourself committing to one for the next 10 years. Which idea could you see yourself throwing all of your effort into growing each week till you’re today+10 years old?
  - dang 3y ago
    > the highest probability of growing at 5% per week minimum I don't think this is a helpful frame, because you can't know this in advance, and I'd hate for anybody to read something like this, feel "I have no idea what could grow 5% per week minimum", and close the page on getting started. No one knows this in advance. What YC teaches is to start by making something a few people actually want, no matter how small it is or seems, and then iterate. It's much more important, for example, to work on something you're personally interested in than something you've persuaded yourself has a chance at growing "5% per week minimum".
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      That’s a good point. Thank you. Happy one-decade anniversary, by the way. I just noticed https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over... was almost exactly 10 years ago. The trouble with your frame is that you can’t know what people actually want until you try to get them to use what you’ve built. There’s a sort of chicken and egg problem here: you have to think of an idea first, before you build anything. "Choose what people actually want" begs the question. It’s probably true that it’s better to work on something that you personally believe in (in the https://paulgraham.com/earnest.html https://paulgraham.com/earnest.html sense), because you’re more likely to find ways to grow it. It’s hard to be earnest about an idea that only interests you because it might grow at 5% per week. But pg chose Viaweb, and he couldn’t have known ahead of time that anybody would actually want it, since it was the first webapp. Nobody even understood how to try it out, since this was the era of desktop software. All he had was a hunch that lots of people would soon want websites for their businesses. So which frame would you choose, if you had to decide today? Suppose you and Scott were trapped in a room, and the door unlocks only after you pick something to build together. How would you decide, other than "X seems most likely to be something that people will actually want"? (Which is similar to "has a chance of growing at 5% per week," just phrased a little differently. pg originally thought museums would want websites; if he’d asked himself whether it might morph into an idea that could grow at 5% per week, he probably would’ve realized museums didn’t actually want that.)

Animats 3y ago

I know that. I just threw that in because I've been doing game work in Rust and the graphics stack suffers from too few devs. Better school software is worth another go-round, now that we have large language models. Somebody already emailed me offering to fund the MoneyNow idea. That's a bad idea for another reason. The big problem with money transfer is fraud. PayPal is mostly a fraud-management service. Money transfer and user interface are the easy part.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
I’d be very curious to see what you’d choose to work on if you were forced to pick something with the highest probability of growing at 5% per week minimum. I suspect you have a few ideas, but it becomes a different sort of question when you imagine yourself committing to one for the next 10 years. Which idea could you see yourself throwing all of your effort into growing each week till you’re today+10 years old?
- dang 3y ago
  > the highest probability of growing at 5% per week minimum I don't think this is a helpful frame, because you can't know this in advance, and I'd hate for anybody to read something like this, feel "I have no idea what could grow 5% per week minimum", and close the page on getting started. No one knows this in advance. What YC teaches is to start by making something a few people actually want, no matter how small it is or seems, and then iterate. It's much more important, for example, to work on something you're personally interested in than something you've persuaded yourself has a chance at growing "5% per week minimum".
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    That’s a good point. Thank you. Happy one-decade anniversary, by the way. I just noticed https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over... was almost exactly 10 years ago. The trouble with your frame is that you can’t know what people actually want until you try to get them to use what you’ve built. There’s a sort of chicken and egg problem here: you have to think of an idea first, before you build anything. "Choose what people actually want" begs the question. It’s probably true that it’s better to work on something that you personally believe in (in the https://paulgraham.com/earnest.html https://paulgraham.com/earnest.html sense), because you’re more likely to find ways to grow it. It’s hard to be earnest about an idea that only interests you because it might grow at 5% per week. But pg chose Viaweb, and he couldn’t have known ahead of time that anybody would actually want it, since it was the first webapp. Nobody even understood how to try it out, since this was the era of desktop software. All he had was a hunch that lots of people would soon want websites for their businesses. So which frame would you choose, if you had to decide today? Suppose you and Scott were trapped in a room, and the door unlocks only after you pick something to build together. How would you decide, other than "X seems most likely to be something that people will actually want"? (Which is similar to "has a chance of growing at 5% per week," just phrased a little differently. pg originally thought museums would want websites; if he’d asked himself whether it might morph into an idea that could grow at 5% per week, he probably would’ve realized museums didn’t actually want that.)