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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

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.)
  - dang 3y ago
    I would work on what I was most passionate about. Which btw is also the advice that pg and Jessica (specifically Jessica in this case) gave at their last YC talk, and you can't get more YC than that.
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      Did they? It’s surprising because your description can’t possibly be a recipe for generating startup ideas. pg was most passionate about lisp. There must be more to it than what you said. I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand, but this seems like bad advice for someone explicitly trying to become wealthy. It’s great advice for YC to be giving, because it would maximize YC’s returns over decades: if everyone works on what they’re most passionate about, YC would get a flood of applications from exactly the type of people most likely to be effective founders. But for every passionate founder that chooses to build Stripe, there are dozens who would choose to work on programming languages, or game engines. “Passion project" is practically synonymous with an artist not intending to make money. Even if today you were most passionate about spreadsheets, would you really choose to build skysheet again? It’s impossible to imagine pg writing "If I wanted to start a startup, I would work on what I was most passionate about, since it’s the most likely way I’d succeed." The sentence seems mistaken, so pg must have said something more precise.
      - sungho_ 3y ago
        No advice has a 100% success rate. The existence of failure cases doesn't inherently make the advice bad. The advice to pursue your passion as a startup idea is still relatively good advice. It's the best way to avoid the most trite and cliché ideas. I don't know what someone passionate about spreadsheets would create, but it would be more unexpected than building a generic AI writing app. Whether it succeeds or fails.
      - dang 3y ago
        I was probably too concise. What I mean is that if I had to choose between two different ideas for what people want, I would pick the one I was more interested in, even if it seemed smaller at first, over one that had a better cover story but which I was bored by. And yes this is what Jessica said, advising a particular founder who had grown weary of what he was working on. I think the basic philosophy is that your starting point is not so important—you can get anywhere from anywhere, as long as you are (in pg's phrase) relentlessly resourceful. Given that starting point isn't so important, you're better off starting with something you have a lot of energy for. You're going to need it. Of course I would work on Skysheet again! When did spreadsheets stop being the most important thing in programming?

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.)
- dang 3y ago
  I would work on what I was most passionate about. Which btw is also the advice that pg and Jessica (specifically Jessica in this case) gave at their last YC talk, and you can't get more YC than that.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    Did they? It’s surprising because your description can’t possibly be a recipe for generating startup ideas. pg was most passionate about lisp. There must be more to it than what you said. I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand, but this seems like bad advice for someone explicitly trying to become wealthy. It’s great advice for YC to be giving, because it would maximize YC’s returns over decades: if everyone works on what they’re most passionate about, YC would get a flood of applications from exactly the type of people most likely to be effective founders. But for every passionate founder that chooses to build Stripe, there are dozens who would choose to work on programming languages, or game engines. “Passion project" is practically synonymous with an artist not intending to make money. Even if today you were most passionate about spreadsheets, would you really choose to build skysheet again? It’s impossible to imagine pg writing "If I wanted to start a startup, I would work on what I was most passionate about, since it’s the most likely way I’d succeed." The sentence seems mistaken, so pg must have said something more precise.
    - sungho_ 3y ago
      No advice has a 100% success rate. The existence of failure cases doesn't inherently make the advice bad. The advice to pursue your passion as a startup idea is still relatively good advice. It's the best way to avoid the most trite and cliché ideas. I don't know what someone passionate about spreadsheets would create, but it would be more unexpected than building a generic AI writing app. Whether it succeeds or fails.
    - dang 3y ago
      I was probably too concise. What I mean is that if I had to choose between two different ideas for what people want, I would pick the one I was more interested in, even if it seemed smaller at first, over one that had a better cover story but which I was bored by. And yes this is what Jessica said, advising a particular founder who had grown weary of what he was working on. I think the basic philosophy is that your starting point is not so important—you can get anywhere from anywhere, as long as you are (in pg's phrase) relentlessly resourceful. Given that starting point isn't so important, you're better off starting with something you have a lot of energy for. You're going to need it. Of course I would work on Skysheet again! When did spreadsheets stop being the most important thing in programming?