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I appreciate you treating the question in the good faith in which it was intended. While the topic may be provocative, I felt it was relevant, based on my obser
by villageidiot 18y ago
I appreciate you treating the question in the good faith in which it was intended. While the topic may be provocative, I felt it was relevant, based on my observations of YC. However, because I can only provide anecdote as evidence of my case, I asked the question to discover whether my observations about YC are shared or whether I am suffering from a delusion. Textually this may seem like trollish behavior but some of the responses to the question seem to belie this suggestion.
As for your point about Google, some ideas are so powerful that they fall outside the conventional expectations of business practice. The fact that Google's founders have, until lately anyway, been unassertive in the manner of Microsoft, does not indicate that Bill Gates' approach "is not worth much". Absent some ground-shaking idea like Google's, I would argue the assertive approach of Microsoft is the norm for a successful company and a key ingredient missing in the YC environment.
- fallentimes 18y agoCan you please clarify what you mean by assertive approach? You continually use Microsoft as an example, but I don't really think spending half a decade in courts is assertive. Or maybe you could use some mid sized companies as examples as Google and Microsoft are both anomalies.
- mattmaroon 18y agoMy guess would be that he means, for instance, shipping IE for free and essentially destroying Netscape was ruthless and/or assertive. He's probably forgetting that that occurred in 1995, one decade after Windows first appeared, and two decades after Microsoft was founded.
- pg 18y agoIt's funny that you two have taken up the question. When I first read that comment about lack of killer instinct, there were certain YC founders who immediately popped into my head as people whose faces I'd have liked to hear him say that to...
- mattmaroon 18y ago:)
- mattmaroon 18y agoHow "assertive" was Microsoft at first? It seems like they spent their first decade toiling along at standardizing programming across the many different OEMs and computer types of the day. It was probably another decade until they did anything that anyone would consider "ruthless". They started off trying to build something people want (Basic for the Altair) just like any YC company. I wouldn't say that most YC startups display any less ambition than building a Basic interpreter.
- brandonkm 18y agoMircosoft was VERY assertive at first. Without laying out a detailed history, very early on gates had a keen business sense and was quite ruthless. They may have been 'building something people want', but the seeds of what microsoft would later become were without a doubt being planted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
- mattmaroon 18y agoI don't think asking people to pay for your product is ruthless.
- brandonkm 18y agoNot ruthless but certainly assertive.
- villageidiot 18y agoQDOS produced by Seattle Computer and purchased by Microsoft after Digital Research dragged their heels on their promises to deliever CP/M to IBM, was a rip-off of CP/M. We can argue about this point but it's documented by Gates' biographers. Gates was hungry for that deal and beat Kildall to the punch, doing what he needed to, bending the rules/law to get his foot in the door at IBM. The essay by pg about "doing good" mentioned by someone in this thread might ring true when the valves are open and VC funding is flowing freely but in the new financial reality that we are in, I am arguing that it is the companies that have this kind of ruthlessness that will be the ones who make it, not the ones who want to "do good". Microsoft is not an outlier in this practice. It is self-evident that this is the American way of business. http://books.google.com/books?id=iPWjNoSS9vUC&pg=PA120&lpg=PA120&dq=%22digital+research%22+%22seattle+computer+products%22+microsoft&source=bl&ots=62oRvvfB2g&sig=fBD_sIAB0Ogf3aLfiw_-Vk6pcrA&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA120,M1 http://books.google.com/books?id=iPWjNoSS9vUC&pg=PA120&#...
- Retric 18y agoEvil is only useful once you step outside of a competitive market. EX: Cable company's seem to be Evil because they make more money that way, but trying to be more evil than the next pizza delivery company is useless.
- konsl 18y agoToday, the best way to compete is to focus on cooperation, not competition. The behavior you're admiring isn't very effective when looking to cooperate with others.
- jamiequint 18y agoI think this statement is mired in sample bias. What companies are you comparing YC companies to? Other successful companies or a random sample of other startups that are non-YC? Particularly with the examples of Microsoft and Google, your analysis is historical. In their pre-public-company days you may have been lured into making the same type of statement in regards to them because any business they were involved in at the time was probably minimally visible from the outside just as it is with many YC companies now. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that you probably don't know about and thus cannot consider. That is the nature of private companies.