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This is a collection of points PG has made before in other essays and comments. If the ideas are new to you, you may want to check out the others: http://www.

by portLAN 19y ago

This is a collection of points PG has made before in other essays and comments. If the ideas are new to you, you may want to check out the others: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html > Perhaps the optimal solution is for big companies not even to try to develop ideas in house, but simply to buy them. What's good for YC is good for the country!

Alex3917 19y ago
IIRC a lot of it actually comes from the ITConversations interviews and wasn't actually in writing.
pg 19y ago
> What's good for YC is good for the country! It's not that unlikely. Since we had the luxury of doing whatever we wanted by the time we started YC, it stands to reason we'd do something beneficial instead of merely money-making.
- portLAN 19y ago
  It reads like a marketing pitch to acquirers -- "don't build, buy! Look at this one, a 2.0 webby thingamajig, ain't she a beaut? Only nine ninety nine nine nine nine ninety-nine. Hardly any miles!" Google sure seems to have a lot of success developing apps in-house, and due to integration requirements this makes a lot more sense in many cases. An outside party would simply be unable to provide an optimal solution in those instances. E.g., Kiko.
  - pg 19y ago
    > Google sure seems to have a lot of success developing apps in-house Bad choice of examples. Google is by far the biggest buyer of small startups. They just don't publicize it.
    - portLAN 19y ago
      Everyone wants to get acquired by Google, and yet it doesn't stop them doing their own stuff in-house. Unless AdSense, GMail, Calendar, News, Froogle, Video, Finance, etc. were bought instead of built. Not to mention all the work that happened after they bought Keyhole et al.
      - staunch 19y ago
        AdSense was at least partially an acquisition. Video became YouTube. Froogle is largely a failure. Considering how many programmers Google has your argument that they're good at producing stuff in-house is pretty weak. They're great at scaling and running stuff, but so far they don't seem to be very much better at creating new great things than any big company is.
        portLAN 19y ago
        Everything they buy they do a huge amount of work on, and they don't merely scale; they add features. Google Video was already easily superior to YouTube for the player alone (actual random access); they bought YouTube for its audience. YouTube got so big because unlike GV, it was very lax at policing commercial content. Its poor video quality, lack of download facility, lack of fast-forward, and short clip length limits should not be confused with the killer feature of giving other people's stuff away. Froogle a failure? It's a search engine for product prices.
        staunch 19y ago
        I didn't claim YouTube's success was due to any technical features like supporting seeking. I agree a large part of why they were so successful was because of the copyrighted content. They took a risk that Google wouldn't. That proves my point exactly. Startups do many things that big companies can't or won't do. Sometimes that takes the form of working in a gray area of the law.
        portLAN 19y ago

by portLAN 19y ago

Alex3917 19y ago

IIRC a lot of it actually comes from the ITConversations interviews and wasn't actually in writing.

pg 19y ago

> What's good for YC is good for the country! It's not that unlikely. Since we had the luxury of doing whatever we wanted by the time we started YC, it stands to reason we'd do something beneficial instead of merely money-making.

portLAN 19y ago
It reads like a marketing pitch to acquirers -- "don't build, buy! Look at this one, a 2.0 webby thingamajig, ain't she a beaut? Only nine ninety nine nine nine nine ninety-nine. Hardly any miles!" Google sure seems to have a lot of success developing apps in-house, and due to integration requirements this makes a lot more sense in many cases. An outside party would simply be unable to provide an optimal solution in those instances. E.g., Kiko.
- pg 19y ago
  > Google sure seems to have a lot of success developing apps in-house Bad choice of examples. Google is by far the biggest buyer of small startups. They just don't publicize it.
  - portLAN 19y ago
    Everyone wants to get acquired by Google, and yet it doesn't stop them doing their own stuff in-house. Unless AdSense, GMail, Calendar, News, Froogle, Video, Finance, etc. were bought instead of built. Not to mention all the work that happened after they bought Keyhole et al.
    - staunch 19y ago
      AdSense was at least partially an acquisition. Video became YouTube. Froogle is largely a failure. Considering how many programmers Google has your argument that they're good at producing stuff in-house is pretty weak. They're great at scaling and running stuff, but so far they don't seem to be very much better at creating new great things than any big company is.
      - portLAN 19y ago
        Everything they buy they do a huge amount of work on, and they don't merely scale; they add features. Google Video was already easily superior to YouTube for the player alone (actual random access); they bought YouTube for its audience. YouTube got so big because unlike GV, it was very lax at policing commercial content. Its poor video quality, lack of download facility, lack of fast-forward, and short clip length limits should not be confused with the killer feature of giving other people's stuff away. Froogle a failure? It's a search engine for product prices.
        staunch 19y ago
        I didn't claim YouTube's success was due to any technical features like supporting seeking. I agree a large part of why they were so successful was because of the copyrighted content. They took a risk that Google wouldn't. That proves my point exactly. Startups do many things that big companies can't or won't do. Sometimes that takes the form of working in a gray area of the law.
        portLAN 19y ago