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No filter: the meanest thing Paul Graham said to a startup

• jfb 13y ago
  Paul can be terse, and sometimes you don't want to hear what he has to say, and he can be wrong; but he's never a bully.
  • hnriot 13y ago
    sounds to me like he was using his position to bully these guys away from pivoting. If he hadn't been an investor his opinion, like those of their other colleagues, would have gone unheeded. How is this not bullying? Personally I don't even think it was a mean thing to say, it was just honesty, but the whole drama stuff of throwing up arms in exasperation rather than just professionally explaining why they were about to make am mistake is just bad manners.
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• Jd 13y ago
  It's a good question to ask yourself all the time, not only when you are working on a startup. "Am I failing? How?" The more you ask it, the more evaluate your own progress according to whatever goals you have, the better you get at managing your own progress towards goals -- and the less you need other people to manage you. That said, kudos to pg and team for being honest and to the point.
• rubiquity 13y ago
  Good post until the Linus reference without any context.
  • yebyen 13y ago
    Heh... I laughed. I got the context. I suspect you did too. As a matter of fact as soon as I saw "SHUT THE FUCK UP" I knew that when I moused over[1], I was going to be looking at a link to the LKML. Ed: [1] And I haven't ever read the original thread.
    • rubiquity 13y ago
      You probably should read the original thread. People like you are exactly why the reference is out of context, you don't understand how egregious the mistake the person who Linus is replying to made.
      • yebyen 13y ago
        You are mistaken. I have read and replied to people like the people you accuse me of being, and defended the right and necessity of the newsgroup flame. Some people fuck up just that bad. You can't even sugar coat it. It's people like you who... Just kidding!
  • brandonb 13y ago
    Do you think it's bad because you disagree with the point of the Linus reference, or because you didn't understand it without context?
    • rubiquity 13y ago
      I disagree with the Linus reference being brought up without the surrounding details. It's too easy to just point out someone who is using foul language.
    • phpnode 13y ago
      You imply that Linus was overdoing it, he wasn't. Mauro wasn't asking for feedback, he acted in a way that resulted in strong negative feedback, that's why it's not really relevant to the rest of your post.
• jaredstenquist 13y ago
  Was this recent? If not, how did the advice turn out?
  • brandonb 13y ago
    This was two years ago, and so far PG's advice is turning out well: we were able to raise a seed round, series A, get a bunch of customers, and hire an awesome team. You can never be exactly sure where the other road would take you, but one of our employees, who was very encouraging about the local events idea, told me after he decided to join: "There's no way I would have joined if you were working on local events. A user, maybe, but joining you, no." And in the same period of time, I've seen a lot of startups focus on some variant of local events, and most have pivoted or failed completely.
    • brandnewlow 13y ago
      Local events is one of those ideas PG says he outright hates. I remember being surprised when you guys said you were working on it during YC and happy when I heard you moved into fraud detection.
    • nameiscarl 13y ago
      Brandond, would you care to give insight why the local event idea is bad ?
• rexreed 13y ago
  This is nothing compared to the meanest thing a CUSTOMER has said to a startup. Be thankful he doesn't have the power to complain to everyone over twitter, facebook, and the web about your business and the power to sue you if stuff goes wrong. I'll take a harsh-sounding, well-intentioned comment from PG over a truly-mean, ill-intended customer complaint any day. But often even the customer complaints are gems in disguise as well.
  • brandonb 13y ago
    Very true. The customers that were the biggest pain in the ass also provide the most accurate, detailed feedback. But it can be hard to hear when you've been up 20 hours working on something. You need to steel yourself and just try to separate out the objective feedback from any apparent rudeness.
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• dllthomas 13y ago
  "Crocker's Rules" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Daniel_Crocker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Daniel_Crocker) seems relevant.
• JohnsonB 13y ago
  So what was the terrible B2C idea?
  • jdminhbg 13y ago
    From the OP: "So we pivoted to a mobile app for local events."
    • brandonb 13y ago
      Yep. That's it.
• deleted 13y ago
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• anuragramdasan 13y ago
  This is great. I once was a part of a startup. I had my doubts about the idea but the other co-founder assured me that the market would work well. I was the tech guy and had nothing else to do at that point(and also coz I love to code) played along. We talked to a lot of people about the idea and they all had "kinda" nice response, too much filtered. The startup didn't work out. Those were the times when I wished the comments were as unfiltered as the one made by PG here.
• lnanek2 13y ago
  Heh, good for them. I know so many companies in local events it's silly.
• jmduke 13y ago
  For reference: the B2B company Brandon stuck with is Sift Science, which detects fraud via machine learning. https://siftscience.com/ https://siftscience.com/
  • inthewoods 13y ago
    How is this different from what the credit card companies provide? Or do they really not provide that service or only do it on the backend (post transaction)?
    • redidas 13y ago
      It looks like it might be different from checking for monetary fraud. It almost seems like it monitors activity on your website to determine any abnormal activity? Maybe it's more along the line of loss prevention positions at a retail store, which monitor customers' behavior in-store, and follow the ones that look suspicious. Applied to web activity, it seems like it might yield interesting results...
    • brandonb 13y ago
      (I don't like advertising on these threads, but since somebody asked me directly I'll reply.) Credit card companies protect consumers, but not merchants. When you call up your bank to report that a transaction was fraudulent, the credit card company reverses the transaction and withdraws the money from the merchant's account. That reversal, called a chargeback, can occur months after the original sale. Merchants can lose thousands, even millions, of dollars per month due to chargebacks. That means anybody who sells stuff online needs a way to detect fraud on their site in real time, and that's what Sift Science does. If you run a web site with a payment form, give it a shot: http://siftscience.com http://siftscience.com.
      • inthewoods 13y ago
        I appreciate you not overly pitching - I'll check it out. Separately, why aren't you mentioned on the team page? Are you still involved? https://siftscience.com/about https://siftscience.com/about
• fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  It is so hard to get some people to understand that criticism is not always meant to be an insult.
• adamtait 13y ago
  Great post, Brandon. Getting object & honest thoughts, opinions & feedback is vitally important to both teams and each one of us. To help our team be more open, I've tried to use regular retrospectives where we highlight aspects of projects/sprints/teams that went well, poorly, and some that were both. I've also tried having time away from work, but found that without the focus on feedback, people are reluctant to offer criticism. What practices have others used to foster critical feedback? What types of personalities are best at bringing this out of others?
• a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  American society is way too polite and "sensitive" now days. Go read Mencken and Twain, and editorials in general from 90 years ago. You couldn't write invective like that anymore; people would freak out and demand apologies. It's sad. Seems to me the most effective organizations don't pussy foot around stark language. Read about Bill Gates back in the heyday calling people idiots and yelling at them.
• deleted 13y ago
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• bjourne 13y ago
  This post is very gladwellesque; presents an anecdote then draws a very general conclusion based on it (being honest is good). Reading it, it doesn't seem that what made an impression on you was PG's objective criticism of your idea that made your change your mind. It was that he was upset and said something mean. I think that because what you quote of what PG said and therefore must have made the most impact on your decision is his expressions that basically can be translated to "you are fucking stupid": "Moments like these make me glad we invested in sixty-four startups!", "If you want to drive off a cliff, go right ahead.", "like moths for bad ideas." I suppose you want to be seen as rational actors and would never admit it, but when I read your post it seems like you reacted to PG's anger, frustration, meanness and other emotions, but not to his honesty. The conclusion I would draw from your anecdote is that it is much easier to get your point across if you are emotional, even when dealing with intelligent, technical people.
  • pg 13y ago
    I wasn't angry. I was resigned. That's why I phrased what I said the way I did. After so many cycles of doing YC, I know a certain percentage of the startups in each batch are doomed. Some people just aren't meant to start startups, but there's no way for them to know that for sure without trying it. So when a startup seems determined to stay on the wrong path, I won't keep fighting them forever. Eventually I give up. And occasionally when I do I tell them so, because sometimes that wakes them up.
    • jacquesm 13y ago
      Lots of lessons in life have to be experienced, they can't be taught.
    • oyasumi 13y ago
      > "... know a certain percentage of the startups in each batch are doomed. Some people just aren't meant to start startups, but there's no way for them to know that for sure without trying it." People are much stronger and amazing than that. It's important not to forget that all people have unlimited potential, because we are all the same. However, one factor that cannot be measured, is passion. Passion can come from one or any number of factors - and passion can make the impossible possible. To that extent, I'd encourage comment readers to grasp that idea you love so greatly, and grasp it with all your heart... for off that cliff lies a river where you can pan for gold. The other driver's cars were not designed for high altitude nose dives into water. The car designers did not care enough to pay that much attention to detail to handle that dive. However, for the passionate who can make the finest car, there in that river lies the gold.
• llamataboot 13y ago
  OH: "People interested in being brutally honest often seem more interested in the brutality part" There's nothing wrong with creating a culture (especially a non-hierarchical culture) built around trust, good intentions, and honest criticism. But honestly, I see a lot more damage in almost every community I am apart of (not just tech communities, art communities and political communities suffer from the same things) from people hitting people over the head in the name of "honesty" than from bad ideas or bad practices being allowed to continue because no one bothered to point them out.
  • orky56 13y ago
    "Brutally" not only refers to the force applied during the conversation but also the lack of escalation in communicating the sentiment. There is a difference between being passive/aggressive or subtle and giving constructive criticism in an unemotional way. The former is easier and ineffective whereas the latter is an exercise in empathy and self-control.
    • wwweston 13y ago
      "Brutally" may be one of the poorer choices for a modifier intended to communicate a lack of escalation. Maybe "flatly honest" would be better?
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• WestCoastJustin 13y ago
  Personally, I would much rather someone be brutally honest with me, rather than beating around the bush or talking in innuendos hoping that I will figure it out. PG is an expert in his field, and there is no point for him to waste either parties time participating in this charade. Being blunt likely accelerates the learning curve by gutting the conversation of red tape. Getting to the meat and potatoes of the conversation. p.s. This is also why I respect Linus.
  • DanBC 13y ago
    I genuinely do not understand why every discussion about this has people presenting the same two extremes - "Fuck off you idiot" on one end and an inability to give any useful information on the other. In between those two extremes are a wide range of responses that can express anger at having your time wasted, through gratitude for something but inability to use it because of $REASON, through all sort of other stuff.
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    • smackfu 13y ago
      Often because someone accused of being too harsh presents the polar opposite as being the only other option.
    • WestCoastJustin 13y ago
      Going through life being brutally honest would be a hell of a way to live. There obviously needs to be balance and there is a time and a place for everything. I just think that being brutally honest is the time and place when you are asking an expert for their opinion, like seeing a Dr. about a medical issue, he is not mean, but will tell you directly the facts, and his professional opinion on how to help your situation. I guess brutally honest is open to interpretation too. I do mean, honest, professional, constructive feedback, but don't blow smoke up my ass when I need your help, because that is not what I'm there for.
    • diminoten 13y ago
• DanBC 13y ago
  > Actively fostering a culture of "no filter" is painful at first. But like exercising, the more you do it, the easier it gets. And it's better than the alternative—death. No. You say that people tried to tell you what was wrong, and that you didn't listen. Better communication doesn't mean "start with being blunt", just as better communication doesn't mean "dance around the issues but never talk directly about them for fear of offending people." Or, let's see how this works: You're an idiot if the lesson you get from this is that 'no filters' are a good idea. Only a dumb-ass would reach that conclusion. The same kind of fuckwit who would ignore all the smart people trying to give them information and who only gets the point when someone is exasperated enough to fall into rudeness.
  • andrewflnr 13y ago
    I see your point, but different sides of the communication need to hear different things to make things better. Whatever side you're on, you can only change what you do, not what other people do. He's talking to the "tellers" in this case, based on his experience as a recipient, telling them what works. I totally agree with you on the stupid false dichotomy that comes up in all these discussions. It's difficult but possible to get your point across efficiently without being rude. If people think you're being rude, well, sometimes that's a listener problem and there's nothing you can do about it.
• deleted 13y ago
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• candybar 13y ago
  But whose honesty are we talking about? I agree with the heart of this, but very often leaders being "brutally honest" to the point of being rude and inconsiderate have the effect of causing others to become too afraid to speak their minds, lest they trigger an angry response.
• joshuaellinger 13y ago
  It's a little simplistic. Try having 'no filter' in a marriage and most of you would be headed for divorce. Instead, you need to say things in a manner that your target audience will understand. Sometimes, it takes yelling. Sometimes, you can just be silent and have an even greater impact. If my kid is throwing a tantrum, I sit down and listen to what he is saying and give him a message in terms that he is likely to understand. The key is that, if you are dealing with a bunch of headstrong engineers, you might have to push them a lot of get through. If you are dealing with someone who has a bit more sensitivity, this approach can be totally counter-productive.
  • diminoten 13y ago
    > Try having 'no filter' in a marriage and most of you would be headed for divorce. Might be a small point, but people marry those who they like. If you change into someone with no filter, then yeah you'll get that divorce. If you've always been that person with no filter, then your marriage is safe considering that's the man your wife/woman your husband married. If expectations get set at a certain place and then suddenly change, friction will happen, regardless. Even if it's going from "no filter" to "tactful response", that's going to cause interpersonal friction as well. PG seems to have cultivated a perception of "no filter", and so when a person hears, "Let me get Paul", you generally know what's coming. You don't join YC to get patted on the head.
    • jacquesm 13y ago
      People change over time more often than not.
      • diminoten 13y ago
        People get divorced as often as not!
  • john_b 13y ago
    These are qualitatively different kinds of relationships. PG functions as an advisor for YC startups, someone who can influence the direction of your life greatly for a period of time. The difference between failure and success of an early startup can come down to a few critical days or weeks, and living in a version of reality that your ego has warped to protect itself is usually death for a startup. The most important thing in this case is to break that psychological bubble as fast as possible, and harsh words are one way to do it. One's relationship with a spouse or a child is different. You will generally have many years to influence their thinking, and they won't usually suffer if you do it slowly.
• michaelochurch 13y ago
  My thought on this: a "no filter" policy is good, but it requires sensitivity. Paul Graham can shoot down a bad idea (that's a service, not a slight) but not a person, which is an important skill because good people come up with bad ideas all the time and someone has to do the culling. Few people have that ability. Paul Graham is not (from the sounds of it) an asshole. Constructive criticism is good, but assholes are toxic. They shoot down bad ideas, but also good ones, and generally make people insecure. They aren't taken seriously after a while, but they inject random, highly visible, embarrassment that can effectively target anyone and it has a chilling effect. People create and refine these filters and then go too far in the other direction. They know they aren't assholes, but they don't even want to look like assholes. Additionally, most people spend most of their organizational lives as subordinates, in positions where there is literally no upside (and considerable downside) to being a bearer of bad news.
• kangaroo5383 13y ago
  Personally I believe that no filter communication works best in conveying ideas clearly and directly. However, it only work if there's established trust and respect in the relationship. In addition, no filter doesn't mean be abrasive (like Linus). I've found that with some pretty competent people they can shutdown in those situations. Clear, honest, no fluff communication is essential, but it's also essential to keep the conversation about the work and not about the person. A combination of appropriate encouragement, honest criticism, and healthy respect is needed to bring out the best in people.
• johngalt 13y ago
  Never compromise on clarity. Nothing wrong with the proper application of a filter. Filter out words that don't improve the message, or criticism that isn't constructive. The problem with your filter is that you had it tuned to filter out anything that disagreed with you.
• mhartl 13y ago
  It's possible to be honest and tactful at the same time, but doing so requires developing quality real-time filters, which is hard and takes lots of practice. One hypothesis is that powerful people have the luxury of not developing such filters because they can better get away with alienating the targets of their (often, to be fair, dead-on) criticism. Mistaking correlation for causation, people then conclude that operating without such filters is the cause of such power, rather than an effect. As a thought experiment, consider the Jobs quote from the OP: We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same. Now, what would you guess was the rough ratio of brutal honesty directed to Jobs to the brutal honesty coming from Jobs? In physics parlance, I'm guessing it was << 1. Jobs was human, and even an advocate of brutal honesty would probably rather hear "Steve, I need to talk to you about a delicate subject..." than "Steve, you smell like shit and need to take a shower." [1] Considering that Steve could fire you at will, which tack would you take? [1] I once had the pleasure of hearing Mike Scott tell me and a group of other Caltech grad students about his first duty as Apple's first president: tell Steve that, contrary to his belief, a "fruitarian" diet does not result in zero body odor. If memory serves, Mike was wisely oblique and tactful when bringing up the subject.
• omegant 13y ago
  There are several factors here and I haven't seen anybody post them: -PG has surely seen lots of mistakes like the op was going to do. -He has seen how they end. -he has tried persuading those founders in several ways, and probably failed too many times to be satisfied. -probably (I don't know PG beyond his essays and concerences) he knew that giving polite advice was the best way to keep the OP on his track to failure. -so be did the equivalent of a Doctor starting a CPR: a heavy punch to the chest. That may seem a rude behavior to a external observer, but in fact he is saving a live. I suppose that his mean comment was studied and acted, not REALLY emotional. But it worked none the less, it doesn't matter what other people think about that, his role is to keep startups growing, not external people happy about his kindness. PD. CPR (CRP in spanish) and the enter button doesn´t seem to work on the Iphone.
• blackaspen 13y ago
  TIL: Paul Graham is one of the nicest people on earth if that's the meanest thing he could say.
• mindcrime 13y ago
  Our second week in Y Combinator, we almost pivoted away from building a B2B startup I thought a "pivot" was a change in target market in an attempt to find product-market fit, OR a change to a whole new idea in response to a failure to find product-market fit for the current idea. The lean startup book defines a pivot as a "structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.". From that little blurb this sounds more like a "I'm bored with this B2B thing, let's do something totally different and B2C" moment rather than an actual pivot. Or am I missing something?
• mvkel 13y ago
  Not a good sign if you pivot twice before you even get to the top of the hill.
• offsky 13y ago
  I had a professor at Stanford who had a policy to always give positive advice, unless you said "give it to me hot", in which case he gave you the truth. I always asked for advice this way and it saved my butt a few times. More people should have this "brutal honesty mode".
• brymaster 13y ago
  What's with the double standard? There seems to be a disconnect between what people agree can be said to someone's face and what people can say on a public internet forum. I see defense of language in the article and that doesn't add up with what people refer to as 'fatuous vitriol' and are up in arms about on HN comments. I guess there are no hellbannings in 'real life.'
• 6d0debc071 13y ago
  If you want to be an effective communicator, it may be a good idea to speak to different people differently. Brutal honesty works for some people. Other people will just get so upset or defensive that they'll stop thinking or choose not to associate with you. I'd suggest that when it comes to manners and you don't know the other party that well, you might benefit from playing your cards as conservatively as you can given the time you have available. You can get ... blunter ... a lot more easily than you can take back hurting someone's feelings. > Actively fostering a culture of "no filter" is painful at first. But like exercising, the more you do it, the easier it gets. And it's better than the alternative — death. Supposedly, old Chinese courts used to communicate with the Emperor via the interpretation of heavenly portents. I seem to remember that the fool in some European courts was meant to criticise the ruler too. Whether true or not, however, in either of those cases you'd be abstracting the filter out into a procedure and avoiding retaliation from the ruler. If you think that the problem is that people have their egos invested in particular solutions, then I suppose that you could take approaches liable to lessen attachment in the generation stage too. Anyway, I'm not really sure that the only alternative to no filter is death, is what I'm saying ^^; (Though it seems plausible that the alternative to no honesty is.)
• melvinmt 13y ago
  Just curious: what was the idea of the mobile app for local events?
  • nameiscarl 13y ago
    I'm interested in that, too. I go out a lot (in my home town, and even more so in holidays), and I'd love to have an app to give me suggestions of events (special nights, museums, openings, and such). Why was it a bad idea ? Have brandond and al. research the market ?
    • chourobin 13y ago
      There's an app called Now that fits that kind of description. http://www.getnowapp.com/ http://www.getnowapp.com/
    • tonyarkles 13y ago
      Having worked on a local events app in the past (which I ended up abandoning), I have a few thoughts. These aren't necessarily unsurmountable, but they were sticky points: - Event database curation doesn't scale very well. If you want high quality and accurate content, you're either going to need to have people double-checking stuff or come up with some nice algorithms to pre-filter it. - Event entry is a hassle. At the start, you're going to be entering a LOT of the content by hand. This is pretty normal across a lot of different types of product, but with event data, the data has a very definite shelf-life. As soon as the event is over, you've lost a piece of data and you're going to need to replace it with something else. - Chicken & egg: when you haven't grown to be the place to search for events in a city, you're not going to have people entering events for the city (e.g. people who work at venues who want to advertise their events). There are so many different apps that advertise events for you, and putting events into all of them is going to pretty onerous. - Facebook: for a venue, or a band, Facebook is a super easy captive audience. I follow venues I like on FB, and they advertise all of their coming events right there. That's your competition. - Reasonably high cost to drive traffic. If I recall, we were paying somewhere around $0.25/user that came to our site. We got decent inbound traffic, but almost no sign-ups, and even fewer self-posted events. - How do you monetize it? Your two big competitors are Facebook (free for posting events) and posters stapled to telephone poles (25¢/poster to print it).
• harrisreynolds 13y ago
  This was a great post. Honesty/Transparency/Bluntness is just critical. Related to this, it requires a culture where people don't have an emotional attachment to their ideas or work (at least during the development stage).
• 205guy 13y ago
  Minor distracting nitpick: the post title is misleading. I thought PG was the one who said "No filter." I realize the title has no quotes, but missing quotes seems like a smaller mistake than requiring the reader to decipher what it's supposed to mean ("PG has no filter against speaking his mind, which led him to saying the meanest thing he ever said to a startup"). Better title: "Paul Graham dares to criticize, and why you should to." Or just drop the "No filter:". Also, for the first half of the article, I thought "no filter" referred to the founders who switched focus on a whim, ie "no filter against other alluring ideas."
• trustfundbaby 13y ago
  > And that has a corrosive effect on culture. Those negative thoughts don't go away, and when team members repress doubts, resentment builds. Passive-aggressive behavior starts to predominate, politics brew, and problems linger on without being solved. So although people may hold their tongue intending to be nice, the result is that a more subtle kind of meanness takes root This is so absolutely true that its painful, because I have seen this first hand. The thing you must do is try to figure this out before you join a company, because this tiptoeing around people's feelings seems to work really well at shit and spectacularly average companies. So if you go into a place where this is the accepted way of doing things and try to be the straight shooter, you'll find yourself on everybody's shit list because that's just the way things are done, and in short order (depending on the level of sociopathy that prevails at your particular firm) very strange things will start to happen to your career. It seems to be that at companies that are doing really amazing things, with really smart and accomplished people, this is not the case. I also think that this might be a function of culture in the city you work, So while a more unfiltered approach might not raise eyebrows in New York, doing that in Texas could cause problems
• guard-of-terra 13y ago
  Off topic, but Linus is my hero after reading that e-mail. After that story which uncovered sheer idiocy of glibc developers who break user code between two minor releases. Was it Drepper who broke memmove?
• qwerta 13y ago
  There is saying that people will always say nice things. You need good friends or pay small fortune to hear bad things.
• workhere-io 13y ago
  We shouldn't aim for "brutally honest", we should aim for "honest" (meaning telling the truth, but trying our best not to hurt the other party's feelings). Also, the author seems to assume that the person being brutally honest is always right in his/her criticism. But what if he/she isn't? This is the situation many employees find themselves in: Their boss lacks the qualifications to bring valuable input to the table, but still thinks he/she should be allowed to be "brutally honest" (which in those cases basically means being dumb and a loudmouth at the same time).
• zw123456 13y ago
  I enjoy reading HN very much, Most start ups that HN invests in are started by a group of very young people and from what I understand, the amount of money invested is relatively small, which is probably wise. But as someone who has, let's say been around awhile, let me just say that it probably would have been really helpful to have a resource like YC when I was making all my mistakes (ahem, several fails, leave it at that). I agree, PG sounds like he knows when to shake you up a little, I wish I had had a little guidance like that back when. YC'ers, pay attention.
• general_failure 13y ago
  "I want to design something my mom can use". Ahhh, remind me again where I have heard this before. Thank god, pg shot the idea down.