7 ms·

Wow is this list good. It has the kind of resonance you only get when you're writing from a lot of hard experience. As I just wrote when I sent this link to t

by pg 13y ago

Wow is this list good. It has the kind of resonance you only get when you're writing from a lot of hard experience. As I just wrote when I sent this link to the current YC batch, if you see advice here that puzzles you, it may be a sign of a painful lesson you're going to learn in the future.

dylangs1030 13y ago
With respect, I completely disagree with you. I'm sure a lot of this advice is valid and useful for founders, maybe even the majority of it, but I see a lot that strikes me as false. I'm not a founder of a startup, but I don't think a lot of these are good advice because Slava comes across as so condescending when he states them. That's not to say I'm attacking his tone instead of the advice, but I don't think the advice is valid because it comes from a place of dogmatic declaration (I understand he has a lot of experience, but I don't think some of these subjects can have absolute statements said about them). Take this one, which other commenters have mentioned already: >"If it doesn’t augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way, it’s not worth doing." I'm going to say this is not only blatantly false, but just bad advice and nothing but discouragement. 'cperciva's startup, Tarsnap, is not something I'd say "augments the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way" - it's Colin's full-time job, and I personally think it's fantastic, creative, and genuinely useful to his client-base. But apparently, it's not worth doing because it doesn't "augment the human condition." (I don't mean to involve you, Colin, it's just a relatively well-known example on HN). Let's see...'patio11. His most recent startup, Appointment Reminder, might fall into the category of augmenting the human condition. Does Bingo Card Creator? Maybe I'm reaching here...but no, probably not. Was it not worth doing? Absolutely not. (Again, same to you Patrick). Then we have this tidbit: >"Pick new ideas because they’ve been made possible by other social or technological change. Get on the train as early as possible, but make sure the technology is there to make the product be enough better that it matters." This encourages the stream of, for example, crappy camera apps that currently saturate the app store. A lot of developers got on the train, but giving this kind of advice will probably (as history suggests) make founders believe they have the technology to genuinely make a difference in a highly saturated market. On the other end of the extreme: >"Don’t build something that already exists. Customers won’t buy it just because it’s yours." If you do get on that train early, and you can genuinely innovate, or just plain reverse-engineer at a lower manufacturing cost, by all means do it. That's a good starting recipe for profit. >"Pick implementations that give 80% of the benefit with 20% of the work." The 80/20 ratio has cropped up everywhere and grown in popularity for a while now, but I think it's too vague. In particular, I believe this advice would encourage the wrong kind of behavior. It could be interpreted as being efficient, or it could be interpreted as foregoing the more rewarding, effort-filled path with the one that's only marginally useful but exponentially easier. Risky absolutes for advice. Finally: >"If you can’t get to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, something’s wrong. (You can choose not to be profitable, but it must be your choice, not something forced on you by the market)." Maybe Slava successfully did this, but I don't think it's fair to hold all startups to this bar. I also don't think things like being a "final say" CEO are fully compatible with evenly splitting stocks. This is a very highly debated part of startup financial management. So, yes, this is my opinion, but equally importantly, the opposite advice is also Slava's opinion. Now, on the other hand, a lot of these statements are really good. I'm not flaming the entire post. In particular, I liked: >"Product sense is everything. Learn it as quickly as you can. Being good at engineering has nothing to do with being good at product management." Yes, very true, and something you have echoed before as well, pg. Running a company in any sense of the term is completely different from engineering a company's product. >"Learn the difference between people who might buy your product and people who are just commenting. Pay obsessive attention to the former. Ignore the latter." Often stated, definitely true, also applies to investor courting. My personal favorite: >"Morale is very real and self-perpetuating. If you work too long without victories, your investors, employees, family, and you yourself will lose faith. Work like hell not to get yourself into this position." This is one of those murky, non-actionable truths of startups that you don't really get until you've tried it. Judging from the "I failed" Ask HN: posts, I think this might be one of the least expected but extremely true ones. I might even say that for personal well-being, this might be the most important piece of advice. I'm sure I'll be downvoted for this, but I would ask people to at least explain why they disagree so we can have productive discussion. I respect the OP, I'm just expressing my disagreements here.
- timruffles 13y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted. As you said: the list contains great, tough advice, but some of it is wrong as it's personal preference or pompous. "augmenting the human condition" sounds like it'd be better achieved by writing a novel. I'm trying to imagine the person who could say their startup was "augmenting the human condition" with a straight face.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    I'd agree, that one phrase seems a little out of touch. If it had been phrased differently (e.g. "Do something that changes the world") I still would have taken issue with it. I'm not attacking the phrasing so much as the sentiment that startups need to have Google-level ambitions (something I don't think Larry and Sergey had in the beginning, in fact). Even pg has observed in one of his essays that not all founders set out to disrupt entire industries. But to be fair, there are plenty of examples of companies (Microsoft, Google, Airbnb, Dropbox) which arguable have legitimately augmented the human condition for huge numbers of people. There's just plenty more that didn't, and that's okay.
    - timruffles 13y ago
      Yup. Also I doubt anyone who sets out to "augment the human condition" will: most founder of big cos set out to do something small, & and grew from there when it worked well. If Google started with the goal of being where it is today (self-driving cars, ubiquity), rather than to build the best search-engine possible, it'd have undoubtably failed.
    - simonw 13y ago
      How about "solve problems people care about"?
- swombat 13y ago
  Tarsnap and BCC are pretty awful by the metrics by which startups are judged. They've take. Many years to produce a very modest return. That doesn't mean they're not worthwhile projects, but make no mistake: they are very lousy startups - so bad that the only reason to invest time or money in them is love or learning. The financial return is pretty close to zero compared to other ways Colin and Patrick could have spent their time. Startups are high growth businesses. If there's no high growth potential, it's not a startup. The list is pretty clearly about startups, not pet projects.
philsnow 13y ago
> if you see advice here that puzzles you, it may be a sign of a painful lesson you're going to learn in the future. Ugh, does anybody mind taking a stab at paraphrasing this one: > Don’t say things if your competitors can’t say the opposite. For example, your competitors can’t say their product is slow, so saying yours is fast is sloppy marketing. On the other hand, your competitors can say their software is for Python programmers, so saying yours is for Ruby programmers is good marketing. Apple can get away with breaking this rule, you can’t. This is the only bullet out of the list that I can't quite brain.
- DannoHung 13y ago
  Don't make positive assertions about your product which your competitor wouldn't make an opposite assertion of their product. Stop trying to say you're the hottest shit on the planet, try to make it clear how you're different without trying to imply everyone is shit. Makes it harder for people to get into idiotic debates about whether the claims are true or not for some stupid metric. That is, I suppose, unless your product actually is somehow much faster, smaller, bigger, whatever and it does everything else exactly the same.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  Here's Marc Andreesen saying the same thing with very different words: "There are always real and legitimate reasons why people often pass on opportunities — they see the risks and they wish to avoid them." And here's me trying to say the thing in still other words: Most people are not stupid. If they've chosen to make their product a certain way, it's probably for a real reason. If your marketing implies that they're stupid, people will assume that you can't see their real reason, and assume that you're stupid. It's better to phrase things in terms of trade-offs instead, and let your market decide whether the trade-offs you've made are more appropriate for their use-case than the trade-offs your competitors have made. For an example from a project I just released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209908 (Incidentally, almost all the comments on Gumbo were of the vein of "Why should I use this?" until I started making replies like this, saying "Here's what html5lib does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs from those choices. Here's what validator.nu does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs. Here's what Hubbub does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs."
oziegler 13y ago
Well I disagree with the ramen profitability timeframe, since sometimes it is better first to penetrate the market without compromising your products (ads) and then implement money generating components. Example facebook... They implemented ads at a later stage, long after 6-12 months
- aptwebapps 13y ago
  Isn't that covered by the caveat contained in the point? ... (You can choose not to be profitable, but it must be your choice, not something forced on you by the market).
  - d4nt 13y ago
    I think some business models only make sense at scale. While the caveat does apply to facebook (they probably could have been a profitable niche student social network) occasionally I see businesses that it just doesn't make sense to even start unless you plan on getting really big. Examples would be PayPal, Google and Spotify.
jwp 13y ago
It also resonates especially when you're reading from hard experience. A year ago I would have quickly read & enjoyed this, then moved on. Now too many items give me pause as I recall some mistake I've made. It is very good. Can you tell apart founders who sponge up advice vs those who are doomed to learn on their own? I suspect the answer is conversational resourcefulness (http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html) but wonder if you have more to say.

by pg 13y ago

dylangs1030 13y ago

With respect, I completely disagree with you. I'm sure a lot of this advice is valid and useful for founders, maybe even the majority of it, but I see a lot that strikes me as false. I'm not a founder of a startup, but I don't think a lot of these are good advice because Slava comes across as so condescending when he states them. That's not to say I'm attacking his tone instead of the advice, but I don't think the advice is valid because it comes from a place of dogmatic declaration (I understand he has a lot of experience, but I don't think some of these subjects can have absolute statements said about them). Take this one, which other commenters have mentioned already: >"If it doesn’t augment the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way, it’s not worth doing." I'm going to say this is not only blatantly false, but just bad advice and nothing but discouragement. 'cperciva's startup, Tarsnap, is not something I'd say "augments the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way" - it's Colin's full-time job, and I personally think it's fantastic, creative, and genuinely useful to his client-base. But apparently, it's not worth doing because it doesn't "augment the human condition." (I don't mean to involve you, Colin, it's just a relatively well-known example on HN). Let's see...'patio11. His most recent startup, Appointment Reminder, might fall into the category of augmenting the human condition. Does Bingo Card Creator? Maybe I'm reaching here...but no, probably not. Was it not worth doing? Absolutely not. (Again, same to you Patrick). Then we have this tidbit: >"Pick new ideas because they’ve been made possible by other social or technological change. Get on the train as early as possible, but make sure the technology is there to make the product be enough better that it matters." This encourages the stream of, for example, crappy camera apps that currently saturate the app store. A lot of developers got on the train, but giving this kind of advice will probably (as history suggests) make founders believe they have the technology to genuinely make a difference in a highly saturated market. On the other end of the extreme: >"Don’t build something that already exists. Customers won’t buy it just because it’s yours." If you do get on that train early, and you can genuinely innovate, or just plain reverse-engineer at a lower manufacturing cost, by all means do it. That's a good starting recipe for profit. >"Pick implementations that give 80% of the benefit with 20% of the work." The 80/20 ratio has cropped up everywhere and grown in popularity for a while now, but I think it's too vague. In particular, I believe this advice would encourage the wrong kind of behavior. It could be interpreted as being efficient, or it could be interpreted as foregoing the more rewarding, effort-filled path with the one that's only marginally useful but exponentially easier. Risky absolutes for advice. Finally: >"If you can’t get to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, something’s wrong. (You can choose not to be profitable, but it must be your choice, not something forced on you by the market)." Maybe Slava successfully did this, but I don't think it's fair to hold all startups to this bar. I also don't think things like being a "final say" CEO are fully compatible with evenly splitting stocks. This is a very highly debated part of startup financial management. So, yes, this is my opinion, but equally importantly, the opposite advice is also Slava's opinion. Now, on the other hand, a lot of these statements are really good. I'm not flaming the entire post. In particular, I liked: >"Product sense is everything. Learn it as quickly as you can. Being good at engineering has nothing to do with being good at product management." Yes, very true, and something you have echoed before as well, pg. Running a company in any sense of the term is completely different from engineering a company's product. >"Learn the difference between people who might buy your product and people who are just commenting. Pay obsessive attention to the former. Ignore the latter." Often stated, definitely true, also applies to investor courting. My personal favorite: >"Morale is very real and self-perpetuating. If you work too long without victories, your investors, employees, family, and you yourself will lose faith. Work like hell not to get yourself into this position." This is one of those murky, non-actionable truths of startups that you don't really get until you've tried it. Judging from the "I failed" Ask HN: posts, I think this might be one of the least expected but extremely true ones. I might even say that for personal well-being, this might be the most important piece of advice. I'm sure I'll be downvoted for this, but I would ask people to at least explain why they disagree so we can have productive discussion. I respect the OP, I'm just expressing my disagreements here.

timruffles 13y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted. As you said: the list contains great, tough advice, but some of it is wrong as it's personal preference or pompous. "augmenting the human condition" sounds like it'd be better achieved by writing a novel. I'm trying to imagine the person who could say their startup was "augmenting the human condition" with a straight face.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  I'd agree, that one phrase seems a little out of touch. If it had been phrased differently (e.g. "Do something that changes the world") I still would have taken issue with it. I'm not attacking the phrasing so much as the sentiment that startups need to have Google-level ambitions (something I don't think Larry and Sergey had in the beginning, in fact). Even pg has observed in one of his essays that not all founders set out to disrupt entire industries. But to be fair, there are plenty of examples of companies (Microsoft, Google, Airbnb, Dropbox) which arguable have legitimately augmented the human condition for huge numbers of people. There's just plenty more that didn't, and that's okay.
  - timruffles 13y ago
    Yup. Also I doubt anyone who sets out to "augment the human condition" will: most founder of big cos set out to do something small, & and grew from there when it worked well. If Google started with the goal of being where it is today (self-driving cars, ubiquity), rather than to build the best search-engine possible, it'd have undoubtably failed.
  - simonw 13y ago
    How about "solve problems people care about"?
swombat 13y ago
Tarsnap and BCC are pretty awful by the metrics by which startups are judged. They've take. Many years to produce a very modest return. That doesn't mean they're not worthwhile projects, but make no mistake: they are very lousy startups - so bad that the only reason to invest time or money in them is love or learning. The financial return is pretty close to zero compared to other ways Colin and Patrick could have spent their time. Startups are high growth businesses. If there's no high growth potential, it's not a startup. The list is pretty clearly about startups, not pet projects.

philsnow 13y ago

> if you see advice here that puzzles you, it may be a sign of a painful lesson you're going to learn in the future. Ugh, does anybody mind taking a stab at paraphrasing this one: > Don’t say things if your competitors can’t say the opposite. For example, your competitors can’t say their product is slow, so saying yours is fast is sloppy marketing. On the other hand, your competitors can say their software is for Python programmers, so saying yours is for Ruby programmers is good marketing. Apple can get away with breaking this rule, you can’t. This is the only bullet out of the list that I can't quite brain.

DannoHung 13y ago
Don't make positive assertions about your product which your competitor wouldn't make an opposite assertion of their product. Stop trying to say you're the hottest shit on the planet, try to make it clear how you're different without trying to imply everyone is shit. Makes it harder for people to get into idiotic debates about whether the claims are true or not for some stupid metric. That is, I suppose, unless your product actually is somehow much faster, smaller, bigger, whatever and it does everything else exactly the same.
nostrademons 13y ago
Here's Marc Andreesen saying the same thing with very different words: "There are always real and legitimate reasons why people often pass on opportunities — they see the risks and they wish to avoid them." And here's me trying to say the thing in still other words: Most people are not stupid. If they've chosen to make their product a certain way, it's probably for a real reason. If your marketing implies that they're stupid, people will assume that you can't see their real reason, and assume that you're stupid. It's better to phrase things in terms of trade-offs instead, and let your market decide whether the trade-offs you've made are more appropriate for their use-case than the trade-offs your competitors have made. For an example from a project I just released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209908 (Incidentally, almost all the comments on Gumbo were of the vein of "Why should I use this?" until I started making replies like this, saying "Here's what html5lib does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs from those choices. Here's what validator.nu does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs. Here's what Hubbub does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs."

oziegler 13y ago

Well I disagree with the ramen profitability timeframe, since sometimes it is better first to penetrate the market without compromising your products (ads) and then implement money generating components. Example facebook... They implemented ads at a later stage, long after 6-12 months

aptwebapps 13y ago
Isn't that covered by the caveat contained in the point? ... (You can choose not to be profitable, but it must be your choice, not something forced on you by the market).
- d4nt 13y ago
  I think some business models only make sense at scale. While the caveat does apply to facebook (they probably could have been a profitable niche student social network) occasionally I see businesses that it just doesn't make sense to even start unless you plan on getting really big. Examples would be PayPal, Google and Spotify.

jwp 13y ago

It also resonates especially when you're reading from hard experience. A year ago I would have quickly read & enjoyed this, then moved on. Now too many items give me pause as I recall some mistake I've made. It is very good. Can you tell apart founders who sponge up advice vs those who are doomed to learn on their own? I suspect the answer is conversational resourcefulness (http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html) but wonder if you have more to say.