4 ms·

Can you give an example of advice I give about startups in Hackers & Painters that you consider to be mistaken?

by pg 13y ago

ghc 13y ago
Let me preface this by saying that when I was 19 and Hackers and Painters was just published, there was no book more subversive to the natural order of things. H&P changed my life so completely that less than a year after reading it I was standing in the YC office in Mountain View for a YC interview. And even after subsequent rejection, deciding to change majors to CS, going back to school to seek of the advice of Olin Shivers, and actually getting a CS degree, I practically kept it by my bedside. There was nothing even close to as influential in my decision to move to Cambridge and get reinvolved with startups as soon as I graduated. But while H&P is is great at showing people like me that you can succeed in business without an MBA, and in fact might be at an advantage, it might be too subversive in that sense as well. Later essays that weren't included in H&P tell a clearer story. Black Swan Farming and What We Look For In Founder and Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas are essays that might have affected my thinking back then. I don't think anything could have changed my path away from startups; any book containing Why Nerds Are Unpopular and How to Make Wealth was destined to have a profound affect on my life. But while VC is somewhat demonized and stories are told about running out of money, I think there is a certain glorification of the process that translated in my brain to "build product -> seek seed funding (YC) -> get users -> get VC", when I might have been better served by something telling me in big, bold l etters that while all this is great, if you're just starting out, don't just make something people want, make something people want to pay you for. I didn't learn the lesson fully (after all, everyone I knew was building facebook clones back then) until being part of my first exit at a startup where we took no money . It was so refreshing to fund the company off customers' payments that even for my latest side project I found ways to make people want to pay me for it before I had built anything. So while I don't think Hackers & Painters gives any wrong advice, I think that you are such a good essayist that you unintentionally glorified the traditional VC-back ed startup process to someone as young as I was. If I'd read more about how to be a cockroach, and had someone tell me that my first company should focus on making so mething people will pay me for immediately, maybe I would have had a better chance of success at 19 instead of in my mid-twenties.
- acgourley 13y ago
  I feel the same way - it was an inspiring book but didn't suitably point out the difference between an unproven and proven founding team and how they can approach fundraising, which I believe caused parent (and me) to "get into the game" with unrealistic expectations.
  - pg 13y ago
    That seems a bit of a stretch. Hackers & Painters wasn't a book about startups. It was a collection of essays about topics related to computers. One of them ("How to Make Wealth") happened to be an analysis of the economics underlying startups. But tactical advice about fundraising would have been out of place in it.
    - acgourley 13y ago
      Probably the original parent and I should not have been directing our comments at Hackers & Painters so much as your set of essays on startups before How to Convince Investors. You've served as a source of inspiration which accomplished a net good overall, I simply feel I (and others) went all in with un-calibrated expectations on closing investment. This explains why realism on the topic (your recent essays, alex's article, etc.) is being well received.
- pg 13y ago
  Thanks for the kind words, but I think you may be attributing ideas to "How to Make Wealth" that you picked up elsewhere at about the same time. Perhaps from your peers building Facebook clones. The whole point of that essay is that startups should make something people pay them for. E.g. What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue to exist, is earn money. And the way most companies make money is by creating wealth.
  - ghc 13y ago
    I don't deny that I may have missed the point of "How to Make Wealth" when I was younger, but I think it wasn't so hard to get the wrong things out of it: -- So I think you should make users the test, just as acquirers do. Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users. -- Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice. -- The advantage of creating wealth, as a way to get rich, is not just that it's more legitimate (many of the other methods are now illegal) but that it's more straightforward. You just have to do something people want. What those passages mean to an experienced entrepreneur and what they mean for a college student living in a dorm around the time facebook was released might be completely different (it was for me). Building something technically difficult to replicate that people wanted didn't scream "find paying customers yesterday", then build it. None of us paid for any of the software we used (either b/c it was free or we had Kazaa), so the "user test" meant something different to me than it does now. I think I was pretty convinced that the "monetize later" model was the way to go until at least 2008. So you might say my main critique is that I was too naive at 19, and needed things spelled out for me. "How to make Weath" was just too subtle.

Can you give an example of advice I give about startups in Hackers & Painters that you consider to be mistaken?

by pg 13y ago

Can you give an example of advice I give about startups in Hackers & Painters that you consider to be mistaken?

ghc 13y ago

Let me preface this by saying that when I was 19 and Hackers and Painters was just published, there was no book more subversive to the natural order of things. H&P changed my life so completely that less than a year after reading it I was standing in the YC office in Mountain View for a YC interview. And even after subsequent rejection, deciding to change majors to CS, going back to school to seek of the advice of Olin Shivers, and actually getting a CS degree, I practically kept it by my bedside. There was nothing even close to as influential in my decision to move to Cambridge and get reinvolved with startups as soon as I graduated. But while H&P is is great at showing people like me that you can succeed in business without an MBA, and in fact might be at an advantage, it might be too subversive in that sense as well. Later essays that weren't included in H&P tell a clearer story. Black Swan Farming and What We Look For In Founder and Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas are essays that might have affected my thinking back then. I don't think anything could have changed my path away from startups; any book containing Why Nerds Are Unpopular and How to Make Wealth was destined to have a profound affect on my life. But while VC is somewhat demonized and stories are told about running out of money, I think there is a certain glorification of the process that translated in my brain to "build product -> seek seed funding (YC) -> get users -> get VC", when I might have been better served by something telling me in big, bold l etters that while all this is great, if you're just starting out, don't just make something people want, make something people want to pay you for. I didn't learn the lesson fully (after all, everyone I knew was building facebook clones back then) until being part of my first exit at a startup where we took no money . It was so refreshing to fund the company off customers' payments that even for my latest side project I found ways to make people want to pay me for it before I had built anything. So while I don't think Hackers & Painters gives any wrong advice, I think that you are such a good essayist that you unintentionally glorified the traditional VC-back ed startup process to someone as young as I was. If I'd read more about how to be a cockroach, and had someone tell me that my first company should focus on making so mething people will pay me for immediately, maybe I would have had a better chance of success at 19 instead of in my mid-twenties.

acgourley 13y ago
I feel the same way - it was an inspiring book but didn't suitably point out the difference between an unproven and proven founding team and how they can approach fundraising, which I believe caused parent (and me) to "get into the game" with unrealistic expectations.
- pg 13y ago
  That seems a bit of a stretch. Hackers & Painters wasn't a book about startups. It was a collection of essays about topics related to computers. One of them ("How to Make Wealth") happened to be an analysis of the economics underlying startups. But tactical advice about fundraising would have been out of place in it.
  - acgourley 13y ago
    Probably the original parent and I should not have been directing our comments at Hackers & Painters so much as your set of essays on startups before How to Convince Investors. You've served as a source of inspiration which accomplished a net good overall, I simply feel I (and others) went all in with un-calibrated expectations on closing investment. This explains why realism on the topic (your recent essays, alex's article, etc.) is being well received.
pg 13y ago
Thanks for the kind words, but I think you may be attributing ideas to "How to Make Wealth" that you picked up elsewhere at about the same time. Perhaps from your peers building Facebook clones. The whole point of that essay is that startups should make something people pay them for. E.g. What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue to exist, is earn money. And the way most companies make money is by creating wealth.
- ghc 13y ago
  I don't deny that I may have missed the point of "How to Make Wealth" when I was younger, but I think it wasn't so hard to get the wrong things out of it: -- So I think you should make users the test, just as acquirers do. Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users. -- Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice. -- The advantage of creating wealth, as a way to get rich, is not just that it's more legitimate (many of the other methods are now illegal) but that it's more straightforward. You just have to do something people want. What those passages mean to an experienced entrepreneur and what they mean for a college student living in a dorm around the time facebook was released might be completely different (it was for me). Building something technically difficult to replicate that people wanted didn't scream "find paying customers yesterday", then build it. None of us paid for any of the software we used (either b/c it was free or we had Kazaa), so the "user test" meant something different to me than it does now. I think I was pretty convinced that the "monetize later" model was the way to go until at least 2008. So you might say my main critique is that I was too naive at 19, and needed things spelled out for me. "How to make Weath" was just too subtle.