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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 y

by 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.

by pg 13y ago

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.