12 ms·

as someone geographically & logically outside of the silicon valley bubble, working in the 'real economy' and a bit older than the y combinator target group it

as someone geographically & logically outside of the silicon valley bubble, working in the 'real economy' and a bit older than the y combinator target group it hurts me to see those kind of lectures / advice on startups. from my perspective it all seems like one big circle jerk, especially considering the hive-mind mentality here on hackernews where working 80hours+ / week for some fun app startup seems like good guidance for young people and something to strive for. the goal of a startup is to make money, not raising money. the SV scene seems to be concentrating on the latter since its influenced & guided completely by venture capitalists and their interests instead of market opportunities. to be provocative: just throw thousands of teenagers at random things, give them some pocket money and hope something sticks. motivate them by giving them some grand illusion of being an independent entrepreuner. burnout is just something that comes with the game. give them lectures to clone them into perfect worker bees for VCs as traditional education would clone them into perfect big corp employees. my advice to young people with drive is: go travel, see the world first. solve real problems. starting your typical SV startup is mostly an illusion and a bad proposition for you. young age is certainly good for coming up with disrupting ideas, but execution profits heavily from life experience - think of survivorship bias and don't be fooled by the few success stories.

pratyushag 12y ago
It often takes leaving SV to understand what you're saying here.
gloverkcn 12y ago
I don't think you're being that provocative. I think you should change teenagers to dreamers, and random things to whatever was funded last week by the other VC. People who are convinced they have an idea for a billon dollar startup idea(no matter how unrealistic) are far more willing to sign lopsided deals, and destroy themselves trying to make it happen. They are so tunnel vision that they just refuse to acknowledge what a 90% failure rate means.
- trendyy 12y ago
  I think you should let people dream. Very few people start billion dollar start-ups - but there are skills and insight being provided here that is highly transferable. Start-ups are frequently on the cutting edge of business practices - the ideas that are generated here often have impact for people working in big business as well.
- menriquez 12y ago
  'They are so tunnel vision that they just refuse to acknowledge what a 90% failure rate means.' yes it means 1 out of 10 becomes fabulously wealthy and semi-famous...those are pretty great odds as compared as going to work for someone else.
thu 12y ago
I guess you could call it a circle jerk, but it is in some way acknowledged (not in a negative way). For instance the path get-accepted-at-yc -> demo-day -> raise-money is intended for those who want to raise money which is not necessarily the desire of every startup (I guess this is clear for everybody). The one implicit assumption that I find the most difficult to grasp is the "change the world" attitude, especially when you see that as soon as they try to make money at the same scale they are valuated, startups do "wrong" things. Take FB or Twitter; I guess that connecting people is a noble goal. But trying all the time to get me to click on promoted content, is that good ?
JonoBB 12y ago
> AirBnB spent 5 months hiring before they hired a person. Brian Chesky: "Would you take the job if you had a medical diagnosis that says you only have a year left to live?" - culture of extremely dedicated people I couldn't help but feel an extreme level of utter disgust at this. Somehow portraying that its heroic to work for a start up for the last 12 months of your life. Really? Utterly fucking ridiculous.
- freakonom 12y ago
  The point isn't that working at a startup is heroic. The point is that if you don't believe in your core that the startup's mission is worth spending the last year of your life on, you're not the kind of person who'll do what's necessary to make it happen. Maybe you can't think of a cause you'd make that sacrifice for, but many founders and startup employees can. I don't think that's disgusting.
  - malthaus 12y ago
    how cynical is it to demand this of your employees when you are the founder with 10-100% of the equity? and how easily impressed (or young / stupid) do you have to be to buy into this as an employee? it's airbnb, you're not curing cancer!
    - yellow_and_gray 12y ago
      You slightly changed the problem here though. Your point now is that employees should be rewarded more. That's a fair point [1]. But it's still separate to being dedicated to what you do. There are several occupations people enter knowing there is little monetary reward. Schoolteachers don't make much but they are dedicated to building children's lives and can't imagine themselves doing anything else. So are artists and generally anyone who has found their calling. If I had a only a year to live I probably would still be working on the things I'm working on now. [1] - It's a fair hypothesis that the most valuable company would be the one where everyone involved is rewarded in proportion to the value they generate. You can't build some kinds of companies if you keep 100% of the equity as a founder btw. Look at Alibaba's $210b IPO and Alibaba's founder who has only 8.4%.
trendyy 12y ago
Whilst I somehwhat agree with your sentiment, I actually think the content of the course (thus far) is acutally pretty consistent with what you've said above. The main takeaway from the last lecture was identify a good problem and a good idea that resonates with you personally - or as you phrased it "solve real problems". The key difference between a start-up and a normal small business is that a start-up's main aim is to grow very quickly to benefit from the economies of the business model. Unfortunately in that environment raising venture capital and working 80 hour weeks is a bit of a fact of life - I hope some people take away from this course that there are other options to this. Specifically a slower self-financing growth phase, bank loans or family/friends etc.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  How many people really work 80 hour weeks on their startup? Counting only time that is spent actually working, and not on HN or playing foosball. In my experience people often overestimate how much they work because they want to one up others.
revorad 12y ago
That's overly cynical. There are different paths to building a business, and you can choose which one you want to take.
- malthaus 12y ago
  true, maybe i'm just bitter because i missed both bubbles in '99 and the one now to raise some money and flip a startup. :) i respect everyone who starts a business, it's tough (and success is heavily influenced by luck & personal connections). i just want to make the point that from an outside perspective this doesnt look like a building a business, its more like big corp work disguised as entrepreneurship.
  - revorad 12y ago
    The mistake is to paint the situation as black and white, which it's clearly not. There are plenty of failures and successes across the spectrum.
wellboy 12y ago
I get your point, but it might be you do not want to build a $1B company. Y-Combinator is designed to build $1B+ companies, however, it is not designed to not build $1B companies at all. So if you don't want to do that, yes do not work 80h/week. However, this way, you are also very unlikely to build a company of that size. If you want to build a huge tech-company like Uber, Twitter, AirBnB, you will need to spend all your brain capacity for what you are doing in order to make a company like that happen, you will simply need to sacrifice a lot, friends, sports, having a girlfriend, sometimes even sanity. Most people would never do that and that is fine, however, there are some people can't imagine doing something else, because they really, really want to change the world and there is nothing else that would give them more satisfaction. This is not possible as a side-project and the evidence is that the huge companies we have these days were not built part-time. They were built full-time, probably double full-time. Hope the other point of view makes a bit more sense to you now.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  The parent understands what you wrote just fine. What I think you misunderstand is the parent's point. The "$1B" has to come from somewhere. The parent's point is that in the Valley/VC bubble, that $1B isn't primarily from economic activity in the traditional sense that a business provides a good or service to enterprise or retail consumers in exchange for money, but is instead primarily from additional rounds of fundraising from other investors in later series. So I'd modify your first sentence to make it more accurate: "It might be you do not want to build a company with a $1B value that is largely paper-money based on investor provided funding."
yellow_and_gray 12y ago
Besides being imprecise you also contradicted yourself. (1) > my advice to young people with drive is ... solve real problems. You say burnout is intrinsic to startups but ignore that hard work is needed for other things that aren't startups. What makes you think solving real problems doesn't require dedication? (2) > the goal of a startup is to make money No. It's a goal, but not the only goal. Another goal is to make the world a better place. (3) Can you be precise about what "hurts you to see" those lectures? Is it because what they say is true and the truth is uncomfortable? Or do the lectures say something that's false? Can you point to a specific sentence that's false? If you can't boil something down to a single sentence then you don't know what you are saying and judging from the length of your comment you don't.
- McDoku 12y ago
  I always disagree with the single sentence thing. Being able to turn a complicated idea into a sentence does generally mean you get the concept, but you can still get the concept with out expressing it at a 5th grade language level.
  - yellow_and_gray 12y ago
    The goal isn't just to get the concept. It's also to transmit it. You'll be surprised how hard it is to get a message through to people, even when it's expressed in plain words in a single sentence. And don't be tricked into thinking that making your ideas understandable to all people is a mark of low intelligence because it isn't. It can't be a total accident there's a high correlation between being a good communicator and being a successful founder.
    - McDoku 12y ago
      I agree 100%. My issue is with it being framed as understanding your work. When it is more about understanding how the public thinks and feels. It is more political then technical. It is about connection. Highlighting that I think helps people to focus on a completely different skill set. I know I got bogged up in the joy of my technical development and needed to remind myself to be an evangelist which is fundamentally an application of rhetoric. It also means skilfully using cognitive short cuts that already cluster information in order to simplify. It is not that the public cannot understand, it is just that it is hard to not use domain specific vocabulary and still communicate the concept. Take search engine. It is a perfect example of this process.
nchlswu 12y ago
I think the lectures so far aren't exactly inconsistent with your thinking. They're skewed SV and given their origins, why wouldn't they be? But at the same time, the first two lectures have politely/subtly pointed out whats wrong with the scene and taken them down
n_coats 12y ago
Extremely well put sir! Go forth and travel young ones!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cliffcrosland 12y ago
The assumption that startup success relies on enduring 80 hour work weeks is a commonly held one in Silicon Valley, yet there are some remarkable counter-examples. Dropcam, for example, made it an explicit part of their culture that employees work a focused 40 hour work week and have dinner with family and friends outside of the office. The CEO believes that startups who offer dinner at work are basically manipulating employees to work late into the night [1]. Did these sane, healthy work policies hold Dropcam back from massive success? Nope. It was acquired for half a billion dollars [2]. For the sake of our team members and employees, I think we would do well to emulate Dropcam. [1] http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/04/23/dropcam-ceos-beef-with-brogramming-late-nights-and-free-dinners/ http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/04/23/dropcam-ceos... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/20/google-and-nest-acquire-dropcam-for-555-million/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/20/google-and-nest-acquire-dro...
- gkmoyn 12y ago
  The idea that people really work 80-hour weeks is TOTAL BULLSHIT. It's only self-aggrandizement. 80 hours a week means 11 hours a day every single day. That means you wake up at 8am, roll into office at 9am (ya, show me a startup where everyone's there at 9am!), work straight until 8pm, and get home 9pm. Including Saturdays and Sundays. I completely reject the notion that even in the most dedicated startup, you will find a large number of people who do this for any sustained period of time. People have limits. After a few days of 11-hour shifts, anyone will say "fuck, I need a break." Even the fabled CEO, who will be on email and essentially on call 24/7, will take breaks that bring the number down from 80 hours sustained.
  - rdlecler1 12y ago
    I don't have any data on this, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the average knowledge worker works 4 hours per days. So even if you're right, they're still doing 2x. When I have a programming/computer task a typical day for me is 8:30 am - 10:30 during weekdays. I work from home so there is no commute time and I usually quickly eat at my desk. If I have meetings and a lot of multi-tasking then that eats into my productivity because there's always task switching inertia.
fan 12y ago
Are you against the particular points in this lecture? The video seems like sound tactical advice on how to do a particular type of startup. He talks about things like looking for cofounders, hiring, and soforth. Very little time is spend haranguing students on raising money, or working 80 hour weeks. Or perhaps you are speaking against the SV startup culture in general, with this video as a catalyst for touching off those thoughts? In that case, perhaps there's just a difference of values.
fooaway 12y ago
Along these lines, the music business is largely driven by 23+ year olds making music bought by teenagers.
- thejdude 12y ago
  23+ for actual bands. Most pop music is probably made by 40+. (recommendation: listen to Porcupine Tree - The Sound of Muzak)
wslh 12y ago
> The goal of a startup is to make money, not raising money. the SV scene seems to be concentrating on the latter since its influenced & guided completely by venture capitalists and their interests instead of market opportunities. I see it as a protocol to reduce uncertainty and expect more protocols (appcoins? kickstarters?) to arise. You know that the next carrot in front of you is going to an accelerator, then raise more money (repeat), then get acquired, get profitable, go public, or simply die.

pratyushag 12y ago

It often takes leaving SV to understand what you're saying here.

gloverkcn 12y ago

I don't think you're being that provocative. I think you should change teenagers to dreamers, and random things to whatever was funded last week by the other VC. People who are convinced they have an idea for a billon dollar startup idea(no matter how unrealistic) are far more willing to sign lopsided deals, and destroy themselves trying to make it happen. They are so tunnel vision that they just refuse to acknowledge what a 90% failure rate means.

trendyy 12y ago
I think you should let people dream. Very few people start billion dollar start-ups - but there are skills and insight being provided here that is highly transferable. Start-ups are frequently on the cutting edge of business practices - the ideas that are generated here often have impact for people working in big business as well.
menriquez 12y ago
'They are so tunnel vision that they just refuse to acknowledge what a 90% failure rate means.' yes it means 1 out of 10 becomes fabulously wealthy and semi-famous...those are pretty great odds as compared as going to work for someone else.

thu 12y ago

I guess you could call it a circle jerk, but it is in some way acknowledged (not in a negative way). For instance the path get-accepted-at-yc -> demo-day -> raise-money is intended for those who want to raise money which is not necessarily the desire of every startup (I guess this is clear for everybody). The one implicit assumption that I find the most difficult to grasp is the "change the world" attitude, especially when you see that as soon as they try to make money at the same scale they are valuated, startups do "wrong" things. Take FB or Twitter; I guess that connecting people is a noble goal. But trying all the time to get me to click on promoted content, is that good ?

JonoBB 12y ago

> AirBnB spent 5 months hiring before they hired a person. Brian Chesky: "Would you take the job if you had a medical diagnosis that says you only have a year left to live?" - culture of extremely dedicated people I couldn't help but feel an extreme level of utter disgust at this. Somehow portraying that its heroic to work for a start up for the last 12 months of your life. Really? Utterly fucking ridiculous.

freakonom 12y ago
The point isn't that working at a startup is heroic. The point is that if you don't believe in your core that the startup's mission is worth spending the last year of your life on, you're not the kind of person who'll do what's necessary to make it happen. Maybe you can't think of a cause you'd make that sacrifice for, but many founders and startup employees can. I don't think that's disgusting.
- malthaus 12y ago
  how cynical is it to demand this of your employees when you are the founder with 10-100% of the equity? and how easily impressed (or young / stupid) do you have to be to buy into this as an employee? it's airbnb, you're not curing cancer!
  - yellow_and_gray 12y ago
    You slightly changed the problem here though. Your point now is that employees should be rewarded more. That's a fair point [1]. But it's still separate to being dedicated to what you do. There are several occupations people enter knowing there is little monetary reward. Schoolteachers don't make much but they are dedicated to building children's lives and can't imagine themselves doing anything else. So are artists and generally anyone who has found their calling. If I had a only a year to live I probably would still be working on the things I'm working on now. [1] - It's a fair hypothesis that the most valuable company would be the one where everyone involved is rewarded in proportion to the value they generate. You can't build some kinds of companies if you keep 100% of the equity as a founder btw. Look at Alibaba's $210b IPO and Alibaba's founder who has only 8.4%.

trendyy 12y ago

Whilst I somehwhat agree with your sentiment, I actually think the content of the course (thus far) is acutally pretty consistent with what you've said above. The main takeaway from the last lecture was identify a good problem and a good idea that resonates with you personally - or as you phrased it "solve real problems". The key difference between a start-up and a normal small business is that a start-up's main aim is to grow very quickly to benefit from the economies of the business model. Unfortunately in that environment raising venture capital and working 80 hour weeks is a bit of a fact of life - I hope some people take away from this course that there are other options to this. Specifically a slower self-financing growth phase, bank loans or family/friends etc.

jiggy2011 12y ago
How many people really work 80 hour weeks on their startup? Counting only time that is spent actually working, and not on HN or playing foosball. In my experience people often overestimate how much they work because they want to one up others.

revorad 12y ago

That's overly cynical. There are different paths to building a business, and you can choose which one you want to take.

malthaus 12y ago
true, maybe i'm just bitter because i missed both bubbles in '99 and the one now to raise some money and flip a startup. :) i respect everyone who starts a business, it's tough (and success is heavily influenced by luck & personal connections). i just want to make the point that from an outside perspective this doesnt look like a building a business, its more like big corp work disguised as entrepreneurship.
- revorad 12y ago
  The mistake is to paint the situation as black and white, which it's clearly not. There are plenty of failures and successes across the spectrum.

wellboy 12y ago

I get your point, but it might be you do not want to build a $1B company. Y-Combinator is designed to build $1B+ companies, however, it is not designed to not build $1B companies at all. So if you don't want to do that, yes do not work 80h/week. However, this way, you are also very unlikely to build a company of that size. If you want to build a huge tech-company like Uber, Twitter, AirBnB, you will need to spend all your brain capacity for what you are doing in order to make a company like that happen, you will simply need to sacrifice a lot, friends, sports, having a girlfriend, sometimes even sanity. Most people would never do that and that is fine, however, there are some people can't imagine doing something else, because they really, really want to change the world and there is nothing else that would give them more satisfaction. This is not possible as a side-project and the evidence is that the huge companies we have these days were not built part-time. They were built full-time, probably double full-time. Hope the other point of view makes a bit more sense to you now.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago
The parent understands what you wrote just fine. What I think you misunderstand is the parent's point. The "$1B" has to come from somewhere. The parent's point is that in the Valley/VC bubble, that $1B isn't primarily from economic activity in the traditional sense that a business provides a good or service to enterprise or retail consumers in exchange for money, but is instead primarily from additional rounds of fundraising from other investors in later series. So I'd modify your first sentence to make it more accurate: "It might be you do not want to build a company with a $1B value that is largely paper-money based on investor provided funding."

yellow_and_gray 12y ago

Besides being imprecise you also contradicted yourself. (1) > my advice to young people with drive is ... solve real problems. You say burnout is intrinsic to startups but ignore that hard work is needed for other things that aren't startups. What makes you think solving real problems doesn't require dedication? (2) > the goal of a startup is to make money No. It's a goal, but not the only goal. Another goal is to make the world a better place. (3) Can you be precise about what "hurts you to see" those lectures? Is it because what they say is true and the truth is uncomfortable? Or do the lectures say something that's false? Can you point to a specific sentence that's false? If you can't boil something down to a single sentence then you don't know what you are saying and judging from the length of your comment you don't.

McDoku 12y ago
I always disagree with the single sentence thing. Being able to turn a complicated idea into a sentence does generally mean you get the concept, but you can still get the concept with out expressing it at a 5th grade language level.
- yellow_and_gray 12y ago
  The goal isn't just to get the concept. It's also to transmit it. You'll be surprised how hard it is to get a message through to people, even when it's expressed in plain words in a single sentence. And don't be tricked into thinking that making your ideas understandable to all people is a mark of low intelligence because it isn't. It can't be a total accident there's a high correlation between being a good communicator and being a successful founder.
  - McDoku 12y ago
    I agree 100%. My issue is with it being framed as understanding your work. When it is more about understanding how the public thinks and feels. It is more political then technical. It is about connection. Highlighting that I think helps people to focus on a completely different skill set. I know I got bogged up in the joy of my technical development and needed to remind myself to be an evangelist which is fundamentally an application of rhetoric. It also means skilfully using cognitive short cuts that already cluster information in order to simplify. It is not that the public cannot understand, it is just that it is hard to not use domain specific vocabulary and still communicate the concept. Take search engine. It is a perfect example of this process.

nchlswu 12y ago

I think the lectures so far aren't exactly inconsistent with your thinking. They're skewed SV and given their origins, why wouldn't they be? But at the same time, the first two lectures have politely/subtly pointed out whats wrong with the scene and taken them down

n_coats 12y ago

Extremely well put sir! Go forth and travel young ones!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

cliffcrosland 12y ago

The assumption that startup success relies on enduring 80 hour work weeks is a commonly held one in Silicon Valley, yet there are some remarkable counter-examples. Dropcam, for example, made it an explicit part of their culture that employees work a focused 40 hour work week and have dinner with family and friends outside of the office. The CEO believes that startups who offer dinner at work are basically manipulating employees to work late into the night [1]. Did these sane, healthy work policies hold Dropcam back from massive success? Nope. It was acquired for half a billion dollars [2]. For the sake of our team members and employees, I think we would do well to emulate Dropcam. [1] http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/04/23/dropcam-ceos-beef-with-brogramming-late-nights-and-free-dinners/ http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/04/23/dropcam-ceos... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/20/google-and-nest-acquire-dropcam-for-555-million/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/20/google-and-nest-acquire-dro...

gkmoyn 12y ago
The idea that people really work 80-hour weeks is TOTAL BULLSHIT. It's only self-aggrandizement. 80 hours a week means 11 hours a day every single day. That means you wake up at 8am, roll into office at 9am (ya, show me a startup where everyone's there at 9am!), work straight until 8pm, and get home 9pm. Including Saturdays and Sundays. I completely reject the notion that even in the most dedicated startup, you will find a large number of people who do this for any sustained period of time. People have limits. After a few days of 11-hour shifts, anyone will say "fuck, I need a break." Even the fabled CEO, who will be on email and essentially on call 24/7, will take breaks that bring the number down from 80 hours sustained.
- rdlecler1 12y ago
  I don't have any data on this, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the average knowledge worker works 4 hours per days. So even if you're right, they're still doing 2x. When I have a programming/computer task a typical day for me is 8:30 am - 10:30 during weekdays. I work from home so there is no commute time and I usually quickly eat at my desk. If I have meetings and a lot of multi-tasking then that eats into my productivity because there's always task switching inertia.

fan 12y ago

Are you against the particular points in this lecture? The video seems like sound tactical advice on how to do a particular type of startup. He talks about things like looking for cofounders, hiring, and soforth. Very little time is spend haranguing students on raising money, or working 80 hour weeks. Or perhaps you are speaking against the SV startup culture in general, with this video as a catalyst for touching off those thoughts? In that case, perhaps there's just a difference of values.

fooaway 12y ago

Along these lines, the music business is largely driven by 23+ year olds making music bought by teenagers.

thejdude 12y ago
23+ for actual bands. Most pop music is probably made by 40+. (recommendation: listen to Porcupine Tree - The Sound of Muzak)

wslh 12y ago

> The goal of a startup is to make money, not raising money. the SV scene seems to be concentrating on the latter since its influenced & guided completely by venture capitalists and their interests instead of market opportunities. I see it as a protocol to reduce uncertainty and expect more protocols (appcoins? kickstarters?) to arise. You know that the next carrot in front of you is going to an accelerator, then raise more money (repeat), then get acquired, get profitable, go public, or simply die.