11 ms·

What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?

331 points by oskarth 12y ago

MichaelGG 12y ago
Did MS start out to just write BASIC for the Altair? Or if asked would they have said they were going to write software for computer users? The second phrasing doesn't sound so lame. And I imagine you can come up with a lame sounding subset for many companies. Edit: I get the point that companies might have a larger scope and to look out for it but deliberately trying to come up with a lame tagline seems... Off? Did AirBNB really set out just to offer a single place with air mattresses? Like no plans?
- chubot 12y ago
  I don't know for sure, but AirBNB had the weird domain name airbednbreakfast.com or something, and it still has pretty weird company name too. It's not really what you would choose for disrupting the hotel industry. By decades of media coverage, "Microsoft" evokes images of a behemoth. But try to imagine what the name "Microsoft" must have sounded like -- it doesn't sound very ambitious. It sounds a little lame. If you planned to be the biggest company in the world, would you name your company "Microsoft"? Microsoft was started when Gates was 20 or something. I think a lot of 20 year olds are just trying to make something interesting. Some are dreaming of taking over the world, but those are the types that probably don't actually do it. I think you can see a similar thing with Linux. If you look at Linus's original mail announcing Linux, it doesn't sound like he has any goals to run on the majority of servers, mobile phones, many desktops, and tons of embedded devices. He even insisted it would never be portable past i386!!! I agree with pg that a lot of these people are living in the future and don't necessarily realize that they're going to be riding this hockey stick growth. Even if you're doing it, I'm sure it's hard to predict. There's hundreds of decisions and improvements you have to make along the way. There's no one idea or feature to implement to get that big.
  - kryptiskt 12y ago
    > But try to imagine what the name "Microsoft" must have sounded like -- it doesn't sound very ambitious. It sounds a little lame. If you planned to be the biggest company in the world, would you name your company "Microsoft"? They certainly were no match for the ambitions of Intergalactic Digital Research.
    - chubot 12y ago
      Ha! I didn't know Digital was originally called that. That's a beautiful irony. http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM
- trequartista 12y ago
  I think it's about the MVP - minimum viable product of the company. The first product which is going to bring in revenue and keep the lights on. You will obviously consolidate further and build a business plan around the MVP. Basic for Altair was Microsoft's MVP. Offering air mattresses was AirBNB's MVP.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Looking at Wikipedia, it appears they spent several months before launching their site, after getting a technical cofounder. So 3 people and 6 months, at least. I find it very hard to believe they did all that with the idea their MVP was renting out their flat.
    - ashraful 12y ago
      It wasn't just renting out their flat, they let other people rent out their air mattresses (or couches) too. Early on their idea was to be a "Bed and Breakfast", to the point where they required the hosts to cook breakfast for the guests.
- enf 12y ago
  What they said in 1976 was that they wanted to be "able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software." So more than BASIC, but without the notion that the computer software market would grow to encompass everyone.
  - kens 12y ago
    The letter containing that statement is a key to understanding Microsoft's goals and their success (in particular the key innovation that people should pay for software). If you haven't read it, I recommend taking a look: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-software.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-...
    - frabcus 12y ago
      Reading that letter for the first time in years (and having worked on a commercial startup for the first time since)... My main question is, how could Bill Gates afford the $40,000 of computer time? That's quite a lot of capital at the time.
      - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
        Because like the (vast) majority of very successful people he started from a position of financial independence and social connections that absolutely are far beyond the norm. Becoming very financially successful is very much more about what family you were born into and fortune than it is about skill or talent, although the latter certainly still matter.
      - noblethrasher 12y ago
        I thought that they wrote the BASIC interpreter using the machines in Harvard's computer lab.
        cpr 12y ago
        Yes, they wrote an assembler/linker/simulator on old Harv-10. I was there bugging him late at night, asking why he was wasting his time on silly hobbyist machines when we had the whole Arpanet at our fingertips. (All 20-30 machines at that point.) ;/) Even though lots of folks were using the -10 for commercial projects on the side, Harvard made him give all the Altair money back to avoid disciplinary action. Wasn't really fair. So, yeah, some of us were blind at the time. In my defense, I did help Carl Helmers get Byte Magazine off the ground a year later or so, along with my high school buddy Dan Fylstra who went on to create VisiCorp to commercialize the original VisiCalc.
- bluedino 12y ago
  >> Did MS start out to just write BASIC for the Altair? Yes, in 1975. The DOS deal with IBM didn't come around until 1980, Excel showed up in 1982, Word in 1983, and Windows in 1984.
yatoomy 12y ago
This seems to me a clarification of the strategy PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012 and an essay called "frighteningly ambitious startup ideas". It is a great way to think about and frame how to judge startup ideas. Mainly centering around high potential technology, overlooked ideas and opportunities that these startups can take advantage of. My question becomes, and it seems PGs, how can you do this without the value of hindsight. One one hand, you could sit and reason why startup x or your startup idea is the Microsoft in this scenario. But you can also easily delude yourself. Pebble, IMO, is shaping up alot like early Apple did. They are entering a competitive industry with a new product, facing a goliath and have a huge emphasis on their design & focus on developer. Which makes me believe history will repeat itself. That if we have the Apple for wearables, there should be, or soon, a Microsoft for wearables. Just a thought, would love any point for/against. For reference: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI
- seiji 12y ago
  PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012 That was a great talk. Everybody should re-watch it. Even if just for the one off question "why does HN violate the HTTP spec by sending invalid line endings?" (Answer: "because it works for me!")
ja27 12y ago
Starting a company to make a paid browser when Mosaic is already free.
- kstenerud 12y ago
  Free and pretty crappy & limited. When you can do better than the free crappy shit, people will pay. It was the same with Athena vs Motif.
zw123456 12y ago
This reminds me of my experience with Microsoft very early in my career. Way back when MS was working on Windows 1.0, I was working for a start up company and we were developing network management software for SNA Networks and Mainframes. It was very advanced for the day and used a GUI but was done on Mainframe computers and terminals. The company sold out to IBM and I chose to take the money and run. A friend of mine referred me to MS because they needed people with graphics experience. So I met with one of the team leaders and went over and talked with them. At the time, Windows was very very primitive, they had not yet figured out how to make the windows overlap and re-paint (which we had figured out a long time before that). I actually felt sorry for them at the time because I just could not imagine how they would ever catch up with Apple, the Mac was just so much more advanced. It seemed to me like there was no doubt that they would be out of business in a few years completely replaced by Apple, it was just so obvious at the time to me. They offered me a job but it was less money in terms of salary than another offer I had from a Fortune 500 company, but at the time MS had a great stock option plan, but I felt that was worthless based on my brilliant analysis of their prospects. So I took the safe bet. I tell this story occasionally to younger people who are trying to decide about what to do in terms of career choices. Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice. Do what excites you and put your energy into that. Just my view from the cheap seats.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago
  > Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice. It's really just dumb luck. One thinks one can extract a lesson from this hindsight, but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it? > Do what excites you and put your energy into that. Absolutely.
  - TheAnimus 12y ago
    >but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it? Sometimes I think people look at where a company is, rather than it's direction, it's velocity.
jonathanjaeger 12y ago
The Google and AirBnB references seem on point, but were people skeptical of Facebook being a good idea? Sure there were naysayers who thought Facebook couldn't beat MySpace or break out of the college campuses, but people did love Facebook pretty early on and weren't hating on the product (it was "cool").
- seiji 12y ago
  The 0th version of facebook was literally "illegal stalking as a service." Outgrowth from that, and from ignoring the "we're accessing your systems illegally and you can't stop us" part, grew the horrible monster choking the Internet today.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Hah, the first time I met Bill Gates was at Percomp '78 in Long Beach California. This was a pretty small personal computer conference, but Microsoft was there pushing Altair BASIC. I had a Digital Group Z80 system (which I considered to be waaaaay superior to the Altair in the way that only a male high school student can project.) Bill was selling BASIC for $399, I had paid $900 for my entire system (as a kit). He offered to let me work for him and port it to the DG system, I declined. After all this guy was going nowhere, who in their right mind would pay more than half the price of their computer for BASIC right? Looking back on that I cannot see any way in which I would have concluded differently, given the information I had available, but that experience has since given me insight to never dismiss an idea simply. I like to have solid reasoning behind my mistakes :-)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- veb 12y ago
  Shows that he believed in what he was doing, and kept at it no matter what. Sounds like he got dismissed by a LOT of people seemingly (from reading posts like yours, and other articles over the years). Pretty good effort I'd say! All I could think of after reading your post was: ouch!
  - r00fus 12y ago
    Not to detract from his success, it also may have helped that he was financially independent (had a big safety net) having come from a wealthy family. Things are different if you're worried about putting food on the table a couple of months from now.
    - shin_lao 12y ago
      You could also say that having a wealthy family was not an incentive to work hard. There is no rule to success.
    - paulhauggis 12y ago
Fuzzwah 12y ago
Its a fun thought experiment, but I think it falls down when you start to consider how many "right bets" Microsoft, Apple and Google made. The other examples are no where near as mature and, to me, are still working on their initial idea. The 3 I mentioned I think much of their success comes from implementing their first ideas very well and attracting the excellent talent which allowed them to pivot or broaden when other things came along. Of course that then lands you back on another familiar YC idea of investing in teams rather than ideas.
zerop 12y ago
"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
- doospark 12y ago
  in a way self-proved in context. Thank you.
- xdjfjm 12y ago
  in a way self-proved in context. Thank you.
nartz 12y ago
How does framing the question this way lead to deeper thinking or rather, yield different answers, than the typical questions of 'whats the bigger picture' or 'whats the company vision' ?
- seiji 12y ago
  Reasoning based on concrete examples is easier to convey to other human meat brains for understanding and retention. If you start off with "big picture" or "vision" you're already into meaningless buzzword territory, and any discussion quickly derails practical advice/progress/suggestions. Examples first, details later. The Altair->Microsoft example also emphasizes the minimum condition necessary. What seems small but could be big (given the proper market growth and a mother who's also an IBM executive to get you free connections+business)? Also see this great example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082844
- hyperliner 12y ago
  Because the question worded that way is more specific. I asked myself the same question you ask and my answer was that the question "what is the company's vision?" or anything that has the words "vision" or "mission" immediately gets eyes rolling.
segmondy 12y ago
I have to strongly disagree with this article. Altair BASIC was not lame for it's time. It was GREAT! There was no OS, there were barely any assemblers, you would have to toggle switches to binary representation to enter code in home brew computer. Without BASIC, You do have to first of all learn assembly programming, learn to assemble it by hand and translate to hex/binary then flip it in. BASIC was amazing for the time, anyone could and can program in BASIC. Google was not lame for the time, search engines sucked, no one saw/used google and said why? The first time we all used google we were hooked, we didn't have to AND OR NOT our results, it found meaningful results from the get go. Now Facebook we could argue that about if it would take off, you might say, why? There's already myspace. But I don't know that the Microsoft BASIC or google search was lame in any way shape or form. If we all folks did was hear about the idea, then yes, they would easily be brushed off, but after implementation, it was a no brainer. Kinda like Tesla, all electric cars have really sucked until Tesla showed you could make electric cars stylish, fun to drive and with range.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  PCs were lame for their time. They cost a couple thousand dollars, there was no software for them, and you really couldn't do much with them. Search was lame for its time. You couldn't actually find anything, that's why we all had to use portals and directories instead. Social networking online was lame for its time. What are you, some kind of nerd who doesn't have any friends? I think the meta-lesson here is that you don't want your product to be lame. You want your product to be exceptional, given what's already out there. You want your market to be lame, but very fast-growing, such that in a couple years people won't think it's so lame anymore.
  - rwmj 12y ago
    PCs had a huge ecosystem of software, certainly after a year or two. Google search was awesome. Even Altavista was awesome back at the beginning before they let their search results become polluted by spam.
    - 12y ago
turbostyler 12y ago
How many times can he make this same blog post with different wording?
Alex3917 12y ago
My own side project sounds so comically bad that I don't even bother describing it to folks anymore. Usually when they ask why anyone would use it, I just pretend to be surprised and say, "Oh, I guess we never thought about that." Multiples times people have gotten so angry by how bad they think the idea is that they've actually started visibly shaking, which is a lot of fun in public at meetups or whatever. The good thing though is that it keeps us totally focused on building our MVP. I think part of the issue is that the most successful startups aren't successful because of new hardware or software, but because of the new social practices they enable. And while Apple releasing a new iPhone every year has gotten people really good at evaluating new hardware and software, most people don't have the same level of proficiency at evaluating novel forms of social interaction. (Even though it's totally learnable.)
- bglazer 12y ago
  Well you can't just dangle that out there and then not actually describe your idea!
mixmax 12y ago
I think there's a lot of survivorship bias in the statement that lame ideas turn out to be visionary. Just because many successful companies are built on ideas that at first seemed ridiculous doesn't mean that ideas that seem ridiculous will be smash hits. Actually, most ideas that seem ridiculous are ridiculous. If, however, a new market, technology or cultural bend turns up, an idea that exploits it might seem ridiculous because it breaks with social norm or accepted technological limitations but actually be viable. When Tesla started building electric cars they were ridiculed because few people understood that both the technology and the social acceptance was now at a point that made it possible. Had they started ten years prior the idea would probably have been ridiculous. The trick is to be able to see the difference between the snakeoil salesmen, mad hatters and crazy inventors and the true visionaries. What makes this really difficult is that noone, including the founders, knows whether they're one or the other. There's a lot of luck and timing involved. I'd also wager that the reason that mindblowingly successful companies often start out as seemingly ridiculous ideas is that if they don't have any competition in a niche that they can exploit. Microsoft, for example, were the first to sell software. IBM laughed them out of the room because software was just something that came with the hardware. The idea that you could sell software seemed as crazy as selling sand in Sahara. But because of a technological and cultural shift it was a good idea, and because it seemed ridiculous to "real" companies they had the market to themselves for the first vital years. Had they not been so lucky (or smart) with their timing noone would know who Bill Gates is. I think you might be able to conclude the following: "If you want merely to be well-off start a company that isn't based on a ridiculous idea. If you want a small chance of changing the world start a company based on a ridiculous idea"
- untog 12y ago
  Yep. Huge survivor bias both in the article and the comments here. Plenty of people talking about the time they turned down a job with early MS and came to regret it. We need some stories of the people that took a risk and failed miserably, because that's the far more common occurrence.
- bjt 12y ago
  I think the article more useful to VCs than to founders. Good VCs worry about being pitched on the next Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Google and passing on it because of their own prejudices or lack of vision. I see the article as an effort to consciously counter those prejudices. But VCs have the luxury of being able to invest in a lot of companies. When you have that luxury, you can afford to say "let's let a few lame ideas in because they could grow huge". You're right that potential founders don't have that luxury. Sinking 5-10 years of your life into a lame idea is overwhelmingly likely to have little payoff for the founder.
pi-squared 12y ago
Unusually short, and I feel very biased essay with examples from 3 big(est) companies out of hundreds of thousands (more?). #NotConvinced
moron4hire 12y ago
But how do we account for the perennial bad ideas? The 15th time we get pitched "stock market for small businesses" or "social network for coupons"? Are these good ideas that are just too boring to have attracted a good team yet? I've heard these ideas going back and forth for 10 years now. After 10 years, nobody has gotten it right? Or are they lazy ideas that appeal to get-rich-quickers who think they can play the startup game? What is it? I understand the value of "don't make fun", and it's something I really struggle with in my own life. I've (unfortunately) been on both sides of that exchange, and frequently feel bad about my involvement in it. It's a weird world we live in where you can't just keep your mouth shut sometimes. It's probably a sign of internet addiction. I digress. But I also have to consider things from the standpoint of someone who is being pitched by non-technical founders on these ideas. "It might be a good idea" isn't enough.
- VLM 12y ago
  Companies can fail because of bad idea, but also finance/capitalization, personal issues, bad execution... Want a huge fight? Assign the dreaded smart watch to one of those reasons for past failure and likely near future. Or "the smart house". Or "voice control" or alternative UIs in general. If you can convince a couple people the only reason the cuecat failed was their capitalization structure, then the world is doomed to a flood of plastic cat barcode readers and barcodes all over legacy media. Not all the different from QR codes (aren't they officially dead now?)
VLM 12y ago
Youngsters are notorious for thinking history began when they got involved. See also, sex, drugs, music, dance... Anyway I am sad to report that PDP8s and Decmates were widely available (if you had friends in the right places, surplus, repaired scrap, etc) but DEC insanely wanted to charge $3000 or whatever for the OS8 license. I think even Fortran and basic were separately licensed and billed products. It was nuts. You could get an old -8 for free, more or less, (back then, now they sell for thousands on ebay) but legal software was insanely priced. Microsoft disrupted the market at a mere $300. That's what made them interesting right from the start, the dinosaurs of the industry didn't understand the imploding ratios of hardware cost to software cost. Sure the hardware is dropping in price so something that cost a corporate buyer $10K in '63 might only cost $1K in '73 but its not like software was getting even on dollar cheaper so if legacy corp buyers will pay $3K per seat for OS-8 I guess we'll keep right on charging $3K till they go away or we go away. Well guess how that turned out? The above is based on my Dad's experiences although I was a kid watching watching it all unfold at that time.
pekk 12y ago
As long as that realization is tempered with this one: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
- bztzt 12y ago
  what, are you saying Bozo the Clown wasn't a success? :)
  - pekk 12y ago
    Sometimes something is laughed at not because it is out-of-the-box genius which will do well defying all expectations, but because it is actually ridiculous and will fail.
bootload 12y ago
"What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" ... then figure out, 'Which IBM will let itself be duped?'. If MS hadn't made the DOS deal with IBM PC, would the Microsoft we know now, have happened? This is of course counter-factual, because MS was a raging success. It's a great question to ask though.
frik 12y ago
Read this: * Bill Gates's memoir/vision book, The Road Ahead (1995) * Paul Allen's memoir book, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft (2011) Watch this: * Pirates of Silicon Valley TV movie (funny but accurate, based on Triumph of the Nerds interviews) * Triumph of the Nerds (TV docu, 1996, by R. Cringely) * Nerds 2.0.1 (TV docu, 1998, by R. Cringely)
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Appreciate the "read / watch" recommendations, but to what specific end / meaning?
  - frik 12y ago
    The early years of Microsoft, a history lesson.
jhallenworld 12y ago
Give Bill Gates more credit: his vision certainly went beyond BASIC. They had a directed effort to provide microprocessor versions of all popular (or business significant) languages. For example, they had Fortran and Cobol before they had MSDOS.
logfromblammo 12y ago
The title would have been better worded as follows: "How does this Altair BASIC become a Microsoft?"
levlandau 12y ago
While he didn't know Microsoft would pioneer it, Bill Gates says he knew that there'd be a software industry. While he didn't know Facebook would pioneer it, Mark Zuckerberg says he knew that all software would be social. While he didn't know Google would pioneer it, Larry Page said he knew that the fast growing web would eventually need a good way to search. While he didn't know Viaweb would pioneer it, Paul Graham said he knew that ecommerce sites would eventually be created by software. And so on.... I respect the fuzziness and path dependence of startup growth but boy do I respect people who can see the future now, make it happen and end up being correct. Even more props to people who make it happen multiple times [e.g. Joel Spolsky, Elon Musk]
- sangnoir 12y ago
  While he didn't know WebVan would pioneer it, Loius Borders says he know ecommerce would rule the world. ...that doesn't quite have the same ring, does it? There is a lot of survivorship bias at play here. Thousands of individuals had convictions that their instincts were right as as well - but it turned out poorly for them. Luck and timing plays a big part in success, but more often than not, hn ignores this.
  - levlandau 12y ago
    How does this change the point that there are entrepreneurs who have instincts about the market AND timing that turn out to be right? The broader point is Peter Thiel's --> You are not a lottery ticket. The best example might be Jeff Bezos and his business plan. Elon Musk has been consistent for ~ 20 yrs about the areas he set out to work on since college and he's followed that through. It's not dumb luck. It's skill + luck. The skill part of the equation is oft dumbed down in favor of the randomized success algorithm. People who are able to repeat their successes multiple times e.g. Joel Spolsky, Elon Musk, David Duffield, Rich Barton are especially skilled and it would be disingenuous to attribute their successes to some luck/timing that they were not ultimately mostly responsible for creating or noticing.
    - dputtick 12y ago
ramigb 12y ago
Could someone please rephrase the title of the article to me? thank you.
- jpindar 12y ago
  What future large company might this be the first product of?
- dang 12y ago
  How might this company turn into something huge, the way that Altair Basic turned into Microsoft?
graycat 12y ago
PG sounds like it's okay to invest time, effort, code, money, etc. in a project without having any idea why it might work, and his justification is Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc. Okay: I grew up not far from a nice public golf course. It had some par 3 holes. Sure, on such a hole, it's possible to make a hole in one. Okay, for a year track all the hole in one successes and see how many were by expert golfers and how many were by people lucky to have a round at 10 over par. So, conclude from this that for a hole in one it doesn't help to be good at golf? Nope! Instead, on that course there were so many more poor players than expert ones that, likely, net, just from luck, there were more successful hole in one shots from the poor players than from the expert ones. Or, case #9,284,387,437 of how to lie with statistics! But, let's consider some other examples: Ike wanted some pictures of the USSR and sent some U-2 airplanes. Too soon one got shot down, and then someone called Kelly Johnson at Lockheed, and he noticed a new engine developed by Pratt and Whitney in their Florida operation: The engine was a turbojet until about Mach 2.5 at which time it became a ram jet and, thus, could go on to Mach 3+ without overheating the engine. So, get some titanium, design some aerodynamics especially good for supersonic flight, and get an airplane that could fly at Mach 3+, at 80,000+ feet, for 2000+ miles without refueling. Then the US got a lot of good pictures, and the Lockheed plane, the SR-71, never got shot down. There are many more examples from GPS, the F-117, the first Xerox copier, etc. These examples are cases of hole in one with high payoff and low risk from just routine work after the initial planning and review of the plans. Commercial version? Okay: Xerox, the IBM System 360, the Intel 386, Cisco IP routers, the Bell Labs work in optical fibers and Ga-Al-As heterojunction lasers, the Sony work on Blu-ray optical disks, etc. Lesson: It really is possible to pick a good target, plan carefully, execute with low risk, and be successful. For just one team, poor work and luck are not better.
serve_yay 12y ago
What Microsoft was Aereo the Altair Basic of? :) (The problem of silent evidence.)
rwmj 12y ago
I had a similar feeling when egroups[1] was announced. We were all using mailing lists at the time, and what was clever about that? The clever bit was that end users didn't have to set up and host majordomo themselves. Now egroups itself never came to much, but the idea of taking complex applications (mailing lists, email, CRM, ..) and turning them into SaaS is pretty massive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGroups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGroups
ksk 12y ago
They're not all the same - two of those companies - Facebook and Google initially had no clue about funding their companies. MS and Apple sold actual products that people could buy. As startups they did the really really hard work of convincing a bunch of people to open their wallets and pay hard cash for a product. I think this is a far more valuable exercise that attempting to create something that's popular by giving it away for free, and then selling some advertising product/platform/service that has a nebulous value which is often supported by spying/data-mining users. (aka Investor Story time http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm)
navait 12y ago
Any idea sounds awful if you phrase it right. Any idea sounds good phrased right. I don't think this is a good metric at all to evaluate a start-up.
frozenport 12y ago
Wrong wrong wrong. For example, the guys at Google spent years doing research in the field before starting their company. Clearly MS achieved success with a different product than they had begun with.
based2 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires
peteretep 12y ago
> Often the founders themselves didn't know why their ideas > were promising. They were attracted to these ideas by > instinct, because they were living in the future and they > sensed that something was missing. This is confirmation bias
WalterBright 12y ago
The thing is, any of those early tech companies could have been an Apple or Microsoft. There was nothing special about Altair Basic. Other companies didn't because they made disastrous mistakes along the way - see "In Search of Stupidity" by Chapman. Microsoft grew into a behemoth by making crucial decisions at several key turning points, and avoiding making disastrous mistakes.
defen 12y ago
It would be cool if PG could reveal whether he used this test, and what the answer was at the time, for any of the YC "big successes" (Which I'm defining as Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Justin.TV/Twitch, Heroku and Reddit)
beaugunderson 12y ago
"lame" is an unfortunately ableist choice of words (it appears five times in the article and many times here the comments). for information on why it's problematic try this: http://www.disabilityandrepresentation.com/2013/09/14/ableist-language/ http://www.disabilityandrepresentation.com/2013/09/14/ableis...
pedalpete 12y ago
I still think Uber sounds lame. But really, aside from the survivor bias, is what PG trying to say, very similar to the YC interview question [paraphrasing] "what do you know that nobody else knows?". That question lead us to be able to define the product we're currently working on, when we had spent months coming up with a good description and totally missed it. It actually helped me sell myself (and a few of the team members) on how big our idea could be. My guess is that each example PG gives, the founders would have an answer to that question where they would say "we're [re-]defining an industry because..."
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
There's some serious sharp shooter fallacy going in this article. The bottom line is that most of the startups based on a lame idea are, indeed, lame. It's all too easy to focus on the ones that succeeded.
GuiA 12y ago
Selection bias and post hoc rationalization. You can always frame success in any way you want- it'll sound good, because if the company's successful then your argument proves itself. How many successful companies don't fit the mold that was just described? I can think of many examples that had fairly straightforward road to success: Facebook, Dropbox, Stripe, usw. The real measure of a theory is how successful it is at predicting whatever it predicts. So out of all of the companies that you predicted could become the next "Microsoft of X", how many did? If your method doesn't perform better than randomized selection, then it's worthless. I suspect that's the case here. Of course, the law of large numbers combined with the high returns offered by tech companies means that even if investors aren't performing better than a randomized process, they feel like their theories about what makes a successful companies/entrepreneur are valid. Here's an experiment that will never happen, but that I'd love to see YC perform: for a given batch, select who makes it to the batch randomly from the pool of preselected applicants (you want preselected applicants and not all applicants because it's fairly likely that the 90% of people who are applying with their "Facebook for cats" idea that they came up with after beers 2 hours before the submission deadline won't make it. Or will they?). Then, look how that batch performs. It wouldn't be surprising if the batch performed no worse or no better.
shirro 12y ago
Perhaps as harder call is, which MS-DOS is this the CPM-86 of?
michaelochurch 12y ago
I think that the lesson you'd draw from many of these successes is something like this: 1. Find a specialty or niche that you care about. 2. Excel in it. 3. ???? 4. Profit! First, look at #1. For Microsoft, this was putting a modern (by the standard of the time) language on microcomputers as the PC era began. For Facebook, it was improving the way people manage and form weak ties. For Google, it was improving search. These ideas seemed "lame" for businesses because they were hobbyist projects, but done to excellence because of the passion that was behind them. Still, hobby + excellence doesn't always make a business. You need a lot of help, and that help can be hard to summon. Of course, there are also counterexamples. If Evan Spiegel excels at anything, it's writing creepy emails to his frat brethren. He's clearly not a technologist, and that applies to most of the VC darlings in this round, which is why it's going to be horrible for a lot of people when the chickens come home to roost and these P&D fake-tech companies have no buyers. But enough about that... Where there's confusion, I'd say, is at step #3. To what extent is excellence (even in something that seems "lame", insofar as being impossible to build a business on, like fixing web search) going to get noticed and draw enough backing to overcome the extreme "pointiness" (as opposed to well-roundedness) that comes with narrowly-focused excellence (which seems, to most, to be a hobby project at best and obsessive at worst). And what are the odds? I don't know what the answers are. I did #1 and #2 when I optimized hand-luck out of a trick-taking game, Ambition. ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhHZh5IEKBDf56ExgErv4o/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH... ) It's been published in a few gaming magazines (mostly abroad, as in Hungary and Japan) but generally hasn't caught on, and I doubt it'll ever make me rich. I guess you can say that step #3 isn't automatic. But I'm not sure that that's a bad thing. Excellence doesn't need to produce wealth to be valuable, and doing something to make money makes excellence almost impossible in practice, anyhow. (Excellent products can make money, but products that are optimized for money-making are rarely excellent, because value-creation and value-capture are separate disciplines and antagonistic toward one another at the highest levels of performance.) One thing I admire about Paul Graham (despite differences) is that he does place a value on excellence, as you can see in his work on Lisp. He understands excellence as a virtue (which is admirable) and believes that the market will reward it (which is debatable; we agree that there is correlation but would disagree on its strength). For his part, he tried to make an excellent Lisp (Arc) and showed a strong aesthetic sense. It didn't catch on. Rich Hickey made a Lisp that was, at the time, uglier but because it ran on the butt-ugly JVM, and you had a lot of S-expressions that looked more like (.addEventListener thingy other-thingy) than (map (comp f g) list). Eight years later, most of Clojure is beautiful (unless you peer into the innards) because of the work it has attracted. All I'm saying is that it's hard to predict who'll win. If it was 2006 and someone told you that in half a decade, the best Lisp would be on the JVM, you'd laugh in that person's face. And yet... that's what happened. I think we can agree that excellence, because of the narrowness of focus it often (and not always, but often) requires, will lead a person to be thought "lame". (There is also the extremely slow process through which true excellence is recognized.) In 2006, many would've written Rich Hickey off as a barely-employed ex-musician trying to do the impossible (write a beautiful Lisp on top of the JVM) and unsellable (who'd buy it)? And yet Cognitect has shown that Clojure's excellence is sellable. From the statically typed world we seem similar slow uptake: Haskell's over 25 years old and just starting to be recognized as a practical language for "real programming". Full agreement exists on #1 and #2. What about #3: the "????" term that leads from focused, diligent excellence to freely flowing money? Before Silicon Valley, I feel like Americans were more honest about the lack of a strong relationship between excellence and financial success. People understood the "starving artist" concept, and that writers of trash novels (e.g. Fifty Shades of Gray) would economically outperform people writing genuine literature. (That said, don't write off Tolkien, King, or Rowling just 'cause they do "genre lit"; they're fantastically skilled.) The problem with Silicon Valley exceptionalism is that these people believe that they've transcended the nonexistence of a causal arrow between excellence and financial success. That leads to a naive optimism at first, and later to a self-serving sense of "meritocracy" that's divorced from reality. The truth about item #3 in the above is that it's very random and we have almost no insight into how it actually works, and that's upsetting but I don't know what to do about it.
hyperpallium 12y ago
They made something easier, in a growing market. Their big break was DOS. Getting offered to do an OS for the PC was luck, but they scrappily exploited it to the hilt: they didn't even have an OS; their license terms allowed them to sell to (future) clones; they sold it far cheaper than the competition.
eklavya 12y ago
I got the article and it's nice. However I am having a hard time trying to understand(english wise) this sentence - What microsoft is this the Altair Basic of? How to parse it?
- ahpeeyem 12y ago
  What [future gigantic corporation] is this the [first small product] of?
  - eklavya 12y ago
    Thanks :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
pitchups 12y ago
With 20/20 hindsight it is easy to connect the dots that led to Microsoft's dominance of the PC industry. And although the Altair Basic may have led to it - it in itself was not enough to catapult them to their future success. Their big break came from their deal with IBM for the Operating System. And that deal was literally gifted to them due to a confluence of many factors - with luck playing a huge part in it. In fact Gates directed IBM to approach Gary Kildall of Digital Research for the OS. But Kildall skipped the first meeting with IBM and his team at DR dilly-dallied on signing a standard NDA with IBM and could not reach an agreement. IBM went back to Gates for an answer for the OS. [1] Had DR not dropped the ball on the IBM deal, the future would have been very different for Microsoft, and for DR and for the world. It is all of course counterfactual - but who knows - the world may have been running on CPM/2015, and Gates and Allen would have been running a successful PC software company - selling compilers and languages for it. It Gates and Allen's ability to turn this fateful second chance into what we now know to be the deal of the century. In fact, Microsoft used this chance to sell QDOS (Quick and Dirty OS) - from a lone programmer (Dave Patterson) working across the lake in Seattle on a port of CP/M to 8086 - to IBM. IBM was not aware of this small company (Seattle Computer Products). Later it was found that QDOS literally "stole" CP/M code and function calls. DR sued but IBM settled the suit with DR by bundling CPM/86 with the PC - but selling it for $240 as opposed to $40 for PC DOS. CP/M never had a chance. And the rest as they say is history... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall EDITS: typos
InclinedPlane 12y ago
The problem with advice like this is that it's not nearly as useful as it seems. The biggest problem here is that typically it takes a visionary to recognize a visionary in the early stages, before any of the vision has actually been realized. And that's only part of the equation, there's also talent, ability to execute well, and luck of course. If you're a time traveler from the future, sure you bet on Bill and Paul, because you know how that turns out. But let's say you're a time traveler from an alternate timeline, or an alien from a more advanced planet, can you still tell who to bet on? Even if you had the knowledge to know how people would use computers in the future and what sorts of things would be most in demand, Microsoft wasn't necessarily the best bet way back in the Altair Basic era. Back then the obvious choice would have been Gary Kildall and Digital Research who had CP/M, a serious operating system that was light years ahead of the competition in the late '70s. It took several bizarre twists and turns for Microsoft to end up on top, but it was far from foreordained that they would. Other obvious competitors included Lotus and VisiCalc, folks who seemed poised to have strong offerings nestled in the bosom of a growing computer industry. What Microsoft had that the others lacked was sticktoitiveness, adaptability, and business savvy. They were willing to do what ever it took to ride to the top, whereas other companies were satisfied with "merely" massive runaway success. And that showed up in surprising and non-intuitive ways. DR built CP/M from the ground up and invested heavily in making it the best they could. Microsoft bought a clone of CP/M that was written in 6 weeks for $75k because they needed an OS to deliver to IBM for the IBM PC, and they thought that was a reasonable business arrangement to be in. In no way does that sound like sound engineering or sound business strategy, but it turned out to be one of the most pivotal events in computing history. It was Microsoft's tenacity and their desire to make billions where others were content to make only billions that brought them to the top of the industry, things that weren't really obvious until after they happened. For venture capitalists this problem isn't a big deal, because they can just play the lottery and invest in Digital Research as well as Microsoft and Lotus and all the reasonable bets. For people looking for "the next microsoft" to work at, the problem is much more difficult, if not fundamentally impossible.
tempodox 12y ago
This article shows beautifully how this is all just random. Of course it helps to be an enterprising person with an optimistic outlook. Failures are far too normal to be impressed by them. But seriously, who is really able to tell which extravagant nice-to-have (or even too-ridiculous-to-be-wanted) will be next week's must-have? If there was a way to find that out, we finally would have understood humanity. So cheers to all with above-average stats at guessing who will be the next big Dollar Sign.

331 points by oskarth 12y ago

Did MS start out to just write BASIC for the Altair? Or if asked would they have said they were going to write software for computer users? The second phrasing doesn't sound so lame. And I imagine you can come up with a lame sounding subset for many companies. Edit: I get the point that companies might have a larger scope and to look out for it but deliberately trying to come up with a lame tagline seems... Off? Did AirBNB really set out just to offer a single place with air mattresses? Like no plans?

chubot 12y ago
I don't know for sure, but AirBNB had the weird domain name airbednbreakfast.com or something, and it still has pretty weird company name too. It's not really what you would choose for disrupting the hotel industry. By decades of media coverage, "Microsoft" evokes images of a behemoth. But try to imagine what the name "Microsoft" must have sounded like -- it doesn't sound very ambitious. It sounds a little lame. If you planned to be the biggest company in the world, would you name your company "Microsoft"? Microsoft was started when Gates was 20 or something. I think a lot of 20 year olds are just trying to make something interesting. Some are dreaming of taking over the world, but those are the types that probably don't actually do it. I think you can see a similar thing with Linux. If you look at Linus's original mail announcing Linux, it doesn't sound like he has any goals to run on the majority of servers, mobile phones, many desktops, and tons of embedded devices. He even insisted it would never be portable past i386!!! I agree with pg that a lot of these people are living in the future and don't necessarily realize that they're going to be riding this hockey stick growth. Even if you're doing it, I'm sure it's hard to predict. There's hundreds of decisions and improvements you have to make along the way. There's no one idea or feature to implement to get that big.
- kryptiskt 12y ago
  > But try to imagine what the name "Microsoft" must have sounded like -- it doesn't sound very ambitious. It sounds a little lame. If you planned to be the biggest company in the world, would you name your company "Microsoft"? They certainly were no match for the ambitions of Intergalactic Digital Research.
  - chubot 12y ago
    Ha! I didn't know Digital was originally called that. That's a beautiful irony. http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM http://www.digitalresearch.biz/HISZMSD.HTM
trequartista 12y ago
I think it's about the MVP - minimum viable product of the company. The first product which is going to bring in revenue and keep the lights on. You will obviously consolidate further and build a business plan around the MVP. Basic for Altair was Microsoft's MVP. Offering air mattresses was AirBNB's MVP.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Looking at Wikipedia, it appears they spent several months before launching their site, after getting a technical cofounder. So 3 people and 6 months, at least. I find it very hard to believe they did all that with the idea their MVP was renting out their flat.
  - ashraful 12y ago
    It wasn't just renting out their flat, they let other people rent out their air mattresses (or couches) too. Early on their idea was to be a "Bed and Breakfast", to the point where they required the hosts to cook breakfast for the guests.
enf 12y ago
What they said in 1976 was that they wanted to be "able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software." So more than BASIC, but without the notion that the computer software market would grow to encompass everyone.
- kens 12y ago
  The letter containing that statement is a key to understanding Microsoft's goals and their success (in particular the key innovation that people should pay for software). If you haven't read it, I recommend taking a look: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-software.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-...
  - frabcus 12y ago
    Reading that letter for the first time in years (and having worked on a commercial startup for the first time since)... My main question is, how could Bill Gates afford the $40,000 of computer time? That's quite a lot of capital at the time.
    - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
      Because like the (vast) majority of very successful people he started from a position of financial independence and social connections that absolutely are far beyond the norm. Becoming very financially successful is very much more about what family you were born into and fortune than it is about skill or talent, although the latter certainly still matter.
    - noblethrasher 12y ago
      I thought that they wrote the BASIC interpreter using the machines in Harvard's computer lab.
      - cpr 12y ago
        Yes, they wrote an assembler/linker/simulator on old Harv-10. I was there bugging him late at night, asking why he was wasting his time on silly hobbyist machines when we had the whole Arpanet at our fingertips. (All 20-30 machines at that point.) ;/) Even though lots of folks were using the -10 for commercial projects on the side, Harvard made him give all the Altair money back to avoid disciplinary action. Wasn't really fair. So, yeah, some of us were blind at the time. In my defense, I did help Carl Helmers get Byte Magazine off the ground a year later or so, along with my high school buddy Dan Fylstra who went on to create VisiCorp to commercialize the original VisiCalc.
bluedino 12y ago
>> Did MS start out to just write BASIC for the Altair? Yes, in 1975. The DOS deal with IBM didn't come around until 1980, Excel showed up in 1982, Word in 1983, and Windows in 1984.

yatoomy 12y ago

This seems to me a clarification of the strategy PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012 and an essay called "frighteningly ambitious startup ideas". It is a great way to think about and frame how to judge startup ideas. Mainly centering around high potential technology, overlooked ideas and opportunities that these startups can take advantage of. My question becomes, and it seems PGs, how can you do this without the value of hindsight. One one hand, you could sit and reason why startup x or your startup idea is the Microsoft in this scenario. But you can also easily delude yourself. Pebble, IMO, is shaping up alot like early Apple did. They are entering a competitive industry with a new product, facing a goliath and have a huge emphasis on their design & focus on developer. Which makes me believe history will repeat itself. That if we have the Apple for wearables, there should be, or soon, a Microsoft for wearables. Just a thought, would love any point for/against. For reference: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI

seiji 12y ago
PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012 That was a great talk. Everybody should re-watch it. Even if just for the one off question "why does HN violate the HTTP spec by sending invalid line endings?" (Answer: "because it works for me!")

ja27 12y ago

Starting a company to make a paid browser when Mosaic is already free.

kstenerud 12y ago
Free and pretty crappy & limited. When you can do better than the free crappy shit, people will pay. It was the same with Athena vs Motif.

zw123456 12y ago

This reminds me of my experience with Microsoft very early in my career. Way back when MS was working on Windows 1.0, I was working for a start up company and we were developing network management software for SNA Networks and Mainframes. It was very advanced for the day and used a GUI but was done on Mainframe computers and terminals. The company sold out to IBM and I chose to take the money and run. A friend of mine referred me to MS because they needed people with graphics experience. So I met with one of the team leaders and went over and talked with them. At the time, Windows was very very primitive, they had not yet figured out how to make the windows overlap and re-paint (which we had figured out a long time before that). I actually felt sorry for them at the time because I just could not imagine how they would ever catch up with Apple, the Mac was just so much more advanced. It seemed to me like there was no doubt that they would be out of business in a few years completely replaced by Apple, it was just so obvious at the time to me. They offered me a job but it was less money in terms of salary than another offer I had from a Fortune 500 company, but at the time MS had a great stock option plan, but I felt that was worthless based on my brilliant analysis of their prospects. So I took the safe bet. I tell this story occasionally to younger people who are trying to decide about what to do in terms of career choices. Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice. Do what excites you and put your energy into that. Just my view from the cheap seats.

AceJohnny2 12y ago
> Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice. It's really just dumb luck. One thinks one can extract a lesson from this hindsight, but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it? > Do what excites you and put your energy into that. Absolutely.
- TheAnimus 12y ago
  >but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it? Sometimes I think people look at where a company is, rather than it's direction, it's velocity.

jonathanjaeger 12y ago

The Google and AirBnB references seem on point, but were people skeptical of Facebook being a good idea? Sure there were naysayers who thought Facebook couldn't beat MySpace or break out of the college campuses, but people did love Facebook pretty early on and weren't hating on the product (it was "cool").

seiji 12y ago
The 0th version of facebook was literally "illegal stalking as a service." Outgrowth from that, and from ignoring the "we're accessing your systems illegally and you can't stop us" part, grew the horrible monster choking the Internet today.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Hah, the first time I met Bill Gates was at Percomp '78 in Long Beach California. This was a pretty small personal computer conference, but Microsoft was there pushing Altair BASIC. I had a Digital Group Z80 system (which I considered to be waaaaay superior to the Altair in the way that only a male high school student can project.) Bill was selling BASIC for $399, I had paid $900 for my entire system (as a kit). He offered to let me work for him and port it to the DG system, I declined. After all this guy was going nowhere, who in their right mind would pay more than half the price of their computer for BASIC right? Looking back on that I cannot see any way in which I would have concluded differently, given the information I had available, but that experience has since given me insight to never dismiss an idea simply. I like to have solid reasoning behind my mistakes :-)

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
veb 12y ago
Shows that he believed in what he was doing, and kept at it no matter what. Sounds like he got dismissed by a LOT of people seemingly (from reading posts like yours, and other articles over the years). Pretty good effort I'd say! All I could think of after reading your post was: ouch!
- r00fus 12y ago
  Not to detract from his success, it also may have helped that he was financially independent (had a big safety net) having come from a wealthy family. Things are different if you're worried about putting food on the table a couple of months from now.
  - shin_lao 12y ago
    You could also say that having a wealthy family was not an incentive to work hard. There is no rule to success.
  - paulhauggis 12y ago

Fuzzwah 12y ago

Its a fun thought experiment, but I think it falls down when you start to consider how many "right bets" Microsoft, Apple and Google made. The other examples are no where near as mature and, to me, are still working on their initial idea. The 3 I mentioned I think much of their success comes from implementing their first ideas very well and attracting the excellent talent which allowed them to pivot or broaden when other things came along. Of course that then lands you back on another familiar YC idea of investing in teams rather than ideas.

zerop 12y ago

"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill

doospark 12y ago
in a way self-proved in context. Thank you.
xdjfjm 12y ago
in a way self-proved in context. Thank you.

nartz 12y ago

How does framing the question this way lead to deeper thinking or rather, yield different answers, than the typical questions of 'whats the bigger picture' or 'whats the company vision' ?

seiji 12y ago
Reasoning based on concrete examples is easier to convey to other human meat brains for understanding and retention. If you start off with "big picture" or "vision" you're already into meaningless buzzword territory, and any discussion quickly derails practical advice/progress/suggestions. Examples first, details later. The Altair->Microsoft example also emphasizes the minimum condition necessary. What seems small but could be big (given the proper market growth and a mother who's also an IBM executive to get you free connections+business)? Also see this great example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082844
hyperliner 12y ago
Because the question worded that way is more specific. I asked myself the same question you ask and my answer was that the question "what is the company's vision?" or anything that has the words "vision" or "mission" immediately gets eyes rolling.

segmondy 12y ago

I have to strongly disagree with this article. Altair BASIC was not lame for it's time. It was GREAT! There was no OS, there were barely any assemblers, you would have to toggle switches to binary representation to enter code in home brew computer. Without BASIC, You do have to first of all learn assembly programming, learn to assemble it by hand and translate to hex/binary then flip it in. BASIC was amazing for the time, anyone could and can program in BASIC. Google was not lame for the time, search engines sucked, no one saw/used google and said why? The first time we all used google we were hooked, we didn't have to AND OR NOT our results, it found meaningful results from the get go. Now Facebook we could argue that about if it would take off, you might say, why? There's already myspace. But I don't know that the Microsoft BASIC or google search was lame in any way shape or form. If we all folks did was hear about the idea, then yes, they would easily be brushed off, but after implementation, it was a no brainer. Kinda like Tesla, all electric cars have really sucked until Tesla showed you could make electric cars stylish, fun to drive and with range.

nostrademons 12y ago
PCs were lame for their time. They cost a couple thousand dollars, there was no software for them, and you really couldn't do much with them. Search was lame for its time. You couldn't actually find anything, that's why we all had to use portals and directories instead. Social networking online was lame for its time. What are you, some kind of nerd who doesn't have any friends? I think the meta-lesson here is that you don't want your product to be lame. You want your product to be exceptional, given what's already out there. You want your market to be lame, but very fast-growing, such that in a couple years people won't think it's so lame anymore.
- rwmj 12y ago
  PCs had a huge ecosystem of software, certainly after a year or two. Google search was awesome. Even Altavista was awesome back at the beginning before they let their search results become polluted by spam.
  - 12y ago

turbostyler 12y ago

How many times can he make this same blog post with different wording?

Alex3917 12y ago

My own side project sounds so comically bad that I don't even bother describing it to folks anymore. Usually when they ask why anyone would use it, I just pretend to be surprised and say, "Oh, I guess we never thought about that." Multiples times people have gotten so angry by how bad they think the idea is that they've actually started visibly shaking, which is a lot of fun in public at meetups or whatever. The good thing though is that it keeps us totally focused on building our MVP. I think part of the issue is that the most successful startups aren't successful because of new hardware or software, but because of the new social practices they enable. And while Apple releasing a new iPhone every year has gotten people really good at evaluating new hardware and software, most people don't have the same level of proficiency at evaluating novel forms of social interaction. (Even though it's totally learnable.)

bglazer 12y ago
Well you can't just dangle that out there and then not actually describe your idea!

mixmax 12y ago

I think there's a lot of survivorship bias in the statement that lame ideas turn out to be visionary. Just because many successful companies are built on ideas that at first seemed ridiculous doesn't mean that ideas that seem ridiculous will be smash hits. Actually, most ideas that seem ridiculous are ridiculous. If, however, a new market, technology or cultural bend turns up, an idea that exploits it might seem ridiculous because it breaks with social norm or accepted technological limitations but actually be viable. When Tesla started building electric cars they were ridiculed because few people understood that both the technology and the social acceptance was now at a point that made it possible. Had they started ten years prior the idea would probably have been ridiculous. The trick is to be able to see the difference between the snakeoil salesmen, mad hatters and crazy inventors and the true visionaries. What makes this really difficult is that noone, including the founders, knows whether they're one or the other. There's a lot of luck and timing involved. I'd also wager that the reason that mindblowingly successful companies often start out as seemingly ridiculous ideas is that if they don't have any competition in a niche that they can exploit. Microsoft, for example, were the first to sell software. IBM laughed them out of the room because software was just something that came with the hardware. The idea that you could sell software seemed as crazy as selling sand in Sahara. But because of a technological and cultural shift it was a good idea, and because it seemed ridiculous to "real" companies they had the market to themselves for the first vital years. Had they not been so lucky (or smart) with their timing noone would know who Bill Gates is. I think you might be able to conclude the following: "If you want merely to be well-off start a company that isn't based on a ridiculous idea. If you want a small chance of changing the world start a company based on a ridiculous idea"

untog 12y ago
Yep. Huge survivor bias both in the article and the comments here. Plenty of people talking about the time they turned down a job with early MS and came to regret it. We need some stories of the people that took a risk and failed miserably, because that's the far more common occurrence.
bjt 12y ago
I think the article more useful to VCs than to founders. Good VCs worry about being pitched on the next Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Google and passing on it because of their own prejudices or lack of vision. I see the article as an effort to consciously counter those prejudices. But VCs have the luxury of being able to invest in a lot of companies. When you have that luxury, you can afford to say "let's let a few lame ideas in because they could grow huge". You're right that potential founders don't have that luxury. Sinking 5-10 years of your life into a lame idea is overwhelmingly likely to have little payoff for the founder.

pi-squared 12y ago

Unusually short, and I feel very biased essay with examples from 3 big(est) companies out of hundreds of thousands (more?). #NotConvinced

moron4hire 12y ago

But how do we account for the perennial bad ideas? The 15th time we get pitched "stock market for small businesses" or "social network for coupons"? Are these good ideas that are just too boring to have attracted a good team yet? I've heard these ideas going back and forth for 10 years now. After 10 years, nobody has gotten it right? Or are they lazy ideas that appeal to get-rich-quickers who think they can play the startup game? What is it? I understand the value of "don't make fun", and it's something I really struggle with in my own life. I've (unfortunately) been on both sides of that exchange, and frequently feel bad about my involvement in it. It's a weird world we live in where you can't just keep your mouth shut sometimes. It's probably a sign of internet addiction. I digress. But I also have to consider things from the standpoint of someone who is being pitched by non-technical founders on these ideas. "It might be a good idea" isn't enough.

VLM 12y ago
Companies can fail because of bad idea, but also finance/capitalization, personal issues, bad execution... Want a huge fight? Assign the dreaded smart watch to one of those reasons for past failure and likely near future. Or "the smart house". Or "voice control" or alternative UIs in general. If you can convince a couple people the only reason the cuecat failed was their capitalization structure, then the world is doomed to a flood of plastic cat barcode readers and barcodes all over legacy media. Not all the different from QR codes (aren't they officially dead now?)

VLM 12y ago

Youngsters are notorious for thinking history began when they got involved. See also, sex, drugs, music, dance... Anyway I am sad to report that PDP8s and Decmates were widely available (if you had friends in the right places, surplus, repaired scrap, etc) but DEC insanely wanted to charge $3000 or whatever for the OS8 license. I think even Fortran and basic were separately licensed and billed products. It was nuts. You could get an old -8 for free, more or less, (back then, now they sell for thousands on ebay) but legal software was insanely priced. Microsoft disrupted the market at a mere $300. That's what made them interesting right from the start, the dinosaurs of the industry didn't understand the imploding ratios of hardware cost to software cost. Sure the hardware is dropping in price so something that cost a corporate buyer $10K in '63 might only cost $1K in '73 but its not like software was getting even on dollar cheaper so if legacy corp buyers will pay $3K per seat for OS-8 I guess we'll keep right on charging $3K till they go away or we go away. Well guess how that turned out? The above is based on my Dad's experiences although I was a kid watching watching it all unfold at that time.

pekk 12y ago

As long as that realization is tempered with this one: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

bztzt 12y ago
what, are you saying Bozo the Clown wasn't a success? :)
- pekk 12y ago
  Sometimes something is laughed at not because it is out-of-the-box genius which will do well defying all expectations, but because it is actually ridiculous and will fail.

bootload 12y ago

"What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" ... then figure out, 'Which IBM will let itself be duped?'. If MS hadn't made the DOS deal with IBM PC, would the Microsoft we know now, have happened? This is of course counter-factual, because MS was a raging success. It's a great question to ask though.

frik 12y ago

Read this: * Bill Gates's memoir/vision book, The Road Ahead (1995) * Paul Allen's memoir book, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft (2011) Watch this: * Pirates of Silicon Valley TV movie (funny but accurate, based on Triumph of the Nerds interviews) * Triumph of the Nerds (TV docu, 1996, by R. Cringely) * Nerds 2.0.1 (TV docu, 1998, by R. Cringely)

dredmorbius 12y ago
Appreciate the "read / watch" recommendations, but to what specific end / meaning?
- frik 12y ago
  The early years of Microsoft, a history lesson.

jhallenworld 12y ago

Give Bill Gates more credit: his vision certainly went beyond BASIC. They had a directed effort to provide microprocessor versions of all popular (or business significant) languages. For example, they had Fortran and Cobol before they had MSDOS.

logfromblammo 12y ago

The title would have been better worded as follows: "How does this Altair BASIC become a Microsoft?"

levlandau 12y ago

While he didn't know Microsoft would pioneer it, Bill Gates says he knew that there'd be a software industry. While he didn't know Facebook would pioneer it, Mark Zuckerberg says he knew that all software would be social. While he didn't know Google would pioneer it, Larry Page said he knew that the fast growing web would eventually need a good way to search. While he didn't know Viaweb would pioneer it, Paul Graham said he knew that ecommerce sites would eventually be created by software. And so on.... I respect the fuzziness and path dependence of startup growth but boy do I respect people who can see the future now, make it happen and end up being correct. Even more props to people who make it happen multiple times [e.g. Joel Spolsky, Elon Musk]

sangnoir 12y ago
While he didn't know WebVan would pioneer it, Loius Borders says he know ecommerce would rule the world. ...that doesn't quite have the same ring, does it? There is a lot of survivorship bias at play here. Thousands of individuals had convictions that their instincts were right as as well - but it turned out poorly for them. Luck and timing plays a big part in success, but more often than not, hn ignores this.
- levlandau 12y ago
  How does this change the point that there are entrepreneurs who have instincts about the market AND timing that turn out to be right? The broader point is Peter Thiel's --> You are not a lottery ticket. The best example might be Jeff Bezos and his business plan. Elon Musk has been consistent for ~ 20 yrs about the areas he set out to work on since college and he's followed that through. It's not dumb luck. It's skill + luck. The skill part of the equation is oft dumbed down in favor of the randomized success algorithm. People who are able to repeat their successes multiple times e.g. Joel Spolsky, Elon Musk, David Duffield, Rich Barton are especially skilled and it would be disingenuous to attribute their successes to some luck/timing that they were not ultimately mostly responsible for creating or noticing.
  - dputtick 12y ago

ramigb 12y ago

Could someone please rephrase the title of the article to me? thank you.

jpindar 12y ago
What future large company might this be the first product of?
dang 12y ago
How might this company turn into something huge, the way that Altair Basic turned into Microsoft?

graycat 12y ago

PG sounds like it's okay to invest time, effort, code, money, etc. in a project without having any idea why it might work, and his justification is Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc. Okay: I grew up not far from a nice public golf course. It had some par 3 holes. Sure, on such a hole, it's possible to make a hole in one. Okay, for a year track all the hole in one successes and see how many were by expert golfers and how many were by people lucky to have a round at 10 over par. So, conclude from this that for a hole in one it doesn't help to be good at golf? Nope! Instead, on that course there were so many more poor players than expert ones that, likely, net, just from luck, there were more successful hole in one shots from the poor players than from the expert ones. Or, case #9,284,387,437 of how to lie with statistics! But, let's consider some other examples: Ike wanted some pictures of the USSR and sent some U-2 airplanes. Too soon one got shot down, and then someone called Kelly Johnson at Lockheed, and he noticed a new engine developed by Pratt and Whitney in their Florida operation: The engine was a turbojet until about Mach 2.5 at which time it became a ram jet and, thus, could go on to Mach 3+ without overheating the engine. So, get some titanium, design some aerodynamics especially good for supersonic flight, and get an airplane that could fly at Mach 3+, at 80,000+ feet, for 2000+ miles without refueling. Then the US got a lot of good pictures, and the Lockheed plane, the SR-71, never got shot down. There are many more examples from GPS, the F-117, the first Xerox copier, etc. These examples are cases of hole in one with high payoff and low risk from just routine work after the initial planning and review of the plans. Commercial version? Okay: Xerox, the IBM System 360, the Intel 386, Cisco IP routers, the Bell Labs work in optical fibers and Ga-Al-As heterojunction lasers, the Sony work on Blu-ray optical disks, etc. Lesson: It really is possible to pick a good target, plan carefully, execute with low risk, and be successful. For just one team, poor work and luck are not better.

serve_yay 12y ago

What Microsoft was Aereo the Altair Basic of? :) (The problem of silent evidence.)

rwmj 12y ago

I had a similar feeling when egroups[1] was announced. We were all using mailing lists at the time, and what was clever about that? The clever bit was that end users didn't have to set up and host majordomo themselves. Now egroups itself never came to much, but the idea of taking complex applications (mailing lists, email, CRM, ..) and turning them into SaaS is pretty massive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGroups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGroups

ksk 12y ago

They're not all the same - two of those companies - Facebook and Google initially had no clue about funding their companies. MS and Apple sold actual products that people could buy. As startups they did the really really hard work of convincing a bunch of people to open their wallets and pay hard cash for a product. I think this is a far more valuable exercise that attempting to create something that's popular by giving it away for free, and then selling some advertising product/platform/service that has a nebulous value which is often supported by spying/data-mining users. (aka Investor Story time http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm)

navait 12y ago

Any idea sounds awful if you phrase it right. Any idea sounds good phrased right. I don't think this is a good metric at all to evaluate a start-up.

frozenport 12y ago

Wrong wrong wrong. For example, the guys at Google spent years doing research in the field before starting their company. Clearly MS achieved success with a different product than they had begun with.

based2 12y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires

peteretep 12y ago

> Often the founders themselves didn't know why their ideas > were promising. They were attracted to these ideas by > instinct, because they were living in the future and they > sensed that something was missing. This is confirmation bias

WalterBright 12y ago

The thing is, any of those early tech companies could have been an Apple or Microsoft. There was nothing special about Altair Basic. Other companies didn't because they made disastrous mistakes along the way - see "In Search of Stupidity" by Chapman. Microsoft grew into a behemoth by making crucial decisions at several key turning points, and avoiding making disastrous mistakes.

defen 12y ago

It would be cool if PG could reveal whether he used this test, and what the answer was at the time, for any of the YC "big successes" (Which I'm defining as Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Justin.TV/Twitch, Heroku and Reddit)

beaugunderson 12y ago

"lame" is an unfortunately ableist choice of words (it appears five times in the article and many times here the comments). for information on why it's problematic try this: http://www.disabilityandrepresentation.com/2013/09/14/ableist-language/ http://www.disabilityandrepresentation.com/2013/09/14/ableis...

pedalpete 12y ago

I still think Uber sounds lame. But really, aside from the survivor bias, is what PG trying to say, very similar to the YC interview question [paraphrasing] "what do you know that nobody else knows?". That question lead us to be able to define the product we're currently working on, when we had spent months coming up with a good description and totally missed it. It actually helped me sell myself (and a few of the team members) on how big our idea could be. My guess is that each example PG gives, the founders would have an answer to that question where they would say "we're [re-]defining an industry because..."

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

There's some serious sharp shooter fallacy going in this article. The bottom line is that most of the startups based on a lame idea are, indeed, lame. It's all too easy to focus on the ones that succeeded.

GuiA 12y ago

Selection bias and post hoc rationalization. You can always frame success in any way you want- it'll sound good, because if the company's successful then your argument proves itself. How many successful companies don't fit the mold that was just described? I can think of many examples that had fairly straightforward road to success: Facebook, Dropbox, Stripe, usw. The real measure of a theory is how successful it is at predicting whatever it predicts. So out of all of the companies that you predicted could become the next "Microsoft of X", how many did? If your method doesn't perform better than randomized selection, then it's worthless. I suspect that's the case here. Of course, the law of large numbers combined with the high returns offered by tech companies means that even if investors aren't performing better than a randomized process, they feel like their theories about what makes a successful companies/entrepreneur are valid. Here's an experiment that will never happen, but that I'd love to see YC perform: for a given batch, select who makes it to the batch randomly from the pool of preselected applicants (you want preselected applicants and not all applicants because it's fairly likely that the 90% of people who are applying with their "Facebook for cats" idea that they came up with after beers 2 hours before the submission deadline won't make it. Or will they?). Then, look how that batch performs. It wouldn't be surprising if the batch performed no worse or no better.

shirro 12y ago

Perhaps as harder call is, which MS-DOS is this the CPM-86 of?

michaelochurch 12y ago

I think that the lesson you'd draw from many of these successes is something like this: 1. Find a specialty or niche that you care about. 2. Excel in it. 3. ???? 4. Profit! First, look at #1. For Microsoft, this was putting a modern (by the standard of the time) language on microcomputers as the PC era began. For Facebook, it was improving the way people manage and form weak ties. For Google, it was improving search. These ideas seemed "lame" for businesses because they were hobbyist projects, but done to excellence because of the passion that was behind them. Still, hobby + excellence doesn't always make a business. You need a lot of help, and that help can be hard to summon. Of course, there are also counterexamples. If Evan Spiegel excels at anything, it's writing creepy emails to his frat brethren. He's clearly not a technologist, and that applies to most of the VC darlings in this round, which is why it's going to be horrible for a lot of people when the chickens come home to roost and these P&D fake-tech companies have no buyers. But enough about that... Where there's confusion, I'd say, is at step #3. To what extent is excellence (even in something that seems "lame", insofar as being impossible to build a business on, like fixing web search) going to get noticed and draw enough backing to overcome the extreme "pointiness" (as opposed to well-roundedness) that comes with narrowly-focused excellence (which seems, to most, to be a hobby project at best and obsessive at worst). And what are the odds? I don't know what the answers are. I did #1 and #2 when I optimized hand-luck out of a trick-taking game, Ambition. ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhHZh5IEKBDf56ExgErv4o/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH... ) It's been published in a few gaming magazines (mostly abroad, as in Hungary and Japan) but generally hasn't caught on, and I doubt it'll ever make me rich. I guess you can say that step #3 isn't automatic. But I'm not sure that that's a bad thing. Excellence doesn't need to produce wealth to be valuable, and doing something to make money makes excellence almost impossible in practice, anyhow. (Excellent products can make money, but products that are optimized for money-making are rarely excellent, because value-creation and value-capture are separate disciplines and antagonistic toward one another at the highest levels of performance.) One thing I admire about Paul Graham (despite differences) is that he does place a value on excellence, as you can see in his work on Lisp. He understands excellence as a virtue (which is admirable) and believes that the market will reward it (which is debatable; we agree that there is correlation but would disagree on its strength). For his part, he tried to make an excellent Lisp (Arc) and showed a strong aesthetic sense. It didn't catch on. Rich Hickey made a Lisp that was, at the time, uglier but because it ran on the butt-ugly JVM, and you had a lot of S-expressions that looked more like (.addEventListener thingy other-thingy) than (map (comp f g) list). Eight years later, most of Clojure is beautiful (unless you peer into the innards) because of the work it has attracted. All I'm saying is that it's hard to predict who'll win. If it was 2006 and someone told you that in half a decade, the best Lisp would be on the JVM, you'd laugh in that person's face. And yet... that's what happened. I think we can agree that excellence, because of the narrowness of focus it often (and not always, but often) requires, will lead a person to be thought "lame". (There is also the extremely slow process through which true excellence is recognized.) In 2006, many would've written Rich Hickey off as a barely-employed ex-musician trying to do the impossible (write a beautiful Lisp on top of the JVM) and unsellable (who'd buy it)? And yet Cognitect has shown that Clojure's excellence is sellable. From the statically typed world we seem similar slow uptake: Haskell's over 25 years old and just starting to be recognized as a practical language for "real programming". Full agreement exists on #1 and #2. What about #3: the "????" term that leads from focused, diligent excellence to freely flowing money? Before Silicon Valley, I feel like Americans were more honest about the lack of a strong relationship between excellence and financial success. People understood the "starving artist" concept, and that writers of trash novels (e.g. Fifty Shades of Gray) would economically outperform people writing genuine literature. (That said, don't write off Tolkien, King, or Rowling just 'cause they do "genre lit"; they're fantastically skilled.) The problem with Silicon Valley exceptionalism is that these people believe that they've transcended the nonexistence of a causal arrow between excellence and financial success. That leads to a naive optimism at first, and later to a self-serving sense of "meritocracy" that's divorced from reality. The truth about item #3 in the above is that it's very random and we have almost no insight into how it actually works, and that's upsetting but I don't know what to do about it.

hyperpallium 12y ago

They made something easier, in a growing market. Their big break was DOS. Getting offered to do an OS for the PC was luck, but they scrappily exploited it to the hilt: they didn't even have an OS; their license terms allowed them to sell to (future) clones; they sold it far cheaper than the competition.

eklavya 12y ago

I got the article and it's nice. However I am having a hard time trying to understand(english wise) this sentence - What microsoft is this the Altair Basic of? How to parse it?

ahpeeyem 12y ago
What [future gigantic corporation] is this the [first small product] of?
- eklavya 12y ago
  Thanks :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

pitchups 12y ago

With 20/20 hindsight it is easy to connect the dots that led to Microsoft's dominance of the PC industry. And although the Altair Basic may have led to it - it in itself was not enough to catapult them to their future success. Their big break came from their deal with IBM for the Operating System. And that deal was literally gifted to them due to a confluence of many factors - with luck playing a huge part in it. In fact Gates directed IBM to approach Gary Kildall of Digital Research for the OS. But Kildall skipped the first meeting with IBM and his team at DR dilly-dallied on signing a standard NDA with IBM and could not reach an agreement. IBM went back to Gates for an answer for the OS. [1] Had DR not dropped the ball on the IBM deal, the future would have been very different for Microsoft, and for DR and for the world. It is all of course counterfactual - but who knows - the world may have been running on CPM/2015, and Gates and Allen would have been running a successful PC software company - selling compilers and languages for it. It Gates and Allen's ability to turn this fateful second chance into what we now know to be the deal of the century. In fact, Microsoft used this chance to sell QDOS (Quick and Dirty OS) - from a lone programmer (Dave Patterson) working across the lake in Seattle on a port of CP/M to 8086 - to IBM. IBM was not aware of this small company (Seattle Computer Products). Later it was found that QDOS literally "stole" CP/M code and function calls. DR sued but IBM settled the suit with DR by bundling CPM/86 with the PC - but selling it for $240 as opposed to $40 for PC DOS. CP/M never had a chance. And the rest as they say is history... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall EDITS: typos

InclinedPlane 12y ago

The problem with advice like this is that it's not nearly as useful as it seems. The biggest problem here is that typically it takes a visionary to recognize a visionary in the early stages, before any of the vision has actually been realized. And that's only part of the equation, there's also talent, ability to execute well, and luck of course. If you're a time traveler from the future, sure you bet on Bill and Paul, because you know how that turns out. But let's say you're a time traveler from an alternate timeline, or an alien from a more advanced planet, can you still tell who to bet on? Even if you had the knowledge to know how people would use computers in the future and what sorts of things would be most in demand, Microsoft wasn't necessarily the best bet way back in the Altair Basic era. Back then the obvious choice would have been Gary Kildall and Digital Research who had CP/M, a serious operating system that was light years ahead of the competition in the late '70s. It took several bizarre twists and turns for Microsoft to end up on top, but it was far from foreordained that they would. Other obvious competitors included Lotus and VisiCalc, folks who seemed poised to have strong offerings nestled in the bosom of a growing computer industry. What Microsoft had that the others lacked was sticktoitiveness, adaptability, and business savvy. They were willing to do what ever it took to ride to the top, whereas other companies were satisfied with "merely" massive runaway success. And that showed up in surprising and non-intuitive ways. DR built CP/M from the ground up and invested heavily in making it the best they could. Microsoft bought a clone of CP/M that was written in 6 weeks for $75k because they needed an OS to deliver to IBM for the IBM PC, and they thought that was a reasonable business arrangement to be in. In no way does that sound like sound engineering or sound business strategy, but it turned out to be one of the most pivotal events in computing history. It was Microsoft's tenacity and their desire to make billions where others were content to make only billions that brought them to the top of the industry, things that weren't really obvious until after they happened. For venture capitalists this problem isn't a big deal, because they can just play the lottery and invest in Digital Research as well as Microsoft and Lotus and all the reasonable bets. For people looking for "the next microsoft" to work at, the problem is much more difficult, if not fundamentally impossible.

tempodox 12y ago

This article shows beautifully how this is all just random. Of course it helps to be an enterprising person with an optimistic outlook. Failures are far too normal to be impressed by them. But seriously, who is really able to tell which extravagant nice-to-have (or even too-ridiculous-to-be-wanted) will be next week's must-have? If there was a way to find that out, we finally would have understood humanity. So cheers to all with above-average stats at guessing who will be the next big Dollar Sign.