1) How can a just-now-released essay be influential at all?

2) At least half of pg's essays are better written than this, which to me seemed a little phoned-in. It's not really an essay anyway, but a peptalk. He didn't even have the usual cavalcade of proofreaders at the bottom.

3) The most influential essay I've ever read is the first essay of "Genealogy of Morals".

1) I just resigned from my day job this week to pursue startup ambitions and

2) I am definitely having "oh shit what am I doing" thoughts right now.

So given the timing for me, this kind of inspiration is very moving. As far as how it is written, I would argue that the phoned-in and impulsive nature is what makes this essay so elegant. It is clean and concise, stating the idea simply: dont give up. Anyway, this is all one mans opinion so you are certainly entitled to disagree.

It can, obviously, be very influential to one reader...and instantly. Time is irrelevant once it reaches that one reader.

The most influential, well-written paragraph I've ever read!

I guess startups are like old soldiers, they just fade away. Anyone want memamp.com? It went to unregistered status a week or two ago.

But this was a good handling of the subject, and good for founders to hear. What I think is great about YC's structure is that it gives startups feedback and deadlines, and I agree that just getting those is enough to keep startups going. Someone should start a startup that just calls people once a week and talks with them about what they got done! It would work even better if the caller was of higher status, but it would work well enough with friends.

But seriously, for startups this would work great. Get together with a group and make a weekly appointment for each person to call another each week and chat about what they're doing, preferably with a little demo. I'm sure one of you is already thinking of how to make this a Facebook app, but I think a personal phone call would work best.

P.S.: "Francisco."

By what definition of "too much"? I see nothing wrong with focusing on studying the best--the ones that made it. Those are the people to emulate. Why spend your limited time studying the ones that failed? Sure, learning from mistakes is great. But I suspect I'm going to weather the storm better if I learn about mistakes from people who made it through to the other side--rather than from people who blew it and ended up bankrupt. I really don't think I'd like to be facing a problem and thinking, "Oh, wait, I read about this...it turned out horribly...we're dead!" Much better to think, "Well, Evan Williams had exactly this problem with Blogger. And look how that turned out! Just gotta keep plugging away."

Just a thought. I don't really think we need a lot of post-mortems while we're in the early stages. Maybe later when we have a huge success on our hands and want to know how to avoid becoming the next SGI (Google uses SGI internally to mean, "company that has huge success and then made huge mistakes", because Google has actually moved into nearly all of the old SGI buildings in Mountain View as SGI has atrophied into a shell of itself--seeing how business and management heavy Google has become in the past year makes me think they didn't think hard enough about SGI...).

After that happened, I spent a couple of months staring at walls, feeling sorry for myself. During that time, I listened to everything at venturevoice.com, read Founders at Work, and kept thinking "man, these success stories are inspiring, but what I need right now are some goddamn failure storiesX." (If you're in the same position, I highly recommend this book: http://tinyurl.com/362eg5 )

Anyways, you're both right. Founders at Rest: Stories of Losers Who Fucked Up and Gave Up would be boring and depressing. But interviews with successful people about their failures -- e.g., Evan Williams' Blogger saga -- would be fascinating and inspiring. The classic story arc doesn't let the hero succeed right off the bat. First he hits a low point, then pulls himself up by his bootstraps.

One of these days I'll write that book. Right now, though, I'm too busy working on my next startup.

Don't forget, Microsoft wasn't Bill Gates' first company.

Reasons #2, 7, 8, 14, 16, and 18. ;-)

What if the failures are doing a lot of the same things? You just can't get a complete picture without examining the failures, too.

It's probably better to be optimistic, because being realistic is likely to simply be depressing, but still, for those curious about the system as a whole, you can't just look at success.

>>I'm sure one of you is already thinking of how to make this a Facebook app, but I think a personal phone call would work best.

Actually, my first thought was meetup group in a certain area.

Or perhaps some kind of demo party. Everyone has to present something for 10 minutes, something they've done or learnt since last week.

Perhaps opencoffee should have a culture of demoing every week. You show up, you get scrutinized, but it's all for the best.

If we can be recipients of messages like this, I don't think any of us not funded by YC should feel like we're outside the club.

Also very good point about how peers motivate each other. When I am sitting in my weekly target meetings and see that my peer did 110% of his target and i did only 95%, it immediately triggers me to go and re-examine my methods.

Of course, it's not just money - you "pay" in other ways. If it takes, say, 4 years to get to the success or failure point, then some people will have worked for over 12 years with grim determination and still never quite nail it. I wonder if this is a memory-less process (ie., how does a previous failure affect your future attempts?). Wisdom and exhaustion in equal parts, I'd suspect, and only one side is going to win.

"Wisdom and exhaustion in equal parts, I'd suspect, and only one side is going to win."

Agreed. I'm just stubborn enough to keep trying. I'm also lucky enough to have a fantastic business partner, which I didn't have the first time around (I should have brought him on back then...he was already doing contract work for me on a regular basis).

This time around I put much tighter time constraints on myself. I'm not giving myself 7 years to figure out if I have a failure on my hands. Every 6 months I evaluate where we are, and if I don't see clearly how to get to the next level, it's time for a serious change. So far, that hasn't happened...wisdom gained from the previous startup seems to have allowed me to avoid most pitfalls.

At the same time, it's exactly what someone should do who's starting out, if they can't get funding or a team together. Try to get all three for as long as it takes.

So, not counting this batch (19), 10 out of 39 [1] startups died so far. So, the survival rate is 72%. Not bad! I know that some more YC companies might die at some point in the future, but the numbers so far seem impressive.

[1] The following article quotes 58 companies funded in all: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/08/paul-...

There were 38 before this batch, 20 new ones this summer, 1 of which immediately merged with a startup from a previous round = 19 in Cambridge.

Failure has a different meaning in Silicon Valley (kind of). There have been a couple of quiet fizzle outs from WFP that I'm sure of, and I've spoken to two of the guys from those fizzle outs since then...one is working on new ideas, and another has moved to another company (perhaps the most flexible of the bunch, in that they changed their entire business model and started from scratch during the program) from the same program that raised some money and he's happy and enthusiastic. While there is a bit of averting of the gaze when I asked how things were going, the fact that they were there at a YC event and talking about new things tells me they will probably go on to great things.

It's the folks who went back home, went back to consulting or school, who aren't going to be among the winners in the end. Which comes back to pg's assertion that just by staying in touch and staying involved you could very well guarantee success...I'm not sure if it's the cause or the effect, but I do think the folks who've stuck around and keep coming to the events and keep in touch with other YC'ers will probably do well.

Perhaps that's an obvious point, but I think it's an important one.

What can go wrong with startups? You can work on the problem wrong, which is hopefully averted by smarts. Or you can work on the wrong problem, which is averted by flexibility and subjecting yourself to reality checks. If you've got both of those elements, the only thing that can really go wrong is that you give up before you hit upon an idea that's useful.

And it's actually been proven true by one of the YC companies that was in WFP 07 (I'm sure it's been true of others, too...pg mentions Wufoo in the essay). Paul McKellar's first run was SocialMoth.com which is fun as hell to use and crazy sticky...but got no traction and no investment. Next came Overhear.us. Also fun to use, but no traction and no investment. Then came the Facebook SocialMoth, which exploded...now he's a mini-mogul with a bunch of Facebook apps in development, and real revenues from those users. Is he rich yet? Probably not. But he's found a niche that is paying and growing rapidly, because he stubbornly kept iterating and evolving.

That statement is self-serving, so, whether it is true or not, it stands that there must be a better way to express what you're saying (and without speaking for YCombinator, as well.) Right now it runs the danger of scaring off a lot of applicants.

No specific college, degree, or major can define someone as a great, dedicated, productive, and fervent entrepreneur or hacker in the consumer application space.

Secondly, YCombinator isn't a one-hour Intelligence Quotient test, but a commitment far-and-above graduate school or work at any college or enterprise. The last thing Paul would want to do is 'weed out' the 'weed' who are not from great schools or 'intelligent.'

Thirdly, you're implying two things: that Paul interviews all intelligent people as of primary concern, and those who are not interviewed are therefore unintelligent.

Both of those deductions do not fit what Paul has said in the past.

It's true that every founder from YCombinator has been smart, and has at least been accepted, if not graduated from, a good, famous college. And yet, that's not what Paul states he looks for in any of his speeches, essays, or posts. In fact, he has said things in conflict to your ideas in all of those media.

I think the best way to put this is that YCombinator picks those applicants who offered a better 'package deal' than those who would be later rejected. It might be two MIT guys with experience. It could be two european guys from Cambridge with little programming experience but with a good background in a similar venture.

There are Olympians who win Gold medals in Olympic Games who have to match that performance along with others _just to qualify for the event only 4 or 8 years later._ I just watched a segment on TV about that two hours ago. I don't think it's wise to pretend there are only so many intelligent people (or good candidates) out there, that one should rest on one's laurels.

Of course YCombinator founders are smart. That's why I said so. I haven't met a stupid one. But it doesn't mean that they were the only smart people, or that stupid people make bad entrepreneurs, or that a great way to judge how smart someone is is by their degree, or that a great way to predict success in the consumer app space is how 'smart' someone is. All of those assumptions go against what is preached time and time again by both Pauls, Max Levchin, and others.

And I still disagree that, based on Paul's application, essays, interviews, and speeches, that YCombinator's main filter is how smart the team is. The order is likely 1) how famous the company already is, 2) whether the team is incorporated already, 3) whether the team is bigger than one person, 4) followed by how dedicated the team is, 5) and, how smart it is. (But it's the same kind of speculation as anyone else's.)

Please let me know what you think, because I respect your opinion.

I'm going to have to disagree with the majority of fanboys here and say that I (still) disagree with Paul's premise that a good way to spend your life is to be miserable in anticipation of a tiny chance to be wealthy. I'd rather enjoy my job every day instead of live in the kind of environment where failure would be synonymous with my actual death. Many great things have come of "failure."

It isn't tiny in the case of Octopart or the audience I was addressing. They've all been selected out of a much larger pool. For them the odds might be as high as 50%.

Especially condom failure.

http://thingsilearned.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/the-dangers-o...

The actual statistic (Business Links, UK) is 90% of startup businesses go bust within the first 6 months. If you can hang on longer than this, the statistics improve. This mainly has to do with cash flow, startup costs etc. which many starups don't adequately plan for. If the business model enables you to survive "indefinitely" and and you have minimum operating and living costs, this works fine. However, the other problem is stagnation - if you're not growing and no new ideas or changes are going into the business, you're going nowhere, no matter how long you hold on. Sincwe markets change quite rapidly, chances are that an idea that was great 3-4 years ago, will be stale and done by somebody else if it's not acted on quickly enough.

> We're taking on some consulting projects, but we're going to keep working on the startup.

All good if you're single, but what if you've got a wife and family and just need the cash? (Okay, feel free to say you shouldn't start a startup with a family, but it's too late... :-)

The real threat posed by taking on consulting is not what it does to your time; seeking funding would eat up lots of time as well. The threat is what it does to your determination. When the startup seems hopeless you can easily drop it and make consulting your focus.

If you're determined enough, you'll come up with a plan to maintain that determination even if consulting goes well and the startup goes terribly.

This is doable, you need to be able to at least get your application developed and maintain hosting for it, but work also for others so you can have an income. This is what I have done at least.

I thought my system would develop revenue right away, but the number of sign ups it took to create a paying customer cost more then what I could afford and natural search traffic was just not coming fast enough.

So I gave it away free so I could figure out the money part later. Not to mention the system wasn't very mature, it needed a revision to bring the quality up and then what seemed like months of bug fixing.

Out of my biding my time, putting out incremental improvements, and building good repore with the users I have discovered instead of putting out a generic product, success will come from taloring very specific products out of my generic product. Using my application as sort of a platform of generic parts to build a system for a particular market.

Having kids, wife, things have still worked out fine.

We gave up a lot financially to be here. If you have kids and a family it does take a lot more work, but it is not impossible. Just work it out with your wife.

I don't think most startup founders with families are looking at the same picture of success as those right out of college.

Or, maybe they stop communicating because they know they're going to die.

I love it when people take a statistic and try and "cheat" it.

For example: a report came out last year that statistically speaking most people that have dogs and cats have children that don't have allergies to dogs and cats. It may be that having dogs and cats around makes children not have the allergy. Or, since allergies to dogs and cats are hereditary, maybe only people that don't have the allergy get dogs and cats, and those people would be more likely to have children without the allergy.

That's how I feel about the "communicate you won't die" comment.

Thanks for this influential piece. Those who would rebuild the production base of the Information Age and who still believe in Yankee Ingenuity applaud your fighting spirit.

I'm going to link to this from EconomicsWorks.com and bibusiness.com.

PG, you just scored.

Another inspiring speech is this one from Steve Jobs:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-06150...

 2.- Only 1 of 1000 of startups will get success.

 3.- you can foresee the future of your startups:
     disaster perhaps with one exception, the one
     that thinks by himself.
 

I've started companies in Houston, Austin, and now in the Valley. Austin was vastly better than Houston, but Silicon Valley is worlds apart from anything I've ever seen.

The only benefit to not being in a startup hub is that you don't have as short of a runway during that very early self-funded stage. You can live on peanuts in most parts of the country...but in the valley you will go broke fast if you don't have income or funding. So, it seems like "not dying" would be easier in places where the cost of living is very low, but I think it's probably a zombie-like existence. You also don't have to move as fast...and if you aren't moving fast at 3 months into your company, you're as good as dead.

So I know the thing to do is to drop out and move to the Valley. But the only socially acceptable way I had to do that was acceptance into Y Combinator, or angel funding from someone else.

So for now, my company is in Pittsburgh. It's going to be really easy to "not die" because there is absolutely no way for my company to fail because we have no expenses. Unless we get sued and can't afford to defend ourselves. While we're not dying, we should start making money. So if we have enough revenue to support a Bay Area or NYC lifestyle, we would happily move the company there, regardless of college education.

im from austin, live in dallas short term now

but where did you find all the hot startup action in austin?

are there any groups or communities that you frequented? any websites that you conncected with other hackers on? is austinventures really the only game in town? It seems like austin has the free spirit startup culture, but I dont feel near the amount of startup community there as I do when I read about the valley on here and other startup oriented blogs/sites. maybe im just out of the loop tho. got any tips for an aspiring austin starterupper?

Perl mongers was also pretty interesting, though not startup-y enough. PUG (Python Users Group) also met a few times, and they were a bit more dynamic.

There's also some money in Austin. Austin Ventures is well-known and well-regarded, and they do a lot of deals. A few angels exist there, and if you're doing anything related to oil and gas or telecommunications you can find investors, if you beat the bushes. Other areas are not as well served.

But, the valley is in a class by itself. I wouldn't recommend starting up in Austin to anyone, now that I know how big the difference is between the #1 startup hub and the #5 startup hub...as pg pointed out in his article about startup hubs, the drop-off is steep. Boston is barely half as good as Silicon Valley, and everything else is likewise half as good as the next step up (I believe the list goes SV, Boston, New York, Seattle, Austin, but I might be misremembering). Might as well be in Dubuque as anywhere other than the Valley.

Archana [email protected] www.planeaikon.com

very inspiring, thanks pg!

Funny you say that because every single founder I was with this summer had two things in common: they were passionate about what they were doing and they learned A LOT over the course of the three months.

Relax. If you dislike an individual, you can simply state it rather than using some twisted logic to express the same thing.

(just when I'm finally making > $100k if you include all the bad-ass benefits & shit!)

That's relieving to hear.

Hmm.. I wonder if writing can help one to think through software design faster, too.

I suppose that writing consists of actual programming, though.

Example - all of our successful startup founders admitted to smoking pot, therefore pot makes you successful at starting a startup.

Then the mind comes up with all sorts of sophistry to explain a possible relationship with a tentative link at best.

Example - all of our startup founders smoked pot ... must be some chemical thing that stimulates "creative thinking." And their "in the face of the man and his system" attitudes probably subconciously registered and gave them some sort of extra confidence. Yeh - that's it.

Just be careful when you follow the pied piper guys. Ever wonder what happens to guys who try and never make it? What happens to their careers? Do they go back to "Big Corp." and explain that they were "on their own" for 2 years? Most people will be jealous and snicker at them inside, thinking, "Who did you think you were, some genius or something?"

What happens to those guys. Obviously there are a lot of them. But you never hear about them. They're kept hidden. On purpose.

A professor I had once told me that the only reason people don't want socialism is because deep down inside they secretly expect that they're gonna hit the jackpot and dammit, nobody will come between them and their ferrari parked in front of their mansion full of sexy ladies.

And so we all labor on under similar secret personal delusions, each thinking that "somehow, someway ... in the end we'll prevail - because we're special that way."

And that's how the system works. Once in a while we get discouraged and read some financial porn-o-graphy about some new multi-billionaire success story to keep us sweating more and trying harder.

Only they don't tell you the part about how most of such success stories are usually deep, well-developed scams that serve other purposes.

Oracle had deep connections to intelligence agencies.

A recent (1year ago?) report by some french intelligence agency examined microsoft and concluded that it more than likely received quite a bit of help from the nsa.

Look at the charges about the connections that facebook's investors have with big brother.

And google? the "let's not be evil" company - what does it do the second it makes big money? Start offering lucrative retirement packages to attract intelligence guys to come on board.

You think all this is a coincidence? You don't think those peope have colleagues who call them up and say, "Hey - what do you think about so and so's search habits?"

Donald Trump, as fans of Rosie know, made his first "deal" at age 30 only because his billionaire father co-signed the bank loan. Then he died and left him most of his money.

His counterpart in vegas, Steve Winn, is now, as people are finding out, the "legit" clean face for the mob, which still controls vegas, though only more corporate and proper like.

Famed investing "genius" George Soros is now, as it turns out, less of a lucky genius than he is a front for a european faction of investors with very close, personal ties to the folks who decide financial policies for nations.

What do you think they discuss when these people all vacation together, the weather and whether Brad Pit and Angelina are getting back together?

No they discuss whether interest rates will rise or fall ... weeks ahead of official announcements.

THE POINT OF ALL THIS IS in the final analysis, you never know why a tech company became a big success.

Suppose you start a company where people catalogue their deepest fears and share them with each other.

You think it would be difficult to find funding for that from some VC firm with intelligence connections? If you could get people to trust you and sign up, you'd find tens of millions in first round funding over night.

Learn to think for yourselves and stop mindlessly following every pundit with a slick blog.

Just because somebody writes well doesn't mean that the info is useful. Just because they were successful 10 years ago when people were raising $100 million first round financing for a website that sells scissors to cut your dog's butt hair, doesn't mean they can do it now.

True story - some of you may remember this: 6 months before the 2000 market crash, 2 extacy potheads with rich parents raised $300 million seed financing for a site which imported sneakers and watches from europe that people who frequented nightclubs wanted but couldn't find in the U.s.

Soon they were all over FastCompany, Business 2.0, Wired, etc., blabbering for 50 page articles about "how to raise money" and "the new economy paradigm shift" this and that.

you think anybody would give those fools 50 cents these days? Don't think so.

Guy Kawasaki is very derisive and flippant about all the silly plans he gets from entrepreneurs. But what exactly has he done except become an expert at being an expert at makign every body feel he's an expert?

When you think deeply, most of these pundit blogs are nothng more then a clever, well-connected mutual admiration society where pundits all write about each other and how smart they are and link to each other's blogs and interview each other wherey they proclaim their own friends genius, etc. - As cools as giving your own forum comments props on the next forum.

Go ahead. Drop out. Look with big gleaming eyes at that facebook guy and think, "Maybe, someday, if I work hard enough and don't quit ..."

But make sure you realize that in today's world, where you'd be lucky to find a job at all that isn't on it's way to india or china or where-ever the next hot place to send US jobs is, if you don't make it ... well then what?

Try and try again.

Right. Easy for people like Bill Gates who came from a wealthy and unbelievably well-connected family (his mommy sat on the board of directors of the american cancer society, alongside the then IBM CEO --- wonder if that had something to do with his getting a meeting with them when he had no product to speak of yet?).

Easy to try and fail when you got financial backup, rich families, well-connected uncles who can help you get a job if you mess up.

But what if you don't? What if you're not one of the 1 in a thousand ... or 5 thousand who has any measurable success?

"Oh, you'll learn a lot and that will be valuable."

Try putting that on your resume and see who will care.

All I'm saying is think clearly before chasing pipe dreams and if you do it, do it because there is something really there and there's a better than average chance - not because some guy on the internet puts up glossy, emotional propoganda to give it another go.

Look at the housing market. Just a year ago you could still walk into a bank and find all these glossy, emotional posters - "Refinance now - NOW's the right time - You can afford it and we can help you afford it! Ask a representative today."

Now look what happens when euphoria hits reality.

Most of these pleas are from folks who believe that some "next big wave" is coming because Google and YouTube happened.

Google is, if you think about it, Total Information Awareness program - except its voluntary.

YouTube was a fluke.

Think carefully if your own impression of your chance of success is based on your own impression ... or one that was carefully crafted via slick PR firms and well-worded blogs.

Thanks to Paul... I am trying to build something since 2005... and his words just push me!

I don't think YC encourages people to keep trying with an idea that doesn't work. Rather, they encourage them to drop the idea and find another one. Many YC startups have switched their idea even during the initial 3 months.

It's fairly common for a failing idea to still be a failing idea 10 years later. It's fairly uncommon for an entrepreneur to come up with 40 failing ideas in a row. Usually by the 4th or 5th, you've stumbled onto something decent.

But you imply that if you keep switching ideas, it's guaranteed that soon you'll come up with the right one. What if you don't? How then do you account for the time? Where do you get the money that you spent back? There needs to be a clear line - if young kids are dropping everything and moving to Boston, that situation can only be maintained for so long. How do you determine when that is before that becomes personally ruinous. I see that a note is left that YC funded hundreds of startups. Great. how many went anywhere? What happens to the rest? Are they still in Boston? Did they move back? Can they still attend YC dinners? Does Paul still take their calls if they don't make it? Or are they in some weird limbo where they need to go back to "real life" but have to account for lost time and opportunities? Paul is not your father nor is he the father of any of these young people trying this. If you make it, great! But if you don't ... (sounds of crickets). Well let's just say I doubt he'll offer you room and board until you find the next thing or get back on your feet.

>> It's fairly common for a failing idea to still be a failing idea 10 years later.

Yes it is. It's also fairly common for a failing idea to become a huge hit on the 11th year because something in society changed. Entrepreneurs are usually a bit more right-brain oriented and can see patterns in social dynamics which is why they are more likely than others to predict how to profit from emerging patters. But predicting a change and timing it exactly are two different things, as anyone on Wall Street will tell you.

>> Many YC startups have switched their idea even during the initial 3 months.

That's my point exactly. How do you determine if you're wasting time or just one idea switch away? What if by the time you hit your idea the market is in the course of moving away from it? Do you get invested in continuously to keep trying? Who's paying your personal bills during this time? Does Paul write a letter explaining what you've been up to for 6 months if you go back to school? Are there companies in Boston that will hire you if you don't make it so you can stay around while you think of the next YC idea?

One succeeded and is now overly optimisitic, the other failed and is overly bitter.

And del.icio.us, and Flickr, and Reddit, and Digg, and GMail, and JotSpot, and Picasa, and Twitter, and Blogger, and HotOrNot, and LiveJournal, and Scribd, and AddictingGames, and so on.

One of the most annoying things about starting up is that everyone assumes you're doing it because you heard about YouTube or Google and want to be though guys. No. I have no desire to run a $100B company. If I end up building one, it'll be by pure accident, like if my market niche is bigger than I thought and nobody bothers to buy us out.

Instead, I'm a startup person because my math teacher founded ClearPoint and sold it for $40M or so. Or because a friend of my dad sold a company for around that amount. Or because the dad of a friend founded Avici and cashed out at the height of the dot-com boom, when it was worth $3B. Or because a friend of a friend started Avid and ended up with a few tens of millions. Or because a coworker was an early employee at Stratus and ended up with a $3M house.

You probably haven't heard of any of these. That's the point. There's a lot of value-creation that goes on in the economy that isn't reported by the media, either because it's in an unsexy field like memory chips, or because the companies get sold before the media discovers them.

It does happen, though, and it happens to people who are fairly ordinary. All you need is a unique angle on some problem that nobody else has thought of.

(And actually, I'm doing a startup for a bunch of reasons other than "to get rich". When I chose my present job from a bunch of offers, it was because the founder said the company's mission was "to innovate", yet I eventually found that meant "I get to innovate, while you implement my innovations". Startups are really the only place where you can truly innovate, because it gets squashed at nearly all companies.)

Talk to me in 5 years when nobody even remembers, let alone uses these things. I know, I know ... you think "impossible - they're so widespread and useful!" Remember something called "GeoCities"?

And by citing these examples, I take it to mean you want something smaller that gets bought out by Big Corp International. Great. So you want to drop out of the system only to "innovate" for the system and put yourself at their mercy when they make an offer. But what if they don't?

>> One of the most annoying things about starting up is that everyone assumes you're doing it because you heard about YouTube or Google and want to be though guys. No. I have no desire to run a $100B company. If I end up building one, it'll be by pure accident, like if my market niche is bigger than I thought and nobody bothers to buy us out.

>> Instead, I'm a startup person because my math teacher founded ClearPoint and sold it for $40M or so. Or because a friend of my dad sold a company for around that amount. Or because the dad of a friend founded Avici and cashed out at the height of the dot-com boom, when it was worth $3B. Or because a friend of a friend started Avid and ended up with a few tens of millions. Or because a coworker was an early employee at Stratus and ended up with a $3M house.

So people who do it for the money are trite ... you on the other hand are evolved and do it from a "monkey see, monkey do" perspective. Ok I hope it works for you. But notice the timing of when your family and friends sold out. Talk to me after you pickup the Financial Times and read something along the lines of "China gets pissed after latest toy recall and dumps 1.3 trillion dollars worth of bearer bond and currency holdings, sending U.S. economy into tailspin from which it may never recover."

>> You probably haven't heard of any of these. That's the point. There's a lot of value-creation that goes on in the economy that isn't reported by the media, either because it's in an unsexy field like memory chips, or because the companies get sold before the media discovers them.

That's my point. How many of these were started in an atmosphere like YC though? Ask these people if it's really true that as long as you keep trying out of fear of shame, like the article suggests, then that's all it takes in the end.

>It does happen, though, and it happens to people who are fairly ordinary. All you need is a unique angle on some problem that nobody else has thought of.

No, you need a lot more than that as Aaron Greenspan and countless others can attest to.

>> (And actually, I'm doing a startup for a bunch of reasons other than "to get rich". When I chose my present job from a bunch of offers, it was because the founder said the company's mission was "to innovate", yet I eventually found that meant "I get to innovate, while you implement my innovations". Startups are really the only place where you can truly innovate, because it gets squashed at nearly all companies.)

So be it. Sounds like you have some career maturity to fall back on if you don't make it until you can recoup and try again. But think of the majority of the people that read this article. Mostly younger and with less experience I would say. And whereas failure is a badge of honor in SV and gets rid of your green-ness, you can explain to you're blue in the face how all entrepreneurs value early failure to others but they'll just dismiss you as a failure.

All I'm saying in the end is that SV is a unique situation. The Dot Com bubble, if you are a fan of history, was just a con-job to remove wealth via the market mechanism to set us up for war-mongering overseas. It happened before WW1, it happened before WWII, and it happened in order to mess up the economy and convince gullible corporations to ship jobs overseas because that's the way it's done in the "new economy." Which doesn't seem to work well. And now you have millions of young people with no options but to join the military. What a coincidence. Don't expect "Dot Com Part II" or even the 'ol "technolgoy maturity curve" of consulting lore. We're living in very, very strange times economically and if you're basing your future on doing your own thing, make sure u know what you're getting into. "Let's have meetings every week and have dinners every week and keep everyone updated." Great - I just saw a midnight screening of Office space at this theater near me. Don't forget to have the right cover fax sheet for those TPS reports too.

Nice talk but the problem with this insight, like most on this site, is that it is largely in-applicable and I bet nobody would actually act on it if presented with the opportunity in real life.

Hey, Mr. Graham - I have the absolute best business idea in the world bar none and I'm so dead serious about it I'd sign a blood contract with you that I will commit Seppuku with a dirty, rusty, blunt sword if it doesn't radically alter the world in 4 years of its launch.

According to this essay, my "dead seriousness" about the quality of this idea should translate into a surefire success. Couple that with the notion that you won't need a weekly update as to what we're up to because you'll wind up a daily user.

Surely if this is the leading indicator of the next multi-billion dollar thing, a measly little NDA would be a small obstacle to have unfettered access to this. Care to sign a measly NDA to hear it?

Thought so. But why not - if I'm dead serious and you wind up a daily user and so you know what we're up to every day, then according to this article it's a surefire success story in the making.

Care to test the premise of this article? Thought so.

Same with that article on "outside the box ideas need to come more from outside the box people."

Outside the box people have good ideas all the time because they have a more strategic, top-down perspective and can see adjacent markets / fields of study where good ideas can be cross-polinated.

How many times have you looked at a product and thought to yourself, "I could do better than that."

11 years ago I thought, "What someone made a palm-pilot case ... with a flexible rubber keyboard on the inside which folded three ways to a full size, but flexible keyboard?" A friend and I made a working but ugly model out of parts from stuff we bought at Staples/Office Depot.

We were "dead serious" about making it work but after a year of college where we dedicated every spare minute to "making it work" nobody at palm would even listen to us because they found it impossible that anybody outside of palm could think of any useful ideas for a palm product. No investors wanted to talk to us because we didn't work for palm. And we couldn't afford the tens of thousands of dollars for the many patents it would require. BUT - WE WERE "DEAD SERIOUS." For a year.

This summer Sony just patented a "flexible, material-embedded data input device" ie, the same idea we had over a decade ago. But we were very serious so why didn't it work? The only difference between us and sony is $$$$$$ and connections - the real critical variables. Wake up people.

Try being one of those people with no connections in the industry and getting anybody in the field or investors or whatever to get you seriously enough to work with you.

In my experience, if by some far-out chance you ever get a credible party in an industry to sit down and take you seriously enough to listen to you, they still won't work with you out of sheer spite for for being an outsider and coming up with something insiders haven't thought of.

Most VCs will think you're stupid if you don't have an MBA, most programmers will whine on their blogs about how come nobody in the business world respects them just because they don't have an MBA, yet they in turn think anybody who didn't major in computer science is stupid, and so on and so forth.

The whole world is full of theorizing hypocrites and the sooner people wake up to this reality the better.

Many of these articles are taken from a top-down, "Wouldn't the world be better/nicer/more efficient if only ..." perspective.

I'm sure there are many brilliant programmers in china, bulgaria, romania, russia, etc. who would gladly hack off their legs for an opportunity to "do their thing."

But unless they live in California or, increasingly, Boston ... well tough luck.

So the CRITICAL VARIABLE is not "Dead seriousness" or even good ideas or even intelligence, resiliance, ability to ride out the storms, ability to motivate yourself when it appears like nothing is going right, etc. It's physical proximity to and connections with someone with the cash and connections to get stuff rolling.

How good idea is and how serious you are and how many times you call to tell people, "this is what we're up to today/this week/this month/this hour/next 5 minutes" would have no relevance if you lived in, say, Japan or Italy or Australia and you can argue all you want but you all know I'm right.

Like this essay, the book gives much advice of the "don't give up" type. But the book also mentions some cases when you should quit: you should quit activities that are a cul-de-sac, those in which you are not committed to become the best, or that don't help you become the best at what you most want to do. The rationale is that current society rewards the very best, ignoring the rest, out of proportion with actual quality/merit. I'm oversimplifying of course.

Obviously, PG doesn't think any of the YC startups is in a cul-de-sac, so he can dispense with that exception and tell all of them to just push forward. If anything, he warns the folks not to 'unquit' school and other attention/commitment escape valves.

[1] Edit: I was focusing on the "don't give up, don't lose focus" part. This essay has other big theme, shame as a motivator, which is not touched in The Dip.

Otherwise, the qualifiers that apply to any other startup in general, apply.