I don't think I'm overly optimistic. For one thing, I've both succeeded and failed (http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html). But also there are the 58 startups YC has funded over the past 2 1/2 years. With that amount of data, I think I look at the startup business with a fairly clear eye.
I don't think I'm overly pessimistic. I'm saying look at post-2000. What do you have, in reality? Google (intelligence connections), YouTube ... doubtful to have gotten off the ground if one of the co-founders wasn't coincidentally related to Jim Clark ... and MySpace, a "startup" which seems to have been "started up" by Fox itself ... and Facebook, which everybody knows by now is just a greedy jerk who stole somebody else's idea and found a VC firm with intelligence community ties who see a device for gathering info on personal relationships useful. BUT WHAT HAPPENED TO the several people NYT claims may have been the original people behind MyFace? They're suing or writing "I got shafted" memoirs. They didn't make it. What are the consequences? Nobody knows because for the most part such people are politely brushed under the carpet (with MyFace being an exception). Oh and some company that went public last week that does something with servers that I don't understand. What else? What else really made it? Flickr to a lesser extent. All I'm saying is if somebody with who didn't go to Horace Mann and Harvard or Yale and isn't related to somebody who may help behind the scenes came up with "the next big thing" ... NOW ... during THIS time period when China controls more of our economic destiny than silicon valley and wallstreet combined ... well then you should pay close attention to that person. They're super-smart in a way that is directly relevant in cold, hard reality land. But can you find such a person? Who? Thought so. Everybody else just take with a few dozen grains of salt. And people who know how to make it in tough environments will never show you how its done. Why would they? The number one rule in business is "Figure it out for yourself." I'm sorry but there are no shortcuts, no magic formulas, and the sooner you realize that the better. And people who tell you that they have some "system" for pumping out real-estate fortunes, or making a killing in the stock/commodity market, or pumping out multibillion dollar startups at-will (ecompanies, idealab, and the 300 or so "incubators" that got started 1998-2000) never made a penny in anything but getting people to sign up for their magical secret systems. And making money at one time period during certain circumstances does not the expert make. Honestly - who thinks mark cuban could start another company and sell it a year later for $5 Billion today? How about 1 Billion? I doubt he could convince anybody in today's market to give him a loan. I'll say what is being left out. More than likely you will not make it at YC or even Kleiner Perkins. You will probably fail. You might be inspired to come back again having learned much and made good contacts from the experience. But nobody at YC will give you a loan and pay your apartment rent and car bills while you look for a job to pay the bills until you recover and get ready to try again. And you need to be used to that reality because people who called will call less and less and then eventually they won't return your calls. For years. Until they hear you're up to something cool again. If you can deal with that reality, fine. Deal with it 1, 2, maybe 3 or 4 times. If it sounds to cold, rethink how much time you're ready to commit.
"What do you have, in reality? Google (intelligence connections), YouTube ... doubtful to have gotten off the ground if one of the co-founders wasn't coincidentally related to Jim Clark ... and MySpace, a "startup" which seems to have been "started up" by Fox itself ... and Facebook"
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.)
>> 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.
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.
