How to Start Google(paulgraham.com) |
How to Start Google(paulgraham.com) |
To my mind, to immediately relate to kids in the UK, I would need to say TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Oculus, iPhone, iPad, and such, and not the company name.
Same thing as Packard & Hewlett when they got the ball rolling . . .
Worked for Edison too, he really got in on the ground floor when it comes to electrons.
* as many(interested projects) -> tech -> product ideas
* Grades -> top college -> co-workers
With fully 2 datapoints, I conjecture that this odd Scandinavian combination of being highly advanced nations yet isolated from the action in and around Silicon Valley increases the probability of public social Communication, as we (Scandis) are used to not having peers physically around us. The chi^2 is good with this one.
One had a full 3d rendering engine implemented in Dartlang written in 48 hours. Another was a minecraft top down rpg clone.
Dude is the Bobby Fischer of tech
* [X] Skills to build those ideas
* [ ] Runway to develop those ideas
* [ ] Someone to help find money to provide runway
Isn't this a bit misleading and can only be true for companies that don't take VC money or never go public (ex: Basecamp/37 Signals)? For VC funded or public companies, ultimately you'd have to be responsible to answer to your shareholders.
"Of the 137 people in the global study who achieved billionaire status in the 12-month study period, 53 of them inherited $150.8 billion collectively, more than the $140.7 billion that was earned by the 84 new self-made billionaires in the same time period, the UBS study says.Nov 30, 2023"
The citation for this quote appears to be https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/11/30/new-bil... , but I don't believe that limits to those "that occasionally get published in the press".
Unless you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, the best (safest, surest) way to start your entrepreneurial journey is to work for someone else. The goal is to learn everything about the rules of the trade and expand your network—these two things you don't get from school—while being paid to do that.
On the side, do what PG says to keep your entrepreneurial spirit and avoid "comfort zone" i.e pursuing your career (which is actually fine, but we're talking about starting a business right).
Probably you won't end up building Google. But hey, maybe with this approach, you can give a silver spoon to your offspring.
You could start a sewing business with few clients at most. Thats still a start up and will make you just as successful and happy and content and will help your local community and if you are good at it become bigger over time. This is how humanity has evolved. These big tech startups are a thing since the last 20 years maybe. But businesses have existed for centuries and they all start with small projects.
But this writeup focusses on these billionaires and tech startup culture so much that it misses to focus on the part - 'do your thing and it might not be programming'. Now being a founder of Y combinator might make you biased to look at only programming and tech companies but it's a shame because tech companies only show up as giants in share value. The tangible world of businesses is vastly bigger and includes millions of startups serving billions that such people will miss completely maybe because they don't have a website or a ticker in NASDAQ.
Such a sad hustle world we live in that we forget your local falafel vendor is also a startup who probably will expand to multiple falafel carts over time.
People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically getting rich is the most important thing is one of the reasons we got into this late-stage capitalism nightmare in the first place. Fuck this.
Edit: Sorry, to update after my rant. So many things wrong with this advice. For most people, starting a company is not the best path to happiness. Sure, if you have a job, there's a "boss" that tells you what to do as Graham notes, but if you think for a second you can do whatever the fuck you want when you start your own company, you're dead wrong. Of course, Graham knows this.
I suppose the strongest criticism would be that pg's advice outlines necessary conditions to start the next Google but are not sufficient. Yes, the stuff you "make" needs to feel like a fun project, but without the "...something people want" then your company will not make you rich. As with any advice, there there will always be exceptions ("do you really need a cofounder?") but as far as "here is some advice to achieve x", where x is "create a billion-dollar company" this isn't a bad start.
One of the reasons is my background, besides ‘building my stuff’ I was very busy fighting the obstacles most of the people in a developed country would never meet. Or most of the people having parents would never meet.
Life got me in the middle of building a very nice thing, giving me obstacles I couldn’t manage. Then, when I was climbing out of it, there was the pandemic, which messed many things in my life.
I just migrated to Ukraine back then, and you all know what happened next, the Russian full-scale invasion. That’s only the public events, I’m ignoring all the personal stuff here.
Saying that, for me, it was about five years, at least, I paused with my projects. Some of them are slightly irrelevant, some are not. There are ones I still believe are very good, even now when I’m older and more experienced. I got a huge load of non-professional experience over these years, and it helps me to understand the world so much better now. Will I ever find my resources for building my ideas? Nobody knows. If I’ll survive the war, I think I will.
During this half a decade I juggled stupid jobs (won’t mention why to save time, personal life events) because for a regular job I’m either too qualified or have a very different experience, non-applicable to local market. And I’m way too expensive when I work as an employee. I’m more the founder / employer type than the employee type, unemployable, as they used to brag in the Valley.
And my point is. I regret I never took my time to explore the professional life I despised all my life. This stupid CV/resume and LinkedIn idiocracy. When I had no resources, I could easily manage any enterprise job. I’m very good at stupid politics if needed, but I don’t enjoy it. And I’m very good with the software tools, so I can do your average enterprise employee workday for a couple of hours time. That proved my previous years as a freelancer, building my company, and interacting with the people I know from the corporate world.
In time of my need, I was just contemplating others earning way too much for their skills. When I didn’t even have a stupid resume, but was usually overqualified for a senior position, not to say a junior one. And no resources to learn the things I missed from this corporate thing.
Now it’s getting better due to my personal life changes, but I just lost some years of professional development. Plus loads of money I could earn on a stupid job (I won’t burn out type, as I don’t give a flying duck type).
While I’m not arguing about the point, especially as a piece of advice for teenagers, I would recommend learning other options, and get as much different life experience as you can, while you’re very young. That experience is much more valuable than all the money you can get. I got loads of money and all of that money is burned by now. I could earn more (loss less) if I would be better prepared for personal stuff in my life. As it took way too much energy and affected my work way too much.
Also, I don’t believe you build Facebook or Google when you are super young. I would say that is more of a luck thing. I believe you build something valuable when you understand what is around you and how the World works. You can build your super project at 50, why not?
And as the P.S. the Zuck story is a pure manipulation. We all know that wasn’t even his idea.
It's no surprise that almost all of the iconic things about Minecraft was created in the first few years by Notch.... everything else afterwards is just polishing it and adding fluff.
It's a valuable experience with a lot of potential upside in the long haul - but let's not pretend that it's less taxing than a cozy 9-to-5 tech job where your boss might ask you to update your OKRs once in a while.
:-p
Yeah but that boss is paying you mid 6 figs or even 7, plus comp and other stuff, then maybe it's not so bad. Why else are these tech companies inundated with so many job applications if having a boss is supposed to be so bad. I think this guy is still stuck in a '90s or early 2000s 'Dilbert' mindset when salaries were way worse and bosses had more leverage and employees were closer to being like slaves. A lot has changed. .
The vast majority of employees at the largest, most successful companies, do not earn that much.
Your boss's job is to oversee the minutiae of your day-to-day activities. Like in most workplaces, you can't choose to just chill for a few days, work only at night, or choose to avoid meetings for a few days, etc.
You will have a level autonomy and the ability to change directions/features, etc. that you cannot have working for others.
My reports absolutely can chill for a couple days, work only at night, or skip meetings. My job is to get them promoted, which can’t happen until they land projects that demonstrate business impact.
go to a casino, throw your life savings on one number. if you win, tell everyone how you gave it all and you manifested it by pure will. if you lose, nobody will ever hear from it.
in addition, pg is so heavily biased on this and should never be taken as gospel.
Pretending like all 8 billion people have the same opportunity to be the next Jeff Bezos/Elon/Jobs is misleading.
My advice for the 99% is to the best you can and foster family and friend relationships, work less, and get out of the mindless consumerist game.
If you personally want to be an employee, fine, but a cultural value for entrepreneurs is a good thing to have and should be supported.
But I mean this is the guy that foisted Sam Altman onto the world, so clearly he already knows that. Which makes an article like this understandable as the propaganda that it is.
You don't write an article like this to influence kids, you write it to rationalize the giant pile of money you find yourself sitting on.
This is a pep talk for trust fund kids who can afford to mess around with start ups. It's probably lousy advice for most people outside the affluenza bubble.
I know too many people born rich who think exactly this. And in their experience it works like that; they have no money stress anyway, take a little bit more risk and if it fails, well, they just fold and brag about ‘at least I tried’ and then try again or, you know, sit on the boat and get slobbered. Same thing. The rest of us don’t quite have this and especially bootstrapping your own company is hard, really hard; you will be doing a great deal of things that have nothing to do with what you want or set out to do and those probably turn out to be more important than what you started it for.
14 year old need good role models (preferably from their trusted social circles). These people should, ideally before the child turns 14, give him or her a strong moral framework to judge advice that they might come across.
On the topic of being rich (which can be a good goal if pursued along with a strong moral compass), it's much better to take advice from a Paul Graham rather from some grifter selling courses on "how to be a rich as me" on the net.
He could tell the truth instead about how most startups fail miserably and the founders see nothing.
Not to mention that the only way this works is if you have parents as a financial back stop.
I don't think that's a fair summary of the article. Yes, he says you can get rich. But he also says, and says first, that it's less annoying and more fun (and also more actual work).
Then for the rest of the article, he doesn't harp on "you can get rich". He talks about getting good at some technology, and doing projects because they're interesting, and finding other people to do things with.
- Concretly what's the late-stage capitalism nightmare? How do you define it and what do you compare it against?
- What do you define what PG is concretely telling kids and how that's related to what you describe as capitalism nightmare.
Finally, would you care to share some examples of better scenarios that could inspire advice for 14-year olds?
* Inequality in societies is as large as ever, and inequality is one of the main predcitors how happy a society is
* Influence of people and corporations with money on politics and society is unprecedented (i.e. lobbyism)
* In the US, but also in many Western European "developed" countries, basic human rights like education, health, housing and food are fucked by capitalism
PG is putting a big emphasis on getting rich and building your own company. Better advice for 14-year-olds would be, just off the top of my head:
* Money is important, but it's not the most important thing
* You are not your job or your company. Find something interesting to work for, but don't define yourself over it
* Participating democray is important: Fight for a more equal society and help make your community better
* Don't focus your education on one hard skill like computer science. Learn about arts, literature, philosophy and all other things that interest you
>In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich.
No. The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good career that pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at Wall Street, law or Congress. Getting rich through business is a lottery.
I would have attributed this article from Graham to relative inexperience had he written this early on, say in the 2000s. But him writing this now is just bad-faith preaching intended to give VCs another lottery ticket with a very low success probability of forming a unicorn.
And for the record, 14 and 15 year olds, the best way to get rich is still Wall Street, Congress or law.
> pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at
> Wall Street, law or Congress
I'm afraid this isn't really true. Through most of the industrial revolution and after (i.e. after the early 1800's), professionals (lawyers, bankers, accountants, doctors, etc.) made a smaller multiple of unskilled labor wages than they do today. In America at least, the way to get "rich" has always been to start your own business.
This was true in the 1800's and it's true today. There have been repeated waves of change as new technologies spread: textile mills, cotton production, mining, railroads, telecom, electricity, appliances, automobiles, department stores, advertising, aviation, broadcasting, computing, etc, etc. Each wave of innovation saw the creation of thousands of new businesses. Sure most eventually fail, but hundreds did pretty well and a handful got insanely wealthy.
American culture and laws (usually) rewards this sort of risky behavior. One can debate whether it's, moral, just, or good for society. But generally speaking, not much has changed wrt this facet of our culture over the last 200 years.
This is exactly the kind of thing that made me dramatically more ambitious and harder working when I started reading pg essays (pushing 20 years ago now), so I have a huge soft spot for the feeling/nostalgia that I got when I just let it wash over me. And it’s ultimately why I think it nets out constructive in spite of some real problems: if I heard this at 15 I would have started working really hard at 15 and not 22 or 23, and I would have started cultivating relationships with people who were going to be powerful at 15, instead of arguably antagonizing powerful people until, well maybe still today [1].
It’s got some serious problems though: the way most people get rich is by having wealthy parents, though at the apex it’s having wealthy parents who raised you to work hard and manage relationships with powerful people well [2], so given that by 15 most of that already has or hasn’t happened, I think we can generally regard pg saying that as a “useful fiction”: outcomes will improve at the mean for 15-year olds who believe him about this, or such is my prediction.
The advice about university is extremely dangerous in 2024 for anyone without a privileged upbringing because university is a far inferior place to learn things than YouTube videos aggregating all the best university lectures in history with the even more effective education style pioneered by Grant with 3blue1brown. And while trying to achieve at a level where you go to Stanford without a mountain of uniquely nasty debt [3] is strictly a good thing in high school / primary school, actually going to university via debt is an extremely dicey proposition if you miss and that distinction is tough to sell to that audience.
Better advice would be to start learning from the best educators in the world via a YouTube Premium subscription concurrent to high-school studies (and making them whiffle ball on a curve compared to peers that don’t), try to get a scholarship to an Ivy or Cal or something, but go to community college or directly into the workforce (Work for a Startup™) if you miss and don’t have graduate study on the agenda.
Mostly the feeling I get is that pg and his essays these days sit in the Venn between “well intentioned”, “aspirational/idealistic” and “not true”. It’s a fine line sometimes between “aspirational” and “false”, it gets finer yet in light of Sinclair’s Maxim [4]: what might be dismissed in a low-effort way as “out of touch” or even “self-serving” is trivially unfair to pg. He has his own family he could be spending time with instead of speaking to young people, he doesn’t need or seem to want any more money. He’s just past the point where he can de-leverage his intellectual and emotional investment in a world that doesn’t exist anymore: he’s the LTCM of serious intellectuals in technology. The book about that is called “When Genius Failed”, and John Meriwether is a brilliant man who lived by an admirably robust ethical code in a very rough neighborhood.
[1] The most significant glitch in pg’s firmware is that he says “smart and hardworking” when he really means “good at becoming powerful”, a direct quote [5] about his protégée illustrates this very clearly.
[2] Pick a list of very rich people and click on all the links, a fine starting point is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires.
[3] Yes there have been some modest reforms, no it’s not fixed: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67546893
[4] At the top, a man’s living can be about intellectual as well as financial capital: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
[5] I’ve known too many YC alumni too well for too long to even engage with any hatchet job on a piece that if anything understates the reality: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma..., please don’t prey on my worst instincts by tempting me to cite documented examples and credible primary sources.
I furthermore said that Grant of 3Blue1Brown fame and others inspired by him (Richard Behial, Sean Carrol, and many others, this matters enough that I'll do the rigorous citation routine if people personified in this instance by you don't regard this as common knowledge) have used the lever of technology to increase the upper-bound on the efficacy of education in a way that dwarfs the technological lever that LLMs represent for being wrong at scale persuasively enough to convince anyone but an expert in a bad mood.
I explicitly acknowledged the dominant term in the kinds of outcomes pg is talking about, which is having and effectively managing relationships with people who either already are or soon will be with high probability powerful.
In 2013 I was shortlisted as a candidate for some of the top jobs at the hottest company in the business and on a polynomially steeper career ascent trajectory than someone who now sits on OpenAI's board: that person diligently managed relationships and had a keen sense for whose star was rising and falling, I produced 10^4 more marginal revenue (very conservatively) but gave the establishment (including too many of my colleagues who chose the other path on geek/climber) the finger and didn't manage so much as my personal life, let alone the establishment. Which is why that person is on OpenAI's board and I'm scratching out a living as a consultant, and even that is only possible because I'm finally learning twenty years too late to be at least thoughtful, reasonably polite most of the time, and well-cited when being skeptical of an establishment.
The most effective way to interact with cutting-edge researchers short of actually getting a PhD at Oxford or something is to work for or consult for public-private partnerships between top academic labs and private-sector spinoffs. Even as a marginalized consultant I've worked directly with people at top research universities who get whispered about as Nobel candidates, these companies are often under-resourced in the beginning and if you're willing and able to represent a bargain, you can work adjacent to some truly stratospheric levels of elite research.
You're not wrong that going to an excellent school that you or your parents can actually afford is among the best advantages one can have early in life, you're exactly right about that.
You're incorrect in demonstrable ways on the rest of the stuff you've bundled into one statement. This is the problem with bundling together tangentially related ideas into one atomic unit.
I've kicked this thing back and forth a few times because even on revision I'm finding it difficult to say "What you Can't Say" [1] with both of: concrete and documented examples and low scope for seeming rude or snarky. I don't intend snark, but pg wrote those essays for a reason: being right is offensive sometimes. So I apologize if I give any offense to you or anyone else, but all this is true and a lot hangs in the balance right now for the industry and civilization as a whole. And I regret that you personally wind up being the person who said the thing that many/most think that needs demolishing, there's absolutely nothing personal in it.
Anecdotally it seems to be a different ranker with much more “interest” as opposed to “engagement” joint loss, but I could just be in a lucky bandit group.
Larry. Sergey. Mark Z. Steve.
All of these people were born into families where both parents either had advanced degrees or were well off due to their success in the field. Failure for these people does not mean much. Maybe just a hit to their egos. But otherwise they keep living life, just not as the billionaires of today.
Actaally if you look at those lists, the largest number made it by choosing their parents correctly.
99% or more of the people who enable Google to do what Google does are employees of Google. Same with every other company. The odds of being the founder of a successful company are probably worse than being a professional sportsball player (if only because they turn over more frequently).
Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder rather than an employee?
Does anything good come from encouraging people to ignore the actual situation that the overwhelming majority of the population finds itself in, and instead focusing on some essentially impossible pipe dream?
Obviously, every successful company does have founders. But so does every unsuccessful company. And what actually powers every successful company are its employees, not its founders.
The absolute worst of SV thinking, personified.
Tell the kids to study, don't sell them an unobtainable dream
I hear things like this a lot and I'm sick of it. There's nothing wrong with working for someone, in fact it's the best way to improve your skills as a beginner since you're going to be mentored by people much more experienced than you. I still call my first boss to this day.
But of course this is all made up. Nothing has any real value in this sense. We just each get 100 years on Earth and we each get to decide how to spend that time. Those are the facts.
The entrepreneur worship culture is simply about making people who make those choices feel better about those choices. And as another commenter has observed, most of us are no more likely to make it as an entrepreneur than we are likely to play for the Lakers.
So, yeah, "a boss telling you what to do" is fine if it works for you and gets you what you want out of life. Some of us just don't give a shit and don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about things like market fit and business transactions and valuation blah blah blah.
The standard way for a young 15yo to get rich, is to be passed on wealth by their parents. But starting a company can probably work, occasionally enough that we can use it as a smoke screen.
> You might have thought I was joking when I said I was going to tell you how to start Google. You might be thinking "How could we start Google?" But that's effectively what the people who did start Google were thinking before they started it.
We shouldn't be telling young people to start companies like Google or to aim for being really rich in the first place. We should be teaching children how to be more sustainable. Companies like Google are a net harm to society and the really rich like Sergey Brin and Larry Page are parasites, promoting the unsustainable ruthless capitalism that has caused the immense climactic problems of the world today.
- I agree that we should tell young children to aim for sustainable companies
- I at least partially disagree with warning against the unsustainable ruthless capitalism in case your sustainable ideas do get really big. Some companies would get really really big, and I would prefer to see those reaching there to be those who had a (comparatively) caring mind (the others would not listen anyway)
- but I would agree to explain young children that what and where they buy does impact climatic problems. And that supporting small-medium sized companies (or creating one) is the most beneficial for our future
How irresponsible.
So no word about funding from the CIA and NSA. If you want to build something that changes the world in such a profound way as Google did, you can not possibly expect the powerful not having a word with you. I am inclined to believe that these days you will need influential "friends" with aligned interests at some point.
Bill Gates, Zuck, Jobs, etc....
Students should quit school. -> (?) -> profit
It's not open to sign ups or anything (blocked in Supabase), so this isn't really trying to be a marketing exercise, the idea about joy projects just resonated with me.
If you want to listen to the generated audio (really it just custom parses a web page and sends it off to azure), I've uploaded it to a public Cloudflare R2 bucket[1]. It's not perfect, I haven't fully configured the SSML to treat quotes correct, and I'm adding weird breaks in between normal text and anchors, but... it's a project :).
[0] https://www.webtospeech.app/
[1] https://publicmedia.webtospeech.app/b3dc8034-c2f4-4835-afe8-...
https://new.nsf.gov/news/origins-google
> "The National Science Foundation led the multi-agency Digital Library Initiative (DLI) that, in 1994, made its first six awards. One of those awards supported a Stanford University project led by professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd... Around the same time, one of the graduate students funded under the NSF-supported DLI project at Stanford took an interest in the Web as a "collection." The student was Larry Page.... Page was soon joined by Sergey Brin, another Stanford graduate student working on the DLI project. (Brin was supported by an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.)"
Under a rational and fair approach to patents, anything created with taxpayer funds would be available to all American businesses under a non-exclusive licensing program. However, in the 1980s, Bayh-Dole was pushed through which allowed exclusive licensing of those inventions to private parties. This is nothing but theft from the taxpayer, the entity who funds the NSF, which funded this research effort, which generated PageRank.
As a result, Google didn't face market competition for some time, and was able to create a monopolistic situation, and as with all monopolies, this resulted in the degradation of their product, which is why, as everyone seems to agree, Google search results are much worse today than they used to be.
[edit: contemplate the outcome if Brin & Page had instead invented PageRank as Apple or Microsoft employees - would they have been able to run off with the IP and found a company?]
Every one of those people was incredibly successful before and after getting fired.
And actually it's a stupid point to begin with; making a point by choosing the absolute top percentage as if there is nothing other than 'really' rich (forget whether that is even a good thing I'd argue it's not a plus to have that much money and notoriety). There is of course 'lots of money' or 'comfortable'.
Irony also that Paul is probably not on that list but even if he was it's not because he 'built a google' but rather he decided to be an investor and incubator spreading bets over many potential winners.
Also ironic that Paul had decided rather than making more money he'd rather spend time with his family.
He then goes on to exploit young techies to put himself in a very prime position in the relations of production. Nowadays he tweets minimally veiled racist tweets about the supposed biological superiority of his brain compared to the rest of us, especially other races. Talk about privilege.
The $ offered by YC wouldn't even cover a typical salary for a single coder or an adverting budget, although being chosen by YC does help to some degree in the latter though. Same for Thiel Fellowship: Not much $ either. You need a lot more than being offered by these incubators, which is a pittance. Back in the '90s it was easier to get decent funding, plus costs were way lower even adjusted for inflation. Now it's huge competition for bread crumbs, plus huge expenses.
On Reddit investing and 'FIRE' subs, way more young and middle-aged people getting rich (as in 7-8 figures) with lucrative white collar jobs or being early in a start-up, plus investing in stock market and real estate, than creating actual companies.
You can do well in computer science classes without ever really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a degree in computer science from a top university and still not be any good at programming. That's why tech companies all make you take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you went to university or how well you did there. They know grades and exam results prove nothing.
Yeah, theoretical computer science is not the same as coding. The guys who did theoretical AI work seem to do okay though.
Would Gates have made it if Mum wasn’t on the board of IBM? Would Bezos have made it without 200k from mum&dad ?
Isn’t this also mostly inherited: do most get into the good universities because of their grades or their connections? Can most get good grades without an “inherited” support system?
https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-2023...
https://fortune.com/europe/2023/11/30/billionaire-heirs-over...
If I look here, top 20 are 17 founders and 3 heirs (2 Waltons - Walmart, and one Bettencourt - L’Oreal)
Arnault whose father owned Ferret-Savinel is not an heir.
Gates father was a prominent lawyer, his mother was an heiress who was on a board with the chairman of IBM.
Even looking at those who are not classified as heirs - Zuckerberg's high school currently costs over $50,000 a year. Buffett's father was a congressman and his family owned grocery stores. Not billionaires, but people with more wealth and connections then even our minority of upper middle class people.
I would imagine dreaming big is pretty good for children.
A big reason for why I'm optimistic in life is because I have hope for achieving something. I truly can't imagine a life where my father/mother would only hammer in the fact that I am just an average joe and should stick to climbing the corporate ladder. Such an uninspiring take, this one. Depressing.
That is depressing! But also not what the parent comment said -- you seem to have accidentally taken a much more severe meaning from that comment (than I did, at least).
The top-level comment is just talking about being pragmatic. It's hard to walk the line between having idealistic visions and knowing that most of them won't pan out, and probably harder still to teach walking that line to your kids. I think that's what the comment was talking about -- not advocating for falling entirely on the latter side of that line -- which, as you say, would be super depressing!
I would rather have my children dream of becoming astronauts than becoming the next Steve Jobs.
It might interest you to know what I was employee #2 at amzn.
It can be a lot more depressing to learn you are a loser well into your adulthood, after a long time of thinking very highly of yourself.
But like you said, this is peak SV. Luckily there is a whole world outside of SV where the rest of us operate :)
I’ve founded failed startups. I don’t regret a single one of them. I’ve worked at failed startups and big companies and I learned more and had more fun at the startups than I ever did at a big company.
The point is, if you try to found a company, you don’t have to make a billion dollars to consider it a success. In terms of personal growth it’s easily the equal of any big company job.
You'll get FAR MORE practical and useful knowledge doing it yourself, and being exposed to other businesses.
Most of what you'd get from college can be had reading a handful of well-written books on the subject.
Sure, they aren't all mega behemoth tech companies, but what of it? Setting your ambitions high when you're young is still worth it. It can be a major difference maker in motivating you to learn the skills necessary to build a successful business, and it turns out that those same skills are helpful for landing good jobs, too.
Most of the people I know who are doing well now dreamed relatively big when they were young. And many of the people I know who stress about making ends meet never had anyone telling them to aim high when they were young.
If you believe you can, you might try, and you might make it. If you believe you can't, it's madness to true, so you won't try, and you won't make it. These are basic building blocks of motivation and success.
Your pessimistic message could be applied to anything. Why try to build the next Google? It's impossible! Why try to build a smaller business? The odds are against you! Why try to get a high-paying job? Most people work average jobs! Why go for an average job? You're competing with the vast majority of the country! Why get a less-than-average job? It's so stressful and barely worth it.
The statistics are pretty clear that you almost certainly will not.
So by all means give it a shot if you can do so without screwing your chance at whatever you'll do if/when it fails.
People deserve dignity and meaning no matter what work they do. This should not be reserved to the folks who manage to start unicorns (let alone Googles).
- Get good at tech - Build projects that you want - Get good grades and into the best university you can
I really hope my kid does that. I tried incredibly hard at projects I loved. That built me untold skills. Who cares if they start Google, or fail and get a job or get aquihired, they’ll be fine. They’ll know what their boss wants. They won’t just sit and bitch about parking. And at the back of their minds they might remember that this isn’t the only way to live so maybe they’ll be braver than they would otherwise.
If one is trying to recruit future Sergeys Larrys, then it’s prudent to write to a very narrow audience.
This article addresses that audience perfectly well, imho.
> The absolute worst of SV thinking, personified.
… or maybe the best.
This is not “general life advice from pg”. It’s highly targeted and narrow.
That’s ok. That needs to be ok. It’s one of those things that makes SV unique and uniquely strong, imho.
Edited to add the following:
The advice goes from broad (you don’t have to get a job, you can start your own company) to very specific (how to start a hypergrowth startup), with lots of other (good, imho) advice in between.
This will resonate with some folks in the (ostensibly high school) audience, many of whom may be unfamiliar with startups, the startup world, and maybe even the tech world in general. It will fall on deaf ears for most of the rest, because that’s not the life or lifestyle they are looking for.
From a psychological standpoint not aiming high would have been a bigger miss to the person taking the shot. They clearly chose risk no matter how they sulk afterwards.
The ratio of posts about "work-purpose porn" for employee bees and pipe dream madness for misfits is never going to satisfy everyone on HN.
Maybe a big part of the founders' skill is to actually hire the right management which in turn is capable of hiring the right employees. In which case, the credit goes to the founders after all.
Or maybe the quality of employees does not vary that much (after controlling for the the obvious factors like location / funding / business area). In which case, the company's success is explained by something else. Again, founders' skill? Or maybe something else?
I tend to think that it's a combination of founders' skill and being lucky to start the right business at the right time. I'd understand if others put greater weight on the founders or greater weight on luck.
And even if you fail to become Google, you might still make a living. Some people would gladly make a modest income doing something they love, with the possibility of making more, rather than working for someone else making three times as much but doing something they hate.
As for what good comes of it, just think about it. Where do new companies come from? Should we have no more of them? What would happen then?
In SV, if you’re a founder then it’s medium-risk, high-reward. You’ll be propped up by investor funding, have acquihire>exec as escape route, and in the slim chance of actual success you’ll range from rich to mega-rich.
For non-founders (employees) it’s high-risk medium-reward. An acquihire will make you a rank-and-file employee, and if the startup is a true success you might still only bag a moderate sum, thanks to your tiny sub-percent of equity. Only huge IPOs bring wealth to non-founders.
I think it probably has a lot to do with the US being the number 1 economy in the world so yes, it does appear to have society-wide benefits. Does it have personal benefits? I think this is probably more controversial. I suspect some people push themselves too hard and would have been happier otherwise, whereas others do indeed benefit from this advice. I suspect that the users of HN probably fall in the latter category.
Being "the number 1 economy in the world" (Actually kind of debatable by some metrics, but that's beside the point) is a measure of the power of the few that hold it, not the general living conditions of the populace. "Society-wide benefits" being the same as having the richest aggregate economy is to say the least pretty dubious
I also want to point out it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that most founders come from well off backgrounds. Their parents can essentially foot the bills while they're getting things off the ground combined w/ the natural access to capital growing up in wealthy circles provides.
Currently Michigan's idea of business development is to write big checks to folks who promise thousands of jobs.
Yet when the automobile industry got started in Michigan no one wrote them any government checks yet it became our largest industry. We can do much better and more startups is the answer.
> You can't know whether it will turn into a company worth billions or one that goes out of business. So when I say I'm going to tell you how to start Google, I mean I'm going to tell you how to get to the point where you can start a company that has as much chance of being Google as Google had of being Google.
People seem to think that Google is some sort of existence proof that there's a non-zero chance (and perhaps even quite a good one) of starting a company with this level of success.
And they are correct.
However, this is not the same probability at all as the chance that your company will turn out like that.
Depends on the size of company. A small company maybe is more probable than being a top athlete.
Yes, VCs flourish by it.
However, packaging it under a "being a mere employee is lame" mantra... Is lame!
But I'm curious. Why do you think that doing something which is maybe not study related is a bad idea?
("Maybe not" because ie. john Mayer is both a rockstar and a Berkelee grad)
Because 99.999% of those kids won't go on to start the next Google and make more money for PG's investments.
When I was at school there were a few kids who were genuinely moderately good at football/soccer. With only minor encouragement from PE staff and family they essentially had the attitude of "I don't need to study, I am going to be a professional footballer." (who by the way make huge huge huge sums of money if you are at the very top)
And how many of those went on to to be top-flight professional footballers do you think? Yep - zero. What are they doing now considering they crashed out of out of school with no qualifications, no professional sports career, and barely able to even do basic literacy and arithmetic etc? Low skilled and relatively dead-end jobs like gardeners, working on building sites, security guards etc.
They threw away their chance to study and gain skills because irresponsible and self-interested adults told them they should abandon school and concentrate on this dream of fame and fortune with essentially zero chance of it coming true. You're fucking with people's lives by doing this - don't tell people you don't need to try hard and study and learn, you just need to become a billionaire business owner!
Your guidance counsellor told hundreds of kids the same thing, and it was good advice for basically all of them. For every guy who made it rich with some crazy risky stock trade, there's hundreds of guys who lost everything. For every business that was about to go under but managed to pull through, there's hundreds that were in the same position and failed. The attitude of following in the footsteps of the lucky few just seems like it's teaching kids to double down on failure.
Everyone can spot the issue when someone is wasting their money in a casino, thinking they're one more pull on the slot machine away from becoming rich. But for some reason it's encouraged when it's reframed as "following your dreams."
Since universities are publicly funded by taxpayers, their inventions should be thrown to the capitalist wolves who will compete to provide the best implementation of the idea to the consumers. If the corporations want to instead finance their own research centers, then they'd own all the patents outright - but it's cheaper to steal from the public.
Anyhoo, props to 1998 era web design. Sincerely.
> if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are...
> The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as the list of the most selective universities.
Is it at all possible that the people who are able to take a gamble on founding a startup rather than getting a job are also disproportionately drawn from the wealthy class that is also able to afford the privileges necessary to get their kids over the admissions humps needed to get into highly selective schools?
Because in spite of the suggestion that getting into these schools is a matter of ‘doing well in your classes’, Graham knows and acknowledges in his footnote that he knows full well that’s actually not what these schools are selecting for anyway:
> US admissions departments make applicants jump through a lot of arbitrary hoops that have little to do with their intellectual ability. But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of mere determination and resourcefulness.
‘Mere determination and resourcefulness’? Or the background, finances and support and time necessary to make the grade in terms of non academic achievements, volunteer work, experience, extracurriculars, etc?
But even if you get in through academics plus determination and resourcefulness… will you also have the resources to take a risk on turning a project into a startup?
This is cargo cultism. Yes, successful founders are disproportionately drawn from high end selective schools, because they are disproportionately drawn from the community of people who come from a background of privilege, and are academically bright. Such people naturally tend to end up at Stanford or MIT or wherever.
But getting in to Stanford or MIT doesn’t magically make you into a member of that privileged class.
"Education" nor "work" can be passed through generations. If I am a very gifted lawyer, this is not something I can pass on to my daughters or suns (but a castle or land can be). Yet you can employ your network and power to get your daughter or suns into "highly selective" universities. Where, once they are in, being smart (e.g being a gifted lawyer) matters less than "being in".
So, indeed, "cargo cultism" and privilege.
And, I would add, a problem and cause of why the startup world is so shortsighted, monoculture (non-diverse) and dogpiling on similar problems, yet ignoring others entirely. (disclaimer: I too, however, am the typical priviliged bearded white male that "does computers" since late eighties though)
People often get this the wrong way around. They believe you just need a good idea. No, you need social circles that can invest in your idea. Investment improves things over time.
Alan Kay talks about this. That the quality of the project is the quality of the funders.
You can have good ideas, but if you don't have access to funders, your good idea will not have the resources to become a great idea.
The essay (intentionally, no doubt) doesn't pick a side in this fight.
It's very clear on why you should go to the best university: not because it will make you the best founder, but to meet the best co-founders.
> And if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are. When Larry and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a real advantage for them.
It doesn't matter whether elite universities are meritocratic or terribly unfair: either way, they've been the source of very many successful companies over the last 30 years, and Paul Graham is betting on that continuing to be the case. (Unlike Peter Thiel, for example, who is telling kids to drop out).
My point is that his empirical evidence and continued willingness to bet on startups that emerge from that path does not justify his claim that that path is the open for everyone to take.
If you are among the stratum from whom startup founders and cofounders will most likely be drawn, then sure, 100%, these schools are a networking opportunity which will help you on that path. Great place to meet cofounders.
If you aren’t, going to these schools will not make you magically able to take the financial risks needed to become a founder; they might make you among the smartest people some founders know, and get you a gig working for one.
Gates, Jobs, Dell, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg are all dropouts.
That said, I think the biggest risk for ambitious young people reading this is black and white thinking about getting into the right school. Successful founders are relentlessly resourceful, so while it's a decent plan to target a top school, I believe that how you handle rejection and refocus your ambitions says more about your long-term entrepreneurial prospects than being accepted would have. Focus on what you can control, play to your strengths, and on balance you'll get better outcomes.
> ‘Mere determination and resourcefulness’
... is actually really a test of class position. Your motivation to pursue and pass those artificial goalposts is in most cases going to be directly co-related to the values and expectations that the people who surround you have. Mommy and daddy and their friends at the country club expect it.
CS education is good all over the place, not just Stanford or MIT. And CS education pulled out of books and through self-reading is also great. But knowing that said person went to Stanford is a signifier to the VCs that said person is acculturated into the class and culture of capitalist administration.
More mind boggling is seeing them admitting to the "cargo cultism" (which I'd just call "class bias") instead of the usual ideological cover of entrepreneurialism and the "American dream."
The more I try to plug myself in, the more it seems like starting a company at this age is borderline schizophrenic delusion.
Saying that, I would like to see the advice for higher age ranges as I have a feeling more successful startups tend to be around there.
Looking back, when I was the age in the article I was way too insecure and nervous to be able to take this advice. Looking at it now I think it is great and want to set my children up with that way of thinking.
I am 34 and found the message inspiring.
Did not expect this tbh. So many people here worried about the future of programming but PG believes we're safe! Alas, something positive!
1. 15-25 year olds who do programming passion projects are often attracted to video games. Video game companies are not "startups" in the sense pg means here. You will not get rich by indulging a passion for the entertainment industry.
2. You do in fact need capital to do a startup, and there is a lot more to getting that than just having cofounders and something you're interested in.
3. "What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want." This isn't really true, is it. I thought there is another pg/ycombinator essay somewhere that warns people away from specific types of startup pitches, and one of them is something like "an app that tells you about events in your local community". Supposedly this is one of those things that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to work on, but which never turns into a successful startup.
There are actually a lot of things that your friends might want which are not startup material anywhere except Sand Hill Road, mostly because there are lots of things people want but won't pay for. A sad example of this is developer tools. If you take pg's advice literally and learn programming, hang out with other people who do that and then do projects with them, soon you will see lots of sticky doors that look like missing bits of infrastructure. Unfortunately startups that do dev tooling aren't a good way to get rich. Developers generally don't or can't buy things, so you have to sell to their CTOs and thus all the money accumulates in companies like Amazon or Microsoft. Example of what happens if you try, even with great PMF: Docker.
Most kids with ideas in the world don't have the contacts or work visas to raise money from US VC firms. They need a project that people will pay money for immediately. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the size of the US VC ecosystem is that if someone comes up with a good idea that takes off and they try to grow like a normal company, and they aren't taking VC money, then they will be immediately outcompeted by someone who does, simply because whoever does have that access will engage in market dumping until there's nobody else left except other VC funded startups. One of the US funded companies will end up taking the entire market even if they are burning money with no hope of ever balancing the books, but that's OK because one of the VC's other investments can always be persuaded to give a clean exit.
Example: DailyMotion (European) vs YouTube (US). At the time YouTube was bought they didn't have a hope in hell of ever being a standalone business and didn't even care to try, but they were down the road from Google and were scaring Larry/Sergey/Eric with their success. Buying a company if you can just jump in your car to go visit them is easy, if you need to constantly do trans-Atlantic flights, not so easy. It doesn't make sense to bet on the "grow like crazy and wait for an exit" strategy elsewhere. WhatsApp is another example of an MTV based company that had no strategy beyond grow-and-exit. I actually made a WhatsApp-like app a few years before the smartphone revolution hit, and my friends thought it was awesome, but I had no illusions that it could ever be a business. And indeed none of these messenger apps ever have been. In the world of "startups" (vs small businesses), you don't necessarily need to care.
There is imo so much wrong with PG's post, but as an European the whole proximity to tech thing feels very real. I remember seeing a talk by Craig Frederhigi where he also made fun of the fact that at least 50% of his success came from just being present in Silicon Valley / Cupertino at the right time.
Apple, Patagonia (and its predecessors), WhatsApp (pre-FB), Trader Joe’s (pre acquisition), Yahoo! (pre-‘99) are some that come to mind for me. Any others?
If you want to play the “next Google” game, get ready to be disappointed by Lady Luck.
* Have a rich family to get you into an elite university and to give you the financial independence to start a startup
* Be lucky. Only ~1% of all startups succeed.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-...
(I don't know how truthful these articles are, but found them interesting to read.)
99.99% of people who read this article are not going to start the next Google. Being a successful entrepreneur requires an incredible amount of luck, timing, skill, and risk taking.
If you choose that path, great, but that in no way devalues the skill building, network building, and predictable income of working for someone else.
I also disagree about the incredible qualities entrepreneurs need and hardships they have to endure. Many incredible businesses are just good product + good distribution. Many kids think starting a startup is practically impossible, and pg correctly points out that it isn’t.
Paul's leaving a significant fraction of the intended audience on the table here IMO: teens who are resistant to being told what to do and how to do it. :)
Starting is trivial. Succeeding is in fact practically impossible.
All the money and power in the world keeps consolidating upwards with the people closer to the apex of the pyramid deluding others that consistent climbing will help others reach there.
A tale as old as time, but due to exponential growth of tech playing out much faster.
There are certain people that deeply desire this and that understand their chances of success are low. Nevertheless, these people want to try and find encouragement in these types of essays.
You don't need to be upset that this isn't for you. There are all sorts of shapes of people in the world. We benefit by having curious people at all strata of society, exploring various sorts of ideas and problems. It keeps us from deadlock.
The person you're responding to does not seem upset to me.
You add an interesting perspective that some people want to find encouragement in these types of essays. And the personal jab just isn't necessary.
Kinda, but this skips over the whole Facemash thing https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creat...
Facebook was actually based on something he was hired by Winklevoss to create, and he decided to keep it for himself instead of delivering it. That's the "naughtiness" that YC seeks out in its Founder application process.
Note, by the way, in the recent "cancellation" of President Gay, the false claim that behavior like this would get a Harvard student expelled (although Zuck did end up "expelling" himself.)
> The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as the list of the most selective universities.
In that sense, I do strongly agree with the overall conclusion, "That's it, just two things, build stuff and do well in school." Building stuff for your own edification, and soaking up as much knowledge and relationships while you're in school, is really sound advice that works regardless of your end goal.
A family friend was recently admitted to a magnet school - it's not like an Ivy League level institution, but it's fairly prestigious in the area, and not easy to get to. I need to make sure to remind him that while it's good that he's feeling academically challenged, he should also focus on building friendships with people who are statistically likely (much as he is, tbh) to be successful in life - they can help pull him up when he's down, and he can do the same for them.
I didn't get that much out of college, academically - but the relationships I built there got me my first two jobs, and I still treasure the friends I made there.
You only get rich by starting your own company if you win the startup lottery. Otherwise you're better off getting a high paid job.
Take the old comparison between Gates and Jordan. "If Jordan saves 100% of his income for the next 450 years, he'll still have less than Bill Gates has today."
You can become wealthy and comfortable working for a salary. But, the canonical way to get "FU money" is to win the lottery.
PG's definition of rich is probably 100x what yours is.
"strongest" is highly subjective. I also don't think we should make things up and pretend the other person said them, which is much more commonly used to strawman, but steelmanning involves the same process.
Interesting comment; seems at odds with what a lot of others seem to think at the moment. But time will tell. I suspect he’s right.
So Leetcode is actually a good way to hire?
Is this the guy that a lot of HNers look up to?
Matt Levine, as usual, has a great take on the phases of life of a partner/founder of a hedge fund (which a VC fund basically is), and PG is deep in phase 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-07/bridge...
I will say that unlike GPT-4 he is an objectively good writer (ie has very good style) most of the time, so the essays tend to be somewhat entertaining to read.
Opinions may differ but to me this sounds really pathetic. "[B]lathering about literature." Maybe he is addressing a room full of social outcasts.
Yes, there is so much money that has flowed through Google, it's truly astounding, but nevertheless, beyond fortuitous circumstances, this has only persisted because of dissemination of online ads and anti-competitive conduct. Is there is any kid who is thinking, "My dream is to put ads on every screen and collect more data about peoples' lives that has ever before been collected. Settle all the lawsuits against us for violating peoples' privacy, pay off all the regulators, fire people by the thousands, let harassment run rampant amongst our managers, and destroy eveidence so the government cannot catch us breaking the law." All they see is the money and hype and, during ZIRP, lack of comparable alternatives in terms of opportunity and compensation.
Silicon Valley VC telling kids that learning how to program is more important than getting an education, advising them to go to university not for the education but to find "cofounders" and employees. Hard to rationalise how this would be healthy advice for anyone.
This is literally true, but it's disingenuous. Not every job has a boss telling you what to do. Many jobs hire people for their expertise and pay them to solve problems for them, and in these kinds of jobs the employee collaborates with her boss on deciding what kinds of problems you will work on. Of course, it will only be enjoyable if the company's problems are aligned with the employee's interests.
If you are a technical expert with the kind of ability and acumen needed to run a successful start up, I would argue that it is at least as easy to find a company whose problems are aligned with your interests as to find investors who will truly let you pursue your own interests with their money.
"Making it" as a startup founder should be seen in the same class of success as making it as a rock star or an actor. There are lots of aspirants and hardly any of them succeed. Even though some manage to become wildly wealthy, the prior expected payoff is negative.
And that's a huge if. PG's view of regular jobs might be colored by his own experience (working for Yahoo after they bought Viaweb--of course it's going to jar when the thing you built is now owned by someone else that you now have to work for), but it's still the case that even the best case regular job (and of course most regular jobs aren't the best case) is going to give you significantly less autonomy than owning your own company--because you don't make the final business decisions for a company you don't own. If you're the type of person that's going to jar (and I suspect PG is that type of person), you're not going to like even the best case regular job.
> "Making it" as a startup founder should be seen in the same class of success as making it as a rock star or an actor. There are lots of aspirants and hardly any of them succeed. Even though some manage to become wildly wealthy, the prior expected payoff is negative.
This is probably true if you take VC funding, since VC outcomes are basically bimodal: either "huge win" or "tank". I'm not sure all startups actually need to take VC funding, however.
The challenge with programming as a career now is that most of the solely technical problems have been solved. If you're looking for the YC playbook, start a SaaS that solves a specific problem that people will pay you for, those niches have been very carefully picked over for the last 15 years, and there are few that are very profitable remaining.
Most of the big remaining problems are ones of incentives - they are cases where a whole system is fractally fucked up, with lots of human actors all doing what is individually best for themselves but with a sum result that is a net negative for humanity. If you study the housing crisis, for example, you end up with municipalities that need ever-rising housing prices and ever-restricting supply to balance their budgets; residents who depend on their rising home prices to fund their retirement; developers who need to work within the local regulations that are explicitly designed to make their lives difficult; and young people who can't move out because a second mortgage that requires their parents' ever-increasing home equity was used to fund their college education. Finding a better way to build houses doesn't help here; you need to work around all the people who actively don't want you to find a better way to build houses.
There is room for software here, but often in subtle and what seems "evil" ways. Your problem is other people; software is useful to the extent that it lets you work around other people. Technical skills are table stakes for this, but understanding people and their incentives is critical for this work.
To maximise their chances of success, Paul suggests:
1. Become a builder: Gain expertise in technology or other fields you're passionate about. (Does not have to just be coding, either!)
2. Start personal projects: Build things you and your friends find useful. Paul suggests this is the fastest way to learn and potentially discover startup ideas.
3. Collaborate: Work on projects with like-minded people. This fosters skill development and could lead to finding potential cofounders.
I liked how Paul also emphasises the importance of good grades in order to access top universities, where you'll find other bright collaborators.
There are obviously many other paths, but if I wish I had this advice at 14 or 15.
I don't disagree with Paul's choice to focus on entrepreneurship and getting rich here. If you're looking to excite people, tell an exciting story. Captivate imagination. No one gets pumped up (especially at that age) at the mediocre story.
What I find great about his advice is that it is by no means limited to entrepreneurship. Working on passion projects, doing well in school, and learning how to build relationships is valuable even if you're working for someone else.
There's a big space in tech jobs between the "grinding away at code/help desk" and "startup bro" that I feel doesn't get described enough. And that's one thing I'd tack on to Paul's advice, notwithstanding the need to sell the message above. That advice he espouses can also lead to being a really standout contributor at a tech firm, and probably with a higher rate of success than getting a startup to stick. One doesn't have to form a startup to contribute ideas, and there's good money to be made in that space.
I think your choice of wording above is important to call out: The advice "maximizes" the chance of success; but it doesn't guarantee it.
Overall, completely agreed. =)
This is a great observation!
I agree that Paul is framing an inspiring narrative, especially when targeting younger people. You're spot on, suggesting that this advice sets people up for success in general, whether they become entrepreneurs, standout employees, or something else entirely.
We need more narratives about those successful 'in-between' tech roles.
Paul's giving the ingredients for good outcomes, but the recipe is up to the individual.
I've started one of the "small rich" businesses before, and made a few millions out of it when I was too young. Those millions enabled me to make certain bets that, though risky, would still have a huge upside. That huge upside allowed me to make very good money, the kind of "rich" that PG actually means, without the risk that comes with starting up a business that your VCs want to push to unicorn status. That's basically what most sensible rich folks in America have done, even the ones that you celebrate in your comment. And yet they'll all send their kids to Harvard and Stanford to attend MBAs and grad school because they don't want to put their kid's futures to the whims of a lottery.
"Making your first million is the hardest, so start with a second million." - Arnold Schwarzenegger
There's another comment here that links to staticstics regarding this topic here somewhere
I’m curious, what are you referring to?
If only people tried for real.
In my experience people most likely to write this are trust fund babies who neglect to mention they're getting essentially a stipend from their parents to take care of all their life necessities, so they can "try for real". Whatever that means.
20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but today I don't.
On that point, I'll agree with you. 20 years ago I would have said you're flat out wrong, but today, I'd say you have a valid point in that too many people give up after the first few failures (or never even try enough to get to a failure point)
Bezos was already the youngest Senior Vice President at DE Shaw before he started Amazon, so he wouldn't have any problem finding other investors. His mom had Bezos as a teenager, and his adoptive dad was a young Cuban refugee. His grandfather was rich though.
That’s a fair point to make in the abstract, but it’s absolutely, breath-takingly extraordinary to turn moderately well-off parents into a top-twenty global wealth position. I went to high school and university with many people considerably more privileged than either of those, and the challenge is generally in not mismanaging the assets too poorly so there’s enough to pass on to the next generation.
It's impossible to draw any firm conclusions from those lists because they aren't representative samples of wealthy people. They're a sample of wealthy people with public assets, and of course that's going to skew heavily towards people who founded large publically traded companies who live in countries with high degrees of financial transparency.
I was replying to this. I don’t find this “offensive”, I find it misleading and untrue. Maybe some tiny percentage of people will prefer sitting at home watching YouTube videos to the experience of attending a top college. For everyone else, the university is a better choice, not least because you’ll build a better network.
Not everyone wants to sit at home alone and watch videos. I’m not sure why that is difficult to understand.
It's all but universally acknowledged that technology represents the highest-leverage tool in the arsenal of getting things done in a leveraged way and this includes learning difficult topics in a time-efficient way.
The best universities (in the modern sense of the word) face and pretty much always faced a stark tradeoff between a faculty that were exceptional regarding novel research, and faculty that were chosen on the basis of educational outcomes, there's even a term for it: "teaching professor". Excellent researchers at the cutting edge of their field are only competent educators by coincidence, they're at a minimum different competencies, and arguably pull in opposite or at least different directions. Many of the best academic researchers in the world teach in some country where they learned the language they teach in late in life: every undergraduate in STEM has professors they struggle to even understand via verbal communication (people that smart can generally master written communication in another language far more easily than verbal communication).
There are better lectures (even restricting the field to e.g. MIT OCW) online and social interaction in a lecture is, with a few exceptions, disruptive and frowned upon. And even if someone wants to listen to a university lecture in person, universities generally have a formal or informal mechanism for non-students to attend them without any acceptance criteria or a staggering bill at the end.
The networking that happens at a top school is difficult to the point of being nearly impossible to achieve any other way.
I'm only interested in having this conversation if you're willing to address those points individually rather than as an atomic unit: they are not an atomic unit.
This isn't an argument. Not everyone wants to stare at a computer for 15 hours a day. Maybe you do. Some people prefer in-person interaction and discussion, others don't.
Yes, in 1-to-1 comparisons, a YouTube video about a topic may be better than a university lecture in which you are mute and can't interact with the professor. But university isn't just mutely watching less qualified professors give lectures. Lectures are but a small part of the entire university experience, which also includes: learning how to work with others, discussion groups, office hours with the professor, managing your time to complete tasks, building social skills, dating, on and on. It's a complete package. The key element is that you are immersed in this environment and interact with the community of people around you. A university is not merely a place that stores information. When you attend a quality university, all of these things are a part of the learning experience. They are not separate.
To use myself as an example: I have a degree in philosophy from one of the higher-ranking programs in the world. The Internet and YouTube are full of lectures and podcasts and free books about philosophy. And yet – none of them comes even close to the experience of sitting in a room for 3 hours intensely discussing metaphysics, or logic, or Kant, or another complex philosophical topic with a small group of other students and professors. That doesn't happen on the Internet and no amount of innovative video formats is going to change it. When you directly interact with another human being face-to-face and discuss/critique ideas, (in my experience) you learn much better than just watching videos. There is a huge difference between someone that has merely read a lot of books on a topic, and someone that has been through a rigorous discussion and critique with qualified interlocutors.
Finally, on the networking element: if you look at most of the actual top performers in the tech industry, they all have one thing in common: they know each other. Learning how to interact with people – and not merely acquiring information – is a key element of actually being successful. And that's still learning. It's not some nebulous hand-wavy thing that you can brush away. Building the next Google, which is what the original essay was about, necessarily requires you to build and navigate complex human social structures. It's not something you can just watch in a video. Merely having information in your head isn't actually that useful if your goal is build a company.
I read all his essays long ago, when I was young, and it sounded persuading to me. I think it even influenced me here and there. Now, somewhat a decade or two later, I take it with a grain of salt, and don’t get it as it is. Some things are just quite manipulative. I can read them as someone’s point of view, but not as someone I would even listen to, not to say follow the advice. I know much better for myself and what’s around me.
E.g. a man like me would never go to a VC, it’s a waste of my time and energy, and I can easily earn all the money I need to run my idea till the production. Why would I want anyone like him, to give me money and help grow my idea infinitely? People like him are interested in Unicorns, that’s how he multiplies his money, that’s how the system works. People like me are interested in steady, reliable businesses that actually deliver.
Personally, I’m very disappointed with most of the unicorns I used before. They’re non-existent to me. Hence, I wouldn’t listen to people who follow the Unicorns. I think that’s why we don’t have any advice for a higher age.
This is an area where I think this quote applies.
Don't reach Google status and build the next $1T company? Okay, maybe you'll make a unicorn. Don't make a unicorn? Maybe you'll start a $100M company. Or a $10M company. Or a $1M company. Or hell, a $100k company is a hell of an achievement.
And if you fail to do that? Well congratulations, you're eminently employable. Because on your way to "failure," you likely taught yourself a lot about code/tech, work either, managing people, raising money, marketing, and business, to say nothing of the professional contacts you made along the way.
I haven't met founders who feel that by starting and failing companies they have "screwed their chance" at something, at least not in a professional capacity.
One caveat (and it's a big one) is people going all in* on startups in their 20s, neglecting their health and relationships.
YC in that sense is a full “all guns blazing” thing. It’s generally younger folks who don’t mind eating ramen and don’t have to take care of a large family, and hence are more likely to go into a startup full time. Combine these two and I think you see what I mean.
Btw this isn’t a new criticism of YC/VCs, it’s something that’s been around for a while.
I don't think we're reading this the same.
To quote OP,
>> I was distracted by the generally smug tone of it.
The definition of "smug":
> smug /sməɡ/ adjective. having or showing an excessive pride in oneself or one's achievements.
> contentedly confident of one's ability, superiority, or correctness; complacent.
This is why I responded. If you don't like the tone of the article, you don't need to suggest that the author has a superiority complex.
> And the personal jab just isn't necessary.
"smug" is a personal jab. I didn't make one.
There's a big difference between a casino and actively throwing yourself at problem gradients, learning, adapting.
(I would not even be surprised if some of the survivors did precisely that -- copy behavior of their successful parents, or try to prove their worth in terms of money, lacking other means to receive confirmation.)
And it doesn't preclude you from going and getting paid too much at a big tech co afterwards if it doesn't work. This field has been so lucrative recently that you can generally afford to not be earning at peak potential for a bit, so why not roam free for at least a bit, and let your interest take you where it will, rather than doing something you describe as a grind, just to earn the privilege to go sit in meetings for most of the day and count the years till you can afford retirement?
Yes most people would rather not work to support those addictions I mentioned. But that’s what most people have to do.
Obviously it's not right for everyone, nothing is. But it's right for more people than the number who do it, and it's worth letting the others know it's an option. A similar talk by PG at my university is why I realized that this was a realistic option, and I'm incredibly grateful he gave it.
> But you will avoid many of the annoying things
> that come with a job, including a boss telling
> you what to do.
First, you've elided the unambiguous context of the OP's essay and my response to it: I said it's dangerous for people who miss getting into and through an elite university education without burdensome and difficult-to-discharge debt to go for broke anyways: the typical outcome there is the typical outcome of modern university education in general, which is a pile of debt for a mediocre education with a lift on employment outcomes asymptotically approaching zero and trivially not justifying the cost of the debt and the debt service, and a network of principally personal social utility. When the cheese at the end of the maze is "getting rich", that's a bad play.
Another important piece of context you've used as a wedge (because I didn't dissect his essay via cherry-picked quotes, assuming that everyone who cared had read it and internalized the broader context) is that pg is clearly addressing people who he hopes will become high-achieving technologists, at a point in life where the decision is around a STEM undergraduate education with large class sizes and and a decaying level of interaction with faculty or other eminent thinkers affiliated with the university.
This is nothing like a philosophy degree from an eminent university that involves freewheeling face-to-face interaction with some of the sharpest and most disruptive thinkers in a field, and furthermore in a field with very subjective measures on short time horizons about who has or has not made lasting contributions. We argue to this day about the philosophical and epistemological impact of work done millennia ago: right off the top of my head people debate whether or not Augustine was a key figure in the development of a modern sense of personal identity, and the debate about who was worth listening in these areas was very old then [1]. There is no evidence that's ever been presented to me that we can identify worthwhile contributions to philosophy on a time scale measured in years or even decades: people who devote their lives to such pursuits are optimizing for posterity, a very worthy thing to optimize for in my opinion but rarely one a person ever knows the outcome on in their lifetime.
Furthermore, the exact immersive scenario you're describing requires nothing like the nepotism, barriers to entry, or cost structure of a modern elite university: we've erected barriers around class dynamics, wealth dynamics, and admissions that had far better solutions with the cost structure of a coffee shop in recent history [2]. We've eradicated that institution intentionally or unintentionally in favor of something defense-procurement markup expensive, with admissions criteria constantly plagued by scandal and lawsuit [3] after scandal [4], which welcomes false positives on admissions when attached to wealth and power [5], and sees false negatives on groundbreaking contribution unambiguous in contribution [6] when not attached to wealth and power, at least until forced to by mathematical rigor.
And in your conclusion you've linked learning, broadly construed, with learning how to operate in circles where people face no consequences, continue to act unilaterally on behalf of the commons, and fuck up constantly [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] to put any question about their innate capability at anything other than learning how to work the socio-economic, professional, and academic class systems and maintain those distinctions by stepping on people who were both right and doing the right thing [11] via thuggery [12].
Almost all destructive forces with actual power [13] [14] [15] trace clear intellectual, academic, and philosophical origins to the work of academics or other noted intellectuals on the wrong side of history [16] [17] [18] [19].
So the question for you here isn't whether or not the world currently works they way you're describing, for the elite few it does. The question is what team you're playing for from a post of extremely influential privilege. Things aren't going well for the non-elites, and I don't think pg was trying to send 1-3% of his audience into a decaying elite subsidized by leading the other 97% to the slaughter in the form of useless degrees with mountains of debt. He's backed the wrong horse on a few things, but he's a fundamentally good guy.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/book/4734/chapter-abstract/14697047... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/claudine-g... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences [5] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10798.pdf [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management [8] https://www.npr.org/2008/10/24/96070766/greenspan-admits-fre... [10] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/22/tech/larry-summers-openai... [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born [12] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/warning/ [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism [14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism [15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture [16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx [17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman [18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand [19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
A typical founder, 10 years in, is less rich than he could have been if he had taken a high paid tech job.
But anyway, PG is saying the same thing he's been saying for years. He wants people to launch startups, and he wants them to shoot for the moon with VC money. He has no interest in bootstrapped companies. Because he's a VC, so he's talking in his own interest first and foremost.
I don’t think he’s being malicious. I think he genuinely just doesnt see a $5-10m NW as rich.
So what? Why be so terrified of failure? I think it's better if kids learn to be brave, and pick themselves up in life after they stumble. Living life in utter fear of failing at anything seems like a terrible way for your children to start off life. Besides for which few things are better learning experiences than trying to start your own company.
And who knows. They might even succeed beyond their wildest dreams, as some do.
It was that it is foolish to tell/teach/encourage people to expect that things like "start Google" have any reasonable likelihood of succeeding.
And it is even worse when that encourages people to fail to organize, vote, protest, push for better work and better working conditions for everybody who are not founders of unicorns.
You've lost me here. How does working at a startup make it any more difficult to do this than working at a bank or hospital? For that matter, would you discourage someone from pursuing basic research at a university or a doctorate degree because that doesn't directly advance a political agenda?
But I do not think most kids today, once adults, will be very happy with their parents if they just blindly support them in that dream, neglecting other realistic career possibilities in blind faith that their kid will be a star.
I'm not saying you should tell your kid 'no! you can't be, I won't let you.' - but like, maybe nudge them in the right direction, have them meet influencers and hear how hard the job actually can be, hear how lucky/unfair who becomes popular and successful can be - then if they are comfortable with and understand those risks, support them in any way possible after that.
Funny enough is successful people like pg themselves become essentially social media influencers after they’ve achieved things. Fame and following are the next pursuit after wealth.
> and keep a pulse on what the thing is they're focusing on
Can a janitor save enough money to rival Gates? No. Not even close.
But the same janitor could save enough money to have "FU money" later in life, and only continue working as a janitor if he chose to do so.
That is exceedingly doubtful
The average Janitor I salary in the United States is $34,623 as of February 26, 2024.
Average home price in the United States: $417,700.
Monthly payment for 30-year mortgage is $2,950.
Monthly gross pay is $34,623 / 12 = $2885.25...
Hm...it's literally not doable.
Sure the pay is lower, but the housing costs are substantially lower.
You were never not “safe”
I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too.
I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like how sucky accessing all kinds of “adulting” things are from aged care to dealing with myriad systems with kids schools or any other problems that have inevitably been chucked at you. Some of these “startups” might actually be lobbying/political work for the good that doesn’t make money, some might be startups.
Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor.
The older I get the less I want to build a startup and more I want to start a business. Something that takes a little bit of capital, lots of hard work, gets some customers and provides goods or services, without venture capital firms and 100x returns and everything that comes with that, just a standard business.
As a just-graduated poor student I was used to living on practically nothing. By 40 I had a mortgage, kids, wife etc. The penalty-for-failure at that age is substantial.
When I stopped getting a salary in my 20s my wife was earning so we just lived on her salary. That lasted a few years until the new business found its niche.
So, how to start a business later in life? Slowly and carefully. First do it as a side hustle. Night's and weekends. (Which is good to see if you still gave the energy for that.)
Price things "as if its full time". If you're selling ceramics on Saturdays figure out what your daily sales need to be and price accordingly. If you're teaching piano ditto.
Side hustles also let you experiment with marketing. See if the market will bear more than just a Saturday here or there.
When you can, take a paid vacation from your day job, and see how busy you are (and what income) from the eide hustle. Figure out if you enjoyed that more than the day job.
Save every penny from the dide hustle. You'll want at least 6 months of cash before you make the leap. 3 months to get income back up, 3 to look for a new job if it fails.
It's harder to start a new thing in your 40s. But it's also more likely to succeed, IF you plan and execute right.
All my attempts at starting a SaaS when I was younger were basically me building a cool thing and then yelling into the wind. I am looking for a more concrete market for my next venture, and it doesn't have to be cool or cutting edge.
It depends a lot on how you qualify and categorise founders, companies and "successful", but of course you can understand why it can be somewhat truthful: people in their 40s have had 2-3 decades to build up experience, networks and a track record, making it much easier to build a team and attract investors and initial customers. I'm sure almost all of these founders in their 40s have had at least some partial success in their past.
So it still affirms that it's best to start as young as possible, allowing time to experiment with ideas, markets, co-founders, etc. I've seen plenty of founders bounce from one-to-another-to-another startup from their 20s to their 40s, each one being vastly more successful than the last.
But as you point out there are still all kinds of opportunities to build new products to address needs that are overlooked by younger founders, so you should absolutely go for it if you're inspired.
I feel the same as you about being less interested in "unicorn"-scale success after 40; as you mature, have kids, experience illness in your family and become more observant of problems in different segments of society, you become much more focused on just providing well for your family and doing some good for the world than having to be some kind of all-conquering hero.
If you want to connect privately to talk more about what kind of company you want to build and how best to go about it, feel free to get in touch (email in bio).
There might be others, but this one is clear and to the point:
The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.
Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.
Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value. There's a reason why every shop which supports massive open source projects is running away from legacy licenses as fast as they can and that reason is Amazon.
If you don't care about developers from the user side of things it's just as bad. The GPL in the age of cloud services does as much to protect user freedom as the MIT license did in the 1990s.
The Oxide route is one of the better approaches for backend. "Apple" of enterprise OSS, but I think their ambitions are too small. Prefab containers full of seamless and modular amounts of each food groups: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, HDD, interconnect, and uplink all in and managed. Not rack-up but dirt-up and totally managed offering IAM, VMs, 12factor PAAS, serverless, volumes, and object storage with multitenancy, accounting, security, data lifecycle, config management, appropriate redundancy, and other cross-cutting concerns harmonized in a way that is necessarily managed but sufficiently customizable.
Frontend, the trick is standardizing on the least fragile tools that are widely used enough. Churn on tools and dependencies is a distraction and a time waster.
There’s lots of reasons a Google is impossible to start today (the main one being “Google exists, whatever the next explosive startup-to-giant is [0], it will look nothing like Google, and such things aren’t cookie-cutter, each is sui generis), but the explanation you offer above is… unconvincing as a bare conclusion, but maybe could be fleshed out with more description and support.
> Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value.
The two halves of this sentence are in tension, and the first seems more reasonable than the second.
> Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.
You don’t have to use a flavor-of-the-week JS framework in place of cgi-bin scripts. (And, in some ways, the lowest-friction backend options are lower friction to get up and running than cgi-bin scripts on a server you set up, because you’ve got things like “serverless” FaaS hosts.)
[0] OpenAI?
There is no need to follow the trend du jour, it is some fallacy that you're describing that somehow it's easier then than today when the technology is largely backwards compatible.
This is the nuts of it.
For meeting founders, find someone in the area you’re interested in and build stuff with them. Also consider using the YC founder network, but they may be too ambitious for you.
Lifestyle businesses are probably less dependent on cofounders for success.
You’ll need to work hard at your tech skills if they’ve atrophied. The good news is, this part is incredibly fun.
[Stair Step Method of Bootstrapping] https://robwalling.com/2015/03/26/the-stair-step-method-of-b...
[Podcast] https://startupsfortherestofus.com
[Book] https://saasplaybook.com
[YouTube] https://microconf.com/youtube
The link above links to the article I was going to post. Just adding the headline here, since it was missing.
Go big or go home, it’s no fun to chew bones.
As years that remain shrink, you have to pick and choose the battles you want to fight.
You can use that term as a proxy for delivering large impact to the world. It's approximately the same thing. If you do something like "aged care" and "dealing with kids schools" in a way that helps millions of people, you'll end up a billionaire whether you want to or not.
I don't use the term "unicorn" but I think keeping score in financial terms helps because that's how you know you've delivered something people want and at scale. If you remove money out of the equation it's easier to fool yourself thinking you're making some difference and you're not.
If I have a business that impacts millions of people, then every hour I spend on it, would have huge influence, and if I don't spend the hours on increasing that percentage, I'm also letting down millions of people.
I would suggest using your network and consider a path of least resistance such as building a side-business while working that either solves niche enterprise problems or makes enterprise capabilities more manageable for small businesses.
Starting a business is really easy. The bullshit that every business needs to do isn't particularly magical or mysterious. Don't get too invested in the bureaucratization process, but also be sure to implement what needs to happen just in time.
Find cofounders from your friends and coworkers, and go to startup events. Find people who you respect and who respect you, have integrity, and are the most fun. It's important to find people who don't turn into arrogant SOBs or raging sociopaths when large sums of money become involved. Honesty, awareness, navigating/prioritizing ambiguity, and conflict resolution skills are damn important.
Avoid external funding if at all possible unless it unblocks time-to-market that would otherwise miss market time or grow too slowly to survive. (Growing slower is often easier and more sustainable!)
Have sensible cost controls that are pennywise and poundwise.
If not changing the world or building a startup per se, focus on building a business that something people want. ;@] Expect it to take 20x longer, 50x more effort, and 4x more money than you think.
Also, I think 'Google' in this instance is more for motivation rather than a literal comparison. He's leaving out the part that Google was founded by graduate CS students a) looking for a thesis, b) into node-link graphs, and c) inspired by academic citation metrics. Would PG advise anyone to go to grad school to learn how to find scientific-discovery-based startup ideas these days?
2. Use Stanford bandwidth for your web crawler.
3. See how AltaVista does it; they're in downtown Palo Alto.
4. Get 100K from the guy who founded Sun.
5. Move into the space above the bike shop in Palo Alto. (9 major startups began there.)
6. Get more funding from the guy who founded Amazon.
7. Sell search ads.
8. Profit!
I agree with you, wanting to become “filthy rich” is abhorrent given all of the known implications that comes with. At the very least people should have some shame and keep that to themselves.
You get rich by offering a good or service that society desires.
You get filthy rich by capturing as much of the market as possible by whatever means necessary and killing off competition - including user lock-in, artificial bundling, using successful past products to subsidize non-profitable new ones just to screw competitors etc.
Google was a successful, unsustainable search engine before it was a successful business.
Facebook was a successful social network waay before it was a successful business.
Reddit was... You can see where I am going with this.
Anything that gets eyeballs will be paid for by ad placement. I think that's the "dirty" (open) "secret". Many industries are paid for by ads, not just tech companies. Though, tech companies have taken a huge chunk out of the entertainment industry as YouTubers, Instagrammers and TikTokkers (etc.) are now creating that entertaining content for the tech companies. All in an effort to capture eye balls.
And Hacker News is no different. Everyone who's on here long enough will slowly learn about Y Combinator. HN is an ad placement site for YC and YC affiliates. HN is much more than that of course, and that is why the ad placement works so well. Personally, I find the way HN is doing it tasteful. Moreover, it's not the only reason why HN exists, it's a synergy thing. With that said, there's still the same dynamic in there.
It's because ads pay, one way or another.
Still pivoting for monetisation is important.
People partially flocked to them (me included) because of their public stance on ads, and then they played me.
Without claiming things they did the opposite from, one can't help but wonder if they would have ever succeeded? And would that have made them a story to tell at all?
I don't mean that to even sound bitter or cynical, but it's just a fact if you look at most founders, even the ones that fail miserably.
There is always an excuse. The parents are professors, or upper middle class dentists, or your mom does charity for United Way and managed to become the leader of the charitable organization and managed to meet some exec from IBM. Given how diverse these professions are and that they basically describe a slightly upper middle class family, im gonna guess their children account for more than 1%.
I mean, it's not the worst thing he could do but it would be great if he at least acknowledged the privilege filter once in a while.
The happiest entrepreneurs I know got advanced degrees, had a solid career, developed plenty of contacts, then launched something in their 30s or 40s with substantially less risk than taking a punt on knowing what problems were worth solving while at University, or taking a punt on finding the right person to start a company with while at University, or taking a punt on having the wide range of skills required to actually make a company work without ever having any work experience.
This is the sort of hype that drew me in when I was younger and I think it's damaging. The real way to start Google is to be smart, hard working and incredibly lucky. IMHO the best way to start a company is to be smart, hard working and patient.
Not saying Larry Page and Sergey page aren't talented - clearly they were/are very talented people. But they were also extraordinarily lucky. To take another example, if Gary Kildall had been a slightly more ruthless businessman and IBM had had a little more foresight, Bill Gates would not be a billionaire.
The people who read here can read it for clarity and the chance that they can show this article to a smart nephew to inspire them. Like I just did.
And note that the chances of founders and companies that have passed and been anointed with money is below (how much? I don't know) companies that haven't even made it to that round (to be potentially winnowed out). And have spent time and perhaps family money.
Will point out that I benefit from all of this (let's call it 'pick axe' for short) but I would or could never with a straight face and conscience write or give the same advice to kids in high school. Shoot for the moon? Risky. Sure if you have family money to fall back on possibly take the chance.
Especially and in particular 'how to start google' (meaning something with huge potential).
Oh yeah back in olden times I started a company right out of college and did pretty well and sold it (with ZERO investor money).
Lastly the joke that existed back and forever was someone saying 'find a good lawyer' as if doing so is a matter of knowing you had to do it not the specifics of how to do it.
Before I get to the complaints though - am I the only one with the feeling there would be a huge market niche for a search engine that gave as useful results as Google did in its earlier days? It sometimes feels like half the results for non-tech-related searches these days lead to low-quality AI-generated SEO-optimised fake content.
> If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at programming.
We tried this with unemployed former coal miners in Appalachia. It turns out, the real secret sauce here is "be the kind of person who can get good at programming". I'm with Freddie deBoer here, as he says in his book The Cult of Smart: we need to accept that not everyone has the same intellectual abilities. Once we do that, we can start thinking about how we make a world that works for the half of the population below the median on this dimension.
> ... facebook ...
The other story I heard about Zuckerberg is that he got his first 1000 users by scraping everyone's profile picture off the university "facebooks", then making a page where you could rate the women as "hot" or "not". I feel like missing this part out gives a rather one-sided picture of the story - especially if there were any young women in the class that PG originally gave this talk to. That's a shame because PG makes a very different point in "Why it's safe for founders to be nice" [1].
> (US uni admissions are done badly)
I agree with footnote 3 that determination and resourcefulness are important, but you also need to be able to program and reason mathematically if you want to start the next google. There are a lot of incredibly determined and resourceful students on liberal-arts or law degrees who might go far in the world, but they're not the person you want as a _technical_ co-founder.
Another reason to play it slower is you can work and save for financial security beforehand, and you can build your network without going to MIT or Stanford. You’ll meet plenty of people working from all kinds of backgrounds. You’ll get to practice financial decision making. You’ll be a more well-rounded person who can empathize with different walks of life, (isn’t understanding people gospel in VC land?).
Even if they don’t make a startup, at least following the advice would make them more employable.
""" What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want. """
Nothing about friends, nothing about fun projects. Mainly just looking at Salesforce, knowing its the DB for business-side of the house, and that the UI/X of SFDC is not good, so here is a better UX (much appreciated).
I think it's more important to note how talks like this use "children" as an excuse to present a very sanitized version of the history being discussed. I think a massively underappreciated mechanism by which American culture distorts history is by its very lax and sometimes supportive norms about fudging the truth and sometimes even outright lying to children
Theres simply no way to get away with what Google, Facebook or Uber did today. You will not sneak your software into enterprise customers, you will not be able to skirt regulations.
Hell the big money pot of getting acquired may be dead too, e.g. Figma.
For most startups, you will fail. For the top 1% of companies you can hope to at best make a comfortable living at a multi-million dollar valuation. Only the .0001% will become a Google.
It's not about starting Koch Industries or Disney.
It's not about some ideal world where connections and funding don't matter.
It's about a kind of productive problem solving that creates value for other people by solving problems they just accept as friction in their lives.
It's insightful in focusing on how projects you love can end up helping others.
But it's a little misleading in that people are listening not because they are doing what they love, but because they want to be successful - ideally to take what they love and turn it into success - according to this plan.
Let's say each year 10,000 people would love to become professional football players, 500 make it to the NFL, and 5 become household names - success stories.
There's no real accounting for the time wasted by the 9,500 doing the extra required not out of enjoyment of the game but to become successful (leaving aside any actual costs like TBI). It's at least an exported cost. But it might have other downstream effects, making someone less confident in their judgement, less likely to engage in making a better world of whatever sort.
One of the Buddhist precepts is not to sell the wine of delusion (in some translations). But it's also soul-killing to tell someone how likely they are to fail; who says that at a wedding? What benefit is that?
Paul Graham made a success of helping others be successful. That's a really good model to consider: to do and teach and help. So I would take this as good teaching for teens.
This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.
Somewhere in this essay it needs to say “99% of you who try this will fail”.
All the examples he mentioned Google, himself and the Irish Stripe founders had to do the same for their startups.
Sadly in the UK all the current unicorn "startups" are a bit iffy: XTX (high frequency hedgefund), betfair (betting company), tripledot studios (Zynga like company).
Unfortunately mega success in startups doing soemthing innovative is non-existent in Europe and UK in particular. Mistral stands out to how exceptional it is to the rule, and the closest other one I can think of is BioNtech.
Sadly the highest expected route to fortune in the UK remains quant trading in finance. Including starting your own hedge fund.
You leave that to your customers and stock holders instead.
For every one of these giant trillion dollar companies, there are also thousands of companies that couldn't make it. Also, just by the distribution of it all, not every company can be a Google. Not trying to be pessimistic here; everyone should be able to try solving some problem as a project and have fun meanwhile. However, expecting a Google out of it could be a bit too demanding.
L&S were, and they hired other people who were. They didn't start with a business idea, but with a technical one. They filled in the blanks on the business side after they survived the .com crash.
I didn't get to Google until 2011, but it became clear to me after joining that in the past they had gone on a very nerdy mission to hire all the nerdy people and collect them into one place to do nerdy things.
(Unfortunately that nerdy thing ended up being selling ads really efficient, but that's another story.)
My fundamental point is that the Google story is very unlike the kind of stories that YCombinator or a16z like. It started, like you said, as a set of intellectual/technical interests. The other stuff, that VCs today like, came later.
In a way they did the opposite of the usual advice. They started with the hammer (the tech) rather than the nail (the business problem.) They certainly didn't start with a "Like X but for Y" statement like seems to be desired by VC today. And they didn't look like the typical .com story at the time (which was usually: give us lots of VC $$ so we can sell something on the web that is currently not sold on the web, but we'll just use the $$ to buy customers and make no profit...)
I would posit that if today's Google came to YCombinator today they'd be shown the "no thanks" door.
The irony is that both the thing and its side effects were anticipated very early on.
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ... It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
(The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998)
You bring up a good point about starting from the tech rather than the problem. Usually the advice from VCs is to start from the problem and iterate on the tech until you solve it. What was very fortunate for Google is that the tech translated into a great business problem. Open up any CS textbook and 'Search' is always a major section. It was also a great business because the problem is important, frequent, and had not been properly solved by the big players in the mid 90s.
"And then we realized that we had a querying tool..." (Page)
The purpose of VC can be viewed as trying to take a company from nonexistent to big while skipping the small stage, but small is where the action really is.
I wonder if we really shouldn't make a bit more out of the fact that there are different types of startups: those that pick off low-hanging fruit really well, those that combine novel technology with novel problems (for instance, the recent YC LLM meeting note-taking / transcription service), those that are scientific-discovery based (see, for example the NSF Small Business Innovation Research program), etc. I am not experienced enough to create an ontology of startup ideas, but I think it'd be an interesting exercise.
I disagree. The AI stuff seems pretty nerdy. Same for GitHub and other levels of abstraction. The disruption talk is just the branding by the media.
Building a successful company depends on many things. The point made here is that you are unlikely to be expert enough, and motivated enough to build a successful business in an area you are not interested in, and haven't played around in. So to increase the amount of domains that you could create a business in from 0 to a small positive integer you should build things that interest you.
Of course if you have money, or know how to persuade people who have money, you can be something of an idiot and still develop a successful business. Usually you are not really developing the business in this case, more attaching yourself to a business that smart people are running for you.
In a pool of high school freshmen, most probably have a better chance of success following the first path, than the second.
Isn’t “you shouldn’t focus on science to start a good tech company” a good indicator that our conception of “tech” company is completely broken? That we’re really talking about ways to milk money from gambling billionaires, not change the world with successful products?
Nope, ended up going to scientific-discovery-based-startup-ideas-R-us instead, by client demand.
Google had good timing but importantly, a good product and market fit. Prior search engines sucked in comparison with obnoxious monetization.
"Build a search engine so good all nerds on the early Internet abandon AltaVista and switch to it, no marketing required."?
which?
But, in all honesty, if you want to identify single factors that truly contributed to Google not just surviving but thriving, I'd point at Jeff Dean. When he joined, Google was unable to update its index due to the design of the indexer. Jeff (along with Sanjay, or as many of us know him, "The Wise One"), built seminal software that enabled google to grow rapidly - not just updating the index faster, but doing search quality on logs, early ad experiments, and more. Obviously, other people played critical roles (Silverstein, /proc/bogdan, SRE Lucas) but IMHO if they hadn't had Jeff and Sanjay, google would have died back in 97 or 98.
Not at scale. In the 1980s, Stanford's biggest IP revenue came from FM synthesis for musical instruments. In 1991, Stanford started up the Stanford Management Company to manage the endowment. Offices were on Sand Hill Road, out by the venture capitalists. That worked out very well. Enough so that SMC became the tail that wagged the dog. But that's a long story.
I spent 3 years trying to keep a startup afloat after graduating from college. Most of my peers own a (some of them multiple) house now. I have 75k in my savings.
It has taken about a decade of switching back and forth between consulting and working on the SaaS until I run out of money. Some consulting stints took a few months, others a few years, depending on our needs.
As I grew older, our needs and risk aversion in the family increased, so I just took on longer or more financially interesting consulting assignments, to grow a bigger buffer and allocate some extra assets.
I'm quite sure that, if I had just been consulting the last 15 years, I would already have been able to retire (owning more real estate and other assets).
However, my life would have been very different, and every single time I took on an ad interim assignment, I noticed the impact of my SaaS building experience was a big plus for my consulting assignments...
I'm not saying it's all rainbows & unicorns - building a SaaS is romanticized a lot, but IME it's an infinite game that requires a lot of grit, and as you grow you move the goal posts, so you're always in "hard" mode -, but I beg to differ that it has led to a more interesting life for me personally, as I tend to get bored quickly.
I have a few friends that built, sold, and could retire, but every single one of them has started building something new...
You need to love playing the game and be willing to sacrifice things, as the odds are typically against you.
To quote Simon Sinek "The only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself." [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/simonsinek/status/1433808001375277080?t=...
Reward requires effort, but effort does not guarantee reward.
It's a fact of life that we really should teach our kids instead of the nonsense that effort will be rewarded.
Or at least that's how I always read it in my head.
22-year-olds have a hard time selling to enterprises, 14-year-olds will find it impossible. Whereas if they build something cool that they and their friends love they will gain many of the skills that might be useful later on.
PG has made the point many times that the superpower 22-year-olds have is that they can live on ramen and work 16 hours a day. The superpower that 14-year-olds have is that (in many cases) they don't even need to find the $1,000 a month to survive.
And the fact that most people don't see a problem with a statement like this a _big_ problem.
- Work on a personal project that is motivating to you (obviously you won't work on it if it's not motivating to you)
- It's a good sign if the project you're motivated to work on solves a problem that you and your friends care a lot about, because there's a good chance many more people will also want that problem solved and will buy/use your product.
Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school.
And neither was Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page both hold masters degrees in Computer Science from Stanford.
We now have a single organization shaping the information access patterns of the people all over the world ostensibly paid by ads. Right.
He says you have to be interested in it, it should excite you, and it should be your own project.
That’s absolutely not at odds with solving a problem. In fact, there’s a good chance that people are interested in solving a problem, likely one that is painful to you.
Yes you need to be lucky to get super-rich as a founder too, but you have a lot more control, i.e., you make the primary decisions that determine whether the company will make good products that people will use/buy.
Back in the early y2ks, and late 90s, yes, you could get rich and be up and out if you were lucky and played your cards right. Those days are done.
There are tens of not hundreds of thousands of people who could retire comfortably after working at Google, Facebook, Apple, MSFT for a decade during their growth years. How many startup founders can do that?
Sure, becoming a billionaire is a different story but who cares?
Hell if you joined Facebook last year and got in when the stock was around 100, your initial equity grant just 5x.
Predicting which big tech company will do well enough in future to give you that big stock reward over time is a big gamble, but certainly a smaller gamble than doing a startup.
I know plenty of people who have joined half a dozen startups, none of which yielded any gain. And many entrepreneurs who worked super hard many times and have nothing to show for it but scar tissue.
Whatever you do, the best advice is to ensure you are enjoying the journey. Don’t waste your life just to be rich. That path nearly always yields a Pyrrhic victory.
It feels irresponsible to tell kids how they can build the next Google, without also telling them how likely it is they won't succeed at it.
Granted, most people in their early 20s have very little to lose, so a failed startup may not be much of a problem, outside of the stress and emotional effects.
To be clear, this was always true to some degree, but inequality is higher, industries have more power and thus workers have less, and safety nets that don't come from your parents being well-off are weaker (and fewer people's parents are well-off) than when I was a kid, and this has actually been true for a few subsequent generations of kids
Universities kind of double down on this equivalence in some ways, as they are the de facto credentialing system for the job market, although there's some evidence that this is for the first time in quite a while becoming less true in some sectors, it's still a huge part of the reality of how social mobility is gated.
So when Graham frames the role of "selective" universities in the success of various famous startups, he's totally right that they're excellent places to network. But his conception of their selectivity is pretty strange. It's pretty well-understood by now that a lot of mechanisms can get people into great schools via the wealth and influence of their parents rather than "smarts and determination". I once read someone who pointed out that bringing in a few "scholarship" kids who are less well off makes it seem like anyone could get in with the right grades and test scores, and the incentive is to have just enough of these to ambiguate who is there for what reasons. To launder the "wealthy, well-connected" with some "smart, determined" cred. It's telling therefore that he leaves out one of the most important parts of the networking value of universities: They're a great place to meet funders, and the top tier universities also have significant resources to facilitate student projects that may turn into companies, compared to other institutions
The author is British, for one.
That said, the US and Britain are both quite world-class at both endorsing lying to children and revisionist history are definitely among
Larry Page's original ambition was to digitize books and knowledge in the world [2].
> Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, the student project that eventually became Google—a “crawler” that would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against a user’s query—was actually conceived as part of an effort “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library.”
[1]: https://twitter.com/jam3scampbell/status/1608270969763729415
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...
To hear Larry tell it, his original idea for Google was to download the whole web and throw away everything but the links, and he was inspired by academic notions of citation indexes. It wasn’t specifically (or really at all, until Google books came out) about books - that sounds like a cover story to get grad student funding for his actual idea, because you can’t really go to a university and say “I want to download the whole web and throw away everything but the links” without telling them why or connecting it to some plausibly useful idea.
The acquisition offer is often cited, but I don’t think Larry and Sergey were ever really serious about taking it. They didn’t, after all. But if you’re living on a grad student stipend (which was like $20k in the 90s), a million bucks is a lot of money.
And they absolutely knew it would be big, they just didn’t know how it would be big. It was quite popular within the Stanford lab as well…it’s interesting, looking through the early CVS commits for Google, how much work was done by people who ended up not actually becoming employees of Google or having a major part in its story. I think the real genius of Google was treating the web as an object that could be studied and manipulated, and not as some amorphous thing you were part of. That was exciting even if people didn’t know how it would be.
His dad was a computer scientist and larry read a lot of AGI sci fi as a kid, so it's not really that hard to extrapolate 1980s technology to 2040s outcomes.
I don't know what point you are trying to make.
Googles mission was always to know everything for everyone.
Nobody can know such a thing -- especially turning around a billion-dollar business, a thing with a near-zero prior probability. It's more reasonable to say that Larry had the drive, the aptitude, and the resources to maximize his odds (which would still be low.)
Anyway ,we chatted about his latest company, which I can't find now. The idea was this: industrial facilities often return really noisy signals on the electrical supply lines, and the electrical company has to do a lot of work to clean it up (hey, I'm not an EE). Like, motors, etc, all severely distort the waveform. So his company made and I guess sold a product that you'd put at your electrical service panel that "cleaned up" the signal before it went back to the power company. In response, the company would give you cheaper power prices.
I was reminded of this when Larry Page met with Donald Trump early in the Trump administration and brought up one of his favorite plans- to rebuild the US electrical grid around DC distribution. He's truly made for another world.
I was the first graduating class from one of the first public high schools in the country with an IT magnet program.
I remember the program coordinator telling us and our parents in a big presentation that we could be making $70-80k out of high school. He was really selling it.
I was not making anywhere near that out of high school. =P
But I wasn't doing bad either. In fact, I'd had two jobs with tech companies before I even graduated. I had a job lined up in the engineering department of an OEM prior to receiving my high school diploma. That same administrator was always encouraging us, cheering us on with our various projects, helping where he could.
I never thought for a moment I'd been mislead that my salary wasn't that high or that I didn't make it "rich". Any kid who'd sat through a school fundraiser presentation in middle school knows that those awesome prizes of a computer or game console or whatnot is just meant to hype you up. But you might be able to land a CD player. (My age is showing here. =P )
I expect any 14-15yo he's talking to will get the gist. The kids are not stupid. They get the pitch. And I think they intrinsically know the odds too. Those 9,500 football players are not all going to see it as a loss, even if they didn't achieve their ultimate goal. People turn losses into wins and salvage the good from a failed attempt all of the time.
My son is 3, and already has fun mashing computer parts together and wanting to see how things work. I'm excited to see if he wants to do this as well. Will I tell him "Dude, that guy said I'd be making $90k and that was B.S." Nah. I'll give him simple version of Paul's advice. Even if he doesn't go into entrepreneurship, it'll set him up well if he follows it.
Actually, PG advice is solid. Trying to guess the next big thing is not a winning strategy. More so for teenagers who lack a lot of skills including good judgement. Even if their guess was guaranteed spot-on, and the universe was rooting for you, once the cat is out of the bag, what advantage would a 15 years old have? They don't have any war chest or connections to survive.
If the goal is to optimize the individual's outcome, outside working towards a stable 9-5 career, their best bet is indeed building projects they're passionate about and utilizing the skills they gain in their next endeavour.
One way to waste your life is being constantly distracted by which industry is more profitable or has more potential, doubting yourself and switching context.
What PG is noting is that sometimes (even if rarely), what an individual is passionate about can also be good for investors. But the passion comes first.
I think there’s a strong element of luck here: even if you have general purpose skills in eg programming or CS, once a novel opportunity presents itself, you likely won’t have a head start, especially today. But what can you do about it? Telling kids who are 14-15 that they should bet on some more niched tech like LLMs or even transformers would likely be terrible advice.
You can certainly become the best in the world at some combination of things that don’t interest you, but that seems less fun.
I don't get your comment. Are you saying PG is trying to deter and throw off teenagers so they don't compete in the space he invested in?
I don't have any particular advice. I've been very lucky to join a few companies that were on the run up at the time but I never really knew at the time that they were going to be successful.
I just think blindly pursuing passion to the exclusion of profit will leave most people happy (or not) but impoverished and some people happy, lucky, and wealthy.
It was really just a tongue in cheek comment. I think Paul's advice is inspirational but it should be checked with a healthy dose of reality.
That's a prism it's really worth applying to all advice given by VCs: What's the outcome for me if I fail vs what's the outcome for them if I fail?
There is an opportunity cost to starting your own company, but it's not some kind of horrible experience that will drive you to bankruptcy unless you're part of the 1% who manages a spectacular exit.
Maybe start an actual, scaleable business that makes money. It's not sexy, but it's within the realm of possibility to get it off the ground yourself; and usually those within the gilded class are not interested in such things.
If you're a regular schmuck, maybe take a page from the countless immigrants in the U.S. that start various businesses (trade, real estate, etc.) that make them enough money to allow them to live like kings back in their home countries.
There's something to be said about the severe glaucoma of understanding class in the U.S. Very few (notably the middle class) are willing to internalize they're serfs, whose current comfort is more a product of luck than anything more. It's a precarious situation, and any notions of aspiring to "life satisfaction" or other leisure-class values is just foolish, in my opinion.
Each time, you learn and get better, your odds go up. Now the real question is whether your odds are going from 1:1000 to 1:100 or from 1:100 to 10:100?
Given it's a repeated game, and you gain knowledge at each round, I'd say the odds are probably pretty good that the highly dynamic / fast learning environment of early companies yields returns over a lifetime.
Google: 180,000 employees. Let's say including ex-employees 250,000
These started 1,200 companies, according to the only source I could find. These collectively apparently made their founders ~20 billion. Let's say (heh) that it's a power law, let's say the top 10 got 1 billion each.
So we're talking the odds for an "average" software engineer to get to 1 billion is about 0.1% * 10/180000 = 0.000005556%, or about 1 in 18 million.
Odds for a current or ex-Google engineer: 1 in 18,000.
If Google in 2006 wasn't powerful enough to get someone as culturally unthreatening as a Brit into the USA, it cannot be easier to do so as a startup founder.
That said I did know someone later who was able to make it in and become a startup CTO there (a German guy). Hilariously he did it by making a viral YouTube video. And by "make" I mean he hired an agency to make it. This was sufficient to get him in on an artist visa, which was easier than getting in on an H1B.
Seems kinda reasonable for a motivational speech not to mention it (even assuming it's entirely true.)
It would be dishonest if he intentionally left it out since for some (arguably a minority of young people) it is a deal breaker.
I'd rather a government that enables a thousand mid-sized companies with moderately well-paid executives and employees than one that enables a single monopolistic mega-corporation with billionaires whose power rivals states and whose incentives are not aligned with most of the world.
To say nothing of the lost revenue from tech export do you think it is better for the UK that it depends on AWS cloud for running the majority of its public services, Apple for almost 70% of the phones used by it's citizens, Google for the other 30%?
Which midsize company is going to be able to compete with AWS on offering cloud computing services, Apple on developing smart phones or Nvidia on GPUs?
Actually the UK has the worst of both worlds: US big tech opens office here leading to well-paid executives and engineer, while all revenue (and none of the taxes) from selling the products these engineers develop goes to the US.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t insightful things to say about building a Google or becoming a gold Olympic medalist.
I agree with the first point. I do think that the experience would nonetheless be valuable, though, to pilot a failed company.
- Peter O’Toole, probably.
He's trying to inspire the one kid that will actually create the next Google.
Alternatively, if only one person in the upcoming generation tries to create the next Google it will probably be a crap company. If 200 million kids try to create the next Google the one that succeeds in creating their own survivorship bias story will likely be a stellar co.
Competition necessitates excellence.
There is always room for competition.
I think when someone like him shows up, kids want to hear about the extreme end of financial success.
Hopefully those kids get to hear from other types of business people as well -- those who can talk about more of the middle of the road.
Google story is peculiar because their founders started with "ads are evil" mantra. If it wasn't for that (and support for free software communities), us geeks would not have recommended Google to everyone and their dog over Altavista, Yahoo or whatever else was there at the time. We certainly would not have gotten our non-techy pops and grandmas to use the Google of today.
At some point, I was proud to wear a Google shirt I got from them during the early days.
Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI) for example was employed inside Google doing that kind of work and only left when he ran up against the limits of what he felt he could get done there. But the fundamental R&D had already been done. When I was at Google I saw some of it from a distance before I ever heard of OpenAI.
The VCs have come along at the tail end of the R&D cycle on this stuff in hopes of cashing in. Same as they did with crypto and N number of trends before. They're trailing, not innovating.
They're primarily interested in successful business models capitalizing on existing technology, not the actual development of new technology. Unless one has distorted the meaning of "technology" significantly.
I didn't really see how a business that was starting from a more R&D angle would make it through.
And a lot of it seemed really pitched to the bizdev "hustler" founder personality, not to engineers/nerds.
I'd had never seen an avocado in any grocery story growing up, never tasted it until I visited California.
Is this "changing the world"?
Well I suppose it could be, after all myriads of people have never used or even heard of slack.
People want to stay in touch with those they love.
People want to have medicines to improve their stress.
Etc.
> user lock-in, artificial bundling,
But eventually Google hit its peak and has had to for the last decade or so concern itself with just maintaining its monopoly position, and it's done a lot of shady things to abet that, if you recall from reading the news over the last decade. A few I recall offhand.
* The infamous developer wage fixing scheme! Remember when it was uncovered that Apple and Google had been secretly and informally following no-poaching and wage cap rules to try to use their market power against developers?
* Monopolizing the ad marketplace by constant mergers and acquisitions (eg DoubleClick)
* Just generally using M&A and hiring as an anti competitive tool, eg acquihiring, overhiring, acquire-and-shut-down, etc -- hiring and acquiring not as a way to legitimately add profitable capabilities but instead merely as a way to tie up valuable limited resources (devs) and thus deny oxygen to potential competition.
* Don't get me started on how they're currently abusing Chromebooks to infiltrate the schools and get kids hooked on watching addictive YouTube Shorts and otherwise being good online ad targets during class time
And I'm sure all the other usual monopolistic behavior companies in their position are often tempted into. Google's challenge has been that by the 2010s, there wasn't really anything left for it to innovate in that could possibly come close to adding more than a rounding error's worth of profit to the huge ad machine.
So since then Google has fundamentally been more like a petrostate or a traditional utility company or something -- just protect the cash cow at all costs and don't rock the boat otherwise. It still kept and continues to try to keep to wear the costume of its earlier younger hip innovative days, but I think that's falling away as a new generation grows up who now sees them as part of the Man, an institution that's been there forever and no longer have a memory of the days when they were new, fun, innovative, countercultural.
In summary, Google didn't do shady things to get filthy rich, but it did do shady things later to stay filthy rich once it became clear there was nothing else left to do but either that, or watch the business gradually decline and get eaten by newer, hungrier startups and competitors.
First, "better" is so subjective that it almost becomes a moot point.
Second, a single counter example disproves it.
You don't think Ronaldo has entertained millions of kids around the world and made them very happy to watch him play? I would say that is a good thing.
I don't know anybody impoverished from trying to build something. Even if they failed, the lessons they learned and people they met in the process offered plenty of future opportunities.
On the other hand, I know plenty of people unhappy with their lot in life but who didn't try anything to improve it when they could. They like to complain a lot and impose their bitterness and skepticism on the young dreamers.
And our society needs many, many more dreamers. Because when they succeed, as seldom as it happens, we all end up better thanks to them.
I'm 36 and I can afford to not work for many years with my savings.
It's definitely easier now for me.
Then there's a question when you start a family, that's subjective and something you can control but the model of creating career and then having kids (in late 30s/early 40s) seems more common in US. If you have your first child in mid 30s, then few laters 2nd one for example, you still need to be very hands-on, attentive and provide at least until your late 40s/early 50s.
You can't just use HTML because browsers have mutated to fat clients for a X like protocol which is a mishmash of html, css, js, and whatever else someone's decided to throw on top of it.
We're using screwdrivers as axes and everyone is acting like this is some type of acceptable outcome.
You can't make as rich an interavtive experience as you can with JS, but you never could.
These are some of the JS functions HN runs in the background, on top of the CSS:
function $ (id) { return document.getElementById(id); }
function byClass (el, cl) { return el ? el.getElementsByClassName(cl) : [] }
function byTag (el, tg) { return el ? el.getElementsByTagName(tg) : [] }
function allof (cl) { return byClass(document, cl) }
...I think the parent poster was referring to how much noise there is, and I'd agree. The moment you start learning, just the fanciest stuff is shoved down your throat. So you just assume its the best and roll with it.
I find myself tinkering more with PHP now that I've been using js for the past 7 years.
For quite a while at least before they joined the crowd.
If you had a 1 in a million chance of winning something and you tried a million times, the chance of winning once is about 63.2%, not much different from when n=100.
Inspiration matters. Attention matters.
Teenagers are not inspired by: you could start a little business that de facto operates as a medium paying job (but is far more stressful and risky to your future, your potential family, and your long-term finances), and it'll be miserably difficult, and you really shouldn't even try it because the likely rewards are so tiny that you should just go work for Microsoft instead for the fat (and easier) paycheck. Even if you try to sell that with a passion premise (the reward is in the love of the craft), the sell is so ugly you shouldn't even waste the young audience's time (they'll just come away depressed at best).
Why do people ever aspire to anything that's exceptionally difficult?
Decision inertia means that employees often don't sell vested stock, and end up being lucky. Similarly, external investors aren't willing to put 30-50% of their networth into one bet and therefore miss out on the kind of luck that can set them up for life.
There is nothing that a lowly engineer at Tesla or Nvidia knows, that can't be found out by an external investor. They are operating in the same information landscape, but different outcomes when they give into decision inertia.
It's not about joining Tesla or Nvidia early. It's about betting on them.
It's also possible to bet on Tesla/Nvidia and lose. Badly.
That was a bet.
If they hadn't made the bet and sold stocks as soon as they vested, then the returns wouldn't have been as incredible.
The real point is that it's misguided to try and compare percentages of tech company employees with percentages of founders; they're very different things.
Of course, out of all the founders of all the companies, a relatively tiny percentage will be vastly rich. And out of all the employees of all the tech companies, most will be quite wealthy and comfortable, and a small percentage will be vastly rich.
But that doesn't tell you anything about what is the most reliable path for any given individual to get vastly rich; it entirely depends on whether you're the kind of person you are how well you can learn how to build successful products and companies.
pg is giving advice based on him getting rich from that period of time where the small startup could make it big. But those conditions are probably rare going forward.
Yes, there are also all kinds of completely unrelated to your idea things that can succeed or kill your business.
Happen to launch your idea the day before a global economic collapse, well, better be exceptionally lucky.
Happen to launch when interest rates drop though the floor and banks are handing out money to anyone. You're going to have a harder time failing.
Of course YC funds tons of ChatGPT wrappers so dunno.
Paradoxically, avoiding risks makes people more likely to take the riskier options.
So yeah, give someone 500 years, hopefully they keep going at it and the odds play out...but in the lets call it 50 productive years I feel I probably have been given, plus a few distractions along the way, there are maybe 5-10 serious bets one can place? Feels like that needs to be considered in conjunction with the mathematical probability "just keep trying" misleads us to believe.
10 coin flips can happen in less time than it took to type this reply. Those odds are a little more predictable because of the time span involved.
If you think it is easy to save more than a third of your income, remember you’ll have a federal marginal tax rate of 35% or higher, will probably have to work onsite in a HCOL state, and unless you’re lucky enough to live in WA, a high state income tax. Yes you can shield some of your income via 401ks and Roths, but for the former you’re going to get taxed on withdrawal, and for the latter you get penalized if you touch it before you’re 59.5.
Now if you’re dual cogs with no kids, maybe. If you do have kids, you’re not retiring until long after ten years.
This is very easy, actually. You just happen to like fancy things and houses, probably.
> Now if you’re dual cogs with no kids, maybe. If you do have kids, you’re not retiring until long after ten years.
I find it depressing that so many people use kids as an excuse to avoid facing their own problems with money and spending. Look deeper and you can find happiness with a lot less.
If I save absolutely everything left ($235 K) for 10 years that gets me to 2.35 million.
The parent post mentioned saving $2-5 million. To get to $ 2 M I have to live off $35 K a year (I realize I'm ignoring investment activities).
EDIT: additionally to minimize taxation you’re probably doing some of that savings in a 401k. Let’s say $25k * 10 year (I was). But that actually creates a deferred tax obligation. Let’s say the tax rate you pay that at is 20% (very optimistic but by the time you pay it you’ll likely be used to living below the poverty line). That takes you down to $30k a year. Actually even worse the employer match is taxable when you withdraw it, so another deferred tax obligation means that to get to $2M (accounting for future tax obligations) in 10 years you need to live on $25K a year.
That seems challenging in Northern California. Also why would I want to do that? - living at that spending level is likely to affect my long-term health and happiness, so the motivation is not clear to me.
Around the dawn of YC, IIRC, when PG did the "summer founders" or something like that, a group of 4 of us Lisp hackers applied as a team. No response.
We were mostly in grad student-like lifestyle modes, and not tied down, were energetic, and already had various applicable experience.
But I think PG was mostly looking for barely-20 year-olds to drop out of college, rent an apartment in Harvard Square together, and sit around hacking in towels.
Since that's what he wrote in one article. Which I guess trumped the article in which he said Lisp hackers are great for startups.
Now his latest article says he's going after 14 and 15 year-olds. :)
Don’t get me wrong. This folklore is extremely important, if not just to raise the grades of one student. But as a founder, when I give advice, out of inflated ego generally, I also have vertigo from the height of everything that could go wrong about being mistaken about my advice.
I'm 44 and spent most of my career working individually and with my closest friends on projects that felt interesting, and it went really well for us in all of the ways. I also met these friends at a selective school, though it was a state-funded high school (massacademy.org), not a university.
Also, someone once came to my very conventional elementary school in 5th grade on career day to talk about a very unconventional career path (being a full-time peace activist) and this had a huge impact on me, both because it validated activism as a career and perhaps more importantly because it validated not having a normal job.
Getting a very short lecture in school from an interesting non-teacher can be at least very memorable and perhaps life-changing.
(Excerpt from the “wear sunscreen” speech: http://plodplod.blogspot.com/2006/07/advice-like-youth-proba...)
Search is not a good business. Ad sales over top of search turned out to be. AdWords is the thing that catapulted Google towards (insane) profitability. And for the first few years, Google didn't really sell ads, or market themselves as even aiming to sell ads. But AdWords could only be successful because they had already captured the market on search, and so had a captive audience to show ads to (and relevance information based on their searches).
AdWords rolled out in 2000. Many of us had been using Google as a search engine since before the company had even been founded (1998).
We already realized the necessity of finding information amongst the exponentially growing wealth of Web servers (sites).
And Google obviously worked much better than the existing crawler-based search indexes and curated directories.
And lots of people thought a "portal" was a good place to be, if you could manage it.
Funny thing is I recall using Google from the very day I first saw it come across Slashdot -- probably late 1997 -- before they were incorporated even... but I also recall that at some point around 1999 I actually switched back to using AltaVista or something similar for a bit. Because I preferred the search results I got.
It was actually a more competitive situation than people might remember in hindsight.
The big difference is that Google made it through the .com crash filter better than anybody else. That and they kept the good will of their customers by keeping minimal and straightforward and (for a while) ad free.
Also, I'm just more interested in family and enjoying the mobility of the youth I have left, much more than chasing down unlimited resources.
A math teacher and researcher's son, a middle class immigrant from third world Soviet Russia.
Or: the middle class son of a professor of computer science and an instructor of programming.
Such privilege. /s
"Elite nepo baby" applies to anyone that ever accomplishes anything these days huh.
"His dad wasn't "just" a computer scientist, he was a professor for computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. Sergey Brin's father was equally a professor in mathematics at the University of Maryland. > It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn well near as engineered with data as it could be. They also were _insanely_ well connected through their and their parents academic career. Both Sergey and Larry had obtained their PhD prior to starting the company. I can also remember reading that they obtained significant amounts of funding through connections Larry's dad had into the industry. You can ignore the rest of my comment, what follows is just my take. Their success story is imo one of the most blatant examples on how privilege really does give you a boost in life. I am not arguing that anyone could have done it, but I do wonder how the world would look like if we were all kids of academics with a successful career, with a relatively safe, secure and stable childhood home and a family background that really incentivizes learning and academic success over succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income at some point."
Most of the FIRE bloggers who bother to account for this—like MMM—have a (perhaps implicit) fallback plan of returning to work somewhere with decent health insurance if they or a family member becomes very sick, but that’s quite a gamble.
(Never mind that a bunch of those sorts have jobs and couldn’t remain comfortably “retired” without them—god I really hate that part of the blogosphere, “look it’s so easy you dumb idiot” but then you start reading between the lines and realize how much of it’s just a bit)
Exchange plans are fine enough, and like, they're not that cheap, but they're also not that expensive either. Depending on how much you make from investments on your never have to work again horde, you may be able to qualify for rate subsidies, and then it's even less expensive. In my county, if I were 64 years old, assigned male at birth, I'm looking at about $17,000/year for a Blue Cross Bronze plan (less costly options available), with $9,200 out of pocket max. Budgeting $26,000/year for healthcare means less than $1 M should cover you for life (assume 3% perpetual withdrawal rate). Rates are lower for younger people, but budgeting based on current costs for the oldest people should help the numbers work. Double the budget if you have a spouse; do some math if you have kids you need to cover until they become independent. Definitely make sure you work until you have earned Medicare eligibility, cause it'll be handy when you reach that age.
Is $1-2 M crazy-high? Kind of, but depending on what your annual withdrawal rate target was, maybe you can just say if you've got enough to pull $100,000/year, you're good on healthcare too. Hopefully most years you won't hit the out of pocket max.
You’ll be exposed to tens of thousands in risk per year on top of (low) tens of thousands in premiums per year for a family Exchange plan. You’ll be burning nearly half of that (and spending all your free time trying to keep hospitals and insurers taking even more) if one of you gets cancer—or, if it’s you who gets cancer, you better hope someone else can handle that.
You also can’t withdraw at as high a “safe rate” as people planning for an ordinary retirement at ~65 do, because your fund needs to last a lot longer despite inflation and such. $2m isn’t “retire at 35” (… or 45) money. It might be “take a big gamble and maybe get lucky… for a while” money. Or semi-retire money.
[edit] at constant 2% inflation (ha!) you need a very safe source of consistent (not average!) 6% returns to retire with 80,000/yr income on $2m, without eating into principal. Anything goes wrong (“whoops, ‘safe’ wasn’t as safe as I thought!” or “whoops, we had a year of 7% inflation and my investments didn’t benefit from that!”) and you can find yourself burning principal while your account value is already down. It won’t take a lot of that before $80k is no longer your safe-withdrawal amount. A couple such years and you may be back to work. 30+ years is a long time…
[edit edit] also damn under $10k max out of pocket on a family plan at the bronze level for $17k? I gotta get out of my shithole state. That’s better than our Gold plans (also our plans tend not to cover like 2/3 of area providers, which may include 100% of area specialists for certain situations)
I'm well aware that the definition of rich can be very different in other contexts. I'm talking about the context of this article.
I'm sitting on the accumulated wealth of 25 rather up-and-downish years in this industry, 10 years at Google, an almost paid-off mortgage, and a decent lump sum I got from when Google bought my employer, I turn 50 this year, and there's no way I can retire. Not without selling my home and moving somewhere a lot cheaper (hard to find here).
Maybe I've made some bad financial choices (not that many), but mostly it's that compensation packages in our industry are set just high enough to keep people on the upper side of comfortable middle class.
If you don't own capital -- haven't invested in rental properties or starting your own business --getting out of the job market isn't really a thing before 65 for most people even in our very well compensated industry.
If I were single or it were just me and my wife, sure.
I've been through tldroptions, and looked at enough options agreement given out by startups in the last few years, to know that as an IC engineer... even if you are lucky enough to be part of the very few startups that have a liquidity event... you're likely gonna get $300k, $400k USD tops.
Unless you're 25 and can shove that in the bank without touching it at all... that's not the life changing event some people think it is. Once the gov't takes their share, it's enough for a house downpayment or a very nice car, and you're certainly not going mortgage free with it.
Still, I'm in a 500x better position than most.
Of course, a bad market makes it longer, but the converse is also true: it's more likely a good market makes it shorter! (historically markets go up more than down, of course)
Add a spouse that also saves and invests, and you can have MORE than $45,000/yr of expenses covered within 7 years of earning at that rate. You can also back off to part time or have one spouse continue working after having kids, and all you need to do is cover SOME (not even all!) of your expenses.
> I want to do that? - living at that spending level is likely to affect my long-term health and happiness
The freedom of not dealing with "the cult of impact" [1] and other such silly things is amazing. Having a huge pile of money allows solid peace of mind in a way most people can't even conceive.
And finding out how much happiness you can get independently of spending money is truly eye-opening. Most people are too scared to even TRY finding fulfillment away from what society tells us is "fun".
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1bh80wl/go...
There are also ways to get at this money with almost no taxes paid later IF you are not working--look for "Roth IRA conversion ladder".
Also look into "Mega Backdoor Roth" for more tax sheltering.
> That seems challenging in Northern California
You don't have to retire to California. Just pay minimal costs while you're there. Many places in US are beautiful, have great infrastructure and health care, and don't cost as much.
And investment growth is a LOT; don't ignore it. And after just a few years of not working, unless you have a bad start you can probably live off of much more than the initial safe withdrawal rate.
The insight here is to only play in games that you have the advantage (or are at least evenly matched) and be very, very careful not to put yourself in a position to go bust on any one hand.
Also, people don’t realize that startups aren’t one single event. There’s a million events and each one has its own luck. For example, you make a piece of content marketing there’s luck in whether it performs well, but that luck can be managed and the risk spread across many events by doing lots of small pieces of content marketing.
I also wrote a blog post about how a popular psychology book oriented towards poker pros (The Mental Game of Poker) can be easily reframed for entrepreneurs:
https://writing.billprin.com/p/the-mental-game-of-entreprene...
With all that said, it’s highly ironic you picked Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he’s famous in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player who got extremely lucky at the perfect time . It’s a bit like talking about the importance of hard work and deep technology skills for founders, and using Adam Neumann and WeWork as your example of that.
The luck is seen in the short term fluctuations but over the long run when executing your strategy there is no luck.
This requires proper bankroll management among other things.
Also starting a business is easier than poker, poker is zero sum (more often negative sum due to rake).
Business is positive sum. What this means is people will gladly hand you money if your product generates more value for them than holding that money does. In poker, every single hand is like a fist fight because there is always a loser in every hand.
Yes you can win if you are a VC. Less clear what to do if you’re just a card.
And, in the unfortunately common case, recognize when you cannot take any bets and instead focus on getting yourself to a place where you can, rather than betting everything and losing everything.
A 15-year-old hearing this talk from Graham as-is might take from it, "wow, if I learn programming, work on things that interest me, do well in school, and go to a good university, I'm guaranteed to build a Google-scale successful startup!"
Telling that kid that there's also a component of luck involved, and that the vast majority of startups fail, would temper that enthusiasm in a much more honest way. If that means fewer kids decide to start companies, that's obviously a negative in Graham's book, but may not be a negative for those kids themselves.
If the kid is motivated from this essay to learn programming, work on things that interest them, do well in school, and go to a good university -- I think they're well setup for success in their life.
take the shot, but have a back-up plan, basically.
I think it’s reasonable to inspire more than hedge. They’ll presumably already hear lots about what the least risky things to do are from many, many sources — that’s the default.
- discount the useless advice you get from people who got lucky and are unaware of this fact
- target trying to be in the right place at the right time and have a plan B if you don't get lucky, rather than waking up at 0400 every day to eat raw eggs or whatever
- respect yourself and your employees more
- be more generous with what luck brings you
etc etc etc
a much better question is why do YC and co not talk about luck and connections more? why do they pretend it's all some imaginary meritocracy rather than hugely dependent on going to the right school / being born into the right social class, and then hugely advantaged by having YC's name recognition and tame lendors attached?
Solvable, including consideration of valuations via CAPE PE 10. Based on past data, the safe withdrawal rate (SWR) happens to be around 3.25-3.5% of assets to extend to a 60-year time horizon [1]
> at constant 2% inflation (ha!) you need a very safe source of consistent (not average!) 6% returns to retire with 80,000/yr income on $2m, without eating into principal.
For most of this research, "failure" constitutes running out of money. Preserving the initial portfolio value in inflation-adjusted terms can also be solved for. It takes the SWR closer to 2.8-3% for 60-year horizon with high equity valuation corrections.
> You’ll be exposed to tens of thousands in risk per year on top of (low) tens of thousands in premiums per year for a family Exchange plan.
Better to cap expenses and be ready to pay for it than live in fear. Save, invest, and move on with life.
> $2m isn’t “retire at 35” (… or 45) money. It might be “take a big gamble and maybe get lucky… for a while” money. Or semi-retire money.
Depends on how much money you need to spend every year to be happy. Sounds like you need a lot of it. For many, $2m would be fine, even with a very long time horizon. And if any problems crop up, there would be a 15-20 year warning during which a small income boost could top things up.
----
Things don't always have to be so gloomy.
[1] https://earlyretirementnow.com/2017/09/13/the-ultimate-guide...
> You also can’t withdraw at as high a “safe rate” as people planning for an ordinary retirement at ~65 do, because your fund needs to last a lot longer despite inflation and such. $2m isn’t “retire at 35” (… or 45) money. It might be “take a big gamble and maybe get lucky… for a while” money. Or semi-retire money.
The $2 M is the budged accumulation only to pay for premiums and out of pocket until you hit Medicare; and that's assuming a spouse. Budgeting that based on perpetual withdrawl rate gives yet another buffer, because it only has to last until Medicare eligibility age. Yeah, there's unknowns, but whatever. I'm not saying $2 M is enough to accumulate for early retirement. It could be, but a lot of people want to spend more money than that. $2 M doesn't generate that much income, so you'll likely qualify for health plan subsidies, which would help a bit too.
Edit: I used zipcode 98110, birthday for illustration 01/01/1960. Going into the less expensive side of my state, zipcode 99336; there's no blue cross out there, but the most expensive bronze plan for that birthdate is $14,000 / year with the same $9200 out of pocket max. And yeah, limited networks suck ... I'm not going to shop for hypotheticals there --- I'm pretty sure if there's no reasonable in network doctors, you can fight your insurance to get covered at a reasonable doctor, regardless of the insurance and state, and if you're early retired, you'll have time for it.
You may be overly generous in your estimation of MY poker skills! However bad Chris is, I am sure I am not anywhere close.
Plus the no fast no clutter homepage for google compared to how many links can we fit in one screen for the portals
Maybe AltaVista improved after that, which could explain how the parent commenter could go back to it.
The turning point that brought me fulltime to Google from then on (until recently switching to Kagi) was when they started having almost live results. It's hard to remember or imagine but search indices were often days, weeks out of sync for critical things like news, etc and Google was really the first to fix that.
> It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time.
It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn well near as engineered with data as it could be. They also were _insanely_ well connected through their and their parents academic career. Both Sergey and Larry had obtained their PhD prior to starting the company. I can also remember reading that they obtained significant amounts of funding through connections Larry's dad had into the industry.
You can ignore the rest of my comment, what follows is just my take.
Their success story is imo one of the most blatant examples on how privilege really does give you a boost in life. I am not arguing that anyone could have done it, but I do wonder how the world would look like if we were all kids of academics with a successful career, with a relatively safe, secure and stable childhood home and a family background that really incentivizes learning and academic success over succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income at some point.
Don't forget that Larry's older brother Carl went through the whole VC process with egroups and gained extreme experience with how to maximize his position in negotiation.
But yes, I agree completely that kids of academics raised in an environment that incentivzes learning is a reliable way to transform the future.
The rest of my statement is true.
I recently read something that played out a thought experiment about "imagine the world could only hold 10,000 people". It may have been a comment somewhere on HN honestly. The idea was that if the world could only hold 10,000 people, there never would have been enough division of basic duties for any one individual to dive so deep that they could invent semi-conductors (insert any modern tech really). I mean we likely wouldn't even have mastered locomotion by now if that was the case.
Lets assume we're "all kids of academics with a successful career, with a relatively safe, secure and stable childhood home and a family background that really incentivizes learning and academic success over succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income at some point." Most of us will still just be working on the basic societal problems of producing food and taking out the trash.
With all due respect, the world isn't a thought experiment and the dynamics of a system with 10.000 people is not comparable to that of 7 billion.
My argument was pointing at the fact that it may be pointless to compare your own plans to success against someone elses success story, when they had completely different starting variables in life and people who refuse to at least consider this are either trapped in the Silicon Valley hustle culture or are, sorry, completely ignorant, bordering on idiotic.
With that same logic ala "Not everyone can be X" I can justify almost all of human suffering in the world. I refuse to believe that you follow an ideology like this if you're on this site, because if you did, you were already rich by means of some criminal enterprise exploiting humans far beyond what tech startups are capable of.
This isn't some appeal to idk, introducing communism and making everyone equal but this argument is as dumb as making a healthy runner compete in the paralympics.
(Still not obvious if you ask me.)