Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups(techcrunch.com) |
Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups(techcrunch.com) |
His essays from the last few years are almost exclusively about startups and I think they're a must-read resource. IMO, they contain pretty much all the ideas that make up YC and going through the program will mostly reinforce these ideas in a very effective way, rather than teach some new secret.
There's much to be said about technology and its impact on society, so I hope we'll see some great new material.
This I find slightly worrying. It's amazing if it still works (and I've been wondering how YC was still able to scale), but is the minimum amount of information that needs to be exchanged between startup and YC in order to get a good assessment really that small? Or is the quality of selection (due to scaling issues / less time per applicant) nowdays compensated by the effect of YC's reputation?
As I am usually interviewing people for one position, which they need to perform well in, it would take more than ten minutes to get to a yes. But since YC gives sixty or more yeses a batch, and they still win if only a few of them pan out to be a Dropbox or Reddit, than they can probably afford to give a yes in the first ten minutes as well. Because who is a superstar is obvious in the first ten minutes as well. The only question for a superstar beyond the first ten minutes is if they are a fit or not (for example, would the obviously motivated and skilled author of Temple OS, who is marked dead here on HN, be a fit).
I have come to believe over the years that interviewing measures interviewing skills. Test scores measure test taking skills. Success on the job requires success-on-the-job (to coin a phrase) skills. All those things correlate, but the correlation coefficient is not super high. In fact, ignoring those correlations can be an effective strategy to find great people.
edit: not saying i disagree per se. I can tell really quickly if someone knows their shit by working with them for a day... or so i'd like to think. the truth is i've been completely misjudged based on interviews before. i've seen people on top of their fields do the same mistakes with other people because they "seemed to know" based on talk. in the end talk is just that, talk.
Nope, you cannot. I think it's highly likely that there are some rather large biases in your process.
This goes for pg too.
If YC has nailed down the process, then only formidable teams would make it to the interview, and then the interview would serve to simply make sure the dynamic and attitude of the team is not such that they'd be likely to not succeed (sorry for the double negative, but I think the inverse would have a different meaning). It seems reasonable that after hundreds of these interviews, YC partners would be able to spot those dynamics in minutes.
What if someone was really onto something and they were describing it to you. They might be trying to explain it as simply as they possibly can and you might think you understand, but a lot could be lost and your impression might be that, that person is not good at what they are doing or that it's a toy.
It all comes down to good communication but I think overall, we learn more over more time. I get that there is a time constraint with the current approach so maybe to scale things there should be some sort of engine that processes people/teams from a watch list over a period of time. For example, mine data from a private YC journal that applicants can start writing in a year or six months in advance. I don't think that should be a problem since a lot is submitted in the applications (my basic understanding of the process).
I'm not sure there are Richard Feynmans in startups or similarly "soft" fields.
Called "thin-slicing", first read about it in "Blink" by Gladwell, which is based entirely on this concept, and has plenty of great examples of this phenomenon (The Wikipedia link below has some of them).
I think the human brain is the ultimate pattern-matching and learning machine, and when trained long enough develops an ability to discern patterns from the faintest and narrowest of signals.
As an investment first that pretty much the only statistic that matters.
Anyone got any more details on this? Is this just an inside joke that I don't get? (Yes I remember the build-better-email-client thing, but actually trying, and using one beta-tester?)
To be honest I no longer think an email client is the problem. Its the lack of contact book, integration with all my devices and just generally tying up my orgnaisation for me - frankly a better email client from now is an AI.
I'm sure they appreciate your two sentence dismissal of something you've never seen and haven't heard more than two sentences about.
I struggle to imagine that there is a single email client that will solve this - this is an integration problem - multiple devices, multiple slices of my life.
Executives pay good money, very good money, for PAs to solve these problems. And I get more and more frustrated by the siloes of data (Skype, iPhones call log) that actively make it harder for me to get metadata about what I am doing each day.
so an email client, by my definition of what a single client is, no, does not seem a good idea. but maybe a cross platform synchronising and intelligent solution, that might be worth getting excited about
so that's why I asked if anyone knew anymore. Not a dismissal of their app, a request for more info. And then a strawman of the idea of building a better email client.
I think building a better mousetrap is an outdated when a jungle is waiting out there.
I think one reason we're wrestling with this smart/stupid/success/fail subject is that these words paint with broad brushes. It's not just being smart or stupid, it's what you're smart or stupid about.
For example, I knew an uneducated couple who opened a small clothing store. At first, they naively sold merchandise for less than they paid for it. They calculated the markup on belts by adding $4, then adding $3. When I suggested just adding $7, they got angry and said no, you HAD to add $4 first, or it wouldn't work. I would have been fired for pressing the issue.
Pretty stupid, eh? Maybe. But they were smart, too, about other things. What other things? Some people get MBAs at Harvard and still can't figure it out.
I watched that couple expand into a small chain of clothing stores with an 8-figure annual cash flow, and retire as millionaires.
One can only wonder how long they would have lasted in a YC pitch session. My grandmother used to say, "we're all stupid, we're just stupid about different things." The same could be said of "smart," and I believe success reflects a correctness in this rather delicate dichotomy.
He wasn't comfortable with math, but supposedly he made quite good money.
> “You can be surprisingly stupid if you’re sufficiently determined,” he concluded.
Oh that's nice.
Reminds me of the Simpsons episode when some kid accepts homecoming king with "Thank you for not choosing the popular jock and electing me, your intellectual superior, as homecoming king".
I think "surprisingly" is the key word here. Someone could be quite smart and still surprisingly stupid if you were expecting them to be a genius.
I dont know about PG but Warren Buffett says the same thing when it comes to buying new business that he make a decision within 5 minutes.
Now given that, let me say that I completely understand what PG was trying to say there, and I hope that I haven't hijacked the conversation.
PG's point was that if your accent is sufficiently strong that people have trouble understanding you, then you have a big problem. And that's something that is obvious in a sentence. So person opens their mouth, and you know it is a no.
If the person merely has an accent, that's OK.
And so we have confirmation of what he's saying now. There are times when it is obvious within the first 10 minutes, in fact in the first 2, that you need to say no.
I am not comparing pg to either of these three people, at least not directly. I'm just claiming that it's not unlikely there's some kind of taste, knowledge or whatever have you which he (and the other partners) possesses to a much higher degree than Random Joe Investor.
There are. Game recognize Game[1] is a thing for a reason.
[1] If you need this footnote then it doesn't apply to you.
Wasn't quite expecting the violent downvoting though. Humour never goes well on HN.
I found it "lacking" because it was tedious and exasperating to stand there with a little pocket calculator adding 4, then adding 3, to make price tags for hundreds of items, one at a time.
All of these are 'soft skill' competencies that hackers tend to downplay. But you need someone who can do this and do it well.
In other words, you by failing to distinguish scaling phenomena (1->N) with a gating criteria (0,1), you are making an attribution error concerning the "essentialness" of your explanatory variable.
For example: co-founders are typically not "interviewed" for the job. But (a) their selection is essential; and (b) if you can find a co-founder, you can find any lesser employee.
It could be argued, that having the ability to "recruit" without formal interview is actually a more essential skill.