What is the parallel advice for a 40 year old? I guess the programming and tinkering stuff still applies. But university cannot be redone. Sure I can study but I wont have any connection to most young people. I’ll be the old guy.
And this assumes I can afford the loss of income.
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.
There's a study that often gets shared around, purportedly "Debunking the Myth of the Young Entrepreneur", showing data that most successful startup founders start their companies in their mid-to-late 40s, including tech/social media companies.
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).
Give yourself a break. When I studied in uni I was stuck at tables with 'old guys' and 'old ladies' and I had a lot of respect for them. They paid attention, wanted to learn, were there to learn. When I didn't understand something, I asked them before I asked the teacher and they generally were happy to help. I have fond memories
>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.
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.
Sounds like you might want to start a lifestyle business. You should read and listen to everything by Rob Walling, especially his “stair step approach”. Wish someone had told me this at your stage.
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.
Wow, the older I get the more ambitious I get about what to build. A lot of the companies I created in my 20s and 30s I wouldn’t waste my time on in my 40s. I’m so the exact opposite it’s kinda funny.
I think PG addresses this subtlety where he says: "when you're young it's easier to know what you are interested in, than what people need." This inverts as you get older.
// Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn
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.
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.
PG is remarkably consistent in his advice; much of his writing is about developing a nose for "what's missing" and having the chops and resources to attempt a solution.
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?
Stanford was in the VC business long, long before. It's been told many times but Frank Terman set up much of the infrastructure to enable this back in the 1950s, building Stanford Research Park which housed Varian (microwaves and other RF), HP (some digital electronics stuff), and Lockheed (some bomb stuff). And that work built off the incredible investments into California infrastructure by the US military during WWII (https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...), which followed some amazing investments in education, transport, and housing since the beginning of the gold rush.
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.
It's interesting that this piece mentions "to get really rich" as one of the primary motivators. Especially to high school students. I wonder if that's good advice or if society is better served by motivating students to start companies that make the world better.
I feel like there was a moment where “love was all you needed” and people just followed their passions with real careers as a backup. Hollywood pressed that view (or echoed it) into the zeitgeist and I’m not sure what the turning point was, but people started getting filthy rich. Almost as if the dormant culture combined with the internet made it possible to amass an absurd amount of wealth. Since then, whenever that is, it feels like it’s socially acceptable again to do be driven by earning potential and nothing else.
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.
I don't see any mention of being ready to completely pivot from your original, lofty mission ("best search with no ads") to exactly the opposite ("ads are money").
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.
He left out the part about starting your company at a unique point in history where a generational technology shift was taking place that also happens to be a time when antitrust laws had recently been enforced (making your main competitor wary) but were about to be completely ignored for the next 20 years, so you could exploit your initial market position and engage in anti-competitive behavior to grow huge.
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.
I agree, it is damaging especially when you don't have a wealthy relative to fall back on.
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.
>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.
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.
Entirely and obviously self serving in that not only is this probably the only 'business' world that Paul has been exposed to (he started a tech company) but Paul also benefits (as do VC's and angel investors) from the entire eco system of young people taking chances with a small chance of success. The investor (and YC) wins with lots of people trying regardless of how many fail.
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.
Ok, so I am having a hard time buying the idea that just make a fun project if you want to create a something like 'Google'. Startup 101 teaches us that you need to solve a painful problem that lot of people have, that is the best way to create 'Google', so isn't the advise contradictory?
Paul Graham is second to no-one in understanding the startup ecosystem, but there's some points here that only tell one side of the story.
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.
I'm wondering if there is a research about which percentile of these two groups became rich:
People who started a company vs People who worked for Tech companies.
Unless you're very early (and/or very lucky), you can't get "rich" (i.e., can choose never to work again and can invest in many other things) as an employee (though of course a highly-paid employee can become very well off and comfortable).
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.
My guess is that it is much easier to get rich from working at a tech company and rising through the ranks. Being a FANG middle manager for a couple of years and managing your money well should put you in a very comfortable position. However, if you want to be private island rich, you need to do your own startup.
it really depends on what you mean by rich: the surest path to end up with $2-5M over ~10 years is job at ~FAANG, do it well to get promoted, and manage your savings/investments well. that path is very unlikely to get you to $10-100M in the same 10 years, and starting a startup seems to be one of the best ways to do that.
I was really excited to open this thinking it would be a thought experiment on how to restart all of Google's services if they ever went down all at the same time. Was mildly disappointed to find that this was about starting the next Google.
What I want to know is how to become an individual that is able to obtain the kind of things that provide leverage. I already have the machines, I just don't have the platform to move around exciting events and I simply stay in my room. I don't even have a bank account afaik. My paypal account insists on using chinese language (it's cursed). I'm waiting for github to implement a currency I can use. Then again, maybe there's nothing I would do differently.
I am curious how this ethos of the 3 things you need and playfulness/not-intended-to-be-a-startup startups project is in enacted per batch. Like YC's now numerous sales operations/software companies in the past batches: 19-22 years are making email-based-crms for their friends? (I guess a batch and other batches are "friends" so goalposts shift and magically appear). The growth in sales saas companies out of YC seems less of fun project and more of this is a business opportunity for the enterprise. Probably for other spaces as well. Is there dissonance between the tenets of this essay and actually YC companies of late? Does someone have better analysis, would be much appreciated?
"""
What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want.
"""
I know people mention that this advice smacks of survivorship bias, and I think that's pretty obviously going to be a part of any advice given about economic outcomes whose odds of working out are perhaps a whole order of magnitude better than lottery tickets
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
The biggest thing missing from this talk -- something that would have been easy to include, even for a younger audience -- is that the majority of startups fail, and even many startups that do well enough end up making their founders less money than if they went to work for another company.
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.
The best advice to give children is that they should be born to rich, influential and well-connected parents. That will give them a huge advantage in all walks of life including if they want to start a startup. Larry and Sergei had the benefit of rich, influential and well-connected parents, as did Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Paul Graham himself.
Paul Graham sounds like a boomer telling their kids to go apply in person or go door to door for jobs. Especially talking about Software startups, which will increasingly have a lower and lower barrier to entry (aka lower profitability)
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.
Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew google was going to be huge from the beginning. His brother Carl was already a multimillionare in tech and taught him everything required to set up a future successful company.
Larry made it clear to me that he always planned Google to be a large cash-generating cow to invest in long-term AGI and there were only a few times at the beginning when he truly feared that wouldn't happen.
This is entirely fair in its goal and perspective.
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.
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.
[+] [-] codethatwerks|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] emseetech|2 years ago|reply
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1SLHEC98I
[+] [-] tomhoward|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] throwoutway|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llm_trw|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eggdaft|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xhrpost|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happytiger|2 years ago|reply
Go big or go home, it’s no fun to chew bones.
[+] [-] navane|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzelement|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mynameisnoone|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] idkdotcom|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] YossarianFrPrez|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] dpbriggs|2 years ago|reply
Google had good timing but importantly, a good product and market fit. Prior search engines sucked in comparison with obnoxious monetization.
[+] [-] nickpp|2 years ago|reply
"Build a search engine so good all nerds on the early Internet abandon AltaVista and switch to it, no marketing required."?
[+] [-] swyx|2 years ago|reply
which?
[+] [-] dekhn|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] difflens|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heyoni|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paulddraper|2 years ago|reply
You get rich by offering a good or service that society desires.
[+] [-] sandspar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] necovek|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CPLX|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dools|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] esalman|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kaptainscarlet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dalewyn|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] justforasingle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codelord|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gist|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] suyash|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] red_admiral|2 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://paulgraham.com/safe.html
[+] [-] alismayilov|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomhoward|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alexchantavy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] takinola|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rguzman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AIorNot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swang720|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BMSR|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpflan|2 years ago|reply
""" What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want. """
[+] [-] advael|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] kelnos|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] seanhunter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lupire|2 years ago|reply
The author is British, for one.
[+] [-] bearjaws|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dekhn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w10-1|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ckozlowski|2 years ago|reply
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.