Ask PG: What would your next startup be?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014548

by nick007 • 17 years ago

58 32 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

PG, have you ever considered doing another startup? Or, even if you aren't considering it anymore, did you ever consider it after finishing up at Yahoo? If so, what would it be? Merry Christmas

leelin• 17 years ago

Is Y Combinator not an ambitious, challenging, and impressive enough startup?

gruseom• 17 years ago

It's a meta-startup, which is probably different enough that the original question doesn't answer itself.

richardburton• 17 years ago

Great point. But the question still stands: if pg wasn't investing all his time and energy into dozens of startups and wanted to put his energies into a new company, what would he go for?

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

Isn't this like asking my grandfather which of his eleven children is his favorite?

nick007• 17 years ago

I wouldn't consider YC a "startup" in the sense of the word that most people here think of it. Note that YC was just nominated for a Crunchie in the Angel Investor category.

jmonegro• 17 years ago

It wouldn't surprise me if he stayed at YC for a very long time. As far as I can tell, he loves this.

staunch• 17 years ago

"10. Independently wealthy

This is my excuse for not starting a startup. Startups are stressful. Why do it if you don't need the money? For every "serial entrepreneur," there are probably twenty sane ones who think "Start another company? Are you crazy?"" -- http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

alanthonyc• 17 years ago

He's got a request for startup (http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html).

I'd think that he'd be working on one of these if were willing to spend the time.

SlyShy• 17 years ago

I too would like to know what idea of PG's to best steal. ;)

pg2• 17 years ago

Leelin's right in a way. We think of YC as a kind of of startup. Our m.o. is to treat investing as if it were a technical problem.

If I had to start another startup in the classic sense, I might do RFS 1: http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html

I did consider trying another startup once after Yahoo. I hired 3 hackers during the summer of 2000 to work on a prototype of a hosted application platform. I couldn't convince Rtm or Trevor to work on it with me, though, and I wasn't into the project enough to do it without cofounders.

coffeemug6• 17 years ago

I always thought that the problem statement for rfs1 is excellent - far more insightful than other rfs statements and hints. Perhaps this is because you've spent more time thinking about the problem.

This is an incredibly interesting problem I've thought a lot about, so I'll say the following despite the danger of turning this into discussion about rfs1. Since I first read it, I found myself disagreeing with the following statement:

We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time.

I think one of the fundamental questions is what type of content is valuable today (compared to what type of content was valuable two hundred years ago). Back when the newspaper business started, news were extremely desirable and difficult to get (and therefore valuable). Someone actually had to travel to the front lines, record the news, and then break it faster than everyone else in order to make money. The cultural artifact of this remains today - newspapers are still called newspapers, and when you turn on CNN you often see the term breaking news (despite the fact that every other channel is "breaking" the news as well). But this model has almost no differentiating value today - real-time publishing technology is so cheap that anyone can break news, and therefore no one wants to pay for it. News is a cheap commodity, not unlike orange juice.

Today we have an opposite problem - there is an exponential explosion of content, and people are willing to pay a lot of money for services that filter rare, excellent, original content from the rest of the noise (I don't count digg and reddit because they do a very poor job at finding excellent content). People are willing to pay for excellent writers, balanced and insightful opinion pieces, and articles about current events that actually teach us something, rather than tell us what happened. Some "traditional" publications have already figured this out - Economist, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal (although the future of the latter is in question precisely because of potential for declining quality). They didn't completely embrace this model and don't take nearly full advantage of information technology, but they're on the right track - they accept great guest authors, provide valuable and insightful opinion pieces, and give us articles that teach us things. In exchange, their customers have consistently payed up while other publishers have seen a steady loss of readership.

The trick here is branding - Economist has a world class brand that's recognized for their valuable content. Once they get around to using modern technology to take this model to its logical extreme, there is no stopping them. I suppose a startup could do it first if it figures out a good way to quickly build a brand (which shouldn't be hard, considering how little good content is out there and how many people complain about it), but fundamentally there is nothing stopping Economist from doing this - they're already in a perfect position to do it. All they need a little bit of technology (this should be easy), and a bit of a psychological shift in their culture. They're already on the right track - the solution is definitely not too far from their current model.

rms3• 17 years ago

Some good thoughts here, but I don't think branding is the hard part. You can build a brand from nothing with consistent, high quality journalism. See this article on Politico: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/wolff200...

Also see Arrington on the New New York Times http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/30/what-if-the-new-new-yor....

ntoshev3• 17 years ago

I can see where you are coming from with your call for quality content, but lets question this for a minute.

I don't see much new in the world now vs 15 years ago that would shift the economics to high quality publishing. Technology and the internet can provide a better platform for crowdsourcing journalism or easier dissemination and aggregation of information, but these are different from just creating and consuming high quality content.

I think what's new is the ability to personalize the information. One way to think about it is that industrial revolution was all about economical mass production, and one of the first things to be mass produced was written text with the help of the Gutenberg press. No one knows what information revolution is really about yet, but one of the promises is economical mass customization, and the news is a perfect first candidate for this (more distant candidates being economically producing clothes that fit you perfectly, for example).

In a related area, Google seems to think they have mostly exhausted the opportunities to improve their search results in the same way for everyone: they have employed IP geolocation for ages and now they even track your search history by default in order to show you different results from what everyone else is seeing.

DanielBMarkham3• 17 years ago

Just by way of explanation, RFS 1 has not been attempted by other YC startups, right? Or if it has, it's still open for solutions. So you guys are open for applicants to pitch you startups that might address this problem.

Would you only consider pitches that involved applying at YC? Or would you consider getting involved in startups that are going a different route?

pg2• 17 years ago

No, I haven't managed to find anyone to do it yet. I'd only consider groups doing it through YC.

Ask PG: What would your next startup be?

Related Stories