The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn

http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

by DaniFong • 18 years ago

56 8 18 years ago

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

I submitted this to see the thread of whomever already did. Apparently I'm the first.

Another weird coincidence is that I'd never seen this before, and it's really good. Possibly one of the best essays I've read. Or at least one of the most informative.

"Startup founders are naturally optimistic. They wouldn't do it otherwise. But you should treat your optimism the way you'd treat the core of a nuclear reactor: as a source of power that's also very dangerous. You have to build a shield around it, or it will fry you."

dkokelley• 18 years ago

Wow. Congratulations. This is the second old PG essay that hasn't made it up here yet that I've seen in about 2 weeks. I guess this is like a HN sport now. :P

eb• 18 years ago

It looks like it was submitted a long time ago, before this site was even announced.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

I guess the prefix www. isn't stemmed for the collision detection algorithm, then...

noahlt• 18 years ago

> So I'm going to number these points, and maybe with future startups I'll be able to pull off a form of Huffman coding. I'll make them all read this, and then instead of nagging them in detail, I'll just be able to say: number four!

I am curious as to how well this worked out.

lsb• 18 years ago

Strictly speaking, it's Lempel-Ziv coding. LZ compresses text by replacing the second occurrence of a phrase with a pointer to the first, as above, whereas Huffman represents more frequently used characters with shorter bit strings, like Morse code.

bstadil• 18 years ago

But make sure your "tell it right" and occasionally refer to a number "they haven't heard before"

eru• 18 years ago

17.

The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn

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