Paul Graham spills: Why some companies get his cash and others don't

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219377

by rhartsock • 15 years ago

186 122 15 years ago

rch3• 15 years ago

True: "If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about."

Jebdm7• 15 years ago

Not necessarily. My friend and cofounder is one of the smartest people I know, but even when he talks about things I know he is an expert at (as demonstrated by his skill), he's often a bit verbose.

Personally, I can generate concise statements (and I'm good at it when I try), but the first couple of times I verbalize an idea I'm usually somewhat verbose. I make an explicit effort to figure out a concise way to say things once I've noticed that I'll probably be expressing the same idea again (and when I write). Perhaps other people become significantly more concise over time without effort, but I'd estimate my baseline compression rate is only something like 10% (whereas when I explicitly compress I can often get 30% or better).

I think the difference is that some people think very verbally and linearly, whereas I tend to think more visually and abstractly. A lot of the time, I have to translate the ideas in my head from these somewhat amorphous concepts or visual ideas into English (or German, or code, or whatever).

rch3• 15 years ago

I think what you're referring to is synthesis, which I consider an important aspect of understanding. One might be an expert only through knowing, another precursor to understanding (see, expert Visual Basic programmer).

My girlfriend might take this opportunity to point out I much I like to ramble on sometimes. shrugs

btam• 15 years ago

What you're missing is that PG says "can." When you're in a ten-minute interview that could change your life forever, you're going to be concise when possible.

That being said, I don't believe that one's 'natural' verbosity has any correlation with intelligence. Minds aren't that simple.

Alex3917• 15 years ago

I think this is true, but I don't think it's the whole story.

What I see is that the best entrepreneurs understand that it's ok to leave 70% of the potential value on the table in order to have a business that's more explainable to investors and customers.

Jebdm7• 15 years ago

I think that's a particularly salient point for most intelligent/dedicated people to understand; if you're intelligent, you've got to remember that most people have a harder time understanding things than you, and if you're dedicated to your idea, you've got to remember that most people don't care about your idea as much as you do.

delineal• 15 years ago

I would add that I think the Y Combinator application process forces you to leave most of the potential value of your idea on the table (assuming your idea has a moderate or high level of complexity). Since they're more interested in founders, this is probably a wise choice.

sdizdar• 15 years ago

Not necessary - by using this rule you might miss a lot of truly brilliant people (I know a couple of them: they just mumble about things and you understand what they were saying only after you see their design and code). This again tries to equate somebody being able to express something using English (in other words, being a good communicator) and ability to really understand the nature and working of a very complex system or idea.

But each startup must have at least one founder which has this capability.

iqster• 15 years ago

"But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.": Love this line!

pg3• 15 years ago

There are a few transcription errors in this. What I actually said was "ineffectual perpetual grad student."

nbaumann2• 15 years ago

That is something I've always agreed with. I have respect for someone that goes from undergrad to doctorate, but I certainly have no admiration for them.

Shamiq2• 15 years ago

I don't understand the difference between the version with and the version without "and" other than pedantic correctness of the quotation itself.

EDIT:Fixed typos.

alexophile2• 15 years ago

semi-related: do you ever get tired of interviews that amount to "So what do you look for in a company?" "Well we look at the founders, more than the idea."? I'm always impressed at how genial you are in answering the world's most predictable questions in these interviews with big business outlets.

shawndumas• 15 years ago

Printable Link: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/printthis/219377.html

ccc3• 15 years ago

Knowing the business. If we ask a bunch of questions and they have the answers at their fingertips because they understand the domain really well, that's a good sign.

An old boss of mine is a design judge for a student engineering competition. Often times he will ask a team for a specific piece of information about their project, only to have the team pull out a giant binder and start shuffling through looking for the answer. At this point he tells them "If I ask you to tell me your girlfriends phone number and you pull out your phone book and start searching for it, you're probably not in love"

I think the same sentiment applies here

corin_2• 15 years ago

I love the comparison, but I would imagine that due to mobile phones and contact lists, it's quite possible to be in love without knowing any phone numbers.

Personally I know the numbers of the (at a guess) 20 people I call most often, but I always assumed that, in 2011, I'm the exception not the rule.

Not particularly relevant, his point stands either way, just interested to know if other people on HN still find themselves memorising phone numbers.

Jebdm7• 15 years ago

The only numbers I know are the ones that haven't changed since before I was a teenager (basically just my parents' numbers and 911), my own Google Voice number, and Bing 411. That's partially because I can always look up numbers in my contacts, on Facebook, or online, and partially because I make phone calls less than once a week.

cydonian_monk2• 15 years ago

I don't directly remember any new numbers, but I know how the DTMF sequence for the number is supposed to sound when dialed. I could always work back from that to get a human-readable phone number if I needed it.

Like Jebdm, the only numbers I really know are those that haven't changed in a few decades and my own cell number. But I also prefer face to face conversation over telephone, so I'm only likely to call you if I can't find you. (And then I'm more likely to just text or e-mail....)

run4yourlives• 15 years ago

Use address then.

mattm• 15 years ago

I got a new phone number three weeks ago and I still haven't memorized my own phone number.

shazow• 15 years ago

Perhaps an undervalued skill is determining the amount of accuracy necessary? When asked on the spot like that, you may be better off giving an education guess than shuffling through a giant binder.

Sometimes I'll see somebody being asked a question which I know they know the answer to but they'll misinterpret the motivation behind it and the desired answer. This makes me wonder, is it a situational thing or some kind of cultural/language barrier?

I also notice that solid hackers get along really well together because they can anticipate how the other person thinks and know what they want to know (or already know/don't care about). Hacker types seem to be much more culture-biased than the average person, so when you introduce somebody from the other end of the spectrum you get a huge rift.

I suppose that 10 minutes is enough time to notice if this rift exists.

StavrosK• 15 years ago

I'm totally like that. Many times people will ask me questions (oddly, this only happens in interview-type situations) when I will just entirely space out on the motivation. I just can't understand what they want and the question either seems too vague or too obvious. I don't know if it's me or them, but it happens.

physcab• 15 years ago

When I was in graduate school taking my qualifying examination, I stood in front of my 5 advisors answering their questions one by one about my dissertation project (pre-defense). The first time I failed. They questioned me for 2 hours on every detail of my project and grew impatient every time I gave them a hand-wavy answer. The second time I passed. The questioning lasted 15 minutes. I had spent the previous 3 months since the first failure reading every single book on my domain atleast twice. I was also angered (as were they) the first time when they asked simple questions and the answer just didn't bubble to the top of my memory. I think the second time around, they were almost freaked out by my eagerness.

acconrad2• 15 years ago

How do you prepare for this? How do you practice answering these questions? I feel like I can never know enough about the business.

So I would ask, for any of you who have pitched to investors / YC, how do you go about preparing and practicing?

rwar• 15 years ago

(full disclosure: haven't pitched to investors/YC)

Just talking about your product with colleagues, mentors, friends, etc. can help you get prepared. Most likely they will ask you questions and it can be like a mock "interview".

OmarIsmail• 15 years ago

That's the whole point it's not about "preparing and practicing" for the pitch/investors. You'll never "know enough". Instead if you're passionate about the domain and somewhat intelligent then you should know everything the investors know and a hell of a lot more. The investors should have a fraction of the knowledge and experience that you have and thus should be practically incapable of asking you a question you don't know the answer to.

If you can't answer the question then you're either not particularly passionate, or you're not very smart - either way you're not worth investing in.

coffeemug• 15 years ago

Same way the best engineers "prepare" for a job interview - by largely ignoring it. Instead of studying Java certification books they hack in Python, C, and Haskell and read about interesting algorithms in their spare time. When it's time for a job interview, all they have to do is show up.

If you talk to one of your target customers and one startup founder in a similar field a day, in three months you will have spoken to ~180 people that are intimately related to your business. You'll know more about your domain than you ever wanted to, and when the YC interview comes, there is nothing to prepare for.

revorad3• 15 years ago

I find this statement at odds with this one:

The very best startup ideas, the ones that are the biggest successes, tend to be the ideas that you don't know are even going to work.

cbo• 15 years ago

Knowing a domain and being able to predict success in it are two very different things.

EDIT: A better example. Before Ford released the F-150, it seemed to be a solution in search of a problem. It was somewhere between the F-100 and F-250 and none of the pre-market reviewers really seemed to like it. Ford released it anyway. The F-150 went on to become the most popular variant of the best selling truck series for 34 years.

danssig2• 15 years ago

Like most one liners, that's not very fair. I don't even know my own phone number. Why would I? I consider it bad interface that I have to ever even hear this kind of technical detail at all. I know my number and every other number by the name of the person or place I want to call.

Likewise, are you sure the people are looking in their document because they don't know? Maybe they answered this question at some previous time in a really concise and elegant way and want to reuse it? Maybe they have a page in their that visually illustrates the answer?

zbruhnke4• 15 years ago

Interesting article that I think most of the people who apply to YC already understand (Hopefully)

As someone who does not have a co-founder and has now applied for the second time I have decided I am moving to the bay area in June whether I get into YC or not and I am either going to find a co-founder to continue with or go to work at another startup while retaining my rights to the work on this project until I meet some more interesting people interested in working long hours for low pay and having lots of fun while doing it.

I cant imagine my life any other way but in a culture where I am creating every day, life is just not the same for me otherwise and working a 9 to 5 like my parents did when i was growing up has never been an option as far as I am concerned.

spoiledtechie• 15 years ago

It was never an option for me either, but now that I have it, im sort of stuck until my after work life catches up to make the same as my work life.

blhack3• 15 years ago

What are you working on right now, Zach?

Why not start living the crazy-startup-founder lifestyle today? That's what I'm trying to do. [1]The time I spend at my current job is like sleeping to me. It's time during a 24 hour period that I just plain will not get back. I have to do it or I will die.

But the hours I spend not sleeping are hours that I spend reading, and hacking, and writing, and more reading, and more hacking.

As much as I'd prefer the weather (and the availability of coffee) in the Bay Area to the weather in Phoenix, I can't make the move happen right now, so I'm just doing the "crazy hours" thing anyway :)

[1]: I just want to clarify that I don't mean I'm slacking off at my job, if anything, being in "work" mode 100% of the time, as well as having a passion for learning new stuff has benefited my employer. When I say "sleeping", I just mean something that I don't have a choice about doing.

zbruhnke4• 15 years ago

I am working on my current startup idea, right now it is simply a side project. I work for myself as it is so sleep is certainly a commodity in my life. I am hacking just about all day every day and enjoying the heck out of it.

unfortunately I am in Louisiana and with a shortage of hackers to network with here moving to the bay area just seems to make sense for my work as well as my sanity :)

mparke2• 15 years ago

>I cant imagine my life any other way but in a culture where I am creating every day, life is just not the same for me otherwise and working a 9 to 5 like my parents did when i was growing up has never been an option as far as I am concerned.

I'm with you on this one.

clistctrl• 15 years ago

As a stupid, but determined person this gives me hope :D

rokhayakebe3• 15 years ago

Well you need to be a bit stupid to want to start a business. You would be considered stupid if someone told you you have a 5% chance at every kissing this girl, yet you decide to spend the next 3 years of your life pursuing her and her only. This is exactly what we do.

cperciva2• 15 years ago

You would be considered stupid if someone told you you have a 5% chance at every kissing this girl, yet you decide to spend the next 3 years of your life pursuing her and her only.

If that girl is worth more than 20x as much to you as any other girl, a 5% chance is worth it.

chrisaycock• 15 years ago

Progress in life often comes through a healthy dose of foolishness.

VaedaStrike4• 15 years ago

To be concise is more indicative of mastery rather than proficiency. You can understand something very well and be able to navigate your way through your own domain of expertise at whim. But if you can do that AND also communicate your domain to those for whom your domain is horribly foreign then you've demonstrated that you've not merely mastered the domain but that you have a grasp on a more foundational framework that translates to virtually limitless perspectives.

Proficiency is to navigate your world, Mastery is to successfully guide a complete alien through that world and have them see it, even if just dimmly, with the eyes of a native.

Jebdm7• 15 years ago

I don't think that what you're calling mastery and proficiency are matters of degree like you seem to be expressing. Ability to communicate can be completely separate from understanding, because (particularly if you're of above-average intelligence) most people don't understand things the same way that you do.

VaedaStrike4• 15 years ago

I don't think that the underlying inherent knowledge that accompanies the capacity to successfully transmit understanding can be set apart from a more complete understanding.

For example if you can produce any number of outcomes in a single language but lack the capacity to do the same things in another language there's a level of abstraction that you simply have not witnessed which itself gives greater dimension to the fundamental capacities that are being exercised.

If all you know is English, even if you speak it very very very well you can go your whole life missing out on seeing language itself rather than just a one dimensional perspective on a single language. You can have all the parts held in theory but until you can see equivalents in another language in action you lack understanding of English.

The mere capacity to communicate something real demands an empathy that speaks to experience on a higher level. If you can't, in some degree of abundance, find analogous material from which you can more clearly communicate your realm of knowledge to the uninitiated then it says something about the true depth of your knowledge.

Just as you can't get real depth perception without a plurality of vistas neither can you truly see what you're doing unless you have experience, and thereby the capacity for empathy and making links with that empathy, from far outside of your field of focus.

VaedaStrike4• 15 years ago

"then you've demonstrated that you've not merely mastered the domain but that you have a grasp on a more foundational framework that translates to virtually limitless perspectives"

I should have phrased that "not merely grasped" instead of "not merely mastered"

mparke2• 15 years ago

I really like what you've said here. However I'd like to suggest that you've narrowed Mastery quite a bit, The way I see it, proficiency can come with with the ability to guide an alien through the world you understand, but mastery might exist as your very own specific understanding (which when measured against another's mastery might not even be in the same range of comparison ). I might try even argue your point differently, maybe your proficiency represents the ability for you to compare to another person's proficiency in a common subject, which allows you to achieve conciseness when discussing the subject. And your mastery is merely a completely individual experience. Just thinking out loud here. Again well said.

RobMcCullough• 15 years ago

Tried to read but I am distracted by all the clutter!

VaedaStrike4• 15 years ago

To put it concisely :)

A demonstration of empathy that translates to real communication with the particular lay person you are engaging with regard to your domain of expertise shows mastery rather than mere proficiency.

grncdr• 15 years ago

Agreed, the important part about being concise is not that you can boil down a complex idea into a short statement, but that you can give the questioner the information relevant to them. When there is too much relevant information to be concise, that is in itself a relevant (and concise) answer, the art is giving the questioner just enough information to ask another question.

Personally I find doing that sort of thing _extremely_ difficult, and doing it in real-time as part of a verbal conversation orders of magnitude more so.

gerner3• 15 years ago

a great related article at Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/what-is-success-tr... what PG calls determination I think Wired (quoting Angela Duckworth) calls "grit"

gerner3• 15 years ago

and the survey measuring how gritty you are is here: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/17-item%2520Grit%2...

kenjackson• 15 years ago

Clicked it, it didn't work, gave up, moved on.

wpeterson2• 15 years ago

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/12-item%20Grit%20S...

jacoblyles2• 15 years ago

Old news.

6ren• 15 years ago

It's nice and concise.

> If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding.

How much? What percentage lobotomy are we talking about?

I totally agree btw: provided you are focussed on meeting a need ("make something people want"), and are willing to iterate trial-and-error (that's the determination part), massive intelligence isn't required: the inside of your software doesn't need to be great; and it doesn't need to implemen some fundamentally new technology; it's what it does that counts.

> Or when Google started, there were eight to 10 successful established search engines already...

I read a great interview (maybe a co-founder of tripod...?) who went through the evolution of search engines over a decade, each time saying that it was too late to enter the field, and playfully finishing with "[of course, now with google, it really is too late]". I've searched and searched for this but can't find it - anyone recognize it?

rfzabick• 15 years ago

> I read a great interview (maybe a co-founder of tripod...?) who went through the evolution of search engines over a decade, each time saying that it was too late to enter the field, and playfully finishing with "[of course, now with google, it really is too late]". I've searched and searched for this but can't find it - anyone recognize it?

Well, I guess it's not too late to enter the search field, then.

kchronis• 15 years ago

When an entrepreneur is determined and passionate they will find a way to succeed. Without both of those, the "intelligent" individual will just move on to another idea or company.

joelrunyon• 15 years ago

Great line & sentiment --> "And you can see where that line is? Well, this is why we pick based on founders."

Ruudjah• 15 years ago

> What do you look for? Determination. When we started, we thought we were looking for smart people, but it turned out that intelligence was not as important as we expected. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

This is awesome.

Paul Graham spills: Why some companies get his cash and others don't

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