A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

https://www.tonykulesa.com/p/a-relatively-small-amount-of-force

by jseliger • 3 years ago

102 125 3 years ago

It sounds good. But it kind of reminds me of High School Football or Basketball Players (choose a high paying professional sport). Who bank their whole future on focusing on one thing that is Super-Low-Percentage-Of-Success-High-Paying-Job.

How many football players skip their education, and then DON'T make it? Where do they end up.

Now, think Joe Blow Computer Science Major, is NOT going to be a Millionaire, but a decade later when they are applying for some middle tier IT Job, they will damn well need to show a degree..

mattlondon4• 3 years ago

There are often posts on here showing that it is better to spend say 10 or even 5 years doing 35-40 hour weeks at a FAANG where your total comp will end up being $2-5,000,000 over that time, than risk it at a startup working 80+ hour weeks for a chance at the big time but ultimately leave with nothing apart from exhaustion and an unheard-of failed startup on your resume.

I think there is a lot of truth in that.

And yeah I went to school with a bunch of kids who had semi-success as a teenager at sports or music, only to then not make it big when they needed to at 16 or 17 etc. Perhaps they all ended up at successful unicorns or are L7-FAANGs, but I doubt it

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

But that's also a false dichotomy. There are many options aside from those two.

tqi• 3 years ago

The economics of the Bay Area really distorts things. If you make 2M over 10 years, you will almost certainly have enough money to live a good life (never go hungry, able to travel, etc), but you will absolutely not have enough to buy a house or start a family. I think this realization is what drives folks to take a third path, which is starting at established Big Tech companies before moving to early stage startups.

angarg12• 3 years ago

It drives me nuts when people point at engineers making $1M on a startup exit, without counting the average income over their tenure.

If they worked in the company 5 years with a 100k base salary, the income averages to about 300k per year. Sure, that's a healthy income, but it's about on par with a big tech salary, with the difference that big tech is more stable and predictable, and not heavily backloaded.

btilly2• 3 years ago

The hit rate in the article is almost 1/4. That's a lot better than high school sports.

The fallback if you don't succeed is called "programmer". And no, programmers don't need college degrees if they have real world experience. I've known a lot of very successful programmers with no college degree at all.

FrustratedMonky5• 3 years ago

Not if the denominator is all Computer Science students who may think of dropping out of school when seeing these success stories.

And

The days of hacking something together and getting a job are kind of dwindling if not gone. The days of self learning, and showing skill isn't really as prevalent anymore. Sure, it was like that during 90-2000's. But these days, not so much.

timewasterthrow4• 3 years ago

Peoples say the odds are ultra low, and talk a lot of young people out of trying. I played freshman football. I was ok. I'm 6'4", smart enough to get into Cal MechE, decently capable physically and grow muscle easily and have never been injured in my life basically even though I ride dirtbikes. My dad got me to give up on football.

Later I found out that if you look at all highschool players that play all 4 years, the odds of making it are about 0.1% or 1 in 1000. That includes tons of players that are basically playing casually and not really physically the right body type to make it.

If you make it to college football, something that I could have somewhere with my academics and size, the odds are about 1 in 100. At that point you can argue that just about everyone is physically capable of potentially making it, just missing the skill. But take away those that are playing still just to play with no plans of going further and thus train about that way (I'd argue thats about half of them), that means that 1 in 50 serious football players at the college level can make it.

If my dad had told me that with my size and decent brain I had about 1 in 50 chance of making it, I would have stuck with it. Even if I failed, I would have learned a lot from the team work and gotten a lot of value from the comradery IMO. Instead I studied a lot more, passed some AP tests, and got some boring as hell mech engineering degree.

bagacrap3• 3 years ago

You make it sound as if all you need to do is study, try hard, and roll a 50-sided die.

Obviously that is not sufficient. And anyone who's playing in the NFL today was far better than "ok" at all previous levels of competition.

snapplebobapple2• 3 years ago

Kind of wish hackernews would screen newly registered domain names and tell people to post again when their domain is over 30 days old...

dang2• 3 years ago

We'd need to go over the list of submissions from such domains in order to see how many good ones were in there.

As frustrating as the mediocre median is, it's more important to not lose good articles than it is to avoid bad ones.

snapplebobapple2• 3 years ago

Yah I wasn't commenting on the quality of the post. I was just annoyed because I've been hit a bunch of times recently by seeing something I wanted to read and being blocked by work dns policies (since domains less than 30 days old make up a huge portion of malware/scam attack domains). Would rather wait 30 days to see it in my hacker news feed or see a link to a twitter summary that then links to the newly created domain website so I can at least get a longer form summary before I am disappointed by my inability to see it.

anileated18• 3 years ago

I want to start a company, but will not. The main reason why the existence of YC does not change this is because I know my idea, even if I go all in, does not promise explosive growth on par with Airbnbs of this world, and therefore is not attractive to investment. It does have the potential to eventually become a lifestyle business, though, which would be good enough for me. Unfortunately, I guess it will have to wait until I have some more spare time (ah, the age old excuse).

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

VC money is essential for certain, specific sorts of businesses. If what you have in mind is not one of that type, then I argue VC money is something you want to actively avoid. That's not to say you should avoid investors -- there is a dizzying array of different kinds of investors outside of venture capital.

Unfortunately, I guess it will have to wait until I have some more spare time (ah, the age old excuse).

In my experience, such a time will never arrive. You need to consciously prioritize starting a business (although that doesn't mean you can't hold down a day job at the very start).

How does the old saying go? The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.

brigadier1322• 3 years ago

Why do you need investment? If you can build it on your own and there is a real niche with people willing to pay money for what you build then you can make a lot of money as an individual.

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

Yes!

If your goal isn't to build a kind of empire or to shoot for unimaginable riches, but instead to start a solid small business that lets you do the sort of work you enjoy and provides enough income to live in your preferred style, then it's never been easier than it is today.

All you really need is to find a niche that has a small market. How small is OK depends a lot on the specifics of a business, but if we're talking a one-person software shop, you can probably live decently with a customer base of a handful of thousands. Even less if your niche supports very high profit margins.

And, as an old mentor pointed out, if you're fishing in the pool of the entire world (which the internet allows at low cost), then you can just nail two boards together and find a thousand or two who are willing to buy it.

anileated18• 3 years ago

I can’t because I need money to survive, and this will not provide that money for months until the thing is written, deployed, and has an established enough paying user base… And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by whatever calamity in meantime!

tiedieconderoga• 3 years ago

Simple: capex and economies of scale.

Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not $50/.

I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.

Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're looking at 7-8 figures.

If you aren't independently wealthy, neither option is really feasible, and the former option will almost certainly end in tears if you try to stretch and bootstrap with your own money.

s1artibartfast5• 3 years ago

As you point out, not all VCS are right for all businesses, nor should anyone expect them to be. Some businesses aren't suitable for Venture Capital at all.

There's a lot of friction and transaction costs around finding capital for even suitable Investments. Reputation is one way to overcome this but it's difficult to bootstrap reputation.

timewasterthrow4• 3 years ago

I have used this excuse in one way or another for 15 years, over several iterations. I made great money in sales, so was able to step away every few years to tackle the great startup lifestyle businesses I have.

The #1 rule I have now, and advice I have for you is, if your idea does not pull at you so strongly to work on it on whatever 'spare time' you have (aka, time you make for it by ignoring other non main job related things), then DO not quit your job to make time. And do not think you will work on it when you retire. Most people just wont.

Unless your idea/business naturally grows to the point where you are spending SO much time on it that you can basically not function while having your job due to sleep deprivation, do not quit your job thinking you will do the work then or you'll have the skill/ability to get it to that point if only you had more time.

anileated18• 3 years ago

I think it is a fair point. Imagine quitting your job, assuming it is an OK job, and finding you have to do something you dislike in order to survive…

deterministic• 3 years ago

99.9999% (or whatever) of businesses are started without VC funding.

sonicshadow9• 3 years ago

If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented OpenAI, Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit, and many more.

Interesting, comparing core scientific research and output by Bell Labs to just techi-ifying existing industries and not really adding much new value (other than OpenAI).

jrvarela562• 3 years ago

Funny how you just picked out OpenAI, maybe Stripe and the others create value too?

sonicshadow9• 3 years ago

Naw I'm not trying to get VC funding so I don't feel like brown-nosing them too.

adventured3• 3 years ago

OpenAI shook the planet with something fairly groundbreaking. It's closer to the iPhone in the rapid impact it had, moving a lot faster than the iPhone did, than the extension of a payment processor made easier (which is what Stripe is).

Stripe, Airbnb, Doordash, Uber etc. They're services that add value by extending existing concepts to the Internet or in a slightly better way. There's nothing revolutionary or earth shaking about them. They're eBay, taking auctions and putting it online; it's not revolutionary, it's modestly evolutionary. They certainly add very real value (although Airbnb's value add at this point may be going backwards; most services peak in value creation at some point before heading south).

The connected world took notice of GPT extremely rapidly. Only a few tech lightning strikes have been like that in the past 50 years, and only a few have moved very fast.

Downplaying the dramatic impact of GPT 3 / 4 would be silly, frankly. And we're only in the first or second inning. It has set off a remarkable chain reaction that is reverberating globally. It's a eureka moment the likes of which you only see a few times in a lifetime if you're lucky.

mattlondon4• 3 years ago

Yeah I think there is a lot of sentiment that these ideas/founders are somehow unique and that if those people didn't do anything with those ideas then something like Airbnb or Reddit or Dropbox wouldn't have ever happened.

I think people need to be realistic - none of those are particularly ground breaking ideas, as evidenced by the fact that there are countless competitors and in many cases even predecessors that were not in the right place at the right time. These people just happened to be born to the right parents in the right country at the right time to have the privilege to have someone throw money at a not very original idea that could have been anyone's. Great for them, but I think it is worth staying grounded and realise that they're not visionaries and had they not even been born, someone would have thought up the same idea anyway. Monkies and typewriters and all that.

So maybe we'd not have "Reddit", but we'd no doubt have something largely identical that would fill that same niche. Equating any of these trivial things with something like the transistor is just absolute arrogance.

</unpopular-opinion>

fragmede3• 3 years ago

But by that argument, we'd no doubt still have transistors if the transistor hadn't been invented. The traitorous eight, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts shaped our world in a way that no one else could. Same with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We'd no doubt still have computers, and smartphones, but the landscape would be much different and we'd be poorer without them.

The larger picture is to say that you can have an effect on the world. Even if it is just being in the right place at the right time, what you do, and how you do it matters. If Elon Musk hadn't bought Twitter, there would still be a Twitter, but with less Elon Musk brand of shittery. Maybe a different brand of shittery, but it would be that other person's brand.

sonicshadow9• 3 years ago

Until I joined HN I wasn't aware that all these tech companies deserve the same rareified air as core scientific research. The real world barely thinks about Airbnb and how it's "revolutionized the world for a narrow slice of remote tech workers that want to rent a house in Mexico for a month".

adventured3• 3 years ago

These people just happened to be born to the right parents in the right country at the right time to have the privilege to have someone throw money at a not very original idea that could have been anyone's

You elaborated precisely that not just anyone could have implemented the ideas, which is in fact the single most important thing. Having an idea is not very meaningful, as nearly all ideas are close to worthless. It's a common mistake to think ideas are what have a lot of value.

The thing that primarily matters is who can and or is willing to act on an idea, who can bring it into existence (whether in a tangible sense of a product/service, or in terms of reaching a community to spread an idea (such as an idea in the field of published science)).

Those ideas only come into existence as a thing because some people were in the right place at the right time to make them happen and acted on it (with several other critical factors being required, some of which you listed). Not just anybody can bring an idea to fruition; literally millions of Internet users could easily have the idea for a subscription Internet-based Photoshop (circa 10-15 years ago) - now try making it a thing and try making it successful.

scrozier• 3 years ago

lol...I came to post this EXACTLY. Having been in, or on the periphery of, the startup world for a long time (ending about ten years ago), I've come to see it as pretty vapid, unimaginative, and even downright destructive. If a bunch of young-ish guys (and a few women) with elite upbringings want to have an incestuous little money party, well, good on them, I guess. But all the eloquent words trying to obscure the theme of "I want to make a whole bunch of money" is wearing thin on me.

sonicshadow9• 3 years ago

I'm not in the startup world and live in a city that Silicon Valley considers "tech-adjacent". I excitedly attended a start-up event a few months ago where people pitched ideas, and I was massively disappointed by how unoriginal every single idea was. Everyone proposed creating an app that does xyz pointless service that they think will make money. I also hated how many people showed up thinking they could con some hyper-intelligent but obviously socially retarded dev to "bust out an app" for them over the weekend, presumably for free.

efficax• 3 years ago

lol, imagine telling Bill Shockley: "oh, you invented the transistor? well I built an iPhone app that dispatches a pizza order". The only thing here even close to a real invention is OpenAI and even they didn't invent the core tech (neural nets, transformers, linear regression, gpu farms) but just threw a bunch of money at applying it in a new way.

adventured3• 3 years ago

You're overly downplaying the role of combination in creation, which is what most creation consists of (including inventing the transistor, although to a lesser degree).

Imagine downplaying the iPhone by saying they merely combined some things that already existed, as they didn't invent most of the core tech in the first iPhone.

Apple just threw a bunch of money at combining tech that already existed by that premise; and they definitely didn't invent the smartphone. And SpaceX didn't invent rocketry either. And Tesla didn't invent the electric car. It'd be absurd to downplay these things and how difficult they were to bring into routine existence. And Netscape didn't invent the Web browser, and Google didn't invent the search engine, and Amazon didn't invent ecommerce, and Atari + Nintendo didn't invent the video game, and Ford didn't invent the automobile.

Impact also matters a lot more than just being first.

tom-_-• 3 years ago

I think people are reading this line the wrong way. The author isn't implying Instacart is as important as the transistor, that would be ludicrous.

He's simply drawing an analogy between the output of laboratories like Bell Labs that produce breakthrough scientic research and "economic labs" like YC that produce breakthrough businesses.

Yes, AirBNB, Instacart etc are breakthrough businesses in the sense that they disrupted long-standing and deeply entrenched business models. The ideas themselves are not extraordinary but building and scaling a business from zero often against much better financed competitors is no easy feat and takes a unique amount of persistence (and often good timing) to succeed.

xigency• 3 years ago

Actually seems like a prescient comparison to me. Relevant here is ‘economic research’ which is developing new methods in business, not technology. If YC isn’t a function which transforms startups, then at least it’s a transistor which amplifies VC capital.

sonicshadow9• 3 years ago

Economists do ecomomic research. The founders of Stripe, Airbnb, etc are not researchers, just unrepentant opportunists.

bowsamic2• 3 years ago

I find it quite distasteful. Founders should just admit that they want to make the next big thing that explodes into huge money, a la "The Social Network". It's sad that they feel like they have to do this self-deception to try and convince themselves they are doing something noble

bfrog• 3 years ago

Please don’t equate DoorDash and Stripe with the laser and transistor.

sonicshadow9• 3 years ago

DoorDash was the laser that cut the razor-thin margins of the small mom-and-pop restaurant to nothing, and Stripe "transitioned" the banking industry to a world where...they just do the same thing but a little better.

dang2• 3 years ago

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tlb• 3 years ago

Most outsider analyses of YC are total nonsense. But this article focuses on the right things.

One thing it gets wrong:

Despite Paul Graham’s assertion that startups should not co-locate, many of the YC startups of this period did live together (and still do today). This created a social community around YC startups that also attracted new recruits, such as Justin Kan’s brother, Dan Kan, who went on to found Exec (W12) and Cruise (W14).

PG has talked about not starting your startup in co-working spaces, because the startup will take on the ambient culture instead of developing its own, and the ambient culture in co-working spaces is pretty bogus. But living with and being friends with fellow founders is great. Being a founder can be lonely, because there are parts of the struggle you can't share with the rest of the company. Being friends with people going through the same process is one of the best things you can do for the company and yourself.

animalia• 3 years ago

Thanks, I've added this correction to the essay.

eshack94• 3 years ago

Feels like someone's trying to sell me something.

SV_BubbleTime• 3 years ago

Most things are ads, but especially this.

I like the list of sites in as success stories. I find the majority of them absolutely awful for humanity.

mistermann2• 3 years ago

As long as the stack of cash keeps getting higher, all is well. No need to overthink things. :)

dmvdoug• 3 years ago

Yet it got put in the same sentence as Bell Labs. First sign for me not to take it seriously.

prions• 3 years ago

Comparing YC to Bell Labs, which had deep ties to academia, misses the entire philosophy of YC and Paul Graham. He constantly talks about academia being a hive of orthodoxy, and positions "smart people" as those who can think around it.

By his logic, Bell Labs would be one of the largest hives of orthodox thinking to ever exist, and its the complete antithesis of vc heterodox thought

KArgos• 3 years ago

It is crucial to choose high-quality natural supplements that will actually help your body when using them, so it is crucial to make the right choice. The supplements you can find on https://www.amazon.com/stores/KIKIGreen/Homepage/page/6032AE..., in my opinion, are very helpful and well-liked. They will help your skin tone and make you feel better overall. Therefore, since adding these supplements to your diet will be very beneficial to you, you should think about doing so.

darkclouds• 3 years ago

was a discovery about who could do great work, how to find them, and how to massively raise their ambition.

It sounds great, but life doesnt work like that, which is why besides finance, YC's main attribute, law and medicine also exists.

Some people get radicalised before they even start school, just watch the news every day to see whats going on and see where people are getting radicalised.

tehsauce• 3 years ago

If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit…

This comparison made me chuckle. It seems to highlight how yc is different from an organization focused on scientific research rather than how it is similar.

amelius• 3 years ago

The only principle they follow is: "if you throw a shitton of money at any given problem, you can corner a market!"

incompatible• 3 years ago

I know which inventions I'd rather have.

gonzo412• 3 years ago

It's important to learn the history of Jack Welch at GE. His choices echo through most modern society at the moment.

shanusmagnus• 3 years ago

Can you say more about this? Why Welch specifically, vs other important execs over time?

neilv• 3 years ago

How has the percentage of YC founders who are "nerds" varied over time?

pepecoder• 3 years ago

Ahahaha comparing CRUDs apps to technological breakthroughs like the laser or transistor xD

koromak• 3 years ago

I don't know why everyone assumes "more startups!" is an unambiguously good thing.

This industry is changing the world, but probably not for the better.

YossarianFrPrez• 3 years ago

Perhaps a bit tangential, but the reason there aren't more bio-tech startups given the cited number of bio-tech PhDs is because graduate school / academia doesn't select for "entrepreneurship potential" (broadly defined), it doesn't nurture this potential over the course of one's graduate education, and it doesn't reward entrepreneurship.

Academia has favored "the mind" over every other quality of a human being for a long time. Maybe this is useful for capital-d Discovery. Jury's out on whether it is more effective to train researchers to be founders rather than training founders to be research-oriented.

A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

Related Stories