What Kate saw in Silicon Valley

by albertcardona • 17 years ago

264 107 17 years ago

I was thunderstruck by the following:

"By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the 'normal' world. It's populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy."

And:

"Interestingly, while Kate said that she could never pick out successful founders, she could recognize VCs, both by the way they dressed and the way they carried themselves."

arfrank2• 17 years ago

With regards to being able to pick out founders and VCs, I wonder if the inability to pick out successful founders is due to the fact that they look just like everyone else who is trying to create something and do something cool, and after they have become successful they see no need to change themselves because thats what got them their in the first place. As for VCs this could be due to the fact that they in order to maintain their position need to have a certain composure.

replicatorblog4• 17 years ago

I wonder if the issue of carriage has more to do with the Avg. age of founders being ~25yrs. vs. VC's ~45yrs. Beyond the obvious appearance issues you tend to develop more confidence, present better, etc. as you age. That said a fundamental difference in the Funder vs. Founder personality makes sense as well.

wheels4• 17 years ago

I can't answer for Kate, but the last speaker of the summer was a founder in his 40s -- and former VC at that -- and he still definitely gave off the founder vibe.

I think the biggest difference between younger and older founders seemed to be the relative levels of confidence at various points in the game.

Gibbon• 17 years ago

The average age of founders is not 25.. I suggest you revisit your assumptions.

bkovitz• 17 years ago

Lots of people, even in their teens, but certainly by their early 20s, take almost a scientific interest in "clothes and carriage". These are the sorts of people who become business majors and read Maxim.

Examples of the kinds of things they talk, think, and work on quite deliberately (I am not making any of this up):

- How high should you hold your drink? (Correct answer: A little above waist high, somewhat at your side.)

- Details about ties, suits, shoes, shirts, pants, accessories, etc. The exact social niche that each possible choice puts you in.

- Should you ever apologize, even when you've done something wrong? (No consensus here, but a surprisingly large contingent say "no".)

- Exactly how to position your feet when standing casually, in order to demonstrate high status. (Sort of an L shape.)

- Which hole in your belt at which to place the buckle. (Correct answer: the third hole.)

As Paul Graham pointed out, most people spend pretty much all their time thinking about and practicing these things. Women work on this stuff much more than men, and they tend to notice your skill level at those social games very acutely. It might look like that stuff happens unconsciously, but it doesn't. It's practiced, discussed, refined quite deliberately.

It makes me think of programmers thinking about small things like how to name variable names (e.g. name arrays with a plural), when to use aggregation or inheritance, etc. You keep refining every little detail of a skill every day, and two things happen after a while: you get really good, and you can size up someone else's skill level very quickly and accurately.

jedc• 17 years ago

I was recently looking back at the Startup School 08 videos, and the difference between the startup founders (even Bezos) and Greg McAdoo (of Sequoia) was striking.

I've since heard that Greg is one of the most "hacker-like" of VC's out there... which would go to further proving that point.

benatkin• 17 years ago

Have you ever seen Vint Cerf speak? I wonder where you'd place him. He's been wearing suits regularly since Junior High.

yannis2• 17 years ago

>Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects. I was scratching my head on this one - thinking why a person with architectural skills would be chosen to help run YC - and then it struck me that originality and creativity is perhaps the hallmarks of YC or am I missing something?

maxklein• 17 years ago

YC is a business of friends. The companies are made of friends, they try to get startups who come as friends, they try to make startups become friends.

yannis2• 17 years ago

Great reply maxklein, thank you.

ujjwalg3• 17 years ago

On a side note, can someone from YC post pictures of YC office? Just curious. :)

arfrank2• 17 years ago

I believe this a group of pictures from the DemoDay that just happened at YC: http://demoday.fanchatter.com/

ujjwalg3• 17 years ago

I was more curious about how the office setup is designed. How startups are allocated space, what is the interaction model between different startups, is there a white board to post story/question/idea of the day?

jl• 17 years ago

Our frontpage has some good photos.

ujjwalg3• 17 years ago

I am not a big fan of flash slide shows. They literally suck.

edit: One cannot control it. Move the slide show faster, slower, go back, stop, etc., which makes it time consuming and inefficient.

edw519• 17 years ago

9. What a solitary task startups are.

This is the hardest thing for me to explain to others. And still one of the hardest for me to get used to myself. It takes a lot of time working alone to get anything done.

It may also be one of the many reasons Hacker News is so popular. I don't know about you guys, but if I didn't have this place to break up the loneliness, I'd probably go nuts.

kyro3• 17 years ago

I am in no way trying to be disrespectful here, but if you rely on an online forum to keep you from going crazy, you might want to consider restructuring your priorities and workflow to give you a little more time to breathe and enjoy life. An online community is great and all, but there are millions of other, more tangible and real world, things that can be as, if not and most likely more, rewarding than participating on HN.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

there are millions of other, more tangible and real world, things that can be as, if not and most likely more, rewarding than participating on HN.

Well, that depends strongly on the person, doesn't it? :)

billswift4• 17 years ago

Maybe, but interacting with people directly is more distracting than HN too.

wheels4• 17 years ago

Actually I've noticed that online communities can provide some sort of minimum level of social interaction required to keep one sane. I don't think it's a good strategy for long-term social interaction, but if you're going through a phase of your life where you're optimizing all parameters for maximum productivity while staying 1% south of jumping the shark, it kind of makes sense.

delano• 17 years ago

It's difficult to engage with someone while you put a thought on the back burner for 5 or 10 minutes.

abalashov• 17 years ago

I don't think he was being entirely literal, quite to the extreme that would warrant your didactic prescription.

maxniederhofer• 17 years ago

I've never been as lonely as when I started a one-founder company. Long hours practically made my social life go away. Sure, I hired people, but I couldn't afford to hire the people I really wanted to work with.

Lessons? Don't start alone. Pick your co-founders really well (think "marriage"). Make sure you have people you really want to work with who are ready to leave their jobs and work for less money because they really want to work with you.

hooande• 17 years ago

It seems like that approach greatly increases the cost of starting a company. Finding a suitable partner for "marriage" isn't easy...ask any middle aged single woman. It's almost a full time job in and of itself. And then you have to face the herculian task of creating something out of nothing.

I think the lesson here is that if loneliness is a big problem for you, you might not want to start your own company.

billswift4• 17 years ago

Most really creative work is. Writers proverbially are loners, so are artists who are actually producing rather than showing off. Even architecture is solo in the design phase, it's also iterative; you come up with ideas, show them to the client, get their feedback, go off revise your ideas, and around again and again until the client is satisfied enough to start building; then the new set of changes start when the client sees it being built and starts making more changes. That's why the architectural and landscape designer I used to work for ONLY worked cost plus.

dkasper• 17 years ago

Doesn't it seem like this is a reason it doesn't matter if you are in Silicon Valley?

sid• 17 years ago

You are very right with that !, I have a friend who is working on his product and sometimes he asks me to come over and hack with him. If i know what it is im going to hack and its more typing then actual thinking or problem solving i may come but if i need to do some serious work i never take him up on the offer.

Reason is, it is about locking yourself up, getting through alot of the problems on your own and working on the next one. The minute you have someone there (even if they are coding as well) and when your task is not integrating it becomes more of a distraction having someone there.

For me, youtube, hacker news and sydney morning herald get me through my lonliness when im hacking away, also the odd trip to subway to get myself a sandwich and the lady at the counter :)

zaidf• 17 years ago

This is one reason being on a campus can help.

Then again, that has its own challenges. I've tried to work with several different uni friends in last few months and it's astonishing how many things they have calling their attention leaving little to no time for the start-up.

What I do is lock myself deep inside a little library cubicle. Then when I need some fresh air, I chill out by the student union. Talk to buds. And return to work. It really helps that my product is hyper-focused for the college market.

Tawheed• 17 years ago

I propose you create a BrainTrust with your most trusted advisors -- http://AskMyBrainTrust.com. Having one can immensely help you not only get past loneliness but also get advice and outside thought on your strategic decisions.

tsestrich• 17 years ago

Very interesting to get a "third-party" perspective on things, having never gotten to work out in that environment myself.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure most people could tolerate the risk of failure. I think the change for the future is that large organizations will be collections of small groups run like startups, but without the large update and downside.

billswift4• 17 years ago

I doubt that could successfully be done more than rare occasions, for some of the problems see Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Busin...

apu2• 17 years ago

pg/jl/tlb/rtm: as you're primarily advisors and investors now, do you feel like you've started adopting any habits of VCs (either positive or negative)?

pg8• 17 years ago

Interesting question.

Not all investors are VCs. There are also angel investors, and we are much more like angels, both in our backgrounds and the part of the startup world we occupy. Angels don't have a lot of habits, either good or bad. They're mostly just individuals who got rich from their own startups; their personalities are not much affected by being investors.

The one thing that makes us different from angels is that we invest on such a large scale. We have a brand name and an office and a web site and all that. Would that engender any habits, though? I can't think of any.

I definitely don't think we have any of the habits of VCs that are mentioned in this list. The fact that VCs dress up and try to project an aura of power comes from being finance guys, not VCs per se; investment bankers are the same (and in fact are indistinguishable to me). And we don't have the luxury of being sheep, because we have to decide whether or not to invest in a company the same day we meet them.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

Has managing your own fund affected how you think about the upside of startups?

nuweborder• 17 years ago

Great insight. Launch fast and iterate. Learn from mistakes, edit, and continue to build something that people want.

The "Founder" next door is like "The Millionaire Nextdoor".Keeping it simple, frugal, and staying cash-flow positive wins the game. This is why your millionaire next door and your founder next door are probably one in the same. Similar philosophies.

stumm• 17 years ago

"I always worry the speakers will put us in an embarrassing position by contradicting what we tell the startups, but it happens surprisingly rarely."

Why would someone with a different opinion be embarrassing?

pg8• 17 years ago

Because it would imply that we'd given people the wrong advice. The speakers are generally pretty eminent. We'd look bad if we told people to do x and some famous startup founder then told them not to.

blasdel• 17 years ago

I think that any public exposition / debate following such a disagreement would be far more valuable to all present than anything either party could convey as intentional advice.

jjs• 17 years ago

"Starting a startup is like science in that you have to follow the truth wherever it leads. In the rest of the world, people don't start things till they're sure what they want to do, and once started they tend continue on their initial path even if it's mistaken."

mkyc• 17 years ago

Modesty. When someone who you respect or look up to inadvertantly contradicts what you have been teaching, this can be embarrassing.

hristov• 17 years ago

And the perfect start-up founder is ....

http://croutonboy.typepad.com/photos/people_i_hate/scrappy.j...

indiejade• 17 years ago

4. How scrappy founders are. That was her actual word. I agree with her, but till she mentioned this it never occurred to me how little this quality is appreciated in most of the rest of the world. It wouldn't be a compliment in most organizations to call someone scrappy.

Scrappy is getting by on the most minimal of necessities, does not ever involve a company doing one's laundry, and from everything I've been able to gather, requires actual bean counting.

databus• 17 years ago

Weird, I asked and to my wife "scrappy" meant someone who gets into physical altercations. References were made to a family member who has a volatile personality.

To me, a "scrappy person" has always been someone who, when life or a situation knocks them down, they get back up and try again. I was not aware that this was a derogatory term.

LogicHoleFlaw• 17 years ago

Huh, I always thought of "scrappy" as a willingness to get into a fight, despite the odds being against you.

gojomo• 17 years ago

I think that's the traditional definition -- but its meaning is drifting, because the word also makes people think of 'scrounging' or 'getting by on scraps'. So it's not just a fighter, but one who fights on in a resourceful/thrifty way.

Though PG cites the 'belligerent' meaning, I suspect Kate and others are likely to mean/hear the 'thrifty/tenacious' connotations.

dschobel3• 17 years ago

2. How much startups' ideas change. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they started with.

If this is really true (and I fully believe that it is), why not just interview individuals like a job interview rather than have them pitch ideas?

If you know the resulting product is almost certainly not going to look anything like what they're proposing, I would just try to swing some on-campus interviews at Stanford and UC Berkeley, hire the kids based on smarts & personality and then put them in a room and only then start talking about ideas.

Why bother reviewing their initial ideas at all (other than as an indicator of the aforementioned smarts & personality)?

snprbob86• 17 years ago

Having an idea gives you something to talk about. It grants candidates many opportunities to prove (or disprove) their ability to operate within a problem domain. If they just dropped the idea-specialized interviews, it would be paradoxically harder to find "stem cell" founders who can take on any task.

billswift4• 17 years ago

Having someone that's actually working on a problem also helps weed out those who are competent but unable to self-motivate and focus (like me, unfortunately) both of which are needed for startups.

lacker• 17 years ago

If you know the resulting product is almost certainly not going to look anything like what they're proposing

Big difference between "about half" and "almost certainly not".

dschobel3• 17 years ago

Semantics notwithstanding, 50% is still a significant rate of death for a process which is focussed heavily on the incipient idea.

aberman• 17 years ago

"other than as an indicator of the aforementioned smarts & personality"

Shouldn't that be enough? Having an idea gives you a starting point from which to iterate.

apsurd2• 17 years ago

Ah you see, your premise is wrong. To go looking for someone is the polar opposite of how to find capable founders, very simply because it implies they need to be found. Don't take this the wrong way, but I think your ideas are too academic. You don't just "go to a college and find entrepreneurs".

There certainly is value in the effort one engages in when self-developing, self-formulating, self-revising, self-actualizing, self-motivating, self-preserving and finally self-sticking-your-neck-out, which is what the YC process is sort of about.

In Summary:

Being a doer aint easy.

dschobel3• 17 years ago

I was thinking of something along the lines of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton but for computer scientists & entrepreneurs.

In short: Interesting things happen when you put smart people in a room without any constraint and a little bit of funding.

Although I freely admit the IAS is fairly controversial and some people hate the model.

pg8• 17 years ago

Why bother reviewing their initial ideas at all (other than as an indicator of the aforementioned smarts & personality)?

That is in fact about how we think of the idea, if it's still just an idea. Sometimes, as e.g. with a company like Bump, there's a real product to judge, but that's rarely the case.

kabuks• 17 years ago

Good question. I would be interested to know if there's a correlation between startups who stuck to their ideas, and startups who failed

dgabriel• 17 years ago

I've always thought of "scrappy," as more like an indomitable underdog, not someone belligerent (which has negative connotations) or necessarily undignified.

jwecker• 17 years ago

It comes from old-school boxing. "Inclined to fight" was the original meaning. Bellicose is closer than belligerent. Certainly undignified, traditionally at least. In the last few decades it has been used for underdogs, as in "he's small but scrappy-" giving it that positive implication you mention- small but always ready to fight. Think scrappy-doo

geebee• 17 years ago

"Scrappy" is a half-compliment. That's different from an underhanded compliment, which is an insult in the guise of a compliment. A half-compliment is a statement that is earnestly complimentary, but with some negative connotations.

Think of it this way: nobody would refer to Roger Federer as "scrappy". You could say that the opposite of "scrappy" is dignified, but you could also say the opposite of scrappy is "elegant." Dignity may be deadly, but I'm not sure that's the only thing you lose when you exude "scrappiness".

tyn• 17 years ago

Number 4 was a surprise to me. And I'm not sure I really get the meaning of "If you're not threatening, you're probably not doing anything new, and dignity is merely a sort of plaque".

wwkeyboard• 17 years ago

About point #1, does anyone have data on how many startups really fail? I have found answers from 70-90% on google, but those numbers come from blog posts and not from 100 times the number of failed businesses divided by the number of successful businesses formed in some reasonable grouping of time and space.

replicatorblog4• 17 years ago

Along those lines I'm curious how many of the YC companies make it to a next round of funding? Or make it to profitability and don't seek funding vs. those that formally wind down. I went to a TechStars meetup and something like 10 of 16 from the inaugural class got funded, 4 didn't because they were profitable, acquired, or otherwise all set, and 2 formally closed. Is that kind of data available for YC?

pg8• 17 years ago

From the winter cycle of 16 startups, there are 3 that have neither raised money nor are ramen profitable. Of those 3, 1 is already dead, because of disputes between the founders. Another hasn't started trying to raise money yet, because there's stuff they want to get built first. So only 1 of the 16 is currently trying to raise money.

apsurd2• 17 years ago

I don't always understand why everyone is so extremely hung up on PG. I respect the guy, but he's human after all.

Anyway, this might have something to do with it:

"By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the "normal" world. It's populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy."

That made me smile for about 30 mins. Awesome.

nsrivast• 17 years ago

Does it feel good not to be so unbearably and inefficiently "normal"?

sp332• 17 years ago

It's not everyone, its just that PG fanatics are... more concentrated here.

yef• 17 years ago

Good observations, but the last two paragraphs fail to convince me. "Normal people" span the gamut of solitary, advice-seeking, etc. I also wouldn't describe the past as "slow and harmonious".

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the "normal" world. It's populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy.

Don't stop there, Paul. This "inversion" idea still has a lot more mileage in it. Just off the top of my head I'd add that the "normal" world is also full of large teams, scheduled meetings, integrated hierarchical social environments, and teams that never die.

tjmc• 17 years ago

Made me smile, but I don't agree that "dignity is merely a sort of plaque". That may be right if you're just talking about presentation/grooming, but "dignity" (to me) includes self assurance, courage and perhaps a bit of defiance. All good things to see in a founder I'd say.

netsp4• 17 years ago

By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the "normal" world.

I suspect that this observation has something to do with the last PG essay to hit HN about putting yourself in the centre.

If you take any list of characteristics that you apply to a group, it will tend to contrast them with the 'norm.' Invert it and you get their perspective on the rest of the world, especially if the list is self authored.

Imagine a group of Uzbeki expats in Rotterdam commenting on themselves. They'll come up with a list of traits that make them stand out from the crowd. Invert it and you have their perspective on the Dutch. The problem/advantage of this trick is that you might end up with a list of fairly marginal (in the eyes of a non-Uzbeki) or unremarkable traits.

sielskr• 17 years ago

Paul Graham: I'd like to encourage you to write up any insight you may have had not about startups. Your essay about high school (the one that compares the assiduousness of high school students to Navy Seals) was one the most helpful and insight-dense things I have ever read.

torpor• 17 years ago

WTF, is it normal practice for tech startups to hire their /architects/ to help run the company? I mean, is this really such a great thing?

messel• 17 years ago

Surprised Kate didn't mention that founders were not only scrappy, but a little crazy. The combination of willpower, imagination, confidence, and the ability to listen to users/customers is like dancing with a Tasmanian devil. It always sets my neurons spinning when I try and grok an entrepreneurs rationale.

ngs• 17 years ago

'Scrappy' is a great description. I also like the imagery 'Scrappy smart' brings to mind.

What Kate saw in Silicon Valley

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