by harscoat on 3/19/24, 3:36 PM with 652 comments
by codethatwerks on 3/19/24, 10:48 PM
I assume a lot of start ups are started by older people too.
I think for older people an advantage is to solve older people problems. Like how sucky accessing all kinds of “adulting” things are from aged care to dealing with myriad systems with kids schools or any other problems that have inevitably been chucked at you. Some of these “startups” might actually be lobbying/political work for the good that doesn’t make money, some might be startups.
Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor.
by YossarianFrPrez on 3/19/24, 4:32 PM
Also, I think 'Google' in this instance is more for motivation rather than a literal comparison. He's leaving out the part that Google was founded by graduate CS students a) looking for a thesis, b) into node-link graphs, and c) inspired by academic citation metrics. Would PG advise anyone to go to grad school to learn how to find scientific-discovery-based startup ideas these days?
by Animats on 3/19/24, 10:53 PM
2. Use Stanford bandwidth for your web crawler.
3. See how AltaVista does it; they're in downtown Palo Alto.
4. Get 100K from the guy who founded Sun.
5. Move into the space above the bike shop in Palo Alto. (9 major startups began there.)
6. Get more funding from the guy who founded Amazon.
7. Sell search ads.
8. Profit!
by difflens on 3/19/24, 10:34 PM
by necovek on 3/20/24, 4:37 AM
Google was a successful, unsustainable search engine before it was a successful business.
Facebook was a successful social network waay before it was a successful business.
Reddit was... You can see where I am going with this.
by CPLX on 3/19/24, 3:48 PM
by dools on 3/20/24, 2:55 AM
The happiest entrepreneurs I know got advanced degrees, had a solid career, developed plenty of contacts, then launched something in their 30s or 40s with substantially less risk than taking a punt on knowing what problems were worth solving while at University, or taking a punt on finding the right person to start a company with while at University, or taking a punt on having the wide range of skills required to actually make a company work without ever having any work experience.
This is the sort of hype that drew me in when I was younger and I think it's damaging. The real way to start Google is to be smart, hard working and incredibly lucky. IMHO the best way to start a company is to be smart, hard working and patient.
by codelord on 3/19/24, 11:58 PM
by gist on 3/19/24, 5:18 PM
And note that the chances of founders and companies that have passed and been anointed with money is below (how much? I don't know) companies that haven't even made it to that round (to be potentially winnowed out). And have spent time and perhaps family money.
Will point out that I benefit from all of this (let's call it 'pick axe' for short) but I would or could never with a straight face and conscience write or give the same advice to kids in high school. Shoot for the moon? Risky. Sure if you have family money to fall back on possibly take the chance.
Especially and in particular 'how to start google' (meaning something with huge potential).
Oh yeah back in olden times I started a company right out of college and did pretty well and sold it (with ZERO investor money).
Lastly the joke that existed back and forever was someone saying 'find a good lawyer' as if doing so is a matter of knowing you had to do it not the specifics of how to do it.
by suyash on 3/19/24, 3:56 PM
by red_admiral on 3/20/24, 10:08 AM
Before I get to the complaints though - am I the only one with the feeling there would be a huge market niche for a search engine that gave as useful results as Google did in its earlier days? It sometimes feels like half the results for non-tech-related searches these days lead to low-quality AI-generated SEO-optimised fake content.
> If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at programming.
We tried this with unemployed former coal miners in Appalachia. It turns out, the real secret sauce here is "be the kind of person who can get good at programming". I'm with Freddie deBoer here, as he says in his book The Cult of Smart: we need to accept that not everyone has the same intellectual abilities. Once we do that, we can start thinking about how we make a world that works for the half of the population below the median on this dimension.
> ... facebook ...
The other story I heard about Zuckerberg is that he got his first 1000 users by scraping everyone's profile picture off the university "facebooks", then making a page where you could rate the women as "hot" or "not". I feel like missing this part out gives a rather one-sided picture of the story - especially if there were any young women in the class that PG originally gave this talk to. That's a shame because PG makes a very different point in "Why it's safe for founders to be nice" [1].
> (US uni admissions are done badly)
I agree with footnote 3 that determination and resourcefulness are important, but you also need to be able to program and reason mathematically if you want to start the next google. There are a lot of incredibly determined and resourceful students on liberal-arts or law degrees who might go far in the world, but they're not the person you want as a _technical_ co-founder.
by alismayilov on 3/19/24, 4:27 PM
by AIorNot on 3/20/24, 4:02 AM
by swang720 on 3/20/24, 2:36 AM
by BMSR on 3/20/24, 6:08 AM
by dpflan on 3/19/24, 6:13 PM
""" What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want. """
by advael on 3/19/24, 4:14 PM
I think it's more important to note how talks like this use "children" as an excuse to present a very sanitized version of the history being discussed. I think a massively underappreciated mechanism by which American culture distorts history is by its very lax and sometimes supportive norms about fudging the truth and sometimes even outright lying to children
by bearjaws on 3/19/24, 5:02 PM
Theres simply no way to get away with what Google, Facebook or Uber did today. You will not sneak your software into enterprise customers, you will not be able to skirt regulations.
Hell the big money pot of getting acquired may be dead too, e.g. Figma.
For most startups, you will fail. For the top 1% of companies you can hope to at best make a comfortable living at a multi-million dollar valuation. Only the .0001% will become a Google.
by dekhn on 3/19/24, 4:14 PM
by w10-1 on 3/19/24, 4:11 PM
It's not about starting Koch Industries or Disney.
It's not about some ideal world where connections and funding don't matter.
It's about a kind of productive problem solving that creates value for other people by solving problems they just accept as friction in their lives.
It's insightful in focusing on how projects you love can end up helping others.
But it's a little misleading in that people are listening not because they are doing what they love, but because they want to be successful - ideally to take what they love and turn it into success - according to this plan.
Let's say each year 10,000 people would love to become professional football players, 500 make it to the NFL, and 5 become household names - success stories.
There's no real accounting for the time wasted by the 9,500 doing the extra required not out of enjoyment of the game but to become successful (leaving aside any actual costs like TBI). It's at least an exported cost. But it might have other downstream effects, making someone less confident in their judgement, less likely to engage in making a better world of whatever sort.
One of the Buddhist precepts is not to sell the wine of delusion (in some translations). But it's also soul-killing to tell someone how likely they are to fail; who says that at a wedding? What benefit is that?
Paul Graham made a success of helping others be successful. That's a really good model to consider: to do and teach and help. So I would take this as good teaching for teens.
by ranman on 3/20/24, 3:54 AM
This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.
by Scubabear68 on 3/19/24, 4:08 PM
Somewhere in this essay it needs to say “99% of you who try this will fail”.
by ak_111 on 3/19/24, 4:44 PM
All the examples he mentioned Google, himself and the Irish Stripe founders had to do the same for their startups.
Sadly in the UK all the current unicorn "startups" are a bit iffy: XTX (high frequency hedgefund), betfair (betting company), tripledot studios (Zynga like company).
Unfortunately mega success in startups doing soemthing innovative is non-existent in Europe and UK in particular. Mistral stands out to how exceptional it is to the rule, and the closest other one I can think of is BioNtech.
Sadly the highest expected route to fortune in the UK remains quant trading in finance. Including starting your own hedge fund.
by kleiba on 3/19/24, 7:48 PM
You leave that to your customers and stock holders instead.
by abhayhegde on 3/19/24, 10:11 PM
For every one of these giant trillion dollar companies, there are also thousands of companies that couldn't make it. Also, just by the distribution of it all, not every company can be a Google. Not trying to be pessimistic here; everyone should be able to try solving some problem as a project and have fun meanwhile. However, expecting a Google out of it could be a bit too demanding.
by FrustratedMonky on 3/19/24, 4:06 PM
Bill Gates, Zuck, Jobs, etc....
Students should quit school. -> (?) -> profit
by radicalriddler on 3/20/24, 3:46 AM
It's not open to sign ups or anything (blocked in Supabase), so this isn't really trying to be a marketing exercise, the idea about joy projects just resonated with me.
If you want to listen to the generated audio (really it just custom parses a web page and sends it off to azure), I've uploaded it to a public Cloudflare R2 bucket[1]. It's not perfect, I haven't fully configured the SSML to treat quotes correct, and I'm adding weird breaks in between normal text and anchors, but... it's a project :).
[0] https://www.webtospeech.app/
[1] https://publicmedia.webtospeech.app/b3dc8034-c2f4-4835-afe8-...
by photochemsyn on 3/19/24, 4:08 PM
https://new.nsf.gov/news/origins-google
> "The National Science Foundation led the multi-agency Digital Library Initiative (DLI) that, in 1994, made its first six awards. One of those awards supported a Stanford University project led by professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd... Around the same time, one of the graduate students funded under the NSF-supported DLI project at Stanford took an interest in the Web as a "collection." The student was Larry Page.... Page was soon joined by Sergey Brin, another Stanford graduate student working on the DLI project. (Brin was supported by an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.)"
Under a rational and fair approach to patents, anything created with taxpayer funds would be available to all American businesses under a non-exclusive licensing program. However, in the 1980s, Bayh-Dole was pushed through which allowed exclusive licensing of those inventions to private parties. This is nothing but theft from the taxpayer, the entity who funds the NSF, which funded this research effort, which generated PageRank.
As a result, Google didn't face market competition for some time, and was able to create a monopolistic situation, and as with all monopolies, this resulted in the degradation of their product, which is why, as everyone seems to agree, Google search results are much worse today than they used to be.
[edit: contemplate the outcome if Brin & Page had instead invented PageRank as Apple or Microsoft employees - would they have been able to run off with the IP and found a company?]
by erickhill on 3/19/24, 7:38 PM
Anyhoo, props to 1998 era web design. Sincerely.
by jameshart on 3/19/24, 5:19 PM
> if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are...
> The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as the list of the most selective universities.
Is it at all possible that the people who are able to take a gamble on founding a startup rather than getting a job are also disproportionately drawn from the wealthy class that is also able to afford the privileges necessary to get their kids over the admissions humps needed to get into highly selective schools?
Because in spite of the suggestion that getting into these schools is a matter of ‘doing well in your classes’, Graham knows and acknowledges in his footnote that he knows full well that’s actually not what these schools are selecting for anyway:
> US admissions departments make applicants jump through a lot of arbitrary hoops that have little to do with their intellectual ability. But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of mere determination and resourcefulness.
‘Mere determination and resourcefulness’? Or the background, finances and support and time necessary to make the grade in terms of non academic achievements, volunteer work, experience, extracurriculars, etc?
But even if you get in through academics plus determination and resourcefulness… will you also have the resources to take a risk on turning a project into a startup?
This is cargo cultism. Yes, successful founders are disproportionately drawn from high end selective schools, because they are disproportionately drawn from the community of people who come from a background of privilege, and are academically bright. Such people naturally tend to end up at Stanford or MIT or wherever.
But getting in to Stanford or MIT doesn’t magically make you into a member of that privileged class.
by confoundcofound on 3/19/24, 4:12 PM
The more I try to plug myself in, the more it seems like starting a company at this age is borderline schizophrenic delusion.
by sarimkx on 3/19/24, 6:54 PM
Did not expect this tbh. So many people here worried about the future of programming but PG believes we're safe! Alas, something positive!
by mike_hearn on 3/19/24, 5:34 PM
1. 15-25 year olds who do programming passion projects are often attracted to video games. Video game companies are not "startups" in the sense pg means here. You will not get rich by indulging a passion for the entertainment industry.
2. You do in fact need capital to do a startup, and there is a lot more to getting that than just having cofounders and something you're interested in.
3. "What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want." This isn't really true, is it. I thought there is another pg/ycombinator essay somewhere that warns people away from specific types of startup pitches, and one of them is something like "an app that tells you about events in your local community". Supposedly this is one of those things that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to work on, but which never turns into a successful startup.
There are actually a lot of things that your friends might want which are not startup material anywhere except Sand Hill Road, mostly because there are lots of things people want but won't pay for. A sad example of this is developer tools. If you take pg's advice literally and learn programming, hang out with other people who do that and then do projects with them, soon you will see lots of sticky doors that look like missing bits of infrastructure. Unfortunately startups that do dev tooling aren't a good way to get rich. Developers generally don't or can't buy things, so you have to sell to their CTOs and thus all the money accumulates in companies like Amazon or Microsoft. Example of what happens if you try, even with great PMF: Docker.
Most kids with ideas in the world don't have the contacts or work visas to raise money from US VC firms. They need a project that people will pay money for immediately. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the size of the US VC ecosystem is that if someone comes up with a good idea that takes off and they try to grow like a normal company, and they aren't taking VC money, then they will be immediately outcompeted by someone who does, simply because whoever does have that access will engage in market dumping until there's nobody else left except other VC funded startups. One of the US funded companies will end up taking the entire market even if they are burning money with no hope of ever balancing the books, but that's OK because one of the VC's other investments can always be persuaded to give a clean exit.
Example: DailyMotion (European) vs YouTube (US). At the time YouTube was bought they didn't have a hope in hell of ever being a standalone business and didn't even care to try, but they were down the road from Google and were scaring Larry/Sergey/Eric with their success. Buying a company if you can just jump in your car to go visit them is easy, if you need to constantly do trans-Atlantic flights, not so easy. It doesn't make sense to bet on the "grow like crazy and wait for an exit" strategy elsewhere. WhatsApp is another example of an MTV based company that had no strategy beyond grow-and-exit. I actually made a WhatsApp-like app a few years before the smartphone revolution hit, and my friends thought it was awesome, but I had no illusions that it could ever be a business. And indeed none of these messenger apps ever have been. In the world of "startups" (vs small businesses), you don't necessarily need to care.
by gen220 on 3/20/24, 2:13 AM
Apple, Patagonia (and its predecessors), WhatsApp (pre-FB), Trader Joe’s (pre acquisition), Yahoo! (pre-‘99) are some that come to mind for me. Any others?
by ttul on 3/19/24, 5:23 PM
If you want to play the “next Google” game, get ready to be disappointed by Lady Luck.
by KETpXDDzR on 3/21/24, 4:39 AM
* Have a rich family to get you into an elite university and to give you the financial independence to start a startup
* Be lucky. Only ~1% of all startups succeed.
by jankovicsandras on 3/19/24, 8:36 PM
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-...
(I don't know how truthful these articles are, but found them interesting to read.)
by BogdanPetre on 3/19/24, 7:54 PM
by babl-yc on 3/19/24, 8:21 PM
99.99% of people who read this article are not going to start the next Google. Being a successful entrepreneur requires an incredible amount of luck, timing, skill, and risk taking.
If you choose that path, great, but that in no way devalues the skill building, network building, and predictable income of working for someone else.
by benzible on 3/19/24, 4:00 PM
Kinda, but this skips over the whole Facemash thing https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creat...
by dirkc on 3/20/24, 11:31 AM
> The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as the list of the most selective universities.
by hn_throwaway_99 on 3/19/24, 4:06 PM
In that sense, I do strongly agree with the overall conclusion, "That's it, just two things, build stuff and do well in school." Building stuff for your own edification, and soaking up as much knowledge and relationships while you're in school, is really sound advice that works regardless of your end goal.
by xanderlewis on 3/19/24, 10:00 PM
Interesting comment; seems at odds with what a lot of others seem to think at the moment. But time will tell. I suspect he’s right.
by taneq on 3/19/24, 4:10 PM
by elwell on 3/19/24, 3:56 PM
So Leetcode is actually a good way to hire?
by antisthenes on 3/19/24, 5:51 PM
Is this the guy that a lot of HNers look up to?
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 3/20/24, 7:45 PM
Opinions may differ but to me this sounds really pathetic. "[B]lathering about literature." Maybe he is addressing a room full of social outcasts.
Yes, there is so much money that has flowed through Google, it's truly astounding, but nevertheless, beyond fortuitous circumstances, this has only persisted because of dissemination of online ads and anti-competitive conduct. Is there is any kid who is thinking, "My dream is to put ads on every screen and collect more data about peoples' lives that has ever before been collected. Settle all the lawsuits against us for violating peoples' privacy, pay off all the regulators, fire people by the thousands, let harassment run rampant amongst our managers, and destroy eveidence so the government cannot catch us breaking the law." All they see is the money and hype and, during ZIRP, lack of comparable alternatives in terms of opportunity and compensation.
Silicon Valley VC telling kids that learning how to program is more important than getting an education, advising them to go to university not for the education but to find "cofounders" and employees. Hard to rationalise how this would be healthy advice for anyone.
by jp57 on 3/19/24, 9:52 PM
This is literally true, but it's disingenuous. Not every job has a boss telling you what to do. Many jobs hire people for their expertise and pay them to solve problems for them, and in these kinds of jobs the employee collaborates with her boss on deciding what kinds of problems you will work on. Of course, it will only be enjoyable if the company's problems are aligned with the employee's interests.
If you are a technical expert with the kind of ability and acumen needed to run a successful start up, I would argue that it is at least as easy to find a company whose problems are aligned with your interests as to find investors who will truly let you pursue your own interests with their money.
"Making it" as a startup founder should be seen in the same class of success as making it as a rock star or an actor. There are lots of aspirants and hardly any of them succeed. Even though some manage to become wildly wealthy, the prior expected payoff is negative.
by nostrademons on 3/20/24, 11:06 AM
The challenge with programming as a career now is that most of the solely technical problems have been solved. If you're looking for the YC playbook, start a SaaS that solves a specific problem that people will pay you for, those niches have been very carefully picked over for the last 15 years, and there are few that are very profitable remaining.
Most of the big remaining problems are ones of incentives - they are cases where a whole system is fractally fucked up, with lots of human actors all doing what is individually best for themselves but with a sum result that is a net negative for humanity. If you study the housing crisis, for example, you end up with municipalities that need ever-rising housing prices and ever-restricting supply to balance their budgets; residents who depend on their rising home prices to fund their retirement; developers who need to work within the local regulations that are explicitly designed to make their lives difficult; and young people who can't move out because a second mortgage that requires their parents' ever-increasing home equity was used to fund their college education. Finding a better way to build houses doesn't help here; you need to work around all the people who actively don't want you to find a better way to build houses.
There is room for software here, but often in subtle and what seems "evil" ways. Your problem is other people; software is useful to the extent that it lets you work around other people. Technical skills are table stakes for this, but understanding people and their incentives is critical for this work.
by humbleferret on 3/19/24, 4:21 PM
To maximise their chances of success, Paul suggests:
1. Become a builder: Gain expertise in technology or other fields you're passionate about. (Does not have to just be coding, either!)
2. Start personal projects: Build things you and your friends find useful. Paul suggests this is the fastest way to learn and potentially discover startup ideas.
3. Collaborate: Work on projects with like-minded people. This fosters skill development and could lead to finding potential cofounders.
I liked how Paul also emphasises the importance of good grades in order to access top universities, where you'll find other bright collaborators.
There are obviously many other paths, but if I wish I had this advice at 14 or 15.
by ngd on 3/19/24, 6:06 PM
To my mind, to immediately relate to kids in the UK, I would need to say TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Oculus, iPhone, iPad, and such, and not the company name.
by gsky on 3/20/24, 5:09 AM
by n0us on 3/19/24, 6:30 PM
by enlightenedfool on 3/20/24, 12:27 AM
by fuzzfactor on 3/19/24, 9:01 PM
Same thing as Packard & Hewlett when they got the ball rolling . . .
Worked for Edison too, he really got in on the ground floor when it comes to electrons.
by tcgv on 3/19/24, 7:47 PM
by ArunRaja on 3/20/24, 6:32 AM
* as many(interested projects) -> tech -> product ideas
* Grades -> top college -> co-workers
by keiferski on 3/19/24, 6:12 PM
by htsb on 3/19/24, 7:19 PM
* [X] Skills to build those ideas
* [ ] Runway to develop those ideas
* [ ] Someone to help find money to provide runway
by sidcool on 3/20/24, 6:17 AM
by gordon_freeman on 3/19/24, 5:47 PM
Isn't this a bit misleading and can only be true for companies that don't take VC money or never go public (ex: Basecamp/37 Signals)? For VC funded or public companies, ultimately you'd have to be responsible to answer to your shareholders.
by hiddencost on 3/19/24, 3:47 PM
"Of the 137 people in the global study who achieved billionaire status in the 12-month study period, 53 of them inherited $150.8 billion collectively, more than the $140.7 billion that was earned by the 84 new self-made billionaires in the same time period, the UBS study says.Nov 30, 2023"
by meigwilym on 3/20/24, 12:30 PM
by a_n on 3/19/24, 7:09 PM
by wiradikusuma on 3/20/24, 5:44 AM
Unless you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, the best (safest, surest) way to start your entrepreneurial journey is to work for someone else. The goal is to learn everything about the rules of the trade and expand your network—these two things you don't get from school—while being paid to do that.
On the side, do what PG says to keep your entrepreneurial spirit and avoid "comfort zone" i.e pursuing your career (which is actually fine, but we're talking about starting a business right).
Probably you won't end up building Google. But hey, maybe with this approach, you can give a silver spoon to your offspring.
by ignoramous on 3/19/24, 4:15 PM
by bustling-noose on 3/20/24, 2:50 AM
You could start a sewing business with few clients at most. Thats still a start up and will make you just as successful and happy and content and will help your local community and if you are good at it become bigger over time. This is how humanity has evolved. These big tech startups are a thing since the last 20 years maybe. But businesses have existed for centuries and they all start with small projects.
But this writeup focusses on these billionaires and tech startup culture so much that it misses to focus on the part - 'do your thing and it might not be programming'. Now being a founder of Y combinator might make you biased to look at only programming and tech companies but it's a shame because tech companies only show up as giants in share value. The tangible world of businesses is vastly bigger and includes millions of startups serving billions that such people will miss completely maybe because they don't have a website or a ticker in NASDAQ.
Such a sad hustle world we live in that we forget your local falafel vendor is also a startup who probably will expand to multiple falafel carts over time.
by shafyy on 3/19/24, 3:50 PM
People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically getting rich is the most important thing is one of the reasons we got into this late-stage capitalism nightmare in the first place. Fuck this.
Edit: Sorry, to update after my rant. So many things wrong with this advice. For most people, starting a company is not the best path to happiness. Sure, if you have a job, there's a "boss" that tells you what to do as Graham notes, but if you think for a second you can do whatever the fuck you want when you start your own company, you're dead wrong. Of course, Graham knows this.
by memset on 3/19/24, 4:24 PM
I suppose the strongest criticism would be that pg's advice outlines necessary conditions to start the next Google but are not sufficient. Yes, the stuff you "make" needs to feel like a fun project, but without the "...something people want" then your company will not make you rich. As with any advice, there there will always be exceptions ("do you really need a cofounder?") but as far as "here is some advice to achieve x", where x is "create a billion-dollar company" this isn't a bad start.
by walteweiss on 3/19/24, 8:03 PM
One of the reasons is my background, besides ‘building my stuff’ I was very busy fighting the obstacles most of the people in a developed country would never meet. Or most of the people having parents would never meet.
Life got me in the middle of building a very nice thing, giving me obstacles I couldn’t manage. Then, when I was climbing out of it, there was the pandemic, which messed many things in my life.
I just migrated to Ukraine back then, and you all know what happened next, the Russian full-scale invasion. That’s only the public events, I’m ignoring all the personal stuff here.
Saying that, for me, it was about five years, at least, I paused with my projects. Some of them are slightly irrelevant, some are not. There are ones I still believe are very good, even now when I’m older and more experienced. I got a huge load of non-professional experience over these years, and it helps me to understand the world so much better now. Will I ever find my resources for building my ideas? Nobody knows. If I’ll survive the war, I think I will.
During this half a decade I juggled stupid jobs (won’t mention why to save time, personal life events) because for a regular job I’m either too qualified or have a very different experience, non-applicable to local market. And I’m way too expensive when I work as an employee. I’m more the founder / employer type than the employee type, unemployable, as they used to brag in the Valley.
And my point is. I regret I never took my time to explore the professional life I despised all my life. This stupid CV/resume and LinkedIn idiocracy. When I had no resources, I could easily manage any enterprise job. I’m very good at stupid politics if needed, but I don’t enjoy it. And I’m very good with the software tools, so I can do your average enterprise employee workday for a couple of hours time. That proved my previous years as a freelancer, building my company, and interacting with the people I know from the corporate world.
In time of my need, I was just contemplating others earning way too much for their skills. When I didn’t even have a stupid resume, but was usually overqualified for a senior position, not to say a junior one. And no resources to learn the things I missed from this corporate thing.
Now it’s getting better due to my personal life changes, but I just lost some years of professional development. Plus loads of money I could earn on a stupid job (I won’t burn out type, as I don’t give a flying duck type).
While I’m not arguing about the point, especially as a piece of advice for teenagers, I would recommend learning other options, and get as much different life experience as you can, while you’re very young. That experience is much more valuable than all the money you can get. I got loads of money and all of that money is burned by now. I could earn more (loss less) if I would be better prepared for personal stuff in my life. As it took way too much energy and affected my work way too much.
Also, I don’t believe you build Facebook or Google when you are super young. I would say that is more of a luck thing. I believe you build something valuable when you understand what is around you and how the World works. You can build your super project at 50, why not?
And as the P.S. the Zuck story is a pure manipulation. We all know that wasn’t even his idea.
by paulmd on 3/19/24, 9:02 PM
by benreesman on 3/20/24, 5:33 AM
This is exactly the kind of thing that made me dramatically more ambitious and harder working when I started reading pg essays (pushing 20 years ago now), so I have a huge soft spot for the feeling/nostalgia that I got when I just let it wash over me. And it’s ultimately why I think it nets out constructive in spite of some real problems: if I heard this at 15 I would have started working really hard at 15 and not 22 or 23, and I would have started cultivating relationships with people who were going to be powerful at 15, instead of arguably antagonizing powerful people until, well maybe still today [1].
It’s got some serious problems though: the way most people get rich is by having wealthy parents, though at the apex it’s having wealthy parents who raised you to work hard and manage relationships with powerful people well [2], so given that by 15 most of that already has or hasn’t happened, I think we can generally regard pg saying that as a “useful fiction”: outcomes will improve at the mean for 15-year olds who believe him about this, or such is my prediction.
The advice about university is extremely dangerous in 2024 for anyone without a privileged upbringing because university is a far inferior place to learn things than YouTube videos aggregating all the best university lectures in history with the even more effective education style pioneered by Grant with 3blue1brown. And while trying to achieve at a level where you go to Stanford without a mountain of uniquely nasty debt [3] is strictly a good thing in high school / primary school, actually going to university via debt is an extremely dicey proposition if you miss and that distinction is tough to sell to that audience.
Better advice would be to start learning from the best educators in the world via a YouTube Premium subscription concurrent to high-school studies (and making them whiffle ball on a curve compared to peers that don’t), try to get a scholarship to an Ivy or Cal or something, but go to community college or directly into the workforce (Work for a Startup™) if you miss and don’t have graduate study on the agenda.
Mostly the feeling I get is that pg and his essays these days sit in the Venn between “well intentioned”, “aspirational/idealistic” and “not true”. It’s a fine line sometimes between “aspirational” and “false”, it gets finer yet in light of Sinclair’s Maxim [4]: what might be dismissed in a low-effort way as “out of touch” or even “self-serving” is trivially unfair to pg. He has his own family he could be spending time with instead of speaking to young people, he doesn’t need or seem to want any more money. He’s just past the point where he can de-leverage his intellectual and emotional investment in a world that doesn’t exist anymore: he’s the LTCM of serious intellectuals in technology. The book about that is called “When Genius Failed”, and John Meriwether is a brilliant man who lived by an admirably robust ethical code in a very rough neighborhood.
[1] The most significant glitch in pg’s firmware is that he says “smart and hardworking” when he really means “good at becoming powerful”, a direct quote [5] about his protégée illustrates this very clearly.
[2] Pick a list of very rich people and click on all the links, a fine starting point is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires.
[3] Yes there have been some modest reforms, no it’s not fixed: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67546893
[4] At the top, a man’s living can be about intellectual as well as financial capital: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
[5] I’ve known too many YC alumni too well for too long to even engage with any hatchet job on a piece that if anything understates the reality: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma..., please don’t prey on my worst instincts by tempting me to cite documented examples and credible primary sources.
by xyst on 3/20/24, 1:34 AM
Larry. Sergey. Mark Z. Steve.
All of these people were born into families where both parents either had advanced degrees or were well off due to their success in the field. Failure for these people does not mean much. Maybe just a hit to their egos. But otherwise they keep living life, just not as the billionaires of today.
by gumby on 3/19/24, 6:23 PM
Actaally if you look at those lists, the largest number made it by choosing their parents correctly.
by PaulDavisThe1st on 3/19/24, 6:47 PM
99% or more of the people who enable Google to do what Google does are employees of Google. Same with every other company. The odds of being the founder of a successful company are probably worse than being a professional sportsball player (if only because they turn over more frequently).
Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder rather than an employee?
Does anything good come from encouraging people to ignore the actual situation that the overwhelming majority of the population finds itself in, and instead focusing on some essentially impossible pipe dream?
Obviously, every successful company does have founders. But so does every unsuccessful company. And what actually powers every successful company are its employees, not its founders.
The absolute worst of SV thinking, personified.
by mattlondon on 3/19/24, 6:45 PM
Tell the kids to study, don't sell them an unobtainable dream
by elektrontamer on 3/19/24, 7:48 PM
I hear things like this a lot and I'm sick of it. There's nothing wrong with working for someone, in fact it's the best way to improve your skills as a beginner since you're going to be mentored by people much more experienced than you. I still call my first boss to this day.
by sgu999 on 3/19/24, 9:37 PM
The standard way for a young 15yo to get rich, is to be passed on wealth by their parents. But starting a company can probably work, occasionally enough that we can use it as a smoke screen.
by vouaobrasil on 3/19/24, 3:56 PM
> You might have thought I was joking when I said I was going to tell you how to start Google. You might be thinking "How could we start Google?" But that's effectively what the people who did start Google were thinking before they started it.
We shouldn't be telling young people to start companies like Google or to aim for being really rich in the first place. We should be teaching children how to be more sustainable. Companies like Google are a net harm to society and the really rich like Sergey Brin and Larry Page are parasites, promoting the unsustainable ruthless capitalism that has caused the immense climactic problems of the world today.
by d--b on 3/19/24, 6:26 PM
How irresponsible.
by HMH on 3/19/24, 4:38 PM
So no word about funding from the CIA and NSA. If you want to build something that changes the world in such a profound way as Google did, you can not possibly expect the powerful not having a word with you. I am inclined to believe that these days you will need influential "friends" with aligned interests at some point.