Usain Bolt is the fastest man in history. We understand that he's a genetic freak who happened to try out for the best track team in the world. Exactly the right man in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. We understand that he's so far outside the norm that he can eat 40 chicken nuggets and run 100m in 9.69 seconds on the same day. We understand that what he does teaches us nothing about what we should do if we want to run faster.
YouTube was founded by three guys working for PayPal who were likewise exactly the right men in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. What they did is very informative if you happen to be well-connected guys in the valley who chance upon perfect timing. For the rest of us, "sell out to Google" is not a business plan. It seems to me that the whole point of what we're doing here at HN is to upend the old notions about what it means to start up. The discourse has long been dominated by VCs who are only interested in billion-dollar companies, but I for one am far more interested in the idea of ten thousand people becoming millionaires than ten people becoming billionaires.
Patrick of BCC is for me the prime example of the new startup logic. Absolutely any of us could realistically aspire to do what he has done. He's not making 'fuck you money', but he's making a good living from a couple of evenings a week. How much happier would he be if he were a billionaire? In utilitarian terms, what is the net benefit of a million Patio11s vs one Chad Hurley?
These sorts of articles really bug me, because they seem to me to be part of this age-old cultural notion about what geeks ought to be doing with their lives. For the rest of the human race, it's perfectly acceptable to pursue your own happiness, but if you're really smart you're expected to change the world. I'm sure there are plenty of people who really do want to change the world, but I'm also fairly confident that most of us just want to do cool things and have enough money to be comfortable.
It seems to me that the dialogue about startups is warped by a particular kind of charming, eloquent VC. I think there are a number of very influential people out there who are using our sense of public service, our avarice and our ego to manipulate our expectations of success. I think we as smart people are pressured enough without our own community distorting our sense of what constitutes a good day's work.
I think that talking about mega-companies is just as harmful as our cultural fixation on size zero models, or the sense amongst some young men that the only good jobs are playing ball or rapping. I think paying much attention to outliers is inherently harmful as it warps our sense of what is normal and reasonable and realistic.
I think that startup culture has a sickness - a disease that we caught in High School and that we have incubated since. I think we expect far too much from ourselves and have an unrealistic sense of the threshold for success. DHH is considered a radical, in no small part because he has a very specific scope to his ambition. He is noteworthy in the startup community for saying that there are such things as 'enough revenue' and 'enough customers. We forget that to most ordinary people, DHH has wealth and freedom beyond their imagination. I think the schoolroom sense of "I expected better of you, you're a bright boy" has evolved into this sense that we are in it to serve shareholders and VCs, that we are in it to do something superhuman. Why is there a sense of shame to say in our community that we just want to pay the bills and have fun doing it? Why do so many people seem to sneer at the likes of Tim Ferriss? Why can't we be happy to do things just for ourselves and our customers?