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Comment by spenrose | Hacker News Reader

My concern about Paul's vision has always been (2), flexibility. It is my humble belief that you should care what you succeed at, not just that you succeed at something. On this point Paul seems to be leading in the opposite direction from Tim O'Reilly ("work on stuff that matters"), and I wish he would do a 180.

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It is my humble belief that you should care what you succeed at

I know how you feel, but if that empirically produces a lower probability of success then what can you do?

You can fail, pick yourself up, and try again. You can increase your probability of doing good, and accept the tradeoff WRT business success.

I should add that I think Paul presents a very clear vision of why he thinks this is not a problem: his mantra about finding a problem a real person needs solved and solving it (substitute actual quotation here). My objection is that where this leads you is to unexploited niches in the market ecosystem -- returning to Tim's language, to focus on capturing value rather than creating it. I suspect Paul tart rejoinder would be that a happy customer is much better evidence of value created than fuzzy dreams of do-gooderism are. I believe he is partly wrong. I hope he will speak for himself on this topic.

I'd rather be moderately successful doing something that matters than very successful selling sugared water.

If you become successful at <random common, unimportant thing>, you can leverage that to pursue <really great idea>. One example that comes to mind is Andrew Mason's Groupon talk at Startup School. Before Groupon, the Groupon guys ran "The Point", which tried to organize people to solve societal problems, including such ambitious, world changing ideas like building a climate dome over Chicago to avoid the brutal winters there. Obviously, the climate dome was never built, and "The Point" pivoted into Groupon. Although I don't think Andrew Mason has enough leverage/money/etc. to build that climate dome, he's certainly a lot closer today with Groupon's success than he was previously.

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