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That's also my largest concern with this essay. PG describes the world they way he wants it to be, but not the world the way it is. And I haven't been inside of YC, but everything I've seen is that YC is essentially program that combines some level of "support" with essentially learning to hack VCs.

If it were simply build the best product then there wouldn't be a need for YC. If it were simply build the best product there wouldn't be a need for marketing or sales or business degrees.

The hacks involved in marking and sales became so important to any companies success that they've over time become entire fields of their own. Same thing with an MBA - essentially a degree to hack business. Regardless of what you think of it, it's clear based on the financial returns of it that it works.

One of the biggest lessons constantly mentioned of startups is how naive engineers are to the business side of things and there is more than building a great product. In this essay PG takes all of that and throws it out the window. Is that suddenly no longer true? My read of it is that he (rightfully) likes YC and as a result doesn't see how it has the same flaws as the systems he describes. Essentially like every parent who only sees their kid as beautiful.

This going to be true of most self help writing by survivors.

> If you can't create a 200 person per year startup incubator that focuses on true learning instead of process hacking, then how could someone do it for a 20,000 person university?

As a university professor, I can at least try. Not at scale -- certainly not for my entire university -- but for my own classes as an individual.

There are several constraints, of course. I have to give grades, and students care about grades, a lot. These grades should measure (to some extent) how prepared students are to proceed to whatever is next. Students have a number of conflicting priorities, and it is natural to concentrate on whatever is most urgent. And students come with wildly differing backgrounds and interest levels (and amounts of available time), and I have to be consistent and fair to everyone.

But, when I grade, I have a lot of leeway to decide what I believe is worth measuring, and measure that. My aim -- which I hope I at least partially realize -- is to ensure that the best way to "hack" my classes is to learn what I hope the students will learn.

Agree wholeheartedly. That's exactly the approach I take, but the problem of course is that 1) it's difficult to do successfully, and 2) students "freak out" because the exams become unpredictable and they end up getting more stressed out that they need to about succeeding at the exam. Of course, my regular high-performing students do well regardless, but I haven't found a way to convince them that they have the skills already to do well on the exam. Instead, they pull all-nighters and ultimately damage their results on exam day when, if I had given it as a surprise exam, they would have been just fine. So on some level, it's a need to teach self-confidence, self-diagnostics, and introspection. This (again) is a TON of work, since it's necessarily person-dependent, so only professors who have the time and energy can actually attempt to do it. The others will just say "screw it" and give an exam of sentences copy/pasted from the textbook, but with keywords, blanked out. Yet another extreme are the professors who endlessly allow exam re-submissions, so students just brute-force hack their way to a passing grade.

I want the obvious response to the above to be "okay, just raise the bar for teaching professors" but, unfortunately, those decisions are usually made by people who are completely ignorant to the process, and who rely on broken systems of teaching evaluation. Those who would be good at making those decisions are busy doing the teaching, and doing it well. Also, I don't personally think we want a system that so micro-manages our professors' pedagogical styles. I get fairly positive student feedback, but so do the professors who offer endless exam re-submissions and whose students have basically zero material retention after they pass the class. The optimal (but impossible, partially due to sheer laziness) way would be for students to self-select themselves into classes with professors that they believe will ultimately teach them more and better material, without having the extra pressure of the effect on their GPA.

(edited with some last-minute thoughts).

The problem in my eyes is while you are fighting the fight your department is fighting another one entirely within a university of departments competing in yet another fight.

Who is fighting at the organizational level for the students?

The problem is systemic. All of the solutions I see, here and elsewhere, describe a small piece of the problem. At best — a few courses in a curriculum.

> Who is fighting at the organizational level for the students?

Plenty of people. Sometimes at cross purposes, rarely with little effect.

Unlike Tolstoy's happy families, good teachers are not all alike. For the most part, I can't envision what a productive organizational-level fight would even look like.

> Yet another extreme are the professors who endlessly allow exam re-submissions, so students just brute-force hack their way to a passing grade.

I know professors who have changed the answers during the re-submission time, so students brute-force their way to a failing grade...

Companies are this way too. The best companies are all run by OKRs and metrics. But if you peek under the hood, all of it is insanely hackable; you have to be naive to try and actually meet your explicitly stated objectives because that's not how you get promoted.

It reminds me of a quote from The Elephant in the Brain. I don't remember the wording exactly, but it's something like "if there is a behavior in a large group of people that doesn't make sense to you, not only is it by design, but it's also probably the whole point."

Incidentally, I was also struck by how much of YC was (in 2009) about hacking venture capital. But lots of people from that era now say this behavior is unethical disavow all knowledge that it was ever actively promoted. It's like we lived through different realities.

If I were to steelman The Lesson to Unlearn I think I'd say this. On an individual level there is enormous benefit to learning how to operate without hacking a test. That's how you do great work; that's what original thinking is. On a societal level this seems unshakable. But societies have made dramatic shifts in behavior and social organization before. From hunter gatherers to farmers to city dwellers, for example. So while this is hard to imagine it might just be that-- lack of imagination. The social return to abandoning this system might indeed be enormous.

Your last graph is very interesting. I think it resonates because tests are setup with the test-devisers biases and blind spots, but original thinking (tautologically) has to be outside the current consensus that built the environment that built the test makers.

There's a snake eating its tail situation here.

I really like the steelman interpretation. I suspect that often times, PG's trying to express some sort of core idea, but readers bring their own context with it, and apply it to something else, in this case, YC. And in a different thread, interviews.

But if one were to find oneself in a situation where there are no gatekeeper tests, then how would you go about doing great work? And by being able to see it as an idealism, at least we have a target to shoot for, even if we might fall short in practice.

It's because he doesn't believe getting into YC is the achievement. Creating a company with users / profitability / growth is. You can get into YC and still fail with your company. And it's desirable for founders and YC to be more interested in building a successful company.

When he says, "Make a good product", I think he's trying to convey a core and fundamental principle of business that gets obfuscated by all the things you have to do be successful in a startup. That's necessary when teaching beginners.

But he's traditionally had a hard time conveying this seemingly simple concept, and he's always been puzzled by it. You can see it in the previous essays he referenced in this one--the high school one, and how founders over-complicate things.

Though he's talking about this topic as if creating the company is the goal, I'm not sure to what degree he realizes how YC contributes to the effect he's seeing.

Even after getting into YC, I was moderately surprised by how you're still being judged, sometimes explicitly, and other time implicitly. I had batchmates that didn't want to go into office hours, for fear of appearing weak and hence wouldn't get a follow-on recommendation to investors from a YC partner.

Of course, I think PG would say that's stupid. If you go into office hours and fix your problem, then by virtue of being a better startup, you'll be a more attractive investment. Trying to do it the other way is putting the cart before the horse.

That said, the effect is real. Like the Observer Effect in quantum mechanics, by virtue of being a conduit to further funding, founders will turn their attention to the tests. Because if you don't, it's easy to be written off and not be able to get the help that you need.

> It's because he doesn't believe getting into YC is the achievement.

But so much of YC felt (and probably does more so now) like you're being judged all the time. Which makes total sense to me, because seeking prestige is so fundamental to human nature. That co-evolved with social cooperation in a virtuous cycle.

If pg really believed what he wrote in this essay, YC would be structured very differently. The moment pg allowed some companies/founders to have better access to him than others, or the moment he talked about how some founders are better than others, he implicitly set up a criteria for judging founders and their companies. And people will always naturally feel envy and try to hack that criteria. But a precondition for doing good original work is not feeling judged. So he should have gone on a crusade to completely eliminate all forms of favoritism if he wanted to maximize the odds of success for a modal company. But that's not what he actually ended up doing. At all.

Now the question is, is the essay wrong or is the YC structure/culture wrong. If I were a betting man, I'd put all my money on the former every single time, and I think I'd never come lose that bet once.

> Now the question is, is the essay wrong or is the YC structure/culture wrong.

I think that's a false dichotomy.

> The moment pg allowed some companies/founders to have better access to him than others, or the moment he talked about how some founders are better than others, he implicitly set up a criteria for judging founders and their companies.

It's correct that this creates a hackable test, but the losses incurred via that might be less than "going on a crusade to completely eliminate all forms of favoritism". This does not imply that hackable tests aren't bad, meaning the the essay is wrong, just that the pendulum can swing too far in the other direction too. Which isn't that striking of a realization.

> If pg really believed what he wrote in this essay, YC would be structured very differently

Yes, I agree. I can't tell if he's ever thought about it. I would have thought Jessica, being the social radar, would have picked up on it. Maybe it just wasn't a high order bit on the list of priorities.

I've come to think of PG as the disapproving father I never had.

Spot on. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I'd recommend the book Seeing Like A State. The author basically walks through most of history as viewed through the lens of authorities trying to measure things (usually to extract taxes or exercise control). But basically traces everything from the layout of cities to how we name ourselves down to authority trying to standardize things so they can measure them.

> There seemed to be no time given to "how to make a great product", likely because this is something that can't be taught

It can be taught, but the general principles are weak (it’s basically “how to be an effective futurist”), with most of the useful knowledge being domain-specific.

And the thing with the specific domains is, either they’re not understood yet—in which case everyone is flailing around—or they are well-understood—in which case the market has already consolidated around the companies who can best operationalize the set of techniques required to create great products for that market, and the best you’ll hope to do is to get bought out by one of them, not to compete or replace them.

Because, in the end, having a great product is a multiplier, but so is execution; and execution provides compound interest on its gains, such that corporations inevitably execute exponentially better as they age.

In other words, the only time where you can set out to win a market, and actually have a hope of doing so, is precisely when we don’t yet know how to operationalize the production of great products for that domain.

My take on this:

Having a great product, building things people want (i.e. the "non-hackable" parts of building a startup) are necessary but not sufficient requirements for building a successful startup. What YC tries to teach is all the other parts (how to deal with VCs, what metrics to focus on, how to manage your time, etc.) that are also necessary, but not the core of what makes a good company. These are the "hackable" parts if you will. But you're very likely to be unsuccessful if you only have those hackable parts right, but still don't have a product people find useful and want to buy.

Since you're not posting anonymously, I'd be curious if you could offer more information on what parts of YC you think you hacked, and how your startup turned out.

This was my immediate objection as well. School, as it stands, was actually -incredibly- useful to me. Because it taught me that the stated objectives of a person, organization, etc, are often lies, and that the trick is to learn the real objectives, and optimize accordingly. Between classes that actually taught me the material, classes that expected me to learn the material without teaching it to me (but still expected me to complete relevant projects that required understanding), and classes that required me to learn completely separate things (i.e., yes, physics class, where the taught material, homework material, and tested material, were all ENTIRELY DISTINCT FROM EACH OTHER, and so I had to learn to navigate that and reach out for help from TAs and past students and etc), I feel like I got a more complete education in how the world works.

That's not to say "hack the system", but it is to say look deeper. There's value in learning. There's value in the stated objectives; after all, there's a reason they're being called out. But there often are unstated, important systems and objectives to understand and address, too.

I'd love this dream world PG describes where everything aligns, the stated priorities are the only ones, and the systems and cultures and tests optimize only for them. But that's not the world we live in.

I think what he's saying is that the approach is wrong. The highly industrialized school system is the way it is because of scale. His perspective is the initial point (paraphrasing: tests should be the same as taking a blood test).

To add to that point, take a urine test: people have been hacking it for years. The purpose of the urine test is to see what residual byproducts from certain drugs are in my system. I can hack it by using someone else's urine or imbibe on drugs that have a short lifetime in my bloodstream. Otherwise, to pass the test I have to not consume drugs.

His complaint is that people who pass the tests really shouldn't have. It's like a principal assuring parents that a strict urine exam is given to all teachers only to find out all the teachers who work for you are drug addicts (drug addicts who can hack the pee test).

His reference to private schools teaching students how to hack tests resonates with me as social workers teaching drug users how to hack their pee tests. I take that to mean that if teachers are doing their best but resort to teaching how to hack tests then their needs to be more work done outside of the teacher-student system.

[This is where disparities due to parent's wealth and income come in:] Students who have access to tutors can get the help they in a way having a teacher can't. A teacher can be a tutor, but cannot be a tutor for everyone (an issue with scale).

If the emphasis is on teaching, rather than conformity or daycare, then I suspect teachers being tutors for everyone would actually be more cost-effective !

Observation: creators and maintainers of hackable systems will typically spend a lot of effort to convince you that these systems are not hackable and absolutely reward only "honest effort". Pg's essay meshes very well with this observation.

pg’s articles are all about how to build a great product (Startup=Growth, for example). Are these VC tips-and-tricks secret insider-only info? They don’t publish anything like that

> YCombinator was (in 2008) oriented around learning what magic words to say to investors and exactly when to time techcrunch launch articles, etc. There seemed to be no time given to "how to make a great product”

Check out their advice on startup school, e.g. the "fundraising" section:

https://www.startupschool.org/library

I've watched many of the videos on YouTube. I would say that each speaker consistently emphasizes the need to "build something users want" before making a big press launch, before applying growth hacking techniques, before talking to investors, etc.

They always say that in the first 5 minutes of the talk, and then go onto more tactical stuff.

They do teach you about hacking investors, or maybe more charitably seeing it from their side, and seeing their motivations.

I think it's true that you can't teach the "build something users want" part, so a lot of the advice is lower level than that.

Advice about building things tends to sound very vague and general, and for every rule there's an exception. Probably the most memorable advice is "live in the future and build what's missing", which I think is true, but hard to implement if you're not the right person.

Whereas the hacking tactics are more specific and actionable (although more likely to be out of date).

Thanks for the link looks great

“Startup = Growth” is pure actionable advice and probably the most useful document i’ve ever seen on starting companies (I say that as someone who has founded 3 venture funded startups and two bootstrapped before that)