Hacker News Reader

Comment by coder1001 | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me how @pg managed to conquer the business side of startups and started YC given his very technical background!

To me it is not very common for (very) technical people to be good at both tech and business!

View on HN

I'm electronics and embedded software developer, but I took a pause from that and founded a small web business startup with few guys two years before PG founded Viaweb. The product was very similar to PG 's Viaweb. Viaweb was more general and consumer market oriented. We had narrow focus with b2b trough our connections.

It's hard to describe how easy it was to make money in the late 90's with even little technical skill and tiniest amount of business understanding. We were making money hand over fist knowing next to nothing.

PG sold his company for $50 million, we sold ours for $5 million after we took the mountain of cash out of it (another $5 million). After reading how PG did it, I think his genius was paying $16,000 a month for a PR firm. He understood the value of PR, we didn't. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

His essays, HackerNews and Y combinator are expression of this understanding. He has created expanding self-reinforcing network of affordable PR and connections for startups. That's the real scarcity in the startup scene. Being accepted into a batch is valuable. Instead of hiring PR firm, PR firm accepts you and stamps you with the Y Combinator brand.

Does PR stands for Purchase Request here?

Public relations.

For some counter examples:

Bill Joy co-founded SUN - but also wrote ex, vi, the BSD UNIX tcp/ip stack, and other things.

Marc Andreessen wrote Mosaic and Netscape - and is a famous VC person now (of Andreessen Horowitz fame).

Bill Gates, also very technical (wrote early MS programs, BASIC interpreters etc).

Eric Schmidt (ex Google CEO) wrote Lex (the lexer, now more known by its GNU port, flex) and was SUN's first programmer.

Early Microsoft tended to clone or buy successful products. They were not really into core R&D, only improvement R&D. They let others be the guinea pigs. Gates was a skilled poker player, which probably helped him be a shrewd business-person. When all was said and done, you would realize he walked away with all your best cards.

Gates was a skilled poker player, which probably helped him be a shrewd business-person. When all was said and done, you would realize he walked away with all your best cards.

That doesn't happen in poker.

Insert better card-game metaphor here.

Yet some of the most successful business people seem to be good at tech. I heard that half of the CEOs of the top 500 fortune companies have a STEM degree.

My guess: STEM degrees require and foster critical thinking, logic, and abstraction skills, which are all very conducive to being a good business person.

There might be some survivorship bias in there if STEM fields are more successful than others, naturally leading to more STEM leaders, or more opportunities for leaders to form.

Often times it's a matter of just listening to customers. Even if you don't have a knack for the domain, if you get enough feedback and react to it, you can "organically" fit it well. It's sort of comparable to a genetic algorithm. Of course, having a knack for a domain could mean fewer iterations of rework.

Lisp is ideal for changing on a dime, at least for a small team.

It's not very common for anyone to be good at business. But for some reason when people are good at tech, suddenly that becomes the reason they are bad at business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com