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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

"Perhaps he’s not a great speaker, but I’m not so sure."

I'm not a great speaker. The awkward delivery he describes is unfortunately pretty much the norm. Believe it or not, I used to be even worse.

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Hi pg - I admit, I was surprised by your speaking style when you first started but in a positive way. The surprise was in contrast to the mental model I have formed of you after many years of reading your essays (perhaps a Gandalf-esque character was what I was expecting). Overall, I left inspired about technology startups and even more enamored of both the hustle and humility of the YC team.

Smooth delivery is overrated.

The pauses convey information about the speaker's state of mind about what he is talking. I usually find that such talks contain much more digestible information than surface-level slick talks.

Don't change your style! The talk rocked, but there are valid points in the article about setting about booths etc.

"Smooth delivery is overrated."

Agreed, though it depends on your audience and your message.

John Carmack is the most awkward public speaker I've ever seen and also one of the people whom I most enjoying listening to.

Carmack is a long way short of the most awkward public speaker I've seen. Carmack knows what he's talking about, and can monologue stream of consciousness from that. Far more awkward is watching someone who only just barely knows what they're talking about, but gets tripped up by e.g. interjections or questions from the audience. You see it a lot with consultants doing presentations at conferences, pretending competence in some domain or other. I can find myself either cringing with embarrassment on their behalf, or shaking my head in disgust, depending on the personality and the degree to which they try to BS their way through.

The content of PG's talk more than made up for his lack of flair. And besides, he was honest and funny. IMHO several of the more charismatic YC alumni spoiled their talks with Powerpoint abuse -- either not-actually-funny pictures or too much text. On the other hand (ahem), the guy who had all the graphs used his slides really well for that.

(Loopt CEO, I think you were saying really interesting stuff, but I found it hard to take in, because I was trying to read the words on your slides at the same time. I think your talk would have been much better with zero words on the slides.)

Oh, and if anyone's worried about their public speaking skills, remember Knuth. Content trumps flair. :-)

I was there, you did a fine job. Inspiring, everyone liked it. Yes, you were there to drive enthusiasm for your mission, it's not cynical to note that, and it's naive to be dissapointed by it.

EDIT: removed silly domino's in NYC joke

Have you priced out buying good pizza vs cheap pizza for 800 people?

Yeah, it's true, it's probably possible but a logistical nightmare. Can't actually fault them for that, was a good event all around.

Ah bummer, I thought that was funny.

For what it's worth I agree. It just sounds like the OP couldn't find anything big to complain about, so picked on Paul's style rather than the substance of his talk.

YC served Domino's in NYC? I lived there most of my life, swear I never even knew one existed.

If this was downtown (Tribeca/Soho), John's would have been the choice. Talk to them a couple days in advance, I'm sure they could handle it. If not, go to 3 or 4 places and get a variety. Just not Domino's.

It was Papa Johns and it was due to a matter of scale. What local pizzeria could handle 300 pies?

They had both Papa Johns and Dominos. It was free pizza ... why are we discussing this?

It's not a huge deal, but it's a matter of NYC culture. It just would have made a better impression to do it differently. Little things can matter.

I was there and really appreciated the talk. The message was clear, NYC is good enough to found a startup in, and nobody will promise that it will be an equally strong startup hub as SV.

PG.... I believe that this article displays a problem in culture with NYC. Here there's a culture of complainers, while in the valley there is a culture of do-ers. I mean this article mentions why you didn't give an introduction as to what Y combinator is. For any real hacker, that would have been a waste of time just like anything else that is similarly a Google/Wikipedia search away.

The event was great. We are trying here in NYC, but one of the largest problems here is because (as you said) startups are not culturally accepted as the norm, its harder to get word of mouth about your product going. Therefore allow me to plug spottmusic.com here. :)

Thoughts appreciated....

Hmm. It's been a few years since I saw you speak in person, but at the very first startup school (2005?) I thought your presentation was perfectly fine.

In other recorded presentations of other events it just seems like you take the casual/personable approach to a presentation vs. an overly formalized approach.

I would not give you any negative points for your stage presence at these events. I would suggest some more upscale footwear at times though...

eh for what its worth, you kind of amaze me in Office Hours being able to ferret out the nuggets of idea's you've barely heard. That plenty makes up for being on stage.

Supposedly, Toastmasters can help with that. I have no idea if you have ever participated in a Toastmasters (and I have not personally) and I realize that once you are a big name, there are challenges to trying to do something like that (I mean it might be a wash because people might treat you differently due to who you are). Just tossing it out there on the off chance that a) you haven't done this b) you didn't know about it for some reason (or hadn't really thought about doing it yourself) and c) you actually have some reason to want to work on this. If you don't do that much public speaking, it may not really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Peace.

I can vouch for the effectiveness of Toastmasters in addressing the problems the article describes in the first paragraph of "this is Paul Graham". http://www.toastmasters.org/

The rest of the paragraphs in that section are off. I didn't see the presentation, but just reading the writer's complaints about unanswered questions tells me that pg's speech was effective. The goal was to get the audience to want the answers to those questions.

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