Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

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"pg's definition of a startup is just one kind of startup."

Most important is that PG's definition of a startup (or Fred Wilson's or Steve Blanks or pmarcas or Doug McClure's etc.) is to serve a purpose of what is good for them in their business model which is to make money off of people who take chances with their time hoping for a certain outcome.

It's not about what is good for any particular person or for society. Guess what? That's not what business is about either. And YC is a business. It's not on a mission to help the world although that could be a by product of a successful investment.

That's fine as we all tend to do what is in our best interest (in varying degrees of course), but it needs to be recognized and considered when one makes a decision to go down that path of which the person taking the journey is the one who has something to loose (time or impact on family).

Possibly the parent poster is jesting or perhaps they didn't realize this before, but it is quite obvious that what people write is self serving in so many ways. PG is no different.

Notice also that PG didn't exactly do anything "ambitious" with his time. He choose a path of certainty (Harvard and YC was certainly not "bet the ranch" in any way it's an excellent idea that in retrospect anyone can see had an excellent chance of working with a smallish downside). Viaweb was not "ambitious" either. I was around when that was founded and it was fairly obvious small business needed online stores and there were multiple companies doing the same thing.

Before you downvote, this is not in any way to rain on Paul's parade or take away any of his achievements at all. Or to try and make a point that there is anything wrong with what he is saying vs. what he has done.

There are always the "to be sure phrases" sprinkled about. PG does this quite early (in the fourth paragraph) by stating "because most startups fail." which of course is slipped in there the same way financial firms say "past performance is no guarantee of future gains" in their advertising (while taking out expensive full page ads in order to tout their past performance - at least they did back in the day..)

Businesses that are good for society need to grow quickly to actually reach a large fraction of society. To get from 100 users to 100 million, you need to double 20 times. If you only double once a year, it'll take 20 years before you benefit a lot of people. If you can double 5 times a year, you benefit a lot of people after only 4 years.

So no, rapid growth isn't just something investors like. If your product helps people, you want it to help the most people possible as soon as possible.

> "Businesses that are good for society need to grow quickly to actually reach a large fraction of society"

That is not true (and is more relevant to manufacturing than to tech companies). Look at ARM, for example, it never needed to grow rapidly and it doesn't actually produce stuff - it just licenses intellectual property - but the existence of ARM benefits millions. Would this fledgling firm in the early 90s Cambridge not be called a startup (was Apple dumb to fund it as a joint venture?) - would VCs not have liked to have a piece of it in the early 90s?

EDIT: Same goes for id, Valve and other game studios - you see sometimes it's better to have the best engineers and researchers take their time, let them develop and mature the technology they're working on and build something long-lasting that affects millions of people.

If ARM's business model is around licensing their IP, wouldn't getting distribution (via Apple, etc.) be considered growth? They hit profitability in a year.

"EDIT: Same goes for id, Valve and other game studios - you see sometimes it's better to have the best engineers and researchers take their time, let them develop and mature the technology they're working on and build something long-lasting that affects millions of people."

Game studios take time because game releases used to be all or nothing. There were no second chances.

I can't comment on id, but the entire reason Valve built Steam was to speed up distribution and release updates incrementally (the previous patching system sucked). It went from idea to inception in about a year. It was also buggy as hell when it was first released. Now developers can easily release additional content and make game play changes after a game is initially launched.

There is growth indeed via Apple, Samsung and other licensees. But that's mostly within the purview of Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm etc. ARM doesn't have to scale for that growth - Apple and Samsung do - yet ARM's designs reach millions of us.

As I understand it, the whole reason Valve built Steam was to cut the publisher out of the value chain (who, to be honest, had too much power and added little value for the customer).

Incremental patching and DLCs are (extremely beneficial) side-effects.

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