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Comment by timruffles | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why you're being downvoted. As you said: the list contains great, tough advice, but some of it is wrong as it's personal preference or pompous.

"augmenting the human condition" sounds like it'd be better achieved by writing a novel. I'm trying to imagine the person who could say their startup was "augmenting the human condition" with a straight face.

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I'd agree, that one phrase seems a little out of touch. If it had been phrased differently (e.g. "Do something that changes the world") I still would have taken issue with it. I'm not attacking the phrasing so much as the sentiment that startups need to have Google-level ambitions (something I don't think Larry and Sergey had in the beginning, in fact). Even pg has observed in one of his essays that not all founders set out to disrupt entire industries.

But to be fair, there are plenty of examples of companies (Microsoft, Google, Airbnb, Dropbox) which arguable have legitimately augmented the human condition for huge numbers of people. There's just plenty more that didn't, and that's okay.

Yup. Also I doubt anyone who sets out to "augment the human condition" will: most founder of big cos set out to do something small, & and grew from there when it worked well.

If Google started with the goal of being where it is today (self-driving cars, ubiquity), rather than to build the best search-engine possible, it'd have undoubtably failed.

How about "solve problems people care about"?

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