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30 Comments
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -2/+21˙sdnpuǝ ǝɯoɔǝq oʇ ƃuıoƃ uoos ǝɹɐ sdnʇɹɐʇs ǝɥʇ
- dunkin, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8that's just backwards thinking... ;-)
- fthead9, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7The challenges of entrepreneurship are constantly evolving. Expect to see a lot more crap companies started and a lot more little ideas that wouldn't have stood a chance in the past to get quickly flipped and turned into successes as part of a larger company's product offerings. These are exciting times.
- marc2242, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Worth a read.
- hixsonj, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5Magnitudes more? There's already so many I can't even begin to keep track... http://www.go2web20.net/
- jambarama, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Paul Graham is brilliant - don't get me wrong - but he's been saying the same thing for years. Startups are cheap, they are the only ones that innovate, and big companies will slurp them up. All smart people will create web statups then sell out to big companies for big bucks. That is idea behind Y Combinator.
Again he is brilliant, but it seems like the quality of his essays has been declining over time. Just because this worked for Viaweb - Yahoo for Graham, doesn't mean all smart people will only work on startups nor does it mean a startup is the best way to get rich. For every myspace/viaweb that sells out for big bucks there is a Kiko that fails. - mckirkus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2You need a strong stomach though, they pay generally sucks but you do get equity. Prepare to love your work, 12 hours a day. It may make sense to save up some money quit your job and build a prototype. You'll get more equity that way. I just went in with an idea and didn't have much leverage.
- jkharris07, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1There are more and more startups, how should I say it, starting up.
- KingBunny, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2I'm hopeful that large amounts of low-grade competition will just make the good quality, creative start-ups stand out better.
In the "real world" success is measured by how many customers you can buy, where as on the internet, the customers choose what to buy based on what's successful. - shauncorleone, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3This guy must be a true techie who knows what he's talking about, because his horrid grammar and sentence structure makes solid content almost unreadable.
- tony23, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1"But I'd like someone to think of those of us who have good ideas, and a willingness to work, but have real obligations to deal with as well..."
You just have to get out there and do it. You work harder and sacrifice more, or you let the opportunity slip by.
And before you say that I don't understand - I have a full-time job, a wife with lupus, a 5-year old son and a teenage daughter with aspergers. And I'm working on my own startup in my 'spare time'.
You want someone to think about us? Give them a reason. - lajkonik86, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Paul's articles are always splendid, browse the other ones as well!
- smellinator, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I have problem with my monitor - it's got up-side-down pixels. The guy at Geek Squad told me that it's probably $200 to get it fixed. Can anyone help?
- smellinator, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1We could have done without the slur at the end.
[/sarcasm] - bubbadoo989, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yes, the Y-Combinator is definitely youth-oriented. There aren't too many of us older guys and gals that can fly off for a couple of months to build a start-up.
But it doesn't mean you don't try. I have kids, mortgage, even a big dog and yet, I'm in the game. I'm not in the game to get rich (although that would be nice), I'm in to get control of my life and my family's financial future.
My tech job requires that I commute 4 hours/day and it's boring, without any future. I do fairly well, but believe h1b's will cause compensation in the tech arena to sink even further. So, in my view, it's really important to be working towards a startup every spare moment I get. Yes, it's going very slowly, and it's hard, but it is going. - MagicCake, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1What I'm wondering is how you start something when you're just too dumb to do it... Things are complicated now. To start a cool web-based business you'd have to do crazy stuff with PHP and/or AJAX and I can't see myself ever learning all that and doing it by myself. But at the same time, I have no idea where to find someone who could help. I have an awesome idea that someone else is going to do before I get a chance... That's frustrating to me.
- daridave, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Meh. An opinion... almost felt like a blog post. While interesting, I don't agree with everything in there... besides, anything that made sense in it falls into the "state the obvious" dept.
- smellinator, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Not to mention, Paul Graham does NOT take the extra time necessary to shorten his blabbering. If you can say it in 10 words, why use 100?
- ewang, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1OK, call me an old crank, but it seems the article is truly slanted toward, as he puts it "a pair of 22 year olds". I'd like to see the article about how to successfully startup a web-based business when you have three kids, two of whom have chronic illnesses. You know, things like how I can make enough money to pay for health care when an individual policy for my family would be $1800/month (I used to be an independent consultant - I suspect the rate would be even higher now). How I can make enough time to get the thing up and running while still having a couple hours a day to sleep, and be awake enough to still do my day job since I can't afford to just quit and not have any income.
I "appreciate" that it's gotten easier to be an entrepreneur if you're young. But I'd like someone to think of those of us who have good ideas, and a willingness to work, but have real obligations to deal with as well... - byogman, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Paul Graham is a smart enough guy, but there's no content to the post, only idle speculation and unsubstantiated talk of a new age which he uses to as a segue to Y-combinator. Perfectly sound economic behavior... raise awareness in your target demographic of the name of your service and how it does things differently (better), but I call BS on the predictions.
Startups are frequent and will probably become even more so, but there's no singularity we're heading toward, rather a horizontal asymptote based on human nature in those fields where startup costs are becoming very small, punctuated by bubbles of overoptimism in new applications of software. Most people will never start a successful startup or even try because that's not how most people are wired, most people don't really want to throw caution to the wind and go it alone even if they do like to fantasize about the money an unrepresentative minority of startup founders have made. That's a perfectly fine thing, you need some risk lovers with some great ideas, but you need more people actually willing to work toward common goals to flesh out and deliver on anything.
Having a degree is still pretty much a prerequisite to getting that regular job he thinks so little of, and there's really no call for that sentiment. Most businesses are actually pretty receptive to your proposal to go out and do what really matters as long as it relates somehow to their business, and you get the work done you've been given. Conversely, there's actually a lot of BS to deal with as a startup in terms of setting up the mechanics of your business and actually trying to find enough customers and make money.
Trying to start up your own business does not make you a courageous hero. Not trying to start up your own business does not make you a coward. Bottom line, life passes inexorably before your eyes only if you don't apply yourself.
Back to work now ;-) - empiric, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0"Google has by far the best programmers of any public technology company."
Weird article. It reads like he outsourced it, or was simply drunk at the time of writing... - n0va, on 10/10/2007, -2/+2i see what you did there.
- chris9902, on 10/10/2007, -3/+3kinda like how the 90s was exciting? It's all going to end in tears.
but, at least we can start looking forward to Web 3.0... huh, huh. - kreativeguy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Your right. Real people are the one's searching and they can make judgments and decisions based on the quality of the layout and content on the sites they search for. It may be easy to create a start-up, but you have to know something about what you are doing to make any money. http://www.coastalcreativegroup.com
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0You've gotta love what you do -- you might need to put in the extra hours and time but in the end it will pay off. There are a lot of resources out there and there needs to be more. Sun Microsystems is kicking ass right now in offering free Startup Camps to help get Startups 'started'. There are pretty heavy discounts for the equipment and resources as well. Check out www.startupcamp.org and http://www.sun.com/emrkt/startupessentials/ for more info.
- arcticsoft, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1It seems this article is meaningless ramble. I get the point of the article after the first section. No need to go into the college degree stuff or any of that. It seems he is using the article to target the word "startup" for search engines for potential traffic, not actually for any useful knowledge.
- stevedclarke, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1This one actually worked ;)
- Tmax88, on 10/10/2007, -1/+0Rife with unsubstantiated claims and sloppy writing. "Orders of magnitude more"? That means at least one hundred times more than present, and he doesn't put a number at the present number of startups. Of course, with no timeframe, any prediction is, in theory, feasible. A few paragraphs later, this: "[...]unfortunately most investors are terrible judges. I know because I see behind the scenes what an enormous amount of work it takes to raise money, and the amount of selling required." A great example of inductive reasoning. "Risk is always proportionate to reward" In economics textbooks, perhaps. Not in the real world, where there can be "shortcuts" in the form of political favors. Just ask,oh say, Erik Prince.
- stevedclarke, on 10/10/2007, -3/+1You should, really. Its got this guy singing and dancing and ...
- alexandralerman, on 10/10/2007, -4/+0http://www.scribemedia.org/2007/10/04/startups/
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