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Paul Graham
@paulg
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Someone wondered how startups fail. In most cases, because they don't make something people want. That can happen by (a) failing to ship, (b) shipping but never getting any growth, or (c) mediocre growth combined with high expenses.
This recipe will beat all three: ship quickly, then relentlessly optimize for growth, and don't hire a lot of people till you have it.
Obviously this won't work for all startups. Boom or Oklo can't avoid spending before growth. But even in cases like those you can adapt the recipe. Just replace "growth" with "convincingness to investors." E.g. hitting milestones.
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Paul Graham
@paulg
People have little loyalty to meat per se. If you made something that was cheaper and tasted better, most carnivores would switch. Once that shift started, social pressure against eating meat would grow rapidly. It would seem, and in fact would be, perverse.
Predictions about the future often turn out to be false, but I'm going to risk predicting a rapid switch away from meat at some point. It's rocket-science hard, but no harder, and there is a huge amount of money to be made. Ergo it will happen.
I'll warn you in advance, though, that the switch will probably increase rather than decrease economic inequality. The replacements for meat will be created by startups, which means more Bezoses, and will simultaneously put lots of small farmers out of business.
Read 3 tweets
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Paul Graham
@paulg
Many of the most important discoveries read at first like small tweaks to something that already existed. Often their own inventors initially thought of them this way.
It's easiest to parse something new as a delta on something old. But to judge an idea properly you have to project it forward in time, not back. Which is so hard to do that the only wise course is to reserve judgment.
That's why I hate it when someone posts something online and people put it down, saying it's not really new. This is not merely mean-spirited, but often factually wrong too. Whole new worlds grow from tiny deltas of novelty.
Read 3 tweets
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Paul Graham
@paulg
Projects that yield great results often wouldn't seem promising to a rational person. Fortunately some people have a compensating irrationality: they're so interested in the project that they'll work on it for its own sake.
One reason big companies can't do what startups can is that people in big companies aren't allowed to have this kind of irrationality. You can't work on something just because it seems cool. You have to explain what the benefits will be. A reasonable request. All too reasonable.
Y Combinator itself was an instance of this pattern. We had no idea if it would make money. But it seemed like a cool thing to try. And being an instance of this pattern helped us to see it in startups that applied.
Read 4 tweets

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Stu Stein
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1/ A friend asked why every Silicon Valley startup has to be a billion dollars or it’s considered a fail. Why isn’t profitability enough?

(The @shl article sparked their interest.)

It was a good question, and so I did my best to answer, as someone working at a startup….👇
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That Instagram influencer I occasionally check in on because she's The Worst is now charging $165 for a 4 hour "seminar" on how to be yourself.
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NATE SCHMIDT
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Want to start an online business, but don't know where to start?

Then listen here and listen close.

Because about a year ago I "figured it out."

And in this thread, I'm gonna tell you 90% of everything you need to know to start your own profitable online business.

👇👇
You must sell something. Specifically, a product or a service. Something people want and are willing to buy at a price they're willing to pay. A blog, YouTube channel, etc. won't cut it. You need an offer.
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Jessica Livingston
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9 things you can learn from my experience starting Y Combinator: foundersatwork.posthaven.com/grow-the-puzzl…
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oliver beige
@ecoinomia
One of the momentous things in dot-com history we are, uhh, "privileged" to witness in real time is Facebook's shift from Schumpeterian monopoly to Ricardian monopoly. In ten years, business school cases will be written about this stuff...
This isn't the first of course. Microsoft maneuvered itself into the same position ca. 1999, and the verdict back then was MS is irrelevant now that it missed the whole internet thing and is just flailing around, but MS never stopped being a hugely profitable key player.
There's others, but the key lesson learned should be: you can coast on cruise control for quite some time, 20 years plus apparently, when you can milk Ricardian rents. And that's a problem.
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