This is a great article! Max Chafkin takes a way of thinking most of us here take for granted and makes it understandable to a general audience. Sure, he occasionally gets lazy with the same old tired cliches about hygiene and interpersonal skills, but really nails the 3 essentials, passion, hard work, and customers.
This interchange with pg makes almost anyone want to jump up and do something:
"But what you really should do is start a start-up," he says. He stops and thinks for a moment. "You know what? You should do a news website for finance. You could be like Bloomberg, but you'd be just one person." His mind is going faster than his mouth. "What about Blogberg as a name? Is Blogberg.com taken?" Before I have a chance to respond, he flips open his MacBook to check, using a clever domain-name search tool developed by another Y Combinator founder, Beau Hartshorne.
Sam Altman's quote about hard work pretty much sums it up:
"The start-ups that do well are the ones that are working all the time."
Good to see he didn't miss the most important thing of all:
"We learned quickly by paying attention to the users," Graham says.
Thanks, Max. How about a follow-up article about Hacker News? Paul Graham & Y Combinator's influence goes far beyond 145 start-ups.
How is this comment worth 6 points? I mean, sure, it answers a question and all, but it's not very insightful or thought-provoking. What exactly is this "pg" guy bringing to the table here?
I'm going to assume you're serious. Pg is Paul Graham, founding partner of Y Combinator, so he is extremely qualified to answer questions about what YC will or won't fund. Simple answers to questions always do well here karma wise and they don't always need to be thought provoking, especially when a simple "yes" is enough.
They quote Fred Wilson: "I don't mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader."
I love that he added that last sentence! No one would've known what he meant otherwise. ;)
That's a stupid quote. If he didn't want to put a negative spin on it, he should have avoided the word "cult". Replace it with "club" and it is both more reasonable and accurate.
Note that most of the fan boys that are cultishly obsessed with pg and yc are actually NOT in YC. That's just such an important distinction. I get this impression just by tracking the most ridiculous comments on YC during the acceptance notifications, and noting the source.
In my experience, YC startup founders are far more likely to say they're sick of his slop (literally) after a few weeks than gush over him.
That is NOT TRUE! It's so frustrating people think this. He popularized one particular algorithm, which is great. But he did not invent it, not by a long shot.
I think you're misreading the article. They're not claiming I invented spam filtering, just one particular algorithm that worked.
There were effective spam filters before "A Plan for Spam," most notably CRM114, but that worked differently. And there were a couple papers published that had the words "Bayesian" and "spam filter" in the title, but the algorithms they described were different, and in fact quite useless.
Who invented spam filtering as we know it? I recall a transition from useless spam filters that blocked ~50% just fine but if you made them more restrictive you started to get your own messages blocked. I realize he did little more than say, this is a problem, here is an algorithm that works. But, who would you suggest first pointed out this type of approach?
Not to be facetious but who invented them, depends on your definition of "spam filter". I know you mean email filter, but when you put it that way, it makes me think of the generalized problem of filtering.
Put that way, I don't think a who invented it. It was more like it was discovered by a what.
"Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly," he says. "But working for a large company is like being waterboarded."
classic quote indeed. and true of course.
"... I doubt I've done anything anyone would care about in 100 years."
No way. For one thing, I'm convinced that "What You Can't Say" will be read in a hundred years and long beyond. Imagine if someone had written essentially the same essay centuries ago. Wouldn't we still read it?
This interchange with pg makes almost anyone want to jump up and do something:
"But what you really should do is start a start-up," he says. He stops and thinks for a moment. "You know what? You should do a news website for finance. You could be like Bloomberg, but you'd be just one person." His mind is going faster than his mouth. "What about Blogberg as a name? Is Blogberg.com taken?" Before I have a chance to respond, he flips open his MacBook to check, using a clever domain-name search tool developed by another Y Combinator founder, Beau Hartshorne.
Sam Altman's quote about hard work pretty much sums it up:
"The start-ups that do well are the ones that are working all the time."
Good to see he didn't miss the most important thing of all:
"We learned quickly by paying attention to the users," Graham says.
Thanks, Max. How about a follow-up article about Hacker News? Paul Graham & Y Combinator's influence goes far beyond 145 start-ups.