[troughway]

Can someone pin point what is objectively wrong or out of touch with this article? Genuinely asking because the past three+ posts from pg have been met with negativity saying pg is a wealthy Londoner who doesn’t understand the prole struggle.

[postingpals]

He starts his entire essay with a faulty premise, that in order to be a billionaire you have to be exploitative, and then goes on to argue why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true.

Look, not even 'prole defenders' agree with this. You don't have to be exploitative to be a billionaire, it's simply a byproduct. There are only several thousand billionaires on earth and you'd be hard pressed to find any one of them without some sort of scandal involving their workers or consumers.

Pinpointing what is 'objectively' wrong with a subjective essay is hard, which is why most people are attacking the subjectivity itself, and I think that's healthy to do.

[treis]

>why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true.

I have a dim recollection of an article many years ago that Y Combinator asked applicants a time when they gamed the system and the answer to that was on of the most correlated to success. Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. They framed it as a positive. Finding opportunities and using them to your advantage. But a negative framing would be that they were looking for people that exploited whatever advantage they oculd find.

[ac2u]

>Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet.

Are you sure you didn't just come up with that example yourself to suit the narrative? Until you know what all selected companies chose as an answer for that, aren't we just guessing as to what quality they were looking for?

To be clear, I'm not accusing you of making it up, as my memory of it is dim too, I just can't remember examples being given like lying on a resume.

[treis]

What examples can you remember?

[ac2u]

I think this was the thread I remember reading at the time where people came up with examples that don't have to be deceptive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197674

There was also a quote from someone in yc saying that the question wasn't really that important (probably why it got removed).

[jelliclesfarm]

That’s an interesting thread ..altho not enough comments to make it super interesting..

I guess ‘hacks’ are what we call as ‘loopholes’ in tax audits. This is how I understand hacking. Every system has its strength/weaknesses and boundaries. As long as we can rearrange the system from within the boundaries by exploiting the available strengths/weaknesses to create an entirely different model/system/agenda qualifies as a ‘hack’.

[treis]

I'm glad you found it, but I don't really see those as really changing my point. They looked for people that beat the system. They're amusing anecdotes when it's a plucky college kid hustling for a job. But when it's a head of a billion+ company beating the system (i.e. laws protecting workers and/or the general populace) it's a different story.

[jelliclesfarm]

I remember that(I applied twice. Won’t likely do it again because YC isn’t a good fit for me) and I wrote something to fill the blank..while thinking why on earth would I put that in writing here for the off chance that I might be get into an accelerator program.

I don’t expect anyone to answer that truthfully, but the ability to come up with a convincing and impressive response would score major points for creativity.

[troughway]

People have already minced words over "exploitation" and where to exactly draw the boundary between acceptable/tolerable and not. It strikes me personally as flimsy reasoning to harp on his writings.

If you're going to build a business and you hope to make money, you're going to have to EXPLOIT inefficiencies in markets, competitors, customers, processes, conventional modes of thinking, and so on. Doesn't matter if the business is making you a dollar or a million or a billion.

And also, this whole "scandal involving workers or consumers". YC's portfolio has plenty of companies who are making a killing with revenue who haven't had to do this.

Patrick Collison is a regular poster on here. Go ahead and tell him he's exploiting people and he's scandalous with workers and consumers. I'd like to see someone go to one of the successful YC alumni and say directly at them half the shit you people spout out into the nether.

As I have mentioned in a comment to the throwaway account in this thread - I sincerely think a lot of commenters on here either have no experience or no ambition in starting a business, never mind getting a healthy revenue stream. Hell, I wonder what the percentage here is who got as far to having to talk to clients.

[throwaway2245]

I don't really think this is a new theme for pg's essays [edit: I mean, I don't think pg's style or content has changed that much], although I've also noticed this change [in responses here].

Usually, HN is the space where his essays are most heavily defended.

[troughway]

This is certainly a newer-ish theme.

I am not sure where the bitterness comes, and to be honest, I would like to know. We are reading the same essays.

More and more I am starting to think that people who are decrying pg's writing should come clean and say whether or not they've started a business, and if so, what was the outcome. The outcome isn't as relevant, but I bet there are very few people out there who have reached, lets call it "Fuck You" money through running their own business who would read this essay and go "Hah he's so out of touch he doesn't even see it anymore" and toss some link about Dunning-Kruger or whatever.

For people who are in the business of making money through getting shit built, I think what he's saying will resonate just fine. But then again it's one of those things where the people who need it the most are the least likely ones to take it, and vice versa. It's akin to the "It's a good problem to have" crowd when you say how you're sick of dealing with clients on the phone even though you have a 200-person company, and they look at you sideways because they have no idea why you are complaining.

He's talking about billionaires and interviews in this one, and he starts off saying how the two threads are connected. But what he's really talking about is building-a-business-by-convincing-people-you're-not-full-of-hot-air.

And unfortunately, when I see people tearing his essays apart, their ramblings strike me as nothing but hot air.

I think it's HN who is out of touch more than pg is, because I don't think the vast majority are here to build businesses whatsoever.

[majormajor]

"He's talking about billionaires but he's REALLY talking about something else that people in the right audience will get, and just filter out the noise" sounds fairly out of touch, if he can't see that the framing he's using is needlessly complicating the issue. Or if he wants to connect to a larger political discussion about global economic systems but only has substance to discuss related to a narrower "building a business" question.

Would be easier to just talk about what he's actually talking about, then.

[troughway]

To be fair this is another article/essay in a very, very long string of his that can be filed under some kind of a "Fundamentals of Business" type category. If you talk to owners, they will inevitably say the same things he's saying, sometimes verbatim. But these owners wouldn't speak in direct words either, because "speaking to customers/users" is too context dependent to get into in an HN comment. There's too much nuance to bash the person over the head with it when writing this sort of an essay.

That's mostly what tipped me off to not take his words at face value but to interpret them through his lens as a VC and someone who is trying to communicate business ideas (ideals?) to people who, I would at least hope, aspire to create a business of their own. Whether it's a million or a billion, it doesn't matter. Nearly everything he talks about applies to "lifestyle businesses," which is I think partly why YC offers some small bit of money to get the ball rolling rather than go gung-ho and throw massive amounts of money at people. I don't know if this has changed, I don't think it has. Obviously it doesn't hurt to get a leg-up from the counsellors and whatnot that YC provides through their alumni program.

I am not sure if he's spoken about it but I wouldn't doubt that one of his philosophies is that a diverse number of businesses can grow to a reasonable revenue (where the founders are happy and working away at it) with a bit of money to start with, and that way YC doesn't have to spend a fortune early on and everyone walks away happy even if YC doesn't turn a sizable profit. Some kind of a threshold where YC feels anything above that means they're pissing money in the wind and their ROI isn't any better, but at the same time they're helping the founders as best as they can.

So you have to take the times he talks about being Ramen Profitable and talks about building a Billion Dollar Business and find the underlying threads tying it all together.

pg can't tell you exactly what, how, when, where, why you should be doing the thing you need to be doing to build a business. His words sound like platitudes most of the time to me personally, which is why I take the side of "the people who need this the most won't take it, and vice versa", because the person who started a business and is profitable didn't have anyone like pg telling them this sort of stuff. Would someone read his words before starting anything and be inspired to? Perhaps, but it's a long journey and counting on such flimsy motivation to keep you going is to me silly.

For some, certain things might be common sense. For others, not so much. Plenty of founders, even those with serious business experience, still have it ingrained in them that "if you build it, they will come", and they neglect every other aspect of business. Yes, I'm talking primarily about engineering types. This essay is to remind you to focus on the users, and the rest will follow.

Aside: I'm grateful for the Startup School library. I think it's a great resource. It's got a nice mix of obvious and non-obvious advice in there. When people disparage pg's writing, they should take a moment and see what his company has built for people who wish to create a business before declaring him out of touch.

[nsp]

I've started a business, we were recently acquired for a nine figure sum, and I think PG is increasingly out of touch. My best guess is that he's been rich too long, but I feel the bitterness and have been quite successful in my tech career starting companies.

[troughway]

>I feel the bitterness

Elaborate on it then.