[merwanedr]

HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success. "It's too expensive" or "Nobody needs it because we have X" on a project lead by a domain expert is not constructive criticism or conservatism, it's pure envy.

PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase because he has skin in the game, but because he knows what the teams have achieved and what they could potentially achieve.

I don't understand, it seems so obvious to me. Dropbox started as a better FTP, Coinbase is a better Bitcoin wallet, Gmail is a better SMTP, Mighty is a better Chrome. All of these products are meant for the masses because the core technologies/protocols are too complicated or restrictive to directly interact with.

[dunkelheit]

People always bring Dropbox to these discussions as an example of a startup that was dismissed by HN but turned out to be huge, but turns out there are examples of the opposite thing happening too!

Does anyone remember Color Labs? Go read this thread and marvel at the similarities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364463. A stellar team backed by top VCs who invested (extraordinary at the time) $41M sets out to build a location enabled photo-sharing app. VCs tout it as "the next Google". Most of HN is pretty critical with some voices advocating caution and saying "let's not be so dismissive, maybe there is something more to it". Well, it turned out there was nothing more to it.

So no, being dismissed by HN does not automatically mean that your idea is good and you will be successful.

[gofreddygo]

I see this as a pessimism/optimism spectrum. We are on the extreme left if we can reliably predict successes and on the extreme right if we can reliably predict failures.

As we pick a few datapoints (Dropbox, Coinbase, Airbnb) and we average it out, we are pushed towards the left.

More data we pick (colorlabs for example, and I'm sure many others) we are pushed more towards the right.

Most popular article dealing with VC news, startup promotion, funding news, valuation bragging, acquisition gossip, startup failure reports picks data that push the narrative towards the extremes.

My instinct says we are squarely around the center where we can't predict shit.

[ZephyrBlu]

> My instinct says we are squarely around the center where we can't predict shit

Completely agree. There are a lot of people in this post trying to rationalize their own biased opinion on what predicts success or failure though.

[IgorPartola]

To expand on your model, I think our ability to predict success and our ability to predict failure are separate things not on a continuum with each other but orthogonal metrics. We need to count false positives and false negatives here.

I predict that HN is no better at predicting success than average. It might be better than average at predicting failure but given the distribution that might not be that hard: if you dismiss every idea AND most ideas fail, then you always look like you are getting it right with a few occasional wrongs. Think about it in the inverse: if most startups succeeded spectacularly but a few failed miserably and you always were bullish on all startups, people would just say that you are almost always right.

The only real difference between predicting success and the result being failure and the opposite is that in this world success is unbounded (your valuation isn’t constrained since you can create a whole new market segment), but failure is always bounded. Therefore getting a success wrong sucks more than getting a failure wrong: you could have made a lot of money by correctly predicting a unicorn.

[gofreddygo]

> I predict that HN is no better at predicting success than average

I can't fully agree on this. In a fair game (coin toss) your chances are just that, average. In a game where your experience, network and wealth can influence the outcome, things can be different. This is common in the enterprise market.

In the consumer market (which isn't more fair, but just works differently), that model fails miserably, that's where we start seeing the failures of the predictions and bets made.

What I see happening, is the vested parties (VC, Founders, investors) trying to cherry pick data points (from both markets), and then bragging about how they are good at predicting in both markets, but when you add in more data you see, that is not the case.

[aerosmile]

I am really surprised that you didn't choose the more obvious line of reasoning, which would be to bring up examples of companies that PG predicted to be breakout successes and then they failed. PG marveled about Instacart and Flexport well before anyone else, including myself (I know members of the founding teams in both companies very well, and think very highly of them... but even so, I didn't see their companies as the type of breakout successes that they became until PG made his case for them). The constant hate against PG is really starting to get tiring, especially when you see such sloppy reasoning. Why judge his reasoning based on what other VCs thought? Saying PG = VC industry is a really stunningly poor argument IMO.

[sombremesa]

Yep, you can actually go through the list of companies YC has funded on the website and most of them are out of business today (as you’d expect based on the stats on VC backed ventures). Of course, nobody talks about those.

[aerosmile]

I am struggling to understand what you're trying to say. Technically what you said is perfectly correct, but in a "the sun goes up in the morning and comes down in the evening" kind of a way. I doubt there are many people on Hacker News who don't realize that most VC backed ventures fail.

What would have been more insightful is a conversation around relative benchmarks. For example, "do YC companies fail at a higher rate than the cohort of equally funded companies?" (hint: no).

Or perhaps, if you're trying to criticize the VC industry, perhaps ask, "if a VC put in money in every YC company since the beginning of YC, what would their IRR be today?" (hint: massive).

[sombremesa]

I'm trying to say: 'Of course, nobody talks about those.'

Since it's soooo obvious that we should all hide our failures and glorify our successes without questioning this practice (I did say 'of course'), I understand how you missed the point.

[deckard1]

There were people also defending Theranos and WeWork.

I take all articles and comments here with a huge grain of salt. Especially Paul Graham.

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Way back in 2005. Back when lemonodor was a thing.

[gist]

The essay is really just self serving to keep stoking the YC starmaking machinery (see lyrics to 'Free Man in Paris' by Joni Mitchell). Keep people dreaming and some of the crazy ideas will hit.

People often forget that even Apple (or might not know if young) was not wildly successful and almost went bankrupt (or close to that) and had to be bailed out by Microsoft.

Also forgotten is that the quality of the execution matters a great deal. Dropbox or Coinbase w/o good execution and attention to details would not be where they are today. Ditto Color Labs with great execution would not work necessarily.

[ChrisArchitect]

Dropbox got big because iPhone users were so desperate to be able to share files between people and desktops that they started using it in droves. The desktop users that took it on were simply looking for some more storage and it just took off from there. There was no reason to pay attention to it initially (and still isn't imo) and over in android phone land everyone had no reason to either other than to retrieve files their friends sent them.

[Uehreka]

That’s not how I remember it at all. The first time I heard of Dropbox it was in 2010-ish (1 year before I got an iPhone and several years before iPhones had a usable file system) when folks in my dorm were using it to share music libraries. I was a CS major and had never even heard the word “samba” (yeah, I know) and it seemed super useful for all kinds of things.

I mean, that’s just me, but my understanding was that it didn’t take off on mobile until after it had established a secure foothold on the desktop.

[mbesto]

> HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success.

It's not. This is survivorship bias from the infamous stories about Dropbox, Coinbase, etc. There's plenty of "Show HNs" of HNr's criticizing companies that go nowhere. Including one of my own!

What you're referring to is effectively called "non consensus and right"[0]. The problem with this concept is that it can only be verified after the idea is deemed right or wrong.

https://disruptionobserver.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/image...

[fighterpilot]

Non-consensus and right is the best framework for making investments, since you need non-consensus in order to get a cheap price. But for merely estimating the probability that something will succeed, consensus (whether positive or negative) is probably slightly predictive in that regard, as you point out w.r.t. survivor bias.

I do put a lot of stock into Paul's essay, though. If someone credible and highly intelligent has some non-consensus opinion, it's a good idea to suspend judgement and really listen to their reasoning.

[easton]

Mighty's problem is different than the others though, in that it is a thin client for a thin client. If web apps are too big to the point people need to stream Chrome in a container to get them to run well, why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities and instead could just target Windows (or Linux)? The entire point of web applications was that they didn't require an install and were lighter than their desktop counterparts, and now that isn't true, so can't we ditch them?

[suhail]

Linux has low market share, Apple won't let you on non-Apple hardware, and Windows has high fees to license in that way.

The only path is the browser and most desktop apps are web apps.

Feel free to read my post that goes deeper about our thinking: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...

[easton]

Microsoft keeps cutting the cost of licensing Windows for VDI though. Microsoft 365 E3 costs $32 a month (when you're already probably paying them $15-20 per month, not a bad increase) and includes Windows 10 Enterprise licensing for VDI. $12 + compute (which we could presume is $30-ish per month for a VM similar to the one Mighty ships? depending on if you buy the servers vs go to a cloud provider, etc), and it seems like you could get there for the cost Mighty is charging for Chrome. You'd need a sysadmin to set it all up, so a service like Mighty where you could just show it you have the correct licenses and get a beefy VM turned up would be really nice (Microsoft is working on something, but who knows when it'll be out).

I read your article, and the technology sounds interesting. I also understand you pivoted from offering a simple VDI service, presumably because of licensing (and of course, everything I just said goes out the window if Microsoft decides to alter the deal). But for the worker who doesn't 100% live in web apps (I'm thinking of the legions of accountants who have 8GB of RAM tied up in Excel all day long) and needs more than their garbage corporate machine can handle, I don't see this being enough.

Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll hold me up as the next "Dropbox is just FTP with extra steps!" person. I would be fine with that. But maybe, just maybe, once the streaming tech is proven (it looks like it is, honestly), reconsider?

[stephc_int13]

>most desktop apps are web apps.

Not yet.

[stingrae]

for the average user, they are.

[boredtofears]

I'm not sure who the average user is, but everyone I can think of in my life that fits that description definitely does not have more "web apps as desktop apps" than pure desktop apps. Not by a long shot.

[noloblo]

very valuable is it possible to get beta access @suhail

[merwanedr]

Why doesn't Heroku simply give you a linux instance to do whatever you want like you'd do with EC2? Because it's easier for end users to deal with something that has a higher level of abstraction. Mighty is addressing an existing problem with a complex technology that seems simple on the surface.

[granshaw]

> why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities

Ahem, that ship has long since sailed. We have an entire generation of developers now where all they know is the Web, and industry investments, tooling, etc has all shifted in that direction

[marvin]

Maybe they’ll do that someday. Bootstrap to there, and then switch around and save us all the hassle of writing webapps.

That would make this comment thread look more hilarious than «less space than a Nomad, no wireless».

[qshaman]

This is so common in SV, you are just being arrogant and salty in general, because people are showing how dumb, privacy unfriendly, and dangerous this product is, it has nothing to do with envy. Using Dropbox as an example is even worst, thats like saying "X celebrity is famous and smoke weed, then if I smoke weed, I will be famous". PG is clearly biased and he is just trying to get a return on his investment, thats all, and if he needs to hype this product to make money he will. People are not dummies, if the product is meant for the general public and not the HN crowd, then start a Google Ads campaign, or get in the Tonight Show or something.

[dang]

This is so pitch-perfect an example of what pg used to call a middlebrow dismissal (which we reworked as 'shallow dismissal' on HN), upgraded to 2020-21 rage levels, that I'm not sure one could improve upon it as a parody. Is there any note it doesn't hit?

[dd36]

If they pivot, does that mean the negative feedback was right or is it always wrong? What if the feedback precipitates the pivot?

I have no idea if Mighty will succeed or not. But I suspect it will not succeed as a a $30/mo consumer product. Indeed, I'd bet money on it. The companies everyone keeps referencing were free products. I got excited about Dropbox. So did my friends. No friend has excitedly sent me a link to Mighty.

I'm sure some professionals will pay though. How many and how many they need to hit their numbers is another question. They can still probably ride the hype machine to an exit.

[te_chris]

Mighty isn't "better chrome"! It's a whole thin client proxy-service privacy-nightmare. It's more and more centralising of everything under corporate control with the payoff to users of marginal gains in speed. Kill it with fire.

[the-dude]

The money will be made by charging corporations, edu's & gov's who want just that : centralized control.

[dd36]

Yes. Unless they can figure out how to be free to consumers.

[s3r3nity]

Don’t forget my favorite: “Slack is just IRC with clever marketing.”

[rsj_hn]

TBH, I still don't understand what people like about Slack. I'm not trying to insult Slack users, but it seems like the chat-version of an open office floorplan, where everyone is yelling into a crowd, and supposedly the crowd is sitting in front of their screens, scrolling through this noise and occasionally yelling back. I'm surprised employers allow such a productivity hit, let alone pay to have it in their workplace.

[clpwq]

Interesting metric. The underlying principle is:

"No one went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

HN just hasn't internalized it quite yet, so we have the counter-indicator.

[baud147258]

> Mighty is a better Chrome

yes, it's better in the sense that the privacy issues are even better; well, worse in the viewpoint of the user, but since when VCs cared about it?

[baud147258]

And other than that I don't even think Mighty is better that Chrome, because it wouldn't work if you have a bad internet connection speed or if the connection drops

[FlyingSnake]

> HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success.

The success of a startup depends on many factors and pessimism on HN is definitely not one of them. HN is a forum where people intellectualize things from their limited point of view. It is usually not the primary forum where the founders seek feedback. I think HN is a remix of the old slashdot forums with a healthy mix of digg + reddit.

[justicezyx]

> PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase

Those are not needing defense. Those are quite mundane business.

Dropbox for one, everyone thinks it's useful. The controversial part is whether or not it's a good business. Turns out Dropbox is not so great a business. I mean, if Dropbox is in China, it will be crushed by copycats and die very quickly.

Similarly for coinbase. It's useful. The question was whether or not btc and crypto currency will be big enough for coinbase to be a great business. Of course, given the success in crypto currency, coinbase is a great business.

But neither of these are “crazy new ideas”. They are not even new ideas...

[ta_ca]

there are lots of links to casey's twitter account but the real gem is[0]. it reads like the famous jurassic park quote: 'Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should'

[0]https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441