[revorad]

The surprising thing was that Sam's advice about working on a big mission and something "important" seems directly contradicting what pg has been writing for years.

Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

I'm not too keen on Dustin Moskovitz's whole spiel about telling people not to start startups. In a course about how to start startups, it seems really misplaced.

[mej10]

They addressed these points directly in the lecture.

Sam's message here is to try and shift the balance back to where it should be. PG says that they seemed like toys. Not that they were toys. I think what they've said is very well aligned. Many people in the past few years have totally dismissed having a good idea as being important.

Similarly, Dustin Moskovitz is just trying to counterbalance the way over-romanticized view of startups in our culture. Many people get into startups for the wrong reasons, and anyone convinced not to by what he has said is probably much better off.

[revorad]

Is it about balance or the truth?

Of course, eventually you want to do something important. But since we are talking about starting a startup, I just can't see how sama's advice aligns with this, for example:

I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.

The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

I read Thiel's book and class notes, in which again he talks about having a vision and big idea. Sounds great until you stop to think about how Thiel's own startup Paypal came about.

Quoting Max Levchin from Founders at work:

I think we didn't know what we were doing. I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you're not really going to build one specific company. The goal—at least the way I think about entrepreneurship—is you realize one day that you can't really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what that thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.

If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever any clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie."

Paypal didn't follow any of Thiel's recipe for a great startup:

They didn't start out with a very clear plan or big idea. They pivoted lots. They had intense competition.

[tim333]

I'm not sure the two view points really contradict. While early microcomputers, BackRub and early Facebook may have seemed like toys I sure some of those folks were aware they could become "important." I think Gates and the Apple guys were aware microcomputers would become widespread and the Google guys were aware better search could be a big deal. I think from interviews Zuckerberg was a bit surprised by how theFacebook took off though. Although subsequently he's got the "For us, it is this vision of connecting the world," thing going on.

[revorad]

It's easy to write grand vision statements in retrospect. At the time though, Page and Brin said looking at Sean Parker, "We'll never be as famous as him", as per a story Ron Conway once told at Startup school.

[hkailahi]

*Shawn Fanning

[antaviana]

I believe that in the early days Mark Zuckerberg wanted to build some kind of Dropbox, and that Facebook was some kind of interim thing. It was exposed in a chat that came out with litigation with Winklevoss brothers. He ended up sticking with building Facebook.

[cfield]

I believe you can explain the difference by understanding Sam to mean "important to the founders". As he explains, this is the source of the motivation to persist, despite the risk and downsides discussed by Dustin.

[consta]

As there is a high failure rate in startups it is very important to know though whether you are made for that kind of world. True, you'll learn a lot with every failure but not all of us want to spend years and years on miscarriages.

[revorad]

But then why would you do a course on how to start a startup?