Not enthusiastic single startups alive or that Paul Grem keeps back
A startup is a company with a short history aimed at rapid growth. Apologists of the teachings of Paul Gram, who share his approach to creating startups - as soon as possible, with extreme effort in a short time - recall successful companies that have grown as a result of this cycle: Reddit is a social news site, Loopt is a visualization of friends on a city map in real time, Scribd - a document exchange system a la YouTube. Indeed, these sites have become relatively widely known or have been sold for substantial amounts.
Paul Gram is absolutely right in believing that a start-up game is win-win: either a person becomes rich and successful, or he gets a lot of invaluable experience that is incomparable with work even in the best companies: “the percentage of people who would regret not doing normal work will be almost zero. " Also, one cannot argue with other arguments of Graeme: it is better to create a startup earlier, when a person is still young, not burdened by obligations and is able to work intensively. Under Gram’s influence, people drop out of universities and set up companies, although Graeme himself doesn’t recommend leaving a university for a startup.
The devil is in the details. Of course, Paul Gram is absolutely right in the belief that Reddit and Loopt are best created immediately after undergraduate, when there is a lot of enthusiasm and there are still no commitments. The problem is that right after the university, neither Google , nor Apple , nor Yahoo , nor Microsoft , nor FogCreek ( Joel Spolsky’s company) will succeed . There is a huge difference between the companies that are created within the framework of the Paul Gram YCombinator Fund and the leaders of the modern IT market. The first are created by luck and enthusiasm, and the second by luck, enthusiasm, knowledge and, often, experience.
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All companies that are created with the participation of Paul Gram have a very short planned life cycle. Of course, Gram’s companies may also make market giants, but the likelihood of this is low. The financing and development cycle is several person-months. About scientific research, the creation of new technologies during this time are out of the question. If during this time it turns out a product that attracts an avalanche of users, then this is considered a success. If not, then it’s not fate, you have to try something else. However, even the successful companies of Paul Gram have almost no chance to compete with the best players. The ultimate dream is to be purchased for a large amount or to be constantly in the black, increasing the user base. One of the reasons why many Paul Gram companies exist is the absence of truly large players on this market. Reddit competes with Digg , but only because Google or another company with significant intellectual resources has not yet appeared in this area. When Google launched Calendar, Kiko, the company that worked under Graham's year, was defeated - they had no chance to compete with experts, although Google Calendar is not something brilliant.
When Paul Gram urges not to doubt that a startup should be created, he cites the example of Larry and Sergey, the founders of Google, and Jerry and David, the founders of Yahoo. However, these names are not mysteriously mentioned when it comes to creating a startup right after undergraduate. The fact is that the most successful companies were created according to a model somewhat different from the one that Paul Gram is preaching.
Google was created by two Stanford graduate students who were smart enough to create a PageRank algorithm that formed the basis of a new search engine. In other words, their startup got out of scientific research and they won largely because of their abilities in the field of computer science. They turned out to be good managers, but the main factor that gave the company its initial impulse was the new algorithm that allowed them to beat Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos, the then leaders of this market. So, Google was created by giftedness and knowledge of the founders.
Yahoo was also created by two graduate students from one of the world's best universities - Stanford. The first lines of the code were written not by fresh bachelors, but by gifted graduate students. For about a year, they compiled a network catalog before forming a company. One of the first employees was a twenty-six-year-old (guess) Stanford, an expert in artificial intelligence. The rest is history, but the direction is the same: the largest company was created by a team of highly qualified specialists who are not at all like Paul Grame's wards.
Apple? The main success factor is the brilliant decisions of Steve Wozniak, a gifted engineer who assembled revolutionary computers at home. He was fascinated by them, he liked to create more simple and powerful computers than those that existed then. True, he was not a graduate student; moreover, he was dismissed from Berkeley (then he returned and finished his studies). But firstly, he worked at Hewlett-Packard, where he created scientific calculators, and secondly, he was a genius who created computers, surpassing the existing analogues created by large companies. Like Google, Apple was created with the talent of the founders.
Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates at the age of 21. Gates received brilliant grades in school, particularly in mathematics and science. In addition, from the age of 13 he studied in one of the most elite schools. He was enrolled at Harvard, where he met Ballmer, his future partner at Microsoft. At the same time, he wrote an article in collaboration with prominent scientist Christos Papadimitriou. Then Gates was 24 years old. For the first five years of its existence, Microsoft was engaged in rather vague things and there was no talk of world domination. The first product, which became the basis of Microsoft's domination for decades to come - Windows, was developed only in the early 80s, while the company was founded in 1976. The same story repeats itself: a talented programmer created a really worthy thing only a few years later after the founding of the company.
I remembered Fog Creek above just because it’s a good example of a quality startup, although Joel doesn’t want to grow exponentially. Joel Spolsky created it already in the second half of his life, after having had many years of experience at Microsoft (he participated in developing Excel). Joel created a company that developed a high-quality product — FogBugz’s error tracking system, which for many years has been developing relatively slowly but surely. As far as I can tell, the speed of the company's development is seriously limited by the ambitions of Joel himself: he does not conquer the world, like Google, but tries to create a quality product and put together a brilliant team and he succeeds. By the way, he never took external financing. He created a good, quality product for which people pay money, using their rich experience.
All of these companies have a lot in common. First, they are created by the endowments and knowledge of the creators, and not only by the enthusiasm of fresh bachelors who have no real experience. Secondly, they create a product for which people pay money, and not receive money from advertising at the expense of people spending time on social sites. Thirdly, these companies are much more stable: they cannot be destroyed by a bubble in the high-tech market, similar to that in 2000.
The path that Paul Graeme leads his supporters does have a huge pile of advantages: to create a company and sell it for several million is much more pleasant than working from 9 to 6 in Google. However, companies created according to such a scheme, based on enthusiasm and luck for the sake of knowledge and experience, have, apparently, their own development ceiling. Companies that can compete with others through technological know-how and experience take off above this ceiling. I think that Google would have less chance to take its place in this world if Larry and Sergey had founded the company right after undergraduate. The enthusiasm and desire to conquer the world is really very important, but if you attach to them the knowledge that puts you above the majority of competitors who have only enthusiasm and programming skills, then your chances of competing with Google and Microsoft once again increase significantly.
PS Paul Grame PhD in computer science, obtained at Harvard. He also noted the scientific work describing the use of Bayesian filter to detect spam . His first successful company, ViaWeb, he created after graduate school in the field of CS, and the second, even more successful company, YCombinator, in an even more mature age.
Paul Gram is absolutely right in believing that a start-up game is win-win: either a person becomes rich and successful, or he gets a lot of invaluable experience that is incomparable with work even in the best companies: “the percentage of people who would regret not doing normal work will be almost zero. " Also, one cannot argue with other arguments of Graeme: it is better to create a startup earlier, when a person is still young, not burdened by obligations and is able to work intensively. Under Gram’s influence, people drop out of universities and set up companies, although Graeme himself doesn’t recommend leaving a university for a startup.
The devil is in the details. Of course, Paul Gram is absolutely right in the belief that Reddit and Loopt are best created immediately after undergraduate, when there is a lot of enthusiasm and there are still no commitments. The problem is that right after the university, neither Google , nor Apple , nor Yahoo , nor Microsoft , nor FogCreek ( Joel Spolsky’s company) will succeed . There is a huge difference between the companies that are created within the framework of the Paul Gram YCombinator Fund and the leaders of the modern IT market. The first are created by luck and enthusiasm, and the second by luck, enthusiasm, knowledge and, often, experience.
')
All companies that are created with the participation of Paul Gram have a very short planned life cycle. Of course, Gram’s companies may also make market giants, but the likelihood of this is low. The financing and development cycle is several person-months. About scientific research, the creation of new technologies during this time are out of the question. If during this time it turns out a product that attracts an avalanche of users, then this is considered a success. If not, then it’s not fate, you have to try something else. However, even the successful companies of Paul Gram have almost no chance to compete with the best players. The ultimate dream is to be purchased for a large amount or to be constantly in the black, increasing the user base. One of the reasons why many Paul Gram companies exist is the absence of truly large players on this market. Reddit competes with Digg , but only because Google or another company with significant intellectual resources has not yet appeared in this area. When Google launched Calendar, Kiko, the company that worked under Graham's year, was defeated - they had no chance to compete with experts, although Google Calendar is not something brilliant.
When Paul Gram urges not to doubt that a startup should be created, he cites the example of Larry and Sergey, the founders of Google, and Jerry and David, the founders of Yahoo. However, these names are not mysteriously mentioned when it comes to creating a startup right after undergraduate. The fact is that the most successful companies were created according to a model somewhat different from the one that Paul Gram is preaching.
Google was created by two Stanford graduate students who were smart enough to create a PageRank algorithm that formed the basis of a new search engine. In other words, their startup got out of scientific research and they won largely because of their abilities in the field of computer science. They turned out to be good managers, but the main factor that gave the company its initial impulse was the new algorithm that allowed them to beat Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos, the then leaders of this market. So, Google was created by giftedness and knowledge of the founders.
Yahoo was also created by two graduate students from one of the world's best universities - Stanford. The first lines of the code were written not by fresh bachelors, but by gifted graduate students. For about a year, they compiled a network catalog before forming a company. One of the first employees was a twenty-six-year-old (guess) Stanford, an expert in artificial intelligence. The rest is history, but the direction is the same: the largest company was created by a team of highly qualified specialists who are not at all like Paul Grame's wards.
Apple? The main success factor is the brilliant decisions of Steve Wozniak, a gifted engineer who assembled revolutionary computers at home. He was fascinated by them, he liked to create more simple and powerful computers than those that existed then. True, he was not a graduate student; moreover, he was dismissed from Berkeley (then he returned and finished his studies). But firstly, he worked at Hewlett-Packard, where he created scientific calculators, and secondly, he was a genius who created computers, surpassing the existing analogues created by large companies. Like Google, Apple was created with the talent of the founders.
Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates at the age of 21. Gates received brilliant grades in school, particularly in mathematics and science. In addition, from the age of 13 he studied in one of the most elite schools. He was enrolled at Harvard, where he met Ballmer, his future partner at Microsoft. At the same time, he wrote an article in collaboration with prominent scientist Christos Papadimitriou. Then Gates was 24 years old. For the first five years of its existence, Microsoft was engaged in rather vague things and there was no talk of world domination. The first product, which became the basis of Microsoft's domination for decades to come - Windows, was developed only in the early 80s, while the company was founded in 1976. The same story repeats itself: a talented programmer created a really worthy thing only a few years later after the founding of the company.
I remembered Fog Creek above just because it’s a good example of a quality startup, although Joel doesn’t want to grow exponentially. Joel Spolsky created it already in the second half of his life, after having had many years of experience at Microsoft (he participated in developing Excel). Joel created a company that developed a high-quality product — FogBugz’s error tracking system, which for many years has been developing relatively slowly but surely. As far as I can tell, the speed of the company's development is seriously limited by the ambitions of Joel himself: he does not conquer the world, like Google, but tries to create a quality product and put together a brilliant team and he succeeds. By the way, he never took external financing. He created a good, quality product for which people pay money, using their rich experience.
All of these companies have a lot in common. First, they are created by the endowments and knowledge of the creators, and not only by the enthusiasm of fresh bachelors who have no real experience. Secondly, they create a product for which people pay money, and not receive money from advertising at the expense of people spending time on social sites. Thirdly, these companies are much more stable: they cannot be destroyed by a bubble in the high-tech market, similar to that in 2000.
The path that Paul Graeme leads his supporters does have a huge pile of advantages: to create a company and sell it for several million is much more pleasant than working from 9 to 6 in Google. However, companies created according to such a scheme, based on enthusiasm and luck for the sake of knowledge and experience, have, apparently, their own development ceiling. Companies that can compete with others through technological know-how and experience take off above this ceiling. I think that Google would have less chance to take its place in this world if Larry and Sergey had founded the company right after undergraduate. The enthusiasm and desire to conquer the world is really very important, but if you attach to them the knowledge that puts you above the majority of competitors who have only enthusiasm and programming skills, then your chances of competing with Google and Microsoft once again increase significantly.
PS Paul Grame PhD in computer science, obtained at Harvard. He also noted the scientific work describing the use of Bayesian filter to detect spam . His first successful company, ViaWeb, he created after graduate school in the field of CS, and the second, even more successful company, YCombinator, in an even more mature age.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/14482/
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