How to Start Google

I was sad to search for the word "luck" and come up empty. You can do everything right and still fail. You can do everything wrong and win. Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time, and that external factor is completely out of your control and can be the difference you need.

if i had a 1 in 100 shot of becoming google I'd just do it 100 times. I'm pretty sure its more like 99.99999%

I wonder, over the course of a career in startups, what is the probability that you'll either found or be an early employee at one that makes up (financially) for the rest? Not hugely rich, but better than "normal" career.

Given it's a repeated game, and you gain knowledge at each round, I'd say the odds are probably pretty good that the highly dynamic / fast learning environment of early companies yields returns over a lifetime.

Agree but he doesn't do this because he makes money because people try this. Like other vcs he doesn't really care if the vast majority fail as long as he makes bank on a few who dont' fail.

That's a prism it's really worth applying to all advice given by VCs: What's the outcome for me if I fail vs what's the outcome for them if I fail?

Maybe don't start a startup, because you do not have the connections or resources necessary to make it successful. Same with any other "speculative" venture: it's dominated by insiders who know how to minimize risk to a point it no longer becomes speculative.

Maybe start an actual, scaleable business that makes money. It's not sexy, but it's within the realm of possibility to get it off the ground yourself; and usually those within the gilded class are not interested in such things.

If you're a regular schmuck, maybe take a page from the countless immigrants in the U.S. that start various businesses (trade, real estate, etc.) that make them enough money to allow them to live like kings back in their home countries.

There's something to be said about the severe glaucoma of understanding class in the U.S. Very few (notably the middle class) are willing to internalize they're serfs, whose current comfort is more a product of luck than anything more. It's a precarious situation, and any notions of aspiring to "life satisfaction" or other leisure-class values is just foolish, in my opinion.

I agree most startups fail, but no they don't die a horrible death nor do the majority of them earn no money for their founders. Many founders could have made more money through traditional employment, but you'll find very few startup founders are actually poor or become poor due to a startup.

There is an opportunity cost to starting your own company, but it's not some kind of horrible experience that will drive you to bankruptcy unless you're part of the 1% who manages a spectacular exit.

Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder rather than an employee?

I would imagine dreaming big is pretty good for children.

A big reason for why I'm optimistic in life is because I have hope for achieving something. I truly can't imagine a life where my father/mother would only hammer in the fact that I am just an average joe and should stick to climbing the corporate ladder. Such an uninspiring take, this one. Depressing.

Startups are high-risk high-reward. That doesn't necessarily mean they're a bad idea. Expected value can be positive even when probability is low. Moreover, a lot of young people can afford to take a chance on something. If you spend a few years living with your parents and attempting to create something, and you fail, you still have several decades of your life to go punch a clock at Big Corp.

And even if you fail to become Google, you might still make a living. Some people would gladly make a modest income doing something they love, with the possibility of making more, rather than working for someone else making three times as much but doing something they hate.

As for what good comes of it, just think about it. Where do new companies come from? Should we have no more of them? What would happen then?

Starting a successful company is not an essentially impossible pipe dream. There are literally millions of businesses in the US that are generating millions in revenue.

Sure, they aren't all mega behemoth tech companies, but what of it? Setting your ambitions high when you're young is still worth it. It can be a major difference maker in motivating you to learn the skills necessary to build a successful business, and it turns out that those same skills are helpful for landing good jobs, too.

Most of the people I know who are doing well now dreamed relatively big when they were young. And many of the people I know who stress about making ends meet never had anyone telling them to aim high when they were young.

If you believe you can, you might try, and you might make it. If you believe you can't, it's madness to true, so you won't try, and you won't make it. These are basic building blocks of motivation and success.

Your pessimistic message could be applied to anything. Why try to build the next Google? It's impossible! Why try to build a smaller business? The odds are against you! Why try to get a high-paying job? Most people work average jobs! Why go for an average job? You're competing with the vast majority of the country! Why get a less-than-average job? It's so stressful and barely worth it.

The essay isn't called "How to optimize your likelihood of retiring comfortably"

You can't know whether it will turn into a company worth billions or one that goes out of business. So when I say I'm going to tell you how to start Google, I mean I'm going to tell you how to get to the point where you can start a company that has as much chance of being Google as Google had of being Google.

If 10000 more kids shoot for the moon they’ll build a lot of skills that the equivalent lifers won’t. He’s saying things like:

- Get good at tech - Build projects that you want - Get good grades and into the best university you can

I really hope my kid does that. I tried incredibly hard at projects I loved. That built me untold skills. Who cares if they start Google, or fail and get a job or get aquihired, they’ll be fine. They’ll know what their boss wants. They won’t just sit and bitch about parking. And at the back of their minds they might remember that this isn’t the only way to live so maybe they’ll be braver than they would otherwise.

I can’t disagree more.

I’ve founded failed startups. I don’t regret a single one of them. I’ve worked at failed startups and big companies and I learned more and had more fun at the startups than I ever did at a big company.

The point is, if you try to found a company, you don’t have to make a billion dollars to consider it a success. In terms of personal growth it’s easily the equal of any big company job.

This is a very strange comment to make on the Y combinator link sharing site. A site started as a space for a community of founders and aspiring founders to share their inspiration, ideas and stories. And you're responding to an article written by the founder of that community.

Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder rather than an employee?

I think it probably has a lot to do with the US being the number 1 economy in the world so yes, it does appear to have society-wide benefits. Does it have personal benefits? I think this is probably more controversial. I suspect some people push themselves too hard and would have been happier otherwise, whereas others do indeed benefit from this advice. I suspect that the users of HN probably fall in the latter category.

To observers it looks like they missed but observers don't really want to put themselves in the shoes of him who is about to take the shot. In that moment the observer can only win by onlooking, either be reassured that failure is near certain and all risk folly or the observer can be surprised and glad to see the consuming world birth another product.

From a psychological standpoint not aiming high would have been a bigger miss to the person taking the shot. They clearly chose risk no matter how they sulk afterwards.

The ratio of posts about "work-purpose porn" for employee bees and pipe dream madness for misfits is never going to satisfy everyone on HN.

I just posted on X that every high school in Michigan should spend a day discussing startups, even if it truly reaches one kid in fifty the payoff would be immense.

Currently Michigan's idea of business development is to write big checks to folks who promise thousands of jobs.

Yet when the automobile industry got started in Michigan no one wrote them any government checks yet it became our largest industry. We can do much better and more startups is the answer.

99% or more of the people who enable Google to do what Google does are employees of Google. Same with every other company. The odds of being the founder of a successful company are probably worse than being a professional sportsball player (if only because they turn over more frequently).

Depends on the size of company. A small company maybe is more probable than being a top athlete.

If you’re a prominent VC that’s exactly what you want to happen though, it will let you spread your bets even more.

But like you said, this is peak SV. Luckily there is a whole world outside of SV where the rest of us operate :)

It doesn't matter, though. If you follow that advice, you'll probably be more successful as an employee.

That is such a good point. It distracts us from thinking about what our industry really needs right now which is unionization and regulation. The risk of off shore outsourcing and AI and imminent. These kind of posts provide false promises of riches.

I also want to point out it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that most founders come from well off backgrounds. Their parents can essentially foot the bills while they're getting things off the ground combined w/ the natural access to capital growing up in wealthy circles provides.

The odds are actually pretty reasonable if you go to a school like MIT or Harvard. I know its hard for outsiders to grasp, but this is the reality. PG even explicitly calls it out.

Does anything good come from encouraging people to ignore the actual situation that the overwhelming majority of the population finds itself in, and instead focusing on some essentially impossible pipe dream?

If one is trying to recruit future Sergeys Larrys, then it’s prudent to write to a very narrow audience.

This article addresses that audience perfectly well, imho.

The absolute worst of SV thinking, personified.

… or maybe the best.

This is not “general life advice from pg”. It’s highly targeted and narrow.

That’s ok. That needs to be ok. It’s one of those things that makes SV unique and uniquely strong, imho.

Edited to add the following:

The advice goes from broad (you don’t have to get a job, you can start your own company) to very specific (how to start a hypergrowth startup), with lots of other (good, imho) advice in between.

This will resonate with some folks in the (ostensibly high school) audience, many of whom may be unfamiliar with startups, the startup world, and maybe even the tech world in general. It will fall on deaf ears for most of the rest, because that’s not the life or lifestyle they are looking for.

when i was the kids' age, a teacher told us "aim at the stars, you might at least reach the moon" and i always found it motivating

Does anything good come from encouraging kids to think that they will manage to sail through life as a successful business founder rather than an employee?

Yes, VCs flourish by it.

I think your argument is flawed. By the time a company is successful, it has around 100-1000 employees. If those employees are all sampled from the same statistical population, any individual randomness in employee quality will wash out when averaged over 100+ people. So how come a successful company A has better employees than a failed company B?

Maybe a big part of the founders' skill is to actually hire the right management which in turn is capable of hiring the right employees. In which case, the credit goes to the founders after all.

Or maybe the quality of employees does not vary that much (after controlling for the the obvious factors like location / funding / business area). In which case, the company's success is explained by something else. Again, founders' skill? Or maybe something else?

I tend to think that it's a combination of founders' skill and being lucky to start the right business at the right time. I'd understand if others put greater weight on the founders or greater weight on luck.

Less startup, more starting a business.

The older I get the less I want to build a startup and more I want to start a business. Something that takes a little bit of capital, lots of hard work, gets some customers and provides goods or services, without venture capital firms and 100x returns and everything that comes with that, just a standard business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1SLHEC98I

Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn. I see that as an odd goal for a founder of any age but a great goal for an investor.

Looking at the state of open source software today a google is simply impossible because the ecosystem has rotted from the inside.

Look at how much effort it took to write the cgi-bin scripts google started with vs whatever flavour of the week JS framework you have to use now.

Not sure what the solution is but we need fewer sheep in development and less permissive licenses so developers doing unglamorous work can capture more of the value. There's a reason why every shop which supports massive open source projects is running away from legacy licenses as fast as they can and that reason is Amazon.

If you don't care about developers from the user side of things it's just as bad. The GPL in the age of cloud services does as much to protect user freedom as the MIT license did in the 1990s.

// Also being older I don’t care about making a unicorn

You can use that term as a proxy for delivering large impact to the world. It's approximately the same thing. If you do something like "aged care" and "dealing with kids schools" in a way that helps millions of people, you'll end up a billionaire whether you want to or not.

I don't use the term "unicorn" but I think keeping score in financial terms helps because that's how you know you've delivered something people want and at scale. If you remove money out of the equation it's easier to fool yourself thinking you're making some difference and you're not.

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

Wow, the older I get the more ambitious I get about what to build. A lot of the companies I created in my 20s and 30s I wouldn’t waste my time on in my 40s. I’m so the exact opposite it’s kinda funny.

Go big or go home, it’s no fun to chew bones.

Sounds like you might want to start a lifestyle business. You should read and listen to everything by Rob Walling, especially his “stair step approach”. Wish someone had told me this at your stage.

For meeting founders, find someone in the area you’re interested in and build stuff with them. Also consider using the YC founder network, but they may be too ambitious for you.

Lifestyle businesses are probably less dependent on cofounders for success.

You’ll need to work hard at your tech skills if they’ve atrophied. The good news is, this part is incredibly fun.

There's a study that often gets shared around, purportedly "Debunking the Myth of the Young Entrepreneur", showing data that most successful startup founders start their companies in their mid-to-late 40s, including tech/social media companies.

It depends a lot on how you qualify and categorise founders, companies and "successful", but of course you can understand why it can be somewhat truthful: people in their 40s have had 2-3 decades to build up experience, networks and a track record, making it much easier to build a team and attract investors and initial customers. I'm sure almost all of these founders in their 40s have had at least some partial success in their past.

So it still affirms that it's best to start as young as possible, allowing time to experiment with ideas, markets, co-founders, etc. I've seen plenty of founders bounce from one-to-another-to-another startup from their 20s to their 40s, each one being vastly more successful than the last.

But as you point out there are still all kinds of opportunities to build new products to address needs that are overlooked by younger founders, so you should absolutely go for it if you're inspired.

I feel the same as you about being less interested in "unicorn"-scale success after 40; as you mature, have kids, experience illness in your family and become more observant of problems in different segments of society, you become much more focused on just providing well for your family and doing some good for the world than having to be some kind of all-conquering hero.

If you want to connect privately to talk more about what kind of company you want to build and how best to go about it, feel free to get in touch (email in bio).

Give yourself a break. When I studied in uni I was stuck at tables with 'old guys' and 'old ladies' and I had a lot of respect for them. They paid attention, wanted to learn, were there to learn. When I didn't understand something, I asked them before I asked the teacher and they generally were happy to help. I have fond memories

I think PG addresses this subtlety where he says: "when you're young it's easier to know what you are interested in, than what people need." This inverts as you get older.

Same boat here.

I would suggest using your network and consider a path of least resistance such as building a side-business while working that either solves niche enterprise problems or makes enterprise capabilities more manageable for small businesses.

Starting a business is really easy. The bullshit that every business needs to do isn't particularly magical or mysterious. Don't get too invested in the bureaucratization process, but also be sure to implement what needs to happen just in time.

Find cofounders from your friends and coworkers, and go to startup events. Find people who you respect and who respect you, have integrity, and are the most fun. It's important to find people who don't turn into arrogant SOBs or raging sociopaths when large sums of money become involved. Honesty, awareness, navigating/prioritizing ambiguity, and conflict resolution skills are damn important.

Avoid external funding if at all possible unless it unblocks time-to-market that would otherwise miss market time or grow too slowly to survive. (Growing slower is often easier and more sustainable!)

Have sensible cost controls that are pennywise and poundwise.

If not changing the world or building a startup per se, focus on building a business that something people want. ;@] Expect it to take 20x longer, 50x more effort, and 4x more money than you think.

This is what is fundamentally missing from most talk about "tech" startups by VC types these days. They're not actually interested in the nerdy stuff, just in the "disruption" stuff.

L&S were, and they hired other people who were. They didn't start with a business idea, but with a technical one. They filled in the blanks on the business side after they survived the .com crash.

I didn't get to Google until 2011, but it became clear to me after joining that in the past they had gone on a very nerdy mission to hire all the nerdy people and collect them into one place to do nerdy things.

(Unfortunately that nerdy thing ended up being selling ads really efficient, but that's another story.)

My fundamental point is that the Google story is very unlike the kind of stories that YCombinator or a16z like. It started, like you said, as a set of intellectual/technical interests. The other stuff, that VCs today like, came later.

In a way they did the opposite of the usual advice. They started with the hammer (the tech) rather than the nail (the business problem.) They certainly didn't start with a "Like X but for Y" statement like seems to be desired by VC today. And they didn't look like the typical .com story at the time (which was usually: give us lots of VC $$ so we can sell something on the web that is currently not sold on the web, but we'll just use the $$ to buy customers and make no profit...)

I would posit that if today's Google came to YCombinator today they'd be shown the "no thanks" door.

Google in 1999 had the the fortuitous alignment of every possible factor: brains, Stanford connections, timing, extremely scalable and lucrative business model, funding, etc.

go to grad school to learn how to find scientific-discovery-based startup ideas these days?

Nope, ended up going to scientific-discovery-based-startup-ideas-R-us instead, by client demand.

He should! As I hope to convince people of next month, there’s a wealth of classical AI knowledge that’s just begging to be applied to modern systems. That’s not to speak of the wizardry happening in neuroscience and drug discovery right now…

Isn’t “you shouldn’t focus on science to start a good tech company” a good indicator that our conception of “tech” company is completely broken? That we’re really talking about ways to milk money from gambling billionaires, not change the world with successful products?

I wouldn't fixate on the Google part too much. It's pretty clear he is using it as a common point of reference for 14 and 15 year olds. "You guys know about Google?, the giant company with the web site? Okay well let me tell you how companies like that are built."

Building a successful company depends on many things. The point made here is that you are unlikely to be expert enough, and motivated enough to build a successful business in an area you are not interested in, and haven't played around in. So to increase the amount of domains that you could create a business in from 0 to a small positive integer you should build things that interest you.

Of course if you have money, or know how to persuade people who have money, you can be something of an idiot and still develop a successful business. Usually you are not really developing the business in this case, more attaching yourself to a business that smart people are running for you.

In a pool of high school freshmen, most probably have a better chance of success following the first path, than the second.

Unless you're very early (and/or very lucky), you can't get "rich" (i.e., can choose never to work again and can invest in many other things) as an employee (though of course a highly-paid employee can become very well off and comfortable).

Yes you need to be lucky to get super-rich as a founder too, but you have a lot more control, i.e., you make the primary decisions that determine whether the company will make good products that people will use/buy.

it really depends on what you mean by rich: the surest path to end up with $2-5M over ~10 years is job at ~FAANG, do it well to get promoted, and manage your savings/investments well. that path is very unlikely to get you to $10-100M in the same 10 years, and starting a startup seems to be one of the best ways to do that.

My guess is that it is much easier to get rich from working at a tech company and rising through the ranks. Being a FANG middle manager for a couple of years and managing your money well should put you in a very comfortable position. However, if you want to be private island rich, you need to do your own startup.

Not research, but here's this popular Dan Luu essay https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

He's telling kids that they don't have to get a job, and one of the key objections is obviously going to be "but how will I get money". The emphasis in the essay is not getting rich, it's that it's a much more interesting path. And it is.

I think you're being overly harsh.

14 year old need good role models (preferably from their trusted social circles). These people should, ideally before the child turns 14, give him or her a strong moral framework to judge advice that they might come across.

On the topic of being rich (which can be a good goal if pursued along with a strong moral compass), it's much better to take advice from a Paul Graham rather from some grifter selling courses on "how to be a rich as me" on the net.

Exactly.

In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich.

No. The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good career that pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at Wall Street, law or Congress. Getting rich through business is a lottery.

I would have attributed this article from Graham to relative inexperience had he written this early on, say in the 2000s. But him writing this now is just bad-faith preaching intended to give VCs another lottery ticket with a very low success probability of forming a unicorn.

And for the record, 14 and 15 year olds, the best way to get rich is still Wall Street, Congress or law.

He said "more exciting" at the beginning of your quote. And if the 14-year-olds somehow don't already want to be rich, how is Paul Graham telling them how to do it going to teach them that it is the most important thing?

Genuinely curious to understand your line of reasoning.

- Concretly what's the late-stage capitalism nightmare? How do you define it and what do you compare it against?

- What do you define what PG is concretely telling kids and how that's related to what you describe as capitalism nightmare.

Finally, would you care to share some examples of better scenarios that could inspire advice for 14-year olds?

but if you think for a second you can do whatever the fuck you want when you start your own company

I know too many people born rich who think exactly this. And in their experience it works like that; they have no money stress anyway, take a little bit more risk and if it fails, well, they just fold and brag about ‘at least I tried’ and then try again or, you know, sit on the boat and get slobbered. Same thing. The rest of us don’t quite have this and especially bootstrapping your own company is hard, really hard; you will be doing a great deal of things that have nothing to do with what you want or set out to do and those probably turn out to be more important than what you started it for.

It's even worse than that. Not only is he saying that, he's parroting the bullshit idea that "starting your own company" is the relevant skillset, rather than "absolutely ruthlessly exploiting every moral and legal grey area to hoard as much value for yourself as possible with extreme urgency."

But I mean this is the guy that foisted Sam Altman onto the world, so clearly he already knows that. Which makes an article like this understandable as the propaganda that it is.

You don't write an article like this to influence kids, you write it to rationalize the giant pile of money you find yourself sitting on.

People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically getting rich is the most important thing is one of the reasons we got into this late-stage capitalism nightmare in the first place.

I don't think that's a fair summary of the article. Yes, he says you can get rich. But he also says, and says first, that it's less annoying and more fun (and also more actual work).

Then for the rest of the article, he doesn't harp on "you can get rich". He talks about getting good at some technology, and doing projects because they're interesting, and finding other people to do things with.

Certainly a few, but a quick scan of lists makes it look more like 25% inherited in the top 20 or so

I guess luck plays a big role in one's success. That said, pg's points still hold, as he is telling us how to maximize our chance of success despite of what we are born with.

If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies.

And actually it's a stupid point to begin with; making a point by choosing the absolute top percentage as if there is nothing other than 'really' rich (forget whether that is even a good thing I'd argue it's not a plus to have that much money and notoriety). There is of course 'lots of money' or 'comfortable'.

Irony also that Paul is probably not on that list but even if he was it's not because he 'built a google' but rather he decided to be an investor and incubator spreading bets over many potential winners.

Also ironic that Paul had decided rather than making more money he'd rather spend time with his family.

https://www.forbes.com/consent/ketch/?toURL=https://www.forb...

If I look here, top 20 are 17 founders and 3 heirs (2 Waltons - Walmart, and one Bettencourt - L’Oreal)

"choosing their parents correctly" - yes.. having great parents doing their best is probably one of the main indicators of success. (mileage definitely varies) A child can learn a lot from their parents.. things like prudence, patience, work ethic.. a lot of folks think its about "inheritance". imho

It's n=1 and huge survivorship bias. There is not that much useful or applicable in this essay. Yeah starting a company is one way to get rich, but the odds are not that good and start-up costs are higher than ever. Nothing is getting cheaper, whether it's advertising, labor, or developing the product.

The $ offered by YC wouldn't even cover a typical salary for a single coder or an adverting budget, although being chosen by YC does help to some degree in the latter though. Same for Thiel Fellowship: Not much $ either. You need a lot more than being offered by these incubators, which is a pittance. Back in the '90s it was easier to get decent funding, plus costs were way lower even adjusted for inflation. Now it's huge competition for bread crumbs, plus huge expenses.

On Reddit investing and 'FIRE' subs, way more young and middle-aged people getting rich (as in 7-8 figures) with lucrative white collar jobs or being early in a start-up, plus investing in stock market and real estate, than creating actual companies.

You can do well in computer science classes without ever really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a degree in computer science from a top university and still not be any good at programming. That's why tech companies all make you take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you went to university or how well you did there. They know grades and exam results prove nothing.

Yeah, theoretical computer science is not the same as coding. The guys who did theoretical AI work seem to do okay though.

Parents who started companies. Lookin' at you Walton kids!

Do you have any sources for this? If he knew it was going to be this huge, why were they looking for an acquisition for north of a million dollars? On AGI: are you referencing this clip? [1] To me, it seems like an ordinary vision when you stretch your imagination. He didn't have any realistic idea how Google might achieve AGI, just something that could happen in the future. And this was in 2000. Google, I imagine, was pretty successful by then.

Larry Page's original ambition was to digitize books and knowledge in the world [2].

Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, the student project that eventually became Google—a “crawler” that would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against a user’s query—was actually conceived as part of an effort “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library.”

[1]: https://twitter.com/jam3scampbell/status/1608270969763729415

[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...

Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew google was going to be huge from the beginning.

Nobody can know such a thing -- especially turning around a billion-dollar business, a thing with a near-zero prior probability. It's more reasonable to say that Larry had the drive, the aptitude, and the resources to maximize his odds (which would still be low.)

You know I remember hearing this way back in the early 2000s but forgot about it, Carl is pretty low key, no Wikipedia / etc

This advice is for 14/15 year olds. I think the advice would be different for 22-year-olds. It would be different still for 35-year-olds.

22-year-olds have a hard time selling to enterprises, 14-year-olds will find it impossible. Whereas if they build something cool that they and their friends love they will gain many of the skills that might be useful later on.

PG has made the point many times that the superpower 22-year-olds have is that they can live on ramen and work 16 hours a day. The superpower that 14-year-olds have is that (in many cases) they don't even need to find the $1,000 a month to survive.

His advice is:

- Work on a personal project that is motivating to you (obviously you won't work on it if it's not motivating to you)

- It's a good sign if the project you're motivated to work on solves a problem that you and your friends care a lot about, because there's a good chance many more people will also want that problem solved and will buy/use your product.

Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school.

I am not seeing any mention of a certain US security state 'investor'that gave them a bunch of money and PR, either in the article or in comments. I suppose it's uncouth within polite company to speak of such things.

We now have a single organization shaping the information access patterns of the people all over the world ostensibly paid by ads. Right.

I think the message is more about not getting caught up in external sources of what to build. Basically, don't follow the hype, follow your nose.

I don't think there is a contradiction. The argument is that building fun projects helps you gain expertise to the point where you can more easily recognize painful problems to solve.

In "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America" Barbara Ehrenreich poses that universities are (in my words) merely a fictional moat, "invented" by the new class that became rich through education and work, rather then before through ownership and capital.

"Education" nor "work" can be passed through generations. If I am a very gifted lawyer, this is not something I can pass on to my daughters or suns (but a castle or land can be). Yet you can employ your network and power to get your daughter or suns into "highly selective" universities. Where, once they are in, being smart (e.g being a gifted lawyer) matters less than "being in".

So, indeed, "cargo cultism" and privilege.

And, I would add, a problem and cause of why the startup world is so shortsighted, monoculture (non-diverse) and dogpiling on similar problems, yet ignoring others entirely. (disclaimer: I too, however, am the typical priviliged bearded white male that "does computers" since late eighties though)

But getting in to Stanford or MIT doesn’t magically make you into a member of that privileged class.

The essay (intentionally, no doubt) doesn't pick a side in this fight.

It's very clear on why you should go to the best university: not because it will make you the best founder, but to meet the best co-founders.

And if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are. When Larry and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a real advantage for them.

It doesn't matter whether elite universities are meritocratic or terribly unfair: either way, they've been the source of very many successful companies over the last 30 years, and Paul Graham is betting on that continuing to be the case. (Unlike Peter Thiel, for example, who is telling kids to drop out).

The overwhelming influential factor of people who start successful businesses is that they have a tremendous amount of resources relative to the average person. I would guess that easily over half of all successful medium to large size businesses started with someone who had a big leg-up.

I find most of his posts over the last few years to be an exercise in ignoring privilege. It's a very long time since I read one that felt grounded.

Exactly, it's not that good technology gets funding, it's that technology that gets funding gets good.

People often get this the wrong way around. They believe you just need a good idea. No, you need social circles that can invest in your idea. Investment improves things over time.

Alan Kay talks about this. That the quality of the project is the quality of the funders.

You can have good ideas, but if you don't have access to funders, your good idea will not have the resources to become a great idea.

Ya that is the main one. If you are born in midwest usa or god forbid, nigeria, please forget starting google.

Jumping through arbitrary hoops sounds an awful lot like "push hard, the door sticks".

You're right that PG ignores the privilege and selection bias at play in all stages on the funnel to Google-scale success. I'm okay with that though, because calling out all the statistical realities does not lead to actionable advice for young people; it tends to devolve into hand-wringing and complaining about what "we" as a society should do, but very few are actually empowered or incentivized to address. And, at the end of the day, if you're looking for a single place to find good co-founders, it's hard to argue there is any better place than Stanford or MIT. I think Paul's advice on balance is decent, even for folks starting from less privilege.

That said, I think the biggest risk for ambitious young people reading this is black and white thinking about getting into the right school. Successful founders are relentlessly resourceful, so while it's a decent plan to target a top school, I believe that how you handle rejection and refocus your ambitions says more about your long-term entrepreneurial prospects than being accepted would have. Focus on what you can control, play to your strengths, and on balance you'll get better outcomes.

Yep

‘Mere determination and resourcefulness’

... is actually really a test of class position. Your motivation to pursue and pass those artificial goalposts is in most cases going to be directly co-related to the values and expectations that the people who surround you have. Mommy and daddy and their friends at the country club expect it.

CS education is good all over the place, not just Stanford or MIT. And CS education pulled out of books and through self-reading is also great. But knowing that said person went to Stanford is a signifier to the VCs that said person is acculturated into the class and culture of capitalist administration.

More mind boggling is seeing them admitting to the "cargo cultism" (which I'd just call "class bias") instead of the usual ideological cover of entrepreneurialism and the "American dream."

This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.

I don't get your comment. Are you saying PG is trying to deter and throw off teenagers so they don't compete in the space he invested in?

I wonder: what better advice, that optimizes for individual outcomes, would you offer founders-to-be instead?

it seems like PG doesn't worry about AI replacing programmers

Becoming among the best in the world at one or an intersection of things is an excellent individual outcome, and one way to do that is to work hard on what interests you.

You can certainly become the best in the world at some combination of things that don’t interest you, but that seems less fun.

Depends on how you measure individual outcomes. Arguably, a life lived passionately is the best individual outcome, even if it doesn't result in you becoming rich. Maybe that's a privileged thing to say, and certainly if someone following their passions is staring down the barrel of poverty then they might want to rebalance in favor of their financial health, but in the absence of dire financial circumstances, passion is a good compass to follow. Certainly many people volunteer their time for causes they are passionate about, with no expectation of financial reward, and are happier for doing so.

What PG is noting is that sometimes (even if rarely), what an individual is passionate about can also be good for investors. But the passion comes first.

I think he’s saying that at the time when you’re making the prediction you can’t know. If you're gonna learn som core technology that you can use 7 years later (where he suggests programming) then this makes sense.

I think there’s a strong element of luck here: even if you have general purpose skills in eg programming or CS, once a novel opportunity presents itself, you likely won’t have a head start, especially today. But what can you do about it? Telling kids who are 14-15 that they should bet on some more niched tech like LLMs or even transformers would likely be terrible advice.

This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.

Actually, PG advice is solid. Trying to guess the next big thing is not a winning strategy. More so for teenagers who lack a lot of skills including good judgement. Even if their guess was guaranteed spot-on, and the universe was rooting for you, once the cat is out of the bag, what advantage would a 15 years old have? They don't have any war chest or connections to survive.

If the goal is to optimize the individual's outcome, outside working towards a stable 9-5 career, their best bet is indeed building projects they're passionate about and utilizing the skills they gain in their next endeavour.

One way to waste your life is being constantly distracted by which industry is more profitable or has more potential, doubting yourself and switching context.

I upvoted because I thought it was a clever observation (meaning one that did not obviously present itself to me), although I did need https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39763016 to explain what you meant.

What is YMMV?

The real way to start Google is to be smart, hard working and incredibly lucky. IMHO the best way to start a company is to be smart, hard working and patient.

Reward requires effort, but effort does not guarantee reward.

It's a fact of life that we really should teach our kids instead of the nonsense that effort will be rewarded.

I agree, it is damaging especially when you don't have a wealthy relative to fall back on.

I spent 3 years trying to keep a startup afloat after graduating from college. Most of my peers own a (some of them multiple) house now. I have 75k in my savings.

You really nailed the last part. The luck part is the funniest. It's a gamble with very low odds that pays out after a couple of years if not decades.

Yes, but the VCs trust you to a large extent and they can't delve into the nitty-gritty of daily operations. If they do they will develop a bad reputation.

Your boss's job is to oversee the minutiae of your day-to-day activities. Like in most workplaces, you can't choose to just chill for a few days, work only at night, or choose to avoid meetings for a few days, etc.

You will have a level autonomy and the ability to change directions/features, etc. that you cannot have working for others.

Right, and from all my friends who did take VC money: it's an incredibly demanding period of your life, a large proportion of which isn't about delivering on your vision. You're gonna learn a lot about office space leases, accounting, fundraising, customer pitches, etc. You're gonna have impatient VCs on your board, with the power to fire you, breathing down your neck. You won't be relaxing much and won't be spending that much time with family and non-work friends.

It's a valuable experience with a lot of potential upside in the long haul - but let's not pretend that it's less taxing than a cozy 9-to-5 tech job where your boss might ask you to update your OKRs once in a while.

> "But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including a boss telling you what to do."

Yeah but that boss is paying you mid 6 figs or even 7, plus comp and other stuff, then maybe it's not so bad. Why else are these tech companies inundated with so many job applications if having a boss is supposed to be so bad. I think this guy is still stuck in a '90s or early 2000s 'Dilbert' mindset when salaries were way worse and bosses had more leverage and employees were closer to being like slaves. A lot has changed. .

That's true, and since Paul Graham's in the role of VC shareholder or something closely related, he would prefer you didn't realize that.

Exactly: instead of a boss, you get venture capitalists, plus you probably don’t have that pesky work-life balance either.

Getting rich and making the world better are not incompatible, or even unaligned in general.

You get rich by offering a good or service that society desires.

Being really rich is awesome. There's never a downside to having more money. That's the whole point of money: the more the better.

I feel like there was a moment where “love was all you needed” and people just followed their passions with real careers as a backup. Hollywood pressed that view (or echoed it) into the zeitgeist and I’m not sure what the turning point was, but people started getting filthy rich. Almost as if the dormant culture combined with the internet made it possible to amass an absurd amount of wealth. Since then, whenever that is, it feels like it’s socially acceptable again to do be driven by earning potential and nothing else.

I agree with you, wanting to become “filthy rich” is abhorrent given all of the known implications that comes with. At the very least people should have some shame and keep that to themselves.

I think he answers the second point of "not every company can be a Google" though. He says this will get you to the point where your company could be a Google, but makes no promises that it will be one.

I agree with the first point. I do think that the experience would nonetheless be valuable, though, to pilot a failed company.

He's not trying to create 500 new Googles.

He's trying to inspire the one kid that will actually create the next Google.

Alternatively, if only one person in the upcoming generation tries to create the next Google it will probably be a crap company. If 200 million kids try to create the next Google the one that succeeds in creating their own survivorship bias story will likely be a stellar co.

Competition necessitates excellence.

From the perspective of society, this is how to start Google

Agree. Although, de does mention that a barber shop counts.

I think when someone like him shows up, kids want to hear about the extreme end of financial success.

Hopefully those kids get to hear from other types of business people as well -- those who can talk about more of the middle of the road.

Yes, that’s inherent to the problem statement. Any guidance on “how to become a gold medalist Olympic athlete” would suffer from the same limitation.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t insightful things to say about building a Google or becoming a gold Olympic medalist.

Yes, and doing a startup involves risk. If you fail, you’ll lose time and likely money. I’m now 10+ years behind on my retirement savings. I’ll likely need to work until 70-75.

Yes he tells you how to increase your odds in the lottery from 1E-11 to 1E-6 perhaps. His advice assumes you won the birth lottery already. Really you can’t be motivated by being the next Google because it (approximately) won’t happen. Be excited by the other things on the way.

Also "the standard way to get rich"... It's much easier to get rich by getting hired at a FAANG than starting your own company.

You only get rich by starting your own company if you win the startup lottery. Otherwise you're better off getting a high paid job.

soaking up as much knowledge and relationships while you're in school

A family friend was recently admitted to a magnet school - it's not like an Ivy League level institution, but it's fairly prestigious in the area, and not easy to get to. I need to make sure to remind him that while it's good that he's feeling academically challenged, he should also focus on building friendships with people who are statistically likely (much as he is, tbh) to be successful in life - they can help pull him up when he's down, and he can do the same for them.

I didn't get that much out of college, academically - but the relationships I built there got me my first two jobs, and I still treasure the friends I made there.

I think it's also a good idea to keep in mind the general HN guideline of "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says."

"strongest" is highly subjective. I also don't think we should make things up and pretend the other person said them, which is much more commonly used to strawman, but steelmanning involves the same process.

The amount of survivorship bias ignored in the article is appalling. Why?

To be fair, he does tell them to study. But only because you have to get into a good college to find other people to found startups with.

The core advice is to produce instead of consume. And the second one is to study.

However, packaging it under a "being a mere employee is lame" mantra... Is lame!

But I'm curious. Why do you think that doing something which is maybe not study related is a bad idea?

("Maybe not" because ie. john Mayer is both a rockstar and a Berkelee grad)

The tone isn’t smug. pg simplified his language for a teenage audience. Simple arguments made simply can come across as smug because they lack caveats and polite hedging, but I don’t think the accusation of smugness sticks in this case.

I also disagree about the incredible qualities entrepreneurs need and hardships they have to endure. Many incredible businesses are just good product + good distribution. Many kids think starting a startup is practically impossible, and pg correctly points out that it isn’t.

Perhaps you're not the intended audience.

There are certain people that deeply desire this and that understand their chances of success are low. Nevertheless, these people want to try and find encouragement in these types of essays.

You don't need to be upset that this isn't for you. There are all sorts of shapes of people in the world. We benefit by having curious people at all strata of society, exploring various sorts of ideas and problems. It keeps us from deadlock.

I mean even basic math cannot uphold the thesis.

All the money and power in the world keeps consolidating upwards with the people closer to the apex of the pyramid deluding others that consistent climbing will help others reach there.

A tale as old as time, but due to exponential growth of tech playing out much faster.

because most people have something called life experience or come from a culture not brainwashed by the american dream. of course YOU can do anything, but whether you are successful with that or not is up to a million factors you cannot control, no matter how much of your all you give.

go to a casino, throw your life savings on one number. if you win, tell everyone how you gave it all and you manifested it by pure will. if you lose, nobody will ever hear from it.

in addition, pg is so heavily biased on this and should never be taken as gospel.

IMO most folks find it easier to point to the million reasons why something wont work/why someone is speaking from a point of affluence/how luck/finances/etc play a role in success than to just do the thing, learn from their mistakes, and grow. It's probably because doing the latter is hard and forces you to face ambiguity & hard personal growth on a daily basis.

I also don’t get why people care so much about what OTHER people do. Will some people fail? Yes of course. But it’s good for society to have a ton of people busting their ass and trying new things. And it’s good for society if bloggers encourage that.

If you personally want to be an employee, fine, but a cultural value for entrepreneurs is a good thing to have and should be supported.

To say I can do literally anything means I can have a 5x body weight deadlift or run a 4 minute mile. There are limits.

A lot of opportunities are locked behind a massive paywall and the system isn’t intended for your average Joe to get through that paywall. If it were, you’d have less people to serve you coffee or deliver your meals or advertise to in order to increase shareholder value which the ruling class do not want. Do not be dense.

Pretending like all 8 billion people have the same opportunity to be the next Jeff Bezos/Elon/Jobs is misleading.

My advice for the 99% is to the best you can and foster family and friend relationships, work less, and get out of the mindless consumerist game.

You say all this like it's a bad thing, but maybe it's ultimately better for a society if there isn't a financial lottery that enables a small number of people to become insanely wealthy and powerful.

I'd rather a government that enables a thousand mid-sized companies with moderately well-paid executives and employees than one that enables a single monopolistic mega-corporation with billionaires whose power rivals states and whose incentives are not aligned with most of the world.

Am surprised PG gave this talk at a UK school without mentioning an important assumption that they will need to migrate to the US in his opening paragraph.

Seems kinda reasonable for a motivational speech not to mention it (even assuming it's entirely true.)

Not anymore, London is the biggest startup hub in Europe and top AI companies like Google Deep Mind and Stability AI were founded and HQ is based in London. These days all you need is talent and funding, once you have that you can do it from anywhere.

Yes, and of course you cannot just move to the USA especially if you're a young guy in the UK. I know, I faced the same issue. 2006, recruited by Google before I'd even graduated. I wanted to go to California but... they hit the H1B cap that year and I wasn't important enough to get one. So I ended up in Switzerland.

If Google in 2006 wasn't powerful enough to get someone as culturally unthreatening as a Brit into the USA, it cannot be easier to do so as a startup founder.

That said I did know someone later who was able to make it in and become a startup CTO there (a German guy). Hilariously he did it by making a viral YouTube video. And by "make" I mean he hired an agency to make it. This was sufficient to get him in on an artist visa, which was easier than getting in on an H1B.

In the zero interest rate environment it was easier to get good advice and orders of magnitude more more money. A lot of those companies are crap.

Google had good timing but importantly, a good product and market fit. Prior search engines sucked in comparison with obnoxious monetization.

Stanford was in the VC business long, long before. It's been told many times but Frank Terman set up much of the infrastructure to enable this back in the 1950s, building Stanford Research Park which housed Varian (microwaves and other RF), HP (some digital electronics stuff), and Lockheed (some bomb stuff). And that work built off the incredible investments into California infrastructure by the US military during WWII (https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...), which followed some amazing investments in education, transport, and housing since the beginning of the gold rush.

But, in all honesty, if you want to identify single factors that truly contributed to Google not just surviving but thriving, I'd point at Jeff Dean. When he joined, Google was unable to update its index due to the design of the indexer. Jeff (along with Sanjay, or as many of us know him, "The Wise One"), built seminal software that enabled google to grow rapidly - not just updating the index faster, but doing search quality on logs, early ad experiments, and more. Obviously, other people played critical roles (Silverstein, /proc/bogdan, SRE Lucas) but IMHO if they hadn't had Jeff and Sanjay, google would have died back in 97 or 98.

9 major startups began there

which?

Which step is:

"Build a search engine so good all nerds on the early Internet abandon AltaVista and switch to it, no marketing required."?

Folks underestimate how incredibly skilled Notch was and is. Unfortunately ludum dare has taken down its historical compo pages, but I remember that he had several games built from scratch in 24 hours which were mind boggling impressive.

One had a full 3d rendering engine implemented in Dartlang written in 48 hours. Another was a minecraft top down rpg clone.

Dude is the Bobby Fischer of tech

The story of Minecraft was an awesome inspiration for my peers and me, much more relatable than Google or any SV startup. Markus Persson did not come from a family of academics or engineers; he was just a poor blue-collar kid who liked videogames and coding (unfortunately his political views have stained his image).

Maybe merely having a billion dollars isn't what pg was thinking of when talking about "the richest people". If you look at the top 100, like he quotes in his article, only 27 inherited their fortune.

And still not taking into consideration that the majority of those "self-made" billionaires anyway inherited many privileges from their parents that helped them to "self make".

"Of the 137 people in the global study who achieved billionaire status in the 12-month study period, 53 of them inherited $150.8 billion collectively, more than the $140.7 billion that was earned by the 84 new self-made billionaires in the same time period, the UBS study says.Nov 30, 2023"

The citation for this quote appears to be https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/11/30/new-bil... , but I don't believe that limits to those "that occasionally get published in the press".

Average age of successful startup founders is 35-45. YC likes young founders because they’re impressionable and exploitable.

I had the same sort of reaction, even though I felt like the article was not intending to invoke that.

Looking back, when I was the age in the article I was way too insecure and nervous to be able to take this advice. Looking at it now I think it is great and want to set my children up with that way of thinking.

I am 34 and found the message inspiring.

Don't be deflated - it is not a negative statement on you. For most people, going the startup route is bad advice. Older people know that and take much more care to set up safety nets for themselves before going into the VC world. I don't want to go so far to say that YC & PC are exploiting the naivety of youth... but they certainly know which demographics will embrace the risk vs. which will not, and they speak accordingly.

Watching videos on YouTube is in no way comparable to going to a quality university, being around likeminded ambitious young people, and interacting with professors and researchers directly.

The best advice to give children is that they should be born to rich, influential and well-connected parents. That will give them a huge advantage in all walks of life including if they want to start a startup. Larry and Sergei had the benefit of rich, influential and well-connected parents, as did Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Paul Graham himself.

Why do think this is an "American" thing?

The author is British, for one.

The biggest thing missing from this talk -- something that would have been easy to include, even for a younger audience -- is that the majority of startups fail, and even many startups that do well enough end up making their founders less money than if they went to work for another company.

It feels irresponsible to tell kids how they can build the next Google, without also telling them how likely it is they won't succeed at it.

Granted, most people in their early 20s have very little to lose, so a failed startup may not be much of a problem, outside of the stress and emotional effects.

So, can we then say the title is 'click bait'?

This is the best take I've read yet.

I don't disagree with Paul's choice to focus on entrepreneurship and getting rich here. If you're looking to excite people, tell an exciting story. Captivate imagination. No one gets pumped up (especially at that age) at the mediocre story.

What I find great about his advice is that it is by no means limited to entrepreneurship. Working on passion projects, doing well in school, and learning how to build relationships is valuable even if you're working for someone else.

There's a big space in tech jobs between the "grinding away at code/help desk" and "startup bro" that I feel doesn't get described enough. And that's one thing I'd tack on to Paul's advice, notwithstanding the need to sell the message above. That advice he espouses can also lead to being a really standout contributor at a tech firm, and probably with a higher rate of success than getting a startup to stick. One doesn't have to form a startup to contribute ideas, and there's good money to be made in that space.

I think your choice of wording above is important to call out: The advice "maximizes" the chance of success; but it doesn't guarantee it.

Overall, completely agreed. =)

If you consider that >10 years ago there were blog posts talking about how hard the "FizzBuzz" question was to implement when asked in-person as a way to demonstrate how you approach solving problems, there's definitely a reasonable assertion that these types of interviewing methods help weed out applicants unable to write basic compound statements. Might not be the best way as a single pass/fail criterion though.

Leetcode style interviews were always a reasonable option for a particular type of company. But they became a trend for companies that weren't a good fit.

Sure, if your company is as prestigious as Stanford or MIT.

Sadly, yes, at least for a certain type of job. Probably not the best, but considering the effort involved on the part of the employer (ie very little) combined with the result, it's pretty good. Anything better requires a ton more effort (work trials) and/or doesn't scale well (personal referrals).

In a way, it became a pivot from "organize the world's information" to "organize the world's ads".

But topic is "how to start your own Google" not "how to run your own Google".

Still pivoting for monetisation is important.

Google and Facebook had 2 decades. Even the most successful of YC companies had a little over a decade. Not a valid comparison. And $100+ billion for Coinbase, Stripe, Dropbox is still huge.

While thats true they did fund Airbnb which is 100B. So while they haven't funded anyone that big yet, they have come 1/10 of the way.

As a VC (purchaser of startup) pg's main interest is in driving up supply of premoney startups in order to drive down price.

Here is a launch front-page today: Okapi (YC W24) -- A new, flexible CRM with good UX

Nothing about friends, nothing about fun projects. Mainly just looking at Salesforce, knowing its the DB for business-side of the house, and that the UI/X of SFDC is not good, so here is a better UX (much appreciated).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39755927

Yes, sadly. If you read between the lines and take his advice more as "understanding the psychology of VCs" rather than as actual advice, his essays are very useful. He has long passed the phases of a manager's life where he has to be right - he is surrounded by yes men who tell him that he is right no matter what.

Matt Levine, as usual, has a great take on the phases of life of a partner/founder of a hedge fund (which a VC fund basically is), and PG is deep in phase 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-07/bridge...

I will say that unlike GPT-4 he is an objectively good writer (ie has very good style) most of the time, so the essays tend to be somewhat entertaining to read.

Or the part where your parents are professors and provide the educational opportunities and financial freedom to take risks that 99% of people don't have.

I don't mean that to even sound bitter or cynical, but it's just a fact if you look at most founders, even the ones that fail miserably.

The advice boils down to “work on projects that interest you” and “do well and school” and maybe “if you don’t know what you’re interested in, try programming”.

Even if they don’t make a startup, at least following the advice would make them more employable.

really? at the end of the day it just says "study well and have your own projects" which is a great advice in any way?

I think most of it is good advice focusing on creativity, independence, crafting and tinkering – which traditional schooling is bad at. What’s toxic is the extreme rush of it all. You don't need to be successful business owner at 22. In fact, sounds like a good way to distort your perspective on life, and business. Incubators seem to like young people because they are gullible and investors can offer them less and get more control. If it was so important to be young in business, then how come they should listen to advice from those old farts? That’s the part that bugs me, it seems exploitative.

Another reason to play it slower is you can work and save for financial security beforehand, and you can build your network without going to MIT or Stanford. You’ll meet plenty of people working from all kinds of backgrounds. You’ll get to practice financial decision making. You’ll be a more well-rounded person who can empathize with different walks of life, (isn’t understanding people gospel in VC land?).

yeah, I had an idea for a new search engine and was hoping to get an idea of how to do it :(

The PageRank patent expired 5 years ago, and frankly a lot of other search engines were copying the method a long time before that. Search results have been deteriorating since "SEO" became a thing.

In fact most knowledge work that's above average really feels like you are working 'with' someone. Self leading teams etc.

People like PG are at the apex of this weird fawning worship of entrepreneurs and getting rich that particularly affects the tech world. This culture places great intrinsic real value on not having a boss.

But of course this is all made up. Nothing has any real value in this sense. We just each get 100 years on Earth and we each get to decide how to spend that time. Those are the facts.

The entrepreneur worship culture is simply about making people who make those choices feel better about those choices. And as another commenter has observed, most of us are no more likely to make it as an entrepreneur than we are likely to play for the Lakers.

So, yeah, "a boss telling you what to do" is fine if it works for you and gets you what you want out of life. Some of us just don't give a shit and don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about things like market fit and business transactions and valuation blah blah blah.

The actual advice given is “learn to program and then pursue projects that interest you”, which is great advice for a 14 year old.

You're overestimating the importance of talent and underestimating the importance of luck.

Not saying Larry Page and Sergey page aren't talented - clearly they were/are very talented people. But they were also extraordinarily lucky. To take another example, if Gary Kildall had been a slightly more ruthless businessman and IBM had had a little more foresight, Bill Gates would not be a billionaire.

This essay is for kids. Many successful founders have likely listened to inspiring talks like this when they were kids. In places like Stanford or the prestigious high schools they come from.

The people who read here can read it for clarity and the chance that they can show this article to a smart nephew to inspire them. Like I just did.

Yes, one should choose rich parents to start with.

Fully agreed.

I was the first graduating class from one of the first public high schools in the country with an IT magnet program.

I remember the program coordinator telling us and our parents in a big presentation that we could be making $70-80k out of high school. He was really selling it.

I was not making anywhere near that out of high school. =P

But I wasn't doing bad either. In fact, I'd had two jobs with tech companies before I even graduated. I had a job lined up in the engineering department of an OEM prior to receiving my high school diploma. That same administrator was always encouraging us, cheering us on with our various projects, helping where he could.

I never thought for a moment I'd been mislead that my salary wasn't that high or that I didn't make it "rich". Any kid who'd sat through a school fundraiser presentation in middle school knows that those awesome prizes of a computer or game console or whatnot is just meant to hype you up. But you might be able to land a CD player. (My age is showing here. =P )

I expect any 14-15yo he's talking to will get the gist. The kids are not stupid. They get the pitch. And I think they intrinsically know the odds too. Those 9,500 football players are not all going to see it as a loss, even if they didn't achieve their ultimate goal. People turn losses into wins and salvage the good from a failed attempt all of the time.

My son is 3, and already has fun mashing computer parts together and wanting to see how things work. I'm excited to see if he wants to do this as well. Will I tell him "Dude, that guy said I'd be making $90k and that was B.S." Nah. I'll give him simple version of Paul's advice. Even if he doesn't go into entrepreneurship, it'll set him up well if he follows it.

- I agree that we shouldn‘t tell young people to aim for companies like Google / aim to get really really rich

- I agree that we should tell young children to aim for sustainable companies

- I at least partially disagree with warning against the unsustainable ruthless capitalism in case your sustainable ideas do get really big. Some companies would get really really big, and I would prefer to see those reaching there to be those who had a (comparatively) caring mind (the others would not listen anyway)

- but I would agree to explain young children that what and where they buy does impact climatic problems. And that supporting small-medium sized companies (or creating one) is the most beneficial for our future

Funnily enough, the fact that PG's website is archaic actually pushed me to parse a lot of legacy tags that I'd never had to use in that way.

Thank you. This is a much more informed post than the article.

There is imo so much wrong with PG's post, but as an European the whole proximity to tech thing feels very real. I remember seeing a talk by Craig Frederhigi where he also made fun of the fact that at least 50% of his success came from just being present in Silicon Valley / Cupertino at the right time.

It's misleading and poor advice to children. You see this issue a lot in certain immigrant communities where the equivalent "talk" might be: "How to become a Doctor [and be rich and successful]". Becoming a doctor is orders of magnitudes more in an individual's control but even _then_ we observe the plethora of issues that occur.

> the employee collaborates with her boss on deciding what kinds of problems you will work on. Of course, it will only be enjoyable if the company's problems are aligned with the employee's interests.

And that's a huge if. PG's view of regular jobs might be colored by his own experience (working for Yahoo after they bought Viaweb--of course it's going to jar when the thing you built is now owned by someone else that you now have to work for), but it's still the case that even the best case regular job (and of course most regular jobs aren't the best case) is going to give you significantly less autonomy than owning your own company--because you don't make the final business decisions for a company you don't own. If you're the type of person that's going to jar (and I suspect PG is that type of person), you're not going to like even the best case regular job.

> "Making it" as a startup founder should be seen in the same class of success as making it as a rock star or an actor. There are lots of aspirants and hardly any of them succeed. Even though some manage to become wildly wealthy, the prior expected payoff is negative.

This is probably true if you take VC funding, since VC outcomes are basically bimodal: either "huge win" or "tank". I'm not sure all startups actually need to take VC funding, however.

There are many entrepreneurs that got started late in life. They might not be running the most cutting edge technology companies, but there is more than one industry in the world.

You are too kind. It's a complete lie, or worse, utter BS fabricated to back up the OP argument. Zuckerberg stole photos (and the website name!) from the already existing online facebook.

Facebook was actually based on something he was hired by Winklevoss to create, and he decided to keep it for himself instead of delivering it. That's the "naughtiness" that YC seeks out in its Founder application process.

Note, by the way, in the recent "cancellation" of President Gay, the false claim that behavior like this would get a Harvard student expelled (although Zuck did end up "expelling" himself.)

While you are right, the trick is to find the new unturned stone. Google, Facebook and Uber developed playbooks for their respective environments. One cannot replay their playbook and expect it to work

I would recommend to look at local hacker spaces and just befriend people there. Chat around, listen to others, show interest. That’s a good starting point