I’ve been in and around startups since 2008. I feel that pretty much all of wisdom around startups has become outdated, especially the entire narrative around them.<p>The biggest change I’ve seen is how startups are being seen as “risk free”. At my first startup, I was one of the early employees and I had to convince and cajole new grads to join a startup. Everyone wanted to join big tech co. for the job security.<p>That’s changed now. New grads I’ve hired don’t see a startup as a risk event anymore, but rather, a normal career move.<p>It also used to be that founders would forego a salary and early employees would assume they would get paid much less than a regular job. Founders were also driven to protect their equity share and would dread dilution.<p>Of late, I’ve seen founders very eager to secure fat salaries and to get to liquidity events as fast as possible. The earliest startups I worked with, the founders would fret for days about bringing a VC onboard since that meant diluting their holding. Now, founders are driven to raise funding and sell some of their holdings to safeguard their future.<p>I say all of this without judgment or bias - I truly believe your first priority should be to secure your family’s financial future.<p>I just feel that the startup world is awash in so much funding (at least before 2022) that the riskiness and “courage” associated with startups - something most early startup essays would talk about endlessly - have been largely negated.
For the most part, all the low hanging fruit that the great startups of the last 30 years monopolized on has been picked. The next 30 years will look nothing like the last. I suspect we'll be seeing much fewer sub 50 year old self-made billionaires, a near total collapse in the number of inflation-adjusted unicorns under age 10, and a relative shrinking of what we think of currently as "tech" in proportion of total GDP. We may even soon to stop thinking of software companies as tech companies by default.<p>Even looking at the last 10 years vs. the 10 years before that, the emphasis has already started to shift back the power to the celebrity content creator over the nerdy engineering tech creator. Before Web 2.0 really took off, websites and apps were all the rage because it was mostly nerds and other early adopters that could monopolize the power of the internet. Now the playing field has been leveled again, and it's those with strong personalities, marketing skills and other digital content production skills who have been making the big bucks. Mr. Beast's youtube channel was offered a $1 billion buyout. Engineers weren't thought of very highly before the personal computer revolution, and the money and power was all with the celebrities instead. I think the last 30 years was mostly an anomaly, but now that the internet is more democratized, the money and power will be returning to the celebrity content creator.
I read most of Paul Graham's essays and the core theories I associate with him are:<p>1: As a founder it is more important to be competent and productive than to seem competent and productive.<p>2: It is an advantage to trust your own competence and ignore common practices.<p>3: It is better to build something for real users than for imaginary users.<p>4: A great product is more valuable than great marketing.<p>They still ring true with me. But maybe I am biased and just remember the thesis that I agree with.
I think a lot of them are. A big change is that start-ups have started to stay private for obscene amount of time making a lot of options into toilet paper. This means unless you are happy to work for a start-up with your options being worth $0 you shouldn’t work for them. Even if they end up being worth something you might work for a company starting at 20 years old and get a windfall at 37.
Startup culture is rebooting. It has reached an unseemly level of stereotypical, cut and paste, me too, lemming behavior that cannot be redeemed by any insights conceived by essays writen for a less absurd era.
Startup = Growth is timeless, as are most of the essays. I did feel Hackers vs Painters was little outdated but the book is almost 30 years old at this point.
I went to a couple startup events in Bay Area and I’m not being a hater but it was the equivalent of “glamping” with people dripped out in designer clothing and taking group photos than people interested in talking about solving any actual problems.<p>Like I was hoping for people who want to leverage AI to do some cool shit or solve some difficult problem in some industry. You know, something actually useful. I wanted to talk about my scheduling software, or discuss some challenges in industry I don’t know shit about.<p>Instead people were talking about their (yet another) copy of a copy of a wellness app..<p>Granted I’m fresh af to this game but I honestly felt so out of place. Nobody was talking tech and people were talking about their vacations to some exotic places and taking selfies. That’s fine, but nobody really seemed like an engineer or solver minded person.<p>It was honestly bizarre and kind of depressing. I felt like I had better tech and ideation focused discussions in my tiny city that I left to move to Bay Area.
I would change topics as: Is creating startups outdated? …making PG essays outdated.<p>I’m serious. 1980-2020 was the hype of an undertaped market that was personal computing. Anyone in a garage could do something revolutionary because <i>anything</i> was already better than nothing. Even if it didn’t respect GDPR and leaked PII accounts like a sieve. That’s always like that in the start of a Schumpeter economic cycle, same happened with cars in 1900.<p>Now, we’re in a consolidation phase.<p>Or are we still in an “invention” phase? AI maybe?
“Outdated” implies a belief that some portion of some of his essays represented verifiable objective truth about reality which needs updating to reflect environmental changes.<p>That belief is outdated.
Outdated? Yes, and yet they are largely relevant because the culture around startups are largely the same from when they were written. There's a comment I read-- "The brain (culture) knows it -- but the heart (economy) hasn't caught up yet."[0] -- that applies to this. In general we can say startups have largely become a predictable path to take for anyone with the competence to go through with the process. This has , in one way, to coin it gentrified and/or mainstream it. I think this is actually a good sign as it means theres "slack" in our general ecosystem to allow such outcome. But it should not in any way allow anyone to ignore that it also means we should probably be working/concentrating on harder/ridiculous problems to solve. Yes, you could probably correlate this with low-interest rates and macro market trends but that's another story for another time. To conclude, I think we live in some of the best times to build and in general, especially if you are already here (on HN). Reading Paul's essays can still be of value and I'd bet there would be value in updating and/or revising the essays in general; just like author's revisiting/updating great books over time.<p>[0] - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673325" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673325</a><p>EDIT: I'd like to add some links to some comments that had done a good job of listing some of the worthy information to revisit from Paul's essays.<p>[1] - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34751744" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34751744</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752781" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34752781</a>
This is an interesting question, but a bit vague and therefore hard to answer. Some of the articles that come to mind are quite timeless, such as Schlep Blindness. Do you have some particular articles in mind that you think are outdated? Which? Why?
Outdated may be a bit harsh. I'd say that almost everything we knew about modern startup culture was predicated on one thing: easy access to cash. That had huge impacts on ease of funding, length of runway before profit, safety to pivot, and so on.<p>If the era of cheap money is truly at an end, then the whole edifice must be reconsidered.
I think although the tools and context have definitely changed, the foundational principles in his essays remain true:<p>Ideas for startups often come from solving your own problems.<p>A good startup idea should have at least one of three things: it's something you're passionate about, it solves a problem you have, or it's something you're good at.<p>The best way to predict the future is to build it.<p>Move fast and break things.<p>A startup is a company designed to grow fast.<p>A startup is a company that is confused about what its product is.<p>The key to growing a startup is to learn as fast as possible.<p>The ideal size for a startup team is around three to five people.<p>The best startups are often started by people who are still in school or in their early 20s.<p>Don't worry about competition. Worry about creating something that people love.<p>Make something people want.<p>A startup is a company that is trying to answer a question nobody knows the answer to.<p>The most important quality for a startup CEO is determination.<p>A startup is a company that is being run by a small group of people who are trying to discover how to build a scalable business.<p>To be a successful startup founder, you need to be an expert in something.<p>A startup is a company that is trying to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.<p>The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.<p>If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.<p>Don't let your ideas be dragged down by the standard of what already exists.<p>Don't scale too soon.<p>Your job is to do what you do best and delegate the rest.<p>Don't take VC money until you have to.<p>If you want to start a startup, don't think too much. Just do it.<p>To be successful, a startup has to be run like a cult.<p>The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.<p>The biggest mistake startups make is not making something people want.<p>Your first 10 users are more important than your next 10,000.<p>If you're going to start a startup, you should know from the beginning that it's going to be hard.<p>The best way to raise money for a startup is to not need it.
Taking YC advice is sort of like getting cooking tips from customers coming out of a nice restaurant.<p>They’ve eaten good food, but they may or may not know anything about starting a business.<p>Paul Graham hasn’t started a company in several decades now. Just because he has proximity with a lot of people who have, doesn’t mean his advice is still sound.<p>He was competing with Perl shops, for crying out loud!<p>The scene has changed. A lot. Seek out lessons from success by yourself, directly. Ask local, search local, find the people successful near you in your industry and just ask them. Many will tell their tale over lunch, and then you’ve received personal, actionable advice for the price of a good meal.