Call me cynical, but I tripped over this paragraph:<p>> <i>For example, when Adora Cheung was starting Homejoy, she would work all day as a cleaner to learn the business, drive an hour back to Mountain View, stay up as late as she could coding, then drive back to San Francisco at ~3am to beat traffic, sleep in her car, and do it again. She also gave both her apartment and her car to early cleaners so that they could partner up with Homejoy. We don’t want to delude anyone about what running a startup is like—it’s a rational decision to decide you don’t want to start a startup.</i><p>What I read here is the idea that the only way to do a startup is no sleep (except a few hours in a car) and no life. 100% of your time is startup, startup, startup.<p>Who profits most from cultivating this image? The startup founder or the VC?<p>I seldomly see current founders / executives say that this is how they lead their lives, but somehow, VCs (like Altman) keep squeezing this image into their blog posts somehow.<p>I don't think it's some kind of evil plot, and I like the rest of the post: it's good to be reminded that everybody started somewhere and nobody's great from the start. But I just don't believe that you can't be a successful founder and still have a life/family/healthy lifestyle.
My experience at repeatedly starting companies is not that taking risk for yourself is hard -- if you have simple taste, enjoy coding and are articulate enough to identify a problem and conceive a solution… There is no reason to be, really. I mean: sitting on your ass wondering what to do is pretty much what anyone looking for a job does after <i>that</i> phone-call, and no one has described job seekers as heroes, certainly not developers.<p>What still scares the be-jeezus out of me, and anyone I’ve met is getting someone else involved, pretending that you know your thing and making them, innocent travel companions, crash with you, unaware that it’s all shadows and illusion. I’m assuming that’s why psychopaths are so good at that stage: they can hire ten people that they can’t pay, and not care for the life of them that their baby won’t have formula to eat in two months. (I’ve seen that with my own eyes. Spoiler alert: it cries.)<p>I am not surprised that HomeJoy founder gave her home to those first helpers: with an ounce of human decency, that must have felt like a tenth of the bare minimum she was asking from them. That discomfort must have been less that the inhumane hours. Good on her, and great for her.<p>The fact that Sam Altman fails to see that the problem is generally others scares me.
> The only thing you have to know how to do is build something people want.<p>"Build something people want" is a popular mantra, but notwithstanding the fact that many entrepreneurs overestimate the potential demand for their product or service, it oversimplifies what's actually required to build a company that's likely to be successful.<p>In the consumer market, translating popularity into dollars sufficient to support a sustainable business can be very hard. It's easy to look at companies like Snapchat, but most startups will not become so popular that they can obtain the type of funding that allows them to significantly delay the implementation of a revenue strategy. Monetizing a modestly popular consumer property that can support more than a handful of employees is still very, very difficult.<p>In the B2B market, creating a successful business requires that you build something people want (or, more preferably, need), that you can sell and sell at a profit, and in sufficient volume. B2B sales can be difficult and slow, even if you have a great sales team and a great product, and the cost of sale can be much higher than you anticipate. If you do crack the sales puzzle in a profitable manner, scaling sales to the point at which you actually have a real business is a hurdle many startups never get past.<p>If you look beyond the top 1% startups, you'll quickly find that Silicon Valley is littered with stagnant startups that are based on seemingly good ideas and that might even elicit comments like "I would use that!" But they're not "wanted" enough to get from <i>great idea</i> to <i>great business</i>.<p>None of this means creating a company is a bad idea, but starting the journey with the "build something people want" mantra in mind, and little else, is more often than not a path to disappointment than success.
"The only thing you have to know how to do is build something people want."<p>I have actually found this to be the most difficult thing - a lack of ideas that turn out to be wanted by other people.
Long time back I had posed a question on "Ask PG" - that how come PG does not go out and do a startup(after his initial one)? My aim was to ask if doing startup is such a "must to do" thing for certain kind of folks, then he should be doing it again, and again (and not stop after the first one and then start advising only). While I never got a direct answer to that one, he did answer this in another forum the same thing - which basically boiled down to - that doing startup is too much work, and he does not want spend his time doing that. I really do think, that doing startup is not such a sexy thing as it is portrayed it to be. I feel it is another of those things in life, where primary reason for most folks for doing a startup is that you will seem more "important" a person, after you have a successful startup. Otherwise you are just an ordinary dude with 9-5 job. I truly wonder how many folks actually do it because it is more fun and adventure, than pain and stress(most of the time). Or if the real reasons for doing startup are ever examined.
Although I understand this is a post by sama & for YC, I don't think that YC should be the reason you do a startup. That's what the article seemed to be insinuating to me. The hustle needed is just as impressive, if not more so, than the successful results we see.
One thing I like about YC is that you'll are honest about a lot of things and invest to help the founders and company grow . However I've found out that people are the least optimistic about success in the valley . Then why the compulsion of having to move there.<p>P.S - I'm not a YC graduate but a startup aficionado
"We fund companies at all stages, from just the faintest idea to post-Series B"<p>Does this mean that (i) YC will continue to invest in it companies up through their later rounds, or (ii) that YC will actually participate in a Series B for a company that it had no prior connection with?