<story><title>What I’ve learned from users</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/users.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>This essay is getting a surprising amount of hate, and I must confess that my first impression on reading it was that it sounded an awful lot like a Robert Kiyosaki book [1].  But then I followed the two links in the essay [2] [3] and that put it into perspective: the thing that Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such formula.  It&amp;#x27;s like Goedel&amp;#x27;s incompleteness theorem, except that it&amp;#x27;s not a theorem.  People come to YC and buy Robert Kiyosaki&amp;#x27;s books hoping to find an Answer that simply doesn&amp;#x27;t exist.&lt;p&gt;The difference between Paul and Robert is that Paul is up-front about this while Robert is cagey and deceptive and makes his money by stringing people along thinking that The Answer can be found by buying one more of his books.  But I think a lot of the hate here is driven by disappointment that Paul is honest, and that his answer is that there is no Answer.  It can be frustrating to hear that (which is also something that Paul explicitly points out).&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;1612680194&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;1612680...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;lesson.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;lesson.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;before.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;before.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>And the whole thing with VC is that they&amp;#x27;ve somehow figured out how to make money while being wrong 90% of the time. With those sorts of numbers, are you really doing much better than random chance?&lt;p&gt;I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer, but to identify who&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;lying&lt;/i&gt; about it. With those sorts of volumes of money you&amp;#x27;re going to attract fraud, and fraud can quickly break &amp;quot;throwing darts at a board&amp;quot; as a selection strategy.&lt;p&gt;If you can just select for people who are earnest and aren&amp;#x27;t lying to themselves too energetically, you can call it a day.</text></comment>
<story><title>What I’ve learned from users</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/users.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>This essay is getting a surprising amount of hate, and I must confess that my first impression on reading it was that it sounded an awful lot like a Robert Kiyosaki book [1].  But then I followed the two links in the essay [2] [3] and that put it into perspective: the thing that Paul learned from his users is that they are looking for The Answer, the formula, the procedure for how to succeed, and there is no such formula.  It&amp;#x27;s like Goedel&amp;#x27;s incompleteness theorem, except that it&amp;#x27;s not a theorem.  People come to YC and buy Robert Kiyosaki&amp;#x27;s books hoping to find an Answer that simply doesn&amp;#x27;t exist.&lt;p&gt;The difference between Paul and Robert is that Paul is up-front about this while Robert is cagey and deceptive and makes his money by stringing people along thinking that The Answer can be found by buying one more of his books.  But I think a lot of the hate here is driven by disappointment that Paul is honest, and that his answer is that there is no Answer.  It can be frustrating to hear that (which is also something that Paul explicitly points out).&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;1612680194&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;1612680...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;lesson.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;lesson.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;before.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;before.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iamwil</author><text>Yeah, I think it&amp;#x27;s a combination of some of this stuff is common knowledge now, rather than surprising, and people were looking for concrete examples of mistakes startups made (so they can avoid it themselves)&lt;p&gt;Rather, this is an essay about what was surprising to him about startups in YC. And I think it&amp;#x27;s fair to say that these were all surprising, and I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have inferred them if someone told me about YC as an idea back in 2005.&lt;p&gt;Or put in another way, if someone came to you and told you about the idea for creating YC back in 2005, when the only model of investing in startups was how large institutional VCs and angels invested in startups, would you have been able to tell them the following insights about how it would work and what the value add of the advice is? Remember, when YC started, lots of people thought 7% for $15k (I know they give more now) was a joke.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    - Most startup problems are the same, but in different forms. It makes advising tractable for a single person to do.
    - Advising a lot of startups in batches has the advantage of learning about all these problems faster.
    - And yet, startup advising has to stay individualized (presumably to keep things concrete), so in order to scale, they had to shard. Limit was somewhere between 60 and 80 per individual advisor.
    - Identifying problems and ranking their severity are two different skills. You&amp;#x27;d think they&amp;#x27;re the same, but they&amp;#x27;re not. As an advisor, if you can help startups do only these two things, it&amp;#x27;d go a long way. Lots of advisors try to help with other things, but these are the two most important, because if a startup died, all other problems are moot.
    - Despite this, founders don&amp;#x27;t listen to advice about how not to die. And they don&amp;#x27;t listen because the advice is counterintuitive. It&amp;#x27;s like how there are more skiing instructors than running instructors. Skiing is more counterintuitive.
    - A big headwinds to advising startups on how not to die is that due to the educational system, founders have all learned how to hack the system. The skills that got them to where they are stops working when trying to build a company. 
    - Beyond helping startups not die, advisors likely know less about the product&amp;#x2F;strategy in any domain, but they can increase focus, which increases speed of iteration, which indirectly helps startups with their product&amp;#x2F;strategy through iterative greedy algorithm.
    - A follow-on value-add of YC is the alumni network. Like clusters of painters in Paris during the impressionist period or musicians in Vienna, and Xerox Parc, lots of great work is done when great people do it in clusters along side each other. At the time, people thought the price of independence of is loneliness, but turns out it&amp;#x27;s not true.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></comment>