I think there's a flaw in the premise, namely that one persons schlepp is another mans passion.
From the Stripe example: "You'd have to make deals with banks." - I know quite a few people who would love nothing more than the challenge of getting big banks to sign on to a new payment service. Their passion is selling. The harder the sell the bigger the challenge. Just like good hackers want to work on hard technical problems great salespeople like to work on hard sales problems.
The real takeaway here is that you should find your personal schlepps and start a company with someone who is passionate about them. If a great hacker, a great salesman and a great fraud investigator started a company they would be able to start a company like stripe. And they'd all be doing stuff they were passionate about.
I had a paragraph about this in an earlier draft, but I took it out because it was only half true and the true half seemed obvious. The obvious half is that one man's schlep is another man's interesting problem, and that once the company gets going you can hire experts in each of the schleps you need to deal with.
But not all the schleps a company undertakes are schleps simply in virtue of not being someone's specialty. You have to satisfy users' needs to make a successful company, and it is very unlikely that the stuff you have to do to satisfy users' needs also happens to be exactly what you'd most like to work on, even if you're the specialist in that problem.
>> Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software
I wonder if the word "hackers" ought to be replaced with "young hackers of the type to apply to YC"?
If you're fresh out of school, or have only worked in big silicon-valley companies doing specialized tasks, I can see it. I have a hard time believing someone with even a few years experience in smaller companies haven't come to grips with "schlepness".
>> Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
I don't think that's what the research shows:
""" Old guys rule. And they are far more likely to be the founder of a successful technology company than most of you understand. How do I know this? Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40. """
Old hackers still wish they could just program. The difference between old and young is that the old are more likely to know they can't have what they wish for in that respect.
The research you quote is about moderately successful startups, not about the most successful of all. You can easily verify I'm right about the outliers by traversing the Forbes 400.
Ok... with correlation vs. causation out of the way, and a ridiculously small sample size to boot, it appears the average age of Forbes 400 tech company founders was almost 32 at the time of the founding their companies (http://goo.gl/iHAEe).
I have a feeling that's not what you meant when you said "young"...? Maybe you meant to restrict that to only founders that wrote the code their companies are based on? In which case, yeah, the founders of facebook, google, and Microsoft were all young when they started... I'd be careful drawing too many conclusions on that sample size, however.
Yin and yang perhaps. Companies that are entirely schleps tend to be self-limiting. In software I imagine the typical "enterprise trenches" of folks making software based on requirements set out by people who are themselves far removed from the customer as being the typical example of such "all schlep" work environment.
On the other hand, an all passion company is likely to end up making inconsequential products, or failing to meet schedules, or having poor customer service, or otherwise just failing at being a grown up company. Perhaps the best companies are those that mix schlep and passion in the proper measure. Apple and Google definitely come to mind as examples.
You have to satisfy users' needs to make a successful company, and it is very unlikely that the stuff you have to do to satisfy users' needs also happens to be exactly what you'd most like to work on, even if you're the specialist in that problem.
Banks are a good example, though. What irritates me most about banks is not having to figure out how their merchant services work but that they bring a slow, ineffective communication factor into the equation. I would probably dislike dealing with banks for the same reason I dislike trying to make changes in a big company: everything's rolling on a different track from a hacker's viewpoint and the very communication that could bridge that together and bring everyone on the same track goes forward very, very slowly.
I think Paul over simplified this one. The average hacker is attracted to things like recipe sites because these are solutions which can be accomplished entirely by code and execution. They are driven away by problem spaces which require foreign skills or unknown social networks, namely startups involving payment processing and banks.
So really a schlep is just a hard problem, one that the person considering it doesn't have the skills or know-how to solve.
It's easy to say that there is hidden value in these "schlep niches" but not if you don't have the slightest inkling of how to approach it. It'd be like me telling the average hacker to go start a farm.
Startups aren't only for hackers, though you might easily be deceived into thinking so if you live in the Valley or spend a lot of time on HN. Ingvar Kamprad started Ikea, Richard Branson started Virgin and Warren Buffett started Berkshire Hathaway - all very successful entrepreneurs that wouldn't be able to code an if-then loop if their life depended on it..
It's about niches in the market, not about who fills them. For any given hard problem in a marketniche there's probably someone out there who is passionate about it. Hacker, MBA, farmer, or something entirely different.
Sorry to nitpick, but Warren Buffett did not start Berkshire Hathaway, he bought an ailing textile manufacturing company in 1960s thinking he could turn it around. He could not, but Berkshire eventually became a holding company for most of his investments.
Warren Buffett is more of an example of meta-enterepreneur, that is he is great at investing in companies with great entrepreneurs (and managers).
The founders of Stripe didn't know any more about banking than farming when they decided to start the company. It was precisely their willingness to undertake alien problems (= schleps) that made them so effective.
It was the same way with my startup. I had no idea how Hollywood or fashion worked, but I had a problem [1] and when I asked people if they knew how to solve it, they just gave me back a similar problem they once had [2]. At that point, I figured this was a good company to build.
If it's even possible, the entertainment and fashion industries may require even more schlepping than the banking industry. Instead of dealing with lots of regulation and paperwork, now you're frequently dealing with self-obsessed, anti-technology narcissists who are completely unwilling to help you do anything.
But we muddled through and did the work that everyone else doesn't want to do. And that's why we're launching this week.
[1] I wanted to buy my girlfriend the sunglasses that Bella was wearing in Twilight, but couldn't find them anywhere.
[2] Johnny Depp's sunglasses in Blow, a necklace from Real Housewives, etc.
It's funny. "Starting a farm" seems like it'd be easier than my current schlep, which is figuring out how to market an app. Researching "how to start a farm" seems like a problem I could sink my teeth into a lot easier. To me that supports your thesis.
I know you use it as a general example, but do some very basic research on what it would take to start a farm... and not go broke within a year. You will feel differently.
The iTunes music store can be seen as a schlepp solved. Apple made tough deals with record labels and Bill Gates' comment "This time somehow he has applied his talents in getting a better licensing deal than anyone else has gotten for music." does seem like a symptom of schlepp blindness.
Dropbox is also a case of schlepp solving I think. It solved the problem of syncing, backup and history maintenance and did so by going all out on integrating into OS file system interfaces (findEr, explorer, whatever) with all their quirks.
Maybe we should start a "schlepp exchange" at HN where people posts their schlepps that they don't want to work on and whoever else does picks them up and runs with them.
I think you're mostly right, and your example (sales work with big companies) is well aligned with your theory, but there are plenty of schlepps that are not conceivably anyone's passion because they don't require any differentiated work. My personal favorite example is a service that will perform DMV operations on your behalf (where the primary work involved is standing in line). Whenever I need that service, I am ecstatic to pay the $50 or so that they demand rather than lose rand()*4 hours of my day.
Similarly, while someone somewhere is probably excited to work on Stripe's fraud and security problems, I suspect there's a ton of paperwork that must be filed and waited-upon in order to operate such a service legally. I know plenty of lawyers and none of them consider that sort of thing fulfilling work.
I think there's a strong correlation between hard problems and intelligent people being passionate about them.
You probably won't find many intelligent people that are particularly interested in standing in queues, driving a cab or waiting tables. That's because these aren't hard things to do. On the other hand you'll find surprisingly many intelligent people that are passionate about how ants build nests, how quasars work and how to solve a rubiks cube because these are hard problems.
I've seen people post "Stand in line for me at the DMV" on TaskRabbit. I haven't tracked how many tasks, but it would be interesting to see growth over time. I wonder how that compares to the specialized services.
There are plenty of people who'd happily stand in line for $10. I'd do it; give me a usable queue computing device and I can do other stuff at the same time.
While I agree with your point, I think the deeper detail is that, in order to solve the difficult problem, you've just got to find the person that can deal with the banks. So in this case, the schlepp is not necessarily working out a deal with the bank yourself, but going through the work to understand the deal, and then going through the work to find the right person to make the deal happen.
It rolls up into the overall point which is not that everyone should try and do a payments processing system, but that most of the ideas that are probably worth doing are those that have a significant amount of difficulties involved. And that, to execute the worthwhile idea, you'll have to figure out the problem somehow, and not just switch off because you don't have x - whatever that is, whether a person, a skill, a contact or a social network.
If you want to find the fresh powder you've got to hike up the hill that nobody else can be bothered with because it looks too hard.
Back during the first internet bubble, I was playing around calculating Pi and drew the attention of some VCs: "distributed computing" was big. After asking if I was interested in starting a company (I wasn't -- I was going off to Oxford to do my doctorate) one of them asked for my opinion on the technical feasibility of a business plan.
My advice (which I provided for free, being a foolish 19 year old) was "it is provably impossible to solve these problems as stated without transmitting information faster than the speed of light". They funded the company anyway, and $10M later the company died having never produced anything.
Be the guy who says "this is going to be hard, but I'm sure it's possible". Don't be the guy who says "I'm sure I can find a way to circumvent the laws of physics".
I know an entrepreneur who never bothers to check his business plans with even back-of-napkin calculations. He just makes Powerpoints. He is an "idea guy", you see.
So far he hasn't crashed and burned because he happened to start his first business during the 90s bubble, at the exact same time that other people were making business plans without doing back-of-napkin calculations. And he sold them a lot of stuff. His other terrible business ideas since then haven't yet returned his net worth to where it should be (zero, or negative) because he'd have to live several lifetimes for that.
I think this explains a lot about how mind-bogglingly stupid the world can be. Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book on this theme, "Fooled by Randomness".
In the late 90's, I remember talking to a guy at a company that was solving a similar kind of problem. I thought it would be almost impossible to solve and that even if they did solve it the payoff for their potential customers would be relatively small.
By the time I talked to this guy they had already raised something like $100 million dollars. When I mentioned that I thought their problem was impossible to solve he said "yeah, that's what we discovered too, so now we're winding down the business."
$100 million dollars on something I had doubts about in the first five minutes! And it's not like I'm some kind of computer genius. Anyone with a decent working knowledge of databases and analytics could have seen this.
Remember Marconi. He wanted to do wireless telegraphy across the Atlantic. Maxwell's equations predicted that radio waves traveled in straight lines. Hertz's experiments had proved the point. Marconi's radio waves were not going to bend round the curvature of the earth.
Marconi went ahead anyway. This wasn't stupid. He already knew that radio propagation wasn't strictly line of sight. Nevertheless, radio waves don't follow the curvature of the earth well enough to get messages across the Atlantic. He was gambling that the laws of physics could be circumvented.
He won! Not for the reason that he gambled on, but by dumb luck. His radio waves headed off into space and bounced back from the ionosphere.
If I were clever I would know the moral of this story. It is either "Sometimes you can circumvent the laws of physics." or its "Watch out for the Marconi trap. He won the 1909 Nobel prize by trying to circumvent the laws of physics and succeeding. And what we have learned in the past hundred years is that people have been throwing their money away trying to repeat this ever since, with no success, so don't go fooling yourself and throw your money away too."
Be the guy who says "this is going to be hard, but I'm sure it's possible". Don't be the guy who says "I'm sure I can find a way to circumvent the laws of physics".
Why be either guy? If you know that something really isn't possible, just say so. Hang onto your self-respect and reputation.
Stripe is an awesome example of a company that addressed a tangible frustration / real need instead of a desire or a higher-level "want". I've noticed that companies that provide "Internet plumbing" often fall into this category:
* SendGrid (bulk email sending)
* Twilio (easy to use telephony / sms)
* Zencoder (video encoding)
* MailChimp (mailing list management)
What others can you think of? Would love to see a list here :).
One of the things that I have noticed about all of your examples is that they are all tools for developers. Do you have any examples of companies that solve real problems for the general consumer?
I think a lot of us are clamoring for an alternative to Gmail that also happens to be placed outside the (immediate) jurisdiction of the United States.
It's obvious people want it, but mere mortals shirk from the prospect of securing it.
Another plus for young founders - older people have solved more problems by brute force (often just paying a specialist to solve it for them) and don't consider them problems anymore.
This is funny because one of the first startup ideas I ever had was 'hey, I should make a webservices based site for collecting web payments, lots of people would use that'. This was back when PayPal was still principally something you used to share money between two people, and was limited principally to US accounts.
But I made the mistake of talking over the idea with someone who I looked up to at the time, who seemed older and wiser. They said 'there are already systems that do that, I would find something else'.
Now I'm not saying I had even the remotest chance of getting such a thing off the ground - but at the time, I was so ignorant that I thought I could - but the ignorance worked both ways in that I would blindly accept the word of someone else, who just highlighted the schlep involved and so I immediately gave up.
But that's just what the article says : when you're young ignorance can be a blessing, but you've got to be prepared to put in the hard work and not give up at even the tiniest hurdle. Getting that rare mix in a young person is the elusive part. But I'm convinced you can get young people to put in the hard work - you've just got to give them the encouragement to go ahead and fail big if need be.
One of the big failures we have as a society is not teaching our young people that "average" people will do their best to suppress success in others. Almost everyone I know has a story like this to tell... if only that so-and-so didn't tell me my dream was impossible, perhaps I could have been successful at it.
One of the things that made Seinfeld so successful was his insane tenacity; what he did in a year most of his fellow comedians did in five. It's not that he was necessarily the smartest nor the funniest guy in stand-up, but he was one of the people who worked the hardest. And it's not as if he didn't hone his craft while doing it.
Skills, talent, money, and ideas are a part of the puzzle, but you can also beat your competitors on work ethic.
i worked for a startup (eVend) that tried to tackle the 'hard problem' stripe tackles way back in 1997. You read that right - 1997!
From Stripe's home page: "you don't need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account."
The problem was - not schlepp blindness - but the fact that this problem was completely impossible to solve in 1997.
Sure, maybe our execution was lacking (I was just a junior programmer at the time) but what really killed it was the banks and especially the credit card companies.
Mastercard and Visa just said no. We will not allow this to happen. Whoever charges the card must be responsible for delivery. We pivoted to take this into account (digital content delivery anyone) but reality was. This schlepp was too hard at that time.
People have been banging on the 'making payment easy' door, for a long, long, time. The fact that Stripe is making progress now is more a fortuitous confluence of events than the fact that nobody else had tried.
Product fulfillment is hard but doesn't have to be a pain. There are plenty of very sophisticated 3PL warehouses that can do any type of fulfillment you need. At my last job I managed an e-commerce business and our process was so streamlined that we'd never actually touch our products. They were delivered from production directly to the 3PL fulfillment warehouses where the items were unpacked and stored. When the orders came in items were packed up, and shipped out, including international delivery. When items were sent out, we got the tracking numbers for the packages back so we could send customers e-mails (again all automated).
Some of the newer operations have staff on site that has electronics expertise and offer troubleshooting of arriving items, etc. It seems that having them flash NFC stickers shouldn't be soo bad to teach them (but maybe expensive).
These all require upfront payments in the 6-figure range, right?
As far as I know, good 3PL services are at best like Braintree, not like Stripe. That is, they work well but don't lower the barriers so that it's easy to start using them.
Certainly. None of these require 6 figure payments. There are some setup fees, (very reasonable) and then they usually charge per action (items packed, computers checked, etc).
Forgot to mention, there is a lot of pros/cons to 3rd party fulfillment and it has to be done right. If you seriously decide to look into 3PL warehouses, I'll be happy to give you more info about what you need to look at.
I agree with you 100%. I briefly looked into fulfillment for a previous business idea, and, I think if there was a stripe for fulfillment, there would be more innovative companies coming out that would ship physical products.
Sincerely and PicPlum are two more examples of companies that have to deal with this pain.
It's hard to imagine Amazon offering specialized services for a class of products such as pre-programming NFC stickers, so I'd say you are safe from them.
A minor typo on your site:"If you are ordering NFC tags in bulk, need stickers pre-programmed..."
the pre-programming part isn't a problem, it's mixing skus to make an order.
when we started in June, we'd get like an order or two a day, and it wasn't too bad. the daily trip to the post office was almost a welcome break.
now, we get as many orders in a day as we used to get a month back then, and it's hard to scale. we've made a lot of the processes as efficient as possible, but the whole thing is still a pain in the ass.
Fulfillment as a service seems like it'd be a good business. No stressing about packaging, customer service etc etc
This is pretty much chicken and egg problem.
There is a huge schlep blindess in world of VCs, advisors, incubators, etc. So many entrepreneurs are actively discouraged to do things they want and to solve the real hard problems (the most common theme is: because there is a big company XYZ doing something kinda similar like that).
Unfortunately for many, joining an incubator is a schlep itself. I'm obviously not talking about the programs themselves but instead the application process and relocation requirements.
There are plenty of problems out there that people are trying to solve outside of the bubble area. Sadly it also seems that not moving to some 'hot spot' is a handicap these days.
Oh come on, that specific part wasn't the point. Have you gone through the process of actually being accepted? I have and it takes more than just a quick 15 min meeting. It also takes quite a bit of saving, planning, sacrifice and bit of logistics to actually get your life in order to go through an incubator program. Been there, done that!
I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. Quite the contrary. That's why I said it was a schlep. But some people's wives can only handle so much. :)
There's nothing specific to going through an incubator in what you mention, that all applies to the decision of starting a company regardless of incubators. If you can't handle a bit of saving, planning, sacrifice and a bit of logistics then you probably shouldn't start a company.
I think that's a little harsh, and misjudging what he is saying.
I can handle lots of saving, planning and sacrifice, as well as logistics. I cannot handle moving to the valley, without destroying a happy family life. That doesn't mean I shouldn't start a company, it means I shouldn't apply to YC or other things that require a move to the valley.
There's nothing WRONG with requiring that move, and I agree, it probably does considerably raise your chances of success. It is just not necessarily possible for everyone who would/could/should start a company.
Sure, I was just pointing out that life is full of layers of schleps to overcome before you get to the fun and business related schleps which you actually have a choice to overcome. For some, they are more of obstacles.
Before incubators far fewer people had the opportunity to attempt to solve life's problems by starting a company. Hopefully things continue to evolve and new ways are created to expose as many minds as possible to the various business schleps in the world.
The amount of money more-or-less promised to all YC companies is deceptively larger than the amount YC itself publishes. Also, until you get to Webvan sizes, there are existence proofs to pretty much all the possible company sizes at YC.
I am aware that there are very large companies that were originally funded by YC. There are some problems that do not begin with throwing some code on EC2 and iterating to success. Hardware design and production is the area that comes to mind. I realize that there are a few companies that were funded by YC that did some hardware design and production, but they are certainly not representative of the entire problem of hardware design and production.
No business starts with all the money it will ever need. Some YC companies are profitable in the first year and never need more. Some raise hundreds of millions for capital intensive businesses like Dropbox. The size of seed funding is not a limit on the size of problems companies can tackle.
That's certainly true. If you want to do something that requires 10s of millions of dollars to get off the ground, seed funding is not for you. Car and solar energy companies are great recent examples. Hugely capital intensive, and you'll note the pace of innovation is slower to match...
I don't think there's any problem that doesn't benefit from being worked on by a small, focused, core team (what seed funding can cover) before scaling up. Step 1 in building an innovative business is never "hire 100 people".
We encountered this problem, "Oh, so you are like OPower, how are you ever going to beat them at their own game?"
I love consumer energy and see a huge shift in the way people relate to their energy. I am solving my own problem because no one in the energy space has solved it for me.
That is just another schlep that you have to break through, all the people who laugh and say no, because there will be many who just don't understand.
I find online shopping for a lot of things to be really tedious (when you don't exactly know what to buy). That's why I'm working on a shopping search engine to make finding the right products much faster and easier. But PG dismissed my idea as a shopping guide that no one needs.
Almost every new shopping/ecommerce startup is some clone of Pinterest or a Q&A site. Those are very attractive ideas, but I believe I'm working on the real schlep, which involves combing product feeds, crawling for furniture photos, etc. and making life for the average Joe easier.
How would you say it's tedious? There are many sites with product reviews, blogs, forums, etc. Need a new camera? There's dpreviews. Need a new TV? Cnet. Need a new video game? IGN.
Well, don't be too enthusiastic about this idea.. I've seen lots of sites try it and fail such as Measy, Gdgt, etc. The ones that succeed are the ones that thrive in the search engines. People use search engines to find what they want.. they don't go to a specific destination.
Just a side note: like many Yiddish words, 'schlep' originates from the german verb 'schleppen', which translates to 'haul','tow','drag','carry' or 'tug'.
Yes, I've never heard schlep defined as an unpleasant task, except in that schlepping your suitcase all the way to Newark airport and back (or any other schlep) is unpleasant. The main conclusion I draw from this article: Paul Graham is not jewish. Either that or I don't know what schlep means.
I'd also only heard it used specific to a journey, but just found this definition (the second group, from Collins http://www.thefreedictionary.com/schlep) includes:
2. an arduous journey or procedure
I feel there's a connotation of unnecessariness to the difficulty ("clumsiness" in the literal meaning is similar; that it shouldn't be there).
e.g. climbing Mt. Everest is "an arduous journey" - but I don't think it's a "schlep". Unnecessary difficulty is just the thing for a startup to target. Suffer that tedium so your customers don't have to.
Yes, schlep isn't used for tasks. It's used only for journeys. The connotation is that a particular trip is going to be long, painful, tedious, annoying, difficult, etc. It is not used for tasks that don't involve physically moving yourself or transporting something.
It "isn't used to to mean a arduous task in general" says who? The OED defines it as a "troublesome business, a piece of hard work" with examples of that particular usage going back to 1964 in the Economist, who I presume wouldn't have used it unless their audience would understand. Pg has provided contemporary examples from the web at large using it in this fashion as well. Also the original German doesn't mean the actual journey but the act of dragging or being burdened so I don't see how this usage is likely to be at odds anyway.
As a native Yiddish speaker, my experience is that schlep is only used to describe a journey-related pain in Yiddish - I think TFA statement that this is a Yiddish word used in this context is what's confusing (has the article been edited to clarify this since?). It appears that its use has been expanded by non-Yiddish speakers to refer to "arduous tasks" - although no-one besides OED seems to think this.
As it happens, in Yiddish, there is a one other use which is more related which is to describe someone as "a schlepper" (or that they "schlepped") which means they take a long time do something.
No-one besides the OED.. There is no central authority for English, but if there were one it would be the OED. Besides, there are copious examples of people using it in that way in English for half a century: the OED catalogues these so it's not really up for debate in English. And that's the point, it's English not Yiddish we are talking about. You would say "it's Yiddish, not German" if a German started trying to correct you on things because he's a "native speaker".
Edit: as far as I can tell the article always said "originally a Yiddish word" which serves to hold the case I am making.
The problem with doing one of these (as with all of the ones above) is that you have a serious principal-agent problem on the buy side.
The people using your products (doctors) aren't necessarily the ones making the purchasing decisions, and in such situations you won't always win by providing the best product.
This is why EHR systems especially have a lot of fine grained reporting systems that let administrators spy on just about everything going on (they love this) and huge sales teams with budgets to lavish potential buyers with champagne and horrific user interfaces for doctors.
"And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in." (love the metaphor pg)
I did this once outside of my startup on a motorcycle trip to Panama, crossing the boarder into Mexico was a huge block for me and my riding buddy. We stayed in the US and drank beer for 2 days straight not realizing what we were doing. Then one night we had a moment of clarity, jumped on our bikes and headed for the boarder.
We just jumped right in!
In that moment of clarity I removed the fear and felt total freedom and the world became my oyster if only for a moment or two.
I think schleps are the reasons why many startups either fail or succeed, the ones that win hit the wall and learn to break through them.
Schleps is an indicator our work goes towards success. It has to be hard. Notice this can equally lead the entrepreneur to nowhere. It is the role of the entrepreneur to understand if this the right schleps.
An interesting piece, but I think a flawed one too.
I am in complete agreement with the section about "you can't start a startup by just writing code", and I think that concept could have expanded to become an entire and valid article.
But then it morphed from that into the idea that people (often subconciously) avoid "schleps" and pick easier tasks instead, which I think is both obvious and normal. I also think it is often a lot less subconcious than pg thinks.
To expand on the example of olympic athletes: I don't know about that specific example, but to expand to "professional athletes", an awful lot of people do think about being a football star, a top baseball player, whatever. But ultimately, even children with dreams have a basic understanding of risk vs. reward.
Saying that starting stripe involves a lot of schleps is one way of putting it, another way is to say that you're less likely to succeed.
Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking "should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?" and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.
Other than gut instinct is there any reason to believe this is the case? Those people also chose to start a recipe site over becoming journalists, or chefs, or working in fashion - nobody has ever, before starting either a career or a startup, gone through every possibility and ticked them all off, so why is it that in this case we should assign subconcious fear of hard work s the reason?
Personally I find it can often be the reason conciously, to the extent that I don't believe it has any need to be in my subconcious. Much like when I'm in a casino and think "let's bet fairly small" rather than "risk my entire savings to have a chance at getting crazily rich", when it comes to work I conciously think about how hard something will be, and what rewards it could bring.
Personally I work in content/publishing, and no it never occured to me to work on Stripe, but thinking about it now, if I could go back in time, I wouldn't try to build Stripe first, nor would I at this point in time consider a job in that kind of company. Maybe part of that can be assigned to the schelps involved, but I'm conciously deciding that.
Regardless, an interesting piece as food for thought.
edit: As a completely unrelated question that doesn't really merit creating an entire topic to ask, does anyone with showdead enabled have any idea what comments like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465559 are all about? I see them now and again, and can't work out any logic behind them.
Answer to unrelated question: Losethos is a developer of a quite unique operating system, http://www.losethos.com/videos.html which he has been developing for the past 10 years.
I reached out by e-mail once, out of similar curiosity to the parent, and got a string of replies that made about as much sense as his comments here. The mails kept coming, several minutes apart... I was actually worried I'd stepped into a situation I didn't want to be in. I'm convinced there are some real psychological problems there that startup advice won't help with...
> I'm some kind of terrorist lab animal, in jail--shrinks abuse me and shit.
> All I can do is post to HN News and yell at my shrinks.
> I get fake downloads and no emails. Total terrorist lab rat abused by shrinks.
From his comments and yours, here is what might have happened:
He developed an operating system by himself, spent a lot of effort in it.
Despite spending a large part of his life on this project, not many people are interested.
In despair, and alone, all he thinks about everyday is losethos, as you can see in each comment. In his mind, everything links back to losethos in someway.
`I could do USB but keyboard and mice aren't any better, possibly worse from a compatibility state. Memory sticks would be really nice. Now, we're in the domain of distinctive drivers for similar pieces of hardware. Can't do that. Might be able to.`
He seems to have related this article to how he didn't implement drivers for those accessories in his OS. (Schleps)
I am guessing he was sent to a clinic by his parents.
`I don't know. I don't even care. I don't care about one person. Parents are enemies. I pay them $600 they take care of me, but abuse me, I prolly abuse them.
This is heaven -- argument clinic and I'm telling truth all the time, except for wild speculation. I don't know shit about reality.`
His frequent references to God suggests someone close has given him a bible, in an attempt to help him.
He is able to comment on HN probably because he still has access to his computer and internet.
Pouring your life into a project, only after finding nobody cares much about it, while living alone for years... I can see how I'd become mentally unstable too.
I always assumed it was some spam bot that had been set up by a moron, could it really be the case that somebody is genuinely writing them out sincerely?
Sometimes the first lines make some sense. Sometimes he talks random things about his operating system. Then there's the God says part where he generates random blabber from Bible or something. I'm pretty sure this is caused by mental instability, not any kind of spamming/harassing purposes.
Wow, this is both very touching but also very intriguing. In my mind I have romanticized it into a tale of an online version of a mad, solitary genious.
A couple of years ago i stumbled upon this guy who was acting as the entire community of a pokémon forum all by himself. He was mentally ill, and often posted threads about his and Nurse Joys marriage. It was very sad, but he seemed happy in his own little world. It's interesting to see how technology/internet and mental issues interact. We get a small peek into their world. It's touching.
Could someone shed some light on the quality of his OS, and point out some interesting details? I know very little of that kind of thing, but the Youtube comments suggests it's skillfully made.
I don't think it has commercial value, simply because of the OpenSource competition. But it's nothing short of amazing the sheer amount of work he has done.
If this guy was born long enough before the Internet age, he'd probably be a historical figure of computing. His seemingly lacking social abilities would have been mostly a non-factor.
I never noticed those before. As far as trying to help, I would think it's a bit beyond the capacity of a well-intentioned stranger. From my untrained perspective, I'd worry about doing more harm than good.
I just got back from two days of mentoring people at a startup event (Lean Startup Machine), and I think Graham has it pretty much right.
The way I see it happen is that a lot of people start out with products they want to build. They would like to sit down and start coding, because that's the thing they know how to do. The t-shirt we mentors wear says "GET OUT OF THE BUILDING" because people are extremely resistant to the shlepping involved in talking to real people and seeing what problems they actually have.
I'm sure it's true, as you suggest, that some people didn't build Stripe because it was a project they really weren't competent to build. But I'm equally sure that plenty of people who could create something great jump into building a particular product because it seems safe and familiar, and then make themselves a little cocoon that insulates them from the fact that nobody is out there saying, "Gosh, I really need another recipe site." Until the money runs out, anyhow.
Very hopeful. pg wrote similarly in "How to make wealth" (choose hard problems; choose hard options) http://awurl.com/HLZs3Bxu7
my version: life is suffering, so you might as well suffer meaningfully. Making something tedious into something simple can itself be extraordinarily tedious. But what a great thing to have done!
> Most people don't consciously decide not to be in as good physical shape as Olympic athletes, for example. Their unconscious mind decides for them, shrinking from the work involved.
Being a world-class athlete is essentially a full-time job. Most people quite consciously do decide not to work two full time jobs, or simply don't have the energy for it. Not the best example...
It's not only a full-time job, those who are successful at it are genetically suited to it. It wasn't training that gave Michael Phelps his flipper-like feet...
pg, would you be willing to share some of the great startup ideas you think people are overlooking? (In addition to the ones on the Request for Startups list.)
Generally speaking, the more shlep you're willing to deal with, the less perfect your marketing can be. Find a cure for cancer, and you won't have to market it. Work on a recipe site OTOH and your marketing better be tight.
And you definitely have less competition. More shlep acts as barriers to entry. So does unique insight/expertise in a field outside of technology. Anyone can build the next Del.icio.us, or Pinterest, but not anyone can build the next software system that can help currency traders make money, or software to monitor diabetes patients. But most people just go after the low hanging fruit.
and this is because of many reasons too... Easier money, lack of time for harder problems, scared of failure and thus wasting time/money. Agreed to point one, more shlep now, less marketing required.
Nitpicking: To schlep comes from the German verb "schleppen" - to drag. In yiddish it refers generally to a commute or journey that is in some way quite aggravating - for example, I consider my daily commute in which I'm stuck in traffic a "schlep". Or, "I had to schlep my buby around town all afternoon as she kvetched about her bad back".
In short, to schlep does not mean a tedious or unpleasant task, it means a tedious or unpleasant journey.
If you guys are really, and i mean really looking forward to include other countries; i know that me and another bunch of people would be willing to give you money right now as an advance for the service and as incentive to actually make it happen.
Just be sure to include the big profitable countries: Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Japan, Canada, France, UK among others.
It's too bad that government / regulatory boundaries can't be overcome as easily :(. But when they can be overcome, the solutions are all that much more valuable and defensible.
"If you pick an ambitious idea, you'll have less competition, because everyone else will have been frightened off by the challenges involved. (This is also true of starting a startup generally.)"
Given the right set of circumstances of course this is exactly where
the opportunity is with many things.
Take real estate as another example.
If you buy a nice looking, appealing, ready to go condo or home in a well know building or neighborhood, assuming values aren't rising, there is really no way to make a killing.
You make a killing by transforming something. By adding value.
You take an unappealing piece of real estate and you transform it.
Or you buy a piece of land and you build something on it ready to go.
It's well known that people buy on an emotional level.
And if they can't get attached to something they won't
pay as much. (This is why homes are staged for example or cars are shined
up at the dealer).
Very good article. I think we should also consider the /reasons/ many consciously avoid "known/well understood" schleps. They have to do with the motivations for undertaking the work involved with a startup (or anything else, but startups for this argument) in the first place. Paths of least resistance are going to be taken if they satisfy the goals. Basically, the issue in the cases I'm speaking of is _satisficing_.
1) If you want to hang out with "cool startup people" and be involved in "cool startup culture" just about any startup will do. No need to do something difficult. That recipe aggregator will do just fine.
2) If you want to work on "interesting" problems, there are lots of those too. They might not serve many people (dev tools which do the same thing as many other existing dev tools and do not improve upon them) or change the world in really useful ways, they can still be /interesting/ to work on.
3) If you just want to make enough money so that you can stop stressing out every single day of your worry-filled life over having to work yourself to the bone for the rest of your life/becoming homeless/being able to afford food/shelter/health insurance, and you think just about any startup can give you that Startup Lottery Ticket, you don't need to work on the next Stripe. You just need a couple of million, then you could move into your one room studio/log cabin/pod and live the rest of your life sans the typical day-to-day worries about the basics and be just fine. The diminishing marginal utility of money seems like an excellent bulwark against trying to do those Schleppier things. If you're going to make at least as much from a RecipeAggregator472 as you would from a Stripe, the choice is easy.
As pg states, undertaking these sorts of endeavors requires ignorance for some, but I would also add some other possible useful motivators (ignorance may also become tougher "motivator" since so much useful data about failure is so readily available):
1) The need for big money for other goals. If you want to be a mega-philanthropist/cure cancer/finally solve immortality/whatever, you probably need BIG BUCKS. The number of people motivated to actually do this (or who even think it is possible) is probably not very large.
2) Fanaticism. You want to make this project happen because it's just your dream. The rewards are irrelevant. You will make it so that it's possible to create coffee from rain no matter what it takes, it's just that important to you. Probably not that many of these either.
3) Revenge. Everyone told you it could not, can not, and will not be done. Maybe they told you that you will never be the Coffee From Rain King. Whatever the reason, you live to prove them wrong and rub their faces in it. You want to get on the news and blithely tell the world about you invented this genius thing while making no mention of your detractors, but you secretly giggle with glee since you know you were Right, and they were Wrong. This one might actually be the easiest of the bunch, but still requires a delicate balance of just enough ridicule and scorn to motivate one, but not so much so that one
one thinks said thing is truly impossible.
A question to ask may be, is there a more efficient way to discover what these problems are? I know Y combinator and co. have somewhat of a pre-defined list of problems they would like to see solved that are not being addressed. For a lot startups it seems to be random. Their idea occurred to them when 'they', or someone they knew were having this problem.
I think there are many industries that many talented engineers know nothing about, and therefore don't know where the problems lie. How can we facilitate this awareness to the people who want to create startups without it being happenstance?
I'm sure many people have gone through the same thought process. The problem is many people don't know they want something or realize they have a need until they see a solution. The whole, I'll know when I see it mentality in a way.
Instead of a request for proposal we need a request for startup. But people want their solutions now because they have the need now.
I thought for a moment that the essay was about how to find startup ideas: solving your own schleps. Solve those things which everyone assumes are an annoying part of life/business.
The things I do that I find the most tiresome: commute by car, dishes, laundry, and flossing.
I find it funny that the solution to the first three if you have money are:
1. Hire a human driver (or move). 2. Hire a human maid. 3. Hire a human maid.
But all might be solved by technology: robot drivers, robot butler, robot butler, and "vaccines" against tooth decay and halitosis.
If I dug into the less important schleps, I bet I'd find that software is a solution.
Even though Braintree (http://braintreepayments.com) is not exactly like Stripe in terms of "speed to be up and running", it was created way before Stripe and has important features (like Third Party Payment Aggregations - a must for sites like Airbnb) that Stripe can't have in the short term.
As a result, Braintree is processing billion and billion of dollars a year.
"A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in."
It also helps to think of things like "making deals with banks", which can initially seem scary, in terms of the basic human actions they really stand for: "talking to a lot of people who work for banks". To me at least, that is both less boring and less scary.
For me, "talking to a lot of people who work for banks" is a lot less scary, but it is also so unimaginably boring. It would be difficult for me to imagine something more boring that talking to a ton of people who work at banks about banking.
I like talking to people. It can be pretty boring if they don't engage with you and just stay with formal/small talk, but if you can get someone to really talk, you learn all sorts of new things about the world.
Its about personality and subsequent 'search pattern'. Stripe was never on the radar for most entrepreneurs, while building the next RecipeBook is. This is due to most entrepreneurs are not the game changing type whose personalities lead them to tackle such large and unwieldy issues like Stripe did.
It should be noted that the world will never know how many tried and failed to do what Stripe succeeded in.
Another problem is, if you are out of university or high school without much experience in really any field, what exactly are you going to build, you have no real specializations and are a blank state, so you can work with what you do know a little about... music? recipes, travel? existing consumer web apps that are easy to code (and then coding it and realizing marketing is the real challenge for them).
I don't mind doing tedious things. I discovered in college that I was an excellent bureaucrat when I became student treasurer.
I just wish I could come up with ideas, though. A lot of them are hard for me to relate to. I don't go out and do normal consumer-type things ( not that there's anything wrong if you do) or have any real friends, so social things are out.
Startup ideas are so cheap that there are a bunch of resources for finding free ones if you don't think you can come up with one (which I'm sure you could, if you had a good brainstorming session!)
I wonder if going after a schlep problem hurts you in the hiring department. Although founders may be motivated to grind out schlep problems in the hopes of a large payoff, the talented programmer who is willing be engineer #1 at a startup is exactly the type of person who is susceptible to schlep blindness.
At least in the one example you gave, 'blindness' is a terrible way to describe how hackers avoid it
"fixing payment processing" is not a problem that we subconsciously avoid — but rather one that we very deliberately stay as far away from as possible. Is there a more inglorious class of failed internet startups?
One of the key reasons why I think the US university system is useful is it demonstrates who can do the schlepp.
And boy howdy, is enterprisey full of schlepping. Talking with my dad, who has run his own small construction business for the last 20? years, this is just the nature with work in general.
The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps.
"Unconscious" should probably be "subconscious" in these two sentences...
The case of Stripe is a rather bad example: most of the work is schleps, leaving very little for the enjoyment of creating something new, something unique, something that has the potential to not become an "also ran".
How many, or which, of the companies that have had success with Y-combinator were companies that were, in a manner you could discern early on (such as in the application process), clearly addressing schleps versus those you took on simply due to the force of character of the founder(s) (by virtue of their relentless resourcefulness)?
this article has a lot of truth to it, but one thing I will always disagree with PG about is that ignorance is a good thing. perhaps ignorance may produce a better local maximum than limited knowledge, but as a hacker I believe the true optimum lies at maximum knowledge.
The idea is that a simple "like Stripe, but better" doesn't cut it, you need to define "better", which then becomes what makes you NOT Stripe. And it's not too late if you can figure out how to do something that they don't do. In the spirit of the article, find a schlep they didn't tackle: availability, pricing, payment devices, support for legal revenue tax evasion strategies... :) whatever.
Because there's already a Stripe. Doesn't mean you couldn't start a company to do what Stripe does, but it'd be hard, since people would probably be saying, "Isn't that what Stripe does?"
I disagree completely. Stripe is the only one so far who doesn't suck. There's room for more, and plenty of room for differentiation. Sure, stripe.com set the bar and has first mover advantage etc., but that doesn't mean they now own the market. Not at all.
If you did exactly what Stripe did but charged less, there is no reason you couldn't completely replace Stripe. You aren't being judged on novelty here.
Yep, I spent the last two days hanging out in the Stripe campfire chat while I was implementing my own billing system. Some of the questions were borderline bizarre and I was truly shocked at how the Stripe team went above and beyond to answer every single request. My only other experience is with SagePay who I spent weeks asking questions on their developer forum to get a handful of vague responses.
One of the reasons that I like stripe more is that they give you much more granular control ove the user experience. Users on your site never need to know that you are using stripe to process payments. Things just work. Also: PayPal customer service is a joke, they will freeze your account etc... etc...
They do that to save money. PayPal has very low losses due to fraud. Maybe if Stripe gets large enough to attract attention, or starts doing business across international boundaries, or in Eastern Europe, they'll start doing the same thing.
Point of usage - "Schlep" is most commonly used as a verb. As in, "Oy, you had to drop out of college and schlep all the way to California, just to listen to some schmuck make himself a macher?" It's true, you could say "that was a long schlep" - but other than meaning a long or difficult physical journey, (think getting home from Vegas on a Sunday), when schlep is used as a noun, it almost always refers to a person, short for schlepper, or one who schleps. This is someone at the bottom of the totem pole. As in "what kind of schlep wants to deal with this guy's verkakte ego?"
This essay is very disingenuous. Businesses are hard work, Paul Graham wants to invest in the next Facebook, he needs younger founders who are ridiculously ambitious and won't take an early exit.
I don't think it's disingenuous; I think it's pretty on-the-nose. Also, I think "early exits" are still win conditions at YC; that's one of the (salubrious) benefits of being organized like YC and not DFJ; there's a lot of reasons why a "YC" would want to tune outreach to young people, and none of them need to be "avoid build-to-flip companies".
From the Stripe example: "You'd have to make deals with banks." - I know quite a few people who would love nothing more than the challenge of getting big banks to sign on to a new payment service. Their passion is selling. The harder the sell the bigger the challenge. Just like good hackers want to work on hard technical problems great salespeople like to work on hard sales problems.
The real takeaway here is that you should find your personal schlepps and start a company with someone who is passionate about them. If a great hacker, a great salesman and a great fraud investigator started a company they would be able to start a company like stripe. And they'd all be doing stuff they were passionate about.