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.
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.