I was really touched that PG's greatest regret was something related to his family, and not YC or his larger professional career. As young founders we tend to forget (or are expected to anyways) where our real long term priorities should be, and I hope PG's own regret reminds us to think about it from time to time.
This "from time to time" should be daily. A very big part of happiness comes from relationships. Often you don't realize this and even make jokes like this one:
Q: "Do you have time for private life in Silicon Valley?"
A: "What's this?" and then LOL because you know you are doing too little for your personal life...
If you would give only 15% more of your focused time to your spouse, kids, father, mother, friends... they would value it a lot! And it would be your long-term success! Are you ready to make such a small sacrifice for your "private life start-up"?
I wish I had really understood this 20 years ago. And I wasn't even in a startup. I just had things I wanted to work on that took time. Good things, useful things, but I put time/energy/thought into them that should have been spent on my kids.
Those things are like your baby but when you have a real baby then thats your BABY!
I think all people want to transcend their own death and for men, it's through creating useful things and for women the instinct is more for raising good children.
I had a difficult time watching this video from a technical aspect, so to save others the trouble :
PGs biggest regret has to do with not with business or entrepreneurship, but that he wishes that he had told his parent(s) to have more frequent colon cancer screenings.
Jessica's biggest regret was squandering her time in college, not learning as much as she wishes she had.
> Jessica's biggest regret was squandering her time in college, not learning as much as she wishes she had.
This is also my regret. As much as I want to say doing more internship and building more personal projects and contributing to more open source projects are useful today, dedicate more time on studying the material instead of saying "no one will care if you know how to write quicksort" or "I will learn them in my job anyway" is absolutely a requirement.
There's volumes there. Some combination of the sentiment that $900 million isn't nearly the most interesting thing going on about YC [+] and the notion that while $900 million isn't important enough to think about you'd have to correct a math error on it because math.
[+] A totally reasonable sentiment, which makes me smile in about three different ways. Once for not caring about money, once for having the luxury to not care about money because $900 million, and once for that happening to very deserving people.
Well, to know that it wasn't enough money to care about you would first have to have done the math to know that it was only $900M.
I like your first point about it not being about the money. I suspect it's more about proving that their new (at the time) approach to startup investing, their new appreciation for founders, their completely differnt model was right and that the conventional wisdom that came before them was wrong. At least that would be my biggest satisfaction.
It's easy to get the first digit if you ignore the decimal exponents. If you have the 3 * 10^? part of 3 * 10^? dollars, then you have 3 * 3 * 10^? * 10^? = 9 * 10^? dollars. Perhaps $90, perhaps $9000, perhaps $9000000, ... something that starts with a 9.
Now, if someone tells you that the amount is close to 10^9 then it's easy to complete the information and realize that you have $9 * 10^8.
You can just divide by a hundred and multiply by 3.
Edit: You'd be surprised how good at calculating percentages you can be if you do them a lot. It just becomes automatic. Source: binged-watched Shark Tank, got real good at multiplying by percentages and their reciprocals in the process.
As others are saying: almost unwatchable due to the bad editing. The site also has a ton of tracking going on. Seems to me this interview is all about (Bloomberg/YC) advertising.
But I got one interesting quote from PG. Funding multiple startups at once gives the startups the benefit of having colleagues. It's nice to have others around while working on your own idea.
Maybe this could be the standard in bigger companies too. Teams working on there own idea approved by management. This way big companies could be like founders.
It doesn't help with video editing, but you can avoid the other stuff by downloading the video with youtube-dl[1]. Yes, it works on sites other than youtube. Sometimes[2].
Paul Graham is somewhat of a modern day hero. Forget the rappers and the athletes, he is the embodiment of a good, moral and sensible person. Great husband and parent, great sense of humor, and all of this aside from what he has done for the tech/startup community.
Did you watch the interview? Jessica flat out states that he is a great father. And the fact that they haven't fought in the years they've been married once about something as huge as YC says enough about their relationship.
My point wasn't to deify Paul Graham but to give respect where it's due. There is plenty of criticism doled out on HN daily, what's wrong with a little praise?
This is a very try-hard comment. Paul Graham is someone to believe in. Definitely a great guy/hero. If you cannot realize this, then the fault is in you.
Hm, some of his tweets and talks don't hint in that particular direction. Your comment seems like a bit of a black white painting...
To come back to the video: IMHO the editing and the overall interview style is aweful but that's only me.
Hmm..classifying a motorised skateboard as a possible solution to public transportation's last mile problem is a far stretch.
The folks that could really benefit from a solution are the elderly, physically disabled and young kids. For the life of me, I would find it difficult to see the majority of these folks riding a skateboard.
I don't really see the analogy. MS bootstrapped fairly naturally (with the help of a great deal of luck along the way) from BASIC to progressively more sophisticated OSes, each of which closely followed well-established pre-existing models. AFAIK (I'm not an expert) there are no viable existing models out there for a big next step from the Boosted Board.
Even assuming infinite battery life, what's the form factor? A wheelchair won't cut it. A Segway-like thing won't cut it. A unicycle won't cut it. A conventional bicycle won't cut it. A recumbent bike or trike won't cut it. Roller-skates won't cut it. Exoskeletal legs won't cut it. Many of these things are of proven usefulness, but they've never been general-purpose substitutes or augmentors for pedestrianism. A version of some of the above which folds into something unprecedentedly small and light might begin to cut it, but how is that achievable within present-day engineering constraints?
You're looking at a solution that solves the problem for 100% of people. Most products don't do that. The popularity of bikes proves that.
You only need to solve the problem for the majority of people ( >50% ) to be considered a good solution. The solution may prove to be elegantly simple.
Well, it makes sense that they'll keep focusing on the last mile - but I'm hoping the next product will appeal to more people. Boosted boards are amazing, but few are going to experience them because of the learning curve and style of longboarding.
I believe their ambition is solving the problem presented in one of YC's requests for startups -- specifically short-distance personal transportation for everyone.
This caught my attention as well...he said it with the same kind of passion that Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos had for Segway. Obviously Segway didn't live up to the anyone's expectations. Hopefully pg isn't nearly as far off the mark as those guys were.
This really "humanized" them for me. Im far removed from startups and the culture out there. I've read the blogs. Its obvious PG is a smart individual, and from the outside it seemed like a culture "way above my league". Hearing this made me think it may not be so crazy to take a risk on a project I want to see happen. They both seemed very down to earth and approachable.
As a side note, due to his name, and hearing he had English roots, I did not expect the Pitts-achutsetts accent from him.I was thinking more like a toned down Roger Moore...
It looks like the interview parts were mixed up in the editing. To watch the interview in chronological order start at 13:44, watch till the end and then start from the beginning.
It's always amazing to me that good business people are so much more real in interviews than almost any other category of "celebrity". (The regrets question here or, say, Steve Jobs "hearts outside your bodies" comment.)
Lower stakes, perhaps? I suspect that far fewer people are paying attention to what business people (even Steve Jobs) say than what Tom Cruise or Lebron James says. If James, for example, says anything interesting you can be guaranteed hundreds of columns and on-air rants from national and local media praising and criticizing him. It probably makes him wary of actually saying anything beyond PR-approved soundbites.
"It ended?" Was my thought when it ended. It was getting really interesting. I think an interview with the two of them on Charlie Rose would be the right format to explore YC and how it came into being and evolved.
How do you get suspended every year and get into Harvard? Mind you, that makes me respect Harvard a bit more. Not just mindless strivers, perhaps. But in my preppy liberal arts school, I don't think that could ever happen.
I think she's alright, but would have definitely liked someone like Sarah Lacy doing the interview. I know people have different opinions about her, but I really like her interviewing style, seems much more personal.
This is maybe beside the point of this video, but the editing of this interview is truly annoying. I guess it fits a lots of information in twenty minutes, but cutting pretty much after their first sentences right into a next question... I feel breathless.
Agreed. I really like listening to Paul Graham's longer responses. I'm left wondering how he and Jessica elaborated on most of these questions (if they did).