I am finishing up my PhD and I have a very direct analogy to what PG mentions.
There are multiple research groups with different success rates and what I have noticed is groups with extremes are not doing that well. By extremes I mean professors who try to micromanage and get a daily update and professors who do not care at all. In my group, we have a biweekly meeting for everyone to present what they did in 2 weeks time which makes all of us work hard but on our own terms. I think incorporating similar things in education/research will be very helpful in the long run.
Startup idea: present the user with 8 adjectives and ask them to pick the one which best describes their mood, then give them an optimal article to read as they start their day.
We'd all be more successful if we could capitalize on our good moods and not let our bad moods drag us down for long.
I was doing something like this that I called "the ugh2yay project" (a webapp). I abandoned it after some time as I thought there is no real need for it as people will just talk to their friends to feel better. Do you think it will be useful? It had features like ability to save stuff when you are happy (say a hilarious lolcat) to be shown to you when you are not so happy etc...
I have cut & pasted all of pg's essays onto my Palm pilot. Along with my bridge program and a bunch of other great content, I never have an excuse not to learn something.
Whenever I sense that I'm getting stagnant, I always go back and reread old faithful, "Good and Bad Procrastination".
I've started 4 companies. 3 died (but not badly) one petered out and I sold the core tech for a pretty decent figure (so I call it a semi-success even though it was the least likely to succeed)
I dont know: I came to HN after I began hacking and doing startups (I never even called them startups till I got here) and my assumption was that 99% failed anyway as a part of the process of learning.
I figure you have to either be super lucky (and make a Twitter, Facebook or Google hit) or you have to fail hard a few times before eventually succeeding. I chatted to some London VC's the other week and they said they trusted founders from previously failed startups a lot more than newbies - simply because they had learned many of the hard lessons and wouldn't then make them at the crucial moment their company could be worth something 6 figures or more.
I don't know anybody that 'scored' that didn't fail a couple of times first. The ones that hit a home-run the first time out are the ones that you hear about all the time but they're the exceptions.
It's not a rule, but hard work definitely pays off - most of the time.
> I dont know: I came to HN after I began hacking and doing startups (I never even called them startups till I got here) and my assumption was that 99% failed anyway as a part of the process of learning.
Same here I've been doing startups since 13, didn't even know about the dot-com boom bust at the time.
Quick question: Do you make a note of how successful a startup would be when you fund it, and then revisit those notes a year or 2 down the line? How do you make sure you have the right feedback mechanisms in place?
wufoo's demo video peters out just where it gets interesting to me, and it confuses me about their value proposition: once you've got the form made, what do you do with it? Do they just give you the html and point you to where the URL for the CGI ought to go?
You're right in that creating a a form in Wufoo is only the beginning. At that point, you can start sharing the link to the form or embedding it on a web page to start collecting data, leads or even payments. You can do all this from our Code Manager: http://wufoo.com/docs/code-manager/
Built into every form is also the ability to subscribe to the incoming data in real time to your email inbox, mobile device via SMS or your RSS Newsreader.
We also have a robust report building feature that can help you visualize and export your data so you can better understand the information you've collected.
i asked the MIT Electronics Research Society http://mitERS.mit.edu if anyone used octopart and what they thought. here are the responses so far (sent to public list not just me personally):
"It's a great idea, it's useful, but it's a work in progress and not yet a replacement for searching distributor websites." -henry
"If you know what you're looking for and Octopart has incorporated it, you'll find it in seconds flat, and it's fantastic. Unfortunately, it seems spotty in terms of catalog completeness, and it is not as comfortable as browsing/guided search on, say, DigiKey or Mouser, so it gave me mixed results." -darwin
thanks for asking mitERS for their input. please let everyone know to email me with suggestions on how we can help them search for parts (andres@octopart.com).
I agree and disagree. Octopart is very revealing if you do low volume manufacturing had have been caught in the 'digikey convenience turbine'. Like any search engine, it's useless if you don't have the part. But there are a lot of core parts to a generic circuit board listed, so I end up using it quite a lot.
I fear there may be less to this than meets the eye.
It reminds me of a foolproof recipe for (human) immortality, which I think I read in a book by Raymond Smullyan. It goes something like this: every day you say "I will say this sentence again tomorrow". If you always keep that promise, then you are assured of never dying.
The point, of course, is that "if X, then Y" doesn't mean that by doing X you can ensure Y, even if on the face of it X is something under your control.
Similarly: yes, indeed, if your company continues interacting with PG and other Y-Combinator-funded companies, then it will not die -- because if it dies, it will no longer be able to have those interactions.
Similarly: yes, indeed, if your company continues interacting with PG and other Y-Combinator-funded companies, then it will not die -- because if it dies, it will no longer be able to have those interactions.
But that's false. People don't lose the ability to email us once their company dies.
The companies no longer have that ability, even though the individuals do.
Don't get me wrong; I think "keep doing something and stay in touch" is an excellent piece of advice for someone doing something difficult where failure is strongly correlated with losing motivation.
But I wonder whether you're overestimating the causal role of demotivation here. Toy model: a startup has some kind of "health score" which varies according to exogenous events; "motivation" is some function of health and d(health)/dt, which is small when the startup is unhealthy and getting healthier; the startup dies if its health goes negative. In this model, motivation has no causal role, it's a pure epiphenomenon; but I bet you'll find that startups that die typically have very poor motivation shortly before their demise, and that poor motivation is a good short-term predictor of failure.
Of course, this is only a ridiculous toy model; in reality motivation clearly does have causal effects of its own, but it's also clearly affected by outside causes that themselves have an effect on the success of a startup. An observed correlation between demotivation and death is only weak evidence that demotivation is the underlying problem more than it's a symptom of having no customers, no money, technical problems you can't solve, etc.
(Doubtless you have more evidence than that correlation, having seen lots of startups succeed and fail.)
The part I found most useful is where he quotes Paul Buchheit, and about pleasing that first small set of users. He doesn't tell you where to find them, but at least once you've found them, you can hang on to that through thick and thin to protect your morale (given that morale is what motivates founders not to quit)
This post really came at the right time for me. Such a moral boost.
I created and is currently operating a startup in orange county, ca. I am also in the middle of a divorce. So to sum it up: Though times. Personal advise: If you believe your idea can provide value to clients, end-users, or to the community as a whole: Never ever give up. It will eventually pay off.
Side-projects are always confusing because the answer to "Should you do a side project?" is always "Yes - if that side project will eventually become your main project." Unfortunately, it's almost never possible to tell that a priori. So it always comes out as "You should do side projects, except in the cases where you shouldn't", which isn't terribly helpful.
In addition, once ev realized the side project was better than his current startup, he shut down the original, gave back all the money to his investors, and raised for twitter.
What if the economy is a shitstorm? I'm not talking about right now, either; I'm talking about an Argentina-style, complete meltdown. What then? Can it become implausible to do well?
Obviously there's a point at which it could, yes. If you lose civil order, for example, you lose most of the economy. That's what really destroyed the economy of the Roman Empire. There were of course deeper underlying causes, but the proximate cause was plundering and brigandage.
There are multiple research groups with different success rates and what I have noticed is groups with extremes are not doing that well. By extremes I mean professors who try to micromanage and get a daily update and professors who do not care at all. In my group, we have a biweekly meeting for everyone to present what they did in 2 weeks time which makes all of us work hard but on our own terms. I think incorporating similar things in education/research will be very helpful in the long run.
Good article PG!!