
How not to die - swombat
http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
======
ujjwalg
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.

Good article PG!!

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mrshoe
I'd read that before, but I think I needed it today.

Maybe someone should set up a cron job to submit that talk to HN every 3
months.

~~~
jpwagner
Or to randomly choose one of PG's essays every month.

This particular one was last posted almost two years ago.

~~~
mrshoe
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.

~~~
Zev
I don't know if that would be a good startup idea, but it would make for a
nice side project to create on a weekend.

~~~
wensing
Which is exactly how many startups are born.

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ErrantX
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

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Estragon
So, how are octopart and wufoo doing? (They both seem to be around, still.
Have they been in the news, lately?)

~~~
pg
They're both doing well, actually. Both are profitable. Wufoo remarkably so,
but they've had longer.

~~~
Estragon
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?

~~~
unfoldedorigami
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.

You can learn more about all these different steps in our other video
tutorials at <http://wufoo.com/docs/getting-started/>

~~~
Estragon
Thanks for the explanation.

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gjm11
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.

~~~
pg
_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.

~~~
gjm11
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.)

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keyist
Do not go gentle into rewrite / Rage, rage against the dying of the site.

/me ducks

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zaidf
This ranks right up there with Steve Job's Stanford speech.

It was even more powerful when pg actually delivered it. I wish a video from
that night's dinner existed.

~~~
iamwil
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)

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iamwil
the previous discussion when it was last submitted.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294>

~~~
swombat
I thought it was relevant (and far enough away time-wise) for a repost, given
the news from SnapTalent today.

~~~
zackattack
[http://img.skitch.com/20090818-ca7b431u5urtm7rpdh1ag7uwnx.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20090818-ca7b431u5urtm7rpdh1ag7uwnx.jpg)

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AlphaEvolve
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.

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paul9290
Sorry I think the part about starting up other things is ill-advised.

TWITTER WAS A SIDE PROJECT!

~~~
nostrademons
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.

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martincmartin
Am I the only one that thought PG was going to come out as an extropian?

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nopassrecover
I thought it was customary to include the year at the end of old/reposts.

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helveticaman
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?

~~~
pg
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.

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wastedbrains
I read this whenever we are currently on a down swing on the roller coaster
that is a startup.

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sound2man
Work hard and never give up. Got it.

~~~
aditya
or, work hard and know when to give up. much harder.

