
Office Hours With Paul Graham At TC Disrupt - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/25/absolute-must-watch-office-hours-with-paul-graham-at-tc-disrupt/
======
dgallagher
In regards to Flytivity (introduce people to each other at airports):

 _PG:You don’t know where people are going unless you expect them to tell you
all the time. You have to find a subset of people who super-want to talk to
one another. Enough to seek out and sign up for something they aren’t using.
If I were you i’d stat over. You’ve spent 60 days on this. Plenty of companies
start over after 60 days. The very best startups solve problems that founders
themselves have. What is the worst problem in my life._

First idea that popped into my head: frequent fliers who like to sleep around
and/or cheat on their spouses. If you're always on the go, away from home (for
better or worse), an app connecting like-minded people easily might have a
viable group of customers. Basically, a mobile/geo version of
AdultFriendFinder.com. Want to share a hotel room to fool around in, and save
some money by doubling up? Stranded out of town with nothing to do? Etc...

People will go out of their way for sex, including logging into an app and
planning ahead. The question is, how big is the customer base, and what are
they willing to pay? Do you end up with too many men and not enough women?
Perhaps it's different between W4M, M4W, M4M, W4W.

~~~
philwelch
With anything like this, the M4W market is going to overwhelm.

~~~
hugh3
But the m4m market could be the most lucrative. Look at... that senator whose
name I forget. Wouldn't it be much easier to solicit random sex via your phone
than try to do it in a cubicle? And heck, it's probably a lot more pleasant
for everyone who has to use those cubicles.

Of course in order to make this happen you'd probably need to build a general-
purpose "meet people with common interests" app, just to provide some
plausible deniability (either to others, or to one's own self). "Oh no, that's
not a random gay sex app, I just like to meet other... model railroad
enthusiasts..."

One more thing: by the time you've done all this, there's no point in
restricting it to airports, is there?

~~~
not_chriscohoat
I believe the senator's name you're looking for is Larry Craig, if I'm not
mistaken.

~~~
wyclif
You mean Larry "Wide Stance" Craig.

------
guynamedloren
pg comes off as a great guy during interviews and is clearly intelligent based
on his success (YC + others) as well as his essays, but I always kind of
wondered if he's just gotten really lucky spotting startup talent, or if he's
just firing shots in a barrel hoping to hit something.

2 minutes into his first "office hour" and all of my doubts are out the
window. pg really does know what he's doing. He asks questions that seem
blatantly obvious, yet nobody else seems to be asking them. He doesn't let
something go if he wants to know more - he keeps nagging. He understands how
markets work and where people spend money, but also has the technological
know-how. I am thoroughly impressed, and can't wait to gather his insight for
the next 42 minutes of this video.

~~~
mindcrime
_2 minutes into his first "office hour" and all of my doubts are out the
window. pg really does know what he's doing. He asks questions that seem
blatantly obvious, yet nobody else seems to be asking them._

Yeah, that video does make it clear how good pg is at pointing out important
stuff and asking pertinent questions. The only thing that struck me as a
little dodgy, was his tendency to ask a question, then cut the other person
off before they had barely started answering. I mean, I understand that he
wants to cut to the chase in the interest of time, and that some people will
ramble if you don't cut them off... but a couple of times that I found myself
thinking that the conversation would have flowed more smoothly if he'd let the
other person continue an existing train of thought a little further.

But his methods seem to work, so who am I to quibble? :-)

~~~
alanning
I would guess he is also using questions to test/signal expertise. If you
really know what you are talking about, no awkward pauses. The 10-years of
experience guy with the video application startup...iirc no interruptions.

~~~
mindcrime
That's a fair point, but I think sheer nervousness can cause some of those
pauses. I mean, hasn't everybody stumbled over an answer to a question - even
when they knew the answer - at some point, just because of nerves?

And to be fair to pg and everyone, that was a fairly unique situation... doing
office hours on stage in front of all those people, etc.

------
po
I was surprised and impressed by pg sniffing out the last guy. I felt like
there was something shady about how he was describing his company… like it was
a 'platform' and too general and he had too many 'users' for what he was
describing.

Then Paul jumped right to the "is this a penny auction site?" question and
nailed it. I wonder if he hears from people running that angle a lot…

Also, I think from now on when someone describes how many users they have, my
next question will be _how many active users per day/week/month?_

------
waterside81
It's amazing how good pg is at sizing up startup ideas within minutes
(seconds?). I imagine with enough experience many can achieve this, but
impressive nonetheless. Not sure if it was the nerves or what, but it seemed
like the startups chosen couldn't quite get the "tell me your idea in 1-2
sentences" down pat. Took a while longer to see where they were going.

Fascinating for non-YC folk to see this live.

~~~
endergen
Investors are similar in general to him in terms of questions, but they don't
try to give as much help/suggestions and mulling over of your idea.

------
vnorby
I'd pay anything to sit down for 8 minutes with pg and have him rip through my
idea. It's pretty obvious why YC companies have such a big advantage. He knows
exactly the right things to say, and he did it in a way that didn't make any
of them feel bad, but rather inspired them. Totally atypical for an investor.

~~~
iqster
My pitch for the motorcycle giveaway was that I'd try to trade it with pg for
30 minutes of his advice! Almost thought I had nailed it. Much sadness :'(

------
david927
I was really impressed by this. None of the questions he asked were so
surprising, but when I asked myself the same questions, such as which
demographic desperately needs you, I was embarrassed at my lack of good
answers.

~~~
david927
P.S. After spending time with some of these questions, we have a new direction
and new energy. I used to say, "It would be nice to have a mentor." Now I
think it's absolutely critical.

Our startup is Kongoroo (<http://kongoroo.com>). If anyone wants to be a
mentor to us, we would deeply appreciate it. My email is in my profile.
Thanks.

~~~
kenjackson
I tried to play Monster Crossing, but after I picked the game type (addition
word problems) the screen flashed between two screens. I couldn't get to the
play button because it would move positions too fast. This is in IE9.

~~~
david927
I'll check it. Thanks.

------
kenjackson
This was great advertising for pg. He's a great writer and success story,
obviously. But he comes across a lot nicer than I thought he was.

------
marcamillion
I imagine that the applications for the next batch are going to grow at an
even faster clip after the entire interwebs have seen this.

It really is fascinating to see how good PG is at zero-ing on the most
essential stuff and asking the tough questions and how genuinely happy (almost
excited) he seems when he comes up with a suggestion that the company can use.

Not that I had any doubts about YC before, but it definitely is here to stay.

Edit: I was also surprised at the quality of the startups that he spoke to. I
expected wishy-washy 'social media' crap, but these guys seem to be onto
something.

------
mikeleeorg
Correct me if I'm wrong, but one takeaway I had from this fascinating segment
is:

For investors, your pitch should include the problem you're trying to solve,
the people who have this problem, and your solution.

For pg's office hours, you should strip away all that marketing talk and just
say what it is in it's most barest technical essentials.

~~~
petervandijck
Correcting you: I got the impression pg wants to know exactly who will be your
customer and what problem you're solving. He asked that again and again.
(saying what problem you're solving is not marketing talk)

~~~
mikeleeorg
Ah, perhaps I should have phrased that better. What I meant to say was:

For pg's office hours, you should strip away all the buzz words and describe
your business (customer, market, etc) in words someone outside of this
industry would understand.

Basically, I got the feeling he was trying to pare away buzz words.

~~~
petervandijck
Yes, totally. You should probably do the same for VC's.

------
citizenkeys
In regards to Vidappy (and I hope they're listening): These founders seriously
need to examine and address the legal issues associated with this idea. If
your target clients are big-name companies, particularly if actual candidate
skills are less relevant, there are serious Equal Employment Opportunity
issues to resolve. This whole idea is a giant class-action lawsuit waiting to
happen.

I take this issue very seriously because I just took some MBA classes
regarding human resources. At a very basic level, this idea is designed to let
potential employers prejudice potential hires. Job candidates are legally
protected from this specific idea in the same way they're protected from job
application questions like race, age, nationality, and other questions that
are not directly job-related. In so many words, if the candidate is qualified
for the job, the hiring manager doesn't legally get a choice as to whether he
likes the way the candidate looks.

~~~
benmccann
By that logic interviewing people in person would put you in jeopardy of
violating EEO laws. How does doing an interview over the net instead of in
person change anything?

------
jasonkolb
I'm always impressed with what a genuinely nice guy PG seems to be. I love
watching him try to brainstorm with these guys about ways to make their ideas
work, even when they resist :P

------
staunch
PG: Please do this again at the next Startup School. This is seriously useful
stuff.

------
bambax
This was super-interesting; watching PG do his thing lets one get familiar
with his way of thinking.

What every entrepreneur should do should be to build a "virtual PG" in their
head (the way writers pretend to write _to_ one person they actually know, and
not in general).

Also, there is great potential for a fascinating reality TV show.

Instead of watching people eating bugs in Guatemala, how captivating would it
be to follow a few startups going from nothing to world domination, their
doubts, failures and successes, etc., and see how they're coached and what
they learn along the way?

I would pay to watch such a show.

------
maxwin
PG seems like a really smart guy. He was able to point put the pain points
with very litter background information. He reminded me something my college
professor used to tell me "Always try to surround yourself with someone
smarter than you". I wish I know more people as smart as him.

~~~
rhizome
There are about 5 questions that feed into "who is going to pay you?" All of
them are pain points for the vast majority of startups (anecdata). Idea +
development + customers = Business. I'm not saying PG is a dope or anything,
but it has to be apparent that the "customer" chunk is an Achilles heel for
just about all dotcom-y biz. The ones who aren't getting funded for being
gadget new tech, who aren't going to be bought as a team for implementing a
possibly-useful technology, are going to have to figure out who the customer
is, and from reading HN it seems most are counting on the first two options.

------
natural219
The fourth guy (TvTak) didn't seem very interested in Paul's idea, which I
thought was magnitudes better than his original idea. The idea of being able
to signify that you're watching a show could actually be disruptive.

...so who wants to do it? I'm down.

~~~
kenjackson
How does this technology work? I'd think it would have to have a huge cache of
video to make this work.

Update: I checked IntoNow and this is what they say:

"IntoNow, which is based our patented platform SoundPrint, analyzes the
ambient audio being generated from your television in three-second increments.
The audio is then converted into a “fingerprint”—basically, the show’s unique
signature for ID—that is matched on the back-end to our reference set (which
covers 130 channels of live broadcasting and has more than five years
history). Once we make a match, we return all the metadata associated with
that show and episode—things like title, description, cast, and associate
links. This all happens in seconds."

So it actually uses the audio, which is much better, although I watch a lot of
TV with CC in bed.

~~~
natural219
I still don't know how they analyze shows airing for the first time. They
could recognize voices, but what if an actor opens in two different TV shows?

~~~
kenjackson
Presumably if they're on the East Coast they get the shows first (at least for
the major networks and national cable). And then if you're watching it at the
same time, they're encoding in real time.

------
extension
Can anybody see the video right now? I just get a black box and the page takes
~30 seconds to load. If I load the player .swf directly, I get Ooyala's
throbber forever.

~~~
guptaneil
Same here, tried in both Safari and Firefox. Briefly got the play button to
show up in Firefox, and then the browser crashed...

------
dshep
By FAR the best of the disrupt videos. Thanks Paul for giving us a glimpse
behind closed doors.

------
andrest
A bit off-topic, but I find it interesting how motivated people are to post
stuff on HN. It took just under 2 minutes for the person to find the post,
'digest' it and submit it. The video is 50 minutes long.

~~~
achompas
It's all about karma here. People have set up scripts to automatically submit
blog posts by more highly-regarded members.

------
melvinram
My notes of stuff I typed while listening to this the second time... mostly
verbatim questions by PG:

GRAPH DATABASE

So who uses it?

So it's for ___ ?

Can you give me an example, of all the people in the world, who needs you the
most right now? Like what problem needs you the most right now?

Who has trouble with this problem now? Who wants to do ___ that would
otherwise have problems with doing ___ ?

Is the ___ (latency) going to be a problem?

Is there anyone who has said yes? Is there anyone who wants to use this
software?

Why do they need you? What's special about you?

Are any of these people ready to pay you yet?

So they want to pay you because they need the product this much?

If they want to pay you, are they paying you? You never know if they are
serious until you try to get [their money.]

[Money] will really impress investors. It's not so much that they care about
the money. They care about money as evidence that people really want what you
are building.

Who is going to use your ___ in production first? Cuz you won't really know if
it's good until they are using it... good in the sense of helping them out.
This is going to be a combination of how desperately they need you and how
quickly they make decisions.

Find out who the users to use you first are and figure out the types of
problems they are solving and describe yourself as solving those problems.

\-----------

VID APPY

How do they ____ (hire people now) now?

Is the problem that ___ (walk-in's don't scale)? (what is the problem with the
current alternative.)

So how do you know ___ (what questions to ask)? (the tough part of the new
solution that you hope to offer)

It's good for the end user too (people applying too.)

What's hard about what you're trying to do is ___ (establish a marketplace).

Which one is the harder quantity to get? (the retailers or the job
applicants?)

Is this thing launched yet?

Maybe the way you get this started is ___ (go to a big retailer and tell them
to tell their applicants to go to this url).

\---------------

DATA CURIOUS

Who needs it?

How are they going to use it? (On the fly report generation or prepared
reports)

What do you think is going to be the most common ____ (query) that people will
do?

I worry that this won't have a big enough gravity well to stay up in the top
of people's heads. This is the sort of thing people would do occasionally and
never come back.

If someone were to come back over and over, what ____ (queries) would they be
doing (or running) over and over?

I wonder how many ___ (investors) that into ___ that are going to come back
over and over again.

I worry that you're not going to be able to find enough (users who will want
to use your solution over and over again.)

\-------------------

TV TECH

So how?

Where is that going to be most used? Like if you imagine a year from now and
you've launched, you're successful and people are using this a lot... everyone
who has a business like that can say the biggest single case of people using
this is for ___. So what is going to be the biggest single case of people
using this?

You're going to decide what to show when I click on the stuff. (You're making
assumptions on what they want when even they might not know what they want.)
What if it's wrong?

I would test this on some actual people a lot. See if you can get them to the
point where they won't ___ (watch TV) without this. Unless you can make it
stick on them, it's not going to stick on other people.

You have the underlying technology to do ___. This doesn't have to be how you
use it. There could be other ways to use it besides ___ (this thing that every
consumer is clicking on).

\-----------------

FLYITIVITY

How do you beat the chicken and egg problem? The way to beat a chicken and egg
problem is to find a tiny subset of the market that is small but much more
driven than normal.

I don't feel like ___ (airports) is the secret because they don't all want to
solve this problem.

You have to find a subset of people really want to ___ ... enough to want to
seek out and try this new thing that they are not already using.

What is the worst problem in your life?

If this really honestly is one of the biggest problems in your life than maybe
you're not the only one.

\-------------------

LUCKY CHIC

What do you do for them once they get to your site?

When a typical user shows up on your site, what do they see and what do they
do?

What is the most common thing users do?

What's the biggest driver of traffic?

So far the one that they use is the ___ (penny auction)?

Can you grow while breaking even?

In a given day, how many people use it? Do they return?

What's the growth rate like?

You should figure out, what are you seeing people do or wanting to do among
your existing users that you're not really suited for yet or that no one
really gives them. Is there anything?

------
prgrmr
Does anyone by chance have a (the?) list of good questions a founder should
ask themselves (similar to what pg asks)? Would be much appreciated.

~~~
idoh
Try reading the yc application and thinking about how it applies to you.

------
gnufs
The video file can be downloaded at
[http://ustream.vo.llnwd.net/pd14/0/1/14/14951/14951420/1_819...](http://ustream.vo.llnwd.net/pd14/0/1/14/14951/14951420/1_8193296_14951420.flv)

------
icandoitbetter
Are there any similar videos? I could listen to PG coaching for hours.

------
alagu
Not sure how much it helped the startups who went on to the stage but it did
help a ton for folks who are in initial phase of building a product.

We ask ourselves all those pg questions. Get answers.

------
parfe
Why is the penny auction guy ashamed of his site? 100k registrations is pretty
good I would think. Is there a reason he can't just focus on profiting on the
auctions?

------
david927
Did anyone else get a "nerd giggle" out of the exchange: "graph database,"
"Cartesian graph?" I guess you can never be too sure, but I still found it
funny.

------
kenjackson
Videos at Disrupt aren't showing up. At least not in IE9.

~~~
andrest
Works in FF and Chrome

~~~
kenjackson
Yeah, watching in Chrome, but it hangs a lot trying to resume from pause.

------
6ren
Re the TV app: at first I was thinking that is incredibly impressive video
recognition technology, but then I realized that just the variation of overall
brightness over time would be enough information to select from the channels
that are playing at that moment.

------
6ren
The only one with a clear market need was Vidappy, the retail employment one.
That addresses a task that people are already trying to get done, but in a
better way.

pg's question for finding a market need: "What is the worst problem in my
life?"

------
joeyespo
Awesome.

Although I think Paul should've polled the audience on some of the ideas to
see who would be interested. Especially the airport guy. It's not what
normally happens during office hours. But hey, why not take advantage of the
situation?

------
gbog
Any other place to see the video? It seems to not work from China even under a
VPN.

~~~
PakG1
I watched it fine from China, using strongvpn.com, open VPN. Maybe try again?
Possible just was high server load or something?

~~~
gbog
Watching now, but I have to wait for 10 minutes more every minute...

~~~
PakG1
That's usually the case for streaming anything to China from overseas. :D I
got lucky on that particular day.

------
6ren
actual start: 6:20

------
swah
In which I remember that PG is really good at what he does.

------
swah
So, now I have to ask again: do ideas matter?

------
zyfo
Impressive. I could almost see the bayesian filtering taking place inside pg's
head when he went from saying "scrap that idea" to "maybe there's something
here" on Flyify, once he realized this honestly was a real problem for the
founder and that maybe he just wasn't part of their target demographic. (Not
saying it's viable or that pg thought so, but he was open to the fact that it
_could be_ ).

Not only great at shooting down leaky abstractions, understanding different
customers but also at being non-judgemental - a rare combination.

~~~
petervandijck
I think the founder was fooling himself: being bored waiting for an airplane
is a problem, but an app that connects you to people closeby isn't gonna work.

~~~
greendestiny
I've had some random conversations with people in airports before, it wasn't a
particularly life changing experience. I think there is probably an
opportunity to provide services for people who are out of town on business
better - basically at the moment the social interactions serviced by having a
few beers at the hotel bar. I think grubwithus does this pretty well, but
there might be other models.

------
zackattack
Great Video. In my YC application I will be sure to pre-answer these
questions: Who in the world needs you the most and... what's special about
you?

People will seek out something they desperately need

One mechanism to evaluate opportunity appeal: f(how bad they need you, how
fast they move)

------
zackattack
by the way, this made me think of another idea.

Vacation Discovery....like StumbleUpon, but shows awesome places you can go
within a certain budget..

maybe categories "Castles" "East Asia" "Tropical" "Waterfalls" "Jungles"
"Deserts"

It would have to be:

1) Very picture-oriented, so you can fantasize and browse (escapism)

2) Able to filter by price easily, and include airfare

Good business model, fun to use, win win win.

~~~
revorad
YC-funded <http://adioso.com> already does something like this. Don't know how
successful they are.

~~~
zackattack
It's somewhat different, but I always thought they had a neat idea and
product! I love NLP

------
suking
This first guy is brutally bad @ explaining what he does - jfc - learn how to
explain wtf you do and stop saying pivot. Nervous much?

------
ezl
Wow thats brutal. Poorly organized. Nobody knew to show up.

~~~
edanm
Skip the first few minutes of choosing companies, and go straight to the
office hours.

~~~
vellum
Go to 6:20 for the first office hour.

