
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - transburgh
http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
======
vegashacker
Here's a link to the Artix website (RTM & PG's first startup):

[http://web.archive.org/web/19961226071744/http://www.artix.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/19961226071744/http://www.artix.com/)

This is apparently a year into their venture, but I think they'd already
abandoned the idea at this point. Notice the ad on the top for Viaweb.

~~~
pg
Holy shit. I had no idea that was still around. Pretty spiffy for 1995. That
was before tables.

I notice our pitch to galleries

[http://web.archive.org/web/19961227091110/www.artix.com/how....](http://web.archive.org/web/19961227091110/www.artix.com/how.a.html)

has a lot in common with Viaweb's

<http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/bugbear/how.html>

~~~
vlad
Paul, you were on the internet for 13 years before your sold your first
startup? And you have _five_ degrees? Yet you want 20-year-olds to succeed in
6 months if possible, even without a degree? That's insane (in a good way.)

~~~
pg
We'd actually prefer if it took longer. If you succeed in 6 months, it was
probably an early acquisition, and YC doesn't make very much from those.

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transburgh
This is most interesting to me;

"This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that
any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on
what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him,
but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this
view:

"80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least one management person
in the team at the start. The business person represents the "voice of the
customer" and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on
track."

This is, in my opinion, a crock. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the
voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for
them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which
presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because
they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It
seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who
obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started."

~~~
Jd
This is a simple case of specialization of labor. While a hacker may be able
to hear the voice of the customer, it probably makes sense to have some folks
that do more hacking and some more customer hearing. If you have two co-
founders, it makes sense to have one on each side.

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portLAN
Whee, let's resubmit the entire PG archive. Free points!

~~~
pg
You ought to let them have this one. I had no idea this existed myself.

~~~
randallsquared
He's talking about the 2005 article, but it seems you're talking about the
artix site. Wrong thread. :)

~~~
pg
Oops, yes. No need to submit stuff already on the Library link at the bottom
of the site.

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blored
In a sense, pg, don't you think that you are perhaps still funding ideas that
are in fringe markets?

In the future can we expect to see a fund for a) a standard search engine and
b) a standard social network....

~~~
rms
a) To beat Google will take a clever new technology/algorithm. I'm sure if
someone came to YC with an idea for a fundamentally better search engine they
would get funding.

b) Same thing here. It's hard to beat facebook as far as a general interest
social network. There needs to be something unique.

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rokhayakebe
Lazy people have the best ideas. Lazy people always try to cut the process
short and find the easiest way to do things. Now this is a gift and a curse as
they never act. This is how we all get to hear stories of someone saying "Oh I
had this idea n months ago. They stole my idea"

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myoung8
pg, have you found that those accepted into the SFP are increasingly able to
get past the bad idea stage?

~~~
pg
They're usually pretty flexible, but that's because we try really hard to
screen out inflexible people in the interview.

