
Notes From a Conversation With Y Combinator’s Paul Graham - aditya
http://gigaom.com/2010/02/01/ycombinator-paul-graham/
======
pg
If I could emphasize one thing I said in this interview, it would be the
importance of cofounders. More of the interview dealt with that topic than it
seems from these notes. That's what someone thinking of starting a startup
should be thinking most about, not the idea.

I talked afterward to a guy who wanted to apply to YC, but didn't have a
cofounder. I suggested he just apply 6 months later, and spend the intervening
time finding a good cofounder. He didn't want to hear it. For some reason
founders seem to think that the set of potential cofounders is a given they
can't change. But surely if you made finding a cofounder your main priority
and worked at it like a job for 6 months, you could find people.

~~~
jayliew
Paul, the guy you spoke to afterwards is me :) Jay Liew, the guy who also
posted the cofounder spreadsheet on Google Docs that spread like wildfire a
few weeks ago.

I do _not_ want to be the stereotypical stubborn child who won't listen (that
would be like trying to shoot my way into YC); I completely agree with your
reasoning why having a co-founder is best, and I highly respect your
analytical skills, but I would like to respectfully assert that you're missing
the point. My write up below is not an attempt to get you to agree with me,
but to merely understand my reasoning (and perhaps readers here can tell me if
I am off-course).

My end goal is not to have a "YC" notch in my belt (I don't need a resume
stuffer). My end goal is a successful startup that will make $ by creating so
much value for everybody (the founders, the investors, the customers) - I want
to absolutely maximize the value pie for everybody. And having a co-founder
will increase my odds of success.

I am not a parent, but here is a generalized statement based on statistics:
"Divorce rates in the US is some of the highest in the world, and
statistically, children with parents still married fare much better than
single parents." This assertion is true, when your sample size of married
people is global, and when your sample size is all children who grew up with
single and divorced parents in this country or world.

The point that I am trying to make is that being a good parent is a choice to
the individual. If I was a single parent (fyi, I view my startup as my baby),
I will either take my son to soccer practice, or not. I will either spend time
reading books at night to her. Or not. I will take the good in with the bad -
or I can throw my hands up and say "I'm too busy for this crap, here's a baby-
sitter instead".

That was all I was saying.

I _believe_ in the benefits of a co-founder, but my search has been
distracting me from my #1 goal of running my startup; and a co-founder is just
means to an end. Just as YC is just means to an end (yes, I plan on applying -
which I know I may not get in, but I still plan on succeeding with or without
YC - because if my startup fails simply because I didn't get into YC, then I
have a bigger problem).

Note that this is different from saying "1 in 3 women will have breast cancer"
(or whatever the actual number is). Because a perfectly health-conscious woman
can get cancer due to pure bad luck. The difference is, being a good parent
who will do _anything_ for his child, is an individual entrepreneur's choice.
He will either do it, or go watch tv. It's much tougher to say "Damnit, I'm
not going to get cancer" (if I'm already a health nut)

The other thing I want to mention is your investor bias. An entrepreneur has
an only-child, an investor as a portfolio of children. So investors can say,
X% of startups die from Y. Therefore I can completely understand when you say,
"therefore, I will not bother reviewing with startups with Y". It is logical -
you are optimizing your portfolio's success. I understand that statistically
there are less single founders like Bezos and Patzer, and there's more
cofounders like Woz-Jobs, Hewlett-Packard. Statistically that is true and
unrefutable.

But using Chaos Theory as an analogy, I speak for any single co-founders
applying, I hope you will not write us off as "goners", and that you really
look inside of that one person who is trying his hardest and pulling the
weight of 2 co-founders today on top of his day job and current
responsibilities, before pulling the trigger "you're fired" trigger, Donald
Trump style.

All said, as an investor, your goal is to optimize your portfolio. My goal is
to do anything humanly possible within my means to increase the odds of
success, and definitely remove any obstacle, one after another that will keep
me from success. And on this one co-founder point, we may disagree on the
tactics but the fact is that we do have a common end goal. I respect your
choice, and I still very much respect you and want to be in YC. I just hope
you understand why I cannot completely agree for the reasons mentioned above.

Consider the converse: If I thought that getting into YC wouldn't "move the
needle" in helping me get to success, I wouldn't be writing this comment and
3/3/10 would mean nothing to me ;) However - that would also imply that I am
indifferent to you, and Jessica, who I first met in person at the Anybots
party before the day of the 1st SUS. That is not true, you guys rock, and are
people I look up to. So I do care about the people behind YC and I'm not a
1-dimensional robot. You have to admit, it feels good to be benevolent (isn't
that YC is built on?) - and I too, wish I could be benevolent in return.

I am still continuing my search for a co-founder, while minimizing the
distraction as much as I can. It's tough.

~~~
paulbaumgart
Not sure I understand the next-to-last paragraph, but other than that, it
seems like PG is convinced having a good co-founder is so important that
focusing on finding one is the best way to maximize your chances for success
(ie. achieving your "#1 goal"). Clearly, that's only true in the average case,
and if you're convinced you're significantly different from that average, that
might well not apply to you. The point about investor bias is spot-on, though
I wouldn't say it's something specific to investors- it's just that, without
looking deeply into your particular circumstances, the advice with the highest
chance of being useful that anyone can give you is precisely for the average
case.

~~~
jayliew
In corporate sales (thanks dayjob!), you have the transactional sales and the
relationship based sales.

Transactional: e.g. used car salesman. The sales guy promises you the world to
convince you to hand over a boatload of cash, even if he knows the car is
crap. Why? Because after the paperwork is inked and the money is safely in his
bank account, he's done with you and moving on to the next guy. Nevermind if
the car breaks on the 31st day - just 1 day past the warranty date. Because
all the effort is on that single transaction. He could care less about why you
actually need a car.

Relationship-based: e.g. System integrators, consulting firms. e.g. They sell
you a firewall / router / set up your internal network, but it is in their
best interest not to screw you over because your lifetime value to them as a
customer is greater than the immediate gain (e.g. marking up the hardware or
charging ridiculous installation fees). Plus, they want your respect and need
credibility so that next time when you need something else, you will go to
them first. E.g. Maybe aside from an email solution for your SMB, you now
need, a simple internal collaboration tool installed. Granted there are also
sleazy relationship-based sales people, but the difference is that it is not
as transactional as a used car salesman.

The reason why I mentioned that is because I'm not trying to be the jerk who
says "gimme all your goodies now now now" and then conveniently forget how I
got there when I get there.

At the risk of aiming for too lofty of a loooong-term goal - just as Mark
Zuckerberg said "these are my people" at the last YC SUS, I <3 startup
entrepeneurs and I too, wish that I could one day be in a position to be like
Paul Graham. To start a startup that helps other startups. But I realize that
in order to do that I need to succeed at my own startup first.

pg started YC to help the small guy, and I feel that I should stand up for the
even smaller guy amongst the other small guys, since single founders get
easily drowned out by the majority of non-single startups.

Thanks for the opportunity to clarify.

~~~
thaumaturgy
If you really want to do these things, then whether or not you get into YC, or
whether or not you find a co-founder will just be a minor distraction to your
actual goals.

YC is great if the timing is right and if you can get into it. At the same
time, if someone were to tell me, "go spend 6 months finding a co-founder and
working on something together, and then we'll talk", I would nod politely, and
then proceed to spend the next 6 months building my project. Those are 6
months that you could use to get off the ground, if you're really motivated.
You could _launch_ in 6 months if your project doesn't require a large initial
outlay of resources. And if your project is awesome enough, then it will
attract people interested in your project, and it will gain momentum.

~~~
jayliew
Exactly. It's an opportunity cost.

With 2 months, I can do so much in terms of not just product development but
also customer development - because let's face it, the bulk of startups YC
invests in are not technology risks, they are market risks.

Granted, I am optimistic - but imho 6 months is enough time for me get off the
ground and raise a seed round outside of YC (but I do prefer to get into YC,
just a preference).

That is the plan. I'm not waiting, I believe in making my own luck. I'm not
saying I can predict the future, I'm just saying I know what I can do to
influence the outcome, and I'm going to try my best. More people need to make
their own luck.

Thanks Rob!

------
wensing
_Slightly annoyed._ seems wrong to me--or at least, needs an explanation, i.e.
in what sense does he find it annoying. The JK Rowling analogy doesn't make it
clear either.

See also: <http://twitter.com/msuster/status/8502845427>

~~~
tptacek
I was amused by the insinuation that you could "plagiarize" a business model.

~~~
pg
I wasn't implying plagiarism, just that such a novel would be copying JK
Rowling's premise.

Though as a matter of fact, many of them do copy chunks of our site.

~~~
Coax
Paul, do you fault every entrepreneur that takes a novel business
model/approach and tries to improve upon it or extend it? If not, can you
explain what is special about this situation?

By way of comparison, do you fault Burger King and Wendy's for taking
McDonald's idea?

~~~
pg
Depends how much they add. Like most people, I think, I don't have a high
opinion of things that could be described as knockoffs. E.g.

[http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/02/technology/kopy_kat_kids.biz...](http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/02/technology/kopy_kat_kids.biz2/index.htm)

Whereas if the idea is significantly transformed, it starts to be a new idea.
If someone started a YC-style operation for funding films, I'd think that was
cool. In fact I've suggested it to several people.

~~~
Coax
Fair enough, but since there's a geographic element to startup accelerators,
can't their addition merely be porting the concept to another geography?

If I visit SF and go to a great a great Hawaiian-Italian fusion restaurant (I
random example), I don't think the proprietor would blame me of plagiarism if
I started a Hawaiian-Italian joint in Boston.

Further, I see important differences between YC and competing accelerators. YC
doesn't provide office space; TechStars and DreamIt do. I'm not sure which
approach is better, but I do think it's a non-trivial difference.

~~~
pg
There isn't a geographic element to seed funding, though. That's the mistake
they all make. People think they're starting the YC of city x, and then they
discover that everyone is competing for the same national (and to some extent
even international) founder pool.

You're right that office space is a distinction. It's not an innovation
though. The incubators of the late 90s all did that. It was a novel move for
YC to consciously discard it. So it's hard to say whether including office
space was a deliberate change or a transcription error. Honestly, I'd guess
the latter. The naive impulse when starting some kind of incubator is always
to envision it as a space, rather than a set of relationships between people.

~~~
Coax
Point taken regarding the geographic element, your argument makes sense.

But I'm still having trouble understanding how your gripe with the other
accelerators is legitimate....

In founding YC you came up with a wonderful, innovative model for birthing
startups. Kudos for that. You invented a whole new paradigm of investment;
that's f-ing cool. But whenever an entrepreneur comes up with an brilliant new
way to do business, other entrepreneurs follow. I struggle to think of an
instance where a company created a new industry and other folks didn't join.
And I don't begrudge the followers; they are part of a dynamic that is central
to the innovative beast that is American capitalism.

Perhaps other entrepreneurs follow because a single company can rarely support
an entire industry. Perhaps they follow because they think they can do things
subtly (or radically) different to improve the model. I'm not sure the reason
is terribly important. The point is, inventing an industry niche does not give
you a monopoly right on that niche ad infinitum.

The internet space is full of examples. Aliweb was (arguably) the first
commercial search engine. I remember trying it back in 1994. At the time, it
seemed damn cool. Then, soon after, I heard about a new search engine called
Lycos, so I tried that. It was similar to Aliweb--I thought I slightly
preferred the Lycos results, but I wasn't sure. Lycos begot Altavista;
Altavista begot Dogpile; Dogpile begot Google. Each new search engine was
doubtlessly dependent on its predecessors. And each new search engine had no
obvious new innovation--changes were subtle, usually hidden under the hood.

I don't buy the argument that entrepreneurs should be frowned upon for
entering a new industry without a radical new twist. Begrudging folks who are
making subtle changes to your model seems petty. YC will, for the foreseeable
future, have the name brand and network to attract better talent than all
other accelerators. That--not a universal monopoly--is a proper reward for
being the first mover.

~~~
pg
You're blowing this out of proportion. All I said at the event was that while
I was slightly annoyed at being copied, the other YC-like organizations helped
us by showing us when we mistakenly rejected people.

~~~
Coax
Okay, fair enough, I'm probably blowing this out of proportion. That comment
caught my attention because I've always sensed antagonism between YC and the
other accelerators, which seems unwarranted.

I think your responses in this thread do indicate that, to some extent, you
think they have unfairly stolen the YC model and their existence is unjust.

~~~
pg
Please don't put words into my mouth. All I said was that we were slightly
annoyed at being copied.

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ecuzzillo
Bing cache (Google didn't have one):
[http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http+gigaom+com+2010+02+01+...](http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http+gigaom+com+2010+02+01+ycombinator+paul+graham&d=253171925260&mkt=en-
US&setlang=en-US&w=46dd1b92,4a07d433)

------
staunch
Is there a video posted anywhere?

