

Ask PG: What would your next startup be? - nick007

PG, have you ever considered doing another startup? Or, even if you aren't considering it anymore, did you ever consider it after finishing up at Yahoo? If so, what would it be? Merry Christmas
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pg
Leelin's right in a way. We think of YC as a kind of of startup. Our m.o. is
to treat investing as if it were a technical problem.

If I had to start another startup in the classic sense, I might do RFS 1:
<http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html>

I did consider trying another startup once after Yahoo. I hired 3 hackers
during the summer of 2000 to work on a prototype of a hosted application
platform. I couldn't convince Rtm or Trevor to work on it with me, though, and
I wasn't into the project enough to do it without cofounders.

~~~
coffeemug
I always thought that the problem statement for rfs1 is excellent - far more
insightful than other rfs statements and hints. Perhaps this is because you've
spent more time thinking about the problem.

This is an incredibly interesting problem I've thought a lot about, so I'll
say the following despite the danger of turning this into discussion _about_
rfs1. Since I first read it, I found myself disagreeing with the following
statement:

 _We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace
them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in
time._

I think one of the fundamental questions is what _type_ of content is valuable
today (compared to what type of content was valuable two hundred years ago).
Back when the newspaper business started, _news_ were extremely desirable and
difficult to get (and therefore valuable). Someone actually had to travel to
the front lines, record the news, and then break it faster than everyone else
in order to make money. The cultural artifact of this remains today -
newspapers are still called _news_ papers, and when you turn on CNN you often
see the term _breaking news_ (despite the fact that every other channel is
"breaking" the news as well). But this model has almost no differentiating
value today - real-time publishing technology is so cheap that anyone can
break news, and therefore no one wants to pay for it. News is a cheap
commodity, not unlike orange juice.

Today we have an opposite problem - there is an exponential explosion of
content, and people are willing to pay a lot of money for services that filter
rare, excellent, original content from the rest of the noise (I don't count
digg and reddit because they do a very poor job at finding excellent content).
People are willing to pay for excellent writers, balanced and insightful
opinion pieces, and articles about current events that actually _teach_ us
something, rather than tell us what happened. Some "traditional" publications
have already figured this out - Economist, New York Times, and Wall Street
Journal (although the future of the latter is in question precisely because of
potential for declining quality). They didn't completely embrace this model
and don't take nearly full advantage of information technology, but they're on
the right track - they accept great guest authors, provide valuable and
insightful opinion pieces, and give us articles that _teach_ us things. In
exchange, their customers have consistently payed up while other publishers
have seen a steady loss of readership.

The trick here is branding - Economist has a world class brand that's
recognized for their valuable content. Once they get around to using modern
technology to take this model to its logical extreme, there is no stopping
them. I suppose a startup could do it first if it figures out a good way to
quickly build a brand (which shouldn't be hard, considering how little good
content is out there and how many people complain about it), but fundamentally
there is nothing stopping Economist from doing this - they're already in a
perfect position to do it. All they need a little bit of technology (this
should be easy), and a bit of a psychological shift in their culture. They're
already on the right track - the solution is definitely not _too_ far from
their current model.

~~~
ntoshev
I can see where you are coming from with your call for _quality_ content, but
lets question this for a minute.

I don't see much new in the world now vs 15 years ago that would shift the
economics to high quality publishing. Technology and the internet can provide
a better platform for crowdsourcing journalism or easier dissemination and
aggregation of information, but these are different from just creating and
consuming high quality content.

I think what's new is the ability to personalize the information. One way to
think about it is that industrial revolution was all about economical mass
production, and one of the first things to be mass produced was written text
with the help of the Gutenberg press. No one knows what information revolution
is really about yet, but one of the promises is economical mass customization,
and the news is a perfect first candidate for this (more distant candidates
being economically producing clothes that fit you perfectly, for example).

In a related area, Google seems to think they have mostly exhausted the
opportunities to improve their search results _in the same way for everyone_ :
they have employed IP geolocation for ages and now they even track your search
history by default in order to show you different results from what everyone
else is seeing.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I think one way to be commercially successful is to further differentiate the
market for news based on news viewers.

People want to be sheltered from news which goes against their beliefs.
Currently, the segregation of news sources does an adequate job of this. Right
wingers watch fox and never need to learn about evolution, left wingers read
the NYT and never need to learn about climategate. See also the reddit
downmodsquad.

But this filtering scheme is pretty weak. I think the next stage in news is
pure entertainment and ideological reinforcement. Ignoring ethics, this is
what most people want.

(The only exception I can see is people who might be punished by the market
for incorrect facts and the intellectually honest. But such people are a small
minority.)

~~~
anamax
> Right wingers watch fox and never need to learn about evolution

Stereotype much? (BTW - There are several "right"s in the US, and only one of
them, a fairly small one at that, disagrees with evolution. Others do think
that teaching preschoolers how to fist is objectionable, but it's not clear
that fisting has much to do with evolution.)

It turns out that Limbaugh etc often cite NYT articles. I'd guess that a
reasonable number of folks actually followup on such cites.

The reverse - not so much. Otherwise "good people" wouldn't assume that "the
right" is as cocooned as they are.

------
staunch
_"10. Independently wealthy

This is my excuse for not starting a startup. Startups are stressful. Why do
it if you don't need the money? For every "serial entrepreneur," there are
probably twenty sane ones who think "Start another company? Are you crazy?""_
\-- <http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html>

------
leelin
Is Y Combinator not an ambitious, challenging, and impressive enough startup?

~~~
richardburton
Great point. But the question still stands: if pg wasn't investing all his
time and energy into dozens of startups and wanted to put his energies into a
new company, what would he go for?

~~~
mechanical_fish
Isn't this like asking my grandfather which of his eleven children is his
favorite?

~~~
moe
Always the smallest girl. But they never admit that.

------
alanthonyc
He's got a request for startup (<http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html>).

I'd think that he'd be working on one of these if were willing to spend the
time.

------
jmonegro
It wouldn't surprise me if he stayed at YC for a very long time. As far as I
can tell, he loves this.

------
SlyShy
I too would like to know what idea of PG's to best steal. ;)

