

Paul Graham, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is - pldpld
http://blog.helioid.com/2012/03/paul-grahams-frighteningly-ambitious-ideas/

======
akkartik
He's missing a subtlety in the essay. Even if the eventual vision is
ambitious, don't tackle it head-on. Start with something that looks like a
toy.

 _"Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current
blueprint is almost certainly mistaken."_

~~~
david_shaw
This is a great point, but pg actually did touch on it in his essay:

 _Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem
as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it.
Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you
raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be
asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see
you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless.
People can notice you've replaced email when it's a fait accompli._

It was in the 'tactics' section near the bottom of
<http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

~~~
akkartik
_"..but pg actually did touch on it.."_

That's what I said. I just quoted a different part of the same section :)

~~~
xenophanes
You said "He's missing..." and the other guy read "he" as "PG" but you meant
the author of the linked post.

------
cperciva
I think there's some selection bias going on here. Companies which aim to do
frighteningly ambitious things are less likely to launch, and most of us only
ever hear about the YC companies which launch.

Just based on counting noses it's clear that there's a bunch of YC companies
every year which vanish without a trace; I'm sure many of them were failed
runs at frighteningly ambitious ideas.

~~~
zck
Additionally, we only hear about what they've decided to launch with. If they
start with a grandiose idea, start it and find it impossible, we only hear
about the twitter app they salvaged from the wreckage. If they _have a plan to
get to world domination_ , but don't tell you, we only see a new calendar
site.

~~~
daveying99
And the idea that people who set out to change industries start with something
that is not perceived as so is included in that same Paul Graham essay. i.e.
AirBnB launched as a way to rent out airbeds and couches. They didn't launch
saying they will revolutionize the hotel industry but that might the end
result of their work.

------
wasd
Something that bothers me about HN is a sort of a tactical assault on the
front page between articles. The title is semi-inflammatory and stirs some
controversy but the article doesn't feel researched. This article is no
exception. It feels more like a post to garner publicity by loudly going
against a more mainstream opinion. Perhaps if the author offered any analysis
I might not feel so offended. Even a list of all the start ups funded last
year and their topics would offer more insight.

------
dlokshin
On the contrary, I think YC and PG have put their money where their mouth is.

Search: Greplin

Email: eTacts (sort of), Taskforce (emails => todo list), Xobni

Movies / Music: Earbits

Publishing: Hyperink

These are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more. Does the
author want an entire class to be new search engines?

~~~
plnewman
* Heroku took on the traditional hosting space and has done quite well

* justin.tv pioneered live broadcasting online

------
david927
This was one of the top stories a few minutes ago and suddenly it's on the
second page. That's a shame, because it needs to be addressed.

Dear startups,

If you want to do something very innovative, don't apply to YC with it. YC is
a three month program designed to make companies; it is not a research
program. On the application, you will have to describe what you're working on
in three sentences. That's not a design flaw; they're looking for things that
can be described in a few sentences.

There have been exceptions -- people that went through the program who were
(and are) working on hard problems -- but if you look at the numbers, they are
clearly the exception.

YC is great. I'm glad it exists. But understand what it is, not what you want
it to be.

------
phil
This seems exactly backwards.

I took that essay as a call for more people to please start applying to YC
with really big ideas so they can fund more of them.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I agree. It seems to me the essay came more from a place of wanting to see
lots of big ideas come his way. And more of the people who are attracted to
the big idea and can at the very least convince you they'd have a shot at
actually pulling it off. Those are the people he'd love to see walk in the
door.

------
ryanwaggoner
I have my criticisms (or concerns to be more charitable) with PG and the YC
model, but I don't think this is fair. In addition to people who have pointed
out the survivorship / selection bias, as well as the number of companies YC
has funded that are aiming very high, there's also the issue of YC only being
able to fund what people apply for.

Though I guess they could convince people to drop a good idea for a pie-in-
the-sky idea, but I think what happens more often is that they get them to
drop a mediocre idea for a better one.

But anyway, YC gets like 2k apps per cycle, but most of those are going to be
for non-devastatingly-ambitious ideas, and then the ones that are have to have
great teams behind them. If you don't see very many coming out of YC, it might
be because there weren't that many to start with.

------
dpkendal
It seems this argument is based on a misunderstanding of Paul Graham's essay.

> that the biggest opportunities for revolution often sound like the craziest
> ideas at first. Graham points out the flawed reasoning in investors’ so
> often shying away from projects trying to pull off these sorts of major
> revolutions, but Y Combinator itself mostly gravitates toward startups
> making relatively small, iterative progress on existing idea spaces

Graham is pointing out how frightening these startup ideas are _because_ they
are existing markets ripe for some innovation. Eg. search, universities,
compilers.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
And just how are compilers a business space in which innovation should take
place? Most major compilers activity has long-since been displaced into open-
source and academia.

~~~
daeken
If you develop a compiler that, say, parallelizes the hell out of code, you'll
have a group of massive companies breaking down your door and throwing money
at you.

Edit: Also, compilers to move code from mainframes to commodity servers,
recompilers to switch architectures (e.g. Rosetta by Transitive), etc are big
business. Are they going to make you a billionaire? Probably not. Can you make
a couple million and a great ROI? Absolutely.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>If you develop a compiler that, say, parallelizes the hell out of code,
you'll have a group of massive companies breaking down your door and throwing
money at you.

I speak with some fair knowledge of compilers, PLs, runtime systems, and OSs
when I say: massive companies will also throw money at me if I can turn lead
into gold.

A compiler cannot transform an inherently stateful, sequential program into an
inherently parallel program that can be easily parallelized-the-hell-out-of.
This is why there has been actual interest in shifting over to functional
programming among those who need lots and lots of concurrency.

There do exist systems that will, for example, guarantee the determinism of
threaded applications -- making them more predictable and debuggable. But
DThreads still won't take a fold and turn it into a map.

~~~
rogerbinns
Proebsting has shown that compilers double performance about every 18 years -
<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/>

Given enough time and memory more things are possible. Heck you could probably
add speculative execution to many programs for more speedup. You are right in
that the easy stuff has already been done, but that doesn't mean the hard
stuff can't be done - just that it is hard. The good news is that people are
prepared to pay for hard stuff.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
1) See my other post, where I list out _how_ you _would_ build a Sufficiently
Smart Compiler for parallelizing preexisting code.

2) You've gone into the research world, which concedes my original point about
it not being a viable _business_ ;-).

~~~
rogerbinns
WRT to 1) you left out profiled feedback which would help with some of the
analysis choices. Something else that can be done is to compile multiple
versions of things and makes choices/switch things around according to
circumstances at runtime (as pretty much every modern JIT does). We also still
have a "waste not" mentality which is why I mentioned speculative execution
which inherently wastes CPU in order to get quicker answers.

2) Not really. You've used current thinking to define your business model.
Think disruptive instead. And worst case you'd end up spending Ycombinator
money and end up with a better CV.

Some thoughts: It is possible now for a compiler to chew through terabytes of
open source code to build up an information bank. Internal representation of
code can be centrally submitted to see if anything matches and provides more
compilation hints. Runtime profiling could submit back big O information. An
organisation could run all the possibilities Seti-at-home style. ie rather
than the compiler having to make more intelligent choices, it can just try all
the choices.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
1) OK, I concede this one, certainly we can use profiling to get an idea of
what a given function's performance curve looks like. We just need some notion
of how to vary the size of the inputs in a controlled way when profiling, and
then we need to look at the curve and decide what kind of curve we're seeing,
and _then_ we need to actually run the statistical software to calculate the
precise terms of the curve.

To my knowledge, the middle step is actually the hardest. I'm no statistician,
but do we have math/software that can look at a curve and distinguish a
logarithmic function with little error in the data from a linear function with
lots of error in the data?

>2) Not really. You've used current thinking to define your business model.
Think disruptive instead. And worst case you'd end up spending Ycombinator
money and end up with a better CV.

The man-years here are the dominant cost. A SSC falls outside the start-up
business model of releasing a "Minimum Viable Product" and all that jazz. You
can't build a _minimum_ SSC without building _most of the whole thing_.

That doesn't mean I wouldn't take someone's money to do it, but I'd be asking
for a research-project budget, not an equity investment that has to be "ramen
profitable".

Besides, I prefer home-made vegetable curry to ramen any day ;-).

~~~
rogerbinns
See slide 6 of this IBM presentation
[http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/IBM-Stoodley-
talks/Uof...](http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/IBM-Stoodley-
talks/UofAKASWideAudience.pdf) (warning: pdf). Note how little compilers cost
relative to other ways of improving performance.

You are still thinking "cathedral" as the project structure. I think "bazaar"
is a better approach - try all the things, fling stuff against the wall and
see what sticks. Use the terabytes of existing code to learn. I see the latter
like spoken language translation. The approach used to be coming up with rules
from experts which is very expensive. Nowadays they use statistical approaches
which relies on having lots of data, uses humungous amounts of machine time to
build the translation, but uses very few (expensive) people.

A YC startup doesn't have to be profitable or even come up with a MVP - it has
to show there is merit to what they doing and some probability of success in
the long run.

~~~
rogerbinns
Another example from a favoured database - MongoDB. Rather than trying to come
up with optimal query plans they try all pertinent ones concurrently.
Whichever finishes first is noted and used in the future. Its performance
results continue to be monitored and if they start diverging all are tried
again.

This means not having to guess big O correctly, or access patterns or other
stuff in advance. It is possible to add future optimisations and not worry
about current ones since they just won't be used work inapplicable workloads.

------
elangoc
geez, what is up with this spate of snide/cynical posts about PG and/or YC?
it's not necessary the content. I mean, I love almost all of what PG says in
his essays, but there are at times genuine questions and doubts (e.g., I've
heard schlep as a verb more than a noun). Sometimes, these questions of a
larger, fundamental discussion (e.g., copyrights & property). questioning is
fine, and is necessary in order to attain greater understanding.

what I'm getting annoyed at is the tone I'm sensing -- it's sometimes
downright sneering. i know it's been brought up very recently as well, and PG
has said it's been happening gradually as the site has grown. i've read the
essay on trolls, but this seems like it's something different. jealousy is
also something that increases as a function of success, and when jealousy
crosses a threshold, it morphs into resentment. just sayin'...

~~~
goodcanadian
I am not trying to invoke Godwin's Law, but in the 1930s, somehow millions of
Germans were convinced that Hitler was a good idea. In retrospect, he clearly
wasn't.

Whenever a lot of people start getting really excited by someone or something,
I think that there is a certain subset of people, myself included, that react
by getting overly skeptical, by looking for the problems. Personally, I try to
be thoughtful and present any negatives I find in a polite and well reasoned
manner, but I am sure that there are others who simply have a knee-jerk
reaction of the sort: "I can't believe you're drinking the Kool-Aid, you
idiot."

------
dkrich
To Graham's point about the things we do that will appear ridiculous to future
generations, I believe travel is one of the most obvious. Think about this-
people pay three times the normal ticket price to fly "first class" and have a
seat that is not uncomfortable to sit in for more than an hour, a drink that
is served in a glass, and a meal. People are subjected to long lines, security
screenings, and an archaic, drawn-out search for the cheapest tickets. And
even with all this, the airlines are still losing!

------
kls
I personally think it is a double edge sword, very few people are pursuing
truly large ideas because the odds of finding funding to even get started just
are not there and some ideas require funding to even get off the ground. As
someone who pursued a very large scale idea, I know all too well that
investors just don't seem to be interested in efforts that require large
amounts of upfront work and infrastructure before they can even launch. I
think Amazon was the last effort of that kind, that has been funded. Ideas
like Facebook are more palatable because the infrastructure requirements
scales with the company. With search you really are not afforded that luxury,
to compete you have big data requirements from day one. Ultimately big data
requirements is was what doomed my idea and to this day I have not found many
investors that have an appetite for a start-up that has big data requirements
from day one. In saying that, my experience is subjective and I am not playing
ball in the valley, so take my post for what it is a personal observation.

------
dannyr
"Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with
deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by
writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to
make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads
to stalk one another."

<http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

------
cwilson
I think many people are forgetting a key part, if not THE key part, in the
selection process for YC companies, and that's the TEAM. The idea is second to
the people behind it when PG and company make their selections (and in many
cases, YC teams end up going with a totally different idea than what they
applied with), at least most of the time.

There is far too much focus on selection bias around ideas in both this
article and the comments, when in fact PG is simply putting faith in teams
that happen to be passionate about certain ideas (that may or may not fall
into his ambitious ideas categories).

------
staunch
Part of the reason for the essay is surely to encourage more ambitious YC
applications. Likely no one is more tired of flavor of the day mashups than YC
partners who have to wade through them.

------
zasz
"Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem
as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it."

I remember somewhere that AirBnB said they wanted to become the best
marketplace for trading used goods. That's pretty ambitious, but they're
attacking it sideways by letting people rent out rooms first.

------
etrain
I have nothing to do with YC and no reason to defend pg, but I will say that
this article clearly misses one of his big points: it's very hard to be
successful if your whole goal is to change the world from day 1. Even if it is
your secret goal - you are probably going to run out of money before you get
the chance to.

------
cliftonk
Well, to be fair, he does say that you need to take a novel (and niche) angle
on doing such a thing (not to say your company doesn’t). To secure the
investment on any extremely ambitious idea you would also need to be very
effective in person; much more so than someone with a less ambitious, more
realistic idea.

------
silentscope
I understand what the author's saying and I think (not being as experienced as
some on HN) that he's got a bit of a point. But boy, if you're gonna call out
a man with metals on his jacket, you better have something to back it up.

Or a least a byline.

------
adamtmca
HireArt = replace universities.

It's a deceptively focused/small offering to start with but they have the key
components required to become a credentialing system outside of the
university/college system.

It's easy to look at YC startups and say they aren't pursuing massive visions
but the truth is many of them are just starting with some tiny subset of a big
problem.

------
gojomo
Can we have a rule, like the one about headlines starting with numbers ("12
ways to.."), for headlines starting "Paul Graham"?

------
eli_gottlieb
Meh. If it was really revolutionary, you would have to spend a few pages
explaining what the hell it is, or make people go read research work from 30
years ago to understand it.

