
Black Swan Farming - siavosh
http://paulgraham.com/swan.html
======
mixmax
There's a pretty interesting lesson for potential YC candidates, particularly
the ones that get turned down, here.

 _When you interview a startup and think "they seem likely to succeed," it's
hard not to fund them. And yet, financially at least, there is only one kind
of success: they're either going to be one of the really big winners or not,
and if not it doesn't matter whether you fund them, because even if they
succeed the effect on your returns will be insignificant._

What this means is that YC is not looking for sustainable businesses, but
homeruns. Which is entirely fair, that's the business they're in.

But you and your startup are in a different business: Your measure of success
isn't the same as Ycombinators. If your startup ends up making you a million
dollars a year you will probably be very happy and rightfully call yourself a
success. But as the post points out that won't be enough for YC since they
need to fund a lot of other startups that will inevitably fail out of their
minority share. Thus they need a much bigger success.

If you get turned down for YC it might well be that your idea is just a sound
business idea that YC doesn't consider just crazy enough that it might make
them a billion dollars. But that doesn't mean that it won't make you a
million.

~~~
pmarca
> If your startup ends up making you a million dollars a year you will
> probably be very happy and rightfully call yourself a success.

I see this a lot from various corners of the startup ecosystem, particularly
37 Signals and their followers. The problem is that it's not really true, by
which I mean there are not very many examples of it begin true, and there is
an excellent reason to believe that it may never be true. Which is: you need
to find a market big enough to support "lifestyle income" (or your million
dollars a year) but not big enough that a startup or growth technology company
that is really good at doing things at scale isn't just going to eat it, and
kill you in the process.

One of the reasons Jason Fried needs to yell so loudly about 37 Signals being
the model for lots of other companies is because it's really not -- it's
really rare to find a lifestyle technology business.

~~~
patio11
_it's really rare to find a lifestyle technology business._

The traditional challenge you'd level here is "Name three" (37signals, Fog
Creek, Balsamiq) but, due to the type of people I hang out with, I could get
to fifty before having to slow down and start checking my Gmail. A friend of
mine who is in the selling shovels business estimated that there are _30,000
firms_ selling SaaS. (That number struck me as crazy until I realized that, oh
yeah, I'm routinely in rooms with several hundred of them at once.) The
overwhelming majority will never raise outside capital.

~~~
dirtyaura
Are those fifty making 1 million dollars a year (per founder) from products? I
mean it's obvious that you can make a good living in tech by consulting, but
I'm curious how many "lifestyle" product companies are out there that make
profit in millions.

~~~
rmc
I don't think profit per year per founder is a good definition of "lifestyle
business", a better definition would be "can you make money while you're
sleeping/on holiday?". If you're a consultant, then you don't make money while
on holiday. I don't even think you need €1,000,000 per annum to count as
success, I'd set the bar at €100,000. I'd be quite happy to make that amount
per year in my sleep.

~~~
dirtyaura
"a million dollars a year for you" was a limit given in mixmax's comment, and
Marc also use that.

So I'm just curious if Patrick was really meaning that he can without pausing
name 50 non-VC backed lifestyle product companies that are making $1M in
salaries and profits for their founders, or that he meant that he can name 50
companies that are generally well-off, and are making e.g. a few thousand
dollars per year for their founders.

The difference is important in my opinion, as I can name a several that make a
few thousand dollars a year by consulting, but I don't know people that make
over a million a year for themselves with an internet product without an
investment. Those that I personally know that earn $1m, are in more fishy type
of business (E.g. quick SMS loans) and have a sizeable financial backing from
more traditional investors.

~~~
tptacek
Any multi-person consultancy in our industry can easily be doing $1MM.

Most companies that build and ship product can easily consult, so, any of
those companies that continue to ship product for multiple years should cause
you to ask how much more than $1MM they must be making.

"Salaries and profits" is an awfully weird metric, since salary is the #1 cost
factor both for consultancies _and_ product companies. Maybe you should just
say "revenue".

I respectfully suggest that your radar is off here. No, you don't need to be
in "fishy types of businesses" to break $1MM.

~~~
dirtyaura
Maybe my English is causing problems here (I'm not a native speaker). Of
course there is a huge amount of lifestyle companies doing millions in
revenue.

But that's not what founders _themselves_ earn. Founder's personal salary and
a slice of pure profits that are not reinvested to company growth can be
considered a total that founders "earn" in lifestyle businesses.

Even with this metric, of course there is a lot of lifestyle internet
companies in the world that do over $1M per founder. I'm just interested if
Patrick meant that he can name 50 companies (presumably from his network) that
are doing this well.

~~~
snowwrestler
If the founders are smart, they will personally earn very little, and funnel
as many of their expenses through the business as possible, for tax reasons.

I worked for consultant who had a lifestyle business. He pulled in nearly half
a million dollars in revenue per year, but I got paid a higher salary than he
did. But I drove my own car, and he drove a company car. He didn't own a
computer, but the company had a fiber connection, a server room and several
very nice recent laptops. He didn't own a cell phone or a camera, but the
company supplied him with a nice world smart phone and multiples of the latest
cameras. He rarely took vacations, but the company paid for him to travel the
world to visit clients and trade shows. Etc.

It's for this reason that revenue is often a better gauge of success for a
lifestyle business, than profit or salary.

------
paul
The counter-intuitive nature of startup investing is a big part of what makes
it so interesting to me. In most aspects of life, we are trained to avoid risk
and only pursue "good ideas" (e.g. try to be a lawyer, not a rock star). With
startups, I get to focus on things that are probably bad ideas, but possibly
great ideas. It's not for everyone, but for those of us who love chasing
dreams, it can be a great adventure.

~~~
bambax
Is it really that counter-intuitive, though? A sample of two "rock stars"
doesn't seem to be enough to draw conclusions from it.

For instance, whereas Airbnb can admittedly be seen as a questionable idea
(but not outright bad), Dropbox (the idea, before implementation) sounds like
a very good idea. Maybe not a $7b idea, but still very good.

Of course, among the YC funded startups, there may be a lot of ideas that
sounded bad at first; but if all those startups are in fact financially
irrelevant, should they be used to try to build a theory of success?

\- - -

It's interesting to learn that if YC funded 10x more startups they would be
just as successful (and maybe more, since there could be a big success in the
startups that are left out) -- it means that if the selection process rate is
around 10%, YC could do without it entirely, with no significant effect to its
bottom line.

Also, I took this picture this summer <http://i.imgur.com/B30hL.jpg>

~~~
Estragon
Frankly, I still don't understand why everyone's so excited about dropbox.

~~~
gmac
For me, Dropbox beautifully solves four hard problems:

1\. Keeping all my documents in sync between several computers, so that I can
pick up work on any one of them at any time

2\. Off-site incremental backup

3\. Sharing and working on a set of project files with non-technically-minded
collaborators

4\. Sending and receiving large files

Moreover, it just sits there quietly solving problems 1 - 3 day-in, day-out,
and I never have to think about it.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I have to think about it all the time. It flatly fails to serve my gaming
club. We have a Gb of card images for our card games. Almost every club member
cannot share these files, since they run out of space.

Think about it. Sharing files between 25 club members, using our own
bandwidth, our own disk space. And Dropbox thinks we should pay them big bucks
for this. For what? Storing our files on their server, insecurely? If they had
an option to stop doing that, I would select it.

SO no, it doesn't solve any hard problems for us.

~~~
gmac
Well, OK. The fact that it doesn't solve any problems for you has little
bearing on the excitement of those who, like me, find that it solves many of
their problems.

The reason that storing files on their server (and using their bandwidth, as
well as yours) is important is that it means I don't have to keep all my
synced computers on at all times. That's a big deal for me.

It sounds like yours is another problem, which Dropbox is not well adapted to.
Perhaps you'd be better off with PowerFolder or similar.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Just posting my experience, like others here do all the time. Another example
is instructive.

My problem is, Dropbox scales the cost as the number of people looking at a
folder increases. As an Engineer I see that as marketing, their cost doesn't
increase incrementally in this case. It seems unnecessary and blocks me.

Btw you would only have to keep 1 synced computer on, some of the time. Not a
big deal actually. And why keep my data around on their server after we're
synced? Simpler for them I suppose, but insecure for me.

I could try and get everybody in the club to install another tool; might look
into that, thx.

------
cperciva
Quoth pg: _It would hurt YC's brand (at least among the innumerate) if we
invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out._

Paul, you're sounding like a venture capitalist who is worried about whether
he can find investors for his next fund.

I would posit that the people whose opinions you should care about are
_potential founders_ ; and that their primary concern is _themselves_ , not
the performance of a fund (oops, I mean class) as a whole. You're damn right
that it would hurt YC's brand if 70% of each class didn't survive past Demo
Day -- because for an individual founder, success is pretty much binary, and
having a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire is more attractive than having a
5% chance of becoming a billionaire, despite the 100-fold reduction in mean
wealth.

You may be in in the business of farming black swans, but if they're all you
worry about you'll find that _all_ the swans end up laying their eggs
elsewhere.

~~~
mnutt
It would hurt founders' perceptions but wouldn't actually decrease any
individual founder's chances of success. YC would just accept a bunch of
people who aren't likely to get funded.

What would happen if you split up the batches into two groups, YC Classic and
YC Black Swan, and placed founders into the groups post-interview? People who
were placed in YC Classic could continue to have the expectation of ~100% demo
day success they do now, while the people placed in YC Black Swan would be
told "I find your idea interesting and we'll let you in but don't expect
funding after demo day." People could take the Black Swan offers as rejections
if they wanted.

There are a bunch of problems with this approach, but I wouldn't be totally
surprised if way more than 30% of YC Black Swan was funded.

~~~
brc
The problem is you are applying post-hoc analysis.

While a theme was that the outsized returns can come from ideas which sound
bad, it doesn't necessarily say that _all_ outsized returns come from bad-
sounding ideas.

Not only that, but I think reading the essay will show that the outsized
returns are not known until several years after demo day.

Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas. In the Venn intersection between bad-
sounding-ideas and good-ideas - the 'bad sounding and not good' is a much
bigger area.

To me, the entire essay is about making sure that institutionally, the bad-
sounding-but-ultimately-good ideas are not left out. Trying to further
identify and silo them at application stage would be even more fraught.

------
patio11
This is a very interesting essay, if for no other reason that when smart
people observe that other smart people have mental blocks against believing
the truth of measurable features of material reality, that suggests a market
inefficiency. Persistent market inefficiencies should always ping your radar a
little bit, because exploiting them makes you rich.

~~~
onwardly
One inefficiency could be related to this point Paul makes:

 _We can afford to take at least 10x as much risk as Demo Day investors. And
since risk is usually proportionate to reward, if you can afford to take more
risk you should. What would it mean to take 10x more risk than Demo Day
investors? We'd have to be willing to fund 10x more startups than they would.
Which means that even if we're generous to ourselves and assume that YC can on
average triple a startup's expected value, we'd be taking the right amount of
risk if only 30% of the startups were able to raise significant funding after
Demo Day._

So- if a VC can triple a startups expected value that's great, but you'd need
to do a bunch of them. I think this is essentially what Dave McClure is doing-
making lots of smaller bets to "hit singles" as he says.

Reminds me of my college days playing online poker. The best players would
have a 20% ROI at the $55 10 person tournament tables, and each game would
take an hour. If you just play one at a time, you'd make about $10/hr. That's
why everyone played 10 tables at a time- we made 10 times as much.

~~~
nostrademons
That quote was the sketchiest part of the article for me, because the same
math was used to justify the subprime mortgage bubble.

The implicit assumption is that the population of startups is uniform across
both the set that YC funds and the set that YC does not fund, such that
startups in the latter group have the same chance of being a big hit (modulo
YC's mentoring, which is accounted for with the "triple a startup's expected
value" clause). But the implication of that assumption is that YC is picking
startups at random, and that their filtering process is totally useless!

This sort of math comes up all the time whenever there's a screening process.
Imagine that you're hiring for a large tech company, you currently hire 1% of
applicants, and you find that among the employees hired, there is no
correlation between your interview scores and the employee's eventual job
performance. Can you conclude that your interviewing is useless? Should you
ramp up hires so you get more workforce of equal quality?

Well, maybe. Because there are a bunch of possible hypotheses that could give
this result. Perhaps your interview process is designed to weed out false
positives more than false negatives, so it's accurate to the 99th percentile,
but then gives no discriminatory power. (Many IQ tests are like this; they're
highly correlated with life outcomes up until an IQ of about 140, but beyond
that they break down entirely and there's often an _inverse_ correlation with
income, happiness, etc. past that). Or perhaps your applicant pool is bimodal:
1% come from other employers and are fully qualified, while 99% are the same
jobseekers that every other company rejects. Or perhaps your interview process
is broken, and you would do better to find a new one. Or perhaps your
interview process is okay, but a number of well-qualified applicants are not
even applying to your company.

Which of these is correct? _You can't know_ without randomly sampling the
population that was rejected and making an estimate of their quality. This is
why all decent scientific experiments have a control, and why financial models
get backtested on data that was not part of the training set. Even then,
there're lots of things that can go wrong in experiment design, and lots of
different ways to interpret data that don't necessarily mean "Fund 10x more
startups."

~~~
aptwebapps
"That quote was the sketchiest part of the article for me, because the same
math was used to justify the subprime mortgage bubble."

Except that YC doesn't do this. They aren't funding 10x more startups and pg
says he avoids finding out how many get funded afterwards because it's the
wrong thing to optimize for.

To put it another way, there are a lot of ways to bring down post-Demoday
funding to 30% and most of them are not going to be helpful. The observation
just points out that given their high VC funding rate YC is probably not
optimizing for the homeruns as well as it should from a financial perspective.

~~~
nostrademons
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding this, but:

"We'd have to be willing to fund 10x more startups than they would."

I guess that if currently nearly all of your startups are getting VC funding,
there are two ways to end up funding 10x more startups than VCs: 1.) Make the
VCs fund 10x fewer startups or 2.) Fund 10x more startups yourself. (Or
various combinations, of course.) #1 seemed absurd to me, so I read the
thought experiment as suggesting #2.

Edit: Hmm, I guess another alternative is to fund startups that "look worse"
to VCs, which is basically #1 but doesn't seem so absurd. So perhaps I was
misreading the quote.

~~~
aptwebapps
Either you are or I am. ;)

"We'd have to be willing to fund 10x more startups than they would."

The contracted 'we would' is key. They WOULD have to be willing to do that IF
they were going to pursue that goal. They aren't. He's positing the idea that
if they were properly optimized for the black swans then they would see a much
lower funding rate. Not that they should aim for a low funding rate for it's
own sake. But, as he discusses, actually performing such an optimization is
hard, not to mention the fact that making money isn't their only reason for
running YC.

------
JumpCrisscross
I remember drawing a similar diagramme - the x-axis was the "agreeability of
the trade" and the y "realised yield". Bottom left quadrant (disagreeable and
low yielding) is eccentric crap and top-left (agreeable and low-yielding) is
bubble land. The bottom-right (disagreeable and high-yielding) is where that
magical alpha lives while the top-right (agreeable and high-yielding) is not
sustainable in an even remotely efficient market - it quickly devolves and
when overcrowded becomes a bubble (many people thinking it's disagreeable
makes it agreeably disagreeable).

That we can accept and reject trades (or ideas) based on their agreeability,
or dispersion of opinions, is not often considered as a metric. So long as the
difference between eccentric crap and alpha is difficult to discern and costly
if one goes all in on the wrong bet the uncertainty should be dealt with by
diversifying across _only disagreeable trades_.

As a former quant trader who left a large bank and found the centre of Silicon
Valley uncannily similar to the heart of Wall Street, this essay is
illuminating. Wall Street is being too conservative, consigning itself to
blindly jumping between mediocrity (low expected return) or bubbles (strongly
negative expected return) in the top two quadrants. Just like Silicon Valley,
though, at its edges it allows itself to be different. It's interesting seeing
how similar mantras, based in sound financial theory, change in their
aesthetics as they cross domains.

It's telling, though, that the concept of a "black swan", implying a tail
event generally unforeseen by the relevant population, is met with trepidation
by much of Wall Street and corporate America yet seized with zeal by a select
few.

------
dbul
_For that reason one of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded
to me when I first heard about it._

This is partially why I think the YC application process is flawed. If you
think about the idea for 20 seconds or so, what good is that? You may be
wasting 20 seconds trying to rectify an idea you can't logically determine to
be good.

A better process is a continuous one: you'll get an excellent stream of actual
_data_ and not just made up answers to "What is your best non-computer hack?"
The YC partners could start out the morning looking at their Twitter-like feed
of _what have potential startup teams done today?_ At some point a partner
would say, "We have to pull these guys into our next batch."

Incidentally, this would be better for startup teams looking to break the
threshold of project to startup. By updating this proposed feed, the startup
feels obligated to not only continue to put out data, but _good data_.
Eventually the team would realize they can't cut it or they will keep mutating
teams or changing ideas until one has great prospects.

EDIT: I'll buy someone a smile and a coke if the above hypothesis is
implemented and tested. The following is exactly why: _Instagram is the one
we'd most likely have missed. It all depends when we'd talked to them. They
were a kind of overnight success in traffic. If we'd talked to them even a day
after they launched we would certainly have said yes. But before that it might
have seemed too speculative._ [1]

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497561>

~~~
waterlesscloud
Funny. I was just today thinking of something similar for finding unknown
creative breakthrough talent.

------
mikeleeorg
_History tends to get rewritten by big successes, so that in retrospect it
seems obvious they were going to make it big. For that reason one of my most
valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about
it._

As a thought experiment, I would love to hear what pg and team would have
thought about the following companies, had they applied to YC before they grew
in popularity (assuming YC existed when they were starting out):

PayPal, Twitter, Pandora, SalesForce, Instagram, FourSquare, and Pinterest.
And perhaps a few others as well.

~~~
pg
That is a very interesting exercise.

I feel pretty sure we'd have been impressed enough by Max and Peter to fund
them regardless of the idea (which initially had almost nothing in common with
Paypal).

I knew Ev before Twitter so I'm sure we would have funded that.

Pandora I know nothing about, so I can't guess there.

SalesForce I'm pretty sure we would have funded because Benioff radiates
"winner" in much the same overwhelming way that Zuckerberg does.

Instagram is the one we'd most likely have missed. It all depends when we'd
talked to them. They were a kind of overnight success in traffic. If we'd
talked to them even a day after they launched we would certainly have said
yes. But before that it might have seemed too speculative.

I don't know about FourSquare. I've never met the founders and don't
understand the business.

Pinterest we definitely would have funded, because Ben is a two time YC alum
(with different companies alas). We knew he was good because the first time he
was part of a startup that as an experiment we didn't make move to California.
As Demo Day approached, they were in terrible shape. But Ben swooped in at the
last moment and gave one of the most convincing Demo Day presentations.

~~~
dschobel
a guy 'radiates "winner"'? Really?

I sincerely hope you're being flippant and don't mean that as a serious
answer.

~~~
pg
I mean it. Have you met either of them? They both seem unstoppable.

~~~
dschobel
It strikes me as smacking of old-school fatalistic "some are born winners"
type thinking which is fundamentally contrary to everything we are led to
believe about startups (namely; success is a function of smarts, hustle and
luck).

I have not met either of them. And while I have met a few individuals who have
achieved success I can honestly say I have never met anyone who I thought
radiated success or was otherwise predisposed to success.

~~~
ajju
When did he claim they were born that way?

------
steve8918
What is the value of all companies that weren't picked by YC? Are there any
notable black swans that are known YC-rejects?

It would be interesting to do an analysis of those companies that were
rejected by YC, and see how many "black swans" were present in those rejects,
as well as maybe relative value of the rejected startups vs the chosen ones to
see how effective the YC selection process is.

~~~
pg
There aren't any black swans yet that I know of, though there are at least two
companies we rejected that must have valuations close to a hundred million,
judging from the amounts they've raised. What worries me most is the
possibility that we missed some we never heard about, because they either died
or didn't happen.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
The chance of that having happened or happening in the future is surely 100%
at the stage you invest at. There are also undoubtedly many companies who
_could_ have been black swans that you did/will invest in who don't for
execution's sake.

Take the swans you get an enjoy them. :)

------
neilk
Just curious, YC people - let's say that an eccentric billionaire asked you to
"invest" in things that would have the greatest impact on the world, even if
they weren't profit-generating enterprises.

Would you have invested in Wikipedia? Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb project?
WikiLeaks? Linux?

I guess I'm interested because it's not clear to me that any of the founders
of these things radiate "winner" in the same way that you seem to look for in
your founders. Or maybe they do?

~~~
jnw2
Improving medical technology with a goal of curing currently-uncurable
diseases, making health care cheap enough to make Medicare sustainable
(perhaps specifically by looking for ways to eliminate 90% of the costs
associated with the half dozen or so families of diseases that Medicare finds
most expensive), and improve quality of life with better treatments.

Better transportation infrastructure, especially high speed rail. (Notice how
the French have better track than the Germans because the Germans put off
investment while playing with maglev; Elon Musk might be at risk for repeating
the same mistake in the US with Hyperloop.)

Fiber optic cable to just about every building in the world, owned by people
who charge at a rate that isn't much higher than the construction cost and
don't try to keep charging more and more for higher data rates.

Possibly some more good parks.

We need cheap solar and batteries too, but I think those things are likely
inevitable given enough time at this point.

~~~
danenania
What we need to stop doing is strictly equating profit with money. A venture
can be extremely profitable without making a dime if it improves people's
lives in a significant way. Money is only a tool to accomplish this, and
monetary profits are only loosely correlated to true profits, the kind that
add value to the world by making a it a healthier, happier place.

------
gabrielbutu
Thiel had a nice way of approaching this question in his CS183 class. In
assessing a venture's probability of success, think in terms of calculus --
and not statistically. Since many of these founders are charting new
territory, the standard deviation in this sample size of 1 will be infinite.
Statistical analysis can't happen.

So instead you treat it as a calculus problem. The metaphor Thiel used was
that of space travel and the Apollo missions. You assume you know exactly
what's going to happen and behave as such. In a nutshell, "no-one would want
to ride in a statistically, probabilistically-informed spaceship."

It's a hard task spotting black swan founders (so instead you just leave
yourself as open as possible to them). But the conviction of calculus (in them
and in you) is almost certainly a necessary ingredient.

You could stretch a Wilde one-liner around this: "We are all in the gutter,
but some of us are looking at the stars."

------
pytrin
I think the unproportional returns of the really big hits are blinding
investors, and even pg a bit in this essay. Yes, it's easy to look at it from
that viewpoint and say - 3/4 of our returns are from 2 companies and 1/4 from
all the rest. But it misses a couple of important points - 1/4 of 10 billion
is not small change, you would still like to have those companies in your
portfolio, all things considered, and second, considering the (very) small
sample size - it could've been just 1 company worth a 1/4 of the total or 0.
That's how variable it is.

Another thing to consider is that the best teams often pivot into a big
success rather than start with it. There are countless of such examples, and
it just goes to show that even starting with what appears a relatively safe
but limited idea can eventually grow into a huge success. Sometimes founders
need to get their hands dirty in the market to realize what is the real
opportunity. If you pass those teams up because you think their idea cap is
too small, you'll be missing a lot of big hits.

What it all comes to for me is investing in people. People make big hits, not
markets. Markets can grow and startups can span multiple markets, but it all
starts with the people who direct it forwards.

------
grueful
I disagree with some of the meta-cognition.

Take the "seems like a bad idea" bit. Many of the big hits are really well-
worn ideas done with better marketing, better timing, and a user experience
which makes it available to new markets.

Dropbox? File sharing. Facebook? Geocities. Both are interesting in that they
take something that was a giant pain in the neck but useful enough to put up
with anyway, and then they make it usable enough that virtually anyone can do
that stuff _routinely_.

But the meta-cognition isn't all that important. What's important is that
they're getting out there and helping new companies learn and grow. They can
be wrong all day (or not) about the _why_ because they've developed a process
which provably works, and which they can measure and improve upon.

~~~
paul
Can you honestly not tell the difference between Facebook and Geocities?

Also, the fact that Dropbox and Facebook were "unoriginal" is exactly what
made them seem like bad ideas at the time. I saw Dropbox present at demoday,
and the main question on my mind was, "How is this different from the million
other attempts at online file storage? (xdrive, etc)".

~~~
mikeleeorg
If I had the time, I would do a bunch of research into trying to determine
what made Dropbox, Facebook, AirBnB, et al, succeed in their markets. I assume
the answer involves the founding teams, but what traits did these founders
have that others did not?

I don't have the time though, so if any bloggers/journalists are reading, this
could be an interesting article, or even book, if you get enough info.

Whether or not this info would actually help another team become successful is
another story though.

~~~
paul
As best I can tell, success = luck * skill.

The big successes that I've seen all have exceptional founders, but that's
clearly not enough. Timing is a huge component as well. Often a good idea will
fail simply because the market or technology isn't ready. My own experience
with Gmail reflects some of that. When we decided to write the whole frontend
in JS, everyone said that it was a bad idea doomed to failure. It had been
tried before (e.g. desktop.com) and had always been a disaster. They were
right about the past, but wrong about the future. We released Gmail right
around the time that browsers were finally getting good enough, and were were
very careful to keep our code as fast and slim as possible.

~~~
Alex3917
"As best I can tell, success = luck * skill."

The actual formula that academics use is Performance = AMO, ability *
motivation * opportunity. I think there are a couple of modified versions but
I can't remember what they are off the top of my head.

~~~
drblast
I've found that in instances where my ability is 7 and motivation is 34 but
opportunity is something like, say, 23, I've had better performance than when
my ability is 22 and my motivation is 12 compared with a 13 opportunity.

This is to say that my experience confirms that there probably is some
completely subjective formula that will fool people into thinking there is
some reason behind my good luck. :-)

------
rsheridan6
I'm not a VC, but I don't see how most successful startups seemed like bad
ideas. Google was entering a crowded field, but the field sucked (still does,
actually) and Google was obviously superior early on. As for Paypal, do you
remember mailing checks after winning Ebay auctions back in the 90s? As for
Youtube, do you remember what it was like to share videos in 2004? Enough
said. Dropbox was about unbreaking broken informal filesharing via email that
everybody did at the time, an obvious improvement. Evernote was to Dropbox
what notes were to files (I still have an ancient set of emails with every
address, employers address, etc I've ever had, and it's extremely awkward).
And did anyone else think it was odd to pay outrageous sums of money to make
international phone calls when you could IM anywhere for the cost of an
internet connection before Skype existed? Or that it was odd to have to buy a
bundle of cable channels to watch shows at times chosen by someone other than
yourself over the same internet connection your cable modem used (before Hulu
and Netflix, that is)?

I wanted all of those services before they existed, which to me says that they
never seemed to be bad ideas, unless you were unduly afraid of
implementation/regulatory difficulties. It may not have been obvious which
competitor was going to win, but it seemed likely without the benefit of
hindsight that somebody would.

Facebook and Twitter seemed like fundamentally bad ideas to me at the time (in
fact, they still do, but the world appears to disagree), and I just don't get
instagram, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

~~~
lmm
It wasn't at all obvious that Google could do better than the big four of the
day. There were at least thirty upstarts that had good results in some way or
other. My money wouldn't have been on google.

With paypal it seemed crazy that sellers would hand over control of their bank
accounts to this unqualified, unregulated company. Given paypal's history of
account freezes, it still does.

Video sharing sucked in 2004, damn right. Microsoft and Real and Aol and Apple
were pouring big money into making it work. Could we've guessed that someone
was going to make a lot of money in internet video? Sure. Could we have
predicted that it would be youtube? Much tougher. Dropbox was the same; there
were hundreds of other products making much the same claims about how they
could synchronize your files easily. Likewise skype; we'd had netmeeting for
years (even today, polycom are still in business selling software that works
less well than skype for hundreds of thousands).

Can you predict that a given service could be done much better? Maybe. But
picking which startup is going to win based on that is a whole lot harder.

~~~
rsheridan6
I agree with almost everything you said, but being leery of a startup because
it has stiff competition or regulatory hurdles is not the same as reacting
with a "WTF?" to the basic idea like PG did when Facebook was new. It was an
odd example for him to use.

------
markerdmann
Did Dropbox appear to be a bad idea at the time? I seem to recall that the
market was pretty crowded when Dropbox launched, and that everyone was
expecting Google to announce a "GDrive".

Or does PG mean that the idea can seem bad because the market is already very
crowded? I remember talking to William Morgan about the early days of GitHub.
He knew the founders from Powerset, and he told me that at the time he thought
to himself, "Really? Another hosted version control startup? That seems like a
bad idea."

~~~
pg
Yes, Dropbox was in the Google category of bad ideas: there were already lots
of similar things. Success turned out to depend on execution. Dropbox was the
first application of its type that worked sufficiently well. But that sort of
thing is hard to predict.

~~~
nostrademons
My recollection of Drew's YC app was that it was posted on HN before he
applied to YC and it received wide acclaim, so I went and Googled it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863>

Turns out my memory was only half right. DropBox had many people that _loved_
the idea and thought it would revolutionize filesharing. It also had a large
number of people who pointed out all the reasons why it wouldn't work.

I wonder if there's a lesson here in that good ideas that _seem_ bad tend to
be highly polarizing. I've recalled Paul Buchheit say here that GMail met a
lot of internal resistance, with many Googlers saying it was a distraction and
would never work. I also recall Larry saying that there was significant
support for GMail at all levels of the company, going up to the founders, and
many Googlers loved it.

~~~
pmarca
> I wonder if there's a lesson here in that good ideas that seem bad tend to
> be highly polarizing.

Yes -- exactly -- and they tend to generate a lot of heat in group
discussions. One of the indicators we watch for are people getting visibly
angry during the discussion -- either angry that other people aren't "getting
it" or angry that other people ARE "getting it".

------
maxdemarzi
There is going to be nothing that will "explain" why or which companies could
be the big winners. Trying to is falling into the narrative fallacy trap Taleb
writes about.

Best strategy is to "win" in other ways, and let the cards fall where they
may.

~~~
pmarca
Taleb has an exact translation of what Paul is talking about -- Taleb would,
and has, described what Paul is saying as "construct a portfolio of cheap
high-risk long-dated options, each of which has a high probability of losing
all of your money but also uncapped upside". "Uncapped upside" being the key,
of course.

Taleb's new book coming out soon will describe all this in a lot more detail
-- should be very interesting.

------
sidman
So it seems for investors, the big winners are simply based on luck, there is
no logical factor that you can easily pick out that will give you a better
chance of winning accept for possibly experience over a number of years that
allows you to pick the features of a successful startup that initially doesn't
look like they are going to be successful (maybe a glimmer in the founders
eyes, something that isn't completely obvious to the general investment
population).

But whats the thought process and how does it change given this insight ? It
should still be the case that as an investor you still should focus on the
best opportunities and try to maximize a decent return from the majority of
your investments then focus on picking that facebook, dropbox or AirBnB right,
just as you would if you were a trader in the stock market ... otherwise your
just gambling ?! Focus on the technicals and data that give you the best odds
and just take those trades cause taking trades where you are waiting on
information from the fed chairman or draghi without insider info for example
(even though they have big pay offs if you swing the right way) will earn you
pretty much the same amount of returns as losses in the long term.

If the potential to win big time is counter intuitive what do you trust from
data in front of you to make the decision to invest other than the "gut
feeling" ?

In any case, i would think with dropbox it never really sounded like a bad
idea and the founder/founders (Drew and Arash) sounded very promising even
from the start. If this is the case even good bets do pay of big time to :)
maybe these are easier to pick then the facebooks where at the time it does
look like a bad idea.

Basically, Im curious as how this insight in PG's essay would change how an
investor should invest or is it just an FYI and something to keep in the back
of your mind as an investor ?

~~~
rsheridan6
I think there is a way to improve your chance of winning big - don't invest in
startups that serve niche markets. Look at this list of YC companies from last
summer: [http://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-Summer-2011-Y-Combinator-
co...](http://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-Summer-2011-Y-Combinator-companies)

Don't you think you can you pick out some that had zero chance of becoming
massive-scale homeruns, because they served sort of a niche market? There are
none that were obviously (to me, or apparently to pg and co) going to be
unprofitable, but if you want the next Facebook, you're not going to get it by
investing in, say, Codecademy, which, as laudable as its goals are, only
appeals to newbie coders, who are a tiny slice of the population.

~~~
sidman
> but if you want the next Facebook, you're not going to get it by investing
> in, say, Codecademy, which, as laudable as its goals are, only appeals to
> newbie coders, who are a tiny slice of the population

Well you would just never know. Computer science and software engineering
could become part of the basic school curriculum in the next few years. In the
news you see that "the 14 year old boy developed an X for the iPhone and is
now a millionaire". Enough of these stories could prompt the education system
to deem coding as a basic skill like math, english and science. Code academy
could end up being the platform that schools use to teach it.

But i guess the chances are slim because as it stands now the population is
small though the possibility is there.

~~~
rsheridan6
That's true. Even Ebay started as a pez dispenser trading site.

------
waterlesscloud
So is there value in increasing the class size every time around?

If there's only one winner in a class, at best, does it matter if the class is
10 or 50? 50 isn't going to give 5 winners, is it?

Is the idea that 50 gives a 5 times higher chance of finding the 1? Is that
really true, though?

Would focusing on a smaller number of potentials actually be better for
finding the 1? Thinking through the scenarios more thoroughly?

~~~
pg
There should be value in increasing the class size if (a) the number of
applicants increases and (b) the average quality of the top applicants remains
at least constant.

During YC's history so far, we know (a) is true and (b) seems anecdotally to
be true.

------
6ren

      > the one thing you can measure is dangerously misleading [Demo Day fundraising]
    

That this is misleading follows from the thesis that _the best ideas look like
bad ideas_. But - historically - didn't the best ideas (dropbox and airbnb)
raise funds after Demo Day?

Footnote [4] <http://paulgraham.com/swan.html#f4n> says airbnb did get funded;
and dropbox was unanimously voted the best in their class (according to one of
them [http://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/When-Dropbox-first-
present...](http://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/When-Dropbox-first-presented-at-
Y-Combinator-Demo-Day-was-it-swarmed-by-investors-or-misunderstood))

So this is an intriguing thesis, but not supported by the (admittedly scanty)
evidence of the two biggest outsize hits. Do the other outsize hits support it
(i.e. by not raising funds after Demo Day)?

------
ashrust
I think the opportunity to reinvest in repeat founders is a large, if
currently potential, factor. Stripe & Hipmunk being the likely big win
examples, but in our batch there was shoptiques and exec.

I expect it will take a few more years but it will turn out to be financially
rational to invest in teams with repeat YC founders.

------
JoelMarsh
Great essay. Enlightening, actually. A few somewhat provocative questions:

If you could theoretically "randomize" start up ideas, founders, business
models, and every other primary ingredient in current "start-up theory", like
a giant multivariate test... would we not see similar results to now?

Or similarly, if you closed your eyes and invested "blindly" how would you
expect your results to differ (ROI-wise)?

It seems like investing results more closely resemble a lottery than a
predictive model, based on your description.

Sort of a scary thought: what if current investment criteria (and therefore
start-up goals) are largely irrelevant?

For example, IQ is distributed in the same way as winners and losers in start-
ups. What if that is a key factor,(purely hypothetically, of course)?

In theory, shouldn't "good criteria" for investing generate progressively
better results within smaller and smaller samples?

------
gregcohn
_...in purely financial terms, there is probably at most one company in each
YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are
just a cost of doing business._

Clearly you don't look at YC in purely financial terms, but it would be an
interesting thought experiment to consider whether there would be more
efficient ways to generate returns if you did.

Among other things, there may be more efficient ways of testing variations of
ideas around a theme, or testing/ranking skills, or assessing likelihood of
success for various experimental team combinations.

To use a casino metaphor, it seems like you're taking a 50-100 completely
binary and largely independent bets per class and hoping to beat the house on
average. As opposed to, say, trying to create the MIT blackjack team to beat
the house systemically.

------
Alex3917
"A Demo Day where only 30% of the startups were fundable would be a shambles.
Everyone would agree that YC had jumped the shark."

The reason that angels and VCs show up is because YC is providing a service
for them, so from their perspective you would have jumped the shark. Each
angel only has so much money to invest, and VCs feel it's necessary to provide
value-add in other ways, so because their ends don't scale I'm having trouble
seeing this purely mathematical strategy benefitting anyone besides YC. If
there were a way for follow-on investors to benefit in a way that helps
improve the overall startup ecosystem then it makes a lot of sense, but I
think that's a case that needs to be made that this essay didn't touch on.

------
hiddenstage
Dropbox and AirBnB may currently have the biggest valuations, but I imagine it
would be difficult to say they are YC's biggest successes (both in financial
and historical terms).

If YC had funded Paypal, they would have made a nice return with the $1.5B
eBay acquisition. But their valuation would've ended there. In reality though,
they currently make up 44.9% of eBay's revenue. eBay is a $63.45B company.

I don't know YC's policy on holding stock in the acquirers company after
someone in their portfolio is bought out, but assuming they keep stock, a
company acquired by Google a few years ago which allowed YC to accrue a few
million dollars worth of Google stock could very well be their biggest
financial gain in 50 years.

~~~
loumf
eBay and Google stock is available for anyone with cash. You'd have to get
acquired with pre-IPO stock for it to make a difference.

~~~
hiddenstage
A lot of acquisitions are funded via stock. I imagine YC owns a sizable amount
of publically traded stock through acquisitions.

My point though is that in 50 years, their minute percent ownership in Google
they received via an acquisition could be worth far more than their much
larger percent ownership in Dropbox.

So which was the better investment?

------
martian
What strikes me about Dropbox and Airbnb more than anything is that they had
incredibly strong growth strategies.

* Dropbox used rewards for more storage, as well as its fundamental file-sharing tools, to encourage users to sign up their friends and family.

* Airbnb gamed Craigslist [1] to encourage property owners to signup on Airbnb. With a strong supply of rental properties, Airbnb was able to build a true case for its value in the minds of travelers.

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-
craig...](http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craigslist/)

~~~
paul
By definition, every huge success has a strong growth strategy :)

That said, it often isn't obvious from the beginning. When I met Dropbox at
YC, I don't recall them having any great plans for how to grow. I think that
was discovered later on.

Also, that often-repeated Craigslist claim about AirBnB is actually false.
They got very few listings from Craigslist.

~~~
martian
Thanks for the clarifications.

------
lsc
The thing of it is that a bubble is not the right time to start a
lifestyle/sustainable business. During a bubble there is all sorts of investor
money floating around driving up prices on things you might want to buy as a
sustainable company, and as a sustainable company, you can't compete with
investor money for inputs.

So yeah; right now? PG is absolutely doing the right thing. But if I'm right,
after the crash? assuming he comes through financially able (which I assume he
will; he doesn't seem the type to bet the farm on facebook stock) and wanting
to continue investing, at that point? he will look for sustainable companies.
If you are trying to start a traditional sustainable company, in many ways,
it's easier to do during a downturn. There is little competition for inputs,
so you can get everything you need much more cheaply, and there is a lot less
competition, so if you come up with something new, you won't have 5 other 'me
too' companies copying you in the first year.

Really, there's less opportunity cost for the founder, too. I mean, right now,
the temptation to get a job at facebook or google is really strong, even for
me; I'd get to work with some really great people, and probably make about 3x
more 'profit' than I do now.

During the downturn, getting those plum jobs that pay really well while
letting you work with really great people is a whole lot more difficult, so
taking the pay cut while you get your business off the ground is not as big of
a deal.

~~~
Andrex
_If you are trying to start a traditional sustainable company, in many ways,
it's easier to do during a downturn._

This was basically the message of PG's recent leaked "bad times" email:

 _"The startups that really get hosed are going to be the ones that have easy
money built into the structure of their company: the ones that raise a lot on
easy terms, and are then led thereby to spend a lot, and to pay little
attention to profitability. That kind of startup gets destroyed when markets
tighten up. So don't be that startup."_ [1]

What I take away from all this is: have a revenue model built into your
startup from the start. Use it. Generate profits of some kind. Not only will
this help when you need investors (since they like businesses that can stand
alone), but it will help you even more if they don't come.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-fallout-y-
combinator...](http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-fallout-y-combinators-
paul-graham-just-emailed-portfolio-companies-warning-of-bad-times-in-silicon-
valley-2012-6#ixzz263AllOkW)

~~~
lsc
Interesting. That's completely the opposite of what I was taking away from
PG's essay; My takeaway from the essay was that investors want you to swing
for the fences; in my mind, that means not worrying about profitability early
on.

I mean, twitter didn't introduce advertising at all until they were absolutely
huge. I had the impression that facebook was similar (though I could be off;
I'm not a regular user of facebook) - I mean, in a very real sense, it's
easier to grow if you don't monetize (assuming you can still keep the lights
on.)

~~~
Andrex
I get the feeling from PG's other essays that he regards Google, Facebook,
Twitter, etc. as the extreme outliers that succeeded in defiance of the "rule
of revenue," not because of it.

~~~
lsc
huh... but wasn't he saying, in this, that he was looking for the extreme
outliers? I thought that's what a 'black swan' was.

------
committed_lp
Reading this, I wonder if pg & co. have done an experiment where they do two
sets of interviews for applicants: One to assess anything at all about their
business, and another which is more or less a normal technical (or marketing)
interview _without informing the interviewer about the applicant's potential
business idea_.

This would basically be a test of the notion that "ideas don't matter", and it
would allow you to correlate how even knowing a founder's idea might bias you
towards believing they might succeed.

------
nsns
Startup investing seems counter-intuitive only from a traditional business
point of view, it makes a lot more sense if you perceive it as the business
firm equivalent of the mass-media model: a few 'hits' that make up for all the
rest, rising exponentially then falling precipitously, producing a (very) few
classics on the way, just like the pop charts gambles taken by record
companies (where sometimes the seemingly silliest song lyrics might
unexpectedly draw millions of listeners).

------
abbasmehdi
Interesting to observe from that really big successes are better executed
versions of ideas/products that exist on the market in a big way already (e.g.
airbnb, facebook, dropbox, google) and the reason they seem like a bad idea
(to investors) is not because they offer something nobody wants, but because
they already exist in a too-big-to-challenge of a way? And that they might
also seem bad because their starting point might seem like a niche (facebook).

------
ivankirigin
It seems like there could be more than one way forward. The big successes
dominating point to one path: finding those wild outliers.

But many startups exit without making it big and return 2-3X to their
investors. If the median startup were doing 3X, you'd be making a great
return. I don't hear much about this strategy. It would be interesting to look
at the remainder of YC's portfolio with Dropbox and Airbnb removed to see what
that distribution looks like.

~~~
dirtyaura
My guess is that it will still resemble a power law curve.

If we just examine YC exits to date, Heroku and OMGPOP are around $200M each,
$400M in total, which is likely over 50% of the rest. If we remove those too,
there are a few exits in $30-60M range (Loopt, CloudKick etc.) which are quite
likely to be over 50% of the rest. At the lower end of exit price curve, the
power law might not hold, as acqui-hires typically have a rather standard
price ($1-2M per an engineer)

------
trevor99
"It means the probability of a startup making it really big is not merely not
a constant fraction of the probability that it will succeed, but that the
startups with a high probability of the former will seem to have a
disproportionately low probability of the latter."

The "not merely not" phrase here is a little confusing. What PG is saying is
that the probability of it succeeding is inversely related to the probability
of it being a big success?

------
cdixon
"You have to ignore the elephant in front of you, the likelihood they'll
succeed, and focus instead on the separate and almost invisibly intangible
question of whether they'll succeed really big."

This reminds me of Arthur Rock's heuristic: he said he invested in startups
that were "open ended with no limits to their success" as opposed to ones that
seemed likely to succeed.

------
stchangg
Is it really so counterintuitive? I think PG is making it out to be more
complicated than it really is.

Solve a big, annoying problem for lots of people. Dropbox was obviously a
great idea; look at how much trouble people went through to share files (using
flashdrives, CDs, email, spammy uploading sites or ones that enforced a delay)
before it got big. Just because there are existing players in the space
doesn't mean the problem is solved. There are so many other major
inconveniences that people have to put up with that are incredibly ripe for
disruption. Healthcare - why is it so damn hard to get an instant, cheap
medical opinion on a non-urgent but still worrying issue if you don't have a
doctor in the family? Apartment rental (for both owners and tenants).

The hard part is not telling whether or not something is a good idea. It's
evaluating whether or not the team can pull it off.

------
pitchups
Great insights and lots of lessons for both investors and entrepreneurs.
Especially the one about the best ideas looking like bad ideas initially. This
should give pause to all aspiring entrepreneurs, and keep them moving towards
their vision if they are convinced, even if everyone else thinks their idea
will never work. In fact one could almost say that it is a necessary but not a
sufficient condition for an idea to be the next big thing is for it to be
considered bad or crazy initially by most people. Reminds me of Neils Bohr
famous quote (paraprhasing) : "Yes your theory is crazy, but is it crazy
enough to be correct!" It also reminds one of how some of our most successful
books in publishing history have been rejected dozens of times by publishers -
Harry Potter by JK Rowling, Carrie by Stephen King, Dr. Seuss' books, plus
many others.

------
akkartik
Does it matter?

I remember hearing PG comment that as a founder you need just a few million
from a startup. That's as true today.

Perhaps the relationship between exit valuation and wealth created is elastic.
If the goal is to make wealth, perhaps lots of 10-100M startups has a bigger
impact on society than a couple of billion-dollar startups.

------
mp99e99
Hi, I'm with Atlantic.Net cloud so I speak with startups quite frequently.

In terms of dialing up risk, I think you're looking @ it backwards. You have a
finite life, which means you are slowly eroding to zero. You have nothing to
lose by taking risk because you are already eroding towards zero.

Even worse, the remaining days you have left are a greater percentage of the
remaining days in totality of your existence, so therefore each day is eroding
FASTER than the previous one.

So, relatively speaking, you should be increasing risk over time in any case
because the rate at which you are eroding is accelerating.

Basically, rather than looking @ risk as what you have to lose, really its
about what you have to gain. There isn't any true risk because the end game is
the same.

------
sidcool
There will be several self professed disagreements posted here citing very
specific situations.

------
theorique
Excellent article, but this little section misses the mark slightly.

 _YC would be a pretty lonely place if we only had one company per batch. And
yet it's true._

The point is that not only would it be lonely, it would also be impossible to
pick that one perfect company per batch. (Well, not impossible, but
vanishingly unlikely.)

And I think pg understands this well, as shown by the rest of the article - a
person or investment team can't possibly pick that 1000-bagger without it
being a complete lottery. So you invest in a large number, knowing that most
of them won't do too much, a few will tank, and one in a hundred will be a
grand slam that pays for all the others.

------
alliemobley
We think we have a good idea that seems like a bad idea:
[http://hometract.blogspot.com/2012/09/connectwithcontractors...](http://hometract.blogspot.com/2012/09/connectwithcontractorscom-
hacking-home.html)

------
markerdmann
From the essay: "And since risk is usually proportionate to reward, if you can
afford to take more risk you should."

I think I understand the intent of what you're saying here, but it could also
be read to mean that you can increase your reward simply by taking on more
risk. It might help to clarify that whenever a market isn't perfectly
efficient (which is apparently always, unless P=NP), there will be investments
that carry more risk without offering a higher return (i.e. that have a
negative alpha). Perhaps it's better to state that as the potential reward (or
return) of an investment increases, you can tolerate more risk.

------
samikc
A part of any investing activity requires risk taking (truer now than ever as
sovereign debts are defaulting or on verge of that), the other part is making
profit based on risk. In case of startup seed funding the risk are much higher
but profits are high too (like 1000x). Now an investor can make profit by
selling their share to other (future) investors. The point to note here is:
the first investor sells thinking that the venture’s value has reached a
reasonable price which was expected or it’s now overpriced.

The point is, profit has to be booked to be realized.My question to PG is how
does YC decide when to sell?

------
noiv
Paul has described the problem very well and he also made a habit of insisting
a startup needs to solve a real problem.

Now, I wonder whether the understanding of both aspects is enough to put him
in a position to recognize founders on the other side of the table capable to
provide a solution to random black swan farming?

Eventually more interesting is the question what would be his best guess from
which field of science he expects useful outcome enhancing the criteria to
make more educated decisions on founders?

Am I alone with the impression the essay sounds stucked?

------
marcamillion
This paragraph read a bit confusing to me:

 _The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to
recognize the big winners. It means the probability of a startup making it
really big is not merely not a constant fraction of the probability that it
will succeed, but that the startups with a high probability of the former will
seem to have a disproportionately low probability of the latter._

It could be that it's a bit late, and I am tired. But it sounds a bit awkward.

Anyone care to clear that up for me?

Thanks!

~~~
JumpCrisscross
There is a tradeodd between are startups that will succeed, i.e. return their
risk-adjusted capital, and those that will make it big - the subset of the
prior that are able to scale. One can get return-of-capital startups in niches
that cannot scale or attempt to take on Google or Fb with a very low
probability of success.

~~~
marcamillion
Ahh....ok....I get you.

------
neilk
What if you changed how YC operates so even more of the startups flamed out
before Demo Day? An internal Demo Day, perhaps?

If the public Demo Day is now fraught with too much expectation perhaps it
should be treated as a PR event rather than a goal for the startups to shoot
for.

This doesn't solve the other problem you mention, which is that you'd be
surrounded by people flaming out, which would be stressful in a lot of
dimensions.

------
jmtame
I'm curious if this would affect how you give advice to founders. For example,
let's say a team is working on an idea that isn't working out. If you had two
ideas or recommendations in your head, one that seems intuitively good and one
intuitively bad, would you ignore the intuitively good idea in favor of the
intuitively bad idea because it seems that the best ideas start out as bad
ones?

------
hansc
What about analysing the other way around: Objectively look at the companies
that made it (not just YC companies) and the ones that didn't make it and try
to see if there are clues that distinguish them. Were the founders really big
dreamers for instance, or was the traction immediatelly high from the start,
or was tracction high + no interest from investors?

------
sytelus
The important question is, can this be changed? Several processes involving
randomness generates power law but with appropriate understanding and
interference, these processes can yield either less drastic function or a
bigger constant. The challenge is to understand exactly where, how and why our
intuition fails and correct for that.

------
Tichy
My takeaway seems to be don't apply to YC unless my startup has the potential
to become a billion dollar company.

------
barking
I can't think of any reasons why Dropbox would have 'seemed like a bad idea'.
OTOH I can't understand why it's so valuable either because 1)it seems pretty
vulnerable to being replaced by something smarter. 2)I think there must be a
lot of people like me who keep their storage below the free 2GB limit.

------
lifeisstillgood
Is this 10000x return that makes everything else counter intuitive a function
of startups or of startups in a bubble?

Are the returns going to remain of this order over the next 20 years ? I
understood that VCs rule of thumb was 10x return paid for the other 9. is this
difference earlier stage, bubble or other?

------
batgaijin
It's funny how this focused on "making it" and not disruption, which is what I
assmed by the title and was wishing for.

I am still surprised how YC hasn't transitioned to that entirely. They already
have the money; optimizing for that is tryin to play a financial game that
others have already mastered.

------
david927
Now the question seems to be, based on this, will you alter the application
process for YC? It currently seems to me to be more reliant on "have you often
have you got on base," than, "are you swinging for the bleachers?" criteria. I
hope you experiment a bit and share the results!

------
caf
_You not only have to solve this hard problem, but you have to do it with no
indication of whether you're succeeding. When you pick a big winner, you won't
know it for two years._

That's a lot like distilling whisky - you have to wait at least a decade to
find out how good a batch was.

------
00000000swan
Can you afford to fund 100% bad ideas?

Assume you could separate the funding vehicle from the YC reputation, having
it as a separate unassociated entity.

That is, assume the "reputational" cost could be managed. And no one would
accuse you of being "insane".

I liked this essay. I think it's sufficiently honest.

------
Kilimanjaro
Investing in startups has become a giant ponzy scheme where the idea that can
be transformed in a giant hype machine can bring more results as more people
invest in the hype before the bubble bursts.

Facebook is useless, Airbnb will be gone in five years when more horror
stories surface, as well as dropbox, today storage is so cheap anybody can
have 20GB for free when buying a cheapo hosting plan. Even GAE gives you 10GB
free, all you need is a piece of software.

So, etsy will last forever, facebook won't, amazon will, dropbox won't,
godaddy will, airbnb won't.

Sometimes I think, investing a billion dollars in instagram is running a
freight train loaded with money over a cliff.

That money would have been better invested in a new eBay (without auctions)
that would last forever, empowering small merchants and providing a complete
experience for ecommerce, from payment to delivery.

We already had enough with social, but the hype machine won't die just yet, so
fuck investors, I hope they lose all their money and then blame the economy.

------
fleaflicker
This same idea was discussed in CS 183, the power law:

[http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-
thiels...](http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels-
cs183-startup-class-7-notes-essay)

------
karpathy
Great post. I hope that by "idea", what is really meant is a more general
notion of "some kind of weighted average of the idea, the context, the team
dynamics, and an estimate of how capable they could be in the execution".

------
coolswan
I would love to see a demo day of YC companies that are still around who
either quietly launched / didn't have much on demo day or who pivoted to
something entirely different. Sort of like a "where are they now" demo day.

------
fredBuddemeyer
perhaps paul's intuition is right - there is something wrong here. certainly
real world business success is not so binary as this.

if there is a 500 pound supposition in the room it's liquidity. if the only
way an investor can achieve it is through a massive "event" such as an ipo or
sell out then any otherwise successful company is a non-entity for investors.

if y combinator were holding securities with some liquidity it needn't devolve
into a 20th century vc. there are many ways to achieve this, all disruptive
yet also quite well suited for this institution and its community.

------
mwww
The secret of creating wealth is identifying a solution that will improve the
world and is not evident before it does.

(<http://on.fb.me/Pb3DeP>)

------
lionhearted
> It would hurt YC's brand (at least among the innumerate)

Worse, even -- innumerate _and/or_ people who don't have domain knowledge.
Probably considerably over 99% of all people.

------
jstreebin
Is that really a black swan, tho? I used the term the other day wrt wearing
eyeguards while playing squash (to avoid losing an eye) but think I misused it
then, too.

------
EricDeb
This article implies that many potentially successful start ups will not make
the cut. Another reason not to get down if one's team doesn't make it in YC.

------
Tycho
I heard Taleb actually run a portfolio called 'the Black Swan fund.' I didn't
really think of it before but that pretty much what YC is.

------
kristopher
Japanese Investors need to adapt to this way of thinking -- you'll get some
duds, but certainly having flow is what is important.

------
qeorge
Do you think YC helped the Black Swans become Black Swans, or were the
founders unstoppable?

------
hasenj
Am I the only one to notice that both AirBnB and DropBox actually have a
viable business model and a real way to make money?

I think this would be a good metric. I mean think about it, if you're a
startup and your only strategy is to burn money making an awesome product
that's free, how on earth are you going to return 1000x on investment?

~~~
rsheridan6
I have no idea, but isn't that exactly what Facebook and Google did?

~~~
hasenj
Facebook (AFAIK) is not quite profitable yet, but it does have a business
model: selling ads. The same business model that Google used, and the same
business model that the TV industry has been using (very successfully) for
decades.

If you build a company with no business model other than hoping for a nice
exit (usually as a talent acquisition) there's no chance that you can give
your investors 1000x returns. This should be obvious.

~~~
rsheridan6
I assume that any awesome product that's free can sell ads, since people will
be looking at it.

------
dschiptsov
It is almost the same idea as of scientific revolution - to make a paradigm
shift one must discover something which is orthogonal, incompatible with a
main-stream view, with current scientific consensus. There are lots of
readings for students about how to become a new Darwin or Einstein.

To make a paradigm shift one should pick up a special kind of person (let's
call him _focused, disciplined introvert_ ) place this person in a good
environment (or just help the person to make one for himself) and it must be
done in a right moment - create a wave others will try to catch and ride. Luck
could be summoned by avoiding being too narrow focused and self-centered, by
being awake.

There is a small essay which, I think, is related to the subject -
<http://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Hiring>

------
fleitz
Given the small number of companies that 'return the fund' is the YC dataset
even statistically meaningful for 2 events out of all the companies accepted?

Would the outcome possibly be better by using an approach similar to index
funds. By focusing on repeatability would it be possible that one might be
able to put together a fund where 30 to 40% of the return is made up by
'average' companies and then take the outliers as bonuses rather than focusing
on an event that's unpredictable given the amount of statistical data
available?

Or is YC as close to an index fund as it gets?

------
its_so_on
I wrote the following email to PG some time ago, which I hope have helped
inform the present essay.

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

1.

You know, I came across:

" I think they're not so much dense as bitter. There's a subset of HN readers
who regard startups as a whole as a sort of con game, and are angry that the
participants get so much attention. There may not be that many of them, but
their anger makes them disproportionately active as commenters and voters. "

I want to tell you that I don't like the fact that you and ycombinator only
look at immediate sales vehicles and hardly any big ideas, like Google or
Skype. Mine is a Big Idea - it's not a sales vehicle. You almost have negative
things to say about $100B market aspirations. And your results speak for
themselves - smaller companies with no big vision.

That's what I don't like.

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

2\. this was after leaving him this comment which I hope he also saw

(PG here on HN): _Financially, as if you were an investor. They're the people
whose job it is to evaluate startups' prospects, and they care above all about
two things: the founders and the market. The founders should be relentlessly
effective, and the market should ideally be of a size that can only be
obtained by riding on trends beyond the startup's control (but visible to few
besides the founders, or the market would already be full). Joining the young
Microsoft, for example was a bet on Bill Gates and microcomputers, both of
which turned out to be very good bets.

As a hacker you may be able to judge market bets as well as or better than
many investors. E.g. I think HN readers knew Dropbox was onto something before
most investors did. So if you go wrong it will be in judging founders. For
many hackers, especially the unwordly sort, it's hard to distinguish true Bill
Gateses from mere good talkers.

I wish I could offer some advice about distinguishing, but that would take a
whole essay. The best simple hack I can think of is completely self-serving,
but I'll offer it anyway: piggback on our filter. YC specializes in
distinguishing between genuine Gateses and good talkers. We're occasionally
fooled, but far less often than a typical hacker looking for a job would be_.

reply

*

1 point by its_so_on 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete

where's your Microsoft?

My only problem with your filter is that it filters out companies that
genuinely have a plan to grow to revenues in the billions or tens of billions
annually. This doesn't happen by chance alone, but through planning and
commitment. That very commitment is a red flag for you and reason enough for
you to say "no".

reply

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

3.

To drive the point home: it's almost impossible to adjust to investors like YC
with a big idea. You can't sell what you have, however cheaply - which I think
is ridiculous.

If you are holding a winning lottery ticket that is worth $20 billion and you
need $500,000 to go and cash it, you would think that selling 7% of your
company for the 500k amount is a no-brainer. Yeah, it's expensive, but so is
taxes. You can live with 93% of the $20Billion. Expensive for you, not for the
investor.

The ticket in this example is worth $1,400,000,000 (7% of the $20b) minus a
bit of net-present-value calculation, and you are selling it for $500,000.
This means the built-in return is 2800x or 280000%. Selling this share is very
expensive for you, the owner of the company/holder of the winning ticket.

But would an investor like YC jump on this? No. An investor like YC will go
ahead and take the step of applying a "0.000..% chance of successfully
cashing" to the winning lottery ticket you hold. (If you are honest with them
about what you will do and what you need to do it.)

 _NOT_ 1%, leaving an expected 28x or 2800% return (2800x built-in * 1%) from
the 2800x or even 0.1% which would leave a 2.8x or 280% expected return (2800x
* 0.1%) out of the built-in 2800x. But, _exactly_ 0.000..% with unlimited
precision. And then, obviously, in their estimation "it doesn't make sense to
invest." (Even though in reality they have a built in 2800x return from the
terms you are offering them. A cool 1.4 billion dollars basically for free.)

Then they will go ahead and say "no".

What is interesting is that you can show that the "0.00..%" they go ahead and
apply to you really does have unlimited significant figures. If you were to
hypotehtically need only $50,000 instead of $500,000 in this round you have to
lie if you want their money.* The above calculation still produces a "no".

Yet another way to show significant figures in the 0.000%: if your winning
ticket has 200b written on it (mine doesn't, mine has 20b written on it) it
does not increase your chances of funding or interest in it. The 0.0000 that
YC and several other "investors" apply really has that many sig figs.

So now you understand why I would never like to be associated with an outfit
like YC. If I need money to cash my check, why would I ever want to associate
with someone whose only M.O. implies they will go and apply a 0.000000000000%
(infinite zeros) factor to it? I don't need that kind of tarnish. Where is
YC's "Google"? Nowhere. They wouldn't touch a $200B or even $20B seed-stage
company with a 200-foot pole.

* how can you build a $50b company from $50,000? Maybe you're an Indian-American entrepreneur and an able CTO and single founder, and you can get nearly unlimited high-quality output for peanuts, while personally overseeing it, from your Indian network. Then $50,000 is easily as much as $800,000 in the hands of a non-tech MBA who must first of all find a CTO and then insists on expensive labor.

~~~
yen223
Wait I don't understand, are we assuming that the lottery ticket has a 100%
chance of being worth $20 billion? Are we ignoring the fact that there's a
sizeable chance that it is worth $0?

~~~
its_so_on
The lottery ticket has $20 billion winner written on it. I gave you a range of
probabilities that the ticket can actually be cashed. The point is that this
probability is clearly not exactly 0.00000... given others have cashed theirs.

But YC assigns it a probability of exactly 0.00000... that you can cash it,
given any amount of "seed" money.

However, if you lie and claim the ticket has "$20million winner" written on it
(you are misrepresenting the business plan by a factor of 1000 in this case)
their ears will perk up and they will assign a non-zero probability (actually
an extremely high one), and give you a seed to go ahead and cash it, in
exchange for owing them 7% of the winnings.

Given the size of these seeds this behavior doesn't make any sense at all. It
is like refusing to take 7% of big winners, only small winners, when most of
the lottery payoff is in big winners.

------
ten_fingers
PG,

In part you are correct, but you are making some huge mistakes and, in a
saying from my past, are "straining over gnats and forgetting elephants".

> That's made harder by the fact that the best startup ideas seem at first
> like bad ideas. I've written about this before: if a good idea were
> obviously good, someone else would already have done it.

That's likely true from what you and Silicon Valley see, but that's just a
gnat.

Basically you are saying that success is a shot in the dark and it is
impossible for an entrepreneur and their financiers to design success with
good reliability. That is, from enormous data, obviously nonsense.

Paul, instead of shooting in the dark, you need to turn on a light!

I claim that we can design success, on just clean sheets of paper, with high
reliability and that how to do so is well known with a fantastic track record
with the long track record right in front of us.

Also, we need to address your:

> if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it.

Nonsense. Paul, where do you get such stuff? You have one of the best
backgrounds of anyone in Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, and yet you still
fall for that nonsense that fills the trash and the offices on Sand Hill Road.

What you mean by "a good idea" is just a good 'business idea', e.g., a very
short, nearly superficial, description of the business to, say, an early
customer. But, Paul, that's nearly irrelevant.

Want a good business idea? Make a billion dollars quickly? A sure fire winner?
Okay, this is your lucky day. May I have the envelope, please (drum roll).
Yes, here it is: One pill to take once that provides a safe and effective cure
for any cancer. That's your guaranteed, 100% true, died in the wool, sure
fire, billion dollar "good business idea". And it's obvious, and no one has
done it. Done.

Since the 'idea' is obvious, why has no one done it? Sure: No one knows HOW to
do it.

Are you beginning to understand?

So, for a hand up, in case you were up all night drinking beer with the boys,
here is a 'generic method' (ALL TRUE hackers just LOVE such verbiage):

Step 1. Think of a big, unmet need, something a billion people will pay a
little for or thousands of people will pay a lot for. E.g., the one pill cure
for any cancer. That is, think of an important, unsolved problem.

Step 2. Find a way to meet this need. E.g., for the cancer pill, have to do
some quite good biomedical research. Uh, did I say that it was all easy? I
don't remember saying it was all easy. If Step 2 is too difficult, then return
to Step 1 (we're writing this in the form of an 'algorithm' since ALL TRUE
hackers just LOVE algorithms). Else proceed to Step 3.

Step 3. Sell the solution to the customers and take the money to the bank.

There it is, in just three steps. Of course, likely the bigger the unmet need
from Step 1, the more difficult will be the research in Step 2. Whatever, the
key to the 'algorithm' is the research in Step 2.

Did I mention 'research'? Gee, does anyone on Sand Hill Road consider
research? Well, Paul, you and Y Combinator have high qualifications in
evaluating research, but a cursory look at several of the best known venture
capital firms in Silicon Valley, Boston, Winter Street, and NYC show little to
no ability or willingness to evaluate research. Uh, to evaluate research, as
usual, we want at least a relevant Ph.D., a tenure track faculty position in a
research university, and some relevant peer-reviewed publications of original
research.

So, research is being ignored! Opportunity knocks!

Now, should we have any faith in the promise of research to get solutions to
practical problems, or is all of research just ivory tower intellectual self-
abuse that has yet to be proven totally useless forever?

Let's see: It turns out that there is in all of the world in all of history
exactly one, unchallenged, unique grand champion of doing research to get
powerful solutions to important practical problems. And the track record is
much better and much longer than that of Silicon Valley.

Without further ceremony, here's the envelope. Yes, the answer is, the US DoD.
They got going about 70 years ago and did little projects like "the bomb, the
hydrogen bomb", radar, synthetic aperture radar, spread spectrum radar,
encoded with shift register sequences, adaptive beam forming passive sonar,
inertial navigation, GPS, and on and on.

So, for the question, is it possible to do research that yields powerful
solutions to important practical problems? Sure. Done.

So, should Silicon Valley fund research? Well, perhaps not. But, if an
entrepreneur has selected a good "unmet need" in Step 1 and done some good
research to get a powerful solution in Step 2, should Silicon Valley consider
the research?

Hmm ...? But, such research is rare! Right! Did I notice that you have already
noticed that big winners are rare, 'black swans', outliers, "few"? Yup.

How many $200 billion winners does a $100 million venture fund need to give
good returns to its limited partners? Many? Several? A few? How about just
one?

Silicon Valley is shooting in the dark into a pond with nearly only small
fish. Silicon Valley needs to turn on some lights, look, pay attention to
powerful research for big unmet needs, and then evaluate pulling the trigger.

My guess is that the real problem is the limited partners (LPs) who really
prefer to look at reports from accountants. So, the LPs tell their venture
funds to do all evaluations as close to accounting as possible. Since the
usual accounting metrics are not yet available, the venture firms use
surrogates, and their favorite is 'traction'. They want their coveted
'traction' to be high and growing rapidly. E.g., in the case of the bomb, they
would have said "You build and test one and get one ready for delivery, and we
will chip in for the gas for the Enola Gay.".

~~~
harryh
I'm sympathetic to what you are saying, but the DoD bit is the worst part of
your argument. The DoD wasn't trying to _profitably_ conduct (or fund)
research.

~~~
ten_fingers
You deliberately misread or need a remedial reading course: I was clear,
totally clear, crystal clear: My point was that the DoD research shows that
research can be powerful for finding solutions to practical problems.

Your point does not contradict what I wrote and is hardly even relevant.

Also I was totally clear that venture capital might not want to fund research.
Instead my point, my recommendation, was that venture capital should consider
and evaluate research that has already been done. But in information
technology, Sand Hill Road will NOT do that. A-H won't do it. Menlo won't do
it. KP won't do it. Sequoia won't do it. Founders's Fund won't do it. Silicon
Valley will NOT evaluate research. PERIOD. No wonder their returns suck.

For the DoD, actually, if do some arithmetic on something like ROI, their
deployments and even their research look good, MUCH better than Silicon
Valley.

Let's take a simple example: If read Richard Rhodes, the atomic bomb project,
The Manhattan Project, cost about $3 billion. And there was a LOT of
duplication and failed directions. But apparently the Bomb saved about 1
million US casualties by avoiding invading the islands of Japan. So, we're
talking $3000 per casualty. We're talking a financial bargain.

Want to do some ROI calculation on, say, GPS? How about the ROI of GPS and
laser guided bombs? So, roughly get one bomb to do the work of some power of
10 bombs without GPS and laser guidance.

Want to do some ROI on, say, packet communications networks, i.e., the
Internet, and just for the DoD uses?

Again, yet again, my point was that DoD has shown in rock solid terms for over
70 years that research can provide astoundingly powerful solutions to
important practical problems. So, in my 'algorithm', the key in Step 2 is just
such research, and the DoD has shown that such research is possible.

Just what part of this simple argument is too difficult to understand?

Look, guys, I know that it's possible to dream of typing in some Java, Python,
C++, etc. for a social, mobile, sharing, app and hope to get rich. But, PG's
essay explained how tough it is to evaluate such work early on, and the
averages along Sand Hill Road just SUCK.

But the DoD has done well in essentially my three steps for 70+ years.

Gotta tell you, in broad parts of our economy and technology, what YC and SV
use as project evaluations won't pass either the giggle or sniff tests.
Instead, projects in applied science and engineering receive careful, detailed
evaluation early on and, when a passing grade is given, execute with high
success. We're talking dams, bridges, tall buildings, airplanes, and much
more. Net, the evaluation techniques of SV are back in the paper airplane
days.

------
ten_fingers
Ah, how to use the law of large numbers and utility functions to make money!!!

~~~
YuriNiyazov
You seem to be new here. Let me give you a tip: you will be hellbanned very
shortly if you continue commenting on the site the way that you have been
doing so far. Please read the guidelines:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

~~~
ten_fingers
You responded to my post about the law of large numbers and utility functions?

That is actually a good and appropriate observation.

Of course, some mods came along and down voted it. I doubt that they
understand either the law of large number or utility functions. Of course, the
law of large numbers is a crown jewel of 20th century probability theory, and
utility functions are one of the better contributions of von Neumann.

For being HELL BANNED, sure, that is the shame of HN. I no longer care about
HN. I've had it.

I long ago read the 'guidelines', and I've done nothing wrong. But HN is run
by some arrogant, nasty people. To HELL with HN.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
I responded to your post about large numbers and utility functions only
because it was your most recent one. I would've sent you a private message had
the site supported PM functionality or if you had some e-mail address in your
profile.

The point that I am making is about your general behavior in this thread. You
have broken multiple guidelines:

'Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.'

'When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g.
"That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 +
1 is 2, not 3."'

'Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or
phrase, put _asterisks_ around it and it will get italicized.'

'Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.'

~~~
ten_fingers
I was attacked strongly for no good reason. Basically this UID was ruined
because I am now an enemy of the HN mods. In the future, they wouldn't let me
comment in positive terms about apple pie.

The main reason for the attack was clear: I was commenting on how venture
capital could do better, and that is a sensitive subject on HN. Further, the
VC community is wildly arrogant and just insists on pretending to be the
smartest guys in the room. So, no way do they want public comments on their
work, comments that presume to tell them better ways to do their work. And,
since the venture partners are rarely significantly technical, they are
insecure and defensive about their qualifications and, thus, especially fear
and resent a technical Ph.D. commenting on their work. Especially the VCs
don't want comments that go around them to their LPs, who now are unhappy with
VC returns. So, in the end the issue is VC and HN ego.

The HN mods are hot on slapping down any commenter who fails to bow deeply
enough before the VCs. So, they slapped me down. In the end, that is the shame
of HN and its mods and a display of their absurd ego. I did nothing wrong but
defend myself.

The world is what it is. It's too bad that HN is run by some nasty people.
But, so be it. Users can read this thread and draw their own conclusions, at
least while my posts are still available and not yet 'hell banned'.

I've got nothing to lose here. But HN and PG have lost, and by attacking me
for no good reason they deserve to lose.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
0) It's very nice to see you change your position. First, "you did nothing
wrong". Then, after I pointed out that you did, indeed, do something wrong,
turns out you did it because "you were attacked strongly". This is a common
behavior in elementary school, and not an acceptable mode of conduct in adult
age, especially from a technical Ph.D.

1) There are plenty of people on HN who don't bow down before VCs. See
patio11, mechanical_fish, tptacek etc. They are not voted down into oblivion,
so it is likely that the reason why you are being downvoted has nothing to do
with your particular opinion of VCs.

2) I looked through your comment history on the site. You tend to write long,
rambling, stream-of-consciousness walls of text - this is true not just of
this thread, but of many others over the last two months. Different commenters
have pointed out that they do not enjoy reading your posts precisely because
of that reason. Frankly, I don't either. So, I'm pretty sure that's why you
were, as you say, "strongly attacked". It is perfectly acceptable to downvote
comments for presentation rather than substance, and that happens on HN quite
often. If you think that the substance of your comments is so important that
presentation doesn't matter, you and HN are both better off if you leave.

~~~
ten_fingers
My first comment on this thread was down voted to -4 quickly. That post did
nothing seriously wrong on the HN rules. Since only a few users are able to
down vote, that down voting had to be heavily or entirely from HN mods.

For more evidence, the down voting was well before any responding comments.
That is chicken sh!t behavior from the mods.

So I was attacked, and not for anything I did wrong. Then I responded and
defended myself and called names, and that was justified.

For your claim that later I violated the HN rules and, thus, engaged in
childish behavior, here is a close analogy: It's against the law to hit
someone on the street. But if you do hit someone, then they may hit you back
just in self defense, and then they are not violating the law. All I did was
to defend myself against a wildly unjustified attack.

It was the HN mods who misbehaved and started the fight, not me.

For my writing, it's clear enough and well organized, for a technical Ph.D. or
anyone else. But most blog comments are just really short with little content.
Many of my posts to HN have had some content.

And my main post here was of length comparable with the PG post I was
responding to.

For making my posts shorter, responses on this thread have shown that even
when I explain carefully, number points, give headings, give examples, provide
summaries, etc., still many readers don't get it. In part the problem was
mentioned by PG in his post -- people can willfully respond critically. Then,
as PG mentioned, it can be good to have written enough to be able to point to
the part of an original post they just didn't read.

In being so critical of me, you are just doing a playground thing of joining
with the majority to form a gang to attack me as a group. It's mob behavior.
The posts have not been at all thoughtful about what PG talked about and I
responded about on evaluating projects and, instead, have just been gang
hostility.

So why was I down voted? Not for length, some use of all caps, some use of
sarcasm to try to raise interest and avoid being boring. No, I was down voted
because I presumed to mention research to venture capital and, thus, rubbed
the ego the wrong way on the VC community and, thus, also the HN mods.

If you don't want to read what I write, then don't.

But HN and I are done. HN is run by some nasty people, and I've had enough. PG
has already indicated that he believes that HN has become too big to be easy
to manage.

In particular, my UID is dead: The HN mods are angry with me, hostile, making
me a target of gang hostility, and down voting just anything, e.g., my little
line on the strong law of large numbers and utility functions you responded
to.

The shame here is HN's. I'm leaving nothing of value.

But on leaving HN, sure, it's run by some nasty people. That's the shame of
HN, YC, and PG.

~~~
barry-cotter
> Since only a few users are able to down vote, that down voting had to be
> heavily or entirely from HN mods.

This site has been running for more than five years. Trust me, the
overwhelming majority of users who can downvote aren't mods, they're not even
regular participants in the conversation; they're probably mostly lurkers who
submit decent articles.

Your comments are mostly flip, and provide little value. That's why they get
downvoted; you're trying to be funny and by the community standards you're
not.

------
asifjamil
Is it possible that this is simply just the effect of a Bell Curve (i.e, the
normal (Gaussian) distribution of a field)?

~~~
seiji
I think that's the exact opposite of what pg means.

pg is basically writing
[http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-
thiels...](http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels-
cs183-startup-class-7-notes-essay)

~~~
gojomo
There's a similarity to Thiel's analysis -- that few outliers provide all the
returns -- but also a difference: PG seems more comfortable with the idea that
early on, the ultimate winners are completely unknowable, and so 'many trails'
(diversification) is absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile, throughout his lectures, Thiel seems to emphasize that with enough
focus on the right people. important projects, and right 'secrets', outcomes
are not as random as they seem... and both individuals and investors must
concentrate on some big bets rather than endlessly diversify.

------
autophil
I still shake my head with AirBnB, a total ripoff of couch surfing. For it to
be comparable in any way, shape or form to the innovative and beautifully
executed Dropbox boggles the mind.

~~~
seiji
I used to think airbnb was a direct for-profit, money grubbing ripoff of the
pure-of-heart couchsurfing. Then I tried to use couchsurfing this year. Their
website is virtually unusable. It looks like it hasn't been updated since
1995. They have a horrific profile system and verification process. They have
one 500,000th of the audience they could have.

If you stagnate, you will be eaten. Just keep swimming.

~~~
autophil
Nicely said. I'll have to give you that. I used couch surfing a few years ago
and distinctly remember thinking I should redo the site for them. I may have
even written it on my profile.

