
Paul Graham is too arrogant - infirstlive
http://livinginfirstlife.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/paul-graham-and-y-combinator-true-lies-and-damn-lies/
======
rwalker
I posted the following comment in defense of my co-founder Wayne:

Jay,

It is supremely unfair of you to characterize my co-founder as irresponsible,
selfish, and ruining his family.

I have never met a man who loves his wife more than Wayne. He and his wife
reached a decision together that the best thing for their family and their
future was for him to come start a company. Your post makes it sound as if he
snuck over the fence in the middle of the night.

It is one thing to attack a business, or even to attack the visible leader of
said business. But to slander a good hard working father, husband, and friend
is criminal. You owe him a public apology.

Sincerely, Robby Walker

EDIT: it appears he listened - the language has been softened a bit and he
apologized.

------
Sam_Odio
Essay comes off as a poorly written rant. However, there is a sliver of truth
there; PG would benefit from a little more humility. So would the whole
program, actually. It sometimes has a very "clubby" feel to it - you're either
in, or you're not.

Even though this isn't a big issue now, it might benefit them to address it
before YC gets a reputation of arrogance. This is especially important, given
YC essentially bashes a thousand egos a year. Even if 1% of those guys start
blogs like this, that's bad news.

~~~
pg
Can you give me an example of something YC does that seems clubby, and that we
could do differently to cure that?

~~~
paul
The problem is that success makes other people feel bad, and so even neutral
statements get interpreted in the worst possible way, and of course it also
attracts haters (such as this 'livinginfirstlife' guy), who will repaint
everything to look bad.

This was certainly the experience at Google. I don't think that there is
necessarily a solution, though it helps to avoid things that could be
misinterpreted, even though that also means avoiding some aspects of the truth
unfortunately.

~~~
nostrademons
"The problem is that success makes other people feel bad"

It's more that success attracts attention, some fraction of attention will
always be negative, and the haters tend to scream louder than the likers. I'm
still a loyal GMail user, I still visit Reddit frequently, and (despite some
quibbles and a rejection) I generally think YCombinator's done a lot of good
for the startup community. But you don't hear from folks like me often: we're
happy, the software does what we want it to, so we have little reason to speak
up. Folks with a gripe, however, are willing to put countless hours into
venting their spleen.

That was one of the reasons I left FictionAlley (a non-profit Harry Potter
fanfiction archive). 99% of users were very appreciative of what we did.
However, 1% were not, and the 1% took up about 80% of our time and attention.
When you're not being paid for your work (FA was all-volunteer), 80% is far
too much time to spend on people with massive entitlement complexes.

(There's perhaps a lesson for prospective founders here: build anything worth
visiting, and people _will_ hate you for it. Not a lot, and not nearly as many
as it seems, but you better be prepared for it and willing to put it in
perspective.)

The latest fad in business now seems to be "fire your customers" - get rid of
the 1% that soaks up 80% of your attention, so you can better serve the 99%
that actually appreciate what you do. I dunno if that's applicable to YC;
probably not, since they "fire" 95% of their customers simply through lack of
resources and the haters come from the people who're not doing business with
them anyways. Ironic, that is...

------
Harj
What I find most amusing about this is guy is how he so passionately bashes Y
Combinator on his blog, Techcrunch and probably any other form of medium he
can get his hands on. Each time he argues how YC is worthless and irrelevant.
The problem being that if YC is so irrelevant and pointless - why spend so
much of your time and energy writing about it? I know my general approach to
things I think are a waste of time is putting them to the side and spending my
time on the things that are in my opinion. Since I value my time as a scarce
resource I think that's a justified approach.

The logical assumption then is either:

1) "Livingfirstlife" doesn't actually consider YC to be so pointless as
presumably if he genuinely believed that to be true, he wouldn't be so
generous as to provide a stream of free PR.

2) He doesn't value his time particularly highly, in which case he's not
exactly the type of person I'll be asking for startup advice anytime soon.

Perhaps one day he'll learn that childish tantrums aren't the most effective
method for convincing people your point of view is correct.

~~~
angelasimpson
Harj I'm a little confused. If you're someone that YC has invested in, why do
you have so much spare time to argue with this guy? His tantrums aren't very
childish and I think you're showing your lack of maturity by not presenting
any general arguments. You clearly aren't valuing your time very highly either
- you're just being hypocritical.

~~~
Harj
I've posted one techcrunch comment and one comment here disagreeing with him.
That's a combined total of about 10 minutes of my time which in my view is
justified use of it, as it was time spent defending an organization that has
done nothing but provide me with a stream of endless opportunity.

------
stuki
pg, whatever you read into this rant, please don't let it make you go soft and
pull your punches in essays, posts, talks or interviews. Most of your audience
prefer your straight talk to mealy mouthed, watered down, PC blandspeak, even
when you're wrong. And if destitution necessitated scurvy (out of all
things......) turns out to be a huge problem amongst your founders, I suspect
there are investors out there willing to come to the rescue, even at twice
YC's valuations. No questions asked :).

PS: for those who find the IQ test comment arrogant; Paul Graham is just
showing off his mastery of Cambridgeian lingo. Back there, saying someone has
low IQ is short for saying they disagree with you. Nothing more, nothing less,
and absolutely nothing to be all up in arms about.

~~~
nostrademons
"Paul Graham is just showing off his mastery of Cambridgeian lingo"

Technically, it's "Canterbridgian". ;-)

------
budu3
I guess the Newsweek article is bringing PG a lot of unwanted attention.

\ "there is no need for a marketing budget when youÂve got Internet word of
mouth.Â Of course - build it and they will come right?

In PG's defense I don't think he meant to imply that if you build it they'll
come. I think he was emphasising the power of Internet word of mouth for an
Internet business as opposed to traditions marketing channels. BTW. It doesn't
seem like the above quote was PG's, unless I'm mistaken.

That being said, the author made some valid points. For one, even if the YC
hopefully know they gonna accept the offer even before applying, giving them 5
mins to respond, and then suggesting that anyone not responding within that
time in unintelligent makes PG come of as arrogant, if not a bully.

Secondly, I don't think PG can be blamed for a YC founder's personal choice to
leave his pregnant wife to pursue a startup (this is a far stretch from the
true story) and poor dietary choices of YC founders.

------
npk
Wow,

This guy's whole blog (not just the article) is based on bashing YC & YC
funded companies. There are some valid cons to YC Funding: the funding comes
at a low valuation, and it is scary to build a company without a clear path to
monetization. But this guy basically repeats this over, and over, and over
again. Don't expect any enlightenment. Lame.

------
pg
Some comments on this thread were upvoted by several sockpuppet accounts at
the same IP addr as infirstlive (including angelasimpson and hotstufff). There
was also some sockpuppet downvoting of comments disagreeing with them. Seven
of the upvotes on the link itself were from the same source. I've manually
fixed the scores in a lot of the cases. Sorry, will add more anti-sockpuppet
features in June.

------
kyro
I'd rather base my opinion of YCombinator on the opinions of those who have
actually gone through the program and have an insight and perspective about
the program that are much more objective than any outsider's. If there's
anyone who'd claim that joining YCombinator is a stupid idea, it'd be those
who were actually put through the process.

However, I do have to say, that being rejected from YC and being an outside
observer, I do at times feel that YC itself seems to get a bit 'clubby.' One
big reason for this feeling comes straight out of pure envy and jealousy for
wanting to be a YC member. The other reason deals with the fact that I feel as
if the connections/information gained through such a program are ones that no
one on the outside has access to. So it's either you're in and you're
connected, or you're out and left in the dark.

~~~
nostrademons
There were a couple YC members at the recent Boston startup meeting (Tsumoki
was there, and I think Dropbox, and possibly one other that I didn't catch the
name of)..They didn't seem clubby or standoffish at all. Really, they seemed
like pretty approachable, frighteningly intelligent, and generally decent
guys.

------
tx
I like Paul. He is one of rare cases when an engineer, besides being good at
what he does (engineering), on top of that also has business smarts and CAN
WRITE. That is very refreshing after all this MBA BS in the mainstream media.

As an investor, however, PS and Co is not a very good fit for vast majority of
engineers because... because they give you only what... 5K per founder? That
is much less than good engineer's one month salary after-taxes. That limits
his investments to trivial weekend projects completed by fresh college grads.
It's the investment side of PG, that the blog post is bitching about.

~~~
davidw
I don't see what the point of complaining is, though. Everyone knows what the
terms are, so do your own calculations, and if it's not worth it to you, don't
apply.

~~~
tx
I guess alot of people, including this guy, are openly questioning "validity"
of YComb's startups. Since everything they do is so trivial, can their
creations be considered "products with value"?

My personal issue with YComb's approach is that they _actively_ (via this
site, for instance) promote engineering mediocrity. Remember posts "PG made me
drop out of college today!" ? I have seen several of those. Web 2.0 is all
about this: cheap&quick; high-school level programming project done over a
weekend, polluted with google ads with mandatory "blog" attached to it.

To me that is sad, There is nothing "glamorous" about it. My major in school
was AI, and our professor used to dream alot about more powerful hardware that
was supposed to become a reality soon. Well, it became. And for what? To run 8
Mongrels with some quick&dirty; Ruby scripts converting contents of 4 DB
tables into nicely looking HTML with roundeed corners? What a waste...

~~~
whacked_new
Business does not equal mastery. if you complain about MBA BS then it should
be obvious enough. The iPod was nothing new in terms of technical mastery. But
it was innovative in terms of interface design, and a damn good example of
successful marketing and integration into a whole product family; as such,
it's also an innovation of process.

But does an iPod engineer understand any AI? Probably not. Steve Jobs made
stupid comments in his presentations (still remember the "branch prediction...
it predicts branches!"). But he has an eye for opportunities that not even
your professor can boast having. If there's a market, and you know what it
takes to supply it, supply it. In my view, YC is addressing this; it may
saturate quickly, but the need obviously exists. If your expertise targets the
extremely educated, by all means make something that satisfies them.

But don't forget that there are a lot of people to please. Just please the
ones you understand, or think you do. I'm completely taken aback by twitter's
success, but hey, people use it, what can I say.

------
gyro_robo
I read raves about Yahoo Store long before I ever heard of Viaweb or PG. If a
best-of-breed web app used by thousands of businesses is a "crappy start-up",
we need more crappy start-ups. I think he forgot an S -- they were _S_ crappy.

------
Tichy
On a side note, what is the problem at Justin.tv, if there is one? The article
mentioned that it is in free fall - really?

Justin.tv page seems to not work in Firefox anymore, so I couldn't see any
announcements they might have made on their web page.

------
Prrometheus
If he gets rich, they won't call it "arrogance". People would call Steve Jobs
arrogant (based on his public statements) if he weren't so damn successful.

------
phil
See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=22277> ;)

------
wschroter
Historically the companies that bragged before they were successful imploded
the fastest.

------
jamescoops
this guy killed his credibility by using AliG as an avatar

------
yubrew
got link bait?

------
sabat
Sour grapes, it sounds like.

"Paul Graham & Co. take equity at an extremely low valuation.

Because the company is not worth very much when it's only days or weeks old.
So?

"watch Justin.tv and you'll see a business in free-fall"

Huh? What makes him say that? Justin.tv has been live for a few weeks now.
Free-fall?

"The number of visitors required to have an advertising driven site that is
profitable and viable as a business is staggering"

So not true. You don't have to think very hard to come up with examples
(dooce.com comes immediately to mind), but what I really want to suggest is
that the post author read The Long Tail. You do _not_ need a huge, mainstream,
"staggering" audience to make good money, even with Google AdSense.

"... says another start-up was sold making it seem like a huge deal that
closed. Except it's not. That other start-up is called Kiko and it sold for
$258,000 on eBay to Tucows who will surely find it was a waste of their own
money."

Tucows thinks otherwise, and seems to have pretty good reasoning. See

<http://blog.tucows.com/blog/_archives/2006/9/5/2297315.html>

where they say: "What was the value to Tucows of the time and the certainty?
... What was the value of having it be good for sure? Even if we threw it away
in six months (not that we plan to do that)? What I can tell you for certain
(and you'll be able to hear more details in an upcoming podcast) is that it
was more than we paid!"

"Get Duped. You get 5 minutes to decide."

You should decide when you apply. If you don't know by the time you get the
phone call, that's your fault, blogga.

"Ruin Your Health."

If your health is ruined by Lean Cuisine, then you would have died in college
when you were subsisting on Top Ramen.

"Hurt your Family."

No one is forcing you to leave your pregnant wife. Hell, no one is even
encouraging that.

"Become Pinocchio ... You pretend secrecy is important when you need to cover
up a bomb or lack of actual interest from an acquirer."

That would be no different than any other company, except that this post's
"evidence" that YC does this is scant and misrepresents the facts.

Blogga, PLEASE.

~~~
nostrademons
Justin.TV's Alexa rankings have been tanking, to the point where ustream.tv
has almost overtaken them:

<http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=justin.tv>

Granted, that's just Alexa, and Compete.com still shows justin.tv growing
healthily (though ustream's growth rate is higher). But still...were I
justin.tv, I'd be concerned.

~~~
sabat
Ok, fair enough -- but the site is still only a few weeks old, and the way I
understand it, watching Justin's life through his hat-cam is not the whole
point of the business model. There is more to come.

------
angelasimpson
The blog is a bit of a rant but there are a lot of valid points. I doubt this
is someone who got turned down by Y Combinator though since he/she knows
nothing about the application process.

That being said, I think the arrogance is reaching all time highs and Paul
Graham needs to get it under control.

~~~
Tichy
People just don't like to hear the truth, and then they try to avoid listening
by just calling it "arrogance". I think PG is just taking some short cuts in
his reasoning here and there, and people who can't follow get frustrated by
that.

~~~
angelasimpson
I'm still kind of confused. Y Combinator has just one success - Reddit.
Everything else has either failed or is To Be Decided...

~~~
Tichy
I don't know anything about the numbers, to be honest. It just seems like a
very interesting and inspiring environment. I think it would be worth to pay
money to be a part of it. If money was the only thing that would interest me,
I would probably have become a financial consultant or an estate agent.

------
leisuresuit
It's pretty obvious what Paul Grahams goal is. He wants to pay some kids a
laughable amount of money to write code for an idea he likes. He then uses his
popularity to promote those websites. He basically gets coders for cheap. He's
not stupid or anything, it's just he gets the better end of the deal than the
kids he gives $5k to.

If you have an idea that paul graham likes, you're better off not taking the
money.

