
Paul Graham’s Checklist, Would You Make The Cut? - drey
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/30/paul-grahams-checklist-would-you-make-the-cut-video/
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fizx
Anyone else not want to watch a video to see a checklist? Anyone kind enough
to paste notes?

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alnayyir
PG's Startup Checklist

Been friends

Worked together for awhile

Don't come together for only the startup

If close friends, stick with it even if things look bad because things
eventually get better.

Don't want companies run by committee.

Need clear leadership, don't want unclear sense of who the primary decision
maker is. Want to know who they should address a question to.

But not a megalomaniac, just want somebody who steps forward.

Founder power is increasing, investor power waning, probably good because
those most knowledgeable getting more power.

Lot cheaper to start a startup these days.

More socially acceptable to start a startup these days.

Conway said a lot of his portfolio companies were in New York these days.

\----

I hate watching videos too as interesting as PG is to watch, I took the hit
for the rest of ya.

(I read much faster than anyone can possibly speak.)

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HNer
This does not convey the sentiment that Paul expressed.

I took away : friends will work on a project through the bad times out of
loyalty (which happens to be a good thing), while co founders who were not
friends will bail at the point when the walls come crashing down.

~~~
HNer
Samuel_Michon, That's what I said... (almost) since you misstated one of the
points 'if for no other reason than the co founders like working with each
other' when PG actually said they will continue to work out of loyalty and not
wanting to let their friend down.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Didn't mean to criticize you. I personally found it quite enlightening to hear
Graham say that every startup will eventually go through a tough phase,
whether or not the business has any chance of making it -- I felt that little
nugget of truth needed some attention.

Everything else I said in that post were my own words, especially the
reasoning on _why_ good friends stick it out. I find it kind of negative to
simply put it on guilt -- I choose to believe that good friends work together
and help each other out because they like each other, not because of fear of
losing a friendship.

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chegra
hmm... I don't think as an entrepreneur we should seek to optimize these
metrics. These rules are ideal for Paul since they reduces his risk for
investing, which is necessary as a prudent investor. Y-Combinator would be
over the moon if 6 out of ten start-ups were successful. If you were one of
those 4 who didn't make it, it would be devastating for you.

Ultimately as the entrepreneur your rules should be gear towards gaining
traction. Think about it, you would be over the moon if 6 out of 10 persons
sign-up. Gaining customers is your way of reducing risk. Concoct your rules
for reducing your risk. I think Eric Reis, Steve Blank and the lean start-up
movement are doing a great job at this.

So my advice is don't try to focus on meeting this check list but focus on
obtaining traction. Oddly enough, all investors love traction.

~~~
pg
This isn't my entire checklist. The interview wasn't even about checklists.
They just stuck that word in the title to get traffic. If you describe
something as a checklist, then everyone wants to see what it is to see if
they're missing anything. Much like the list-of-n-things.

This is probably closer to what you want:
<http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html>

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jacquesm
There is actually a really good reason _not_ to start a start-up with friends,
you might find that your friendship is the victim of either the success or the
failure of your start-up.

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lelele
So what? You may just discover that your friendship isn't that strong. If it
is, it will endure and grow, whether your business succeeds or fails.

I wonder why people are so afraid to put their relationships on trial. An old
adage says that you should not trust a friend of yours until you have tested
it.

~~~
kristiandupont
A friendship may still be valuable even if it isn't fit for a startup.

~~~
lelele
That's fine. Being friends does not mean being fit to work together.

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sayemm
"...New York is full of energetic ass-kickers" - Paul Graham

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pg
We had a quite interesting conversation about NYC at the end but for some
reason they cut it off. Maybe the cameras stopped working or something.

~~~
gruseom
Does "quite interesting" extend as far as revising your view about the primacy
of Silicon Valley for startups? NYC seems to have supplanted Boston as the
obvious runner-up, which is already the first tectonic shift in the startup
lithosphere in a long time (decades?), so if any place is going to give SV a
run for its money it would likely be NYC. Curious to know how significant you
think the trend is or might get.

~~~
pg
It was about why NYC may be supplanting Boston as the number 2. If my theory
about the reason is correct, then the trend will be pretty significant.

~~~
eugenejen
I am curious about you theory because I've been in NYC since web 1.0 so I like
to see how your theory is.

Would you like to share it?

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sage_joch
I think he misinterpreted the Twitter question. She seemed to be asking
whether he would reject a group with an idea as compelling as Twitter if the
founders didn't have the right personalities.

~~~
patrickk
_"an idea as compelling as Twitter"_ \- proof that something is a great idea
like Twitter only becomes obvious in retrospect. If you heard a description of
Twitter just before it launched, you probably wouldn't think it would work (or
wouldn't know one way or the other). Hence the importance of the founding team
and how well they execute the idea.

~~~
sage_joch
Well sure, that might be a good answer. Another good answer might be, "the
execution is more important than the idea." I was just pointing out that he
misinterpreted the question.

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herdrick
Where's the rest?

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danielha
I will never tire of hearing pg's analogies and metaphors. I'm considering
compiling them for a website.

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Gotttzsche
that site just auto-reloaded while i was watching the video. :|

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gigafemtonano
I founded a startup that was featured by the WSJ all by myself and have gone
on to work on a new project which has some traction. I applied to YC with
another idea and didn't "make the cut." I personally take that to be a greater
challenge to succeede than any friendship or relationship could obligate me
to. PG may have a checklist which works most of the time but I suspect that's
the first step toward missing the outliers who define true success. No one's
going to take the next Google seriously 'till its too late.

~~~
derefr
But for someone whose whole job is to find, and invest in, "the next Google",
you'd think there could be some sort of recognizable _features_ that a
Bayesian classifier could learn as positive weights (as, if there weren't,
that person would guess correctly at no greater a rate than chance, and would
therefore be replaced by a small shell-script/die roll.) Those recognizable
features should then be able to be decomposed into discrete features—which
could be written down as a checklist.

To put it another way—there are only two ways to do a job whose output is
boolean (invest/don't invest): either algorithmically, or randomly. Any
judging algorithm can be approximated by a checklist.

~~~
chegra
I think PG is on the right track with his investing strategy.

Lets say his probability of finding the next Google with this rule was a
arbitary value of 0.001. I wouldn't know its exact value but I'm assuming it's
non-zero.

He would have to invest in 693 companies before he has a 50% chance of hitting
a google. I don't think they have gone that far as yet. It's just a matter of
time.

~~~
jacquesm
There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of web companies, there is _one_
google, and maybe 50 or so (extremely successful) companies where investors
from a seed fund had a chance to get in on the bottom rung they way YC wants
to have it.

The chances of finding 'the next google' are a lot smaller than what you think
they are, but the chances of scoring a really big hit (on the order of 10's of
millions in terms of ROI for YC) are pretty good.

