
How Not to Die (2007) - sellingwebsite
http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
======
andygcook
_For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don 't hear from you.
When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a
bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply,
that's a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death._

Can someone at YC comment on if this is still a good proxy for startup
failure?

From a personal perspective, we've sent out an investor update every single
month [1] for our startup over the last four years. We also almost ran out of
money at the end of 2017. The updates around that time were the hardest ones
send out, but I can confirm they did help keep the company alive by forcing me
to create and articulate a survival plan to our investors to get to
profitability, which we pulled off [2] and are still going strong today.

\--

[1] The template we use for investor updates if you're curious:
[https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-
tem...](https://app.tettra.co/teams/tettra/pages/investor-update-template-
rundown) [2] The story about how we almost ran out of money but survived:
[https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-
faili...](https://tettra.co/blog/navigating-the-depths-of-nearly-failing-to-
profitability-part-1-a-brewing-storm)

~~~
DoreenMichele
_The updates around that time were the hardest ones send out_

The people who don't want to have those hard discussions are the ones that
have their startup die. People who don't reply to emails are often people who
are having negative feelings they don't want to deal with.

Maybe they don't have answers and are afraid to give a status report that
includes an admission that they simply don't know. Maybe they don't want to be
the harbinger of bad news and are waiting until things get better.

Neither of those is a constructive response. Neither of those fixes the
problem.

Avoidance tactics are usually about emotional reactions. They usually aren't
actually tactical choices for effectively addressing a problem.

There are exceptions. There are times when silence is golden or when it is the
least worst option. I doubt that ever applies to dealing with an ongoing
relationship with your investors.

(I'm not someone with startup experience. I just know something about people.)

~~~
exolymph
Why did this comment get downvoted? (It's currently somewhat greyed out.) Can
someone who downvoted say what they found objectionable?

~~~
nothrabannosir
Wild guess but I'd be remiss not to express this saturnine suspicion: probably
because it's Doreen. She posts a lot, mostly solid content like the above
post, some of which hard hitting. Some people take offense, she's often greyed
out for no reason and regularly gets pretty harsh criticism. I would be
shocked if she doesn't have some auto downvotes for every post. Unfortunately.

I recognise it's not constructive to express this suspicion of sexism, except
perhaps as a message of support, so hereby: Doreen, you have my +1. Ignore the
haters.

~~~
DoreenMichele
There's probably an element of truth to that, but it's also a large forum that
gets about 5 million unique visitors per month and I'm a demographic outlier
on multiple axes, so I simply express myself differently from the way most
people here do. (I also focus on things that would never occur to most people
here, which can easily be perceived as irrelevant.)

I suspect a high percentage of the downvotes I get -- and I do get quite a lot
of them, but I have no data on what's "normal" \-- are simply people who have
no idea I'm a woman, don't think the way I do, don't have the background
knowledge I have, can't see how it's pertinent and are unaware of me being
someone with any particular expertise that anyone "should" respect or be
interested in. (Edit: In fact, I fairly often get feedback that the person I'm
arguing with assumed I was male simply because it is HN and HN is
overwhelmingly male, which lefthandedly implies "Doreen _blends_ and does not
read as _girly._ ")

In this case, the downvotes occurred after I added the qualifier that I don't
have startup experience, so a very good guess is that it was downvoted by
someone who thinks my knowledge of how people work doesn't apply and I'm just
some blowhard and armchair politician who shouldn't have added "low value
content" to HN. The degree to which I have formally studied people topics
(negotiation, social psychology, etc) is something alien to a lot of STEM
folks who see that as a soft science and not something you can really
understand with any confidence.

There is a lot of hand-wavy BS in areas like psychology. I'm quite critical of
such things myself, though it often doesn't go over well for me to do that
either because the degree to which I think I understand a more bright line
standard for how to study social phenomenon is also not seen by most people as
anything believable.

On the upside, my latest parenting blog is something some people have
expressed real interest in. That's an area of social expertise and it might
eventually get real traction, unlike so many of my projects.

(Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why my
comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of
downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not
redacting this comment cuz _reasons._ But this is all off topic.)

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> Hopefully, the mods will come along and hide this entire discussion of why
> my comment was temporarily greyed out before being upvoted. Discussion of
> downvotes is something the guidelines ask people to not engage in. I'm not
> redacting this comment cuz reasons. But this is all off topic.

I have to say, I don't have an issue with downvote discussions when they are
initiated by someone _other than_ the original poster. Such conversations
frequently lead somewhere interesting, as this one did, whereas the opposite
type (in which the original poster complains) never does.

I sometimes come across fully grayed out comments that I simply cannot imagine
why anyone would ever downvote. I upvote these, but I'd very much like to know
why they were downvoted in the first place. Did the author get their facts
wrong? Is there an angle I'm missing? Could the comment be construed as
offensive?

I've heard it suggested that no one should downvote comments without leaving a
reply on why they downvoted. This strikes me as _completely_ unreasonable, but
allowing users (who aren't the OP) to ask "hey, why was this downvoted" in
cases where they're legitimately confused seems like a good compromise.

I do also see how this might get out of hand if it was officially allowed...
but maybe worth a try?

~~~
Xelbair
>> I sometimes come across fully grayed out comments that I simply cannot
imagine why anyone would ever downvote. I upvote these, but I'd very much like
to know why they were downvoted in the first place. Did the author get their
facts wrong? Is there an angle I'm missing? Could the comment be construed as
offensive?

Even here people confuse downvotes with "i don't like it"s.

------
randall
My version of this story:

I almost quit a year ago, exactly today, then my company got acquired. A story
(with pictures! only on Twitter though, link at the bottom.)

This is what I looked like last March 27. [horrible pic] One month prior... My
dad passed away. I wasn't having a good month. But that wasn't what happened
on March 27. I took a photo on March 27 because it was probably the worst I
had felt in the last 5 years. Even worse than my dad's death. (We had a
complicated relationship).

So yeah. We were dead. Like dead dead. I got my cofounders together on Monday,
March 26 (today) for our team meeting. I laid out our situation and that I was
going to fire myself.

[journal entry photo explaining the situation]

I woke up a lot of days and worked as hard as I could. But honestly it didn't
matter. My fate had actually been set in motion five to ten years prior.

I didn't give up, and I didn't sit on my laurels. Ironically, I started
reading a book called "Performing Under Pressure", and the entire premise of
the book is basically: Act like you're not under pressure and you'll do your
best work.

[https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-
Mat...](https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-
Matters/dp/0804136726)

See, this idea that I had been working on? I started working on the seeds for
it in roughly 2008. It's the same idea I'm working on now. Here's me giving a
talk about the idea in 2011, roughly 3 years before founding Vidpresso.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vYJ0w3UuM0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vYJ0w3UuM0)

As @justinkan and now my coworkers at Facebook know, I'm tenacious AF about
this idea, and I know it's gonna happen.

But last year, it didn't seem like it was going to happen. Not only that, it
seemed like the entire last 7 years were about to unwind, and I was going to
start back from scratch.

Lots of entries like this one in my @dayoneapp. [Dead tired journal image.]

And some like this one unfortunately. #openup #mentalhealth #suicide

[suicidal journal image]

But then, one week later. This entry hits my journal.

[Wow, yesterday was insane. journal entry]

Then my journal kind of goes silent because I got really busy for a while.

But then this really cool thing happened.

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/facebook-
vidpresso/](https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/13/facebook-vidpresso/)

This isn't some sort of rags to riches story: I knew my idea was solid and I
can have people vouch for me, I'm tenacious AF, don't give up, and really the
issue with me was that my idea was / is too early (still!)

But the other lesson is that for a certain subset of people: You'll probably
always be happiest working on the problem you find most interesting, with your
best friends, at a company who cares about your interests. Find that, and hold
on to it.

It took me a long time to get those things together, but I think I have all of
them now. It's very, very surprising, but I've learned a lot and I'm very
grateful.

I now want to try to help others. If you're in your founder journey, feel free
to DM! I'll try to help! It takes a long time though... it took me well over
10 years, and I'm still just getting started. Don't be in a hurry.

Also an addendum: The timing is really what worked out. We happened to have
the right tech at the right time with the right partners. I'm in love with my
job at FB, mostly because I had been derisking it for years.

When we joined FB, Interactivity had just become very important to FB. So it
really was all about timing and persistence. We were in the game long enough
for it to work out.

\---

It doesn't work out for everyone, but it did for me. :)

thread:
[https://twitter.com/randallb/status/1110669172487286784](https://twitter.com/randallb/status/1110669172487286784)

~~~
fennecfoxen
This isn't a bad story, but copy-and-pasting to YC from Twitter-with-images is
not an effective communications format.

------
diego
I don't think "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" has proven true.
I've invested in startups (including YC ones) that followed this to a tee.
They never found product-market fit, they could have been going forever,
investors forgot about them. Some are still going, some managed to get
acquired, some closed shop.

It's really a false dichotomy, only a small fraction of the companies that
avoid dying manage to explode. You just don't hear about the rest.

~~~
philwelch
I think the point where you stop trying to pivot into higher and higher growth
opportunities and accept your fate as a sustainable but small business could
be classified as a form of “death” (perhaps “undead”) if your original goal
really was to get rich.

~~~
peruvian
Imagine how much better the tech industry would be (in countless ways) if more
business owners were content with "small but sustainable".

~~~
philwelch
That’s all well and good, but I think pg is writing more for founders who want
to go big. And just like on StackOverflow, it’s not necessarily helpful to
derail conversations around “how to do X” with arguments over “whether you
should want to do X in the first place”.

------
maxlamb
I think this essay was valid for the year it was written (2007) where much
fewer people were doing startups, lots of good ideas had not been executed
yet, mobile was about to take off. Just like the belief in 2007 that "real
estate prices can never go down" lead to the real estate bubble/crash that
eventually invalidated that statement, if everyone starts beleiving if they
start a company and never give up they will become rich even if their idea is
bad, will end up invalidating that very belief.

~~~
CPLX
Yeah exactly.

Things were really really different then. Youtube was two years old, Facebook
had only been open to non students for less than a year. Things like making
databases of electronic parts or other less sexy B2B style ideas were often
still wide open green fields with almost no competition. Plus just making
websites work was tough, the cloud existed but just getting servers to work
and stay up was a non trivial part of launching something.

You can't just do the X + Software formula anymore and expect to get anywhere.

~~~
slededit
2007 was In the shadow of the post 2000 crash. People were still debating with
me if going in to Computer Science even made sense (aren’t they sending all
those jobs to India?). The financial crisis would happen just a few months
later and take almost 10 years to recover.

There’s a bias when looking at the past. We tend to assume the future was both
inevitable and easily predictable. Not like these uncertain times today.

Now pre-2000s was a little different. VCs were taking to me on the phone about
my “robotics” company. I was 10.

------
jessmartin
I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup
([https://first.io](https://first.io)). I particularly love this quote:
"Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!"

In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP
TYPING!"

~~~
Uehreka
Not a startup, and not necessarily dying, but here’s a personal anecdote of
mine that goes against this:

In 2016 I was working on a UX team, making improvements to components that
were used across the entire front-end of the new platform we were building.
One spring afternoon I was working on a new hierarchical selector widget while
a quarterly executive town hall was playing on the projector in our team room.
Midway through writing an AngularJS directive, our head of product surprise
announced that we were pivoting and that the platform we had been building for
the past year was going to be mostly thrown out. I basically closed my editor
and never touched that component again.

The upshot here is that in startups or big companies, change can come very
suddenly. And when big problems with a strategy are only known to those at the
top, it makes the sudden changes even more surprising for those down the
ladder. If you’ve got a bad board, you might find out about a change that you
_need_ to make the day that you need to make it.

------
pascalxus
Paul Graham usually writes some really good stuff, but this is highly
misleading: "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." There are soo many
projects that can continue in obscurity on a shoe string budget, never to
amount to anything. You could continue to invest in those businesses great
effort and money all for nothing. ProductHunt is filled to brim with failed
projects. Even, Google one of the world's most successful companies, has
countless projects that didn't work out. Were they supposed to keep pouring
100s of millions of dollars in projects that could never succeed?

Furthermore, it's misleading because it implies that things are within your
control. That, all you have to do is the right thing and you'll be successful.
Nothing could be further from the truth. When you have a bad idea that didn't
work out because of lack of consumer demand (the #1 reason why software
startups die), then, after you've tried everything, there's not much else to
do. It's better to shut down or pivot to something where there is demand.

~~~
nwsm
Read the whole article.

>And however tough things get for the Octoparts, I predict they'll succeed.
They may have to morph themselves into something totally different, but they
won't just crawl off and die. They're smart; they're working in a promising
field; and they just cannot give up.

>All of you guys already have the first two. You're all smart and working on
promising ideas. Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to
the third ingredient, not giving up.

He admits that this speech is made for the startups in the room; ones that
already passed the bar.

------
gfodor
You can def be typing while your startup dies. Maybe it's the exception not
the rule though.

My last startup was firing on all cylinders, with addicted early adopters, and
our team literally shipped features the last day we could pay them because
they loved the project and team so much. It didn't matter much to the VCs who
declined to invest further. If you can't pay your people, they can't eat, and
they can't work on the startup any further. So if you're not profitable,
you're always subject to investor sentiment and calculus to survive, and that
can often be a totally separate question of if you still have the drive to
push further and continue to reply to emails.

In those scenarios where you have investors, you can't just go into
'hibernation mode' and get the founders back on the ramen lifestyle to keep
going if you are hitting the trough, because on the way down you will be
forced to sell or liquidate all the existing IP and other assets to help
existing investors and debtholders recoup their losses. So you're left with
nothing but the idea, and insofar as you want to continue to pursue similar
ideas you run the risk of getting sued since you've sold the IP.

So, its certainly possible for the market to 'correct' you out of existence,
even if you have the deepest will to keep going and are willing to sacrifice
almost anything to do so. The best thing you can do at this point is to move
on and try to leverage what you've learned or the networks you've built into
something you're similarly interested in.

------
dang
Previous threads for the curious:

2015
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10009262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10009262)

2009
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163)

2007
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48294)

------
JesseAldridge
It should be stated that the flip side of not giving up is incurring the
massive opportunity cost of years of lost compensation. That can easily be
over a million dollars for a good software engineer.

If you're a genius, then sure, not giving up makes a lot of sense. But if
you're just _pretty smart_ , you better think two, three, or four times before
committing to do a startup. It's really easy to end up over thirty and broke.

------
MetalGuru
The biggest issue with the article is clearly correlation vs. causation. He
admits to it. I think this advice can be dangerous for someone sacrificing a
great deal for a startup that has a extremely low probability of success
because “PG says I’ll be a millionaire as long as I just don’t let my startup
die”

~~~
cdelsolar
I mean, pivoting is a thing, it doesn't mean you gave up.

------
throwaway35784
> If you can just avoid dying, you get rich.

Or end up a zombie startup. I'm not buying this stuff. It sounds more like an
exploration of what works than a recommendation. Signs of success rather than
suggestions for how to succeed.

> keep typing

Telling you about our progress leads to success? I believe you have your cause
and effect out of order.

> 90% of those who get into Newsweek would survive.

Source? I see no evidence to support this is the survival factor. Why did
those who got into Newsweek get there? It's comorbidity at best.

------
jpincheira
I love this. I have read it a few times in the last years. This and Never Quit
If [1] from Jason Lemkin have been essential for me to keep pursuing and never
stop building my startup [2].

[1] [https://www.saastr.com/never-quit-if/](https://www.saastr.com/never-quit-
if/)

[2] [https://standups.io](https://standups.io)

------
excalibur
> When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to
> interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down
> an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to
> stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the
> grim reaper.

This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of _Silicon Valley_.

~~~
bumblebee4
As an investor, won't you pull this move just to get better conditions? The
founders are fixated on closing the deal so they will put up with almost any
condition that you throw at them?

~~~
excalibur
The investors in the series would.

------
Bostonian
'Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other
things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going
to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble.'

Since many start-up ideas are bad ones, it often will be rational for start-up
founders to quit and do other things.

~~~
ErikAugust
I don't know. Ideas are overrated.

If the startup is able to execute on building things of unique value, I don't
necessarily think it is rational to stop.

So often however, the startups don't build anything unique, and many don't
seem to build anything at all.

~~~
buzzkillington
>I don't know. Ideas are overrated.

A good idea doesn't mean you won't fail. A bad idea does mean you will fail.

~~~
ErikAugust
I still don't even believe that. A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset
of value, is okay. You can move your asset to a more viable market. That is
what a real pivot is. Pivoting is not "we have nothing but an idea, so we
change our idea."

~~~
badestrand
> A bad idea, as long as it produces an asset of value, is okay. You can move
> your asset to a more viable market.

Sorry but it sounds to me that you are not speaking from experience but just
from reading many "startup culture" posts. In reality there just are many
startups that have ideas and build products that never get to profitability.
Most even have users that love the product but that doesn't help you if you
can't get enough money.

And ideas matter a lot. Some are just almost impossible to execute to
profitability while others are a relatively easy win. I have seen both and no,
you can not just "move the asset to a more viable market".

~~~
ErikAugust
Do you care to share what makes an idea matter? Do you have a framework?

Is Uber a bad idea, given it is not profitable?

Feel free to share your experience, since you are implying you have any.

------
pixelmonkey
I wrote a 2012 reflection on this post, "Why Startups Die", that I think still
holds up:

[https://amontalenti.com/2012/10/03/why-startups-
die](https://amontalenti.com/2012/10/03/why-startups-die)

~~~
ErikAugust
Any tips, strategies, ideas you have behind the "Bootstrapping Plan"?

I am personally trying to balance Paul's advice of "the number one thing not
to do is other things" with being able to bootstrap for an indefinite period
of time.

~~~
pixelmonkey
I wrote a little about how I bootstrapped for a couple years via tech
consulting projects here:

[https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-
hear...](https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-heart)

It wasn't easy, but it was necessary for me to get over the "rent and health
insurance hump". I do agree that it's hard to reconcile
bootstrapping/consulting with pg's advice to "not do other things".

My main advice is: make sure consulting (or whatever "auxiliary income source"
you are spending time on) is a means-to-an-end for you, and that it doesn't
become the main thing. And also make sure to carve out time to actually work
on the startup daily -- whether that's early mornings, "lunch breaks", or late
nights. (In my case, it was all 3 :-) ...)

Avoid the easy way out. During my multi-year consulting/bootstrapping journey,
I got a lot of offers to join other startups or take on big consulting
clients. But I knew that wasn't what I wanted, however tempting. Ultimately, I
had to turn down lucrative short-term gain for taking a stipend salary on my
startup when it finally landed seed funding. Pulling the trigger on that was
tough, but worth it, in retrospect. This was only possible because I had
already mentally convinced myself that consulting/bootstrapping revenue was a
means-to-the-end for the startup.

But yeah, life is messy, and we aren't all in the privileged position of being
able to work without income for months or years on end, which unfortunately is
often the vantage point taken by some of our "wise startup elders".

One small piece of practical advice based on some mistakes I saw other
founders make: don't use debt.

~~~
ErikAugust
Thank you for the comment, and both pieces are great. You even answered my
question directly - way back in 2011!

"If I hadn’t worked on my consulting projects last year, Parse.ly would have
died. PERIOD. PG is often right, but he’s wrong on this one. I agree that
startups require your undivided attention. But surviving isn’t a compromise —
it’s a necessity. Do it however you possibly can."

------
nexuist
>A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups. There is now a
whole neighborhood of them in San Francisco. If you move there, the peer
pressure that made you work harder all summer will continue to operate.

Funny how much that single sentence changed what life was like on the West
Coast. Now we are witnessing mini-Valleys springing up in other cities
desperate to replicate what San Francisco did for startups.

~~~
compiler-guy
There have been mini Silicon Valley attempts for much longer than there has
been a ycombinator. If this sentence changed anything, it is something very
small.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers)

Scroll down to "Places with 'Silicon' names"

------
mschuster91
From the part about Octopart:

> The distributors want to prevent the transparency that comes from having
> prices online.

Some manufacturers are worse, they don't publish datasheets (looking at you,
Intel VDSL chipset department, laptop keyboard manufacturers, Broadcom). It's
almost as if there are companies that want to lock out anyone not a multi-
million company to tinker with their products...

------
SandroG
How prophetic. This was written just before the Great Recession of 2008.

------
consultutah
So did the Octopart guys ever become billionaires?

~~~
tpmx
I feel like I can share this particular piece of gossip - hopefully it's
useful to someone - I'm not particularly interested in going after this
particular slice of business:

So we just had a sales guy join from a large electronics components
distributor - the kind that handles the interfaces between

a) globally known consumer hardware brands both in "the west" and in PRC

b) the hardware manufacturers (mostly PRC, some TW)

c) the component manufacturers (mixed)

I had been assuming they had been running some super sophisticated globally
integrated software system. I was really curious about how this stuff actually
worked, in real life. It turns out it's just excel sheets and phone-calls in
the end. They are working to introduce ERP systems, but..no.

This seems like something that's ripe for a software-based revolution.

~~~
jpindar
This. So much this. The whole electronics manufacturing industry runs on Excel
sheets. Every BOM, inventory list etc. is in Excel. Because that's what your
manager knows how to use, because that's what their managers knew how to use,
and so on.

It came with Windows so that's that, they can't be bothered to try anything
else. Not even after mangled sheets cause repeated mistakes.

I would so love to work on something like this, but when people won't even use
a free solution suggested by one of their trusted employees, selling one will
be tough.

~~~
hef19898
I am starting a bootstrapped business along the lines now. My take is that
sellzong a solution won't work. You have to compete with Excel, and all the
reasons you just stated, and SAP (or any other ERP-System they might use if
any). Selling a service is different story so. If you can show them that you
as a subcontractor, in my case as a 4PL, can deliver better performance or
solve some of their pain points you can use whatever solutions you want. And
being more efficient and software-heavy only helps you.

All you have to do is give them their data in the se excel sheets they are
used to. Preferably by e-mail, portals and such are the devil.

~~~
jpindar
BOMs as a service! I like it, but I'm not quite sure how it would work. A lot
of the errors that creep into these documents are things only someone very
familiar with the company and the product design would spot. You'd almost have
to be onsite.

~~~
hef19898
Ah, I won't touch BOMs or production for the time being! More the logistics
side of things. But I remember a discussion I had back the day regarding
config management and BOMs. And yeah, there definitely is a market for good
BOM / Config Management solution as a service. The trick would be to figure
out which BOM to use so. But especially in the aerospace and defense sector
there should he money to be made.

------
mcguire
"Don't take advice from the successful; they might just be lucky."

    
    
      -- anon

------
tabtab
I can build a flowchart out of this article, but realized it has no end: it's
an infinite loop. There has to be a point where you give up after get-user-
feedback-tweak-and-try-again happens too many times. It's almost like a
genetic algorithm where somebody forgot to put an upper limit on the
regeneration loop count.

Sure, tweak-and-try-again can keep going on until you _eventually_ stumble on
the right formula, since you'll eventually exhaust all possible related ideas,
but it may be 2 years or 2 centuries until you hit it.

Somebody may have to put a time limit on how long they'll try. For example,
"I'll try for 4 years, and if nothing looks viable after 4 years, I'll get a
real job or go to grad school."

------
elmar
Personally I Think Paul Graham is very under appreciated, his legacy on the
Startup ecosystem and zeitgeist will probably only be recognised many years on
the future. It's a great pity that he doesn't write these wonderful essays for
some time now.

~~~
Riley
Read his book, Hackers and Painters. I don't think he's under appreciated. He
was way ahead of the curve. And deserves to be happy with his family, or
change the world some more..

------
azinman2
> “In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition
> of success is that the founders get rich.“

Does this not appear to be really terrible to others? That the metric of
success is just founders getting rich? At minimum, what about employees? But
really, shouldn’t we be aiming higher where the companies are creating useful
impact on the world and improving it?

I understand he’s saying this as a contrast to the investors getting rich, but
this train of thought and the people chasing it is what has caused SF to lose
its soul IMHO.

~~~
cyborgx7
You noticed how evil that sentence is, same as me. And you are getting
downvoted, also like me. Start-up culture has no soul. They think having soul
is a weakness. They are interested in getting rich, and nothing else. It's an
empty, greedy culture.

~~~
azinman2
Thank you. I was surprised at my downvotes with no comments, reread what I
wrote, and still agree with it. Sad that apparently this isn’t a common
sentiment. Life is about so much more than just money, and given we have such
a limited time on earth, we should strive to have some positive impact on the
world.

------
JoeMayoBot
Sounds more inspirational than literal. He sets the scene as the last Y
Combinator dinner of the Summer. Folks are probably taking the evening to
relax and something too serious wouldn't fit the mood. Just reading this, I
can see the humor, yet appreciate good advice cleverly mixed in to share a few
meaningful tips.

------
mapcars
>founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of
getting millions of dollars

Oh that's not the best factor to look for, as one can go beyond the fear of
failure and this won't work anymore.

------
sdoken123
This article seems to contradict the advice given in the other too trending
hacker news article right now which says: “Makers, don’t let yourself be
forced into the ‘Manager Schedule’“ no?

------
haskellandchill
Hm I was looking for some more practical advice on avoiding death.

------
pragmatic
Why did they add the terrible "read more" garbage?

Et tu PG?

------
ncmncm
Graham essays are, as a rule, good. But for each mention of Lisp, they are
half as good. Half as good can still be pretty good, but one mentioned Lisp
more than two dozen times. There was very little good left.

This one doesn't mention Lisp at all. It's pretty good.

------
agumonkey
fascinated by how much of this is emotional :

\- don't invent excuses

\- don't lose faith

\- talk to others a lot

\- keep making them happy

------
IGotThroughIt
_Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!_

My most important takeaway.

------
streetcat1
The logical rule is quite simple:

1\. Bootstrap 2\. Reach cash flow positive asap.

------
lamubanao
that depends on your luck to be honest, although I think it's not true in any
way but you can always think like that and you will have a better life

------
perfunctory
> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y
> Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad
> than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get
> millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public
> and humiliating.

Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the
fear of loosing something. I guess if people read Bertrand Russell [0] instead
of Paul Graham, the world would be a better place.

[0] [http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

~~~
burtonator
Commitment device... they're really interesting but they can also cause you to
do stupid things.

One example of a commitment device is to tell your friend something like "I'm
going to write a book and get it published in six months and if I don't I'll
give you $5k"

... the problem is, what if you legitimately decide that writing a book is
just not for you?

~~~
samatman
$5k is a high strike price, but this is the point of a commitment device.

By putting a cost on failure, you can sort between "I genuinely no longer want
to do this" and "I'm getting akrasia because doing things is hard and quitting
is easy".

If you've made the cost of walking away higher than the expected value of the
commitment (five grand would be a lot of money to make on many books), you
should have some strong, intrinsic reason for it.

~~~
philwelch
Thanks for introducing me to the word “akrasia”!

~~~
kian
Read "Breakdown of Will" by George Ainslie, if this is your first introduction
to that word.

------
ronilan
_Everybody dies, Sally. The thing is, to die well._

------
Etheryte
Could use a (2007) in the title. Previous discussion with the most comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769163)

------
briffle
I know Paul Graham's legendary status, but someone needs to sit with him for
30 min, and get letsencrypt deployed to his webiste.

~~~
mercora
Maybe invest some more time and fix the already present TLS setup by bringing
it up to the current state of the art. If you try to connect via HTTPS Firefox
stops me from proceeding with a warning about not being able to negotiate a
common cipher (SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP).

------
uptownfunk
Epic post, love it.

------
cyborgx7
>because our definition of success is that the founders get rich

The entire start-up industry is a get-rich-quick scheme and a cancer on
society.

------
markstos
Since Paul Graham is a vegetarian, I presumed the title was referring to a
review of the book "How Not to Die".
[https://nutritionfacts.org/book/](https://nutritionfacts.org/book/)

~~~
jacquesm
Funny, I've invested in a start-up that makes food packs based on that book.
They're doing _very_ well, can just about manage their growth.

~~~
markstos
Link?

