Yes. I told him the following in person earlier tonight, at the last YCS10 dinner, and I think it's the consensus among the other founders I've talked to from our batch.
For the first month of Y Combinator, Paul Graham will tear you and your startup apart on a weekly basis (when you meet with him during office hours). If you're doing your job as a founder, though, you are the world expert in your particular field. So there should be times when you are right, and he's wrong, and you know that this is the case because of specific domain knowledge. There may even be times when you try to explain this to him and are unable to communicate it successfully.
However! There are also times when you think you have a problem specific to your startup that is actually a problem most startups have. In this case, PG is the domain expert, and you should probably listen to him.
The hard thing to do, obviously, is to distinguish the two cases. I have some thoughts on that, too, but they basically boil down to "you should appropriately mix cautious thought with bullheaded stubbornness", and you already knew that if you read anything anyone wrote about startups ever.
Edit: Didn't mean to speak for the rest of the founders. Feel free to disagree.
This doesn't quite qualify as ignoring, but I think it matches the spirit of the question: I wouldn't be running Tarsnap now if Paul Graham hadn't listed "Single Founder" as the #1 mistake that kills startups. Having read that, I decided I was going to prove him wrong, damnit.
I don't particularly like CSS, but I do use it. I believe in separation of content and presentation, though, so I want the page to be readable without CSS. While the page is somewhat ugly, I think the minimalism suits the service.
That said, if someone sends me a redesigned page, I'll certainly look at it. :-)
It just goes to show that a pretty landing page is not all that necessary. Functionality and usefulness are more important than web 2.0 glitz and glamor. You think tarsnap's website is ugly now? You should have seen it at the beginning.
I wish more HN startups would realize that. Almost all of the 'review my startup' posts are just a single page with an email signup form you fill out to be notified when the app will be ready.
To be fair, at the beginning it didn't claim to be a website -- it just said "there will be a website here later, meanwhile go read these blog posts about tarsnap".
I went to the site to see what you meant, and figured initially I had gone to the wrong site, because I saw some modern-looking thing with floating divs and whatnot. ;-) When you implied it was pretty old-school I was expecting the design to look like, say, this: http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/
I like Tarsnap's design. It's easy to tell what's going on and there's no eye-candy to get in the way. The lack of design is old-school in a pleasing way.
Likewise, though I haven't "got away with it", because I haven't succeeded yet. But I'll show him, oh yes. And then he'll have to amend his advice to "no single founders unless they're really awesome".
Great to hear! Reading PG got me convinced I can't run a successful startup on my own. I was gonna try doing it anyway, but I would've been expecting to fail from the start.
While I'm happy to run a startup as a single founder myself - I think I'd prefer to invest in teams too. A team already has something to match your investment (the team itself).
Also, I wonder if its not more difficult to judge which single founders will be successful, and easier to judge when it is a small team.
So I think treat this rule as investment advice, but if you're confident of running your own startup, trust yourself rather than PG's advice.
That is an interesting piece of advice. Credit yourself in areas that you are capable but be humble to recognize your weaknesses, and you'll have a clearer picture of whether you can make it on your own.
In the words of Sun Tzu, "If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles."
Paul Graham is not some magic oracle. He's a statistician who has seen, experienced and analyzed (formally and informally) a lot of very rich data. To ignore him and get away with it you either have to be an outlier in his model or the kind of person who would never appear in his model to begin with.
He mainly sees YC applicants and there may be a selection bias among them. Entirely possible that there is a really great trait among founders that makes them unlikely to apply to YC and likely to succeed without his advice.
Well normally at YC dinners he goes into his yurt and swallows a lot of peyote, and then he comes out talking in tongues and we all write down what he's saying and try to figure out how to proceed.
Or his model is wrong. So many folks assume, since they succeeded, they are responsible for that success. Market conditions, accidental sales, and Brownian motion may in fact be more important.
Even considering YC companies, who's to say how many would have succeeded anyway? There's no control, so no experiment.
Even considering YC companies, who's to say how many would have succeeded anyway? There's no control, so no experiment.
I guess you could look at rejected applicants as a sort of control group (not perfect though)? How many of those have gone on to be a success (I have no idea)?
Assuming that PG is not a complete idiot and can identify obvious skill and/or obvious product home runs, thus removing them from the "rejected" list, your control group isn't very accurate.
Ignoring Paul Graham is a bad idea because PG is extremely sharp, reasonable, and has a keen grasp of where his expertise lies. If he says something I disagree with, I'll happily engage in a discussion until we've laid out all our facts and ideas and found an optimal path. Provided a reasonable argument, PG will readily take your word. If you can't provide a reasonable argument to contradict PG, well, that's a good sign that you at least need to think about the problem some more.
I co-founded a games studio. Paul doesn't have experience in the games space. The "worst" outcome of a meeting with PG has been that he's given me an important new perspective, even if he isn't able to come up with specific prescriptive advice. His ideas and perspectives are hugely valuable. Not once has he stepped on our toes.
The key here is that startups receive tons of conflicting advice from all angles and discovering how to process this advice is crucial. Paul trusts that founders can decide for themselves whether his advice is, at face-value, good.
If you don't want/need investment money, you're ignoring him in a passive way. It's a side effect of another decision/fact. Everyone can list examples of not caring about something pg wrote/said, because it doesn't apply to him. This post is asking for instances where people actively move counter to his advice.
PG advices people to get funds from VCs and whatnot. Actually he doesn't do it explicitly, he just sort of assumes it's the only thing to do; it's the default thing to do! In pretty much the same way that the rest of the world (and many of our parents/family/friends) assume that getting a job is the only option we have after finishing college.
By not applying to YC, you're saying that you can bootstrap yourself.
Yes, I do. Because I do value enjoyable or thought-provoking articles, but do not really care who wrote them. So whenever there is name-dropping involved, I get wary and usually avoid clicking because I fear it is "empty celebrity worship".
Hero worship aside Mr. Graham is good at what he does; distilling an idea until that potent cocktail is finally derived. This process in itself is something far more important than having an idea in the first place, and in order to truly work with someone like Mr. Graham you need to teach yourself to be ego-less.
It is my ego that says to me; 'no that can't be true at all. He's wrong!' without considering the facts. It's my ego that causes teenage defiance for the sake of defiance. It's quite true that he will be wrong some times, but what is undeniable is the fact that you gain more out of it by simply listening to him.
So, what if he is wrong and you know that you're right? Listen to what he has to say and try to understand why he raised that objection. Perhaps, there's a gem hidden beyond the surface. If something comes up then you've gained something out of it. Otherwise, you can always wait for your turn, reflect, and then grill him on things and try to make him understand your point of view.
This is something really hard to do, but if I was lucky enough to have pg as a mentor, then I think that it would be wiser to work with him. Rather than against him.
Note: I've noticed that this holds true for everybody in virtually any situation, be it Mr. Graham distilling your startup. Or a disagreement with your neighbor next door.
"So, what if he is wrong and you know that you're right? Listen to what he has to say and try to understand why he raised that objection. Perhaps, there's a gem hidden beyond the surface."
For the first month of Y Combinator, Paul Graham will tear you and your startup apart on a weekly basis (when you meet with him during office hours). If you're doing your job as a founder, though, you are the world expert in your particular field. So there should be times when you are right, and he's wrong, and you know that this is the case because of specific domain knowledge. There may even be times when you try to explain this to him and are unable to communicate it successfully.
However! There are also times when you think you have a problem specific to your startup that is actually a problem most startups have. In this case, PG is the domain expert, and you should probably listen to him.
The hard thing to do, obviously, is to distinguish the two cases. I have some thoughts on that, too, but they basically boil down to "you should appropriately mix cautious thought with bullheaded stubbornness", and you already knew that if you read anything anyone wrote about startups ever.
Edit: Didn't mean to speak for the rest of the founders. Feel free to disagree.