> Never explain yourself to people who misunderstand you on the internet. They'll just use it as an excuse to misunderstand you again, which is worse because not only are you a terrible monster who said those terrible things, but now you've had the unmitigated gall to defend those terrible things.
This has been the exact opposite of my experience. Usually when I approach people directly and in a forthright manner and try and correct and clarify (and of course, apologize if my position offends and offer to listen to a counter-argument) then people seem to positively adjust their opinion of me.
I can't help but feel like your advice smacks of elitism. When I read your post I get a subtext of, "Everyone else is dumb if they don't get what I'm saying. At best, that is! Usually they're trying to shoot me down! I don't negotiate with terrorists."
I'm not sure how I could wake up every morning if I felt that way.
The Internet is filled with every type of person with many different motivations. Many of those people have a different motivation than "understanding" you. They are people that get social currency from signaling that they are anti-racist, they are people that monetize outrage, they are people for who arguing is a bloodsport, they are self-avowed trolls. Why bother? The people who make the attempt to understand you will treat what you say charitably, they are self-selecting. The rest you can ignore.
Well, recent events suggest that unfortunately there is a grain of truth to that assessment.
A lot of the noise in blogs and twitter has been along the lines of "PG is an evil monster who hates women and foreigners and people of color and doesn't ever want to invest in their companies". None of which he said or implied, but that doesn't seem to have stopped the attacks.
> "PG is an evil monster who hates women and foreigners and people of color and doesn't ever want to invest in their companies".
There are long-standing complaints with the structure and the predatory nature of YCombinator. It is very unusual and complaints center around how HN is essentially a very high-pressure situation designed to try and sell kids on the value of PG & YComb as investors on very small funding events.
Personally, I don't think this article really justifies the behavior that has been consistently (if not as high-profile) that PG has had. His reported castigation and refusal to see people who have Indian accents is troublesome. It's very difficult to take his claims seriously when he affects fake russian accents while proclaiming his innocence.
There's no question that YC has benefited greatly from PG's "propaganda" - and vice-versa. (That is, the success and growth of YC has given PG a lot more tangible stuff to write about, as opposed to 'thought experiments'.)
I'm far from an insider so I can't speak to whether a person or team should go for YC funding or not. Or whether the system is biased against people with Indian accents (your comment is the first I've heard of that, actually).
Clearly, a team with potential success ahead of them ought to consider their options carefully and see whether applying to YC is right for them. And, if they get in, whether doing the program is the most valuable use of their next few months. A founding team needs to look beyond the hype and headlines and determine what the best deal is - but that's hardly YC's fault if they present themselves in the best possible light.
> Clearly, a team with potential success ahead of them ought to consider their options carefully and see whether applying to YC is right for them.
It seems like this step is precisely what the YCombinator process is meant to complicate. The entire structure is designed to make it feel like a competition for PG's attention. By structuring it this way, it makes it much more likely that the people who "win the competition" will say yes to YComb.
And YComb moves fast! People tell me there isn't a lot of time to think. Implicit in YComb's structure is the statement, "There are a dozen people in line behind you that will take your place." It's all very American Idol.
It seems like this step is precisely what the YCombinator process is meant to complicate. The entire structure is designed to make it feel like a competition for PG's attention. By structuring it this way, it makes it much more likely that the people who "win the competition" will say yes to YComb.
I suspect that vibe emerges from the scaling aspect of things - if a regular VC firm invests in N deals a year and YC does 10N [], then there is no need to 'create' a competition for the attention of PG and the other principals. It will just emerge out of the large number of portfolio companies. (And this is not unique to YC, but may be exaggerated - VC firms are notoriously busy for the same reason.)
And YComb moves fast! People tell me there isn't a lot of time to think. Implicit in YComb's structure is the statement, "There are a dozen people in line behind you that will take your place." It's all very American Idol.*
Again, this sounds like a scaling issue. If you're investing in fewer companies, you can spend more time hand holding with the teams of each one. HUman attention is the thing that doesn't scale, so it makes sense that it is the thing in short supply.
It sounds to me like teams need to precompute their responses to lots of possible situations. And get as much information about the downside of participating as possible, beyond the headlines and the hype. But this is the kind of suggestion that I'd give anybody considering YC (or a job, or the military, or a college, or a grad school, or a training program).
[*] I don't know if these numbers are accurate, but the point is that YC is well known to do many more, smaller deals than VC firms.
> Again, this sounds like a scaling issue. If you're investing in fewer companies, you can spend more time hand holding with the teams of each one. HUman attention is the thing that doesn't scale, so it makes sense that it is the thing in short supply.
Isn't human coaching the primary asset that YComb offers though? It's certainly not money, HN seed rounds are not exceptionally large, and they aren't unusually early.
There are long-standing complaints with the structure and the predatory nature of YCombinator.
It seems like a "good deed never goes unpunished"-type situation. YC partners are both independently wealthy and brilliant. They could choose to do anything they wanted with their time, or nothing at all, and they'd still be fine. Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies. Men, women, foreigners, everybody. The selection process for getting into YC is the most open you'd ever find anywhere. The paperwork is open-source for heaven's sakes! Could you suggest a couple of things they could do to make the process less "predatory"?
> Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies.
You know, most of the good venture capital firms and angels who enter in on seed rounds do this.
> Instead, they chose to dedicate themselves to coaching people and sharing their expertise to teach people to build companies. Men, women, foreigners, everybody.
I'd love to know the ratio of male founders who apply to the number that get funded vs. the ratio of female ones. Did PG publish this data?
> Could you suggest a couple of things they could do to make the process less "predatory"?
Not structure it like American Idol, for starters. With the possible exception of pre-everyone-goes-on-summer-vactation, most agencies don't structure their funding around some kind of audition structure. They make appointments and develop leads as they see fit, trying to talk to companies when they're actually read to do funding.
Of course, many venture firms out there are sleazy and lots of people are working on ideas that won't interest the top tier firms. But personally I've always felt like everything about the YComb process was design to fool young Stanford undergrads into taking what, honestly, is a kinda mediocre funding deal unless YComb is basically the biggest value-add ever.
> I can't help but feel like your advice smacks of elitism. When I read your post I get a subtext of, "Everyone else is dumb if they don't get what I'm saying. At best, that is! Usually they're trying to shoot me down! I don't negotiate with terrorists."
I don't think it was meant to be elitist. I believe it was directed towards those who are going to find a problem with anything you say, regardless of what you say.
I am elitist against people who judge ideas on the scale of which one is most politically correct.
I don't understand how they get anything done in life without giving their brain room to think. For example, a founder having trouble raising funds could consider Paul Graham's advice on accents and see if it applies to him, but not if he censors his own mind to avoid it.
That is not what's at play here. There is a systemic problem in Silicon Valley and San Francisco in startup culture. Berating founders for their accent publicly (as has been reported) is an excellent example of the problem.
That is not polite, cordial conversation between equals. That is not the behavior of two equals talking business. It's not acceptable behavior in a civilized venue. This is not because it's "politically correct," but rather because of the profound implications of antagonizing someone for what they are and where they were born.
PG is in the business of giving business advice and teaching startups how to grow and prosper in the world as it exists. He has stated that he writes publicly in order to scale the process of giving advice. By putting it online, it is precisely where founders who most need the advice are most likely to find it.
It makes you upset that PG is giving this advice. But if it is true advice, then founders will be better off for hearing it, regardless of your feelings.
It is easier for founders to modify their behavior than it is to teach all the VCs of the valley to understand lots of accents, so PG's advice passes the sanity check even though we may wish the contrary were true.
> PG is in the business of giving business advice and teaching startups how to grow and prosper in the world as it exists.
Quite untrue. PG is in the business of giving very small seed rounds to mostly small, low-effort consumer plays in the web and mobile space. He does fund things that do not meet these criterion, but they are in a notable minority.
His writing and website and other aspects are part of his overall plan to engage with the tech community. This is the added value (beyond cash, of which everyone's int he same) he proposes to add as an investor. Have you ever done YComb or gotten seed/A-round funding before? You know how this works, right.
> But if it is true advice, then founders will be better off for hearing it, regardless of your feelings.
It is clearly true that PG will be less likely to fund you if you were not born in the parts of the world he is familiar with, consequently speaking the language and dialects that he is comfortable with. His arguments that only western-sounding people succeed in the world of tech business is absurd (and poorly sourced).
> It is easier for founders to modify their behavior than it is to teach all the VCs of the valley to understand lots of accents, so PG's advice passes the sanity check even though we may wish the contrary were true.
Yeah dude, I just made walked into the doors of basically every top tier VC in the Valley, sat down, gave a presentation, then left. I heard people prepping for presentations with thick accents in nearly every office. I'm pretty sure it is "okay" to be not born in the US.
Especially since it's entirely possible to, you know, employ someone to help you with this part if your English skills aren't up where you need them to be.
So I am not only upset that PG is mockingly affecting accents to tell people what not to do, but I'm upset that these are his criterion. I'm a bit upset because this diminishes the slowly tarnishing image I have of my former Lisp idol, and because the Valley has a systemic problem with women and certain ethnicities.
This is another example of that coming into play, and I'm mad because the engineering part of my head demands I try and fix it if it bothers me. But I can think of no solutions that don't involve putting people who say things like this in a shock collar. So now I am more upset because my irrational and pervasive desire to fix things is thwarted by brute feasibility.
Pg is the equal of very few of the people with whom he does business. He has more money, power, knowledge and experience than almost anyone he deals with on a regular basis. YC applicants are not equals, they are supplicants. His equals are VCs, super angels and C-suite executives from big software companies. People who are not equals can have mutually beneficial relationships, but treating rhetoric about people being equal in dignity or legal rights with an accurate description of the world is a mistake.
> People who are not equals can have mutually beneficial relationships, but treating rhetoric about people being equal in dignity or legal rights with an accurate description of the world is a mistake.
Except that PG's continued fortune is dependent upon the success of these "supplicants" approaching his business for money. And if he does his job well, the winners will become his equals. So... yeah. Unwise to play the "I am better because economics!" card.
Certainly, PG is not the equal of most of these people in engineering ability. He's so far out of the game that it'd take him 1-3 years just to update his vocabulary.
This has been the exact opposite of my experience. Usually when I approach people directly and in a forthright manner and try and correct and clarify (and of course, apologize if my position offends and offer to listen to a counter-argument) then people seem to positively adjust their opinion of me.
I can't help but feel like your advice smacks of elitism. When I read your post I get a subtext of, "Everyone else is dumb if they don't get what I'm saying. At best, that is! Usually they're trying to shoot me down! I don't negotiate with terrorists."
I'm not sure how I could wake up every morning if I felt that way.