It makes me wince for HN to see so many people upvoting the parent. It's not just the meanness of it; it's that it's both mean and wrong. Surely at this point everyone is at least familiar with the strategy of launching something minimal and then expanding it. And yet here is a startup doing exactly the right thing, and they have a mob jeering at them.
Part of the difficulty is convincing a strongly technical crowd that companies and products live or die for reasons other than technology.
Unless they're solving crazy hard problems, a lot of engineering types are just going to be underwhelmed. Add in a lot of early success and that quickly turns to cynicism and frustration.
"... Part of the difficulty is convincing a strongly technical crowd that companies and products live or die for reasons other than technology. ..."
That is a really good point but part of the entrepreneur bit is unlearning to a degree - tempering if you like - and thinking how can I convert technology into something users want. I see ample evidence of pure technologists viewing ideas without this frame of mind. Entrepreneurship is the union of the hacker mindset of building things and an eye on the business of selling - "make things that people want ... and will buy".
Speaking as one of the technical crowd, it is hard to adjust to the fact that all of your skills put together contributes only a few percent to the success of a product.
It is obviously true, but it still takes a while getting used to :)
Oh I agree and it's my reaction too, "yeah but what problem are they solving? how are they doing it?"
That's the extent of my evaluation. And that's also why I'm not an entrepreneur. :)
There's a definite mismatch between the valuation function I (and a lot of us, I think) use and what the market uses which is addressed by the YC's of the world.
But the bottom line is I don't think pg should misconstrue the confusion (and sometimes frustration) as malice.
Even if we immediately see how wrong the feature comment is, it's still likely many of us won't come up with anything as useful as Rapportive's "gmail feature". That's the real kicker.
I fell in love with Rapportive the moment I installed it, but probably because I'm a regular blogger and glutton for info about people.
I had no idea it had 10k users in 24 hours, that's Facebook like numbers.
What I'm most surprised at is that they went into YCombinator after such amazing traction and gave up equity for such a small cash offering. The could have had any angel round they wanted with that type of fire. That's a big compliment to YC, but a strange business move for a new company.
The question is whether the connections to investors and the advice is worth it, not whether the investment itself is worth it. In most cases, it's probably a resounding yes.
This is the second or third time I've something like that. First time was from Mark Suster who said the best way to raise an angel round is to get a few key angels on board with a great deal 2% for 10k, then have a larger angel round afterwards using social proof to get introductions to more potential investors.
Do you think the YC brand increases your valuation for subsequent funding and/or exit price by 6% or more? I do. That alone makes it a wash. The investor intros, mentorship, cash, free PR, free legal stuff, etc., is all gravy.
I somewhat agree - but when we're talking about minimal people usually mean a minimal feature set on a clearly much bigger product. It's hard to imagine a full product being built around this. I think what's also frustrating is for some is that it's hard to imagine anyone ever paying for this.
It is cool and useful though, so lets certainly not belittle that.
WTB a PG essay on how our angry and competitive culture results in people being mean and wrong about things they don't really know about, why it's a mindset to be assiduously avoided in favor of a pensive and open-minded one, and some prescriptions for doing that.
This problem seems to permeate our culture these days, from the Internet to politics to road rage. It seems to result from a combination of a highly competitive society that has adopted the trash talking mental games of sports and anger at the traffic/opposite sex/government/corporations/world/whatever people are angry about. Trash talking is fashionable and being mad is the new black.
The consequence is a crowding out of thoughtful, rational thinking about things, to the detriment of all of society. If anyone could give such a topic the treatment it deserves, it would be PG.
See part 8, and in particular the third paragraph:
http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html
It makes me wince for HN to see so many people upvoting the parent. It's not just the meanness of it; it's that it's both mean and wrong. Surely at this point everyone is at least familiar with the strategy of launching something minimal and then expanding it. And yet here is a startup doing exactly the right thing, and they have a mob jeering at them.