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Graham does it again: Why not to start a startup

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urlwolf:
http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html

As always, some amazing bits here:
To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It's a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards, that's something that's changing pretty rapidly.

We may be seeing another such change right now. I've read a lot of economic history, and I understand the startup world pretty well, and it now seems to me fairly likely that we're seeing the beginning of a change like the one from farming to manufacturing.

(...)

That's ultimately what drives us to work on Y Combinator. We want to make money, if only so we don't have to stop doing it, but that's not the main goal. There have only been a handful of these great economic shifts in human history. It would be an amazing hack to make one happen faster.


--- End quote ---

This hacker mentality is really impressive. Hackers can take the role of contemporary 'greek tragedy heros' if one thinks of them that way. They make things out of thin air, like magicians and gods. And they are even morally outstanding, since they do it not for money but for some internal motivation of improving their lives and those of the people around them.

mouser:
I'm not a business person, I don't have the apptitude for it, but my real fear about these things, which is completely absent in paul's article, is the role that having well-positioned contacts/friends plays, and the importance of being chummy with heavily networked people.

It is my sincere fear that if you looked at the startups that "succeed", you might find less of a correlation with the quality of the product, than with the quality of the networked connections the founders have established.  It's a hugely scary idea, and i could be wrong, but it's what keeps me depressed about this business.  :(

Regardless, Paul Graham is one of the best writers about this stuff on the planet, and always worth reading.

Nighted:
Actually, a lot of "criminals" are farmers! ;)

pro3carp3:
Farming IS a job.

mouser:
Not only is Farming a job, but Farming may have been the original Start Up.

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