Why to Not Not Start a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html <comment><USER5> Great read, but the biggest things that stop me from starting a startup aren't really on your list.

It's a combination of factors, including (1) need for savings and planning for the [non-startup-rich] future, (2) supporting a girlfriend who refuses to live a grad student lifestyle, (3) expensive cost of living in the area I want to live.

I fully realize that most of those sound like excuses more than reasons, but there is definitely a huge chasm between investing money for retirement, buying decent furniture, being able to pay rent and utility bills, etc.; and throwing caution to the wind for a probable failure and extremely strenuous social, economic and physical ordeal.

So I think my answer to why more people don't start startups is rather simple: it's not easy to leap that chasm into poverty, seclusion and exhaustion for a glint of a chance at huge success.

Of course I'll continue hacking on my side projects and hoping my equity in the startup I'm working for affords me the opportunity to take a risk of my own in the near future.

<comment><USER6> I think this is the explanation for why YC gets hundreds and not thousands of applications.

Most hackers get jobs and generally make quite substantial income. Then they get comfortable with being able to provide for themselves well (and frequently a girlfriend or wife).

Even without kids there's a lot of commitment there. A 1 year lease on a nice apartment, a girlfriend/wife "accustomed" to living comfortably, car loan/insurance, etc.

Years of people doing this means that the highest potential founders have day jobs right now. For them paths to a startup are 1) Make a lifestyle change and go back to having little money. 2) Get sizable funding 3) Manage to pull off something in their spare time.

I think #2 and #3 are rarely successful, making #1 the most likely path to startup success for someone in this position.

Give up money, car, (nice) housing, girlfriend/wife(?), etc. to slave away with no life on a startup that will probably fail. Certainly seems like a good filter for determination, the most important attribute, the chances of success for these people must be higher.

I suppose YC figures that the potential for these people is not significantly high enough to justify the smaller number they could fund. Better to do 12 x $20k investments with 25% chance of success than 2 x $120k with a 50% chance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hypothesis: "I'd rather work on hard AI problems at Google than create a startup and bitch about how Safari is not rendering my site properly."

What do you think? I haven't tried either, but working on cool problems ought to be worth something. Most startup work seems rather mundane.

<comment><USER8> Other posters show an inability to engage in a sufficient level of abstraction. Original post is an interesting question that has nothing to do with AI, Google, or Safari.

The point is that at a startup (especially the two guys and a laptop variety) you do absolutely everything yourself, while at a big company you are supported by IT, QA, custodial services, etc, etc.

The interesting question is whether there exist jobs for which that support is worth the money and freedom one gives up working at the large company.

<comment><USER9> The Big problem with a Big company: Let's say you're working on a great project and you know what the next step should be to make the project even better. _But_ , management disagrees and pursues a direction that you know will diminish the value of the project. Your options are to suffer and watch your energy go to waste, quit and work for another company (repeat the above), or to start a start-up and do the job the way you know it needs to be done.

There has been nothing more stressful for me than having this scenario happen - I just can't stand by and watch my efforts go to waste. (The Big company context for me was in the Architecture world, but you can substitute any profession you like in the above scenario) The best stress-reduction decision I have ever made was to start my own company. It was very difficult financially at first, but it was _completely_ worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm only partly covered by this list. It's true that I don't really have an immediately viable potential cofounder, but it's also true that if I had one, I still don't think I would start a startup in the near future. My main problem is that I'm most interested in machine learning and robotics, and neither of those seem particularly friendly to starting a startup. (Alexa doesn't run on robots, so I can't bypass the need for revenue, and selling robots to people other than the government has so far been a fairly limited market.) Grad school is much more friendly that way, and that's what I'm planning to do at the moment.

This may change in the next few years, but it doesn't seem like robotics will ever be as low-capital an operation as the Web.

<comment><USER11> Grad school is more friendly only in the sense that you are not constrained to make things that people want.

<comment><USER12> Are you kidding me? You have to make things the people on your thesis committee want. There's only 4 of them, but you have to have 100% satisfaction.

<comment><USER13> That may be true, but you can work for 5+ years at a problem, fully supported by your university, without having to worry about pleasing anyone in the short term. There is no need to worry about releases or fickle customers. And in the end, success is virtually guaranteed. So I would have to agree that grad school is more "friendly" than starting a startup, where you have to start worrying about the viability of your work within a few months (at least in the YC model).

<comment><USER12> It's true that you don't have to prove yourself after the first semester of grad school, but there are many "release"-like hoops you have to jump through in those 5+ years. The main one is your thesis proposal. I also had to do a plan of study a couple years before that; nowadays, my school (Northeastern) instead makes you publish a paper (and you're encouraged to publish multiple papers). There's also all the things your advisor asks you to do as his research assistant, which isn't always directly connected to your thesis work.

Your adviser, committee members, and conference/journal reviewers are all "fickle customers". And these aren't customers who came to you because they want your product, these are more or less assigned to you and you're stuck with them (unless you change departments or schools). It's true that you get a stipend, but I'm not sure that counts as "full support". And while the drop- out rate is obviously lower than the startup failure rate, it's far from zero.

Still, I agree that grad school is less scary than a startup. But don't think it's not all about pleasing others, with many non-trivial deadlines and constraints.

<comment><USER13> Good points. I had some of them in the back of my mind, but I think that I was subconsciously trying to forget about all that :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Paul writes: "The big mystery to me is: why don't more people start startups? If nearly everyone who does it prefers it to a regular job, and a significant percentage get rich, why doesn't everyone want to do this?"

You have a logical disconnect here, involving the self-selecting nature of the group. One could just as easily say: most people who try bungee-jumping enjoy it - why doesn't everyone bungee jump?

</comment><comment><USER15> "It's exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift like the one from farming to manufacturing."

The biggest reason why startups are so much more feasible now than ever before is because of the plummeting costs of production. Whereas twenty years ago it would have taken millions of dollars to do a startup, today a college kid with a powerbook can do one in his dorm room. Every year the tools of production get exponentially more powerful and less expensive.

To play devil's advocate, these same factors that are currently driving startups may ultimately be their demise as well. Almost every tool can be used for both good and evil. A hammer can be used to drive a nail, or also to harm someone. Governments have taken it on themselves to try to allow the good uses of any given technology while regulating the evil purposes. The problem is that every time they try to regulate away an evil, there is inevitably a little spill over that prevents us from using the technology for good. Every time a powerful new technology is invented, we end up losing little bits of our rights and civil liberties.

As technologies exponentiate in both their power and interconnectedness, it seems as if society (at least ours) will go down the road of increasingly restricting freedoms in order to prevent terrorism and other evils.

It isn't hard to imagine that as the costs of production approach zero, so will the freedoms that enable us to start startups. In many countries, such as Japan and Germany, it is so hard to do anything other than the status quo that it is effectively illegal. In Germany the government subsidizes the wages of students finishing school, which makes it effectively impossible to get a job without graduating. And in Japan it's even worse.

If the past is any indicator, the same forces driving the boom in startups are ultimately going to be drivers in forcing people into more restrictive social structures.

N.B. I don't necessarily believe this, but I think it is a serious argument that has never really been rebutted. Perhaps because the guy who proposed the idea was driven insane by it is currently doing life in prison for killing a bunch of people (Kaczynksi).

<comment><USER13> It's a little discouraging, after considering PG's idea that we may be on the cusp of another production revolution, to consider some of the ideas that you put forward here. I do think, however, that you are right in saying that it is very hard to rebut the idea that you present.

I don't really think, though, that what you present are the precise beliefs of Kaczynski. In your comment, you seem to have the idea that decreasing costs of production (which is largely due to improvements in technology) is a good thing, while the decrease in freedom is the thing that is bad. It seems to me that anarcho-primitivists actually believe that technology itself is the bad thing, because it departs from the pure, hierarchy-less society of hunter- gatherers.

It is truly an interesting endeavor to consider where the boundary exists between what is good about where we are headed and what is bad. I think that all of us accept the idea that those who have greater drive and motivation to succeed should be rewarded for their efforts, and it's also hard to deny PG's contention that people now are living more luxurious lifestyles than kings of yesterday (heated houses year 'round). We may also argue that if people are content with their station in life (i.e. doing nothing to change it), then what is the problem?

On the other hand, I think that nearly all of us would agree that a situation like that in the Matrix would be a bad thing; even though the people believe they are living well, it is all a facade. Additionally, we are perfectly okay with improving the lives of friends and family members who have been less driven than we, presumably because we love them.

I guess if you consider the implications of that train of thought, if we loved humanity, we would be perfectly fine with sharing everything equally, regardless of the amount of work the individual does, and we thereby arrive back where we started, with hunter-gatherer cultures that have gift societies. We can even see evidence of this model working in the open source movement today.

I'm not really trying to make any points here, I'm just pointing out some interesting questions that your post (and my readings on Kaczynski) brought up in my mind which made me question what I had previously considered to be unquestionable truths. Perhaps it's not necessary for the entrepreneur's reward to be directly proportional to the amount of wealth the he or she has created, especially considering that with the current state of social stratification, opportunity is certainly not equal.

<comment><USER15> From the Unabomber Manifesto:

"technology exacerbates the effects of crowding because it puts increased disruptive powers in people's hands. For example, a variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios, motorcycles, etc. If the use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want peace and quiet are frustrated by the noise. If their use is restricted, people who use the devices are frustrated by the regulations... But if these machines had never been invented there would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them."

"It is a chronic complaint of small-business persons and entrepreneurs that their hands are tied by excessive government regulation. Some of these regulations are doubtless unnecessary, but for the most part government regulations are essential and inevitable parts of our extremely complex society."

I take it that what he is saying is that technology creates social complexity, both good and bad, which then inevitably leads to the loss of liberty. I know Bill Joy, who co-founded Sun, wrote a good article in Wired a while back about reconciling Kaczynski's ideas with Kurzweil's.

<comment><USER13> "But if these machines had never been invented there would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them."

That is the quote that stands out to me, and what it tells me is that he believes technology itself to be the bad thing, because it breeds the conflict and resulting regulations.

Regardless of this minor issue, I think that we are both thinking along the same lines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Excellent. The essay and talk together produced several surprises. The essay cleared up things things that the video obscured (couldn't see the visuals), like the "not-so-smart" / "enterprise software" connection (I was thinking he just meant the competition was dumb so you'd have the one-eyed man / land of the blind advantage).

The big surprise is that YC hasn't seen an order of magnitude increase in applicants from their first round. You'd think this impossible: Paul announced the first YC program only about a week before its deadline and they got something like 250 applications. Now they are all over the tech news and they still haven't cracked 1000? Maybe PG's new speaking approach (memorize, practice, use visuals) is an effort to get more people fired up?

Paul, regarding this new speaking style: you _could_ make yourself into a Steve Jobs dynamo of a speaker, but I think you shouldn't. Your usual wordsmith style is probably better for attracting nerds.

Question: Paul, it sounds like you've mostly swung in the direction of encouraging people to look at their own lives for problems to solve. Whereas in "Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas" you were saying the opposite, like in the two paragraphs starting with "Reading the Wall Street Journal for a week should give anyone ideas... " Trevor says something similar in the footnotes. But it looks like YC has been placing all its bets on the first sort of ideas. There's a good reason: all the huge software successes come from the "build it for you and your friends" model because those are the problems you fully understand. But it's more common to find software companies making solid profits on products they built for others' problems. Am I overlooking YC companies building products designed for other people? Is the problem that there just aren't enough potential founders like the Octopart guys: people deeply involved in some non-computing world who also happen to be good programmers? If so, maybe the richest source of ideas and cofounders would be cruising web forums for the near-programmers (people who build things like MS Access half-solutions to their companies' problems) to listen to what they would like to build if only they knew how. Maybe YC should be recruiting there, too. Thoughts?

<comment><USER17> I've often wondered whether you could make a lot of progress by bringing together hackers with, for example, doctors or lawyers. These are people who use computers every day but probably don't spend much time thinking about how to hack a solution to their computing problems.

As a scientist I've had a lot of success looking for the simple yet groundbreaking problems that occur at the boundaries between very different disciplines. It can be difficult not to make 'stupid' mistakes in a discipline with which you are unfamiliar...but it's a lot easier than trying to work faster and smarter on the exact same problem as everyone else!

Surely interdisciplinary collaboration could be just as valuable in startups.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. And yet the founders need to have worked together already, at least a bit. The big problem is that non-programmers can't help out with the programming in the early stages of a startups when that's about all that's happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love the comment about telling an adult from a kid. I'm 25 and many a times I just feel my peers are clueless, or should be more mature than they should. Maybe I'm just thinking too far ahead, but the same goes for dates that I go on. Dumb clueless girls actually turn me off (even if pretty). My friends think I am kidding when I say I am attracted to women a little older than me because they assume I am a gold-digger. But I'm not, I just like their maturity over girls my age.

Anyway, for the longest time, I couldn't really describe, I didn't have any solid metrics on how to explain to a friend, why I think a girl is mature/inmature. It's not about the age.

I think your point about pulling the "I'm just a kid" card totally makes sense. Kids tend to wait for something to happen (reactive) -- wait for their mom/dad/boss to tell them to do something, they need to be prodded, at which they will say "do I really need to brush my teeth now?" and groan. Adults are they ones who anticipate the next move, planning the strategy of where to go next, looking out for potential pitfalls and coming up with ideas of mitigating (proactive).

I guess I just am attracted to driven people, and dislike pessimists. I've seen plenty of people in college and in corporate who pessimists/downers like that, because they can't come up with new ideas/strategies. So by shooting at ideas of their peers, and bringing their peers down to their level -- they get to maintain the status-quo.

</comment><comment><USER19> Paul, your essays inspired me to quit my job even though I was looking forward to a nice promotion. A couple of years was enough. I'm two weeks into my startup, which I'm basing on a Paul Graham/Joel Spolsky hybrid model. I'm building up capital by taking on some small- to medium-sized projects while prototyping my real idea behind the scenes with a few collaborators.

While my work struggles to find my replacement, I have no problems finding people that A) want to work for me on contract projects, and B) want me to work on their projects (right now there is a queue). I actually work longer now than I did in the office. But I'm not tired. In fact, I have more energy. Additionally, if you normalize my work hours, I am even more productive working on my own. I just generally feel better about myself and am only experiencing "good" stress these days. I encourage anyone who finds themselves agreeing with Paul Graham in his essays more often than not to make the leap.

I fundamentally agree with Paul Graham about the change we are seeing. In fact, my little prototype bets the farm on the premise that this change is indeed happening.

I'm sufficiently capitalized having had a couple of years out of school to make some money that Y Combinator's funding is, quite frankly, an unattractive proposition. Plus, I'm in Toronto and I love the city. I live/work downtown right near the university. I would not want to move. All this said, is there any chance that you will do a talk up here in Canada?

</comment><comment><USER20> "[2] The best kind of organization for that might be an open source project, but those don't involve a lot of face to face meetings. Maybe it would be worth starting one that did"

Mitch Kapor's OSAF (profiled in the excellent book Dreaming in Code) is an example of the pitfalls of doing this. I'd say the primary pitfall is the lack of hard deadlines which it itself caused by the lack of 'hunger' because profit/existence is not the ulimate motive. This seemed to have wreaked havoc on the schedule for Chandler at OSAF..

<comment><USER21> Hence the Cathedral and the Bazaar rule "release early and often".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Question to Paul: First of all I've to tell you I'm a big fan of all your essays. But a lot of things which you say in your essays seem to work really well only if you're developing Web 2.0 sites. Version 1 of any Web 2.0 app can be built with 3 people in 3 months with very less capital needs (especially if the founders are fresh grads, all you need to do is to feed them for the three months). So as an investor, I would assume that you don't have to care much about revenue models, business experience & age of the founders, etc because in the event the startup tumbles, you don't stand to lose a lot?

But what about bigger projects? Projects which need maybe 10 people working for an year? Hardware? Would your views change when you are asked to invest in projects of these kind? The reason I ask is because I'm a final year CS student in Singapore and I've developed a 360 degree video camera along with a couple of my friends and we've been talking to a lot of angel investors here. They all love the idea and are amazed by the demo but most of the time their major cause of concern is that we don't have business experience and we're very young (21). How would you evaluate an idea like this one (hardware+software)? Would you be interested in seeing something like this sent to YC? Or do you prefer sticking to web 2.0 sites?

<comment><USER23> We do sometimes fund expensive projects. Then the focus is not so much to get something launched in three months but just to build a good demo to take to VCs to raise more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I see the big divide between those who do and those who don't differently. Most people choose a life pursuing happiness, a few choose lives of meaning. The person who chooses a life of meaning wants to get rich, but they secretly don't do it for the money. they simply can't not do their dreams. To most, it's foolishness. It's not that the person choosing a life of meaning doesn't want to be happy, or can't be, it's just that their happiness is largely irrelevant. I also disagree with the crap about age. PG filters everything through this fine mesh, then claims the result is representative of the whole. I realized sometime around age 40 that to those who see startups as foolishness, there IS NO GOOD AGE. I kept wondering how I could go instantly from being too young to being too old. According to most, there is no good age. It's always a bad idea. What PG is experiencing is this. Much of the corporate World, and the homes of families in which people grow up, it is heavily permission-based. In the Midwest for example, anyone behind a tech startup is considered out of line because they didn't ask permission, they didn't spend twenty years climbing a permission ladder. If they succeed, they are thought to have broken the rules. Younger people are more rebellious - <USER2> don't need no stinking permission - and can succeed if they don't first spend years working for a bunch of mindless droids. Yet, it is still far superior to have broken through all this and risen above it all, to have endured the worst and still plow ahead in relentless pursuit of meaningful dreams to build something great. Meanwhile, there's PG with his clipboard going up and down a check list. I plain know better.

</comment><comment><USER25> My favorite part is this: "To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job." As an entrepreneur, I'm happy to almost be in the same category as a criminal. ;)

I also love the 0% dissatisfaction idea, whether or not the result is a success. The experience of launching your own project just can't be replicated. Any of the points you mentioned, even if the result is complete failure, is well worth the expense of time & risk.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was particularly interested in the reversal Paul made with his opinion on working for a company right after school (before founding a startup).

This was something I've always debated myself. I can see how the companies he's funded have shown that working first is probably not necessary. I also understand his argument that trying and failing can teach you more than working for a company would anyway. But I think it really depends on the company. Not all larger tech companies suck. And I'd still argue that working in the corporate environment (even for just a short while) teaches you a lot of valuable lessons.

I guess my view is weigh the options. Some larger companies (mainly the people you work with there) can teach you new and diversive things you simply cant learn on your own. Looking back 10 months to when I just graduated, I definitely feel I've learned a lot about accountability and being responsible from the corporate work environment. It also modivates the hell out of you to break free of the mandatory work hours and start something on your own..

</comment><comment><USER27> Question for Paul: if you believe that more people will startup in the future, but success requires lots of hands-on help, coaching, etc, surely you need a way to scale YCombinator, right? How?

<comment><USER23> We often think about that. We could hire assistants, so we didn't have to do everything ourselves. Or we could make YC work more peer-to-peer. Or we could build a robot that would walk around telling everyone "don't make users register," "delete half the text on your frontpage," "face the audience when you're presenting," etc, and I could just hang out in the next room with a book and a cup of tea.

<comment><USER28> "don't make users register" Funny that I had to register to post here :)

<comment><USER29> The alternative is anonymous comments, which usually lead to a significant drop-off in the quality of discussion.

I think "Let the users see what they're getting into before registering" is a more accurate description.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hey, I said something before PG did! Compare footnote 2 with <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=635>

I'm sure I wasn't first, but it's cool nonetheless.

Startup idea: supporting geographically collocated open source projects to help potential partners get to know each other. It might start out similar to <http://prehacked.com> \-- allow people to enter projects they're interested in and their geographic location, and cluster similar interests together to show them potential partners. Allow people to say x is similar to y when the system can't figure it out (I always thought reddit should accept hints like x is related to y or not related to y).

</comment><comment><USER31> A sad thing about life is that after squandering ten years on playing in bands and stuff (point 11), if you eventually do get your act together and go to university and then (point 16) take the default route to a job in a big company, happy to make a living at all; after a while, if you have half a mind, you'll end up realizing that you're getting dumber by the year (point 14), but by then you've also stumbled into a family, and a start-up is no longer a realistic option (point 9, 13, and maybe even point 12 has kicked in). But then it's just 25 years to go until you're retired, just clench a fist in the pocket, produce a smile and keep coding for a salary. Sorry.

<comment><USER32> Or alternatively you spend 8 years in the military, 4 years in a big national Telco and then you're 33, with a family, and even PG saying you shouldn't start a startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think this is a great essay, but it's missing one very important factor which keeps me from starting a startup (successfully so far) - networking. I don't know the right people, and knowing people is so much of the battle (as I've found recently).... I guess that's not much of a problem if you are Paul Graham, or know Paul Graham. But, it's a problem for average joes like me. Spend all your time hacking on a problem and no time meeting the right people and you'll still have problems with your startup, like getting funded, getting known by the public, etc. That takes people.

<comment><USER34> Yes, I'd have more or less the same view; I don't know enough people, and I doubt I have the social skills to court VCs or similar. I've worked for a couple of startups/ex-startups, and in each case there was at least one person there from the beginning who was very good at things like that.

<comment><USER35> Hello. I am Aur Saraf.

Social skills are learnable. Very learnable.

I believe that every geek should submit himself to a crash course in social skills (to a level where he can control a room in a party). It's really not that hard. The problem is that it's one of those problems where no one would admit it and therefore I currently research the field alone, recording my results in private (anyone interesting in starting a community dedicated to it should contact me by mail, hunt my address).

Aur Saraf

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Excellent!! Like so many current narratives - You assume that only the young are concerned with start-ups! My partner is in his middle 50's and I'm 61 going on "28". You made quite a point to inform us what and why 18 was such an important age - how about telling me something about the other end of the scale. As a boomer - there are more of us coming back from the corporate wars battered, bruised and ready for a life we can love. I say send the "kids" to work and let those of us that still have the fire do the creating.

</comment><comment><USER37> The success rate Paul has had is actually lower than average success rate of small business startups (with more than one employee) Everyone always quotes a 10% success rate after 1 or 2 years. That is, as Paul suspects, a myth. True success rate is around 66%. Y-combinator's success rate was 50%

66% OF SMALL BUSINESS STARTUPS LAST 2 YEARS <http://www.smallbiztrends.com/2005/07/business-failure-rates-highest-in.html>

<comment><USER9> Survival and success are two different things. The 50% PG referred to are for the founders becoming "rich" by their standards, not just staying in business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well, you state that 0% of your startups had a bad experience. But of course these were the ones that got funding - they are already winners, even if they later failed to make it big. What about the 400-odd that didn't get funding? It takes much more than a couple of weekends in a cafe to put together a decent startup proposal, often the startups have made considerable sacrifice, not to mention putting their hopes and dreams on the line, even to get face time with potential investors.

</comment><comment><USER39> 6\. No cofounder Is my main discouragement. I'm 28 and have been out of school for 6 years.

13\. Uncertainty interferes a little. I have a comfortable , quiet apartment and I'd be risking that on a startup. This obstactle isn't hard to overcome, though.

Other comments on the essay

2\. Too inexperienced: In my case, being too inexperienced meant that the idea of a startup didn't even occur to me. This advice might have helped, but I probably wasn't listening.

12\. Need for Structure: While some people do seem to have a built-in need for structure, sometimes that structure can be "There Is No Structure." I'd say:

The problems appear when the expected structure is differs from what actually exists.

Employees will stagnate in what feels like a structured environment if they are given no instruction. However, if it's clear from the start that no structure will be provided, they won't waste time waiting. On the other side, managers may get upset if employees don't follow policy with military precision, despite the fact that military structure hasn't been provided and the relevant policy is 30 pages deep in a handbook no one has read in 2 years. The manager can either figure out how to include military drilling, or accept that degree of structure is unworkable.

My impression of Y Combinator is that it's fairly clear early on how much structure is provided (or not provided).

</comment><comment><USER40> The time span cited in that study was an aberration; anyone with an idea was getting money thrown at them. There is also a great big chasm between "still in existence" and success. If you sell-off assets for the benefit of creditors your company can still exist but it would be hard to call that a success.

The numbers I hear from my VC friends is that around 50% are out of business after the 2nd year. They see more of teh picture than I do so I trust they are better qualified to make teh call.

My opinion is that more companies fail because of incompetence than insufficient funding. If you really have a great idea you can make it work. The trouble is that most make some big mistake and spoil the well.

I think starting a company is one of the most exhilarating things you can do. I wish more people would try it. I also wish more of them would try to understand the basics of business operations. This is where I disagree with Paul. I have seen too many $100 million ideas ruined by founders mistakes. Too often the time has past before they can regain their opportunity.

I still encourage everyone to give it their best shot. It's a great ride, up or down.

</comment><comment><USER41> Here's my big question for Paul, and for everyone. How does one afford to start a startup? Does everyone do it by eating Ramen and maxing out their credit cards? Wouldn't you hear about more people who had their life left in ruins with $50k in debt when their website went under? I'm not talking about the cost of running and developing your business. I'm merely worried about rent, food, and Health Insurance!

I work a day job and am diligently developing multiple startup ideas with a few friends, but these will obviously never get off the ground until we quit our jobs. How do you do this without massive savings for six months or a year? What if you don't become profitable for 2 or 3 years?

My best solution so far has been to trick myself and go back to get my MBA this fall. I can live off loans and spend all my free 'college' time developing our sites. I've had a lot of entrepreneurs tell me that this is a bad decision, and that I should just quit and go to town on the web.

Could someone please suggest some means that would allow me and my fellow co- founders to do this?

<comment><USER42> Someone's already mentioned Y Combinator. But YC isn't the only place you could go for funding. There are angel investors and VC groups all over the map. What you have to do is put together something that convinces these people that not investing in you now is leaving money on the table. Don't worry about failure to get financing at this stage; there's always more people out there looking for the next hot startup to invest in. All you have to do is convince first yourself and then these other people that you can do this.

I would caution you against using college loans to fund your startup. For one thing, it's probably foolish to borrow money for this when there are people who will invest if you spend the time to get them interested. But for another thing, it may be a violation of federal law, with serious consequences if you get caught. A CPA or lawyer may be able to advise you about your options here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Paul, I really liked your point about the change in the business world. I also feel that the current model is shifting into a more favorable situation for individuals.

I think it might be the change in perception. My parents, and people around their age, seem to have a different perspective on what a job means. They see work as a smaller role in their life. "Work just pays the bills". But most younger generations seem to put more of an emphasis on their careers. They see work as the main part of their life. It could be due to the amount of money that we pay for college tuition. I know I don't want to waste my degree and years of my life doing someone else's work. I'd rather have the comfort and responsibility to be left alone to do my own work. Maybe I'm just speaking about my own situation.

</comment><comment><USER44> Paul, Great article, I found it extremely helpful and encouraging. I did have one question though around point # 9. Family to support. When you started Viaweb, did you have a family? If not, what about when you founded Y Combinator? The reason I ask is that I feel that having a family is a huge motivator for success, not a detractor. Now it is extremely risky especially if you are the sole provider for the family, but the reward is extremely high. If you have the confidence, determination and the right support (money, good business partners, etc.) your chances of success are increased. That would be like saying that it is not wise to be an extreme sports athlete or even a race car driver if you have a family because it is too risky. Calculated risks have great potential.

Will

<comment><USER45> Will, you've just told me my thoughts :) I absolutelly agree with that. A family is a powerful incentive to becoming the best one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> As a young startup founder myself, the one point that really drove me to uproot was the monotony of the day to day life in cubeville. I lasted a little over a year - told myself "what the hell" - and two weeks later.. I quit and started my own company.

The primary reasons I left corporate are already iterated in the essay.

1\. I'm only two years out of college and fairly young, My living expenses are fairly low.

2\. I was bored out of mind. I now know the real meaning of corporate drone and can relate to the movie 'Office Space'.

3\. As each day of work passed by, I swear the work made me a little dumber.

4\. Nothing to loose. Last straw was when the company got bought out, and the CEO jumped ship with his golden parachute.

5\. I don't want to be remembered as a person who was a [insert job title] at Big Company A.

</comment><comment><USER47> great article paul. i especially love number 7: produce something specific for yourself. this forces you to notice problems and noticing your own problems and overcoming them with technology is a subset of noticing problems of others and using technology to help them, which is the job of startups and companies... so IMHO, noticing and solving your own problems is a fundamental skill people in startups need to have.

that technique works because most of us have been conditioned to ignore the problems that we encounter daily. when faced with a problem we simply side step, avoid the problem and keep marching. the entrepreneurs are the ones who stop, notice the problem (or opportunity) and help us get things done easier.

<comment><USER48> "produce something specific for yourself."

This excludes any sort of capital good like an accounting package, or his own example of groupware.

You'd never get most of the good product ideas targeted at businesses without industry experience, which sort of contradicts his advice not to work before starting a company.

<comment><USER49> I don't understand -- how are accounting packages or groupware examples of goods that don't solve a problem for oneself?

If I need to manage my money and taxes, I can build software for that.

If I need to develop some kind of collaboration tool to help me work better with teams at school, or on an open-source project (both not inherently business domains), I can build software for that.

Business tools are merely extensions of these. Unless I missed it, PG never mentions good product ideas targeted at businesses, so I am unclear as to where there is a contradicition. His mantra is to go for a wide user base, which typically requires mainstream business ideas, i.e., business-to- consumer, not business-to-business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Terrific essay.

I worked for startups all through my 20s, but now at 37, I, I find myself up against point #9.

9\. Family to support

I'd love to found a startup, but having a wife, two wonderful kids, and a $500K mortgage give you a very different perspective on the startup lifestyle.

I imagine a startup incubator where the founders are provided with salary and benefits comparable to working for a corporation, and they are encouraged (forced?) to maintain a reasonable life/work balance, (The latter is probably the hardest to achieve; a startup requires an almost monomaniacal focus).

In return,the incubator would gain access to a pool of talented people who would otherwise not be able to make the leap.

Is this being done now?

<comment><USER29> "I imagine a startup incubator where the founders are provided with salary and benefits comparable to working for a corporation, and they are encouraged (forced?) to maintain a reasonable life/work balance,"

Google. Except the work/life balance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone less than an excellent co-founder, is worse than no co-founder at all. I have been there and done that many many times. Pressure is intense, 100 hr work weeks, then the "other guy" is a little cynical or has to dumb everything down. It's worse than no partner at all. I'm not sure about the advice to go and get a co-founder no matter what. I'm sitting on the next big thing and I have $ to pay people, and do everytbing else myself. Now, I'm supposed to get a co-founder? Why? And if there isn't anyone I guess I'll just shut it down. No wait! Why not spend 6 mos of precious time searching.

</comment><comment><USER51> The cofounder requirement is always going to be a huge deal for a lot of people. I spent lots of time in college doing extracurricular projects to try to find smart, hard-working people to be around. Most of the best of that bunch ended up working for large technology companies for lack of any better ideas. My experience suggests that meeting cofounders at school is a pretty chancy thing. I wonder if the best way to purposely meet potential cofounders isn't to work at startups in the first place, where people won't be stuck in the big-company mindset.

</comment><comment><USER52> Question about co-founders. Say one guy came up a good idea and has worked on it for some time. He wants to find a co-founder as you suggested. But how should the two co-founders split up the pie? Is each having 50% reasonable? If not, will the new co-founder accept a less share? How do you value the past work of the 1st co-founder and the new value that the 2nd guy brings in? It seems stupid to argue this when nothing has achieved, but this delicate and sensitive issue has impeded many cooperations. Your insight is very much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER53> Count me as one of the (apparently) very few who had a terrible time with my startup. The one thing that I really didn't count on his how hard the government makes it. It is a REAL pain in the butt to handle all the paperwork to create an LLC and then it gets worse when tax time comes around. I tried to do it all on my own and I would NEVER do it again without hiring both a lawyer and an accountant. How one-man operations do it, with all the legal and accounting plus doing their actual jobs of running the startup is unfathomable to me.

</comment><comment><USER54> Very strange notions of "success," if you ask me. To me, if you're in a "startup" only to be acquired, then you're not in business, you're in speculation, and you've already started to undermine your longevity. Why go through all the pain and sweat of starting up a company if you don't want to be driving that company 20 years from now? What you're describing strikes me as a "flash in the pan" mindset. If all you want to do is start and then cash in, well, that's not starting _up_ , it's just starting _out_.

</comment><comment><USER55> Most failures and successes are based on the business' operations....too much marketing/sales will drive a start-up to failure. Too much work setting up operations causes the business to really never start. My advice to my clients is if you are not a person who can balance both sides of business you need to get another person to take on the part you are not strong at...most of the time it is Operations....

Scot Duke Virtual Operations Consulting <http://innovativebusinessgolf.com>

</comment><comment><USER56> _[3] There need to be some number of big companies to acquire the startups, so the number of big companies couldn't decrease to zero._

No there don't. There only needs to be some number of entities with deep pockets and marketing expertise. Those entities could be small companies and individuals, or networks thereof.

While it might turn out that a large black-box structure like today's multinationals is the most efficient organization for accomplishing certain important tasks, it doesn't seem obvious to me that it must be so.

Michael Sullivan

</comment><comment><USER57> I just finished reading this essay and there were so many sentances that resonated for me that I may have to frame the whole friggin thing. We had originally applied a year ago for the Y Combinator summer program of 06. We didn't make it but we did the startup on our own instead and it continues to be the most rewarding experience of my life: JumpBox.com Paul, you are an absolute beacon in this industry. I look forward to reading all these comments on this post next...

</comment><comment><USER58> Paul,

I wish I had met you or read this column column back in 1993 when I was graduating from college. Not that I'm complaining but I'm now in the don't start phase of my life due to kids etc... So I'll just wait and use the time to learn more until the point where my kids are a little older and can go off like Mike Siebold.

PS: I thought I'd add this post since no one has posted for a while to let you know that people are still reading your thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER59> 0% of the startup founders hate startups these people: Paul __selected out of a pool of people having advanced ahead enough to consider funding __. Sounds a lot like - making 100000$ per year is an easy problem - just go to Stanford Univ everyone who goes there makes 100,000$.

Drive is probably the hardest thing to maintain. I worked at a startup for 3 months. Highs are higher and lows are much much lower.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not to nitpick or anything, but in the essay:

"If you're smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are"

I understood what the last line meant, although it may seem ambiguous to some. It could easily have been interpreted to mean that if you think you are stupid, that means you are probably correct that you are stupid, and shouldn't start a startup.

But what do I know, I'm no linguistics expert ;P

<comment><USER60> Well it's not that hard... Normally smart people don't realize that they are smart because they have higher standards and often if they reached those they set them even higher. So from their perspective they normaly never reach their own standards. The problem is that smartness and self-confidence often seem to be diametrically opposed.

The point is: Don't hesitate too much and learn to deal with your doubts (especially if you start a startup :o)).

<comment><USER18> That's a very good point, Daniel .. thanks :)

It is true -- sometimes I get that feeling that I beat my up unnecessarily for no real reason, and get miserable. Then, it takes someone else (like my mentor), to point to me all the things I did right, which makes me go "oh yeah ..", I'm not a that dumb after all. HEH.

But you know what, if there's one thing I've learned from my previous job -- working in a team where I am the smartest person on board, IS NOT APPEALING to me. I specifically told my current boss, during the interview, that I _don't_ want to be the smartest guy on the team.

So basically its an infinite loop:

1\. don't want to be the smartest person on the team

2\. play catch up

3\. go to (1)

So in all that three steps, the standard I set for myself is always higher and I never appear to have "met" my standards. Just like you said.

LOL

:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> To the JumpBox guy. Interesting idea. You need to come right out with what you're doing, on the home page, or in the first sentence of the 'about' page. I don't want to read a paragraph of crap about automobiles, before coming to what you're all about. Also, I'm sure LAMP components (ie the various tiers of web server) would be a hit - ie seperate VM images for apache, database, etc.

<comment><USER57> jackpipe- yea we know that page is admittedly weak right now ;-) we're replacing the about page with a distilled 5-point tour that explains the concept better and more visually. RE: the vanilla preconfigured stacks- the VirtualAppliances.net guys and Spike Source are doing a pretty good job now with putting out lean versions of the basic software stacks so we're targeting the end-to-end apps for now. We'll hit those up down the road though. thanks for the feedback.

sean

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> As a 32 year old owner of 2 failed and one successful startup, I can say without hesitation that this is by far the most insightful piece I've read on the topic. It was not just an essay, for me this was a trip down memory lane. Thanks to the author for a very insightful and enjoyable piece of literature, I hope to see this selected as its been submitted to Slashdot.

</comment><comment><USER62> Great essay, I sure wish my reason was because of #10 (wealthy) and not #9 (family to support), so true, so true.

An alternative to starting a consulting business is to build your stuff on the side. Possibly draining? Yes, but if you're determined, I believe this is better than getting distracted by a consulting business. Time will tell if this is wise though.

<comment><USER63> Another alternative is to work 4 days a week, and use the extra day for your startup.

<comment><USER11> You're talking about Google, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> There will be more startups over time, but eventually this growth will hit a limit. There are only so many people who can participate in a startup. Eventually the startups grow and merge with big companies and that's where _most_ of the people will spend their life working. Startup will always remain an adventure fit only for the elite.

</comment><comment><USER65> Paul - I think you missed one point.

You really have to find the right technologies that motivate and enable you. For you, it was lisp. For me, it seems to be python right now. For years I worked with java, and it simply didn't seem to fit well with me. For some reason, python seems to be the perfect fit, and I have a new sense of desire to code.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how large a factor student debt is when people consider the one or the other. A guaranteed liability can be a powerful motivator for finding guaranteed income.

(Although if you think that a job at a big company is guaranteed income, you've never worked at a big company going through any kind of hard times!)

<comment><USER66> Its income period. If you are reasonably frugal any sort of "real" programming job is enough to handle the loan payments.

But no matter how frugal you are a $40000 debt is unlikely to be paid off on $10000 in funding. You would be making a big bet not only on a success but a timely one. So yes I think student debt is a large deterrent for those who have it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Minor edits: under #4, the second paragraph, "Any in any case..." should be "And...". Also, I personally think that the previous sentence could use a little work, because "you probably are" could mean "you probably are not smart enough".

Feel free to delete this comment after changes are made.

</comment><comment><USER67> I love this post. I loved it so much it was forwarded to all my friends that hate their jobs. It was very inspiring for all of them, esspecially since most of us are looking to escape the corporate world and its life energy sucking affect.

</comment><comment><USER68> "After they paid back their angel investors, they had about a year's salary each"

Paid back?, what about the risk issue involved here, do founders have to expose their money (if they have) to launch the startup?, don't really understand

</comment><comment><USER69> Paul,

I wish you would provide another funding route for the old hackers who didn't strike gold in 1999 but who don't have the option to work for next to nothing for a summer (even if we're willing to quit our jobs for the opportunity).

</comment><comment><USER70> What if I'd like to accomplish something, like building an operating system or a world wide web, and don't really care about the money. What if I just want to change the world. Should I start a company and if so why?

<comment><USER35> Hello. My name is Aur Saraf.

If you want to change the world, you have two ways to do it:

1) By force - in this case, don't do it. Waste of energy on anti-productivity.

2) By creating something people REALLY REALLY want (like your examples) - <USER3> that case, yes. Create a company. Find someone as enthusiastic as you. If you create something people want, money will come.

Email me for details, I'm a gmailer and my nick is SonOfLilit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> are there any plans on putting up the videos for start-up school on the YC site?

</comment><comment><USER72> Greate article.

But I have the impression that PG means "to start starup is to launch a web application". right?

<comment><USER73> Not necessarily, but building a web app turns out to be a good way to build a product. He wrote about some advantages of doing so here- <http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I think a lot of this stuff applies to starting anything new. I thought about church planters who work for non monetary rewards. Same stuff applies to pioneers in any endeavor.

</comment><comment><USER75> The very last title won by Real Madrid was the National Championship, at the middle of 2003. Beckham himself never won anything there, even playing with Ronaldo and Zidane :)

</comment><comment><USER76> I've been going the consulting + startup route, and I already feel the way about "real jobs" as Paul described-- serfs, or slaves. I feel a certain pity for them.

</comment><comment><USER77> Awesome essay Paul! Tell it like it really, really is.

</comment><comment><USER78> Fantastic essay. Now I'm all pumped up. As soon as I find a colleague that I want to share an office with, I'll be submitting an application :)

</comment><comment><USER79> Essay great, as usual from PGraham. Quibble is: should rightly be called "Not reasons not to start a startup".

Your friend, Julie

</comment><comment><USER80> Who are the random schleps? Customers?

<comment><USER23> errands

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Very impressive essay. I'm a founder of a startup and agree with most things here. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER82> Provoking my thoughts to start a Start-Up again (I already failed twice). I will.

\- Prabu

</comment><comment><USER83> What are your plans on putting YC up on the TDP? and tell PG he rocks!!

</comment><comment><USER84> "Even the founders who fail don't seem to have such a bad time."

I was a founder in a startup that died late last year. It was the hardest I have ever worked, and one of the most challenging things I have ever done. It was frustrating in so many ways and there was amazing amounts of strife involved. In the end the project ran out of money and the products of my labor and imagination are now gathering dust in storage. After all that, without any monetary reward, I would do it all again in a second. The challenge of following my senses through completely unknown territory and the reward of seeing my idea come to life was more then enough to make the whole thing worth it. It was the challenge that drove me. In the end it was the challenge itself that rewarded me even though the company didn't fly.

"A lot of people think they're too young to start a startup. Many are right. The median age worldwide is about 27..."

I do agree completely with the idea that adulthood is a state of mind and not an age. I remember my dad asking me "What do you want?" when i was somewhere between 18 and 21. My reply at that time was "I just want to be comfortable." I remember it quite distinctly. He then told me "I expect that will change some day, given your creed." He was right, and I realized it while in the midst of working my tail off on a project. All I wanted to do was work on my ideas, see them come to life. The discomfort didn't slow me down at all, it was the challenge that I wanted.

"You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It's probably the single best predictor of success."

A founder without determination is not going to succeed, but their drive can't cause them to loose perspective. One can dig with a singular purpose and make a big hole, but if it is in the wrong place it does the project no good.

"You don't need to know anything about business to start a startup."

True, but eventually the business skills will be required if the project is to continue. My experiences have taught me that while a viable product is most of the battle, a lack of resources on the business end of a project can stop it in it's tracks. Weather it is the founders themselfs that learn the skills, or outside resources are brought in to help - the skills must be obtained. The lesson I learned is pick the right people to depend on, or depend on yourself. Implementing your ideas is great all in itself, but it is much better if there is someone interesting there to see it when you finish.

"If you don't have a co founder, what should you do? Get one."

Be careful! Going into business with someone in the startup environment is a commitment. You will spend allot of time with them and you will have to depend on them constantly. It is almost like a marriage, choose wisely. Good friends do not always make good business partners.

"In a sense, it's not a problem if you don't have a good idea..."

I believe that a person's ability to learn, gain skills, and adapt is the most important thing period. You find someone with a carrot, you've just got a carrot. Even if you need a carrot, their value is limited once they give it to you. Find a gardener and you can grow anything you need. Reminds me of some proverb about choosing a fishing pole or a fish.

"This one is real. I wouldn't advise anyone with a family to start a startup."

I agree with this 100%. I did it, and I would not advise it for someone with a choice. My family is amazing and supportive and more then anything else they KNOW me. I have founder pumping through my veins. The startup world is home to me, there is no question that I will be a serial entrepreneur. Good ideas give me goosebumps, unsolved problems give me insomnia. My family supports who I am, so I am able to do what makes me happy. Successfully pouring your soul into a project and being a member of a family at the same time is a learned skill. Play it safe unless you know what you are getting into, or just can't change who you are.

"Start another company? Are you crazy?"

See above.

"Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you'll probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take, and you'll find you have much less spare time than you might expect."

Working a regular job instead of chasing dreams is still a commitment. Yes, you can work a regular job without thinking about it all the time. You can go to work 8 hours a day 5 days a week and not have it take over the rest of your personal time. Having said that, is it really worth it? Why do something all day that you don't care about? Sounds flawed to me.

"Each person should just do what they need to without anyone telling them."

This throws back to the "pick carefully" comment. Your choice in business partners is paramount. There are many many people who will just stand there on the field with the ball looking confused. Within the constraints of a startup you may not have time to figure it out after the fact. Make sure you know they can work, and that they can work with you.

"If you go to work for Microsoft, you can predict fairly accurately what the next few years will be like—all too accurately, in fact. If you start a startup, anything might happen."

This is part of what attracts me to the role of a founder. Clicking send on an important proposal and not knowing what will happen is like jumping off a bridge for me (with cord of course). I love not knowing, I love the process of finding out. I love the risks you have to take and the rewards you can reap. Anything can happen, and that resonates with me.

"A significant number of would-be startup founders are probably dissuaded from doing it by their parents."

This is a problem I never had. My dad tells a story about having a booth across the aisle from Oracle WAY back when they were both small. He was lead developer on a similar DB app called RDM which was a far more mature and fully featured product at the time. His business leaders thought conservatively, Oracle shot for the stars. The rest is history. My father will never discourage me from chasing my ideas, and my mom just loves to see me glow. He was there, at the time and the place; he chose the steady paycheck.

"Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you'd have to get up and go to work. How did they stand it?"

What, as apposed to kicking back - stretching out - and wondering what day it is on Sunday afternoon? Never.. operating by the seat of your pants and living your ideas is the only way to go. Its the best feeling in the world, and the bad times only make the good ones better.

[edit] Getting my proverbs straight.

</comment><comment><USER85> oohhhhhhhhhhh 100th comment :)

</comment><comment><USER86> 1\. _the_ best piece I've ever read on startups.

2\. These ideas don't just apply to technology startups. They apply to new businesses generally.

3\. Walt Disney couldn't make it on his own, knew this and got his brother Roy out of hospital (!) to work with him. Roy outlived Walt. Walt painted castles in the air, Roy built the (economic) foundations. = Co-founder good, Creative+Executor great :-) = There has to be real trust/loyalty between the founders. With enormous wealth on offer, enough people go crazy & try to take it all. A partner you don't know well can take you down easily.

4\. 'Founders', a.k.a. entrepeneurs, are more willing to take _risk_ than most people - which means they get pretty comfortable with failure. They are also a special breed. = Comfort is the enemy of Change. = Change is Risk, but the only way forward. = Comfortable people won't pursue a startup vigorously...

5\. How do you get your Founders to "put skin in the game"? To have a personal stake in the outcome? (Besides losing their dream - or is that generally enough?)

6\. One of the most important personal traits of a great entrepeneur - <USER4> a journal... Gotta write everything down. Crops up repeatedly in biographies. Richard Branson is quite clear about it - but doesn't relate it to his success. There is supposedly some research that says 1.5-3% of all people write down their goals. Once there was a long-term Ivy League school study (is this apocryphal?) showing that people who wrote down their goals out-performed others by 5:1 or 10:1

7\. People are different. Some are shy/introvert, many extrovert. Shy people don't sift through the large numbers needed to establish 'good networks' and check-out who'd make a good partner. Many of the best geeks are quiet & retiring folk. They will, by definition, find it hard or impossible to bring along a partner. But forcing someone on them won't work either. This is a hard problem to solve. = A solution is something like your "Startup School", but a little more frequent, to provide a mileu in which these people can mix and hook up. [As conferences and User Groups can do.]

[For a great example of this, see how Paul Allen was treated by Bill Gates and Steve Balmer on his last project at Microsoft.]

8\. The Internet changes everything. But the VC process is still face-to-face personal contact... Silicon Valley was caused by VC firms like "Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers" bringing money from The East into technology. Even with the hordes of imititors and rip-off merchants, greedy investors flocked and made out well... Because the place had critical mass - in people and places to meet, and the culture to support it. These comments are peppered with genuine frustration (& longing) from would-be entrepeneurs. = How can the Internet overcome this tyranny? = Business is about personal relationships. Can the Net ever replace or augment that critical factor?

9\. Technology support. Finding someone who is fluent with a key technology, like hardware hacking, can be critical to the success of a project/startup. When it's not your field, how do you find a way in? Then how do you get taken seriously by an expert??

10\. Scaling: small trials and growing entrepeneurs. My belief is that good entrepeneurs are grown, not born. And that there are predictable growth stages for all companies. A wealthy friends' advice is: Never attempt anything more than 30% larger than you've done before. = Have you thought of building a process to train up entrepeneurs before they enter your funding process? = I'm thinking graduated funding levels, starting low ($10k) and in a couple of stages getting to $500k or so.

11\. For solid research on what makes _great_ employees, see Robert E Kelley's book "How to be a Star Performer" [<http://www.kelleyideas.com/pages/howtobeastar.htm]> Number One Quality: Initiative. Sounds the same...

12\. One of the prime causes of some recent major corporate collapses here in Australia was: "Ignorance, Arrogance and Self-Delusion". They are a powerful triplet that can't be broken through. Witness the non-musical entrants in "American Idol" who honestly believe they are brilliant. = How do you sort these out? They'll always have a high opinion of themselves, their abilities and a string of huge accomplishments.

</comment><comment><USER87> Thank you

</comment><comment><USER87> Thank you

</comment><comment><USER87> Thank you

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm still doubtful about the "Revenue is not important" thing. Maybe right now you can get acquired with no revenues, but that probably won't last. People said revenue didn't matter during the Web 1.0 IPO bubble, and that turned out wrong. To be convinced otherwise I'd have to see the accounting for these web deals showing a return on investment. And if the profits are predicated on web advertising call me skeptical about the sustainability.

To my knowledge the "revenue-less liquidity event" route to riches is new circa 1998, e.g. The Globe and other such IPOs. This route is probably a symptom of the global liquidity bubble rather than a lasting development. We are still in a global liquidity explosion that measurably started around 1995. It has fueled all kinds of bubbles and weird business practices and now it's fueling acquisitions, just like it's fueling Private Equity deals and stock buybacks. We are in financially anomalous times.

<comment><USER66> There is a distinction between "revenue is not important" and "if lots of users love you, you can probably figure out how to make money out of it (if you arn't acquired first)".

<comment><USER39> I think another difference is that there are companies absorbing the risk and associated losses. As was noted in another one of Paul's essays, big companies tend to be good at extracting revenue from an existing product but not so good on boldness and innovation.

There are a variety of business models to try once you've made something people want. Sometimes it is ads (myspace) sometimes it is merchandise (homestarrunner) or a combination of the two (penny-arcade). Maybe your content is worth a subscription (hotornot). Maybe you sell books or offer training and advanced services (SysInternals/Winternals).

Another argument for not worrying about the business model, if it is your intent to be acquired, is that your product may wind up more flexible. 3 different companies might use 3 different ways to make money from your product. Again, the distinction is that it's already profitable companies doing the buying, rather than the Stock Market At Large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> dear Paul et. al.

I'm a Paul myself ... :) Y Combinator is an inspiration for me! I think that as Y Combinator incubates more companies successfully, more and more groups will apply. :)

</comment><comment><USER83> This essay was exceedingly entrancing, enticing and thrilling!!!!!!! It made me very pensive and extreamly vexed!! I thouroughly commended your effort, however for your intellectual ability you could have tried harder!! Durrr :p

</comment><comment><USER89> Too many start-ups are doing trite and vacuous work. The world does not need another online calendar or customisable homepage or some clown wearing a webcam 24/7.

The comparitively small number of valuable start-ups are doing good work by tackling problems that are difficult, and/or have a strong potential to separate a customer from the contents of his/her wallet. It is not that hard to separate the wheat from the chaff and identify start-ups with good ideas.

The biggest discouragement for starting a start-up is the notion that you'll bust your ass for a few years and create a great product, but end up skewered by IP patent trolls, aggressively predatory competitors with deep pockets, professional compensation claimants etc. etc. etc.

Incidentally, I wonder how attitudes to starting a start-up will change when the current western bubble of cheap credit finally pops?

</comment><comment><USER90> Hhhhmmm, I've read some of your site so far.

I see that paying naive college students in Ramon noodles to work in overdrive to create a startup is indeed pure genius. The startup at Y-Combinatorics has a much better chance of being popular regardless of merit, because, face facts, our mass media isn't particularly clever or creative but more a bullhorn for what they are told is trendy and clever. Congratulations.

That said, I say to everyone out there, empathy is the well from which creativity springs.

The old have suffered and have had their minds sharply honed to recognize problems. It's called being cranky. That gives the old the unique perspectives needed to identify solutions. However, the old have wrinkles, yuck, and are not marketable by the mass media as genius wunderkinder.

With that in mind and noting that telecomuting is increasingly relevant it's clear Y-Combinatorics is not about founding companies with relevant solutions and worth while products. It is about marketing (man we Americans have mass media that are ignorant a@@ clowns). It is about manipulating the ignorant mass media into egging on the Goggles of the world to ape the thought process expounded in the media and snatch up such trendy start-ups as StuffedUp and so on.

So yeah, any clown with a startup idea would be a fool not to take advantage of such a flatulent environment. If they don't like your makeup, wipe it off and paint a new face. Go for it!</comment>


Ask HK: Jobs Is Southeast Asia or Remote? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HK,
I've been living in Southeast Asia and working remotely for a company in SF for the past 2 years as a Front-end and iOS developer.
I really like my current job, co-workers and bosses, my lately the salary has been extremely late putting me in a position to seek something else.
I don't see many southeast asia jobs being published here, but any chance you guys know any? Or a remote position?
Thanks <comment><USER2> You try it on [http://www.startupjobs.asia/](http://www.startupjobs.asia/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I didn't know this one.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do vitamins for your brain work? - <AUTHOR>

I saw an add for something called Neurozan that's billed as vitamins to improve concentration and mental performance. Does anyone have much experience with these kinds of supplements. I'd like some anecdotal evidence that they aren't completely useless. <comment><USER2> I went on a Piracetam (Nootropil) phase during high school for about 3 months. I would not qualify the effects as subtle. They were quite dramatic in my case. Razor-like focus and amazing retention of study material. No side- effects that I can remember.

It's been many years, and I would like to self-experiment again. Where can a U.S. citizen get Piracetam from these days?

<comment><USER3> [http://www.amazon.com/Piracetam-800-mg-60-vcaps/dp/B0019Z498...](http://www.amazon.com/Piracetam-800-mg-60-vcaps/dp/B0019Z4984) (non-affiliate link)

<comment><USER4> Ordered - thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Piracetam works. It has been in use in former Soviet Union countries for a while now (under the name of Nootropil) and it is generally available from the drugstores.

A milder version is Co-Q10, which is available here in North Am over the counter, though it's a pricey bugger.

Do your homework, decide for yourself :)

<comment><USER6> I use piracetam and can attest to its effects. They're subtle, but I find that I lose my train of thought FAR less frequently than I did without it - it's not uncommon for me to work for multiple hours without having to stop and ask myself "what was I doing now?".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Eat well, get exercise, sleep properly, drink lots of water.

Vitamin tablets are a symptom not a cure.</comment>


The Streets of New York - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/20/the-streets-of-new-york/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing! As an amateur street photographer myself, this really resonated with me. I've found that street photography can be extremely unforgiving but the drive to capture and understand urban life is addictive. Would love to hear other peoples' experiences with how to be more successful at street photography!

<comment><USER3> Really it's all about pounding the pavement. You have to be monastic, slogging through poor weather and always being on point with your surroundings -- enjoying those good days out there. It's hard and unforgiving -- you'll go whole months without making a single decent photograph, thousands of wasted frames all for that single moment when the entropy of the street arranges itself well.

Of course then you get the inverse of that -- people like Nikos Economopoulos -- who argue that street photography is already hard so why make it harder and go outside when the light is poor? It's all about finding your drive -- why are you out there doing it?

Daniel Arnold has a quote recently where he said: "I don't know. I don't know what it's worth. I don't know if there's a purpose to any of this work. Certainly, there's a great argument to be made that walking around the street all day looking at things and pressing a button is a stupid use of my life, but my life doesn't feel stupid. It feels full." I think that's the head space you have to get in as you continue to press and develop your skills and vision. Keep picking new things to work on as well -- I like to make achievements like: I want to make a good photograph where you can feel the congestion of overtourism, then keeping that feeling in mind (along with dozens of other things) go out and try to achieve that. On the inverse sometimes things just align and all you have to do is press the shutter and you aren't sure why, but the photograph is gorgeous.

Last thing of course is to study photographs of the masters. Find the sub- genre that sticks with you. The painterly Henri-Cartier Bresson, the facts clearly describe of Garry Winogrand, the ethereal loneliness of Josef Koudelka, the emotional connection with the mundane of Henry Wessel, the color pallets of Saul Leiter, the elaborate colors of Nikos Economopoulos or the raw grit of Richard Sandler. It's all out there to be studied and to try to emulate while you make your way.

Good luck in your street photography journey. If you have an instagram please share it and I'll give you a follow. Always nice to find other photographers out there putting in the work.

<comment><USER2> great advice - thank you! I think my biggest issue is patience, so I'm working on that slowly (using film as a medium has helped). my instagram is @agastya.mondal - would love to see your work as well!</comment></comment></comment>


Transformers from Scratch - <AUTHOR> http://www.peterbloem.nl/blog/transformers <comment><USER2> This is a _great_ article. One of the things I enjoy most is finding new ways to understand or think about things I already feel like I know. This article helped me do both with transformer networks. I especially liked how explicitly and simply things were explained like queries, keys, and values; permutation equivariance; and even the distinction between learned model parameters and parameters derived from the data (like the attention weights).

The author quotes Feynman, and I think this is a great example of his concept of explaining complex subjects in simple terms.

</comment><comment><USER3> And here I was, excited to learn something about actual transformers, something involving wire and metal..

<comment><USER4> Same here, would have loved a build creating some actual transformers :)

<comment><USER5> We did in school on a coil winding machine, and also learned the math.

I don't rember the winding part being that much fun. :)

It was something old, akin to this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-GyMYZ8yTU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-GyMYZ8yTU)

<comment><USER6> RF transformers (in forms of various coils, chokes, baluns, etc) are more interesting and complex to analyze. I once winded three of them, and none worked. I thought I finally found an article that explains the subject, well, not a chance ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the best article I have read so far explaining the transformer architecture. The clear and intuitive explanation can't be praised enough.

Note that the teacher has a Machine Learning course with video lectures on youtube that he references throughout the article : [http://www.peterbloem.nl/teaching/machine- learning](http://www.peterbloem.nl/teaching/machine-learning)

</comment><comment><USER8> This man was my professor at the VU.

Honestly his lectures were fun and easy to look forward too, I'm really glad his post is getting traction.

If you find his video lectures they are a really graceful introduction to most ML concepts.

<comment><USER9> VU Machine Learning 2019 playlist:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pve3oIvxa8&list=PLCof9EqayQ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pve3oIvxa8&list=PLCof9EqayQgupldnTvqNy_BThTcME5r93)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stellar article, I never understood self attention; this makes it so very clear in a few concise lines, with little fluff.

The author has a gift for explaining these concepts.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is sweet. I've written conv, dense, and recurrent networks from scratch. Transformers next!

Plug: I just published this demo using GD to find control points for Bezier Curves: [http://nhq.github.io/beezy/public/](http://nhq.github.io/beezy/public/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Ah yes, machine learning architecture transformers, I knew that.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow. I have been looking for a good resource on implementing self- attention/transformers on my own for the last week - can't wait to read this through.

</comment><comment><USER14> Noob question: I have some 1D conv net for financial time series prediction. Could a transformer architecture be better for this task, is it worth a try?

<comment><USER15> If you think a longer context length might be helpful consider stacking convolutions to give higher units a bigger receptive field, or try the convolutional LSTM. If that helps and you have a further argument for why an even larger context window would be helpful then perhaps try attention and in that case a Transformer would be reasonable. But your stacked conv net would be the fastest and most obvious thing that should work (with the caveat that I know nothing else about your data and it's characteristics, which is a really big caveat).

Consider looking at your errors and judging whether they stem from things your current model doesn't do well but that Transformers do, i.e., correlating two steps in a sequence across a large number of time steps. Attention is basically a memory module, so if you don't need that it's just a waste of compute resources.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the insight, also for mentioning convolutional LSTM, I wasn't aware such a thing existed.

> _Attention is basically a memory module, so if you don 't need that it's > just a waste of compute resources._

But aren't CNNs also like a memory module (ie: they memorize how leopard skin looks like)? I guess attention is a more sophisticated kind of memory, "more dynamic" so to speak.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that a transformer architecture isn't totally stupid for my task, I will look up the literature, there seems to be a bit on this matter.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, in some sense any layer is a "memory module". Perhaps more specifically, attention solves the problem of directly correlating two items in a sequence that are very, very far away from each other. I'd generally caution against using attention prematurely as it's extremely slow, meaning you'll waste a lot of your time and resources without knowing if it'll help. Stacking conv layers or using recurrence is an easy middle step that, if it helps, can guide you on whether attention could provide even more gains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The title is deceiving. I thought this was an article about building your own electrical transformer, or building your own version of the 1980s toy.

<comment><USER17> I think the top level domain of the author's blog kinda gives it away :)

<comment><USER18> Huh? The website's TLD is NL not ML. (And I'll also chime in to say that I thought it was either electrical transformers or 3D printed transformers toys).

<comment><USER17> Oh wow, my sight must be poor since I honestly thought it was .ml.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HyperCard Adventures - <AUTHOR> http://hypercardadventures.com <comment><USER2> This appears to be using my port of the PCE emulator[1]. It's also used on the Internet Archive, which has a collection of HyperCard stacks which you can run in the browser[2].

I have a short tutorial[3] for running HyperCard stacks locally which might be interesting to anyone who has some stacks lying around on their filesystem, or who just wants to play around with Mac OS 9.

[1] [https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/](https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/)

[2] [https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks](https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks)

[3] [https://jamesfriend.com.au/running-hypercard- stack-2014](https://jamesfriend.com.au/running-hypercard-stack-2014)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard

by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte

"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...

[https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for- hyp...](https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/)

Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:

[https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...](https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=false)

Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:

[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=25053106-2187-4cde-9981-a9eb002aa4e8)

Including polaroids of early Lisa development.

About PhotoCard:

[http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html](http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html)

PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.

With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!

<comment><USER4> .. several million people in the US and Europe did this, in the 1960s and 1970s, and none of them built HyperCard. Please include a full perspective, as emphasis on the chemical will be a plus to some, but a hard negative to many more..

<comment><USER3> I'm confused: Are you saying you think that everyone who took LSD should have invented HyperCard? Or do you think I or Bill Atkinson meant that's what LSD will make anyone who takes it do? Or that LSD is bad because only one in several million who take it invent HyperCard? Or that nobody should use HyperCard because it was invented by a drug crazed loonie? Or are there many notorious software disasters you blame on LSD, like C++, X-Windows, or BSD Unix? Can you hook me up with some PCP/IP? What are you getting at, exactly?

"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that is a coincidence." -Unix-Haters Handbook

[http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf](http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf)

<comment><USER5> I think it's pretty clear that mistral9 means that you need more than just LSD to create something like HyperCard, and maybe you don't need the LSD at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish that thing were screen reader accessible. People are always saying how easy it was to use and I really wantto experience it, though I sadly can't. The only things the screen reader can see on the website are the power switch, the paperclip button, the disk number and the copyright footer.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately it's an emulator of a classic Motorola 68000 Macintosh, you would need some kind of OCR technology to make it accessible

<comment><USER3> Maybe it would be possible to run Berkeley System's "OutSpoken" screen reader on the Mac emulator? (Berkeley Systems also developed the famous "After Dark" screensaver with the flying toasters.)

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

"OutSpoken (styled outSPOKEN) was one of the first commercially available screen readers for a graphical user interface (GUI). Its notable innovations were the use of an off-screen model [1] and the mouse pointer as a review cursor. The original Macintosh version was written by Wes Boyd and Bruce Berkhalter at Berkeley Systems. OutSpoken was first released for the Macintosh in 1989, and was the only screen reader ever available for the Macintosh prior to VoiceOver. OutSpoken for Microsoft Windows was released in 1994 for Windows 3.1, and was widely recognized as one of the first truly effective screen readers for Windows.[2] OutSpoken for Windows was developed primarily by Ben Drees and Peter Korn, with user interface design by Marc Sutton and Joshua Miele."

Oh rats, it looks like Outspoken is not compatible with HyperCard, unfortunately:

[https://books.google.nl/books?id=3KBOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA79&lpg=PA...](https://books.google.nl/books?id=3KBOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=%22outspoken%22+%22hypercard%22&source=bl&ots=ttWUBWFMZD&sig=ACfU3U3JslONELCf- qQtdPUAl0lHiM0Jbg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwio6b-Bx9TgAhUR_aQKHf8xAA0Q6AEwAHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22outspoken%22%20%22hypercard%22&f=false)

"The Outspoken user manual acknowledges some commercial applications with which Outspoken cannot be used because of software incompatibilities. chief among these is HyperCard, a very popular piece of Macintosh software. Additionally, however, there is a whole range of software which is inherently so visual that it would make no sense to attempt to use Outspoken -- all drawing programs, for instance." -Extraordinary Human-Computer Interaction: Interfaces for Users with Disabilities

I would suggest at least listening to Bill Atkinson's description of his LSD trip that inspired HyperCard, which goes into eloquent details about what was important about HyperCard, and is quite evocative.

Here's the transcript published in Mondo 2000:

[https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for- hyp...](https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/)

And the interview that's a transcript of:

[https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...](https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=false)

<comment><USER8> [https://vipercard.net](https://vipercard.net) maybe? It appears to be JavaScript, but it may render to a canvas, which wouldn't help much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I first learned to program with HyperCard and HyperTalk. I owe my professional career partly to it. It will always have a happy spot in my heart.

<comment><USER10> Same. I learned hypercard on the family Apple II starting at maybe age 5. Made all kinds of silly stuff. Eventually learned how to make rudimentary games.

It was one of the experiences that taught me that I control the computer, it's not just a platform to run other's applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This works surprisingly well on an iPhone. Glad people are out there keeping HyperCard alive.

<comment><USER12> And perfectly on iPad 2018... amazing it's possible to use Mac OS Classic in a browser on an iPad. The touch to mouse translation support is better than on most other apps too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are those old Mac shareware games still alive in an emulator anywhere?

I vaguely remember one where you battled a knight early on, and then went on to a modern battlefield... Hmm. I bet that box of 3.5-inch floppies is still sitting around somewhere.

<comment><USER14> You can browse what the Internet Archive has [https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_mac](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_mac)

each of the disk runs in your browser, e.g. [https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation](https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation)

<comment><USER13> Thank you!

"Enchanted Scepters" was the game I was thinking of.

It always struck me as vaguely hypercard-based, but is actually built on a different engine called "World Builder"

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

<comment><USER15> I've been trying to remember the name of this game for decades. I also thought it had a HyperCard feel, which inspired me at 12 years old to attempt making something similar.

I never completed that attempt, but it was my first serious programming effort and I've been programming ever since.

I never managed to finish Enchanted Scepters, but it seems I can fix that now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this actually running in an emulated Mac?

<comment><USER17> appears so, yeah. probably very similar (if not the same) to the emscripten version of PCE that they use over at archive.org:

[https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/16/early-macintosh- emulatio...](https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/16/early-macintosh-emulation- comes-to-the-archive/)

<comment><USER18> The "Credits" HyperCard stack in "Macintosh HD" seems to confirm this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> OMG the paperclip

I logged hundreds of hours on HyperCard. This is wow.

<comment><USER20> My first thought was clippy.

Then I remembered how Apple don't like extraneous useless buttons.

Edit: The paperclip was to eject a stuck floppy if/when the system crashed.

<comment><USER21> There was also a functional reason to eliminate the eject button: a somewhat common problem 'back in the day' was that users would remove/eject floppy discs before they were done being written to. This could cause corruption since there could be several seconds of writing after they clicked the save button or copied a file. Even more fun were when applications or the OS would write for a bit, stop for a couple seconds (and at this point some users would see the disc light turn off and eject the disc) to do some other processing then start writing again. Having the computer control when a disc could be ejected did serve a purpose.

<comment><USER20> True. But there was (and still is) a risk of powering down the computer before writing to disc has finished.

Plus I feel that a better user interface could have solved the problem better. But maybe its 30 years too late for that conversation :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> First thing I wanted to do was fix the HD's system folder so it could boot without the floppy. Hang on, there's no System folder on the floppy!

<comment><USER23> I think it does boot from the HD, clicking the floppy icon just chooses the floppy to have inserted when the system starts, as though the intent is for more floppies to be available?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is this? Context?

<comment><USER25> No real context, it's just an emulated classic Mac with some installed software (including Hypercard, an amazing for the time development system that both influenced the Web and RAD tools like Visual Basic and Delphi). If you ever used such a system it is nostalgic.

<comment><USER23> Had someone thought to publish HyperCard stacks on a network using URIs, HyperCard might have become the web. I think that timeline might be a better place than this one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A lot of the stacks seem to be missing?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm just playing GunShy now.</comment>