Joshua, Delicious/popular was mentioned a bunch of times in the podcast as a main inspiration. I'll send you a transcript someday if I can arrange it :)
"But remember that making something for yourself is just a heuristic to guide you in finding an idea. In the actual execution, you need to focus on users. You need to understand what they want, and be fanatically dedicated to making them happy."
This point aside, I haven't written anything in 2 years, so it's possible I'm out of shape :)
> This point aside, I haven't written anything in 2 years, so it's possible I'm out of shape :)
Not at all, it was a great read! And perhaps, as @eloff mentioned, my own biases might be at work. As an introvert, it's a more significant effort for me to go out there and investigate other people's problems (so pg's point might be more salient).
What an incredible and inspiring story... truly the highest highs and the lowest lows.
Some take always that really resonated with me:
- Life is is short and it isn’t. Don’t waste time working on “trivial bullshit.”
- A small “family” can take on a bigger, better funded copycat because the small, nimble team obsesses over the sticks.
- Sometimes you’ve gotta just “man up.” I thought it was interesting Tracy used that language, but you can just tell that she doesn’t have time for the bullshit. Be the honey badger.
- If you don’t find joy in what you do say to day, you’re doing the wrong thing.
Amazing job and congratulations! This acquisition votes YES on YC's approach to build user experience, on the fact that the real incumbent exists only in your users's hands.
On the other hand, PlanGrid could be worth quite a bit more than this acquisition pays. I don't buy their argument of 100 billion TAM in one of the Medium posts[1], but it surely had greater potential than what is realized in this deal, had it expand into nearby territories.
[Ask HN: When people tell founders that you need to convince investor that yours will be a billion dollar company, do they mean a billion dollar in revenue, or a billion in valuation? There's likely an order of magnitude difference here hence I wonder which is the default during a normal conversation without further qualification on the number.]
Third, video says it had 10k paying customers in 3 years of launch, while at 12k 4 years later when acquired. Was it saturating the market, or was it fighting considerable churn after raising its B round？ Always amazed by the team's ability to sell the service at this price level, that says how much of a pain PlanGrid is solving.
> This is a big deal: this is by far the biggest acquisition of a YC startup with a female founder/CEO.
I feel I may be ignorant, but doesn't drawing attention to her gender like this only work to diminish her accomplishments? I feel as though she did an amazing job, and siloing it into "best of..." as opposed to letting it stand on its own seems only to lessen the significance of her work.
Maybe I am naive and do not appreciate the difficulties of being a woman in tech, or perhaps I am too idealistic to think that we should not acknowledge the tribulations of achieving this as a female...but to me it seems to cheapen it rather than strengthen it. It's drawing attention to her gender rather than the accomplishment itself.
I am aware of who I am replying to, and I truly am not trying to sling mud here and I fear I may derail this comment thread when it really should just be a celebration of what Tracy Young has done, but then again if I never ask I'll never learn.
It would be awesome if we lived in a world where VCs, investors, and the tech industry in general just invested in people who deserve it. But we're so far from that world right now (just google vc investment in women-founded cos).
I think what JL is bringing up here is important because there is no room for naysayers with this exit. It's a monumental achievement, (for anyone!) but particularly a big F YOU to all the rampant misogny and boys-club culture that persists in tech among investors.
I don't speak for women, but I will say as a mostly-white dude, I have never thought "are there even CEOs or founders that look like me?" whereas I have, through the years, heard that many many times from women and POC.
What Tracy and her team have done is really fantastic. The fact that she's a woman is important only in that it begins the process of shutting up the old boys club, and (hopefully) a sign of things to come for those people who haven't traditionally been given the benefit of the doubt.
It's more than just shutting up the boy's club, and you alluded to it. I think it is important to shed light on the fact that she is a female founder because there are lots of young girls out there that need to see that someone like them, at least in one respect, can achieve something like this.
> I feel I may be ignorant, but doesn't drawing attention to her gender like this only work to diminish her accomplishments?
How would it diminish her accomplishments? As a woman founder, the deck was stacked against her, so her accomplishing this makes it even more impressive.
You're creating a separate category based on her gender, which is sexist in and of itself. It may have good intentions, but you're treating her different because of her sex. If we believe that genders are equal I'm not sure we should be drawing attention to it as a handicap. And if it is a handicap, which seems to be what you're saying, this only promulgates the status that men are more likely to succeed and I initially read it as discouraging.
I guess I just framed it differently than you. You see it as progress towards overcoming the adversity gap of being a woman in tech, whereas I naïvely think we should just treat women as equals. If calling attention to it is a necessary step in overcoming inequality then so be it.
I guess the issue is how do we change the playing field so it's no longer a handicap? I have no idea how to solve sexism and I am not trying to incite rage. I am asking questions because I am trying to have a conversation. For those who have responded civilly, thank you. I have some thinking to do.
Recognizing that the deck is stacked against her because of her gender isn't contributing to stacking the deck further against her. It's doing the opposite; it's pointing out an example that women can succeed in the industry.
Framing both the reality that the tech industry systematically discriminates against women, and pointing out that fact, as if they're two sides of the same coin makes no sense.
I think you're misunderstanding my perspective. Think of it this way. If I said "Tracy did an amazing job for a woman" would you not read it as disparaging? I am fully aware that was not the intention, but that is how I and I am guessing many other people initially read it (judging by how many people upvoted my comment). If our goal is to challenge people's perspectives (ie women are just as capable as succeeding in the tech industry as men), it's important to understand how they read things so we can communicate effectively.
I guess I think of it as fighting sexism with more sexism. We are making a special case to point out her gender, which is pointing out that we don't treat men and women equally in tech. That's sexism, even if it's meant to be good instead of bad. We are trying to solve sexism with more sexism. I guess it may be a necessary step to get to where we want to go, but honestly I'm not convinced it's the right way to get there. To me, simply treating women as equals rather than drawing attention to their gender is the way to go. And we are not treating them equally now, otherwise we wouldn't be mentioning gender.
But I could be wrong. Maybe it is a necessary step to get to where we want to go. I am not a woman and do not pretend to understand their perspective. I am currently trying to understand it more by reading the arguments for and against affirmative action, which I believe has many parallels to this discussion.
I find it weird that we can't have a dialogue about this. Parent post wasn't inflammatory, and yet by its mere nature it makes you uncomfortable?
That is not to say anything of the truth of the post. I happen to disagree with it quite a bit. But people with opposing views (even in issues that seem very cut and dry eg we should celebrate women in tech) should be questioned, not shunned.
I fully agree with you. Welcome to the world of identity politics where every achievement must fill a narrative based on you gender//religion//sexual orientation.
The worst in all of this is that people pushing this are the ones that want to eradicate racism and sexism, which is a very brave goal but by attracting attention to all those external factors, They only create more racism and sexism.
Oh please. Succeeding despite adversity is worth celebrating. Just because that adversity is entrenched sexism and racism doesn't make it any less adverse.
You are right in a way though: there is going to be more visible sexism and racism from some sectors of society (e.g. Trump). This is to be expected as those fights move further towards victory. As Gandhi put it: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Well done to Tracy Young for this step towards winning.
I fully agree that adversity is worth celebrating. I'm therefore 100% congratulating Tracy Young for this achievement. I'm congratulating her on the base that taking a company to this point is really hard.
I'm not congratulating her based on her sex or race. It is unfortunate that some sexist and/or racist behavior exist in tech but if you treat people differently and congratulate them based on their race//gender and not on their individuality, you are not doing anything differently than the racists//sexists.
> I feel I may be ignorant, but doesn't drawing attention to her gender like this only work to diminish her accomplishments?
Please watch the video. Every now and then she mentions her own gender as a very rare-to-find CEO, and clearly use it to her own advantage. I'm not judging whether its good or bad just merely stating the fact.
Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN:
I genuinely laugh every time at that comment every time this gets reposted, as if 99.99% of people wouldn't run away if they read 'curlftpfs' and 'mounted filesystem'
Thanks for this comment and the one about ftp. I also didn’t see the difference between Facebook and MySpace. It’s hard to understand the money side of reality until you are older and have seen some things.
Classic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.
I think there's another point to be learned from both the Dropbox comment and CmdrTaco's original infamous iPod take. And that's the importance of a really well-designed product that's simple and easy to use. Both Dropbox and the iPod weren't the first to try to solve the problems they were addressing, but they were the most elegant, intuitive solution. Both implementations effectively got out of the way of their users and exposed the underlying function with a little impedance as possible. It's always important to remember that the goal isn't for users to use your product. The goal is for users to get the value your product delivers. That sounds obvious, but a lot of product development teams forget that. Both Dropbox and the original iPod seem to embody that distinction.
As for your "nothing I can deploy on my own server" comment, checkout syncthing or Resilio. Both take a bit more doing than a simple Dropbox install, but I've found syncthing to be pretty bulletproof once it's configured and I've heard a lot of people prefer Resilio.
There was nothing intuitive about the iPod click-wheel interface; in casual use of other people's iPods I never did determine how to use it before it was superseded by touchscreens.
I don't believe you. firstly rotate the wheel to adjust a level (i.e. level of menu selection highlight) is literally how volume knobs have always worked. secondly clickwheel was in the iPod for 5 years? 8 years? in all the time you never figured out how to use it?
I think it is a reasonable comment, even in hindsight. It didn't dismiss the idea completely like CmdrTaco did, it just offered three criticisms of the business plan. All three points are real issues that Dropbox faced. They obviously dealt with all of them successfully, but there was no guarantee that any company in the space would deal with those issues successfully.
Ha-ha, but for every one where the criticism turned out to be wrong, how many are there where the criticism was spot on? We laugh at things the HN Dropbox critique and the Slashdot iPod critique, but without people there to criticize and point out potential pitfalls, we’re all just patting each other on the back and telling each other how awesome everything is. Is that how good ideas grow?
It would be a fun experiment to put comments like this as quotes on the "Add Comment" page so you had to read them while typing your own comment. Might make people take a second or two extra to reconsider.
> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
I don't think that comment is necessarily unfair. Dropdox does charge for the service if a user wants over 2GB. I think the more questionable comment is that first point:
>For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
I miss pg. He was really cool. I understand why he left, I think, but...
I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of good.
I don't know. Sometimes it just feels like you and pg stopped believing in us. Which I guess is understandable. One year it went from HN feeling like a part of the community to feeling like we're an adversary. After all, we -- the internet at large -- are small-minded reactionaries, right? Why bother?
But it's a perception worth changing. The old guard is still here. HN grew up, so there are more voices now -- there's more to sift through. But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here.
Setting all that aside, though: have a nice day! And thanks for everything you've built.
Yeah, they built a great thing...I think they sparked a revolution and empowered founders making vcs play fair. But, they're parents now and life is short, as the essay says....
> But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here.
Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react to any post or comment : talk trash. Examples of the latter : tptacek, dguido and other secuity professionals. If you read some of the security related threads where tptacek takes part, you will notice that he is literally talking to a wall, people refuse to listen to the guy or try to understand the reasoning behind his comments, though he is respected in the security community and is always right on security related topics. Especially on security related threads there is dangerous advice floating around. Eg- use Tor or some stupid suggestion on how to trick the CBP at the border.
I also noticed the rise of anti-semiticism and just generally hateful comments when the topics of religion, nationality or Trump are brought up. This issue is only getting worse and god help the moderators who have to read these comments on a daily basis.
Though this might be controversial, the general quality of discussion has gone down over the years. I think this is inevitable : as the community grows, quality of discussion goes down. HN is doing incredibly well on this count, the discussions are still the best on any public forum, but IMO the quality is going down. As the community grows, veterans generally tend to become inactive.
(Before people point out that my account is only 159 days old, I've been part of HN for much longer under different handles.)
I respect tptacek's expertise in his domain. I sometimes argue with him in other topics, where he is out of depth but assumes that because his a respected expert in one domain he is also an expert in others when he is actually not an expert at all.
this applies to all sorts of things, and PG is no exception. PG is an expert on programming and on founding VC funded companies. he is certainly not an expert on most other things but would frequently comment on those things as if he was, and then act very defensive and shocked when he was criticized for things he was wrong about or tone-deaf about.
really this applies to ANYONE in this community. there is lots of very intelligent, well-reasoned discussion, but nobody ought to get a pass on things because of their reputation. we ought not defer to authority. we ought to discuss the arguments as presented.
I never said he should be given a free pass on all topics, I specifically mention tptacek as an example of an expert in the security industry whose security related advice, people ignore here on HN.
I've been here since ~2009, under my real name account that I don't use at all anymore. At this point, I find it nearly impossible to interact with this forum in any positive or useful way. IMO the quality went WAY down. Gradually at first, starting around 2011. Worse each year.
> a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting
is the problem one of diversity? Writing for a diverse audience is hard, especially at internet scale, it's a lot easier to write to people who agree with you. Writing for people who don't agree with you is way harder but also way more valuable. It's a shame that most people just give up. I see this not just on HN but also in other elite communities that over time begin to mainstream. A lot of the clojure discussion forums died once the language grew enough that it wasn't just elites. The people who know the most just don't say anything in public anymore. All the discussion is on slack now which is a shame.
I was giving a talk to 800+ women (most of whom were not affiliated with YC in any way) who attended the Female Founders Conference last April in SF. A majority of them have already started a startup, so of course I'm hoping they will become successful someday.
Thanks for the context and taking the time to answer.
I took the time of watching the talk, not just read the transcript. Came up with a completely different impression. They really needed some words of encouragement after the meat of the talk.
As the sibling comment says, I've indeed over-analyzed it. My apologies.
"But if a university really wanted to help its students start startups, the empirical evidence, weighted by market cap, suggests the best thing they can do is literally nothing." This is an important insight and will be totally counterintuitive to universities.
