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Paul Graham Explains How to Start a Startup
woginuk writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay on his website on how to start a startup. According to him 'You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.'
How difficult can that be? So go start them startups."
Ummm, shouldn't there be a good idea somewhere in there too?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
First, I have excellent fucking people skills, I understand that people just want to be left alone and I didn't spend ANY money on that! Where is my friggin' BMW at?
I thought it went something like this:
1. Give something valuable away for free.
2. ???
3. Profit!
I didn't RTFA.
Was Step Two "????" by any chance?
I am going to resurrect Gopherspace and sell it as the internet 2.
to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible
Ahhh, so that was the secret to Microsoft's success...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
There is one and only one thing that a startup needs. And that is the infamous: "???"
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
When someone makes a point of telling me how honest he is, I make sure to count my fingers after we shake hands. My reaction to people who tell me how smart they are is similar.
Yeah, when someone tells me how smart they are, I count my fingers afterwords, too, out of fear their stupidity might be contageous.
For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. when you're starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.
"Hello, i'm Susan Johnson."
"I'm going to call you Suzy."
"Ummm, OK."
"Actually, lets call you Suzy McTitsfull."
"What??"
"Are you a breeder McTitsfull? Because we're trying to start a business and we can't have your water breaking all over our nice Aerons."
"That is none of your goddamn business."
"Well, then we have something in common, because THIS isn't YOUR business, McTitsfull. I knew I shouldn't have interviewed some random gash. GOOD-BYE."
Which brings us to the alternate requirements:
-A patent
-A lawyer
-Xerox paper and envelopes
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
If you can pull that one off, you may as well just play the stock market. One rule: buy low, sell high. How can you lose?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Garage.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
In future episodes we will teach you how to pick a pickup, fix a fixup, hang a hangup, and screw a screwup.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Dear Paul,
If you don't
mind, I would
like to have
control over
how wide a
column of
text appears
in my web
browser
window.
Thanks,
Teh Intarweb
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That's an awesome name. It's up there with Wolf Blitzer. I wish I had a name like that.
In th end, they chose to make a movie about it all and rake in a few thousand dollars to cover some of their losses ... the first good business decision they made :)
1) look at the integral
2) scratch head (or balls)
3) write down the symbols that, when you take the derivative, give the integral
Compare also to Joel of Fogbrain Software, and his guides on how to clean up old code, for example -- it consists of 1) have a lot of time, weeks and weeks, in which you have to do nothing and 2) write code that does the exact same thing but is better organized.