Paul Graham – founder of Viaweb (bought by Yahoo! in the late 1990s) and author of Hackers & Painters – has two new excellent essays up. While I don’t know Paul, I do know of him, and I think his writing is great.
- How To Start A Startup. Paul thinks you need three things: (1) good people, (2) make stuff people want, and (3) spend as little money as possible. All the right stuff with fun examples, lots of Paul’s trademark bluntness, and plenty of provocative questions.
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckage. I won’t even try to defend my VC brethern since Paul’s theory is sound in many ways. He admits that he’s met a few VC’s that he likes, so there must be something messed up in the universe somewhere.
He’s finally put an RSS feed up on his site so you can have his thoughts delivered directly to your computer.
Posted in:COMMENTS (3)
Hey Brad. welcome back.
I agree that the Startup article was provocative and contained some great tidbits...but his significant bias toward techies (and against business people) erodes some of his credibility in my mind. Somewhere in the article he talks about failed products, but doesn't ask the rhetorical quesiton "How many really cool technologies failed because they couldn't build a business
around it?" He also takes a few cheap shots at marketing people.
One other point - his promotion of an "animal" lifestyle is not sustainable over time and is not necessary to be a successful entrepreneur in my opinion.
Com'on Brad, you can't let Paul go unanswered, it's unamerican to let the shot go with some kind of response! :-)
I took a shot at my response, see the trackback.
VC do sometime sucks... I proposed few ideas to a VC, they shown there keen interest to go ahead. We had idea, we had a BIG potential client in loop.
But suddenly VC disappeared...never returned back to say even NO.
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