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10 Sep 17
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our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick.
Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great. -
it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work.
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If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they'd often make good startups.
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Would all good nonprofits be good companies? Possibly not. What makes Google so valuable is that their users have money. If you make people with money love you, you can probably get some of it. But could you also base a successful startup on behaving like a nonprofit to people who don't have money? Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?
I'm not sure, but I suspect that if you pushed this idea, you'd be surprised how far it would go. -
Maybe an organization that helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting growth.
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One way to guess how far an idea extends is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it.
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When you're small, you can't bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you're big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it's easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.
You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So "Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. -
Anyone can adopt "Don't be evil." The catch is that people will hold you to it.
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being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and above all, it helps them be decisive.
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Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it makes you stop working.
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If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail.
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If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed.
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if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day, you've basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi. You've made something you need to take care of.
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There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in. Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable information.
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If you're really committed and your startup is cheap to run, you become very hard to kill. And practically all startups, even the most successful, come close to death at some point. So if doing good for people gives you a sense of mission that makes you harder to kill, that alone more than compensates for whatever you lose by not choosing a more selfish project.
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Another advantage of being good is that it makes other people want to help you. This too seems to be an inborn trait in humans.
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If you're benevolent, people will rally around you: investors, customers, other companies, and potential employees. In the long term the most important may be the potential employees.
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If you can attract the best hackers to work for you, as Google has, you have a big advantage. And the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. They're not desperate for a job. They can work wherever they want. So most want to work on things that will make the world better.
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But the most important advantage of being good is that it acts as a compass. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide?
Here's the answer: Do whatever's best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. Follow it and it will take you through everything you need to do. -
It's even the answer to questions that seem unrelated, like how to convince investors to give you money.
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Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. It's like telling the truth.
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I'm not suggesting you be good in the usual sanctimonious way. I'm suggesting it because it works. It will work not just as a statement of "values," but as a guide to strategy, and even a design spec for software. Don't just not be evil. Be good.
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it's ok to focus on growth instead of profits—but only if the growth is genuine. You can't be buying users; that's a pyramid scheme. But a company with rapid, genuine growth is valuable, and eventually markets learn how to value valuable things.
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[2] The idea of starting a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because the kind of people who currently make that their explicit goal don't usually do a very good job.
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They act as if having good intentions were enough to guarantee good effects.
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26 May 17
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Make something people want.
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Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great.
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Craigslist. It's not a charity, but they run it like one.
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Google looked a lot like a charity in the beginning. They didn't have ads for over a year.
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What makes Google so valuable is that their users have money. If you make people with money love you, you can probably get some of it.
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One way to guess how far an idea extends is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it. The thought of betting against benevolence is alarming in the same way as saying that something is technically impossible.
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Surely Microsoft isn't benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood.
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Microsoft isn't so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F. [3] And yet it doesn't seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google's. Could there be a connection?
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When you're small, you can't bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you're big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it's easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.
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So "Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I'm sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.
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From what we've seen, being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and above all, it helps them be decisive.
-
Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it makes you stop working. So the downhills of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail.
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Here's where benevolence comes in. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence.
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There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in. Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable information.
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The added confidence that comes from trying to help people can also help you with investors. One of the founders of Chatterous told me recently that he and his cofounder had decided that this service was something the world needed, so they were going to keep working on it no matter what, even if they had to move back to Canada and live in their parents' basements.
Once they realized this, they stopped caring so much what investors thought about them. They still met with them, but they weren't going to die if they didn't get their money. And you know what? The investors got a lot more interested. They could sense that the Chatterouses were going to do this startup with or without them. -
If you're really committed and your startup is cheap to run, you become very hard to kill. And practically all startups, even the most successful, come close to death at some point. So if doing good for people gives you a sense of mission that makes you harder to kill, that alone more than compensates for whatever you lose by not choosing a more selfish project.
-
If you're benevolent, people will rally around you: investors, customers, other companies, and potential employees. In the long term the most important may be the potential employees. I think everyone knows now that good hackers are much better than mediocre ones. If you can attract the best hackers to work for you, as Google has, you have a big advantage. And the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. They're not desperate for a job. They can work wherever they want. So most want to work on things that will make the world better.
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One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide?
Here's the answer: Do whatever's best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. Follow it and it will take you through everything you need to do. -
if you make something users love enough to tell their friends, you grow exponentially, and that will convince any investor.
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The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast.
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When you're trying to advise 57 startups, it turns out you have to have a stateless algorithm. You can't have ulterior motives when you have 57 things going on at once, because you can't remember them. So our rule is just to do whatever's best for the founders. Not because we're particularly benevolent, but because it's the only algorithm that works on that scale.
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08 Dec 14
Jordan GoldmanAbout a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick.
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24 Nov 14
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Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great.
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15 Oct 14
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tacking
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Power
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malaria
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elixir
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sanctimonious
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trustafarians
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Bolivia
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25 Feb 14
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14 Nov 12
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Either businesses aren't supposed to be like charities, and we've proven by reductio ad absurdum that one or both of the principles we began with is false. Or we have a new idea.
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04 Oct 12
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But the most important advantage of being good is that it acts as a compass. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide?
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23 Dec 11
William GunnRT @emp: The bigger your company gets, the more important it is that you keep in mind one of @paulg's greatest hits: http://t.co/VlzZ3bMO
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15 Aug 11
Ryan Swanstrom" You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean."
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24 May 11
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20 May 11
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07 Sep 10
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Google looked a lot like a charity in the beginning. They didn't have ads for over a year. At year 1, Google was indistinguishable from a nonprofit. If a nonprofit or government organization had started a project to index the web, Google at year 1 is the limit of what they'd have produced.
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Microsoft isn't so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F. [3] And yet it doesn't seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google's. Could there be a connection?
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There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in. Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable information.
-
Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. It's like telling the truth. The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast.
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11 Mar 09
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19 Nov 08
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10 Oct 08
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24 Jul 08
Marc LijourEthics of success: do something people want
article blog business career corporate culture ethics entrepreneurship startup for:mt8212
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16 Jun 08
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15 Jun 08
Ilan Gordon"One way to guess how far an idea extends is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it. The thought of betting against benevolence is alarming in the same way as saying that something is technically impossible. You're just asking to be made a foo
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28 May 08
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Arturo CalleSome ideas on profiting by being good and benefiting others, a somewhat inspirational essay ("the golden rule can work for you too.")
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22 May 08
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21 May 08
Adam Crowe"... being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and above all, it helps them be decisive.... I'm suggesting [being good] because it works."
startup business entrepreneurship decisions strategy advice ethics idealism
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07 May 08
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05 May 08
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Maybe the situation is similar with malaria. Maybe an organization that helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting growth.
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04 May 08
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02 May 08
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Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it makes you stop working. So the downhills of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail. Here's where benevolence comes in. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence. The mere fact that someone needs you makes you want to help them. So if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day, you've basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi. You've made something you need to take care of.
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Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it makes you stop working. So the downhills of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail. Here's where benevolence comes in. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence. The mere fact that someone needs you makes you want to help them. So if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day, you've basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi. You've made something you need to take care of.
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30 Apr 08
Adriana Lukasthe best way to run a start- up is as if it were a charity. actually makes sense. VRM Hub and VRM NEA have no business model as such, trying to make something work first. Make something work, money will follow. The trick is spotting where.
paulgraham non-profit charity startup business craiglist google success delicious
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25 Apr 08
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23 Apr 08
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22 Apr 08
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21 Apr 08
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Thomas R. StegelmannAnother thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great.
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