Young, impressionable and inexperienced entrepreneurs are willing to sacrifice their health, happiness and creativity while pursuing wealth. (Movie at 11.)
Take Michael Parkatti and Mike Marrone, living the Y Combinator dream, “working 18 hour days for almost two straight months“.
A few weeks into that grueling schedule, they started to produce less than people working normal 40 hour weeks. By now they are so sleep deprived that they are only working at a small fraction of their peak-capacity. Creativity is your most important asset in development, and the first one to go with sleep deprivation.
In other words, the YC model is not optimal for wealth creation. It does however bear more than a passing resemblance a textbook definition of a cult:
- People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;
- Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized;
- They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic;
- They get a new identity based on the group;
- They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.
YC has incredible buzz, and their success rate may increase despite the entrepreneurs being increasingly over-worked. They are growing a community of people who ascribe their success to their workaholic ways and repeat their mantras, too sleep deprived to question whether they suffer from confirmation bias.
All the new recruits tend to be believers, ensuring YC will stay nicely conservative about its most irrational and cultish traits. They’ll endure sleep deprivation (1), work absurdly long hours to make money and concentrate 40 years of work into 4 (2), get to meet the mighty Paul Graham (3), show their pride in being a YC funded company! (4). To do all this, they’ll willingly move away from their friends to join a new hive.
It’s not just YC: the best hackers are increasingly dropping out of the VC insanity. Our interests are increasingly at odds with those of the VCs: we need them less and less. And judging from the popularity of talks like DHH’s at startup school, many hackers want more time, less money.
VCs still have a great role to play. While some have tried roundtables (or suggested a startup school), the problem is more fundamental - I’ll cover that and my solution in my next entry.
39 comments ↓
It is a cult, and Paul Graham is Jesus. It is almost sad to see some of the postings to Hacker News:
“I’m 40 with two kids…am I too old to do a startup?”
“Is it possible to live in Podunk, Iowa (i.e., not Silicon Valley) and do a start up?”
“Does anyone know if it is possible to succeed at a startup without using Lisp?”
Folks, if you need confirmation on Hacker News for stuff like this, don’t even bother.
Is this a joke?
Just read Paul Graham’s most recent string of essays and maybe you won’t come away thinking that YC is a cult but you will have the distinct impression that Paul is fucking nuts. According to him we’re all morons and the only good programmers are YC-funded startups within fart-smelling distance of Silicon Valley.
according to Paul Graham you are all morons? no, look at the current state of the nation, helped by people like you and your parents through your support of a suicidal administration. the proof is in the pudding, no need to find someone to attack just because he can write and do so much better than you will ever be able to.
None of the really famous startups had any sort of VC Funding. Working hard is something that just comes naturally when your love in what you do.Then it doesnt remain working hard.Theres a difference between working for Paul Graham (YC) and working for the love of it.
yikers. is bertox accusing the french (guy) of supporting bush to persecute graham? sounds like something a scientologist who you couldn’t prove is a scientologist would say.
first time i’ve seen someone suggest that working harder solves everything while being anti-bush. what is this guy, a post-Rand objectivist or something?
Yip.
http://stephan.reposita.org/archives/2007/06/28/paul-graham/
Peace
-stephan
did you talk to the people who are IN ycombinator?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260017
I don’t know why I’m even bothering to reply to this, but…
I am in YC and I’ve been up for 42 hours straight now! There must be something sinister afoot!
Give me a break.
I’m still awake because I haven’t felt like sleeping, not because I am under some kind of abnormal amount of stress. The point of YC, in part, is to get the extremely high productivity level that comes with being under pressure and a deadline to present, among other things. Has this been a pretty stress summers as far as summers go? Sure. But making the leap to “cult” would be an obviously baiting and rather asinine leap!
(1) essentially describes life, (2)&(3) aren’t remotely accurate, (4) — I’m pretty sure I brought my identity with me, (5) is essentially the opposite of true on the latter portion while on the former is precisely what happens when you spend all waking hours working! Crazy!
Now, when did Paul say that kool-aid party was…
Uhh, I just quit a job that paid $65k ($37k after taxes and burnout time) and required 65+ hours in the office each week.
I averaged 3.822 hours of sleep on weeknights and, near the end, went for three weeks straight w\o a real day off (7 day work weeks weren’t uncommon.) No overtime or no comptime.
I took sick days and unpaid leave just to rest.
That’s the story of my last 15 months. I would be thrilled to work for a YC startup, I’d probably be able to catchup on some sleep.
Tom - go see a doctor for that. Seriously.
mcu - Nice way to make less than $20/hr. You’re selling yourself short: consultants charge $100+/hr. Does consulting 10-20 hours a week while you build a product really sound so bad that you’d rather do another 3 month sprint?
So my question to you is… what is the perfect environment to make it happen? I think the need for creativity goes down with time. Once your idea is “set”, you start working. You might make some changes in the beginning but the more you get to the goal, the less changes you will make. That is if you want to release your product someday
I think that this school of thought (doing it quick) is just like startups who remain stealthy. Some thrive in publicity even without a product and they get good feedback even before they started “real coding”. I think it’s a better approach but someone else might like your idea and work on a clone somewhere else… Thus the need for speed…
must be a french guy that would rail against working hard.
10k for 10% of my company? paul can keep his proselytizing and ramen, i’ll fund myself, thanks
danielharan - You have the sound of a man who is selling something… How would you recommend going from developer to consultant?
mcu - I can coach you to become financially successful for only $300/hr. Results guaranteed in as little as 10 hours.
I jest: I know of no good recipe to transition to consulting.
Obie Fernandez told us all at Rubyfringe that we should be charging at least $150/hr. Experience in today’s hot technology is always useful.
danielharan - I’m a Free Software developer. I’ve spent the last two months working 8-10 hours a day for free. At $150 an hour it seems that the best way to transition from developer to consultant is to shed your shame. I think it would take weeks before I could ask for $100+ w\o giggling.
“People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations”
I’m the CEO of my own company now, and I’m being paid to work on problems that are interesting to me. It’s totally distressing!
“Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized”
We call it “make something people want”, which is way harder than my last job, which paid by “average warmth of my chair”.
“They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic”
I would be so much less distressed if the people running this place didn’t accept me. What’s wrong with those wankers?
“They get a new identity based on the group”
I’ve got this totally bitchin’ new email address.
“They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled”
I work building things on the “information superhighway”, and yet I don’t seem to be able to access any pop culture! I think Paul installed a packet filter on my line so I can only visit sites with “ruby” in the name.
@mcu: You took the wrong job, buddy. Why would you let such a job run your entire life? The goal isn’t to work to live, it’s to live to work and enjoy what you’re doing. A good work-life balance is the key to being happy, along with copious amounts of sleep that you’re not getting.
DHH’s Startup School talk needs to be watched by anyone who has any interest in starting a project/site/company. Thinking that your idea is worth $0 if it’s not done by yesterday is bullshit. Work on it in your spare time, keep your day job, and build it into a real business. Sleeping in a shitty apartment with a bunch of your coworkers and working like a dog for a summer for scrap wages is no way to live. There are far better ways to start a company than to subject yourself to intolerable conditions.
Paul’s point that loading code into your head takes a while and that interruptions are horrible and that therefore coding very long isolated days seems perfectly sensible to me; coding two of those days in a row (okay, three in a row if you’re half my age), on the other hand, would be bad. Obvious conclusion is don’t code more than three days a week, right? There’s always plenty of short-attention-span stuff to fill up another couple of work days per week, right?
cmp - Free Software is an ideal way to build up your portfolio.
In his talk at Rubyfringe, Obie mentioned that his standard consulting contract mentions that any work done on the framework or plugins (basically, anything that’s not related to the client’s core business) can be released as open source. In other words, they get paid in part to work on open source projects.
It is surprisingly easy to get used to asking for $100/hr. Hopefully your free software work will bring you the right contacts to get you started - good luck
cmp:
Yeah, pretty much. However, it is a startling truth to realize that we’re genuinely always worth more than we think we are. I’ve been working on a project, charging more than $100/hr, and while personally, that number seems astronomical to me, I’m actually producing more useful work than an entire company of people that was also hired to work on the project. I’m not accidentally infecting systems with viruses, exposing SQL injection holes everywhere I go, or generally producing worthless code that has to be rewritten. Turns out, that ability is really worth quite a bit. Don’t undersell yourself. Right now, the company I’m working for thinks I’m an incredible steal because the stuff I’m writing actually works the first time around. (Thank you, unit tests.)
I think YC is just like American Idol: you are losing your time putting youself against a lot of other people, instead of building on your own strengh.
First, if you are a small startup you *dont* need to move to the Bay Area. By definition, you don’t have money to hire anyone, so why bother being there? If/when you get funding to hire hundreds of people, then move if that is the easiest way to access a qualified work force.
Moreover, PG will take at least 6% of you company just for a few thousand dollars. This doesn’t sound something that a smart founder would do. Can you picture the Google guys or the Facebook guy doing such a silly thing?
I really do hope you’re kidding.
You need to know when to draw the line between “sacrifice and hard work” and “stepping into a cult.”
Do you really think that an entrepreneur, someone who is starting a company from the ground up, can actually afford to create something on 40 HOURS A WEEK? I’m sorry, have you ever even tried to start a company before? Or do you just sort of sit on the sideline and call it how you see it?
I would really encourage you to try and start a company on 40 hours a week, and when you’ve done it successfully, let me know the results. Until then, going around and calling communities of people who share similar interests and similar passions a cult, probably not the most productive use of your time.
By the way, I’m glad some “French” guy is giving advice to the world about how to run things. What was the last major successful startup that came out of France…?
For the tl;dr crowd: Loyalty kills. For some people YC and the chance to be their own boss is a steal. Even if it doesn’t work out.
Mike Rundle – After interning with the company for two summers I took it out of loyalty.
Unfortunately I have a sleep condition, a 26 hour internal clock, which means that I’m useless when I get off of my sleep schedule (e.g. trying to wake up at the same time everyday.) For the two summers that I interned I would show up at work and pick at code, then I would go home, sleep, and work at full capacity when rested. I killed myself to try to get my foot in the door. At the end of those summers I would skip the first week of class to catch up on my sleep.
When I started full-time [0] I did the same. After about three months I was frazzled. After four I started talking to the president about needing a change. Two months after that, he suggested having a sleep study done. So I scheduled one.
I would often work on weekends to make up for the fact that I felt unproductive during some weekdays and to keep up with the schedules (when you get ~4 hours of sleep a night during the week, your brain is pretty much shot by Thursday morning.)
I talked to the president about the fact that I was tired of being tired and just wanted to be productive for him. I went so far as to schedule a meeting with him to ask him if he had any interest in letting me go in the short / long term or if he saw my schedule changing in the future. I practically begged him to fire me or at the very least tell me that nothing was going to change so I could leave.
He told me that he didn’t have any plans to fire me.
I asked if I could change my schedule until the results of the sleep study came in, he shrugged and said no.
I should have quit on the spot.
It was another month (9 total months of partial sleep deprivation) before the study was conducted.
The results were pretty much what I expected. The diagnosis was severe delayed sleep phase syndrome. Most likely with a genetic component, (I have it, my mom has it, numerous uncles have it) it wasn’t going to change.
My direct supervisor (there was a re-org just before I had the study done, the tech dept no longer reported to the president) asked me what I would do if my work schedule wasn’t changed. I replied that I would have to quit, and he informed me that they had no plans to fire me, but that nothing was going to change with my schedule.
I was told by the president that “It would be very hard to change if I didn’t want it to change.”
I lost a girlfriend of 8 years to this (we were in a long distance relationship while she was in law school, she couldn’t handle me sleeping through our weekends together.) I went through prolonged partial sleep deprivation for a year trying to change it. I stayed out of loyalty to the company, and, because I actually believed that things were going to change.
So to get back to the theme of the article, I lost a year of my life to prolonged partial sleep deprivation and I’m further in debt now than I would be if I had stayed home and watched TV with my thumb up my ass. I still owe a large sum in work related medical expenses (the sleep study + interpretation was $5,000, it was not covered by our insurance program as I was told it would be) and my student loans came due far earlier than they would have otherwise.
For me, YC and the opportunity to start my own company would be a steal. At this point even the thought of working for someone as a contractor leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I really wish I were exaggerating about this last year.
I did periodically take unpaid leave.
After the first six months I took two weeks and after they informed me that they would not change my schedule I took another two. Unfortunately I had to work 8-14 hours a day during this time to finish up contributions to a free software project (~14 KLOC of heavily multi-threaded code, not fun to work on 10 minutes at a time) that I had to put on hold when they asked me to start early[see 0].
I honestly don’t understand why they wouldn’t fire me and would let me take time off when I was burned out, but wouldn’t let me find any kind of a balance so that I could stay on as a productive employee. I’ve been gone for two months now and it just seems crazier and crazier as time goes by.
[0] - I started working for them six months earlier then originally scheduled because they had a “big project” and were splitting the company in two. I eventually dropped out of school (with only a semester and change left) to find the time to work on their project. After five months it was completed and shelved. It still hasn’t been released.
ha. it’s a funny analogy. entirely wrongheaded of course, but amusing.
I also find the anti-PG vitriol to be entertaining. People don’t like it when Paul calls their baby ugly. Paul’s only “fucking nuts” enough to opine about the optimal startup experience. frankly - even though I don’t have anything close to PG’s vision of a startup, I love learning from his view.
[…] Wow, I didn’t think one off-hand remark in a blog post would cause such a controversy. I mention that we’re working 18 hour days and people assume that we’ve been entranced by slave mongers. […]
^ ah, a trackback from Michael Parkatti’s answer. He calls my interpretation ludicrous and naive - fair enough since I called him “young, impressionable and inexperienced”
Worth a read!
[…] You gotta read this Posted on July 30, 2008 by saneyuki Read t h i s […]
[…] and read “danielharan.com”. he is a smart guy. smarter than me i suppose. but his recent post (which got me to read his blog) makes me sorta think about entrepreneurship and […]
Been working for startups for 15 years. Went to “Startup School” and drank the Paul Graham Koolaide.
But my 15 years of experience has left me wise to the ways of the world, and the koolaide was clearly poison.
PG has little experience and no clues. He’s charismatic, but that’s all.
His coterie of kids- and they are all kids because anyone 4 years out of college knows its BS– are so wrapped up in the ideology that they can’t even see straight.
The best litmust test for whether its a cult or not is how they react to skeptics. If any group immediately starts branding people who disagree as evile (or “old and washed up”) and rejects them without considering the possibility they might be right, you’ve got a cult.
Cults generate self reinforcing ideologies that cultivate an “us vs them” perspective. Go to hacker news and you’ll see a lot of brainwashed kids but not any hackers.
Its sad too, because there’s probably some genuine talent going to waste.
Also, anyone with any experience knows that VCs are assholes without a clue who are so ego driven that they can’t wait to fuck up your company. The dotbomb was not the result of bad entrepreneurs, but VCs forcing them to spend way too much money. VCs want to flip the company and turn over the investment, they couldn’t care less about building a business. And no, your VC is not different. You’ve just fallen for him (and his money.)
In fact, YC is all about flipping companies, and these kids think that getting VC funding is “success”.
They don’t even respect building a business- they consider that in derogatory terms. “Making a profit? What a fool you are! You’re in a “lifestyle business”".
Whatever, see you when you’re burned out and no longer enjoy programming…..
The hilarious thing is that PG gets torn up when a rare brain shows up on News.yc but the Y-tards come to his rescue. His logic is awful and his essays are bombastic and full of crap. He has no understanding of business whatsoever.
Then again, Paul Graham is rich. Good for him. Oh wait, isn’t Mark Cuban richer and an even bigger douche? Yeah, I’d rather be Mark Cuban than Paul Graham. They both sold their companies to Yahoo but one is a fly, the other is a big ass fly.
So what’s wrong with a cult?
It has benefits, you know.
[…] Hackerspace, Morgan Tocker from MySQL/Sun, Praized, Flow Consulting, CoRadiant, future BarCampers, linkbaiters :-), hackers and “security experts” who came up for RECON ‘08, and a reporter […]
[…] Новую религию придумали не-индусы, YC is a cult — Some French Guy […]
[…] ← YC is a cult […]
[…] French Guy’s original post and it’s follow up merely reminded me of these facts and finally pushed me over the edge to the point where I felt that a counter-culture to this industrialization of software needed to form. I’m under no false pretense that one little blog entry was going to start a counter culture. But it was all I could be bothered to do […]
[…] I promised I’d look at the fundamental problem between hackers and VCs, and propose a solution. […]
@#4 bertox,
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Leave a Comment