Seventeen years ago, Paul Graham, then a relatively obscure web developer, gave a talk at Harvard titled “How to Start a Startup.” The lecture, which Graham adapted into a widely read essay, argued for a vision of entrepreneurship that was more limited than what had been attempted during the dot-com bubble. He suggested that entrepreneurs should be skeptical of venture capitalists, that they should be obsessively cheap, and that they should focus on small, unsexy markets. Above all, Graham urged founders to seek out customers from the very beginning and to respond to their needs. “Make something customers actually want,” he said.
Over the next two decades, this advice became canonical in Silicon Valley. Graham co-founded an incubator and venture capital firm, Y Combinator, that would go on to seed dozens of big companies while adopting his advice as something of a mantra. Walk around tech campuses, and you’ll see T-shirts with the Y Combinator logo, proclaiming: “Make something people want.” The advice was applied to an entire generation of so-called Web 2.0 companies—a category that came to include Facebook, YouTube, Airbnb, and dozens of other wildly successful companies.
As a startup philosophy, “Make something people want” comes with obvious limitations. Critics have long pointed out that Graham’s advice, which you could boil down to “Take a couple of MIT dormmates and build a little app,” led to companies that, at their worst, were less companies than impossibly trivial projects, led by founders who tended to be white, male, and dweeby. It also led to companies with shaky economics. There were the Web 2.0 startups that offered addictive products without making money—Vine, for instance—and those, like Uber, where customer desires (sure, dirt-cheap taxis sound great) have yet to translate into profitability.
Continue reading: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-28/web3-is-the-big-idea-customers-didn-t-ask-for
Over the next two decades, this advice became canonical in Silicon Valley. Graham co-founded an incubator and venture capital firm, Y Combinator, that would go on to seed dozens of big companies while adopting his advice as something of a mantra. Walk around tech campuses, and you’ll see T-shirts with the Y Combinator logo, proclaiming: “Make something people want.” The advice was applied to an entire generation of so-called Web 2.0 companies—a category that came to include Facebook, YouTube, Airbnb, and dozens of other wildly successful companies.
As a startup philosophy, “Make something people want” comes with obvious limitations. Critics have long pointed out that Graham’s advice, which you could boil down to “Take a couple of MIT dormmates and build a little app,” led to companies that, at their worst, were less companies than impossibly trivial projects, led by founders who tended to be white, male, and dweeby. It also led to companies with shaky economics. There were the Web 2.0 startups that offered addictive products without making money—Vine, for instance—and those, like Uber, where customer desires (sure, dirt-cheap taxis sound great) have yet to translate into profitability.
Continue reading: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-28/web3-is-the-big-idea-customers-didn-t-ask-for
