The comments here are taking a very uncharitable definition of “power”. If I take that definition I can see how people are being so negative. But just a slightly more positive definition and this all seems like reasonable dialogue to have with an early stage startup.
> There's a variant of going full stack where you eat your way gradually through the customer by doing all their hardest work for them.
One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack.
One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.
In my experience it depends on the nature of that client. A drawback to having a dominant client is that they have a lot more leverage in roadmap, prioritisation, and product fit. That can seriously impact the internal coherence and maintainability of the product. Too many bits of business logic lodges in weird places because the client didn't want to write custom behaviours, and no time to tidy it up because they're always demanding their next wishlist feature to be deployed yesterday.
I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
I think people have now become extremely wary of VC, startup and Silicon Valley because at some point there was a boiling frog shift from helping people and enabling new things to viciously eating anyone not participating.
Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed.
Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.
I would hazard a guess that the people attending a YC event (!) to watch Sam Altman (!) talk with Garry Tan (!) would regard Paul Graham well irrespective of how the rest of the world sees him.
Playing for the long game is good. But that sentence is too lossy to decipher the meaning unless you know what it means.
Instead of making the company more powerful, I would recommend making the company more aligned with truth and the real world which has a nice side effect of being resilient.
Add to that, preparing for scale.
We have dedicated an entire year for nothing but architecture, correctness, distributedness and scaling.
The economic perspective of the same would be reducing the cost of software development (not in the LLM massive code generation way but the opposite with architecture).
Its been 5 years since we have been building Slyp and SlypBusiness along with the plethora of technologies around it.
I don't know whether we are powerful as per the author's definition but we are damn resilient.
I am not surprised that Silicon Valley researchers say they cannot solve the alignment problem... Here the leading voice in the region publishes an article about how to be more powerful without any other mention of alignment but "users".
For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?
How do we prove alignment? Often times, large regulatory bodies. Who supports that? Does the regulatory body actually have enough power to enforce those standards? (Hint: look at modern America). That's an example of power questions sneaking in even when you didn't want to.
Even "mere Darwinism" is less extreme because it pretends like there is some objective criterion called natural selection that will filter out bad candidates, when it's often the case that the bad candidates are the ones that weren't proactive to define the selection process themselves. Sitting back and optimizing for an externally imposed standard is worse than being able to impose said standard yourself.
(If this point was complicated - my point is that yes, Darwinism makes sense, but when applying it, you can get a mis-skewed definition of what "natural selection" really entails. I am calling out that caveat).
Of course, my hope is that that isn't the end all, be all solution. Philosophy doesn't end with Nietzche, hopefully. But the world does sure looks bleak right now...
Is open source still viable these days for a business model that relies on a single large customer and anyone else that also happens to need that solution?
We really need a change in mindset around what success means. Concentration of power, concentration of resources, concentration of market share are some measures of success. Out competing your rivals until you grind them into dust is some measure of success. This is the Peter Thiel and Bezos and to a large extent the ycombinator and PG philosophy of success. It's dressed up as "just innovation bro" whereas the truth is, innovation in a rapidly increasing technological society is certainly both broadly useful to everyone, but also, left unchecked, just a tool to be successful in ways that are, sometimes extremely, detrimental to society as a whole. "Disruption and Innovation" could go well past the lines that AirBnb and Uber crossed and achieve a lot more success.
Just on PG as a persona, I was never a fan or non fan I've barely read his blogposts and only know of him incidentally from knowing this forum, but on the general area of "thought leaders" and the increasingly asymmetry one-to-many relationships we have been getting used to for decades I came across this very interesting and well put together video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU , give it 15 minutes if you do decide to watch it its a bit of a slow burn.
I realize posting youtube videos that appear to be about 'creator beefs' at first glance may be considered low brow content for all the Jane Street or Palantir aspiring employees around here but such is life, you can lead a horse and all that. The world is made up of a bigger bubble than you are in but its still just a larger bubble with a lot of symmetries
> But all these strategies for making startups more powerful have one thing in common — or more precisely, have to obey one constraint. They all have to make things better for the customer.
Good thing we have venture capital to alleviate that constraint by enabling selling a dollar for 50 cents.
Given the impact some YC startups are having on society at large I think a better question than "How" is "Why". Do we really want Flock to become even more powerful?
Even in the cases where the answer is "yes"; I believe that working backwards from the why could provide a more elegant path to accomplishing said goal.
PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore.
For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.
I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible. The cliche advice for years was that if your first shipping MVP wasn’t embarrassing in some way, you probably weren’t shipping fast enough.
That led to a long period where startups were shipping things that barely worked and would fall apart if you deviated from the happy path at all.
Companies and consumers alike got tired of paying to be alpha testers and do market research for startups. It was really bad when you’d start using a startup product, spend a lot of time working with them to identify bugs, and then they would pivot to some other idea they had.
> I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible.
Nope. They did, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that VCs moved way too much in the direction of "take over the world or go home" and don't allow companies that take investment to be just successful anymore.
I think this is a very classic "waterfall" world view.
In many cases, the problem can only be understood through many failed solution attempts. It could be because the actual problem is novel. It could be because there is a different way of thinking about the problem that is not apparent studying only what a customer does today with the limitations of the software that they have right now.
The point of "move fast, break things" is to address this fallacy that anyone can fully understand a problem before attempting the solution; it is often the case that in attempting a solution, one comes to understand the actual, valuable problem.
Waterfall means designing and building everything before rolling it out to users. Researching a problem before you start tackling it is just general good advice. You can be more effective while moving fast and breaking things while still taking some time to know where to move and what is ok vs not ok to break.
Prioritizing something other than 7% week over week growth. This doesn't appeal as much to venture capitalists so we may have to try it with some bootstrapped products first.
The only ones I've seen are AI grifters (not even useful AI) and Polymarket/Kalshi, which makes me cynical; although I've seen some decent startups that are small (i.e. non-powerful) but nonetheless profitable.
I read the article and kept wondering what the author is trying to convey. It reads like a checklist compiled into an essay with no wisdom nor rationale baked into it. mostly vague and generic -- like a human transform applied to an llm output.
For example, if you opt in, we'll tell you how you're doing compared to other users. The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others.
The vanilla one? Is this the pg Malcolm Gladwell arc, where he's retelling some real concept but warped by misunderstanding to the point of incoherence? Who's getting hobbled running on "vanilla models", do we have examples?
Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd.
Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify.
It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
Here is an article on this topic, which comes to a mixed conclusion.
"The article suggests that more musicians rather than fewer might now be able to earn money from recorded music than in preceding recorded-music systems. But it also proposes that the current system retains the striking inequalities and generally poor working conditions that characterised its predecessors, and that better debate requires greater transparency about usage and payment on the part of streaming services and music businesses."
Here's an article about Germany, which claims streaming is not worse
"However, the current streaming-dominated music market does not fundamentally perform worse compared to the former CD market: in 2023, more than twice as many music creators earned revenues above the basic tax-free allowance compared to 2002."
I'm shocked to read that Paul Graham is only 61. His writings lately sound more like late 70s in terms of age and worldview.
References to record labels? How much do record labels have to do with people discovering and catching on to music artists in 2026? What does a multi-billion-dollar 17 year old tech conglomerate like Stripe have to do with startups at this point?
I maintain that one of the hardest things for people to really internalize is when the group that they are in goes from being an insurgent to being the establishment. I can think of very few examples of people successfully adapting their worldview to that fundamental change in their identity.
The next class of YC founders is no less a product of the financial/tech ruling elite than the next batch of Goldman Sachs summer interns.
IIRC the record labels made a deal with Spotify to own a percentage of the company in exchange for a lower royalty rate. This is a mathematically diabolical way to shut artists out of profits. Sure, the record label also takes a lower percent of the pie, but they also own part of Spotify's pie.
In the context of the post-AI economic environment where we are casually talking about our TVs wiretapping our homes even when they don't have Internet access, the whole article reads so gross. How to make your startups more powerful:
1. Get your customers signed up and locked in ASAP
2. Make your product its own little feudal kingdom with walls, moats, and gates
3. Maximize the amount you slurp up customer data in disgusting ways your customers can't even comprehend
Steve Jobs was no saint but compare how he talked about products to how Paul G is talking about them, it's not even the same basic concept of business. For the former, it was about increasing profits by building the best product experience possible. People will spend more on a Mac or an iPod because it's better than the competition. Yes, there were plenty of forms of ecosystem and lock-in, but the way you locked customers in was by providing the best experience.
In the case of the latter, it's all about flexing your leverage and holding power over your customers. You don't even hold basic respect your customers in the system that Paul and the rest of Silicon Valley champions these days.
I’m glad there’s a lot of people commenting negatively below to PGs modus operandi (rationalizing maximum greed in seemingly thoughtful measured essays that make him seem like a kindly philosopher instead or digital robber barron)
Like Ayn Rand, and PT Barnum before them VCs and Tech Bros will be looked at with great hostility in next years as having destroyed society with their brand of hyper-capitalism all in the name of “disruption”
I feel like the basis of this post is that in the current state of software development, SaaS alone holds very limited power.
The comments here are taking a very uncharitable definition of “power”. If I take that definition I can see how people are being so negative. But just a slightly more positive definition and this all seems like reasonable dialogue to have with an early stage startup.
> There's a variant of going full stack where you eat your way gradually through the customer by doing all their hardest work for them.
One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack.
One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.
In my experience it depends on the nature of that client. A drawback to having a dominant client is that they have a lot more leverage in roadmap, prioritisation, and product fit. That can seriously impact the internal coherence and maintainability of the product. Too many bits of business logic lodges in weird places because the client didn't want to write custom behaviours, and no time to tidy it up because they're always demanding their next wishlist feature to be deployed yesterday.
I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.
Once YC companies started having a negative impact on people and communities. Airbnb and gig worker stuff seems to be the start of it.
His reaction to the 2011 Dropbox password incident was an early concern, IIRC.
Very much so in my recollection
OpenAI Airbnb Stripe Coinbase DoorDash Scale AI Dropbox Reddit Instacart GitLab Kalshi Replit Twitch
These are the companies advertised on ycombinator.com. The only one I like is GitLab which I'm neutral about. All other are companies I dislike.
I think people have now become extremely wary of VC, startup and Silicon Valley because at some point there was a boiling frog shift from helping people and enabling new things to viciously eating anyone not participating.
Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed.
https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38
Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.
I would hazard a guess that the people attending a YC event (!) to watch Sam Altman (!) talk with Garry Tan (!) would regard Paul Graham well irrespective of how the rest of the world sees him.
I would say, the author does have a point.
Playing for the long game is good. But that sentence is too lossy to decipher the meaning unless you know what it means.
Instead of making the company more powerful, I would recommend making the company more aligned with truth and the real world which has a nice side effect of being resilient.
Add to that, preparing for scale.
We have dedicated an entire year for nothing but architecture, correctness, distributedness and scaling.
The economic perspective of the same would be reducing the cost of software development (not in the LLM massive code generation way but the opposite with architecture).
Its been 5 years since we have been building Slyp and SlypBusiness along with the plethora of technologies around it.
I don't know whether we are powerful as per the author's definition but we are damn resilient.
Sometimes communication from “powerful” people are often signals to others who are, or aspire to be, “powerful”.
When you are signalling to the latter, you need to be cruder with your approach or the signal may be lost. There needs not be any wisdom in it.
Agree with what you're saying, but what are you ultimately driving at?
I am not surprised that Silicon Valley researchers say they cannot solve the alignment problem... Here the leading voice in the region publishes an article about how to be more powerful without any other mention of alignment but "users".
For example, I am sure facebook users (the ones buying ads) are super happy, but is the company aligned?
To a first approximation, everything is power.
How do we prove alignment? Often times, large regulatory bodies. Who supports that? Does the regulatory body actually have enough power to enforce those standards? (Hint: look at modern America). That's an example of power questions sneaking in even when you didn't want to.
Even "mere Darwinism" is less extreme because it pretends like there is some objective criterion called natural selection that will filter out bad candidates, when it's often the case that the bad candidates are the ones that weren't proactive to define the selection process themselves. Sitting back and optimizing for an externally imposed standard is worse than being able to impose said standard yourself.
(If this point was complicated - my point is that yes, Darwinism makes sense, but when applying it, you can get a mis-skewed definition of what "natural selection" really entails. I am calling out that caveat).
Of course, my hope is that that isn't the end all, be all solution. Philosophy doesn't end with Nietzche, hopefully. But the world does sure looks bleak right now...
Counterpoint: Love is not power.
"Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." -Jung
Is open source still viable these days for a business model that relies on a single large customer and anyone else that also happens to need that solution?
We really need a change in mindset around what success means. Concentration of power, concentration of resources, concentration of market share are some measures of success. Out competing your rivals until you grind them into dust is some measure of success. This is the Peter Thiel and Bezos and to a large extent the ycombinator and PG philosophy of success. It's dressed up as "just innovation bro" whereas the truth is, innovation in a rapidly increasing technological society is certainly both broadly useful to everyone, but also, left unchecked, just a tool to be successful in ways that are, sometimes extremely, detrimental to society as a whole. "Disruption and Innovation" could go well past the lines that AirBnb and Uber crossed and achieve a lot more success.
Just on PG as a persona, I was never a fan or non fan I've barely read his blogposts and only know of him incidentally from knowing this forum, but on the general area of "thought leaders" and the increasingly asymmetry one-to-many relationships we have been getting used to for decades I came across this very interesting and well put together video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU , give it 15 minutes if you do decide to watch it its a bit of a slow burn.
I realize posting youtube videos that appear to be about 'creator beefs' at first glance may be considered low brow content for all the Jane Street or Palantir aspiring employees around here but such is life, you can lead a horse and all that. The world is made up of a bigger bubble than you are in but its still just a larger bubble with a lot of symmetries
> But all these strategies for making startups more powerful have one thing in common — or more precisely, have to obey one constraint. They all have to make things better for the customer.
Good thing we have venture capital to alleviate that constraint by enabling selling a dollar for 50 cents.
Given the impact some YC startups are having on society at large I think a better question than "How" is "Why". Do we really want Flock to become even more powerful?
Even in the cases where the answer is "yes"; I believe that working backwards from the why could provide a more elegant path to accomplishing said goal.
PG hasn't been in the bay for a long time so he doesn't understand what the ecosystem is like anymore.
For example "startups make the best stuff" is just wrong these days. I almost always assume the startup's product today is going to screw you or is hacky, because they prove over and over again they cut corners for growth. Very few startups still take the mentality PG has in his era and now ship half broken hacked stuff.
I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible. The cliche advice for years was that if your first shipping MVP wasn’t embarrassing in some way, you probably weren’t shipping fast enough.
That led to a long period where startups were shipping things that barely worked and would fall apart if you deviated from the happy path at all.
Companies and consumers alike got tired of paying to be alpha testers and do market research for startups. It was really bad when you’d start using a startup product, spend a lot of time working with them to identify bugs, and then they would pivot to some other idea they had.
> I do think that the startup pendulum swung too far in the direction of shipping as fast as possible.
Nope. They did, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that VCs moved way too much in the direction of "take over the world or go home" and don't allow companies that take investment to be just successful anymore.
What’s the solution
Understanding the problem before attempting the solution is always a good idea.
I think this is a very classic "waterfall" world view.
In many cases, the problem can only be understood through many failed solution attempts. It could be because the actual problem is novel. It could be because there is a different way of thinking about the problem that is not apparent studying only what a customer does today with the limitations of the software that they have right now.
The point of "move fast, break things" is to address this fallacy that anyone can fully understand a problem before attempting the solution; it is often the case that in attempting a solution, one comes to understand the actual, valuable problem.
Waterfall means designing and building everything before rolling it out to users. Researching a problem before you start tackling it is just general good advice. You can be more effective while moving fast and breaking things while still taking some time to know where to move and what is ok vs not ok to break.
Prioritizing something other than 7% week over week growth. This doesn't appeal as much to venture capitalists so we may have to try it with some bootstrapped products first.
You can't say it here
What are some recent powerful startups?
The only ones I've seen are AI grifters (not even useful AI) and Polymarket/Kalshi, which makes me cynical; although I've seen some decent startups that are small (i.e. non-powerful) but nonetheless profitable.
I read the article and kept wondering what the author is trying to convey. It reads like a checklist compiled into an essay with no wisdom nor rationale baked into it. mostly vague and generic -- like a human transform applied to an llm output.
"Vapid" is the best description of the slop that comes out of paul graham's website.
For example, if you opt in, we'll tell you how you're doing compared to other users. The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others.
The vanilla one? Is this the pg Malcolm Gladwell arc, where he's retelling some real concept but warped by misunderstanding to the point of incoherence? Who's getting hobbled running on "vanilla models", do we have examples?
Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd.
Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify.
It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
Here is an article on this topic, which comes to a mixed conclusion.
"The article suggests that more musicians rather than fewer might now be able to earn money from recorded music than in preceding recorded-music systems. But it also proposes that the current system retains the striking inequalities and generally poor working conditions that characterised its predecessors, and that better debate requires greater transparency about usage and payment on the part of streaming services and music businesses."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820953541
Here's an article about Germany, which claims streaming is not worse
"However, the current streaming-dominated music market does not fundamentally perform worse compared to the former CD market: in 2023, more than twice as many music creators earned revenues above the basic tax-free allowance compared to 2002."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5474735
I'm shocked to read that Paul Graham is only 61. His writings lately sound more like late 70s in terms of age and worldview.
References to record labels? How much do record labels have to do with people discovering and catching on to music artists in 2026? What does a multi-billion-dollar 17 year old tech conglomerate like Stripe have to do with startups at this point?
I maintain that one of the hardest things for people to really internalize is when the group that they are in goes from being an insurgent to being the establishment. I can think of very few examples of people successfully adapting their worldview to that fundamental change in their identity.
The next class of YC founders is no less a product of the financial/tech ruling elite than the next batch of Goldman Sachs summer interns.
IIRC the record labels made a deal with Spotify to own a percentage of the company in exchange for a lower royalty rate. This is a mathematically diabolical way to shut artists out of profits. Sure, the record label also takes a lower percent of the pie, but they also own part of Spotify's pie.
In the context of the post-AI economic environment where we are casually talking about our TVs wiretapping our homes even when they don't have Internet access, the whole article reads so gross. How to make your startups more powerful:
1. Get your customers signed up and locked in ASAP
2. Make your product its own little feudal kingdom with walls, moats, and gates
3. Maximize the amount you slurp up customer data in disgusting ways your customers can't even comprehend
Steve Jobs was no saint but compare how he talked about products to how Paul G is talking about them, it's not even the same basic concept of business. For the former, it was about increasing profits by building the best product experience possible. People will spend more on a Mac or an iPod because it's better than the competition. Yes, there were plenty of forms of ecosystem and lock-in, but the way you locked customers in was by providing the best experience.
In the case of the latter, it's all about flexing your leverage and holding power over your customers. You don't even hold basic respect your customers in the system that Paul and the rest of Silicon Valley champions these days.
Capitalism is being replaced by Leveragism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FZy1lBNykA
I’m glad there’s a lot of people commenting negatively below to PGs modus operandi (rationalizing maximum greed in seemingly thoughtful measured essays that make him seem like a kindly philosopher instead or digital robber barron)
Like Ayn Rand, and PT Barnum before them VCs and Tech Bros will be looked at with great hostility in next years as having destroyed society with their brand of hyper-capitalism all in the name of “disruption”