{"id":173,"date":"2008-10-17T09:26:16","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T16:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briantroy.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/17\/paul-graham%e2%80%99s-advice-to-startups\/"},"modified":"2008-10-17T09:26:16","modified_gmt":"2008-10-17T16:26:16","slug":"paul-grahams-advice-to-startups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/2008\/10\/17\/paul-grahams-advice-to-startups\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Graham\u2019s Advice to Startups"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\">TechCrunch<\/a> published a post referencing Paul Graham&#8217;s (of Y Combinator) advice on why you should start a company now. He makes some great points. I would argue that Mr. Graham&#8217;s advice should apply in any economic environment.<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/Techcrunch\/~3\/fnDSZgBJDNw\/\"><p>\n  A financial nuclear winter may be upon us, but many startups will still survive and even thrive in this environment. Y Combinator\u2019s Paul Graham argues that, in fact, now may be the best time to launch a startup. In an essay titled \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulgraham.com\/badeconomy.html\">Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy<\/a>,\u201d he notes that \u201cwhat matters is who you are, not when you do it.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/Techcrunch\/~3\/fnDSZgBJDNw\/\"><p>\n  [From <a href=\"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/Techcrunch\/~3\/fnDSZgBJDNw\/\"><cite>Paul Graham\u2019s Startup Survival Guide For The Coming Nuclear Winter: Be a Cockroach<\/cite><\/a>]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>One of the downsides to VC funding is that it forces a company to immediately chase exponential growth &#8211; ready or not. Often that leads to strange thinking. The metrics become out of touch with reality and revenues (and profit) take a back seat to subscriber growth, or aggregating eyeballs (remember when portals were huge and search was not?).<\/p>\n<p>Listen &#8211; VCs are smart. But they want big multiples (if the invest 3MM they way 300MM back &#8211; that is their ideal deal). The problem with that is it is really, really rare. You should take Mr. Graham&#8217;s advice and focus on managing costs, generating revenues and being sustainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TechCrunch published a post referencing Paul Graham&#8217;s (of Y Combinator) advice on why you should start a company now. He makes some great points. I would argue that Mr. Graham&#8217;s advice should apply in any economic environment. A financial nuclear winter may be upon us, but many startups will still survive and even thrive in&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/2008\/10\/17\/paul-grahams-advice-to-startups\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Paul Graham\u2019s Advice to Startups<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,30],"tags":[125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}