I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million.

(Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would come from 2 years)

I made close to 50,000 phone calls, leaving probably 20,000 voicemails. I closed atleast 1000 deals purely on the phone.

I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections over 10,000 times.

I've seen thousands of married couples discuss if they should go ahead with spending $30-100k. I've seen how they interact while waiting. (Nothing pains me more than couples, or moreso one party, playing games on their phones ignoring each other).

While there is a lot more to modern tech sales than just closing incoming leads, I think car sales is an accelerator course for interacting with, reading, and closing people.

Every time I visit a new car dealer I feel a need to take a shower, just to get the stink off of me.

The buyer might practice this 4--20 times in a lifetime. At the high end, that's only a month's experience for the salesperson.

Consider it a form of practice which might save many thousands of dollars in time.

Probably my least favorite consumer experience leans toward purchasing cars. Ironically I also LOVE cars. Hate buying them though

Do those fixed price dealers count their various add-ons (rust proofing, extended warranty...) in the fixed price or not. These add-ons are how most dealers make money (that and warranty work)

Whatever is on the sale sheet is included. You can order extra stuff, they will install it for you, but obviously it’s not included in the advertised price.

Honest question, when the customer knows you're trying to fleece them and is willing to pay a small premium to finish the deal and get on with their lives, why would a dealer double down on something so outrageous?

Basically if scamming your customers works a nontrivial fraction of the time and the margin when you're not scamming is small, scamming is the incentivized behavior.

Obviously there could be bad dealership which would try to screw you, read some reviews and don’t go to such place.

Do your research, narrow it down to a small set of models and trim levels, know what the best deals available are, and set your numbers a bit lower. Ring several dealers and say "I'm looking for X.Y.Z at price $NNN, what can you do for me?". Some will not even respond, and do NOT get pulled into the "we can only talk when you are here" - cross those off the list. I found one that would come very close to what I needed, and did the whole deal via email, only actually physically meeting him when I actually went to trade-in and get the new vehicle.

And guess who got the next sale a year later when my wife's lease ran out? And who will get the next one?

On top of that, my experience at that dealer overall has been FAR better than many others. It's worth the long search and semi-log drive to find the right one.

WITHOUT anesthesia

Local classifieds, private sellers, take the car to a trusted mechanic for an inspection.

I've never bought a car at a dealership, and neither has anyone in my family in 25 years. But then again, I know cars inside and out (even from before my car sales career) so I feel pretty safe not accidentally buying a scammers car from Craigslist.

Compared to Craigslist where there is no shortage of people selling cars directly with current problems, intermittent problems, hidden problems, and massive paperwork issues that can stop you from registering the vehicle all together until resolved.

So you still can buy from Craigslist without the risk.

I've never had any issue from a private sale.

I don't see how this is preferable if you are purchasing nice/new or high end vehicles.

Dropping 30k on a car seems a little nuts to me, but I understand different people have different values.

And see Tesla knows this, which is why the margin on their cars is higher than most.

You may have disliked that sales experience with a dealer or used car salesperson, but it quite likely got you a slightly better deal than had you tried to negotiate yourself.

My first Toyota dealer experience was offering to buy a car at advertised price, and them refusing/countering with a lease. We just walked out.

Based on that, I waited until Toyota offered pretty good unadvertised discounts and called up a bunch of dealers with an offer/car in mind. I got the car my wife and I wanted for $1k more than my offer, which was I think $9k less than MSRP, and the experience was way better. We only had to sit through the finance departments upsells.

The third sale was paying MSRP at a Lexus dealer and we still were there for almost 5 hours.

I think these numbers are better represented in percents rather than absolutes. $9k less than msrp on a Corolla seems unobtainium.

Buying a Ford was the worst experience I've had with a new car, but that could have been entirely on the dealership.

Nothing to lose with the strategy, but it is societal economic situation and demand of car dependent.

If you start off combative I think its much less likely to go well.

I just let my fiancée know recently that this is how I intend to purchase our next vehicle. Strictly through email until the day I go to pick it up in person. If they say 'You have to come in' to talk price I am going to hang up immediately and call the next dealer on my list.

Pretty sure the parent means "best" as in the best way to get experience doing sales for the salesperson.

> I understand that it could greatly benefit the salesperson

Yes, that's what I said.

> Of course they're buying from an individual.

That was not clear.

I have career-coached a lot of top sales people and most of them have been very clear that time spent convincing other people is exactly that much less time spent on personal goals, education, etc. For introverts, the #1 complaint is that it focuses you on your weakest side as your career foundation.

Most also ended up gradually substituting sales education for specialty education, without realizing what they were doing, or that they had a choice. So you get people with tremendous, but less-interesting people skills hitting their '40s and going to tech boot camps because that's where their heart was all along.

I had similar experience myself and if I could go back in time I think people skills learned in basic IT work were plenty. Let sales people be sales people, hire them to do sales, and stick to one's own favorite things...otherwise yeah if you like sales, knock yourself out.

To me: Sales is fundamentally about upselling -- selling you more than you need. How can people do this 8 hours per day, then go home and pretend they are not a sales person? Every GOOD sales person tells me they are "only like that at work". No, they are not. As a result, I try to avoid them! In social settings with sales people, before you know it, they are trying to manipulate you. It is so tiring.

I was a salesman 20+ years ago and still engage in up selling my friends. But it’s usually to get them to engage in healthy activities like working out, going for a walk, or eating healthy; or to get them to try a new experience like tasting a new food or being more honest/kind to their loved ones.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m exhausting to them or they appreciate the good intention.

By the way: this is also a reason that I see why so many hackers date differently from the typical population since dating is about manipulating the other side to love one.

Sounds like you're doing it wrong.

Then I have to conclude that a lot of dating advice that one finds is plainly wrong: "show off your best side" is for example an instance of "manipulate the other person to believe that you are of higher value than you actually are (and thus a relationship with you is a better deal than it actually is)".

I think the hacker (non-sales) style is to lead by example, not spend so much effort trying to convince others with words. "Deeds lead" for hackers.

For example, instead of trying to directly convince a very unhealthy co-worker to eat less junk food, I might talk about my own struggles with junk food eating... or say that I am trying to cut down. Or exercise more. Or whatever. But focus on myself and my own actions and the messages they emit... rather that trying to directly manipulate the other person with words only.

I assume you agree a McDonald's employee is not going to close accountants and doctors and lawyers and programmers on a car as often as an engineering grad would... And if that's true, why would a car dealership hire McDonald's type employees instead of slightly failed but still intelligent university stem grads? They don't cost more, since it's all pay for performance.

That’s not a thing. The MCAT is used for admission into med school (equivalent to the LSAT or GRE).

Fun fact, most surgeons learn to perform surgeries (in particular how to use new techniques and equipment) from sales people who don't have degrees. They often actually go into the surgery with them.

In reality, even very desirable cars can have this game played on them. I once sold a car $25k over MSRP, and the customer was thrilled because that was the lowest markup he could find.

When it comes to used cars, finding the lowest price is usually a terrible plan I could go into for longer than a PG blog post.

By far the swiftest and best large product purchasing experience I ever had. I was sad to see them close.

It reminds me how Best Buy used to have horrible customer experience, it was all commission-based, and you would be hounded when first walking in the store. Then Apple came along with the model of "don't force someone to do anything, and the right product for them might not be in the store, and that's fine". (Notably, Best Buy seems to have gotten better since.)

The owner of our dealership was a Cal grad, the sales manager was a Jewish accounting major, I had an engineering degree, my favorite coworker completed medschool but couldn't pass the MCATS, and everyone else had a degree too.

When I went to work for a Penske dealership (a public company), corporate was in town one day and had a meeting with me to ask how the owner at my previous dealership did things. So maybe it wasn't your typical car dealership.

One of these things seems out of place when listing qualifications

I have to admit, the fun banter between salespeople and even management is the #1 thing I miss these days.

could have been avoided had you said something like "we had a Jewish accountant, as he often liked to remind us" or something that didn't imply that you personally attached some elevated level of job competence based on his choice of holy book(s).

e.g., How do you fail an MCAT? You get a score.

The rest sounds like partial truth + embellishment.

If I had said we had a Polish mathematician, would that also need moderation? Or if describing how service oriented we were, I included an ex Catholic nun?

> I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections over 10,000 times.

Sounds like you were also trying to guilt trip people who then struggled to find a socially acceptable way to disengage

Others instantly assumed I was lying or exaggerating, as if I need some street cred on an anonymous 1 week old throwaway account.

The real issue is that failing a step exam or passing with a lower score (once passed you can never retake) nearly completely eliminates you from certain specialities - especially the more lucrative surgical subspecialties. Some people may simply decide to give up at that point. It’s much more likely burnout or an overall “fuck this” with the training, or other red flag, eg cheating or egregious behavioral problem then not passing a single exam. Because although there are a ton of exams after entering medical school none are as high stakes as the MCAT for continuing to be a doctor.

Perhaps they didn’t match (entirely didn’t match or couldn’t match where they needed to be for family/some obligation), burnt out, etc.

There’s tons of reasons one may not make it all the way through, though it is quite rare if you grind hard enough and are adequately flexible RE residency location and stuff. The system wants you to finish once you’re in med school, since med schools and residencies are measured by completion rates and similar success metics.

Medicine is a really tough thing to get in to, and I don’t think people fully grasp that as they apply for med school. It looks prestigious from the outside, but is financially draining for a long time and is extremely inflexible (find out where you match and move with only ~3 months notice?! Who thinks that’s acceptable in the modern world of two working spouses?).

Maybe not the thread, but certainly relevant to the top commenter's story, which sounds really embellished.

"Failing the MCAT" (?) -> "Failing boards as dropout reason" (?) ...

And top commenter is all over the thread, trying to win people back after folks point out these oddities. Seems like a lot of effort.

Either top commenter is the car sales messiah or embellishing (along with his "alleged" med school dropout colleague). Both are possible, but one is more likely.

Furthermore, I said early on I was top 1% in the country (for my brand atleast, which already only hires 'better' and experienced salespeople) and later narrowed it down to the most accurate at 0.3%.

But let's say I'm lying.. for fun I suppose? Doesn't everything I wrote apply to someone that actually IS top 1% in car sales? Even if I didn't sell 30 cars a month for 10 years, surely you don't deny someone does that? And even if you'd argue that "no, no one can sell 30 cars a month for years!!"... Doesn't the entire point of my original message still stand.. even a salesperson that is just average will still make tens of thousands of calls, practice thousands of closes, see how thousands of people act as they try to negotiate or stall...

Are you implying top sales people don't exist, or that one wouldn't be on hacker News, or that I was simply not one because of the way I write things?

Ps, if you check my post history, you'll see I went to Cal as an ME, and recently self taught and wrote an entire Saas in shitty php that 30+ companies pay for happily. Unless that is ALSO made up, doesn't that sound exactly like the type of person that would probably outperform the average car sales person?

On first order principles, I reject your premises that "throwaway" account names make accounts worthless in the long run. There are tons of counter-factual examples, e.g., "ironic name."

> Ps, if you check my post history, you'll see <insert resume"...

See, this is circular reasoning. If your account is "worthless," what incentive do you have to be reliable/honest?

What's interesting is that I think you know these counter-arguments and are trying to steer away from them.

And to your second point, that while obviously there is no proof of anything by just reading my post history, you'd have to be slightly crazy to think I started a new account recently, and from the FIRST post dreamt up an elaborate plan to seem like a php Saas creating, Berkeley grad, top salesperson persona..

And to think, you caught me in my massive lie because I mistook the MCAT exam for board exams! Something no regular person would EVER do.

> There’s a lot of stigma associated with dropping out of something like medicine...

Sure, there's external stigma, but IMO, the larger driver for stigma is self-imposed. Med school enrollees are filled with "most likely to exceed" personalities who are harder on themselves and catastrophize a minor setback v. peers as "the end of the world."

> (colloquially doctors hardly ever call them boards in the US, they just call them “step”.

Anecdotally, I've only heard friends in medicine (US) refer to them (the USMLE exam[0] and steps) as "boards," while in med school. I'm sure that some call them steps, too. I'm also aware of post-residency/fellowship specialty boards. Those are usually singular because you only need one and sometimes they're oral, like a thesis defense where you get grilled on a schedule of of your cases over the past couple years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Medical_Licensin...

The counterpoint to this is that most medical trainees endure a tremendous number or setbacks during training that they must overcome. If anything residency teaches it is grit. I would say trainees generally tend to evolve in this respect from premed undergrads and 1st/2nd year med students who are relatively insufferable throughout the rest of training where there is necessarily a personality shift.

> Anecdotally, I've only heard friends in medicine (US) refer to them (the USMLE exam[0] and steps) as "boards,"

Yes, probably when talking to non doctors to keep it simple. But everyone inside usually just says specifically Step 1, Step 2 etc or USMLE.

> Those are usually singular because you only need one

No. If you subspecialize - you will board in two or more things. For instance an interventional cardiologist will be boarded in internal medicine, general cardiology and interventional cardiology each with their own training requirements and exams.

> sometimes they're oral, like a thesis defense where you get grilled on a schedule of of your cases over the past couple years.

The vast majority of even the oral exams are standardized tests with standardized cases. I can only think of OBGYN that does the case review.

> No. If you subspecialize

Sure. I agree that you need a singular board for a terminal specialty and potentially interstitial boards along the way.

> Yes, probably when talking to non doctors to keep it simple. But everyone inside usually just says specifically Step 1, Step 2 etc or USMLE.

Again, I'm not in the field, but see a lot of references on the web using "boards" language. From a quick google search "USMLE called steps or boards", I get a test prep site [0]. I'm assuming this is a matter of "precise v. common" usage.

> The United States Medical Licensure Exam (USMLE) Step 1, commonly called “the Boards,” is a standardized test

[0] https://www.boardvitals.com/blog/9-things-to-know-before-tak....

After the "sale", there's a much longer gauntlet of pitfalls and traps to navigate: extended warranties, add-ons (roof racks, floor mats, etc...), financing, trade-in value, anti-theft, pre-paid maintenance, etc, etc... (it goes on and on, it's exhausting).

I'm going to guess, just based on the amount of manhours the dealership spends on the initial sale agreement, versus all the other crap, that the true money is not made by the dealership on the actual car sale, but on all these add-ons after the sale.

[1] - fairly limited, bought 3 cars over the ~15 years, 1 used, 2 new, and it's been about 8 years since my last purchase, not sure how much its changed since then.

I would sometimes fill in for finance on a rainy day, and even though I was top 0.3% in the country when it came to car sales, I Couldn't sell that garbage even with a gun pointed at me. I just can't lie like that.

As a basic set of rules:

a) say no to everything.

b) look at the service intervals in the book (or what the maintenance minder in the car says).

c) ask them if the factory service plan would cover it

d) ask them if it's critical to safety, and if so, explain what would happen if you didn't do it, how you would notice it was an issue, and how you should respond while it's happening on the road.

e) as soon as you run out of factory service, and maybe factory warranty, use an independent mechanic

Now, sometimes the factory service intervals are wrong, and sometimes there's stuff you probably should do that the factory doesn't say to do ever; but for the most part, the factory schedule is a good baseline, and dealer service wants to do extra frivolous stuff. Some independents do too, I have never seen a next oil change sticker printed with factory intervals.

For example the green energy clipboard person trying to get you to switch power companies, you can tell them that you rent and there is no comeback.

If a car is undesirable, and many are available and we need to move them, we will sell them for a loss.

I don't blame people for buying cars we sell for at a loss (although sometimes I wonder why these people don't stop and wonder why this car is so heavily discounted). And they shouldn't blame us for charging more for something many people want and is in short supply.

Then there’s the gold that only gets short-listed to customers that have been long-time customers and sometimes helped you move the crap (but that’s probably only on the higher-end of things).

Myth, I think. That information (the real wholesale cost) is not public.

How do you allocate a $x promo for selling Y cars in a month, when some of those cars were unpopular crap and others sold themselves?

A dealer for example will get more back per car sold, if they have the most modern building style. (a way manufacturers entice dealerships to remodel to latest corporate recommended aesthetics/experience).

They also pay more if your dealership is stand alone. A joint VW/Audi/Porsche dealership will end up paying more for cars (getting less money back technically) than a standalone dealership.

I could go on and on about the various metrics for getting more or less rebate money back.

Would you really pay more for your car because a dealership paid more because they hadn't remodeled recently? Of course not. You compare to what others are doing and that should be enough, unless you really want to try and randomly guess just how low they might go that day and walk and try again everywhere?

As others have said things like holdbacks and incentives are not known. (And since incentives depend on number sold they can't be known) Still buyers have good information and take advantage of that.

I sometimes used to think how fun being a waiter could be compared to car sales, because the interaction in nowhere near as tense and adversarial. In the best of sales, you quickly become and stay friendly with people, but the bottom 25% are mini wars and that beats on you after a while.

> an accelerator course for *interacting with, reading*, and closing people

(Emphasis mine)

The finance arms of sales teams however, like the teams that assemble “no interest” parts of the deals, I was no fan of. There ain’t no free lunch, and the linguistic gymnastics they went through were a waste of my time to parse.

There’s a lot of truth to this, but you could easily switch out "car sales" with any other kind of client and customer interaction. When I worked closely with users many moons ago, I quickly realized that most of them weren’t getting their needs met and were super excited to have me work one on one with them, and a very small percentage were actively hostile to any interaction at all. This kind of thing has held true for every job I’ve ever had. 1% of the customers cause 99% of the problems.

Obviously selling a $1M Saas enterprise contract is even higher dollars, but you probably don't get to try and close 5 of those in one day like you do in cars. You'd be lucky to get 5 in a month I assume, if not quarter.

You could get more sales practice selling items at an electronics store, but the stakes are lower than a $50k car so you won't learn the reading people part because few people totally shut down when discussing buying a stereo.

Also helped that the dealership was pretty empty. A few of the dealerships I went to were madhouses and I just wanted to leave immediately as it was a chaotic environment

About buying a car: As I understand, it is the most expensive "consumable" product that most people buy in their life. And they buy at least one every 10 years, so about 6-12 in their life. Compare a house: Many people only buy one or two in whole life. When selling cars, you are seeing the pinnacle of retail sales. I agree: The experience must be incredible. What do you do now? I hope you are doing B2B sales in software or pharma (where the markup is crazy)!

My favorite example/rebuttal to this is: Imagine a car sales evolves to basically vending machines. You walk up to the box, pick a car, swipe your card, and a roll-up door opens and your car pops out. Amazing! No salespeople needed. Every town just gets a few vending machine!

Then one day, one vending machine owner decides to pay a bright kid to stand next to the vending machine in case the people have questions. Sales would go up at that vending machine. Soon all vending machines have a salesperson standing next to them helping people. And we're back to where we started.

(Unless you think a smart helpful person standing next to the vending machine would make sales go down I suppose... But this is against everything I've seen selling thousands of cars)

The difference is that today there are actually companies successfully following this model, Tesla being the most prominent example. All other manufacturers want to cut down on the mandatory middlemen fees (and have publicly said it - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629075106/https://www.nytim...). It's a matter of when, not if, they will get to it.

Even Tesla has a lot of salespeople, at corporate and at the showcase stores. You just can't get a discount from them.

If someone built a car vending machine, it would only be a matter of time until someone noticed you can make sales go up at the vending machine by putting someone standing next to it.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Corporation>

I recall a number of stories of "automobile vending machines", and believe there may have been some early instances based out of Dubai or China, though the earliest online stories I'm finding presently are from the 2012--2014 period, about one decade ago, not two. That said, the concept surely occurred to someone prior to that.

Wired, 2014: <https://archive.ph/JkbfK>. Chinese EV rental by Kandi. Discussed on Slashdot at the time: <https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/28/1630208/next-carsha...>

And an early story about Carvana from 2013, via The Car Connection: <https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1088617_would-you-buy-...>

Google Books finds a snippet from a 1990 book, here: <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Implementing_Japanese_A...>

"Think back to the Automobile Vending Machine concept presented earlier...", in Implementing Japanese AI Techniques: Turning the Tables for a Winning Strategy by Richard Tabor Greene.

I'd buy from the vending machine in a hot minute. But I might be a freak.

To be fair, my most recent car buying experience was just fine. It was a new Subaru, just as the pandemic was starting and they had a lot of excess inventory. We paid the asking price, but it was close enough to the best price we could find from our research. The finance salesman pushed every possible add-on, and we simply countered with "let us take the brochure home and figure out what we want to do." At the end we wrote a check for the car with no extra goodies and drove away.

On the other hand, I learn that working in car sales might teach you about wrong sales "skills". At least, one does not learn skills needed for companies which want to have relationship with their customers.

But you also learn a lot right skills (follow up, tick skin, read people, etc.)

I personally had more leads than I could handle, because I didn't burn my leads. So if you came in wanting a vehicle for the snow, and all I had was SUVs with the sports package and performance tires, I didn't lie to you or try to downplay it. Sure I mentioned you could have a winter set of wheels and swap, and get the best performance year round, but I didn't say "don't worry, these tires work just fine in snow". It burns leads that know better.

Thus if I couldnt really help you, I'd make the best of the situation if possible and move on. I had enough people to email and call back waiting on me, that spending an hour lying in hopes of a sale really wasn't worth it.

The difference between Paul and Robert is that Paul is up-front about this while Robert is cagey and deceptive and makes his money by stringing people along thinking that The Answer can be found by buying one more of his books. But I think a lot of the hate here is driven by disappointment that Paul is honest, and that his answer is that there is no Answer. It can be frustrating to hear that (which is also something that Paul explicitly points out).

---

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612680...

[2] http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

[3] http://paulgraham.com/before.html

I think your main goal is not finding who knows the Answer, but to identify who's lying about it. With those sorts of volumes of money you're going to attract fraud, and fraud can quickly break "throwing darts at a board" as a selection strategy.

If you can just select for people who are earnest and aren't lying to themselves too energetically, you can call it a day.

They are not wrong 90% of the time. They place correct bets on correct companies, 90% of which will fail. This does not make them wrong, it makes them excellent gamblers. If I'm getting 100:1 odds to roll snake-eyes (two 1's), that's a great bet, and a correct one, and I am not wrong to take it, even though I'll lose money the vast majority of the time.

But even more generally outside of the YC-model VCs compete on their networks and influence as well. The more connected you are, the better you'll do - it's a feedback loop.[0]

Look at the evolution of VC companies. If the skill was just "making correct bets" wouldn't that look like making fewer, but likely larger, bets over time? You grow, on the other hand, if you have some significant influence on the odds or can't tell the odds between companies you select that well. If "success" is 1/10 odds, and "phenomenal success" is 1/100, and you don't think that you are capable of digging deeper to instead find just the ones with 1/20 phenomenal odds, you have a better shot of huge returns if you place 100 bets instead of 10. Then you get more knock-on influence of having a bigger network over time, too!

Of course, trying to control the odds is a classic old gambler move too, but if you're caught doing it in a casino "excellent gambler" may not be the label they apply to you.

[0] to a certain type of tech enthusiast, the huge political aspects here are very frustrating.

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the bottom?

“Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.”

― André Gide

Rather, this is an essay about what was surprising to him about startups in YC. And I think it's fair to say that these were all surprising, and I wouldn't have inferred them if someone told me about YC as an idea back in 2005.

Or put in another way, if someone came to you and told you about the idea for creating YC back in 2005, when the only model of investing in startups was how large institutional VCs and angels invested in startups, would you have been able to tell them the following insights about how it would work and what the value add of the advice is? Remember, when YC started, lots of people thought 7% for $15k (I know they give more now) was a joke.

    - Most startup problems are the same, but in different forms. It makes advising tractable for a single person to do.
    - Advising a lot of startups in batches has the advantage of learning about all these problems faster.
    - And yet, startup advising has to stay individualized (presumably to keep things concrete), so in order to scale, they had to shard. Limit was somewhere between 60 and 80 per individual advisor.
    - Identifying problems and ranking their severity are two different skills. You'd think they're the same, but they're not. As an advisor, if you can help startups do only these two things, it'd go a long way. Lots of advisors try to help with other things, but these are the two most important, because if a startup died, all other problems are moot.
    - Despite this, founders don't listen to advice about how not to die. And they don't listen because the advice is counterintuitive. It's like how there are more skiing instructors than running instructors. Skiing is more counterintuitive.
    - A big headwinds to advising startups on how not to die is that due to the educational system, founders have all learned how to hack the system. The skills that got them to where they are stops working when trying to build a company. 
    - Beyond helping startups not die, advisors likely know less about the product/strategy in any domain, but they can increase focus, which increases speed of iteration, which indirectly helps startups with their product/strategy through iterative greedy algorithm.
    - A follow-on value-add of YC is the alumni network. Like clusters of painters in Paris during the impressionist period or musicians in Vienna, and Xerox Parc, lots of great work is done when great people do it in clusters along side each other. At the time, people thought the price of independence of is loneliness, but turns out it's not true.

Which he has written about before: http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

My first impression was that the title was somewhat vague, but it was actually just very literal. This is what PG himself has learned from his users, not an essay on how to learn from users or how to build a successful startup.

Going back to the initial set up of the piece, he was trying to help startups get into YC. Basically he was helping them sell themselves to YC, by having them answer “explain what you learned from users”

If it’s any effective at all, then by answering this question, you can make your startup very compelling to YC. Would it work? One way to judge that is to apply it to what he knows (YC) and see if it’s appealing to startups both now and back in 2005.

So the complaint about how this piece feels sales-y is missing the forest for the trees, because that’s the point of the exercise!

By the very nature of the intent of the question, of course it’s going to sound like a sales pitch for YC. That’s the whole purpose of the exercise to begin with. It’s a question, when answered, begates a sales pitch for getting into YC.

Is this even possible or useful? I mean there are obvious things but they're so obvious and generalized as to be seemingly useless when you are at a serious stage in starting a company. It kind of reminds me of when people talking about something being "priced in" in the market as a related concept.

I agree, I also think this is the message that YC sells to founders. You are giving up a lot of equity for access/membership to an organization that will make you successful (Im clearly summarizing a bit). It's a bit of a MLM scheme (not that they are ripping you off) but if you get into the club the other members will help you be successful and, then it will repeat every batch constantly filling the pool with new members and the network continues to grow. And it works for the most part, so do MLMs for the most part. Most companies in the US, if successful are around for about 20 years, extremely successful maybe 40, the few rare last longer. YC is getting to the 20 year mark and maybe some of the rough edges are starting to show, cracks in the foundation as the original people that powered the machine start to move on.

Indirectly, YC quite possibly are ripping most founders off financially, even though the average company return is high (power-law — few winners and many losers[1]). It is hard to find good figures, because we have reliable dollar estimates for the companies that win, but a paucity of information about the founders that lose, or what individual founders made[2].

When YC only selects the best 1 of ## applicants, it is hard to remove selection bias from any later analyses of returns for founders.

Value and opportunity-cost are messy, so measuring the returns for “loser” founders is really difficult. I am unsure if founders’ own self-assessment would be trustworthy information.

Here is an analysis from 2014 on YC founder returns: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-much-do-y-combinator-foun...

I would expect early employees to have worse odds of good payouts.

[1] startup valuations tend to fall along a steep power law curve and YC startups fall along one nearly perfectly: https://medium.com/swlh/on-300b-of-y-combinator-startup-succ...

[2] company returns are easier to find than individual founder returns.

It is good to be skeptical, I but I would counsel anyone to avoid becoming deeply cynical and missing out on the value because you don’t like the messenger. I learn as much from arseholes like Thiel, as I do from Paul Graham who appears to me that he is one of the good guys (disclaimer: I haven’t met Paul, & I disagree strongly with some of his theses).

Rich Dad Poor Dad is a very worthwhile book IMHO - it costs you a few dollars and a few hours. I read it and later became a moderately successful founder. I think that book had some positive influence on that success: my guess is that I got high $10’s of thousands value for $10’s of input. In particular the idea of designing a money machine, versus selling hours for dollars. Good knowledge is like that: you can get 1000x return or more. Of course that is offset by the other shit I have read that didn’t give good return ($0 return is OK, highly negative returns from crap knowledge is the real risk).

This link summarises some of the value of the book: https://sergioschuler.com/rich-dad-poor-dad-tl-dr-version-3e... (edits: minor improves).

In spirit of open discussion and intellectual curiosity here, I share my insights in the following order matching that of the post:

1) PG opens with the best advice that he could dispense to prospective applicants which is "what you've learned from users".

2) He proceeds to ask himself the same question.

3) He then informs readers that his users; startup founders, usually face the same set of problems across the board.

4) Since these problems are the same, he thought of automating the solution to scale his business (dogfooding in some sense).

5) That blew up in his face spectacularly that he had to rework the plan and concede that his solution won't scale.

6) But these same problems are not recognized uniformly by founders as they sometimes face difficulties identifying them in the first place, that's where the YC partners' role come to fill this unmet need.

7) Even when people are good at identifying problems, some are bad at determining the severity or urgency that these problems pose, cue again the YC partners' role.

8) Even when they're good at risk assessment, some are bad at risk mitigation, and won't listen to the advice given by the partners but it is not made clear what he means exactly by "not listening", dismissing/not acting on solutions proposed by YC staff, or not acknowledging that there's a problem to begin with?

9) Getting down to business to solve these problems warrants focus, and how this focus is tied into speed, and how YC can help with that.

10) Startup colleagues are more important than YC partners when it comes to realizing success with their feedback, guidance and even practical help, and how YC is the best in class in this regard.

Even though the marketing language, esp the value propositions in the piece is a bit stronger for my taste, but I can't say with honesty that it overpowered the core message of the essay nor was it incoherent or disjointed in anyway that made following or understanding impossible as some have claimed here.

Verdict: 8/10

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28951278

While I still think many of those points apply to this essay (yes, whether or not it's a sales pitch "in disguise", it's still a sales pitch), they don't bother me as much here because pg is specifically talking about his experiences in YC and startups in general. If there is one person who I think has earned the title of "expert on early stage startup experiences and lessons learned" it is Paul Graham.

Yes, he touches on a lot of different points, but I still found it to be a useful read. If anything, I'd be interested in some more pointed follow-up, e.g "Here are some of the top common problems startups hit", with specific examples, or "Here are 5 times founders ignored our advice, and what happened".

Regarding your suggestions, I don't think that this listicle-heavy Buzzfeed type of writing suits PG. I'm more drawn to his abstract and enigmatic writing style.

I love that it doesn't and how it doesn't. I also find it hilarious that we have been so trained by SEO and modern day marketing gurus to expect The Answer (either roughly 90% down the page or alternatively within a list of 10 short, bulleted paragraphs) that an open question makes people uncomfortable.

I for once felt like returning to the days of college when I finished writing this comment where I'd prepare summaries for lecture notes for me and my friends, very nostalgic times.

I was part of the S12 batch. I certainly knew it was broken a few weeks in. Every week when we had office hours, it was always with a new partner and we spent the entire time getting them up-to-speed on just our background and context.

Still loved the experience and would do YC again.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/21/yc-demo-day-s12/

This goes both ways. A few years ago a group reached out to me from HN who wanted to start up in the same sector we're working in. They were a small group of guys from a famous US university who arranged to call me and pick my brains, which I was happy to do for over an hour. I was all like "welcome to the space" and gave them some strategic pointers. I had done online YC and met some of the YC partners and felt these people being from a decent university and engaged with HN should have been, err, of reasonable ethical stature. Later on these people totally blanked me, are presenting my insights freely shared as their own, and have since secured YC funding. I am not worried in the slightest - in fact I can see them struggling and their mistakes are clear to me from afar, but I just wanted to note clearly that there is no code of honour that will not be broken, and this place is not immune.

This is also true of undergrads, who often come in to office hours thinking they have one problem, but they in fact have another, or several others. I suspect that mentorship is useful: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-pr... because good mentors often see the non-apparent problems.

I occasionally bang on about "Million Startups". Some back of the envelope maths and I reckon one could finance a literal million startups with what SoftBank might call a bad year (around 30 billion). When YC started they funded people with 5k per founder.

I am not saying fund the next fusion machine, but put momentum into cities and groups across the globe.

And if what pg says is true (there are few new problems) then guiding those startups must be more feasible then "million" sounds. Yes 60 to 80 is a big leap but 80 to a million is only slightly bigger :-)

Anyway - saying more startups on HN is very much preaching to the choir so Inwill stop now.

I cannot see a way to bring it in without collapsing the economy basically.

Anyone talking about UBI as though it would be a significant income source and fund a "fun" life is an idle dreamer - that will never work.

It will never be that way, it will always be muddied by some conditions. Like income restrictions bonuses based on various protect group clauses and million other details.

When I hear UBI I do not hear "welfare system that is just about enough to get by in cheapest area of the country." That we already have in most of Europe. And what happens is the cheapest area of the country turns into a wasteland where no-one wants to put a business and the local doctors get the worst set of long-term health cases anywhere.

What I hear when I hear UBI is "lets try a new equilibrium to solve the problem of fairness."

And as your friendly neighbourhood Software Socialist, I would like to try and explain, poorly, with barely any context.

We, the people, conceive of a form of Venture Capitalism, called government. We shall, since more or less 1945, invest in our main resource, babies, feeding them, educating them, and providing basic infrastructure such as contract law, and bridges. And they shall achieve great things. They shall find ways to organise space engineers in ways that NASA could not, or start political parties the way legacy parties cannot, and will build new capabilities. And as VCs we shall find a way to exit our investment, ready for new investments. We shall call these exits Taxation.

And we shall use these exits to invest in the new set of babies - and because of the veil of ignorance, we do not know which ones will be the next valuable entrepreneurs so we will invest in them all, equally. Fairly.

Lets see what the back of the envelope figures look like

US Adults- 250M

US GDP - 23 Trillion Dollars (!)

GDP per adult is 92,000 dollars. (The global version of that calculation is ~10,000 dollars)

To me UBI is an expression of democracy. We do not live in 'idiocracy'. We all know on a basic level we need to work to produce. Its just that the choice of where and how and who with to do that work is not a free choice. The choice of who to vote for is (kinda) free. But if we imagine democracy not as 'where do you put your vote' but 'where do you allocate your sliver of the total capital allocation' we get a different, interesting question. Why can I not vote to allocate my capital each day as I go to work? I would vastly prefer to have my capital allocated to the solar energy transition. So would many folks. That is barely a choice on most ballot papers. But it is a choice in the market place.

UBI is somewhere around there.

Today the question is "why do I have to do the shitty work for shitty pay?"

Current but unsatisfactory answers include :

- your parents were not wealthy

- you have not invested 20% of your income over thirty years in the stock market

- you or your parents were not able to invest in real estate

- we really need someone to do the shitty job and have built a social underclass for that reason.

But if we break those traps, the question is "where is my work best allocated". There is a lot to figure out. But the current system is unlikely to be what we need to cut our current gordian knot

I suspect UBI would have similar but wider reaching results.

I assumed that when people ask what you've learned from your users, they're not asking you to list how lousy your users are at doing various things, and why they just need to listen to you more.

I would actually be interested to read a post about what a VC has learned from his/her users, in a constructive sense.

Founders ask for other stuff from YC too: a hangout lounge in SF, comfier seating, shared office space. But helping their startups succeed is 100x more important than all those frills, as any founder who has succeeded or failed will confirm.

Markets where customers only care about one thing are rare, so people aren't very familiar with them. They're unlike commodity services like dentists, where you care about convenience & frills, and more like heart surgeons where you want the one that will give you the best chance of not dying.

I suspect that not providing the frills helps YC attract better founders, because the best founders care only about their startup succeeding, while the scenesters care more about the frills. Also, it sets a good example of focusing on the most important thing, as startups should. Most importantly, by not spending much time on other stuff, YC can focus its energy on helping startups succeed.

What he's telling you is that he learned:

- That founders don't believe YC-partners often because their advice is counterintuitive. The underlying message is that it's important to not only give advice (sell your service) but also understand if it's being taken (your service is being actually used).

- That founders (sers) come with presumptions and those affect how they apply your advice (use your product). In his "hack the test" example he emphasizes how important it is to persist in your advice (educate your users) so they unlearn old habits.

etc..

He skips directly spelling out the conclusions to encourage you to read more than headlines which makes the reading (IMO) more interesting.

But skipping the conclusions means that we don't know what, if anything, they are doing differently to solve these issues. Just telling someone "trust us, you'll regret it if you don't follow our advice" isn't exactly a compelling argument.

I'ma also not sure PG is trying to use a literary device, as you suggest. His normal writing style is very candid, so it would be surprising if he were all of a sudden burying (omitting?) the lede here.

In fact, what is worse is that you don't realize your focus is totally wrong because you're not losing revenue. You might be losing eyeballs or growth and adoption, but that's easier to gloss over considering it's a factor of advertising.

I constantly ask myself when looking at some of the de facto solutions in open source spaces what the hell the maintainers are doing, because what they are focused on is completely irrelevant.

The same could be said about large companies who have so much revenue that can continue to make mistakes until someone challenges them.

There are lots of user requests that he just outright ignores. He doesn't even care about his stats, or trying to "compete" with another more popular framework- to him its just more headaches. He built what he wanted, pushed it out for the world to use, and plenty of people did, enough that even 10x'ing that number is unlikely to really burnish the resume any further. He even tried to make it a full time job, but he found the Patreon model just way too much begging and inconsistent. Offering a support contract, a few people bit, but not enough that he could really hire people so he could offer 24/7/365 support that that implies.

So he refactors, adds features he wants, and tells everyone to go Fork themselves if they whine about their pet feature not getting implemented. Of course PRs are welcome, and its actually more of a community based project now, but he has retained BDFL status for the core of it.

But of course, I doubt they'd ever share the distribution of income for users off those platforms. You'd realize there's no point.

This is neat, but isn't actually right. Each partner has to know each startup, which is, yes, O(n2) relationships. But there's no one who needs to do work proportional to the number of partner-startup relationships: each partner only has O(n) startups to keep track of. So probably the reason it blew up was just ordinary linear growth outstripping capacity: 60 startups was an amount most partners could keep track of, and 80 wasn't.

Not that that's necessarily the mechanism, but it's the thing to mention.

If humans evolved to hold about 150 relationships in our minds, to say that an org has a tipping point of 150 people assumes the members of the organization know 0 people outside of the organization. Maybe this is approximately true for Amish communities. It is not close to true for startups doubling in size every year. The available "relationship slots" for your company is probably more like 10-25.

If you want to say "things get weird at about 150+", sure, maybe that's true. But no need to bring up theories that extrapolate primate cranial capacity.

This is the first time an essay feels like a sale pitch. Specifically, a sale pitch for YC. I’ve read pg’s essay about YC for about 15 years, and this is the first one I have that feeling.

This one is a bit too abstract. I’m getting the idea that YC can help founders tremendously, that their knowledge is specialized and hard to get elsewhere. But I’m eagerly waiting for one concrete example, and none are to be found. Normally I’d expect a real set of examples from startups, instead of the analogy in horror movies. I still remember the essay where pg described how he came up with Jessica the idea of YC, while walking somewhere, explaining very concretely what he thought at the time.

For any other writer or organization, I’d just guess they are trying to “keep their secret recipe”. That is neither pg or YC’s MO.

So yeah, this feels strange.

Well not in essay, but there are plenty examples in the real world, surely?

"Paul Graham gave us a series of advice that changed our business forever." -Brian Chesky, https://archive.is/xvx31

"One big thing that YC did for me is it was an ambition multiplier. Pre-YC I thought it'd be cool to make software that could just pay my bills. A year post-batch and I find my default state is much more ambitious than before." -u/CoffeePython (YC S21), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32556060

"I have to say though - while the success rate of these YC-only funds is likely good enough to make them quite profitable, none of them come even close to what I observed with PG's ability to pick the winners (which makes sense, since a lot of other people have tried to build accelerators and none of them come even close to YC)." -u/aerosimle (YC), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381893

...

Agree, this sounded like a Tony Robbins style pitch where you don't get to hear any of the magic until you've paid for the seminar.

Were you looking for testimonials embedded in the essay to meet your expectations?

Of course, this wouldn't be acceptable as it would turn the piece unmistakably into a sales pitch for his product cementing your suspicions about the nature or motives behind authoring this post, a viewpoint which by the way I don't necessarily share.

This type of reporting that you're specifically looking for is best served with other formats like featured stories or in-depth analyses done by news organization; where they get to interview YC partners, alumni and startup founders, and solicit their opinions and thoughts about their experience with the organization, but even this reporting needs to be balanced and informative otherwise it will be mistaken for an advertorial or, as you guessed, a sales pitch.

It’s true that independent reporting will be more likely to provide a balanced and objective assessment, but at the same time, opinionated articles like the submitted essay are more valuable with the provision of stronger evidence.

On the second point, what you wrote is true, but the Airbnb mention was pretty short; your comment is probably around the same length as Graham's mention. The Airbnb mention in full consists of: "[4] The Airbnbs were particularly good at listening — partly because they were flexible and disciplined, but also because they'd had such a rough time during the preceding year. They were ready to listen."

I could find no mentions of other named companies involved with YC in the article, and the Airbnb mention was quite brief (the assertion was that they listened to YC's advice, and the implication is that this was the reason behind its success).

2) I totally agree with you that details are scarce and left much to be desired but maybe this narrative is more suitable to other media like books or podcasts where they have the space to expand on points and let us all on the juicy details.

I pretty much would have appreciated to hear the full story on Airbnb struggles in the beginning and how they managed to turn it around.

The first “sales pitch” I noticed was 10 years ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html (it isn’t a sales pitch for YC, instead it is a sales pitch for founding a startup).

I also suspect you are mistaking his passion for a pitch. I would bet PG is happy to see all startups succeed, whether YC is helping them or not. It isn’t like PG needs to try and succeed with more status and more money. Disclaimer: I don’t know PG and I don’t know similar people that might help me stereotype him correctly.

They realize that their value is in the people, not the artifacts.

My suggestion for all founders - find a mentor who is a founder & builder.

You don't want VC, you just want growth and the ability to do your startup full-time. Why would someone mentor you in that case? What's the benefit to them?

The only weak spot I could find was "It took me a long time to figure out why founders don't listen."

I think sometimes their advice is packaged in a data backed, falsifiable way. For example, JL's: "I don't know of a single case of a startup that felt they spent too much time talking to users".

But sometimes it's just "Because I said so".

In the latter case it would be better if they showed their CSV backing their advice, or took the time to reformulate into a testable, falsifiable piece of wisdom.

This article doesn't hit the mark. Startup people don't listen, because they're trying to create something new, that nobody else understands (or people who understand are a 'parallel thought threat' like Newton and Liebniz). Counter-intuitivity is in the ballpark, but not quite "it".

Really what an inventor/entrepreneur does is to specialize in a direction or idea no-one else gets or no-one else will understand the way to make it, until it's in MVP or prototype stage. How can that person slam the breaks on the train and start doing rational, sensible things that could extinguish the light of discovery/creation? Not saying that's a good thing, it's what it is.

There's a weird trend online to keep blaming school for poor thinking. It's a cool rhetorical device. Doesn't work for me though. I went to a good school that challenged me to open my mind and is also the basis for faith and way of thinking that gets me to discovery. The patterns I see that others don't, is partially because I hold a tiny candle flame for an older way of thinking that is sorely needed in some spaces.

There's also a quiet truth that there's now two truths. One truth for the established and comfortable, another truth for the man battling for his soul's light. They point mostly in different directions and they don't understand each other so much. It's physically painful to try and synthesize those two truths into one.

More transparency in communication is the way to go. Everyone needs to admit only the old wisdom and knowledge is firm and stable. The more we can admit we don't know what's going on as we go forward, the more we can relate... my probably-wrong 0.02c

We talk about people 'losing their way' as Reality chips away at their original idea. And while I'm sure this really does happen to some people, how often is it just a pretty story the person tells themselves that makes them feel good, helps them get through the day, helps them sleep at night? It's much easier to compromise on something you didn't hold that dearly to begin with. Anything else that helps you sleep at night (like not worrying about payroll) makes a fine substitute, especially if you don't look at it too closely.

Executing on them is difficult if the charging bull has to be asked to serve two gods. Can you lash reigns to the bull without keeping the bull from it's target?

1) The quantity and quality of new ideas in PG's essays is declining.

2) Readers' expectations of quality in PG's essays is increasing.

3) The pool of disenfranchised readers is growing.

The quantity and quality of new ideas is decreasing because PG naturally wrote down his best ideas a long time ago.

Readers' expectations increases because YC's power and influence grows.

And, the pool of disenfranchised readers grows as more people try to join YC's ranks unsuccessfully.

I feel badly about this because anyone who has interacted with PG irl knows he's as kind-hearted as people come. But, then again, I get the sense this doesn't bother him too much .

4. PG is thinking about YC at a high level of abstraction (e.g., making it a productive place for thinkers and makers like Xerox PARC was) while also having Inside Baseball-level knowledge [1] of YC strategy and tactics (both successes and failures) in ways that most people don’t understand well and don’t really appreciate.

Based on my personal experience and on the experiences of people I know well, most people are fundamentally perceiving the challenges of elite performers vastly different than those elite performers do.

As a simple example in my personal life, I was once a top tier online poker player. Trying to talk about hand histories with lower stakes players, even if they were winners, was an exercise in futility. The things that they had to focus on in their main games was very different what I had to focus on in my main games. Hand reviews that I thought were works of art that showcased high-level thinking were semi-regularly panned by the peanut gallery.

I remember one post in particular where multiple small stakes players were trying to tell me and another winning pro about how bad we were for recommending and explaining a line he took in a medium-stakes live game. We both thought the line was sound both strategically and tactically (although not at all obvious), and all we got were comments like “I wish I was bankrolled for you game… I would clean you out by [insert a strategy that would cause them to be repeatedly violated in those games, even by the “bad” players]”.

I’ve seen similar examples in sports, business, and research.

I think many parts of the HN peanut gallery would probably be well-served by focusing on being more curious and less certain, especially when dealing with people who have been wildly successful in their field of choice.

Note that I’m not saying that 4 is the “right” answer, but I wanted to throw it out there as another possibility.

[1] Inside Baseball is a tv show that goes super deep and super technical into details of baseball-related topics.

Back in the Hackers & Painters days, it seemed like he was writing about a wide variety of topics. Startups were among the things he wrote about, but it wasn't exclusively about them. There were things about management styles, programming languages, even why nerds are not popular in high school.

At some point, I think around the time YC started to become really successful, that changed, and pg started to write basically exclusively about startups. I can understand why, but his essays have been a lot less interesting ever since.

pg actually reminds me of Eliyahu Goldratt, who developed the "theory of constraints"("TOC"). Dr Goldratt was a physicist who then tried to apply the logical problem-solving approach from physics to business problems initially, but whose work has been also used for interpersonal conflict resolution [1]. I get the same vibe from pg's essays, just trying to apply the same critical thinking skills to new areas from first principles, and just trying to see where it leads regardless of what the "established" wisdom is.

If anyone is interested in learning more, most people start by reading "The Goal", which is application of TOC to manufacturing, but if you're interested in how to think about how to apply new technology to existing human systems in a way that actually brings benefits, "beyond the goal" by goldratt is an audiobook that you should really listen to.

Fyi I have no financial interest in TOC :) But if anyone is interested in discussing how TOC thinking might apply to the problems startups face, I'd love to chat, please get in touch! (Contact info in profile)

[1] https://www.tocforeducation.com/yanibook.html

I like that it is more evidence-based and thought out. However I think applying this is challenging - for the same reason as scrum - because methodologies like this require leaders to let go of their control-ego and trust the system. And systems like TOC which require a lot of thinking, understanding and are easily corrupted by misunderstanding it are fragile to the reality of a hierarchical team structure where the bosses personality can dominate processes more than the process. As such I believe (may not be true) that taking good principles from TOC would be better.

I have seen TOC tried to be applied in a software job and it turned into the typical "JIRA-style" nightmare of estimations, pressure, short term thinking and so on. I don't think that is what TOC is about, but what it can end up with when it hits the ground. SCRUM has the same issues of course. Because these methodologies are not meant to be an al a carte menu of options, where the ones that make the bosses eyes light up are chosen. But they are complete systems. Like it might be fun to only do bench presses at the gym and nothing else, and still eat badly, but that won't work - you need to do the whole regime!

That is why in reality I prefer systems that can be offered al-a-carte. Maybe TOC can be I am not an expert and haven't read the book. But I like for example if someone comes to lead a team and sees how things are done and slowly tweaks things towards a long term goal. For example come in and get people work as a team not individually so that work is delivered sooner and there is less WIP.

A bit rambly but those are my thoughts!