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Be Good - College Essays

Be Good

About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick.

Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great.

A couple weeks ago I realized that if you put those two ideas together, you get something surprising. Make something people want. Don't worry too much about making money. What you've got is a description of a charity.

When you get an unexpected result like this, it could ...

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web sites, the number of employees at Craigslist looks like a misprint. Their revenues aren't as high as they could be, but most startups would be happy to trade places with them.

In Patrick O'Brian's novels, his captains always try to get upwind of their opponents. If you're upwind, you decide when and if to engage the other ship. Craigslist is effectively upwind of enormous revenues. They'd face some challenges if they wanted to make more, but not the sort you face when you're tacking upwind, trying to force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times as much on sales as on development. [1]

I'm not saying startups should aim to end up like Craigslist. They're a product of unusual circumstances. But they're a good model for the early phases.

Google looked a lot like a charity in the beginning. They didn't have ads for over a year. At year 1, Google was indistinguishable from a nonprofit. If a nonprofit or government organization had started a project to ...

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nonprofits be good companies? Possibly not. What makes Google so valuable is that their users have money. If you make people with money love you, you can probably get some of it. But could you also base a successful startup on behaving like a nonprofit to people who don't have money? Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?

I'm not sure, but I suspect that if you pushed this idea, you'd be surprised how far it would go. For example, people who apply to Y Combinator don't generally have much money, and yet we can profit by helping them, because with our help they could make money. Maybe the situation is similar ...

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PAPER DETAILS
Added: 3/23/2011 10:01:08 AM
Submitted By: melbetua
Category: Business
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 3044
Pages: 12

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