Y Combinator to Hackers: Dream SMALL and Code for Google on the Cheap
Is Paul Graham sending the right message to our young men? How about the NBA?
Just as every LeBron James wannabe hoopster should NOT be hyped into believing who needs college, every Sergey Brin wannabe hacker should not be spun a Google billionaire fairytale.
LeBron is a moneymaking star machine, Kwame Brown is not. Brin is a high-flying cash machine, the Zenter (now Googler) developers are not.
Quinnipiac University student newspaper on why “NBA’s age restriction adds maturity and talent to rosters”:
The age restriction forces inexperienced players to take a year to develop rather than sit on NBA benches. Such development would almost certainly have helped Brown more than sitting on the bench in Washington. Clearly, James needed no additional development. Yet, wouldn’t his already phenomenal resume look even better if he had played in a Final Four in the 2003-04 season?
And wouldn’t basketball fans have benefited from witnessing James possibly go for a national title that year, rather than play for a developing Cavs team?
YCombinator’s Graham on why “leaving” college, rather than graduating with a degree, is potentially a very good thing:
If you’re starting your own company, why do you need a degree?
Right, and if you are going to be the next Michael Jordan, why do you need to even pretend to care about college?
BUT, how many Michael Jordans might there ever be AND how many Brin billionaires might the world sustain?
Just as the Internet’s “court jester,” Esther Dyson led would be startups astray in June when she cajoled to hackers “throw out your development, go use Facebook,” YCombinator is NOT serving the nations future hackers well by validating that it “matters less whether students get degrees.”
Who needs college? Who needs business plans? are NOT the right questions for startup hackers: WHO NEEDS GOOGLE is what truly savvy entrepreneurial coders will say to themselves, just as paper billionaire Mark Zuckerberg apparently says to himself every day!
While Graham hails Google for “standardizing” startup acquisitions so “they’re little more work than hiring someone,” I lament that brilliant deveoplers of proprietary software IP are selling themseleves short by selling out on the cheap to Google.
The latest prime example: Sami Shalabi, of not quite Zingku fame.
Read my Insider Chatter exclusives: Zingku Backstory: Founder Sami Shalabi Newest Google Engineer? and Zingku Flips to Google: NO Dodgeball Hacker Lessons Learned!
Also, before signing on the low-ball Googley dotted line, read the Googleplex-centric startup advice of Google’s star biz dev guy, Chris Sacca, who proudly calls himself a “corporate sellout interloper.”
In Sacca’s actual words, “STAY CHEAP”:
I see too many entrepreneurs these days feeling the need to build an entire company to support what is essentially a feature of a larger search engine. It depresses me to see creative people wasting productive cycles on the mundane aspects of building full companies. Y Combinator gets this.
But Mr. Sacca, HOW can emulation of a rule the world for bilions strategy as followed by your chief, Sergey Brin, ever be deemed “mundane”? Was Brin “wasting” his creativity by building out his global vision to pocket billions for himself?
Why DO Sacca and Graham evangelize startup sellouts the faster the better? So they can get THEIR big money returns the faster the better.
Graham disses the “stigma of inadequacy” in quick startup flips. If he was really looking out for hackers’ long-term best interests, though, he would push his stable of ramen noodle funded coders into trying to BE the next Google, rather than hoping to be the next hackers to sell themselves to Google, on the cheap.
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