I'll never forget this essay, because he first delivered it as a talk at Harvard that Steve and I trained up from Virginia to attend. After Steve had lent me Masters of Doom, I was already convinced we should start a startup together, but this talk sealed the deal. I know Chris Slowe (later our first 'hire' at reddit) was in the audience that evening and I'm sure a number of other future YCers were also there with no clue of where it would lead.

Thank you, Paul Graham, for making that comment about finding investment from rich people who'd done it before (but not him). If I recall, it was feeling guilty about hearing the dejection in the room that got him thinking about starting Y Combinator.

And what a difference that decision has made in so many of our lives.

So as an interesting anecdote, a Squidoo lens I have has for the last several years been the #2 Google result for the phrase 'start a startup,' after this essay. The page gets on average 45 visits per week, and has sold about 40 startup-related books total over the last 3.5 years.

I think it's interesting because

* The number of people looking to learn about starting businesses seems to be flat or even slightly declining, at least if search traffic is any indicator.

* Based on what I can extrapolate from my analytics and well as my experience playing around with Google / FB ads, it seems like the total number of people searching for information on starting new businesses is on the order of a a couple hundred per week. This is pretty disturbing for a nation of 300M people.

I'm not sure how much validity there is to this, but I've always been a little disturbed whenever I've done things like, say, comparing the number of parenting books sold on Amazon to the number of children born each year.

Definitely a brilliant essay, but I might take issue with a possible interpretation of:

"It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does."

I definitely understand his point, but I am afraid others might not. This sort of mentality can lead you to under price your services greatly. I see it everyday. Our customers sell downloadables and just the other day some guy was trying to sell a brilliantly manicured and useful spreadsheet for $2. His competition charged $10-$15+ and looked 10x more confusing and horrible. He said he wanted to "sell the most possible and low price was the way to do it".

I think I may talked him into raising his price and testing a few different pricing schemes.

In short: "owning the low-end" isn't always the best way to go about it, you might be leaving a lot of money on the table and selecting a different set of customers.

Now, I don't want to sound like a hopeless groupie or somesuch, but I don't know how else to say this... I love this guy!

Too often my hope of ever launching my own startup one day falters after attending yet another pointless big company Dilbertian meeting or when I give in and watch a stupid action movie from Netflix that I had watched at least twice before, rather than learning Rails. After those moments, I read one of PG's essays and I feel it is possible, I can do it.

Maybe I'll never launch, but just for giving me that hope for a short while, I love him.

I would like to see an updated version of this essay. I am sure many things do not apply or are out of date by now.

It would be interesting to know how many HN readers have first seen and/or read this essay just now, after seeing this thread. Or have we all read it years ago...

A classic, but it's interesting to read alternative ideas to:

>> During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be.

such as from Jason Fried who recommends against working all the time.

Overall my experience has been: work as much as you can while not burning out and still enjoying your life overall. You never know how long you'll be at it, this could be your lifestyle indefinitely especially if you enjoy startups and may do another even after a big success.

For me so far this has meant incredibly long hours come in spurts, maybe a burst of 3 days every couple weeks, and otherwise, hours that approach "normal" (10-12 hour days, take at least one weekend day completely off).

"Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people."

That's gold

This was written in 2005, but I can see at least 2-3 businesses that have cropped up since then that match the end of the "What customers want" section almost completely. He certainly knows how to find a niche.

Inspiring. Somebody recommended this essay a couple of months ago and I never got to reading it until today.

Hands down the best of his essays, at least among the startup focused ones.