Reddit is a classic example of this approach. 
  When Reddit first launched, it seemed like 
  there was nothing to it. To the graphically 
  unsophisticated its deliberately minimal design 
  seemed like no design at all. But Reddit solved 
  the real problem, which was to tell people what 
  was new and otherwise stay out of the way. As a 
  result it became massively successful.

So how do you define success? Is Arc successful if you open a web page and then 30 minutes later try to submit a form and get "unknown link" or something to that effect. It seems massively broken to me.

I'm not trying to pick on pg. I'm trying to present the alternative which is this: survivor bias. pg may have been in the right place at the right time with viaweb. As an incubator, pg probably made money on reddit, but conde nast has almost certainly lost money on reddit, so I'm on the fence about that.

Continuing on, I think it isn't unsurprising that putting $15k or so into 118 startups over the past 5 years would lead to one or two successes. pg has the benefit of being the magnet, or is it magnate? All the best ideas come to him, but there have only been a small handful of "massive successes" turned out. With his social network and contacts, quite frankly, I expect more big successes than I've seen.

How successful is pg, really? Do we know?

I suppose, really, my point is this: If there was a science to this, then it should be repeatable. Since it doesn't appear that pg has repeated his viaweb success in over 10 years, I wonder where is the science? Is pg just someone we choose to listen to because it feels good? He makes hackers feel good and important and understood? He can empathize with us, so we lend him our ear?

But are we wasting our time?

I love hn, I love listening to pg on stage talk about startups. It's like chicken soup for the startup soul. But maybe I'm being misled. Maybe it's just feel good, irrational stuff that isn't practical or beneficial -- and perhaps even harmful.

How do we know we won't be listening to him and then 10 years from now, we find out he's lost all his viaweb money. He hasn't been able to keep the startup chuck wagon turning out profitable businesses or something like that and we wasted all this time trying to replicate his success because... well... he writes a lot and it feels good to read it...

Reddit is successful, in that it's valued by many. It was successful for the founders [I'd dearly like to know how much they got, to an order of magnitude]. It's only 5 years old - it took Amazon 10 years to become profitable, google began in 1996 was incorporated in 1998, but didn't even start serving ads til 2000 - which accounts for almost all revenue today. So I think it's too early to call reddit "not very successful". [It would be interesting to have data on how long it typically takes for "successful" startups to become successful.]

I do disagree with pg that the essence of reddit was "to tell people what was new". Slashdot already did that and other news sites. Reddit's (and Digg's) innovation was that everyone could vote on comments. [But pg has far better information on reddit than me, so I'm left wondering why he thinks that...]

YCombinator does seem more successful than you mention though: they've turned out a lot of companies that, while not always huge, are making money. A few of them are even game-changers in their industries, like Scrib, Posterous, Justin.tv, Dropbox.

I observed this in 2007FEB22 , you can see it here ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/398269769/ and the classic response ... "... wouldn't have been a timeout; we probably restarted the server ..."

Though I wouldn't call a broken piece of a webapp (hackernews) a failure of Arc.

Yet... HN grows and grows... it is reported widely... luminaries routinely post here... and here are you and I.

pg has said he is careful to focus on what matters (eg. spam; ranking), not what seems to. It appears to be working. And it exactly supports this essay's thesis, of working on looking professional vs. what's important. Maybe it's a bit like undergraduates handing in essays in a fancy folder?

Were there no mp3 players b4 Ipod. Was there no Lotus 1-2-3 b4 excel spreedsheet. Were there no other search engines prior to google. So really providing the best tool to solve the problem is not enough to guarantee success.

In the academic sense ("was it a design that influenced others?") I think the answer is yes. pg's essays about Arc and the language itself got a lot of people thinking about how to improve Lisp. Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, was influenced to some extent by Arc.

In the practical sense ("is the community active and thriving?") I think the answer is no, so far. #arc on freenode is dead quiet and nearly empty, and there are only 20 new posts on arclanguage.org in the last 40 days. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not "on fire", that's all. Not yet, anyway.

But it's only fair to give it time. pg said:

"Number one, expect change. Arc is still fluid and future releases are guaranteed to break all your code. It was mainly to aid the evolution of the language that we even released it."

So it's not surprising that an active, thriving community of library creators hasn't sprung up yet.

It turns out I can do a maximum of 2 things at once. I can't work on YC, writing, and hacking. And since YC is a given, that means I have to choose between writing and hacking. Over the last couple years I've mostly chosen writing, but that might change.

Which reminds me, I really should do a new release of news.arc. It's significantly better now.

Huh. That reminds me of a rule I figured out a long time ago: you have two cards to play. As in: Job, school, family, startup, pick 2. (Though startup really wants both.)

Anyways, thanks for keeping it fast!

By happy coincidence, I believe pg has coined a new term: fiterating: iterating until you find product-market fit.

For me, this was the most important point. True entrepreneurial genius is being able to differentiate between ideas that seem wrong/impossible to the masses but are right and those that are plain wrong in the business sense.

I totally understand the difficulties reddit faced (chicken&egg) but I don't understand "pushing hard against the current" part. What current? People love wasting time online and keep looking for new ways of doing it. Yes, getting their attention (or even noticing you) may be hard, but pushing against the current?

Yes, there were people who wasted time online, but they were usually people in niche subcultures like fandom or gaming. Many of the early Web 2.0 successes still had a significant productivity bent to them, eg. del.icio.us was seen as a way to organize your bookmarks online, Flickr grew a large community of professional or semi-professional photographers, and blogs were often viewed as a way to increase your professional reputation.

People love wasting time online now, but that was not a mainstream view when Reddit started, and they are perhaps responsible for some of it. That's what PG means by pushing against the current.

As for pushing back, every day I wake up and face the battle. Not easy, not fun at times, but the key isn't some great scheme, or brilliant pattern, or ruleset; it's just getting up and fighting, over and over, each and every day.

I don't know what to think but I am building it.

EDIT: RPG is role playing game, not Rocket Propelled Grenade.

So I don't have adversaries, just encouragement to build it.

Ughh, easier to say than find! :) There are thousands of very, very, very smart people running around looking for "simple solutions to overlooked problems". I like to ask entrepreneurs what are their thoughts on this intense cutthroat competition. The best answer/advice I've got so far was "Watch those who almost succeeded and learn from them".

Now I need to learn to distinguish between "failed" and "almost succeeded". :)

Also, can this be related to "idea vs execution" question? Finding an overlooked problem is an idea (very hard) and coming up with a _simple_ solution is "execution". Both are overwhelmingly hard to crack.

I don't think you have reason to be so pessimistic. Sal Khan, maker of Khan Academy, mentioned in an interview that while a lot of people were predicting that efforts like Khan Academy would spring up, in fact, there are very few of them that had. Sal is just one guy, who up until recently was working part-time and unfunded, who now has the largest private tutoring service in the world. This during a time when thousands of "smart" people funded by billions of dollars were ostensibly trying to do something similar. The number of people who actually start working on solutions is orders of magnitude smaller than people who are merely "looking for" solutions.

  I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked   
  problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d)    
  deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a   
  very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

You really do just need a good idea.