A Chance to Be Good

In his essay on being good, Paul Graham first introduces two Y-Combinator principles of “Make Something People Want” and “don’t worry about the business model”, and considers at length the similarities (and differences) between why these principles, seemingly descriptive of a charity, also describe a successful startup.

The passage below is one that I find to be particularly insightful:

The most important advantage of being good is that it acts as a compass. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide?

Here’s the answer: Do whatever’s best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. Follow it and it will take you through everything you need to do.

It’s even the answer to questions that seem unrelated, like how to convince investors to give you money. If you’re a good salesman, you could try to just talk them into it. But the more reliable route is to convince them through your users: if you make something users love enough to tell their friends, you grow exponentially, and that will convince any investor.

The advantage of being good that pg missed was your goodness will be your ace in the hole when it comes to challenging an establishment.

Good for Newspaper Readers

The story of the fall of newspapers is a perfect example. The internet was just so darn good for newspaper readers that newspapers did not have nearly the sort of bargaining power they imagined they would have had.

For one of my last classes at Medill, I read op-eds and essays about internet journalism from the mid-nineties that made not only the mistake of underplaying the new medium’s true strengths, but also greatly overestimating their own ability to bargain their way to the top, because they mostly denied the possibility that the web would be so good that people would simply be willing to see newspapers fail.

After all, what would it be like to live in a country where most small cities didn’t have their own newspaper?

Good for Students

I think the next example we’ll see of something extraordinarily good happening will be in classrooms.

Teacher’s unions have claimed that it’s their job to help students by helping teachers, when they block new technologies from entering the classroom that vaguely appear to be a threat to the livelihood of teachers.

So the only way to get such a thing into a classroom would be to have something so good for students that it would just make the teachers unions look bad to be anything but enthusiastic about it.

This is another chance to be good that has finally arrived.