After reading the Woz interview in Founders, it's obvious that he wasn't paying much attention to the stock market. He was too busy doing what he loved. Their initial business approach (cash for product) may have been produced by their times, but they didn't let that stand in the way.

And that's the lesson for me. All I can control is my immediate situation. The other stuff is just noise best drowned out by hard work at things I enjoy.

Technology doesn't evolve independently of a market for it. While "make something people want" is true in any economy, the problem is that what people want changes with the state of the economy. So startup founders need to reassess the market for their products (building iPods or building pacemakers?), and I'd guess many will decide this is not the right economy for their startups, and some will now discover new opportunities.

You do touch upon this a little bit in your article, where you mention startups that save customers money will succeed more in a bad economy. But I thought the more general assertion wasn't made.

I've often thought that the mantra make something people want should be amended to make something people want to pay for. It's an important distinction. It's the difference between Richard Stallman and Steve Jobs, between Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates. I have great respect for all of those individuals, but I don't look to Stallman or Torvalds for business inspiration. I don't doubt that all YC companies have made something people want, but I wonder whether all have made something people want to pay for.

Neither Stallman nor Torvalds are scrambling to pay rent.

So it depends if you want to be "well off" (Stallman), "obscenely rich" (Torvalds), "shockingly rich" (Jobs), or "embarassingly rich" (Gates).

And I think that most would, given the choice, rather be the BDFL of a project they obviously enjoy (Torvalds), than spend all day in meetings, or managing management, or whatever Gates has done for the last decade. Unless you're a masochist, or a megalomaniac.

And besides that, lightning has to strike the same place 200 times before you make it to the 99.9th percentile.

"I'm trying to make a living; if you're trying to make a killing then you're stuck in the system."

>Neither Stallman nor Torvalds are scrambling to pay rent.

I've heard rumors that Torvalds wishes he had the money Jobs and Gates have. So, yeah, a little unhappy.

>And besides that, lightning has to strike the same place 200 times before you make it to the 99.9th percentile.

That's if you're in a bell-curve. If you're in a zipf-distribution, lightning only has to strike once.

If you can make something that people want, but don't want to pay for, then you can probably make money indirectly from it: by selling t-shirts, giving after-dinner speeches, or whatever.