And even after subsequent rejection, deciding to change majors to CS, going back to school to seek of the advice of Olin Shivers, and actually getting a CS degree, I practically kept it by my bedside. There was nothing even close to as influential in my decision to move to Cambridge and get reinvolved with startups as soon as I graduated.
But while H&P is is great at showing people like me that you can succeed in business without an MBA, and in fact might be at an advantage, it might be too subversive in that sense as well. Later essays that weren't included in H&P tell a clearer story. Black Swan Farming and What We Look For In Founder and Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas are essays that might have affected my thinking back then.
I don't think anything could have changed my path away from startups; any book containing Why Nerds Are Unpopular and How to Make Wealth was destined to have a profound affect on my life. But while VC is somewhat demonized and stories are told about running out of money, I think there is a certain glorification of the process that translated in my brain to "build product -> seek seed funding (YC) -> get users -> get VC", when I might have been better served by something telling me in big, bold l etters that while all this is great, if you're just starting out, don't just make something people want, make something people want to pay you for.
I didn't learn the lesson fully (after all, everyone I knew was building facebook clones back then) until being part of my first exit at a startup where we took no money . It was so refreshing to fund the company off customers' payments that even for my latest side project I found ways to make people want to pay me for it before I had built anything.
So while I don't think Hackers & Painters gives any wrong advice, I think that you are such a good essayist that you unintentionally glorified the traditional VC-back ed startup process to someone as young as I was. If I'd read more about how to be a cockroach, and had someone tell me that my first company should focus on making so mething people will pay me for immediately, maybe I would have had a better chance of success at 19 instead of in my mid-twenties.
What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue
to exist, is earn money. And the way most companies make
money is by creating wealth.--
So I think you should make users the test, just as
acquirers do. Treat a startup as an optimization problem
in which performance is measured by number of users.
Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense.
If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for
competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on
other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and
then at every decision point, take the harder choice.
The advantage of creating wealth, as a way to get rich,
is not just that it's more legitimate (many of the other
methods are now illegal) but that it's more straightforward.
You just have to do something people want.
So you might say my main critique is that I was too naive at 19, and needed things spelled out for me. "How to make Weath" was just too subtle.
The first-time founders I mentor now have somewhat more realistic expectations than we did during the Web 2.0 startup craze circa 2005, but there are still far too many of them looking to build what comes easy (e.g. social network) instead of looking to build what makes money.
For my part, I'm done taking money unless there's a compelling reason. Right now I'm spending weekends building my next startup while doing my time at my last startup, now post-acquisition. It doesn't just feel better than chasing money, it feels right. If enough revenue comes in such that I need to quit and put my full time in, it will be a victory that tastes all the sweeter because this time I did it on my own terms.