> There's a variant of going full stack where you eat your way gradually through the customer by doing all their hardest work for them.
One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack.
One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.
Suggesting every dark pattern for startups and then using record labels as the boogeyman like it's 2000 again is ... odd.
Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify.
It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
I'm shocked to read that Paul Graham is only 61. His writings lately sound more like late 70s in terms of age and worldview.
References to record labels? How much do record labels have to do with people discovering and catching on to music artists in 2026? What does a multi-billion-dollar 17 year old tech conglomerate like Stripe have to do with startups at this point?
I maintain that one of the hardest things for people to really internalize is when the group that they are in goes from being an insurgent to being the establishment. I can think of very few examples of people successfully adapting their worldview to that fundamental change in their identity.
The next class of YC founders is no less a product of the financial/tech ruling elite than the next batch of Goldman Sachs summer interns.
One of my clients provisions front office applications for banks and the conversation has come up more than once regarding the client evolving into a bank themselves and building up operations around the capabilities of the product stack.
One good multi-regional partner and it could be a radically different animal. Providing software to one very big customer tends to be a lot simpler than providing it to 20+ smaller customers.
Why don't you let artists decide if they want record labels? They were far better off with EMI and Columbia records than with Spotify.
It is better to give $500,000 of $1,000,000 to a record label than $3 of $10 to Spotify. And record labels were pretty damn good at selecting artists, even in pop music. Does Paul Graham think music got any better after 2010?.
References to record labels? How much do record labels have to do with people discovering and catching on to music artists in 2026? What does a multi-billion-dollar 17 year old tech conglomerate like Stripe have to do with startups at this point?
I maintain that one of the hardest things for people to really internalize is when the group that they are in goes from being an insurgent to being the establishment. I can think of very few examples of people successfully adapting their worldview to that fundamental change in their identity.
The next class of YC founders is no less a product of the financial/tech ruling elite than the next batch of Goldman Sachs summer interns.