Why NOW Is A Great Time To Launch Your Startup

Do you know Paul Graham, by the way? We're not best buddies or anything, but I do know of him. I've met him. Yeah.

He wrote a blog post back in 2008, right after the crash. And he makes this case where he goes, the economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid-'70s, which is when Microsoft and Apple were founded. And as those examples suggest, like, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. But he— which you've heard before. But I thought there's one interesting part where he goes, I'm not saying it's a good time either. The truth is more boring. The economy doesn't matter much either way for a founder starting a startup. And so I thought it was a great little blog post talking about like kind of starting a startup during the downtime, which is where I think we're about to or we just officially entered a recession again. So I was curious, Dharmesh, do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah. So my position is I lean more towards kind of the Paul Graham end of the spectrum, which is I think it's either neutral that it doesn't matter. It's one of the things you're suggesting towards positive and the positive elements of being in a kind of downturn economy or recession is that things become available that would not have been available to a startup before, like talent. It's like, oh, well, there are people sitting at Meta, Facebook, or sitting at Google right now that may be reevaluating their lives, or they may have just been let go from a venture-backed company that raised $200+ million, right? So now you've got this talent that's coming on the market that might not have come on the market before. Things that were super expensive, like buying Google AdWords or certain marketing channels, because you have this glut of money and a glut of venture capital, I mean, I think of venture capital as a very efficient machine of turning like money from LPs into Google AdWords revenue, right? That's— they're just a conduit between the two. And as in a downward economy, you're going to get less of that kind of glut of money flowing in, which drives the cost overall down for certain things that I think are important to entrepreneurs. So I'm generally net positive that a down economy is actually a relatively good time to start a startup. Thank you.