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Friedman: Google's early success warped founders into obsessing over premature scalability

Jared Friedman · Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale · Y Combinator · May 30, 2024 · at 2:10

Y Combinator Group Partner Jared Friedman explains the historical origins behind early-stage startups over-prioritizing technical scalability.

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“I actually think Google is indirectly responsible responsible for basically scaling. Warping the minds of a whole generation of founders and investors and creating the problem that Paul Graham had to solve with this, which is because Google became so famous for this because they did so much content marketing. Everybody wanted to emulate Google. And so everybody from day one wanted to do the same thing and to be thinking about how they were going to build something that was as scalable as Google.”

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