What We Look for in Founders
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2010
(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something
about the qualities we look for in founders.  In print they had to cut
the last item because they didn't have room.)
1. Determination
This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup
founders.  We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most
important quality would be intelligence.  That's the myth in the
Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid.  But
as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what
matters most is determination.  You're going to hit a lot of
obstacles.  You can't be the sort of person who gets
demoralized
easily.
Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman of
WePay
are a good example.  They're
doing a finance startup, which means endless negotiations with big,
bureaucratic companies.  When you're starting a startup that depends
on deals with big companies to exist, it often feels like they're
trying to ignore you out of existence.  But when Bill Clerico starts
calling you, you may as well do what he asks, because he is not
going away.
2. Flexibility
You do not however want the sort of determination implied by phrases
like "don't give up on your dreams."  The world of startups is so
unpredictable that you need to be able to modify your dreams on the
fly.  The best metaphor I've found for the combination of determination
and flexibility you need is a
running back
.
He's determined to get
downfield, but at any given moment he may need to go sideways or
even backwards to get there.
The current record holder for flexibility may be Daniel Gross of
Greplin
.  He applied to YC with
some bad ecommerce idea.  We told
him we'd fund him if he did something else.  He thought for a second,
and said ok.  He then went through two more ideas before settling
on Greplin.  He'd only been working on it for a couple days when
he presented to investors at Demo Day, but he got a lot of interest.
He always seems to land on his feet.
3. Imagination
Intelligence does matter a lot of course.  It seems like the type
that matters most is imagination.  It's not so important to be able
to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to come up with
surprising new ideas.  In the startup world, most good ideas
seem
bad
initially.  If they were obviously good, someone would already
be doing them.  So you need the kind of intelligence that produces
ideas with just the right level of craziness.
Airbnb
is that kind of idea.
In fact, when we funded Airbnb, we
thought it was too crazy.  We couldn't believe large numbers of
people would want to stay in other people's places.  We funded them
because we liked the founders so much.  As soon as we heard they'd
been supporting themselves by selling Obama and McCain branded
breakfast cereal, they were in.  And it turned out the idea was on
the right side of crazy after all.
4. Naughtiness
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they
tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye.  They're not Goody
Two-Shoes type good.  Morally, they care about getting the big
questions right, but not about observing proprieties.  That's why
I'd use the word naughty rather than evil.  They delight in
breaking
rules
, but not rules that matter.  This quality may be redundant
though; it may be implied by imagination.
Sam Altman of
Loopt
is one of the most successful alumni, so we
asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application
that would help us discover more people like him.  He said to ask
about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into
computers.  It has become one of the questions we pay most attention
to when judging applications.
5. Friendship
Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just
one
founder
.  Most of the big successes have two or three.  And the
relationship between the founders has to be strong.  They must
genuinely like one another, and work well together.  Startups do
to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock:
if it can be pulled apart, it will be.
Emmett Shear and Justin Kan of
Justin.tv
are a good example of close
friends who work well together.  They've known each other since
second grade.  They can practically read one another's minds.  I'm
sure they argue, like all founders, but I have never once sensed
any unresolved tension between them.
Thanks
to Jessica Livingston and Chris Steiner for reading drafts of this.


@Luvaglio This is so mistaken that it's actually useful, because it draws out an important point. All users have feature requests, but the feature requests of startups tend to improve your product, because they're predictive of future demand.

@tickinterstate We knew they'd give one another moral support, but we didn't realize they'd also become one another's customers.

@tom__ballard This rarely happens, because startups have such wildly different products. A database company selling to a company making a CAD tool is not going to sign up for the CAD tool; a database company has no need for one.

@suroorwijdan Recruiting may be a special case. In fact I wouldn't encourage early stage startups even to use recruiters; their first hires should usually just be their smartest friends.

@aaemartins When you can no longer get the growth you need by selling to startups. But it may take a very long time to reach this point, because if you sell to startups, your users will grow into big companies.

@tomhaerter I encourage them to try to sell to their batchmates, definitely.

@Timurvural34215 Here's one: https://t.co/EoMe2YigXz

@rahim_mirani Too? It's what I tell startups in office hours at YC.

If you're running a startup, sell to startups if you can. They don't have as much money, but they decide quickly, and even more importantly, they have a better influence on your product.

@mattyglesias Most of the fire on the left is friendly fire.


What the Bubble Got Right
September 2004
(This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.)
I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble,
because I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999.  One day,
when the stock was trading around $200, I sat down and calculated
what I thought the price should be. The
answer I got was $12.  I went to
the next cubicle and told my friend Trevor.  "Twelve!" he said.
He tried to sound indignant, but he didn't quite manage it.  He
knew as well as I did that our valuation was crazy.
Yahoo was a special case.  It was not just our price to earnings
ratio that was bogus.  Half our earnings were too.  Not in
the Enron way, of course.  The finance guys seemed
scrupulous about reporting earnings.  What made our
earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of
a Ponzi scheme.  Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings
and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make
money.  So they invested in new
startups that promised to be the next Yahoo.  And as soon as these startups
got the money, what did they do with it?
Buy millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote
their brand.  Result: a capital investment in a startup this
quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter—stimulating
another round of investments in startups.
As in a Ponzi scheme, what seemed to be the returns of this system
were simply the latest round of investments in it.
What made it not a Ponzi scheme was that it was unintentional.
At least, I think it was.  The venture capital business is pretty incestuous,
and there were presumably people in a position, if not to create
this situation, to realize what was happening and to milk it.
A year later the game was up.  Starting in January 2000, Yahoo's
stock price began to crash, ultimately losing 95% of its
value.
Notice, though, that even with all the fat trimmed off its market
cap, Yahoo was still worth a lot.  Even at the morning-after
valuations of March and April 2001, the people at Yahoo had managed
to create a company worth about $8 billion in just six years.
The fact is, despite all the nonsense we heard
during the Bubble about the "new economy," there was a
core of truth.  You need
that to get a really big bubble: you need to have something
solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in.
(Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift both lost money
in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.)
Now the pendulum has swung the other way.  Now anything that
became fashionable during the Bubble is ipso facto unfashionable.
But that's a mistake—an even bigger mistake than believing
what everyone was saying in 1999.  Over the long term,
what the Bubble got right will be more important than what
it got wrong.
1. Retail VC
After the excesses of the Bubble, it's now
considered dubious to take companies public before they have earnings.
But there is nothing intrinsically wrong with
that idea.  Taking a company public at an early stage is simply
retail VC: instead of going to venture capital firms for the last round of
funding, you go to the public markets.
By the end of the Bubble, companies going public with no
earnings were being derided as "concept stocks," as if it
were inherently stupid to invest in them.
But investing in concepts isn't stupid; it's what VCs do,
and the best of them are far from stupid.
The stock of a company that doesn't yet have earnings is
worth
something.
It may take a while for the market to learn
how to value such companies, just as it had to learn to
value common stocks in the early 20th century.   But markets
are good at solving that kind of problem.  I wouldn't be
surprised if the market ultimately did a better
job than VCs do now.
Going public early will not be the right plan
for every company.
And it can of course be
disruptive—by distracting the management, or by making the early
employees suddenly rich.  But just as the market will learn
how to value startups, startups will learn how to minimize
the damage of going public.
2. The Internet
The Internet genuinely is a big deal.  That was one reason
even smart people were fooled by the Bubble.  Obviously
it was going to have a huge effect.  Enough of an effect to
triple the value of Nasdaq companies in two years?  No, as it
turned out.  But it was hard to say for certain at the time. [1]
The same thing happened during the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles.
What drove them was the invention of organized public finance
(the South Sea Company, despite its name, was really a competitor
of the Bank of England).  And that did turn out to be
a big deal, in the long run.
Recognizing an important trend turns out to be easier than
figuring out how to profit from it.  The mistake
investors always seem to make is to take the trend too literally.
Since the Internet was the big new thing, investors supposed
that the more Internettish the company, the better.  Hence
such parodies as Pets.Com.
In fact most of the money to be made from big trends is made
indirectly.  It was not the railroads themselves that
made the most money during the railroad boom, but the companies
on either side, like Carnegie's steelworks, which made the rails,
and Standard Oil, which used railroads to get oil to the East Coast,
where it could be shipped to Europe.
I think the Internet will have great effects,
and that what we've seen so far is nothing compared to what's
coming.  But most of the winners will only indirectly be
Internet companies; for every Google there will be ten
JetBlues.
3. Choices
Why will the Internet have great effects?  The general
argument is that new forms of communication always do.  They happen
rarely (till industrial times there were just speech, writing, and printing),
but when they do, they always cause a big splash.
The specific argument, or one of them, is the Internet gives us
more choices.  In the "old" economy,
the high cost of presenting information to people meant they
had only a narrow range of options to choose from.  The tiny,
expensive pipeline to consumers was tellingly named "the channel."
Control the channel and you
could feed them what you wanted, on your terms.  And it
was not just big corporations that depended
on this principle.  So, in their way, did
labor unions, the traditional news media,
and the art and literary establishments.
Winning depended not on doing good work, but on gaining control
of some bottleneck.
There are signs that this is changing.
Google has over 82 million unique users a month and
annual revenues of about three billion dollars. [2]
And yet have you ever seen
a Google ad?
Something is going on here.
Admittedly, Google is an extreme case.  It's very easy for
people to switch to a new search engine.  It costs little
effort and no money to try a new one, and it's easy to
see if the results are better.  And so Google doesn't
have
to advertise.  In a business like theirs, being the best is
enough.
The exciting thing about the Internet is that it's
shifting everything in that direction.
The hard part, if you want to win by making the best stuff,
is the beginning.  Eventually everyone
will learn by word of mouth that you're the best,
but how do you survive to that point?  And it is in this crucial
stage that the Internet has the most effect.  First, the
Internet lets anyone find you at almost zero cost.
Second, it dramatically speeds up the rate at which
reputation spreads by word of mouth.  Together these mean that in many
fields the rule will be: Build it, and they will come.
Make something great and put it online.
That is a big change from the recipe for winning in the
past century.
4. Youth
The aspect of the Internet Bubble that the press seemed most
taken with was the youth of some of the startup founders.
This too is a trend that will last.
There is a huge standard deviation among 26 year olds.  Some
are fit only for entry level jobs, but others are
ready to rule the world if they can find someone to handle
the paperwork for them.
A 26 year old may not be very good at managing people or
dealing with the SEC.  Those require experience.
But those are also commodities, which can be handed off to
some lieutenant.  The most important quality in a CEO is his
vision for the company's future.  What will they build next?
And in that department, there are 26 year olds who can
compete with anyone.
In 1970 a company president meant someone in his fifties, at
least.   If he had technologists working for him, they were
treated like a racing stable: prized, but not powerful.  But
as technology has grown more important, the power of nerds
has grown to reflect it.  Now it's not enough for a CEO to
have someone smart he can ask about technical matters.   Increasingly,
he has to be that person himself.
As always, business has clung to old forms.  VCs still seem
to want to install a legitimate-looking
talking head as the CEO.  But increasingly the founders of
the company are the real powers, and the grey-headed man
installed by the VCs more like a
music group's manager than a general.
5. Informality
In New York, the Bubble had dramatic consequences:
suits went out of fashion.  They made one seem old.  So in
1998 powerful New York types were suddenly wearing
open-necked shirts and khakis and oval wire-rimmed glasses,
just like guys in Santa Clara.
The pendulum has swung back a bit, driven in part by a panicked
reaction by the clothing industry.  But I'm betting on the
open-necked shirts.  And this is not as frivolous a question
as it might seem.  Clothes are important, as all nerds can sense,
though they may not realize it consciously.
If you're a nerd, you can understand how important clothes are
by asking yourself how you'd feel about a company
that made you wear a suit and tie to work.  The idea sounds
horrible, doesn't it?  In fact, horrible far out of proportion
to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes.  A company that
made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong
with it.
And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself
counted more than the quality of one's ideas.
That's
the problem with formality.  Dressing up is not so much bad in
itself.  The problem is the receptor it binds to: dressing
up is inevitably a substitute
for good ideas.   It is no coincidence that technically
inept business types are known as "suits."
Nerds don't just happen to dress informally.  They do it too
consistently.  Consciously or not, they dress informally as
a prophylactic measure against stupidity.
6. Nerds
Clothing is only the most visible battleground in the war
against formality.  Nerds tend to eschew formality of any sort.
They're not impressed by one's job title, for example,
or any of the other appurtenances of authority.
Indeed, that's practically the definition of a nerd.  I found
myself talking recently to someone from Hollywood who was planning
a show about nerds.  I thought it would be useful if I
explained what a nerd was.  What I came up with was: someone who
doesn't expend any effort on marketing himself.
A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance.
So what's the connection between nerds and technology? Roughly
that you can't fool mother nature. In technical matters, you
have to get the right answers.  If your software miscalculates
the path of a space probe, you can't finesse your way out of
trouble by saying that your code is patriotic, or avant-garde,
or any of the other dodges people use in nontechnical
fields.
And as technology becomes increasingly important in the
economy, nerd culture is
rising
with it.  Nerds are already
a lot cooler than they were when I was a kid.  When I was in
college in the mid-1980s, "nerd" was still an insult.  People
who majored in computer science generally tried to conceal it.
Now women ask me where they can meet nerds.  (The answer that
springs to mind is "Usenix," but that would be like drinking
from a firehose.)
I have no illusions about why nerd culture is becoming
more accepted.  It's not because people are
realizing that substance is more important than marketing.
It's because the nerds are getting
rich.  But that is not going
to change.
7. Options
What makes the nerds rich, usually, is stock options.  Now there
are moves afoot to make it harder for companies to grant
options.  To the extent there's some genuine accounting abuse
going on, by all means correct it.  But don't kill the golden
goose.  Equity is the fuel that drives technical innovation.
Options are a good idea because (a) they're fair, and (b) they
work.  Someone who goes to work for a company is (one hopes)
adding to its value, and it's only fair to give them a share
of it.  And as a purely practical measure, people work a
lot
harder when they have options.  I've seen that first hand.
The fact that a few crooks during the Bubble robbed their
companies by granting themselves options doesn't mean options
are a bad idea.  During the railroad boom, some executives
enriched themselves by selling watered stock—by issuing more
shares than they said were outstanding.  But that doesn't
make common stock a bad idea.  Crooks just use whatever
means are available.
If there is a problem with options, it's that they reward
slightly the wrong thing.  Not surprisingly, people do what you
pay them to. If you pay them by the hour, they'll work a lot of
hours.  If you pay them by the volume of work done, they'll
get a lot of work done (but only as you defined work).
And if you pay them to raise the
stock price, which is what options amount to, they'll raise
the stock price.
But that's not quite what you want.  What you want is to
increase the actual value of the company, not its market cap.
Over time the two inevitably meet, but not always as quickly
as options vest.  Which means options tempt employees, if
only unconsciously, to "pump and dump"—to do things
that will make the company
seem
valuable.
I found that when I was at Yahoo, I couldn't help thinking,
"how will this sound to investors?"  when I should have been
thinking "is this a good idea?"
So maybe the standard option deal needs to be tweaked slightly.
Maybe options should be replaced with something tied more
directly to earnings.  It's still early days.
8. Startups
What made the options valuable, for the most part, is
that they were options on the stock of
startups
.  Startups
were not of course a creation of the Bubble, but they
were more visible during the Bubble than ever before.
One thing most people did learn about for the first time
during the Bubble was the startup
created with the intention of selling it.
Originally a
startup meant a small company that hoped to grow into a
big one.  But increasingly startups are evolving into a
vehicle for developing technology on spec.
As I wrote in
Hackers & Painters
, employees seem to be most
productive when they're paid in proportion to the wealth
they generate.  And the advantage of a startup—indeed,
almost its raison d'etre—is that it offers something
otherwise impossible to obtain: a way of
measuring
that.
In many businesses, it just makes more sense for companies
to get technology by buying startups rather than developing
it in house.  You pay more, but there is less risk,
and risk is what big companies don't want.  It makes the
guys developing the technology more accountable, because they
only get paid if they build the winner.  And you end up
with better technology, created faster, because things are
made in the innovative atmosphere of startups instead of
the bureaucratic atmosphere of big companies.
Our startup, Viaweb, was built to be sold.  We were open
with investors about that from the start.  And we were
careful to create something that could slot easily into a
larger company.  That is the pattern for the future.
9. California
The Bubble was a California phenomenon.  When I showed up
in Silicon Valley in 1998, I felt like an immigrant from
Eastern Europe arriving in America in 1900.  Everyone
was so cheerful and healthy and rich.  It seemed a new
and improved world.
The press, ever eager to exaggerate small trends, now gives
one the impression that Silicon Valley is a ghost town.
Not at all.  When I drive down 101 from the airport,
I still feel a buzz of energy, as if there were a giant
transformer nearby.  Real estate is still more expensive
than just about anywhere else in the country.  The people
still look healthy, and the weather is still fabulous.
The future is there.
(I say "there" because I moved back to the East Coast after
Yahoo.  I still wonder if this was a smart idea.)
What makes the Bay Area superior is the attitude of the
people.  I notice that when I come home to Boston.
The first thing I see when I walk out of the airline terminal
is the fat, grumpy guy in
charge of the taxi line.  I brace myself for rudeness:
remember, you're back on the East Coast now.
The atmosphere varies from city to city, and fragile
organisms like startups are exceedingly sensitive to such variation.
If it hadn't already been hijacked as a new euphemism
for liberal, the word to describe the atmosphere in
the Bay Area would be "progressive."  People there are trying
to build the future.
Boston has MIT and Harvard, but it also has a lot of
truculent, unionized employees like the police who
recently held the Democratic National Convention for
ransom
, and a lot of people trying to be
 Thurston Howell.
Two sides of an obsolete coin.
Silicon Valley may not be the next Paris or London, but it
is at least the next Chicago.  For the next fifty years,
that's where new wealth will come from.
10. Productivity
During the Bubble, optimistic analysts used to justify high
price to earnings ratios by saying that technology was going
to increase productivity dramatically.  They were wrong about
the specific companies, but not so wrong about the underlying
principle.  I think one of the big trends we'll see in the
coming century is a huge increase in productivity.
Or more precisely, a huge increase in
variation
in
productivity.  Technology is a lever.  It doesn't add;
it multiplies.  If the present range of productivity is
0 to 100, introducing a multiple of 10 increases the range
from 0 to 1000.
One upshot of which is that the companies of the future may
be surprisingly small.  I sometimes daydream about how big
you could grow a company (in revenues) without ever having
more than ten people.  What would happen if you outsourced
everything except product development?  If you tried this experiment,
I think you'd be surprised at how far you could get.
As Fred Brooks pointed out, small groups are
intrinsically more productive, because the
internal friction in a group grows as the
square of its size.
Till quite recently, running a major company
meant managing an army of workers.  Our standards about how
many employees a company should have are still influenced by
old patterns.  Startups are perforce small, because they can't
afford to hire a lot of people.  But I think it's a big mistake for
companies to loosen their belts as revenues increase.  The
question is not whether you can afford the extra salaries.
Can you afford the loss in productivity that comes from making
the company bigger?
The prospect of technological leverage will of course raise the
specter of unemployment.  I'm surprised people still worry about
this.
After centuries of supposedly job-killing innovations,
the number of jobs is within ten percent of the number of people
who want them.  This can't be a coincidence.  There must be some
kind of balancing mechanism.
What's New
When one looks over these trends, is there any overall theme?
There does seem to be: that in the coming century, good ideas
will count for more.  That 26
year olds with good ideas will increasingly have an edge over 50
year olds with powerful connections.  That doing good work will
matter more than dressing up—or advertising, which is the
same thing for companies.  That people
will be rewarded a bit more in proportion to the value of what
they create.
If so, this is good news indeed.
Good ideas always tend to win eventually.  The problem is,
it can take a very long time.
It took decades for relativity to be accepted, and the
greater part of a century to establish that central planning didn't work.
So even a small increase in the
rate at which good ideas win would be a momentous
change—big enough, probably, to justify a name like
the "new economy."
Notes
[1] Actually it's hard to say now.  As Jeremy Siegel points
out, if the value of a stock is its future earnings, you
can't tell if it was overvalued till you see what the earnings
turn out to be.   While certain famous Internet stocks were
almost certainly overvalued in 1999, it is still hard to say for sure
whether, e.g., the Nasdaq index was.
Siegel, Jeremy J.  "What Is an Asset Price Bubble?  An
Operational Definition."
European Financial Management,
9:1, 2003.
[2] The number of users comes from a 6/03 Nielsen
study quoted on Google's site.  (You'd think they'd have
something more recent.)   The revenue estimate is based on
revenues of $1.35 billion for the first half of 2004, as
reported in their IPO filing.
Thanks
to Chris Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica
Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
The Long Tail
Russian Translation
Japanese Translation


When people say that certain phrases are "outdated," what they usually mean, without wanting to say so openly, is that they're forbidden. No one would care if you said "automobile" instead of "car," or referred to a ten dollar bill as a "sawbuck."

@raeesgillani Yes, some very good ones.

@Austen The impressive thing to me is that they didn't just find some alternative criteria that would allow them to ignore the decision. Though indeed they probably did to some degree.

@lulumeservey For customers maybe, but investors like it.

@Andercot Humanity has stopped evolving iff how many kids people have has no correlation to what's in their DNA. Which is obviously false, since some countries have higher birthrates than others.

@rulerngu Someone with your achievements doesn't need YC anyway.

The deadline for applying to Y Combinator's fall batch is in less than a week: August 27. https://t.co/XPA5lYzRXN

@pitdesi @theinformation They hadn't already?

The reason seems to be that liberals are less optimistic. https://t.co/Or5dIrYL8b

"Depression increased the most among liberal young women, where it went from 15% in the late 2000s to 46% in 2021-22 — more than tripling in a little more than a decade."

— Jean Twenge https://t.co/5VOeE2NIo5


@PanoKPhoto Good idea. That was one of the main reasons I retired in 2014, that we'd just had a second kid.

@Noahpinion I think they do, but the problem is that they're not sure which new ideas to switch to. Which makes them even weaker than they'd be merely from being the minority in both houses. They have nothing to rally around.

I'm doing my second Social Radars episode with Jessica and Carolynn this afternoon. Anything you want me to talk about?

@mfreeman451 @ycombinator Thanks! I've told people at YC.

@leecronin Ever is a really long time. I'd be so reluctant to make such a prediction. You're just asking to be made a fool of.

@hugmoretreez @MassieforKY I already donated.

@jdmccafferty And Lely flattered his sitters more than Dobson.

@hunterballew I would think it's improbable if only because the Republicans have used every possible argument for not releasing the files, and they haven't used this one.

My take on whether Tylenol causes autism is why is the government refusing to release the Epstein files? Who are they protecting?

If you make your app 10% easier to use you'll get twice as many users.


@vladgives You see a video of a boy crying over the corpse of his dead father, and this is your reaction? Not horror or sympathy, but that other people are dying too?

I do most of my office hours with YC startups at our house. My sons can't help overhearing much of the conversation. After meeting one of the startups I talked to today, they were both asking how they could invest. That's a first.

@himanshu_ragtah People used to stop me on the street and say I looked like Paul.

@jos_b_mahoney Thanks, Joe! I wish I still did...

@RaffaelSe That having kids is fun.

https://t.co/mqo7WlXhh3

@worldlive123 That was alas a well-established one.

@mehdirhasan Many of these accounts are fake. Israel has thousands of them. Judging by a quick look at what "Tom" has posted, there's a good chance this is one of them.

@arden_tir To stop killing civilians.

@NoLongerBennett You think we should just ignore this kind of suffering?

@StevenOwsley That would not stop the killing.


A YC startup in the middle of fundraising found a way to cut their costs by 2/3. Now they don't need to raise at all. They can make it to profitability on the money they already have. Bet you can guess what will happen when they tell investors they're shutting down the raise.

@nikitabier How about when they announce a fund?

@fredericolawson @itskenbook @eldsjal Actually the fact that they aren't tends to prove my point. The reason none of them are in the same position is that those who might have been chose not to, by divesting themselves of their colonial possessions after WWII.

@PicoPaco17 That's also too noticeable. Like using no mat and just thumbtacking the art to the wall.

@2begilded @delia_burgess We go back every summer to talk to startups in the summer batch.

@ahistoryinart Blurry Sargent. Though to be fair Sargent generally seems to have used photos.

@delia_burgess I learned to spell in America.

@omuinetimi It will be a long time before it can teach everything everyone needs to know, since that includes a possibly infinite number of interesting but unproven theorems.

@delia_burgess Hard to say. It doesn't seem to have been an issue that Einstein knew so much more about physics than his neighbors, but the consequences of these big, historic changes are always hard to predict.

AI will magnify the already great difference in knowledge between the people who are eager to learn and those who aren't.


How Art Can Be Good
December 2006
I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference.
Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any
better than anyone else's.  There is no such thing as
good
taste.
Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to be
false, and I'm going to try to explain why.
One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that
it also means there's no such thing as good art.  If there were
good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than
people who didn't.  So if you discard taste, you also have to discard
the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it.
It was pulling on that thread that unravelled my childhood faith
in relativism.  When you're trying to make things, taste becomes a
practical matter.  You have to decide what to do next.  Would it
make the painting better if I changed that part?  If there's no
such thing as better, it doesn't matter what you do.  In fact, it
doesn't matter if you paint at all.  You could just go out and buy
a ready-made blank canvas.  If there's no such thing as good, that
would be just as great an achievement as the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel.  Less laborious, certainly, but if you can achieve the same
level of performance with less effort, surely that's more impressive,
not less.
Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it?
Audience
I think the key to this puzzle is to remember that art has an
audience.  Art has a purpose, which is to interest its audience.
Good art (like good anything) is art that achieves its purpose
particularly well.  The meaning of "interest" can vary.  Some works
of art are meant to shock, and others to please; some are meant to
jump out at you, and others to sit quietly in the background. But
all art has to work on an audience, and—here's the critical
point—members of the audience share things in common.
For example, nearly all humans find human faces engaging.  It seems
to be wired into us.  Babies can recognize faces practically from
birth.  In fact, faces seem to have co-evolved with our interest
in them; the face is the body's billboard.  So all other things
being equal, a painting with faces in it will interest people more
than one without.
[
1
]
One reason it's easy to believe that taste is merely personal
preference is that, if it isn't, how do you pick out the people
with better taste?  There are billions of people, each with their
own opinion; on what grounds can you prefer one to another?
[
2
]
But if audiences have a lot in common, you're not in a position of
having to choose one out of a random set of individual biases,
because the set isn't random.  All humans find faces
engaging—practically by definition: face recognition is
in our DNA.  And so
having a notion of good art, in the sense of art that does its job
well, doesn't require you to pick out a few individuals and label
their opinions as correct.  No matter who you pick, they'll find
faces engaging.
Of course, space aliens probably wouldn't find human faces engaging.
But there might be other things they shared in common with us.  The
most likely source of examples is math.  I expect space aliens would
agree with us most of the time about which of two proofs was better.
Erdos thought so.  He called a maximally elegant proof one out of
God's book, and presumably God's book is universal.
[
3
]
Once you start talking about audiences, you don't have to argue
simply that there are or aren't standards of taste.  Instead tastes
are a series of concentric rings, like ripples in a pond.  There
are some things that will appeal to you and your friends, others
that will appeal to most people your age, others that will appeal
to most humans, and perhaps others that would appeal to most sentient
beings (whatever that means).
The picture is slightly more complicated than that, because in the
middle of the pond there are overlapping sets of ripples.  For
example, there might be things that appealed particularly to men,
or to people from a certain culture.
If good art is art that interests its audience, then when you talk
about art being good, you also have to say for what audience.  So
is it meaningless to talk about art simply being good or bad?  No,
because one audience is the set of all possible humans.  I think
that's the audience people are implicitly talking about when they
say a work of art is good: they mean it would engage any human.
[
4
]
And that is a meaningful test, because although, like any everyday
concept, "human" is fuzzy around the edges, there are a lot of
things practically all humans have in common.  In addition to our
interest in faces, there's something special about primary colors
for nearly all of us, because it's an artifact of the way our eyes
work.  Most humans will also find images of 3D objects engaging,
because that also seems to be built into our visual perception.
[
5
]
And beneath that there's edge-finding, which makes images
with definite shapes more engaging than mere blur.
Humans have a lot more in common than this, of course.  My goal is
not to compile a complete list, just to show that there's some solid
ground here.  People's preferences aren't random.  So an artist
working on a painting and trying to decide whether to change some
part of it doesn't have to think "Why bother?  I might as well flip
a coin." Instead he can ask "What would make the painting more
interesting to people?"  And the reason you can't equal Michelangelo
by going out and buying a blank canvas is that the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel is more interesting to people.
A lot of philosophers have had a hard time believing it was possible
for there to be objective standards for art. It seemed obvious that
beauty, for example, was something that happened in the head of the observer,
not something that was a property of objects.  It was thus
"subjective" rather than "objective."  But in fact if you narrow the
definition of beauty to something that works a certain way on
humans, and you observe how much humans have in common, it turns out
to be a property of objects after all.   You don't
have to choose between something being a property of the
subject or the object if subjects all react similarly.
Being good art is thus a property of objects as much as, say, being
toxic to humans is: it's good art if it consistently affects humans
in a certain way.
Error
So could we figure out what the best art is by taking a vote?  After
all, if appealing to humans is the test, we should be able to just
ask them, right?
Well, not quite.  For products of nature that might work.  I'd be
willing to eat the apple the world's population had voted most
delicious, and I'd probably be willing to visit the beach they voted
most beautiful, but having to look at the painting they voted the
best would be a crapshoot.
Man-made stuff is different.  For one thing, artists, unlike apple
trees, often deliberately try to trick us.  Some tricks are quite
subtle.  For example, any work of art sets expectations by its level
of finish.  You don't expect photographic accuracy in something
that looks like a quick sketch.  So one widely used trick, especially
among illustrators, is to intentionally make a painting or drawing
look like it was done faster than it was.  The average person looks
at it and thinks: how amazingly skillful.  It's like saying something
clever in a conversation as if you'd thought of it on the spur of
the moment, when in fact you'd worked it out the day before.
Another much less subtle influence is brand.  If you go to see the
Mona Lisa, you'll probably be disappointed, because it's hidden
behind a thick glass wall and surrounded by a frenzied crowd taking
pictures of themselves in front of it.  At best you can see it the
way you see a friend across the room at a crowded party.  The Louvre
might as well replace it with copy; no one would be able to tell.
And yet the Mona Lisa is a small, dark painting.  If you found
people who'd never seen an image of it and sent them to a museum
in which it was hanging among other paintings with a tag labelling
it as a portrait by an unknown fifteenth century artist, most would
walk by without giving it a second look.
For the average person, brand dominates all other factors in the
judgement of art.  Seeing a painting they recognize from reproductions
is so overwhelming that their response to it as a painting is drowned
out.
And then of course there are the tricks people play on themselves.
Most adults looking at art worry that if they don't like what they're
supposed to, they'll be thought uncultured.  This doesn't just
affect what they claim to like; they actually make themselves like
things they're supposed to.
That's why you can't just take a vote.  Though appeal to people is
a meaningful test, in practice you can't measure it, just as you
can't find north using a compass with a magnet sitting next to it.
There are sources of error so powerful that if you take a vote, all
you're measuring is the error.
We can, however, approach our goal from another direction, by using
ourselves as guinea pigs.  You're human.  If you want to know what
the basic human reaction to a piece of art would be, you can at
least approach that by getting rid of the sources of error in your
own judgements.
For example, while anyone's reaction to a famous painting will be
warped at first by its fame, there are ways to decrease its effects.
One is to come back to the painting over and over.  After a few
days the fame wears off, and you can start to see it as a painting.
Another is to stand close.  A painting familiar from reproductions
looks more familiar from ten feet away; close in you see details
that get lost in reproductions, and which you're therefore seeing
for the first time.
There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of seeing a
work of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, and
tricks played by the artist.  Tricks are straightforward to correct
for. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from working.
For example, when I was ten I used to be very impressed by airbrushed
lettering that looked like shiny metal.  But once you study how
it's done, you see that it's a pretty cheesy trick—one of the
sort that relies on pushing a few visual buttons really hard to
temporarily overwhelm the viewer.  It's like trying to convince
someone by shouting at them.
The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out
and catalog them.  When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming
from some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on.  When
someone is obviously pandering to an audience that's easily fooled,
whether it's someone making shiny stuff to impress ten year olds,
or someone making conspicuously avant-garde stuff to impress would-be
intellectuals, learn how they do it.  Once you've seen enough
examples of specific types of tricks, you start to become a connoisseur
of trickery in general, just as professional magicians are.
What counts as a trick?  Roughly, it's something done with contempt
for the audience.  For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the
1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired.
Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are
telling the designers, "Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem
manly, not to drive off-road. So don't worry about the suspension;
just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can."
[
6
]
I think with some effort you can make yourself nearly immune to
tricks.  It's harder to escape the influence of your own circumstances,
but you can at least move in that direction.  The way to do it is
to travel widely, in both time and space.  If you go and see all
the different kinds of things people like in other cultures, and
learn about all the different things people have liked in the past,
you'll probably find it changes what you like.  I doubt you could
ever make yourself into a completely universal person, if only
because you can only travel in one direction in time.  But if you
find a work of art that would appeal equally to your friends, to
people in Nepal, and to the ancient Greeks, you're probably onto
something.
My main point here is not how to have good taste, but that there
can even be such a thing.  And I think I've shown that.  There is
such a thing as good art. It's art that interests its human audience,
and since humans have a lot in common, what interests them is not
random.  Since there's such a thing as good art, there's
also such a thing as good taste, which is the ability to recognize
it.
If we were talking about the taste of apples, I'd agree that taste
is just personal preference.  Some people like certain kinds of
apples and others like other kinds, but how can you say that one
is right and the other wrong?
[
7
]
The thing is, art isn't apples.  Art is man-made. It comes with a
lot of cultural baggage, and in addition the people who make it
often try to trick us.  Most people's judgement of art is dominated
by these extraneous factors; they're like someone trying to judge
the taste of apples in a dish made of equal parts apples and jalapeno
peppers.  All they're tasting is the peppers.  So it turns out you
can pick out some people and say that they have better taste than
others: they're the ones who actually taste art like apples.
Or to put it more prosaically, they're the people who (a) are hard
to trick, and (b) don't just like whatever they grew up with.  If
you could find people who'd eliminated all such influences on their
judgement, you'd probably still see variation in what they liked.
But because humans have so much in common, you'd also find they
agreed on a lot.  They'd nearly all prefer the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel to a blank canvas.
Making It
I wrote this essay because I was tired of hearing "taste is subjective"
and wanted to kill it once and for all. Anyone who makes things
knows intuitively that's not true.  When you're trying to make art,
the temptation to be lazy is as great as in any other kind of work.
Of course it matters to do a good job.  And yet you can see how
great a hold "taste is subjective" has even in the art world by how
nervous it makes people to talk about art being good or bad.  Those
whose jobs require them to judge art, like curators, mostly resort
to euphemisms like "significant" or "important" or (getting dangerously
close) "realized."
[
8
]
I don't have any illusions that being able to talk about art being
good or bad will cause the people who talk about it to have anything
more useful to say.  Indeed, one of the reasons "taste is subjective"
found such a receptive audience is that, historically, the things
people have said about good taste have generally been such nonsense.
It's not for the people who talk about art that I want to free the
idea of good art, but for those who
make
it.  Right now, ambitious
kids going to art school run smack into a brick wall.  They arrive
hoping one day to be as good as the famous artists they've seen in
books, and the first thing they learn is that the concept of good
has been retired.  Instead everyone is just supposed to explore
their own personal vision.
[
9
]
When I was in art school, we were looking one day at a slide of
some great fifteenth century painting, and one of the students asked
"Why don't artists paint like that now?" The room suddenly got
quiet.  Though rarely asked out loud, this question lurks uncomfortably
in the back of every art student's mind.  It was as if someone had
brought up the topic of lung cancer in a meeting within Philip
Morris.
"Well," the professor replied, "we're interested in different
questions now."  He was a pretty nice guy, but at the time I couldn't
help wishing I could send him back to fifteenth century Florence
to explain in person to Leonardo & Co. how we had moved beyond their
early, limited concept of art.  Just imagine that conversation.
In fact, one of the reasons artists in fifteenth century Florence made
such great things was that they believed you could make great things.
[
10
]
They were intensely competitive and were always trying to outdo
one another, like mathematicians or physicists today—maybe like
anyone who has ever done anything really well.
The idea that you could make great things was not just a useful
illusion.  They were actually right.  So the most important consequence
of realizing there can be good art is that it frees artists to try
to make it.  To the ambitious kids arriving at art school this year
hoping one day to make great things, I say: don't believe it when
they tell you this is a naive and outdated ambition.  There is such
a thing as good art, and if you try to make it, there are people
who will notice.
Notes
[
1
]
This is not to say, of course, that good paintings must
have faces in them, just that everyone's visual piano has that key
on it.  There are situations in which you want to avoid faces,
precisely because they attract so much attention.  But you can see
how universally faces work by their prevalence in
advertising.
[
2
]
The other reason it's easy to believe is that it makes people
feel good.  To a kid, this idea is crack.  In every other respect
they're constantly being told that they have a lot to learn.  But
in this they're perfect.  Their opinion carries the same weight as
any adult's.  You should probably question anything you believed
as a kid that you'd want to believe this much.
[
3
]
It's conceivable that the elegance of proofs is quantifiable,
in the sense that there may be some formal measure that turns out
to coincide with mathematicians' judgements.  Perhaps it would be
worth trying to make a formal language for proofs in which those
considered more elegant consistently came out shorter (perhaps after
being macroexpanded or compiled).
[
4
]
Maybe it would be possible to make art that would appeal to
space aliens, but I'm not going to get into that because (a) it's
too hard to answer, and (b) I'm satisfied if I can establish that
good art is a meaningful idea for human audiences.
[
5
]
If early abstract paintings seem more interesting than later
ones, it may be because the first abstract painters were trained
to paint from life, and their hands thus tended to make the kind
of gestures you use in representing physical things.  In effect
they were saying "scaramara" instead of "uebfgbsb."
[
6
]
It's a bit more complicated, because sometimes artists
unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that does.
[
7
]
I phrased this in terms of the taste of apples because if
people can see the apples, they can be fooled.  When I was a kid
most apples were a variety called Red Delicious that had been bred
to look appealing in stores, but which didn't taste very good.
[
8
]
To be fair, curators are in a difficult position.  If they're
dealing with recent art, they have to include things in shows that
they think are bad.  That's because the test for what gets included
in shows is basically the market price, and for recent art that is
largely determined by successful businessmen and their wives.  So
it's not always intellectual dishonesty that makes curators and
dealers use neutral-sounding language.
[
9
]
What happens in practice is that everyone gets really good at
talking
about art.  As the art itself gets more random, the effort
that would have gone into the work goes instead into the intellectual
sounding theory behind it.  "My work represents an exploration of
gender and sexuality in an urban context," etc.  Different people
win at that game.
[
10
]
There were several other reasons, including that Florence was
then the richest and most sophisticated city in the world, and that
they lived in a time before photography had (a) killed portraiture
as a source of income and (b) made brand the dominant factor in the
sale of art.
Incidentally, I'm not saying that good art = fifteenth century
European art.  I'm not saying we should make what they made, but
that we should work like they worked.  There are fields now in which
many people work with the same energy and honesty that fifteenth
century artists did, but art is not one of them.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris
for reading drafts of this, and to Paul Watson for permission to
use the image at the top.
Japanese Translation
Simplified Chinese Translation


(Sorry, I know these ideas are vague. This is what they look like before I spend a month writing an essay about them. But I do think there is something here.)

Obviously there were always types of writing that were like code: recipes, checklists, procedures that had to be followed. What LLMs prove is that the codeness extended well beyond these.

LLMs prove that writing is not an epiphenomenon — that what we write matters. They're trained mostly on writing, and yet people use their output to affect the real world. So all that writing was source code after all.

@jeremys @mattyglesias Maybe, but the mayor got weaker still after Ed Lee died.

@mattyglesias They had to. The previous mayor was so weak that she allowed the Board of Supervisors to usurp many of her powers. Indeed it was mainly the supervisors who were the proximate cause of SF's decay. Especially Peskin and Preston (both now gone, thank God.)

@thefernandocz No it is not.

@BThinkful @sfmcguire79 What action is Logan Rozos being punished for?

https://t.co/Hiw4M2nJRp

@robertwarren @GAZAWOOD1 @HamasAtrocities You will always find some people who've gone without food for 10 days?

Do you genuinely believe that, Rob?

@robertwarren Why do you assume this is made up, Rob? Does it seem implausible to you that some people in Gaza would have had no food for 10 days, when no food has been allowed in for 75 days?

@sfmcguire79 Laughing at the students in this case is like the trick bullies often play of raising their hand as if they're about to hit you, and then laughing when you wince. It's not really fair to laugh in that situation. Based on past behavior, it's a reasonable assumption you'll be hit.


Faster growth means you not only get to x dollars per year in earnings sooner, but the company is more valuable when it reaches that point than it would be if it were growing slower.

This is why there are so many billionaires now. The value of a company depends on its earnings and its growth rate. But a faster growth rate means both those numbers increase.

Why does this happen? Startups don't just produce technology. They also consume technology. Better technology lets you do what you want faster. Startups want to grow. So better technology yields faster growth.

AI startups seem to grow faster than previous startups. But this is just the latest stage in a consistent trend over the last 50 years. Each decade's startups grow faster than the previous decade's.

@MarioNawfal He's wrong there. Sam is just super into cars. He always has been. However much money he had, he always spent too much of it on cars.

@henhaohank No, it was lack of dental care. Lots of people in both the US and UK eat the same food today, and their teeth don't all fall out.

You consistently post emphatic but mistaken replies.

In 1950, 2 out of 3 British people wore false teeth by age 28. https://t.co/vfoAhoyoPh

@himbo_sl1ce Incidentally, from what I've heard the NYC-London route was profitable (because it carried business travelers). But the NYC-Paris route wasn't (because it carried tourists). So eventually Air France bailed, and BA alone couldn't afford to keep spare parts flowing.

@Meow_LK Yes, but it turns out there are a bunch of engineering wins if you do both.

@TahaRDar They've hired some of the top experts in the field (people love working on an actual new product) and they seem to be doing well so far.


Web 2.0
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
November 2005
Does "Web 2.0" mean anything?  Till recently I thought it didn't,
but the truth turns out to be more complicated.  Originally, yes,
it was meaningless.  Now it seems to have acquired a meaning.  And
yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it
means what I think it does, we don't need it.
I first heard the phrase "Web 2.0" in the name of the Web 2.0
conference in 2004.  At the time it was supposed to mean using "the
web as a platform," which I took to refer to web-based applications.
[
1
]
So I was surprised at a conference this summer when Tim O'Reilly
led a session intended to figure out a definition of "Web 2.0."
Didn't it already mean using the web as a platform?  And if it
didn't already mean something, why did we need the phrase at all?
Origins
Tim says the phrase "Web 2.0" first
arose
in "a brainstorming session between
O'Reilly and Medialive International." What is Medialive International?
"Producers of technology tradeshows and conferences," according to
their site.  So presumably that's what this brainstorming session
was about.  O'Reilly wanted to organize a conference about the web,
and they were wondering what to call it.
I don't think there was any deliberate plan to suggest there was a
new
version
of the web.  They just wanted to make the point
that the web mattered again.  It was a kind of semantic deficit
spending: they knew new things were coming, and the "2.0" referred
to whatever those might turn out to be.
And they were right.  New things were coming.  But the new version
number led to some awkwardness in the short term.  In the process
of developing the pitch for the first conference, someone must have
decided they'd better take a stab at explaining what that "2.0"
referred to.  Whatever it meant, "the web as a platform" was at
least not too constricting.
The story about "Web 2.0" meaning the web as a platform didn't live
much past the first conference.  By the second conference, what
"Web 2.0" seemed to mean was something about democracy.  At least,
it did when people wrote about it online.  The conference itself
didn't seem very grassroots.  It cost $2800, so the only people who
could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies.
And yet, oddly enough, Ryan Singel's
article
about the conference in
Wired News
spoke of "throngs of
geeks."  When a friend of mine asked Ryan about this, it was news
to him.  He said he'd originally written something like "throngs
of VCs and biz dev guys" but had later shortened it just to "throngs,"
and that this must have in turn been expanded by the editors into
"throngs of geeks."  After all, a Web 2.0 conference would presumably
be full of geeks, right?
Well, no.  There were about 7.  Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a
suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first.  I saw
him walk by and said to one of the O'Reilly people "that guy looks
just like Tim."
"Oh, that's Tim.  He bought a suit."
I ran after him, and sure enough, it was.  He explained that he'd
just bought it in Thailand.
The 2005 Web 2.0 conference reminded me of Internet trade shows
during the Bubble, full of prowling VCs looking for the next hot
startup.  There was that same odd atmosphere created by a large
number of people determined not to miss out.  Miss out on what?
They didn't know.  Whatever was going to happen—whatever Web 2.0
turned out to be.
I wouldn't quite call it "Bubble 2.0" just because VCs are eager
to invest again.  The Internet is a genuinely big deal.  The bust
was as much an
overreaction
as
the boom.  It's to be expected that once we started to pull out of
the bust, there would be a lot of growth in this area, just as there
was in the industries that spiked the sharpest before the Depression.
The reason this won't turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO
market is gone.
Venture investors
are driven by exit strategies.  The reason they were funding all
those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped
to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing
all the way to the bank.  Now that route is closed.  Now the default
exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to
irrational exuberance than IPO investors.  The closest you'll get
to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for
Myspace.  That's only off by a factor of 10 or so.
1. Ajax
Does "Web 2.0" mean anything more than the name of a conference
yet?  I don't like to admit it, but it's starting to.  When people
say "Web 2.0" now, I have some idea what they mean.  And the fact
that I both despise the phrase and understand it is the surest proof
that it has started to mean something.
One ingredient of its meaning is certainly Ajax, which I can still
only just bear to use without scare quotes.  Basically, what "Ajax"
means is "Javascript now works."  And that in turn means that
web-based applications can now be made to work much more like desktop
ones.
As you read this, a whole new
generation
of software is being written to take advantage of Ajax.  There
hasn't been such a wave of new applications since microcomputers
first appeared.  Even Microsoft sees it, but it's too late for them
to do anything more than
leak
"internal"
documents designed to give the impression they're on top of this
new trend.
In fact the new generation of software is being written way too
fast for Microsoft even to channel it, let alone write their own
in house.  Their only hope now is to buy all the best Ajax startups
before Google does.  And even that's going to be hard, because
Google has as big a head start in buying microstartups as it did
in search a few years ago.  After all, Google Maps, the canonical
Ajax application, was the result of a startup they
bought
.
So ironically the original description of the Web 2.0 conference
turned out to be partially right: web-based applications are a big
component of Web 2.0.  But I'm convinced they got this right by
accident.  The Ajax boom didn't start till early 2005, when Google
Maps appeared and the term "Ajax" was
coined
.
2. Democracy
The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy.  We now have several
examples to prove that
amateurs
can
surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to
channel their efforts.
Wikipedia
may be the most famous.  Experts have given Wikipedia middling
reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough.  And
it's free, which means people actually read it.  On the web, articles
you have to pay for might as well not exist.  Even if you were
willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them.
They're not part of the conversation.
Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as
news.  I never look at any news site now except
Reddit
.
[
2
]
I know if something major
happens, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it
will show up there.  Why bother checking the front page of any
specific paper or magazine?  Reddit's like an RSS feed for the whole
web, with a filter for quality.  Similar sites include
Digg
, a technology news site that's
rapidly approaching Slashdot in popularity, and
del.icio.us
, the collaborative
bookmarking network that set off the "tagging" movement.  And whereas
Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough and free, these
sites suggest that voters do a significantly better job than human
editors.
The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection
of ideas, but their production.
I've noticed for a while that the stuff I read on individual people's
sites is as good as or better than the stuff I read in newspapers
and magazines.  And now I have independent evidence: the top links
on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather
than to magazine articles or news stories.
My experience of writing
for magazines suggests an explanation.  Editors.  They control the
topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever
you produce.  The result is to damp extremes.  Editing yields 95th
percentile writing—95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are
dragged down.  5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."
On the web, people can publish whatever they want.  Nearly all of
it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications.
But the pool of writers is very, very large.  If it's large enough,
the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass
the best in print.
[
3
]
And now that the web has evolved mechanisms
for selecting good stuff, the web wins net.  Selection beats damping,
for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.
Even the startups are different this time around.  They are to the
startups of the Bubble what bloggers are to the print media.  During
the Bubble, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was
blowing through several million dollars of VC money to "get big
fast" in the most literal sense.  Now it means a smaller,
younger
, more technical group that just
decided to make something great.  They'll decide later if they want
to raise VC-scale funding, and if they take it, they'll take it on
their terms
.
3. Don't Maltreat Users
I think everyone would agree that democracy and Ajax are elements
of "Web 2.0."  I also see a third: not to maltreat users.  During
the Bubble a lot of popular sites were quite high-handed with users.
And not just in obvious ways, like making them register, or subjecting
them to annoying ads.  The very design of the average site in the
late 90s was an abuse.  Many of the most popular sites were loaded
with obtrusive branding that made them slow to load and sent the
user the message: this is our site, not yours.  (There's a physical
analog in the Intel and Microsoft
stickers
that come on some
laptops.)
I think the root of the problem was that sites felt they were giving
something away for free, and till recently a company giving anything
away for free could be pretty high-handed about it.  Sometimes it
reached the point of economic sadism: site owners assumed that the
more pain they caused the user, the more benefit it must be to them.
The most dramatic remnant of this model may be at salon.com, where
you can read the beginning of a story, but to get the rest you have
sit through a
movie
.
At Y Combinator we advise all the startups we fund never to lord
it over users.  Never make users register, unless you need to in
order to store something for them.  If you do make users register,
never make them wait for a confirmation link in an email; in fact,
don't even ask for their email address unless you need it for some
reason.  Don't ask them any unnecessary questions.  Never send them
email unless they explicitly ask for it.  Never frame pages you
link to, or open them in new windows.  If you have a free version
and a pay version, don't make the free version too restricted.  And
if you find yourself asking "should we allow users to do x?" just
answer "yes" whenever you're unsure.  Err on the side of generosity.
In
How to Start a Startup
I advised startups
never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let any other
company offer a cheaper, easier solution.  Another way to fly low
is to give users more power.  Let users do what they want.  If you
don't and a competitor does, you're in trouble.
iTunes is Web 2.0ish in this sense.  Finally you can buy individual
songs instead of having to buy whole albums.  The recording industry
hated the idea and resisted it as long as possible.  But it was
obvious what users wanted, so Apple flew under the labels.
[
4
]
Though really it might be better to describe iTunes as Web 1.5.
Web 2.0 applied to music would probably mean individual bands giving
away DRMless songs for free.
The ultimate way to be nice to users is to give them something for
free that competitors charge for.  During the 90s a lot of people
probably thought we'd have some working system for micropayments
by now.  In fact things have gone in the other direction.  The most
successful sites are the ones that figure out new ways to give stuff
away for free.  Craigslist has largely destroyed the classified ad
sites of the 90s, and OkCupid looks likely to do the same to the
previous generation of dating sites.
Serving web pages is very, very cheap.  If you can make even a
fraction of a cent per page view, you can make a profit.  And
technology for targeting ads continues to improve.  I wouldn't be
surprised if ten years from now eBay had been supplanted by an
ad-supported freeBay (or, more likely, gBay).
Odd as it might sound, we tell startups that they should try to
make as little money as possible.  If you can figure out a way to
turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry,
so much the better, if all fifty million go to you.  Though indeed,
making things cheaper often turns out to generate more money in the
end, just as automating things often turns out to generate more
jobs.
The ultimate target is Microsoft.  What a bang that balloon is going
to make when someone pops it by offering a free web-based alternative
to MS Office.
[
5
]
Who will?  Google?  They seem to be taking their
time.  I suspect the pin will be wielded by a couple of 20 year old
hackers who are too naive to be intimidated by the idea.  (How hard
can it be?)
The Common Thread
Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users.  What do they all have in
common?  I didn't realize they had anything in common till recently,
which is one of the reasons I disliked the term "Web 2.0" so much.
It seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened
to be new—that it didn't predict anything.
But there is a common thread.  Web 2.0 means using the web the way
it's meant to be used.  The "trends" we're seeing now are simply
the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models
that got imposed on it during the Bubble.
I realized this when I read an
interview with
Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite.
[
6
]
Excite really never got the business model right at all.  We fell
  into the classic problem of how when a new medium comes out it
  adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old
  medium—which fails, and then the more appropriate models get
  figured out.
It may have seemed as if not much was happening during the years
after the Bubble burst.  But in retrospect, something was happening:
the web was finding its natural angle of repose.  The democracy
component, for example—that's not an innovation, in the sense of
something someone made happen.  That's what the web naturally tends
to produce.
Ditto for the idea of delivering desktop-like applications over the
web.  That idea is almost as old as the web.  But the first time
around it was co-opted by Sun, and we got Java applets.  Java has
since been remade into a generic replacement for C++, but in 1996
the story about Java was that it represented a new model of software.
Instead of desktop applications, you'd run Java "applets" delivered
from a server.
This plan collapsed under its own weight. Microsoft helped kill it,
but it would have died anyway.  There was no uptake among hackers.
When you find
PR firms
promoting
something as the next development platform, you can be sure it's
not.  If it were, you wouldn't need PR firms to tell you, because
hackers would already be writing stuff on top of it, the way sites
like
Busmonster
used Google Maps as a
platform before Google even meant it to be one.
The proof that Ajax is the next hot platform is that thousands of
hackers have spontaneously started building things on top
of it.  Mikey likes it.
There's another thing all three components of Web 2.0 have in common.
Here's a clue.  Suppose you approached investors with the following
idea for a Web 2.0 startup:
Sites like del.icio.us and flickr allow users to "tag" content
  with descriptive tokens.  But there is also huge source of
implicit
tags that they ignore: the text within web links.
  Moreover, these links represent a social network connecting the
  individuals and organizations who created the pages, and by using
  graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of the
  reputation of each member.  We plan to mine the web for these
  implicit tags, and use them together with the reputation hierarchy
  they embody to enhance web searches.
How long do you think it would take them on average to realize that
it was a description of Google?
Google was a pioneer in all three components of Web 2.0: their core
business sounds crushingly hip when described in Web 2.0 terms,
"Don't maltreat users" is a subset of "Don't be evil," and of course
Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps.
Web 2.0 means using the web as it was meant to be used, and Google
does.  That's their secret.
They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting
becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or
trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and
the record labels.
[
7
]
Google doesn't try to force things to happen their way.  They try
to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing
there when it does.  That's the way to approach technology—and
as business includes an ever larger technological component, the
right way to do business.
The fact that Google is a "Web 2.0" company shows that, while
meaningful, the term is also rather bogus.  It's like the word
"allopathic."  It just means doing things right, and it's a bad
sign when you have a special word for that.
Notes
[
1
]
From the
conference
site
, June 2004: "While the first wave of the Web was closely
tied to the browser, the second wave extends applications across
the web and enables a new generation of services and business
opportunities."  To the extent this means anything, it seems to be
about
web-based applications
.
[
2
]
Disclosure: Reddit was funded by
Y Combinator
.  But although
I started using it out of loyalty to the home team, I've become a
genuine addict.  While we're at it, I'm also an investor in
!MSFT, having sold all my shares earlier this year.
[
3
]
I'm not against editing. I spend more time editing than
writing, and I have a group of picky friends who proofread almost
everything I write.  What I dislike is editing done after the fact
by someone else.
[
4
]
Obvious is an understatement.  Users had been climbing in through
the window for years before Apple finally moved the door.
[
5
]
Hint: the way to create a web-based alternative to Office may
not be to write every component yourself, but to establish a protocol
for web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across
multiple servers.  Or it may be to write it all yourself.
[
6
]
In Jessica Livingston's
Founders at
Work
.
[
7
]
Microsoft didn't sue their customers directly, but they seem
to have done all they could to help SCO sue them.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Peter
Norvig, Aaron Swartz, and Jeff Weiner for reading drafts of this, and to the
guys at O'Reilly and Adaptive Path for answering my questions.
Interview About Web 2.0
Spanish Translation
German Translation
Russian Translation
Japanese Translation
If you liked this, you may also like
Hackers & Painters
.


@gfodor @cyantist @travisk It started with him.

@yuris Apparently it's disproportionately common in all ChatGPT-generated text.

https://t.co/XpdIlVpxvz

@asemota I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make, but you do realize, right, that I'm a British citizen living in England, and that I'm saying here that British writing is better than American?

@sid_thinketh It randomly hit a sore spot shared by a large group of people.

@gechife This sinister conspiracy has been operating for a long time. It goes back to the diabolical Mr. Strunk and Mr. White, and some say even before.

@Spotlight_Abby There's a whole industry of companies writing software to detect AI-generated text. If you're serious about your concerns, it's them you should be talking to. But that will be more work than trolling someone who happened to mention one AI tell.

https://t.co/yA2baY9gSP

@ID_AA_Carmack @PalmerLuckey Thank you for doing this. It will encourage other people to speak up in the future.

@whyvert This graph would be more useful with more deciles and a log scale.

@dened21 @pashadelics No, the first was Watsi.

@Spotlight_Abby That might be an important topic, but it's unrelated to this conversation, which is about whether people's own writing might be mistaken for AI-generated writing if they used certain words that AIs use disproportionately often.


@GoldwagNathan @sarcasticSyzygy Can you name one election where the consensus about the relative charisma of the two candidates is different from the one I gave?

@GoldwagNathan If it were a tautology it could never fail, and this theory did fail in 2020, when Biden beat Trump despite Trump being more charismatic.

@gadbadd I decided to ask some more people first.

@vishvelraj @misha_saul @McCormickProf Unless I'm talking to him myself, what better source of information could I have than a trusted friend talking to him?

@misha_saul @McCormickProf Yes, actually. I know someone who talked to him in person in late February and said he seemed fine.

Yet another person exonerated after being wrongly convicted of murder. She went into prison at age 20, and left it at 64.

@Noahpinion Do you know why @ATabarrok?

@Itsjoeco You might find that if you insisted on being civil, you could get by in the short term and actually be net ahead in the long term. But don't do it yet! Boxcar needs you.

@brianbobc @jam3scampbell Where on earth did I say it doesn't matter how candidates campaign? Of course it does. What I'm claiming is what I wrote: the more charismatic candidate wins in presidential elections.

@brianbobc @jam3scampbell If you'd read the essay, you'd have seen that it addresses this point.

https://t.co/xRlmbGXuVT


@alex_valaitis @iamgingertrash Surely you can see that even if they changed their idea during the batch (as a large percentage of startups do) that doesn't imply that the YC partners told them to work on your idea. When startups change their idea, it's almost always to one they think of.

@alex_valaitis @iamgingertrash You realize, right, that with so many applications it's very common to get multiple applications for similar ideas?

As for going "radio silent," what do you expect the partners to do after you make a false accusation of this type? What can they say besides "sorry, you're wrong"?

I've started to sing Christmas Carols in an English accent. It's less work not to have to pronounce all those Rs, and no one can hear me with everyone else singing.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that prim, prig, and prude all begin with pr. There's something censorious about pr the same way there's something slippery about sl.

@abarrallen Why would companies need to hold bitcoin? They're not expected to hold gold.

@uaustinorg Are *assigned* to read. If students at UATX actually do all the assigned reading, there is something much more unique about you than you're claiming here.

Why would you have less moral obligation to help people you'll never see? If that were the rule, you could make yourself morally perfect by staying in your gated community. You'd never see anyone who needed help, and thus never fall short of delivering it.

@zacksiri Follow @bscholl and you'll get regular updates.

@packyM The hardest data to compress is a series of random numbers.

The future is happening beautifully. https://t.co/qjXGyqwycV


@__tosh @ricotrebeljahr The "a" was missing from "not much of a rallying cry."

@aClassicLiberal @whyvert Three of them were instances of the general wave of wokeness. And a worldwide epidemic happening at the same time is just random. So really there was just one craze.

Wow, @ricotrebeljahr found a typo in "Relentlessly Resourceful" (https://t.co/NCuiRQP1k1), which was written in 2009. I was about to say "an obvious typo" but it can't have been that obvious if no one else saw it in 15 years.

The high bit of lighting is to have a variety of different light sources, no one of which is too bright. If you merely do this you'll have a room in the 95th percentile.

@kyleichan They do protest too much. "Self-developed," "proprietary," and "self-researching" all in one sentence. https://t.co/bFxCJr8AmU

@Rainmaker1973 It's more compact than individual Arabic digits, but the size of number you can express with place-value numerals grows exponentially with the number of digits.

@matterasmachine I don't like this use of LLMs, but they can be used for a lot more than this.

One reason I dislike being sent stuff written by ChatGPT is that it feels like being sent object code instead of source code. The source code was the prompts.

@Noahpinion He's mistaken about the AI part, at least currently.

@amaldorai @asra_yousuf Oops, yes, I forgot to mention that you should only take seriously the essays that have been reprinted in physical books like Hackers and Painters. The rest don't become useful till they are too.


@s_r_constantin It wasn't secretly about anything specific. There are always things you can't say.

@acsanduba That was deliberate. It needs does in italics to work.

@TrodRoughshod @waitbutwhy I just got a copy in fact.

@man_fredX If they were trying to convert me to satanism I wouldn't like it.

@veronica_humble Ugh, yes, that's the limit case; now every actress will write a children's book.

@Austen This case might be different. LLMs do so much more than a calculator.

@whyvert Searle! Is that the dog from Molesworth's school?

@mayank1Dhiman They'll definitely thrive. Have you ever looked at a romance novel? These things already seem like they're generated by AI.

@arnitly I have anticipated you slightly.
https://t.co/hXNzDGU76f

Another prediction: These prompters will be more physically attractive than actual authors (a low bar), because with the playing field levelled by AI, the author's charisma will matter more in appealing to readers. I.e. Milli Vanilli.


@ratlpolicy Of course, everyone knows that. I'm saying she would have been one of the people trying to keep them out.

@EliLake Yes, I know. I'm saying Loomer would have been one of the people trying to keep them out.

@KurtSchlichter Trump despises the powerless. In 1940 those were Jewish refugees. Now they're Palestinian refugees.

@a_know_nothing @mattyglesias In that case you should be ashamed of yourself, because you represent the opposite of American values.

@hoogilyboogily @hirbowedge @growing_daniel Frith and Landseer were the big stars IIRC.

@mkesome @growing_daniel How can a person that one believes to be good be phony?

@yuris I've experienced exactly the same weird disconnect. Founders are doing better things than at any time in the last several decades, while politicians do worse things than at any time in the last several decades. It's hard to predict which will prevail.

@eshear Yes, but (a) these objects correspond directly to things that can be expressed in a formal language in a way that few other physical things do, and (b) this correspondence is retained as programs move from one physical embodiment to another.

@AaronPogue @growing_daniel Imagine if you did this with physics. Instead of funding Newton you'd fund some agreeable mediocrity, and get the result you deserved. I think art should be treated with the same respect as physics.

@hirbowedge @growing_daniel That's not true. Wealth may be a necessary condition for  producing great art, but it's not a sufficient one. Very few people like the art that mid-Victorian British industrialists liked, even though they were the richest people of their time.


@MyanMajid I'm skipping this one.

I've been rereading the novels of Raymond Chandler, and he was just stupendously great.

If you want to see for yourself, The Lady in the Lake is a good one to start with.

@eastdakota @drewhouston @ycombinator @jesslivingston It didn't. We started YC in 2005 and HN in 2007.

@mattyglesias To be fair, a lot of their supporters are...

@harjtaggar 12 years ago: https://t.co/oq1rap8tfI

@DudespostingWs The circus.

@DKokotajlo67142 @robertskmiles No, the trend is the same for the whole world.

@robertskmiles If that were true it would be even more interesting than what the graph seems to show. It would mean that countries where people are expected to say they're happy are richer.

@AJamesMcCarthy Is that true color? It's really that red?

@migowski @tlbtlbtlb @garrytan Yes, that is what his point is. But it's not relevant to this conversation.


@AlecStapp Corollary: People who don't want to take it are proportionally stupid.

I remember feeling this for the first time in 1983...

@sarmadgulzar My advice.

Every time we come back to SV, my 16 yo son gets a massive dose of cognitive dissonance when he notices that apparently smart and reasonable people seem eager to obtain something he's convinced is utterly worthless.

@patio11 @PrinceVogel I remember reading about how surprised he was the first time he ate a Camembert-like cheese, and how he asked if he was supposed to eat the rind.

After we hired Harj Taggar as YC's first employee, I asked him what surprised him most about how YC worked behind the scenes. One of the things he mentioned was how much we laughed. It was true. I think there ought to be a lot of laughing at a well-run incubator.

A startup in the current YC batch was trying to choose between two strategies, and I advised them to choose the funnier one. This is not as frivolous as it sounds. The best startup ideas often seem a bit preposterous.

@Austen Honestly I would settle for merely avoiding disaster.

Alexandr Wang is so interesting to talk to. The first time I met him we talked for an hour and we had to arrange a second meeting because we weren't finished.

12 yo asked when poverty first became a problem. I told him it was the default — that most animal species are hungry.


@dflieb Caring about (which includes understanding) users is also the key to getting funded by YC: https://t.co/zXWErQqlwV

@amasad That bit was why I didn't retweet posts I saw with this quote. Seemed like [confirmation needed].

@codepublish Automation must have cost some jobs in weaving at some point. But it didn't net cost jobs. (A point I also made to him.)

12 yo: What were the Luddites?

Me: They were weavers who destroyed weaving machines because they thought they'd lose their jobs.

12 yo: So they were a labor union?

(I explained that they weren't.)

These guys were among the earliest of all the startups we've funded to understand what AI was going to make possible, and they have executed perfectly on that early insight.

@Chris_arnade I wish your account wasn't private. You often post stuff I'd like to retweet.

@ericrasputin @daltonc It sucks. I wish I could be more specific.

@fitainable @daltonc I mean intellectually difficult.

I was curious if GLAAD still has her on their Orwellianly-named "accountability" list (i.e. blacklist). Yep. There's only one entry in the last two years though. The one before that is for using the wrong word to wish someone Merry Christmas.

https://t.co/4rG52XyTAd

I love how J. K. Rowling now seems to have her haters on the run.