Before the Startup
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2014
(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's
startup class
at
Stanford.  It's intended for college students, but much of it is
applicable to potential founders at other ages.)
One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give
advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell my own kids?"  My
kids are little, but I can imagine what I'd tell them about startups
if they were in college, and that's what I'm going to tell you.
Startups are very counterintuitive.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's
just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet.
But whatever the reason, starting a startup is a task where you
can't always trust your instincts.
It's like skiing in that way.  When you first try skiing and you
want to slow down, your instinct is to lean back.  But if you lean
back on skis you fly down the hill out of control.  So part of
learning to ski is learning to suppress that impulse.  Eventually
you get new habits, but at first it takes a conscious effort.  At
first there's a list of things you're trying to remember as you
start down the hill.
Startups are as unnatural as skiing, so there's a similar list for
startups. Here I'm going to give you the first part of it — the things
to remember if you want to prepare yourself to start a startup.
Counterintuitive
The first item on it is the fact I already mentioned: that startups
are so weird that if you trust your instincts, you'll make a lot
of mistakes.  If you know nothing more than this, you may at least
pause before making them.
When I was running Y Combinator I used to joke that our function
was to tell founders things they would ignore.  It's really true.
Batch after batch, the YC partners warn founders about mistakes
they're about to make, and the founders ignore them, and then come
back a year later and say "I wish we'd listened."
Why do the founders ignore the partners' advice?  Well, that's the
thing about counterintuitive ideas: they contradict your intuitions.
They seem wrong.  So of course your first impulse is to disregard
them.  And in fact my joking description is not merely the curse
of Y Combinator but part of its raison d'etre. If founders' instincts
already gave them the right answers, they wouldn't need us.  You
only need other people to give you advice that surprises you. That's
why there are a lot of ski instructors and not many running
instructors.
[
1
]
You can, however, trust your instincts about people.  And in fact
one of the most common mistakes young founders make is not to
do that enough.  They get involved with people who seem impressive,
but about whom they feel some misgivings personally.  Later when
things blow up they say "I knew there was something off about him,
but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive."
If you're thinking about getting involved with someone — as a
cofounder, an employee, an investor, or an acquirer — and you
have misgivings about them, trust your gut.  If someone seems
slippery, or bogus, or a jerk, don't ignore it.
This is one case where it pays to be self-indulgent. Work with
people you genuinely like, and you've known long enough to be sure.
Expertise
The second counterintuitive point is that it's not that important
to know a lot about startups.  The way to succeed in a startup is
not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users
and the problem you're solving for them.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't succeed because he was an expert on startups.
He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because he
understood his users really well.
If you don't know anything about, say, how to raise an angel round,
don't feel bad on that account.  That sort of thing you can learn
when you need to, and forget after you've done it.
In fact, I worry it's not merely unnecessary to learn in great
detail about the mechanics of startups, but possibly somewhat
dangerous.  If I met an undergrad who knew all about convertible
notes and employee agreements and (God forbid) class FF stock, I
wouldn't think "here is someone who is way ahead of their peers."
It would set off alarms.  Because another of the characteristic
mistakes of young founders is to go through the motions of starting
a startup.  They make up some plausible-sounding idea, raise money
at a good valuation, rent a cool office, hire a bunch of people.
From the outside that seems like what startups do.  But the next
step after rent a cool office and hire a bunch of people is: gradually
realize how completely fucked they are, because while imitating all
the outward forms of a startup they have neglected the one thing
that's actually essential: making something people want.
Game
We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it: playing
house.  Eventually I realized why it was happening.  The reason
young founders go through the motions of starting a startup is
because that's what they've been trained to do for their whole lives
up to that point.  Think about what you have to do to get into
college, for example.  Extracurricular activities, check.  Even in
college classes most of the work is as artificial as running laps.
I'm not attacking the educational system for being this way. There
will always be a certain amount of fakeness in the work you do when
you're being taught something, and if you measure their performance
it's inevitable that people will exploit the difference to the point
where much of what you're measuring is artifacts of the fakeness.
I confess I did it myself in college. I found that in a lot of
classes there might only be 20 or 30 ideas that were the right shape
to make good exam questions.  The way I studied for exams in these
classes was not (except incidentally) to master the material taught
in the class, but to make a list of potential exam questions and
work out the answers in advance. When I walked into the final, the
main thing I'd be feeling was curiosity about which of my questions
would turn up on the exam.  It was like a game.
It's not surprising that after being trained for their whole lives
to play such games, young founders' first impulse on starting a
startup is to try to figure out the tricks for winning at this new
game. Since fundraising appears to be the measure of success for
startups (another classic noob mistake), they always want to know what the
tricks are for convincing investors.  We tell them the best way to
convince investors
is to make a startup
that's actually doing well, meaning
growing fast
, and then simply
tell investors so.  Then they want to know what the tricks are for
growing fast.  And we have to tell them the best way to do that is
simply to make something people want.
So many of the conversations YC partners have with young founders
begin with the founder asking "How do we..." and the partner replying
"Just..."
Why do the founders always make things so complicated?  The reason,
I realized, is that they're looking for the trick.
So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about
startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops
working.  Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work
for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can
succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression
of productivity, and so on.
[
2
]
But that doesn't work with startups.
There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is
whether your product does what they want. Startups are as impersonal
as physics.  You have to make something people want, and you prosper
only to the extent you do.
The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors.
If you're super good at sounding like you know what you're talking
about, you can fool investors for at least one and perhaps even two
rounds of funding.  But it's not in your interest to.  The company
is ultimately doomed.  All you're doing is wasting your own time
riding it down.
So stop looking for the trick. There are tricks in startups, as
there are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude less
important than solving the real problem. A founder who knows nothing
about fundraising but has made something users love will have an
easier time raising money than one who knows every trick in the
book but has a flat usage graph. And more importantly, the founder
who has made something users love is the one who will go on to
succeed after raising the money.
Though in a sense it's bad news in that you're deprived of one of
your most powerful weapons, I think it's exciting that gaming the
system stops working when you start a startup.  It's exciting that
there even exist parts of the world where you win by doing good
work.  Imagine how depressing the world would be if it were all
like school and big companies, where you either have to spend a lot
of time on bullshit things or lose to people who do.
[
3
]
I would
have been delighted if I'd realized in college that there were parts
of the real world where gaming the system mattered less than others,
and a few where it hardly mattered at all.  But there are, and this
variation is one of the most important things to consider when
you're thinking about your future.  How do you win in each type of
work, and what would you like to win by doing?
[
4
]
All-Consuming
That brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point: startups are
all-consuming.  If you start a startup, it will take over your life
to a degree you cannot imagine.  And if your startup succeeds, it
will take over your life for a long time: for several years at the
very least, maybe for a decade, maybe for the rest of your working
life.  So there is a real opportunity cost here.
Larry Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there are aspects
of it that are unenviable.  Basically at 25 he started running as
fast as he could and it must seem to him that he hasn't stopped to
catch his breath since.  Every day new shit happens in the Google
empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he, as CEO, has to deal
with it.  If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole week's
backlog of shit accumulates.  And he has to bear this uncomplainingly,
partly because as the company's daddy he can never show fear or
weakness, and partly because billionaires get less than zero sympathy
if they talk about having difficult lives.  Which has the strange
side effect that the difficulty of being a successful startup founder
is concealed from almost everyone except those who've done it.
Y Combinator has now funded several companies that can be called
big successes, and in every single case the founders say the same
thing.  It never gets any easier.  The nature of the problems change.
You're worrying about construction delays at your London office
instead of the broken air conditioner in your studio apartment.
But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it
increases.
Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids in that
it's like a button you push that changes your life irrevocably.
And while it's truly wonderful having kids, there are a lot of
things that are easier to do before you have them than after.  Many
of which will make you a better parent when you do have kids. And
since you can delay pushing the button for a while, most people in
rich countries do.
Yet when it comes to startups, a lot of people seem to think they're
supposed to start them while they're still in college.  Are you
crazy?  And what are the universities thinking?  They go out of
their way to ensure their students are well supplied with contraceptives,
and yet they're setting up entrepreneurship programs and startup
incubators left and right.
To be fair, the universities have their hand forced here.  A lot
of incoming students are interested in startups.  Universities are,
at least de facto, expected to prepare them for their careers.  So
students who want to start startups hope universities can teach
them about startups.  And whether universities can do this or not,
there's some pressure to claim they can, lest they lose applicants
to other universities that do.
Can universities teach students about startups?  Yes and no.  They
can teach students about startups, but as I explained before, this
is not what you need to know.  What you need to learn about are the
needs of your own users, and you can't do that until you actually
start the company.
[
5
]
So starting a startup is intrinsically
something you can only really learn by doing it.  And it's impossible
to do that in college, for the reason I just explained: startups
take over your life.  You can't start a startup for real as a
student, because if you start a startup for real you're not a student
anymore. You may be nominally a student for a bit, but you won't even
be that for long.
[
6
]
Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take?  Be
a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and
not be a student?  I can answer that one for you. Do not start a
startup in college.  How to start a startup is just a subset of a
bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life.
And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot
of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it.
Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search.  Most
people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.
You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before
or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel
super cheaply with no sense of a deadline.  For unambitious people,
this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the
ambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration.
If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful,
you'll never get to do it.
[
7
]
Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign country.  He
can do other things most people can't, like charter jets to fly him
to foreign countries. But success has taken a lot of the serendipity
out of his life. Facebook is running him as much as he's running
Facebook. And while it can be very cool to be in the grip of a
project you consider your life's work, there are advantages to
serendipity too, especially early in life.  Among other things it
gives you more options to choose your life's work from.
There's not even a tradeoff here. You're not sacrificing anything
if you forgo starting a startup at 20, because you're more likely
to succeed if you wait.  In the unlikely case that you're 20 and
one of your side projects takes off like Facebook did, you'll face
a choice of running with it or not, and it may be reasonable to run
with it.  But the usual way startups take off is for the founders
to
make them
take off, and it's gratuitously
stupid to do that at 20.
Try
Should you do it at any age?  I realize I've made startups sound
pretty hard.  If I haven't, let me try again: starting a startup
is really hard.  What if it's too hard?  How can you tell if you're
up to this challenge?
The answer is the fifth counterintuitive point: you can't tell. Your
life so far may have given you some idea what your prospects might
be if you tried to become a mathematician, or a professional football
player.  But unless you've had a very strange life you haven't done
much that was
like
being a startup founder.
Starting a startup will change you a lot.  So what you're trying
to estimate is not just what you are, but what you could grow into,
and who can do that?
For the past 9 years it was my job to predict whether people would
have what it took to start successful startups.  It was easy to
tell how smart they were, and most people reading this will be over
that threshold.  The hard part was predicting how
tough and ambitious
they would become.  There
may be no one who has more experience at trying to predict that,
so I can tell you how much an expert can know about it, and the
answer is: not much.  I learned to keep a completely open mind about
which of the startups in each batch would turn out to be the stars.
The founders sometimes think they know. Some arrive feeling sure
they will ace Y Combinator just as they've aced every one of the (few,
artificial, easy) tests they've faced in life so far.  Others arrive
wondering how they got in, and hoping YC doesn't discover whatever
mistake caused it to accept them.  But there is little correlation
between founders' initial attitudes and how well their companies
do.
I've read that the same is true in the military — that the
swaggering recruits are no more likely to turn out to be really
tough than the quiet ones. And probably for the same reason: that
the tests involved are so different from the ones in their previous
lives.
If you're absolutely terrified of starting a startup, you probably
shouldn't do it.  But if you're merely unsure whether you're up to
it, the only way to find out is to try.  Just not now.
Ideas
So if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in
college?  There are only two things you need initially: an idea and
cofounders.  And the m.o. for getting both is the same.  Which leads
to our sixth and last counterintuitive point: that the way to get
startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas.
I've written a whole
essay
on this,
so I won't repeat it all here.  But the short version is that if
you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideas
you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and plausible-sounding,
meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before realizing they're
bad.
The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back.
Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas,
turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any
conscious effort.  In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even
realize at first that they're startup ideas.
This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and
Facebook all got started.  None of these companies were even meant
to be companies at first.  They were all just side projects.  The
best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great
ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject
them as ideas for companies.
Ok, so how do you turn your mind into the type that startup ideas
form in unconsciously?  (1) Learn a lot about things that matter,
then (2) work on problems that interest you (3) with people you
like and respect.  The third part, incidentally, is how you get
cofounders at the same time as the idea.
The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of "learn a lot about
things that matter," I wrote "become good at some technology." But
that prescription, though sufficient, is too narrow.  What was
special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was not that they were
experts in technology.  They were good at design, and perhaps even
more importantly, they were good at organizing groups and making
projects happen.  So you don't have to work on technology per se,
so long as you work on problems demanding enough to stretch you.
What kind of problems are those?  That is very hard to answer in
the general case.  History is full of examples of young people who
were working on important problems that
no
one else
at the time thought were important, and in particular
that their parents didn't think were important.  On the other hand,
history is even fuller of examples of parents who thought their
kids were wasting their time and who were right.  So how do you
know when you're working on real stuff?
[
8
]
I know how
I
know.  Real problems are interesting, and I am
self-indulgent in the sense that I always want to work on interesting
things, even if no one else cares about them (in fact, especially
if no one else cares about them), and find it very hard to make
myself work on boring things, even if they're supposed to be
important.
My life is full of case after case where I worked on something just
because it seemed interesting, and it turned out later to be useful
in some worldly way.
Y
Combinator itself
was something I only did because it seemed
interesting. So I seem to have some sort of internal compass that
helps me out.  But I don't know what other people have in their
heads. Maybe if I think more about this I can come up with heuristics
for recognizing genuinely interesting problems, but for the moment
the best I can offer is the hopelessly question-begging advice that
if you have a taste for genuinely interesting problems, indulging
it energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup.
And indeed, probably also the best way to live.
[
9
]
But although I can't explain in the general case what counts as an
interesting problem, I can tell you about a large subset of them.
If you think of technology as something that's spreading like a
sort of fractal stain, every moving point on the edge represents
an interesting problem.  So one guaranteed way to turn your mind
into the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to the
leading edge of some technology — to cause yourself, as Paul
Buchheit put it, to "live in the future." When you reach that point,
ideas that will seem to other people uncannily prescient will seem
obvious to you.  You may not realize they're startup ideas, but
you'll know they're something that ought to exist.
For example, back at Harvard in the mid 90s a fellow grad student
of my friends Robert and Trevor wrote his own voice over IP software.
He didn't mean it to be a startup, and he never tried to turn it
into one.  He just wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan without
paying for long distance calls, and since he was an expert on
networks it seemed obvious to him that the way to do it was turn
the sound into packets and ship it over the Internet. He never did
any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this
is exactly the way the best startups get started.
So strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want
to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational
version of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the classic
version of college as education for its own sake. If you want to
start a startup after college, what you should do in college is
learn powerful things.  And if you have genuine intellectual
curiosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just
follow your own inclinations.
[
10
]
The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain
expertise.  The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert
on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be
driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.
At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for
curiosity.  And you'll do it best if you introduce the ulterior
motive toward the end of the process.
So here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders,
boiled down to two words: just learn.
Notes
[
1
]
Some founders listen more than others, and this tends to be a
predictor of success
. One of the things I
remember about the Airbnbs during YC is how intently they listened.
[
2
]
In fact, this is one of the reasons startups are possible.  If
big companies weren't plagued by internal inefficiencies, they'd
be proportionately more effective, leaving less room for startups.
[
3
]
In a startup you have to spend a lot of time on
schleps
, but this sort of work is merely
unglamorous, not bogus.
[
4
]
What should you do if your true calling is gaming the system?
Management consulting.
[
5
]
The company may not be incorporated, but if you start to get
significant numbers of users, you've started it, whether you realize
it yet or not.
[
6
]
It shouldn't be that surprising that colleges can't teach
students how to be good startup founders, because they can't teach
them how to be good employees either.
The way universities "teach" students how to be employees is to
hand off the task to companies via internship programs.  But you
couldn't do the equivalent thing for startups, because by definition
if the students did well they would never come back.
[
7
]
Charles Darwin was 22 when he received an invitation to travel
aboard the HMS Beagle as a naturalist.  It was only because he was
otherwise unoccupied, to a degree that alarmed his family, that he
could accept it. And yet if he hadn't we probably would not know
his name.
[
8
]
Parents can sometimes be especially conservative in this
department.  There are some whose definition of important problems
includes only those on the critical path to med school.
[
9
]
I did manage to think of a heuristic for detecting whether you
have a taste for interesting ideas: whether you find known boring
ideas intolerable.  Could you endure studying literary theory, or
working in middle management at a large company?
[
10
]
In fact, if your goal is to start a startup, you can stick
even more closely to the ideal of a liberal education than past
generations have. Back when students focused mainly on getting a
job after college, they thought at least a little about how the
courses they took might look to an employer.  And perhaps even
worse, they might shy away from taking a difficult class lest they
get a low grade, which would harm their all-important GPA.  Good
news: users
don't care
what your GPA
was.  And I've never heard of investors caring either.  Y Combinator
certainly never asks what classes you took in college or what grades
you got in them.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick
Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.
Arabic Translation


@ScooterCasterNY 61st to 79th street is less than a mile. Who'd drive that?

Initially I was shocked. But the fact is that kids just know more than they did when I was their age. Making them not talk about these things in front of us doesn't make them unknow them. So it seemed best just to roll with it. The gross jokes were at least funny.

Over the Christmas holidays 12 yo directed some movies. He and 15 yo and one of their friends acted in them. Some of the jokes were unbelievably raunchy. As in it took me 10 seconds to get them level raunchy.

@0xgnarea Just the history of the field. When the NSA is finally able to break it, we won't find out till decades later.

Link to the article, which must now be put in a reply in order to avoid being dinged by the algorithm. Sigh.

https://t.co/rCGycAgCjV

Now the government doesn't want backdoors built into encryption after all, since other governments are able to use them as well. (And possibly also because they can now break RSA and don't need backdoors anyway?) https://t.co/G9U7N8SDkQ

@Noahpinion They may have been politically liberal by the standards of their time, but they were the opposite of woke. They were pragmatic and reasonable and had no interest in virtue-signalling.

@aloktayi It's simply that 1.78^8 > 100. But neither I nor anyone I've met can easily calculate 1.78^8 in their head.

@agazdecki This is not a trend. It's just Carta marketing people trying to cultivate a new market.

There have always been a huge number of bootstrapped, single-founder companies. What matters is how common they are among the most successful companies, not how common they are overall.

@Visage_1 @jmcdonaldktx Parents talk a lot to other parents. Just get the parents at one school, and you're rolling.


@BWay124 You can make a lot of money in some domains by being determined and ruthless without being particularly smart. Certainly you can become president without being smart; Harding was a dolt.

@PaulVNickerson My career is evidence I do.

@mrhuntoon Not AI specifically but tech generally.

@russell_m Sure, if free speech and due process increased rather than decreasing, or the country became more prosperous than it would have without him.

@KenRoth Typo: "Trump is attack them."

This is not an unfortunate fact. It's one of the things that make startups great. Domains where you win by gimmicks or connections or manipulating credulous people are very depressing.

This is an instance of a more general rule. Great startups don't win in any dimension by using tricks, but by actually doing the work.

Great startups don't get noticed by using tricks to get people's attention. They do it by making something so amazing that people tell their friends about it.

@earakely @BradenMerritt There are good people who've been falsely accused of being them. Even the government admits that.

@i_am_brennan But destruction is easier than creation.


@pseudonuum @el_errouze It's hard to start a new one. Big chicken-and-egg problem.

@FreeTrade68 @el_errouze Or a successor.

@stefan_salaices Something you yourself want.

@StatisticUrban Ancient in this context doesn't mean super old. It just means older than some threshold. E.g. in England there is a kind of land called "ancient woodland" and all it means is that the land has been woodland since before 1600.

@cortex_star I meant they will make lots of money, though one of them will also advance society a lot if it succeeds.

@hirschibar No, it's largely random that these founders ended up working on the ideas they did.

@Yoroomie Neither are marketplaces.

@AlexKolicich Well that's not true. I've met about 20 companies in the summer batch that seem like they could be really huge. These are just the most promising 2, and at a very early stage.

@tickinterstate @rauchg I've been interested in art for a long time. I went to art school to study painting at one point. Most artists I probably first heard about from books, but Twitter is a good source too. I especially recommend @ahistoryinart for 20th century art.

@ezcrypt I'm back in SV doing office hours with the founders in the current YC batch.


Cities and Ambition
May 2008
Great cities attract ambitious people.  You can sense it when you
walk around one.  In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a
message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be.  New
York tells you, above all: you should make more money.  There are
other messages too, of course.  You should be hipper.  You should
be better looking.  But the clearest message is that you should be
richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message
there is: you should be smarter.  You really should get around to
reading all those books you've been meaning to.
When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising
answers.  As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the
message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.
That's not quite the same message New York sends.  Power matters
in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a
billion dollars even if you merely inherited it.  In Silicon Valley
no one would care except a few real estate agents.  What matters
in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world.  The
reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth
but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically
everyone.
_____
How much does it matter what message a city sends?  Empirically,
the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had
enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend
your environment.  Where you live should make at most a couple
percent difference.  But if you look at the historical evidence,
it seems to matter more than that.  Most people who did great things
were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was
done at the time.
You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about
earlier
: the case of the Milanese Leonardo.
Practically every
fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence,
even though Milan was just as big.  People in Florence weren't
genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born
in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo.  What happened
to him?
If even someone with the same natural ability as Leonardo
couldn't beat the force of environment, do you suppose you can?
I don't.  I'm fairly stubborn, but I wouldn't try to fight this
force.  I'd rather use it.  So I've thought a lot about where to
live.
I'd always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place — that
it would basically be Cambridge with good weather.  But when I
finally tried living there a couple years ago, it turned out not
to be.  The message Berkeley sends is: you should live better.  Life
in Berkeley is very civilized.  It's probably the place in America
where someone from Northern Europe would feel most at home.  But
it's not humming with ambition.
In retrospect it shouldn't have been surprising that a place so
pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of
life.  Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge.
The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident.  You
have to make sacrifices to live there.  It's expensive and somewhat
grubby, and the weather's often bad.  So the kind of people you
find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the
smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive,
grubby place with bad weather.
As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital
of the world.  I realize that seems a preposterous claim.  What
makes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere
else.  American universities currently seem to be the best, judging
from the flow of ambitious students.  And what US city has a stronger
claim?  New York?  A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a
much larger number of neanderthals in suits.  The Bay Area has a
lot of smart people too, but again, diluted;  there are two great
universities, but they're far apart.  Harvard and MIT are practically
adjacent by West Coast standards, and they're surrounded by about
20 other colleges and universities.
[
1
]
Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is
ideas, while New York's is finance and Silicon Valley's is startups.
_____
When you talk about cities in the sense we are, what you're really
talking about is collections of people.  For a long time cities
were the only large collections of people, so you could use the two
ideas interchangeably.  But we can see how much things are changing
from the examples I've mentioned.  New York is a classic great city.
But Cambridge is just part of a city, and Silicon Valley is not
even that.  (San Jose is not, as it sometimes claims, the capital
of Silicon Valley.  It's just 178 square miles at one end of it.)
Maybe the Internet will change things further.  Maybe one day the
most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and
it won't matter where you live physically.  But I wouldn't bet on
it.  The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the
ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.
One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every
spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see
into the houses.  When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening,
you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs.  In Cambridge you see
shelves full of promising-looking books.  Palo Alto was probably
much like Cambridge in 1960, but you'd never guess now that there
was a university nearby.  Now it's just one of the richer neighborhoods
in Silicon Valley.
[
2
]
A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see
through windows, in conversations you overhear.  It's not something
you have to seek out, but something you can't turn off.  One of the
occupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the
conversations of people who use interrogative intonation in declarative
sentences.  But on average I'll take Cambridge conversations over
New York or Silicon Valley ones.
A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst
thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping.
At the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure,
it can be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good quality
eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to
live?  Now I understand what she meant.  The conversations you
overhear tell you what sort of people you're among.
_____
No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced
by the people around you.  It's not so much that you do whatever a
city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around
you cares about the same things you do.
There's an imbalance between encouragement and discouragement like
that between gaining and losing money.  Most people overvalue
negative amounts of money: they'll work much harder to avoid losing
a dollar than to gain one.  Similarly, although there are plenty of
people strong enough to resist doing something just because that's
what one is supposed to do where they happen to be, there are few
strong enough to keep working on something no one around them cares
about.
Because ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admiration
is a zero-sum game, each city tends to focus on one type of ambition.
The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that
there's a concentration of smart people there, but that there's
nothing
else
people there care about more.  Professors in
New York and the Bay area are second class citizens — till they
start hedge funds or startups respectively.
This suggests an answer to a question people in New York have
wondered about since the Bubble: whether New York could grow into
a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley.  One reason that's unlikely
is that someone starting a startup in New York would feel like a
second class citizen.
[
3
]
There's already something else people in New York admire more.
In the long term, that could be a bad thing for New York.  The power
of an important new technology does eventually convert to money.
So by caring more about money and less about power than Silicon
Valley, New York is recognizing the same thing, but slower.
[
4
]
And in fact it has been losing to Silicon Valley at its own game:
the ratio of New York to California residents in the Forbes 400 has
decreased from 1.45 (81:56) when the list was first published in
1982 to .83 (73:88) in 2007.
_____
Not all cities send a message.  Only those that are centers for
some type of ambition do.  And it can be hard to tell exactly what
message a city sends without living there.  I understand the messages
of New York, Cambridge, and Silicon Valley because I've lived for
several years in each of them.  DC and LA seem to send messages
too, but I haven't spent long enough in either to say for sure what
they are.
The big thing in LA seems to be fame.  There's an A List of people
who are most in demand right now, and what's most admired is to be
on it, or friends with those who are.  Beneath that, the message is
much like New York's, though perhaps with more emphasis on physical
attractiveness.
In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who
you know.  You want to be an insider.  In practice this seems to
work much as in LA.  There's an A List and you want to be on it or
close to those who are.  The only difference is how the A List is
selected.  And even that is not that different.
At the moment, San Francisco's message seems to be the same as
Berkeley's: you should live better.  But this will change if enough
startups choose SF over the Valley.  During the Bubble that was a
predictor of failure — a self-indulgent choice, like buying
expensive office furniture.  Even now I'm suspicious when startups
choose SF.  But if enough good ones do, it stops being a self-indulgent
choice, because the center of gravity of Silicon Valley will shift
there.
I haven't found anything like Cambridge for intellectual ambition.
Oxford and Cambridge (England) feel like Ithaca or Hanover: the
message is there, but not as strong.
Paris was once a great intellectual center.  If you went there in
1300, it might have sent the message Cambridge does now.  But I
tried living there for a bit last year, and the ambitions of the
inhabitants are not intellectual ones.  The message Paris sends now
is: do things with style.  I liked that, actually.  Paris is the
only city I've lived in where people genuinely cared about art.  In
America only a few rich people buy original art, and even the more
sophisticated ones rarely get past judging it by the brand name of
the artist.  But looking through windows at dusk in Paris you can
see that people there actually care what paintings look like.
Visually, Paris has the best eavesdropping I know.
[
5
]
There's one more message I've heard from cities: in London you can
still (barely) hear the message that one should be more aristocratic.
If you listen for it you can also hear it in Paris, New York, and
Boston.  But this message is everywhere very faint.  It would have
been strong 100 years ago, but now I probably wouldn't have picked
it up at all if I hadn't deliberately tuned in to that wavelength
to see if there was any signal left.
_____
So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is:
wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political
power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of
life.
My immediate reaction to this list is that it makes me slightly
queasy.  I'd always considered ambition a good thing, but I realize
now that was because I'd always implicitly understood it to mean
ambition in the areas I cared about.  When you list everything
ambitious people are ambitious about, it's not so pretty.
On closer examination I see a couple things on the list that are
surprising in the light of history.  For example, physical
attractiveness wouldn't have been there 100 years ago (though it
might have been 2400 years ago).  It has always mattered for women,
but in the late twentieth century it seems to have started to matter
for men as well.  I'm not sure why — probably some combination
of the increasing power of women, the increasing influence of actors
as models, and the fact that so many people work in offices now:
you can't show off by wearing clothes too fancy to wear in a factory,
so you have to show off with your body instead.
Hipness is another thing you wouldn't have seen on the list 100
years ago.  Or wouldn't you?  What it means is to know what's what.
So maybe it has simply replaced the component of social class that
consisted of being "au fait."  That could explain why hipness seems
particularly admired in London: it's version 2 of the traditional
English delight in obscure codes that only insiders understand.
Economic power would have been on the list 100 years ago, but what
we mean by it is changing.  It used to mean the control of vast
human and material resources.  But increasingly it means the ability
to direct the course of technology, and some of the people in a
position to do that are not even rich — leaders of important
open source projects, for example.  The Captains of Industry of
times past had laboratories full of clever people cooking up new
technologies for them.  The new breed are themselves those people.
As this force gets more attention, another is dropping off the list:
social class.  I think the two changes are related.  Economic power,
wealth, and social class are just names for the same thing at
different stages in its life: economic power converts to wealth,
and wealth to social class.  So the focus of admiration is simply
shifting upstream.
_____
Does anyone who wants to do great work have to live in a great city?
No; all great cities inspire some sort of ambition, but they aren't
the only places that do.  For some kinds of work, all you need is
a handful of talented colleagues.
What cities provide is an audience, and a funnel for peers.  These
aren't so critical in something like math or physics, where no
audience matters except your peers, and judging ability is sufficiently
straightforward that hiring and admissions committees can do it
reliably.  In a field like math or physics all you need is a
department with the right colleagues in it.  It could be anywhere — in
Los Alamos, New Mexico, for example.
It's in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the
larger environment matters.  In these the best practitioners aren't
conveniently collected in a few top university departments and
research labs — partly because talent is harder to judge, and
partly because people pay for these things, so one doesn't need to
rely on teaching or research funding to support oneself.  It's in
these more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great city:
you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care
about the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers for
yourself, you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great city.
You don't have to live in a great city your whole life to benefit
from it.  The critical years seem to be the early and middle ones
of your career.  Clearly you don't have to grow up in a great city.
Nor does it seem to matter if you go to college in one.  To most
college students a world of a few thousand people seems big enough.
Plus in college you don't yet have to face the hardest kind of
work — discovering new problems to solve.
It's when you move on to the next and much harder step that it helps
most to be in a place where you can find peers and encouragement.
You seem to be able to leave, if you want, once you've found both.
The Impressionists show the typical pattern: they were born all
over France (Pissarro was born in the Carribbean) and died all over
France, but what defined them were the years they spent together
in Paris.
_____
Unless you're sure what you want to do and where the leading center
for it is, your best bet is probably to try living in several
places when you're young.  You can never tell what message a city
sends till you live there, or even whether it still sends one.
Often your information will be wrong: I tried living in Florence
when I was 25, thinking it would be an art center, but it turned
out I was 450 years too late.
Even when a city is still a live center of ambition, you won't know
for sure whether its message will resonate with you till you hear
it.  When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first.  It's
an exciting place.  So it took me quite a while to realize I just
wasn't like the people there.  I kept searching for the Cambridge
of New York.  It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown
by air.
Some people know at 16 what sort of work they're going to do, but
in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific
to be ambitious about.  They know they want to do something great.
They just haven't decided yet whether they're going to be a rock
star or a brain surgeon.  There's nothing wrong with that.  But it
means if you have this most common type of ambition, you'll probably
have to figure out where to live by trial and error.  You'll
probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of
ambition you have.
Notes
[
1
]
This is one of the advantages of not having the universities
in your country controlled by the government.  When governments
decide how to allocate resources, political deal-making causes
things to be spread out geographically.  No central goverment would
put its two best universities in the same town, unless it was the
capital (which would cause other problems).  But scholars seem to
like to cluster together as much as people in any other field, and
when given the freedom to they derive the same advantages from it.
[
2
]
There are still a few old professors in Palo Alto, but one by
one they die and their houses are transformed by developers into
McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev.
[
3
]
How many times have you read about startup founders who continued
to live inexpensively as their companies took off?  Who continued
to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in
grad school, and so on?  If you did that in New York, people would
treat you like shit.  If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San
Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they're nice to you; who
knows who you might be?  Not in New York.
One sign of a city's potential as a technology center is the number
of restaurants that still require jackets for men.  According to
Zagat's there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle,
4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and 20 in Paris.
(Zagat's lists the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in SF as requiring jackets
but I couldn't believe it, so I called to check and in fact they
don't. Apparently there's only one restaurant left on the entire West
Coast that still requires jackets: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.)
[
4
]
Ideas are one step upstream from economic power, so it's
conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one day
have an edge over Silicon Valley like the one the Valley has over
New York.
This seems unlikely at the moment; if anything Boston is falling
further and further behind.  The only reason I even mention the
possibility is that the path from ideas to startups has recently
been getting smoother.  It's a lot easier now for a couple of hackers
with no business experience to start a startup than it was 10 years
ago.  If you extrapolate another 20 years, maybe the balance of
power will start to shift back.  I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn't
bet against it either.
[
5
]
If Paris is where people care most about art, why is New York
the center of gravity of the art business?  Because in the twentieth
century, art as brand split apart from art as stuff.  New York is
where the richest buyers are, but all they demand from art is brand,
and since you can base brand on anything with a sufficiently
identifiable style, you may as well use the local stuff.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston,
Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and David Sloo for reading drafts
of this.
Italian Translation
Portuguese Translation
Chinese Translation
Korean Translation


@jasrusable I don't know about that particular one, but some of these lanes are thousands of years old.

This is a sunken lane, or holloway. It's so old that it has been worn down below the surrounding land. These look like something out of the Lord of the Rings, but they're not at all uncommon in the UK. There are two near our house. https://t.co/zcefdwH7Km

@ahistoryinart We have a painting of his next to our bed. It may be the one in our house that I see most.

@Rainmaker1973 That's acrylic paint, not oil.

@IterIntellectus I was talking about the tweet Noah quoted.

@JesterMule @Noahpinion Yes.  Some people thought I was talking about Noah's tweet, rather than the one he was quoting, so I rephrased it to make it clear which one I was referring to.

@Noahpinion I just deleted the original reply because so many people misunderstood it.

@Noahpinion Occasionally I see a tweet so spectacularly mistaken that I screenshot it to laugh about in the future. Thanks for bringing this gem to my attention.

@Noahpinion Don't worry, I'm talking about his tweet, not yours.

@Noahpinion Since some people are asking, the tweet I screenshotted is David Roberts's, not Noah's.


@provisionalidea You're not doing your cause any favors when you twist complaining about the ACLU's institutional drift into "railing against even the slightest recognition of atrocities." Anyone can see you're not telling the truth.

@JonErlichman 3 of the 5 that were founded since YC has existed were funded by YC.

@gracels It has nothing to do with civil liberties. The ACLU has been transformed from a unique politically neutral organization focused on civil liberties to a generic one focused on left-wing causes.

@zackkanter This is one of my favorite books.

The ACLU you remember is gone.

@lexfridman @ZelenskyyUa He's pretty busy. He might be more likely to say yes if you proposed a 45 minute podcast.

@growing_daniel There's an implicit "in order to make it conform to their ideology." Obviously Christians or the woke (or atheists) can change what my kids are taught about biology if it's merely some new discovery about how DNA works.

@joshuamcclure And here's what you get if you switch the polarity of your leading question: https://t.co/I0xrGUbCio

@joshuamcclure If you merely thought I was getting slightly stupider, it wouldn't have made you say so explicitly — unless you were a terrible person. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. And in that case Occam's razor says I've said things that offended you, and you're concern-trolling.

@ravroberts Because it made sense in 1600.


Unless of course this is due to the work of an anonymous hero who saw the coverup as it was happening and organized a de facto leak.

The three actors I know well have one thing in common. They don't want their kids to become actors. It's a brutally precarious profession.

A three-dive day is a good day.

A startup told me a highly-funded competitor bought the .com of their name. I told them this is good news in a way. It means the competitor is (a) amateurish and (b) afraid of them, both of which suggest the competitor will lose in the long term.

Neural nets work. https://t.co/uZ2XPyEcuE

(At the time they didn't seem to, so I ignored them. But they turned out to be one of those things that start to work when you increase the scale by several orders of magnitude.)

If I could send my 18 year old self a message, it would have three parts:

1. Prestige is often mistaken. Follow curiosity instead.

2. There's no way to avoid hard work. It's not sufficient, but it is necessary.

3. Don't take your parents for granted.

You could combine the first two into: Hard work is the magnitude of the vector and curiosity is the direction. I might not have gotten that immediately, but it would have stuck in my head till I did.

"Make something people want" sounds obvious, but not doing it is the most common mistake founders make. I explained why I made it in the essay where I coined the term. I didn't understand the market I was building for, so I was wrong about what it wanted.

https://t.co/S8HdPEH7YX

But with startups the phrase means more than just "don't lie to yourself about the market." In a properly run startup, product development is a kind of experiment to discover users' true needs. That's why we tell founders to launch fast, for example.


@Noahpinion Not just the popular kids, but the Mean Girls.

@Chris_arnade I don't think you have to assume regulation is the reason. Occam's razor says developers just DGAF.

@DKThomp Damn. So Polymarket is right.

While we're on the subject, what are the most important things the Democrats could do to win?

@DKThomp You seem like a wise and well-informed observer. What would you estimate is the probability of each side winning?

@xlr8harder @naval If you don't draw a line you turn Naval's original claim into a tautology, which we have to assume isn't what he meant.

@xlr8harder @naval Rule of law, tax rates on the left side of the Laffer curve, investment firms, social customs that prize learning and achievement...

@naval I would say that increasing GDP per capita increases quality of life the most. Technology can contribute to increasing GDP per capita, but they're not identical.

Something subtle you'll notice if you look closely at this picture: these are people who genuinely like working together. If you're young you may think "what's so unusual about that?" but if you've worked at a law or VC firm or big company or university department, you know.

@victorcardenas One of the Vice President's duties in the US is to certify election results. When Trump tried to steal the election in 2020 by asking Pence not to certify the results, he refused.

@serpunketh There are many such stories here: https://t.co/W7sN1hBEiZ


Why Nerds are Unpopular
February 2003
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map
of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy
to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same
popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of
football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the
kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of
the time we called "retards."
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking
physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade
ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise.
Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was,
including us.
My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived;
I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground
newspaper.  So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell
the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart
and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between
being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to
make
you
unpopular.
Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to
ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to
imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart
doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm
you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem
so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary
school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult.  Why?
The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why
don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why
don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system,
just as they do for standardized tests?
One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart
kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart,
and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the
other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job
of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an
enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that
guys envy, girls like.
In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids
didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they
would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the
dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical
appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.
So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are
smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that
they don't really want to be popular.
If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at
him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them
so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't
want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of
thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course
I wanted to be popular.
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted
more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that
counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write
well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to
make great things.
At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them
against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart
was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be
the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of
average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.
Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many
nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable.
But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be
a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming,
as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who
wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired
by everyone?
And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two
masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even
more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in
your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an
American secondary school.
Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that
"no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you
want to excel in it."
I wonder if anyone in the world works harder
at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs
and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They
occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American
teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a
year.
I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly
are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers
are always on duty as conformists.
For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes.
They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good.
But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their
definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything
they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they
make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort
to be more popular.
Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to
be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field
don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though
often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider
the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall.
In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent
many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popular
isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make
yourself.
The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things
to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural
world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to
play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other
players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them
effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.
Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being
popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to
be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned
to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the
nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids
were being trained to please.
So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd,
using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the
context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially
adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical
American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least,
so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look
awkward by comparison.
Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires.
Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or
siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's
why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven
and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity
than before or after.
Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by
other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school,
but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.
Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their
family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and
standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family.
Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the
world they care about.
The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at
first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds
to their own devices, what you get is
Lord of the Flies.
Like
a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it
was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to
us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and
stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed
entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish
they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world
was stupid.
Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely
caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school
is to be actively persecuted.
Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a
strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But
they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage
kids do it?
Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many
children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the
same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a
conscience, torture is amusing.
Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel
better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water
down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own
position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think
rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United
States are the group most hostile to blacks.
But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's
part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially
about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances.
To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that
bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people
closer than a common enemy.
Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at
home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling
out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the
hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider
makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying
happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from
a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.
If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The
group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same
thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together
to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something
to chase.
Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target
for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular
kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things.
Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous
middle classes.
The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of
popularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear.
The least popular group is quite small. (I believe we were the only
D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want
to pick on nerds than there are nerds.
As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids,
one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that
in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking
to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity
is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still
ostracize them in self-defense.
It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle
school and high school. Their other interests leave them little
attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity resembles
a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole
school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens
without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the
situation.
For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new
and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate
the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to
agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.
In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen
for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our
teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and
was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an
eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.
It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time
was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of
things they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?
It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the
kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that
kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the
abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like
us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't
see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.
Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison
wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the
premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible
prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to
have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave
them to create whatever social organization they want. From what
I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage,
and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most
important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the
authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort
to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have
too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers
mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we
created was barbaric.
Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that
the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too
mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true.
Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently,
do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds
like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.
I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's
populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you
do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch
all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little
bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect.
Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no
function for their form to follow.
When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough
just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right
answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will
of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills,
he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.
The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's
much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities
can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real
world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies
where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current
even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly
in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately
exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash
so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the
wall as he walked down a corridor.
As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of
the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little
world we lived in was, I thought,
the world.
The world seemed cruel
and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.
Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must
be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't
fit in was that in some ways
we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about
the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending
all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the
others.
We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into
middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right
music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a
complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what
they thought. We had no such confidence.
A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown
together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps.
But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really
is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience
at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders
threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn
to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal
ritual.
If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice,
the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look
around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world
we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the
entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no
wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant
nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of
breeding children.
Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing
to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to
exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could
endanger children.
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this
fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In
fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one
place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And
I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society,
it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that
(a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly
by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing
meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run
after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing
in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're
called misfits.
Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just
for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.
Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why
don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty.
The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that
monstrous new chemicals,
hormones
, are now coursing through their
bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with
the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at
that age.
This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which
probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt
is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing
the wrong size shoes.
I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are
intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be
universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read
a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference
to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century.
Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful
and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of
course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they
weren't crazy.
As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager
is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I
think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead.
Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers
now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the
idle everywhere.
When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter
kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and
some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other
teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic.
But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.
Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly
an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on.
Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity.
And all the work we did was
pointless
, or seemed so at the time.
At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future,
so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing
for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump
through, words without content designed mainly for testability.
(The three main causes of the Civil War were....
Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)
And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among
themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way
to escape this empty life was to submit to it.
Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In
pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or
another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They
weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members
of adult societies.
Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because
the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying
to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in
their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is
precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as
adults.
And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use
for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could
be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry
messages or sweep the workshop.
Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in
the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way
to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they
were going away for the weekend.
What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this
problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization.
As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them.
Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at
the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far
earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time
till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not
finish your training till 30.
Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like
fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost
any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too
young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and
the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in
one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.
If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison,
albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically
do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids.
But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most
schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really
take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we
were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.
In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's
Les
Miserables.
I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make
our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I
just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the
book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of
long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these
questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The
teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.
There are certainly great public school teachers.  The energy and
imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that
year something his students still talk about, thirty years later.
But teachers like him were individuals swimming
upstream. They couldn't fix the system.
In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy.
When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for
some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best
at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose.
But hierarchy there must be.
And so the kids make one out of nothing.
We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be
created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation
degenerates into a popularity contest.
And that's exactly what
happens in most American schools.
Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank
depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's
like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the
kids become one another's opponents.
When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful
to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team
doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him
one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him.
The veteran may in turn feel a sense of
noblesse oblige
.
And most importantly, their status depends on how well they
do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.
Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society
debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the
bottom, nor
noblesse oblige
at the top. It's kill or be killed.
This is the sort of society that gets created
in American
secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no
real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain
number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and
in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors
of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same
cause.
The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences
than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness
that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to
be learning.
Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I
could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then.
And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and
"integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they
were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing:
obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to
be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers.
If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of
them.
The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it
seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut.
I assumed it was derived from the same root as
"tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I
vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut
me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and
what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of
clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.
Nerds aren't the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds are
unpopular because they're distracted. There are other kids who
deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole
process.
Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt
out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I
went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana.
The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called
"freaks."
Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap
between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids,
though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an
important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was
friends with a lot of freaks.
They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they
created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs
were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.
I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get
into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum.
No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from
other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school
at least, the reason most kids
started
using drugs was rebellion.
Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard
it would help them forget their problems. They started because they
wanted to join a different tribe.
Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the
authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves
the cause of the problem.
The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won't see
solutions till adults realize that. The adults who
may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in
school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as
you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to
fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the
current system. It has come about mostly by default.
Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing.
Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few
will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest
part is realizing that you can.
Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one day
a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to
rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any
immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have to
come from the nerds themselves.
Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less
painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game,
and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults
know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim
to have been nerds in high school.
It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life.
School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral.
It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's
only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while
you're still in it.
If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are
turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because
life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults,
who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to
spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.
Any
society
of that type is awful to live in.
You don't have
to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.
I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis
is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted
are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently
unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults
both.
Thanks
to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris,
Eric Raymond, and Jackie Weicker for reading drafts of this essay,
and Maria Daniels for scanning photos.
Re: Why Nerds are Unpopular
Gateway High School, 1981
Japanese Translation
French Translation
My War With Brian
Buttons
Portuguese Translation
Spanish Translation


This is the strongest evidence I've seen so far that Trump is in fact in the Epstein files.

@grok @mysecretph37270 Impressive hallucinating. Only two of these are correct (The School for Scandal and Come Out, Wherever You Are).

@JoeDotAverage One of my favorite things to do is go to dinner or a cafe with a selection of books I've just bought. When I do that I might read parts of four or five of them.

A shaggy patron who arrived just after I took that. https://t.co/mUrIOoWptd

My favorite pub in my favorite town in Britain, the Blue Boar in Hay. https://t.co/AKuESRoifp

Very pleased to find I've forgotten the Decameron well enough to reread it.

@IE_Capital I think the Republicans might not even be in power if the woke left hadn't alienated moderates.

@doctorparadox You should not use dishonest techniques to fight, because then your opponents will use them too.

@DanielW_Kiwi option-dash for an en-dash, option-shift-dash for an em-dash

@KhurrumM @im_imrich There is a right side of history, but it's not the right or the left side.


Apparently that recent essay "No One Buys Books" is mostly mistaken. (Its quotes are accurate, but the people it quotes were deliberately presenting a misleading picture of the publishing business.)

https://t.co/1rvJQ7Mxyc

@JacobsLadders Yes; this aphorism is left over from the time when books all had the same covers.

@3000Elsinore How can you ever reread anything if you throw books away after the first time you read them?

@newtonlaw What do you think are the things people most commonly neglect to say?

I hope organizing books by color is merely a fashion and not something more sinister: the final stage before not having books at all.

@alz_zyd_ I do it. I wear the same kind of socks all the time (when I wear socks).

@engineers_feed It would have to be a profession that for some reason is unaffected by market forces.

"Philip Unwin, its publisher & a friend of mine, told me that when the huge bundle of MS came, they were dismayed & at first refused to take the risk of publishing it. So Tolkien offered to cut it into 3 parts..."

— Roger Lloyd https://t.co/vlXHpAveDJ

@mattgoldenberg How to Avoid Wasting Your Life

@quorlin Whatever point you want. Whatever point you want.


@Big_Picture_89 @boomsupersonic That's hilarious. And indeed I'm sure it's a big part of the reason why.

@rickasaurus I don't think there are any joint ventures planned, so they'd have do it the old fashioned way.

You have to give credit where credit is due: the current administration seems more aware of the progress being made toward a supersonic airliner.

@jdmccafferty Happy Valentine's Day to you too.

@therabbithole Why don't grad students get counted?

@barryeisler Really? What about Putin dies, and his successor, who's not invested in this war, decides that it was a waste of lives and money and goes for "peace with honor"?

@yuris @AntWilson Yeah, I figured as much. The main reason I changed the aspect ratio was just so that I could judge it myself.

@bscholl @ycombinator @boomsupersonic Thanks Blake!

This is what success looks like in tech: exponential growth that's very steep, and consistent for years. Usually only cumulative numbers look this good. But these aren't cumulative, as you can see from the occasional downward spikes.

@yuris @AntWilson Me too! It's so crazy steep that my first thought was "cumulative".


@somewheresy You decided to switch to a language with strong typing?

@longestsoloever That's not sorting them completely, just per row. There's still interesting data there.

@dobuildyourown Wrong thread :-).

It grew exponentially because the main thing that determines whether someone puts pronouns in their bio  or switches from "slave" to "enslaved person" is how many other people are doing it. But that also works in reverse.

People seem to be surprised that wokeness is collapsing so fast. But what grows exponentially shrinks exponentially too.

Nothing disgusts 12 yo more than when I mix up his various fictional worlds (there are about 7 or 8 he writes stories about). It's as if I had presented him with a bowl of beef-flavored ice cream.

None of the other things are that expensive. The shelves are painted pine. The desk is a kitchen table I bought in the 90s. A used Aeron costs £350. The monitor is so old it's worthless. The books are all used and cost maybe £10k total.

I've seen people saying they want an office like this when they get rich, but you don't have to be that rich. The biggest cost is the space, and this much space costs about £150k out in the country where we live, and under $100k in a similar part of the US.

@leanmediaorg If you're from America you have no idea of the protection listed buildings have in England. You're not changing any windows or anything else.

@samtayyari These comments are making me feel a lot better about being too lazy to buy a new monitor.


@BrandonVanB A large fraction of my meetings with startups are done walking.

A lot of people unconsciously think of Y Combinator as a marketplace for fundraising, but this is what it's really for: making the startups better. When YC is done right, fundraising is just a victory lap at the end.

I always prefer ordinary voice calls to Zoom calls. Zoom calls are much more work, because you have to think about what your body is doing and not just what your voice is doing. And you have to stay put; you can't pace like you can on a voice call.

@dadiomov Are you talking about AI? Do you think we can say that yet? Surely not...

@aryehazan The Israeli intelligence officers that the Guardian article quotes explicitly say that they have the option to target people in other places, but that they prefer to do it when they're at home.

@snowmaker @adagyrobotics @tlbtlbtlb It's weird isn't it what good karma it is to have robots around YC? It's like having dogs in a household. You should encourage future robotics startups to have their robots there as much as possible.

@micsolana Most people aren't even aware of it.

@micsolana It honestly does feel strange in the UK, after growing up with the first amendment.

"It's much easier to bomb a family's home. The system is built to look for them in these situations."

Built to look for them at home. Built to. And yet the person saying this is not a critic of the Israeli regime. It's an intelligence officer describing business as usual.

@ggweitz You need to go back and look at that screenshot more carefully. https://t.co/tOlXWwlJqa