What Happened to Yahoo
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
August 2010
When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998,
it felt like the center of the world.  It was supposed to be the
next big thing.  It was supposed to be what Google turned out to
be.
What went wrong?  The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time,
practically to the beginning of the company.  They were already
very visible when I got there in 1998.  Yahoo had two problems
Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology
company.
Money
The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for
different reasons.  He thought we were meeting so he could check
us out in person before buying us. I thought we were meeting so we
could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop.   It was a way of
sorting shopping search results.  Merchants bid a percentage of
sales for traffic, but the results were sorted not by the bid but
by the bid times the average amount a user would buy.  It was
like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the
spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
Revenue Loop was the optimal sort for shopping search, in the sense
that it sorted in order of how much money Yahoo would make from
each link.  But it wasn't just optimal in that sense.  Ranking
search results by user behavior also makes search better.  Users
train the search: you can start out finding matches based on mere
textual similarity, and as users buy more stuff the search results
get better and better.
Jerry didn't seem to care.  I was confused.  I was showing him
technology that extracted the maximum value from search traffic,
and he didn't care?  I couldn't tell whether I was explaining it
badly, or he was just very poker faced.
I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at
Yahoo.  It was neither of my guesses.  The reason Yahoo didn't care
about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that
advertisers were already overpaying for it.  If Yahoo merely extracted
the actual value, they'd have made less.
Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads.
Advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads.
So Yahoo's sales force had evolved to exploit this source of revenue.
Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh,
Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back
with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
The prices seemed cheap compared to print, which was what advertisers,
for lack of any other reference, compared them to.  But they were
expensive compared to what they were worth.  So these big, dumb
companies were a dangerous source of revenue to depend on.  But
there was another source even more dangerous: other Internet startups.
By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme.
Investors were excited about the Internet.  One reason they were
excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.  So they invested in new Internet
startups.  The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to
get traffic.  Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and
further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in.
When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up
like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was
shouting "Sell!"
Both the Internet startups and the Procter & Gambles were doing
brand advertising.  They didn't care about targeting.  They just
wanted lots of people to see their ads.  So traffic became the thing
to get at Yahoo.  It didn't matter what type.
[
1
]
It wasn't just Yahoo.  All the search engines were doing it.  This
was why they were trying to get people to start calling them "portals"
instead of "search engines." Despite the actual meaning of the word
portal, what they meant by it was a site where users would find
what they wanted on the site itself, instead of just passing through
on their way to other destinations, as they did at a search engine.
I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo
should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in
the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search.  He told me
that it wasn't worth worrying about.  Search was only 6% of our
traffic, and we were growing at 10% a month.   It wasn't worth doing
better.
I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!"
I said "Oh, ok."  Because I didn't realize either how much search
traffic was worth.  I'm not sure even Larry and Sergey did then.
If they had, Google presumably wouldn't have expended any effort
on enterprise search.
If circumstances had been different, the people running Yahoo might
have realized sooner how important search was.  But they had the
most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money.
As long as customers were writing big checks for banner ads, it was
hard to take search seriously.  Google didn't have that to distract
them.
Hackers
But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change
directions.  They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their
ambivalence about being a technology company.
One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there
was the way they insisted on calling themselves a "media company."
If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software
company.  The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product
managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates, support people
(yes, there were actually support people) telling users to restart
their browsers, and so on, just like a software company.  So why
did they call themselves a media company?
One reason was the way they made money: by selling ads.  In 1995
it was hard to imagine a technology company making money that way.
Technology companies made money by selling their software to users.
Media companies sold ads.  So they must be a media company.
Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft.   If anyone at Yahoo
considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the
next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.
It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear
Microsoft still inspired in 1995.  Imagine a company with several
times the power Google has now, but way meaner.  It was perfectly
reasonable to be afraid of them.  Yahoo watched them crush the first
hot Internet company, Netscape.  It was reasonable to worry that
if they tried to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the same fate.
How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft's
last victim?
It would have been a clever move to pretend to be a media company
to throw Microsoft off their scent.  But unfortunately Yahoo actually
tried to be one, sort of.  Project managers at Yahoo were called
"producers," for example, and the different parts of the company
were called "properties." But what Yahoo really needed to be was a
technology company, and by trying to be something else, they ended
up being something that was neither here nor there.  That's why
Yahoo as a company has never had a sharply defined identity.
The worst consequence of trying to be a media company was that they
didn't take programming seriously enough.  Microsoft (back in the
day), Google, and Facebook have all had hacker-centric cultures.
But Yahoo treated programming as a commodity.  At Yahoo, user-facing software
was controlled by product managers and designers.  The job of
programmers was just to take the work of the product managers and
designers the final step, by translating it into code.
One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things,
they often weren't very good. But that wasn't the worst problem.
The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers.
Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been
obsessed with hiring the best programmers.  Yahoo wasn't.  They
preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn't have the
kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring
the smartest people that the big winners have had.  And when you
consider how much competition there was for programmers when they
were hiring, during the Bubble, it's not surprising that the quality
of their programmers was uneven.
In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed.  I
can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical
mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other
good programmers.  So once the quality of programmers at your company
starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no
recovery.
[
2
]
At Yahoo this death spiral started early.  If there was ever a time when
Yahoo was a Google-style talent magnet, it was over by the time I
got there in 1998.
The company felt prematurely old.  Most technology companies
eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers.  At Yahoo
it felt as if they'd deliberately accelerated this process.  They
didn't want to be a bunch of hackers.  They wanted to be suits.  A
media company should be run by suits.
The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the
same number Yahoo had when I went to work there.  But boy did things
seem different.  It was still very much a hacker-centric culture.
I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the
problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked
"what should we do?"  Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.
Theirs was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product
managers spec'd.  I remember coming away from Google thinking "Wow,
it's still a startup."
There's not much we can learn from Yahoo's first fatal flaw. It's
probably too much to hope any company could avoid being damaged by
depending on a bogus source of revenue.  But startups can learn an
important lesson from the second one.  In the software business,
you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.
Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a
hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at
Startup School in 2007.  He said that in the early days Facebook
made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not
ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.
So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture?  Which
companies are "in the software business" in this respect?  As Yahoo
discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people
realize.  The answer is: any company that needs to have good software.
Why would great programmers want to work for a company that didn't
have a hacker-centric culture, as long as there were others that
did?  I can imagine two reasons: if they were paid a huge amount,
or if the domain was interesting and none of the companies in it
were hacker-centric.  Otherwise you can't attract good programmers
to work in a suit-centric culture.  And without good programmers
you won't get good software, no matter how many people you put on
a task, or how many procedures you establish to ensure "quality."
Hacker culture
often seems kind of irresponsible.  That's why people
proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That
was the phrase they used at Yahoo.  But there are worse things than
seeming irresponsible.  Losing, for example.
Notes
[
1
]
The closest we got to targeting when I was there was when we
created pets.yahoo.com in order to provoke a bidding war between 3
pet supply startups for the spot as top sponsor.
[
2
]
In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good
programmers instead of hiring them.  You can get programmers
who would never have come to you as employees by buying their
startups. But so far the only companies smart enough
to do this are companies smart enough not to need to.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and
Geoff Ralston for
reading drafts of this.


Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
"...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day."
 Charles Dickens
July 2009
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on
a different type of schedule from other people.  Meetings cost them
more.
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's
schedule and the maker's schedule.  The manager's schedule is for
bosses.  It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with
each day cut into one hour intervals.  You can block off several
hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change
what you're doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet
with someone.  Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and
you're done.
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule.  It's the
schedule of command.  But there's another way of using time that's
common among people who make things, like programmers and writers.
They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least.
You can't write or program well in units of an hour.  That's barely
enough time to get started.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a
disaster.  A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking
it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.  Plus you
have to remember to go to the meeting.  That's no problem for someone
on the manager's schedule.  There's always something coming on the
next hour; the only question is what.  But when someone on the
maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like
throwing an exception.  It doesn't merely cause you to switch from
one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day.   A meeting
commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or
afternoon.  But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect.
If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less
likely to start something ambitious in the morning.  I know this
may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own
case.  Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire
day free to work, with no appointments at all?  Well, that means
your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't.  And
ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your
capacity.  A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
Each type of schedule works fine by itself.  Problems arise when
they meet.  Since most powerful people operate on the manager's
schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their
frequency if they want to.  But the smarter ones restrain themselves,
if they know that some of the people working for them need long
chunks of time to work in.
Our case is an unusual one.  Nearly all investors, including all
VCs I know, operate on the manager's schedule.  But
Y Combinator
runs on the maker's schedule.  Rtm and Trevor and I do because we
always have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she's gotten
into sync with us.
I wouldn't be surprised if there start to be more companies like
us.  I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or at
least postpone, turning into managers, just as a few decades ago
they started to be able to resist switching from jeans
to suits.
How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule?
By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule
within the maker's: office hours.  Several times a week I set aside
a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded.  These chunks of
time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program
that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours
are clustered at the end.  Because they come at the end of my day
these meetings are never an interruption.  (Unless their working
day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts
theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to
them.)  During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough
that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.
When we were working on
our own startup
, back in the 90s, I evolved
another trick for partitioning the day.  I used to program from
dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could
interrupt me.  Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and
work until dinner on what I called "business stuff."  I never thought
of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day,
one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.
When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something
you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative
meetings.  You can meet someone just to get to know one another.
If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not?  Maybe it will
turn out you can help one another in some way.
Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that
matter) have speculative meetings all the time.  They're effectively
free if you're on the manager's schedule.  They're so common that
there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you
want to "grab coffee," for example.
Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's
schedule, though.  Which puts us in something of a bind.  Everyone
assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule.
So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or
send us an email proposing we grab coffee.  At this point we have
two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose
half a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably
offend them.
Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the source
of the problem.  We just took it for granted that we had to either
blow our schedules or offend people.  But now that I've realized
what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something
explaining the two types of schedule.  Maybe eventually, if the
conflict between the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule
starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a
problem.
Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise.   We
know we have to have some number of meetings.  All we ask from those
on the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston,
and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Related:
How to Do What You Love
Good and Bad Procrastination
Turkish Translation
French Translation
Korean Translation
German Translation


@profplum99 The fact that there's one technical sense of the word "commodity" that doesn't include labor (or electricity, before effective batteries) doesn't affect the point I made about commodities (in the more general sense of fungible economic goods) having only market prices.

@PGunigantiAT I wrote about that law in an essay. It's a hack to protect labor unions from antitrust regulations.

https://t.co/1UVuSO3clr

@Mayanklll He was very psyched when we got home from school and he found some Itsu seaweed thins in the cupboard.

Something I told 13 yo: If you're worried you'll become arrogant, you probably won't. Most arrogant people kind of want to be that way.

@smalera Thanks, but I don't think you have to be a painter to be troubled by this. https://t.co/SfLOR8y7gd

@cometposter The fact that labor has a market price doesn't imply that all labor has the *same* price. Far from it. The market price of different people's work varies by orders of magnitude.

@ironick @Luzius Yes, and of course it does.

@Luzius All that means is that the price isn't the actual market price, because the cartel is distorting it.

@jdmccafferty That would make a much better flag than their current one. https://t.co/mwyxUUuVMi

@arold_marc A commodity is something people sell. People sell their work.


English isn't the first instance of this pattern. It's the norm. It happened with Latin too.

Apropos of no particular recent controversy, here's Gibbon on what the Byzantines did with the language they inherited from classical Greece. https://t.co/DJ21tSoEgP

@KILRI71 @ben_m_somers @JohnDCook This is what @JohnDCook meant about people who do vs people who teach.

One of the most striking things to me about games like Call of Duty is the lack of profanity. It means there are millions of parents out there who are ok with characters being blown up and set on fire, so long as they don't swear.

@ben_m_somers @JohnDCook Interesting question. I think it's mostly how good the work done in academia is. But also how much money people can make outside it.

This was not a YC startup, incidentally. YC founders know about things like this. And in any case most investors would think twice before maltreating them.

Experienced investors know that all the money comes from the most successful startups. Trying to squeeze money out of the failures is a waste of time. And often a temptation to behave badly.

The founder of a failing startup emailed me saying that his investors were trying to make him go work for one of their portfolio cos. What should he tell them? I told him he could tell them from me that this was the mark of a noob investor.

@mqudsi I know. That's what makes it so remarkable.

@axios I notice this list of people using the term doesn't include those it supposedly refers to.


Relentlessly Resourceful
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
March 2009
A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down
to two words:  relentlessly resourceful.
Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down
to one: hapless.  Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky.  But
the dictionaries are not doing a very good job.  A team that outplays
its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee
could be called unlucky, but not hapless.  Hapless implies passivity.
To be hapless is to be battered by circumstances — to let the world
have its way with you, instead of having your way with the world.
[
1
]
Unfortunately there's no antonym of hapless, which makes it difficult
to tell founders what to aim for.  "Don't be hapless" is not much
of a rallying cry.
It's not hard to express the quality we're looking for in metaphors.
The best is probably a running back.  A good running back is not
merely determined, but flexible as well.  They want to get downfield,
but they adapt their plans on the fly.
Unfortunately this is just a metaphor, and not a useful one to most
people outside the US.   "Be like a running back" is no better than
"Don't be hapless."
But finally I've figured out how to express this quality directly.
I was writing a talk for
investors
, and I had to explain what to
look for in founders.  What would someone who was the opposite of
hapless be like?  They'd be relentlessly resourceful.  Not merely
relentless.  That's not enough to make things go your way except
in a few mostly uninteresting domains.  In any interesting domain,
the difficulties will be novel.  Which means you can't simply plow
through them, because you don't know initially how hard they are;
you don't know whether you're about to plow through a block of foam
or granite.  So you have to be resourceful. You have to keep
trying new things.
Be relentlessly resourceful.
That sounds right, but is it simply a description
of how to be successful in general?  I don't think so.  This isn't
the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example.  In
that kind of work the recipe is more to be actively curious.
Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they generally
are in startups. But in writing and painting they're mostly internal;
the obstacle is your own obtuseness.
[
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]
There probably are other fields where "relentlessly resourceful"
is the recipe for success.  But though other fields may share it,
I think this is the best short description we'll find of what makes
a good startup founder.  I doubt it could be made more precise.
Now that we know what we're looking for, that leads to other
questions.  For example, can this quality be taught?  After four
years of trying to teach it to people, I'd say that yes, surprisingly
often it can.  Not to everyone, but to many people.
[
3
]
Some
people are just constitutionally passive, but others have a latent
ability to be relentlessly resourceful that only needs to be brought
out.
This is particularly true of young people who have till now always
been under the thumb of some kind of authority.  Being relentlessly
resourceful is definitely not the recipe for success in big companies,
or in most schools.  I don't even want to think what the recipe is
in big companies, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving
some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building
alliances.
Identifying this quality also brings us closer to answering a
question people often wonder about: how many startups there could
be.  There is not, as some people seem to think, any economic upper
bound on this number.  There's no reason to believe there is any
limit on the amount of newly created wealth consumers can absorb,
any more than there is a limit on the number of theorems that can
be proven.  So probably the limiting factor on the number of startups
is the pool of potential founders.  Some people would make good
founders, and others wouldn't.  And now that we can say what makes
a good founder, we know how to put an upper bound on the size of
the pool.
This test is also useful to individuals.  If you want to know whether
you're the right sort of person to start a startup, ask yourself
whether you're relentlessly resourceful.  And if you want to know
whether to recruit someone as a cofounder, ask if they are.
You can even use it tactically.  If I were running a startup, this
would be the phrase I'd tape to the mirror.  "Make something people
want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how
you get there.
Notes
[
1
]
I think the reason the dictionaries are wrong is that the
meaning of the word has shifted.  No one writing a dictionary from
scratch today would say that hapless meant unlucky.  But a couple
hundred years ago they might have.  People were more at the mercy
of circumstances in the past, and as a result a lot of the words
we use for good and bad outcomes have origins in words about luck.
When I was living in Italy, I was once trying to tell someone
that I hadn't had much success in doing something, but I couldn't
think of the Italian word for success.  I spent some time trying
to describe the word I meant.  Finally she said "Ah! Fortuna!"
[
2
]
There are aspects of startups where the recipe is to be
actively curious.  There can be times when what you're doing is
almost pure discovery.  Unfortunately these times are a small
proportion of the whole.  On the other hand, they are in research
too.
[
3
]
I'd almost say to most people, but I realize (a) I have no
idea what most people are like, and (b) I'm pathologically optimistic
about people's ability to change.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts
of this.


The Two Kinds of Moderate
December 2019
There are two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose
and by accident. Intentional moderates are trimmers, deliberately
choosing a position mid-way between the extremes of right and left.
Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they
make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and
far left are roughly equally wrong.
You can distinguish intentional from accidental moderates by the
distribution of their opinions. If the far left opinion on some
matter is 0 and the far right opinion 100, an intentional moderate's
opinion on every question will be near 50. Whereas an accidental
moderate's opinions will be scattered over a broad range, but will,
like those of the intentional moderate, average to about 50.
Intentional moderates are similar to those on the far left and the
far right in that their opinions are, in a sense, not their own.
The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the
right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk. You don't get to pick
and choose. Your opinions about taxation can be predicted from your
opinions about sex. And although intentional moderates
might seem to be the opposite of ideologues, their beliefs (though
in their case the word "positions" might be more accurate) are also
acquired in bulk. If the median opinion shifts to the right or left,
the intentional moderate must shift with it. Otherwise they stop
being moderate.
Accidental moderates, on the other hand, not only choose their own
answers, but choose their own questions. They may not care at all
about questions that the left and right both think are terribly
important. So you can only even measure the politics of an accidental
moderate from the intersection of the questions they care about and
those the left and right care about, and this can
sometimes be vanishingly small.
It is not merely a manipulative rhetorical trick to say "if you're
not with us, you're against us," but often simply false.
Moderates are sometimes derided as cowards, particularly by
the extreme left. But while it may be accurate to call intentional
moderates cowards, openly being an accidental moderate requires the
most courage of all, because you get attacked from both right and
left, and you don't have the comfort of being an orthodox member
of a large group to sustain you.
Nearly all the most impressive people I know are accidental moderates.
If I knew a lot of professional athletes, or people in the entertainment
business, that might be different. Being on the far left or far
right doesn't affect how fast you run or how well you sing. But
someone who works with ideas has to be independent-minded to do it
well.
Or more precisely, you have to be independent-minded about the ideas
you work with. You could be mindlessly doctrinaire in your politics
and still be a good mathematician. In the 20th century, a lot of
very smart people were Marxists  just no one who was smart about
the subjects Marxism involves. But if the ideas you use in your
work intersect with the politics of your time, you have two choices:
be an accidental moderate, or be mediocre.
Notes
[1] It's possible in theory for one side to be entirely right and
the other to be entirely wrong. Indeed, ideologues must always
believe this is the case. But historically it rarely has been.
[2] For some reason the far right tend to ignore moderates rather
than despise them as backsliders. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it
means that the far right is less ideological than the far left. Or
perhaps that they are more confident, or more resigned, or simply
more disorganized. I just don't know.
[3] Having heretical opinions doesn't mean you have to express
them openly. It may be
easier to have them
if you don't.
Thanks
to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston,
Amjad Masad, Ryan Petersen, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.
Japanese Translation


Are Software Patents Evil?
March 2006
(This essay is derived from a talk at Google.)
A few weeks ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted four
patents
.
This was all the more surprising
because I'd only applied for three.  The patents aren't mine, of
course.  They were assigned to Viaweb, and became Yahoo's when they
bought us.  But the news set me thinking about the question of
software patents generally.
Patents are a hard problem.  I've had to advise most of the startups
we've funded about them, and despite years of experience I'm still
not always sure I'm giving the right advice.
One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against
software patents, you're against patents in general.  Gradually our
machines consist more and more of software.  Things that used to
be done with levers and cams and gears are now done with loops and
trees and closures.  There's nothing special about physical embodiments
of control systems that should make them patentable, and the software
equivalent not.
Unfortunately, patent law is inconsistent on this point.  Patent
law in most countries says that algorithms aren't patentable.  This
rule is left over from a time when "algorithm" meant something like
the Sieve of Eratosthenes.  In 1800, people could not see as readily
as we can that a great many patents on mechanical objects were
really patents on the algorithms they embodied.
Patent lawyers still have to pretend that's what they're doing when
they patent algorithms.  You must not use the word "algorithm" in
the title of a patent application, just as you must not use the
word "essays" in the title of a book.  If you want to patent an
algorithm, you have to frame it as a computer system executing that algorithm.
Then it's mechanical; phew.  The default euphemism for algorithm
is "system and method."  Try a patent search for that phrase and
see how many results you get.
Since software patents are no different from hardware patents,
people who say "software patents are evil" are saying simply "patents
are evil."  So why do so many people complain about software patents
specifically?
I think the problem is more with the patent office than the concept
of software patents.  Whenever software meets government, bad things
happen, because software changes fast and government changes slow.
The patent office has been overwhelmed by both the volume and the
novelty of applications for software patents, and as a result they've
made a lot of mistakes.
The most common is to grant patents that shouldn't be granted.  To
be patentable, an invention has to be more than new.  It also has
to be non-obvious.  And this, especially, is where the USPTO has
been dropping the ball. Slashdot has an icon that expresses the
problem vividly: a knife and fork with the words "patent pending"
superimposed.
The scary thing is, this is the
only
icon they have for
patent stories.  Slashdot readers now take it for granted that a
story about a patent will be about a bogus patent.
That's how bad the problem has become.
The problem with Amazon's notorious one-click patent, for example,
is not that it's a software patent, but that it's obvious.  Any
online store that kept people's shipping addresses would have
implemented this.  The reason Amazon did it first was not that they
were especially smart, but because they were one of the earliest
sites with enough clout to force customers to log in before they
could buy something.
[
1
]
We, as hackers, know the USPTO is letting people patent the knives
and forks of our world.  The problem is, the USPTO are not hackers.
They're probably good at judging new inventions for casting steel
or grinding lenses, but they don't understand software yet.
At this point an optimist would be tempted to add "but they will
eventually."  Unfortunately that might not be true.  The problem
with software patents is an instance of a more general one: the
patent office takes a while to understand new technology.  If so,
this problem will only get worse, because the rate of technological
change seems to be increasing.  In thirty years, the patent office
may understand the sort of things we now patent as software, but
there will be other new types of inventions they understand even
less.
Applying for a patent is a negotiation.  You generally apply for a
broader patent than you think you'll be granted, and the examiners
reply by throwing out some of your claims and granting others.  So
I don't really blame Amazon for applying for the one-click patent.
The big mistake was the patent office's, for not insisting on
something narrower, with real technical content.  By granting such
an over-broad patent, the USPTO in effect slept with Amazon on the
first date.  Was Amazon supposed to say no?
Where Amazon went over to the dark side was not in applying for the
patent, but in enforcing it.  A lot of companies (Microsoft, for
example) have been granted large numbers of preposterously over-broad
patents,  but they keep them mainly for defensive purposes.  Like
nuclear weapons, the main role of big companies' patent portfolios
is to threaten anyone who attacks them with a counter-suit.  Amazon's
suit against Barnes & Noble was thus the equivalent of a nuclear
first strike.
That suit probably hurt Amazon more than it helped them.  Barnes &
Noble was a lame site; Amazon would have crushed them anyway.  To
attack a rival they could have ignored, Amazon put a lasting black
mark on their own reputation.  Even now I think if you asked hackers
to free-associate about Amazon, the one-click patent would turn up
in the first ten topics.
Google clearly doesn't feel that merely holding patents is evil.
They've applied for a lot of them.  Are they hypocrites?  Are patents
evil?
There are really two variants of that question, and people answering
it often aren't clear in their own minds which they're answering.
There's a narrow variant: is it bad, given the current legal system,
to apply for patents? and also a broader one: is it bad that the
current legal system allows patents?
These are separate questions.  For example, in preindustrial societies
like medieval Europe, when someone attacked you, you didn't call
the police.  There were no police.  When attacked, you were supposed
to fight back, and there were conventions about how to do it.  Was
this wrong?  That's two questions: was it wrong to take justice
into your own hands, and was it wrong that you had to?  We tend to
say yes to the second, but no to the first.  If no one else will
defend you, you have to defend yourself.
[
2
]
The situation with patents is similar.  Business is a kind of
ritualized warfare.  Indeed, it evolved from actual warfare: most
early traders switched on the fly from merchants to pirates depending
on how strong you seemed.  In business there are certain rules
describing how companies may and may not compete with one another,
and someone deciding that they're going to play by their own rules
is missing the point.  Saying "I'm not going to apply for patents
just because everyone else does" is not like saying "I'm not going
to lie just because everyone else does."  It's more like saying
"I'm not going to use TCP/IP just because everyone else does." Oh
yes you are.
A closer comparison might be someone seeing a hockey game for the
first time, realizing with shock that the players were
deliberately
bumping into one another, and deciding that one would on no account
be so rude when playing hockey oneself.
Hockey allows checking.  It's part of the game.  If your team refuses
to do it, you simply lose.  So it is in business.  Under the present
rules, patents are part of the game.
What does that mean in practice?  We tell the startups we fund not
to worry about infringing patents, because startups rarely get sued
for patent infringement.  There are only two reasons someone might
sue you: for money, or to prevent you from competing with them.
Startups are too poor to be worth suing for money. And in practice
they don't seem to get sued much by competitors, either.  They don't
get sued by other startups because (a) patent suits are an expensive
distraction, and (b) since the other startups are as young as they
are, their patents probably haven't issued yet.
[
3
]
Nor do startups,
at least in the software business, seem to get sued much by established
competitors.  Despite all the patents Microsoft holds, I don't know
of an instance where they sued a startup for patent infringement.
Companies like Microsoft and Oracle don't win by winning lawsuits.
That's too uncertain.  They win by locking competitors out of their
sales channels.  If you do manage to threaten them, they're more
likely to buy you than sue you.
When you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller
ones, it's usually a big company on the way down, grasping at
straws.  For example, Unisys's attempts to enforce their patent on
LZW compression.  When you see a big company threatening patent
suits, sell.  When a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign
they've lost the real battle, for users.
A company that sues competitors for patent infringement is like
a defender who has been beaten so thoroughly that he turns to plead
with the referee.  You don't do that if you can still reach the
ball, even if you genuinely believe you've been fouled.  So a company
threatening patent suits is a company in
trouble
.
When we were working on Viaweb, a bigger company in the e-commerce
business was granted a patent on online ordering, or something like
that.  I got a call from a VP there asking if we'd like to license
it.  I replied that I thought the patent was completely bogus, and
would never hold up in court.  "Ok," he replied.  "So, are you guys
hiring?"
If your startup grows big enough, however, you'll start to get sued,
no matter what you do.  If you go public, for example, you'll be
sued by multiple patent trolls who hope you'll pay them off to go
away.  More on them later.
In other words, no one will sue you for patent infringement till
you have money, and once you have money, people will sue you whether
they have grounds to or not.  So I advise fatalism.  Don't waste
your time worrying about patent infringement.  You're probably
violating a patent every time you tie your shoelaces.  At the start,
at least, just worry about making something great and getting lots
of users.  If you grow to the point where anyone considers you worth
attacking, you're doing well.
We do advise the companies we fund to apply for patents, but not
so they can sue competitors.  Successful startups either get bought
or grow into big companies.  If a startup wants to grow into a big
company, they should apply for patents to build up the patent
portfolio they'll need to maintain an armed truce with other big
companies.  If they want to get bought, they should apply for patents
because patents are part of the mating dance with acquirers.
Most startups that succeed do it by getting bought, and most acquirers
care about patents.  Startup acquisitions are usually a build-vs-buy
decision for the acquirer.  Should we buy this little startup or
build our own?  And two things, especially, make them decide not
to build their own: if you already have a large and rapidly growing
user base, and if you have a fairly solid patent application on
critical parts of your software.
There's a third reason big companies should prefer buying to building:
that if they built their own, they'd screw it up.  But few big
companies are smart enough yet to admit this to themselves.  It's
usually the acquirer's engineers who are asked how hard it would
be for the company to build their own, and they overestimate their
abilities.
[
4
]
A patent seems to change the balance.  It gives the
acquirer an excuse to admit they couldn't copy what you're doing.
It may also help them to grasp what's special about your technology.
Frankly, it surprises me how small a role patents play in the
software business.  It's kind of ironic, considering all the dire
things experts say about software patents stifling innovation, but
when one looks closely at the software business, the most striking
thing is how little patents seem to matter.
In other fields, companies regularly sue competitors for patent
infringement.  For example, the airport baggage scanning business
was for many years a cozy duopoly shared between two companies,
InVision and L-3.  In 2002 a startup called Reveal appeared, with
new technology that let them build scanners a third the size.  They
were sued for patent infringement before they'd even released a
product.
You rarely hear that kind of story in our world.  The one example
I've found is, embarrassingly enough, Yahoo, which filed a patent
suit against a gaming startup called Xfire in 2005.  Xfire doesn't
seem to be a very big deal, and it's hard to say why Yahoo felt
threatened.  Xfire's VP of engineering had worked at Yahoo on similar
stuff-- in fact, he was listed as an inventor on the patent Yahoo
sued over-- so perhaps there was something personal about it.  My
guess is that someone at Yahoo goofed.  At any rate they didn't
pursue the suit very vigorously.
Why do patents play so small a role in software?  I can think of
three possible reasons.
One is that software is so complicated that patents by themselves
are not worth very much.  I may be maligning other fields here, but
it seems that in most types of engineering you can hand the details
of some new technique to a group of medium-high quality people and
get the desired result.  For example, if someone develops a new
process for smelting ore that gets a better yield, and you assemble
a team of qualified experts and tell them about it, they'll be able
to get the same yield.  This doesn't seem to work in software.
Software is so subtle and unpredictable that "qualified experts"
don't get you very far.
That's why we rarely hear phrases like "qualified expert" in the
software business.  What that level of ability can get you is, say,
to make your software compatible with some other piece of software--
in eight months, at enormous cost.  To do anything harder you need
individual brilliance.  If you assemble a team of qualified experts
and tell them to make a new web-based email program, they'll get
their asses kicked by a team of inspired nineteen year olds.
Experts can implement, but they can't
design
.
Or rather, expertise in implementation is the only kind most people,
including the experts themselves, can measure.
[
5
]
But design is a definite skill.  It's not just an airy intangible.
Things always seem intangible when you don't understand them.
Electricity seemed an airy intangible to most people in 1800.  Who
knew there was so much to know about it?  So it is with design.
Some people are good at it and some people are bad at it, and there's
something very tangible they're good or bad at.
The reason design counts so much in software is probably that there
are fewer constraints than on physical things.  Building physical
things is expensive and dangerous.  The space of possible choices
is smaller; you tend to have to work as part of a larger group; and
you're subject to a lot of regulations.  You don't have any of that
if you and a couple friends decide to create a new web-based
application.
Because there's so much scope for design in software, a successful
application tends to be way more than the sum of its patents.  What
protects little companies from being copied by bigger competitors
is not just their patents, but the thousand little things the big
company will get wrong if they try.
The second reason patents don't count for much in our world is that
startups rarely attack big companies head-on, the way Reveal did.
In the software business, startups beat established companies by
transcending them.  Startups don't build desktop word processing
programs to compete with Microsoft Word.
[
6
]
They build Writely.
If this paradigm is crowded, just wait for the next one; they run
pretty frequently on this route.
Fortunately for startups, big companies are extremely good at denial.
If you take the trouble to attack them from an oblique angle, they'll
meet you half-way and maneuver to keep you in their blind spot.  To
sue a startup would mean admitting it was dangerous, and that often
means seeing something the big company doesn't want to see.  IBM
used to sue its mainframe competitors regularly, but they didn't
bother much about the microcomputer industry because they didn't
want to see the threat it posed.  Companies building web based apps
are similarly protected from Microsoft, which even now doesn't want
to imagine a world in which Windows is irrelevant.
The third reason patents don't seem to matter very much in software
is public opinion-- or rather, hacker opinion.  In a recent
interview
,
Steve Ballmer coyly left open the possibility of attacking Linux
on patent grounds.  But I doubt Microsoft would ever be so stupid.
They'd face the mother of all boycotts.  And not just from the
technical community in general; a lot of their own people would
rebel.
Good hackers care a lot about matters of principle, and they are
highly mobile.  If a company starts misbehaving, smart people won't
work there.  For some reason this seems to be more true in software
than other businesses.  I don't think it's because hackers have
intrinsically higher principles so much as that their skills are
easily transferrable.  Perhaps we can split the difference and say
that mobility gives hackers the luxury of being principled.
Google's "don't be evil" policy may for this reason be the most
valuable thing they've discovered.  It's very constraining in some
ways.  If Google does do something evil, they get doubly whacked
for it: once for whatever they did, and again for hypocrisy.  But
I think it's worth it.  It helps them to hire the best people, and
it's better, even from a purely selfish point of view, to be
constrained by principles than by stupidity.
(I wish someone would get this point across to the present
administration.)
I'm not sure what the proportions are of the preceding three
ingredients, but the custom among the big companies seems to be not
to sue the small ones, and the startups are mostly too busy and too
poor to sue one another.  So despite the huge number of software
patents there's not a lot of suing going on.  With one exception:
patent trolls.
Patent trolls are companies consisting mainly of lawyers whose whole
business is to accumulate patents and threaten to sue companies who
actually make things.  Patent trolls, it seems safe to say, are
evil.  I feel a bit stupid saying that, because when you're saying
something that Richard Stallman and Bill Gates would both agree
with, you must be perilously close to tautologies.
The CEO of Forgent, one of the most notorious patent trolls, says
that what his company does is "the American way." Actually that's
not true. The American way is to make money by
creating wealth
, not by suing people.
[
7
]
What companies like Forgent do is actually the proto-industrial
way.  In the period just before the industrial revolution, some of
the greatest fortunes in countries like England and France were
made by courtiers who extracted some lucrative right from the crown--
like the right to collect taxes on the import of silk-- and then
used this to squeeze money from the merchants in that business.  So
when people compare patent trolls to the mafia, they're more right
than they know, because the mafia too are not merely bad, but bad
specifically in the sense of being an obsolete business model.
Patent trolls seem to have caught big companies by surprise.  In
the last couple years they've extracted hundreds of millions of
dollars from them.  Patent trolls are hard to fight precisely because
they create nothing.  Big companies are safe from being sued by
other big companies because they can threaten a counter-suit.  But
because patent trolls don't make anything, there's nothing they can
be sued for.  I predict this loophole will get closed fairly quickly,
at least by legal standards.  It's clearly an abuse of the system,
and the victims are powerful.
[
8
]
But evil as patent trolls are, I don't think they hamper innovation
much.  They don't sue till a startup has made money, and by that
point the innovation that generated it has already happened.  I
can't think of a startup that avoided working on some problem because
of patent trolls.
So much for hockey as the game is played now.  What about the more
theoretical question of whether hockey would be a better game without
checking?  Do patents encourage or discourage innovation?
This is a very hard question to answer in the general case.  People
write whole books on the topic.  One of my main hobbies is the
history of technology, and even though I've studied the subject for
years, it would take me several weeks of research to be able to say
whether patents have in general been a net win.
One thing I can say is that 99.9% of the people who express opinions
on the subject do it not based on such research, but out of a kind
of religious conviction.  At least, that's the polite way of putting
it; the colloquial version involves speech coming out of organs not
designed for that purpose.
Whether they encourage innovation or not, patents were at least
intended to.  You don't get a patent for nothing.  In return for
the exclusive right to use an idea, you have to
publish
it,
and it was largely to encourage such openness that patents were
established.
Before patents, people protected ideas by keeping them secret.  With
patents, central governments said, in effect, if you tell everyone
your idea, we'll protect it for you.  There is a parallel here to
the rise of civil order, which happened at roughly the same time.
Before central governments were powerful enough to enforce order,
rich people had private armies.  As governments got more powerful,
they gradually compelled magnates to cede most responsibility for
protecting them.  (Magnates still have bodyguards, but no longer
to protect them from other magnates.)
Patents, like police, are involved in many abuses.  But in both
cases the default is something worse. The choice is not "patents
or freedom?" any more than it is "police or freedom?" The actual
questions are respectively "patents or secrecy?" and "police or
gangs?"
As with gangs, we have some idea what secrecy would be like, because
that's how things used to be.  The economy of medieval Europe was
divided up into little tribes, each jealously guarding their
privileges and secrets.  In Shakespeare's time, "mystery" was
synonymous with "craft."   Even today we can see an echo of the
secrecy of medieval guilds, in the now pointless secrecy of the
Masons.
The most memorable example of medieval industrial secrecy is probably
Venice, which forbade glassblowers to leave the city, and sent
assassins after those who tried.  We might like to think we wouldn't
go so far, but the movie industry has already tried to pass
laws
prescribing three year prison terms just for putting movies on
public networks.  Want to try a frightening thought experiment? If
the movie industry could have any law they wanted, where would they
stop?  Short of the death penalty, one assumes, but how close would
they get?
Even worse than the spectacular abuses might be the overall decrease
in efficiency that would accompany increased secrecy.  As anyone
who has dealt with organizations that operate on a "need to know"
basis can attest, dividing information up into little cells is
terribly inefficient.  The flaw in the "need to know" principle is
that you don't
know
who needs to know something.  An idea
from one area might spark a great discovery in another.  But the
discoverer doesn't know he needs to know it.
If secrecy were the only protection for ideas, companies wouldn't
just have to be secretive with other companies; they'd have to be
secretive internally.  This would encourage what is already the
worst trait of big companies.
I'm not saying secrecy would be worse than patents, just that we
couldn't discard patents for free.  Businesses would become more
secretive to compensate, and in some fields this might get ugly.
Nor am I defending the current patent system.  There is clearly a
lot that's broken about it.   But the breakage seems to affect
software less than most other fields.
In the software business I know from experience whether patents
encourage or discourage innovation, and the answer is the type that
people who like to argue about public policy least like to hear:
they don't affect innovation much, one way or the other.  Most
innovation in the software business happens in startups, and startups
should simply ignore other companies' patents.  At least, that's
what we advise, and we bet money on that advice.
The only real role of patents, for most startups, is as an element
of the mating dance with acquirers.  There patents do help a little.
And so they do encourage innovation indirectly, in that they give
more power to startups, which is where, pound for pound, the most
innovation happens.  But even in the mating dance, patents are of
secondary importance.  It matters more to make something great and
get a lot of users.
Notes
[
1
]
You have to be careful here, because a great discovery often
seems obvious in retrospect.  One-click ordering, however, is not
such a discovery.
[
2
]
"Turn the other cheek" skirts the issue; the critical question
is not how to deal with slaps, but sword thrusts.
[
3
]
Applying for a patent is now very slow, but it might actually
be bad if that got fixed.  At the moment the time it takes to get
a patent is conveniently just longer than the time it takes a startup
to succeed or fail.
[
4
]
Instead of the canonical "could you build this?" maybe the corp
dev guys should be asking "will you build this?" or even "why haven't
you already built this?"
[
5
]
Design ability is so hard to measure that you can't even trust
the design world's internal standards.  You can't assume that someone
with a degree in design is any good at design, or that an eminent
designer is any better than his peers.  If that worked, any company
could build products as good as Apple's just by hiring
sufficiently qualified designers.
[
6
]
If anyone wanted to try, we'd be interested to hear from them.
I suspect it's one of those things that's not as hard as everyone
assumes.
[
7
]
Patent trolls can't even claim, like speculators, that they
"create" liquidity.
[
8
]
If big companies don't want to wait for the government to take
action, there is a way to fight back themselves.  For a long time
I thought there wasn't, because there was nothing to grab onto.
But there is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers.  Big technology
companies between them generate a lot of legal business.  If they
agreed among themselves never to do business with any firm employing
anyone who had worked for a patent troll, either as an employee or
as outside counsel, they could probably starve the trolls of the
lawyers they need.
Thanks
to Dan Bloomberg, Paul Buchheit, Sarah Harlin,
Jessica Livingston, and Peter Norvig
for reading drafts of this, to Joel Lehrer and Peter Eng for answering
my questions about patents, and to Ankur Pansari for inviting me
to speak.
Japanese Translation


@ahistoryinart I was wondering who that Hockney painting reminded me of. https://t.co/6O5zkwwhHz

You'd think nothing would be more obvious than to avoid policies that will kill large numbers of children. You'd think.

@RealTimeWWII When my younger son was little he called his crib his sleeping cage.

@ryangrim Is this really true @FrancisSuarez? I would not have thought you'd do something like that.

@HumanoidHistory Reminds me of @newsillustrator's drawings.

@FibNewtonian Get someone I know to introduce you.

@FintechKristen @Rainmaker1973 I had no idea till now. It's a coincidence.

@JeremyBrace Not in this case.

Replying to a cold email you sent me in order to get it back to the top of my inbox is not the way to my heart.

@kn_owled_ge Yes. Seems far more likely it was unintentional though; if it had been intentional, they wouldn't have done it right there in Wuhan.


She's eight.

@dry_while They mentioned that too but I ran out of space.

@dimireadsthings The new mayor and supervisors had only had 2 months to fix things at that point. It would be surprising if things weren't significantly better by now.

The Trump administration has suspended the funding of Terence Tao and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA. https://t.co/jc4W57E4IT

@rob_soko I don't know how good they are. But even if I was worse I'd still want to do it.

@opus131 That made my day to read!

If she writes something long enough and you want to encourage her further, try out https://t.co/XgbcE121nQ. That's what we use.

@dimireadsthings When did you see it?

@Chad_Kosciusko I have a vague idea what you might be saying, but I'm not sure. And in any case, I want you to say it openly. Or are you too much of a coward?

@Chad_Kosciusko What do you mean?

@PaulJeffries Both.


@ATabarrok Beat Terrence Tao?

@AlperenBelgic Good luck!

Romanian voters just did the same thing as Canadian and Australian voters. Trump may be dragging down the US, but he seems to be saving the rest of the world.

@cremieuxrecueil Is it bullshit?

@Ben_Reinhardt The first one is correct. The best people have lots of options, and you're probably deluded if you think there aren't others a smart person would find equally attractive.

@migueldeicaza I didn't mean anything is being censored. I meant the site has a reputation for being grumpy and intolerant.

@migueldeicaza Funny and censorious at the same time? That's a rare combination...

@lefineder @FraserNelson Interesting. Thanks!

@farhadnoorzay I *hope* they're not the people we interact with. I'm guessing the world we work in has lots of filters we don't consciously notice but that keep most of these people out. I hope.

@FraserNelson Is there data from before 1895?


@Metabrate The boys used to watch Family Guy. To be honest I'm relieved I don't have to overhear it anymore.

@markojak What they are is spineless. When wokeness has the upper hand, they give in to that, and when Trump does, they give in to him.

Jessica just cancelled our Disney+ subscription because of the shameful way they caved to the Trump administration over Jimmy Kimmel. This is a way to be heard, and save money too.

@patrickc Has their revenue grown at the same rate? If so perhaps there's some limit at which big companies can grow and they're all at it.

If not, then there's presumably some kind of contagion of market cap expectations between what investors view as similar companies.

Australian doctor in Gaza:

"The bombing is ongoing, and every half an hour to an hour we have another mass casualty that arrives in huge numbers because the whole building is destroyed on top of patients."

@AnechoicMedia_ Getting venture funding from a reputable firm isn't fake. It means experts are betting their own future paychecks on you.

@chazbot_ No doubt true, but I suspect some of the people doing this are doing it as a covert way of seeking ethnic diversity.

@bscholl They were round till they became turbofans.

In this particular case the result could be disastrous for Britain. Kids worrying that Oxford and Cambridge will discriminate against them are among the smartest in the country. And if they go to university in the US, they're likely to stay there.

As so often happens, the social engineers at Oxford and Cambridge overestimated their power to remake society. They didn't realize that highly motivated people would be able to find ways around their new rules.


Why to Move to a Startup Hub
October 2007
After the last
talk
I gave, one of the organizers
got up on the
stage to deliver an impromptu rebuttal.  That never happened before.
I only heard the first few sentences, but that was enough to tell
what I said that upset him: that startups would do better if they
moved to Silicon Valley.
This conference was in London, and most of the audience seemed to
be from the UK.  So saying startups should move to Silicon Valley
seemed like a nationalistic remark: an obnoxious American telling
them that if they wanted to do things right they should all just
move to America.
Actually I'm less American than I seem.  I didn't say so, but I'm
British by birth.  And just as Jews are ex officio allowed to tell
Jewish jokes, I don't feel like I have to bother being diplomatic
with a British audience.
The idea that startups would do better to move to Silicon Valley
is not even a nationalistic one.
[
1
]
It's the same thing I say to
startups in the US.  Y Combinator alternates between coasts every
6 months. Every other funding cycle is in Boston.  And even though
Boston is the second biggest startup hub in the US (and the world),
we tell the startups from those cycles that their best bet is to
move to Silicon Valley.  If that's true of Boston, it's even more
true of every other city.
This is about cities, not countries.
And I think I can prove I'm right.  You can easily reduce the
opposing argument ad what most people would agree was absurdum.
Few would be willing to claim that it doesn't matter at all where
a startup is—that a startup operating out of a small agricultural
town wouldn't benefit from moving to a startup hub.  Most people
could see how it might be helpful to be in a place where there was
infrastructure for startups, accumulated knowledge about how to
make them work, and other people trying to do it.  And yet whatever
argument you use to prove that startups don't need to move from
London to Silicon Valley could equally well be used to prove startups
don't need to move from smaller towns to London.
The difference between cities is a matter of degree.  And if, as
nearly everyone who knows agrees, startups are better off in Silicon
Valley than Boston, then they're better off in Silicon Valley than
everywhere else too.
I realize I might seem to have a vested interest in this conclusion,
because startups that move to the US might do it through Y Combinator.
But the American startups we've funded will attest that I say the
same thing to them.
I'm not claiming of course that every startup has to go to Silicon
Valley to succeed.  Just that all other things being equal, the
more of a startup hub a place is, the better startups will do there.
But other considerations can outweigh the advantages of moving.
I'm not saying founders with families should uproot them to move
halfway around the world; that might be too much of a distraction.
Immigration difficulties might be another reason to stay put.
Dealing with immigration problems is like raising money: for some
reason it seems to consume all your attention.  A startup can't
afford much of that.  One Canadian startup we funded spent about 6
months working on moving to the US.  Eventually they just gave up,
because they couldn't afford to take so much time away from working
on their software.
(If another country wanted to establish a rival to Silicon Valley,
the single best thing they could do might be to create a special
visa for startup founders.  US immigration policy is one of Silicon
Valley's biggest weaknesses.)
If your startup is connected to a specific industry, you may be
better off in one of its centers.  A startup doing something related
to entertainment might want to be in New York or LA.
And finally, if a good investor has committed to fund
you if you stay where you are, you should probably stay.  Finding
investors is hard.  You generally shouldn't pass up a definite
funding offer to move.
[
2
]
In fact, the quality of the investors may be the main advantage of
startup hubs.  Silicon Valley investors are noticeably more aggressive
than Boston ones.  Over and over, I've seen startups we've funded
snatched by west coast investors out from under the noses of Boston
investors who saw them first but acted too slowly.  At this year's
Boston Demo Day, I told the audience that this happened every year,
so if they saw a startup they liked, they should make them an offer.
And yet within a month it had happened again: an aggressive west
coast VC who had met the founder of a YC-funded startup a week
before beat out a Boston VC who had known him for years.  By the
time the Boston VC grasped what was happening, the deal was already
gone.
Boston investors will admit they're more conservative.  Some want
to believe this comes from the city's prudent Yankee character.
But Occam's razor suggests the truth is less flattering.  Boston
investors are probably more conservative than Silicon Valley investors
for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than
Boston ones.  They don't understand startups as well.
West coast investors aren't bolder because they're irresponsible
cowboys, or because the good weather makes them optimistic.  They're
bolder because they know what they're doing.  They're the skiers
who ski on the diamond slopes.  Boldness is the essence of venture
investing.  The way you get big returns is not by trying to avoid
losses, but by trying to ensure you get some of the big hits. And
the big hits often look risky at first.
Like Facebook.  Facebook was started in Boston.  Boston VCs had the
first shot at them.  But they said no, so Facebook moved to Silicon
Valley and raised money there.  The partner who turned them down
now says that "may turn out to have been a mistake."
Empirically, boldness wins.  If the aggressive ways of west coast
investors are going to come back to bite them, it has been a long
time coming.  Silicon Valley has been pulling ahead of Boston since
the 1970s.  If there was going to be a comeuppance for the west
coast investors, the bursting of the Bubble would have been it.
But since then the west coast has just pulled further ahead.
West coast investors are confident enough of their judgement to act
boldly; east coast investors, not so much; but anyone who thinks
east coast investors act that way out of prudence should see the
frantic reactions of an east coast VC in the process of losing a
deal to a west coast one.
In addition to the concentration that comes from specialization,
startup hubs are also markets.  And markets are usually centralized.
Even now, when traders could be anywhere, they cluster in a few
cities.  It's hard to say exactly what it is about face to face
contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet
been duplicated by technology.
Walk down University Ave at the right time, and you might overhear
five different people talking on the phone about deals.  In fact,
this is part of the reason Y Combinator is in Boston half the time:
it's hard to stand that year round.  But though it can sometimes
be annoying to be surrounded by people who only think about one
thing, it's the place to be if that one thing is what you're trying
to do.
I was talking recently to someone who works on search at Google.
He knew a lot of people at Yahoo, so he was in a good position to
compare the two companies.  I asked him why Google was better at
search.  He said it wasn't anything specific Google did, but simply
that they understood search so much better.
And that's why startups thrive in startup hubs like Silicon Valley.
Startups are a very specialized business, as specialized as diamond
cutting.  And in startup hubs they understand it.
Notes
[
1
]
The nationalistic idea is the converse: that startups should
stay in a certain city because of the country it's in.  If you
really have a "one world" viewpoint, deciding to move from London
to Silicon Valley is no different from deciding to move from Chicago
to Silicon Valley.
[
2
]
An investor who merely seems like he will fund you, however,
you can ignore.  Seeming like they will fund you one day is the way
investors say No.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Harjeet Taggar, and Kulveer
Taggar for reading drafts of this.
Comment
on this essay.
Japanese Translation


Coronavirus and Credibility
April 2020
I recently saw a
video
of TV journalists and politicians confidently
saying that the coronavirus would be no worse than the flu. What
struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed, but how
daring. How could they feel safe saying such things?
The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get
caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false
predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and
get away with it, because the things they make predictions about
either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way
out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember
what they said.
An epidemic is different. It falsifies your predictions rapidly and
unequivocally.
But epidemics are rare enough that these people clearly
didn't realize this was even a possibility. Instead they just
continued to use their ordinary m.o., which, as the epidemic has
made clear, is to talk confidently about things they don't
understand.
An event like this is thus a uniquely powerful way of taking people's
measure. As Warren Buffett said, "It's only when the tide goes out
that you learn who's been swimming naked." And the tide has just
gone out like never before.
Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because
this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have. I hope.
Finnish Translation
German Translation
French Translation


I'm voting for the Harvard Board of Overseers. In past years I looked for the few who didn't have woke shibboleths in their bios. This year either the candidates have changed or (more likely) the way they want to present themselves has, because none have them.

@Anthony_Bonato It has to be pronounced without the serifs though.

@SquishyCoder Large enough that drug development isn't slowed down.

@waitbutwhy Having one's head tilted back seems a bad sign.

@rafidhoda If they're truly equally good then obviously the latter one is more likely to succeed. No one thinks kids take no time. If they took no time it wouldn't be necessary to tell people to put them first.

@sama It would be very interesting to see a page where you got answers from both the old and current versions side by side. In fact you yourselves would probably learn something from it.

@abarrallen It's a bad sign that they're still so rare that we point them out when we see them. Whereas Tesla cars are ubiquitous.

@MacaesBruno I've never once heard a Brexit supporter mention this.

@stephlepp It's what I did. Having a second child was one of the main reasons I retired as president of YC in 2014.

I heard this directly from someone who works for a biotech startup. Layoffs at the FDA have slowed the development of new drugs.


How Y Combinator Started
March 2012
Y Combinator's 7th birthday was March 11.   As usual we were so
busy we didn't notice till a few days after.  I don't think we've
ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday.
On March 11 2005, Jessica and I were walking home from dinner in
Harvard Square.  Jessica was working at an investment bank at the
time, but she didn't like it much, so she had interviewed for a job
as director of marketing at a Boston VC fund.  The VC fund was doing
what now seems a comically familiar thing for a VC fund to do:
taking a long time to make up their mind.  Meanwhile I had been
telling Jessica all the things they should change about the VC
business  essentially the ideas now underlying Y Combinator:
investors
should be making more, smaller investments, they should be funding
hackers instead of suits, they should be willing to fund younger
founders, etc.
At the time I had been thinking about doing some angel investing.  I
had just given a talk to the undergraduate computer club at Harvard
about
how to start a
startup
, and it
hit me afterward that although I had always
meant to do angel investing, 7 years had now passed since I got
enough money to do it, and I still hadn't started.  I had also
been thinking about ways to work with Robert Morris and Trevor
Blackwell again.  A few hours before I had
sent them an email trying to figure out what we could do together.
Between Harvard Square and my house the idea gelled.  We'd start
our own investment firm and Jessica could work for that instead.
As we turned onto Walker Street we decided to do it.  I agreed to
put $100k into the new fund and Jessica agreed to quit her job to
work for it.  Over the next couple days I recruited Robert
and Trevor, who put in another $50k each.  So YC
started with $200k.
Jessica was so happy to be able to quit her job and start her own
company that I took her
picture
when we got home.
The company wasn't called Y Combinator yet. At first we called it
Cambridge Seed.  But that name never saw the light of day, because
by the time we announced it a few days later, we'd changed the name
to Y Combinator.  We realized early on that what we were doing could
be national in scope and we didn't want a name that tied us to one
place.
Initially we only had part of the idea. We were going to do
seed funding with standardized terms.  Before YC, seed funding was
very haphazard. You'd get that first $10k from your friend's rich
uncle. The deal terms were often a disaster; often neither the
investor nor the founders nor the lawyer knew what the documents
should look like.  Facebook's early history as a Florida LLC shows
how random things could be in those days.  We were going to be
something there had not been before: a standard source of seed
funding.
We modelled YC on the seed funding we ourselves had taken
when we started Viaweb.  We started Viaweb with $10k we got from
our friend
Julian Weber
,
the husband of Idelle Weber, whose
painting class I took as a grad student at Harvard.  Julian knew
about business, but you would not describe him as a suit.  Among
other things he'd been president of the
National Lampoon
.  He was
also a lawyer, and got all our paperwork set up properly.  In return
for $10k, getting us set up as a company, teaching us what
business was about, and remaining calm in times of crisis, Julian
got 10% of Viaweb.  I remember thinking once what a good deal
Julian got.  And then a second later I realized that without
Julian, Viaweb would never have made it.  So even though it was a
good deal for him, it was a good deal for us too.  That's why I
knew there was room for something like Y Combinator.
Initially we didn't have what turned out to be the most important
idea: funding startups synchronously, instead of asynchronously as
it had always been done before.  Or rather we had the idea, but we
didn't realize its significance.  We decided very early
that the first thing we'd do would
be to fund a bunch of startups over the coming summer.  But we
didn't realize initially that this would be the way we'd do all our
investing.  The reason we began by funding a bunch of startups at
once was not that we thought it would be a better way to fund
startups, but simply because we wanted to learn how to be angel
investors, and a summer program for undergrads seemed the fastest
way to do it.  No one takes summer jobs that seriously.  The
opportunity cost for a bunch of undergrads to spend a summer working
on startups was low enough that we wouldn't feel guilty encouraging
them to do it.
We knew students would already be making plans for the summer, so
we did what we're always telling startups to do: we launched fast.
Here are the
initial
announcement
and
description
of what
was at the time called the Summer Founders Program.
We got lucky in that the length and structure of a summer program
turns out to be perfect for what we do.
The structure of the YC cycle is still almost identical to what
it was that first summer.
We also got lucky in who the first batch of founders were.  We never
expected to make any money from that first batch.  We thought of
the money we were investing as a combination of an educational expense
and a charitable donation.  But the
founders in the first batch turned out to be surprisingly good.
And great people too.  We're still friends with a lot of them today.
It's hard for people to realize now how inconsequential YC seemed at the
time.  I can't blame people who didn't take us seriously, because
we ourselves didn't take that first summer program seriously in the
very beginning.  But as the summer progressed we were increasingly
impressed by how well the startups were doing.  Other people started
to be impressed too.  Jessica and I invented a term, "the Y Combinator
effect," to describe the moment when the realization hit someone
that YC was not totally lame.  When people came to YC to speak
at the dinners that first summer, they came in the spirit of someone
coming to address a Boy Scout troop.  By the time they left the
building they were all saying some variant of "Wow, these
companies might actually succeed."
Now YC is well enough known that people are no longer surprised
when the companies we fund are legit, but it took a
while for reputation to catch up with reality.  That's one of the
reasons we especially like funding ideas that might be dismissed
as "toys"  because YC itself was dismissed as one initially.
When we saw how well it worked to fund companies synchronously,
we decided we'd keep doing that.  We'd fund two batches of
startups a year.
We funded the second batch in Silicon Valley.  That was
a last minute decision.  In retrospect I think what pushed me over
the edge was going to Foo Camp that fall.  The density of startup
people in the Bay Area was so much greater than in Boston, and the
weather was so nice.  I remembered that from living there in the
90s.  Plus I didn't want someone else to copy us and describe it
as the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley.  I wanted YC to be the Y Combinator
of Silicon Valley.  So doing the winter batch in California
seemed like one of those rare cases where the self-indulgent choice
and the ambitious one were the same.
If we'd had enough time to do what we wanted, Y Combinator would
have been in Berkeley.  That was our favorite part of the Bay Area.
But we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley.  We didn't
have time to get our own building anywhere. The only way to get
enough space in time was to convince Trevor to let us take over
part of his (as it then seemed) giant building in Mountain View.
Yet again we lucked out, because Mountain View turned out to be the
ideal place to put something like YC.  But even then we barely made
it.  The first dinner in California, we had to warn all the founders
not to touch the walls, because the paint was still wet.


@toly Being stubborn about your product vision is a dangerous territory. There are interpretations of that phrase that lead to good results, and others that lead to disaster.

https://t.co/k96mXit5Xl

@NEETWorldOrder Not if you're ambitious. Partying is not your goal if you're ambitious.

If you're ambitious, your twenties will be hard (because of how much you have left to learn) but exciting (because of how much energy you have), almost regardless of how much money your parents have.

@erikbryn @pietergaricano For example, it's also true that the 7.5m people in the Bay Area have created more tech value than the 283m living in US states not bordering the Pacific.

@erikbryn @pietergaricano True, but this is a somewhat unfair comparison, because technology is created in small, dense startup hubs, so comparing any such hub with a large region will make the region look bad per capita.

@BlickyIan The engines were that far forward? I never knew...

@LeeDavidEvansUK Ouch, that is truly terrible.

@DanielleFong It does feel that way but I think there are at least some quiet, reasonable people who see what you say and appreciate it. The question is how many. And of course you have to pick your battles.

@charliekirk11 If Twitter had existed in 1940 and you were on it, I know just what you'd have been saying.

@arrington @Techstars Neither do I. Not that I'd want to though...

@BowTiedCrocodil @robbystarbuck @X @elonmusk Random and selected to optimize some specific quality are in fact mutually exclusive.


@JosephOnions If my child were among the hostages, I wouldn't want other people's children to be starved to death. That's basic humanity.

It's strange to think it would be at all controversial to post this. But in a time of moral decay, the obvious becomes controversial. https://t.co/D181aCSlKl

@pitdesi My guess is that before calculators 3% of the population were really good at mental arithmetic, and now .3% are. The proportions will be similar with writing.

@jen_camille Kids will be taught this for surprisingly long, but it will increasingly be a matter of going through the motions of practicing some traditional but now mostly forgotten craft. It will be like when 7 year olds are "taught" to weave in their art class one week.

@meneton_tech Interesting point. People who specialize in writing prompts will be good writers, for however long prompting lasts.

Writing (and the kind of thinking that goes with it) will become like making pottery: little kids will do it in school, a few specialists will be amazingly good at it, and everyone else will be unable to do it at all.

Schools may think they're going to stem this tide, but we should be honest about what's going to happen. Writing is hard and people don't like doing hard things. So adults will stop doing it, and it will feel very artificial to most kids who are made to.

And indeed I worry that something much bigger will be lost when most people stop writing. It's not that big a loss if you don't weave your own cloth. But writing is thinking. So if people stop writing, that's a whole kind of thinking they'll stop doing.

This is a very common kind of knowledge to be lost as technology progresses. Very few people now know how to weave cloth or turn pots or make baskets. But it's strange to think that writing will now enter this category.

I just realized something most people are going to lose when (as they inevitably will) they start using AIs to write everything for them. They'll lose the knowledge of how writing is constructed.


Despite the fact that "wokeness" is now a word in constant use, Chrome still pretends it's a misspelling. https://t.co/hYgBzpOIN9

@StanleyBoxman I didn't mean it as a compliment.

@lofelle You're tricking people.

@brandonginsberg If it's done right there shouldn't be signs. The startup should just seem boring.

@StanleyBoxman Are these replies AI-generated? They have a certain similarity... https://t.co/Ba0TCkLiVQ

I love it when a startup is working on something so promising that we talk about strategies for seeming unimportant for as long as possible. Not just because the startup is promising, but because it's so funny.

@BrianBrackeen Incidentally, there's some implicit advice here for writers: if you write about things that (a) you've thought about a lot and (b) still surprise you, then they'll probably surprise most readers too. Or at least most intellectually honest readers...

@BrianBrackeen My threshold for writing about something is when it surprises me, and I was genuinely surprised when having kids showed me it was possible to answer a question I (and most other people) thought was unanswerable.

"Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders."

https://t.co/574vzIiTiK

@lefineder This is unreadable unless you treat it as a test of your ability to match gray scales.


@intellectronica Parents who understand this often help one another out by telling their friends' kids things that they know their parents would like to tell them.

@mrcunsolo Depends on the kid. My older son became a teenager at about 11, whereas the younger one is only hitting it now.

@sasuke___420 @aditmag This is called boarding school. It does seem to mitigate the problem a good deal.

@intellectronica There's a sharp difference between teenagers who are your kids and those who aren't. Teenagers who aren't your kids will listen to anything, but with those who are, the window is apparently extremely narrow.

@Yakuza_Crypto_ I'm optimistic about this kid, but I've heard estimates ranging from 17 to 25.

@aditmag My guess is: they're sufficiently confident not to treat everything their parents say as a threat to their independence.

@gheorgheiuga I only have one older kid, so I still don't have much practice dealing with teenagers yet. But at certain ages it seems like the most you can do is ask questions, and you have to make those seem as inconsequential as possible.

@KevinHenrikson It's already getting hard to be sure whether dishonesty or dementia is responsible for statements like this.

https://t.co/deQHxdNI6n

We're about to see (if we aren't seeing it already) what happens when shamelessness and dementia converge.

Something I told 13 yo: For the next 5 years or so, everything I suggest will be idiotic. But don't worry, I'll eventually start to become reasonable again.


@balajis I agree with you that Biden shouldn't have run for a second term. But this is *very* different from your original claim, that some Democratic cabal arranged for him to win the primary and then drop out, so that they could insert some other preselected candidate.

@clintbetts Not when there are two or more parties.

@ZyMazza @EndWokeness 2 is even, because every number greater than 1 is even.

@EndWokeness I despise the NYT as much as the next person, but it's dishonest to try to claim that it's contradicting itself here. Many of those viral videos were in fact deliberately misleading.

@MrCArmstrong @marketplunger1 In a race against an intelligent, principled candidate, that's true. But when your opponent is Donald Trump, the most important thing is simply to defeat him.

@NicolaiNihilist @marketplunger1 In this election, yes, because the opposing candidate is Donald Trump, and anyone with a chance of winning the Democratic nomination would do a better job than him.

@stevenbrant @marketplunger1 No, the high bit of course correcting this great nation is simply to ensure that the next president isn't Donald Trump.

@micsolana This is probably true so long as it's genuinely a question. But claims can be dangerous, and it's possible to express a claim in a way that's grammatically a question, so it has to be possible for there to be dangerous questions in that sense.

@4thRT @micsolana @balajis Sounds like you need one too...

@marketplunger1 Whoever's most likely to win.


Programming Bottom-Up
1993
(This essay is from the introduction to
On Lisp
.)
It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional
elements of a program should not be too large.  If some component of a
program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible,
it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as easily
as a big city conceals fugitives.  Such software will be
hard to read, hard to test, and hard to debug.
In accordance with this principle, a large program must be divided
into pieces, and the larger the program, the more it must be divided.
How do you divide a program?  The traditional approach is
called
top-down design:
you say "the purpose of the
program is to do these seven things, so I divide it into seven major
subroutines.  The first subroutine has to do these four things, so
it in turn will have four of its own subroutines," and so on.
This process continues until the whole program has the right level
of granularity-- each part large enough to do something substantial,
but small enough to be understood as a single unit.
Experienced Lisp programmers divide up their programs differently.
As well as top-down design, they follow a principle which
could be called
bottom-up design
-- changing the language
to suit the problem.
In Lisp, you don't just write your program down toward the language,
you also build the language up toward your program.  As you're
writing a program you may think "I wish Lisp had such-and-such an
operator." So you go and write it. Afterward
you realize that using the new operator would simplify the design
of another part of the program, and so on.
Language and program evolve together.
Like the border between two warring states,
the boundary between language and program is drawn and redrawn,
until eventually it comes to rest along the mountains and rivers,
the natural frontiers of your problem.
In the end your program will look as if the language had been
designed for it.
And when language and
program fit one another well, you end up with code which is
clear, small, and efficient.
It's worth emphasizing that bottom-up design doesn't mean
just writing the same program in a different order.  When you
work bottom-up, you usually end up with a different program.
Instead of a single, monolithic program,
you will get a larger language with more abstract operators,
and a smaller program written in it.  Instead of a lintel,
you'll get an arch.
In typical code, once you abstract out the parts which are
merely bookkeeping, what's left is much shorter;
the higher you build up the language, the less distance you
will have to travel from the top down to it.
This brings several advantages:
By making the language do more of the work, bottom-up design
yields programs which are smaller and more agile.  A shorter
program doesn't have to be divided into so many components, and
fewer components means programs which are easier to read or
modify.  Fewer components also means fewer connections between
components, and thus less chance for errors there.  As
industrial designers strive to reduce the number of moving parts
in a machine, experienced Lisp programmers use bottom-up design
to reduce the size and complexity of their programs.
Bottom-up design promotes code re-use.
When you write two
or more programs, many of the utilities you wrote for the first
program will also be useful in the succeeding ones.  Once you've
acquired a large substrate of utilities, writing a new program can
take only a fraction of the effort it would require if you had to
start with raw Lisp.
Bottom-up design makes programs easier to read.
An instance of this type
of abstraction asks the reader to understand a general-purpose operator;
an instance of functional abstraction asks the reader to understand
a special-purpose subroutine. [1]
Because it causes you always to be on the lookout for patterns
in your code, working bottom-up helps to clarify your ideas about
the design of your program.  If two distant components of a program
are similar in form, you'll be led to notice the similarity and
perhaps to redesign the program in a simpler way.
Bottom-up design is possible to a certain degree in languages
other than Lisp.  Whenever you see library functions,
bottom-up design is happening.  However, Lisp gives you much broader
powers in this department, and augmenting the language plays a
proportionately larger role in Lisp style-- so much so that
Lisp is not just a different language, but a whole different way
of programming.
It's true that this style of development is better suited to
programs which can be written by small groups.  However, at the
same time, it extends the limits of what can be done by a small
group.  In
The Mythical Man-Month
,
Frederick Brooks
proposed that the productivity of a group of programmers
does not grow linearly with its size.  As the size of the
group increases, the productivity of individual programmers
goes down.  The experience of Lisp programming
suggests a more cheerful way
to phrase this law: as the size of the group decreases, the
productivity of individual programmers goes up.
A small group wins, relatively speaking, simply because it's
smaller.  When a small group also takes advantage of the
techniques that Lisp makes possible, it can
win outright
.
New:
Download On Lisp for Free
.
[1] "But no one can read
the program without understanding all your new utilities."
To see why such statements are usually mistaken,
see Section 4.8.


@ecomarxi What I think is a mistake is to inconvenience the public merely for the sake of inconveniencing them. If a big protest incidentally blocks traffic, that's ok. But a small number of people blocking traffic *in order to* inconvenience the public is a tactical error.

@ecomarxi It might have been stupid. You can't assume that just because women got the vote, every one of the suffragettes' tactics helped. Some presumably hurt.

@eemaguire That doesn't change the ratio of applicants to spots.

@ivy_roadmap I think applicants thought of it as a mere credential even more when I was in HS than they do now. In those days the goal was to climb the corporate ladder, and the brand of your college mattered a lot in doing that.

@Ljungman What I'm saying is that competition for elite colleges feels like it's increased more than that 43%.

@joshsendstweets That's true, but not in the way you think. The middle class is only shrinking in the sense that more people are becoming rich.

@BertholdGambrel They'll try, but it won't have much effect.

@matadcze In some domains. It depends how smart the other people are and how much they talk. In domains where the people are stupid and/or don't talk much, scammers can keep their scams going forever.

@HgcMatt @Will_Bunch IIRC politicians from coal states helped things along.

@AlexBachmann_ @Will_Bunch It's as true as you can get in 6 words.