Great Hackers
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July 2004
(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.)
A few months ago I finished a new
book
,
and in reviews I keep
noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say
nothing of "idiotic.''
I didn't mean to make the book controversial.  I was trying to make
it efficient.  I didn't want to waste people's time telling them
things they already knew.  It's more efficient just to give them
the diffs.  But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book.
Edisons
There's no controversy about which idea is most controversial:
the suggestion that variation in wealth might not be as big a
problem as we think.
I didn't say in the book that variation in wealth was in itself a
good thing.  I said in some situations it might be a sign of good
things.  A throbbing headache is not a good thing, but it can be
a sign of a good thing-- for example, that you're recovering
consciousness after being hit on the head.
Variation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity.
(In a society of one, they're identical.) And
that
is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation
in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas
Edison.  It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.
In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity.
If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how
much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than
the worst?  A factor of two?  Whereas when you hand people a complex tool
like a computer, the variation in what they can do with
it is enormous.
That's not a new idea.  Fred Brooks wrote about it in 1974, and
the study he quoted was published in 1968.  But I think he
underestimated the variation between programmers.  He wrote about productivity in lines
of code:  the best programmers can solve a given problem in a tenth
the time.  But what if the problem isn't given? In programming, as
in many fields, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding
what problems to solve.  Imagination is hard to measure, but
in practice it dominates the kind of productivity that's measured
in lines of code.
Productivity varies in any field, but there are few in which it
varies so much.  The variation between programmers
is so great that it becomes a difference in kind.  I don't
think this is something intrinsic to programming, though.  In every field,
technology magnifies differences in productivity.  I think what's
happening in programming is just that we have a lot of technological
leverage.  But in every field the lever is getting longer, so the
variation we see is something that more and more fields will see
as time goes on.  And the success of companies, and countries, will
depend increasingly on how they deal with it.
If variation in productivity increases with technology, then the
contribution of the most productive individuals will not only be
disproportionately large, but will actually grow with time.  When
you reach the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1%
of its members, you lose big if something (whether Viking raids,
or central planning) drags their productivity down to the average.
If we want to get the most out of them, we need to understand these
especially productive people.  What motivates them?  What do they
need to do their jobs?  How do you recognize them? How do you
get them to come and work for you?  And then of course there's the
question, how do you become one?
More than Money
I know a handful of super-hackers, so I sat down and thought about
what they have in common.  Their defining quality is probably that
they really love to program.  Ordinary programmers write code to pay
the bills.  Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun,
and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for.
Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money.
This isn't quite true.  It is true that all they really care about
is doing interesting work.  But if you make enough money, you get
to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers
are
attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money.
But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they
care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for
it.
Economically, this is a fact of the greatest importance, because
it means you don't have to pay great hackers anything like what
they're worth.  A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times
as productive as an ordinary one, but he'll consider himself lucky
to get paid three times as much.  As I'll explain later, this is
partly because great hackers don't know how good they are.  But
it's also because money is not the main thing they want.
What do hackers want?  Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools.
In fact, that's an understatement.  Good hackers find it unbearable
to use bad tools.  They'll simply refuse to work on projects with
the wrong infrastructure.
At a startup I once worked for, one of the things pinned up on our
bulletin board was an ad from IBM.  It was a picture of an AS400,
and the headline read, I think, "hackers despise
it.'' [1]
When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're
not just making a technical decision.  You're also making a social
decision, and this may be the more important of the two.  For
example, if your company wants to write some software, it might
seem a prudent choice to write it in Java.  But when you choose a
language, you're also choosing a community.  The programmers you'll
be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as
smart
as the
ones you could get to work on a project written in Python.
And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the
language you choose.  Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers
prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative
merits of those languages.
Business types prefer the most popular languages because they view
languages as standards. They don't want to bet the company on
Betamax.  The thing about languages, though, is that they're not
just standards.  If you have to move bits over a network, by all
means use TCP/IP.  But a programming language isn't just a format.
A programming language is a medium of expression.
I've read that Java has just overtaken Cobol as the most popular
language.  As a standard, you couldn't wish for more.  But as a
medium of expression, you could do a lot better.  Of all the great
programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily
program in Java.  And of all the great programmers I can think of
who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.
Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software.
Not just because it's better, but because it gives them more control.
Good hackers insist on control.  This is part of what makes them
good hackers:  when something's broken, they need to fix it.  You
want them to feel this way about the software they're writing for
you.  You shouldn't be surprised when they feel the same way about
the operating system.
A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new
startup he was involved with.  It sounded promising.  But the next
time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software
on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer
to be their chief technical officer.  When I heard this, I thought,
these guys are doomed.  One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate
hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have
had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine
a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have
a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had
to be built on NT. [2]
The Final Frontier
After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably
his office.  Big companies think the function of office space is to express
rank.  But hackers use their offices for more than that: they
use their office as a place to think in.  And if you're a technology
company, their thoughts are your product.  So making hackers work
in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory
where the air is full of soot.
The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about cubicles, and with
good reason.  All the hackers I know despise them.  The mere prospect
of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on
hard problems.  If you want to get real work done in an office with
cubicles, you have two options: work at home, or come in early or
late or on a weekend, when no one else is there.  Don't companies
realize this is a sign that something is broken?  An office
environment is supposed to be something that
helps
you work, not something you work despite.
Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle,
even the CEO.  But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously
they still view office space as a badge of rank.  Note too that
Cisco is famous for doing very little product development in house.
They get new technology by buying the startups that created it-- where
presumably the hackers did have somewhere quiet to work.
One big company that understands what hackers need is Microsoft.
I once saw a recruiting ad for Microsoft with a big picture of a
door.  Work for us, the premise was, and we'll give you a place to
work where you can actually get work done.   And you know, Microsoft
is remarkable among big companies in that they are able to develop
software in house.  Not well, perhaps, but well enough.
If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at
what they do at home.  At home, hackers can arrange things themselves
so they can get the most done.  And when they work at home, hackers
don't work in noisy, open spaces; they work in rooms with doors.  They
work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere
to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass
boxes set in acres of parking lots.  They have a sofa they can take
a nap on when they feel tired, instead of sitting in a coma at
their desk, pretending to work.  There's no crew of people with
vacuum cleaners that roars through every evening during the prime
hacking hours.  There are no meetings or, God forbid, corporate
retreats or team-building exercises.  And when you look at what
they're doing on that computer, you'll find it reinforces what I
said earlier about tools.  They may have to use Java and Windows
at work, but at home, where they can choose for themselves, you're
more likely to find them using Perl and Linux.
Indeed, these statistics about Cobol or Java being the most popular
language can be misleading.  What we ought to look at, if we want
to know what tools are best, is what hackers choose when they can
choose freely-- that is, in projects of their own.  When you ask
that question, you find that open source operating systems already
have a dominant market share, and the number one language is probably
Perl.
Interesting
Along with good tools, hackers want interesting projects.  What
makes a project interesting?  Well, obviously overtly sexy
applications like stealth planes or special effects software would
be interesting to work on.  But any application can be interesting
if it poses novel technical challenges.  So it's hard to predict
which problems hackers will like, because some become
interesting only when the people working on them discover a new
kind of solution.  Before ITA
(who wrote the software inside Orbitz),
the people working on airline fare searches probably thought it
was one of the most boring applications imaginable.  But ITA made
it interesting by
redefining
the problem in a more ambitious way.
I think the same thing happened at Google.  When Google was founded,
the conventional wisdom among the so-called portals was that search
was boring and unimportant.  But the guys at Google didn't think
search was boring, and that's why they do it so well.
This is an area where managers can make a difference.  Like a parent
saying to a child, I bet you can't clean up your whole room in
ten minutes, a good manager can sometimes redefine a problem as a
more interesting one.  Steve Jobs seems to be particularly good at
this, in part simply by having high standards.  There were a lot
of small, inexpensive computers before the Mac.  He redefined the
problem as: make one that's beautiful.  And that probably drove
the developers harder than any carrot or stick could.
They certainly delivered.  When the Mac first appeared, you didn't
even have to turn it on to know it would be good; you could tell
from the case.  A few weeks ago I was walking along the street in
Cambridge, and in someone's trash I saw what appeared to be a Mac
carrying case.  I looked inside, and there was a Mac SE.  I carried
it home and plugged it in, and it booted.  The happy Macintosh
face, and then the finder.  My God, it was so simple.  It was just
like ... Google.
Hackers like to work for people with high standards.  But it's not
enough just to be exacting.  You have to insist on the right things.
Which usually means that you have to be a hacker yourself.  I've
seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers.  Really
there should be two articles: one about what to do if
you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not.  And the
second could probably be condensed into two words:  give up.
The problem is not so much the day to day management.  Really good
hackers are practically self-managing.  The problem is, if you're
not a hacker, you can't tell who the good hackers are.  A similar
problem explains why American cars are so ugly.  I call it the
design paradox.
You might think that you could make your products
beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them.  But if
you yourself don't have good
taste
,
how are you going to recognize
a good designer?  By definition you can't tell from his portfolio.
And you can't go by the awards he's won or the jobs he's had,
because in design, as in most fields, those tend to be driven by
fashion and schmoozing, with actual ability a distant third.
There's no way around it:  you can't manage a process intended to
produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is.  American
cars are ugly because American car companies are run by people with
bad taste.
Many people in this country think of taste as something elusive,
or even frivolous.  It is neither.  To drive design, a manager must
be the most demanding user of a company's products.  And if you
have really good taste, you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying
you the kind of problem that good people like to work on.
Nasty Little Problems
It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting:
those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have
to solve a lot of nasty little ones.  One of the worst kinds of
projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's
full of bugs.  Another is when you have to customize
something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs.
To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand
cuts.
The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you
don't learn anything from them.   Writing a compiler is interesting
because it teaches you what a compiler is.  But writing an interface
to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the
bugs are random.  [3] So it's not just fastidiousness that makes good
hackers avoid nasty little problems.  It's more a question of
self-preservation.  Working on nasty little problems makes you
stupid.  Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid
cheeseburgers.
Of course some problems inherently have this character.  And because
of supply and demand, they pay especially well.  So a company that
found a way to get great hackers to work on tedious problems would
be very successful.  How would you do it?
One place this happens is in startups.  At our startup we had
Robert Morris working as a system administrator.  That's like having the
Rolling Stones play at a bar mitzvah.  You can't hire that kind of
talent.  But people will do any amount of drudgery for companies
of which they're the founders.  [4]
Bigger companies solve the problem by partitioning the company.
They get smart people to work for them by establishing a separate
R&D department where employees don't have to work directly on
customers' nasty little problems. [5] In this model, the research
department functions like a mine. They produce new ideas; maybe
the rest of the company will be able to use them.
You may not have to go to this extreme.
Bottom-up programming
suggests another way to partition the company: have the smart people
work as toolmakers.  If your company makes software to do x, have
one group that builds tools for writing software of that type, and
another that uses these tools to write the applications.  This way
you might be able to get smart people to write 99% of your code,
but still keep them almost as insulated from users as they would
be in a traditional research department.  The toolmakers would have
users, but they'd only be the company's own developers.  [6]
If Microsoft used this approach, their software wouldn't be so full
of security holes, because the less smart people writing the actual
applications wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating
memory.  Instead of writing Word directly in C, they'd be plugging
together big Lego blocks of Word-language.  (Duplo, I believe, is
the technical term.)
Clumping
Along with interesting problems, what good hackers like is other
good hackers.  Great hackers tend to clump together-- sometimes
spectacularly so, as at Xerox Parc.   So you won't attract good
hackers in linear proportion to how good an environment you create
for them.  The tendency to clump means it's more like the square
of the environment.  So it's winner take all.  At any given time,
there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to
work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer
great hackers, you'll have zero.
Having great hackers is not, by itself, enough to make a company
successful.  It works well for Google and ITA, which are two of
the hot spots right now, but it didn't help Thinking Machines or
Xerox.  Sun had a good run for a while, but their business model
is a down elevator.  In that situation, even the best hackers can't
save you.
I think, though, that all other things being equal, a company that
can attract great hackers will have a huge advantage.  There are
people who would disagree with this.  When we were making the rounds
of venture capital firms in the 1990s, several told us that software
companies didn't win by writing great software, but through brand,
and dominating channels, and doing the right deals.
They really seemed to believe this, and I think I know why.  I
think what a lot of VCs are looking for, at least unconsciously,
is the next Microsoft.  And of course if Microsoft is your model,
you shouldn't be looking for companies that hope to win by writing
great software.  But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft,
because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other
company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be
the next IBM.
It's a mistake to use Microsoft as a model, because their whole
culture derives from that one lucky break.  Microsoft is a bad data
point.  If you throw them out, you find that good products do tend
to win in the market.  What VCs should be looking for is the next
Apple, or the next Google.
I think Bill Gates knows this.  What worries him about Google is
not the power of their brand, but the fact that they have
better hackers. [7]
Recognition
So who are the great hackers?  How do you know when you meet one?
That turns out to be very hard.  Even hackers can't tell.  I'm
pretty sure now that my friend Trevor Blackwell is a great hacker.
You may have read on Slashdot how he made his
own Segway
.  The
remarkable thing about this project was that he wrote all the
software in one day (in Python, incidentally).
For Trevor, that's
par for the course.  But when I first met him, I thought he was a
complete idiot.  He was standing in Robert Morris's office babbling
at him about something or other, and I remember standing behind
him making frantic gestures at Robert to shoo this nut out of his
office so we could go to lunch.  Robert says he misjudged Trevor
at first too.  Apparently when Robert first met him, Trevor had
just begun a new scheme that involved writing down everything about
every aspect of his life on a stack of index cards, which he carried
with him everywhere.  He'd also just arrived from Canada, and had
a strong Canadian accent and a mullet.
The problem is compounded by the fact that hackers, despite their
reputation for social obliviousness, sometimes put a good deal of
effort into seeming smart.  When I was in grad school I used to
hang around the MIT AI Lab occasionally. It was kind of intimidating
at first.  Everyone there spoke so fast.  But after a while I
learned the trick of speaking fast.  You don't have to think any
faster; just use twice as many words to say everything.
With this amount of noise in the signal, it's hard to tell good
hackers when you meet them.  I can't tell, even now.  You also
can't tell from their resumes.  It seems like the only way to judge
a hacker is to work with him on something.
And this is the reason that high-tech areas
only happen around universities.  The active ingredient
here is not so much the professors as the students.  Startups grow up
around universities because universities bring together promising young
people and make them work on the same projects.  The
smart ones learn who the other smart ones are, and together
they cook up new projects of their own.
Because you can't tell a great hacker except by working with him,
hackers themselves can't tell how good they are.  This is true to
a degree in most fields.  I've found that people who
are great at something are not so much convinced of their own
greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
But it's particularly hard for hackers to know how good they are,
because it's hard to compare their work.  This is easier in most
other fields.  In the hundred meters, you know in 10 seconds who's
fastest.  Even in math there seems to be a general consensus about
which problems are hard to solve, and what constitutes a good
solution.  But hacking is like writing.  Who can say which of two
novels is better?  Certainly not the authors.
With hackers, at least, other hackers can tell.  That's because,
unlike novelists, hackers collaborate on projects.  When you get
to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn
pretty quickly how hard they hit them back.  But hackers can't
watch themselves at work.  So if you ask a great hacker how good
he is, he's almost certain to reply, I don't know.  He's not just
being modest.  He really doesn't know.
And none of us know, except about people we've actually worked
with.  Which puts us in a weird situation: we don't know who our
heroes should be.  The hackers who become famous tend to become
famous by random accidents of PR.  Occasionally I need to give an
example of a great hacker, and I never know who to use.  The first
names that come to mind always tend to be people I know personally,
but it seems lame to use them.  So, I think, maybe I should say
Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds, or Alan Kay, or someone famous
like that.  But I have no idea if these guys are great hackers.
I've never worked with them on anything.
If there is a Michael Jordan of hacking, no one knows, including
him.
Cultivation
Finally, the question the hackers have all been wondering about:
how do you become a great hacker?  I don't know if it's possible
to make yourself into one.  But it's certainly possible to do things
that make you stupid, and if you can make yourself stupid, you
can probably make yourself smart too.
The key to being a good hacker may be to work on what you like.
When I think about the great hackers I know, one thing they have
in common is the extreme
difficulty
of making them work
on anything they
don't want to.  I don't know if this is cause or effect; it may be
both.
To do something well you have to
love
it.
So to the extent you
can preserve hacking as something you love, you're likely to do it
well.  Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at
age 14.  If you're worried that your current job is rotting your
brain, it probably is.
The best hackers tend to be smart, of course, but that's true in
a lot of fields.  Is there some quality that's unique to hackers?
I asked some friends, and the number one thing they mentioned was
curiosity.
I'd always supposed that all smart people were curious--
that curiosity was simply the first derivative of knowledge.  But
apparently hackers are particularly curious, especially about how
things work.  That makes sense, because programs are in effect
giant descriptions of how things work.
Several friends mentioned hackers' ability to concentrate-- their
ability, as one put it, to "tune out everything outside their own
heads.''  I've certainly noticed this.  And I've heard several
hackers say that after drinking even half a beer they can't program at
all.   So maybe hacking does require some special ability to focus.
Perhaps great hackers can load a large amount of context into their
head, so that when they look at a line of code, they see not just
that line but the whole program around it.  John McPhee
wrote that Bill Bradley's success as a basketball player was due
partly to his extraordinary peripheral vision.  "Perfect'' eyesight
means about 47 degrees of vertical peripheral vision.  Bill Bradley
had 70; he could see the basket when he was looking at the floor.
Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability.  (I cheat by
using a very
dense
language,
which shrinks the court.)
This could explain the disconnect over cubicles.  Maybe the people
in charge of facilities, not having any concentration to shatter,
have no idea that working in a cubicle feels to a hacker like having
one's brain in a blender.  (Whereas Bill, if the rumors of autism
are true, knows all too well.)
One difference I've noticed between great hackers and smart people
in general is that hackers are more
politically incorrect
.  To the
extent there is a secret handshake among good hackers, it's when they
know one another well enough to express opinions that would get
them stoned to death by the general public.  And I can see why
political incorrectness would be a useful quality in programming.
Programs are very complex and, at least in the hands of good
programmers, very fluid.  In such situations it's helpful to have
a habit of questioning assumptions.
Can you cultivate these qualities?  I don't know.  But you can at
least not repress them.  So here is my best shot at a recipe.  If
it is possible to make yourself into a great hacker, the way to do
it may be to make the following deal with yourself: you never have
to work on boring projects (unless your family will starve otherwise),
and in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a half-assed job.
All the great hackers I know seem to have made that deal, though
perhaps none of them had any choice in the matter.
Notes
[1] In fairness, I have to say that IBM makes decent hardware.  I
wrote this on an IBM laptop.
[2] They did turn out to be doomed.  They shut down a few months
later.
[3] I think this is what people mean when they talk
about the "meaning of life."  On the face of it, this seems an
odd idea.  Life isn't an expression; how could it have meaning?
But it can have a quality that feels a lot like meaning.  In a project
like a compiler, you have to solve a lot of problems, but the problems
all fall into a pattern, as in a signal.  Whereas when the problems
you have to solve are random, they seem like noise.
[4] Einstein at one point worked designing refrigerators. (He had equity.)
[5] It's hard to say exactly what constitutes research in the
computer world, but as a first approximation, it's software that
doesn't have users.
I don't think it's publication that makes the best hackers want to work
in research departments.  I think it's mainly not having to have a
three hour meeting with a product manager about problems integrating
the Korean version of Word 13.27 with the talking paperclip.
[6] Something similar has been happening for a long time in the
construction industry. When you had a house built a couple hundred
years ago, the local builders built everything in it.  But increasingly
what builders do is assemble components designed and manufactured
by someone else.  This has, like the arrival of desktop publishing,
given people the freedom to experiment in disastrous ways, but it
is certainly more efficient.
[7] Google is much more dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was.
Probably more dangerous than any other company has ever been.  Not
least because they're determined to fight.  On their job listing
page, they say that one of their "core values'' is "Don't be evil.''
From a company selling soybean oil or mining equipment, such a
statement would merely be eccentric.  But I think all of us in the
computer world recognize who that is a declaration of war on.
Thanks
to Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Sarah Harlin
for reading earlier versions of this talk.
Audio of talk
The Python Paradox
Japanese Translation
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If you liked this, you may also like
Hackers & Painters
.


Inequality and Risk
August 2005
(This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.)
Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality.  There are
two ways to do it: give money to the poor, or take it away from the
rich.  But they amount to the same thing, because if you want to
give money to the poor, you have to get it from somewhere.  You
can't get it from the poor, or they just end up where they started.
You have to get it from the rich.
There is of course a way to make the poor richer without simply
shifting money from the rich.  You could help the poor become more
productive — for example, by improving access to education.  Instead
of taking money from engineers and giving it to checkout clerks,
you could enable people who would have become checkout clerks to
become engineers.
This is an excellent strategy for making the poor richer.  But the
evidence of the last 200 years shows that it doesn't reduce economic
inequality, because it makes the rich richer too.  If there
are more engineers, then there are more opportunities to hire them
and to sell them things.  Henry Ford couldn't have made a fortune
building cars in a society in which most people were still subsistence
farmers; he would have had neither workers nor customers.
If you want to reduce economic inequality instead of just improving
the overall standard of living, it's not enough just to raise up
the poor.  What if one of your newly minted engineers gets ambitious
and goes on to become another Bill Gates?  Economic inequality will
be as bad as ever.  If you actually want to compress the gap between
rich and poor, you have to push down on the top as well as pushing
up on the bottom.
How do you push down on the top?  You could try to decrease the
productivity of the people who make the most money: make the best
surgeons operate with their left hands, force popular actors to
overeat, and so on.  But this approach is hard to implement.  The
only practical solution is to let people do the best work they can,
and then (either by taxation or by limiting what they can charge)
to confiscate whatever you deem to be surplus.
So let's be clear what reducing economic inequality means.  It is
identical with taking money from the rich.
When you transform a mathematical expression into another form, you
often notice new things.  So it is in this case.  Taking money from
the rich turns out to have consequences one might not foresee when
one phrases the same idea in terms of "reducing inequality."
The problem is, risk and reward have to be proportionate.  A bet
with only a 10% chance of winning has to pay more than one with a
50% chance of winning, or no one will take it.  So if you lop off
the top of the possible rewards, you thereby decrease people's
willingness to take risks.
Transposing into our original expression, we get: decreasing economic
inequality means decreasing the risk people are willing to take.
There are whole classes of risks that are no longer worth taking
if the maximum return is decreased.  One reason high tax rates are
disastrous is that this class of risks includes starting new
companies.
Investors
Startups are intrinsically risky.  A startup
is like a small boat
in the open sea.  One big wave and you're sunk.  A competing product,
a downturn in the economy, a delay in getting funding or regulatory
approval, a patent suit, changing technical standards, the departure
of a key employee, the loss of a big account — any one of these can
destroy you overnight.  It seems only about 1 in 10 startups succeeds.
[
1
]
Our startup paid its first round of outside investors 36x.  Which
meant, with current US tax rates, that it made sense to invest in
us if we had better than a 1 in 24 chance of succeeding.  That
sounds about right.  That's probably roughly how we looked when we
were a couple of nerds with no business experience operating out
of an apartment.
If that kind of risk doesn't pay, venture investing, as we know it,
doesn't happen.
That might be ok if there were other sources of capital for new
companies.  Why not just have the government, or some large
almost-government organization like Fannie Mae, do the venture
investing instead of private funds?
I'll tell you why that wouldn't work. Because then you're asking
government or almost-government employees to do the one thing they
are least able to do: take risks.
As anyone who has worked for the government knows, the important
thing is not to make the right choices, but to make choices that
can be justified later if they fail.  If there is a safe option,
that's the one a bureaucrat will choose.   But that is exactly the
wrong way to do venture investing.  The nature of the business means
that you want to make terribly risky choices, if the upside looks
good enough.
VCs are currently
paid
in a way that makes them
focus on the upside:
they get a percentage of the fund's gains.  And that helps overcome
their understandable fear of investing in a company run by nerds
who look like (and perhaps are) college students.
If VCs weren't allowed to get rich, they'd behave like bureaucrats.
Without hope of gain, they'd have only fear of loss.  And so they'd
make the wrong choices.  They'd turn down the nerds in favor of the
smooth-talking MBA in a suit, because that investment would be
easier to justify later if it failed.
Founders
But even if you could somehow redesign venture funding to work
without allowing VCs to become rich, there's another kind of investor
you simply cannot replace: the startups' founders and early employees.
What they invest is their time and ideas.  But these are equivalent
to money; the proof is that investors are willing (if forced) to
treat them as interchangeable, granting the same status to "sweat
equity" and the equity they've purchased with cash.
The fact that you're investing time doesn't change the relationship
between risk and reward.  If you're going to invest your time in
something with a small chance of succeeding, you'll only do it if
there is a proportionately large payoff.
[
2
]
If large payoffs aren't allowed, you may as well play it safe.
Like many startup founders, I did it to get rich.  But not because
I wanted to buy expensive things.  What I wanted was security.  I
wanted to make enough money that I didn't have to worry about money.
If I'd been forbidden to make enough from a startup to do this, I
would have sought security by some other means: for example, by
going to work for a big, stable organization from which it would
be hard to get fired.  Instead of busting my ass in a startup, I
would have tried to get a nice, low-stress job at a big research
lab, or tenure at a university.
That's what everyone does in societies where risk isn't rewarded.
If you can't ensure your own security, the next best thing is to
make a nest for yourself in some large organization where your
status depends mostly on
seniority
.
[
3
]
Even if we could somehow replace investors, I don't see how we could
replace founders.  Investors mainly contribute money, which in
principle is the same no matter what the source.  But the founders
contribute ideas.  You can't replace those.
Let's rehearse the chain of argument so far.  I'm heading for a
conclusion to which many readers will have to be dragged kicking
and screaming, so I've tried to make each link unbreakable.  Decreasing
economic inequality means taking money from the rich.  Since risk
and reward are equivalent, decreasing potential rewards automatically
decreases people's appetite for risk.  Startups are intrinsically
risky.  Without the prospect of rewards proportionate to the risk,
founders will not invest their time in a startup.  Founders are
irreplaceable.  So eliminating economic inequality means eliminating
startups.
Economic inequality is not just a consequence of startups.
It's the engine that drives them, in the same way a fall of water
drives a water mill.  People start startups in the hope of becoming
much richer than they were before.  And if your society tries to
prevent anyone from being much richer than anyone else, it will
also prevent one person from being much richer at t2 than t1.
Growth
This argument applies proportionately.  It's not just that if you
eliminate economic inequality, you get no startups.  To the extent
you reduce economic inequality, you decrease the number of startups.
[
4
]
Increase taxes, and willingness to take risks decreases in
proportion.
And that seems bad for everyone.  New technology and new jobs both
come disproportionately from new companies.  Indeed, if you don't
have startups, pretty soon you won't have established companies
either, just as, if you stop having kids, pretty soon you won't
have any adults.
It sounds benevolent to say we ought to reduce economic inequality.
When you phrase it that way, who can argue with you?
Inequality
has to be bad, right?  It sounds a good deal less benevolent to say
we ought to reduce the rate at which new companies are founded.
And yet the one implies the other.
Indeed, it may be that reducing investors' appetite for risk doesn't
merely kill off larval startups, but kills off the most promising
ones especially.  Startups yield faster growth at greater risk than
established companies.  Does this trend also hold among startups?
That is, are the riskiest startups the ones that generate most
growth if they succeed?  I suspect the answer is yes.  And that's
a chilling thought, because it means that if you cut investors'
appetite for risk, the most beneficial startups are the first to
go.
Not all rich people got that way from startups, of course.  What
if we let people get rich by starting startups, but taxed away all
other surplus wealth?  Wouldn't that at least decrease inequality?
Less than you might think.  If you made it so that people could
only get rich by starting startups, people who wanted to get rich
would all start startups.  And that might be a great thing.  But I
don't think it would have much effect on the distribution of wealth.
People who want to get rich will do whatever they have to.  If
startups are the only way to do it, you'll just get far more people
starting startups.  (If you write the laws very carefully, that is.
More likely, you'll just get a lot of people doing things that can
be made to look on paper like startups.)
If we're determined to eliminate economic inequality, there is still
one way out: we could say that we're willing to go ahead and do
without startups.  What would happen if we did?
At a minimum, we'd have to accept lower rates of technological
growth.  If you believe that large, established companies could
somehow be made to develop new technology as fast as startups, the
ball is in your court to explain how.  (If you can come up with a
remotely plausible story, you can make a fortune writing business
books and consulting for large companies.)
[
5
]
Ok, so we get slower growth.  Is that so bad?  Well, one reason
it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to
slow down with us.  If you're content to develop new technologies
at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that
you don't invent anything at all.  Anything you might discover has
already been invented elsewhere.  And the only thing you can offer
in return is raw materials and cheap labor.  Once you sink that
low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install
puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women
as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory — all the
things we do to poor countries now.  The only defense is to isolate
yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century.  But
the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce
it.
Wealth and Power
I realize startups are not the main target of those who want to
eliminate economic inequality.   What they really dislike is the
sort of wealth that becomes self-perpetuating through an alliance
with power. For example, construction firms that fund politicians'
campaigns in return for government contracts, or rich parents who
get their children into good colleges by sending them to expensive
schools designed for that purpose.  But if you try to attack this type of wealth
through
economic
policy, it's hard to hit without destroying
startups as collateral damage.
The problem here is not wealth, but corruption.  So why not go after
corruption?
We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent
wealth from translating into power.  And there has been progress
on that front.  Before he died of drink in 1925, Commodore Vanderbilt's
wastrel grandson Reggie ran down pedestrians on five separate
occasions, killing two of them.  By 1969, when Ted Kennedy drove
off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, the limit seemed to be down to
one.  Today it may well be zero.  But what's changed is not variation
in wealth.  What's changed is the ability to translate wealth into
power.
How do you break the connection between wealth and power?  Demand
transparency.  Watch closely how power is exercised, and demand an
account of how decisions are made.  Why aren't all police interrogations
videotaped?  Why did 36% of Princeton's class of 2007 come from
prep schools, when only 1.7% of American kids attend them?  Why did
the US really invade Iraq?  Why don't government officials disclose
more about their finances, and why only during their term of office?
A friend of mine who knows a lot about computer security says the
single most important step is to log everything.  Back when he was
a kid trying to break into computers, what worried him most was the
idea of leaving a trail.  He was more inconvenienced by the need
to avoid that than by any obstacle deliberately put in his path.
Like all illicit connections, the connection between wealth and
power flourishes in secret.  Expose all transactions, and you will
greatly reduce it.  Log everything.  That's a strategy that already
seems to be working, and it doesn't have the side effect of making
your whole country poor.
I don't think many people realize there is a connection between
economic inequality and risk.  I didn't fully grasp it till recently.
I'd known for years of course that if one didn't score in a startup,
the other alternative was to get a cozy, tenured research job.  But
I didn't understand the equation governing my behavior.  Likewise,
it's obvious empirically that a country that doesn't let people get
rich is headed for disaster, whether it's Diocletian's Rome or
Harold Wilson's Britain.  But I did not till recently understand
the role risk played.
If you try to attack wealth, you end up nailing risk as well, and
with it growth.  If we want a fairer world, I think we're better
off attacking one step downstream, where wealth turns into power.
Notes
[
1
]
Success here is defined from the initial investors' point of
view: either an IPO, or an acquisition for more than the valuation
at the last round of funding.  The conventional 1 in 10 success rate
is suspiciously neat, but conversations with VCs suggest it's roughly
correct for startups overall.  Top VC firms expect to do better.
[
2
]
I'm not claiming founders sit down and calculate the expected
after-tax return from a startup.  They're motivated by examples of
other people who did it.  And those examples do reflect after-tax returns.
[
3
]
Conjecture: The variation in wealth in a (non-corrupt)
country or organization
will be inversely proportional to the prevalence of systems of
seniority.  So if you suppress variation in wealth, seniority will
become correspondingly more important.  So far, I know of no
counterexamples, though in very corrupt countries you may get
both simultaneously.  (Thanks to Daniel Sobral for pointing
this out.)
[
4
]
In a country with a truly feudal economy, you might be able to
redistribute wealth successfully, because there are no startups to
kill.
[
5
]
The speed at which startups develop new techology is the other
reason they pay so well.  As I explained in
"How to Make Wealth"
, what you do in a startup is compress a
lifetime's worth of work into a few years.  It seems as
dumb to discourage that as to discourage risk-taking.
Thanks
to Chris Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Dan Giffin,
Jessica Livingston, and Evan Williams for reading drafts of this
essay, and to Langley Steinert, Sangam Pant, and Mike Moritz for
information about venture investing.
Romanian Translation
Dutch Translation
Traditional Chinese Translation
Japanese Translation
Hebrew Translation
If you liked this, you may also like
Hackers & Painters
.


@Austen That's super easy.

"It's lovely to be useful."

— Jony Ive

@markhumphrys @UEFA What makes you think they're talking about Israel, Mark?

@NathanJRobinson If it makes you feel any better, he doesn't actually believe it.

@joshxhowie You keep pressing that button, and each time you press it, it has less effect.

@ikirigin Yes, that may have been the biggest mistake in the US reaction. But it seems to have been driven as much by teachers' unions as by epidemiologists.

@matthewherper @knofun Yes and no. The things people believe are surprisingly crazy, but it's not surprising that there are people who believe surprisingly crazy things. There are actual flat earthers out there, after all.

It makes me so happy that Pebble is going to live again. It was always such an optimistic, hackerly project.

@knofun On the whole not. It was a novel and highly infectious disease. Early strains had a high fatality rate. And at first it wasn't even clear how it spread.

This prediction turned out to be all too accurate.


A bold move. I wonder if it will work to own two pieces of the pipeline that are so far apart.

@pitdesi And in particular, that there are a huge number of fake accounts on Twitter.

@acnewsitics Can't have one without the other.

@gdb Which graphs?

I came across something GPT5 is reliably bad at: monograms. It can't get any of these, even after being told it's wrong and "thinking longer for a better answer." https://t.co/Km7LFGPEpi

@techczech Ironically enough, it's your reply that is. I mention one data point = it's the only one I have.

@cremieuxrecueil Did it look like this? Was it resting on the bottom? https://t.co/fL0m0PrdkT

@cremieuxrecueil What kind?

One day no one will believe this is real. Already people in most other countries would have trouble believing it is.

@ATabarrok It's just so clumsy.


Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
March 2012
One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working
on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup
ideas are.  In this essay I'm going to demonstrate
this phenomenon by describing some.  Any one of them
could make you a billionaire.  That might sound like an attractive
prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may
notice you find yourself shrinking away from them.
Don't worry, it's not a sign of weakness.  Arguably it's a sign of
sanity.  The biggest startup ideas are terrifying.  And not just
because they'd be a lot of work.  The biggest ideas seem to threaten
your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry
them through.
There's a scene in
Being John Malkovich
where the nerdy hero
encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman.  She says to
him:
Here's the thing: If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue
  what to do with me.
That's what these ideas say to us.
This phenomenon is one of the most important things you can understand
about startups.
[
1
]
You'd expect big startup ideas to be
attractive, but actually they tend to repel you.  And that has a
bunch of consequences.  It means these ideas are invisible to most
people who try to think of startup ideas, because their subconscious
filters them out.  Even the most ambitious people are probably best
off approaching them obliquely.
1. A New Search Engine
The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible.  I don't
know if this one is possible, but there are signs it might be.
Making a new search engine means competing with Google, and recently
I've noticed some cracks in their fortress.
The point when it became clear to me that Microsoft had lost their
way was when they decided to get into the search business.  That
was not a natural move for Microsoft.  They did it because they
were afraid of Google, and Google was in the search business.  But
this meant (a) Google was now setting Microsoft's agenda, and (b)
Microsoft's agenda consisted of stuff they weren't good at.
Microsoft : Google :: Google : Facebook.
That does not by itself mean
there's room for a new search engine, but lately when using Google
search I've found myself nostalgic for the old days, when
Google was true to its own slightly aspy self.  Google used to give
me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter.  Now the
results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's
true is what's true for you.  And the pages don't have the
clean, sparse feel they used to.  Google search results used to
look like the output of a Unix utility.  Now if I accidentally put
the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen.
The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers
use.  A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers
and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its
small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine.  And
for the first time in over a decade the idea of switching seems
thinkable to me.
Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000
hackers, the route is at least straightforward: make the search
engine you yourself want.  Feel free to make it excessively hackerish.
Make it really good for code search, for example.  Would you like
search queries to be Turing complete?  Anything that gets you those
10,000 users is ipso facto good.
Don't worry if something you want to do will constrain you in the
long term, because if you don't get that initial core of users,
there won't be a long term.  If you can just build something that
you and your friends genuinely prefer to Google, you're already
about 10% of the way to an IPO, just as Facebook was (though they
probably didn't realize it) when they got all the Harvard undergrads.
2. Replace Email
Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now.  Email is
not a messaging protocol.  It's a todo list.  Or rather, my inbox
is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it.  But it
is a disastrously bad todo list.
I'm open to different types of solutions to this problem, but I
suspect that tweaking the inbox is not enough, and that email has
to be replaced with a new protocol.
This new protocol should be a todo list protocol, not
a messaging protocol, although there is a degenerate case where
what someone wants you to do is: read the following text.
As a todo list protocol, the new protocol should give more power
to the recipient than email does.  I want there to be more restrictions
on what someone can put on my todo list.  And when someone can put
something on my todo list, I want them to tell me more about what
they want from me.  Do they want me to do something beyond just
reading some text?  How important is it?  (There obviously has to
be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is
important.)  When does it have to be done?
This is one of those ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting
an immovable object.  On one hand, entrenched protocols are impossible
to replace.  On the other, it seems unlikely that people in
100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now.
And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now?
If you do it right, you may be able to avoid the usual chicken
and egg problem new protocols face, because some of the most powerful
people in the world will be among the first to switch to it.
They're all at the mercy of email too.
Whatever you build, make it fast.  GMail has become painfully slow.
[
2
]
If you made something no better than GMail, but fast, that
alone would let you start to pull users away from GMail.
GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it.
But people will pay for this.  I'd have no problem paying $50 a month.
Considering how much time I spend in email, it's kind of scary to
think how much I'd be justified in paying.  At least $1000 a month.
If I spend several hours a day reading and writing email, that would
be a cheap way to make my life better.
3. Replace Universities
People are all over this idea lately, and I think they're onto
something.  I'm reluctant to suggest that an institution that's
been around for a millennium is finished just because of some mistakes
they made in the last few decades, but certainly in the last few
decades US universities seem to have been headed down the wrong
path.  One could do a lot better for a lot less money.
I don't think universities will disappear.  They won't be replaced
wholesale.  They'll just lose the de facto monopoly on certain types
of learning that they once had.  There will be many different ways
to learn different things, and some may look quite different from
universities.   Y Combinator itself is arguably one of them.
Learning is such a big problem that changing the way people do it
will have a wave of secondary effects.  For example, the name of
the university one went to is treated by a lot of people (correctly
or not) as a credential in its own right.  If learning breaks up
into many little pieces, credentialling may separate from it.  There
may even need to be replacements for campus social life (and oddly
enough, YC even has aspects of that).
You could replace high schools too, but there you face bureaucratic
obstacles that would slow down a startup.  Universities seem the
place to start.
4. Internet Drama
Hollywood has been slow to embrace the Internet.  That was a
mistake, because I think we can now call a winner in the race between
delivery mechanisms, and it is the Internet, not cable.
A lot of the reason is the horribleness of cable clients, also known
as TVs.  Our family didn't wait for Apple TV.  We hated our last
TV so much that a few months ago we replaced it with an iMac bolted
to the wall.  It's a little inconvenient to control it with a
wireless mouse, but the overall experience is much better than the
nightmare UI we had to deal with before.
Some of the attention people currently devote to watching
movies and TV can be stolen by things that seem completely unrelated,
like social networking apps.  More can be stolen by things that are
a little more closely related, like games.  But there will probably
always remain some residual demand for conventional drama, where
you sit passively and watch as a plot happens.  So how do you deliver
drama via the Internet?  Whatever you make will have to be on a
larger scale than Youtube clips.  When people sit down to watch a
show, they want to know what they're going to get: either part
of a series with familiar characters, or a single longer "movie"
whose basic premise they know in advance.
There are two ways delivery and payment could play out.  Either
some company like Netflix or Apple will be the app store for
entertainment, and you'll reach audiences through them.  Or the
would-be app stores will be too overreaching, or too technically
inflexible, and companies will arise to supply payment and streaming
a la carte to the producers of drama.  If that's the way things
play out, there will also be a need for such infrastructure companies.
5. The Next Steve Jobs
I was talking recently to someone who knew Apple well, and I asked
him if the people now running the company would be able to keep
creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs.  His answer
was simply "no."  I already feared that would be the answer.  I
asked more to see how he'd qualify it.  But he didn't qualify it
at all.  No, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's
currently in the pipeline.  Apple's
revenues may continue to rise for a long time, but as Microsoft
shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.
So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is?  None of the
existing players.  None of them are run by product visionaries, and
empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them.  Empirically
the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the
company and not get fired.  So the company that creates the next
wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup.
I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try
to become as big as Apple.  But no more ambitious than it was for
Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it.  Plus a startup
taking on this problem now has an advantage the original Apple
didn't: the example of Apple.  Steve Jobs has shown us what's
possible.  That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger
Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people
did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea
in users' minds that a single person could unroll the future
for them.
[
3
]
Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel.  If a new company
led boldly into the future of hardware, users would follow.  The
CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up
to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to.  He'd just have to do a
better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty
doable.
6. Bring Back Moore's Law
The last 10 years have reminded us what Moore's Law actually says.
Till about 2002 you could safely misinterpret it as promising that
clock speeds would double every 18 months.  Actually what it says
is that circuit densities will double every 18 months.  It used to
seem pedantic to point that out.  Not any more.  Intel can no longer
give us faster CPUs, just more of them.
This Moore's Law is not as good as the old one.  Moore's Law used
to mean that if your software was slow, all you had to do was wait,
and the inexorable progress of hardware would solve your problems.
Now if your software is slow you have to rewrite it to do more
things in parallel, which is a lot more work than waiting.
It would be great if a startup could give us something of the old
Moore's Law back, by writing software that could make a large number
of CPUs look to the developer like one very fast CPU.  There are
several ways to approach this problem.  The most ambitious is to
try to do it automatically: to write a compiler that will parallelize
our code for us.  There's a name for this compiler,
the sufficiently
smart compiler,
and it is a byword for impossibility.  But is
it really impossible?  Is there no configuration of the bits in
memory of a present day computer that is this compiler?  If you
really think so, you should try to prove it, because that would be
an interesting result.  And if it's not impossible but simply very
hard, it might be worth trying to write it.  The expected value
would be high even if the chance of succeeding was low.
The reason the expected value is so high is web services.  If you
could write software that gave programmers the convenience of the
way things were in the old days, you could offer it to them as a
web service.  And that would in turn mean that you got practically
all the users.
Imagine there was another processor manufacturer that could still translate
increased circuit densities into increased clock speeds. They'd
take most of Intel's business.  And since web services mean that
no one sees their processors anymore, by writing the sufficiently
smart compiler you could create a situation indistinguishable from
you being that manufacturer, at least for the server market.
The least ambitious way of approaching the problem is to start from
the other end, and offer programmers more parallelizable Lego blocks
to build programs out of, like Hadoop and MapReduce.   Then the
programmer still does much of the work of optimization.
There's an intriguing middle ground where you build a semi-automatic
weapon—where there's a human in the loop.  You make something
that looks to the user like the sufficiently smart compiler, but
inside has people, using highly developed optimization tools to
find and eliminate bottlenecks in users' programs.   These people
might be your employees, or you might create a marketplace for
optimization.
An optimization marketplace would be a way to generate the sufficiently
smart compiler piecemeal, because participants would immediately
start writing bots.  It would be a curious state of affairs if you
could get to the point where everything could be done by bots,
because then you'd have made the sufficiently smart compiler, but
no one person would have a complete copy of it.
I realize how crazy all this sounds.  In fact, what I like about
this idea is all the different ways in which it's wrong.  The whole
idea of focusing on optimization is counter to the general trend
in software development for the last several decades.  Trying to
write the sufficiently smart compiler is by definition a mistake.
And even if it weren't, compilers are the sort of software that's
supposed to be created by open source projects, not companies.  Plus
if this works it will deprive all the programmers who take pleasure
in making multithreaded apps of so much amusing complexity. The
forum troll I have by now internalized doesn't even know where to
begin in raising objections to this project.  Now that's what I
call a startup idea.
7. Ongoing Diagnosis
But wait, here's another that could face even greater resistance:
ongoing, automatic medical diagnosis.
One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the
ways in which we'll seem backward to future generations.  And I'm
pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future, it will
seem barbaric that people in our era waited till they had symptoms
to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer.
For example, in 2004 Bill Clinton found he was feeling short of
breath.  Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over
90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass.  It seems
reasonable to assume Bill Clinton has the best medical care available.
And yet even he had to wait till his arteries were over 90% blocked
to learn that the number was over 90%.  Surely at some point in the
future we'll know these numbers the way we now know something like
our weight.  Ditto for cancer.  It will seem preposterous to future
generations that we wait till patients have physical symptoms to
be diagnosed with cancer.  Cancer will show up on some sort of radar
screen immediately.
(Of course, what shows up on the radar screen may be different from
what we think of now as cancer.  I wouldn't be surprised if at any
given time we have ten or even hundreds of microcancers going at
once, none of which normally amount to anything.)
A lot of the obstacles to ongoing diagnosis will come from the fact
that it's going against the grain of the medical profession.  The
way medicine has always worked is that patients come to doctors
with problems, and the doctors figure out what's wrong.  A lot of
doctors don't like the idea of going on the medical equivalent of
what lawyers call a "fishing expedition," where you go looking for
problems without knowing what you're looking for.  They call the
things that get discovered this way "incidentalomas," and they are
something of a nuisance.
For example, a friend of mine once had her brain scanned as part
of a study.  She was horrified when the doctors running the study
discovered what appeared to be a large tumor.  After further testing,
it turned out to be a harmless cyst.  But it cost her a few days
of terror. A lot of doctors worry that if you start scanning people
with no symptoms, you'll get this on a giant scale: a huge number
of false alarms that make patients panic and require expensive and
perhaps even dangerous tests to resolve.  But I think that's just
an artifact of current limitations.  If people were scanned all the
time and we got better at deciding what was a real problem, my
friend would have known about this cyst her whole life and known
it was harmless, just as we do a birthmark.
There is room for a lot of startups here.
In addition to the technical obstacles all
startups face, and the bureaucratic obstacles all medical startups
face, they'll be going against thousands of years of medical
tradition.  But it will happen, and it will be a great thing—so
great that people in the future will feel as sorry for us as we do
for the generations that lived before anaesthesia and antibiotics.
Tactics
Let me conclude with some tactical advice.  If you want to take on
a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct
frontal attack on it.  Don't say, for example, that you're going
to replace email.  If you do that you raise too many expectations.
Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there
yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail.
Just say you're building todo-list software.  That sounds harmless.
People can notice you've replaced email when it's a
fait accompli
.
[
4
]
Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start
with deceptively small things.  Want to dominate microcomputer
software?  Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with
a few thousand users.  Want to make the universal web site?  Start
by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another.
Empirically, it's not just for other people that you need to start
small.  You need to for your own sake.  Neither Bill Gates nor Mark
Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get.
All they knew was that they were onto something.  Maybe it's a bad
idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger
your ambition, the longer it's going to take, and the further you
project into the future, the more likely you'll get it wrong.
I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a
precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from
here to there, like the popular image of a visionary.  You'll be
better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general
westerly direction.  Don't try to construct the future like a
building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken.
Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand
westward.
The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of
the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.
Notes
[
1
]
It's also one of the most important things VCs fail to
understand about startups.  Most expect founders to walk in with a
clear plan for the future, and judge them based on that.  Few
consciously realize that in the biggest successes there is the least
correlation between the initial plan and what the startup eventually
becomes.
[
2
]
This sentence originally read "GMail is painfully slow."
Thanks to Paul Buchheit for the correction.
[
3
]
Roger Bannister is famous as the first person to run a mile
in under 4 minutes.  But his world record only lasted 46 days.  Once
he showed it could be done, lots of others followed.  Ten years
later Jim Ryun ran a 3:59 mile as a high school junior.
[
4
]
If you want to be the next Apple, maybe you don't even want to start
with consumer electronics.  Maybe at first you make something hackers
use.  Or you make something popular but apparently unimportant,
like a headset or router.  All you need is a bridgehead.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell,
Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica
Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan
for reading drafts of this.


@synopsi I wrote about this here: https://t.co/Icj6P7OYx2

@tjdada Over 90% of the code being written by the latest batch of startups is written by AI. Sold now?

The lesson of the 2020s, like the 1930s, is how much damage bad leaders can do.

For sure there will be new uses of AI as well, perhaps more important than the ones we already know about. But we already know about so many that existing uses are enough to generate rapid growth.

It took a while for society to "digest" integrated circuits and the internet in the sense of figuring out all the ways they could be used. This seems to be happening faster with AI. Maybe because so many uses of intelligence are already known.

The AI boom is not just probably bigger than the two previous ones I've seen (integrated circuits and the internet), but also seems to be spreading faster.

@0xshei If you're talking to startups early enough and you have a lot of practice munging startup ideas, yes.

@justinvincent Sure, lots of times in both directions.

@lefineder You don't yet know what's going to happen.

Yuri is one of the best early stage investors in Silicon Valley and General Catalyst was very clever to recruit him. They were already ranked high on my mental list of VC firms, but this jumps them up a few spots.


Hiring is Obsolete
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
May 2005
(This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.)
The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and
Microsoft.  Average age of their founders: 24.  So it is pretty
well established now that grad students can start successful
companies.  And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?
Like everything else in technology, the cost of starting a startup
has decreased dramatically.  Now it's so low that it has disappeared
into the noise. The main cost of starting a Web-based
startup is food and rent.  Which means it doesn't cost much more
to start a company than to be a total slacker.  You can probably
start a startup on ten thousand dollars of seed funding, if you're
prepared to live on ramen.
The less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission
of investors to do it.  So a lot of people will be able to start
companies now who never could have before.
The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties.
I'm not so excited about founders who have everything investors
want except intelligence, or everything except energy.  The most
promising group to be liberated by the new, lower threshold are
those who have everything investors want except experience.
Market Rate
I once claimed that
nerds
were unpopular
in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do
than work full-time at being popular.  Some said I was just telling
people what they wanted to hear.  Well, I'm now about to do that
in a spectacular way: I think undergraduates are undervalued.
Or more precisely, I think few realize the huge
spread in the value of 20 year olds.  Some, it's true, are not very
capable.  But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30
year olds.
[
1
]
Till now the problem has always been that it's difficult to pick
them out.  Every VC in the world, if they could go back in time,
would try to invest in Microsoft.  But which would have then?  How
many would have understood that this particular 19 year old was
Bill Gates?
It's hard to judge the young because (a) they change rapidly, (b)
there is great variation between them, and (c) they're individually
inconsistent.  That last one is a big problem.  When you're young,
you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you're smart.
So if the algorithm is to filter out people who say stupid things,
as many investors and employers unconsciously do, you're going to
get a lot of false positives.
Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only
aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high.
And so the idea for most of the twentieth century was that everyone
had to begin as a trainee in some
entry-level
job.  Organizations
realized there was a lot of variation in the incoming stream, but
instead of pursuing this thought they tended to suppress it, in the
belief that it was good for even the most promising kids to start
at the bottom, so they didn't get swelled heads.
The most productive young people will
always
be undervalued
by large organizations, because the young have no performance to
measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend
toward the mean.
What's an especially productive 22 year old to do?  One thing you
can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users.
Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for
the customer.  The rate at which they value you (though they may
not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess your value to
the user.  But there's a way to appeal their judgement.  If you
want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your
own company.
The market is a lot more discerning than any employer.  And it is
completely non-discriminatory.  On the Internet, nobody knows you're
a dog.  And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22.  All users
care about is whether your site or software gives them what they
want.  They don't care if the person behind it is a high school
kid.
If you're really productive, why not make employers pay market rate
for you?  Why go work as an ordinary employee for a big
company, when you could start a startup and make them buy it to get
you?
When most people hear the word "startup," they think of the famous
ones that have gone public.  But most startups that succeed do it
by getting bought.  And usually the acquirer doesn't just want the
technology, but the people who created it as well.
Often big companies buy startups before they're profitable.  Obviously
in such cases they're not after revenues.  What they want is the
development team and the software they've built so far.  When a
startup gets bought for 2 or 3 million six months in, it's really
more of a hiring bonus than an acquisition.
I think this sort of thing will happen more and more, and that it
will be better for everyone.  It's obviously better for the people
who start the startup, because they get a big chunk of money up
front.  But I think it will be better for the acquirers too.  The
central problem in big companies, and the main reason they're so
much less productive than small companies, is the difficulty of
valuing each person's work.  Buying larval startups solves that
problem for them: the acquirer doesn't pay till the developers have
proven themselves.  Acquirers are protected on the downside, but
still get most of the upside.
Product Development
Buying startups also solves another problem afflicting big companies:
they can't do product development.  Big companies are good at
extracting the value from existing products, but bad at creating
new ones.
Why? It's worth studying this phenomenon in detail, because this
is the raison d'etre of startups.
To start with, most big companies have some kind of turf to protect,
and this tends to warp their development decisions.  For example,
Web-based
applications are hot now, but
within Microsoft there must
be a lot of ambivalence about them, because the very idea of Web-based
software threatens the desktop.  So any Web-based application that
Microsoft ends up with, will probably, like Hotmail, be something
developed outside the company.
Another reason big companies are bad at developing new products is
that the kind of people who do that tend not to have much power in
big companies (unless they happen to be the CEO).  Disruptive
technologies are developed by disruptive people.  And they either
don't work for the big company, or have been outmaneuvered by yes-men
and have comparatively little influence.
Big companies also lose because they usually only build one of each
thing.  When you only have one Web browser, you can't do anything
really risky with it.  If ten different startups design ten different
Web browsers and you take the best, you'll probably get something
better.
The more general version of this problem is that there are too many
new ideas for companies to explore them all.  There might be 500
startups right now who think they're making something Microsoft
might buy.  Even Microsoft probably couldn't manage 500 development
projects in-house.
Big companies also don't pay people the right way.  People developing
a new product at a big company get paid roughly the same whether
it succeeds or fails.  People at a startup expect to get rich if
the product succeeds, and get nothing if it fails.
[
2
]
So naturally
the people at the startup work a lot harder.
The mere bigness of big companies is an obstacle.  In startups,
developers are often forced to talk directly to users, whether they
want to or not, because there is no one else to do sales and support.
It's painful doing sales, but you learn much more from
trying to sell people something than reading what
they said in focus groups.
And then of course, big companies are bad at product development
because they're bad at everything.  Everything happens slower in
big companies than small ones, and product development is something
that has to happen fast, because you have to go through a lot of
iterations to get something good.
Trend
I think the trend of big companies buying startups will only
accelerate.  One of the biggest remaining obstacles is pride.  Most
companies, at least unconsciously, feel they ought to be able to
develop stuff in house, and that buying startups is to some degree
an admission of failure.  And so, as people generally do with
admissions of failure, they put it off for as long as possible.
That makes the acquisition very expensive when it finally happens.
What companies should do is go out and discover startups when they're
young, before VCs have puffed them up into something that costs
hundreds of millions to acquire.  Much of what VCs add, the acquirer
doesn't need anyway.
Why don't acquirers try to predict the companies they're going to
have to buy for hundreds of millions, and grab them early for a
tenth or a twentieth of that?  Because they can't predict the winners
in advance?  If they're only paying a twentieth as much, they only
have to predict a twentieth as well.  Surely they can manage that.
I think companies that acquire technology will gradually learn to
go after earlier stage startups.  They won't necessarily buy them
outright.  The solution may be some hybrid of investment and
acquisition: for example, to buy a chunk of the company and get an
option to buy the rest later.
When companies buy startups, they're effectively fusing recruiting
and product development.  And I think that's more efficient than
doing the two separately, because you always get people who are
really committed to what they're working on.
Plus this method yields teams of developers who already work well
together.  Any conflicts between them have been ironed out under
the very hot iron of running a startup.  By the time the acquirer
gets them, they're finishing one another's sentences.  That's
valuable in software, because so many bugs occur at the boundaries
between different people's code.
Investors
The increasing cheapness of starting a company doesn't just give
hackers more power relative to employers.  It also gives them more
power relative to investors.
The conventional wisdom among VCs is that hackers shouldn't be
allowed to run their own companies.  The founders are supposed to
accept MBAs as their bosses, and themselves take on some title like
Chief Technical Officer.  There may be cases where this is a good
idea.  But I think founders will increasingly be able to push back
in the matter of control, because they just don't need the investors'
money as much as they used to.
Startups are a comparatively new phenomenon.  Fairchild Semiconductor
is considered the first VC-backed startup, and they were founded
in 1959, less than fifty years ago.  Measured on the time scale of
social change, what we have now is pre-beta.  So we shouldn't assume
the way startups work now is the way they have to work.
Fairchild needed a lot of money to get started.  They had to build
actual factories.  What does the first round of venture funding for
a Web-based startup get spent on today?  More money can't get
software written faster; it isn't needed for facilities, because
those can now be quite cheap; all money can really buy you is sales
and marketing.  A sales force is worth something, I'll admit.  But
marketing is increasingly irrelevant.  On the Internet, anything
genuinely good will spread by word of mouth.
Investors' power comes from money.  When startups need less money,
investors have less power over them.  So future founders may not
have to accept new CEOs if they don't want them.  The VCs will have
to be dragged kicking and screaming down this road, but like many
things people have to be dragged kicking and screaming toward, it
may actually be good for them.
Google is a sign of the way things are going.  As a condition of
funding, their investors insisted they hire someone old and experienced
as CEO.  But from what I've heard the founders didn't just give in
and take whoever the VCs wanted.  They delayed for an entire year,
and when they did finally take a CEO, they chose a guy with a PhD
in computer science.
It sounds to me as if the founders are still the most powerful
people in the company, and judging by Google's performance, their
youth and inexperience doesn't seem to have hurt them.  Indeed, I
suspect Google has done better than they would have if the founders
had given the VCs what they wanted, when they wanted it, and let
some MBA take over as soon as they got their first round of funding.
I'm not claiming the business guys installed by VCs have no value.
Certainly they have.  But they don't need to become the founders'
bosses, which is what that title CEO means.  I predict that in the
future the executives installed by VCs will increasingly be COOs
rather than CEOs.  The founders will run engineering directly, and
the rest of the company through the COO.
The Open Cage
With both employers and investors, the balance of power is slowly
shifting towards the young.  And yet they seem the last to realize
it.  Only the most ambitious undergrads even consider starting their
own company when they graduate.  Most just want to get a job.
Maybe this is as it should be.  Maybe if the idea of starting a
startup is intimidating, you filter out the uncommitted.  But I
suspect the filter is set a little too high.  I think there are
people who could, if they tried, start successful startups, and who
instead let themselves be swept into the intake ducts of big
companies.
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they
don't always realize at first that the door's open?  Often they
have to be poked with a stick to get them out.  Something similar
happened with blogs.  People could have been publishing online in
1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple
years.  In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled
to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank.
Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants
to do it, even print journalists.  But blogging has not taken off
recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight
years for everyone to realize the cage was open.
I think most undergrads don't realize yet that the economic cage
is open.  A lot have been told by their parents that the route to
success is to get a good job.  This was true when their parents
were in college, but it's less true now. The route to success is
to build something valuable, and you don't have to be working for
an existing company to do that.  Indeed, you can often do it better
if you're not.
When I talk to undergrads, what surprises me most about them is how
conservative they are.   Not politically, of course.  I mean they
don't seem to want to take risks.  This is a mistake, because the
younger you are, the more risk you can take.
Risk
Risk and reward are always proportionate.  For example, stocks are
riskier than bonds, and over time always have greater returns.  So
why does anyone invest in bonds?  The catch is that phrase "over
time."  Stocks will generate greater returns over thirty years, but
they might lose value from year to year.  So what you should invest
in depends on how soon you need the money.  If you're young, you
should take the riskiest investments you can find.
All this talk about investing may seem very theoretical.  Most
undergrads probably have more debts than assets.  They may feel
they have nothing to invest.  But that's not true: they have their
time to invest, and the same rule about risk applies there.  Your
early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks.
The reason risk is always proportionate to reward is that market
forces make it so.  People will pay extra for stability.  So if you
choose stability-- by buying bonds, or by going to work for a big
company-- it's going to cost you.
Riskier career moves pay better on average, because there is less
demand for them.  Extreme choices like starting a startup are so
frightening that most people won't even try.  So you don't end up
having as much competition as you might expect, considering the
prizes at stake.
The math is brutal.  While perhaps 9 out of 10 startups fail, the
one that succeeds will pay the founders more than 10 times what
they would have made in an ordinary job.
[
3
]
That's the sense in
which startups pay better "on average."
Remember that.  If you start a startup, you'll probably fail.  Most
startups fail. It's the nature of the business.  But it's not
necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of
failing, if you can afford the risk.  Failing at 40, when you have
a family to support, could be serious.  But if you fail at 22, so
what?  If you try to start a startup right out of college and it
tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter.  Which, if you
think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate
program.
Even if your startup does tank, you won't harm your prospects with
employers.  To make sure I asked some friends who work for big
companies.  I asked managers at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Cisco and
Microsoft how they'd feel about two candidates, both 24, with equal
ability, one who'd tried to start a startup that tanked, and another
who'd spent the two years since college working as a developer at
a big company.  Every one responded that they'd prefer the guy who'd
tried to start his own company.  Zod Nazem, who's in charge of
engineering at Yahoo, said:
I actually put more value on the guy with the failed
  startup.  And you can quote me!
So there you have it.  Want to get hired by Yahoo?  Start your own
company.
The Man is the Customer
If even big employers think highly of young hackers who start
companies, why don't more do it?  Why are undergrads so conservative?
I think it's because they've spent so much time in institutions.
The first twenty years of everyone's life consists of being piped
from one institution to another.  You probably didn't have much
choice about the secondary schools you went to.  And after high
school it was probably understood that you were supposed to go to
college.  You may have had a few different colleges to choose
between, but they were probably pretty similar.  So by this point
you've been riding on a subway line for twenty years, and the next
stop seems to be a job.
Actually college is where the line ends.  Superficially, going to
work for a company may feel like just the next in a series of
institutions, but underneath, everything is different.  The end of
school is the fulcrum of your life, the point where you go from
net consumer to net producer.
The other big change is that now, you're steering.  You can go
anywhere you want. So it may be worth standing back and understanding
what's going on, instead of just doing the default thing.
All through college, and probably long before that, most undergrads
have been thinking about what employers want.  But what really
matters is what customers want, because they're the ones who give
employers the money to pay you.
So instead of thinking about what employers want, you're probably
better off thinking directly about what users want.  To the extent
there's any difference between the two, you can even use that to
your advantage if you start a company of your own.  For example,
big companies like docile conformists.  But this is merely an
artifact of their bigness, not something customers need.
Grad School
I didn't consciously realize all this when I was graduating from
college-- partly because I went straight to grad school.  Grad
school can be a pretty good deal, even if you think of one day
starting a startup.  You can start one when you're done, or even
pull the ripcord part way through, like the founders of Yahoo and
Google.
Grad school makes a good launch pad for startups, because you're
collected together with a lot of smart people, and you have bigger
chunks of time to work on your own projects than an undergrad or
corporate employee would.  As long as you have a fairly tolerant
advisor, you can take your time developing an idea before turning
it into a company.  David Filo and Jerry Yang started the Yahoo
directory in February 1994 and were getting a million hits a day
by the fall, but they didn't actually drop out of grad school and
start a company till March 1995.
You could also try the startup first, and if it doesn't work, then
go to grad school.  When startups tank they usually do it fairly
quickly. Within a year you'll know if you're wasting your time.
If it fails, that is.  If it succeeds, you may have to delay grad
school a little longer.  But you'll have a much more enjoyable life
once there than you would on a regular grad student stipend.
Experience
Another reason people in their early twenties don't start startups
is that they feel they don't have enough experience.  Most investors
feel the same.
I remember hearing a lot of that word "experience" when I was in
college.  What do people really mean by it?  Obviously it's not the
experience itself that's valuable, but something it changes in your
brain.  What's different about your brain after you have "experience,"
and can you make that change happen faster?
I now have some data on this, and I can tell you what tends to be
missing when people lack experience.  I've said that every
startup
needs three things: to start with good people,
to make something users want, and not to spend too much money.  It's
the middle one you get wrong when you're inexperienced.  There are
plenty of undergrads with enough technical skill to write good
software, and undergrads are not especially prone to waste money.
If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have
to make something people
want
.
This is not exclusively a failing of the young.  It's common for
startup founders of all ages to build things no one wants.
Fortunately, this flaw should be easy to fix.  If undergrads were
all bad programmers, the problem would be a lot harder.  It can
take years to learn how to program.  But I don't think it takes
years to learn how to make things people want.  My hypothesis is
that all you have to do is smack hackers on the side of the head
and tell them: Wake up.  Don't sit here making up a priori theories
about what users need.  Go find some users and see what they need.
Most successful startups not only do something very specific, but
solve a problem people already know they have.
The big change that "experience" causes in your brain is learning
that you need to solve people's problems.  Once you grasp that, you
advance quickly to the next step, which is figuring out what those
problems are.  And that takes some effort, because the way software
actually gets used, especially by the people who pay the most for
it, is not at all what you might expect.  For example, the stated
purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas.  Its real role is to
overcome people's fear of public speaking.  It allows you to give
an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience
to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of a bright one
looking at you.
This kind of thing is out there for anyone to see.  The key is to
know to look for it-- to realize that having an idea for a startup
is not like having an idea for a class project.  The goal in a
startup is not to write a cool piece of software.  It's to make
something people want.  And to do that you have to look at users--
forget about hacking, and just look at users.  This can be quite a
mental adjustment, because little if any of the software you write
in school even has users.
A few steps before a Rubik's Cube is solved, it still looks like a
mess.  I think there are a lot of undergrads whose brains are in a
similar position: they're only a few steps away from being able to
start successful startups, if they wanted to, but they don't realize
it.  They have more than enough technical skill.  They just haven't
realized yet that the way to create wealth is to make what users
want, and that employers are just proxies for users in which risk
is pooled.
If you're young and smart, you don't need either of those.  You
don't need someone else to tell you what users want, because you
can figure it out yourself.  And you don't want to pool risk, because
the younger you are, the more risk you should take.
A Public Service Message
I'd like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents.
Don't drop out of college to start a startup.  There's no rush.
There will be plenty of time to start companies after you graduate.
In fact, it may be just as well to go work for an existing company
for a couple years after you graduate, to learn how companies work.
And yet, when I think about it, I can't imagine telling Bill Gates
at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company.
He'd have told me to get lost.  And could I have honestly claimed
that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working
at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have
if he'd been taking classes back at Harvard?  No, probably not.
And yes, while it is probably true that you'll learn some valuable
things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years
before starting your own, you'd learn a thing or two running your
own company during that time too.
The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even
colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates.  So I'm supposed
to finish college, then go work for another company for two years,
and then I can start my own?  I have to wait till I'm 23?  That's
four years
.  That's more than twenty percent of my life so
far.  Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money
writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.
And he'd be right.  The Apple II was launched just two years later.
In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another
company as we're suggesting, he might well have gone to work for
Apple.  And while that would probably have been better for all of
us, it wouldn't have been better for him.
So while I stand by our responsible advice to finish college and
then go work for a while before starting a startup, I have to admit
it's one of those things the old tell the young, but don't expect
them to listen to.  We say this sort of thing mainly so we can claim
we warned you.  So don't say I didn't warn you.
Notes
[
1
]
The average B-17 pilot in World War II was in his early twenties.
(Thanks to Tad Marko for pointing this out.)
[
2
] If a company tried to pay employees this way, they'd be called
unfair.  And yet when they buy some startups and not others, no one
thinks of calling that unfair.
[
3
] The 1/10 success rate for startups is a bit of an urban legend.
It's suspiciously neat.  My guess is the odds are slightly worse.
Thanks
to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this, to
the friends I promised anonymity to for their opinions about hiring,
and to Karen Nguyen and the Berkeley CSUA for organizing this talk.
Russian Translation
Romanian Translation
Japanese Translation
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If you rarely use other verbs, it will be all the more effective when you do use "whined" or "spluttered." But you should only use different verbs when they mean something different. E.g. you should probably never use "queried", which is merely a synonym for "asked".

Something I taught 11 yo: using "said" in dialogue is like framing works on paper with plain white mats. It's the right choice nearly all the time. You want people to notice the dialogue/art itself, not the mat.

@alabd_jebreen Neither Victorian furniture nor Victorian architecture.

@eshear If you've made yourself the way you think people should be (honest, hard-working, imaginative, whatever) then you'd tend to steer your kid in the same direction.

@engineers_feed What @NooraHealth tells new mothers.

@Algon_33 Not among people who understand architecture.

There are some Twitter accounts popular with the taste equivalent of midwits (whatever that is) that diss modern architecture, but even they shy away from Gothic Revival.

I don't like it when people mob some kid in their teens or early twenties for seeming entitled in a video. It's too easy. And it doesn't teach us anything; we already know there are a lot of people like that. In fact most of us probably said some stupid things at that age.

Prediction: Victorian furniture will be rehabilitated sooner and more completely than Victorian architecture. Partly because it can be mixed with other things. Partly because it's actually better, or at least the best of it is.

@GarettJones What you want is for them to invest it and thereby increase GDP growth.

@chinmay @michelletandler So I can get an image of your current location simply by replying?