I just saw Marty Supreme. That must be the most non-stop movie I've ever seen. They made every frame count.

...then they fight you, then you win.

Now that I've been through being a kid, growing up, and then having kids, it's clear that the main thing that differentiates people is simply whether they make an effort. Whether they're content to drift along with the current, or whether they try to swim.

Stripe's new frontpage shows the scope of their ambition. A ticker for percent of global GDP! This is not a gimmick. Patrick and John have always thought in these terms. https://t.co/DD0qZPI3vS

A retired Minneapolis couple who had guns pointed at them by ICE in a church parking lot.

"They were obviously not trained at all. I've known many police officers in my life. These people were right off the streets."

"They had the professional demeanor of criminals." https://t.co/LyaKCjVLow

Information wants to be free.

At least ChatGPT is candid about its training artifacts. https://t.co/jRd30fTblF

If someone had predicted before the last election that if Trump won, federal officers would be shooting Americans in the streets, he'd have been dismissed as an alarmist.

It's bizarre how many people on the left choose to read this as if I'd written "No one predicted this." Obviously people made all sorts of dire predictions about what would happen if Trump won. What I'm saying is that the most dire predictions are now coming true.

Ten years ago I wrote an essay explaining the source of America's increasing polarization. If you want to understand how we got from the unity (and uniformity) of the mid 20th century to the way things are now, this is what happened: https://t.co/Luw9oajZyu


Economic Inequality
January 2016
Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased
dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer.
Nearly everyone who writes about the topic says that economic inequality
should be decreased.
I'm interested in this question because I was one of the founders of
a company called Y Combinator that helps people start startups.
Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds, its founders become
rich. Which means by helping startup founders I've been helping to
increase economic inequality.  If economic inequality should be
decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. No one should
be.
But that doesn't sound right. What's going on here? What's going
on is that while economic inequality is a single measure (or more
precisely, two: variation in income, and variation in wealth), it
has multiple causes. Many of these causes are bad, like tax loopholes
and drug addiction. But some are good, like Larry Page and
Sergey Brin starting the company you use to find things online.
If you want to understand economic inequality — and more importantly,
if you actually want to fix the bad aspects of it — you have to
tease apart the components.  And yet the trend in nearly everything
written about the subject is to do the opposite: to squash together
all the aspects of economic inequality as if it were a single
phenomenon.
Sometimes this is done for ideological reasons.  Sometimes it's
because the writer only has very high-level data and so draws
conclusions from that, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his
keys under the lamppost, instead of where he dropped them, because the
light is better there.  Sometimes it's because the writer doesn't
understand critical aspects of inequality, like the role of technology
in wealth creation.  Much of the time, perhaps most of the time,
writing about economic inequality combines all three.
___
The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is
to treat it as a single phenomenon.  The most naive version of which
is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by
taking money from the poor.
Usually this is an assumption people start from rather than a
conclusion they arrive at by examining the evidence.  Sometimes the
pie fallacy is stated explicitly:
...those at the top are grabbing an increasing fraction of the
  nation's income — so much of a larger share that what's left over
  for the rest is diminished....
[
1
]
Other times it's more unconscious. But the unconscious form is very
widespread.  I think because we grow up in a world where the pie
fallacy is actually true.  To kids, wealth
is
a fixed pie
that's shared out, and if one person gets more, it's at the expense
of another.  It takes a conscious effort to remind oneself that the
real world doesn't work that way.
In the real world you can create wealth as well as taking it from
others.  A woodworker creates wealth.  He makes a chair, and you
willingly give him money in return for it.  A high-frequency trader
does not.  He makes a dollar only when someone on the other end of
a trade loses a dollar.
If the rich people in a society got that way by taking wealth from
the poor, then you have the degenerate case of economic inequality,
where the cause of poverty is the same as the cause of wealth.  But
instances of inequality don't have to be instances of the degenerate
case.  If one woodworker makes 5 chairs and another makes none, the
second woodworker will have less money, but not because anyone took
anything from him.
Even people sophisticated enough to know about the pie fallacy are
led toward it by the custom of describing economic inequality as a
ratio of one quantile's income or wealth to another's.  It's so
easy to slip from talking about income shifting from one quantile
to another, as a figure of speech, into believing that is literally
what's happening.
Except in the degenerate case, economic inequality can't be described
by a ratio or even a curve.  In the general case it consists of
multiple ways people become poor, and multiple ways people become
rich.  Which means to understand economic inequality in a country,
you have to go find individual people who are poor or rich and
figure out why.
[
2
]
If you want to understand
change
in economic inequality, you
should ask what those people would have done when it was different.
This is one way I know the rich aren't all getting richer simply
from some new system for transferring wealth to them from
everyone else.  When you use the would-have method with startup
founders, you find what most would have done
back in 1960
, when
economic inequality was lower, was to join big companies or become
professors.  Before Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, his default
expectation was that he'd end up working at Microsoft.  The reason
he and most other startup founders are richer than they would have
been in the mid 20th century is not because of some right turn the
country took during the Reagan administration, but because progress
in technology has made it much easier to start a new company that
grows fast
.
Traditional economists seem strangely averse to studying individual
humans. It seems to be a rule with them that everything has to start
with statistics.  So they give you very precise numbers about
variation in wealth and income, then follow it with the most naive
speculation about the underlying causes.
But while there are a lot of people who get rich through rent-seeking
of various forms, and a lot who get rich by playing zero-sum games,
there are also a significant number
who get rich by creating wealth.  And creating wealth, as a source
of economic inequality, is different from taking it — not just
morally, but also practically, in the sense that it is harder to
eradicate.  One reason is that variation in productivity is
accelerating.  The rate at which individuals can create wealth
depends on the technology available to them, and that grows
exponentially. The other reason creating wealth is such a tenacious
source of inequality is that it can expand to accommodate a lot of
people.
___
I'm all for shutting down the crooked ways to get rich.  But that
won't eliminate great variations in wealth, because as long as you leave
open the option of getting rich by creating wealth, people who want
to get rich will do that instead.
Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their
other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them.  Suppose new
policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem
plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make
their fortunes will continue to do so, but be content to work for
ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because
they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only
way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups.
They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor
in the success of a startup.
[
3
]
And while it would probably be
a good thing for the world if people who wanted to get rich switched
from playing zero-sum games to creating wealth, that would not only
not eliminate great variations in wealth, but might even
exacerbate them.
In a zero-sum game there is at least a limit to the upside.  Plus
a lot of the new startups would create new technology that further
accelerated variation in productivity.
Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic
inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that
you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources. And if
you do, that core will be big, because it will have expanded to
include the efforts of all the refugees.  Plus it will have a large
Baumol penumbra around it: anyone who could get rich by creating
wealth on their own account will have to be paid enough to prevent
them from doing it.
You can't prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people
from getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them
from starting startups.
So let's be clear about that. Eliminating great variations in wealth would
mean eliminating startups.  And that doesn't seem a wise move.
Especially since it would only mean you eliminated
startups in your own country.  Ambitious people already move halfway
around the world to further their careers, and startups can operate
from anywhere nowadays.  So if you made it impossible to get rich
by creating wealth in your country, people who wanted to do that
would just leave and do it somewhere else. Which would
certainly get you a lower Gini coefficient, along with a lesson in
being careful what you ask for.
[
4
]
I think rising economic inequality is the inevitable fate of countries
that don't choose something worse. We had a 40 year stretch in the
middle of the 20th century that convinced some people otherwise.
But as I explained in
The Refragmentation
,
that was an anomaly — a
unique combination of circumstances that compressed American society
not just economically but culturally too.
[
5
]
And while some of the growth in economic inequality we've seen since
then has been due to bad behavior of various kinds, there has
simultaneously been a huge increase in individuals' ability to
create wealth.  Startups are almost entirely a product of this
period. And even within the startup world, there has been a qualitative
change in the last 10 years.  Technology has decreased the cost of
starting a startup so much that founders now have the upper hand
over investors.  Founders get less diluted, and it is now common
for them to retain
board control
as well.  Both further increase
economic inequality, the former because founders own more stock,
and the latter because, as investors have learned, founders tend
to be better at running their companies than investors.
While the surface manifestations change, the underlying forces are
very, very old.  The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon
Valley has been happening for thousands of years.  If you look at
the history of stone tools, technology was already accelerating in
the Mesolithic.  The acceleration would have been too slow to
perceive in one lifetime.  Such is the nature of the leftmost part
of an exponential curve.  But it was the same curve.
You do not want to design your society in a way that's incompatible
with this curve. The evolution of technology is one of the most
powerful forces in history.
Louis Brandeis said "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth
concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." That
sounds plausible.  But if I have to choose between ignoring him and
ignoring an exponential curve that has been operating for thousands
of years, I'll bet on the curve.  Ignoring any trend that has been
operating for thousands of years is dangerous.  But exponential
growth, especially, tends to bite you.
___
If accelerating variation in productivity is always going to produce
some baseline growth in economic inequality, it would be a good
idea to spend some time thinking about that future.  Can you have
a healthy society with great variation in wealth?  What would it
look like?
Notice how novel it feels to think about that.  The public conversation
so far has been exclusively about the need to decrease economic
inequality.  We've barely given a thought to how to live with it.
I'm hopeful we'll be able to.  Brandeis was a product of the Gilded
Age, and things have changed since then. It's harder to hide
wrongdoing now.  And to get rich now you don't have to buy politicians
the way railroad or oil magnates did.
[
6
]
The great concentrations
of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be
destroying democracy.
There are lots of things wrong with the US that have economic
inequality as a symptom. We should fix those things.  In the process
we may decrease economic inequality. But we can't start from the
symptom and hope to fix the underlying causes.
[
7
]
The most obvious is poverty. I'm sure most of those who want to
decrease economic inequality want to do it mainly to help the poor,
not to hurt the rich.
[
8
]
Indeed, a good number are merely being
sloppy by speaking of decreasing economic inequality when what they
mean is decreasing poverty.  But this is a situation where it would
be good to be precise about what we want.  Poverty and economic
inequality are not identical.  When the city is turning off your
water
because you can't pay the bill, it doesn't make any difference
what Larry Page's net worth is compared to yours.  He might only
be a few times richer than you, and it would still be just as much
of a problem that your water was getting turned off.
Closely related to poverty is lack of social mobility.  I've seen
this myself: you don't have to grow up rich or even upper middle
class to get rich as a startup founder, but few successful founders
grew up desperately poor.  But again, the problem here is not simply
economic inequality.  There is an enormous difference in wealth
between the household Larry Page grew up in and that of a successful
startup founder, but that didn't prevent him from joining their
ranks.  It's not economic inequality per se that's blocking social
mobility, but some specific combination of things that go wrong
when kids grow up sufficiently poor.
One of the most important principles in Silicon Valley is that "you
make what you measure."  It means that if you pick some number to
focus on, it will tend to improve, but that you have to choose the
right number, because only the one you choose will improve; another
that seems conceptually adjacent might not.  For example, if you're
a university president and you decide to focus on graduation rates,
then you'll improve graduation rates.  But only graduation rates,
not how much students learn.  Students could learn less, if to
improve graduation rates you made classes easier.
Economic inequality is sufficiently far from identical with the
various problems that have it as a symptom that we'll probably only
hit whichever of the two we aim at.  If we aim at economic inequality,
we won't fix these problems.  So I say let's aim at the problems.
For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth
in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking
wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty.
[
9
]
And if
there are people getting rich by tricking consumers or lobbying the
government for anti-competitive regulations or tax loopholes, then
let's stop them. Not because it's causing economic inequality, but
because it's stealing.
[
10
]
If all you have is statistics, it seems like that's what you need
to fix. But behind a broad statistical measure like economic
inequality there are some things that are good and some that are
bad, some that are historical trends with immense momentum and
others that are random accidents.  If we want to fix the world
behind the statistics, we have to understand it, and focus our
efforts where they'll do the most good.
Notes
[
1
]
Stiglitz, Joseph.
The Price of Inequality
. Norton, 2012. p.
32.
[
2
]
Particularly since economic inequality is a matter of outliers,
and outliers are disproportionately likely to have gotten where
they are by ways that have little do with the sort of things
economists usually think about, like wages and productivity, but
rather by, say, ending up on the wrong side of the "War on Drugs."
[
3
]
Determination is the most important factor in deciding between
success and failure, which in startups tend to be sharply differentiated.
But it takes more than determination to create one of the hugely
successful startups.  Though most founders start out excited about
the idea of getting rich, purely mercenary founders will usually
take one of the big acquisition offers most successful startups get
on the way up.  The founders who go on to the next stage tend to
be driven by a sense of mission.  They have the same attachment to
their companies that an artist or writer has to their work.  But
it is very hard to predict at the outset which founders will do
that. It's not simply a function of their initial attitude.  Starting
a company changes people.
[
4
]
After reading a draft of this essay, Richard Florida told me
how he had once talked to a group of Europeans "who said
 they wanted to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more
  like Silicon Valley. I said by definition this will give you more
  inequality.  They thought I was insane — they could not process
  it."
[
5
]
Economic inequality has been decreasing globally.  But this
is mainly due to the erosion of the kleptocracies that formerly
dominated all the poorer countries.  Once the playing field is
leveler politically, we'll see economic inequality start to rise
again. The US is the bellwether.  The situation we face here, the
rest of the world will sooner or later.
[
6
]
Some people still get rich by buying politicians.  My point is that
it's no longer a precondition.
[
7
]
As well as problems that have economic inequality as a symptom,
there are those that have it as a cause.  But in most if not all,
economic inequality is not the primary cause.  There is usually
some injustice that is allowing economic inequality to turn into
other forms of inequality, and that injustice is what we need to
fix.  For example, the police in the US treat the poor worse than
the rich.  But the solution is not to make people richer. It's to
make the police treat people more equitably.  Otherwise they'll
continue to maltreat people who are weak in other ways.
[
8
]
Some who read this essay will say that I'm clueless or even
being deliberately misleading by focusing so much on the richer end
of economic inequality — that economic inequality is really about
poverty. But that is exactly the point I'm making, though sloppier
language than I'd use to make it.  The real problem is poverty, not
economic inequality.  And if you conflate them you're aiming at the
wrong target.
Others will say I'm clueless or being misleading by focusing on
people who get rich by creating wealth — that startups aren't the
problem, but corrupt practices in finance, healthcare, and so on.
Once again, that is exactly my point.  The problem is not economic
inequality, but those specific abuses.
It's a strange task to write an essay about why something isn't the
problem, but that's the situation you find yourself in when so many
people mistakenly think it is.
[
9
]
Particularly since many causes of poverty are only partially
driven by people trying to make money from them. For example,
America's abnormally high incarceration rate is a major cause of
poverty.  But although
for-profit prison companies
and
prison guard unions
both spend
a lot lobbying for harsh sentencing laws, they
are not the original source of them.
[
10
]
Incidentally, tax loopholes are definitely not a product
of some power shift due to recent increases in economic inequality.
The golden age of economic equality in the mid 20th century was
also the golden age of tax avoidance. Indeed, it was so widespread
and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality was
really so low then as we think.  In a period when people are trying
to hide wealth from the government, it will tend to be hidden from
statistics too. One sign of the potential magnitude of the problem
is the discrepancy between government receipts as a percentage of
GDP, which have remained more or less constant during the entire
period from the end of World War II to the present, and tax rates,
which have varied dramatically.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Tiffani Ashley Bell, Patrick Collison, Ron
Conway, Richard Florida, Ben Horowitz, Jessica Livingston, Robert
Morris, Tim O'Reilly, Max Roser, and Alexia Tsotsis for reading
drafts of this.
Note:
This is a new version from which I
removed a pair of metaphors that made a lot of people mad,
essentially by macroexpanding them.  If anyone wants to see
the old version, I put it
here
.
Related:
The Short Version
A Reply to Ezra Klein
A Reply to Russell Okung
French Translation


The professional traders' dream. After all, in a zero-sum game you can't win without losers. https://t.co/4q4Hi3vDoi

@erikbryn I would guess it's because people in those cities are richer, and richer people are less likely to commit murder or be murdered.

@dsiroker I used to prefer weekends because it was so quiet.

@elonmusk Really you need to go to the source, which is the supervisors.

@PlanMaestro @jeremybney Rather suspicious how much the numbers change at state borders.

@pwlot Usually with cities it isn't, but in San Francisco's case it is. That's what makes this situation so striking historically.

@onejasonknight They pretend that this isn't what DEI is about, but this is what it requires in practice, and everyone who knows what goes on, and isn't blinded by ideology, knows it.

San Francisco is not being dragged down by circumstances. It's being actively held down by misgovernment. Swap out a handful of supervisors, and it would start to spring back within a week.

One thing people don't realize about San Francisco's problems is that the city would almost instantly become one of the best in America in every category if it were governed as well as even the median city.

@ScottAdamsSays Their methods may be, but their beliefs about widespread election fraud aren't. Those are a joke.


@archaeologyart You might like this, @iriscompietart.

@knewter Oops, sorry, make that: Apparently Richard what are you doing got age limits removed.

@phenomheights @readswithravi Whenever I write about how to write, I try to do whatever I'm writing about.

@jonatanpallesen I didn't realize this implied Genghis had 16 million descendants in unbroken male lines (nor apparently did the author of the Smithsonian Magazine article I learned about this research from), but that's so much stronger a claim that I should delete the original tweet.

@artrecovery Guessed that flag right on the first try...

@ahistoryinart Yet another good artist I've learned about from you!

This NYT article is pretty damning. Apparently Rachel Levine got age limits for transgender surgeries removed from medical guidelines because the proposed ages were so low that even mentioning them would generate opposition.

https://t.co/BeMR9Jz0Uw

@lisperati The reason this isn't true is that for most of history most people didn't move around much. https://t.co/NXuQvgL2TQ

For example, a lot of Americans claim to have millenarian beliefs, but as far as I know there aren't a lot of people buying options on their assets.

I can't help wondering if there is a way to profit from such widespread stupidity. If people actually act on their beliefs about the economy, beyond just stating them to pollsters, then presumably there would be. But very likely they don't.


YC, for example, cares way more about how much knowledge and insight you have than how worldly you are. They know that starting a startup is a crash course in worldliness. You may be a reclusive nerd at first, but you'll be plenty worldly after a year or two.

Worldliness seems impressive to the unworldly, but it's very easily acquired. So don't overrate it. It's worth something, but not much. It's infinitely more common than knowledge and insight.

The police must hate having to do this. This was not what they signed up for.

The shower in our vacation rental is decorated with coronaviruses. https://t.co/LKba5iTGRm

@createsomechaos @NdemoKelvin These are called scholarships.

@NdemoKelvin College will not always be there. If you drop out for more than a year or two, you'll be older than the other students when you return, and you won't have the same experience.

@rburton @WhiteHouse It's hard to imagine that people would have been as disappointed with Kamala as they are with Trump. https://t.co/e8S7AORlnN

@kentlinyy Business school is a mistake if you want to start a startup, though it could be a good idea if you want to work in management at a large company.

@DudespostingWs $4 million seemed ridiculously high so I looked it up. It was sold for £70,000.

https://t.co/ppUhQzLfeu

@WhiteHouse I understand the symbolism of the ruinous arena: the current administration will leave the country in ruins. But what's with the latex suit? Is that some kind of covert reference to Trump's adventures with Epstein?


@patrickc Oh no. I'd have thought if anyone had a clever way around jet lag, it would be you. If even you can't beat it, it must be unbeatable.

@Noahpinion It's a little sad to think that these people will stop getting busted now thanks to AI. This will be one of the last.

@ThomasDespin You'd think, but he insists on changing it every year.

@aymannadeem Man, you post a funny picture and now you're in trouble for not "graduating past a narrative."

@derekworldover I gave him a bowl of pretzels and he was happy.

@toothfairy_hk Once you have kids, put them first.

I was doing office hours with a founder from an earlier batch and 12 yo walked in looking for pretzels. I asked the founder how old 12 yo had been during his batch. Turned out he did YC in 2011, a year before 12 yo was even born.

@yacineMTB Peter Thiel has very good advice about startups. He's one of the smartest people in Silicon Valley.

@OmerSMano What's changed, presumably, is that it's now possible for startups to compete in the defense business.

@stats_feed You need to go to original sources.

https://t.co/5KgnGQqprr


Beating the Averages
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
April 2001, rev. April 2003
(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz
Developer Symposium.)
In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I
started a startup called
Viaweb
.
Our plan was to write
software that would let end users build online stores.
What was novel about this software, at the time, was
that it ran on our server, using ordinary Web pages
as the interface.
A lot of people could have been having this idea at the
same time, of course, but as far as I know, Viaweb was
the first Web-based application.  It seemed such
a novel idea to us that we named the company after it:
Viaweb, because our software worked via the Web,
instead of running on your desktop computer.
Another unusual thing about this software was that it
was written primarily in a programming language called
Lisp. It was one of the first big end-user
applications to be written in Lisp, which up till then
had been used mostly in universities and research labs. [1]
The Secret Weapon
Eric Raymond has written an essay called "How to Become a Hacker,"
and in it, among other things, he tells would-be hackers what
languages they should learn.  He suggests starting with Python and
Java, because they are easy to learn.  The serious hacker will also
want to learn C, in order to hack Unix, and Perl for system
administration and cgi scripts.  Finally, the truly serious hacker
should consider learning Lisp:
Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience
  you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make
  you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you
  never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin.  It
won't get you a job, except perhaps as a classics professor, but
it will improve your mind, and make you a better writer in languages
you do want to use, like English.
But wait a minute.  This metaphor doesn't stretch that far.  The
reason Latin won't get you a job is that no one speaks it.  If you
write in Latin, no one can understand you.  But Lisp is a computer
language, and computers speak whatever language you, the programmer,
tell them to.
So if Lisp makes you a better programmer, like he says, why wouldn't
you want to use it? If a painter were offered a brush that would
make him a better painter, it seems to me that he would want to
use it in all his paintings, wouldn't he? I'm not trying to make
fun of Eric Raymond here.  On the whole, his advice is good.  What
he says about Lisp is pretty much the conventional wisdom.  But
there is a contradiction in the conventional wisdom:  Lisp will
make you a better programmer, and yet you won't use it.
Why not?  Programming languages are just tools, after all.  If Lisp
really does yield better programs, you should use it.  And if it
doesn't, then who needs it?
This is not just a theoretical question.  Software is a very
competitive business, prone to natural monopolies.  A company that
gets software written faster and better will, all other things
being equal, put its competitors out of business.  And when you're
starting a startup, you feel this very keenly.  Startups tend to
be an all or nothing proposition.  You either get rich, or you get
nothing.  In a startup, if you bet on the wrong technology, your
competitors will crush you.
Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason
not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp.  We knew that everyone
else was writing their software in C++ or Perl.  But we also knew
that that didn't mean anything.  If you chose technology that way,
you'd be running Windows.  When you choose technology, you have to
ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will
work the best.
This is especially true in a startup.  In a big company, you can
do what all the other big companies are doing.  But a startup can't
do what all the other startups do.  I don't think a lot of people
realize this, even in startups.
The average big company grows at about ten percent a year.  So if
you're running a big company and you do everything the way the
average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the
average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.
The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course.
If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should
expect average performance.  The problem here is, average performance
means that you'll go out of business.  The survival rate for startups
is way less than fifty percent.  So if you're running a startup,
you had better be doing something odd.  If not, you're in trouble.
Back in 1995, we knew something that I don't think our competitors
understood, and few understand even now:  when you're writing
software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use
any language you want.  When you're writing desktop software,
there's a strong bias toward writing applications in the same
language as the operating system.  Ten years ago, writing applications
meant writing applications in C.  But with Web-based software,
especially when you have the source code of both the language and
the operating system, you can use whatever language you want.
This new freedom is a double-edged sword, however.  Now that you
can use any language, you have to think about which one to use.
Companies that try to pretend nothing has changed risk finding that
their competitors do not.
If you can use any language, which do you use?  We chose Lisp.
For one thing, it was obvious that rapid development would be
important in this market.  We were all starting from scratch, so
a company that could get new features done before its competitors
would have a big advantage.  We knew Lisp was a really good language
for writing software quickly, and server-based applications magnify
the effect of rapid development, because you can release software
the minute it's done.
If other companies didn't want to use Lisp, so much the better.
It might give us a technological edge, and we needed all the help
we could get.  When we started Viaweb, we had no experience in
business.  We didn't know anything about marketing, or hiring
people, or raising money, or getting customers.  Neither of us had
ever even had what you would call a real job.  The only thing we
were good at was writing software.  We hoped that would save us.
Any advantage we could get in the software department, we would
take.
So you could say that using Lisp was an experiment.  Our hypothesis
was that if we wrote our software in Lisp, we'd be able to get
features done faster than our competitors, and also to do things
in our software that they couldn't do.  And because Lisp was so
high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs
would be lower.  If this were so, we could offer a better product
for less money, and still make a profit.  We would end up getting
all the users, and our competitors would get none, and eventually
go out of business.  That was what we hoped would happen, anyway.
What were the results of this experiment?  Somewhat surprisingly,
it worked.  We eventually had many competitors, on the order of
twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete
with ours.  We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the
server and yet felt like a desktop application.  Our competitors
had cgi scripts.  And we were always far ahead of them in features.
Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce
features that we didn't have.  But with Lisp our development cycle
was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within
a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release.  By
the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling
us, we would have the new feature too.
It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of
secret weapon-- that we were decoding their Enigma traffic or
something.  In fact we did have a secret weapon, but it was simpler
than they realized.  No one was leaking news of their features to
us.   We were just able to develop software faster than anyone
thought possible.
When I was about nine I happened to get hold of a copy of
The Day
of the Jackal,
by Frederick Forsyth.  The main character is an
assassin who is hired to kill the president of France.  The assassin
has to get past the police to get up to an apartment that overlooks
the president's route.  He walks right by them, dressed up as an
old man on crutches, and they never suspect him.
Our secret weapon was similar.  We wrote our software in a weird
AI language, with a bizarre syntax full of parentheses.  For years
it had annoyed me to hear Lisp described that way.  But now it
worked to our advantage.  In business, there is nothing more valuable
than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand.  In
business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.
And so, I'm a little embarrassed to say, I never said anything
publicly about Lisp while we were working on Viaweb.  We never
mentioned it to the press, and if you searched for Lisp on our Web
site, all you'd find were the titles of two books in my bio.  This
was no accident.  A startup should give its competitors as little
information as possible.  If they didn't know what language our
software was written in, or didn't care, I wanted to keep it that
way.[2]
The people who understood our technology best were the customers.
They didn't care what language Viaweb was written in either, but
they noticed that it worked really well.  It let them build great
looking online stores literally in minutes.  And so, by word of
mouth mostly, we got more and more users.  By the end of 1996 we
had about 70 stores online.  At the end of 1997 we had 500.  Six
months later, when Yahoo bought us, we had 1070 users.  Today, as
Yahoo Store, this software continues to dominate its market.  It's
one of the more profitable pieces of Yahoo, and the stores built
with it are the foundation of Yahoo Shopping.  I left Yahoo in
1999, so I don't know exactly how many users they have now, but
the last I heard there were about 20,000.
The Blub Paradox
What's so great about Lisp?  And if Lisp is so great, why doesn't
everyone use it?  These sound like rhetorical questions, but actually
they have straightforward answers.  Lisp is so great not because
of some magic quality visible only to devotees, but because it is
simply the most powerful language available.  And the reason everyone
doesn't use it is that programming languages are not merely
technologies, but habits of mind as well, and nothing changes
slower.  Of course, both these answers need explaining.
I'll begin with a shockingly controversial statement:  programming
languages vary in power.
Few would dispute, at least, that high level languages are more
powerful than machine language.  Most programmers today would agree
that you do not, ordinarily, want to program in machine language.
Instead, you should program in a high-level language, and have a
compiler translate it into machine language for you.  This idea is
even built into the hardware now: since the 1980s, instruction sets
have been designed for compilers rather than human programmers.
Everyone knows it's a mistake to write your whole program by hand
in machine language.  What's less often understood is that there
is a more general principle here: that if you have a choice of
several languages, it is, all other things being equal, a mistake
to program in anything but the most powerful one. [3]
There are many exceptions to this rule.  If you're writing a program
that has to work very closely with a program written in a certain
language, it might be a good idea to write the new program in the
same language.  If you're writing a program that only has to do
something very simple, like number crunching or bit manipulation,
you may as well use a less abstract language, especially since it
may be slightly faster.  And if you're writing a short, throwaway
program, you may be better off just using whatever language has
the best library functions for the task.  But in general, for
application software, you want to be using the most powerful
(reasonably efficient) language you can get, and using anything
else is a mistake, of exactly the same kind, though possibly in a
lesser degree, as programming in machine language.
You can see that machine language is very low level.  But, at least
as a kind of social convention, high-level languages are often all
treated as equivalent.  They're not.  Technically the term "high-level
language" doesn't mean anything very definite.  There's no dividing
line with machine languages on one side and all the high-level
languages on the other.  Languages fall along a continuum [4] of
abstractness, from the most powerful all the way down to machine
languages, which themselves vary in power.
Consider Cobol.  Cobol is a high-level language, in the sense that
it gets compiled into machine language.  Would anyone seriously
argue that Cobol is equivalent in power to, say, Python?  It's
probably closer to machine language than Python.
Or how about Perl 4?  Between Perl 4 and Perl 5, lexical closures
got added to the language.  Most Perl hackers would agree that Perl
5 is more powerful than Perl 4.  But once you've admitted that,
you've admitted that one high level language can be more powerful
than another.  And it follows inexorably that, except in special
cases, you ought to use the most powerful you can get.
This idea is rarely followed to its conclusion, though.  After a
certain age, programmers rarely switch languages voluntarily.
Whatever language people happen to be used to, they tend to consider
just good enough.
Programmers get very attached to their favorite languages, and I
don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so to explain this point I'm
going to use a hypothetical language called Blub.  Blub falls right
in the middle of the abstractness continuum.  It is not the most
powerful language, but it is more powerful than Cobol or machine
language.
And in fact, our hypothetical Blub programmer wouldn't use either
of them.  Of course he wouldn't program in machine language.  That's
what compilers are for.  And as for Cobol, he doesn't know how
anyone can get anything done with it.  It doesn't even have x (Blub
feature of your choice).
As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the
power continuum, he knows he's looking down.  Languages less powerful
than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some
feature he's used to.  But when our hypothetical Blub programmer
looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't
realize he's looking up.  What he sees are merely weird languages.
He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but
with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well.  Blub is good
enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of
the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that
he in turn looks down upon Blub.  How can you get anything done in
Blub? It doesn't even have y.
By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the
differences in power between the various languages are those who
understand the most powerful one.  (This is probably what Eric
Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't
trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox:
they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because
it dictates the way they think about programs.
I know this from my own experience, as a high school kid writing
programs in Basic.  That language didn't even support recursion.
It's hard to imagine writing programs without using recursion, but
I didn't miss it at the time.  I thought in Basic.  And I was a
whiz at it.  Master of all I surveyed.
The five languages that Eric Raymond recommends to hackers fall at
various points on the power continuum.  Where they fall relative
to one another is a sensitive topic.  What I will say is that I
think Lisp is at the top.  And to support this claim I'll tell you
about one of the things I find missing when I look at the other
four languages.  How can you get anything done in them, I think,
without macros? [5]
Many languages have something called a macro.  But Lisp macros are
unique.  And believe it or not, what they do is related to the
parentheses.  The designers of Lisp didn't put all those parentheses
in the language just to be different.  To the Blub programmer, Lisp
code looks weird.  But those parentheses are there for a reason.
They are the outward evidence of a fundamental difference between
Lisp and other languages.
Lisp code is made out of Lisp data objects.  And not in the trivial
sense that the source files contain characters, and strings are
one of the data types supported by the language.  Lisp code, after
it's read by the parser, is made of data structures that you can
traverse.
If you understand how compilers work, what's really going on is
not so much that Lisp has a strange syntax as that Lisp has no
syntax.  You write programs in the parse trees that get generated
within the compiler when other languages are parsed.  But these
parse trees are fully accessible to your programs.  You can write
programs that manipulate them.  In Lisp, these programs are called
macros.  They are programs that write programs.
Programs that write programs?  When would you ever want to do that?
Not very often, if you think in Cobol.  All the time, if you think
in Lisp.  It would be convenient here if I could give an example
of a powerful macro, and say there! how about that?  But if I did,
it would just look like gibberish to someone who didn't know Lisp;
there isn't room here to explain everything you'd need to know to
understand what it meant.  In
Ansi Common Lisp
I tried to move
things along as fast as I could, and even so I didn't get to macros
until page 160.
But I think I can give a kind of argument that might be convincing.
The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25%
macros.  Macros are harder to write than ordinary Lisp functions,
and it's considered to be bad style to use them when they're not
necessary.  So every macro in that code is there because it has to
be.  What that means is that at least 20-25% of the code in this
program is doing things that you can't easily do in any other
language.  However skeptical the Blub programmer might be about my
claims for the mysterious powers of Lisp, this ought to make him
curious.  We weren't writing this code for our own amusement.  We
were a tiny startup, programming as hard as we could in order to
put technical barriers between us and our competitors.
A suspicious person might begin to wonder if there was some
correlation here.  A big chunk of our code was doing things that
are very hard to do in other languages.  The resulting software
did things our competitors' software couldn't do.  Maybe there was
some kind of connection.  I encourage you to follow that thread.
There may be more to that old man hobbling along on his crutches
than meets the eye.
Aikido for Startups
But I don't expect to convince anyone
(
over 25
)
to go out and learn
Lisp.  The purpose of this article is not to change anyone's mind,
but to reassure people already interested in using Lisp-- people
who know that Lisp is a powerful language, but worry because it
isn't widely used.  In a competitive situation, that's an advantage.
Lisp's power is multiplied by the fact that your competitors don't
get it.
If you think of using Lisp in a startup, you shouldn't worry that
it isn't widely understood.  You should hope that it stays that
way. And it's likely to.  It's the nature of programming languages
to make most people satisfied with whatever they currently use.
Computer hardware changes so much faster than personal habits that
programming practice is usually ten to twenty years behind the
processor.  At places like MIT they were writing programs in
high-level languages in the early 1960s, but many companies continued
to write code in machine language well into the 1980s.  I bet a
lot of people continued to write machine language until the processor,
like a bartender eager to close up and go home, finally kicked them
out by switching to a risc instruction set.
Ordinarily technology changes fast.  But programming languages are
different: programming languages are not just technology, but what
programmers think in.  They're half technology and half religion.[6]
And so the median language, meaning whatever language the median
programmer uses, moves as slow as an iceberg.  Garbage collection,
introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be
a good thing.  Runtime typing, ditto, is growing in popularity.
Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in the early 1970s, are now,
just barely, on the radar screen.  Macros, introduced by Lisp in the
mid 1960s, are still terra incognita.
Obviously, the median language has enormous momentum.  I'm not
proposing that you can fight this powerful force.  What I'm proposing
is exactly the opposite: that, like a practitioner of Aikido, you
can use it against your opponents.
If you work for a big company, this may not be easy.  You will have
a hard time convincing the pointy-haired boss to let you build
things in Lisp, when he has just read in the paper that some other
language is poised, like Ada was twenty years ago, to take over
the world.  But if you work for a startup that doesn't have
pointy-haired bosses yet, you can, like we did, turn the Blub
paradox to your advantage:  you can use technology that your
competitors, glued immovably to the median language, will never be
able to match.
If you ever do find yourself working for a startup, here's a handy
tip for evaluating competitors.  Read their job listings.  Everything
else on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent,
but the job listings have to be specific about what they want, or
they'll get the wrong candidates.
During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions.
A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month
or so.  The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they
had a live online demo, was look at their job listings.  After a
couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about
and which not to.  The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions
had, the less dangerous the company was.  The safest kind were the
ones that wanted Oracle experience.  You never had to worry about
those.  You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java
developers.  If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would
be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company
where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers.  If I
had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have
been really worried.
Notes
[1] Viaweb at first had two parts: the editor, written in Lisp,
which people used to build their sites, and the ordering system,
written in C, which handled orders.  The first version was mostly
Lisp, because the ordering system was small.  Later we added two
more modules, an image generator written in C, and a back-office
manager written mostly in Perl.
In January 2003, Yahoo released a new version of the editor
written in C++ and Perl.  It's hard to say whether the program is no
longer written in Lisp, though, because to translate this program
into C++ they literally had to write a Lisp interpreter: the source
files of all the page-generating templates are still, as far as I
know,  Lisp code.  (See
Greenspun's Tenth Rule
.)
[2] Robert Morris says that I didn't need to be secretive, because
even if our competitors had known we were using Lisp, they wouldn't
have understood why:  "If they were that smart they'd already be
programming in Lisp."
[3] All languages are equally powerful in the sense of being Turing
equivalent, but that's not the sense of the word programmers care
about. (No one wants to program a Turing machine.)  The kind of
power programmers care about may not be formally definable, but
one way to explain it would be to say that it refers to features
you could only get in the less powerful language by writing an
interpreter for the more powerful language in it. If language A
has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B
doesn't, that probably doesn't make A more powerful, because you
can probably write a subroutine to do it in B.  But if A supports,
say, recursion, and B doesn't, that's not likely to be something
you can fix by writing library functions.
[4] Note to nerds: or possibly a lattice, narrowing toward the top;
it's not the shape that matters here but the idea that there is at
least a partial order.
[5] It is a bit misleading to treat macros as a separate feature.
In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other Lisp
features like lexical closures and rest parameters.
[6] As a result, comparisons of programming languages either take
the form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly
neutral that they're really works of anthropology.  People who
value their peace, or want tenure, avoid the topic.  But the question
is only half a religious one; there is something there worth
studying, especially if you want to design new languages.
More Technical Details
Japanese Translation
Turkish Translation
Uzbek Translation
Orbitz Uses Lisp Too
How To Become A Hacker
A Scheme Story
Italian Translation
You'll find this essay and 14 others in
Hackers & Painters
.


@cesarsuarezpab Long before, in the late 1980s. I talk about this in the essay, in the first few paragraphs.

I love it when people tell me about typos in a new essay. It means they've actually read the essay, which puts them in the top 5% of people commenting on it.

@alxnderco Good guess. That's the one.

@greekoptimist That summary is a hallucination. I don't talk at all about how the word "woke" has been diluted.

@yz_aisdr The reason is that wokeness was still on the rise when Trump was first elected, but had already been declining for several years the second time.

@growing_daniel Honestly I think he did, but running Meta = living in a world of compromise. He's used to not acting on his own personal opinions. But only a fool could fail to see by this point how corrosive wokeness is, and Mark is not a fool.

@DaleCloudman Wokeness was already declining. It peaked in 2020 or 2021.

@s8mb Honest question: The US is doing great at AI without any zones. Why does the UK need them?

@aman1sehgal If you read the essay you'll see that this is explained in the first few paragraphs.

I just published a new essay, and since the algorithm prefers links in replies, I dutifully put it in a thread about why I wrote it. But a lot of people didn't notice the link, so screw that:

The Origins of Wokeness: https://t.co/jvOj5AyYT5


There is nothing more dangerous than a frightened dictator.

@AccountableDeep That was my point. They weren't unique and neither are we.

@igorsushko If I meant that, I'd have said that.

@carlcortright Depends what they're building.

"We are not unique in suffering from moral confusion — these crises are a familiar story — but we are unique in the tremendous acceleration of the rate of social change and in the tremendous risk of a catastrophic end to all our hopes."

— Alan Simpson, 1961

@BruegelBot Never noticed the chimney fire!

It's hard to imagine a country both arresting the founder of Telegram and being a major startup hub.

@gorbansky The ones that don't churn will grow so much that you're net ahead. And startups won't be fickle if you have the best product.

@robinhanson They would have been able, and would be able, to do more if they controlled the presidency and both houses.

@andyk112002 Actually he bought the game since then.


@pitdesi "Avoid metaphors, which can introduce unneeded baggage."

– UC Irvine Inclusive IT Language Guide

@ilamparithi_ja Thanks! A 20 year old typo. I fixed it.

@gfodor @DavidSacks Bullshit.

https://t.co/hISBWla9W4

@Chris_arnade There's a kappa in Animal Crossing. https://t.co/Ve8QJbkT5Z

@ilamparithi_ja Thanks! The notes are on a separate page. Not sure why I did that...

https://t.co/KfGNcdbZZW

@pt @IAPonomarenko I don't think this is enough to explain it though. I doubt Ukraine is even in the top 20 favorite Republican topics.

@adnashmyash @IAPonomarenko Why though? Why is this random Silicon Valley guy so zealously promoting Russian interests? That's the mystery.

@DavidSacks If you're able to think for yourself instead of adopting a complete set of orthodox left- or (in your case) right-wing opinions, it's possible to see how dishonest both wokeness and Trump are.

https://t.co/ogMaJHrydF

@NJGenerals85 It does if you click on the links and read them.

@liburteeusa Then why do you follow me?


Jessica discovered something surprising now that she's doing some video interviews for The Social Radars. She says editing video is less work than editing audio, because with video she can't be such a perfectionist.

@asifchach They'll be here.

@vazserox True, but the victors in a war can commit genocide.

@eshear By definition.

It's official. It's genocide.

Nine former CDC directors who served under Republican and Democratic presidents warn that the damage RFK Jr is doing to America's public health system is "unlike anything our country has ever experienced." https://t.co/T5hPhH4VeK

13 yo just started dictating the fourth book in his series, and a character he created when he was 9 just met a character from the book he finished a few weeks ago. They're really starting to take on lives of their own.

@MustafaBarghou1 Do they even bother to claim that these buildings have tunnels under them?

@eshear I go to Hay on Wye and spend 3 days working my way through the used bookshops there.

@derJamesJackson What was the speaker charged with?


@JDHamkins Do either neither or both.

@FrancisOKC I don't entirely blame them. A lot of them were justifiably fed up with the appallingly irresponsible way the Biden administration handled crypto.

@Jon_Genghis Gerald Ford and Bob Dole weren't Trump underneath.

@Kayodeodeleye Not all of them. I'd guess less than half of tech supported Trump in this last election.

@lesgreys If you had to judge by the trend in government, it would seem that America was past its peak. But simultaneously you have a huge boom in technology, so it's hard to call.

@O1010lO Some. LBJ seems to have been more thuggish than he seemed in the press. But I don't think e.g. Gerald Ford was.

I just came across this essay I wrote in 2009 about how Silicon Valley seemed to an observant outsider, and it's remarkable how little things have changed.

https://t.co/EYFzZm02Mj

@ahistoryinart It helps to need reading glasses.

@PrabhsimratG I think it's the most boring possible explanation: ideas don't come at a constant rate, but more like a sine wave.

@Mayanklll I miss the quiet. The thugs seem to start some new fight every day.


@rezich Wrong.

I explained to 12 yo that Trump thinks that a poor country that ships a lot of raw materials to American manufacturers but can't afford to buy much from us is taking advantage of us. He couldn't believe it.

@quantum_pinkink @cremieuxrecueil Actually judging from the paper linked to in this thread, it's going to be the opposite.

@AlexTISYoung 20 edits meaning 20 base pairs?

@BillAckman If there's a problem with current tariff rates, fix it. Otherwise leave things as they were.

*That's* simple.

@BillAckman But the real question is why we're speculating about this. There are experts within the government who know far more about this than us. They should be deciding these things. And their starting point should be current tariff levels.

@BillAckman Simple, but not thoughtful. Presumably the amount of tariff different imports can bear varies a good deal. There must be some for which a 10% tariff would have little effect, but what if there are others where it would be prohibitive?

@lefineder Merely having access to antibiotics means everyone now is richer than everyone then.

Whenever someone tweets a graph that has been adjusted for inflation, someone will reply "but what about inflation?"

@bestinvesting1 But not net manufacturing jobs, that's the problem.


Why Startups Condense in America
May 2006
(This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)
Startups happen in clusters.  There are a lot of them in Silicon
Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami.  A country that
wants startups will probably also have to reproduce whatever makes
these clusters form.
I've claimed that the
recipe
is a
great university near a town smart
people like.  If you set up those conditions within the US, startups
will form as inevitably as water droplets condense on a cold piece
of metal.  But when I consider what it would take to reproduce
Silicon Valley in another country, it's clear the US is a particularly
humid environment.  Startups condense more easily here.
It is by no means a lost cause to try to create a silicon valley
in another country.  There's room not merely to equal Silicon Valley,
but to surpass it.  But if you want to do that, you have to
understand the advantages startups get from being in America.
1. The US Allows Immigration.
For example, I doubt it would be possible to reproduce Silicon
Valley in Japan, because one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive
features is immigration.  Half the people there speak with accents.
And the Japanese don't like immigration.  When they think about how
to make a Japanese silicon valley, I suspect they unconsciously
frame it as how to make one consisting only of Japanese people.
This way of framing the question probably guarantees failure.
A silicon valley has to be a mecca for the smart and the ambitious,
and you can't have a mecca if you don't let people into it.
Of course, it's not saying much that America is more open to
immigration than Japan.  Immigration policy is one area where a
competitor could do better.
2. The US Is a Rich Country.
I could see India one day producing a rival to Silicon Valley.
Obviously they have the right people: you can tell that by the
number of Indians in the current Silicon Valley.  The problem with
India itself is that it's still so poor.
In poor countries, things we take for granted are missing.  A friend
of mine visiting India sprained her ankle falling down the steps
in a railway station.  When she turned to see what had happened,
she found the steps were all different heights.  In industrialized
countries we walk down steps our whole lives and never think about
this, because there's an infrastructure that prevents such a staircase
from being built.
The US has never been so poor as some countries are now.  There
have never been swarms of beggars in the streets of American cities.
So we have no data about what it takes to get from the swarms-of-beggars
stage to the silicon-valley stage.  Could you have both at once,
or does there have to be some baseline prosperity before you get a
silicon valley?
I suspect there is some speed limit to the evolution
of an economy.  Economies are made out of people, and attitudes can
only change a certain amount per generation.
[
1
]
3. The US Is Not (Yet) a Police State.
Another country I could see wanting to have a silicon valley is
China.  But I doubt they could do it yet either.  China still seems
to be a police state, and although present rulers seem enlightened
compared to the last, even enlightened despotism can probably only
get you part way toward being a great economic power.
It can get you factories for building things designed elsewhere.
Can it get you the designers, though?  Can imagination flourish
where people can't criticize the government?  Imagination means
having odd ideas, and it's hard to have odd ideas about technology
without also having odd ideas about politics.  And in any case,
many technical ideas do have political implications.  So if you
squash dissent, the back pressure will propagate into technical
fields.
[
2
]
Singapore would face a similar problem.  Singapore seems very aware
of the importance of encouraging startups.  But while energetic
government intervention may be able to make a port run efficiently,
it can't coax startups into existence.  A state that bans chewing
gum has a long way to go before it could create a San Francisco.
Do you need a San Francisco?  Might there not be an alternate route
to innovation that goes through obedience and cooperation instead
of individualism?  Possibly, but I'd bet not.  Most imaginative
people seem to share a certain prickly
independence
,
whenever and wherever they lived.  You see it in Diogenes telling
Alexander to get out of his light and two thousand years later in
Feynman breaking into safes at Los Alamos.
[
3
]
Imaginative people
don't want to follow or lead.  They're most productive when everyone
gets to do what they want.
Ironically, of all rich countries the US has lost the most civil
liberties recently.  But I'm not too worried yet.  I'm hoping once
the present administration is out, the natural openness of American
culture will reassert itself.
4. American Universities Are Better.
You need a great university to seed a silicon valley, and so far
there are few outside the US.  I asked a handful of American computer
science professors which universities in Europe were most admired,
and they all basically said "Cambridge" followed by a long pause
while they tried to think of others.  There don't seem to be many
universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at
least in technology.
In some countries this is the result of a deliberate policy.  The
German and Dutch governments, perhaps from fear of elitism, try to
ensure that all universities are roughly equal in quality.  The
downside is that none are especially good.   The best professors
are spread out, instead of being concentrated as they are in the
US.  This probably makes them less productive, because they don't
have good colleagues to inspire them.  It also means no one university
will be good enough to act as a mecca, attracting talent from abroad
and causing startups to form around it.
The case of Germany is a strange one.  The Germans invented the
modern university, and up till the 1930s theirs were the best in
the world.  Now they have none that stand out.  As I was mulling
this over, I found myself thinking: "I can understand why German
universities declined in the 1930s, after they excluded Jews.  But
surely they should have bounced back by now."  Then I realized:
maybe not.  There are few Jews left in Germany and most Jews I know
would not want to move there.  And if you took any great American
university and removed the Jews, you'd have some pretty big gaps.
So maybe it would be a lost cause trying to create a silicon valley
in Germany, because you couldn't establish the level of university
you'd need as a seed.
[
4
]
It's natural for US universities to compete with one another because
so many are private.  To reproduce the quality of American universities
you probably also have to reproduce this.  If universities are
controlled by the central government, log-rolling will pull them
all toward the mean: the new Institute of X will end up at the
university in the district of a powerful politician, instead of
where it should be.
5. You Can Fire People in America.
I think one of the biggest obstacles to creating startups in Europe
is the attitude toward employment.  The famously rigid labor laws
hurt every company, but startups especially, because startups have
the least time to spare for bureaucratic hassles.
The difficulty of firing people is a particular problem for startups
because they have no redundancy.  Every person has to do their
job well.
But the problem is more than just that some startup might have a
problem firing someone they needed to.  Across industries and
countries, there's a strong inverse correlation between performance
and job security.  Actors and directors are fired at the end of
each film, so they have to deliver every time.  Junior professors
are fired by default after a few years unless the university chooses
to grant them tenure.  Professional athletes know they'll be pulled
if they play badly for just a couple games.  At the other end of
the scale (at least in the US) are auto workers, New York City
schoolteachers, and civil servants, who are all nearly impossible
to fire.  The trend is so clear that you'd have to be willfully
blind not to see it.
Performance isn't everything, you say?  Well, are auto workers,
schoolteachers, and civil servants
happier
than actors,
professors, and professional athletes?
European public opinion will apparently tolerate people being fired
in industries where they really care about performance.  Unfortunately
the only industry they care enough about so far is soccer.  But
that is at least a precedent.
6. In America Work Is Less Identified with Employment.
The problem in more traditional places like Europe and Japan goes
deeper than the employment laws.  More dangerous is the attitude
they reflect: that an employee is a kind of servant, whom the
employer has a duty to protect.  It used to be that way in America
too.  In 1970 you were still supposed to get a job with a big
company, for whom ideally you'd work your whole career.  In return
the company would take care of you: they'd try not to fire you,
cover your medical expenses, and support you in old age.
Gradually employment has been shedding such paternalistic overtones
and becoming simply an economic exchange.  But the importance of
the new model is not just that it makes it easier for startups to
grow.  More important, I think, is that it it makes it easier for
people to
start
startups.
Even in the US most kids graduating from college still think they're
supposed to get jobs, as if you couldn't be productive without being
someone's employee.  But the less you identify work with employment,
the easier it becomes to start a startup.  When you see your career
as a series of different types of work, instead of a lifetime's
service to a single employer, there's less risk in starting your
own company, because you're only replacing one segment instead of
discarding the whole thing.
The old ideas are so powerful that even the most successful startup
founders have had to struggle against them.  A year after the
founding of Apple, Steve Wozniak still hadn't quit HP.  He still
planned to work there for life.  And when Jobs found someone to
give Apple serious venture funding, on the condition that Woz quit,
he initially refused, arguing that he'd designed both the Apple I
and the Apple II while working at HP, and there was no reason he
couldn't continue.
7.  America Is Not Too Fussy.
If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can assume larval
startups will break most of them, because they don't know what the
laws are and don't have time to find out.
For example, many startups in America begin in places where it's
not really legal to run a business.  Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and
Google were all run out of garages.  Many more startups, including
ours, were initially run out of apartments.  If the laws against
such things were actually enforced, most startups wouldn't happen.
That could be a problem in fussier countries.  If Hewlett and Packard
tried running an electronics company out of their garage in
Switzerland, the old lady next door would report them to the municipal
authorities.
But the worst problem in other countries is probably the effort
required just to start a company.  A friend of mine started a company
in Germany in the early 90s, and was shocked to discover, among
many other regulations, that you needed $20,000 in capital to
incorporate.  That's one reason I'm not typing this on an Apfel
laptop.  Jobs and Wozniak couldn't have come up with that kind of
money in a company financed by selling a VW bus and an HP calculator.
We couldn't have started Viaweb either.
[
5
]
Here's a tip for governments that want to encourage startups: read
the stories of existing startups, and then try to simulate what
would have happened in your country.  When you hit something that
would have killed Apple, prune it off.
Startups are
marginal
.
They're started by the poor and the
timid; they begin in marginal space and spare time; they're started
by people who are supposed to be doing something else; and though
businesses, their founders often know nothing about business.  Young
startups are fragile.  A society that trims its margins sharply
will kill them all.
8. America Has a Large Domestic Market.
What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting
their initial product out.  The successful ones therefore make the
first version as simple as possible.  In the US they usually begin
by making something just for the local market.
This works in America, because the local market is 300 million
people.  It wouldn't work so well in Sweden.  In a small country,
a startup has a harder task: they have to sell internationally from
the start.
The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, large domestic
market.  The problem is that the inhabitants still speak many
different languages.  So a software startup in Sweden is still at
a disadvantage relative to one in the US, because they have to deal
with internationalization from the beginning.  It's significant
that the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a
problem that was intrinsically international.
However, for better or worse it looks as if Europe will in a few
decades speak a single language.  When I was a student in Italy in
1990, few Italians spoke English.  Now all educated people seem to
be expected to-- and Europeans do not like to seem uneducated.  This
is presumably a taboo subject, but if present trends continue,
French and German will eventually go the way of Irish and Luxembourgish:
they'll be spoken in homes and by eccentric nationalists.
9. America Has Venture Funding.
Startups are easier to start in America because funding is easier
to get.  There are now a few VC firms outside the US, but startup
funding doesn't only come from VC firms.  A more important source,
because it's more personal and comes earlier in the process, is
money from individual angel investors.  Google might never have got
to the point where they could raise millions from VC funds if they
hadn't first raised a hundred thousand from Andy Bechtolsheim.  And
he could help them because he was one of the founders of Sun.  This
pattern is repeated constantly in startup hubs.  It's this pattern
that
makes
them startup hubs.
The good news is, all you have to do to get the process rolling is
get those first few startups successfully launched.  If they stick
around after they get rich, startup founders will almost automatically
fund and encourage new startups.
The bad news is that the cycle is slow.  It probably takes five
years, on average, before a startup founder can make angel investments.
And while governments
might
be able to set up local VC funds
by supplying the money themselves and recruiting people from existing
firms to run them, only organic growth can produce angel investors.
Incidentally, America's private universities are one reason there's
so much venture capital.  A lot of the money in VC funds comes from
their endowments.  So another advantage of private universities is
that a good chunk of the country's wealth is managed by enlightened
investors.
10. America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers.
Compared to other industrialized countries the US is disorganized
about routing people into careers.  For example, in America people
often don't decide to go to medical school till they've finished
college.  In Europe they generally decide in high school.
The European approach reflects the old idea that each person has a
single, definite occupation-- which is not far from the idea that
each person has a natural "station" in life.  If this were true,
the most efficient plan would be to discover each person's station
as early as possible, so they could receive the training appropriate
to it.
In the US things are more haphazard.  But that turns out to be an
advantage as an economy gets more liquid, just as dynamic typing
turns out to work better than static for ill-defined problems.  This
is particularly true with startups.  "Startup founder" is not the
sort of career a high school student would choose.  If you ask at
that age, people will choose conservatively.  They'll choose
well-understood occupations like engineer, or doctor, or lawyer.
Startups are the kind of thing people don't plan, so you're more
likely to get them in a society where it's ok to make career decisions
on the fly.
For example, in theory the purpose of a PhD program is to train you
to do research.  But fortunately in the US this is another rule
that isn't very strictly enforced.  In the US most people in CS PhD
programs are there simply because they wanted to learn more.  They
haven't decided what they'll do afterward.  So American grad schools
spawn a lot of startups, because students don't feel they're failing
if they don't go into research.
Those worried about America's "competitiveness" often suggest
spending more on public schools.  But perhaps America's lousy public
schools have a hidden advantage.  Because they're so bad, the kids
adopt an attitude of waiting for college.  I did; I knew I was
learning so little that I wasn't even learning what the choices
were, let alone which to choose.  This is demoralizing, but it does
at least make you keep an open mind.
Certainly if I had to choose between bad high schools and good
universities, like the US, and good high schools and bad universities,
like most other industrialized countries, I'd take the US system.
Better to make everyone feel like a late bloomer than a failed child
prodigy.
Attitudes
There's one item conspicuously missing from this list: American
attitudes.  Americans are said to be more entrepreneurial, and less
afraid of risk.  But America has no monopoly on this.  Indians and
Chinese seem plenty entrepreneurial, perhaps more than Americans.
Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I don't believe it.  I
think the problem with Europe is not that they lack balls, but that
they lack examples.
Even in the US, the most successful startup founders are often
technical people who are quite timid, initially, about the idea of
starting their own company. Few are the sort of backslapping
extroverts one thinks of as typically American.  They can usually
only summon up the activation energy to start a startup when they
meet people who've done it and realize they could too.
I think what holds back European hackers is simply that they don't
meet so many people who've done it. You see that variation even
within the US.  Stanford students are more entrepreneurial than
Yale students, but not because of some difference in their characters;
the Yale students just have fewer examples.
I admit there seem to be different attitudes toward ambition in
Europe and the US.  In the US it's ok to be overtly ambitious, and
in most of Europe it's not.  But this can't be an intrinsically
European quality; previous generations of Europeans were as ambitious
as Americans.  What happened?  My hypothesis is that ambition was
discredited by the terrible things ambitious people did in the first
half of the twentieth century.  Now swagger is out. (Even now the
image of a very ambitious German presses a button or two, doesn't
it?)
It would be surprising if European attitudes weren't affected by
the disasters of the twentieth century.  It takes a while to be
optimistic after events like that.  But ambition is human nature.
Gradually it will re-emerge.
[
6
]
How To Do Better
I don't mean to suggest by this list that America is the perfect
place for startups.  It's the best place so far, but the sample
size is small, and "so far" is not very long.   On historical time
scales, what we have now is just a
prototype.
So let's look at Silicon Valley the way you'd look at a product
made by a competitor.  What weaknesses could you exploit?  How could
you make something users would like better?  The users in this case
are those critical few thousand people you'd like to move to your
silicon valley.
To start with, Silicon Valley is too far from San Francisco.  Palo
Alto, the original ground zero, is about thirty miles away, and the
present center more like forty.  So people who come to work in
Silicon Valley face an unpleasant choice: either live in the boring
sprawl of the valley proper, or live in San Francisco and endure
an hour commute each way.
The best thing would be if the silicon valley were not merely closer
to the interesting city, but interesting itself.  And there is a
lot of room for improvement here.  Palo Alto is not so bad, but
everything built since is the worst sort of strip development.  You
can measure how demoralizing it is by the number of people who will
sacrifice two hours a day commuting rather than live there.
Another area in which you could easily surpass Silicon Valley is
public transportation.  There is a train running the length of it,
and by American standards it's not bad.  Which is to say that to
Japanese or Europeans it would seem like something out of the third
world.
The kind of people you want to attract to your silicon valley like
to get around by train, bicycle, and on foot.  So if you want to
beat America, design a town that puts cars last.  It will be a while
before any American city can bring itself to do that.
Capital Gains
There are also a couple things you could do to beat America at the
national level.  One would be to have lower capital gains taxes.
It doesn't seem critical to have the lowest
income
taxes,
because to take advantage of those, people have to move.
[
7
]
But
if capital gains rates vary, you move assets, not yourself, so
changes are reflected at market speeds.  The lower the rate, the
cheaper it is to buy stock in growing companies as opposed to real
estate, or bonds, or stocks bought for the dividends they pay.
So if you want to encourage startups you should have a low rate on
capital gains.  Politicians are caught between a rock and a hard
place here, however: make the capital gains rate low and be accused
of creating "tax breaks for the rich," or make it high and starve
growing companies of investment capital.   As Galbraith said,
politics is a matter of choosing between the unpalatable and the
disastrous.  A lot of governments experimented with the disastrous
in the twentieth century; now the trend seems to be toward the
merely unpalatable.
Oddly enough, the leaders now are European countries like Belgium,
which has a capital gains tax rate of zero.
Immigration
The other place you could beat the US would be with smarter immigration
policy.  There are huge gains to be made here.  Silicon valleys are
made of people, remember.
Like a company whose software runs on Windows, those in the current
Silicon Valley are all too aware of the shortcomings of the INS,
but there's little they can do about it.  They're hostages of the
platform.
America's immigration system has never been well run, and since
2001 there has been an additional admixture of paranoia.  What
fraction of the smart people who want to come to America can even
get in?  I doubt even half.  Which means if you made a competing
technology hub that let in all smart people, you'd immediately get
more than half the world's top talent, for free.
US immigration policy is particularly ill-suited to startups, because
it reflects a model of work from the 1970s.  It assumes good technical
people have college degrees, and that work means working for a big
company.
If you don't have a college degree you can't get an H1B visa, the
type usually issued to programmers.  But a test that excludes Steve
Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell can't be a good one.  Plus you
can't get a visa for working on your own company, only for working
as an employee of someone else's.  And if you want to apply for
citizenship you daren't work for a startup at all, because if your
sponsor goes out of business, you have to start over.
American immigration policy keeps out most smart people, and channels
the rest into unproductive jobs.  It would be easy to do better.
Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting-- if
you made a conscious effort to seek out the smartest people and get
them to come to your country.
A country that got immigration right would have a huge advantage.
At this point you could become a mecca for smart people simply by
having an immigration system that let them in.
A Good Vector
If you look at the kinds of things you have to do to create an
environment where startups condense, none are great sacrifices.
Great universities?  Livable towns?  Civil liberties?  Flexible
employment laws?  Immigration policies that let in smart people?
Tax laws that encourage growth?  It's not as if you have to risk
destroying your country to get a silicon valley; these are all good
things in their own right.
And then of course there's the question, can you afford not to?  I
can imagine a future in which the default choice of ambitious young
people is to start their
own
company
rather than work for someone else's.  I'm not sure that will happen,
but it's where the trend points now.  And if that is the future,
places that don't have startups will be a whole step behind,
like those that missed the Industrial Revolution.
Notes
[
1
]
On the verge of the Industrial Revolution, England was already
the richest country in the world.  As far as such things can be
compared, per capita income in England in 1750 was higher than
India's in 1960.
Deane, Phyllis,
The First Industrial Revolution
, Cambridge
University Press, 1965.
[
2
]
 This has already happened once in China, during the Ming
Dynasty, when the country turned its back on industrialization at
the command of the court.  One of Europe's advantages was that it
had no government powerful enough to do that.
[
3
]
Of course, Feynman and Diogenes were from adjacent traditions,
but Confucius, though more polite, was no more willing to be told
what to think.
[
4
]
For similar reasons it might be a lost cause to try to establish
a silicon valley in Israel.  Instead of no Jews moving there, only
Jews would move there, and I don't think you could build a silicon
valley out of just Jews any more than you could out of just Japanese.
(This is not a remark about the qualities of these groups, just their
sizes.  Japanese are only about 2% of the world population, and
Jews about .2%.)
[
5
]
According to the World Bank, the initial capital requirement
for German companies is 47.6% of the per capita income.  Doh.
World Bank,
Doing Business in 2006
, http://doingbusiness.org
[
6
]
For most of the twentieth century, Europeans looked back on
the summer of 1914 as if they'd been living in a dream world.  It
seems more accurate (or at least, as accurate) to call the years
after 1914 a nightmare than to call those before a dream.  A lot
of the optimism Europeans consider distinctly American is simply
what they too were feeling in 1914.
[
7
]
The point where things start to go wrong seems to be about
50%.  Above that people get serious about tax avoidance.  The reason
is that the payoff for avoiding tax grows hyperexponentially (x/1-x
for 0 < x < 1).  If your income tax rate is 10%, moving to Monaco
would only give you 11% more income, which wouldn't even cover the
extra cost.  If it's 90%, you'd get ten times as much income.  And
at 98%, as it was briefly in Britain in the 70s, moving to Monaco
would give you fifty times as much income.  It seems quite likely
that European governments of the 70s never drew this curve.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Matthias Felleisen, Jessica
Livingston, Robert Morris, Neil Rimer, Hugues Steinier, Brad
Templeton, Fred Wilson, and Stephen Wolfram for reading
drafts of this, and to Ed Dumbill for inviting me to speak.
French Translation
Russian Translation
Japanese Translation
Arabic Translation


@IAPonomarenko By the way, I'm not saying I don't think Putin did it. It seems very possible that he did. I just wondered what he would gain by it. And from the sound of it, the answer is that he could now justify a general mobilization.

These stories remind me of the ones I used to hear in 2015 about people looking at their parents' Facebook feeds, and it was all right-wing conspiracy theories.

@nosilverv What Charisma Is: https://t.co/m29Q3nmupp

@tedgioia I wish I could like this twice.

@Liv_Boeree I don't think that's accurate. People who are "based" do not, as a rule, advocate that those who disagree with them should be punished for it.

@IAPonomarenko Why do you think Putin did it? What will he be able to do now that he couldn't do before?

"I hoped my brother Tarazan was still alive. But I found him in an unimaginable state, his head severed. I wish for death after seeing my brother like that. He was only 18 months old. What has he done in this war?"

https://t.co/Vh06FJRY9y

Apparently we can add the Mac to the list of things insiders omit the definite article before:

https://t.co/EaHDxjVpqN

"Volunteer doctors who have returned from besieged hospitals in Gaza took their firsthand accounts of the carnage to Washington this week, hoping to convey that an immediate cease-fire was needed to provide lifesaving medical care." https://t.co/TirVwfAn4C

UI designer Susan Kare explaining the Mac in 1984:

https://t.co/Be138Vc2iG


@SteveStuWill So ideology is responsible for about 18% of mass shootings.

@Aella_Girl They were nowhere near being able to. The Industrial Revolution was preceded by centuries of progress that are not considered part of the IR but were a necessary precondition for it.

https://t.co/sbYsxtfQ6A

@cremieuxrecueil These people predate worries about climate problems. Before global warming, it was other things.

On the other hand, global warming is a real problem. So like the proverbial stopped clock that's right twice a day, they do happen to be right.

@jaapyx No, that's the job of investors. But that's probably easier to judge for Boom than for the median startup. This is not some new kind of software whose potential market is hard to predict.

Backstage at Startup School there was a monitor showing the current talk. At one point Dalton was asking Sam about the future of AI, and everyone in the room was silent, watching the monitor like we were watching a moon launch. This is a historic moment.

It's fascinating to hear what actual Concorde pilots thought about flying the Overture. It never occurred to me before, the number of pilots who've flown supersonic airliners is tiny. They are the ultimate judges.

@pickover Fields.

Multiple speakers at Startup School made the same very interesting point. If you start a startup now to do something that barely works with AI, the next models will make it really work.

@eshear Symbolizing something isn't meaning in the sense he meant.

But it also wasn't meaningless in that sense even originally. I can easily imagine interpretations of it.

@bchesky If they ever have the Olympics in New York, they'll have to unban Airbnb or they won't be able to house everyone.


@DarwynsTheory Do you not understand what a normal distribution is, or are you just pretending not to?

@John4man Fortunately for us dietary restrictions haven't yet been discovered in the English countryside, except for vegetarianism.

Maybe the reason you have to be formal when entertaining strangers is that you know they assume any such dinner is much more formal than everyday life. So if you just gave them everyday life, they'd assume in actual everyday life you ate dinner out of a trough.

The more laborious way we entertain people we don't know as well is not for their sake. It's because we worry they'd be shocked if they saw how we actually live. But only 1% of them would be; 99% of them live the same way, when no one's looking.

When you have good friends over for dinner, you can just eat what and where you normally do. You don't have to shave or change your clothes or cook different food, or eat in the dining room.

@ThomasSowell I'm certainly not surprised by the distribution. Overall the more intellectual the specialty, the less Republican they are, just as in the rest of the population.

Another landmark in the decline of wokeness.

@MSanchezWorld Looks and intelligence. With those you can get money. But money and intelligence can't get you looks, and looks and money definitely can't get you intelligence.

@sdixitmd You don't appear to be very well informed about Silicon Valley. This strategy is good for Meta making social networks. It would be a disaster if Apple did it with hardware.

@TheRealN8works I'm a US citizen and pay US taxes and vote in US elections. But you knew that; I'm just explaining why I blocked you.