Earnestness

Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as "earnest." This is not by itself a guarantee of success. You could be earnest but incapable. But when founders are both formidable (another of our words) and earnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get.

Earnestness sounds like a boring, even Victorian virtue. It seems a bit of an anachronism that people in Silicon Valley would care about it. Why does this matter so much?

When you call someone earnest, you're making a statement about their motives. It means both that they're doing something for the right reasons, and that they're trying as hard as they can. If we imagine motives as vectors, it means both the direction and the magnitude are right. Though these are of course related: when people are doing something for the right reasons, they try harder. \[[1](#f1n)\]

The reason motives matter so much in Silicon Valley is that so many people there have the wrong ones. Starting a successful startup makes you rich and famous. So a lot of the people trying to start them are doing it for those reasons. Instead of what? Instead of interest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root of earnestness. \[[2](#f2n)\]

It's also the hallmark of a nerd. Indeed, when people describe themselves as "x nerds," what they mean is that they're interested in x for its own sake, and not because it's cool to be interested in x, or because of what they can get from it. They're saying they care so much about x that they're willing to sacrifice seeming cool for its sake.

A [genuine interest](genius.html) in something is a very powerful motivator � for some people, the most powerful motivator of all. \[[3](#f3n)\] Which is why it's what Jessica and I look for in founders. But as well as being a source of strength, it's also a source of vulnerability. Caring constrains you. The earnest can't easily reply in kind to mocking banter, or put on a cool facade of nihil admirari. They care too much. They are doomed to be the straight man. That's a real disadvantage in your [teenage years](nerds.html), when mocking banter and nihil admirari often have the upper hand. But it becomes an advantage later.

It's a commonplace now that the kids who were nerds in high school become the cool kids' bosses later on. But people misunderstand why this happens. It's not just because the nerds are smarter, but also because they're more earnest. When the problems get harder than the fake ones you're given in high school, caring about them starts to matter.

Does it always matter? Do the earnest always win? Not always. It probably doesn't matter much in politics, or in crime, or in certain types of business that are similar to crime, like gambling, personal injury law, patent trolling, and so on. Nor does it matter in academic fields at the more [bogus](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hermeneutic+dialectics+hegemonic+phenomenology+intersectionality) end of the spectrum. And though I don't know enough to say for sure, it may not matter in some kinds of humor: it may be possible to be completely cynical and still be very funny. \[[4](#f4n)\]

Looking at the list of fields I mentioned, there's an obvious pattern. Except possibly for humor, these are all types of work I'd avoid like the plague. So that could be a useful heuristic for deciding which fields to work in: how much does earnestness matter? Which can in turn presumably be inferred from the prevalence of nerds at the top.

Along with "nerd," another word that tends to be associated with earnestness is "naive." The earnest often seem naive. It's not just that they don't have the motives other people have. They often don't fully grasp that such motives exist. Or they may know intellectually that they do, but because they don't feel them, they forget about them. \[[5](#f5n)\]

It works to be slightly naive not just about motives but also, believe it or not, about the problems you're working on. Naive optimism can compensate for the bit rot that [rapid change](ecw.html) causes in established beliefs. You plunge into some problem saying "How hard can it be?", and then after solving it you learn that it was till recently insoluble.

Naivete is an obstacle for anyone who wants to seem sophisticated, and this is one reason would-be intellectuals find it so difficult to understand Silicon Valley. It hasn't been safe for