laundry

October 2004
As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting."  I didn't
realize this when I was in school.  In writing, as in math and
science, they only show you the finished product.
You don't see all the false starts.  This gives students a
misleading view of how things get made.Part of the reason it happens is that writers don't want
people to see their mistakes.  But I'm willing to let people
see an early draft if it will show how much you have
to rewrite to beat an essay into shape.Below is the oldest version I can find of
The Age of the Essay
(probably the second or third day), with
text that ultimately survived in
red and text that later
got deleted in gray.
There seem to be several categories of cuts: things I got wrong,
things that seem like bragging, flames,
digressions, stretches of awkward prose, and unnecessary words.I discarded more from the beginning.  That's
not surprising; it takes a while to hit your stride.  There
are more digressions at the start, because I'm not sure where
I'm heading.The amount of cutting is about average.  I probably write
three to four words for every one that appears in the final
version of an essay.(Before anyone gets mad at me for opinions expressed here, remember
that anything you see here that's not in the final version is obviously
something I chose not to publish, often because I disagree
with it.)
Recently a friend said that what he liked about
my essays was that they weren't written the way
we'd been taught to write essays in school.  You
remember: topic sentence, introductory paragraph,
supporting paragraphs, conclusion.  It hadn't
occurred to me till then that those horrible things
we had to write in school were even connected to
what I was doing now.  But sure enough, I thought,
they did call them "essays," didn't they?Well, they're not.  Those things you have to write
in school are not only not essays, they're one of the
most pointless of all the pointless hoops you have
to jump through in school.  And I worry that they
not only teach students the wrong things about writing,
but put them off writing entirely.So I'm going to give the other side of the story: what
an essay really is, and how you write one.  Or at least,
how I write one.  Students be forewarned: if you actually write
the kind of essay I describe, you'll probably get bad
grades.  But knowing how it's really done should
at least help you to understand the feeling of futility
you have when you're writing the things they tell you to.
The most obvious difference between real essays and
the things one has to write in school is that real
essays are not exclusively about English literature.
It's a fine thing for schools to

teach students how to
write.  But for some bizarre reason (actually, a very specific bizarre
reason that I'll explain in a moment),

the teaching of
writing has gotten mixed together with the study
of literature.  And so all over the country, students are
writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget
might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in
fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about
symbolism in Dickens.With obvious
results.  Only a few people really

care about
symbolism in Dickens.  The teacher doesn't.
The students don't.  Most of the people who've had to write PhD
disserations about Dickens don't.  And certainly

Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay
about color or baseball.How did things get this way?  To answer that we have to go back
almost a thousand years.  Between about 500 and 1000, life was
not very good in Europe.  The term "dark ages" is presently
out of fashion as too judgemental (the period wasn't dark;
it was just different), but if this label didn't already
exist, it would seem an inspired metaphor.  What little
original thought there was took place in lulls between
constant wars and had something of the character of
the thoughts of parents with a new baby.
The most amusing thing written during this
period, Liudprand of Cremona's Embassy to Constantinople, is,
I suspect, mostly inadvertantly so.Around 1000 Europe began to catch its breath.
And once they
had the luxury of curiosity, one of the first things they discovered
was what we call "the classics."
Imagine if we were visited
by aliens.  If they could even get here they'd presumably know a
few things we don't.  Immediately Alien Studies would become
the most dynamic field of scholarship: instead of painstakingly
discovering things for ourselves, we could simply suck up
everything they'd discovered.  So it was in Europe in 1200.
When classical texts began to circulate in Europe, they contained
not just new answers, but new questions.  (If anyone proved
a theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, there
is no record of it.)For a couple centuries, some of the most important work
being done was intellectual archaelogy.  Those were also
the centuries during which schools were first established.
And since reading ancient texts was the essence of what
scholars did then, it became the basis of the curriculum.By 1700, someone who wanted to learn about
physics didn't need to start by mastering Greek in order to read Aristotle.  But schools
change slower than scholarship: the study of
ancient texts
had such prestige that it remained the backbone of
education
until the late 19th century.  By then it was merely a tradition.
It did serve some purposes: reading a foreign language was difficult,
and thus taught discipline, or at least, kept students busy;
it introduced students to
cultures quite different from their own; and its very uselessness
made it function (like white gloves) as a social bulwark.
But it certainly wasn't
true, and hadn't been true for centuries, that students were
serving apprenticeships in the hottest area of scholarship.Classical scholarship had also changed.  In the early era, philology
actually mattered.  The texts that filtered into Europe were
all corrupted to some degree by the errors of translators and
copyists.  Scholars had to figure out what Aristotle said
before they could figure out what he meant.  But by the modern
era such questions were answered as well as they were ever
going to be.  And so the study of ancient texts became less
about ancientness and more about texts.The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of
ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern
texts?  The answer, of course, is that the raison d'etre
of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaelogy that
does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors.
But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer.
The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that
the people studying the classics were, if not wasting their
time, at least working on problems of minor importance.And so began the study of modern literature. There was some
initial resistance, but it didn't last long.
The limiting
reagent in the growth of university departments is what
parents will let undergraduates study.  If parents will let
their children major in x, the rest follows straightforwardly.
There will be jobs teaching x, and professors to fill them.
The professors will establish scholarly journals and publish
one another's papers.  Universities with x departments will
subscribe to the journals.  Graduate students who want jobs
as professors of x will write dissertations about it.  It may
take a good long while for the more prestigious universities
to cave in and establish departments in cheesier xes,  but
at the other end of the scale there are so many universities
competing to attract students that the mere establishment of
a discipline requires little more than the desire to do it.High schools imitate universities.
And so once university
English departments were established in the late nineteenth century,
the 'riting component of the 3 Rs
was morphed into English.
With the bizarre consequence that high school students now
had to write about English literature-- to write, without
even realizing it, imitations of whatever
English professors had been publishing in their journals a
few decades before.   It's no wonder if this seems to the
student a pointless exercise, because we're now three steps
removed from real work: the students are imitating English
professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are
merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what
was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.Perhaps high schools should drop English and just teach writing.
The valuable part of English classes is learning to write, and
that could be taught better by itself.  Students learn better
when they're interested in what they're doing, and it's hard
to imagine a topic less interesting than symbolism in Dickens.
Most of the people who write about that sort of thing professionally
are not really interested in it.  (Though indeed, it's been a
while since they were writing about symbolism; now they're
writing about gender.)I have no illusions about how eagerly this suggestion will
be adopted.  Public schools probably couldn't stop teaching
English even if they wanted to; they're probably required to by
law.  But here's a related suggestion that goes with the grain
instead of against it: that universities establish a
writing major.  Many of the students who now major in English
would major in writing if they could, and most would
be better off.It will be argued that it is a good thing for students to be
exposed to their literary heritage.  Certainly.  But is that
more important than that they learn to write well?  And are
English classes even the place to do it?  After all,
the average public high school student gets zero exposure to
his artistic heritage.  No disaster results.
The people who are interested in art learn about it for
themselves, and those who aren't don't.  I find that American
adults are no better or worse informed about literature than
art, despite the fact that they spent years studying literature
in high school and no time at all studying art.  Which presumably
means that what they're taught in school is rounding error
compared to what they pick up on their own.Indeed, English classes may even be harmful.  In my case they
were effectively aversion therapy.  Want to make someone dislike
a book?  Force him to read it and write an essay about it.
And make the topic so intellectually bogus that you
could not, if asked, explain why one ought to write about it.
I love to read more than anything, but by the end of high school
I never read the books we were assigned.  I was so disgusted with
what we were doing that it became a point of honor
with me to write nonsense at least as good at the other students'
without having more than glanced over the book to learn the names
of the characters and a few random events in it.I hoped this might be fixed in college, but I found the same
problem there.  It was not the teachers.  It was English.
We were supposed to read novels and write essays about them.
About what, and why?  That no one seemed to be able to explain.
Eventually by trial and error I found that what the teacher
wanted us to do was pretend that the story had really taken
place, and to analyze based on what the characters said and did (the
subtler clues, the better) what their motives must have been.
One got extra credit for motives having to do with class,
as I suspect one must now for those involving gender and
sexuality.  I learned how to churn out such stuff well enough
to get an A, but I never took another English class.And the books we did these disgusting things to, like those
we mishandled in high school, I find still have black marks
against them in my mind.  The one saving grace was that
English courses tend to favor pompous, dull writers like
Henry James, who deserve black marks against their names anyway.
One of the principles the IRS uses in deciding whether to
allow deductions is that, if something is fun, it isn't work.
Fields that are intellectually unsure of themselves rely on
a similar principle.  Reading P.G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh or
Raymond Chandler is too obviously pleasing to seem like
serious work, as reading Shakespeare would have been before
English evolved enough to make it an effort to understand him. [sh]
And so good writers (just you wait and see who's still in
print in 300 years) are less likely to have readers turned
against them by clumsy, self-appointed tour guides.
The other big difference between a real essay and the
things
they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't
take a position and then defend it.  That principle,
like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature,
turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long
forgotten origins.  It's often mistakenly believed that
medieval universities were mostly seminaries.  In fact they
were more law schools.  And at least in our tradition
lawyers are advocates: they are
trained to be able to
take
either side of an argument and make as good a case for it
as they can. Whether or not this is a good idea (in the case of prosecutors,
it probably isn't), it tended to pervade
the atmosphere of
early universities.  After the lecture the most common form
of discussion was the disputation.  This idea
is at least
nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense-- indeed,
in the very word thesis.  Most people treat the words
thesis
and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least,
a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was
the argument by which one defended it.I'm not complaining that we blur these two words together.
As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we lose the original
sense of the word thesis, the better.  For many, perhaps most,
graduate students, it is stuffing a square peg into a round
hole to try to recast one's work as a single thesis.  And
as for the disputation, that seems clearly a net lose.
Arguing two sides of a case may be a necessary evil in a
legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth,
as I think lawyers would be the first to admit.
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of
the essays
they teach you to write in high school.  The topic
sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting
paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the
conclusion--- uh, what it the conclusion?  I was never sure
about that in high school.  If your thesis was well expressed,
what need was there to restate it?  In theory it seemed that
the conclusion of a really good essay ought not to need to
say any more than QED.
But when you understand the origins
of this sort of "essay", you can see where the
conclusion comes from.  It's the concluding remarks to the
jury.
What other alternative is there?  To answer that
we have to
reach back into history again, though this time not so far.
To Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the essay.
He was
doing something quite different from what a
lawyer does,
and
the difference is embodied in the name.  Essayer is the French
verb meaning "to try" (the cousin of our word assay),

and an "essai" is an effort.
An essay is something you
write in order
to figure something out.Figure out what?  You don't know yet.  And so you can't begin with a
thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have
one.  An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a
question.  In a real essay, you don't take a position and
defend it.  You see a door that's ajar, and you open it and
walk in to see what's inside.If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need
to write anything, though?  Why not just sit and think?  Well,
there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery.  Expressing
ideas helps to form them.  Indeed, helps is far too weak a
word.  90%
of what ends up in my essays was stuff
I only
thought of when I sat down to write them.  That's why I
write them.So there's another difference between essays and
the things
you have to write in school.   In school

you are, in theory,
explaining yourself to someone else.  In the best case---if
you're really organized---you're just writing it down.
In a real essay you're writing for yourself.  You're
thinking out loud.But not quite.  Just as inviting people over forces you to
clean up your apartment, writing something that you know

other people will read forces you to think well.  So it
does matter to have an audience.  The things I've written
just for myself are no good.  Indeed, they're bad in
a particular way:
they tend to peter out.  When I run into
difficulties, I notice that I
tend to conclude with a few vague
questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.This seems a common problem.
It's practically the standard
ending in blog entries--- with the addition of a "heh" or an
emoticon, prompted by the all too accurate sense that
something is missing.And indeed, a lot of
published essays peter out in this
same way.
Particularly the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines.  Outside writers tend to supply
editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which
make a beeline toward a rousing (and
foreordained) conclusion.   But the staff writers feel
obliged to write something more
balanced, which in
practice ends up meaning blurry.
Since they're
writing for a popular magazine, they start with the
most radioactively controversial questions, from which
(because they're writing for a popular magazine)
they then proceed to recoil from
in terror.
Gay marriage, for or
against?  This group says one thing.  That group says
another.  One thing is certain: the question is a
complex one.  (But don't get mad at us.  We didn't
draw any conclusions.)Questions aren't enough.  An essay has to come up with answers.
They don't always, of course.  Sometimes you start with a
promising question and get nowhere.  But those you don't
publish.  Those are like experiments that get inconclusive
results.   Something you publish ought to tell the reader
something he didn't already know.
But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as
it's interesting.  I'm sometimes accused of meandering.
In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw.
There you're not concerned with truth.  You already
know where you're going, and you want to go straight there,
blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving
your way across swampy ground.  But that's not what
you're trying to do in an essay.  An essay is supposed to
be a search for truth.  It would be suspicious if it didn't
meander.The Meander is a river in Asia Minor (aka
Turkey).
As you might expect, it winds all over the place.
But does it
do this out of frivolity?   Quite the opposite.
Like all rivers, it's rigorously following the laws of physics.
The path it has discovered,
winding as it is, represents
the most economical route to the sea.The river's algorithm is simple.  At each step, flow down.
For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting.
Of all the places to go next, choose
whichever seems
most interesting.I'm pushing this metaphor a bit.  An essayist
can't have
quite as little foresight as a river.  In fact what you do
(or what I do) is somewhere between a river and a roman
road-builder.  I have a general idea of the direction
I want to go in, and
I choose the next topic with that in mind.  This essay is
about writing, so I do occasionally yank it back in that
direction, but it is not all the sort of essay I
thought I was going to write about writing.Note too that hill-climbing (which is what this algorithm is
called) can get you in trouble.
Sometimes, just
like a river,
you
run up against a blank wall.  What
I do then is just
what the river does: backtrack.
At one point in this essay
I found that after following a certain thread I ran out
of ideas.  I had to go back n
paragraphs and start over
in another direction.  For illustrative purposes I've left
the abandoned branch as a footnote.
Err on the side of the river.  An essay is not a reference
work.  It's not something you read looking for a specific
answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it.  I'd much
rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but
interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along
a prescribed course.So what's interesting?  For me, interesting means surprise.
Design, as Matz
has said, should follow the principle of
least surprise.
A button that looks like it will make a
machine stop should make it stop, not speed up.  Essays
should do the opposite.  Essays should aim for maximum
surprise.I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel
vicariously.  When friends came back from faraway places,
it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked them about
their trip.
I really wanted to know.  And I found that
the best way to get information out of them was to ask
what surprised them.  How was the place different from what
they expected?  This is an extremely useful question.
You can ask it of even
the most unobservant people, and it will
extract information they didn't even know they were
recording. Indeed, you can ask it in real time.  Now when I go somewhere
new, I make a note of what surprises me about it.  Sometimes I
even make a conscious effort to visualize the place beforehand,
so I'll have a detailed image to diff with reality.
Surprises are facts
you didn't already
know.
But they're
more than that.  They're facts
that contradict things you
thought you knew.  And so they're the most valuable sort of
fact you can get.  They're like a food that's not merely
healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things
you've already eaten.
How do you find surprises?  Well, therein lies half
the work of essay writing.  (The other half is expressing
yourself well.)   You can at least
use yourself as a
proxy for the reader.  You should only write about things
you've thought about a lot.  And anything you come across
that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot,
will probably surprise most readers.For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because
you can only judge computer programmers by working with
them, no one knows in programming who the heroes should
be.
I
certainly
didn't realize this when I started writing
the
essay, and even now I find it kind of weird.  That's
what you're looking for.So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients:
you need
a few topics that you think about a lot, and you
need some ability to ferret out the unexpected.What should you think about?  My guess is that it
doesn't matter.  Almost everything is
interesting if you get deeply
enough into it.  The one possible exception
are
things
like working in fast food, which
have deliberately had all
the variation sucked out of them.
In retrospect, was there
anything interesting about working in Baskin-Robbins?
Well, it was interesting to notice
how important color was
to the customers.  Kids a certain age would point into
the case and say that they wanted yellow.  Did they want
French Vanilla or Lemon?  They would just look at you
blankly.  They wanted yellow.  And then there was the
mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines n' Cream
was so appealing. I'm inclined now to
think it was the salt.
And the mystery of why Passion Fruit tasted so disgusting.
People would order it because of the name, and were always
disappointed.  It should have been called In-sink-erator
Fruit.
And there was
the difference in the way fathers and
mothers bought ice cream for their kids.
Fathers tended to
adopt the attitude of
benevolent kings bestowing largesse,
and mothers that of
harried bureaucrats,
giving in to
pressure against their better judgement.
So, yes, there does seem to be material, even in
fast food.What about the other half, ferreting out the unexpected?
That may require some natural ability.  I've noticed for
a long time that I'm pathologically observant.  ....[That was as far as I'd gotten at the time.]Notes[sh] In Shakespeare's own time, serious writing meant theological
discourses, not the bawdy plays acted over on the other
side of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses.The other extreme, the work that seems formidable from the moment
it's created (indeed, is deliberately intended to be)
is represented by Milton.  Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost is a
rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get fossilized.
Even Samuel Johnson seems to have balked at this, on the one
hand paying Milton the compliment of an extensive biography,
and on the other writing of Paradise Lost that "none who read it
ever wished it longer."


love

Want to start a startup?  Get funded by
Y Combinator.

January 2006To do something well you have to like it.   That idea is not exactly
novel.  We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love."  But
it's not enough just to tell people that.  Doing what you love is
complicated.The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids.  When I
was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition.
Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do
things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could
do what you wanted, and that was called playing.  Occasionally the
things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing
wasn't—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself.  But except
for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as
not-fun.And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was
tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids.
Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work.  Kids didn't,
but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of
work meant to prepare us for the real thing.  Much as we disliked
school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and
that we had it easy.Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work
was not fun.  Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of
them.  Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing
dodgeball?  For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of
kids instead of lying on a beach.  You couldn't just do what you
wanted.I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want.
They may have to be made to work on certain things.  But if we make
kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness
is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason
they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more
interesting stuff later.
[1]Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever
I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it.  I remember that
precisely because it seemed so anomalous.  It was like being told
to use dry water.  Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he
meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing.  It
took me years to grasp that.JobsBy high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon.
Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we
would go to see them at work.  It was always understood that they
enjoyed what they did.  In retrospect I think one may have: the
private jet pilot.  But I don't think the bank manager really did.The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was
presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed
to.  It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you
despised your job, but a social faux-pas.Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do?  The first
sentence of this essay explains that.  If you have to like something
to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what
they do.  That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from.
Just as houses all over America are full of
chairs
that are, without
the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed
250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work
are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of
the attitudes of people who've done great things.What a recipe for alienation.  By the time they reach an age to
think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly
misled about the idea of loving one's work.  School has trained
them to regard work as an unpleasant duty.  Having a job is said
to be even more onerous than schoolwork.  And yet all the adults
claim to like what they do.  You can't blame kids for thinking "I
am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught
to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not
(necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around
them are lying when they say they like what they do.The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents.  If you take
a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so
many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that
work is boring.
[2]
Maybe it would be better for kids in this one
case if parents were not so unselfish.  A parent who set an example
of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive
house.
[3]It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke
free from the idea of making a living.  Then the important question
became not how to make money, but what to work on.  Ideally these
coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in
the patent office) proved they weren't identical.The definition of work was now to make some original contribution
to the world, and in the process not to starve.  But after the habit
of so many years my idea of work still included a large component
of pain.  Work still seemed to require discipline, because only
hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't
literally be fun.   Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to
notice if you're doing it wrong.  That about sums up my experience
of graduate school.BoundsHow much are you supposed to like what you do?  Unless you
know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most
people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too
early.  You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents,
or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia.Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you
would like to do most this second.  Even Einstein probably
had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself
he ought to finish what he was working on first.It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they
did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do.  There didn't
seem to be any sort of work I liked that much.  If I had a
choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b)
be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was
there any sort of work I'd prefer?  Honestly, no.But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment,
float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious
food, than work on hard problems.  The rule about doing what you
love assumes a certain length of time.  It doesn't mean, do what
will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest
over some longer period, like a week or a month.Unproductive pleasures pall eventually.  After a while you get tired
of lying on the beach.  If you want to stay happy, you have to do
something.As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive
pleasure.  You have to like what you do enough that the concept of
"spare time" seems mistaken.  Which is not to say you have to spend
all your time working.  You can only work so much before you get
tired and start to screw up.  Then you want to do something else—even something mindless.  But you don't regard this time as the
prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn
it.I put the lower bound there for practical reasons.  If your work
is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems
with procrastination.  You'll have to force yourself to work,  and
when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only
enjoy, but admire.  You have to be able to say, at the end, wow,
that's pretty cool.  This doesn't mean you have to make something.
If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language
fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least,
wow, that's pretty cool.  What there has to be is a test.So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is
reading books.  Except for some books in math and the hard sciences,
there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why
merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work.  You have to do
something with what you've read to feel productive.I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things
that would make your friends say wow.  But it probably wouldn't
start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't
had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.SirensWhat you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of
anyone beyond your friends.  You shouldn't worry about prestige.
Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.  When you can ask
the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it
add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?
[4]This is easy advice to give.  It's hard to follow, especially when
you're young.
[5]
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps
even your beliefs about what you enjoy.  It causes you to work not
on what you like, but what you'd like to like.That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example.  They
like reading novels.  They notice that people who write them win
Nobel prizes.  What could be more wonderful, they think, than to
be a novelist?  But liking the idea of being a novelist is not
enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're
going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.Prestige is just fossilized inspiration.  If you do anything well
enough, you'll make it prestigious.  Plenty of things we now
consider prestigious were anything but at first.  Jazz comes to
mind—though almost any established art form would do.   So just
do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious.  If you want to
make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do
it is to bait the hook with prestige.  That's the recipe for getting
people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be
department heads, and so on.  It might be a good rule simply to
avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have
had to make it prestigious.Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more
prestigious, you should probably choose the other.  Your opinions
about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced
by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have
more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.The other big force leading people astray is money.  Money by itself
is not that dangerous.  When something pays well but is regarded
with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal
injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it.  That
kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to
make a living."  (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say
this.)  The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in,
say, corporate law, or medicine.  A comparatively safe and prosperous
career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting
to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really
like.The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do
it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at
another job to make a living.  How many corporate lawyers would do
their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare
time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds
of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect.  Most
good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs
as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of
the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver:
people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies,
and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs.  Math
would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of
English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into
being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity
in the novels of Conrad.  No one does
that
kind of thing for fun.The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money.  It
seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists
and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors
and whose parents want them to be novelists.  The kids think their
parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily.  All parents tend to
be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves,
simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards.  If
your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage
daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share
in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets
pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.DisciplineWith such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising
we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on.  Most people
are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain.
Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige
or money.  How many even discover something they love to work on?
A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do.  So don't
underestimate this task.  And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded
yet.  In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented,
you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial.  If
you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you
find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves.  Not
necessarily, but probably.Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so
much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding
work you love does usually require discipline.   Some people are
lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just
glide along as if they were on railroad tracks.  But this seems the
exception.  More often people who do great things have careers with
the trajectory of a ping-pong ball.  They go to school to study A,
drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after
taking it up on the side.Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of
energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness.  Are you dropping
out, or boldly carving a new path?  You often can't tell yourself.
Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments
early on, when they're trying to find their niche.Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest?  One is to
try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't
like it.  Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction
as an excuse for being lazy.  Perhaps more importantly, you'll get
into the habit of doing things well.Another test you can use is: always produce.  For example, if you
have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a
novelist, are you producing?  Are you writing pages of fiction,
however bad?  As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not
merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write
one day as an opiate.  The view of it will be obstructed by the all
too palpably flawed one you're actually writing."Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love.
If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically
push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on,
toward things you actually like.  "Always produce" will discover
your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the
hole in your roof.Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you
get to work on it.  That's a separate question.  And if you're
ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious
effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated
by what seems possible.
[6]It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe
the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their
expectations.  For example, if you asked random people on the street
if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most
would say something like "Oh, I can't draw."  This is more a statement
of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try.  Because
the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow
got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the
next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far.  But it would require
a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every
day for years.  And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do
work they love—that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs.  Really?
How do you make them?  In the US the only mechanism for forcing
people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't been
invoked for over 30 years.  All we can do is encourage people to
do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if society
just has to make do without.  That's what happened with domestic
servants.  For millennia that was the canonical example of a job
"someone had to do."  And yet in the mid twentieth century servants
practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just
had to do without.So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a good
chance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken.
Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no
one were willing to do them.Two RoutesThere's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love"
that's all too true, however.  One has to make a living, and it's
hard to get paid for doing work you love.  There are two routes to
that destination:

  The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to
  increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of
  those you don't.The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money
  to work on things you do.

The organic route is more common.  It happens naturally to anyone
who does good work.  A young architect has to take whatever work
he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position
to pick and choose among projects.  The disadvantage of this route
is that it's slow and uncertain.  Even tenure is not real freedom.The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you
work for money at a time.  At one extreme is the "day job," where
you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what
you love in your spare time.  At the other extreme you work at
something till you make enough not to
have to work for money again.The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because
it requires a deliberate choice.  It's also more dangerous.  Life
tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get
sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job.
Worse still, anything you work on changes you.  If you work too
long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain.  And the best paying
jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over
obstacles.  The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are
walls of varying heights between different kinds of work.
[7]
The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you
from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music.
If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you
have more freedom of choice.Which route should you take?  That depends on how sure you are of
what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much
risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your
lifetime) for what you want to do.  If you're sure of the general
area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to
pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route.  But
if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take
orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand
the risk.Don't decide too soon.  Kids who know early what they want to do
seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question
before the other kids.  They have an answer, certainly, but odds
are it's wrong.A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly
about her job.  When people applying to medical school ask her for
advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!"  (But she
never does.) How did she get into this fix?  In high school she
already wanted to be a doctor.  And she is so ambitious and determined
that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including,
unfortunately, not liking it.Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get
enough information to make each choice before you need to make it.
But this is certainly not so with work.  When you're deciding what
to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information.
Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are
like.  At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs
offer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more about
the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you
get better results if you use flexible media.  So unless you're
fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a
type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job
career.  That was probably part of the reason I chose computers.
You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it into
any number of other kinds of work.It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different
things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like.
Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerous
because it teaches you so little about what you like.  If you work
hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll
quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when
you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing
novels?Most people would say, I'd take that problem.  Give me a million
dollars and I'll figure out what to do.  But it's harder than it
looks.  Constraints give your life shape.  Remove them and most
people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who
win lotteries or inherit money.  Much as everyone thinks they want
financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it,
but those who like what they do.  So a plan that promises freedom
at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as
it seems.Whichever route you take, expect a struggle.  Finding work you love
is very difficult.  Most people fail.  Even if you succeed, it's
rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or
forties.  But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more
likely to arrive at it.  If you know you can love work, you're in
the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're
practically there.Notes[1]
Currently we do the opposite: when we make kids do boring work,
like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it's
boring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.[2]
One father told me about a related phenomenon: he found himself
concealing from his family how much he liked his work.  When he
wanted to go to work on a saturday, he found it easier to say that
it was because he "had to" for some reason, rather than admitting
he preferred to work than stay home with them.[3]
Something similar happens with suburbs.  Parents move to suburbs
to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull
and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced
the whole world is boring.[4]
I'm not saying friends should be the only audience for your
work.  The more people you can help, the better.  But friends should
be your compass.[5]
Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so
obsessed with being published.  But you can imagine what it would
do for a 24 year old to get a poem published in The New Yorker.
Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet.  Actually he's
no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience
like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the
difference.   So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes.  The
reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people
they want to impress are not very discerning.[6]
This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent
your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how
you wish they were.  Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously.
The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of
that.[7]
A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobs
is not very well connected.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Dan Friedman, Sarah Harlin,
Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig,
David Sloo, and Aaron Swartz
for reading drafts of this.


nft

May 2021Noora Health, a nonprofit I've
supported for years, just launched
a new NFT. It has a dramatic name, Save Thousands of Lives,
because that's what the proceeds will do.Noora has been saving lives for 7 years. They run programs in
hospitals in South Asia to teach new mothers how to take care of
their babies once they get home. They're in 165 hospitals now. And
because they know the numbers before and after they start at a new
hospital, they can measure the impact they have. It is massive.
For every 1000 live births, they save 9 babies.This number comes from a study
of 133,733 families at 28 different
hospitals that Noora conducted in collaboration with the Better
Birth team at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems
innovation at Brigham and Womens Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health.Noora is so effective that even if you measure their costs in the
most conservative way, by dividing their entire budget by the number
of lives saved, the cost of saving a life is the lowest I've seen.
$1,235.For this NFT, they're going to issue a public report tracking how
this specific tranche of money is spent, and estimating the number
of lives saved as a result.NFTs are a new territory, and this way of using them is especially
new, but I'm excited about its potential. And I'm excited to see
what happens with this particular auction, because unlike an NFT
representing something that has already happened,
this NFT gets better as the price gets higher.The reserve price was about $2.5 million, because that's what it
takes for the name to be accurate: that's what it costs to save
2000 lives. But the higher the price of this NFT goes, the more
lives will be saved. What a sentence to be able to write.


startuplessons

April 2006(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006
Startup School.)The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem
quicker to learn some lessons than others.  I think it's because
some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.We've now
invested
in enough companies that I've learned a trick
for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones:
they're the ones I have to keep repeating.So I'm going to number these points, and maybe with future startups
I'll be able to pull off a form of Huffman coding. I'll make them
all read this, and then instead of nagging them in detail, I'll
just be able to say: number four!
1. Release Early.The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get
a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.By "release early" I don't mean you should release something full
of bugs, but that you should release something minimal.  Users hate
bugs, but they don't seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there's
more coming soon.There are several reasons it pays to get version 1 done fast.  One
is that this is simply the right way to write software, whether for
a startup or not.  I've been repeating that since 1993, and I haven't seen much since to
contradict it.  I've seen a lot of startups die because they were
too slow to release stuff, and none because they were too quick.
[1]One of the things that will surprise you if you build something
popular is that you won't know your users.  Reddit now has almost half a million
unique visitors a month.  Who are all those people?  They have no
idea.  No web startup does.  And since you don't know your users,
it's dangerous to guess what they'll like.  Better to release
something and let them tell you.Wufoo took this to heart and released
their form-builder before the underlying database.  You can't even
drive the thing yet, but 83,000 people came to sit in the driver's
seat and hold the steering wheel.  And Wufoo got valuable feedback
from it: Linux users complained they used too much Flash, so they
rewrote their software not to.  If they'd waited to release everything
at once, they wouldn't have discovered this problem till it was
more deeply wired in.Even if you had no users, it would still be important to release
quickly, because for a startup the initial release acts as a shakedown
cruise.  If anything major is broken-- if the idea's no good,
for example, or the founders hate one another-- the stress of getting
that first version out will expose it.  And if you have such problems
you want to find them early.Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that
it makes you work harder.  When you're working on something that
isn't released, problems are intriguing.  In something that's out
there, problems are alarming.  There is a lot more urgency once you
release.  And I think that's precisely why people put it off.  They
know they'll have to work a lot harder once they do.
[2]
2. Keep Pumping Out Features.Of course, "release early" has a second component, without which
it would be bad advice.  If you're going to start with something
that doesn't do much, you better improve it fast.What I find myself repeating is "pump out features."  And this rule
isn't just for the initial stages.  This is something all startups
should do for as long as they want to be considered startups.I don't mean, of course, that you should make your application ever
more complex.  By "feature" I mean one unit of hacking-- one quantum
of making users' lives better.As with exercise, improvements beget improvements.  If you run every
day, you'll probably feel like running tomorrow.  But if you skip
running for a couple weeks, it will be an effort to drag yourself
out.  So it is with hacking: the more ideas you implement, the more
ideas you'll have.  You should make your system better at least in
some small way every day or two.This is not just a good way to get development done; it is also a
form of marketing.  Users love a site that's constantly improving.
In fact, users expect a site to improve.  Imagine if you visited a
site that seemed very good, and then returned two months later and
not one thing had changed.  Wouldn't it start to seem lame?
[3]They'll like you even better when you improve in response to their
comments, because customers are used to companies ignoring them.
If you're the rare exception-- a company that actually listens--
you'll generate fanatical loyalty.  You won't need to advertise,
because your users will do it for you.This seems obvious too, so why do I have to keep repeating it?  I
think the problem here is that people get used to how things are.
Once a product gets past the stage where it has glaring flaws, you
start to get used to it, and gradually whatever features it happens
to have become its identity.  For example, I doubt many people at
Yahoo (or Google for that matter) realized how much better web mail
could be till Paul Buchheit showed them.I think the solution is to assume that anything you've made is far
short of what it could be.  Force yourself, as a sort of intellectual
exercise, to keep thinking of improvements.  Ok, sure, what you
have is perfect.  But if you had to change something, what would
it be?If your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations:
(a) it is finished, or (b) you lack imagination.  Experience suggests
(b) is a thousand times more likely.
3. Make Users Happy.Improving constantly is an instance of a more general rule: make
users happy.  One thing all startups have in common is that they
can't force anyone to do anything.  They can't force anyone to use
their software, and they can't force anyone to do deals with them.
A startup has to sing for its supper.  That's why the successful
ones make great things.  They have to, or die.When you're running a startup you feel like a little bit of debris
blown about by powerful winds.  The most powerful wind is users.
They can either catch you and loft you up into the sky, as they did
with Google, or leave you flat on the pavement, as they do with
most startups.  Users are a fickle wind, but more powerful than any
other.  If they take you up, no competitor can keep you down.As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is
not to lie flat, but to curl yourself into a shape the wind will
catch.I like the wind metaphor because it reminds you how impersonal the
stream of traffic is.  The vast majority of people who visit your
site will be casual visitors.  It's them you have to design your
site for.  The people who really care will find what they want by
themselves.The median visitor will arrive with their finger poised on the Back
button.  Think about your own experience: most links you
follow lead to something lame.  Anyone who has used the web for
more than a couple weeks has been trained to click on Back after
following a link.  So your site has to say "Wait!  Don't click on
Back.  This site isn't lame.  Look at this, for example."There are two things you have to do to make people pause.  The most
important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell
your site is about.  How often have you visited a site that seemed
to assume you already knew what they did?  For example, the corporate
site that says the
company makes

  enterprise content management solutions for business that enable
  organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize
  business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total
  cost of ownership.

An established company may get away with such an opaque description,
but no startup can.  A startup
should be able to explain in one or two sentences exactly what it
does.
[4]
And not just to users.  You need this for everyone:
investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and
even current employees.  You probably shouldn't even start a company
to do something that can't be described compellingly in one or two
sentences.The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you've got,
right away.  If you have something impressive, try to put it on the
front page, because that's the only one most visitors will see.
Though indeed there's a paradox here: the more you push the good
stuff toward the front, the more likely visitors are to explore
further.
[5]In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell
visitors what your site is about by showing them.  One of the
standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is "show, don't tell."
Don't say that a character's angry; have him grind his teeth, or
break his pencil in half.  Nothing will explain what your site does
so well as using it.The industry term here is "conversion."  The job of your site is
to convert casual visitors into users-- whatever your definition
of a user is.  You can measure this in your growth rate.  Either
your site is catching on, or it isn't, and you must know which.  If
you have decent growth, you'll win in the end, no matter how obscure
you are now.  And if you don't, you need to fix something.
4. Fear the Right Things.Another thing I find myself saying a lot is "don't worry."  Actually,
it's more often "don't worry about this; worry about that instead."
Startups are right to be paranoid, but they sometimes fear the wrong
things.Most visible disasters are not so alarming as they seem.  Disasters
are normal in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent
that covers what you're doing, your servers keep crashing, you run
into an insoluble technical problem, you have to change your name,
a deal falls through-- these are all par for the course.  They won't
kill you unless you let them.Nor will most competitors.  A lot of startups worry "what if Google
builds something like us?"  Actually big companies are not the ones
you have to worry about-- not even Google.  The people at Google
are smart, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because
Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails;
and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players,
but other startups you don't know exist yet.  They're way more
dangerous than Google because, like you, they're cornered animals.Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of
security.  You should compete against what someone else could be
doing, not just what you can see people doing.  A corollary is that
you shouldn't relax just because you have no visible competitors
yet.  No matter what your idea, there's someone else out there
working on the same thing.That's the downside of it being easier to start a startup: more people
are doing it.  But I disagree with Caterina Fake when she says that
makes this a bad time to start a startup.  More people are starting
startups, but not as many more as could.  Most college graduates
still think they have to get a job.  The average person can't ignore
something that's been beaten into their head since they were three
just because serving web pages recently got a lot cheaper.And in any case, competitors are not the biggest threat.  Way more
startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors.  There
are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal
disputes, inertia, and ignoring users.  Each is, by itself, enough
to kill you.  But if I had to pick the worst, it would be ignoring
users.  If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die,
here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know
everyone is going to love, and that's what they're going to build,
no matter what.Almost everyone's initial plan is broken.  If companies stuck to
their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages,
and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards.  In both cases
their customers told them what their business should be-- and they
were smart enough to listen.As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than
the imagination of man.  You'll find more interesting things by
looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking.
This principle is very powerful.  It's why the best abstract painting
still falls short of Leonardo, for example.  And it applies to
startups too.  No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the
ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam
of users.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what
the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not
what you might think.  The most important quality in a startup
founder is determination.  Not intelligence-- determination.This is a little depressing.  I'd like to believe Viaweb succeeded
because we were smart, not merely determined.  A lot of people in
the startup world want to believe that.  Not just founders, but
investors too.  They like the idea of inhabiting a world ruled by
intelligence.  And you can tell they really believe this, because
it affects their investment decisions.Time after time VCs invest in startups founded by eminent professors.
This may work in biotech, where a lot of startups simply commercialize
existing research, but in software you want to invest in students,
not professors.  Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by
people who dropped out of school to do it.  What students lack in
experience they more than make up in dedication.Of course, if you want to get rich, it's not enough merely to be
determined.  You have to be smart too, right?  I'd like to think
so, but I've had an experience that convinced me otherwise: I spent
several years living in New York.You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill
you.  But lose even a little bit in the commitment department, and
that will kill you very rapidly.Running a startup is like walking on your hands: it's possible, but
it requires extraordinary effort.  If an ordinary employee were
asked to do the things a startup founder has to, he'd be very
indignant.  Imagine if you were hired at some big company, and in
addition to writing software ten times faster than you'd ever had
to before, they expected you to answer support calls, administer
the servers, design the web site, cold-call customers, find the
company office space, and go out and get everyone lunch.And to do all this not in the calm, womb-like atmosphere of a big
company, but against a backdrop of constant disasters.  That's the
part that really demands determination.  In a startup, there's
always some disaster happening.  So if you're the least bit inclined
to find an excuse to quit, there's always one right there.But if you lack commitment, chances are it will have been hurting
you long before you actually quit.  Everyone who deals with startups
knows how important commitment is, so if they sense you're ambivalent,
they won't give you much attention.  If you lack commitment, you'll
just find that for some mysterious reason good things happen to
your competitors but not to you.  If you lack commitment, it will
seem to you that you're unlucky.Whereas if you're determined to stick around, people will pay
attention to you, because odds are they'll have to deal with you
later.  You're a local, not just a tourist, so everyone has to come
to terms with you.At Y Combinator we sometimes mistakenly fund teams who have the
attitude that they're going to give this startup thing a shot for
three months, and if something great happens, they'll stick with
it-- "something great" meaning either that someone wants to buy
them or invest millions of dollars in them.  But if this is your
attitude, "something great" is very unlikely to happen to you,
because both acquirers and investors judge you by your level of
commitment.If an acquirer thinks you're going to stick around no matter what,
they'll be more likely to buy you, because if they don't and you
stick around, you'll probably grow, your price will go up, and
they'll be left wishing they'd bought you earlier.  Ditto for
investors.  What really motivates investors, even big VCs, is not
the hope of good returns, but the fear of missing out.
[6]
So if
you make it clear you're going to succeed no matter what, and the only
reason you need them is to make it happen a little faster, you're
much more likely to get money.You can't fake this.  The only way to convince everyone that you're
ready to fight to the death is actually to be ready to.You have to be the right kind of determined, though.  I carefully
chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness
is a disastrous quality in a startup.  You have to be determined,
but flexible, like a running back.  A successful running back doesn't
just put his head down and try to run through people.  He improvises:
if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone
tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in
the wrong direction briefly if that will help.  The one thing he'll
never do is stand still.
[7]
6. There Is Always Room.I was talking recently to a startup founder about whether it might
be good to add a social component to their software.  He said he
didn't think so, because the whole social thing was tapped out.
Really?  So in a hundred years the only social networking sites
will be the Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Del.icio.us?  Not likely.There is always room for new stuff.  At every point in history,
even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering
things that made everyone say "why didn't anyone think of that
before?"  We know this continued to be true up till 2004, when the
Facebook was founded-- though strictly speaking someone else did
think of that.The reason we don't see the opportunities all around us is that we
adjust to however things are, and assume that's how things have to
be.  For example, it would seem crazy to most people to try to make
a better search engine than Google.  Surely that field, at least,
is tapped out.  Really?  In a hundred years-- or even twenty-- are
people still going to search for information using something like
the current Google?  Even Google probably doesn't think that.In particular, I don't think there's any limit to the number of
startups.  Sometimes you hear people saying "All these guys starting
startups now are going to be disappointed. How many little startups
are Google and Yahoo going to buy, after all?" That sounds cleverly
skeptical, but I can prove it's mistaken.  No one proposes that
there's some limit to the number of people who can be employed in
an economy consisting of big, slow-moving companies with a couple
thousand people each.  Why should there be any limit to the number
who could be employed by small, fast-moving companies with ten each?
It seems to me the only limit would be the number of people who
want to work that hard.The limit on the number of startups is not the number that can get
acquired by Google and Yahoo-- though it seems even that should
be unlimited, if the startups were actually worth buying-- but the
amount of wealth that can be created.  And I don't think there's
any limit on that, except cosmological ones.So for all practical purposes, there is no limit to the number of
startups.  Startups make wealth, which means they make things people
want, and if there's a limit on the number of things people want,
we are nowhere near it.  I still don't even have a flying car.
7. Don't Get Your Hopes Up.This is another one I've been repeating since long before Y Combinator.
It was practically the corporate motto at Viaweb.Startup founders are naturally optimistic.  They wouldn't do it
otherwise.  But you should treat your optimism the way you'd treat
the core of a nuclear reactor: as a source of power that's also
very dangerous.  You have to build a shield around it, or it will
fry you.The shielding of a reactor is not uniform; the reactor would be
useless if it were.  It's pierced in a few places to let pipes in.
An optimism shield has to be pierced too.  I think the place to
draw the line is between what you expect of yourself, and what you
expect of other people.  It's ok to be optimistic about what you
can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people.This is particularly necessary in a startup, because you tend to
be pushing the limits of whatever you're doing.  So things don't
happen in the smooth, predictable way they do in the rest of the
world.  Things change suddenly, and usually for the worse.Shielding your optimism is nowhere more important than with deals.
If your startup is doing a deal, just assume it's not going to
happen.  The VCs who say they're going to invest in you aren't.
The company that says they're going to buy you isn't.  The big
customer who wants to use your system in their whole company won't.
Then if things work out you can be pleasantly surprised.The reason I warn startups not to get their hopes up is not to save
them from being disappointed when things fall through.  It's
for a more practical reason: to prevent them from leaning their
company against something that's going to fall over, taking them
with it.For example, if someone says they want to invest in you, there's a
natural tendency to stop looking for other investors.  That's why
people proposing deals seem so positive: they want you to
stop looking.  And you want to stop too, because doing deals is a
pain.  Raising money, in particular, is a huge time sink.  So you
have to consciously force yourself to keep looking.Even if you ultimately do the first deal, it will be to your advantage
to have kept looking, because you'll get better terms.  Deals are
dynamic; unless you're negotiating with someone unusually honest,
there's not a single point where you shake hands and the deal's
done. There are usually a lot of subsidiary questions to be cleared
up after the handshake, and if the other side senses weakness-- if
they sense you need this deal-- they will be very tempted to screw
you in the details.VCs and corp dev guys are professional negotiators.  They're trained
to take advantage of weakness.
[8]
So while they're often nice
guys, they just can't help it.  And as pros they do this more than
you.  So don't even try to bluff them.  The only way a startup can
have any leverage in a deal is genuinely not to need it.  And if
you don't believe in a deal, you'll be less likely to depend on it.So I want to plant a hypnotic suggestion in your heads: when you
hear someone say the words "we want to invest in you" or "we want
to acquire you," I want the following phrase to appear automatically
in your head: don't get your hopes up.  Just continue running
your company as if this deal didn't exist.  Nothing is more likely
to make it close.The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting
lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors
and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money in your face.
Speed, not MoneyThe way I've described it, starting a startup sounds pretty stressful.
It is.  When I talk to the founders of the companies we've funded,
they all say the same thing: I knew it would be hard, but I didn't
realize it would be this hard.So why do it?  It would be worth enduring a lot of pain and stress
to do something grand or heroic, but just to make money?  Is making
money really that important?No, not really.  It seems ridiculous to me when people take business
too seriously.  I regard making money as a boring errand to be got
out of the way as soon as possible.  There is nothing grand or
heroic about starting a startup per se.So why do I spend so much time thinking about startups?  I'll tell
you why.  Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get
rich, but as a way to work faster.  You have to make a living, and
a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it
drag on through your whole life.
[9]We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly
miraculous.  It is also palpably short.  You're given this marvellous
thing, and then poof, it's taken away.  You can see why people
invent gods to explain it.  But even to people who don't believe
in gods, life commands respect.  There are times in most of our
lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a
sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious.  As Ben
Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is
what life is made of.So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money.  That's
not what makes startups worth the trouble.  What's important about
startups is the speed.  By compressing the dull but necessary task
of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect
for life, and there is something grand about that.Notes[1]
Startups can die from releasing something full of bugs, and not
fixing them fast enough, but I don't know of any that died from
releasing something stable but minimal very early, then promptly
improving it.[2]
I know this is why I haven't released Arc.  The moment I do,
I'll have people nagging me for features.[3]
A web site is different from a book or movie or desktop application
in this respect.  Users judge a site not as a single snapshot, but
as an animation with multiple frames.  Of the two, I'd say the rate of
improvement is more important to users than where you currently
are.[4]
It should not always tell this to users, however.  For example,
MySpace is basically a replacement mall for mallrats.  But it was
wiser for them, initially, to pretend that the site was about bands.[5]
Similarly, don't make users register to try your site.  Maybe
what you have is so valuable that visitors should gladly register
to get at it.  But they've been trained to expect the opposite.
Most of the things they've tried on the web have sucked-- and
probably especially those that made them register.[6]
VCs have rational reasons for behaving this way. They don't
make their money (if they make money) off their median investments.
In a typical fund, half the companies fail, most of the rest generate
mediocre returns, and one or two "make the fund" by succeeding
spectacularly.  So if they miss just a few of the most promising
opportunities, it could hose the whole fund.[7]
The attitude of a running back doesn't translate to soccer.
Though it looks great when a forward dribbles past multiple defenders,
a player who persists in trying such things will do worse in the
long term than one who passes.[8]
The reason Y Combinator never negotiates valuations
is that we're not professional negotiators, and don't want to turn
into them.[9]
There are two ways to do
work you love: (a) to make money, then work
on what you love, or (b) to get a job where you get paid to work on
stuff you love.  In practice the first phases of both
consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and in (b) the second phase is less
secure.Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Beau Hartshorne, Jessica
Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.


gba

April 2004To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks
into computers.  Among programmers it means a good programmer.
But the two meanings are connected.  To programmers,
"hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone
who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer
wants to or not.To add to the confusion, the noun "hack" also has two senses.  It can
be either a compliment or an insult.  It's called a hack when
you do something in an ugly way.  But when you do something
so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also
called a hack.  The word is used more often in the former than
the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more
common than brilliant ones.Believe it or not, the two senses of "hack" are also
connected.  Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in
common: they both break the rules.  And there is a gradual
continuum between rule breaking that's merely ugly (using
duct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking
that is brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space).Hacking predates computers.  When he
was working on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to
amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents.
This tradition continues today.
When we were in grad school, a hacker friend of mine who spent too much
time around MIT had
his own lock picking kit.
(He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)It is sometimes hard to explain to authorities why one would
want to do such things.
Another friend of mine once got in trouble with the government for
breaking into computers.  This had only recently been declared
a crime, and the FBI found that their usual investigative
technique didn't work.  Police investigation apparently begins with
a motive.  The usual motives are few: drugs, money, sex,
revenge.  Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on
the FBI's list.  Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to
them.Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers'
general attitude of disobedience.  But that disobedience is
a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.
They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate
newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them
a certain problem can't be solved.
Suppress one, and you suppress the other.This attitude is sometimes affected.  Sometimes young programmers
notice the eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to
adopt some of their own in order to seem smarter.
The fake version is not merely
annoying; the prickly attitude of these posers
can actually slow the process of innovation.But even factoring in their annoying eccentricities,
the disobedient attitude of hackers is a net win.  I wish its
advantages were better understood.For example, I suspect people in Hollywood are
simply mystified by
hackers' attitudes toward copyrights.  They are a perennial
topic of heated discussion on Slashdot.
But why should people who program computers
be so concerned about copyrights, of all things?Partly because some companies use mechanisms to prevent
copying.  Show any hacker a lock and his first thought is
how to pick it.  But there is a deeper reason that
hackers are alarmed by measures like copyrights and patents.
They see increasingly aggressive measures to protect
"intellectual property"
as a threat to the intellectual
freedom they need to do their job.
And they are right.It is by poking about inside current technology that
hackers get ideas for the next generation.  No thanks,
intellectual homeowners may say, we don't need any
outside help.  But they're wrong.
The next generation of computer technology has
often—perhaps more often than not—been developed by outsiders.In 1977 there was no doubt some group within IBM developing
what they expected to be
the next generation of business computer.  They were mistaken.
The next generation of business computer was
being developed on entirely different lines by two long-haired
guys called Steve in a garage in Los Altos.  At about the
same time, the powers that be
were cooperating to develop the
official next generation operating system, Multics.
But two guys who thought Multics excessively complex went off
and wrote their own.  They gave it a name that
was a joking reference to Multics: Unix.The latest intellectual property laws impose
unprecedented restrictions on the sort of poking around that
leads to new ideas. In the past, a competitor might use patents
to prevent you from selling a copy of something they
made, but they couldn't prevent you from
taking one apart to see how it worked.   The latest
laws make this a crime.  How are we
to develop new technology if we can't study current
technology to figure out how to improve it?Ironically, hackers have brought this on themselves.
Computers are responsible for the problem.  The control systems
inside machines used to be physical: gears and levers and cams.
Increasingly, the brains (and thus the value) of products is
in software. And by this I mean software in the general sense:
i.e. data.  A song on an LP is physically stamped into the
plastic.  A song on an iPod's disk is merely stored on it.Data is by definition easy to copy.  And the Internet
makes copies easy to distribute.  So it is no wonder
companies are afraid.  But, as so often happens, fear has
clouded their judgement.  The government has responded
with draconian laws to protect intellectual property.
They probably mean well. But
they may not realize that such laws will do more harm
than good.Why are programmers so violently opposed to these laws?
If I were a legislator, I'd be interested in this
mystery—for the same reason that, if I were a farmer and suddenly
heard a lot of squawking coming from my hen house one night,
I'd want to go out and investigate.  Hackers are not stupid,
and unanimity is very rare in this world.
So if they're all squawking,
perhaps there is something amiss.Could it be that such laws, though intended to protect America,
will actually harm it?  Think about it.  There is something
very American about Feynman breaking into safes during
the Manhattan Project.  It's hard to imagine the authorities
having a sense of humor about such things over
in Germany at that time.  Maybe it's not a coincidence.Hackers are unruly.  That is the essence of hacking.  And it
is also the essence of Americanness.  It is no accident
that Silicon Valley
is in America, and not France, or Germany,
or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside
the lines.I lived for a while in Florence.  But after I'd been there
a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping
to find there was back in the place I'd just left.
The reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was New York.
In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious
people you find now in America.  (So I went back to America.)It is greatly to America's advantage that it is
a congenial atmosphere for the right sort of unruliness—that
it is a home not just for the smart, but for smart-alecks.
And hackers are invariably smart-alecks.  If we had a national
holiday, it would be April 1st.  It says a great deal about
our work that we use the same word for a brilliant or a
horribly cheesy solution.   When we cook one up we're not
always 100% sure which kind it is.  But as long as it has
the right sort of wrongness, that's a promising sign.
It's odd that people
think of programming as precise and methodical.  Computers
are precise and methodical.  Hacking is something you do
with a gleeful laugh.In our world some of the most characteristic solutions
are not far removed from practical
jokes.  IBM was no doubt rather surprised by the consequences
of the licensing deal for DOS, just as the hypothetical
"adversary" must be when Michael Rabin solves a problem by
redefining it as one that's easier to solve.Smart-alecks have to develop a keen sense of how much they
can get away with.  And lately hackers
have sensed a change
in the atmosphere.
Lately hackerliness seems rather frowned upon.To hackers the recent contraction in civil liberties seems
especially ominous.  That must also mystify outsiders.
Why should we care especially about civil
liberties?  Why programmers, more than
dentists or salesmen or landscapers?Let me put the case in terms a government official would appreciate.
Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a quaint
American tradition.  Civil liberties make countries rich.
If you made a graph of
GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite
trend.  Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather
than just an effect?  I think so.  I think a society in which
people can do and say what they want will also tend to
be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than
those sponsored by the most influential people.
Authoritarian countries become corrupt;
corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak.
It seems to me there is
a Laffer curve for government power, just as for
tax revenues.  At least, it seems likely enough that it
would be stupid to try the experiment and find out.  Unlike
high tax rates, you can't repeal totalitarianism if it
turns out to be a mistake.This is why hackers worry.  The government spying on people doesn't
literally make programmers write worse code.  It just leads
eventually to a world in which bad ideas win.  And because
this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive
to it.  They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a
distance, as animals can sense an approaching
thunderstorm.It would be ironic if, as hackers fear, recent measures
intended to protect national security and intellectual property
turned out to be a missile aimed right at what makes
America successful.  But it would not be the first time that
measures taken in an atmosphere of panic had
the opposite of the intended effect.There is such a thing as Americanness.
There's nothing like living abroad to teach you that.
And if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash
this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus
group than hackers, because they come closest of any group
I know to embodying it.  Closer, probably,  than
the men running our government,
who for all their talk of patriotism
remind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin
than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.When you read what the founding fathers had to say for
themselves, they sound more like hackers.
"The spirit of resistance to government,"
Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish
it always to be kept alive."Imagine an American president saying that today.
Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of
the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of
their less confident successors.  They remind us where we come from.
They remind us that it is the people who break rules that are
the source of America's wealth and power.Those in a position to impose rules naturally want them to be
obeyed.  But be careful what you ask for. You might get it.Thanks to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Giffin,
Sarah Harlin,  Shiro Kawai, Jessica Livingston, Matz,
Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum,
David Weinberger, and
Steven Wolfram for reading drafts of this essay.
(The image shows Steves Jobs and Wozniak
with a "blue box."
Photo by Margret Wozniak. Reproduced by permission of Steve
Wozniak.)


island

July 2006I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted
to.  Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house
on a little island off the coast of Maine.  There are no shops on
the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there.  Also,
you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will
have more than any house might.What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing?
That's what you're addicted to.  For example, if you find yourself
packing a bottle of vodka (just in case), you may want to stop and
think about that.For me the list is four things: books, earplugs, a notebook, and a
pen.There are other things I might bring if I thought of it, like music,
or tea, but I can live without them.  I'm not so addicted to caffeine
that I wouldn't risk the house not having any tea, just for a
weekend.Quiet is another matter.  I realize it seems a bit eccentric to
take earplugs on a trip to an island off the coast of Maine.  If
anywhere should be quiet, that should.  But what if the person in
the next room snored?  What if there was a kid playing basketball?
(Thump, thump, thump... thump.)  Why risk it?  Earplugs are small.Sometimes I can think with noise.  If I already have momentum on
some project, I can work in noisy places.  I can edit an essay or
debug code in an airport.  But airports are not so bad: most of the
noise is whitish.  I couldn't work with the sound of a sitcom coming
through the wall, or a car in the street playing thump-thump music.And of course there's another kind of thinking, when you're starting
something new, that requires complete quiet.   You never
know when this will strike. It's just as well to carry plugs.The notebook and pen are professional equipment, as it were.  Though
actually there is something druglike about them, in the sense that
their main purpose is to make me feel better.  I hardly ever go
back and read stuff I write down in notebooks.  It's just that if
I can't write things down, worrying about remembering one idea gets
in the way of having the next.  Pen and paper wick ideas.The best notebooks I've found are made by a company called Miquelrius.
I use their smallest size, which is about 2.5 x 4 in.
The secret to writing on such
narrow pages is to break words only when you run out of space, like
a Latin inscription.  I use the cheapest plastic Bic ballpoints,
partly because their gluey ink doesn't seep through pages, and
partly so I don't worry about losing them.I only started carrying a notebook about three years ago.  Before
that I used whatever scraps of paper I could find.  But the problem
with scraps of paper is that they're not ordered.  In a notebook
you can guess what a scribble means by looking at the pages
around it.  In the scrap era I was constantly finding notes I'd
written years before that might say something I needed to remember,
if I could only figure out what.As for books, I know the house would probably have something to
read.  On the average trip I bring four books and only read one of
them, because I find new books to read en route.  Really bringing
books is insurance.I realize this dependence on books is not entirely good—that what
I need them for is distraction.  The books I bring on trips are
often quite virtuous, the sort of stuff that might be assigned
reading in a college class.  But I know my motives aren't virtuous.
I bring books because if the world gets boring I need to be able
to slip into another distilled by some writer.  It's like eating
jam when you know you should be eating fruit.There is a point where I'll do without books.  I was walking in
some steep mountains once, and decided I'd rather just think, if I
was bored, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce.  It wasn't
so bad.  I found I could entertain myself by having ideas instead
of reading other people's.  If you stop eating jam, fruit starts
to taste better.So maybe I'll try not bringing books on some future trip.  They're
going to have to pry the plugs out of my cold, dead ears, however.