pookie3000/paul_graham_all_essays huggingface dataset:
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|  **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator.  
  
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October 2012  
  
One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends
before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last
batch was the large number of hardware startups. Out of 84 companies, 7 were
making hardware. On the whole they've done better than the companies that
weren't.  
  
They've faced resistance from investors of course. Investors have a deep-
seated bias against hardware. But investors' opinions are a trailing
indicator. The best founders are better at seeing the future than the best
investors, because the best founders are making it.  
  
There is no one single force driving this trend. Hardware does well on
crowdfunding sites. The spread of tablets makes it possible to build new
things controlled by and even incorporating them. Electric motors have
improved. Wireless connectivity of various types can now be taken for granted.
It's getting more straightforward to get things manufactured. Arduinos, 3D
printing, laser cutters, and more accessible CNC milling are making hardware
easier to prototype. Retailers are less of a bottleneck as customers
increasingly buy online.  
  
One question I can answer is why hardware is suddenly cool. It always was
cool. Physical things are great. They just haven't been as great a way to
start a rapidly growing business as software. But that rule may not be
permanent. It's not even that old; it only dates from about 1990. Maybe the
advantage of software will turn out to have been temporary. Hackers love to
build hardware, and customers love to buy it. So if the ease of shipping
hardware even approached the ease of shipping software, we'd see a lot more
hardware startups.  
  
It wouldn't be the first time something was a bad idea till it wasn't. And it
wouldn't be the first time investors learned that lesson from founders.  
  
So if you want to work on hardware, don't be deterred from doing it because
you worry investors will discriminate against you. And in particular, don't be
deterred from applying to Y Combinator with a hardware idea, because we're
especially interested in hardware startups.  
  
We know there's room for the next Steve Jobs. But there's almost certainly
also room for the first <Your Name Here>.  
  
  
  
  
  
**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Cann, Sanjay Dastoor, Paul
Gerhardt, Cameron Robertson, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of
this.  
  
  
  
  
  
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A Hardware Renaissance while Software Eats the World?  
  
  
  
  

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January 2015  
  
My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for
Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.  
  
He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do. When
you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clear watershed at about age
12, when he "got interested in maths."  
  
He grew up in the small Welsh seacoast town of Pwllheli. As we retraced his
walk to school on Google Street View, he said that it had been nice growing up
in the country.  
  
"Didn't it get boring when you got to be about 15?" I asked.  
  
"No," he said, "by then I was interested in maths."  
  
In another conversation he told me that what he really liked was solving
problems. To me the exercises at the end of each chapter in a math textbook
represent work, or at best a way to reinforce what you learned in that
chapter. To him the problems were the reward. The text of each chapter was
just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new
textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems — to the slight annoyance
of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book
gradually.  
  
Few people know so early or so certainly what they want to work on. But
talking to my father reminded me of a heuristic the rest of us can use. If
something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you,
that's something you're well suited for. For example, a lot of programmers I
know, including me, actually like debugging. It's not something people tend to
volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to
like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which
programming consists of it.  
  
The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they
probably are of what you should do. When I was in college I used to write
papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I
wasn't taking. Plus they were always so relieved.  
  
It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one person and
pleasant to another, but I didn't realize at the time what this imbalance
implied, because I wasn't looking for it. I didn't realize how hard it can be
to decide what you should work on, and that you sometimes have to figure it
out from subtle clues, like a detective solving a case in a mystery novel. So
I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly.
What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?  
  
  
  
  
  
**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris,
and my father for reading drafts of this.  
  
  
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Robert Morris: All About Programming  
  
French Translation  
  
  
  
  

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