diff --git "a/pual_graham_essays.csv" "b/pual_graham_essays.csv" --- "a/pual_graham_essays.csv" +++ "b/pual_graham_essays.csv" @@ -9656,7 +9656,7 @@ It could be that in Java's case I'm mistaken. It could be that a language promot [Sun Internal Memo](http://www.archub.org/javamemo.txt) [2005: BusinessWeek Agrees](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051213_042973.htm)" -116,Heresy,April 2022,"Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as ""earnest."" This is not by itself a guarantee of success. You could be earnest but incapable. But when founders are both formidable (another of our words) and earnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get. +116,Earnestness,December 2020,"Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as ""earnest."" This is not by itself a guarantee of success. You could be earnest but incapable. But when founders are both formidable (another of our words) and earnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get. Earnestness sounds like a boring, even Victorian virtue. It seems a bit of an anachronism that people in Silicon Valley would care about it. Why does this matter so much? @@ -9715,7 +9715,7 @@ The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is als \[6\] Much of business is schleps, and probably always will be. But even being a professor is largely schleps. It would be interesting to collect statistics about the schlep ratios of different jobs, but I suspect they'd rarely be less than 30%. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Jessica Livingston, Mattias Ljungman, Harj Taggar, and Kyle Vogt for reading drafts of this." -117,The Two Kinds of Moderate,December 2019,"One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy. +117,Heresy,April 2022,"One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy. In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College: @@ -9788,7 +9788,7 @@ The superficial demands of orthodoxy make it an inexpensive substitute for virtu \[6\] People only have the luxury of ignoring the medical consensus about vaccines because vaccines have worked so well. If we didn't have any vaccines at all, the mortality rate would be so high that most current anti-vaxxers would be begging for them. And the situation with freedom of expression is similar. It's only because they live in a world created by the Enlightenment that kids from the suburbs can play at banning ideas. **Thanks** to Marc Andreessen, Chris Best, Trevor Blackwell, Nicholas Christakis, Daniel Gackle, Jonathan Haidt, Claire Lehmann, Jessica Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Robert Morris, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this." -118,Donate Unrestricted,March 2021,"There are two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose and by accident. Intentional moderates are trimmers, deliberately choosing a position mid-way between the extremes of right and left. Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong. +118,The Two Kinds of Moderate,December 2019,"There are two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose and by accident. Intentional moderates are trimmers, deliberately choosing a position mid-way between the extremes of right and left. Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong. You can distinguish intentional from accidental moderates by the distribution of their opinions. If the far left opinion on some matter is 0 and the far right opinion 100, an intentional moderate's opinion on every question will be near 50. Whereas an accidental moderate's opinions will be scattered over a broad range, but will, like those of the intentional moderate, average to about 50. @@ -9813,7 +9813,7 @@ Or more precisely, you have to be independent-minded about the ideas you work wi \[3\] Having heretical opinions doesn't mean you have to express them openly. It may be [easier to have them](say.html) if you don't. **Thanks** to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Amjad Masad, Ryan Petersen, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." -119,Learning from Founders,January 2007,"The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations. If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have heard this phrase before. But if you have been, it probably made you wince. +119,Donate Unrestricted,March 2021,"The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations. If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have heard this phrase before. But if you have been, it probably made you wince. Restricted donations mean donations where the donor limits what can be done with the money. This is common with big donations, perhaps the default. And yet it's usually a bad idea. Usually the way the donor wants the money spent is not the way the nonprofit would have chosen. Otherwise there would have been no need to restrict the donation. But who has a better understanding of where money needs to be spent, the nonprofit or the donor? @@ -9832,7 +9832,7 @@ You can't expect candor in a relationship so asymmetric. So I'll tell you what n \[1\] Unfortunately restricted donations tend to generate more publicity than unrestricted ones. ""X donates money to build a school in Africa"" is not only more interesting than ""X donates money to Y nonprofit to spend as Y chooses,"" but also focuses more attention on X. **Thanks** to Chase Adam, Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, and Edith Elliot for reading drafts of this." -120,Return of the Mac,March 2005,"_(Foreword to Jessica Livingston's [Founders at Work](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597141).)_ +120,Learning from Founders,January 2007,"_(Foreword to Jessica Livingston's [Founders at Work](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597141).)_ Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak. @@ -9855,7 +9855,7 @@ Of course, big companies won't be able to do everything these startups do. In bi **Founders at Work** There can't be more than a couple thousand people who know first-hand what happens in the first month of a successful startup. Jessica Livingston got them to tell us. So despite the interview format, this is really a how-to book. It is probably the single most valuable book a startup founder could read." -121,Five Questions about Language Design,May 2001,"All the best [hackers](gba.html) I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get. +121,Return of the Mac,March 2005,"All the best [hackers](gba.html) I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get. The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know? @@ -9896,7 +9896,7 @@ So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that \[1\] These horrible stickers are much like the intrusive ads popular on pre-Google search engines. They say to the customer: you are unimportant. We care about Intel and Microsoft, not you. \[2\] [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com) is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago." -122,Why YC,August 2009,"_(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.)_ +122,Five Questions about Language Design,May 2001,"_(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.)_ **1\. Programming Languages Are for People.** @@ -10033,7 +10033,7 @@ What this means for language design, I think, is that you shouldn't build object Having your language designed by a committee is a big pitfall, and not just for the reasons everyone knows about. Everyone knows that committees tend to yield lumpy, inconsistent designs. But I think a greater danger is that they won't take risks. When one person is in charge he can take risks that a committee would never agree on. Is it necessary to take risks to design a good language though? Many people might suspect that language design is something where you should stick fairly close to the conventional wisdom. I bet this isn't true. In everything else people do, reward is proportionate to risk. Why should language design be any different?" -123,Defining Property,March 2012,"Yesterday one of the founders we funded asked me why we started [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com). Or more precisely, he asked if we'd started YC mainly for fun. +123,Why YC,August 2009,"Yesterday one of the founders we funded asked me why we started [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com). Or more precisely, he asked if we'd started YC mainly for fun. Kind of, but not quite. It is enormously fun to be able to work with Rtm and Trevor again. I missed that after we sold Viaweb, and for all the years after I always had a background process running, looking for something we could do together. There is definitely an aspect of a band reunion to Y Combinator. Every couple days I slip and call it ""Viaweb."" @@ -10044,7 +10044,7 @@ The real reason we started Y Combinator is neither selfish nor virtuous. We didn The real reason we started Y Combinator is one probably only a [hacker](gba.html) would understand. We did it because it seems such a great hack. There are thousands of smart people who could start companies and don't, and with a relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place, we can spring on the world a stream of new startups that might otherwise not have existed. In a way this is virtuous, because I think startups are a good thing. But really what motivates us is the completely amoral desire that would motivate any hacker who looked at some complex device and realized that with a tiny tweak he could make it run more efficiently. In this case, the device is the world's economy, which fortunately happens to be open source." -124,Mean People Fail,November 2014,"As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. A poor student who could afford only rice was eating his rice while enjoying the delicious cooking smells coming from the food shop. The owner wanted the student to pay for the smells he was enjoying. +124,Defining Property,March 2012,"As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. A poor student who could afford only rice was eating his rice while enjoying the delicious cooking smells coming from the food shop. The owner wanted the student to pay for the smells he was enjoying. The student was stealing his smells! @@ -10083,7 +10083,7 @@ The people running the US may not like it when voters or other countries refuse \[4\] The state of technology isn't simply a function of the definition of property. They each constrain the other. But that being so, you can't mess with the definition of property without affecting (and probably harming) the state of technology. The history of the USSR offers a vivid illustration of that. **Thanks** to Sam Altman and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." -125,Six Principles for Making New Things,February 2008,"It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few. +125,Mean People Fail,November 2014,"It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few. Meanness isn't rare. In fact, one of the things the internet has shown us is how mean people can be. A few decades ago, only famous people and professional writers got to publish their opinions. Now everyone can, and we can all see the long tail of meanness that had previously been hidden. @@ -10126,7 +10126,7 @@ So I'm really glad I stopped to think about this. Jessica and I have always work In sufficiently disordered times, even thinking requires control of scarce resources, because living at all is a scarce resource. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Ron Conway, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." -126,Jessica Livingston,November 2015,"The fiery reaction to the release of [Arc](arc.html) had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy. The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. After years of working on it, all I had to show for myself were a few thousand lines of macros? Why hadn't I worked on more substantial problems? +126,Six Principles for Making New Things,February 2008,"The fiery reaction to the release of [Arc](arc.html) had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy. The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. After years of working on it, all I had to show for myself were a few thousand lines of macros? Why hadn't I worked on more substantial problems? As I was mulling over these remarks it struck me how familiar they seemed. This was exactly the kind of thing people said at first about Viaweb, and Y Combinator, and most of my essays. @@ -10157,7 +10157,7 @@ At Y Combinator we bet money on it, in the sense that we encourage the startups [Reddit](http://reddit.com) is a classic example of this approach. When Reddit first launched, it seemed like there was nothing to it. To the graphically unsophisticated its deliberately minimal design seemed like no design at all. But Reddit solved the real problem, which was to tell people what was new and otherwise stay out of the way. As a result it became massively successful. Now that conventional ideas have caught up with it, it seems obvious. People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it; now it looks like they're merely floating downstream. So when you look at something like Reddit and think ""I wish I could think of an idea like that,"" remember: ideas like that are all around you. But you ignore them because they look wrong." -127,"The Other Half of ""Artists Ship""",November 2008,"A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been a ""one-man show."" It's sadly common to read that sort of thing. But the problem with that description is not just that it's unfair. It's also misleading. Much of what's most novel about YC is due to Jessica Livingston. If you don't understand her, you don't understand YC. So let me tell you a little about Jessica. +127,Jessica Livingston,November 2015,"A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been a ""one-man show."" It's sadly common to read that sort of thing. But the problem with that description is not just that it's unfair. It's also misleading. Much of what's most novel about YC is due to Jessica Livingston. If you don't understand her, you don't understand YC. So let me tell you a little about Jessica. YC had 4 founders. Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor read applications and did interviews with us. @@ -10220,7 +10220,7 @@ Incidentally, if you saw Jessica at a public event, you would never guess she ha There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people start to leave. No one understands female founders better than Jessica. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the topic. She ventured a toe in that water a while ago, and the reaction was so violent that she decided ""never again."" **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Daniel Gackle, Carolynn Levy, Jon Levy, Kirsty Nathoo, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this. And yes, Jessica Livingston, who made me cut surprisingly little." -128,A Way to Detect Bias,October 2015,"One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A startup walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over all the time. A big company is more deliberate. +128,"The Other Half of ""Artists Ship""",November 2008,"One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A startup walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over all the time. A big company is more deliberate. The gradual accumulation of checks in an organization is a kind of learning, based on disasters that have happened to it or others like it. After giving a contract to a supplier who goes bankrupt and fails to deliver, for example, a company might require all suppliers to prove they're solvent before submitting bids. @@ -10263,7 +10263,7 @@ They'd have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps millions, just And just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won't even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work for you. Steve Jobs's famous maxim ""artists ship"" works both ways. Artists aren't merely capable of shipping. They insist on it. So if you don't let people ship, you won't have any artists." -129,Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy,October 2008,"This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing anything about the applicant pool. Which is exciting because among other things it means third parties can use this technique to detect bias whether those doing the selecting want them to or not. +129,A Way to Detect Bias,October 2015,"This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing anything about the applicant pool. Which is exciting because among other things it means third parties can use this technique to detect bias whether those doing the selecting want them to or not. You can use this technique whenever (a) you have at least a random sample of the applicants that were selected, (b) their subsequent performance is measured, and (c) the groups of applicants you're comparing have roughly equal distribution of ability. @@ -10284,7 +10284,7 @@ I predict we'll see this technique used more in the future. The information need \[2\] As Paul Buchheit points out, First Round excluded their most successful investment, Uber, from the study. And while it makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies, studies of returns from startup investing, which is all about hitting outliers, are not one of them. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." -130,Why to Move to a Startup Hub,October 2007,"The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. +130,Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy,October 2008,"The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. @@ -10323,7 +10323,7 @@ You're an investor too. As a founder, you're buying stock with work: the reason Were you nodding in agreement, thinking ""stupid investors"" a few paragraphs ago when I was talking about how investors are reluctant to put money into startups in bad markets, even though that's the time they should rationally be most willing to buy? Well, founders aren't much better. When times get bad, hackers go to grad school. And no doubt that will happen this time too. In fact, what makes the preceding paragraph true is that most readers won't believe it—at least to the extent of acting on it. So maybe a recession is a good time to start a startup. It's hard to say whether advantages like lack of competition outweigh disadvantages like reluctant investors. But it doesn't matter much either way. It's the people that matter. And for a given set of people working on a given technology, the time to act is always now." -131,Before the Startup,October 2014,"After the last [talk](webstartups.html) I gave, one of the organizers got up on the stage to deliver an impromptu rebuttal. That never happened before. I only heard the first few sentences, but that was enough to tell what I said that upset him: that startups would do better if they moved to Silicon Valley. +131,Why to Move to a Startup Hub,October 2007,"After the last [talk](webstartups.html) I gave, one of the organizers got up on the stage to deliver an impromptu rebuttal. That never happened before. I only heard the first few sentences, but that was enough to tell what I said that upset him: that startups would do better if they moved to Silicon Valley. This conference was in London, and most of the audience seemed to be from the UK. So saying startups should move to Silicon Valley seemed like a nationalistic remark: an obnoxious American telling them that if they wanted to do things right they should all just move to America. @@ -10376,7 +10376,7 @@ And that's why startups thrive in startup hubs like Silicon Valley. Startups are \[2\] An investor who merely seems like he will fund you, however, you can ignore. Seeming like they will fund you one day is the way investors say No. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Harjeet Taggar, and Kulveer Taggar for reading drafts of this." -132,Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas,March 2012,"_(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's [startup class](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/) at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.)_ +132,Before the Startup,October 2014,"_(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's [startup class](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/) at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.)_ One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself ""what would I tell my own kids?"" My kids are little, but I can imagine what I'd tell them about startups if they were in college, and that's what I'm going to tell you. @@ -10525,7 +10525,7 @@ The way universities ""teach"" students how to be employees is to hand off the t \[10\] In fact, if your goal is to start a startup, you can stick even more closely to the ideal of a liberal education than past generations have. Back when students focused mainly on getting a job after college, they thought at least a little about how the courses they took might look to an employer. And perhaps even worse, they might shy away from taking a difficult class lest they get a low grade, which would harm their all-important GPA. Good news: users [don't care](credentials.html) what your GPA was. And I've never heard of investors caring either. Y Combinator certainly never asks what classes you took in college or what grades you got in them. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." -133,The Roots of Lisp,May 2001,"One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them. +133,Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas,March 2012,"One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them. Don't worry, it's not a sign of weakness. Arguably it's a sign of sanity. The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they'd be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through. @@ -10658,7 +10658,7 @@ The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, b \[4\] If you want to be the next Apple, maybe you don't even want to start with consumer electronics. Maybe at first you make something hackers use. Or you make something popular but apparently unimportant, like a headset or router. All you need is a bridgehead. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this." -134,"6,631,372",August 2009,"_(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp � both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and the reason why, unlike other languages, Lisp has dialects.)_ +134,The Roots of Lisp,May 2001,"_(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp � both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and the reason why, unlike other languages, Lisp has dialects.)_ In 1960, [John McCarthy](http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/index.html) published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry. He showed how, given a handful of simple operators and a notation for functions, you can build a whole programming language. He called this language Lisp, for ""List Processing,"" because one of his key ideas was to use a simple data structure called a _list_ for both code and data. @@ -10671,7 +10671,7 @@ In this article I'm going to try to explain in the simplest possible terms what [What Made Lisp Different](diff.html) [The Code](https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/jmc.lisp?t=1595850613&)" -135,Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas,April 2005,"A couple days ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a [patent](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,631,372.PN.&OS=PN/6,631,372&RS=PN/6,631,372). It issued in 2003, but no one told me. I wouldn't know about it now except that a few months ago, while visiting Yahoo, I happened to run into a Big Cheese I knew from working there in the late nineties. He brought up something called Revenue Loop, which Viaweb had been working on when they bought us. +135,"6,631,372",August 2009,"A couple days ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a [patent](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,631,372.PN.&OS=PN/6,631,372&RS=PN/6,631,372). It issued in 2003, but no one told me. I wouldn't know about it now except that a few months ago, while visiting Yahoo, I happened to run into a Big Cheese I knew from working there in the late nineties. He brought up something called Revenue Loop, which Viaweb had been working on when they bought us. The idea is basically that you sort search results not in order of textual ""relevance"" (as search engines did then) nor in order of how much advertisers bid (as Overture did) but in order of the bid times the number of transactions. Ordinarily you'd do this for shopping searches, though in fact one of the features of our scheme is that it automatically detects which searches are shopping searches. @@ -10700,7 +10700,7 @@ The main thing that struck me on reading it, actually, is that lawyers at some p (That ""compat disc player"" wasn't a typo, guys.) For the fine prose of the original, see the provisional application of February 1998, back when we were still Viaweb and couldn't afford to pay lawyers to turn every ""a lot of"" into ""considerable.""" -136,Write Simply,March 2021,"This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving [seed funding](http://ycombinator.com) to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer—so even college students can participate. +136,Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas,April 2005,"This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving [seed funding](http://ycombinator.com) to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer—so even college students can participate. We know from Google and Yahoo that grad students can start successful startups. And we know from experience that some undergrads are as capable as most grad students. The accepted age for startup founders has been creeping downward. We're trying to find the lower bound. @@ -10829,7 +10829,7 @@ but now we've decided it's going to be **Thanks** to Bill Birch, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." -137,Haters,January 2020,"I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. +137,Write Simply,March 2021,"I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas. @@ -10854,7 +10854,7 @@ But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none of them are w There are of course times when you want to use a complicated sentence or fancy word for effect. But you should never do it by accident. The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and that makes simple writing even simpler." -139,Web 2.0,November 2005,"_(I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but it applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.)_ +139,Haters,January 2020,"_(I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but it applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.)_ If you become sufficiently famous, you'll acquire some fans who like you too much. These people are sometimes called ""fanboys,"" and though I dislike that term, I'm going to have to use it here. We need some word for them, because this is a distinct phenomenon from someone simply liking your work. @@ -10903,7 +10903,7 @@ Since haters are equivalent to fanboys, that's the way to deal with them too. Th \[4\] A competent hater will not merely attack you individually but will try to get mobs after you. In some cases you may want to refute whatever bogus claim they made in order to do so. But err on the side of not, because ultimately it probably won't matter. **Thanks** to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Christine Ford, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Elon Musk, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this." -140,Beating the Averages,April 2003,"Thirty years ago, one was supposed to work one's way up the corporate ladder. That's less the rule now. Our generation wants to get paid up front. Instead of developing a product for some big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, we develop the product ourselves, in a startup, and sell it to the big company. At the very least we want options. +140,After the Ladder,August 2005,"Thirty years ago, one was supposed to work one's way up the corporate ladder. That's less the rule now. Our generation wants to get paid up front. Instead of developing a product for some big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, we develop the product ourselves, in a startup, and sell it to the big company. At the very least we want options. Among other things, this shift has created the appearance of a rapid increase in economic inequality. But really the two cases are not as different as they look in economic statistics. @@ -10922,7 +10922,7 @@ I like the new model better. For one thing, it seems a bad plan to treat jobs as The big disadvantage of the new system is that it involves more [risk](inequality.html). If you develop ideas in a startup instead of within a big company, any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish. But maybe the older generation would laugh at me for saying that the way we do things is riskier. After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result of arbitrary decisions from higher up. My father's entire industry (breeder reactors) disappeared that way. For better or worse, the idea of the corporate ladder is probably gone for good. The new model seems more liquid, and more efficient. But it is less of a change, financially, than one might think. Our fathers weren't _that_ stupid." -141,Orthodox Privilege,July 2020,"Does ""Web 2.0"" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don't need it. +141,Web 2.0,November 2005,"Does ""Web 2.0"" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don't need it. I first heard the phrase ""Web 2.0"" in the name of the Web 2.0 conference in 2004. At the time it was supposed to mean using ""the web as a platform,"" which I took to refer to web-based applications. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -11052,7 +11052,7 @@ The fact that Google is a ""Web 2.0"" company shows that, while meaningful, the [Interview About Web 2.0](web20interview.html) If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." -142,News from the Front,September 2007,"_(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.)_ +142,Beating the Averages,April 2003,"_(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.)_ In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called [Viaweb](http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release184.html). Our plan was to write software that would let end users build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the time, was that it ran on our server, using ordinary Web pages as the interface. @@ -11193,7 +11193,7 @@ In January 2003, Yahoo released a new version of the editor written in C++ and P [A Scheme Story](http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html) You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." -143,Billionaires Build,December 2020,"""Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."" +143,Orthodox Privilege,July 2020,"""Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."" � Einstein @@ -11222,7 +11222,7 @@ Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a Once you realize that orthodox privilege exists, a lot of other things become clearer. For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call ""cancel culture,"" while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem? Once you understand the concept of orthodox privilege, it's easy to see the source of this disagreement. If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, Geoff Ralston, Max Roser, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." -144,Novelty and Heresy,November 2019,"A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college. +144,News from the Front,September 2007,"A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college. For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up. What was I? A student. To do that well meant to get good grades. Why did one have to get good grades? To get into a good college. And why did one want to do that? There seemed to be several reasons: you'd learn more, get better jobs, make more money. But it didn't matter exactly what the benefits would be. College was a bottleneck through which all your future prospects passed; everything would be better if you went to a better college. @@ -11287,7 +11287,7 @@ Indeed, the great advantage of not caring where people went to college is not ju \[4\] Possible doesn't mean easy, of course. A smart student at a party school will inevitably be something of an outcast, just as he or she would be in most [high schools](nerds.html). **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Peter Norvig, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -145,You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss,June 2008,"As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find that two separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually the same. +145,Billionaires Build,December 2020,"As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find that two separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually the same. The first is about how to ace your Y Combinator interview. There has been so much nonsense written about this topic that I've been meaning for years to write something telling founders the truth. @@ -11388,7 +11388,7 @@ Users are what the partners want to know about in YC interviews, and what I want \[4\] Not these days, anyway. There were some big ones during the Internet Bubble, and indeed some big IPOs. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." -146,Disconnecting Distraction,May 2008,"If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy. +146,Novelty and Heresy,November 2019,"If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy. To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious; if an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already working on it. One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to. But anything you discover from working on such an idea will tend to contradict the mistaken assumption that was concealing it. And you will thus get a lot of heat from people attached to the mistaken assumption. Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon, but it's probably always an ingredient in the resistance to new ideas. @@ -11397,7 +11397,7 @@ So it's particularly dangerous for an organization or society to have a culture Every cherished mistaken assumption has a dead zone of unexplored ideas around it. And the more preposterous the assumption, the bigger the dead zone it creates. There is a positive side to this phenomenon though. If you're looking for new ideas, one way to find them is by [looking for heresies](say.html). When you look at the question this way, the depressingly large dead zones around mistaken assumptions become excitingly large mines of new ideas." -147,The Top of My Todo List,April 2012,"Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically. +147,You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss,June 2008,"Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically. I began to suspect this after spending several years working with startup founders. I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their own startups and those working for large organizations. I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily; starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put it is to say that they're happier in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts. @@ -11490,7 +11490,7 @@ Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the differe \[4\] The founders we fund used to be younger (initially we encouraged undergrads to apply), and the first couple times I saw this I used to wonder if they were actually getting physically taller. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, Aaron Iba, Abby Kirigin, Ivan Kirigin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -148,Do Things that Don't Scale,July 2013,"_Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work. It would work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet on my work computer. I'm trying other strategies now, but I think this time I'll wait till I'm sure they work before writing about them._ +148,Disconnecting Distraction,May 2008,"_Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work. It would work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet on my work computer. I'm trying other strategies now, but I think this time I'll wait till I'm sure they work before writing about them._ Procrastination feeds on distractions. Most people find it uncomfortable just to sit and do nothing; you avoid work by doing something else. @@ -11535,7 +11535,7 @@ _Wow. All I can do at this computer is work. Ok, I better work then._ That's the good part. Your old bad habits now help you to work. You're used to sitting in front of that computer for hours at a time. But you can't browse the web or check email now. What are you going to do? You can't just sit there. So you start working. [Good and Bad Procrastination](http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html)" -149,How to Convince Investors,August 2013,"A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest [regrets of the dying](http://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/). Her list seems plausible. I could see myself — _can_ see myself — making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes. +149,The Top of My Todo List,April 2012,"A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest [regrets of the dying](http://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/). Her list seems plausible. I could see myself — _can_ see myself — making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes. If you had to compress them into a single piece of advice, it might be: don't be a cog. The 5 regrets paint a portrait of post-industrial man, who shrinks himself into a shape that fits his circumstances, then turns dutifully till he stops. @@ -11546,7 +11546,7 @@ I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you m > Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy. which I then put at the top of the file I use as a todo list." -150,Black Swan Farming,September 2012,"One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. \[[1](#f1n)\] +150,Do Things that Don't Scale,July 2013,"One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. \[[1](#f1n)\] Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going. @@ -11689,7 +11689,7 @@ In the best case, both components of the vector contribute to your company's DNA \[12\] It will also remind founders that an idea where the second component is empty — an idea where there is nothing you can do to get going, e.g. because you have no way to find users to recruit manually — is probably a bad idea, at least for those founders. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Kevin Hale, Steven Levy, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this." -151,Cities and Ambition,May 2008,"When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be better off if they let their startup do the work — if they started by understanding why their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this well to investors. +151,How to Convince Investors,August 2013,"When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be better off if they let their startup do the work — if they started by understanding why their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this well to investors. Investors are looking for startups that will be very successful. But that test is not as simple as it sounds. In startups, as in a lot of other domains, the distribution of outcomes follows a power law, but in startups the curve is startlingly steep. The big successes are so big they [dwarf](swan.html) the rest. And since there are only a handful each year (the conventional wisdom is 15), investors treat ""big success"" as if it were binary. Most are interested in you if you seem like you have a chance, however small, of being one of the 15 big successes, and otherwise not. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -11810,7 +11810,7 @@ So although it works well to show growth graphs at either stage, investors treat We consciously optimize for this at YC. When we work with founders create a Demo Day pitch, the last step is to imagine how an investor would sell it to colleagues. **Thanks** to Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Alfred Lin, Ben Horowitz, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Greg Mcadoo, Andrew Mason, Geoff Ralston, Yuri Sagalov, Emmett Shear, Rajat Suri, Garry Tan, Albert Wenger, Fred Wilson, and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this." -152,The Lesson to Unlearn,December 2019,"I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. +152,Black Swan Farming,September 2012,"I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas. @@ -11875,7 +11875,7 @@ Nor do we push founders to try to become one of the big winners if they don't wa \[5\] I calculated it once for the last batch before a consortium of investors started offering investment automatically to every startup we funded, summer 2010. At the time it was 94% (33 of 35 companies that tried to raise money succeeded, and one didn't try because they were already profitable). Presumably it's lower now because of that investment; in the old days it was raise after Demo Day or die. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." -153,How to Disagree,March 2008,"Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. +153,Cities and Ambition,May 2008,"Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer. @@ -11996,7 +11996,7 @@ This seems unlikely at the moment; if anything Boston is falling further and fur \[5\] If Paris is where people care most about art, why is New York the center of gravity of the art business? Because in the twentieth century, art as brand split apart from art as stuff. New York is where the richest buyers are, but all they demand from art is brand, and since you can base brand on anything with a sufficiently identifiable style, you may as well use the local stuff. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and David Sloo for reading drafts of this." -154,The Airbnbs,December 2020,"The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades. +154,The Lesson to Unlearn,December 2019,"The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades. When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only what he learned in it. This stuck in my mind because it was the only time I ever heard anyone say such a thing. @@ -12123,7 +12123,7 @@ This is not just a lesson for individuals to unlearn, but one for society to unl \[11\] Note to tiger parents: you may think you're training your kids to win, but if you're training them to win by hacking bad tests, you are, as parents so often do, training them to fight the last war. **Thanks** to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." -155,Coronavirus and Credibility,April 2020,"The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts. +155,How to Disagree,March 2008,"The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts. Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored. @@ -12226,7 +12226,7 @@ If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make m [What You Can't Say](say.html) [The Age of the Essay](essay.html)" -156,How Not to Die,August 2007,"To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. +156,The Airbnbs,December 2020,"To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. What was special about the Airbnbs was how earnest they were. They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview. Sometimes after we interviewed a startup we'd be uncertain what to do, and have to talk it over. Other times we'd just look at one another and smile. The Airbnbs' interview was that kind. We didn't even like the idea that much. Nor did users, at that stage; they had no growth. But the founders seemed so full of energy that it was impossible not to like them. @@ -12257,7 +12257,7 @@ In late January 2009, about three weeks into Y Combinator, their efforts started ""I assume you know what you've now set yourself up for next week,"" I responded. Brian's reply was seven words: ""We are not going to slow down.""" -157,How to Fund a Startup,November 2005,"I recently saw a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o) of TV journalists and politicians confidently saying that the coronavirus would be no worse than the flu. What struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed, but how daring. How could they feel safe saying such things? +157,Coronavirus and Credibility,April 2020,"I recently saw a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o) of TV journalists and politicians confidently saying that the coronavirus would be no worse than the flu. What struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed, but how daring. How could they feel safe saying such things? The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said. @@ -12268,7 +12268,7 @@ But epidemics are rare enough that these people clearly didn't realize this was An event like this is thus a uniquely powerful way of taking people's measure. As Warren Buffett said, ""It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."" And the tide has just gone out like never before. Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have. I hope." -158,Lisp for Web-Based Applications,,"_(This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk. I didn't mean this as an essay; I wrote it down because I only had two hours before dinner and think fastest while writing.)_ +158,How Not to Die,August 2007,"_(This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk. I didn't mean this as an essay; I wrote it down because I only had two hours before dinner and think fastest while writing.)_ A couple days ago I told a reporter that we expected about a third of the companies we funded to succeed. Actually I was being conservative. I'm hoping it might be as much as a half. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could achieve a 50% success rate? @@ -12327,7 +12327,7 @@ And however tough things get for the Octoparts, I predict they'll succeed. They All of you guys already have the first two. You're all smart and working on promising ideas. Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up. So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don't get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don't give up." -159,What Business Can Learn from Open Source,August 2005,"Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear. +159,How to Fund a Startup,November 2005,"Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear. Few startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few are overfunded, which is like trying to start driving in third gear. @@ -12626,10 +12626,10 @@ Some government agencies run venture funding groups, which make investments rath Founders are tempted to ignore these clauses, because they think the company will either be a big success or a complete bust. VCs know otherwise: it's not uncommon for startups to have moments of adversity before they ultimately succeed. So it's worth negotiating anti-dilution provisions, even though you don't think you need to, and VCs will try to make you feel that you're being gratuitously troublesome. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Hutch Fishman, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Sesha Pratap, Stan Reiss, Andy Singleton, Zak Stone, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this." -160,This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California,November 2016,"After a link to [Beating the Averages](avg.html) was posted on slashdot, some readers wanted to hear in more detail about the specific technical advantages we got from using Lisp in Viaweb. For those who are interested, here are some excerpts from a talk I gave in April 2001 at BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA. +160,Lisp for Web-Based Applications,,"After a link to [Beating the Averages](avg.html) was posted on slashdot, some readers wanted to hear in more detail about the specific technical advantages we got from using Lisp in Viaweb. For those who are interested, here are some excerpts from a talk I gave in April 2001 at BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA. [BBN Talk Excerpts (ASCII)](https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt?t=1595850613&)" -161,Good and Bad Procrastination,December 2005,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)_ +161,What Business Can Learn from Open Source,August 2005,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)_ Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -12790,7 +12790,7 @@ That may be the greatest effect, in the long run, of the forces underlying open \[6\] The word ""boss"" is derived from the Dutch _baas_, meaning ""master."" **Thanks** to Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -162,Inequality and Risk,August 2005,"If you're a California voter, there is an important proposition on your ballot this year: Proposition 62, which bans the death penalty. +162,This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California,November 2016,"If you're a California voter, there is an important proposition on your ballot this year: Proposition 62, which bans the death penalty. When I was younger I used to think the debate about the death penalty was about when it's ok to take a human life. Is it ok to kill a killer? @@ -12805,7 +12805,7 @@ A child could answer that one for you. This year, in California, you have a chance to end this, by voting yes on Proposition 62. But beware, because there is another proposition, Proposition 66, whose goal is to make it easier to execute people. So yes on 62, no on 66. It's time." -163,Early Work,October 2020,"The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad? +163,Good and Bad Procrastination,December 2005,"The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad? Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. @@ -12874,7 +12874,7 @@ When I talk to people who've managed to make themselves work on big things, I fi I think the way to ""solve"" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you. Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -164,Being a Noob,January 2020,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.)_ +164,Inequality and Risk,August 2005,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.)_ Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality. There are two ways to do it: give money to the poor, or take it away from the rich. But they amount to the same thing, because if you want to give money to the poor, you have to get it from somewhere. You can't get it from the poor, or they just end up where they started. You have to get it from the rich. @@ -12985,7 +12985,7 @@ If you try to attack wealth, you end up nailing risk as well, and with it growth **Thanks** to Chris Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Dan Giffin, Jessica Livingston, and Evan Williams for reading drafts of this essay, and to Langley Steinert, Sangam Pant, and Mike Moritz for information about venture investing. If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." -165,Lies We Tell Kids,May 2008,"One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They're too frightened even to start. +165,Early Work,October 2020,"One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They're too frightened even to start. Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do. @@ -13078,7 +13078,7 @@ Curiously enough, the solution to the problem of judging early work too harshly \[8\] Michael Nielsen points out that the internet has made this easier, because you can see programmers' first commits, musicians' first videos, and so on. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Michael Nielsen, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts of this." -166,A New Venture Animal,May 2013,"When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true. +166,Being a Noob,January 2020,"When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true. I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking to some startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or reading a book about a topic I don't understand well enough, or visiting some new country where I don't know how things work. @@ -13093,7 +13093,7 @@ I think the answer is that there are two sources of feeling like a noob: being s Now that too much food is more of a problem than too little, our dislike of feeling hungry leads us astray. And I think our dislike of feeling like a noob does too. Though it feels unpleasant, and people will sometimes ridicule you for it, the more you feel like a noob, the better." -167,How to Raise Money,September 2013,"Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. +167,Lies We Tell Kids,May 2008,"Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. There may also be a benefit to us. We were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us. So by studying the ways adults lie to kids, we may be able to clear our heads of lies we were told. @@ -13284,7 +13284,7 @@ I can't predict which these will be, and I don't want to write an essay that wil \[9\] The ironic thing is, this is also the main reason kids lie to adults. If you freak out when people tell you alarming things, they won't tell you them. Teenagers don't tell their parents what happened that night they were supposed to be staying at a friend's house for the same reason parents don't tell 5 year olds the truth about the Thanksgiving turkey. They'd freak if they knew. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and David Sloo for reading drafts of this. And since there are some controversial ideas here, I should add that none of them agreed with everything in it." -168,The Hardware Renaissance,October 2012,"_(This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out what we do. Even though Y Combinator is now 3 years old, we're still trying to understand its implications.)_ +168,A New Venture Animal,May 2013,"_(This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out what we do. Even though Y Combinator is now 3 years old, we're still trying to understand its implications.)_ I was annoyed recently to read a description of Y Combinator that said ""Y Combinator does seed funding for startups."" What was especially annoying about it was that I wrote it. This doesn't really convey what we do. And the reason it's inaccurate is that, paradoxically, funding very early stage startups is not mainly about funding. @@ -13335,7 +13335,7 @@ It's not surprising something like this would happen. Most fields become more sp And it's natural that the new niche would at first be described, even by its inhabitants, in terms of the old one. But really Y Combinator is not in the startup funding business. Really we're more of a small, furry steam catapult. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -169,Startup = Growth,September 2012,"Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company, and then (3) once the company is clearly succeeding, raise one or more later rounds to accelerate growth. +169,How to Raise Money,September 2013,"Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company, and then (3) once the company is clearly succeeding, raise one or more later rounds to accelerate growth. Reality can be messier. Some companies raise money twice in phase 2. Others skip phase 1 and go straight to phase 2. And at Y Combinator we get an increasing number of companies that have already raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands. But the three phase path is at least the one about which individual startups' paths oscillate. @@ -13704,7 +13704,7 @@ You can relent a little if the potential series A investor has a great reputatio \[27\] The actual sentence in the King James Bible is ""Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."" **Thanks** to Slava Akhmechet, Sam Altman, Nate Blecharczyk, Adora Cheung, Bill Clerico, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Parker Conrad, Ron Conway, Travis Deyle, Jason Freedman, Joe Gebbia, Mattan Griffel, Kevin Hale, Jacob Heller, Ian Hogarth, Justin Kan, Professor Moriarty, Nikhil Nirmel, David Petersen, Geoff Ralston, Joshua Reeves, Yuri Sagalov, Emmett Shear, Rajat Suri, Garry Tan, and Nick Tomarello for reading drafts of this." -170,Investor Herd Dynamics,August 2013,"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. +170,The Hardware Renaissance,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. @@ -13721,7 +13721,7 @@ We know there's room for the [next Steve Jobs](ambitious.html). But there's almo **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Cann, Sanjay Dastoor, Paul Gerhardt, Cameron Robertson, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this. [A Hardware Renaissance while �Software Eats the World�?](http://mantellavp.com/a-hardware-renaissance-while-software-eats-the-world/)" -171,Trolls,February 2008,"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of ""exit."" The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. +171,Startup = Growth,September 2012,"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of ""exit."" The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. If you want to start one it's important to understand that. Startups are so hard that you can't be pointed off to the side and hope to succeed. You have to know that growth is what you're after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face. @@ -13916,7 +13916,7 @@ Beware too of the edge case where something spreads rapidly but the churn is hig \[14\] I once explained this to some founders who had recently arrived from Russia. They found it novel that if you threatened a company they'd pay a premium for you. ""In Russia they just kill you,"" they said, and they were only partly joking. Economically, the fact that established companies can't simply eliminate new competitors may be one of the most valuable aspects of the rule of law. And so to the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we should worry, not because it's a departure from the rule of law per se but from what the rule of law is aiming at. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." -172,Be Good,April 2008,"The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so on. +172,Investor Herd Dynamics,August 2013,"The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so on. Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly conclude that manipulating these forces is the essence of fundraising. They hear stories about stampedes to invest in successful startups, and think it's therefore the mark of a successful startup to have this happen. But actually the two are not that highly correlated. Lots of startups that cause stampedes end up flaming out (in extreme cases, partly as a result of the stampede), and lots of very successful startups were only moderately popular with investors the first time they raised money. @@ -13947,7 +13947,7 @@ While few startups will experience a stampede of interest, almost all will at le \[3\] If an investor pushes you hard to tell them about your conversations with other investors, is this someone you want as an investor? **Thanks** to Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this." -173,How to Write Usefully,February 2020,"A user on Hacker News recently posted a [comment](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116938) that set me thinking: +173,Trolls,February 2008,"A user on Hacker News recently posted a [comment](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116938) that set me thinking: > Something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this � the nastiness. ... I just don't understand why people troll like they do. @@ -13982,7 +13982,7 @@ I'm optimistic we will. We're not depending just on technical tricks. The core u \[1\] I mean forum in the general sense of a place to exchange views. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups. \[2\] I'm talking here about everyday tagging. Some graffiti is quite impressive (anything becomes art if you do it well enough) but the median tag is just visual spam." -174,How to Think for Yourself,November 2020,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)_ +174,Be Good,April 2008,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)_ About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. @@ -14095,7 +14095,7 @@ Most explicitly benevolent projects don't hold themselves sufficiently accountab \[3\] Users dislike their new operating system so much that they're starting petitions to save the old one. And the old one was nothing special. The hackers within Microsoft must know in their hearts that if the company really cared about users they'd just advise them to switch to OSX. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -175,What I Did this Summer,October 2005,"What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful. +175,How to Write Usefully,February 2020,"What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful. To start with, that means it should be correct. But it's not enough merely to be correct. It's easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. That's a common flaw in academic writing, for example. If you know nothing at all about an issue, you can't go wrong by saying that the issue is a complex one, that there are many factors to be considered, that it's a mistake to take too simplistic a view of it, and so on. @@ -14212,7 +14212,7 @@ The exciting thing is not that there's a lot left to write, but that there's a l \[2\] Even now I sometimes write essays that are not meant for publication. I wrote several to figure out what Y Combinator should do, and they were really helpful. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -176,Programming Bottom-Up,September 1993,"There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet. +176,How to Think for Yourself,November 2020,"There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet. The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share. @@ -14329,7 +14329,7 @@ Some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenues without growing t \[10\] Exception: gossip. Almost everyone is curious about gossip. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this." -177,How to Do What You Love,January 2006,"The first Summer Founders Program has just finished. We were surprised how well it went. Overall only about 10% of startups succeed, but if I had to guess now, I'd predict three or four of the eight startups we funded will make it. +177,What I Did this Summer,October 2005,"The first Summer Founders Program has just finished. We were surprised how well it went. Overall only about 10% of startups succeed, but if I had to guess now, I'd predict three or four of the eight startups we funded will make it. Of the startups that needed further funding, I believe all have either closed a round or are likely to soon. Two have already turned down (lowball) acquisition offers. @@ -14440,7 +14440,7 @@ If I'm right, ""hacker"" will mean something different in twenty years than it d The [image](https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/sfptable.jpg?t=1595850613&) shows us, the 2005 summer founders, and Smartleaf co-founders Mark Nitzberg and Olin Shivers at the 30-foot table Kate Courteau designed for us. Photo by Alex Lewin. **Thanks** to Sarah Harlin, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Zak Stone, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this." -178,Made in USA,November 2004,"_(This essay is from the introduction to_ [On Lisp](onlisp.html)_.)_ +178,Programming Bottom-Up,September 1993,"_(This essay is from the introduction to_ [On Lisp](onlisp.html)_.)_ It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as easily as a big city conceals fugitives. Such software will be hard to read, hard to test, and hard to debug. @@ -14467,7 +14467,7 @@ It's true that this style of development is better suited to programs which can **New:** [Download On Lisp for Free](onlisptext.html). \[1\] ""But no one can read the program without understanding all your new utilities."" To see why such statements are usually mistaken, see Section 4.8." -179,If Lisp is So Great,May 2003,"To 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. +179,How to Do What You Love,January 2006,"To 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. @@ -14622,7 +14622,7 @@ Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very diffi \[7\] 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." -180,The Patent Pledge,August 2011,"_(This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of [Hackers & Painters](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596006624). It tries to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.)_ +180,Made in USA,November 2004,"_(This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of [Hackers & Painters](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596006624). It tries to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.)_ A few years ago an Italian friend of mine travelled by train from Boston to Providence. She had only been in America for a couple weeks and hadn't seen much of the country yet. She arrived looking astonished. ""It's so _ugly!""_ @@ -14689,7 +14689,7 @@ In many technologies, version 2 has higher resolution. Why not in design general [American Gothic](amcars.html) [The John Rain Books](http://www.barryeisler.com)" -181,Apple's Mistake,November 2009,"If Lisp is so great, why don't more people use it? I was asked this question by a student in the audience at a talk I gave recently. Not for the first time, either. +181,If Lisp is So Great,May 2003,"If Lisp is so great, why don't more people use it? I was asked this question by a student in the audience at a talk I gave recently. Not for the first time, either. In languages, as in so many things, there's not much correlation between popularity and quality. Why does John Grisham (_King of Torts_ sales rank, 44) outsell Jane Austen (_Pride and Prejudice_ sales rank, 6191)? Would even Grisham claim that it's because he's a better writer? @@ -14712,7 +14712,7 @@ People frightened by Lisp make up other reasons for not using it. The standard e Popularity is always self-perpetuating, but it's especially so in programming languages. More libraries get written for popular languages, which makes them still more popular. Programs often have to work with existing programs, and this is easier if they're written in the same language, so languages spread from program to program like a virus. And managers prefer popular languages, because they give them more leverage over developers, who can more easily be replaced. Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent, there would be little justification for using any but the most popular. But they [aren't](icad.html) all equivalent, not by a long shot. And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. When everyone else is reading the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people reading Jane Austen instead." -182,The Founder Visa,April 2009,"I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government. +182,The Patent Pledge,August 2011,"I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government. I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technological progress. When I was a kid I thought they helped. I thought they protected inventors from having their ideas stolen by big companies. Maybe that was truer in the past, when more things were physical. But regardless of whether patents are in general a good thing, there do seem to be bad ways of using them. And since bad uses of patents seem to be increasing, there is an increasing call for patent reform. @@ -14745,7 +14745,7 @@ Companies that use patents on startups are attacking innovation at the root. Now So for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the 25 people have to be employees, or whether contractors count too. If a company has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's probably still a dick move. [The Investment That Didn't Happen](http://k9ventures.com/blog/2011/04/27/modista/)" -183,Five Founders,April 2009,"I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken. +183,Apple's Mistake,November 2009,"I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken. The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil. @@ -14832,7 +14832,7 @@ My current development machine is a MacBook Air, which I use with an external mo \[4\] Several people I talked to mentioned how much they liked the iPhone SDK. The problem is not Apple's products but their policies. Fortunately policies are software; Apple can change them instantly if they want to. Handy that, isn't it? **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, James Bracy, Gabor Cselle, Patrick Collison, Jason Freedman, John Gruber, Joe Hewitt, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Teng Siong Ong, Nikhil Pandit, Savraj Singh, and Jared Tame for reading drafts of this." -184,What Startups Are Really Like,October 2009,"I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one. The single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of startups in this country is a policy that would cost nothing: establish a new class of visa for startup founders. +184,The Founder Visa,April 2009,"I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one. The single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of startups in this country is a policy that would cost nothing: establish a new class of visa for startup founders. The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley. It's that we won't let the people who want to start them into the country. @@ -14853,7 +14853,7 @@ How would the government decide who's a startup investor? The same way they deci [The United States of Entrepreneurs](http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13216037&fsrc=rss) [About Half of VC-Backed Company Founders are Immigrants](http://venturebeat.com/2006/11/15/note-to-washington-about-half-of-vc-backed-company-founders-are-immigrants)" -185,Subject: Airbnb,March 2011,"_Inc_ recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years. How do you decide who's the most interesting? The best test seemed to be influence: who are the 5 who've influenced me most? Who do I use as examples when I'm talking to companies we fund? Who do I find myself quoting? +185,Five Founders,April 2009,"_Inc_ recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years. How do you decide who's the most interesting? The best test seemed to be influence: who are the 5 who've influenced me most? Who do I use as examples when I'm talking to companies we fund? Who do I find myself quoting? **1\. Steve Jobs** @@ -14890,7 +14890,7 @@ I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask ""What would Steve do?"" but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask ""What would Sama do?"" What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want." -186,Hackers and Painters,May 2003,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.)_ +186,What Startups Are Really Like,October 2009,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.)_ I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet? @@ -15271,7 +15271,7 @@ You probably can't overcome anything so pervasive as the model of work you grew [The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups](startupmistakes.html) [A Fundraising Survival Guide](fundraising.html)" -187,What You'll Wish You'd Known,January 2005,"Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable [post](http://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb) about missing [Airbnb](http://airbnb.com). VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's extraordinarily rare for one to talk about it publicly till long afterward. So that post is further evidence what a rare bird Fred is. He's probably the nicest VC I know. +187,Subject: Airbnb,March 2011,"Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable [post](http://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb) about missing [Airbnb](http://airbnb.com). VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's extraordinarily rare for one to talk about it publicly till long afterward. So that post is further evidence what a rare bird Fred is. He's probably the nicest VC I know. Reading Fred's post made me go back and look at the emails I exchanged with him at the time, trying to convince him to invest in Airbnb. It was quite interesting to read. You can see Fred's mind at work as he circles the deal. @@ -15527,7 +15527,7 @@ I am not negative on this one, I am interested, but we are still in the gathering data phase. fred" -188,What You Can't Say,January 2004,"_(This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)_ +188,Hackers and Painters,May 2003,"_(This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)_ When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge. @@ -15710,7 +15710,7 @@ Painting was not, in Leonardo's time, as cool as his work helped make it. How co [Knuth: Computer Programming as an Art](knuth.html) You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." -189,A Unified Theory of VC Suckage,March 2005,"_(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)_ +189,What You'll Wish You'd Known,January 2005,"_(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)_ When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us. @@ -15889,7 +15889,7 @@ It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've lear **Thanks** to Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, Rich Draves, Dan Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, Lisa Randall, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this, and to many others for talking to me about high school. [Why Nerds are Unpopular](nerds.html)" -190,Organic Startup Ideas,April 2010,"Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? _Did we actually dress like that?_ We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it. +190,What You Can't Say,January 2004,"Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? _Did we actually dress like that?_ We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it. What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. @@ -16096,7 +16096,7 @@ How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's t [A Blacklist for ""Excuse Makers""](http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2598) [What You Can't Say Will Hurt You](http://www.archub.org/stone.txt)" -191,Why Startup Hubs Work,October 2011,"A couple months ago I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested in being a ""technologist in residence"" at a new venture capital fund. I think the idea was to play Karl Rove to the VCs' George Bush. +191,A Unified Theory of VC Suckage,March 2005,"A couple months ago I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested in being a ""technologist in residence"" at a new venture capital fund. I think the idea was to play Karl Rove to the VCs' George Bush. I considered it for about four seconds. Work for a VC fund? Ick. @@ -16151,7 +16151,7 @@ Perhaps this was the sort of strategic insight I was supposed to come up with as No, we don't use Oracle. We just store the data in files. Our secret is to use an OS that doesn't lose our data. Which OS? FreeBSD. Why do you use that instead of Windows NT? Because it's better and it doesn't cost anything. What, you're using a _freeware_ OS? How many times that conversation was repeated. Then when we got to Yahoo, we found they used FreeBSD and stored their data in files too." -192,"Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998",January 2012,"The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you? +192,Organic Startup Ideas,April 2010,"The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you? There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple was the first type. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design one, so he did. And since lots of other people wanted the same thing, Apple was able to sell enough of them to get the company rolling. They still rely on this principle today, incidentally. The iPhone is the phone Steve Jobs wants. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -16184,7 +16184,7 @@ There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. \[3\] Possible exception: It's hard to compete directly with open source software. You can build things for programmers, but there has to be some part you can charge for. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this." -193,How to Start a Startup,March 2005,"If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide. +193,Why Startup Hubs Work,October 2011,"If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide. I wondered about this for years. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions: smart, ambitious people went in, but no startups came out. But I was never able to figure out exactly what happened inside the motel—exactly what was killing all the potential startups. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -16249,7 +16249,7 @@ I flew into the Bay Area a few days ago. I notice this every time I fly over the \[4\] As I was writing this, I had a demonstration of the density of startup people in the Valley. Jessica and I bicycled to University Ave in Palo Alto to have lunch at the fabulous Oren's Hummus. As we walked in, we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door. Selina Tobaccowala stopped to say hello on her way out. Then Josh Wilson came in to pick up a take out order. After lunch we went to get frozen yogurt. On the way we met Rajat Suri. When we got to the yogurt place, we found Dave Shen there, and as we walked out we ran into Yuri Sagalov. We walked with him for a block or so and we ran into Muzzammil Zaveri, and then a block later we met Aydin Senkut. This is everyday life in Palo Alto. I wasn't trying to meet people; I was just having lunch. And I'm sure for every startup founder or investor I saw that I knew, there were 5 more I didn't. If Ron Conway had been with us he would have met 30 people he knew. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." -194,Filters that Fight Back,August 2003,"A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a [snapshot of Viaweb's site](http://ycombinator.com/viaweb). I thought it might be interesting to look at one day. +194,"Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998",January 2012,"A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a [snapshot of Viaweb's site](http://ycombinator.com/viaweb). I thought it might be interesting to look at one day. The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are. Screens were a lot smaller in 1998. If I remember correctly, our frontpage used to just fit in the size window people typically used then. @@ -16280,7 +16280,7 @@ For describing pages, we had a template language called [RTML](http://ycombinato Since we did continuous releases, our software didn't actually have versions. But in those days the trade press expected versions, so we made them up. If we wanted to get lots of attention, we made the version number [an integer](http://www.ycombinator.com/viaweb/rel4.html). That ""version 4.0"" icon was generated by our own button generator, incidentally. The whole Viaweb site was made with our software, even though it wasn't an online store, because we wanted to experience what our users did. At the end of 1997, we released a general purpose shopping search engine called [Shopfind](http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/shoprel.html). It was pretty advanced for the time. It had a programmable crawler that could crawl most of the different stores online and pick out the products." -196,Bradley's Ghost,November 2004,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)_ +196,How to Start a Startup,March 2005,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)_ You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed. @@ -16569,7 +16569,7 @@ If you want to do it, do it. Starting a startup is not the great mystery it seem **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this essay, and to Steve Melendez and Gregory Price for inviting me to speak. [Domain Name Search](http://instantdomainsearch.com)" -197,What Happened to Yahoo,August 2010,"We may be able to improve the accuracy of Bayesian spam filters by having them follow links to see what's waiting at the other end. Richard Jowsey of [death2spam](http://death2spam.com) now does this in borderline cases, and reports that it works well. +197,Filters that Fight Back,August 2003,"We may be able to improve the accuracy of Bayesian spam filters by having them follow links to see what's waiting at the other end. Richard Jowsey of [death2spam](http://death2spam.com) now does this in borderline cases, and reports that it works well. Why only do it in borderline cases? And why only do it once? @@ -16612,7 +16612,7 @@ There should probably be multiple blacklists. A single point of failure would be [A Perl FFB](http://radio.weblogs.com/0111823/2003/11/16.html#a373) [Lycos DDoS@Home](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4051553.stm)" -198,Founder Control,December 2010,"When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once. +198,Mind the Gap,May 2004,"When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once. Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong. @@ -16795,7 +16795,7 @@ Another approach would be to ask, if you were going back to the year x in a time According to a 2002 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, about 1.7% of American kids attend private, non-sectarian schools. At Princeton, 36% of the class of 2007 came from such schools. (Interestingly, the number at Harvard is significantly lower, about 28%.) Obviously this is a huge loophole. It does at least seem to be closing, not widening. Perhaps the designers of admissions processes should take a lesson from the example of computer security, and instead of just assuming that their system can't be hacked, measure the degree to which it is." -199,Tablets,December 2010,"A lot of people are writing now about why Kerry lost. Here I want to examine a more specific question: why were the exit polls so wrong? +199,Bradley's Ghost,November 2004,"A lot of people are writing now about why Kerry lost. Here I want to examine a more specific question: why were the exit polls so wrong? In Ohio, which Kerry ultimately lost 49-51, exit polls gave him a 52-48 victory. And this wasn't just random error. In every swing state they overestimated the Kerry vote. In Florida, which Bush ultimately won 52-47, exit polls predicted a dead heat. @@ -16820,7 +16820,7 @@ When the values of the elite are liberal, polls will tend to underestimate the c [Support for a Woman President](http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Woman%20President.htm) If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." -200,The Future of Startup Funding,August 2010,"When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. +200,What Happened to Yahoo,August 2010,"When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company. @@ -16895,7 +16895,7 @@ Why would great programmers want to work for a company that didn't have a hacker \[2\] In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to. **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." -201,"It's Charisma, Stupid",June 2006,"Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. +201,Founder Control,December 2010,"Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. Ten years ago that was true. In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A. The traditional series A board consisted of two founders, two VCs, and one independent member. More recently the recipe is often one founder, one VC, and one independent. In either case the founders lose their majority. @@ -16920,7 +16920,7 @@ Like a lot of changes that have been forced on VCs, this change won't turn out t Knowing that founders will keep control of the board may even help VCs pick better. If they know they can't fire the founders, they'll have to choose founders they can trust. And that's who they should have been choosing all along. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, John Bautista, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Brian Chesky, Bill Clerico, Patrick Collison, Adam Goldstein, James Lindenbaum, Jessica Livingston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." -202,Great Hackers,July 2004,"I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general term seems to be ""mobile devices,"" but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't really capture what's distinctive about the iPad. +202,Tablets,December 2010,"I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general term seems to be ""mobile devices,"" but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't really capture what's distinctive about the iPad. After a few seconds it struck me that what we'll end up calling these things is tablets. The only reason we even consider calling them ""mobile devices"" is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. If the iPad had come first, we wouldn't think of the iPhone as a phone; we'd think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear. @@ -16937,7 +16937,7 @@ I worry about the power Apple could have with this force behind them. I don't wa It has turned out to be a great thing that Apple tablets have accelerometers in them. Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple could never have imagined. That's the nature of platforms. The more versatile the tool, the less you can predict how people will use it. So tablet makers should be thinking: what else can we put in there? Not merely hardware, but software too. What else can we give developers access to? Give hackers an inch and they'll take you a mile. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -203,A Version 1.0,October 2004,"Two years ago I [wrote](http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html#next) about what I called ""a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:"" the growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest large amounts, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. Increasingly, startups want a couple hundred thousand dollars, not a couple million. \[[1](#f1n)\] +203,The Future of Startup Funding,August 2010,"Two years ago I [wrote](http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html#next) about what I called ""a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:"" the growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest large amounts, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. Increasingly, startups want a couple hundred thousand dollars, not a couple million. \[[1](#f1n)\] The opportunity is a lot less unexploited now. Investors have poured into this territory from both directions. VCs are much more likely to make angel-sized investments than they were a year ago. And meanwhile the past year has seen a dramatic increase in a new type of investor: the super-angel, who operates like an angel, but using other people's money, like a VC. @@ -17076,7 +17076,7 @@ Another danger, pointed out by Mitch Kapor, is that if VCs are only doing angel \[13\] I'm not saying option pools themselves will go away. They're an administrative convenience. What will go away is investors requiring them. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, John Bautista, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jeff Clavier, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Matt Cohler, Chris Dixon, Mitch Kapor, Josh Kopelman, Pete Koomen, Carolynn Levy, Jessica Livingston, Ariel Poler, Geoff Ralston, Naval Ravikant, Dan Siroker, Harj Taggar, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." -204,How to Make Wealth,May 2004,"Occam's razor says we should prefer the simpler of two explanations. I begin by reminding readers of this principle because I'm about to propose a theory that will offend both liberals and conservatives. But Occam's razor means, in effect, that if you want to disagree with it, you have a hell of a coincidence to explain. +204,"It's Charisma, Stupid",June 2006,"Occam's razor says we should prefer the simpler of two explanations. I begin by reminding readers of this principle because I'm about to propose a theory that will offend both liberals and conservatives. But Occam's razor means, in effect, that if you want to disagree with it, you have a hell of a coincidence to explain. Theory: In US presidential elections, the more charismatic candidate wins. @@ -17133,7 +17133,7 @@ Finally, to the people who say that the theory is probably true, but rather depr [What Charisma Is](recharisma.html) [Politics and the Art of Acting](http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/miller/lecture.html)" -205,The Hundred-Year Language,April 2003,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.)_ +205,Great Hackers,July 2004,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.)_ A few months ago I finished a new [book](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596006624), and in reviews I keep noticing words like ""provocative'' and ""controversial.'' To say nothing of ""idiotic.'' @@ -17304,7 +17304,7 @@ I don't think it's publication that makes the best hackers want to work in resea [The Python Paradox](http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html) If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." -206,Post-Medium Publishing,September 2009,"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. +206,A Version 1.0,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. @@ -17415,7 +17415,7 @@ What about the other half, ferreting out the unexpected? That may require some n \[sh\] 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.""" -207,The New Funding Landscape,October 2010,"_(This essay was originally published in [Hackers & Painters](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624/104-0572701-7443937).)_ +207,How to Make Wealth,May 2004,"_(This essay was originally published in [Hackers & Painters](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624/104-0572701-7443937).)_ If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word ""startup"" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages. @@ -17694,7 +17694,7 @@ What's the connection? None at all. Which is precisely my point. If you want to \[11\] It may indeed be a sufficient condition. But if so, why didn't the Industrial Revolution happen earlier? Two possible (and not incompatible) answers: (a) It did. The Industrial Revolution was one in a series. (b) Because in medieval towns, monopolies and guild regulations initially slowed the development of new means of production. You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." -208,The Top Idea in Your Mind,July 2010,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)_ +208,The Hundred-Year Language,April 2003,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)_ It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars? @@ -17851,7 +17851,7 @@ I believe Lisp Machine Lisp was the first language to embody the principle that **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, and Dan Giffin for reading drafts of this, and to Guido van Rossum, Jeremy Hylton, and the rest of the Python crew for inviting me to speak at PyCon. You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](hackpaint.html)." -209,The Acceleration of Addictiveness,July 2010,"Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it. +209,Post-Medium Publishing,September 2009,"Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it. In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more? \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -17922,7 +17922,7 @@ Ironically, the main reason I don't like ""content"" is the thesis of this essay \[4\] Unfortunately, making physically nice books will only be a niche within a niche. Publishers are more likely to resort to expedients like selling autographed copies, or editions with the buyer's picture on the cover. **Thanks** to Michael Arrington, Trevor Blackwell, Steven Levy, Robert Morris, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." -210,What We Look for in Founders,October 2010,"After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations. +210,The New Funding Landscape,October 2010,"After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations. The trends we've been seeing are probably not YC-specific. I wish I could say they were, but the main cause is probably just that we see trends first—partly because the startups we fund are very plugged into the Valley and are quick to take advantage of anything new, and partly because we fund so many that we have enough data points to see patterns clearly. @@ -18029,7 +18029,7 @@ There were a couple predecessors. Ron Conway had angel funds starting in the 199 \[7\] Obviously signalling risk is also not a problem if you'll never need to raise more money. But startups are often mistaken about that. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, John Bautista, Patrick Collison, James Lindenbaum, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." -211,Persuade xor Discover,September 2009,"I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower. +211,The Top Idea in Your Mind,July 2010,"I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower. Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -18076,7 +18076,7 @@ I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any g \[4\] Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard, _Life of Isaac Newton_, p. 107. **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -212,Why Nerds are Unpopular,February 2003,"What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating. +212,The Acceleration of Addictiveness,July 2010,"What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating. We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -18119,7 +18119,7 @@ I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own \[5\] Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those.) **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." -213,"The Word ""Hacker""",April 2004,"_(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.)_ +213,What We Look for in Founders,October 2010,"_(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.)_ **1\. Determination** @@ -18152,7 +18152,7 @@ Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just [one founder](start Emmett Shear and Justin Kan of [Justin.tv](http://justin.tv) are a good example of close friends who work well together. They've known each other since second grade. They can practically read one another's minds. I'm sure they argue, like all founders, but I have never once sensed any unresolved tension between them. **Thanks** to Jessica Livingston and Chris Steiner for reading drafts of this." -214,What the Bubble Got Right,September 2004,"When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is to seem extra friendly. You smile and say ""pleased to meet you,"" whether you are or not. There's nothing dishonest about this. Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as everyone knows that ""Can you pass the salt?"" is only grammatically a question. +214,Persuade xor Discover,September 2009,"When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is to seem extra friendly. You smile and say ""pleased to meet you,"" whether you are or not. There's nothing dishonest about this. Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as everyone knows that ""Can you pass the salt?"" is only grammatically a question. I'm perfectly willing to smile and say ""pleased to meet you"" when meeting new people. But there is another set of customs for being ingratiating in print that are not so harmless. @@ -18201,7 +18201,7 @@ It's hard enough to overcome one's own misconceptions without having to think ab **Thanks** to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. **Note:** An earlier version of this essay began by talking about why people dislike Michael Arrington. I now believe that was mistaken, and that most people don't dislike him for the same reason I did when I first met him, but simply because he writes about controversial things." -215,,,"When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called ""retards."" +215,Why Nerds are Unpopular,February 2003,"When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called ""retards."" We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us. @@ -18396,7 +18396,7 @@ I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimisti [My War With Brian](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1561632155) [Buttons](http://armandfrasco.typepad.com/armandele/)" -216,,,"To 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. +216,"The Word ""Hacker""",April 2004,"To 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. @@ -18461,7 +18461,7 @@ Those in a position to impose rules naturally want them to be obeyed. But be car (The [image](bluebox.html) shows Steves Jobs and Wozniak with a ""blue box."" Photo by Margret Wozniak. Reproduced by permission of Steve Wozniak.) You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](hackpaint.html)." -217,,,"_(This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.)_ +217,What the Bubble Got Right,September 2004,"_(This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.)_ I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble, because I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999. One day, when the stock was trading around $200, I sat down and calculated what I thought the price should be. The answer I got was $12. I went to the next cubicle and told my friend Trevor. ""Twelve!"" he said. He tried to sound indignant, but he didn't quite manage it. He knew as well as I did that our valuation was crazy. @@ -18612,6 +18612,3 @@ Siegel, Jeremy J. ""What Is an Asset Price Bubble? An Operational Definition."" **Thanks** to Chris Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. [The Long Tail](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html)" -115,Earnestness,December 2020, -138,After the Ladder,August 2005, -195,Mind the Gap,May 2004,