diff --git "a/pg_dataset.csv" "b/pg_dataset.csv" --- "a/pg_dataset.csv" +++ "b/pg_dataset.csv" @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@ id,title,date,text -0,"Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in _Moby Dick_ was a Christ-like figure. +0,The Age of the Essay,September 2004,"Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in _Moby Dick_ was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one. @@ -155,8 +155,8 @@ The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, where it was considered **Thanks** to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. -If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](hackpaint.html).",September 2004,The Age of the Essay -1,"_(This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise [Arc](arc.html). An improved algorithm is described in [Better Bayesian Filtering](better.html).)_ +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](hackpaint.html)." +1,A Plan for Spam,August 2002,"_(This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise [Arc](arc.html). An improved algorithm is described in [Better Bayesian Filtering](better.html).)_ I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up. They have so far, at least. But they have to deliver their message, whatever it is. If we can write software that recognizes their messages, there is no way they can get around that. @@ -346,8 +346,8 @@ You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.am [LWN: Filter Comparison](http://lwn.net/Articles/9460/) -[CRM114 gets 99.87%](wsy.html)",August 2002,A Plan for Spam -2,"The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork. +[CRM114 gets 99.87%](wsy.html)" +2,The Trouble with the Segway,July 2009,"The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork. My friend Trevor Blackwell built [his own Segway](http://tlb.org/#scooter), which we called the Segwell. He also built a one-wheeled version, [the Eunicycle](http://tlb.org/#eunicycle), which looks exactly like a regular unicycle till you realize the rider isn't pedaling. He has ridden them both to downtown Mountain View to get coffee. When he rides the Eunicycle, people smile at him. But when he rides the Segwell, they shout abuse from their cars: ""Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?"" @@ -359,8 +359,8 @@ Try this thought experiment and it becomes clear: imagine something that worked So there may be a way to capture more of the market Segway hoped to reach: make a version that doesn't look so easy for the rider. It would also be helpful if the styling was in the tradition of skateboards or bicycles rather than medical devices. -Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they'd had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they'd have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I'm sure, but they didn't have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.",July 2009,The Trouble with the Segway -3,"A few months ago I read a _New York Times_ article on South Korean cram schools that said +Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they'd had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they'd have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I'm sure, but they didn't have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley." +3,After Credentials,December 2008,"A few months ago I read a _New York Times_ article on South Korean cram schools that said > Admission to the right university can make or break an ambitious young South Korean. @@ -464,8 +464,8 @@ Scribes in ancient Egypt took exams, but they were more the type of proficiency \[3\] Progressive tax rates will tend to damp this effect, however, by decreasing the difference between good and bad measurers. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and David Sloo for reading drafts of this.",December 2008,After Credentials -4,"The reason startups have been using [more convertible notes](http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22319113993) in angel rounds is that they make deals close faster. By making it easier for startups to give different prices to different investors, they help them break the sort of deadlock that happens when investors all wait to see who else is going to invest. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and David Sloo for reading drafts of this." +4,High Resolution Fundraising,September 2010,"The reason startups have been using [more convertible notes](http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22319113993) in angel rounds is that they make deals close faster. By making it easier for startups to give different prices to different investors, they help them break the sort of deadlock that happens when investors all wait to see who else is going to invest. By far the biggest influence on investors' opinions of a startup is the opinion of other investors. There are very, very few who simply decide for themselves. Any startup founder can tell you the most common question they hear from investors is not about the founders or the product, but ""who else is investing?"" @@ -487,8 +487,8 @@ Fixed-size, multi-investor angel rounds are such a bad idea for startups that on The most interesting question here may be what high res fundraising will do to the world of investors. Bolder investors will now get rewarded with lower prices. But more important, in a hits-driven business, is that they'll be able to get into the deals they want. Whereas the ""who else is investing?"" type of investors will not only pay higher prices, but may not be able to get into the best deals at all. -**Thanks** to Immad Akhund, Sam Altman, John Bautista, Pete Koomen, Jessica Livingston, Dan Siroker, Harj Taggar, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",September 2010,High Resolution Fundraising -5,"Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's different from other places. +**Thanks** to Immad Akhund, Sam Altman, John Bautista, Pete Koomen, Jessica Livingston, Dan Siroker, Harj Taggar, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +5,Where to See Silicon Valley,October 2010,"Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's different from other places. **1\. [Stanford University](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=stanford+university)** @@ -538,8 +538,8 @@ Silicon Valley has two highways running the length of it: 101, which is pretty u I skipped the [Computer History Museum](http://www.computerhistory.org/) because this is a list of where to see the Valley itself, not where to see artifacts from it. I also skipped San Jose. San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley, but when people in the Valley use the phrase ""the city,"" they mean San Francisco. San Jose is a dotted line on a map. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.",October 2010,Where to See Silicon Valley -6,"I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this." +6,Keep Your Identity Small,February 2009,"I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums? @@ -571,8 +571,8 @@ Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step be Considering yourself a scientist is equivalent to putting a sign in a cupboard saying ""this cupboard must be kept empty."" Yes, strictly speaking, you're putting something in the cupboard, but not in the ordinary sense. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",February 2009,Keep Your Identity Small -7,"Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects. Though she'd heard a lot about YC since the beginning, the last 9 months have been a total immersion. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +7,What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley,August 2009,"Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects. Though she'd heard a lot about YC since the beginning, the last 9 months have been a total immersion. I've been around the startup world for so long that it seems normal to me, so I was curious to hear what had surprised her most about it. This was her list: @@ -622,8 +622,8 @@ Architects are constantly interacting face to face with other people, whereas do By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the ""normal"" world. It's populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy. -That's also a fairly accurate description of the past. So startup culture may not merely be different in the way you'd expect any subculture to be, but a leading indicator.",August 2009,What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley -8,"""We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."" +That's also a fairly accurate description of the past. So startup culture may not merely be different in the way you'd expect any subculture to be, but a leading indicator." +8,Revenge of the Nerds,May 2002,"""We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."" \- Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec @@ -840,8 +840,8 @@ Some of the mail on LL1 led me to try to go deeper into the subject of language A larger set of canonical implementations of the [accumulator generator benchmark](accgen.html) are collected together on their own page. -You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624).",May 2002,Revenge of the Nerds -9,"In a recent [talk](gh.html) I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project. +You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +9,The Python Paradox,August 2004,"In a recent [talk](gh.html) I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project. I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know. @@ -855,8 +855,8 @@ At the mention of ugly source code, people will of course think of Perl. But the So far, anyway. Both languages are of course [moving](hundred.html) targets. But they share, along with Ruby (and Icon, and Joy, and J, and Lisp, and Smalltalk) the fact that they're created by, and used by, people who really care about programming. And those tend to be the ones who do it well. -If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624).",August 2004,The Python Paradox -10,"_(This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting of NEPLS.)_ +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +10,Design and Research,January 2003,"_(This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting of NEPLS.)_ Visitors to this country are often surprised to find that Americans like to begin a conversation by asking ""what do you do?"" I've never liked this question. I've rarely had a neat answer to it. But I think I have finally solved the problem. Now, when someone asks me what I do, I look them straight in the eye and say ""I'm designing a [new dialect of Lisp](arc.html)."" I recommend this answer to anyone who doesn't like being asked what they do. The conversation will turn immediately to other topics. @@ -936,8 +936,8 @@ I'm inclined to think there isn't-- that good design requires a dictator. One re **Related:** -[Taste for Makers](http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html)",January 2003,Design and Research -11,"Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned so much from working on it. +[Taste for Makers](http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html)" +11,What I've Learned from Hacker News,February 2009,"Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned so much from working on it. **Growth** @@ -1047,8 +1047,8 @@ You may not have to kill bad comments to solve the problem. Comments at the bott \[7\] What makes most suburbs so demoralizing is that there's no center to walk to. -**Thanks** to Justin Kan, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Alexis Ohanian, Emmet Shear, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",February 2009,What I've Learned from Hacker News -12,"I bet you the current issue of _Cosmopolitan_ has an article whose title begins with a number. ""7 Things He Won't Tell You about Sex,"" or something like that. Some popular magazines feature articles of this type on the cover of every issue. That can't be happening by accident. Editors must know they attract readers. +**Thanks** to Justin Kan, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Alexis Ohanian, Emmet Shear, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +12,The List of N Things,September 2009,"I bet you the current issue of _Cosmopolitan_ has an article whose title begins with a number. ""7 Things He Won't Tell You about Sex,"" or something like that. Some popular magazines feature articles of this type on the cover of every issue. That can't be happening by accident. Editors must know they attract readers. Why do readers like the list of n things so much? Mainly because it's easier to read than a regular article. \[[1](#f1n)\] Structurally, the list of n things is a degenerate case of essay. An essay can go anywhere the writer wants. In a list of n things the writer agrees to constrain himself to a collection of points of roughly equal importance, and he tells the reader explicitly what they are. @@ -1086,8 +1086,8 @@ Another advantage of admitting to beginning writers that the 5 paragraph essay i \[1\] Articles of this type are also startlingly popular on Delicious, but I think that's because [delicious/popular](http://delicious.com/popular) is driven by bookmarking, not because Delicious users are stupid. Delicious users are collectors, and a list of n things seems particularly collectible because it's a collection itself. -\[2\] Most ""word problems"" in school math textbooks are similarly misleading. They look superficially like the application of math to real problems, but they're not. So if anything they reinforce the impression that math is merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be memorized.",September 2009,The List of N Things -13,"Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. +\[2\] Most ""word problems"" in school math textbooks are similarly misleading. They look superficially like the application of math to real problems, but they're not. So if anything they reinforce the impression that math is merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be memorized." +13,The Anatomy of Determination,September 2009,"Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination. At first we thought it might be intelligence. Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups succeed. It makes a better story that a company won because its founders were so smart. The PR people and reporters who spread such stories probably believe them themselves. But while it certainly helps to be smart, it's not the deciding factor. There are plenty of people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing. @@ -1147,8 +1147,8 @@ Conversely, it's probably a mistake to do as some European countries have done a \[3\] For example, willfulness clearly has two subcomponents, stubbornness and energy. The first alone yields someone who's stubbornly inert. The second alone yields someone flighty. As willful people get older or otherwise lose their energy, they tend to become merely stubborn. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",September 2009,The Anatomy of Determination -14,"One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be? +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +14,Startups in 13 Sentences,February 2009,"One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be? When I made the list there turned out to be 13: @@ -1218,8 +1218,8 @@ Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That's the \[3\] Joe thinks one of the founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, but he doesn't remember which. -\[4\] They'd be interchangeable if markets stood still. Since they don't, working twice as fast is better than having twice as much time.",February 2009,Startups in 13 Sentences -15,"_(This article was given as a talk at the 2003 Spam Conference. It describes the work I've done to improve the performance of the algorithm described in [A Plan for Spam](spam.html), and what I plan to do in the future.)_ +\[4\] They'd be interchangeable if markets stood still. Since they don't, working twice as fast is better than having twice as much time." +15,Better Bayesian Filtering,January 2003,"_(This article was given as a talk at the 2003 Spam Conference. It describes the work I've done to improve the performance of the algorithm described in [A Plan for Spam](spam.html), and what I plan to do in the future.)_ The first discovery I'd like to present here is an algorithm for lazy evaluation of research papers. Just write whatever you want and don't cite any previous work, and indignant readers will send you references to all the papers you should have cited. I discovered this algorithm after \`\`A Plan for Spam'' \[1\] was on Slashdot. @@ -1436,8 +1436,8 @@ Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been the losing side in debates abo [2003 Spam Conference Proceedings](http://spamconference.org/proceedings2003.html) -[Test of These Suggestions](http://www.bgl.nu/bogofilter/graham.html)",January 2003,Better Bayesian Filtering -16,"""The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid."" +[Test of These Suggestions](http://www.bgl.nu/bogofilter/graham.html)" +16,Succinctness is Power,May 2002,"""The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid."" \- Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture @@ -1571,8 +1571,8 @@ One reason it's hard to imagine a language being too succinct is that if there w [J](http://www.jsoftware.com/books/help/primer/contents.htm) -[K](http://www.cosy.com/language/k-lang.htm)",May 2002,Succinctness is Power -17,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at [AngelConf](http://angelconf.org).)_ +[K](http://www.cosy.com/language/k-lang.htm)" +17,How to Be an Angel Investor,March 2009,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at [AngelConf](http://angelconf.org).)_ When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. Seven years later I still hadn't started. I put it off because it seemed mysterious and complicated. It turns out to be easier than I expected, and also more interesting. @@ -1706,8 +1706,8 @@ I'm not saying you should always absolutely refuse to give up your anti-dilution If you like a startup enough to invest in it, then invest in it. Just use the standard [series AA](http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html) terms and write them a check. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",March 2009,How to Be an Angel Investor -18,"One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +18,"Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule",July 2009,"One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour. @@ -1747,8 +1747,8 @@ Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have t [How to Do What You Love](love.html) -[Good and Bad Procrastination](procrastination.html)",July 2009,"Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" -19,"Now that the term ""ramen profitable"" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails. +[Good and Bad Procrastination](procrastination.html)" +19,Ramen Profitable,July 2009,"Now that the term ""ramen profitable"" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails. Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. This is a different form of profitability than startups have traditionally aimed for. Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it buys you time. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -1826,8 +1826,8 @@ Investors are one of the biggest sources of pain for founders; if they stopped c \[3\] It's conceivable that a startup could grow big by transforming consulting into a form that would scale. But if they did that they'd really be a product company. -**Thanks** to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.",July 2009,Ramen Profitable -20,"A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. +**Thanks** to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this." +20,Relentlessly Resourceful,March 2009,"A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not hapless. Hapless implies passivity. To be hapless is to be battered by circumstances—to let the world have its way with you, instead of having your way with the world. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -1865,8 +1865,8 @@ When I was living in Italy, I was once trying to tell someone that I hadn't had \[3\] I'd almost say to most people, but I realize (a) I have no idea what most people are like, and (b) I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to change. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.",March 2009,Relentlessly Resourceful -21,"Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. The surprising thing is how many, and how well, languages can be described this way. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this." +21,What Languages Fix,,"Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. The surprising thing is how many, and how well, languages can be described this way. **Algol:** Assembly language is too low-level. @@ -1916,8 +1916,8 @@ When I was living in Italy, I was once trying to tell someone that I hadn't had **Ruby:** Perl is a kludge, and Lisp syntax is scary. -**Prolog:** Programming is not enough like logic.",,What Languages Fix -22,"There is a kind of mania for object-oriented programming at the moment, but some of the [smartest programmers](reesoo.html) I know are some of the least excited about it. +**Prolog:** Programming is not enough like logic." +22,Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented,,"There is a kind of mania for object-oriented programming at the moment, but some of the [smartest programmers](reesoo.html) I know are some of the least excited about it. My own feeling is that object-oriented programming is a useful technique in some cases, but it isn't something that has to pervade every program you write. You should be able to define new types, but you shouldn't have to express every program as the definition of new types. @@ -1937,8 +1937,8 @@ I personally have never needed object-oriented abstractions. Common Lisp has an Maybe I'm just stupid, or have worked on some limited subset of applications. There is a danger in designing a language based on one's own experience of programming. But it seems more dangerous to put stuff in that you've never needed because it's thought to be a good idea. -[Rees Re: OO](reesoo.html)",,Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented -23,"_(Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.)_ +[Rees Re: OO](reesoo.html)" +23,Undergraduation,March 2005,"_(Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.)_ Recently I've had several emails from computer science undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was one. I was certainly a hacker, at least. @@ -2080,8 +2080,8 @@ Which implies a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal [Joel Spolsky: Advice for Computer Science College Students](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html) -[Eric Raymond: How to Become a Hacker](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html)",March 2005,Undergraduation -24,"A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying. +[Eric Raymond: How to Become a Hacker](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html)" +24,A Word to the Resourceful,January 2012,"A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying. This caught my attention because earlier we'd noticed a pattern among the most successful startups, and it seemed to hinge on a different quality. We found the startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we'd say ""they can take care of themselves."" The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll close it, whatever type of lead it is. When they're raising money, for example, you can do the initial intros knowing that if you wanted to you could stop thinking about it at that point. You won't have to babysit the round to make sure it happens. That type of founder is going to come back with the money; the only question is how much on what terms. @@ -2105,8 +2105,8 @@ My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've already With the good groups, you can tell that everything you say is being looked at with fresh eyes and even if it's dismissed, it's because of some logical reason e.g. ""we already tried that"" or ""from speaking to our users that isn't what they'd like,"" etc. Those groups never have that glazed over look. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.",January 2012,A Word to the Resourceful -25,"Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this." +25,A Local Revolution?,April 2009,"Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined. The first is that startups may represent a [new economic phase](highres.html), on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I'm not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it's true. People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups—imagine how much less Larry and Sergey would have achieved if they'd gone to work for a big company—and that scale of improvement can change social customs. @@ -2148,8 +2148,8 @@ Incidentally, Google may appear to be an instance of a type II startup, but it w \[3\] The biggest counterexample here is Skype. If you're doing something that would get shut down in the US, it becomes an advantage to be located elsewhere. That's why Kazaa took the place of Napster. And the expertise and connections the founders gained from running Kazaa helped ensure the success of Skype. -**Thanks** to Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",April 2009,A Local Revolution? -26,"About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word ""convergence"" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call ""TV shows,"" but they'll watch them mostly on computers. +**Thanks** to Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +26,Why TV Lost,March 2009,"About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word ""convergence"" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call ""TV shows,"" but they'll watch them mostly on computers. What decided the contest for computers? Four forces, three of which one could have predicted, and one that would have been harder to. @@ -2203,8 +2203,8 @@ Shows will change even more. On the Internet there's no reason to keep their cur \[4\] Emmett Shear writes: ""I'd argue the long tail for sports may be even larger than the long tail for other kinds of content. Anyone can broadcast a high school football game that will be interesting to 10,000 people or so, even if the quality of production is not so good."" -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Nancy Cook, Michael Seibel, Emmett Shear, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",March 2009,Why TV Lost -27,"A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask ""How could we make something like that happen here?"" The [organic](siliconvalley.html) way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live. That's how Silicon Valley happened. But could you shortcut the process by funding startups? +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Nancy Cook, Michael Seibel, Emmett Shear, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +27,Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.,February 2009,"A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask ""How could we make something like that happen here?"" The [organic](siliconvalley.html) way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live. That's how Silicon Valley happened. But could you shortcut the process by funding startups? Possibly. Let's consider what it would take. @@ -2286,13 +2286,13 @@ I realize the chance of any city having the political will to carry out this pla \[4\] Thanks to Michael Keenan for pointing this out. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",February 2009,Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. -28,"[Om Malik](http://gigaom.com/2009/04/03/google-may-buy-twitter-or-not-but-why-is-twitter-so-hot/) is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +28,Why Twitter is a Big Deal,April 2009,"[Om Malik](http://gigaom.com/2009/04/03/google-may-buy-twitter-or-not-but-why-is-twitter-so-hot/) is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal. The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer. -Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.",April 2009,Why Twitter is a Big Deal -29,"There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call _schlep blindness_. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task. +Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread." +29,Schlep Blindness,January 2012,"There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call _schlep blindness_. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task. No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it. @@ -2316,13 +2316,13 @@ Ignorance can't solve everything though. Some ideas so obviously entail alarming It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's plenty still broken in the world, if you know how to see it. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Emmett Shear, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.",January 2012,Schlep Blindness -30,"_(In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.)_ +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Emmett Shear, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +30,"Writing, Briefly",March 2005,"_(In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.)_ I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated. -As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don't (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don't try to sound impressive; don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don't feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.",March 2005,"Writing, Briefly" -31,"""...Copernicus' aesthetic objections to \[equants\] provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...."" +As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don't (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don't try to sound impressive; don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don't feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it." +31,Taste for Makers,February 2002,"""...Copernicus' aesthetic objections to \[equants\] provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...."" \- Thomas Kuhn, _The Copernican Revolution_ @@ -2498,8 +2498,8 @@ _ [Interview: Milton Glaser](http://www.believermag.com/issues/200309/?read=interview_glaser) -You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624).",February 2002,Taste for Makers -32,"There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly. If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant to say ""That will never work."" +You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +32,Crazy New Ideas,May 2021,"There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly. If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant to say ""That will never work."" Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world. @@ -2547,8 +2547,8 @@ If you're nice, as well as wise, you won't merely resist attacking such people, \[5\] Hall, Rupert. _From Galileo to Newton._ Collins, 1963. This book is particularly good at getting into contemporaries' heads. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",May 2021,Crazy New Ideas -33,"When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from [poor to rich](wealth.html), I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +33,How to Lose Time and Money,July 2010,"When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from [poor to rich](wealth.html), I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were. So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. @@ -2564,8 +2564,8 @@ And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they're not even fun. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",July 2010,How to Lose Time and Money -34,"I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +34,Stuff,July 2007,"I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars. It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't have closets. In those days people's stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I'm surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they'd be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews' rooms the bed is the only clear space. @@ -2607,8 +2607,8 @@ I'm not claiming this is because I've achieved some kind of zenlike detachment f In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they're indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little. We've now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden. -The good news is, if you're carrying a burden without knowing it, your life could be better than you realize. Imagine walking around for years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them removed.",July 2007,Stuff -35,"One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded. +The good news is, if you're carrying a burden without knowing it, your life could be better than you realize. Imagine walking around for years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them removed." +35,The Four Quadrants of Conformism,July 2020,"One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded. I think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the beliefs prevalent in their society. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -2674,8 +2674,8 @@ But I'm hopeful long term. The independent-minded are good at protecting themsel \[5\] Many professors are independent-minded � especially in math, the hard sciences, and engineering, where you have to be to succeed. But students are more representative of the general population, and thus mostly conventional-minded. So when professors and students are in conflict, it's not just a conflict between generations but also between different types of people. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Nicholas Christakis, Patrick Collison, Sam Gichuru, Jessica Livingston, Patrick McKenzie, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.",July 2020,The Four Quadrants of Conformism -36,"I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Nicholas Christakis, Patrick Collison, Sam Gichuru, Jessica Livingston, Patrick McKenzie, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +36,The Island Test,July 2006,"I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might. What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to. For example, if you find yourself packing a bottle of vodka (just in case), you may want to stop and think about that. @@ -2701,8 +2701,8 @@ I realize this dependence on books is not entirely good—that what I need them There is a point where I'll do without books. I was walking in some steep mountains once, and decided I'd rather just think, if I was bored, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce. It wasn't so bad. I found I could entertain myself by having ideas instead of reading other people's. If you stop eating jam, fruit starts to taste better. -So maybe I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. They're going to have to pry the plugs out of my cold, dead ears, however.",July 2006,The Island Test -37,"Umair Haque [wrote](http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/04/i_agree_and_i.html) recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world. +So maybe I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. They're going to have to pry the plugs out of my cold, dead ears, however." +37,Why There Aren't More Googles,April 2008,"Umair Haque [wrote](http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/04/i_agree_and_i.html) recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world. > Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time—didn't sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo's or MSN's search box. > @@ -2760,8 +2760,8 @@ But there is a big opportunity here, and one way or the other it's going to get \[1\] Another tip: If you want to get all that value, don't destroy the startup after you buy it. Give the founders enough autonomy that they can grow the acquisition into what it would have become. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",April 2008,Why There Aren't More Googles -38,"Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +38,The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius,November 2019,"Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic. To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group of people, and I'm going to choose bus ticket collectors. There are people who collect old bus tickets. Like many collectors, they have an obsessive interest in the minutiae of what they collect. They can keep track of distinctions between different types of bus tickets that would be hard for the rest of us to remember. Because we don't care enough. What's the point of spending so much time thinking about old bus tickets? @@ -2861,8 +2861,8 @@ Newton tripped over this distinction when he chose to work on theology. His beli \[8\] How much of people's propensity to become interested in a topic is inborn? My experience so far suggests the answer is: most of it. Different kids get interested in different things, and it's hard to make a child interested in something they wouldn't otherwise be. Not in a way that sticks. The most you can do on behalf of a topic is to make sure it gets a fair showing � to make it clear to them, for example, that there's more to math than the dull drills they do in school. After that it's up to the child. -**Thanks** to Marc Andreessen, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Kevin Lacker, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Lisa Randall, Zak Stone, and [my 7 year old](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1196537802621669376) for reading drafts of this.",November 2019,The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius -39,"One of the most valuable exercises you can try if you want to understand startups is to look at the most successful companies and explain why they were not as lame as they seemed when they first launched. Because they practically all seemed lame at first. Not just small, lame. Not just the first step up a big mountain. More like the first step into a swamp. +**Thanks** to Marc Andreessen, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Kevin Lacker, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Lisa Randall, Zak Stone, and [my 7 year old](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1196537802621669376) for reading drafts of this." +39,What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?,February 2015,"One of the most valuable exercises you can try if you want to understand startups is to look at the most successful companies and explain why they were not as lame as they seemed when they first launched. Because they practically all seemed lame at first. Not just small, lame. Not just the first step up a big mountain. More like the first step into a swamp. A Basic interpreter for the Altair? How could that ever grow into a giant company? People sleeping on airbeds in strangers' apartments? A web site for college students to stalk one another? A wimpy little single-board computer for hobbyists that used a TV as a monitor? A new search engine, when there were already about 10, and they were all trying to de-emphasize search? These ideas didn't just seem small. They seemed wrong. They were the kind of ideas you could not merely ignore, but ridicule. @@ -2872,8 +2872,8 @@ Most people's first impulse when they hear about a lame-sounding new startup ide When I encounter a startup with a lame-sounding idea, I ask ""What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?"" Now it's a puzzle, and the burden is on me to solve it. Sometimes I can't think of an answer, especially when the idea is a made-up one. But it's remarkable how often there does turn out to be an answer. Often it's one the founders themselves hadn't seen yet. -Intriguingly, there are sometimes multiple answers. I talked to a startup a few days ago that could grow into 3 distinct Microsofts. They'd probably vary in size by orders of magnitude. But you can never predict how big a Microsoft is going to be, so in cases like that I encourage founders to follow whichever path is most immediately exciting to them. Their instincts got them this far. Why stop now?",February 2015,What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? -40,"No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it. +Intriguingly, there are sometimes multiple answers. I talked to a startup a few days ago that could grow into 3 distinct Microsofts. They'd probably vary in size by orders of magnitude. But you can never predict how big a Microsoft is going to be, so in cases like that I encourage founders to follow whichever path is most immediately exciting to them. Their instincts got them this far. Why stop now?" +40,The Ronco Principle,January 2015,"No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it. And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word. Ronco is good. I know of zero instances in which he has behaved badly. It's hard even to imagine. @@ -2905,8 +2905,8 @@ Fortunately that future is not limited to the startup world. The startup world i \[2\] Y Combinator in particular, because it aggregates data from so many startups, has a pretty comprehensive view of investor behavior. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.",January 2015,The Ronco Principle -41,"There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this." +41,Some Heroes,April 2008,"There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes. I'm not claiming this is a list of the _n_ most admirable people. Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to? @@ -3018,8 +3018,8 @@ To do really great things, you have to seek out questions people didn't even rea You only get one life. Why not do something huge? The phrase ""paradigm shift"" is overused now, but Kuhn was onto something. And you know more are out there, separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity. If we work like Newton. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for reading drafts of this.",April 2008,Some Heroes -42,"The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve. That territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for reading drafts of this." +42,General and Surprising,September 2017,"The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve. That territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable. Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: either surprising without being general (e.g. gossip), or general without being surprising (e.g. platitudes). @@ -3033,8 +3033,8 @@ And of course, ideas beget ideas. (That sounds [familiar](ecw.html).) An idea wi It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun. There are some domains where there's almost nothing new. But there's a big difference between nothing and almost nothing, when it's multiplied by the area under the sun. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.",September 2017,General and Surprising -43,"When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. But since their size made them perfect for use in high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number three. And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this." +43,Copy What You Like,July 2006,"When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. But since their size made them perfect for use in high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number three. And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep. For most of college I was a philosophy major. I was very impressed by the papers published in philosophy journals. They were so beautifully typeset, and their tone was just captivating—alternately casual and buffer-overflowingly technical. A fellow would be walking along a street and suddenly modality qua modality would spring upon him. I didn't ever quite understand these papers, but I figured I'd get around to that later, when I had time to reread them more closely. In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them. This was, I can now see, a doomed undertaking, because they weren't really saying anything. No philosopher ever refuted another, for example, because no one said anything definite enough to refute. Needless to say, my imitations didn't say anything either. @@ -3050,8 +3050,8 @@ Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to be It was painting, incidentally, that cured me of copying the wrong things. Halfway through grad school I decided I wanted to try being a painter, and the art world was so manifestly corrupt that it snapped the leash of credulity. These people made philosophy professors seem as scrupulous as mathematicians. It was so clearly a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced to see the distinction. It's there to some degree in almost every field, but I had till then managed to avoid facing it. -That was one of the most valuable things I learned from painting: you have to figure out for yourself what's [good](taste.html). You can't trust authorities. They'll lie to you on this one.",July 2006,Copy What You Like -44,"A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will. +That was one of the most valuable things I learned from painting: you have to figure out for yourself what's [good](taste.html). You can't trust authorities. They'll lie to you on this one." +44,Holding a Program in One's Head,August 2007,"A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will. That's particularly valuable at the start of a project, because initially the most important thing is to be able to change what you're doing. Not just to solve the problem in a different way, but to change the problem you're solving. @@ -3103,8 +3103,8 @@ Good programmers manage to get a lot done anyway. But often it requires practica Whether or not understanding this can help large organizations, it can certainly help their competitors. The weakest point in big companies is that they don't let individual programmers do great work. So if you're a little startup, this is the place to attack them. Take on the kind of problems that have to be solved in one big brain. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this.",August 2007,Holding a Program in One's Head -45,"Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income and capital gains taxes. Let's try modeling the effects of various levels of wealth tax to see what they would mean in practice for a startup founder. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this." +45,Modeling a Wealth Tax,August 2020,"Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income and capital gains taxes. Let's try modeling the effects of various levels of wealth tax to see what they would mean in practice for a startup founder. Suppose you start a successful startup in your twenties, and then live for another 60 years. How much of your stock will a wealth tax consume? @@ -3188,13 +3188,13 @@ The reason wealth taxes have such dramatic effects is that they're applied over **Note** -\[1\] In practice, eventually some of this 8% would come in the form of dividends, which are taxed as income at issue, so this model actually represents the most optimistic case for the founder.",August 2020,Modeling a Wealth Tax -46,"_([Someone](https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222428727586816) fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. This is what I would have said.)_ +\[1\] In practice, eventually some of this 8% would come in the form of dividends, which are taxed as income at issue, so this model actually represents the most optimistic case for the founder." +46,How to Get New Ideas,January 2023,"_([Someone](https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222428727586816) fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. This is what I would have said.)_ The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge. -Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.",January 2023,How to Get New Ideas -47,"[Noora Health](https://www.noorahealth.org/), a nonprofit I've supported for years, just launched a new NFT. It has a dramatic name, [Save Thousands of Lives](http://bit.ly/NooraNFT), because that's what the proceeds will do. +Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds." +47,An NFT That Saves Lives,May 2021,"[Noora Health](https://www.noorahealth.org/), a nonprofit I've supported for years, just launched a new NFT. It has a dramatic name, [Save Thousands of Lives](http://bit.ly/NooraNFT), because that's what the proceeds will do. Noora has been saving lives for 7 years. They run programs in hospitals in South Asia to teach new mothers how to take care of their babies once they get home. They're in 165 hospitals now. And because they know the numbers before and after they start at a new hospital, they can measure the impact they have. It is massive. For every 1000 live births, they save 9 babies. @@ -3206,8 +3206,8 @@ For this NFT, they're going to issue a public report tracking how this specific NFTs are a new territory, and this way of using them is especially new, but I'm excited about its potential. And I'm excited to see what happens with this particular auction, because unlike an NFT representing something that has already happened, this NFT gets better as the price gets higher. -The reserve price was about $2.5 million, because that's what it takes for the name to be accurate: that's what it costs to save 2000 lives. But the higher the price of this NFT goes, the more lives will be saved. What a sentence to be able to write.",May 2021,An NFT That Saves Lives -48,"Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No. +The reserve price was about $2.5 million, because that's what it takes for the name to be accurate: that's what it costs to save 2000 lives. But the higher the price of this NFT goes, the more lives will be saved. What a sentence to be able to write." +48,Having Kids,December 2019,"Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No. If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since I was a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that, to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind. Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids, the kids seemed to be terrors, and the parents pathetic harried creatures, even when they prevailed. @@ -3261,8 +3261,8 @@ People's experiences as parents vary a lot, and I know I've been lucky. But I th \[1\] Adults are sophisticated enough to see 2 year olds for the fascinatingly complex characters they are, whereas to most 6 year olds, 2 year olds are just defective 6 year olds. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",December 2019,Having Kids -49,"Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary social situations they are — as quiet and diffident as the star quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics symposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water. But the apparent diffidence of nerds is an illusion due to the fact that when non-nerds observe them, it's usually in ordinary social situations. In fact some nerds are quite fierce. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +49,Fierce Nerds,May 2021,"Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary social situations they are — as quiet and diffident as the star quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics symposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water. But the apparent diffidence of nerds is an illusion due to the fact that when non-nerds observe them, it's usually in ordinary social situations. In fact some nerds are quite fierce. The fierce nerds are a small but interesting group. They are as a rule extremely competitive — more competitive, I'd say, than highly competitive non-nerds. Competition is more personal for them. Partly perhaps because they're not emotionally mature enough to distance themselves from it, but also because there's less randomness in the kinds of competition they engage in, and they are thus more justified in taking the results personally. @@ -3300,8 +3300,8 @@ If you do choose the ambitious route, you'll have a tailwind behind you. There h So the worst-case scenario is someone who's both naturally bitter and extremely ambitious, and yet only moderately successful. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Steve Blank, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Amjad Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",May 2021,Fierce Nerds -50,"In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They're already stuck with a seller's market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven't invested. This by itself is not the end of the world. In fact, it's just a more extreme version of the [norm](http://www.archub.org/dilbertvc.gif) in the VC business: too much money chasing too few deals. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Steve Blank, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Amjad Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +50,The Venture Capital Squeeze,November 2005,"In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They're already stuck with a seller's market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven't invested. This by itself is not the end of the world. In fact, it's just a more extreme version of the [norm](http://www.archub.org/dilbertvc.gif) in the VC business: too much money chasing too few deals. Unfortunately, those few deals now want less and less money, because it's getting so cheap to start a startup. The four causes: open source, which makes software free; Moore's law, which makes hardware geometrically closer to free; the Web, which makes promotion free if you're good; and better languages, which make development a lot cheaper. @@ -3355,8 +3355,8 @@ If VCs are frightened at the idea of letting founders partially cash out, let me **Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, 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).",November 2005,The Venture Capital Squeeze -51,"_(This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.)_ +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +51,The Power of the Marginal,June 2006,"_(This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.)_ A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. @@ -3564,8 +3564,8 @@ So that, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Be inappropriate. \[6\] Without the prospect of publication, the closest most people come to writing essays is to write in a journal. I find I never get as deeply into subjects as I do in proper essays. As the name implies, you don't go back and rewrite journal entries over and over for two weeks. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Olin Shivers, and Chris Small for reading drafts of this, and to Chris Small and Chad Fowler for inviting me to speak.",June 2006,The Power of the Marginal -52,"An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You're about to hire your first employee. How much stock should you give him? +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Olin Shivers, and Chris Small for reading drafts of this, and to Chris Small and Chad Fowler for inviting me to speak." +52,The Equity Equation,July 2007,"An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You're about to hire your first employee. How much stock should you give him? These are some of the hardest questions founders face. And yet both have the same answer: @@ -3611,8 +3611,8 @@ And more generally, when you make any decision involving equity, run it through \[2\] The obvious choice for your present valuation is the post-money valuation of your last funding round. This probably undervalues the company, though, because (a) unless your last round just happened, the company is presumably worth more, and (b) the valuation of an early funding round usually reflects some other contribution by the investors. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Hutch Fishman, David Hornik, Paul Kedrosky, Jessica Livingston, Gary Sabot, and Joshua Schachter for reading drafts of this.",July 2007,The Equity Equation -53,"Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet or not. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Hutch Fishman, David Hornik, Paul Kedrosky, Jessica Livingston, Gary Sabot, and Joshua Schachter for reading drafts of this." +53,Don't Talk to Corp Dev,January 2015,"Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet or not. It's usually a mistake to talk to corp dev unless (a) you want to sell your company right now and (b) you're sufficiently likely to get an offer at an acceptable price. In practice that means startups should only talk to corp dev when they're either doing really well or really badly. If you're doing really badly, meaning the company is about to die, you may as well talk to them, because you have nothing to lose. And if you're doing really well, you can safely talk to them, because you both know the price will have to be high, and if they show the slightest sign of wasting your time, you'll be confident enough to tell them to get lost. @@ -3660,15 +3660,15 @@ If you do want to sell, there's another set of [techniques](https://justinkan.co \[3\] To be fair, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev people are magnified by the fact that they function as the face of a large organization that often doesn't know its own mind. Acquirers can be surprisingly indecisive about acquisitions, and their flakiness is indistinguishable from dishonesty by the time it filters down to you. -**Thanks** to Marc Andreessen, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this.",January 2015,Don't Talk to Corp Dev -54,"Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don't seem risky either. +**Thanks** to Marc Andreessen, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this." +54,The Risk of Discovery,January 2017,"Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don't seem risky either. Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology. The impression we get is that his unerring judgment led him straight to truths no one else had noticed. How to explain all the time he spent on alchemy and theology? Well, smart people are often kind of crazy. But maybe there is a simpler explanation. Maybe the smartness and the craziness were not as separate as we think. Physics seems to us a promising thing to work on, and alchemy and theology obvious wastes of time. But that's because we know how things turned out. In Newton's day the three problems seemed roughly equally promising. No one knew yet what the payoff would be for inventing what we now call physics; if they had, more people would have been working on it. And alchemy and theology were still then in the category Marc Andreessen would describe as ""huge, if true."" -Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But they were all risky.",January 2017,The Risk of Discovery -55,"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. +Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But they were all risky." +55,How to Get Startup Ideas,November 2012,"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way. @@ -3904,8 +3904,8 @@ I have no idea whether this would work. \[17\] And the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak started out by solving his own problems. He, like most of his peers, couldn't afford a monitor. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Mike Arrington, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Garry Tan, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this, and Marc Andreessen, Joe Gebbia, Reid Hoffman, Shel Kaphan, Mike Moritz and Kevin Systrom for answering my questions about startup history.",November 2012,How to Get Startup Ideas -56,"_(This talk was written for an audience of investors.)_ +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Mike Arrington, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Garry Tan, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this, and Marc Andreessen, Joe Gebbia, Reid Hoffman, Shel Kaphan, Mike Moritz and Kevin Systrom for answering my questions about startup history." +56,Startup Investing Trends,June 2013,"_(This talk was written for an audience of investors.)_ Y Combinator has now funded 564 startups including the current batch, which has 53. The total valuation of the 287 that have valuations (either by raising an equity round, getting acquired, or dying) is about $11.7 billion, and the 511 prior to the current batch have collectively raised about $1.7 billion. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -3997,11 +3997,11 @@ Geoff Ralston reports that in Silicon Valley it seemed thinkable to start a star \[7\] If idea clashes got bad enough, it could change what it means to be a startup. We currently advise startups mostly to ignore competitors. We tell them startups are competitive like running, not like soccer; you don't have to go and steal the ball away from the other team. But if idea clashes became common enough, maybe you'd start to have to. That would be unfortunate. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Dalton Caldwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Andrew Mason, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.",June 2013,Startup Investing Trends -57,"People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked. Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have the charisma to disarm. That was Hillary Clinton's problem. It also tends to be a problem for any CEO who is more of a builder than a schmoozer. And yet the builder-type CEO is (like Hillary) probably the best person for the job. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Dalton Caldwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Andrew Mason, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this." +57,Charisma / Power,January 2017,"People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked. Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have the charisma to disarm. That was Hillary Clinton's problem. It also tends to be a problem for any CEO who is more of a builder than a schmoozer. And yet the builder-type CEO is (like Hillary) probably the best person for the job. -I don't think there is any solution to this problem. It's human nature. The best we can do is to recognize that it's happening, and to understand that being a magnet for criticism is sometimes a sign not that someone is the wrong person for a job, but that they're the right one.",January 2017,Charisma / Power -58,"My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors. +I don't think there is any solution to this problem. It's human nature. The best we can do is to recognize that it's happening, and to understand that being a magnet for criticism is sometimes a sign not that someone is the wrong person for a job, but that they're the right one." +58,What Doesn't Seem Like Work?,January 2015,"My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors. He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do. When you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clear watershed at about age 12, when he ""got interested in maths."" @@ -4021,8 +4021,8 @@ It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one person and pleasant **Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and my father for reading drafts of this. -[Robert Morris: All About Programming](aap.html)",January 2015,What Doesn't Seem Like Work? -59,"People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing jobs that boosted the median income. I wouldn't quite call the high-paying union job a myth, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it. +[Robert Morris: All About Programming](aap.html)" +59,An Alternative Theory of Unions,May 2007,"People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing jobs that boosted the median income. I wouldn't quite call the high-paying union job a myth, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it. Oddly enough, it was working with startups that made me realize where the high-paying union job came from. In a rapidly growing market, you don't worry too much about efficiency. It's more important to grow fast. If there's some mundane problem getting in your way, and there's a simple solution that's somewhat expensive, just take it and get on with more important things. EBay didn't win by paying less for servers than their competitors. @@ -4040,8 +4040,8 @@ Basically, unions were just Razorfish. People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic union organizers have a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking now? The best they can do is fall back on the default explanation of people living in fallen civilizations. Our ancestors were giants. The workers of the early twentieth century must have had a moral courage that's lacking today. -In fact there's a simpler explanation. The early twentieth century was just a fast-growing startup overpaying for infrastructure. And we in the present are not a fallen people, who have abandoned whatever mysterious high-minded principles produced the high-paying union job. We simply live in a time when the fast-growing companies overspend on different things.",May 2007,An Alternative Theory of Unions -60,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)_ +In fact there's a simpler explanation. The early twentieth century was just a fast-growing startup overpaying for infrastructure. And we in the present are not a fallen people, who have abandoned whatever mysterious high-minded principles produced the high-paying union job. We simply live in a time when the fast-growing companies overspend on different things." +60,Why Startups Condense in America,May 2006,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)_ Startups happen in clusters. There are a lot of them in Silicon Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami. A country that wants startups will probably also have to reproduce whatever makes these clusters form. @@ -4241,8 +4241,8 @@ World Bank, _Doing Business in 2006_, http://doingbusiness.org \[7\] The point where things start to go wrong seems to be about 50%. Above that people get serious about tax avoidance. The reason is that the payoff for avoiding tax grows hyperexponentially (x/1-x for 0 < x < 1). If your income tax rate is 10%, moving to Monaco would only give you 11% more income, which wouldn't even cover the extra cost. If it's 90%, you'd get ten times as much income. And at 98%, as it was briefly in Britain in the 70s, moving to Monaco would give you fifty times as much income. It seems quite likely that European governments of the 70s never drew this curve. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Matthias Felleisen, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Neil Rimer, Hugues Steinier, Brad Templeton, Fred Wilson, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this, and to Ed Dumbill for inviting me to speak.",May 2006,Why Startups Condense in America -61,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 [Startup School.](http://startupschool.org))_ +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Matthias Felleisen, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Neil Rimer, Hugues Steinier, Brad Templeton, Fred Wilson, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this, and to Ed Dumbill for inviting me to speak." +61,Ideas for Startups,October 2005,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 [Startup School.](http://startupschool.org))_ How do you get good ideas for [startups](start.html)? That's probably the number one question people ask me. @@ -4400,8 +4400,8 @@ It seems like it violates some kind of conservation law, but there it is: the be \[3\] Bill Yerazunis had solved the problem, but he got there by another path. He made a general-purpose file classifier so good that it also worked for spam. -[One Specific Idea](fixrazr.html)",October 2005,Ideas for Startups -62,"A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard him say — not just because he was excited about his story, but because he'd discovered this way of working. Working on a project of your own is as different from ordinary work as skating is from walking. It's more fun, but also much more productive. +[One Specific Idea](fixrazr.html)" +62,A Project of One's Own,June 2021,"A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard him say — not just because he was excited about his story, but because he'd discovered this way of working. Working on a project of your own is as different from ordinary work as skating is from walking. It's more fun, but also much more productive. What proportion of great work has been done by people who were skating in this sense? If not all of it, certainly a lot. @@ -4463,8 +4463,8 @@ If it's harder as adults to retain that kind of confidence, we at least tend to \[5\] If a company could design its software in such a way that the best newly arrived programmers always got a clean sheet, it could have a kind of eternal youth. That might not be impossible. If you had a software backbone defining a game with sufficiently clear rules, individual programmers could write their own players. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Andy Hertzfeld, Jessica Livingston, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this.",June 2021,A Project of One's Own -63,"A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How? +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Andy Hertzfeld, Jessica Livingston, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this." +63,Is It Worth Being Wise?,February 2007,"A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How? What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of situations. I'm not trying to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do. @@ -4598,8 +4598,8 @@ Some translators use ""calm"" instead of ""happy."" One source of difficulty her \[10\] The bias toward wisdom in ancient philosophy may be exaggerated by the fact that, in both Greece and China, many of the first philosophers (including Confucius and Plato) saw themselves as teachers of administrators, and so thought disproportionately about such matters. The few people who did invent things, like storytellers, must have seemed an outlying data point that could be ignored. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",February 2007,Is It Worth Being Wise? -64,"In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious ""tapes"" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +64,The Need to Read,November 2022,"In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious ""tapes"" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer. That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -4619,8 +4619,8 @@ People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who w \[1\] Audiobooks can give you examples of good writing, but having them read to you doesn't teach you as much about writing as reading them yourself. -\[2\] By ""good at reading"" I don't mean good at the mechanics of reading. You don't have to be good at extracting words from the page so much as extracting meaning from the words.",November 2022,The Need to Read -65,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.)_ +\[2\] By ""good at reading"" I don't mean good at the mechanics of reading. You don't have to be good at extracting words from the page so much as extracting meaning from the words." +65,Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?,November 2021,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.)_ When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told me so. Some people like some things, and other people like other things, and who's to say who's right? @@ -4648,8 +4648,8 @@ Because people's responses to art aren't random, art can be designed to operate The situation with art is messier, of course. You can't measure effectiveness by simply taking a vote, as you do with vaccines. You have to imagine the responses of subjects with a deep knowledge of art, and enough clarity of mind to be able to ignore extraneous influences like the fame of the artist. And even then you'd still see some disagreement. People do vary, and judging art is hard, especially recent art. There is definitely not a total order either of works or of people's ability to judge them. But there is equally definitely a partial order of both. So while it's not possible to have perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste. -**Thanks** to the Cambridge Union for inviting me, and to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",November 2021,Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? -66,"In a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded this summer present to investors. Y Combinator funds startups twice a year, in January and June. Ten weeks later we invite all the investors we know to hear them present what they've built so far. +**Thanks** to the Cambridge Union for inviting me, and to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +66,How to Present to Investors,September 2010,"In a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded this summer present to investors. Y Combinator funds startups twice a year, in January and June. Ten weeks later we invite all the investors we know to hear them present what they've built so far. Ten weeks is not much time. The average startup probably doesn't have much to show for itself after ten weeks. But the average startup fails. When you look at the ones that went on to do great things, you find a lot that began with someone pounding out a prototype in a week or two of nonstop work. Startups are a counterexample to the rule that haste makes waste. @@ -4785,8 +4785,8 @@ It's a good exercise for you, too, to sit down and try to figure out how to desc [Hackers' Guide to Investors](guidetoinvestors.html) -Image: Casey Muller: Trevor Blackwell at Rehearsal Day, summer 2006",September 2010,How to Present to Investors -67,"_(This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.)_ +Image: Casey Muller: Trevor Blackwell at Rehearsal Day, summer 2006" +67,Why to Not Not Start a Startup,March 2007,"_(This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.)_ We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded. Three have been acquired: [Reddit](http://reddit.com) was a merger of two, Reddit and Infogami, and a third was acquired that we can't talk about yet. Another from that batch was [Loopt](http://loopt.com), which is doing so well they could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to. @@ -5010,8 +5010,8 @@ That's ultimately what drives us to work on Y Combinator. We want to make money, \[4\] Thought experiment: If doctors did the same work, but as impoverished outcasts, which parents would still want their kids to be doctors? -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, to the founders of Zenter for letting me use their web-based PowerPoint killer even though it isn't launched yet, and to Ming-Hay Luk of the Berkeley CSUA for inviting me to speak.",March 2007,Why to Not Not Start a Startup -68,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 [Startup School](http://startupschool.org).)_ +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, to the founders of Zenter for letting me use their web-based PowerPoint killer even though it isn't launched yet, and to Ming-Hay Luk of the Berkeley CSUA for inviting me to speak." +68,The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn,April 2006,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 [Startup School](http://startupschool.org).)_ The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive. @@ -5199,8 +5199,8 @@ So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's not what ma \[9\] There are two ways to do [work you love](love.html): (a) to make money, then work on what you love, or (b) to get a job where you get paid to work on stuff you love. In practice the first phases of both consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and in (b) the second phase is less secure. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Beau Hartshorne, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",April 2006,The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn -69,"American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers. Who's right? +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Beau Hartshorne, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +69,Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In,December 2014,"American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers. Who's right? The technology companies are right. What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can't train them to be exceptional. Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and [interest in](genius.html) programming that is not merely the product of training. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -5232,8 +5232,8 @@ So please, get on with it. \[3\] Though this essay talks about programmers, the group of people we need to import is broader, ranging from designers to programmers to electrical engineers. The best one could do as a general term might be ""digital talent."" It seemed better to make the argument a little too narrow than to confuse everyone with a neologism. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, Fred Wilson, and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this.",December 2014,Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In -70,"I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, Fred Wilson, and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this." +70,Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice,August 2015,"I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people. I grew up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman (in the cartoon it was always a man): a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his fifties who wins by exercising power, and isn't too fussy about how. As I've written before, one of the things that has surprised me most about startups is [how few](mean.html) of the most successful founders are like that. Maybe successful people in other industries are; I don't know; but not startup founders. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -5261,8 +5261,8 @@ So if you're a founder, here's a deal you can make with yourself that will both \[3\] The other reason it might help to be good at squeezing money out of customers is that startups usually lose money at first, and making more per customer makes it easier to get to profitability before your initial funding runs out. But while it is very common for startups to [die](pinch.html) from running through their initial funding and then being unable to raise more, the underlying cause is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than insufficient effort to extract money from existing customers. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Harj Taggar, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this, and to Randall Bennett for being such a nice guy.",August 2015,Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice -71,"Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Nearly everyone who writes about the topic says that economic inequality should be decreased. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Harj Taggar, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this, and to Randall Bennett for being such a nice guy." +71,Economic Inequality,January 2016,"Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Nearly everyone who writes about the topic says that economic inequality should be decreased. I'm interested in this question because I was one of the founders of a company called Y Combinator that helps people start startups. Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds, its founders become rich. Which means by helping startup founders I've been helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. No one should be. @@ -5376,8 +5376,8 @@ It's a strange task to write an essay about why something isn't the problem, but [A Reply to Ezra Klein](klein.html) -[A Reply to Russell Okung](okung.html)",January 2016,Economic Inequality -72,"One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest. And increasing economic inequality means the spread between rich and poor is growing too. I'd like to propose a hypothesis: that all these trends are instances of the same phenomenon. And moreover, that the cause is not some force that's pulling us apart, but rather the erosion of forces that had been pushing us together. +[A Reply to Russell Okung](okung.html)" +72,The Refragmentation,January 2016,"One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest. And increasing economic inequality means the spread between rich and poor is growing too. I'd like to propose a hypothesis: that all these trends are instances of the same phenomenon. And moreover, that the cause is not some force that's pulling us apart, but rather the erosion of forces that had been pushing us together. Worse still, for those who worry about these trends, the forces that were pushing us together were an anomaly, a one-time combination of circumstances that's unlikely to be repeated — and indeed, that we would not want to repeat. @@ -5613,8 +5613,8 @@ Witte, John. _The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax_. Wisconsin **Related:** -[Too Many Elite American Men Are Obsessed With Work and Wealth](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/too-many-elite-american-men-are-obsessed-with-work/479940/)",January 2016,The Refragmentation -73,"If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name. +[Too Many Elite American Men Are Obsessed With Work and Wealth](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/too-many-elite-american-men-are-obsessed-with-work/479940/)" +73,Change Your Name,August 2015,"If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name. The reason is not just that people can't find you. For companies with mobile apps, especially, having the right domain name is not as critical as it used to be for getting users. The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company. Whereas (as Stripe shows) having x.com signals strength even if it has no relation to what you do. @@ -5648,8 +5648,8 @@ There are of course examples of startups that have succeeded without having the \[3\] Sometimes founders know it's a problem that they don't have the .com of their name, but delusion strikes a step later in the belief that they'll be able to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale. Don't believe a domain is for sale unless the owner has already told you an asking price. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.",August 2015,Change Your Name -74,"If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less likely it would be false. Most people implicitly believe something like this about their opinions. And they're justified in doing so with opinions about things that don't change much, like human nature. But you can't trust your opinions in the same way about things that change, which could include practically everything else. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." +74,How to Be an Expert in a Changing World,December 2014,"If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less likely it would be false. Most people implicitly believe something like this about their opinions. And they're justified in doing so with opinions about things that don't change much, like human nature. But you can't trust your opinions in the same way about things that change, which could include practically everything else. When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world. @@ -5689,8 +5689,8 @@ It's hard enough already not to become the prisoner of your own expertise, but i \[4\] Though they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on e.g. forums and places like Twitter seem empirically to work like casual conversation. The threshold may be whether what you write has a title. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",December 2014,How to Be an Expert in a Changing World -75,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)_ +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +75,How to Be Silicon Valley,May 2006,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)_ Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it? @@ -5850,8 +5850,8 @@ For all its power, Silicon Valley has a great weakness: the paradise Shockley fo [Scattered Abroad](http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04363/433484.stm) -If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624).",May 2006,How to Be Silicon Valley -76,"A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a ""media company"" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who? +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +76,Microsoft is Dead,April 2007,"A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a ""media company"" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who? Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them. @@ -5899,8 +5899,8 @@ I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will sa \[1\] It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible. All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you're a big company, you produce in copious quantities. The situation is analogous to the writing of ""literary theorists."" Most don't try to be obscure; they just don't make an effort to be clear. It wouldn't pay. -\[2\] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.",April 2007,Microsoft is Dead -77,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)_ +\[2\] In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way that's rare among technology companies. If Apple's board hadn't made that blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back." +77,A Student's Guide to Startups,October 2006,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)_ Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup. But how common will that be? @@ -6066,8 +6066,8 @@ To be safe either (a) don't use code written while you were still employed in yo \[4\] Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox ignored them. If Xerox had used what they built, they would probably never have left PARC. -**Thanks** to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Jeff Arnold and the SIPB for inviting me to speak.",October 2006,A Student's Guide to Startups -78,"If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he had important new ideas. Being very smart was a necessary precondition for having those ideas, but the two are not identical. +**Thanks** to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Jeff Arnold and the SIPB for inviting me to speak." +78,Beyond Smart,October 2021,"If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he had important new ideas. Being very smart was a necessary precondition for having those ideas, but the two are not identical. It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that intelligence and its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time around universities and research labs knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely smart people who don't achieve very much. @@ -6109,8 +6109,8 @@ Those ways of using intelligence are much more common than having new ideas. And \[4\] Curiously enough, this essay is an example. It started out as an essay about writing ability. But when I came to the distinction between intelligence and having new ideas, that seemed so much more important that I turned the original essay inside out, making that the topic and my original topic one of the points in it. As in many other fields, that level of reworking is easier to contemplate once you've had a lot of practice. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts of this.",October 2021,Beyond Smart -79,"Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted. At the time I had a self-interested motive for exploring the question. At that age (like most succeeding ages) I was always in trouble with the authorities, and it seemed to me that there might possibly be some way to get out of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible for my actions. I gradually lost hope of that, but the puzzle remained: How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do? \[[1](#f1n)\] +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts of this." +79,What You (Want to)* Want,November 2022,"Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted. At the time I had a self-interested motive for exploring the question. At that age (like most succeeding ages) I was always in trouble with the authorities, and it seemed to me that there might possibly be some way to get out of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible for my actions. I gradually lost hope of that, but the puzzle remained: How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do? \[[1](#f1n)\] The best way to explain the answer may be to start with a slightly wrong version, and then fix it. The wrong version is: You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want. Yes, you can control what you do, but you'll do what you want, and you can't control that. @@ -6130,8 +6130,8 @@ So one way to express the correct answer is to use a regular expression. You can \[2\] If you don't like using an expression, you can make the same point using higher-order desires: There is some n such that you don't control your nth-order desires. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Michael Nielsen for reading drafts of this.",November 2022,What You (Want to)* Want -80,"It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I was in school, the answer is definitely yes. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Michael Nielsen for reading drafts of this." +80,How to Work Hard,June 2021,"It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I was in school, the answer is definitely yes. One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to do well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to do almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard work through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question. There isn't. @@ -6235,8 +6235,8 @@ In the average American high school, you have a choice of pretending to do somet \[9\] Many people face this question on a smaller scale with individual projects. But it's easier both to recognize and to accept a dead end in a single project than to abandon some type of work entirely. The more determined you are, the harder it gets. Like a Spanish Flu victim, you're fighting your own immune system: Instead of giving up, you tell yourself, I should just try harder. And who can say you're not right? -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.",June 2021,How to Work Hard -81,"I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I could give for getting in, per word, was +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +81,What I've Learned from Users,September 2022,"I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I could give for getting in, per word, was > Explain what you've learned from users. @@ -6304,8 +6304,8 @@ YC founders aren't just inspired by one another. They also help one another. Tha \[5\] The optimal unit of decisiveness depends on how long it takes to get results, and that depends on the type of problem you're solving. When you're negotiating with investors, it could be a couple days, whereas if you're building hardware it could be months. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.",September 2022,What I've Learned from Users -82,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford.)_ +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this." +82,The Hacker's Guide to Investors,April 2007,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford.)_ The world of investors is a foreign one to most hackers—partly because investors are so unlike hackers, and partly because they tend to operate in secret. I've been dealing with this world for many years, both as a founder and an investor, and I still don't fully understand it. @@ -6551,8 +6551,8 @@ Apparently the most likely animals to be left alive after a nuclear war are cock \[4\] Actually this sounds to me like a VC who got buyer's remorse, then used a technicality to get out of the deal. But it's telling that it even seemed a plausible excuse. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Hutch Fishman, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Kenneth King of ASES for inviting me to speak.",April 2007,The Hacker's Guide to Investors -83,"I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than anyone else's. There is no such thing as _good_ taste. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Hutch Fishman, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Kenneth King of ASES for inviting me to speak." +83,How Art Can Be Good,December 2006,"I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than anyone else's. There is no such thing as _good_ taste. Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to be false, and I'm going to try to explain why. @@ -6662,8 +6662,8 @@ The idea that you could make great things was not just a useful illusion. They w Incidentally, I'm not saying that good art = fifteenth century European art. I'm not saying we should make what they made, but that we should work like they worked. There are fields now in which many people work with the same energy and honesty that fifteenth century artists did, but art is not one of them. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Paul Watson for permission to use the image at the top.",December 2006,How Art Can Be Good -84,"When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are [innocent](https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7230). +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Paul Watson for permission to use the image at the top." +84,The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty,April 2021,"When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are [innocent](https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7230). When I was a kid I imagined that it was unusual for people to be convicted of crimes they hadn't committed, and that in murder cases especially this must be very rare. Far from it. Now, thanks to organizations like the [Innocence Project](https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases), we see a constant stream of stories about murder convictions being overturned after new evidence emerges. Sometimes the police and prosecutors were just very sloppy. Sometimes they were crooked, and knew full well they were convicting an innocent person. @@ -6695,8 +6695,8 @@ This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with the death pena [Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/17/opinion/sunday/kevin-cooper-california-death-row.html) -[Did Texas execute an innocent man?](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire)",April 2021,The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty -85,"_(This article came about in response to some questions on the [LL1](http://ll1.mit.edu) mailing list. It is now incorporated in [Revenge of the Nerds](icad.html).)_ +[Did Texas execute an innocent man?](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire)" +85,What Made Lisp Different,May 2002,"_(This article came about in response to some questions on the [LL1](http://ll1.mit.edu) mailing list. It is now incorporated in [Revenge of the Nerds](icad.html).)_ When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was [Fortran](history.html). @@ -6738,8 +6738,8 @@ When Lisp was first invented, all these ideas were far removed from ordinary pro Over time, the default language, embodied in a succession of popular languages, has gradually evolved toward Lisp. 1-5 are now widespread. 6 is starting to appear in the mainstream. Python has a form of 7, though there doesn't seem to be any syntax for it. 8, which (with 9) is what makes Lisp macros possible, is so far still unique to Lisp, perhaps because (a) it requires those parens, or something just as bad, and (b) if you add that final increment of power, you can no longer claim to have invented a new language, but only to have designed a new dialect of Lisp ; -) -Though useful to present-day programmers, it's strange to describe Lisp in terms of its variation from the random expedients other languages adopted. That was not, probably, how McCarthy thought of it. Lisp wasn't designed to fix the mistakes in Fortran; it came about more as the byproduct of an attempt to [axiomatize computation](rootsoflisp.html).",May 2002,What Made Lisp Different -86,"Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long? +Though useful to present-day programmers, it's strange to describe Lisp in terms of its variation from the random expedients other languages adopted. That was not, probably, how McCarthy thought of it. Lisp wasn't designed to fix the mistakes in Fortran; it came about more as the byproduct of an attempt to [axiomatize computation](rootsoflisp.html)." +86,Life is Short,January 2016,"Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long? Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short. @@ -6795,8 +6795,8 @@ Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the \[2\] I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say ""Hey, that's not true!"" -**Thanks** to Jessica Livingston and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.",January 2016,Life is Short -87,"For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations. Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the largest organizations were the most successful ones. +**Thanks** to Jessica Livingston and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." +87,The High-Res Society,December 2008,"For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations. Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the largest organizations were the most successful ones. Things have already changed so much that this is hard for us to believe, but till just a few decades ago the largest organizations tended to be the most progressive. An ambitious kid graduating from college in 1960 wanted to work in the huge, gleaming offices of Ford, or General Electric, or NASA. Small meant small-time. Small in 1960 didn't mean a cool little startup. It meant uncle Sid's shoe store. @@ -6852,8 +6852,8 @@ Startups seem to go more against the grain, socially. It's hard for them to flou \[4\] Lecuyer, Christophe, _Making Silicon Valley_, MIT Press, 2006. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",December 2008,The High-Res Society -88,"When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die? +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +88,Default Alive or Default Dead?,October 2015,"When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die? The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead. @@ -6905,8 +6905,8 @@ Paul Buchheit adds: ""A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling—founders take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics, typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really fast."" -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.",October 2015,Default Alive or Default Dead? -89,"_(I originally wrote this at the request of a company producing a report about entrepreneurship. Unfortunately after reading it they decided it was too controversial to include.)_ +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." +89,Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?,December 2008,"_(I originally wrote this at the request of a company producing a report about entrepreneurship. Unfortunately after reading it they decided it was too controversial to include.)_ VC funding will probably dry up somewhat during the present recession, like it usually does in bad times. But this time the result may be different. This time the number of new startups may not decrease. And that could be dangerous for VCs. @@ -6938,8 +6938,8 @@ VCs think they're playing a zero sum game. In fact, it's not even that. If you l This recession may be different from the one after the Internet Bubble. This time founders may keep starting startups. And if they do, VCs will have to keep writing checks, or they could become irrelevant. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",December 2008,Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession? -90,"Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +90,Write Like You Talk,October 2015,"Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a different language than they'd use if they were talking to a friend. The sentence structure and even the words are different. No one uses ""pen"" as a verb in spoken English. You'd feel like an idiot using ""pen"" instead of ""write"" in a conversation with a friend. @@ -6969,8 +6969,8 @@ People often tell me how much my essays sound like me talking. The fact that thi If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers. And it's so easy to do: just don't let a sentence through unless it's the way you'd say it to a friend. -**Thanks** to Patrick Collison and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.",October 2015,Write Like You Talk -91,"_(This is a talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of it will apply to other towns. But not all, because as I say in the talk, Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most would-be startup hubs.)_ +**Thanks** to Patrick Collison and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this." +91,How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub,April 2016,"_(This is a talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of it will apply to other towns. But not all, because as I say in the talk, Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most would-be startup hubs.)_ What would it take to make Pittsburgh into a startup hub, like Silicon Valley? I understand Pittsburgh pretty well, because I grew up here, in Monroeville. And I understand Silicon Valley pretty well because that's where I live now. Could you get that kind of startup ecosystem going here? @@ -7042,8 +7042,8 @@ This is not a fast path to becoming a startup hub. But it is at least a path, wh And that's an encouraging thought. If Pittsburgh's path to becoming a startup hub is to be even more itself, then it has a good chance of succeeding. In fact it probably has the best chance of any city its size. It will take some effort, and a lot of time, but if any city can do it, Pittsburgh can. -**Thanks** to Charlie Cheever and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this, and to Meg Cheever for organizing Opt412 and inviting me to speak.",April 2016,How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub -92,"_(This article explains why much of the next generation of software may be server-based, what that will mean for programmers, and why this new kind of software is a great opportunity for startups. It's derived from a talk at BBN Labs.)_ +**Thanks** to Charlie Cheever and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this, and to Meg Cheever for organizing Opt412 and inviting me to speak." +92,The Other Road Ahead,September 2001,"_(This article explains why much of the next generation of software may be server-based, what that will mean for programmers, and why this new kind of software is a great opportunity for startups. It's derived from a talk at BBN Labs.)_ In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I decided to start a startup. The PR campaign leading up to Netscape's IPO was running full blast then, and there was a lot of talk in the press about online commerce. At the time there might have been thirty actual stores on the Web, all made by hand. If there were going to be a lot of online stores, there would need to be software for making them, so we decided to write some. @@ -7385,8 +7385,8 @@ You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](hackpaint.htm [Microsoft finally agrees](http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=172900624) -[Gates Email](gatesemail.html)",September 2001,The Other Road Ahead -93,"In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. +[Gates Email](gatesemail.html)" +93,The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups,October 2006,"In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. It's easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn't than always to remember to do something you should. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -7616,8 +7616,8 @@ I don't mean to be hard on Google. They did better than their competitors, who m \[13\] So how do you know whether you're in the category of people who should quit their day job, or the presumably larger one who shouldn't? I got to the point of saying that this was hard to judge for yourself and that you should seek outside advice, before realizing that that's what we do. We think of ourselves as investors, but viewed from the other direction Y Combinator is a service for advising people whether or not to quit their day job. We could be mistaken, and no doubt often are, but we do at least bet money on our conclusions. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Greg McAdoo, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",October 2006,The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups -94,"Every year since 1982, _Forbes_ magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big differences. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Greg McAdoo, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +94,How People Get Rich Now,April 2021,"Every year since 1982, _Forbes_ magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big differences. In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes. @@ -7709,8 +7709,8 @@ Hewlett-Packard's revenues in 1964 were $125 million. Microsoft's revenues in 1988 were $590 million. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Bob Lesko, Robert Morris, Russ Roberts, and Alex Tabarrok for reading drafts of this, and to Jon Erlichman for growth data.",April 2021,How People Get Rich Now -95,"There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We'd probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren't. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Bob Lesko, Robert Morris, Russ Roberts, and Alex Tabarrok for reading drafts of this, and to Jon Erlichman for growth data." +95,Two Kinds of Judgement,April 2007,"There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We'd probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren't. The first type of judgement, the type where judging you is the end goal, include court cases, grades in classes, and most competitions. Such judgements can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is to judge you correctly, there's usually some kind of appeals process. If you feel you've been misjudged, you can protest that you've been treated unfairly. @@ -7730,8 +7730,8 @@ Our early training and our self-centeredness combine to make us believe that eve And curiously enough, taking rejection less personally may help you to get rejected less often. If you think someone judging you will work hard to judge you correctly, you can afford to be passive. But the more you realize that most judgements are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors—that most people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome. -One good place to apply this principle is in college applications. Most high school students applying to college do it with the usual child's mix of inferiority and self-centeredness: inferiority in that they assume that admissions committees must be all-seeing; self-centeredness in that they assume admissions committees care enough about them to dig down into their application and figure out whether they're good or not. These combine to make applicants passive in applying and hurt when they're rejected. If college applicants realized how quick and impersonal most selection processes are, they'd make more effort to sell themselves, and take the outcome less personally.",April 2007,Two Kinds of Judgement -96,"If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for the truths of physics; the mass of a carbon atom would be the same on their planet. But I think we'd share other truths with aliens besides the truths of math and physics, and that it would be worthwhile to think about what these might be. +One good place to apply this principle is in college applications. Most high school students applying to college do it with the usual child's mix of inferiority and self-centeredness: inferiority in that they assume that admissions committees must be all-seeing; self-centeredness in that they assume admissions committees care enough about them to dig down into their application and figure out whether they're good or not. These combine to make applicants passive in applying and hurt when they're rejected. If college applicants realized how quick and impersonal most selection processes are, they'd make more effort to sell themselves, and take the outcome less personally." +96,Alien Truth,October 2022,"If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for the truths of physics; the mass of a carbon atom would be the same on their planet. But I think we'd share other truths with aliens besides the truths of math and physics, and that it would be worthwhile to think about what these might be. For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled experiment testing some hypothesis entitles us to have proportionally increased belief in it. It seems fairly likely, too, that it would be true for aliens that one can get better at something by practicing. We'd probably share Occam's razor. There doesn't seem anything specifically human about any of these ideas. @@ -7747,8 +7747,8 @@ We may one day have something like alien life among us in the form of AIs. And t Whatever we call it, the attempt to discover alien truths would be a worthwhile undertaking. And curiously enough, that is itself probably an alien truth. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Greg Brockman, Patrick Collison, Robert Morris, and Michael Nielsen for reading drafts of this.",October 2022,Alien Truth -97,"When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of programming they've done. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Greg Brockman, Patrick Collison, Robert Morris, and Michael Nielsen for reading drafts of this." +97,Weird Languages,August 2021,"When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of programming they've done. 99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. All popular languages are equally good at this. So one can easily spend one's whole career operating in the intersection of popular programming languages. @@ -7760,8 +7760,8 @@ A concrete example: Lisp macros. Lisp macros seem weird even to many Lisp progra So if you want to expand your concept of what programming can be, one way to do it is by learning weird languages. Pick a language that most programmers consider weird but whose median user is smart, and then focus on the differences between this language and the intersection of popular languages. What can you say in this language that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others? In the process of learning how to say things you couldn't previously say, you'll probably be learning how to think things you couldn't previously think. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Daniel Gackle, Amjad Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",August 2021,Weird Languages -98,"A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How? +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Daniel Gackle, Amjad Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +98,Is It Worth Being Wise?,February 2007,"A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How? What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of situations. I'm not trying to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do. @@ -7903,8 +7903,8 @@ Some translators use ""calm"" instead of ""happy."" One source of difficulty her [Russian Translation](http://evilnero.blogspot.com/2008/08/blog-post.html) -[Russian Translation](http://ryba4.com/translations/wisdom)",February 2007,Is It Worth Being Wise? -99,"Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them. +[Russian Translation](http://ryba4.com/translations/wisdom)" +99,Putting Ideas into Words,February 2022,"Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them. Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your ideas, and now you've expressed them. But you know this isn't true. You know that putting your ideas into words changed them. And not just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead. @@ -7936,8 +7936,8 @@ Putting ideas into words is certainly no guarantee that they'll be right. Far fr It can be very useful to talk (in either sense) with other people as you're writing something. But a verbal conversation will never be more exacting than when you're talking about something you're writing. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",February 2022,Putting Ideas into Words -100,"Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +100,What I Worked On,February 2021,"Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep. The first programs I tried writing were on the IBM 1401 that our school district used for what was then called ""data processing."" This was in 9th grade, so I was 13 or 14. The school district's 1401 happened to be in the basement of our junior high school, and my friend Rich Draves and I got permission to use it. It was like a mini Bond villain's lair down there, with all these alien-looking machines � CPU, disk drives, printer, card reader � sitting up on a raised floor under bright fluorescent lights. @@ -8273,15 +8273,15 @@ I picked orange as our color partly because it's the warmest, and partly because But if so there's no reason to suppose that this is the limit of the language that might be known to them. Presumably aliens need numbers and errors and I/O too. So it seems likely there exists at least one path out of McCarthy's Lisp along which discoveredness is preserved. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Daniel Gackle, Ralph Hazell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.",February 2021,What I Worked On -101,"I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Daniel Gackle, Ralph Hazell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +101,Fashionable Problems,December 2019,"I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things. Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is in fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding � you may notice a pattern here. If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be [multiplied](sun.html) by its enormous surface area. -The best protection against getting drawn into working on the same things as everyone else may be to [genuinely love](genius.html) what you're doing. Then you'll continue to work on it even if you make the same mistake as other people and think that it's too marginal to matter.",December 2019,Fashionable Problems -102,"Plato quotes Socrates as saying ""the unexamined life is not worth living."" Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, just as the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills. +The best protection against getting drawn into working on the same things as everyone else may be to [genuinely love](genius.html) what you're doing. Then you'll continue to work on it even if you make the same mistake as other people and think that it's too marginal to matter." +102,See Randomness,August 2009,"Plato quotes Socrates as saying ""the unexamined life is not worth living."" Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, just as the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills. A lot of ancient philosophy had the quality — and I don't mean this in an insulting way — of the kind of conversations freshmen have late at night in common rooms: @@ -8311,8 +8311,8 @@ I say pick b. No one knows who said ""never attribute to malice what can be expl Or better still, the positive version: -> See randomness.",August 2009,See Randomness -103,"_(This article was written as a kind of business plan for a [new language](arc.html). So it is missing (because it takes for granted) the most important feature of a good programming language: very powerful abstractions.)_ +> See randomness." +103,Being Popular,May 2001,"_(This article was written as a kind of business plan for a [new language](arc.html). So it is missing (because it takes for granted) the most important feature of a good programming language: very powerful abstractions.)_ A friend of mine once told an eminent operating systems expert that he wanted to design a really good programming language. The expert told him that it would be a waste of time, that programming languages don't become popular or unpopular based on their merits, and so no matter how good his language was, no one would use it. At least, that was what had happened to the language _he_ had designed. @@ -8574,8 +8574,8 @@ It's hard to think of a lumbar disc herniation as juicy (except literally). And [Five Questions about Language Design](langdes.html) -[How to Become a Hacker](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html)",May 2001,Being Popular -104,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.)_ +[How to Become a Hacker](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html)" +104,Hiring is Obsolete,May 2005,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.)_ The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads? @@ -8765,8 +8765,8 @@ So while I stand by our responsible advice to finish college and then go work fo **Thanks** to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this, to the friends I promised anonymity to for their opinions about hiring, and to Karen Nguyen and the Berkeley CSUA for organizing this talk. -If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624).",May 2005,Hiring is Obsolete -105,"Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in the bank, they're also losing a lot each month, and revenue growth is either nonexistent or mediocre. The company has, say, 6 months of runway. Or to put it more brutally, 6 months before they're out of business. They expect to avoid that by raising more from investors. \[[1](#f1n)\] +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +105,The Fatal Pinch,December 2014,"Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in the bank, they're also losing a lot each month, and revenue growth is either nonexistent or mediocre. The company has, say, 6 months of runway. Or to put it more brutally, 6 months before they're out of business. They expect to avoid that by raising more from investors. \[[1](#f1n)\] That last sentence is the fatal one. @@ -8826,8 +8826,8 @@ The good news is, plenty of successful startups have passed through near-death e \[4\] Unless of course the source of the problem is that you're paying yourselves high salaries. If by cutting the founders' salaries to the minimum you need, you can make it to profitability, you should. But it's a bad sign if you needed to read this to realize that. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.",December 2014,The Fatal Pinch -106,"Y Combinator's 7th birthday was March 11. As usual we were so busy we didn't notice till a few days after. I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." +106,How Y Combinator Started,March 2012,"Y Combinator's 7th birthday was March 11. As usual we were so busy we didn't notice till a few days after. I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday. On March 11 2005, Jessica and I were walking home from dinner in Harvard Square. Jessica was working at an investment bank at the time, but she didn't like it much, so she had interviewed for a job as director of marketing at a Boston VC fund. The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically familiar thing for a VC fund to do: taking a long time to make up their mind. Meanwhile I had been telling Jessica all the things they should change about the VC business � essentially the ideas now underlying Y Combinator: investors should be making more, smaller investments, they should be funding hackers instead of suits, they should be willing to fund younger founders, etc. @@ -8859,8 +8859,8 @@ When we saw how well it worked to fund companies synchronously, we decided we'd We funded the second batch in Silicon Valley. That was a last minute decision. In retrospect I think what pushed me over the edge was going to Foo Camp that fall. The density of startup people in the Bay Area was so much greater than in Boston, and the weather was so nice. I remembered that from living there in the 90s. Plus I didn't want someone else to copy us and describe it as the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. I wanted YC to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. So doing the winter batch in California seemed like one of those rare cases where the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious one were the same. -If we'd had enough time to do what we wanted, Y Combinator would have been in Berkeley. That was our favorite part of the Bay Area. But we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley. We didn't have time to get our own building anywhere. The only way to get enough space in time was to convince Trevor to let us take over part of his (as it then seemed) giant building in Mountain View. Yet again we lucked out, because Mountain View turned out to be the ideal place to put something like YC. But even then we barely made it. The first dinner in California, we had to warn all the founders not to touch the walls, because the paint was still wet.",March 2012,How Y Combinator Started -107,"At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a [talk](http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08) in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way. Instead of hoping to get rich by building a valuable company and then selling stock in a ""liquidity event,"" founders should start companies that make money and live off the revenues. +If we'd had enough time to do what we wanted, Y Combinator would have been in Berkeley. That was our favorite part of the Bay Area. But we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley. We didn't have time to get our own building anywhere. The only way to get enough space in time was to convince Trevor to let us take over part of his (as it then seemed) giant building in Mountain View. Yet again we lucked out, because Mountain View turned out to be the ideal place to put something like YC. But even then we barely made it. The first dinner in California, we had to warn all the founders not to touch the walls, because the paint was still wet." +107,The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company,July 2008,"At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a [talk](http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08) in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way. Instead of hoping to get rich by building a valuable company and then selling stock in a ""liquidity event,"" founders should start companies that make money and live off the revenues. Sounds like a good plan. Let's think about the optimal way to do this. @@ -8906,8 +8906,8 @@ You can choose whichever revenue strategy you think is best for the type of comp David isn't mistaken in saying you should start a company to live off its revenues. The mistake is thinking this is somehow opposed to starting a company and selling it. In fact, for most people the latter is merely the optimal case of the former. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Michael Mandel, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",July 2008,The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company -108,"In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do. Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear, which were other forms of impressive impracticality then just coming into fashion. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Michael Mandel, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +108,How to Do Philosophy,September 2007,"In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do. Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear, which were other forms of impressive impracticality then just coming into fashion. But I had some more honest motives as well. I thought studying philosophy would be a shortcut straight to wisdom. All the people majoring in other things would just end up with a bunch of domain knowledge. I would be learning what was really what. @@ -9081,8 +9081,8 @@ Wolter, Allan (trans), _Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings_, Nelson, 1963, p. 9 This argument seems to me like someone in 1500 looking at the lack of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value was as a process. No, they were going about it wrong. It turns out it is possible to transmute lead into gold (though not economically at current energy prices), but the route to that knowledge was to backtrack and try another approach. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this.",September 2007,How to Do Philosophy -109,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)_ +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this." +109,The Future of Web Startups,October 2007,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)_ There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. @@ -9224,8 +9224,8 @@ The process of starting startups is currently like the plumbing in an old house. This will change a lot of things for the better. In a big, straight pipe like that, the force of being measured by one's performance will propagate back through the whole system. Performance is always the ultimate test, but there are so many kinks in the plumbing now that most people are insulated from it most of the time. So you end up with a world in which high school students think they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think they need to get good grades to impress employers, within which the employees waste most of their time in political battles, and from which consumers have to buy anyway because there are so few choices. Imagine if that sequence became a big, straight pipe. Then the effects of being measured by performance would propagate all the way back to high school, flushing out all the arbitrary stuff people are measured by now. That is the future of web startups. -**Thanks** to Brian Oberkirch and Simon Willison for inviting me to speak, and the crew at Carson Systems for making everything run smoothly.",October 2007,The Future of Web Startups -110,"Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they didn't do that. But the second biggest cause of death is probably the difficulty of raising money. Fundraising is brutal. +**Thanks** to Brian Oberkirch and Simon Willison for inviting me to speak, and the crew at Carson Systems for making everything run smoothly." +110,A Fundraising Survival Guide,August 2008,"Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they didn't do that. But the second biggest cause of death is probably the difficulty of raising money. Fundraising is brutal. One reason it's so brutal is simply the brutality of markets. People who've spent most of their lives in schools or big companies may not have been exposed to that. Professors and bosses usually feel some sense of responsibility toward you; if you make a valiant effort and fail, they'll cut you a break. Markets are less forgiving. Customers don't care how hard you worked, only whether you solved their problems. @@ -9415,8 +9415,8 @@ No VC will admit they're influenced by buzz. Some genuinely aren't. But there ar \[7\] But not all are. Though most VCs are suits at heart, the most successful ones tend not to be. Oddly enough, the best VCs tend to be the least VC-like. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.",August 2008,A Fundraising Survival Guide -111,"I'm not a very good speaker. I say ""um"" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good writer than being a good speaker. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +111,Writing and Speaking,March 2012,"I'm not a very good speaker. I say ""um"" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good writer than being a good speaker. Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you're talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you'll be perceived as having a good style. With speaking it's the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker. @@ -9446,8 +9446,8 @@ Talks are also good at motivating me to do things. It's probably no coincidence \[4\] For sufficiently small audiences, it may not be true that being part of an audience makes people dumber. The real decline seems to set in when the audience gets too big for the talk to feel like a conversation — maybe around 10 people. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",March 2012,Writing and Speaking -112,"I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them? +**Thanks** to Sam Altman and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +112,How You Know,December 2014,"I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them? A few months ago, as I was reading Constance Reid's excellent biography of Hilbert, I figured out if not the answer to this question, at least something that made me feel better about it. She writes: @@ -9471,8 +9471,8 @@ Intriguingly, this implication isn't limited to books. Technology will increasin Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but also to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",December 2014,How You Know -113,"""Suits make a corporate comeback,"" says the [_New York Times_](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/fashion/thursdaystyles/14peacock.html?ex=1271131200&en=e96f2670387e3636&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland). Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in [February](http://www.cvbizlink.com/articles/2005/04/07/news/news/doc42406f05edf53293947237.prt), [September 2004](http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2004-09-01-suits_x.htm), [June 2004](http://www.cnn.com/2004/BUSINESS/06/23/go.fashion.jones/), [March 2004](http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04062/279616.stm), [September 2003](http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/09-03/09-21-03/c01li238.htm), [November 2002](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_46/b3808122.htm), [April 2002](http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/s_65540.html), and [February 2002](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1836010.stm). +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +113,The Submarine,April 2005,"""Suits make a corporate comeback,"" says the [_New York Times_](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/fashion/thursdaystyles/14peacock.html?ex=1271131200&en=e96f2670387e3636&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland). Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in [February](http://www.cvbizlink.com/articles/2005/04/07/news/news/doc42406f05edf53293947237.prt), [September 2004](http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2004-09-01-suits_x.htm), [June 2004](http://www.cnn.com/2004/BUSINESS/06/23/go.fashion.jones/), [March 2004](http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04062/279616.stm), [September 2003](http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/09-03/09-21-03/c01li238.htm), [November 2002](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_46/b3808122.htm), [April 2002](http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/s_65540.html), and [February 2002](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1836010.stm). Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms [tell](http://www.maximumexposurepr.com/middleMAA.html) them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms. @@ -9598,8 +9598,8 @@ Actually no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because the remedy w [The Decline of the Tie](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1864095,00.html) -If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](hackpaint.html).",April 2005,The Submarine -114,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Google.)_ +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](hackpaint.html)." +114,Are Software Patents Evil?,March 2006,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Google.)_ A few weeks ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted four [patents](http://paulgraham.infogami.com/blog/morepatents). This was all the more surprising because I'd only applied for three. The patents aren't mine, of course. They were assigned to Viaweb, and became Yahoo's when they bought us. But the news set me thinking about the question of software patents generally. @@ -9747,8 +9747,8 @@ The only real role of patents, for most startups, is as an element of the mating \[8\] If big companies don't want to wait for the government to take action, there is a way to fight back themselves. For a long time I thought there wasn't, because there was nothing to grab onto. But there is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. Big technology companies between them generate a lot of legal business. If they agreed among themselves never to do business with any firm employing anyone who had worked for a patent troll, either as an employee or as outside counsel, they could probably starve the trolls of the lawyers they need. -**Thanks** to Dan Bloomberg, Paul Buchheit, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this, to Joel Lehrer and Peter Eng for answering my questions about patents, and to Ankur Pansari for inviting me to speak.",March 2006,Are Software Patents Evil? -115,"This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious. It's not a critique of Java! It is a case study of hacker's radar. +**Thanks** to Dan Bloomberg, Paul Buchheit, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Peter Norvig for reading drafts of this, to Joel Lehrer and Peter Eng for answering my questions about patents, and to Ankur Pansari for inviting me to speak." +115,Java's Cover,April 2001,"This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious. It's not a critique of Java! It is a case study of hacker's radar. Over time, hackers develop a nose for good (and bad) technology. I thought it might be interesting to try and write down what made Java seem suspect to me. @@ -9798,8 +9798,8 @@ 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)",April 2001,Java's Cover -116,"Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No. +[2005: BusinessWeek Agrees](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051213_042973.htm)" +116,Having Kids,December 2019,"Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No. If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since I was a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that, to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind. Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids, the kids seemed to be terrors, and the parents pathetic harried creatures, even when they prevailed. @@ -9853,8 +9853,8 @@ People's experiences as parents vary a lot, and I know I've been lucky. But I th \[1\] Adults are sophisticated enough to see 2 year olds for the fascinatingly complex characters they are, whereas to most 6 year olds, 2 year olds are just defective 6 year olds. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",December 2019,Having Kids -117,"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. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +117,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? @@ -9912,8 +9912,8 @@ 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.",December 2020,Earnestness -118,"One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Jessica Livingston, Mattias Ljungman, Harj Taggar, and Kyle Vogt for reading drafts of this." +118,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: @@ -9985,8 +9985,8 @@ 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.",April 2022,Heresy -119,"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. +**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." +119,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. @@ -10010,8 +10010,8 @@ 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.",December 2019,The Two Kinds of Moderate -120,"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. +**Thanks** to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Amjad Masad, Ryan Petersen, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +120,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? @@ -10029,8 +10029,8 @@ 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.",March 2021,Donate Unrestricted -121,"_(Foreword to Jessica Livingston's [Founders at Work](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597141).)_ +**Thanks** to Chase Adam, Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, and Edith Elliot for reading drafts of this." +121,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. @@ -10052,8 +10052,8 @@ 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.",January 2007,Learning from Founders -122,"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. +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." +122,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? @@ -10093,8 +10093,8 @@ 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.",March 2005,Return of the Mac -123,"_(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.)_ +\[2\] [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." +123,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.** @@ -10230,8 +10230,8 @@ 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?",May 2001,Five Questions about Language Design -124,"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. +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?" +124,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."" @@ -10241,8 +10241,8 @@ 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.",August 2009,Why YC -125,"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. +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." +125,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! @@ -10280,8 +10280,8 @@ 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.",March 2012,Defining Property -126,"It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." +126,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. @@ -10323,8 +10323,8 @@ 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.",November 2014,Mean People Fail -127,"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? +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Ron Conway, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +127,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. @@ -10354,8 +10354,8 @@ 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.",February 2008,Six Principles for Making New Things -128,"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. +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." +128,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. @@ -10417,8 +10417,8 @@ 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.",November 2015,Jessica Livingston -129,"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. +**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." +129,"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. @@ -10460,8 +10460,8 @@ 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.",November 2008,"The Other Half of ""Artists Ship""" -130,"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. +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." +130,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. @@ -10481,8 +10481,8 @@ 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.",October 2015,A Way to Detect Bias -131,"The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." +131,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. @@ -10520,8 +10520,8 @@ 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.",October 2008,Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy -132,"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. +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." +132,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. @@ -10573,8 +10573,8 @@ 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.",October 2007,Why to Move to a Startup Hub -133,"_(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.)_ +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Harjeet Taggar, and Kulveer Taggar for reading drafts of this." +133,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. @@ -10722,8 +10722,8 @@ 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.",October 2014,Before the Startup -134,"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. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this." +134,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. @@ -10855,8 +10855,8 @@ 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.",March 2012,Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas -135,"_(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.)_ +**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." +135,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. @@ -10868,8 +10868,8 @@ 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&)",May 2001,The Roots of Lisp -136,"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 Code](https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/jmc.lisp?t=1595850613&)" +136,"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. @@ -10897,8 +10897,8 @@ 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.""",August 2009,"6,631,372" -137,"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. +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.""" +137,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. @@ -11026,8 +11026,8 @@ 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).",April 2005,Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas -138,"I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +138,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. @@ -11051,8 +11051,8 @@ 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.",March 2021,Write Simply -139,"A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How? +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,Is It Worth Being Wise?,February 2007,"A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How? What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of situations. I'm not trying to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do. @@ -11186,8 +11186,8 @@ Some translators use ""calm"" instead of ""happy."" One source of difficulty her \[10\] The bias toward wisdom in ancient philosophy may be exaggerated by the fact that, in both Greece and China, many of the first philosophers (including Confucius and Plato) saw themselves as teachers of administrators, and so thought disproportionately about such matters. The few people who did invent things, like storytellers, must have seemed an outlying data point that could be ignored. -**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",February 2007,Is It Worth Being Wise? -140,"_(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.)_ +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +140,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. @@ -11235,8 +11235,8 @@ 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.",January 2020,Haters -141,"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. +**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." +141,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. @@ -11254,8 +11254,8 @@ 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.",August 2005,After the Ladder -142,"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. +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." +142,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. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -11384,8 +11384,8 @@ 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).",November 2005,Web 2.0 -143,"_(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.)_ +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +143,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. @@ -11525,8 +11525,8 @@ 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).",April 2003,Beating the Averages -144,"""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."" +You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +144,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 @@ -11554,8 +11554,8 @@ 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.",July 2020,Orthodox Privilege -145,"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. +**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." +145,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. @@ -11619,8 +11619,8 @@ 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.",September 2007,News from the Front -146,"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. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Peter Norvig, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +146,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. @@ -11720,8 +11720,8 @@ 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.",December 2020,Billionaires Build -147,"If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +147,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. @@ -11729,8 +11729,8 @@ 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.",November 2019,Novelty and Heresy -148,"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. +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." +148,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. @@ -11822,8 +11822,8 @@ 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.",June 2008,You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss -149,"_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._ +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, Aaron Iba, Abby Kirigin, Ivan Kirigin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +149,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. @@ -11867,8 +11867,8 @@ _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)",May 2008,Disconnecting Distraction -150,"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. +[Good and Bad Procrastination](http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html)" +150,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. @@ -11878,8 +11878,8 @@ 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.",April 2012,The Top of My Todo List -151,"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. \[[1](#f1n)\] +which I then put at the top of the file I use as a todo list." +151,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. @@ -12021,8 +12021,8 @@ 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.",July 2013,Do Things that Don't Scale -152,"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. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Kevin Hale, Steven Levy, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this." +152,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. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -12142,8 +12142,8 @@ 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.",August 2013,How to Convince Investors -153,"I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. +**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." +153,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. @@ -12207,8 +12207,8 @@ 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.",September 2012,Black Swan Farming -154,"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. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +154,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. @@ -12328,8 +12328,8 @@ 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.",May 2008,Cities and Ambition -155,"The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and David Sloo for reading drafts of this." +155,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. @@ -12455,8 +12455,8 @@ 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.",December 2019,The Lesson to Unlearn -156,"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. +**Thanks** to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +156,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. @@ -12558,8 +12558,8 @@ 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)",March 2008,How to Disagree -157,"To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. +[The Age of the Essay](essay.html)" +157,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. @@ -12589,8 +12589,8 @@ 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.""",December 2020,The Airbnbs -158,"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? +Brian's reply was seven words: ""We are not going to slow down.""" +158,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. @@ -12600,8 +12600,8 @@ 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.",April 2020,Coronavirus and Credibility -159,"_(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.)_ +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." +159,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? @@ -12659,8 +12659,8 @@ 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.",August 2007,How Not to Die -160,"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. +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." +160,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. @@ -12958,11 +12958,11 @@ 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.",November 2005,How to Fund a Startup -161,"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. +**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." +161,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&)",,Lisp for Web-Based Applications -162,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)_ +[BBN Talk Excerpts (ASCII)](https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt?t=1595850613&)" +162,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. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -13122,8 +13122,8 @@ 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.",August 2005,What Business Can Learn from Open Source -163,"Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No. +**Thanks** to Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +163,Having Kids,December 2019,"Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No. If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since I was a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that, to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind. Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids, the kids seemed to be terrors, and the parents pathetic harried creatures, even when they prevailed. @@ -13181,8 +13181,8 @@ People's experiences as parents vary a lot, and I know I've been lucky. But I th [Arabic Translation]( https://tldrarabiccontents.blogspot.com/2020/02/blog-post_3.html) -[Slovak Translation](https://otcom.sk/paul-graham-mat-deti/)",December 2019,Having Kids -164,"If you're a California voter, there is an important proposition on your ballot this year: Proposition 62, which bans the death penalty. +[Slovak Translation](https://otcom.sk/paul-graham-mat-deti/)" +164,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? @@ -13196,8 +13196,8 @@ 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.",November 2016,This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California -165,"The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad? +It's time." +165,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. @@ -13265,8 +13265,8 @@ 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.",December 2005,Good and Bad Procrastination -166,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.)_ +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +166,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. @@ -13376,8 +13376,8 @@ 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).",August 2005,Inequality and Risk -167,"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. +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +167,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. @@ -13469,8 +13469,8 @@ 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.",October 2020,Early Work -168,"When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Michael Nielsen, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts of this." +168,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. @@ -13484,8 +13484,8 @@ 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.",January 2020,Being a Noob -169,"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. +Though it feels unpleasant, and people will sometimes ridicule you for it, the more you feel like a noob, the better." +169,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. @@ -13675,8 +13675,8 @@ 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.",May 2008,Lies We Tell Kids -170,"_(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.)_ +**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." +170,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. @@ -13726,8 +13726,8 @@ 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.",May 2013,A New Venture Animal -171,"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. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +171,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. @@ -14095,8 +14095,8 @@ 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.",September 2013,How to Raise Money -172,"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. +**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." +172,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. @@ -14112,8 +14112,8 @@ 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/)",October 2012,The Hardware Renaissance -173,"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. +[A Hardware Renaissance while �Software Eats the World�?](http://mantellavp.com/a-hardware-renaissance-while-software-eats-the-world/)" +173,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. @@ -14307,8 +14307,8 @@ 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.",September 2012,Startup = Growth -174,"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. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +174,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. @@ -14338,8 +14338,8 @@ 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.",August 2013,Investor Herd Dynamics -175,"A user on Hacker News recently posted a [comment](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116938) that set me thinking: +**Thanks** to Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this." +175,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. @@ -14373,8 +14373,8 @@ 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.",February 2008,Trolls -176,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)_ +\[2\] 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." +176,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. @@ -14486,8 +14486,8 @@ 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.",April 2008,Be Good -177,"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. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +177,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. @@ -14603,8 +14603,8 @@ 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.",February 2020,How to Write Usefully -178,"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. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +178,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. @@ -14720,8 +14720,8 @@ 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.",November 2020,How to Think for Yourself -179,"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. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this." +179,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. @@ -14831,8 +14831,8 @@ 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.",October 2005,What I Did this Summer -180,"_(This essay is from the introduction to_ [On Lisp](onlisp.html)_.)_ +**Thanks** to Sarah Harlin, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Zak Stone, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this." +180,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. @@ -14858,8 +14858,8 @@ 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.",September 1993,Programming Bottom-Up -181,"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. +\[1\] ""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." +181,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. @@ -15013,8 +15013,8 @@ 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.",January 2006,How to Do What You Love -182,"When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from [poor to rich](wealth.html), I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were. +**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." +182,How to Lose Time and Money,July 2010,"When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from [poor to rich](wealth.html), I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were. So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. @@ -15030,8 +15030,8 @@ And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they're not even fun. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",July 2010,How to Lose Time and Money -183,"_(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.)_ +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +183,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!""_ @@ -15097,8 +15097,8 @@ 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)",November 2004,Made in USA -184,"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. +[The John Rain Books](http://www.barryeisler.com)" +184,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? @@ -15120,8 +15120,8 @@ 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.",May 2003,If Lisp is So Great -185,"I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government. +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." +185,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. @@ -15153,8 +15153,8 @@ 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/)",August 2011,The Patent Pledge -186,"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 Investment That Didn't Happen](http://k9ventures.com/blog/2011/04/27/modista/)" +186,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. @@ -15240,8 +15240,8 @@ 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.",November 2009,Apple's Mistake -187,"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. +**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." +187,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. @@ -15261,8 +15261,8 @@ 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)",April 2009,The Founder Visa -188,"_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? +[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)" +188,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** @@ -15298,8 +15298,8 @@ 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.",April 2009,Five Founders -189,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.)_ +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." +189,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? @@ -15679,8 +15679,8 @@ 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)",October 2009,What Startups Are Really Like -190,"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. +[A Fundraising Survival Guide](fundraising.html)" +190,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. @@ -15935,8 +15935,8 @@ elsewhere too I am not negative on this one, I am interested, but we are still in the gathering data phase. -fred",March 2011,Subject: Airbnb -191,"_(This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)_ +fred" +191,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. @@ -16118,8 +16118,8 @@ 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).",May 2003,Hackers and Painters -192,"_(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)_ +You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +192,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. @@ -16297,8 +16297,8 @@ 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)",January 2005,What You'll Wish You'd Known -193,"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. +[Why Nerds are Unpopular](nerds.html)" +193,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. @@ -16504,8 +16504,8 @@ 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)",January 2004,What You Can't Say -194,"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. +[What You Can't Say Will Hurt You](http://www.archub.org/stone.txt)" +194,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. @@ -16559,8 +16559,8 @@ 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.",March 2005,A Unified Theory of VC Suckage -195,"The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you? +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." +195,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. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -16592,8 +16592,8 @@ 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.",April 2010,Organic Startup Ideas -196,"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. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this." +196,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. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -16657,8 +16657,8 @@ 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.",October 2011,Why Startup Hubs Work -197,"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. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +197,"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. @@ -16688,8 +16688,8 @@ 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.",January 2012,"Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998" -198,"When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from [poor to rich](wealth.html), I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were. +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." +198,How to Lose Time and Money,July 2010,"When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from [poor to rich](wealth.html), I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were. So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. @@ -16705,8 +16705,8 @@ And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they're not even fun. -**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.",July 2010,How to Lose Time and Money -199,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)_ +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +199,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. @@ -16994,8 +16994,8 @@ 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)",March 2005,How to Start a Startup -200,"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. +[Domain Name Search](http://instantdomainsearch.com)" +200,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? @@ -17037,8 +17037,8 @@ 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)",August 2003,Filters that Fight Back -201,"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. +[Lycos DDoS@Home](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4051553.stm)" +201,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. @@ -17220,8 +17220,8 @@ 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.",May 2004,Mind the Gap -202,"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? +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." +202,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. @@ -17245,8 +17245,8 @@ 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).",November 2004,Bradley's Ghost -203,"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. +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +203,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. @@ -17320,8 +17320,8 @@ 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.",August 2010,What Happened to Yahoo -204,"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. +**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." +204,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. @@ -17345,8 +17345,8 @@ 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.",December 2010,Founder Control -205,"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. +**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." +205,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. @@ -17362,8 +17362,8 @@ 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.",December 2010,Tablets -206,"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. \[[1](#f1n)\] +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +206,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. @@ -17501,8 +17501,8 @@ 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.",August 2010,The Future of Startup Funding -207,"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. +**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." +207,"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. @@ -17558,8 +17558,8 @@ 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)",June 2006,"It's Charisma, Stupid" -208,"_(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.)_ +[Politics and the Art of Acting](http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/miller/lecture.html)" +208,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.'' @@ -17729,8 +17729,8 @@ 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).",July 2004,Great Hackers -209,"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. +If you liked this, you may also like [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +209,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. @@ -17840,8 +17840,8 @@ 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.""",October 2004,A Version 1.0 -210,"_(This essay was originally published in [Hackers & Painters](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624/104-0572701-7443937).)_ +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.""" +210,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. @@ -18119,8 +18119,8 @@ 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).",May 2004,How to Make Wealth -211,"_(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)_ +You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624)." +211,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? @@ -18276,8 +18276,8 @@ 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).",April 2003,The Hundred-Year Language -212,"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. +You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](hackpaint.html)." +212,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? \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -18347,8 +18347,8 @@ 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.",September 2009,Post-Medium Publishing -213,"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. +**Thanks** to Michael Arrington, Trevor Blackwell, Steven Levy, Robert Morris, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this." +213,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. @@ -18454,8 +18454,8 @@ 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.",October 2010,The New Funding Landscape -214,"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. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, John Bautista, Patrick Collison, James Lindenbaum, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this." +214,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. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -18501,8 +18501,8 @@ 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.",July 2010,The Top Idea in Your Mind -215,"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. +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +215,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. \[[1](#f1n)\] @@ -18544,8 +18544,8 @@ 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.",July 2010,The Acceleration of Addictiveness -216,"_(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.)_ +**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this." +216,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** @@ -18577,8 +18577,8 @@ 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.",October 2010,What We Look for in Founders -217,"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. +**Thanks** to Jessica Livingston and Chris Steiner for reading drafts of this." +217,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. @@ -18626,8 +18626,8 @@ 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.",September 2009,Persuade xor Discover -218,"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."" +**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." +218,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. @@ -18821,8 +18821,8 @@ 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/)",February 2003,Why Nerds are Unpopular -219,"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. +[Buttons](http://armandfrasco.typepad.com/armandele/)" +219,"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. @@ -18886,8 +18886,8 @@ 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).",April 2004,"The Word ""Hacker""" -220,"_(This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.)_ +You'll find this essay and 14 others in [**_Hackers & Painters_**](hackpaint.html)." +220,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. @@ -19037,4 +19037,4 @@ 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)",September 2004,What the Bubble Got Right +[The Long Tail](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html)"