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Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.October 2015This 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.How does it work? Think about what it means to be biased. What
it means for a selection process to be biased against applicants
of type x is that it's harder for them to make it through. Which
means applicants of type x have to be better to get selected than
applicants not of type x.
[1]
Which means applicants of type x
who do make it through the selection process will outperform other
successful applicants. And if the performance of all the successful
applicants is measured, you'll know if they do.Of course, the test you use to measure performance must be a valid
one. And in particular it must not be invalidated by the bias you're
trying to measure.
But there are some domains where performance can be measured, and
in those detecting bias is straightforward. Want to know if the
selection process was bias
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ed against some type of applicant? Check
whether they outperform the others. This is not just a heuristic
for detecting bias. It's what bias means.For example, many suspect that venture capital firms are biased
against female founders. This would be easy to detect: among their
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It doesn't
work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business
learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed
that although the words "software" and "publ
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isher" fit together,
the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books.
It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary
between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying
to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly
overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced
house style.If software publishing didn't work in 1980, it works even less now
that software development has evolved from a small number of big
releases to a constant stream of small ones. But Apple doesn't
understand that either. Their model of product development derives
from hardware. They work on something till they think it's finished,
then they release it. You have to do that with hardware, but because
software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution.
The standard way to develop applications now is to launch fast and
iterate. Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays
each time you release a new version.Apparently Apple's attitude is that developers should be more careful
when they submit a new version to the App Store. They would say
that. But powerful as they are, they're not powerful enough to
turn back the evolution of technology. Programmers don't use
launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it
yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is
making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple
would.How would Apple like it if when they discovered a
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You can pick any group of users you
want. If you're designing a tool, for example, you can design it
for anyone from beginners to experts, and what's good design
for one group might be bad for another. The point
is, you have to pick some group of users. I don't think you can
even talk about good or bad design except with
reference to some intended user.You're most likely to get good design if the intended users include
the designer himself. When you design something
for a group that doesn't include you, it tends to be for people
you consider to be less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated.That's a problem, because looking down on the user, however benevolently,
seems inevitably to corrupt the designer.
I suspect that very few housing
projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live
in them. You can see the same thing
in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for
their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Java, were created
for other people to use.If you think you're designing something for idiots, the odds are
that you're not designing something good, even for idiots.
Even if you're designing something for the most sophisticated
users, though, you're still designing for humans. It's different
in research. In math you
don't choose abstractions because they're
easy for humans to understand; you choose whichever make the
proof shorter. I think this is true for the sciences genera
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lly.
Scientific ideas are not meant to be ergonomic.Over in the arts, things are very different. Design is
all about people. The human body is a strange
thing, but when you're designing a chair,
that's what you're designing for, and there's no
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the hope of good returns, but the fear of missing out.
[6]
So if
you make it clear you're going to succeed no matter what, and the only
reason you need them is to make it happen a little faster, you're
much more likely to get money.You can't fake this. The only way to convince everyone that you're
ready to fight to the dea
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th is actually to be ready to.You have to be the right kind of determined, though. I carefully
chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness
is a disastrous quality in a startup. You have to be determined,
but flexible, like a running back. A successful running back doesn't
just put his head down and try to run through people. He improvises:
if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone
tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in
the wrong direction briefly if that will help. The one thing he'll
never do is stand still.
[7]
6. There Is Always Room.I was talking recently to a startup founder about whether it might
be good to add a social component to their software. He said he
didn't think so, because the whole social thing was tapped out.
Really? So in a hundred years the only social networking sites
will be the Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Del.icio.us? Not likely.There is always room for new stuff. At every point in history,
even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering
things that made everyone say "why didn't anyone think of that
before?" We know this continued to be true up till 2004, when the
Facebook was founded-- though strictly speaking someone else did
think of that.The reason we don't see the
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a startup. They make up some plausible-sounding idea, raise money
at a good valuation, rent a cool office, hire a bunch of people.
From the outside that seems like what startups do. But
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 54235.
the next
step after rent a cool office and hire a bunch of people is: gradually
realize how completely fucked they are, because while imitating all
the outward forms of a startup they have neglected the one thing
that's actually essential: making something people want.
GameWe saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it: playing
house. Eventually I realized why it was happening. The reason
young founders go through the motions of starting a startup is
because that's what they've been trained to do for their whole lives
up to that point. Think about what you have to do to get into
college, for example. Extracurricular activities, check. Even in
college classes most of the work is as artificial as running laps.I'm not attacking the educational system for being this way. There
will always be a certain amount of fakeness in the work you do when
you're being taught something, and if you measure their performance
it's inevitable that people will exploit the difference to the point
where much of what you're measuring is artifacts of the fakeness.I confess I did it myself in college. I found that in a lot of
classes there might only be 20 or 30 ideas that were the right shape
to make good exam questions. The way I studied for exams in these
classes was not (except incidentally) to master the material taught
in the class, but to make a list of potential exam questions and
work out the answers in advance. When I walked into the final, the
main thing I'd be feeling was curiosity about which of my questions
would
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I wish
I could say they were, but the main cause is probably just that we
see trends fi
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rst—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.What we're seeing now, everyone's probably going to be seeing in
the next couple years. So I'm going to explain what we're seeing,
and what that will mean for you if you try to raise money.Super-AngelsLet me start by describing what the world of startup funding used
to look like. There used to be two sharply differentiated types
of investors: angels and venture capitalists. Angels are individual
rich people who invest small amounts of their own money, while VCs
are employees of funds that invest large amounts of other people's.For decades there were just those two types of investors, but now
a third type has appeared halfway between them: the so-called
super-angels.
[1]
And VCs have been provoked by their arrival
into making a lot of angel-style investments themselves. So the
previously sharp line between angels and VCs has become hopelessly
blurred.There used to be a no man's land between angels and VCs. Angels
would invest $20k to $50k apiece, and VCs usually a million or more.
So an angel round meant a collection of angel investments that
combined to maybe $200k, and a VC round meant a series A round in
which a single VC fund (or occasionally two) invested $1-5 million.The no man's land between angels and VCs was a very inconvenient
one for startups, because it coincided with the amount many wanted
to raise. Most startups coming out of Demo Day wanted to raise
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's more in the nature of an investment.)[2]
When one reads about the origins of the Fabian Society, it
sounds like something cooked up by the high-minded Edwardian
child-heroes of Edith Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods.[3]
According to a study by the Corporate Library, the median total
compensation, including salary, bonus, stock grants, and the exercise
of stock options, of S&P 500 CEOs in 2002 was $3.65 million.
According to Sports Illustrated, the average NBA player's
salary during the 2002-03 season was $4.54 million, and the average
major league baseball player's salary at the start of the 2003
season was $2.56 million. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, the mean annual wage in the US in 2002 was $35,560.[4]
In the early empire the price of an ordinary adult slave seems
to have been about 2,000 sestertii (e.g. Horace, Sat. ii.7.43).
A servant girl cost 600 (Martial vi.66), while Columella (iii.3.8)
says that a skilled vine-dresser was worth 8,000. A doctor, P.
Decimus Eros Merula, paid 50,000 sestertii for his freedom (Dessau,
Inscriptiones 7812). Seneca (Ep. xxvii.7) reports
that one Calvisius Sabinus paid 100,000 sestertii apiece for slaves
learned in the Greek classics. Pliny (Hist. Nat. vii.39)
says that the highest price paid for a slave up to his ti
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me was
700,000 sestertii, for the linguist (and presumably teacher)
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're given this marvellous
thing, and then poof, it's taken away. You can see why people
invent gods to explain it. But even to people who don't believe
in gods, life commands respect. There are times in most of our
lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a
sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious. As Ben
Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is
what life is made of.So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's
not what makes startups worth the trouble. What's important about
startups is the speed
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. By compressing the dull but necessary task
of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect
for life, and there is something grand about that.Notes[1]
Startups can die from releasing something full of bugs, and not
fixing them fast enough, but I don't know of any that died from
releasing something stable but minimal very early, then promptly
improving it.[2]
I know this is why I haven't released Arc. The moment I do,
I'll have people nagging me for features.[3]
A web site is different from a book or movie or desktop application
in this respect. Users judge a site not as a single snapshot, but
as an animation with multiple frames. Of the two, I'd say the rate of
improvement is more important to users than where you currently
are.[4]
It should not always tell this to users, however. For example,
MySpace is basically a replacement mall for mallrats. But it was
wiser for them, initially, to pretend that the site was about bands.[5]
Similarly, don't make
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systems like
the garbage collector.In Common Lisp I have often wanted to iterate through the fields
of a struct — to comb out references to a deleted object, for example,
or find fields that are uninitialized. I know the structs are just
vectors underneath. And yet I can't write a general purpose function
that I can call on any struct. I can only access the fields by
name, because that's what a struct is supposed to mean.A hacker may only want to subvert the intended model of things once
or twice in a big program. But what a difference it makes to be
able to. And it may be more than a question of just solving a
problem. There is a kind of pleasure here too. Hackers share the
surgeon's secret pleasure in poking about in gross innards, the
teenager's secret pleasure in popping zits. [2] For boys, at least,
certain kinds of horrors are fascinating. Maxim magazine publishes
an annual volume of photographs, containing a mix of pin-ups and
grisly accidents. They know their audience.Historically, Lisp has been good at letting hackers have their way.
The political correctness of Common Lisp is an aberration. Early
Lisps let you get your hands on everything. A good deal of that
spirit is, fortunately, preserved in macros. What a wonderful thing,
to be able to make arbitrary transformations on the source code.Classic macros are a real hacker's tool — simple, powerful, and
dangerous. It's so easy to understand what they do: you call a
function on the macro's arguments, and whatever it returns gets
inserted in place of the macro call. Hygienic macros embody the
opposite principle. They try to protect you from understanding what
they're doing. I have never heard hygienic macros explained in
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one
sentence. And
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deciding to start a company. And to reproduce that you need those
people.UniversitiesThe exciting thing is, all you need are the people. If you could
attract a critical mass of nerds and investors to live somewhere,
you could reproduce Silicon Valley. And both groups are highly
mobile. They'll go where life is good. So what makes a place good
to them?What nerds like is other nerds. Smart people will go wherever other
smart people are. And in particular, to great universities. In
theory there could be other ways to attract them, but so far
universities seem to be indispensable. Within the US, there are
no technology hubs without first-rate universities-- or at least,
first-rate computer science departments.So if you want to make a silicon valley, you not only need a
university, but one of the top handful in the world. It has to be
good enough to act as a magnet, drawing the best people from thousands
of miles away. And that means it has to stand up to existing magnets
like MIT and Stanford.This sounds hard. Actually it might be easy. My professor friends,
when they're deciding where they'd like to work, consider one thing
above all: the quality of the other faculty. What attracts professors
is good colleagues. So if you managed to recruit, en masse, a
significant number of the best young researchers, you could create
a first-rate university from nothing overnight
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. And you could do
that for surprisingly little. If you paid 200 people hiring bonuses
of $3 million apiece, you could put together a faculty that would
bear comparison with any in the world. And from that point the
chain reaction would be self-sustaining. So whatever it costs to
establish
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.Around 1000 Europe began to catch its breath.
And once they
had the luxury of curiosity, one of the first things they discovered
was what we call "the classics."
Imagine if we were visited
by aliens. If they could even get here they'd presumably know a
few things we don't. Immediately Alien Studies would become
the most dynamic field of scholarship: instead of painstakingly
discovering things for ourselves, we could simply suck up
everything they'd discovered. So it was in Europe in 1200.
When classical texts began to circulate in Europe, they contained
not just new answers, but new questions. (If anyone proved
a theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, there
is no record of it.)For a couple centuries, some of the most important work
being done wa
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s intellectual archaelogy. Those were also
the centuries during which schools were first established.
And since reading ancient texts was the essence of what
scholars did then, it became the basis of the curriculum.By 1700, someone who wanted to learn about
physics didn't need to start by mastering Greek in order to read Aristotle. But schools
change slower than scholarship: the study of
ancient texts
had such prestige that it remained the backbone of
education
until the late 19th century. By then it was merely a tradition.
It did serve some purposes: reading a foreign language was difficult,
and thus taught discipline, or at least, kept students busy;
it introduced students to
cultures quite different from their own; and its very uselessness
made it function (like white gloves) as a social bulwark.
But it certainly wasn't
true, and hadn't been true for centuries, that students were
serving apprenticeships in the hottest area of scholarship.Classical scholarship had also changed.
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the 30 to 40% of the company you usually
give up in a series A r
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ound if you do it so early.
[5]But the advantage of these medium-sized rounds is not just that
they cause less dilution. You also lose less control. After an
angel round, the founders almost always still have control of the
company, whereas after a series A round they often don't. The
traditional board structure after a series A round is two founders,
two VCs, and a (supposedly) neutral fifth person. Plus series A
terms usually give the investors a veto over various kinds of
important decisions, including selling the company. Founders usually
have a lot of de facto control after a series A, as long as things
are going well. But that's not the same as just being able to do
what you want, like you could before.A third and quite significant advantage of angel rounds is that
they're less stressful to raise. Raising a traditional series A
round has in the past taken weeks, if not months. When a VC firm
can only do 2 deals per partner per year, they're careful about
which they do. To get a traditional series A round you have to go
through a series of meetings, culminating in a full partner meeting
where the firm as a whole says yes or no. That's the really scary
part for founders: not just that series A rounds take so long, but
at the end of this long process the VCs might still say no. The
chance of getting rejected after the full partner meeting averages
about 25%. At some firms it's over 50%.Fortunately for founders, VCs have been getting a lot faster.
Nowadays Valley VCs are more likely to take 2 weeks than 2
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only a great university short of becoming a silicon valley, if they
wanted to.TimeA great university near an attractive town. Is that all it takes?
That was all it took to make the original Silicon Valley. Silicon
Valley traces its origins to William Shockley, one of the inventors
of the transistor. He did the research that won him the Nobel Prize
at Bell Labs, but when he started his own company in 1956 he moved
to Palo Alto to do it. At the time that was an odd thing to do.
Why did he? Because he had grown up there and remembered how nice
it was. Now Palo Alto is suburbia, but then it was a charming
college town-- a charming co
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llege town with perfect weather and San
Francisco only an hour away.The companies that rule Silicon Valley now are all descended in
various ways from Shockley Semiconductor. Shockley was a difficult
man, and in 1957 his top people-- "the traitorous eight"-- left to
start a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Among them were
Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who went on to found Intel, and
Eugene Kleiner, who founded the VC firm Kleiner Perkins. Forty-two
years later, Kleiner Perkins funded Google, and the partner responsible
for the deal was John Doerr, who came to Silicon Valley in 1974 to
work for Intel.So although a lot of the newest companies in Silicon Valley don't
make anything out of silicon, there always seem to be multiple links
back to Shockley. There's a lesson here: startups beget startups.
People who work for startups start their own. People who get rich
from startups fund new ones. I suspect this kind of organic growth
is the only way to produce a startup hub, because
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Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.October 2015This 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
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 76724.
subsequent performance is measured, and (c) the groups of
applicants you're comparing have roughly equal distribution of ability.How does it work? Think about what it means to be biased. What
it means for a selection process to be biased against applicants
of type x is that it's harder for them to make it through. Which
means applicants of type x have to be better to get selected than
applicants not of type x.
[1]
Which means applicants of type x
who do make it through the selection process will outperform other
successful applicants. And if the performance of all the successful
applicants is measured, you'll know if they do.Of course, the test you use to measure performance must be a valid
one. And in particular it must not be invalidated by the bias you're
trying to measure.
But there are some domains where performance can be measured, and
in those detecting bias is straightforward. Want to know if the
selection process was biased against some type of applicant? Check
whether they outperform the others. This is not just a heuristic
for detecting bias. It's what bias means.For example, many suspect that venture capital firms are biased
against female founders. This would be easy to detect: among their
portfolio companies, do startups with female founders outperform
those
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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A conditional is an if-then-else
construct. We take these for granted now. They were
invented
by McCarthy in the course of developing Lisp.
(Fortran at that time only had a conditional
goto, closely based on the branch instruction in the
underlying hardware.) McCarthy, who wa
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s on the Algol committee, got
conditionals into Algol, whence they spread to most other
languages.2. A function type. In Lisp, functions are first class
objects-- they're a data type just like integers, strings,
etc, and have a literal representation, can be stored in variables,
can be passed as arguments, and so on.3. Recursion. Recursion existed as a mathematical concept
before Lisp of course, but Lisp was the first programming language to support
it. (It's arguably implicit in making functions first class
objects.)4. A new concept of variables. In Lisp, all variables
are effectively pointers. Values are what
have types, not variables, and assigning or binding
variables means copying pointers, not what they point to.5. Garbage-collection.6. Programs composed of expressions. Lisp programs are
trees of expressions, each of which returns a value.
(In some Lisps expressions
can return multiple values.) This is in contrast to Fortran
and most succeeding languages, which distinguish between
expressions and statements.It was natural to have this
distinction in Fortran because (not surprisingly in a language
where the input format was punched cards) the language was
line-oriented. You could not nest statements. And
so while you needed expressions for math to work, there was
no point in making anything else return a value, because
there could not be anything waiting for it.This limitation
went away with the arrival of block-structured languages,
but by then
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Nicole Ford in Sexbuzz.Com ("the ultimate men's
entertainment magazine").Dressing
down loses appeal as men suit up at the office writes Tenisha
Mercer of The Detroit News.
Now that so many news articles are online, I suspect you could find
a similar pattern for most trend stories placed by PR firms. I
propose we call this new sport "PR diving," and I'm sure there are
far more striking examples out there than this clump of five stories.OnlineAfter spending years chasing them, it's now second nature
to me to recognize press hits for what they are. But before we
hired a PR firm I had no idea where articles in the mainstream media
came from. I could tell a lot of them were crap, but I didn't
realize why.Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where
you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether
the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be
a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step
further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth,
but why he's writing about this subject at all.Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who
publish online write what they write for the simple reason that
they want to. You
can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as
you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons,
though they may not c
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onsciously realize it, that readers trust
bloggers more than Business Week.I was talking recently to a friend who works for a
big newspaper. He thought the print media were in serious trouble,
and that they were still mostly in denial about it. "They think
the decline is cyclic," he said.
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many universities
competing to attract students that the mere establishment of
a discipline requires little more than the desire to do it.High schools imitate universities.
And so once university
English departments were established in the late nineteenth century,
the 'riting component of the 3 Rs
was morphed into English.
With the bizarre consequence that high school students now
had to write about English literature-- to write, without
even realizing it, imitations of whatever
English professors had been publishing in their journals a
few decades before. It's no wonder if this seems to the
student a pointless exercise, because we're now three steps
removed from real work: the students are imitating English
professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are
merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what
was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.Perhaps high schools should drop English and just teach writing.
The valuable part of English classes is learning to write, and
that could be taught better by itself. Students learn better
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when they're interested in what they're doing, and it's hard
to imagine a topic less interesting than symbolism in Dickens.
Most of the people who write about that sort of thing professionally
are not really interested in it. (Though indeed, it's been a
while since they were writing about symbolism; now they're
writing about gender.)I have no illusions about how eagerly this suggestion will
be adopted. Public schools probably couldn't stop teaching
English even if they wanted to; they're probably required to by
law. But here's a related suggestion that goes with the grain
instead of against it: that universities establish a
writing major. Many of the students who now major in English
would major in writing if they could, and most would
be better off.It will be argued that it is
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get better terms. Deals are
dynamic; unless you're negotiating with someone unusually honest,
there's not a single point where you shake hands and the deal's
done. There are usually a lot of subsidiary questions to be cleared
up after the handshake, and if the other side senses weakness-- if
they sense you need this deal-- they will be very tempted to screw
you in the details.VCs and corp dev guys are professional negotiators. They're trained
to take advantage of weakness.
[8]
So while they're often nice
guys, they just can't help it. And as pros they do this more than
you. So don't even try to bluff them. The only way a startup can
have any leverage in a deal is genuinely not to need it. And if
you don't believe in a deal, you'll be less likely to depend on it.So I want to plant a hypnotic suggestion in your heads: when you
hear someone say the words "we want to invest in you" or "we want
to acquire you," I want the following phrase to appear automatically
in your head: don't get your hopes up. Just continue running
your company as if this deal didn't exist. Nothing is more likely
to make it close.The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting
lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors
and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money i
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n your face.
Speed, not MoneyThe way I've described it, starting a startup sounds pretty stressful.
It is. When I talk to the founders of the companies we've funded,
they all say the same thing: I knew it would be hard, but I didn't
realize it would be this hard.So why do it? It would be worth enduring a
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years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't
mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous
drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without.
Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful.
More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful
about.Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world
becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a
normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal"
is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the
sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a
piece of machinery: what works best.These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone
trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of
the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced.
You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if
people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things.
I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first
appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through
a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a
(statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We
had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of
my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking
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, customs changed.
In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something
that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something
movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of
addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of
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In that case the money invested
in the angel round just converts into stock at the valuation of the
next round, no matter how large. Angels and super-angels tend not
to like uncapped notes. They have no idea how much of the company
they're buying. If the company does well and the valuation of the
next round is high, they may end up with only a sliver of it. So
by agreeing to uncapped notes, VCs who don't care about valuations
in angel rounds can make offers that super-angels hate to match.[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.April 2012A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the
biggest 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.The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are
all err
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ors of omission. You forget your dreams, ignore your family,
suppress your feelings, neglect your friends, and forget to be
happy. Errors of omission are a particularly dangerous type of
mistake, because you make them by default.I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid
mist
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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]No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing
numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like
too much.
[2]As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much.
The closest is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has
become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why:
there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the
extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been
transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in
food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the
buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers
and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille.
TV has become much more engaging, and
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even so it can't compete with Facebook.The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless
the forms of technological progress that produced these things are
subject to different laws than technological progress in general,
the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did
in the last 40.The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't
mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous
drug, but I'd rather live in a
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to go sideways or
even backwards to get there.The current record holder for flexibility may be Daniel Gross of
Grepli
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n. He applied to YC with
some bad ecommerce idea. We told
him we'd fund him if he did something else. He thought for a second,
and said ok. He then went through two more ideas before settling
on Greplin. He'd only been working on it for a couple days when
he presented to investors at Demo Day, but he got a lot of interest.
He always seems to land on his feet.
3. ImaginationIntelligence does matter a lot of course. It seems like the type
that matters most is imagination. It's not so important to be able
to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to come up with
surprising new ideas. In the startup world, most good ideas
seem
bad initially. If they were obviously good, someone would already
be doing them. So you need the kind of intelligence that produces
ideas with just the right level of craziness.Airbnb is that kind of idea.
In fact, when we funded Airbnb, we
thought it was too crazy. We couldn't believe large numbers of
people would want to stay in other people's places. We funded them
because we liked the founders so much. As soon as we heard they'd
been supporting themselves by selling Obama and McCain branded
breakfast cereal, they were in. And it turned out the idea was on
the right side of crazy after all.
4. NaughtinessThough the most successful founders are usually good people, they
tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody
Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big
questions right, but not
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to a startup founder about whether it might
be good to add a social component to their software. He said he
didn't think so, because the whole social thing was tapped out.
Really? So in a hundred years the only social networking sites
will be the Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Del.icio.us? Not likely.There is always room for new stuff. At every point in history,
even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering
things that made everyone say "why didn't anyone think of that
before?" We know this continued to be true up till 2004, when the
Facebook was founded-- though strictly speaking someone else did
think of that.The reason we don't see the opportunities all around us is that we
adjust to however things are, and assume that's how things have to
be. For example, it would seem crazy to most people to try to make
a better search engine than Google. Surely that field, at least,
is tapped out. Really? In a hundred years-- or even twenty-- are
people still going to search for information using something like
the current Google? Even Google probably does
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n't think that.In particular, I don't think there's any limit to the number of
startups. Sometimes you hear people saying "All these guys starting
startups now are going to be disappointed. How many little startups
are Google and Yahoo going to buy, after all?" That sounds cleverly
skeptical, but I can prove it's mistaken. No one proposes that
there's some limit to the number of people who can be employed in
an economy consisting of big, slow-moving companies with a couple
thousand people each. Why should there be any limit to the number
who could be employed by small, fast-moving companies with ten each?
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your ideas about what you want from being contaminated
by what seems possible.
[6]It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe
the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their
expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street
if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most
would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement
of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because
the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow
got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the
next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require
a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every
day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do
work they love—that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really?
How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcing
people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't been
invoked for over 30 years. All we can do is encourage people to
do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.If there's something people still won't do, it seem
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s as if society
just has to make do without. That's what happened with domestic
servants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job
"someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servants
practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just
had to do without.So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a good
chance anyone saying that about any particular job
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think,
how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?, thereby continuing
the cycle.It's tricky to keep the two forces balanced. In young hackers,
optimism predominates. They produce something, are convinced it's
great, and never improve it. In old hackers, skepticism predominates,
and they won't even dare to take on ambitious projects.Anything you can do to keep the redesign cycle going is good. Prose
can be rewritten over and over until you're happy with it. But
software, as a rule, doesn't get redesigned enough. Prose has
readers, but software has users. If a writer rewrites an essay,
people who read the old version are unlikely to complain that their
thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility.Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your
language, but they can also deter you from improving it. So choose
your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having
users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it. Also,
as a general rule, you can at any given time get away with changing
more than you think. Introducing change is like pulling off a
bandage: the pain is a memory almost as soon as you feel it.Everyone knows that it's not a good idea to have a language designed
by a committee. Committees yield bad design. But I think the worst
danger of comm
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ittees is that they interfere with redesign. It is
so much work to introduce changes that no one wants to bother.
Whatever a committee decides tends to stay that way, even if most
of the members don't like it.Even a committee of two gets in the way of redesign. This happens
particularly in the interfaces between pieces of software written
by two different people. To change the interface both have to agree
to change it
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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
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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.December 2014If 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.Is it possible to avoid that? Can you protect yourself against
obsolete beliefs? To some extent, yes. I spent almost a decade
investing in early stage startups, and curiously enough protecting
yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do
to succeed as a startup investor. Most really good startup ideas
look like bad ideas at first
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etc, and have
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a literal representation, can be stored in variables,
can be passed as arguments, and so on.3. Recursion. Recursion existed as a mathematical concept
before Lisp of course, but Lisp was the first programming language to support
it. (It's arguably implicit in making functions first class
objects.)4. A new concept of variables. In Lisp, all variables
are effectively pointers. Values are what
have types, not variables, and assigning or binding
variables means copying pointers, not what they point to.5. Garbage-collection.6. Programs composed of expressions. Lisp programs are
trees of expressions, each of which returns a value.
(In some Lisps expressions
can return multiple values.) This is in contrast to Fortran
and most succeeding languages, which distinguish between
expressions and statements.It was natural to have this
distinction in Fortran because (not surprisingly in a language
where the input format was punched cards) the language was
line-oriented. You could not nest statements. And
so while you needed expressions for math to work, there was
no point in making anything else return a value, because
there could not be anything waiting for it.This limitation
went away with the arrival of block-structured languages,
but by then it was too late. The distinction between
expressions and statements was entrenched. It spread from
Fortran into Algol and thence to both their descendants.When a language is made entirely of expressions, you can
compose expressions however you want. You can say either
(using Arc syntax)(if foo (= x 1) (= x 2))or(= x (if foo 1 2))7. A symbol type. Symbols differ from strings in that
you can test equality by comparing a pointer.8. A notation for code using trees of symbols.
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less abstract language, especially since it
may be slightly faster. And if you're writing a short, throwaway
program, you may be better off just using whatever language has
the best library functions for the task. But in general, for
application software, you want to be using the most powerful
(reasonably efficient) language you can get, and using anything
else is a mistake, of exactly the same kind, though possibly in a
lesser degree, as programming in machine language.You can see that machine language is very low level. But, at least
as a kind of social convention, high-level languages are often all
treated as equivalent. They're not. Technically the term "high-level
language" doesn't mean anything very definite. There's no dividing
line with machine languages on one side and all the high-level
languages on the other. Languages fall along a continuum [4] of
abstractness, from the most powerful all the way down to machine
languages, which themselves vary in power.Consider Cobol. Cobol is a high-level language, in the sense tha
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t
it gets compiled into machine language. Would anyone seriously
argue that Cobol is equivalent in power to, say, Python? It's
probably closer to machine language than Python.Or how about Perl 4? Between Perl 4 and Perl 5, lexical closures
got added to the language. Most Perl hackers would agree that Perl
5 is more powerful than Perl 4. But once you've admitted that,
you've admitted that one high level language can be more powerful
than another. And it follows inexorably that, except in special
cases, you ought to use the most powerful you can get.This idea is rarely followed to its conclusion, though. After a
certain age, programmers rarely
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aries-- of Beckman Instruments and Fairchild Camera and
Instrument respectively. Those companies were apparently willing
to establish subsidiaries wherever the experts wanted to live.Venture investors, however, prefer to fund startups within an hour's
drive. For one, they're more likely to notice startups nearby.
But when they do notice startups in other towns they prefer them
to move. They don't want to have to travel to attend board meetings,
and in any case the odds of succeeding are higher in a startup hub.The centralizing effect of venture firms is a double one: they cause
startups to form around them, and those draw in more startups through
acquisitions. And although the first may be weakening because it's
now so cheap to start some startups, the second seems as strong as ever.
Three of the most admired
"Web 2.0" companies were started outside the usual startup hubs,
but two of them have already been reeled in through acquisitions.Such centralizing forces make it harder for new silicon valleys to
get started. But by no means impossible. Ultimately power rests
with the founders. A startup with the best people will beat one
with funding fro
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m famous VCs, and a startup that was sufficiently
successful would never have to move. So a town that
could exert enough pull over the right people could resist and
perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley.For all its power, Silicon Valley has a great weakness: the paradise
Shockley found in 1956 is now one giant parking lot. San Francisco
and Berkeley are great, but they're forty miles away. Silicon
Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl. It
has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the
soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities. But a competitor
that managed to avoid sprawl would have real
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of it — the things
to remember if you want to prepare yourself to start a startup.
CounterintuitiveThe first item on it is the fact I already mentioned: that startups
are so weird that if you trust your instincts, you'll make a lot
of mistakes. If you know nothing more than this, you may at least
pause before making them.When I was running Y Combinator I used to joke that our function
was to tell founders things they would ignore. It's really true.
Batch after batch, the YC partners warn founders about mistakes
they're about to make, and the founders ignore them, and then come
back a year later and say "I wish we'd listened."Why do the founders ignore the partners' advice? Well, that's the
thing about counterintuitive ideas: they contradict your intuitions.
They seem wrong. So of course your first impulse is to disregard
them. And in fact my joking description is not merely the curse
of Y Combinator but part of its raison d'etre. If founders' instincts
already gave them the right answers, they wouldn't need us. You
only need other people to give you advice that surprises you. That's
why there are a lot of ski instructors and not many running
instructors.
[1]You can, however, trust your instincts about people. And in fact
one of the most common mistakes young founders make is not to
do that enough. They get involved wit
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h people who seem impressive,
but about whom they feel some misgivings personally. Later when
things blow up they say "I knew there was something off about him,
but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive."If you're thinking about getting involved with someone — as a
cofounder, an employee, an investor, or an acquirer —
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Also,
as a general rule, you can at any given time get away with changing
more than you think. Introducing change is like pulling off a
bandage: the pain is a memory almost as soon as you feel it.Everyone knows that it's not a good idea to have a language designed
by a committee. Committees yield bad design. But I think the worst
danger of committees is that they interfere with redesign. It is
so much work to introduce changes that no one wants to bother.
Whatever a committee decides tends to stay that way, even if most
of the members don't like it.Even a committee of two gets in the way of redesign. This happens
particularly in the interfaces between pieces of software written
by two different people. To change the interface both have to agree
to change it at once. And so interfaces tend not to change at all,
which is a problem because they tend to be one of the most ad hoc
parts of any system.One solution here might be to design systems so that interfaces
are horizontal instead of vertical — so that modules are always
vertically stacked strata of abstraction. Then the interface will
tend to be owned by one of them. The lower of two levels will either
be a language in which the upper is written, in which case the
lower level will own the interface, or it will be a slave, in which
case the interface can be dictated
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by the upper level.11 LispWhat all this implies is that there is hope for a new Lisp. There
is hope for any language that gives hackers what they want, including
Lisp. I think we may have made a mistake in thinking that hackers
are turned off by Lisp's strangeness. This comforting illusion may
have prevented us from seeing the real problem with Lisp, or at
least Common Lisp, which is that it sucks for doing what
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the final whistle, the fatigue
hits you like a wave. To talk to corp dev is to let yourself feel
it mid-game.[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
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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 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."
I recommend this answer to anyone who doesn't like being asked what
they do. The conversation will turn immediately to other topics.I don't consider myself to be doing research on programming languages.
I'm just designing one, in the same way that someone might design
a building or a chair or a new typeface.
I'm not trying to discover anything new. I just want
to make a language that will be good to program in. In some ways,
this assumption makes life a lot easier.The difference between design and research seems to be a question
of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to
be good. Research doesn't
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rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other
skill. What causes people to react so
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strongly when the skill is
making money?I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different:
the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable
way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and
the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for
society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second
outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a
modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?The Daddy Model of WealthWhen I was five I thought electricity was created by electric
sockets. I didn't realize there were power plants out there
generating it. Likewise, it doesn't occur to most kids that wealth
is something that has to be generated. It seems to be something
that flows from parents.Because of the circumstances in which they encounter it, children
tend to misunderstand wealth. They confuse it with money. They
think that there is a fixed amount of it. And they think of it as
something that's distributed by authorities (and so should be
distributed equally), rather than something that has to be created
(and might be created unequally).In fact, wealth is not money. Money is just a convenient way of
trading one form of wealth for another. Wealth is the underlying
stuff—the goods and services we buy. When you travel to a
rich or poor country, you don't have to look at people's bank
accounts to tell which kind you're in. You can see
wealth—in buildings and streets, in the clothes and the health
of the people
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's not likely to be something
you can fix by writing library functions.[4] Note to nerds: or possibly a lattice, narrowing toward the top;
it's not the shape that matters here but the idea that there is at
least a partial order.[5] It is a bit misleading to treat macros as a separate feature.
In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other Lisp
features like lexical closures and rest parameters.[6] As a result, comparisons of programming languages either take
the form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly
neutral that they're really works of anthropology. People who
value their peace, or want tenure, avoid the topic. But the question
is only half a religious one; there is something there worth
studying, especially if you want to design new languages.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
October 2014(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class 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.Startups are very counterintuitive. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's
just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet.
But whatever the reason, starting a startup is a task where you
can't always trust you
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r instincts.It's like skiing in that way. When you first try skiing and you
want to slow down, your instinct is to lean back. But if you lean
back on skis you
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you a practical
tip: Don't underestimate qualification. It's an important skill in
its own right, not just a sort of tax you have to pay in order to
avoid saying things that are false. So learn and use its full range.
It may not be fully half of having good ideas, but it's part of
having them.There's one other quality I aim for in essays: to say things as
simply as possible. But I don't think this is a component of
usefulness. It's more a matter of consideration for the reader. And
it's a practical aid in getting things right; a mistake is more
obvious when expressed in simple language. But I'll admit that the
main reason I write simply is not for the reader's sake or because
it helps get things right, but because it bothers me to use more
or fancier words than I need to. It seems inelegant, like a program
th
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at's too long.I realize florid writing works for some people. But unless you're
sure you're one of them, the best advice is to write as simply as
you can._____
I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty +
correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay. But I should
warn you that it's also a recipe for making people mad.The root of the problem is novelty. When you tell people something
they didn't know, they don't always thank you for it. Sometimes the
reason people don't know something is because they don't want to
know it. Usually because it contradicts some cherished belief. And
indeed, if you're looking for novel ideas, popular but mistaken
beliefs are a good place to find them. Every popular mistaken belief
creates a dead zone of ideas around
it that are relatively unexplored because they contradict it.The strength
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average
trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough
articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for
"content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim,
if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times
and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and
find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen
to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press
hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed
to crack the print edition of the Times. [3]The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity.
You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as if
you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it
seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought
of themselves.Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on
some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the
Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral
enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote
it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20%
of the online store market.This was roughly true. We really did have the biggest share of the
online store market, and 5000 was our best guess at its size. But
the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite.Reporters like definitive statements. For example, many of the
stories about Jeremy Jaynes's conviction say that
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he was one of the
10 worst spammers. This "fact"
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won't be
offended. And you in turn will be guaranteed to be spared one of
the worst experiences that can happen to a startup.If you do want to sell, there's another set of
techniques
for doing
that. But the biggest mistake founders make in dealing with corp
dev is not doing a bad job of talking to them when they're ready
to, but talking to them before they are. So if you remember only
the title of this essay, you already know most of what you need to
know about M&A in the first year.Notes[1]
I'm not saying you should never sell. I'm saying you should
be clear in your own mind about whether you
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want to sell or not,
and not be led by manipulation or wishful thinking into trying to
sell earlier than you otherwise would have.[2]
In a startup, as in most competitive sports, the task at hand
almost does this for you; you're too busy to feel tired. But when
you lose that protection, e.g. at the final whistle, the fatigue
hits you like a wave. To talk to corp dev is to let yourself feel
it mid-game.[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 2003(This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting
of NEPLS.)Visitors to this country are often surprised
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if
you're running a big company and you do everything the way the
average big company does it, you ca
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n expect to do as well as the
average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course.
If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should
expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance
means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups
is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup,
you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.Back in 1995, we knew something that I don't think our competitors
understood, and few understand even now: when you're writing
software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use
any language you want. When you're writing desktop software,
there's a strong bias toward writing applications in the same
language as the operating system. Ten years ago, writing applications
meant writing applications in C. But with Web-based software,
especially when you have the source code of both the language and
the operating system, you can use whatever language you want.This new freedom is a double-edged sword, however. Now that you
can use any language, you have to think about which one to use.
Companies that try to pretend nothing has changed risk finding that
their competitors do not.If you can use any language, which do you use? We chose Lisp.
For one thing, it was obvious that rapid development would be
important in this market. We were all starting from scratch, so
a company that could get new features done before its competitors
would have a big advantage. We knew Lisp was a really good language
for writing software quickly, and server
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compiler when other languages are parsed. But these
parse trees are fully accessible to your programs. You can write
programs that manipulate them. In Lisp, these programs are called
macros. They are programs that write programs.Programs that write programs? When would you ever want to do that?
Not very often, if you think in Cobol. All the time, if you think
in Lisp. I
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t would be convenient here if I could give an example
of a powerful macro, and say there! how about that? But if I did,
it would just look like gibberish to someone who didn't know Lisp;
there isn't room here to explain everything you'd need to know to
understand what it meant. In
Ansi Common Lisp I tried to move
things along as fast as I could, and even so I didn't get to macros
until page 160.But I think I can give a kind of argument that might be convincing.
The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25%
macros. Macros are harder to write than ordinary Lisp functions,
and it's considered to be bad style to use them when they're not
necessary. So every macro in that code is there because it has to
be. What that means is that at least 20-25% of the code in this
program is doing things that you can't easily do in any other
language. However skeptical the Blub programmer might be about my
claims for the mysterious powers of Lisp, this ought to make him
curious. We weren't writing this code for our own amusement. We
were a tiny startup, programming as hard as we could in order to
put technical barriers between us and our competitors.A suspicious person might begin to wonder if there was some
correlation here. A
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Philosophy
101. And yet my plan to study philosophy remained intact. It was
my fault I hadn't learned anything. I hadn't read the books we
were assigned carefully enough. I'd give Berkeley's Principles
of Human Knowledge another shot in college. Anything so admired
and so difficult to read must have something in it, if one could
only figure out what.Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley. I have
a nice edition of his collected works. Will I ever read it? Seems
unlikely.Th
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e difference between then and now is that now I understand why
Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand. I think I see
now what went wrong with philosophy, and how we might fix it.WordsI did end up being a philosophy major for most of college. It
didn't work out as I'd hoped. I didn't learn any magical truths
compared to which everything else was mere domain knowledge. But
I do at least know now why I didn't. Philosophy doesn't really
have a subject matter in the way math or history or most other
university subjects do. There is no core of knowledge one must
master. The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various
individual philosophers have said about different topics over the
years. Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten
who discovered what they discovered.Formal logic has some subject matter. I took several classes in
logic. I don't know if I learned anything from them.
[1]
It does seem to me very important to be able to flip ideas around in
one's head: to see when two ideas don't fully cover the space of
possibilities, or when one idea is the same as another but with a
couple things changed. But did studying logic
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love; it must be, if so few do. So don't
underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded
yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented,
you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If
you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you
find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not
necessarily, but probably.Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so
much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding
work you love does usually require discipline. Some peop
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le are
lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just
glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the
exception. More often people who do great things have careers with
the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A,
drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after
taking it up on the side.Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of
energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping
out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself.
Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments
early on, when they're trying to find their niche.Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to
try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't
like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction
as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get
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ging
it energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup.
And indeed, probably also the best way to live.
[9]But although I can't explain in the general case what counts as an
interesting problem, I can tell you about a large subset of them.
If you think of technology as something that's spreading like a
sort of fractal stain, every moving point on the edge represents
an interesting problem. So one guaranteed way to turn your mind
into the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to the
leading edge of some technology — to cause yourself, as Paul
Buchheit put it, to "live in the future." When you reach that point,
ideas that will seem to other people uncannily prescient will seem
obvious to you. You may not realize they're startup ideas, but
you'll know they're something that ought to exist.For example, back at Harvard in the mid 90s a fellow grad student
of my friends Robert and Trevor wrote his own voice over IP software.
He didn't mean it to be a startup, and he never tried to turn it
into one. He just wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan without
paying for long distance calls, and since he was an expert on
networks it seemed obvious to him that the way to do it was turn
the sound into packets and ship it over the Internet. He never did
any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this
is exactly the
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way the best startups get started.So strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want
to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational
version of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the classic
version of college as education for its own sake. If you want to
start a startup after college,
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good languages from bad ones, because feedback from real live users
always leads to improvements. Look at how much any popular language
has changed during its life. Perl and Fortran are extreme cases,
but even Lisp has changed a lot. Lisp 1.5 didn't have macros, for
example; these evolved later, after hackers at MIT had spent a
couple years using Lisp to write real programs. [1]So whether or not a language has to be good to be popular, I think
a language has to be popular to be good. And it has to stay popular
to stay good. The state of the art in programming languages doesn't
stand still. And yet the Lisps we have today are still pretty much
what they had at MIT in the mid-1980s, because that's the last time
Lisp had a sufficiently large and demanding user base.Of course, hackers have to know about a language before they can
use it. How are they to hear? From other hackers. But there has to
be some initial group of hackers using the language for others even
to hear about it. I wonder how large this group has to be; how many
users make a critical mass? Off the top of my head, I'd say twenty.
If a language had twenty separate users, me
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aning twenty users who
decided on their own to use it, I'd consider it to be real.Getting there can't be easy. I would not be surprised if it is
harder to get from zero to twenty than from twenty to a thousand.
The best way to get those initial twenty users is probably to use
a trojan horse: to give people an application they want, which
happens to be written in the new language.2 External FactorsLet's start by acknowledging one external factor that does affect
the popularity of a programming language. To become
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of my friends Robert and Trevor wrote his own voice over IP software.
He didn't mean it to be a startup, and he never tried to turn it
into one. He just wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan without
paying for long distance calls, and since he was an expert on
networks it seemed obvious to him that the way to do it was turn
the sound into packets and ship it over the Internet. He never did
any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this
is exactly the way the best startups get started.So strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want
to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational
version of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the clas
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sic
version of college as education for its own sake. If you want to
start a startup after college, what you should do in college is
learn powerful things. And if you have genuine intellectual
curiosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just
follow your own inclinations.
[10]The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain
expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert
on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be
driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for
curiosity. And you'll do it best if you introduce the ulterior
motive toward the end of the process.So here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders,
boiled down to two words: just learn.
Notes[1]
Some founders listen more than others, and this tends to be a
predictor of success. One of the things I
remember about the Airbnbs during YC is how intently they listened.[2
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it will take years.The short term forecast is more competition between investors, which
is good news for you. The super-angels will try to undermine the
VCs by acting faster, and the VCs will try to undermine the
super-angels by driving up valuations. Which for founders will
result in the perfect combination: funding rounds that close fast,
with high valuations.But remember that to get that combination, your startup will have
to appeal to both super-angels and VCs. If you don't seem like you
have the potential to go public, you won't be able to use VCs to
drive up the valuation of an angel round.There is a danger of having VCs in an angel round: the so-called
signalling risk. If VCs are only doing it in the hope of investing
more later, what happens if they don't? That's a signal to everyone
else that they think you're lame.How much should you worry about that? The seriousness of signalling
risk depends on how far along you are. If by the next time you
need to raise money, you have graphs showing rising revenue or
traffic month after month, you don't have to worry about any signals
your
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existing investors are sending. Your results will speak for
themselves.
[7]Whereas if the next time you need to raise money you won't yet have
concrete results, you may need to think more about the message your
investors might send if they don't invest more. I'm not sure yet
how much you have to worry, because this whole phenomenon of VCs
doing angel investments is so new. But my instincts tell me you
don't have to worry much. Signalling risk smells like one of those
things founders worry about that's not a real problem.
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time someone asks
him. He knows that people sometimes ask for things that they turn
out not to want. To avoid wasting his time, he waits till the third
or fourth time he's asked to do something; by then, whoever
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's asking
him may be fairly annoyed, but at least they probably really do
want whatever they're asking for.Most people have learned to do a similar sort of filtering on new
things they hear about. They don't even start paying attention
until they've heard about something ten times. They're perfectly
justified: the majority of hot new whatevers do turn out to be a
waste of time, and eventually go away. By delaying learning VRML,
I avoided having to learn it at all.So anyone who invents something new has to expect to keep repeating
their message for years before people will start to get it. We
wrote what was, as far as I know, the first web-server based
application, and it took us years to get it through to people that
it didn't have to be downloaded. It wasn't that they were stupid.
They just had us tuned out.The good news is, simple repetition solves the problem. All you
have to do is keep telling your story, and eventually people will
start to hear. It's not when people notice you're there that they
pay attention; it's when they notice you're still there.It's just as well that it usually takes a while to gain momentum.
Most technologies evolve a good deal even after they're first
launched — programming languages especially. Nothing could be better,
for a new techology, than a few years of being used only by a small
number of early adopters. Early adopters are sophisticated and
demanding, and quickly flush out whatever flaws remain in your
technology. When you only have a few users you can be in
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only if he mastered a new kind of farming.I've seen the lever of technology grow visibly in my own time. In
high school I made money by mowing lawns and scooping ice cream at
Baskin-Robbins. This was the only kind of work available at the
time. Now high school kids could write software or design web
sites. But only some of them will; the rest will still be scooping
ice cream.I remember very vividly when in 1985 improved technology made it
possible for me to buy a computer of my own. Within months I was
using it to make money as a freelance programmer. A few years
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before, I couldn't have done this. A few years before, there was
no such thing as a freelance programmer. But Apple created
wealth, in the form of powerful, inexpensive computers, and programmers
immediately set to work using it to create more.As this example suggests, the rate at which technology increases
our productive capacity is probably exponential, rather than linear.
So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in individual
productivity as time goes on. Will that increase the gap between
rich and the poor? Depends which gap you mean.Technology should increase the gap in income, but it seems to
decrease other gaps. A hundred years ago, the rich led a different
kind of life from ordinary people. They lived in houses
full of servants, wore elaborately uncomfortable clothes, and
travelled about in carriages drawn by teams of horses which themselves
required their own houses and servants. Now, thanks to technology,
the rich live more like the average person.Cars are a good example of why. It's possible to buy expensive,
handmade cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there
is not much point
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't realize there were power plants out there
generating it. Likewise, it doesn't occur to most kids tha
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t wealth
is something that has to be generated. It seems to be something
that flows from parents.Because of the circumstances in which they encounter it, children
tend to misunderstand wealth. They confuse it with money. They
think that there is a fixed amount of it. And they think of it as
something that's distributed by authorities (and so should be
distributed equally), rather than something that has to be created
(and might be created unequally).In fact, wealth is not money. Money is just a convenient way of
trading one form of wealth for another. Wealth is the underlying
stuff—the goods and services we buy. When you travel to a
rich or poor country, you don't have to look at people's bank
accounts to tell which kind you're in. You can see
wealth—in buildings and streets, in the clothes and the health
of the people.Where does wealth come from? People make it. This was easier to
grasp when most people lived on farms, and made many of the things
they wanted with their own hands. Then you could see in the house,
the herds, and the granary the wealth that each family created. It
was obvious then too that the wealth of the world was not a fixed
quantity that had to be shared out, like slices of a pie. If you
wanted more wealth, you could make it.This is just as true today, though few of us create wealth directly
for ourselves (except for a few vestigial domestic tasks). Mostly
we create wealth for other people in exchange for money, which we
then trade for the forms of wealth we want.
[1]Because kids are unable to
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pretty stressful.
It is. When I talk to the founders of the companies we've funded,
they all say the same thing: I knew it would be hard, but I didn't
realize it would be this hard.So why do it? It would be worth enduring a lot of pain and stress
to do something g
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rand or heroic, but just to make money? Is making
money really that important?No, not really. It seems ridiculous to me when people take business
too seriously. I regard making money as a boring errand to be got
out of the way as soon as possible. There is nothing grand or
heroic about starting a startup per se.So why do I spend so much time thinking about startups? I'll tell
you why. Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get
rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and
a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it
drag on through your whole life.
[9]We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly
miraculous. It is also palpably short. You're given this marvellous
thing, and then poof, it's taken away. You can see why people
invent gods to explain it. But even to people who don't believe
in gods, life commands respect. There are times in most of our
lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a
sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious. As Ben
Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is
what life is made of.So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's
not what makes startups
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technological progress to areas where you
wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state.
And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects.
"Good" and "bad" technological progress aren't sh
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arply differentiated,
so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the
former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the "war on drugs"
show, bans often do more harm than good.[2]
Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic
standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic
period.[3]
Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent
resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction
to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if
their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God. But
that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to
say no to drugs. You end up saying no to
science as well.
I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people
plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books
a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the
government.[4]
People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe
what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe
what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it
procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.[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
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don't. And if they have deep
domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.
[1]Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but disproportionately
likely to be interesting. When the average person proposes an
implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their
incompetence. But whe
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n a reasonable domain expert does it, the
situation is reversed. There's something like an efficient market
here: on average the ideas that seem craziest will, if correct,
have the biggest effect. So if you can eliminate the theory that
the person proposing an implausible-sounding idea is incompetent,
its implausibility switches from evidence that it's boring to
evidence that it's exciting.
[2]Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be.
They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently
high expected value. And I think on average they do. I think if you
bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by
reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.The reason is that everyone is too conservative. The word "paradigm"
is overused, but this is a case where it's warranted. Everyone is
too much in the grip of the current paradigm. Even the people who
have the new ideas undervalue them initially. Which means that
before they reach the stage of proposing them publicly, they've
already subjected them to an excessively strict filter.
[3]The wise response to such an idea is not to make statements, but
to ask questions, because there's a real mystery here. Why has this
smart and reasonable person proposed an idea that seems so wrong?
Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be. If you're the
one who's mistaken, that would be good to know, because it
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people writing the actual
applications wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating
memory. Instead of writing Word directly in C, they'd be plugging
together big Lego blocks of Word-language. (Duplo, I believe, is
the technical term.)ClumpingAlong with interesting problems, what good hackers like is other
good hackers. Great hackers tend to clump together-- sometimes
spectacularly so, as at Xerox Parc. So you won't
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attract good
hackers in linear proportion to how good an environment you create
for them. The tendency to clump means it's more like the square
of the environment. So it's winner take all. At any given time,
there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to
work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer
great hackers, you'll have zero.Having great hackers is not, by itself, enough to make a company
successful. It works well for Google and ITA, which are two of
the hot spots right now, but it didn't help Thinking Machines or
Xerox. Sun had a good run for a while, but their business model
is a down elevator. In that situation, even the best hackers can't
save you.I think, though, that all other things being equal, a company that
can attract great hackers will have a huge advantage. There are
people who would disagree with this. When we were making the rounds
of venture capital firms in the 1990s, several told us that software
companies didn't win by writing great software, but through brand,
and dominating channels, and doing the right deals.They really seemed to believe this, and I think I know why. I
think what a lot of VCs are looking for, at
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time to start a startup. More people are starting
startups, but not as many more as could. Most college graduates
still think they have to get a job. The average person can't ignore
something that's been beaten into their head since they were three
just because serving web pages recently got a lot cheaper.And i
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n any case, competitors are not the biggest threat. Way more
startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors. There
are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal
disputes, inertia, and ignoring users. Each is, by itself, enough
to kill you. But if I had to pick the worst, it would be ignoring
users. If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die,
here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know
everyone is going to love, and that's what they're going to build,
no matter what.Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If companies stuck to
their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages,
and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. In both cases
their customers told them what their business should be-- and they
were smart enough to listen.As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than
the imagination of man. You'll find more interesting things by
looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking.
This principle is very powerful. It's why the best abstract painting
still falls short of Leonardo, for example. And it applies to
startups too. No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the
ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam
of users.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.I now have enough experience with startups to
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-- one quantum
of making users' lives better.As with exercise, improvements beget improvements. If you run every
day, you'll probably feel like running tomorrow. But if you skip
running for a couple weeks, it will be an effort to drag yourself
out. So it is with hacking: the more ideas you implement, the more
ideas you'll have. You should make your system better at least in
some small way every day or two.This is not just a good way to get development done; it is also a
form of marketing. Users love a site that's constantly improving.
In fact, users expect a site to improve. Imagine if you visited a
site that seemed very good, and then returned two months later and
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not one thing had changed. Wouldn't it start to seem lame?
[3]They'll like you even better when you improve in response to their
comments, because customers are used to companies ignoring them.
If you're the rare exception-- a company that actually listens--
you'll generate fanatical loyalty. You won't need to advertise,
because your users will do it for you.This seems obvious too, so why do I have to keep repeating it? I
think the problem here is that people get used to how things are.
Once a product gets past the stage where it has glaring flaws, you
start to get used to it, and gradually whatever features it happens
to have become its identity. For example, I doubt many people at
Yahoo (or Google for that matter) realized how much better web mail
could be till Paul Buchheit showed them.I think the solution is to assume that anything you've made is far
short of what it could be. Force yourself, as a sort of intellectual
exercise, to keep thinking of improvements. Ok, sure, what you
have is
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it's sometimes better to say something
slightly misleading and then add the co
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rrection than to try to get
an idea right in one shot. That can be more efficient, and can also
model the way such an idea would be discovered.But I don't think you should explicitly forestall intentional
misinterpretations in the body of an essay. An essay is a place to
meet honest readers. You don't want to spoil your house by putting
bars on the windows to protect against dishonest ones. The place
to protect against intentional misinterpretations is in end-notes.
But don't think you can predict them all. People are as ingenious
at misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want to
hear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things they
want to do but know they shouldn't. I suspect it's the same skill._____
As with most other things, the way to get better at writing essays
is to practice. But how do you start? Now that we've examined the
structure of useful writing, we can rephrase that question more
precisely. Which constraint do you relax initially? The answer is,
the first component of importance: the number of people who care
about what you write.If you narrow the topic sufficiently, you can probably find something
you're an expert on. Write about that to start with. If you only
have ten readers who care, that's fine. You're helping them, and
you're writing. Later you can expand the breadth of topics you write
about.The other constraint you can relax is a little surprising: publication.
Writing essays doesn't have to mean publishing them. That may seem
strange now that the trend is to publish every random thought, but
it worked for me. I wrote what amounted to essays in notebooks for
about 15 years. I never published any of them and
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see what valuation they could get for the second half of the stock
after using the first half of the money to increase its value. But
VCs never offered that option.Now startups have another alternative. Now it's easy to raise angel
rounds about half the size of series A rounds. Many of the startups
we fund are taking this route, and I predict that will be true of
startups in general.A typical big angel round might be $600k on a convertible note with
a valuati
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on cap of $4 million premoney. Meaning that when the note
converts into stock (in a later round, or upon acquisition), the
investors in that round will get.6 / 4.6, or 13% of the company.
That's a lot less than the 30 to 40% of the company you usually
give up in a series A round if you do it so early.
[5]But the advantage of these medium-sized rounds is not just that
they cause less dilution. You also lose less control. After an
angel round, the founders almost always still have control of the
company, whereas after a series A round they often don't. The
traditional board structure after a series A round is two founders,
two VCs, and a (supposedly) neutral fifth person. Plus series A
terms usually give the investors a veto over various kinds of
important decisions, including selling the company. Founders usually
have a lot of de facto control after a series A, as long as things
are going well. But that's not the same as just being able to do
what you want, like you could before.A third and quite significant advantage of angel rounds is that
they're less stressful to raise. Raising a traditional series A
round has in the past taken
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be falsified. I'm not going to try to explore the structure
of qualification here. It's probably more complex than the whole
topic of writing
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usefully. Instead I'll just give you a practical
tip: Don't underestimate qualification. It's an important skill in
its own right, not just a sort of tax you have to pay in order to
avoid saying things that are false. So learn and use its full range.
It may not be fully half of having good ideas, but it's part of
having them.There's one other quality I aim for in essays: to say things as
simply as possible. But I don't think this is a component of
usefulness. It's more a matter of consideration for the reader. And
it's a practical aid in getting things right; a mistake is more
obvious when expressed in simple language. But I'll admit that the
main reason I write simply is not for the reader's sake or because
it helps get things right, but because it bothers me to use more
or fancier words than I need to. It seems inelegant, like a program
that's too long.I realize florid writing works for some people. But unless you're
sure you're one of them, the best advice is to write as simply as
you can._____
I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty +
correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay. But I should
warn you that it's also a recipe for making people mad.The root of the problem is novelty. When you tell people something
they didn't know, they don't always thank you for it. Sometimes the
reason people don't know something is because they don't want to
know it. Usually because it contradicts some cherished belief. And
indeed, if you're looking for novel ideas, popular
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Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston,
and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store appro
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val 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.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they
lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far.
The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.* * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is
that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through
iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to
reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed,
reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't
work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business
learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed
that although the words "software" and "publisher" fit together,
the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books.
It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary
between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying
to be with the App
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ability, as a guide to keep us from wondering
off into a swamp of abstractions. Instead of trying to answer the
question:
What are the most general truths?
let's try to answer the question
Of all the useful things we can say, which are the most general?
The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read
what we've written to do anything differently afterward. Knowing
we have to give definite (if implicit) advice will keep us from
straying beyond the resolution of the words we're using.The goal is the same as Aristotle's; we just approach it from a
different direction.As an example of a useful, general idea, consider that of the
controlled experiment. There's an idea that has turned out to be
widely applicable. Some might say it's part of science, but it's
not part of any specific science; it's literally meta-physics (in
our sense of "meta"). The id
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ea of evolution is another. It turns
out to have quite broad applications—for example, in genetic
algorithms and even product design. Frankfurt's distinction between
lying and bullshitting seems a promising recent example.
[15]These seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general
observations that would cause someone who understood them to do
something differently.Such observations will necessarily be about things that are imprecisely
defined. Once you start using words with precise meanings, you're
doing math. So starting from utility won't entirely solve the
problem I described above—it won't flush out the metaphysical
singularity. But it should help. It gives people with good
intentions a new roadmap into abstraction. And they may thereby
produce things that make the writing of the people with bad intentions
look bad by comparison.One drawback of this approach is that
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by the so-called experts in one generation
are often so different from those admired a few generations later.
It's easy to conclude there's nothing real there at all. It's only
when you isolate this force, for example by trying to paint and
comparing your work to Bellini's, that you can see that it does in
fact exist.The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there
doesn't seem to be any room in the art for this goodness. The
argument goes like this. Imagine several people looking at a work
of art and judging how good it is. If being good art really is a
property of objects, it should be in the object somehow. But it
doesn't seem to be; it seems to be something happening in the heads
of each of the observers. And if they disagree, how do you choose
between them?The solution to this puzzle is to realize that the purpose of art
is to work on its human audience, and humans have a lot in common.
And to the extent the things an object acts upon respond in the
same way, that's arguably what it means for the object to have the
corresponding property. If everything a particle interacts with
behaves as if the particle had a mass of m, then it has a mass
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of
m. So the distinction between "objective" and "subjective" is not
binary, but a matter of degree, depending on how much the subjects
have in common. Particles interacting with one another are at one
pole, but people interacting with art are not all the way at the
other; their reactions aren't random.Because people's responses to art aren't random, art can be designed
to operate on people, and be good or bad depending on how effectively
it does so. Much as a vaccine can be. If someone were talking about
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binator.
October 2010After 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.What we're seeing now, everyone's probably going to be seeing in
the next couple years. So I'm going to explain what we're seeing,
and what that will mean for you if you try to raise money.Super-AngelsLet me start by describing what the world of startup funding used
to look like. There used to be two sharply differentiated types
of investors: angels and venture capitalists. Angels are individual
rich people who invest small amounts of th
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eir own money, while VCs
are employees of funds that invest large amounts of other people's.For decades there were just those two types of investors, but now
a third type has appeared halfway between them: the so-called
super-angels.
[1]
And VCs have been provoked by their arrival
into making a lot of angel-style investments themselves. So the
previously sharp line between angels and VCs has become hopelessly
blurred.There used to be a no man's land between angels and VCs. Angels
would invest $20k to $50k apiece, and VCs usually a million or more.
So an angel round meant a collection of
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generation of business computer was
being developed on entirely different lines by two long-haired
guys called Steve in a garage in Los Altos. At about the
same time, the powers that be
were cooperating to develop the
official next generation operating system, Multics.
But two guys who thought Multics excessively complex went off
and wrote their own. They gave it a name that
was a joking reference to Multics: Unix.The latest intellectual property laws impose
unprecedented restrictions on the sort of poking around that
leads to new ideas. In the past, a competitor might use patents
to prevent you from selling a copy of something they
made, but they couldn't prevent you from
taking one apart to see how it worked. The latest
laws make this a crime. How are we
to develop new technology if we can't study current
technology to figure out how to improve it?Ironically, hackers have brought this on themselves.
Computers are responsible for the problem. The control systems
inside machines used to be physical: gears and levers and cams.
Increasingly, the brains (and thus the value) of products is
in software. And by this I mean software in the general sense:
i.e. data. A song on an LP is physically stamped into the
plastic. A song on an iPod's disk is merely stored on it.Data is by definition easy to copy. And the Internet
makes copies e
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asy to distribute. So it is no wonder
companies are afraid. But, as so often happens, fear has
clouded their judgement. The government has responded
with draconian laws to protect intellectual property.
They probably mean well. But
they may not realize that such laws will do more harm
than good.Why are programmers so violently opposed to these laws?
If I were a legislator, I
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you need a lot of people to supply each startup with what they need
most. Sean Parker was exactly what Facebook needed in 2004. Another
startup might have needed a database guy, or someone with connections
in the movie business.This is one of the reasons we fund such a large number of companies,
incidentally. The bigger the community, the greater the chance it
will contain the person who has that one thing you need most.The third reason you need a lot of people to make a startup hub is
that once you have enough people interested in the same problem,
they start to set the social norms. And it is a particularly
valuable thing when the atmosphere around you encourages you to do
something that would otherwise seem too ambitious. In most places
the atmosphere pulls you back toward the mean.I flew into the Bay Area a few days ago. I notice this every time
I fly over the Valley: somehow you can sense something is going on.
Obviously you can sense prosperity in how well kept a
place looks. But there are different kinds of prosperity. Silicon
Valley doesn't look like Boston, or New York, or LA, or DC. I tried
asking myself what word I'd use to describe the feeling the Valley
radiated, and the word that came to mind was optimism.Notes[1]
I'm not saying it's impossible to succeed in a city with few
other startups, just harder. If you're sufficiently good at
generating your own morale, you can survive w
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ithout external
encouragement. Wufoo was based in Tampa and they succeeded. But
the Wufoos are exceptionally disciplined.[2]
Incidentally, this phenomenon is not limited to startups. Most
unusual ambitions fail, unless the person who has them manages to
find the right sort of community.[3]
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features from Lisp.
There is no longer much left to copy before the language you've
made is Lisp. The latest hot language, Python, is a watered-down
Lisp with infix syntax and no macros. A new Lisp would be a natural
step in this progression.I sometimes think that it would be a good marketing trick to call
it an improved version of Python. That sounds hipper than Lisp. To
many people, Lisp is a slow AI language with a lot of parentheses.
Fritz Kunze's official biography carefully avoids mentioning the
L-word. But my guess is that we shouldn't be afraid to call the
new Lisp Lisp. Lisp still has a lot of latent respect among the
very best hackers — the ones who took 6.001 and understood it, for
example. And those are the users you need to win.In "How to Become a Hacker," Eric Raymond describes Lisp as something
like Latin or Greek — a language you should learn as an intellectual
exercise, even though you won't actually use it:
Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience
you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make
you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you
never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
If I didn't know Lisp, reading this would set me asking questions.
A language that would make me a better programmer, if it means
anything at all, means a language that would be better for programming.
And that is in fact the implication of what Eric is saying.As long as that idea is still floating around, I think hackers will
be receptive enough t
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o a new Lisp, even if it is called Lisp. But
this Lisp must be a hacker's language, like the classic Lisps of
the 1970s. It must be terse, simple, and hackable. And it must
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does happen it will take years.The short term forecast is more competition between investors, which
is good news for you. The super-angels will try to undermine the
VCs by acting faster, and the VCs will try to undermine the
super-angels by driving up valuations. Which for founders will
result in the perfect combination: funding rounds that close fast,
with high valuations.But remember that to get that combination, your startup will have
to appeal to both super-angels and VCs. If you don't seem like you
have the potential to go public, you won't be able to use VCs to
drive up the valuation of an angel round.There is a danger of having VCs in an angel round: the so-called
signalling risk. If VCs are only doing it in the hope of investing
more later, what happens if they don't? That's a signal to everyone
else that they think you're lame.How much should you worry about that? The seriousness of signalling
risk depends on how far along you are. If by the next time you
need to raise money, you have graphs showing rising revenue or
traffic month after month, you don't have to worry about any signals
your existing investors are sending. Your results will speak for
themselves.
[7]Whereas if the next time you need to raise money you won't yet have
concrete results, you may need to think more about the message your
investors might send if they don't invest more. I'm not sure yet
how much you have to worry, because this whole phenomenon of VCs
doing angel investments is so new. But my instincts tell me you
don't have to worry much. Signalling risk smells like one of those
things founders worry about that's not a real
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many programmers have observed since, one is very often mistaken
about where these bottlenecks are.So, in practice, the way to get fast code is to have a very good
profiler, rather than by, say, making the language strongly typed.
You don't need to know the type of every argument in every call in
the program. You do need to be able to declare the types of arguments
in the bottlenecks. And even more, you need to be able to find out
where the bottlenecks are.One complaint people have had with Lisp is that it's hard to tell
what's expensive. This might be true. It might also be inevitable,
if you want to have a very abstract language. And in any case I
t
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hink good profiling would go a long way toward fixing the problem:
you'd soon learn what was expensive.Part of the problem here is social. Language designers like to
write fast compilers. That's how they measure their skill. They
think of the profiler as an add-on, at best. But in practice a good
profiler may do more to improve the speed of actual programs written
in the language than a compiler that generates fast code. Here,
again, language designers are somewhat out of touch with their
users. They do a really good job of solving slightly the wrong
problem.It might be a good idea to have an active profiler — to push
performance data to the programmer instead of waiting for him to
come asking for it. For example, the editor could display bottlenecks
in red when the programmer edits the source code. Another approach
would be to somehow represent what's happening in running programs.
This would be an especially big win in server-based applications,
where you have lots of running programs to look at. An active
profiler could show graphically what's happening in memory as a
program's running, or even make
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reader, it turns out you have to step back one step
further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth,
but why he's writing about this subject at all.Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who
publish online write what they write for the simple reason that
they want to. You
can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as
you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons,
though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust
bloggers more than Business Week.I was talking recently to a friend who works for a
big newspaper. He thought the print media were in serious trouble,
and that they were still mostly in denial about it. "They think
the decline is cyclic," he said. "Actually it's structural."In other words, the readers are leaving, and they're not coming
back.
Why? I think the main reason is that the writing online is more honest.
Imagine how incongruous the New York Times article about
suits would sound if you read it in a blog:
The urge to look corporate-- sleek, commanding,
prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve--
is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace.
The problem
with this article is not just that it originated in a PR firm.
The whole tone is bogus. This is the tone of someone writing down
to their audience.Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online
is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up
out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into
molds of zippy
journalese. It's people writing what they think.I didn't realize, till t
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here was an alternative, just how artificial
most of the writing in
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] Note to nerds: or possibly a lattice, narrowing toward the top;
it's not the shape that matters here but the idea that there is at
least a partial order.[5] It is a bit misleading to treat macros as a separate feature.
In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other Lisp
features like lexical closures and rest parameters.[6] As a result, comparisons of programming languages either take
the form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly
neutral that they're really works of anthropology. People who
value their peace, or want tenure, avoid the topic. But the question
is only half a religious one; there is something there worth
studying, especially if you want to design new languages.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
October 2014(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class 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.Startups are very counterintuitive. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's
just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet.
But whatever the reason, starting a startup is a task where you
can't always trust your instincts.It's like skiing in that way. When you first try skiing and you
want to slow down, your instinct is to lean back. But if you lean
back on skis you fly down the hill out of control. So part of
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learning to ski
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to switch.That would definitely happen if programmers started to use handhelds
as development machines—if handhelds displaced laptops the
way laptops displaced desktops. You need more control of a development
machine than Apple will let you have over an iPhone.Could anyone make a device that you'd carry around in your pocket
like a phone, and yet would also work as a development machine?
It's hard to imagine what it would look like. But I've learned
never to say never about technology. A phon
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e-sized device that
would work as a development machine is no more miraculous by present
standards than the iPhone itself would have seemed by the standards
of 1995.My current development machine is a MacBook Air, which I use with
an external monitor and keyboard in my office, and by itself when
traveling. If there was a version half the size I'd prefer it.
That still wouldn't be small enough to carry around everywhere like
a phone, but we're within a factor of 4 or so. Surely that gap is
bridgeable. In fact, let's make it an
RFS. Wanted:
Woman with hammer.Notes[1]
When Google adopted "Don't be evil," they were still so small
that no one would have expected them to be, yet.
[2]
The dictator in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, incidentally;
it's IBM. IBM seemed a lot more frightening in those days, but
they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now.[3]
He couldn't even afford a monitor. That's why the Apple
I used a TV as a monitor.[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.
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to be new, but it has to
be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new.
I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design
surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research
solves problems that are not only new, but actually worth solving.
So ultimately we're aiming for the same destination, just approaching
it from different directions.What I'm going to talk about today is what your target looks like
from the back. What do you do differently when you treat
programming languages as a design problem instead of a research topic?The biggest difference is that you focus more on the user.
Design begins by asking, who is this
for and what do they need from it? A good architect,
for example, does not begin by creating a design that he then
imposes on the users, but by studying the intended users and figuring
out what they need.Notice I said "what they need," not "what they want." I don't mean
to give the impression that working as a designer means working as
a sort of short-order cook, making whatever the client tells you
to. This varies from field to field in the arts, but
I don't think there is any field in which the best work is done by
the people who just make exactly what the customers tell them to.The customer is always right in
the sense that the measure of good design is how well it works
for the user. If you make a novel that bores everyone, or a chair
that's horribly uncomfortable to sit
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in, then you've done a bad
job, period. It's no defense to say that the novel or the chair
is designed according to the most advanced theoretical principles.And yet, making what works for the user doesn't mean simply making
what the user tells
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they're going to build,
no matter what.Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If companies stuck to
their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages,
and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. In both cases
their customers told them what their business should be-- and they
were smart enough to listen.As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than
the imagination of man. You'll find more interesting things by
looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking.
This principle is very powerful. It's why the best abstract painting
still falls short of Leonardo, for example. And it applies to
startups too. No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the
ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam
of users.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what
the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not
what you might think. The most important quality in a startup
founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination.This is a little depressing. I'd like to believe Viaweb succeeded
because we were smart, not merely determined. A lot of people in
the startup world want to believe that. Not just founders, but
investors too. They like the idea of inhabiting a world ruled by
intelligence. And you can tell they really believe this, because
it affects their investment decisions.Time after time VCs invest in startups founded by eminent professors.
This may work in biotech, where a lot of startups simply commercialize
existing research, but in software you want to invest in students,
not professors. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by
people who
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dropped out of school to do it
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Morris and I
started a startup called
Viaweb.
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.A lot of people could have been having this idea at the
same time, of course, but as far as I know, Viaweb was
the first Web-based application. It seemed such
a novel idea to us that we named the company after it:
Viaweb, because our software worked via the Web,
instead of running on your desktop computer.Another unusual thing about this software was that it
was written primarily in a programming language called
Lisp. It was one of the first big end-user
applications to be written in Lisp, which up till then
had been used mostly in universities and research labs. [1]The Secret WeaponEric Raymond has written an essay called "How to Become a Hacker,"
and in it, among other things, he tells would-be hackers what
languages they should learn. He suggests starting with Python and
Java, because they are easy to learn. The serious hacker will also
want to learn C, in order to hack Uni
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x, and Perl for system
administration and cgi scripts. Finally, the truly serious hacker
should consider learning Lisp:
Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience
you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make
you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you
never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin. It
won't get you a job, except perhaps as a classics professor, but
it will improve your mind, and make you a better writer in languages
you do want to use,
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leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas
is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the
sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm. It doesn't just affect
the way we think; it is the Lego blocks we build thoughts out of.
Popping out of the current paradigm is something only a few people
can do. And even they usually have to suppress their intuitions at
first, like a pilot flying through cloud who has to trust his
instruments over his sense of balance.
[4]Paradigms don't just define our present thinking. They also vacuum
up the trail of crumbs that led to them, making our standards for
new ideas impossibly high. The current paradigm seems so perfect
to us, its offspring, that we imagine it must have been accepted
completely as soon as it was discovered — that whatever the church thought
of the heliocentric model, astronomers must have been convinced as
soon as Copernicus proposed it. Far, in fact, from it. Copernicus
published the heliocentric model in 1532, but it wasn't till the
mid seventeenth century that the balance of scientific opinion
shifted in its favor.
[5]Few understand how feeble new ideas look when they first appear.
So if you want to have new ideas yourself, one
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of the most valuable
things you can do is to learn what they look like when they're born.
Read about how new ideas happened, and try to get yourself into the
heads of people at the time. How did things look to them, when the
new idea was only half-finished, and even the person who had it was
only half-convinced it was right?But you don't have to stop at history. You can observe big new ideas
being born all around you right now. Just look for a reasonable
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language may be related
to how you express it.I was talking recently to Robert Morris, and he pointed out that
operator overloading is a bigger win in languages with infix
syntax. In a language with prefix syntax, any function you define
is effectively an operator. If you want to define a plus for a
new type of number yo
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u've made up, you can just define a new function
to add them. If you do that in a language with infix syntax,
there's a big difference in appearance between the use of an
overloaded operator and a function call.1. New Programming Languages.Back in the 1970s
it was fashionable to design new programming languages. Recently
it hasn't been. But I think server-based software will make new
languages fashionable again. With server-based software, you can
use any language you want, so if someone does design a language that
actually seems better than others that are available, there will be
people who take a risk and use it.2. Time-Sharing.Richard Kelsey gave this as an idea whose time
has come again in the last panel, and I completely agree with him.
My guess (and Microsoft's guess, it seems) is that much computing
will move from the desktop onto remote servers. In other words,
time-sharing is back. And I think there will need to be support
for it at the language level. For example, I know that Richard
and Jonathan Rees have done a lot of work implementing process
scheduling within Scheme 48.3. Efficiency.Recently it was starting to seem that computers
were finally fast enough. More and more we were starting to hear
about byte code, which implies to me at least that we feel we have
cycles to spare. But I don't think we will, with server-based
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Outside writers tend to supply
editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which
make a beeline toward a rousing (and
foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feel
obliged to write something more
balanced, which in
practice ends up meaning blurry.
Since they're
writing for a popular magazine, they start with the
most radioactively controversial questions, from which
(because they're writing for a popular magazine)
they then proceed to recoil from
in terror.
Gay marriage, for or
against? This group says one thing. That group says
another. One thing is certain: the question is a
complex one. (But don't get mad at us. We didn't
draw any conclusions.)Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers.
They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a
promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't
publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive
results. Something you publish ought to tell the reader
something he didn't already know.
But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as
it's interesting. I'm sometimes accused of meandering.
In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw.
There you're not concerned with truth. You already
know where you're going, and you want to go straight there,
bluster
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ing through obstacles, and hand-waving
your way across swampy ground. But that's not what
you're trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to
be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't
meander.The Meander is a river in Asia Minor (aka
Turkey).
As you might expect, it winds all over the place.
But does it
do this out of
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you're seeing a country a full step ahead of Venezuela.The Lever of TechnologyWill technology increase the gap between rich and poor? It will
certainly increase the gap between the productive and the unproductive.
That's the whole point of technology. With a tractor an energetic
farmer could plow six times as much land in a day as he could with
a team of horses. But only if he mastered a new kind of farming.I've seen the lever of technology grow visibly in my own time. In
high school I made money by mowing lawns and scooping ice cream at
Baskin-Robbins. This was the only kind of work available at the
time. Now high school kids could write software or design web
sites. Bu
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t only some of them will; the rest will still be scooping
ice cream.I remember very vividly when in 1985 improved technology made it
possible for me to buy a computer of my own. Within months I was
using it to make money as a freelance programmer. A few years
before, I couldn't have done this. A few years before, there was
no such thing as a freelance programmer. But Apple created
wealth, in the form of powerful, inexpensive computers, and programmers
immediately set to work using it to create more.As this example suggests, the rate at which technology increases
our productive capacity is probably exponential, rather than linear.
So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in individual
productivity as time goes on. Will that increase the gap between
rich and the poor? Depends which gap you mean.Technology should increase the gap in income, but it seems to
decrease other gaps. A hundred years ago, the rich led a different
kind of life from ordinary people. They lived in houses
full
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say which of two famous painters
is better. It means we can't say that any painter is better than a
randomly chosen eight year old.That was how I realized my father was wrong. I started studying
painting. And it was just like other kinds of work I'd done: you
could do it well, or badly, and if you tried hard, you could get
better at it. And it was obvious that Leonardo and Bellini were
much better at it than me. That gap between us was not imaginary.
They were so good. And if they could be good, then art could be
good, and there was such a thing as good taste after all.Now that I've explained how to show there is such a thing as good
taste, I should also explain why people think there isn't. There
are two reasons. One is that there's always so much disagreement
about taste. Most people's response to art is a tangle of unexamined
impulses. Is the artist famous? Is the subject attractive? Is this
the sort of art they're supposed to like? Is it hanging in a famous
museum, or reproduced in a big, expensive book? In practice most
people's response to art is dominated by such extraneous factors.And the people who do claim to have good taste are so often mistaken.
The paintings admired by the so-called experts in one generation
are often so different from those admired a few generations later.
It's easy to conclude there's nothing real there at all. It's only
when you isolate this force, for example by t
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rying to paint and
comparing your work to Bellini's, that you can see that it does in
fact exist.The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there
doesn't seem to be any room in the art for this goodness. The
argument goes like this
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Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so
obsessed with being published. But you can imagine what it would
do for a 24 year old to get a poem published in The New Yorker.
Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet. Actually he's
no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience
like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the
difference. So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. The
reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people
they want to impress are not very discerning.[6]
This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent
your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how
you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously.
The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of
that.[7]
A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobs
is not very well connected.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Da
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n Friedman, Sarah Harlin,
Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig,
David Sloo, and Aaron Swartz
for reading drafts of this.December 2019There 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
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're the limiting reagents in the
reactio
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n that produces startups, because they're the only ones
present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.Observation bears this out: within the US, towns have become startup
hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few
startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it's full
of rich people, it has few nerds. It's not the kind of place nerds
like.Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but
no rich people. The top US Computer Science departments are said
to be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon. MIT yielded
Route 128. Stanford and Berkeley yielded Silicon Valley. But
Carnegie-Mellon? The record skips at that point. Lower down the
list, the University of Washington yielded a high-tech community
in Seattle, and the University of Texas at Austin yielded one in
Austin. But what happened in Pittsburgh? And in Ithaca, home of
Cornell, which is also high on the list?I grew up in Pittsburgh and went to college at Cornell, so I can
answer for both. The weather is terrible, particularly in winter,
and there's no interesting old city to make up for it, as there is
in Boston. Rich people don't want to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca.
So while there are plenty of hackers who could start startups,
there's no one to invest in them.Not BureaucratsDo you really need the rich people? Wouldn't it work to have the
government invest in the nerds? No, it would not. Startup investors
are a distinct type of rich people. They tend to have a lot of
experience themselves in the technology business
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Useful writing tells people something
true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them
as unequivocally as possible.Notice these are all a matter of degree. For example, you can't
expect an idea to be novel to everyone. Any insight that you have
will probably have already been had by at least one of the world's
7 billion people. But it's sufficient if an idea is novel to a lot
of readers.Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four
components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score
for usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly reductive, but
nonetheless true._____
How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and
important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this. I
learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying
anything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure
it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him,
but when you do, they're usually right.Translated into essay writing, what this means is that if you write
a bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again.
Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes
a whole essay.You can't ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can
ensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the
ones that aren't.In the sciences, this is called publication bias, and is considered
bad. When some hypothesis you're exploring gets inconclusive results,
you're supposed to tell people about that too. But with essay
writing, publication bias is the way to go.My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an
essay fast, trying out all kinds
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of ideas. Then I
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take these for granted now. They were
invented
by McCarthy in the course of developing Lisp.
(Fortran at that time only had a conditional
goto, closely based on the branch instruction in the
underlying hardware.) McCarthy, who was on the Algol committee, got
conditionals into Algol, whence they spread to most other
languages.2. A function type. In Lisp, functions are first class
objects-- they're a data type just like integers, strings,
etc, and have a literal representation, can be stored in variables,
can be passed as arguments, and so on.3. R
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ecursion. Recursion existed as a mathematical concept
before Lisp of course, but Lisp was the first programming language to support
it. (It's arguably implicit in making functions first class
objects.)4. A new concept of variables. In Lisp, all variables
are effectively pointers. Values are what
have types, not variables, and assigning or binding
variables means copying pointers, not what they point to.5. Garbage-collection.6. Programs composed of expressions. Lisp programs are
trees of expressions, each of which returns a value.
(In some Lisps expressions
can return multiple values.) This is in contrast to Fortran
and most succeeding languages, which distinguish between
expressions and statements.It was natural to have this
distinction in Fortran because (not surprisingly in a language
where the input format was punched cards) the language was
line-oriented. You could not nest statements. And
so while you needed expressions for math to work, there was
no point in making anything else return a value, because
there could not be anything waiting for it.This limitation
went away with the arrival of block-structured languages,
but by then it was too late. The distinction between
expressions and statements was
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izing effect of venture firms is a double one: they cause
startups to form around them, and those draw in more startups through
acquisitions. And although the first may be weakening because it's
now so cheap to start some startups, the second seems as strong as ever.
Three of the most admired
"Web 2.0" companies were started outside th
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e usual startup hubs,
but two of them have already been reeled in through acquisitions.Such centralizing forces make it harder for new silicon valleys to
get started. But by no means impossible. Ultimately power rests
with the founders. A startup with the best people will beat one
with funding from famous VCs, and a startup that was sufficiently
successful would never have to move. So a town that
could exert enough pull over the right people could resist and
perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley.For all its power, Silicon Valley has a great weakness: the paradise
Shockley found in 1956 is now one giant parking lot. San Francisco
and Berkeley are great, but they're forty miles away. Silicon
Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl. It
has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the
soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities. But a competitor
that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage. All a city
needs is to be the kind of place the next traitorous eight look at
and say "I want to stay here," and that would be enough to get the
chain reaction started.Notes[1]
It's interesting to consider how low this number could be
made. I suspect five hundred would be enough, even if they could
bring no assets with them. Probably just thirty, if I could pick them,
would be enough to turn Buffalo into a significant startup hub.[2
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. That alone is
fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy's claims. It's
supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people
would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.Because philosophy's flaws turned away the sort of people who might
have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. Bertrand
Russell wrote in a letter in 1912:
Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those
who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that
few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
[11]
His response was to launch Wittgenstein at it, with dramatic results.I think Wittgenstein deserves to be famous not for the discovery
that most previous philosophy was a waste of time, which judging
from the circumstantial evidence must have been made by every smart
person who studied a little philosophy and declined to pursue it
further, but for how he acted in response.
[12]
Instead of quietly
switching to another field, he made a fuss, from inside. He was
Gorbachev.The field of philosophy is still shaken from the fright Wittgenstein
gave it.
[13]
Later in life he spe
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nt a lot of time talking about
how words worked. Since that seems to be allowed, that's what a
lot of philosophers do now. Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the
metaphysical speculation department, the people who used to do
literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new names like
"literary theory," "critical theory," and when they're feeling
ambitious, plain "theory." The writing is the familiar word salad:
Gender is not like some of the other grammatical modes which
express precisely a mode of conception without any reality that
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Viaweb.
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.A lot of people could have been having this idea at the
same time, of course, but as far as I know, Viaweb was
the first Web-based application. It seemed such
a novel idea to us that we named the company after it:
Viaweb, because our software worked via the Web,
instead of running on your desktop computer.Another unusu
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al thing about this software was that it
was written primarily in a programming language called
Lisp. It was one of the first big end-user
applications to be written in Lisp, which up till then
had been used mostly in universities and research labs. [1]The Secret WeaponEric Raymond has written an essay called "How to Become a Hacker,"
and in it, among other things, he tells would-be hackers what
languages they should learn. He suggests starting with Python and
Java, because they are easy to learn. The serious hacker will also
want to learn C, in order to hack Unix, and Perl for system
administration and cgi scripts. Finally, the truly serious hacker
should consider learning Lisp:
Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience
you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make
you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you
never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin. It
won't get you a job, except perhaps as a classics professor, but
it will improve your mind, and make you a better writer in languages
you do want to use, like English.But wait a minute.
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every point in history,
even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering
things that made everyone say "why didn't anyone think of that
before?" We know this continued to be true up till 2004, when the
Facebook was founded-- though strictly speaking someone else did
think of that.The reason we don't see the opportunities all around us is that we
adjust to however things are, and assume that's how things have to
be. For example, it would seem crazy to most people to try to make
a better search engine than Google. Surely that field, at least,
is tapped out. Really? In a hundred years-- or even twenty-- are
people still going to search for information using something like
the current Google? Even Google probably doesn't think that.In particular, I
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don't think there's any limit to the number of
startups. Sometimes you hear people saying "All these guys starting
startups now are going to be disappointed. How many little startups
are Google and Yahoo going to buy, after all?" That sounds cleverly
skeptical, but I can prove it's mistaken. No one proposes that
there's some limit to the number of people who can be employed in
an economy consisting of big, slow-moving companies with a couple
thousand people each. Why should there be any limit to the number
who could be employed by small, fast-moving companies with ten each?
It seems to me the only limit would be the number of people who
want to work that hard.The limit on the number of startups is not the number that can get
acquired by Google and Yahoo-- though it seems even that should
be unlimited, if the startups were actually worth buying-- but the
amount of wealth that can be created. And I don't think there's
any limit
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yet. No matter what your idea, there's someone else out there
working on the same thing.That's the downside of it being easier to start a startup: more people
are doing it. But I disagree with Caterina Fake when she says that
makes this a bad time to start a startup. More people are starting
startups, but not as many more as could. Most college graduates
still think they have to get a job. The average person can't ignore
something that's been beaten into their head since they were three
just because serving web pages recently got a lot cheaper.And in any case, competitors are not the biggest threat. Way more
startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors. There
are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal
disputes, inertia, and ignoring users. Each is, by itself, enough
to kill you. But if I had to pick the worst, it would be ignoring
users. If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die,
here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know
everyone is going to love, and that's what they're going to build,
no matter what.Alm
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ost everyone's initial plan is broken. If companies stuck to
their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages,
and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. In both cases
their customers told them what their business should be-- and they
were smart enough to listen.As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than
the imagination of man. You'll find more interesting things by
looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking.
This principle is very powerful. It's why the best abstract painting
still falls short of Leonardo, for example. And
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, and use investment by recognized startup investors as the test of whether a company was a real startup.How would the government decide who's a startup investor? The same way they decide what counts as a university for student visas. We'll establish our own accreditation procedure. We know who one another are.10,000 people is a drop in the bucket by immigration standards, but would represent a huge incr
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ease in the pool of startup founders. I think this would have such a visible effect on the economy that it would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous. The only way to know for sure would be to try it, and that would cost practically nothing.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jeff Clavier, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Greg Mcadoo, Aydin Senkut, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.Related:May 2004When 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.Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other
skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is
making money?I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different:
the
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you must simultaneously keep two opposing
ideas in your head. You need the young hacker's naive faith in
his abilities, and at the same time the veteran's skepticism. You
have to be able to think
how hard can it be? with one half of
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your brain while thinking
it will never work with the other.The trick is to realize that there's no real contradiction here.
You want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things.
You have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the
problem, but skeptical about the value of whatever solution you've
got so far.People who do good work often think that whatever they're working
on is no good. Others see what they've done and are full of wonder,
but the creator is full of worry. This pattern is no coincidence:
it is the worry that made the work good.If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project
forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward. In the
first phase of the two-cycle innovation engine, you work furiously
on some problem, inspired by your confidence that you'll be able
to solve it. In the second phase, you look at what you've done in
the cold light of morning, and see all its flaws very clearly. But
as long as your critical spirit doesn't outweigh your hope, you'll
be able to look at your admittedly incomplete system, and think,
how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?, thereby continuing
the cycle.It's tricky to keep the two forces balanced. In young hackers,
optimism predominates. They produce something, are convinced it's
great, and never improve it. In old hackers, skepticism predominates,
and they won't even dare to take on ambitious projects.Anything you can do to keep the redesign cycle going is good. Prose
can be rewritten over and over
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wrote in verse. This must
have affected what they said. If you try to write about the nature
of the world in verse, it inevitably turns into incantation. Prose
lets you be more precise, and more tentative.[4]
Philosophy is like math's
ne'er-do-well brother. It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked
at the works of their predecessors and said in effect "why can't
you be more like your brother?" Russell was still saying the same
thing 2300 years later.Math is the precise half of the most abstract ideas, and philosophy
the imprecise half. It's probably inevitable that philosophy will
suffer by comparison, because there's no lower bound to its precision.
Bad math is merely boring, whereas bad philosophy is nonsense. And
yet there are some good ideas in the imprecise half.[5]
Aristotle's best work was in logic and zoology, both of which
he can be said to have invented. But the most dramatic departure
from his predecessors was a new, much more analytical style of
thinking. He was arguably the first scientist.[6]
Brooks, Rodney, Programming in Common Lisp, Wiley, 1985, p.
94.[7]
Some would say we depend on Aristotle more than we realize,
because his ideas were one of the ingredients in our common culture.
Certainly a lot of the words we use have a connection with Aristotle,
but it seems a bit much to suggest that we wouldn't have the concept
of the essence of something or the distinction between matter and
form if Aristotle hadn't written about them.One way to see how much we really depend on Aristot
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le would be to
diff European culture with Chinese: what ideas did European culture
have in 1800 that Chinese culture didn't, in virtue of Aristotle's
con
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the disobedient attitude of hackers is a net win. I wish its
advantages were better understood.For example, I suspect people in Hollywood are
simply mystified by
hackers' attitudes toward copyrights. They are a perennial
topic of heated discussion on Slashdot.
But why should people who program computers
be so concerned about copyrights, of all things?Partly because some companies use mechanisms to prevent
copying. Show any hacker a lock and his first thought is
how to pick it. But there is a deeper reason that
hackers are alarmed by measures like copyrights and patents.
They see increasingly aggressive measures to protect
"intellectual property"
as a threat to the intellectual
freedom they need to do their job.
And they are right.It is by poking about inside current technology that
hackers get ideas for the next generation. No thanks,
intellectual homeowners may say, we don't need any
outside help. But they're wrong.
The next generation of computer technology has
often—perhaps more often than not—been developed by outsiders.In 1977 there was no doubt some group within IBM developing
what they expected to be
the next generation of business computer. They
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were mistaken.
The next generation of business computer was
being developed on entirely different lines by two long-haired
guys called Steve in a garage in Los Altos. At about the
same time, the powers that be
were cooperating to develop the
official next generation operating system, Multics.
But two guys who thought Multics excessively complex went off
and wrote their own. They gave it a name that
was a joking reference to Multics: Unix.The latest intellectual property laws impose
unprecedented restrictions on the sort of poking around that
leads to new ideas. In the past, a competitor might use patents
to prevent you from selling a copy of
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't think "here is someone who is way ahead of their peers."
It would set off alarms. Because another of the characteristic
mistakes of young founders is to go through the motions of starting
a startup. They make up some plausible-sounding idea, raise money
at a good valuation, rent a cool office, hire a bunch of people.
From the outside that seems like what startups do. But the next
step after rent a cool office and hire a bunch of people is: gradually
realize how completely fucked they are, because while imitating all
the outward forms of a startup they have neglected the one thing
that's actually essential: making something people want.
GameWe saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it: playing
house. Eventually I realized why it was happening. The reason
young founders go through the motions of starting a startup is
because that's what they've been trained to do for their whole lives
up to that point. Think about what you have to do to get into
college, for example. Extracurricular activities, check. Even in
college classes most of the work is as artificial as running laps.I'm not attacking the educational system for being this way. There
will always be a certain amount of fakeness in the work you do when
you're being taught something, and if you measure their performance
it's inevitable that people will exploit the difference to the point
where much of what you're measuring is art
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ifacts of the fakeness.I confess I did it myself in college. I found that in a lot of
classes there might only be 20 or 30 ideas that were the right shape
to make good exam questions. The way I studied for exams in these
classes was not (except incidentally) to master the material taught
in the class, but to
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at
something till you make enough not to
have to work for money again.The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because
it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life
tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get
sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job.
Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too
long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying
jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over
obstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are
walls of varying heights between different kinds of work.
[7]
The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you
from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music.
If you make mone
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y doing one thing and then work on another, you
have more freedom of choice.Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are of
what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much
risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your
lifetime) for what you want to do. If you're sure of the general
area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to
pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But
if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take
orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand
the risk.Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do
seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question
before the
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have control of the
company, whereas after a series A round they often don't. The
traditional board structure after a series A round is two founders,
two VCs, and a (supposedly) neutral fifth person. Plus series A
terms usually give the investors a veto over various kinds of
important decisions, including selling the company. Founders usually
have a lot of de facto control after a series A, as long as things
are going well. But that's not the same as just being able to do
what you want, like you could before.A third and quite significant advantage of angel rounds is that
they're less stressful to raise. Raising a traditional series A
round has in the past taken weeks, if not months. When a VC firm
can only do 2 deals per partner per year, they're careful about
which they do. To get a traditional series A round you have to go
through a series of meetings, culminating in a full partner meeting
where the firm as a whole says yes or no. That's the really scary
part for founders: not
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just that series A rounds take so long, but
at the end of this long process the VCs might still say no. The
chance of getting rejected after the full partner meeting averages
about 25%. At some firms it's over 50%.Fortunately for founders, VCs have been getting a lot faster.
Nowadays Valley VCs are more likely to take 2 weeks than 2 months.
But they're still not as fast as angels and super-angels, the most
decisive of whom sometimes decide in hours.Raising an angel round is not only quicker, but you get feedback
as it progresses. An angel round is not an all or nothing thing
like a series A. It's composed
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startling results. Don't ignore this data point just because it's
an outlier.Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy
as guilty pleasures. Many things people like, especially if they're
young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue
in liking them. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking
"I'm reading Ulysses" as they do it. A guilty pleasure is
at least a pure one. What do you read when you don't feel up to being
virtuous? What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's
only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half
way through? That's what you really like.Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another
pitfall to be avoided. Be careful to copy what makes them good,
rather than their flaws. It's easy to be drawn into imitating
flaws, because they're easier to see, and of course easier to copy
too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great
painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown
with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing
brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.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
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as scrupulous as mathematicians. It was so clearly
a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was
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your way out toward the
ambivalent ones, whose interest increases as the round fills up.But at each point you know how you're doing. If investors turn
cold you may have to raise less, but when investors in an angel
round turn cold the process at least degrades gracefully, instead
of blowing up in your face and leaving you with nothing, as happens
if you get rejected by a VC fund after a full partner meeting.
Whereas if investors seem hot, you can not only close the round
faster, but now that convertible notes are becoming the norm,
actually raise the price to reflect demand.ValuationHowever, the VCs have a weapon they can use against the super-angels,
and they have started to use it. VCs have started making angel-sized
investments too. The term "angel round" doesn't mean that all the
investors in it are angels; it just describes the structure of the
round. Increasingly the participants include VCs making investments
of a hundred thousand or two. And when VCs invest in angel rounds
they can do things that super-angels don't like. VCs are quite
valuation-insensitive in angel rounds—partly because they are
in general, and partly because they don't care that much about the
returns on angel rounds, which they still view mostly as a way to
recruit startups for series A rounds later. So VCs who invest in
angel rounds can blow up the valuations for angels and super-angels
who invest in them.
[6]Some super-angels seem to care about valuations. Several turned
down YC-fund
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ed startups after Demo Day because their valuations
were too high. This was not a problem for the startups; by definition
a high valuation means enough investors were willing to accept it.
But
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the founders has to be strong. They must
genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do
to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock:
if it can be pulled apart, it will be.Emmett Shear and Justin Kan of 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.
April 2009I 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.Letting just 10,000 startup founders into the country each year could have a visible effect on the economy. If we assume 4 people per startup, which is probably an overestimate, that's 2500 new companies. Each year. They wouldn't all grow as big as Google, but out of 2500 some would come close.By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the
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terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies, only new ones they'd founded. In fact they'd cause there to be
more jobs for Americans, because the companies they started
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want to write essays, you need two ingredients:
you need
a few topics that you think about a lot, and you
need some ability to ferret out the unexpected.What should you think about? My guess is that it
doesn't matter. Almost everything is
interesting if you get deeply
enough into it. The one possible exception
are
things
like working in fast food, which
have deliberately had all
the variation sucked out of them.
In retrospect, was there
anything interesting about working in Baskin-Robbins?
Well, it was interesting to notice
how important color was
to the customers. Kids a certain age would point into
the case and say that they wanted yellow. Did they
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want
French Vanilla or Lemon? They would just look at you
blankly. They wanted yellow. And then there was the
mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines n' Cream
was so appealing. I'm inclined now to
think it was the salt.
And the mystery of why Passion Fruit tasted so disgusting.
People would order it because of the name, and were always
disappointed. It should have been called In-sink-erator
Fruit.
And there was
the difference in the way fathers and
mothers bought ice cream for their kids.
Fathers tended to
adopt the attitude of
benevolent kings bestowing largesse,
and mothers that of
harried bureaucrats,
giving in to
pressure against their better judgement.
So, yes, there does seem to be material, even in
fast food.What about the other half, ferreting out the unexpected?
That may require some natural ability. I've noticed for
a long time that I'm pathologically observant. ....[That was as far as I'd gotten at the time.]Notes[sh] In
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makes them;
idleness is lonely and demoralizing.Nor do we have the social distinctions there were a hundred years
ago. The novels and etiquette manuals of that period read now
like descriptions of some strange tribal society. "With respect
to the continuance of friendships..." hints Mrs. Beeton's Book
of Household Management (1880), "it may be found necessary, in
some cases, for a mistress to relinquish, on assuming the responsibility
of a household, many of those commenced in the earlier part of her
life." A woman who married a rich man was expected to drop friends
who didn't. You'd seem a barbarian if you behaved that way today.
You'd also have a very boring life. People still tend to segregate
themselves somewhat, but much more on the basis of education than
wealth.
[16]Materially and socially, technology seems to be decreasing the gap
between the rich and the poor, not increasing it. If Lenin walked
around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he'd
think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes,
have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same
furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead
of by honorifics. Everything
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would seem exactly as he'd predicted,
until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops.Is it a problem if technology increases that gap? It doesn't seem
to be so far. As it increases the gap in income, it seems to
decrease most other gaps.Alternative to an AxiomOne often hears a policy criticized on the grounds that it would
increase the income gap between rich and poor. As if it were an
axiom that this would be bad. It might be true
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