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+<html><head><title>Apple's Mistake</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc3b><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc3b border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/apple-s-mistake-2.gif" width="129" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Apple's Mistake" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+November 2009<br /><br />I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process
+is broken.  Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters
+that it's broken.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><center>* * *</center><br /><br />How did Apple get into this mess?  Their fundamental problem is
+that they don't understand software.<br /><br />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 Store: a software publisher.  And a particularly
+overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced
+house style.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in
+OS&nbsp;X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had
+to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month
+and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?<br /><br />By breaking software development, Apple gets the opposite of what
+they intended: the version of an app currently available in the App
+Store tends to be an old and buggy one.  One developer told me:
+<blockquote>
+  As a result of their process, the App Store is full of half-baked
+  applications. I make a new version almost every day that I release
+  to beta users. The version on the App Store feels old and crappy.
+  I'm sure that a lot of developers feel this way: One emotion is
+  "I'm not really proud about what's in the App Store", and it's
+  combined with the emotion "Really, it's Apple's fault."
+</blockquote>
+Another wrote:
+<blockquote>
+  I believe that they think their approval process helps users by
+  ensuring quality.  In reality, bugs like ours get through all the
+  time and then it can take 4-8 weeks to get that bug fix approved,
+  leaving users to think that iPhone apps sometimes just don't work.
+  Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms
+  that have immediate approval processes.
+</blockquote>
+Actually I suppose Apple has a third misconception: that all the
+complaints about App Store approvals are not a serious problem.
+They must hear developers complaining.  But partners and suppliers
+are always complaining.  It would be a bad sign if they weren't;
+it would mean you were being too easy on them.  Meanwhile the iPhone
+is selling better than ever.  So why do they need to fix anything?<br /><br />They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because
+they make such great hardware.  I just bought a new 27" iMac a
+couple days ago.  It's fabulous.  The screen's too shiny, and the
+disk is surprisingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you can't
+make yourself care.<br /><br />So I bought it, but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings.
+I felt the way I'd feel buying something made in a country with a
+bad human rights record.  That was new.  In the past when I bought
+things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure.  Oh boy!  They make
+such great stuff.  This time it felt like a Faustian bargain.  They
+make such great stuff, but they're such assholes.  Do I really want
+to support this company?<br /><br /><center>* * *</center><br /><br />Should Apple care what people like me think?  What difference does
+it make if they alienate a small minority of their users?<br /><br />There are a couple reasons they should care.  One is that these
+users are the people they want as employees.  If your company seems
+evil, the best programmers won't work for you.  That hurt Microsoft
+a lot starting in the 90s.  Programmers started to feel sheepish
+about working there.  It seemed like selling out.  When people from
+Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where
+they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having
+gone over to the dark side.  But the real problem for Microsoft
+wasn't the embarrassment of the people they hired.  It was the
+people they never got.  And you know who got them?  Google and
+Apple.  If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance.
+And it's largely because they got more of the best people that
+Google and Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today.<br /><br />Why are programmers so fussy about their employers' morals?  Partly
+because they can afford to be.  The best programmers can work
+wherever they want.  They don't have to work for a company they
+have qualms about.<br /><br />But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil
+begets stupidity.  An organization that wins by exercising power
+starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work.  And it's
+not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas
+aren't the ones that win.  I think the reason Google embraced "Don't
+be evil" so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world
+as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />That has worked for Google so far.  They've become more
+bureaucratic, but otherwise they seem to have held true to their
+original principles. With Apple that seems less the case.  When you
+look at the famous 
+<a href="http://www.uriahcarpenter.info/1984.html">1984 ad</a> 
+now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the
+dictator on the screen than the woman with the hammer.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font>
+In fact, if you read the dictator's speech it sounds uncannily like a
+prophecy of the App Store.
+<blockquote>
+  We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts.<br /><br />We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of
+  pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests
+  of contradictory and confusing truths.
+</blockquote>
+The other reason Apple should care what programmers think of them
+is that when you sell a platform, developers make or break you.  If
+anyone should know this, Apple should.  VisiCalc made the Apple II.<br /><br />And programmers build applications for the platforms they use.  Most
+applications&mdash;most startups, probably&mdash;grow out of personal projects.
+Apple itself did.  Apple made microcomputers because that's what
+Steve Wozniak wanted for himself.  He couldn't have afforded a
+minicomputer. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font>
+ Microsoft likewise started out making interpreters
+for little microcomputers because
+Bill Gates and Paul Allen were interested in using them.  It's a
+rare startup that doesn't build something the founders use.<br /><br />The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many programmers
+have iPhones.  They may know, because they read it in an article,
+that Blackberry has such and such market share.  But in practice
+it's as if RIM didn't exist. If they're going to build something,
+they want to be able to use it themselves, and that means building
+an iPhone app.<br /><br />So programmers continue to develop iPhone apps, even though Apple
+continues to maltreat them.  They're like someone stuck in an abusive
+relationship.  They're so attracted to the iPhone that they can't
+leave.  But they're looking for a way out.  One wrote:
+<blockquote>
+  While I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, the control they
+  place on the App Store does not give me the drive to develop
+  applications as I would like. In fact I don't intend to make any
+  more iPhone applications unless absolutely necessary.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font>
+</blockquote>
+Can anything break this cycle?  No device I've seen so far could.
+Palm and RIM haven't a hope.  The only credible contender is Android.
+But Android is an orphan; Google doesn't really care about it, not
+the way Apple cares about the iPhone.  Apple cares about the iPhone
+the way Google cares about search.<br /><br /><center>* * *</center><br /><br />Is the future of handheld devices one locked down by Apple?  It's
+a worrying prospect.  It would be a bummer to have another grim
+monoculture like we had in the 1990s.  In 1995, writing software
+for end users was effectively identical with writing Windows
+applications.  Our horror at that prospect was the single biggest
+thing that drove us to start building <a href="road.html">web apps</a>.<br /><br />At least we know now what it would take to break Apple's lock.
+You'd have to get iPhones out of programmers' hands.  If programmers
+used some other device for mobile web access, they'd start to develop
+apps for that instead.<br /><br />How could you make a device programmers liked better than the iPhone?
+It's unlikely you could make something better designed.  Apple
+leaves no room there.  So this alternative device probably couldn't
+win on general appeal.  It would have to win by virtue of some
+appeal it had to programmers specifically.<br /><br />One way to appeal to programmers is with software.  If you
+could think of an application programmers had to have, but that
+would be impossible in the circumscribed world of the iPhone, 
+you could presumably get them to switch.<br /><br />That would definitely happen if programmers started to use handhelds
+as development machines&mdash;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.<br /><br />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 phone-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.<br /><br />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
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html">RFS</a>. Wanted: 
+Woman with hammer.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+When Google adopted "Don't be evil," they were still so small
+that no one would have expected them to be, yet.<br /><br />
+[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+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.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+He couldn't even afford a <i>monitor</i>.  That's why the Apple
+I used a TV as a monitor.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+Several people I talked to mentioned how much they liked the
+iPhone SDK.  The problem is not Apple's products but their policies.
+Fortunately policies are software; Apple can change them instantly
+if they want to.  Handy that, isn't it?<br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, 
+James Bracy, Gabor Cselle,
+Patrick Collison, Jason Freedman, John Gruber, Joe Hewitt, Jessica Livingston,
+Robert Morris, Teng Siong Ong, Nikhil Pandit, Savraj Singh, and Jared Tame for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://www.mroodles.com/hacking/apple_mistake_ru.php">Russian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+    if(node.hasAttributes()){
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+        node.setAttribute(attr.name,attr.value.replace(/(us-dc1-order|us-dc2-order|order)\.(store|stores)\.([a-z0-9-]+)\.(net|com)/g, storeCheckoutDomain));
+      }
+    }
+  };
+  document.addEventListener('readystatechange', event => {
+  if(typeof storeCheckoutDomain != 'undefined' && storeCheckoutDomain != "order.store.turbify.net"){
+    if (event.target.readyState === "interactive") {
+      fromOSYN = document.getElementsByTagName('form');
+        for (let i = 0; i < fromOSYN.length; i++) {
+          toOSTN(fromOSYN[i]);
+        }
+      }
+    }
+  });
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+ </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/lq/ult/ylc_1.9.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/lib/smbiz/store/csell/beacon-a9518fc6e4.js" >
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+ csell_page_data = {}; csell_page_rec_data = []; ts='TOK_STORE_ID';
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG() { var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_SPACEID'] = '2022276099'; csell_token_map['TOK_URL'] = ''; csell_token_map['TOK_STORE_ID'] = 'paulgraham'; csell_token_map['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST'] = 'apple'; csell_token_map['TOK_ORDER_HOST'] = 'order.store.turbify.net'; csell_token_map['TOK_BEACON_TYPE'] = 'prod'; csell_token_map['TOK_RAND_KEY'] = 't'; csell_token_map['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE'] = '2';  c = csell_page_data; var x = (typeof storeCheckoutDomain == 'string')?storeCheckoutDomain:'order.store.turbify.net'; var t = csell_token_map; c['s'] = t['TOK_SPACEID']; c['url'] = t['TOK_URL']; c['si'] = t[ts]; c['ii'] = t['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST']; c['bt'] = t['TOK_BEACON_TYPE']; c['rnd'] = t['TOK_RAND_KEY']; c['io'] = t['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE']; YStore.addItemUrl = 'http%s://'+x+'/'+t[ts]+'/ymix/MetaController.html?eventName.addEvent&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_itemId=%s&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_quantity=1&ysco_key_cs_item=1&sectionId=ysco.cart&ysco_key_store_id='+t[ts]; } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_REC_VIEW_TAG() {  var env = (typeof csell_env == 'string')?csell_env:'prod'; var p = csell_page_data; var a = '/sid='+p['si']+'/io='+p['io']+'/ii='+p['ii']+'/bt='+p['bt']+'-view'+'/en='+env; var r=Math.random(); YStore.CrossSellBeacon.renderBeaconWithRecData(p['url']+'/p/s='+p['s']+'/'+p['rnd']+'='+r+a); } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=apple&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html104.prod.store.e1a.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:55 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/arc.html

@@ -0,0 +1,75 @@
+<html><head><title>Arc</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc1c5><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc1c5 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><a href="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/arc-12.gif"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/arc-13.gif" width="49" height="50" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Click to enlarge" /></a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="58" width="10" align="left" border="0" /><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/arc-14.gif" width="31" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Arc" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">Arc is a new dialect of Lisp we're working on.   You can 
+find an early release and ask questions at 
+<a href="http://arclanguage.org">arclanguage.org</a>.
+The Arc community is very newbie-friendly,
+because all the users are newbies to some extent.<br /><br />To get an idea of where we eventually hope to take Arc,
+see <a href ="popular.html">Being Popular</a>
+and <a href="hundred.html">The Hundred-Year Language</a>.
+<!-- We do now have a reasonably efficient Arc implementation,
+written by Robert Morris and me on top of MzScheme.
+The next step is to beat it into shape on some real projects.
+The most interesting is <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com">Hacker
+News</a>, which is written entirely in Arc, including the http
+server.  Among other things this allowed us to add a read-eval-print
+loop (which I obviously can't link to) that we can use to modify
+the server as it's running, without restarting it.<br /><br />When we release something, we'll set up a server where you'll be able to 
+get an Arc toplevel through Web forms.
+Anyone who wants to try Arc will be able to see the latest version
+without having to download or install anything.
+If you'd like to try Arc, send an email to <a href="mailto:tryarc@paulgraham.com">tryarc@paulgraham.com</a>
+and we'll notify you when there is something online to experiment with.<br /><br />When will that be?  We have no idea.  We reserve the right to take a
+very long time.  It's been almost 50 years since
+McCarthy first <a href="rootsoflisp.html">described</a> Lisp.  
+Another 2 or 3 aren't going to kill
+anyone. So please don't send us mail asking what
+Arc's status is or when it will be done.
+(When it's done, we'll tell you.)
+--><br /><br /><br clear="all" /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://arclanguage.org/forum">Forum</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt">Tutorial</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://arclanguage.org/install">Get Arc</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="arc0.html">Arc's Out</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="arcchallenge.html">Take the Arc Challenge</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="core.html">First Priority: Core Language</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="arcfaq.html">Arc FAQ</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="helpus.html">Help Us</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="design.html">Design Philosophy</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="noop.html">Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="vanlfsp.html">LFM and LFSP</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://www.archub.org/arcsug.txt">Ideas People Have Sent Us</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="arcold.html">Old Arc Stuff</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="8" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+csell_env = 'ue1';
+ var storeCheckoutDomain = 'order.store.turbify.net';
+</script>
+
+<script type="text/javascript">
+  function toOSTN(node){
+    if(node.hasAttributes()){
+      for (const attr of node.attributes) {
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+      }
+    }
+  };
+  document.addEventListener('readystatechange', event => {
+  if(typeof storeCheckoutDomain != 'undefined' && storeCheckoutDomain != "order.store.turbify.net"){
+    if (event.target.readyState === "interactive") {
+      fromOSYN = document.getElementsByTagName('form');
+        for (let i = 0; i < fromOSYN.length; i++) {
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+  });
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+ </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/lq/ult/ylc_1.9.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/lib/smbiz/store/csell/beacon-a9518fc6e4.js" >
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+ csell_page_data = {}; csell_page_rec_data = []; ts='TOK_STORE_ID';
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG() { var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_SPACEID'] = '2022276099'; csell_token_map['TOK_URL'] = ''; csell_token_map['TOK_STORE_ID'] = 'paulgraham'; csell_token_map['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST'] = 'arc'; csell_token_map['TOK_ORDER_HOST'] = 'order.store.turbify.net'; csell_token_map['TOK_BEACON_TYPE'] = 'prod'; csell_token_map['TOK_RAND_KEY'] = 't'; csell_token_map['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE'] = '2';  c = csell_page_data; var x = (typeof storeCheckoutDomain == 'string')?storeCheckoutDomain:'order.store.turbify.net'; var t = csell_token_map; c['s'] = t['TOK_SPACEID']; c['url'] = t['TOK_URL']; c['si'] = t[ts]; c['ii'] = t['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST']; c['bt'] = t['TOK_BEACON_TYPE']; c['rnd'] = t['TOK_RAND_KEY']; c['io'] = t['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE']; YStore.addItemUrl = 'http%s://'+x+'/'+t[ts]+'/ymix/MetaController.html?eventName.addEvent&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_itemId=%s&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_quantity=1&ysco_key_cs_item=1&sectionId=ysco.cart&ysco_key_store_id='+t[ts]; } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_REC_VIEW_TAG() {  var env = (typeof csell_env == 'string')?csell_env:'prod'; var p = csell_page_data; var a = '/sid='+p['si']+'/io='+p['io']+'/ii='+p['ii']+'/bt='+p['bt']+'-view'+'/en='+env; var r=Math.random(); YStore.CrossSellBeacon.renderBeaconWithRecData(p['url']+'/p/s='+p['s']+'/'+p['rnd']+'='+r+a); } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=arc&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html105.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:29 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/before.html

@@ -0,0 +1,441 @@
+<html><head><title>Before the Startup</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
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+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+October 2014<br /><br /><i>(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's <a
+href="http://startupclass.samaltman.com/">startup class</a> at
+Stanford.  It's intended for college students, but much of it is
+applicable to potential founders at other ages.)</i><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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
+learning to ski is learning to suppress that impulse.  Eventually
+you get new habits, but at first it takes a conscious effort.  At
+first there's a list of things you're trying to remember as you
+start down the hill.<br /><br />Startups are as unnatural as skiing, so there's a similar list for
+startups. Here I'm going to give you the first part of it &mdash; the things
+to remember if you want to prepare yourself to start a startup.<br /><br />
+<b>Counterintuitive</b><br /><br />The 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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />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 with 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."<br /><br />If you're thinking about getting involved with someone &mdash; as a
+cofounder, an employee, an investor, or an acquirer &mdash; and you
+have misgivings about them, trust your gut.  If someone seems
+slippery, or bogus, or a jerk, don't ignore it.<br /><br />This is one case where it pays to be self-indulgent. Work with
+people you genuinely like, and you've known long enough to be sure.<br /><br />
+<b>Expertise</b><br /><br />The second counterintuitive point is that it's not that important
+to know a lot about startups.  The way to succeed in a startup is
+not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users
+and the problem you're solving for them.
+Mark Zuckerberg didn't succeed because he was an expert on startups.
+He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because he
+understood his users really well.<br /><br />If you don't know anything about, say, how to raise an angel round,
+don't feel bad on that account.  That sort of thing you can learn
+when you need to, and forget after you've done it.<br /><br />In fact, I worry it's not merely unnecessary to learn in great
+detail about the mechanics of startups, but possibly somewhat
+dangerous.  If I met an undergrad who knew all about convertible
+notes and employee agreements and (God forbid) class FF stock, I
+wouldn'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.<br /><br />
+<b>Game</b><br /><br />We 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 turn up on the exam.  It was like a game.<br /><br />It's not surprising that after being trained for their whole lives
+to play such games, young founders' first impulse on starting a
+startup is to try to figure out the tricks for winning at this new
+game. Since fundraising appears to be the measure of success for
+startups (another classic noob mistake), they always want to know what the
+tricks are for convincing investors.  We tell them the best way to
+<a href="convince.html">convince investors</a> is to make a startup
+that's actually doing well, meaning <a
+href="growth.html">growing fast</a>, and then simply
+tell investors so.  Then they want to know what the tricks are for
+growing fast.  And we have to tell them the best way to do that is
+simply to make something people want.<br /><br />So many of the conversations YC partners have with young founders
+begin with the founder asking "How do we..." and the partner replying
+"Just..."<br /><br />Why do the founders always make things so complicated?  The reason,
+I realized, is that they're looking for the trick.<br /><br />So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about
+startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops
+working.  Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work
+for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can
+succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression
+of productivity, and so on. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font>
+But that doesn't work with startups.
+There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is
+whether your product does what they want. Startups are as impersonal
+as physics.  You have to make something people want, and you prosper
+only to the extent you do.<br /><br />The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors.
+If you're super good at sounding like you know what you're talking
+about, you can fool investors for at least one and perhaps even two
+rounds of funding.  But it's not in your interest to.  The company
+is ultimately doomed.  All you're doing is wasting your own time
+riding it down.<br /><br />So stop looking for the trick. There are tricks in startups, as
+there are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude less
+important than solving the real problem. A founder who knows nothing
+about fundraising but has made something users love will have an
+easier time raising money than one who knows every trick in the
+book but has a flat usage graph. And more importantly, the founder
+who has made something users love is the one who will go on to
+succeed after raising the money.<br /><br />Though in a sense it's bad news in that you're deprived of one of
+your most powerful weapons, I think it's exciting that gaming the
+system stops working when you start a startup.  It's exciting that
+there even exist parts of the world where you win by doing good
+work.  Imagine how depressing the world would be if it were all
+like school and big companies, where you either have to spend a lot
+of time on bullshit things or lose to people who do.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font>
+I would
+have been delighted if I'd realized in college that there were parts
+of the real world where gaming the system mattered less than others,
+and a few where it hardly mattered at all.  But there are, and this
+variation is one of the most important things to consider when
+you're thinking about your future.  How do you win in each type of
+work, and what would you like to win by doing?
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>All-Consuming</b><br /><br />That brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point: startups are
+all-consuming.  If you start a startup, it will take over your life
+to a degree you cannot imagine.  And if your startup succeeds, it
+will take over your life for a long time: for several years at the
+very least, maybe for a decade, maybe for the rest of your working
+life.  So there is a real opportunity cost here.<br /><br />Larry Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there are aspects
+of it that are unenviable.  Basically at 25 he started running as
+fast as he could and it must seem to him that he hasn't stopped to
+catch his breath since.  Every day new shit happens in the Google
+empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he, as CEO, has to deal
+with it.  If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole week's
+backlog of shit accumulates.  And he has to bear this uncomplainingly,
+partly because as the company's daddy he can never show fear or
+weakness, and partly because billionaires get less than zero sympathy
+if they talk about having difficult lives.  Which has the strange
+side effect that the difficulty of being a successful startup founder
+is concealed from almost everyone except those who've done it.<br /><br />Y Combinator has now funded several companies that can be called
+big successes, and in every single case the founders say the same
+thing.  It never gets any easier.  The nature of the problems change.
+You're worrying about construction delays at your London office
+instead of the broken air conditioner in your studio apartment.
+But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it
+increases.<br /><br />Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids in that
+it's like a button you push that changes your life irrevocably.
+And while it's truly wonderful having kids, there are a lot of
+things that are easier to do before you have them than after.  Many
+of which will make you a better parent when you do have kids. And
+since you can delay pushing the button for a while, most people in
+rich countries do.<br /><br />Yet when it comes to startups, a lot of people seem to think they're
+supposed to start them while they're still in college.  Are you
+crazy?  And what are the universities thinking?  They go out of
+their way to ensure their students are well supplied with contraceptives,
+and yet they're setting up entrepreneurship programs and startup
+incubators left and right.<br /><br />To be fair, the universities have their hand forced here.  A lot
+of incoming students are interested in startups.  Universities are,
+at least de facto, expected to prepare them for their careers.  So
+students who want to start startups hope universities can teach
+them about startups.  And whether universities can do this or not,
+there's some pressure to claim they can, lest they lose applicants
+to other universities that do.<br /><br />Can universities teach students about startups?  Yes and no.  They
+can teach students about startups, but as I explained before, this
+is not what you need to know.  What you need to learn about are the
+needs of your own users, and you can't do that until you actually
+start the company.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#999999>5</font></a>]</font>
+So starting a startup is intrinsically
+something you can only really learn by doing it.  And it's impossible
+to do that in college, for the reason I just explained: startups
+take over your life.  You can't start a startup for real as a
+student, because if you start a startup for real you're not a student
+anymore. You may be nominally a student for a bit, but you won't even
+be that for long.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#999999>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take?  Be
+a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and
+not be a student?  I can answer that one for you. Do not start a
+startup in college.  How to start a startup is just a subset of a
+bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life.
+And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot
+of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it.
+Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search.  Most
+people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.<br /><br />You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before
+or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel
+super cheaply with no sense of a deadline.  For unambitious people,
+this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the
+ambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration.
+If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful,
+you'll never get to do it.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#999999>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign country.  He
+can do other things most people can't, like charter jets to fly him
+to foreign countries. But success has taken a lot of the serendipity
+out of his life. Facebook is running him as much as he's running
+Facebook. And while it can be very cool to be in the grip of a
+project you consider your life's work, there are advantages to
+serendipity too, especially early in life.  Among other things it
+gives you more options to choose your life's work from.<br /><br />There's not even a tradeoff here. You're not sacrificing anything
+if you forgo starting a startup at 20, because you're more likely
+to succeed if you wait.  In the unlikely case that you're 20 and
+one of your side projects takes off like Facebook did, you'll face
+a choice of running with it or not, and it may be reasonable to run
+with it.  But the usual way startups take off is for the founders
+to <a href="ds.html">make them</a> take off, and it's gratuitously
+stupid to do that at 20.<br /><br />
+<b>Try</b><br /><br />Should you do it at any age?  I realize I've made startups sound
+pretty hard.  If I haven't, let me try again: starting a startup
+is really hard.  What if it's too hard?  How can you tell if you're
+up to this challenge?<br /><br />The answer is the fifth counterintuitive point: you can't tell. Your
+life so far may have given you some idea what your prospects might
+be if you tried to become a mathematician, or a professional football
+player.  But unless you've had a very strange life you haven't done
+much that was <a href="really.html">like</a> being a startup founder.
+Starting a startup will change you a lot.  So what you're trying
+to estimate is not just what you are, but what you could grow into,
+and who can do that?<br /><br />For the past 9 years it was my job to predict whether people would
+have what it took to start successful startups.  It was easy to
+tell how smart they were, and most people reading this will be over
+that threshold.  The hard part was predicting how <xa
+href="relres.html">tough and ambitious</a> they would become.  There
+may be no one who has more experience at trying to predict that,
+so I can tell you how much an expert can know about it, and the
+answer is: not much.  I learned to keep a completely open mind about
+which of the startups in each batch would turn out to be the stars.<br /><br />The founders sometimes think they know. Some arrive feeling sure
+they will ace Y Combinator just as they've aced every one of the (few,
+artificial, easy) tests they've faced in life so far.  Others arrive
+wondering how they got in, and hoping YC doesn't discover whatever
+mistake caused it to accept them.  But there is little correlation
+between founders' initial attitudes and how well their companies
+do.<br /><br />I've read that the same is true in the military &mdash; that the
+swaggering recruits are no more likely to turn out to be really
+tough than the quiet ones. And probably for the same reason: that
+the tests involved are so different from the ones in their previous
+lives.<br /><br />If you're absolutely terrified of starting a startup, you probably
+shouldn't do it.  But if you're merely unsure whether you're up to
+it, the only way to find out is to try.  Just not now.<br /><br />
+<b>Ideas</b><br /><br />So if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in
+college?  There are only two things you need initially: an idea and
+cofounders.  And the m.o. for getting both is the same.  Which leads
+to our sixth and last counterintuitive point: that the way to get
+startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas.<br /><br />I've written a whole <a href="startupideas.html">essay</a> on this,
+so I won't repeat it all here.  But the short version is that if
+you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideas
+you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and plausible-sounding,
+meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before realizing they're
+bad.<br /><br />The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back.
+Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas,
+turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any
+conscious effort.  In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even
+realize at first that they're startup ideas.<br /><br />This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and
+Facebook all got started.  None of these companies were even meant
+to be companies at first.  They were all just side projects.  The
+best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great
+ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject
+them as ideas for companies.<br /><br />Ok, so how do you turn your mind into the type that startup ideas
+form in unconsciously?  (1) Learn a lot about things that matter,
+then (2) work on problems that interest you (3) with people you
+like and respect.  The third part, incidentally, is how you get
+cofounders at the same time as the idea.<br /><br />The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of "learn a lot about
+things that matter," I wrote "become good at some technology." But
+that prescription, though sufficient, is too narrow.  What was
+special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was not that they were
+experts in technology.  They were good at design, and perhaps even
+more importantly, they were good at organizing groups and making
+projects happen.  So you don't have to work on technology per se,
+so long as you work on problems demanding enough to stretch you.<br /><br />What kind of problems are those?  That is very hard to answer in
+the general case.  History is full of examples of young people who
+were working on important problems that <a href="marginal.html">no
+one else</a> at the time thought were important, and in particular
+that their parents didn't think were important.  On the other hand,
+history is even fuller of examples of parents who thought their
+kids were wasting their time and who were right.  So how do you
+know when you're working on real stuff?
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#999999>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />I know how <i>I</i> know.  Real problems are interesting, and I am
+self-indulgent in the sense that I always want to work on interesting
+things, even if no one else cares about them (in fact, especially
+if no one else cares about them), and find it very hard to make
+myself work on boring things, even if they're supposed to be
+important.<br /><br />My life is full of case after case where I worked on something just
+because it seemed interesting, and it turned out later to be useful
+in some worldly way.  <a href="http://ycombinator.com/start.html">Y
+Combinator itself</a> was something I only did because it seemed
+interesting. So I seem to have some sort of internal compass that
+helps me out.  But I don't know what other people have in their
+heads. Maybe if I think more about this I can come up with heuristics
+for recognizing genuinely interesting problems, but for the moment
+the best I can offer is the hopelessly question-begging advice that
+if you have a taste for genuinely interesting problems, indulging
+it energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup.
+And indeed, probably also the best way to live.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#999999>9</font></a>]</font><br /><br />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 &mdash; 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.<br /><br />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 way the best startups get started.<br /><br />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, 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.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#999999>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />So here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders,
+boiled down to two words: just learn.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+Some founders listen more than others, and this tends to be a
+<a href="word.html">predictor of success</a>. One of the things I
+remember about the Airbnbs during YC is how intently they listened.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+In fact, this is one of the reasons startups are possible.  If
+big companies weren't plagued by internal inefficiencies, they'd
+be proportionately more effective, leaving less room for startups.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+In a startup you have to spend a lot of time on <a
+href="schlep.html">schleps</a>, but this sort of work is merely
+unglamorous, not bogus.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+What should you do if your true calling is gaming the system?
+Management consulting.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+The company may not be incorporated, but if you start to get
+significant numbers of users, you've started it, whether you realize
+it yet or not.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+It shouldn't be that surprising that colleges can't teach
+students how to be good startup founders, because they can't teach
+them how to be good employees either.<br /><br />The way universities "teach" students how to be employees is to
+hand off the task to companies via internship programs.  But you
+couldn't do the equivalent thing for startups, because by definition
+if the students did well they would never come back.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+Charles Darwin was 22 when he received an invitation to travel
+aboard the HMS Beagle as a naturalist.  It was only because he was
+otherwise unoccupied, to a degree that alarmed his family, that he
+could accept it. And yet if he hadn't we probably would not know
+his name.<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+Parents can sometimes be especially conservative in this
+department.  There are some whose definition of important problems
+includes only those on the critical path to med school.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+I did manage to think of a heuristic for detecting whether you
+have a taste for interesting ideas: whether you find known boring
+ideas intolerable.  Could you endure studying literary theory, or
+working in middle management at a large company?<br /><br />[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
+In fact, if your goal is to start a startup, you can stick
+even more closely to the ideal of a liberal education than past
+generations have. Back when students focused mainly on getting a
+job after college, they thought at least a little about how the
+courses they took might look to an employer.  And perhaps even
+worse, they might shy away from taking a difficult class lest they
+get a low grade, which would harm their all-important GPA.  Good
+news: users <a href="credentials.html">don't care</a> what your GPA
+was.  And I've never heard of investors caring either.  Y Combinator
+certainly never asks what classes you took in college or what grades
+you got in them.<br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick
+Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
+Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://caramel.la/yousefales/DyfU-w5hH/qbl-almshrwa-alryady">Arabic Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/bel.html

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+<html><head><title>Bel</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc1c7><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc1c7 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-5.gif" width="31" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Bel" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">Oct 2019<br /><br />Bel is a spec for a new dialect of Lisp, written in itself. This should sound familiar to people who know about Lisp's origins, because it's <a href="rootsoflisp.html"><font color="#000099">the way Lisp began</font></a>.<br /><br />It consists of two text files meant to be read in parallel: a <a href="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bellanguage.txt?t=1688221954&"><font color="#000099">guide to the Bel language</font></a>, and the <a href="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bel.bel?t=1688221954&"><font color="#000099">Bel source</font></a>.<br /><br />For those who just want to see some code examples, there's a <a href="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/belexamples.txt?t=1688221954&"><font color="#000099">file of those</font></a>. But of course the Bel source is also a code example, since it's written in itself.<br /><br />Considering the rate at which I was discovering bugs before publishing Bel, there are bound to be more remaining. So this first version is version C, after Cunningham's Law.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+</script>
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+<!-- html107.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:29 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/best.html

@@ -0,0 +1,404 @@
+<html><head><meta name="Keywords" content="" /><title>The Best Essay</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=9e2a65f3391b49><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#9e2a65f3391b49 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-best-essay-1.gif" width="121" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="The Best Essay" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">March 2024<br /><br />Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal
+here is to figure out what the best essay would be like.<br /><br />It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic.
+What made it special would be what it was about.<br /><br />Obviously some topics would be better than others. It probably
+wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors. But it wouldn't be
+vaporous talk about elevated themes either. A good essay has to be
+surprising. It has to tell people something they don't already know.<br /><br />The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell
+people something surprising about.<br /><br />That may sound obvious, but it has some unexpected consequences.
+One is that science enters the picture like an elephant stepping
+into a rowboat. For example, Darwin first described the idea of
+natural selection in an essay written in 1844.
+Talk about an
+important topic you could tell people something surprising about.
+If that's the test of a great essay, this was surely the best one
+written in 1844. 
+And indeed, the best possible essay at any given
+time would usually be one describing the most important scientific
+or technological discovery it was possible to make.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Another unexpected consequence: I imagined when I started writing
+this that the best essay would be fairly timeless &mdash; that the best
+essay you could write in 1844 would be much the same as the best
+one you could write now. But in fact the opposite seems to be true.
+It might be true that the best painting would be timeless in this
+sense. But it wouldn't be impressive to write an essay introducing
+natural selection now. The best essay <i>now</i> would be one describing
+a great discovery we didn't yet know about.<br /><br />If the question of how to write the best possible essay reduces to
+the question of how to make great discoveries, then I started with
+the wrong question. Perhaps what this exercise shows is that we
+shouldn't waste our time writing essays but instead focus on making
+discoveries in some specific domain. But I'm interested in essays
+and what can be done with them, so I want to see if there's some
+other question I could have asked.<br /><br />There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the
+one I started with. Instead of asking <i>what would the best essay
+be?</i> I should have asked <i>how do you write essays well?</i> Though
+these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer
+to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay
+writing. The second question forces it to be.<br /><br />Writing essays, at its best, is a way of discovering ideas. How do
+you do that well? How do you discover by writing?<br /><br />An essay should ordinarily start with what I'm going to call a
+question, though I mean this in a very general sense: it doesn't
+have to be a question grammatically, just something that acts like
+one in the sense that it spurs some response.<br /><br />How do you get this initial question? It probably won't work to
+choose some important-sounding topic at random and go at it.
+Professional traders won't even trade unless they have what they
+call an <i>edge</i> &mdash; a convincing story about why in some class of
+trades they'll win more than they lose. Similarly, you shouldn't
+attack a topic unless you have a way in &mdash; some new insight about
+it or way of approaching it.<br /><br />You don't need to have a complete thesis; you just need some kind
+of gap you can explore. In fact, merely having questions about
+something other people take for granted can be edge enough.<br /><br />If you come across a question that's sufficiently puzzling, it could
+be worth exploring even if it doesn't seem very momentous. Many an
+important discovery has been made by pulling on a thread that seemed
+insignificant at first. How can they <i>all</i> be finches? 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Once you've got a question, then what? You start thinking out loud
+about it. Not literally out loud, but you commit to a specific
+string of words in response, as you would if you were talking. This
+initial response is usually mistaken or incomplete. Writing converts
+your ideas from vague to bad. But that's a step forward, because
+once you can see the brokenness, you can fix it.<br /><br />Perhaps beginning writers are alarmed at the thought of starting
+with something mistaken or incomplete, but you shouldn't be, because
+this is why essay writing works. Forcing yourself to commit to some
+specific string of words gives you a starting point, and if it's
+wrong, you'll see that when you reread it. At least half of essay
+writing is rereading what you've written and asking <i>is this correct
+and complete?</i> You have to be very strict when rereading, not just
+because you want to keep yourself honest, but because a gap between
+your response and the truth is often a sign of new ideas to be
+discovered.<br /><br />The prize for being strict with what you've written is not just
+refinement. When you take a roughly correct answer and try to make
+it exactly right, sometimes you find that you can't, and that the
+reason is that you were depending on a false assumption. And when
+you discard it, the answer turns out to be completely different.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Ideally the response to a question is two things: the first step
+in a process that converges on the truth, and a source of additional
+questions (in my very general sense of the word). So the process
+continues recursively, as response spurs response. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#dddddd>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Usually there are several possible responses to a question, which
+means you're traversing a tree. But essays are linear, not tree-shaped,
+which means you have to choose one branch to follow at each point.
+How do you choose? Usually you should follow whichever offers the
+greatest combination of generality and novelty. I don't consciously
+rank branches this way; I just follow whichever seems most exciting;
+but generality and novelty are what make a branch exciting. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#dddddd>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If you're willing to do a lot of rewriting, you don't have to guess
+right. You can follow a branch and see how it turns out, and if it
+isn't good enough, cut it and backtrack. I do this all the time.
+In this essay I've already cut a 17-paragraph subtree, in addition
+to countless shorter ones. Maybe I'll reattach it at the end, or
+boil it down to a footnote, or spin it off as its own essay; we'll
+see. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#dddddd>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In general you want to be quick to cut. One of the most dangerous
+temptations in writing (and in software and painting) is to keep
+something that isn't right, just because it contains a few good bits
+or cost you a lot of effort.<br /><br />The most surprising new question being thrown off at this point is
+<i>does it really matter what the initial question is?</i> If the space
+of ideas is highly connected, it shouldn't, because you should be
+able to get from any question to the most valuable ones in a few
+hops. And we see evidence that it's highly connected in the way,
+for example, that people who are obsessed with some topic can turn
+any conversation toward it. But that only works if you know where
+you want to go, and you don't in an essay. That's the whole point.
+You don't want to be the obsessive conversationalist, or all your
+essays will be about the same thing. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#dddddd>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The other reason the initial question matters is that you usually
+feel somewhat obliged to stick to it. I don't think about this when
+I decide which branch to follow. I just follow novelty and generality.
+Sticking to the question is enforced later, when I notice I've
+wandered too far and have to backtrack. But I think this is
+the optimal solution. You don't want the hunt for novelty and
+generality to be constrained in the moment. Go with it and see what
+you get.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#dddddd>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Since the initial question does constrain you, in the best case it
+sets an upper bound on the quality of essay you'll write. If you
+do as well as you possibly can on the chain of thoughts that follow
+from the initial question, the initial question itself is the only
+place where there's room for variation.<br /><br />It would be a mistake to let this make you too conservative though,
+because you can't predict where a question will lead. Not if you're
+doing things right, because doing things right means making
+discoveries, and by definition you can't predict those. So the way
+to respond to this situation is not to be cautious about which
+initial question you choose, but to write a lot of essays. Essays
+are for taking risks.<br /><br />Almost any question can get you a good essay. Indeed, it took some
+effort to think of a sufficiently unpromising topic in the third
+paragraph, because any essayist's first impulse on hearing that the
+best essay couldn't be about x would be to try to write it. But if
+most questions yield good essays, only some yield great ones.<br /><br />Can we predict which questions will yield great essays? Considering
+how long I've been writing essays, it's alarming how novel that
+question feels.<br /><br />One thing I like in an initial question is outrageousness. I love
+questions that seem naughty in some way &mdash; for example, by seeming
+counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three.
+This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there
+is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive,
+though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay
+being better than another. And thinking about how to do something
+so ambitious is close enough to doing it that it holds your attention.<br /><br />I like to start an essay with a gleam in my eye. This could be just
+a taste of mine, but there's one aspect of it that probably isn't:
+to write a really good essay on some topic, you have to be interested
+in it. A good writer can write well about anything, but to stretch
+for the novel insights that are the raison d'etre of the essay, you
+have to care.<br /><br />If caring about it is one of the criteria for a good initial question,
+then the optimal question varies from person to person. It also
+means you're more likely to write great essays if you care about a
+lot of different things. The more curious you are, the greater the
+probable overlap between the set of things you're curious about and
+the set of topics that yield great essays.<br /><br />What other qualities would a great initial question have? It's
+probably good if it has implications in a lot of different areas.
+And I find it's a good sign if it's one that people think has already
+been thoroughly explored. But the truth is that I've barely thought
+about how to choose initial questions, because I rarely do it. I
+rarely <i>choose</i> what to write about; I just start thinking about
+something, and sometimes it turns into an essay.<br /><br />Am I going to stop writing essays about whatever I happen to be
+thinking about and instead start working my way through some
+systematically generated list of topics? That doesn't sound like
+much fun. And yet I want to write good essays, and if the initial
+question matters, I should care about it.<br /><br />Perhaps the answer is to go one step earlier: to write about whatever
+pops into your head, but try to ensure that what pops into your
+head is good. Indeed, now that I think about it, this has to be the
+answer, because a mere list of topics wouldn't be any use if you
+didn't have edge with any of them. To start writing an essay, you
+need a topic plus some initial insight about it, and you can't
+generate those systematically. If only. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#dddddd>9</font></a>]</font><br /><br />You can probably cause yourself to have more of them, though. The
+quality of the ideas that come out of your head depends on what goes
+in, and you can improve that in two dimensions, breadth and depth.<br /><br />You can't learn everything, so getting breadth implies learning
+about topics that are very different from one another. When I tell
+people about my book-buying trips to Hay and they ask what I buy
+books about, I usually feel a bit sheepish answering, because the
+topics seem like a laundry list of unrelated subjects. But perhaps
+that's actually optimal in this business.<br /><br />You can also get ideas by talking to people, by doing and building
+things, and by going places and seeing things. I don't think it's
+important to talk to new people so much as the sort of people who
+make you have new ideas. I get more new ideas after talking for an
+afternoon with Robert Morris than from talking to 20 new smart
+people. I know because that's what a block of office hours at Y
+Combinator consists of.<br /><br />While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes
+from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have
+to solve problems in it. Though this could take the form of writing,
+I suspect that to be a good essayist you also have to do, or have
+done, some other kind of work. That may not be true for most other
+fields, but essay writing is different. You could spend half your
+time working on something else and be net ahead, so long as it was
+hard.<br /><br />I'm not proposing that as a recipe so much as an encouragement to
+those already doing it. If you've spent all your life so far working
+on other things, you're already halfway there. Though of course to
+be good at writing you have to like it, and if you like writing
+you'd probably have spent at least some time doing it.<br /><br />Everything I've said about initial questions applies also to the
+questions you encounter in writing the essay. They're the same
+thing; every subtree of an essay is usually a shorter essay, just
+as every subtree of a Calder mobile is a smaller mobile. So any
+technique that gets you good initial questions also gets you good
+whole essays.<br /><br />At some point the cycle of question and response reaches what feels
+like a natural end. Which is a little suspicious; shouldn't every
+answer suggest more questions? I think what happens is that you
+start to feel sated. Once you've covered enough interesting ground,
+you start to lose your appetite for new questions. Which is just
+as well, because the reader is probably feeling sated too. And it's
+not lazy to stop asking questions, because you could instead be
+asking the initial question of a new essay.<br /><br />That's the ultimate source of drag on the connectedness of ideas:
+the discoveries you make along the way. If you discover enough
+starting from question A, you'll never make it to question B. Though
+if you keep writing essays you'll gradually fix this problem by
+burning off such discoveries. So bizarrely enough, writing lots of
+essays makes it as if the space of ideas were more highly connected.<br /><br />When a subtree comes to an end, you can do one of two things. You
+can either stop, or pull the Cubist trick of laying separate subtrees
+end to end by returning to a question you skipped earlier. Usually
+it requires some sleight of hand to make the essay flow continuously
+at this point, but not this time. This time I actually need an
+example of the phenomenon. For example, we discovered earlier that
+the best possible essay wouldn't usually be timeless in the way the
+best painting would. This seems surprising enough to be
+worth investigating further.<br /><br />There are two senses in which an essay can be timeless: to be about
+a matter of permanent importance, and always to have the same effect
+on readers. With art these two senses blend together. Art that
+looked beautiful to the ancient Greeks still looks beautiful to us.
+But with essays the two senses diverge, because essays
+teach, and you can't teach people something they already know.
+Natural selection is certainly a matter of permanent importance,
+but an essay explaining it couldn't have the same effect on us that
+it would have had on Darwin's contemporaries, precisely because his
+ideas were so successful that everyone already knows about them.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#dddddd>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />I imagined when I started writing this that the best possible essay
+would be timeless in the stricter, evergreen sense: that it would
+contain some deep, timeless wisdom that would appeal equally to
+Aristotle and Feynman. That doesn't seem to be true. But if the
+best possible essay wouldn't usually be timeless in this stricter
+sense, what would it take to write essays that were?<br /><br />The answer to that turns out to be very strange: to be the evergreen
+kind of timeless, an essay has to be ineffective, in the sense that
+its discoveries aren't assimilated into our shared culture. Otherwise
+there will be nothing new in it for the second generation of readers.
+If you want to surprise readers not just now but in the future as
+well, you have to write essays that won't stick &mdash; essays that,
+no matter how good they are, won't become part of what people in
+the future learn before they read them. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f11n"><font color=#dddddd>11</font></a>]</font><br /><br />I can imagine several ways to do that. One would be to write about
+things people never learn. For example, it's a long-established
+pattern for ambitious people to chase after various types of prizes,
+and only later, perhaps too late, to realize that some of them
+weren't worth as much as they thought. If you write about that, you
+can be confident of a conveyor belt of future readers to be surprised
+by it.<br /><br />Ditto if you write about the tendency of the inexperienced to overdo
+things &mdash; of young engineers to produce overcomplicated solutions,
+for example. There are some kinds of mistakes people never learn
+to avoid except by making them. Any of those should be a timeless
+topic.<br /><br />Sometimes when we're slow to grasp things it's not just because
+we're obtuse or in denial but because we've been deliberately lied
+to. There are a lot of things adults <a href="lies.html"><u>lie</u></a> 
+to kids about, and when
+you reach adulthood, they don't take you aside and hand you a list
+of them. They don't remember which lies they told you, and most
+were implicit anyway. So contradicting such lies will be a source
+of surprises for as long as adults keep telling them.<br /><br />Sometimes it's systems that lie to you. For example, the educational
+systems in most countries train you to win by 
+<a href="lesson.html"><u>hacking the test</u></a>. But
+that's not how you win at the most important real-world tests, and
+after decades of training, this is hard for new arrivals in the real
+world to grasp. Helping them overcome such institutional lies will
+work as long as the institutions remain broken. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f12n"><font color=#dddddd>12</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Another recipe for timelessness is to write about things readers
+already know, but in much more detail than can be transmitted
+culturally. "Everyone knows," for example, that it can be rewarding
+to have <a href="kids.html"><u>kids</u></a>. But till you have them you don't know precisely what
+forms that takes, and even then much of what you know you may never
+have put into words.<br /><br />I've written about all these kinds of topics. But I didn't do it
+in a deliberate attempt to write essays that were timeless in the
+stricter sense. And indeed, the fact that this depends on one's ideas
+not sticking suggests that it's not worth making a deliberate attempt
+to. You should write about topics of timeless importance, yes, but
+if you do such a good job that your conclusions stick and future
+generations find your essay obvious instead of novel, so much the
+better. You've crossed into Darwin territory.<br /><br />Writing about topics of timeless importance is an instance of
+something even more general, though: breadth of applicability. And
+there are more kinds of breadth than chronological &mdash; applying to
+lots of different fields, for example. So breadth is the ultimate
+aim.<br /><br />I already aim for it. Breadth and novelty are the two things I'm
+always chasing. But I'm glad I understand where timelessness fits.<br /><br />I understand better where a lot of things fit now. This essay has
+been a kind of tour of essay writing. I started out hoping to get
+advice about topics; if you assume good writing, the only thing
+left to differentiate the best essay is its topic. And I did get
+advice about topics: discover natural selection. Yeah, that would
+be nice. But when you step back and ask what's the best you can do
+short of making some great discovery like that, the answer turns
+out to be about procedure. Ultimately the quality of an essay is a
+function of the ideas discovered in it, and the way you get them
+is by casting a wide net for questions and then being very exacting
+with the answers.<br /><br />The most striking feature of this map of essay writing are the
+alternating stripes of inspiration and effort required. The questions
+depend on inspiration, but the answers can be got by sheer persistence.
+You don't have to get an answer right the first time, but there's
+no excuse for not getting it right eventually, because you can keep
+rewriting till you do. And this is not just a theoretical possibility.
+It's a pretty accurate description of the way I work. I'm rewriting
+as we speak.<br /><br />But although I wish I could say that writing great essays depends mostly
+on effort, in the limit case it's inspiration that makes the
+difference. In the limit case, the questions are the harder thing
+to get. That pool has no bottom.<br /><br />How to get more questions? That is the most important question of
+all.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+There might be some resistance to this conclusion on the
+grounds that some of these discoveries could only be understood by
+a small number of readers. But you get into all sorts of difficulties
+if you want to disqualify essays on this account. How do you decide
+where the cutoff should be? If a virus kills off everyone except a 
+handful of people sequestered at Los Alamos,
+could an essay that had been disqualified now be eligible? Etc.<br /><br />Darwin's 1844 essay was derived from an earlier version written in 1839.
+Extracts from it were published in 1858.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+When you find yourself very curious about an apparently minor
+question, that's an exciting sign. Evolution has designed you to
+pay attention to things that matter. So when you're very curious
+about something random, that could mean you've unconsciously noticed
+it's less random than it seems.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+Corollary: If you're not intellectually honest, your writing
+won't just be biased, but also boring, because you'll miss all the
+ideas you'd have discovered if you pushed for the truth.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+Sometimes this process begins before you start writing.
+Sometimes you've already figured out the first few things you want
+to say. Schoolchildren are often taught they should decide <i>everything</i>
+they want to say, and write this down as an outline before they
+start writing the essay itself. Maybe that's a good way to get them
+started &mdash; or not, I don't know &mdash; but it's antithetical to the
+spirit of essay writing. The more detailed your outline, the less
+your ideas can benefit from the sort of discovery that essays are for.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+The problem with this type of "greedy" algorithm is that you
+can end up on a local maximum. If the most valuable question is
+preceded by a boring one, you'll overlook it. But I can't imagine
+a better strategy. There's no lookahead except by writing. So use
+a greedy algorithm and a lot of time.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+I ended up reattaching the first 5 of the 17 paragraphs, and
+discarding the rest.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+Stephen Fry confessed to making use of this phenomenon when
+taking exams at Oxford. He had in his head a standard essay about
+some general literary topic, and he would find a way to turn the
+exam question toward it and then just reproduce it again.<br /><br />Strictly speaking it's the graph of ideas that would be highly
+connected, not the space, but that usage would confuse people who
+don't know graph theory, whereas people who do know it will get
+what I mean if I say "space".<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+Too far doesn't depend just on the distance from the original
+topic. It's more like that distance divided by the value of whatever
+I've discovered in the subtree.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+Or can you? I should try writing about this. Even if the
+chance of succeeding is small, the expected value is huge.<br /><br />[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
+There was a vogue in the 20th century for saying that the
+purpose of art was also to teach. Some artists tried to justify
+their work by explaining that their goal was not to produce something
+good, but to challenge our preconceptions about art. And to be fair,
+art can teach somewhat. The ancient Greeks' naturalistic sculptures
+represented a new idea, and must have been extra exciting to
+contemporaries on that account. But they still look good to us.<br /><br />[<a name="f11n"><font color=#000000>11</font></a>]
+Bertrand Russell caused huge controversy in the early 20th
+century with his ideas about "trial marriage." But they make boring
+reading now, because they prevailed. "Trial marriage" is what we
+call "dating."<br /><br />[<a name="f12n"><font color=#000000>12</font></a>]
+If you'd asked me 10 years ago, I'd have predicted that schools
+would continue to teach hacking the test for centuries. But now it
+seems plausible that students will soon be taught individually by
+AIs, and that exams will be replaced by ongoing, invisible
+micro-assessments.<br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, 
+Jessica Livingston, Robert
+Morris, Courtenay Pipkin, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of
+this.</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<html><head><title>A Way to Detect Bias</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc43><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc43 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/a-way-to-detect-bias-4.gif" width="169" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="A Way to Detect Bias" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">October 2015<br /><br />This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases
+it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing
+anything about the applicant pool.  Which is exciting because among
+other things it means third parties can use this technique to detect
+bias whether those doing the selecting want them to or not.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font>
+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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 without?  A couple months ago, one VC firm (almost certainly
+unintentionally) published a study showing bias of this type. First
+Round Capital found that among its portfolio companies, startups
+with female founders <a href="http://10years.firstround.com/#one"><u>outperformed</u></a>
+those without by 63%. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The reason I began by saying that this technique would come as a
+surprise to many people is that we so rarely see analyses of this
+type.  I'm sure it will come as a surprise to First Round that they
+performed one. I doubt anyone there realized that by limiting their
+sample to their own portfolio, they were producing a study not of
+startup trends but of their own biases when selecting companies.<br /><br />I predict we'll see this technique used more in the future.  The
+information needed to conduct such studies is increasingly available.
+Data about who applies for things is usually closely guarded by the
+organizations selecting them, but nowadays data about who gets
+selected is often publicly available to anyone who takes the trouble
+to aggregate it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+This technique wouldn't work if the selection process looked
+for different things from different types of applicants&mdash;for
+example, if an employer hired men based on their ability but women
+based on their appearance.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+As Paul Buchheit points out, First Round excluded their most 
+successful investment, Uber, from the study.  And while it 
+makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies, 
+studies of returns from startup investing, which is all about 
+hitting outliers, are not one of them.<br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading
+drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://tldrarabiccontents.blogspot.com/2020/01/blog-post_29.html">Arabic Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://www.jensbackbom.se/2020/09/10/ett-satt-att-upptacka-bias/">Swedish Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/bio.html

@@ -0,0 +1,77 @@
+<html><head><title>Bio</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc325><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc325 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><a href="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bio-11.gif"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bio-12.gif" width="109" height="97" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="105" width="10" align="left" border="0" /><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bio-13.gif" width="29" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Bio" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor.
+In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software
+as a service company.  Viaweb was acquired by 
+<a href="http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release184.html">Yahoo</a> in 1998, 
+where it became Yahoo Store.  In 2001 he started publishing
+essays on <a href="http://paulgraham.com">paulgraham.com</a>,
+which now gets around 25 million page views per year.
+In 2005 he and
+Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell
+started <a href="http://ycombinator.com"><u>Y&nbsp;Combinator</u></a>, the first of a new type of startup
+incubator.  Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 3000 startups,
+including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit.  In 2019 he published a
+new Lisp dialect written in itself called <a href="bel.html"><u>Bel</u></a>.<br /><br />Paul
+is the author of 
+<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0130305529">On Lisp</a> (Prentice Hall,
+                   1993),
+<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0133708756">ANSI Common Lisp</a> 
+(Prentice Hall, 1995), and
+<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596006624">Hackers &
+Painters</a> (O'Reilly, 2004).
+He has an AB from Cornell and a
+                   PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting
+at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.<br /><br /><!-- 2004: 3.7, 2005: 8.1, 2006: 9.7 2007: 10, 2008: 10.6, 2009: 8.9, 2011: 17, 2014: 12.2, 2015: 34--><br /><br /><br clear="all" /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><hr>
+<font size=1 color=#aaaaaa>Photo by Dave Thomas, released under the 
+Attribution Creative Commons license.
+Click for full-size version.
+<!--Photo by Doug Tolton at ILC 2003.  From
+left, David Bakhash, Paul Graham, Duane Rettig, Erann Gat, Kenny Tilton,
+Jan Rychter.--></font></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/books.html

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+<html><head><title>Books</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc1c9><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc1c9 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/books-5.gif" width="55" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Books" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="bottom"><td width="129"><center><a href="onlisp.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/on-lisp-14.gif" width="58" height="95" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="On Lisp" /></a></center></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="129"><center><a href="acl.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/ansi-common-lisp-18.gif" width="59" height="95" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="ANSI Common Lisp" /></a></center></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="129"><center><a href="hackpaint.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/hackers-painters-16.gif" width="58" height="95" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Hackers &amp; Painters" /></a></center></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="129"><font size="2" face="verdana"><center><b><a href="onlisp.html">On Lisp</a></b><br /><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></center></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="129"><font size="2" face="verdana"><center><b><a href="acl.html">ANSI Common Lisp</a></b><br /><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></center></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="129"><font size="2" face="verdana"><center><b><a href="hackpaint.html">Hackers & Painters</a></b><br /><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></center></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<!-- html106.prod.store.e1a.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:28 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/conformism.html

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+<html><head><title>The Four Quadrants of Conformism</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebcab><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebcab border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-four-quadrants-of-conformism-4.gif" width="288" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="The Four Quadrants of Conformism" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">July 2020<br /><br />One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree
+and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate
+system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the
+left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis
+runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The
+resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in
+the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively
+conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively
+independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.<br /><br />I think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that
+which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality
+than the beliefs prevalent in their society.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Young children offer some of the best evidence for both points.
+Anyone who's been to primary school has seen the four types, and
+the fact that school rules are so arbitrary is strong evidence that
+which quadrant people fall into depends more on them than the rules.<br /><br />The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded
+ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must
+be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.<br /><br />The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded,
+are the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when other
+kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be
+punished, not to ensure that they will.<br /><br />The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded,
+are the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probably
+aren't 100% sure what the rules even are.<br /><br />And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively
+independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule,
+their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to
+do makes them inclined to do the opposite.<br /><br />When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect
+to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's
+the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules
+becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school
+rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.<br /><br />In adulthood we can recognize the four types by their distinctive
+calls, much as you could recognize four species of birds. The call
+of the aggressively conventional-minded is "Crush &lt;outgroup&gt;!" (It's
+rather alarming to see an exclamation point after a variable, but
+that's the whole problem with the aggressively conventional-minded.)
+The call of the passively conventional-minded is "What will the
+neighbors think?" The call of the passively independent-minded is
+"To each his own." And the call of the aggressively independent-minded
+is "Eppur si muove."<br /><br />The four types are not equally common. There are more passive people
+than aggressive ones, and far more conventional-minded people than
+independent-minded ones. So the passively conventional-minded are
+the largest group, and the aggressively independent-minded the
+smallest.<br /><br />Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the
+nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant
+even if they'd grown up in a quite different society.<br /><br />Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:
+<blockquote>
+   I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would
+   have been had they been white and living in the South before
+   abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists!
+   They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and
+   worked tirelessly against it.
+</blockquote>
+He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed,
+our default assumption should not merely be that his students would,
+on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but
+that the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would
+have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words,
+that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that
+they'd have been among its staunchest defenders.<br /><br />I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively
+conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate
+amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs
+we've evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect
+the rest of us from them. In particular, the retirement of the
+concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freely
+debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently
+considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try
+them out to see if they work.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because
+they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for
+example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right
+when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do
+that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not
+merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence
+that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs
+for keeping the conventional-minded at bay.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs
+protecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting
+� that they haven't been weakened very much, or that they've been
+weakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I'll dispose
+of immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand,
+they always say it's in the service of a greater good.  It just
+happens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time.<br /><br />As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being
+oversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down that
+much, you can't judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded.
+You can't know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped off
+unless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the ones
+at the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be very
+sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas. They're
+the canaries in this coalmine.<br /><br />The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't
+want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.<br /><br />You'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a
+dangerous game they're playing. But I'll spell it out. There are
+two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad" ideas.<br /><br />The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is
+bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent
+wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by
+the stupid. And when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you need
+to leave a margin for error. Which in this case means you need to
+ban fewer ideas than you'd like to. But that's hard for the
+aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy
+seeing people punished, as they have since they were children, and
+partly because they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxy
+can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other
+enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department,
+and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting
+the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the
+bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being
+banned. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#dddddd>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is
+that ideas are more closely related than they look. Which means if
+you restrict the discussion of some topics, it doesn't only affect
+those topics. The restrictions propagate back into any topic that
+yields implications in the forbidden ones. And that is not an edge
+case. The best ideas do exactly that: they have consequences
+in fields far removed from their origins. Having ideas in a world
+where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that
+has a minefield in one corner. You don't just play the same game
+you would have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a much
+more subdued game even on the ground that's safe.<br /><br />In the past, the way the independent-minded protected themselves
+was to congregate in a handful of places �  first in courts, and
+later in universities � where they could to some extent make their
+own rules. Places where people work with ideas tend to have customs
+protecting free inquiry, for the same reason wafer fabs have powerful
+air filters, or recording studios good sound insulation. For the
+last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded
+were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the
+safest places to be.<br /><br />That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact
+that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. It began
+in the mid 1980s, and by 2000 seemed to have died down, but it has
+recently flared up again with the arrival of social media. This
+seems, unfortunately, to have been an own goal by Silicon Valley.
+Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all independent-minded,
+they've handed the aggressively conventional-minded a tool such as
+they could only have dreamed of.<br /><br />On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry
+within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the
+independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become
+professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become
+quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to
+succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors,
+they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic
+freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing
+declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are
+declining because so many have already left.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#dddddd>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Though I've spent a lot of time thinking about this situation, I
+can't predict how it plays out. Could some universities reverse the
+current trend and remain places where the independent-minded want
+to congregate? Or will the independent-minded gradually abandon
+them? I worry a lot about what we might lose if that happened.<br /><br />But I'm hopeful long term. The independent-minded are good at
+protecting themselves. If existing institutions are compromised,
+they'll create new ones. That may require some imagination. But
+imagination is, after all, their specialty.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+I realize of course that if people's personalities vary in any
+two ways, you can use them as axes and call the resulting four
+quadrants personality types. So what I'm really claiming is that
+the axes are orthogonal and that there's significant variation in
+both.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+The aggressively conventional-minded aren't responsible for all
+the trouble in the world. Another big source of trouble is the sort
+of charismatic leader who gains power by appealing to them. They
+become much more dangerous when such leaders emerge.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+I never worried about writing things that offended the
+conventional-minded when I was running Y Combinator. If YC were a
+cookie company, I'd have faced a difficult moral choice.
+Conventional-minded people eat cookies too. But they don't start
+successful startups. So if I deterred them from applying to YC, the
+only effect was to save us work reading applications.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+There has been progress in one area: the punishments for talking
+about banned ideas are less severe than in the past. There's little
+danger of being killed, at least in richer countries. The aggressively
+conventional-minded are mostly satisfied with getting people fired.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+Many professors are independent-minded � especially in math,
+the hard sciences, and engineering, where you have to be to succeed.
+But students are more representative of the general population, and
+thus mostly conventional-minded. So when professors and students
+are in conflict, it's not just a conflict between generations but
+also between different types of people.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Nicholas Christakis, Patrick
+Collison, Sam Gichuru, Jessica Livingston, Patrick McKenzie, Geoff
+Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://www.noahleidinger.com/unlisted/konformismus-graham-paul">German Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://github.com/j30ng/translations/blob/main/paul-graham/%EC%BD%98%ED%8F%AC%EB%AF%B8%EC%A6%98%EC%9D%98%EC%82%AC%EB%B6%84%EB%A9%B4-conformism.md">Korean Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://jelenadobric.com/writing-translations/konformizam-paul-graham">Serbian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/control.html

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+<html><head><title>Founder Control</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebced><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebced border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/founder-control-2.gif" width="141" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Founder Control" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+December 2010<br /><br />Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common
+it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after
+a series A round.  He said VCs told him this almost never happened.<br /><br />Ten years ago that was true.  In the past, founders rarely kept
+control of the board through a series A.  The traditional series A
+board consisted of two founders, two VCs, and one independent member.
+More recently the recipe is often one founder, one VC, and one
+independent.  In either case the founders lose their majority.<br /><br />But not always.  Mark Zuckerberg kept control of Facebook's board
+through the series A and still has it today.  Mark Pincus has kept
+control of Zynga's too.  But are these just outliers?  How common
+is it for founders to keep control after an A round?  I'd heard of
+several cases among the companies we've funded, but I wasn't sure
+how many there were, so I emailed the ycfounders list.<br /><br />The replies surprised me.  In a dozen companies we've funded, the
+founders still had a majority of the board seats after the series
+A round.<br /><br />I feel like we're at a tipping point here.  A lot of VCs still act
+as if founders retaining board control after a series A is unheard-of.
+A lot of them try to make you feel bad if you even ask &mdash; as if
+you're a noob or a control freak for wanting such a thing.  But the
+founders I heard from aren't noobs or control freaks.  Or if they
+are, they are, like Mark Zuckerberg, the kind of noobs and control
+freaks VCs should be trying to fund more of.<br /><br />Founders retaining control after a series A is clearly heard-of.
+And barring financial catastrophe, I think in the coming year it
+will become the norm.<br /><br />Control of a company is a more complicated matter than simply
+outvoting other parties in board meetings.  Investors usually get
+vetos over certain big decisions, like selling the company, regardless
+of how many board seats they have.  And board votes are rarely
+split.  Matters are decided in the discussion preceding the vote,
+not in the vote itself, which is usually unanimous.  But if opinion
+is divided in such discussions, the side that knows it would lose
+in a vote will tend to be less insistent.  That's what board control
+means in practice.  You don't simply get to do whatever you want;
+the board still has to act in the interest of the shareholders; but
+if you have a majority of board seats, then your opinion about
+what's in the interest of the shareholders will tend to prevail.<br /><br />So while board control is not total control, it's not imaginary
+either.  There's inevitably a difference in how things feel within
+the company.  Which means if it becomes the norm for founders to
+retain board control after a series A, that will change the way
+things feel in the whole startup world.<br /><br />The switch to the new norm may be surprisingly fast, because the
+startups that can retain control tend to be the best ones.  They're
+the ones that set the trends, both for other startups and for VCs.<br /><br />A lot of the reason VCs are harsh when negotiating with startups
+is that they're embarrassed to go back to their partners looking
+like they got beaten.  When they sign a termsheet, they want to be
+able to brag about the good terms they got.  A lot of them don't
+care that much personally about whether founders keep board control.
+They just don't want to seem like they had to make concessions.
+Which means if letting the founders keep control stops being perceived
+as a concession, it will rapidly become much more common.<br /><br />Like a lot of changes that have been forced on VCs, this change
+won't turn out to be as big a problem as they might think. VCs will
+still be able to convince; they just won't be able to compel.  And
+the startups where they have to resort to compulsion are not the
+ones that matter anyway.  VCs make most of their money from a few
+big hits, and those aren't them.<br /><br />Knowing that founders will keep control of the board may even help
+VCs pick better.  If they know they can't fire the founders, they'll
+have to choose founders they can trust.  And that's who they should
+have been choosing all along.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, John Bautista, Trevor Blackwell, Paul
+Buchheit, Brian Chesky, Bill Clerico, Patrick Collison, Adam
+Goldstein, James Lindenbaum, Jessica Livingston, and Fred Wilson
+for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<!-- html107.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:53 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/convince.html

@@ -0,0 +1,383 @@
+<html><head><title>How to Convince Investors</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc65><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc65 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-convince-investors-4.gif" width="221" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="How to Convince Investors" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+August 2013<br /><br />When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually
+because they try to lift with their back.  The right way to lift
+heavy things is to let your legs do the work.  Inexperienced founders
+make the same mistake when trying to convince investors.  They try
+to convince with their pitch.  Most would be better off if they let
+their startup do the work &mdash; if they started by understanding why
+their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this
+well to investors.<br /><br />Investors are looking for startups that will be very successful.
+But that test is not as simple as it sounds.  In startups, as in a
+lot of other domains, the distribution of outcomes follows a power
+law, but in startups the curve is startlingly steep.  The big
+successes are so big they 
+<a href="swan.html">dwarf</a> the rest.  And since there are only
+a handful each year (the conventional wisdom is 15), investors treat
+"big success" as if it were binary.  Most are interested in you if
+you seem like you have a chance, however small, of being one of the
+15 big successes, and otherwise not.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />(There are a handful of angels who'd be interested in a company
+with a high probability of being moderately successful.  But angel
+investors like big successes too.)<br /><br />How do you seem like you'll be one of the big successes?  You need
+three things: formidable founders, a promising market, and (usually)
+some evidence of success so far.<br /><br /><b>Formidable</b><br /><br />The most important ingredient is formidable founders.  Most investors
+decide in the first few minutes whether you seem like a winner or
+a loser, and once their opinion is set it's hard to change.&nbsp;<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font>
+Every startup has reasons both to invest and not to invest.  If
+investors think you're a winner they focus on the former, and if
+not they focus on the latter.  For example, it might be a rich
+market, but with a slow sales cycle.  If investors are impressed
+with you as founders, they say they want to invest because it's a
+rich market, and if not, they say they can't invest because of the
+slow sales cycle.<br /><br />They're not necessarily trying to mislead you.  Most investors are
+genuinely unclear in their own minds why they like or dislike
+startups.  If you seem like a winner, they'll like your idea more.
+But don't be too smug about this weakness of theirs, because you
+have it too; almost everyone does.<br /><br />There is a role for ideas of course.  They're fuel for the fire
+that starts with liking the founders.  Once investors like you,
+you'll see them reaching for ideas: they'll be saying "yes, and you
+could also do x."  (Whereas when they don't like you, they'll be
+saying "but what about y?")<br /><br />But the foundation of convincing investors is to seem formidable,
+and since this isn't a word most people use in conversation much,
+I should explain what it means.  A formidable person is one who
+seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever
+obstacles are in the way.  Formidable is close to confident, except
+that someone could be confident and mistaken.  Formidable is roughly
+justifiably confident.<br /><br />There are a handful of people who are really good at seeming
+formidable &mdash; some because they actually are very formidable and
+just let it show, and others because they are more or less con
+artists.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font>
+But most founders, including many who will go on
+to start very successful companies, are not that good at seeming
+formidable the first time they try fundraising.  What should they
+do?
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />What they should not do is try to imitate the swagger of more
+experienced founders.  Investors are not always that good at judging
+technology, but they're good at judging confidence.  If you try to
+act like something you're not, you'll just end up in an uncanny
+valley.  You'll depart from sincere, but never arrive at convincing.<br /><br /><b>Truth</b><br /><br />The way to seem most formidable as an inexperienced founder is to
+stick to the truth.   How formidable you seem isn't a constant.  It
+varies depending on what you're saying.  Most people can seem
+confident when they're saying "one plus one is two," because they
+know it's true.  The most diffident person would be puzzled and
+even slightly contemptuous if they told a VC "one plus one is two"
+and the VC reacted with skepticism.  The magic ability of people
+who are good at seeming formidable is that they can do this with
+the sentence "we're going to make a billion dollars a year."  But
+you can do the same, if not with that sentence with some fairly
+impressive ones, so long as you convince yourself first.<br /><br />That's the secret.  Convince yourself that your startup is worth
+investing in, and then when you explain this to investors they'll
+believe you.  And by convince yourself, I don't mean play mind games
+with yourself to boost your confidence.  I mean truly evaluate
+whether your startup is worth investing in.  If it isn't, don't try
+to raise money.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#999999>5</font></a>]</font>
+But if it is, you'll be telling the truth
+when you tell investors it's worth investing in, and they'll sense
+that.  You don't have to be a smooth presenter if you understand
+something well and tell the truth about it.<br /><br />To evaluate whether your startup is worth investing in, you have
+to be a domain expert.  If you're not a domain expert, you can be
+as convinced as you like about your idea, and it will seem to
+investors no more than an instance of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
+Which in fact it will usually be.  And investors can tell fairly
+quickly whether you're a domain expert by how well you answer their
+questions.  Know everything about your market.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#999999>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Why do founders persist in trying to convince investors of things
+they're not convinced of themselves?  Partly because we've all been
+trained to.<br /><br />When my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell were in grad
+school, one of their fellow students was on the receiving end of a
+question from their faculty advisor that we still quote today.  When
+the unfortunate fellow got to his last slide, the professor burst
+out:
+<blockquote>
+  Which one of these conclusions do you actually believe?
+</blockquote>
+One of the artifacts of the way schools are organized is that we
+all get trained to talk even when we have nothing to say.  If you
+have a ten page paper due, then ten pages you must write, even if
+you only have one page of ideas.  Even if you have no ideas.  You
+have to produce something.  And all too many startups go into
+fundraising in the same spirit.  When they think it's time to raise
+money, they try gamely to make the best case they can for their
+startup.  Most never think of pausing beforehand to ask whether
+what they're saying is actually convincing, because they've all
+been trained to treat the need to present as a given &mdash; as an area
+of fixed size, over which however much truth they have must needs
+be spread, however thinly.<br /><br />The time to raise money is not when you need it, or when you reach
+some artificial deadline like a Demo Day.  It's when you can convince
+investors, and not before. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#999999>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br />And unless you're a good con artist, you'll never convince investors
+if you're not convinced yourself.  They're far better at detecting
+bullshit than you are at producing it, even if you're producing it
+unknowingly.  If you try to convince investors before you've convinced
+yourself, you'll be wasting both your time.<br /><br />But pausing first to convince yourself will do more than save you
+from wasting your time.  It will force you to organize your thoughts.
+To convince yourself that your startup is worth investing in, you'll
+have to figure out why it's worth investing in.   And if you can
+do that you'll end up with more than added confidence.  You'll also
+have a provisional roadmap of how to succeed.<br /><br /><b>Market</b><br /><br />Notice I've been careful to talk about whether a startup is worth
+investing in, rather than whether it's going to succeed.  No one
+knows whether a startup is going to succeed.  And it's a good thing
+for investors that this is so, because if you could know in advance
+whether a startup would succeed, the stock price would already be
+the future price, and there would be no room for investors to make
+money.  Startup investors know that every investment is a bet, and
+against pretty long odds.<br /><br />So to prove you're worth investing in, you don't have to prove
+you're going to succeed, just that you're a sufficiently good bet.
+What makes a startup a sufficiently good bet?  In addition to
+formidable founders, you need a plausible path to owning a big piece
+of a big market.  Founders think of startups as ideas, but investors
+think of them as markets.  If there are x number of customers who'd
+pay an average of $y per year for what you're making, then the total
+addressable market, or TAM, of your company is $xy.  Investors don't
+expect you to collect all that money, but it's an upper bound on
+how big you can get.<br /><br />Your target market has to be big, and it also has to be capturable
+by you.  But the market doesn't have to be big yet, nor do you
+necessarily have to be in it yet.  Indeed, it's often better to
+start in a <a href="ds.html">small</a> market that will either turn into a big one or
+from which you can move into a big one.  There just has to be some
+plausible sequence of hops that leads to dominating a big market a
+few years down the line.<br /><br />The standard of plausibility varies dramatically depending on the
+age of the startup.  A three month old company at Demo Day only
+needs to be a promising experiment that's worth funding to see how
+it turns out.  Whereas a two year old company raising a series A
+round needs to be able to show the experiment worked. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#999999>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />But every company that gets really big is "lucky" in the sense that
+their growth is due mostly to some external wave they're riding,
+so to make a convincing case for becoming huge, you have to identify
+some specific trend you'll benefit from.  Usually you can find this
+by asking "why now?"  If this is such a great idea, why hasn't
+someone else already done it?  Ideally the answer is that it only
+recently became a good idea, because something changed, and no one
+else has noticed yet.<br /><br />Microsoft for example was not going to grow huge selling Basic
+interpreters.  But by starting there they were perfectly poised to
+expand up the stack of microcomputer software as microcomputers
+grew powerful enough to support one. And microcomputers turned out
+to be a really huge wave, bigger than even the most optimistic
+observers would have predicted in 1975.<br /><br />But while Microsoft did really well and there is thus a temptation
+to think they would have seemed a great bet a few months in, they
+probably didn't.  Good, but not great.  No company, however successful,
+ever looks more than a pretty good bet a few months in. Microcomputers
+turned out to be a big deal, and Microsoft both executed well and
+got lucky.  But it was by no means obvious that this was how things
+would play out.  Plenty of companies seem as good a bet a few months
+in.  I don't know about startups in general, but at least half the
+startups we fund could make as good a case as Microsoft could have
+for being on a path to dominating a large market.  And who can
+reasonably expect more of a startup than that?<br /><br /><b>Rejection</b><br /><br />If you can make as good a case as Microsoft could have, will you
+convince investors?  Not always.  A lot of VCs would have rejected
+Microsoft.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#999999>9</font></a>]</font>
+Certainly some rejected Google.  And getting
+rejected will put you in a slightly awkward position, because as
+you'll see when you start fundraising, the most common question
+you'll get from investors will be "who else is investing?" What do
+you say if you've been fundraising for a while and no one has
+committed yet? 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#999999>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The people who are really good at acting formidable often solve
+this problem by giving investors the impression that while no
+investors have committed yet, several are about to.  This is arguably
+a permissible tactic.  It's slightly dickish of investors to care
+more about who else is investing than any other aspect of your
+startup, and misleading them about how far along you are with other
+investors seems the complementary countermove.  It's arguably an
+instance of scamming a scammer. But I don't recommend this approach
+to most founders, because most founders wouldn't be able to carry
+it off.  This is the single most common lie told to investors, and
+you have to be really good at lying to tell members of some profession
+the most common lie they're told.<br /><br />If you're not a master of negotiation (and perhaps even if you are)
+the best solution is to tackle the problem head-on, and to explain
+why investors have turned you down and why they're mistaken.  If
+you know you're on the right track, then you also know why investors
+were wrong to reject you. Experienced investors are well aware that
+the best ideas are also the scariest.  They all know about the VCs
+who rejected Google.  If instead of seeming evasive and ashamed
+about having been turned down (and thereby implicitly agreeing with
+the verdict) you talk candidly about what scared investors about
+you, you'll seem more confident, which they like, and you'll probably
+also do a better job of presenting that aspect of your startup.  At
+the very least, that worry will now be out in the open instead of
+being a gotcha left to be discovered by the investors you're currently
+talking to, who will be proud of and thus attached to their discovery.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f11n"><font color=#999999>11</font></a>]</font><br /><br />This strategy will work best with the best investors, who are both
+hard to bluff and who already believe most other investors are
+conventional-minded drones doomed always to miss the big outliers.
+Raising money is not like applying to college, where you can assume
+that if you can get into MIT, you can also get into Foobar State.
+Because the best investors are much smarter than the rest, and the
+best startup ideas look initially like 
+<a href="startupideas.html">bad ideas</a>, it's not uncommon
+for a startup to be rejected by all the VCs except the best ones.
+That's what happened to Dropbox.  Y Combinator started in Boston,
+and for the first 3 years we ran alternating batches in Boston and
+Silicon Valley.  Because Boston investors were so few and so timid,
+we used to ship Boston batches out for a second Demo Day in Silicon
+Valley.  Dropbox was part of a Boston batch, which means all those
+Boston investors got the first look at Dropbox, and none of them
+closed the deal.  Yet another backup and syncing thing, they all
+thought.  A couple weeks later, Dropbox raised a series A round
+from Sequoia.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f12n"><font color=#999999>12</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><b>Different</b><br /><br />Not understanding that investors view investments as bets combines
+with the ten page paper mentality to prevent founders from even
+considering the possibility of being certain of what they're saying.
+They think they're trying to convince investors of something very
+uncertain &mdash; that their startup will be huge &mdash; and convincing anyone
+of something like that must obviously entail some wild feat of
+salesmanship.  But in fact when you raise money you're trying to
+convince investors of something so much less speculative &mdash; whether
+the company has all the elements of a good bet &mdash; that you can
+approach the problem in a qualitatively different way.  You can
+convince yourself, then convince them.<br /><br />And when you convince them, use the same matter-of-fact language
+you used to convince yourself.  You wouldn't use vague, grandiose
+marketing-speak among yourselves.  Don't use it with investors
+either.  It not only doesn't work on them, but seems a mark of
+incompetence.  Just be concise.  Many investors explicitly use that
+as a test, reasoning (correctly) that if you can't explain your
+plans concisely, you don't really understand them.  But even investors
+who don't have a rule about this will be bored and frustrated by
+unclear explanations.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f13n"><font color=#999999>13</font></a>]</font><br /><br />So here's the recipe for impressing investors when you're not already
+good at seeming formidable:
+<ol>
+<li> Make something worth investing in.<br /><br /><li> Understand why it's worth investing in.<br /><br /><li> Explain that clearly to investors.
+</ol>
+If you're saying something you know is true, you'll seem confident
+when you're saying it.  Conversely, never let pitching draw you
+into bullshitting.  As long as you stay on the territory of truth,
+you're strong.  Make the truth good, then just tell it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+There's no reason to believe this number is a constant.  In
+fact it's our explicit goal at Y Combinator to increase it, by
+encouraging people to start startups who otherwise wouldn't have.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Or more precisely, investors decide whether you're a loser
+or possibly a winner.  If you seem like a winner, they may then,
+depending on how much you're raising, have several more meetings
+with you to test whether that initial impression holds up.<br /><br />But if you seem like a loser they're done, at least for the next
+year or so.  And when they decide you're a loser they usually decide
+in way less than the 50 minutes they may have allotted for the first
+meeting.  Which explains the astonished stories one always hears
+about VC inattentiveness.  How could these people make investment
+decisions well when they're checking their messages during startups'
+presentations?  The solution to that mystery is that they've already
+made the decision.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+The two are not mutually exclusive.  There are people who are
+both genuinely formidable, and also really good at acting that way.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+How can people who will go on to create giant companies not
+seem formidable early on?  I think the main reason is that their
+experience so far has trained them to keep their wings folded, as
+it were.  Family, school, and jobs encourage cooperation, not
+conquest.  And it's just as well they do, because even being Genghis
+Khan is probably 99% cooperation.  But the result is that most
+people emerge from the tube of their upbringing in their early
+twenties compressed into the shape of the tube.  Some find they
+have wings and start to spread them.  But this takes a few years.
+In the beginning even they don't know yet what they're capable of.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+In fact, change what you're doing.  You're investing your own
+time in your startup.  If you're not convinced that what you're
+working on is a sufficiently good bet, why are you even working on
+that?<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+When investors ask you a question you don't know the answer
+to, the best response is neither to bluff nor give up, but instead
+to explain how you'd figure out the answer.  If you can work out a
+preliminary answer on the spot, so much the better, but explain
+that's what you're doing.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+At YC we try to ensure startups are ready to raise money on
+Demo Day by encouraging them to ignore investors and instead focus
+on their companies till about a week before.  That way most reach
+the stage where they're sufficiently convincing well before Demo
+Day.  But not all do, so we also give any startup that wants to the
+option of deferring to a later Demo Day.<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+Founders are often surprised by how much harder it is to raise
+the next round.  There is a qualitative difference in investors'
+attitudes.  It's like the difference between being judged as a kid
+and as an adult.  The next time you raise money, it's not enough
+to be promising.  You have to be delivering results.<br /><br />So although it works well to show growth graphs at either stage,
+investors treat them differently.  At three months, a growth graph
+is mostly evidence that the founders are effective.  At two years,
+it has to be evidence of a promising market and a company tuned to
+exploit it.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+By this I mean that if the present day equivalent of the 3
+month old Microsoft presented at a Demo Day, there would be investors
+who turned them down.  Microsoft itself didn't raise outside money,
+and indeed the venture business barely existed when they got started
+in 1975.<br /><br />[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
+The best investors rarely care who else is investing, but
+mediocre investors almost all do.  So you can use this question as
+a test of investor quality.<br /><br />[<a name="f11n"><font color=#000000>11</font></a>]
+To use this technique, you'll have to find out why investors
+who rejected you did so, or at least what they claim was the reason.
+That may require asking, because investors don't always volunteer
+a lot of detail.  Make it clear when you ask that you're not trying
+to dispute their decision &mdash; just that if there is some weakness in
+your plans, you need to know about it.  You won't always get a real
+reason out of them, but you should at least try.<br /><br />[<a name="f12n"><font color=#000000>12</font></a>]
+Dropbox wasn't rejected by all the East Coast VCs.  There was
+one firm that wanted to invest but tried to lowball them.<br /><br />[<a name="f13n"><font color=#000000>13</font></a>]
+Alfred Lin points out that it's doubly important for the
+explanation of a startup to be clear and concise, because it has
+to convince at one remove: it has to work not just on the partner
+you talk to, but when that partner re-tells it to colleagues.<br /><br />We consciously optimize for this at YC.  When we work with founders
+create a Demo Day pitch, the last step is to imagine how an investor
+would sell it to colleagues.<br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway,
+Chris Dixon, Alfred Lin, Ben Horowitz, Steve Huffman, Jessica
+Livingston, Greg Mcadoo, Andrew Mason, Geoff Ralston, Yuri Sagalov,
+Emmett Shear, Rajat Suri, Garry Tan, Albert Wenger, Fred Wilson,
+and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

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+<html><head><title>Don't Talk to Corp Dev</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc79><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc79 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/don-t-talk-to-corp-dev-4.gif" width="187" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Don't Talk to Corp Dev" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">January 2015<br /><br />Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies
+that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp
+dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet or not.<br /><br />It's usually a mistake to talk to corp dev unless (a) you want to
+sell your company right now and (b) you're sufficiently likely to
+get an offer at an acceptable price.  In practice that means startups
+should only talk to corp dev when they're either doing really well
+or really badly.  If you're doing really badly, meaning the company
+is about to die, you may as well talk to them, because you have
+nothing to lose. And if you're doing really well, you can safely
+talk to them, because you both know the price will have to be high,
+and if they show the slightest sign of wasting your time, you'll
+be confident enough to tell them to get lost.<br /><br />The danger is to companies in the middle.  Particularly to young
+companies that are growing fast, but haven't been doing it for long
+enough to have grown big yet.  It's usually a mistake for a promising
+company less than a year old even to talk to corp dev.<br /><br />But it's a mistake founders constantly make.  When someone from
+corp dev wants to meet, the founders tell themselves they should
+at least find out what they want.  Besides, they don't want to
+offend Big Company by refusing to meet.<br /><br />Well, I'll tell you what they want.  They want to talk about buying
+you.  That's what the title "corp dev" means.   So before agreeing
+to meet with someone from corp dev, ask yourselves, "Do we want to
+sell the company right now?"  And if the answer is no, tell them
+"Sorry, but we're focusing on growing the company."  They won't be
+offended.  And certainly the founders of Big Company won't be
+offended. If anything they'll think more highly of you.  You'll
+remind them of themselves.  They didn't sell either; that's why
+they're in a position now to buy other companies.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Most founders who get contacted by corp dev already know what it
+means.  And yet even when they know what corp dev does and know
+they don't want to sell, they take the meeting.  Why do they do it?
+The same mix of denial and wishful thinking that underlies most
+mistakes founders make. It's flattering to talk to someone who wants
+to buy you.  And who knows, maybe their offer will be surprisingly
+high.  You should at least see what it is, right?<br /><br />No.  If they were going to send you an offer immediately by email,
+sure, you might as well open it.  But that is not how conversations
+with corp dev work.  If you get an offer at all, it will be at the
+end of a long and unbelievably distracting process.  And if the
+offer is surprising, it will be surprisingly low.<br /><br />Distractions are the thing you can least afford in a startup.  And
+conversations with corp dev are the worst sort of distraction,
+because as well as consuming your <a href="top.html">attention</a> they undermine your
+morale.  One of the tricks to surviving a grueling process is not
+to stop and think how tired you are.  Instead you get into a sort
+of flow. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font>
+Imagine what it would do to you if at mile 20 of a
+marathon, someone ran up beside you and said "You must feel really
+tired.  Would you like to stop and take a rest?"  Conversations
+with corp dev are like that but worse, because the suggestion of
+stopping gets combined in your mind with the imaginary high price
+you think they'll offer.<br /><br />And then you're really in trouble.  If they can, corp dev people
+like to turn the tables on you. They like to get you to the point
+where you're trying to convince them to buy instead of them trying
+to convince you to sell.  And surprisingly often they succeed.<br /><br />This is a very slippery slope, greased with some of the most powerful
+forces that can work on founders' minds, and attended by an experienced
+professional whose full time job is to push you down it.<br /><br />Their tactics in pushing you down that slope are usually fairly
+brutal. Corp dev people's whole job is to buy companies, and they
+don't even get to choose which.  The only way their performance is
+measured is by how cheaply they can buy you, and the more ambitious
+ones will stop at nothing to achieve that. For example, they'll
+almost always start with a lowball offer, just to see if you'll
+take it. Even if you don't, a low initial offer will demoralize you
+and make you easier to manipulate.<br /><br />And that is the most innocent of their tactics. Just wait till
+you've agreed on a price and think you have a done deal, and then
+they come back and say their boss has vetoed the deal and won't do
+it for more than half the agreed upon price. Happens all the time.
+If you think investors can behave badly, it's nothing compared to
+what corp dev people can do.  Even corp dev people at companies
+that are otherwise benevolent.<br /><br />I remember once complaining to a
+friend at Google about some nasty trick their corp dev people had
+pulled on a YC startup.<br /><br />"What happened to Don't be Evil?" I asked.<br /><br />"I don't think corp dev got the memo," he replied.<br /><br />The tactics you encounter in M&A conversations can be like nothing
+you've experienced in the otherwise comparatively 
+<a href="mean.html">upstanding</a> world
+of Silicon Valley.  It's as if a chunk of genetic material from the
+old-fashioned robber baron business world got incorporated into the
+startup world.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The simplest way to protect yourself is to use the trick that John
+D. Rockefeller, whose grandfather was an alcoholic, used to protect
+himself from becoming one.  He once told a Sunday school class
+<blockquote>
+  Boys, do you know why I never became a drunkard?  Because I never
+  took the first drink.
+</blockquote>
+Do you want to sell your company right now?  Not eventually, right
+now.  If not, just don't take the first meeting.  They 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.<br /><br />If you do want to sell, there's another set of 
+<a href="https://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company-a1b2025c9481">techniques
+</a> 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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+I'm not saying you should never sell.  I'm saying you should
+be clear in your own mind about whether you want to sell or not,
+and not be led by manipulation or wishful thinking into trying to
+sell earlier than you otherwise would have.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+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.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+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.<br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Marc Andreessen, Jessica Livingston, Geoff
+Ralston, and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/cred.html

@@ -0,0 +1,69 @@
+<html><head><title>Coronavirus and Credibility</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebcaf><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebcaf border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/coronavirus-and-credibility-4.gif" width="229" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Coronavirus and Credibility" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">April 2020<br /><br />I recently saw a 
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o"><u>video</u></a> 
+of TV journalists and politicians confidently
+saying that the coronavirus would be no worse than the flu. What
+struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed, but how
+daring. How could they feel safe saying such things?<br /><br />The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get
+caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false
+predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and
+get away with it, because the things they make predictions about
+either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way
+out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember
+what they said.<br /><br />An epidemic is different. It falsifies your predictions rapidly and
+unequivocally.<br /><br />But epidemics are rare enough that these people clearly
+didn't realize this was even a possibility. Instead they just
+continued to use their ordinary m.o., which, as the epidemic has
+made clear, is to talk confidently about things they don't
+understand.<br /><br />An event like this is thus a uniquely powerful way of taking people's
+measure. As Warren Buffett said, "It's only when the tide goes out
+that you learn who's been swimming naked." And the tide has just
+gone out like never before.<br /><br />Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because
+this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have. I hope.<br /><br /><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://medium.com/brandin-kirjasto/koronavirus-ja-uskottavuus-6054bd52c335">Finnish Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://www.noahleidinger.com/unlisted/graham-coronavirus">German Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://corrigan2.blogspot.com/p/coronavirus-et-credibilite-paul-graham.html">French Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+// Begin Store Generated Code
+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=cred&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
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+<!-- html103.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:42 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/disc.html

@@ -0,0 +1,73 @@
+<html><head><title>The Risk of Discovery</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc59><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc59 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-risk-of-discovery-4.gif" width="177" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="The Risk of Discovery" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">January 2017<br /><br />Because biographies of famous scientists tend to 
+edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the 
+degree of risk they were willing to take.
+And because anything a famous scientist did that
+wasn't a mistake has probably now become the
+conventional wisdom, those choices don't
+seem risky either.<br /><br />Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus
+more on physics than alchemy or theology.
+The impression we get is that his unerring judgment
+led him straight to truths no one else had noticed.
+How to explain all the time he spent on alchemy
+and theology?  Well, smart people are often kind of
+crazy.<br /><br />But maybe there is a simpler explanation. Maybe
+the smartness and the craziness were not as separate
+as we think. Physics seems to us a promising thing
+to work on, and alchemy and theology obvious wastes
+of time. But that's because we know how things
+turned out. In Newton's day the three problems 
+seemed roughly equally promising. No one knew yet
+what the payoff would be for inventing what we
+now call physics; if they had, more people would 
+have been working on it. And alchemy and theology
+were still then in the category Marc Andreessen would 
+describe as "huge, if true."<br /><br />Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But 
+they were all risky.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://note.com/tokyojack/n/n6f02daf57237">Japanese Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<!-- html105.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:44 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/discover.html

@@ -0,0 +1,174 @@
+<html><head><title>Persuade xor Discover </title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc3f><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc3f border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/persuade-xor-discover-2.gif" width="187" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Persuade xor Discover " /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">September 2009<br /><br />When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is
+to seem extra friendly.  You smile and say "pleased to meet you,"
+whether you are or not.  There's nothing dishonest about this.
+Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant
+to be taken literally, just as everyone knows that 
+"Can you pass the salt?" is only grammatically a question.<br /><br />I'm perfectly willing to smile and say "pleased to meet you"
+when meeting new people.  But there is another set of 
+customs for being ingratiating in print that are not so
+harmless.<br /><br />The reason there's a convention of being ingratiating in print
+is that most essays are written to persuade.
+And as any politician could tell
+you, the way to persuade people is not just to baldly state the
+facts.  You have to add a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine
+go down.<br /><br />For example, a politician announcing the cancellation of 
+a government program will not merely say "The
+program is canceled." That would seem offensively
+curt.  Instead he'll spend most of his time talking about the
+noble effort made by the people who worked on it.<br /><br />The reason these conventions are more dangerous is that they
+interact with the ideas.  Saying "pleased to meet you" is just
+something you prepend to a conversation, but the sort of spin 
+added by politicians is woven through it.  We're starting to
+move from social lies to real lies.<br /><br />Here's an example of a paragraph from an essay I wrote about
+<a href="unions.html">labor unions</a>.  As written,
+it tends to offend people who like unions.
+<blockquote>
+  People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic
+  union organizers have a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking
+  now?  The best they can do is fall back on the default explanation
+  of people living in fallen civilizations. Our ancestors were
+  giants.  The workers of the early twentieth century must have had
+  a moral courage that's lacking today.
+</blockquote>
+Now here's the same paragraph rewritten to please instead of
+offending them:
+<blockquote>
+  Early union organizers made heroic sacrifices to improve conditions
+  for workers.  But though
+  labor unions are shrinking now, it's not because present union
+  leaders are any less courageous.  An employer couldn't get away
+  with hiring thugs to beat up union leaders today, but if they
+  did, I see no reason to believe today's union leaders would shrink
+  from the challenge.  So I think it would be a mistake to attribute
+  the decline of unions to some kind of decline in the people who
+  run them.  Early union leaders were heroic, certainly, but we
+  should not suppose that if unions have declined, it's because
+  present union leaders are somehow inferior.  The cause must be
+  external.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font>
+</blockquote>
+It makes the same point: that it can't have been the personal
+qualities of early union organizers that made unions successful,
+but must have been some external factor, or otherwise present-day
+union leaders would have to be inferior people.  But written this
+way it seems like a defense of present-day union organizers rather
+than an attack on early ones.  That makes it more persuasive to
+people who like unions, because it seems sympathetic to their cause.<br /><br />I believe everything I wrote in the second version.  Early union
+leaders did make heroic sacrifices.   And
+present union leaders probably would rise to the occasion if
+necessary.  People tend to; I'm skeptical about the idea of "the
+greatest generation." 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If I believe everything I said in the second version, why didn't I
+write it that way?  Why offend people needlessly?<br /><br />Because I'd rather offend people than pander to them, 
+and if you write about controversial topics you have to choose one or the other.  The degree of
+courage of past or present union leaders is beside the point; all
+that matters for the argument is that they're the same.
+But if you want to please
+people who are mistaken, you can't simply tell the truth.  You're
+always going to have to add some sort of padding to protect their
+misconceptions from bumping against reality.<br /><br />Most writers do.  Most writers write to persuade, if only out of
+habit or politeness.  But I don't write to persuade; I write to
+figure out.  I write to persuade a hypothetical perfectly unbiased
+reader.<br /><br />Since the custom is to write to persuade the actual reader, someone
+who doesn't will seem arrogant.  In fact, worse than arrogant: since
+readers are used to essays that try to please someone, an essay
+that displeases one side in a dispute reads as an attempt to pander
+to the other.  To a lot of pro-union readers, the first paragraph
+sounds like the sort of thing a right-wing radio talk show host
+would say to stir up his followers.  But it's not.  Something that
+curtly contradicts one's beliefs can be hard to distinguish from a
+partisan attack on them, but though they can end up in the same
+place they come from different sources.<br /><br />Would it be so bad to add a few extra words, to make people feel
+better?  Maybe not.  Maybe I'm excessively attached to conciseness.
+I write <a href="power.html">code</a> the same way I write essays, 
+making pass after pass
+looking for anything I can cut.  But I have a legitimate reason for
+doing this.  You don't know what the ideas are until you get them
+down to the fewest words.  
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The danger of the second paragraph
+is not merely that it's longer.  It's that you start to lie to
+yourself.  The ideas start to get mixed together with the spin
+you've added to get them past the readers' misconceptions.<br /><br />I think the goal of an essay should be to discover 
+<a href="essay.html">surprising</a> things.  That's my goal, at least.
+And most surprising means most different from what people currently
+believe.  So writing to persuade and writing to discover are
+diametrically opposed.  The more your conclusions disagree with
+readers' present beliefs, the more effort you'll have to expend on
+selling your ideas rather than having them.  As you accelerate,
+this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100%
+of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go any
+faster.<br /><br />It's hard enough to overcome one's own misconceptions without having
+to think about how to get the resulting ideas past other people's.
+I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously
+from ideas I knew would be hard to sell.  When I notice something
+surprising, it's usually very faint at first.  There's nothing more
+than a slight stirring of discomfort.  I don't want anything to get
+in the way of noticing it consciously.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+I had a strange feeling of being back in high school writing
+this.  To get a good grade you had to both write the sort of pious
+crap you were expected to, but also seem to be writing with conviction.
+The solution was a kind of method acting.  It was revoltingly
+familiar to slip back into it.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Exercise for the reader:
+rephrase that thought to please the same people the first version
+would offend.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+Come to think of it, there is one way in which I deliberately
+pander to readers, because it doesn't change the number of words:
+I switch person.  This flattering distinction seems so natural to
+the average reader that they probably don't notice even when I
+switch in mid-sentence, though you tend to notice when it's done
+as conspicuously as this.<br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris
+for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /><b>Note:</b> An earlier version of this essay began by talking
+about why people dislike Michael Arrington.  I now believe that
+was mistaken, and that most people don't dislike him for the
+same reason I did when I first met him, but simply because
+he writes about controversial things.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<html><head><meta name="Keywords" content="" /><title>What to Do</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-6.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=bb9f6831daad29><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-7.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#bb9f6831daad29 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-8.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/what-to-do-1.gif" width="93" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="What to Do" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">March 2025<br /><br />What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not
+meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask
+before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it
+myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I
+did, I thought I should at least try to answer it.<br /><br />So what <i>should</i> one do? One should help people, and take care of
+the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When
+I ask that, the answer that pops up is <i>Make good new things</i>.<br /><br />I can't prove that one should do this, any more than I can prove
+that one should help people or take care of the world. We're talking
+about first principles here. But I can explain why this principle
+makes sense. The most impressive thing humans can do is to think.
+It may be the most impressive thing that can be done. And the best
+kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has
+thought well, is to make good new things.<br /><br />I mean new things in a very general sense. Newton's physics was a
+good new thing. Indeed, the first version of this principle was to
+have good new ideas. But that didn't seem general enough: it didn't
+include making art or music, for example, except insofar as they
+embody new ideas. And while they may embody new ideas, that's not
+all they embody, unless you stretch the word "idea" so uselessly
+thin that it includes everything that goes through your nervous
+system.<br /><br />Even for ideas that one has consciously, though, I prefer the
+phrasing "make good new things." There are other ways to describe
+the best kind of thinking. To make discoveries, for example, or to
+understand something more deeply than others have. But how well do
+you understand something if you can't make a model of it, or write
+about it? Indeed, trying to express what you understand is not just
+a way to prove that you understand it, but a way to understand it
+better.<br /><br />Another reason I like this phrasing is that it biases us toward
+creation. It causes us to prefer the kind of ideas that are naturally
+seen as making things rather than, say, making critical observations
+about things other people have made. Those are ideas too, and
+sometimes valuable ones, but it's easy to trick oneself into believing
+they're more valuable than they are. Criticism seems sophisticated,
+and making new things often seems awkward, especially at first; and
+yet it's precisely those first steps that are most rare and valuable.<br /><br />Is newness essential? I think so. Obviously it's essential in
+science. If you copied a paper of someone else's and published it
+as your own, it would seem not merely unimpressive but dishonest.
+And it's similar in the arts. A copy of a good painting can be a
+pleasing thing, but it's not impressive in the way the original
+was. Which in turn implies it's not impressive to make the same
+thing over and over, however well; you're just copying yourself.<br /><br />Note though that we're talking about a different kind of should
+with this principle. Taking care of people and the world are shoulds
+in the sense that they're one's duty, but making good new things
+is a should in the sense that this is how to live to one's full
+potential. Historically most rules about how to live have been a
+mix of both kinds of should, though usually with more of the former
+than the latter. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />For most of history the question "What should one do?" got much the
+same answer everywhere, whether you asked Cicero or Confucius. You
+should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition,
+and serve the public interest. There was a long stretch where in
+some parts of the world the answer became "Serve God," but in
+practice it was still considered good to be wise, brave, honest,
+temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest.
+And indeed this recipe would have seemed right to most Victorians.
+But there's nothing in it about taking care of the world or making
+new things, and that's a bit worrying, because it seems like this
+question should be a timeless one. The answer shouldn't change much.<br /><br />I'm not too worried that the traditional answers don't mention
+taking care of the world. Obviously people only started to care
+about that once it became clear we could ruin it. But how can making
+good new things be important if the traditional answers don't mention
+it?<br /><br />The traditional answers were answers to a slightly different question.
+They were answers to the question of how to be, rather than what
+to do. The audience didn't have a lot of choice about what to do.
+The audience up till recent centuries was the landowning class,
+which was also the political class. They weren't choosing between
+doing physics and writing novels. Their work was foreordained:
+manage their estates, participate in politics, fight when necessary.
+It was ok to do certain other kinds of work in one's spare time,
+but ideally one didn't have any. Cicero's <i>De Officiis</i> is one of the
+great classical answers to the question of how to live, and in it
+he explicitly says that he wouldn't even be writing it if he hadn't
+been excluded from public life by recent political upheavals.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />There were of course people doing what we would now call "original
+work," and they were often admired for it, but they weren't seen
+as models. Archimedes knew that he was the first to prove that a
+sphere has 2/3 the volume of the smallest enclosing cylinder and
+was very pleased about it. But you don't find ancient writers urging
+their readers to emulate him. They regarded him more as a prodigy
+than a model.<br /><br />Now many more of us can follow Archimedes's example and devote most
+of our attention to one kind of work. He turned out to be a model
+after all, along with a collection of other people that his
+contemporaries would have found it strange to treat as a distinct
+group, because the vein of people making new things ran at right
+angles to the social hierarchy.<br /><br />What kinds of new things count? I'd rather leave that question to
+the makers of them. It would be a risky business to try to define
+any kind of threshold, because new kinds of work are often despised
+at first. Raymond Chandler was writing literal pulp fiction, and
+he's now recognized as one of the best writers of the twentieth
+century. Indeed this pattern is so common that you can use it as a
+recipe: if you're excited about some kind of work that's not
+considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is
+overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that's
+ok to do, but one to seek out.<br /><br />The other reason I wouldn't want to define any thresholds is that
+we don't need them. The kind of people who make good new things 
+don't need rules to keep them honest.<br /><br />So there's my guess at a set of principles to live by: take care
+of people and the world, and make good new things. Different people
+will do these to varying degrees. There will presumably be lots who
+focus entirely on taking care of people. There will be a few who
+focus mostly on making new things. But even if you're one of those,
+you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't
+net <i>harm</i> people or the world. And if you go a step further and
+try to make things that help them, you may find you're ahead on the
+trade. You'll be more constrained in what you can make, but you'll
+make it with more energy.<br /><br />On the other hand, if you make something amazing, you'll often be
+helping people or the world even if you didn't mean to. Newton was
+driven by curiosity and ambition, not by any practical effect his
+work might have, and yet the practical effect of his work has been
+enormous. And this seems the rule rather than the exception. So
+if you think you can make something amazing, you should probably
+just go ahead and do it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+We could treat all three as the same kind of should by saying
+that it's one's duty to live well &mdash; for example by saying, as some
+Christians have, that it's one's duty to make the most of one's
+God-given gifts. But this seems one of those casuistries people
+invented to evade the stern requirements of religion: it was permissible to
+spend time studying math instead of praying or performing acts of
+charity because otherwise you were rejecting a gift God had given
+you. A useful casuistry no doubt, but we don't need it.<br /><br />We could also combine the first two principles, since people are
+part of the world. Why should our species get special treatment?
+I won't try to justify this choice, but I'm skeptical that anyone
+who claims to think differently actually lives according to their
+principles.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Confucius was also excluded from public life after ending up
+on the losing end of a power struggle, and presumably he too would
+not be so famous now if it hadn't been for this long stretch of
+enforced leisure.<br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b> to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica 
+Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
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+ csell_page_data = {}; csell_page_rec_data = []; ts='TOK_STORE_ID';
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
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+<script type="text/javascript">
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+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
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+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html109.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:33 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/donate.html

@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+<html><head><title>Donate Unrestricted</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebcd1><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebcd1 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/donate-unrestricted-4.gif" width="170" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Donate Unrestricted" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">March 2021<br /><br />The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations.
+If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have
+heard this phrase before. But if you have been, it probably made
+you wince.<br /><br />Restricted donations mean donations where the donor limits what can
+be done with the money. This is common with big donations, perhaps
+the default. And yet it's usually a bad idea. Usually the way the
+donor wants the money spent is not the way the nonprofit would have
+chosen. Otherwise there would have been no need to restrict the
+donation. But who has a better understanding of where money needs
+to be spent, the nonprofit or the donor?<br /><br />If a nonprofit doesn't understand better than its donors where money
+needs to be spent, then it's incompetent and you shouldn't be
+donating to it at all.<br /><br />Which means a restricted donation is inherently suboptimal. It's
+either a donation to a bad nonprofit, or a donation for the wrong
+things.<br /><br />There are a couple exceptions to this principle. One is when the
+nonprofit is an umbrella organization. It's reasonable to make a
+restricted donation to a university, for example, because a university
+is only nominally a single nonprofit. Another exception is when the
+donor actually does know as much as the nonprofit about where money
+needs to be spent. The Gates Foundation, for example, has specific
+goals and often makes restricted donations to individual nonprofits
+to accomplish them. But unless you're a domain expert yourself or
+donating to an umbrella organization, your donation would do more
+good if it were unrestricted.<br /><br />If restricted donations do less good than unrestricted ones, why
+do donors so often make them? Partly because doing good isn't donors'
+only motive. They often have other motives as well &mdash; to make a mark,
+or to generate good publicity
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font>,
+or to comply with regulations
+or corporate policies. Many donors may simply never have considered
+the distinction between restricted and unrestricted donations. They
+may believe that donating money for some specific purpose is just
+how donation works. And to be fair, nonprofits don't try very hard
+to discourage such illusions. They can't afford to. People running
+nonprofits are almost always anxious about money. They can't afford
+to talk back to big donors.<br /><br />You can't expect candor in a relationship so asymmetric. So I'll
+tell you what nonprofits wish they could tell you. If you want to
+donate to a nonprofit, donate unrestricted. If you trust them to
+spend your money, trust them to decide how.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Note</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+Unfortunately restricted donations tend to generate more
+publicity than unrestricted ones. "X donates money to build a school
+in Africa" is not only more interesting than "X donates money to Y
+nonprofit to spend as Y chooses," but also focuses more attention
+on X.<br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Chase Adam, Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, and Edith
+Elliot for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_REC_VIEW_TAG() {  var env = (typeof csell_env == 'string')?csell_env:'prod'; var p = csell_page_data; var a = '/sid='+p['si']+'/io='+p['io']+'/ii='+p['ii']+'/bt='+p['bt']+'-view'+'/en='+env; var r=Math.random(); YStore.CrossSellBeacon.renderBeaconWithRecData(p['url']+'/p/s='+p['s']+'/'+p['rnd']+'='+r+a); } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
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+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=donate&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html104.prod.store.e1a.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:39 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/ds.html

@@ -0,0 +1,428 @@
+<html><head><title>Do Things that Don't Scale</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-6.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=cd976720bf1055><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-7.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#cd976720bf1055 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-8.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/do-things-that-don-t-scale-3.gif" width="217" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Do Things that Don't Scale" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+July 2013<br /><br />One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is
+to do things that don't scale.  A lot of would-be founders believe
+that startups either take off or don't.  You build something, make
+it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a
+path to your door as promised.  Or they don't, in which case the
+market must not exist.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off.
+There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually
+it takes some sort of push to get them going.  A good metaphor would
+be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters.
+Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a
+separate and laborious process to get it going.<br /><br /><b>Recruit</b><br /><br />The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start
+is to recruit users manually.  Nearly all startups have to.  You
+can't wait for users to come to you.  You have to go out and get
+them.<br /><br />Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the
+problem they solved was an urgent one.   If anyone could have sat
+back and waited for users, it was Stripe.  But in fact they're
+famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.<br /><br />Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of
+potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took
+better advantage of it than Stripe.  At YC we use the term "Collison
+installation" for the technique they invented.  More diffident
+founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes,
+they say "Great, we'll send you a link."  But the Collison brothers
+weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say
+"Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.<br /><br />There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users
+individually.  One is a combination of shyness and laziness.  They'd
+rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of
+strangers and probably be rejected by most of them.  But for a
+startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will
+have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute
+numbers seem so small at first.  This can't be how the big, famous
+startups got started, they think. The mistake they make is to
+underestimate the power of compound growth.  We encourage every
+startup to measure their progress by weekly <a href="growth.html">growth
+rate</a>.  If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week
+to grow 10% a week.  And while 110 may not seem much better than
+100, if you keep growing at 10% a week you'll be surprised how big
+the numbers get.  After a year you'll have 14,000 users, and after
+2 years you'll have 2 million.<br /><br />You'll be doing different things when you're acquiring users a
+thousand at a time, and growth has to slow down eventually.  But
+if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users
+manually and then gradually switch to less manual methods. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Airbnb is a classic example of this technique.  Marketplaces are
+so hard to get rolling that you should expect to take heroic measures
+at first. In Airbnb's case, these consisted of going door to door
+in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve
+their listings.  When I remember the Airbnbs during YC, I picture
+them with rolly bags, because when they showed up for tuesday dinners
+they'd always just flown back from somewhere.<br /><br /><b>Fragile</b><br /><br />Airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it
+was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in
+person with users made the difference between success and failure.<br /><br />That initial fragility was not a unique feature of Airbnb.  Almost
+all startups are fragile initially.  And that's one of the biggest
+things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and
+know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them.  They unconsciously
+judge larval startups by the standards of established ones.  They're
+like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding "there's no
+way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything."<br /><br />It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup.
+They always get things wrong.   It's even ok if investors dismiss
+your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth.  The
+big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself.  I've seen
+it happen.  I often have to encourage founders who don't see the
+full potential of what they're building.  Even Bill Gates made that
+mistake.  He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting
+Microsoft.  He didn't stay long, but he wouldn't have returned at
+all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to be even a fraction of
+the size it turned out to be. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this
+company taking over the world?"  but "how big could this company
+get if the founders did the right things?"  And the right things
+often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time. Microsoft
+can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys
+in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few
+thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect
+that was the optimal path to dominating microcomputer software.
+And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were
+en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos
+of their first hosts' apartments.  They were just trying to survive.
+But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big
+market.<br /><br />How do you find users to recruit manually?  If you build something
+to solve <a href="startupideas.html">your own problems</a>, then
+you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward.
+Otherwise you'll have to make a more deliberate effort to locate
+the most promising vein of users.  The usual way to do that is to
+get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted
+launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and
+seek out more like them.  For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that
+a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design,
+so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and
+that worked well. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#999999>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><b>Delight</b><br /><br />You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users,
+but also to make them happy.  For as long as they could (which
+turned out to be surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a
+hand-written thank you note.  Your first users should feel that
+signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made.
+And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways
+to delight them.<br /><br />Why do we have to teach startups this?  Why is it counterintuitive
+for founders?  Three reasons, I think.<br /><br />One is that a lot of startup founders are trained as engineers,
+and customer service is not part of the training of engineers.
+You're supposed to build things that are robust and elegant, not
+be slavishly attentive to individual users like some kind of
+salesperson.  Ironically, part of the reason engineering is
+traditionally averse to handholding is that its traditions date
+from a time when engineers were less powerful &mdash; when they were
+only in charge of their narrow domain of building things, rather
+than running the whole show.  You can be ornery when you're Scotty,
+but not when you're Kirk.<br /><br />Another reason founders don't focus enough on individual customers
+is that they worry it won't scale.  But when founders of larval
+startups worry about this, I point out that in their current state
+they have nothing to lose.  Maybe if they go out of their way to
+make existing users super happy, they'll one day have too many to
+do so much for.  That would be a great problem to have.  See if you
+can make it happen.  And incidentally, when it does, you'll find
+that delighting customers scales better than you expected.  Partly
+because you can usually find ways to make anything scale more than
+you would have predicted, and partly because delighting customers
+will by then have permeated your culture.<br /><br />I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying
+too hard to make their initial users happy.<br /><br />But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing
+how attentive they could be to their users is that they've never
+experienced such attention themselves.  Their standards for customer
+service have been set by the companies they've been customers of,
+which are mostly big ones.  Tim Cook doesn't send you a hand-written
+note after you buy a laptop.  He can't.  But you can.  That's one
+advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big
+company can. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#999999>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Once you realize that existing conventions are not the upper bound
+on user experience, it's interesting in a very pleasant way to think
+about how far you could go to delight your users.<br /><br /><b>Experience</b><br /><br />I was trying to think of a phrase to convey how extreme your attention
+to users should be, and I realized Steve Jobs had already done it:
+insanely great.  Steve wasn't just using "insanely" as a synonym
+for "very."  He meant it more literally &mdash; that one should focus
+on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be
+considered pathological.<br /><br />All the most successful startups we've funded have, and that probably
+doesn't surprise would-be founders.  What novice founders don't get
+is what insanely great translates to in a larval startup.  When
+Steve Jobs started using that phrase, Apple was already an established
+company.  He meant the Mac (and its documentation and even
+packaging &mdash; such is the nature of obsession) should be insanely
+well designed and manufactured.  That's not hard for engineers to
+grasp.  It's just a more extreme version of designing a robust and
+elegant product.<br /><br />What founders have a hard time grasping (and Steve himself might
+have had a hard time grasping) is what insanely great morphs into
+as you roll the time slider back to the first couple months of a
+startup's life.  It's not the product that should be insanely great,
+but the experience of being your user.  The product is just one
+component of that.  For a big company it's necessarily the dominant
+one.  But you can and should give users an insanely great experience
+with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the
+difference with attentiveness.<br /><br />Can, perhaps, but should?  Yes.  Over-engaging with early users is
+not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling.  For
+most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop
+that makes the product good.  Making a better mousetrap is not an
+atomic operation.  Even if you start the way most successful startups
+have, by building something you yourself need, the first thing you
+build is never quite right.  And except in domains with big penalties
+for making mistakes, it's often better not to aim for perfection
+initially.  In software, especially, it usually works best to get
+something in front of users as soon as it has a quantum of utility,
+and then see what they do with it.  Perfectionism is often an excuse
+for procrastination, and in any case your initial model of users
+is always inaccurate, even if you're one of them. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#999999>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users
+will be the best you ever get.  When you're so big you have to
+resort to focus groups, you'll wish you could go over to your users'
+homes and offices and watch them use your stuff like you did when
+there were only a handful of them.<br /><br /><b>Fire</b><br /><br />Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately
+narrow market.  It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get
+it really hot before adding more logs.<br /><br />That's what Facebook did.  At first it was just for Harvard students.
+In that form it only had a potential market of a few thousand people,
+but because they felt it was really for them, a critical mass of
+them signed up.  After Facebook stopped being for Harvard students,
+it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while.
+When I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School, he said that
+while it was a lot of work creating course lists for each school,
+doing that made students feel the site was their natural home.<br /><br />Any startup that could be described as a marketplace usually has
+to start in a subset of the market, but this can work for other
+startups as well.  It's always worth asking if there's a subset of
+the market in which you can get a critical mass of users quickly.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#999999>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Most startups that use the contained fire strategy do it unconsciously.
+They build something for themselves and their friends, who happen
+to be the early adopters, and only realize later that they could
+offer it to a broader market.  The strategy works just as well if
+you do it unconsciously.  The biggest danger of not being consciously
+aware of this pattern is for those who naively discard part of it.
+E.g. if you don't build something for yourself and your friends,
+or even if you do, but you come from the corporate world and your
+friends are not early adopters, you'll no longer have a perfect
+initial market handed to you on a platter.<br /><br />Among companies, the best early adopters are usually other startups.
+They're more open to new things both by nature and because, having
+just been started, they haven't made all their choices yet.  Plus
+when they succeed they grow fast, and you with them.  It was one
+of many unforeseen advantages of the YC model (and specifically of
+making YC big) that B2B startups now have an instant market of
+hundreds of other startups ready at hand.<br /><br /><b>Meraki</b><br /><br />For <a href="hw.html">hardware startups</a> there's a variant of
+doing things that don't scale that we call "pulling a Meraki."
+Although we didn't fund Meraki, the founders were Robert Morris's
+grad students, so we know their history.  They got started by doing
+something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers
+themselves.<br /><br />Hardware startups face an obstacle that software startups don't.
+The minimum order for a factory production run is usually several
+hundred thousand dollars.  Which can put you in a catch-22: without
+a product you can't generate the growth you need to raise the money
+to manufacture your product.  Back when hardware startups had to
+rely on investors for money, you had to be pretty convincing to
+overcome this.  The arrival of crowdfunding (or more precisely,
+preorders) has helped a lot.  But even so I'd advise startups to
+pull a Meraki initially if they can.  That's what Pebble did.  The
+Pebbles 
+<a href="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/eric.jpg?t=1730199416&">assembled</a>
+ the first several hundred watches themselves. If
+they hadn't gone through that phase, they probably wouldn't have
+sold $10 million worth of watches when they did go on Kickstarter.<br /><br />Like paying excessive attention to early customers, fabricating
+things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups.
+You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you
+learn things you'd never have known otherwise.  Eric Migicovsky of
+Pebble said one of the things he learned was "how valuable it was to
+source good screws."   Who knew?<br /><br /><b>Consult</b><br /><br />Sometimes we advise founders of B2B startups to take over-engagement
+to an extreme, and to pick a single user and act as if they were
+consultants building something just for that one user.   The initial
+user serves as the form for your mold; keep tweaking till you fit
+their needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something
+other users want too.  Even if there aren't many of them, there are
+probably adjacent territories that have more.  As long as you can
+find just one user who really needs something and can act on that
+need, you've got a toehold in making something people want, and
+that's as much as any startup needs initially. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#999999>9</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Consulting is the canonical example of work that doesn't scale.
+But (like other ways of bestowing one's favors liberally) it's safe
+to do it so long as you're not being paid to.  That's where companies
+cross the line.  So long as you're a product company that's merely
+being extra attentive to a customer, they're very grateful even if
+you don't solve all their problems.  But when they start paying you
+specifically for that attentiveness &mdash; when they start paying
+you by the hour &mdash; they expect you to do everything.<br /><br />Another consulting-like technique for recruiting initially lukewarm
+users is to use your software yourselves on their behalf.  We
+did that at Viaweb.  When we approached merchants asking if they
+wanted to use our software to make online stores, some said no, but
+they'd let us make one for them.  Since we would do anything to get
+users, we did.  We felt pretty lame at the time.  Instead of
+organizing big strategic e-commerce partnerships, we were trying
+to sell luggage and pens and men's shirts.  But in retrospect it
+was exactly the right thing to do, because it taught us how it would
+feel to merchants to use our software.  Sometimes the feedback loop
+was near instantaneous: in the middle of building some merchant's
+site I'd find I needed a feature we didn't have, so I'd spend a
+couple hours implementing it and then resume building the site.<br /><br /><b>Manual</b><br /><br />There's a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software,
+but are your software.  When you only have a small number of users,
+you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan
+to automate later.  This lets you launch faster, and when you do
+finally automate yourself out of the loop, you'll know exactly what
+to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.<br /><br />When manual components look to the user like software, this technique
+starts to have aspects of a practical joke.  For example, the way
+Stripe delivered "instant" merchant accounts to its first users was
+that the founders manually signed them up for traditional merchant
+accounts behind the scenes.<br /><br />Some startups could be entirely manual at first. If you can find
+someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it
+manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then
+gradually automate the bottlenecks.  It would be a little frightening
+to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic,
+but less frightening than the far more common case of having something
+automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems.<br /><br /><b>Big</b><br /><br />I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't
+work: the Big Launch.  I occasionally meet founders who seem to
+believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and
+that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with
+sufficient initial velocity.  They want to launch simultaneously
+in 8 different publications, with embargoes.  And on a tuesday, of
+course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch
+something.<br /><br />It's easy to see how little launches matter.  Think of some successful
+startups.  How many of their launches do you remember?
+All you need from a launch is some initial core of users.  How well
+you're doing a few months later will depend more on how happy you
+made those users than how many there were of them.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#999999>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />So why do founders think launches matter?  A combination of solipsism
+and laziness.  They think what they're building is so great that
+everyone who hears about it will immediately sign up.  Plus it would
+be so much less work if you could get users merely by broadcasting
+your existence, rather than recruiting them one at a time.  But
+even if what you're building really is great, getting users will
+always be a gradual process &mdash; partly because great things
+are usually also novel, but mainly because users have other things
+to think about.<br /><br />Partnerships too usually don't work.  They don't work for startups
+in general, but they especially don't work as a way to get growth
+started.  It's a common mistake among inexperienced founders to
+believe that a partnership with a big company will be their big
+break.  Six months later they're all saying the same thing: that
+was way more work than we expected, and we ended up getting practically
+nothing out of it. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f11n"><font color=#999999>11</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It's not enough just to do something extraordinary initially.  You
+have to make an extraordinary <i>effort</i> initially.  Any strategy
+that omits the effort &mdash; whether it's expecting a big launch to
+get you users, or a big partner &mdash; is ipso facto suspect.<br /><br /><b>Vector</b><br /><br />The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so
+nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of
+startup ideas as scalars.  Instead we should try thinking of them
+as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s)
+you're going to do initially to get the company going.<br /><br />It could be interesting to start viewing startup ideas this way,
+because now that there are two components you can try to be imaginative
+about the second as well as the first.  But in most cases the second
+component will be what it usually is &mdash; recruit users manually
+and give them an overwhelmingly good experience &mdash; and the main
+benefit of treating startups as vectors will be to remind founders
+they need to work hard in two dimensions.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f12n"><font color=#999999>12</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In the best case, both components of the vector contribute to your
+company's DNA: the unscalable things you have to do to get started
+are not merely a necessary evil, but change the company permanently
+for the better.  If you have to be aggressive about user acquisition
+when you're small, you'll probably still be aggressive when you're
+big.  If you have to manufacture your own hardware, or use your
+software on users's behalf, you'll learn things you couldn't have
+learned otherwise.  And most importantly, if you have to work hard
+to delight users when you only have a handful of them, you'll keep
+doing it when you have a lot.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically.  He
+wrote "If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell,
+or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs,
+than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his
+house, though it be in the woods."<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Thanks to Sam Altman for suggesting I make this explicit.
+And no, you can't avoid doing sales by hiring someone to do it for
+you.  You have to do sales yourself initially.  Later you can hire
+a real salesperson to replace you.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+The reason this works is that as you get bigger, your size
+helps you grow.  Patrick Collison wrote "At some point, there was
+a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt. It tipped from being
+this boulder we had to push to being a train car that in fact had
+its own momentum."<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+One of the more subtle ways in which YC can help founders
+is by calibrating their ambitions, because we know exactly how a
+lot of successful startups looked when they were just getting
+started.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+If you're building something for which you can't easily get
+a small set of users to observe &mdash; e.g. enterprise software &mdash; and
+in a domain where you have no connections, you'll have to rely on
+cold calls and introductions.  But should you even be working on
+such an idea?<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+Garry Tan pointed out an interesting trap founders fall into
+in the beginning.  They want so much to seem big that they imitate
+even the flaws of big companies, like indifference to individual
+users.  This seems to them more "professional."  Actually it's
+better to embrace the fact that you're small and use whatever
+advantages that brings.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+Your user model almost couldn't be perfectly accurate, because
+users' needs often change in response to what you build for them.
+Build them a microcomputer, and suddenly they need to run spreadsheets
+on it, because the arrival of your new microcomputer causes someone
+to invent the spreadsheet.<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up
+quickest and those that will pay the most, it's usually best to
+pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters.
+They'll have a better influence on your product, and they won't
+make you expend as much effort on sales.  And though they have less
+money, you don't need that much to maintain your target growth rate
+early on.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+Yes, I can imagine cases where you could end up making
+something that was really only useful for one user.  But those are
+usually obvious, even to inexperienced founders.  So if it's not
+obvious you'd be making something for a market of one, don't worry
+about that danger.<br /><br />[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
+There may even be an inverse correlation between launch
+magnitude and success.  The only launches I remember are famous
+flops like the Segway and Google Wave.  Wave is a particularly
+alarming example, because I think it was actually a great idea that
+was killed partly by its overdone launch.<br /><br />[<a name="f11n"><font color=#000000>11</font></a>]
+Google grew big on the back of Yahoo, but that wasn't a
+partnership.  Yahoo was their customer.<br /><br />[<a name="f12n"><font color=#000000>12</font></a>]
+It will also remind founders that an idea where the second
+component is empty &mdash; an idea where there is nothing you can do
+to get going, e.g. because you have no way to find users to recruit
+manually &mdash; is probably a bad idea, at least for those founders.<br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Kevin
+Hale, Steven Levy, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading
+drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-reddits-2.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://postd.cc/do-things-that-dont-scale/">Japanese Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-reddits-2.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://blog.perevedem.ru/2013/07/25/do-things-that-dont-scale/">Russian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-reddits-2.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://www.adsteroid.com/101">French Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-reddits-2.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://academy.hsoub.com/entrepreneurship/general/%D8%A7%D9%81%D8%B9%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B4%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%8A-%D9%84%D8%A7-%D9%8A%D9%8F%D9%85%D9%83%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%A8%D9%87%D8%A7-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89-%D9%86%D8%B7%D8%A7%D9%82-%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%B9-do-things-that-dont-scale-r60/">Arabic Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-reddits-2.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://marcotrombetti.com/nonscalabili">Italian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-reddits-2.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://medium.com/delightroom/do-things-that-dont-scale-6876c5682a75">Korean Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/early.html

@@ -0,0 +1,278 @@
+<html><head><title>Early Work</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebca7><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebca7 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/early-work-4.gif" width="94" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Early Work" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">October 2020<br /><br />One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work
+is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an
+irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on
+where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You
+have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies
+beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the
+stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue
+past it. They're too frightened even to start.<br /><br />Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame.
+Imagine how much more we'd do.<br /><br />Is there any hope of turning it off? I think so. I think the habits
+at work here are not very deeply rooted.<br /><br />Making new things is itself a new thing for us as a species. It has
+always happened, but till the last few centuries it happened so
+slowly as to be invisible to individual humans. And since we didn't
+need customs for dealing with new ideas, we didn't develop any.<br /><br />We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious
+projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would
+judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects. We don't
+realize they're a special case.<br /><br />Or at least, most of us don't. One reason I'm confident we can do
+better is that it's already starting to happen. There are already
+a few places that are living in the future in this respect. Silicon
+Valley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-sounding
+idea won't automatically be dismissed the way they would back home.
+In Silicon Valley, people have learned how dangerous that is.<br /><br />The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge
+to your imagination � not just to have lower standards, but to
+<a href="altair.html"><u>switch polarity</u></a> entirely, from listing 
+the reasons an idea won't
+work to trying to think of ways it could. That's what I do when I
+meet people with new ideas. I've become quite good at it, but I've
+had a lot of practice. Being a partner at Y Combinator means being
+practically immersed in strange-sounding ideas proposed by unknown
+people. Every six months you get thousands of new ones thrown at
+you and have to sort through them, knowing that in a world with a
+power-law distribution of outcomes, it will be painfully obvious
+if you miss the needle in this haystack. Optimism becomes
+urgent.<br /><br />But I'm hopeful that, with time, this kind of optimism can become
+widespread enough that it becomes a social custom, not just a trick
+used by a few specialists. It is after all an extremely lucrative
+trick, and those tend to spread quickly.<br /><br />Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh
+on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem
+clever. And in a field where the new ideas are risky, like startups,
+those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right. Just
+not when their predictions are 
+<a href="swan.html"><u>weighted by outcome</u></a>.<br /><br />But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas.
+If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope,
+consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if
+you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them.
+In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part
+of the national culture.<br /><br />I wouldn't claim that people in Silicon Valley overcome these
+impulses because they're morally better. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font>
+The reason many hope
+you'll succeed is that they hope to rise with you. For investors
+this incentive is particularly explicit. They want you to succeed
+because they hope you'll make them rich in the process. But many
+other people you meet can hope to benefit in some way from your
+success. At the very least they'll be able to say, when you're
+famous, that they've known you since way back.<br /><br />But even if Silicon Valley's encouraging attitude
+is rooted in self-interest, it has over time actually grown into a
+sort of benevolence. Encouraging startups has been practiced for
+so long that it has become a custom. Now it just seems that that's
+what one does with startups.<br /><br />Maybe Silicon Valley is too optimistic. Maybe it's too easily fooled
+by impostors. Many less optimistic journalists want to believe that.
+But the lists of impostors they cite are suspiciously short, and
+plagued with asterisks. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font> If you use revenue as the test, Silicon
+Valley's optimism seems better tuned than the rest of the world's.
+And because it works, it will spread.<br /><br />There's a lot more to new ideas than new startup ideas, of course.
+The fear of making something lame holds people back in every field.
+But Silicon Valley shows how quickly customs can evolve to support
+new ideas. And that in turn proves that dismissing new ideas is not
+so deeply rooted in human nature that it can't be unlearnt.<br /><br />
+<center>___________</center><br /><br />
+Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a force
+more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism.
+You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoid
+that?<br /><br />This is a difficult problem, because you don't want to completely
+eliminate your horror of making something lame. That's what steers
+you toward doing good work. You just want to turn it off temporarily,
+the way a painkiller temporarily turns off pain.<br /><br />People have already discovered several techniques that work. Hardy
+mentions two in <i>A Mathematician's Apology</i>:
+<blockquote>
+  Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first
+  duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate
+  a little both the importance of his subject and his importance
+  in it.
+</blockquote>
+If you overestimate the importance of what you're working on, that
+will compensate for your mistakenly harsh judgment of your initial
+results. If you look at something that's 20% of the way to a goal
+worth 100 and conclude that it's 10% of the way to a goal worth
+200, your estimate of its expected value is correct even though
+both components are wrong.<br /><br />It also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident.
+I've noticed in many fields that the most successful people are
+slightly overconfident. On the face of it this seems implausible.
+Surely it would be optimal to have exactly the right estimate of
+one's abilities. How could it be an advantage to be mistaken?
+Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the
+opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against
+both other people's skepticism and your own.<br /><br />Ignorance has a similar effect. It's safe to make the mistake of
+judging early work as finished work if you're a sufficiently lax
+judge of finished work. I doubt it's possible to cultivate this
+kind of ignorance, but empirically it's a real advantage, especially
+for the young.<br /><br />Another way to get through the lame phase of ambitious projects is
+to surround yourself with the right people � to create an eddy in
+the social headwind. But it's not enough to collect people who are
+always encouraging. You'd learn to discount that. You need colleagues
+who can actually tell an ugly duckling from a baby swan. The people
+best able to do this are those working on similar projects of their
+own, which is why university departments and research labs work so
+well. You don't need institutions to collect colleagues. They
+naturally coalesce, given the chance. But it's very much worth
+accelerating this process by seeking out other people trying to do
+new things.<br /><br />Teachers are in effect a special case of colleagues. It's a teacher's
+job both to see the promise of early work and to encourage you to
+continue. But teachers who are good at this are unfortunately quite
+rare, so if you have the opportunity to learn from one, take it.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />For some it might work to rely on sheer discipline: to tell yourself
+that you just have to press on through the initial crap phase and
+not get discouraged. But like a lot of "just tell yourself" advice,
+this is harder than it sounds. And it gets still harder as you get
+older, because your standards rise. The old do have one compensating
+advantage though: they've been through this before.<br /><br />It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate
+of change. You won't worry so much about doing bad work if you can
+see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this
+is. So when you start something new, it's good if you can spend a
+lot of time on it. That's another advantage of being young: you
+tend to have bigger blocks of time.<br /><br />Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of
+a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that
+it's just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it's
+just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower
+standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it
+to something more.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#dddddd>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />This will be easier if you use a medium that lets you work fast and
+doesn't require too much commitment up front. It's easier to convince
+yourself that something is just a sketch when you're drawing in a
+notebook than when you're carving stone. Plus you get initial results
+faster. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#dddddd>5</font></a>]</font>
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#dddddd>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It will be easier to try out a risky project if you think of it as
+a way to learn and not just as a way to make something. Then even
+if the project truly is a failure, you'll still have gained by it.
+If the problem is sharply enough defined, failure itself is
+knowledge: if the theorem you're trying to prove turns out to
+be false, or you use a structural member of a certain size and
+it fails under stress, you've learned something, even if it
+isn't what you wanted to learn.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#dddddd>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br />One motivation that works particularly well for me is curiosity.
+I like to try new things just to see how they'll turn out. We started
+Y Combinator in this spirit, and it was one of main things that
+kept me going while I was working on 
+<a href="bel.html"><u>Bel</u></a>. Having worked for so long
+with various dialects of Lisp, I was very curious to see what its
+inherent shape was: what you'd end up with if you followed the
+axiomatic approach all the way.<br /><br />But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself
+to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts. The thing
+you're trying to trick yourself into believing is in fact the truth.
+A lame-looking early version of an ambitious project truly is more
+valuable than it seems. So the ultimate solution may be to teach
+yourself that.<br /><br />One way to do it is to study the histories of people who've
+done great work. What were they thinking early on? What was the
+very first thing they did? It can sometimes be hard to get an
+accurate answer to this question, because people are often embarrassed
+by their earliest work and make little effort to publish it. (They
+too misjudge it.) But when you can get an accurate picture of the
+first steps someone made on the path to some great work, they're
+often pretty feeble.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#dddddd>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Perhaps if you study enough such cases, you can teach yourself to
+be a better judge of early work. Then you'll be immune both to other
+people's skepticism and your own fear of making something lame.
+You'll see early work for what it is.<br /><br />Curiously enough, the solution to the problem of judging early work
+too harshly is to realize that our attitudes toward it are themselves
+early work. Holding everything to the same standard is a crude
+version 1. We're already evolving better customs, and we can already
+see signs of how big the payoff will be.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+This assumption may be too conservative. There is some evidence
+that historically the Bay Area has attracted a 
+<a href="cities.html"><u>different sort of person</u></a> than, 
+say, New York City.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+One of their great favorites is Theranos. But the most conspicuous
+feature of Theranos's cap table is the absence of Silicon Valley
+firms. Journalists were fooled by Theranos, but Silicon Valley
+investors weren't.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+I made two mistakes about teachers when I was younger.  I
+cared more about professors' research than their reputations as
+teachers, and I was also wrong about what it meant to be a good
+teacher. I thought it simply meant to be good at explaining things.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+Patrick Collison points out that you can go past treating
+something as a hack in the sense of a prototype and onward to the
+sense of the word that means something closer to a practical joke:
+<blockquote>
+  I think there may be something related to being a hack that can
+  be powerful � the idea of making the tenuousness and implausibility
+  <i>a feature</i>. "Yes, it's a bit ridiculous, right?  I'm just trying
+  to see how far such a naive approach can get." YC seemed to me
+  to have this characteristic.
+</blockquote>
+[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+Much of the advantage of switching from physical to digital
+media is not the software per se but that it lets you start something
+new with little upfront commitment.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+John Carmack adds:
+<blockquote>
+  The value of a medium without a vast gulf between the early work
+  and the final work is exemplified in game mods. The original
+  Quake game was a golden age for mods, because everything was very
+  flexible, but so crude due to technical limitations, that quick
+  hacks to try out a gameplay idea weren't all <i>that</i> far from the
+  official game. Many careers were born from that, but as the
+  commercial game quality improved over the years, it became almost
+  a full time job to make a successful mod that would be appreciated
+  by the community. This was dramatically reversed with Minecraft
+  and later Roblox, where the entire esthetic of the experience was
+  so explicitly crude that innovative gameplay concepts became the
+  overriding value. These "crude" game mods by single authors are
+  now often bigger deals than massive professional teams' work.
+</blockquote>
+[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+Lisa Randall suggests that we
+<blockquote>
+  treat new things as experiments. That way there's no such thing
+  as failing, since you learn something no matter what. You treat
+  it like an experiment in the sense that if it really rules something
+  out, you give up and move on, but if there's some way to vary it
+  to make it work better, go ahead and do that
+</blockquote>
+[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+Michael Nielsen points out that the internet has made this
+easier, because you can see programmers' first commits, musicians'
+first videos, and so on.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, Patrick Collison, Jessica
+Livingston, Michael Nielsen, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts
+of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/earnest.html

@@ -0,0 +1,200 @@
+<html><head><title>Earnestness</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebcd5><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebcd5 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/earnestness-4.gif" width="103" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Earnestness" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">December 2020<br /><br />Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance
+when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can
+pay to founders is to describe them as "earnest." This is not by
+itself a guarantee of success. You could be earnest but incapable.
+But when founders are both formidable (another of our words) and
+earnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get.<br /><br />Earnestness sounds like a boring, even Victorian virtue. It seems
+a bit of an anachronism that people in Silicon Valley would care
+about it. Why does this matter so much?<br /><br />When you call someone earnest, you're making a statement about their
+motives. It means both that they're doing something for the right
+reasons, and that they're trying as hard as they can. If we imagine
+motives as vectors, it means both the direction and the magnitude
+are right. Though these are of course related: when people are doing
+something for the right reasons, they try harder.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The reason motives matter so much in Silicon Valley is that so many
+people there have the wrong ones. Starting a successful startup
+makes you rich and famous. So a lot of the people trying to start
+them are doing it for those reasons. Instead of what? Instead of
+interest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root of
+earnestness. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It's also the hallmark of a nerd. Indeed, when people describe
+themselves as "x nerds," what they mean is that they're interested
+in x for its own sake, and not because it's cool to be interested
+in x, or because of what they can get from it. They're saying they
+care so much about x that they're willing to sacrifice seeming cool
+for its sake.<br /><br />A <a href="genius.html"><u>genuine interest</u></a> 
+in something is a very powerful motivator � for
+some people, the most powerful motivator of all.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font>
+Which is why
+it's what Jessica and I look for in founders. But as well as being
+a source of strength, it's also a source of vulnerability. Caring
+constrains you. The earnest can't easily reply in kind to mocking
+banter, or put on a cool facade of nihil admirari. They care too
+much. They are doomed to be the straight man. That's a real
+disadvantage in your 
+<a href="nerds.html"><u>teenage years</u></a>, 
+when mocking banter and nihil
+admirari often have the upper hand. But it becomes an advantage
+later.<br /><br />It's a commonplace now that the kids who were 
+nerds in high school
+become the cool kids' bosses later on. But people misunderstand why
+this happens. It's not just because the nerds are smarter, but also
+because they're more earnest. When the problems get harder than the
+fake ones you're given in high school, caring about them starts to
+matter.<br /><br />Does it always matter? Do the earnest always win? Not always. It
+probably doesn't matter much in politics, or in crime, or in certain
+types of business that are similar to crime, like gambling, personal
+injury law, patent trolling, and so on. Nor does it matter in
+academic fields at the more 
+<a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hermeneutic+dialectics+hegemonic+phenomenology+intersectionality"><u>bogus</u></a> end of the spectrum. And though
+I don't know enough to say for sure, it may not matter in some kinds
+of humor: it may be possible to be completely cynical and still be
+very funny.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#dddddd>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Looking at the list of fields I mentioned, there's an obvious
+pattern. Except possibly for humor, these are all types of work I'd
+avoid like the plague. So that could be a useful heuristic for
+deciding which fields to work in: how much does earnestness matter?
+Which can in turn presumably be inferred from the prevalence of
+nerds at the top.<br /><br />Along with "nerd," another word that tends to be associated with
+earnestness is "naive." The earnest often seem naive.  It's not
+just that they don't have the motives other people have. They often
+don't fully grasp that such motives exist. Or they may know
+intellectually that they do, but because they don't feel them, they
+forget about them.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#dddddd>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It works to be slightly naive not just about motives but also,
+believe it or not, about the problems you're working on. Naive
+optimism can compensate for the bit rot that 
+<a href="ecw.html"><u>rapid change</u></a> causes
+in established beliefs. You plunge into some problem saying "How
+hard can it be?", and then after solving it you learn that it was
+till recently insoluble.<br /><br />Naivete is an obstacle for anyone who wants to seem sophisticated,
+and this is one reason would-be intellectuals find it so difficult
+to understand Silicon Valley. It hasn't been safe for such people
+to use the word "earnest" outside scare quotes since Oscar Wilde
+wrote "The Importance of Being Earnest" in 1895. And yet when you
+zoom in on Silicon Valley, right into 
+<a href="jessica.html"><u>Jessica Livingston's brain</u></a>,
+that's what her x-ray vision
+is seeking out in founders. Earnestness!
+Who'd have guessed? Reporters literally can't believe it when
+founders making piles of money say that they started their companies
+to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery.
+How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible
+they sound?<br /><br />Though those asking this question don't realize it, that's not a
+rhetorical question.<br /><br />A lot of founders are faking it, of course, particularly the smaller
+fry, and the soon to be smaller fry. But not all of them. There are
+a significant number of founders who really are interested in the
+problem they're solving mainly for its own sake.<br /><br />Why shouldn't there be? We have no difficulty believing that people
+would be interested in history or math or even old bus tickets for
+their own sake. Why can't there be people interested in self-driving
+cars or social networks for their own sake? When you look at the
+question from this side, it seems obvious there would be. And isn't
+it likely that having a deep interest in something would be a source
+of great energy and resilience? It is in every other field.<br /><br />The question really is why we have a blind spot about business.
+And the answer to that is obvious if you know enough history. For
+most of history, making large amounts of money has not been very
+intellectually interesting. In preindustrial times it was never far
+from robbery, and some areas of business still retain that character,
+except using lawyers instead of soldiers.<br /><br />But there are other areas of business where the work is genuinely
+interesting. Henry Ford got to spend much of his time working on
+interesting technical problems, and for the last several decades
+the trend in that direction has been accelerating. It's much easier
+now to make a lot of money by working on something you're interested
+in than it was <a href="re.html"><u>50 years ago</u></a>. 
+And that, rather than how fast they
+grow, may be the most important change that startups represent.
+Though indeed, the fact that the work is genuinely interesting is
+a big part of why it gets done so fast.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#dddddd>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Can you imagine a more important change than one in the relationship
+between intellectual curiosity and money? These are two of the most
+powerful forces in the world, and in my lifetime they've become
+significantly more aligned. How could you not be fascinated to watch
+something like this happening in real time?<br /><br />I meant this essay to be about earnestness generally, and now I've
+gone and talked about startups again. But I suppose at least it
+serves as an example of an x nerd in the wild.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+It's interesting how many different ways there are <i>not</i> to
+be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant,
+to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to
+be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make.
+This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum,
+but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions.<br /><br />Another thing I notice about this list is that it sounds like a
+list of the ways people behave on Twitter. Whatever else social
+media is, it's a vivid catalogue of ways not to be earnest.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+People's motives are as mixed in Silicon Valley as anywhere
+else. Even the founders motivated mostly by money tend to be at
+least somewhat interested in the problem they're solving, and even
+the founders most interested in the problem they're solving also
+like the idea of getting rich. But there's great variation in the
+relative proportions of different founders' motivations.<br /><br />And when I talk about "wrong" motives, I don't mean morally wrong.
+There's nothing morally wrong with starting a startup to make money.
+I just mean that those startups don't do as well.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+The most powerful motivator for most people is probably family.
+But there are some for whom intellectual curiosity comes first. In
+his (wonderful) autobiography, Paul Halmos says explicitly that for
+a mathematician, math must come before anything else, including
+family. Which at least implies that it did for him.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness even
+when used as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the opposite.
+It's not only in actual politics that earnestness seems to be a
+handicap, but also in office politics and academic politics.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+It's a bigger social error to seem naive in most European
+countries than it is in America, and this may be one of subtler
+reasons startups are less common there. Founder culture is completely
+at odds with sophisticated cynicism.<br /><br />The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly
+this is also the region with the highest number of successful
+startups per capita.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+Much of business is schleps, and probably always will be. But
+even being a professor is largely schleps. It would be interesting
+to collect statistics about the schlep ratios of different jobs,
+but I suspect they'd rarely be less than 30%.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Jessica
+Livingston, Mattias Ljungman, Harj Taggar, and Kyle Vogt for reading
+drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/ecw.html

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+<html><head><title>How to Be an Expert in a Changing World</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc7d><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc7d border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-be-an-expert-in-a-changing-world-4.gif" width="330" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="How to Be an Expert in a Changing World" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">December 2014<br /><br />If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing
+confidence in our beliefs.  The more (and more varied) experience
+a belief survived, the less likely it would be false.  Most people
+implicitly believe something like this about their opinions.  And
+they're justified in doing so with opinions about things that don't
+change much, like human nature.  But you can't trust your opinions
+in the same way about things that change, which could include
+practically everything else.<br /><br />When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an
+earlier version of the world.<br /><br />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, and many of those look bad specifically
+because some change in the world just switched them from bad to
+good.  I spent a lot of time learning to recognize such ideas, and
+the techniques I used may be applicable to ideas in general.<br /><br />The first step is to have an explicit belief in change.  People who
+fall victim to a monotonically increasing confidence in their
+opinions are implicitly concluding the world is static.  If you
+consciously remind yourself it isn't, you start to look for change.<br /><br />Where should one look for it?  Beyond the moderately useful
+generalization that human nature doesn't change much, the unfortunate
+fact is that change is hard to predict.  This is largely a tautology
+but worth remembering all the same: change that matters usually
+comes from an unforeseen quarter.<br /><br />So I don't even try to predict it.  When I get asked in interviews
+to predict the future, I always have to struggle to come up with
+something plausible-sounding on the fly, like a student who hasn't
+prepared for an exam.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font>
+But it's not out of laziness that I haven't
+prepared.  It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so
+rarely correct that they usually aren't worth the extra rigidity
+they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively
+open-minded.  Instead of trying to point yourself in the right
+direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and
+try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change.<br /><br />It's ok to have working hypotheses, even though they may constrain
+you a bit, because they also motivate you.  It's exciting to chase
+things and exciting to try to guess answers.  But you have to be
+disciplined about not letting your hypotheses harden into anything
+more.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />I believe this passive m.o. works not just for evaluating new ideas
+but also for having them.  The way to come up with new ideas is not
+to try explicitly to, but to try to solve problems and simply not
+discount weird hunches you have in the process.<br /><br />The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain
+experts.  If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea
+or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto
+worth exploring. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font>
+ Within Y Combinator, when an idea is described
+as crazy, it's a compliment&mdash;in fact, on average probably a
+higher compliment than when an idea is described as good.<br /><br />Startup investors have extraordinary incentives for correcting
+obsolete beliefs.  If they can realize before other investors that
+some apparently unpromising startup isn't, they can make a huge
+amount of money.  But the incentives are more than just financial.
+Investors' opinions are explicitly tested: startups come to them
+and they have to say yes or no, and then, fairly quickly, they learn
+whether they guessed right.  The investors who say no to a Google
+(and there were several) will remember it for the rest of their
+lives.<br /><br />Anyone who must in some sense bet on ideas rather than merely
+commenting on them has similar incentives.  Which means anyone who
+wants such incentives can have them, by turning their comments into
+bets: if you write about a topic in some fairly durable and public
+form, you'll find you worry much more about getting things right
+than most people would in a casual conversation.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs
+is to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Though the nature
+of future discoveries is hard to predict, I've found I can predict
+quite well what sort of people will make them.  Good new ideas come
+from earnest, energetic, independent-minded people.<br /><br />Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor.
+We thought Airbnb was a bad idea, for example. But we could tell
+the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded.
+(Indeed, almost pathologically so.)  So we suspended disbelief and
+funded them.<br /><br />This too seems a technique that should be generally applicable.
+Surround yourself with the sort of people new ideas come from.  If
+you want to notice quickly when your beliefs become obsolete, you
+can't do better than to be friends with the people whose discoveries
+will make them so.<br /><br />It's hard enough already not to become the prisoner of your own
+expertise, but it will only get harder, because change is accelerating.
+That's not a recent trend; change has been accelerating since the
+paleolithic era.  Ideas beget ideas.  I don't expect that to change.
+But I could be wrong.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+My usual trick is to talk about aspects of the present that
+most people haven't noticed yet.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Especially if they become well enough known that people start
+to identify them with you.  You have to be extra skeptical about
+things you want to believe, and once a hypothesis starts to be
+identified with you, it will almost certainly start to be in that
+category.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+In practice "sufficiently expert" doesn't require one to be
+recognized as an expert&mdash;which is a trailing indicator in any
+case.  In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot would
+be enough.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+Though they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on
+e.g. forums and places like Twitter seem empirically to work like
+casual conversation.  The threshold may be whether what you write
+has a title.<br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, and Robert Morris
+for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://nrike.svbtle.com/cmo-ser-un-experto-en-un-mundo-cambiante">Spanish Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://tldrarabiccontents.blogspot.com/2020/01/blog-post_31.html">Arabic Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+csell_env = 'ue1';
+ var storeCheckoutDomain = 'order.store.turbify.net';
+</script>
+
+<script type="text/javascript">
+  function toOSTN(node){
+    if(node.hasAttributes()){
+      for (const attr of node.attributes) {
+        node.setAttribute(attr.name,attr.value.replace(/(us-dc1-order|us-dc2-order|order)\.(store|stores)\.([a-z0-9-]+)\.(net|com)/g, storeCheckoutDomain));
+      }
+    }
+  };
+  document.addEventListener('readystatechange', event => {
+  if(typeof storeCheckoutDomain != 'undefined' && storeCheckoutDomain != "order.store.turbify.net"){
+    if (event.target.readyState === "interactive") {
+      fromOSYN = document.getElementsByTagName('form');
+        for (let i = 0; i < fromOSYN.length; i++) {
+          toOSTN(fromOSYN[i]);
+        }
+      }
+    }
+  });
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+ </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/lq/ult/ylc_1.9.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/lib/smbiz/store/csell/beacon-a9518fc6e4.js" >
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+ csell_page_data = {}; csell_page_rec_data = []; ts='TOK_STORE_ID';
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG() { var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_SPACEID'] = '2022276099'; csell_token_map['TOK_URL'] = ''; csell_token_map['TOK_STORE_ID'] = 'paulgraham'; csell_token_map['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST'] = 'ecw'; csell_token_map['TOK_ORDER_HOST'] = 'order.store.turbify.net'; csell_token_map['TOK_BEACON_TYPE'] = 'prod'; csell_token_map['TOK_RAND_KEY'] = 't'; csell_token_map['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE'] = '2';  c = csell_page_data; var x = (typeof storeCheckoutDomain == 'string')?storeCheckoutDomain:'order.store.turbify.net'; var t = csell_token_map; c['s'] = t['TOK_SPACEID']; c['url'] = t['TOK_URL']; c['si'] = t[ts]; c['ii'] = t['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST']; c['bt'] = t['TOK_BEACON_TYPE']; c['rnd'] = t['TOK_RAND_KEY']; c['io'] = t['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE']; YStore.addItemUrl = 'http%s://'+x+'/'+t[ts]+'/ymix/MetaController.html?eventName.addEvent&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_itemId=%s&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_quantity=1&ysco_key_cs_item=1&sectionId=ysco.cart&ysco_key_store_id='+t[ts]; } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_REC_VIEW_TAG() {  var env = (typeof csell_env == 'string')?csell_env:'prod'; var p = csell_page_data; var a = '/sid='+p['si']+'/io='+p['io']+'/ii='+p['ii']+'/bt='+p['bt']+'-view'+'/en='+env; var r=Math.random(); YStore.CrossSellBeacon.renderBeaconWithRecData(p['url']+'/p/s='+p['s']+'/'+p['rnd']+'='+r+a); } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=ecw&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html107.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:47 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/faq.html

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+<html><head><title>FAQs</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc303><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc303 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/faqs-2.gif" width="42" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="FAQs" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="gfaq.html">General FAQ</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="pfaq.html">Programming FAQ</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="startupfaq.html">Startup FAQ</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="arcfaq.html">Arc FAQ</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="lispfaq1.html">Lisp FAQ</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="vwfaq.html">Viaweb FAQ</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="spamfaq.html">Plan for Spam FAQ</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="ffbfaq.html">FFB FAQ</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+csell_env = 'ue1';
+ var storeCheckoutDomain = 'order.store.turbify.net';
+</script>
+
+<script type="text/javascript">
+  function toOSTN(node){
+    if(node.hasAttributes()){
+      for (const attr of node.attributes) {
+        node.setAttribute(attr.name,attr.value.replace(/(us-dc1-order|us-dc2-order|order)\.(store|stores)\.([a-z0-9-]+)\.(net|com)/g, storeCheckoutDomain));
+      }
+    }
+  };
+  document.addEventListener('readystatechange', event => {
+  if(typeof storeCheckoutDomain != 'undefined' && storeCheckoutDomain != "order.store.turbify.net"){
+    if (event.target.readyState === "interactive") {
+      fromOSYN = document.getElementsByTagName('form');
+        for (let i = 0; i < fromOSYN.length; i++) {
+          toOSTN(fromOSYN[i]);
+        }
+      }
+    }
+  });
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+ </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/lq/ult/ylc_1.9.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/lib/smbiz/store/csell/beacon-a9518fc6e4.js" >
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+ csell_page_data = {}; csell_page_rec_data = []; ts='TOK_STORE_ID';
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG() { var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_SPACEID'] = '2022276099'; csell_token_map['TOK_URL'] = ''; csell_token_map['TOK_STORE_ID'] = 'paulgraham'; csell_token_map['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST'] = 'faq'; csell_token_map['TOK_ORDER_HOST'] = 'order.store.turbify.net'; csell_token_map['TOK_BEACON_TYPE'] = 'prod'; csell_token_map['TOK_RAND_KEY'] = 't'; csell_token_map['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE'] = '2';  c = csell_page_data; var x = (typeof storeCheckoutDomain == 'string')?storeCheckoutDomain:'order.store.turbify.net'; var t = csell_token_map; c['s'] = t['TOK_SPACEID']; c['url'] = t['TOK_URL']; c['si'] = t[ts]; c['ii'] = t['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST']; c['bt'] = t['TOK_BEACON_TYPE']; c['rnd'] = t['TOK_RAND_KEY']; c['io'] = t['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE']; YStore.addItemUrl = 'http%s://'+x+'/'+t[ts]+'/ymix/MetaController.html?eventName.addEvent&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_itemId=%s&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_quantity=1&ysco_key_cs_item=1&sectionId=ysco.cart&ysco_key_store_id='+t[ts]; } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_REC_VIEW_TAG() {  var env = (typeof csell_env == 'string')?csell_env:'prod'; var p = csell_page_data; var a = '/sid='+p['si']+'/io='+p['io']+'/ii='+p['ii']+'/bt='+p['bt']+'-view'+'/en='+env; var r=Math.random(); YStore.CrossSellBeacon.renderBeaconWithRecData(p['url']+'/p/s='+p['s']+'/'+p['rnd']+'='+r+a); } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=faq&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html107.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:30 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/fh.html

@@ -0,0 +1,152 @@
+<html><head><title>Haters</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc9f><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc9f border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/haters-4.gif" width="58" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Haters" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">January 2020<br /><br /><i>(I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often
+surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but
+it applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.)</i><br /><br />If you become sufficiently famous, you'll acquire some fans who
+like you too much. These people are sometimes called "fanboys," and
+though I dislike that term, I'm going to have to use it here.  We
+need some word for them, because this is a distinct phenomenon from
+someone simply liking your work.<br /><br />A fanboy is obsessive and uncritical. Liking you becomes part of
+their identity, and they create an image of you in their own head
+that is much better than reality. Everything you do is good, because
+you do it. If you do something bad, they find a way to see it as
+good. And their love for you is not, usually, a quiet, private one.
+They want everyone to know how great you are.<br /><br />Well, you may be thinking, I could do without this kind of obsessive
+fan, but I know there are all kinds of people in the world, and if
+this is the worst consequence of fame, that's not so bad.<br /><br />Unfortunately this is not the worst consequence of fame. As well
+as fanboys, you'll have haters.<br /><br />A hater is obsessive and uncritical. Disliking you becomes part of
+their identity, and they create an image of you in their own head
+that is much worse than reality. Everything you do is bad, because
+you do it. If you do something good, they find a way to see it as
+bad. And their dislike for you is not, usually, a quiet, private
+one. They want everyone to know how awful you are.<br /><br />If you're thinking of checking, I'll save you the trouble. The
+second and fifth paragraphs are identical except for "good" being
+switched to "bad" and so on.<br /><br />I spent years puzzling about haters.  What are they, and where do
+they come from? Then one day it dawned on me. Haters are just fanboys
+with the sign switched.<br /><br />Note that by haters, I don't simply mean trolls. I'm not talking about 
+people who say bad things about you and then move on. I'm talking
+about the much smaller group of people for whom this becomes a 
+kind of obsession and who do it repeatedly over a long period.<br /><br />Like fans, haters seem to be an automatic consequence of fame.
+Anyone sufficiently famous will have them. And like fans, haters
+are energized by the fame of whoever they hate. They hear a song
+by some pop singer. They don't like it much. If the singer were an
+obscure one, they'd just forget about it. But instead they keep
+hearing her name, and this seems to drive some people crazy.
+Everyone's always going on about this singer, but she's no good!
+She's a fraud!<br /><br />That word "fraud" is an important one. It's the spectral signature
+of a hater to regard the object of their hatred as a 
+<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=Musk%20fraud&src=typed_query&f=live"><u>fraud</u></a>. They
+can't deny their fame. Indeed, their fame is if anything exaggerated
+in the hater's mind. They notice every mention of the singer's name,
+because every mention makes them angrier. In their own minds they
+exaggerate both the singer's fame and her lack of talent, and the
+only way to reconcile those two ideas is to conclude that she has
+tricked everyone.<br /><br />What sort of people become haters? Can anyone become one? I'm not
+sure about this, but I've noticed some patterns. Haters are generally
+losers in a very specific sense: although they are occasionally
+talented, they have never achieved much. And indeed, anyone
+successful enough to have achieved significant fame would be unlikely
+to regard another famous person as a fraud on that account, because
+anyone famous knows how random fame is.<br /><br />But haters are not always complete losers. They are not always the
+proverbial guy living in his mom's basement. Many are, but some
+have some amount of talent. In fact I suspect that a sense of
+frustrated talent is what drives some people to become haters.
+They're not just saying "It's unfair that so-and-so is famous," but
+"It's unfair that so-and-so is famous, and not me."<br /><br />Could a hater be cured if they achieved something impressive? My
+guess is that's a moot point, because they 
+<a href="mean.html"><u>never will</u></a>. I've been
+able to observe for long enough that I'm fairly confident the pattern
+works both ways: not only do people who do great work never become
+haters, haters never do great work. Although I dislike the word
+"fanboy," it's evocative of something important about both haters
+and fanboys. It implies that the fanboy is so slavishly predictable in his admiration
+that he's diminished as a result, that he's less than a man.<br /><br />Haters seem even more diminished. I can imagine being a fanboy.
+I can think of people whose work I admire so much that I could abase
+myself before them out of sheer gratitude. If P. G.  Wodehouse were
+still alive, I could see myself being a Wodehouse fanboy. But I
+could not imagine being a hater.<br /><br />Knowing that haters are just fanboys with the sign bit flipped makes
+it much easier to deal with them. We don't need a separate theory
+of haters. We can just use existing techniques for dealing with
+obsessive fans.<br /><br />The most important of which is simply not to think much about them.
+If you're like most people who become famous enough to acquire
+haters, your initial reaction will be one of mystification. Why
+does this guy seem to have it in for me? Where does his obsessive
+energy come from, and what makes him so appallingly nasty? What did
+I do to set him off? Is it something I can fix?<br /><br />The mistake here is to think of the hater as someone you have a
+dispute with. When you have a dispute with someone, it's usually a
+good idea to try to understand why they're upset and then fix things
+if you can. Disputes are distracting. But it's a false analogy to
+think of a hater as someone you have a dispute with.  It's an
+understandable mistake, if you've never encountered haters before.
+But when you realize that you're dealing with a hater, and what a
+hater is, it's clear that it's a waste of time even to think about
+them. If you have obsessive fans, do you spend any time wondering
+what makes them love you so much? No, you just think "some
+people are kind of crazy," and that's the end of it.<br /><br />Since haters are equivalent to fanboys, that's the way to deal with
+them too. There may have been something that set them off. But it's
+not something that would have set off a normal person, so there's
+no reason to spend any time thinking about it. It's not you, it's
+them.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[1] There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can
+you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater,
+and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds
+are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken
+in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you
+can usually assume y is not a fraud.<br /><br />[2] I would make an exception for teenagers, who sometimes act in
+such extreme ways that they are literally not themselves. I can
+imagine a teenage kid being a hater and then growing out of it. But
+not anyone over 25.<br /><br />[3] I have a much worse memory for misdeeds than my wife Jessica,
+who is a connoisseur of character, but I don't wish it were better.
+Most disputes are a waste of time even if you're in the right, and
+it's easy to bury the hatchet with someone if you can't remember
+why you were mad at them.<br /><br />[4] A competent hater will not merely attack you individually but
+will try to get mobs after you. In some cases you may want to refute
+whatever bogus claim they made in order to do so. But err on the
+side of not, because ultimately it probably won't matter.<br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b> to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison,
+Christine Ford, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, 
+Elon Musk, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this.</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://note.com/tokyojack/n/n5c47575488b6">Japanese Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://tldrarabiccontents.blogspot.com/2020/01/blog-post_22.html">Arabic Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://stronglyagainst.com/pgraham-fanboy-hater/">Polish Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<!-- html103.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:42 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/field.html

@@ -0,0 +1,110 @@
+<html><head><meta name="Keywords" content="" /><title>The Shape of the Essay Field</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-6.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=166cf683ec4085f><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-7.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#166cf683ec4085f border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-8.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-shape-of-the-essay-field-1.gif" width="227" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="The Shape of the Essay Field" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">June 2025<br /><br />An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But
+there are three different reasons people might not know something,
+and they yield three very different kinds of essays.<br /><br />One reason people won't know something is if it's not important to
+know. That doesn't mean it will make a bad essay. For example, you
+might write a good essay about a particular model of car. Readers
+would learn something from it. It would add to their picture of the
+world. For a handful of readers it might even spur some kind of
+epiphany. But unless this is a very unusual car it's not critical
+for everyone to know about it. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If something isn't important to know, there's no answer to the
+question of why people don't know it. Not knowing random facts is
+the default. But if you're going to write about things that <i>are</i>
+important to know, you have to ask why your readers don't already
+know them. Is it because they're smart but inexperienced, or because
+they're obtuse?<br /><br />So the three reasons readers might not already know what you tell
+them are (a) that it's not important, (b) that they're obtuse, 
+or (c) that they're inexperienced.<br /><br />The reason I did this breakdown was to get at the following fact,
+which might have seemed controversial if I'd led with it, but should
+be obvious now. If you're writing for smart people about important
+things, you're writing for the young.<br /><br />Or more precisely, that's where you'll have the most effect. Whatever
+you say should also be at least somewhat novel to you, however old
+you are. It's not an essay otherwise, because an essay is something
+you write to figure something out. But whatever you figure out will
+presumably be more of a surprise to younger readers than it is to
+you.<br /><br />There's a continuum of surprise. At one extreme, something you read
+can change your whole way of thinking. <i>The Selfish Gene</i> did this
+to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an
+ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the
+protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you
+do. At the other extreme, writing merely puts into words something
+readers were already thinking &mdash; or thought they were.<br /><br />The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking
+multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well
+at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics.
+So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking
+a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about
+very important ones. But with younger readers the tradeoff shifts.
+There's more room to change their thinking, so there's a bigger
+payoff for writing about important things.<br /><br />The tradeoff isn't a conscious one, at least not for me. It's more
+like a kind of gravitational field that writers work in. But every
+essayist works in it, whether they realize it or not.<br /><br />This seems obvious once you state it, but it took me a long time
+to understand. I knew I wanted to write for smart people about
+important topics. I noticed empirically that I seemed to be writing
+for the young. But it took me years to understand that the latter
+was an automatic consequence of the former. In fact I only really
+figured it out as I was writing this essay.<br /><br />Now that I know it, should I change anything? I don't think so. In
+fact seeing the shape of the field that writers work in has reminded
+me that I'm not optimizing for returns in it. I'm not trying to
+surprise readers of any particular age; I'm trying to surprise
+myself.<br /><br />The way I usually decide what to write about is by following
+curiosity. I notice something new and dig into it. It would probably
+be a mistake to change that. But seeing the shape of the essay field
+has set me thinking. What would surprise young readers? Which
+important things do people tend to learn late? Interesting question.
+I should think about that.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Note</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+It's hard to write a really good essay about an unimportant
+topic, though, because a really good essayist will inevitably draw
+the topic into deeper waters. E. B. White could write an essay about
+how to boil potatoes that ended up being full of timeless wisdom.
+In which case, of course, it wouldn't really be about how to boil
+potatoes; that would just have been the starting point.<br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b> to Jessica Livingston and Michael 
+Nielsen for reading drafts of this.</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/fn.html

@@ -0,0 +1,160 @@
+<html><head><title>Fierce Nerds</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebccb><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebccb border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/fierce-nerds-4.gif" width="104" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Fierce Nerds" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">May 2021<br /><br />Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary
+social situations they are &mdash; as quiet and diffident as the star
+quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics
+symposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water.
+But the apparent diffidence of nerds is an illusion due to the fact
+that when non-nerds observe them, it's usually in ordinary social
+situations. In fact some nerds are quite fierce.<br /><br />The fierce nerds are a small but interesting group. They are as a
+rule extremely competitive &mdash; more competitive, I'd say, than highly
+competitive non-nerds. Competition is more personal for them. Partly
+perhaps because they're not emotionally mature enough to distance
+themselves from it, but also because there's less randomness in the
+kinds of competition they engage in, and they are thus more justified
+in taking the results personally.<br /><br />Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especially
+when young. It might seem like it would be a disadvantage to be
+mistaken about one's abilities, but empirically it isn't. Up to a
+point, confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy.<br /><br />Another quality you find in most fierce nerds is intelligence. Not
+all nerds are smart, but the fierce ones are always at least
+moderately so. If they weren't, they wouldn't have the confidence
+to be fierce.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />There's also a natural connection between nerdiness and
+<a href="think.html"><u>independent-mindedness</u></a>. It's hard to be 
+independent-minded without
+being somewhat socially awkward, because conventional beliefs are
+so often mistaken, or at least arbitrary. No one who was both
+independent-minded and ambitious would want to waste the effort it
+takes to fit in. And the independent-mindedness of the fierce nerds
+will obviously be of the <a href="conformism.html"><u>aggressive</u></a> 
+rather than the passive type:
+they'll be annoyed by rules, rather than dreamily unaware of them.<br /><br />I'm less sure why fierce nerds are impatient, but most seem to be.
+You notice it first in conversation, where they tend to interrupt
+you. This is merely annoying, but in the more promising fierce nerds
+it's connected to a deeper impatience about solving problems. Perhaps
+the competitiveness and impatience of fierce nerds are not separate 
+qualities, but two manifestations of a single underlying drivenness.<br /><br />When you combine all these qualities in sufficient quantities, the
+result is quite formidable. The most vivid example of fierce nerds
+in action may be James Watson's <i>The Double Helix</i>. The first sentence
+of the book is "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood,"
+and the portrait he goes on to paint of Crick is the quintessential
+fierce nerd: brilliant, socially awkward, competitive, independent-minded,
+overconfident. But so is the implicit portrait he paints of himself.
+Indeed, his lack of social awareness makes both portraits that much
+more realistic, because he baldly states all sorts of opinions and
+motivations that a smoother person would conceal. And moreover it's
+clear from the story that Crick and Watson's fierce nerdiness was
+integral to their success. Their independent-mindedness caused them
+to consider approaches that most others ignored, their overconfidence
+allowed them to work on problems they only half understood (they
+were literally described as "clowns" by one eminent insider), and
+their impatience and competitiveness got them to the answer ahead
+of two other groups that would otherwise have found it within the
+next year, if not the next several months.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The idea that there could be fierce nerds is an unfamiliar one not
+just to many normal people but even to some young nerds. Especially
+early on, nerds spend so much of their time in ordinary social
+situations and so little doing real work that they get a lot more
+evidence of their awkwardness than their power. So there will be
+some who read this description of the fierce nerd and realize "Hmm,
+that's me." And it is to you, young fierce nerd, that I now turn.<br /><br />I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that
+your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems.
+And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that
+nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number
+of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases.
+Recently <a href="richnow.html"><u>getting rich</u></a> became 
+one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people
+in America are now fierce nerds.<br /><br />Indeed, being a fierce nerd is probably even more helpful in business
+than in nerds' original territory of scholarship. Fierceness seems
+optional there. Darwin for example doesn't seem to have been
+especially fierce. Whereas it's impossible to be the CEO of a company
+over a certain size without being fierce, so now that nerds can win
+at business, fierce nerds will increasingly monopolize the really
+big successes.<br /><br />The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will
+turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground
+bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the 
+<a href="fh.html"><u>hater</u></a>, the shooter
+down of <a href="newideas.html"><u>new ideas</u></a>.<br /><br />How do you avoid this fate? Work on ambitious projects. If you
+succeed, it will bring you a kind of satisfaction that neutralizes
+bitterness. But you don't need to have succeeded to feel this;
+merely working on hard projects gives most fierce nerds some
+feeling of satisfaction. And those it doesn't, it at least keeps
+busy.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by
+devoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something like
+that. Maybe that's the right answer for some people. I have no idea.
+But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a
+sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge
+to avoid cutting yourself.<br /><br />If you do choose the ambitious route, you'll have a tailwind behind
+you. There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past
+century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers
+to technicians &mdash; from the charismatic to the competent &mdash; and I
+don't see anything on the horizon that will end it. At least not
+till the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+To be a nerd is to be socially awkward, and there are two
+distinct ways to do that: to be playing the same game as everyone
+else, but badly, and to be playing a different game. The smart nerds
+are the latter type.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+The same qualities that make fierce nerds so effective can
+also make them very annoying. Fierce nerds would do well to remember
+this, and (a) try to keep a lid on it, and (b) seek out organizations
+and types of work where getting the right answer matters more than
+preserving social harmony. In practice that means small groups
+working on hard problems. Which fortunately is the most fun kind
+of environment anyway.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+If success neutralizes bitterness, why are there some people
+who are at least moderately successful and yet still quite bitter?
+Because people's potential bitterness varies depending on how
+naturally bitter their personality is, and how ambitious they are:
+someone who's naturally very bitter will still have a lot left after
+success neutralizes some of it, and someone who's very ambitious
+will need proportionally more success to satisfy that ambition.<br /><br />So the worst-case scenario is someone who's both naturally bitter
+and extremely ambitious, and yet only moderately successful.<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Trevor Blackwell, Steve Blank, Patrick Collison, Jessica
+Livingston, Amjad Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://xueqiu.com/6663886898/188768282">Chinese Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

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+<html><head><meta name="Keywords" content="" /><title>Founder Mode</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-6.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1806066d4a82e49><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-7.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1806066d4a82e49 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-8.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/founder-mode-1.gif" width="118" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Founder Mode" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">September 2024<br /><br />At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who
+was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said
+it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time
+in his life, forgot to take notes. I'm not going to try to reproduce
+it here. Instead I want to talk about a question it raised.<br /><br />The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about
+how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning
+people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way
+for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized
+as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He
+followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to
+figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying
+how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb's
+free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.<br /><br />The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful
+founders we've funded, and one after another said that the same
+thing had happened to them. They'd been given the same advice about
+how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of helping
+their companies, it had damaged them.<br /><br />Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was
+the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured
+out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company
+you hadn't founded &mdash; how to run a company if you're merely a
+professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that
+to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that
+managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because
+it is.<br /><br />In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder
+mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley
+have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to
+manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from
+the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their
+attempts to escape from it.<br /><br />There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode.
+Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the
+experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for
+themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can
+search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well
+understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the
+ways it will differ.<br /><br />The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular
+design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as
+black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up
+to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details
+of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.<br /><br />Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great
+when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging
+from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out
+to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company
+into the ground.<br /><br />One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to founders
+afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they're
+being gaslit from both sides &mdash; by the people telling them they
+have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working
+for them when they do. Usually when everyone around you disagrees
+with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken.
+But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven't been founders
+themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level
+execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the
+world.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going
+to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company
+only via his or her direct reports. "Skip-level" meetings will
+become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there's a
+name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge
+number of permutations to choose from.<br /><br />For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he
+considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were
+not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the
+force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And
+yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big
+company feel like a startup. Steve presumably wouldn't have kept
+having these retreats if they didn't work. But I've never heard of
+another company doing this. So is it a good idea, or a bad one? We
+still don't know. That's how little we know about founder mode.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way
+they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount
+of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp
+they are, will probably vary from company to company. They'll even
+vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn
+trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode.
+But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples
+of individual founders groping their way toward it.<br /><br />Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that
+once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual
+founders were already most of the way there &mdash; except that in doing
+what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Curiously enough it's an encouraging thought that we still know so
+little about founder mode. Look at what founders have achieved
+already, and yet they've achieved this against a headwind of bad
+advice. Imagine what they'll do once we can tell them how to run
+their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+The more diplomatic way of phrasing this statement would be
+to say that experienced C-level execs are often very skilled at
+managing up. And I don't think anyone with knowledge of this world
+would dispute that.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+If the practice of having such retreats became so widespread
+that even mature companies dominated by politics started to do it,
+we could quantify the senescence of companies by the average depth
+on the org chart of those invited.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as
+the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start
+misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they
+should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't
+founders will decide they should try to act like founders. That may
+even work, to some extent, but the results will be messy when it
+doesn't; the modular approach does at least limit the damage a bad
+CEO can do.<br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b> to Brian Chesky, Patrick Collison, 
+Ron Conway, Jessica
+Livingston, Elon Musk, Ryan Petersen, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan
+for reading drafts of this.</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/founders.html

@@ -0,0 +1,133 @@
+<html><head><title>What We Look for in Founders</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc71><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc71 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/what-we-look-for-in-founders-2.gif" width="248" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="What We Look for in Founders" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+October 2010
+<p>
+<i>(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something
+about the qualities we look for in founders.  In print they had to cut
+the last item because they didn't have room.)</i><br /><br /><b>1. Determination</b><br /><br />This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup
+founders.  We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most
+important quality would be intelligence.  That's the myth in the
+Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid.  But
+as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what
+matters most is determination.  You're going to hit a lot of
+obstacles.  You can't be the sort of person who gets <a href="die.html">demoralized</a>
+easily.<br /><br />Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman of <a href="http://wepay.com">WePay</a> 
+are a good example.  They're
+doing a finance startup, which means endless negotiations with big,
+bureaucratic companies.  When you're starting a startup that depends
+on deals with big companies to exist, it often feels like they're
+trying to ignore you out of existence.  But when Bill Clerico starts
+calling you, you may as well do what he asks, because he is not
+going away.<br /><br />
+<b>2. Flexibility</b><br /><br />You do not however want the sort of determination implied by phrases
+like "don't give up on your dreams."  The world of startups is so
+unpredictable that you need to be able to modify your dreams on the
+fly.  The best metaphor I've found for the combination of determination
+and flexibility you need is a <a href="relres.html">running back</a>.  
+He's determined to get
+downfield, but at any given moment he may need to go sideways or
+even backwards to get there.<br /><br />The current record holder for flexibility may be Daniel Gross of
+<a href="http://greplin.com">Greplin</a>.  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.<br /><br />
+<b>3. Imagination</b><br /><br />Intelligence 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 
+<a href="googles.html">seem
+bad</a> 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://airbnb.com">Airbnb</a> 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.<br /><br />
+<b>4. Naughtiness</b><br /><br />Though 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 about observing proprieties.  That's why
+I'd use the word naughty rather than evil.  They delight in 
+<a href="gba.html">breaking
+rules</a>, but not rules that matter.  This quality may be redundant
+though; it may be implied by imagination.<br /><br />Sam Altman of <a href="http://loopt.com">Loopt</a> 
+is one of the most successful alumni, so we
+asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application
+that would help us discover more people like him.  He said to ask
+about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage&mdash;hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into
+computers.  It has become one of the questions we pay most attention
+to when judging applications.<br /><br />
+<b>5. Friendship</b><br /><br />Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just 
+<a href="startupmistakes.html">one
+founder</a>.  Most of the big successes have two or three.  And the
+relationship between 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.<br /><br />Emmett Shear and Justin Kan of <a href="http://justin.tv">Justin.tv</a> 
+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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Jessica Livingston and Chris Steiner for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<script type="text/javascript">
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+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=founders&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
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+</html>
+<!-- html106.prod.store.e1a.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:53 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/fp.html

@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+<html><head><title>Fashionable Problems</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebcb9><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebcb9 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/fashionable-problems-4.gif" width="182" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Fashionable Problems" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">December 2019<br /><br />I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though
+lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction
+of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've
+all worked on similar things.<br /><br />Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly
+conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never
+dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working
+on fashionable problems.<br /><br />If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the
+best places to look is in fields that people think have already been
+fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding � you may notice a
+pattern here. If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently
+played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be
+<a href="sun.html"><u>multiplied</u></a> by its enormous surface area.<br /><br />The best protection against getting drawn into working on the same
+things as everyone else may be to <a href="genius.html"><u>genuinely 
+love</u></a> what you're doing.
+Then you'll continue to work on it even if you make the same mistake
+as other people and think that it's too marginal to matter.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://note.com/tokyojack/n/n2cd5fc7b8eeb">Japanese Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://tldrarabiccontents.blogspot.com/2020/01/blog-post_73.html">Arabic Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://corrigan2.blogspot.com/p/problemes-la-mode-paul-graham.html">French Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<html><head><title>How to Raise Money</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebce1><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebce1 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-raise-money-4.gif" width="165" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="How to Raise Money" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+September 2013<br /><br />Most startups that raise money do it more than once.  A typical
+trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands
+from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then 
+(2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company,
+and then (3) once the company is clearly succeeding, raise one or
+more later rounds to accelerate growth.<br /><br />Reality can be messier.  Some companies raise money twice in phase
+2.  Others skip phase 1 and go straight to phase 2.  And at Y&nbsp;Combinator 
+we get an increasing number of companies that have already
+raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands.  But the three phase
+path is at least the one about which individual startups' paths
+oscillate.<br /><br />This essay focuses on phase 2 fundraising.  That's the type the
+startups we fund are doing on Demo Day, and this essay is the advice
+we give them.<br /><br />
+<b>Forces</b><br /><br />Fundraising is hard in both senses: hard like lifting a heavy weight,
+and hard like solving a puzzle.  It's hard like lifting a weight
+because it's intrinsically hard to convince people to part with
+large sums of money.  That problem is irreducible; it should be
+hard.  But much of the other kind of difficulty can be eliminated.
+Fundraising only seems a puzzle because it's an alien world to most
+founders, and I hope to fix that by supplying a map through it.<br /><br />To founders, the behavior of investors is often opaque &mdash; partly
+because their motivations are obscure, but partly because they
+deliberately mislead you.  And the misleading ways of investors
+combine horribly with the wishful thinking of inexperienced founders.
+At YC we're always warning founders about this danger, and investors
+are probably more circumspect with YC startups than with other
+companies they talk to, and even so we witness a constant series
+of explosions as these two volatile components combine.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If you're an inexperienced founder, the only way to survive is by
+imposing external constraints on yourself.  You can't trust your
+intuitions.  I'm going to give you a set of rules here that will
+get you through this process if anything will.  At certain moments
+you'll be tempted to ignore them.  So rule number zero is: these
+rules exist for a reason.  You wouldn't need a rule to keep you
+going in one direction if there weren't powerful forces pushing you
+in another.<br /><br />The ultimate source of the forces acting on you are the forces
+acting on investors.  Investors are pinched between two kinds of
+fear: fear of investing in startups that fizzle, and fear of missing
+out on startups that take off.  The cause of all this fear is the
+very thing that makes startups such attractive investments: the
+successful ones grow very fast.  But that fast growth means investors
+can't wait around.  If you wait till a startup is obviously a
+success, it's too late.  To get the really high returns, you have
+to invest in startups when it's still unclear how they'll do.  But
+that in turn makes investors nervous they're about to invest in a
+flop.  As indeed they often are.<br /><br />What investors would like to do, if they could, is wait.  When a
+startup is only a few months old, every week that passes gives you
+significantly more information about them.  But if you wait too
+long, other investors might take the deal away from you.  And of
+course the other investors are all subject to the same forces.  So
+what tends to happen is that they all wait as long as they can,
+then when some act the rest have to.<br /><br />
+<b>Don't raise money unless you want it and it wants you.</b><br /><br />Such a high proportion of successful startups raise money that it
+might seem fundraising is one of the defining qualities of a startup.
+Actually it isn't.  <a href="growth.html">Rapid growth</a> is what
+makes a company a startup.  Most companies in a position to grow
+rapidly find that (a) taking outside money helps them grow faster,
+and (b) their growth potential makes it easy to attract such money.
+It's so common for both (a) and (b) to be true of a successful
+startup that practically all do raise outside money.  But there may
+be cases where a startup either wouldn't want to grow faster, or
+outside money wouldn't help them to, and if you're one of them,
+don't raise money.<br /><br />The other time not to raise money is when you won't be able to.  If
+you try to raise money before you can <a href="convince.html">convince</a>
+investors, you'll not only waste your time, but also burn your
+reputation with those investors.<br /><br />
+<b>Be in fundraising mode or not.</b><br /><br />One of the things that surprises founders most about fundraising
+is how distracting it is.  When you start fundraising, everything
+else grinds to a halt.  The problem is not the time fundraising
+consumes but that it becomes the <a href="top.html">top idea in
+your mind</a>.  A startup can't endure that level of distraction
+for long.  An early stage startup grows mostly because the founders
+<a href="ds.html">make</a> it grow, and if the founders look away,
+growth usually drops sharply.<br /><br />Because fundraising is so distracting, a startup should either be
+in fundraising mode or not.  And when you do decide to raise money,
+you should focus your whole attention on it so you can get it done
+quickly and get back to work.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />You can take money from investors when you're not in fundraising
+mode.  You just can't expend any attention on it.  There are two
+things that take attention: convincing investors, and negotiating
+with them.  So when you're not in fundraising mode, you should take
+money from investors only if they require no convincing, and are
+willing to invest on terms you'll take without negotiation.  For
+example, if a reputable investor is willing to invest on a convertible
+note, using standard paperwork, that is either uncapped or capped
+at a good valuation, you can take that without having to think.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font>
+The terms will be whatever they turn out to be in your next
+equity round.  And "no convincing" means just that: zero time spent
+meeting with investors or preparing materials for them.  If an
+investor says they're ready to invest, but they need you to come
+in for one meeting to meet some of the partners, tell them no, if
+you're not in fundraising mode, because that's fundraising. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font>
+Tell them politely; tell them you're focusing on the company right
+now, and that you'll get back to them when you're fundraising; but
+do not get sucked down the slippery slope.<br /><br />Investors will try to lure you into fundraising when you're not.
+It's great for them if they can, because they can thereby get a
+shot at you before everyone else.  They'll send you emails saying
+they want to meet to learn more about you.  If you get cold-emailed
+by an associate at a VC firm, you shouldn't meet even if you are
+in fundraising mode.  Deals don't happen that way.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#999999>5</font></a>]</font>
+But even
+if you get an email from a partner you should try to delay meeting
+till you're in fundraising mode.  They may say they just want to
+meet and chat, but investors never just want to meet and chat.  What
+if they like you?  What if they start to talk about giving you
+money?  Will you be able to resist having that conversation?  Unless
+you're experienced enough at fundraising to have a casual conversation
+with investors that stays casual, it's safer to tell them that you'd
+be happy to later, when you're fundraising, but that right now you
+need to focus on the company.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#999999>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Companies that are successful at raising money in phase 2 sometimes
+tack on a few investors after leaving fundraising mode.  This is
+fine; if fundraising went well, you'll be able to do it without
+spending time convincing them or negotiating about terms.<br /><br />
+<b>Get introductions to investors.</b><br /><br />Before you can talk to investors, you have to be introduced to them.
+If you're presenting at a Demo Day, you'll be introduced to a whole
+bunch simultaneously.  But even if you are, you should supplement
+these with intros you collect yourself.<br /><br />Do you have to be introduced?  In phase 2, yes.  Some investors
+will let you email them a business plan, but you can tell from the
+way their sites are organized that they don't really want startups
+to approach them directly.<br /><br />Intros vary greatly in effectiveness.  The best type of intro is
+from a well-known investor who has just invested in you.  So when
+you get an investor to commit, ask them to introduce you to other
+investors they respect.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#999999>7</font></a>]</font>
+The next best type of intro is from a
+founder of a company they've funded.  You can also get intros from
+other people in the startup community, like lawyers and reporters.<br /><br />There are now sites like AngelList, FundersClub, and WeFunder that
+can introduce you to investors.  We recommend startups treat them
+as auxiliary sources of money.  Raise money first from leads you
+get yourself.  Those will on average be better investors.  Plus
+you'll have an easier time raising money on these sites once you
+can say you've already raised some from well-known investors.<br /><br />
+<b>Hear no till you hear yes.</b><br /><br />Treat investors as saying no till they unequivocally say yes, in
+the form of a definite offer with no contingencies.<br /><br />I mentioned earlier that investors prefer to wait if they can.
+What's particularly dangerous for founders is the way they wait.
+Essentially, they lead you on.  They seem like they're about to
+invest right up till the moment they say no.  If they even say no.
+Some of the worse ones never actually do say no; they just stop
+replying to your emails.  They hope that way to get a free option
+on investing.  If they decide later that they want to invest &mdash; usually
+because they've heard you're a hot deal &mdash; they can pretend they
+just got distracted and then restart the conversation as if they'd
+been about to.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#999999>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />That's not the worst thing investors will do.  Some will use language
+that makes it sound as if they're committing, but which doesn't
+actually commit them.  And wishful thinking founders are happy to
+meet them half way.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#999999>9</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Fortunately, the next rule is a tactic for neutralizing this behavior.
+But to work it depends on you not being tricked by the no that
+sounds like yes.  It's so common for founders to be misled/mistaken
+about this that we designed a <a
+href="http://ycombinator.com/hdp.html">protocol</a> to fix the
+problem.  If you believe an investor has committed, get them to
+confirm it.  If you and they have different views of reality, whether
+the source of the discrepancy is their sketchiness or your wishful
+thinking, the prospect of confirming a commitment in writing will
+flush it out.  And till they confirm, regard them as saying no.<br /><br />
+<b>Do breadth-first search weighted by expected value.</b><br /><br />When you talk to investors your m.o. should be breadth-first search,
+weighted by expected value.  You should always talk to investors
+in parallel rather than serially.  You can't afford the time it
+takes to talk to investors serially, plus if you only talk to one
+investor at a time, they don't have the pressure of other investors
+to make them act.  But you shouldn't pay the same attention to every
+investor, because some are more promising prospects than others.
+The optimal solution is to talk to all potential investors in
+parallel, but give higher priority to the more promising ones. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#999999>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Expected value = how likely an investor is to say yes, multiplied
+by how good it would be if they did.  So for example, an eminent
+investor who would invest a lot, but will be hard to convince, might
+have the same expected value as an obscure angel who won't invest
+much, but will be easy to convince.  Whereas an obscure angel who
+will only invest a small amount, and yet needs to meet multiple
+times before making up his mind, has very low expected value.  Meet
+such investors last, if at all. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f11n"><font color=#999999>11</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Doing breadth-first search weighted by expected value will save you
+from investors who never explicitly say no but merely drift away,
+because you'll drift away from them at the same rate.  It protects
+you from investors who flake in much the same way that a distributed
+algorithm protects you from processors that fail.  If some investor
+isn't returning your emails, or wants to have lots of meetings but
+isn't progressing toward making you an offer, you automatically
+focus less on them.  But you have to be disciplined about assigning
+probabilities.  You can't let how much you want an investor influence
+your estimate of how much they want you.<br /><br />
+<b>Know where you stand.</b><br /><br />How do you judge how well you're doing with an investor, when
+investors habitually seem more positive than they are?  By looking
+at their actions rather than their words.  Every investor has some
+track they need to move along from the first conversation to wiring
+the money, and you should always know what that track consists of,
+where you are on it, and how fast you're moving forward.<br /><br />Never leave a meeting with an investor without asking what happens
+next.  What more do they need in order to decide?  Do they need
+another meeting with you?  To talk about what?  And how soon?  Do
+they need to do something internally, like talk to their partners,
+or investigate some issue?  How long do they expect it to take?
+Don't be too pushy, but know where you stand.  If investors are
+vague or resist answering such questions, assume the worst; investors
+who are seriously interested in you will usually be happy to talk
+about what has to happen between now and wiring the money, because
+they're already running through that in their heads. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f12n"><font color=#999999>12</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If you're experienced at negotiations, you already know how to ask
+such questions.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f13n"><font color=#999999>13</font></a>]</font>
+If you're not, there's a trick you can use
+in this situation.  Investors know you're inexperienced at raising
+money.  Inexperience there doesn't make you unattractive.  Being a
+noob at technology would, if you're starting a technology startup,
+but not being a noob at fundraising.  Larry and Sergey were noobs
+at fundraising.  So you can just confess that you're inexperienced
+at this and ask how their process works and where you are in it.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f14n"><font color=#999999>14</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Get the first commitment.</b><br /><br />The biggest factor in most investors' opinions of you is the opinion
+of <a href="herd.html">other investors</a>.  Once you start getting
+investors to commit, it becomes increasingly easy to get more to.
+But the other side of this coin is that it's often hard to get the
+first commitment.<br /><br />Getting the first substantial offer can be half the total difficulty
+of fundraising.  What counts as a substantial offer depends on who
+it's from and how much it is.  Money from friends and family doesn't
+usually count, no matter how much.  But if you get $50k from a well
+known VC firm or angel investor, that will usually be enough to set
+things rolling.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f15n"><font color=#999999>15</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Close committed money.</b><br /><br />It's not a deal till the money's in the bank.  I often hear
+inexperienced founders say things like "We've raised $800,000,"
+only to discover that zero of it is in the bank so far.  Remember
+the twin fears that torment investors?  The fear of missing out
+that makes them jump early, and the fear of jumping onto a turd
+that results?  This is a market where people are exceptionally prone
+to buyer's remorse.  And it's also one that furnishes them plenty
+of excuses to gratify it.  The public markets snap startup investing
+around like a whip.  If the Chinese economy blows up tomorrow, all
+bets are off.  But there are lots of surprises for individual
+startups too, and they tend to be concentrated around fundraising.
+Tomorrow a big competitor could appear, or you could get C&Ded, or
+your cofounder could quit.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f16n"><font color=#999999>16</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Even a day's delay can bring news that causes an investor to change
+their mind.  So when someone commits, get the money.  Knowing where
+you stand doesn't end when they say they'll invest.  After they say
+yes, know what the timetable is for getting the money, and then
+babysit that process till it happens.  Institutional investors have
+people in charge of wiring money, but you may have to hunt angels
+down in person to collect a check.<br /><br />Inexperienced investors are the ones most likely to get buyer's
+remorse.  Established ones have learned to treat saying yes as like
+diving off a diving board, and they also have more brand to preserve.
+But I've heard of cases of even top-tier VC firms welching on deals.<br /><br />
+<b>Avoid investors who don't "lead."</b><br /><br />Since getting the first offer is most of the difficulty of fundraising,
+that should be part of your calculation of expected value when you
+start.  You have to estimate not just the probability that an
+investor will say yes, but the probability that they'd be the <i>first</i>
+to say yes, and the latter is not simply a constant fraction of the
+former.  Some investors are known for deciding quickly, and those
+are extra valuable early on.<br /><br />Conversely, an investor who will only invest once other investors
+have is worthless initially.  And while most investors are influenced
+by how interested other investors are in you, there are some who
+have an explicit policy of only investing after other investors
+have.  You can recognize this contemptible subspecies of investor
+because they often talk about "leads."  They say that they don't
+lead, or that they'll invest once you have a lead.  Sometimes they
+even claim to be willing to lead themselves, by which they mean
+they won't invest till you get $x from other investors.  (It's great
+if by "lead" they mean they'll invest unilaterally, and in addition
+will help you raise more.  What's lame is when they use the term
+to mean they won't invest unless you can raise more elsewhere.)
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f17n"><font color=#999999>17</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Where does this term "lead" come from?  Up till a few years ago,
+startups raising money in phase 2 would usually raise equity rounds
+in which several investors invested at the same time using the same
+paperwork.  You'd negotiate the terms with one "lead" investor, and
+then all the others would sign the same documents and all the money
+change hands at the closing.<br /><br />Series A rounds still work that way, but things now work differently
+for most fundraising prior to the series A.  Now there are rarely
+actual rounds before the A round, or leads for them.  Now startups
+simply raise money from investors one at a time till they feel they
+have enough.<br /><br />Since there are no longer leads, why do investors use that term?
+Because it's a more legitimate-sounding way of saying what they
+really mean.  All they really mean is that their interest in you
+is a function of other investors' interest in you.  I.e. the spectral
+signature of all mediocre investors.  But when phrased in terms of
+leads, it sounds like there is something structural and therefore
+legitimate about their behavior.<br /><br />When an investor tells you "I want to invest in you, but I don't
+lead," translate that in your mind to "No, except yes if you turn
+out to be a hot deal."  And since that's the default opinion of any
+investor about any startup, they've essentially just told you
+nothing.<br /><br />When you first start fundraising, the expected value of an investor
+who won't "lead" is zero, so talk to such investors last if at all.<br /><br />
+<b>Have multiple plans.</b><br /><br />Many investors will ask how much you're planning to raise. This
+question makes founders feel they should be planning to raise a
+specific amount.  But in fact you shouldn't.  It's a mistake to
+have fixed plans in an undertaking as unpredictable as fundraising.<br /><br />So why do investors ask how much you plan to raise?  For much the
+same reasons a salesperson in a store will ask "How much were you
+planning to spend?" if you walk in looking for a gift for a friend.
+You probably didn't have a precise amount in mind; you just want
+to find something good, and if it's inexpensive, so much the better.
+The salesperson asks you this not because you're supposed to have
+a plan to spend a specific amount, but so they can show you only
+things that cost the most you'll pay.<br /><br />Similarly, when investors ask how much you plan to raise, it's not
+because you're supposed to have a plan.  It's to see whether you'd
+be a suitable recipient for the size of investment they like to
+make, and also to judge your ambition, reasonableness, and how far
+you are along with fundraising.<br /><br />If you're a wizard at fundraising, you can say "We plan to raise
+a $7 million series A round, and we'll be accepting termsheets next
+tuesday."  I've known a handful of founders who could pull that off
+without having VCs laugh in their faces.  But if you're in the
+inexperienced but earnest majority, the solution is analogous to
+the solution I recommend for <a href="convince.html">pitching</a>
+your startup: do the right thing and then just tell investors what
+you're doing.<br /><br />And the right strategy, in fundraising, is to have multiple plans
+depending on how much you can raise.  Ideally you should be able
+to tell investors something like: we can make it to profitability
+without raising any more money, but if we raise a few hundred
+thousand we can hire one or two smart friends, and if we raise a
+couple million, we can hire a whole engineering team, etc.<br /><br />Different plans match different investors.  If you're talking to a
+VC firm that only does series A rounds (though there are few of
+those left), it would be a waste of time talking about any but your
+most expensive plan.  Whereas if you're talking to an angel who
+invests $20k at a time and you haven't raised any money yet, you
+probably want to focus on your least expensive plan.<br /><br />If you're so fortunate as to have to think about the upper limit
+on what you should raise, a good rule of thumb is to multiply the
+number of people you want to hire times $15k times 18 months.  In
+most startups, nearly all the costs are a function of the number
+of people, and $15k per month is the conventional total cost
+(including benefits and even office space) per person.  $15k per
+month is high, so don't actually spend that much.  But it's ok to
+use a high estimate when fundraising to add a margin for error.  If
+you have additional expenses, like manufacturing, add in those at
+the end.  Assuming you have none and you think you might hire 20
+people, the most you'd want to raise is 20 x $15k x 18 = $5.4
+million.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f18n"><font color=#999999>18</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Underestimate how much you want.</b><br /><br />Though you can focus on different plans when talking to different
+types of investors, you should on the whole err on the side of
+underestimating the amount you hope to raise.<br /><br />For example, if you'd like to raise $500k, it's better to say
+initially that you're trying to raise $250k.  Then when you reach
+$150k you're more than half done.  That sends two useful signals
+to investors: that you're doing well, and that they have to decide
+quickly because you're running out of room.  Whereas if you'd said
+you were raising $500k, you'd be less than a third done at $150k.
+If fundraising stalled there for an appreciable time, you'd start
+to read as a failure.<br /><br />Saying initially that you're raising $250k doesn't limit you to
+raising that much.  When you reach your initial target and you still
+have investor interest, you can just decide to raise more.  Startups
+do that all the time.  In fact, most startups that are very successful
+at fundraising end up raising more than they originally intended.<br /><br />I'm not saying you should lie, but that you should lower your
+expectations initially.  There is almost no downside in starting
+with a low number.  It not only won't cap the amount you raise, but
+will on the whole tend to increase it.<br /><br />A good metaphor here is angle of attack.  If you try to fly at too
+steep an angle of attack, you just stall.  If you say right out of
+the gate that you want to raise a $5 million series A round, unless
+you're in a very strong position, you not only won't get that but
+won't get anything. Better to start at a low angle of attack, build
+up speed, and then gradually increase the angle if you want.<br /><br />
+<b>Be profitable if you can.</b><br /><br />You will be in a much stronger position if your collection of plans
+includes one for raising zero dollars &mdash; i.e. if you can make
+it to profitability without raising any additional money.  Ideally
+you want to be able to say to investors "We'll succeed no matter
+what, but raising money will help us do it faster."<br /><br />There are many analogies between fundraising and dating, and this
+is one of the strongest.  No one wants you if you seem desperate.
+And the best way not to seem desperate is not to <i>be</i> desperate.
+That's one reason we urge startups during YC to keep expenses low
+and to try to make it to <a href="ramenprofitable.html">ramen
+profitability</a> before Demo Day.  Though it sounds slightly
+paradoxical, if you want to raise money, the best thing you can do
+is get yourself to the point where you don't need to.<br /><br />There are almost two distinct modes of fundraising: one in which
+founders who need money knock on doors seeking it, knowing that
+otherwise the company will die or at the very least people will
+have to be fired, and one in which founders who don't need money
+take some to grow faster than they could merely on their own revenues.
+To emphasize the distinction I'm going to name them: type A fundraising
+is when you don't need money, and type B fundraising is when you
+do.<br /><br />Inexperienced founders read about famous startups doing what was
+type A fundraising, and decide they should raise money too, since
+that seems to be how startups work. Except when they raise money
+they don't have a clear path to profitability and are thus doing
+type B fundraising.  And they are then surprised how difficult and
+unpleasant it is.<br /><br />Of course not all startups can make it to ramen profitability in a
+few months.  And some that don't still manage to have the upper
+hand over investors, if they have some other advantage like
+extraordinary growth numbers or exceptionally formidable founders.
+But as time passes it gets increasingly difficult to fundraise from
+a position of strength without being profitable.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f19n"><font color=#999999>19</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Don't optimize for valuation.</b><br /><br />When you raise money, what should your valuation be?  The most
+important thing to understand about valuation is that it's not that
+important.<br /><br />Founders who raise money at high valuations tend to be unduly proud
+of it.  Founders are often competitive people, and since valuation
+is usually the only visible number attached to a startup, they end
+up competing to raise money at the highest valuation.  This is
+stupid, because fundraising is not the test that matters.  The real
+test is revenue.  Fundraising is just a means to that end.  Being
+proud of how well you did at fundraising is like being proud of
+your college grades.<br /><br />Not only is fundraising not the test that matters, valuation is not
+even the thing to optimize about fundraising.  The number one thing
+you want from phase 2 fundraising is to get the money you need, so
+you can get back to focusing on the real test, the success of your
+company.  Number two is good investors. Valuation is at best third.<br /><br />The empirical evidence shows just how unimportant it is.  Dropbox
+and Airbnb are the most successful companies we've funded so far,
+and they raised money after Y Combinator at premoney valuations of
+$4 million and $2.6 million respectively. Prices are so much higher
+now that if you can raise money at all you'll probably raise it at
+higher valuations than Dropbox and Airbnb.  So let that satisfy
+your competitiveness.  You're doing better than Dropbox and Airbnb!
+At a test that doesn't matter.<br /><br />When you start fundraising, your initial valuation (or valuation
+cap) will be set by the deal you make with the first investor who
+commits.  You can increase the price for later investors, if you
+get a lot of interest, but by default the valuation you got from
+the first investor becomes your asking price.<br /><br />So if you're raising money from multiple investors, as most companies
+do in phase 2, you have to be careful to avoid raising the first
+from an over-eager investor at a price you won't be able to
+sustain.  You can of course lower your price if you need to (in
+which case you should give the same terms to investors who invested
+earlier at a higher price), but you may lose a bunch of leads in
+the process of realizing you need to do this.<br /><br />What you can do if you have eager first investors is raise money
+from them on an uncapped convertible note with an MFN clause.  This
+is essentially a way of saying that the valuation cap of the note
+will be determined by the next investors you raise money from.<br /><br />It will be easier to raise money at a lower valuation.  It shouldn't
+be, but it is.  Since phase 2 prices vary at most 10x and the big
+successes generate returns of at least 100x, investors should pick
+startups entirely based on their estimate of the probability that
+the company will be a big success and hardly at all on price.  But
+although it's a mistake for investors to care about price, a
+significant number do.  A startup that investors seem to like but
+won't invest in at a cap of $x will have an easier time at $x/2.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f20n"><font color=#999999>20</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Yes/no before valuation.</b><br /><br />Some investors want to know what your valuation is before they even
+talk to you about investing.  If your valuation has already been
+set by a prior investment at a specific valuation or cap, you can
+tell them that number.  But if it isn't set because you haven't
+closed anyone yet, and they try to push you to name a price, resist
+doing so.  If this would be the first investor you've closed, then
+this could be the tipping point of fundraising. That means closing
+this investor is the first priority, and you need to get the
+conversation onto that instead of being dragged sideways into a
+discussion of price.<br /><br />Fortunately there is a way to avoid naming a price in this situation.
+And it is not just a negotiating trick; it's how you (both) should
+be operating.  Tell them that valuation is not the most important
+thing to you and that you haven't thought much about it, that you
+are looking for investors you want to partner with and who want to
+partner with you, and that you should talk first about whether they
+want to invest at all.  Then if they decide they do want to invest,
+you can figure out a price. But first things first.<br /><br />Since valuation isn't that important and getting fundraising rolling
+is, we usually tell founders to give the first investor who commits
+as low a price as they need to.  This is a safe technique so long
+as you combine it with the next one. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f21n"><font color=#999999>21</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Beware "valuation sensitive" investors.</b><br /><br />Occasionally you'll encounter investors who describe themselves as
+"valuation sensitive."  What this means in practice is that they
+are compulsive negotiators who will suck up a lot of your time
+trying to push your price down.  You should therefore never approach
+such investors first. While you shouldn't chase high valuations,
+you also don't want your valuation to be set artificially low because
+the first investor who committed happened to be a compulsive
+negotiator.  Some such investors have value, but the time to approach
+them is near the end of fundraising, when you're in a position to
+say "this is the price everyone else has paid; take it or leave it"
+and not mind if they leave it.  This way, you'll not only get market
+price, but it will also take less time.<br /><br />Ideally you know which investors have a reputation for being
+"valuation sensitive" and can postpone dealing with them till last,
+but occasionally one you didn't know about will pop up early on.
+The rule of doing breadth first search weighted by expected value
+already tells you what to do in this case: slow down your interactions
+with them.<br /><br />There are a handful of investors who will try to invest at a lower
+valuation even when your price has already been set.  Lowering your
+price is a backup plan you resort to when you discover you've let
+the price get set too high to close all the money you need.  So
+you'd only want to talk to this sort of investor if you were about
+to do that anyway.  But since investor meetings have to be arranged
+at least a few days in advance and you can't predict when you'll
+need to resort to lowering your price, this means in practice that
+you should approach this type of investor last if at all.<br /><br />If you're surprised by a lowball offer, treat it as a backup offer
+and delay responding to it.  When someone makes an offer in good
+faith, you have a moral obligation to respond in a reasonable time.
+But lowballing you is a dick move that should be met with the
+corresponding countermove.<br /><br />
+<b>Accept offers greedily.</b><br /><br />I'm a little leery of using the term "greedily" when writing about
+fundraising lest non-programmers misunderstand me, but a greedy
+algorithm is simply one that doesn't try to look into the future.
+A greedy algorithm takes the best of the options in front of it
+right now.  And that is how startups should approach fundraising
+in phases 2 and later.  Don't try to look into the future because
+(a) the future is unpredictable, and indeed in this business you're
+often being deliberately misled about it and (b) your first priority
+in fundraising should be to get it finished and get back to work
+anyway.<br /><br />If someone makes you an acceptable offer, take it.  If you have
+multiple incompatible offers, take the best.  Don't reject an
+acceptable offer in the hope of getting a better one in the future.<br /><br />These simple rules cover a wide variety of cases.  If you're raising
+money from many investors, roll them up as they say yes.  As you
+start to feel you've raised enough, the threshold for acceptable
+will start to get higher.<br /><br />In practice offers exist for stretches of time, not points.  So
+when you get an acceptable offer that would be incompatible with
+others (e.g. an offer to invest most of the money you need), you
+can tell the other investors you're talking to that you have an
+offer good enough to accept, and give them a few days to make their
+own.  This could lose you some that might have made an offer if
+they had more time.  But by definition you don't care; the initial
+offer was acceptable.<br /><br />Some investors will try to prevent others from having time to decide
+by giving you an "exploding" offer, meaning one that's only valid
+for a few days.  Offers from the very best investors explode less
+frequently and less rapidly &mdash; Fred Wilson never gives exploding
+offers, for example &mdash; because they're confident you'll pick
+them.  But lower-tier investors sometimes give offers with very
+short fuses, because they believe no one who had other options would
+choose them.  A deadline of three working days is acceptable.  You
+shouldn't need more than that if you've been talking to investors
+in parallel.  But a deadline any shorter is a sign you're dealing
+with a sketchy investor.  You can usually call their bluff, and you
+may need to.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f22n"><font color=#999999>22</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It might seem that instead of accepting offers greedily, your goal
+should be to get the best investors as partners.  That is certainly
+a good goal, but in phase 2 "get the best investors" only rarely
+conflicts with "accept offers greedily," because the best investors
+don't usually take any longer to decide than the others.  The only
+case where the two strategies give conflicting advice is when you
+have to forgo an offer from an acceptable investor to see if you'll
+get an offer from a better one.  If you talk to investors in parallel
+and push back on exploding offers with excessively short deadlines,
+that will almost never happen.  But if it does, "get the best
+investors" is in the average case bad advice.  The best investors
+are also the most selective, because they get their pick of all the
+startups.  They reject nearly everyone they talk to, which means
+in the average case it's a bad trade to exchange a definite offer
+from an acceptable investor for a potential offer from a better
+one.<br /><br />(The situation is different in phase 1.  You can't apply to all the
+incubators in parallel, because some offset their schedules to
+prevent this.  In phase 1, "accept offers greedily" and "get the
+best investors" do conflict, so if you want to apply to multiple
+incubators, you should do it in such a way that the ones you want
+most decide first.)<br /><br />Sometimes when you're raising money from multiple investors, a
+series A will emerge out of those conversations, and these rules
+even cover what to do in that case.  When an investor starts to
+talk to you about a series A, keep taking smaller investments till
+they actually give you a termsheet.  There's no practical difficulty.
+If the smaller investments are on convertible notes, they'll just
+convert into the series A round.  The series A investor won't like
+having all these other random investors as bedfellows, but if it
+bothers them so much they should get on with giving you a termsheet.
+Till they do, you don't know for sure they will, and the greedy
+algorithm tells you what to do.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f23n"><font color=#999999>23</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Don't sell more than 25% in phase 2.</b><br /><br />If you do well, you will probably raise a series A round eventually.
+I say probably because things are changing with series A rounds.
+Startups may start to skip them.  But only one company we've funded
+has so far, so tentatively assume the path to huge passes through
+an A round.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f24n"><font color=#999999>24</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Which means you should avoid doing things in earlier rounds that
+will mess up raising an A round.  For example, if you've sold more
+than about 40% of your company total, it starts to get harder to
+raise an A round, because VCs worry there will not be enough stock
+left to keep the founders motivated.<br /><br />Our rule of thumb is not to sell more than 25% in phase 2, on top
+of whatever you sold in phase 1, which should be less than 15%.  If
+you're raising money on uncapped notes, you'll have to guess what
+the eventual equity round valuation might be.  Guess conservatively.<br /><br />(Since the goal of this rule is to avoid messing up the series A,
+there's obviously an exception if you end up raising a series A in
+phase 2, as a handful of startups do.)<br /><br />
+<b>Have one person handle fundraising.</b><br /><br />If you have multiple founders, pick one to handle fundraising so
+the other(s) can keep working on the company.  And since the danger
+of fundraising is not the time taken up by the actual meetings but
+that it becomes the top idea in your mind, the founder who handles
+fundraising should make a conscious effort to insulate the other
+founder(s) from the details of the process.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f25n"><font color=#999999>25</font></a>]</font><br /><br />(If the founders mistrust one another, this could cause some friction.
+But if the founders mistrust one another, you have worse problems
+to worry about than how to organize fundraising.)<br /><br />The founder who handles fundraising should be the CEO, who should
+in turn be the most formidable of the founders.  Even if the CEO
+is a programmer and another founder is a salesperson?  Yes.  If you
+happen to be that type of founding team, you're effectively a single
+founder when it comes to fundraising.<br /><br />It's ok to bring all the founders to meet an investor who will
+invest a lot, and who needs this meeting as the final step before
+deciding.  But wait till that point.  Introducing an investor to
+your cofounder(s) should be like introducing a girl/boyfriend to
+your parents &mdash; something you do only when things reach a certain
+stage of seriousness.<br /><br />Even if there are still one or more founders focusing on the company
+during fundraising, growth will slow.  But try to get as much growth
+as you can, because fundraising is a segment of time, not a point,
+and what happens to the company during that time affects the outcome.
+If your numbers grow significantly between two investor meetings,
+investors will be hot to close, and if your numbers are flat or
+down they'll start to get cold feet.<br /><br />
+<b>You'll need an executive summary and (maybe) a deck.</b><br /><br />Traditionally phase 2 fundraising consists of presenting a slide
+deck in person to investors.  Sequoia describes what such a deck
+should <a href="http://www.sequoiacap.com/ideas">contain</a>, and
+since they're the customer you can take their word for it.<br /><br />I say "traditionally" because I'm ambivalent about decks, and (though
+perhaps this is wishful thinking) they seem to be on the way out.
+A lot of the most successful startups we fund never make decks in
+phase 2.  They just talk to investors and explain what they plan
+to do.  Fundraising usually takes off fast for the startups that
+are most successful at it, and they're thus able to excuse themselves
+by saying that they haven't had time to make a deck.<br /><br />You'll also want an executive summary, which should be no more than
+a page long and describe in the most matter of fact language what
+you plan to do, why it's a good idea, and what progress you've made
+so far.  The point of the summary is to remind the investor (who
+may have met many startups that day) what you talked about.<br /><br />Assume that if you give someone a copy of your deck or executive
+summary, it will be passed on to whoever you'd least like to have
+it.  But don't refuse on that account to give copies to investors
+you meet.  You just have to treat such leaks as a cost of doing
+business.  In practice it's not that high a cost.  Though founders
+are rightly indignant when their plans get leaked to competitors,
+I can't think of a startup whose outcome has been affected by it.<br /><br />Sometimes an investor will ask you to send them your deck and/or
+executive summary before they decide whether to meet with you.  I
+wouldn't do that.  It's a sign they're not really interested.<br /><br />
+<b>Stop fundraising when it stops working.</b><br /><br />When do you stop fundraising?  Ideally when you've raised enough.
+But what if you haven't raised as much as you'd like?  When do you
+give up?<br /><br />It's hard to give general advice about this, because there have
+been cases of startups that kept trying to raise money even when
+it seemed hopeless, and miraculously succeeded. But what I usually
+tell founders is to stop fundraising when you start to get a lot
+of air in the straw.  When you're drinking through a straw, you can
+tell when you get to the end of the liquid because you start to get
+a lot of air in the straw.  When your fundraising options run out,
+they usually run out in the same way.  Don't keep sucking on the
+straw if you're just getting air.  It's not going to get better.<br /><br />
+<b>Don't get addicted to fundraising.</b><br /><br />Fundraising is a chore for most founders, but some find it more
+interesting than working on their startup.  The work at an early
+stage startup often consists of unglamorous <a
+href="schlep.html">schleps</a>.  Whereas fundraising, when it's
+going well, can be quite the opposite.  Instead of sitting in your
+grubby apartment listening to users complain about bugs in your
+software, you're being offered millions of dollars by famous investors
+over lunch at a nice restaurant.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f26n"><font color=#999999>26</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The danger of fundraising is particularly acute for people who are
+good at it.  It's always fun to work on something you're good at.
+If you're one of these people, beware.  Fundraising is not what
+will make your company successful.  Listening to users complain
+about bugs in your software is what will make you successful.  And
+the big danger of getting addicted to fundraising is not merely
+that you'll spend too long on it or raise too much money.  It's
+that you'll start to think of yourself as being already successful,
+and lose your taste for the schleps you need to undertake to actually
+be successful.  Startups can be destroyed by this.<br /><br />When I see a startup with young founders that is fabulously successful
+at fundraising, I mentally decrease my estimate of the probability
+that they'll succeed.  The press may be writing about them as if
+they'd been anointed as the next Google, but I'm thinking "this is
+going to end badly."<br /><br />
+<b>Don't raise too much.</b><br /><br />Though only a handful of startups have to worry about this, it is
+possible to raise too much.  The dangers of raising too much are
+subtle but insidious.  One is that it will set impossibly high
+expectations.  If you raise an excessive amount of money, it will
+be at a high valuation, and the danger of raising money at too high
+a valuation is that you won't be able to increase it sufficiently
+the next time you raise money.<br /><br />A company's valuation is expected to rise each time it raises money.
+If not it's a sign of a company in trouble, which makes you
+unattractive to investors.  So if you raise money in phase 2 at a
+post-money valuation of $30 million, the pre-money valuation of
+your next round, if you want to raise one, is going to have to be
+at least $50 million.  And you have to be doing really, really well
+to raise money at $50 million.<br /><br />It's very dangerous to let the competitiveness of your current round
+set the performance threshold you have to meet to raise your next
+one, because the two are only loosely coupled.<br /><br />But the money itself may be more dangerous than the valuation.  The
+more you raise, the more you spend, and spending a lot of money can
+be disastrous for an early stage startup.  Spending a lot makes it
+harder to become profitable, and perhaps even worse, it makes you
+more rigid, because the main way to spend money is people, and the
+more people you have, the harder it is to change directions.  So
+if you do raise a huge amount of money, don't spend it.  (You will
+find that advice almost impossible to follow, so hot will be the
+money burning a hole in your pocket, but I feel obliged at least
+to try.)<br /><br />
+<b>Be nice.</b><br /><br />Startups raising money occasionally alienate investors by seeming
+arrogant.  Sometimes because they are arrogant, and sometimes because
+they're noobs clumsily attempting to mimic the toughness they've
+observed in experienced founders.<br /><br />It's a mistake to behave arrogantly to investors.  While there are
+certain situations in which certain investors like certain kinds
+of arrogance, investors vary greatly in this respect, and a flick
+of the whip that will bring one to heel will make another roar with
+indignation.  The only safe strategy is never to seem arrogant at
+all.<br /><br />That will require some diplomacy if you follow the advice I've given
+here, because the advice I've given is essentially how to play
+hardball back.  When you refuse to meet an investor because you're
+not in fundraising mode, or slow down your interactions with an
+investor who moves too slow, or treat a contingent offer as the no
+it actually is and then, by accepting offers greedily, end up leaving
+that investor out, you're going to be doing things investors don't
+like.  So you must cushion the blow with soft words.  At YC we tell
+startups they can blame us.  And now that I've written this, everyone
+else can blame me if they want.  That plus the inexperience card
+should work in most situations: sorry, we think you're great, but
+PG said startups shouldn't ___, and since we're new to fundraising,
+we feel like we have to play it safe.<br /><br />The danger of behaving arrogantly is greatest when you're doing
+well.  When everyone wants you, it's hard not to let it go to your
+head.  Especially if till recently no one wanted you.  But restrain
+yourself.  The startup world is a small place, and startups have
+lots of ups and downs.  This is a domain where it's more true than
+usual that pride goeth before a fall.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f27n"><font color=#999999>27</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Be nice when investors reject you as well.  The best investors are
+not wedded to their initial opinion of you.  If they reject you in
+phase 2 and you end up doing well, they'll often invest in phase
+3.  In fact investors who reject you are some of your warmest leads
+for future fundraising.  Any investor who spent significant time
+deciding probably came close to saying yes.  Often you have some
+internal champion who only needs a little more evidence to convince
+the skeptics.  So it's wise not merely to be nice to investors who
+reject you, but (unless they behaved badly) to treat it as the
+beginning of a relationship.<br /><br />
+<b>The bar will be higher next time.</b><br /><br />Assume the money you raise in phase 2 will be the last you ever
+raise.  You must make it to profitability on this money if you can.<br /><br />Over the past several years, the investment community has evolved
+from a strategy of anointing a small number of winners early and
+then supporting them for years to a strategy of spraying money at
+early stage startups and then ruthlessly culling them at the next
+stage.  This is probably the optimal strategy for investors.  It's
+too hard to pick winners early on.  Better to let the market do it
+for you.  But it often comes as a surprise to startups how much
+harder it is to raise money in phase 3.<br /><br />When your company is only a couple months old, all it has to be is
+a promising experiment that's worth funding to see how it turns
+out.  The next time you raise money, the experiment has to have
+worked.  You have to be on a trajectory that leads to going public.
+And while there are some ideas where the proof that the experiment
+worked might consist of e.g. query response times, usually the proof
+is profitability.  Usually phase 3 fundraising has to be type A
+fundraising.<br /><br />In practice there are two ways startups hose themselves between
+phases 2 and 3.  Some are just too slow to become profitable.  They
+raise enough money to last for two years.  There doesn't seem any
+particular urgency to be profitable.  So they don't make any effort
+to make money for a year.  But by that time, not making money has
+become habitual.  When they finally decide to try, they find they
+can't.<br /><br />The other way companies hose themselves is by letting their expenses
+grow too fast.  Which almost always means hiring too many people.
+You usually shouldn't go out and hire 8 people as soon as you raise
+money at phase 2.  Usually you want to wait till you have growth
+(and thus usually revenues) to justify them.  A lot of VCs will
+encourage you to hire aggressively.  VCs generally tell you to spend
+too much, partly because as money people they err on the side of
+solving problems by spending money, and partly because they want
+you to sell them more of your company in subsequent rounds.  Don't
+listen to them.<br /><br />
+<b>Don't make things complicated.</b><br /><br />I realize it may seem odd to sum up this huge treatise by saying
+that my overall advice is not to make fundraising too complicated,
+but if you go back and look at this list you'll see it's basically
+a simple recipe with a lot of implications and edge cases.  Avoid
+investors till you decide to raise money, and then when you do,
+talk to them all in parallel, prioritized by expected value, and
+accept offers greedily.  That's fundraising in one sentence.  Don't
+introduce complicated optimizations, and don't let investors introduce
+complications either.<br /><br />Fundraising is not what will make you successful.  It's just a means
+to an end.  Your primary goal should be to get it over with and get
+back to what will make you successful &mdash; making things and talking
+to users &mdash; and the path I've described will for most startups
+be the surest way to that destination.<br /><br />Be good, take care of yourselves, and <i>don't leave the path</i>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+The worst explosions happen when unpromising-seeming startups
+encounter mediocre investors.  Good investors don't lead startups
+on; their reputations are too valuable.  And startups that seem
+promising can usually get enough money from good investors that
+they don't have to talk to mediocre ones.  It is the unpromising-seeming
+startups that have to resort to raising money from mediocre investors.
+And it's particularly damaging when these investors flake, because
+unpromising-seeming startups are usually more desperate for money.<br /><br />(Not all unpromising-seeming startups do badly.  Some are merely
+ugly ducklings in the sense that they violate current startup
+fashions.)<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+One YC founder told me:
+<blockquote>
+  I think in general we've done ok at fundraising, but I managed
+  to screw up twice at the exact same thing &mdash; trying to focus
+  on building the company and fundraising at the same time.
+</blockquote>
+[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+There is one subtle danger you have to watch out for here, which
+I warn about later: beware of getting too high a valuation from an
+eager investor, lest that set an impossibly high target when raising
+additional money.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+If they really need a meeting, then they're not ready to invest,
+regardless of what they say. They're still deciding, which means
+you're being asked to come in and convince them. Which is fundraising.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+Associates at VC firms regularly cold email startups.  Naive
+founders think "Wow, a VC is interested in us!"  But an associate
+is not a VC.  They have no decision-making power.  And while they
+may introduce startups they like to partners at their firm, the
+partners discriminate against deals that come to them this way.   I
+don't know of a single VC investment that began with an associate
+cold-emailing a startup.  If you want to approach a specific firm,
+get an intro to a partner from someone they respect.<br /><br />It's ok to talk to an associate if you get an intro to a VC firm
+or they see you at a Demo Day and they begin by having an associate
+vet you.  That's not a promising lead and should therefore get low
+priority, but it's not as completely worthless as a cold email.<br /><br />Because the title "associate" has gotten a bad reputation, a few
+VC firms have started to give their associates the title "partner,"
+which can make things very confusing.  If you're a YC startup you
+can ask us who's who; otherwise you may have to do some research
+online.  There may be a special title for actual partners.  If
+someone speaks for the firm in the press or a blog on the firm's
+site, they're probably a real partner.  If they're on boards of
+directors they're probably a real partner.<br /><br />There are titles between "associate" and "partner," including
+"principal" and "venture partner."  The meanings of these titles
+vary too much to generalize.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+For similar reasons, avoid casual conversations with potential
+acquirers.  They can lead to distractions even more dangerous than
+fundraising.  Don't even take a meeting with a potential acquirer
+unless you want to sell your company right now.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+Joshua Reeves specifically suggests asking each investor to
+intro you to two more investors.<br /><br />Don't ask investors who say no for introductions to other investors.
+That will in many cases be an anti-recommendation.<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+This is not always as deliberate as its sounds.  A lot of the
+delays and disconnects between founders and investors are induced
+by the customs of the venture business, which have evolved the way
+they have because they suit investors' interests.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+One YC founder who read a draft of this essay wrote:
+<blockquote>
+  This is the most important section. I think it might bear stating
+  even more clearly. "Investors will deliberately affect more
+  interest than they have to preserve optionality. If an investor
+  seems very interested in you, they still probably won't invest.
+  The solution for this is to assume the worst &mdash; that an investor
+  is just feigning interest &mdash; until you get a definite commitment."
+</blockquote>
+[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
+Though you should probably pack investor meetings as closely
+as you can, Jeff Byun mentions one reason not to: if you pack
+investor meetings too closely, you'll have less time for your pitch
+to evolve.<br /><br />Some founders deliberately schedule a handful of lame investors
+first, to get the bugs out of their pitch.<br /><br />[<a name="f11n"><font color=#000000>11</font></a>]
+There is not an efficient market in this respect.  Some of the
+most useless investors are also the highest maintenance.<br /><br />[<a name="f12n"><font color=#000000>12</font></a>]
+Incidentally, this paragraph is sales 101.  If you want to see
+it in action, go talk to a car dealer.<br /><br />[<a name="f13n"><font color=#000000>13</font></a>]
+I know one very smooth founder who used to end investor meetings
+with "So, can I count you in?" delivered as if it were "Can you
+pass the salt?"   Unless you're very smooth (if you're not sure...),
+do not do this yourself.  There is nothing more unconvincing, for
+an investor, than a nerdy founder trying to deliver the lines meant
+for a smooth one.<br /><br />Investors are fine with funding nerds.  So if you're a nerd, just
+try to be a good nerd, rather than doing a bad imitation of a smooth
+salesman.<br /><br />[<a name="f14n"><font color=#000000>14</font></a>]
+Ian Hogarth suggests a good way to tell how serious potential
+investors are: the resources they expend on you after the first
+meeting.  An investor who's seriously interested will already be
+working to help you even before they've committed.<br /><br />[<a name="f15n"><font color=#000000>15</font></a>]
+In principle you might have to think about so-called "signalling
+risk."  If a prestigious VC makes a small seed investment in you,
+what if they don't want to invest the next time you raise money?
+Other investors might assume that the VC knows you well, since
+they're an existing investor, and if they don't want to invest in
+your next round, that must mean you suck.  The reason I say "in
+principle" is that in practice signalling hasn't been much of a
+problem so far.  It rarely arises, and in the few cases where it
+does, the startup in question usually is doing badly and is doomed
+anyway.<br /><br />If you have the luxury of choosing among seed investors, you can
+play it safe by excluding VC firms.  But it isn't critical to.<br /><br />[<a name="f16n"><font color=#000000>16</font></a>]
+Sometimes a competitor will deliberately threaten you with a
+lawsuit just as you start fundraising, because they know you'll
+have to disclose the threat to potential investors and they hope
+this will make it harder for you to raise money.  If this happens
+it will probably frighten you more than investors.  Experienced
+investors know about this trick, and know the actual lawsuits rarely
+happen. So if you're attacked in this way, be forthright with
+investors.  They'll be more alarmed if you seem evasive than if you
+tell them everything.<br /><br />[<a name="f17n"><font color=#000000>17</font></a>]
+A related trick is to claim that they'll only invest contingently
+on other investors doing so because otherwise you'd be "undercapitalized."
+This is almost always bullshit.  They can't estimate your minimum
+capital needs that precisely.<br /><br />[<a name="f18n"><font color=#000000>18</font></a>]
+You won't hire all those 20 people at once, and you'll probably
+have some revenues before 18 months are out.  But those too are
+acceptable or at least accepted additions to the margin for error.<br /><br />[<a name="f19n"><font color=#000000>19</font></a>]
+Type A fundraising is so much better that it might even be
+worth doing something different if it gets you there sooner.  One
+YC founder told me that if he were a first-time founder again he'd
+"leave ideas that are up-front capital intensive to founders with
+established reputations."<br /><br />[<a name="f20n"><font color=#000000>20</font></a>]
+I don't know whether this happens because they're innumerate,
+or because they believe they have zero ability to predict startup
+outcomes (in which case this behavior at least wouldn't be irrational).
+In either case the implications are similar.<br /><br />[<a name="f21n"><font color=#000000>21</font></a>]
+If you're a YC startup and you have an investor who for some
+reason insists that you decide the price, any YC partner can estimate
+a market price for you.<br /><br />[<a name="f22n"><font color=#000000>22</font></a>]
+You should respond in kind when investors behave upstandingly
+too.  When an investor makes you a clean offer with no deadline,
+you have a moral obligation to respond promptly.<br /><br />[<a name="f23n"><font color=#000000>23</font></a>]
+Tell the investors talking to you about an A round about the
+smaller investments you raise as you raise them.  You owe them such
+updates on your cap table, and this is also a good way to pressure
+them to act.  They won't like you raising other money and may
+pressure you to stop, but they can't legitimately ask you to commit
+to them till they also commit to you.  If they want you to stop
+raising money, the way to do it is to give you a series A termsheet
+with a no-shop clause.<br /><br />You can relent a little if the potential series A investor has a
+great reputation and they're clearly working fast to get you a
+termsheet, particularly if a third party like YC is involved to
+ensure there are no misunderstandings.  But be careful.<br /><br />[<a name="f24n"><font color=#000000>24</font></a>]
+The company is Weebly, which made it to profitability on a
+seed investment of $650k.  They did try to raise a series A in the
+fall of 2008 but (no doubt partly because it was the fall of 2008)
+the terms they were offered were so bad that they decided to skip
+raising an A round.<br /><br />[<a name="f25n"><font color=#000000>25</font></a>]
+Another advantage of having one founder take fundraising
+meetings is that you never have to negotiate in real time, which
+is something inexperienced founders should avoid.  One YC founder
+told me:
+<blockquote>
+  Investors are professional negotiators and can negotiate on the
+  spot very easily.  If only one founder is in the room, you can
+  say "I need to circle back with my co-founder" before making any
+  commitments. I used to do this all the time.
+</blockquote>
+[<a name="f26n"><font color=#000000>26</font></a>]
+You'll be lucky if fundraising feels pleasant enough to become
+addictive.  More often you have to worry about the other
+extreme &mdash; becoming demoralized when investors reject you.  As
+one (very successful) YC founder wrote after reading a draft of
+this:
+<blockquote>
+  It's hard to mentally deal with the sheer scale of rejection in
+  fundraising and if you are not in the right mindset you will fail.
+  Users may love you but these supposedly smart investors may not
+  understand you at all. At this point for me, rejection still
+  rankles but I've come to accept that investors are just not super
+  thoughtful for the most part and you need to play the game according
+  to certain somewhat depressing rules (many of which you are
+  listing) in order to win.
+</blockquote>
+[<a name="f27n"><font color=#000000>27</font></a>]
+The actual sentence in the King James Bible is "Pride goeth
+before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."<br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Slava Akhmechet, Sam Altman, Nate Blecharczyk,
+Adora Cheung, Bill Clerico, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Parker
+Conrad, Ron Conway, Travis Deyle, Jason Freedman, Joe Gebbia, Mattan
+Griffel, Kevin Hale, Jacob Heller, Ian Hogarth, Justin Kan, Professor
+Moriarty, Nikhil Nirmel, David Petersen, Geoff Ralston, Joshua
+Reeves, Yuri Sagalov, Emmett Shear, Rajat Suri, Garry Tan, and Nick
+Tomarello for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://alef-null.blogspot.ru/2014/03/blog-post_26.html">Russian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/future.html

@@ -0,0 +1,412 @@
+<html><head><title>The Future of Startup Funding </title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc119><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc119 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-future-of-startup-funding-2.gif" width="245" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="The Future of Startup Funding " /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+August 2010<br /><br />Two years ago I
+<a
+href="http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html#next">wrote</a> about what I called "<xa
+href="http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html#next">a huge, unexploited
+opportunity in startup funding</a>:" the growing disconnect between
+VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest large
+amounts, and a large class of startups that need less than they
+used to.  Increasingly, startups want a couple hundred thousand
+dollars, not a couple million. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The opportunity is a lot less unexploited now.  Investors have
+poured into this territory from both directions.  VCs are much more
+likely to make angel-sized investments than they were a year ago.
+And meanwhile the past year has seen a dramatic increase in a new
+type of investor: the super-angel, who operates like an angel, but
+using other people's money, like a VC.<br /><br />Though a lot of investors are entering this territory, there is
+still room for more.  The distribution of investors should mirror
+the distribution of startups, which has the usual power law dropoff.
+So there should be a lot more people investing tens or hundreds of
+thousands than millions. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In fact, it may be good for angels that there are more people doing
+angel-sized deals, because if angel rounds become more legitimate,
+then startups may start to opt for angel rounds even when they
+could, if they wanted, raise series A rounds from VCs.  One reason
+startups prefer series A rounds is that they're more prestigious.
+But if angel investors become more active and better known, they'll
+increasingly be able to compete with VCs in brand.<br /><br />Of course, prestige isn't the main reason to prefer a series A
+round.  A startup will probably get more attention from investors
+in a series A round than an angel round.  So if a startup is choosing
+between an angel round and an A round from a good VC fund, I usually
+advise them to take the A round. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />But while series A rounds aren't going away, I think VCs should be
+more worried about super-angels than vice versa.  Despite their
+name, the super-angels are really mini VC funds, and they clearly
+have existing VCs in their sights.<br /><br />They would seem to have history on their side.  
+The pattern here seems the same
+one we see when startups and established companies enter a new
+market.  Online video becomes possible, and YouTube plunges right
+in, while existing media companies embrace it only half-willingly,
+driven more by fear than hope, and aiming more to protect their
+turf than to do great things for users.  Ditto for PayPal.  This
+pattern is repeated over and over, and it's usually the invaders
+who win. In this case the super-angels are the invaders.  Angel
+rounds are their whole business, as online video was for YouTube.
+Whereas VCs who make angel investments mostly do it as a way to
+generate deal flow for series A rounds.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />On the other hand, startup investing is a very strange business.
+Nearly all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners.  If
+the super-angels merely fail to invest in (and to some extent
+produce) the big winners, they'll be out of business, even if they
+invest in all the others.<br /><br /><b>VCs</b><br /><br />Why don't VCs start doing smaller series A rounds?  The sticking
+point is board seats.  In a traditional series A round, the partner
+whose deal it is takes a seat on the startup's board.  If we assume
+the average startup runs for 6 years and a partner can bear to be
+on 12 boards at once, then a VC fund can do 2 series A deals per
+partner per year.<br /><br />It has always seemed to me the solution is to take fewer board
+seats.  You don't have to be on the board to help a startup.  Maybe
+VCs feel they need the power that comes with board membership to
+ensure their money isn't wasted.  But have they tested that theory?
+Unless they've tried not taking board seats and found their returns
+are lower, they're not bracketing the problem.<br /><br />I'm not saying VCs don't help startups.  The good ones help them a
+lot.  What I'm saying is that the kind of help that matters, you
+may not have to be a board member to give.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#999999>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />How will this all play out?  Some VCs will probably adapt, by doing
+more, smaller deals.  I wouldn't be surprised if by streamlining
+their selection process and taking fewer board seats, VC funds could
+do 2 to 3 times as many series A rounds with no loss of quality.<br /><br />But other VCs will make no more than superficial changes.  VCs are
+conservative, and the threat to them isn't mortal.  The VC funds
+that don't adapt won't be violently displaced.  They'll edge gradually
+into a different business without realizing it.  They'll still do
+what they will call series A rounds, but these will increasingly
+be de facto series B rounds.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#999999>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In such rounds they won't get the 25 to 40% of the company they do
+now.  You don't give up as much of the company in later rounds
+unless something is seriously wrong.  Since the VCs who don't adapt
+will be investing later, their returns from winners may be smaller.
+But investing later should also mean they have fewer losers.  So
+their ratio of risk to return may be the same or even better.
+They'll just have become a different, more conservative, type of
+investment.<br /><br /><b>Angels</b><br /><br />In the big angel rounds that increasingly compete with series A
+rounds, the investors won't take as much equity as VCs do now.  And
+VCs who try to compete with angels by doing more, smaller deals
+will probably find they have to take less equity to do it. Which
+is good news for founders: they'll get to keep more of the company.<br /><br />The deal terms of angel rounds will become less restrictive
+too&mdash;not just less restrictive than series A terms, but less
+restrictive than angel terms have traditionally been.<br /><br />In the future, angel rounds will less often be for specific amounts
+or have a lead investor.  In the old days, the standard m.o. for
+startups was to find one angel to act as the lead investor.  You'd
+negotiate a round size and valuation with the lead, who'd supply
+some but not all of the money.  Then the startup and the lead would
+cooperate to find the rest.<br /><br />The future of angel rounds looks more like this: instead of a fixed
+round size, startups will do a rolling close, where they take money
+from investors one at a time till they feel they have enough.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#999999>7</font></a>]</font>
+And though there's going to be one investor who gives them the first
+check, and his or her help in recruiting other investors will
+certainly be welcome, this initial investor will no longer be the
+lead in the old sense of managing the round.  The startup will now
+do that themselves.<br /><br />There will continue to be lead investors in the sense of investors
+who take the lead in <i>advising</i> a startup.  They may also make
+the biggest investment.  But they won't always have to be the one
+terms are negotiated with, or be the first money in, as they have
+in the past.  Standardized paperwork will do away with the need to
+negotiate anything except the valuation, and that will get easier
+too.<br /><br />If multiple investors have to share a valuation, it will be whatever
+the startup can get from the first one to write a check, limited
+by their guess at whether this will make later investors balk.  But
+there may not have to be just one valuation.  Startups are increasingly
+raising money on convertible notes, and convertible notes have not
+valuations but at most valuation <i>caps</i>: caps on what the
+effective valuation will be when the debt converts to equity (in a
+later round, or upon acquisition if that happens first).  That's
+an important difference because it means a startup could do multiple
+notes at once with different caps.  This is now starting to happen,
+and I predict it will become more common.<br /><br /><b>Sheep</b><br /><br />The reason things are moving this way is that the old way sucked
+for startups.  Leads could (and did) use a fixed size round as a
+legitimate-seeming way of saying what all founders hate to hear:
+I'll invest if other people will.  Most investors, unable to judge
+startups for themselves, rely instead on the opinions of other
+investors.  If everyone wants in, they want in too; if not, not.
+Founders hate this because it's a recipe for deadlock, and delay
+is the thing a startup can least afford.  Most investors know this
+m.o. is lame, and few say openly that they're doing it.  But the
+craftier ones achieve the same result by offering to lead rounds
+of fixed size and supplying only part of the money.  If the startup
+can't raise the rest, the lead is out too.  How could they go ahead
+with the deal?  The startup would be underfunded!<br /><br />In the future, investors will increasingly be unable to offer
+investment subject to contingencies like other people investing.
+Or rather, investors who do that will get last place in line.
+Startups will go to them only to fill up rounds that are mostly
+subscribed.  And since hot startups tend to have rounds that are
+oversubscribed, being last in line means they'll probably miss the
+hot deals.  Hot deals and successful startups are not identical,
+but there is a significant correlation. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#999999>8</font></a>]</font>
+So investors who won't invest unilaterally will have lower returns.<br /><br />Investors will probably find they do better when deprived of this
+crutch anyway.   Chasing hot deals doesn't make investors choose
+better; it just makes them feel better about their choices.  I've
+seen feeding frenzies both form and fall apart many times, and as
+far as I can tell they're mostly random. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#999999>9</font></a>]</font>
+If investors can
+no longer rely on their herd instincts, they'll have to think more
+about each startup before investing.  They may be surprised how
+well this works.<br /><br />Deadlock wasn't the only disadvantage of letting a lead investor
+manage an angel round.  The investors would not infrequently collude
+to push down the valuation.  And rounds took too long to close,
+because however motivated the lead was to get the round closed, he
+was not a tenth as motivated as the startup.<br /><br />Increasingly, startups are taking charge of their own angel rounds.
+Only a few do so far, but I think we can already declare the old
+way dead, because those few are the best startups.  They're the
+ones in a position to tell investors how the round is going to work.
+And if the startups you want to invest in do things a certain way,
+what difference does it make what the others do?<br /><br /><b>Traction</b><br /><br />In fact, it may be slightly misleading to say that angel rounds
+will increasingly take the place of series A rounds.  What's really
+happening is that startup-controlled rounds are taking the place
+of investor-controlled rounds.<br /><br />This is an instance of a very important meta-trend, one that Y
+Combinator itself has been based on from the beginning: founders
+are becoming increasingly powerful relative to investors.  So if
+you want to predict what the future of venture funding will be like,
+just ask: how would founders like it to be?  One by one, all the
+things founders dislike about raising money are going to get
+eliminated. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#999999>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Using that heuristic, I'll predict a couple more things.  One is
+that investors will increasingly be unable to wait for startups to
+have "traction" before they put in significant money.  It's hard
+to predict in advance which startups will succeed.  So most investors
+prefer, if they can, to wait till the startup is already succeeding,
+then jump in quickly with an offer.  Startups hate this as well,
+partly because it tends to create deadlock, and partly because it
+seems kind of slimy.  If you're a promising startup but don't yet
+have significant growth, all the investors are your friends in
+words, but few are in actions.  They all say they love you, but
+they all wait to invest. Then when you start to see growth, they
+claim they were your friend all along, and are aghast at the thought
+you'd be so disloyal as to leave them out of your round.  If founders
+become more powerful, they'll be able to make investors give them
+more money upfront.<br /><br />(The worst variant of this behavior is the tranched deal, where the
+investor makes a small initial investment, with more to follow if
+the startup does well.  In effect, this structure gives the investor
+a free option on the next round, which they'll only take if it's
+worse for the startup than they could get in the open market.
+Tranched deals are an abuse.  They're increasingly rare, and they're
+going to get rarer.) 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f11n"><font color=#999999>11</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Investors don't like trying to predict which startups will succeed,
+but increasingly they'll have to.  Though the way that happens won't
+necessarily be that the behavior of existing investors will change;
+it may instead be that they'll be replaced by other investors with
+different behavior&mdash;that investors who understand startups
+well enough to take on the hard problem of predicting their trajectory
+will tend to displace suits whose skills lie more in raising money
+from LPs.<br /><br /><b>Speed</b><br /><br />The other thing founders hate most about fundraising is how long
+it takes.  So as founders become more powerful, rounds should start
+to close faster.<br /><br />Fundraising is still terribly distracting for startups. If you're
+a founder in the middle of raising a round, the round is the <a
+href="top.html">top idea in your mind</a>, which means working on the
+company isn't.  If a round takes 2 months to close, which is
+reasonably fast by present standards, that means 2 months during
+which the company is basically treading water.  That's the worst
+thing a startup could do.<br /><br />So if investors want to get the best deals, the way to do it will
+be to close faster.   Investors don't need weeks to make up their
+minds anyway.  We decide based on about 10 minutes of reading an
+application plus 10 minutes of in person interview, and we only
+regret about 10% of our decisions.  If we can decide in 20 minutes,
+surely the next round of investors can decide in a couple days.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f12n"><font color=#999999>12</font></a>]</font><br /><br />There are a lot of institutionalized delays in startup funding: the
+multi-week mating dance with investors; the distinction between
+termsheets and deals; the fact that each series A has enormously
+elaborate, custom paperwork.  Both founders and investors tend to
+take these for granted.  It's the way things have always been.  But
+ultimately the reason these delays exist is that they're to the
+advantage of investors.  More time gives investors more information
+about a startup's trajectory, and it also tends to make startups
+more pliable in negotiations, since they're usually short of money.<br /><br />These conventions weren't designed to drag out the funding process,
+but that's why they're allowed to persist.  Slowness is to the
+advantage of investors, who have in the past been the ones with the
+most power.  But there is no need for rounds to take months or even
+weeks to close, and once founders realize that, it's going to stop.
+Not just in angel rounds, but in series A rounds too.  The future
+is simple deals with standard terms, done quickly.<br /><br />One minor abuse that will get corrected in the process is option
+pools.  In a traditional series A round, before the VCs invest they
+make the company set aside a block of stock for future hires&mdash;usually
+between 10 and 30% of the company.  The point is to ensure this
+dilution is borne by the existing shareholders.  The practice isn't
+dishonest; founders know what's going on.  But it makes deals
+unnecessarily complicated.  In effect the valuation is 2 numbers.
+There's no need to keep doing this.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f13n"><font color=#999999>13</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The final thing founders want is to be able to sell some of
+their own stock in later rounds.  This won't be a change, 
+because the practice is now quite common.  A lot of investors
+hated the idea, but the world hasn't exploded as a result,
+so it will happen more, and more openly.<br /><br /><b>Surprise</b><br /><br />I've talked here about a bunch of changes that will be forced on
+investors as founders become more powerful.  Now the good news:
+investors may actually make more money as a result.<br /><br />A couple days ago an interviewer 
+<a href="http://techcrunch.tv/watch?id=Q3amZtMTryrpiP80cbUtsV2ah92eZP2m">asked 
+me</a> if founders having more
+power would be better or worse for the world.  I was surprised,
+because I'd never considered that question.  Better or worse, it's
+happening.  But after a second's reflection, the answer seemed
+obvious.  Founders understand their companies better than investors,
+and it has to be better if the people with more knowledge have more
+power.<br /><br />One of the mistakes novice pilots make is overcontrolling the
+aircraft: applying corrections too vigorously, so the aircraft
+oscillates about the desired configuration instead of approaching
+it asymptotically.  It seems probable that investors have till now
+on average been overcontrolling their portfolio companies.  In a
+lot of startups, the biggest source of stress for the founders is
+not competitors but investors.  Certainly it was for us at Viaweb.
+And this is not a new phenomenon: investors were James Watt's biggest
+problem too.   If having less power prevents investors from
+overcontrolling startups, it should be better not just for founders
+but for investors too.<br /><br />Investors may end up with less stock per startup, but startups will
+probably do better with founders more in control, and there will
+almost certainly be more of them.  Investors all compete with one
+another for deals, but they aren't one another's main competitor.
+Our main competitor is employers.  And so far that competitor is
+crushing us.  Only a tiny fraction of people who could start a
+startup do.  Nearly all customers choose the competing product, a
+job.  Why?  Well, let's look at the product we're offering.  An
+unbiased review would go something like this:
+<blockquote>
+  Starting a startup gives you more freedom and the opportunity to
+  make a lot more money than a job, but it's also hard work and at
+  times very stressful.
+</blockquote>
+Much of the stress comes from dealing with investors.  If reforming
+the investment process removed that stress, we'd make our product
+much more attractive.  The kind of people who make good startup
+founders don't mind dealing with technical problems&mdash;they enjoy
+technical problems&mdash;but they hate the type of problems investors
+cause.<br /><br />Investors have no
+idea that when they maltreat one startup, they're preventing 10
+others from happening, but they are.  Indirectly, but they are.  So
+when investors stop trying to squeeze a little more out of their
+existing deals, they'll find they're net ahead, because so many
+more new deals appear.<br /><br />One of our axioms at Y Combinator is not to think of deal flow as
+a zero-sum game.  Our main focus is to encourage more startups to happen,
+not to win a larger share of the existing stream.  We've found this
+principle very useful, and we think as it spreads outward it will
+help later stage investors as well.<br /><br />"Make something people want"
+applies to us too.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+In this essay I'm talking mainly about software startups.
+These points don't apply to types of startups that are still expensive
+to start, e.g. in energy or biotech.<br /><br />Even the cheap kinds of startups will generally raise large amounts
+at some point, when they want to hire a lot of people.  What has
+changed is how much they can get done before that.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+It's not the distribution of good startups that has a power
+law dropoff, but the distribution of potentially good startups,
+which is to say, good deals.  There are lots of potential winners,
+from which a few actual winners emerge with superlinear certainty.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+As I was writing this, I asked some founders who'd taken
+series A rounds from top VC funds whether it was worth it, and they
+unanimously said yes.<br /><br />The quality of investor is more important than the type of round,
+though.  I'd take an angel round from good angels over a series A
+from a mediocre VC.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+Founders also worry that taking an angel investment from a
+VC means they'll look bad if the VC declines to participate in the
+next round.  The trend of VC angel investing is so new that it's
+hard to say how justified this worry is.<br /><br />Another danger, pointed out by Mitch Kapor, is that if VCs are only
+doing angel deals to generate series A deal flow, then their
+incentives aren't aligned with the founders'.  The founders want
+the valuation of the next round to be high, and the VCs want it to
+be low.  Again, hard to say yet how much of a problem this will be.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+Josh Kopelman pointed out that another way to be on fewer
+boards at once is to take board seats for shorter periods.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+Google was in this respect as so many others the pattern for
+the future.  It would be great for VCs if the similarity extended
+to returns.  That's probably too much to hope for, but the returns
+may be somewhat higher, as I explain later.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+Doing a rolling close doesn't mean the company is always
+raising money.  That would be a distraction.  The point of a rolling
+close is to make fundraising take less time, not more.  With a
+classic fixed sized round, you don't get any money till all the
+investors agree, and that often creates a situation where they all
+sit waiting for the others to act.  A rolling close usually prevents
+this.<br /><br /><!-- [<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+Jeff Clavier pointed out a tax disadvantage of convertible
+notes: they don't start the long term capital gains clock.  So
+perhaps the ultimate solution, after investors have been conditioned
+to do simpler deals with multiple caps by convertible notes, is
+eventually to do equity rounds that approach the same simplicity
+and flexibility.
+-->
+[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+There are two (non-exclusive) causes of hot deals: the quality
+of the company, and domino effects among investors.  The former is
+obviously a better predictor of success.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+Some of the randomness is concealed by the fact that investment
+is a self fulfilling prophecy.<br /><br />[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
+The shift in power to founders is exaggerated now because
+it's a seller's market.  On the next downtick it will seem like I
+overstated the case.  But on the next uptick after that, founders
+will seem more powerful than ever.<br /><br />[<a name="f11n"><font color=#000000>11</font></a>]
+More generally, it will become less common for the same
+investor to invest in successive rounds, except when exercising an
+option to maintain their percentage.  When the same investor invests
+in successive rounds, it often means the startup isn't getting
+market price.  They may not care; they may prefer to work with an
+investor they already know; but as the investment market becomes
+more efficient, it will become increasingly easy to get market price
+if they want it.  Which in turn means the investment community will
+tend to become more stratified.<br /><br />[<a name="f12n"><font color=#000000>12</font></a>]
+The two 10 minuteses have 3 weeks between them so founders
+can get cheap plane tickets, but except for that they could be
+adjacent.<br /><br />[<a name="f13n"><font color=#000000>13</font></a>]
+I'm not saying option pools themselves will go away.  They're
+an administrative convenience.  What will go away is investors
+requiring them.<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, John Bautista, Trevor Blackwell,
+Paul Buchheit, Jeff Clavier,
+Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Matt Cohler, Chris Dixon, Mitch Kapor,
+Josh Kopelman, Pete Koomen, Carolynn Levy, Jessica Livingston, Ariel
+Poler, Geoff Ralston, Naval Ravikant, Dan Siroker, Harj Taggar, and 
+Fred Wilson
+for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/genius.html

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+<html><head><title>The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
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+and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as
+well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.<br /><br />To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group
+of people, and I'm going to choose bus ticket collectors.  There
+are people who collect old bus tickets. Like many collectors, they
+have an obsessive interest in the minutiae of what they collect.
+They can keep track of distinctions between different types of bus
+tickets that would be hard for the rest of us to remember.  Because
+we don't care enough. What's the point of spending so much time
+thinking about old bus tickets?<br /><br />Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession:
+there is no point. A bus ticket collector's love is disinterested.
+They're not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, but
+for its own sake.<br /><br />When you look at the lives of people who've done great work, you
+see a consistent pattern. They often begin with a bus ticket
+collector's obsessive interest in something that would have seemed
+pointless to most of their contemporaries. One of the most striking
+features of Darwin's book about his voyage on the Beagle is the
+sheer depth of his interest in natural history. His curiosity seems
+infinite. Ditto for Ramanujan, sitting by the hour working out on
+his slate what happens to series.<br /><br />It's a mistake to think they were "laying the groundwork" for the
+discoveries they made later. There's too much intention in that
+metaphor. Like bus ticket collectors, they were doing it
+because they liked it.<br /><br />But there is a difference between Ramanujan and a bus ticket
+collector. Series matter, and bus tickets don't.<br /><br />If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might
+be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.<br /><br />Aren't I forgetting about the other two ingredients? Less than you
+might think. An obsessive interest in a topic is both a proxy for
+ability and a substitute for determination.  Unless you have
+sufficient mathematical aptitude, you won't find series interesting.
+And when you're obsessively interested in something, you don't need
+as much determination: you don't need to push yourself as hard when
+curiosity is pulling you.<br /><br />An obsessive interest will even bring you luck, to the extent
+anything can. Chance, as Pasteur said, favors the prepared mind,
+and if there's one thing an obsessed mind is, it's prepared.<br /><br />The disinterestedness of this kind of obsession is its most important
+feature. Not just because it's a filter for earnestness, but because
+it helps you discover new ideas.<br /><br />The paths that lead to new ideas tend to look unpromising. If they
+looked promising, other people would already have explored them.
+How do the people who do great work discover these paths that others
+overlook?  The popular story is that they simply have better vision:
+because they're so talented, they see paths that others miss.  But
+if you look at the way great discoveries are made, that's not what
+happens. Darwin didn't pay closer attention to individual species
+than other people because he saw that this would lead to great
+discoveries, and they didn't. He was just really, really interested
+in such things.<br /><br />Darwin couldn't turn it off. Neither could Ramanujan.  They didn't
+discover the hidden paths that they did because they seemed promising,
+but because they couldn't help it. That's what allowed them to
+follow paths that someone who was merely ambitious would have
+ignored.<br /><br />What rational person would decide that the way to write great novels
+was to begin by spending several years creating an imaginary elvish
+language, like Tolkien, or visiting every household in southwestern
+Britain, like Trollope? No one, including Tolkien and Trollope.<br /><br />The bus ticket theory is similar to Carlyle's famous definition of
+genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains. But there are two
+differences. The bus ticket theory makes it clear that the source
+of this infinite capacity for taking pains is not infinite diligence,
+as Carlyle seems to have meant, but the sort of infinite interest
+that collectors have. It also adds an important qualification: an
+infinite capacity for taking pains about something that matters.<br /><br />So what  matters? You can never be sure. It's precisely because no
+one can tell in advance which paths are promising that you can
+discover new ideas by working on what you're interested in.<br /><br />But there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether an
+obsession might be one that matters. For example, it's more promising
+if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something
+someone else creates. It's more promising if something you're
+interested in is difficult, especially if it's <a href="work.html"><u>more difficult for
+other people</u></a> than it is for you. And the obsessions of talented
+people are more likely to be promising. When talented people become
+interested in random things, they're not truly random.<br /><br />But you can never be sure. In fact, here's an interesting idea
+that's also rather alarming if it's true: it may be that to do great
+work, you also have to waste a lot of time.<br /><br />In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If that
+rule holds here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly great
+work is to be willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turn
+out to be every bit as unpromising as they seem.<br /><br />I'm not sure if this is true. On one hand, it seems surprisingly
+difficult to waste your time so long as you're working hard on
+something interesting. So much of what you do ends up being useful.
+But on the other hand, the rule about the relationship between risk
+and reward is so powerful that it seems to hold wherever risk occurs.
+<a href="disc.html"><u>Newton's</u></a> case, at least, suggests that the risk/reward rule holds
+here. He's famous for one particular obsession of his that turned
+out to be unprecedentedly fruitful: using math to describe the
+world. But he had two other obsessions, alchemy and theology, that
+seem to have been complete wastes of time. He ended up net ahead.
+His bet on what we now call physics paid off so well that it more
+than compensated for the other two. But were the other two necessary,
+in the sense that he had to take big risks to make such big
+discoveries? I don't know.<br /><br />Here's an even more alarming idea: might one make all bad bets?  It
+probably happens quite often. But we don't know how often, because
+these people don't become famous.<br /><br />It's not merely that the returns from following a path are hard to
+predict. They change dramatically over time. 1830 was a really good
+time to be obsessively interested in natural history. If Darwin had
+been born in 1709 instead of 1809, we might never have heard of
+him.<br /><br />What can one do in the face of such uncertainty?  One solution is
+to hedge your bets, which in this case means to follow the obviously
+promising paths instead of your own private obsessions. But as with
+any hedge, you're decreasing reward when you decrease risk.  If you
+forgo working on what you like in order to follow some more
+conventionally ambitious path, you might miss something wonderful
+that you'd otherwise have discovered. That too must happen all the
+time, perhaps even more often than the genius whose bets all fail.<br /><br />The other solution is to let yourself be interested in lots of
+different things. You don't decrease your upside if you switch
+between equally genuine interests based on which seems to be working
+so far. But there is a danger here too: if you work on too many
+different projects, you might not get deeply enough into any of
+them.<br /><br />One interesting thing about the bus ticket theory is that it may
+help explain why different types of people excel at different kinds
+of work. Interest is much more unevenly distributed than ability.
+If natural ability is all you need to do great work, and natural
+ability is evenly distributed, you have to invent elaborate theories
+to explain the skewed distributions we see among those who actually
+do great work in various fields. But it may be that much of the
+skew has a simpler explanation: different people are interested in
+different things.<br /><br />The bus ticket theory also explains why people are less likely to
+do great work after they have children. Here interest has to compete
+not just with external obstacles, but with another interest, and
+one that for most people is extremely powerful. It's harder to find
+time for work after you have kids, but that's the easy part. The
+real change is that you don't <xa href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-women-desire-work-outside-home.aspx">want</a> to.<br /><br />But the most exciting implication of the bus ticket theory is that
+it suggests ways to encourage great work. If the recipe for genius
+is simply natural ability plus hard work, all we can do is hope we
+have a lot of ability, and work as hard as we can. But if interest
+is a critical ingredient in genius, we may be able, by cultivating
+interest, to cultivate genius.<br /><br />For example, for the very ambitious, the bus ticket theory suggests
+that the way to do great work is to relax a little. Instead of
+gritting your teeth and diligently pursuing what all your peers
+agree is the most promising line of research, maybe you should try
+doing something just for fun. And if you're stuck, that may be the
+vector along which to break out.<br /><br />I've always liked <a href="hamming.html"><u>Hamming's</u></a> famous double-barrelled question: what
+are the most important problems in your field, and why aren't you
+working on one of them? It's a great way to shake yourself up. But
+it may be overfitting a bit. It might be at least as useful to ask
+yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that
+probably wouldn't be important but would be really interesting,
+what would it be?<br /><br />The bus ticket theory also suggests a way to avoid slowing down as
+you get older. Perhaps the reason people have fewer new ideas as
+they get older is not simply that they're losing their edge. It may
+also be because once you become established, you can no longer mess
+about with irresponsible side projects the way you could when you
+were young and no one cared what you did.<br /><br />The solution to that is obvious: remain irresponsible. It will be
+hard, though, because the apparently random projects you take up
+to stave off decline will read to outsiders as evidence of it.  And
+you yourself won't know for sure that they're wrong. But it will
+at least be more fun to work on what you want.<br /><br />It may even be that we can cultivate a habit of intellectual bus
+ticket collecting in kids. The usual plan in education is to start
+with a broad, shallow focus, then gradually become more specialized.
+But I've done the opposite with my kids. I know I can count on their
+school to handle the broad, shallow part, so I take them deep.<br /><br />When they get interested in something, however random, I encourage
+them to go preposterously, bus ticket collectorly, deep.  I don't
+do this because of the bus ticket theory. I do it because I want
+them to feel the joy of learning, and they're never going to feel
+that about something I'm making them learn. It has to be something
+they're interested in. I'm just following the path of least resistance;
+depth is a byproduct. But if in trying to show them the joy of
+learning I also end up training them to go deep, so much the better.<br /><br />Will it have any effect? I have no idea. But that uncertainty may
+be the most interesting point of all. There is so much more to learn
+about how to do great work. As old as human civilization feels,
+it's really still very young if we haven't nailed something so
+basic. It's exciting to think there are still discoveries to make
+about discovery. If that's the sort of thing you're interested in.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[1] There are other types of collecting that illustrate this point
+better than bus tickets, but they're also more popular. It seemed
+just as well to use an inferior example rather than offend more
+people by telling them their hobby doesn't matter.<br /><br />[2] I worried a little about using the word "disinterested," since
+some people mistakenly believe it means not interested. But anyone
+who expects to be a genius will have to know the meaning of such a
+basic word, so I figure they may as well start now.<br /><br />[3] Think how often genius must have been nipped in the bud by
+people being told, or telling themselves, to stop messing about and
+be responsible. Ramanujan's mother was a huge enabler. Imagine if
+she hadn't been. Imagine if his parents had made him go out and get
+a job instead of sitting around at home doing math.<br /><br />On the other hand, anyone quoting the preceding paragraph to justify
+not getting a job is probably mistaken.<br /><br />[4] 1709 Darwin is to time what the <a href="cities.html"><u>Milanese Leonardo</u></a> is to space.<br /><br />[5] "An infinite capacity for taking pains" is a paraphrase of what
+Carlyle wrote. What he wrote, in his <i>History of Frederick the Great</i>,
+was "... it is the fruit of 'genius' (which means transcendent
+capacity of taking trouble, first of all)...." Since the paraphrase
+seems the name of the idea at this point, I kept it.<br /><br />Carlyle's <i>History</i> was published in 1858. In 1785 H�rault de S�chelles
+quoted Buffon as saying "Le g�nie n'est qu'une plus grande aptitude
+� la patience." (Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience.)<br /><br />[6] Trollope was establishing the system of postal routes. He himself
+sensed the obsessiveness with which he pursued this goal.
+<blockquote>
+   It is amusing to watch how a passion will grow upon a man. During
+   those two years it was the ambition of my life to cover the
+   country with rural letter-carriers.
+</blockquote>
+Even Newton occasionally sensed the degree of his obsessiveness.
+After computing pi to 15 digits, he wrote in a letter to a friend:
+<blockquote>
+   I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these
+   computations, having no other business at the time.
+</blockquote>
+Incidentally, Ramanujan was also a compulsive calculator. As Kanigel
+writes in his excellent biography:
+<blockquote>
+  One Ramanujan scholar, B. M. Wilson, later told how Ramanujan's
+  research into number theory was often "preceded by a table of
+  numerical results, carried usually to a length from which most
+  of us would shrink."
+</blockquote>
+[7] Working to understand the natural world counts as creating
+rather than consuming.<br /><br />Newton tripped over this distinction when he chose
+to work on theology. His beliefs did not allow him to see it, but
+chasing down paradoxes in nature is fruitful in a way that chasing
+down paradoxes in sacred texts is not.<br /><br />[8] How much of people's propensity to become interested in a topic
+is inborn?  My experience so far suggests the answer is: most of
+it. Different kids get interested in different things, and it's
+hard to make a child interested in something they wouldn't otherwise
+be. Not in a way that sticks.  The most you can do on behalf of a
+topic is to make sure it gets a fair showing � to make it clear to
+them, for example, that there's more to math than the dull drills
+they do in school. After that it's up to the child.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Marc Andreessen, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Kevin
+Lacker, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Lisa
+Randall, Zak Stone, and <a href="https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1196537802621669376"><u>my 7 year old</u></a> for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://www.isaacbelmar.com/posts/el-ticket-de-autobus/">Spanish Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://ideanomics.ru/articles/19574">Russian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://yujonglee.com/genius/">Korean Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://davidmayilian.com/blog/2022/genius/">Armenian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/getideas.html

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+<html><head><title>How to Get New Ideas</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc135><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc135 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-6.gif" width="176" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="How to Get New Ideas" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">January 2023<br /><br /><i>(<a href="https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222428727586816"><u>Someone</u></a> fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer
+questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from.  The
+answer was ok, but not what I would have said. This is what I would have said.)</i><br /><br />The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange,
+or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much
+of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for
+them is at the frontiers of knowledge.<br /><br />Knowledge grows fractally.
+From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough
+to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps
+will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried
+x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields
+whole new fractal buds.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_REC_VIEW_TAG() {  var env = (typeof csell_env == 'string')?csell_env:'prod'; var p = csell_page_data; var a = '/sid='+p['si']+'/io='+p['io']+'/ii='+p['ii']+'/bt='+p['bt']+'-view'+'/en='+env; var r=Math.random(); YStore.CrossSellBeacon.renderBeaconWithRecData(p['url']+'/p/s='+p['s']+'/'+p['rnd']+'='+r+a); } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=getideas&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html111.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:36 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html

@@ -0,0 +1,135 @@
+<html><head><title>Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc93><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc93 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/is-there-such-a-thing-as-good-taste-5.gif" width="295" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">November 2021<br /><br /><i>(This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.)</i><br /><br />When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told me so.
+Some people like some things, and other people like other things,
+and who's to say who's right?<br /><br />It seemed so obvious that there was no such thing as good taste
+that it was only through indirect evidence that I realized my father
+was wrong. And that's what I'm going to give you here: a proof by
+reductio ad absurdum. If we start from the premise that there's no
+such thing as good taste, we end up with conclusions that are
+obviously false, and therefore the premise must be wrong.<br /><br />We'd better start by saying what good taste is. There's a narrow
+sense in which it refers to aesthetic judgements and a broader one
+in which it refers to preferences of any kind. The strongest proof
+would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense, so I'm
+going to talk about taste in art. You have better taste than me if
+the art you like is better than the art I like.<br /><br />If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing
+as <a href="goodart.html"><u>good art</u></a>. Because if there is such a
+thing as good art, it's
+easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot
+of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to
+choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better
+taste.<br /><br />So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have
+to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to
+discard the possibility of people being good at making it. Which
+means there's no way for artists to be good at their jobs. And not
+just visual artists, but anyone who is in any sense an artist. You
+can't have good actors, or novelists, or composers, or dancers
+either. You can have popular novelists, but not good ones.<br /><br />We don't realize how far we'd have to go if we discarded the concept
+of good taste, because we don't even debate the most obvious cases.
+But it doesn't just mean we can't 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 trying to paint and
+comparing your work to Bellini's, that you can see that it does in
+fact exist.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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 <i>m</i>, then it has a mass of
+<i>m</i>. 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 <i>random</i>.<br /><br />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
+the ability of a vaccine to confer immunity, it would seem very
+frivolous to object that conferring immunity wasn't really a property
+of vaccines, because acquiring immunity is something that happens
+in the immune system of each individual person. Sure, people's
+immune systems vary, and a vaccine that worked on one might not
+work on another, but that doesn't make it meaningless to talk about
+the effectiveness of a vaccine.<br /><br />The situation with art is messier, of course. You can't measure
+effectiveness by simply taking a vote, as you do with vaccines.
+You have to imagine the responses of subjects with a deep knowledge
+of art, and enough clarity of mind to be able to ignore extraneous
+influences like the fame of the artist. And even then you'd still
+see some disagreement. People do vary, and judging art is hard,
+especially recent art. There is definitely not a total order either
+of works or of people's ability to judge them. But there is equally
+definitely a partial order of both. So while it's not possible to
+have perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888">
+<b>Thanks</b> to the Cambridge Union for inviting me, and to Trevor
+Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts
+of this.
+</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html108.prod.store.e1a.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:37 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html

@@ -0,0 +1,210 @@
+<html><head><meta name="Keywords" content="" /><title>Good Writing</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-6.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=19afd6832e0a1b><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-7.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#19afd6832e0a1b border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-8.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/good-writing-1.gif" width="111" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Good Writing" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">May 2025<br /><br />There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can
+sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice,
+flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions
+about important things. It might seem as if these two
+kinds of good would be unrelated, like the speed of a car
+and the color it's painted. And yet I don't think they
+are. I think writing that sounds good is more likely to
+be right.<br /><br />So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that
+seems both preposterous and true. Let's examine it. How
+can this possibly be true?<br /><br />I know it's true from writing. You can't simultaneously
+optimize two unrelated things; when you push one far
+enough, you always end up sacrificing the other. And yet
+no matter how hard I push, I never find myself having to
+choose between the sentence that sounds best and the one
+that expresses an idea best. If I did, it would be
+frivolous to care how sentences sound. But in practice it
+feels the opposite of frivolous. Fixing sentences that
+sound bad seems to help get the ideas right.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas
+right means developing them well &mdash; drawing the
+conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to
+the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is
+not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the
+right true things.<br /><br />How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do
+that? The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30
+years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book.
+Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck.
+For example, you get a section that runs one line longer
+than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do
+in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section
+to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary
+constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my
+surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with
+something I liked better.<br /><br />I don't think this was because my writing was especially
+careless. I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in
+anything written by anyone and told them to make it
+slightly shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to
+come up with something better.<br /><br />The best analogy for this phenomenon is when you shake a
+bin full of different objects. The shakes are arbitrary
+motions. Or more precisely, they're not calculated to
+make any two specific objects fit more closely together.
+And yet repeated shaking inevitably makes the objects
+discover brilliantly clever ways of packing themselves.
+Gravity won't let them become less tightly packed, so any
+change has to be a change for the better.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />So it is with writing. If you have to rewrite an awkward
+passage, you'll never do it in a way that makes it <i>less</i>
+true. You couldn't bear it, any more than gravity could
+bear things floating upward. So any change in the ideas
+has to be a change for the better.<br /><br />It's obvious once you think about it. Writing that sounds
+good is more likely to be right for the same reason that
+a well-shaken bin is more likely to be tightly packed.
+But there's something else going on as well. Sounding
+good isn't just a random external force that leaves the
+ideas in an essay better off. It actually helps you to
+get them right.<br /><br />The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read.
+It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does
+that help the writer? <i>Because the writer is the first
+reader.</i> When I'm working on an essay, I spend far more
+time reading than writing. I'll reread some parts 50 or
+100 times, replaying the thoughts in them and asking
+myself, like someone sanding a piece of wood, does
+anything catch? Does anything feel wrong? And the easier
+the essay is to read, the easier it is to notice if
+something catches.<br /><br />So yes, the two senses of good writing are connected in
+at least two ways. Trying to make writing sound good
+makes you fix mistakes unconsciously, and also helps you
+fix them consciously; it shakes the bin of ideas, and
+also makes mistakes easier to see. But now that we've
+dissolved one layer of preposterousness, I can't resist
+adding another. Does sounding good do more than just help
+you get the ideas right? Is writing that sounds good
+<i>inherently</i> more likely to be right? Crazy as it may
+seem, I think that's true too.<br /><br />Obviously there's a connection at the level of individual
+words. There are lots of words in English that sound like
+what they mean, often in wonderfully subtle ways.
+Glitter. Round. Scrape. Prim. Cavalcade. But the sound of
+good writing depends even more on the way you put words
+together, and there's a connection at that level too.<br /><br />When writing sounds good, it's mostly because it has good
+rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm
+of music, or the meter of verse. It's not so regular. If
+it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good
+writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all
+kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and
+you just state them. But other times they're more subtle,
+and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease
+out all the implications.<br /><br />An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same
+way dialogue is cleaned up conversation, and a train of
+thought has a natural rhythm. So when an essay sounds
+good, it's not merely because it has a pleasing rhythm,
+but because it has its natural one. Which means you can
+use getting the rhythm right as a heuristic for getting
+the ideas right. And not just in principle: good writers
+do both simultaneously as a matter of course. Often I
+don't even distinguish between the two problems. I just
+think Ugh, this doesn't sound right; what do I mean to
+say here?
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The sound of writing turns out to be more like the shape
+of a plane than the color of a car. If it looks good, as
+Kelly Johnson used to say, it will fly well.<br /><br />This is only true of writing that's used to develop
+ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in
+some other way and then write about them afterward &mdash; for
+example, if you build something, or conduct an
+experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such
+cases the ideas often live more in the work than the
+writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas
+are good. The writing in textbooks and popular surveys
+can be bad for the same reason: the author isn't
+developing the ideas, merely describing other people's.
+It's only when you're writing to develop ideas that
+there's such a close connection between the two senses of
+doing it well.<br /><br />Ok, many people will be thinking, this seems plausible so
+far, but what about liars? Is it not notoriously possible
+for a smooth-tongued liar to write something beautiful
+that's completely false?<br /><br />It is, of course. But not without method acting. The way
+to write something beautiful and false is to begin by
+making yourself almost believe it. So just like someone
+writing something beautiful and true, you're presenting a
+perfectly-formed train of thought. The difference is the
+point where it attaches to the world. You're saying
+something that would be true if certain false premises
+were. If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a
+country were fixed, then immigrants really would be
+taking our jobs.<br /><br />So it's not quite right to say that better sounding
+writing is more likely to be true. Better sounding
+writing is more likely to be internally consistent. If
+the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth
+converge.<br /><br />But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing
+is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse:
+something that seems clumsily written will usually have
+gotten the ideas wrong too.<br /><br />Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two
+ends of the same thing. The connection between them is
+not a rigid one; the goodness of good writing is not a
+rod but a rope, with multiple overlapping connections
+running through it. But it's hard to move one end without
+moving the other. It's hard to be right without sounding
+right.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+The closest thing to an exception is when you have
+to go back and insert a new point into the middle of
+something you've written. This often messes up the flow,
+sometimes in ways you can never quite repair. But I think
+the ultimate source of this problem is that ideas are
+tree-shaped and essays are linear. You inevitably run
+into difficulties when you try to cram the former into
+the latter. Frankly it's surprising how much you can get
+away with. But even so you sometimes have to resort to an
+endnote.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Obviously if you shake the bin hard enough the
+objects in it can become less tightly packed. And
+similarly, if you imposed some huge external constraint
+on your writing, like using alternating one and two
+syllable words, the ideas would start to suffer.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+Bizarrely enough, this happened in the writing of
+this very paragraph. An earlier version shared several
+phrases in common with the preceding paragraph, and the
+repetition bugged me each time I reread it. When I got
+annoyed enough to fix it, I discovered that the
+repetition reflected a problem in the underlying ideas,
+and I fixed both simultaneously.<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b> to Jessica Livingston 
+and Courtenay Pipkin for reading drafts of this.</b><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<html><head><meta name="Keywords" content="" /><title>How to Start Google</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=114876600023d67><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#114876600023d67 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-start-google-1.gif" width="171" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="How to Start Google" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">March 2024<br /><br /><i>(This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do now
+if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of schools think
+they should tell students something about startups. This is what I
+think they should tell them.)</i><br /><br />Most of you probably think that when you're released into the
+so-called real world you'll eventually have to get some kind of
+job. That's not true, and today I'm going to talk about a trick you
+can use to avoid ever having to get a job.<br /><br />The trick is to start your own company. So it's not a trick for
+avoiding <i>work</i>, because if you start your own company you'll
+work harder than you would if you had an ordinary job. But you will
+avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including
+a boss telling you what to do.<br /><br />It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone else's.
+And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the standard
+way to get 
+<a href="richnow.html"><u>really rich</u></a>. If you look at the lists of the richest
+people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of
+them did it by starting their own companies.<br /><br />Starting your own company can mean anything from starting a barber
+shop to starting Google. I'm here to talk about one extreme end of
+that continuum. I'm going to tell you how to start Google.<br /><br />The companies at the Google end of the continuum are called startups
+when they're young. The reason I know about them is that my wife
+Jessica and I started something called Y Combinator that is basically
+a startup factory. Since 2005, Y Combinator has funded over 4000
+startups. So we know exactly what you need to start a startup,
+because we've helped people do it for the last 19 years.<br /><br />You might have thought I was joking when I said I was going to tell
+you how to start Google. You might be thinking "How could <i>we</i>
+start Google?" But that's effectively what the people who did start
+Google were thinking before they started it. If you'd told Larry
+Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, that the company they
+were about to start would one day be worth over a trillion dollars,
+their heads would have exploded.<br /><br />All you can know when you start working on a startup is that it
+seems worth pursuing. You can't know whether it will turn into
+a company worth billions or one that goes out of business. So when I
+say I'm going to tell you how to start Google, I mean I'm going to
+tell you how to get to the point where you can start a company that
+has as much chance of being Google as Google had of being Google.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />How do you get from where you are now to the point where you can
+start a successful startup? You need three things. You need to be
+good at some kind of technology, you need an idea for what you're
+going to build, and you need cofounders to start the company with.<br /><br />How do you get good at technology? And how do you choose which
+technology to get good at? Both of those questions turn out to have
+the same answer: work on your own projects. Don't try to guess
+whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the
+most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that.
+Just work on whatever interests you the most. You'll work much
+harder on something you're interested in than something you're doing
+because you think you're supposed to.<br /><br />If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at
+programming. That has been the source of the median startup for the
+last 30 years, and this is probably not going to change in the next
+10.<br /><br />Those of you who are taking computer science classes in school may
+at this point be thinking, ok, we've got this sorted. We're already
+being taught all about programming. But sorry, this is not enough.
+You have to be working on your own projects, not just learning stuff
+in classes. You can do well in computer science classes without
+ever really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a
+degree in computer science from a top university and still not be
+any good at programming. That's why tech companies all make you
+take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you
+went to university or how well you did there. They know grades and
+exam results prove nothing.<br /><br />If you really want to learn to program, you have to work on your
+own projects. You learn so much faster that way. Imagine you're
+writing a game and there's something you want to do in it, and you
+don't know how. You're going to figure out how a lot faster than
+you'd learn anything in a class.<br /><br />You don't have to learn programming, though. If you're wondering
+what counts as technology, it includes practically everything you
+could describe using the words "make" or "build." So welding would
+count, or making clothes, or making videos. Whatever you're most
+interested in. The critical distinction is whether you're producing
+or just consuming. Are you writing computer games, or just playing
+them? That's the cutoff.<br /><br />Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, spent time when he was a teenager
+studying calligraphy &mdash; the sort of beautiful writing that
+you see in medieval manuscripts. No one, including him, thought
+that this would help him in his career. He was just doing it because
+he was interested in it. But it turned out to help him a lot. The
+computer that made Apple really big, the Macintosh, came out at
+just the moment when computers got powerful enough to make letters
+like the ones in printed books instead of the computery-looking
+letters you see in 8 bit games. Apple destroyed everyone else at
+this, and one reason was that Steve was one of the few people in
+the computer business who really got graphic design.<br /><br />Don't feel like your projects have to be <i>serious</i>. They can
+be as frivolous as you like, so long as you're building things
+you're excited about. Probably 90% of programmers start out building
+games. They and their friends like to play games. So they build
+the kind of things they and their friends want. And that's exactly
+what you should be doing at 15 if you want to start a startup one
+day.<br /><br />You don't have to do just one project. In fact it's good to learn
+about multiple things. Steve Jobs didn't just learn calligraphy.
+He also learned about electronics, which was even more valuable.
+Whatever you're interested in. (Do you notice a theme here?)<br /><br />So that's the first of the three things you need, to get good at
+some kind or kinds of technology. You do it the same way you get
+good at the violin or football: practice. If you start a startup
+at 22, and you start writing your own programs now, then by the
+time you start the company you'll have spent at least 7 years
+practicing writing code, and you can get pretty good at anything
+after practicing it for 7 years.<br /><br />Let's suppose you're 22 and you've succeeded: You're now really
+good at some technology. How do you get 
+<a href="startupideas.html"><u>startup ideas</u></a>? It might
+seem like that's the hard part. Even if you are a good programmer,
+how do you get the idea to start Google?<br /><br />Actually it's easy to get startup ideas once you're good at technology.
+Once you're good at some technology, when you look at the world you
+see dotted outlines around the things that are missing. You start
+to be able to see both the things that are missing from the technology
+itself, and all the broken things that could be fixed using it, and
+each one of these is a potential startup.<br /><br />In the town near our house there's a shop with a sign warning that
+the door is hard to close. The sign has been there for several
+years. To the people in the shop it must seem like this mysterious
+natural phenomenon that the door sticks, and all they can do is put
+up a sign warning customers about it. But any carpenter looking at
+this situation would think "why don't you just plane off the part
+that sticks?"<br /><br />Once you're good at programming, all the missing software in the
+world starts to become as obvious as a sticking door to a carpenter.
+I'll give you a real world example. Back in the 20th century,
+American universities used to publish printed directories with all
+the students' names and contact info. When I tell you what these
+directories were called, you'll know which startup I'm talking
+about. They were called facebooks, because they usually had a picture
+of each student next to their name.<br /><br />So Mark Zuckerberg shows up at Harvard in 2002, and the university
+still hasn't gotten the facebook online. Each individual house has
+an online facebook, but there isn't one for the whole university.
+The university administration has been diligently having meetings
+about this, and will probably have solved the problem in another
+decade or so. Most of the students don't consciously notice that
+anything is wrong. But Mark is a programmer. He looks at this
+situation and thinks "Well, this is stupid. I could write a program
+to fix this in one night. Just let people upload their own photos
+and then combine the data into a new site for the whole university."
+So he does. And almost literally overnight he has thousands of
+users.<br /><br />Of course Facebook was not a startup yet. It was just a... project.
+There's that word again. Projects aren't just the best way to learn
+about technology. They're also the best source of startup ideas.<br /><br />Facebook was not unusual in this respect. Apple and Google also
+began as projects. Apple wasn't meant to be a company. Steve Wozniak
+just wanted to build his own computer. It only turned into a company
+when Steve Jobs said "Hey, I wonder if we could sell plans for this
+computer to other people." That's how Apple started. They weren't
+even selling computers, just plans for computers. Can you imagine
+how lame this company seemed?<br /><br />Ditto for Google. Larry and Sergey weren't trying to start a company
+at first. They were just trying to make search better. Before Google,
+most search engines didn't try to sort the results they gave you
+in order of importance. If you searched for "rugby" they just gave
+you every web page that contained the word "rugby." And the web was
+so small in 1997 that this actually worked! Kind of. There might
+only be 20 or 30 pages with the word "rugby," but the web was growing
+exponentially, which meant this way of doing search was becoming
+exponentially more broken. Most users just thought, "Wow, I sure
+have to look through a lot of search results to find what I want."
+Door sticks. But like Mark, Larry and Sergey were programmers. Like
+Mark, they looked at this situation and thought "Well, this is
+stupid. Some pages about rugby matter more than others. Let's figure
+out which those are and show them first."<br /><br />It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup.
+It wasn't obvious at the time. It's never obvious. If it was obviously
+a good idea to start Apple or Google or Facebook, someone else would
+have already done it. That's why the best startups grow out of
+projects that aren't meant to be startups. You're not trying to
+start a company. You're just following your instincts about what's
+interesting. And if you're young and good at technology, then your
+unconscious instincts about what's interesting are better than your
+conscious ideas about what would be a good company.<br /><br />So it's critical, if you're a young founder, to build things for
+yourself and your friends to use. The biggest mistake young founders
+make is to build something for some mysterious group of other people.
+But if you can make something that you and your friends truly want
+to use &mdash; something your friends aren't just using out of
+loyalty to you, but would be really sad to lose if you shut it down
+&mdash; then you almost certainly have the germ of a good startup
+idea. It may not seem like a startup to you. It may not be obvious
+how to make money from it. But trust me, there's a way.<br /><br />What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something
+your friends actually want. And those ideas aren't hard to see once
+you're good at technology. There are sticking doors everywhere.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Now for the third and final thing you need: a cofounder, or cofounders.
+The optimal startup has two or three founders, so you need one or
+two cofounders. How do you find them? Can you predict what I'm going
+to say next? It's the same thing: projects. You find cofounders by
+working on projects with them. What you need in a cofounder is
+someone who's good at what they do and that you work well with, and
+the only way to judge this is to work with them on things.<br /><br />At this point I'm going to tell you something you might not want
+to hear. It really matters to do well in your classes, even the
+ones that are just memorization or blathering about literature,
+because you need to do well in your classes to get into a good
+university. And if you want to start a startup you should try to
+get into the best university you can, because that's where the best
+cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are. When Larry
+and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest
+people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a real advantage for
+them.<br /><br />The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the
+largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much
+the same as the list of the most selective universities.<br /><br />I don't think it's the prestigious names of these universities that
+cause more good startups to come out of them. Nor do I think it's
+because the quality of the teaching is better. What's driving this
+is simply the difficulty of getting in. You have to be pretty smart
+and determined to get into MIT or Cambridge, so if you do manage
+to get in, you'll find the other students include a lot of smart
+and determined people.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />You don't have to start a startup with someone you meet at university.
+The founders of Twitch met when they were seven. The founders of
+Stripe, Patrick and John Collison, met when John was born. But
+universities are the main source of cofounders. And because they're
+where the cofounders are, they're also where the ideas are, because
+the best ideas grow out of projects you do with the people who
+become your cofounders.<br /><br />So the list of what you need to do to get from here to starting a
+startup is quite short. You need to get good at technology, and the
+way to do that is to work on your own projects. And you need to do
+as well in school as you can, so you can get into a good university,
+because that's where the cofounders and the ideas are.<br /><br />That's it, just two things, build stuff and do well in school.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+The rhetorical trick in this sentence is that the "Google"s
+refer to different things. What I mean is: a company that has as
+much chance of growing as big as Google ultimately did as Larry and
+Sergey could have reasonably expected Google itself would at the
+time they started it. But I think the original version is zippier.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Making something for your friends isn't the only source of
+startup ideas. It's just the best source for young founders, who
+have the least knowledge of what other people want, and whose own
+wants are most predictive of future demand.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+Strangely enough this is particularly true in countries like
+the US where undergraduate admissions are done badly. US admissions
+departments make applicants jump through a lot of arbitrary hoops
+that have little to do with their intellectual ability. But the
+more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of mere determination
+and resourcefulness. And those are the two most important qualities
+in startup founders. So US admissions departments are better at
+selecting founders than they would be if they were better at selecting
+students.<br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b> to Jared Friedman, Carolynn Levy, Jessica Livingston, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<html><head><meta name="Keywords" content="" /><title>How to Do Great Work</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-6.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=118ab66adb24b4f><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-7.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#118ab66adb24b4f border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-8.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-do-great-work-2.gif" width="185" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="How to Do Great Work" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">July 2023<br /><br />If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot
+of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided
+to find out by making it.<br /><br />Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone
+working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the
+intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does
+have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."<br /><br />The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose
+needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a
+natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that
+offers scope to do great work.<br /><br />In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion.
+Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it.
+So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for
+and great interest in.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />That sounds straightforward, but it's often quite difficult. When
+you're young you don't know what you're good at or what different
+kinds of work are like. Some kinds of work you end up doing may not
+even exist yet. So while some people know what they want to do at
+14, most have to figure it out.<br /><br />The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not
+sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going.
+You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. It's
+good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries
+come from noticing connections between different fields.<br /><br />Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work"
+mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do
+great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own.
+It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your
+part of it.<br /><br />What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly
+ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves,
+exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitingly
+ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach
+yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered
+questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness.<br /><br />There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the
+rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let
+it have its way, will also show you what to work on.<br /><br />What are you excessively curious about &mdash; curious to a degree that
+would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.<br /><br />Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the
+next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the
+frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a
+distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get
+close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.<br /><br />The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because
+your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler
+model of the world. Many discoveries have come from asking questions
+about things that everyone else took for granted. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If the answers seem strange, so much the better. Great work often
+has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math.
+It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears,
+embrace it.<br /><br />Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested
+in them &mdash; in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited
+about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have
+enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking,
+that's as good a bet as you'll find.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier,
+notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone
+who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.<br /><br />Steps two and four will require hard work. It may not be possible
+to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the
+empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality.
+That's why it's essential to work on something you're deeply
+interested in. Interest will drive you to work harder than mere
+diligence ever could.<br /><br />The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the
+desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and
+that combination is the most powerful of all.<br /><br />The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack
+in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world
+inside.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Let's talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring
+out what to work on. The main reason it's hard is that you can't
+tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. Which
+means the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something for
+years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at
+it. And in the meantime you're not doing, and thus not learning
+about, most other kinds of work. So in the worst case you choose
+late based on very incomplete information.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#dddddd>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes in
+two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that
+grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the
+more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what
+to do.<br /><br />The educational systems in most countries pretend it's easy. They
+expect you to commit to a field long before you could know what
+it's really like. And as a result an ambitious person on an optimal
+trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.<br /><br />It would be better if they at least admitted it &mdash; if they admitted
+that the system not only can't do much to help you figure out what
+to work on, but is designed on the assumption that you'll somehow
+magically guess as a teenager. They don't tell you, but I will:
+when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own.
+Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest will
+find themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid down on
+the assumption that everyone does.<br /><br />What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know
+what to work on? What you should <i>not</i> do is drift along passively,
+assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action.
+But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read
+biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how
+much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result
+of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up.
+So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to
+do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people,
+read lots of books, ask lots of questions.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#dddddd>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you
+learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very
+different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need
+to give different types of work a chance to show you what they're
+like. But a field should become <i>increasingly</i> interesting as you
+learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you.<br /><br />Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things than
+other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the
+better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste
+for work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to find
+new things if you're looking where few have looked before.<br /><br />One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like
+even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening.<br /><br />But fields aren't people; you don't owe them any loyalty. If in the
+course of working on one thing you discover another that's more
+exciting, don't be afraid to switch.<br /><br />If you're making something for people, make sure it's something
+they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something
+you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool
+you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests,
+this will also get you your initial audience.<br /><br />This <i>should</i> follow from the excitingness rule. Obviously the most
+exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason
+I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong.
+Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some
+imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down
+that route, you're lost.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#dddddd>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you're
+trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion,
+fear, money, politics, other people's wishes, eminent frauds. But
+if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof
+against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy,
+but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of
+obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it
+does take a good deal of boldness.<br /><br />But while you need boldness, you don't usually need much planning.
+In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard
+on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of
+it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try
+to preserve certain invariants.<br /><br />The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements
+you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich
+by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal,
+but you can't discover natural selection that way.<br /><br />I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy
+is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most
+interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call
+this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done
+great work seem to have done it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Even when you've found something exciting to work on, working on
+it is not always straightforward. There will be times when some new
+idea makes you leap out of bed in the morning and get straight to
+work. But there will also be plenty of times when things aren't
+like that.<br /><br />You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration.
+There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there's a
+technique to working, just as there is to sailing.<br /><br />For example, while you must work hard, it's possible to work too
+hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns:
+fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health.
+The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the
+type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for
+four or five hours a day.<br /><br />Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try
+to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in.
+You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.<br /><br />It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working.
+You'll often have to trick yourself to get over that initial
+threshold. Don't worry about this; it's the nature of work, not a
+flaw in your character. Work has a sort of activation energy, both
+per day and per project. And since this threshold is fake in the
+sense that it's higher than the energy required to keep going, it's
+ok to tell yourself a lie of corresponding magnitude to get over
+it.<br /><br />It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do great
+work, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. When I'm
+reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by
+saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes
+later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and
+I'm off.<br /><br />Similar techniques work for starting new projects. It's ok to lie
+to yourself about how much work a project will entail, for example.
+Lots of great things began with someone saying "How hard could it
+be?"<br /><br />This is one case where the young have an advantage. They're more
+optimistic, and even though one of the sources of their optimism
+is ignorance, in this case ignorance can sometimes beat knowledge.<br /><br />Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to be
+more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise
+in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the best
+work happens in what was meant to be the final stage.<br /><br />Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what
+you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you
+discover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie after
+all.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#dddddd>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Since there are two senses of starting work &mdash; per day and per
+project &mdash; there are also two forms of procrastination. Per-project
+procrastination is far the more dangerous. You put off starting
+that ambitious project from year to year because the time isn't
+quite right. When you're procrastinating in units of years, you can
+get a lot not done.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#dddddd>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it
+usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around
+doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So
+per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day
+procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it.<br /><br />The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I
+working on what I most want to work on? When you're young it's ok
+if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous
+as you get older.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#dddddd>9</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people
+an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of
+this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the
+work sufficiently engaging as it's happening.<br /><br />There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years
+at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not
+how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently
+on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take
+stock, you're surprised how far you've come.<br /><br />The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative
+effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but
+if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key:
+consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every
+day. They get something done, rather than nothing.<br /><br />If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth. Most
+people who do this do it unconsciously, but it's worth stopping to
+think about. Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon:
+the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more.
+Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more
+new fans they'll bring you.<br /><br />The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat
+in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential
+curve. But we can't grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential
+growth in its early stages.<br /><br />Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's
+worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started. But since
+we underrate exponential growth early on, this too is mostly done
+unconsciously: people push through the initial, unrewarding phase
+of learning something new because they know from experience that
+learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their
+audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do.
+If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential
+growth, many more would do it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Work doesn't just happen when you're trying to. There's a kind of
+undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying
+in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a
+little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by
+frontal attack.<br /><br />You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this
+phenomenon, though. You can't just walk around daydreaming. The
+daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds
+it questions.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#dddddd>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also important
+to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your
+mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that
+moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out
+of the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on
+the distraction instead. (Exception: Don't avoid love.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field.
+Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don't
+know what you're aiming for.<br /><br />And that <i>is</i> what you're aiming for, because if you don't try to
+be the best, you won't even be good. This observation has been made
+by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth
+thinking about why it's true. It could be because ambition is a
+phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction &mdash; where
+almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short.
+Or it could be because ambition to be the best is a qualitatively
+different thing from ambition to be good. Or maybe being good is
+simply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f11n"><font color=#dddddd>11</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Fortunately there's a kind of economy of scale here. Though it might
+seem like you'd be taking on a heavy burden by trying to be the
+best, in practice you often end up net ahead. It's exciting, and
+also strangely liberating. It simplifies things. In some ways it's
+easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good.<br /><br />One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will
+care about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions matter
+more than your contemporaries', but because something that still
+seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Don't try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best
+job you can; you won't be able to help doing it in a distinctive
+way.<br /><br />Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying
+to is affectation.<br /><br />Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is
+doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while
+you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows
+in the work.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f12n"><font color=#dddddd>12</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They
+often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that
+problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently
+ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're
+not a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work and
+your identity will take care of itself.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+"Avoid affectation" is a useful rule so far as it goes, but how
+would you express this idea positively? How would you say what to
+be, instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest. If you're
+earnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similar
+vices.<br /><br />The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're
+taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue &mdash; as a kind
+of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new
+ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're
+trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can
+you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?<br /><br />One way to avoid intellectual dishonesty is to maintain a slight
+positive pressure in the opposite direction. Be aggressively willing
+to admit that you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistaken
+about something, you're free. Till then you have to carry it.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f13n"><font color=#dddddd>13</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Another more subtle component of earnestness is informality.
+Informality is much more important than its grammatically negative
+name implies. It's not merely the absence of something. It means
+focusing on what matters instead of what doesn't.<br /><br />What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as
+doing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doing
+it. But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being
+good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work:
+they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's
+basically the definition of a nerd.<br /><br />Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that's exactly what you need
+in doing great work. It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood.
+So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than
+the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms
+of them. "It's easy to criticize" is true in the most literal sense,
+and the route to great work is never easy.<br /><br />There may be some jobs where it's an advantage to be cynical and
+pessimistic, but if you want to do great work it's an advantage to
+be optimistic, even though that means you'll risk looking like a
+fool sometimes. There's an old tradition of doing the opposite. The
+Old Testament says it's better to keep quiet lest you look like a
+fool. But that's advice for <i>seeming</i> smart. If you actually want
+to discover new things, it's better to take the risk of telling
+people your ideas.<br /><br />Some people are naturally earnest, and with others it takes a
+conscious effort. Either kind of earnestness will suffice. But I
+doubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest.
+It's so hard to do even if you are. You don't have enough margin
+for error to accommodate the distortions introduced by being affected,
+intellectually dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, or cool.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f14n"><font color=#dddddd>14</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself.
+It's usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middle
+of working on something, ask which choice is more consistent.<br /><br />You may have to throw things away and redo them. You won't necessarily
+have to, but you have to be willing to. And that can take some
+effort; when there's something you need to redo, status quo bias
+and laziness will combine to keep you in denial about it. To beat
+this ask: If I'd already made the change, would I want to revert
+to what I have now?<br /><br />Have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fit
+just because you're proud of it, or because it cost you a lot of
+effort.<br /><br />Indeed, in some kinds of work it's good to strip whatever you're
+doing to its essence. The result will be more concentrated; you'll
+understand it better; and you won't be able to lie to yourself about
+whether there's anything real there.<br /><br />Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn from
+the arts. That's what I thought when I first heard the term "elegant"
+applied to a proof. But now I suspect it's conceptually prior &mdash; 
+that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical
+elegance. At any rate it's a useful standard well beyond math.<br /><br />Elegance can be a long-term bet, though. Laborious solutions will
+often have more prestige in the short term. They cost a lot of
+effort and they're hard to understand, both of which impress people,
+at least temporarily.<br /><br />Whereas some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively
+little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn't
+have to be built, just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hard
+to say whether you're creating something or discovering it.<br /><br />When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation or
+discovery, err on the side of discovery. Try thinking of yourself
+as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape.<br /><br />(Strangely enough, one exception is the problem of choosing a problem
+to work on. This is usually seen as search, but in the best case
+it's more like creating something. In the best case you create the
+field in the process of exploring it.)<br /><br />Similarly, if you're trying to build a powerful tool, make it
+gratuitously unrestrictive. A powerful tool almost by definition
+will be used in ways you didn't expect, so err on the side of
+eliminating restrictions, even if you don't know what the benefit
+will be.<br /><br />Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being something
+others build on. So it's a good sign if you're creating ideas that
+others could use, or exposing questions that others could answer.
+The best ideas have implications in many different areas.<br /><br />If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer
+than you intended.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+True by itself is not enough, of course. Great ideas have to be
+true and new. And it takes a certain amount of ability to see new
+ideas even once you've learned enough to get to one of the frontiers
+of knowledge.<br /><br />In English we give this ability names like originality, creativity,
+and imagination. And it seems reasonable to give it a separate name,
+because it does seem to some extent a separate skill. It's possible
+to have a great deal of ability in other respects &mdash; to have a great
+deal of what's often called <i>technical</i> ability &mdash; and yet not have
+much of this.<br /><br />I've never liked the term "creative process." It seems misleading.
+Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers
+throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle
+grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it.<br /><br />If the thing they're focused on is something they don't understand
+very well, these new ideas might not be good. One of the most
+original thinkers I know decided to focus on dating after he got
+divorced. He knew roughly as much about dating as the average 15
+year old, and the results were spectacularly colorful. But to see
+originality separated from expertise like that made its nature all
+the more clear.<br /><br />I don't know if it's possible to cultivate originality, but there
+are definitely ways to make the most of however much you have. For
+example, you're much more likely to have original ideas when you're
+working on something. Original ideas don't come from trying to have
+original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something
+slightly too difficult.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f15n"><font color=#dddddd>15</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good
+way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a
+missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you.
+Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.<br /><br />Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'll
+often find you have new ideas there. The journey itself often
+dislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit.
+Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f16n"><font color=#dddddd>16</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas
+if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives
+the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because
+analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.<br /><br />Don't divide your attention <i>evenly</i> between many topics though,
+or you'll spread yourself too thin. You want to distribute it
+according to something more like a power law.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f17n"><font color=#dddddd>17</font></a>]</font>
+Be professionally
+curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.<br /><br />Curiosity and originality are closely related. Curiosity feeds
+originality by giving it new things to work on. But the relationship
+is closer than that. Curiosity is itself a kind of originality;
+it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since
+questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity
+at its best is a creative force.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Having new ideas is a strange game, because it usually consists of
+seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a
+new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this
+before?<br /><br />When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably
+a good one.<br /><br />Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having
+new ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction?
+It's that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the
+way you look at the world. We see the world through models that
+both help and constrain us. When you fix a broken model, new ideas
+become obvious. But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard.
+That's how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover:
+they're easy to see after you do something hard.<br /><br />One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other
+people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where
+they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these
+clues. It would be an understatement to say that they're attached
+to their current model; it's what they think in; so they'll tend
+to ignore the trail of clues left by its breakage, however conspicuous
+it may seem in retrospect.<br /><br />To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead
+of looking away. That's what Einstein did. He was able to see the
+wild implications of Maxwell's equations not so much because he was
+looking for new ideas as because he was stricter.<br /><br />The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. Paradoxical
+as it sounds, if you want to fix your model of the world, it helps
+to be the sort of person who's comfortable breaking rules. From the
+point of view of the old model, which everyone including you initially
+shares, the new model usually breaks at least implicit rules.<br /><br />Few understand the degree of rule-breaking required, because new
+ideas seem much more conservative once they succeed. They seem
+perfectly reasonable once you're using the new model of the world
+they brought with them. But they didn't at the time; it took the
+greater part of a century for the heliocentric model to be generally
+accepted, even among astronomers, because it felt so wrong.<br /><br />Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to
+most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what
+you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of
+crazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Often
+ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of
+crazy tend to be exciting; they're rich in implications; whereas
+ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing.<br /><br />There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoy
+breaking them, and to be indifferent to them. I call these two cases
+being aggressively and passively independent-minded.<br /><br />The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules
+don't merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional
+energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of
+a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it
+started.<br /><br />The other way to break rules is not to care about them, or perhaps
+even to know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often
+make new discoveries; their ignorance of a field's assumptions acts
+as a source of temporary passive independent-mindedness. Aspies
+also seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs.
+Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas.<br /><br />Strictness plus rule-breaking sounds like a strange combination.
+In popular culture they're opposed. But popular culture has a broken
+model in this respect. It implicitly assumes that issues are trivial
+ones, and in trivial matters strictness and rule-breaking <i>are</i>
+opposed. But in questions that really matter, only rule-breakers
+can be truly strict.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+An overlooked idea often doesn't lose till the semifinals. You do
+see it, subconsciously, but then another part of your subconscious
+shoots it down because it would be too weird, too risky, too much
+work, too controversial. This suggests an exciting possibility: if
+you could turn off such filters, you could see more new ideas.<br /><br />One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for <i>someone
+else</i> to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to
+protect you.<br /><br />You could also discover overlooked ideas by working in the other
+direction: by starting from what's obscuring them. Every cherished
+but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable
+ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it.<br /><br />Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So
+anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically
+as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow.
+Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f18n"><font color=#dddddd>18</font></a>]</font><br /><br />What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being
+too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident
+as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+People show much more originality in solving problems than in
+deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly
+conservative when deciding what to work on. People who'd never dream
+of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on
+fashionable problems.<br /><br />One reason people are more conservative when choosing problems than
+solutions is that problems are bigger bets. A problem could occupy
+you for years, while exploring a solution might only take days. But
+even so I think most people are too conservative. They're not merely
+responding to risk, but to fashion as well. Unfashionable problems
+are undervalued.<br /><br />One of the most interesting kinds of unfashionable problem is the
+problem that people think has been fully explored, but hasn't.
+Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its
+latent potential. Durer and Watt both did this. So if you're
+interested in a field that others think is tapped out, don't let
+their skepticism deter you. People are often wrong about this.<br /><br />Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing. There's
+no hype or hurry. Opportunists and critics are both occupied
+elsewhere. The existing work often has an old-school solidity. And
+there's a satisfying sense of economy in cultivating ideas that
+would otherwise be wasted.<br /><br />But the most common type of overlooked problem is not explicitly
+unfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion. It just doesn't
+seem to matter as much as it actually does. How do you find these?
+By being self-indulgent &mdash; by letting your curiosity have its way,
+and tuning out, at least temporarily, the little voice in your head
+that says you should only be working on "important" problems.<br /><br />You do need to work on important problems, but almost everyone is
+too conservative about what counts as one. And if there's an important
+but overlooked problem in your neighborhood, it's probably already
+on your subconscious radar screen. So try asking yourself: if you
+were going to take a break from "serious" work to work on something
+just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The
+answer is probably more important than it seems.<br /><br />Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than
+originality in solving them. That's what distinguishes the people
+who discover whole new fields. So what might seem to be merely the
+initial step &mdash; deciding what to work on &mdash; is in a sense the key
+to the whole game.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Few grasp this. One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas
+is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition.
+People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was
+in the question.<br /><br />Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're used
+in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being
+answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question can
+be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery.
+How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to
+earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By
+even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel
+territory.<br /><br />Unanswered questions can be uncomfortable things to carry around
+with you. But the more you're carrying, the greater the chance of
+noticing a solution &mdash; or perhaps even more excitingly, noticing
+that two unanswered questions are the same.<br /><br />Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often
+comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before
+&mdash; in your childhood, even &mdash; and couldn't stop thinking about.
+People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful
+dreams alive, but it's just as important to keep your youthful
+questions alive.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f19n"><font color=#dddddd>19</font></a>]</font><br /><br />This is one of the places where actual expertise differs most from
+the popular picture of it. In the popular picture, experts are
+certain. But actually the more puzzled you are, the better, so long
+as (a) the things you're puzzled about matter, and (b) no one else
+understands them either.<br /><br />Think about what's happening at the moment just before a new idea
+is discovered. Often someone with sufficient expertise is puzzled
+about something. Which means that originality consists partly of
+puzzlement &mdash; of confusion! You have to be comfortable enough with
+the world being full of puzzles that you're willing to see them,
+but not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f20n"><font color=#dddddd>20</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is
+one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best
+way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones.
+Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+The best questions grow in the answering. You notice a thread
+protruding from the current paradigm and try pulling on it, and it
+just gets longer and longer. So don't require a question to be
+obviously big before you try answering it. You can rarely predict
+that. It's hard enough even to notice the thread, let alone to
+predict how much will unravel if you pull on it.<br /><br />It's better to be promiscuously curious &mdash; to pull a little bit on
+a lot of threads, and see what happens. Big things start small. The
+initial versions of big things were often just experiments, or side
+projects, or talks, which then grew into something bigger. So start
+lots of small things.<br /><br />Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try,
+the greater the chance of discovering something new. Understand,
+though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of things
+that don't work. You can't have a lot of good ideas without also
+having a lot of bad ones.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f21n"><font color=#dddddd>21</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Though it sounds more responsible to begin by studying everything
+that's been done before, you'll learn faster and have more fun by
+trying stuff. And you'll understand previous work better when you
+do look at it. So err on the side of starting. Which is easier when
+starting means starting small; those two ideas fit together like
+two puzzle pieces.<br /><br />How do you get from starting small to doing something great? By
+making successive versions. Great things are almost always made in
+successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it,
+and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than
+anything you could have planned.<br /><br />It's particularly useful to make successive versions when you're
+making something for people &mdash; to get an initial version in front
+of them quickly, and then evolve it based on their response.<br /><br />Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work.
+Surprisingly often, it does. If it doesn't, this will at least get
+you started.<br /><br />Don't try to cram too much new stuff into any one version. There
+are names for doing this with the first version (taking too long
+to ship) and the second (the second system effect), but these are
+both merely instances of a more general principle.<br /><br />An early version of a new project will sometimes be dismissed as a
+toy. It's a good sign when people do this. That means it has
+everything a new idea needs except scale, and that tends to follow.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f22n"><font color=#dddddd>22</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The alternative to starting with something small and evolving it
+is to plan in advance what you're going to do. And planning does
+usually seem the more responsible choice. It sounds more organized
+to say "we're going to do x and then y and then z" than "we're going
+to try x and see what happens." And it is more <i>organized</i>; it just
+doesn't work as well.<br /><br />Planning per se isn't good. It's sometimes necessary, but it's a
+necessary evil &mdash; a response to unforgiving conditions. It's something
+you have to do because you're working with inflexible media, or
+because you need to coordinate the efforts of a lot of people. If
+you keep projects small and use flexible media, you don't have to
+plan as much, and your designs can evolve instead.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Take as much risk as you can afford. In an efficient market, risk
+is proportionate to reward, so don't look for certainty, but for a
+bet with high expected value. If you're not failing occasionally,
+you're probably being too conservative.<br /><br />Though conservatism is usually associated with the old, it's the
+young who tend to make this mistake. Inexperience makes them fear
+risk, but it's when you're young that you can afford the most.<br /><br />Even a project that fails can be valuable. In the process of working
+on it, you'll have crossed territory few others have seen, and
+encountered questions few others have asked. And there's probably
+no better source of questions than the ones you encounter in trying
+to do something slightly too hard.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages
+of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy,
+time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge,
+efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of
+the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.<br /><br />The old also have the advantage of knowing which advantages they
+have. The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest
+is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time.
+The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly
+frivolous ways: to learn about something you don't need to know
+about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just
+because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something.<br /><br />That "slightly" is an important qualification. Spend time lavishly
+when you're young, but don't simply waste it. There's a big difference
+between doing something you worry might be a waste of time and doing
+something you know for sure will be. The former is at least a bet,
+and possibly a better one than you think.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f23n"><font color=#dddddd>23</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The most subtle advantage of youth, or more precisely of inexperience,
+is that you're seeing everything with fresh eyes. When your brain
+embraces an idea for the first time, sometimes the two don't fit
+together perfectly. Usually the problem is with your brain, but
+occasionally it's with the idea. A piece of it sticks out awkwardly
+and jabs you when you think about it. People who are used to the
+idea have learned to ignore it, but you have the opportunity not
+to.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f24n"><font color=#dddddd>24</font></a>]</font><br /><br />So when you're learning about something for the first time, pay
+attention to things that seem wrong or missing. You'll be tempted
+to ignore them, since there's a 99% chance the problem is with you.
+And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keep
+progressing. But don't forget about them. When you've gotten further
+into the subject, come back and check if they're still there. If
+they're still viable in the light of your present knowledge, they
+probably represent an undiscovered idea.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge you get from experience
+is to know what you <i>don't</i> have to worry about. The young know all
+the things that could matter, but not their relative importance.
+So they worry equally about everything, when they should worry much
+more about a few things and hardly at all about the rest.<br /><br />But what you don't know is only half the problem with inexperience.
+The other half is what you do know that ain't so. You arrive at
+adulthood with your head full of nonsense &mdash; bad habits you've
+acquired and false things you've been taught &mdash; and you won't be
+able to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense in
+the way of whatever type of work you want to do.<br /><br />Much of the nonsense left in your head is left there by schools.
+We're so used to schools that we unconsciously treat going to school
+as identical with learning, but in fact schools have all sorts of
+strange qualities that warp our ideas about learning and thinking.<br /><br />For example, schools induce passivity. Since you were a small child,
+there was an authority at the front of the class telling all of you
+what you had to learn and then measuring whether you did. But neither
+classes nor tests are intrinsic to learning; they're just artifacts
+of the way schools are usually designed.<br /><br />The sooner you overcome this passivity, the better. If you're still
+in school, try thinking of your education as your project, and your
+teachers as working for you rather than vice versa. That may seem
+a stretch, but it's not merely some weird thought experiment. It's
+the truth economically, and in the best case it's the truth
+intellectually as well. The best teachers don't want to be your
+bosses. They'd prefer it if you pushed ahead, using them as a source
+of advice, rather than being pulled by them through the material.<br /><br />Schools also give you a misleading impression of what work is like.
+In school they tell you what the problems are, and they're almost
+always soluble using no more than you've been taught so far. In
+real life you have to figure out what the problems are, and you
+often don't know if they're soluble at all.<br /><br />But perhaps the worst thing schools do to you is train you to win
+by hacking the test. You can't do great work by doing that. You
+can't trick God. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut. The way
+to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others
+have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you
+a "big break." Even if this were true, the best way to get it would
+be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential
+people.<br /><br />And don't take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that
+impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different
+from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection
+committees are only meaningful to the extent that they're part of
+a feedback loop, and very few are.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+People new to a field will often copy existing work. There's nothing
+inherently bad about that. There's no better way to learn how
+something works than by trying to reproduce it. Nor does
+copying necessarily make your work unoriginal. Originality is the
+presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones.<br /><br />There's a good way to copy and a bad way. If you're going to copy
+something, do it openly instead of furtively, or worse still,
+unconsciously. This is what's meant by the famously misattributed
+phrase "Great artists steal." The really dangerous kind of copying,
+the kind that gives copying a bad name, is the kind that's done
+without realizing it, because you're nothing more than a train
+running on tracks laid down by someone else. But at the other
+extreme, copying can be a sign of superiority rather than subordination.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f25n"><font color=#dddddd>25</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In many fields it's almost inevitable that your early work will be
+in some sense based on other people's. Projects rarely arise in a
+vacuum. They're usually a reaction to previous work. When you're
+first starting out, you don't have any previous work; if you're
+going to react to something, it has to be someone else's. Once
+you're established, you can react to your own. But while the former
+gets called derivative and the latter doesn't, structurally the two
+cases are more similar than they seem.<br /><br />Oddly enough, the very novelty of the most novel ideas sometimes
+makes them seem at first to be more derivative than they are. New
+discoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations of
+existing things, <i>even by their discoverers</i>, because there isn't
+yet the conceptual vocabulary to express them.<br /><br />There are definitely some dangers to copying, though. One is that
+you'll tend to copy old things &mdash; things that were in their day at
+the frontier of knowledge, but no longer are.<br /><br />And when you do copy something, don't copy every feature of it.
+Some will make you ridiculous if you do. Don't copy the manner of
+an eminent 50 year old professor if you're 18, for example, or the
+idiom of a Renaissance poem hundreds of years later.<br /><br />Some of the features of things you admire are flaws they succeeded
+despite. Indeed, the features that are easiest to imitate are the
+most likely to be the flaws.<br /><br />This is particularly true for behavior. Some talented people are
+jerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the inexperienced that
+being a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't; being talented
+is merely how they get away with it.<br /><br />One of the most powerful kinds of copying is to copy something from
+one field into another. History is so full of chance discoveries
+of this type that it's probably worth giving chance a hand by
+deliberately learning about other kinds of work. You can take ideas
+from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors.<br /><br />Negative examples can be as inspiring as positive ones. In fact you
+can sometimes learn more from things done badly than from things
+done well; sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's
+missing.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in one
+place, it's usually a good idea to visit for a while. It will
+increase your ambition, and also, by showing you that these people
+are human, increase your self-confidence.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f26n"><font color=#dddddd>26</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If you're earnest you'll probably get a warmer welcome than you
+might expect. Most people who are very good at something are happy
+to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested. If they're
+really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist's
+interest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about their
+hobbies.<br /><br />It may take some effort to find the people who are really good,
+though. Doing great work has such prestige that in some places,
+particularly universities, there's a polite fiction that everyone
+is engaged in it. And that is far from true. People within universities
+can't say so openly, but the quality of the work being done in
+different departments varies immensely. Some departments have people
+doing great work; others have in the past; others never have.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Seek out the best colleagues. There are a lot of projects that can't
+be done alone, and even if you're working on one that can be, it's
+good to have other people to encourage you and to bounce ideas off.<br /><br />Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect
+you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.<br /><br />Quality is more important than quantity in colleagues. It's better
+to have one or two great ones than a building full of pretty good
+ones. In fact it's not merely better, but necessary, judging from
+history: the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests
+that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great
+work and not.<br /><br />How do you know when you have sufficiently good colleagues? In my
+experience, when you do, you know. Which means if you're unsure,
+you probably don't. But it may be possible to give a more concrete
+answer than that. Here's an attempt: sufficiently good colleagues
+offer <i>surprising</i> insights. They can see and do things that you
+can't. So if you have a handful of colleagues good enough to keep
+you on your toes in this sense, you're probably over the threshold.<br /><br />Most of us can benefit from collaborating with colleagues, but some
+projects require people on a larger scale, and starting one of those
+is not for everyone. If you want to run a project like that, you'll
+have to become a manager, and managing well takes aptitude and
+interest like any other kind of work. If you don't have them, there
+is no middle path: you must either force yourself to learn management
+as a second language, or avoid such projects.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f27n"><font color=#dddddd>27</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working
+on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a
+living organism.<br /><br />Morale starts with your view of life. You're more likely to do great
+work if you're an optimist, and more likely to if you think of
+yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim.<br /><br />Indeed, work can to some extent protect you from your problems. If
+you choose work that's pure, its very difficulties will serve as a
+refuge from the difficulties of everyday life. If this is escapism,
+it's a very productive form of it, and one that has been used by
+some of the greatest minds in history.<br /><br />Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which
+increases your morale and helps you do even better work. But this
+cycle also operates in the other direction: if you're not doing
+good work, that can demoralize you and make it even harder to. Since
+it matters so much for this cycle to be running in the right
+direction, it can be a good idea to switch to easier work when
+you're stuck, just so you start to get something done.<br /><br />One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow
+setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting.
+You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly considering
+setbacks a part of your process. Solving hard problems always
+involves some backtracking.<br /><br />Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the
+desire to. So "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" isn't
+quite right. It should be: If at first you don't succeed, either
+try again, or backtrack and then try again.<br /><br />"Never give up" is also not quite right. Obviously there are times
+when it's the right choice to eject. A more precise version would
+be: Never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than you
+need to. Corollary: Never abandon the root node.<br /><br />It's not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more
+than it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It depends
+how fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain from
+bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+An audience is a critical component of morale. If you're a scholar,
+your audience may be your peers; in the arts, it may be an audience
+in the traditional sense. Either way it doesn't need to be big.
+The value of an audience doesn't grow anything like linearly with
+its size. Which is bad news if you're famous, but good news if
+you're just starting out, because it means a small but dedicated
+audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people
+genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough.<br /><br />To the extent you can, avoid letting intermediaries come between
+you and your audience. In some types of work this is inevitable,
+but it's so liberating to escape it that you might be better off
+switching to an adjacent type if that will let you go direct.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f28n"><font color=#dddddd>28</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your
+morale. You'll find there are some who increase your energy and
+others who decrease it, and the effect someone has is not always
+what you'd expect. Seek out the people who increase your energy and
+avoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there's someone
+you need to take care of, that takes precedence.<br /><br />Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work,
+or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're
+ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition;
+so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you,
+or does and doesn't care.<br /><br />Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it's
+important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly,
+eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds of
+drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise
+because they're good for thinking.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f29n"><font color=#dddddd>29</font></a>]</font><br /><br />People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone
+else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact,
+if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous <i>not</i> to be productive.
+People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to
+become bitter.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+It's ok to want to impress other people, but choose the right people.
+The opinion of people you respect is signal. Fame, which is the
+opinion of a much larger group you might or might not respect, just
+adds noise.<br /><br />The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and
+sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough,
+you'll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type of
+work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.<br /><br />Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choose
+the problem for you; don't let yourself get drawn into chasing
+something just because others are. In fact, don't let competitors
+make you do anything much more specific than work harder.<br /><br />Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows
+more than you do about what's worth paying attention to.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Notice how often that word has come up. If you asked an oracle the
+secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single
+word, my bet would be on "curiosity."<br /><br />That doesn't translate directly to advice. It's not enough just to
+be curious, and you can't command curiosity anyway. But you can
+nurture it and let it drive you.<br /><br />Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will
+choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to
+notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole
+process is a kind of dance with curiosity.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could.
+But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it
+this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so
+you're already further along than you might realize, because the
+set of people willing to want to is small.<br /><br />The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal,
+mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and
+luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can
+ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to
+do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest.
+Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will
+combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?<br /><br />Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different
+ways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered.
+Out of all those different types of work, the one you're most suited
+for is probably a pretty close match. Probably a comically close
+match. It's just a question of finding it, and how far into it your
+ability and interest can take you. And you can only answer that by
+trying.<br /><br />Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds
+them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous
+to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if
+you tried something like that, you'd fail. Presumably the calculation
+is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do
+great work. But that's what's going on subconsciously; they shy
+away from the question.<br /><br />So I'm going to pull a sneaky trick on you. Do you want to do great
+work, or not? Now you have to decide consciously. Sorry about that.
+I wouldn't have done it to a general audience. But we already know
+you're interested.<br /><br />Don't worry about being presumptuous. You don't have to tell anyone.
+And if it's too hard and you fail, so what? Lots of people have
+worse problems than that. In fact you'll be lucky if it's the worst
+problem you have.<br /><br />Yes, you'll have to work hard. But again, lots of people have to
+work hard. And if you're working on something you find very
+interesting, which you necessarily will if you're on the right path,
+the work will probably feel less burdensome than a lot of your
+peers'.<br /><br />The discoveries are out there, waiting to be made. Why not by you?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+I don't think you could give a precise definition of what
+counts as great work. Doing great work means doing something important
+so well that you expand people's ideas of what's possible. But
+there's no threshold for importance. It's a matter of degree, and
+often hard to judge at the time anyway. So I'd rather people focused
+on developing their interests rather than worrying about whether
+they're important or not. Just try to do something amazing, and
+leave it to future generations to say if you succeeded.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies in
+everyday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doing
+this about nontrivial things. Which may help explain why people's
+reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha!<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+That second qualifier is critical. If you're excited about
+something most authorities discount, but you can't give a more
+precise explanation than "they don't get it," then you're starting
+to drift into the territory of cranks.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+Finding something to work on is not simply a matter of finding
+a match between the current version of you and a list of known
+problems. You'll often have to coevolve with the problem. That's
+why it can sometimes be so hard to figure out what to work on. The
+search space is huge. It's the cartesian product of all possible
+types of work, both known and yet to be discovered, and all possible
+future versions of you.<br /><br />There's no way you could search this whole space, so you have to
+rely on heuristics to generate promising paths through it and hope
+the best matches will be clustered. Which they will not always be;
+different types of work have been collected together as much by
+accidents of history as by the intrinsic similarities between them.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do
+great work, but one of the more subtle is that, by casting a wide
+net, they're more likely to find the right thing to work on in the
+first place.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+It can also be dangerous to make things for an audience you
+feel is less sophisticated than you, if that causes you to talk
+down to them. You can make a lot of money doing that, if you do it
+in a sufficiently cynical way, but it's not the route to great work.
+Not that anyone using this m.o. would care.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+This idea I learned from Hardy's <i>A Mathematician's Apology</i>,
+which I recommend to anyone ambitious to do great work, in any
+field.<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+Just as we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate
+what we can do over several years, we overestimate the damage done
+by procrastinating for a day and underestimate the damage done by
+procrastinating for several years.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+You can't usually get paid for doing exactly what you want,
+especially early on. There are two options: get paid for doing work
+close to what you want and hope to push it closer, or get paid for
+doing something else entirely and do your own projects on the side.
+Both can work, but both have drawbacks: in the first approach your
+work is compromised by default, and in the second you have to fight
+to get time to do it.<br /><br />[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
+If you set your life up right, it will deliver the focus-relax
+cycle automatically. The perfect setup is an office you work in and
+that you walk to and from.<br /><br />[<a name="f11n"><font color=#000000>11</font></a>]
+There may be some very unworldly people who do great work
+without consciously trying to. If you want to expand this rule to
+cover that case, it becomes: Don't try to be anything except the
+best.<br /><br />[<a name="f12n"><font color=#000000>12</font></a>]
+This gets more complicated in work like acting, where the
+goal is to adopt a fake persona. But even here it's possible to be
+affected. Perhaps the rule in such fields should be to avoid
+<i>unintentional</i> affectation.<br /><br />[<a name="f13n"><font color=#000000>13</font></a>]
+It's safe to have beliefs that you treat as unquestionable
+if and only if they're also unfalsifiable. For example, it's safe
+to have the principle that everyone should be treated equally under
+the law, because a sentence with a "should" in it isn't really a
+statement about the world and is therefore hard to disprove. And
+if there's no evidence that could disprove one of your principles,
+there can't be any facts you'd need to ignore in order to preserve
+it.<br /><br />[<a name="f14n"><font color=#000000>14</font></a>]
+Affectation is easier to cure than intellectual dishonesty.
+Affectation is often a shortcoming of the young that burns off in
+time, while intellectual dishonesty is more of a character flaw.<br /><br />[<a name="f15n"><font color=#000000>15</font></a>]
+Obviously you don't have to be working at the exact moment
+you have the idea, but you'll probably have been working fairly
+recently.<br /><br />[<a name="f16n"><font color=#000000>16</font></a>]
+Some say psychoactive drugs have a similar effect. I'm
+skeptical, but also almost totally ignorant of their effects.<br /><br />[<a name="f17n"><font color=#000000>17</font></a>]
+For example you might give the nth most important topic
+(m-1)/m^n of your attention, for some m > 1. You couldn't allocate
+your attention so precisely, of course, but this at least gives an
+idea of a reasonable distribution.<br /><br />[<a name="f18n"><font color=#000000>18</font></a>]
+The principles defining a religion have to be mistaken.
+Otherwise anyone might adopt them, and there would be nothing to
+distinguish the adherents of the religion from everyone else.<br /><br />[<a name="f19n"><font color=#000000>19</font></a>]
+It might be a good exercise to try writing down a list of
+questions you wondered about in your youth. You might find you're
+now in a position to do something about some of them.<br /><br />[<a name="f20n"><font color=#000000>20</font></a>]
+The connection between originality and uncertainty causes a
+strange phenomenon: because the conventional-minded are more certain
+than the independent-minded, this tends to give them the upper hand
+in disputes, even though they're generally stupider.
+<blockquote>
+   The best lack all conviction, while the worst<br>
+   Are full of passionate intensity.
+</blockquote>
+[<a name="f21n"><font color=#000000>21</font></a>]
+Derived from Linus Pauling's "If you want to have good ideas,
+you must have many ideas."<br /><br />[<a name="f22n"><font color=#000000>22</font></a>]
+Attacking a project as a "toy" is similar to attacking a
+statement as "inappropriate." It means that no more substantial
+criticism can be made to stick.<br /><br />[<a name="f23n"><font color=#000000>23</font></a>]
+One way to tell whether you're wasting time is to ask if
+you're producing or consuming. Writing computer games is less likely
+to be a waste of time than playing them, and playing games where
+you create something is less likely to be a waste of time than
+playing games where you don't.<br /><br />[<a name="f24n"><font color=#000000>24</font></a>]
+Another related advantage is that if you haven't said anything
+publicly yet, you won't be biased toward evidence that supports
+your earlier conclusions. With sufficient integrity you could achieve
+eternal youth in this respect, but few manage to. For most people,
+having previously published opinions has an effect similar to
+ideology, just in quantity 1.<br /><br />[<a name="f25n"><font color=#000000>25</font></a>]
+In the early 1630s Daniel Mytens made a painting of Henrietta
+Maria handing a laurel wreath to Charles I. Van Dyck then painted
+his own version to show how much better he was.<br /><br />[<a name="f26n"><font color=#000000>26</font></a>]
+I'm being deliberately vague about what a place is. As of
+this writing, being in the same physical place has advantages that
+are hard to duplicate, but that could change.<br /><br />[<a name="f27n"><font color=#000000>27</font></a>]
+This is false when the work the other people have to do is
+very constrained, as with SETI@home or Bitcoin. It may be possible
+to expand the area in which it's false by defining similarly
+restricted protocols with more freedom of action in the nodes.<br /><br />[<a name="f28n"><font color=#000000>28</font></a>]
+Corollary: Building something that enables people to go around
+intermediaries and engage directly with their audience is probably
+a good idea.<br /><br />[<a name="f29n"><font color=#000000>29</font></a>]
+It may be helpful always to walk or run the same route, because
+that frees attention for thinking. It feels that way to me, and
+there is some historical evidence for it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b> 
+to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Pam Graham, Tom Howard,
+Patrick Hsu, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston, Henry Lloyd-Baker,
+Bob Metcalfe, Ben Miller, Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, Courtenay
+Pipkin, Joris Poort, Mieke Roos, Rajat Suri, Harj Taggar, Garry
+Tan, and my younger son for suggestions and for reading drafts.
+</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<html><head><title>Startup = Growth</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebcf7><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebcf7 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/startup-growth-2.gif" width="147" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Startup = Growth" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+September 2012<br /><br />A startup is a company designed to grow fast.  Being newly founded
+does not in itself make a company a startup.  Nor is it necessary
+for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or
+have some sort of "exit."  The only essential thing is growth.
+Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.<br /><br />If you want to start one it's important to understand that. Startups
+are so hard that you can't be pointed off to the side and hope to
+succeed.  You have to know that growth is what you're after.  The
+good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into
+place.  Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost
+every decision you face.<br /><br />
+<b>Redwoods</b><br /><br />Let's start with a distinction that should be obvious but is often
+overlooked: not every newly founded company is a startup.  Millions
+of companies are started every year in the US.  Only a tiny fraction
+are startups.  Most are service businesses &mdash; restaurants, barbershops,
+plumbers, and so on.  These are not startups, except in a few unusual
+cases.  A barbershop isn't designed to grow fast.  Whereas a search
+engine, for example, is.<br /><br />When I say startups are designed to grow fast, I mean it in two
+senses.  Partly I mean designed in the sense of intended, because
+most startups fail.  But I also mean startups are different by
+nature, in the same way a redwood seedling has a different destiny
+from a bean sprout.<br /><br />That difference is why there's a distinct word, "startup," for
+companies designed to grow fast.  If all companies were essentially
+similar, but some through luck or the efforts of their founders
+ended up growing very fast, we wouldn't need a separate word.  We
+could just talk about super-successful companies and less successful
+ones.  But in fact startups do have a different sort of DNA from
+other businesses.  Google is not just a barbershop whose founders
+were unusually lucky and hard-working.  Google was different from
+the beginning.<br /><br />To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big
+market.  That's the difference between Google and a barbershop.  A
+barbershop doesn't scale.<br /><br />For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots
+of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people.  Barbershops
+are doing fine in the (a) department.  Almost everyone needs their
+hair cut.  The problem for a barbershop, as for any retail
+establishment, is (b).  A barbershop serves customers in person,
+and few will travel far for a haircut.  And even if they did, the
+barbershop couldn't accomodate them. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Writing software is a great way to solve (b), but you can still end
+up constrained in (a).  If you write software to teach Tibetan to
+Hungarian speakers, you'll be able to reach most of the people who
+want it, but there won't be many of them.   If you make software
+to teach English to Chinese speakers, however, you're in startup
+territory.<br /><br />Most businesses are tightly constrained in (a) or (b).  The distinctive
+feature of successful startups is that they're not.<br /><br />
+<b>Ideas</b><br /><br />It might seem that it would always be better to start a startup
+than an ordinary business.  If you're going to start a company, why
+not start the type with the most potential?  The catch is that this
+is a (fairly) efficient market.   If you write software to teach
+Tibetan to Hungarians, you won't have much competition.  If you
+write software to teach English to Chinese speakers, you'll face
+ferocious competition, precisely because that's such a larger prize.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The constraints that limit ordinary companies also protect them.
+That's the tradeoff.  If you start a barbershop, you only have to
+compete with other local barbers.  If you start a search engine you
+have to compete with the whole world.<br /><br />The most important thing that the constraints on a normal business
+protect it from is not competition, however, but the difficulty of
+coming up with new ideas.  If you open a bar in a particular
+neighborhood, as well as limiting your potential and protecting you
+from competitors, that geographic constraint also helps define your
+company.  Bar + neighborhood is a sufficient idea for a small
+business.  Similarly for companies constrained in (a).  Your niche
+both protects and defines you.<br /><br />Whereas if you want to start a startup, you're probably going to
+have to think of something fairly novel.  A startup has to make
+something it can deliver to a large market, and ideas of that type
+are so valuable that all the obvious ones are already taken.<br /><br />That space of ideas has been so thoroughly picked over that a startup
+generally has to work on something everyone else has overlooked.
+I was going to write that one has to make a conscious effort to
+find ideas everyone else has overlooked.  But that's not how most
+startups get started.  Usually successful startups happen because
+the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas
+few others can see seem obvious to them.  Perhaps later they step
+back and notice they've found an idea in everyone else's blind spot,
+and from that point make a deliberate effort to stay there. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font>
+But at the moment when successful startups get started, much of the
+innovation is unconscious.<br /><br />What's different about successful founders is that they can see
+different problems.  It's a particularly good combination both to
+be good at technology and to face problems that can be solved by
+it, because technology changes so rapidly that formerly bad ideas
+often become good without anyone noticing.  Steve Wozniak's problem
+was that he wanted his own computer.  That was an unusual problem
+to have in 1975.  But technological change was about to make it a
+much more common one.  Because he not only wanted a computer but
+knew how to build them, Wozniak was able to make himself one.  And
+the problem he solved for himself became one that Apple solved for
+millions of people in the coming years.  But by the time it was
+obvious to ordinary people that this was a big market, Apple was
+already established.<br /><br />Google has similar origins.  Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to
+search the web.  But unlike most people they had the technical
+expertise both to notice that existing search engines were not as
+good as they could be, and to know how to improve them.  Over the
+next few years their problem became everyone's problem, as the web
+grew to a size where you didn't have to be a picky search expert
+to notice the old algorithms weren't good enough.  But as happened
+with Apple, by the time everyone else realized how important search
+was, Google was entrenched.<br /><br />That's one connection between startup ideas and technology.  Rapid
+change in one area uncovers big, soluble problems in other areas.
+Sometimes the changes are advances, and what they change is solubility.
+That was the kind of change that yielded Apple; advances in chip
+technology finally let Steve Wozniak design a computer he could
+afford.  But in Google's case the most important change was the
+growth of the web. What changed there was not solubility but bigness.<br /><br />The other connection between startups and technology is that startups
+create new ways of doing things, and new ways of doing things are,
+in the broader sense of the word, new technology.  
+When a startup both begins with an
+idea exposed by technological change and makes a product consisting
+of technology in the narrower sense (what used to be called "high
+technology"), it's easy to conflate the two.  But the two connections
+are distinct and in principle one could start a startup that was
+neither driven by technological change, nor whose product consisted
+of technology except in the broader sense. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><b>Rate</b><br /><br />How fast does a company have to grow to be considered a startup?
+There's no precise answer to that.  "Startup" is a pole, not a
+threshold.  Starting one is at first no more than a declaration of
+one's ambitions.  You're committing not just to starting a company,
+but to starting a fast growing one, and you're thus committing to
+search for one of the rare ideas of that type.  But at first you
+have no more than commitment.  Starting a startup is like being an
+actor in that respect.  "Actor" too is a pole rather than a threshold.
+At the beginning of his career, an actor is a waiter who goes to
+auditions.  Getting work makes him a successful actor, but he doesn't
+only become an actor when he's successful.<br /><br />So the real question is not what growth rate makes a company a
+startup, but what growth rate successful startups tend to have.
+For founders that's more than a theoretical question, because it's
+equivalent to asking if they're on the right path.<br /><br />The growth of a successful startup usually has three phases:
+<ol>
+<li> There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup
+  tries to figure out what it's doing.<br /><br /><li> As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people
+  want and how to reach those people, there's a period of rapid
+  growth.<br /><br /><li> Eventually a successful startup will grow into a big company.
+  Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because
+  the company is starting to bump up against the limits of the
+  markets it serves.  
+  <font color=#999999>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#999999>5</font></a>]</font>
+</ol>
+Together these three phases produce an S-curve.  The phase whose
+growth defines the startup is the second one, the ascent.  Its
+length and slope determine how big the company will be.<br /><br />The slope is the company's growth rate.  If there's one number every
+founder should always know, it's the company's growth rate.  That's
+the measure of a startup.  If you don't know that number, you don't
+even know if you're doing well or badly.<br /><br />When I first meet founders and ask what their growth rate is,
+sometimes they tell me "we get about a hundred new customers a
+month."  That's not a rate.  What matters is not the absolute number
+of new customers, but the ratio of new customers to existing ones.
+If you're really getting a constant number of new customers every
+month, you're in trouble, because that means your growth rate is
+decreasing.<br /><br />During Y Combinator we measure growth rate per week, partly because
+there is so little time before Demo Day, and partly because startups
+early on need frequent feedback from their users to tweak what
+they're doing. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#999999>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week.  If you can hit 10% a
+week you're doing exceptionally well.  If you can only manage 1%,
+it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing.<br /><br />The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue.  The next
+best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users.
+That's a reasonable proxy for revenue growth because whenever the
+startup does start trying to make money, their revenues will probably
+be a constant multiple of active users. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#999999>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Compass</b><br /><br />We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they
+can hit, and then just try to hit it every week.  The key word here
+is "just." If they decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that
+number, they're successful for that week.  There's nothing more
+they need to do.  But if they don't hit it, they've failed in the
+only thing that mattered, and should be correspondingly alarmed.<br /><br />Programmers will recognize what we're doing here.  We're turning
+starting a startup into an optimization problem.  And anyone who
+has tried optimizing code knows how wonderfully effective that sort
+of narrow focus can be.  Optimizing code means taking an existing
+program and changing it to use less of something, usually time or
+memory.  You don't have to think about what the program should do,
+just make it faster.  For most programmers this is very satisfying
+work.  The narrow focus makes it a sort of puzzle, and you're
+generally surprised how fast you can solve it.<br /><br />Focusing on hitting a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly
+multifarious problem of starting a startup to a single problem.
+You can use that target growth rate to make all your decisions for
+you; anything that gets you the growth you need is ipso facto right.
+Should you spend two days at a conference?  Should you hire another
+programmer?  Should you focus more on marketing?  Should you spend
+time courting some big customer?  Should you add x feature? Whatever
+gets you your target growth rate. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#999999>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Judging yourself by weekly growth doesn't mean you can look no more
+than a week ahead.  Once you experience the pain of missing your
+target one week (it was the only thing that mattered, and you failed
+at it), you become interested in anything that could spare you such
+pain in the future.  So you'll be willing for example to hire another
+programmer, who won't contribute to this week's growth but perhaps
+in a month will have implemented some new feature that will get you
+more users.   But only if (a) the distraction of hiring someone
+won't make you miss your numbers in the short term, and (b) you're
+sufficiently worried about whether you can keep hitting your numbers
+without hiring someone new.<br /><br />It's not that you don't think about the future, just that you think
+about it no more than necessary.<br /><br />In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into
+trouble.  They could end up on a local maximum.  But in practice
+that never happens.  Having to hit a growth number every week forces
+founders to act, and acting versus not acting is the high bit of
+succeeding.  Nine times out of ten, sitting around strategizing is
+just a form of procrastination.  Whereas founders' intuitions about
+which hill to climb are usually better than they realize.  Plus the
+maxima in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated.
+Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.<br /><br />The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it can
+actually discover startup ideas.  You can use the need for growth
+as a form of evolutionary pressure.  If you start out with some
+initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10%
+weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than
+you meant to start.  But anything that grows consistently at 10% a
+week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with.<br /><br />There's a parallel here to small businesses.  Just as the constraint
+of being located in a particular neighborhood helps define a bar,
+the constraint of growing at a certain rate can help define a
+startup.<br /><br />You'll generally do best to follow that constraint wherever it leads
+rather than being influenced by some initial vision, just as a
+scientist is better off following the truth wherever it leads rather
+than being influenced by what he wishes were the case.  When Richard
+Feynman said that the imagination of nature was greater than the
+imagination of man, he meant that if you just keep following the
+truth you'll discover cooler things than you could ever have made
+up. For startups, growth is a constraint much like truth. Every
+successful startup is at least partly a product of the imagination
+of growth.  
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#999999>9</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Value</b><br /><br />It's hard to find something that grows consistently at several
+percent a week, but if you do you may have found something surprisingly
+valuable.  If we project forward we see why.<br /><br /><center>
+<table border=1 cellpadding=4 cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td align=center><font size=2>weekly<td align=center><font size=2>yearly</tr>
+<tr><td align=right><font size=2>1%</font><td align=right><font size=2>1.7x</tr>
+<tr><td align=right><font size=2>2%</font><td align=right><font size=2>2.8x</tr>
+<tr><td align=right><font size=2>5%</font><td align=right><font size=2>12.6x</tr>
+<tr><td align=right><font size=2>7%</font><td align=right><font size=2>33.7x</tr>
+<tr><td align=right><font size=2>10%</font><td align=right><font size=2>142.0x</tr>
+</table>
+</center>
+<p>
+A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a
+company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x.  A company making
+$1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a
+week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is less than
+a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley.  A startup
+that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a
+month. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#999999>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Our ancestors must rarely have encountered cases of exponential
+growth, because our intuitions are no guide here.  What happens
+to fast growing startups tends to surprise even the founders.<br /><br />Small variations in growth rate produce qualitatively different
+outcomes.  That's why there's a separate word for startups, and why
+startups do things that ordinary companies don't, like raising money
+and getting acquired.  And, strangely enough, it's also why they
+fail so frequently.<br /><br />Considering how valuable a successful startup can become, anyone
+familiar with the concept of expected value would be surprised if
+the failure rate weren't high.  If a successful startup could make
+a founder $100 million, then even if the chance of succeeding were
+only 1%, the expected value of starting one would be $1 million.
+And the probability of a group of sufficiently smart and determined
+founders succeeding on that scale might be significantly over 1%.
+For the right people &mdash; e.g. the young Bill Gates &mdash; the probability
+might be 20% or even 50%.  So it's not surprising that so many want
+to take a shot at it.  In an efficient market, the number of failed
+startups should be proportionate to the size of the successes.  And
+since the latter is huge the former should be too. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f11n"><font color=#999999>11</font></a>]</font><br /><br />What this means is that at any given time, the great majority of
+startups will be working on something that's never going to go
+anywhere, and yet glorifying their doomed efforts with the grandiose
+title of "startup."<br /><br />This doesn't bother me.  It's the same with other high-beta vocations,
+like being an actor or a novelist.  I've long since gotten used to
+it.  But it seems to bother a lot of people, particularly those
+who've started ordinary businesses.  Many are annoyed that these
+so-called startups get all the attention, when hardly any of them
+will amount to anything.<br /><br />If they stepped back and looked at the whole picture they might be
+less indignant.  The mistake they're making is that by basing their
+opinions on anecdotal evidence they're implicitly judging by the
+median rather than the average.  If you judge by the median startup,
+the whole concept of a startup seems like a fraud.  You have to
+invent a bubble to explain why founders want to start them or
+investors want to fund them.  But it's a mistake to use the median
+in a domain with so much variation.  If you look at the average
+outcome rather than the median, you can understand why investors
+like them, and why, if they aren't median people, it's a rational
+choice for founders to start them.<br /><br />
+<b>Deals</b><br /><br />Why do investors like startups so much?  Why are they so hot to
+invest in photo-sharing apps, rather than solid money-making
+businesses?  Not only for the obvious reason.<br /><br />The test of any investment is the ratio of return to risk.  Startups
+pass that test because although they're appallingly risky, the
+returns when they do succeed are so high.  But that's not the only
+reason investors like startups.  An ordinary slower-growing business
+might have just as good a ratio of return to risk, if both were
+lower.  So why are VCs interested only in high-growth companies?
+The reason is that they get paid by getting their capital back,
+ideally after the startup IPOs, or failing that when it's acquired.<br /><br />The other way to get returns from an investment is in the form of
+dividends.  Why isn't there a parallel VC industry that invests in
+ordinary companies in return for a percentage of their profits?
+Because it's too easy for people who control a private company to
+funnel its revenues to themselves (e.g. by buying overpriced
+components from a supplier they control) while making it look like
+the company is making little profit.  Anyone who invested in private
+companies in return for dividends would have to pay close attention
+to their books.<br /><br />The reason VCs like to invest in startups is not simply the returns,
+but also because such investments are so easy to oversee.  The
+founders can't enrich themselves without also enriching the investors.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f12n"><font color=#999999>12</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Why do founders want to take the VCs' money?  Growth, again.  The
+constraint between good ideas and growth operates in both directions.
+It's not merely that you need a scalable idea to grow.  If you have
+such an idea and don't grow fast enough, competitors will.  Growing
+too slowly is particularly dangerous in a business with network
+effects, which the best startups usually have to some degree.<br /><br />Almost every company needs some amount of funding to get started.
+But startups often raise money even when they are or could be
+profitable.  It might seem foolish to sell stock in a profitable
+company for less than you think it will later be worth, but it's
+no more foolish than buying insurance.  Fundamentally that's how
+the most successful startups view fundraising.  They could grow the
+company on its own revenues, but the extra money and help supplied
+by VCs will let them grow even faster.  Raising money lets you
+<i>choose</i> your growth rate.<br /><br />Money to grow faster is always at the command of the most successful
+startups, because the VCs need them more than they need the VCs.
+A profitable startup could if it wanted just grow on its own revenues.
+Growing slower might be slightly dangerous, but chances are it
+wouldn't kill them.  Whereas VCs need to invest in startups, and
+in particular the most successful startups, or they'll be out of
+business.  Which means that any sufficiently promising startup will
+be offered money on terms they'd be crazy to refuse.  And yet because
+of the scale of the successes in the startup business, VCs can still
+make money from such investments.  You'd have to be crazy to believe
+your company was going to become as valuable as a high growth rate
+can make it, but some do.<br /><br />Pretty much every successful startup will get acquisition offers
+too.  Why?  What is it about startups that makes other companies
+want to buy them? 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f13n"><font color=#999999>13</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Fundamentally the same thing that makes everyone else want the stock
+of successful startups: a rapidly growing company is valuable.  It's
+a good thing eBay bought Paypal, for example, because Paypal is now
+responsible for 43% of their sales and probably more of their growth.<br /><br />But acquirers have an additional reason to want startups.  A rapidly
+growing company is not merely valuable, but dangerous.  If it keeps
+expanding, it might expand into the acquirer's own territory.  Most
+product acquisitions have some component of fear.  Even if an
+acquirer isn't threatened by the startup itself, they might be
+alarmed at the thought of what a competitor could do with it.  And
+because startups are in this sense doubly valuable to acquirers,
+acquirers will often pay more than an ordinary investor would. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f14n"><font color=#999999>14</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+<b>Understand</b><br /><br />The combination of founders, investors, and acquirers forms a natural
+ecosystem.  It works so well that those who don't understand it are
+driven to invent conspiracy theories to explain how neatly things
+sometimes turn out.  Just as our ancestors did to explain the
+apparently too neat workings of the natural world.  But there is
+no secret cabal making it all work.<br /><br />If you start from the mistaken assumption that Instagram was
+worthless, you have to invent a secret boss to force Mark Zuckerberg
+to buy it.  To anyone who knows Mark Zuckerberg, that is the reductio
+ad absurdum of the initial assumption.  The reason he bought Instagram
+was that it was valuable and dangerous, and what made it so was
+growth.<br /><br />If you want to understand startups, understand growth.  Growth
+drives everything in this world.  Growth is why startups usually
+work on technology &mdash; because ideas for fast growing companies are
+so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those
+recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source
+of rapid change.  Growth is why it's a rational choice economically
+for so many founders to try starting a startup: growth makes the
+successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high
+even though the risk is too.  Growth is why VCs want to invest in
+startups: not just because the returns are high but also because
+generating returns from capital gains is easier to manage than
+generating returns from dividends.  Growth explains why the most
+successful startups take VC money even if they don't need to: it
+lets them choose their growth rate.  And growth explains why
+successful startups almost invariably get acquisition offers.  To
+acquirers a fast-growing company is not merely valuable but dangerous
+too.<br /><br />It's not just that if you want to succeed in some domain, you have
+to understand the forces driving it.  Understanding growth is what
+starting a startup <i>consists</i> of.  What you're really doing (and
+to the dismay of some observers, all you're really doing) when you
+start a startup is committing to solve a harder type of problem
+than ordinary businesses do.  You're committing to search for one
+of the rare ideas that generates rapid growth.  Because these ideas
+are so valuable, finding one is hard.  The startup is the embodiment
+of your discoveries so far.  Starting a startup is thus very much
+like deciding to be a research scientist: you're not committing to
+solve any specific problem; you don't know for sure which problems
+are soluble; but you're committing to try to discover something no
+one knew before.  A startup founder is in effect an economic research
+scientist.  Most don't discover anything that remarkable, but some
+discover relativity.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+Strictly speaking it's not lots of customers you need but a big
+market, meaning a high product of number of customers times how
+much they'll pay.  But it's dangerous to have too few customers
+even if they pay a lot, or the power that individual customers have
+over you could turn you into a de facto consulting firm.  So whatever
+market you're in, you'll usually do best to err on the side of
+making the broadest type of product for it.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged
+programmers who wanted to start businesses to use a restaurant as
+a model.  What he meant, I believe, is that it's fine to start
+software companies constrained in (a) in the same way a restaurant
+is constrained in (b).  I agree.  Most people should not try to
+start startups.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+That sort of stepping back is one of the things we focus on at
+Y Combinator.  It's common for founders to have discovered something
+intuitively without understanding all its implications.  That's
+probably true of the biggest discoveries in any field.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+I got it wrong in <a href="wealth.html">"How to Make Wealth"</a> when I said that a
+startup was a small company that takes on a hard technical
+problem.  That is the most common recipe but not the only one.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+In principle companies aren't limited by the size of the markets
+they serve, because they could just expand into new markets.  But
+there seem to be limits on the ability of big companies to do that.
+Which means the slowdown that comes from bumping up against the
+limits of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which
+internal limits are expressed.<br /><br />It may be that some of these limits could be overcome by changing
+the shape of the organization &mdash; specifically by sharding it.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+This is, obviously, only for startups that have already launched
+or can launch during YC.  A startup building a new database will
+probably not do that.  On the other hand, launching something small
+and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a
+valuable technique that any company that could start this way
+probably should.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+If the startup is taking the Facebook/Twitter route and building
+something they hope will be very popular but from which they don't
+yet have a definite plan to make money, the growth rate has to be
+higher, even though it's a proxy for revenue growth, because such
+companies need huge numbers of users to succeed at all.<br /><br />Beware too of the edge case where something spreads rapidly but the
+churn is high as well, so that you have good net growth till you run
+through all the potential users, at which point it suddenly stops.<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+Within YC when we say it's ipso facto right to do whatever gets
+you growth, it's implicit that this excludes trickery like buying
+users for more than their lifetime value, counting users as active
+when they're really not, bleeding out invites at a regularly
+increasing rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc.  Even
+if you were able to fool investors with such tricks, you'd ultimately
+be hurting yourself, because you're throwing off your own compass.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+Which is why it's such a dangerous mistake to believe that
+successful startups are simply the embodiment of some brilliant
+initial idea.  What you're looking for initially is not so much a
+great idea as an idea that could evolve into a great one.   The
+danger is that promising ideas are not merely blurry versions of
+great ones.  They're often different in kind, because the early
+adopters you evolve the idea upon have different needs from the
+rest of the market.  For example, the idea that evolves into Facebook
+isn't merely a subset of Facebook; the idea that evolves into
+Facebook is a site for Harvard undergrads.<br /><br />[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
+What if a company grew at 1.7x a year for a really long time?
+Could it not grow just as big as any successful startup?  In principle
+yes, of course. If our hypothetical company making $1000 a month
+grew at 1% a week for 19 years, it would grow as big as a company
+growing at 5% a week for 4 years.  But while such trajectories may
+be common in, say, real estate development, you don't see them much
+in the technology business.  In technology, companies that grow
+slowly tend not to grow as big.<br /><br />[<a name="f11n"><font color=#000000>11</font></a>]
+Any expected value calculation varies from person to person
+depending on their utility function for money.  I.e. the first
+million is worth more to most people than subsequent millions.  How
+much more depends on the person.  For founders who are younger or
+more ambitious the utility function is flatter.  Which is probably
+part of the reason the founders of the most successful startups of
+all tend to be on the young side.<br /><br />[<a name="f12n"><font color=#000000>12</font></a>]
+More precisely, this is the case in the biggest winners, which
+is where all the returns come from.  A startup founder could pull
+the same trick of enriching himself at the company's expense by
+selling them overpriced components.  But it wouldn't be worth it
+for the founders of Google to do that.  Only founders of failing
+startups would even be tempted, but those are writeoffs from the
+VCs' point of view anyway.<br /><br />[<a name="f13n"><font color=#000000>13</font></a>]
+Acquisitions fall into two categories: those where the acquirer
+wants the business, and those where the acquirer just wants the
+employees.  The latter type is sometimes called an HR acquisition.
+Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a scale that has a
+significant effect on the expected value calculation for potential
+founders, HR acquisitions are viewed by acquirers as more akin to
+hiring bonuses.<br /><br />[<a name="f14n"><font color=#000000>14</font></a>]
+I once explained this to some founders who had recently arrived
+from Russia.  They found it novel that if you threatened a company
+they'd pay a premium for you.  "In Russia they just kill you," they
+said, and they were only partly joking.  Economically, the fact
+that established companies can't simply eliminate new competitors
+may be one of the most valuable aspects of the rule of law.  And
+so to the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via
+regulations or patent suits, we should worry, not because it's a
+departure from the rule of law per se but from what the rule of law
+is aiming at.<br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Paul Buchheit, Patrick
+Collison, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for
+reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://academy.hsoub.com/entrepreneurship/general/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%B1%D9%83%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B4%D8%A6%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D9%85%D9%88-r57/">Arabic Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://leht.postimees.ee/6821400/paul-graham-idufirma-kasv">Estonian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://danielscocco.com/startups-crescimento/">Portuguese Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://marcotrombetti.com/crescita">Italian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/herd.html

@@ -0,0 +1,154 @@
+<html><head><title>Investor Herd Dynamics</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc67><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc67 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/investor-herd-dynamics-4.gif" width="195" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Investor Herd Dynamics" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+August 2013<br /><br />The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the
+opinion of other investors.  Which is of course a recipe for
+exponential growth.  When one investor wants to invest in you, that
+makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so
+on.<br /><br />Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly conclude that manipulating
+these forces is the essence of fundraising.  They hear stories about
+stampedes to invest in successful startups, and think it's therefore
+the mark of a successful startup to have this happen.  But actually
+the two are not that highly correlated.  Lots of startups that cause
+stampedes end up flaming out (in extreme cases, partly as a result
+of the stampede), and lots of very successful startups were only
+moderately popular with investors the first time they raised money.<br /><br />So the point of this essay is not to explain how to create a stampede,
+but merely to explain the forces that generate them.  These forces
+are always at work to some degree in fundraising, and they can cause
+surprising situations.  If you understand them, you can at least
+avoid being surprised.<br /><br />One reason investors like you more when other investors like you
+is that you actually become a better investment.  Raising money
+decreases the risk of failure.  Indeed, although investors hate it,
+you are for this reason justified in raising your valuation for
+later investors.  The investors who invested when you had no money
+were taking more risk, and are entitled to higher returns.  Plus a
+company that has raised money is literally more valuable.  After
+you raise the first million dollars, the company is at least a
+million dollars more valuable, because it's the same company as
+before, plus it has a million dollars in the bank.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Beware, though, because later investors so hate to have the price
+raised on them that they resist even this self-evident reasoning.
+Only raise the price on an investor you're comfortable with losing,
+because some will angrily refuse.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The second reason investors like you more when you've had some
+success at fundraising is that it makes you more confident, and an
+investors' opinion of <a href="convince.html">you</a> is the foundation
+of their opinion of your company.  Founders are often surprised how
+quickly investors seem to know when they start to succeed at raising
+money.  And while there are in fact lots of ways for such information
+to spread among investors, the main vector is probably the founders
+themselves.  Though they're often clueless about technology, most
+investors are pretty good at reading people.  When fundraising is
+going well, investors are quick to sense it in your increased
+confidence.  (This is one case where the average founder's inability
+to remain poker-faced works to your advantage.)<br /><br />But frankly the most important reason investors like you more when
+you've started to raise money is that they're bad at judging startups.
+Judging startups is hard even for the best investors.  The mediocre
+ones might as well be flipping coins.  So when mediocre investors
+see that lots of other people want to invest in you, they assume
+there must be a reason.  This leads to the phenomenon known in the
+Valley as the "hot deal," where you have more interest from investors
+than you can handle.<br /><br />The best investors aren't influenced much by the opinion of other
+investors.  It would only dilute their own judgment to average it
+together with other people's.  But they are indirectly influenced
+in the practical sense that interest from other investors imposes
+a deadline.  This is the fourth way in which offers beget offers.
+If you start to get far along the track toward an offer with one
+firm, it will sometimes provoke other firms, even good ones, to
+make up their minds, lest they lose the deal.<br /><br />Unless you're a wizard at negotiation (and if you're not sure,
+you're not) be very careful about exaggerating this to push a good
+investor to decide.  Founders try this sort of thing all the time,
+and investors are very sensitive to it.  If anything oversensitive.
+But you're safe so long as you're telling the truth.  If you're
+getting far along with investor B, but you'd rather raise money
+from investor A, you can tell investor A that this is happening.
+There's no manipulation in that.  You're genuinely in a bind, because
+you really would rather raise money from A, but you can't safely
+reject an offer from B when it's still uncertain what A will decide.<br /><br />Do not, however, tell A who B is.  VCs will sometimes ask which
+other VCs you're talking to, but you should never tell them.  Angels
+you can sometimes tell about other angels, because angels cooperate
+more with one another. But if VCs ask, just point out that they
+wouldn't want you telling other firms about your conversations, and
+you feel obliged to do the same for any firm you talk to.  If they
+push you, point out that you're inexperienced at fundraising &mdash; which
+is always a safe card to play &mdash; and you feel you have to be
+extra cautious. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />While few startups will experience a stampede of interest, almost
+all will at least initially experience the other side of this
+phenomenon, where the herd remains clumped together at a distance.
+The fact that investors are so much influenced by other investors'
+opinions means you always start out in something of a hole.  So
+don't be demoralized by how hard it is to get the first commitment,
+because much of the difficulty comes from this external force.  The
+second will be easier.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+An accountant might say that a company that has raised a million
+dollars is no richer if it's convertible debt, but in practice money
+raised as convertible debt is little different from money raised
+in an equity round.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Founders are often surprised by this, but investors can get
+very emotional.  Or rather indignant; that's the main emotion I've
+observed; but it is very common, to the point where it sometimes
+causes investors to act against their own interests.  I know of one
+investor who invested in a startup at a $15 million valuation cap.
+Earlier he'd had an opportunity to invest at a $5 million cap, but
+he refused because a friend who invested earlier had been able to
+invest at a $3 million cap.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+If an investor pushes you hard to tell them about your conversations
+with other investors, is this someone you want as an investor?<br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan
+for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://blog.perevedem.ru/2013/08/26/investor-herd-dynamics/">Russian Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/heresy.html

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+<html><head><title>Heresy</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc8d><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc8d border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/heresy-4.gif" width="59" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Heresy" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">April 2022<br /><br />One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is
+the rebirth of the concept of heresy.<br /><br />In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the
+moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:
+<blockquote>
+  Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly
+  to whatever he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three
+  unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage.
+  <font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font>
+</blockquote>
+The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusingly
+medieval. How strange, to have to avoid committing heresy. But when
+I reread it 20 years later it sounded like a description of
+contemporary employment.<br /><br />There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired
+for. Those doing the firing don't use the word "heresy" to describe
+them, but structurally they're equivalent. Structurally there are
+two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority
+over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs
+everything else the speaker has done.<br /><br />For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also
+implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do
+not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is
+true or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of
+signalling an exception. That's one of the reasons they're used:
+to end a discussion.<br /><br />If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a
+lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe
+any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement
+be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is
+yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth. That's obvious
+enough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they answer no,
+it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice such
+labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or
+falsity.<br /><br />The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is
+considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work
+that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it,
+but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The other distinctive thing about heresies, compared to ordinary
+opinions, is that the public expression of them outweighs everything
+else the speaker has done. In ordinary matters, like knowledge of
+history, or taste in music, you're judged by the average of your
+opinions. A heresy is qualitatively different. It's like dropping
+a chunk of uranium onto the scale.<br /><br />Back in the day (and still, in some places) the punishment for
+heresy was death. You could have led a life of exemplary goodness,
+but if you publicly doubted, say, the divinity of Christ, you were
+going to burn. Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get
+fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the
+structure of the situation is the same: the heresy
+outweighs everything else. You could have spent the last ten years
+saving children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you're
+automatically fired.<br /><br />It's much the same as if you committed a crime. No matter how
+virtuously you've lived, if you commit a crime, you must still
+suffer the penalty of the law. Having lived a previously blameless
+life might mitigate the punishment, but it doesn't affect whether
+you're guilty or not.<br /><br />A heresy is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime &mdash;
+one that makes some people feel not merely that you're mistaken,
+but that you should be punished. Indeed, their desire to see you
+punished is often stronger than it would be if you'd committed an
+actual crime. There are many on the far left who believe
+strongly in the reintegration of felons (as I do myself), and yet
+seem to feel that anyone guilty of certain heresies should never
+work again.<br /><br />There are always some heresies &mdash; some opinions you'd be punished
+for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few
+decades ago, and even those who are happy about this would have to
+agree that it's so.<br /><br />Why? Why has this antiquated-sounding religious concept come back
+in a secular form? And why now?<br /><br />You need two ingredients for a wave of intolerance: intolerant
+people, and an ideology to guide them. The intolerant people are
+always there. They exist in every sufficiently large society. That's
+why waves of intolerance can arise so suddenly; all they need is
+something to set them off.<br /><br />I've already written an <a href="conformism.html"><u>essay</u></a> 
+describing the aggressively
+conventional-minded. The short version is that people can be
+classified in two dimensions according to (1) how independent- or
+conventional-minded they are, and (2) how aggressive they are about
+it. The aggressively conventional-minded are the enforcers of
+orthodoxy.<br /><br />Normally they're only locally visible. They're the grumpy, censorious
+people in a group &mdash; the ones who are always first to complain when
+something violates the current rules of propriety. But occasionally,
+like a vector field whose elements become aligned, a large number
+of aggressively conventional-minded people unite behind some ideology
+all at once. Then they become much more of a problem, because a mob
+dynamic takes over, where the enthusiasm of each participant is
+increased by the enthusiasm of the others.<br /><br />The most notorious 20th century case may have been the Cultural
+Revolution. Though initiated by Mao to undermine his rivals, the
+Cultural Revolution was otherwise mostly a grass-roots phenomenon.
+Mao said in essence: There are heretics among us. Seek them out and
+punish them. And that's all the aggressively conventional-minded
+ever need to hear. They went at it with the delight of dogs chasing
+squirrels.<br /><br />To unite the conventional-minded, an ideology must have many of the
+features of a religion. In particular it must have strict and
+arbitrary rules that adherents can demonstrate their 
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM"><u>purity</u></a> 
+by obeying, and its adherents must believe that anyone who obeys these
+rules is ipso facto morally superior to anyone who doesn't.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In the late 1980s a new ideology of this type appeared in US
+universities. It had a very strong component of moral purity, and
+the aggressively conventional-minded seized upon it with their usual
+eagerness &mdash; all the more because the relaxation of social norms
+in the preceding decades meant there had been less and less to
+forbid. The resulting wave of intolerance has been eerily similar
+in form to the Cultural Revolution, though fortunately much smaller
+in magnitude.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#dddddd>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here.
+Partly because one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now
+as in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in
+which they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves. Indeed,
+this tactic is so consistent that you could use it as a way of
+detecting witch hunts in any era.<br /><br />And that's the second reason I've avoided mentioning any specific
+heresies. I want this essay to work in the future, not just now.
+And unfortunately it probably will. The aggressively conventional-minded
+will always be among us, looking for things to forbid. All they
+need is an ideology to tell them what. And it's unlikely the current
+one will be the last.<br /><br />There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right
+and the left. The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from
+the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to
+come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine
+what that would be like.<br /><br />Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies is
+nothing like as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinions
+you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still
+much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the
+derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever
+wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected
+freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has
+decreased.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#dddddd>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The situation is similar to what's happened with infectious diseases
+like measles. Anyone looking into the future in 2010 would have
+expected the number of measles cases in the US to continue to
+decrease. Instead, thanks to anti-vaxxers, it has increased. The
+absolute number is still not that high. The problem is the derivative.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#dddddd>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In both cases it's hard to know how much to worry. Is it really
+dangerous to society as a whole if a handful of extremists refuse
+to get their kids vaccinated, or shout down speakers at universities?
+The point to start worrying is presumably when their efforts start
+to spill over into everyone else's lives. And in both cases that
+does seem to be happening.<br /><br />So it's probably worth spending some amount of effort on pushing
+back to keep open the window of free expression. My hope is that
+this essay will help form social antibodies not just against current
+efforts to suppress ideas, but against the concept of heresy in
+general. That's the real prize. How do you disable the concept of
+heresy? Since the Enlightenment, western societies have discovered
+many techniques for doing that, but there are surely more to be
+discovered.<br /><br />Overall I'm optimistic. Though the trend in freedom of expression
+has been bad over the last decade, it's been good over the longer
+term. And there are signs that the current wave of intolerance is
+peaking. Independent-minded people I talk to seem more confident
+than they did a few years ago. On the other side, even some of the
+<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html"><u>leaders</u></a> are starting to wonder if things have 
+gone too far. And popular culture among the young has already moved on. 
+All we have
+to do is keep pushing back, and the wave collapses. And then we'll
+be net ahead, because as well as having defeated this wave, we'll
+also have developed new tactics for resisting the next one.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>] 
+Or more accurately, biographies of Newton, since Westfall wrote
+two: a long version called <i>Never at Rest</i>, and a shorter one called
+<i>The Life of Isaac Newton</i>. Both are great. The short version moves
+faster, but the long one is full of interesting and often very funny
+details. This passage is the same in both.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Another more subtle but equally damning bit of evidence is
+that claims of x-ism are never qualified. You never hear anyone say
+that a statement is "probably x-ist" or "almost certainly y-ist."
+If claims of x-ism were actually claims about truth, you'd expect
+to see "probably" in front of "x-ist" as often as you see it in
+front of "fallacious."<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>] 
+The rules must be strict, but they need not be demanding. So
+the most effective type of rules are those about superficial matters,
+like doctrinal minutiae, or the precise words adherents must use.
+Such rules can be made extremely complicated, and yet don't repel
+potential converts by requiring significant sacrifice.<br /><br />The superficial demands of orthodoxy make it an inexpensive substitute
+for virtue. And that in turn is one of the reasons orthodoxy is so
+attractive to bad people. You could be a horrible person, and yet
+as long as you're orthodox, you're better than everyone who isn't.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>] 
+Arguably there were two. The first had died down somewhat by
+2000, but was followed by a second in the 2010s, probably caused
+by social media.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>] 
+Fortunately most of those trying to suppress ideas today still
+respect Enlightenment principles enough to pay lip service to them.
+They know they're not supposed to ban ideas per se, so they have
+to recast the ideas as causing "harm," which sounds like something
+that can be banned. The more extreme try to claim speech itself is
+violence, or even that silence is. But strange as it may sound,
+such gymnastics are a good sign. We'll know we're really in trouble
+when they stop bothering to invent pretenses for banning ideas &mdash;
+when, like the medieval church, they say "Damn right we're banning
+ideas, and in fact here's a list of them."<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>] 
+People only have the luxury of ignoring the medical consensus
+about vaccines because vaccines have worked so well. If we didn't
+have any vaccines at all, the mortality rate would be so high that
+most current anti-vaxxers would be begging for them. And the situation
+with freedom of expression is similar. It's only because they live
+in a world created by the Enlightenment that kids from the suburbs
+can play at banning ideas.<br /><br /><br /><br /><font color="888888"><b>Thanks</b> to Marc Andreessen, Chris Best, 
+Trevor Blackwell, Nicholas
+Christakis, Daniel Gackle, Jonathan Haidt, Claire Lehmann, Jessica
+Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Robert Morris, and Garry Tan for reading
+drafts of this.</font><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+function csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG() { var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_SPACEID'] = '2022276099'; csell_token_map['TOK_URL'] = ''; csell_token_map['TOK_STORE_ID'] = 'paulgraham'; csell_token_map['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST'] = 'heresy'; csell_token_map['TOK_ORDER_HOST'] = 'order.store.turbify.net'; csell_token_map['TOK_BEACON_TYPE'] = 'prod'; csell_token_map['TOK_RAND_KEY'] = 't'; csell_token_map['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE'] = '2';  c = csell_page_data; var x = (typeof storeCheckoutDomain == 'string')?storeCheckoutDomain:'order.store.turbify.net'; var t = csell_token_map; c['s'] = t['TOK_SPACEID']; c['url'] = t['TOK_URL']; c['si'] = t[ts]; c['ii'] = t['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST']; c['bt'] = t['TOK_BEACON_TYPE']; c['rnd'] = t['TOK_RAND_KEY']; c['io'] = t['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE']; YStore.addItemUrl = 'http%s://'+x+'/'+t[ts]+'/ymix/MetaController.html?eventName.addEvent&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_itemId=%s&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_quantity=1&ysco_key_cs_item=1&sectionId=ysco.cart&ysco_key_store_id='+t[ts]; } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_REC_VIEW_TAG() {  var env = (typeof csell_env == 'string')?csell_env:'prod'; var p = csell_page_data; var a = '/sid='+p['si']+'/io='+p['io']+'/ii='+p['ii']+'/bt='+p['bt']+'-view'+'/en='+env; var r=Math.random(); YStore.CrossSellBeacon.renderBeaconWithRecData(p['url']+'/p/s='+p['s']+'/'+p['rnd']+'='+r+a); } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=heresy&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html108.prod.store.e1a.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:37 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/hiresfund.html

@@ -0,0 +1,118 @@
+<html><head><title>High Resolution Fundraising </title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc73><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc73 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/high-resolution-fundraising-2.gif" width="231" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="High Resolution Fundraising " /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+September 2010<br /><br />The reason startups have been using 
+<a href="http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22319113993">more convertible notes</a> in angel
+rounds is that they make deals close faster.  By making it easier
+for startups to give different prices to different investors, they
+help them break the sort of deadlock that happens when investors
+all wait to see who else is going to invest.<br /><br />By far the biggest influence on investors' opinions of a startup
+is the opinion of other investors.  There are very, very few who
+simply decide for themselves.  Any startup founder can tell you the
+most common question they hear from investors is not about the
+founders or the product, but "who else is investing?"<br /><br />That tends to produce deadlocks.  Raising an old-fashioned 
+fixed-size equity round can take weeks, because all the angels sit around
+waiting for the others to commit, like competitors in a bicycle
+sprint who deliberately ride slowly at the start so they can follow
+whoever breaks first.<br /><br />Convertible notes let startups beat such deadlocks by rewarding
+investors willing to move first with lower (effective) valuations.
+Which they deserve because they're taking more risk.  It's much
+safer to invest in a startup Ron Conway has already invested in;
+someone who comes after him should pay a higher price.<br /><br />The reason convertible notes allow more flexibility in price is
+that valuation caps aren't actual valuations, and notes are cheap
+and easy to do.  So you can do high-resolution fundraising: if you
+wanted you could have a separate note with a different cap for each
+investor.<br /><br />That cap need not simply rise monotonically.  A startup could 
+also give better deals to investors they expected to help
+them most.  The point is simply that different investors, 
+whether because of the help they offer or their willingness to
+commit, have different values for
+startups, and their terms should reflect that.<br /><br />Different terms for different investors is
+clearly the way of the future.  Markets always evolve toward higher
+resolution.  You may not need to use convertible notes to do it.
+With sufficiently lightweight standardized equity terms (and some
+changes in investors' and lawyers' expectations about equity rounds)
+you might be able to do the same thing with equity instead of debt.
+Either would be fine with startups, so long as they can easily
+change their valuation.<br /><br />Deadlocks weren't the only problem with fixed-size equity rounds.
+Another was that startups had to decide in advance how much to
+raise.  I think it's a mistake for a startup to fix upon a specific
+number. If investors are easily convinced, the startup should raise more
+now, and if investors are skeptical, the startup should take a
+smaller amount and use that to get the company to the point where
+it's more convincing.<br /><br />It's just not reasonable to expect startups to pick an optimal round
+size in advance, because that depends on the reactions of investors,
+and those are impossible to predict.<br /><br />Fixed-size, multi-investor angel rounds are such a bad idea for
+startups that one wonders why things were ever done that way.  One
+possibility is that this custom reflects the way investors like to
+collude when they can get away with it.  But I think the actual
+explanation is less sinister.  I think angels (and their lawyers)
+organized rounds this way in unthinking imitation of VC series A
+rounds.  In a series A, a fixed-size equity round with a lead makes
+sense, because there is usually just one big investor, who is
+unequivocally the lead.  Fixed-size series A rounds already are
+high res.  But the more investors you have in a round, the less
+sense it makes for everyone to get the same price.<br /><br />The most interesting question here may be what high res fundraising
+will do to the world of investors.  Bolder investors will now get
+rewarded with lower prices.  But more important, in a
+hits-driven business, is that they'll be able to get into the deals
+they want.  Whereas the "who else is investing?" type of investors
+will not only pay higher prices, but may not be able to get into
+the best deals at all.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Immad Akhund, Sam Altman, John Bautista, Pete Koomen, 
+Jessica Livingston, Dan Siroker, Harj Taggar, and
+Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+ var storeCheckoutDomain = 'order.store.turbify.net';
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+
+<script type="text/javascript">
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+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+ csell_page_data = {}; csell_page_rec_data = []; ts='TOK_STORE_ID';
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG() { var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_SPACEID'] = '2022276099'; csell_token_map['TOK_URL'] = ''; csell_token_map['TOK_STORE_ID'] = 'paulgraham'; csell_token_map['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST'] = 'hiresfund'; csell_token_map['TOK_ORDER_HOST'] = 'order.store.turbify.net'; csell_token_map['TOK_BEACON_TYPE'] = 'prod'; csell_token_map['TOK_RAND_KEY'] = 't'; csell_token_map['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE'] = '2';  c = csell_page_data; var x = (typeof storeCheckoutDomain == 'string')?storeCheckoutDomain:'order.store.turbify.net'; var t = csell_token_map; c['s'] = t['TOK_SPACEID']; c['url'] = t['TOK_URL']; c['si'] = t[ts]; c['ii'] = t['TOK_ITEM_ID_LIST']; c['bt'] = t['TOK_BEACON_TYPE']; c['rnd'] = t['TOK_RAND_KEY']; c['io'] = t['TOK_IS_ORDERABLE']; YStore.addItemUrl = 'http%s://'+x+'/'+t[ts]+'/ymix/MetaController.html?eventName.addEvent&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_itemId=%s&cartDS.shoppingcart_ROW0_m_orderItemVector_ROW0_m_quantity=1&ysco_key_cs_item=1&sectionId=ysco.cart&ysco_key_store_id='+t[ts]; } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+function csell_REC_VIEW_TAG() {  var env = (typeof csell_env == 'string')?csell_env:'prod'; var p = csell_page_data; var a = '/sid='+p['si']+'/io='+p['io']+'/ii='+p['ii']+'/bt='+p['bt']+'-view'+'/en='+env; var r=Math.random(); YStore.CrossSellBeacon.renderBeaconWithRecData(p['url']+'/p/s='+p['s']+'/'+p['rnd']+'='+r+a); } 
+</script>
+<script type="text/javascript">
+// Begin Store Generated Code
+var csell_token_map = {}; csell_token_map['TOK_PAGE'] = 'p'; csell_token_map['TOK_CURR_SYM'] = '$'; csell_token_map['TOK_WS_URL'] = 'https://paulgraham.csell.store.turbify.net/cs/recommend?itemids=hiresfund&location=p'; csell_token_map['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS'] = 'false';  var t = csell_token_map; csell_GLOBAL_INIT_TAG(); YStore.page = t['TOK_PAGE']; YStore.currencySymbol = t['TOK_CURR_SYM']; YStore.crossSellUrl = t['TOK_WS_URL']; YStore.showCSRecs = t['TOK_SHOW_CS_RECS']; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/ae/store/secure/recs-1.3.2.2.js" ></script> <script type="text/javascript" >
+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html105.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:54 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/hubs.html

@@ -0,0 +1,208 @@
+<html><head><title>Why Startup Hubs Work</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc61><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc61 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/why-startup-hubs-work-2.gif" width="196" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Why Startup Hubs Work" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+October 2011<br /><br />If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number
+of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude.
+Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide.<br /><br />I wondered about this for years.  I could see the average town was
+like a roach motel for startup ambitions: smart, ambitious people
+went in, but no startups came out.  But I was never able to figure
+out exactly what happened inside the motel&mdash;exactly what was
+killing all the potential startups.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />A couple weeks ago I finally figured it out. I was framing the
+question wrong.  The problem is not that most towns kill startups.
+It's that death is the <a href="die.html">default</a> for startups,
+and most towns don't save them.  Instead of thinking of most places
+as being sprayed with startupicide, it's more accurate to think of
+startups as all being poisoned, and a few places being sprayed with
+the antidote.<br /><br />Startups in other places are just doing what startups naturally do:
+fail.  The real question is, what's <i>saving</i> startups in places
+like Silicon Valley?
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br /><b>Environment</b><br /><br />I think there are two components to the antidote: being in a place
+where startups are the cool thing to do, and chance meetings with
+people who can help you.  And what drives them both is the number
+of startup people around you.<br /><br />The first component is particularly helpful in the first stage of
+a startup's life, when you go from merely having an interest in
+starting a company to actually doing it.  It's quite a leap to start
+a startup.  It's an unusual thing to do. But in Silicon Valley it
+seems normal.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />In most places, if you start a startup, people treat you as if
+you're unemployed.  People in the Valley aren't automatically
+impressed with you just because you're starting a company, but they
+pay attention.  Anyone who's been here any amount of time knows not
+to default to skepticism, no matter how inexperienced you seem or
+how unpromising your idea sounds at first, because they've all seen
+inexperienced founders with unpromising sounding ideas who a few
+years later were billionaires.<br /><br />Having people around you care about what you're doing is an
+extraordinarily <a href="cities.html">powerful</a> force.  Even the
+most willful people are susceptible to it.  About a year after we
+started Y Combinator I said something to a partner at a well known
+VC firm that gave him the (mistaken) impression I was considering
+starting another startup.  He responded so eagerly that for about
+half a second I found myself considering doing it.<br /><br />In most other cities, the prospect of starting a startup just doesn't
+seem real.  In the Valley it's not only real but fashionable.  That
+no doubt causes a lot of people to start startups who shouldn't.
+But I think that's ok.  Few people are suited to running a startup,
+and it's very hard to predict beforehand which are (as I know all
+too well from being in the business of trying to predict beforehand),
+so lots of people starting startups who shouldn't is probably the
+optimal state of affairs.  As long as you're at a point in your
+life when you can bear the risk of failure, the best way to find
+out if you're suited to running a startup is to <a href="notnot.html">try
+it</a>.<br /><br /><b>Chance</b><br /><br />The second component of the antidote is chance meetings with people
+who can help you.  This force works in both phases: both in the
+transition from the desire to start a startup to starting one, and
+the transition from starting a company to succeeding.  The power
+of chance meetings is more variable than people around you caring
+about startups, which is like a sort of background radiation that
+affects everyone equally, but at its strongest it is far stronger.<br /><br />Chance meetings produce miracles to compensate for the disasters
+that characteristically befall startups.  In the Valley, terrible
+things happen to startups all the time, just like they do to startups
+everywhere.  The reason startups are more likely to make it here
+is that great things happen to them too.  In the Valley, lightning
+has a sign bit.<br /><br />For example, you start a site for college students and you decide
+to move to the Valley for the summer to work on it.  And then on a
+random suburban street in Palo Alto you happen to run into Sean
+Parker, who understands the domain really well because he started
+a similar startup himself, and also knows all the investors.  And
+moreover has advanced views, for 2004, on founders retaining <a
+href="control.html">control</a> of their companies.<br /><br />You can't say precisely what the miracle will be, or even for sure
+that one will happen.  The best one can say is: if you're in a
+startup hub, unexpected good things will probably happen to you,
+especially if you deserve them.<br /><br />I bet this is true even for startups we fund.  Even with us working
+to make things happen for them on purpose rather than by accident,
+the frequency of helpful chance meetings in the Valley is so high
+that it's still a significant increment on what we can deliver.<br /><br />Chance meetings play a role like the role relaxation plays in having
+ideas.  Most people have had the experience of working hard on some
+problem, not being able to solve it, giving up and going to bed,
+and then thinking of the answer in the shower in the morning.  What
+makes the answer appear is letting your thoughts <a
+href="top.html">drift</a> a bit&mdash;and thus drift off the wrong
+path you'd been pursuing last night and onto the right one adjacent
+to it.<br /><br />Chance meetings let your acquaintance drift in the same way taking
+a shower lets your thoughts drift. The critical thing in both cases
+is that they drift just the right amount.  The meeting between Larry
+Page and Sergey Brin was a good example.  They let their acquaintance
+drift, but only a little; they were both meeting someone they had
+a lot in common with.<br /><br />For Larry Page the most important component of the antidote was
+Sergey Brin, and vice versa.  The antidote is 
+<a href="siliconvalley.html">people</a>.  It's not the
+physical infrastructure of Silicon Valley that makes it work, or
+the weather, or anything like that.  Those helped get it started,
+but now that the reaction is self-sustaining what drives it is the
+people.<br /><br />Many observers have noticed that one of the most distinctive things
+about startup hubs is the degree to which people help one another
+out, with no expectation of getting anything in return.  I'm not
+sure why this is so.  Perhaps it's because startups are less of a
+zero sum game than most types of business; they are rarely killed
+by competitors.  Or perhaps it's because so many startup founders
+have backgrounds in the sciences, where collaboration is encouraged.<br /><br />A large part of YC's function is to accelerate that process.  We're
+a sort of Valley within the Valley, where the density of people
+working on startups and their willingness to help one another are
+both artificially amplified.<br /><br /><b>Numbers</b><br /><br />Both components of the antidote&mdash;an environment that encourages
+startups, and chance meetings with people who help you&mdash;are
+driven by the same underlying cause: the number of startup people
+around you.  To make a startup hub, you need a <i>lot</i> of people
+interested in startups.<br /><br />There are three reasons. The first, obviously, is that if you don't
+have enough density, the chance meetings don't happen.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font>
+The second is that different startups need such different things, so
+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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+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 without external
+encouragement.  Wufoo was based in Tampa and they succeeded.  But
+the Wufoos are exceptionally disciplined.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+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.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+Starting a company is common, but starting a startup is rare.
+I've talked about the distinction between the two elsewhere, but
+essentially a startup is a new business designed for scale.  Most
+new businesses are service businesses and except in rare cases those
+don't scale.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+As I was writing this, I had a demonstration of the density of
+startup people in the Valley.  Jessica and I bicycled to University
+Ave in Palo Alto to have lunch at the fabulous Oren's Hummus.  As
+we walked in, we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door.  Selina
+Tobaccowala stopped to say hello on her way out.  Then Josh Wilson
+came in to pick up a take out order.  After lunch we went to get
+frozen yogurt.  On the way we met Rajat Suri.  When we got to the
+yogurt place, we found Dave Shen there, and as we walked out we ran
+into Yuri Sagalov.  We walked with him for a block or so and we ran
+into Muzzammil Zaveri, and then a block later we met Aydin Senkut.
+This is everyday life in Palo Alto.  I wasn't trying to meet people;
+I was just having lunch.  And I'm sure for every startup founder
+or investor I saw that I knew, there were 5 more I didn't.  If Ron
+Conway had been with us he would have met 30 people he knew.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and
+Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<!-- html111.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:52 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/hw.html

@@ -0,0 +1,100 @@
+<html><head><title>The Hardware Renaissance</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebcef><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebcef border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/the-hardware-renaissance-2.gif" width="215" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="The Hardware Renaissance" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=100% cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b>  Get funded by
+<a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+October 2012<br /><br />One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we
+see trends before most other people.  And one of the most conspicuous
+trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups.
+Out of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware.  On the whole
+they've done better than the companies that weren't.<br /><br />They've faced resistance from investors of course.  Investors have
+a deep-seated bias against hardware.  But investors' opinions are
+a trailing indicator.  The best founders are better at seeing the
+future than the best investors, because the best founders are making
+it.<br /><br />There is no one single force driving this trend.  Hardware <a
+href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/pebble-smartwatch-tops-out-at-10-million-on-kickstarter/">does
+well</a> on crowdfunding sites.  The spread of <a
+href="http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html">tablets</a> makes it
+possible to build new things <a href="http://lockitron.com">controlled
+by</a> and even <a href="http://doublerobotics.com">incorporating</a>
+them.  <a href="http://www.boostedboards.com/">Electric motors</a>
+ have improved.
+Wireless connectivity of various types can now be taken for granted.
+It's getting more straightforward to get things manufactured.
+Arduinos, 3D printing, laser cutters, and more accessible CNC milling are making hardware easier to prototype.
+Retailers are less of a bottleneck as customers increasingly buy
+online.<br /><br />One question I can answer is why hardware is suddenly cool.
+It always was cool.
+Physical things are great.  They just haven't
+been as great a way to start a <a
+href="growth.html">rapidly growing</a> business
+as software.  But that rule may not be permanent.  It's not even
+that old; it only dates from about 1990.  Maybe the advantage
+of software will turn out to have been temporary.  Hackers love to
+build hardware, and customers love to buy it.  So if the ease of
+shipping hardware even approached the ease of shipping software,
+we'd see a lot more hardware startups.<br /><br />It wouldn't be the first time something was a bad idea till it
+wasn't.  And it wouldn't be the first time investors learned that
+lesson from founders.<br /><br />So if you want to work on hardware, don't be deterred from doing
+it because you worry investors will discriminate against you.  And
+in particular, don't be deterred from <a
+href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">applying</a> to Y Combinator
+with a hardware idea, because we're especially interested in hardware
+startups.<br /><br />We know there's room for the <a href="ambitious.html">next Steve Jobs</a>.
+But there's almost certainly also room for the first 
+&lt;Your Name Here&gt;.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Cann, Sanjay Dastoor, 
+Paul Gerhardt, Cameron Robertson, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://mantellavp.com/a-hardware-renaissance-while-software-eats-the-world/">A Hardware Renaissance while �Software Eats the World�?</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+</script>
+</html>
+<!-- html107.prod.store.e1b.lumsb.com Sun Aug 24 02:50:50 PDT 2025 -->

platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/hwh.html

@@ -0,0 +1,331 @@
+<html><head><title>How to Work Hard</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebcc7><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebcc7 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-work-hard-4.gif" width="152" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="How to Work Hard" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">June 2021<br /><br />It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard.
+Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they
+chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And
+yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I
+was in school, the answer is definitely yes.<br /><br />One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll
+have to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork
+varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to
+do well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to
+do almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard
+work through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question.
+There isn't.<br /><br />The reason some subjects seemed easy was that my school had low
+standards. And the reason famous adults seemed to do things
+effortlessly was years of practice; they made it look easy.<br /><br />Of course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural ability
+too. There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability,
+practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to
+do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability
+<i>and</i> to have practiced a lot <i>and</i> to be trying very hard. 
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#dddddd>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business
+in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never
+took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." It was similar
+with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth
+coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but
+his dedication and his desire to win. P. G. Wodehouse would probably
+get my vote for best English writer of the 20th century, if I had
+to choose. Certainly no one ever made it look easier. But no one
+ever worked harder. At 74, he wrote
+<blockquote>
+  with each new book of mine I have, as I say, the feeling that
+  this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A
+  good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one's toes and
+  makes one rewrite every sentence ten times. Or in many cases
+  twenty times.
+</blockquote>
+Sounds a bit extreme, you think. And yet Bill Gates sounds even
+more extreme. Not one day off in ten years?  These two had about
+as much natural ability as anyone could have, and yet they also
+worked about as hard as anyone could work. You need both.<br /><br />That seems so obvious, and yet in practice we find it slightly hard
+to grasp. There's a faint xor between talent and hard work. It comes
+partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and
+partly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. If great talent
+and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare
+squared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less
+of the other. But you'll need both if you want to be an outlier
+yourself. And since you can't really change how much natural talent
+you have, in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reduces
+to working very hard.<br /><br />It's straightforward to work hard if you have clearly defined,
+externally imposed goals, as you do in school. There is some technique
+to it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate
+(which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and
+not to give up when things go wrong. But this level of discipline
+seems to be within the reach of quite young children, if they want
+it.<br /><br />What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals
+that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll
+probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.<br /><br />The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working
+without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm
+bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working
+hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it
+feels awful.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#dddddd>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little
+kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did
+something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of
+disgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely dateable
+landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age&nbsp;13.<br /><br />Several people I've talked to remember getting serious about work
+around this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to
+find idleness distasteful, he said
+<blockquote>
+  I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around
+  then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering
+  why I was wasting my summer holiday.
+</blockquote>
+Perhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense.<br /><br />Strangely enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious about
+work was probably school, which made work (what they called work)
+seem boring and pointless. I had to learn what real work was before
+I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because
+even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire
+departments that are pointless. But as I learned the shape of real
+work, I found that my desire to do it slotted into it as if they'd
+been made for each other.<br /><br />I suspect most people have to learn what work is before they can
+love it. Hardy wrote eloquently about this in <i>A Mathematician's
+Apology</i>:
+<blockquote>
+  I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any <i>passion</i> for
+  mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of
+  a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in
+  terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other
+  boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most
+  decisively.
+</blockquote>
+He didn't learn what math was really about till part way through
+college, when he read Jordan's <i>Cours d'analyse</i>.
+<blockquote>
+  I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that
+  remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians
+  of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what
+  mathematics really meant.
+</blockquote>
+There are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn to
+discount in order to understand what real work is. One is the kind
+Hardy encountered in school. Subjects get distorted when they're
+adapted to be taught to kids &mdash; often so distorted that they're
+nothing like the work done by actual practitioners.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#dddddd>3</font></a>]</font>
+The other
+kind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of work. Some types
+of work are inherently bogus, or at best mere busywork.<br /><br />There's a kind of solidity to real work. It's not all writing the
+<i>Principia</i>, but it all feels necessary. That's a vague criterion,
+but it's deliberately vague, because it has to cover a lot of
+different types.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#dddddd>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many
+hours a day to spend on it. You can't solve this problem by simply
+working every waking hour, because in many kinds of work there's a
+point beyond which the quality of the result will start to decline.<br /><br />That limit varies depending on the type of work and the person.
+I've done several different kinds of work, and the limits were
+different for each. My limit for the harder types of writing or
+programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running
+a startup, I could
+work all the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I'd
+kept going much longer, I'd probably have needed to take occasional
+vacations.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#dddddd>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a
+sensitivity to the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'll
+notice if it decreases because you're working too hard. Honesty is
+critical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you're
+being lazy, but also when you're working too hard. And if you think
+there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea
+out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but
+getting them because you're showing off &mdash; if not to other people,
+then to yourself.
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#dddddd>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process,
+not something you do just once. Both the difficulty of the work and
+your ability to do it can vary hour to hour, so you need to be
+constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're
+doing.<br /><br />Trying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though.
+There may be some people who do, but I think my experience is fairly
+typical, and I only have to push myself occasionally when I'm
+starting a project or when I encounter some sort of check. That's
+when I'm in danger of procrastinating. But once I get rolling, I
+tend to keep going.<br /><br />What keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working
+on Viaweb, I was driven by fear of failure. I barely procrastinated
+at all then, because there was always something that needed doing,
+and if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing beast
+by doing it, why wait? <font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f7n"><font 
+color=#dddddd>7</font></a>]</font>
+Whereas what drives me now, writing
+essays, is the flaws in them. Between essays I fuss for a few days,
+like a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down. But
+once I get started on one, I don't have to push myself to work,
+because there's always some error or omission already pushing me.<br /><br />I do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many
+problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff
+at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the
+extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll
+only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should
+always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.<br /><br />The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these
+problems with a hard core. There are important problems at the
+center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at
+the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in
+working on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to make
+big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do.
+And the rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward the
+center &mdash; toward the most ambitious problems.<br /><br />By center, though, I mean the actual center, not merely the current
+consensus about the center. The consensus about which problems are
+most important is often mistaken, both in general and within specific
+fields. If you disagree with it, and you're right, that could
+represent a valuable opportunity to do something new.<br /><br />The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although
+you should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat
+difficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do. If you
+discover some ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the sense
+of being easier for you than other people, either because of the
+abilities you happen to have, or because of some new way you've
+found to approach it, or simply because you're more excited about
+it, by all means work on that. Some of the best work is done by
+people who find an easy way to do something hard.<br /><br />As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out
+which kind you're suited for. And that doesn't just mean figuring
+out which kind your natural abilities match the best; it doesn't
+mean that if you're 7 feet tall, you have to play basketball. What
+you're suited for depends not just on your talents but perhaps even
+more on your interests. A <a href="genius.html"><u>deep interest</u></a> 
+in a topic makes people
+work harder than any amount of discipline can.<br /><br />It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents.
+There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to
+be judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is a
+subtle thing that may not mature till your twenties, or even later.
+The topic may not even exist earlier. Plus there are some powerful
+sources of error you need to learn to discount. Are you really
+interested in x, or do you want to work on it because you'll make
+a lot of money, or because other people will be impressed with you,
+or because your parents want you to?
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#dddddd>8</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies enormously
+from one person to another. That's one of the most important things
+I've learned about work since I was a kid. As a kid, you get the
+impression that everyone has a calling, and all they have to do is
+figure out what it is. That's how it works in movies, and in the
+streamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes it works that way
+in real life. Some people figure out what to do as children and
+just do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlessly
+from one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospect we can identify
+one as their calling &mdash; we can wish Newton spent more time on math
+and physics and less on alchemy and theology &mdash; but this is an
+<a href="disc.html"><u>illusion</u></a> induced by hindsight bias. 
+There was no voice calling to him that he could have heard.<br /><br />So while some people's lives converge fast, there will be others
+whose lives never converge. And for these people, figuring out what
+to work on is not so much a prelude to working hard as an ongoing
+part of it, like one of a set of simultaneous equations. For these
+people, the process I described earlier has a third component: along
+with measuring both how hard you're working and how well you're
+doing, you have to think about whether you should keep working in
+this field or switch to another. If you're working hard but not
+getting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple
+expressed that way, but in practice it's very difficult. You shouldn't
+give up on the first day just because you work hard and don't get
+anywhere. You need to give yourself time to get going. But how much
+time? And what should you do if work that was going well stops going
+well? How much time do you give yourself then?
+<font color=#dddddd>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#dddddd>9</font></a>]</font><br /><br />What even counts as good results? That can be really hard to decide.
+If you're exploring an area few others have worked in, you may not
+even know what good results look like. History is full of examples
+of people who misjudged the importance of what they were working
+on.<br /><br />The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is
+whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously
+subjective measure, but it's probably the most accurate one you're
+going to get. You're the one working on the stuff. Who's in a better
+position than you to judge whether it's important, and what's a
+better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting?<br /><br />For this test to work, though, you have to be honest with yourself.
+Indeed, that's the most striking thing about the whole question of
+working hard: how at each point it depends on being honest with
+yourself.<br /><br />Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated,
+dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You
+have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind
+you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you
+can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of
+and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can
+without harming the quality of the result. This network is too
+complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and
+clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and
+you'll be productive in a way few people are.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+In "The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius" I said the three ingredients
+in great work were natural ability, determination, and interest.
+That's the formula in the preceding stage; determination and interest
+yield practice and effort.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+I mean this at a resolution of days, not hours. You'll often
+get somewhere while not working in the sense that the solution to
+a problem comes to you while taking a 
+<a href="top.html"><u>shower</u></a>, or even in your sleep,
+but only because you were working hard on it the day before.<br /><br />It's good to go on vacation occasionally, but when I go on vacation,
+I like to learn new things. I wouldn't like just sitting on a beach.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+The thing kids do in school that's most like the real version
+is sports. Admittedly because many sports originated as games played
+in schools. But in this one area, at least, kids are doing exactly
+what adults do.<br /><br />In the average American high school, you have a choice of pretending
+to do something serious, or seriously doing something pretend.
+Arguably the latter is no worse.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+Knowing what you want to work on doesn't mean you'll be able
+to. Most people have to spend a lot of their time working on things
+they don't want to, especially early on. But if you know what you
+want to do, you at least know what direction to nudge your life in.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+The lower time limits for intense work suggest a solution to
+the problem of having less time to work after you have kids: switch
+to harder problems. In effect I did that, though not deliberately.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+Some cultures have a tradition of performative hard work. I
+don't love this idea, because (a) it makes a parody of something
+important and (b) it causes people to wear themselves out doing
+things that don't matter. I don't know enough to say for sure whether
+it's net good or bad, but my guess is bad.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+One of the reasons people work so hard on startups is that
+startups can fail, and when they do, that failure tends to be both
+decisive and conspicuous.<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+It's ok to work on something to make a lot of money. You need
+to solve the money problem somehow, and there's nothing wrong with
+doing that efficiently by trying to make a lot at once. I suppose
+it would even be ok to be interested in money for its own sake;
+whatever floats your boat. Just so long as you're conscious of your
+motivations. The thing to avoid is <i>unconsciously</i> letting the need
+for money warp your ideas about what kind of work you find most
+interesting.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+Many people face this question on a smaller scale with
+individual projects. But it's easier both to recognize and to accept
+a dead end in a single project than to abandon some type of work
+entirely. The more determined you are, the harder it gets. Like a
+Spanish Flu victim, you're fighting your own immune system: Instead
+of giving up, you tell yourself, I should just try harder. And who
+can say you're not right?<br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, John Collison, Patrick Collison,
+Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://world.hey.com/amna/post-09ff9372">Arabic Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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+<html><head><title>Paul Graham</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-6.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=166cf683ec4081f><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,357,67,378" href="ind.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,378,67,399" href="info.html"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/img-32.gif" width="69" height="399" usemap=#166cf683ec4081f border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/bel-8.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><br /><br /><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/index-21.gif" width="410" height="308" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><table width=410 cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ffcc33><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>New:</b> 
+<!-- Follow me at @paulg@mas.to -->
+<a href="goodwriting.html">Good Writing</a> |
+<a href="foundermode.html">Founder Mode</a>
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<table width=410 cellspacing=0>
+<tr><td bgcolor=#ff9922><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<b>Want to start a startup?</b> Get funded by <a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
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+<tr><td bgcolor=#ffcc33><img src="http://ycombinator.com/images/s.gif"
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+<font size=1>
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+&copy; mmxxv pg</font> <!--
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+<html><head><title>Economic Inequality</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
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+<tr><td bgcolor=#ffeeaa><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif"
+height=15 width=1><font size=2>
+<xb>There is also a</b>
+<a href="sim.html"><u>shorter version</u></a>.
+</font>
+<br><img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=5 width=1></td
+></tr>
+</table>
+<p> -->
+January 2016<br /><br />Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased
+dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer.
+Nearly everyone who writes about the topic says that economic inequality
+should be decreased.<br /><br />I'm interested in this question because I was one of the founders of
+a company called Y Combinator that helps people start startups.
+Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds, its founders become
+rich. Which means by helping startup founders I've been helping to
+increase economic inequality.  If economic inequality should be 
+decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. No one should
+be.<br /><br />But that doesn't sound right. What's going on here? What's going
+on is that while economic inequality is a single measure (or more
+precisely, two: variation in income, and variation in wealth), it
+has multiple causes. Many of these causes are bad, like tax loopholes
+and drug addiction. But some are good, like Larry Page and
+Sergey Brin starting the company you use to find things online.<br /><br />If you want to understand economic inequality &mdash; and more importantly,
+if you actually want to fix the bad aspects of it &mdash; you have to
+tease apart the components.  And yet the trend in nearly everything
+written about the subject is to do the opposite: to squash together
+all the aspects of economic inequality as if it were a single
+phenomenon.<br /><br />Sometimes this is done for ideological reasons.  Sometimes it's
+because the writer only has very high-level data and so draws
+conclusions from that, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his
+keys under the lamppost, instead of where he dropped them, because the
+light is better there.  Sometimes it's because the writer doesn't
+understand critical aspects of inequality, like the role of technology
+in wealth creation.  Much of the time, perhaps most of the time,
+writing about economic inequality combines all three.<br /><br /><center>___</center><br /><br />The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is
+to treat it as a single phenomenon.  The most naive version of which
+is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by
+taking money from the poor.<br /><br />Usually this is an assumption people start from rather than a
+conclusion they arrive at by examining the evidence.  Sometimes the
+pie fallacy is stated explicitly:
+<blockquote>
+  ...those at the top are grabbing an increasing fraction of the
+  nation's income &mdash; so much of a larger share that what's left over
+  for the rest is diminished....
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font>
+</blockquote>
+Other times it's more unconscious. But the unconscious form is very
+widespread.  I think because we grow up in a world where the pie
+fallacy is actually true.  To kids, wealth <i>is</i> a fixed pie
+that's shared out, and if one person gets more, it's at the expense
+of another.  It takes a conscious effort to remind oneself that the
+real world doesn't work that way.<br /><br />In the real world you can create wealth as well as taking it from
+others.  A woodworker creates wealth.  He makes a chair, and you
+willingly give him money in return for it.  A high-frequency trader
+does not.  He makes a dollar only when someone on the other end of
+a trade loses a dollar.<br /><br />If the rich people in a society got that way by taking wealth from
+the poor, then you have the degenerate case of economic inequality,
+where the cause of poverty is the same as the cause of wealth.  But
+instances of inequality don't have to be instances of the degenerate
+case.  If one woodworker makes 5 chairs and another makes none, the
+second woodworker will have less money, but not because anyone took
+anything from him.<br /><br />Even people sophisticated enough to know about the pie fallacy are
+led toward it by the custom of describing economic inequality as a
+ratio of one quantile's income or wealth to another's.  It's so
+easy to slip from talking about income shifting from one quantile
+to another, as a figure of speech, into believing that is literally
+what's happening.<br /><br />Except in the degenerate case, economic inequality can't be described
+by a ratio or even a curve.  In the general case it consists of
+multiple ways people become poor, and multiple ways people become
+rich.  Which means to understand economic inequality in a country,
+you have to go find individual people who are poor or rich and
+figure out why.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If you want to understand <i>change</i> in economic inequality, you
+should ask what those people would have done when it was different.
+This is one way I know the rich aren't all getting richer simply
+from some new system for transferring wealth to them from
+everyone else.  When you use the would-have method with startup
+founders, you find what most would have done 
+<a href="re.html"><u>back in 1960</u></a>, when
+economic inequality was lower, was to join big companies or become
+professors.  Before Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, his default
+expectation was that he'd end up working at Microsoft.  The reason
+he and most other startup founders are richer than they would have
+been in the mid 20th century is not because of some right turn the
+country took during the Reagan administration, but because progress
+in technology has made it much easier to start a new company that
+<a href="growth.html"><u>grows fast</u></a>.<br /><br />Traditional economists seem strangely averse to studying individual
+humans. It seems to be a rule with them that everything has to start
+with statistics.  So they give you very precise numbers about
+variation in wealth and income, then follow it with the most naive
+speculation about the underlying causes.<br /><br />But while there are a lot of people who get rich through rent-seeking
+of various forms, and a lot who get rich by playing zero-sum games, 
+there are also a significant number
+who get rich by creating wealth.  And creating wealth, as a source
+of economic inequality, is different from taking it &mdash; not just
+morally, but also practically, in the sense that it is harder to
+eradicate.  One reason is that variation in productivity is
+accelerating.  The rate at which individuals can create wealth
+depends on the technology available to them, and that grows
+exponentially. The other reason creating wealth is such a tenacious
+source of inequality is that it can expand to accommodate a lot of
+people.<br /><br /><center>___</center><br /><br />I'm all for shutting down the crooked ways to get rich.  But that
+won't eliminate great variations in wealth, because as long as you leave
+open the option of getting rich by creating wealth, people who want
+to get rich will do that instead.<br /><br />Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their
+other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them.  Suppose new
+policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem
+plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make
+their fortunes will continue to do so, but be content to work for
+ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because
+they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only
+way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups.
+They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor
+in the success of a startup. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font>
+And while it would probably be
+a good thing for the world if people who wanted to get rich switched
+from playing zero-sum games to creating wealth, that would not only
+not eliminate great variations in wealth, but might even 
+exacerbate them.
+In a zero-sum game there is at least a limit to the upside.  Plus
+a lot of the new startups would create new technology that further
+accelerated variation in productivity.<br /><br />Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic
+inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that
+you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources. And if
+you do, that core will be big, because it will have expanded to
+include the efforts of all the refugees.  Plus it will have a large
+Baumol penumbra around it: anyone who could get rich by creating
+wealth on their own account will have to be paid enough to prevent
+them from doing it.<br /><br />You can't prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people
+from getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them
+from starting startups.<br /><br />So let's be clear about that. Eliminating great variations in wealth would
+mean eliminating startups.  And that doesn't seem a wise move.
+Especially since it would only mean you eliminated
+startups in your own country.  Ambitious people already move halfway
+around the world to further their careers, and startups can operate
+from anywhere nowadays.  So if you made it impossible to get rich
+by creating wealth in your country, people who wanted to do that
+would just leave and do it somewhere else. Which would
+certainly get you a lower Gini coefficient, along with a lesson in
+being careful what you ask for. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />I think rising economic inequality is the inevitable fate of countries
+that don't choose something worse. We had a 40 year stretch in the
+middle of the 20th century that convinced some people otherwise.
+But as I explained in <a href="re.html"><u>The Refragmentation</u></a>,
+that was an anomaly &mdash; a
+unique combination of circumstances that compressed American society
+not just economically but culturally too.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#999999>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />And while some of the growth in economic inequality we've seen since
+then has been due to bad behavior of various kinds, there has
+simultaneously been a huge increase in individuals' ability to
+create wealth.  Startups are almost entirely a product of this
+period. And even within the startup world, there has been a qualitative
+change in the last 10 years.  Technology has decreased the cost of
+starting a startup so much that founders now have the upper hand
+over investors.  Founders get less diluted, and it is now common
+for them to retain 
+<a href="control.html"><u>board control</u></a> as well.  Both further increase
+economic inequality, the former because founders own more stock,
+and the latter because, as investors have learned, founders tend
+to be better at running their companies than investors.<br /><br />While the surface manifestations change, the underlying forces are
+very, very old.  The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon
+Valley has been happening for thousands of years.  If you look at
+the history of stone tools, technology was already accelerating in
+the Mesolithic.  The acceleration would have been too slow to
+perceive in one lifetime.  Such is the nature of the leftmost part
+of an exponential curve.  But it was the same curve.<br /><br />You do not want to design your society in a way that's incompatible
+with this curve. The evolution of technology is one of the most
+powerful forces in history.<br /><br />Louis Brandeis said "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth
+concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." That
+sounds plausible.  But if I have to choose between ignoring him and
+ignoring an exponential curve that has been operating for thousands
+of years, I'll bet on the curve.  Ignoring any trend that has been
+operating for thousands of years is dangerous.  But exponential
+growth, especially, tends to bite you.<br /><br /><center>___</center><br /><br />If accelerating variation in productivity is always going to produce
+some baseline growth in economic inequality, it would be a good
+idea to spend some time thinking about that future.  Can you have
+a healthy society with great variation in wealth?  What would it
+look like?<br /><br />Notice how novel it feels to think about that.  The public conversation
+so far has been exclusively about the need to decrease economic
+inequality.  We've barely given a thought to how to live with it.<br /><br />I'm hopeful we'll be able to.  Brandeis was a product of the Gilded
+Age, and things have changed since then. It's harder to hide
+wrongdoing now.  And to get rich now you don't have to buy politicians
+the way railroad or oil magnates did. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#999999>6</font></a>]</font>
+The great concentrations
+of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be
+destroying democracy.<br /><br />There are lots of things wrong with the US that have economic
+inequality as a symptom. We should fix those things.  In the process
+we may decrease economic inequality. But we can't start from the
+symptom and hope to fix the underlying causes.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#999999>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br />The most obvious is poverty. I'm sure most of those who want to
+decrease economic inequality want to do it mainly to help the poor,
+not to hurt the rich. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f8n"><font color=#999999>8</font></a>]</font>
+Indeed, a good number are merely being
+sloppy by speaking of decreasing economic inequality when what they
+mean is decreasing poverty.  But this is a situation where it would
+be good to be precise about what we want.  Poverty and economic
+inequality are not identical.  When the city is turning off your
+<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/what-happens-when-detroit-shuts-off-the-water-of-100000-people/374548/"><u>water</u></a>
+because you can't pay the bill, it doesn't make any difference
+what Larry Page's net worth is compared to yours.  He might only
+be a few times richer than you, and it would still be just as much
+of a problem that your water was getting turned off.<br /><br />Closely related to poverty is lack of social mobility.  I've seen
+this myself: you don't have to grow up rich or even upper middle
+class to get rich as a startup founder, but few successful founders
+grew up desperately poor.  But again, the problem here is not simply
+economic inequality.  There is an enormous difference in wealth
+between the household Larry Page grew up in and that of a successful
+startup founder, but that didn't prevent him from joining their
+ranks.  It's not economic inequality per se that's blocking social
+mobility, but some specific combination of things that go wrong
+when kids grow up sufficiently poor.<br /><br />One of the most important principles in Silicon Valley is that "you
+make what you measure."  It means that if you pick some number to
+focus on, it will tend to improve, but that you have to choose the
+right number, because only the one you choose will improve; another
+that seems conceptually adjacent might not.  For example, if you're
+a university president and you decide to focus on graduation rates,
+then you'll improve graduation rates.  But only graduation rates,
+not how much students learn.  Students could learn less, if to
+improve graduation rates you made classes easier.<br /><br />Economic inequality is sufficiently far from identical with the
+various problems that have it as a symptom that we'll probably only
+hit whichever of the two we aim at.  If we aim at economic inequality,
+we won't fix these problems.  So I say let's aim at the problems.<br /><br />For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth
+in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking
+wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f9n"><font color=#999999>9</font></a>]</font>
+And if
+there are people getting rich by tricking consumers or lobbying the
+government for anti-competitive regulations or tax loopholes, then
+let's stop them. Not because it's causing economic inequality, but
+because it's stealing.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f10n"><font color=#999999>10</font></a>]</font><br /><br />If all you have is statistics, it seems like that's what you need
+to fix. But behind a broad statistical measure like economic
+inequality there are some things that are good and some that are
+bad, some that are historical trends with immense momentum and
+others that are random accidents.  If we want to fix the world
+behind the statistics, we have to understand it, and focus our
+efforts where they'll do the most good.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+Stiglitz, Joseph. <i>The Price of Inequality</i>. Norton, 2012. p.
+32.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Particularly since economic inequality is a matter of outliers,
+and outliers are disproportionately likely to have gotten where
+they are by ways that have little do with the sort of things
+economists usually think about, like wages and productivity, but
+rather by, say, ending up on the wrong side of the "War on Drugs."<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+Determination is the most important factor in deciding between
+success and failure, which in startups tend to be sharply differentiated.
+But it takes more than determination to create one of the hugely
+successful startups.  Though most founders start out excited about
+the idea of getting rich, purely mercenary founders will usually
+take one of the big acquisition offers most successful startups get
+on the way up.  The founders who go on to the next stage tend to
+be driven by a sense of mission.  They have the same attachment to
+their companies that an artist or writer has to their work.  But
+it is very hard to predict at the outset which founders will do
+that. It's not simply a function of their initial attitude.  Starting
+a company changes people.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+After reading a draft of this essay, Richard Florida told me
+how he had once talked to a group of Europeans "who said
+ they wanted to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more
+  like Silicon Valley. I said by definition this will give you more
+  inequality.  They thought I was insane &mdash; they could not process
+  it."<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+Economic inequality has been decreasing globally.  But this
+is mainly due to the erosion of the kleptocracies that formerly
+dominated all the poorer countries.  Once the playing field is
+leveler politically, we'll see economic inequality start to rise
+again. The US is the bellwether.  The situation we face here, the
+rest of the world will sooner or later.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+Some people still get rich by buying politicians.  My point is that
+it's no longer a precondition.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+As well as problems that have economic inequality as a symptom,
+there are those that have it as a cause.  But in most if not all,
+economic inequality is not the primary cause.  There is usually
+some injustice that is allowing economic inequality to turn into
+other forms of inequality, and that injustice is what we need to
+fix.  For example, the police in the US treat the poor worse than
+the rich.  But the solution is not to make people richer. It's to
+make the police treat people more equitably.  Otherwise they'll
+continue to maltreat people who are weak in other ways.<br /><br />[<a name="f8n"><font color=#000000>8</font></a>]
+Some who read this essay will say that I'm clueless or even
+being deliberately misleading by focusing so much on the richer end
+of economic inequality &mdash; that economic inequality is really about
+poverty. But that is exactly the point I'm making, though sloppier
+language than I'd use to make it.  The real problem is poverty, not
+economic inequality.  And if you conflate them you're aiming at the
+wrong target.<br /><br />Others will say I'm clueless or being misleading by focusing on
+people who get rich by creating wealth &mdash; that startups aren't the
+problem, but corrupt practices in finance, healthcare, and so on.
+Once again, that is exactly my point.  The problem is not economic
+inequality, but those specific abuses.<br /><br />It's a strange task to write an essay about why something isn't the
+problem, but that's the situation you find yourself in when so many
+people mistakenly think it is.<br /><br />[<a name="f9n"><font color=#000000>9</font></a>]
+Particularly since many causes of poverty are only partially
+driven by people trying to make money from them. For example,
+America's abnormally high incarceration rate is a major cause of
+poverty.  But although <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/how-for-profit-prisons-have-become-the-biggest-lobby-no-one-is-talking-about/"><u>for-profit prison companies</u></a> and 
+<a href="http://mic.com/articles/41531/union-of-the-snake-how-california-s-prison-guards-subvert-democracy"><u>prison guard unions</u></a> both spend 
+a lot lobbying for harsh sentencing laws, they
+are not the original source of them.<br /><br />[<a name="f10n"><font color=#000000>10</font></a>]
+Incidentally, tax loopholes are definitely not a product
+of some power shift due to recent increases in economic inequality.
+The golden age of economic equality in the mid 20th century was
+also the golden age of tax avoidance. Indeed, it was so widespread
+and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality was
+really so low then as we think.  In a period when people are trying
+to hide wealth from the government, it will tend to be hidden from
+statistics too. One sign of the potential magnitude of the problem
+is the discrepancy between government receipts as a percentage of
+GDP, which have remained more or less constant during the entire
+period from the end of World War II to the present, and tax rates,
+which have varied dramatically.<br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Tiffani Ashley Bell, Patrick Collison, Ron
+Conway, Richard Florida, Ben Horowitz, Jessica Livingston, Robert
+Morris, Tim O'Reilly, Max Roser, and Alexia Tsotsis for reading
+drafts of this.<br /><br /><b>Note:</b> This is a new version from which I
+removed a pair of metaphors that made a lot of people mad, 
+essentially by macroexpanding them.  If anyone wants to see 
+the old version, I put it <a href="ineqold.html"><u>here</u></a>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Related:</b><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="sim.html">The Short Version</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="klein.html">A Reply to Ezra Klein</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="okung.html">A Reply to Russell Okung</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="8" border="0" /></td><td width="210"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="https://medium.com/@edouardtheron/les-in�galit�s-�conomiques-da70011717c6">French Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/invtrend.html

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+<html><head><title>Startup Investing Trends</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc69><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc69 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/startup-investing-trends-2.gif" width="205" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Startup Investing Trends" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">June 2013<br /><br /><i>(This talk was written for an audience of investors.)</i><br /><br />Y Combinator has now funded 564 startups including the current
+batch, which has 53.  The total valuation of the 287 that have
+valuations (either by raising an equity round, getting acquired,
+or dying) is about $11.7 billion, and the 511 prior to the current
+batch have collectively raised about $1.7 billion.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />As usual those numbers are dominated by a few big winners.  The top
+10 startups account for 8.6 of that 11.7 billion.  But there is a
+peloton of younger startups behind them.  There are about 40 more
+that have a shot at being really big.<br /><br />Things got a little out of hand last summer when we had 84 companies
+in the batch, so we tightened up our filter to decrease the batch
+size. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font>
+Several journalists have tried to interpret that as
+evidence for some macro story they were telling, but the reason had
+nothing to do with any external trend.  The reason was that we
+discovered we were using an n&sup2; algorithm, and we needed to buy
+time to fix it.  Fortunately we've come up with several techniques
+for sharding YC, and the problem now seems to be fixed.  With a new
+more scaleable model and only 53 companies, the current batch feels
+like a walk in the park.  I'd guess we can grow another 2 or 3x
+before hitting the next bottleneck. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />One consequence of funding such a large number of startups is that
+we see trends early.  And since fundraising is one of the main
+things we help startups with, we're in a good position to notice
+trends in investing.<br /><br />I'm going to take a shot at describing where these trends are
+leading.  Let's start with the most basic question: will the future
+be better or worse than the past?  Will investors, in the aggregate,
+make more money or less?<br /><br />I think more.  There are multiple forces at work, some of which
+will decrease returns, and some of which will increase them.  I
+can't predict for sure which forces will prevail, but I'll describe
+them and you can decide for yourself.<br /><br />There are two big forces driving change in startup funding: it's
+becoming cheaper to start a startup, and startups are becoming a
+more normal thing to do.<br /><br />When I graduated from college in 1986, there were essentially two
+options: get a job or go to grad school.  Now there's a third: start
+your own company.
+That's a big change.  In principle it was possible to start your
+own company in 1986 too, but it didn't seem like a real possibility.
+It seemed possible to start a consulting company, or a niche product
+company, but it didn't seem possible to start a company that would
+become big.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f4n"><font color=#999999>4</font></a>]</font><br /><br />That kind of change, from 2 paths to 3, is the sort of big social
+shift that only happens once every few generations.  I think we're
+still at the beginning of this one.  It's hard to predict how big
+a deal it will be.  As big a deal as the Industrial Revolution?
+Maybe.  Probably not.  But it will be a big enough deal that it
+takes almost everyone by surprise, because those big social shifts
+always do.<br /><br />One thing we can say for sure is that there will be a lot more
+startups.  The monolithic, hierarchical companies of the mid 20th
+century are being <a href="highres.html">replaced</a> by networks
+of smaller companies.  This process is not just something happening
+now in Silicon Valley.  It started decades ago, and it's happening
+as far afield as the car industry.  It has a long way to run. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f5n"><font color=#999999>5</font></a>]</font><br /><br />
+The other big driver of change is that startups are becoming cheaper
+to start.  And in fact the two forces are related: the decreasing
+cost of starting a startup is one of the reasons startups are
+becoming a more normal thing to do.<br /><br />The fact that startups need less money means founders will increasingly
+have the upper hand over investors.  You still need just as much
+of their energy and imagination, but they don't need as much of
+your money.  Because founders have the upper hand, they'll retain
+an increasingly large share of the stock in, and <a href="control.html">control of</a>, their
+companies.  Which means investors will get less stock and less
+control.<br /><br />Does that mean investors will make less money?  Not necessarily,
+because there will be more good startups.  The total amount of
+desirable startup stock available to investors will probably increase,
+because the number of desirable startups will probably grow faster
+than the percentage they sell to investors shrinks.<br /><br />There's a rule of thumb in the VC business that there are about 15
+companies a year that will be really successful.  Although a lot
+of investors unconsciously treat this number as if it were some
+sort of cosmological constant, I'm certain it isn't.   There are
+probably limits on the rate at which technology can develop, but
+that's not the limiting factor now.  If it were, each successful
+startup would be founded the month it became possible, and that is
+not the case. Right now the limiting factor on the number of big
+hits is the number of sufficiently good founders starting companies,
+and that number can and will increase.  There are still a lot of
+people who'd make great founders who never end up starting a company.
+You can see that from how randomly some of the most successful
+startups got started.  So many of the biggest startups almost didn't
+happen that there must be a lot of equally good startups that
+actually didn't happen.<br /><br />There might be 10x or even 50x more good founders out there.  As
+more of them go ahead and start startups, those 15 big hits a year
+could easily become 50 or even 100.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f6n"><font color=#999999>6</font></a>]</font><br /><br />What about returns, though?  Are we heading for a world in which
+returns will be pinched by increasingly high valuations?  I think
+the top firms will actually make more money than they have in the
+past.  High returns don't come from investing at low valuations.
+They come from investing in the companies that do really well.  So
+if there are more of those to be had each year, the best pickers
+should have more hits.<br /><br />This means there should be more variability in the VC business.
+The firms that can recognize and attract the best startups will do
+even better, because there will be more of them to recognize and
+attract.  Whereas the bad firms will get the leftovers, as they do
+now, and yet pay a higher price for them.<br /><br />Nor do I think it will be a problem that founders keep control of
+their companies for longer.  The empirical evidence on that is
+already clear: investors make more money as founders' bitches than
+their bosses.  Though somewhat humiliating, this is actually good
+news for investors, because it takes less time to serve founders
+than to micromanage them.<br /><br />What about angels?  I think there is a lot of opportunity there.
+It used to suck to be an angel investor.  You couldn't get access
+to the best deals, unless you got lucky like Andy Bechtolsheim, and
+when you did invest in a startup, VCs might try to strip you of
+your stock when they arrived later.  Now an angel can go to something
+like Demo Day or AngelList and have access to the same deals VCs
+do.  And the days when VCs could wash angels out of the cap table
+are long gone.<br /><br />I think one of the biggest unexploited opportunities in startup
+investing right now is angel-sized investments made quickly.  Few
+investors understand the cost that raising money from them imposes
+on startups.  When the company consists only of the founders,
+everything grinds to a halt during fundraising, which can easily
+take 6 weeks.  The current high cost of fundraising means there is
+room for low-cost investors to undercut the rest.  And in this
+context, low-cost means deciding quickly.  If there were a reputable
+investor who invested $100k on good terms and promised to decide
+yes or no within 24 hours, they'd get access to almost all the best
+deals, because every good startup would approach them first.  It
+would be up to them to pick, because every bad startup would approach
+them first too, but at least they'd see everything.  Whereas if an
+investor is notorious for taking a long time to make up their mind
+or negotiating a lot about valuation, founders will save them for
+last.  And in the case of the most promising startups, which tend
+to have an easy time raising money, last can easily become never.<br /><br />Will the number of big hits grow linearly with the total number of
+new startups?  Probably not, for two reasons.  One is that the
+scariness of starting a startup in the old days was a pretty effective
+filter.  Now that the cost of failing is becoming lower, we should
+expect founders to do it more.  That's not a bad thing.  It's common
+in technology for an innovation that decreases the cost of failure
+to increase the number of failures and yet leave you net ahead.<br /><br />The other reason the number of big hits won't grow proportionately
+to the number of startups is that there will start to be an increasing
+number of idea clashes.  Although the finiteness of the number of
+good ideas is not the reason there are only 15 big hits a year, the
+number has to be finite, and the more startups there are, the more
+we'll see multiple companies doing the same thing at the same time.
+It will be interesting, in a bad way, if idea clashes become a lot
+more common. 
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f7n"><font color=#999999>7</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Mostly because of the increasing number of early failures, the startup
+business of the future won't simply be the same shape, scaled up.
+What used to be an obelisk will become a pyramid.  It will be a
+little wider at the top, but a lot wider at the bottom.<br /><br />What does that mean for investors?  One thing it means is that there
+will be more opportunities for investors at the earliest stage,
+because that's where the volume of our imaginary solid is growing
+fastest.  Imagine the obelisk of investors that corresponds to
+the obelisk of startups.  As it widens out into a pyramid to match
+the startup pyramid, all the contents are adhering to the top,
+leaving a vacuum at the bottom.<br /><br />That opportunity for investors mostly means an opportunity for new
+investors, because the degree of risk an existing investor or firm
+is comfortable taking is one of the hardest things for them to
+change.  Different types of investors are adapted to different
+degrees of risk, but each has its specific degree of risk deeply
+imprinted on it, not just in the procedures they follow but in the
+personalities of the people who work there.<br /><br />I think the biggest danger for VCs, and also the biggest opportunity,
+is at the series A stage.  Or rather, what used to be the series A
+stage before series As turned into de facto series B rounds.<br /><br />Right now, VCs often knowingly invest too much money at the series
+A stage.  They do it because they feel they need to get a big chunk
+of each series A company to compensate for the opportunity cost of
+the board seat it consumes.  Which means when there is a lot of
+competition for a deal, the number that moves is the valuation (and
+thus amount invested) rather than the percentage of the company
+being sold.  Which means, especially in the case of more promising
+startups, that series A investors often make companies take more
+money than they want.<br /><br />Some VCs lie and claim the company really needs that much.  Others
+are more candid, and admit their financial models require them to
+own a certain percentage of each company.  But we all know the
+amounts being raised in series A rounds are not determined by asking
+what would be best for the companies.  They're determined by VCs
+starting from the amount of the company they want to own, and the
+market setting the valuation and thus the amount invested.<br /><br />Like a lot of bad things, this didn't happen intentionally.  The
+VC business backed into it as their initial assumptions gradually
+became obsolete.  The traditions and financial models of the VC
+business were established when founders needed investors more.  In
+those days it was natural for founders to sell VCs a big chunk of
+their company in the series A round.  Now founders would prefer to
+sell less, and VCs are digging in their heels because they're not
+sure if they can make money buying less than 20% of each series A
+company.<br /><br />The reason I describe this as a danger is that series A investors
+are increasingly at odds with the startups they supposedly serve,
+and that tends to come back to bite you eventually.  The reason I
+describe it as an opportunity is that there is now a lot of potential
+energy built up, as the market has moved away from VCs' traditional
+business model.  Which means the first VC to break ranks and start
+to do series A rounds for as much equity as founders want to sell
+(and with no "option pool" that comes only from the founders' shares)
+stands to reap huge benefits.<br /><br />What will happen to the VC business when that happens?  Hell if I
+know.  But I bet that particular firm will end up ahead.  If one
+top-tier VC firm started to do series A rounds that started from
+the amount the company needed to raise and let the percentage
+acquired vary with the market, instead of the other way around,
+they'd instantly get almost all the best startups.  And that's where
+the money is.<br /><br />You can't fight market forces forever.  Over the last decade we've
+seen the percentage of the company sold in series A rounds creep
+inexorably downward.  40% used to be common.  Now VCs are fighting
+to hold the line at 20%.  But I am daily waiting for the line to
+collapse.  It's going to happen.  You may as well anticipate it,
+and look bold.<br /><br />Who knows, maybe VCs will make more money by doing the right thing.
+It wouldn't be the first time that happened.  Venture capital is a
+business where occasional big successes generate hundredfold returns.
+How much confidence can you really have in financial models for
+something like that anyway?  The
+big successes only have to get a tiny bit less occasional to
+compensate for a 2x decrease in the stock sold in series A rounds.<br /><br />If you want to find new opportunities for investing, look for things
+founders complain about.  Founders are your customers, and the
+things they complain about are unsatisfied demand.  I've given two
+examples of things founders complain about most&mdash;investors who
+take too long to make up their minds, and excessive dilution in
+series A rounds&mdash;so those are good places to look now.  But
+the more general recipe is: do something founders want.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+I realize revenue and not fundraising is the proper test of
+success for a startup.  The reason we quote statistics about
+fundraising is because those are the numbers we have.  We couldn't
+talk meaningfully about revenues without including the numbers from
+the most successful startups, and we don't have those.  We often
+discuss revenue growth with the earlier stage startups, because
+that's how we gauge their progress, but when companies reach a
+certain size it gets presumptuous for a seed investor to do that.<br /><br />In any case, companies' market caps do eventually become a function
+of revenues, and post-money valuations of funding rounds are at
+least guesses by pros about where those market caps will end up.<br /><br />The reason only 287 have valuations is that the rest have mostly
+raised money on convertible notes, and although convertible notes
+often have valuation caps, a valuation cap is merely an upper bound
+on a valuation.<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+We didn't try to accept a particular number.  We have no way
+of doing that even if we wanted to.  We just tried to be significantly
+pickier.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+Though you never know with bottlenecks, I'm guessing the next
+one will be coordinating efforts among partners.<br /><br />[<a name="f4n"><font color=#000000>4</font></a>]
+I realize starting a company doesn't have to mean starting a
+<a href="growth.html">startup</a>.  There will be lots of people starting normal companies
+too.  But that's not relevant to an audience of investors.<br /><br />Geoff Ralston reports that in Silicon Valley it seemed thinkable
+to start a startup in the mid 1980s.  It would have started there.
+But I know it didn't to undergraduates on the East Coast.<br /><br />[<a name="f5n"><font color=#000000>5</font></a>]
+This trend is one of the main causes of the increase in
+economic inequality in the US since the mid twentieth century.  The
+person who would in 1950 have been the general manager of the x
+division of Megacorp is now the founder of the x company, and owns
+significant equity in it.<br /><br />[<a name="f6n"><font color=#000000>6</font></a>]
+If Congress passes the <a href="foundervisa.html">founder
+visa</a> in a non-broken form, that alone could in principle get
+us up to 20x, since 95% of the world's population lives outside the
+US.<br /><br />[<a name="f7n"><font color=#000000>7</font></a>]
+If idea clashes got bad enough, it could change what it means
+to be a startup.  We currently advise startups mostly to ignore
+competitors.  We tell them startups are competitive like running,
+not like soccer; you don't have to go and steal the ball away from
+the other team.  But if idea clashes became common enough, maybe
+you'd start to have to.  That would be unfortunate.<br /><br /><b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Dalton Caldwell,
+Patrick Collison, Jessica
+Livingston, Andrew Mason, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading
+drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/jessica.html

@@ -0,0 +1,207 @@
+<html><head><title>Jessica Livingston</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
+</head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-4.gif" text="#000000" link="#000099" vlink="#464646"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr valign="top"><td><map name=1717c64a02ebc45><area shape=rect coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,21,67,42" href="articles.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,42,67,63" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624"><area shape=rect coords="0,63,67,84" href="books.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,84,67,105" href="http://ycombinator.com"><area shape=rect coords="0,105,67,126" href="arc.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,126,67,147" href="bel.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,147,67,168" href="lisp.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,168,67,189" href="antispam.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,189,67,210" href="kedrosky.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,210,67,231" href="faq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,231,67,252" href="raq.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,252,67,273" href="quo.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,273,67,294" href="rss.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,294,67,315" href="bio.html"><area shape=rect coords="0,315,67,336" href="https://twitter.com/paulg"><area shape=rect coords="0,336,67,357" href="https://mas.to/@paulg"></map><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-5.gif" width="69" height="357" usemap=#1717c64a02ebc45 border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" ismap /></td><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="1" width="26" border="0" /></td><td><a href="index.html"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/essays-6.gif" width="410" height="45" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /></a><br /><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/jessica-livingston-4.gif" width="146" height="18" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="Jessica Livingston" /><br /><br /><font size="2" face="verdana">November 2015<br /><br />A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on
+it had been a "one-man show."  It's sadly common to read that sort
+of thing.  But the problem with that description is not just that
+it's unfair.  It's also misleading.  Much of what's most novel about
+YC is due to Jessica Livingston.  If you don't understand her, you
+don't understand YC.  So let me tell you a little about Jessica.<br /><br />YC had 4 founders.  Jessica and I decided one night to start it,
+and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor
+Blackwell.  Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor
+read applications and did interviews with us.<br /><br />Jessica and I were already dating when we started YC.  At first we
+tried to act "professional" about this, meaning we tried to conceal
+it.  In retrospect that seems ridiculous, and we soon dropped the
+pretense.  And the fact that Jessica and I were a couple is a big
+part of what made YC what it was.  YC felt like a family.  The
+founders early on were mostly young.  We all had dinner together
+once a week, cooked for the first couple years by me. Our first
+building had been a private home.  The overall atmosphere was
+shockingly different from a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, in a way
+that was entirely for the better.  There was an authenticity that
+everyone who walked in could sense.  And that didn't just mean that
+people trusted us.  It was the perfect quality to instill in startups.
+Authenticity is one of the most important things YC looks for in
+founders, not just because fakers and opportunists are annoying,
+but because authenticity is one of the main things that separates
+the most successful startups from the rest.<br /><br />Early YC was a family, and Jessica was its mom.  And the culture
+she defined was one of YC's most important innovations.  Culture
+is important in any organization, but at YC culture wasn't just how
+we behaved when we built the product. At YC, the culture was the
+product.<br /><br />Jessica was also the mom in another sense: she had the last word.
+Everything we did as an organization went through her <nobr>first &mdash; who</nobr>
+to fund, what to say to the public, how to deal with other companies,
+who to hire, everything.<br /><br />Before we had kids, YC was more or less our life. There was no real
+distinction between working hours and not.  We talked about YC all
+the time.  And while there might be some businesses that it would
+be tedious to let infect your private life, we liked it. We'd started
+YC because it was something we were interested in.  And some of the
+problems we were trying to solve were endlessly difficult.  How do
+you recognize good founders?  You could talk about that for years,
+and we did; we still do.<br /><br />I'm better at some things than Jessica, and she's better at some
+things than me.  One of the things she's best at is judging people.
+She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character.
+She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately.  Her
+nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of
+hers was critical in making YC what it is.  The earlier you pick
+startups, the more you're picking the founders.  Later stage investors
+get to try products and look at growth numbers.  At the stage where
+YC invests, there is often neither a product nor any numbers.<br /><br />Others thought YC had some special insight about the future of
+technology.  Mostly we had the same sort of insight Socrates claimed:
+we at least knew we knew nothing.  What made YC successful was being
+able to pick good founders.  We thought Airbnb was a bad idea.  We
+funded it because we liked the founders.<br /><br />During interviews, Robert and Trevor and I would pepper the applicants
+with technical questions.  Jessica would mostly watch.  A lot of
+the applicants probably read her as some kind of secretary, especially
+early on, because she was the one who'd go out and get each new
+group and she didn't ask many questions. She was ok with that.  It
+was easier for her to watch people if they didn't notice her. But
+after the interview, the three of us would turn to Jessica and ask
+"What does the Social Radar say?"
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f1n"><font color=#999999>1</font></a>]</font><br /><br />Having the Social Radar at interviews wasn't just how we picked
+founders who'd be successful.  It was also how we picked founders
+who were good people.  At first we did this because we couldn't
+help it.  Imagine what it would feel like to have x-ray vision for
+character.  Being around bad people would be intolerable.  So we'd
+refuse to fund founders whose characters we had doubts about even
+if we thought they'd be successful.<br /><br />Though we initially did this out of self-indulgence, it turned out
+to be very valuable to YC.  We didn't realize it in the beginning,
+but the people we were picking would become the YC alumni network.
+And once we picked them, unless they did something really egregious,
+they were going to be part of it for life. Some now think YC's
+alumni network is its most valuable feature. I personally think
+YC's advice is pretty good too, but the alumni network is certainly
+among the most valuable features.  The level of trust and helpfulness
+is remarkable for a group of such size.  And Jessica is the main
+reason why.<br /><br />(As we later learned, it probably cost us little to reject people
+whose characters we had doubts about, because how good founders are
+and how well they do are <a href="mean.html"><u>not orthogonal</u></a>.  If bad founders succeed
+at all, they tend to sell early.  The most successful founders are
+almost all good.)<br /><br />If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize
+it?  Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate
+attention.  YC's brand was initially my brand, and our applicants
+were people who'd read my essays.  But there is another reason:
+Jessica hates attention.  Talking to reporters makes her nervous.
+The thought of giving a talk paralyzes her.  She was even uncomfortable
+at our wedding, because the bride is always the center of attention.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f2n"><font color=#999999>2</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It's not just because she's shy that she hates attention, but because
+it throws off the Social Radar. She can't be herself. You can't
+watch people when everyone is watching you.<br /><br />Another reason attention worries her is that she hates bragging.
+In anything she does that's publicly visible, her biggest fear
+(after the obvious fear that it will be bad) is that it will seem
+ostentatious.  She says being too modest is a common problem for
+women.  But in her case it goes beyond that.  She has a horror of
+ostentation so visceral it's almost a phobia.<br /><br />She also hates fighting. She can't do it; she just shuts down.  And
+unfortunately there is a good deal of fighting in being the public
+face of an organization.<br /><br />So although Jessica more than anyone made YC unique, the very
+qualities that enabled her to do it mean she tends to get written
+out of YC's history.  Everyone buys this story that PG started YC
+and his wife just kind of helped.  Even YC's haters buy it.  A
+couple years ago when people were attacking us for not funding more
+female founders (than exist), they all treated YC as identical with
+PG.  It would have spoiled the narrative to acknowledge Jessica's
+central role at YC.<br /><br />Jessica was boiling mad that people were accusing <i>her</i> company of
+sexism. I've never seen her angrier about anything.  But she did
+not contradict them.  Not publicly.  In private there was a great
+deal of profanity.  And she wrote three separate essays about the
+question of female founders.  But she could never bring herself to
+publish any of them.  She'd seen the level of vitriol in this debate,
+and she shrank from engaging.
+<font color=#999999>[<a href="#f3n"><font color=#999999>3</font></a>]</font><br /><br />It wasn't just because she disliked fighting.  She's so sensitive
+to character that it repels her even to fight with dishonest people.
+The idea of mixing it up with linkbait journalists or Twitter trolls
+would seem to her not merely frightening, but disgusting.<br /><br />But Jessica knew her example as a successful female founder would
+encourage more women to start companies, so last year she did
+something YC had never done before and hired a PR firm to get her
+some interviews.  At one of the first she did, the reporter brushed
+aside her insights about startups and turned it into a sensationalistic
+story about how some guy had tried to chat her up as she was waiting
+outside the bar where they had arranged to meet.  Jessica was
+mortified, partly because the guy had done nothing wrong, but more
+because the story treated her as a victim significant only for being
+a woman, rather than one of the most knowledgeable investors in the
+Valley.<br /><br />After that she told the PR firm to stop.<br /><br />You're not going to be hearing in the press about what Jessica has
+achieved. So let me tell you what Jessica has achieved.  <nobr>Y Combinator</nobr>
+is fundamentally a nexus of people, like a university. It doesn't
+make a product. What defines it is the people.  Jessica more than
+anyone curated and nurtured that collection of people.  In that
+sense she literally made YC.<br /><br />Jessica knows more about the qualities of startup founders than
+anyone else ever has. Her immense data set and x-ray vision are the
+perfect storm in that respect.  The qualities of the founders are
+the best predictor of how a startup will do.  And startups are in
+turn the most important source of growth in mature economies.<br /><br />The person who knows the most about the most important factor in
+the growth of mature economies &mdash; that is who Jessica Livingston is.
+Doesn't that sound like someone who should be better known?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes</b><br /><br />[<a name="f1n"><font color=#000000>1</font></a>]
+Harj Taggar reminded me that while Jessica didn't ask many
+questions, they tended to be important ones:<br /><br />"She was always good at sniffing out any red flags about the team
+or their determination and disarmingly asking the right question,
+which usually revealed more than the founders realized."<br /><br />[<a name="f2n"><font color=#000000>2</font></a>]
+Or more precisely, while she likes getting attention in the
+sense of getting credit for what she has done, she doesn't like
+getting attention in the sense of being watched in real time.
+Unfortunately, not just for her but for a lot of people, how much
+you get of the former depends a lot on how much you get of the
+latter.<br /><br />Incidentally, if you saw Jessica at a public event, you would never
+guess she
+hates attention, because (a) she is very polite and (b) when she's
+nervous, she expresses it by smiling more.<br /><br />[<a name="f3n"><font color=#000000>3</font></a>]
+The existence of people like Jessica is not just something
+the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something
+feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well.  There are successful
+women who don't like to fight.  Which means if the public conversation
+about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.<br /><br />There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation
+reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people
+start to leave. No one understands female founders better than
+Jessica.  But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly
+about the topic. She ventured a toe in that water a while ago, and
+the reaction was so violent that she decided "never again."<br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, 
+Daniel Gackle, Carolynn
+Levy, Jon Levy, Kirsty Nathoo, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
+Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.  And yes, Jessica Livingston,
+who made me cut surprisingly little.<br /><br /><br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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platform/aiml/etl/corpus-data/for-profit/raw/paulgraham/paulgraham.com/know.html

@@ -0,0 +1,101 @@
+<html><head><title>How You Know</title><!-- <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> -->
+<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc.png">
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+two times, maybe three.  And yet if I had to write down everything
+I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a
+page.  Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy
+feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all
+these books if I remember so little from them?<br /><br />A few months ago, as I was reading Constance Reid's excellent
+biography of Hilbert, I figured out if not the answer to this
+question, at least something that made me feel better about it.
+She writes:
+<blockquote>
+  Hilbert had no patience with mathematical lectures which filled
+  the students with facts but did not teach them how to frame a
+  problem and solve it. He often used to tell them that "a perfect
+  formulation of a problem is already half its solution."
+</blockquote>
+That has always seemed to me an important point, and I was even
+more convinced of it after hearing it confirmed by Hilbert.<br /><br />But how had I come to believe in this idea in the first place?  A
+combination of my own experience and other things I'd read.  None
+of which I could at that moment remember!  And eventually I'd forget
+that Hilbert had confirmed it too.  But my increased belief in the
+importance of this idea would remain something I'd learned from
+this book, even after I'd forgotten I'd learned it.<br /><br />Reading and experience train your model of the world.  And even if
+you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model
+of the world persists.  Your mind is like a compiled program you've
+lost the source of.  It works, but you don't know why.<br /><br />The place to look for what I learned from Villehardouin's chronicle
+is not what I remember from it, but my mental models of the crusades,
+Venice, medieval culture, siege warfare, and so on.  Which doesn't
+mean I couldn't have read more attentively, but at least the harvest
+of reading is not so miserably small as it might seem.<br /><br />This is one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect.  But
+it was a surprise to me and presumably would be to anyone else who
+felt uneasy about (apparently) forgetting so much they'd read.<br /><br />Realizing it does more than make you feel a little better about
+forgetting, though.  There are specific implications.<br /><br />For example, reading and experience are usually "compiled" at the
+time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time.  The
+same book would get compiled differently at different points in
+your life.  Which means it is very much worth reading important
+books multiple times.  I always used to feel some misgivings about
+rereading books.  I unconsciously lumped reading together with work
+like carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you
+did it wrong the first time.  Whereas now the phrase "already read"
+seems almost ill-formed.<br /><br />Intriguingly, this implication isn't limited to books.  Technology
+will increasingly make it possible to relive our experiences.  When
+people do that today it's usually to enjoy them again (e.g. when
+looking at pictures of a trip) or to find the origin of some bug in
+their compiled code (e.g. when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering
+the childhood trauma that prevented him from singing).  But as
+technologies for recording and playing back your life improve, it
+may become common for people to relive experiences without any goal
+in mind, simply to learn from them again as one might when rereading
+a book.<br /><br />Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but
+also to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you
+know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading 
+drafts of this.<br /><br /></font></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="5" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td width="435"><img src="https://s.turbifycdn.com/aah/paulgraham/how-to-get-new-ideas-5.gif" width="12" height="14" align="left" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" /><font size="2" face="verdana"><a href="http://postd.cc/how-you-know/">Japanese Translation</a><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="2" width="1" border="0" /><br /></font></td></tr><tr><td><img src="https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ca/Img/trans_1x1.gif" height="3" width="1" border="0" /></td></tr></table><br /><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="435"><tr><td><font size="2" face="verdana"><br><br><hr></font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body>
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