A Version 1.0
October 2004
As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting."  I didn't
realize this when I was in school.  In writing, as in math and
science, they only show you the finished product.
You don't see all the false starts.  This gives students a
misleading view of how things get made.
Part of the reason it happens is that writers don't want
people to see their mistakes.  But I'm willing to let people
see an early draft if it will show how much you have
to rewrite to beat an essay into shape.
Below is the oldest version I can find of
The Age of the Essay
(probably the second or third day), with
text that ultimately survived in
red
and text that later
got deleted in
gray
.
There seem to be several categories of cuts: things I got wrong,
things that seem like bragging, flames,
digressions, stretches of awkward prose, and unnecessary words.
I discarded more from the beginning.  That's
not surprising; it takes a while to hit your stride.  There
are more digressions at the start, because I'm not sure where
I'm heading.
The amount of cutting is about average.  I probably write
three to four words for every one that appears in the final
version of an essay.
(Before anyone gets mad at me for opinions expressed here, remember
that anything you see here that's not in the final version is obviously
something I chose not to publish, often because I disagree
with it.)
Recently a friend said that what he liked about
my essays was that they weren't written the way
we'd been taught to write essays in school.  You
remember:
topic sentence, introductory paragraph,
supporting paragraphs, conclusion.
It hadn't
occurred to me till then that those horrible things
we had to write in school were even connected to
what I was doing now.  But sure enough, I thought,
they did call them "essays," didn't they?
Well, they're not.  Those things you have to write
in school are not only not essays, they're one of the
most pointless of all the pointless hoops you have
to jump through in school.  And I worry that they
not only teach students the wrong things about writing,
but put them off writing entirely.
So I'm going to give the other side of the story: what
an essay really is, and how you write one.  Or at least,
how I write one.
Students be forewarned: if you actually write
the kind of essay I describe, you'll probably get bad
grades.  But knowing how it's really done should
at least help you to understand the feeling of futility
you have when you're writing the things they tell you to.
The most obvious difference between real essays and
the things one has to write in school is that real
essays are not exclusively about English literature.
It's a fine thing for schools to
teach students how to
write.
But for some bizarre reason (actually, a very specific bizarre
reason that I'll explain in a moment),
the teaching of
writing has gotten mixed together with the study
of literature.  And so all over the country, students are
writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget
might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in
fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about
symbolism in Dickens.
With
obvious
result
s.  Only a few people really
care about
symbolism in Dickens.
The teacher doesn't.
The students don't.  Most of the people who've had to write PhD
disserations about Dickens don't.  And certainly
Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay
about color or baseball.
How did things get this way?  To answer that we have to go back
almost a thousand years.
Between about 500 and 1000, life was
not very good in Europe.  The term "dark ages" is presently
out of fashion as too judgemental (the period wasn't dark;
it was just
different
), but if this label didn't already
exist, it would seem an inspired metaphor.  What little
original thought there was took place in lulls between
constant wars and had something of the character of
the thoughts of parents with a new baby.
The most amusing thing written during this
period, Liudprand of Cremona's Embassy to Constantinople, is,
I suspect, mostly inadvertantly so.
Around 1000
Europe began to catch its breath.
And once they
had the luxury of curiosity,
one of the first things they discovered
was
what we call "the classics."
Imagine if
we were visited
by
aliens.  If they could even get here they'd presumably know a
few things we don't.  Immediately Alien Studies would become
the most dynamic field of scholarship: instead of painstakingly
discovering things for ourselves, we could simply suck up
everything they'd discovered.  So it was in Europe in 1200.
When classical texts began to circulate in Europe, they contained
not just new answers, but new questions.  (If anyone proved
a theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, there
is no record of it.)
For a couple centuries, some of the most important work
being done was intellectual archaelogy.  Those were also
the centuries during which schools were first established.
And since reading ancient texts was the
essence of what
scholars did
then, it became the basis of the curriculum.
By 1700,
someone who wanted to learn about
physics didn't need to start by mastering Greek in order to read
Aristotle.  But schools
change slower than scholarship
:
the study of
ancient texts
had such prestige that it remained
the backbone of
education
until the late 19th century.  By then it was merely a tradition.
It did serve some purposes: reading a foreign language was difficult,
and thus taught discipline, or at least, kept students busy;
it introduced students to
cultures quite different from their own; and its very uselessness
made it function (like white gloves) as a social bulwark.
But it certainly wasn't
true, and hadn't been true for centuries, that students were
serving apprenticeships in the hottest area of scholarship.
Classical scholarship had also changed.  In the early era, philology
actually mattered.  The texts that filtered into Europe were
all corrupted to some degree by the errors of translators and
copyists.  Scholars had to figure out what Aristotle said
before they could figure out what he meant.  But by the modern
era such questions were answered as well as they were ever
going to be.  And so the study of ancient texts became less
about ancientness and more about texts.
The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of
ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern
texts?  The answer, of course, is that the raison d'etre
of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaelogy that
does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors.
But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer.
The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that
the people studying the classics were, if not wasting their
time, at least working on problems of minor importance.
And so began the study of modern literature. There was
some
initial
resistance
, but it didn't last long.
The limiting
reagent in the growth of university departments is what
parents will let undergraduates study.  If parents will let
their children major in x, the rest follows straightforwardly.
There will be jobs teaching x, and professors to fill them.
The professors will establish scholarly journals and publish
one another's papers.  Universities with x departments will
subscribe to the journals.  Graduate students who want jobs
as professors of x will write dissertations about it.  It may
take a good long while for the more prestigious universities
to cave in and establish departments in cheesier xes,  but
at the other end of the scale there are so many universities
competing to attract students that the mere establishment of
a discipline requires little more than the desire to do it.
High schools imitate universities.
And so once university
English departments were established in the late nineteenth century,
the 'riting component of the 3 Rs
was
morphed into English.
With the bizarre consequence that high school students now
had to write about English literature-- to write, without
even realizing it, imitations of whatever
English professors had been publishing in their journals a
few decades before.   It's no wonder if this seems to the
student a pointless exercise, because we're now three steps
removed from real work: the students are imitating English
professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are
merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what
was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.
Perhaps high schools should drop English and just teach writing.
The valuable part of English classes is learning to write, and
that could be taught better by itself.  Students learn better
when they're interested in what they're doing, and it's hard
to imagine a topic less interesting than symbolism in Dickens.
Most of the people who write about that sort of thing professionally
are not really interested in it.  (Though indeed, it's been a
while since they were writing about symbolism; now they're
writing about gender.)
I have no illusions about how eagerly this suggestion will
be adopted.  Public schools probably couldn't stop teaching
English even if they wanted to; they're probably required to by
law.  But here's a related suggestion that goes with the grain
instead of against it: that universities establish a
writing major.  Many of the students who now major in English
would major in writing if they could, and most would
be better off.
It will be argued that it is a good thing for students to be
exposed to their literary heritage.  Certainly.  But is that
more important than that they learn to write well?  And are
English classes even the place to do it?  After all,
the average public high school student gets zero exposure to
his artistic heritage.  No disaster results.
The people who are interested in art learn about it for
themselves, and those who aren't don't.  I find that American
adults are no better or worse informed about literature than
art, despite the fact that they spent years studying literature
in high school and no time at all studying art.  Which presumably
means that what they're taught in school is rounding error
compared to what they pick up on their own.
Indeed, English classes may even be harmful.  In my case they
were effectively aversion therapy.  Want to make someone dislike
a book?  Force him to read it and write an essay about it.
And make the topic so intellectually bogus that you
could not, if asked, explain why one ought to write about it.
I love to read more than anything, but by the end of high school
I never read the books we were assigned.  I was so disgusted with
what we were doing that it became a point of honor
with me to write nonsense at least as good at the other students'
without having more than glanced over the book to learn the names
of the characters and a few random events in it.
I hoped this might be fixed in college, but I found the same
problem there.  It was not the teachers.  It was English.
We were supposed to read novels and write essays about them.
About what, and why?  That no one seemed to be able to explain.
Eventually by trial and error I found that what the teacher
wanted us to do was pretend that the story had really taken
place, and to analyze based on what the characters said and did (the
subtler clues, the better) what their motives must have been.
One got extra credit for motives having to do with class,
as I suspect one must now for those involving gender and
sexuality.  I learned how to churn out such stuff well enough
to get an A, but I never took another English class.
And the books we did these disgusting things to, like those
we mishandled in high school, I find still have black marks
against them in my mind.  The one saving grace was that
English courses tend to favor pompous, dull writers like
Henry James, who deserve black marks against their names anyway.
One of the principles the IRS uses in deciding whether to
allow deductions is that, if something is fun, it isn't work.
Fields that are intellectually unsure of themselves rely on
a similar principle.  Reading P.G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh or
Raymond Chandler is too obviously pleasing to seem like
serious work, as reading Shakespeare would have been before
English evolved enough to make it an effort to understand him. [sh]
And so good writers (just you wait and see who's still in
print in 300 years) are less likely to have readers turned
against them by clumsy, self-appointed tour guides.
The other big difference between a real essay and the
things
they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't
take a position and then defend it.  That principle,
like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature,
turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long
forgotten origins.  It's often mistakenly believed that
medieval universities were mostly seminaries.  In fact they
were more law schools.  And at least in our tradition
lawyers are advocates
: they are
trained to
be able to
take
either side of an argument and make as good a case for it
as they can.
Whether or not this is a good idea (in the case of prosecutors,
it probably isn't), it tended to
pervade
the atmosphere of
early universities.  After the lecture the most common form
of discussion was the disputation.  This
idea
is at least
nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense
-- indeed,
in the very word thesis.
Most people treat the words
thesis
and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least,
a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was
the argument by which one defended it.
I'm not complaining that we blur these two words together.
As far as I'm concerned, the sooner we lose the original
sense of the word thesis, the better.  For many, perhaps most,
graduate students, it is stuffing a square peg into a round
hole to try to recast one's work as a single thesis.  And
as for the disputation, that seems clearly a net lose.
Arguing two sides of a case
may be a necessary evil in a
legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth,
as I think lawyers would be the first to admit.
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of
the
essays
they teach you to write in high school.  The topic
sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting
paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the
conclusion--- uh, what it the conclusion?  I was never sure
about that in high school.
If your thesis was well expressed,
what need was there to restate it?  In theory it seemed that
the conclusion of a really good essay ought not to need to
say any more than QED.
But when you understand the origins
of this sort of "essay", you can see where the
conclusion comes from.  It's the concluding remarks to the
jury.
What other alternative is there?  To answer that
we have to
reach back into history again, though this time not so far.
To Michel de Montaigne,
inventor of the essay.
He was
doing something quite different from what
a
lawyer do
es,
and
the difference is embodied in the name.  Essayer is the French
verb meaning "to try"
(the cousin of our word assay),
and an "essai" is an
effort.
An essay is something you
write
in order
to figure something out.
Figure out what?  You don't know yet.  And so you can't begin with a
thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have
one.  An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a
question.  In a real essay, you don't take a position and
defend it.  You see a door that's ajar, and you open it and
walk in to see what's inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need
to write anything, though?  Why not just sit and think?  Well,
there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery.  Expressing
ideas helps to form them.  Indeed, helps is far too weak a
word.
90%
of what ends up in my essays
was stuff
I only
thought of when I sat down to write them.  That's why I
write them.
So there's another difference between essays and
the things
you have to write in school
.   In school
you are, in theory,
explaining yourself to
someone else.  In the best case---if
you're really organized---you're just writing it
down.
In a real essay you're writing for yourself.  You're
thinking out loud.
But not quite.  Just as inviting people over forces you to
clean up your apartment, writing something that
you know
other people will read forces you to think well.  So it
does matter to have an audience.  The things I've written
just for myself are no good.
Indeed, they're bad in
a particular way:
they tend to peter out.  When I run into
difficulties, I
notice that I
tend to conclude with a few vague
questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.
This seems a common problem.
It's practically the standard
ending in blog entries--- with the addition of a "heh" or an
emoticon, prompted by the all too accurate sense that
something is missing.
And indeed, a lot of
published essays peter out in
this
same way.
Particularly the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines.  Outside writers tend to supply
editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which
make a beeline toward a rousing (and
foreordained) conclusion.   But the staff writers feel
obliged to write something
more
balanced
, which in
practice ends up meaning blurry.
Since they're
writing for a popular magazine, they start with the
most radioactively controversial questions, from which
(
because they're writing for a popular magazine
)
they then proceed to recoil
from
in terror.
Gay marriage,
for or
against?  This group says one thing.  That group says
another.  One thing is certain: the question is a
complex one.  (But don't get mad at us.  We didn't
draw any conclusions.)
Questions aren't enough.  An essay has to come up with answers.
They don't always, of course.  Sometimes you start with a
promising question and get nowhere.  But those you don't
publish.  Those are like experiments that get inconclusive
results.   Something you publish ought to tell the reader
something he didn't already know.
But
what
you tell him doesn't matter, so long as
it's interesting.  I'm sometimes accused of meandering.
In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw.
There you're not concerned with truth.  You already
know where you're going, and you want to go straight there,
blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving
your way across swampy ground.  But that's not what
you're trying to do in an essay.  An essay is supposed to
be a search for truth.  It would be suspicious if it didn't
meander.
The Meander is a river in
Asia Minor (aka
Turkey
).
As you might expect, it winds all over the place.
But
does it
do this out of frivolity
?   Quite the opposite.
Like all rivers, it's rigorously following the laws of physics.
The path it has discovered
,
winding as it is, represents
the most economical route to the sea.
The river's algorithm is simple.  At each step, flow down.
For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting.
Of all the places to go next, choose
whichever seems
most interesting.
I'm pushing this metaphor a bit.  An essayist
can't have
quite as little foresight as a river.
In fact what you do
(or what I do) is somewhere between a river and a roman
road-builder.  I have a general idea of the direction
I want to go in, and
I choose the next topic with that in mind.  This essay is
about writing, so I do occasionally yank it back in that
direction, but it is not all the sort of essay I
thought I was going to write about writing.
Note too that hill-climbing (which is what this algorithm is
called) can get you in trouble.
Sometimes,
just
like a river,
you
run up against a blank wall.
What
I do
then is just
what the river does: backtrack.
At one point in this essay
I found that after following a certain thread I ran out
of ideas.  I had to go back
n
paragraphs and start over
in another direction.
For illustrative purposes I've left
the abandoned branch as a footnote.
Err on the side of the river.  An essay is not a reference
work.  It's not something you read looking for a specific
answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it.  I'd much
rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but
interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along
a prescribed course.
So what's interesting?  For me, interesting means surprise.
Design, as
Matz
has said, should follow the principle of
least
surprise.
A button that looks like it will make a
machine stop should make it stop, not speed up.  Essays
should do the opposite.  Essays should aim for maximum
surprise.
I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel
vicariously.  When friends came back from faraway places,
it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked them
about
their trip.
I really wanted to know.  And I found
that
the best way to get information out of them was to ask
what surprised them.  How was the place different from what
they expected?  This is an extremely useful question.
You can ask it of
even
the most unobservant people, and it will
extract information they didn't even know they were
recording.
Indeed, you can ask it in real time.  Now when I go somewhere
new, I make a note of what surprises me about it.  Sometimes I
even make a conscious effort to visualize the place beforehand,
so I'll have a detailed image to diff with reality.
Surprises are
facts
you didn't
already
know
.
But
they're
more than that.  They're facts
that contradict things you
thought you knew.  And so they're the most valuable sort of
fact you can get.  They're like a food that's not merely
healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things
you've already eaten.
How do you find surprises?  Well, therein lies half
the work of essay writing.  (The other half is expressing
yourself well.)
You can at least
use yourself as a
proxy for the reader.  You should only write about things
you've thought about a lot.  And anything you come across
that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot,
will probably surprise most readers.
For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because
you can only judge computer programmers by working with
them, no one knows
in programming who the heroes should
be.
I
certainly
didn't realize this when I
started writing
the
essay, and even now I find it kind of weird.  That's
what you're looking for.
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients:
you need
a few topics that you think about a lot, and
you
need
some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
What should you think about?  My guess is that it
doesn't matter
.  Almost everything is
interesting if you get deeply
enough into it.
The
one possible exception
are
things
like working in fast food,
which
have deliberately had all
the variation sucked out of them
.
In retrospect, was there
anything interesting about working in Baskin-Robbins?
Well, it was interesting
to notice
how important color was
to the customers.  Kids a certain age would point into
the case and say that they wanted yellow.  Did they want
French Vanilla or Lemon?  They would just look at you
blankly.  They wanted yellow.  And then there was the
mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines n' Cream
was so appealing. I
'm inclined now to
think it was the salt.
And the mystery of why Passion Fruit tasted so disgusting.
People would order it because of the name, and were always
disappointed.  It should have been called In-sink-erator
Fruit.
And
there was
the difference in the way fathers and
mothers bought ice cream for their kids
.
Fathers
tended to
adopt the attitude of
benevolent kings bestowing largesse,
and
mothers
that of
harried
bureaucrats,
giving in to
pressure
against their better judgement.
So, yes, there does seem to be material, even in
fast food.
What about the other half, ferreting out the unexpected?
That may require some natural ability.  I've noticed for
a long time that I'm pathologically observant.  ....
[That was as far as I'd gotten at the time.]
Notes
[sh] In Shakespeare's own time, serious writing meant theological
discourses, not the bawdy plays acted over on the other
side of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses.
The other extreme, the work that seems formidable from the moment
it's created (indeed, is deliberately intended to be)
is represented by Milton.  Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost is a
rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get fossilized.
Even Samuel Johnson seems to have balked at this, on the one
hand paying Milton the compliment of an extensive biography,
and on the other writing of Paradise Lost that "none who read it
ever wished it longer."


@Noahpinion Resource extraction.

@benmharrison @StephenFleming Robert Morris does this before hitting return when typing something momentous into the command line.

A friend who's a former British military officer told me that when he was training soldiers in jungle warfare they were taught that if they got lost in the jungle, the first thing they should do was to brew a cup of tea and think about what to do next.

12 yo is refining his evil villain laugh in the next room and it's quite disconcerting.

@nick_sinai @eshear Musing?

@AlmostMedia @KeturahAbigail What, no. I said the middling writers will disappear. The good ones will remain, because they like doing it.

https://t.co/GdwU5KKU6M

@eshear Since editing is part of writing, that reduces to: why bother to write when the AI will do it for you? And since writing is thinking, that reduces in turn to: why bother to think when the AI will do it for you?

@archaeologyart This was made for tourists.

AI will punish those who aren't concise.

@TheRealN8works Compared to venture debt it is, because VCs' incentives are much more aligned with founders'.


@rauchg Why is it the most powerful?

@AnalyticaCamil1 If you think I supported Trump in the election, you really have not been paying attention. In fact that would have been so easy to check that I have to assume you're being deliberately dishonest here.

I'm not trying to convince you, just explaining why I blocked you.

@artee_49 @Austen Presumably there are powerful Democrats in there too.

@toomzheng Our World in Data is a nonprofit funded by YC.

@Austen It was known that he flew on Epstein's plane. But presumably Elon means the Epstein files contain evidence of something more serious than that (e.g. sex with underage girls), or it wouldn't make the government withhold the files, or be a "bomb" to disclose it.

@electricave3 Do you think Trump should remain in office if the allegations are true?

A lot of people seem to be treating this as if it were just a beef. But the underlying allegation is a very serious one. If it's true, Trump is surely going to have to resign.

@lisperati Not if it's true.

@JasonKander What? Presumably he didn't learn about this till after the Republicans won and they got access to the files.

@SpencrGreenberg The Selfish Gene


@aaronsibarium precisely

@elonmusk Come on, tourists aren't getting killed. Their cars are getting broken into, sure, but no one's getting killed.

@yuris That was where we got the banana cream pie I got hit in the face with.

https://t.co/L8Lx2Z6D9m

This is true. I often have to explain to people in Britain that it's not actually dangerous to visit SF, as long as you stay out of a few bad bits.

@Rufus87078959 If +2 is right for reading a book 2 feet away, then +1 will be right for looking at a painting 6 feet away.

Something I taught 12 yo: There are, unfortunately, people in the world who enjoy hurting other people. And they don't wear signs advertising this, or everyone would avoid them.

Tip for people who use reading glasses: save your older, weaker ones for looking at paintings in museums.

@scarletinked If there was only one of them, you didn't need to measure his efficiency. He must have been stupendously efficient.

@pritika_mehta All you need is nerds, rich people, a government that doesn't get in the way, and time.

@LifeMathMoney Write Like You Talk: https://t.co/K1ZWs2v6RF


@TimSuzman @garrytan We had A/C on Pioneer Way too. It just couldn't keep up on the hottest days.

@Niklas_Sikorra @DudespostingWs Dealing with bats flying around inside the house.

Karaoke in our household. https://t.co/DSDv6xKJ9B

12 yo is writing a zombie story where instead of turning into zombies people turn into some politician. He asked me what politician he should use. I told him Ted Cruz.

Although two parties to a private settlement can agree to a confidentiality clause if they want to, perhaps in a matter of national security we should know what actually happened.

@GarettJones The funny thing is that Armstrong himself muffed the quote he was supposed to deliver. He was supposed to say "small step for a man" but instead said "small step for man."

@xpasky @fermatslibrary When I reproduce a quote in an essay, I make sure to get the correct version. And this can take a surprising amount of work, because even recent quotes have often been mangled. But if you don't do it you just perpetuate the drift.

@xpasky @fermatslibrary Not mangling quoted passages is a more important hill to die on than you might think. Errors and (supposed) amendments introduced into quotes are a constant problem for scholars.

@tjdonegan @fermatslibrary That's not the origin of this quote. I believe Teller quoted Bohr at least twice, once in 1954 and once in 1972. This is the 1972 quote. The 1954 quote is longer and more awkward, and incidentally will also tempt people to rewrite it for the same reason.

@fermatslibrary The original version is "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."

Paraphrase or use quotes, but don't put quotes around a paraphrase.


@jdmccafferty Whoah, that actually surpasses the Pollaiuolos' record for lack of back of head. https://t.co/nhJNJ7fKZT

The more inflated the language in your startup's pitch, the less convincing it seems. If you're a seed stage company, don't tell me you're transforming global this or poised to dominate that. Tell me you noticed something that might turn out to be an overlooked opportunity.

@russian_cosmist @kevinvdahlgren @GraduatedBen Not in many other countries.

@KyleTibbitts @synopsi I don't want capital gains rates to be increased either, but Carter lost because Reagan was more charismatic.

https://t.co/yF5TXJlxs8

@Noahpinion I was about to write "Does the New York Times really want Trump as president?" and then it occurred to me that they might. It made them a lot of money last time.

https://t.co/YJRvok9Ajo

@andrewbean Ugh, yes, and National Geographic.

@robinhanson I wonder if that's true. I'm not disagreeing. It might be true. It's just so hard to say for sure about something like that. It would be interesting if there were some way to measure it.

@Coruscating @devesh_khare @0xKNL__ Woke mobs are a much narrower phenomenon than  someone disagreeing with you. They're people attacking you for very specific things (basically heresy) in a very specific way.

One thing we've learned from the past decade is that there's a reason western legal traditions have safeguards like penalties for perjury, making the jury be separate from the accusers, and so on, and without them you're going to get miscarriages of justice.

@yuris Ack, that's awful. I can't believe it.


@Hooman323 Someone has to. Imagine if no one did.

@Jonathangel5 Because this is probably the most notorious instance of this type of xenophobia in US history. If we can imagine her doing it then, as we easily can, then she's not just a little bad. She's really bad.

@EV_Trapper Of course. There were a lot of people like her at the time. But it's even less excusable now.

@Jonathangel5 She should not get her way.

@theunusualflow At the very least he's opportunistically xenophobic.

If Laura Loomer had been around in 1940, she'd have been trying to prevent Jewish refugees from entering the US. You know she would. And if Trump had been president then, she'd have succeeded.

@SaukkonenVille @rickasaurus Here's one famous example:

https://t.co/4jDtF3XNsx

@rickasaurus This is less likely at YC. One of the things YC is good at is protecting naive founders.

@traders_guild In fact one of the startups in the current batch specializes in testing vibe coded apps.

@ya_asmarani Thanks, Asmarani. Brandon's style of storytelling is ideal for a situation like this. It reminds us that we're talking about 2 million individuals.


@jeazous Secular = not cyclical.

@cremieuxrecueil I always make a point of telling the truth (e.g. about drinks a week) and it's weird to sense that doctors think I'm lying.

Prediction: This is a secular trend. The pendulum will never swing back. https://t.co/G4NttLBHMl

Jessica is hosting a girls' Rummikub night. I was warned to keep away from both the Rummikub and all the party food. Then one of the guests cancelled and they don't have enough players, and now I'm suddenly in demand...

@elonmusk @NoahCarl90 I was thinking mainly of conversations I've had with ordinary people. I don't think you realize the size of the gap between how your tweets about the UK seem to people in Texas and how they seem to people in the UK.

@Timmystravels @NoahCarl90 That's definitely false. The mums and dads I run into at dinner parties are so far from woke that they've never even heard of SJWs.

@NoahCarl90 I worry Elon has no idea how much he has damaged his personal brand in the UK. He thinks he's just tweeting away, and meanwhile ordinary British people now think of him like some sinister rich bad guy in a Batman movie.

@mattyglesias I don't see anything there that he'd disagree with now.

@FRANKDIAZ All the time, when the desk was called a table and was inside a restaurant.

@mccartydan Room to pace was one of the design specs of my office. That and bookshelves and natural light.


How to Get Startup Ideas
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
November 2012
The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup
ideas.  It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have
yourself.
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common:
they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves
can build, and that few others realize are worth doing.  Microsoft,
Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.
Problems
Why is it so important to work on a problem you have?  Among other
things, it ensures the problem really exists.  It sounds obvious
to say you should only work on problems that exist.  And yet by far
the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one
has.
I made it myself.  In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries
online.  But galleries didn't want to be online.  It's not how the
art business works.  So why did I spend 6 months working on this
stupid idea?  Because I didn't pay attention to users.  I invented
a model of the world that didn't correspond to reality, and worked
from that.  I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried
to convince users to pay for what we'd built.  Even then I took
embarrassingly long to catch on.  I was attached to my model of the
world, and I'd spent a lot of time on the software.  They had to
want it!
Why do so many founders build things no one wants?  Because they
begin by trying to think of startup ideas.  That m.o. is doubly
dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad
ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas.  Imagine
one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup.  The
writers would have to invent something for it to do.  But coming
up with good startup ideas is hard.  It's not something you can do
for the asking.  So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers
would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually
bad.
For example, a social network for pet owners.  It doesn't sound
obviously mistaken.  Millions of people have pets.  Often they care
a lot about their pets and spend a lot of money on them.  Surely
many of these people would like a site where they could talk to
other pet owners.  Not all of them perhaps, but if just 2 or 3
percent were regular visitors, you could have millions of users.
You could serve them targeted offers, and maybe charge for premium
features.
[
1
]
The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your
friends with pets, they don't say "I would
never
use this." They
say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when
the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people.
They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but
they could imagine other people wanting it.  Sum that reaction
across the entire population, and you have zero users.
[
2
]
Well
When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who
really need what they're making — not just people who could see
themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently.  Usually
this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that
if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed
and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually
puts into a version one, it would probably already exist.  Which
means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build
something a large number of people want a small amount, or something
a small number of people want a large amount.  Choose the latter.
Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all
good startup ideas are of that type.
Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might
want what you're making and whose y axis represents how much they
want it.  If you invert the scale on the y axis, you can envision
companies as holes.  Google is an immense crater: hundreds of
millions of people use it, and they need it a lot.  A startup just
starting out can't expect to excavate that much volume.  So you
have two choices about the shape of hole you start with.  You can
either dig a hole that's broad but shallow, or one that's narrow
and deep, like a well.
Made-up startup ideas are usually of the first type.  Lots of people
are mildly interested in a social network for pet owners.
Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type.  Microsoft
was a well when they made Altair Basic.  There were only a couple
thousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming
in machine language.  Thirty years later Facebook had the same
shape.  Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of
which there are only a few thousand, but those few thousand users
wanted it a lot.
When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this
right now?  Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when
it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never
heard of?  If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad.
[
3
]
You don't need the narrowness of the well per se.  It's depth you
need; you get narrowness as a byproduct of optimizing for depth
(and speed).  But you almost always do get it.  In practice the
link between depth and narrowness is so strong that it's a good
sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific
group or type of user.
But while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition
for a good startup idea, it's not a sufficient one.  If Mark
Zuckerberg had built something that could only ever have appealed
to Harvard students, it would not have been a good startup idea.
Facebook was a good idea because it started with a small market
there was a fast path out of.  Colleges are similar enough that if
you build a facebook that works at Harvard, it will work at any
college. So you spread rapidly through all the colleges.  Once you
have all the college students, you get everyone else simply by
letting them in.
Similarly for Microsoft: Basic for the Altair; Basic for other
machines; other languages besides Basic; operating systems;
applications; IPO.
Self
How do you tell whether there's a path out of an idea?  How do you
tell whether something is the germ of a giant company, or just a
niche product?  Often you can't. The founders of Airbnb didn't
realize at first how big a market they were tapping.  Initially
they had a much narrower idea.  They were going to let hosts rent
out space on their floors during conventions.  They didn't foresee
the expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually.
All they knew at first is that they were onto something.  That's
probably as much as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first.
Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path
out of the initial niche.  And sometimes I can see a path that's
not immediately obvious; that's one of our specialties at YC.  But
there are limits to how well this can be done, no matter how much
experience you have.  The most important thing to understand about
paths out of the initial idea is the meta-fact that these are hard
to see.
So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, how
do you choose between ideas?  The truth is disappointing but
interesting: if you're the right sort of person, you have the right
sort of hunches.  If you're at the leading edge of a field that's
changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing,
you're more likely to be right.
In
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, Robert Pirsig says:
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy.  Make
  yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
I've wondered about that passage since I read it in high school.
I'm not sure how useful his advice is for painting specifically,
but it fits this situation well.  Empirically, the way to have good
startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.
Being at the leading edge of a field doesn't mean you have to be
one of the people pushing it forward.  You can also be at the leading
edge as a user.  It was not so much because he was a programmer
that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he
used computers so much.  If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004
whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the
Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea.  But Mark already
lived online; to him it seemed natural.
Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly
changing field "live in the future."  Combine that with Pirsig and
you get:
Live in the future, then build what's missing.
That describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got
started.  Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even
supposed to be companies at first.  They grew out of things their
founders built because there seemed a gap in the world.
If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas,
it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a
prepared mind.  Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and
think "I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it." Drew Houston
realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to
make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair.
Lots forgot USB sticks.  The reason those stimuli caused those
founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared
them to notice the opportunities they represented.
The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not
"think up" but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally
out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas.  The
most successful startups almost all begin this way.
That may not have been what you wanted to hear.  You may have
expected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I'm
telling you that the key is to have a mind that's prepared in the
right way.  But disappointing though it may be, this is the truth.
And it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the worst case takes
a year rather than a weekend.
If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field,
you can get to one.  For example, anyone reasonably smart can
probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps)
in a year.  Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5
years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable
investment.  Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder.
[
4
]
You don't have to learn programming to be at the leading edge of a
domain that's changing fast.  Other domains change fast.  But while
learning to hack is not necessary, it is for the forseeable future
sufficient. As Marc Andreessen put it, software is eating the world,
and this trend has decades left to run.
Knowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you'll be
able to implement them.  That's not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos
couldn't) but it's an advantage.  It's a big advantage, when you're
considering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if
instead of merely thinking "That's an interesting idea," you can
think instead "That's an interesting idea.  I'll try building an
initial version tonight."  It's even better when you're both a
programmer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating
new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head.
Noticing
Once you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice
startup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing.  If
you're really at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field, there
will be things that are obviously missing.  What won't be obvious
is that they're startup ideas.  So if you want to find startup
ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's missing?" Also turn
off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big company?"
There's plenty of time to apply that test later.  But if you're
thinking about that initially, it may not only filter out lots
of good ideas, but also cause you to focus on bad ones.
Most things that are missing will take some time to see.  You almost
have to trick yourself into seeing the ideas around you.
But you
know
the ideas are out there.  This is not one of those
problems where there might not be an answer.  It's impossibly
unlikely that this is the exact moment when technological progress
stops.  You can be sure people are going to build things in the
next few years that will make you think "What did I do before x?"
And when these problems get solved, they will probably seem flamingly
obvious in retrospect.  What you need to do is turn off the filters
that usually prevent you from seeing them.  The most powerful is
simply taking the current state of the world for granted.  Even the
most radically open-minded of us mostly do that.  You couldn't get
from your bed to the front door if you stopped to question everything.
But if you're looking for startup ideas you can sacrifice some of
the efficiency of taking the status quo for granted and start to
question things.  Why is your inbox overflowing?  Because you get
a lot of email, or because it's hard to get email out of your inbox?
Why do you get so much email?  What problems are people trying to
solve by sending you email?  Are there better ways to solve them?
And why is it hard to get emails out of your inbox?  Why do you
keep emails around after you've read them?  Is an inbox the optimal
tool for that?
Pay particular attention to things that chafe you.  The advantage
of taking the status quo for granted is not just that it makes life
(locally) more efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable.
If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but
don't have yet, you'd find present day life pretty constraining,
just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50
years in a time machine.  When something annoys you, it could be
because you're living in the future.
When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be
able to describe it as
obvious
, at least to you.  When we started
Viaweb, all the online stores were built by hand, by web designers
making individual HTML pages.  It was obvious to us as programmers
that these sites would have to be generated by software.
[
5
]
Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas
is a question of seeing the obvious.  That suggests how weird this
process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet
that you hadn't seen.
Since what you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, it may
be best not to make too much of a direct frontal attack on the
problem — i.e. to sit down and try to think of ideas.  The best
plan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for
things that seem to be missing.  Work on hard problems, driven
mainly by curiosity, but have a second self watching over your
shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies.
[
6
]
Give yourself some time.  You have a lot of control over the rate
at which you turn yours into a prepared mind, but you have less
control over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it.  If
Bill Gates and Paul Allen had constrained themselves to come up
with a startup idea in one month, what if they'd chosen a month
before the Altair appeared?  They probably would have worked on a
less promising idea.  Drew Houston did work on a less promising
idea before Dropbox: an SAT prep startup.  But Dropbox was a much
better idea, both in the absolute sense and also as a match for his
skills.
[
7
]
A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on
projects that seem like they'd be cool.  If you do that, you'll
naturally tend to build things that are missing.  It wouldn't seem
as interesting to build something that already existed.
Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones,
working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces
good ones.  When something is described as a toy, that means it has
everything an idea needs except being important.  It's cool; users
love it; it just doesn't matter.  But if you're living in the future
and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more
than outsiders think.  Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple
and Microsoft started working on them.  I'm old enough to remember
that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers
was "hobbyists."  BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science
project.  The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one
another.
At YC we're excited when we meet startups working on things that
we could imagine know-it-alls on forums dismissing as toys.  To us
that's positive evidence an idea is good.
If you can afford to take a long view (and arguably you can't afford
not to), you can turn "Live in the future and build what's missing"
into something even better:
Live in the future and build what seems interesting.
School
That's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying
to learn about "entrepreneurship."  "Entrepreneurship" is something
you learn best by doing it.  The examples of the most successful
founders make that clear.  What you should be spending your time
on in college is ratcheting yourself into the future.  College is
an incomparable opportunity to do that.  What a waste to sacrifice
an opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup — becoming
the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas — by
spending time learning about the easy part.  Especially since
you won't even really learn about it, any more than you'd learn
about sex in a class.  All you'll learn is the words for things.
The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas.
If you know a lot about programming and you start learning about
some other field, you'll probably see problems that software could
solve.  In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in
another domain: (a) the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely
as software people to have already solved their problems with
software, and (b) since you come into the new domain totally ignorant,
you don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.
So if you're a CS major and you want to start a startup, instead
of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking a
class on, say, genetics.  Or better still, go work for a biotech
company.  CS majors normally get summer jobs at computer hardware
or software companies.  But if you want to find startup ideas, you
might do better to get a summer job in some unrelated field.
[
8
]
Or don't take any extra classes, and just build things.  It's no
coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January.
At Harvard that is (or was) Reading Period, when students have no
classes to attend because they're supposed to be studying for finals.
[
9
]
But don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups.  That's
premature optimization. Just build things.  Preferably with other
students.  It's not just the classes that make a university such a
good place to crank oneself into the future.  You're also surrounded
by other people trying to do the same thing.  If you work together
with them on projects, you'll end up producing not just organic
ideas, but organic ideas with organic founding teams — and that,
empirically, is the best combination.
Beware of research.  If an undergrad writes something all his friends
start using, it's quite likely to represent a good startup idea.
Whereas a PhD dissertation is extremely unlikely to.  For some
reason, the more a project has to count as research, the less likely
it is to be something that could be turned into a startup.
[
10
]
I think the reason is that the subset of ideas that count as research
is so narrow that it's unlikely that a project that satisfied that
constraint would also satisfy the orthogonal constraint of solving
users' problems.  Whereas when students (or professors) build
something as a side-project, they automatically gravitate toward
solving users' problems — perhaps even with an additional energy
that comes from being freed from the constraints of research.
Competition
Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll
tend to feel that you're late.  Don't let that deter you.  Worrying
that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea.  Ten minutes
of searching the web will usually settle the question.  Even if you
find someone else working on the same thing, you're probably not
too late.  It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by
competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility.
So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that
would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea.
If you're uncertain, ask users.  The question of whether you're too
late is subsumed by the question of whether anyone urgently needs
what you plan to make.  If you have something that no competitor
does and that some subset of users urgently need, you have a
beachhead.
[
11
]
The question then is whether that beachhead is big enough. Or more
importantly, who's in it: if the beachhead consists of people doing
something lots more people will be doing in the future, then it's
probably big enough no matter how small it is.  For example, if
you're building something differentiated from competitors by the
fact that it works on phones, but it only works on the newest phones,
that's probably a big enough beachhead.
Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors.
Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than
they deserve.  Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on
your competitors.  So better a good idea with competitors than a
bad one without.
You don't need to worry about entering a "crowded market" so long
as you have a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking.
In fact that's a very promising starting point.  Google was that
type of idea.  Your thesis has to be more precise than "we're going
to make an x that doesn't suck" though. You have to be able to
phrase it in terms of something the incumbents are overlooking.
Best of all is when you can say that they didn't have the courage
of their convictions, and that your plan is what they'd have done
if they'd followed through on their own insights.  Google was that
type of idea too.  The search engines that preceded them shied away
from the most radical implications of what they were doing — particularly
that the better a job they did, the faster users would
leave.
A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both
that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are
good enough.  A startup can't hope to enter a market that's obviously
big and yet in which they have no competitors.  So any startup that
succeeds is either going to be entering a market with existing
competitors, but armed with some secret weapon that will get them
all the users (like Google), or entering a market that looks small
but which will turn out to be big (like Microsoft).
[
12
]
Filters
There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to
notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.
Most programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing
some brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay
them lots of money.  They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems
or get involved in messy ways with the real world.  Which is a
reasonable preference, because such things slow you down.  But this
preference is so widespread that the space of convenient startup
ideas has been stripped pretty clean.  If you let your mind wander
a few blocks down the street to the messy, tedious ideas, you'll
find valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be implemented.
The schlep filter is so dangerous that I wrote a separate essay
about the condition it induces, which I called
schlep blindness
.
I gave Stripe as an example of a startup that benefited from turning
off this filter, and a pretty striking example it is.  Thousands
of programmers were in a position to see this idea; thousands of
programmers knew how painful it was to process payments before
Stripe.  But when they looked for startup ideas they didn't see
this one, because unconsciously they shrank from having to deal
with payments.  And dealing with payments is a schlep for Stripe,
but not an intolerable one.  In fact they might have had net less
pain; because the fear of dealing with payments kept most people
away from this idea, Stripe has had comparatively smooth sailing
in other areas that are sometimes painful, like user acquisition.
They didn't have to try very hard to make themselves heard by users,
because users were desperately waiting for what they were building.
The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps
you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear.
We overcame this one to work on Viaweb. There were interesting
things about the architecture of our software, but we weren't
interested in ecommerce per se.  We could see the problem was one
that needed to be solved though.
Turning off the schlep filter is more important than turning off
the unsexy filter, because the schlep filter is more likely to be
an illusion.  And even to the degree it isn't, it's a worse form
of self-indulgence.  Starting a successful startup is going to be
fairly laborious no matter what.  Even if the product doesn't entail
a lot of schleps, you'll still have plenty dealing with investors,
hiring and firing people, and so on.  So if there's some idea you
think would be cool but you're kept away from by fear of the schleps
involved, don't worry: any sufficiently good idea will have as many.
The unsexy filter, while still a source of error, is not as entirely
useless as the schlep filter.  If you're at the leading edge of a
field that's changing rapidly, your ideas about what's sexy will
be somewhat correlated with what's valuable in practice.  Particularly
as you get older and more experienced.  Plus if you find an idea
sexy, you'll work on it more enthusiastically.
[
13
]
Recipes
While the best way to discover startup ideas is to become the sort
of person who has them and then build whatever interests you,
sometimes you don't have that luxury.  Sometimes you need an idea
now.  For example, if you're working on a startup and your initial
idea turns out to be bad.
For the rest of this essay I'll talk about tricks for coming up
with startup ideas on demand.  Although empirically you're better
off using the organic strategy, you could succeed this way. You
just have to be more disciplined.  When you use the organic method,
you don't even notice an idea unless it's evidence that something
is truly missing.  But when you make a conscious effort to think
of startup ideas, you have to replace this natural constraint with
self-discipline.  You'll see a lot more ideas, most of them bad,
so you need to be able to filter them.
One of the biggest dangers of not using the organic method is the
example of the organic method.  Organic ideas feel like inspirations.
There are a lot of stories about successful startups that began
when the founders had what seemed a crazy idea but "just knew" it
was promising.  When you feel that about an idea you've had while
trying to come up with startup ideas, you're probably mistaken.
When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise.
If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers
(unless you're also a teenager).  Maybe it's a good idea, but you
can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it.  There have to
be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can
judge.  Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving
databases?  That's because your expertise raises your standards.
Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving
yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
The place to start looking for ideas is things you need.  There
must
be things you need.
[
14
]
One good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you
ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x?  If someone
made x we'd buy it in a second." If you can think of any x people
said that about, you probably have an idea.  You know there's demand,
and people don't say that about things that are impossible to build.
More generally, try asking yourself whether there's something unusual
about you that makes your needs different from most other people's.
You're probably not the only one.  It's especially good if you're
different in a way people will increasingly be.
If you're changing ideas, one unusual thing about you is the idea
you'd previously been working on.  Did you discover any needs while
working on it?  Several well-known startups began this way.  Hotmail
began as something its founders wrote to talk about their previous
startup idea while they were working at their day jobs.
[
15
]
A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young.  Some
of the most valuable new ideas take root first among people in their
teens and early twenties.  And while young founders are at a
disadvantage in some respects, they're the only ones who really
understand their peers.  It would have been very hard for someone
who wasn't a college student to start Facebook.  So if you're a
young founder (under 23 say), are there things you and your friends
would like to do that current technology won't let you?
The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need
of someone else.  Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps
they find in the world.  What's missing?  What would they like to
do that they can't?  What's tedious or annoying, particularly in
their work?  Let the conversation get general; don't be trying too
hard to find startup ideas.  You're just looking for something to
spark a thought.  Maybe you'll notice a problem they didn't consciously
realize they had, because you know how to solve it.
When you find an unmet need that isn't your own, it may be somewhat
blurry at first.  The person who needs something may not know exactly
what they need.  In that case I often recommend that founders act
like consultants — that they do what they'd do if they'd been
retained to solve the problems of this one user.  People's problems
are similar enough that nearly all the code you write this way will
be reusable, and whatever isn't will be a small price to start out
certain that you've reached the bottom of the well.
[
16
]
One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems
is to make them your own.  When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided
to write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn
how restaurants worked.  That may seem like taking things to extremes,
but startups are extreme.  We love it when founders do such things.
In fact, one strategy I recommend to people who need a new idea is
not merely to turn off their schlep and unsexy filters, but to seek
out ideas that are unsexy or involve schleps.  Don't try to start
Twitter.  Those ideas are so rare that you can't find them by looking
for them.  Make something unsexy that people will pay you for.
A good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent the unsexy
filter is to ask what you wish someone else would build, so that
you could use it.  What would you pay for right now?
Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries,
it can be a good trick to look for those that are dying, or deserve
to, and try to imagine what kind of company would profit from their
demise.  For example, journalism is in free fall at the moment.
But there may still be money to be made from something like journalism.
What sort of company might cause people in the future to say "this
replaced journalism" on some axis?
But imagine asking that in the future, not now.  When one company
or industry replaces another, it usually comes in from the side.
So don't look for a replacement for x; look for something that
people will later say turned out to be a replacement for x.  And
be imaginative about the axis along which the replacement occurs.
Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get
information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and
to get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of
advertising.  It could be replaced on any of these axes (it has
already started to be on most).
When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving
some small but important market that the big players ignore.  It's
particularly good if there's an admixture of disdain in the big
players' attitude, because that often misleads them.  For example,
after Steve Wozniak built the computer that became the Apple I, he
felt obliged to give his then-employer Hewlett-Packard the option
to produce it.  Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one
of the reasons they did was that it used a TV for a monitor, which
seemed intolerably déclassé to a high-end hardware company like HP
was at the time.
[
17
]
Are there groups of
scruffy
but sophisticated users like the early
microcomputer "hobbyists" that are currently being ignored by the
big players?  A startup with its sights set on bigger things can
often capture a small market easily by expending an effort that
wouldn't be justified by that market alone.
Similarly, since the most successful startups generally ride some
wave bigger than themselves, it could be a good trick to look for
waves and ask how one could benefit from them.  The prices of gene
sequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like
declines.  What new things will we be able to do in the new world
we'll have in a few years?  What are we unconsciously ruling out
as impossible that will soon be possible?
Organic
But talking about looking explicitly for waves makes it clear that
such recipes are plan B for getting startup ideas.  Looking for
waves is essentially a way to simulate the organic method.  If
you're at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you don't
have to look for waves; you are the wave.
Finding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that's why most
people who try fail so miserably.  It doesn't work well simply to
try to think of startup ideas.  If you do that, you get bad ones
that sound dangerously plausible.  The best approach is more indirect:
if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will
seem obvious to you.  But even then, not immediately.  It takes
time to come across situations where you notice something missing.
And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just
things that would be interesting to build.  Which is why it's good
to have the time and the inclination to build things just because
they're interesting.
Live in the future and build what seems interesting.  Strange as
it sounds, that's the real recipe.
Notes
[
1
]
This form of bad idea has been around as long as the web.  It
was common in the 1990s, except then people who had it used to say
they were going to create a portal for x instead of a social network
for x.  Structurally the idea is stone soup: you post a sign saying
"this is the place for people interested in x," and all those people
show up and you make money from them.  What lures founders into
this sort of idea are statistics about the millions of people who
might be interested in each type of x.  What they forget is that
any given person might have 20 affinities by this standard, and no
one is going to visit 20 different communities regularly.
[
2
]
I'm not saying, incidentally, that I know for sure a social
network for pet owners is a bad idea.  I know it's a bad idea the
way I know randomly generated DNA would not produce a viable organism.
The set of plausible sounding startup ideas is many times larger
than the set of good ones, and many of the good ones don't even
sound that plausible.  So if all you know about a startup idea is
that it sounds plausible, you have to assume it's bad.
[
3
]
More precisely, the users' need has to give them sufficient
activation energy to start using whatever you make, which can vary
a lot.  For example, the activation energy for enterprise software
sold through traditional channels is very high, so you'd have to
be a
lot
better to get users to switch.  Whereas the activation
energy required to switch to a new search engine is low.  Which in
turn is why search engines are so much better than enterprise
software.
[
4
]
This gets harder as you get older.  While the space of ideas
doesn't have dangerous local maxima, the space of careers does.
There are fairly high walls between most of the paths people take
through life, and the older you get, the higher the walls become.
[
5
]
It was also obvious to us that the web was going to be a big
deal.  Few non-programmers grasped that in 1995, but the programmers
had seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers.
[
6
]
Maybe it would work to have this second self keep a journal,
and each night to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies
you'd noticed that day.  Not startup ideas, just the raw gaps and
anomalies.
[
7
]
Sam Altman points out that taking time to come up with an
idea is not merely a better strategy in an absolute sense, but also
like an undervalued stock in that so few founders do it.
There's comparatively little competition for the best ideas, because
few founders are willing to put in the time required to notice them.
Whereas there is a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas,
because when people make up startup ideas, they tend to make up the
same ones.
[
8
]
For the computer hardware and software companies, summer jobs
are the first phase of the recruiting funnel.  But if you're good
you can skip the first phase.  If you're good you'll have no trouble
getting hired by these companies when you graduate, regardless of
how you spent your summers.
[
9
]
The empirical evidence suggests that if colleges want to help
their students start startups, the best thing they can do is leave
them alone in the right way.
[
10
]
I'm speaking here of IT startups; in biotech things are different.
[
11
]
This is an instance of a more general rule: focus on users,
not competitors.  The most important information about competitors
is what you learn via users anyway.
[
12
]
In practice most successful startups have elements of both.
And you can describe each strategy in terms of the other by adjusting
the boundaries of what you call the market.  But it's useful to
consider these two ideas separately.
[
13
]
I almost hesitate to raise that point though.  Startups are
businesses; the point of a business is to make money; and with that
additional constraint, you can't expect you'll be able to spend all
your time working on what interests you most.
[
14
]
The need has to be a strong one.  You can retroactively
describe any made-up idea as something you need.  But do you really
need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much as Drew
Houston needed Dropbox, or Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb?
Quite often at YC I find myself asking founders "Would you use this
thing yourself, if you hadn't written it?" and you'd be surprised
how often the answer is no.
[
15
]
Paul Buchheit points out that trying to sell something bad
can be a source of better ideas:
"The best technique I've found for dealing with YC companies that
have bad ideas is to tell them to go sell the product ASAP (before
wasting time building it). Not only do they learn that nobody
wants what they are building, they very often come back with a
real idea that they discovered in the process of trying to sell
the bad idea."
[
16
]
Here's a recipe that might produce the next Facebook, if
you're college students.  If you have a connection to one of the
more powerful sororities at your school, approach the queen bees
thereof and offer to be their personal IT consultants, building
anything they could imagine needing in their social lives that
didn't already exist.  Anything that got built this way would be
very promising, because such users are not just the most demanding
but also the perfect point to spread from.
I have no idea whether this would work.
[
17
]
And the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak
started out by solving his own problems.  He, like most of his
peers, couldn't afford a monitor.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Mike Arrington, Paul Buchheit, John Collison,
Patrick Collison, Garry Tan, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of
this, and Marc Andreessen, Joe Gebbia, Reid Hoffman, Shel Kaphan,
Mike Moritz and Kevin Systrom for answering my questions about
startup history.
Japanese Translation
Italian Translation
Spanish Translation


@bscholl Would server-based apps solve the problem at the software end?

@AdHaque110 Since it was predictable, we have to assume it was intentional.

"A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a pastime."

— Major General Yair Golan, former deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army https://t.co/oRQrNCoIXN

@benthompson You're right that they're being outcompeted, but it's also true that a lot of people in tech have deliberately turned their back on legacy media because of its overall anti-tech bias.

@AssalRad @LatitudePodcast Why are the soldiers masked?

@EricLeeAtty Weird that they'd do all this work of writing these reports rather than just letting him hold his kid. That is real malice.

@ericmigi One reason you're good at hardware is that you are a true hardware nerd.

@eshear I think it's when something that once got you from feeling normal to feeling good becomes something you need just to feel normal.

@adrianionel @Kayodeodeleye The result was that while the majority of SV founders probably still *voted* for Harris, the ones supporting Trump were more excited and donated more money.

@adrianionel @Kayodeodeleye Elizabeth Warren lost Silicon Valley for the Democrats. She asked Biden for several powerful appointments as the price of her support. She hates the tech world, so her network of appointees then set out to undermine it. Especially Gensler at the SEC.


After Credentials
December 2008
A few months ago I read a
New York Times
article on South
Korean cram schools that said
Admission to the right university can make or break an ambitious
  young South Korean.
A parent added:
"In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent
  of a person's future."
It was striking how old fashioned this sounded.  And
yet when I was in high school it wouldn't have seemed too far off
as a description of the US.  Which means things must have been
changing here.
The course of people's lives in the US now seems to be determined
less by credentials and more by performance than it was 25 years
ago.  Where you go to college still matters, but not like it used
to.
What happened?
_____
Judging people by their academic credentials was in its time an
advance.  The practice seems to have begun in China, where starting
in 587 candidates for the imperial civil service had to take an
exam on classical literature.
[
1
]
It was also a test of wealth,
because the knowledge it tested was so specialized that passing
required years of expensive training.  But though wealth was a
necessary condition for passing, it was not a sufficient one.  By
the standards of the rest of the world in 587, the Chinese system
was very enlightened.  Europeans didn't introduce formal civil
service exams till the nineteenth century, and even then they seem
to have been influenced by the Chinese example.
Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by
family influence, if not outright bribery.   It was a great step
forward to judge people by their performance on a test.  But by no
means a perfect solution.  When you judge people that way, you tend
to get cram schools—which they did in Ming China and nineteenth
century England just as much as in present day South Korea.
What cram schools are, in effect, is leaks in a seal.  The use of
credentials
was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between
generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes
in the seal.  Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into
credentials in the next.
It's hard to beat this phenomenon, because the schools adjust to suit
whatever the tests measure.  When the tests are narrow and
predictable, you get cram schools on the classic model, like those
that prepared candidates for Sandhurst (the British West Point) or
the classes American students take now to improve their SAT scores.
But as the tests get broader, the schools do too.  Preparing a
candidate for the Chinese imperial civil service exams took years,
as prep school does today.  But the raison d'etre of all these
institutions has been the same: to beat the system.
[
2
]
_____
History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society
prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from
influencing their children's success directly.  It's a fine thing
for parents to help their children indirectly—for example,
by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then
makes them more successful.  The problem comes when parents use
direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power
as a substitute for their children's qualities.
Parents will tend to do this when they can.  Parents will die for
their kids, so it's not surprising to find they'll also push their
scruples to the limits for them.  Especially if other parents are
doing it.
Sealing off this force has a double advantage.  Not only does a
society get "the best man for the job," but
parents' ambitions are diverted from direct methods to indirect
ones—to actually trying to raise their kids well.
But we should expect it to be very hard to contain parents' efforts
to obtain an unfair advantage for their kids.  We're dealing with
one of the most powerful forces in human nature.  We shouldn't expect
naive solutions to work, any more than we'd expect naive solutions
for keeping heroin out of a prison to work.
_____
The obvious way to solve the problem is to make credentials better.
If the tests a society uses are currently hackable, we can study
the way people beat them and try to plug the holes.  You can use
the cram schools to show you where most of the holes are.  They
also tell you when you're succeeding in fixing them: when cram
schools become less popular.
A more general solution
would be to push for increased transparency, especially at critical
social bottlenecks like college admissions.  In the US this process
still shows many outward signs of corruption.  For example, legacy
admissions.  The official story is that legacy status doesn't carry
much weight, because all it does is break ties: applicants are
bucketed by ability, and legacy status is only used to decide between
the applicants in the bucket that straddles the cutoff.  But what
this means is that a university can make legacy status have as much
or as little weight as they want, by adjusting the size of the
bucket that straddles the cutoff.
By gradually chipping away at the abuse of credentials, you could
probably make them more airtight.  But what a long fight it would
be.  Especially when the institutions administering the tests don't
really want them to be airtight.
_____
Fortunately there's a better way to prevent the direct transmission
of power between generations.  Instead of trying to make credentials
harder to hack, we can also make them matter less.
Let's think about what credentials are for.  What they are,
functionally, is a way of predicting performance.  If you could
measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them.
So why did they even evolve?  Why haven't we just been measuring
actual performance?  Think about where credentialism first appeared:
in selecting candidates for large organizations.  Individual
performance is hard to measure in large organizations, and the
harder performance is to measure, the more important it is
to predict it.  If an organization could immediately and cheaply
measure the performance of recruits, they wouldn't need to examine
their credentials.  They could take everyone and keep just the good
ones.
Large organizations can't do this.  But a bunch of small organizations
in a market can come close.  A market takes every organization and
keeps just the good ones.  As organizations get smaller, this
approaches taking every person and keeping just the good ones.  So
all other things being equal, a society consisting of more, smaller
organizations will care less about credentials.
_____
That's what's been happening in the US.  That's why those quotes
from Korea sound so old fashioned.  They're talking about an economy
like America's a few decades ago, dominated by a few big companies.
The route for the ambitious in that sort of environment is to join
one and climb to the top.  Credentials matter a lot then.  In the
culture of a large organization, an elite pedigree becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
This doesn't work in small companies.  Even if your colleagues were
impressed by your credentials, they'd soon be parted from you if
your performance didn't match, because the company would go out of
business and the people would be dispersed.
In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares
about.  People hiring for a startup don't care whether you've even
graduated from college, let alone which one.  All they care about
is what you can do.  Which is in fact all that should matter, even
in a large organization.  The reason credentials have such prestige
is that for so long the large organizations
in a society tended to be the most powerful.  But in the US at least
they don't have the monopoly on power they once did, precisely
because they can't measure (and thus reward) individual performance.
Why spend twenty years climbing the corporate ladder when you can
get rewarded directly by the market?
I realize I see a more exaggerated version of the change than most
other people.  As a partner at an early stage venture funding firm,
I'm like a jumpmaster shoving people out of the old world of
credentials and into the new one of performance.  I'm an agent of
the change I'm seeing.  But I don't think I'm imagining it.  It was
not so easy 25 years ago for an ambitious person to choose to be
judged directly by the market.  You had to go through bosses, and
they were influenced by where you'd been to college.
_____
What made it possible for small organizations to succeed in America?
I'm still not entirely sure.  Startups are certainly a large part
of it.  Small organizations can develop new ideas faster than large
ones, and new ideas are increasingly valuable.
But I don't think startups account for all the shift from credentials
to measurement.  My friend Julian Weber told me that when he went
to work for a New York law firm in the 1950s they paid associates
far less than firms do today.  Law firms then made no pretense of
paying people according to the value of the work they'd done.  Pay
was based on seniority.  The younger employees were paying their
dues.  They'd be rewarded later.
The same principle prevailed at industrial companies.  When my
father was working at Westinghouse in the 1970s, he had people
working for him who made more than he did, because they'd been there
longer.
Now companies increasingly have to pay employees market price for
the work they do.   One reason is that employees no longer trust
companies to deliver
deferred rewards
: why work to accumulate
deferred rewards at a company that might go bankrupt, or be taken
over and have all its implicit obligations wiped out?  The other
is that some companies broke ranks and started to pay young employees
large amounts.  This was particularly true in consulting, law, and
finance, where it led to the phenomenon of yuppies.  The word is
rarely used today because it's no longer surprising to see a 25
year old with money, but in 1985 the sight of a 25 year old
professional
able to afford a new BMW was so novel that it
called forth a new word.
The classic yuppie worked for a small organization.  He didn't work
for General Widget, but for the law firm that handled General
Widget's acquisitions or the investment bank that floated their
bond issues.
Startups and yuppies entered the American conceptual vocabulary
roughly simultaneously in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  I don't
think there was a causal connection.  Startups happened because
technology started to change so fast that big companies could no
longer keep a lid on the smaller ones.  I don't think the rise of
yuppies was inspired by it; it seems more as if there was a change
in the social conventions (and perhaps the laws) governing the way
big companies worked.  But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce
a principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people
market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from
them.
At about the same time the US economy rocketed out of the doldrums
that had afflicted it for most of the 1970s.  Was there a connection?
I don't know enough to say, but it felt like it at the time.  There
was a lot of energy released.
_____
Countries worried about their competitiveness are right to be
concerned about the number of startups started within them.  But
they would do even better to examine the underlying principle.  Do
they let energetic young people get paid market rate for the work
they do?  The young are the test, because when people aren't rewarded
according to performance, they're invariably rewarded according to
seniority instead.
All it takes is a few beachheads in your economy that pay for
performance.  Measurement spreads like heat.  If one part of a
society is better at measurement than others, it tends to push the
others to do better.  If people who are young but smart and driven
can make more by starting their own companies than by working for
existing ones, the existing companies are forced to pay more to
keep them.  So market rates gradually permeate every organization,
even the government.
[
3
]
The measurement of performance will tend to push even the organizations
issuing credentials into line.  When we were kids I used to annoy
my sister by ordering her to do things I knew she was about to do
anyway.  As credentials are superseded by performance, a similar
role is the best former gatekeepers can hope for.  Once credential
granting institutions are no longer in the self-fullfilling prophecy
business, they'll have to work harder to predict the future.
_____
Credentials are a step beyond bribery and influence.  But they're
not the final step.  There's an even better way to block the
transmission of power between generations: to encourage the trend
toward an economy made of more, smaller units.  Then you can measure
what credentials merely predict.
No one likes the transmission of power between generations—not
the left or the right.  But the market forces favored by the right
turn out to be a better way of preventing it than the credentials
the left are forced to fall back on.
The era of credentials began to end when the power of large
organizations
peaked
in the late twentieth century.  Now we seem
to be entering a new era based on measurement.  The reason the new
model has advanced so rapidly is that it works so much better.  It
shows no sign of slowing.
Notes
[
1
] Miyazaki, Ichisada
(Conrad Schirokauer trans.),
China's Examination Hell: The Civil
Service Examinations of Imperial China,
Yale University Press,
1981.
Scribes in ancient Egypt took exams, but they were more the type
of proficiency test any apprentice might have to pass.
[
2
] When I say the
raison d'etre of prep schools is to get kids into better colleges,
I mean this in the narrowest sense.  I'm not saying that's all prep
schools do, just that if they had zero effect on college admissions
there would be far less demand for them.
[
3
] Progressive tax
rates will tend to damp this effect, however, by decreasing the
difference between good and bad measurers.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and David
Sloo for reading drafts of this.


@DudespostingWs She was trying to make an angry feminist point. It's hilarious how no guys reading this even noticed, and just regard the guy as lucky.

It often seems to people in the tech world that the journalists who seem to have it in for us are crazy, but it looks like this may be literally the case. (via @SteveStuWill) https://t.co/EyoU6Qr2bN

What an insane decade the 2020s have turned out to be, and we're only halfway through.

@lulumeservey The sad thing is, I don't think they even care whether their attacks work or not. It's just a bunch of random individuals hunting clicks.

Surely there's orders of magnitude more waste in the Department of Defense than USAID. But if you just show up at the Pentagon and try to push your way in and get access to every classified system, I bet there will be a good deal more resistance.

@Baba_Ayoola Roughly 100 ft.

In both cases what's going on is that the dismisser didn't really, fully have the idea earlier. He (it's usually a he) *began* to have the idea, but it was nowhere near complete and never would be. It's very easy to lie to yourself about this though.

The people who dismiss such ideas as "obvious" are in much the same position as those (in fact they're probably often the same people) who, when someone creates something new, respond by saying "I had that idea years ago." Really? Where's the evidence?

The most valuable insights tend to be the most general, so a lot of people will have almost had them. When you write about them, some readers say "you put my thoughts into words" and others dismiss your observations as "obvious." And both are describing the same experience!

@tempest_books After a few drinks maybe.


@XFaure @typesfast @zipline If you think that's small, how about the memory capacity of the first microcomputers? 4k of RAM. What a joke. They'll never succeed.

@XFaure "No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame."

If anyone can understand how rapidly a startup's initial product can scale, you should...

And incidentally if the Democrats did such a thing, I'd be speaking out against them. Suppressing free speech and ignoring due process are equally bad whether done from the right or the left.

To understand the danger of giving the government overreaching powers, imagine your opponents with them. How are you going to feel in 10 years when the Democrats are in power and label those against abortion as "terrorist sympathizers" because some extremist bombed a clinic?

@MacaesBruno Two thirds?

A day later there's a perfect illustration of my point. Whatever the political and economic conditions happen to be, drone delivery is happening now.

https://t.co/tMXcB5AYpq

@gdelujo Using weird superlatives for good is a phenomenon that happens in many if not most languages. I doubt there's a part of human language where usage evolves faster.

@TheStalwart The real problem would be parking spaces. Roads in Europe are wide enough. They have to fit semis. But if you drove an F-150 you couldn't take it to the supermarket, or anywhere really.

@Scholars_Stage Could it be because senators serve 6 year terms and representatives 2?

Notice I didn't say I thought *well* about it, just that I was occasionally able to think about this instead of what was happening in my mouth. I also made an intensive study of the ceiling lights. I could probably draw them from memory.


@typesfast Wow, really? That's even better.

In-person Startup School is back, and boy was it good. I didn't realize what good public speakers so many of the YC partners are. Dalton and Michael had the timing of a comedy team.

@typesfast Ah, ok, this was watching presentations, not vertebrae office hours. I wondered how the hell I had ever managed to do 42 of those.

@typesfast That made me laugh out loud. It's not the only time that's happened. But at least I'm consistent. It's better than me saying "This is terrible, you have to change everything."

@brian_t_muldoon Free public transport might actually be a good idea though.

@cremieuxrecueil That doesn't quite answer my question, because some 65 year olds are older than others. How about this: is it because a lot is spent in the last years of old people's lives?

@cremieuxrecueil Is this just because far more is spent on the very old? What does that graph look like?

@das_munch Good thing you didn't suggest this earlier or they might actually have done it.

@JonathanRoseD They blur together after 5.

@patrickc The boring answer is just that I'd get tired sooner. But there's also an interesting answer: one's expectations. I couldn't have done 42 office hours 20 years ago either. I'd worked my way up to it.