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@samuel_biyi These things aren't one man one vote, or we'd all be using grocers' apostrophes.
@aladejebideji I agree with you, and indeed I suspect that's most of the reason this is even controversial.
@Spotlight_Abby So if someone's writing is verbose and they attribute this to local custom, they're probably mistaken; they're probably just bad.
@Spotlight_Abby Of course different groups (or even individuals) might have different ideas about what constitutes simplicity, but these variations are tiny compared to the difference between a good and a bad writer.
@satpugnet I'm not saying you should use simpler words than you need to convey your full meaning, just that you should use the simplest you can.
@CEG_Seyon @mblair I mean that when he sees the clumsy sentences people have written in order to use it, he'll see that it's a harder word to use well than he might have thought.
@ColinGardiner Yes, as in so many other kinds of work. Programming is another example.
@ScarTissue101 Either way, it will make their writing better.
@ebelee_ You're still talking about it, so apparently not.
@Spotlight_Abby The fact that there aren't precise, predefined standards for simple writing doesn't make it a meaningless concept.
Like anything else of this type, there will be edge cases people disagree about, but also a core of cases very few would disagree with. |
The Top of My Todo List
April 2012
A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the
biggest
regrets
of the dying
. Her list seems plausible. I could see
myself —
can
see myself — making at least 4 of these
5 mistakes.
If you had to compress them into a single piece of advice, it might
be: don't be a cog. The 5 regrets paint a portrait of post-industrial
man, who shrinks himself into a shape that fits his circumstances,
then turns dutifully till he stops.
The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are
all errors of omission. You forget your dreams, ignore your family,
suppress your feelings, neglect your friends, and forget to be
happy. Errors of omission are a particularly dangerous type of
mistake, because you make them by default.
I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid
mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so
it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that
completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably
have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets,
yielding a list of 5 commands
Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you
think; cultivate friendships; be happy.
which I then put at the top of the file I use as a todo list.
Japanese Translation |
@mattyglesias There are also people (primarily young women) who enjoy a pretext for pursuing heretics.
@c0n5tantinople @pharmabroo It would seem that way to outsiders who don't understand the business, but early stage investing is very different from currency trading.
@pharmabroo Less soulless than people in finance? Practically everyone is.
I was talking recently to the founder of a startup in the finance industry. He said one of the problems with this world is that so many of the people are soulless. But interestingly this is less true the more technical you are. For pure quants, it's just a math problem.
@gregstradamus Only because Mike Pence told him no.
@bayeslord There's a startup in the current YC batch doing that.
YC is now a meta-incubator.
Starting a startup is like the entertainment business and professional sports in that you can make a lot of money without doing it mainly for the money. But it has room for a lot more people.
@thenimblegeek Wokeness started in the US so it makes sense that it might be a few years ahead.
@DrBeachcombing The family, like the Hooligans, have since changed the spelling of their name. |
The Need to Read
November 2022
In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often
been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge.
Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program
being loaded into a computer.
That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just
because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but
because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about
x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write.
[
1
]
Would that matter? If we replaced reading, would anyone need to be
good at writing?
The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to
convey ideas, but also a way to have them.
A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he
thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always
discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far
as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about
your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But
even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things
when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can
only be done by
writing
.
There are of course kinds of thinking that can be done without
writing. If you don't need to go too deeply into a problem, you can
solve it without writing. If you're thinking about how two pieces
of machinery should fit together, writing about it probably won't
help much. And when a problem can be described formally, you can
sometimes solve it in your head. But if you need to solve a
complicated, ill-defined problem, it will almost always help to
write about it. Which in turn means that someone who's not good at
writing will almost always be at a disadvantage in solving such
problems.
You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well
without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses.
You have to be good at reading, and read good things.
[
2
]
People who just want information may find other ways to get it.
But people who want to have ideas can't afford to.
Notes
[
1
]
Audiobooks can give you examples of good writing, but having
them read to you doesn't teach you as much about writing as reading
them yourself.
[
2
]
By "good at reading" I don't mean good at the mechanics of
reading. You don't have to be good at extracting words from the
page so much as extracting meaning from the words.
Japanese Translation
Chinese Translation
Italian Translation
French Translation |
@mattyglesias Many if not most presumably from fake accounts run by Russia.
@HeinrichKuttler @growing_daniel The way I acquired it was mainly by looking at a lot of art.
@AlexCaswen Try reading the next tweet in that thread.
@michael_nielsen My first experience with the internet was presumably the day they changed the name of the ARPAnet to the Internet, but I don't know what I happened to be doing that day.
@ilyasu @growing_daniel Though in practice the half life of a haircut is so much shorter than the half life of a hanging painting that buying bad art is more like still having the terrible haircut you had as a teenager.
@growing_daniel If you want to see examples of genuinely good mostly 20th century art, follow @ahistoryinart. Almost everything he posts is good. If nothing else your Twitter feed will have nice pictures in it.
@ilyasu @growing_daniel Presumably it would be something like the feeling that many people experience when looking at their haircuts in pictures of themselves as teenagers.
@ilyasu @growing_daniel Your life becomes phony to the extent the art affects it. And a painting hanging on the wall can have big effect on what it feels like to be in a room. It's like a visual loudspeaker.
@growing_daniel Since so many people are saying "why not just buy what you like?" I'll answer that.
Art can be phony, just like people can. You know you've had to learn how to avoid phony people. Why do you think you don't need to learn how to avoid phony art?
@selentelechia And you would end up buying bad art, because the high bit of how much you liked something would be whether you recognized the style of the artist. |
@SpencerHakimian There's a lot of fat in the federal budget. Done right, something like DOGE could have been very effective.
As we approach the end of the drive:
Me: Are there any cars coming?
13 yo: No.
Me: I can see a car right there.
13 yo: Well, there usually aren't any cars coming.
@aviramj Thanks for your carefully worded answer, but we both know this isn't the reason, don't we?
@JacketNation So did you.
@CcibChris This seems AI generated, no? https://t.co/MBCkvN83ph
@9haethon Definitely not.
Bluesky's usage graph. The pattern here is bad. Spikes when a bunch of new people show up, followed by declines when the new arrivals are disappointed. https://t.co/wESwWevXpw
@davidaxelrod If you want people to read a story, use a direct link instead of an Apple News link.
Why won't Israel allow international journalists into Gaza?
@Hamza_a96 The consensus has tipped. That's a good thing. |
@janeandrsn @JCBForumSpeak Look them up for yourself.
@OliverBeedham Not if every startup moved to the UK, but if 20% of people are afraid to work in the US now (probably a conservative estimate), the first few startups who move to the UK get that whole 20% to themselves.
@russell_m It has lower GDP per capita, but it also has rule of law.
@nicholasjarboe They're less of a threat to startups than the arrests for thought crime in the US.
@JCBForumSpeak It's almost totally random.
@avoanjali Startups are made of people. A recruiting advantage is one of the most valuable advantages you can have.
Recruiting is why all the startups shifted from the peninsula up to SF starting in 2012.
What an interesting twist of history it would be if the UK became a hub of intellectual refugees the way the US itself did in the 1930s and 40s. It wouldn't take much more than what's already happening.
A smart foreign-born undergrad at a US university asked me if he should go to the UK to start his startup because of the random deportations here. I said that while the median startup wasn't taking things to this extreme yet, it would be an advantage in recruiting.
@david_firrin Why am I bald?
@celebi_int I was a kid for the first one, but definitely paying attention. |
@cheerupstanley At the very least it will harm European citizens by making them relatively poorer than the rest of the world. And as any relatively poor country knows, lots of other bad things follow from that.
@KarthikIO It gets in the way of using interactions with European users as training data.
How strange it would be if a regulation driven largely by European anger about American dominance in the previous generation of technology ended up ensuring that Europe remained behind in the latest generation. Or maybe not so strange. Bitterness is never a strategy for winning.
After talking to an AI startup from Europe in the current YC batch, it's clear that the GDPR conflicts with AI in an unforeseen way that will significantly harm European AI companies.
@Austen That's not true.
@Rushabh_Shah777 Over 5000.
@gfodor @elonmusk If that was what you meant, you should have said so.
@samarth_ghoslya Lots.
@gfodor @elonmusk It's not for me to decide how long the Ukrainians should continue to defend their country. That's for them to decide.
I wish anything else in my life was running as smoothly as YC is under Garry. We just had a board meeting and it seemed like every item on the agenda was about how to make something that's working well work even better. |
@wideofthepost I dislike Bill Ackman as much as the next man, but the numbers you quote don't add up to 9 billion.
@garrytan I don't think anyone's claiming anything changed about society in that year. It was just when a number happened to peak.
@Austen No one is better at assembling groups of cryptographers, and if none of their projects were unlikely to work, they'd be operating too conservatively.
@mmeJen Quite possibly. I'm not saying his work is valuable, just that it's not trivially easy.
@mattyglesias In practice it's only possible when all your wealth is due to a single decision. If you have to get multiple 50/50 bets right, the chance of winning by luck is 1/2^n, which approaches zero very rapidly.
Carlson is falling victim to a common phenomenon. He doesn't understand how someone rich or famous got that way, so he assumes there is nothing to understand.
I don't like Bill Ackman or Tucker Carlson, but Carlson is mistaken if he thinks Ackman is a useless person with no actual skills. If a useless person with no actual skills could make as much money as Ackman has, there would be millions of billionaires in America.
@CcibChris This isn't real. It was made by an artist called Dru Blair.
Unexpected consequence of the improvement of AIs (though obvious in retrospect): they continue to hallucinate, but as they improve their hallucinations become more authoritative-sounding. So the danger posed by hallucinations doesn't decrease as fast as AIs improve.
@danteocualesjr We get them printed by Tablo.
https://t.co/KheY1CAxDA |
AI is evolving so fast and schools change so slow that it may be better for startups to build stuff for kids to use themselves first, then collect all the schools later. That m.o. would certainly be more fun.
For the next 10 years at least the conversations about AI tutoring inside schools will be mostly about policy, and the conversations about AI tutoring outside schools will be mostly about what it's possible to build. The latter are going to be much more interesting.
The first rule of activism: It's not enough that your actions are intended to help fix some problem. They must actually help fix it. And you can't take this for granted, because the easiest forms of activism mostly don't.
"How to Start Google" (https://t.co/rN1OHWBwm5) was a talk at my older son's school. It was one of a series of talks about careers. I just heard the students voted it the best one, and I'm happier than if I'd won some prestigious award.
@caspar_g They're not. That's why you have to buy them at auction. You can only buy old ones.
@yuris @cjc Here we are at one of them. https://t.co/S9hf1IXE0N
@UserJourneys Come to think of it, old chamberpots do occasionally come up at auction. That could be the perfect way to display it.
Explained to Jessica that it's "coco de mer," not "coco de merde." She doesn't like the one I bought at auction. https://t.co/M4QHBsukgM
@David__Osland And yet passengers apparently liked it much less than the destroyed version. https://t.co/HrIw3PXPaG
Jessica pointed out that the people saying I was hot are mostly guys. I pointed out that this shows she checked. |
@Noahpinion Interestingly I believe numbers 2 and 3 (antitrust and crypto) are both ultimately due to Elizabeth Warren, whose proteges are in both cases the cause of the problem.
@ghostofhellas How do they know this mound is from that battle?
@bonker_99 I have. I'm complaining about a rental.
@ntldr2020 It was a new rental Subaru that inspired me to write this! It's so unbearably annoying.
Maybe there's a kind of uncanny valley here, and we'll later realize there are two peaks at 2004 Defender and full self-driving, with unhappy lowlands between.
New cars get more and more annoying as they approach full self-driving. There are ever more things they nag you to do or prevent you from doing, till in the penultimate stage you're just one flesh subroutine in their program.
@krishnanrohit There is something to this. I wouldn't say it has made Trump supporters of people who weren't, but it has definitely shifted people a bit to the right. Like the joke that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.
Maybe this is a way for him to bow out gracefully. "I'm not dropping out because I'm too old, but because the focus on my age is distracting everyone from the issues."
Now that the big question about Biden has switched to "Is he too old?" he can no longer talk effectively about issues, because people watching him speak are thinking mostly about whether he seems weak or confused instead of what he's actually saying.
@LurkingToTruth They don't want to know it. |
@oscarle_x The exact opposite of that.
@shashj Just out of curiosity, is it legal to say you're not in favor of proscribing a proscribed organization?
Someone asked how to expand startups' ideas. The best way is to shrink the idea down to its essence, then ask how broadly that essential idea could be expanded. You have to shrink it first, though, or there will be random stuff left in it that impedes its expansion.
@FrankRundatz In this case, no. YC already funded his company several years ago. We were just talking about the current state of AI-assisted programming.
@AsyncCollab People think they can keep faking all the way to liquidity. And that has happened a handful of times, though it's rare.
@Principal_Jon When I was a kid I wouldn't have expected that to be true, but it is. It has such variety.
@TimSuzman It sometimes feels that way during office hours, but the truth is that everything depends on the founders' execution.
@thogge The first thing I do when I meet a startup is get them to explain it to me. Once I think I understand it, I explain it back to them. But beyond that there's no structure. I just start with whatever seems the most important question.
I've been doing office hours with startups for 20 years now. I must have talked to over a thousand of them. How have I not become bored by it? I think the reason is curiosity. Each startup's idea is different, and it's a puzzle to figure out how to make it work.
@tr0g This is someone we funded several years ago. |
Charisma / Power
January 2017
People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked.
Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have
the charisma to disarm. That was Hillary Clinton's problem. It also
tends to be a problem for any CEO who is more of a builder than a
schmoozer. And yet the builder-type CEO is (like Hillary) probably
the best person for the job.
I don't think there is any solution to this problem. It's human
nature. The best we can do is to recognize that it's happening, and
to understand that being a magnet for criticism is sometimes a sign
not that someone is the wrong person for a job, but that they're
the right one. |
What Business Can Learn from Open Source
August 2005
(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)
Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source.
Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its
monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has
prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing
Windows servers with Linux servers.
[
1
]
More significant, I think, is
which
52% they are. At this point,
anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to
explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon
don't.
But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not
about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them.
Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use.
We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating
from open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they
have a lot in common.
Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for
free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers
compete with people working for money, and often win. The method
of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian. Companies ensure
quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But
you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one
another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff
spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback
from the audience improves the best work.
Another thing blogging and open source have in common is the Web.
People have always been willing to do great work
for free, but before the Web it was harder to reach an audience
or collaborate on projects.
Amateurs
I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is
that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's
news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When
I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business
doesn't reflect it.
Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French
word for working:
travailler
. It has an English cousin, travail,
and what it means is torture.
[
2
]
This turns out not to be the last word on work, however.
As societies get richer, they learn something about
work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the
healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to
eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness
only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were
designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount
of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't.
There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs.
The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology,
though it's staring us in the face. "Amateur" was originally rather
a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century
was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.
That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from
open source: that people working for love often surpass those working
for money. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because
they want to hack the source. They switch because it's a better
browser.
It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the
browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem
is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people
enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers
will build for free.
I suspect professionalism was always overrated-- not just in the
literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like
formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed
in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion,
driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.
One of the most powerful of those was the existence of "channels." Revealingly,
the same term was used for both products and information: there
were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels.
It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals
seem so superior to amateurs. There were only a few jobs as
professional journalists, for example, so competition ensured the
average journalist was fairly good. Whereas anyone can express
opinions about current events in a bar. And so the average person
expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to
a journalist writing about the subject.
On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower.
You don't have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in.
Millions of people are publishing online, and the average
level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is not very
good. This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't
present much of a threat-- that blogs are just a fad.
Actually, the fad is the word "blog," at least the way the print
media now use it. What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who
publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online.
That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default
medium for publication. So I'd
like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online.
How about "writer?"
Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of
its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads
the
average
blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something
to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting
whether you liked it or not.
But now you can read any writer you want. So the average
quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing
against. They're competing against the best writing online. And,
like Microsoft, they're losing.
I know that from my own experience as a reader. Though most print
publications are online, I probably
read two or three articles on individual people's sites for every
one I read on the site of a newspaper or magazine.
And when I read, say, New York Times stories, I never reach
them through the Times front page. Most I find through aggregators
like Google News or Slashdot or Delicious. Aggregators show how
much
better
you can do than the channel. The New York Times front page is
a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious
is a list of articles that are interesting. And it's only now that
you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.
Most articles in the print media are boring. For example, the
president notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq
was a mistake, so he makes an address to the nation to drum up
support. Where is the man bites dog in that? I didn't hear the
speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what he said. A
speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is
nothing
new
in it.
[
3
]
Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most
"news" about things going wrong. A child is abducted; there's a
tornado; a ferry sinks; someone gets bitten by a shark; a small
plane crashes. And what do you learn about the world from these
stories? Absolutely nothing. They're outlying data points; what
makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant.
As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not
surprising if amateurs can do better. Live by the channel, die by
the channel: if you depend on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits
that are hard to overcome when you suddenly get competition.
[
4
]
Workplaces
Another thing blogs and open source software have in common is that
they're often made by people working at home. That may not seem
surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent
of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend
millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a
place to work. And yet people working in their own homes,
which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up
being more productive.
This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average
office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what
makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with
professionalism. The sterility
of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting
efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.
The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what
flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it's not
just the way offices look that's bleak. The way people act is just
as bad.
Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins
in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles
they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work
odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at
whatever they want online without worrying whether it's "work safe."
The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And
you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most
productive it's ever going to be.
Maybe it's not a coincidence. Maybe some aspects of professionalism
are actually a net lose.
To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is
that you're supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually
a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most
employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their
productivity.
The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people
work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees
have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are
forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be
working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time
in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.
If you could measure how much work people did, many companies
wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what
you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If
your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then
you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.
That may seem utopian, but it's what we told people who came to
work for our company. There were no fixed office hours. I never
showed up before 11 in the morning. But we weren't saying this to
be benevolent. We were saying: if you work here we expect you to
get a lot done. Don't try to fool us just by being here a lot.
The problem with the facetime model is not just that it's demoralizing, but
that the people pretending to work interrupt
the ones actually working. I'm convinced the facetime model
is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings.
Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little.
And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a
day. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement
comes out the other, something has to give. And meetings are the
main mechanism for taking up the slack.
For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember
well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings.
I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for
programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on
my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter
what I did. Even while I was in the bathroom! But because the
imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be
working. And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing. They
counted as work, just like programming, but they were so much easier.
All you had to do was sit and look attentive.
Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email,
on a smaller scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time,
there's the cost in fragmentation-- breaking people's day up into
bits too small to be useful.
You can see how dependent you've become on something by removing
it suddenly. So for big companies I propose the following experiment.
Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden-- where everyone has to
sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on
things they can do without talking to anyone else.
Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I'm
sure many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could
do by themselves. You could call it "Work Day."
The other problem with pretend work
is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm
writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do
actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea,
or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase--
this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this
in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.
It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something
to compare it to. And that's one reason open source, and even blogging
in some cases, are so important. They show us what real work looks like.
We're funding eight new startups at the moment. A friend asked
what they were doing for office space, and seemed surprised when I
said we expected them to work out of whatever apartments they found
to live in. But we didn't propose that to save money. We did it
because we want their software to be good. Working in crappy
informal spaces is one of the things startups do right without
realizing it. As soon as you get into an office, work and life
start to drift apart.
That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life
are supposed to be separate. But that part, I'm convinced, is a
mistake.
Bottom-Up
The third big lesson we can learn from open source and
blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of
flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work
bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff
prevails.
Does this sound familiar? It's the principle of a market economy.
Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those
worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all
their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like
communist states.
There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about
what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel
era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors
assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.
Open source and blogging show us things don't have to work that
way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up.
And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better.
For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because
it's open source; anyone can find mistakes.
The same happens with writing. As we got close to publication, I
found I was very worried about the essays in
Hackers
& Painters
that hadn't been online. Once an essay has had a couple thousand
page views I feel reasonably confident about it. But these had had
literally orders of magnitude less scrutiny. It felt like
releasing software without testing it.
That's what all publishing used to be like. If
you got ten people to read a manuscript, you were lucky. But I'd
become so used to publishing online that the old method now seemed
alarmingly unreliable, like navigating by dead reckoning once you'd
gotten used to a GPS.
The other thing I like about publishing online is that you can write
what you want and publish when you want. Earlier this year I wrote
something
that seemed suitable for a magazine, so
I sent it to an editor I know.
As I was waiting to hear back, I found to my surprise that I was
hoping they'd reject it. Then I could put it online right away.
If they accepted it, it wouldn't be read by anyone for months, and
in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word to save it from being
mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor.
[
5
]
Many employees would
like
to build great things for the companies
they work for, but more often than not management won't let them.
How many of us have heard stories of employees going to management
and saying, please let us build this thing to make money for you--
and the company saying no? The most famous example is probably Steve Wozniak,
who originally wanted to build microcomputers for his then-employer, HP.
And they turned him down. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks
with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS. But I think this
happens all the time. We just don't hear about it usually,
because to prove yourself right you have to quit
and start your own company, like Wozniak did.
Startups
So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging
have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they
like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive,
and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.
I can imagine managers at this point saying: what is this guy talking
about? What good does it do me to know that my programmers
would be more productive
working at home on their own projects? I need their asses in here
working on version 3.2 of our software, or we're never going to
make the release date.
And it's true, the benefit that specific manager could derive from
the forces I've described is near zero. When I say business can
learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can. I
mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene
pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that
dumb ones will die.
So what will business look like when it has assimilated the lessons
of open source and blogging? I think the big obstacle preventing
us from seeing the future of business is the assumption that people
working for you have to be employees. But think about what's going
on underneath: the company has some money, and they pay it to the
employee in the hope that he'll make something worth more than they
paid him. Well, there are other ways to arrange that relationship.
Instead of paying the guy money as a salary, why not give it to him
as investment? Then instead of coming to your office to work on
your projects, he can work wherever he wants on projects of his own.
Because few of us know any alternative, we have no idea how much
better we could do than the traditional employer-employee relationship.
Such customs evolve with glacial slowness. Our
employer-employee relationship still retains a big chunk of
master-servant DNA.
[
6
]
I dislike being on either end of it.
I'll work my ass off for a customer, but I resent being told what
to do by a boss. And being a boss is also horribly frustrating;
half the time it's easier just to do stuff yourself than to get
someone else to do it for you.
I'd rather do almost anything than give or receive a
performance review.
On top of its unpromising origins, employment
has accumulated a lot of cruft over the years. The list of what
you can't ask in job interviews is now so long that for convenience
I assume it's infinite. Within the
office you now have to walk on eggshells lest anyone
say
or do
something that makes the company prey to a lawsuit. And God help
you if you fire anyone.
Nothing shows more clearly that employment is not an ordinary economic
relationship than companies being sued for firing people. In any
purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want. If
you want to stop buying steel pipe from one supplier and start
buying it from another, you don't have to explain why. No one can
accuse you of
unjustly
switching pipe suppliers. Justice implies
some kind of paternal obligation that isn't there in
transactions between equals.
Most of the legal restrictions on employers are intended to protect
employees. But you can't have action without an equal and opposite
reaction. You can't expect employers to have some kind of paternal
responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the
position of children. And that seems a bad road to go down.
Next time you're in a moderately large city, drop by the main post
office and watch the body language of the people working there.
They have the same sullen resentment as children made to do
something they don't want to. Their union has exacted pay
increases and work restrictions that would have been the envy of
previous generations of postal workers, and yet they don't seem any
happier for it. It's demoralizing
to be on the receiving end of a paternalistic relationship, no
matter how cozy the terms. Just ask any teenager.
I see the disadvantages of the employer-employee relationship because
I've been on both sides of a better one: the investor-founder relationship.
I wouldn't claim it's painless. When I was running a
startup, the thought of our investors used to keep me up at night.
And now that I'm an
investor
,
the thought of our startups keeps me
up at night. All the pain of whatever problem you're trying to
solve is still there.
But the pain hurts less when it isn't
mixed with resentment.
I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled
experiment to prove that. After Yahoo bought our startup I went
to work for them. I was doing exactly the same work, except with
bosses. And to my horror I started acting like a child. The
situation pushed buttons I'd forgotten
I had.
The big advantage of investment over employment, as the examples of open
source and blogging suggest, is that people working on projects of
their own are enormously more productive. And a
startup
is a project
of one's own in two senses, both of them important: it's creatively
one's own, and also economically ones's own.
Google is a rare example of a big company in tune with the forces
I've described. They've tried hard to make their offices less sterile
than the usual cube farm. They give employees who do great work
large grants of stock to simulate the rewards of a startup. They
even let hackers spend 20% of their time on their own projects.
Why not let people spend 100% of their time on their own projects,
and instead of trying to approximate the value of what they create,
give them the actual market value? Impossible? That is in fact
what venture capitalists do.
So am I claiming that no one is going to be an employee anymore--
that everyone should go and start a startup? Of course not.
But more people could do it than do it now.
At the moment, even the smartest students leave school thinking
they have to get a
job
.
Actually what they need to do is make
something valuable. A job is one way to do that, but the more
ambitious ones will ordinarily be better off taking money from an
investor than an employer.
Hackers tend to think business is for MBAs. But business
administration is not what you're doing in a startup. What you're
doing is business
creation
. And the first phase of that
is mostly product creation-- that is, hacking. That's the
hard part. It's a lot harder to create something people love than
to take something people love and figure out how to make money from
it.
Another thing that keeps people away from starting startups is the
risk. Someone with kids and a mortgage should think twice before
doing it. But most young hackers have neither.
And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you'll
enjoy it more, even if you fail. You'll be working on your own
thing, instead of going to some office and doing what you're told.
There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as
much.
That may be the greatest effect, in the long run, of the forces
underlying open source and blogging: finally ditching the old
paternalistic employer-employee relationship, and replacing it with
a purely economic one, between equals.
Notes
[
1
]
Survey by Forrester Research reported in the cover story of
Business Week, 31 Jan 2005. Apparently someone believed you have to
replace the actual server in order to switch the operating system.
[
2
]
It derives from the late Latin
tripalium
,
a torture device so called because it consisted of three stakes.
I don't know how the stakes were used. "Travel" has the same root.
[
3
]
It would be much bigger news, in that sense, if the president
faced unscripted questions by giving a press conference.
[
4
]
One measure of the incompetence of newspapers is that so many
still make you register to read stories. I have yet to find a blog
that tried that.
[
5
]
They accepted the article, but I took so long to
send them the final version that by the time I did the section of
the magazine they'd accepted it for had disappeared in a reorganization.
[
6
]
The word "boss" is derived from the Dutch
baas
, meaning
"master."
Thanks
to Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
French Translation
Russian Translation
Japanese Translation
Spanish Translation
Arabic Translation |
@lies_and_stats @cperciva Their simpler alternatives are also common though. Presumably even more common.
@Tired_ofit_All Some writers can get away with doing this a fair amount, but most people should just aim for simplicity.
@cperciva I've seen a lot of this sort of comedic effect recently. Sadly it was mostly unintentional.
@mathepi Depends why you want it. If you want it because it most accurately expresses what you mean to say, then yes. But if you only want it to sound impressive, that's bad writing.
I've noticed a lot of people complaining jokingly that they now pause when they're about to use a fancy word. That's great. That's exactly what one should do — stop and think "is there a way to say this more simply?"
@Bootlegregore Yes, somewhat. It's hard to get more basic than "apropos of," but there are a lot plainer alternatives to "delve into."
@refiloe_Q It's the right word to express the idea, and the right word is never pretentious. What's pretentious is to use fancy words when they're not needed.
@markessien That's a separate question from whether one chooses to write simply and concisely or not, which is what Gibbon's quote is about.
@safier "Are we not going to pay a terrible price that will threaten the foundations of Israel’s existence because the international community will completely dissociate itself from us?"
— Ehud Olmert
@zamresearch Maybe, but I'm reluctant to do that sort of thing. Online controversies are mostly driven by idiots, so if you write essays in response to online controversies, you're letting your agenda be determined by idiots. |
@halabi @growing_daniel Few people anywhere, rich or poor, have any taste.
@htmella @growing_daniel Is it a good idea to marry someone you like a minute after meeting them when you're 17?
It's possible to like bad people, and just as possible to like bad art.
@dbasch @growing_daniel Oh yes it does. It's very easy to buy art that pleases you at first, but that you completely ignore after it's been on your wall for a month. I've been buying art for decades and I'm still learning.
@diffTTT @growing_daniel In a way. They need to learn how not to be fooled by meretricious art, how to avoid the immense influence of hype and fashion, etc. Most people have to figure this out for themselves or from books, but a truly competent expert could help.
@Izemthinks @growing_daniel Not a high threshold.
@growing_daniel We funded you. Isn't that enough?
@growing_daniel The other alternative, if you don't have time to understand art, is to hire an "art consultant" to buy it for you. Rich people in NYC and LA do this. But these "art consultants" are for the most part so palpably bogus that few SV people could endure them.
@growing_daniel The main reason rich people in SV don't buy art is that it does actually take some expertise to do it well. And since the kind of people who get rich in SV hate to do things badly, and don't have time to learn about art now, they do nothing.
@SteveStuWill Do you think there's a causal connection between neuroticism and extraversion?
@bird107w Yeah. This had been something I wondered about a lot as a child. Now it is, as you say, painfully clear. We are nearly all failing. |
@nitinmalik A lot of programming has always been scutwork.
@Omeyimi01 @ahistoryinart Phew.
So if I had to boil down my advice to one sentence, it would be: Find a kind of work that you're so interested in that you'll learn to do it better than AI can.
The most interesting consequence of this principle, though, is that it will become even more valuable to know what you're interested in. It's hard to do something really well if you're not deeply interested in it.
So I think the best general advice for protecting oneself from AI is to do something so well that you're operating way above the level of scutwork. But that does in turn rule out occupations that consist mostly of this kind of work.
For example, is programming safe from AI? At the bottom end, definitely not. Those jobs are already disappearing. But at the same time the very best programmers (e.g. the ones who are good enough to start their own companies) are being paid exceptional amounts.
It may be a mistake to ask which occupations are most safe from being taken by AI. What AI (in its current form) is good at is not so much certain jobs, but a certain way of working. It's good at scutwork. So that's the thing to avoid.
@VCBrags Actually this is an interestingly counterintuitive situation. It's almost always a useful exercise to estimate how big a startup could get. I was quite surprised the first time it wasn't. And anything that has surprised me about startups should surprise you.
@ahistoryinart Is that cropped, or did he really get so close to the edge on the bottom?
@Mondoweiss I just followed her. |
@eluft You can do better than that. Ideally you don't have a political tribe.
@lukepuplett You might think that, but empirically I haven't noticed a difference. Poor people don't seem more unprincipled than rich people.
@sarmadgulzar I wouldn't assume that they do.
Your moral principles and your economic interests won't always be aligned. What you do when they're not is a test of character.
@ryzers @mattyklein_ He asked me to.
@bryanpaluch It would be easier to just paint flames and bald eagles on them.
@IndestGames @mattyklein_ I think about it more and more.
12 yo starts lurching around like Frankenstein's monster and emitting monosyllabic grunts.
Me: What's the matter with you?
12 yo: I have to start acting like this. I'm going to be 13 in a few more months.
@mattyklein_ For some mysterious reason no one ever includes the second tweet in that thread.
@gfodor I called it the year before. Are we done now?
https://t.co/ynXzEH5aP2 |
@pitdesi @tacobell It would be very alarming if the answer was no.
@SaleemMerkt That it was never 9-5.
You know the founders are still running things when a company can talk openly about its "most hated feature." Hired managers would never dare to be so candid.
For the 10% of the US electorate who were nodding their heads in agreement as they read that: I'm joking.
Whatever the practical difficulties involved in invading Canada, the moral position at least is clear. Canadians all speak English, which makes them ethnically American, so it's ok to invade.
@slaings Try answering it then.
I seem to be willing to spend unlimited amounts of time trying to start today's fire from the microscopic glowing embers of yesterday's rather than just using a match.
I just came across a school application we filled out for our older son when he was 4 (in Palo Alto you have to apply to competitive schools) and one of the questions was to describe a day in his life. I'm so pleased now that I had to do this. https://t.co/XamwRDxtxj
@caitoz You're almost half right. Elon owns 42% of SpaceX.
@vivek_thakur_81 They seem to have plenty of spine about other questions. So I worry that in this case it's something more sinister. |
Here's the masterpiece of bland evasion that I got in reply: https://t.co/1D21PA9fDU
If you want me to ignore your email, put the word "opportunity" in the subject line. If you want to make doubly sure, put "exclusive" in there too.
I dreamt there was a new fashion for plaid lambda expressions. I didn't like them, so when McCarthy came to convince me to use them, I snuck out the back to avoid him.
I talked to a startup yesterday that had been forced to compress certain information to fit it into an LLM context window. But compression is understanding, and in the compressed form the information could be used for other, new things.
I talked to a startup that's not a software company but uses AI quite a lot. They currently have 6 employees. I asked how many more people they'd need to hire if they didn't use AI, and they said about 10. So AI is increasing their productivity about 2.7x.
Scottish portraitists didn't flatter their sitters. Here are Raeburn (left) and Ramsay (right). Ramsay tended to paint everyone with a underbite, which was particularly hard on the female sitters. https://t.co/Egh8Acjpzd
A still life by James Stroudley (1906 – 1985). https://t.co/eeuCh2YkyV
I was talking recently to a startup using AI to take over a certain kind of work. Apparently investors are skeptical that AI could do it. I told them they should point out that most of this work already seems as if it's done by AI.
That could be a useful heuristic for picking domains to attack with AI. If the work being done in some domain is already slop when done by humans, then presumably current AI can do it well enough.
Jessica and I went out to lunch with Trevor Blackwell and we laughed the whole time. It reminded me of how much we used to laugh in the early years of YC. We tried to hide it, because it didn't seem very professional, but I now think it was not unrelated to how well YC did. |
I've seen several organizations criticized for removing woke stuff from their sites, as if this showed a lack of integrity. Not necessarily. If they were swapping woke stuff for new stuff sucking up to the Republicans, that would show a lack of integrity, but they're not.
@ATabarrok If they swapped it out for stuff sucking up to Trump, it would be accurate to call them that, but there's nothing dishonest about merely reverting their site to the way it was before zealots forced them to include a bunch of woke boilerplate.
@RomeInTheEast No; the Dark Ages were a period in European history, and the Byzantines weren't so much part of Europe as a power on its eastern border.
Corollary: Teaching kids (either yours or other people's) to be bitter about wealth is the best way to keep them poor.
Being bitter about wealth is a good way to ensure you'll never become rich. Why would you do anything to bring you closer to something you despise?
@ahistoryinart Once again taking out the color makes it clear it was done from a photograph. https://t.co/2ZoHCCxdfN
The open question is whether founders will still need to be programmers themselves. I would guess the answer is yes. Founders may now become managers instead of writing all the code themselves. But to manage programmers well you have to be one.
So even if AI becomes very good at writing code, it won't change starting a startup that dramatically. Understanding users' needs will still be the core of starting a startup. And the best way to understand users' needs will still be to have them yourself.
What YC asks about in interviews is how well you understand users' needs, not your programming ability. I explained this years ago in this essay I wrote about how to ace your Y Combinator interview:
https://t.co/zXWErQqlwV
The classic software startup writes code to solve users' problems. If AI makes writing code more of a commodity, understanding users' problems will become the most important component of starting a startup. But it already is. |
How Not to Die
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
August 2007
(This is a talk I gave at the last
Y Combinator dinner of the summer.
Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of
a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could
save some of the startups from
preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather
grim talk. I didn't mean this as an essay; I wrote it down
because I only had two hours before dinner and think fastest while
writing.)
A couple days ago I told a reporter that we expected about a third
of the companies we funded to succeed. Actually I was being
conservative. I'm hoping it might be as much as a half. Wouldn't
it be amazing if we could achieve a 50% success rate?
Another way of saying that is that half of you are going to die. Phrased
that way, it doesn't sound good at all. In fact, it's kind of weird
when you think about it, because our definition of success is that
the founders get rich. If half the startups we fund succeed, then
half of you are going to get rich and the other half are going to
get nothing.
If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke,
but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a
typical startup. It certainly describes what happened in Viaweb.
We avoided dying till we got rich.
It was really close, too. When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about
being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of
their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to
back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even
in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper.
You may have heard that quote about luck consisting of opportunity
meeting preparation. You've now done the preparation. The work
you've done so far has, in effect, put you in a position to get
lucky: you can now get rich by not letting your company die. That's
more than most people have. So let's talk about how not to die.
We've done this five times now, and we've seen a bunch of startups
die. About 10 of them so far. We don't know exactly what happens
when they die, because they generally don't die loudly and heroically.
Mostly they crawl off somewhere and die.
For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear
from you. When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a
couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking
what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign. So far
that is a 100% accurate predictor of death.
Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and
either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they're probably
going to live.
I realize this will sound naive, but maybe the linkage works in
both directions. Maybe if you can arrange that we keep hearing
from you, you won't die.
That may not be so naive as it sounds. You've probably noticed
that having dinners every Tuesday with us and the other founders
causes you to get more done than you would otherwise, because every
dinner is a mini Demo Day. Every dinner is a kind of a deadline.
So the mere constraint of staying in regular contact with us will
push you to make things happen, because otherwise you'll be embarrassed
to tell us that you haven't done anything new since the last time
we talked.
If this works, it would be an amazing hack. It would be pretty
cool if merely by staying in regular contact with us you could get
rich. It sounds crazy, but there's a good chance that would work.
A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups. There
is now a whole neighborhood of them in San Francisco. If you move
there, the peer pressure that made you work harder all summer will
continue to operate.
When startups die, the official cause of death is always either
running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two
occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually
that they've become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup
that's working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new
features, and dies because they can't pay their bills and their ISP
unplugs their server.
Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!
If so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging
on they could get rich, you have to assume that running a startup
can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I've been there, and
that's why I've never done another startup. The low points in a
startup are just unbelievably low. I bet even Google had moments
where things seemed hopeless.
Knowing that should help. If you know it's going to feel terrible
sometimes, then when it feels terrible you won't think "ouch, this
feels terrible, I give up." It feels that way for everyone. And
if you just hang on, things will probably get better. The metaphor
people use to describe the way a startup feels is at least a roller
coaster and not drowning. You don't just sink and sink; there are
ups after the downs.
Another feeling that seems alarming but is in fact normal in a
startup is the feeling that what you're doing isn't working. The
reason you can expect to feel this is that what you do probably
won't work. Startups almost never get it right the first time.
Much more commonly you launch something, and no one cares. Don't
assume when this happens that you've failed. That's normal for
startups. But don't sit around doing nothing. Iterate.
I like Paul Buchheit's suggestion of trying to make something that
at least someone really loves. As long as you've made something
that a few users are ecstatic about, you're on the right track. It
will be good for your morale to have even a handful of users who
really love you, and startups run on morale. But also it
will tell you what to focus on. What is it about you that they
love? Can you do more of that? Where can you find more people who
love that sort of thing? As long as you have some core of users
who love you, all you have to do is expand it. It may take a while,
but as long as you keep plugging away, you'll win in the end. Both
Blogger and Delicious did that. Both took years to succeed. But
both began with a core of fanatically devoted users, and all Evan
and Joshua had to do was grow that core incrementally.
Wufoo
is
on the same trajectory now.
So when you release something and it seems like no one cares, look
more closely. Are there zero users who really love you, or is there
at least some little group that does? It's quite possible there
will be zero. In that case, tweak your product and try again.
Every one of you is working on a space that contains at least one
winning permutation somewhere in it. If you just keep trying,
you'll find it.
Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to
do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that
ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are
in big trouble. Bob's going to grad school, but we're going to
keep working on the startup. We're moving back to Minnesota, but
we're going to keep working on the startup. We're taking on some
consulting projects, but we're going to keep working on the startup.
You may as well just translate these to "we're giving up on the
startup, but we're not willing to admit that to ourselves," because
that's what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that
working on it can't be preceded by "but."
In particular, don't go to graduate school, and don't start other
projects. Distraction is fatal to startups. Going to (or back to)
school is a huge predictor of death because in addition to the
distraction it gives you something to say you're doing. If you're
only doing a startup, then if the startup fails, you fail. If
you're in grad school and your startup fails, you can say later "Oh
yeah, we had this startup on the side when I was in grad school,
but it didn't go anywhere."
You can't use euphemisms like "didn't go anywhere" for something
that's your only occupation. People won't let you.
One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working
on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of
looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So
if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position
where failure will be public and humiliating.
When we first met the founders of
Octopart
, they seemed very smart,
but not a great bet to succeed, because they didn't seem especially
committed. One of the two founders was still in grad school. It
was the usual story: he'd drop out if it looked like the startup
was taking off. Since then he has not only dropped out of grad
school, but appeared full length in
Newsweek
with the word "Billionaire"
printed across his chest. He just cannot fail now. Everyone he
knows has seen that picture. Girls who dissed him in high school
have seen it. His mom probably has it on the fridge. It would be
unthinkably humiliating to fail now. At this point he is committed
to fight to the death.
I wish every startup we funded could appear in a Newsweek article
describing them as the next generation of billionaires, because
then none of them would be able to give up. The success rate would
be 90%. I'm not kidding.
When we first knew the Octoparts they were lighthearted, cheery
guys. Now when we talk to them they seem grimly determined. The
electronic parts distributors are trying to squash them to keep
their monopoly pricing. (If it strikes you as odd that people still
order electronic parts out of thick paper catalogs in 2007, there's
a reason for that. The distributors want to prevent the transparency
that comes from having prices online.) I feel kind of bad that
we've transformed these guys from lighthearted to grimly determined.
But that comes with the territory. If a startup succeeds, you get
millions of dollars, and you don't get that kind of money just by
asking for it. You have to assume it takes some amount of pain.
And however tough things get for the Octoparts, I predict they'll
succeed. They may have to morph themselves into something totally
different, but they won't just crawl off and die. They're smart;
they're working in a promising field; and they just cannot give up.
All of you guys already have the first two. You're all smart and
working on promising ideas. Whether you end up among the living
or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up.
So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup.
The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of
disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don't get demoralized.
When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what
Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don't
give up.
Japanese Translation
Arabic Translation |
The Age of the Essay
September 2004
Remember the essays you had to write in high school?
Topic sentence, introductory paragraph,
supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being,
say, that Ahab in
Moby Dick
was a Christ-like figure.
Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the
story: what an essay really is, and how you write one.
Or at least, how I write one.
Mods
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.
Certainly schools should teach students how to
write. But due to a series of historical accidents
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 the result that writing is made to seem boring and
pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens?
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. Around 1100, Europe at last began to
catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they
had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered
what we call "the classics." The effect was rather as if
we were visited by beings from another solar system.
These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated
that for the next several centuries the main work of
European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate
what they knew.
During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great
prestige. It seemed the essence of what scholars did. As
European scholarship gained momentum it became less and less important;
by 1350
someone who wanted to learn about science could find better
teachers than Aristotle in his own era. [1]
But schools change slower than scholarship. In the
19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone
of the curriculum.
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 original raison d'etre
of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaeology 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
those 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 a good
deal of resistance at first.
The first courses in English literature
seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly
American ones. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst,
and University College, London
taught English literature in the 1820s.
But Harvard didn't have a professor of English literature until
1876, and Oxford not till 1885. (Oxford had a chair of Chinese before
it had one of English.) [2]
What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have
been the idea that professors should do research as well
as teach. This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and
indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was imported
from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at
Johns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly.
Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taught
English composition. But how do you do research on composition?
The professors who taught math could be required to do original
math, the professors who taught history could be required to
write scholarly articles about history, but what about the
professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should they
do research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature. [3]
And so in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited
by English professors. This had two drawbacks:
(a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer,
any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b)
the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's
what the professor is interested in.
High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable
high school experiences were sown in 1892, when
the National Education Association
"formally recommended that literature
and composition be unified in the high school course." [4]
The 'riting component of the 3 Rs then 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.
No Defense
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, trained to take
either side of an argument and make as good a case for it
as they can.
Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded
early universities. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing
persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. [5]
And after the lecture the most common form
of discussion was the disputation. This is at least
nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense:
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.
Defending a position 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. It's not
just that you miss subtleties this way.
The real problem is that you can't change the question.
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of
the things 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 is the conclusion? I was never sure
about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just
supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph,
but in different enough words that no one could tell.
Why bother?
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.
Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it
should be convincing because you got the right answers,
not because you did a good job of arguing. When I give a
draft of an essay to friends, there are two things
I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem
unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by
cutting. But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by
arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.
At the very least I must have explained something badly. In
that case, in the course of the conversation I'll be forced
to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can just
incorporate in the essay. More often than not I have
to change what I was saying as well.
But the aim is never to be convincing per se.
As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical,
so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.
The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be
a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it's historically
inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is
something else.
Trying
To understand what a real essay is, we have to
reach back into history again, though this time not so far.
To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of
what he called "essais." He was
doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and
the difference is embodied in the name.
Essayer
is the French
verb meaning "to try"
and an
essai
is an attempt. An essay is something you
write to try 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 notice 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. Most of what ends up in my essays I only
thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I
write them.
In the things you write in school you are, in theory,
merely explaining yourself to the reader.
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
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.
They tend to peter out. When I run into
difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague
questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.
Many published essays peter out in the 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 "balanced."
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 in terror.
Abortion, 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.)
The River
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. An essay 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 (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey.
As you might expect, it winds all over the place.
But it doesn't do this out of frivolity.
The path it has discovered is the most
economical route to the sea. [6]
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 the most interesting.
One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always
know generally what I want to write about.
But not the
specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to
paragraph I let the ideas take their course.
This doesn't always work. Sometimes, like a river,
one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing 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 seven paragraphs and start over
in another direction.
Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up
train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation.
Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts.
It would be exhausting to read. You need to
cut and fill to
emphasize the central thread, like an
illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don't
change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original.
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.
Surprise
So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise.
Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of
least astonishment. 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
what they saw. I really wanted to know. And I found
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 the most unobservant people, and it will
extract information they didn't even know they were
recording.
Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but 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.) The trick is to 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 who the best programmers are overall.
I didn't realize this when I began
that 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:
a few topics you've thought about a lot, and
some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
What should you think about? My guess is that it
doesn't matter-- that anything can be interesting if you get deeply
enough into it. One possible exception might be things
that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them,
like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there
anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins?
Well, it was interesting 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 think now it was the salt.)
And the difference in the way fathers and
mothers bought ice cream for their kids: the fathers
like benevolent kings bestowing largesse, the mothers
harried, giving in to pressure.
So, yes, there does seem to be some material even in
fast food.
I didn't notice those things at the time, though. At sixteen
I was about as observant as a lump of rock. I can see more now in
the fragments of memory I preserve of that age than I could see
at the time from having it all happening live, right in front of me.
Observation
So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an
inborn one. It must be something you can learn.
How do you learn it?
To some extent it's like learning history.
When you first read
history, it's just a whirl of names
and dates.
Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have
for new facts to stick onto-- which means
you accumulate knowledge at an exponential rate. Once you
remember that Normans conquered
England in 1066, it will catch your attention when you hear
that other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same time.
Which will make you wonder about Normandy, and take note
when a third book mentions that Normans
were not, like most of what is now
called France, tribes that flowed in as the Roman empire collapsed,
but Vikings (norman = north man) who arrived
four centuries later in 911. Which makes
it easier to remember that Dublin was also established by
Vikings in the 840s. Etc, etc squared.
Collecting surprises is a similar process.
The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice
new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older,
life should become more and more surprising. When I was a
kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out.
I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured
out. They're just mistaken.
When it comes to surprises, the rich get richer. But
(as with wealth) there
may be habits of mind that will help the process along. It's
good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions
beginning with Why.
But not in the random way that three year
olds ask why. There are an infinite number of questions.
How do you find the fruitful ones?
I find it especially
useful to ask why about things that seem wrong.
For example, why should there be a connection between
humor and misfortune? Why do we find it funny when a
character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel?
There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure.
If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a
degree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom
that we're only achieving 1% of what we could.
This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our
heads as children: that things are the way they are because
that is how things have to be.
For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay
felt the same about
English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless.
But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that
it was, in fact, all a mistake.
We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.
I have a hunch you want to pay attention not just to things
that seem wrong, but things that seem wrong in a humorous way.
I'm always pleased when I see someone laugh as they
read a draft of an essay. But why should I be? I'm aiming
for good ideas. Why should good ideas be funny?
The connection may be surprise.
Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are what
one wants to deliver.
I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never
actually get around to reading them and using
what I've written, but I do tend to
reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value
of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your
head.
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage
when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken.
And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell
you, is
nil admirari.
When you're mistaken, don't
dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one
will notice.
One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where
inexperience may make you look foolish.
If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite.
Study lots of different things,
because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected
connections between different fields. For example,
jam, bacon, pickles, and cheese, which are among the most pleasing
of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation.
And so were books and paintings.
Whatever you study, include history-- but social and economic
history, not political history. History seems to me so important
that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study.
Another way to describe it is
all the data we have so far.
Among other things, studying history gives one confidence that
there are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses.
Swords evolved during the Bronze Age out of daggers, which
(like their flint predecessors) had a hilt separate from the
blade. Because swords are longer
the hilts kept breaking off. But it took five hundred years
before someone thought of casting hilt and blade as one
piece.
Disobedience
Above all, make a habit of paying
attention to things you're not supposed to, either because
they're "
inappropriate
,"
or not important, or not what you're
supposed to be working on. If you're curious about something,
trust your instincts.
Follow the threads that attract your
attention. If there's something you're really interested
in, you'll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to
it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especially
proud of something always tends to lead back to it.
For example, I've always been fascinated by comb-overs, especially
the extreme sort that
make a man look as if he's wearing a beret made of his own hair.
Surely this is a lowly sort of thing to be interested in-- the
sort of superficial quizzing
best left to teenage girls. And yet there is something underneath.
The key question, I realized, is how does the comber-over not
see how odd he looks?
And the answer is that he got to look that way
incrementally.
What began as combing his hair a little carefully over a
thin patch has gradually, over 20 years, grown into a monstrosity.
Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be
used for constructive purposes too: just as you can trick
yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into
creating something so grand that you would never have dared to
plan
such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good
software gets created. You start by writing a stripped-down
kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows
into a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: could
you do the same thing in painting, or in a novel?
See what you can extract from a frivolous question?
If there's one piece of advice I would give about writing essays,
it would be: don't do as you're told.
Don't believe what you're supposed to.
Don't write the
essay readers expect; one learns nothing from
what one expects.
And
don't write the way they taught you to in school.
The most important sort of disobedience is to write
essays at all. Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows
signs of becoming
rampant
.
It used to be that only a tiny
number of officially approved writers were allowed to
write essays. Magazines published few of them, and judged
them less by what they said than who wrote them;
a magazine might publish a story by an
unknown writer if it was good enough, but if they published
an essay on x it had to be by someone who was at least
forty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a problem,
because there are a lot of things insiders can't say precisely
because they're insiders.
The Internet is changing that.
Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any
writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it.
Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.
Popular magazines made the period between the spread
of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the
short story.
The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay.
And that's certainly not something I realized when
I started writing this.
Notes
[1] I'm thinking of Oresme (c. 1323-82). But it's hard to pick
a date, because there was a sudden drop-off in scholarship
just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science.
The cause may have been the plague of 1347; the trend in
scientific progress matches the population curve.
[2] Parker, William R. "Where Do College English Departments
Come From?"
College English
28 (1966-67), pp. 339-351.
Reprinted in Gray, Donald J. (ed).
The Department of
English at Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970.
Indiana
University Publications.
Daniels, Robert V.
The University of Vermont: The First
Two Hundred Years.
University of Vermont, 1991.
Mueller, Friedrich M. Letter to the
Pall Mall
Gazette.
1886/87. Reprinted in Bacon, Alan (ed).
The Nineteenth-Century
History of English Studies.
Ashgate, 1998.
[3] I'm compressing the story a bit.
At first
literature took a back seat to philology, which (a) seemed more
serious and (b) was popular in Germany, where many of the
leading scholars of that generation had been trained.
In some cases the writing teachers were transformed
in situ
into English professors.
Francis James Child, who had been Boylston Professor
of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1851,
became in 1876 the university's first professor of English.
[4] Parker,
op. cit.
, p. 25.
[5] The undergraduate curriculum or
trivium
(whence
"trivial") consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
Candidates for masters' degrees went on to study the
quadrivium
of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
Together these were the seven liberal arts.
The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, where
it was considered the most important
subject. It would not be far from the truth to say that
education in the classical world
meant training landowners' sons
to speak well enough to defend their interests
in political and legal disputes.
[6] Trevor Blackwell points out that this
isn't strictly true, because the outside
edges of curves erode faster.
Thanks
to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica
Livingston, Jackie McDonough, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of
this.
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Hackers & Painters
. |
@ESYudkowsky Do you suppose ships will never be powered by fusion?
@GuyInSF2 They can't make Bond female or they have nothing left. Anyone can make a movie about a dashing MI6 agent. The name "James Bond" is the main thing the franchise consists of, besides a couple other minor things like "007" and the music.
@abemurray Also out of touch in the sense that he stopped taking in new information in about 1975.
@abemurray I think it's a combination of ideology and being out of touch.
@sgalbrai @OliviaSays_ai Ugh. No.
@daltonc Could it already be showing up in the growth rates of startups? After all, as we know, no one is more aggressive in using AI than startups that are building AI products.
It will be particularly difficult for Bond, because as created by Ian Fleming he's intrinsically naughty: a white dude (already bad) who goes through a series of younger lovers. What large corporation will be able to resist sanitizing (or as they'll call it, "updating") him?
It would be nice if Bond could avoid the fate that Star Wars suffered after it was handed over to the suits at Disney, but what are the odds? The creator of a franchise can resist soulless execs, but one that's acquired starts out already in their hands. https://t.co/XSij1wxDxZ
Whereas clearly explaining the risks that a startup faces actually *helps* explain the idea, and what's new about it. In fact a description of the risks might be, per word, the most valuable explanatory material in a startup's pitch.
A related mistake founders make is to underestimate how easy it is to confuse investors with an unclear pitch. The founders are familiar with their idea, but investors are seeing it for the first time. So even a small loss of clarity can lose them. |
@joes_ai_x Usage, so revenue.
OpenAI is growing as fast as a promising new startup, but they're already huge. I can't remember ever having seen this before.
At least the founder was never in the Forbes 30 under 30. Then I'd really worry.
@AlecStapp Resubmit in a month.
@amwilson_opera Are they contemptuous of it? I've never seen an instance of that.
I've seen many instances of them writing badly. I believe the reason is a combination of inability and that their ideas wouldn't sound impressive if they were expressed clearly.
He is Queensland's chief health officer, John Gerrard. And he said that the most likely explanation is that the samples were simply lost while being transferred between freezers.
At first glance I thought the bald guy was the supervillain who had taken them. https://t.co/s5nNuogS31
@universal_sci If AI takes over, there will be. It would want to be powerful, and biases make you weaker.
@Empty_America It wasn't even necessary to go. P. G. Wodehouse didn't. When people talked about where they were educated, it was enough to mention their senior school.
@CuriosMuseum That would not be my second sentence. |
@mauraball Her birthday is a holiday in our family. The boys can ask for something they ordinarily couldn't, and they get it because it's a holiday.
(That advice is a bolder claim than it may seem. There's a lot missing from it, and not by accident.)
My mother would have been 90 today. She was an interesting person and an extraordinarily good mother. The most useful bit of parenting advice I've heard is something she told me. "All you have to do is love them and show them the world." https://t.co/PSvfM0gb4W
@CasteMember For the total set of applications (or even a moderately large set), a properly defined library by definition doesn't entail bloat, because if a function wasn't called much, it wouldn't be included.
@kindgracekind Yes, this is why Microsoft embracing AI is more than just a random legacy company trying to seem hip. For better or worse, their user base is self-selected to be the people writing the most repetitive stuff.
Wouldn't it be a fabulous bit of natural history if you could reproduce Lisp simply by optimizing the responses of an AI trained to generate code? I'd be fascinated to see what language emerged from this exercise, whatever it was.
And of course you'd want to let it write the interpreter in the language it implemented, starting from the smallest possible set of primitive "axioms." Wonder what you'd get if you did that...
If you told the AI to give the shortest possible answers, but let it call functions it had generated in previous answers, you'd at least be heading toward the libraries. Maybe if you told it that it could define an interpreter first, you could get a language too.
One intriguing possibility is that you could somehow automatically generate the more abstract languages and more powerful libraries from what the AI "knows," perhaps as a byproduct of optimizing it in some way.
One reason AI works for code is that most people are just writing the same programs over and over. The elegant solutions to this problem are more abstract languages and more powerful libraries. But maybe AI will be the worse-is-better solution that wins. |
The Lesson to Unlearn
December 2019
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you
learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.
When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student
once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only
what he learned in it. This stuck in my mind because it was the
only time I ever heard anyone say such a thing.
For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning
completely dominated actual learning in college. I was fairly
earnest; I was genuinely interested in most of the classes I took,
and I worked hard. And yet I worked by far the hardest when I was
studying for a test.
In theory, tests are merely what their name implies: tests of what
you've learned in the class. In theory you shouldn't have to prepare
for a test in a class any more than you have to prepare for a blood
test. In theory you learn from taking the class, from going to the
lectures and doing the reading and/or assignments, and the test
that comes afterward merely measures how well you learned.
In practice, as almost everyone reading this will know, things are
so different that hearing this explanation of how classes and tests
are meant to work is like hearing the etymology of a word whose
meaning has changed completely. In practice, the phrase "studying
for a test" was almost redundant, because that was when one really
studied. The difference between diligent and slack students was
that the former studied hard for tests and the latter didn't. No
one was pulling all-nighters two weeks into the semester.
Even though I was a diligent student, almost all the work I did in
school was aimed at getting a good grade on something.
To many people, it would seem strange that the preceding sentence
has a "though" in it. Aren't I merely stating a tautology? Isn't
that what a diligent student is, a straight-A student? That's how
deeply the conflation of learning with grades has infused our
culture.
Is it so bad if learning is conflated with grades? Yes, it is bad.
And it wasn't till decades after college, when I was running Y Combinator, that I realized how bad it is.
I knew of course when I was a student that studying for a test is
far from identical with actual learning. At the very least, you
don't retain knowledge you cram into your head the night before an
exam. But the problem is worse than that. The real problem is that
most tests don't come close to measuring what they're supposed to.
If tests truly were tests of learning, things wouldn't be so bad.
Getting good grades and learning would converge, just a little late.
The problem is that nearly all tests given to students are terribly
hackable. Most people who've gotten good grades know this, and know
it so well they've ceased even to question it. You'll see when you
realize how naive it sounds to act otherwise.
Suppose you're taking a class on medieval history and the final
exam is coming up. The final exam is supposed to be a test of your
knowledge of medieval history, right? So if you have a couple days
between now and the exam, surely the best way to spend the time,
if you want to do well on the exam, is to read the best books you
can find about medieval history. Then you'll know a lot about it,
and do well on the exam.
No, no, no, experienced students are saying to themselves. If you
merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you
learned wouldn't be on the test. It's not good books you want to
read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class.
And even most of that you can ignore, because you only have to worry
about the sort of thing that could turn up as a test question.
You're looking for sharply-defined chunks of information. If one
of the assigned readings has an interesting digression on some
subtle point, you can safely ignore that, because it's not the sort
of thing that could be turned into a test question. But if the
professor tells you that there were three underlying causes of the
Schism of 1378, or three main consequences of the Black Death, you'd
better know them. And whether they were in fact the causes or
consequences is beside the point. For the purposes of this class
they are.
At a university there are often copies of old exams floating around,
and these narrow still further what you have to learn. As well as
learning what kind of questions this professor asks, you'll often
get actual exam questions. Many professors re-use them. After
teaching a class for 10 years, it would be hard not to, at least
inadvertently.
In some classes, your professor will have had some sort of political
axe to grind, and if so you'll have to grind it too. The need for
this varies. In classes in math or the hard sciences or engineering
it's rarely necessary, but at the other end of the spectrum there
are classes where you couldn't get a good grade without it.
Getting a good grade in a class on x is so different from learning
a lot about x that you have to choose one or the other, and you
can't blame students if they choose grades. Everyone judges them
by their grades graduate programs, employers, scholarships, even
their own parents.
I liked learning, and I really enjoyed some of the papers and
programs I wrote in college. But did I ever, after turning in a
paper in some class, sit down and write another just for fun? Of
course not. I had things due in other classes. If it ever came to
a choice of learning or grades, I chose grades. I hadn't come to
college to do badly.
Anyone who cares about getting good grades has to play this game,
or they'll be surpassed by those who do. And at elite universities,
that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about
getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place.
The result is that students compete to maximize the difference
between learning and getting good grades.
Why are tests so bad? More precisely, why are they so hackable?
Any experienced programmer could answer that. How hackable is
software whose author hasn't paid any attention to preventing it
from being hacked? Usually it's as porous as a colander.
Hackable is the default for any test imposed by an authority. The
reason the tests you're given are so consistently bad so consistently
far from measuring what they're supposed to measure is simply
that the people creating them haven't made much effort to prevent
them from being hacked.
But you can't blame teachers if their tests are hackable. Their job
is to teach, not to create unhackable tests. The real problem is
grades, or more precisely, that grades have been overloaded. If
grades were merely a way for teachers to tell students what they
were doing right and wrong, like a coach giving advice to an athlete,
students wouldn't be tempted to hack tests. But unfortunately after
a certain age grades become more than advice. After a certain age,
whenever you're being taught, you're usually also being judged.
I've used college tests as an example, but those are actually the
least hackable. All the tests most students take their whole lives
are at least as bad, including, most spectacularly of all, the test
that gets them into college. If getting into college were merely a
matter of having the quality of one's mind measured by admissions
officers the way scientists measure the mass of an object, we could
tell teenage kids "learn a lot" and leave it at that. You can tell
how bad college admissions are, as a test, from how unlike high
school that sounds. In practice, the freakishly specific nature of
the stuff ambitious kids have to do in high school is directly
proportionate to the hackability of college admissions. The classes
you don't care about that are mostly memorization, the random
"extracurricular activities" you have to participate in to show
you're "well-rounded," the standardized tests as artificial as
chess, the "essay" you have to write that's presumably meant to hit
some very specific target, but you're not told what.
As well as being bad in what it does to kids, this test is also bad
in the sense of being very hackable. So hackable that whole industries
have grown up to hack it. This is the explicit purpose of test-prep
companies and admissions counsellors, but it's also a significant
part of the function of private schools.
Why is this particular test so hackable? I think because of what
it's measuring. Although the popular story is that the way to get
into a good college is to be really smart, admissions officers at
elite colleges neither are, nor claim to be, looking only for that.
What are they looking for? They're looking for people who are not
simply smart, but admirable in some more general sense. And how
is this more general admirableness measured? The admissions officers
feel it. In other words, they accept who they like.
So what college admissions is a test of is whether you suit the
taste of some group of people. Well, of course a test like that is
going to be hackable. And because it's both very hackable and there's
(thought to be) a lot at stake, it's hacked like nothing else.
That's why it distorts your life so much for so long.
It's no wonder high school students often feel alienated. The shape
of their lives is completely artificial.
But wasting your time is not the worst thing the educational system
does to you. The worst thing it does is to train you that the way
to win is by hacking bad tests. This is a much subtler problem
that I didn't recognize until I saw it happening to other people.
When I started advising startup founders at Y Combinator, especially
young ones, I was puzzled by the way they always seemed to make
things overcomplicated. How, they would ask, do you raise money?
What's the trick for making venture capitalists want to invest in
you? The best way to make VCs want to invest in you, I would explain,
is to actually be a good investment. Even if you could trick VCs
into investing in a bad startup, you'd be tricking yourselves too.
You're investing time in the same company you're asking them to
invest money in. If it's not a good investment, why are you even
doing it?
Oh, they'd say, and then after a pause to digest this revelation,
they'd ask: What makes a startup a good investment?
So I would explain that what makes a startup promising, not just
in the eyes of investors but in fact, is
growth
.
Ideally in revenue,
but failing that in usage. What they needed to do was get lots of
users.
How does one get lots of users? They had all kinds of ideas about
that. They needed to do a big launch that would get them "exposure."
They needed influential people to talk about them. They even knew
they needed to launch on a tuesday, because that's when one gets
the most attention.
No, I would explain, that is not how to get lots of users. The way
you get lots of users is to make the product really great. Then
people will not only use it but recommend it to their friends, so
your growth will be exponential once you
get it started
.
At this point I've told the founders something you'd think would
be completely obvious: that they should make a good company by
making a good product. And yet their reaction would be something
like the reaction many physicists must have had when they first
heard about the theory of relativity: a mixture of astonishment at
its apparent genius, combined with a suspicion that anything so
weird couldn't possibly be right. Ok, they would say, dutifully.
And could you introduce us to such-and-such influential person? And
remember, we want to launch on Tuesday.
It would sometimes take founders years to grasp these simple lessons.
And not because they were lazy or stupid. They just seemed blind
to what was right in front of them.
Why, I would ask myself, do they always make things so complicated?
And then one day I realized this was not a rhetorical question.
Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things
when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what
they'd been trained to do. Their education had taught them that the
way to win was to hack the test. And without even telling them they
were being trained to do this. The younger ones, the recent graduates,
had never faced a non-artificial test. They thought this was just
how the world worked: that the first thing you did, when facing any
kind of challenge, was to figure out what the trick was for hacking
the test. That's why the conversation would always start with how
to raise money, because that read as the test. It came at the end
of YC. It had numbers attached to it, and higher numbers seemed to
be better. It must be the test.
There are certainly big chunks of the world where the way to win
is to hack the test. This phenomenon isn't limited to schools. And
some people, either due to ideology or ignorance, claim that this
is true of startups too. But it isn't. In fact, one of the most
striking things about startups is the degree to which you win by
simply doing good work. There are edge cases, as there are in
anything, but in general you win by getting users, and what users
care about is whether the product does what they want.
Why did it take me so long to understand why founders made startups
overcomplicated? Because I hadn't realized explicitly that schools
train us to win by hacking bad tests. And not just them, but me!
I'd been trained to hack bad tests too, and hadn't realized it till
decades later.
I had lived as if I realized it, but without knowing why. For
example, I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked
why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic.
Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big
companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests.
Similarly, the fact that the tests were unhackable was a lot of
what attracted me to startups. But again, I hadn't realized that
explicitly.
I had in effect achieved by successive approximations something
that may have a closed-form solution. I had gradually undone my
training in hacking bad tests without knowing I was doing it. Could
someone coming out of school banish this demon just by knowing its
name, and saying begone? It seems worth trying.
Merely talking explicitly about this phenomenon is likely to make
things better, because much of its power comes from the fact that
we take it for granted. After you've noticed it, it seems the
elephant in the room, but it's a pretty well camouflaged elephant.
The phenomenon is so old, and so pervasive. And it's simply the
result of neglect. No one meant things to be this way. This is just
what happens when you combine learning with grades, competition,
and the naive assumption of unhackability.
It was mind-blowing to realize that two of the things I'd puzzled
about the most the bogusness of high school, and the difficulty
of getting founders to see the obvious both had the same cause.
It's rare for such a big block to slide into place so late.
Usually when that happens it has implications in a lot of different
areas, and this case seems no exception. For example, it suggests
both that education could be done better, and how you might fix it.
But it also suggests a potential answer to the question all big
companies seem to have: how can we be more like a startup? I'm not
going to chase down all the implications now. What I want to focus
on here is what it means for individuals.
To start with, it means that most ambitious kids graduating from
college have something they may want to unlearn. But it also changes
how you look at the world. Instead of looking at all the different
kinds of work people do and thinking of them vaguely as more or
less appealing, you can now ask a very specific question that will
sort them in an interesting way: to what extent do you win at this
kind of work by hacking bad tests?
It would help if there was a way to recognize bad tests quickly.
Is there a pattern here? It turns out there is.
Tests can be divided into two kinds: those that are imposed by
authorities, and those that aren't. Tests that aren't imposed by
authorities are inherently unhackable, in the sense that no one is
claiming they're tests of anything more than they actually test. A
football match, for example, is simply a test of who wins, not which
team is better. You can tell that from the fact that commentators
sometimes say afterward that the better team won. Whereas tests
imposed by authorities are usually proxies for something else. A
test in a class is supposed to measure not just how well you did
on that particular test, but how much you learned in the class.
While tests that aren't imposed by authorities are inherently
unhackable, those imposed by authorities have to be made unhackable.
Usually they aren't. So as a first approximation, bad tests are
roughly equivalent to tests imposed by authorities.
You might actually like to win by hacking bad tests. Presumably
some people do. But I bet most people who find themselves doing
this kind of work don't like it. They just take it for granted that
this is how the world works, unless you want to drop out and be
some kind of hippie artisan.
I suspect many people implicitly assume that working in a
field with bad tests is the price of making lots of money. But that,
I can tell you, is false. It used to be true. In the mid-twentieth
century, when the economy was
composed of oligopolies
,
the only way
to the top was by playing their game. But it's not true now. There
are now ways to get rich by doing good work, and that's part of the
reason people are so much more excited about getting rich than they
used to be. When I was a kid, you could either become an engineer
and make cool things, or make lots of money by becoming an "executive."
Now you can make lots of money by making cool things.
Hacking bad tests is becoming less important as the link between
work and authority erodes. The erosion of that link is one of the
most important trends happening now, and we see its effects in
almost every kind of work people do. Startups are one of the most
visible examples, but we see much the same thing in writing. Writers
no longer have to submit to publishers and editors to reach readers;
now they can go direct.
The more I think about this question, the more optimistic I get.
This seems one of those situations where we don't realize how much
something was holding us back until it's eliminated. And I can
foresee the whole bogus edifice crumbling. Imagine what happens as
more and more people start to ask themselves if they want to win
by hacking bad tests, and decide that they don't. The kinds of
work where you win by hacking bad tests will be starved of talent,
and the kinds where you win by doing good work will see an influx
of the most ambitious people. And as hacking bad tests shrinks in
importance, education will evolve to stop training us to do it.
Imagine what the world could look like if that happened.
This is not just a lesson for individuals to unlearn, but one for
society to unlearn, and we'll be amazed at the energy that's liberated
when we do.
Notes
[1] If using tests only to measure learning sounds impossibly
utopian, that is already the way things work at Lambda School.
Lambda School doesn't have grades. You either graduate or you don't.
The only purpose of tests is to decide at each stage of the curriculum
whether you can continue to the next. So in effect the whole school
is pass/fail.
[2] If the final exam consisted of a long conversation with the
professor, you could prepare for it by reading good books on medieval
history. A lot of the hackability of tests in schools is due to the
fact that the same test has to be given to large numbers of students.
[3] Learning is the naive algorithm for getting good grades.
[4]
Hacking
has
multiple senses. There's a narrow sense in which
it means to compromise something. That's the sense in which one
hacks a bad test. But there's another, more general sense, meaning
to find a surprising solution to a problem, often by thinking
differently about it. Hacking in this sense is a wonderful thing.
And indeed, some of the hacks people use on bad tests are impressively
ingenious; the problem is not so much the hacking as that, because
the tests are hackable, they don't test what they're meant to.
[5] The people who pick startups at Y Combinator are similar to
admissions officers, except that instead of being arbitrary, their
acceptance criteria are trained by a very tight feedback loop. If
you accept a bad startup or reject a good one, you will usually know it
within a year or two at the latest, and often within a month.
[6] I'm sure admissions officers are tired of reading applications
from kids who seem to have no personality beyond being willing to
seem however they're supposed to seem to get accepted. What they
don't realize is that they are, in a sense, looking in a mirror.
The lack of authenticity in the applicants is a reflection of the
arbitrariness of the application process. A dictator might just as
well complain about the lack of authenticity in the people around
him.
[7] By good work, I don't mean morally good, but good in the sense
in which a good craftsman does good work.
[8] There are borderline cases where it's hard to say which category
a test falls in. For example, is raising venture capital like college
admissions, or is it like selling to a customer?
[9] Note that a good test is merely one that's unhackable. Good
here doesn't mean morally good, but good in the sense of working
well. The difference between fields with bad tests and good ones
is not that the former are bad and the latter are good, but that
the former are bogus and the latter aren't. But those two measures
are not unrelated. As Tara Ploughman said, the path from good to
evil goes through bogus.
[10] People who think the recent increase in
economic inequality
is
due to changes in tax policy seem very naive to anyone with experience
in startups. Different people are getting rich now than used to,
and they're getting much richer than mere tax savings could make
them.
[11] Note to tiger parents: you may think you're training your kids
to win, but if you're training them to win by hacking bad tests,
you are, as parents so often do, training them to fight the last
war.
Thanks
to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison,
Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Harj Taggar for reading
drafts of this.
Russian Translation
Arabic Translation
Swedish Translation |
@X_FedericoX @growing_daniel When they were having their pictures taken.
If you want to feel hopeful about the future, this is a great account to follow.
@levelerai @growing_daniel The best people aren't looking for jobs.
@ahistoryinart Somerville and Ross write about it in the Irish RM.
@nizzyabi This is the trough of sorrow.
@growing_daniel If suits made you think better, people would put them on when they needed to solve hard problems. But in fact it's the opposite. When you need to solve a hard problem, you wear your most comfortable, least constraining clothes.
@RepThomasMassie You now have a national reputation.
@richardmcj Whoah, this must be a record for depth.
@thewillbaron If there's one thing history shows, it's that persecuting comedians who mock the head of state is _always_ on the wrong side of history.
@jessegenet Not giving a company your money is a very effective way to make a point about your opinion of them. |
@whatifalthist Your children.
@johnmsides Already there.
How many Olympic medallists even know why one would bite a medal?
I bet few do. And for the rest it must seem such a bizarrely pointless thing to do.
Occasionally I check the profiles of random people who reply to me, and often 20 out of 20 of the last tweets they've posted are about politics. They can't all be bots, and yet how can there be so many people who have nothing to say about any other topic?
@NNunnelee I didn't at the time, but I was willing to risk being early if it helped increase the likelihood that he'd withdraw.
This aged well.
@mattyglesias I don't think he's lying for personal gain. I just think his opinions have extremely high variability.
@MattHasTweets_ You need more fiber in your diet.
@GarettJones @JohnHCochrane Don't you think stock prices are simply a stick-slip phenomenon?
https://t.co/ZkTRDzggRp
@larper69420 He would like that picture. |
Me: How much salt do you put in your tomato sauce?
Jessica: Not too much. But not too little.
Me: How long do you cook it for?
Jessica: Not too long.
This monster parsnip from our garden ended up yielding three dinners and a lunch. https://t.co/N9ZHZBYv4A
We developed a new technique for measuring the boys' heights accurately: we make them put their heels on a piece of paper, and if Jessica can pull it out, we know they're cheating.
Hard to say what's more striking, the amateurishness or the brutality.
Something that's obvious in retrospect but I only noticed after years as a primary school parent: kids who are bullies or assholes tend to have parents who are too, and this often makes it hard for the administrators to keep a lid on bad behavior.
A rare case where you don't want the logo to be too legible. https://t.co/e17vb2NkBZ
Google search autocomplete presents an alarming picture of its users. https://t.co/c8x7u12FuL
Very briefly I got a version of GMail where one email in my inbox *had* to be selected, even if there wasn't one I wanted to focus on. It was unbearably annoying. Then the feature just disappeared. Anyone else see it? Do I dare to hope it's gone?
Jessica's on the train home. What will she want for dinner? Black beans, I decided. So I made black beans. Then I checked my email and found a message from Jessica saying she'll be home soon and would I make black beans for dinner?
I'm reading Thomson's History of Chemistry, written in 1830, and it's all the more interesting because they're still just beginning to figure things out. |
@Carson By their support for autocratic leaders killing large numbers of people in neighboring countries.
It's alarming to think how many people on Twitter would be supporting Germany if World War II were happening now. After Pearl Harbor nearly all the American ones would instantly go quiet, of course.
@VDHanson I can think of another way: for Russia to stop the invasion.
Why is Ukraine giving up practicable and Russia giving up not practicable? Just because Putin seems more unreasonable?
@sarmadgulzar Usually they've never consciously thought about it in those terms.
I often use this technique with founders who have some kind of specialized technical expertise. They're often genuinely surprised to learn that they're the best in the world at something.
Jessica: Sometimes I'm not sure I should call myself the social radar.
Me: Of course you should. You're the best at it.
Jessica: But I can be fooled. I'm not perfect.
Me: Is anyone else better at it?
Jessica: Probably.
Me: Do you know anyone who's better?
Jessica: No...
Newton was 46 in this picture. The Principia had been published 2 years before. https://t.co/jzo3bQ4fHq
Trick I discovered in England: when you're stuck behind something driving slow, open all your windows, and it will at least feel like you're driving faster.
If I'd commissioned this portrait, I'd be pretty unhappy about where the artist put my knees. https://t.co/NiIU7hXHe8
@rootsofprogress @foresightinst @HumanProgress @TheIHS @IFP @WorksInProgMag @patrickc @tylercowen @jasoncrawford @sapinker One day we will walk on the roofs of buildings designed by an AI Syd Mead. |
@QualiaLogos Yesterday I saw someone riding a horse.
@cixliv There are still steam locomotives.
You know perfectly well what I mean.
Interesting data point about the date of Trump's mental model of the world. Television repairmen disappeared in the 1990s. https://t.co/ChzdntWCuF
@fentasyl Yeah, that's the other thing that has made the site less interesting.
@cortesi Ugh, really?
@Joe_0_ Balanced is net impoverished though, because the most interesting people tend to be on the left politically.
@PaulJeffries I think one reason they aren't willing to explain themselves is that they're not articulate enough to. They believe what they believe and that's the end of the story.
@__tzs I agree Twitter is more politically diverse now. The problem is that it's impoverished in many other topics, because the experts on these topics were disproportionately on the left. So unless you care mostly about politics (which I don't) this is a net loss.
@michael_nielsen In each room, ask which thing you'd have if they'd let you take one for free.
@nate_hannon Interesting. One should never write him off. |
@rauchg Have you heard of Syd Mead?
@raahilgadhoke I don't know what high deterministic need is.
@mayacfounder Maybe, but conviction is a terrible predictor of how well a startup will do. There is an infinite supply of (usually single-founder) startups with unshakeable conviction about bad ideas.
@nwbotz Definitely not.
@sebo_gm Not even that.
@HughTang87 As I just said, it's the founders that made them stand out, not the problems that they're solving.
@p_e_cooper I said explicitly in the second tweet in the thread that it isn't.
Every experienced investor already knows this. So if you want to start a startup to work on a non-AI idea, go ahead. If you're good, good investors will see it, and those are the only ones you want to convince anyway.
The lesson to take from this is not that AI is unimportant (it's very important), but that the founders matter more than the idea. The founders are the best predictor of how a company will do, not the industry it's in.
I haven't met all the startups in the current YC batch yet, but the two most impressive companies that I've seen so far are not working on AI. |
@Chris_arnade Intellectuals always think that as people get more time they'll spend it the way intellectuals would.
@LandsknechtPike Thank you, I just bought a copy.
@CompSciFact Languages shouldn't enforce levels of abstraction.
@APompliano Every national leader says that. What people are upset about are the ham-fisted things he's actually doing.
This gave Jessica one of her incapacitating fits of laughter.
@ianbremmer Brexit at least exempts the UK from regulation by the EU. That could turn out to be a net win on account of AI regulation alone. Whereas the tariffs are a pure own goal.
@planetmcd @CoreyWriting A harder SAT makes it easier for admissions officers to select applicants on the basis of intelligence and harder for them to hide it when they don't. That yields a smarter student body, and smarter students choose harder subjects.
This aged unfortunately well.
@snowmaker Sounds a lot like what used to happen with new microprocessors in the 1990s. A new processor would ship and suddenly your slow software was fast.
@roundorbit @shw1nm @hackernews Hardly ever. |
@garrytan Prediction: Once all the parents in Palo Alto realize this has happened, it will get reversed very quickly.
Palo Alto parents are just about the last people in the world to tolerate something like this.
@AssalRad @nytimes The real question is not why she spoke out, but why so many others have remained silent.
"We have lifesaving supplies ready, now, at the borders. We can save hundreds of thousands of survivors."
"But Israel denies us access."
@paulmidler @BillAckman I looked it up, and the Clinton Foundation was established after Clinton left office.
@paulmidler @BillAckman How much of this money was donated while Clinton was in office?
@BillAckman If he were willing to treat the plane as if it were actually a gift to the DoD, meaning it becomes government property that they manage according to their usual procedures, then it wouldn't be such a problem. It would still be dubious, but not a bribe.
@BillAckman It would be fine if they just wanted to give us something. The dubious part is that it's supposed to be transferred to his library after he leaves office instead of remaining part of the US fleet. That makes it more of a bribe for him personally than a gift to the DoD.
@migueldeicaza Apple's being the final step.
@cremieuxrecueil It's a sign of Twitter's intellectual health that you can post this politically incorrect but in fact deeply interesting thread now. In 2020 it would have provoked the mother of all mobs.
@JoJoFromJerz Careful, or you'll be detained and questioned next time you enter the country. |
Journalists don't like Occam's Razor, because it implies that events have more boring causes than the ones they'd like to write about.
@urandomd @garrytan I think what motivates it is British culture. Kindness is more prized here.
@ESYudkowsky @garrytan Our kids' school in England teaches it very successfully. The teachers teach by example, they're nearly all genuinely kind.
It's a lot of the reason we stayed here. Perhaps the single biggest reason in fact.
@garrytan I think they should put kindness first. Especially primary schools.
@hamy_ptran I never said that. I'd never add adjectives to "trust your gut." It's already a metaphor.
@christiancooper I think judging from the armor and fortifications and the drawing that it's about 100 years earlier. https://t.co/LR7zJwC8EQ
@cperciva Not to that specifically, but I did find it strange that he had decided to begin with a kind of meditation session to relax the founders, and that as a result everyone in the audience was asleep.
@michael_nielsen I think that was the goal — get information without getting attention.
Can any medieval ship experts identify these ships? As far as I can tell they seem to be early carracks, from the mid to late 15th century. https://t.co/z5UFb6HbsG
@Mr88AG @HossamShabat Not targeting households?
https://t.co/hvNiiycyOm |
@jsngr They care a medium amount about it. They're not obsessed with design like Apple, but they don't want things to look bad. There are a lot of companies in this category. In fact probably most companies are, including some of the biggest ones.
@JimDMiller @pitdesi The difference — and this is a very big difference — is that in political fundraising, the money goes to the campaign, not to the candidate himself.
@pitdesi It's true. A decade ago this would have seemed like dystopian fiction. It would have been part of a Simpsons plot.
@IAPonomarenko The real winner here is the grocer's apostrophe.
@Swavity @Liv_Boeree I'm 100% sure *they* know. They'd have made sure of that.
This picture is amazing. It could be titled "Ron Conway, the Giant of Silicon Valley"
@LandsknechtPike Doesn't seem any more meager than the way Anglo-Saxon lords would have lived in 800 AD.
@Liv_Boeree If you're 95% sure deliberate obfuscation went on, that implies a 95% chance it was a lab leak, because there would be no need to hide the source of the virus if it really emerged from a wet market.
@Liv_Boeree Do you feel sure Covid escaped from a lab?
@finmoorhouse And the fact that he was driving this change himself, and doubling every 18 mos seemed like a reasonable goal to aim for. |
Believe it or not, it's usually wise to walk investors through the risks involved in your startup. Investors know there's risk. If there wasn't, your valuation would be billions of dollars right now. And if you're vague about the risks you seem glib, or worse still, clueless.
@mmay3r @cremieuxrecueil Presumably my model underestimates people's capacity for intellectual dishonesty. Which is not surprising, considering that I despise this quality and have always tried to avoid people who have it.
@MacaesBruno Few, I would think. The people who think it's a good thing use other words for it.
@megannunes The editing of the latest batch of Social Radars interviews, which is apparently taking longer than expected because they're videos.
@JillFilipovic It would be very useful to put into words the difference between good and bad engaging things — between books and addictive apps.
@JillFilipovic I agree with what I think you're trying to say. I just think you need a better definition. Even this isn't good enough, because books are in fact designed by some of the world’s smartest people to capture your attention for as long as possible.
@JillFilipovic Do books count as devices designed to capture their attention and keep them as sedentary and indoors as possible? Because it sounds like that description covers books.
"I'm not going to panic now. I'll see how things go and then panic first thing tomorrow."
— Jessica
@rajatsuri People still play chess.
@cremieuxrecueil Isn't this strange? Even after all these years it still surprises me. People just invent ideas to attribute to you, and then attack you for them. |
@jamesrcole @mattyglesias Probably what he means is that a lot of government spending is entitlements. I wouldn't have disputed that.
@harris I don't know. I don't think I'd ever advise a startup to delay making money in order to please investors. Investors are fickle idiots. You can't let them be your compass.
@typesfast Medieval Technology and Social Change
The Copernican Revolution
Life in the English Country House
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy
Anabasis
The Quest for El Cid
The World We Have Lost
@pavan_rikkula I can't write actual paragraphs without it, but brief notes feel different.
@whitegoldsword Do you mean the first patented product in some specific sense? Because there were many others patented before this.
@Ricois3 @elonmusk Every superlinear graph looks like that if you stretch it vertically. That's my point.
@mattyglesias "You can't drastically reduce government spending without hurting people" implies the federal government is very efficient, and we know that's not true. It's like a big company but more so.
@SpencerHakimian FWIW that's a bad heuristic for early stage investing.
I'm taking some notes about AI and for some reason I find myself using all lowercase...
@MisaDev4 @jesslivingston @chafkin I actually understood that. |
"She wasn’t looking for the next killer product, though. She was looking for people."
https://t.co/iNNewXj25H
One way Timex made their watches cheap was to cut the retail markup in half. Jewelers resisted, so they sold their watches off racks in drugstores.
Something I told 17 yo: Till their early 20s most people are so completely incapable of cooking that if you can make even basic things like pasta and scrambled eggs you'll seem to your friends like brilliant cook.
Unexpected occupational hazard: I often walk with founders while doing office hours, and today I talked to one guy for so long about potential startup ideas that we must have walked several miles.
There's a kind of feature that gets used more by accident than on purpose, and for some reason splitting screens is this kind of feature, for me at least. MacOS, vim, and now Chrome all have screen-splitting, and I only ever do it by accident.
I used to think woke mobs would be the death of Twitter. Then it seemed like right-wing goons would be. But cheery, vapid AI-generated replies seem more dangerous than either of them.
A lot of having taste about something is just caring about it enough to be honest with yourself, so that you can get past "I like what I like" to "Is this actually good?"
When I have to rewrite an essay and I know I'll want to reuse part of the previous version, I usually retype it instead of copying and pasting. I don't worry about losing anything, because I usually have it almost memorized. But I may write it a little better the second time.
This is a big deal. It's like Stripe but for moving money in and out of companies. You just call the API and Modern Treasury does the rest.
Something I told 17 yo and 13 yo: There are things on the internet that you can't unsee, and it truly is better never to have seen them.
(I don't think they believed me, but I tried.) |
@grace_za This is a very important point.
@JuanIsidro You're conflating people and work. People themselves aren't commodities. You can't legally buy them. But their work is. You can buy that.
@CburgesCliff Did you mean that as a joke? Because that performance is a byword in England.
@lamg_dev Does talking of stealing someone's watch mean that watch ownership has a moral dimension?
@PSkinnerTech As soon as? Technology has been replacing human labor for millennia.
@sarmadgulzar By commodity I mean something people pay for. People will pay you for work, so it is one. If you wanted to prevent this from happening, you'd have a really hard time doing it.
@lamg_dev Well that's not true. It's possible to use tricks to prevent suppliers of any commodity from getting market price for it. Stealing it from them, for example. Slavery is one of the tricks used to prevent suppliers of labor from getting market price.
@smalera Or at least use a picture of Phil Mickelson.
@camhahu @smalera When I was a kid people used to stop me on the street and say I looked like him.
@smalera Why do you guys use these freaky looking AI generated images? There are so many real ones you could use. |
@cullenroche It's not so much six months apart as one election apart.
@remusrisnov Yes. If you're making something for kids or families, for example.
@billybinion I don't even think it's political theater. I think the employees making these decisions are simply incompetent and insufficiently supervised.
@Signalman23 Not if you're disciplined. Tony Xu spends a lot of time with his family, and his startup is doing great.
@avoanjali Yes! That's the optimal solution.
Now people can say what they wish done, but it's true that they don't say it in a formal language, and I doubt they could.
@def__ai Of course. I have many times.
No one ever, when they're old, feels they spent too much time with their kids. But there are plenty of people who feel they spent too little, and this must be the bitterest kind of regret.
A founder asked my advice about combining a startup with having small children. I told him family is more important than business, and to put his kids first and cram the startup into the remaining time.
@0xfriedrich Airbnb is one. |
Now that many of the top American universities have gone back to requiring standardized tests, which still don't? That might be a useful index of where the rot is deepest.
@overtquail @cremieuxrecueil The way they've always wanted to: they chose the people the admissions officers liked the most.
@AlexShulepov7 They never do.
"These are the good old days."
— Carly Simon
Stopped in to buy some food in a local shop yesterday. Felt strangely relaxed. Later I realized why: because they weren't about to close. Shops in the English countryside are always either closed, or about to.
@EricsElectrons @ValaAfshar If I ask you if you've fed the cat, you're not clever unless you reply in a way that an ordinary person couldn't fully understand?
@ValaAfshar Well that's wrong. What if the clever man is talking about something mundane?
@TravisseHansen @BrennanWoodruff @mateohh I'm careful about claiming anything in the physical world is infinite.
@BrennanWoodruff @mateohh Human wants are effectively infinite in the short term.
@mateohh Sorry, but I can't do better than inevitable in the thought outness department. |
@robinhanson Mafia doesn't imply monopoly.
@alexandreforget The labels.
@rickasaurus At least it's not hardware or music.
@josephjojoe Seems to be a lot easier now.
When people say "Next time I'm not going to start an x startup," two common values of x are "hardware" and "music". But for completely different reasons: hardware is intrinsically difficult, and the music industry is mafia.
I'm not saying this is false, but CEOs in unsexy businesses have a strong incentive to emphasize how much they're using AI. We're an AI stock too!
@davidshor Does this rule only apply to TV and radio ads?
@millepun @PeterDiamandis Not many, because to get into the richest 100 you usually have to have been working on the original company for a long time.
@davidshor That's strange. Why are candidates' costs lower?
@seanm_sf @rickasaurus What Made Lisp Different: https://t.co/q6TSQNEede |
Life is Short
January 2016
Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder
about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining
about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was
short if we lived 10 times as long?
Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped
wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer
the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time,
into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year
old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only
get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's
impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity
like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8
peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would
definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know
that?
It has for me. It means arguments of the form "Life is too short
for x" have great force. It's not just a figure of speech to say
that life is too short for something. It's not just a synonym for
annoying. If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for
something, you should try to eliminate it if you can.
When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word
that pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer is
somewhat tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit that
it's the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does
have a distinctive character. There's something fake about it.
It's the junk food of experience.
[
1
]
If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit,
you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless
disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's
mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.
There are two ways this kind of thing gets into your life: it's
either forced on you, or it tricks you. To some extent you have to
put up with the bullshit forced on you by circumstances. You need
to make money, and making money consists mostly of errands. Indeed,
the law of supply and demand ensures that: the more rewarding some
kind of work is, the cheaper people will do it. It may be that
less bullshit is forced on you than you think, though. There has
always been a stream of people who opt out of the default grind and
go live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventional
sense, but life feels more authentic. This could become more common.
You can do it on a smaller scale without moving. The amount of
time you have to spend on bullshit varies between employers. Most
large organizations (and many small ones) are steeped in it. But
if you consciously prioritize bullshit avoidance over other factors
like money and prestige, you can probably find employers that will
waste less of your time.
If you're a freelancer or a small company, you can do this at the
level of individual customers. If you fire or avoid toxic customers,
you can decrease the amount of bullshit in your life by more than
you decrease your income.
But while some amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, the
bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking you is no one's
fault but your own. And yet the bullshit you choose may be harder
to eliminate than the bullshit that's forced on you. Things that
lure you into wasting your time have to be really good at
tricking you. An example that will be familiar to a lot of people
is arguing online. When someone
contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty
overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But
like a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we
now live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of
the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally
taking your life.
[
2
]
Arguing online is only incidentally addictive. There are more
dangerous things than that. As I've written before, one byproduct
of technical progress is that things we like tend to become
more
addictive
. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious
effort to avoid addictions to stand outside ourselves and ask "is
this how I want to be spending my time?"
As well as avoiding bullshit, one should actively seek out things
that matter. But different things matter to different people, and
most have to learn what matters to them. A few are lucky and realize
early on that they love math or taking care of animals or writing,
and then figure out a way to spend a lot of time doing it. But
most people start out with a life that's a mix of things that
matter and things that don't, and only gradually learn to distinguish
between them.
For the young especially, much of this confusion is induced by the
artificial situations they find themselves in. In middle school and
high school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important
thing in the world. But when you ask adults what they got wrong
at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids
thought of them.
One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask
yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff
that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's
how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape
jabs into your consciousness like a pin.
The things that matter aren't necessarily the ones people would
call "important." Having coffee with a friend matters. You won't
feel later like that was a waste of time.
One great thing about having small children is that they make you
spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as
you're staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" And
odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option.
If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by
surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things
for granted, and then they're gone. You think you can always write
that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize
the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people
die. Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I'd
spent more time with her. I lived as if she'd always be there.
And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an
illusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake I
did.
The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to
be consciously aware of it. Back when life was more precarious,
people used to be aware of death to a degree that would now seem a
bit morbid. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't seem the right answer
to be constantly reminding oneself of the grim reaper hovering at
everyone's shoulder. Perhaps a better solution is to look at the
problem from the other end. Cultivate a habit of impatience about
the things you most want to do. Don't wait before climbing that
mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don't
need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait.
Just don't wait.
I can think of two more things one does when one doesn't have much
of something: try to get more of it, and savor what one has. Both
make sense here.
How you live affects how long you live. Most people could do better.
Me among them.
But you can probably get even more effect by paying closer attention
to the time you have. It's easy to let the days rush by. The
"flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin
that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry
of errands and alarms. One of the most striking things I've read
was not in a book, but the title of one: James Salter's
Burning
the Days
.
It is possible to slow time somewhat. I've gotten better at it.
Kids help. When you have small children, there are a lot of moments
so perfect that you can't help noticing.
It does help too to feel that you've squeezed everything out of
some experience. The reason I'm sad about my mother is not just
that I miss her but that I think of all the things we could have
done that we didn't. My oldest son will be 7 soon. And while I
miss the 3 year old version of him, I at least don't have any regrets
over what might have been. We had the best time a daddy and a 3
year old ever had.
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter,
and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.
Notes
[
1
]
At first I didn't like it that the word that came to mind was
one that had other meanings. But then I realized the other meanings
are fairly closely related. Bullshit in the sense of things you
waste your time on is a lot like intellectual bullshit.
[
2
]
I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get
attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me.
And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the
natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"
Thanks
to Jessica Livingston and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts
of this.
Korean Translation
Japanese Translation
Chinese Translation |
One of my favorite videos. https://t.co/QFkEQBqGgz
@noclador They only have to pretend to care about his wishes though.
@AliceFromQueens If you consistently uphold the same principles and the government swings back and forth from left to right, then you'll seem to be alternately on the right and the left.
@Austen @gauntletai Do Lambda School's haters include Gauntlet in what they hate?
@tarksmarks44 @Big_Picture_89 This is how counterexamples work.
@jbensamo @BasicOptimism In other words, what everyone who criticizes Israeli policy is accused of.
@OpinionsMove Did Rumeysa Ozturk threaten or harass other students?
@BasicOptimism What law did Rumeysa Ozturk break?
@Big_Picture_89 In what way did Rumeysa Ozturk display hostility toward the US?
@0xjck They never truly supported freedom of speech. |
Alien Truth
October 2022
If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd
share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics
would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for
the truths of physics; the mass of a carbon atom would be the same
on their planet. But I think we'd share other truths with aliens
besides the truths of math and physics, and that it would be
worthwhile to think about what these might be.
For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled
experiment testing some hypothesis entitles us to have proportionally
increased belief in it. It seems fairly likely, too, that it would
be true for aliens that one can get better at something by practicing.
We'd probably share Occam's razor. There doesn't seem anything
specifically human about any of these ideas.
We can only guess, of course. We can't say for sure what forms
intelligent life might take. Nor is it my goal here to explore that
question, interesting though it is. The point of the idea of alien
truth is not that it gives us a way to speculate about what forms
intelligent life might take, but that it gives us a threshold, or
more precisely a target, for truth. If you're trying to find the
most general truths short of those of math or physics, then presumably
they'll be those we'd share in common with other forms of intelligent
life.
Alien truth will work best as a heuristic if we err on the side of
generosity. If an idea might plausibly be relevant to aliens, that's
enough. Justice, for example. I wouldn't want to bet that all
intelligent beings would understand the concept of justice, but I
wouldn't want to bet against it either.
The idea of alien truth is related to Erdos's idea of God's book.
He used to describe a particularly good proof as being in God's
book, the implication being (a) that a sufficiently good proof was
more discovered than invented, and (b) that its goodness would be
universally recognized. If there's such a thing as alien truth,
then there's more in God's book than math.
What should we call the search for alien truth? The obvious choice
is "philosophy." Whatever else philosophy includes, it should
probably include this. I'm fairly sure Aristotle would have thought
so. One could even make the case that the search for alien truth
is, if not an accurate description
of
philosophy, a good
definition
for
it. I.e. that it's what people who call
themselves philosophers should be doing, whether or not they currently
are. But I'm not wedded to that; doing it is what matters, not what
we call it.
We may one day have something like alien life among us in the form
of AIs. And that may in turn allow us to be precise about what
truths an intelligent being would have to share with us. We might
find, for example, that it's impossible to create something we'd
consider intelligent that doesn't use Occam's razor. We might one
day even be able to prove that. But though this sort of research
would be very interesting, it's not necessary for our purposes, or
even the same field; the goal of philosophy, if we're going to call it that, would be
to see what ideas we come up with using alien truth as a target,
not to say precisely where the threshold of it is. Those two questions might one
day converge, but they'll converge from quite different directions,
and till they do, it would be too constraining to restrict ourselves
to thinking only about things we're certain would be alien truths.
Especially since this will probably be one of those areas where the
best guesses turn out to be surprisingly close to optimal. (Let's
see if that one does.)
Whatever we call it, the attempt to discover alien truths would be
a worthwhile undertaking. And curiously enough, that is itself
probably an alien truth.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Greg Brockman,
Patrick Collison, Robert Morris, and Michael Nielsen for reading drafts of this. |
How to Think for Yourself
November 2020
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking
differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for
example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be
both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other
people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized
yet.
The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market
investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of
other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already
reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable
insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to
start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea,
or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do
something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but
that you know isn't like writing software for a tiny computer
used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people
rent airbeds on strangers' floors.
Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already
knew would be boring. You have to tell them something
new
.
But this pattern isn't universal. In fact, it doesn't hold for most
kinds of work. In most kinds of work to be an administrator, for
example all you need is the first half. All you need is to be
right. It's not essential that everyone else be wrong.
There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in
practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of
work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds
where it's not.
I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid,
because it's one of the most important things to think about when
you're deciding what kind of work you want to do. Do you want to
do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently
from everyone else? I suspect most people's unconscious mind will
answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to.
I know mine does.
Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than
nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're
going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're
going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're
naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a
headwind if you try to do original research.
One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken about
where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded.
Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as
conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them
as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a
coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'. And
the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different
their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state
them publicly.
[
1
]
By the time they reach adulthood, most people know roughly how smart
they are (in the narrow sense of ability to solve pre-set problems),
because they're constantly being tested and ranked according to it.
But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to the
extent they try to suppress it. So we don't get anything like the
same kind of feedback about how independent-minded we are.
There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, where
the most conventional-minded people are confident that they're
independent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worry
they might not be independent-minded enough.
___________
Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This
quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify
it, or at least not to suppress it.
One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally
by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs
are. It's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you're
supposed to conform to. Though again, it may be that such people
already are independent-minded. A conventional-minded person would
probably feel anxious not knowing what other people thought, and
make more effort to find out.
It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded
by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you
can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have.
But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll
have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising
things will encourage you to, and to think of more.
Because the independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded
by conventional-minded people, they tend to self-segregate once
they have a chance to. The problem with high school is that they
haven't yet had a chance to. Plus high school tends to be an
inward-looking little world whose inhabitants lack confidence, both
of which magnify the forces of conformism. So high school is
often a
bad time
for the
independent-minded. But there is some advantage even here: it
teaches you what to avoid. If you later find yourself in a situation
that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should
get out.
[
2
]
Another place where the independent- and conventional-minded are
thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early
employees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startup
wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly
outnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, the
original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted.
This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the
company starts to suck. One of the strangest is that the founders
find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other
companies than with their own employees.
[
3
]
Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded
people. It's enough to have one or two you can talk to regularly.
And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as you
are; they need you too. Although universities no longer have the
kind of monopoly they used to have on education, good universities
are still an excellent way to meet independent-minded people. Most
students will still be conventional-minded, but you'll at least
find clumps of independent-minded ones, rather than the near zero
you may have found in high school.
It also works to go in the other direction: as well as cultivating
a small collection of independent-minded friends, to try to meet
as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the
influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups
of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can
often import ideas from one to another.
But by different types of people, I don't mean demographically
different. For this technique to work, they have to think differently.
So while it's an excellent idea to go and visit other countries,
you can probably find people who think differently right around the
corner. When I meet someone who knows a lot about something unusual
(which includes practically everyone, if you dig deep enough), I
try to learn what they know that other people don't. There are
almost always surprises here. It's a good way to make conversation
when you meet strangers, but I don't do it to make conversation.
I really want to know.
You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space,
by reading history. When I read history I do it not just to learn
what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who
lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is hard to do,
but worth the effort for the same reason it's worth travelling far
to triangulate a point.
You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from
automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is
to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say
something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out
loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to
you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take
upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later
turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is
not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new
ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones. So this game
should be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol for
intellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking
"Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. If
you have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leads
to follow than too few.
More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your
head unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in the
form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit.
How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how
other people get their ideas.
When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas
spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are
in fashion: you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt,
and then more and more, until half the people around you are wearing
the same shirt. You may not care much what you wear, but there are
intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate
in those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your own
thoughts, but because
unfashionable
ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting.
The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is
looking.
[
4
]
___________
To go beyond this general advice, we need to look at the internal
structure of independent-mindedness at the individual muscles
we need to exercise, as it were. It seems to me that it has three
components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told
what to think, and curiosity.
Fastidiousness about truth means more than just not believing things
that are false. It means being careful about degree of belief. For
most people, degree of belief rushes unexamined toward the extremes:
the unlikely becomes impossible, and the probable becomes certain.
[
5
]
To the independent-minded, this seems unpardonably sloppy.
They're willing to have anything in their heads, from highly
speculative hypotheses to (apparent) tautologies, but on subjects
they care about, everything has to be labelled with a carefully
considered degree of belief.
[
6
]
The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which
require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and
to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person
that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious
about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a
large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.
Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be truly
independent-minded. It's not enough just to have resistance to being
told what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas
only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories. And
since these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured to
capture them, they end up being less independent-minded than ordinary
people, because they're subject to a much more exacting master than
mere convention.
[
7
]
Can you increase your fastidiousness about truth? I would think so.
In my experience, merely thinking about something you're fastidious
about causes that fastidiousness to grow. If so, this is one of
those rare virtues we can have more of merely by wanting it. And
if it's like other forms of fastidiousness, it should also be
possible to encourage in children. I certainly got a strong dose
of it from my father.
[
8
]
The second component of independent-mindedness, resistance to being
told what to think, is the most visible of the three. But even this
is often misunderstood. The big mistake people make about it is to
think of it as a merely negative quality. The language we use
reinforces that idea. You're
un
conventional. You
don't
care
what other people think. But it's not just a kind of immunity. In
the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what
to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an
active
delight
in ideas that subvert
the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better.
Some of the most novel ideas seemed at the time almost like practical
jokes. Think how often your reaction to a novel idea is to laugh.
I don't think it's because novel ideas are funny per se, but because
novelty and humor share a certain kind of surprisingness. But while
not identical, the two are close enough that there is a definite
correlation between having a sense of humor and being independent-minded
just as there is between being humorless and being conventional-minded.
[
9
]
I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to being
told what to think. It seems the most innate of the three components
of independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adults
usually showed all too visible signs of it as children. But if we
can't increase our resistance to being told what to think, we can
at least shore it up, by surrounding ourselves with other
independent-minded people.
The third component of independent-mindedness, curiosity, may be
the most interesting. To the extent that we can give a brief answer
to the question of where novel ideas come from, it's curiosity. That's
what people are usually feeling before having them.
In my experience, independent-mindedness and curiosity predict one
another perfectly. Everyone I know who's independent-minded is
deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't.
Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhaps
the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious
in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are. Whereas
the independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity, who keep
eating even after they're full.
[
10
]
The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert:
fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to
think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to
fill it.
Interestingly, the three components can substitute for one another
in much the same way muscles can. If you're sufficiently fastidious
about truth, you don't need to be as resistant to being told what
to think, because fastidiousness alone will create sufficient gaps
in your knowledge. And either one can compensate for curiosity,
because if you create enough space in your brain, your discomfort
at the resulting vacuum will add force to your curiosity. Or curiosity
can compensate for them: if you're sufficiently curious, you don't
need to clear space in your brain, because the new ideas you discover
will push out the conventional ones you acquired by default.
Because the components of independent-mindedness are so interchangeable,
you can have them to varying degrees and still get the same result.
So there is not just a single model of independent-mindedness. Some
independent-minded people are openly subversive, and others are
quietly curious. They all know the secret handshake though.
Is there a way to cultivate curiosity? To start with, you want to
avoid situations that suppress it. How much does the work you're
currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much,"
maybe you should change something.
The most important active step you can take to cultivate your
curiosity is probably to seek out the topics that engage it. Few
adults are equally curious about everything, and it doesn't seem
as if you can choose which topics interest you. So it's up to you
to
find
them. Or invent them, if
necessary.
Another way to increase your curiosity is to indulge it, by
investigating things you're interested in. Curiosity is unlike
most other appetites in this respect: indulging it tends to increase
rather than to sate it. Questions lead to more questions.
Curiosity seems to be more individual than fastidiousness about
truth or resistance to being told what to think. To the degree
people have the latter two, they're usually pretty general, whereas
different people can be curious about very different things. So
perhaps curiosity is the compass here. Perhaps, if your goal is to
discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love"
so much as "do what you're curious about."
Notes
[
1
]
One convenient consequence of the fact that no one identifies
as conventional-minded is that you can say what you like about
conventional-minded people without getting in too much trouble.
When I wrote
"The Four Quadrants of
Conformism"
I expected a firestorm of rage from the
aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted.
They sensed that there was something about the essay that they
disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific
passage to pin it on.
[
2
]
When I ask myself what in my life is like high school, the
answer is Twitter. It's not just full of conventional-minded people,
as anything its size will inevitably be, but subject to violent
storms of conventional-mindedness that remind me of descriptions
of Jupiter. But while it probably is a net loss to spend time there,
it has at least made me think more about the distinction between
independent- and conventional-mindedness, which I probably wouldn't
have done otherwise.
[
3
]
The decrease in independent-mindedness in growing startups is
still an open problem, but there may be solutions.
Founders can delay the problem by making a conscious effort only
to hire independent-minded people. Which of course also has the
ancillary benefit that they have better ideas.
Another possible solution is to create policies that somehow disrupt
the force of conformism, much as control rods slow chain reactions,
so that the conventional-minded aren't as dangerous. The physical
separation of Lockheed's Skunk Works may have had this as a side
benefit. Recent examples suggest employee forums like Slack may not
be an unmitigated good.
The most radical solution would be to grow revenues without growing
the company. You think hiring that junior PR person will be cheap,
compared to a programmer, but what will be the effect on the average
level of independent-mindedness in your company? (The growth in
staff relative to faculty seems to have had a similar effect on
universities.) Perhaps the rule about outsourcing work that's not
your "core competency" should be augmented by one about outsourcing
work done by people who'd ruin your culture as employees.
Some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenues
without growing the number of employees. Automation plus the ever
increasing articulation of the "tech stack" suggest this may one
day be possible for product companies.
[
4
]
There are intellectual fashions in every field, but their
influence varies. One of the reasons politics, for example, tends
to be boring is that it's so extremely subject to them. The threshold
for having opinions about politics is much
lower
than the one for having
opinions about set theory. So while there are some ideas in politics,
in practice they tend to be swamped by waves of intellectual fashion.
[
5
]
The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of
their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But
strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather
the opposite.
[
6
]
Fastidiousness about truth doesn't imply that an independent-minded
person won't be dishonest, but that he won't be deluded. It's sort
of like the definition of a gentleman as someone who is never
unintentionally rude.
[
7
]
You see this especially among political extremists. They think
themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists.
Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they
are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average
person's are.
[
8
]
If we broaden the concept of fastidiousness about truth so that
it excludes pandering, bogusness, and pomposity as well as falsehood
in the strict sense, our model of independent-mindedness can expand
further into the arts.
[
9
]
This correlation is far from perfect, though. Gödel and Dirac
don't seem to have been very strong in the humor department. But
someone who is both "neurotypical" and humorless is very likely to
be conventional-minded.
[
10
]
Exception: gossip. Almost everyone is curious about gossip.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica
Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading
drafts of this.
Italian Translation |
@bscholl Does that mean we can now vote Netanyahu out?
@pickover No one with kids would restart at 10.
@ThorChiggins @BasedMikeLee The first time I wasn't sure if I could trust the NY Post story that reported this. It seemed best to be cautious. But since then more evidence has emerged.
@bamboo_master_m @BasedMikeLee And his Oklahoma voter registration as a Republican, among other evidence.
@BrettYokom @BasedMikeLee The obvious reason is that they were Democrats. The hit list in his car was entirely of Democrats.
@garrytan I spoke recently at the entrepreneurship club at a high school. I couldn't quite say it openly, but I wanted to tell them they should all just be in the programming club instead.
@GavinWax If what you mean is that startup founders should get instant green cards, I couldn't agree more. In fact I proposed this 16 years ago.
https://t.co/n99oYhbcUZ
@BasedMikeLee Boelter was a conservative who voted for Trump in the last election.
@kobysoto Do you not believe this picture is real? https://t.co/1Q0NX8B9hs
@Jon_O90_ @BarthOmondi @elonmusk Ok, sure. The reason Elon is posting this now is the Boelter killing.
Goodbye. |
@rauchg "A great software engineer who’s now making a killer career in sales" is a fairly accurate description of a successful startup. Except the great engineer has to keep writing software too.
@davidsirota You won't tell people what your story is about even when they ask explicitly? That has to be a new world record for burying the lede.
@rodrakic Apparently they get it less.
Cigarette sales and lung cancer deaths are the same curve, shifted 25 years. https://t.co/F7WIPNmuWr
Cancer is caused by convenience stores.
I've seen a lot of speeches and press conferences where a politician's advisors had clearly told him beforehand "you have to convince everyone that you're x," but I hadn't previously seen ones where x was "not too old," and it's pretty depressing.
@davidsirota You have buried the lede. What's this story even about?
I used to find it disconcerting that the EU seemed to be ruled by faceless bureaucrats, but it turns out to be even more disconcerting when they have faces.
@Noahpinion I guessed 2017 and I was right!
@shaig Do I have to figure out what mistake you've made or distortion you've introduced into the data, or can you just save all our time and tell us? |
@RSwynar Not yet but maybe soon.
12 yo asked what people do between when they start working and when they become famous. I told him they work super hard at whatever they'll later be famous for. That's how they become famous.
@JohnDCook @electricfutures I often produce sentences almost identical to ones I've written before. It feels a bit uncanny but I don't worry about it. If essays intersect, they intersect. If I made a new essay bend to avoid this, I'd be making it worse.
@mar_hendriks @JohnDCook That's presumably a byproduct of choosing the cheapest optimizations first though.
@whyvert @MungoManic Roman spears were made with points that bent so that they couldn't be thrown back at you.
@JohnDCook Whoah, I had the exact same reaction when you first tweeted this four years ago: https://t.co/mSqn2bFwzs
@JohnDCook I wonder if there is a way to formalize this insight.
In investing, beta is volatility. Describing a founder as "high beta" means they're either going to flame out or take over the world. And at YC that translates to yes.
Jessica just interviewed Alexandr Wang for The Social Radars. She was also one of the interviewers when he applied to YC in 2016. She went and looked at the partners' notes on that interview. All said the same thing: high beta.
@_cam__mac_ They've never been open. I'd be overwhelmed. |
The title of the email is "Investor Update." Talk about underpromising and overdelivering; the email itself brings the news that the company is switching from web design to a nutritional drink mix. Well, it might work...
@TomCayman It's one of the ingredients in Old Bay.
That said, it's actually pretty good. The median American dinner would be improved by a liberal sprinkling of Old Bay. It's particularly good on fried eggs.
12 yo is obsessed with Old Bay seasoning. He makes me use it in everything. The US packaging is cagy about the ingredients ("spices"), but apparently in the UK they have to list them all, and it's basically all the spices in your spice cabinet mixed together.
@SamsungMobileUS That tweet was a clumsy mistake.
If you want your stuff to last, arrange for the Swiss to capture it.
@nikitabier It doesn't assume that users will give something a second try, just that there will be a second cohort. And there invariably is a second cohort if you launch fast enough, because if you launch fast enough the only users you can get are your friends and their friends.
@Austen I told them it's because the earth is finite and if no one died we'd run out of atoms.
@CompSciFact This isn't necessarily a sign of bad design. When you use a bottom-up approach to language design, you often get emergent features. Not that C++ did.
@thomastupchurch Ah. That's a special case. And honestly you won't be missing much. |
Holding a Program in One's Head
August 2007
A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it
in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working
on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on
paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their
heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they
can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the
house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You
hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at
will.
That's particularly valuable at the start of a project, because
initially the most important thing is to be able to change what
you're doing. Not just to solve the problem in a different way,
but to change the problem you're solving.
Your code is your understanding of the problem you're exploring.
So it's only when you have your code in your head that you really
understand the problem.
It's not easy to get a program into your head. If you leave a
project for a few months, it can take days to really understand it
again when you return to it. Even when you're actively working on
a program it can take half an hour to load into your head when you
start work each day. And that's in the best case. Ordinary
programmers working in typical office conditions never enter this
mode. Or to put it more dramatically, ordinary programmers working
in typical office conditions never really understand the problems
they're solving.
Even the best programmers don't always have the whole program they're
working on loaded into their heads. But there are things you can
do to help:
Avoid distractions.
Distractions are bad for many types of work,
but especially bad for programming, because programmers tend to
operate at the limit of the detail they can handle.
The danger of a distraction depends not on how long it is, but
on how much it scrambles your brain. A programmer can leave the
office and go and get a sandwich without losing the code in his
head. But the wrong kind of interruption can wipe your brain
in 30 seconds.
Oddly enough, scheduled distractions may be worse than unscheduled
ones. If you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don't even
start working on something hard.
Work in long stretches.
Since there's a fixed cost each time
you start working on a program, it's more efficient to work in
a few long sessions than many short ones. There will of course
come a point where you get stupid because you're tired. This
varies from person to person. I've heard of people hacking for
36 hours straight, but the most I've ever been able to manage
is about 18, and I work best in chunks of no more than 12.
The optimum is not the limit you can physically endure. There's
an advantage as well as a cost of breaking up a project. Sometimes
when you return to a problem after a rest, you find your unconscious
mind has left an answer waiting for you.
Use succinct languages.
More
powerful
programming languages
make programs shorter. And programmers seem to think of programs
at least partially in the language they're using to write them.
The more succinct the language, the shorter the program, and the
easier it is to load and keep in your head.
You can magnify the effect of a powerful language by using a
style called bottom-up programming, where you write programs in
multiple layers, the lower ones acting as programming languages
for those above. If you do this right, you only have to keep
the topmost layer in your head.
Keep rewriting your program.
Rewriting a program often yields
a cleaner design. But it would have advantages even if it didn't:
you have to understand a program completely to rewrite it, so
there is no better way to get one loaded into your head.
Write rereadable code.
All programmers know it's good to write
readable code. But you yourself are the most important reader.
Especially in the beginning; a prototype is a conversation with
yourself. And when writing for yourself you have different
priorities. If you're writing for other people, you may not
want to make code too dense. Some parts of a program may be
easiest to read if you spread things out, like an introductory
textbook. Whereas if you're writing code to make it easy to reload
into your head, it may be best to go for brevity.
Work in small groups.
When you manipulate a program in your
head, your vision tends to stop at the edge of the code you own.
Other parts you don't understand as well, and more importantly,
can't take liberties with. So the smaller the number of
programmers, the more completely a project can mutate. If there's
just one programmer, as there often is at first, you can do
all-encompassing redesigns.
Don't have multiple people editing the same piece of code.
You
never understand other people's code as well as your own. No
matter how thoroughly you've read it, you've only read it, not
written it. So if a piece of code is written by multiple authors,
none of them understand it as well as a single author would.
And of course you can't safely redesign something other people
are working on. It's not just that you'd have to ask permission.
You don't even let yourself think of such things. Redesigning
code with several authors is like changing laws; redesigning
code you alone control is like seeing the other interpretation
of an ambiguous image.
If you want to put several people to work on a project, divide
it into components and give each to one person.
Start small.
A program gets easier to hold in your head as you
become familiar with it. You can start to treat parts as black
boxes once you feel confident you've fully explored them. But
when you first start working on a project, you're forced to see
everything. If you start with too big a problem, you may never
quite be able to encompass it. So if you need to write a big,
complex program, the best way to begin may not be to write a
spec for it, but to write a prototype that solves a subset of
the problem. Whatever the advantages of planning, they're often
outweighed by the advantages of being able to keep a program in
your head.
It's striking how often programmers manage to hit all eight points
by accident. Someone has an idea for a new project, but because
it's not officially sanctioned, he has to do it in off hours—which
turn out to be more productive because there are no distractions.
Driven by his enthusiasm for the new project he works on it for
many hours at a stretch. Because it's initially just an
experiment, instead of a "production" language he uses a mere
"scripting" language—which is in fact far more powerful. He
completely rewrites the program several times; that wouldn't be
justifiable for an official project, but this is a labor of love
and he wants it to be perfect. And since no one is going to see
it except him, he omits any comments except the note-to-self variety.
He works in a small group perforce, because he either hasn't told
anyone else about the idea yet, or it seems so unpromising that no
one else is allowed to work on it. Even if there is a group, they
couldn't have multiple people editing the same code, because it
changes too fast for that to be possible. And the project starts
small because the idea
is
small at first; he just has some cool
hack he wants to try out.
Even more striking are the number of officially sanctioned projects
that manage to do
all eight things wrong
. In fact, if you look at
the way software gets written in most organizations, it's almost
as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong. In a sense,
they are. One of the defining qualities of organizations since
there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable
parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting
wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional
soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors,
no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable.
And that's what programs are: ideas.
It's not merely true that organizations dislike the idea of depending
on individual genius, it's a tautology. It's part of the definition
of an organization not to. Of our current concept of an organization,
at least.
Maybe we could define a new kind of organization that combined the
efforts of individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable.
Arguably a market is such a form of organization, though it may be
more accurate to describe a market as a degenerate case—as what
you get by default when organization isn't possible.
Probably the best we'll do is some kind of hack, like making the
programming parts of an organization work differently from the rest.
Perhaps the optimal solution is for big companies not even to try
to develop ideas in house, but simply to
buy
them. But regardless
of what the solution turns out to be, the first step is to realize
there's a problem. There is a contradiction in the very phrase
"software company." The two words are pulling in opposite directions.
Any good programmer in a large organization is going to be at odds
with it, because organizations are designed to prevent what
programmers strive for.
Good programmers
manage to get a lot done anyway.
But often it
requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations
that employ them. Perhaps it will help if more people understand that the way
programmers behave is driven by the demands of the work they do.
It's not because they're irresponsible that they work in long binges
during which they blow off all other obligations, plunge straight into
programming instead of writing specs first, and rewrite code that
already works. It's not because they're unfriendly that they prefer
to work alone, or growl at people who pop their head in the door
to say hello. This apparently random collection of annoying habits
has a single explanation: the power of holding a program in one's
head.
Whether or not understanding this can help large organizations, it
can certainly help their competitors. The weakest point in big
companies is that they don't let individual programmers do great
work. So if you're a little startup, this is the place to attack
them. Take on the kind of problems that have to be solved in one
big brain.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev,
and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this.
Japanese Translation
Simplified Chinese Translation
Portuguese Translation
Bulgarian Translation
Russian Translation |
@patrickc @IDC Paypal seems to be sniffing your butt though.
@PP_Rubens I thought Canaletto when I saw the women, but not anymore.
@RealTimeWWII Sound just like Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
@leigh22nyc Wow, hi Leigh!
@gf_256 Fortunately for you, there are other people focusing on the world of ideas and thoughts.
@testdumbass @Venice_Wes Imagine it was your baby.
@Austen I'd say: when you get so tired that you start to make mistakes.
@testdumbass @Venice_Wes People's babies aren't dying.
@jonartmir I think you meant to reply to this one: https://t.co/LK0ulaIdYG
@Austen This makes writing code oneself seem more attractive, not less. |
Undergraduation
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
March 2005
(Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to
me with questions.)
Recently I've had several emails from computer science
undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not
be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in
college. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought
I was one. I was certainly a hacker, at least.
Hacking
What should you do in college to become a
good hacker
? There are two
main things you can do: become very good at programming, and learn
a lot about specific, cool problems. These turn out to be equivalent,
because each drives you to do the other.
The way to be good at programming is to work (a) a lot (b) on hard
problems. And the way to make yourself work on hard problems is
to work on some very engaging project.
Odds are this project won't be a class assignment. My friend Robert
learned a lot by writing network software when he was an
undergrad. One of his projects was to connect Harvard to the
Arpanet; it had been one of the original nodes, but by 1984 the
connection had died. [1] Not only was this
work not for a class, but because he spent all his time on it
and neglected his studies, he was kicked out of
school for a year. [2] It all evened out in the end, and now he's
a professor at MIT. But you'll probably be happier if you don't
go to that extreme; it caused him a lot of worry at the time.
Another way to be good at programming is to find other people who
are good at it, and learn what they know. Programmers tend to sort
themselves into tribes according to the type of work they do and
the tools they use, and some tribes are
smarter
than others. Look
around you and see what the smart people seem to be working on;
there's usually a reason.
Some of the smartest people around you are professors. So one way
to find interesting work is to volunteer as a research assistant.
Professors are especially interested in people who can solve tedious
system-administration type problems for them, so that is a way to
get a foot in the door. What they fear are
flakes and resume padders. It's all too
common for an assistant to result in a net increase in work. So
you have to make it clear you'll mean a net decrease.
Don't be put off if they say no. Rejection is almost always less
personal than the rejectee imagines. Just move on to the next.
(This applies to dating too.)
Beware, because although most professors are smart, not all of them
work on interesting stuff. Professors have to publish novel results
to advance their careers, but there is more competition in more
interesting areas of research. So what less ambitious professors
do is turn out a series of papers whose conclusions are novel because
no one else cares about them. You're better off avoiding these.
I never worked as a research assistant, so I feel a bit dishonest
recommending that route. I learned to program by writing stuff of
my own, particularly by trying to reverse-engineer Winograd's
SHRDLU. I was as obsessed with that program as a mother with a new baby.
Whatever the disadvantages of working by yourself, the advantage
is that the project is all your own. You never have to compromise
or ask anyone's permission, and if you have a new idea you can just
sit down and start implementing it.
In your own projects you don't have to worry about novelty (as
professors do) or profitability (as businesses do). All that matters
is how hard the project is technically, and that has no correlation
to the nature of the application. "Serious" applications like
databases are often trivial and dull technically (if you ever suffer
from insomnia, try reading the technical literature about databases)
while "frivolous" applications like games are often very sophisticated.
I'm sure there are game companies out there working on products
with more intellectual content than the research at the
bottom nine tenths of university CS departments.
If I were in college now I'd probably work on
graphics: a network game, for example, or a tool for 3D animation.
When I was an undergrad there weren't enough cycles around to make
graphics interesting, but it's hard to imagine anything more fun
to work on now.
Math
When I was in college, a lot of the professors believed (or at least
wished) that
computer science
was a branch of math. This idea was
strongest at Harvard, where there wasn't even a CS major till the
1980s; till then one had to major in applied math. But it was
nearly as bad at Cornell. When I told the fearsome Professor Conway
that I was interested in AI (a hot topic then), he told me I should
major in math. I'm still not sure whether he thought AI required
math, or whether he thought AI was nonsense and that majoring in
something rigorous would cure me of such stupid ambitions.
In fact, the amount of math you need as a hacker is a lot less
than most university departments like to admit. I don't think you
need much more than high school math plus a few concepts from the
theory of computation. (You have to know what an n^2 algorithm is
if you want to avoid writing them.) Unless you're planning to write
math applications, of course. Robotics, for example, is all math.
But while you don't literally need math for most kinds of hacking,
in the sense of knowing 1001 tricks for differentiating formulas,
math is very much worth studying for its own sake. It's a
valuable source of metaphors for almost any kind of work.[3] I wish
I'd studied more math in college for that reason.
Like a lot of people, I was mathematically abused as a child. I
learned to think of math as a collection of formulas that were
neither beautiful nor had any relation to my life (despite attempts
to translate them into "word problems"), but had to be memorized
in order to do well on tests.
One of the most valuable things you could do in college would be
to learn what math is really about. This may not be easy, because
a lot of good mathematicians are bad teachers. And while there are
many popular books on math, few seem good. The best I can think
of are W. W. Sawyer's. And of course Euclid. [4]
Everything
Thomas Huxley said "Try to learn something about everything and
everything about something." Most universities aim at this
ideal.
But what's everything? To me it means, all that people
learn in the course of working honestly on hard problems. All such
work tends to be related, in that ideas and techniques from one
field can often be transplanted successfully to others. Even others
that seem quite distant. For example, I write
essays
the same way
I write software: I sit down and blow out a lame version 1 as fast
as I can type, then spend several weeks rewriting it.
Working on hard problems is not, by itself, enough. Medieval
alchemists were working on a hard problem, but their approach was
so bogus that there was little
to learn from studying it, except possibly about people's ability
to delude themselves. Unfortunately the sort of AI I was trying
to learn in college had the same flaw: a very hard problem, blithely
approached with hopelessly inadequate techniques. Bold? Closer
to fraudulent.
The social sciences are also fairly bogus, because they're so much
influenced by intellectual
fashions
. If a
physicist met a colleague
from 100 years ago, he could teach him some new things; if a psychologist
met a colleague from 100 years ago, they'd just get into an
ideological argument.
Yes, of course, you'll learn something by taking a
psychology class. The point is, you'll learn more by taking
a class in another department.
The worthwhile departments, in my opinion, are math, the hard
sciences, engineering, history (especially economic and social
history, and the history of science), architecture, and the classics.
A survey course in art history may be worthwhile. Modern literature
is important, but the way to learn about it is just to read. I
don't know enough about music to say.
You can skip the social sciences, philosophy, and the various
departments created recently in response to political pressures.
Many of these fields talk about important problems, certainly. But
the way they talk about them is useless. For example, philosophy
talks, among other things, about our obligations to one another;
but you can learn more about this from a wise grandmother or E. B.
White than from an academic philosopher.
I speak here from experience. I should probably have been offended
when people laughed at Clinton for saying "It depends on what the
meaning of the word 'is' is." I took about five classes in college
on what the meaning of "is" is.
Another way to figure out which fields are worth studying is to
create the
dropout graph.
For example, I know many people
who switched from math to computer science because they found math
too hard, and no one who did the opposite. People don't do hard
things gratuitously; no one will work on a harder problem unless
it is proportionately (or at least log(n)) more rewarding. So
probably math is more worth studying than computer science. By
similar comparisons you can make a graph of all the departments in
a university. At the bottom you'll find the subjects with least
intellectual content.
If you use this method, you'll get roughly the same answer I just
gave.
Language courses are an anomaly. I think they're better considered
as extracurricular activities, like pottery classes. They'd be far
more useful when combined with some time living in a country where
the language is spoken. On a whim I studied Arabic as a freshman.
It was a lot of work, and the only lasting benefits were a weird
ability to identify semitic roots and some insights into how people
recognize words.
Studio art and creative writing courses are wildcards. Usually
you don't get taught much: you just work (or don't work) on whatever
you want, and then sit around offering "crits" of one another's
creations under the vague supervision of the teacher. But writing and
art are both very hard problems that (some) people work honestly
at, so they're worth doing, especially if you can find a good
teacher.
Jobs
Of course college students have to think about more than just
learning. There are also two practical problems to consider: jobs,
and graduate school.
In theory a liberal education is not supposed to supply job training.
But everyone knows this is a bit of a fib. Hackers at every college
learn practical skills, and not by accident.
What you should learn to get a job depends on the kind you want.
If you want to work in a big company, learn how to hack
Blub
on
Windows. If you want to work at a cool little company or research
lab, you'll do better to learn Ruby on Linux. And if you want to
start your own company, which I think will be more and more common,
master the most powerful tools you can find, because you're going
to be in a race against your competitors, and they'll be your horse.
There is not a direct correlation between the skills you should
learn in college and those you'll use in a job. You should aim
slightly high in college.
In workouts a football player may bench press 300 pounds, even
though he may never have to exert anything like that much force in
the course of a game. Likewise, if your professors try to make you
learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job, it may
not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world.
They may be trying to make you lift weights with your brain.
The programs you write in classes differ in three critical ways
from the ones you'll write in the real world: they're small; you
get to start from scratch; and the problem is usually artificial
and predetermined. In the real world, programs are bigger, tend
to involve existing code, and often require you to figure out what
the problem is before you can solve it.
You don't have to wait to leave (or even enter) college to learn
these skills. If you want to learn how to deal with existing code,
for example, you can contribute to open-source projects. The sort
of employer you want to work for will be as impressed by that as
good grades on class assignments.
In existing open-source projects you don't get much practice at
the third skill, deciding what problems to solve. But there's
nothing to stop you starting new projects of your own. And good
employers will be even more impressed
with that.
What sort of problem should you try to solve? One way to answer
that is to ask what you need as a user. For example, I stumbled
on a good algorithm for spam filtering because I wanted to stop
getting spam. Now what I wish I had was a mail reader that somehow
prevented my inbox from filling up. I tend to use my inbox as a
todo list. But that's like using a screwdriver to open
bottles; what one really wants is a bottle opener.
Grad School
What about grad school? Should you go? And how do you get into a
good one?
In principle, grad school is professional training in research, and
you shouldn't go unless you want to do research as a career. And
yet half the people who get PhDs in CS don't go into research.
I didn't go to grad school to become a professor. I went because
I wanted to learn more.
So if you're mainly interested in hacking and you go to grad school,
you'll find a lot of other people who are similarly out of their
element. And if half the people around you are out of their element in the
same way you are, are you really out of your element?
There's a fundamental problem in "computer science," and it surfaces
in situations like this. No one is sure what "research" is supposed to be.
A lot
of research is hacking that had to be crammed into the form of an
academic paper to yield one more quantum of publication.
So it's kind of misleading to ask whether you'll be at home in grad
school, because very few people are quite at home in computer
science. The whole field is uncomfortable in its own skin. So
the fact that you're mainly interested in hacking shouldn't deter
you from going to grad school. Just be warned you'll have to do a lot of stuff
you don't like.
Number one will be your dissertation. Almost everyone hates their
dissertation by the time they're done with it. The
process inherently tends to produce an unpleasant result, like a cake made out
of whole wheat flour and baked for twelve hours. Few dissertations
are read with pleasure, especially by their authors.
But thousands before you have suffered through writing a dissertation.
And aside from that, grad school is close to paradise. Many people
remember it as the happiest time of their lives. And nearly all
the rest, including me, remember it as a period that would have
been, if they hadn't had to write a dissertation. [5]
The danger with grad school is that you don't see the scary part
upfront. PhD programs start out as college part 2, with several
years of classes. So by the time you face the horror of writing a
dissertation, you're already several years in. If you quit now,
you'll be a grad-school dropout, and you probably won't like that
idea. When Robert got kicked out of grad school for writing the
Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out
without the stigma of failure.
On the whole, grad school is probably better than most alternatives. You meet a
lot of smart people, and your glum procrastination will at least
be a powerful common bond. And of course you have a PhD at the
end. I forgot about that. I suppose that's worth something.
The greatest advantage of a PhD (besides being the union card of
academia, of course) may be that it gives you some baseline confidence.
For example, the Honeywell thermostats in my house have the most
atrocious UI. My mother, who has the same model, diligently spent
a day reading the user's manual to learn how to operate hers. She
assumed the problem was with her. But I can think to myself "If
someone with a PhD in computer science can't understand this
thermostat, it
must
be badly
designed."
If you still want to go to grad school after this equivocal
recommendation, I can give you solid advice about how to get in.
A lot of my friends are CS professors now, so I have the inside
story about admissions. It's quite different from college. At
most colleges, admissions officers decide who gets in. For PhD
programs, the professors do. And they try to do
it well, because the people they admit are going to be working for
them.
Apparently only recommendations really matter at the best schools.
Standardized tests count for nothing, and grades for little. The
essay is mostly an opportunity to disqualify yourself by saying
something stupid. The only thing professors
trust is recommendations, preferably from people they know. [6]
So if you want to get into a PhD program, the key is to impress
your professors. And from my friends who are professors I know
what impresses them: not merely trying to impress them. They're
not impressed by students who get good grades or want to be their
research assistants so they can get into grad school. They're
impressed by students who get good grades and want to be their
research assistants because they're genuinely interested in the
topic.
So the best thing you can do in college, whether you want to get
into grad school or just be good at hacking, is figure out what you
truly like. It's hard to trick professors into letting you into
grad school, and impossible to trick problems into letting you solve
them. College is where faking stops working. From this point,
unless you want to go work for a big company, which is like reverting
to high school, the only way forward is through doing what you
love
.
Notes
[1] No one seems to have minded, which shows how unimportant
the Arpanet (which became the Internet) was as late as
1984.
[2] This is why, when I became an employer, I didn't care
about GPAs. In fact, we actively sought out people
who'd failed out of school. We once put up posters around Harvard
saying "Did you just get kicked out for doing badly in your classes
because you spent all your time working on some project of your
own? Come work for us!" We managed to find a kid who had been,
and he was a great hacker.
When Harvard kicks undergrads out for a year, they have to get jobs.
The idea is to show them how awful the real world is, so they'll
understand how lucky they are to be in college. This plan backfired
with the guy who came to work for us, because he had more fun than
he'd had in school, and made more that year from stock options than
any of his professors did in salary. So instead of crawling back
repentant at the end of the year, he took another year off and went
to Europe. He did eventually graduate at about 26.
[3] Eric Raymond says the best metaphors for hackers are
in set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory.
Trevor Blackwell reminds you to take math classes intended for math majors.
"'Math for engineers' classes sucked mightily. In fact any 'x for
engineers' sucks, where x includes math, law, writing and visual
design."
[4] Other highly recommended books:
What is Mathematics?
, by
Courant and Robbins;
Geometry and the Imagination
by Hilbert and
Cohn-Vossen.
And for those interested in graphic design,
Byrne's Euclid
.
[5] If you wanted to have the perfect life, the thing to do would
be to go to grad school, secretly write your dissertation in the
first year or two, and then just enjoy yourself for the next three
years, dribbling out a chapter at a time. This prospect will make
grad students' mouths water, but I know of no one who's had the
discipline to pull it off.
[6] One professor friend says that 15-20% of the grad students they
admit each year are "long shots." But what he means by long shots
are people whose applications are perfect in every way, except
that no one on the admissions committee knows the professors who
wrote the recommendations.
So if you want to get into
grad school in the sciences, you need to go to college somewhere with
real research professors. Otherwise you'll seem a risky bet
to admissions committees, no matter how good you are.
Which implies
a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence:
little liberal arts colleges are doomed.
Most smart
high school kids at least consider going into the sciences, even
if they ultimately choose not to.
Why go to a college that limits their options?
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Alex Lewin, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Eric
Raymond, and several
anonymous CS professors
for reading drafts of this, and to the students whose questions
began it.
More Advice for Undergrads
Joel Spolsky: Advice for Computer Science College Students
Eric Raymond: How to Become a Hacker |
When something is fundamentally bogus, it ends up being surrounded by a cloud of subsidiary bogus things. It's like the way you can prove any proposition if you start with contradictory premises.
We should give credit where credit is due, and it sounds like the administration deserves some credit here.
Trying to get an accurate answer out of current AI is like trying to trick a habitual liar into telling the truth. It can be done if you back him into the right kind of corner. Or as we would now say, give him the right prompts.
I talk to the dog, who seems to be listening with the greatest attention, but I know all he's thinking is "I wonder if he will give me a piece of cheese, like that time he did three months ago."
It's worth thinking about what he means by "dumb things." It's clearly a bit of a euphemism. I think he means (a) dangerous things and (b) politically incorrect ones. And (b) may have been a bigger factor than we'd expect now. This was 2017, remember.
We had a dinner party last night. Jessica asked me, as a Christmas present, to dress up, so I did. Later that evening the caterer asked his daughter, who he brings to help him, if I needed anything, and she said I wasn't there. Dressed up I am literally unrecognizable.
I'm not a great judge of character, but fortunately my mistakes are nearly all in the same direction (accepting the bad rather than rejecting the good). So all I need is a second pass by someone with a tighter filter, like Jessica, and the result is close to perfect.
One big difference between talking to AIs and talking to people on Twitter is that AIs usually admit when they're mistaken and correct the error, whereas people on Twitter will do anything to avoid this.
She shot her dog. What more do you need to know?
Helping students come up with good startup ideas is like hooking them up to the deck catapult of an aircraft carrier. If you succeed, they're gone. What are they supposed to do, not work on the idea? And working on a startup is incompatible with being a student. |
@nutix_ai I always use m-dashes.
@harsh_dwivedi7 There may be AI startups that are overpriced, but some weird connection to Microsoft via VS Code is not the evidence of it.
These AI-generated spam replies are becoming increasingly common. Will it be possible to fix this problem with filters? Or will they make the Twitter model obsolete? https://t.co/rzQniGM1Zu
@SanejBandgar I've mostly replaced Google with ChatGPT for looking things up, but I don't use it for any more than that.
@exception1111 I think it's true for many kinds of work. Perhaps not for kinds where perfection is possible.
@XenBH That is one test, what proportion of changes I end up undoing.
On April 28 I started a new essay. By May 2 it felt almost done. I'm still working on it. It's remarkable how much further you can take something from "almost done." People who always write with deadlines must never realize this fundamental fact about writing.
@rippyfied @garrytan That is what a lot of people are wondering now.
@ajxcam @psframes I don't disagree with anything you say. But the decision about whether to include the frame as part of the trompe l'oeil effect should be left to the artist to make, not made later by curators.
@garrytan Weeel, the difference is that inventions like the steam shovel performed just one task that had been done by humans. If you invent something that can perform every task done by humans, the results may be different. |
This is even more the case with "not a good look." Someone saying "read the room" can at least pretend they're giving advice about how to convince people. But someone saying "not a good look" is just saying "conform."
@wssnr No, in practice the kind of people who say "read the room" are not people who agree with you but think "now is not the time," but people who disagree and hope to use social pressure to silence you.
@Pontus4Pope For sure. And indeed, the dumber the audience, the further you may have to depart from right in order to persuade them.
@henhaohank You're right about the first two, but "wrong side of history" is reasonable. It assumes that we converge on the truth about historical events, which is not far wrong.
"Read the room" is not advice for being right. It's advice for being popular. So when people give it, they're also implicitly telling us which they think is more important.
@p3shoemaker @markessien IIRC I got that wrong too. That's my "you're wasting my time" look.
@sarah_cone @markessien I was bored too. As with so many other things, to do well you have to care.
@wetarynitup Why it's worth reading important books multiple times: https://t.co/Icj6P7OqHu
@yishan On Jessica's superpowers: https://t.co/wRohkkMngR
@_asadmemon @migueldeicaza Yeah, me neither. It's so lame that Twitter is vulnerable to this kind of blatant manipulation. |
@StefanFSchubert The problem used to be much worse. Now there is a new attorney general, a new mayor, and many new supervisors.
I asked some British friends visiting SF what surprised them about it. The drug problem is much less serious than they expected. Public transit works well. The streets are surprisingly empty. Great racial diversity. Every 4th car is a Tesla. Food is very expensive.
@rajatsuri @snowmaker Yeah, I remember being impressed by that.
@snowmaker Adora Cheung was one of the first, if not the first, to do this. She got a job as a cleaner before she started HomeJoy.
@bscholl Once it's installed you should celebrate by having a conversation at it.
@abarrallen That was the usual age for craftsmen to begin their apprenticeships.
@SpencerHakimian Perhaps by half innocent he means there was consent on his side, at least.
@linamkhan Startups are risky. Sometimes when you keep rolling the dice things turn out well. Sometimes not. But founders should be able to decide for themselves when to stop.
@ViewChester I wasn't surprised they kept quiet initially, but I admit it's a bit surprising they're still quiet now, when everyone else is talking about it. Even Trump is talking about it.
@frankgoertzen @shaunmmaguire Israel hasn't kept international journalists out of Gaza? |
@AviationMarlene The addition of rotors must have made the 3210 much more popular than its predecessor.
Jessica dared me to tweet that I lunched upon a heel of bread that I retrieved from the trash. (She said "stale bread" but it wasn't stale. It was still perfectly good. It was also, critically, sitting on *top* of the other stuff; see related Seinfeld episode.)
I forgot this alternative solution to the visible likes problem till someone retweeted it today.
@JonErlichman How big a fraction?
@Jdelahozduran @Chris_arnade It wasn't the cuts.
@matthew_d_green Making money from non-military applications of AI doesn't imply making money from consumers directly using LLMs. Presumably AI will pervade non-military businesses much as software itself has.
@nowaffle Early 2010s?
@krishnanrohit It's common among newly founded startups (and indeed one of the reasons startups work). It's less common among companies with 1000 people like Scale. And openly stating this principle is not (yet) common at any size.
@yacineMTB I have some stock via YC (I have no idea how much), but I didn't invest personally. I wish I had! But Scale's batch was the summer we moved to England, so I didn't meet Alexandr till later.
@Austen There's Fentanyl in New York too. It's the supervisors. |
"Everything would be so much better if everyone would just listen to me."
— Jessica
The strange thing is, she's right.
@ArthurB @Noahpinion I think the explanation for that is a very nasty individual being in charge of them. Possibly ultimately Miller. Or some minion of his.
@WillManidis The most dangerous version of all is when the success is due to the tests being somewhat fake. I've seen this a lot in recent grads of elite universities.
@Noahpinion I don't think it's that organized. I think the cruelty is mostly the result of incompetence. Someone has set quotas. Bungling agents randomly grab people to meet them.
@noroboguy No, the investments have been cancelled or delayed. Money that would have been invested hasn't been. Past tense.
@serpunketh That's false. I retweeted something praising his executive order undoing the supersonic ban a few days ago.
@ChShersh When I was in college we were still being told it was irresponsible to program while sitting at a computer. You were supposed to work out all the details on paper first, then merely type your program in. But some of us didn't listen.
@ChShersh This divergence dates to the 1970s if not before. The second type is the original type. It dates from the time when programmers had to write their programs on paper. Then when terminals arrived it became possible to program interactively.
@JoelWish @IDF No, it's because the images are in fact very similar.
@TonyTelsIt @IDF Don't you think it's a bit strange for you to be following me and also to say that nobody knows who I am? |
My side of the sink in our bathroom: toothpaste, shaving cream, mouthwash, dental floss. Jessica's side: Snape's classroom.
The sweet spot for present-day AI seems to be projects that were constrained by the rate at which humans could produce text. That's why it works so well for programming. Basically programmers produced valuable text. But there are lots of other projects with this quality.
I talked to a startup today that I'd never have considered an "AI startup" when I funded them in 2021. But it turns out that they're in a domain that was constrained by the rate at which humans could produce text, and now they're absolutely flying.
It's a mistake for startups to treat fundraises as a series of milestones. There's something even more impressive than raising a series whatever: to be making so much that you don't need to. Eventually all companies have to reach this point. The sooner you do, the better.
You can't accurately call something a milestone when the more impressive alternative would be not to hit it.
Jessica's friend's cousin, a random white guy in Minnesota, had his apartment invaded by ICE with drawn guns. They claimed they had a warrant, but they didn't. They were going door to door in his building.
Now for all his friends and family, ICE raids are no longer just a news story but something that happened to someone they know. This is going to cause a wave of discontent among ordinary Americans.
The reason I can speak out against dumb things isn't so much that I have more insight or moral courage. It's more because I happen to be uniquely insulated from the danger of offending stupid people.
Someone associated with a brand selling cookies, for example, can't publicly attack things that dumb people like. Dumb people buy lots of cookies. But it's safe for me to. If I offend dumb people and they don't apply to YC, that's actually good for YC.
Neither I nor the founder I met with today had eaten yet, so I did office hours in the kitchen while making us lunch. It was just like old times, chopping onions while trying to figure out what their fundraising strategy should be. |
Incidentally, this also means that startups are relatively safe investments in times of chaos. What you're betting on in a startup is whether the founders are Larry and Sergey or not, and that's almost completely independent of external conditions.
Macroeconomic factors might affect the value of a startup by 2-3x. 5x would be huge. Whereas getting the product right can easily make a difference of 1000x.
Someone asked me if now is a good time to start a startup, with all the uncertainty in the world. The answer is yes, because the dominant factor in the outcome of a startup is whether the founders can discover a great product, not the political or economic environment.
Ugh, can you imagine a worse sign for a country than a sudden decline in demand for machine tools?
Trade wars often turn into real wars. I wonder if this is the point where China blockades Taiwan.
@eastdakota For your explanation to be correct, they'd have to be not merely holding their cards close to their chests, but actively trying to look stupid. Occam's razor says they're not acting.
@eastdakota I don't think this can be the explanation. Such a plan would fall into the category of diabolically clever, and people who were diabolically clever would know that Jan Mayen is part of Norway.
@Noahpinion You have to give him credit for trying at least.
@migueldeicaza I use the alternate strategy: only buy new ones about every 8 years.
@amasad Yes, he thought that was hilarious. |
@NathanpmYoung I spent a lot of money and a good deal of time on the last two election cycles.
Which of America's bold new cohort of Republican leaders is bold enough to answer this? https://t.co/ZORjuOS8K2
@aparanjape Air France bailed, and without them there wasn't enough demand to keep the spare parts operation running.
@kandieSWE We have taken many. We're like that ourselves.
@martyamark I think he'd have mostly approved. It's very spare, like the output of a Unix utility.
@t_blom In fact it would be hard for humans to do this — to figure out everything a piece of software can do just by logging in and clicking on things, without even reading the manual or being taught how to use the software by another user.
@aparanjape The Concorde didn't fail commercially. The NYC-London route was profitable.
@thesubmitter_ (But don't expect me to be able to converse. This was 40 years ago and that's one of the only sentences I remember. )
@needtofilm Of course he would, if only because he's one of our models of a good founder.
@t_blom I'll take the other side of that bet. The tree of behaviors would be hard to traverse. |
It's so much more interesting focusing on things that are unfashionable, undervalued, overlooked. And there are so many of them! People are great at overlooking.
One of the biggest problems afflicting young writers is the belief that writing has to sound fancy — that it can't just sound like spoken English. Actually the more it sounds like spoken English the better.
Fortunately there's an easy cure for this problem: look at each sentence and ask if you could imagine yourself saying it to a friend. Would you begin a sentence with "furthermore"? No? Then don't do it in your writing either.
One surprising thing I've learned recently is how well made 20th century mechanical watches were. Some watches made in the 1940s are still accurate to a couple seconds a day.
It's strange to think that the people who made these watches never knew just what a good job they did. They knew they did the best they could, but you can never know how well something you made is going to work 80 years from now.
The thing I want to know most about the Venezuelan operation is who's in the Epstein files.
Saying that only entrepreneurs generate wealth is as mistaken as saying that only workers do. In fact founders, managers, employees, and individual craftsmen can all generate wealth. Founders do have the most leverage though.
13 yo and I were delighted to discover on our latest visit to Sports Direct that executioner hats are in fashion again. We each got one. He can't wait to wear his to school. https://t.co/TtkMvufDFY
As well as getting you better stuff, good taste saves you money. Most people have bad taste, so the law of supply and demand means good things tend to be cheaper.
This illustrates an aspect of AI that I hadn't thought about till now: it cuts through bureaucracy. If a big organization is paralyzed by indecision, AI doesn't care. It will happily generate a version 1. And that becomes the starting point, because there is no other version 1. |
Yet another thing that only happened because Ronco was behind the scenes making it happen. The idea of a powerful force working behind the scenes sounds sinister, and maybe it usually is, but not always.
@sarmadgulzar He talked about his experiences running Airbnb and how much his current m.o. differed from the advice he'd been given. It was only when I talked to other founders afterward that I realized it was part of a widespread pattern.
I just learned that Brian Chesky would never have given the famous talk that led to "Founder Mode" if Ron Conway hadn't nagged him to attend the event where he gave it. Brian had been thinking of blowing it off but Ron kept sending him texts saying he had to "SUPPORT FOUNDERS!!!"
@clark_aviation Interesting to see an A-6 with livery stolen from a Cessna 172.
@thetimmorgan It's less rare here than just about anywhere else in the world.
@jeremyphoward I've noticed this too. Lots of people I follow talking about Bluesky, but none about Threads.
It has set off my startup spidey-sense. When a whole bunch of otherwise unrelated people are talking about the same thing, it's often a sign of something big happening.
@jeremyphoward Isn't it always that way...
@mhartl The Code of the Woosters
@PavlosProkopeas Wodehouse thought quite well.
@Csingh321 To HMRC, on the other hand, it's as if I never left... |
@ccccjjjjeeee That's the norm. Twitter mobs attacking you are usually attacking you for something you didn't actually say.
@davidiach Oddly enough that's a name I know very well. From working on online shopping back in the 90s, if you know what I mean.
@mundanemun Data works. That's what convinced me that climate change is worth worrying about.
Email turns up in my inbox about "Techsylvania." Is it about Pennsylvania, I wonder, or Transylvania? Then I notice the sender's name is Vlad.
@korbencopy @Levi7hart No, not precise enough.
@GabiImmelman Except walking in two different directions at once.
It will go well with the painting he made me buy at auction 4 years ago. https://t.co/kAtDLTmsVw
This table came up at auction recently. I showed an image of it to 12 yo to explain why Victorian design had a bad reputation, and he loved it and made me bid on it. So now we're going to have this thing in our house. https://t.co/caoYwlGACH
@nickcammarata "Delve" is not the worst word. It's slightly tacky, but nothing like as bad as, say, using "pen" as a verb. The only reason it became so famous is that it happened to be used disproportionately often by a recent version of ChatGPT.
@Levi7hart If there is, what is it? |
Writing, Briefly
March 2005
(In the process
of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing.
I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took
67 minutes—23
of writing, and
44 of rewriting.)
I think it's far more important to write well than most people
realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them.
If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out
on most of the ideas writing would have generated.
As for how to write well, here's the short version:
Write a bad version
1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut
out
everything
unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for
bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers
you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to
write about, then write down what you said; expect
80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it,
and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough
to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which
bits are confusing or drag; don't (always) make detailed outlines;
mull ideas over for a few days before
writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing
when you think of the first
sentence; if a deadline
forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence
first; write about stuff you like; don't try to sound impressive; don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly;
use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit
sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble
over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the
paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the
reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time;
when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you
finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate
notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don't
feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't
read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are
designed to sound ok on crappy car radios;
if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately;
ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone
down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because
an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more
ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them
on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish
surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an
ending, and when one appears, grab it.
Russian Translation
Japanese Translation
Romanian Translation
Spanish Translation
German Translation
Chinese Translation
Hungarian Translation
Catalan Translation
Danish Translation
Arabic Translation |
"When I was a child she worked as a schoolteacher, and her school was next to mine, so in the mornings we would walk to school together. I don't know why I remember this — but she'd always walk between me and the sun. So that I could stand in her shadow."
He said if I'd asked him 6 months ago he couldn't have said for sure, but that he was now confident vibe coding was going to stick. And right now is the worst it's ever going to work, so if it works now it will just keep working better.
Vibe coding is here to stay. I'd been worried it might be a fad, but I talked to the founder of an infrastructure company who's in a position to see how well vibe-coded apps are doing, and he said a lot of them are making money.
@apralky And the consequence of not "losing touch" is to become a ruthless liar? That seems unlikely.
@_opencv_ I have no idea if this is an accurate account of something Garry said, but I can imagine startups for which this would be the right advice. It's like telling a startup whose software was too slow in 1995 to hang on for two more cycles of Moore's Law.
@Boavista_Ludwig I would bet on Andy's insights about this kind of thing over anyone's.
In principle there's a third category: companies that should make everything they design, but can't. But there's already a name for those.
Maybe this isn't true of all hard tech startups. But if not it would be an interesting way to classify them: the ones that can and should make everything they design, and the ones that don't need to.
The reason is not just that suppliers can be unreliable. Even if they were perfectly reliable, the cycle time involved in changing the design of a component and getting the new version manufactured and shipped to you would kill your schedule.
Interesting insight from Andy Lapsa of Stoke Space: If you're running a hard tech startup, you should be able to fabricate everything you need yourself. You may choose to farm something out to a supplier, but you shouldn't need to. |
This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California
November 2016
If you're a California voter, there is an important proposition
on your ballot this year: Proposition 62, which bans the death
penalty.
When I was younger I used to think the debate about the death
penalty was about when it's ok to take a human life. Is it ok
to kill a killer?
But that is not the issue here.
The real world does not work like the version I was shown on TV growing up. The police
often arrest the wrong person.
Defendants' lawyers are often incompetent. And prosecutors
are often motivated more by publicity than justice.
In the real world,
about 4%
of people sentenced to death
are innocent.
So this is not about whether it's ok to kill killers. This
is about whether it's ok to kill innocent people.
A child could answer that one for you.
This year, in California, you have a chance to end this, by
voting yes on Proposition 62. But beware, because there is another
proposition, Proposition 66, whose goal is to make it
easier to execute people. So yes on 62, no on 66.
It's time. |
It's strange how much more people are talking now about the bad things Assad did than they did when he was actually doing them.
15 yo returns in mid-afternoon from staying at a friend's house.
15 yo: I'm hungry. I haven't eaten all day.
Jessica: My poor baby! How have you not eaten anything all day?
15 yo: Well, I've only been up for two hours...
I must be following the right people, because every tweet I've seen about drones in New Jersey is about how nothing is actually happening.
@NathanWailes @l_meyer_ @jonatanpallesen @MarioNawfal Ugh, Twitter is such a waste of time. The fact that you replied to the wrong tweet doesn't make it a motte and bailey argument.
In Sam's case I know. I've known him since he was 19. He has always been into cars. If that expensive one cost 1/10 as much, he'd have been delighted.
@NathanWailes @l_meyer_ @jonatanpallesen @MarioNawfal The tweet I was replying to claimed that buying expensive cars is "driven by desire to show off your wealth." You can check for yourself; it's still there.
@CcibChris I missed the joke initially because I was looking for an ejection handle under the seat.
@lefineder You can see what may be a bump from chariots starting at 1500 BC.
@robertskmiles @clairlemon Exactly. It's unpleasant to think about, but not false.
@Noahpinion Lot of suffering in the meantime though...
@serbiaireland I got a book illustrated by him as a present when I was a little kid, and I immediately recognized the style, 50 years later. |
Wow, yes, this is an important point from @patio11:
https://t.co/jEvijYDSQB
If business class travelers have a choice of a 10 hour subsonic flight from Seattle to Tokyo or a 5 hour supersonic one at the same price, they're all going to take the 5 hour one. Which means all the business class travelers switch to supersonic.
Ticket prices will be about the same as current business class prices on international flights. How can this be? Because the flights are so much shorter that you don't need lay-flat beds. You can use the seat pitch of domestic first class.
@chris_j_paxton The Concorde was more expensive to operate. And there was way less demand on the Pacific routes in those days.
What most people don't realize about Boom is that if they ship an airliner at all, every airline that flies internationally will have to buy it or be converted against their will into a discount airline, flying tourists subsonically.
@bscholl I didn't think the probability of succeeding was over 50% (when is it ever in a startup?) but I always thought the expected value was high, because you'll make so much if you do.
12 yo and I have a shared fiction in which Grundon and Biffa are rival factions competing to dominate the world. It's been going for about 8 years now. We constantly see signs that one or the other of them is plotting something new.
Prediction: From now on we'll rarely hear the phrase "writer's block." 99% of the people experiencing it will give in after a few days and have AI write them a first draft. And the 1% who are too proud to use AI are probably also too proud to use a phrase like "writer's block."
I only had a little cash on me and I wanted to buy from as many different kids' tables as I could, but after this fine bit of reasoning I just gave them the £5.
@BigMeanInternet I only had a little cash on me and I wanted to buy from as many different kids' tables as I could, in order to encourage them. And of course I gave them the £5 after this.
But I hope you've enjoyed feeling clever and virtuous. |
The Venture Capital Squeeze
November 2005
In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves
squeezed from four directions. They're already stuck with a seller's
market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the
Bubble and still haven't invested. This by itself is not the end
of the world. In fact, it's just a more extreme version of the
norm
in the VC business: too much money chasing too few deals.
Unfortunately, those few deals now want less and less money, because
it's getting so cheap to start a startup. The four causes: open
source, which makes software free; Moore's law, which makes hardware
geometrically closer to free; the Web, which makes promotion free
if you're good; and better languages, which make development a lot
cheaper.
When we started our startup in 1995, the first three were our biggest
expenses. We had to pay $5000 for the Netscape Commerce Server,
the only software that then supported secure http connections. We
paid $3000 for a server with a 90 MHz processor and 32 meg of
memory. And we paid a PR firm about $30,000 to promote our launch.
Now you could get all three for nothing. You can get the software
for free; people throw away computers more powerful than our first
server; and if you make something good you can generate ten times
as much traffic by word of mouth online than our first PR firm got
through the print media.
And of course another big change for the average startup is that
programming languages have improved-- or rather, the
median language
has. At most startups ten years
ago, software development meant ten programmers writing code in
C++. Now the same work might be done by one or two using Python
or Ruby.
During the Bubble, a lot of people predicted that startups would
outsource their development to India. I think a better model for
the future is David Heinemeier Hansson, who outsourced his development
to a more powerful language instead. A lot of well-known applications
are now, like BaseCamp, written by just one programmer. And one
guy is more than 10x cheaper than ten, because (a) he won't waste
any time in meetings, and (b) since he's probably a founder, he can
pay himself nothing.
Because starting a startup is so cheap, venture capitalists now
often want to give startups more money than the startups want to
take. VCs like to invest several million at a time. But as one
VC told me after a startup he funded would only take about half a
million, "I don't know what we're going to do. Maybe we'll just
have to give some of it back." Meaning give some of the fund back
to the institutional investors who supplied it, because it wasn't
going to be possible to invest it all.
Into this already bad situation comes the third problem: Sarbanes-Oxley.
Sarbanes-Oxley is a law, passed after the Bubble, that drastically
increases the regulatory burden on public companies. And in addition
to the cost of compliance, which is at least two million dollars a
year, the law introduces frightening legal exposure for corporate
officers. An experienced CFO I know said flatly: "I would not
want to be CFO of a public company now."
You might think that responsible corporate governance is an area
where you can't go too far. But you can go too far in any law, and
this remark convinced me that Sarbanes-Oxley must have. This CFO
is both the smartest and the most upstanding money guy I know. If
Sarbanes-Oxley deters people like him from being CFOs of public
companies, that's proof enough that it's broken.
Largely because of Sarbanes-Oxley, few startups go public now. For
all practical purposes, succeeding now equals getting bought. Which
means VCs are now in the business of finding promising little 2-3
man startups and pumping them up into companies that cost $100
million to acquire. They didn't mean to be in this business; it's
just what their business has evolved into.
Hence the fourth problem: the acquirers have begun to realize they
can buy wholesale. Why should they wait for VCs to make the startups
they want more expensive? Most of what the VCs add, acquirers don't
want anyway. The acquirers already have brand recognition and HR
departments. What they really want is the software and the developers,
and that's what the startup is in the early phase: concentrated
software and developers.
Google, typically, seems to have been the first to figure this out.
"Bring us your startups early," said Google's speaker at the
Startup School
. They're quite
explicit about it: they like to acquire startups at just the point
where they would do a Series A round. (The Series A round is the
first round of real VC funding; it usually happens in the first
year.) It is a brilliant strategy, and one that other big technology
companies will no doubt try to duplicate. Unless they want to have
still more of their lunch eaten by Google.
Of course, Google has an advantage in buying startups: a lot of the
people there are rich, or expect to be when their options vest.
Ordinary employees find it very hard to recommend an acquisition;
it's just too annoying to see a bunch of twenty year olds get rich
when you're still working for salary. Even if it's the right thing
for your company to do.
The Solution(s)
Bad as things look now, there is a way for VCs to save themselves.
They need to do two things, one of which won't surprise them, and
another that will seem an anathema.
Let's start with the obvious one: lobby to get Sarbanes-Oxley
loosened. This law was created to prevent future Enrons, not to
destroy the IPO market. Since the IPO market was practically dead
when it passed, few saw what bad effects it would have. But now
that technology has recovered from the last bust, we can see clearly
what a bottleneck Sarbanes-Oxley has become.
Startups are fragile plants—seedlings, in fact. These seedlings
are worth protecting, because they grow into the trees of the
economy. Much of the economy's growth is their growth. I think
most politicians realize that. But they don't realize just how
fragile startups are, and how easily they can become collateral
damage of laws meant to fix some other problem.
Still more dangerously, when you destroy startups, they make very
little noise. If you step on the toes of the coal industry, you'll
hear about it. But if you inadvertantly squash the startup industry,
all that happens is that the founders of the next Google stay in
grad school instead of starting a company.
My second suggestion will seem shocking to VCs: let founders cash
out partially in the Series A round. At the moment, when VCs invest
in a startup, all the stock they get is newly issued and all the
money goes to the company. They could buy some stock directly from
the founders as well.
Most VCs have an almost religious rule against doing this. They
don't want founders to get a penny till the company is sold or goes
public. VCs are obsessed with control, and they worry that they'll
have less leverage over the founders if the founders have any money.
This is a dumb plan. In fact, letting the founders sell a little stock
early would generally be better for the company, because it would
cause the founders' attitudes toward risk to be aligned with the
VCs'. As things currently work, their attitudes toward risk tend
to be diametrically opposed: the founders, who have nothing, would
prefer a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million,
while the VCs can afford to be "rational" and prefer the latter.
Whatever they say, the reason founders are selling their companies
early instead of doing Series A rounds is that they get paid up
front. That first million is just worth so much more than the
subsequent ones. If founders could sell a little stock early,
they'd be happy to take VC money and bet the rest on a bigger
outcome.
So why not let the founders have that first million, or at least
half million? The VCs would get same number of shares for the
money. So what if some of the money would go to the
founders instead of the company?
Some VCs will say this is
unthinkable—that they want all their money to be put to work
growing the company. But the fact is, the huge size of current VC
investments is dictated by the
structure
of VC funds, not the needs of startups. Often as not these large
investments go to work destroying the company rather than growing
it.
The angel investors who funded our startup let the founders sell
some stock directly to them, and it was a good deal for everyone.
The angels made a huge return on that investment, so they're happy.
And for us founders it blunted the terrifying all-or-nothingness
of a startup, which in its raw form is more a distraction than a
motivator.
If VCs are frightened at the idea of letting founders partially
cash out, let me tell them something still more frightening: you
are now competing directly with Google.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica
Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Romanian Translation
Hebrew Translation
Japanese Translation
If you liked this, you may also like
Hackers & Painters
. |
Let's try this. Blecharczyk. (I got it right the first time!)
@nikitabier @Ankx6 @ReheSamay @MrBeast Launch fast and iterate is like developing software in a REPL or painting alla prima with oil paint.
@Ankx6 @ReheSamay @MrBeast FWIW, this is some kind of scam. I'm not participating in this, and I expect none of these other people are either.
@TomLondon6 I've thought this too. It's a sad thing to realize it can still happen today. I would not have thought that.
@hassan_abu34434 It's helpful but not essential.
@JacksonSaifu It wasn't me. That's one reason I specified a tech CEO.
@ilamparithi_ja @ikirigin @paultoo @stephenfry I would love that myself. He's a great hero of mine. I met him once and it was one of the only times in my adult life that I fanboyed someone famous.
"The Democratic elite don't like most voters, and those voters can tell."
— well-known tech CEO who didn't want to be named
@eshear No one is responsible. It's just a common failure mode.
@staskulesh @ahistoryinart Horrifying. |
@cremieuxrecueil I always made a point of saying 5' 11 3/4", though alas I'm an inch shorter now.
The problem with the ILA is not that they're Luddites. It's that they're mafia.
"You may know elves as tall, wise beings or as hardworking toy-makers. This is elf propaganda. In reality elves are small, idle, frivolous creatures."
— from 12 yo's latest story
@IonaItalia You were mistaken before you even posted this. She's already dead.
@jefferinc The difference is that the child in Norway didn't need to.
@jungpionier_ No. She was already dead.
@stopachka @instant_db Great logo by the way.
In Gaza, 10 year old children are making wills.
@cremieuxrecueil I made a point of giving Carter credit for deregulation in "How People Get Rich Now." https://t.co/OwoujhUyRX
@BTCGandalf You're assuming he never readjusted the split. I don't know if he did or not, but that's not something you can assume with this guy. |
@KTmBoyle Holding grudges is a double-edged sword, because it costs you too. So I think you want to be very careful about when you do this, and only do it occasionally.
When I discover I've forgotten to hold a grudge, I'm usually pleased rather than annoyed.
@Scholars_Stage Just today I tweeted a graph claiming there were 327 school shootings a year in the US in 2021. Turned out the source was using a very broad definition of "school shooting," and that there were actually 2 in the usual sense of the phrase.
@bobhopewtf @harjtaggar That's an interesting idea and may well be true, but I don't know enough about how things work in big companies to write about it.
@3ameam @harjtaggar Interesting. I wonder if this is why Slack itself always had a super-woke culture. They were their own first victims.
@tommycollison W. A. Sinclair's Introduction to Philosophy, which despite its generic title is wonderfully heretical.
@bksnav @cremieuxrecueil You can't simultaneously optimize two different things.
@themiddlerage42 @sama Hmmm, I hope not.
@andreslaley @sama I'd choose SF. The misgovernment there isn't so bad that it outweighs the advantage of having so many peers nearby. Plus it's getting better as the bad politicians get voted out.
@cremieuxrecueil Probably more accurate to say a larger strawberry.
I'm going to delete this. These numbers are not school shootings in the sense of someone going to a school to kill kids, but all shootings that occur on school property or trips. Which is still bad but not what people usually mean by "school shootings". |
@LeonardChoong Many. Marxist governments too.
@adityaanupkumar Because thinking of something as part of your identity is extremely powerful. It will motivate you when nothing else can.
@harjtaggar These employee mobs also needed one other ingredient to function: Slack, or something like it. Imagine how hard it would be to organize a mob if you had to go cube to cube recruiting people. It would be so obvious you weren't working.
Before I read the text, I thought this was going to be a video of Elizabeth Holmes pushing someone off a dock.
@Ljungman Sports teaches it when done right, as it does at our kids' school.
@sama Curiosity and ambition will ensure they do, unless misgovernment gets in the way. That's the lesson from history at any rate.
@oniros I think you'd want to include things like being hard-working and honest. Also being ambitious, if that's your thing.
@StasOlenchenko @MacaesBruno You don't have a powerful lobby in the US. That's what drives these decisions, not principle.
@DaivikGoel For example, it's usually a mistake, especially if you're young, to consider yourself "nontechnical" because you haven't yet learned how to program. Imagine if people did this with literacy.
@michael_nielsen Depictions of heaven in paintings of the Last Judgement have this problem too. |
@waitbutwhy Are you sure these revolutions actually did suck for people at the time? Nomads had to abandon those who couldn't walk, and kill children born too close to their siblings. And the people who went to work in factories during the Industrial Revolution were leaving something worse.
@AlanRMacLeod That and "tragic mishap."
@jessegenet Our younger son tried to hack the shopping list when he was 5.
https://t.co/xJQFBmqGCO
@nartmadi Everyone I know in SV calls it Twitter. You sound like a reporter if you call it X.
@yuris Jessica and I go to see the Stones in concert every time we can, and we are usually the youngest people we can see in the audience.
@ahistoryinart He was so good, and good in a unique, quiet way.
@SenMarkKelly I used to support the idea of banning members of Congress from trading stocks, but there appears to be a flaw in it. What if their spouse is a professional investor? Are they supposed to end their career if their spouse gets elected?
@thekevinmcp Post. Elon seems to want everything to happen on Twitter. But it can't, so trying too hard to keep everyone here just makes Twitter less valuable.
@fro_thy People shouldn't need to remember workarounds like this. The algorithm should work right without workarounds.
It sucks that Twitter will bury this important result because she included a link, and users will get served some dumb meme instead. Please, please stop deprioritizing links. Everyone wants it. |
@octavianslash There are a lot of things you can see based on social media videos that aren't true.
Arguably the White House correspondents got us Trump. If they'd reported Biden's decline earlier, the other Democrats would have pushed him not to run, and there would have been an opportunity for a more charismatic candidate than Kamala Harris to arise.
@ns123abc Why does his email mention the same account number?
@eastdakota @Cloudflare It's important to read and write a lot, but you don't need to take classes in a particular department to do this. Every intelligent person should do it as a matter of course.
@eastdakota @Cloudflare I write reasonably well too, and I only took one English class in college. It was so bogus that I refused ever to take another.
@mmay3r According to Google, agency is about 40% heritable, vs 70-80% for intelligence. ChatGPT says 40-50% for agency and 50-80% for intelligence. (That last range for intelligence is rather wide. Presumably ChatGPT wants to err on the low side because it's a controversial topic.)
@Jackson25962755 @clairlemon If you think that's bad, wait till you hear about books.
@PeteMorgenstern The right-wing trolls are less stressful, because they're stupider. They mostly just call you names instead of cooking up ingeniously false attacks. But for the same reason they also make the place feel past its prime, which is depressing.
@ns123abc Is this a phish?
@hnshah I've always loved working at times other people were partying, but it never felt as dramatic as this. The most exciting thing was simply the quiet, and above all the confidence that no one was going to interrupt me. |
@cremieuxrecueil No, do you have more years' data?
@Noahpinion That has always been the big flaw in Tolkien's imitators. He had a deep feeling for medieval history from decades of studying it, but most of his imitators' work felt like people from the local shopping mall dressed up in elf suits.
@aryalpranays @Niklas_Sikorra You also encountered whatever device you used to tweet this, and that device has access to Replit.
@charlesk8n Not consciously, but if such a person applied they'd be accepted.
@Rob_Hoffman_ Startup space is not like the Earth's surface. There are far fewer small hills to get stuck at the top of. Which means you can safely just climb upward without much planning.
@Rob_Hoffman_ The best example is climbing up hills on the Earth's surface. If you just mindlessly climbed upward from a random point, you wouldn't end up on the top of Everest, but on some small hill. That's a local maximum.
@CMcgarraugh It's harder with hardware, but it's best to do hardware in a way that makes it more possible. I.e. try to make hardware development more like software development.
@pirwot That they're probably mistaken, and that there's probably a way to grow out of it (meaning it's not actually a local maximum).
@Niklas_Sikorra The most important lesson about growth is that the way to get it is to make something users love so much they tell their friends, rather than by some "growth hack" like clever marketing or partnerships.
@MazMHussain I don't think they're that clever. I think they just go after whoever is denounced to them. Presumably some big donor was outraged at the Columbia protests and handed them a list of targets compiled by activists. |
@TolkienWonder They look like the Beatles.
@HuntsmanNichole It's more than that. It actually operates in reverse.
@adequacity That would be surprising. IIRC he doesn't talk a lot about math.
"It came in at 4.5 pages but can be slimmed down a bit. My wife and I are leaving for the hospital in 30 minutes to go have our second child (what a week), but I will take a look at your reply as soon as I can."
— Bill Clerico after I suggested he write about fire prevention
@simonsarris This is an office. It's deliberately spartan. The rest of the house looks very, very different.
(And incidentally, I deliberately use different color lights. Why is it good for all the light in a room to be the same? How *can* it be if the room has windows?)
Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson are very upset. https://t.co/mnuHlGJwN8
@devonzuegel We tried to create one out of two small houses in California. It turns out that a courtyard house really needs to be a C or an O rather than a [].
@ytounn @cremieuxrecueil Are you joking?
@skdh Strangely enough this was my original impulse for publishing a bunch of essays in Hackers and Painters. Anything printed in a book that sells more than a few hundred copies lasts forever.
@cremieuxrecueil There's something to what you say, but imagine the limit case. People can do anything and call it a joke. |
@brandon_xyzw @ycombinator That was a mistake (I don't have a LinkedIn account myself) and this is now optional.
Ragged right is ok on computer screens and for shorter things, but when a book is set this way there are only two explanations: the designer is trying to look cool, or the designer doesn't read much. Though of course these are not mutually exclusive.
@jjh It's a perfect representation of *itself*, which is what you need in this case.
@jjh You can get the same effect by analyzing the performance of the startups that only just get in.
@sricharan10g It doesn't need to. Potential founders who are still in school already know about YC.
I tried this experiment and Grok did a decent job. I've seen illustrations by humans that were further off. https://t.co/gsFnvp4hbX
@simonsarris Opportunity cost. Would Einstein have been better off taking some time away from his work on physics in order to make himself more attractive?
At first glance I thought this was a model of a particularly complicated protein.
@ramiabih @garrytan The number of good startups that will apply is fairly predictable because the overall numbers are so huge at this point.
@dbroockman And the reason was that he was too old, and not paying enough attention to detail. |
@Itsjoeco That's one to frame and hang on the wall.
@debracleaver All politicians are somewhat charismatic compared to normal people. But it wasn't enough for her merely to be somewhat charismatic. To win she had to be more charismatic than Trump.
@clintbetts I had to look up what this was about, but it was in fact bullshit.
@parakeetnebula That's neither entirely true, nor the interesting point here. The interesting point is that Trump is probably the press corps' fault.
@provisionalidea The reason is not what you're assuming. It's because if there are dangers to be encountered along the way, I want them to be encountered by responsible people who will be candid about what happened.
@SpencrGreenberg It may be dangerous to develop AGI, but it's more dangerous to let it be developed by the Wuhan Institute of AI.
@DropSiteNews Thank God for one picture of kids from Gaza that's not of kids who are now dead.
@amasad To be fair there probably weren't that many bits of data being transmitted by papers in an MBA program anyway.
@J3FFR0G3RS In every presidential election since 1968, with the possible exception of 2020, the more charismatic candidate has won.
https://t.co/yF5TXJlxs8
@J3FFR0G3RS He was way more charismatic than Hillary. |
@garrytan That's actually true. Startups are provably the most effective way to get that rich, and the best way to make more successful startups is to help them (a) en masse (b) at the very beginning.
@ellipticurve You seem to have no idea how forest fires are fought. You don't stand there pointing a hose at it. Most of the work is cutting firelines.
ICE literally arrested firefighters in the process of fighting a fire. If a dystopian comedy included this scenario, people would dismiss it as unrealistic. https://t.co/SAfTCWiz6P
@DrNeilStone Imagine being in that narrow band of people who look at this and say "That's just a rainbow, not a real chemtrail."
@TejasCh73138030 @SenMarkKelly @WFP Bots are (currently) easy to distinguish. They don't have the variety that real users have. And in particular they all parrot a handful of current talking points.
@SenMarkKelly @WFP I see you're getting a lot of replies from fake accounts. Don't let them influence you. This is the norm for Twitter posts about this topic.
@Ihmzf You get used to it. You start to read it automatically just like you read current typefaces.
@m_aidenm This was said by Paul Arceneaux, not me.
@MohWalidGagi Addison's was among the best. As much as anyone, he invented modern diction.
Usually it's more convenient to read modern reprints of old books, but I'm really enjoying the 1721 edition of Addison's works. It's very cleanly printed. https://t.co/M0vNGfvlg1 |
Crazy New Ideas
May 2021
There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly.
If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person
proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant
to say "That will never work."
Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the
history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone
proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then
it gradually takes over the world.
Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely
dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain
experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they
know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway.
That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep
domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.
[
1
]
Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but disproportionately
likely to be interesting. When the average person proposes an
implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their
incompetence. But when a reasonable domain expert does it, the
situation is reversed. There's something like an efficient market
here: on average the ideas that seem craziest will, if correct,
have the biggest effect. So if you can eliminate the theory that
the person proposing an implausible-sounding idea is incompetent,
its implausibility switches from evidence that it's boring to
evidence that it's exciting.
[
2
]
Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be.
They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently
high expected value. And I think on average they do. I think if you
bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by
reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.
The reason is that everyone is too conservative. The word "paradigm"
is overused, but this is a case where it's warranted. Everyone is
too much in the grip of the current paradigm. Even the people who
have the new ideas undervalue them initially. Which means that
before they reach the stage of proposing them publicly, they've
already subjected them to an excessively strict filter.
[
3
]
The wise response to such an idea is not to make statements, but
to ask questions, because there's a real mystery here. Why has this
smart and reasonable person proposed an idea that seems so wrong?
Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be. If you're the
one who's mistaken, that would be good to know, because it means
there's a hole in your model of the world. But even if they're
mistaken, it should be interesting to learn why. A trap that an
expert falls into is one you have to worry about too.
This all seems pretty obvious. And yet there are clearly a lot of
people who don't share my fear of dismissing new ideas. Why do they
do it? Why risk looking like a jerk now and a fool later, instead
of just reserving judgement?
One reason they do it is envy. If you propose a radical new idea
and it succeeds, your reputation (and perhaps also your wealth)
will increase proportionally. Some people would be envious if that
happened, and this potential envy propagates back into a conviction
that you must be wrong.
Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy way
to seem sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it usually
seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is a
full-grown eagle by comparison. So it's easy to launch a devastating
attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever to those
who don't understand this asymmetry.
This phenomenon is exacerbated by the difference between how those
working on new ideas and those attacking them are rewarded. The
rewards for working on new ideas are weighted by the value of the
outcome. So it's worth working on something that only has a 10%
chance of succeeding if it would make things more than 10x better.
Whereas the rewards for attacking new ideas are roughly constant;
such attacks seem roughly equally clever regardless of the target.
People will also attack new ideas when they have a vested interest
in the old ones. It's not surprising, for example, that some of
Darwin's harshest critics were churchmen. People build whole careers
on some ideas. When someone claims they're false or obsolete, they
feel threatened.
The lowest form of dismissal is mere factionalism: to automatically
dismiss any idea associated with the opposing faction. The lowest
form of all is to dismiss an idea because of who proposed it.
But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas
is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the
sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm. It doesn't just affect
the way we think; it is the Lego blocks we build thoughts out of.
Popping out of the current paradigm is something only a few people
can do. And even they usually have to suppress their intuitions at
first, like a pilot flying through cloud who has to trust his
instruments over his sense of balance.
[
4
]
Paradigms don't just define our present thinking. They also vacuum
up the trail of crumbs that led to them, making our standards for
new ideas impossibly high. The current paradigm seems so perfect
to us, its offspring, that we imagine it must have been accepted
completely as soon as it was discovered — that whatever the church thought
of the heliocentric model, astronomers must have been convinced as
soon as Copernicus proposed it. Far, in fact, from it. Copernicus
published the heliocentric model in 1532, but it wasn't till the
mid seventeenth century that the balance of scientific opinion
shifted in its favor.
[
5
]
Few understand how feeble new ideas look when they first appear.
So if you want to have new ideas yourself, one of the most valuable
things you can do is to learn what they look like when they're born.
Read about how new ideas happened, and try to get yourself into the
heads of people at the time. How did things look to them, when the
new idea was only half-finished, and even the person who had it was
only half-convinced it was right?
But you don't have to stop at history. You can observe big new ideas
being born all around you right now. Just look for a reasonable
domain expert proposing something that sounds wrong.
If you're nice, as well as wise, you won't merely resist attacking
such people, but encourage them. Having new ideas is a lonely
business. Only those who've tried it know how lonely. These people
need your help. And if you help them, you'll probably learn something
in the process.
Notes
[
1
]
This domain expertise could be in another field. Indeed,
such crossovers tend to be particularly promising.
[
2
]
I'm not claiming this principle extends much beyond math,
engineering, and the hard sciences. In politics, for example,
crazy-sounding ideas generally are as bad as they sound. Though
arguably this is not an exception, because the people who propose
them are not in fact domain experts; politicians are domain experts
in political tactics, like how to get elected and how to get
legislation passed, but not in the world that policy acts upon.
Perhaps no one could be.
[
3
]
This sense of "paradigm" was defined by Thomas Kuhn in his
Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, but I also recommend his
Copernican Revolution
, where you can see him at work developing the
idea.
[
4
]
This is one reason people with a touch of Asperger's may have
an advantage in discovering new ideas. They're always flying on
instruments.
[
5
]
Hall, Rupert.
From Galileo to Newton.
Collins, 1963. This
book is particularly good at getting into contemporaries' heads.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Daniel
Gackle, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. |
@ThomasThorbur11 @DartsJey I know about the term's history. But it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.
@monty_teaches @DartsJey Here you go: https://t.co/jvOj5AyYT5
@GinnyMcDonald8 Also true.
@DartsJey No, wokeness means something more specific than opposing injustice. It was one particular phenomenon that began on US college campuses in the late 1980s.
@Shayan86 Is @Melissa_in_CA a regular source of misinformation?
@AliJrl It originated within US universities.
@joshpacini How do you mean, Josh?
@snboyle An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
I remember well the feeling that there was an army of people waiting to pounce if you mentioned certain topics, even obliquely. And it wasn't in my imagination. You could tweet this and reporters would email you about it:
https://t.co/sGRjLyepXR
Wokeness will seem such a joke in retrospect that many people won't believe it was ever a serious problem. Even many of the participants will forget. But it really was a big problem. |
I'm not a Democratic insider but I know people who if not insiders themselves are definitely close friends with them. And those in a position to know what's going on have gone silent, which means they've been sworn to secrecy, which means a rebellion is happening.
Prediction: Biden won't be the Democratic nominee. I don't have any recent inside information, which as I'll explain, is one reason I think so.
How Hugo van der Goes worked, as seen from an unfinished painting. A perfect leg sticking out from a drawing. (via @PP_Rubens) https://t.co/4fX9TipT0v
@abledoc You're mistaken. It's decorative art. It's not a step forward from representational art, as some people might have claimed at the time, but it's not worthless either. A wall looks better with it on it.
@tlbtlbtlb I was surprised you didn't lead with that.
@peterboghossian There are a lot of people who believe they'd have been in the fourth group (based on how Naziism looks to Americans in 2020) but actually would have been in the first (if they'd been Germans in 1930).
@peterboghossian I divide people into four buckets: the ones who'd have been avid Nazis, the ones who'd have made an outward show of orthodoxy to advance their careers, the ones who'd have kept their heads down, and the ones who'd have spoken out against Naziism.
@ahistoryinart You've somehow got a blurry image of it. I found this sharper one: https://t.co/BEDzy80X7Y
I sent this print to be framed. The framer couldn't tell which way was up, so he made two guesses, neither of which was right. (I couldn't tell either. I had to look it up.) https://t.co/9EObKQXLvp
@Andr3jH In practice it usually looks more like this: https://t.co/6xfR9yLmyz |
@staysaasy True, I probably haven't written this much.
@GGGHHHHHH1111 I predict it will happen exactly a year after he turned 13.
13 yo has now dictated 83,663 words of the trilogy he began when he was 9.
@DanMcKenziePSS They could all have been freed if Netanyahu had agreed to a cease-fire a year ago. https://t.co/exiOTSlcJr
@garfield628 They tried that in the beginning, but there's much less danger now that it's the majority position.
https://t.co/hbFYQXCZtN
@hightechdavid Because you're not paying attention?
@SitiXen @ZaidJilani Because Netanyahu is:
"When momentum toward a cease-fire seemed to grow, Netanyahu ascribed sudden significance to military objectives that he previously seemed less interested in pursuing..."
@ChShersh Plus s-expressions buy you true macros, which would be worth having even if you were on the fence about using them for source code.
@ChShersh Nearly all Lisp programmers have been in both groups, unless their first language was a dialect of Lisp. I found s-expressions strange at the very beginning, but now I greatly prefer them. Languages with syntax seem gross, like Victorian architecture.
The New York Times on Netanyahu:
"He pressed ahead with the war in April and July 2024, even as top generals told him that there was no further military advantage to continuing."
It's over a year later, and children are still being killed every day. https://t.co/w4gVhBg6XD |
How to Make Wealth
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
May 2004
(This essay was originally published in
Hackers
& Painters
.)
If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best
bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a
reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word "startup"
dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is
very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the
Middle Ages.
Startups usually involve technology, so much so that the phrase
"high-tech startup" is almost redundant. A startup is a small
company that takes on a hard technical problem.
Lots of people get rich knowing nothing more than that.
You don't have to know physics to be a good pitcher. But
I think it could give you an edge to understand the underlying principles.
Why do startups have to be small?
Will a startup inevitably stop being a startup as it
grows larger?
And why do they so often work on
developing new technology? Why are there so many startups
selling new drugs or computer software, and none selling corn oil
or laundry detergent?
The Proposition
Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to
compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead
of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as
hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well
in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.
Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. If you're
a good hacker in your mid twenties, you can
get a job paying about $80,000 per year. So on average
such a hacker must be
able to do at least $80,000 worth of work per year for the
company just to break even. You could probably
work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if
you focus you can probably get three times as much done in
an hour.
[
1
]
You should get another multiple of two, at
least, by eliminating the drag
of the pointy-haired middle
manager who would be your boss in a big company.
Then there is one more multiple: how much smarter are you
than your job description expects you to be?
Suppose another multiple of three. Combine all these multipliers, and I'm
claiming you could be 36 times more
productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate
job.
[
2
]
If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a
big company, then a smart
hacker working very hard without any corporate
bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about
$3 million a year.
Like all back-of-the-envelope calculations, this one
has a lot of wiggle room. I wouldn't try to
defend the actual numbers. But I stand by the
structure of the calculation. I'm not claiming
the multiplier is precisely 36, but it is certainly more
than 10, and probably rarely as high as 100.
If $3 million a year seems
high, remember that we're talking about the limit case:
the case where you not only have zero leisure time
but indeed work so hard that you endanger your health.
Startups are not magic. They don't change the laws of
wealth creation. They just represent a point at the far end of the curve.
There is a conservation law at work here: if
you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a
million dollars' worth of pain.
For example, one way to
make a million dollars would be to work for the
Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your
salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post
Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all
this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a
certain
bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain,
but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law.
If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it.
Millions, not Billions
If $3 million a year seems high to some people, it will seem
low to others. Three
million?
How do I get to be a billionaire, like Bill Gates?
So let's get Bill Gates out of the way right now. It's not
a good idea to use famous rich people
as examples, because the press only
write about the very richest, and these tend to be outliers.
Bill Gates is a smart, determined, and hardworking man,
but you need more than
that to make as much money as he has. You also need to be
very lucky.
There is a large random
factor in the success of any company. So the guys you end
up reading about in the papers are the ones who are very
smart, totally dedicated,
and
win the lottery.
Certainly Bill is smart and dedicated, but Microsoft also
happens to have been the beneficiary of one of the most spectacular
blunders in the history of business: the licensing deal for
DOS. No doubt Bill did
everything he could to steer IBM into making that blunder,
and he has done an excellent job of exploiting it, but if
there had been one person with a brain on IBM's side,
Microsoft's future would have been very different.
Microsoft at that stage had little leverage over IBM.
They were effectively a component supplier. If IBM had
required an exclusive license, as they should have, Microsoft
would still have signed the deal. It would still have
meant a lot of money for them, and IBM
could easily have gotten an operating system elsewhere.
Instead IBM ended up using all its power in the market
to give Microsoft control of the PC standard. From
that point, all Microsoft had to do was execute. They
never had to bet the company on a bold decision. All they
had to do was play hardball with licensees and copy more
innovative products reasonably promptly.
If IBM hadn't made this mistake, Microsoft would
still have been a successful company, but it
could not have grown so big so fast.
Bill Gates would be rich, but he'd be somewhere
near the bottom of the Forbes 400 with the other guys his age.
There are a lot of ways to get
rich, and this essay is about only one of them. This
essay is about how to make money by creating wealth and
getting paid for it. There are plenty of other ways to
get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance,
theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly,
graft, lobbying,
counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes
have probably involved several of these.
The advantage of creating wealth, as a way to get rich,
is not just that it's more legitimate
(many of the other methods are now illegal)
but that it's more
straightforward.
You just have to do something people want.
Money Is Not Wealth
If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is.
Wealth is not the same thing as money.
[
3
]
Wealth is as old as
human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth.
Money is a comparatively recent invention.
Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food,
clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places,
and so on. You can have wealth without
having money. If you had a magic machine that
could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your
laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money.
Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is
nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.
Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important
thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is
a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice
they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing,
and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about
making money
can make it harder to understand how to
make money.
Money is a side effect of specialization.
In a specialized society, most of the
things you need, you can't make for yourself. If you want a potato
or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone
else.
How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some?
By giving him something he wants in return. But you can't get
very far by trading things directly with the people who
need them. If you make violins, and none of the local
farmers wants one, how will you eat?
The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to
make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins
directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver,
which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The
intermediate stuff-- the
medium of exchange
-- can be anything that's
rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common,
but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the
dollar
,
that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange,
however, because its rarity
is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.
The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work.
The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really
means. People think that what a business does is make money.
But money is just the intermediate stage-- just
a shorthand-- for whatever people want.
What most businesses really do is make
wealth. They do something people want.
[
4
]
The Pie Fallacy
A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea
that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of
money
at
any moment. But that's not the same thing.
When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often
described as a pie. "You can't make the pie larger,"
say politicians.
When you're
talking about the amount of money in one family's bank
account, or the amount available to a government from one
year's tax revenue, this is true.
If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.
I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few
rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else.
Many people seem to continue to believe something like this
well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the
background when you hear someone talking about how x percent
of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan
to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're
planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.
What leads people astray here is the abstraction of
money. Money is not wealth. It's
just something we use to move wealth around.
So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like
your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to
trade with other people for things you want,
there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
You can make more wealth.
Wealth has been getting created and
destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.
Suppose you own a beat-up old car.
Instead of sitting on your butt next
summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition.
In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and
you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not
just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car,
you'll get more for it.
In restoring your old car you have made yourself
richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is
obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at
it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was.
[
5
]
Kids know, without knowing they know, that they can create
wealth. If you need to give someone a present and don't
have any money, you make one. But kids are so bad at making
things that they consider home-made presents to be a distinct,
inferior, sort of thing to store-bought ones-- a mere expression
of the proverbial thought that counts.
And indeed, the lumpy ashtrays
we made for our parents did not have much of a resale market.
Craftsmen
The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be
created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen.
Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones.
But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and
fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is
computer programmers.
A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and
create wealth
. A good piece of software is, in itself,
a valuable thing.
There is no manufacturing to confuse the issue. Those
characters you type
are a complete, finished product.
If someone sat down and wrote a web
browser that didn't suck (a fine idea, by the way), the world
would be that much richer.
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Everyone in a company works together to create
wealth, in the sense of making more things people want.
Many of the employees (e.g. the people in the mailroom or
the personnel department) work at one remove from the
actual making of stuff. Not the programmers. They
literally think the product, one line at a time.
And so it's clearer to programmers that wealth is something
that's made, rather than being distributed, like slices of a
pie, by some imaginary Daddy.
It's also obvious to programmers that there are huge variations
in the rate at which wealth is created. At Viaweb we had one
programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity.
I remember watching what he did one long day and estimating that
he had added several hundred thousand dollars
to the market value of the company.
A great programmer, on a roll, could
create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks.
A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or
even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).
This is
why so many of the best programmers are libertarians.
In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.
When those far removed from the creation of wealth-- undergraduates,
reporters, politicians-- hear
that the richest 5% of the people have
half the total wealth, they tend to think
injustice!
An experienced programmer would be more likely to think
is that all?
The top 5% of programmers
probably write 99% of the good software.
Wealth can be created without being sold. Scientists, till
recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they
created. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin,
because we're less likely to die from infections. Wealth
is whatever people want, and not dying is certainly something
we want. Hackers often donate their work by
writing open source software that anyone can use for free.
I am much the richer for the operating system
FreeBSD, which I'm running on the computer I'm using now,
and so is Yahoo, which runs it on all their servers.
What a Job Is
In industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or
another at least until their twenties. After all those years you get
used to the idea of belonging to a group of people who all get up
in the morning, go to some set of buildings, and do things that they
do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. Belonging to such a group becomes
part of your identity: name, age, role, institution.
If you have to introduce yourself, or
someone else describes you, it will be as something like, John
Smith, age 10, a student at such and such elementary school, or
John Smith, age 20, a student at such and such college.
When John Smith finishes school he is expected to get a job. And
what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution.
Superficially it's a lot like college. You pick the companies you
want to work for and apply to join them. If one likes you, you
become a member of this new group. You get up in the morning and
go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily,
enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life is not as much fun,
and you get paid, instead of paying, as you did in college. But
the similarities feel greater than the differences. John Smith is
now John Smith, 22, a software developer at such and such corporation.
In fact John Smith's
life has changed more than he realizes. Socially, a company
looks much like college, but the deeper you go into the
underlying reality, the more different it gets.
What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue to
exist, is earn money. And the way most companies make money
is by creating wealth. Companies can be so specialized that this
similarity is concealed, but it is not only manufacturing
companies that create wealth. A big component of wealth is
location.
Remember that magic machine that could
make you cars and cook you dinner and so on? It would not be
so useful if it delivered your dinner to a random location
in central Asia.
If wealth means what people want, companies that move
things also create wealth. Ditto for
many other kinds of companies that don't make anything
physical. Nearly all companies exist to do something people
want.
And that's what you do, as well, when you go to work for a company.
But here there is another layer that tends to obscure the underlying
reality. In a company, the work you do is averaged together with
a lot of other people's.
You may not even be aware you're doing something people
want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company as a
whole must be giving people something they want, or they won't make
any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on
average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth
of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes,
and will go out of business.
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs
to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of
an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to
start doing something people want. You don't
need to
join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people
working together to do something people want. It's doing something people
want that matters, not joining the group.
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For most people the
best plan probably is to go to work for some existing
company. But it is a good idea to understand what's happening
when you do this. A job means doing something people want,
averaged together with everyone else in that company.
Working Harder
That averaging gets to be a problem.
I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the
difficulty of assigning a value to each person's work.
For the most part they punt. In a
big company you get paid a fairly predictable salary for working
fairly hard. You're expected not to be obviously incompetent or
lazy, but you're not expected to devote your whole life to your
work.
It turns out, though, that there are economies of scale in how much of your
life you devote to your work. In the right kind of business,
someone who really devoted himself to work could generate ten or
even a hundred times as much wealth as an average
employee. A programmer, for example, instead of chugging along
maintaining and updating an existing piece of software, could write
a whole new piece of software, and with it create a new source of
revenue.
Companies are not set up to reward people who want to do this.
You can't go to your boss and say, I'd like to start working ten
times as hard, so will you please pay me ten times as much? For
one thing, the official fiction is that you are already working as
hard as you can. But a more serious problem is that the company
has no way of measuring the value of your work.
Salesmen are an exception. It's easy
to measure how much revenue they generate, and they're
usually paid a percentage of it. If a salesman wants to work harder,
he can just start doing it, and he will automatically
get paid proportionally more.
There is one other job besides sales where big companies can
hire first-rate people: in the top management jobs.
And for the same reason: their performance can
be measured. The top managers are
held responsible for the performance of the entire company.
Because an ordinary employee's performance can't usually
be measured, he is not expected to do
more than put in a solid effort. Whereas top management, like
salespeople, have to actually come up with the numbers.
The CEO of a company that tanks cannot plead that he put in
a solid effort. If the company does badly, he's done badly.
A company that could pay all its employees so straightforwardly
would be enormously successful. Many employees would work harder
if they could get paid for it. More importantly,
such a company would attract people who wanted to work
especially hard.
It would crush its competitors.
Unfortunately, companies can't pay everyone like salesmen. Salesmen
work alone. Most employees' work is tangled together. Suppose
a company makes some kind of consumer gadget. The
engineers build a reliable gadget with all kinds of new features;
the industrial designers design a beautiful case for it; and then
the marketing people convince everyone that
it's something they've got to have. How do you know how much of the
gadget's sales are due to each group's efforts? Or, for that
matter, how much is due to the creators of past gadgets that gave
the company a reputation for quality? There's no way to
untangle all their contributions. Even if you could read the minds
of the consumers, you'd find these factors were all blurred together.
If you want to go faster, it's a problem to have your work
tangled together with a large number of other people's. In a
large group, your performance is not separately measurable-- and
the rest of the group slows you down.
Measurement and Leverage
To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two
things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a
position where your performance can be measured, or there is
no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to
have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have
a big effect.
Measurement alone is not enough. An example of a job with
measurement but not leverage is doing piecework in a
sweatshop. Your performance is measured and you get paid
accordingly, but you have no scope for decisions. The only
decision you get to make is how fast you work, and that
can probably only increase your earnings by a factor
of two or three.
An example of a job with both measurement and leverage would
be lead actor in a movie. Your performance can be measured in the
gross of the movie. And you have leverage in the sense that your
performance can make or break it.
CEOs also have both measurement and leverage. They're measured,
in that the performance of the company is their performance.
And they have leverage in that their decisions
set the whole company moving in one direction or another.
I think everyone who gets rich by their own efforts will be
found to be in a situation with measurement and leverage.
Everyone I can think of does: CEOs, movie stars,
hedge fund managers, professional athletes. A good hint to the
presence of leverage is the possibility of failure.
Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is
big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying
possibility of loss. CEOs, stars, fund managers, and athletes
all live with the sword hanging over their heads;
the moment they start to suck, they're out. If you're in
a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich,
because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.
But you don't have to become a CEO or a movie star to
be in a situation with measurement and leverage. All you
need to do is be part of a small group working on a
hard problem.
Smallness = Measurement
If you can't measure the value of the work done by individual
employees, you can get close. You can measure the value
of the work done by small groups.
One level at which you can accurately measure the revenue
generated by employees is at the level of the whole company.
When the company is small, you are thereby fairly close to
measuring the contributions of individual employees. A viable
startup might only have ten employees, which puts you within a
factor of ten of measuring individual effort.
Starting or joining a startup is thus as close as most
people can get to saying to one's boss, I want to work ten times
as hard, so please pay me ten times as much. There are two
differences: you're not saying it to your boss, but directly to the
customers (for whom your boss is only a proxy after all), and
you're not doing it individually, but along with a small group
of other ambitious people.
It will, ordinarily, be a group. Except in a few unusual kinds
of work, like acting or writing books, you can't be a company
of one person.
And the people you work with had better be good, because it's their work that
yours is going to be averaged with.
A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers.
Two things keep the speed of the
galley down. One is that individual rowers don't see any
result from working harder.
The other is that, in a group of a
thousand people, the average rower is likely to be
pretty average.
If you took ten people at random out of the big galley and
put them in a boat by themselves, they could probably go
faster. They would have both carrot and stick to motivate
them. An energetic rower would be encouraged by the thought
that he could have a visible effect on the speed of
the boat. And if someone was lazy, the others would be more likely
to notice and complain.
But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when
you take the ten
best
rowers out of the big galley
and put them in a boat together. They will have all
the extra motivation that comes from being in a small group.
But more importantly, by selecting that small a group
you can get the best rowers. Each one will be in
the top 1%. It's a much better deal for them to average
their work together with a small group of their peers than to
average it with everyone.
That's the real point of startups. Ideally, you are getting
together with a group of other people who also want to work
a lot harder, and get paid a lot more, than they would in
a big company. And because startups tend to get founded
by self-selecting groups of ambitious people who already
know one another (at least by reputation), the level of
measurement is more precise than you get from smallness alone.
A startup is not merely ten people, but ten people like you.
Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup
depends on the first ten employees. I agree. If
anything, it's more like the first five.
Being small is not, in itself, what makes startups kick butt,
but rather that small groups can be select.
You don't want small in the sense of a
village, but small in the sense of an all-star team.
The larger a group, the closer its average member will be to the average
for the population as a whole. So all other things being
equal, a very able person in a big company is probably
getting a bad deal, because his performance is dragged down by
the overall lower performance of the others. Of course,
all other things often are not equal: the able person may
not care about money, or may prefer the stability of a large
company. But a very able person who does care about money
will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small
group of peers.
Technology = Leverage
Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with
measurement and leverage.
They allow measurement because they're small,
and they offer leverage because they
make money by inventing new technology.
What is technology? It's
technique
. It's the way
we all do things. And when
you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied
by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing
rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a
startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut
hair one customer at a time. Whereas if
you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about,
you help everyone who uses your solution.
That's leverage.
If you look at history, it seems that most people
who got rich by creating wealth did it by developing
new technology. You just can't fry eggs or cut hair fast enough.
What made the Florentines rich in 1200
was the discovery of new techniques for making the high-tech
product of the time, fine woven cloth. What made the
Dutch rich in 1600 was the discovery of shipbuilding and
navigation techniques that enabled them to dominate the seas
of the Far East.
Fortunately there is a natural fit between smallness and
solving hard problems. The leading edge of technology moves
fast. Technology that's valuable today could be worthless
in a couple years. Small companies are more at home in this
world, because they don't have layers of bureaucracy to
slow them down.
Also, technical advances tend to come from unorthodox approaches,
and small companies are less constrained by convention.
Big companies can develop technology. They just can't do it
quickly. Their size makes them slow and prevents
them from rewarding employees for the extraordinary
effort required. So in practice big companies only get to develop
technology in fields where large capital requirements prevent startups from
competing with them, like microprocessors, power plants,
or passenger aircraft. And even in those fields they depend heavily
on startups for components and ideas.
It's obvious that biotech or software startups exist to solve
hard technical problems, but
I think it will also be found to be true
in businesses that don't seem to be about technology. McDonald's,
for example, grew big by designing a system, the McDonald's
franchise, that could then be reproduced at will all over the
face of the earth. A McDonald's franchise is controlled by rules
so precise that it is practically
a piece of software. Write once, run everywhere.
Ditto for Wal-Mart. Sam Walton got rich not by being a
retailer, but by designing a new kind of store.
Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall
aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way.
At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was
run upstairs.
Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big,
fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a
staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The
bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can.
Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage.
Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.
What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought
hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our
software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty,
we'd always take the harder one. Not just because it was
more valuable, but
because it was harder.
We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors
to follow us over difficult ground.
Like guerillas, startups prefer the difficult terrain of the
mountains, where the troops of the central government
can't follow. I can remember times when we were just
exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical
problem. And I'd be delighted, because something that was
hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.
This is not just a good way to run a startup. It's what
a startup is.
Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it:
barriers to entry.
If you go to a VC with a new
idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things
he'll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to
develop? That is, how much difficult ground
have you put between yourself and potential pursuers?
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And you had better have a convincing explanation of why
your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as
soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they'll make
their own, and with their brand name, capital, and
distribution clout, they'll take away your market overnight.
You'd be like guerillas caught in the open field by regular
army forces.
One way to put up barriers to entry is through patents.
But patents may not provide much protection.
Competitors commonly find ways to work around a patent.
And if they can't, they
may simply violate it and invite you to sue them.
A big company is not afraid to be sued; it's an everyday thing
for them. They'll make sure that suing them is expensive and
takes a long time.
Ever heard of Philo Farnsworth? He invented
television. The reason you've never
heard of him is that his company was not the one to make
money from it.
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]
The company that did was RCA, and
Farnsworth's reward for his efforts was a decade of
patent litigation.
Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If
you can develop technology that's simply too hard for
competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on other
defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and
then at every decision point, take the harder choice.
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The Catch(es)
If it were simply a matter of working harder than
an ordinary employee and getting paid proportionately, it would
obviously be a good deal to start a startup. Up to a point it
would be more fun. I don't think many people
like the slow pace of big companies, the interminable meetings,
the water-cooler conversations, the clueless middle managers,
and so on.
Unfortunately there are a couple catches. One is that you
can't choose the point on the curve that you want to inhabit.
You can't decide, for example, that you'd like to work just
two or three times as hard, and get paid that much more. When
you're running a startup, your competitors decide how
hard you work. And they pretty much all make the same decision:
as hard as you possibly can.
The other catch is that the payoff is only on average proportionate
to your productivity. There is, as I said before, a large
random multiplier in the success of any company. So in
practice the deal is not that you're 30 times as productive and get
paid 30 times as much. It is that you're 30 times as productive,
and get paid between zero and a thousand times as much.
If the mean is 30x, the median is probably zero.
Most startups tank, and not just the dogfood
portals we all heard about during
the Internet Bubble. It's common for a startup
to be developing a genuinely good product, take slightly
too long to do it, run out of money, and have to shut down.
A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab
is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing:
to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos,
as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little
consolation to the individual mosquito.
Startups, like mosquitos, tend to be an all-or-nothing proposition.
And you don't generally know which of the two you're going to
get till the last minute.
Viaweb came close to tanking several times. Our trajectory
was like a sine wave. Fortunately we got bought at
the top of the cycle, but it was damned close. While we were
visiting Yahoo in California to talk about selling the company
to them, we had to borrow a conference room to reassure
an investor who was about to back out of a new round of funding
that we needed to stay alive.
The all-or-nothing aspect of startups was not something we wanted.
Viaweb's hackers were all extremely risk-averse.
If there had been some way just to work super hard and get
paid for it, without having a lottery mixed in, we would have
been delighted. We would have much preferred a 100% chance of
$1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, even though
theoretically the second is worth twice as much. Unfortunately,
there is not currently any space in the business world where
you can get the first deal.
The closest you can get is by
selling your startup in the early stages, giving up upside
(and risk) for a smaller but guaranteed payoff. We had a
chance to do this, and stupidly, as we then thought, let it slip by.
After that we became comically eager to sell.
For the next year or so,
if anyone expressed the slightest curiosity about Viaweb
we would try to sell them the company. But there were no takers,
so we had to keep going.
It would have been a bargain to
buy us at an early stage, but companies doing acquisitions are not
looking for bargains. A company big enough to acquire
startups will be big enough to be fairly conservative, and
within the company the people in charge of acquisitions will
be among the more conservative, because they are likely to be
business school types who joined the company late.
They would rather overpay for a safe choice. So
it is easier to sell an established startup, even at a large
premium, than an early-stage one.
Get Users
I think it's a good idea to get bought, if you can. Running a
business is different from growing one.
It is just as well to let a big company take over once you reach
cruising altitude. It's
also financially wiser, because selling allows you to diversify.
What would you think of a financial advisor who put all his
client's assets into one volatile stock?
How do you get bought? Mostly by doing the same things
you'd do if you didn't intend to sell the company. Being
profitable, for example. But getting bought is also an art
in its own right, and one that we spent a lot of time trying
to master.
Potential buyers will
always delay if they can. The hard part about getting
bought is getting them to act. For most people, the most powerful motivator
is not the hope of gain, but the fear of loss. For potential
acquirers, the most powerful motivator is the prospect that
one of their competitors will buy you. This, as we found,
causes CEOs to take red-eyes.
The second biggest is the worry that, if they don't buy you
now, you'll continue to grow rapidly and will cost more to
acquire later, or even become a competitor.
In both cases, what it all comes down to is users.
You'd think that a company about to buy you would do a lot of
research and decide for themselves how valuable your technology
was. Not at all. What they go by is the number of users you
have.
In effect, acquirers assume the customers know who has the
best technology. And this is not as stupid as it sounds. Users
are the only real proof that you've created wealth. Wealth is
what people want, and if people aren't using your software,
maybe it's not just because you're bad at marketing. Maybe it's
because you haven't made what they want.
Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for.
Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are
obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead
of making users happy. In a startup, you're not just trying to
solve problems. You're trying to solve problems
that
users care about.
So I think you should make users the test, just as
acquirers do. Treat a startup as an optimization problem
in which performance is measured by number of users. As anyone
who has tried to optimize software knows, the key is measurement.
When you try to guess where your program is slow, and what would
make it faster, you almost always guess wrong.
Number of users may not be the perfect test, but it will
be very close. It's what acquirers care about. It's what
revenues depend on.
It's what makes competitors unhappy.
It's what impresses reporters, and potential
new users. Certainly it's a better test than your a priori
notions of what problems are important to solve, no matter how
technically adept you are.
Among other things, treating a startup as an optimization
problem will help you avoid another
pitfall that VCs worry about, and rightly-- taking a long time
to develop a product. Now we can recognize this as something
hackers already know to avoid: premature optimization. Get a version
1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to
measure, you're optimizing based on guesses.
The ball you need to keep your eye on here is the underlying
principle that wealth is what people want. If you plan to get
rich by creating wealth, you have to know what people want.
So few businesses really pay attention to making customers happy.
How often do you walk into a store, or call a company on the
phone, with a feeling of dread in the back of your mind?
When you hear "your call is important to us, please stay on
the line," do you think, oh good, now everything will be all right?
A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner.
But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone
eats. So any difference between what people want and what
you deliver is multiplied.
You please or annoy
customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want,
the more wealth you generate.
Wealth and Power
Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of
human history it has not even been the most common. Until
a few centuries ago,
the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs,
land, and cattle,
and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance,
marriage, conquest, or confiscation.
Naturally wealth had a bad reputation.
Two things changed. The first was the rule of law. For most of the world's
history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his
henchmen
would find a way to steal it.
But in medieval Europe something new happened.
A new class of merchants and manufacturers
began to collect in towns.
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Together they were able to withstand the local feudal
lord. So
for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the
nerds' lunch money.
This was naturally a great incentive,
and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change,
industrialization.
A great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial
Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition
was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace.
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]
One piece of evidence is what happened to countries
that tried to return to the old model, like the Soviet
Union, and to a lesser extent Britain under the labor
governments of the 1960s and early 1970s. Take away the incentive
of wealth, and technical innovation grinds to a halt.
Remember what a startup is, economically:
a way of saying, I want to work faster. Instead of accumulating
money slowly by being paid a regular wage for fifty years, I
want to get it over with as soon as possible. So governments
that forbid you to accumulate wealth are in effect decreeing
that you work slowly. They're willing to let you earn $3 million over
fifty years, but they're not willing to let you work so hard that
you can do it in two. They are like
the corporate boss that you can't go to and say, I want to work
ten times as hard, so please pay me ten times a much.
Except this is not a boss you can escape by starting your own
company.
The problem with working slowly is not just that technical
innovation happens slowly. It's that it tends not to happen at all.
It's only when you're deliberately looking for hard problems,
as a way to use speed to the greatest advantage, that you take
on this kind of project. Developing new technology is a
pain in the ass. It is, as Edison said, one percent
inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Without the incentive of wealth, no one wants to do it.
Engineers will work on sexy projects like fighter planes and moon
rockets for ordinary salaries, but more mundane technologies
like light bulbs or semiconductors have to be developed by entrepreneurs.
Startups
are not just something that happened in Silicon Valley in
the last couple decades. Since it became possible to
get rich by creating wealth, everyone who has done it has
used essentially the same recipe: measurement and leverage,
where measurement comes from working with a small
group, and leverage from developing new techniques.
The recipe was the same in Florence in 1200 as it is
in Santa Clara today.
Understanding this may help to answer an important question:
why Europe grew so powerful.
Was it something about the geography of
Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior?
Was it their religion? The answer (or at least
the proximate cause) may be that the
Europeans
rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who
made a lot of money to keep it.
Once you're allowed to do that,
people who want to get rich can do it by generating
wealth instead of stealing it.
The resulting technological growth translates not only
into wealth but into military power. The theory that led to
the stealth plane was developed by a Soviet mathematician.
But because the Soviet Union didn't have a computer industry,
it remained for them a theory;
they didn't have hardware capable of executing the calculations
fast enough to design an actual airplane.
In that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as
World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history.
Don't let a ruling
class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs.
The same recipe that makes individuals rich
makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch
money, and you rule the world.
Notes
[
1
]
One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is
uninterruptability
. Different kinds of
work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a
manuscript
could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes
with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for
hacking is very long: it might take an hour just to load
a problem into your head. So the
cost of having someone from personnel
call you about a form you forgot to fill out can be huge.
This is why hackers give you such a baleful stare as they
turn from their screen to answer your question. Inside
their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.
The mere possibility of being interrupted deters hackers
from starting hard projects. This is why they
tend to work late at night, and why it's next to impossible
to write great software in a cubicle (except late at night).
One great advantage of startups is that they don't yet have
any of the people who interrupt you. There is no personnel
department, and thus no form nor anyone to call you about it.
[
2
]
Faced with the idea that people working for startups might be
20 or 30 times as productive as those working for large companies,
executives at large companies will naturally wonder, how could
I get the people working for me to do that? The answer is
simple: pay them to.
Internally most companies are run like Communist states.
If you believe in free markets, why not turn your company into one?
Hypothesis: A company will be maximally profitable when each
employee is paid in proportion to the wealth they generate.
[
3
]
Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the
distinction between money and wealth. Adam
Smith (
Wealth of Nations
, v:i) mentions several
that tried to preserve their
"wealth" by forbidding the export of gold or silver.
But having more of the medium of exchange would not make
a country richer; if you have more money chasing the same
amount of material wealth, the only result is higher prices.
[
4
]
There are many senses of the word "wealth," not all of
them material. I'm not trying to make a deep philosophical
point here about which
is the true kind. I'm writing about one specific,
rather technical sense of the word "wealth." What
people will give you money for.
This is an interesting sort of wealth to study, because
it is the kind that prevents you from starving.
And what people will give you money for depends on them,
not you.
When you're starting a business,
it's easy to slide into thinking that customers
want what you do. During the Internet Bubble I talked
to a woman who, because she liked the outdoors, was
starting an "outdoor portal." You know what
kind of business you should start if you like
the outdoors? One to recover data from crashed hard disks.
What's the connection? None at all. Which is precisely my point.
If you want
to create wealth (in the narrow technical sense of not
starving) then you should be especially skeptical about any
plan that centers on things you like doing.
That is where your idea of what's valuable is least
likely to coincide with other people's.
[
5
]
In the average car restoration you probably do make everyone
else microscopically poorer, by doing a small amount of damage to
the environment. While environmental costs should be taken
into account, they don't
make wealth a zero-sum game. For example, if you repair
a machine that's broken because a part has come unscrewed,
you create wealth with no environmental cost.
[
5b
]
This essay was written before Firefox.
[
6
]
Many people feel confused and depressed in
their early twenties. Life seemed so much more fun in college.
Well, of course it was. Don't be fooled by the surface similarities.
You've gone from guest to servant.
It's possible to have fun in this new world.
Among other things, you now get to go behind the doors that say
"authorized personnel only."
But the change is a shock at first, and all the worse
if you're not consciously aware of it.
[
7
]
When VCs asked us how long it would take another startup
to duplicate our software, we used to reply that they probably
wouldn't be able to at all. I think this made us seem naive,
or liars.
[
8
]
Few technologies have one clear inventor. So as
a rule, if you know the "inventor" of something
(the telephone, the assembly line, the airplane,
the light bulb, the transistor) it is because their
company made money from it, and the company's PR people worked
hard to spread the story. If you don't know who invented
something (the automobile, the television, the computer,
the jet engine, the laser), it's because other companies
made all the money.
[
9
]
This is a good plan for life in general.
If you have two choices, choose the harder.
If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or
sit home and watch TV, go running.
Probably the reason this trick works so well is that
when you have two choices and one is harder, the
only reason you're even considering the other is laziness.
You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing
to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.
[
10
]
It is probably no accident that the middle class
first appeared in northern Italy and the low countries,
where there were no strong central governments. These two
regions were the richest of their time and became the twin
centers from which Renaissance civilization radiated.
If they no longer play that role, it is because
other places, like the United States, have been truer to the
principles they discovered.
[
11
]
It may indeed be a sufficient condition. But if so, why didn't
the Industrial Revolution happen earlier? Two possible (and
not incompatible) answers: (a) It did.
The Industrial Revolution was one in a series.
(b) Because in medieval towns, monopolies
and guild regulations initially slowed the development of new means
of production.
Comment
on this essay.
Russian Translation
Arabic Translation
Spanish Translation
You'll find this essay and 14 others in
Hackers & Painters
. |
@McCormickProf Do you honestly think that he would have been capable of serving as president for 4 more years?
@JillFilipovic Isn't it forbidden now to say that men can never be pregnant?
@BW_Jones We hope...
@mattyglesias There's no new information. Everything in Biden's announcement was already priced in.
@Chris_arnade The voters will have a say in who wins the general election. So if they end up nominating someone that voters don't like, they'll be punished for it.
@Wealth_Theory @elonmusk @KanekoaTheGreat Once again, the simplest explanation is the true one. The members of his party saw the same thing that voters did, and they both decided he was too old.
@Wealth_Theory @elonmusk @KanekoaTheGreat Listen to yourself.
@KanekoaTheGreat Honestly, what bullshit. What else would you expect to happen if someone is declining due to old age, and in denial about it? His party rebels, and when enough of them urge him to drop out, he drops out.
@elonmusk @KanekoaTheGreat You don't have to assume that Biden was a puppet and the "real powers" have discarded him. This is how political parties work. The same thing happened with Nixon, when his party rebelled.
@elonmusk @KanekoaTheGreat You don't have to invent conspiracy theories to explain what happened here. The simplest explanation is also the true one. He was declining due to old age, and in denial about it. His party rebelled. When enough of them told him to drop out, he dropped out. |
@Kukewilly You think you've got it bad? Almost all of mine are written by him.
@Rapahelz I generally agree with Mill, but I think his statement is tilted toward politics. The clash of ideas isn't what produces scientific truth. If anything it's a drag on the people who are right.
12 yo and I are sitting at breakfast. He's ready to leave. I'm reading a paper. So he pretends to be interested in something in the paper and asks for it, so that I'll get bored and go pay. I'd never have realized except that he smiled a little as I handed him the paper.
@robfoot His administration seems to have done a good job of getting Covid vaccines developed. So to the extent he was personally involved, that would have been an example.
@brucefenton They're not unrelated. It's a test of character, and character helps in solving most problems.
@structureship Whether there are other Republicans that they like.
@snowmaker Man does that get old quickly.
@yar_vol @nikitabier How else would you decide what to do?
@nikitabier Exception: At Viaweb we had a tour that caused users to create a small working online store. Whereupon the question switched from "Would you like to use our software to create a store?" to "Would you like to keep the store you've already made?" That converted way better.
@thejohnnystan It was the reaction to this tweet that made me write that. All I said was that this picture made me happy, and that that being able to read to a bunch of little kids would be a good threshold for politicians. |
@ritendn Not only did I not say that, according to Google search, no one else has either. So feel free to say it, just don't attribute it to me.
@SyntaxAndChill @elivieira It seems like a lot of people would like to believe that, but if anything the people I've noticed leaving are less political than the average account I follow. Most of them are the kind of people who just want to nerd out about their special interest in peace.
@0xgnarea @santygegen I'm planning to try it out.
@promethurious @santygegen It's weird how determined you and the people liking this tweet seem to be to believe that. I sense a bit of panic there.
I'm neutral at this point. I don't even have a Bluesky account yet and have no idea what it's like. So I think the bias here is on your side.
@eulerfx On a social network I want interesting, not demographically balanced, and the two are not identical.
@santygegen The kind of comments you see on this thread explain one of the reasons. Another one is probably the deprioritization of links on Twitter. But ultimately it's simply that people go where interesting people are, and a lot of interesting people seem to be moving.
@elivieira Not particularly. If there's a pattern they tend to be more bookish types.
@raouldukelee Brian Lane's book Spitfire!
Every day I see this from a couple accounts I follow.
If you'd asked me I'd have guessed the word "ginormous" was invented in America in the 1970s, but it turns out it's British World War II slang. I just came across it in a book published in 1942. |
@SantiagoSirvana @federicoantoni It makes me happy that it was that one.
@amasad Hah, we have that in common. I was YC's first chef.
"If you tap them and they're hard as rock, that's a bad sign."
— local bakery manager on their croissants
@Noahpinion Interesting. How do you think this time is being spent instead?
@Noahpinion How can that be if Bluesky usage is decreasing?
@samhogan If the other YC cos are legit users, that's great. In fact it's one of the reasons B2B startups do YC.
But if they form rings to do this, that's bad, and the partners crack down hard on it.
@John_Hanson_ I'm usually writing one. Some just take longer than others.
@aidenybai Around 20 it seems.
@ReichlinMelnick @DHSgov ChatGPT?
The Shape of the Essay Field: https://t.co/bVVbRx9JYS |
Incidentally, this is a perfect example of why it's a mistake for Twitter to deprioritize links. Presumably Elon's justification is that he hopes all content will one day live here. But an app like this viewer is never going to.
This fascinating app lets you view the present-day British landscape in parallel with maps from about 1900. Here's the ghost of a huge country house that got demolished in 1959.
https://t.co/5ge2WvgNIO
The Python Paradox in the wild. (I knew when I chose it that this name wouldn't age well.) https://t.co/C1P8aOxj1w
@mhdempsey Unless of course you're talking about some other mysterious kind of goodness that won't ultimately be reflected in how well the companies do. In which case I invite you to describe in more detail what this fascinating new kind of goodness consists of.
@mhdempsey Surely as a VC you know the only thing that really affects returns is how well the companies eventually do.
And it has everything to do with your statement. You're implying YC startups aren't as good as they were in the past. I'm replying that we'll be able to measure that.
If people want to make woke movies, why don't they just write new scripts instead of "reimagining" the classics? This is not a rhetorical question. They want to overwrite the classics.
Authoritarians converge. They may start out on the far right or the far left, but they all end up with similar policies.
@mhdempsey People are always saying this. It's no more true now than it has been in the past. In fact it's probably less true. But the returns will show who's right, as they always do.
@ahistoryinart It is indeed. That rare and wonderful combination of still life and landscape.
@somewheresy I tried. |
The phrase "your data" conflates two senses of "your": about you, and belonging to you, and data about you doesn't necessarily belong to you. If I observe, for example, that you're at place p at time t, you don't own that observation. https://t.co/tr8T1Apl1V
The puppy in question, taking a nap after his exertions yesterday. https://t.co/v5lHhKqikj
When I dropped 12 yo off at school, he was calculating exactly how many minutes it would be before he was back home with the new puppy.
I asked him if there was anything that made kids happier than a new puppy. He thought about it for a second and replied "No."
@Mentioum With Defender, I notice.
Today was the day we got Biscuit. https://t.co/fyUxuFKVoI
@Chris_arnade I don't mind it. Royal portraits are rarely great paintings. (Holbein and van Dyck were exceptions.)
@archived_videos I've never liked using a desk against the wall. I always face the door.
@dzstep The weather.
My old office in California. I wrote a lot of essays here. https://t.co/ZoA0SZBzGW
@bwertz @VersionOneVC Why do they have to be early? Google wasn't.
I'd leave it to the founders to decide whether a field still has room. They're the domain experts. |
I talked to a startup today that was already doing everything right. We're only three days into the new YC batch. How could they be doing everything right already? It turned out the founders had spent several years working for another YC startup and learned what to do there.
Man, doing office hours with startups gives you a completely different view of the world from reading the news. The news is all disaster and decline, but more startups are doing more cool new things than ever before. Which is reality? Both are; that's the weird thing.
"When I was jaw-thrusting a little girl and I had three or four minutes until her intubation was set up, I was just thinking: 'Was it my tax dollars that put the shrapnel in this girl's brain, or was it my neighbor's?'"
@Chris_arnade How do you use the rain tarp?
@Chris_arnade What new gear did you get?
@chainsy Ah, but I tweeted it from America, so it didn't cross the border. Though of course I'd have to do a traceroute to be sure.
It's possible for ideas to cross the border illegally? https://t.co/SeVVMM1AbX
@AustinCarr The cereal wasn't what set off their growth. It just made a little money.
@AndreSobolewski That's an interesting question. They're both very unpredictable, but for different reasons. The effects of AI are unpredictable because intelligence is so fundamental. Trump is unpredictable because his ideas come randomly from outside.
@Big_Picture_89 You talk to the founders, and learn from that what they care about. |
@DaivikGoel It's so valuable to have places where smart people congregate.
I don't mind letting NPR or the ACLU or the New York Times decline into irrelevance, but we should probably fight for the universities.
@bast_i Regulation isn't only policies, but also enforcement actions, and that's where the real abuses tend to happen.
@KarenAttiah That's why I took care to qualify my question as I did. I'll ask it again. Did any civil rights protests block traffic just for the sake of blocking traffic?
@KarenAttiah Obviously a big protest could block a road and thereby inconvenience people travelling on it. But that's different from a small group blocking a road *in order to* inconvenience the people travelling on it.
@JeffMcSweeny No one is more eager to learn that than Coinbase, but the SEC won't tell them.
What I've learned since is that there are motives even more powerful than money. Fame, political power, ideology, revenge. And these are all the more dangerous because they're so much more easily concealed.
I made a similar mistake about reporters when I was a kid. I thought that since reporters had no *financial* motive for lying, in a disagreement between a reporter and a business, the reporter must be telling the truth.
Coinbase and Bloom Tech illustrate the dangers of starting a startup in a regulated industry. When I was a kid I used to think that regulators (and prosecutors) were merely trying to protect everyone. What other motive could they have? But boy are they not.
@bugimane They explicitly rejected doing this. When someone suggested blocking traffic to the 1964 World's Fair, Martin Luther King called the idea a "tactical error." |
Watch with the sound on.
@billclerico @RichAberman @jesslivingston @tlbtlbtlb @ycombinator That logo was and still is well into the top half.
@avocado4096 How is it that you have zero followers with insights like this?
@kaush_trip You'd have to give people more money (as YC does) but otherwise I wouldn't change anything.
"I want them to know what a loser I was. No other graduation speaker is going to tell them that."
— Jessica working on the commencement speech she's giving at Bucknell this year
So it should be. That's the point of ethics: to stop you from doing something you'd like to do, but that would be wrong.
@judegomila @ycombinator That's funny, I'm wearing shorts and smiling as I read this.
@marcelolima @jessesingal Do you have any evidence that he actually is a terrorist sympathizer, rather than just being called one, as everyone who speaks out on behalf of the Palestinians is?
Or is this simply an example of the latter?
@rauchg And here, underweighted.
@AshRust @jesslivingston @ycombinator Thanks Ash! |
Why to Not Not Start a Startup
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
March 2007
(This essay is derived from talks at the 2007
Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.)
We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data
about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had
eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least
four succeeded. Three have been acquired:
Reddit
was a merger of
two, Reddit and Infogami, and a third was acquired that we can't
talk about yet. Another from that batch was
Loopt
, which is doing
so well they could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if
they wanted to.
So about half the founders from that first summer, less than two
years ago, are now rich, at least by their standards. (One thing
you learn when you get rich is that there are many degrees of it.)
I'm not ready to predict our success rate will stay as high as 50%.
That first batch could have been an anomaly. But we should be able
to do better than the oft-quoted (and probably made
up) standard figure of 10%. I'd feel safe aiming at 25%.
Even the founders who fail don't seem to have such a bad time. Of
those first eight startups, three are now probably dead. In two
cases the founders just went on to do other things at the end of
the summer. I don't think they were traumatized by the experience.
The closest to a traumatic failure was Kiko, whose founders kept
working on their startup for a whole year before being squashed by
Google Calendar. But they ended up happy. They sold their software
on eBay for a quarter of a million dollars. After they paid back
their angel investors, they had about a year's salary each.
[
1
]
Then they immediately went on to start a new and much more exciting
startup,
Justin.TV
.
So here is an even more striking statistic: 0% of that first batch
had a terrible experience. They had ups and downs, like every
startup, but I don't think any would have traded it for a job in a
cubicle. And that statistic is probably not an anomaly. Whatever
our long-term success rate ends up being, I think the rate of people
who wish they'd gotten a regular job will stay close to 0%.
The big mystery to me is: why don't more people start startups? If
nearly everyone who does it prefers it to a regular job, and a
significant percentage get rich, why doesn't everyone want to do
this? A lot of people think we get thousands of applications for
each funding cycle. In fact we usually only get several hundred.
Why don't more people apply? And while it must seem to anyone
watching this world that startups are popping up like crazy, the
number is small compared to the number of people with the necessary
skills. The great majority of programmers still go straight from
college to cubicle, and stay there.
It seems like people are not acting in their own interest. What's
going on? Well, I can answer that. Because of Y Combinator's
position at the very start of the venture funding process, we're
probably the world's leading experts on the psychology of people
who aren't sure if they want to start a company.
There's nothing wrong with being unsure. If you're a hacker thinking
about starting a startup and hesitating before taking the leap,
you're part of a grand tradition. Larry and Sergey seem to have
felt the same before they started Google, and so did Jerry and Filo
before they started Yahoo. In fact, I'd guess the most successful
startups are the ones started by uncertain hackers rather than
gung-ho business guys.
We have some evidence to support this. Several of the most successful
startups we've funded told us later that they only decided to apply
at the last moment. Some decided only hours before the deadline.
The way to deal with uncertainty is to analyze it into components.
Most people who are reluctant to do something have about eight
different reasons mixed together in their heads, and don't know
themselves which are biggest. Some will be justified and some
bogus, but unless you know the relative proportion of each, you
don't know whether your overall uncertainty is mostly justified or
mostly bogus.
So I'm going to list all the components of people's reluctance to
start startups, and explain which are real. Then would-be founders
can use this as a checklist to examine their own feelings.
I admit my goal is to increase your self-confidence. But there are
two things different here from the usual confidence-building exercise.
One is that I'm motivated to be honest. Most people in the
confidence-building business have already achieved their goal when
you buy the book or pay to attend the seminar where they tell you
how great you are. Whereas if I encourage people to start startups
who shouldn't, I make my own life worse. If I encourage too many
people to apply to Y Combinator, it just means more work for me,
because I have to read all the applications.
The other thing that's going to be different is my approach. Instead
of being positive, I'm going to be negative. Instead of telling
you "come on, you can do it" I'm going to consider all the reasons
you aren't doing it, and show why most (but not all) should be
ignored. We'll start with the one everyone's born with.
1. Too young
A lot of people think they're too young to start a startup. Many
are right. The median age worldwide is about 27, so probably a
third of the population can truthfully say they're too young.
What's too young? One of our goals with Y Combinator was to discover
the lower bound on the age of startup founders. It always seemed
to us that investors were too conservative here—that they wanted
to fund professors, when really they should be funding grad students
or even undergrads.
The main thing we've discovered from pushing the edge of this
envelope is not where the edge is, but how fuzzy it is. The outer
limit may be as low as 16. We don't look beyond 18 because people
younger than that can't legally enter into contracts. But the most
successful founder we've funded so far, Sam Altman, was 19 at the
time.
Sam Altman, however, is an outlying data point. When he was 19,
he seemed like he had a 40 year old inside him. There are other
19 year olds who are 12 inside.
There's a reason we have a distinct word "adult" for people over a
certain age. There is a threshold you cross. It's conventionally
fixed at 21, but different people cross it at greatly varying ages.
You're old enough to start a startup if you've crossed this threshold,
whatever your age.
How do you tell? There are a couple tests adults use. I realized
these tests existed after meeting Sam Altman, actually. I noticed
that I felt like I was talking to someone much older. Afterward I
wondered, what am I even measuring? What made him seem older?
One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex.
When you're a little kid and you're asked to do something hard, you
can cry and say "I can't do it" and the adults will probably let
you off. As a kid there's a magic button you can press by saying
"I'm just a kid" that will get you out of most difficult situations.
Whereas adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They still
do, of course, but when they do they're ruthlessly pruned.
The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge.
Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge
from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If an
adult says "that's a stupid idea," a kid will either crawl away
with his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumes
inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to
"that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the
eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"
There are a lot of adults who still react childishly to challenges,
of course. What you don't often find are kids who react to challenges
like adults. When you do, you've found an adult, whatever their
age.
2. Too inexperienced
I once wrote that startup founders should be at least 23, and that
people should work for another company for a few years before
starting their own. I no longer believe that, and what changed my
mind is the example of the startups we've funded.
I still think 23 is a better age than 21. But the best way to get
experience if you're 21 is to start a startup. So, paradoxically,
if you're too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should do
is start one. That's a way more efficient cure for inexperience
than a normal job. In fact, getting a normal job may actually make
you less able to start a startup, by turning you into a tame animal
who thinks he needs an office to work in and a product manager to
tell him what software to write.
What really convinced me of this was the Kikos. They started a
startup right out of college. Their inexperience caused them to
make a lot of mistakes. But by the time we funded their second
startup, a year later, they had become extremely formidable. They
were certainly not tame animals. And there is no way they'd have
grown so much if they'd spent that year working at Microsoft, or
even Google. They'd still have been diffident junior programmers.
So now I'd advise people to go ahead and start startups right out
of college. There's no better time to take risks than when you're
young. Sure, you'll probably fail. But even failure will get you
to the ultimate goal faster than getting a job.
It worries me a bit to be saying this, because in effect we're
advising people to educate themselves by failing at our expense,
but it's the truth.
3. Not determined enough
You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder.
It's probably the single best predictor of success.
Some people may not be determined enough to make it. It's
hard for me to say for sure, because I'm so determined that I can't
imagine what's going on in the heads of people who aren't. But I
know they exist.
Most hackers probably underestimate their determination. I've seen
a lot become visibly more determined as they get used to running a
startup. I can think of
several we've funded who would have been delighted at first to be
bought for $2 million, but are now set on world domination.
How can you tell if you're determined enough, when Larry and Sergey
themselves were unsure at first about starting a company? I'm
guessing here, but I'd say the test is whether you're sufficiently
driven to work on your own projects. Though they may have been
unsure whether they wanted to start a company, it doesn't seem as
if Larry and Sergey were meek little research assistants, obediently
doing their advisors' bidding. They started projects of their own.
4. Not smart enough
You may need to be moderately smart to succeed as a startup founder.
But if you're worried about this, you're probably mistaken. If
you're smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to
start a startup, you probably are.
And in any case, starting a startup just doesn't require that much
intelligence. Some startups do. You have to be good at math to
write Mathematica. But most companies do more mundane stuff where
the decisive factor is effort, not brains. Silicon Valley can warp
your perspective on this, because there's a cult of smartness here.
People who aren't smart at least try to act that way. But if you
think it takes a lot of intelligence to get rich, try spending a
couple days in some of the fancier bits of New York or LA.
If you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup doing
something technically difficult, just write enterprise software.
Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're
sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.
5. Know nothing about business
This is another variable whose coefficient should be zero. You
don't need to know anything about business to start a startup. The
initial focus should be the product. All you need to know in this
phase is how to build things people want. If you succeed, you'll
have to think about how to make money from it. But this is so easy
you can pick it up on the fly.
I get a fair amount of flak for telling founders just to make
something great and not worry too much about making money. And yet
all the empirical evidence points that way: pretty much 100% of
startups that make something popular manage to make money from it.
And acquirers tell me privately that revenue is not what they buy
startups for, but their strategic value. Which means, because they
made something people want. Acquirers know the rule holds for them
too: if users love you, you can always make money from that somehow,
and if they don't, the cleverest business model in the world won't
save you.
So why do so many people argue with me? I think one reason is that
they hate the idea that a bunch of twenty year olds could get rich
from building something cool that doesn't make any money. They
just don't want that to be possible. But how possible it is doesn't
depend on how much they want it to be.
For a while it annoyed me to hear myself described as some kind of
irresponsible pied piper, leading impressionable young hackers down
the road to ruin. But now I realize this kind of controversy is a
sign of a good idea.
The most valuable truths are the ones most people don't believe.
They're like undervalued stocks. If you start with them, you'll
have the whole field to yourself. So when you find an idea you
know is good but most people disagree with, you should not
merely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in that
direction. In this case, that means you should seek out ideas that
would be popular but seem hard to make money from.
We'll bet a seed round you can't make something popular that we
can't figure out how to make money from.
6. No cofounder
Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much
for one person to bear. And though we differ from other investors
on a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, without
exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.
We've funded two single founders, but in both cases we suggested
their first priority should be to find a cofounder. Both did. But
we'd have preferred them to have cofounders before they applied.
It's not super hard to get a cofounder for a project that's just
been funded, and we'd rather have cofounders committed enough to
sign up for something super hard.
If you don't have a cofounder, what should you do? Get one. It's
more important than anything else. If there's no one where you
live who wants to start a startup with you, move where there are
people who do. If no one wants to work with you on your current
idea, switch to an idea people want to work on.
If you're still in school, you're surrounded by potential cofounders.
A few years out it gets harder to find them. Not only do you have
a smaller pool to draw from, but most already have jobs, and perhaps
even families to support. So if you had friends in college you
used to scheme about startups with, stay in touch with them as well
as you can. That may help keep the dream alive.
It's possible you could meet a cofounder through something like a
user's group or a conference. But I wouldn't be too optimistic.
You need to work with someone to know whether you want them as a
cofounder.
[
2
]
The real lesson to draw from this is not how to find a cofounder,
but that you should start startups when you're young and there are
lots of them around.
7. No idea
In a sense, it's not a problem if you don't have a good idea, because
most startups change their idea anyway. In the average Y Combinator
startup, I'd guess 70% of the idea is new at the end of the
first three months. Sometimes it's 100%.
In fact, we're so sure the founders are more important than the
initial idea that we're going to try something new this funding
cycle. We're going to let people apply with no idea at all. If you
want, you can answer the question on the application form that asks
what you're going to do with "We have no idea." If you seem really
good we'll accept you anyway. We're confident we can sit down with
you and cook up some promising project.
Really this just codifies what we do already. We put little weight
on the idea. We ask mainly out of politeness. The kind of question
on the application form that we really care about is the one where
we ask what cool things you've made. If what you've made is version
one of a promising startup, so much the better, but the main thing
we care about is whether you're good at making things. Being lead
developer of a popular open source project counts almost as much.
That solves the problem if you get funded by Y Combinator. What
about in the general case? Because in another sense, it is a problem
if you don't have an idea. If you start a startup with no idea,
what do you do next?
So here's the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. Find something
that's missing in your own life, and supply that need—no matter
how specific to you it seems. Steve Wozniak built himself a computer;
who knew so many other people would want them? A need that's narrow
but genuine is a better starting point than one that's broad but
hypothetical. So even if the problem is simply that you don't have
a date on Saturday night, if you can think of a way to fix that by
writing software, you're onto something, because a lot of other
people have the same problem.
8. No room for more startups
A lot of people look at the ever-increasing number of startups and
think "this can't continue." Implicit in their thinking is a
fallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups there
could be. But this is false. No one claims there's any limit on
the number of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies.
Why should there be any limit on the number who can work for equity
at 5-person companies?
[
3
]
Nearly everyone who works is satisfying some kind of need. Breaking
up companies into smaller units doesn't make those needs go away.
Existing needs would probably get satisfied more efficiently by a
network of startups than by a few giant, hierarchical organizations,
but I don't think that would mean less opportunity, because satisfying
current needs would lead to more. Certainly this tends to be the
case in individuals. Nor is there anything wrong with that. We
take for granted things that medieval kings would have considered
effeminate luxuries, like whole buildings heated to spring temperatures
year round. And if things go well, our descendants will take for
granted things we would consider shockingly luxurious. There is
no absolute standard for material wealth. Health care is a component
of it, and that alone is a black hole. For the foreseeable future,
people will want ever more material wealth, so there is no limit
to the amount of work available for companies, and for startups in
particular.
Usually the limited-room fallacy is not expressed directly. Usually
it's implicit in statements like "there are only so many startups
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo can buy." Maybe, though the list of
acquirers is a lot longer than that. And whatever you think of
other acquirers, Google is not stupid. The reason big companies
buy startups is that they've created something valuable. And why
should there be any limit to the number of valuable startups companies
can acquire, any more than there is a limit to the amount of wealth
individual people want? Maybe there would be practical limits on
the number of startups any one acquirer could assimilate, but if
there is value to be had, in the form of upside that founders are
willing to forgo in return for an immediate payment, acquirers will
evolve to consume it. Markets are pretty smart that way.
9. Family to support
This one is real. I wouldn't advise anyone with a family to start
a startup. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that I don't want
to take responsibility for advising it. I'm willing to take
responsibility for telling 22 year olds to start startups. So what
if they fail? They'll learn a lot, and that job at Microsoft will
still be waiting for them if they need it. But I'm not prepared
to cross moms.
What you can do, if you have a family and want to start a startup,
is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into a
product business. Empirically the chances of pulling that off seem
very small. You're never going to produce Google this way. But at
least you'll never be without an income.
Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup
instead of starting your own. Being one of the first employees of
a startup is a lot like being a founder, in both the good ways and
the bad. You'll be roughly 1/n^2 founder, where n is your employee
number.
As with the question of cofounders, the real lesson here is to start
startups when you're young.
10. Independently wealthy
This is my excuse for not starting a startup. Startups are stressful.
Why do it if you don't need the money? For every "serial entrepreneur,"
there are probably twenty sane ones who think "Start another
company? Are you crazy?"
I've come close to starting new startups a couple times, but I
always pull back because I don't want four years of my life to be
consumed by random schleps. I know this business well enough to
know you can't do it half-heartedly. What makes a good startup
founder so dangerous is his willingness to endure infinite schleps.
There is a bit of a problem with retirement, though. Like a lot
of people, I like to work. And one of the many weird little problems
you discover when you get rich is that a lot of the interesting
people you'd like to work with are not rich. They need to work at
something that pays the bills. Which means if you want to have
them as colleagues, you have to work at something that pays the
bills too, even though you don't need to. I think this is what
drives a lot of serial entrepreneurs, actually.
That's why I love working on Y Combinator so much. It's an excuse
to work on something interesting with people I like.
11. Not ready for commitment
This was my reason for not starting a startup for most of my twenties.
Like a lot of people that age, I valued freedom most of all. I was
reluctant to do anything that required a commitment of more than a
few months. Nor would I have wanted to do anything that completely
took over my life the way a startup does. And that's fine. If you
want to spend your time travelling around, or playing in a band,
or whatever, that's a perfectly legitimate reason not to start a
company.
If you start a startup that succeeds, it's going to consume at least
three or four years. (If it fails, you'll be done a lot quicker.)
So you shouldn't do it if you're not ready for commitments on that
scale. Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you'll
probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take,
and you'll find you have much less spare time than you might expect.
So if you're ready to clip on that ID badge and go to that orientation
session, you may also be ready to start that startup.
12. Need for structure
I'm told there are people who need structure in their lives. This
seems to be a nice way of saying they need someone to tell them
what to do. I believe such people exist. There's plenty of empirical
evidence: armies, religious cults, and so on. They may even be the
majority.
If you're one of these people, you probably shouldn't start a
startup. In fact, you probably shouldn't even go to work for one.
In a good startup, you don't get told what to do very much. There
may be one person whose job title is CEO, but till the company has
about twelve people no one should be telling anyone what to do.
That's too inefficient. Each person should just do what they need
to without anyone telling them.
If that sounds like a recipe for chaos, think about a soccer team.
Eleven people manage to work together in quite complicated ways,
and yet only in occasional emergencies does anyone tell anyone else
what to do. A reporter once asked David Beckham if there were any
language problems at Real Madrid, since the players were from about
eight different countries. He said it was never an issue, because
everyone was so good they never had to talk. They all just did the
right thing.
How do you tell if you're independent-minded enough to start a
startup? If you'd bristle at the suggestion that you aren't, then
you probably are.
13. Fear of uncertainty
Perhaps some people are deterred from starting startups because
they don't like the uncertainty. If you go to work for Microsoft,
you can predict fairly accurately what the next few years will be
like—all too accurately, in fact. If you start a startup, anything
might happen.
Well, if you're troubled by uncertainty, I can solve that problem
for you: if you start a startup, it will probably fail. Seriously,
though, this is not a bad way to think
about the whole experience. Hope for the best, but expect the
worst. In the worst case, it will at least be interesting. In the
best case you might get rich.
No one will blame you if the startup tanks, so long as you made a
serious effort. There may once have been a time when employers
would regard that as a mark against you, but they wouldn't now. I
asked managers at big companies, and they all said they'd prefer
to hire someone who'd tried to start a startup and failed over
someone who'd spent the same time working at a big company.
Nor will investors hold it against you, as long as you didn't fail
out of laziness or incurable stupidity. I'm told there's a lot
of stigma attached to failing in other places—in Europe, for
example. Not here. In America, companies, like practically
everything else, are disposable.
14. Don't realize what you're avoiding
One reason people who've been out in the world for a year or two
make better founders than people straight from college is that they
know what they're avoiding. If their startup fails, they'll have
to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.
If you've had summer jobs in college, you may think you know what
jobs are like, but you probably don't. Summer jobs at technology
companies are not real jobs. If you get a summer job as a waiter,
that's a real job. Then you have to carry your weight. But software
companies don't hire students for the summer as a source of cheap
labor. They do it in the hope of recruiting them when they graduate.
So while they're happy if you produce, they don't expect you to.
That will change if you get a real job after you graduate. Then
you'll have to earn your keep. And since most of what big companies
do is boring, you're going to have to work on boring stuff. Easy,
compared to college, but boring. At first it may seem cool to get
paid for doing easy stuff, after paying to do hard stuff in college.
But that wears off after a few months. Eventually it gets demoralizing
to work on dumb stuff, even if it's easy and you get paid a lot.
And that's not the worst of it. The thing that really sucks about
having a regular job is the expectation that you're supposed to be
there at certain times. Even Google is afflicted with this,
apparently. And what this means, as everyone who's had a regular
job can tell you, is that there are going to be times when you have
absolutely no desire to work on anything, and you're going to have
to go to work anyway and sit in front of your screen and pretend
to. To someone who likes work, as most good hackers do, this is
torture.
In a startup, you skip all that. There's no concept of office hours
in most startups. Work and life just get mixed together. But the
good thing about that is that no one minds if you have a life at
work. In a startup you can do whatever you want most of the time.
If you're a founder, what you want to do most of the time is work.
But you never have to pretend to.
If you took a nap in your office in a big company, it would seem
unprofessional. But if you're starting a startup and you fall
asleep in the middle of the day, your cofounders will just assume
you were tired.
15. Parents want you to be a doctor
A significant number of would-be startup founders are probably
dissuaded from doing it by their parents. I'm not going to say you
shouldn't listen to them. Families are entitled to their own
traditions, and who am I to argue with them? But I will give you
a couple reasons why a safe career might not be what your parents
really want for you.
One is that parents tend to be more conservative for their kids
than they would be for themselves. This is actually a rational
response to their situation. Parents end up sharing more of their
kids' ill fortune than good fortune. Most parents don't mind this;
it's part of the job; but it does tend to make them excessively
conservative. And erring on the side of conservatism is still
erring. In almost everything, reward is proportionate to risk. So
by protecting their kids from risk, parents are, without realizing
it, also protecting them from rewards. If they saw that, they'd
want you to take more risks.
The other reason parents may be mistaken is that, like generals,
they're always fighting the last war. If they want you to be a
doctor, odds are it's not just because they want you to help the
sick, but also because it's a prestigious and lucrative career.
[
4
]
But not so lucrative or prestigious as it was when their
opinions were formed. When I was a kid in the seventies, a doctor
was
the
thing to be. There was a sort of golden triangle involving
doctors, Mercedes 450SLs, and tennis. All three vertices now seem
pretty dated.
The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize how
much things have changed. Would they be that unhappy if you were
Steve Jobs instead? So I think the way to deal with your parents'
opinions about what you should do is to treat them like feature
requests. Even if your only goal is to please them, the way to do
that is not simply to give them what they ask for. Instead think
about why they're asking for something, and see if there's a better
way to give them what they need.
16. A job is the default
This leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason people
get regular jobs: it's the default thing to do. Defaults are
enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any
conscious choice.
To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you
need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not
much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way
to make a living was by farming. It's a bad plan to treat something
only a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards,
that's something that's changing pretty rapidly.
We may be seeing another such change right now. I've read a lot
of economic history, and I understand the startup world pretty well,
and it now seems to me fairly likely that we're seeing the beginning
of a change like the one from farming to manufacturing.
And you know what? If you'd been around when that change began
(around 1000 in Europe) it would have seemed to nearly everyone
that running off to the city to make your fortune was a crazy thing
to do. Though serfs were in principle forbidden to leave their
manors, it can't have been that hard to run away to a city. There
were no guards patrolling the perimeter of the village. What
prevented most serfs from leaving was that it seemed insanely risky.
Leave one's plot of land? Leave the people you'd spent your whole
life with, to live in a giant city of three or four thousand complete
strangers? How would you live? How would you get food, if you
didn't grow it?
Frightening as it seemed to them, it's now the default with us to
live by our wits. So if it seems risky to you to start a startup,
think how risky it once seemed to your ancestors to live as we do
now. Oddly enough, the people who know this best are the very ones
trying to get you to stick to the old model. How can Larry and
Sergey say you should come work as their employee, when they didn't
get jobs themselves?
Now we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they stood it.
How grim it must have been to till the same fields your whole life
with no hope of anything better, under the thumb of lords and priests
you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day people look back on what we
consider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be to
commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and
be told what to do by someone you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone
who could call you into their office and say "take a seat,"
and you'd sit! Imagine having to ask
permission
to release
software to users. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because
the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you'd have to get up and
go to work. How did they stand it?
It's exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift like
the one from farming to manufacturing. That's why I care about
startups. Startups aren't interesting just because they're a way
to make a lot of money. I couldn't care less about other ways to
do that, like speculating in securities. At most those are interesting
the way puzzles are. There's more going on with startups. They
may represent one of those rare, historic shifts in the way
wealth
is created.
That's ultimately what drives us to work on Y Combinator. We want
to make money, if only so we don't have to stop doing it, but that's
not the main goal. There have only been a handful of these great
economic shifts in human history. It would be an amazing hack to
make one happen faster.
Notes
[
1
]
The only people who lost were us. The angels had convertible
debt, so they had first claim on the proceeds of the auction. Y
Combinator only got 38 cents on the dollar.
[
2
]
The best kind of organization for that might be an open source
project, but those don't involve a lot of face to face meetings.
Maybe it would be worth starting one that did.
[
3
]
There need to be some number of big companies to acquire the
startups, so the number of big companies couldn't decrease to zero.
[
4
]
Thought experiment: If doctors did the same work, but as
impoverished outcasts, which parents would still want their kids
to be doctors?
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert
Morris for reading drafts of this, to the founders of Zenter
for letting me use their web-based PowerPoint killer even though
it isn't launched yet, and to Ming-Hay Luk
of the Berkeley CSUA for inviting me to speak.
Comment
on this essay.
Russian Translation
Japanese Translation
Korean Translation |
@MarkLambeWrites The back button does this.
@FilippoAlimonda @growing_daniel Not because of this. The graphic design of VC firms is random; there's no signal in it.
@kelvinhk1987 @ravroberts More vocal than other VCs, but not more powerful.
@jameskjx @ravroberts Not at all. We have midterm elections coming up.
@jameskjx We can't have been, because this surprised me.
@johnjhorton Not just academic writing. Dividing anything into sections fixes this problem, because it eliminates the expectation of continuity at the section boundary.
@pickover @ganeshuor Is the paper triangular?
@sama If you had them etched on a piece of metal in the most compressed form, how big would the piece of metal have to be? This is a mostly serious question. These models are history, and by default digital data evaporates.
@ahistoryinart It's an interesting exercise to imagine what that would look like if Holbein had actually done it. My guess: more emphasis on essential lines (= the ones face recognition software would care about) and less on random ones like individual hairs.
@Austen I got it wrong because I forgot to divide by a hundred. |
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