text stringlengths 3 3.01k |
|---|
| February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned so m... |
seem just as broken as those that don't. Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to... |
amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it. Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it. Hacker News has two kin... |
being stupid. The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length wou... |
be. For me, as for many users, it's a kind of virtual town square. When I want to take a break from working, I walk into the square, just as I might into Harvard Square or University Ave in the physical world. But an online square is more dangerous than a physical one. If I spent half the day loitering on University Av... |
| May 2008 Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. There may also be a benefit to us. We were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us. So by studying the ways adults lie to kids, we may be able to cle... |
course; when parents do that sort of thing it becomes national news. But you see the same problem on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia. The main purpose of suburbia is to provide a protected environment for children to grow up in. And it seems great for 10 year olds. I liked living in suburbia w... |
what they'd see, and more about what they'd do. I went to college with a lot of kids who grew up in Manhattan, and as a rule they seemed pretty jaded. They seemed to have lost their virginity at an average of about 14 and by college had tried more drugs than I'd even heard of. The reasons parents don't want their teena... |
the most obvious differences is the words kids are allowed to use. Most parents use words when talking to other adults that they wouldn't want their kids using. They try to hide even the existence of these words for as long as they can. And this is another of those conspiracies everyone participates in: everyone knows ... |
because small children are particularly horrified by it. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. One of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of our first cat. Over the years, as we asked for more details, they were compelled to invent more, so the story grew quite elaborat... |
if their parents had chosen the other way, they'd have grown up considering themselves as Ys. One reason this works so well is the second kind of lie involved. The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yoursel... |
fall hopelessly short. They walk around feeling horribly evil for having used a swearword, while in fact most of the adults around them are doing much worse things. This happens in intellectual as well as moral questions. The more confident people are, the more willing they seem to be to answer a question "I don't know... |
we were taught was pretty much pure propaganda. For example, we were taught to regard political leaders as saints—especially the recently martyred Kennedy and King. It was astonishing to learn later that they'd both been serial womanizers, and that Kennedy was a speed freak to boot. (By the time King's plagiarism emerg... |
weren't. But we all arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies. There's never a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. They've forgotten most of them. So if you're going to clear these lies out of your head, you're going to have to do it yourself. Few do. Most people go through lif... |
| November 2008 One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A startup walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over all the time. A big company is more deliberate. The gradual accumulation of check... |
will sell to you are companies that specialize in selling to you. Then you've sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency. Market mechanisms no longer protect you, because the good suppliers are no longer in the market. Such things happen constantly to the biggest organizations of all, governments. But checks instituted ... |
was two weeks. This didn't merely make them less productive. It made them hate working for the acquirer. Here's a sign of how much programmers like to be able to work hard: these guys would have _paid_ to be able to release code immediately, the way they used to. I asked them if they'd trade 10% of the acquisition pric... |
| December 2010 I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general term seems to be "mobile devices," but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't really capture what's distinctive about the i... |
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. --- * * * --- |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call _schlep blindness_. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a t... |
regulations to comply with. It's a lot more intimidating to start a startup like this than a recipe site. That scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In addition to their intrinsic value, they're like undervalued stocks in the sense that there's less demand for them among founders. If you pick an ambitious id... |
| November 2015 A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been a "one-man show." It's sadly common to read that sort of thing. But the problem with that description is not just that it's unfair. It's also misleading. Much of what's most novel about YC is due to Jessica Livingston. If you ... |
critical in making YC what it is. The earlier you pick startups, the more you're picking the founders. Later stage investors get to try products and look at growth numbers. At the stage where YC invests, there is often neither a product nor any numbers. Others thought YC had some special insight about the future of tec... |
is watching you. Another reason attention worries her is that she hates bragging. In anything she does that's publicly visible, her biggest fear (after the obvious fear that it will be bad) is that it will seem ostentatious. She says being too modest is a common problem for women. But in her case it goes beyond that. S... |
startup will do. And startups are in turn the most important source of growth in mature economies. The person who knows the most about the most important factor in the growth of mature economies — that is who Jessica Livingston is. Doesn't that sound like someone who should be better known? ** |
| 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 ... |
| September 2017 The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve. That territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable. Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: eithe... |
| January 2016 One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest. An... |
into the army from behind a mule team in West Virginia didn't simply go back to the farm afterward. Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot like the army. If total war was the big political story of the 20th century, the big economic story was the rise of a new kind of company. And this too tend... |
seeing gruesome images that had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can't show these to families while they're having dinner. I know how pervasive the common culture was, because I tried to opt out of it, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives. When I was 13 I realized, more from internal evidenc... |
to milk economies of scale. Just as startups rightly pay AWS a premium over the cost of running their own servers so they can focus on growth, many of the big national corporations were willing to pay a premium for labor. As well as pushing incomes up from the bottom, by overpaying unions, the big companies of the 20th... |
then join some other prestigious institution and work one's way up the hierarchy. Your prestige was the prestige of the institution you belonged to. People did start their own businesses of course, but educated people rarely did, because in those days there was practically zero concept of starting what we now call a _s... |
whole new categories of products appeared. And last but not least, the federal government, which had previously smiled upon J. P. Morgan's world as the natural state of things, began to realize it wasn't the last word after all. What J. P. Morgan was to the horizontal axis, Henry Ford was to the vertical. He wanted to ... |
inexpensive PC clones. Microsoft now owned the PC standard, and the customer. And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. Basically, Apple bumped IBM and then Microsoft stole its wallet. That sort of thing did not happen to big companies in mid-century. But it was going to happen increasingly ofte... |
I wouldn't discount the possibility. It may be that the refragmentation was driven by computers in the way the industrial revolution was driven by steam engines. Whether or not computers were a precondition, they have certainly accelerated it. The new fluidity of companies changed people's relationships with their empl... |
of big companies make more now than they used to, and I think much of the reason is prestige. In 1960, corporate CEOs had immense prestige. They were the winners of the only economic game in town. But if they made as little now as they did then, in real dollar terms, they'd seem like small fry compared to professional ... |
war was due mostly to external forces, and the Duplo economy was an evolutionary phase. If you want cohesion now, you'd have to induce it deliberately. And it's not obvious how. I suspect the best we'll be able to do is address the symptoms of fragmentation. But that may be enough. The form of fragmentation people worr... |
| January 2012 A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site. I thought it might be interesting to look at one day. The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are. Screens were a lot smaller in 1998. If I remember correctly, our frontpage used to just f... |
for big stores, so it was a little alarming to have users who got lots of traffic. I once calculated how much Frederick's was costing us in bandwidth, and it was about $300/month. Since we hosted all the stores, which together were getting just over 10 million page views per month in June 1998, we consumed what at the ... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- October 2010 _(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.)_ **1\. Determination** This has turned out to be the most important... |
to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant tho... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a st... |
trying to buy into lousy startups, investors in 2009 will presumably be reluctant to invest even in good ones. You'll have to adapt to this. But that's nothing new: startups always have to adapt to the whims of investors. Ask any founder in any economy if they'd describe investors as fickle, and watch the face they mak... |
given technology, the time to act is always now. --- Russian Translation | | Chinese Translation Japanese Translation * * * --- |
| April 2008 _(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)_ About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. Another thing we tell founder... |
probably be quite rich now. There was a window of about two years when spam was increasing rapidly but all the big email services had terrible filters. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it. Notice the pattern here? From either direction we get to the same spot. If you st... |
you can stay big by being mean. You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So "Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I'm sure they find it constraining, but think how val... |
so they were going to keep working on it no matter what, even if they had to move back to Canada and live in their parents' basements. Once they realized this, they stopped caring so much what investors thought about them. They still met with them, but they weren't going to die if they didn't get their money. And you k... |
it acts as a compass. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide? Here's the answer: Do whatever's best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if ... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- Watch how this essay was written. --- February 2009 One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a rep... |
out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see. In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn't scale, because it's a way of learning about your users. **7\. You make what you measure.** I learned this one from Joe Kraus. Merely measuring somethi... |
depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don't, but because it makes them less likely to. Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one. Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth yo... |
| July 2008 At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way. Instead of hoping to get rich by building a valuable company and then selling stock in a "liquidity event," founders should start companies that make money ... |
let's suppose there were management companies that could do it for you. They'd charge a lot, but wouldn't it be worth it? I'd sacrifice a large percentage of the income for the extra peace of mind. I realize what I'm describing already sounds too good to be true, but I can think of a way to make it even more attractive... |
when it happens. You can't assume investors will carry you for as long as you might have to wait. Your company has to make money. Opinions are divided about how early to focus on that. Joe Kraus says you should try charging customers right away. And yet some of the most successful startups, including Google, ignored re... |
| April 2008 There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes. I'm not claiming this is a list of the _n_ most admirable people. Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to? Einstein isn't on the list, for example, even though he probably des... |
stand out, though, is the quality of his ideas. His style is deceptively casual, but there is more in his books than in a library of art monographs. Reading _The Nude_ is like a ride in a Ferrari. Just as you're getting settled, you're slammed back in your seat by the acceleration. Before you can adjust, you're thrown ... |
beautiful. And yet they can hold their own with any work of art ever made. No one else, before or since, was that good when no one was looking. **Robert Morris** Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's surprisingly easy. Don't ... |
Modernism was its freshness. Art became stuffy in the nineteenth century. The paintings that were popular at the time were mostly the art equivalent of McMansions—big, pretentious, and fake. Modernism meant starting over, making things with the same earnest motives that children might. The artists who benefited most fr... |
done many things in their lives, there was one factor above all that connected them: the Spitfire. This is supposed to be a list of heroes. How can a machine be on it? Because that machine was not just a machine. It was a lens of heroes. Extraordinary devotion went into it, and extraordinary courage came out. It's a cl... |
| August 2011 I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government. I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technological progress. When I was a kid I thought they helped. I thought they protected inventors from having their ideas stolen by big ... |
problem of patent trolls. Patent trolls are just parasites. A clumsy parasite may occasionally kill the host, but that's not its goal. Whereas companies that sue startups for patent infringement generally do it with explicit goal of keeping their product off the market. Companies that use patents on startups are attack... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- October 2010 Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's different fr... |
the VC business. If you go on a weekday you may see groups of founders there to meet VCs. But mostly you won't see anyone; bustling is the last word you'd use to describe the atmos. Visiting Sand Hill Road reminds you that the opposite of "down and dirty" would be "up and clean." **6.Castro Street** It's a tossup wheth... |
| November 2019 If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy. To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good but non- obvious; if an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already working on it. One common way for a good idea to be non-... |
| 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 won... |
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 y... |
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. ... |
| 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... |
| March 2012 I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good writ... |
rehearse it in my head. But I always end up spending most of the time rewriting it instead. Every talk I give ends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed out and rewritten. Which of course makes me um even more, because I haven't had any time to practice the new bits. Depending on your audience, there ... |
| January 2016 Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Nearly everyone who writes about the topic says that economic inequality should be decreased. I'm interested in this question because I was one of the founders of a company cal... |
makes a dollar only when someone on the other end of a trade loses a dollar. If the rich people in a society got that way by taking wealth from the poor, then you have the degenerate case of economic inequality, where the cause of poverty is the same as the cause of wealth. But instances of inequality don't have to be ... |
that it can expand to accommodate a lot of people. ___ I'm all for shutting down the crooked ways to get rich. But that won't eliminate great variations in wealth, because as long as you leave open the option of getting rich by creating wealth, people who want to get rich will do that instead. Most people who get rich ... |
we've seen since then has been due to bad behavior of various kinds, there has simultaneously been a huge increase in individuals' ability to create wealth. Startups are almost entirely a product of this period. And even within the startup world, there has been a qualitative change in the last 10 years. Technology has ... |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
No dataset card yet
- Downloads last month
- 10