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a bad idea for startups that one wonders why things were ever done that way. One possibility is that this custom reflects the way investors like to collude when they can get away with it. But I think the actual explanation is less sinister. I think angels (and their lawyers) organized rounds this way in unthinking imit... |
| July 2009 The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork. My friend Trevor Blackwell built his own Segway, which we called the Segwell. He also built a one-wheeled ... |
| February 2009 I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums? ... |
so long as you exclude people who respond from identity. More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities. But you could in principle have... |
| March 2008 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts. Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motiv... |
more whether the author is wrong or right than what his tone is. Especially since tone is so hard to judge. Someone who has a chip on their shoulder about some topic might be offended by a tone that to other readers seemed neutral. So if the worst thing you can say about something is to criticize its tone, you're not s... |
when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers. Unless the opposing argument actually ... |
Translation | | Spanish Translation German Translation | | French Translation Arabic Translation | | Finnish Translation Italian Translation | | Turkish Translation * * * --- |
| October 2004 As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting." I didn't realize this when I was in school. In writing, as in math and science, they only show you the finished product. You don't see all the false starts. This gives students a misleading view of how things get made. Part of the reason it happens is tha... |
the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens. With obvious results. Only a few people really care about symbolism in Dickens. The teacher doesn't. The students don't. Most of the people who've had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don't. And cert... |
what Aristotle said before they could figure out what he meant. But by the modern era such questions were answered as well as they were ever going to be. And so the study of ancient texts became less about ancientness and more about texts. The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts is a vali... |
be adopted. Public schools probably couldn't stop teaching English even if they wanted to; they're probably required to by law. But here's a related suggestion that goes with the grain instead of against it: that universities establish a writing major. Many of the students who now major in English would major in writin... |
or Evelyn Waugh or Raymond Chandler is too obviously pleasing to seem like serious work, as reading Shakespeare would have been before English evolved enough to make it an effort to understand him. [sh] And so good writers (just you wait and see who's still in print in 300 years) are less likely to have readers turned ... |
an effort. An essay is something you write in order to figure something out. Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend ... |
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. ... |
place beforehand, so I'll have a detailed image to diff with reality. Surprises are facts you didn't already know. But they're more than that. They're facts that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but countera... |
| March 2005 A couple months ago I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested in being a "technologist in residence" at a new venture capital fund. I think the idea was to play Karl Rove to the VCs' George Bush. I considered it for about four seconds. Work for a VC fund? Ick. One of my most vivid memories... |
large amounts of money. They had to buy a lot of servers and a lot of bandwidth to crawl the whole Web. Less fortunate startups just end up hiring armies of people to sit around having meetings. In principle you could take a huge VC investment, put it in treasury bills, and continue to operate frugally. You just try it... |
salesmen or bureaucrats: the nature of their work turns them into jerks. I've met a few VCs I like. Mike Moritz seems a good guy. He even has a sense of humor, which is almost unheard of among VCs. From what I've read about John Doerr, he sounds like a good guy too, almost a hacker. But they work for the very best VC f... |
| January 2007 _(Foreword to Jessica Livingston'sFounders at Work.)_ Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when ... |
be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by the conventional wisdom. We thought of ourselves as impostors, succeeding despite being totally unprofessional. It was as if we'd created a Formula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn't look like a car was supposed to look. In the car... |
| May 2007 People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing jobs that boosted the median income. I wouldn't quite call the high-paying union job a myth, but I think peo... |
things. --- * * * --- |
| October 2023 One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear. Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. "You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They meant well, but thi... |
amount each successive day. What we don't understand naturally we develop customs to deal with, but we don't have many customs about exponential growth either, because there have been so few instances of it in human history. In principle herding should have been one: the more animals you had, the more offspring they'd ... |
may be learning. Knowledge grows exponentially, but there are also thresholds in it. Learning to ride a bicycle, for example. Some of these thresholds are akin to machine tools: once you learn to read, you're able to learn anything else much faster. But the most important thresholds of all are those representing new di... |
you come across something that's mediocre yet still popular, it could be a good idea to replace it. For example, if a company makes a product that people dislike yet still buy, then presumably they'd buy a better alternative if you made one. It would be great if there were a way to find promising intellectual threshold... |
be better off: people who do well will do even better, but those who do badly will do worse. That's an important point to bear in mind. Exposing oneself to superlinear returns is not for everyone. Most people will be better off as part of the pool. So who should shoot for superlinear returns? Ambitious people of two ty... |
best examples. Be honest, especially with yourself. Exercise and eat and sleep well and avoid the more dangerous drugs. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. And there is of course one other thing you need: to be lucky. Luck is always ... |
you find yourself thinking, _I'll never get anywhere._ But because the reward curve rises so steeply at the far end, it's worth taking extraordinary measures to get there. In the startup world, the name for this principle is "do things that don't scale." If you pay a ridiculous amount of attention to your tiny initial ... |
| After a link to Beating the Averages was posted on slashdot, some readers wanted to hear in more detail about the specific technical advantages we got from using Lisp in Viaweb. For those who are interested, here are some excerpts from a talk I gave in April 2001 at BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA. --- --- | | BBN Talk Exc... |
| December 2020 To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. What was special about the Airbnbs was how earnest they were. They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview. Sometimes after we interviewed a startup w... |
them. And the guests enjoyed it too. Both they and the guests had done it because they were in a sense forced to, and yet they'd all had a great experience. Clearly there was something new here: for hosts, a new way to make money that had literally been right under their noses, and for guests, a new way to travel that ... |
seven words: "We are not going to slow down." --- * * * --- |
| April 2021 Every year since 1982, _Forbes_ magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big differences. In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor... |
companies represents a qualitative change. The oil and real estate magnates of the 1982 Forbes 400 didn't win by making better technology. They won by being really driven and good at making deals. And indeed, that way of getting rich is so old that it predates the Industrial Revolution. The courtiers who got rich in th... |
to break up. Why did it break up? Partly senescence. The big companies that seemed models of scale and efficiency in 1930 had by 1970 become slack and bloated. By 1970 the rigid structure of the economy was full of cosy nests that various groups had built to insulate themselves from market forces. During the Carter adm... |
to build and distribute things, but faster too. This trend has been running for a long time. IBM, founded in 1896, took 45 years to reach a billion 2020 dollars in revenue. Hewlett-Packard, founded in 1939, took 25 years. Microsoft, founded in 1975, took 13 years. Now the norm for fast-growing companies is 7 or 8 years... |
| June 2021 It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I was in school, the answer is definitely yes... |
defined, externally imposed goals, as you do in school. There is some technique to it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate (which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and not to give up when things go wrong. But this level of discipline seems to be within the reach of quite... |
in school. Subjects get distorted when they're adapted to be taught to kids — often so distorted that they're nothing like the work done by actual practitioners. The other kind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of work. Some types of work are inherently bogus, or at best mere busywork. There's a kind of solidit... |
topics. Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the cente... |
to do is figure out what it is. That's how it works in movies, and in the streamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes it works that way in real life. Some people figure out what to do as children and just do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlessly from one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospe... |
| June 2021 A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard him say — not just because he was excited about his story, but because he'd discovered this way of working. Workin... |
Y Combinator, I didn't care about applicants' grades. But if they'd worked on projects of their own, I wanted to hear all about those. It may be inevitable that school is the way it is. I'm not saying we have to redesign it (though I'm not saying we don't), just that we should understand what it does to our attitudes t... |
into the turbulent flow of work in a large organization. Indeed, the history of successful organizations is partly the history of techniques for preserving that excitement. The team that made the original Macintosh were a great example of this phenomenon. People like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson a... |
insist on it. For a project to feel like your own, you must have sufficient autonomy. You can't be working to order, or _slowed down_ by bureaucracy. One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all. There are two ways to do that: to be the boss yourself, and to work on projects outside of work. Though they're a... |
| March 2021 I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas. And the further they'll read. Most reader... |
| 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... |
least till they state them publicly. 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 the... |
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. Mos... |
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, ... |
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 ind... |
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, a... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- April 2001, rev. April 2003 _(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.)_ In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb. Our plan was to write software that would let end users ... |
company that gets software written faster and better will, all other things being equal, put its competitors out of business. And when you're starting a startup, you feel this very keenly. Startups tend to be an all or nothing proposition. You either get rich, or you get nothing. In a startup, if you bet on the wrong t... |
might give us a technological edge, and we needed all the help we could get. When we started Viaweb, we had no experience in business. We didn't know anything about marketing, or hiring people, or raising money, or getting customers. Neither of us had ever even had what you would call a real job. The only thing we were... |
We never mentioned it to the press, and if you searched for Lisp on our Web site, all you'd find were the titles of two books in my bio. This was no accident. A startup should give its competitors as little information as possible. If they didn't know what language our software was written in, or didn't care, I wanted ... |
the best library functions for the task. But in general, for application software, you want to be using the most powerful (reasonably efficient) language you can get, and using anything else is a mistake, of exactly the same kind, though possibly in a lesser degree, as programming in machine language. You can see that ... |
you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y. By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't trust ... |
harder to write than ordinary Lisp functions, and it's considered to be bad style to use them when they're not necessary. So every macro in that code is there because it has to be. What that means is that at least 20-25% of the code in this program is doing things that you can't easily do in any other language. However... |
like a practitioner of Aikido, you can use it against your opponents. If you work for a big company, this may not be easy. You will have a hard time convincing the pointy-haired boss to let you build things in Lisp, when he has just read in the paper that some other language is poised, like Ada was twenty years ago, to... |
| July 2023 If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersecti... |
come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted. If the answers seem strange, so much the better. Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math. It would be affected to try to manufacture it, but if it appears, embrace it. Boldly chase outlier ideas, even... |
you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is i... |
projects, and something good will come of it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try to preserve certain invariants. The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pur... |
is not just an exercise in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage. Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out not to ... |
know from experience that learning new things always takes an initial push, or they grow their audience one fan at a time because they have nothing better to do. If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, many more would do it. Work doesn't just happen when you're trying to. There's a kind ... |
never need to worry about that problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're not a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself. "Avoid affectation" is a useful rule so far as it g... |
dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, or cool. Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself. It's usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middle of working on something, ask which choice is more consistent. You may have to throw things away and redo them. You won't necessarily have to... |
one of the frontiers of knowledge. In English we give this ability names like originality, creativity, and imagination. And it seems reasonable to give it a separate name, because it does seem to some extent a separate skill. It's possible to have a great deal of ability in other respects — to have a great deal of what... |
seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one. Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having new ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction? It's that seeing the new idea usually requires you to change the way you look at the world. We see the world through mod... |
new discoveries; their ignorance of a field's assumptions acts as a source of temporary passive independent-mindedness. Aspies also seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs. Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas. Strictness plus rule-breaking sounds like a strange combination. In popu... |
satisfying sense of economy in cultivating ideas that would otherwise be wasted. But the most common type of overlooked problem is not explicitly unfashionable in the sense of being out of fashion. It just doesn't seem to matter as much as it actually does. How do you find these? By being self-indulgent — by letting yo... |
be comfortable enough with the world being full of puzzles that you're willing to see them, but not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them. It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to ... |
do x and then y and then z" than "we're going to try x and see what happens." And it is more _organized_ ; it just doesn't work as well. Planning per se isn't good. It's sometimes necessary, but it's a necessary evil — a response to unforgiving conditions. It's something you have to do because you're working with infle... |
is with you. And you may have to set aside your misgivings temporarily to keep progressing. But don't forget about them. When you've gotten further into the subject, come back and check if they're still there. If they're still viable in the light of your present knowledge, they probably represent an undiscovered idea. ... |
heart. The qualities that impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection committees are only meaningful to the extent that they're part of a feedback loop, and very few are. People new to a field will often copy existing work. There'... |
if you let them be metaphors. Negative examples can be as inspiring as positive ones. In fact you can sometimes learn more from things done badly than from things done well; sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's missing. If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in one place, it's usuall... |
living organism. Morale starts with your view of life. You're more likely to do great work if you're an optimist, and more likely to if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim. Indeed, work can to some extent protect you from your problems. If you choose work that's pure, its very diffi... |
your energy and avoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there's someone you need to take care of, that takes precedence. Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condi... |
the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas? Here there are grounds for optimism. There are so many different ways to do great work, and even more that are still undiscovered. Out of all those different types... |
| July 2007 An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You're about to hire your first employee. How much stock should you give him? These are some of the hardest questions founders face. And yet both have the same answer: 1/(1 - n) Whenever you're trading stock in... |
- 1)/i. For example, suppose you're just two founders and you want to hire an additional hacker who's so good you feel he'll increase the average outcome of the whole company by 20%. n = (1.2 - 1)/1.2 = .167. So you'll break even if you trade 16.7% of the company for him. That doesn't mean 16.7% is the right amount of ... |
| February 2007 A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How? What is wisdom? I'd say i... |
solving those is key in achieving a high average outcome. And it seems natural that a high average outcome depends mostly on experience, but that dramatic peaks can only be achieved by people with certain rare, innate qualities; nearly anyone can learn to be a good swimmer, but to be an Olympic swimmer you need a certa... |
old recipes may have become obsolete. At the very least we have to go back and figure out if they were really recipes for wisdom or intelligence. But the really striking change, as intelligence and wisdom drift apart, is that we may have to decide which we prefer. We may not be able to optimize for both simultaneously.... |
could. But I don't have anything like this serenity when I'm writing an essay. Then I'm worried. What if I run out of ideas? And when I'm writing, four nights out of five I go to bed discontented, feeling I didn't get enough done. Advising people and writing are fundamentally different types of work. When people come t... |
a goalkeeper who prevents the other team from scoring is considered to have played a perfect game. In this world, wisdom seemed paramount. Even now, most people do work in which problems are put before them and they have to choose the best alternative. But as knowledge has grown more specialized, there are more and mor... |
increase students' "self-esteem." That just breeds laziness. And in any case, it doesn't really fool the kids, not the smart ones. They can tell at a young age that a contest where everyone wins is a fraud. A teacher has to walk a narrow path: you want to encourage kids to come up with things on their own, but you can'... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- March 2005 _(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)_ You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most st... |
business model didn't occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later. Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they're not transferrable. They're not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people... |
said to derive from Chuck Yeager. Even genuinely smart people start to act this way there, so you have to make allowances. It helped us to have Robert Morris, who is one of the readiest to say "I don't know" of anyone I've met. (At least, he was before he became a professor at MIT.) No one dared put on attitude around ... |
can't tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it's roulette. Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends. We thought so when we started ours, and we asked several people who were said to know about this mysterious thing called "busines... |
them than anything else. **What Customers Want** It's not just startups that have to worry about this. I think most businesses that fail do it because they don't give customers what they want. Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had r... |
Web not as an opportunity, but as something that meant more work for them. We did get a few of the more adventurous catalog companies. Among them was Frederick's of Hollywood, which gave us valuable experience dealing with heavy loads on our servers. But most of our users were small, individual merchants who saw the We... |
opportunity. If you want ideas for startups, one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers. Most good hackers have no more idea of the horrors perpetrated in these places than rich Americans do of what goes o... |
Often they're people who themselves got rich from technology. At the seed stage, investors don't expect you to have an elaborate business plan. Most know that they're supposed to decide quickly. It's not unusual to get a check within a week based on a half-page agreement. We started Viaweb with $10,000 of seed money fr... |
or more of the founders might decide to split off and start another company doing the same thing. This does happen. So when you set up the company, as well as as apportioning the stock, you should get all the founders to sign something agreeing that everyone's ideas belong to this company, and that this company is goin... |
depends on how ambitious you feel. When you offer x percent of your company for y dollars, you're implicitly claiming a certain value for the whole company. Venture investments are usually described in terms of that number. If you give an investor new shares equal to 5% of those already outstanding in return for $100,0... |
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