-= On Lisp -> Clojure (chapter 2) =- How to Disagree. 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 motivate people less than disagreeing. The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word.
If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. DH0. This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. U r a fag!!!!!!!!!! But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. The author is a self-important dilettante. is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag. " DH1. An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. Of course he would say that. DH2. DH3. This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in: DH4. DH5. DH6. Related: What Startups Are Really Like.
October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.) I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet? I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. So I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about starting a startup. I'm proud to report I got one response saying: What surprised me the most is that everything was actually fairly predictable! The bad news is that I got over 100 other responses listing the surprises they encountered. There were very clear patterns in the responses; it was remarkable how often several people had been surprised by exactly the same thing. 1. This was the surprise mentioned by the most founders. What people wished they'd paid more attention to when choosing cofounders was character and commitment, not ability.
Here's a typical reponse: We learned this lesson a long time ago. 2. 3. 4. 5. The List of N Things. September 2009 I bet you the current issue of Cosmopolitan has an article whose title begins with a number. "7 Things He Won't Tell You about Sex," or something like that. Some popular magazines feature articles of this type on the cover of every issue. That can't be happening by accident. Editors must know they attract readers. Why do readers like the list of n things so much? Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we'd have called its "outline.
" As well as being explicit, the structure is guaranteed to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and no particular connection between them. Because the main points are unconnected, the list of n things is random access. There are times when this format is what a writer wants.
There are other less legitimate reasons for using this format. The list of n things is easier for writers as well as readers. Notes. The Anatomy of Determination. September 2009 Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination. At first we thought it might be intelligence. Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups succeed.
It makes a better story that a company won because its founders were so smart. In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent. I can't think of any field in which determination is overrated, but the relative importance of determination and talent probably do vary somewhat. If determination is so important, can we isolate its components? Notes [1] Loosely speaking. See Randomness. April 2006, rev August 2009 Plato quotes Socrates as saying "the unexamined life is not worth living. " Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, just as the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills.
A lot of ancient philosophy had the quality—and I don't mean this in an insulting way—of the kind of conversations freshmen have late at night in common rooms: What is our purpose? Well, we humans are as conspicuously different from other animals as the anteater. In our case the distinguishing feature is the ability to reason. So obviously that is what we should be doing, and a human who doesn't is doing a bad job of being human—is no better than an animal.
Now we'd give a different answer. The history of ideas is a history of gradually discarding the assumption that it's all about us. The idea that we're the center of things is difficult to discard. This principle isn't only for big ideas. A) Your housemate did it deliberately to upset you. Graham on Start-ups, Innovation, and Creativity. The Trouble with the Segway. 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 version, the Eunicycle, which looks exactly like a regular unicycle till you realize the rider isn't pedaling. Why do Segways provoke this reaction? Someone riding a motorcycle isn't working any harder.
Try this thought experiment and it becomes clear: imagine something that worked like the Segway, but that you rode with one foot in front of the other, like a skateboard. So there may be a way to capture more of the market Segway hoped to reach: make a version that doesn't look so easy for the rider. Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. On Lisp by Paul Graham (Book) in Computers & Internet.
Lisp in Web-Based Applications Paul Graham (This is an excerpt of a talk given at BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA, in April 2001.) Any Language You Want One of the reasons to use Lisp in writing Web-based applications is that you *can* use Lisp. When you're writing software that is only going to run on your own servers, you can use whatever language you want.
For a long time programmers didn't have a lot of choice about what language to use for writing application programs. Until recently, writing application programs meant writing software to run on desktop computers. In desktop software there was a strong bias toward writing the application in the same language as the operating system. A Local Revolution? April 2009 Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined. The first is that startups may represent a new economic phase, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I'm not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it's true. People are dramatically more The second idea is that startups are a type of business that flourishes in certain places that specialize in it—that Silicon Valley specializes in startups in the same way Los Angeles specializes in movies, or New York in finance. [1] What if both are true?
If so, this revolution is going to be particularly revolutionary. There are already signs that startups may not spread particularly well. Within a few decades of the founding of Boulton & Watt there were steam engines scattered over northern Europe and North America. Startups don't seem to spread so well, partly because they're more a social than a technical phenomenon, and partly because they're not tied to geography.
Notes. The Founder Visa. April 2009 I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one. The single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of startups in this country is a policy that would cost nothing: establish a new class of visa for The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley. It's that we won't let the people who want to start them into the country. Letting just 10,000 startup founders into the country each year could have a visible effect on the economy. By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies, only new ones they'd founded.
The tricky part might seem to be how one defined a startup. How would the government decide who's a startup investor? Related: Five Founders. April 2009 Inc recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years. How do you decide who's the most interesting? The best test seemed to be influence: who are the 5 who've influenced me most? Who do I use as examples when I'm talking to companies we fund? Who do I find myself quoting? 1. I'd guess Steve is the most influential founder not just for me but for most people you could ask. More remarkable still, he's stayed interesting for 30 years. Steve is clever and driven, but so are a lot of people in the Valley. 2.
TJ Rodgers isn't as famous as Steve Jobs, but he may be the best writer among Silicon Valley CEOs. The first essay of his that I read was so electrifying that I remember exactly where I was at the time. 3. I'm sorry to treat Larry and Sergey as one person. Before Google, companies in Silicon Valley already knew it was important to have the best hackers. 4.
Now he's cofounder of a startup called Friendfeed. 5. Paul Graham on Why Boston Should Worry About Its Future as a Tec. Robert Buderi3/10/09 For entrepreneurs and investors alike, it was a sad day back in January, when Y Combinator founder Paul Graham announced he would stay in Silicon Valley year round and give up splitting his startup incubation activities between Mountain View and Cambridge, MA, where Y Combinator has traditionally held forth each summer. On his website, Graham explained that the change had “nothing to do with startups,” but that he had decided California was the best place to raise his about-to-be-born child. That didn’t stop him from a candid assessment of the Boston innovation scene, however. “Boston just doesn’t have the startup culture that the Valley does,” Graham wrote. “It has more startup culture than anywhere else, but the gap between number 1 and number 2 is huge.” Since that time, I’m happy to report, Graham’s wife Jessica Livingston (a Y Combinator partner) has given birth to a healthy son, George.
A lot of other things follow from this. I love Boston as a town. How to Be an Angel Investor. March 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at AngelConf.) When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. Seven years later I still hadn't started. I put it off because it seemed mysterious and complicated. It turns out to be easier than I expected, and also more interesting. The part I thought was hard, the mechanics of investing, really isn't. You give a startup money and they give you stock. There are sometimes minor tactical advantages to using one or the other. That's how you win: by investing in the right startups.
Mechanics Angel investors often syndicate deals, which means they join together to invest on the same terms. The easiest way to get started in angel investing is to find a friend who already does it, and try to get included in his syndicates. Don't feel like you have to join a syndicate, though. That's ok. The agreement by which you invest should have provisions that let you contribute to future rounds to maintain your percentage. Notes. Be Relentlessly Resourceful. March 2009 A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.
Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not hapless. Unfortunately there's no antonym of hapless, which makes it difficult to tell founders what to aim for. It's not hard to express the quality we're looking for in metaphors. Unfortunately this is just a metaphor, and not a useful one to most people outside the US. But finally I've figured out how to express this quality directly.
Be relentlessly resourceful. That sounds right, but is it simply a description of how to be successful in general? There probably are other fields where "relentlessly resourceful" is the recipe for success. You can even use it tactically. Notes. Why TV Lost. March 2009 About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged.
We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word "convergence" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call "TV shows," but they'll watch them mostly on computers. What decided the contest for computers? One predictable cause of victory is that the Internet is an open platform. The second is Moore's Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth. [1] The third reason computers won is piracy. The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. This was the most powerful force of all. After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive.
Facebook killed TV. Notes. Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. February 2009 A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask "How could we make something like that happen here? " The organic way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live. That's how Silicon Valley happened. But could you shortcut the process by funding startups? Possibly. The first thing to understand is that encouraging startups is a different problem from encouraging startups in a particular city.
People sometimes think they could improve the startup scene in their town by starting something like Y Combinator there, but in fact it will have near zero effect. The seed funding business is not a regional business, because at that stage startups are mobile. If you want to encourage startups in a particular city, you have to fund startups that won't leave. Good startups will move to another city as a condition of funding. How much would that take? How much would it cost to grow a startup to that point? But now comes the hard part. Notes. Time Slider. What I've Learned from Hacker News. Mind / Matter. After Credentials. A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham) Links in PG essays. Could VC be a Casualty of the Recesssion? The High-Res Society. The Other Half of "Artists Ship"
A Fundraising Survival Guide. The Python Paradox. The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company. Paul Graham - from social shyness to patronizing. Cities based on ideas are made of straw... and why Paul Graham i. Cities and Ambition. The F|R Interview: Y Combinator’s Paul Graham. How to Write Strong Arguments at The CreateDebate Blog. Disgareeing with Paul Graham. How to Disagree.
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss.