Paul Graham essay
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-airbnbs
The Airbnbs | Y Combinator
2020-12-10T01:23:59-08:00

<html><body><div><div><p>To celebrate Airbnb’s IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb.</p>
<p>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 we’d be uncertain what to do, and have to talk it over. Other times we’d just look at one another and smile. The Airbnbs’ interview was that kind. We didn’t even like the idea that much. Nor did users, at that stage; they had no growth. But the founders seemed so full of energy that it was impossible not to like them.</p>
<p>That first impression was not misleading. During the batch our nickname for Brian Chesky was The Tasmanian Devil, because like the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StG2u5qfFRg&amp;t=2m27s">cartoon character</a> he seemed a tornado of energy. All three of them were like that. No one ever worked harder during YC than the Airbnbs did. When you talked to the Airbnbs, they took notes. If you suggested an idea to them in office hours, the next time you talked to them they’d not only have implemented it, but also implemented two new ideas they had in the process. “They probably have the best attitude of any startup we’ve funded” I wrote to Mike Arrington during the batch.</p>
<p>They’re still like that. Jessica and I had dinner with Brian in the summer of 2018, just the three of us. By this point the company is ten years old. He took a page of notes about ideas for new things Airbnb could do.</p>
<p>What we didn’t realize when we first met Brian and Joe and Nate was that Airbnb was on its last legs. After working on the company for a year and getting no growth, they’d agreed to give it one last shot. They’d try this Y Combinator thing, and if the company still didn’t take off, they’d give up.</p>
<p>Any normal person would have given up already. They’d been funding the company with credit cards. They had a <em>binder</em> full of credit cards they’d maxed out. Investors didn’t think much of the idea. One investor they met in a cafe walked out in the middle of meeting with them. They thought he was going to the bathroom, but he never came back. “He didn’t even finish his smoothie,” Brian said. And now, in late 2008, it was the worst recession in decades. The stock market was in free fall and wouldn’t hit bottom for another four months.</p>
<p>Why hadn’t they given up? This is a useful question to ask. People, like matter, reveal their nature under extreme conditions. One thing that’s clear is that they weren’t doing this just for the money. As a money-making scheme, this was pretty lousy: a year’s work and all they had to show for it was a binder full of maxed-out credit cards. So why were they still working on this startup? Because of the experience they’d had as the first hosts.</p>
<p>When they first tried renting out airbeds on their floor during a design convention, all they were hoping for was to make enough money to pay their rent that month. But something surprising happened: they enjoyed having those first three guests staying with 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 was in many ways better than hotels.</p>
<p>That experience was why the Airbnbs didn’t give up. They knew they’d discovered something. They’d seen a glimpse of the future, and they couldn’t let it go.</p>
<p>They knew that once people tried staying in what is now called “an airbnb,” they would also realize that this was the future. But only if they tried it, and they weren’t. That was the problem during Y Combinator: to get growth started.</p>
<p>Airbnb’s goal during YC was to reach what we call <a href="http://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html">ramen profitability</a>, which means making enough money that the company can pay the founders’ living expenses, if they live on ramen noodles. Ramen profitability is not, obviously, the end goal of any startup, but it’s the most important threshold on the way, because this is the point where you’re airborne. This is the point where you no longer need investors’ permission to continue existing. For the Airbnbs, ramen profitability was $4000 a month: $3500 for rent, and $500 for food. They taped this goal to the mirror in the bathroom of their apartment.</p>
<p>The way to get growth started in something like Airbnb is to focus on the hottest subset of the market. If you can get growth started there, it will spread to the rest. When I asked the Airbnbs where there was most demand, they knew from searches: New York City. So they focused on New York. They went there <a href="http://paulgraham.com/ds.html">in person</a> to visit their hosts and help them make their listings more attractive. A big part of that was better pictures. So Joe and Brian rented a professional camera and took pictures of the hosts’ places themselves.</p>
<p>This didn’t just make the listings better. It also taught them about their hosts. When they came back from their first trip to New York, I asked what they’d noticed about hosts that surprised them, and they said the biggest surprise was how many of the hosts were in the same position they’d been in: they needed this money to pay their rent. This was, remember, the worst recession in decades, and it had hit New York first. It definitely added to the Airbnbs’ sense of mission to feel that people needed them.</p>
<p>In late January 2009, about three weeks into Y Combinator, their efforts started to show results, and their numbers crept upward. But it was hard to say for sure whether it was growth or just random fluctuation. By February it was clear that it was real growth. They made $460 in fees in the first week of February, $897 in the second, and $1428 in the third. That was it: they were airborne. Brian sent me an email on February 22 announcing that they were ramen profitable and giving the last three weeks’ numbers.</p>
<p>“I assume you know what you’ve now set yourself up for next week,” I responded.</p>
<p>Brian’s reply was seven words: “We are not going to slow down.”</p>
</div></div></body></html>
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 we’d be uncertain what to do, and have to talk it over. Other times we’d just look at one another and smile. The Airbnbs’ interview was that kind. We didn’t even like the idea that much. Nor did users, at that stage; they had no growth. But the founders seemed so full of energy that it was impossible not to like them.
That first impression was not misleading. During the batch our nickname for Brian Chesky was The Tasmanian Devil, because like the cartoon character he seemed a tornado of energy. All three of them were like that. No one ever worked harder during YC than the Airbnbs did. When you talked to the Airbnbs, they took notes. If you suggested an idea to them in office hours, the next time you talked to them they’d not only have implemented it, but also implemented two new ideas they had in the process. “They probably have the best attitude of any startup we’ve funded” I wrote to Mike Arrington during the batch.
They’re still like that. Jessica and I had dinner with Brian in the summer of 2018, just the three of us. By this point the company is ten years old. He took a page of notes about ideas for new things Airbnb could do.
What we didn’t realize when we first met Brian and Joe and Nate was that Airbnb was on its last legs. After working on the company for a year and getting no growth, they’d agreed to give it one last shot. They’d try this Y Combinator thing, and if the company still didn’t take off, they’d give up.
Any normal person would have given up already. They’d been funding the company with credit cards. They had a binder full of credit cards they’d maxed out. Investors didn’t think much of the idea. One investor they met in a cafe walked out in the middle of meeting with them. They thought he was going to the bathroom, but he never came back. “He didn’t even finish his smoothie,” Brian said. And now, in late 2008, it was the worst recession in decades. The stock market was in free fall and wouldn’t hit bottom for another four months.
Why hadn’t they given up? This is a useful question to ask. People, like matter, reveal their nature under extreme conditions. One thing that’s clear is that they weren’t doing this just for the money. As a money-making scheme, this was pretty lousy: a year’s work and all they had to show for it was a binder full of maxed-out credit cards. So why were they still working on this startup? Because of the experience they’d had as the first hosts.
When they first tried renting out airbeds on their floor during a design convention, all they were hoping for was to make enough money to pay their rent that month. But something surprising happened: they enjoyed having those first three guests staying with 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 was in many ways better than hotels.
That experience was why the Airbnbs didn’t give up. They knew they’d discovered something. They’d seen a glimpse of the future, and they couldn’t let it go.
They knew that once people tried staying in what is now called “an airbnb,” they would also realize that this was the future. But only if they tried it, and they weren’t. That was the problem during Y Combinator: to get growth started.
Airbnb’s goal during YC was to reach what we call ramen profitability, which means making enough money that the company can pay the founders’ living expenses, if they live on ramen noodles. Ramen profitability is not, obviously, the end goal of any startup, but it’s the most important threshold on the way, because this is the point where you’re airborne. This is the point where you no longer need investors’ permission to continue existing. For the Airbnbs, ramen profitability was $4000 a month: $3500 for rent, and $500 for food. They taped this goal to the mirror in the bathroom of their apartment.
The way to get growth started in something like Airbnb is to focus on the hottest subset of the market. If you can get growth started there, it will spread to the rest. When I asked the Airbnbs where there was most demand, they knew from searches: New York City. So they focused on New York. They went there in person to visit their hosts and help them make their listings more attractive. A big part of that was better pictures. So Joe and Brian rented a professional camera and took pictures of the hosts’ places themselves.
This didn’t just make the listings better. It also taught them about their hosts. When they came back from their first trip to New York, I asked what they’d noticed about hosts that surprised them, and they said the biggest surprise was how many of the hosts were in the same position they’d been in: they needed this money to pay their rent. This was, remember, the worst recession in decades, and it had hit New York first. It definitely added to the Airbnbs’ sense of mission to feel that people needed them.
In late January 2009, about three weeks into Y Combinator, their efforts started to show results, and their numbers crept upward. But it was hard to say for sure whether it was growth or just random fluctuation. By February it was clear that it was real growth. They made $460 in fees in the first week of February, $897 in the second, and $1428 in the third. That was it: they were airborne. Brian sent me an email on February 22 announcing that they were ramen profitable and giving the last three weeks’ numbers.
“I assume you know what you’ve now set yourself up for next week,” I responded.
Brian’s reply was seven words: “We are not going to slow down.”
The Airbnbs | Y Combinator
https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-airbnbs
<div><div>
<p>I’m delighted to announce that Sam Altman has agreed to become president of Y Combinator starting next batch.  I’ll continue to do office hours with startups, but Sam is going to lead YC.</p>
<p>Why the change?  Because YC needs to grow, and I’m not the best person to grow it.  Sam is what YC needs at this stage in its evolution.</p>
<p>I’m convinced there’s a fundamental change happening in the way work gets done.  It’s becoming normal to start a startup.  There will be a lot more startups in 10 years than there are now, and if YC is going to fund them, we’ll have to grow proportionally bigger.</p>
<p>Of all the people we’ve met in the 9 years we’ve been working on YC, Jessica and I both feel Sam is the best suited for that task. He’s one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent–which, though few realize it, is an essential quality in early stage investing.  Sam is one of the smartest people I know, and understands startups better than perhaps anyone I know, including myself.  He’s the one I go to when I want a second opinion about a hard problem.  And his association with Y Combinator is only about a month shorter than mine, because he was one of the founders in the first batch we funded, in 2005.</p>
<p>So when Sam became available in 2012, I started trying to recruit him.  It took me over a year, but eventually I succeeded.</p>
<p>YC should feel the same to the startups we fund. Office hours are the way founders interact with me, and I’ll still be doing those.  In fact, since I’ll only be doing office hours and not also worrying about running YC, I’ll probably be able to give better advice.</p>
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       1. All Posts
     2. 

          Sam Altman for President

          by Paul Graham 2/21/2014

            I’m delighted to announce that Sam Altman has agreed to become president of Y Combinator starting next batch. I’ll continue to do office hours with startups, but Sam is going to lead YC.

            Why the change? Because YC needs to grow, and I’m not the best person to grow it. Sam is what YC needs at this stage in its evolution.

            I’m convinced there’s a fundamental change happening in the way work gets done. It’s becoming normal to start a startup. There will be a lot more startups in 10 years than there are now, and if YC is going to fund them, we’ll have to grow proportionally bigger.

            Of all the people we’ve met in the 9 years we’ve been working on YC, Jessica and I both feel Sam is the best suited for that task. He’s one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent–which, though few realize it, is an essential quality in early stage investing. Sam is one of the smartest people I know, and understands startups better than perhaps anyone I know, including myself. He’s the one I go to when I want a second opinion about a hard problem. And his association with Y Combinator is only about a month shorter than mine, because he was one of the founders in the first batch we funded, in 2005.

            So when Sam became available in 2012, I started trying to recruit him. It took me over a year, but eventually I succeeded.

            YC should feel the same to the startups we fund. Office hours are the way founders interact with me, and I’ll still be doing those. In fact, since I’ll only be doing office hours and not also worrying about running YC, I’ll probably be able to give better advice.

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              Paul is a cofounder of YC. He is the author of On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first SaaS company, which became Yahoo Store.

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Of all the people we’ve met in the 9 years we’ve been working on YC, Jessica and I both feel Sam is the best suited for that task. He’s one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent–which, though few realize it, is an essential quality in early stage investing.  Sam is one of the smartest people I know, and understands startups better than perhaps anyone I know, including myself.  He’s the one I go to when I want a second opinion about a hard problem.  And his association with Y Combinator is only about a month shorter than mine, because he was one of the founders in the first batch we funded, in 2005.
So when Sam became available in 2012, I started trying to recruit him.  It took me over a year, but eventually I succeeded.
YC should feel the same to the startups we fund. Office hours are the way founders interact with me, and I’ll still be doing those.  In fact, since I’ll only be doing office hours and not also worrying about running YC, I’ll probably be able to give better advice.
Sam Altman for President | Y Combinator
https://blog.ycombinator.com/sam-altman-for-president/
<div><div>
<p>As of this batch we’re introducing a new policy for investments by YC partners in the companies we fund.</p>
<p>YC partners have invested in the startups we fund since the first batch. In the beginning it was harmless, and occasionally even necessary. And other investors couldn’t treat investments by YC partners as much of a signal when I was the only one doing it, because I was so haphazard about it. But over the years this gradually changed, as there came to be more YC partners and they paid more attention to picking likely winners, till by the last couple batches, other investors could treat investment by YC partners as an accurate sign of how promising we thought a startup was. Which meant we were now making it harder for the startups that partners didn’t invest in to raise money.</p>
<p>Our new policy is designed to prevent this by depriving other investors of this signal till it’s too late. The new rule is that YC partners can’t be in the first $500k a company raises, unless it’s 3 weeks past Demo Day. And since a startup’s fundraising trajectory is almost always established, one way or another, by 3 weeks after Demo Day, this should mean that we can’t affect anyone’s fundraising unless they’ve raised $500k, at which point their fundraising is already successful.</p>
<p>This should fix the problem.  If it doesn’t we’ll try something else.</p>
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       1. All Posts
     2. 

          New YC Partner Investment Policy

          by Paul Graham 1/31/2014

            As of this batch we’re introducing a new policy for investments by YC partners in the companies we fund.

            YC partners have invested in the startups we fund since the first batch. In the beginning it was harmless, and occasionally even necessary. And other investors couldn’t treat investments by YC partners as much of a signal when I was the only one doing it, because I was so haphazard about it. But over the years this gradually changed, as there came to be more YC partners and they paid more attention to picking likely winners, till by the last couple batches, other investors could treat investment by YC partners as an accurate sign of how promising we thought a startup was. Which meant we were now making it harder for the startups that partners didn’t invest in to raise money.

            Our new policy is designed to prevent this by depriving other investors of this signal till it’s too late. The new rule is that YC partners can’t be in the first $500k a company raises, unless it’s 3 weeks past Demo Day. And since a startup’s fundraising trajectory is almost always established, one way or another, by 3 weeks after Demo Day, this should mean that we can’t affect anyone’s fundraising unless they’ve raised $500k, at which point their fundraising is already successful.

            This should fix the problem. If it doesn’t we’ll try something else.

            Categories

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                  February 27, 2023 by Y Combinator

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                  January 28, 2022 by Tamanna Khemani

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                  February 21, 2023 by Stephanie Simon

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    Author

            * Paul Graham

              Paul is a cofounder of YC. He is the author of On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first SaaS company, which became Yahoo Store.

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About
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       1. All Posts
     2. 
          New YC Partner Investment Policy
          by Paul Graham 1/31/2014
            As of this batch we’re introducing a new policy for investments by YC partners in the companies we fund.
            YC partners have invested in the startups we fund since the first batch. In the beginning it was harmless, and occasionally even necessary. And other investors couldn’t treat investments by YC partners as much of a signal when I was the only one doing it, because I was so haphazard about it. But over the years this gradually changed, as there came to be more YC partners and they paid more attention to picking likely winners, till by the last couple batches, other investors could treat investment by YC partners as an accurate sign of how promising we thought a startup was. Which meant we were now making it harder for the startups that partners didn’t invest in to raise money.
            Our new policy is designed to prevent this by depriving other investors of this signal till it’s too late. The new rule is that YC partners can’t be in the first $500k a company raises, unless it’s 3 weeks past Demo Day. And since a startup’s fundraising trajectory is almost always established, one way or another, by 3 weeks after Demo Day, this should mean that we can’t affect anyone’s fundraising unless they’ve raised $500k, at which point their fundraising is already successful.
            This should fix the problem. If it doesn’t we’ll try something else.
            Categories
            YC News
            Other Posts
                  Congratulations to the 2023 YC Top Companies!
                  February 27, 2023 by Y Combinator
                    Read More
                  YC's Spring Tour 2022
                  January 28, 2022 by Tamanna Khemani
                    Read More
                  Why would you start a startup in an economic downturn?
                  February 21, 2023 by Stephanie Simon
                    Read More
                Sign up for weekly updates from Y Combinator
                  Subscribe
    Author
            * Paul Graham
              Paul is a cofounder of YC. He is the author of On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first SaaS company, which became Yahoo Store.
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New YC Partner Investment Policy | Y Combinator
https://blog.ycombinator.com/new-yc-partner-investment-policy/
http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html
Write Simply
2021-01-01
None
<div><div><tbody><tr><td>March 2021<p>I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.</p><p>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.</p><p>And the further they'll read. Most readers' energy tends to flag
part way through an article or essay. If the friction of reading
is low enough, more keep going till the end.</p><p>There's an Italian dish called <i>saltimbocca</i>, which means "leap
into the mouth." My goal when writing might be called <i>saltintesta</i>:
the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that
got them there.</p><p>It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You
might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the
time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and
pure ideas is not filled with poetry.</p><p>Plus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a
fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just
so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you
that readers have to carry.</p><p>And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your
readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of
ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English. So you
can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can
use difficult words.</p><p>Of course, fancy writing doesn't just conceal ideas. It can also
conceal the lack of them. That's why some people write that way,
to conceal the fact that they have 
</p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&amp;q=hermeneutic+dialectics+hegemonic+modalities"><u></u></a> nothing to say. Whereas writing
simply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be
obvious to everyone, including you.<p>Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the
future will be in much the same position as people from other
countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have
changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain
for a woodworker to build a chair to last.</p><p>Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or
writing. It's a sign you did a good job.</p><p>But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none
of them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it
offends me not to. When I write a sentence that seems too complicated,
or that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy
to me. It seems clumsy.</p><p>There are of course times when you want to use a complicated sentence
or fancy word for effect. But you should never do it by accident.</p><p>The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do
it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying
to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and
that makes simple writing even simpler.</p></td></tr></tbody></div>||||I||||     
     
     
     
 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 readers' energy tends to flag part way through an article or essay. If the friction of reading is low enough, more keep going till the end.   
     
 There's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means "leap into the mouth." My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.  
     
 It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.  
     
 Plus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry.  
     
 And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English. So you can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can use difficult words. 
     
 Of course, fancy writing doesn't just conceal ideas. It can also conceal the lack of them. That's why some people write that way, to conceal the fact that they have nothing to say. Whereas writing simply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be obvious to everyone, including you. 
     
 Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the future will be in much the same position as people from other countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain for a woodworker to build a chair to last.
     
 Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or writing. It's a sign you did a good job.    
     
 But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none of them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it offends me not to. When I write a sentence that seems too complicated, or that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy to me. It seems clumsy. 
     
 There are of course times when you want to use a complicated sentence or fancy word for effect. But you should never do it by accident.   
     
 The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and that makes simple writing even simpler.  
     
     
     
     
     

March 2021I 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 readers' energy tends to flag
part way through an article or essay. If the friction of reading
is low enough, more keep going till the end. There's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means "leap
into the mouth." My goal when writing might be called saltintesta:
the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that
got them there. It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You
might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the
time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and
pure ideas is not filled with poetry. Plus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a
fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just
so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you
that readers have to carry. And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your
readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of
ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English. So you
can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can
use difficult words. Of course, fancy writing doesn't just conceal ideas. It can also
conceal the lack of them. That's why some people write that way,
to conceal the fact that they have 
     nothing to say. Whereas writing
simply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be
obvious to everyone, including you.Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the
future will be in much the same position as people from other
countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have
changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain
for a woodworker to build a chair to last. Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or
writing. It's a sign you did a good job. But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none
of them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it
offends me not to. When I write a sentence that seems too complicated,
or that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy
to me. It seems clumsy. There are of course times when you want to use a complicated sentence
or fancy word for effect. But you should never do it by accident. The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do
it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying
to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and
that makes simple writing even simpler.
Write Simply
http://paulgraham.com/simply.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/noob.html
Being a Noob
2020-04-18
None
<div><div><tbody><tr><td>January 2020<p>When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out.
Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true.</p><p>I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking to
some startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or reading
a book about a topic I don't understand well enough, or visiting some new
country where I don't know how things work.</p><p>It's not pleasant to feel like a noob. And the word "noob" is
certainly not a compliment. And yet today I realized something
encouraging about being a noob: the more of a noob you are locally,
the less of a noob you are globally.</p><p>For example, if you stay in your home country, you'll feel less
of a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything works
differently. And yet you'll know more if you move.
So the feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actual
ignorance.</p><p>But if the feeling of being a noob is good for us, why do we dislike
it? What evolutionary purpose could such an aversion serve?</p><p>I think the answer is that there are two sources of feeling like a
noob: being stupid, and doing something novel. Our dislike of feeling
like a noob is our brain telling us "Come on, come on, figure this
out." Which was the right thing to be thinking for most of human
history. The life of hunter-gatherers was complex, but it didn't
change as much as life does now. They didn't suddenly have to figure
out what to do about cryptocurrency. So it made sense to be biased
toward competence at existing problems over the discovery of new
ones. It made sense for humans to dislike the feeling of being a
noob, just as, in a world where food was scarce, it made sense for
them to dislike the feeling of being hungry.</p><p>Now that too much food is more of a problem than too little, our
dislike of feeling hungry leads us astray. And I think our dislike
of feeling like a noob does too.</p><p>Though it feels unpleasant, and people will sometimes ridicule you
for it, the more you feel like a noob, the better.</p></td></tr></tbody></div>||||I||||            
            
            
            
 January 2020           
            
 When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true.          
            
 I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking to some startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or reading a book about a topic I don't understand well enough, or visiting some new country where I don't know how things work.        
            
 It's not pleasant to feel like a noob. And the word "noob" is certainly not a compliment. And yet today I realized something encouraging about being a noob: the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.        
            
 For example, if you stay in your home country, you'll feel less of a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything works differently. And yet you'll know more if you move. So the feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actual ignorance.        
            
 But if the feeling of being a noob is good for us, why do we dislike it? What evolutionary purpose could such an aversion serve?          
            
 I think the answer is that there are two sources of feeling like a noob: being stupid, and doing something novel. Our dislike of feeling like a noob is our brain telling us "Come on, come on, figure this out." Which was the right thing to be thinking for most of human history. The life of hunter-gatherers was complex, but it didn't change as much as life does now. They didn't suddenly have to figure out what to do about cryptocurrency. So it made sense to be biased toward competence at existing problems over the discovery of new ones. It made sense for humans to dislike the feeling of being a noob, just as, in a world where food was scarce, it made sense for them to dislike the feeling of being hungry.
            
 Now that too much food is more of a problem than too little, our dislike of feeling hungry leads us astray. And I think our dislike of feeling like a noob does too.         
            
 Though it feels unpleasant, and people will sometimes ridicule you for it, the more you feel like a noob, the better.          
            
            
            
            
            
            
            
            
 Japanese Translation Arabic Translation           
            
            
 French Translation Korean Translation           
            
            
 Polish Translation Chinese Translation           
            
            
 Serbian Translation French Translation           
            
            
            
            
            
            

January 2020When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out.
Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true. I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking to
some startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or reading
a book about a topic I don't understand well enough, or visiting some new
country where I don't know how things work. It's not pleasant to feel like a noob. And the word "noob" is
certainly not a compliment. And yet today I realized something
encouraging about being a noob: the more of a noob you are locally,
the less of a noob you are globally. For example, if you stay in your home country, you'll feel less
of a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything works
differently. And yet you'll know more if you move.
So the feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actual
ignorance. But if the feeling of being a noob is good for us, why do we dislike
it? What evolutionary purpose could such an aversion serve? I think the answer is that there are two sources of feeling like a
noob: being stupid, and doing something novel. Our dislike of feeling
like a noob is our brain telling us "Come on, come on, figure this
out." Which was the right thing to be thinking for most of human
history. The life of hunter-gatherers was complex, but it didn't
change as much as life does now. They didn't suddenly have to figure
out what to do about cryptocurrency. So it made sense to be biased
toward competence at existing problems over the discovery of new
ones. It made sense for humans to dislike the feeling of being a
noob, just as, in a world where food was scarce, it made sense for
them to dislike the feeling of being hungry. Now that too much food is more of a problem than too little, our
dislike of feeling hungry leads us astray. And I think our dislike
of feeling like a noob does too. Though it feels unpleasant, and people will sometimes ridicule you
for it, the more you feel like a noob, the better.
Being a Noob
http://paulgraham.com/noob.html
https://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html
Having Kids
2020-02-01
None
<div><div><tbody><tr><td>December 2019<p>Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I
felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living
virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children.
But did I want them now? No.</p><p>If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since
I was a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had
no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that,
to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind.
Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids, the kids seemed to be
terrors, and the parents pathetic harried creatures, even when they
prevailed.</p><p>When people had babies, I congratulated them enthusiastically,
because that seemed to be what one did. But I didn't feel it at
all. "Better you than me," I was thinking.</p><p>Now when people have babies I congratulate them enthusiastically and
I mean it. Especially the first one. I feel like they just got the best gift in the world.</p><p>What changed, of course, is that I had kids. Something I dreaded
turned out to be wonderful.</p><p>Partly, and I won't deny it, this is because of serious chemical
changes that happened almost instantly when our first child was
born. It was like someone flipped a switch. I suddenly felt
protective not just toward our child, but toward all children. As I was
driving my wife and new son home from the hospital, I approached a
crosswalk full of pedestrians, and I found myself thinking "I have
to be really careful of all these people. Every one of them is
someone's child!"</p><p>So to some extent you can't trust me when I say having kids is
great. To some extent I'm like a religious cultist telling you
that you'll be happy if you join the cult too  but only because
joining the cult will alter your mind in a way that will make you
happy to be a cult member.</p><p>But not entirely. There were some things
about having kids that I clearly got wrong before I had them.</p><p>For example, there was a huge amount of selection bias in my
observations of parents and children. Some parents may have noticed
that I wrote "Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids." Of course
the times I noticed kids were when things were going wrong. I only
noticed them when they made noise. And where was I when I noticed
them? Ordinarily I never went to places with kids, so the only
times I encountered them were in shared bottlenecks like airplanes.
Which is not exactly a representative sample. Flying with a toddler
is something very few parents enjoy.</p><p>What I didn't notice, because they tend to be much quieter, were
all the great moments parents had with kids. People don't talk about
these much  the magic is hard to put into words, and all other
parents know about them anyway  but one of the great things about
having kids is that there are so many times when you feel there is
nowhere else you'd rather be, and nothing else you'd rather be
doing. You don't have to be doing anything special. You could just
be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing
them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn't trade these moments
for anything. One doesn't tend to associate kids with peace, but
that's what you feel. You don't need to look any
further than where you are right now.</p><p>Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they
were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day.</p><p>My other source of data about kids was my own childhood, and that
was similarly misleading. I was pretty bad, and was always in trouble
for something or other. So it seemed to me that parenthood was
essentially law enforcement. I didn't realize there were good times
too.</p><p>I remember my mother telling me once when I was about 30 that she'd
really enjoyed having me and my sister. My god, I thought, this
woman is a saint. She not only endured all the pain we subjected
her to, but actually enjoyed it? Now I realize she was simply telling
the truth.</p><p>She said that one reason she liked having us was that we'd been
interesting to talk to. That took me by surprise when I had kids.
You don't just love them. They become your friends too. They're
really interesting. And while I admit small children are disastrously
fond of repetition (anything worth doing once is worth doing fifty
times) it's often genuinely fun to play with them. That surprised
me too. Playing with a 2 year old was fun when I was 2 and definitely
not fun when I was 6. Why would it become fun again later? But it
does.</p><p>There are of course times that are pure drudgery. Or worse still,
terror. Having kids is one of those intense types of experience
that are hard to imagine unless you've had them. But it is not, as I
implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for
the lifeboats.</p><p>Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They
definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some
people get their act together, but if your act was already together,
you're going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you're
going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules. I'm not
sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only
way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids,
you tend to have to work on their schedule.</p><p>You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill
promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had
kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day,
whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be
times when you have to stop, even if it is.</p><p>I've been able to adapt to working this way. Work, like love, finds
a way. If there are only certain times it can happen, it happens
at those times. So while I don't get as much done as before I had
kids, I get enough done.</p><p>I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part
of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It
hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But
if there weren't something real there, why would I squirm? The
fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more
about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum
game. Only one idea at a time can be the 
</p><a href="top.html"><u>top idea in your mind</u></a>.
Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it
will less often be some project you're working on.<p>I have some hacks for sailing close to this wind. For example, when
I write essays, I think about what I'd want my kids to know. That
drives me to get things right. And when I was writing 
</p><a href="bel.html"><u>Bel</u></a>, I told
my kids that once I finished it I'd take them to Africa. When you
say that sort of thing to a little kid, they treat it as a promise.
Which meant I had to finish or I'd be taking away their trip to
Africa. Maybe if I'm really lucky such tricks could put me net
ahead. But the wind is there, no question.<p>On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it
won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?</p><p>And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't
overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like
before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the
ability to take off for some other country at a moment's notice.
That was so great. Why did I never do that?</p><p>See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before
kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used
it.</p><p>I had plenty of happy times before I had kids. But if I count up
happy moments, not just potential happiness but actual happy moments,
there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it
on tap, almost any bedtime.</p><p>People's experiences as parents
vary a lot, and I know I've been lucky. But I think the worries I
had before having kids must be pretty common, and judging by other
parents' faces when they see their kids, so must the happiness that
kids bring.</p><p>
<b>Note</b></p><p>[1] Adults are sophisticated enough to see 2 year olds for the
fascinatingly complex characters they are, whereas to most 6 year
olds, 2 year olds are just defective 6 year olds.</p><p><b>Thanks</b> to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris
for reading drafts of this.</p></td></tr></tbody></div>||||I||||            
            
            
            
 December 2019            
            
 Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No.         
            
 If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since I was a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that, to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind. Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids, the kids seemed to be terrors, and the parents pathetic harried creatures, even when they prevailed.      
            
 When people had babies, I congratulated them enthusiastically, because that seemed to be what one did. But I didn't feel it at all. "Better you than me," I was thinking.          
            
 Now when people have babies I congratulate them enthusiastically and I mean it. Especially the first one. I feel like they just got the best gift in the world.          
            
 What changed, of course, is that I had kids. Something I dreaded turned out to be wonderful.           
            
 Partly, and I won't deny it, this is because of serious chemical changes that happened almost instantly when our first child was born. It was like someone flipped a switch. I suddenly felt protective not just toward our child, but toward all children. As I was driving my wife and new son home from the hospital, I approached a crosswalk full of pedestrians, and I found myself thinking "I have to be really careful of all these people. Every one of them is someone's child!"     
            
 So to some extent you can't trust me when I say having kids is great. To some extent I'm like a religious cultist telling you that you'll be happy if you join the cult too  but only because joining the cult will alter your mind in a way that will make you happy to be a cult member.        
            
 But not entirely. There were some things about having kids that I clearly got wrong before I had them.           
            
 For example, there was a huge amount of selection bias in my observations of parents and children. Some parents may have noticed that I wrote "Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids." Of course the times I noticed kids were when things were going wrong. I only noticed them when they made noise. And where was I when I noticed them? Ordinarily I never went to places with kids, so the only times I encountered them were in shared bottlenecks like airplanes. Which is not exactly a representative sample. Flying with a toddler is something very few parents enjoy.   
            
 What I didn't notice, because they tend to be much quieter, were all the great moments parents had with kids. People don't talk about these much  the magic is hard to put into words, and all other parents know about them anyway  but one of the great things about having kids is that there are so many times when you feel there is nowhere else you'd rather be, and nothing else you'd rather be doing. You don't have to be doing anything special. You could just be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn't trade these moments for anything. One doesn't tend to associate kids with peace, but that's what you feel. You don't need to look any further than where you are right now.
            
 Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day.          
            
 My other source of data about kids was my own childhood, and that was similarly misleading. I was pretty bad, and was always in trouble for something or other. So it seemed to me that parenthood was essentially law enforcement. I didn't realize there were good times too.        
            
 I remember my mother telling me once when I was about 30 that she'd really enjoyed having me and my sister. My god, I thought, this woman is a saint. She not only endured all the pain we subjected her to, but actually enjoyed it? Now I realize she was simply telling the truth.        
            
 She said that one reason she liked having us was that we'd been interesting to talk to. That took me by surprise when I had kids. You don't just love them. They become your friends too. They're really interesting. And while I admit small children are disastrously fond of repetition (anything worth doing once is worth doing fifty times) it's often genuinely fun to play with them. That surprised me too. Playing with a 2 year old was fun when I was 2 and definitely not fun when I was 6. Why would it become fun again later? But it does.    
            
 There are of course times that are pure drudgery. Or worse still, terror. Having kids is one of those intense types of experience that are hard to imagine unless you've had them. But it is not, as I implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for the lifeboats.        
            
 Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some people get their act together, but if your act was already together, you're going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you're going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules. I'm not sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids, you tend to have to work on their schedule.    
            
 You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day, whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be times when you have to stop, even if it is.       
            
 I've been able to adapt to working this way. Work, like love, finds a way. If there are only certain times it can happen, it happens at those times. So while I don't get as much done as before I had kids, I get enough done.         
            
 I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But if there weren't something real there, why would I squirm? The fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game. Only one idea at a time can be the top idea in your mind. Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it will less often be some project you're working on.   
            
 I have some hacks for sailing close to this wind. For example, when I write essays, I think about what I'd want my kids to know. That drives me to get things right. And when I was writing Bel, I told my kids that once I finished it I'd take them to Africa. When you say that sort of thing to a little kid, they treat it as a promise. Which meant I had to finish or I'd be taking away their trip to Africa. Maybe if I'm really lucky such tricks could put me net ahead. But the wind is there, no question.    
            
 On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?          
            
 And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the ability to take off for some other country at a moment's notice. That was so great. Why did I never do that?       
            
 See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.          
            
 I had plenty of happy times before I had kids. But if I count up happy moments, not just potential happiness but actual happy moments, there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it on tap, almost any bedtime.         
            
 People's experiences as parents vary a lot, and I know I've been lucky. But I think the worries I had before having kids must be pretty common, and judging by other parents' faces when they see their kids, so must the happiness that kids bring.        
            
            
            
            
            
            
            
            
            
 Note            
            
 [1] Adults are sophisticated enough to see 2 year olds for the fascinatingly complex characters they are, whereas to most 6 year olds, 2 year olds are just defective 6 year olds.         
            
            
            
 Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.           
            
            
            
            
 Arabic Translation Slovak Translation            
            
            
            
            
            
            

December 2019Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I
felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living
virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children.
But did I want them now? No. If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since
I was a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had
no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that,
to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind.
Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids, the kids seemed to be
terrors, and the parents pathetic harried creatures, even when they
prevailed. When people had babies, I congratulated them enthusiastically,
because that seemed to be what one did. But I didn't feel it at
all. "Better you than me," I was thinking. Now when people have babies I congratulate them enthusiastically and
I mean it. Especially the first one. I feel like they just got the best gift in the world. What changed, of course, is that I had kids. Something I dreaded
turned out to be wonderful. Partly, and I won't deny it, this is because of serious chemical
changes that happened almost instantly when our first child was
born. It was like someone flipped a switch. I suddenly felt
protective not just toward our child, but toward all children. As I was
driving my wife and new son home from the hospital, I approached a
crosswalk full of pedestrians, and I found myself thinking "I have
to be really careful of all these people. Every one of them is
someone's child!" So to some extent you can't trust me when I say having kids is
great. To some extent I'm like a religious cultist telling you
that you'll be happy if you join the cult too  but only because
joining the cult will alter your mind in a way that will make you
happy to be a cult member. But not entirely. There were some things
about having kids that I clearly got wrong before I had them. For example, there was a huge amount of selection bias in my
observations of parents and children. Some parents may have noticed
that I wrote "Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids." Of course
the times I noticed kids were when things were going wrong. I only
noticed them when they made noise. And where was I when I noticed
them? Ordinarily I never went to places with kids, so the only
times I encountered them were in shared bottlenecks like airplanes.
Which is not exactly a representative sample. Flying with a toddler
is something very few parents enjoy. What I didn't notice, because they tend to be much quieter, were
all the great moments parents had with kids. People don't talk about
these much  the magic is hard to put into words, and all other
parents know about them anyway  but one of the great things about
having kids is that there are so many times when you feel there is
nowhere else you'd rather be, and nothing else you'd rather be
doing. You don't have to be doing anything special. You could just
be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing
them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn't trade these moments
for anything. One doesn't tend to associate kids with peace, but
that's what you feel. You don't need to look any
further than where you are right now. Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they
were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day. My other source of data about kids was my own childhood, and that
was similarly misleading. I was pretty bad, and was always in trouble
for something or other. So it seemed to me that parenthood was
essentially law enforcement. I didn't realize there were good times
too. I remember my mother telling me once when I was about 30 that she'd
really enjoyed having me and my sister. My god, I thought, this
woman is a saint. She not only endured all the pain we subjected
her to, but actually enjoyed it? Now I realize she was simply telling
the truth. She said that one reason she liked having us was that we'd been
interesting to talk to. That took me by surprise when I had kids.
You don't just love them. They become your friends too. They're
really interesting. And while I admit small children are disastrously
fond of repetition (anything worth doing once is worth doing fifty
times) it's often genuinely fun to play with them. That surprised
me too. Playing with a 2 year old was fun when I was 2 and definitely
not fun when I was 6. Why would it become fun again later? But it
does. There are of course times that are pure drudgery. Or worse still,
terror. Having kids is one of those intense types of experience
that are hard to imagine unless you've had them. But it is not, as I
implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for
the lifeboats. Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They
definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some
people get their act together, but if your act was already together,
you're going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you're
going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules. I'm not
sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only
way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids,
you tend to have to work on their schedule. You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill
promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had
kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day,
whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be
times when you have to stop, even if it is. I've been able to adapt to working this way. Work, like love, finds
a way. If there are only certain times it can happen, it happens
at those times. So while I don't get as much done as before I had
kids, I get enough done. I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part
of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It
hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But
if there weren't something real there, why would I squirm? The
fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more
about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum
game. Only one idea at a time can be the 
  top idea in your mind .
Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it
will less often be some project you're working on.I have some hacks for sailing close to this wind. For example, when
I write essays, I think about what I'd want my kids to know. That
drives me to get things right. And when I was writing 
  Bel , I told
my kids that once I finished it I'd take them to Africa. When you
say that sort of thing to a little kid, they treat it as a promise.
Which meant I had to finish or I'd be taking away their trip to
Africa. Maybe if I'm really lucky such tricks could put me net
ahead. But the wind is there, no question.On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it
won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare? And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't
overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like
before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the
ability to take off for some other country at a moment's notice.
That was so great. Why did I never do that? See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before
kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used
it. I had plenty of happy times before I had kids. But if I count up
happy moments, not just potential happiness but actual happy moments,
there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it
on tap, almost any bedtime. People's experiences as parents
vary a lot, and I know I've been lucky. But I think the worries I
had before having kids must be pretty common, and judging by other
parents' faces when they see their kids, so must the happiness that
kids bring. 
Note  [1] Adults are sophisticated enough to see 2 year olds for the
fascinatingly complex characters they are, whereas to most 6 year
olds, 2 year olds are just defective 6 year olds.  Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris
for reading drafts of this.
Having Kids
http://paulgraham.com/kids.html
http://paulgraham.com/jessica.html
Jessica Livingston
2015-01-01
None
<div><div><tbody><tr><td>November 2015<p>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 don't understand her, you
don't understand YC. So let me tell you a little about Jessica.</p><p>YC had 4 founders. Jessica and I decided one night to start it,
and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor
Blackwell. Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor
read applications and did interviews with us.</p><p>Jessica and I were already dating when we started YC. At first we
tried to act "professional" about this, meaning we tried to conceal
it. In retrospect that seems ridiculous, and we soon dropped the
pretense. And the fact that Jessica and I were a couple is a big
part of what made YC what it was. YC felt like a family. The
founders early on were mostly young. We all had dinner together
once a week, cooked for the first couple years by me. Our first
building had been a private home. The overall atmosphere was
shockingly different from a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, in a way
that was entirely for the better. There was an authenticity that
everyone who walked in could sense. And that didn't just mean that
people trusted us. It was the perfect quality to instill in startups.
Authenticity is one of the most important things YC looks for in
founders, not just because fakers and opportunists are annoying,
but because authenticity is one of the main things that separates
the most successful startups from the rest.</p><p>Early YC was a family, and Jessica was its mom. And the culture
she defined was one of YC's most important innovations. Culture
is important in any organization, but at YC culture wasn't just how
we behaved when we built the product. At YC, the culture was the
product.</p><p>Jessica was also the mom in another sense: she had the last word.
Everything we did as an organization went through her </p>first — who
to fund, what to say to the public, how to deal with other companies,
who to hire, everything.<p>Before we had kids, YC was more or less our life. There was no real
distinction between working hours and not. We talked about YC all
the time. And while there might be some businesses that it would
be tedious to let infect your private life, we liked it. We'd started
YC because it was something we were interested in. And some of the
problems we were trying to solve were endlessly difficult. How do
you recognize good founders? You could talk about that for years,
and we did; we still do.</p><p>I'm better at some things than Jessica, and she's better at some
things than me. One of the things she's best at is judging people.
She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character.
She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her
nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of
hers was 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.</p><p>Others thought YC had some special insight about the future of
technology. Mostly we had the same sort of insight Socrates claimed:
we at least knew we knew nothing. What made YC successful was being
able to pick good founders. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea. We
funded it because we liked the founders.</p><p>During interviews, Robert and Trevor and I would pepper the applicants
with technical questions. Jessica would mostly watch. A lot of
the applicants probably read her as some kind of secretary, especially
early on, because she was the one who'd go out and get each new
group and she didn't ask many questions. She was ok with that. It
was easier for her to watch people if they didn't notice her. But
after the interview, the three of us would turn to Jessica and ask
"What does the Social Radar say?"
</p>[<a href="#f1n">1</a>]<p>Having the Social Radar at interviews wasn't just how we picked
founders who'd be successful. It was also how we picked founders
who were good people. At first we did this because we couldn't
help it. Imagine what it would feel like to have x-ray vision for
character. Being around bad people would be intolerable. So we'd
refuse to fund founders whose characters we had doubts about even
if we thought they'd be successful.</p><p>Though we initially did this out of self-indulgence, it turned out
to be very valuable to YC. We didn't realize it in the beginning,
but the people we were picking would become the YC alumni network.
And once we picked them, unless they did something really egregious,
they were going to be part of it for life. Some now think YC's
alumni network is its most valuable feature. I personally think
YC's advice is pretty good too, but the alumni network is certainly
among the most valuable features. The level of trust and helpfulness
is remarkable for a group of such size. And Jessica is the main
reason why.</p><p>(As we later learned, it probably cost us little to reject people
whose characters we had doubts about, because how good founders are
and how well they do are </p><a href="mean.html"><u>not orthogonal</u></a>. If bad founders succeed
at all, they tend to sell early. The most successful founders are
almost all good.)<p>If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize
it? Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate
attention. YC's brand was initially my brand, and our applicants
were people who'd read my essays. But there is another reason:
Jessica hates attention. Talking to reporters makes her nervous.
The thought of giving a talk paralyzes her. She was even uncomfortable
at our wedding, because the bride is always the center of attention.
</p>[<a href="#f2n">2</a>]<p>It's not just because she's shy that she hates attention, but because
it throws off the Social Radar. She can't be herself. You can't
watch people when everyone is watching you.</p><p>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. She has a horror of
ostentation so visceral it's almost a phobia.</p><p>She also hates fighting. She can't do it; she just shuts down. And
unfortunately there is a good deal of fighting in being the public
face of an organization.</p><p>So although Jessica more than anyone made YC unique, the very
qualities that enabled her to do it mean she tends to get written
out of YC's history. Everyone buys this story that PG started YC
and his wife just kind of helped. Even YC's haters buy it. A
couple years ago when people were attacking us for not funding more
female founders (than exist), they all treated YC as identical with
PG. It would have spoiled the narrative to acknowledge Jessica's
central role at YC.</p><p>Jessica was boiling mad that people were accusing <i>her</i> company of
sexism. I've never seen her angrier about anything. But she did
not contradict them. Not publicly. In private there was a great
deal of profanity. And she wrote three separate essays about the
question of female founders. But she could never bring herself to
publish any of them. She'd seen the level of vitriol in this debate,
and she shrank from engaging.
</p>[<a href="#f3n">3</a>]<p>It wasn't just because she disliked fighting. She's so sensitive
to character that it repels her even to fight with dishonest people.
The idea of mixing it up with linkbait journalists or Twitter trolls
would seem to her not merely frightening, but disgusting.</p><p>But Jessica knew her example as a successful female founder would
encourage more women to start companies, so last year she did
something YC had never done before and hired a PR firm to get her
some interviews. At one of the first she did, the reporter brushed
aside her insights about startups and turned it into a sensationalistic
story about how some guy had tried to chat her up as she was waiting
outside the bar where they had arranged to meet. Jessica was
mortified, partly because the guy had done nothing wrong, but more
because the story treated her as a victim significant only for being
a woman, rather than one of the most knowledgeable investors in the
Valley.</p><p>After that she told the PR firm to stop.</p><p>You're not going to be hearing in the press about what Jessica has
achieved. So let me tell you what Jessica has achieved. </p>Y Combinator
is fundamentally a nexus of people, like a university. It doesn't
make a product. What defines it is the people. Jessica more than
anyone curated and nurtured that collection of people. In that
sense she literally made YC.<p>Jessica knows more about the qualities of startup founders than
anyone else ever has. Her immense data set and x-ray vision are the
perfect storm in that respect. The qualities of the founders are
the best predictor of how a startup will do. And startups are in
turn the most important source of growth in mature economies.</p><p>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?</p><p><b>Notes</b></p><p>[</p><a>1</a>]
Harj Taggar reminded me that while Jessica didn't ask many
questions, they tended to be important ones:<p>"She was always good at sniffing out any red flags about the team
or their determination and disarmingly asking the right question,
which usually revealed more than the founders realized."</p><p>[</p><a>2</a>]
Or more precisely, while she likes getting attention in the
sense of getting credit for what she has done, she doesn't like
getting attention in the sense of being watched in real time.
Unfortunately, not just for her but for a lot of people, how much
you get of the former depends a lot on how much you get of the
latter.<p>Incidentally, if you saw Jessica at a public event, you would never
guess she
hates attention, because (a) she is very polite and (b) when she's
nervous, she expresses it by smiling more.</p><p>[</p><a>3</a>]
The existence of people like Jessica is not just something
the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something
feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful
women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation
about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.<p>There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation
reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people
start to leave. No one understands female founders better than
Jessica. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly
about the topic. She ventured a toe in that water a while ago, and
the reaction was so violent that she decided "never again."</p><p>
<b>Thanks</b> to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, 
Daniel Gackle, Carolynn
Levy, Jon Levy, Kirsty Nathoo, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this. And yes, Jessica Livingston,
who made me cut surprisingly little.</p></td></tr></tbody></div>||||I||||                 
                 
                 
                 
 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 don't understand her, you don't understand YC. So let me tell you a little about Jessica.          
                 
 YC had 4 founders. Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor read applications and did interviews with us.             
                 
 Jessica and I were already dating when we started YC. At first we tried to act "professional" about this, meaning we tried to conceal it. In retrospect that seems ridiculous, and we soon dropped the pretense. And the fact that Jessica and I were a couple is a big part of what made YC what it was. YC felt like a family. The founders early on were mostly young. We all had dinner together once a week, cooked for the first couple years by me. Our first building had been a private home. The overall atmosphere was shockingly different from a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, in a way that was entirely for the better. There was an authenticity that everyone who walked in could sense. And that didn't just mean that people trusted us. It was the perfect quality to instill in startups. Authenticity is one of the most important things YC looks for in founders, not just because fakers and opportunists are annoying, but because authenticity is one of the main things that separates the most successful startups from the rest.
                 
 Early YC was a family, and Jessica was its mom. And the culture she defined was one of YC's most important innovations. Culture is important in any organization, but at YC culture wasn't just how we behaved when we built the product. At YC, the culture was the product.            
                 
 Jessica was also the mom in another sense: she had the last word. Everything we did as an organization went through her first — who to fund, what to say to the public, how to deal with other companies, who to hire, everything.             
                 
 Before we had kids, YC was more or less our life. There was no real distinction between working hours and not. We talked about YC all the time. And while there might be some businesses that it would be tedious to let infect your private life, we liked it. We'd started YC because it was something we were interested in. And some of the problems we were trying to solve were endlessly difficult. How do you recognize good founders? You could talk about that for years, and we did; we still do.         
                 
 I'm better at some things than Jessica, and she's better at some things than me. One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was 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 technology. Mostly we had the same sort of insight Socrates claimed: we at least knew we knew nothing. What made YC successful was being able to pick good founders. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea. We funded it because we liked the founders.            
                 
 During interviews, Robert and Trevor and I would pepper the applicants with technical questions. Jessica would mostly watch. A lot of the applicants probably read her as some kind of secretary, especially early on, because she was the one who'd go out and get each new group and she didn't ask many questions. She was ok with that. It was easier for her to watch people if they didn't notice her. But after the interview, the three of us would turn to Jessica and ask "What does the Social Radar say?" [1]         
                 
 Having the Social Radar at interviews wasn't just how we picked founders who'd be successful. It was also how we picked founders who were good people. At first we did this because we couldn't help it. Imagine what it would feel like to have x-ray vision for character. Being around bad people would be intolerable. So we'd refuse to fund founders whose characters we had doubts about even if we thought they'd be successful.          
                 
 Though we initially did this out of self-indulgence, it turned out to be very valuable to YC. We didn't realize it in the beginning, but the people we were picking would become the YC alumni network. And once we picked them, unless they did something really egregious, they were going to be part of it for life. Some now think YC's alumni network is its most valuable feature. I personally think YC's advice is pretty good too, but the alumni network is certainly among the most valuable features. The level of trust and helpfulness is remarkable for a group of such size. And Jessica is the main reason why.       
                 
 (As we later learned, it probably cost us little to reject people whose characters we had doubts about, because how good founders are and how well they do are not orthogonal. If bad founders succeed at all, they tend to sell early. The most successful founders are almost all good.)            
                 
 If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize it? Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate attention. YC's brand was initially my brand, and our applicants were people who'd read my essays. But there is another reason: Jessica hates attention. Talking to reporters makes her nervous. The thought of giving a talk paralyzes her. She was even uncomfortable at our wedding, because the bride is always the center of attention. [2]         
                 
 It's not just because she's shy that she hates attention, but because it throws off the Social Radar. She can't be herself. You can't watch people when everyone 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. She has a horror of ostentation so visceral it's almost a phobia.           
                 
 She also hates fighting. She can't do it; she just shuts down. And unfortunately there is a good deal of fighting in being the public face of an organization.              
                 
 So although Jessica more than anyone made YC unique, the very qualities that enabled her to do it mean she tends to get written out of YC's history. Everyone buys this story that PG started YC and his wife just kind of helped. Even YC's haters buy it. A couple years ago when people were attacking us for not funding more female founders (than exist), they all treated YC as identical with PG. It would have spoiled the narrative to acknowledge Jessica's central role at YC.         
                 
 Jessica was boiling mad that people were accusing her company of sexism. I've never seen her angrier about anything. But she did not contradict them. Not publicly. In private there was a great deal of profanity. And she wrote three separate essays about the question of female founders. But she could never bring herself to publish any of them. She'd seen the level of vitriol in this debate, and she shrank from engaging. [3]          
                 
 It wasn't just because she disliked fighting. She's so sensitive to character that it repels her even to fight with dishonest people. The idea of mixing it up with linkbait journalists or Twitter trolls would seem to her not merely frightening, but disgusting.            
                 
 But Jessica knew her example as a successful female founder would encourage more women to start companies, so last year she did something YC had never done before and hired a PR firm to get her some interviews. At one of the first she did, the reporter brushed aside her insights about startups and turned it into a sensationalistic story about how some guy had tried to chat her up as she was waiting outside the bar where they had arranged to meet. Jessica was mortified, partly because the guy had done nothing wrong, but more because the story treated her as a victim significant only for being a woman, rather than one of the most knowledgeable investors in the Valley.      
                 
 After that she told the PR firm to stop.                
                 
 You're not going to be hearing in the press about what Jessica has achieved. So let me tell you what Jessica has achieved. Y Combinator is fundamentally a nexus of people, like a university. It doesn't make a product. What defines it is the people. Jessica more than anyone curated and nurtured that collection of people. In that sense she literally made YC.           
                 
 Jessica knows more about the qualities of startup founders than anyone else ever has. Her immense data set and x-ray vision are the perfect storm in that respect. The qualities of the founders are the best predictor of how a 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?             
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
 Notes                
                 
 [1] Harj Taggar reminded me that while Jessica didn't ask many questions, they tended to be important ones:               
                 
 "She was always good at sniffing out any red flags about the team or their determination and disarmingly asking the right question, which usually revealed more than the founders realized."              
                 
 [2] Or more precisely, while she likes getting attention in the sense of getting credit for what she has done, she doesn't like getting attention in the sense of being watched in real time. Unfortunately, not just for her but for a lot of people, how much you get of the former depends a lot on how much you get of the latter.           
                 
 Incidentally, if you saw Jessica at a public event, you would never guess she hates attention, because (a) she is very polite and (b) when she's nervous, she expresses it by smiling more.              
                 
 [3] The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.           
                 
 There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people start to leave. No one understands female founders better than Jessica. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the topic. She ventured a toe in that water a while ago, and the reaction was so violent that she decided "never again."          
                 
 Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Daniel Gackle, Carolynn Levy, Jon Levy, Kirsty Nathoo, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this. And yes, Jessica Livingston, who made me cut surprisingly little.             
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 

November 2015A 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 don't understand her, you
don't understand YC. So let me tell you a little about Jessica. YC had 4 founders. Jessica and I decided one night to start it,
and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor
Blackwell. Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor
read applications and did interviews with us. Jessica and I were already dating when we started YC. At first we
tried to act "professional" about this, meaning we tried to conceal
it. In retrospect that seems ridiculous, and we soon dropped the
pretense. And the fact that Jessica and I were a couple is a big
part of what made YC what it was. YC felt like a family. The
founders early on were mostly young. We all had dinner together
once a week, cooked for the first couple years by me. Our first
building had been a private home. The overall atmosphere was
shockingly different from a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, in a way
that was entirely for the better. There was an authenticity that
everyone who walked in could sense. And that didn't just mean that
people trusted us. It was the perfect quality to instill in startups.
Authenticity is one of the most important things YC looks for in
founders, not just because fakers and opportunists are annoying,
but because authenticity is one of the main things that separates
the most successful startups from the rest. Early YC was a family, and Jessica was its mom. And the culture
she defined was one of YC's most important innovations. Culture
is important in any organization, but at YC culture wasn't just how
we behaved when we built the product. At YC, the culture was the
product. Jessica was also the mom in another sense: she had the last word.
Everything we did as an organization went through her first — who
to fund, what to say to the public, how to deal with other companies,
who to hire, everything.Before we had kids, YC was more or less our life. There was no real
distinction between working hours and not. We talked about YC all
the time. And while there might be some businesses that it would
be tedious to let infect your private life, we liked it. We'd started
YC because it was something we were interested in. And some of the
problems we were trying to solve were endlessly difficult. How do
you recognize good founders? You could talk about that for years,
and we did; we still do. I'm better at some things than Jessica, and she's better at some
things than me. One of the things she's best at is judging people.
She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character.
She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her
nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of
hers was 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
technology. Mostly we had the same sort of insight Socrates claimed:
we at least knew we knew nothing. What made YC successful was being
able to pick good founders. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea. We
funded it because we liked the founders. During interviews, Robert and Trevor and I would pepper the applicants
with technical questions. Jessica would mostly watch. A lot of
the applicants probably read her as some kind of secretary, especially
early on, because she was the one who'd go out and get each new
group and she didn't ask many questions. She was ok with that. It
was easier for her to watch people if they didn't notice her. But
after the interview, the three of us would turn to Jessica and ask
"What does the Social Radar say?"
[1]Having the Social Radar at interviews wasn't just how we picked
founders who'd be successful. It was also how we picked founders
who were good people. At first we did this because we couldn't
help it. Imagine what it would feel like to have x-ray vision for
character. Being around bad people would be intolerable. So we'd
refuse to fund founders whose characters we had doubts about even
if we thought they'd be successful. Though we initially did this out of self-indulgence, it turned out
to be very valuable to YC. We didn't realize it in the beginning,
but the people we were picking would become the YC alumni network.
And once we picked them, unless they did something really egregious,
they were going to be part of it for life. Some now think YC's
alumni network is its most valuable feature. I personally think
YC's advice is pretty good too, but the alumni network is certainly
among the most valuable features. The level of trust and helpfulness
is remarkable for a group of such size. And Jessica is the main
reason why. (As we later learned, it probably cost us little to reject people
whose characters we had doubts about, because how good founders are
and how well they do are   not orthogonal . If bad founders succeed
at all, they tend to sell early. The most successful founders are
almost all good.)If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize
it? Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate
attention. YC's brand was initially my brand, and our applicants
were people who'd read my essays. But there is another reason:
Jessica hates attention. Talking to reporters makes her nervous.
The thought of giving a talk paralyzes her. She was even uncomfortable
at our wedding, because the bride is always the center of attention.
[2]It's not just because she's shy that she hates attention, but because
it throws off the Social Radar. She can't be herself. You can't
watch people when everyone 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. She has a horror of
ostentation so visceral it's almost a phobia. She also hates fighting. She can't do it; she just shuts down. And
unfortunately there is a good deal of fighting in being the public
face of an organization. So although Jessica more than anyone made YC unique, the very
qualities that enabled her to do it mean she tends to get written
out of YC's history. Everyone buys this story that PG started YC
and his wife just kind of helped. Even YC's haters buy it. A
couple years ago when people were attacking us for not funding more
female founders (than exist), they all treated YC as identical with
PG. It would have spoiled the narrative to acknowledge Jessica's
central role at YC. Jessica was boiling mad that people were accusing her company of
sexism. I've never seen her angrier about anything. But she did
not contradict them. Not publicly. In private there was a great
deal of profanity. And she wrote three separate essays about the
question of female founders. But she could never bring herself to
publish any of them. She'd seen the level of vitriol in this debate,
and she shrank from engaging.
[3]It wasn't just because she disliked fighting. She's so sensitive
to character that it repels her even to fight with dishonest people.
The idea of mixing it up with linkbait journalists or Twitter trolls
would seem to her not merely frightening, but disgusting. But Jessica knew her example as a successful female founder would
encourage more women to start companies, so last year she did
something YC had never done before and hired a PR firm to get her
some interviews. At one of the first she did, the reporter brushed
aside her insights about startups and turned it into a sensationalistic
story about how some guy had tried to chat her up as she was waiting
outside the bar where they had arranged to meet. Jessica was
mortified, partly because the guy had done nothing wrong, but more
because the story treated her as a victim significant only for being
a woman, rather than one of the most knowledgeable investors in the
Valley. After that she told the PR firm to stop. You're not going to be hearing in the press about what Jessica has
achieved. So let me tell you what Jessica has achieved. Y Combinator
is fundamentally a nexus of people, like a university. It doesn't
make a product. What defines it is the people. Jessica more than
anyone curated and nurtured that collection of people. In that
sense she literally made YC.Jessica knows more about the qualities of startup founders than
anyone else ever has. Her immense data set and x-ray vision are the
perfect storm in that respect. The qualities of the founders are
the best predictor of how a 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?  Notes  [ 1]
Harj Taggar reminded me that while Jessica didn't ask many
questions, they tended to be important ones:"She was always good at sniffing out any red flags about the team
or their determination and disarmingly asking the right question,
which usually revealed more than the founders realized." [ 2]
Or more precisely, while she likes getting attention in the
sense of getting credit for what she has done, she doesn't like
getting attention in the sense of being watched in real time.
Unfortunately, not just for her but for a lot of people, how much
you get of the former depends a lot on how much you get of the
latter.Incidentally, if you saw Jessica at a public event, you would never
guess she
hates attention, because (a) she is very polite and (b) when she's
nervous, she expresses it by smiling more. [ 3]
The existence of people like Jessica is not just something
the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something
feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful
women who don't like to fight. Which means if the public conversation
about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation
reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people
start to leave. No one understands female founders better than
Jessica. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly
about the topic. She ventured a toe in that water a while ago, and
the reaction was so violent that she decided "never again." 
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, 
Daniel Gackle, Carolynn
Levy, Jon Levy, Kirsty Nathoo, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this. And yes, Jessica Livingston,
who made me cut surprisingly little.
Jessica Livingston
http://paulgraham.com/jessica.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html
Life is Short
2016-01-01
None
<div><div><tbody><tr><td>January 2016<p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know
that?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.
</p>[<a href="#f1n">1</a>]<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.
</p>[<a href="#f2n">2</a>]<p>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 </p><a href="addiction.html"><u>more
addictive</u></a>. 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?"<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>How you live affects how long you live. Most people could do better.
Me among them.</p><p>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 <i>Burning
the Days</i>.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><b>Notes</b></p><p>[</p><a>1</a>]
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.<p>[</p><a>2</a>]
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!"<p><b>Thanks</b> to Jessica Livingston and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts
of this.</p></td></tr></tbody></div></div>||||I||||             
             
             
             
 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            
             
             
             
             
             
             

January 2016Life 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.
Life is Short
http://paulgraham.com/vb.html
http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
How to Make Wealth
2006-01-26
None
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<p>
May 2004<p><i>
(This essay was originally published in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624/104-0572701-7443937">Hackers 
&amp; Painters</a>.)
</i></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p><b>The Proposition</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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. 
</p>[<a href="#f1n">1</a>]
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. 
[<a href="#f2n">2</a>]
 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.<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><b>Millions, not Billions</b></p><p>If $3 million a year seems high to some people, it will seem
low to others. Three <i>million?</i> 
How do I get to be a billionaire, like Bill Gates?</p><p>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.</p><p>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, <i>and</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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
<i>straightforward.</i> You just have to do something people want.</p><p><b>Money Is Not Wealth</b></p><p>If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. 
Wealth is not the same thing as money. 
</p>[<a href="#f3n">3</a>]
 Wealth is as old as
human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. 
Money is a comparatively recent invention.<p>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.</p><p>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
<i>making money</i> can make it harder to understand how to 
make money.</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>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 <i>medium of exchange</i>-- 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 <i>dollar</i>,
that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange,
however, because its rarity 
is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.</p><p>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. 
</p>[<a href="#f4n">4</a>]<p><b>The Pie Fallacy</b></p><p>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 <i>money</i> at 
any moment. But that's not the same thing.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. 
<i>You can make more wealth.</i> Wealth has been getting created and
destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. 
</p>[<a href="#f5n">5</a>]<p>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.</p><p><b>Craftsmen</b></p><p>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.</p><p>A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and
<i>create wealth</i>. 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.
</p>[<a href="#f5bn">5b</a>]<p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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 <i>injustice!</i>
An experienced programmer would be more likely to think
<i>is that all?</i> The top 5% of programmers
probably write 99% of the good software.</p><p>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.</p><p><b>What a Job Is</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. 
</p>[<a href="#f6n">6</a>]<p>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.</p><p><b>Working Harder</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><b>Measurement and Leverage</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><b>Smallness = Measurement</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when 
you take the ten <i>best</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><b>Technology = Leverage</b></p><p>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.</p><p>What is technology? It's <i>technique</i>. 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <i>run upstairs.</i>
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.</p><p>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 <i>because it was harder.</i>
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.</p><p>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:
<i>barriers to entry.</i> 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? 
</p>[<a href="#f7n">7</a>]
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.<p>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. 
</p>[<a href="#f8n">8</a>]
The company that did was RCA, and
Farnsworth's reward for his efforts was a decade of
patent litigation.<p>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. 
</p>[<a href="#f9n">9</a>]<p><b>The Catch(es)</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><b>Get Users</b></p><p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <i>that 
users care about.</i></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p><b>Wealth and Power</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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. 
</p>[<a href="#f10n">10</a>]
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.<p>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.
</p>[<a href="#f11n">11</a>]
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.<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><b>Notes</b></p><p>[</p><a>1</a>]
One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is
<i>uninterruptability</i>. 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.<p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>[</p><a>2</a>]
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.<p>Internally most companies are run like Communist states.
If you believe in free markets, why not turn your company into one?</p><p>Hypothesis: A company will be maximally profitable when each
employee is paid in proportion to the wealth they generate.</p><p>[</p><a>3</a>]
Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the
distinction between money and wealth. Adam
Smith (<i>Wealth of Nations</i>, 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.<p>[</p><a>4</a>]
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.<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>[</p><a>5</a>]
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.<p>[</p><a>5b</a>]
This essay was written before Firefox.<p>[</p><a>6</a>]
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.<p>[</p><a>7</a>]
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.<p>[</p><a>8</a>]
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.<p>[</p><a>9</a>]
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.<p>[</p><a>10</a>]
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.<p>[</p><a>11</a>]
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.<p><a href="http://reddit.com/"></a>
<a href="http://reddit.com/info?id=20775">
Comment</a> on this essay.</p></p></td></tr></tbody></div>||||I||||                 
                 
                 
                 
 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. [5b]           
                 
 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. [6]          
                 
 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? [7] 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. [8] 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. [9]             
                 
 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. [10] 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. [11] 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.            
                 
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 You'll find this essay and 14 others in Hackers & Painters.                
                 
                 
                 

May 2004 
(This essay was originally published in Hackers 
&amp; 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.
[5b]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. 
[6]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? 
[7]
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. 
[8]
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. 
[9] 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. 
[10]
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.
[11]
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.
How to Make Wealth
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html
Bio
1995-01-01
None
<div><div><tbody><tr><td></td><td></td><td><a href="index.html"></a><p><a href="https://sep.yimg.com/ca/I/paulgraham_2239_0"></a>Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor.
In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software
as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by 
<a href="http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release184.html">Yahoo</a> in 1998, 
where it became Yahoo Store. In 2001 he started publishing
essays on <a href="http://paulgraham.com/">paulgraham.com</a>,
which now gets around 25 million page views per year.
In 2005 he and
Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell
started <a href="http://ycombinator.com/"><u>Y Combinator</u></a>, the first of a new type of startup
incubator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 3000 startups,
including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit. In 2019 he published a
new Lisp dialect written in itself called <a href="bel.html"><u>Bel</u></a>.<p>Paul
is the author of 
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0130305529">On Lisp</a> (Prentice Hall,
 1993),
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0133708756">ANSI Common Lisp</a> 
(Prentice Hall, 1995), and
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596006624">Hackers &amp;
Painters</a> (O'Reilly, 2004).
He has an AB from Cornell and a
 PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting
at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.</p></p><p><hr />
Photo by Dave Thomas, released under the 
Attribution Creative Commons license.
Click for full-size version.
</p></td></tr></tbody></div>||||I||||          
          
          
          
 Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. In 2001 he started publishing essays on paulgraham.com, which now gets around 25 million page views per year. In 2005 he and Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell started Y Combinator, the first of a new type of startup incubator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 3000 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit. In 2019 he published a new Lisp dialect written in itself called Bel.
          
 Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O'Reilly, 2004). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.      
          
          
          
          
          
 Photo by Dave Thomas, released under the Attribution Creative Commons license. Click for full-size version.         
          

Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor.
In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software
as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by 
Yahoo in 1998, 
where it became Yahoo Store. In 2001 he started publishing
essays on paulgraham.com,
which now gets around 25 million page views per year.
In 2005 he and
Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell
started  Y Combinator , the first of a new type of startup
incubator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 3000 startups,
including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit. In 2019 he published a
new Lisp dialect written in itself called  Bel .Paul
is the author of 
On Lisp (Prentice Hall,
 1993),
ANSI Common Lisp 
(Prentice Hall, 1995), and
Hackers &amp;
Painters (O'Reilly, 2004).
He has an AB from Cornell and a
 PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting
at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.   
Photo by Dave Thomas, released under the 
Attribution Creative Commons license.
Click for full-size version.
Bio
http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html
http://paulgraham.com/index.html
Paul Graham
2002-01-01
None
<div><div><tbody><tr><td></td><td></td><td><p></p><p><p>
<b>New:</b> 
<a href="getideas.html">How to Get New Ideas</a> |
<a href="read.html">Read</a> |
<a href="want.html">Will</a> |
<a href="alien.html">Truth</a>
<br /></p>
<p>
<b>Want to start a startup?</b> Get funded by <a href="http://ycombinator.com/apply.html">Y Combinator</a>.
<br /></p>
</p><br /><p><br />
© mmxxiii pg 
</p><br /></td></tr></tbody></div>||||I|||| 
 
 
 
 New: How to Get New Ideas | Read | Will | Truth 
 
 Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 © mmxxiii pg 
 
 

New: 
How to Get New Ideas |
Read |
Will |
Truth
 
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator.
 
   
© mmxxiii pg
Paul Graham
http://www.paulgraham.com/index.html
https://www.jaakkoj.com/blog/graham
Paul Graham 101
2019-12-20
None
<div><div><p>Thereâs probably no one who knows more about startups than Paul Graham. Having helped thousands of startups through Y Combinator, the startup accelerator he co-founded, thereâs a thing or two to learn from his essays. And Grahamâs wisdom isnât limited to startups either; his essays, read by millions, touch on education, intelligence, writing, society, the human mind, and much more.<br /></p><p>Iâve read all of Paul Grahamâs published essays (200+), ending up with enough notes to fill a book. This post tries to summarize the parts Iâve found most insightful and provide an accessible starting point for someone new to Graham.<br /></p><p>Whenever possible, Iâve included links to his essays so you can easily go to the source when something interesting catches your eye. (Indeed, I recommend it - use this post as a gateway to the good stuff rather than a complete account in itself).<br /></p><p><strong>If my description of Grahamâs idea sounds interesting, expect his essay to be 100x better. </strong>Always go back to the essays, where the ideas are fleshed out in full. This post is a very shallow overview.<br /></p><p>Nevertheless, I hope this post inspires you to read Grahamâs essays. Theyâre worth your time.<br /></p><p>Boring disclaimer stuff:</p><ul><li>I made a <a href="https://jaakkoj.gumroad.com/l/paulgraham">Google Docs version</a> of this post, in case that's easier to navigate.</li><li>Iâve included all essays that were published before November 2021 (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/smart.html"><em>Beyond Smart</em></a><em> </em>is the latest essay included). You can find a list of all essays on <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html">Grahamâs site</a>.</li><li>The info included is based on my interests at the time of reading the posts. Had I read an essay a year earlier or later, Iâd likely have included something else. Plus, with over 200 essays, Iâve just downright overlooked and forgot important stuff. Again, I recommend you explore the essays yourself.</li><li><strong>This post does NOT cover Paul Grahamâs thoughts or essays on programming / coding. </strong>Iâm simply not interested in or knowledgeable about that stuff, so I didn't think it fair to talk about it. Heâs written a lot about coding, so if thatâs your interest, explore his essays yourself.</li><li>Finally, if something seem off or missing, let me hear about it and Iâll fix it: <a href="mailto:jaakko@jaakkoj.com">jaakko@jaakkoj.com</a> / <a href="https://twitter.com/jaakkojar">Twitter</a><br /></li></ul><p>Okay, letâs jump in.</p><p>â</p><h2>Paul Graham on Startups</h2><p>Unsurprisingly, many of Grahamâs essays are startup-related. Given his experience on the topic, thereâs a lot to unwrap, including some classics like âRamen Profitableâ, âDo Things that Donât Scaleâ and âMakerâs Schedule, Managerâs Scheduleâ. Letâs start with an overview.<br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html"><em>Startups in 13 sentences</em></a>:</p><ol><li>Pick good co-founders.</li><li>Launch fast.</li><li>Let your idea evolve.</li><li>Understand your users.</li><li>Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.</li><li>Offer surprisingly good customer service.</li><li>You make what you measure.</li><li>Spend little.</li><li>Get ramen profitable.</li><li>Avoid distractions.</li><li>Don't get demoralized.</li><li>Don't give up.</li><li>Deals fall through.<br /></li></ol><p>For a detailed account, try <a href="http://paulgraham.com/start.html"><em>How to Start a Startup</em></a>.Â <br /></p><p>This section presents some of Grahamâs core ideas around startups, including the principles above.<br /></p><p><strong>Essays mentioned in this section:</strong><br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html">Startups in 13 sentences</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/start.html">How to Start a Startup</a></p><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html">Startup = Growth</a>Â </p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html">How to Make Wealth</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html">After Credentials</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html">The Lesson to Unlearn</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html">The Power of the Marginal</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/colleges.html">News from the Front</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/mit.html">A Student's Guide to Startups</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/really.html">What Startups Are Really Like</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/before.html">Before the Startup</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html">Hiring is Obsolete</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html">Why to Not Not Start a Startup</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html">The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/organic.html">Organic Startup Ideas</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/newthings.html">Six Principles for Making New Things</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html">Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/swan.html">Black Swan Farming</a></p><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/newideas.html">Crazy New Ideas</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/googles.html">Why There Aren't More Googles</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html">Ideas for Startups</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/jessica.html">Jessica Livingston</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html">Startup FAQ</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html">Earnestness</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/relres.html">Relentlessly Resourceful</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/word.html">A Word to the Resourceful</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/determination.html">The Anatomy of Determination</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/mean.html">Mean People Fail</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/safe.html">Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/good.html">Be Good</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/desres.html">Design and Research</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/laundry.html">A Version 1.0</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/altair.html">What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/early.html">Early Work</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html">Trolls</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/fh.html">Haters</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/avg.html">Beating the Averages</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ds.html">Do Things that Don't Scale</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html">Ramen Profitable</a></p><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html">Default Alive or Default Dead?</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html">Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/head.html">Holding a Program in One's Head</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/die.html">How Not to Die</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html">Disconnecting Distraction</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html">Good and Bad Procrastination</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html">Donât talk to Corp Dev</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/top.html">The Top Idea in Your Mind</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/pinch.html">The Fatal Pinch<br /></a></p><h3>Startups are fundamentally different</h3><p>Startups arenât ordinary businesses. â<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html">A startup is a company designed to grow fast</a>â, it is fundamentally different from your standard restaurant or hair salon. All decisions reflect this need to grow. Indeed, Graham <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html">says</a>: âIf you want to understand startups, understand growthâ.<br /></p><p>âEconomically, 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.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html"><em>How to Make Wealth</em></a>)<br /></p><p>Startups are also vastly different from your school experience. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html">Your tests at school can be hacked, but success at startups is unhackable.</a> At school, you learned that the way to get ahead is to perform well in a test, so you learned how to <a href="http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html">hack the tests</a>. But in startups, you cannot really trick investors to give you money; the real hack is to be a good investment. You cannot really trick people to use your product; the real hack is to build something great. Valuable work is something you cannot hack.<br /></p><p>So you donât need to be a good student to be a good startup founder. In fact, if your opinions differ from those of your business teacher, <a href="http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html">that may even be a good thing</a> (if your business teacher was excellent in business, theyâd probably be a startup founder). In a startup, <a href="http://paulgraham.com/colleges.html">credentials donât really matter</a> - your users wonât care if you went to Stanford or got straight Aâs. (Related: <a href="http://paulgraham.com/mit.html"><em>A Student's Guide to Startups</em></a><em>)</em>.Â <br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/really.html">Starting a startup is fundamentally different from a normal job</a>, too. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/before.html">In a startup, experience is overrated</a>. The one thing that matters is to be an expert on your users and the problem; everything else can be figured out along the way. âThe most productive young people will <em>always </em>be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html"><em>Hiring is Obsolete</em></a>). By starting a startup, you can figure out your real market value.<br /></p><p>So, startups are fundamentally different from other companies, school and ânormal workâ. But why donât more people start them? Graham has listed common excuses (and rebuttals) in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html"><em>Why to Not Not Start a Startup</em></a>.</p><h3>Startups are wealth-creation machines</h3><p>So, startups are fundamentally different. You cannot really understand them by looking at other things. But what are they then?<br /></p><p>Startups are one of the most powerful legal ways to get rich. If youâre successful, you can, in a few years, get so rich you donât know what to do with all the money. But perhaps even better than the money is all the time a successful founder saves:</p><p>âEconomically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html"><em>The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn</em></a>)Â <br /></p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html"><em>How to Make Wealth</em></a>, Graham shows why startups are optimized for wealth-creation. (And for clarity, wealth is different from money: wealth is what people want, while money is merely the medium of exchange to get it. So a startup doesnât actually create money, it creates wealth; in other words, it creates something people want, and people give money for that. This distinction may seem small but itâs important: âmaking moneyâ seems really complicated while âmaking something people wantâ is far easier.)<br /></p><p>Why are startups optimized for wealth-creation?<br /></p><p><strong>Leverage: </strong>If a startup solves a complex problem, it only needs to solve it once, then scale it infinitely with technology. So a startup, once it cracks the code, can create a lot of wealth rapidly.Â </p><p><strong>Measurement: </strong>The performance of every employee in a startup is easier to measure than the performance of every employee in a big organization. So if you perform well and create wealth, youâre in a better position to get paid according to your value in a startup.<br /></p><p>More detail in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html"><em>How to Make Wealth</em></a>.Â </p><h3>Good startup ideas come from personal need and they donât sound convincing</h3><p>While there are many ways you could get startup ideas, Graham has observed that most successful startups were founded because of a personal need. Fix something for yourself, and donât even think that youâre starting a company. Just keep on fixing the problem until you find that youâve started a company. (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/organic.html"><em>Organic Startup Ideas</em></a>)<br /></p><p>Heâs also observed that good ideas tend to come from the <a href="http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html">margins</a> - places youâd not expect. The idea is often very focused - like a book store online or a networking site for university students - so it isnât obvious how it would change the world; we dismiss the idea until it becomes obvious.<br /></p><p>So, good ideas donât initially sound like billion-dollar ideas - what even is a billion-dollar idea? Certainly not something we could recognize in advance. Indeed, <a href="http://paulgraham.com/newthings.html">the initial idea is usually so crude and basic</a> that youâll ignore it if youâre looking for a billion-dollar idea. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html">The really big ideas may even repel you</a> - they are too ambitious.Â <br /></p><p>A good idea doesnât sound convincing because, for no one to have already taken it, it must be a bit crazy or unconventional. âThe most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/swan.html"><em>Black Swan Farming</em></a>)<br /></p><p>Indeed, when someone presents a <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/newideas.html">crazy new idea</a> to you, and if they are âboth a domain expert and a reasonable personâ, chances are that itâs a good idea (even if it sounds like a bad one). âIf 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.â<br /></p><p>Graham also <a href="http://paulgraham.com/start.html">emphasizes</a> that it is not the idea that matters, but the people who have them.Â </p><p>Oh, and "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (<a href="http://paulgraham.com/googles.html">Graham quoting Howard Aiken</a>)<br /></p><p>Nevertheless, if youâre in need of inspiration, Graham has some <a href="http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html">good starting points</a> for coming up with startup ideas.</p><h3>Founders make the startup</h3><p>â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/jessica.html">The earlier you pick startups, the more youâre picking the founders.</a>â Throughout his essays, Graham emphasizes the importance of the founders. More than anything - target audience, trends, TAMâ¦ - a startupâs success is influenced by the founders. (Obviously, the other employees matter, too. But founders are special, they are the heart and soul of the startup.)<br /></p><p>âCofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.â (from <a href="http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html">Startups in 13 Sentences</a>).Â <br /></p><p>Indeed, Graham notes that most successful startups <a href="http://paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html">tend to have multiple founders</a>.</p><h3>Earnestness and resourcefulness make a good founder</h3><p>If the founders are the most important factor for a startupâs success, it is critical to understand what makes a good founder. Indeed, this is the topic of numerous essays.<br /></p><p>According to Graham, a good founder is:<br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html"><strong>Earnest</strong></a></p><p>âThe highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as âearnest.ââ<br /></p><p>An earnest person does something for the right reasons and tries as hard as they can. The right reason usually isnât to make a lot of money, but to solve a problem or satisfy an intellectual curiosity. This is why itâs important to figure out your intrinsic motivation or embrace your nerdiness (both of which weâll discuss later).<br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/relres.html"><strong>Relentlessly Resourceful</strong></a></p><p>âA couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.â<br /></p><p>Relentless = make things go your way</p><p>Resourceful = adapt and try new things to make things go your way<br /></p><p>Relentlessly resourceful people know what they want, and they will aggressively try things out and âhustleâ until they get what they want. Consider the Airbnb founders and <a href="https://officechai.com/startups/airbnb-founders-sold-obama-labelled-cereal-boxes-grow-airbnb-early-days/">selling cereal</a>.<br /></p><p>Graham noticed a <a href="http://paulgraham.com/word.html">pattern</a> around resourcefulness: when he talks to resourceful founders, he doesnât need to say much. He can point them in the right direction, and theyâll take it from there. The un-resourceful founders felt harder to talk to.Â <br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/determination.html">It is <em>not</em> the most intelligent who succeed, but the most determined</a>. Smart people fail all the time while dumb people succeed just because they decide they must.Â <br /></p><p>Oh, also: good founders arenât mean. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/mean.html"><em>Mean People Fail</em></a> and canât get good people to work with them while startup founders who are nice <a href="http://paulgraham.com/safe.html">tend to attract people to them</a>.</p><h3>Make something people want</h3><p>If thereâs one piece of startup advice to take from Graham, itâs this: âMake something people wantâ. (As you may know, this is also Y Combinatorâs motto)<br /></p><p>Yes, it is obvious. But itâs also pretty much the only thing that matters in a startup: if you just make something people want, youâll attract users, employees, investors, money. â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html">You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives</a>.â<br /></p><p>Indeed, many early-stage startups are â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/good.html">indistinguishable from a nonprofit</a>â, because they focus so much on helping the users and less so on making money. Funnily, this approach makes them money in the long term.<br /></p><p>âIn nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product. For most, the cause of death is listed as âran out of funding,â but that's only the immediate cause. Why couldn't they get more funding? Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be done, or both.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/start.html"><em>How to Start a Startup</em></a>)Â <br /></p><p>So how do you make something people want? Get close to users, launch fast, then iterate.<br /></p><p><strong>Get close to users</strong></p><p>âThe essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html"><em>Startups in 13 Sentences</em></a>)Â <br /></p><p>âYou have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. It's much like being a doctor. You can't just treat a patient's symptoms. When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/desres.html"><em>Design and Research</em></a>)<br /></p><p>Since you may not precisely know who your users are and what exactly are their needs before you launch, itâs useful to yourself be a user of your product. If you use and like the product, other people like you may, too. This is why successful startups <a href="http://paulgraham.com/organic.html">tend to arise</a> from personal need.<br /></p><p><strong>Launch fast, then iterate</strong></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html">âThe thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.â</a><br /></p><p>The importance of iterations is highlighted in â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/laundry.html"><em>A Version 1.0</em></a>â, â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/altair.html"><em>What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?</em></a>â and â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/early.html"><em>Early Work</em></a>â, among others. (If you understand the importance of iterations, then you understand that you must release a version 1 as soon as possible, so you can start iterating sooner.)<br /></p><p>Some ideas from these essays:</p><ul><li>Donât be discouraged by peopleâs ridicules of your early work. Just keep on iterating. (There will always be <a href="http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html"><em>Trolls</em></a><em> </em>and <a href="http://paulgraham.com/fh.html"><em>Haters</em></a>. Donât mind them.)</li><li>Donât compare your early work with someoneâs finished work. (If you wanted to compare your work to something, itâd optimally be a successful personâs early work. But people tend to hide their first drafts, precisely because they donât want to be ridiculed.)</li><li>When in doubt, ask: Could this really lame version 1 turn into an impressive masterpiece, given enough iterations?<br /></li></ul><p>Iterating and getting through the lame early work never gets easy. But Graham has listed some useful tips to trick your brain in â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/early.html"><em>Early Work</em></a>â.</p><h3>Execution is a pathless land, but there is advice to be given</h3><p>Mostly, a startup <a href="http://paulgraham.com/avg.html">shouldnât try to</a> replicate what other startups do:</p><p>âIf you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.â<br /></p><p>Startup execution is a pathless land; thereâs no formula to follow, even though many blog posts and thought leaders want you to believe otherwise. This is why itâs so important for the founders to be earnest and relentlessly resourceful: they need to figure it out themselves.<br /></p><p>Even though there isnât a connect-the-dots type of way to succeed in the startup world, Graham has observed hundreds (if not thousands) of startups from a very close distance, so he has identified general principles that help:<br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ds.html"><strong>Do Things that Donât Scale</strong></a></p><p>âThink of startups not only as something you build and you scale, but something you build and force to scale.âÂ <br /></p><p>âStartups take off because the founders make them take off. If you donât take off, itâs not necessarily because the market doesnât exist but because you havenât exerted enough effort.â<br /></p><p>At some point, your startup may grow on autopilot. But before youâre there, you need to do seemingly insignificant things, like cold emailing potential clients, speaking to people at conferences or offering â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html">surprisingly good customer service</a>â.<br /></p><p>The âDo Things that Donât Scaleâ advice helps us remember that building something great is only one part of the equation; we must also do laborious, unscalable work to get initial growth, no matter how great the product is.<br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html"><strong>Get Ramen Profitable</strong></a></p><p>Ramen profitability = a startup makes just enough to pay the foundersâ living expenses.<br /></p><p>âRamen profitability means the startup does not need to raise money to survive. The only major expenses are the foundersâ living expenses, which are now covered (if they eat ramen).â<br /></p><p>Significance: Ramen profitability means that the startup turns from <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html">default dead into default alive</a>. The game changes from âdonât run out of moneyâ into âdonât run out of energyâ. While running a startup is never not stressful, reaching ramen profitability does take a weight off your shoulders.<br /></p><p>To increase your startupâs chances of succeeding, increase your chances of survival; to increase your chances of survival, reach ramen profitability.<br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html"><strong>Maintain a Makerâs Schedule</strong></a></p><p>To get into the making/building mindset, you need big chunks of time with no interruptions. You canât build a great product in 1-hour units in-between meetings; âthatâs barely enough time to get startedâ. If you think of the stereotypical coder, they prefer to work throughout the night, probably because no one can distract them at 3am.<br /></p><p>âWhen you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.â<br /></p><p>If you want to create great stuff, you need to be mindful that a manager and a maker operate on very different schedules. If youâre the manager, try to give big blocks of time for the maker; if youâre the maker, try to schedule all meetings on two days of the week so the rest is free for creating.<br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/head.html"><em>Holding a Program in One's Head</em></a> expands on some of these ideas.<br /></p><p><strong>What not to do</strong></p><p>Graham has also figured out something about the inverse: what not to do. Or, as he puts it, â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/die.html"><em>How Not to Die</em></a>â.Â </p><ol><li>Keep morale up (donât run out of energy)</li><li>Donât run out of money (for example, hire too fast)</li><li>Donât do other things. The startup needs your full attention. (<a href="http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html">Procrastination is mostly distraction</a>. Avoid distractions and youâll avoid procrastination. Note, though, that you can <a href="http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html">procrastinate well</a>.)</li><li>Make failing unbelievably humiliating (to force you to give your everything)</li><li>Simply donât give up, especially when things get tough</li></ol><p>To summarize this part on execution, here are Paul Grahamâs <a href="http://paulgraham.com/newthings.html"><em>Six Principles for Making New Things</em></a>:Â </p><ol><li>Simple solutions</li><li>To overlooked problems</li><li>That actually need to be solved</li><li>Deliver these solutions as informally as possible</li><li>Starting with a very crude version 1</li><li>Then iterating rapidly</li></ol><h3>The more you focus on money, the less you focus on the product</h3><p>Graham doesnât often talk about money, and when he does, I get this weird feeling. Itâs like âsure, weâre talking about money... but Iâd rather we talk about the product instead.â Let me explain:<br /></p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html"><em>Donât talk to Corp Dev</em></a>, Graham says all a startup needs to know about M&amp;A is that you should never talk to corp dev unless you intend to sell right now. So itâs better to focus on the product until you absolutely must think about M&amp;A.<br /></p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/top.html"><em>The Top Idea in Your Mind</em></a>: âonce you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mindâ, instead of users and the product. So your product suffers.<br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/start.html">When you get money, donât spend it</a>. â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html">The most common form of failure is running out of money</a>â, and you can avoid that by not spending money, not hiring too fast.<br /></p><p>One instance when you should think about money is if your startup is <a href="http://paulgraham.com/aord.html">default dead</a>. âAssuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left?â If you know youâre default dead, your focus quickly shifts to turning the ship around and reaching profitability; avoiding <a href="http://paulgraham.com/pinch.html"><em>The Fatal Pinch</em></a>.<br /></p><p>In the long term, itâs obvious that the company that focuses more on the users and product beats the company that obsesses over investors and raising money.</p><p>â</p><h2>Paul Graham on What to work on</h2><p>What to work on is one of the most important questions in your life, along with where you live and who youâre with. While Grahamâs treatment of this question definitely leans on the side of startups, you can also view his ideas from the perspective of side hustles, hobbies, projects (in or outside of a career) and so on.<br /></p><p><strong>Essays mentioned in this section:</strong></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/work.html">What Doesn't Seem Like Work?</a></p><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/earnest.html">Earnestness</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html">Why Nerds are Unpopular</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/fp.html">Fashionable Problems</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/love.html">How to Do What You Love</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html">You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/own.html">A Project of One's Own</a></p><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html">Ramen Profitable</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/gh.html">Great Hackers</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/top.html">The Top Idea in Your Mind</a></p><h3>Follow intrinsic motivation</h3><p>If itâs something youâre intrinsically motivated about, thatâs something where you have infinite curiosity, and thatâs something youâll eventually do well in. (Later, weâll discuss how curiosity leads to genius.)<br /></p><p>â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/work.html">If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.</a>â Put another way: the stranger your tastes seem to other people, the more you should embrace those tastes.Â <br /></p><p>Because of the internet, you can make money by following your curiosity. <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/earnest.html">This is a revolutionary shift</a>: in the past, money was gained from a boring job, and you satisfied your curiosity during the weekends. But now, you can make real money just by following your curiosity, whether itâs from a startup or a YouTube or Gumroad account.<br /></p><p>The two greatest powers in the world - money and curiosity - are getting more aligned each day. There has never been a greater time to follow your intrinsic motivation. Now, the important question is what to work on, not how to make money, because if you figure out an answer to the former, the latter question will answer itself.Â <br /></p><p>Turns out, nerds are far closer to figuring out the answer than non-nerds. (Nerds - or earnest people - do something for the sake of it, not to become popular or rich). Nerds in high school <a href="http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html">tend to be unpopular</a>, not because they couldnât figure out how popularity works and game the system, but perhaps because they donât really want to be popular. That makes high school a tough time for them, but real life becomes much more fulfilling: while others are stuck in the popularity/status rat race and compete to work on <a href="http://paulgraham.com/fp.html"><em>Fashionable Problems</em></a>, the nerds can follow their own curiosities, thus work on stuff no one else is working on, thus discover new things, thus succeed. Plus, they have a much nicer time doing so.<br /></p><p>A question to figure out your intrinsic motivation and what to work on: âWhat are you a big nerd on?â<br /></p><p>Letâs end this part with a sharp and practical observation from â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/love.html"><em>How to Do What You Love</em></a>â:Â </p><p>âTo be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool.â</p><h3>You should be working on your own projects</h3><p>The logical conclusion of following your intrinsic motivation is that you should be working on your own projects (or other peopleâs projects where you have significant ownership).Â <br /></p><p>You may have noticed that projects you start on your own feel fundamentally different from tasks handed to you by a manager or teacher. And thereâs a reason for that: â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html"><em>You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss</em></a>â.<br /></p><p>In that essay, Graham makes the argument that even though working in a large organization is the default now, itâs not how we evolved to work. A large organization is similar to the modern diet - consisting of pizza, candies and other processed foods - while a small group (like a startup) is the hunter-gatherer diet. One is easy and safe and appealing in the short term (but terrible over time) while the other is hard and unappealing, but more natural and better in the long term.<br /></p><p>While working in smaller groups makes you happier and gives you more freedom, itâs also the way to do great work, as Graham argues in â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/own.html"><em>A Project of Oneâs Own</em></a>â. If a project feels like itâs your own, you have motivation and skin in the game that you donât otherwise have. Youâre much more willing to obsess over the details and make something great.</p><h3>Work on things that you want to take over your life</h3><p>âIt's a mistake to insist dogmatically on âwork/life balance.â Indeed, the mere expression âwork/lifeâ embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. [...] I wouldn't want to work on anything I didn't want to take over my life.â (From â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/own.html"><em>A Project of Oneâs Own</em></a>â)<br /></p><p>For startup founders, the startup is their life - there is time for little else, even sleep. Why would they willingly work 80+ hours a week and <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html">eat nothing but ramen</a>, with no guaranteed financial reward, when they could work 40 hours a week and eat lobster at a big company? Because the startup is a project of their own, and they have - hopefully consciously - decided itâs something they want to take over their lives. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/gh.html">âPeople will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they're the founders.â</a><br /></p><p>How do you know if something has taken over your life? Hereâs a simple test: Do you think about it in the shower?Â <br /></p><p>In â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/top.html"><em>The Top Idea in Your Mind</em></a>â, Graham argues that if something is really important to you, then your mind will think about it subconsciously and ideas will appear in your head whilst walking or showering. Indeed, if this does <em>not </em>happen, youâll have trouble doing great work - thatâs your sign to reconsider what you work on.</p><p>â</p><h2>Paul Graham on Thinking &amp; Decision-making</h2><p>Startup founders are an interesting group of people: they seek to change something about the status quo, which means they see something non-obvious that could be improved and they believe in that improvement so much that theyâre willing to work 80+ hours a week and eat ramen until their vision becomes a reality.<br /></p><p>What drives them? It canât be <em>just </em>money - there are so many founders whoâve already gotten rich, and they still work in their companies and start new startups. And why arenât there more founders? What qualities are there in a founder that you donât find in non-founders?<br /></p><p>By trying to understand this group of people, Graham has discovered a lot about thinking, decision-making, and the human mind in general.<br /></p><p><strong>Essays mentioned in this section:</strong></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html">The Four Quadrants of Conformism</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/mod.html">The Two Kinds of Moderate</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/orth.html">Orthodox Privilege</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/nov.html">Novelty and Heresy</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html">How to Disagree</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/think.html">How to Think for Yourself</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/genius.html">The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html">Is It Worth Being Wise?</a></p><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/smart.html">Beyond Smart</a></p><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hwh.html">How to Work Hard</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html">Mind the Gap</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/noob.html">Being a Noob</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ecw.html">How to Be an Expert in a Changing World</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html">How Art Can Be Good</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/taste.html">Taste for Makers</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/love.html">How to Do What You Love</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/island.html">The Island Test</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/start.html">How to Start a Startup</a></p><h3>Independent-mindedness vs conventional-mindedness</h3><p>Independent-minded people prefer to think through things for themselves, and because of this, they may seem weird to conventional-minded people (who follow the average and agreeable). Hence, it is almost a tautology to say that new ideas and new startups are the work of independent-minded people.<br /></p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html"><em>The Four Quadrants of Conformism</em></a>, Graham goes a bit deeper and differentiates between aggressive and passive forms of independent-mindedness and conventional-mindedness. Notably, aggressively independent-minded people tend to question existing norms and rules, working against them, while aggressively conventional-minded people work to maintain the norms and rules. Thereâs a clash between the groups, so itâs important for independent-minded people to âbe protectedâ, be given space to innovate, break norms and come up with new ideas and things. (These âprotected areasâ are important for innovation. You could think of Silicon Valley as one.)<br /></p><p>If you know someone is conventional-minded, you know a lot about them. Their beliefs and actions match the average, and you know what the average is. Whereas, if someone is independent-minded, you donât really know them; they think things through for themselves, and thus they may arrive at conclusions you canât imagine. In fact, on one issue, independent-minded people can be in the political left, and on another issue, in the political right; they are <a href="http://paulgraham.com/mod.html">politically moderate by accident</a>. A conventional-minded person is more likely either in the left or right for every issue.<br /></p><p>Conventional-minded people have what Graham calls <a href="http://paulgraham.com/orth.html"><em>Orthodox Privilege</em></a>: it seems to them that everyone is safe to express their opinions because everything they think about is conventional and uncontroversial. âThey literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.â<br /></p><p>So if you do express your controversial, new ideas to them, they may regard them as untrue heresy. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/nov.html"><em>Novelty and Heresy</em></a> go hand-in-hand. âIt doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right.â To them, anything that is unconventional is likely to be false; to the independent-minded, anything too conventional seems suspicious. So if you express your independent-minded thoughts publicly, you may want to learn <a href="http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html"><em>How to Disagree</em></a>.<br /></p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/think.html"><em>How to Think for Yourself</em></a>, Graham shows there are some types of work that you can only do well in if you think differently from others: Scientists aim to discover something new, so being conventional-minded wonât get you very far; an investor who thinks exactly like everyone else will not get rich; a startup founder who shares the same ideas as everyone else wonât build great new stuff. You need to be right <em>and </em>most other people need to be wrong.<br /></p><p>Of course, not every type of work is like this. You can be a good administrative worker without thinking differently from others; itâs not essential that everyone else is wrong. Generally, independent-minded people want to work in areas where newness is rewarded.<br /></p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/think.html"><em>How to Think for Yourself</em></a>, Graham shares some exercises for training your independent-mindedness muscles.</p><h3>Genius comes from infinite curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage</h3><p>We tend to think some people are just blessed with genius, that itâs an innate thing. But Graham has taken this black box apart and argues genius is something you can influence.<br /></p><p><strong>CuriosityÂ </strong></p><p>â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/genius.html">Those who do really great work have an unexplainable obsession about something</a>â. Infinite curiosity leads to surprising discoveries, simply because you think about and play with the topic more than any rational person would expect. And all that thinking and tinkering feels like play to you (but looks like work to others) because an obsessive interest âis a proxy for ability and a substitute for determinationâ.Â <br /></p><p><strong>Intelligence</strong></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html">Thereâs a difference between wisdom and intelligence</a>. If wisdom means a high average outcome across all outcomes, intelligence is a spectacularly high outcome in a few situations. If we think of âgeniusâ, it tends to fit the latter description: you can be a terrible fool about everything else, but if you discover relativity, youâre a genius.Â <br /></p><p>High curiosity in something + high intelligence in that domain are a great beginning. But not necessarily enough to discover important new ideas. As Graham elaborates in <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/smart.html"><em>Beyond Smart</em></a>, there are smart people, and then there are those who have important new ideas; âThere are a lot of genuinely smart people who donât achieve very much.â<br /></p><p>Intelligence and curiosity are perhaps necessary to become a genius, but not sufficient; you also need hard work to uncover new ideas and courage to pursue them, as developing something new challenges your ego (and irritates the conventional-minded people).<br /></p><p><strong>Hard work and courage</strong></p><p>Even when youâre undeniably brilliant, you cannot avoid hard work. (Indeed, just knowing <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hwh.html"><em>How to Work Hard</em></a> can get you closer to sheer brilliance.) Hard work in itself isnât the goal, though. Output matters (output being, in this context, important new ideas): â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html">If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush</a>.â<br /></p><div><p>When you start to do or learn anything new, youâll <a href="http://paulgraham.com/noob.html"><em>Be a Noob</em></a> at it first. But âthe more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.â In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/ecw.html"><em>How to Be an Expert in a Changing World</em></a>, Graham notes that if your opinion was right once, it may not be right anymore because the world has changed. So it takes intellectual humility and courage to update your opinions to the new world, instead of clinging to the opinions you formed in the old world.</p></div><p>Putting together Grahamâs thoughts, it seems like genius is not an innate quality that you canât influence, but a combination of multiple qualities like curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage.</p><h3>Good taste is necessary for good work</h3><p>Good taste is a quality related to genius. Some people seem to have an âeyeâ for design or an âearâ for music, but Graham shows, again, that taste is something you can develop.<br /></p><p>âTaste is subjectiveâ isnât true, and you see it as soon as you start designing or writing or building things. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html">Thereâs good art and thereâs bad art</a>, good writing and bad writing, nice design and less nice design. Saying âtaste is subjectiveâ is lazy and wonât help you improve your work.<br /></p><p>So if you want to create better stuff, you need to realize that you may have poor taste and you need to develop good taste, normally by getting better at your craft or studying those who have good taste. âGood work happens when you see something is ugly, understand why, and have the ability to fix it into something beautiful.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/taste.html"><em>Taste for Makers</em></a>)<br /></p><p>So what is good art or design? Graham <a href="http://paulgraham.com/taste.html">gives a list</a> (I redacted a few points):</p><ol><li>Simple</li><li>Timeless</li><li>Solves the right problem</li><li>Suggestive</li><li>Often slightly funny</li><li>Hard</li><li>Looks easy</li><li>Uses symmetry</li><li>Resembles nature</li><li>Often strange</li><li>Often daringÂ <br /></li></ol><p>Good work isnât necessarily the most popular work; <a href="http://paulgraham.com/goodart.html">âThere are sources of error so powerful that if you take a vote, all you're measuring is the error.â</a> But if you do good work, eventually, people will appreciate it.</p><h3>Is your argument testable?</h3><p>If you read Graham closely, you notice that often when he makes an argument, he immediately considers what kind of test is needed to validate the argument. Heâs thinking like a scientist: only accepting an argument if itâs testable.<br /></p><p>Watch him do it in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/love.html"><em>How to Do What You Love</em></a>:</p><p>Â âTo be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.â<br /></p><p>And in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/island.html"><em>The Island Test</em></a>, he presents a test to figure out what youâre addicted to:Â </p><p>âImagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might.<br /></p><p>What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to.â<br /></p><p>In some cases, the way to make a point (and make it practical) is to devise a test. In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/start.html"><em>How to Start a Startup</em></a>, Graham explores what makes a good startup employee. He could just say âthey are determined and will do whatever it takesâ, but thatâs not a testable argument, and not very practical for someone whoâs hiring.Â <br /></p><p>Instead, Graham devised a test: âCould you describe the person as an animal?â If you could say âJaakko is an animalâ and <em>donât </em>laugh but rather take the description seriously, thatâs the person you want in your startup. An animal of a salesperson simply wonât take no for an answer; an animal of a programmer will stay up all night to finish the code; an animal of a PR person will pitch every newspaper in the city until your startup gets featured.Â <br /></p><p>Fun evening activity: Go through an essay youâve written and see if each of the arguments you make is testable.</p><p>â</p><h2>Paul Graham on Writing</h2><p>Paul Graham is known for incredibly clear and simple writing. Each of his essays is easy to understand, no matter how complicated the topic.Â <br /></p><p>You can learn a lot about writing just by reading Graham, and doubly so if itâs an essay on the topic of writing. Fortunately for us, there are many such essays.<br /></p><p>For starters, Graham has summarized his writing philosophy in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/writing44.html"><em>Writing, Briefly</em></a>. Itâs an entire writing course, condensed into one (long) sentence. I recommend you read it now before continuing below.<br /></p><p><strong>Essays mentioned in this section:</strong><br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/writing44.html">Writing, Briefly</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/speak.html">Writing and Speaking</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/nthings.html">The List of N Things</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/discover.html">Persuade xor Discover</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/sun.html">General and Surprising</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/essay.html">The Age of the Essay</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/useful.html">How to Write Usefully</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/laundry.html">A Version 1.0</a></p><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/early.html">Early Work</a></p><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html">Write Simply</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/talk.html">Write Like You Talk</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ds.html">Do Things that Don't Scale</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html">Economic Inequality</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html">Mind the Gap</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/taste.html">Taste for Makers</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html">How to Make Wealth</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/think.html">How to Think for Yourself</a></p><h3>Writing is how you get ideas, develop ideas and improve your thinking</h3><p>If you read <a href="http://paulgraham.com/writing44.html"><em>Writing, Briefly</em></a>, as you should, you noticed this:</p><p>âI 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.â<br /></p><p>From an idea perspective, being a good writer is <a href="http://paulgraham.com/speak.html">better than</a> being a good speaker. You need good ideas to have good essays, but you can do a good speech without saying much at all. Though speeches can be better for motivation and personal touch, writing is better for ideas.</p><h3>Donât write to persuade, write to discover something new and useful</h3><p>There are roughly two types of essays: those where you know exactly where itâs going before you start, and those where you have no clue where itâs going.Â <br /></p><p>Weâre taught to write the first type of essay in school: we write the thesis statement in the introduction and ensure that the rest of the essay supports that thesis. Weâre writing to persuade the reader, so that theyâll accept our thesis. A <a href="http://paulgraham.com/nthings.html">listicle</a> is equivalent to that type of essay, and writing one doesnât help you discover new ideas or knowledge. â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/discover.html">I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to sell</a>.â<br /></p><p>Paul Graham is a supporter (and practitioner) of the second type, writing to discover. In his mind, an essay is supposed to be two things: new and useful.<br /></p><p><strong>An essay should be new</strong></p><p>If an essay doesnât share something new or surprising, what good is it? When we write to discover, we want to surprise ourselves and the reader. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/discover.html">Most surprising = furthest from what people currently believe</a>.Â <br /></p><p>But just anything new doesnât cut it. Thereâs constantly new info and news, and that doesnât make a difference in our lives. What we should aim for is something <a href="http://paulgraham.com/sun.html"><em>General and Surprising</em></a>. âOrdinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: either surprising without being general (e.g. gossip), or general without being surprising (e.g. platitudes).â If you can do some combination of general and surprising (at least to some people), youâve got a winning essay.<br /></p><p>â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/essay.html">Essays should aim for maximum surprise.</a>â<br /></p><p><strong>An essay should be useful</strong></p><p>What does it mean for an essay to be useful? Graham offers some ideas in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/useful.html"><em>How to Write Usefully</em></a>:Â </p><ul><li>When something is useful, itâs correct. If itâs merely persuasive, it could be false. âGood 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.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/essay.html"><em>The Age of the Essay</em></a>)Â </li><li>âUseful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.â</li><li>âUseful writing tells something important that people didnât already knowâ (again, going back to the âsurpriseâ idea)</li></ul><h3>Good writing is rewriting (in particular, rewriting to make the text simpler)</h3><p>Just like in anything involving skill, the way to get better is through iterations. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/laundry.html">Good writing is rewriting</a>. Because we canât see someoneâs drafts and rewrites, we compare their end product to our <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/early.html"><em>Early Work</em></a>, then get discouraged looking at the gap. Instead, we must appreciate that something bad now could become great, if we iterate enough.Â <br /></p><p>âMy strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting it very carefully.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/useful.html"><em>How to Write Usefully</em></a>)Â <br /></p><p>And when you rewrite, your main goal is to <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html">make your writing simple</a>. Most of the time, the simplest words and simplest sentences are better than decorative, complicated words. Your purpose is to convey an idea, not to use fancy words and make the reader âdo extra work just so you can seem cool.â<br /></p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/talk.html"><em>Write Like You Talk</em></a>, Graham shares a trick for writing simply: explain your ideas to a friend by talking; then, use that transcript as a draft for your essay. The spoken and written version of your idea should be as close to each other as possible. âIf you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers.âÂ </p><h3>When possible, find a metaphor for your idea</h3><p>This is not direct advice from Graham (though he does recommend you write simply, and whatâs simpler than a great metaphor?)Â </p><p>Instead, this is a theme you notice if you read a lot of Graham. Metaphors are a weapon he wields often.<br /></p><p><strong>Some of my favorite metaphors from Paul Graham:</strong><br /></p><p>âThere's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means âleap into the mouth.â My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.â (From <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html"><em>Write Simply</em></a>)<br /></p><p>âPeople donât realize that scrapping things together is how big things get started. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding âthere's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything.ââ (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/ds.html"><em>Do Things that Donât Scale</em></a>)<br /></p><p>âThe list of n things [listicle] is in that respect the cheeseburger of essay forms. If you're eating at a restaurant you suspect is bad, your best bet is to order the cheeseburger. Even a bad cook can make a decent cheeseburger. And there are pretty strict conventions about what a cheeseburger should look like. You can assume the cook isn't going to try something weird and artistic. The list of n things similarly limits the damage that can be done by a bad writer.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/nthings.html"><em>The List of N Things</em></a>)<br /></p><p>âSometimes it's because the writer only has very high-level data and so draws conclusions from that, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his keys under the lamppost, instead of where he dropped them, because the light is better there.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html"><em>Economic Inequality</em></a>)Â <br /></p><p>âIf I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html"><em>Mind the Gap</em></a>)Â <br /></p><p>âI'm not sure why. It may just be my own stupidity. A can-opener must seem miraculous to a dog.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/taste.html"><em>Taste for Makers</em></a>)<br /></p><p>âA 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.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html"><em>How to Make Wealth</em></a>)Â <br /></p><p>âThe 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.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/think.html"><em>How to Think for Yourself</em></a>) </p><p>â</p><h2>Paul Graham on Society</h2><p>Startups turn into big companies, startup founders turn into <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/ace.html">billionaires</a>, products used by hundreds turn into products used by millions... If youâre working to help startups, youâre working to change society in a big way.Â <br /></p><p><strong>Essays mentioned in this section:</strong></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html">Mind the Gap</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/gh.html">Great Hackers</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html">Economic Inequality</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html">How to Make Wealth</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/re.html">The Refragmentation</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html">Inequality and Risk</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/taste.html">Taste for Makers</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/orth.html">Orthodox Privilege</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/say.html">What You Can't Say</a></p><h3>âReducing wealth inequalityâ isnât as great as it sounds</h3><p>As we established earlier, a startup is a wealth-creation machine. As such, it shouldnât surprise us to see Graham discussing wealth inequality and why it isnât the demonic thing many believe.<br /></p><p>Wealth inequality is a divisive topic, and one Iâm no expert in, so Iâll try to provide a general overview without twisting Grahamâs ideas into something they arenât. You might want to read the essays in full if youâre interested in the topic.<br /></p><p><strong>By default, we think wealth inequality is inherently bad.Â </strong></p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html"><em>Mind the Gap</em></a>, Graham presents three reasons why we think wealth inequality is inherently bad:</p><ol><li><strong>The Daddy Model of Wealth: </strong>We confuse wealth with money and think there is a fixed amount of it. And if thereâs a fixed amount, we believe it should be distributed equally. (By now, you should realize that wealth is different from money, and that you can create wealth; there is no âfixed amountâ or âfixed pieâ; you can increase the pie)</li><li><strong>We think people get rich today like they got rich earlier: </strong>In the past, the rich people tended to get rich by stealing (through war or taxes). So some people still believe rich people have gotten rich by stealing, even though today the much better, more reliable, faster and legal way to get rich is by creating wealth, not stealing it.</li><li><strong>We donât understand leverage: </strong>Technology increases the gap between the productive and the unproductive, thus increasing wealth inequality. If a CEO is 100x richer than an employee in the same company, we think it unjust because thereâs no way the CEO works 100x more than they do. But because of leverage, the CEO can easily be 100x more productive than an employee, or make decisions that are 100x more valuable. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html">âI have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.â</a>Â <br /></li></ol><p><strong>Wealth inequality can be a sign of good things.</strong></p><p>âVariation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a society of one, they're identical.) And that is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.</p><p>In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/gh.html"><em>Great Hackers</em></a>)<br /></p><p>âBy helping startup founders, youâre helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality should be decreased, no one should be helping founders. But that doesnât sound right.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html"><em>Economic Inequality</em></a>)<br /></p><p>There are many causes of economic inequality. Some of them are bad, like corruption and stealing. But some causes are generally good, like variation in productivity. Some people are vastly better at creating things people want, so itâs unsurprising they are able to <a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html">make more money</a> than other people.<br /></p><p>Remember that startups grow the pie: they get rich by making other people richer. Because they are rich doesnât mean you must have been screwed over. Itâs more like the opposite: the Google founders are rich because they have made life easier and richer for billions of people.<br /></p><p>Of course, wealth inequality isn't only due to startups (although startups create the most extreme results). Some peopleâs salaries are higher than othersâ, again, because some produce more wealth than others. Salaries are closer to market price <a href="http://paulgraham.com/re.html">than ever before</a>, and get constantly closer, as people are more free to start their own companies, switch companies and work internationally.<br /></p><p><strong>Taxing the rich reduces economic inequality, but may not lead to the results youâd hope for.Â </strong></p><p>If you want to make the poor richer - as is probably the intention when you want to reduce economic inequality - you can either take the money from the rich, or make the poor more productive so theyâll get richer (through education and infrastructure, for example). But if you make people more productive, some people will create 1,000x the results as another, so economic inequality remains.Â <br /></p><p>So if you want to reduce economic inequality, the only way is to push from the top - to take money from the rich (see <a href="http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html"><em>Inequality and Risk</em></a>). Thus, you reduce the rewards for creating or funding startups and business activity, thus you hinder technological innovation. This doesnât sound as positive as âreducing economic inequalityâ. Especially when you consider the many different kinds of inequalities beyond income equality.<br /></p><p>The <a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html">gap</a> between rich and poor is increasing in <em>monetary </em>terms, but probably closing in <em>wealth </em>terms. Today, the average person lives a relatively similar life, materially, to a rich person: both have a fridge, a car, a phone, Netflixâ¦ 100 years ago, the rich had a car while the poor didnât, they had things we now regard as âessentialsâ while the poor didnât. Through businesses, essential products are getting cheaper and more accessible to everyone. In many cases, the rich can pay to have a flashier version of something, like a sports car or brand watch, but the basic, affordable version is still good enough.<br /></p><p>Today, the difference is appearance and what brand your stuff is; in the past, the difference was either having it or not having it. So yes, the income gap is increasing, but with it, the gap in quality of life is decreasing.<br /></p><p>âYou need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html"><em>Mind the Gap</em></a>) Trickle-down economics is a bad argument because it misses the point. We need to look at how wealth is created, not how itâs used<br /></p><p><strong>Grahamâs proposition:</strong></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html">Allow those who create wealth to keep it.</a><br /></p><p>When youâre allowed to keep the wealth you create, people can get rich by creating wealth instead of stealing it. People take bigger risks if they can keep more of the upside when those risks pay off. A startup founder never captures all of the wealth created; most of the wealth is transferred to other people, so we should encourage those who want to get rich, not discourage them.<br /></p><p>Based on these ideas, you can probably guess Grahamâs opinions on capitalism vs communism (something he discusses in the essays linked in this section, particularly in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html"><em>How to Make Wealth</em></a> and <a href="http://paulgraham.com/gap.html"><em>Mind the Gap</em></a>).</p><h3>Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false</h3><p>âAt every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/taste.html"><em>Taste for Makers</em></a>)Â <br /></p><p>âAnd yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/orth.html"><em>Orthodox Privilege</em></a>)Â <br /></p><p><em>Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false.</em><br /></p><p>Graham comes back to this idea repeatedly, particularly in the essays discussing independent-mindedness and conformism (see above). But you can see tones of this idea in his startup essays too; after all, a successful startup has a vision of a future that most other people do not believe in at the time.Â <br /></p><p>Graham deep-dives into this idea in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/say.html"><em>What You Can't Say</em></a>, an essay I consider one of his finest - one you must read for yourself. In fact, the whole essay is so intellectually important that Iâd do it a disservice by summarizing. Instead, hereâs the main takeaway I was left with:<br /></p><p>There are things you believe that are incorrect, horribly so. To you, they seem correct without question. Stay open-minded.</p><p>â</p><h2>Paul Graham on Life</h2><p>If we accept that writing is thinking (as we addressed earlier), Graham, with over 200 essays and decades of writing, has done a lot of thinking. When he shares life wisdom, youâd be smart to listen.<br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/hs.html"><em>What You'll Wish You'd Known</em></a> is sort of Paul Grahamâs compilation of life wisdom, targeted at high school students. Itâs also one of his most popular essays. While you should read it yourself, here are a few major points that stood out for me:</p><ul><li>Itâs okay to not have a plan. In fact, it may be better not to fixate on one plan when youâre young. Optimize for optionality. If youâre unsure, go with the option that gives you more options later down the line.Â </li><li>Build something. Work on something hard on your own, doesnât really matter what it is. Youâll learn so much about yourself in that process. This is a shortcut to finding what you want to work on, which is one of the major questions in life. âIf I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. [...] I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something.â (From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html"><em>The Power of the Marginal</em></a>)Â </li><li>How you succeed in school is in no way representative of how you succeed in life. âOne of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.â At school, stuff is forced on you; in real life, it is the stuff you initiate that matters and defines your trajectory.</li><li>âThere's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. Thatâs not how you become an adult. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [...] The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.â<br /></li></ul><p>Beyond that essay, there are a few bigger themes I want to highlight below.<br /></p><p><strong>Essays mentioned in this section:</strong><br /></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/hs.html">What You'll Wish You'd Known</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html">The Power of the Marginal</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html">The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html">Life is Short</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html">The Power of the Marginal</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html">The Acceleration of Addictiveness</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html">You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html">Stuff</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html">How to Lose Time and Money</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/lies.html">Lies We Tell Kids</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/identity.html">Keep Your Identity Small</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/cities.html">Cities and Ambition</a></p><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/todo.html">The Top of My Todo List</a></p><h3>Life is short</h3><p>âLife is shortâ is one of those statements everyone kind of agrees with, without giving it too much thought. But Graham has explored the idea a bit deeper.<br /></p><p>For starters, a startup itself is a way to appreciate the shortness of life or <a href="http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html">adapt to it</a>; instead of a 40-year career, you compress your income-making to a few startup years and thus free up time for activities beyond making a living. The average human lifespan is increasing while the minimum possible time it takes to be set for life is decreasing; startups are one way to maximize the gap.<br /></p><p>Whether you agree with the premise that <a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html"><em>Life is Short</em></a>, itâs easy to agree that one way to make life seem less short is to minimize anything unimportant. If you do nothing for 5 hours, that 5 hours will feel excruciatingly long. The more we have going on, the shorter life feels. So we should cut all the things we donât like doing, the stuff that we think life is too short for (Graham calls this, bluntly, âbullshitâ).<br /></p><p>And if we invert the argument, we realize that we should dedicate more time for the important stuff. If people and relationships are important to you, your calendar should reflect that. When life is short, we must ruthlessly cut the unimportant while making time for the important. Sounds simple and easy to dismiss, but somehow, Graham applies weight to it in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html"><em>Life is Short</em></a>.</p><h3>Itâs surprisingly easy to waste your life if youâre not careful</h3><p>Since life is short, itâs easy to let it slip away in a blur if youâre not careful.<br /></p><p>One thing you get easily sucked into is â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html">anti-tests</a>â. These are tests you can try to excel in, but the way to come on top is to not care about the test at all, to ignore the test. So you could try to be popular in school, but you probably shouldnât care about popularity; you can try to become important and high-status in life, but you probably shouldnât care about that. Just because thereâs a test doesnât mean you should try to perform well in it.Â <br /></p><p>Ignoring tests is especially hard for intelligent, ambitious people, because their ambition provides the motivation and intelligence the means to do well in the test. But try not to get sucked into the anti-tests in life; they are the kind of âbullshitâ life is too short for.<br /></p><p>Another thing that can corrode your life, if youâre not careful, is addiction. We know to be careful with the standard stuff like alcohol and gambling, but itâs harder to avoid addictions that everyone has because those seem normal to us. In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html"><em>The Acceleration of Addictiveness</em></a>, Graham makes a division between two normals: statistically normal (that which everyone does) and operationally normal (that which works best). Being addicted to social media and your phone is statistically normal, but not operationally normal. â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html">Technology tends to separate normal from natural.</a>â<br /></p><p>â<a href="http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html">You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.</a>â For example, if your approach to consumerism doesnât seem a bit weird, you probably own too much <a href="http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html"><em>Stuff</em></a>.<br /></p><p>But being careful about pleasures and self-indulgence and âthe bullshitâ isnât enough. We must also be careful about the things we do that feel important and productive. In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html"><em>How to Lose Time and Money</em></a>, Graham writes:Â <br /></p><p>âIt's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking âwow, I'm spending a lot of money.â Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.â<br /></p><p>Similarly, for a fairly ambitious person, itâs hard to waste your time by watching TV or laying on the sofa - your brain will start thinking âthis is a waste of timeâ sooner or later. But you can easily work 12h a day for 2 years on something that, in retrospect, was a complete waste of your time.Â <br /></p><p>If youâre not careful about where you invest your time and money, life passes by surprisingly easily.Â </p><h3>You have a lot of unconditioning to do</h3><p>Whatâs a lie you were told as a child? Stuff like âif you swallow an apple seed, a tree will grow in your stomachâ is easy to identify as a lie. But stuff like âbe careful with strangers, they are dangerousâ? Less so.<br /></p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/lies.html"><em>Lies We Tell Kids</em></a>, Graham shows that weâve been lied to as kids, for a variety of reasons (some better than others). Some falsities have flowed into our heads at home, some at school, but the main idea is that weâve woven lies into our understanding of the world at a young age. And if itâs something we learned as a child, it feels undeniably true as an adult; it takes serious effort to take apart these deep-held beliefs.<br /></p><p>As a rule, if you think itâs true because you learned it in school or in your childhood, assume it is not true. Itâs better to verify it for yourself, even if it turns out to have been true all along.<br /></p><p>If childhood beliefs are a good place to start unconditioning, a good place to continue is whatever you identify as (democrat, minimalist, crypto bullâ¦). This is because we have a terribly hard time thinking clearly about something thatâs part of our <a href="http://paulgraham.com/identity.html">identity</a>, so you may have taken in opinions one-sidedly. If you identify as x, criticism against x feels like a personal attack because x is a part of your identity, part of you. The bigger your identity, the more you have to process and rethink.Â <br /></p><p>Another thing to uncondition comes from <a href="http://paulgraham.com/cities.html"><em>Cities and Ambition</em></a>. When most people talk about the essay, they consider the obvious implication: you should go to the city that matches your ambition. So if you want to be in the show biz, go to Hollywood, or if youâre into startups, go to Silicon Valley (or, increasingly, the right corner of the internet). But thereâs an inverse consideration, too, and itâs an important one: the places youâve already lived in have subconsciously influenced your ambition. So, yes, we could match the city we live in to our ambition, but before we do that, we should figure out whether our ambition really is our own or if itâs simply a product of where we have lived in so far.<br /></p><p>This idea of unconditioning links back to the earlier point: because youâve been conditioned a certain way, youâre set on a path that you may not wish to be on, had you consciously made the choice. So unless you do uncondition yourself, itâs easy to waste your life.<br /></p><p>You have a lot of unconditioning to do. So better get started.</p><h3>Paul Grahamâs 5 commandments for life</h3><p>Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, made <a href="https://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/">a list</a> of the biggest regrets of the dying:</p><ul><li>Forgetting your dreams</li><li>Ignoring family</li><li>Suppressing emotions</li><li>Neglecting friends</li><li>Forgetting to be happy with what you have<br /></li></ul><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/todo.html"><em>The Top of My Todo List</em></a>, Graham inverted the regrets into his 5 commandments to live by:</p><ul><li>Donât ignore your dreams</li><li>Donât work too much</li><li>Say what you think</li><li>Cultivate friendships</li><li>Be happy</li></ul><p>â<br /></p><h2>Paul Grahamâs Best Essays</h2><p><strong>Paul Grahamâs favorites</strong>â<br /></p><p><strong>My favorites</strong></p><ul><li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/say.html">What You Can't Say</a>Â </li><li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/think.html">How to Think for Yourself</a>Â </li><li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html">You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss</a>Â </li><li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html">How to Make Wealth</a>Â </li><li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html">How to Lose Time and Money</a></li></ul><p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html">â</a><br /></p><h2>Final words</h2><p>This has been nothing but a short introduction to Paul Grahamâs ideas. There are so many essays and ideas and topics that werenât included here, so, who knows, maybe at some point there will be a PG 201.Â <br /></p><p>Anyhow, I hope this has inspired you to explore the essays yourself and gives you a convenient way to find the essays that interest you.Â <br /></p><p>If you found this summary useful, please feel free to share around. It took me nearly a year to read all the essays and turn my notes into something useful, so itâd be awesome if many people knew about this.<br /></p><p>And if thereâs something youâd like to add / edit, reach out: <a href="mailto:jaakko@jaakkoj.com">jaakko@jaakkoj.com</a> / <a href="https://twitter.com/jaakkojar">Twitter</a><br /></p><p>Thanks for reading.<br /></p></div>||||I|||| Jaakko
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 Paul Graham 101

 Misc

 Thereâs probably no one who knows more about startups than Paul Graham. Having helped thousands of startups through Y Combinator, the startup accelerator he co-founded, thereâs a thing or two to learn from his essays. And Grahamâs wisdom isnât limited to startups either; his essays, read by millions, touch on education, intelligence, writing, society, the human mind, and much more.

 Iâve read all of Paul Grahamâs published essays (200+), ending up with enough notes to fill a book. This post tries to summarize the parts Iâve found most insightful and provide an accessible starting point for someone new to Graham.

 Whenever possible, Iâve included links to his essays so you can easily go to the source when something interesting catches your eye. (Indeed, I recommend it - use this post as a gateway to the good stuff rather than a complete account in itself).

 If my description of Grahamâs idea sounds interesting, expect his essay to be 100x better. Always go back to the essays, where the ideas are fleshed out in full. This post is a very shallow overview.

 Nevertheless, I hope this post inspires you to read Grahamâs essays. Theyâre worth your time.

 Boring disclaimer stuff:

 * I made a Google Docs version of this post, in case that's easier to navigate.
 * Iâve included all essays that were published before November 2021 (Beyond Smart is the latest essay included). You can find a list of all essays on Grahamâs site.
 * The info included is based on my interests at the time of reading the posts. Had I read an essay a year earlier or later, Iâd likely have included something else. Plus, with over 200 essays, Iâve just downright overlooked and forgot important stuff. Again, I recommend you explore the essays yourself.
 * This post does NOT cover Paul Grahamâs thoughts or essays on programming / coding. Iâm simply not interested in or knowledgeable about that stuff, so I didn't think it fair to talk about it. Heâs written a lot about coding, so if thatâs your interest, explore his essays yourself.
 * Finally, if something seem off or missing, let me hear about it and Iâll fix it: jaakko@jaakkoj.com / Twitter

 Okay, letâs jump in.

 â

 Paul Graham on Startups

 Unsurprisingly, many of Grahamâs essays are startup-related. Given his experience on the topic, thereâs a lot to unwrap, including some classics like âRamen Profitableâ, âDo Things that Donât Scaleâ and âMakerâs Schedule, Managerâs Scheduleâ. Letâs start with an overview.

 Startups in 13 sentences:

 1. Pick good co-founders.
 2. Launch fast.
 3. Let your idea evolve.
 4. Understand your users.
 5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
 6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.
 7. You make what you measure.
 8. Spend little.
 9. Get ramen profitable.
 10. Avoid distractions.
 11. Don't get demoralized.
 12. Don't give up.
 13. Deals fall through.

 For a detailed account, try How to Start a Startup.Â

 This section presents some of Grahamâs core ideas around startups, including the principles above.

 Essays mentioned in this section:

 Startups in 13 sentences

 How to Start a Startup

 Startup = GrowthÂ

 How to Make Wealth

 After Credentials

 The Lesson to Unlearn

 The Power of the Marginal

 News from the Front

 A Student's Guide to Startups

 What Startups Are Really Like

 Before the Startup

 Hiring is Obsolete

 Why to Not Not Start a Startup

 The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn

 Organic Startup Ideas

 Six Principles for Making New Things

 Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

 Black Swan Farming

 Crazy New Ideas

 Why There Aren't More Googles

 Ideas for Startups

 Jessica Livingston

 Startup FAQ

 Earnestness

 Relentlessly Resourceful

 A Word to the Resourceful

 The Anatomy of Determination

 Mean People Fail

 Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice

 Be Good

 Design and Research

 A Version 1.0

 What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?

 Early Work

 Trolls

 Haters

 Beating the Averages

 Do Things that Don't Scale

 Ramen Profitable

 Default Alive or Default Dead?

 Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

 Holding a Program in One's Head

 How Not to Die

 Disconnecting Distraction

 Good and Bad Procrastination

 Donât talk to Corp Dev

 The Top Idea in Your Mind

 The Fatal Pinch

 Startups are fundamentally different

 Startups arenât ordinary businesses. âA startup is a company designed to grow fastâ, it is fundamentally different from your standard restaurant or hair salon. All decisions reflect this need to grow. Indeed, Graham says: âIf you want to understand startups, understand growthâ.

 âEconomically, 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.â (From How to Make Wealth)

 Startups are also vastly different from your school experience. Your tests at school can be hacked, but success at startups is unhackable. At school, you learned that the way to get ahead is to perform well in a test, so you learned how to hack the tests. But in startups, you cannot really trick investors to give you money; the real hack is to be a good investment. You cannot really trick people to use your product; the real hack is to build something great. Valuable work is something you cannot hack.

 So you donât need to be a good student to be a good startup founder. In fact, if your opinions differ from those of your business teacher, that may even be a good thing (if your business teacher was excellent in business, theyâd probably be a startup founder). In a startup, credentials donât really matter - your users wonât care if you went to Stanford or got straight Aâs. (Related: A Student's Guide to Startups).Â

 Starting a startup is fundamentally different from a normal job, too. In a startup, experience is overrated. The one thing that matters is to be an expert on your users and the problem; everything else can be figured out along the way. âThe most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean.â (From Hiring is Obsolete). By starting a startup, you can figure out your real market value.

 So, startups are fundamentally different from other companies, school and ânormal workâ. But why donât more people start them? Graham has listed common excuses (and rebuttals) in Why to Not Not Start a Startup.

 Startups are wealth-creation machines

 So, startups are fundamentally different. You cannot really understand them by looking at other things. But what are they then?

 Startups are one of the most powerful legal ways to get rich. If youâre successful, you can, in a few years, get so rich you donât know what to do with all the money. But perhaps even better than the money is all the time a successful founder saves:

 âEconomically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life.â (From The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn)Â

 In How to Make Wealth, Graham shows why startups are optimized for wealth-creation. (And for clarity, wealth is different from money: wealth is what people want, while money is merely the medium of exchange to get it. So a startup doesnât actually create money, it creates wealth; in other words, it creates something people want, and people give money for that. This distinction may seem small but itâs important: âmaking moneyâ seems really complicated while âmaking something people wantâ is far easier.)

 Why are startups optimized for wealth-creation?

 Leverage: If a startup solves a complex problem, it only needs to solve it once, then scale it infinitely with technology. So a startup, once it cracks the code, can create a lot of wealth rapidly.Â

 Measurement: The performance of every employee in a startup is easier to measure than the performance of every employee in a big organization. So if you perform well and create wealth, youâre in a better position to get paid according to your value in a startup.

 More detail in How to Make Wealth.Â

 Good startup ideas come from personal need and they donât sound convincing

 While there are many ways you could get startup ideas, Graham has observed that most successful startups were founded because of a personal need. Fix something for yourself, and donât even think that youâre starting a company. Just keep on fixing the problem until you find that youâve started a company. (From Organic Startup Ideas)

 Heâs also observed that good ideas tend to come from the margins - places youâd not expect. The idea is often very focused - like a book store online or a networking site for university students - so it isnât obvious how it would change the world; we dismiss the idea until it becomes obvious.

 So, good ideas donât initially sound like billion-dollar ideas - what even is a billion-dollar idea? Certainly not something we could recognize in advance. Indeed, the initial idea is usually so crude and basic that youâll ignore it if youâre looking for a billion-dollar idea. The really big ideas may even repel you - they are too ambitious.Â

 A good idea doesnât sound convincing because, for no one to have already taken it, it must be a bit crazy or unconventional. âThe most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.â (From Black Swan Farming)

 Indeed, when someone presents a crazy new idea to you, and if they are âboth a domain expert and a reasonable personâ, chances are that itâs a good idea (even if it sounds like a bad one). âIf 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.â

 Graham also emphasizes that it is not the idea that matters, but the people who have them.Â

 Oh, and "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (Graham quoting Howard Aiken)

 Nevertheless, if youâre in need of inspiration, Graham has some good starting points for coming up with startup ideas.

 Founders make the startup

 âThe earlier you pick startups, the more youâre picking the founders.â Throughout his essays, Graham emphasizes the importance of the founders. More than anything - target audience, trends, TAMâ¦ - a startupâs success is influenced by the founders. (Obviously, the other employees matter, too. But founders are special, they are the heart and soul of the startup.)

 âCofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.â (from Startups in 13 Sentences).Â

 Indeed, Graham notes that most successful startups tend to have multiple founders.

 Earnestness and resourcefulness make a good founder

 If the founders are the most important factor for a startupâs success, it is critical to understand what makes a good founder. Indeed, this is the topic of numerous essays.

 According to Graham, a good founder is:

 Earnest

 âThe highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as âearnest.ââ

 An earnest person does something for the right reasons and tries as hard as they can. The right reason usually isnât to make a lot of money, but to solve a problem or satisfy an intellectual curiosity. This is why itâs important to figure out your intrinsic motivation or embrace your nerdiness (both of which weâll discuss later).

 Relentlessly Resourceful

 âA couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.â

 Relentless = make things go your way

 Resourceful = adapt and try new things to make things go your way

 Relentlessly resourceful people know what they want, and they will aggressively try things out and âhustleâ until they get what they want. Consider the Airbnb founders and selling cereal.

 Graham noticed a pattern around resourcefulness: when he talks to resourceful founders, he doesnât need to say much. He can point them in the right direction, and theyâll take it from there. The un-resourceful founders felt harder to talk to.Â

 It is not the most intelligent who succeed, but the most determined. Smart people fail all the time while dumb people succeed just because they decide they must.Â

 "Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.


 Oh, also: good founders arenât mean. Mean People Fail and canât get good people to work with them while startup founders who are nice tend to attract people to them.

 Make something people want

 If thereâs one piece of startup advice to take from Graham, itâs this: âMake something people wantâ. (As you may know, this is also Y Combinatorâs motto)

 Yes, it is obvious. But itâs also pretty much the only thing that matters in a startup: if you just make something people want, youâll attract users, employees, investors, money. âYou can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives.â

 Indeed, many early-stage startups are âindistinguishable from a nonprofitâ, because they focus so much on helping the users and less so on making money. Funnily, this approach makes them money in the long term.

 âIn nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product. For most, the cause of death is listed as âran out of funding,â but that's only the immediate cause. Why couldn't they get more funding? Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be done, or both.â (From How to Start a Startup)Â

 So how do you make something people want? Get close to users, launch fast, then iterate.

 Get close to users

 âThe essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.â (From Startups in 13 Sentences)Â

 âYou have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. It's much like being a doctor. You can't just treat a patient's symptoms. When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that.â (From Design and Research)

 Since you may not precisely know who your users are and what exactly are their needs before you launch, itâs useful to yourself be a user of your product. If you use and like the product, other people like you may, too. This is why successful startups tend to arise from personal need.

 Launch fast, then iterate

 âThe thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.â

 The importance of iterations is highlighted in âA Version 1.0â, âWhat Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?â and âEarly Workâ, among others. (If you understand the importance of iterations, then you understand that you must release a version 1 as soon as possible, so you can start iterating sooner.)

 Some ideas from these essays:

 * Donât be discouraged by peopleâs ridicules of your early work. Just keep on iterating. (There will always be Trolls and Haters. Donât mind them.)
 * Donât compare your early work with someoneâs finished work. (If you wanted to compare your work to something, itâd optimally be a successful personâs early work. But people tend to hide their first drafts, precisely because they donât want to be ridiculed.)
 * When in doubt, ask: Could this really lame version 1 turn into an impressive masterpiece, given enough iterations?

 Iterating and getting through the lame early work never gets easy. But Graham has listed some useful tips to trick your brain in âEarly Workâ.

 Execution is a pathless land, but there is advice to be given

 Mostly, a startup shouldnât try to replicate what other startups do:

 âIf you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.â

 Startup execution is a pathless land; thereâs no formula to follow, even though many blog posts and thought leaders want you to believe otherwise. This is why itâs so important for the founders to be earnest and relentlessly resourceful: they need to figure it out themselves.

 Even though there isnât a connect-the-dots type of way to succeed in the startup world, Graham has observed hundreds (if not thousands) of startups from a very close distance, so he has identified general principles that help:

 Do Things that Donât Scale

 âThink of startups not only as something you build and you scale, but something you build and force to scale.âÂ

 âStartups take off because the founders make them take off. If you donât take off, itâs not necessarily because the market doesnât exist but because you havenât exerted enough effort.â

 At some point, your startup may grow on autopilot. But before youâre there, you need to do seemingly insignificant things, like cold emailing potential clients, speaking to people at conferences or offering âsurprisingly good customer serviceâ.

 The âDo Things that Donât Scaleâ advice helps us remember that building something great is only one part of the equation; we must also do laborious, unscalable work to get initial growth, no matter how great the product is.

 Get Ramen Profitable

 Ramen profitability = a startup makes just enough to pay the foundersâ living expenses.

 âRamen profitability means the startup does not need to raise money to survive. The only major expenses are the foundersâ living expenses, which are now covered (if they eat ramen).â

 Significance: Ramen profitability means that the startup turns from default dead into default alive. The game changes from âdonât run out of moneyâ into âdonât run out of energyâ. While running a startup is never not stressful, reaching ramen profitability does take a weight off your shoulders.

 To increase your startupâs chances of succeeding, increase your chances of survival; to increase your chances of survival, reach ramen profitability.

 Maintain a Makerâs Schedule

 To get into the making/building mindset, you need big chunks of time with no interruptions. You canât build a great product in 1-hour units in-between meetings; âthatâs barely enough time to get startedâ. If you think of the stereotypical coder, they prefer to work throughout the night, probably because no one can distract them at 3am.

 âWhen you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.â

 If you want to create great stuff, you need to be mindful that a manager and a maker operate on very different schedules. If youâre the manager, try to give big blocks of time for the maker; if youâre the maker, try to schedule all meetings on two days of the week so the rest is free for creating.

 Holding a Program in One's Head expands on some of these ideas.

 What not to do

 Graham has also figured out something about the inverse: what not to do. Or, as he puts it, âHow Not to Dieâ.Â

 1. Keep morale up (donât run out of energy)
 2. Donât run out of money (for example, hire too fast)
 3. Donât do other things. The startup needs your full attention. (Procrastination is mostly distraction. Avoid distractions and youâll avoid procrastination. Note, though, that you can procrastinate well.)
 4. Make failing unbelievably humiliating (to force you to give your everything)
 5. Simply donât give up, especially when things get tough


 To summarize this part on execution, here are Paul Grahamâs Six Principles for Making New Things:Â

 1. Simple solutions
 2. To overlooked problems
 3. That actually need to be solved
 4. Deliver these solutions as informally as possible
 5. Starting with a very crude version 1
 6. Then iterating rapidly

 The more you focus on money, the less you focus on the product

 Graham doesnât often talk about money, and when he does, I get this weird feeling. Itâs like âsure, weâre talking about money... but Iâd rather we talk about the product instead.â Let me explain:

 In Donât talk to Corp Dev, Graham says all a startup needs to know about M&A is that you should never talk to corp dev unless you intend to sell right now. So itâs better to focus on the product until you absolutely must think about M&A.

 In The Top Idea in Your Mind: âonce you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mindâ, instead of users and the product. So your product suffers.

 When you get money, donât spend it. âThe most common form of failure is running out of moneyâ, and you can avoid that by not spending money, not hiring too fast.

 One instance when you should think about money is if your startup is default dead. âAssuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left?â If you know youâre default dead, your focus quickly shifts to turning the ship around and reaching profitability; avoiding The Fatal Pinch.

 In the long term, itâs obvious that the company that focuses more on the users and product beats the company that obsesses over investors and raising money.

 â

 Paul Graham on What to work on

 What to work on is one of the most important questions in your life, along with where you live and who youâre with. While Grahamâs treatment of this question definitely leans on the side of startups, you can also view his ideas from the perspective of side hustles, hobbies, projects (in or outside of a career) and so on.

 Essays mentioned in this section:

 What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

 Earnestness

 Why Nerds are Unpopular

 Fashionable Problems

 How to Do What You Love

 You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

 A Project of One's Own

 Ramen Profitable

 Great Hackers

 The Top Idea in Your Mind

 Follow intrinsic motivation

 If itâs something youâre intrinsically motivated about, thatâs something where you have infinite curiosity, and thatâs something youâll eventually do well in. (Later, weâll discuss how curiosity leads to genius.)

 âIf something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.â Put another way: the stranger your tastes seem to other people, the more you should embrace those tastes.Â

 Because of the internet, you can make money by following your curiosity. This is a revolutionary shift: in the past, money was gained from a boring job, and you satisfied your curiosity during the weekends. But now, you can make real money just by following your curiosity, whether itâs from a startup or a YouTube or Gumroad account.

 The two greatest powers in the world - money and curiosity - are getting more aligned each day. There has never been a greater time to follow your intrinsic motivation. Now, the important question is what to work on, not how to make money, because if you figure out an answer to the former, the latter question will answer itself.Â

 Turns out, nerds are far closer to figuring out the answer than non-nerds. (Nerds - or earnest people - do something for the sake of it, not to become popular or rich). Nerds in high school tend to be unpopular, not because they couldnât figure out how popularity works and game the system, but perhaps because they donât really want to be popular. That makes high school a tough time for them, but real life becomes much more fulfilling: while others are stuck in the popularity/status rat race and compete to work on Fashionable Problems, the nerds can follow their own curiosities, thus work on stuff no one else is working on, thus discover new things, thus succeed. Plus, they have a much nicer time doing so.

 A question to figure out your intrinsic motivation and what to work on: âWhat are you a big nerd on?â

 Letâs end this part with a sharp and practical observation from âHow to Do What You Loveâ:Â

 âTo be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool.â

 You should be working on your own projects

 The logical conclusion of following your intrinsic motivation is that you should be working on your own projects (or other peopleâs projects where you have significant ownership).Â

 You may have noticed that projects you start on your own feel fundamentally different from tasks handed to you by a manager or teacher. And thereâs a reason for that: âYou Weren't Meant to Have a Bossâ.

 In that essay, Graham makes the argument that even though working in a large organization is the default now, itâs not how we evolved to work. A large organization is similar to the modern diet - consisting of pizza, candies and other processed foods - while a small group (like a startup) is the hunter-gatherer diet. One is easy and safe and appealing in the short term (but terrible over time) while the other is hard and unappealing, but more natural and better in the long term.

 While working in smaller groups makes you happier and gives you more freedom, itâs also the way to do great work, as Graham argues in âA Project of Oneâs Ownâ. If a project feels like itâs your own, you have motivation and skin in the game that you donât otherwise have. Youâre much more willing to obsess over the details and make something great.

 Work on things that you want to take over your life

 âIt's a mistake to insist dogmatically on âwork/life balance.â Indeed, the mere expression âwork/lifeâ embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. [...] I wouldn't want to work on anything I didn't want to take over my life.â (From âA Project of Oneâs Ownâ)

 For startup founders, the startup is their life - there is time for little else, even sleep. Why would they willingly work 80+ hours a week and eat nothing but ramen, with no guaranteed financial reward, when they could work 40 hours a week and eat lobster at a big company? Because the startup is a project of their own, and they have - hopefully consciously - decided itâs something they want to take over their lives. âPeople will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they're the founders.â

 How do you know if something has taken over your life? Hereâs a simple test: Do you think about it in the shower?Â

 In âThe Top Idea in Your Mindâ, Graham argues that if something is really important to you, then your mind will think about it subconsciously and ideas will appear in your head whilst walking or showering. Indeed, if this does not happen, youâll have trouble doing great work - thatâs your sign to reconsider what you work on.

 â

 Paul Graham on Thinking & Decision-making

 Startup founders are an interesting group of people: they seek to change something about the status quo, which means they see something non-obvious that could be improved and they believe in that improvement so much that theyâre willing to work 80+ hours a week and eat ramen until their vision becomes a reality.

 What drives them? It canât be just money - there are so many founders whoâve already gotten rich, and they still work in their companies and start new startups. And why arenât there more founders? What qualities are there in a founder that you donât find in non-founders?

 By trying to understand this group of people, Graham has discovered a lot about thinking, decision-making, and the human mind in general.

 Essays mentioned in this section:

 The Four Quadrants of Conformism

 The Two Kinds of Moderate

 Orthodox Privilege

 Novelty and Heresy

 How to Disagree

 How to Think for Yourself

 The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

 Is It Worth Being Wise?

 Beyond Smart

 How to Work Hard

 Mind the Gap

 Being a Noob

 How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

 How Art Can Be Good

 Taste for Makers

 How to Do What You Love

 The Island Test

 How to Start a Startup

 Independent-mindedness vs conventional-mindedness

 Independent-minded people prefer to think through things for themselves, and because of this, they may seem weird to conventional-minded people (who follow the average and agreeable). Hence, it is almost a tautology to say that new ideas and new startups are the work of independent-minded people.

 In The Four Quadrants of Conformism, Graham goes a bit deeper and differentiates between aggressive and passive forms of independent-mindedness and conventional-mindedness. Notably, aggressively independent-minded people tend to question existing norms and rules, working against them, while aggressively conventional-minded people work to maintain the norms and rules. Thereâs a clash between the groups, so itâs important for independent-minded people to âbe protectedâ, be given space to innovate, break norms and come up with new ideas and things. (These âprotected areasâ are important for innovation. You could think of Silicon Valley as one.)

 If you know someone is conventional-minded, you know a lot about them. Their beliefs and actions match the average, and you know what the average is. Whereas, if someone is independent-minded, you donât really know them; they think things through for themselves, and thus they may arrive at conclusions you canât imagine. In fact, on one issue, independent-minded people can be in the political left, and on another issue, in the political right; they are politically moderate by accident. A conventional-minded person is more likely either in the left or right for every issue.

 Conventional-minded people have what Graham calls Orthodox Privilege: it seems to them that everyone is safe to express their opinions because everything they think about is conventional and uncontroversial. âThey literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.â

 So if you do express your controversial, new ideas to them, they may regard them as untrue heresy. Novelty and Heresy go hand-in-hand. âIt doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right.â To them, anything that is unconventional is likely to be false; to the independent-minded, anything too conventional seems suspicious. So if you express your independent-minded thoughts publicly, you may want to learn How to Disagree.

 In How to Think for Yourself, Graham shows there are some types of work that you can only do well in if you think differently from others: Scientists aim to discover something new, so being conventional-minded wonât get you very far; an investor who thinks exactly like everyone else will not get rich; a startup founder who shares the same ideas as everyone else wonât build great new stuff. You need to be right and most other people need to be wrong.

 Of course, not every type of work is like this. You can be a good administrative worker without thinking differently from others; itâs not essential that everyone else is wrong. Generally, independent-minded people want to work in areas where newness is rewarded.

 In How to Think for Yourself, Graham shares some exercises for training your independent-mindedness muscles.

 Genius comes from infinite curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage

 We tend to think some people are just blessed with genius, that itâs an innate thing. But Graham has taken this black box apart and argues genius is something you can influence.

 CuriosityÂ

 âThose who do really great work have an unexplainable obsession about somethingâ. Infinite curiosity leads to surprising discoveries, simply because you think about and play with the topic more than any rational person would expect. And all that thinking and tinkering feels like play to you (but looks like work to others) because an obsessive interest âis a proxy for ability and a substitute for determinationâ.Â

 Intelligence

 Thereâs a difference between wisdom and intelligence. If wisdom means a high average outcome across all outcomes, intelligence is a spectacularly high outcome in a few situations. If we think of âgeniusâ, it tends to fit the latter description: you can be a terrible fool about everything else, but if you discover relativity, youâre a genius.Â

 High curiosity in something + high intelligence in that domain are a great beginning. But not necessarily enough to discover important new ideas. As Graham elaborates in Beyond Smart, there are smart people, and then there are those who have important new ideas; âThere are a lot of genuinely smart people who donât achieve very much.â

 Intelligence and curiosity are perhaps necessary to become a genius, but not sufficient; you also need hard work to uncover new ideas and courage to pursue them, as developing something new challenges your ego (and irritates the conventional-minded people).

 Hard work and courage

 Even when youâre undeniably brilliant, you cannot avoid hard work. (Indeed, just knowing How to Work Hard can get you closer to sheer brilliance.) Hard work in itself isnât the goal, though. Output matters (output being, in this context, important new ideas): âIf I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.â

 When you start to do or learn anything new, youâll Be a Noob at it first. But âthe more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.â In How to Be an Expert in a Changing World, Graham notes that if your opinion was right once, it may not be right anymore because the world has changed. So it takes intellectual humility and courage to update your opinions to the new world, instead of clinging to the opinions you formed in the old world.


 Putting together Grahamâs thoughts, it seems like genius is not an innate quality that you canât influence, but a combination of multiple qualities like curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage.

 Good taste is necessary for good work

 Good taste is a quality related to genius. Some people seem to have an âeyeâ for design or an âearâ for music, but Graham shows, again, that taste is something you can develop.

 âTaste is subjectiveâ isnât true, and you see it as soon as you start designing or writing or building things. Thereâs good art and thereâs bad art, good writing and bad writing, nice design and less nice design. Saying âtaste is subjectiveâ is lazy and wonât help you improve your work.

 So if you want to create better stuff, you need to realize that you may have poor taste and you need to develop good taste, normally by getting better at your craft or studying those who have good taste. âGood work happens when you see something is ugly, understand why, and have the ability to fix it into something beautiful.â (From Taste for Makers)

 So what is good art or design? Graham gives a list (I redacted a few points):

 1. Simple
 2. Timeless
 3. Solves the right problem
 4. Suggestive
 5. Often slightly funny
 6. Hard
 7. Looks easy
 8. Uses symmetry
 9. Resembles nature
 10. Often strange
 11. Often daringÂ

 Good work isnât necessarily the most popular work; âThere are sources of error so powerful that if you take a vote, all you're measuring is the error.â But if you do good work, eventually, people will appreciate it.

 Is your argument testable?

 If you read Graham closely, you notice that often when he makes an argument, he immediately considers what kind of test is needed to validate the argument. Heâs thinking like a scientist: only accepting an argument if itâs testable.

 Watch him do it in How to Do What You Love:

 Â âTo be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.â

 And in The Island Test, he presents a test to figure out what youâre addicted to:Â

 âImagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might.

 What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to.â

 In some cases, the way to make a point (and make it practical) is to devise a test. In How to Start a Startup, Graham explores what makes a good startup employee. He could just say âthey are determined and will do whatever it takesâ, but thatâs not a testable argument, and not very practical for someone whoâs hiring.Â

 Instead, Graham devised a test: âCould you describe the person as an animal?â If you could say âJaakko is an animalâ and donât laugh but rather take the description seriously, thatâs the person you want in your startup. An animal of a salesperson simply wonât take no for an answer; an animal of a programmer will stay up all night to finish the code; an animal of a PR person will pitch every newspaper in the city until your startup gets featured.Â

 Fun evening activity: Go through an essay youâve written and see if each of the arguments you make is testable.

 â

 Paul Graham on Writing

 Paul Graham is known for incredibly clear and simple writing. Each of his essays is easy to understand, no matter how complicated the topic.Â

 You can learn a lot about writing just by reading Graham, and doubly so if itâs an essay on the topic of writing. Fortunately for us, there are many such essays.

 For starters, Graham has summarized his writing philosophy in Writing, Briefly. Itâs an entire writing course, condensed into one (long) sentence. I recommend you read it now before continuing below.

 Essays mentioned in this section:

 Writing, Briefly

 Writing and Speaking

 The List of N Things

 Persuade xor Discover

 General and Surprising

 The Age of the Essay

 How to Write Usefully

 A Version 1.0

 Early Work

 Write Simply

 Write Like You Talk

 Do Things that Don't Scale

 Economic Inequality

 Mind the Gap

 Taste for Makers

 How to Make Wealth

 How to Think for Yourself

 Writing is how you get ideas, develop ideas and improve your thinking

 If you read Writing, Briefly, as you should, you noticed this:

 âI 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.â

 From an idea perspective, being a good writer is better than being a good speaker. You need good ideas to have good essays, but you can do a good speech without saying much at all. Though speeches can be better for motivation and personal touch, writing is better for ideas.

 Donât write to persuade, write to discover something new and useful

 There are roughly two types of essays: those where you know exactly where itâs going before you start, and those where you have no clue where itâs going.Â

 Weâre taught to write the first type of essay in school: we write the thesis statement in the introduction and ensure that the rest of the essay supports that thesis. Weâre writing to persuade the reader, so that theyâll accept our thesis. A listicle is equivalent to that type of essay, and writing one doesnât help you discover new ideas or knowledge. âI worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to sell.â

 Paul Graham is a supporter (and practitioner) of the second type, writing to discover. In his mind, an essay is supposed to be two things: new and useful.

 An essay should be new

 If an essay doesnât share something new or surprising, what good is it? When we write to discover, we want to surprise ourselves and the reader. Most surprising = furthest from what people currently believe.Â

 But just anything new doesnât cut it. Thereâs constantly new info and news, and that doesnât make a difference in our lives. What we should aim for is something General and Surprising. âOrdinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: either surprising without being general (e.g. gossip), or general without being surprising (e.g. platitudes).â If you can do some combination of general and surprising (at least to some people), youâve got a winning essay.

 âEssays should aim for maximum surprise.â

 An essay should be useful

 What does it mean for an essay to be useful? Graham offers some ideas in How to Write Usefully:Â

 * When something is useful, itâs correct. If itâs merely persuasive, it could be false. âGood 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.â (From The Age of the Essay)Â
 * âUseful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.â
 * âUseful writing tells something important that people didnât already knowâ (again, going back to the âsurpriseâ idea)

 Good writing is rewriting (in particular, rewriting to make the text simpler)

 Just like in anything involving skill, the way to get better is through iterations. Good writing is rewriting. Because we canât see someoneâs drafts and rewrites, we compare their end product to our Early Work, then get discouraged looking at the gap. Instead, we must appreciate that something bad now could become great, if we iterate enough.Â

 âMy strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting it very carefully.â (From How to Write Usefully)Â

 And when you rewrite, your main goal is to make your writing simple. Most of the time, the simplest words and simplest sentences are better than decorative, complicated words. Your purpose is to convey an idea, not to use fancy words and make the reader âdo extra work just so you can seem cool.â

 In Write Like You Talk, Graham shares a trick for writing simply: explain your ideas to a friend by talking; then, use that transcript as a draft for your essay. The spoken and written version of your idea should be as close to each other as possible. âIf you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers.âÂ

 When possible, find a metaphor for your idea

 This is not direct advice from Graham (though he does recommend you write simply, and whatâs simpler than a great metaphor?)Â

 Instead, this is a theme you notice if you read a lot of Graham. Metaphors are a weapon he wields often.

 Some of my favorite metaphors from Paul Graham:

 âThere's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means âleap into the mouth.â My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.â (From Write Simply)

 âPeople donât realize that scrapping things together is how big things get started. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding âthere's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything.ââ (From Do Things that Donât Scale)

 âThe list of n things [listicle] is in that respect the cheeseburger of essay forms. If you're eating at a restaurant you suspect is bad, your best bet is to order the cheeseburger. Even a bad cook can make a decent cheeseburger. And there are pretty strict conventions about what a cheeseburger should look like. You can assume the cook isn't going to try something weird and artistic. The list of n things similarly limits the damage that can be done by a bad writer.â (From The List of N Things)

 âSometimes it's because the writer only has very high-level data and so draws conclusions from that, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his keys under the lamppost, instead of where he dropped them, because the light is better there.â (From Economic Inequality)Â

 âIf I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.â (From Mind the Gap)Â

 âI'm not sure why. It may just be my own stupidity. A can-opener must seem miraculous to a dog.â (From Taste for Makers)

 âA 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.â (From How to Make Wealth)Â

 âThe 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.â (From How to Think for Yourself)

 â

 Paul Graham on Society

 Startups turn into big companies, startup founders turn into billionaires, products used by hundreds turn into products used by millions... If youâre working to help startups, youâre working to change society in a big way.Â

 Essays mentioned in this section:

 Mind the Gap

 Great Hackers

 Economic Inequality

 How to Make Wealth

 The Refragmentation

 Inequality and Risk

 Taste for Makers

 Orthodox Privilege

 What You Can't Say

 âReducing wealth inequalityâ isnât as great as it sounds

 As we established earlier, a startup is a wealth-creation machine. As such, it shouldnât surprise us to see Graham discussing wealth inequality and why it isnât the demonic thing many believe.

 Wealth inequality is a divisive topic, and one Iâm no expert in, so Iâll try to provide a general overview without twisting Grahamâs ideas into something they arenât. You might want to read the essays in full if youâre interested in the topic.

 By default, we think wealth inequality is inherently bad.Â

 In Mind the Gap, Graham presents three reasons why we think wealth inequality is inherently bad:

 1. The Daddy Model of Wealth: We confuse wealth with money and think there is a fixed amount of it. And if thereâs a fixed amount, we believe it should be distributed equally. (By now, you should realize that wealth is different from money, and that you can create wealth; there is no âfixed amountâ or âfixed pieâ; you can increase the pie)
 2. We think people get rich today like they got rich earlier: In the past, the rich people tended to get rich by stealing (through war or taxes). So some people still believe rich people have gotten rich by stealing, even though today the much better, more reliable, faster and legal way to get rich is by creating wealth, not stealing it.
 3. We donât understand leverage: Technology increases the gap between the productive and the unproductive, thus increasing wealth inequality. If a CEO is 100x richer than an employee in the same company, we think it unjust because thereâs no way the CEO works 100x more than they do. But because of leverage, the CEO can easily be 100x more productive than an employee, or make decisions that are 100x more valuable. âI have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.âÂ

 Wealth inequality can be a sign of good things.

 âVariation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a society of one, they're identical.) And that is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.

 In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.â (From Great Hackers)

 âBy helping startup founders, youâre helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality should be decreased, no one should be helping founders. But that doesnât sound right.â (From Economic Inequality)

 There are many causes of economic inequality. Some of them are bad, like corruption and stealing. But some causes are generally good, like variation in productivity. Some people are vastly better at creating things people want, so itâs unsurprising they are able to make more money than other people.

 Remember that startups grow the pie: they get rich by making other people richer. Because they are rich doesnât mean you must have been screwed over. Itâs more like the opposite: the Google founders are rich because they have made life easier and richer for billions of people.

 Of course, wealth inequality isn't only due to startups (although startups create the most extreme results). Some peopleâs salaries are higher than othersâ, again, because some produce more wealth than others. Salaries are closer to market price than ever before, and get constantly closer, as people are more free to start their own companies, switch companies and work internationally.

 Taxing the rich reduces economic inequality, but may not lead to the results youâd hope for.Â

 If you want to make the poor richer - as is probably the intention when you want to reduce economic inequality - you can either take the money from the rich, or make the poor more productive so theyâll get richer (through education and infrastructure, for example). But if you make people more productive, some people will create 1,000x the results as another, so economic inequality remains.Â

 So if you want to reduce economic inequality, the only way is to push from the top - to take money from the rich (see Inequality and Risk). Thus, you reduce the rewards for creating or funding startups and business activity, thus you hinder technological innovation. This doesnât sound as positive as âreducing economic inequalityâ. Especially when you consider the many different kinds of inequalities beyond income equality.

 The gap between rich and poor is increasing in monetary terms, but probably closing in wealth terms. Today, the average person lives a relatively similar life, materially, to a rich person: both have a fridge, a car, a phone, Netflixâ¦ 100 years ago, the rich had a car while the poor didnât, they had things we now regard as âessentialsâ while the poor didnât. Through businesses, essential products are getting cheaper and more accessible to everyone. In many cases, the rich can pay to have a flashier version of something, like a sports car or brand watch, but the basic, affordable version is still good enough.

 Today, the difference is appearance and what brand your stuff is; in the past, the difference was either having it or not having it. So yes, the income gap is increasing, but with it, the gap in quality of life is decreasing.

 âYou need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.â (From Mind the Gap) Trickle-down economics is a bad argument because it misses the point. We need to look at how wealth is created, not how itâs used

 Grahamâs proposition:

 Allow those who create wealth to keep it.

 When youâre allowed to keep the wealth you create, people can get rich by creating wealth instead of stealing it. People take bigger risks if they can keep more of the upside when those risks pay off. A startup founder never captures all of the wealth created; most of the wealth is transferred to other people, so we should encourage those who want to get rich, not discourage them.

 Based on these ideas, you can probably guess Grahamâs opinions on capitalism vs communism (something he discusses in the essays linked in this section, particularly in How to Make Wealth and Mind the Gap).

 Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false

 âAt every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable.â (From Taste for Makers)Â

 âAnd yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.â (From Orthodox Privilege)Â

 Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false.

 Graham comes back to this idea repeatedly, particularly in the essays discussing independent-mindedness and conformism (see above). But you can see tones of this idea in his startup essays too; after all, a successful startup has a vision of a future that most other people do not believe in at the time.Â

 Graham deep-dives into this idea in What You Can't Say, an essay I consider one of his finest - one you must read for yourself. In fact, the whole essay is so intellectually important that Iâd do it a disservice by summarizing. Instead, hereâs the main takeaway I was left with:

 There are things you believe that are incorrect, horribly so. To you, they seem correct without question. Stay open-minded.

 â

 Paul Graham on Life

 If we accept that writing is thinking (as we addressed earlier), Graham, with over 200 essays and decades of writing, has done a lot of thinking. When he shares life wisdom, youâd be smart to listen.

 What You'll Wish You'd Known is sort of Paul Grahamâs compilation of life wisdom, targeted at high school students. Itâs also one of his most popular essays. While you should read it yourself, here are a few major points that stood out for me:

 * Itâs okay to not have a plan. In fact, it may be better not to fixate on one plan when youâre young. Optimize for optionality. If youâre unsure, go with the option that gives you more options later down the line.Â
 * Build something. Work on something hard on your own, doesnât really matter what it is. Youâll learn so much about yourself in that process. This is a shortcut to finding what you want to work on, which is one of the major questions in life. âIf I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. [...] I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something.â (From The Power of the Marginal)Â
 * How you succeed in school is in no way representative of how you succeed in life. âOne of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.â At school, stuff is forced on you; in real life, it is the stuff you initiate that matters and defines your trajectory.
 * âThere's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. Thatâs not how you become an adult. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [...] The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.â

 Beyond that essay, there are a few bigger themes I want to highlight below.

 Essays mentioned in this section:

 What You'll Wish You'd Known

 The Power of the Marginal

 The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn

 Life is Short

 The Power of the Marginal

 The Acceleration of Addictiveness

 You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

 Stuff

 How to Lose Time and Money

 Lies We Tell Kids

 Keep Your Identity Small

 Cities and Ambition

 The Top of My Todo List

 Life is short

 âLife is shortâ is one of those statements everyone kind of agrees with, without giving it too much thought. But Graham has explored the idea a bit deeper.

 For starters, a startup itself is a way to appreciate the shortness of life or adapt to it; instead of a 40-year career, you compress your income-making to a few startup years and thus free up time for activities beyond making a living. The average human lifespan is increasing while the minimum possible time it takes to be set for life is decreasing; startups are one way to maximize the gap.

 Whether you agree with the premise that Life is Short, itâs easy to agree that one way to make life seem less short is to minimize anything unimportant. If you do nothing for 5 hours, that 5 hours will feel excruciatingly long. The more we have going on, the shorter life feels. So we should cut all the things we donât like doing, the stuff that we think life is too short for (Graham calls this, bluntly, âbullshitâ).

 And if we invert the argument, we realize that we should dedicate more time for the important stuff. If people and relationships are important to you, your calendar should reflect that. When life is short, we must ruthlessly cut the unimportant while making time for the important. Sounds simple and easy to dismiss, but somehow, Graham applies weight to it in Life is Short.

 Itâs surprisingly easy to waste your life if youâre not careful

 Since life is short, itâs easy to let it slip away in a blur if youâre not careful.

 One thing you get easily sucked into is âanti-testsâ. These are tests you can try to excel in, but the way to come on top is to not care about the test at all, to ignore the test. So you could try to be popular in school, but you probably shouldnât care about popularity; you can try to become important and high-status in life, but you probably shouldnât care about that. Just because thereâs a test doesnât mean you should try to perform well in it.Â

 Ignoring tests is especially hard for intelligent, ambitious people, because their ambition provides the motivation and intelligence the means to do well in the test. But try not to get sucked into the anti-tests in life; they are the kind of âbullshitâ life is too short for.

 Another thing that can corrode your life, if youâre not careful, is addiction. We know to be careful with the standard stuff like alcohol and gambling, but itâs harder to avoid addictions that everyone has because those seem normal to us. In The Acceleration of Addictiveness, Graham makes a division between two normals: statistically normal (that which everyone does) and operationally normal (that which works best). Being addicted to social media and your phone is statistically normal, but not operationally normal. âTechnology tends to separate normal from natural.â

 âYou can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.â For example, if your approach to consumerism doesnât seem a bit weird, you probably own too much Stuff.

 But being careful about pleasures and self-indulgence and âthe bullshitâ isnât enough. We must also be careful about the things we do that feel important and productive. In How to Lose Time and Money, Graham writes:Â

 âIt's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking âwow, I'm spending a lot of money.â Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.â

 Similarly, for a fairly ambitious person, itâs hard to waste your time by watching TV or laying on the sofa - your brain will start thinking âthis is a waste of timeâ sooner or later. But you can easily work 12h a day for 2 years on something that, in retrospect, was a complete waste of your time.Â

 If youâre not careful about where you invest your time and money, life passes by surprisingly easily.Â

 You have a lot of unconditioning to do

 Whatâs a lie you were told as a child? Stuff like âif you swallow an apple seed, a tree will grow in your stomachâ is easy to identify as a lie. But stuff like âbe careful with strangers, they are dangerousâ? Less so.

 In Lies We Tell Kids, Graham shows that weâve been lied to as kids, for a variety of reasons (some better than others). Some falsities have flowed into our heads at home, some at school, but the main idea is that weâve woven lies into our understanding of the world at a young age. And if itâs something we learned as a child, it feels undeniably true as an adult; it takes serious effort to take apart these deep-held beliefs.

 As a rule, if you think itâs true because you learned it in school or in your childhood, assume it is not true. Itâs better to verify it for yourself, even if it turns out to have been true all along.

 If childhood beliefs are a good place to start unconditioning, a good place to continue is whatever you identify as (democrat, minimalist, crypto bullâ¦). This is because we have a terribly hard time thinking clearly about something thatâs part of our identity, so you may have taken in opinions one-sidedly. If you identify as x, criticism against x feels like a personal attack because x is a part of your identity, part of you. The bigger your identity, the more you have to process and rethink.Â

 Another thing to uncondition comes from Cities and Ambition. When most people talk about the essay, they consider the obvious implication: you should go to the city that matches your ambition. So if you want to be in the show biz, go to Hollywood, or if youâre into startups, go to Silicon Valley (or, increasingly, the right corner of the internet). But thereâs an inverse consideration, too, and itâs an important one: the places youâve already lived in have subconsciously influenced your ambition. So, yes, we could match the city we live in to our ambition, but before we do that, we should figure out whether our ambition really is our own or if itâs simply a product of where we have lived in so far.

 This idea of unconditioning links back to the earlier point: because youâve been conditioned a certain way, youâre set on a path that you may not wish to be on, had you consciously made the choice. So unless you do uncondition yourself, itâs easy to waste your life.

 You have a lot of unconditioning to do. So better get started.

 Paul Grahamâs 5 commandments for life

 Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying:

 * Forgetting your dreams
 * Ignoring family
 * Suppressing emotions
 * Neglecting friends
 * Forgetting to be happy with what you have

 In The Top of My Todo List, Graham inverted the regrets into his 5 commandments to live by:

 * Donât ignore your dreams
 * Donât work too much
 * Say what you think
 * Cultivate friendships
 * Be happy

 â

 Paul Grahamâs Best Essays

 Paul Grahamâs favoritesâ

 This is in addition to the three that get the most traffic:https://t.co/zsxRpKm4ewhttps://t.co/nROmN4eyhOhttps://t.co/O8hIcjcMd2

 I should also have included:https://t.co/CUBGEQ9N7Hhttps://t.co/bAcAN5wROLhttps://t.co/MVTTJDzyQ2https://t.co/OKZOGIhi4i

 — Paul Graham (@paulg) December 20, 2019

 My favorites

 * What You Can't SayÂ
 * How to Think for YourselfÂ
 * You Weren't Meant to Have a BossÂ
 * How to Make WealthÂ
 * How to Lose Time and Money

 â

 Final words

 This has been nothing but a short introduction to Paul Grahamâs ideas. There are so many essays and ideas and topics that werenât included here, so, who knows, maybe at some point there will be a PG 201.Â

 Anyhow, I hope this has inspired you to explore the essays yourself and gives you a convenient way to find the essays that interest you.Â

 If you found this summary useful, please feel free to share around. It took me nearly a year to read all the essays and turn my notes into something useful, so itâd be awesome if many people knew about this.

 And if thereâs something youâd like to add / edit, reach out: jaakko@jaakkoj.com / Twitter

 Thanks for reading.

 Read next:

 50 Ideas
 Things that are hard to begin but near-impossible to quit
 Signaling is a shortcut - if they signal, update downwards

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Thereâs probably no one who knows more about startups than Paul Graham. Having helped thousands of startups through Y Combinator, the startup accelerator he co-founded, thereâs a thing or two to learn from his essays. And Grahamâs wisdom isnât limited to startups either; his essays, read by millions, touch on education, intelligence, writing, society, the human mind, and much more.  Iâve read all of Paul Grahamâs published essays (200+), ending up with enough notes to fill a book. This post tries to summarize the parts Iâve found most insightful and provide an accessible starting point for someone new to Graham.  Whenever possible, Iâve included links to his essays so you can easily go to the source when something interesting catches your eye. (Indeed, I recommend it - use this post as a gateway to the good stuff rather than a complete account in itself).   If my description of Grahamâs idea sounds interesting, expect his essay to be 100x better. Always go back to the essays, where the ideas are fleshed out in full. This post is a very shallow overview.  Nevertheless, I hope this post inspires you to read Grahamâs essays. Theyâre worth your time.  Boring disclaimer stuff:  I made a Google Docs version of this post, in case that's easier to navigate. Iâve included all essays that were published before November 2021 ( Beyond Smart   is the latest essay included). You can find a list of all essays on Grahamâs site. The info included is based on my interests at the time of reading the posts. Had I read an essay a year earlier or later, Iâd likely have included something else. Plus, with over 200 essays, Iâve just downright overlooked and forgot important stuff. Again, I recommend you explore the essays yourself.  This post does NOT cover Paul Grahamâs thoughts or essays on programming / coding. Iâm simply not interested in or knowledgeable about that stuff, so I didn't think it fair to talk about it. Heâs written a lot about coding, so if thatâs your interest, explore his essays yourself. Finally, if something seem off or missing, let me hear about it and Iâll fix it: jaakko@jaakkoj.com / Twitter    Okay, letâs jump in. â Paul Graham on Startups Unsurprisingly, many of Grahamâs essays are startup-related. Given his experience on the topic, thereâs a lot to unwrap, including some classics like âRamen Profitableâ, âDo Things that Donât Scaleâ and âMakerâs Schedule, Managerâs Scheduleâ. Letâs start with an overview.    Startups in 13 sentences :  Pick good co-founders. Launch fast. Let your idea evolve. Understand your users. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent. Offer surprisingly good customer service. You make what you measure. Spend little. Get ramen profitable. Avoid distractions. Don't get demoralized. Don't give up. Deals fall through.   For a detailed account, try  How to Start a Startup .Â   This section presents some of Grahamâs core ideas around startups, including the principles above.   Essays mentioned in this section:    Startups in 13 sentences   How to Start a Startup   Startup = GrowthÂ   How to Make Wealth   After Credentials   The Lesson to Unlearn   The Power of the Marginal   News from the Front   A Student's Guide to Startups   What Startups Are Really Like   Before the Startup   Hiring is Obsolete   Why to Not Not Start a Startup   The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn   Organic Startup Ideas   Six Principles for Making New Things   Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas   Black Swan Farming   Crazy New Ideas   Why There Aren't More Googles   Ideas for Startups   Jessica Livingston   Startup FAQ   Earnestness   Relentlessly Resourceful   A Word to the Resourceful   The Anatomy of Determination   Mean People Fail   Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice   Be Good   Design and Research   A Version 1.0   What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?   Early Work   Trolls   Haters   Beating the Averages   Do Things that Don't Scale   Ramen Profitable   Default Alive or Default Dead?   Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule   Holding a Program in One's Head   How Not to Die   Disconnecting Distraction   Good and Bad Procrastination   Donât talk to Corp Dev   The Top Idea in Your Mind   The Fatal Pinch   Startups are fundamentally different Startups arenât ordinary businesses. âA startup is a company designed to grow fastâ, it is fundamentally different from your standard restaurant or hair salon. All decisions reflect this need to grow. Indeed, Graham says: âIf you want to understand startups, understand growthâ.  âEconomically, 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.â (From  How to Make Wealth )  Startups are also vastly different from your school experience. Your tests at school can be hacked, but success at startups is unhackable. At school, you learned that the way to get ahead is to perform well in a test, so you learned how to hack the tests. But in startups, you cannot really trick investors to give you money; the real hack is to be a good investment. You cannot really trick people to use your product; the real hack is to build something great. Valuable work is something you cannot hack.  So you donât need to be a good student to be a good startup founder. In fact, if your opinions differ from those of your business teacher, that may even be a good thing (if your business teacher was excellent in business, theyâd probably be a startup founder). In a startup, credentials donât really matter - your users wonât care if you went to Stanford or got straight Aâs. (Related:  A Student's Guide to Startups  ).Â    Starting a startup is fundamentally different from a normal job, too. In a startup, experience is overrated. The one thing that matters is to be an expert on your users and the problem; everything else can be figured out along the way. âThe most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean.â (From  Hiring is Obsolete ). By starting a startup, you can figure out your real market value.  So, startups are fundamentally different from other companies, school and ânormal workâ. But why donât more people start them? Graham has listed common excuses (and rebuttals) in  Why to Not Not Start a Startup . Startups are wealth-creation machines So, startups are fundamentally different. You cannot really understand them by looking at other things. But what are they then?  Startups are one of the most powerful legal ways to get rich. If youâre successful, you can, in a few years, get so rich you donât know what to do with all the money. But perhaps even better than the money is all the time a successful founder saves: âEconomically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life.â (From  The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn )Â   In  How to Make Wealth , Graham shows why startups are optimized for wealth-creation. (And for clarity, wealth is different from money: wealth is what people want, while money is merely the medium of exchange to get it. So a startup doesnât actually create money, it creates wealth; in other words, it creates something people want, and people give money for that. This distinction may seem small but itâs important: âmaking moneyâ seems really complicated while âmaking something people wantâ is far easier.)  Why are startups optimized for wealth-creation?   Leverage: If a startup solves a complex problem, it only needs to solve it once, then scale it infinitely with technology. So a startup, once it cracks the code, can create a lot of wealth rapidly.Â   Measurement: The performance of every employee in a startup is easier to measure than the performance of every employee in a big organization. So if you perform well and create wealth, youâre in a better position to get paid according to your value in a startup.  More detail in  How to Make Wealth .Â  Good startup ideas come from personal need and they donât sound convincing While there are many ways you could get startup ideas, Graham has observed that most successful startups were founded because of a personal need. Fix something for yourself, and donât even think that youâre starting a company. Just keep on fixing the problem until you find that youâve started a company. (From  Organic Startup Ideas )  Heâs also observed that good ideas tend to come from the margins - places youâd not expect. The idea is often very focused - like a book store online or a networking site for university students - so it isnât obvious how it would change the world; we dismiss the idea until it becomes obvious.  So, good ideas donât initially sound like billion-dollar ideas - what even is a billion-dollar idea? Certainly not something we could recognize in advance. Indeed, the initial idea is usually so crude and basic that youâll ignore it if youâre looking for a billion-dollar idea. The really big ideas may even repel you - they are too ambitious.Â   A good idea doesnât sound convincing because, for no one to have already taken it, it must be a bit crazy or unconventional. âThe most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.â (From  Black Swan Farming )  Indeed, when someone presents a crazy new idea to you, and if they are âboth a domain expert and a reasonable personâ, chances are that itâs a good idea (even if it sounds like a bad one). âIf 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.â  Graham also emphasizes that it is not the idea that matters, but the people who have them.Â  Oh, and "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." (Graham quoting Howard Aiken)  Nevertheless, if youâre in need of inspiration, Graham has some good starting points for coming up with startup ideas. Founders make the startup âThe earlier you pick startups, the more youâre picking the founders.â Throughout his essays, Graham emphasizes the importance of the founders. More than anything - target audience, trends, TAMâ¦ - a startupâs success is influenced by the founders. (Obviously, the other employees matter, too. But founders are special, they are the heart and soul of the startup.)  âCofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.â (from Startups in 13 Sentences).Â   Indeed, Graham notes that most successful startups tend to have multiple founders. Earnestness and resourcefulness make a good founder If the founders are the most important factor for a startupâs success, it is critical to understand what makes a good founder. Indeed, this is the topic of numerous essays.  According to Graham, a good founder is:    Earnest   âThe highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as âearnest.ââ  An earnest person does something for the right reasons and tries as hard as they can. The right reason usually isnât to make a lot of money, but to solve a problem or satisfy an intellectual curiosity. This is why itâs important to figure out your intrinsic motivation or embrace your nerdiness (both of which weâll discuss later).    Relentlessly Resourceful   âA couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.â  Relentless = make things go your way Resourceful = adapt and try new things to make things go your way  Relentlessly resourceful people know what they want, and they will aggressively try things out and âhustleâ until they get what they want. Consider the Airbnb founders and selling cereal.  Graham noticed a pattern around resourcefulness: when he talks to resourceful founders, he doesnât need to say much. He can point them in the right direction, and theyâll take it from there. The un-resourceful founders felt harder to talk to.Â    It is not the most intelligent who succeed, but the most determined. Smart people fail all the time while dumb people succeed just because they decide they must.Â   Oh, also: good founders arenât mean.  Mean People Fail  and canât get good people to work with them while startup founders who are nice tend to attract people to them. Make something people want If thereâs one piece of startup advice to take from Graham, itâs this: âMake something people wantâ. (As you may know, this is also Y Combinatorâs motto)  Yes, it is obvious. But itâs also pretty much the only thing that matters in a startup: if you just make something people want, youâll attract users, employees, investors, money. âYou can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives.â  Indeed, many early-stage startups are âindistinguishable from a nonprofitâ, because they focus so much on helping the users and less so on making money. Funnily, this approach makes them money in the long term.  âIn nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product. For most, the cause of death is listed as âran out of funding,â but that's only the immediate cause. Why couldn't they get more funding? Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be done, or both.â (From  How to Start a Startup )Â   So how do you make something people want? Get close to users, launch fast, then iterate.   Get close to users  âThe essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.â (From  Startups in 13 Sentences )Â   âYou have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. It's much like being a doctor. You can't just treat a patient's symptoms. When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that.â (From  Design and Research )  Since you may not precisely know who your users are and what exactly are their needs before you launch, itâs useful to yourself be a user of your product. If you use and like the product, other people like you may, too. This is why successful startups tend to arise from personal need.   Launch fast, then iterate   âThe thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.â   The importance of iterations is highlighted in â A Version 1.0 â, â What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? â and â Early Work â, among others. (If you understand the importance of iterations, then you understand that you must release a version 1 as soon as possible, so you can start iterating sooner.)  Some ideas from these essays:  Donât be discouraged by peopleâs ridicules of your early work. Just keep on iterating. (There will always be  Trolls   and  Haters . Donât mind them.) Donât compare your early work with someoneâs finished work. (If you wanted to compare your work to something, itâd optimally be a successful personâs early work. But people tend to hide their first drafts, precisely because they donât want to be ridiculed.) When in doubt, ask: Could this really lame version 1 turn into an impressive masterpiece, given enough iterations?   Iterating and getting through the lame early work never gets easy. But Graham has listed some useful tips to trick your brain in â Early Work â. Execution is a pathless land, but there is advice to be given Mostly, a startup shouldnât try to replicate what other startups do: âIf you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.â  Startup execution is a pathless land; thereâs no formula to follow, even though many blog posts and thought leaders want you to believe otherwise. This is why itâs so important for the founders to be earnest and relentlessly resourceful: they need to figure it out themselves.  Even though there isnât a connect-the-dots type of way to succeed in the startup world, Graham has observed hundreds (if not thousands) of startups from a very close distance, so he has identified general principles that help:    Do Things that Donât Scale   âThink of startups not only as something you build and you scale, but something you build and force to scale.âÂ   âStartups take off because the founders make them take off. If you donât take off, itâs not necessarily because the market doesnât exist but because you havenât exerted enough effort.â  At some point, your startup may grow on autopilot. But before youâre there, you need to do seemingly insignificant things, like cold emailing potential clients, speaking to people at conferences or offering âsurprisingly good customer serviceâ.  The âDo Things that Donât Scaleâ advice helps us remember that building something great is only one part of the equation; we must also do laborious, unscalable work to get initial growth, no matter how great the product is.    Get Ramen Profitable   Ramen profitability = a startup makes just enough to pay the foundersâ living expenses.  âRamen profitability means the startup does not need to raise money to survive. The only major expenses are the foundersâ living expenses, which are now covered (if they eat ramen).â  Significance: Ramen profitability means that the startup turns from default dead into default alive. The game changes from âdonât run out of moneyâ into âdonât run out of energyâ. While running a startup is never not stressful, reaching ramen profitability does take a weight off your shoulders.  To increase your startupâs chances of succeeding, increase your chances of survival; to increase your chances of survival, reach ramen profitability.    Maintain a Makerâs Schedule   To get into the making/building mindset, you need big chunks of time with no interruptions. You canât build a great product in 1-hour units in-between meetings; âthatâs barely enough time to get startedâ. If you think of the stereotypical coder, they prefer to work throughout the night, probably because no one can distract them at 3am.  âWhen you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.â  If you want to create great stuff, you need to be mindful that a manager and a maker operate on very different schedules. If youâre the manager, try to give big blocks of time for the maker; if youâre the maker, try to schedule all meetings on two days of the week so the rest is free for creating.    Holding a Program in One's Head  expands on some of these ideas.   What not to do  Graham has also figured out something about the inverse: what not to do. Or, as he puts it, â How Not to Die â.Â   Keep morale up (donât run out of energy) Donât run out of money (for example, hire too fast) Donât do other things. The startup needs your full attention. (Procrastination is mostly distraction. Avoid distractions and youâll avoid procrastination. Note, though, that you can procrastinate well.) Make failing unbelievably humiliating (to force you to give your everything) Simply donât give up, especially when things get tough  To summarize this part on execution, here are Paul Grahamâs  Six Principles for Making New Things :Â   Simple solutions To overlooked problems That actually need to be solved Deliver these solutions as informally as possible Starting with a very crude version 1 Then iterating rapidly  The more you focus on money, the less you focus on the product Graham doesnât often talk about money, and when he does, I get this weird feeling. Itâs like âsure, weâre talking about money... but Iâd rather we talk about the product instead.â Let me explain:  In  Donât talk to Corp Dev , Graham says all a startup needs to know about M&amp;A is that you should never talk to corp dev unless you intend to sell right now. So itâs better to focus on the product until you absolutely must think about M&amp;A.  In  The Top Idea in Your Mind : âonce you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mindâ, instead of users and the product. So your product suffers.   When you get money, donât spend it. âThe most common form of failure is running out of moneyâ, and you can avoid that by not spending money, not hiring too fast.  One instance when you should think about money is if your startup is default dead. âAssuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left?â If you know youâre default dead, your focus quickly shifts to turning the ship around and reaching profitability; avoiding  The Fatal Pinch .  In the long term, itâs obvious that the company that focuses more on the users and product beats the company that obsesses over investors and raising money. â Paul Graham on What to work on What to work on is one of the most important questions in your life, along with where you live and who youâre with. While Grahamâs treatment of this question definitely leans on the side of startups, you can also view his ideas from the perspective of side hustles, hobbies, projects (in or outside of a career) and so on.   Essays mentioned in this section:   What Doesn't Seem Like Work?   Earnestness   Why Nerds are Unpopular   Fashionable Problems   How to Do What You Love   You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss   A Project of One's Own   Ramen Profitable   Great Hackers   The Top Idea in Your Mind  Follow intrinsic motivation If itâs something youâre intrinsically motivated about, thatâs something where you have infinite curiosity, and thatâs something youâll eventually do well in. (Later, weâll discuss how curiosity leads to genius.)  âIf something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.â Put another way: the stranger your tastes seem to other people, the more you should embrace those tastes.Â   Because of the internet, you can make money by following your curiosity. This is a revolutionary shift: in the past, money was gained from a boring job, and you satisfied your curiosity during the weekends. But now, you can make real money just by following your curiosity, whether itâs from a startup or a YouTube or Gumroad account.  The two greatest powers in the world - money and curiosity - are getting more aligned each day. There has never been a greater time to follow your intrinsic motivation. Now, the important question is what to work on, not how to make money, because if you figure out an answer to the former, the latter question will answer itself.Â   Turns out, nerds are far closer to figuring out the answer than non-nerds. (Nerds - or earnest people - do something for the sake of it, not to become popular or rich). Nerds in high school tend to be unpopular, not because they couldnât figure out how popularity works and game the system, but perhaps because they donât really want to be popular. That makes high school a tough time for them, but real life becomes much more fulfilling: while others are stuck in the popularity/status rat race and compete to work on  Fashionable Problems , the nerds can follow their own curiosities, thus work on stuff no one else is working on, thus discover new things, thus succeed. Plus, they have a much nicer time doing so.  A question to figure out your intrinsic motivation and what to work on: âWhat are you a big nerd on?â  Letâs end this part with a sharp and practical observation from â How to Do What You Love â:Â  âTo be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool.â You should be working on your own projects The logical conclusion of following your intrinsic motivation is that you should be working on your own projects (or other peopleâs projects where you have significant ownership).Â   You may have noticed that projects you start on your own feel fundamentally different from tasks handed to you by a manager or teacher. And thereâs a reason for that: â You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss â.  In that essay, Graham makes the argument that even though working in a large organization is the default now, itâs not how we evolved to work. A large organization is similar to the modern diet - consisting of pizza, candies and other processed foods - while a small group (like a startup) is the hunter-gatherer diet. One is easy and safe and appealing in the short term (but terrible over time) while the other is hard and unappealing, but more natural and better in the long term.  While working in smaller groups makes you happier and gives you more freedom, itâs also the way to do great work, as Graham argues in â A Project of Oneâs Own â. If a project feels like itâs your own, you have motivation and skin in the game that you donât otherwise have. Youâre much more willing to obsess over the details and make something great. Work on things that you want to take over your life âIt's a mistake to insist dogmatically on âwork/life balance.â Indeed, the mere expression âwork/lifeâ embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. [...] I wouldn't want to work on anything I didn't want to take over my life.â (From â A Project of Oneâs Own â)  For startup founders, the startup is their life - there is time for little else, even sleep. Why would they willingly work 80+ hours a week and eat nothing but ramen, with no guaranteed financial reward, when they could work 40 hours a week and eat lobster at a big company? Because the startup is a project of their own, and they have - hopefully consciously - decided itâs something they want to take over their lives. âPeople will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they're the founders.â   How do you know if something has taken over your life? Hereâs a simple test: Do you think about it in the shower?Â   In â The Top Idea in Your Mind â, Graham argues that if something is really important to you, then your mind will think about it subconsciously and ideas will appear in your head whilst walking or showering. Indeed, if this does not happen, youâll have trouble doing great work - thatâs your sign to reconsider what you work on. â Paul Graham on Thinking &amp; Decision-making Startup founders are an interesting group of people: they seek to change something about the status quo, which means they see something non-obvious that could be improved and they believe in that improvement so much that theyâre willing to work 80+ hours a week and eat ramen until their vision becomes a reality.  What drives them? It canât be just money - there are so many founders whoâve already gotten rich, and they still work in their companies and start new startups. And why arenât there more founders? What qualities are there in a founder that you donât find in non-founders?  By trying to understand this group of people, Graham has discovered a lot about thinking, decision-making, and the human mind in general.   Essays mentioned in this section:   The Four Quadrants of Conformism   The Two Kinds of Moderate   Orthodox Privilege   Novelty and Heresy   How to Disagree   How to Think for Yourself   The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius   Is It Worth Being Wise?   Beyond Smart   How to Work Hard   Mind the Gap   Being a Noob   How to Be an Expert in a Changing World   How Art Can Be Good   Taste for Makers   How to Do What You Love   The Island Test   How to Start a Startup  Independent-mindedness vs conventional-mindedness Independent-minded people prefer to think through things for themselves, and because of this, they may seem weird to conventional-minded people (who follow the average and agreeable). Hence, it is almost a tautology to say that new ideas and new startups are the work of independent-minded people.  In  The Four Quadrants of Conformism , Graham goes a bit deeper and differentiates between aggressive and passive forms of independent-mindedness and conventional-mindedness. Notably, aggressively independent-minded people tend to question existing norms and rules, working against them, while aggressively conventional-minded people work to maintain the norms and rules. Thereâs a clash between the groups, so itâs important for independent-minded people to âbe protectedâ, be given space to innovate, break norms and come up with new ideas and things. (These âprotected areasâ are important for innovation. You could think of Silicon Valley as one.)  If you know someone is conventional-minded, you know a lot about them. Their beliefs and actions match the average, and you know what the average is. Whereas, if someone is independent-minded, you donât really know them; they think things through for themselves, and thus they may arrive at conclusions you canât imagine. In fact, on one issue, independent-minded people can be in the political left, and on another issue, in the political right; they are politically moderate by accident. A conventional-minded person is more likely either in the left or right for every issue.  Conventional-minded people have what Graham calls  Orthodox Privilege : it seems to them that everyone is safe to express their opinions because everything they think about is conventional and uncontroversial. âThey literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.â  So if you do express your controversial, new ideas to them, they may regard them as untrue heresy.  Novelty and Heresy  go hand-in-hand. âIt doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right.â To them, anything that is unconventional is likely to be false; to the independent-minded, anything too conventional seems suspicious. So if you express your independent-minded thoughts publicly, you may want to learn  How to Disagree .  In  How to Think for Yourself , Graham shows there are some types of work that you can only do well in if you think differently from others: Scientists aim to discover something new, so being conventional-minded wonât get you very far; an investor who thinks exactly like everyone else will not get rich; a startup founder who shares the same ideas as everyone else wonât build great new stuff. You need to be right and most other people need to be wrong.  Of course, not every type of work is like this. You can be a good administrative worker without thinking differently from others; itâs not essential that everyone else is wrong. Generally, independent-minded people want to work in areas where newness is rewarded.  In  How to Think for Yourself , Graham shares some exercises for training your independent-mindedness muscles. Genius comes from infinite curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage We tend to think some people are just blessed with genius, that itâs an innate thing. But Graham has taken this black box apart and argues genius is something you can influence.   CuriosityÂ   âThose who do really great work have an unexplainable obsession about somethingâ. Infinite curiosity leads to surprising discoveries, simply because you think about and play with the topic more than any rational person would expect. And all that thinking and tinkering feels like play to you (but looks like work to others) because an obsessive interest âis a proxy for ability and a substitute for determinationâ.Â    Intelligence   Thereâs a difference between wisdom and intelligence. If wisdom means a high average outcome across all outcomes, intelligence is a spectacularly high outcome in a few situations. If we think of âgeniusâ, it tends to fit the latter description: you can be a terrible fool about everything else, but if you discover relativity, youâre a genius.Â   High curiosity in something + high intelligence in that domain are a great beginning. But not necessarily enough to discover important new ideas. As Graham elaborates in  Beyond Smart , there are smart people, and then there are those who have important new ideas; âThere are a lot of genuinely smart people who donât achieve very much.â  Intelligence and curiosity are perhaps necessary to become a genius, but not sufficient; you also need hard work to uncover new ideas and courage to pursue them, as developing something new challenges your ego (and irritates the conventional-minded people).   Hard work and courage  Even when youâre undeniably brilliant, you cannot avoid hard work. (Indeed, just knowing  How to Work Hard  can get you closer to sheer brilliance.) Hard work in itself isnât the goal, though. Output matters (output being, in this context, important new ideas): âIf I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.â   When you start to do or learn anything new, youâll  Be a Noob  at it first. But âthe more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.â In  How to Be an Expert in a Changing World , Graham notes that if your opinion was right once, it may not be right anymore because the world has changed. So it takes intellectual humility and courage to update your opinions to the new world, instead of clinging to the opinions you formed in the old world.  Putting together Grahamâs thoughts, it seems like genius is not an innate quality that you canât influence, but a combination of multiple qualities like curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage. Good taste is necessary for good work Good taste is a quality related to genius. Some people seem to have an âeyeâ for design or an âearâ for music, but Graham shows, again, that taste is something you can develop.  âTaste is subjectiveâ isnât true, and you see it as soon as you start designing or writing or building things. Thereâs good art and thereâs bad art, good writing and bad writing, nice design and less nice design. Saying âtaste is subjectiveâ is lazy and wonât help you improve your work.  So if you want to create better stuff, you need to realize that you may have poor taste and you need to develop good taste, normally by getting better at your craft or studying those who have good taste. âGood work happens when you see something is ugly, understand why, and have the ability to fix it into something beautiful.â (From  Taste for Makers )  So what is good art or design? Graham gives a list (I redacted a few points):  Simple Timeless Solves the right problem Suggestive Often slightly funny Hard Looks easy Uses symmetry Resembles nature Often strange Often daringÂ    Good work isnât necessarily the most popular work; âThere are sources of error so powerful that if you take a vote, all you're measuring is the error.â But if you do good work, eventually, people will appreciate it. Is your argument testable? If you read Graham closely, you notice that often when he makes an argument, he immediately considers what kind of test is needed to validate the argument. Heâs thinking like a scientist: only accepting an argument if itâs testable.  Watch him do it in  How to Do What You Love : Â âTo be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.â  And in  The Island Test , he presents a test to figure out what youâre addicted to:Â  âImagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might.  What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to.â  In some cases, the way to make a point (and make it practical) is to devise a test. In  How to Start a Startup , Graham explores what makes a good startup employee. He could just say âthey are determined and will do whatever it takesâ, but thatâs not a testable argument, and not very practical for someone whoâs hiring.Â   Instead, Graham devised a test: âCould you describe the person as an animal?â If you could say âJaakko is an animalâ and donât laugh but rather take the description seriously, thatâs the person you want in your startup. An animal of a salesperson simply wonât take no for an answer; an animal of a programmer will stay up all night to finish the code; an animal of a PR person will pitch every newspaper in the city until your startup gets featured.Â   Fun evening activity: Go through an essay youâve written and see if each of the arguments you make is testable. â Paul Graham on Writing Paul Graham is known for incredibly clear and simple writing. Each of his essays is easy to understand, no matter how complicated the topic.Â   You can learn a lot about writing just by reading Graham, and doubly so if itâs an essay on the topic of writing. Fortunately for us, there are many such essays.  For starters, Graham has summarized his writing philosophy in  Writing, Briefly . Itâs an entire writing course, condensed into one (long) sentence. I recommend you read it now before continuing below.   Essays mentioned in this section:    Writing, Briefly   Writing and Speaking   The List of N Things   Persuade xor Discover   General and Surprising   The Age of the Essay   How to Write Usefully   A Version 1.0   Early Work   Write Simply   Write Like You Talk   Do Things that Don't Scale   Economic Inequality   Mind the Gap   Taste for Makers   How to Make Wealth   How to Think for Yourself  Writing is how you get ideas, develop ideas and improve your thinking If you read  Writing, Briefly , as you should, you noticed this: âI 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.â  From an idea perspective, being a good writer is better than being a good speaker. You need good ideas to have good essays, but you can do a good speech without saying much at all. Though speeches can be better for motivation and personal touch, writing is better for ideas. Donât write to persuade, write to discover something new and useful There are roughly two types of essays: those where you know exactly where itâs going before you start, and those where you have no clue where itâs going.Â   Weâre taught to write the first type of essay in school: we write the thesis statement in the introduction and ensure that the rest of the essay supports that thesis. Weâre writing to persuade the reader, so that theyâll accept our thesis. A listicle is equivalent to that type of essay, and writing one doesnât help you discover new ideas or knowledge. âI worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to sell.â  Paul Graham is a supporter (and practitioner) of the second type, writing to discover. In his mind, an essay is supposed to be two things: new and useful.   An essay should be new  If an essay doesnât share something new or surprising, what good is it? When we write to discover, we want to surprise ourselves and the reader. Most surprising = furthest from what people currently believe.Â   But just anything new doesnât cut it. Thereâs constantly new info and news, and that doesnât make a difference in our lives. What we should aim for is something  General and Surprising . âOrdinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: either surprising without being general (e.g. gossip), or general without being surprising (e.g. platitudes).â If you can do some combination of general and surprising (at least to some people), youâve got a winning essay.  âEssays should aim for maximum surprise.â   An essay should be useful  What does it mean for an essay to be useful? Graham offers some ideas in  How to Write Usefully :Â   When something is useful, itâs correct. If itâs merely persuasive, it could be false. âGood 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.â (From  The Age of the Essay )Â  âUseful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.â âUseful writing tells something important that people didnât already knowâ (again, going back to the âsurpriseâ idea)  Good writing is rewriting (in particular, rewriting to make the text simpler) Just like in anything involving skill, the way to get better is through iterations. Good writing is rewriting. Because we canât see someoneâs drafts and rewrites, we compare their end product to our  Early Work , then get discouraged looking at the gap. Instead, we must appreciate that something bad now could become great, if we iterate enough.Â   âMy strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting it very carefully.â (From  How to Write Usefully )Â   And when you rewrite, your main goal is to make your writing simple. Most of the time, the simplest words and simplest sentences are better than decorative, complicated words. Your purpose is to convey an idea, not to use fancy words and make the reader âdo extra work just so you can seem cool.â  In  Write Like You Talk , Graham shares a trick for writing simply: explain your ideas to a friend by talking; then, use that transcript as a draft for your essay. The spoken and written version of your idea should be as close to each other as possible. âIf you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers.âÂ  When possible, find a metaphor for your idea This is not direct advice from Graham (though he does recommend you write simply, and whatâs simpler than a great metaphor?)Â  Instead, this is a theme you notice if you read a lot of Graham. Metaphors are a weapon he wields often.   Some of my favorite metaphors from Paul Graham:   âThere's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means âleap into the mouth.â My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.â (From  Write Simply )  âPeople donât realize that scrapping things together is how big things get started. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding âthere's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything.ââ (From  Do Things that Donât Scale )  âThe list of n things [listicle] is in that respect the cheeseburger of essay forms. If you're eating at a restaurant you suspect is bad, your best bet is to order the cheeseburger. Even a bad cook can make a decent cheeseburger. And there are pretty strict conventions about what a cheeseburger should look like. You can assume the cook isn't going to try something weird and artistic. The list of n things similarly limits the damage that can be done by a bad writer.â (From  The List of N Things )  âSometimes it's because the writer only has very high-level data and so draws conclusions from that, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his keys under the lamppost, instead of where he dropped them, because the light is better there.â (From  Economic Inequality )Â   âIf I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.â (From  Mind the Gap )Â   âI'm not sure why. It may just be my own stupidity. A can-opener must seem miraculous to a dog.â (From  Taste for Makers )  âA 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.â (From  How to Make Wealth )Â   âThe 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.â (From  How to Think for Yourself )  â Paul Graham on Society Startups turn into big companies, startup founders turn into billionaires, products used by hundreds turn into products used by millions... If youâre working to help startups, youâre working to change society in a big way.Â    Essays mentioned in this section:   Mind the Gap   Great Hackers   Economic Inequality   How to Make Wealth   The Refragmentation   Inequality and Risk   Taste for Makers   Orthodox Privilege   What You Can't Say  âReducing wealth inequalityâ isnât as great as it sounds As we established earlier, a startup is a wealth-creation machine. As such, it shouldnât surprise us to see Graham discussing wealth inequality and why it isnât the demonic thing many believe.  Wealth inequality is a divisive topic, and one Iâm no expert in, so Iâll try to provide a general overview without twisting Grahamâs ideas into something they arenât. You might want to read the essays in full if youâre interested in the topic.   By default, we think wealth inequality is inherently bad.Â   In  Mind the Gap , Graham presents three reasons why we think wealth inequality is inherently bad:   The Daddy Model of Wealth: We confuse wealth with money and think there is a fixed amount of it. And if thereâs a fixed amount, we believe it should be distributed equally. (By now, you should realize that wealth is different from money, and that you can create wealth; there is no âfixed amountâ or âfixed pieâ; you can increase the pie)  We think people get rich today like they got rich earlier: In the past, the rich people tended to get rich by stealing (through war or taxes). So some people still believe rich people have gotten rich by stealing, even though today the much better, more reliable, faster and legal way to get rich is by creating wealth, not stealing it.  We donât understand leverage: Technology increases the gap between the productive and the unproductive, thus increasing wealth inequality. If a CEO is 100x richer than an employee in the same company, we think it unjust because thereâs no way the CEO works 100x more than they do. But because of leverage, the CEO can easily be 100x more productive than an employee, or make decisions that are 100x more valuable. âI have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.âÂ     Wealth inequality can be a sign of good things.  âVariation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a society of one, they're identical.) And that is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons. In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.â (From  Great Hackers )  âBy helping startup founders, youâre helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality should be decreased, no one should be helping founders. But that doesnât sound right.â (From  Economic Inequality )  There are many causes of economic inequality. Some of them are bad, like corruption and stealing. But some causes are generally good, like variation in productivity. Some people are vastly better at creating things people want, so itâs unsurprising they are able to make more money than other people.  Remember that startups grow the pie: they get rich by making other people richer. Because they are rich doesnât mean you must have been screwed over. Itâs more like the opposite: the Google founders are rich because they have made life easier and richer for billions of people.  Of course, wealth inequality isn't only due to startups (although startups create the most extreme results). Some peopleâs salaries are higher than othersâ, again, because some produce more wealth than others. Salaries are closer to market price than ever before, and get constantly closer, as people are more free to start their own companies, switch companies and work internationally.   Taxing the rich reduces economic inequality, but may not lead to the results youâd hope for.Â   If you want to make the poor richer - as is probably the intention when you want to reduce economic inequality - you can either take the money from the rich, or make the poor more productive so theyâll get richer (through education and infrastructure, for example). But if you make people more productive, some people will create 1,000x the results as another, so economic inequality remains.Â   So if you want to reduce economic inequality, the only way is to push from the top - to take money from the rich (see  Inequality and Risk ). Thus, you reduce the rewards for creating or funding startups and business activity, thus you hinder technological innovation. This doesnât sound as positive as âreducing economic inequalityâ. Especially when you consider the many different kinds of inequalities beyond income equality.  The gap between rich and poor is increasing in monetary terms, but probably closing in wealth terms. Today, the average person lives a relatively similar life, materially, to a rich person: both have a fridge, a car, a phone, Netflixâ¦ 100 years ago, the rich had a car while the poor didnât, they had things we now regard as âessentialsâ while the poor didnât. Through businesses, essential products are getting cheaper and more accessible to everyone. In many cases, the rich can pay to have a flashier version of something, like a sports car or brand watch, but the basic, affordable version is still good enough.  Today, the difference is appearance and what brand your stuff is; in the past, the difference was either having it or not having it. So yes, the income gap is increasing, but with it, the gap in quality of life is decreasing.  âYou need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.â (From  Mind the Gap ) Trickle-down economics is a bad argument because it misses the point. We need to look at how wealth is created, not how itâs used   Grahamâs proposition:   Allow those who create wealth to keep it.   When youâre allowed to keep the wealth you create, people can get rich by creating wealth instead of stealing it. People take bigger risks if they can keep more of the upside when those risks pay off. A startup founder never captures all of the wealth created; most of the wealth is transferred to other people, so we should encourage those who want to get rich, not discourage them.  Based on these ideas, you can probably guess Grahamâs opinions on capitalism vs communism (something he discusses in the essays linked in this section, particularly in  How to Make Wealth  and  Mind the Gap ). Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false âAt every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable.â (From  Taste for Makers )Â   âAnd yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.â (From  Orthodox Privilege )Â    Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false.   Graham comes back to this idea repeatedly, particularly in the essays discussing independent-mindedness and conformism (see above). But you can see tones of this idea in his startup essays too; after all, a successful startup has a vision of a future that most other people do not believe in at the time.Â   Graham deep-dives into this idea in  What You Can't Say , an essay I consider one of his finest - one you must read for yourself. In fact, the whole essay is so intellectually important that Iâd do it a disservice by summarizing. Instead, hereâs the main takeaway I was left with:  There are things you believe that are incorrect, horribly so. To you, they seem correct without question. Stay open-minded. â Paul Graham on Life If we accept that writing is thinking (as we addressed earlier), Graham, with over 200 essays and decades of writing, has done a lot of thinking. When he shares life wisdom, youâd be smart to listen.    What You'll Wish You'd Known  is sort of Paul Grahamâs compilation of life wisdom, targeted at high school students. Itâs also one of his most popular essays. While you should read it yourself, here are a few major points that stood out for me:  Itâs okay to not have a plan. In fact, it may be better not to fixate on one plan when youâre young. Optimize for optionality. If youâre unsure, go with the option that gives you more options later down the line.Â  Build something. Work on something hard on your own, doesnât really matter what it is. Youâll learn so much about yourself in that process. This is a shortcut to finding what you want to work on, which is one of the major questions in life. âIf I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. [...] I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something.â (From  The Power of the Marginal )Â  How you succeed in school is in no way representative of how you succeed in life. âOne of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.â At school, stuff is forced on you; in real life, it is the stuff you initiate that matters and defines your trajectory. âThere's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. Thatâs not how you become an adult. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [...] The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.â   Beyond that essay, there are a few bigger themes I want to highlight below.   Essays mentioned in this section:    What You'll Wish You'd Known   The Power of the Marginal   The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn   Life is Short   The Power of the Marginal   The Acceleration of Addictiveness   You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss   Stuff   How to Lose Time and Money   Lies We Tell Kids   Keep Your Identity Small   Cities and Ambition   The Top of My Todo List  Life is short âLife is shortâ is one of those statements everyone kind of agrees with, without giving it too much thought. But Graham has explored the idea a bit deeper.  For starters, a startup itself is a way to appreciate the shortness of life or adapt to it; instead of a 40-year career, you compress your income-making to a few startup years and thus free up time for activities beyond making a living. The average human lifespan is increasing while the minimum possible time it takes to be set for life is decreasing; startups are one way to maximize the gap.  Whether you agree with the premise that  Life is Short , itâs easy to agree that one way to make life seem less short is to minimize anything unimportant. If you do nothing for 5 hours, that 5 hours will feel excruciatingly long. The more we have going on, the shorter life feels. So we should cut all the things we donât like doing, the stuff that we think life is too short for (Graham calls this, bluntly, âbullshitâ).  And if we invert the argument, we realize that we should dedicate more time for the important stuff. If people and relationships are important to you, your calendar should reflect that. When life is short, we must ruthlessly cut the unimportant while making time for the important. Sounds simple and easy to dismiss, but somehow, Graham applies weight to it in  Life is Short . Itâs surprisingly easy to waste your life if youâre not careful Since life is short, itâs easy to let it slip away in a blur if youâre not careful.  One thing you get easily sucked into is âanti-testsâ. These are tests you can try to excel in, but the way to come on top is to not care about the test at all, to ignore the test. So you could try to be popular in school, but you probably shouldnât care about popularity; you can try to become important and high-status in life, but you probably shouldnât care about that. Just because thereâs a test doesnât mean you should try to perform well in it.Â   Ignoring tests is especially hard for intelligent, ambitious people, because their ambition provides the motivation and intelligence the means to do well in the test. But try not to get sucked into the anti-tests in life; they are the kind of âbullshitâ life is too short for.  Another thing that can corrode your life, if youâre not careful, is addiction. We know to be careful with the standard stuff like alcohol and gambling, but itâs harder to avoid addictions that everyone has because those seem normal to us. In  The Acceleration of Addictiveness , Graham makes a division between two normals: statistically normal (that which everyone does) and operationally normal (that which works best). Being addicted to social media and your phone is statistically normal, but not operationally normal. âTechnology tends to separate normal from natural.â  âYou can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.â For example, if your approach to consumerism doesnât seem a bit weird, you probably own too much  Stuff .  But being careful about pleasures and self-indulgence and âthe bullshitâ isnât enough. We must also be careful about the things we do that feel important and productive. In  How to Lose Time and Money , Graham writes:Â   âIt's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking âwow, I'm spending a lot of money.â Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.â  Similarly, for a fairly ambitious person, itâs hard to waste your time by watching TV or laying on the sofa - your brain will start thinking âthis is a waste of timeâ sooner or later. But you can easily work 12h a day for 2 years on something that, in retrospect, was a complete waste of your time.Â   If youâre not careful about where you invest your time and money, life passes by surprisingly easily.Â  You have a lot of unconditioning to do Whatâs a lie you were told as a child? Stuff like âif you swallow an apple seed, a tree will grow in your stomachâ is easy to identify as a lie. But stuff like âbe careful with strangers, they are dangerousâ? Less so.  In  Lies We Tell Kids , Graham shows that weâve been lied to as kids, for a variety of reasons (some better than others). Some falsities have flowed into our heads at home, some at school, but the main idea is that weâve woven lies into our understanding of the world at a young age. And if itâs something we learned as a child, it feels undeniably true as an adult; it takes serious effort to take apart these deep-held beliefs.  As a rule, if you think itâs true because you learned it in school or in your childhood, assume it is not true. Itâs better to verify it for yourself, even if it turns out to have been true all along.  If childhood beliefs are a good place to start unconditioning, a good place to continue is whatever you identify as (democrat, minimalist, crypto bullâ¦). This is because we have a terribly hard time thinking clearly about something thatâs part of our identity, so you may have taken in opinions one-sidedly. If you identify as x, criticism against x feels like a personal attack because x is a part of your identity, part of you. The bigger your identity, the more you have to process and rethink.Â   Another thing to uncondition comes from  Cities and Ambition . When most people talk about the essay, they consider the obvious implication: you should go to the city that matches your ambition. So if you want to be in the show biz, go to Hollywood, or if youâre into startups, go to Silicon Valley (or, increasingly, the right corner of the internet). But thereâs an inverse consideration, too, and itâs an important one: the places youâve already lived in have subconsciously influenced your ambition. So, yes, we could match the city we live in to our ambition, but before we do that, we should figure out whether our ambition really is our own or if itâs simply a product of where we have lived in so far.  This idea of unconditioning links back to the earlier point: because youâve been conditioned a certain way, youâre set on a path that you may not wish to be on, had you consciously made the choice. So unless you do uncondition yourself, itâs easy to waste your life.  You have a lot of unconditioning to do. So better get started. Paul Grahamâs 5 commandments for life Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying:  Forgetting your dreams Ignoring family Suppressing emotions Neglecting friends Forgetting to be happy with what you have   In  The Top of My Todo List , Graham inverted the regrets into his 5 commandments to live by:  Donât ignore your dreams Donât work too much Say what you think Cultivate friendships Be happy  â  Paul Grahamâs Best Essays  Paul Grahamâs favoritesâ   My favorites    What You Can't SayÂ   How to Think for YourselfÂ   You Weren't Meant to Have a BossÂ   How to Make WealthÂ   How to Lose Time and Money    â   Final words This has been nothing but a short introduction to Paul Grahamâs ideas. There are so many essays and ideas and topics that werenât included here, so, who knows, maybe at some point there will be a PG 201.Â   Anyhow, I hope this has inspired you to explore the essays yourself and gives you a convenient way to find the essays that interest you.Â   If you found this summary useful, please feel free to share around. It took me nearly a year to read all the essays and turn my notes into something useful, so itâd be awesome if many people knew about this.  And if thereâs something youâd like to add / edit, reach out: jaakko@jaakkoj.com / Twitter   Thanks for reading.
Paul Graham 101
https://www.jaakkoj.com/blog/graham
https://medium.com/swlh/10-life-changing-lessons-i-learned-from-paul-graham-30e7b867437a
10 Life-Changing Lessons I Learned From Paul Graham
2020-02-14
Sergey Faldin
<div><div><article><div><p></p><h2>#10: The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas.</h2><p></p><figure><figcaption><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/01/paul-graham-on-why-he-doesnt-like-seeing-college-age-and-younger-founders/"><strong>Image Credits: </strong>Getty Images under a Bloomberg license.</a></figcaption></figure><p>Paul Graham is a computer scientist, author, and, as the founder of Y Combinator (an early-stage startup accelerator) is arguably one of the most famous people from Silicon Valley. His essays are read by more than 35 million people each month.</p></div></article></div>||||I|||| Published in

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 10 Life-Changing Lessons I Learned From Paul Graham

 #10: The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas.

 Image Credits: Getty Images under a Bloomberg license.

 Paul Graham is a computer scientist, author, and, as the founder of Y Combinator (an early-stage startup accelerator) is arguably one of the most famous people from Silicon Valley. His essays are read by more than 35 million people each month.

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#10: The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas.      Image Credits: Getty Images under a Bloomberg license.   Paul Graham is a computer scientist, author, and, as the founder of Y Combinator (an early-stage startup accelerator) is arguably one of the most famous people from Silicon Valley. His essays are read by more than 35 million people each month.
10 Life-Changing Lessons I Learned From Paul Graham
https://medium.com/swlh/10-life-changing-lessons-i-learned-from-paul-graham-30e7b867437a
https://fs.blog/paul-graham-hackers-painters/##What+happens+when+you+argue+with+an+idiot?+You+become+one.+Argue+with+idiots,+and+you+become+an+idiot.+The+most+important+thing+is+to+be+able+to+think+what+you+want,+not+to+say+what+you+want.+And+if+you+feel+you+have+to+say+everything+you+think,+it+may+inhibit+you+from+thinking+improper+thoughts.
Paul Graham: On Arguing With Idiots and Where Ideas Come From
2014-07-16
Farnam Street
<div><div><main><article><div>
<p>Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. His 2004 anthology <a href="https://amzn.to/3dAFS7C"><em>Hackers and Painters</em> </a>explores the world and the people who inhabit it. He calls the book an “intellectual wild west,” and I agree.</p>
<h2>Ideas</h2>
<p>When looking for <a href="https://fs.blog/a-technique-for-producing-ideas/">where to find great ideas</a>, we tend to end up in the <a href="https://fs.blog/seneca-on-combinatorial-creativity/">combination space</a>. Combining <a href="https://fs.blog/einstein-productive-thought-combinatory-creativity/">ideas from different disciplines creates new ideas</a>. It’s repurposing something.</p>
<p>Graham, however, expands on this view and offers another source of new ideas as repurposing overlooked ideas.</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked</strong>, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable.</p></blockquote>
<h2>Arguing with Idiots</h2>
<p>What happens when you argue with an idiot? You become one.</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.</strong> The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts.</p></blockquote>
<h2>What Makes Good Programmers?</h2>
<p>Few people would have better insight into the hacker culture than Graham. He believes, and I agree, that an undercurrent of disobedience can lead to healthy outcomes. Organizations spend a great deal of money hiring these people only to annoy them with pointless bureaucracy.</p>
<blockquote><p>Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that <strong>disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers</strong>. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can’t be solved. <strong>Suppress one, and you suppress the other</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<h2>Still Curious?</h2>
<p>All of the essays in <em><a href="https://amzn.to/3dAFS7C">Hackers &amp; Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age</a></em> are worth reading and thinking about.</p>
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 Paul Graham: On Arguing With Idiots and Where Ideas Come From

 Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. His 2004 anthology Hackers and Painters explores the world and the people who inhabit it. He calls the book an “intellectual wild west,” and I agree.

 Ideas

 When looking for where to find great ideas, we tend to end up in the combination space. Combining ideas from different disciplines creates new ideas. It’s repurposing something.

 Graham, however, expands on this view and offers another source of new ideas as repurposing overlooked ideas.

 Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable.

 Arguing with Idiots

 What happens when you argue with an idiot? You become one.

 Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts.

 What Makes Good Programmers?

 Few people would have better insight into the hacker culture than Graham. He believes, and I agree, that an undercurrent of disobedience can lead to healthy outcomes. Organizations spend a great deal of money hiring these people only to annoy them with pointless bureaucracy.

 Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can’t be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.

 Still Curious?

 All of the essays in Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age are worth reading and thinking about.

 Read Next

 Next Post: The Notebooks of Paul Klee “Ingres is said to have created an artistic order out of rest; I should like to create an order from feeling and, going still further, …

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Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. His 2004 anthology  Hackers and Painters explores the world and the people who inhabit it. He calls the book an “intellectual wild west,” and I agree.
Ideas
When looking for where to find great ideas, we tend to end up in the combination space. Combining ideas from different disciplines creates new ideas. It’s repurposing something.
Graham, however, expands on this view and offers another source of new ideas as repurposing overlooked ideas.
  Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable. 
Arguing with Idiots
What happens when you argue with an idiot? You become one.
  Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. 
What Makes Good Programmers?
Few people would have better insight into the hacker culture than Graham. He believes, and I agree, that an undercurrent of disobedience can lead to healthy outcomes. Organizations spend a great deal of money hiring these people only to annoy them with pointless bureaucracy.
 Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can’t be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other. 
Still Curious?
All of the essays in  Hackers &amp; Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age  are worth reading and thinking about.
Paul Graham: On Arguing With Idiots and Where Ideas Come From
https://fs.blog/paul-graham-hackers-painters/
https://www.ellenrhymes.com/paul-graham
What makes Paul Graham a great writer? — Ellen Fishbein
2022-01-01
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<p>In the last few months, I’ve heard these 4 statements from 4 different people:</p><ul><li><p>“I wish I could write like Paul Graham.”</p></li><li><p>“If I had to pick one writer to imitate, it would be Paul Graham.”</p></li><li><p>“Paul Graham’s writing is the epitome of clarity.”</p></li><li><p>“Paul Graham inspired me to start writing.”</p></li></ul><p>This widespread sentiment motivated me to dive deeper into Graham’s writing, with help from my collaborator &amp; writing mentor <a href="https://www.writing.coach/jaworski"><strong>Dr. William Jaworski</strong></a><strong>.</strong> What’s Paul Graham doing that’s so special? In the world of writing, what do his fingerprints look like?</p><p>Here’s what we’ve observed.</p><h2><strong>He organizes each essay around a razor-sharp core idea.</strong></h2>
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<p><em>All imagery in this blog post comes from the 1930 film </em><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021331/"><strong><em>The Blood of a Poet.</em></strong></a></p><p>Every essay needs a core idea. Maybe you think of it as the focal point, the thesis, or the argument you’re making. Dr. Jaworski frames it as “a pithy one-liner that serves as an organizing principle for the whole essay.”</p><p>When you’re in tune with a core idea, writing feels easier. Intrusive thoughts soften and recede. You’re able to slow down and think more systematically. You start to see where your essay will end (and where a different one might begin—another day). You have a bullseye in your sights.</p><p>Usually, you can grasp the core idea of a Paul Graham essay by reading the title. My favorite examples are <a href="http://paulgraham.com/mod.html"><strong>The Two Kinds of Moderate</strong></a>, <a href="http://paulgraham.com/genius.html"><strong>The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius</strong></a>, and <a href="http://paulgraham.com/talk.html"><strong>Write Like You Talk</strong></a>. As you read any of those, you’ll see how every paragraph, and in fact every sentence, connects with the core idea. His focus is sharp and unwavering.</p><p>Admire that commitment &amp; focus, but realize that even for Graham, essay ideas aren’t sharp from the get-go. Don’t let hazy vision dissuade you: a blurry bullseye is better than no bullseye. The important thing is to not give up—and also to avoid falling in love with any particular idea.</p><p>…which brings me to a new point about Paul Graham’s writing!</p><h2><strong>He doesn’t fall in love with his ideas.</strong></h2>
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<p>From experience, Paul Graham knows even <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html"><strong>smart people have bad ideas.</strong></a> That’s why it’s important not to get caught up in your own. Some of your ideas will be good; some won’t. That’s fine. In fact, it’s completely inevitable: if you want to have good ideas, you have to accept the reality of having bad ones.</p><p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/useful.html"><strong>How to Write Usefully</strong></a>, Paul Graham states this principle about as point-blank as it gets:</p><p><em>If you write a bad sentence, you don’t publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes a whole essay. You can’t ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can ensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the ones that aren’t.</em></p><p>Graham’s essay <a href="http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html"><strong>Startups in 13 Sentences</strong></a> is a subtler illustration of the same idea. There’s no fancy technical footwork—structurally, it’s a plain-Jane listicle. Yet, there’s real insight in it. There’s the feeling that these ideas have weight and presence. That’s because those 13 ideas have been curated from a wide range of options. The essay is not the product of 13 ideas; it’s the product of 1,000+ ideas, narrowed down to 13. Before that essay ever saw the light of day, Paul Graham sifted through many good, bad, and half-decent ideas, and selected the best.</p><p>When Paul Graham starts thinking, he often finds dead ends. He explores the twists &amp; turns his thoughts can take, and eventually he finds the path down which he most wants to guide his readers. Choosing that path to the exclusion of the others requires being a ruthless self-editor—someone who can step back &amp; observe his own writing from a healthy distance. This process is the mark of a good thinker, and it’s also a mark of a good writer.</p><h2><strong>He couples concepts with concrete examples.</strong></h2>
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<p>About 70% of Paul Graham’s essays contain the word “example,” usually within the phrase “for example.” When he introduces an abstract idea, you’re never more than a sentence or two away from a well-picked example.</p><p>For example, in <a href="http://paulgraham.com/copy.html"><strong>Copy What You Like</strong></a>, Graham writes, “<strong><em>It’s easy to be drawn into imitating flaws,</em></strong><em> because they’re easier to see, and of course easier to copy too.”</em></p><p>On its own, that sentence isn’t too useful. But immediately, Graham supplies a real example:</p><p><strong><em>For example,</em></strong><em> most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.</em></p><p>Thanks to that follow-up, I have a better sense of what Graham means.</p><p>Graham uses lots of examples because he knows <strong>concepts are tools</strong> used for thinking about the world. But a tool is helpful only if you know how to use it, and you learn how to use a concept by applying it to real things.</p><p>Paul Graham’s examples show you how to apply concepts to real life. Applying unfamiliar concepts to familiar examples makes those concepts easier to master.</p><p>Here are three more short meta-examples:</p><h3>From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/noob.html"><strong>Being a Noob</strong></a>:</h3><p><strong><em>The more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.</em></strong> <strong><em>For example</em></strong><em>, if you stay in your home country, you’ll feel less of a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything works differently. And yet you’ll know more if you move.</em></p><h3>From <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html"><strong>Stuff</strong></a>:</h3><p><strong><em>Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example,</em></strong><em> the “good china” so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it’s fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.</em></p><h3>From <a href="http://paulgraham.com/work.html"><strong>What Doesn’t Seem Like Work</strong></a>:</h3><p><strong><em>If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for. For example,</em></strong><em> a lot of programmers I know, including me, actually like debugging. It’s not something people tend to volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it.</em></p><h2><strong>He creates rhythm by varying sentence length.</strong></h2>
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<p>When people talk about a writer’s “voice,” they’re largely talking about the rhythm of the writing. Is it choppy? Is it droning? Does it feel conversational? Much of this comes down to the lengths of your sentences, and especially how you mix and match them.</p><p>Paul Graham rarely uses long sentences, but he mixes and matches short and medium-length sentences to create a rhythm that mirrors the pace of real conversation.</p><p>A well-placed short sentence creates a pause. The key expression here is <em>well-placed</em>: you wouldn’t want to listen to a speaker who follows every sentence with a dramatic pause. Paul Graham tends to taper the lengths of his sentences down until he reaches a key point—something he wants to emphasize. That’s where he pauses.</p><p>Here’s a perfect example from <a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html"><strong>Life is Short</strong></a>. Notice how Paul Graham uses the two shortest sentences in the paragraph (bolded), nestled among longer ones, to create points of salience.</p><p><em>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. </em><strong><em>Their lives are short too.</em></strong><em> 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. </em><strong><em>But an illusion it was.</em></strong><em> I think a lot of people make the same mistake I did.</em></p><p>During our review of Paul Graham’s writing, <a href="https://www.writing.coach/jaworski"><strong>Dr. Jaworski</strong></a> identified this technique and explained it to me. As part of his explanation, he wrote this awesome paragraph that I can’t help but share:</p><p>“Imagine you and I are taking a leisurely stroll, conversing as we go—the pace of our words matching the pace of our strides. Then something happens. There’s something I want to say, but I have trouble saying it. It’s important. We slow down. We stop. I struggle to find the words. I utter them. One. By. One. For emphasis. See? I’m being waggish, of course, but I trust you see the point: when you want to emphasize something, you need to slow the reader’s pace with shorter sentences and bolder punctuation. Conversely, when you’ve covered what’s important, you need to regain momentum using longer sentences and lighter punctuation, and might even forgo full stops entirely in favor of commas, conjunctions, semi-colons, dashes, and other devices that keep the reader moving.”</p><p>For me, Dr. Jaworski’s illustration is the most intuitive way to understand this technique. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ll master it overnight—it takes practice and patience. But now, I have an effective metaphor to guide me.</p><h2><strong>He doesn’t underestimate your intelligence.</strong></h2><p>Yes, Paul Graham prefers short sentences and short words—his essays pass <a href="http://www.hemingwayapp.com/"><strong>the Hemingway test</strong></a> with flying colors. But that doesn’t mean he’s dumbing his writing down. Quite the opposite: Graham knows he’s talking about sophisticated ideas, so he presents them cleanly, getting his writing out of the way. He avoids over-explaining things, which is a great way to evade rabbit holes.</p><p>Basically, he knows how to put himself in a smart reader’s shoes, and as soon as he starts thinking, “Yep, I get it”—he stops.</p><h2><strong>He’s codified his own rules, and he follows them.</strong></h2>
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<p>In 2005, Paul Graham codified <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html"><strong>his own rules</strong></a> for writing, and they’re exquisite. Get this: on my team of experienced writers, none of us had seen Graham’s rules before—but in our own separate ways, we’d each already learned to follow them.</p><p>So, straight from the horse’s mouth, here they are:</p><ul><li><p>Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over.</p></li><li><p>cut out everything unnecessary.</p></li><li><p>write in a conversational tone.</p></li><li><p>develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours.</p></li><li><p>imitate writers you like.</p></li><li><p>if you can’t get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said.</p></li><li><p>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.</p></li><li><p>be confident enough to cut.</p></li><li><p>have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag.</p></li><li><p>don’t (always) make detailed outlines.</p></li><li><p>mull ideas over for a few days before writing.</p></li><li><p>carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you.</p></li><li><p>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.</p></li><li><p>write about stuff you like.</p></li><li><p>don’t try to sound impressive.</p></li><li><p>don’t hesitate to change the topic on the fly.</p></li><li><p>use footnotes to contain digressions.</p></li><li><p>use anaphora to knit sentences together.</p></li><li><p>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).</p></li><li><p>try to tell the reader something new and useful.</p></li><li><p>work in fairly big quanta of time.</p></li><li><p>when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far.</p></li><li><p>when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with.</p></li><li><p>accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don’t feel obliged to cover any of them.</p></li><li><p>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.</p></li><li><p>if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately.</p></li><li><p>ask friends which sentence you’ll regret most.</p></li><li><p>go back and tone down harsh remarks.</p></li><li><p>publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas.</p></li><li><p>print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen.</p></li><li><p>use simple, germanic words.</p></li><li><p>learn to distinguish surprises from digressions.</p></li><li><p>learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.</p></li></ul><h2><strong>Room for improvement?</strong></h2>
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<p>It’s hard to criticize Paul Graham as a writer. Actually, it feels heretical, which is why I think it’s important to do it.</p><p>I want to point out one thing that might stand between Paul Graham and an undying legacy as a great writer (if that’s a legacy he wants). That thing is risk aversion.</p><p>Paul Graham has refined his skill as an essayist to a point nearing perfection. But the peak he’s reached as an essayist might be a plateau in his overall development as a writer. It’s been a long time since Graham tried something new in his published writing.</p><p>In both of his latest pieces, <a href="http://paulgraham.com/orth.html"><strong>Orthodox Privilege</strong></a> and <a href="http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html"><strong>The Four Quadrants of Conformism</strong></a>, I see an outstanding communicator whose surgical competence might be interfering with his intuition.  Don’t get me wrong: both essays are superb. In a sense, they’re flawless—almost the way auto-tuned music is flawless. There’s no imperfection, and that, in itself, might be a flaw.</p><p>What could Paul Graham do if he took more risks as a writer? I don’t know. He’s the creator; I’m just part of the peanut gallery. But given his great talent &amp; skill, I hope he explores the possibilities.</p><p><strong>*</strong></p><p><em>I’m happily indebted to both </em><a href="https://www.writing.coach/jaworski"><strong><em>Dr. Jaworski</em></strong></a><em> and </em><a href="https://islandofsignal.com/"><strong><em>Pavel Brodsky</em></strong></a><em> for their essential contributions to this essay.</em></p><p><strong><em>This essay is the first in a series. Want the next one in your inbox? Sign up below!</em></strong></p>
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 What makes Paul Graham a great writer?

 JULY 2020

 In the last few months, I’ve heard these 4 statements from 4 different people:

 * “I wish I could write like Paul Graham.”

 * “If I had to pick one writer to imitate, it would be Paul Graham.”

 * “Paul Graham’s writing is the epitome of clarity.”

 * “Paul Graham inspired me to start writing.”

 This widespread sentiment motivated me to dive deeper into Graham’s writing, with help from my collaborator & writing mentor Dr. William Jaworski. What’s Paul Graham doing that’s so special? In the world of writing, what do his fingerprints look like?

 Here’s what we’ve observed.

 He organizes each essay around a razor-sharp core idea.

 All imagery in this blog post comes from the 1930 film The Blood of a Poet.

 Every essay needs a core idea. Maybe you think of it as the focal point, the thesis, or the argument you’re making. Dr. Jaworski frames it as “a pithy one-liner that serves as an organizing principle for the whole essay.”

 When you’re in tune with a core idea, writing feels easier. Intrusive thoughts soften and recede. You’re able to slow down and think more systematically. You start to see where your essay will end (and where a different one might begin—another day). You have a bullseye in your sights.

 Usually, you can grasp the core idea of a Paul Graham essay by reading the title. My favorite examples are The Two Kinds of Moderate, The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius, and Write Like You Talk. As you read any of those, you’ll see how every paragraph, and in fact every sentence, connects with the core idea. His focus is sharp and unwavering.

 Admire that commitment & focus, but realize that even for Graham, essay ideas aren’t sharp from the get-go. Don’t let hazy vision dissuade you: a blurry bullseye is better than no bullseye. The important thing is to not give up—and also to avoid falling in love with any particular idea.

 …which brings me to a new point about Paul Graham’s writing!

 He doesn’t fall in love with his ideas.

 From experience, Paul Graham knows even smart people have bad ideas. That’s why it’s important not to get caught up in your own. Some of your ideas will be good; some won’t. That’s fine. In fact, it’s completely inevitable: if you want to have good ideas, you have to accept the reality of having bad ones.

 In How to Write Usefully, Paul Graham states this principle about as point-blank as it gets:

 If you write a bad sentence, you don’t publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes a whole essay. You can’t ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can ensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the ones that aren’t.

 Graham’s essay Startups in 13 Sentences is a subtler illustration of the same idea. There’s no fancy technical footwork—structurally, it’s a plain-Jane listicle. Yet, there’s real insight in it. There’s the feeling that these ideas have weight and presence. That’s because those 13 ideas have been curated from a wide range of options. The essay is not the product of 13 ideas; it’s the product of 1,000+ ideas, narrowed down to 13. Before that essay ever saw the light of day, Paul Graham sifted through many good, bad, and half-decent ideas, and selected the best.

 When Paul Graham starts thinking, he often finds dead ends. He explores the twists & turns his thoughts can take, and eventually he finds the path down which he most wants to guide his readers. Choosing that path to the exclusion of the others requires being a ruthless self-editor—someone who can step back & observe his own writing from a healthy distance. This process is the mark of a good thinker, and it’s also a mark of a good writer.

 He couples concepts with concrete examples.

 About 70% of Paul Graham’s essays contain the word “example,” usually within the phrase “for example.” When he introduces an abstract idea, you’re never more than a sentence or two away from a well-picked example.

 For example, in Copy What You Like, Graham writes, “It’s easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they’re easier to see, and of course easier to copy too.”

 On its own, that sentence isn’t too useful. But immediately, Graham supplies a real example:

 For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.

 Thanks to that follow-up, I have a better sense of what Graham means.

 Graham uses lots of examples because he knows concepts are tools used for thinking about the world. But a tool is helpful only if you know how to use it, and you learn how to use a concept by applying it to real things.

 Paul Graham’s examples show you how to apply concepts to real life. Applying unfamiliar concepts to familiar examples makes those concepts easier to master.

 Here are three more short meta-examples:

 From Being a Noob:

 The more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally. For example, if you stay in your home country, you’ll feel less of a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything works differently. And yet you’ll know more if you move.

 From Stuff:

 Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example, the “good china” so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it’s fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.

 From What Doesn’t Seem Like Work:

 If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for. For example, a lot of programmers I know, including me, actually like debugging. It’s not something people tend to volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it.

 He creates rhythm by varying sentence length.

 When people talk about a writer’s “voice,” they’re largely talking about the rhythm of the writing. Is it choppy? Is it droning? Does it feel conversational? Much of this comes down to the lengths of your sentences, and especially how you mix and match them.

 Paul Graham rarely uses long sentences, but he mixes and matches short and medium-length sentences to create a rhythm that mirrors the pace of real conversation.

 A well-placed short sentence creates a pause. The key expression here is well-placed: you wouldn’t want to listen to a speaker who follows every sentence with a dramatic pause. Paul Graham tends to taper the lengths of his sentences down until he reaches a key point—something he wants to emphasize. That’s where he pauses.

 Here’s a perfect example from Life is Short. Notice how Paul Graham uses the two shortest sentences in the paragraph (bolded), nestled among longer ones, to create points of salience.

 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.

 During our review of Paul Graham’s writing, Dr. Jaworski identified this technique and explained it to me. As part of his explanation, he wrote this awesome paragraph that I can’t help but share:

 “Imagine you and I are taking a leisurely stroll, conversing as we go—the pace of our words matching the pace of our strides. Then something happens. There’s something I want to say, but I have trouble saying it. It’s important. We slow down. We stop. I struggle to find the words. I utter them. One. By. One. For emphasis. See? I’m being waggish, of course, but I trust you see the point: when you want to emphasize something, you need to slow the reader’s pace with shorter sentences and bolder punctuation. Conversely, when you’ve covered what’s important, you need to regain momentum using longer sentences and lighter punctuation, and might even forgo full stops entirely in favor of commas, conjunctions, semi-colons, dashes, and other devices that keep the reader moving.”

 For me, Dr. Jaworski’s illustration is the most intuitive way to understand this technique. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ll master it overnight—it takes practice and patience. But now, I have an effective metaphor to guide me.

 He doesn’t underestimate your intelligence.

 Yes, Paul Graham prefers short sentences and short words—his essays pass the Hemingway test with flying colors. But that doesn’t mean he’s dumbing his writing down. Quite the opposite: Graham knows he’s talking about sophisticated ideas, so he presents them cleanly, getting his writing out of the way. He avoids over-explaining things, which is a great way to evade rabbit holes.

 Basically, he knows how to put himself in a smart reader’s shoes, and as soon as he starts thinking, “Yep, I get it”—he stops.

 He’s codified his own rules, and he follows them.

 In 2005, Paul Graham codified his own rules for writing, and they’re exquisite. Get this: on my team of experienced writers, none of us had seen Graham’s rules before—but in our own separate ways, we’d each already learned to follow them.

 So, straight from the horse’s mouth, here they are:

 * 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.

 Room for improvement?

 It’s hard to criticize Paul Graham as a writer. Actually, it feels heretical, which is why I think it’s important to do it.

 I want to point out one thing that might stand between Paul Graham and an undying legacy as a great writer (if that’s a legacy he wants). That thing is risk aversion.

 Paul Graham has refined his skill as an essayist to a point nearing perfection. But the peak he’s reached as an essayist might be a plateau in his overall development as a writer. It’s been a long time since Graham tried something new in his published writing.

 In both of his latest pieces, Orthodox Privilege and The Four Quadrants of Conformism, I see an outstanding communicator whose surgical competence might be interfering with his intuition.  Don’t get me wrong: both essays are superb. In a sense, they’re flawless—almost the way auto-tuned music is flawless. There’s no imperfection, and that, in itself, might be a flaw.

 What could Paul Graham do if he took more risks as a writer? I don’t know. He’s the creator; I’m just part of the peanut gallery. But given his great talent & skill, I hope he explores the possibilities.

 *

 I’m happily indebted to both Dr. Jaworski and Pavel Brodsky for their essential contributions to this essay.

 This essay is the first in a series. Want the next one in your inbox? Sign up below!

 © 2022 by Ellen Fishbein

In the last few months, I’ve heard these 4 statements from 4 different people:   “I wish I could write like Paul Graham.”   “If I had to pick one writer to imitate, it would be Paul Graham.”   “Paul Graham’s writing is the epitome of clarity.”   “Paul Graham inspired me to start writing.”   This widespread sentiment motivated me to dive deeper into Graham’s writing, with help from my collaborator &amp; writing mentor  Dr. William Jaworski  . What’s Paul Graham doing that’s so special? In the world of writing, what do his fingerprints look like? Here’s what we’ve observed.  He organizes each essay around a razor-sharp core idea. 
  
  
 All imagery in this blog post comes from the 1930 film    The Blood of a Poet.    Every essay needs a core idea. Maybe you think of it as the focal point, the thesis, or the argument you’re making. Dr. Jaworski frames it as “a pithy one-liner that serves as an organizing principle for the whole essay.” When you’re in tune with a core idea, writing feels easier. Intrusive thoughts soften and recede. You’re able to slow down and think more systematically. You start to see where your essay will end (and where a different one might begin—another day). You have a bullseye in your sights. Usually, you can grasp the core idea of a Paul Graham essay by reading the title. My favorite examples are  The Two Kinds of Moderate ,  The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius , and  Write Like You Talk . As you read any of those, you’ll see how every paragraph, and in fact every sentence, connects with the core idea. His focus is sharp and unwavering. Admire that commitment &amp; focus, but realize that even for Graham, essay ideas aren’t sharp from the get-go. Don’t let hazy vision dissuade you: a blurry bullseye is better than no bullseye. The important thing is to not give up—and also to avoid falling in love with any particular idea. …which brings me to a new point about Paul Graham’s writing!  He doesn’t fall in love with his ideas. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
From experience, Paul Graham knows even  smart people have bad ideas.  That’s why it’s important not to get caught up in your own. Some of your ideas will be good; some won’t. That’s fine. In fact, it’s completely inevitable: if you want to have good ideas, you have to accept the reality of having bad ones. In  How to Write Usefully , Paul Graham states this principle about as point-blank as it gets:  If you write a bad sentence, you don’t publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes a whole essay. You can’t ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can ensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the ones that aren’t.  Graham’s essay  Startups in 13 Sentences  is a subtler illustration of the same idea. There’s no fancy technical footwork—structurally, it’s a plain-Jane listicle. Yet, there’s real insight in it. There’s the feeling that these ideas have weight and presence. That’s because those 13 ideas have been curated from a wide range of options. The essay is not the product of 13 ideas; it’s the product of 1,000+ ideas, narrowed down to 13. Before that essay ever saw the light of day, Paul Graham sifted through many good, bad, and half-decent ideas, and selected the best. When Paul Graham starts thinking, he often finds dead ends. He explores the twists &amp; turns his thoughts can take, and eventually he finds the path down which he most wants to guide his readers. Choosing that path to the exclusion of the others requires being a ruthless self-editor—someone who can step back &amp; observe his own writing from a healthy distance. This process is the mark of a good thinker, and it’s also a mark of a good writer.  He couples concepts with concrete examples. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
About 70% of Paul Graham’s essays contain the word “example,” usually within the phrase “for example.” When he introduces an abstract idea, you’re never more than a sentence or two away from a well-picked example. For example, in  Copy What You Like , Graham writes, “ It’s easy to be drawn into imitating flaws,   because they’re easier to see, and of course easier to copy too.”  On its own, that sentence isn’t too useful. But immediately, Graham supplies a real example:   For example,   most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.  Thanks to that follow-up, I have a better sense of what Graham means. Graham uses lots of examples because he knows concepts are tools used for thinking about the world. But a tool is helpful only if you know how to use it, and you learn how to use a concept by applying it to real things. Paul Graham’s examples show you how to apply concepts to real life. Applying unfamiliar concepts to familiar examples makes those concepts easier to master. Here are three more short meta-examples: From  Being a Noob :   The more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.   For example  , if you stay in your home country, you’ll feel less of a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything works differently. And yet you’ll know more if you move.  From  Stuff :   Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example,   the “good china” so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it’s fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.  From  What Doesn’t Seem Like Work :   If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for. For example,   a lot of programmers I know, including me, actually like debugging. It’s not something people tend to volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it.   He creates rhythm by varying sentence length. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
When people talk about a writer’s “voice,” they’re largely talking about the rhythm of the writing. Is it choppy? Is it droning? Does it feel conversational? Much of this comes down to the lengths of your sentences, and especially how you mix and match them. Paul Graham rarely uses long sentences, but he mixes and matches short and medium-length sentences to create a rhythm that mirrors the pace of real conversation. A well-placed short sentence creates a pause. The key expression here is well-placed: you wouldn’t want to listen to a speaker who follows every sentence with a dramatic pause. Paul Graham tends to taper the lengths of his sentences down until he reaches a key point—something he wants to emphasize. That’s where he pauses. Here’s a perfect example from  Life is Short . Notice how Paul Graham uses the two shortest sentences in the paragraph (bolded), nestled among longer ones, to create points of salience.  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.  During our review of Paul Graham’s writing,  Dr. Jaworski  identified this technique and explained it to me. As part of his explanation, he wrote this awesome paragraph that I can’t help but share: “Imagine you and I are taking a leisurely stroll, conversing as we go—the pace of our words matching the pace of our strides. Then something happens. There’s something I want to say, but I have trouble saying it. It’s important. We slow down. We stop. I struggle to find the words. I utter them. One. By. One. For emphasis. See? I’m being waggish, of course, but I trust you see the point: when you want to emphasize something, you need to slow the reader’s pace with shorter sentences and bolder punctuation. Conversely, when you’ve covered what’s important, you need to regain momentum using longer sentences and lighter punctuation, and might even forgo full stops entirely in favor of commas, conjunctions, semi-colons, dashes, and other devices that keep the reader moving.” For me, Dr. Jaworski’s illustration is the most intuitive way to understand this technique. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ll master it overnight—it takes practice and patience. But now, I have an effective metaphor to guide me.  He doesn’t underestimate your intelligence.  Yes, Paul Graham prefers short sentences and short words—his essays pass  the Hemingway test  with flying colors. But that doesn’t mean he’s dumbing his writing down. Quite the opposite: Graham knows he’s talking about sophisticated ideas, so he presents them cleanly, getting his writing out of the way. He avoids over-explaining things, which is a great way to evade rabbit holes. Basically, he knows how to put himself in a smart reader’s shoes, and as soon as he starts thinking, “Yep, I get it”—he stops.  He’s codified his own rules, and he follows them. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
In 2005, Paul Graham codified  his own rules  for writing, and they’re exquisite. Get this: on my team of experienced writers, none of us had seen Graham’s rules before—but in our own separate ways, we’d each already learned to follow them. So, straight from the horse’s mouth, here they are:   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.    Room for improvement? 
  
  
It’s hard to criticize Paul Graham as a writer. Actually, it feels heretical, which is why I think it’s important to do it. I want to point out one thing that might stand between Paul Graham and an undying legacy as a great writer (if that’s a legacy he wants). That thing is risk aversion. Paul Graham has refined his skill as an essayist to a point nearing perfection. But the peak he’s reached as an essayist might be a plateau in his overall development as a writer. It’s been a long time since Graham tried something new in his published writing. In both of his latest pieces,  Orthodox Privilege  and  The Four Quadrants of Conformism , I see an outstanding communicator whose surgical competence might be interfering with his intuition.  Don’t get me wrong: both essays are superb. In a sense, they’re flawless—almost the way auto-tuned music is flawless. There’s no imperfection, and that, in itself, might be a flaw. What could Paul Graham do if he took more risks as a writer? I don’t know. He’s the creator; I’m just part of the peanut gallery. But given his great talent &amp; skill, I hope he explores the possibilities.  *   I’m happily indebted to both    Dr. Jaworski    and    Pavel Brodsky    for their essential contributions to this essay.    This essay is the first in a series. Want the next one in your inbox? Sign up below!
What makes Paul Graham a great writer? — Ellen Fishbein
https://www.ellenrhymes.com/paul-graham
https://retireinprogress.com/the-almanack-of-paul-graham/
Retire In Progress - The Almanack of Paul Graham
2021-03-16
MrRIP
<div><div>
<div><p>Table of Contents</p><ul><li><a href="#What_Paul_Worked_On">What Paul Worked On</a><ul><li><a href="#Early_Drive">Early Drive</a></li><li><a href="#Philosophy_and_AI">Philosophy and AI</a></li><li><a href="#Art_School_and_Employment">Art School and Employment</a></li><li><a href="#Rags_to_Riches">Rags to Riches</a></li><li><a href="#Financial_Abundance">Financial Abundance</a></li><li><a href="#The_Age_of_the_Essay">The Age of the Essay</a></li><li><a href="#Y_Combinator_and_Hacker_News">Y Combinator and Hacker News</a></li><li><a href="#The_Last_Cool_Thing_You_Do">The Last Cool Thing You Do</a></li><li><a href="#What_To_Do_Next">What To Do Next</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="#Paul_Graham8217s_Theoretical_Minimum">Paul Graham’s Theoretical Minimum</a></li></ul></div>
<p>Hi Ripsters,</p>
<p>I’m a huge fan of <strong><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/">Paul Graham</a></strong>.</p>
<p>Paul is the co-founder of <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/">Y Combinator</a> and one of the greatest <a href="http://paulgraham.com/articles.html">essayist</a> of modern era.</p>
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/retireinprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/paul-paul.jpg?ssl=1"></a></p>
<p>I’ve read I guess 70% of his essays, several of them multiple times (I reached double digits re-readings count on <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html">The age of the Essay</a>) and I’ve already shared some of his essays in my <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/category/wlj/">Learning Journals</a> with you in the past months.</p>
<p>A good chunk of my life philosophy has been influenced by Paul’s writing. I wish I had his writings available when I was younger. Luckily you, 20-years-younger-than-me reader, have access today to his entire body of work.</p>
<p>Few months ago this crazy idea popped up in my mind: <strong>I wanted to write The Almanack of Paul Graham</strong>.</p>
<p>Of course I got also inspired by <a href="https://www.navalmanack.com/"><strong>The Almanack of Naval Ravikant</strong></a>, by Eric Jorgensen, mentioned in my <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/biweekly-learning-journal-5-28-09-2020/#Sloww_on_The_Almanack_of_Naval_Ravikant_8510">WLJ #5</a>. Naval and Paul are both in my personal Olympus. Paul is much more concrete and action oriented, while Naval is my “principles” guide and “virtual mentor”.</p>
<p>As a Naval huge fan, I looked at the success of the Navalmanack with a bit of envy. I should have written that book myself! I was already devouring everything about Naval, and taking personal notes about his Philosophy from sources like: <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/biweekly-learning-journal-7-26-10-2020/#How_To_Get_Rich_Without_Being_Lucky_by_Naval_Ravikant_1010">How to Get Rich without being Lucky</a>, <a href="https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/naval-ravikant/">Naval on Farnam Street Podcast</a>, <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/biweekly-learning-journal-9-23-11-2020/#Naval_Ravikant_on_Tim_Ferriss_Show_910">Naval on Tim Ferriss Show</a>, <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/biweekly-learning-journal-10-7-12-2020/#Naval_Ravikant_on_Joe_Rogan_Experience_8510">Naval on Joe Rogan Experience</a>, <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/biweekly-learning-journal-10-7-12-2020/#Naval_Ravikant8217s_Tweetstorm_on_Meditation_810">Naval’s Tweetstorm on Meditation</a>, and more. Eric did a great job, bringing Naval’s philosophy tot he masses, but as a “scholar” I felt like being spoiled the finale of a season I was still binge watching 🙂</p>
<p>Btw, thanks to this post you’re reading right now, I found that  <strong>the Navalmanack is available for FREE</strong> as a PDF, Mobi, ePub, and also browsable <a href="https://www.navalmanack.com/almanack-of-naval-ravikant/table-of-contents">on the web</a>. This is awesome, seriously, thanks Eric! I’m going to buy the paperback version from Amazon exactly because you made everything available for free (and because I love paper books).</p>
<p>That’s the “business model” I want to incentivize 🙂</p>
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/retireinprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/paul-navalmanack.png?ssl=1"></a></p>
<p>Please, make yourself a favor and read this book. It’s free, you don’t have excuses 😉</p>
<p>Few weeks after Navalmanack publication, I felt a urge to write something similar about Paul Graham. My inner voice was telling me to drop everything else and go all-in on this project.</p>
<p>I didn’t react though. I silenced that voice. I just threw this idea on top of the infinite list of the things I would love to work on <em>someday</em>. Time is scarce, ideas are abundant.</p>
<p>Anyway, today I can check off this idea from my infinite TODO list.</p>
<p>“”</p>
<p>No. <strong>Paul wrote the <a href="http://paulgraham.com/worked.html">Paulmanack</a> himself</strong>.</p>
<p>And it’s not a book, it’s just an essay (though 13.6k words long).</p>
<p>In the <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/monthly-learning-journal-13-1-3-2021/#Coming_Soon">coming soon</a> section of my latest <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/monthly-learning-journal-13-1-3-2021/">Monthly Learning Journal</a> I mentioned that I was going to read one of Paul’s newly published Essay: “<strong>What I Worked on</strong>“. I just finished reading it a couple of days ago, on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Day">Pi Day</a> 2021. It took me several sessions, and I guess a total of at least 10 hours of reading, taking notes, thinking and connecting the dots (plus another 10 hours to write, edit, and publish this post).</p>
<p>I was going to add it to the next MLJ, but given the quality and quantity of information shared I decided to write a full dedicated post, where I’m going to quote a lot of passages and adding my own thoughts.</p>
<p>I recommend you to read <a href="http://paulgraham.com/worked.html">the original essay</a> first (set at least 30 minutes away for it), then eventually come back here and read my “reaction” post if you’re still curious. I won’t mind if you skipped my post – but please make yourself another favor and read Paul’s essay. Actually, read as many Paul essays as you can, at least those I’ve listed in the “<a href="#Paul_Graham8217s_Theoretical_Minimum">theoretical minimum</a>” 🙂</p>
<p>According to what stage in life you currently are, this is probably going to be <strong>either the most or the least useful post you will find on my blog</strong>.</p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>
<p>…or get out of here asap!</p>
<h2></h2>
<p>Paul was born in November 1964. He’s currently 56 years old (in early 2021).</p>
<h3></h3>
<p>Paul’s story begins with his passions as a late teenager, before picking a field to study in college.</p>
<blockquote><p>Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were <strong>writing</strong> and <strong>programming</strong>. I didn’t write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.</p></blockquote>
<p>I can already see several gems in the first paragraph alone. First, Paul didn’t mention “passion”, or “I was passionate about” but “I worked on writing and programming”. I actually “CTRL+F”ed the word “passion” in the entire essay and I got zero results. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIMu1PGbG-0">Good</a>.</p>
<p>I guess he was deeply passionate about both writing and programming, and he’s still writing and programming almost 40 years later. This is of course a “calling” level of passion, but he’s wise enough to recognize that you can’t call it passion at that early stage. Serendipitous encounters with the fields, rewarding iterations, trending topics, a community to share your thoughts and findings, a ton of deliberate practice, hours spent in flow state, good general cognitive abilities and a bit of <a href="http://paulgraham.com/genius.html">obsession</a> (or “talent” if you like). <strong>Those are the ingredients that build passion</strong>. You work, practice, iterate and then you become passionate. Stop waiting for your “passion” to show up before acting on something!</p>
<p>He’s also aware that beginner writers should write “short stories” and not essays. Why? My guess is that a beginner writer has random unstructured ideas, that could fill a few pages. Usually fictional stories that they think they’re original but whose influences from surrounding culture compose 99% of it. And with no philosophical idea to explore. But it’s ok. Writing crappy stories should ignite the positive feedback loop that gets your ball rolling faster: improving your vocabulary, finding your writing voice, playing with your ideas, building complex structures on top of them… Who cares about the quality of your teenager writings?</p>
<p>Now that I think about it, I also wrote short fantasy stories (and a shitload of Dungeons And Dragons adventures and settings for my players group), but I didn’t keep this ball rolling because <strong>I let society convince me that I was good at math &amp; science, and my literature scores were just average</strong>.</p>
<p>It was Paul, in <strong><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html">The Age of the Essay</a></strong>, who opened my eyes:</p>
<blockquote><p>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. <strong>But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature</strong>.</p>
<p>And so all over the country <strong>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</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>Substitute English with Italian and Dickens with Alessandro Manzoni, and you get the Italian version.</p>
<p>I was so uninterested in literature back then that I never stressed my writing skills hard enough at young age. Of course I don’t think that literature is uninteresting, I just think that it probably is not what a teenager wants to write about.</p>
<p>If I were allowed to write about (and get professional feedback on): “<em>the defensive problems of Roma Soccer Team in the 90s</em>“, “<em>A psychological analysis of the conflict between <a href="https://hokuto.fandom.com/wiki/Shu">Shu</a> and <a href="https://hokuto.fandom.com/wiki/Souther">Souther</a> in Hokuto no Ken</em>“, or “<em>The use of Yellow, Blue, and Purple candies in Bubble Bubble</em>” I might have become a real writer.</p>
<p>“”</p>
<p>Yeah, what?</p>
<p>“”</p>
<p>Ok ok, do not worry my lazy friend… thanks for reminding me to stay on topic. But this is my Paulmanack, so shut up and listen! It’s going to be less than 8k words long, promised 😀</p>
<p>The equivalent of “writing short stories” in the programming field is of course <strong>writing video games</strong>, which Paul also did.</p>
<blockquote><p>Computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before <strong>I convinced my father to buy one</strong>, a TRS-80, in about 1980. The gold standard then was the Apple II, but a TRS-80 was good enough.</p>
<p>This was when I really started programming. <strong>I wrote simple games</strong>, a program to predict how high my model rockets would fly, and a word processor that my father used to write at least one book. There was only room in memory for about 2 pages of text, so he’d write 2 pages at a time and then print them out, but it was a lot better than a typewriter</p></blockquote>
<p>This is me! His father bought him a computer, and he wrote video games on it (<a href="https://retireinprogress.com/mystory3/#:~:text=Commodore64">been there</a>, done that).</p>
<p>My early coding explorations helped building skills that snowballed, because I needed no permission and minimal feedback to keep it rolling. And the artifacts, the WIP crappy games I was coding, were themselves positive pushes in the feedback loop.</p>
<p>So I “quit” writing and humanistic disciplines in general to focus on coding.</p>
<p>Luckily for us, Paul kept working on both. He wanted to become an artist, a painter, and he took a PhD in Computer Science by mistake, dreaming about quitting the field at every turn.</p>
<p>His personal story is so inspiring, keep reading!</p>
<h3></h3>
<p>Paul picked <strong>Philosophy</strong> in College:</p>
<blockquote><p>Though I liked programming, I didn’t plan to study it in college. <strong>In college I was going to study philosophy</strong>, which sounded much more powerful.</p>
<p>It seemed, to my naive high school self, to be the study of the ultimate truths, compared to which the things studied in other fields would be mere domain knowledge.</p>
<p>What I discovered when I got to college was that the other fields took up so much of the space of ideas that there wasn’t much left for these supposed ultimate truths. All that seemed left for philosophy were edge cases that people in other fields felt could safely be ignored.</p></blockquote>
<p>And he quit philosophy for very practical reasons. Paul wrote a great essay about “<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html">How to do Philosophy</a>” in 2007 (ranked 9/10 in my <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/weekly-learning-journal-2-24-08-2020/#Paul_Graham_on_How_to_study_Philosophy_910">WLJ #2</a>).</p>
<blockquote><p>So I decided to switch to AI.</p></blockquote>
<p>Oh come on Paul, <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/mystory4/">stop following me</a>!</p>
<p>Writing, Video Games, AI. And a desire to study the <em>ultimate truths</em>. Same here, that’s me talking.</p>
<p>I need to find patterns, I want to recognize them in myself and in others. I want to anticipate, predict. I want knowledge and wisdom.</p>
<p>I guess the patterns here are:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Creativity</strong>: writing and coding are two expressions of creativity. Coding at least <em>was</em> creative in the good old days, especially if you worked on your own project for its own sake, without the corruption of money.</li>
<li><strong>Curiosity</strong>: writing is a doors opener in the realm of knowledge. Philosophy is the ultimate curiosity expression.</li>
<li><strong>Control</strong>: writing sharpen your thinking. Philosophy attempts to put pieces together. AI extends your control outside of yourself. Writing video games makes you “a God” in the world you created “by definition”.</li>
<li><strong>Self Actualization</strong>? <strong>Transcendence</strong>? <strong>Immortality</strong>? What’s our North Star?</li>
</ul>
<p>Down to Earth.</p>
<p>While I like to let my mind wander in the abstract world of Platonic ideas, Paul is a very concrete man:</p>
<blockquote><p>I don’t remember the moment it happened, or if there even was a specific moment, but during the first year of grad school I realized that <strong>AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax</strong> […]</p>
<p>That whole way of doing AI, with explicit data structures representing concepts, was not going to work. Its brokenness did, as so often happens, generate <strong>a lot of opportunities to write papers about various band-aids that could be applied to it</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>I love his accurate description of the paper publishing industry also known as Academic Research 🙂</p>
<p>This was the AI back in Lisp/Prolog era. I had the same feeling back in the early 2000s, and I still feel like <strong>we’re overestimating AI/ML these days</strong>. I’ll be proven wrong, I’m sure, but yeah… <strong>Intelligence Artificial isn’t</strong> (said RIP, the Principal Research Engineer for an Academic Institute working on ML).</p>
<blockquote><p>So I looked around to see what I could salvage from the wreckage of my plans, and there was <strong>Lisp</strong>. I knew from experience that Lisp was interesting for its own sake and not just for its association with AI.</p></blockquote>
<p>Jumping from a sinking ship to another. This is a common pattern among smart people. Do not get attached to your first ideas. Paul would say “<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html">Keep your Identity Small</a>“. Go deep, learn, view everything from the above, and keep moving.</p>
<p><strong>Alan Watts</strong> would also add: “<em>You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago</em>”</p>
<p>On the technical side of things I can’t relate much to Paul: I’m not a fan of Lisp, simply because I never played with the language. I fell in love for C (and then C++) at first sight, which were de facto standard in the videogame industry when I started coding 30+ years ago.</p>
<p>While Paul loves writing software, he recognized that it has some structural problems:</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Any program you wrote today</strong>, no matter how good, <strong>would be obsolete in a couple decades at best</strong>. People might mention your software in footnotes, but no one would actually use it. And indeed, it would seem very feeble work. Only people with a sense of the history of the field would even realize that, in its time, it had been good.</p></blockquote>
<p>I realized it late. At the peak of my passion for coding I had the ambition of writing “library” code that could last forever. I was more of a library guy than a product guy. For example in my <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/mystory5/">professional Videogame Development career</a> I worked in the Game Engine development, not in final video games implementations.</p>
<p>Maybe if I realized (and accepted) that my artifacts were not going to last forever I’d have either had a better career (due to lower expectations) or I’d have quit way earlier to work on something “more immortal”.</p>
<p>All the code I’ve written at Google has been deprecated, discontinued, thrashed within a few years.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus">Sisyphus</a>, hold my beer.</p>
<p>Paul, like me, had a strong desire to build something that would last:</p>
<blockquote><p>While looking at a painting there <em>(Carnegie Mellon University – RIP Note)</em> I realized something that might seem obvious, but was a big surprise to me. There, right on the wall, was something you could make that would last.</p>
<p><strong>Paintings didn’t become obsolete</strong>. Some of the best ones were hundreds of years old.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yes Paul, but does it pay the bills?</p>
<blockquote><p>And moreover this was something you could make a living doing. Not as easily as you could by writing software, of course, but I thought if you were really industrious <strong>and lived really cheaply</strong>, it had to be possible to make enough to survive. And as an artist <strong>you could be truly independent</strong>. You wouldn’t have <strong>a boss</strong>, or even need to get research funding.</p></blockquote>
<p>Woo-hoo! Frugality as a solution to do what you love, a healthy dose of repulsion of a normal 9to5 life, and independence as a goal.</p>
<p>Paul, you get the <strong>FIRE membership</strong> <em>ad honorem</em>!</p>
<p>Well, given that his Net Worth should be in the 9 or 10 digits according to some <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-Paul-Grahams-net-worth">estimates</a> he “might” get a real Gold or Platinum membership…</p>
<p>Anyway, Paul’s approach to “<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html"><strong>How to do hat you Love</strong></a>” has been expanded in its own essay. I’ve talked about it in my <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/biweekly-learning-journal-4-14-09-2020/#Paul_Graham8217s_2006_essay_8220How_to_do_what_you_Love8221_1010">WLJ #4</a>.</p>
<p>Paul started to take Art classes at Harvard, and dreaming about quitting Grad school and his PhD Program.</p>
<blockquote><p>I remember when my friend Robert Morris got kicked out of Cornell for writing the internet worm of 1988, I was envious that he’d found such a spectacular way to get out of grad school.</p></blockquote>
<p>After graduating in AI in spring 1990 (age 25), Paul decided to apply for Art Schools.</p>
<h3></h3>
<p>Fun fact: Paul studied art in Italy, at the <a href="https://www.accademia.firenze.it/"><strong>Accademia Belle Arti</strong></a> in Florence. They mistakenly sent a response to his application letter back to <em>Cambridge UK</em> instead of Cambridge Massachusetts (US).</p>
<p>Aaaah, what a good taste of Italian Quality! You’re welcome Paul. Luckily for him, he managed to pass the preliminary exam even though he received the invitation letter waaay too late!</p>
<p>Italian bureaucracy did damage his artistic career though. We might have to thank Italy if the world was able to enjoy one of the greatest essayists and angel investors of all times:</p>
<blockquote><p>Here I was, yet again about to attend some august institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed.</p>
<p>The students and faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the nicest people you could imagine, <strong>but they had long since arrived at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn’t require the faculty to teach anything, and in return the faculty wouldn’t require the students to learn anything</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>Welcome to Italy, Paul 🙂</p>
<p>The entire section about his life in Italy is funny to read, but a shame for Italy itself. Shame on us.</p>
<p>I never considered painting, or other visual arts that require manual skills. I’ve always told myself I’m not good at it. Here Paul explains how painting is a way to practice awareness and how it’s a form of meditation:</p>
<blockquote><p>I liked painting <strong>still lives</strong> because I was curious about what I was seeing.</p>
<p><strong>In everyday life, we aren’t consciously aware of much we’re seeing</strong>.</p>
<p>Most visual perception is handled by low-level processes that merely tell your brain “that’s a water droplet” without telling you details like where the lightest and darkest points are, or “that’s a bush” without telling you the shape and position of every leaf.</p>
<p><strong>This is a feature of brains, not a bug</strong>. In everyday life it would be distracting to notice every leaf on every bush.</p>
<p>But when you have to paint something, you have to look more closely, and when you do there’s a lot to see. You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to paint something people usually take for granted, just as you can after days of trying to write an essay about something people usually take for granted.</p></blockquote>
<p>Awesome. Maybe I should add it to my infinite list of things to do 🙂</p>
<p>Sadly, Paul gave up after just a single year:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Accademia wasn’t teaching me anything except Italian, and my money was running out, so at the end of the first year I went back to the US.</p></blockquote>
<p>And got a job at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleaf">Interleaf</a>. But he was a terrible employee:</p>
<blockquote><p>They wanted a Lisp hacker to write things in it. <strong>This was the closest thing I’ve had to a normal job, and I hereby apologize to my boss and coworkers, because I was a bad employee</strong>. Their Lisp was the thinnest icing on a giant C cake, and since I didn’t know C and didn’t want to learn it, I never understood most of the software. Plus I was terribly irresponsible.</p>
<p><strong>This was back when a programming job meant showing up every day during certain working hours. That seemed unnatural to me</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>I wish I had a fraction of your intellectual honesty Paul. You didn’t let Impostor Syndrome drive your career.</p>
<p>This working experience made him quit and go back to art school, a real art school in the US (fall 1992, age 28)</p>
<blockquote><p>I moved back to Providence to continue at RISD. The foundation had merely been intro stuff, and the Accademia had been a (very civilized) joke. Now I was going to see what real art school was like.</p>
<p>But alas <strong>it was more like the Accademia than not. Better organized, certainly, and a lot more expensive, but it was now becoming clear that art school did not bear the same relationship to art that medical school bore to medicine</strong>. At least not the painting department.</p></blockquote>
<p>Ouch, institutionalized art sucks… like any dream of ours, once dressed the productivity vest, becomes something different, usually worse.</p>
<p>It is really inspirational to see how Paul was able to dance in two completely different worlds while still being able to maintain a “view from the above”, a wise clarity of mind, not letting their respectives echo chambers interfere with his judgement. Now I see where <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/monthly-learning-journal-12-1-2-2021/#Paul_Graham_about_How_to_Think_for_Yourself_910">How to Think for Yourself</a> comes from.</p>
<p>In 1993, at age 29, Paul dropped out of art school again. And he was broke. Still a dreamer:</p>
<blockquote><p>I decided to write another book on Lisp. This would be a popular book, the sort of book that could be used as a textbook. <strong>I imagined myself living frugally off the royalties and spending all my time painting</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>RoyaltyFIRE, anyone?</p>
<p>He tried painting for a while, in a rent-controlled apartment in NYC, learning directly from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idelle_Weber">Idelle Weber</a>, one of his professors at Harvard and a real artist.</p>
<p>But one day…</p>
<h3></h3>
<blockquote><p>One day in late 1994 […] there was something on the radio about a famous fund manager. He wasn’t that much older than me, and was super rich. The thought suddenly occurred to me: <strong>why don’t I become rich? Then I’ll be able to work on whatever I want</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>FatFIRE, anyone?</p>
<p>It’s fascinating for me to acknowledge how much “<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html">How to Do what you Love</a>” comes from his own experience. It’s not a speculative essay, it’s been the struggle of his entire life. Thank you Paul, we need more people like you!</p>
<p>Let’s not forget where the story is set:</p>
<blockquote><p>Meanwhile I’d been hearing more and more about this new thing called the <strong>World Wide Web</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>LOL. This made me smile 🙂</p>
<p>Paul shares the story of his first failed startup, softly claiming he “invented” web apps:</p>
<blockquote><p>If I wanted to get rich, here was the next train leaving the station. I was right about that part. What I got wrong was the idea. <strong>I decided we should start a company to put art galleries online</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>And from the ashes of his first startup, in 1995 he launched <strong><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb">Viaweb</a></strong> with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris">Robert Morris</a> and (later) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell">Trevor Blackwell</a>, a precursor of modern <strong>eCommerce</strong> software.</p>
<p>They got funded $10k for 10% (what a bad deal!), agreement that in a more generous form turned out to become the standard at Y Combinator.</p>
<p>A startup that failed hinting an idea for the next startup, who hinted an idea for the final success. Awesome! In all this, having studied Art helped Paul crafting good looking frontends necessary for the second startup (Viaweb) to live long enough and kind of thrive for a while as one of the first eCommerce platform.</p>
<p>How many have written about the compounding of different skills in different fields? <a href="https://www.scottadamssays.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/">Scott Adams</a> calls it <a href="https://www.sloww.co/talent-stack/">The Talent Stack</a>, James Altucher calls it <a href="https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/how-to-make-millions-with-idea-sex/">The Idea Sex</a>… the list is too long.</p>
<p><strong>They sold Viaweb to Yahoo in 1998 for $49 million</strong> in Yahoo stocks. I sincerely hope they sold their stocks before the Dot Com bubble exploded!</p>
<blockquote><p>I hired lots more people, partly because our investors wanted me to, and partly because <strong>that’s what startups did during the Internet Bubble</strong>. A company with just a handful of employees would have seemed amateurish.</p>
<p>So <strong>we didn’t reach breakeven until about when Yahoo bought us in the summer of 1998</strong>. Which in turn meant we were at the mercy of investors for the entire life of the company. And since both we and our investors were noobs at startups, the result was a mess even by startup standards.</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s DotCom bubble babe! Probably most of my readers were too young at that time, but I remember it vividly. I’ve also lost half of my investments back then (8M Italian Lira, i.e. 4k EUR).</p>
<p>Let’s not forget that <strong>Luck</strong> played a huge role in Paul’s success: finding himself at the right place at the right time. Riding the World Wide Web Wave in 1994, exiting in 1998.</p>
<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/1827/"></a></p>
<p>Paul stayed for a year after the acquisition at Yahoo, essentially <a href="https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-who-barely-work-silicon-valley-2017-7">resting and vesting</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>I hung on till the first chunk of options vested, then in the summer of 1999 I left. <strong>It had been so long since I’d painted anything that I’d half forgotten why I was doing this</strong>.</p>
<p>My brain had been entirely full of software and men’s shirts for 4 years. <strong>But I had done this to get rich so I could paint</strong>, I reminded myself, and now I was rich, so I should go paint.</p></blockquote>
<p>We’re all so equal. Deepest desires of humans are very similar. We want to be allowed to be free to do whatever we want. Fun fact: <a href="https://moretothat.com/money/">you</a>, <a href="https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2018/03/09/money-and-confidence-are-interchangeable/">yourself</a>, are the final gatekeeper of the freedom you crave for. Most of the “asking for permission” game is played against your own mind.</p>
<h3></h3>
<p>Paul quit Yahoo in 1999:</p>
<blockquote><p>When I said I was leaving, <strong>my boss</strong> at Yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. <strong>I told him all about the kinds of pictures I wanted to paint</strong>. At the time I was touched that he took such an interest in me. Now I realize it was because <strong>he thought I was lying</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>My options at that point were worth about $2 million a month</strong>. If I was leaving that kind of money on the table, it could only be to go and start some new startup, and if I did, I might take people with me. <strong>This was the height of the Internet Bubble, and Yahoo was ground zero of it</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>Holy shit! 2 Millions a month!</p>
<p>I had to read this out loud several times.</p>
<p>It’s a FIRE amount, each month.</p>
<p>And Paul left everything on the table, with no regrets. Telling his boss “<em>listen boss, I don’t need 2M a month. I want to paint apples, pears, and a watermelon for the rest of my life</em>“. This reminds me of my final conversation with my last manager at Google, discounted by two orders of magnitude in terms of money 🙂</p>
<p>How did Paul’s n-th attempt at painting go?</p>
<blockquote><p>But I really was quitting to paint, and I started immediately. <strong>There was no time to lose. I’d already burned 4 years getting rich</strong>.</p>
<p>Now when I talk to founders who are leaving after selling their companies, my advice is always the same: <strong>take a vacation. That’s what I should have done</strong>, just gone off somewhere and done nothing for a month or two, but the idea never occurred to me.</p>
<p><strong>So I tried to paint, but I just didn’t seem to have any energy or ambition</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>Let me try to humbly diagnose this: a mix of <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/weekly-learning-journal-1-17-08-2020/#Neil_Soni_post_8220The_Optionality_Trap8221910">The Optionality Trap</a> and exhaustion. Paul maximized options in his life by “trying to get rich and then doing what he loved”.</p>
<p><strong>Neil Soni</strong> wrote in The Optionality Trap:</p>
<blockquote><p>And over the course of a lifetime, this <strong>optionality maximization</strong> mentality turns us into habitual option collectors and prevents us from reaching our goals.</p></blockquote>
<p>I’m sorry to inform you all that there’s no solution. Either you play the lottery ticket and you’re lucky, or you play it safe and might never go all-in on your dreams. We’re reaching the boundaries of what could be done in just a short lifetime.</p>
<p>Anyway, do we want to tag Paul’s <em>failure</em> to become a great artist as a real failure? Of course not, he’s done better than 99.999+% of the world population!</p>
<p>Let’s keep going.</p>
<blockquote><p>In the spring of 2000, I had an idea. It was clear from our experience with Viaweb that web apps were the future. <strong>Why not build a web app for making web apps?</strong></p></blockquote>
<p>Actions become passions, not vice versa.</p>
<p>While he romanticized about seeing himself as a painter, his brain has been too much in contact with startups, Internet and the WWW, and money.</p>
<p>He’s now an “idea guy”, back when ideas were not so abundant as they are today.</p>
<p><strong>Our surroundings shape us more than we like to think</strong>. It’s an effect similar to hedonistic adaptation. We become what we do, who we hang out with, where we live.</p>
<p>“<em>I’ll just spend ten years in Switzerland to accumulate money, then I’ll move back to Italy</em>”</p>
<p>“<em>I’ll just keep working for another ten years then I can do whatever I want</em>”</p>
<p>Yeah, sure.</p>
<blockquote><p>I got so excited about this idea that I couldn’t think about anything else. It seemed obvious that this was the future.</p></blockquote>
<p>He was close to launch another startup, a precursor of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service"><strong>SaaS</strong></a> platforms, but…</p>
<blockquote><p>But about halfway through the summer I realized <strong>I really didn’t want to run a company</strong> — especially not a big one, which it was looking like this would have to be.</p>
<p><strong>I’d only started Viaweb because I needed the money</strong>. Now that I didn’t need money anymore, why was I doing this?</p>
<p>If this vision had to be realized as a company, <strong>then screw the vision</strong>. I’d build a subset that could be done as an open source project.</p></blockquote>
<p>He then built <strong><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html">Arc</a></strong>, a Lisp dialect.</p>
<p>After a speech at a Lisp conference he put the slides and talk notes on his <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/">website</a>, and got a 30k pageviews spike.</p>
<p>He was not writing essays yet.</p>
<h3></h3>
<blockquote><p><strong>If I write something and put it on the web, anyone can read it</strong>.</p>
<p>That may seem obvious now, but it was surprising then. In the print era there was a narrow channel to readers, guarded by fierce monsters known as editors. The only way to get an audience for anything you wrote was to get it published as a book, or in a newspaper or magazine. Now anyone could publish anything.</p></blockquote>
<p>In 2001 he started writing the best <a href="http://paulgraham.com/articles.html">essays</a> you can find on the internet, including the incredible <strong><a href="http://paulgraham.com/essay.html">The Age of the Essay</a></strong>. While not exactly being a <a href="https://themeisle.com/blog/history-of-blogging/">blog</a>, we can say that he was one of the pioneers of internet writing.</p>
<blockquote><p>In the print era, the channel for publishing essays had been vanishingly small. Except for a few officially anointed thinkers who went to the right parties in New York, the only people allowed to publish essays were specialists writing about their specialties.</p>
<p><strong>There were so many essays that had never been written, because there had been no way to publish them</strong>. Now they could be, and I was going to write them</p></blockquote>
<p>This essay is a museum of creativity over the internet! I’m having so much fun reading and commenting it. </p>
<blockquote><p>I’ve worked on several different things, but to the extent there was a turning point where I figured out what to work on, it was when I started publishing essays online. <strong>From then on I knew that whatever else I did, I’d always write essays too</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>Writing brings many superpowers. The most powerful one is probably “sharpening your Thinking”.</p>
<p>By writing about things you don’t know (yet) with a curiosity attitude, you explore and prototype working on what might interest you.</p>
<p>Writing is the ultimate <a href="https://jamesclear.com/deliberate-practice-theory">Deliberate Practice</a> tool.</p>
<blockquote><p>One of the most conspicuous patterns I’ve noticed in my life is how well it has worked, for me at least, <strong>to work on things that weren’t prestigious</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p>Paul also wrote about how to not chase prestige in the <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html">How to do what you Love</a> essay, that I already mentioned several times.</p>
<blockquote><p>It’s not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But <strong>when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it’s a sign both that there’s something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives</strong>.</p>
<p>Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious.</p></blockquote>
<p>A single sentence by Paul summarized a 5k words <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/monetization/transparency/">RIP Transparency Manifesto</a>.</p>
<p>Ok, time to talk about the birth of <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/"><strong>Y Combinator</strong></a>.</p>
<h3></h3>
<p>Of course it happened “by chance”, but at this point <strong>he built his luck enough that opportunities were chasing him</strong>, and not the other way around. To improve his writing quality he gave talks, and one of this talks were about “<a href="http://paulgraham.com/start.html">how to start a startup</a>“.</p>
<p>This talk/essay kind of evolved into Y Combinator.</p>
<p>This reminds me of the rarest kind of luck, the one that <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/biweekly-learning-journal-7-26-10-2020/#How_To_Get_Rich_Without_Being_Lucky_by_Naval_Ravikant_1010">according to Naval Ravikant</a> <strong>finds you</strong>.</p>
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/retireinprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/paul-naval-luck.png?ssl=1"></a></p>
<p>Yes, Paul got lucky a couple of times early on his career.</p>
<p>A bit of “blind luck” at the beginning (especially in the form of being at the right place at the right time), a lot of “persistence luck” during his startup years, but at this point he started attracting luck.</p>
<p><strong>Luck of others became luck of him</strong> as well.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://paulgraham.com/summerfounder.html">March 2005</a>, Paul and his three partners (Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Robert Morris) founded <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator">Y Combinator</a>, the most famous (the first?) startup accelerator and one of the top Angel/Venture Capital firms in the world.</p>
<p>They <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/">gave birth</a> to <strong>Reddit</strong>, <strong>Stripe</strong>, <strong>Airbnb</strong>, <strong>DoorDash</strong>, <strong>Coinbase</strong>, <strong>Instacart</strong>, <strong>Dropbox</strong>, <strong>GitLab</strong>, <strong>Substack</strong>, and <strong>Twitch</strong> to mention some.</p>
<blockquote><p>There are multiple components to Y Combinator, and we didn’t figure them all out at once.</p>
<p>The part we got first was to be an <strong>angel firm</strong>. In those days, those two words didn’t go together.</p>
<p>There were VC firms, which were organized companies with people whose job it was to make investments, but they only did big, million dollar investments.</p>
<p>And there were angels, who did smaller investments, but these were individuals who were usually focused on other things and made investments on the side.</p>
<p>And <strong>neither of them helped founders enough in the beginning</strong>.</p>
<p>We knew how helpless founders were in some respects, because we remembered how helpless we’d been.</p></blockquote>
<p>This seems obvious, “the norm” today. But just 15 years ago there were no “startup incubator”. They kind of coined the term.</p>
<p></p>
<blockquote><p>We’d use the building I owned in Cambridge as our headquarters. We’d all have dinner there once a week — on Tuesdays, since I was already cooking for the Thursday diners on Thursdays — and after dinner we’d bring in experts on startups to give talks.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yeah, In forgot to mention that he used to host interesting people and their friends in a <a href="https://www.nateliason.com/blog/second-degree-dinners">second-degree dinner</a> habit at one point of his life.</p>
<p>Now I need a time machine more than ever 🙂</p>
<blockquote><p>Fairly quickly I realized that we had stumbled upon the way to <strong>scale startup funding</strong>.</p>
<p>Funding startups in batches was more convenient for us, because it meant we could do things for a lot of startups at once, but being part of a batch was better for the startups too.</p>
<p>It solved one of the biggest problems faced by founders: the <strong>isolation</strong>. Now you not only had colleagues, but colleagues who understood the problems you were facing and could tell you how they were solving them.</p></blockquote>
<p>I have this bittersweet feeling when I read about startups, especially startups in the “good old days” after the DotCom bubble. <strong>I’ve never worked at one</strong>, even though I think I’m a startup person.</p>
<p>If I’ll leave my tech career for good, not having tried to found a startup would be my biggest regret.</p>
<p>Never say never though 🙂</p>
<blockquote><p>I had not originally intended YC to be a full-time job.</p>
<p>I was going to do three things: <strong>hack</strong>, <strong>write essays</strong>, and <strong>work on YC</strong>. […]</p>
<p>In the summer of 2006, Robert and I started working on a new version of Arc. This one was reasonably fast, because it was compiled into Scheme. To test this new Arc, <strong>I wrote Hacker News in it</strong>. It was originally meant to be a news aggregator for startup founders and was called Startup News, but after a few months I got tired of reading about nothing but startups. Plus it wasn’t startup founders we wanted to reach. It was future startup founders. So I changed the name to Hacker News and the topic to whatever engaged one’s intellectual curiosity.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/">Hacker News</a> (HN) is still, today, the main source of information for Tech topics in general. It’s like a giant tech/startup <strong>subreddit</strong>.</p>
<p>When my own career was taking off, HN, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/">StackOverflow</a>, and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/">r/programming</a> were my places.</p>
<h3></h3>
<p>Paul worked incredibly hard on YC for several years, and in 2010 Robert Morris, friend, co-founder of YC, and renown hacker (in both the good and the bad meaning of the term) suggested him:</p>
<blockquote><p>Make sure Y Combinator isn’t the last cool thing you do.</p></blockquote>
<p>This speaks to my heart as well. Commit all of yourself to what you love right now, but please, do respect your future <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/monthly-learning-journal-13-1-3-2021/#SMBC_about_your_lifetimes_810">lifetimes</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>It was true that on my current trajectory, YC would be the last thing I did, because it was only taking up more of my attention. It had already eaten Arc, and <strong>was in the process of eating essays too</strong>. <strong>Either YC was my life’s work or I’d have to leave eventually</strong>. And it wasn’t, so I would.</p></blockquote>
<p>In October 2013 (Paul close to turn 49), with the benevolence of the other founders, Paul offered the presidency of YC to <strong>Sam Altman</strong>.</p>
<p>Paul still works few hours a week with founders but he’s not deeply involved with YC anymore.</p>
<p></p>
<p>I must admit that I didn’t know Paul was not leading YC anymore. I discovered it thanks to this essay.</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>What should I do next?</strong> Rtm’s advice hadn’t included anything about that. (RIP Note: RTM is Robert Tappan Morris, his co-founder at ViaWeb and YC) <strong>I wanted to do something completely different, so I decided I’d paint</strong>.</p>
<p>I wanted to see how good I could get if I really focused on it. So the day after I stopped working on YC, I started painting. I was rusty and it took a while to get back into shape, but it was at least completely engaging.</p></blockquote>
<p>Still chasing his teenager dreams. It is romantic, it really is. But it’s the dream of a different, younger Paul. Not his anymore.</p>
<p>He had fun for a while though:</p>
<blockquote><p>I spent most of the rest of 2014 painting. <strong>I’d never been able to work so uninterruptedly before, and I got to be better than I had been</strong>. Not good enough, but better.</p>
<p>Then in November, right in the middle of a painting, I ran out of steam. […]</p>
<p><strong>I stopped working on it and cleaned my brushes and haven’t painted since</strong>.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Lao Tzu</strong> is credited with the quote “<em>When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be</em>“.</p>
<p>I think it fits Paul perfectly.</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Attention is a zero sum game</strong>. <strong>If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that’s not the best one</strong> (or at least a good one) <strong>for you, then it’s getting in the way of another project that is</strong>.</p>
<p>And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around.</p></blockquote>
<p>Oh shit, this hit me like a punch in the face.</p>
<p>There’s no time to waste. Once you “solved” your money problems you must work only on what matters most.</p>
<p><strong>Derek Sivers</strong> would say it’s either <a href="https://sive.rs/n">Hell Yeah or No</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>I started writing essays again, and wrote bunch of new ones over the next few months. I even wrote a couple that weren’t about startups.</p></blockquote>
<p>… and we’re so grateful 🙂</p>
<blockquote><p>Then in March 2015 I started working on Lisp again.</p></blockquote>
<p>Writing essays, and writing software for his own pleasure, in the least <em>corporate way</em> possible. He’s definitely living the professional life of my dreams.</p>
<p>Many 20-years-younger-than-me readers reached me out to tell me I’m an inspiration for them. It’s an honor, but I don’t feel like I’m worth being put on a (small) pedestal.</p>
<p>I’m only geometrically halfway between you, average Italian young adult, and people like Naval and Paul, whose accomplishments (and <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-Paul-Grahams-net-worth">Net Worth</a>) are few orders of magnitude mine.</p>
<p>Maybe if Paul would accidentally find this post he’d think I’m exaggerating with my idolatry. He’d probably think that he’s nothing special, that he’s <em>just geometrically halfway between me and Elon Musk</em> for example.</p>
<p>Hey Paul, if you’re reading this: Elon’s nowhere near to you in my Olympus!</p>
<p>(Wait Elon: I didn’t mean <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympus_Mons">Olympus Mons</a>… please, don’t send the Starman wandering on your Roadster to crash into the surface of Mars for the sake of winning this fake competition, please)</p>
<blockquote><p>It took 4 years, from March 26, 2015 to October 12, 2019. It was fortunate that I had a precisely defined goal, or it would have been hard to keep at it for so long.</p>
<p>I wrote this new Lisp, called <a href="http://paulgraham.com/bel.html"><strong>Bel</strong></a>, in itself in Arc.</p></blockquote>
<p>We’re close to the end of this long trip.</p>
<p>Paul reminds us about the importance of <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/deep-work/">Deep Work</a>, and the dangers of Multitasking:</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>I had to ban myself from writing essays during most of this time</strong>, or I would never have finished. In late 2015 I spent 3 months writing essays, and when I went back to working on Bel I could barely understand the code. Not so much because it was badly written as because the problem is so convoluted. When you’re working on an interpreter written in itself, it’s hard to keep track of what’s happening at what level, and errors can be practically encrypted by the time you get them.</p></blockquote>
<p>Luckily for us, the essays he’s written during his ban were still <a href="http://paulgraham.com/re.html">extremely</a> <a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html">good</a>.</p>
<p>But he’s right: you need to clarify your goals, trim the unnecessary, and focus. Maybe I’m doing too many things, none with the required quality. Thanks once again Paul, I’ll think about it.</p>
<blockquote><p>Working on Bel was <strong>hard but satisfying</strong>. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there.</p>
<p>I remember taking the boys to the coast on a sunny day in 2015 and figuring out how to deal with some problem involving continuations while I watched them play in the tide pools.</p>
<p><strong>It felt like I was doing life right</strong>.</p>
<p>I remember that because I was slightly dismayed at how novel it felt. The good news is that I had more moments like this over the next few years.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)">Flow State</a> becoming permanent state of being. This is amazing!</p>
<h3></h3>
<blockquote><p>In the fall of 2019, Bel was finally finished. […] Now that <strong>I could write essays again</strong>, I wrote a bunch about topics I’d had stacked up. I kept writing essays through 2020, but I also started to think about other things I could work on.</p>
<p><strong>How should I choose what to do? </strong></p>
<p><strong>I wrote an essay for myself to answer that question</strong><strong>and this is the last sentence of it</strong></p></blockquote>
<p>And I’m thankful you wrote this amazing essay Paul, which is jumping directly into my Top10 list, among the others listed in <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/?p=9590&amp;preview=true#Paul_Graham_Theoretical_Minimum">the final paragraph of this post</a>.</p>
<p>Fun fact (that I discovered only <a href="http://paulgraham.com/jessica.html">thanks to this rabbit hole</a>) is that Jessica Livingston, one of YC co-founder, is also <strong>Paul’s wife and mother of their children</strong>.</p>
<p>I happen to have read few chapters of <strong>Founders at Work</strong> without knowing the author was Paul’s wife 🙂</p>
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/retireinprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/paul-books.jpg?ssl=1"></a></p>
<p>That’s it!</p>
<p>I hope you enjoyed this trip into one of the most brilliant minds we have the pleasure to share our short ride on this rock around the Sun with.</p>
<p>Here’s a 2014 guest lecture at Stanford University in the <em>How to Start a Startup</em> course by Sam Altman (soon to become Y Combinator President). This lecture became Paul’s “<a href="http://paulgraham.com/before.html">Before The Startup</a>” popular essay. Enjoy:</p>
<p></p>
<h2></h2>
<p>If you want to start reading Paul’s essays I recommend the following ones, split by category.</p>
<p><strong>Creativity and writing</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html"><strong>The age of the Essay</strong></a>: why you should write. Why writing is amazing. This essay inspired me to start blogging back in 2016.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/useful.html"><strong>How to Write Usefully</strong></a>: an essay should be useful: correct, precise, important, novel.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/writing44.html"><strong>Writing, Briefly</strong></a>: write a bad version 1 quickly, and rewrite it many times over.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://paulgraham.com/talk.html">Write Like you Talk</a></strong>: write in spoken language.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://paulgraham.com/speak.html">Writing and Speaking</a></strong>: good ideas are more valuable for a writer, and Paul wants to improve his idea quality (on the same page, take a look at Derek Sivers: “<a href="https://sive.rs/slow">I’m a very Slow Thinker</a>“).</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Life Design</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://retireinprogress.com/biweekly-learning-journal-4-14-09-2020/#Paul_Graham8217s_2006_essay_8220How_to_do_what_you_Love8221_1010"><strong>How to do what you Love</strong></a>: if you’re in your late teens or early 20s this is the essay you should read and re-read few times over. How to do what you love.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html"><strong>What you wish you had known</strong></a>: to be broadcasted in every high school in the world.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/worked.html"><strong>What I worked on</strong></a>: a.k.a. Paulmanack 🙂</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://paulgraham.com/kids.html">Having Kids</a></strong>: on becoming a parent.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html">Life is Short</a></strong>: yeah, literally.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Critical Thinking</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong><a href="https://retireinprogress.com/monthly-learning-journal-12-1-2-2021/#Paul_Graham_about_How_to_Think_for_Yourself_910">How to Think for Yourself</a></strong>: first principle thinking, critical thinking, and much more.</li>
<li><strong> <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html">Keep your Identity small</a></strong>: keep your ego at bay.</li>
<li><a href="https://retireinprogress.com/weekly-learning-journal-2-24-08-2020/#Paul_Graham_on_How_to_study_Philosophy_910"><strong>How to study Philosophy</strong></a>: how to tackle the important questions in life in a practical way.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html"><strong>How to Disagree</strong></a>: A short but effective guide on argumentative Logical Fallacies. Add <a href="https://retireinprogress.com/biweekly-learning-journal-6-12-10-2020/#eBiz_Facts_on_Steel_Man_Argument_7510">Steel Manning</a> on top of it and you’re done.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/mod.html"><strong>The Two Kinds of Moderate</strong></a>: Paul defines himself as an “accidental moderate”. Same here.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/genius.html"><strong>The bus Ticket Theory of Genius</strong></a>: what people call “talent” is most of the time just obsession.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/know.html"><strong>How You Know</strong></a>: and how you learn and retain things.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html">Is it Worth being Wise?</a></strong>: about the relationship between wisdom and intelligence.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html"><strong>The Lesson to Unlearn</strong></a>: stop learning just to get good grades.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/say.html"><strong>What you can’t say</strong></a>: another great essay on conformism.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Startupping</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/before.html"><strong>Before the Startup</strong></a>: advice to wannabe startuppers.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ds.html"><strong>Do Things that Don’t Scale</strong></a>: it seems counterintuitive, but you don’t have to dream big at the beginning. That’s exactly what I am doing at the moment.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/top.html"><strong>The Top Idea in Your Mind</strong></a>: what you think about when you take a shower is what you should work on.</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/good.html"><strong>Be Good</strong></a>: or at least <a href="https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393">don’t stop not being evil</a> (sad face).</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html">You weren’t meant to have a Boss</a></strong>: exactly!</li>
<li><a href="http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html"><strong>How to Make Wealth</strong></a>: warning: wealth is not what you think it is.</li>
</ul>
<p>Yeah, some of the links point to my previous dissertation on the relative essays, but from there you can find the right link to Paul’s website.</p>
<p>It’s been an amazing trip, and I had a lot of fun!</p>
<p>I hope you enjoyed it as well 🙂</p>
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 The Almanack of Paul Graham

 March 16, 2021 MrRIP 13 comments

 Table of Contents

 * What Paul Worked On
 + Early Drive
 + Philosophy and AI
 + Art School and Employment
 + Rags to Riches
 + Financial Abundance
 + The Age of the Essay
 + Y Combinator and Hacker News
 + The Last Cool Thing You Do
 + What To Do Next
 * Paul Graham’s Theoretical Minimum

 Hi Ripsters,

 I’m a huge fan of Paul Graham.

 Paul is the co-founder of Y Combinator and one of the greatest essayist of modern era.

 I’ve read I guess 70% of his essays, several of them multiple times (I reached double digits re-readings count on The age of the Essay) and I’ve already shared some of his essays in my Learning Journals with you in the past months.

 A good chunk of my life philosophy has been influenced by Paul’s writing. I wish I had his writings available when I was younger. Luckily you, 20-years-younger-than-me reader, have access today to his entire body of work.

 Few months ago this crazy idea popped up in my mind: I wanted to write The Almanack of Paul Graham.

 Of course I got also inspired by The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, by Eric Jorgensen, mentioned in my WLJ #5. Naval and Paul are both in my personal Olympus. Paul is much more concrete and action oriented, while Naval is my “principles” guide and “virtual mentor”.

 As a Naval huge fan, I looked at the success of the Navalmanack with a bit of envy. I should have written that book myself! I was already devouring everything about Naval, and taking personal notes about his Philosophy from sources like: How to Get Rich without being Lucky, Naval on Farnam Street Podcast, Naval on Tim Ferriss Show, Naval on Joe Rogan Experience, Naval’s Tweetstorm on Meditation, and more. Eric did a great job, bringing Naval’s philosophy tot he masses, but as a “scholar” I felt like being spoiled the finale of a season I was still binge watching 🙂

 Btw, thanks to this post you’re reading right now, I found that the Navalmanack is available for FREE as a PDF, Mobi, ePub, and also browsable on the web. This is awesome, seriously, thanks Eric! I’m going to buy the paperback version from Amazon exactly because you made everything available for free (and because I love paper books).

 That’s the “business model” I want to incentivize 🙂

 Please, make yourself a favor and read this book. It’s free, you don’t have excuses 😉

 Few weeks after Navalmanack publication, I felt a urge to write something similar about Paul Graham. My inner voice was telling me to drop everything else and go all-in on this project.

 I didn’t react though. I silenced that voice. I just threw this idea on top of the infinite list of the things I would love to work on someday. Time is scarce, ideas are abundant.

 Anyway, today I can check off this idea from my infinite TODO list.

 “Cool! RIP, you finally wrote the book?”

 No. Paul wrote the Paulmanack himself.

 And it’s not a book, it’s just an essay (though 13.6k words long).

 In the coming soon section of my latest Monthly Learning Journal I mentioned that I was going to read one of Paul’s newly published Essay: “What I Worked on“. I just finished reading it a couple of days ago, on Pi Day 2021. It took me several sessions, and I guess a total of at least 10 hours of reading, taking notes, thinking and connecting the dots (plus another 10 hours to write, edit, and publish this post).

 I was going to add it to the next MLJ, but given the quality and quantity of information shared I decided to write a full dedicated post, where I’m going to quote a lot of passages and adding my own thoughts.

 I recommend you to read the original essay first (set at least 30 minutes away for it), then eventually come back here and read my “reaction” post if you’re still curious. I won’t mind if you skipped my post – but please make yourself another favor and read Paul’s essay. Actually, read as many Paul essays as you can, at least those I’ve listed in the “theoretical minimum” 🙂

 According to what stage in life you currently are, this is probably going to be either the most or the least useful post you will find on my blog.

 Enjoy!

 …or get out of here asap!

 What Paul Worked On

 Paul was born in November 1964. He’s currently 56 years old (in early 2021).

 Early Drive

 Paul’s story begins with his passions as a late teenager, before picking a field to study in college.

 Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn’t write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.

 I can already see several gems in the first paragraph alone. First, Paul didn’t mention “passion”, or “I was passionate about” but “I worked on writing and programming”. I actually “CTRL+F”ed the word “passion” in the entire essay and I got zero results. Good.

 I guess he was deeply passionate about both writing and programming, and he’s still writing and programming almost 40 years later. This is of course a “calling” level of passion, but he’s wise enough to recognize that you can’t call it passion at that early stage. Serendipitous encounters with the fields, rewarding iterations, trending topics, a community to share your thoughts and findings, a ton of deliberate practice, hours spent in flow state, good general cognitive abilities and a bit of obsession (or “talent” if you like). Those are the ingredients that build passion. You work, practice, iterate and then you become passionate. Stop waiting for your “passion” to show up before acting on something!

 He’s also aware that beginner writers should write “short stories” and not essays. Why? My guess is that a beginner writer has random unstructured ideas, that could fill a few pages. Usually fictional stories that they think they’re original but whose influences from surrounding culture compose 99% of it. And with no philosophical idea to explore. But it’s ok. Writing crappy stories should ignite the positive feedback loop that gets your ball rolling faster: improving your vocabulary, finding your writing voice, playing with your ideas, building complex structures on top of them… Who cares about the quality of your teenager writings?

 Now that I think about it, I also wrote short fantasy stories (and a shitload of Dungeons And Dragons adventures and settings for my players group), but I didn’t keep this ball rolling because I let society convince me that I was good at math & science, and my literature scores were just average.

 It was Paul, in The Age of the Essay, who opened my eyes:

 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.

 Substitute English with Italian and Dickens with Alessandro Manzoni, and you get the Italian version.

 I was so uninterested in literature back then that I never stressed my writing skills hard enough at young age. Of course I don’t think that literature is uninteresting, I just think that it probably is not what a teenager wants to write about.

 If I were allowed to write about (and get professional feedback on): “the defensive problems of Roma Soccer Team in the 90s“, “A psychological analysis of the conflict between Shu and Souther in Hokuto no Ken“, or “The use of Yellow, Blue, and Purple candies in Bubble Bubble” I might have become a real writer.

 “RIP…”

 Yeah, what?

 “Paul’s essay is 13.6k words long. If you vomit 10x more words on every paragraph, explore tangent topics, and talk about yourself I’m gonna cut my veins right now.”

 Ok ok, do not worry my lazy friend… thanks for reminding me to stay on topic. But this is my Paulmanack, so shut up and listen! It’s going to be less than 8k words long, promised 😀

 The equivalent of “writing short stories” in the programming field is of course writing video games, which Paul also did.

 Computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80, in about 1980. The gold standard then was the Apple II, but a TRS-80 was good enough.

 This was when I really started programming. I wrote simple games, a program to predict how high my model rockets would fly, and a word processor that my father used to write at least one book. There was only room in memory for about 2 pages of text, so he’d write 2 pages at a time and then print them out, but it was a lot better than a typewriter

 This is me! His father bought him a computer, and he wrote video games on it (been there, done that).

 My early coding explorations helped building skills that snowballed, because I needed no permission and minimal feedback to keep it rolling. And the artifacts, the WIP crappy games I was coding, were themselves positive pushes in the feedback loop.

 So I “quit” writing and humanistic disciplines in general to focus on coding.

 Luckily for us, Paul kept working on both. He wanted to become an artist, a painter, and he took a PhD in Computer Science by mistake, dreaming about quitting the field at every turn.

 His personal story is so inspiring, keep reading!

 Philosophy and AI

 Paul picked Philosophy in College:

 Though I liked programming, I didn’t plan to study it in college. In college I was going to study philosophy, which sounded much more powerful.

 It seemed, to my naive high school self, to be the study of the ultimate truths, compared to which the things studied in other fields would be mere domain knowledge.

 What I discovered when I got to college was that the other fields took up so much of the space of ideas that there wasn’t much left for these supposed ultimate truths. All that seemed left for philosophy were edge cases that people in other fields felt could safely be ignored.

 And he quit philosophy for very practical reasons. Paul wrote a great essay about “How to do Philosophy” in 2007 (ranked 9/10 in my WLJ #2).

 So I decided to switch to AI.

 Oh come on Paul, stop following me!

 Writing, Video Games, AI. And a desire to study the ultimate truths. Same here, that’s me talking.

 I need to find patterns, I want to recognize them in myself and in others. I want to anticipate, predict. I want knowledge and wisdom.

 I guess the patterns here are:

 * Creativity: writing and coding are two expressions of creativity. Coding at least was creative in the good old days, especially if you worked on your own project for its own sake, without the corruption of money.
 * Curiosity: writing is a doors opener in the realm of knowledge. Philosophy is the ultimate curiosity expression.
 * Control: writing sharpen your thinking. Philosophy attempts to put pieces together. AI extends your control outside of yourself. Writing video games makes you “a God” in the world you created “by definition”.
 * Self Actualization? Transcendence? Immortality? What’s our North Star?

 Down to Earth.

 While I like to let my mind wander in the abstract world of Platonic ideas, Paul is a very concrete man:

 I don’t remember the moment it happened, or if there even was a specific moment, but during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax […]

 That whole way of doing AI, with explicit data structures representing concepts, was not going to work. Its brokenness did, as so often happens, generate a lot of opportunities to write papers about various band-aids that could be applied to it.

 I love his accurate description of the paper publishing industry also known as Academic Research 🙂

 This was the AI back in Lisp/Prolog era. I had the same feeling back in the early 2000s, and I still feel like we’re overestimating AI/ML these days. I’ll be proven wrong, I’m sure, but yeah… Intelligence Artificial isn’t (said RIP, the Principal Research Engineer for an Academic Institute working on ML).

 So I looked around to see what I could salvage from the wreckage of my plans, and there was Lisp. I knew from experience that Lisp was interesting for its own sake and not just for its association with AI.

 Jumping from a sinking ship to another. This is a common pattern among smart people. Do not get attached to your first ideas. Paul would say “Keep your Identity Small“. Go deep, learn, view everything from the above, and keep moving.

 Alan Watts would also add: “You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago”

 On the technical side of things I can’t relate much to Paul: I’m not a fan of Lisp, simply because I never played with the language. I fell in love for C (and then C++) at first sight, which were de facto standard in the videogame industry when I started coding 30+ years ago.

 While Paul loves writing software, he recognized that it has some structural problems:

 Any program you wrote today, no matter how good, would be obsolete in a couple decades at best. People might mention your software in footnotes, but no one would actually use it. And indeed, it would seem very feeble work. Only people with a sense of the history of the field would even realize that, in its time, it had been good.

 I realized it late. At the peak of my passion for coding I had the ambition of writing “library” code that could last forever. I was more of a library guy than a product guy. For example in my professional Videogame Development career I worked in the Game Engine development, not in final video games implementations.

 Maybe if I realized (and accepted) that my artifacts were not going to last forever I’d have either had a better career (due to lower expectations) or I’d have quit way earlier to work on something “more immortal”.

 All the code I’ve written at Google has been deprecated, discontinued, thrashed within a few years.

 Sisyphus, hold my beer.

 Paul, like me, had a strong desire to build something that would last:

 While looking at a painting there (Carnegie Mellon University – RIP Note) I realized something that might seem obvious, but was a big surprise to me. There, right on the wall, was something you could make that would last.

 Paintings didn’t become obsolete. Some of the best ones were hundreds of years old.

 Yes Paul, but does it pay the bills?

 And moreover this was something you could make a living doing. Not as easily as you could by writing software, of course, but I thought if you were really industrious and lived really cheaply, it had to be possible to make enough to survive. And as an artist you could be truly independent. You wouldn’t have a boss, or even need to get research funding.

 Woo-hoo! Frugality as a solution to do what you love, a healthy dose of repulsion of a normal 9to5 life, and independence as a goal.

 Paul, you get the FIRE membership ad honorem!

 Well, given that his Net Worth should be in the 9 or 10 digits according to some estimates he “might” get a real Gold or Platinum membership…

 Anyway, Paul’s approach to “How to do hat you Love” has been expanded in its own essay. I’ve talked about it in my WLJ #4.

 Paul started to take Art classes at Harvard, and dreaming about quitting Grad school and his PhD Program.

 I remember when my friend Robert Morris got kicked out of Cornell for writing the internet worm of 1988, I was envious that he’d found such a spectacular way to get out of grad school.

 After graduating in AI in spring 1990 (age 25), Paul decided to apply for Art Schools.

 Art School and Employment

 Fun fact: Paul studied art in Italy, at the Accademia Belle Arti in Florence. They mistakenly sent a response to his application letter back to Cambridge UK instead of Cambridge Massachusetts (US).

 Aaaah, what a good taste of Italian Quality! You’re welcome Paul. Luckily for him, he managed to pass the preliminary exam even though he received the invitation letter waaay too late!

 Italian bureaucracy did damage his artistic career though. We might have to thank Italy if the world was able to enjoy one of the greatest essayists and angel investors of all times:

 Here I was, yet again about to attend some august institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed.

 The students and faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the nicest people you could imagine, but they had long since arrived at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn’t require the faculty to teach anything, and in return the faculty wouldn’t require the students to learn anything.

 Welcome to Italy, Paul 🙂

 The entire section about his life in Italy is funny to read, but a shame for Italy itself. Shame on us.

 I never considered painting, or other visual arts that require manual skills. I’ve always told myself I’m not good at it. Here Paul explains how painting is a way to practice awareness and how it’s a form of meditation:

 I liked painting still lives because I was curious about what I was seeing.

 In everyday life, we aren’t consciously aware of much we’re seeing.

 Most visual perception is handled by low-level processes that merely tell your brain “that’s a water droplet” without telling you details like where the lightest and darkest points are, or “that’s a bush” without telling you the shape and position of every leaf.

 This is a feature of brains, not a bug. In everyday life it would be distracting to notice every leaf on every bush.

 But when you have to paint something, you have to look more closely, and when you do there’s a lot to see. You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to paint something people usually take for granted, just as you can after days of trying to write an essay about something people usually take for granted.

 Awesome. Maybe I should add it to my infinite list of things to do 🙂

 Sadly, Paul gave up after just a single year:

 The Accademia wasn’t teaching me anything except Italian, and my money was running out, so at the end of the first year I went back to the US.

 And got a job at Interleaf. But he was a terrible employee:

 They wanted a Lisp hacker to write things in it. This was the closest thing I’ve had to a normal job, and I hereby apologize to my boss and coworkers, because I was a bad employee. Their Lisp was the thinnest icing on a giant C cake, and since I didn’t know C and didn’t want to learn it, I never understood most of the software. Plus I was terribly irresponsible.

 This was back when a programming job meant showing up every day during certain working hours. That seemed unnatural to me.

 I wish I had a fraction of your intellectual honesty Paul. You didn’t let Impostor Syndrome drive your career.

 This working experience made him quit and go back to art school, a real art school in the US (fall 1992, age 28)

 I moved back to Providence to continue at RISD. The foundation had merely been intro stuff, and the Accademia had been a (very civilized) joke. Now I was going to see what real art school was like.

 But alas it was more like the Accademia than not. Better organized, certainly, and a lot more expensive, but it was now becoming clear that art school did not bear the same relationship to art that medical school bore to medicine. At least not the painting department.

 Ouch, institutionalized art sucks… like any dream of ours, once dressed the productivity vest, becomes something different, usually worse.

 It is really inspirational to see how Paul was able to dance in two completely different worlds while still being able to maintain a “view from the above”, a wise clarity of mind, not letting their respectives echo chambers interfere with his judgement. Now I see where How to Think for Yourself comes from.

 In 1993, at age 29, Paul dropped out of art school again. And he was broke. Still a dreamer:

 I decided to write another book on Lisp. This would be a popular book, the sort of book that could be used as a textbook. I imagined myself living frugally off the royalties and spending all my time painting.

 RoyaltyFIRE, anyone?

 He tried painting for a while, in a rent-controlled apartment in NYC, learning directly from Idelle Weber, one of his professors at Harvard and a real artist.

 But one day…

 Rags to Riches

 One day in late 1994 […] there was something on the radio about a famous fund manager. He wasn’t that much older than me, and was super rich. The thought suddenly occurred to me: why don’t I become rich? Then I’ll be able to work on whatever I want.

 FatFIRE, anyone?

 It’s fascinating for me to acknowledge how much “How to Do what you Love” comes from his own experience. It’s not a speculative essay, it’s been the struggle of his entire life. Thank you Paul, we need more people like you!

 Let’s not forget where the story is set:

 Meanwhile I’d been hearing more and more about this new thing called the World Wide Web.

 LOL. This made me smile 🙂

 Paul shares the story of his first failed startup, softly claiming he “invented” web apps:

 If I wanted to get rich, here was the next train leaving the station. I was right about that part. What I got wrong was the idea. I decided we should start a company to put art galleries online.

 And from the ashes of his first startup, in 1995 he launched Viaweb with Robert Morris and (later) Trevor Blackwell, a precursor of modern eCommerce software.

 They got funded $10k for 10% (what a bad deal!), agreement that in a more generous form turned out to become the standard at Y Combinator.

 A startup that failed hinting an idea for the next startup, who hinted an idea for the final success. Awesome! In all this, having studied Art helped Paul crafting good looking frontends necessary for the second startup (Viaweb) to live long enough and kind of thrive for a while as one of the first eCommerce platform.

 How many have written about the compounding of different skills in different fields? Scott Adams calls it The Talent Stack, James Altucher calls it The Idea Sex… the list is too long.

 They sold Viaweb to Yahoo in 1998 for $49 million in Yahoo stocks. I sincerely hope they sold their stocks before the Dot Com bubble exploded!

 I hired lots more people, partly because our investors wanted me to, and partly because that’s what startups did during the Internet Bubble. A company with just a handful of employees would have seemed amateurish.

 So we didn’t reach breakeven until about when Yahoo bought us in the summer of 1998. Which in turn meant we were at the mercy of investors for the entire life of the company. And since both we and our investors were noobs at startups, the result was a mess even by startup standards.

 It’s DotCom bubble babe! Probably most of my readers were too young at that time, but I remember it vividly. I’ve also lost half of my investments back then (8M Italian Lira, i.e. 4k EUR).

 Let’s not forget that Luck played a huge role in Paul’s success: finding himself at the right place at the right time. Riding the World Wide Web Wave in 1994, exiting in 1998.

 Paul stayed for a year after the acquisition at Yahoo, essentially resting and vesting:

 I hung on till the first chunk of options vested, then in the summer of 1999 I left. It had been so long since I’d painted anything that I’d half forgotten why I was doing this.

 My brain had been entirely full of software and men’s shirts for 4 years. But I had done this to get rich so I could paint, I reminded myself, and now I was rich, so I should go paint.

 We’re all so equal. Deepest desires of humans are very similar. We want to be allowed to be free to do whatever we want. Fun fact: you, yourself, are the final gatekeeper of the freedom you crave for. Most of the “asking for permission” game is played against your own mind.

 Financial Abundance

 Paul quit Yahoo in 1999:

 When I said I was leaving, my boss at Yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. I told him all about the kinds of pictures I wanted to paint. At the time I was touched that he took such an interest in me. Now I realize it was because he thought I was lying.

 My options at that point were worth about $2 million a month. If I was leaving that kind of money on the table, it could only be to go and start some new startup, and if I did, I might take people with me. This was the height of the Internet Bubble, and Yahoo was ground zero of it.

 Holy shit! 2 Millions a month!

 I had to read this out loud several times.

 It’s a FIRE amount, each month.

 And Paul left everything on the table, with no regrets. Telling his boss “listen boss, I don’t need 2M a month. I want to paint apples, pears, and a watermelon for the rest of my life“. This reminds me of my final conversation with my last manager at Google, discounted by two orders of magnitude in terms of money 🙂

 How did Paul’s n-th attempt at painting go?

 But I really was quitting to paint, and I started immediately. There was no time to lose. I’d already burned 4 years getting rich.

 Now when I talk to founders who are leaving after selling their companies, my advice is always the same: take a vacation. That’s what I should have done, just gone off somewhere and done nothing for a month or two, but the idea never occurred to me.

 So I tried to paint, but I just didn’t seem to have any energy or ambition.

 Let me try to humbly diagnose this: a mix of The Optionality Trap and exhaustion. Paul maximized options in his life by “trying to get rich and then doing what he loved”.

 Neil Soni wrote in The Optionality Trap:

 And over the course of a lifetime, this optionality maximization mentality turns us into habitual option collectors and prevents us from reaching our goals.

 I’m sorry to inform you all that there’s no solution. Either you play the lottery ticket and you’re lucky, or you play it safe and might never go all-in on your dreams. We’re reaching the boundaries of what could be done in just a short lifetime.

 Anyway, do we want to tag Paul’s failure to become a great artist as a real failure? Of course not, he’s done better than 99.999+% of the world population!

 Let’s keep going.

 In the spring of 2000, I had an idea. It was clear from our experience with Viaweb that web apps were the future. Why not build a web app for making web apps?

 Actions become passions, not vice versa.

 While he romanticized about seeing himself as a painter, his brain has been too much in contact with startups, Internet and the WWW, and money.

 He’s now an “idea guy”, back when ideas were not so abundant as they are today.

 Our surroundings shape us more than we like to think. It’s an effect similar to hedonistic adaptation. We become what we do, who we hang out with, where we live.

 “I’ll just spend ten years in Switzerland to accumulate money, then I’ll move back to Italy”

 “I’ll just keep working for another ten years then I can do whatever I want”

 Yeah, sure.

 I got so excited about this idea that I couldn’t think about anything else. It seemed obvious that this was the future.

 He was close to launch another startup, a precursor of SaaS platforms, but…

 But about halfway through the summer I realized I really didn’t want to run a company — especially not a big one, which it was looking like this would have to be.

 I’d only started Viaweb because I needed the money. Now that I didn’t need money anymore, why was I doing this?

 If this vision had to be realized as a company, then screw the vision. I’d build a subset that could be done as an open source project.

 He then built Arc, a Lisp dialect.

 After a speech at a Lisp conference he put the slides and talk notes on his website, and got a 30k pageviews spike.

 He was not writing essays yet.

 The Age of the Essay

 If I write something and put it on the web, anyone can read it.

 That may seem obvious now, but it was surprising then. In the print era there was a narrow channel to readers, guarded by fierce monsters known as editors. The only way to get an audience for anything you wrote was to get it published as a book, or in a newspaper or magazine. Now anyone could publish anything.

 In 2001 he started writing the best essays you can find on the internet, including the incredible The Age of the Essay. While not exactly being a blog, we can say that he was one of the pioneers of internet writing.

 In the print era, the channel for publishing essays had been vanishingly small. Except for a few officially anointed thinkers who went to the right parties in New York, the only people allowed to publish essays were specialists writing about their specialties.

 There were so many essays that had never been written, because there had been no way to publish them. Now they could be, and I was going to write them

 This essay is a museum of creativity over the internet! I’m having so much fun reading and commenting it. I can’t thank you enough Paul 🙂

 I’ve worked on several different things, but to the extent there was a turning point where I figured out what to work on, it was when I started publishing essays online. From then on I knew that whatever else I did, I’d always write essays too.

 Writing brings many superpowers. The most powerful one is probably “sharpening your Thinking”.

 By writing about things you don’t know (yet) with a curiosity attitude, you explore and prototype working on what might interest you.

 Writing is the ultimate Deliberate Practice tool.

 One of the most conspicuous patterns I’ve noticed in my life is how well it has worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren’t prestigious.

 Paul also wrote about how to not chase prestige in the How to do what you Love essay, that I already mentioned several times.

 It’s not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it’s a sign both that there’s something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives.

 Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious.

 A single sentence by Paul summarized a 5k words RIP Transparency Manifesto.

 Ok, time to talk about the birth of Y Combinator.

 Y Combinator and Hacker News

 Of course it happened “by chance”, but at this point he built his luck enough that opportunities were chasing him, and not the other way around. To improve his writing quality he gave talks, and one of this talks were about “how to start a startup“.

 This talk/essay kind of evolved into Y Combinator.

 This reminds me of the rarest kind of luck, the one that according to Naval Ravikant finds you.

 Yes, Paul got lucky a couple of times early on his career.

 A bit of “blind luck” at the beginning (especially in the form of being at the right place at the right time), a lot of “persistence luck” during his startup years, but at this point he started attracting luck.

 Luck of others became luck of him as well.

 In March 2005, Paul and his three partners (Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Robert Morris) founded Y Combinator, the most famous (the first?) startup accelerator and one of the top Angel/Venture Capital firms in the world.

 They gave birth to Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, GitLab, Substack, and Twitch to mention some.

 There are multiple components to Y Combinator, and we didn’t figure them all out at once.

 The part we got first was to be an angel firm. In those days, those two words didn’t go together.

 There were VC firms, which were organized companies with people whose job it was to make investments, but they only did big, million dollar investments.

 And there were angels, who did smaller investments, but these were individuals who were usually focused on other things and made investments on the side.

 And neither of them helped founders enough in the beginning.

 We knew how helpless founders were in some respects, because we remembered how helpless we’d been.

 This seems obvious, “the norm” today. But just 15 years ago there were no “startup incubator”. They kind of coined the term.

 We’d use the building I owned in Cambridge as our headquarters. We’d all have dinner there once a week — on Tuesdays, since I was already cooking for the Thursday diners on Thursdays — and after dinner we’d bring in experts on startups to give talks.

 Yeah, In forgot to mention that he used to host interesting people and their friends in a second-degree dinner habit at one point of his life.

 Now I need a time machine more than ever 🙂

 Fairly quickly I realized that we had stumbled upon the way to scale startup funding.

 Funding startups in batches was more convenient for us, because it meant we could do things for a lot of startups at once, but being part of a batch was better for the startups too.

 It solved one of the biggest problems faced by founders: the isolation. Now you not only had colleagues, but colleagues who understood the problems you were facing and could tell you how they were solving them.

 I have this bittersweet feeling when I read about startups, especially startups in the “good old days” after the DotCom bubble. I’ve never worked at one, even though I think I’m a startup person.

 If I’ll leave my tech career for good, not having tried to found a startup would be my biggest regret.

 Never say never though 🙂

 I had not originally intended YC to be a full-time job.

 I was going to do three things: hack, write essays, and work on YC. […]

 In the summer of 2006, Robert and I started working on a new version of Arc. This one was reasonably fast, because it was compiled into Scheme. To test this new Arc, I wrote Hacker News in it. It was originally meant to be a news aggregator for startup founders and was called Startup News, but after a few months I got tired of reading about nothing but startups. Plus it wasn’t startup founders we wanted to reach. It was future startup founders. So I changed the name to Hacker News and the topic to whatever engaged one’s intellectual curiosity.

 Hacker News (HN) is still, today, the main source of information for Tech topics in general. It’s like a giant tech/startup subreddit.

 When my own career was taking off, HN, StackOverflow, and r/programming were my places.

 The Last Cool Thing You Do

 Paul worked incredibly hard on YC for several years, and in 2010 Robert Morris, friend, co-founder of YC, and renown hacker (in both the good and the bad meaning of the term) suggested him:

 Make sure Y Combinator isn’t the last cool thing you do.

 This speaks to my heart as well. Commit all of yourself to what you love right now, but please, do respect your future lifetimes.

 It was true that on my current trajectory, YC would be the last thing I did, because it was only taking up more of my attention. It had already eaten Arc, and was in the process of eating essays too. Either YC was my life’s work or I’d have to leave eventually. And it wasn’t, so I would.

 In October 2013 (Paul close to turn 49), with the benevolence of the other founders, Paul offered the presidency of YC to Sam Altman.

 Paul still works few hours a week with founders but he’s not deeply involved with YC anymore.

 I must admit that I didn’t know Paul was not leading YC anymore. I discovered it thanks to this essay.

 What should I do next? Rtm’s advice hadn’t included anything about that. (RIP Note: RTM is Robert Tappan Morris, his co-founder at ViaWeb and YC) I wanted to do something completely different, so I decided I’d paint.

 I wanted to see how good I could get if I really focused on it. So the day after I stopped working on YC, I started painting. I was rusty and it took a while to get back into shape, but it was at least completely engaging.

 Still chasing his teenager dreams. It is romantic, it really is. But it’s the dream of a different, younger Paul. Not his anymore.

 He had fun for a while though:

 I spent most of the rest of 2014 painting. I’d never been able to work so uninterruptedly before, and I got to be better than I had been. Not good enough, but better.

 Then in November, right in the middle of a painting, I ran out of steam. […]

 I stopped working on it and cleaned my brushes and haven’t painted since.

 Lao Tzu is credited with the quote “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be“.

 I think it fits Paul perfectly.

 Attention is a zero sum game. If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that’s not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it’s getting in the way of another project that is.

 And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around.

 Oh shit, this hit me like a punch in the face.

 There’s no time to waste. Once you “solved” your money problems you must work only on what matters most.

 Derek Sivers would say it’s either Hell Yeah or No.

 I started writing essays again, and wrote bunch of new ones over the next few months. I even wrote a couple that weren’t about startups.

 … and we’re so grateful 🙂

 Then in March 2015 I started working on Lisp again.

 Writing essays, and writing software for his own pleasure, in the least corporate way possible. He’s definitely living the professional life of my dreams.

 Many 20-years-younger-than-me readers reached me out to tell me I’m an inspiration for them. It’s an honor, but I don’t feel like I’m worth being put on a (small) pedestal.

 I’m only geometrically halfway between you, average Italian young adult, and people like Naval and Paul, whose accomplishments (and Net Worth) are few orders of magnitude mine.

 Maybe if Paul would accidentally find this post he’d think I’m exaggerating with my idolatry. He’d probably think that he’s nothing special, that he’s just geometrically halfway between me and Elon Musk for example.

 Hey Paul, if you’re reading this: Elon’s nowhere near to you in my Olympus!

 (Wait Elon: I didn’t mean Olympus Mons… please, don’t send the Starman wandering on your Roadster to crash into the surface of Mars for the sake of winning this fake competition, please)

 It took 4 years, from March 26, 2015 to October 12, 2019. It was fortunate that I had a precisely defined goal, or it would have been hard to keep at it for so long.

 I wrote this new Lisp, called Bel, in itself in Arc.

 We’re close to the end of this long trip.

 Paul reminds us about the importance of Deep Work, and the dangers of Multitasking:

 I had to ban myself from writing essays during most of this time, or I would never have finished. In late 2015 I spent 3 months writing essays, and when I went back to working on Bel I could barely understand the code. Not so much because it was badly written as because the problem is so convoluted. When you’re working on an interpreter written in itself, it’s hard to keep track of what’s happening at what level, and errors can be practically encrypted by the time you get them.

 Luckily for us, the essays he’s written during his ban were still extremely good.

 But he’s right: you need to clarify your goals, trim the unnecessary, and focus. Maybe I’m doing too many things, none with the required quality. Thanks once again Paul, I’ll think about it.

 Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there.

 I remember taking the boys to the coast on a sunny day in 2015 and figuring out how to deal with some problem involving continuations while I watched them play in the tide pools.

 It felt like I was doing life right.

 I remember that because I was slightly dismayed at how novel it felt. The good news is that I had more moments like this over the next few years.

 Flow State becoming permanent state of being. This is amazing!

 What To Do Next

 In the fall of 2019, Bel was finally finished. […] Now that I could write essays again, I wrote a bunch about topics I’d had stacked up. I kept writing essays through 2020, but I also started to think about other things I could work on.

 How should I choose what to do? Well, how had I chosen what to work on in the past?

 I wrote an essay for myself to answer that question , and I was surprised how long and messy the answer turned out to be. If this surprised me, who’d lived it, then I thought perhaps it would be interesting to other people, and encouraging to those with similarly messy lives. So I wrote a more detailed version for others to read, and this is the last sentence of it .

 And I’m thankful you wrote this amazing essay Paul, which is jumping directly into my Top10 list, among the others listed in the final paragraph of this post.

 Fun fact (that I discovered only thanks to this rabbit hole) is that Jessica Livingston, one of YC co-founder, is also Paul’s wife and mother of their children.

 I happen to have read few chapters of Founders at Work without knowing the author was Paul’s wife 🙂

 That’s it!

 I hope you enjoyed this trip into one of the most brilliant minds we have the pleasure to share our short ride on this rock around the Sun with.

 Here’s a 2014 guest lecture at Stanford University in the How to Start a Startup course by Sam Altman (soon to become Y Combinator President). This lecture became Paul’s “Before The Startup” popular essay. Enjoy:

 Paul Graham’s Theoretical Minimum

 If you want to start reading Paul’s essays I recommend the following ones, split by category.

 Creativity and writing:

 * The age of the Essay: why you should write. Why writing is amazing. This essay inspired me to start blogging back in 2016.
 * How to Write Usefully: an essay should be useful: correct, precise, important, novel.
 * Writing, Briefly: write a bad version 1 quickly, and rewrite it many times over.
 * Write Like you Talk: write in spoken language.
 * Writing and Speaking: good ideas are more valuable for a writer, and Paul wants to improve his idea quality (on the same page, take a look at Derek Sivers: “I’m a very Slow Thinker“).

 Life Design

 * How to do what you Love: if you’re in your late teens or early 20s this is the essay you should read and re-read few times over. How to do what you love.
 * What you wish you had known: to be broadcasted in every high school in the world.
 * What I worked on: a.k.a. Paulmanack 🙂
 * Having Kids: on becoming a parent.
 * Life is Short: yeah, literally.

 Critical Thinking:

 * How to Think for Yourself: first principle thinking, critical thinking, and much more.
 * Keep your Identity small: keep your ego at bay.
 * How to study Philosophy: how to tackle the important questions in life in a practical way.
 * How to Disagree: A short but effective guide on argumentative Logical Fallacies. Add Steel Manning on top of it and you’re done.
 * The Two Kinds of Moderate: Paul defines himself as an “accidental moderate”. Same here.
 * The bus Ticket Theory of Genius: what people call “talent” is most of the time just obsession.
 * How You Know: and how you learn and retain things.
 * Is it Worth being Wise?: about the relationship between wisdom and intelligence.
 * The Lesson to Unlearn: stop learning just to get good grades.
 * What you can’t say: another great essay on conformism.

 Startupping:

 * Before the Startup: advice to wannabe startuppers.
 * Do Things that Don’t Scale: it seems counterintuitive, but you don’t have to dream big at the beginning. That’s exactly what I am doing at the moment.
 * The Top Idea in Your Mind: what you think about when you take a shower is what you should work on.
 * Be Good: or at least don’t stop not being evil (sad face).
 * You weren’t meant to have a Boss: exactly!
 * How to Make Wealth: warning: wealth is not what you think it is.

 Yeah, some of the links point to my previous dissertation on the relative essays, but from there you can find the right link to Paul’s website.

 It’s been an amazing trip, and I had a lot of fun!

 I hope you enjoyed it as well 🙂

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 13 comments

 1. Julien says:
 March 16, 2021 at 6:00 pm

 Wow, this is great! I need to read many of these essays. It looks like PG has hacked how to live life!

 Also, just to keep the record straight: the whole “almanack” concept (i.e the Navalmanack) derives from “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” (i.e all the wisdom of Charlie Munger) which itself was a reference to “Poor Richard’s Almanack”, written by Benjamin Franklin 😉

 Reply
 1. MrRIP says:
 March 16, 2021 at 8:42 pm

 I knew about the Poor Charlie’s Almanack, I didn’t know about the Poor Richard’s Almanack!
 I thought everything started with Mickey Mouse Almanack 😀

 Reply
 2. Michela says:
 March 16, 2021 at 10:13 pm

 This is terrific… rabbit hole 😂 I have started reading this article two hours ago and have not finished yet. I did not know who Paul Graham was and I now I already read so many of his essays. I especially loved The Age of the Essay, Life is Short, What You’ll Wish You’d Known. And I must admit that the 10-year-old me would have devoured an essay on “The use of Yellow, Blue, and Purple candies in Bubble Bubble”, too.
 I have 5 more essays waiting for me on my browser tabs.
 Thank you for writing and sharing this. It has been an incredibly sobering trip 🙂

 Reply
 1. MrRIP says:
 March 16, 2021 at 10:41 pm

 You’re welcome 🙂
 Read “How to do what you Love” next, that’s probably one of his best!

 Reply
 1. Michela says:
 March 18, 2021 at 5:21 pm

 I read it. And I have mixed feelings about it. It is one of those piece of work you know you have to let sink in, and re-think about days (months? years?) later.

 My father always told me that “When you love your job, you won’t work a day in your life”. and he truly loves what he does. Despite this kind of upbringing, I have a different approach to work life. I think that anything I truly enjoy doing will be spoiled if money ever get involved. I kinda liked Mark Manson take on it (Screw Finding You Passion).
 What do you think?

 Anyway, I know I will reflect upon this topic for a long time from now on xD
 Thanks again for sharing. (And I really appreciated your notes on the essay!)

 Reply
 3. Gravestone says:
 March 18, 2021 at 11:26 am

 You should be aware that Mr. Graham is the guy who took a vendetta against your Google ex-colleague Michael O. Church just for having a different opinion on the VC world. He managed to ban him from a couple of platforms like Quora, etc. and made his life miserable when looking for employment. While I don’t agree with Michael Church on many topics, I think Michael is a talented decent guy and you need to be a psychopath to give him such a treatment.

 I used to read Mr. Graham books when I was younger, I admit he is a talented writer. Now after a certain amount of life experience I find most of his text platitudes or even untruthful given his course of actions. And yes, Michael is right about the VC world. I speak here from my own experience.

 Reply
 1. MrRIP says:
 March 23, 2021 at 2:05 pm

 I know nothing about Graham vs Church, and I don’t expect anyone in particular to be Jesus Christ. If the two guys had a fight over the internet… well… whatever!

 Reply
 1. Gravestone says:
 March 25, 2021 at 5:04 pm

 Well, you know now. Mind you the fight got from the internet to the real world. To make this happen it certainly doesn’t need a Jesus Christ, but a psychopath.

 Reply
 4. dom says:
 March 18, 2021 at 12:51 pm

 This is great. I’m a huge fan of Paul’s writings.
 I ‘m sure that in my 20s I would have reacted differently to Paul’s (and Naval’s) word. And probably lost many of the messages.
 I’m glad I found their writings now that I’m in my 40s. To find what you look for you should know what you need. And you appreciate what you find when you need it, and I was exactly expecting these words now, in my midlife crisis and halfway in my FIRE journey.

 Thanks for your effort.
 What I am missing right now is : “what do I do now with this knowledge and how does a terrible procrastinator like me apply that to my life decisions now that I’m paralyzed by fear of the unknown and by choice paralysis with all the projects and ideas I have in my head? Where to point my focus?”
 The obstacle is in our head, and probably the right answer is already there too, I know, and we fear to say it aloud, but maybe sometimes we just need a gentle push from behind from someone, to start going in a new direction, and I feel that belonging to a community of like minded people can help a lot.

 Reply
 1. MrRIP says:
 March 23, 2021 at 2:08 pm

 This is a very good point. I like to imagine that I’d have benefited by having these writings available 20 years ago but maybe I wouldn’t 🙂

 About procrastination I know what you mean. Having this blog and other creative outlet is my best antidote to chronical procrastination.

 Create. Do stuff. Don’t aim to perfection, just get started. Feedback will guide you somewhere.

 Reply
 5. Endriu 13 says:
 March 24, 2021 at 1:52 pm

 I’m a big fan of Paul since i cofounded my first startup! (My exit strategy for FIRE)

 Hoping an Y combinator style since when i became an angel investor and mentor in early stage/seed startups in Italy

 Reply
 6. David says:
 May 2, 2021 at 12:36 pm

 Did you see this page?

 https://paulmanack.com/

 Is there something coming?

 Reply
 1. MrRIP says:
 May 2, 2021 at 12:44 pm

 I assume it’s Blas Moros (https://retireinprogress.com/monthly-learning-journal-14-5-4-2021/#Blas_Moros_is_writing_the_Paulmanack_Yes_but823010)

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Table of Contents   What Paul Worked On   Early Drive   Philosophy and AI   Art School and Employment   Rags to Riches   Financial Abundance   The Age of the Essay   Y Combinator and Hacker News   The Last Cool Thing You Do   What To Do Next     Paul Graham’s Theoretical Minimum   
Hi Ripsters,
I’m a huge fan of  Paul Graham .
Paul is the co-founder of Y Combinator and one of the greatest essayist of modern era.
   
I’ve read I guess 70% of his essays, several of them multiple times (I reached double digits re-readings count on The age of the Essay) and I’ve already shared some of his essays in my Learning Journals with you in the past months.
A good chunk of my life philosophy has been influenced by Paul’s writing. I wish I had his writings available when I was younger. Luckily you, 20-years-younger-than-me reader, have access today to his entire body of work.
Few months ago this crazy idea popped up in my mind: I wanted to write The Almanack of Paul Graham.
Of course I got also inspired by  The Almanack of Naval Ravikant , by Eric Jorgensen, mentioned in my WLJ #5. Naval and Paul are both in my personal Olympus. Paul is much more concrete and action oriented, while Naval is my “principles” guide and “virtual mentor”.
As a Naval huge fan, I looked at the success of the Navalmanack with a bit of envy. I should have written that book myself! I was already devouring everything about Naval, and taking personal notes about his Philosophy from sources like: How to Get Rich without being Lucky, Naval on Farnam Street Podcast, Naval on Tim Ferriss Show, Naval on Joe Rogan Experience, Naval’s Tweetstorm on Meditation, and more. Eric did a great job, bringing Naval’s philosophy tot he masses, but as a “scholar” I felt like being spoiled the finale of a season I was still binge watching 🙂
Btw, thanks to this post you’re reading right now, I found that  the Navalmanack is available for FREE as a PDF, Mobi, ePub, and also browsable on the web. This is awesome, seriously, thanks Eric! I’m going to buy the paperback version from Amazon exactly because you made everything available for free (and because I love paper books).
That’s the “business model” I want to incentivize 🙂
   
Please, make yourself a favor and read this book. It’s free, you don’t have excuses 😉
Few weeks after Navalmanack publication, I felt a urge to write something similar about Paul Graham. My inner voice was telling me to drop everything else and go all-in on this project.
I didn’t react though. I silenced that voice. I just threw this idea on top of the infinite list of the things I would love to work on someday. Time is scarce, ideas are abundant.
Anyway, today I can check off this idea from my infinite TODO list.
“”
No. Paul wrote the Paulmanack himself.
And it’s not a book, it’s just an essay (though 13.6k words long).
In the coming soon section of my latest Monthly Learning Journal I mentioned that I was going to read one of Paul’s newly published Essay: “What I Worked on“. I just finished reading it a couple of days ago, on Pi Day 2021. It took me several sessions, and I guess a total of at least 10 hours of reading, taking notes, thinking and connecting the dots (plus another 10 hours to write, edit, and publish this post).
I was going to add it to the next MLJ, but given the quality and quantity of information shared I decided to write a full dedicated post, where I’m going to quote a lot of passages and adding my own thoughts.
I recommend you to read the original essay first (set at least 30 minutes away for it), then eventually come back here and read my “reaction” post if you’re still curious. I won’t mind if you skipped my post – but please make yourself another favor and read Paul’s essay. Actually, read as many Paul essays as you can, at least those I’ve listed in the “theoretical minimum” 🙂
According to what stage in life you currently are, this is probably going to be either the most or the least useful post you will find on my blog.
Enjoy!
…or get out of here asap!
 
Paul was born in November 1964. He’s currently 56 years old (in early 2021).
 
Paul’s story begins with his passions as a late teenager, before picking a field to study in college.
 Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn’t write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep. 
I can already see several gems in the first paragraph alone. First, Paul didn’t mention “passion”, or “I was passionate about” but “I worked on writing and programming”. I actually “CTRL+F”ed the word “passion” in the entire essay and I got zero results. Good.
I guess he was deeply passionate about both writing and programming, and he’s still writing and programming almost 40 years later. This is of course a “calling” level of passion, but he’s wise enough to recognize that you can’t call it passion at that early stage. Serendipitous encounters with the fields, rewarding iterations, trending topics, a community to share your thoughts and findings, a ton of deliberate practice, hours spent in flow state, good general cognitive abilities and a bit of obsession (or “talent” if you like). Those are the ingredients that build passion. You work, practice, iterate and then you become passionate. Stop waiting for your “passion” to show up before acting on something!
He’s also aware that beginner writers should write “short stories” and not essays. Why? My guess is that a beginner writer has random unstructured ideas, that could fill a few pages. Usually fictional stories that they think they’re original but whose influences from surrounding culture compose 99% of it. And with no philosophical idea to explore. But it’s ok. Writing crappy stories should ignite the positive feedback loop that gets your ball rolling faster: improving your vocabulary, finding your writing voice, playing with your ideas, building complex structures on top of them… Who cares about the quality of your teenager writings?
Now that I think about it, I also wrote short fantasy stories (and a shitload of Dungeons And Dragons adventures and settings for my players group), but I didn’t keep this ball rolling because I let society convince me that I was good at math &amp; science, and my literature scores were just average.
It was Paul, in  The Age of the Essay , who opened my eyes:
 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. 
Substitute English with Italian and Dickens with Alessandro Manzoni, and you get the Italian version.
I was so uninterested in literature back then that I never stressed my writing skills hard enough at young age. Of course I don’t think that literature is uninteresting, I just think that it probably is not what a teenager wants to write about.
If I were allowed to write about (and get professional feedback on): “the defensive problems of Roma Soccer Team in the 90s“, “A psychological analysis of the conflict between Shu and Souther in Hokuto no Ken“, or “The use of Yellow, Blue, and Purple candies in Bubble Bubble” I might have become a real writer.
“”
Yeah, what?
“”
Ok ok, do not worry my lazy friend… thanks for reminding me to stay on topic. But this is my Paulmanack, so shut up and listen! It’s going to be less than 8k words long, promised 😀
The equivalent of “writing short stories” in the programming field is of course writing video games, which Paul also did.
 Computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80, in about 1980. The gold standard then was the Apple II, but a TRS-80 was good enough.
This was when I really started programming. I wrote simple games, a program to predict how high my model rockets would fly, and a word processor that my father used to write at least one book. There was only room in memory for about 2 pages of text, so he’d write 2 pages at a time and then print them out, but it was a lot better than a typewriter 
This is me! His father bought him a computer, and he wrote video games on it (been there, done that).
My early coding explorations helped building skills that snowballed, because I needed no permission and minimal feedback to keep it rolling. And the artifacts, the WIP crappy games I was coding, were themselves positive pushes in the feedback loop.
So I “quit” writing and humanistic disciplines in general to focus on coding.
Luckily for us, Paul kept working on both. He wanted to become an artist, a painter, and he took a PhD in Computer Science by mistake, dreaming about quitting the field at every turn.
His personal story is so inspiring, keep reading!
 
Paul picked Philosophy in College:
 Though I liked programming, I didn’t plan to study it in college. In college I was going to study philosophy, which sounded much more powerful.
It seemed, to my naive high school self, to be the study of the ultimate truths, compared to which the things studied in other fields would be mere domain knowledge.
What I discovered when I got to college was that the other fields took up so much of the space of ideas that there wasn’t much left for these supposed ultimate truths. All that seemed left for philosophy were edge cases that people in other fields felt could safely be ignored. 
And he quit philosophy for very practical reasons. Paul wrote a great essay about “How to do Philosophy” in 2007 (ranked 9/10 in my WLJ #2).
 So I decided to switch to AI. 
Oh come on Paul, stop following me!
Writing, Video Games, AI. And a desire to study the ultimate truths. Same here, that’s me talking.
I need to find patterns, I want to recognize them in myself and in others. I want to anticipate, predict. I want knowledge and wisdom.
I guess the patterns here are:
 Creativity: writing and coding are two expressions of creativity. Coding at least was creative in the good old days, especially if you worked on your own project for its own sake, without the corruption of money.
 Curiosity: writing is a doors opener in the realm of knowledge. Philosophy is the ultimate curiosity expression.
 Control: writing sharpen your thinking. Philosophy attempts to put pieces together. AI extends your control outside of yourself. Writing video games makes you “a God” in the world you created “by definition”.
 Self Actualization? Transcendence? Immortality? What’s our North Star?
Down to Earth.
While I like to let my mind wander in the abstract world of Platonic ideas, Paul is a very concrete man:
 I don’t remember the moment it happened, or if there even was a specific moment, but during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax […]
That whole way of doing AI, with explicit data structures representing concepts, was not going to work. Its brokenness did, as so often happens, generate a lot of opportunities to write papers about various band-aids that could be applied to it. 
I love his accurate description of the paper publishing industry also known as Academic Research 🙂
This was the AI back in Lisp/Prolog era. I had the same feeling back in the early 2000s, and I still feel like we’re overestimating AI/ML these days. I’ll be proven wrong, I’m sure, but yeah… Intelligence Artificial isn’t (said RIP, the Principal Research Engineer for an Academic Institute working on ML).
 So I looked around to see what I could salvage from the wreckage of my plans, and there was Lisp. I knew from experience that Lisp was interesting for its own sake and not just for its association with AI. 
Jumping from a sinking ship to another. This is a common pattern among smart people. Do not get attached to your first ideas. Paul would say “Keep your Identity Small“. Go deep, learn, view everything from the above, and keep moving.
 Alan Watts would also add: “You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago”
On the technical side of things I can’t relate much to Paul: I’m not a fan of Lisp, simply because I never played with the language. I fell in love for C (and then C++) at first sight, which were de facto standard in the videogame industry when I started coding 30+ years ago.
While Paul loves writing software, he recognized that it has some structural problems:
  Any program you wrote today, no matter how good, would be obsolete in a couple decades at best. People might mention your software in footnotes, but no one would actually use it. And indeed, it would seem very feeble work. Only people with a sense of the history of the field would even realize that, in its time, it had been good. 
I realized it late. At the peak of my passion for coding I had the ambition of writing “library” code that could last forever. I was more of a library guy than a product guy. For example in my professional Videogame Development career I worked in the Game Engine development, not in final video games implementations.
Maybe if I realized (and accepted) that my artifacts were not going to last forever I’d have either had a better career (due to lower expectations) or I’d have quit way earlier to work on something “more immortal”.
All the code I’ve written at Google has been deprecated, discontinued, thrashed within a few years.
 Sisyphus, hold my beer.
Paul, like me, had a strong desire to build something that would last:
 While looking at a painting there (Carnegie Mellon University – RIP Note) I realized something that might seem obvious, but was a big surprise to me. There, right on the wall, was something you could make that would last.
 Paintings didn’t become obsolete. Some of the best ones were hundreds of years old. 
Yes Paul, but does it pay the bills?
 And moreover this was something you could make a living doing. Not as easily as you could by writing software, of course, but I thought if you were really industrious and lived really cheaply, it had to be possible to make enough to survive. And as an artist you could be truly independent. You wouldn’t have a boss, or even need to get research funding. 
Woo-hoo! Frugality as a solution to do what you love, a healthy dose of repulsion of a normal 9to5 life, and independence as a goal.
Paul, you get the FIRE membership ad honorem!
Well, given that his Net Worth should be in the 9 or 10 digits according to some estimates he “might” get a real Gold or Platinum membership…
Anyway, Paul’s approach to “ How to do hat you Love ” has been expanded in its own essay. I’ve talked about it in my WLJ #4.
Paul started to take Art classes at Harvard, and dreaming about quitting Grad school and his PhD Program.
 I remember when my friend Robert Morris got kicked out of Cornell for writing the internet worm of 1988, I was envious that he’d found such a spectacular way to get out of grad school. 
After graduating in AI in spring 1990 (age 25), Paul decided to apply for Art Schools.
 
Fun fact: Paul studied art in Italy, at the  Accademia Belle Arti  in Florence. They mistakenly sent a response to his application letter back to Cambridge UK instead of Cambridge Massachusetts (US).
Aaaah, what a good taste of Italian Quality! You’re welcome Paul. Luckily for him, he managed to pass the preliminary exam even though he received the invitation letter waaay too late!
Italian bureaucracy did damage his artistic career though. We might have to thank Italy if the world was able to enjoy one of the greatest essayists and angel investors of all times:
 Here I was, yet again about to attend some august institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed.
The students and faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the nicest people you could imagine, but they had long since arrived at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn’t require the faculty to teach anything, and in return the faculty wouldn’t require the students to learn anything. 
Welcome to Italy, Paul 🙂
The entire section about his life in Italy is funny to read, but a shame for Italy itself. Shame on us.
I never considered painting, or other visual arts that require manual skills. I’ve always told myself I’m not good at it. Here Paul explains how painting is a way to practice awareness and how it’s a form of meditation:
 I liked painting still lives because I was curious about what I was seeing.
 In everyday life, we aren’t consciously aware of much we’re seeing.
Most visual perception is handled by low-level processes that merely tell your brain “that’s a water droplet” without telling you details like where the lightest and darkest points are, or “that’s a bush” without telling you the shape and position of every leaf.
 This is a feature of brains, not a bug. In everyday life it would be distracting to notice every leaf on every bush.
But when you have to paint something, you have to look more closely, and when you do there’s a lot to see. You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to paint something people usually take for granted, just as you can after days of trying to write an essay about something people usually take for granted. 
Awesome. Maybe I should add it to my infinite list of things to do 🙂
Sadly, Paul gave up after just a single year:
 The Accademia wasn’t teaching me anything except Italian, and my money was running out, so at the end of the first year I went back to the US. 
And got a job at Interleaf. But he was a terrible employee:
 They wanted a Lisp hacker to write things in it. This was the closest thing I’ve had to a normal job, and I hereby apologize to my boss and coworkers, because I was a bad employee. Their Lisp was the thinnest icing on a giant C cake, and since I didn’t know C and didn’t want to learn it, I never understood most of the software. Plus I was terribly irresponsible.
 This was back when a programming job meant showing up every day during certain working hours. That seemed unnatural to me. 
I wish I had a fraction of your intellectual honesty Paul. You didn’t let Impostor Syndrome drive your career.
This working experience made him quit and go back to art school, a real art school in the US (fall 1992, age 28)
 I moved back to Providence to continue at RISD. The foundation had merely been intro stuff, and the Accademia had been a (very civilized) joke. Now I was going to see what real art school was like.
But alas it was more like the Accademia than not. Better organized, certainly, and a lot more expensive, but it was now becoming clear that art school did not bear the same relationship to art that medical school bore to medicine. At least not the painting department. 
Ouch, institutionalized art sucks… like any dream of ours, once dressed the productivity vest, becomes something different, usually worse.
It is really inspirational to see how Paul was able to dance in two completely different worlds while still being able to maintain a “view from the above”, a wise clarity of mind, not letting their respectives echo chambers interfere with his judgement. Now I see where How to Think for Yourself comes from.
In 1993, at age 29, Paul dropped out of art school again. And he was broke. Still a dreamer:
 I decided to write another book on Lisp. This would be a popular book, the sort of book that could be used as a textbook. I imagined myself living frugally off the royalties and spending all my time painting. 
RoyaltyFIRE, anyone?
He tried painting for a while, in a rent-controlled apartment in NYC, learning directly from Idelle Weber, one of his professors at Harvard and a real artist.
But one day…
 
 One day in late 1994 […] there was something on the radio about a famous fund manager. He wasn’t that much older than me, and was super rich. The thought suddenly occurred to me: why don’t I become rich? Then I’ll be able to work on whatever I want. 
FatFIRE, anyone?
It’s fascinating for me to acknowledge how much “How to Do what you Love” comes from his own experience. It’s not a speculative essay, it’s been the struggle of his entire life. Thank you Paul, we need more people like you!
Let’s not forget where the story is set:
 Meanwhile I’d been hearing more and more about this new thing called the World Wide Web. 
LOL. This made me smile 🙂
Paul shares the story of his first failed startup, softly claiming he “invented” web apps:
 If I wanted to get rich, here was the next train leaving the station. I was right about that part. What I got wrong was the idea. I decided we should start a company to put art galleries online. 
And from the ashes of his first startup, in 1995 he launched  Viaweb  with Robert Morris and (later) Trevor Blackwell, a precursor of modern eCommerce software.
They got funded $10k for 10% (what a bad deal!), agreement that in a more generous form turned out to become the standard at Y Combinator.
A startup that failed hinting an idea for the next startup, who hinted an idea for the final success. Awesome! In all this, having studied Art helped Paul crafting good looking frontends necessary for the second startup (Viaweb) to live long enough and kind of thrive for a while as one of the first eCommerce platform.
How many have written about the compounding of different skills in different fields? Scott Adams calls it The Talent Stack, James Altucher calls it The Idea Sex… the list is too long.
 They sold Viaweb to Yahoo in 1998 for $49 million in Yahoo stocks. I sincerely hope they sold their stocks before the Dot Com bubble exploded!
 I hired lots more people, partly because our investors wanted me to, and partly because that’s what startups did during the Internet Bubble. A company with just a handful of employees would have seemed amateurish.
So we didn’t reach breakeven until about when Yahoo bought us in the summer of 1998. Which in turn meant we were at the mercy of investors for the entire life of the company. And since both we and our investors were noobs at startups, the result was a mess even by startup standards. 
It’s DotCom bubble babe! Probably most of my readers were too young at that time, but I remember it vividly. I’ve also lost half of my investments back then (8M Italian Lira, i.e. 4k EUR).
Let’s not forget that Luck played a huge role in Paul’s success: finding himself at the right place at the right time. Riding the World Wide Web Wave in 1994, exiting in 1998.
   
Paul stayed for a year after the acquisition at Yahoo, essentially resting and vesting:
 I hung on till the first chunk of options vested, then in the summer of 1999 I left. It had been so long since I’d painted anything that I’d half forgotten why I was doing this.
My brain had been entirely full of software and men’s shirts for 4 years. But I had done this to get rich so I could paint, I reminded myself, and now I was rich, so I should go paint. 
We’re all so equal. Deepest desires of humans are very similar. We want to be allowed to be free to do whatever we want. Fun fact: you, yourself, are the final gatekeeper of the freedom you crave for. Most of the “asking for permission” game is played against your own mind.
 
Paul quit Yahoo in 1999:
 When I said I was leaving, my boss at Yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. I told him all about the kinds of pictures I wanted to paint. At the time I was touched that he took such an interest in me. Now I realize it was because he thought I was lying.
 My options at that point were worth about $2 million a month. If I was leaving that kind of money on the table, it could only be to go and start some new startup, and if I did, I might take people with me. This was the height of the Internet Bubble, and Yahoo was ground zero of it. 
Holy shit! 2 Millions a month!
I had to read this out loud several times.
It’s a FIRE amount, each month.
And Paul left everything on the table, with no regrets. Telling his boss “listen boss, I don’t need 2M a month. I want to paint apples, pears, and a watermelon for the rest of my life“. This reminds me of my final conversation with my last manager at Google, discounted by two orders of magnitude in terms of money 🙂
How did Paul’s n-th attempt at painting go?
 But I really was quitting to paint, and I started immediately. There was no time to lose. I’d already burned 4 years getting rich.
Now when I talk to founders who are leaving after selling their companies, my advice is always the same: take a vacation. That’s what I should have done, just gone off somewhere and done nothing for a month or two, but the idea never occurred to me.
 So I tried to paint, but I just didn’t seem to have any energy or ambition. 
Let me try to humbly diagnose this: a mix of The Optionality Trap and exhaustion. Paul maximized options in his life by “trying to get rich and then doing what he loved”.
 Neil Soni wrote in The Optionality Trap:
 And over the course of a lifetime, this optionality maximization mentality turns us into habitual option collectors and prevents us from reaching our goals. 
I’m sorry to inform you all that there’s no solution. Either you play the lottery ticket and you’re lucky, or you play it safe and might never go all-in on your dreams. We’re reaching the boundaries of what could be done in just a short lifetime.
Anyway, do we want to tag Paul’s failure to become a great artist as a real failure? Of course not, he’s done better than 99.999+% of the world population!
Let’s keep going.
 In the spring of 2000, I had an idea. It was clear from our experience with Viaweb that web apps were the future. Why not build a web app for making web apps?  
Actions become passions, not vice versa.
While he romanticized about seeing himself as a painter, his brain has been too much in contact with startups, Internet and the WWW, and money.
He’s now an “idea guy”, back when ideas were not so abundant as they are today.
 Our surroundings shape us more than we like to think. It’s an effect similar to hedonistic adaptation. We become what we do, who we hang out with, where we live.
“I’ll just spend ten years in Switzerland to accumulate money, then I’ll move back to Italy”
“I’ll just keep working for another ten years then I can do whatever I want”
Yeah, sure.
 I got so excited about this idea that I couldn’t think about anything else. It seemed obvious that this was the future. 
He was close to launch another startup, a precursor of  SaaS  platforms, but…
 But about halfway through the summer I realized I really didn’t want to run a company — especially not a big one, which it was looking like this would have to be.
 I’d only started Viaweb because I needed the money. Now that I didn’t need money anymore, why was I doing this?
If this vision had to be realized as a company, then screw the vision. I’d build a subset that could be done as an open source project. 
He then built  Arc , a Lisp dialect.
After a speech at a Lisp conference he put the slides and talk notes on his website, and got a 30k pageviews spike.
He was not writing essays yet.
 
  If I write something and put it on the web, anyone can read it.
That may seem obvious now, but it was surprising then. In the print era there was a narrow channel to readers, guarded by fierce monsters known as editors. The only way to get an audience for anything you wrote was to get it published as a book, or in a newspaper or magazine. Now anyone could publish anything. 
In 2001 he started writing the best essays you can find on the internet, including the incredible  The Age of the Essay . While not exactly being a blog, we can say that he was one of the pioneers of internet writing.
 In the print era, the channel for publishing essays had been vanishingly small. Except for a few officially anointed thinkers who went to the right parties in New York, the only people allowed to publish essays were specialists writing about their specialties.
 There were so many essays that had never been written, because there had been no way to publish them. Now they could be, and I was going to write them 
This essay is a museum of creativity over the internet! I’m having so much fun reading and commenting it. 
 I’ve worked on several different things, but to the extent there was a turning point where I figured out what to work on, it was when I started publishing essays online. From then on I knew that whatever else I did, I’d always write essays too. 
Writing brings many superpowers. The most powerful one is probably “sharpening your Thinking”.
By writing about things you don’t know (yet) with a curiosity attitude, you explore and prototype working on what might interest you.
Writing is the ultimate Deliberate Practice tool.
 One of the most conspicuous patterns I’ve noticed in my life is how well it has worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren’t prestigious. 
Paul also wrote about how to not chase prestige in the How to do what you Love essay, that I already mentioned several times.
 It’s not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it’s a sign both that there’s something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives.
Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious. 
A single sentence by Paul summarized a 5k words RIP Transparency Manifesto.
Ok, time to talk about the birth of  Y Combinator .
 
Of course it happened “by chance”, but at this point he built his luck enough that opportunities were chasing him, and not the other way around. To improve his writing quality he gave talks, and one of this talks were about “how to start a startup“.
This talk/essay kind of evolved into Y Combinator.
This reminds me of the rarest kind of luck, the one that according to Naval Ravikant finds you.
   
Yes, Paul got lucky a couple of times early on his career.
A bit of “blind luck” at the beginning (especially in the form of being at the right place at the right time), a lot of “persistence luck” during his startup years, but at this point he started attracting luck.
 Luck of others became luck of him as well.
In March 2005, Paul and his three partners (Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Robert Morris) founded Y Combinator, the most famous (the first?) startup accelerator and one of the top Angel/Venture Capital firms in the world.
They gave birth to Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, GitLab, Substack, and Twitch to mention some.
 There are multiple components to Y Combinator, and we didn’t figure them all out at once.
The part we got first was to be an angel firm. In those days, those two words didn’t go together.
There were VC firms, which were organized companies with people whose job it was to make investments, but they only did big, million dollar investments.
And there were angels, who did smaller investments, but these were individuals who were usually focused on other things and made investments on the side.
And neither of them helped founders enough in the beginning.
We knew how helpless founders were in some respects, because we remembered how helpless we’d been. 
This seems obvious, “the norm” today. But just 15 years ago there were no “startup incubator”. They kind of coined the term.
 
 We’d use the building I owned in Cambridge as our headquarters. We’d all have dinner there once a week — on Tuesdays, since I was already cooking for the Thursday diners on Thursdays — and after dinner we’d bring in experts on startups to give talks. 
Yeah, In forgot to mention that he used to host interesting people and their friends in a second-degree dinner habit at one point of his life.
Now I need a time machine more than ever 🙂
 Fairly quickly I realized that we had stumbled upon the way to scale startup funding.
Funding startups in batches was more convenient for us, because it meant we could do things for a lot of startups at once, but being part of a batch was better for the startups too.
It solved one of the biggest problems faced by founders: the isolation. Now you not only had colleagues, but colleagues who understood the problems you were facing and could tell you how they were solving them. 
I have this bittersweet feeling when I read about startups, especially startups in the “good old days” after the DotCom bubble. I’ve never worked at one, even though I think I’m a startup person.
If I’ll leave my tech career for good, not having tried to found a startup would be my biggest regret.
Never say never though 🙂
 I had not originally intended YC to be a full-time job.
I was going to do three things: hack, write essays, and work on YC. […]
In the summer of 2006, Robert and I started working on a new version of Arc. This one was reasonably fast, because it was compiled into Scheme. To test this new Arc, I wrote Hacker News in it. It was originally meant to be a news aggregator for startup founders and was called Startup News, but after a few months I got tired of reading about nothing but startups. Plus it wasn’t startup founders we wanted to reach. It was future startup founders. So I changed the name to Hacker News and the topic to whatever engaged one’s intellectual curiosity. 
 Hacker News (HN) is still, today, the main source of information for Tech topics in general. It’s like a giant tech/startup subreddit.
When my own career was taking off, HN, StackOverflow, and r/programming were my places.
 
Paul worked incredibly hard on YC for several years, and in 2010 Robert Morris, friend, co-founder of YC, and renown hacker (in both the good and the bad meaning of the term) suggested him:
 Make sure Y Combinator isn’t the last cool thing you do. 
This speaks to my heart as well. Commit all of yourself to what you love right now, but please, do respect your future lifetimes.
 It was true that on my current trajectory, YC would be the last thing I did, because it was only taking up more of my attention. It had already eaten Arc, and was in the process of eating essays too. Either YC was my life’s work or I’d have to leave eventually. And it wasn’t, so I would. 
In October 2013 (Paul close to turn 49), with the benevolence of the other founders, Paul offered the presidency of YC to Sam Altman.
Paul still works few hours a week with founders but he’s not deeply involved with YC anymore.
 
I must admit that I didn’t know Paul was not leading YC anymore. I discovered it thanks to this essay.
  What should I do next? Rtm’s advice hadn’t included anything about that. (RIP Note: RTM is Robert Tappan Morris, his co-founder at ViaWeb and YC) I wanted to do something completely different, so I decided I’d paint.
I wanted to see how good I could get if I really focused on it. So the day after I stopped working on YC, I started painting. I was rusty and it took a while to get back into shape, but it was at least completely engaging. 
Still chasing his teenager dreams. It is romantic, it really is. But it’s the dream of a different, younger Paul. Not his anymore.
He had fun for a while though:
 I spent most of the rest of 2014 painting. I’d never been able to work so uninterruptedly before, and I got to be better than I had been. Not good enough, but better.
Then in November, right in the middle of a painting, I ran out of steam. […]
 I stopped working on it and cleaned my brushes and haven’t painted since. 
 Lao Tzu is credited with the quote “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be“.
I think it fits Paul perfectly.
  Attention is a zero sum game. If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that’s not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it’s getting in the way of another project that is.
And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around. 
Oh shit, this hit me like a punch in the face.
There’s no time to waste. Once you “solved” your money problems you must work only on what matters most.
 Derek Sivers would say it’s either Hell Yeah or No.
 I started writing essays again, and wrote bunch of new ones over the next few months. I even wrote a couple that weren’t about startups. 
… and we’re so grateful 🙂
 Then in March 2015 I started working on Lisp again. 
Writing essays, and writing software for his own pleasure, in the least corporate way possible. He’s definitely living the professional life of my dreams.
Many 20-years-younger-than-me readers reached me out to tell me I’m an inspiration for them. It’s an honor, but I don’t feel like I’m worth being put on a (small) pedestal.
I’m only geometrically halfway between you, average Italian young adult, and people like Naval and Paul, whose accomplishments (and Net Worth) are few orders of magnitude mine.
Maybe if Paul would accidentally find this post he’d think I’m exaggerating with my idolatry. He’d probably think that he’s nothing special, that he’s just geometrically halfway between me and Elon Musk for example.
Hey Paul, if you’re reading this: Elon’s nowhere near to you in my Olympus!
(Wait Elon: I didn’t mean Olympus Mons… please, don’t send the Starman wandering on your Roadster to crash into the surface of Mars for the sake of winning this fake competition, please)
 It took 4 years, from March 26, 2015 to October 12, 2019. It was fortunate that I had a precisely defined goal, or it would have been hard to keep at it for so long.
I wrote this new Lisp, called  Bel , in itself in Arc. 
We’re close to the end of this long trip.
Paul reminds us about the importance of Deep Work, and the dangers of Multitasking:
  I had to ban myself from writing essays during most of this time, or I would never have finished. In late 2015 I spent 3 months writing essays, and when I went back to working on Bel I could barely understand the code. Not so much because it was badly written as because the problem is so convoluted. When you’re working on an interpreter written in itself, it’s hard to keep track of what’s happening at what level, and errors can be practically encrypted by the time you get them. 
Luckily for us, the essays he’s written during his ban were still extremely good.
But he’s right: you need to clarify your goals, trim the unnecessary, and focus. Maybe I’m doing too many things, none with the required quality. Thanks once again Paul, I’ll think about it.
 Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there.
I remember taking the boys to the coast on a sunny day in 2015 and figuring out how to deal with some problem involving continuations while I watched them play in the tide pools.
 It felt like I was doing life right.
I remember that because I was slightly dismayed at how novel it felt. The good news is that I had more moments like this over the next few years. 
 Flow State becoming permanent state of being. This is amazing!
 
 In the fall of 2019, Bel was finally finished. […] Now that I could write essays again, I wrote a bunch about topics I’d had stacked up. I kept writing essays through 2020, but I also started to think about other things I could work on.
 How should I choose what to do?  
 I wrote an essay for myself to answer that question and this is the last sentence of it  
And I’m thankful you wrote this amazing essay Paul, which is jumping directly into my Top10 list, among the others listed in the final paragraph of this post.
Fun fact (that I discovered only thanks to this rabbit hole) is that Jessica Livingston, one of YC co-founder, is also Paul’s wife and mother of their children.
I happen to have read few chapters of Founders at Work without knowing the author was Paul’s wife 🙂
   
That’s it!
I hope you enjoyed this trip into one of the most brilliant minds we have the pleasure to share our short ride on this rock around the Sun with.
Here’s a 2014 guest lecture at Stanford University in the How to Start a Startup course by Sam Altman (soon to become Y Combinator President). This lecture became Paul’s “Before The Startup” popular essay. Enjoy:
 
 
If you want to start reading Paul’s essays I recommend the following ones, split by category.
 Creativity and writing:
  The age of the Essay : why you should write. Why writing is amazing. This essay inspired me to start blogging back in 2016.
  How to Write Usefully : an essay should be useful: correct, precise, important, novel.
  Writing, Briefly : write a bad version 1 quickly, and rewrite it many times over.
  Write Like you Talk : write in spoken language.
  Writing and Speaking : good ideas are more valuable for a writer, and Paul wants to improve his idea quality (on the same page, take a look at Derek Sivers: “I’m a very Slow Thinker“).
 Life Design 
  How to do what you Love : if you’re in your late teens or early 20s this is the essay you should read and re-read few times over. How to do what you love.
  What you wish you had known : to be broadcasted in every high school in the world.
  What I worked on : a.k.a. Paulmanack 🙂
  Having Kids : on becoming a parent.
  Life is Short : yeah, literally.
 Critical Thinking:
  How to Think for Yourself : first principle thinking, critical thinking, and much more.
  Keep your Identity small : keep your ego at bay.
  How to study Philosophy : how to tackle the important questions in life in a practical way.
  How to Disagree : A short but effective guide on argumentative Logical Fallacies. Add Steel Manning on top of it and you’re done.
  The Two Kinds of Moderate : Paul defines himself as an “accidental moderate”. Same here.
  The bus Ticket Theory of Genius : what people call “talent” is most of the time just obsession.
  How You Know : and how you learn and retain things.
  Is it Worth being Wise? : about the relationship between wisdom and intelligence.
  The Lesson to Unlearn : stop learning just to get good grades.
  What you can’t say : another great essay on conformism.
 Startupping:
  Before the Startup : advice to wannabe startuppers.
  Do Things that Don’t Scale : it seems counterintuitive, but you don’t have to dream big at the beginning. That’s exactly what I am doing at the moment.
  The Top Idea in Your Mind : what you think about when you take a shower is what you should work on.
  Be Good : or at least don’t stop not being evil (sad face).
  You weren’t meant to have a Boss : exactly!
  How to Make Wealth : warning: wealth is not what you think it is.
Yeah, some of the links point to my previous dissertation on the relative essays, but from there you can find the right link to Paul’s website.
It’s been an amazing trip, and I had a lot of fun!
I hope you enjoyed it as well 🙂
Retire In Progress - The Almanack of Paul Graham
https://retireinprogress.com/the-almanack-of-paul-graham/