Paul Graham

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pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

The pair of thirty-somethings from Birmingham, Alabama, are in. 3 GRAD SCHOOL Around midmorning on the last day of April, after six days of finalist interviews, selections, offers, and acceptances, Paul Graham addresses about one hundred founders who have been admitted for the summer batch. They fill YC’s main hall, which is not large enough to accommodate the entire batch. Two more days of interviews and acceptances will follow, with a repeat of the kickoff meeting. YC has outgrown its current space—walls must be moved to expand the hall before the dinners begin in a month—but in the meantime, only three-fourths of the future class can be assembled in one place. During the interviews, the Paul Graham seated across the table from the founders had not taken pains to seem welcoming.

Ren faced a summer alone, as his girlfriend decided to stay in Boulder. But the cofounders’ worries about whether they had made the right choice fell away within the first few minutes of Paul Graham’s remarks at the kickoff meeting. He said to the group: if you’re not fully focusing on your product to the exclusion of all else, you’re wasting your time. Dwan turned to his cofounder and smiled. That’s why they’d come. 4 MALE In Paul Graham’s view, startups are qualitatively superior to large corporations in just about every way. Leading the list of the startup’s superior attributes is the ability of its founders to choose one another and then hire employees considering nothing but merit: One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses.

“Let me bring in PG.” Paul Graham comes in. The cofounders again state, with enthusiasm, their preference. “We really want to do consumer. We’re really excited by that stuff.” For weeks Graham has been telling them this would be a mistake and yet here they are, blithely talking as if they have never proposed this before. “Moments like these are why I’m glad we invested in sixty-four startups,” he says, deadpan. “If you want to drive off a cliff, go ahead.” He walks out of the room. The founders decide not to do a product for their moms. 7 GENIUS “Launch Fast” is Paul Graham’s mantra. Move from the idea to a minimally functional product as quickly as possible.


pages: 216 words: 61,061

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

As long as all links are created equal, we have a level playing field—a global platform from which ideas can spread. CHAPTER FIVE Startup MBA Part II—Blueprint for Growth A startup is a company designed to grow fast��. The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. Paul Graham, “Startup = Growth” Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, identifies the core defining characteristic of a startup as growth, which makes it fundamentally different from other types of businesses.1 No matter how successful a brand-new brick-and-mortar bakery is, it’s still not a startup because it’s limited by space and muffins and employees, which all require time and capital to grow.

It’ll never completely balance out until you’re wealthy enough to fund your own company, and even then you’ll likely still want quality investors on your team—but assuming you’re still working your way toward obscene wealth, let’s take it one step at a time. Even when you get a commitment, it’s not a done deal until the money is in the bank. Never forget the wise words of Paul Graham: “Deals fall through.” I’ve applied it to every deal I’ve ever done since he first uttered that warning. I even scrawled it on a photo of Paul that I put up in our bathroom after we started talking to Condé Nast about an acquisition. Every day we’d walk in there and see Paul Graham reminding us to stay focused on building a company, not on a potential acquisition deal that could fall through. How America Gets Her Swagger Back People are investing in Internet startups even at a time when the US economy is still finding its swagger.

Steve and I pushed on with our idea, and I began talking to local restaurateurs about their point-of-sale systems and experiences using online ordering, which back then was basically a glorified fax service. I was learning a lot, and all indications were that we’d stay in Charlottesville after we graduated to build our company: My Mobile Menu (MMM!). Our lives changed with a fateful trip to Cambridge that spring of our senior year. One of Steve’s idols, Paul Graham, announced he’d be speaking at Harvard, and Steve’s girlfriend suggested he go. When he sent me the link, I responded with gusto (despite not really knowing who Graham was) because I’d never been to Boston and the theme sounded perfect for us: “How to Start a Startup.” Granted, it was during our spring break, but it’s not like we were going to the beach anyway.


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

By the end of summer, the nineteen guys were so accustomed to hearing Graham say, “Make something people want,” that they put it on a T-shirt. Well, sort of. The shirt’s front bore a Y Combinator logo. On the back were screenprinted the words “Make Something Paul Graham Wants.” * * * By about three weeks into the summer of 2005, Huffman had become accustomed to panicking roughly twice each day, when the name Paul Graham would appear at the top of his Gmail in-box. This was the same man who’d pledged them thousands of dollars of his own money to let them experiment with code all summer, the same man who’d expressed so much enthusiasm for their startup pitch months earlier.

These were curt notes with feature suggestions (users should email each other!), feedback on the name (he hated it), the alien mascot (what about an octopus?), and, mostly, the dreaded “check-in” email. “Paul in one person is his own good cop and his own bad cop,” Ohanian said later that summer. “And there’s this amazing dichotomy between the Paul Graham that we often get emails from and the Paul Graham we know in person.” This third week in June, it finally got to Huffman. One note was particularly harsh. It didn’t just ask for a progress report; it ranted. Graham wrote, in essence, “I don’t know why you haven’t launched yet; either you can’t do it or you are waiting for it to be perfect, and I don’t know which is worse.”

How to Start a Startup an eighty-page thesis: “Our Y Combinator Summer 05 Application,” posted by Alexis Ohanian on November 29, 2010, AlexisOhanian.com. Swartz was pondering: Aaron Swartz, “The Case Against Lawrence Summers,” aaronsw.com, March 9, 2005. “If you want to do it”: Paul Graham, “How to Start a Startup,” essay delivered before the Harvard Computer Society, posted online March 2005. Not Your Standard Fixed-Point Combinator Graham snapped a photo: Paul Graham, “How Y Combinator Started,” blog post on Y Combinator’s former website, March 15, 2012. “How do we even tell people”: Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (New York: Apress, 2007), 448.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61 Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory (New York: Hachette, 2018), 20. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62 Paul Graham, “Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident,” interview by Aaron Harris and Kat Manalac, Startup School Radio, Y Combinator (blog), Feb. 17, 2016, blog.ycombinator.com/paul-graham-startup-school-radio-interview/. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63 Ohanian, Without Their Permission, 47–54. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64 Lagorio-Chafkin, We Are the Nerds, 4. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65 Graham, “Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66 Livingston, interview by the author, June 6, 2019.

A sales force is worth something, I’ll admit. But marketing is increasingly irrelevant. On the Internet, anything genuinely good will spread by word of mouth.” Paul Graham, “Hiring Is Obsolete,” paulgraham.com (blog), May 2005, paulgraham.com/hiring.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70 Paul Graham, “A Unified Theory of VC Suckage,” paulgraham.com (blog), March 2005, paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71 Paul Graham, “Hiring Is Obsolete.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72 CHAPTER NINE: PETER THIEL, Y COMBINATOR, AND THE VALLEY’S YOUTH REVOLT Valentine, interview by the author, April 7, 2018.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66 The entrepreneur was Sean Parker, of whom more in chapter 9. See Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (New York: Hachette, 2018), 318. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67 These quotations are taken from Paul Graham, “How to Start a Startup,” paulgraham.com (blog), March 2005, paulgraham.com/start.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68 Paul Graham, “The Venture Capital Squeeze,” paulgraham.com (blog), Nov. 2005, paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69 Graham elaborated, “Fairchild needed a lot of money to get started. They had to build actual factories.


pages: 199 words: 43,653

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

Ian Bogost, “The Cigarette of This Century,” Atlantic (June 6, 2012), http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-cigarette-of-this-century/258092/. 4. David H. Freedman, “The Perfected Self,” Atlantic (June 2012), http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/06/the-perfected-self/308970/. 5. Paul Graham,“The Acceleration of Addictiveness,” Paul Graham (July 2010; accessed Nov. 12, 2013), http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html. 6. Gary Bunker, “The Ethical Line in User Experience Research,” mUmBRELLA (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://mumbrella.com.au/the-ethical-line-in-user-experience-research-163114. 7. Chris Nodder, “How Deceptive Is Your Persuasive Design?”

Mitchell, “Disclosing Information About the Self Is Intrinsically Rewarding,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (May 7, 2012): 201202129, doi:10.1073/pnas.1202129109. Chapter 8: Habit Testing and Where to Look for Habit-Forming Opportunities 1. Mattan Griffel, “Discovering Your Aha! Moment,” GrowHack (Dec. 4, 2012), http://www.growhack.com/2012/12/04/discovering-your-aha-moment. 2. Paul Graham, “Schlep Blindness,” Paul Graham (Jan. 2012), http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html. 3. Joel Gascoigne, “Buffer October Update: $2,388,000 Annual Revenue Run Rate, 1,123,000 Users,” Buffer (Nov. 7, 2013), http://open.bufferapp.com/buffer-october-update-2388000-run-rate-1123000-users. 4. Tessa Miller, “I’m Joel Gascoigne, and This Is the Story Behind Buffer,” Life Hacker (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://www.lifehacker.co.in/technology/Im-Joel-Gascoigne-and-This-Is-the-Story-Behind-Buffer. 5.

Newsweek (Feb. 27, 1995), http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/582/582%20readings/stoll.pdf. 9. Mike Maples Jr., “Technology Waves and the Hypernet,” Roger and Mike’s Hypernet Blog (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://rogerandmike.com/post/14629058018/technology-waves-and-the-hypernet. 10. Paul Graham, “How to Get Startup Ideas.” Paul Graham (Nov. 2012), http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html.


pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

By now having access to the top minds in Silicon Valley, as Chesky recounted to Hoffman’s students, he asked for advice from a growing panel of high-octane advisers: Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Mason, Paul Graham, and Hoffman. Everyone had a different opinion: Mason, he said, having just gone through the experience, told him Wimdu had the potential to kill Airbnb. Zuckerberg, Chesky said, advised him not to buy, because whoever had the best product would win. In the end, the advice Chesky took came from Paul Graham, who told him that the difference between Airbnb and Wimdu was that Airbnb owners were missionaries, and Wimdu owners were mercenaries. Missionaries, he told him, usually win.

But back then he was twenty-five, had only recently become a first-time CEO, and didn’t have much experience. “I wasn’t someone people pitched,” he says. Chesky and Gebbia were the first founders who had ever asked him for advice. But he had just gone through Y Combinator, the prestigious start-up accelerator program cofounded by the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Paul Graham (Seibel is now CEO of the Y Combinator program). Seibel told them he’d help give them counsel, and as they began to devise something more tangible, he could maybe introduce them to some angels. Chesky had no idea what he was talking about (“I’m, like, ‘Oh my god, this guy believes in angels. What the hell?’”

After what Chesky would later refer to as an “intervention,” Blecharczyk finally agreed to relocate to San Francisco for three months and moved back into the Rausch Street apartment. The band was back together. They had been given another chance. “What Are You Still Doing Here?” Founded in 2005 by Paul Graham and three copartners, Y Combinator very quickly became one of the most prestigious launchpads in Silicon Valley, a “quasi startup factory, university, and venture capital fund rolled into one,” as Fortune called it. It wasn’t easy to get in, but start-ups it deemed worthy got seed funding of $5,000 plus another $5,000 per founder and a priceless wealth of knowledge, connections, operational assistance, and more offered by Graham and his copartners.


Practical OCaml by Joshua B. Smith

cellular automata, Debian, domain-specific language, duck typing, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Grace Hopper, higher-order functions, hiring and firing, John Conway, Paul Graham, slashdot, SpamAssassin, text mining, Turing complete, type inference, web application, Y2K

Unlike Hormel Spam, email spam has been annoying people and reducing productivity since the 1990s. In August 2002, Paul Graham published his essay, “A Plan for Spam,” which outlined a new idea in ending the spam problem. Now almost everyone uses a variant of the idea he popularized, but at the time it was the first. Paul Graham, of course, published his code in Lisp. His “plan” for spam consisted of a Bayesian classifier that put any given email message into one of two buckets: ham or spam. This chapter presents a working OCaml-based classifier and provides for code reuse and modularity. Naive Bayesian Spam Filtration Paul Graham knew he was on to something with his seminal essay.

Instead, probabilities are combined for these kinds of problems as shown in the following equation, which yields a probability of about 15.5 percent: ab P 5 }}} (ab) 1 (1 2 a)(1 2 b) This combination is also why the original Paul Graham article looked at only the first 15 to 20 “interesting” tokens. The way these probabilities combine makes the probability of a given email being spam decrease at a rapid rate. Sampling (and taking only a few samples) is an effective way to combat this problem. However, how you get the samples is an open problem, and we take the top 20 interesting tokens in our example. Talking About the Design Because the algorithm is provided, you do not have to worry about it. You’ll use the original Paul Graham algorithm, even though several additions and improvements have been made to it since the paper was published.

The function after that actually calculates the probability of a given email being spam by finding the probabilities of each token being spam, taking the top 20 tokens (those with the highest probability of being spam), and combining them. There is no danger of this function returning Not A Number because you ensured that the scoring function (the paul_graham function) always returns some nonzero value. let top_n n lst = try let ar = Array.of_list lst in Array.to_list (Array.sub ar 0 n) with Invalid_argument("Array.sub") -> lst;; let calc_email_prob lbuf = let email = buildmap StringMap.empty lbuf in let scored = StringMap.mapi ( fun x va -> paul_graham x goodmap badmap goodcount badcount ) email in let top_vals = top_n 20 (List.rev (List.sort compare (StringMap.fold (fun x y z -> y :: z) ➥ scored []))) in 173 620Xch14final.qxd 174 9/22/06 12:38 AM Page 174 CHAPTER 14 ■ PRACTICAL: A SPAM FILTER let n = List.fold_left (fun x y -> x *. y) 1.0 top_vals in let dn = List.fold_left (+.) 0.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

It wasn’t even a onetime thing: our final product would be informally titled “Plan J,” given the number of turns we had taken since “Plan A.” But there you have it, dear reader: we made a “pivot.” Plié! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. All this would become clear only after numerous strolls with Paul Graham, something we hadn’t even won the right to have yet. Back to me skulking at Adchemy while working on a Y Combinator application. If my reading of YC’s and Paul Graham’s essays was correct, then bomb-throwing anarchist subversive mixed with cold-blooded execution mixed with irreverent whimsy, a sort of technology-enabled twelve-year-old boy, was precisely the YC entrepreneur profile.

Like control of the water supply in some arid agricultural region, whoever had the most upstream control of the water sluice controlled everything else—which is what Y Combinator’s Demo Day represented. Thus, powerful and haughty VCs who wanted to attend Y Combinator’s showcase pitch event had to kneel and kowtow to a sandal-wearing bear of a man with a distaste for bullshit and a flair for the written word. That man was Paul Graham, without question the canniest tech investor in human history. And it was to Paul Graham we first turned with our existential problem in those desperate days. Like all parents, PG pretends he loves all his startup children equally. The reality is some companies get more of his attention than others. Given the conditional nature of his love, it was somewhat in doubt if he would run to AdGrok’s aid, in light of the pissy, messy nature of our conflict.

He was one of the rising stars at Adchemy, due to both his high-level machine-learning brains and his coding skill. Aside from our lunchtime conversations and odd Sunday phone call, though, we hadn’t formulated any clear business idea. Procrastinating on a Monday, I decided to read an essay by Paul Graham. PG, as he’s known to the cognoscenti, founded an online store builder called Viaweb in the early days of the Web, which got bought in the $40 million range in 1997, and eventually became Yahoo Shopping. In his postacquisition freedom, he created one of the more incredible institutions in Silicon Valley: Y Combinator.* Twice a year, every year, Y Combinator accepts a few dozen startup hopefuls into what can only be described as a startup boot camp.† They are given a tiny amount of money and the goal of shipping a product by the end of three months.


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

“No one in their right mind would invest in a service where people publicly post images of their most intimate spaces—their bedroom, their bathrooms, the kinds of rooms that they usually close when people come over—and then over the internet they’re going to invite complete strangers to sleep in their homes.” This was certainly Paul Graham’s position during their interview with the Y Combinator board for a slot in the 2009 winter class. “The very first thing out of Paul Graham’s mouth was, ‘You mean people actually use this? Well, that’s weird,’” Joe recalled during our conversation. Brian, recounting that same moment during a 2015 interview with Reid Hoffman in his Blitzscaling class at Stanford, remembered Graham then asking them a rhetorical question that only a really good story could sufficiently answer: “What’s wrong with them?”

And make no mistake, it is a trick, because your instinct when you’re caught up in the struggle is to resist removing yourself from the action. You’ll need to have just enough wherewithal to let someone or something take you there. The Airbnb guys had Paul Graham at Y Combinator. He’s the one who made them zoom out and recognize that their biggest pool of users was in New York City, and if they were going to solve their growth problems, the solution was likely there, not in Silicon Valley. Gary Hirshberg and Samuel Kaymen didn’t have a Paul Graham, but what they did have was the entrepreneurial version of a near-death experience that took them out of their bodies and forced them to reckon with the carcass of a business that the Vermont dairy had left bloodied and dying on a conference room floor after changing the terms of the deal that was supposed to save Stonyfield.

Passion for the idea may have gotten Bruce out of bed every morning, and it surely helped him persevere whenever he felt like he might quit, but it was never going to sell his product, nor would it make the Sharks any money, because customers don’t pay for passion. They pay for things they can use. The same month the episode of Shark Tank with Bruce Gaither aired, Paul Graham, co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator and a kind of entrepreneurial Confucius, wrote a long essay titled “How to Get Startup Ideas” for his blog. It opens with a discussion of problems and reads like Graham had just watched Bruce on Shark Tank and was talking directly to him. “The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas,” Graham wrote.


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

For academic research supporting the “blame the horse” viewpoint, see Steven Kaplan, Berk Sensoy, and Per Stromberg, “Should Investors Bet on the Jockey or the Horse? Evidence from the Evolution of Firms from Early Business Plans to Public Companies,” Journal of Finance 64, no. 1 (2009): 75–115. “There’s just one mistake”: Paul Graham, “The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups,” Paul Graham blog, Oct. 2016. In a survey of venture capital: Michael Gorman and William Sahlman, “What Do Venture Capitalists Do?” Journal of Business Venturing 4, no. 4 (1989): 231–248. In another survey: Ian Macmillan, Lauriann Zemann, and P. N. Subbanarasimha, “Criteria Distinguishing Successful from Unsuccessful Ventures in the Venture Screening Process,” Journal of Business Venturing 2, no. 2 (1987): 123–137.

“Our original sin”: Author’s interview with Goldberg, which is also the source for the quote in the next paragraph. According to press accounts: Shontell, “Tech Titanic.” While Fab had some issues: Shontell, “Tech Titanic.” As Reid Hoffman says: Hoffman and Yeh, Blitzscaling, pp. 217–218. “A startup is a company”: Paul Graham, “Startup = Growth,” Paul Graham blog, Sept. 2012. Network Effects: For references regarding network effects, see citations in Ch. 2. Fortunately, it’s possible: For further guidance on conducting conjoint analysis, see Elie Ofek and Olivier Toubia, “Conjoint Analysis: A Do-It-Yourself Guide,” HBS course note 515024, Aug. 2014.

In any case, given our penchant for attribution errors—that is, blaming our own failures on uncontrollable circumstances and others’ failures on their personal faults—we should interpret founders’ explanations for startup failure with care. While most investors blame bad jockeys for startup failure, some see slow horses as the main problem. For example, billionaire entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel says that “all failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” Paul Graham, founder of the elite accelerator Y Combinator, likewise holds that having a compelling solution to a customer’s problem—a strong horse—is the key to success: “There’s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you’ll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don’t do.


pages: 287 words: 69,655

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

Venture capitalists and investors have bought into the media-driven narrative that younger people are more likely to build great companies. Vinod Khosla, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and venture capitalist, said, “People under 35 are the people who make change happen . . . people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.” Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, the famous start-up accelerator, said that, when a founder is over the age of thirty-two, investors “start to be a little skeptical.” Zuckerberg himself famously said, with his characteristic absence of tact, “Young people are just smarter.” But, it turns out, when it comes to age, the entrepreneurs we learn about in the media are not representative.

The Insider’s Edge in Entrepreneurship Work Experience of the Founder Probability Business Will Be a 1-in-1,000 Success No experience in field 0.11% Experience in same broad field—but not narrow field 0.22% Experience in same narrow field 0.26% Source: Azoulay et al. (2020) Myth: The Power of the Marginal Suzy Batiz wasn’t just an outsider to the field of fecal-fighting chemistry when she began her business. She was also, by just about any conventional metric, a failure. Recall that she had declared bankruptcy and had numerous business ventures go bust. She was outside the margins of the successful. Could Batiz’s lack of success actually, as strange as it may seem, have been an advantage? Paul Graham, the brilliant essayist and founder of Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator, wrote a fascinating and provocative essay arguing that people who have failed a lot can actually have an edge in entrepreneurship. In the essay, called “The Power of the Marginal,” Graham notes that “great new things often come from the margins.”

Remarkably, they sold enough to pay back their debt. In any case, their business was basically dead when, one evening, Chesky and Gebbia met up with Seibel, the man who had liked them in Austin. Seibel, still impressed with the two young men, suggested that they apply for Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator that was run by his friend Paul Graham in Silicon Valley. The deadline had passed, but Seibel had enough pull with Graham to get their application a look. This was their first big break. Graham didn’t like Chesky’s and Gebbia’s business idea, but, when told of their cereal story, he was impressed with their moxie. Graham gave them $20,000 in seed funding, which was enough to convince the technical cofounder Blecharczyk to rejoin and allowed the team to survive a few months longer.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

All the resources they have in the world, all the billions of dollars, can’t stop people being creative. There are a lot of companies who, in one way or another, have changed the rules of the game for the better. It’s just going to happen. I think we helped a very conservative industry get their minds around that. C H A P T E 15 R Paul Graham Cofounder, Viaweb Paul Graham and his friend Robert Morris started Viaweb in 1995 to make software for building online stores. A few days into writing the first prototype, they had a crazy idea: why not have the software run on the server and let the user control it through their browser? Within weeks, they had a web-based online store builder they could demo to investors.

For Da and PG Contents FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii CHAPTER 1 MAX LEVCHIN PayPal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 CHAPTER 2 SABEER BHATIA Hotmail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 CHAPTER 3 STEVE WOZNIAK Apple Computer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 CHAPTER 4 JOE KRAUS Excite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 CHAPTER 5 DAN BRICKLIN Software Arts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 CHAPTER 6 MITCHELL KAPOR Lotus Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 CHAPTER 7 RAY OZZIE Iris Associates, Groove Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 CHAPTER 8 EVAN WILLIAMS Pyra Labs (Blogger.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 CHAPTER 9 TIM BRADY Yahoo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 CHAPTER 10 MIKE LAZARIDIS Research In Motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 v vi Contents CHAPTER 11 ARTHUR VAN HOFF Marimba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 CHAPTER 12 PAUL BUCHHEIT Gmail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 CHAPTER 13 STEVE PERLMAN WebTV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 CHAPTER 14 MIKE RAMSAY TiVo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 CHAPTER 15 PAUL GRAHAM Viaweb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 CHAPTER 16 JOSHUA SCHACHTER del.icio.us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 CHAPTER 17 MARK FLETCHER ONElist, Bloglines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 CHAPTER 18 CRAIG NEWMARK craigslist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 CHAPTER 19 CATERINA FAKE Flickr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 CHAPTER 20 BREWSTER KAHLE WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 CHAPTER 21 CHARLES GESCHKE Adobe Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 CHAPTER 22 ANN WINBLAD Open Systems, Hummer Winblad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 CHAPTER 23 DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON 37signals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 CHAPTER 24 PHILIP GREENSPUN ArsDigita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 CHAPTER 25 JOEL SPOLSKY Fog Creek Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 CHAPTER 26 STEPHEN KAUFER TripAdvisor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 CHAPTER 27 JAMES HONG HOT or NOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 CHAPTER 28 JAMES CURRIER Tickle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 CHAPTER 29 BLAKE ROSS Firefox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Contents vii CHAPTER 30 MENA TROTT Six Apart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 CHAPTER 31 BOB DAVIS Lycos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 CHAPTER 32 RON GRUNER Alliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com . . . . . . . . . . 427 CHAPTER 33 JESSICA LIVINGSTON Y Combinator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455 Foreword Sprinters apparently reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down.

In big companies, there’s always going to be more politics and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing. Paul Graham Cofounder, Viaweb Preface It’s been more than a year since Founders at Work was first published. What have I learned since? The biggest surprise has been the sheer number of people interested in startups. I know about the ones who apply to Y Combinator, read Hacker News, or attend Startup School, but I could never be sure how many people were interested in startups beyond that core of would-be founders.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Paul later testified at Robert’s trial that his friend was “usually sort of puritanical in his speech. That is why I thought something really major must be wrong.” Something really major was wrong. Paul’s friend had just crashed the internet. The call came at 11:00 p.m., November 2, 1988. Robert Morris Jr., a PhD student in computer science at Cornell, described the unfolding disaster to Paul Graham, a graduate student at Harvard. Earlier that night, around 8:00 p.m., Robert sat at a terminal in Room 4160 of Upson Hall, then home to Cornell’s Computer Science Department, in Ithaca, New York, and remotely logged in to prep.ai.mit.edu, a VAX 11/750 computer at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When the worm first hit, administrators did not know why it had been launched and what damage it was causing. They feared the worst—that the worm was deleting or corrupting the files on the machines it had infected. (It wasn’t, as they would soon discover.) After he first confessed the “fuckup” to his friend Paul Graham, Robert knew he had to do something. Unfortunately, he could not send out any warning emails because Dean Krafft had ordered the department machines to be disconnected from the main campus network and hence the public internet. At 2:30 a.m., Robert called Andy Sudduth, the system administrator of Harvard’s Aiken Computation Lab, and asked him to send a warning message to other administrators with instructions on how to protect their networks.

As the New York Times reporter John Markoff put it, “The case, with all its bizarre twists, illuminates the cerebral world of a father and son—and indeed a whole modern subculture— obsessed with the intellectual challenge of exploring the innermost crannies of the powerful machines that in the last three decades have come to control much of society.” When Robert’s mother was asked whether father and son appreciated their similarities, she responded, “Of course they are aware of it. How could they not be?” Markoff figured out that Robert Morris Jr. had written the worm when Markoff spoke to Paul Graham. Over several conversations, Paul had referred to the culprit as “Mr. X,” but then Paul slipped up and referred to him as “rtm” by accident. Through Finger, a now-defunct UNIX service that acted like an internet telephone book, Markoff discovered that “rtm” stood for Robert Tappan Morris. When Markoff contacted him, Bob saw no point in pretending other- wise, so he confessed for his son.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

In the beginning, every investor the founders approached had turned them down or, worse, ignored them. The company was on the upswing now, but the painful early days were still fresh in their minds, and they weren’t looking for another battle. * * * When the Airbnb founders first met, Paul Graham, the highly regarded founder of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator (YC), told them flat out that their idea was terrible. “People are actually doing this?!” he incredulously asked. When Brian told him yes, people were, in fact, renting out their living spaces for a night, Graham’s response was “What’s wrong with them?”

After all the blood, sweat, and tears, were they really willing to give up a quarter of their company? Ultimately, Brian decided not to buy Wimdu, swayed in part by the arguments of his key advisers. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg counseled him to fight. “Don’t buy them,” he said. “The best product will win.” YC’s Paul Graham gave similar feedback. “They’re mercenaries. You’re missionaries,” he told Brian. “They’re like people raising a baby they don’t actually want.” When Brian reached out to me for my advice on the situation, I too advised him not to buy Wimdu. The key issue wasn’t the price and dilution, but the way a merger could pose impediments to speed and success.

And Facebook built its social network when most people believed social networking to be either useless, a market dominated by MySpace, or both. As we’ve already seen, most great ideas look dumb at first. Being contrarian doesn’t mean that dumb people disagree with you; it means that smart people disagree with you! Remember what happened when Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharcyzk tried to pitch Airbnb? Investors like Paul Graham literally couldn’t imagine why people would ever use the service. This doesn’t happen because investors are dumb; most venture capitalists and angel investors are smart, and most smart, successful people would probably agree that investing in proven ideas is better than investing in unproven ones.


pages: 397 words: 102,910

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

“CO-OPT OR DESTROY” 1 Aaron Swartz, “Checking In,” Schoolyard Subversion, December 23, 2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20020205111032/http:/swartzfam.com/aaron/school/. 2 Aaron Swartz, “Instant Message from LelandJr247,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, December 11, 2003, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001087. 3 Aaron Swartz, “Stanford: Day 1,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, September 21, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20041009200559/http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001418. 4 Aaron Swartz, “Stanford: Day 3,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, last modified June 3, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001421. 5 Interview with Seth Schoen, January 2013. 6 Aaron Swartz, “Stanford: Day 58,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, November 15, 2004, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001480. 7 Wilcox-O’Hearn, “Part 1.” 8 Aaron Swartz, “Home Again,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, February 13, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001558. 9 Aaron Swartz, “News Update,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, February 17, 2003, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000838. 10 Paul Graham, “What I Did This Summer,” PaulGraham.com, October 2005, http://www.paulgraham.com/sfp.html. 11 Paul Graham, “Summer Founders Program,” PaulGraham.com, March 2005, http://paulgraham.com/summerfounder.html. 12 Ibid. 13 Infogami, March 4, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20060323211212/http://infogami.com/. 14 Aaron Swartz, “infogami,” Infogami, circa October 25, 2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20051025013124/http://infogami.com/.

“When I started high school, I remember watching for that point where foreground and background reverse—the point at which school as a use of my time turned into time being what was left over after school. It didn’t take long,” he wrote on his blog. “School is like that. It keeps you running until running is the only thing you know.”8 Not surprisingly, he took the first possible opportunity to run away from Stanford. Swartz was exactly the sort of disaffected, understimulated genius that Paul Graham was hoping to recruit for his latest enterprise. Graham is a computer programmer and entrepreneur who, in 1998, sold the company he cofounded, Viaweb, to Yahoo for $49.6 million in stock. Following the sale, Graham wrote a series of thoughtful essays on computers and the people who loved them. In 2003, Swartz had excerpted one of those essays, “Why Nerds Are Unpopular,” in which Graham suggested that the pointless busywork assigned in the typical American high school only encourages smart, self-motivated teenagers to consider suicide.

Perhaps it’s a bit lofty of a goal, but we say aim high.”14 Graham was intrigued by Swartz, if not necessarily Swartz’s idea, and so he invited the restless Stanford undergrad to come to Cambridge and pitch the concept in person. As Swartz packed for the trip in his Stanford dorm room, he told his roommates that he was off to interview for a summer job. His friend Seth Schoen, amused at the understatement, suggested Swartz explain that the interview was with Paul Graham, the famous programmer and essayist. “Yeah,” Swartz said, “but they won’t know who that is.”15 On his blog, Swartz portrayed the pitch meeting as a comical and bemusing experience. In Swartz’s telling, Graham spent the session bouncing between conversational topics while paying surprisingly little attention to Swartz’s proposal for Infogami—“which he appears not to have read very carefully,” Swartz noted.


pages: 239 words: 64,812

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

Many programmers, on the other hand, regard themselves as artists. Since programmers create complex objects, and care not just about function but also about beauty, they are just like painters or sculptors. The best-known assertion of this notion is the essay “Hackers and Painters” by programmer and venture capitalist Paul Graham. “Of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike,” writes Graham. “What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.”1 According to Graham, the iterative processes of programming—write, debug (discover and remove bugs, which are coding errors, mistakes), rewrite, experiment, debug, rewrite—exactly duplicate the methods of artists: “The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way … You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.”2 Attention to detail further marks good hackers with artist-like passion: All those unseen details [in a Leonardo da Vinci painting] combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.

No one cares how pretty the code is if the program won’t work. The only objective constraint a painter has is making sure the paint physically stays on the canvas (something that has proven surprisingly challenging). Everything beyond that is aesthetics—arranging coloured blobs in a way that best tickles the mind of the viewer.15 Paul Graham has been hugely successful as a programmer and venture capitalist, and his essays about technology and business are sometimes thought-provoking and insightful. But his writings about art are full of majestically fatuous statements delivered with oracular certainty: “One of the reasons Jane Austen’s novels are so good is that she read them out loud to her family.

Ceglowski the painter is skeptical: You can safely replace “painters”… with “poets,” “composers,” “pastry chefs” or “auto mechanics” with no loss of meaning or insight … The reason Graham’s essay isn’t entitled “Hackers and Pastry Chefs” is not because there is something that unites painters and programmers into a secret brotherhood, but because Paul Graham likes to cultivate the arty aura that comes from working in the visual arts.18 My first response to Graham’s programmers-as-artists maneuver was as exasperated as Ceglowski’s, but after the initial irritation had passed I began to think about the specific aesthetic claims Graham was making for code, about what kind of beauty code might possess, and why Graham would want to claim the mantle of artistry.


pages: 52 words: 14,333

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, data science, growth hacking, Hacker News, iterative process, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, market design, minimum viable product, Multics, Paul Graham, pets.com, post-work, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Wozniak, Travis Kalanick

The new marketing mind-set begins not a few weeks before launch but, in fact, during the development and design phase. So we will begin there, with the most important marketing decision you will likely ever make. STEP 1 It Begins with Product Market Fit Make stuff people want. —Paul Graham You know what the single worst marketing decision you can make is? Starting with a product nobody wants or nobody needs. Yet for years, this was a scenario that marketers tolerated and accepted as part of the job. We all told ourselves that “you go to market with the product you have, not the one you want.”

But if you don’t have the time or the access, below are some amazing resources that pick up where this book leaves off. Blogs and Personalities: Andrew Chen’s essays http://andrewchen.co Noah Kagan’s blog http://okdork.com Patrick Vlaskovits http://vlaskovits.com/blog twitter.com/pv Jesse Farmer http://20bits.com Sean Ellis http://www.startup-marketing.com Paul Graham’s essays http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html Aaron Ginn http://www.aginnt.com Josh Elman https://medium.com/@joshelman Or just follow most of these guys as they answer questions at: http://www.quora.com/Growth-Hacking Books: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries The Lean Entrepreneur by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston Viral Loop by Adam L.


pages: 56 words: 16,788

The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator

Historically, the funding options available to these entrepreneurs have been limited—angel investors are few and far between, which left only loans from friends, family, banks, or credit unions. Even when venture capitalists took an interest, the deals they offered often were not favorable for entrepreneurs—they frequently provided more money than was required in order to obtain the largest possible share of the company. Then in 2008, Paul Graham’s Y Combinator launched. Recognizing that the technology landscape had dramatically lowered the cost of starting a business, Y Combinator offered substantially less money—typically less than $20,000—in return for a commensurately smaller share of the company. Its average equity stake was around 6%.

The code may or may not find a life beyond its original home within the startup, but the acquirer benefits either way. Invest in Developer Relations Born out of government propaganda efforts during the first World War, Public Relations is a profession and a practice that every technology vendor invests in today. As Paul Graham writes: One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren’t about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Initially circulated to dozens of websites simultaneously, now available at Eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 19 “Our general counsel and CEO”: “Twitter’s Tony Wang: ‘We Are the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party,’” Josh Halliday, The Guardian, March 22, 2012. 20 “the founding ideal”: Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story: 458. 21 While Apple was: This is according to Dave Morin, a former senior engineer at Facebook, as paraphrased in Levy: 149. 22 “We’re kind of fundamentally”: “The Facebook Dilemma,” PBS Frontline, October 29, 2018. 23 a letter to shareholders: “Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors,” Reuters, February 1, 2012. 24 “There’s this fundamental”: Levy, 7. 25 “The reason we nerds”: Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham, 2004: 9. 26 has said he looks for: “What We Look for in Founders,” Paul Graham, Paulgraham.com, October 2010. 27 “These guys want to”: “What I Did This Summer,” Paul Graham, Paulgraham.com, October 2005. 28 “If you’re less sensitive”: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, 2014: 40. 29 “Max Levchin, my co-founder”: Ibid: 122. 30 A pair of videos: Screenshots documenting the incident can be found at “Kenny Glenn Case / Dusty the Cat,” Knowyourmeme.com, September 10, 2011. 31 made it wildly popular: “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,” Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Data & Society, May 2017. 32 “Ultimately,” Christopher Poole: “The Trolls Among Us,” Mattathias Schwartz, New York Times Magazine, August 3, 2008. 33 Adolescents also have: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert M.

“I do think that’s the engineering mindset—it may even be more a value set than a mindset.” But that idealism—the belief that whichever startups won the most users could and should remake all of society—reflected a hubris that would prove catastrophic. “The reason we nerds didn’t fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead,” Paul Graham, the investor whose incubator had launched Reddit, once wrote. Future Valleyites were “consistently unpopular” as kids, he argued, because “we were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.”

It launched the era of the hoodie-wearing twenty-two-year-old hacker-founder-CEO. The executive team staffed by the founder’s friends. The corporate cultures boldly, proudly defiant of grown-ups in suits. “Why are most chess masters under thirty?” Zuckerberg had once asked a hall of 650 would-be founders at Paul Graham’s startup incubator. “Young people are just smarter.” He urged the audience’s would-be executives to hire accordingly. Graham himself urged fellow investors to swing young, saying in a public talk, “in software, you want to invest in students, not professors.” Business experience, life experience, and advanced degrees were liabilities, not assets.


pages: 280 words: 82,355

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

Which means people with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage.” Paul Graham blog, November 2014. paulgraham.com/mean.html. 33The Anarchist’s Cookbook. Charles Fishman. Fast Company, July 1, 2014. Justin Fox. The HBR Interview: What Is It That Only I Can Do? Harvard Business Review. January-February 2011. 34Paul Graham observes, “It’s unlikely that every successful startup improves the world. But their founders, like parents, truly believe they do. Successful founders are in love with their companies. And while this sort of love is as blind as the love people have for one another, it is genuine.” Paul Graham blog. Paulgraham.com/mean.html. 35This higher purpose doesn’t mean that Apple hasn’t made mistakes over its history, outsourcing some of its manufacturing to plants that operated in manner that calls into question their treatment of employees. 36Amy Wrzesniewski, C.

That’s why people here in Alibaba are united.25 Obsession comes in three, frequently interconnected, forms. The first, and most important, is an obsession with the work itself and resulting product. In many cutting-edge firms and teams, people view work as central to their identities—not something they do but something they are. Paul Graham, a well-known investor in startup firms, suggests that these people are ridiculously committed to what they produce—fixating, for example, on product details that customers don’t even notice. These are also people who persevere and survive when others are defeated by the challenges they face.26 Obsessive people work primarily to satisfy their own needs.

Aug 31, 2015 22See Geoff Colvin, (New York: Portfolio, 2008). 23Andre Agassi, (New York: Vintage, 2010). 24See the group’s website, www.workaholics-anonymous.org/. 25Xiao-Ping Chen, “Company Culture and Values Are the Lifelines of Alibaba: An Interview with Jack Ma, Founder and Executive,” Executive Perspectives, August 2013, www.iacmr.org/V2/Publications/CMI/LP021101_EN.pdf. 26Graham describes the best founders as being cockroach like—in that they will survive anything, including a nuclear winter, while others perish. See Airbnb, “Conversation with Paul Graham,” YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrWavoJsEks. 27“Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird,” McKinsey Quarterly Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb. April 2008. 28Anthony Lane, “The Fun Factory: Life at Pixar,” New Yorker, May 16, 2011. Jon Michaud, “Animated by Perfectionism,” New Yorker, May 16, 2011.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“All managers at Handelsbanken”: Handelsbanken, “Anders Bouvin, new President and Group Chief Executive of Handelsbanken,” press release, August 16, 2016, http://news.cision.com/handelsbanken/r/anders-bouvin--new-president-and-group-chief-executive-of-handelsbanken,c2059556. “do things that don’t scale”: Paul Graham, “Do Things That Don’t Scale,” Paul Graham, http://paulgraham.com/ds.html. recent research by David DeSteno: David DeSteno, The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More (New York: Plume, 2014). “Questions are places in your mind”: Jason Fried, “What are questions?,” Medium, August 1, 2016, https://m.signalvnoise.com/what-are-questions-51c20fde777d.

You’ll be surprised how easy it is to scale something that has been validated and improved by the people who have to use it every day. When your team is taking smaller bites, there’s a feeling of momentum, and the electricity of that is palpable. Other teams see it. They feel it. And they want it for themselves. None of this is to say that scale doesn’t matter, just that it’s not our first priority. Paul Graham, one of the cofounders of the startup incubator Y Combinator, advises his startups to “do things that don’t scale.” What he means is that in the early days of anything new, worrying about scale can prevent us from learning, growing, and being remarkable. Think systemically. Act locally. And let scale happen.

A complete list of influences would be far too long (you should see my Brave New Work library), so I’ll simply thank those who have taught me the most: Dennis Bakke, Steve Blank, Jos de Blok, Bjarte Bosgnes, Jacob Bøtter, Brian Carney, James Carse, W. Edwards Deming, David Dewane, Peter Drucker, Amy Edmondson, Charles Eisenstein, Gerard Endenburg, Robin Fraser, Jason Fried, Isaac Getz, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Deborah Gordon, Paul Graham, Adam Grant, Dave Gray, Gary Hamel, David Heinemeier Hansson, Tim Harford, Frederick Herzberg, Jeremy Hope, Steven Johnson, Daniel Kahneman, Kevin Kelly, David Kidder, Doug Kirkpatrick, Henrik Kniberg, Lars Kolind, John Kotter, Frederic Laloux, Jason Little, David Marquet, John E. Mayfield, Douglas McGregor, Greg McKeown, Melanie Mitchell, Taiichi Ohno, Tom Peters, Niels Pflaeging, Daniel Pink, Adam Pisoni, Eric Ries, Brian Robertson, Ricardo Semler, Peter Senge, Simon Sinek, Dave Snowden, Nassim Taleb, Ben Thompson, Geoffrey West, Meg Wheatley, Keith Yamashita, Jean-Francois Zobrist, and the few I forgot.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Before they left for the interview, Gebbia went to grab boxes of the cereal. Blecharczyk snapped at him. “No, no, no,” he said. “Keep the cereal at home.” Gebbia pretended to acquiesce, then surreptitiously slipped two boxes into his bag anyway. The interview at Y Combinator’s offices in Mountain View was practically hostile. “People are actually doing this?” asked Paul Graham, the program’s legendary co-founder, when the three men described the home-sharing concept. “Why? What’s wrong with them?” Graham, then forty-four, later admitted that he didn’t get it. “I wouldn’t want to stay on anyone else’s sofa and I didn’t want anyone to stay on mine,” he says. But after they turned to go, to Blecharczyk’s consternation, Gebbia brought out the two boxes of cereal and handed them to Graham, who was rightfully confused.

McAdoo and his partners had identified this kind of true grit as the most important attribute in the founders of their successful portfolio companies, like Google and PayPal. Scouting for new opportunities despite the gathering economic storm enveloping the world, McAdoo asked Graham: “So, who in this class of startups is the most mentally, emotionally tough?” “Well, that’s easy,” Paul Graham responded, and he pointed across the room at two designers and an engineer, all hunkered over their laptops. “Hands down, it’s those guys over there.” CHAPTER 2 JAM SESSIONS The Early Years of Uber When you open up that app and you get that experience of, like, I am living in the future, like I pushed a frickin’ button and a car showed up and now I’m a pimp—Garrett is the guy who invented that shit!

McAdoo spent nearly a year sizing up these companies, but he wasn’t convinced that any of them had a particularly novel approach. “It was a very fragmented market and it was never clear how it should be presented online,” he said many years later. “Frankly, I had moved on.” Then, in early 2009, he sat down for coffee with Y Combinator chief Paul Graham and started talking about the mental toughness that founders needed, and Graham pointed across the room to the Airbnb guys as prime examples. McAdoo introduced himself to Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk that day and was struck by their approach. The vacation-rental startup founders he had talked to were trying to make the experience better for travelers; the Airbnb guys wanted to make it better for hosts.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

In fact, my research shows empirically that artistic and cultural creativity acts alongside the high-tech industry and business and finance to power economic growth. The current urban trend in high tech is not so much a startling reversal as a correction of a historical aberration. The venture capital icon Paul Graham saw the writing on the wall in 2006. For all its advantages and power, he wrote, Silicon Valley had a great weakness. This high-tech “paradise,” with its roots in the 1950s and 1960s, had become “one giant parking lot,” he observed. “San Francisco and Berkeley are great, but they’re 40 miles away.

“The change has created a new vocabulary: Yuppification, croissantification, Manhattanization.”22 Techies and tech startups are just the latest players in a much longer running battle over urban space. That said, the incredible wealth generated by tech startups can and does contribute to the growing gaps between the advantaged and less advantaged. It’s not just lefties and activists who are raising concerns. In a hotly debated essay, venture capitalist Paul Graham argued that startup cities and high-tech districts are “manufacturers of inequality,” but nevertheless defended them as the price of progress: “You can’t prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can’t do that without preventing them from starting startups,” he wrote.

Alessandro Piol and Maria Teresa Cometto, Tech and the City: The Making of New York’s Startup Community (San Francisco: Mirandola Press, 2013). 19. “Stern’s Urbanization Project Hosts a Conversation with Richard Florida and Fred Wilson,” NYU Stern School of Business, October 9, 2013, www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/news-events/conversation-florida-wilson. 20. Paul Graham, “How to Be Silicon Valley,” PaulGraham.com, May 2006, www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html. 21. Rory Carroll, “Oakland: The City That Told Google to Get Lost,” The Guardian, February 11, 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/10/city-google-go-away-oakland-california; Ellen Huet, “Protesters Block, Vomit on Yahoo Bus in Oakland,” SFGate, April 2, 2014, http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2014/04/02/protesters-block-vomit-on-yahoo-bus-in-oakland; Rebecca Solnit, “Diary: Google Invades,” London Review of Books, February 7, 2013, 34–35, www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary.


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

If our problems are the result of high discount rates, so that we make decisions that leave us worse off, then procrastination is an evil and we should make every effort to stop. But often we use the term to describe behavior that is not so bad. Sometimes it is good to procrastinate. In 2005, Paul Graham, a computer programmer, investor, writer, and painter, wrote an essay called “Good and Bad Procrastination.” He opens by saying, “The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn’t always bad? Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it.

But if we are working on something important, then does it really make sense to judge us negatively for not working on something less important? If we put off errands because we are trying to cure cancer, are we really procrastinating? And if that is the meaning of procrastination, why is it so bad? For Paul Graham, procrastination is all about trade-offs. We are constantly trading off what we are doing now against what we might do in the future. As long as we are doing that in a reasonable way, it doesn’t matter that we are putting some things off. In February 1996, John Perry, a philosophy professor at Stanford University, finally got around to writing an essay about procrastination for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

He didn’t suffer from self-control problems or impatience generally. He felt bad about not sending the box—we often feel bad about not doing things—but his behavior didn’t suggest that his short-term discount rate was too high. The cost of sending the box was high, and the benefit was low. The box was like one of Paul Graham’s important tasks or John Perry’s book-order forms. Akerlof was in India beginning work on a research program that would lead to dozens of articles, numerous influential books, and a Nobel Prize. For eight months, that box was at the top of Akerlof’s to-do list, a salient task that he put off each day.


pages: 468 words: 124,573

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

Throughout this stage of the journey we’ll focus on how best to use your seed financing to achieve these goals and set the foundations for a solid app company – and put you in a great place to seduce some serious professional investors to allow you to expand your team and accelerate growth. How to Deliver Wow Paul Graham – one of the founders of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s top startup incubator – offers a great morsel of advice after decades of experience delivering software: ‘Don’t build something clever, build what people want.’ The nature of technology – and software companies in particular – has evolved quickly over the last decade.

I get very excited about being able to objectively measure how much users love an app that I have helped build. There is something great about creating a positive feedback loop that constantly drives improvements – improvements that first and foremost enhance the experience for users, and, as a by-product, improve the performance of your business. Another simple piece of advice from Y Combinator’s Paul Graham takes us to the next level of measurement: ‘Build something users love, and spend less than you make.’1 To achieve this you first need not only to be able to continually measure how much users love your app but also to start building a picture around the costs – and revenue – driven by your users.

As we’ve seen, meetings first thing in the morning – daily stand-ups, where developers and designers quickly discuss what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today and anything that’s blocking their progress – are helpful. Facebook has a loose policy called ‘No-Meeting Wednesday’, when engineers are encouraged to ‘stay focused on building products’. Y Combinator’s Paul Graham echoes this idea on his blog: When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster because they disrupt the creative flow. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.6 For a maker, a single meeting can destroy their flow for a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything meaningful in.


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

They’re not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That’s why I’d use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.” – Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator In his autobiography, Mark Twain tells of his childhood friend, Tom Blankenship, who was the inspiration for Huckleberry Finn, a character who was poorly educated and stood outside society but as a result appraised the world and society around him with a clear and critical eye: “In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was.

In contrast, this more detailed recent research suggests that Mozart was in fact wrestling with his composition all day long, sometimes on paper and sometimes in his prodigious memory. Far from being the passive recipient of great work, the truth is that creativity is work – a great deal of it. Grit The magic lies, brace yourself, in determination. When he spoke about the number one quality he looks for in founders, Paul Graham of Y Combinator said: “Determination. This has turned out to be the most important quality in start-up founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That’s the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don’t want founders to be stupid. But as long as you’re over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination.


pages: 232 words: 63,846

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares

Airbnb, content marketing, Firefox, Hacker News, if you build it, they will come, jimmy wales, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Salesforce, side project, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, software as a service, TechCrunch disrupt, the long tail, the payments system, Uber for X, Virgin Galactic, web application, working poor, Y Combinator

So if you’re in enterprise software, [initial traction] may be two or three early customers who are paying a bit; if you’re in consumer software the bar might be as high as hundreds of thousands of users. You can always get more traction. The whole point of a startup is to grow rapidly. Getting traction means moving your growth curve up and to the right as best you can. Paul Graham, founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, puts it like this: A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth.

Phase I is very product focused and involves pursuing initial traction while also building your initial product. This often means getting traction in ways that don’t scale—giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you have relationships with, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers. As Paul Graham said in his essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale”: A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist.

CHAPTER SIX Targeting Blogs Targeting blogs prospective customers read is one of the most effective ways to get your first wave of customers. However, this traction channel can be difficult to scale in phases II and III due to the limited number of relevant high-traffic blogs. That’s okay. Not all traction channels are infinitely scalable. In fact, using tactics that don’t scale is one of the best ways to get your first customers. Paul Graham put it like this: The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you’re going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you’re going to do initially to get the company going.


pages: 309 words: 65,118

Ruby by example: concepts and code by Kevin C. Baird

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, digital map, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fudge factor, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, MVC pattern, Paul Graham, Perl 6, premature optimization, union organizing, web application

If you use CGI, you could write part of your web application in Python in order to use that library. You might also have a section of your web application that is highly speed critical, so you could write that part in C for execution speed, and the rest in Ruby for development speed. This is exactly the reason that Paul Graham and his colleagues chose to use a combination of Lisp and C for their company Viaweb, which eventually became Yahoo! Stores. They were able to do so because the CGI specification holds across multiple languages. Preparation and Installation Before we get going with Ruby and CGI, we’ve got to do a little work to get our webserver ready.

Lisp has been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer.”3 It is properly understood as a family of languages or a language specification, rather than a single language. It is also diverse enough to resist many classification attempts, but for our purposes, the Lisps can be thought of mainly as functional languages with weak, dynamic typing. Renowned Lisper Paul Graham describes “What Made Lisp Different” at http://paulgraham.com/ diff.html, and it’s interesting to note that Ruby shares all of these features except for Lisp’s peculiar syntax. Lisp’s syntax (or lack thereof) is probably its most noteworthy feature, at first glance. Lisp code consists of bits of data bound by opening and closing parentheses.

Lisp code consists of bits of data bound by opening and closing parentheses. These bits are called lists, and they give Lisp its name (which 2 You can read more about Parrot at http://www.parrotcode.org; I’ll cover Python later in this appendix. 3 Dutch computer science Edsger Dijkstra said this; you can find this and other interesting quotes compiled by Paul Graham at http://www.paulgraham.com/quo.html. Ho w D oes R ub y C om pa re t o O th er L an g ua ges ? 263 comes from LISt Processing).4 Having a syntax that is representable as a data structure within the language itself is Lisp’s most defining characteristic. Arguably, another language that implemented this same feature would not be a distinct language per se, but rather another dialect of Lisp.5 A good argument can be made that Ruby tries to take concepts from Lisp and present them within a more user-friendly framework that also takes advantage of good ideas from object orientation, as well as good text manipulation.


pages: 138 words: 40,787

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

In the next chapter we will take a look at the investment attractiveness of the M2M space. 27 Luke Dempsey, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Complete and Annotated … All the Bits,” Python Productions, Ltd., 159. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilimanjaro_Expedition.) 28 Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Chapter 7 WHERE TO INVEST All creative people want to do the unexpected. ~ Hedy Lamarr According to Paul Graham of Y Combinator, the best way to get start-up ideas is not to think of start-up ideas. Instead, one should focus on problems one has firsthand experience with.29 This is great advice for both start-up and corporate entrepreneurs, but what about investors? How would investors know where to put their money if they are not familiar with the space and specific problems?

Specifically, on the data mining and statistical analysis of data as well as on the data acquisition side — hardware — that’s where we believe the most opportunities for innovation and investment are. But at the end of the day, the best investment opportunities are going to be driven by very well-defined problems that the Internet of Things will help solve: increased visibility, increased productivity, reduced guesswork, better risk management, and better connection to our environment. 29 Paul Graham, “How to Get Startup Ideas,” November 2012. http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html. 30 Iain Morris, “Intelligent Systems to Drive Value in M2M Market: IDC,” Telecom Engine, June 4, 2013. http://www.telecomengine.com/article/intelligent-systems-drive-value-m2m-market-idc. 31 Singularity University, “What Is Singularity University?”


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

This was another opportunity to learn—this time through presenting Airbnb’s story and getting feedback and insights from peers. These dinners created a relentless weekly rhythm of stepping back to reflect, getting feedback and ideas, and heading back to work. Another way of learning was through tailored expert advice. The Airbnb founders gained two pivotal insights from Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham that critically reframed their conception of what to do. One piece of advice was counterintuitive—forget about growing Airbnb, and instead focus on creating the perfect Airbnb experience. Graham’s argument was, “It’s better to have a hundred people love you than to have a million people like you.”

In fact, Airbnb has more guests over fifty-five years old than between eighteen and twenty-five, and accommodations, including Italian villas and beachfront bungalows, are not always cheap. Pursuing many ways of learning increases the likelihood of creative insights. The founders of Airbnb could not have predicted, for example, that Paul Graham’s advice would be so essential to reimagining their simple rules. Yet by pursuing many avenues of learning, the founders improved their odds of experiencing the aha moments. Multitasking in learning also works because when people learn the same lesson in different ways, the learning is reinforced and better learned.

. [>] Because of the success: Ibid. [>] Y Combinator is a “seed accelerator”: Benjamin L. Hallen, Christopher B. Bingham, and Susan L. Cohen, “Do Accelerators Accelerate? A Study of Venture Accelerators as a Path to Success” (working paper, University of Washington, Seattle, 2013). [>] At this point: Paul Graham, October 2013, “What Happens at Y Combinator,” http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html, accessed April 28, 2014; and Freedman, 2013, “YC Without Being in YC,” http://blog.42floors.com, accessed April 28, 2014. Firsthand account of how former Y Combinator entrepreneurs mimicked the Y Combinator experience by pretending that they had just been accepted again. [>] Another way of learning: Derek Thompson, “Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on Building a Company and Starting a Sharing Revolution,” Atlantic, August 13, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-on-building-a-company-and-starting-a- sharing-revolution/278635/. [>] As Brian recalled: Ibid. [>] Like clockwork: Tame, “From Toilet Seats to $1 Billion.” [>] The founders coupled these: Jessie Hempel, “More Than a Place to Crash,” Fortune, May 3, 2012, http://fortune.com/2012/05/03/airbnb-more-than-a-place-to-crash/. [>] The founders also had: Vella and Bradley, “Airbnb CEO—‘Grow Fast but not Too Fast.’” [>] Airbnb ended up with: Tomio Geron, “Airbnb Hires Joie de Vivre’s Chip Conley as Head of Hospitality,” Forbes, September 17, 2013, http://www.Forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/17. [>] In fact, Airbnb: Salter, “Airbnb: The Story Behind the $1.3bn Room-Letting Website.” [>] Airbnb has become: Thompson, “Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on Building a Company and Starting a Sharing Revolution.” 8.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The bigger their success, the more exaggerated their claim to being serial failures. “How I Failed,” O’Reilly thus titled a much-hyped 2013 keynote speech at one of his own successful events.4 But O’Reilly has some stiff competition in this failure Olympiad. Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, advises entrepreneurs to “fail fast.”5 Paul Graham, a multimillionaire angel investor, calls his incubator of startup Internet ventures, which has hatched many successful startups, including Alexis Ohanian’s Reddit, “Failure Central,”6 while Dave McClure, another wealthy angel, not to be outfailed by his successful rival, talks up his equally successful 500 Startups incubator as “Fail Factory.”7 Indeed, the cult of failure has become such a mania in the Valley that there is now even an entire event, a San Francisco conference called FailCon, dedicated to its veneration.

Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, advises entrepreneurs to “fail fast.”5 Paul Graham, a multimillionaire angel investor, calls his incubator of startup Internet ventures, which has hatched many successful startups, including Alexis Ohanian’s Reddit, “Failure Central,”6 while Dave McClure, another wealthy angel, not to be outfailed by his successful rival, talks up his equally successful 500 Startups incubator as “Fail Factory.”7 Indeed, the cult of failure has become such a mania in the Valley that there is now even an entire event, a San Francisco conference called FailCon, dedicated to its veneration. But, of course, winner-take-all entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffman, Tim O’Reilly, and Paul Graham know as much about failure as Michael and Xochi Birch know about running a village pub. And so to find failure, a genuine Failure Central, I’d flown 2,700 miles east, from San Francisco to Rochester. But, on my arrival, the only hint of “failure” in the airport terminal was the glossy cover of a technology business magazine displayed in the window of an airport bookstore.

Having bought a $37.5 million, 89-acre property in Half Moon Bay, a coastal town just south of San Francisco, Khosla unilaterally declared independence and blocked all public access to a much-loved local beach beside his property.74 Balaji Srinivasan, a Stanford University lecturer and startup entrepreneur, has taken the secession fantasy one crazy step further. At one of Paul Graham’s “Failure Central” Y Combinator startup events, Srinivasan pitched the concept of what he called “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit,” a complete withdrawal of Silicon Valley from the United States. “We need to build opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology,” is how he described a ridiculous fantasy that would turn Silicon Valley into a kind of free-floating island that Wired’s Bill Wasik satirizes as the “offshore plutocracy of Libertaristan.”75 And one group of “Libertaristanians” at the Peter Thiel–funded, Silicon Valley–based Seasteading Institute, founded by Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and the grandson of the granddaddy of free-market economics, Milton Friedman, has even begun to plan floating utopias that would drift off the Pacific coast.76 Behind all these secession fantasies is the very concrete reality of the secession of the rich from everyone else in Silicon Valley.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

I grant that there may be a formula in enterprise software where you take domain expertise and leverage it. But in consumer and micro merchant and SMB [small/medium business] companies, which are canonically what I have invested in, I don’t think expertise helps. When looking to invest in founders, I look for founder traits, not the founder-market fit. Paul Graham wrote a great blog post I really love about being relentlessly resourceful. I think that’s an absolute ingredient. I think IQ is pretty important. You need to see things other people just don’t see. Ultimately, the best description of what I’m looking for is people who can navigate this intellectual maze.

Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be better off if they let their startup do the work—if they started by understanding why their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this well to investors. —PAUL GRAHAM, CO-FOUNDER OF Y COMBINATOR Ryan Hudson was ordering pizza. He really wished he had a coupon. Money was tight after several back-to-back startup failures, and he’d become accustomed to cost-saving measures. Recently, he’d called the cable company, the internet provider, and every one of his utility providers to negotiate his monthly bill down by $200 in total.

We couldn’t raise a single dollar and we were a year and a half into the business.”2 To get themselves out of debt, the founders started selling boxes of cereal branded with the names of the presidential candidates in the 2008 election, Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s, at forty dollars a box. They made over $30,000 in profits from the cereals, which helped them continue building Airbnb. Eventually, a year and a half after founding, the startup landed a spot in Y Combinator. Paul Graham accepted them specifically because they were “cockroaches”: they were tenacious and had tried everything to survive, including selling cereal. Graham was looking for cockroaches during the 2008 recession. During a YC dinner, the co-founders met Greg McAdoo, a partner from Sequoia Capital, and they walked up to pitch him.


pages: 567 words: 122,311

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

You need to step back, ignore all the details, and just think about the really big components. When you reduce things to their basic building blocks in this way, you come up with only a few fundamental business models on the Web. Interestingly, all of them share some common themes. First, their aim is to grow (in fact, Paul Graham says that a focus on growth is the one defining attribute of a startup).[21] And second, that growth is achieved by one of Eric Ries’s fundamental Engines of Growth: an increase in stickiness, virality, or revenue. Each business model needs to maximize the thrust from these three engines in order to flourish.

Remember, though, that while you might turn immediately to the chapter for your business model, there’s always some overlap and relevant metrics in other business models that should be helpful to you. So we encourage you to look at what’s normal for other business models, too. Growth Rate Investor Paul Graham makes a good case[78] that above all else, a startup is a company designed to grow fast. In fact, it’s this growth that distinguishes a startup from other new ventures like a cobbler or a restaurant. Startups, Paul says, go through three distinct growth phases: slow, where the organization is searching for a product and market to tackle; fast, where it has figured out how to make and sell it at scale; and slow again, as it becomes a big company and encounters internal constraints or market saturation, and tries to overcome Porter’s “hole in the middle.”

One study showed that Pinterest users spend 14 minutes on the site each day, Tumblr users spend 21 minutes a day, and Facebook users spend an hour a day on the site.[127] Bottom Line You’ll have a very good indicator of stickiness when site visitors are spending 17 minutes a day on your site. Reddit Part 1—From Links to a Community From humble beginnings as a startup in the first cohort of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator accelerator, reddit has grown to be one of the highest-traffic destinations on the Web. Reddit began as a simple link-sharing site, but over the years it’s changed significantly. “A lot of features were just us sitting down and thinking, ‘what would be cool to have?’” says Jeremy Edberg, who was reddit’s first employee and ran infrastructure operations.


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Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Marc Andreessen By 2006, Silicon Valley had fully shaken off its post-dot-com-bubble hangover and was entering a new golden age. The “Web 2.0” wave had already made companies like Skype, Pandora, and Yelp into household names, Facebook and Twitter were just starting their rise to ubiquity, and Apple was putting the final touches on the world’s first smartphone. The venture capitalist Paul Graham captured the mood in a speech he gave that year called “How to Be Silicon Valley.” Between deriding the stifling effects of bureaucracy and celebrating the valley’s “rich people and nerds,” Graham argued, “a place that tolerates oddness in the search for the new is exactly what you want in a startup hub, because economically that’s what startups are.

November 11, 2014. https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-the-origin-story-2014-10 39He would later take credit: Elon Musk. “In the Beginning.” Tesla Motors Blog (since deleted, accessed via web.archive.org). https://web.archive.org/web/20090624221445/http://www.teslamotors.com/blog2/?p=73 Chapter 4 41“How to Be Silicon Valley”: Paul Graham. “How to Be Silicon Valley.” PaulGraham.com, May 2006. http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html 43As Tarpenning explained in Charles Morris’s history of the company: Charles Morris. Tesla Motors: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool and Sparked the Next Tech Revolution, excerpted in Charged Electric Vehicles Magazine, September 7, 2014. https://chargedevs.com/features/new-book-excerpt-the-early-days-of-tesla/ 44This process started with the development of a digital motor controller: Darren Bryant.

Edwards, 56 Department of Energy (DOE) loans from, 68–89, 118, 120, 121 as shareholder of Tesla, 82–86, 90 detractors, 102–108 Detroit, Michigan, 2, 4 Detroit Auto Show, 68 disruptive innovator, Tesla as, 195–197 DOE. see Department of Energy doors falcon-wing, 137–141 gull-wing, 136–137 Downey, California, 76 Drori, Ze’ev, 49–50, 65 Dunlay, Jim, 58 E Eberhard, Martin as advocate of Tesla, 67 founding of Tesla by, 21–24, 27–31, 35, 37–40 ouster of, 44–48, 50, 79 EBITDA, 215 Eisner, Michael, 45 Electrek, 97–101 electric vehicles (EVs), 3, 12–14, 24, 77, 202, 207 Energy Independence and Security Act, 67 Enron, 105 environmental issues, 112–113, 119 Esquire, 61 e-tron quattro, 203 EV1, 13, 24, 34 EVs. see electric vehicles F Facebook, 41 Falcon One, 28 falcon-wing doors, 137–141 FCW (Forward Collision Warning), 125 Ferrari, 60, 200–201 Fiat, 11, 34 financial crisis (2008), 75–76, 105 fixed costs, 54 Flextronics, 47 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), 72, 131 Ford, Henry, 56, 194 Ford Focus, 159 Ford Fusion, 75 Ford Motor Company, 3, 4, 56, 75, 181, 194, 204, 216 Forward Collision Warning (FCW), 125 Founders Edition Roadster, 215 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 72, 131 Fremont, California, 53, 206, 218 funding (fundraising), 29, 40, 44–47, 50, 69–71, 85 G Gage, Tom, 27–29 Galileo Galilei, 105 Gao Yaning, 128 Gartner, 175 gas prices, 11, 14 General Motors (GM). see also specific models bankruptcy and bailout of, 2–3, 88 and electric cars, 11–13, 34 Impact concept car, 24 and Lotus, 36, 37, 53 OnStar system, 194 Germany, 203, 204 Ghosn, Carlos, 197–200 Gigafactory, 77, 183–184, 189, 218 GM. see General Motors G170J1-LE1 screens, 228 Goodwill Agreements, 149 Google, 44, 120–124, 171 Graham, Paul, 41 “A Grain of Salt” (blog post), 152–153 Grant, Charley, 100 “green car” companies, 11 GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT), 95–97 gull-wing doors, 136–137 H Harrigan, Mike, 30 Harris Ranch, 115–116, 119 Harvard Business School, 195 herd mentality, 96 Hethel, England, 49 Hoerbiger, 138–140 Holzhausen, Franz von, 137 Honda, 201 “How to Be Silicon Valley” (speech by Paul Graham), 41 Hyperloop, 16, 88, 217 I IDEO, 38 IGBT (insulated-gate bipolar transistor), 49 Impact concept car, 13, 24 imperfection, 55 incumbent companies, 196–197 innovation, 193–210 by Citroën, 193–195 disruptive, 195–197 by Carlos Ghosn, 197–200 by Tesla, 201–210 “Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things” (Christensen), 196–197 The Innovator’s Dilemma, 197 insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), 49 internal conflict, 29–32 InvestorsHub, 99 Israel, 4, 12 J Jaguar I-PACE, 202–203 Jivan, Jon, 98 Jonas, Adam, 172 K kaizen, 58, 60 Krafcik, John, 176 L Lambert, Fred, 98–101 Lamborghini, 204 Land Rover, 60 lead-acid batteries, 23–24, 197 Leech, Keith, 146–147, 156 Level 4 autonomous cars, 175–176 Level 5 autonomous cars, 170, 172, 175–176, 178 Lexus, 204 lithium-ion batteries, 22–24, 26, 34 “long tailpipe,” 110 losses, 11 Lotus, 36–37, 38, 43, 44, 49, 59 Lotus Elise, 28, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43 Lotus Evora, 59 “Ludicrous Mode,” 16 Lyons, Dave, 64 M Mac, Ryan, 218 Magna Powertrain, 48–49 Magna Steyr, 202 manufacturing, 180–192 of batteries, 183–184, 188–189 and continuous reiteration of Model 3s, 182–192 Elon Musk on, 180–182 preproduction as, 187–188 Marchionne, Sergio, 11 market saturation, 10 Marks, Michael, 47, 48, 50 Mars, 25 “Master Plan, Part Deux” (blog post), 164 McLaren F1, 25–26, 39 media hype, 88, 90–91, 93–95, 97–102, 130, 211–224 and base version of Model 3, 220–224 Elon Musk as cause of, 217–224 at Semi/Roadster unveiling, 211–215 as stock price stimulant, 215–216 Menlo Park, California, 28, 58 Michelin, 194 Miles, 11 Mobileye, 167–170 mobility technology, 11 Model 3, 8–10, 180–182 base version of, 220–224 production of, 182–192 Model S, 15, 74–75, 81–84, 90, 99, 135–137. see also Whitestar Model T, 56 Model X, 101, 134–145 Model Year 2008, 69 Moggridge, Bill, 38–39 Montana Skeptic, 105–108 Morgan Stanley, 172 Morris, Charles, 43 Motley Fool, 98 Musk, Elon on belief, 21 and branding of Tesla, 16–17 as cause of media hype, 217–224 childhood and personality of, 25–26 clientele knowledge of, 60 “cluelessness” of, 33–35 and culture of Tesla, 60 and Daimler, 68 detractors of, 102–108 and electric cars, 25–28 and Elise-Roadster conversion, 38–39 on financial viability of Tesla, 72–73 and fundraising, 44, 69–71 and loans, 70, 78 on manufacturing, 180–181, 190 on Model 3, 8–9 on Model S, 74 on Model X, 144–145 on obstacles faced by Tesla, 46 offers of, to sell Tesla, 120–121 on price increases, 71 and production process, 142, 165 as public figure, 15 on Series D, 47 and JB Straubel, 26 and stress, 64–67, 77–78 and Superchargers, 109–119 and Tesla cofounders, 29–32, 45, 47–48 on Tesla’s master plan, 21–22, 30–31, 58, 163 at town hall meeting, 70–71 and Whitestar, 51 Musk, Errol, 25 Musk, Justine, 25–26 Musk, Kimball, 65 N National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 66 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 127, 131–132, 149–162 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 132, 167 NDAs. see non-disclosure agreements Neil, Dan, 59 Neuralink, 16, 217 New Mexico, 48, 67 New United Motor Manufacturing, 53 New York Times, 2, 30, 66 NHTSA. see National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Nissan Leaf, 198 Nissan-Renault Alliance, 197–200, 207 Noble M12, 27 nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), 5, 149–151, 152, 155–156 Norway, 12 NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), 132, 167 NUMMI plant, 76, 81 Nürburgring, 203 NuvoMedia, 23 O Occupy Wall Street, 80–81 Ohno, Taiichi, 57 OnStar, 194 Opel, 36 Opel Speedster, 36 OpenAI, 217 operating profits and losses, 89 P Packet Design, 23 Page, Larry, 44 Paine, Chris, 13, 64, 71, 73–74 Panasonic, 77 Pandora, 41 PayPal, 16, 28 Peak Oil, 11 Pinnacle Research, 25 platforms, 135–136 Porsche, 24, 26, 39, 203–204 Porsche 911, 39 power electronics module (PEM), 49 Powertrain Technology, 58 Prenzler, Christian, 100 preproduction, 187–188 price increases, 71 Prius, 24 profitability, 81–82, 89 Project Better Place, 4–5, 11–12 public, going, 80–81 Q quality, 55, 59–60 Quality Control Systems, 131 R Ranger, 60 Reddit, 97, 99–100 reliability, 143 Renault Kwid, 207 Renault Zoe, 198 Reuters, 66 Revenge of the Electric Car (film), 64 Roadster as Elise conversion, 37–39 launch of, 14–15, 29, 42, 47–51, 59–61 new model of, 211–215 profitability of, 71–72, 81 securing investments for, 44, 45 and Tesla startup, 2–3 robotaxis, 166–167 Rogan, Joe, 219 Rosen, Harold, 26 Rosen Motors, 26 S Saleen, 99–100 San Carlos, California, 28 San Francisco, California, 59 San Jose, California, 75–76 Santa Monica, California, 45 Saudi Arabia, 218–219 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 45 Scion xB, 27 Seagate, 23 “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” (blog post), 21 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 67, 160, 219–220, 224, 234 Seeking Alpha, 103, 105–107 self-driving cars, 120–133 Semi, 211–215 Senate Finance Committee, 67 Series A funding, 29 Series C funding, 40, 44–45 Series D funding, 46, 47 Series E funding, 50 S 40 model, 84 Shashua, Amnon, 167–170 Silicon Valley, 4, 14, 15, 17, 45, 53, 54, 58 Siry, Darryl, 65, 73 60 Minutes, 66 S 60 model, 84 “skateboard” chassis, 134, 202 Skype, 41 Smart (Tesla car), 68 software startups, 54–55 SolarCity, 110–111, 164 solar power, 109–114 Sorbonne University, 66 South Africa, 25 SpaceX, 15, 16, 25, 28, 39, 66, 78, 100 Spiegel, Mark, 102–103 Stanford University, 4, 26, 27, 28, 121 startups, 41–43, 59, 62, 76 “stealth recalls,” 160–161 stock price, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 StockTwits, 98 Straubel, JB, 26, 28, 48 SunCube, 146–147 Superchargers, 109–119 SYNC, 194 T TACC (Traffic Aware Cruise Control), 125 Tama, 197 Tarpenning, Marc, 21–24, 27, 31, 37, 43, 113 Tea Party movement, 80–81 “Tesla Death Watch” (blog posts), 3 Tesla Energy Group, 68 Tesla Founders Blog, 50 Tesla Motors. see also specific headings and barriers to entry, 35, 56 branding of, 16–17, 18, 59–63, 225–234 and collisions, 127–133 concept of, 34–36 continuous improvement at, 58 culture of, 51–52, 60 detractors of, 102–108 as disruptive innovator, 195–197 EBITDA of, 215 and environmental issues, 112–113, 119 “factory-less” model of, 35–36 innovation by, 201–210 internal conflict at, 29–32 legacy of, 19 Model 3 introduced by, 8–10 personal approach to public relations, xii raising capital for, 44, 69–71, 85 “shaky ground” of, 4, 5 as startup, 2–3 stock price of, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 strategy of, 22 and Supercharger network, 109–119 and whistleblowers, xii Tesla Motors Club (TMC), 95–97 Teslarati, 100 “Tesla stare,” 60 “Tesla Suspension Breakage: It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Coverup” (blog post), 151 Thailand, 48, 218 Think Global, 11, 67 Thrun, Sebastian, 121 TMC (Tesla Motors Club), 95–97 Too Big to Fail, 91 Toyoda, Akio, 76 Toyoda, Sakichi, 57 Toyota, 184, 201. see also specific models auto sales, 11 contract with, 81, 83 electric vehicles of, 159–160 and 2008 financial crisis, 76–77 pragmatism of, 209 safety scandal, 149–151 Toyota Previa, 214 Toyota Production System (TPS), 56–60, 76–77, 142, 183 Toyota Way, 58, 77 TPS. see Toyota Production System Traction Avant, 193–194 trading volume, 89 Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC), 125 The Truth About Cars (TTAC) (blog), 1–3 Tse, Bernard, 67 turnarounds, financial, 83–87 Twitter, 41, 98, 104–108, 113, 152, 156, 217–220, 224, 236 tzero, 23–24, 26, 27, 31, 37 V Valor Equity Partners, 47 Vance, Ashlee, 38, 47, 66, 73, 84, 120–121, 137, 227–228 VantagePoint Capital Partners, 66 variable costs, 54 V8 engine, 62 Volkswagen, 11, 171, 203–205 W Wall Street Journal, 2, 18, 100, 129, 132, 168, 187 Waymo, 173–174 Web 2.0, 41 Weintraub, Seth, 97–98, 101 Wharton School of Business, 25 whistleblowers, xii Whitestar, 46–48, 51, 65, 67, 68, 73 Who Killed the Electric Car?


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

As my friend told me that day in Rock Creek Park: “Not everyone does deep work all the time.” The implication of this final quip is that there’s a small group of professions that specifically value uninterrupted hard thinking—writers, programmers, scientists—but for most positions, being in the thick of things is a major part of the job. We can find a classic example of this split in Paul Graham’s often cited 2009 essay, “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.”17 In this piece, Graham notes that for a manager, meetings are a big part of what they do during the day, while for a maker, a single meeting can be “a disaster,” as it breaks up their ability to work continuously on a difficult problem.

As we learned from the example of IT ticketing systems, if we can somehow create space between communication and execution, people in these roles would find the tasks before them more easily dispatched. This discussion of minders is important because this professional role is about as far as you can get from Paul Graham’s vision of makers dedicating entire afternoons to solving a single challenging problem, and yet, even for the much more varied and administrative obligations of minders, the hyperactive hive mind still ends up causing problems. To conclude this investigation on the hive mind and effectiveness, however, we’ll veer sharply back toward the focused end of the spectrum and look closer at what’s actually at stake when constant communication invades the world of people who create valuable things with their minds

You should notice a difference, as the letter and number counting draw on two different networks. 16. Sophie Leroy, “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work? The Challenge of Attention Residue When Switching between Work Tasks,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109, no. 2 (July 2009): 168–81. 17. Paul Graham, “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule,” July 2009, www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html. 18. “Marshall Retires as Chief of Staff,” George C. Marshall Foundation, November 17, 2017, www.marshallfoundation.org/blog/marshall-retires-chief-staff/. 19. For more on George Marshall’s career timeline, see “George C.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

“The unhelpful no” If you’re the kind of person who might get easily discouraged or talked out of your idea, you need to keep your idea away from people whose opinions you have an emotional investment in. 2 Do Things That Don’t Scale The meeting definitely did not go as he expected. In 2009, Brian Chesky, a young entrepreneur with a big idea, was meeting with Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, the renowned Silicon Valley startup accelerator. Brian’s company, Airbnb, was partway through the Y Combinator program, and he was ready to wow Paul with his vision of a bright future for an unconventional new business that enabled people to rent out their spare rooms or sofa beds to total strangers.

By this line of thinking, the subtle details of a product or customer experience matter less than just finding some way to make a splash and get on the radar. Handcrafting? Most MBA students will tell you, “That doesn’t scale.” But ignoring those details won’t work—not in the long run, says Y Combinator’s president from 2014 to 2019, Sam Altman. An acolyte of Paul Graham’s, Sam adhered to the core Y Combinator dictum: It’s better to have one hundred users who love you than a million users who just kind of like you. It’s counterintuitive. You may be thinking If a million people “kind of like” my product enough to buy it, isn’t that better for business than a hundred obsessive oddballs?

Because these companies were trying to do something hard, and potentially game-changing, they didn’t have as much competition as all the copycat startups. One such company was Airbnb. * * * — When Brian Chesky and his partner, Joe Gebbia, got to New York, at the urging of Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, they had a clear mandate: Go to your users. So they contacted their local hosts and offered to send professional photographers to take pictures for the Airbnb listing. Who were the photographers? Brian and Joe. One particular visit stands out in Brian’s memory. “It’s winter. It’s snowing outside and we’re in snow boots,” Brian recalls.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

For examples of women who came to programming late but were extremely successful, see Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 13. Eric P. Newcomer, “YC’s Paul Graham: The Complete Interview,” The Information (December 26, 2013), https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete-Interview. To represent Graham’s views more accurately, I use his revised wording where available (Paul Graham, “What I Didn’t Say,” personal blog [December 2013], http://paulgraham.com/wids.html). 14. First Round Capital, “State of Startups 2016,” accessed August 15, 2019, http://stateofstartups.firstround.com/2016/#highlights-diversity-problem. 15.

Sklar adds that industry support for coding efforts, while valuable, is not a substitute for reform: “Support for next-gen orgs like Girls Who Code and Yes We Code and Code 2040 and Black Girls Code is fantastic but does not address the very real problems with this gen.”11 The pipeline argument implicitly blames women and minorities themselves for not preparing sufficiently. It also reinforces stereotypes about the kinds of people who succeed in tech, equating the masculine pattern of early, obsessive interest in computers with talent and commitment. Influential venture capitalist Paul Graham exemplifies this circular logic in a 2013 interview, saying, “If you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13.” Asserting that “if you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself,” he assumes that this love for coding will manifest itself at a young age, leading him to dismiss the people who do not learn to program until college—disproportionately women and minorities.


pages: 209 words: 54,638

Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman

anti-pattern, barriers to entry, cognitive dissonance, Dean Kamen, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fear of failure, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, publish or perish, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, value engineering, web application

The odds are good that you’ll stand on the street corner arguing for most of the day unless you simply declare one person to be the final arbiter and then follow him wherever he goes. Useless meetings can seem like torture. Meetings are frequently an interruption to what many refer to as “make time,” inspired by Paul Graham’s “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.”[18] It can be hard for engineers to get into the zone if they’re constantly stopping work to attend meetings. Schedule time on your calendar in three- to four-hour blocks and label these blocks as “busy” or even “make time,” and get your work done. If you have to set up a meeting, try to set it up near another natural break in the day, like lunchtime, or the very end of the day.

Brooks (Addison-Wesley Professional) Startup Engineering Management by Piaw Na (self-published) Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596518387.do) by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye (O’Reilly) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Crown) Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas by Mary Lynn Manns (Addison-Wesley) The Art & Adventure of Beekeeping by Ormond Aebi (Rodale Press) “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” by Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html) The Art of Readable Code (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596802301.do) by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher (O’Reilly) Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard (Plume) “The Significance of Task Significance: Job Performance Effects, Relational Mechanisms, and Boundary Conditions” (2008) by Adam M.


pages: 176 words: 55,819

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

The first is seeing the world from the other person’s perspective. No one knows this better than the skilled entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs succeed when they make stuff people will pay money for, which means understanding what’s going on in the heads of customers. Discovering what people want, in the words of start-up investor Paul Graham, “deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people’s point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.”5 Likewise, in relationships, it’s only when you truly put yourself in the other person’s shoes that you begin to develop an honest connection.

Pamela Walker Laird, Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 11. 4. Jeff Atwood, “The Bad Apple: Group Poison,” Coding Horror: Programming and Human Factors (blog), February 19, 2009, http://​www.​codinghorror.​com/​blog/​2009/​02/​the-​bad-​apple-​group-​poison.​html 5. Paul Graham, “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas,” PaulGraham.​com (blog), April 2005, http://​www.​paulgraham.​com/​bronze.​html 6. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 39–40. 7. Neil Rackham and John Carlisle, “The Effective Negotiator, Part I: The Behaviour of Successful Negotiators,” Journal of European Industrial Training 2, no. 6 (1978): 6–11, doi:10.1108/eb002297 8.


pages: 229 words: 61,482

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

We can’t deepen our connections with others and devote significant attention to our important relationships if we’re also checking email or watching the clock because we’re scheduled for something else in 10 minutes. To be our most effective and efficient selves and to create the time to invest in our priorities, we need reasonably sized blocks of time. One way to create that time is to apply the framework of Maker vs. Manager schedules to our calendars. Paul Graham of Y Combinator introduced the concept in his 2009 blog post “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.”7 I’ll summarize the concepts he introduces, but it’s worth reading it in its entirety. The Manager’s Schedule The Manager’s Schedule is the one most familiar to us, as it’s common for traditional employees and management (as the name implies) in corporations.

Kreider, Tim, “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” The New York Times, June 30 2012. opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?_r=0 6. Sibonney, Clair, “Arianna Huffington on the Third Metric: You Can Complete a Project by Dropping It,” The Huffington Post, September 11, 2013. www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/09/11/arianna-huffington-third-metric_n_3901302.html 7. Graham, Paul, “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule,” Paul Graham, July 2009. www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html 8. Morill, Danielle, “Warming Up to the Manager’s Schedule,” March 23, 2015. medium.com/@DanielleMorrill/warming-up-to-the-manager-s-schedule-e3ec18c7408e#.gxwnuexbp Danielle’s calendar is reproduced here with permission 9. Seligman, Martin E.P., “Building Resilience,” Harvard Business Review, April 2011. hbr.org/2011/04/building-resilience 10.


pages: 207 words: 63,071

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

But with the increasing speed and accessibility of computers, even basic math skills seem unnecessary in many kinds of jobs. So whereas technology will continue to process increasingly complex equations, I don’t see technology being able to express increasingly complex ideas, or paint a literary picture, as good, human writing does. As entrepreneur and engineer Paul Graham has said, “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.” On-Demand Education Due to globalization and accelerating change, knowledge—even of the most esoteric sort—is easily accessible.

Andy Sack’s blog post on “three questions each management team should ask themselves” is at http://asack.typepad.com/a_sack_of_seattle/ 2006/10/the_meeting_tha.html. 188 ENDNOTES “Getting More Good Revenue and Less Bad Revenue” is based on an idea discussed on Will Price’s blog: http://www.willprice.blogspot.com/ 2006/09/how-pure-is-your-model.html. Chapter 16.0: Fulfilling the Mission, One Customer at a Time The sidebar “Make Meaning” contains ideas from Guy Kawasaki’s top ten start-up rules; see http://www.alwayson-network.com/printpage. php?id=11962_0_11_0_C. Chapter 17.0: The Road Ahead I cite Paul Graham’s essay “Writing Briefly,” available at http://www. paulgraham.com/writing44.html. Chapter 18.0: What Will You Be Shouting When You Reach the Grave? “Entrepreneurs Are Optimists” contains ideas from Learned Optimism, by Martin Seligman (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). The Author Ben Casnocha (pronounced kas-NO-ka) is a Silicon Valley–based entrepreneur and writer.


pages: 425 words: 112,220

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

“Chipping away at”: Jocelyn Glei, Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), 11. “The problem is that while winnowing”: Ibid. 13. CREATIVE BLOCK IS THE CONSEQUENCE OF AVOIDING THE TRUTH. “It’s easier to tell Zuck”: Paul Graham (@paulg), “It’s easier to tell Zuck that he’s wrong than to tell the average noob founder. He’s not threatened by it. If he’s wrong, he wants to know,” Twitter, May 8, 2017, 1:31 A.M., https://twitter.com/paulg/status/861498777160622080. “What distinguishes great”: Paul Graham (@paulg), “What distinguishes great founders is not their adherence to some vision, but their humility in the face of the truth,” Twitter, May 8, 2017, https://twitter.com/paulg/status/861498048949735424.

To conquer creative block, you must ask bold questions and shine the spotlight on the elephants in the room. Perhaps the product is shitty. Perhaps your business model and all the assumptions leading up to it were fundamentally flawed. The truth will hurt, and it may set you back temporarily, but it will ultimately set you free. Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham, founder of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, once remarked in an interview about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: “It’s easier to tell Zuck that he’s wrong than to tell the average noob [new] founder. He’s not threatened by it. If he’s wrong, he wants to know.” Paul goes on to say, “What distinguishes great founders is not their adherence to some vision, but their humility in the face of the truth.”


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

For venture capitalists, the phrase is a near-holy invocation. Up and to the right. It means a startup is adding both users and revenue month after month, making a beautiful diagonal line on their PowerPoint slides. Since late 2012, Coinbase had been up and to the right. On three occasions, Brian and Fred had taken their beautiful line to Paul Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator and their rabbi of fundraising. The first two times, Graham had told Fred, “You are not ready, my son.” On the third occasion, he stared at Coinbase’s performance—still growing up and to the right—and gave his blessing for a Series A funding round, introducing Brian and Fred to his well-heeled network of money men.

See Selkis, Ryan Uber, 5, 173 Ulbricht, Ross, 31, 59, 122 uncapped notes, 35 Union Square Ventures, 33–34, 36 “up and to the right,” 35–36 US Treasury, 45 Utzke, David, 121–125 Ver, Roger, 27, 56 Vigna, Paul, 23 Visa, 206 Voorhees, Erik, 27, 127 Wallace, Benjamin, 26 Wall Street, 65, 99–108, 212–213, 225 Bit Licenses and, 127 decentralized currencies and, 11–12 future of, 215–216 Wall Street Journal, 37, 170, 172 Washington Free Beacon, 72 Washington Post, 107 Western Union, 45 White, Adam, 46–47, 55, 64, 107, 154, 157 at Bakkt, 223 on the flash crash, 140 GDAX and, 101–103 on Gemini, 116 Srinivasan and, 193–194 Wilson, Fred, 33–34, 36, 37, 66 Coinbase culture and, 49–51 compliance and, 70–72 first meeting with Brian, 13–14 in funding rounds, 33–37 on “running through brick walls,” 40 Silicon Valley Bank and, 70 workplace morale and, 67–68 Winklevoss, Cameron and Tyler, 48, 54–55, 97, 105, 114–117, 205. See also Gemini Wired magazine, 9, 26, 90 Wozniak, Steve, 7 Wu, Jihan, 82 Wuille, Pieter, 75–76 Xapo, 43, 55, 183, 209–210 Xie, Linda, 158–159 XRP, 106, 196 Yahoo Finance, 107 Y Combinator, 3, 5–6, 9–10 Demo Day at, 6–7 Paul Graham in, 36 startup cofounders and, 7–8 Yellen, Janet, 53, 138 YouTube, 91, 224 Zero to One (Thiel), 5 Zhao, Changpeng, 178–181, 182–183, 209 Zuckerberg, Mark, 48, 109, 114–115, 206 Acknowledgments Bitcoin is a digital currency, but also a technology—one that can be intimidating and difficult to understand at first.


pages: 706 words: 120,784

The Joy of Clojure by Michael Fogus, Chris Houser

cloud computing, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, functional programming, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, higher-order functions, Larry Wall, Paul Graham, rolodex, SQL injection, traveling salesman

All we needed to get back on that road was a modern approach, and Rich Hickey has given it to us in Clojure. The Joy of Clojure just might help make Clojure as fun for you as it is for us. STEVE YEGGE GOOGLE steve-yegge.blogspot.com Preface To fully appreciate Clojure, we hearken back to Paul Graham’s essay “Beating the Averages,” an interesting look at the inner workings of his company Viaweb during the years prior to being bought by Yahoo! Inc. in 1998. Though interesting as survey of startup culture, the truly memorable part of the essay was the description of how Viaweb used the programming language Lisp as an advantage over its competition.

Why would you explicitly group your expressions when their groupings are only a call to partition away? Clojure Aphorism If a project elicits a sense of being lost, then start from the bottom up. DSLs are an important part of a Clojure programmer’s toolset and stem from a long Lisp tradition. When Paul Graham talks about “bottom-up programming” in his perennial work On Lisp, this is what he’s referring to. In Clojure, it’s common practice to start by defining and implementing a low-level language specifically for the levels above. Creating complex software systems is hard, but using this approach, you can build the complicated parts out of smaller, simpler pieces.

Fogus, Michael. Lithp. http://github.com/fogus/lithp. Fowler, Martin. 2005. “Fluent Interface.” http://mng.bz/e2r5. _____. 2007. “Mocks Aren’t Stubs.” http://mng.bz/mq95. Graham, Paul. Arc. www.paulgraham.com/arc.html. _____. 2001. “What Made Lisp Different.” www.paulgraham.com/diff.html. As Paul Graham states, “The whole language always available” appears as a theme throughout this book and as a finale in section 13.5. Houser, Chris. error-kit API. http://mng.bz/07FF. The clojure.contrib.error-kit namespace contains an open error system similar to CL conditions that don’t require recompilation when defining new error types.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Web-based programs just felt clunky, and clunky was the last word Kapor would ever want anyone to associate with his work. With so many options available, a software project’s choice of programming language often comes down to the arbitrary or the ineffable—a matter of taste or habit or gut sense. Programmer-essayist Paul Graham wrote that some coders favor Python simply because they like the way it looks—and that that’s not such an unreasonable criterion: “When you program, you spend more time reading code than writing it. You push blobs of source code around the way a sculptor does blobs of clay. So a language that makes source code ugly is maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps would be to a sculptor.”

one observer’s characterization: The observer is Danny O’Brien in his NTK newsletter from August 6, 2004, at http://www.ntk.net/2004/08/06/. “I spent a few weeks trying”: Benjamin Pierce in a June 2001 message on a private mailing list; full quote confirmed in email to author. “Guido’s time machine”: Eric Raymond’s Jargon File defines it at http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/Guido.htm. “When you program, you spend”: Paul Graham, “The Python Paradox,” August 2004, at http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.htm. Vaporware Hall of Fame: Jon Zilber in MacUser, January 1, 1990. Dan Gillmor’s piece: “Software Idea May Be Just Crazy Enough to Work,” San Jose Mercury News, October 20, 2002. The original Slashdot posting and discussion is at http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/20/1827210.shtml?

I’m grateful, too, to the legions of programmers and technologists who have chosen, over the past decade, to write publicly and candidly about their work online. Their work has made mine possible. Some of those whose writing and blogging I found especially helpful or relevant are Dan Bricklin, Grady Booch, Adam Bosworth, Tim Bray, Geoff Cohen, Paul Ford, Martin Fowler, Paul Graham, David Heinemeyer Hansson, Robert Lefkowitz, Eric Sink, Joel Spolsky, Jon Udell, Dave Winer, and Jeremy Zawodny. Thanks to their work and that of many others, I’m convinced that future decades will look back on our time as a sort of golden age of Renaissance programmer-writers. I also owe a debt of thanks to all my colleagues at Salon.com—in particular, to David Talbot, who gave me the opportunity to pursue this project, and to Joan Walsh, who welcomed me back once it was finished.


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

It is also the one lever of platform scale available to all businesses, irrespective of whether they are pipes or platforms. 5.1 TRANSITIONING TO PLATFORM SCALE From Bumps To Engines “A startup is a company designed to grow fast… The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.” – Paul Graham Paul Graham differentiates between startups and new businesses in one particular parameter, the potential for scale. A startup’s potential to achieve hyper-growth and rapid scale is largely dependent on the types of growth strategies it implements. Before we embark on the journey of understanding the elements that contribute to virality, it is important to contrast viral growth with the way we have traditionally seen growth in a data-poor, non-participative world of pipes.


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

In the 1990s, Innosight cofounder Clayton Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma, whose cover proclaims that the book will show readers how “new technologies cause great companies to fail.” The titles grow more ominous over time. In 2013, Dave Ulmer drew on his experience at several large companies to detail The Innovator’s Extinction. His cover blurb? “How natural selection and best intentions will drive your company into the grave.” Another voice is that of Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, a leading incubator that helped spur Dropbox, Airbnb, and hundreds of other companies. Graham perhaps summed up the zeitgeist best when he said, “Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.”

MacMillan, Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009); Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (New York: Crown Business, 2011). Chapter 4 Paul Graham quote: Startupquote.com, http://startupquote.com/post/10855215114. Medtronic and Plunify case examples: Scott D. Anthony, “The New Corporate Garage,” Harvard Business Review, September 2012. Gilbert’s salesforce decision: Scott D. Antony, “What the Media Industry Can Teach Us About Digital Business Models,” Harvard Business Review Online, June 23, 2015.


pages: 301 words: 78,638

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Goodhart's law, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, late fees, meta-analysis, microaggression, Paul Graham, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, survivorship bias, Walter Mischel, When a measure becomes a target

The surgeon who dismisses the ideas of her younger colleagues. The band who produces a mind-blowing first album and then gets stuck in a rut. The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. In the words of investor Paul Graham, “keep your identity small.” The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you. If you tie everything up in being the point guard or the partner at the firm or whatever else, then the loss of that facet of your life will wreck you. If you’re a vegan and then develop a health condition that forces you to change your diet, you’ll have an identity crisis on your hands.

When comedian Chris Rock is preparing fresh material: Peter Sims, “Innovate Like Chris Rock,” Harvard Business Review, January 26, 2009, https://hbr.org/2009/01/innovate-like-chris-rock. Annual Review: I’d like to thank Chris Guillebeau, who inspired me to start my own annual review process by publicly sharing his annual review each year at https://chrisguillebeau.com. “keep your identity small”: Paul Graham, “Keep Your Identity Small,” February 2009, http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html. CONCLUSION No one can be rich unless one coin can make him or her so: Desiderius Erasmus and Van Loon Hendrik Willem, The Praise of Folly (New York: Black, 1942), 31. Hat tip to Gretchen Rubin. I first read about this parable in her book, Better Than Before, and then tracked down the origin story.


pages: 624 words: 127,987

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

Join me at personalmba.com to explore these ideas in more detail and learn how to apply them to your daily life and work. Let’s begin. 2 VALUE CREATION Make something people want . . . There’s nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. If you find something broken that you can fix for a lot of people, you’ve found a gold mine. —PAUL GRAHAM, FOUNDER OF Y COMBINATOR, VENTURE CAPITALIST, AND ESSAYIST AT PAULGRAHAM.COM Every successful business creates something of value. The world is full of opportunities to make other people’s lives better in some way, and your job as a businessperson is to identify things that people don’t have enough of, then find a way to provide them.

If you have enough profit to do the things you need to do to keep the business running and make it worth your time, you’re successful, no matter how much revenue your business brings in. Sufficiency is the point where a business is bringing in enough profit that the people who are running the business find it worthwhile to keep going for the foreseeable future. Paul Graham, venture capitalist and founder of Y Combinator (an early-stage venture capital firm), calls the point of sufficiency “ramen profitable”—being profitable enough to pay your rent, keep the utilities running, and buy inexpensive food like ramen noodles. You may not be raking in millions of dollars, but you have enough revenue to keep building your venture without going under.

As a result, I can focus on both responsibilities with my full Attention. I use a similar strategy when doing chores, updating financial reports, or running errands: I’ll dedicate a few hours solely to finishing those tasks. As a result, I accomplish everything I need to do in very little time. Paul Graham, a venture capitalist, programmer, and essayist, calls this batching strategy “Maker’s Schedule/Manager’s Schedule.”4 If you’re trying to create something, the worst thing you can possibly do is to try to fit creative tasks in between administrative tasks—context switching will kill your productivity.


pages: 999 words: 194,942

Clojure Programming by Chas Emerick, Brian Carper, Christophe Grand

Amazon Web Services, Benoit Mandelbrot, cloud computing, cognitive load, continuous integration, database schema, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, drop ship, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, game design, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, Larry Wall, mandelbrot fractal, no silver bullet, Paul Graham, platform as a service, premature optimization, random walk, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, semantic web, software as a service, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Turing complete, type inference, web application

On the other hand, patterns can be a source of verbosity and boilerplate. To this point, Paul Graham observed that the existence and use of design patterns in a language are indicative of a weakness in the language itself, rather than a consequence of solving the problem at hand: When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I’m using abstractions that aren’t powerful enough… —Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html Graham was hardly the first to make this observation; Peter Norvig demonstrated some time ago (http://www.norvig.com/design-patterns/) that Lisps in particular either simplify or make invisible most design patterns.

* * * [18] Special forms are always given precedence when resolving symbols in function position. For example, you can have a var or local named def, but you will not be able to refer to the value of that var or local in function position—though you can refer to that value anywhere else. [19] Paul Graham’s The Roots of Lisp (http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html) is a brief yet approachable precis of the fundamental operations of computation, as originally discovered and enumerated by John McCarthy. Though that characterization of computation was made more than 50 years ago, you can see it thriving in Clojure today

However, just as Java was not a Lisp just because the JVM’s designers borrowed a raft of techniques and features from Lisp systems, languages that borrow capabilities and features from Clojure today are not equivalent to Clojure. If you start using Clojure now, you may give yourself the opportunity to have an unfair advantage for years to come. * * * [436] We would be remiss at this point if we did not reference Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages essay, which is very relevant to this point: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html. Emphasize Community Clojure is open source and welcomes contributors. Clojure is open source under a liberal-use license,[437] making it perfect for inclusion in commercial products and for use within commercial organizations (of course in addition to any noncommercial, charitable, or personal use).


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

He is not implying that large funds typically put all their eggs in one basket—all VCs hold a portfolio of companies—only that large investments tend to make you more cautious, which means that your portfolio will be less likely to yield exceptional returns. “Larger firms with more partners that invest more money per deal are always going to be more risk-averse,” Maples says. Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator and likewise a believer in investing at the seed stage, put it more bluntly in his essay “A Theory of VC Suckage.” Each deal is for several million dollars, Graham argues, because management fees give firms an incentive to build up large funds. That, Graham writes, “explains why VCs take so agonizingly long to make up their minds, and why their due diligence feels like a body cavity search.

See Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold, “Seed Capital from Angel Investors: Mike Maples, Founder and Managing Partner, Floodgate (Part 3),” One Million by One Million Blog, July 14, 2010, retrieved from http://www.sramanamitra.com/2010/07/14/seed-capital-from-angel-investors-mike-maples-founder-and-managing-partner-floodgate-part-3/. 26.Interview with Mike Maples Jr., September 17, 2014. 27.Paul Graham, “A Unified Theory of VC Suckage,” PaulGraham.com, March 2005, retrieved from http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html. 28.Russ Roberts, “Marc Andreessen on Venture Capital and the Digital Future,” EconTalk, May 19, 2014, retrieved from http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/marc_andreessen.html. 29.Ben Horowitz mentions Rachleff’s influence in an interview with Stanford engineering professor Tom Byers, “Disrupting the Venture Capital Industry,” Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series, November 19, 2014, retrieved from http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMate rialInfo.html?


pages: 304 words: 125,363

Successful Lisp - About by Unknown

AI winter, general-purpose programming language, Paul Graham, Richard Stallman

Engraver has the slickest software update mechanism you'll find anywhere: select the Check For Patches menu item and Engraver will connect to the Noteheads server, download any patches it needs, and upgrade itself all in a few tens of seconds, without interrupting work in progress. Yahoo Store Yahoo Store is one of the best high-profile Lisp success stories of the past few years. Paul Graham and his team, working out of an attic loft, built and operated a server-side e-commerce site builder for hundreds of customers using Common Lisp and generic Linux servers. Paul's venture was so successful that it drew the attention of Yahoo, who saw it as a better tool for their online stores. Paul sold his company to Yahoo for $49 million.

We don't even have to do a hash lookup at runtime, because the macro expander has captured the free variable TABLE from the MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND form in LOOKUP-SIN. Beyond the obvious, part 2: macros that define macros Macros that define macros are used infrequently, partly because it's hard to think of a good use for this technique and partly because it's difficult to get right. The following macro, based upon an example in Paul Graham's "On Lisp" book, can be used to define synonyms for the names of Lisp functions, macros, and special forms. ? (defmacro defsynonym (old-name new-name) "Define OLD-NAME to be equivalent to NEW-NAME when used in the first position of a Lisp form." `(defmacro ,new-name (&rest args) `(,',old-name ,@args))) DEFSYNONYM ?


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

Would Patio11, the consummate independent developer, have joined a big company if they asked him to grind out code? Not likely. But Collison shared a big, giant, hairy problem and asked him to solve it, while providing him with the resources of a well-funded Silicon Valley startup and the support of its founders. For a developer like Patio11, that’s an exciting challenge. Call for Startups Paul Graham cofounded Y Combinator, one of the most successful Silicon Valley incubators and early-stage investors. Since its founding in 2005, Y Combinator has funded more than two thousand startups, including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Dropbox. The combined value of the startups funded by YC exceeded $150 billion as of October 2019.

The problem is that many developers absolutely hate meetings—not because engineers are antisocial, but because meetings occupy valuable time that could be better spent writing code. And like any meeting, daily stand-ups can be well run and efficient, or a boundless and unfocused waste of time. We as executives are pretty accustomed to days full of meetings, and we often expect that everybody in the company has the same schedule. This is what Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, calls a “manager schedule,” which works really well for people whose primary job is interfacing with other people. Cutting a day into sixty-minute blocks is how you can coordinate a lot of people. Just add it to my calendar. But making something out of nothing usually isn’t accomplished in one-hour blocks—it requires focus and what Graham calls a “maker schedule.”


pages: 450 words: 569

ANSI Common LISP by Paul Graham

Donald Knuth, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, L Peter Deutsch, Paul Graham, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk

ANSI Common Lisp UW§ PRENTICE HALL SERIES IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Editors GRAHAM MUGGLETON RUSSELL & NORVIG ANSI Common Lisp Logical Foundations of Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach ANSI Common Lisp Paul Graham An Alan R. Apt Book Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graham, Paul. ANSI common lisp. / Paul Graham. p. cm. "An Alan R. Apt book." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-13-370875-6 1. COMMON LISP (Computer program language) I. Tide. QA76.73.C28G69 1996 005.13'3-dc20 95-45017 CIP Publisher: Alan Apt Production Editor: Mona Pompili Cover Designer: Gino Lee Copy Editor: Shirley Michaels Production Coordinator: Donna Sullivan Editorial Assistant: Shirley McGuire Cover Photo: Ed Lynch •m © 1996 by Prentice Hall, Inc.

Almost always the real aim is to make something beautiful. Many programmers feel, like Donald Knuth, that this is also the real aim of programming. Almost all Lisp hackers do. The spirit of Lisp hacking can be expressed in two sentences. Programming should be fun. Programs should be beautiful. That's the spirit I have tried to convey in this book. Paul Graham Contents 1. Introduction 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1 New Tools 1 New Techniques 3 A New Approach 4 2. Welcome to Lisp 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 2.6. 2.7. 2.8. 2.9. 2.10. 2.11. 2.12. 2.13. 2.14. 2.15. 2.16. 7 Form 7 Evaluation 9 Data 10 List Operations 12 Truth 13 Functions 14 Recursion 16 Reading Lisp 17 Input and Output 18 Variables 19 Assignment 21 Functional Programming 22 Iteration 23 Functions as Objects 25 Types 27 Looking Forward 27 3.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

break his concentration: Lauren Passell, “Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writers,” B&N Reads (blog), March 22, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/stephen-kings-top-20-rules-for-writers. “his floating hair”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan, Poetry Foundation, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan. “to kill them off”: Paul Graham, “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule,” Paul Graham (blog), July 2009, accessed August 18, 2018, http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html. self-medicates with morphine: Matt Giles, “ ‘Mr. Robot’ Creator Explains What’s Really Going on in Elliot’s Mind,” Popular Science, September 3, 2015, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.popsci.com/mr-robot-creator-explains-whats-really-going-on-in-elliots-mind.

But after three weeks of painstakingly reprogramming her habits, it clicked—and suddenly she felt a cyborgic level of oneness with the machine, a sort of “I know kung fu” moment reminiscent of The Matrix. “You’re one with the keyboard,” she marvels. “There’s no moment when I have to break away from my train of thought.” Coders are white-collar workers, but the need for deep immersion and concentration puts them at sharp odds with most white-collar rhythms. Paul Graham refers to it as the collision between the “maker’s schedule” and the “manager’s schedule.” The work of managers, he points out, is composed almost entirely of meetings. Managers’ jobs are to make sure things are going well, so they block out their day in one-hour increments, meeting with a different employee every hour.


pages: 292 words: 81,699

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

I used to be able to tell the smart kids because they could rip through a recursive algorithm in seconds, or implement linked-list manipulation functions using pointers as fast as they could write on the whiteboard. But with a JavaSchool grad, I can’t tell whether they’re struggling with these problems because they are undereducated or because they don’t actually have that special part of the brain that they’re going to need to do great programming work. Paul Graham calls them “Blub programmers” (www.paulgraham.com/avg.html). The Perils of JavaSchools 57 It’s bad enough that JavaSchools fail to weed out the kids who are never going to be great programmers, which the schools could justifiably say is not their problem. Industry or, at least, the recruiters-who-usegrep are surely clamoring for Java to be taught.

. . . of JavaScript, and it takes 76 seconds to load a page. And your app, Gmail, doesn’t lose any customers. But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6,000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things. And your programmers are like, jeez Louise, Gmail is huge, we can’t port Gmail to this stupid NewSDK. We’d have to change every line of code. Heck, it’d be a complete rewrite; the whole programming model is upside-down and recursive, and the portable programming language has more parentheses than even Google can buy.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

But Conway’s insight retains all its original power: The physical world can be reshaped by the virtual. Networks will create bumps in the surface of our everyday lives. “When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you’re not just making a technical decision,” the programmer and investor Paul Graham has written. “You’re also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two.” You might ask: What drew tens of millions of people to watch as Steve Jobs, live, unveiled some new Apple device? Of course, partly it was the cool technology, the warm charisma of the man. But something else was at work, I think.

Engineers know the idea: Melvin E. Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?” Datamation 14, no. 4 (April 1968): 28–31. In our connected age: Barbara van Schewick, “Foundations,” in Internet Architecture and Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 19–36. “When you decide what infrastructure to use”: Paul Graham, “Great Hackers” (July 2004), on paulgraham.com, http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html. “Contrary to the popular belief”: Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). “Is there a greater tragedy”: F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), 5.


pages: 135 words: 31,098

ClojureScript: Up and Running by Stuart Sierra, Luke Vanderhart

domain-specific language, Firefox, functional programming, higher-order functions, machine readable, MVC pattern, Paul Graham, web application

However, for advanced tasks, such as defining new control structures or embedding domain-specific languages, they can be invaluable. This chapter has barely scratched the surface of what macros can do. For more examples, refer to books about Clojure. For even deeper exploration of macros, look to books on Common Lisp, such as Paul Graham’s classic On Lisp, available free online. Note that most other Lisps use the comma character instead of tilde for unquote. * * * [3] Technically, you can prevent evaluation of function arguments by wrapping each argument in an anonymous function, but this is syntactically cumbersome. Chapter 9.


pages: 120 words: 33,892

The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Jeff Bezos, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tim Cook: Apple

Schwager’s Market Wizards (1989), he said: I learned that even though markets look their very best when they are setting new highs, that is often the best time to sell. To some extent, to be a good trader, you have to be a contrarian. Paul Tudor Jones zigs when the market zags. Billionaire investor Peter Thiele draws this diagram to describe the “sweet spot” for his chosen stocks: Sweet Spot: A Good Idea That Seems Like a Bad Idea Source: Paul Graham, “Black Swan Farming,” September 2012, Available at http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html Thiele’s “sweet spot” is a good idea that seems like a bad idea to the crowd. But Thiele thinks it might be a good idea. Thiele’s zigging while the crowd zags. Billionaire global macroinvestor Michael Steinhardt made his investors about five-hundred times their money over thirty years until 1995.


pages: 406 words: 109,794

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

,” their work indicated that it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested—“Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?” Be a flirt with your possible selves.* Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. “Test-and-learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan-and-implement.” Paul Graham, computer scientist and cofounder of Y Combinator—the start-up funder of Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Twitch—encapsulated Ibarra’s tenets in a high school graduation speech he wrote, but never delivered: It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. . . .

., “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test,” Psychological Science 29, no. 7 (2018): 1159–77. Ibarra began; “We discover the possibilities”: H. Ibarra, Working Identity (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003). “painless path to a new career”: P. Capell, “Taking the Painless Path to a New Career,” Wall Street Journal Europe, January 2, 2002. Paul Graham . . . high school graduation speech: “What You’ll Wish You’d Known,” www.paulgraham.com/hs.html. William Wallace showed: W. Wallace, “Michelangelo: Separating Theory and Practice,” in Imitation, Representation and Printing in the Italian Renaissance, ed. R. Eriksen and M. Malmanger (Pisa and Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2009).


pages: 370 words: 105,085

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

Based on .NET with managed code. XAML. Avalon. Yes, vastly superior to Win32, I admit it. But not an upgrade: a break with the past. Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of Windows development, have defected from the Microsoft platform en masse and are now developing for the Web. Paul Graham, who created Yahoo! Stores in the early days of the dotcom boom, summarized it eloquently: "There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS.

Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973. __________ 6. Mark Driver, "Microsoft WinFX Accelerates Need for .NET Adoption," Gartner Research, November 3, 2003. See www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=118261. 7. Paul Graham, "The Other Road Ahead," September 2001. See www.paulgraham.com/road.html. Automatic Transmissions Win the Day Don't get me wrong; I think .NET is a great development environment, and Avalon with XAML is a tremendous advance over the old way of writing GUI apps for Windows. The biggest advantage of .NET is the fact that it has automatic memory management.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

Diddy” Combs. Other entrepreneurs with educational backgrounds in art, design, and music where play is intrinsic to learning have founded a whole slew of new companies, including Kickstarter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Vimeo, Android, and, of course, Apple. And the list goes on and on: Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, one of the top incubators for new start-ups in Silicon Valley, studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, in addition to getting his PhD in computer science from Harvard. Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter and Xanga, says he learned a valuable lesson studying graphic design.

id=309165&page=1#.UEu57q60J8E. 121 “We both went to Montessori School”: ABC News, “A Fascinating Group.” 121 Montessori alums include: Peter Sims, “The Montessori Mafia,” Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2011, accessed September 13, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-mafia/. 121 Other entrepreneurs with educational backgrounds: “Google Logo, Founders Spell Success: Montessori,” http://HispanicBusiness.com, August 31, 2012, accessed September 13, 2012, http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/2012/8/31/ google_logo_founders_spell_success_montessori.htm. 121 Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator: Randall Stross, The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive School for Startups (New York: Portfolio, 2012); http://paulgra ham.com/bio.html. 121 Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter: http://CMO.com, “Twitter Creator Biz Stone Chats with Adobe CMO Lewnes at Digital Summit 2012, http://m.cmo.com/leadership/ twitter-creator-biz-stone-chats-adobe-cmo-lewnes-digital-summit-2012, accessed September 13, 2012. 121 “Being playful, less structured”: Melissa Korn and Amir Efrati, “Master of ’Biz’ Returns to School,” Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2011, accessed September 13, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190 4009304576533010574207444.html?


pages: 423 words: 21,637

On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp by Paul Graham

Donald Knuth, functional programming, G4S, L Peter Deutsch, Paul Graham, sorting algorithm, Turing machine

On Lisp by Paul Graham * * * Table of Content Preface The Extensible Language Design by Evolution Programming Bottom-Up Extensible Software Extending Lisp Why Lisp (or When) Functions Functions as Data Defining Functions Functional Arguments Functions as Properties Scope Closures Local Functions Tail-Recursion Compilation Functions from Lists Functional Programming Functional Design Imperative Outside-In Functional Interfaces Interactive Programming Utility Functions Birth of a Utility Invest in Abstraction Operations on Lists Search Mapping I/O Symbols and Strings Density Returning Functions Common Lisp Evolves Orthogonality Memoizing Composing Functions Recursion on Cdrs Recursion on Subtrees When to Build Functions Functions as Representation Networks Compiling Networks Looking Forward Macros How Macros Work Backquote Defining Simple Macros Testing Macroexpansion Destructuring in Parameter Lists A Model of Macros Macros as Programs Macro Style Dependence on Macros Macros from Functions Symbol Macros When to Use Macros When Nothing Else Will Do Macro or Function?

Most of all, I'd like to thank my parents, for their example and encouragement; and Jackie, who taught me what I might have learned if I had listened to them. I hope reading this book will be fun. Of all the languages I know, I like Lisp the best, simply because it's the most beautiful. This book is about Lisp at its lispiest. I had fun writing it, and I hope that comes through in the text. Paul Graham * * * 1. The Extensible Language Not long ago, if you asked what Lisp was for, many people would have answered "for artificial intelligence." In fact, the association between Lisp and AI is just an accident of history. Lisp was invented by John McCarthy, who also invented the term "artificial intelligence."


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

Therefore, you should try to avoid multitasking on any consequential activity. Focusing on one high-concentration activity at a time can also help you produce dramatically better results. That’s because the best results rely on creative solutions, which often come from concentrating intently on one thing. Startup investor Paul Graham calls it the top idea in your mind in his 2010 essay of the same name: Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to.

When working to craft a positive organizational culture, there are a few tactical models to keep in mind as well. First, you can show employees that you value their contributions by understanding that people in different positions need different kinds of support to make progress on challenging efforts. Consider what startup investor Paul Graham, in a July 2009 blog post, called the manager’s schedule versus maker’s schedule: The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one-hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour. . . .


pages: 519 words: 118,095

Your Money: The Missing Manual by J.D. Roth

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, book value, buy and hold, buy low sell high, car-free, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, estate planning, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, index card, index fund, John Bogle, late fees, lifestyle creep, low interest rates, mortgage tax deduction, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, passive investing, Paul Graham, random walk, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, traveling salesman, Vanguard fund, web application, Zipcar

This keeps you from buying impulsively and creates a place for your friends and family to go to see what sorts of gifts you might want. The Tyranny of Stuff There's one huge way to save money that few people talk about: Own less Stuff. In his brilliant essay entitled "Stuff" (www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html), Paul Graham writes that before you buy anything, you should ask yourself, "Will this be something I use constantly?" Graham used to pick up free Stuff from the side of the road. He'd buy something at a garage sale simply because he could get it for a tenth of what it cost new. Eventually he realized that nothing is a bargain if it just sits in the garage or a storage unit.

For Love or Money: Which Career Should You Choose? Before you can start down a career path, you have to decide what to do for a living. Should you pursue your passion, doing work you love regardless of how much you earn? Or should you focus simply on the money? In his essay on how to do what you love (www.paulgraham.com/love.html), Paul Graham writes: Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there.


pages: 183 words: 49,460

Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling

8-hour work day, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, inventory management, Jeff Hawkins, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Network effects, Paul Graham, rolodex, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, software as a service, Superbowl ad, web application

Lessons Learned (www.startuplessonslearned.com) – Eric Ries’ Lean Startup Methodology closely parallels the Micropreneur Methodology I’ve laid out in this book, and his knowledge of the startup process is unparalleled. Single Founder (www.singlefounder.com) – Mike Taber shares his insight and wisdom from 10 years in the entrepreneurial trenches. Paul Graham (www.paulgraham.com/articles.html) – Though venture-focused, Graham’s insights into the startup process are unique and powerful. Software by Rob (www.softwarebyrob.com) – My blog, where I talk about all things self-funded. Online Communities The Micropreneur Academy (www.micropreneur.com) – A paid membership community of bootstrappers and Micropreneurs, brought together to learn, be accountable, share community, and launch successful startups.


pages: 165 words: 50,798

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

The other part I recall is the artwork. I remember a colorful drawing of animals in three categories – real, imaginary, impossible – and being inspired by the freedom with which kids invent impossible creatures. Over time, lest we’re careful, our bodyminds grow inflexible. We imagine the impossible less and less until we can’t. Paul Graham says entrepreneurs must be cheeky, always believing there’s a better way. Similarly, information architects must be contrarians, always re-framing ideas and beliefs in a different way. Of course, Richard Saul Wurman, the infamous architect of “information architect” would beg to disagree. I rather worship the space between things, the silence between good friends, the time between the notes of music, the break time during a conference, the space between buildings, negative space…It’s the way I approach everything.


pages: 177 words: 54,421

Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, delayed gratification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Paul Graham, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, side project, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Upton Sinclair

Which is fine, except that’s not how Google started. (Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two Stanford PhDs working on their dissertations.) It’s not how YouTube started. (Its founders weren’t trying to reinvent TV; they were trying to share funny video clips.) It’s not how most true wealth was created, in fact. Investor Paul Graham (who invested in Airbnb, reddit, Dropbox, and others), working in the same city as Walsh a few decades later, explicitly warns startups against having bold, sweeping visions early on. Of course, as a capitalist, he wants to fund companies that massively disrupt industries and change the world—that’s where the money is.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

Harper’s Magazine noted in 1957: The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man, shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio, and TV set, has the same sort of lighting and heating equipment in his house, and so on indefinitely. The differences between his automobile and the poor man’s are minor. Essentially they have similar engines, similar fittings. In the early years of the century there was a hierarchy of automobiles. Paul Graham wrote in 2016 about what something as simple as there only being three TV stations did to equalize culture: It’s difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Caught up in the frenzy, most large firms were stuck writing off at least one overvalued internet acquisition, effectively giving away millions of dollars each to a cohort of web entrepreneurs based on the misperception that those dudes came up with important stuff. But when their buyers wrote off the purchases, these men (they were mostly men) didn’t adjust their self-image downward. After all, they still had the money. Paul Graham sold a web storefront software company called Viaweb to Yahoo! for around $50 million in Yahoo! stock and had the sense to cash out quickly. “By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme,” he wrote later. “Investors were excited about the internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo’s revenue growth.

Though Thiel hasn’t had a presidency of his own to work with—no chance of that for the Frankfurt-born billionaire without a constitutional amendment—he has managed a similar feat with the PayPal Mafia and the Thielverse. As American power shifted toward the private sector and, within the private sector, toward Silicon Valley’s fast-growing tech companies, his networks acquired outsize importance, and his war chest ballooned. Founders Fund was open about investing in people, and Thiel took a position at Paul Graham’s incubator Y Combinator to access ambitious new CEOs at their earliest phase of development. In 2010, Thiel upped the ante: He announced the Thiel Fellowships, a $100,000 grant for handpicked entrepreneurs under age twenty who are willing to forgo college.75 The parallels with Leland Stanford, Charles Marvin, and their sprinting colts are striking.

Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2020), 110. Chapter 5.3 Blister in the Sun 1. Michael S. Malone, Infinite Loop: How the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane (New York: Doubleday, 1999). 2. Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 104. 3. Paul Graham, “What Happened to Yahoo,” PaulGraham.com, August 2010, http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html. 4. Kim Girard, “Commerce One to Buy CommerceBid,” CNet, January 2, 2002, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/commerce-one-to-buy-commercebid. 5. John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (New York: Vintage Books, 2020), 70. 6.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

It’s the same notion of “the Internet” that popular technology blogger and author Jeff Jarvis invokes when, discussing Germans’ complex feelings about privacy, he writes of a “nagging fear Germans harbor that their heritage is coming into fundamental conflict with internet culture—with the future.” All these thinkers take “the Internet” to be fixed and unified, meaningful and didactic, powerful and unconquerable. And, as Jarvis puts it, it’s “the future.” In a similar vein, popular technology investor Paul Graham writes, “Web 2.0 means using the Web the way it’s meant to be used. The ‘trends’ we’re seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the Web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed during the Battle.” “The Internet,” thus, is believed to possess an inherent nature, a logic, a teleology, and that nature is rapidly unfolding in front of us.

(New York: Free Press, 2006). 23 “policymakers should work with the grain of the Internet”: Eric Schmidt, “Let Luvvie Embrace Boffin in the Digital Future,” The Guardian, August 26, 2011. 23 “without a major upgrade”: Rebecca MacKinnon, “Why Doesn’t Washington Understand the Internet?,” Washington Post, January 22, 2012. 23 “nagging fear Germans harbor”: Jeff Jarvis, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 24 “Web 2.0 means using the Web”: Paul Graham, “Web 2.0,” PaulGraham.com, November 2005, http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html. 24 “There are laws of Nature”: David Post, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 211. 25 it’s not “the solution to the problem”: Steven Johnson, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age (New York: Penguin, 2012), xxxv. 25 “one could use the Internet directly”: ibid., xxxv, 26 “the creation of ARPANET and TCP/IP”: ibid., 16. 26 “Slowly but steadily”: ibid., 18. 26 “The question with Kickstarter”: ibid., 43. 27 Kickstarter’s most famous failed alumnus is Diaspora: see Jenna Wortham, “Success of Crowdfunding Puts Pressure on Entrepreneurs,” New York Times, September 17, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/technology/success-of-crowdfunding-puts-pressure-on-entrepreneurs.html. 28 Inge Ejbye Sørensen has studied how crowdfunding: see Inge Ejbye Sørensen, “Crowd-sourcing and Outsourcing: The Impact of Online Funding and Distribution on the Documentary Film Industry in the UK,” Media, Culture & Society 34 no. 6 (September 2012): 726–743; I’ve written about Sørensen’s research in my Slate column, from which the following few paragraphs are drawn: see Evgeny Morozov, “Kickstarter Will Not Save Artists from the Entertainment Industry’s Shackles,” Slate, September 25, 2012http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/09/kickstarter_s_crowdfunding_won_t_save_indie_filmmaking_.single.html . 29 What Would Google Do?


pages: 253 words: 65,834

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

www.whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com Mark Peter Davis Venture Made Transparent www.markpeterdavis.com Fred Destin A VC in Europe www.freddestin.com Chris Dixon Chris Dixon’s Blog www.cdixon.org Don Dodge Don Dodge on the Next Big Thing www.dondodge.typepad.com Tim Draper The Riskmaster www.theriskmaster.blogspot.com Brad Feld Feld Thoughts www.feld.com Seth Godin Seth’s Blog www.sethgodin.typepad.com Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com Michael Greeley On the Flying Bridge www.ontheflyingbridge.wordpress.com Bill Gurley Above the Crowd www.abovethecrowd.com Chip Hazard Hazard Lights www.hazardlights.net Mike Hirshland VCMike’s Blog www.vcmike.wordpress.com David Hornik VentureBlog www.ventureblog.com Jeff Jarvis BuzzMachine www.buzzmachine.com Jon Karlen Venturing Forth www.venturingforth.typepad.com Guy Kawasaki How to Change the World www.blog.guykawasaki.com Scott Kirsner Innovation Economy www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/ Josh Kopelman Redeye VC www.redeye.firstround.com Om Malik GigaOM www.gigaom.com Howard Morgan WayTooEarly www.waytooearly.firstround.com Jeff Nolan Venture Chronicles www.jeffnolan.com/wp Tim O’Reilly O’Reilly Radar www.radar.oreilly.com/tim Mark Pincus Mark Pincus Blog www.markpincus.typepad.com Dan Primack PE Hub www.pehub.com Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi Venture Hacks www.venturehacks.com Eric Ries Lessons Learned www.startuplessonslearned.com Bijan Sabet Bijansabet.com www.bijansabet.com David Meerman Scott Web Ink Now www.webinknow.com Dharmesh Shah OnStartups www.onstartups.com Ed Sim BeyondVC www.beyondvc.com David Skok For Entrepreneurs www.forentrepreneurs.com Mark Suster Both Sides of the Table www.bothsidesofthetable.com Kara Swisher—All Things Digital BoomTown www.kara.allthingsd.com Bill Taylor Practically Radical www.blogs.harvardbusiness.org/taylor/ Noam Wasserman Noam Wasserman’s “Founder Frustrations” Blog www.founderresearch.blogspot.com Fred Wilson A VC www.avc.com PHOTO CREDITS Photo of Christoph Westphal on p. 15, provided by Christoph Westphal Photo of Bob Langer on p. 20, Stu Rosen Photography Photo of Jack Dorsey on p. 25, provided by Jack Dorsey Photo of Reid Hoffman on p. 33, provided by Reid Hoffman Photo of Fred Wilson on p. 51, provided by Fred Wilson Photo of David Hornik on p. 57, provided by David Hornik Photo of Tim Draper on p. 62, Soo Photography Photo of Howard Morgan on p. 66, provided by Howard Morgan Photo of Patricia Nakache on p. 86, provided by Patricia Nakache Photo of Gail Goodman on p. 95, provided by Gail Goodman Photo of Eric Paley on p. 100, provided by Eric Paley Photo of Marsha Moses on p. 106, Staff Photo: Kris Snibbe/ Harvard News Office Photo of Tim Bucher on p. 124, provided by Tim Bucher Photo of Quan Zhou on p. 200, provided by Quan Zhou Photo of Henry Nguyen on p. 204, provided by Henry Nguyen Photo of Irena Goldenberg on p. 214, provided by Irena Goldenberg Photo of Terry McGuire on p. 221, Bachrach Photography INDEX Abdul, Paula Accel Partners Advisory boards, benefits of Akamai Technologies Amazon.com Andreessen, Marc Angel investors, role of Apple Arnold, Steve Aronoff, David.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

But for now there are few constraints on Tech capitalism. The monopoly profits of this new era have been very, very good to a few men. The Forbes 400 list, which ranks American wealth, places Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg in the top ten. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham (CEO of Y Combinator), in a 2016 blog post, was quite open about celebrating income inequality. He wrote, “I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it. Not just by helping the 2500 founders YC has funded. I’ve also written essays encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them detailed instructions showing how.”


pages: 232 words: 71,024

The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

Anonymous Coward II August 27, 2009 at 1:38 pm Apple creates better products “I have no idea how IBM can remain ahead of Apple still at #2 with no product or service not replaceable by any decent open source/freeware company, except perhaps by pure brand name and salesmanship.” Yes, it’s salesmanship, basically. IBM sells ‘enterprise’ software. Read what Paul Graham says on IBM and ‘enterprise’ software. The problem is that the people who are in charge of choosing and buying ‘enterprise’ software, that is, CTOs or CIOs of large companies, aren’t the same people using the software, that is, the low-level workers. If the workers have trouble using the software, the CIO/CTO doesn’t care.


pages: 270 words: 64,235

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code by Jeff Atwood

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, endowment effect, fail fast, Firefox, fizzbuzz, Ford Model T, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Chrome, gravity well, Hacker News, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Merlin Mann, Minecraft, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, price anchoring, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, science of happiness, Skype, social software, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

If you’re looking for good programming blogs to sharpen your saw (or at least pique your intellectual curiosity), I know of two excellent programming specific link aggregation sites that can help you find them. The first is Hacker News, which I recommend highly. Hacker News is the brainchild of Paul Graham, so it partially reflects his interests in Y Combinator and entrepreneurial stuff like startups. Paul is serious about moderation on the site, so in addition to the typical Digg-style voting, there’s a secret cabal (I like to think of it as The Octagon, “no one will admit they still exist!”) of hand-picked editors who remove flagged posts.


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

They were inundated with requests and realized there may be a market for this kind of thing, and so “Airbed and Breakfast” was born. Since then, the story has been one of hard work and growth. Running up the limit on multiple credit cards to finance the very beginnings, they got an early investment from Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator fund. Struggling to get the site to take off, they went out to their biggest city (New York) and got the hosts to have professional photos taken of their rooms to make them more appealing; the bookings increased, and professional photography continues to be the most effective way for a host to attract guests.


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

CULINARY CRAM SCHOOL—LESSON PLAN TECHNIQUE: BUTCHERY TECHNIQUE: COOKING TECHNIQUE: CUTTING TECHNIQUE: EGG COOKERY TECHNIQUE: GARDE MANGER TECHNIQUE: SAUCE MAKING LONGER-TERM LEARNING SUGGESTIONS Y Combinator, quietly tucked away off highway 101 just miles from Google headquarters, is named after one of the coolest ideas in computer science: a program that runs programs. Cofounded in 2005 by Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston, YC offers small amounts of capital ($14,000–$20,000) to founders in exchange for, on average, 6% of each company. Thousands of applications flow in for dozens of spots in each “class,” leading to an acceptance rate of 2.5–3.5%. The chosen few move to Silicon Valley, refine their companies 24/7 for three months, and then pitch investors at Demo Day.

In reality, it has built something more like a SEAL Team 6 meets Harvard34 of start-up cram schools. The system works: YC-backed start-ups have an average valuation of $22.4 million. Some get to the billions within a few years of graduation: DropBox and Airbnb, for instance. Others sell for hundreds of millions, like Heroku ($212 million in cash). Brian Chesky, cofounder of Airbnb, says of Paul Graham, the godfather of YC: “Just as [legendary music producer John] Hammond found Bob Dylan when he was a bad singer no one knew, Graham can spot potential.” If Graham can spot potential, the question I had was: how does he do it? The answer: YC has funded more than 450 start-ups since 2005. They have a far better sample size than most venture capitalists.


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The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

A Pattern Language, Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Boeing 747, Clayton Christensen, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, correlation coefficient, David Brooks, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, end-to-end encryption, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, finite state, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, history of Unix, Innovator's Dilemma, job automation, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, level 1 cache, machine readable, macro virus, Multics, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, OSI model, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, pre–internet, publish or perish, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, transaction costs, Turing complete, Valgrind, wage slave, web application

A whole class of mail filter programs (those easily findable by Web search include popfile, spambayes, and bogofilter) use a database of word correlations to replace the elaborate pattern-matching conditional logic of pattern-matching spam filters. Programs like these became common on the Internet very rapidly following Paul Graham's landmark paper A Plan for Spam [Graham] in 2002. While the explosion was triggered by the increasing cost of the pattern-matching arms race, the statistical-filtering idea was adopted first and fastest by Unix shops. In part, this was certainly because almost all the Internet service providers (who are most burdened by spam, and thus had most incentive to adopt effective new techniques) are Unix shops — but undoubtedly the harmony with some traditional themes in Unix software design helped as well.

Association for Computing Machinery. Don Gentner and Jacob Nielsen. “The Anti-Mac Interface”. August 1996. Available on the Web. [Gettys] Jim Gettys. The Two-Edged Sword. 1998. Available on the Web. [Glickstein] Bob Glickstein. Writing GNU Emacs Extensions. O'Reilly & Associates. 1997. ISBN 1-56592-261-1. [Graham] Paul Graham. A Plan for Spam. Available on the Web. [Harold-Means] Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means. XML in a Nutshell. 2nd Edition. O'Reilly & Associates. 2002. ISBN 0-596-00292-0. [Hatton97] IEEE Software. Les Hatton. “Re-examining the Defect-Density versus Component Size Distribution”. March/April 1997.


pages: 579 words: 76,657

Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python by Joel Grus

backpropagation, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, Hacker News, higher-order functions, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, p-value, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, SpamAssassin, statistical model

Although our features are all of the form “message contains word ,” there’s no reason why this has to be the case. In our implementation, we could add extra features like “message contains a number” by creating phony tokens like contains:number and modifying the tokenizer to emit them when appropriate. For Further Exploration Paul Graham’s articles “A Plan for Spam” and “Better Bayesian Filtering” (are interesting and) give more insight into the ideas behind building spam filters. scikit-learn contains a BernoulliNB model that implements the same Naive Bayes algorithm we implemented here, as well as other variations on the model.


pages: 239 words: 73,178

The Narcissist You Know by Joseph Burgo

Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, megaproject, Paul Graham, Peoples Temple, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

He knew he wanted to found his own Internet company, but he had no clear vision about which type it would be. He played with different possibilities in the areas of social media and mobile apps but couldn’t settle on any one of them. In the meantime, he spent many hours reading about Internet entrepreneurs who had made a fortune. He particularly admired Paul Graham and devoted hours to the study of his essays, as if they were gospel. Like many young men of his age and educational background, he idolized Steve Jobs. Ian also began playing a popular MMORPG in his free time. This type of game allows millions of players across the globe to enter an artificial world and inhabit an alternate identity or avatar.


pages: 536 words: 73,482

Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway, Aaron Bedra

continuous integration, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Gödel, Escher, Bach, higher-order functions, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, type inference, web application

If you want a variant of records with strong typing and configurable null-checking for all fields, you can create your own defrecord macro, to be used like this: ​(defrecord name [Type :arg1 Type :arg2 Type :arg3]​ ​ :allow-nulls false)​ This ability to reprogram the language from within the language is the unique advantage of Lisp. You will see facets of this idea described in various ways: Lisp is homoiconic.[9] That is, Lisp code is just Lisp data. This makes it easy for programs to write other programs. The whole language is there, all the time. Paul Graham’s essay “Revenge of the Nerds”[10] explains why this is so powerful. Lisp syntax also eliminates rules for operator precedence and associativity. You will not find a table documenting operator precedence or associativity anywhere in this book. With fully parenthesized expressions, there is no possible ambiguity.


pages: 258 words: 74,942

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

Because a company’s interests may not always align with the interests of its backers. Worse, investor interests may not always align with what’s best for a business’s end customers. Capital infusion can also leave a business with less control, resilience, speed, and simplicity—the main traits required for companies of one. Paul Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator (one of the largest and most notable VC firms for startups) explains that VCs don’t invest millions in companies because that’s what those companies might need; rather, they invest the amount that their own VC business requires to see growth in their own portfolios, coming from the few companies that actually give them a positive return.


pages: 276 words: 78,094

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy

Airbnb, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, John Gruber, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, web application, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator

They do whatever it takes to achieve their visions. They’re entrepreneurial. They value skills and knowledge over titles and experience. At the forefront of the hacker movement is the Hacker News community (http://news.ycombinator.com), a news aggregation site contributed to by followers of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator entrepreneurial incubator program. The program tends to fund small teams of hackers who have used their skills and hacker attitude to build cool products that solve problems: UserVoice (www.uservoice.com) democratizes customer support; Reddit (www.reddit.com) democratizes news; Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) provides an easy, automatic backup solution; and AirBNB (www.airbnb.com) turns extra bedrooms into places for travelers to stay.


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

As the presidential campaign was in full swing and both sides were keen to show support for their favourite candidates, the Airbnb team decided to sell special edition Cheerios cereal boxes for both presidential candidates called ‘Obama O’s’ and ‘Cap’n McCains’ for $40 each. They made $30,000 in a few weeks. By early 2009, they were invited to join the Y Combinator, one of the leading incubator programmes in San Francisco, and got $20,000 of funding from well-known angel investor Paul Graham. A seed round of $600,000 led 2 Introduction to platform businesses by Sequoia Capital followed shortly afterwards.1 Even so, the business did not take off. The Airbnb team realized that the photos of places advertised on their website were not appealing. According to Brian Chesky, ‘A web startup would say, “Let’s send emails, teach [users] professional photography, and test them.”


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The pet-sharing space was crowded with competitors like MySocialPetwork.com, Petwink—“for passionate pet owners”—and Petbu, which promised to help “make your pet famous.” I needed to come up with something entirely different, yet samey. I browsed the tech press for inspiration, returning, as ever, to Hacker News, the internet home page for people who were convinced they were the world’s smartest people, and I found an essay by the website’s founder, Paul Graham, called “Before the Startup.” That seemed to describe where I was. The essay was adapted from a guest lecture Graham delivered to his business partner Sam Altman’s startup class at Stanford. “The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you’re solving for them,” Graham wrote.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Women represent only 15 percent of decision-making roles. VCs claim that they make decisions based entirely on the strength of the company’s ideas, and without any regard for race or gender. But can you guess where the members of the White Man Club tend to put their money? “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg” is how Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, a top Silicon Valley start-up incubator, once famously put it. Graham later claimed he was joking, but a glance through the roster of Y Combinator portfolio companies turns up an awful lot of nerdy young Zuckerberg clones. As for why there are so few women in venture capital, Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Ventures, once said that it’s not because of gender bias but that “What we’re not prepared to do is to lower our standards.”


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

After that extraordinary initial success, the open source movement settled into a stable, stratified environment over much the last decade, with the community producing little in the way of new innovation. Everything changed in 2008, however, when Chris Wanstrath, P.J. Hyett and Tom Preston-Werner (all out of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator entrepreneurial incubator program) founded a company called GitHub. An open source coding and collaboration tool and platform, GitHub has utterly transformed the open source environment. It is a social network for programmers in which people and their collaborations are central, rather than just the code itself.


pages: 317 words: 84,400

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

By the time I finished, however, I had left Forbes to form a startup, Aisle50, which offers grocery discounts to consumers. It was quite a change for me but also one that I embraced. There have been many helping hands along the way, some of the most formidable ones coming from our investors and advisers at Y Combinator, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston. They have built something special in Silicon Valley, and, for the curious, there happens to be a book being released at exactly the same time as this one, by the same publisher, that is the best chronicle ever put together on Y Combinator: Randy Stross’s The Launch Pad. Read it.


pages: 280 words: 82,393

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

As we enter the third decade of this century, that vision seems painfully naive. Howling mobs clash day and night. The internet is connecting people, but it doesn’t always create fellow-feeling. At its worst, it can resemble a machine for the production of discord and division. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Paul Graham has observed that the internet is a medium that engenders disagreement by design. Digital media platforms are inherently interactive and, well, people are disputatious. As Graham puts it, ‘Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing.’ Readers are more likely to comment on an article or post when they disagree with it, and in disagreement they have more to say (there are only so many ways you can say, ‘I agree’).


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

William McBride, ‘Thomas Piketty’s false depiction of wealth in America’, Tax Foundation Special Report no.223, July 2014. Chris Edwards & Ryan Bourne, ‘Exploring Wealth Inequality’, Policy Analysis, no.881, Cato Institute, 5 November 2019. 14. Amy Castoro, ‘Wealth transition and entitlement: Shedding light on the dark side of a charmed life’, The Journal of Wealth Management, vol.18, no.2, 2015. 15. Paul Graham, ‘How people get rich now’, paulgraham.com, April 2021. 16. Milanović 2019, p.63. 17. Matthew Rognlie, ‘Deciphering the fall and rise in the net capital share: accumulation or scarcity?’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, spring 2015. 18. Milanović 2019, pp.26–9. 19. Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

When asked what would come after the dome, Fuller replied, “Nothing—an electromagnetic field.” This sequence paralleled the stages in his career, which started with concrete and ended with geometry, and its final phase sounded like a paradox: “Ephemeralization trends toward an ultimate doing of everything with nothing at all.” More recently, the venture capitalist Paul Graham defined it as “the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software,” noting that phones and tablets “have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas.” The same trend can be seen in cloud computing, the invention of the blockchain, and the inexorable integration of technology into everyday life.

“Nothing—an electromagnetic field”: RBF, “Domes,” in Synergetics Dictionary: The Mind of Buckminster Fuller, comp. and ed. E. J. Applewhite, 4 vols. (New York: Garland, 1986), 4186. Referred to hereafter as SD. “Ephemeralization trends toward”: RBF, Critical Path, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, adjuvant (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 234. Referred to hereafter as CP. “the increasing tendency”: Paul Graham, “Tablets,” December 2010, http://www.paulgraham.com/tablets.html (accessed January 2021). page in his wallet: Rich Heinemeyer, interviewed by author, February 17, 2020. “We owe the notion”: Yves Béhar interview, “Buckminster Fuller: Utopia Rising,” https://www.nowness.com/story/buckminster-fuller-utopia-rising (accessed February 2021).


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

For some teams, close to 15 percent of new hires have no college education.20 This Moneyball strategy will give Google a competitive advantage over more narrow-minded competitors, prompting others to rethink hiring criteria. Hands-On “Advanced Degrees”: A preview of coming attractions in advanced degrees can be found in Silicon Valley. For decades, a Stanford or Harvard MBA was pure gold in Valley hiring circles. But today innovative programs, such as Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, are giving young entrepreneurs powerful learning experiences and a “brand” as powerful as an elite MBA. Y Combinator is every bit as selective as a top business school, but with admissions criteria focused more on a person’s ideas than his or her undergraduate GPA. A young entrepreneur going to business school will study topics, start a business (now mandatory at many programs, including Harvard Business School), develop a network of contacts, and . . . pay substantially more than $100,000 in tuition.


Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, General Magic , HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

Without showing it to other publishers, I signed a contract with O’Reilly in December 2003, promising a finished draft by June 2004. Tim introduced me to the talented team at his company, including my editor, Allen Noren, who specializes in O’Reilly’s more humanistic efforts (his previous two books were Dan Gillmor’s We the People and Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters). Allen guided me through the laborious process to transform the raw material of the Folklore site into a beautiful book. After completing the writing phase in June 2004, we embarked on the editing and layout process. The first step was copyediting. All 90 or so of the stories had to be thoroughly edited, in batches of 10 at a time.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Almost by definition these companies are founded and run by young people. Young people are the ones who change the world. They’re filled with passion. They have new ideas. Venture capitalists openly admit they prefer to invest in twenty-something founders. “The cut-off in investors’ heads is thirty-two,” Paul Graham, who runs an incubator called Y Combinator, once said, adding that, “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.” John Doerr, a legendary venture capitalist and partner at Kleiner Perkins, once said he liked to invest in “white male nerds who have dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they have absolutely no social life.


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

What if we could create this same experience in every major city? Here is where the two dreamers ran headfirst into conventional wisdom. Initially, no one, outside of Chesky, Gebbia, and a third partner they brought on, thought this was an idea that made business sense or was worth supporting. Paul Graham, a renowned angel investor in Silicon Valley who runs the start-up incubator firm Y Combinator, believed quite simply, “No one would want to stay in23 someone else’s bed.” The idea that would eventually become Airbnb was challenging a basic assumption: that you needed established, reputable hotels to provide accommodation for out-of-town visitors.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“I was impressed with Peter Thiel’s perspective,” says Shea. “Why would you want to compete with some existing company, be incrementally more efficient, and make the world only a slightly better place?” In 2014, they took a $250,000 investment and moved out to Y-Combinator in Mountain View, California, for a stint and demo. Started by the entrepreneur Paul Graham, YC was a kind of reverse Hotel California for nerds—hard to get into and easy to leave. Thiel told the Y-Combinator in 2015 to seek “apparently bad ideas” that “were actually good,” like Dropbox (cloud-based storage) and Airbnb (cloud-based lodgings). Both began nebulously at YC and now have a total market cap of many billions of dollars.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

Why did such savvy: Personal interviews with Aileen Lee, February 6, 2015, Randy Komisar, February 13, 2015, and Bill Sahlman, March 11, 2015; Steve Kemper, Reinventing the Wheel: A Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Hayagreeva Rao, Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Mathew Hayward, Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris Is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap (New York: Kaplan Business, 2007); Jordan Golson, “Well, That Didn’t Work: The Segway Is a Technological Marvel. Too Bad It Doesn’t Make Any Sense,” Wired, January 16, 2015, www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-segway-technological-marvel-bad-doesnt-make-sense; Paul Graham, “The Trouble with the Segway,” July 2009, www.paulgraham.com/segway.html; Mike Masnick, “Why Segway Failed to Reshape the World: Focused on Invention, Rather Than Innovation,” Techdirt, July 31, 2009, www.techdirt.com/articles/20090730/1958335722.shtml; Gary Rivlin, “Segway’s Breakdown,” Wired, March 2003, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/segway.html; Douglas A.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

But as we’ve seen, they actually made the situation worse by seeking to bust unions and whatever other worker protections still lingered and to remake more and more of the society as an always-on labor market in which workers were downbidding one another for millions of little fleeting gigs. “Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by start-ups,” the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham once tweeted. As America’s level of inequality spread to ever more unmanageable levels, these MarketWorld winners might have helped out. Looking within their own communities would have told them what they needed to know. Doing everything to reduce their tax burdens, even when legal, stands in contradiction with their claims to do well by doing good.


pages: 340 words: 100,151

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As a startup, these changes are very significant, as they mean that the amount of money you need to raise from VCs to get started is much less than in the past. Y Combinator Cracks Open the “Black Box” The second material transformation in the startup ecosystem was the advent of an incubator known as Y Combinator (or YC for short). Started in 2005 by Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, YC basically created startup school. Cohorts of entrepreneurs joined a “YC batch,” working in an open office space together and going through a series of tutorials and mentorship sessions over a three-month period to see what might come out the other end. Over the past thirteen years, YC has turned out nearly 1,600 promising startups, including some very well-known success stories such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, and Stripe.


pages: 344 words: 96,020

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

As Facebook’s original growth team lead, Chamath Palihapitiya, wisely cautioned in one talk, “If you can’t be extremely clinical and extremely unemotionally detached from the thing that you’re building, you will make these massive mistakes and things won’t grow because you don’t understand what’s happened.”9 To clarify how dedication to improving a North Star metric helps make difficult decisions about how to spend time and resources, let’s look at how the Airbnb founders decided to conduct an experiment they thought might generate more nights booked—their North Star. To begin, they looked at their data to identify markets where bookings were lagging and, to their surprise, discovered that New York City was underachieving. Clearly, New York is a major tourist destination, so they dug in, with early investor Paul Graham of Y Combinator, to analyze why bookings weren’t stronger. Reviewing the apartment listings for the city, cofounder Joe Gebbia recalls that “the photos were really bad. People were using camera phones and taking Craigslist-quality pictures. Surprise! No one was booking because you couldn’t see what you were paying for.”


pages: 418 words: 102,597

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

Thank you, Adam Barrett, Lionel Barnett, Peter Lush, Alberto Mariola, Yair Pinto, Warrick Roseboom, Michael Schartner, David Schwartzman, Maxine Sherman, Keisuke Suzuki, and Alexander Tschantz. Thank you also, Manuel Baltieri, Reny Baykova, Luc Berthouze, Daniel Bor, Chris Buckley, Acer Chang, Paul Chorley, Ron Chrisley, Andy Clark, Marianne Cole, Clémence Compain, Guillaume Corlouer, Hugo Critchley, Zoltán Dienes, Tom Froese, Paul Graham, Inman Harvey, Owen Holland, Ryota Kanai, Tomasz Korbak, Isabel Maranhão, Federico Micheli, Beren Millidge, Thomas Nowotny, Andy Philippides, Charlotte Rae, Colin Reveley, Ryan Scott, Lina Skora, Nadine Spychala, Marta Suarez-Pinilla, Chris Thornton, Hao-Ting Wang, and Jamie Ward – all colleagues and friends, Sussex past and present, whose work and ideas have contributed much to my own, and many of whom have been kind enough to read and comment on parts of this book.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Aaron VanDevender, Adam D’Augelli, Adam Draper, Adam Reineck, Alaa Saleh Halawa, Alan Boehme, Alan Chang, Alexander Kamb, Alex Lorestani, Amy Muhl, Andrew Hessel, Armen Vidian, Asish Xavier, Augustin Ku, Bill Gates, Bob Nelson, Brian Cork, Brian Schreier, Bruce Freidrich, Bruce Jenett, Bryan Chang, Calvin Nguyen, Celestine Johnson, Charly Chalawan, Clem Fortman, Cooper Rinzler, Costa Yiannoulis, Dan Phillips, Dan Widmaier, Dana White, David Friedberg, David Helgason, Dariush Mozaffarian, Darrin Crisitello, David Aycan, David Eagleman, Drew Endy, Dror Berman, Dylan Morris, Ela Madej, Elad Gil, Elliot Waldron, Eric Scott, Erik Moga, Francisco Gimenez, George Church, Gopi Punukollu, Harsh Patel, Hemant Taneja, Howard Shultz, Ian Rountree, Isabella Maria Jonsdottir, Jim Collins, Jake Moritz, Jason Camm, Jason Okutake, Jenny Rooke, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Harbach, Jennifer Cochran, Jennifer Doudna, Jeremy Kranz, Jerry Zeldis, Joe Luttwak, John Cumbers, John Yu, Josko Bobanovic, Jude Gomila, Kevin Hartz, Khaled Alwaleed, Kinkead Reiling, Laura Smoliar, Leonardo Teixeira, Lior Susan, Lisa Rich, Maria Gotsch, Maria Mitchell, Maria Soloveychik, Mary Wheeler, Mark Goldstein, Matias Mosse, Matias Muchnik, Matías Peire, Matias Viel, Matt Ocko, Melinda Gates, Michael Moritz, Michael Aberman, Mira Chaurushiya, Nabeel Hyatt, Nick Rosa, Nico Berman, Oleg Nodelman, Paolo Riauto, Paul Graham, Peter Kim, Reid Hoffman, Ricardo Gomes, Richard Branson, Roger Wyse, Rohan and Taj, Rohit Sharma, Ron Shigeta, Rosie Wardle, Ryan Bethencourt, Scott Banister, Scott Nolan, Seth Bannon, Shahin Farshchi, Shirl Buss, Solina Chau, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Kim, Steinnun Hjartar, Steve Sanger, Taylor Sittler, Tim Brown, Tim Draper, Timothy Lu, Tom Aiello, Tom Baruch, Tom Chi, Tony Envin, Uma Valeti, Victoria Slivkoff, Vijay Pande, Vinod Khosla and Whitney Mortimer.


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

While much of this stems from noble traditions of SmallTalk and ML [they are computer languages], much of it also fails to realize the point of these ancestral languages: categorization (such as through strict typing and object models) is itself a form of computation. When this fact is not respected, you wind up with a bastardized language that is [ … ] Anal. Perl was designed by a linguist, and realizes that people have different things to say in different contexts, and your language is defined by the environment and not vice versa. As Paul Graham said, both the world and programming is a “Big Ball of Mud,” which perl has evolved around. The implicit variables, the open object model, the terse expressions all contribute to hacking on the Big Ball of Mud. Finally, there is a very pragmatic reason to like perl: It will save your ass. Those who are fluent enough in the culture to realize that “this problem has been solved before,” will be able to invoke forces through perl.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Though Musk soon left OpenAI, the lab’s ambitions only grew under Altman. Sam Altman was a Silicon Valley archetype: In 2005, he founded a social networking company as a twenty-year-old college sophomore. The company was called Loopt, and it eventually raised $30 million in venture capital, including one of the first investments made by Y Combinator and its founder Paul Graham. Seven years later, Loopt’s social networking service was shut down after being sold at a loss for its investors. But this was a successful exit for Altman, a trim, compact man with sharp green eyes and a particular talent for raising money. Graham soon announced that he was stepping down as president of Y Combinator, and he named Altman as his replacement, an appointment that surprised many across the family of Y Combinator companies.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Then ask, What do we know? Put together the knowledge about the situation and what facts may be missing both about the actual topic and the players and power relationships involved. Finally, What will we accept? You don’t have to go public with your acceptance strategy, but it should be thought through.” Programmer Paul Graham: “Find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1.0, then (f) iterating rapidly.” (Iterating rapidly is how squatters build cities and the Bradley sisters eliminate alien-invasive plants.)


pages: 440 words: 117,978

Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll

affirmative action, call centre, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, information security, John Markoff, Menlo Park, old-boy network, Paul Graham, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable

So Bob Morris’ son froze two thousand computers. Why? To impress his dad? As a halloween prank? To show off to a couple thousand computer programmers? Whatever his purposes were, I don’t believe he was in cahoots with his father. Rumors have it that he worked with a friend or two at Harvard’s computing department (Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for “Any news on the brilliant project”), but I doubt his father would encourage anyone to create a virus. As Bob Morris, Sr., said, “This isn’t exactly a good mark for a career at NSA.” After dissecting the code, MIT’s Jon Rochlis characterized the virus as “not very well written.”


pages: 525 words: 149,886

Higher-Order Perl: A Guide to Program Transformation by Mark Jason Dominus

always be closing, Defenestration of Prague, digital rights, Donald Knuth, functional programming, higher-order functions, Isaac Newton, Larry Wall, P = NP, Paul Graham, Perl 6, slashdot, SpamAssassin

He also sent me periodic mail to remind me how wonderful my book was, which often arrived at times when I wasn’t so sure. Several specific ideas in Chapter 4 were suggested by other people. Meng Wong suggested the clever and apt “odometer” metaphor. Randal Schwartz helped me with the “append” function. Eric Roode suggested the multiple list iterator. When I needed to read out-of-print books by Paul Graham, A. E. Sundstrom lent them to me. When I needed a copy of volume 2 of The Art of Computer Programming, Hildo Biersma and Morgan Stanley bought it for me. When I needed money, B. B. King lent me some. Thanks to all of you. The constraint system drawing program of Chapter 9 was a big project, and I was stuck on it for a long time.


pages: 1,132 words: 156,379

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

Ultimately, memes are selected for one reason and one reason only: because they have properties that keep them in circulation in the meme pool. From this modest starting point, some rather profound consequences follow. First, through cultural competition, memes get better and better at surviving and spreading. Food gets more appetizing; music gets catchier; stories get more appealing. As Paul Graham put it, the world gets more addictive.68 Second, given enough time, memes start falling into mutually supportive clusters, known in the trade as memeplexes. Memeplexes include everything from calculus to political ideologies. Like genes in a genome, the memes of a memeplex may coevolve and coordinate with one another.


pages: 598 words: 183,531

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

It’s one outpost in a growing number of "Hacker Spaces" across the country devoted to empowering formerly isolated and underequipped gearheads. “I am a sensei of the dojo, which as you may know is a grand revered master,” he says, a wide grin on his face. “Felsenstein sensei.” • • • • • • • • Greenblatt, Stallman, and Felsenstein see hacking as a set of ideals. But Paul Graham sees it as a humming economic engine. The forty-five-year-old Internet guru, himself a fanatic engineer in his day, is a cofounder of Y Combinator, an incubator for Internet startups. Twice a year, his company runs American Idol-style contests to select twenty to thirty budding companies to participate in a three-month boot camp, culminating in a demo day packed with Angel investors, VCs, and acquisition-hungry companies like Google and Yahoo.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

One founder stated that “very few are contributing enormous amounts to the greater good, be it by starting important companies or leading important causes.” It was also generally accepted that those few seen as contributing to the public good by launching new businesses should be handsomely rewarded. As the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Paul Graham, one of Businessweek’s “twenty-five most influential people on the web,” put it, “I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it.… You can’t prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can’t do that without preventing them from starting startups.”


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

It was about that “pattern recognition” so fatefully identified by John Doerr, looking for the next Stanford or Harvard dropout with a wild but brilliant idea. Of all those assertions, Doerr’s slip-up came closest to the heart of the Valley’s secret. “West Coast investors aren’t bolder because they’re irresponsible cowboys, or because the good weather makes them optimistic,” wrote Paul Graham, founder of the Valley’s most influential tech incubator, Y Combinator, in 2007. “They’re bolder because they know what they’re doing.” The Valley power players knew the tech, knew the people, and knew the formula that worked. They looked for “grade-A men” (who very occasionally were women) from the nation’s best engineering and computer science programs, or from the most promising young companies, and who had validation from someone else they already knew.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

That’s my cue to exit stage left completely, especially when I can do work I love (e.g., writing) with ¹⁄₁₀ the energy expenditure. I need to stop sowing the seeds of my own destruction. How Much of Your Life Is Making Versus Managing? How Do You Feel About the Split? One of my favorite time-management essays is “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” by Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame. Give it a read. As investor Brad Feld and many others have observed, great creative work isn’t possible if you’re trying to piece together 30 minutes here and 45 minutes there. Large, uninterrupted blocks of time—3 to 5 hours minimum—create the space needed to find and connect the dots.


pages: 496 words: 174,084

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages by Federico Biancuzzi, Shane Warden

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), business intelligence, business logic, business process, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive load, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, continuous integration, data acquisition, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, Douglas Hofstadter, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Firefox, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, linear programming, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, millennium bug, Multics, NP-complete, Paul Graham, performance metric, Perl 6, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, Turing complete, type inference, Valgrind, Von Neumann architecture, web application

What is so great about Haskell is that it provides a framework for creating these DSLs easily and effectively. It’s not a perfect methodology, but it’s pretty darn good. Philip: Functional languages make it easy to extend the language within the language. Lisp and Scheme are brilliant examples of this; read Paul Graham[16] on how Lisp was the secret weapon in building one of the earliest web applications (which later became a Yahoo! product), and in particular how Lisp macros were key to building this software. Haskell also provides a number of features that make it easy to extend the power of the language, including lambda expressions, laziness, monad notation, and (in GHC) template Haskell for metaprogramming.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Gottschall, J. 2012. The storytelling animal: How stories make us human. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Gottschall, J., & Wilson, D. S., eds. 2005. The literary animal: Evolution and the nature of narrative. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Graham, P. 2016. The refragmentation. Paul Graham Blog. http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html. Grayling, A. C. 2007. Toward the light of liberty: The struggles for freedom and rights that made the modern Western world. New York: Walker. Grayling, A. C. 2013. The God argument: The case against religion and for humanism. London: Bloomsbury. Greene, J. 2013.


pages: 931 words: 79,142

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming by Peter Van-Roy, Seif Haridi

computer age, Debian, discrete time, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, fault tolerance, functional programming, G4S, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Menlo Park, natural language processing, NP-complete, Paul Graham, premature optimization, sorting algorithm, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, Turing complete, Turing machine, type inference

O’Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, CA, 2002. [69] [70] James Edward Gordon. The Science of Structures and Materials. Scientific American 856 References Library, 1988. [71] [72] James Gosling, Bill Joy, and Guy Steele. The Java Language Specification. Addison-Wesley, 1996. Available at http://www.javasoft.com. Paul Graham. On Lisp. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993. Available for download from the author. [73] Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter. Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 1993. [74] Donatien Grolaux. QTk: Graphical user interface design for Oz, 2003. Available at http://www.mozart-oz.org/mozart-stdlib/index.html.


pages: 1,263 words: 371,402

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

Cambias, Garth Nix, David Hartwell, Ginjer Buchanan, Susan Allison, Shawna McCarthy, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, John Klima, John O’Neill, Rodger Turner, Tyree Campbell, Stuart Mayne, John Kenny, Edmund Schubert, Tehani Wessely, Tehani Croft, Karl Johanson, Sally Beasley, Connor Cochran, Tony Lee, Joe Vas, John Pickrell, Ian Redman, Anne Zanoni, Kaolin Fire, Ralph Benko, Paul Graham Raven, Nick Wood, David Moles, Mike Allen, Jason Sizemore, Karl Johanson, Sue Miller, David Lee Summers, Christopher M. Cevasco, Tyree Campbell, Andrew Hook, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Mark Watson, Sarah Lumnah, and special thanks to my own editor, Marc Resnick. Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, P.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

If you can think of ways to pull the rope sideways, you are justified in expending your limited resources on relatively less common issues where marginal discussion offers relatively higher marginal payoffs. But then the responsibilities that you deprioritize are a matter of your limited resources. Not a matter of floating high above, serene and Wise. My reply to Paul Graham’s comment on Hacker News seems like a summary worth repeating: There’s a difference between: Passing neutral judgment; Declining to invest marginal resources; Pretending that either of the above is a mark of deep wisdom, maturity, and a superior vantage point; with the corresponding implication that the original sides occupy lower vantage points that are not importantly different from up there