Isegoria

Paul Graham on Startup Names:

Because so many names have been taken by squatters, a strange new phenomenon has arisen. It’s now uncool to have a name that was obviously bought from squatters. It’s like running Microsoft software on your servers. It suggests you have more money than brains, and that’s not a good thing for a startup brand to suggest.

Hence names like Flickr, Writely, and Del.icio.us. These are the stars of recent startupdom, and yet they’re living in decidedly marginal name space. It’s a bit like when fashionable people started living in lofts in industrial neighborhoods.

And as happened with lofts, the features that initially repelled people, like rough concrete walls, have now become a badge of coolness. Weird names are now cool, if they’re the right kind of weird. Nothing could be less cool, at this point, than calling a startup ‘cool.com.’

Paul Graham explains How to Do What You Love:

Whichever route you take, if you want to end up working on something you love, it will help if you don’t have a taste for money or prestige, since (a) that’s how unpleasant jobs are rewarded, and (b) you often have to sacrifice one or both when switching fields.

Paul Graham contrasts Good and Bad Procrastination:

What’s “small stuff?” Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. It’s hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?), but there’s a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes — anything that might be called an errand.

Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.

His key point:

The reason it pays to put off even those errands [which get worse if you put them off] is that real work needs two things errands don’t: big chunks of time, and the right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during those few days, you will be net more productive.

More poetically:

People who fail to write novels don’t do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. “I don’t have time to work,” they say. And they don’t; they’ve made sure of that.

As Richard Hamming asked, What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?

Paul Graham finally finds a common thread amongst the disparate elements of Web 2.0:

Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users. What do they all have in common? I didn’t realize they had anything in common till recently, which is one of the reasons I disliked the term ‘Web 2.0′ so much. It seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened to be new — that it didn’t predict anything.

But there is a common thread. 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 on it during the Bubble.

Paul Graham discusses Ideas for Startups:

The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. It would be closer to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is that, in the process of discovering it’s broken, you’ll come up with your real idea.

The initial idea is just a starting point — not a blueprint, but a question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.

There’s a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections in a way a question doesn’t. If you say: I’m going to build a web-based spreadsheet, then critics — the most dangerous of which are in your own head — will immediately reply that you’d be competing with Microsoft, that you couldn’t give people the kind of UI they expect, that users wouldn’t want to have their data on your servers, and so on.

A question doesn’t seem so challenging. It becomes: let’s try making a web-based spreadsheet and see how far we get. And everyone knows that if you tried this you’d be able to make something useful. Maybe what you’d end up with wouldn’t even be a spreadsheet. Maybe it would be some kind of new spreasheet-like collaboration tool that doesn’t even have a name yet. You wouldn’t have thought of something like that except by implementing your way toward it.

In What I Did this Summer, Paul Graham describes how hard the young entrepreneurs worked at his Summer Founders Program:

People this age are commonly seen as lazy. I think in some cases it’s not so much that they lack the appetite for work, but that the work they’re offered is unappetizing.

The experience of the SFP suggests that if you let motivated people do real work, they work hard, whatever their age. As one of the founders said ‘I’d read that starting a startup consumed your life, but I had no idea what that meant until I did it.’

I’d feel guilty if I were a boss making people work this hard. But we’re not these people’s bosses. They’re working on their own projects. And what makes them work is not us but their competitors. Like good athletes, they don’t work hard because the coach yells at them, but because they want to win.

We have less power than bosses, and yet the founders work harder than employees. It seems like a win for everyone. The only catch is that we get on average only about 5-7% of the upside, while an employer gets nearly all of it. (We’re counting on it being 5-7% of a much larger number.)

Paul Graham strongly believes in the agility and speed of small entrepreneurial firms:

Here’s a handy rule for startups: competitors are rarely as dangerous as they seem. Most will self-destruct before you can destroy them. And it certainly doesn’t matter how many of them there are, any more than it matters to the winner of a marathon how many runners are behind him.

“It’s a crowded market,” I remember one founder saying worriedly.

“Are you the current leader?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Is anyone able to develop software faster than you?”

“Probably not.”

“Well, if you’re ahead now, and you’re the fastest, then you’ll stay ahead. What difference does it make how many others there are?”

Paul Graham summarizes the link between Inequality and Risk:

Decreasing economic inequality means taking money from the rich. Since risk and reward are equivalent, decreasing potential rewards automatically decreases people’s appetite for risk. Startups are intrinsically risky. Without the prospect of rewards proportionate to the risk, founders will not invest their time in a startup. Founders are irreplaceable. So eliminating economic inequality means eliminating startups.

Economic inequality is not just a consequence of startups. It’s the engine that drives them, in the same way a fall of water drives a water mill. People start startups in the hope of becoming much richer than they were before. And if your society tries to prevent anyone from being much richer than anyone else, it will also prevent one person from being much richer at t2 than t1.

When you reduce inequality, you reduce risk, and that reduces growth:

Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it’s bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you’re content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don’t invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory — all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it.

Of course, no one’s goal is to stop high-risk startups:

The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?

We don’t need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power. And there has been progress on that front. Before he died of drink in 1925, Commodore Vanderbilt’s wastrel grandson Reggie ran down pedestrians on five separate occasions, killing two of them. By 1969, when Ted Kennedy drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, the limit seemed to be down to one. Today it may well be zero. But what’s changed is not variation in wealth. What’s changed is the ability to translate wealth into power.

How do you break the connection between wealth and power? Demand transparency. Watch closely how power is exercised, and demand an account of how decisions are made. Why aren’t all police interrogations videotaped? Why did 36% of Princeton’s class of 2007 come from prep schools, when only 1.7% of American kids attend them? Why did the US really invade Iraq? Why don’t government officials disclose more about their finances, and why only during their term of office?

Hacker (and painter) Paul Graham hails the Return of the Mac:

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Thinkpad’s hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine.

For most of us, it’s not a switch to Apple, but a return. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker’s computer.