2024-09-01 00:00:00
September 2024
At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who
was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said
it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time
in his life, forgot to take notes. I'm not going to try to reproduce
it here. Instead I want to talk about a question it raised.
The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about
how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning
people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way
for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized
as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He
followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to
figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying
how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb's
free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.
The audience at this event included a lot of the most successful
founders we've funded, and one after another said that the same
thing had happened to them. They'd been given the same advice about
how to run their companies as they grew, but instead of helping
their companies, it had damaged them.
Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was
the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured
out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company
you hadn't founded — how to run a company if you're merely a
professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that
to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that
managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because
it is.
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder
mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley
have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to
manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from
the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their
attempts to escape from it.
There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode.
Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the
experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for
themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can
search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well
understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the
ways it will differ.
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular
design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as
black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up
to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details
of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great
when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging
from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out
to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company
into the ground.
One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to founders
afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they're
being gaslit from both sides — by the people telling them they
have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working
for them when they do. Usually when everyone around you disagrees
with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken.
But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven't been founders
themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level
execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the
world.
[1]
Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going
to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company
only via his or her direct reports. "Skip-level" meetings will
become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there's a
name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge
number of permutations to choose from.
For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he
considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were
not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the
force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And
yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big
company feel like a startup. Steve presumably wouldn't have kept
having these retreats if they didn't work. But I've never heard of
another company doing this. So is it a good idea, or a bad one? We
still don't know. That's how little we know about founder mode.
[2]
Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way
they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount
of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp
they are, will probably vary from company to company. They'll even
vary from time to time within the same company, as managers earn
trust. So founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode.
But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples
of individual founders groping their way toward it.
Indeed, another prediction I'll make about founder mode is that
once we figure out what it is, we'll find that a number of individual
founders were already most of the way there — except that in doing
what they did they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.
[3]
Curiously enough it's an encouraging thought that we still know so
little about founder mode. Look at what founders have achieved
already, and yet they've achieved this against a headwind of bad
advice. Imagine what they'll do once we can tell them how to run
their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.
Notes
[1]
The more diplomatic way of phrasing this statement would be
to say that experienced C-level execs are often very skilled at
managing up. And I don't think anyone with knowledge of this world
would dispute that.
[2]
If the practice of having such retreats became so widespread
that even mature companies dominated by politics started to do it,
we could quantify the senescence of companies by the average depth
on the org chart of those invited.
[3]
I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as
the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start
misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they
should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't
founders will decide they should try to act like founders. That may
even work, to some extent, but the results will be messy when it
doesn't; the modular approach does at least limit the damage a bad
CEO can do.
Thanks to Brian Chesky, Patrick Collison,
Ron Conway, Jessica
Livingston, Elon Musk, Ryan Petersen, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan
for reading drafts of this.
2024-07-01 00:00:00
July 2024
Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work
at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually
find something that does.
Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate
people are so annoying. They won't listen. They beat their heads
against a wall and get nowhere.
But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are
persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or
are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as
persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be
right or not?
If that's the only difference then there's nothing to be learned
from the distinction. Telling someone to be persistent rather than
obstinate would just be telling them to be right rather than wrong,
and they already know that. Whereas if persistence and obstinacy
are actually different kinds of behavior, it would be worthwhile
to tease them apart.
[1]
I've talked to a lot of determined people, and it seems to me that
they're different kinds of behavior. I've often walked away from a
conversation thinking either "Wow, that guy is determined" or "Damn,
that guy is stubborn," and I don't think I'm just talking about
whether they seemed right or not. That's part of it, but not all
of it.
There's something annoying about the obstinate that's not simply
due to being mistaken. They won't listen. And that's not true of
all determined people. I can't think of anyone more determined than
the Collison brothers, and when you point out a problem to them,
they not only listen, but listen with an almost predatory intensity.
Is there a hole in the bottom of their boat? Probably not, but if
there is, they want to know about it.
It's the same with most successful people. They're never more
engaged than when you disagree with them. Whereas the obstinate
don't want to hear you. When you point out problems, their eyes
glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about
matters of doctrine.
[2]
The reason the persistent and the obstinate seem similar is that
they're both hard to stop. But they're hard to stop in different
senses. The persistent are like boats whose engines can't be throttled
back. The obstinate are like boats whose rudders can't be turned.
[3]
In the degenerate case they're indistinguishable: when there's only
one way to solve a problem, your only choice is whether to give up
or not, and persistence and obstinacy both say no. This is presumably
why the two are so often conflated in popular culture. It assumes
simple problems. But as problems get more complicated, we can see
the difference between them. The persistent are much more attached
to points high in the decision tree than to minor ones lower down,
while the obstinate spray "don't give up" indiscriminately over the
whole tree.
The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached
to their ideas about how to reach it.
Worse still, that means they'll tend to be attached to their first
ideas about how to solve a problem, even though these are the least
informed by the experience of working on it. So the obstinate aren't
merely attached to details, but disproportionately likely to be
attached to wrong ones.
Why are they like this? Why are the obstinate obstinate? One
possibility is that they're overwhelmed. They're not very capable.
They take on a hard problem. They're immediately in over their head.
So they grab onto ideas the way someone on the deck of a rolling
ship might grab onto the nearest handhold.
That was my initial theory, but on examination it doesn't hold up.
If being obstinate were simply a consequence of being in over one's
head, you could make persistent people become obstinate by making
them solve harder problems. But that's not what happens. If you
handed the Collisons an extremely hard problem to solve, they
wouldn't become obstinate. If anything they'd become less obstinate.
They'd know they had to be open to anything.
Similarly, if obstinacy were caused by the situation, the obstinate
would stop being obstinate when solving easier problems. But they
don't. And if obstinacy isn't caused by the situation, it must come
from within. It must be a feature of one's personality.
Obstinacy is a reflexive resistance to changing one's ideas. This
is not identical with stupidity, but they're closely related. A
reflexive resistance to changing one's ideas becomes a sort of
induced stupidity as contrary evidence mounts. And obstinacy is a
form of not giving up that's easily practiced by the stupid. You
don't have to consider complicated tradeoffs; you just dig in your
heels. It even works, up to a point.
The fact that obstinacy works for simple problems is an important
clue. Persistence and obstinacy aren't opposites. The relationship
between them is more like the relationship between the two kinds
of respiration we can do: aerobic respiration, and the anaerobic
respiration we inherited from our most distant ancestors. Anaerobic
respiration is a more primitive process, but it has its uses. When
you leap suddenly away from a threat, that's what you're using.
The optimal amount of obstinacy is not zero. It can be good if your
initial reaction to a setback is an unthinking "I won't give up,"
because this helps prevent panic. But unthinking only gets you so
far. The further someone is toward the obstinate end of the continuum,
the less likely they are to succeed in solving hard problems.
[4]
Obstinacy is a simple thing. Animals have it. But persistence turns
out to have a fairly complicated internal structure.
One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the
risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than
merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent
must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep
thinking of things to try.
Energy and imagination make a wonderful combination. Each gets the
best out of the other. Energy creates demand for the ideas produced
by imagination, which thus produces more, and imagination gives
energy somewhere to go.
[5]
Merely having energy and imagination is quite rare. But to solve
hard problems you need three more qualities: resilience, good
judgement, and a focus on some kind of goal.
Resilience means not having one's morale destroyed by setbacks.
Setbacks are inevitable once problems reach a certain size, so if
you can't bounce back from them, you can only do good work on a
small scale. But resilience is not the same as obstinacy. Resilience
means setbacks can't change your morale, not that they can't change
your mind.
Indeed, persistence often requires that one change one's mind.
That's where good judgement comes in. The persistent are quite
rational. They focus on expected value. It's this, not recklessness,
that lets them work on things that are unlikely to succeed.
There is one point at which the persistent are often irrational
though: at the very top of the decision tree. When they choose
between two problems of roughly equal expected value, the choice
usually comes down to personal preference. Indeed, they'll often
classify projects into deliberately wide bands of expected value
in order to ensure that the one they want to work on still qualifies.
Empirically this doesn't seem to be a problem. It's ok to be
irrational near the top of the decision tree. One reason is that
we humans will work harder on a problem we love. But there's another
more subtle factor involved as well: our preferences among problems
aren't random. When we love a problem that other people don't, it's
often because we've unconsciously noticed that it's more important
than they realize.
Which leads to our fifth quality: there needs to be some overall
goal. If you're like me you began, as a kid, merely with the desire
to do something great. In theory that should be the most powerful
motivator of all, since it includes everything that could possibly
be done. But in practice it's not much use, precisely because it
includes too much. It doesn't tell you what to do at this moment.
So in practice your energy and imagination and resilience and good
judgement have to be directed toward some fairly specific goal. Not
too specific, or you might miss a great discovery adjacent to what
you're searching for, but not too general, or it won't work to
motivate you.
[6]
When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn't
resemble obstinacy at all. It's so much more complex. Five distinct
qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and
focus on a goal — combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit
like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But
the way you don't give up is completely different. Instead of merely
resisting change, you're driven toward a goal by energy and resilience,
through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement.
You'll give way on any point low down in the decision tree, if its
expected value drops sufficiently, but energy and resilience keep
pushing you toward whatever you chose higher up.
Considering what it's made of, it's not surprising that the right
kind of stubbornness is so much rarer than the wrong kind, or that
it gets so much better results. Anyone can do obstinacy. Indeed,
kids and drunks and fools are best at it. Whereas very few people
have enough of all five of the qualities that produce the right kind
of stubbornness, but when they do the results are magical.
Notes
[1]
I'm going to use "persistent" for the good kind of stubborn
and "obstinate" for the bad kind, but I can't claim I'm simply
following current usage. Conventional opinion barely distinguishes
between good and bad kinds of stubbornness, and usage is correspondingly
promiscuous. I could have invented a new word for the good kind,
but it seemed better just to stretch "persistent."
[2]
There are some domains where one can succeed by being obstinate.
Some political leaders have been notorious for it. But it won't
work in situations where you have to pass external tests. And indeed
the political leaders who are famous for being obstinate are famous
for getting power, not for using it well.
[3]
There will be some resistance to turning the rudder of a
persistent person, because there's some cost to changing direction.
[4]
The obstinate do sometimes succeed in solving hard problems.
One way is through luck: like the stopped clock that's right twice
a day, they seize onto some arbitrary idea, and it turns out to be
right. Another is when their obstinacy cancels out some other form
of error. For example, if a leader has overcautious subordinates,
their estimates of the probability of success will always be off
in the same direction. So if he mindlessly says "push ahead regardless"
in every borderline case, he'll usually turn out to be right.
[5]
If you stop there, at just energy and imagination, you get
the conventional caricature of an artist or poet.
[6]
Start by erring on the small side. If you're inexperienced
you'll inevitably err on one side or the other, and if you err on
the side of making the goal too broad, you won't get anywhere.
Whereas if you err on the small side you'll at least be moving
forward. Then, once you're moving, you expand the goal.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell,
Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough,
Courtenay Pipkin, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of
this.
2024-03-01 00:00:00
March 2024
Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal
here is to figure out what the best essay would be like.
It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic.
What made it special would be what it was about.
Obviously some topics would be better than others. It probably
wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors. But it wouldn't be
vaporous talk about elevated themes either. A good essay has to be
surprising. It has to tell people something they don't already know.
The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell
people something surprising about.
That may sound obvious, but it has some unexpected consequences.
One is that science enters the picture like an elephant stepping
into a rowboat. For example, Darwin first described the idea of
natural selection in an essay written in 1844.
Talk about an
important topic you could tell people something surprising about.
If that's the test of a great essay, this was surely the best one
written in 1844.
And indeed, the best possible essay at any given
time would usually be one describing the most important scientific
or technological discovery it was possible to make.
[1]
Another unexpected consequence: I imagined when I started writing
this that the best essay would be fairly timeless — that the best
essay you could write in 1844 would be much the same as the best
one you could write now. But in fact the opposite seems to be true.
It might be true that the best painting would be timeless in this
sense. But it wouldn't be impressive to write an essay introducing
natural selection now. The best essay now would be one describing
a great discovery we didn't yet know about.
If the question of how to write the best possible essay reduces to
the question of how to make great discoveries, then I started with
the wrong question. Perhaps what this exercise shows is that we
shouldn't waste our time writing essays but instead focus on making
discoveries in some specific domain. But I'm interested in essays
and what can be done with them, so I want to see if there's some
other question I could have asked.
There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the
one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay
be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though
these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer
to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay
writing. The second question forces it to be.
Writing essays, at its best, is a way of discovering ideas. How do
you do that well? How do you discover by writing?
An essay should ordinarily start with what I'm going to call a
question, though I mean this in a very general sense: it doesn't
have to be a question grammatically, just something that acts like
one in the sense that it spurs some response.
How do you get this initial question? It probably won't work to
choose some important-sounding topic at random and go at it.
Professional traders won't even trade unless they have what they
call an edge — a convincing story about why in some class of
trades they'll win more than they lose. Similarly, you shouldn't
attack a topic unless you have a way in — some new insight about
it or way of approaching it.
You don't need to have a complete thesis; you just need some kind
of gap you can explore. In fact, merely having questions about
something other people take for granted can be edge enough.
If you come across a question that's sufficiently puzzling, it could
be worth exploring even if it doesn't seem very momentous. Many an
important discovery has been made by pulling on a thread that seemed
insignificant at first. How can they all be finches?
[2]
Once you've got a question, then what? You start thinking out loud
about it. Not literally out loud, but you commit to a specific
string of words in response, as you would if you were talking. This
initial response is usually mistaken or incomplete. Writing converts
your ideas from vague to bad. But that's a step forward, because
once you can see the brokenness, you can fix it.
Perhaps beginning writers are alarmed at the thought of starting
with something mistaken or incomplete, but you shouldn't be, because
this is why essay writing works. Forcing yourself to commit to some
specific string of words gives you a starting point, and if it's
wrong, you'll see that when you reread it. At least half of essay
writing is rereading what you've written and asking is this correct
and complete? You have to be very strict when rereading, not just
because you want to keep yourself honest, but because a gap between
your response and the truth is often a sign of new ideas to be
discovered.
The prize for being strict with what you've written is not just
refinement. When you take a roughly correct answer and try to make
it exactly right, sometimes you find that you can't, and that the
reason is that you were depending on a false assumption. And when
you discard it, the answer turns out to be completely different.
[3]
Ideally the response to a question is two things: the first step
in a process that converges on the truth, and a source of additional
questions (in my very general sense of the word). So the process
continues recursively, as response spurs response.
[4]
Usually there are several possible responses to a question, which
means you're traversing a tree. But essays are linear, not tree-shaped,
which means you have to choose one branch to follow at each point.
How do you choose? Usually you should follow whichever offers the
greatest combination of generality and novelty. I don't consciously
rank branches this way; I just follow whichever seems most exciting;
but generality and novelty are what make a branch exciting.
[5]
If you're willing to do a lot of rewriting, you don't have to guess
right. You can follow a branch and see how it turns out, and if it
isn't good enough, cut it and backtrack. I do this all the time.
In this essay I've already cut a 17-paragraph subtree, in addition
to countless shorter ones. Maybe I'll reattach it at the end, or
boil it down to a footnote, or spin it off as its own essay; we'll
see.
[6]
In general you want to be quick to cut. One of the most dangerous
temptations in writing (and in software and painting) is to keep
something that isn't right, just because it contains a few good bits
or cost you a lot of effort.
The most surprising new question being thrown off at this point is
does it really matter what the initial question is? If the space
of ideas is highly connected, it shouldn't, because you should be
able to get from any question to the most valuable ones in a few
hops. And we see evidence that it's highly connected in the way,
for example, that people who are obsessed with some topic can turn
any conversation toward it. But that only works if you know where
you want to go, and you don't in an essay. That's the whole point.
You don't want to be the obsessive conversationalist, or all your
essays will be about the same thing.
[7]
The other reason the initial question matters is that you usually
feel somewhat obliged to stick to it. I don't think about this when
I decide which branch to follow. I just follow novelty and generality.
Sticking to the question is enforced later, when I notice I've
wandered too far and have to backtrack. But I think this is
the optimal solution. You don't want the hunt for novelty and
generality to be constrained in the moment. Go with it and see what
you get.
[8]
Since the initial question does constrain you, in the best case it
sets an upper bound on the quality of essay you'll write. If you
do as well as you possibly can on the chain of thoughts that follow
from the initial question, the initial question itself is the only
place where there's room for variation.
It would be a mistake to let this make you too conservative though,
because you can't predict where a question will lead. Not if you're
doing things right, because doing things right means making
discoveries, and by definition you can't predict those. So the way
to respond to this situation is not to be cautious about which
initial question you choose, but to write a lot of essays. Essays
are for taking risks.
Almost any question can get you a good essay. Indeed, it took some
effort to think of a sufficiently unpromising topic in the third
paragraph, because any essayist's first impulse on hearing that the
best essay couldn't be about x would be to try to write it. But if
most questions yield good essays, only some yield great ones.
Can we predict which questions will yield great essays? Considering
how long I've been writing essays, it's alarming how novel that
question feels.
One thing I like in an initial question is outrageousness. I love
questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming
counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three.
This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there
is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive,
though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay
being better than another. And thinking about how to do something
so ambitious is close enough to doing it that it holds your attention.
I like to start an essay with a gleam in my eye. This could be just
a taste of mine, but there's one aspect of it that probably isn't:
to write a really good essay on some topic, you have to be interested
in it. A good writer can write well about anything, but to stretch
for the novel insights that are the raison d'etre of the essay, you
have to care.
If caring about it is one of the criteria for a good initial question,
then the optimal question varies from person to person. It also
means you're more likely to write great essays if you care about a
lot of different things. The more curious you are, the greater the
probable overlap between the set of things you're curious about and
the set of topics that yield great essays.
What other qualities would a great initial question have? It's
probably good if it has implications in a lot of different areas.
And I find it's a good sign if it's one that people think has already
been thoroughly explored. But the truth is that I've barely thought
about how to choose initial questions, because I rarely do it. I
rarely choose what to write about; I just start thinking about
something, and sometimes it turns into an essay.
Am I going to stop writing essays about whatever I happen to be
thinking about and instead start working my way through some
systematically generated list of topics? That doesn't sound like
much fun. And yet I want to write good essays, and if the initial
question matters, I should care about it.
Perhaps the answer is to go one step earlier: to write about whatever
pops into your head, but try to ensure that what pops into your
head is good. Indeed, now that I think about it, this has to be the
answer, because a mere list of topics wouldn't be any use if you
didn't have edge with any of them. To start writing an essay, you
need a topic plus some initial insight about it, and you can't
generate those systematically. If only.
[9]
You can probably cause yourself to have more of them, though. The
quality of the ideas that come out of your head depends on what goes
in, and you can improve that in two dimensions, breadth and depth.
You can't learn everything, so getting breadth implies learning
about topics that are very different from one another. When I tell
people about my book-buying trips to Hay and they ask what I buy
books about, I usually feel a bit sheepish answering, because the
topics seem like a laundry list of unrelated subjects. But perhaps
that's actually optimal in this business.
You can also get ideas by talking to people, by doing and building
things, and by going places and seeing things. I don't think it's
important to talk to new people so much as the sort of people who
make you have new ideas. I get more new ideas after talking for an
afternoon with Robert Morris than from talking to 20 new smart
people. I know because that's what a block of office hours at Y
Combinator consists of.
While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes
from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have
to solve problems in it. Though this could take the form of writing,
I suspect that to be a good essayist you also have to do, or have
done, some other kind of work. That may not be true for most other
fields, but essay writing is different. You could spend half your
time working on something else and be net ahead, so long as it was
hard.
I'm not proposing that as a recipe so much as an encouragement to
those already doing it. If you've spent all your life so far working
on other things, you're already halfway there. Though of course to
be good at writing you have to like it, and if you like writing
you'd probably have spent at least some time doing it.
Everything I've said about initial questions applies also to the
questions you encounter in writing the essay. They're the same
thing; every subtree of an essay is usually a shorter essay, just
as every subtree of a Calder mobile is a smaller mobile. So any
technique that gets you good initial questions also gets you good
whole essays.
At some point the cycle of question and response reaches what feels
like a natural end. Which is a little suspicious; shouldn't every
answer suggest more questions? I think what happens is that you
start to feel sated. Once you've covered enough interesting ground,
you start to lose your appetite for new questions. Which is just
as well, because the reader is probably feeling sated too. And it's
not lazy to stop asking questions, because you could instead be
asking the initial question of a new essay.
That's the ultimate source of drag on the connectedness of ideas:
the discoveries you make along the way. If you discover enough
starting from question A, you'll never make it to question B. Though
if you keep writing essays you'll gradually fix this problem by
burning off such discoveries. So bizarrely enough, writing lots of
essays makes it as if the space of ideas were more highly connected.
When a subtree comes to an end, you can do one of two things. You
can either stop, or pull the Cubist trick of laying separate subtrees
end to end by returning to a question you skipped earlier. Usually
it requires some sleight of hand to make the essay flow continuously
at this point, but not this time. This time I actually need an
example of the phenomenon. For example, we discovered earlier that
the best possible essay wouldn't usually be timeless in the way the
best painting would. This seems surprising enough to be
worth investigating further.
There are two senses in which an essay can be timeless: to be about
a matter of permanent importance, and always to have the same effect
on readers. With art these two senses blend together. Art that
looked beautiful to the ancient Greeks still looks beautiful to us.
But with essays the two senses diverge, because essays
teach, and you can't teach people something they already know.
Natural selection is certainly a matter of permanent importance,
but an essay explaining it couldn't have the same effect on us that
it would have had on Darwin's contemporaries, precisely because his
ideas were so successful that everyone already knows about them.
[10]
I imagined when I started writing this that the best possible essay
would be timeless in the stricter, evergreen sense: that it would
contain some deep, timeless wisdom that would appeal equally to
Aristotle and Feynman. That doesn't seem to be true. But if the
best possible essay wouldn't usually be timeless in this stricter
sense, what would it take to write essays that were?
The answer to that turns out to be very strange: to be the evergreen
kind of timeless, an essay has to be ineffective, in the sense that
its discoveries aren't assimilated into our shared culture. Otherwise
there will be nothing new in it for the second generation of readers.
If you want to surprise readers not just now but in the future as
well, you have to write essays that won't stick — essays that,
no matter how good they are, won't become part of what people in
the future learn before they read them.
[11]
I can imagine several ways to do that. One would be to write about
things people never learn. For example, it's a long-established
pattern for ambitious people to chase after various types of prizes,
and only later, perhaps too late, to realize that some of them
weren't worth as much as they thought. If you write about that, you
can be confident of a conveyor belt of future readers to be surprised
by it.
Ditto if you write about the tendency of the inexperienced to overdo
things — of young engineers to produce overcomplicated solutions,
for example. There are some kinds of mistakes people never learn
to avoid except by making them. Any of those should be a timeless
topic.
Sometimes when we're slow to grasp things it's not just because
we're obtuse or in denial but because we've been deliberately lied
to. There are a lot of things adults lie
to kids about, and when
you reach adulthood, they don't take you aside and hand you a list
of them. They don't remember which lies they told you, and most
were implicit anyway. So contradicting such lies will be a source
of surprises for as long as adults keep telling them.
Sometimes it's systems that lie to you. For example, the educational
systems in most countries train you to win by
hacking the test. But
that's not how you win at the most important real-world tests, and
after decades of training, this is hard for new arrivals in the real
world to grasp. Helping them overcome such institutional lies will
work as long as the institutions remain broken.
[12]
Another recipe for timelessness is to write about things readers
already know, but in much more detail than can be transmitted
culturally. "Everyone knows," for example, that it can be rewarding
to have kids. But till you have them you don't know precisely what
forms that takes, and even then much of what you know you may never
have put into words.
I've written about all these kinds of topics. But I didn't do it
in a deliberate attempt to write essays that were timeless in the
stricter sense. And indeed, the fact that this depends on one's ideas
not sticking suggests that it's not worth making a deliberate attempt
to. You should write about topics of timeless importance, yes, but
if you do such a good job that your conclusions stick and future
generations find your essay obvious instead of novel, so much the
better. You've crossed into Darwin territory.
Writing about topics of timeless importance is an instance of
something even more general, though: breadth of applicability. And
there are more kinds of breadth than chronological — applying to
lots of different fields, for example. So breadth is the ultimate
aim.
I already aim for it. Breadth and novelty are the two things I'm
always chasing. But I'm glad I understand where timelessness fits.
I understand better where a lot of things fit now. This essay has
been a kind of tour of essay writing. I started out hoping to get
advice about topics; if you assume good writing, the only thing
left to differentiate the best essay is its topic. And I did get
advice about topics: discover natural selection. Yeah, that would
be nice. But when you step back and ask what's the best you can do
short of making some great discovery like that, the answer turns
out to be about procedure. Ultimately the quality of an essay is a
function of the ideas discovered in it, and the way you get them
is by casting a wide net for questions and then being very exacting
with the answers.
The most striking feature of this map of essay writing are the
alternating stripes of inspiration and effort required. The questions
depend on inspiration, but the answers can be got by sheer persistence.
You don't have to get an answer right the first time, but there's
no excuse for not getting it right eventually, because you can keep
rewriting till you do. And this is not just a theoretical possibility.
It's a pretty accurate description of the way I work. I'm rewriting
as we speak.
But although I wish I could say that writing great essays depends mostly
on effort, in the limit case it's inspiration that makes the
difference. In the limit case, the questions are the harder thing
to get. That pool has no bottom.
How to get more questions? That is the most important question of
all.
Notes
[1]
There might be some resistance to this conclusion on the
grounds that some of these discoveries could only be understood by
a small number of readers. But you get into all sorts of difficulties
if you want to disqualify essays on this account. How do you decide
where the cutoff should be? If a virus kills off everyone except a
handful of people sequestered at Los Alamos,
could an essay that had been disqualified now be eligible? Etc.
Darwin's 1844 essay was derived from an earlier version written in 1839.
Extracts from it were published in 1858.
[2]
When you find yourself very curious about an apparently minor
question, that's an exciting sign. Evolution has designed you to
pay attention to things that matter. So when you're very curious
about something random, that could mean you've unconsciously noticed
it's less random than it seems.
[3]
Corollary: If you're not intellectually honest, your writing
won't just be biased, but also boring, because you'll miss all the
ideas you'd have discovered if you pushed for the truth.
[4]
Sometimes this process begins before you start writing.
Sometimes you've already figured out the first few things you want
to say. Schoolchildren are often taught they should decide everything
they want to say, and write this down as an outline before they
start writing the essay itself. Maybe that's a good way to get them
started — or not, I don't know — but it's antithetical to the
spirit of essay writing. The more detailed your outline, the less
your ideas can benefit from the sort of discovery that essays are for.
[5]
The problem with this type of "greedy" algorithm is that you
can end up on a local maximum. If the most valuable question is
preceded by a boring one, you'll overlook it. But I can't imagine
a better strategy. There's no lookahead except by writing. So use
a greedy algorithm and a lot of time.
[6]
I ended up reattaching the first 5 of the 17 paragraphs, and
discarding the rest.
[7]
Stephen Fry confessed to making use of this phenomenon when
taking exams at Oxford. He had in his head a standard essay about
some general literary topic, and he would find a way to turn the
exam question toward it and then just reproduce it again.
Strictly speaking it's the graph of ideas that would be highly
connected, not the space, but that usage would confuse people who
don't know graph theory, whereas people who do know it will get
what I mean if I say "space".
[8]
Too far doesn't depend just on the distance from the original
topic. It's more like that distance divided by the value of whatever
I've discovered in the subtree.
[9]
Or can you? I should try writing about this. Even if the
chance of succeeding is small, the expected value is huge.
[10]
There was a vogue in the 20th century for saying that the
purpose of art was also to teach. Some artists tried to justify
their work by explaining that their goal was not to produce something
good, but to challenge our preconceptions about art. And to be fair,
art can teach somewhat. The ancient Greeks' naturalistic sculptures
represented a new idea, and must have been extra exciting to
contemporaries on that account. But they still look good to us.
[11]
Bertrand Russell caused huge controversy in the early 20th
century with his ideas about "trial marriage." But they make boring
reading now, because they prevailed. "Trial marriage" is what we
call "dating."
[12]
If you'd asked me 10 years ago, I'd have predicted that schools
would continue to teach hacking the test for centuries. But now it
seems plausible that students will soon be taught individually by
AIs, and that exams will be replaced by ongoing, invisible
micro-assessments.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell,
Jessica Livingston, Robert
Morris, Courtenay Pipkin, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of
this.
2024-03-01 00:00:00
March 2024
(This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do now
if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of schools think
they should tell students something about startups. This is what I
think they should tell them.)
Most of you probably think that when you're released into the
so-called real world you'll eventually have to get some kind of
job. That's not true, and today I'm going to talk about a trick you
can use to avoid ever having to get a job.
The trick is to start your own company. So it's not a trick for
avoiding work, because if you start your own company you'll
work harder than you would if you had an ordinary job. But you will
avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including
a boss telling you what to do.
It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone else's.
And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the standard
way to get
really rich. If you look at the lists of the richest
people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of
them did it by starting their own companies.
Starting your own company can mean anything from starting a barber
shop to starting Google. I'm here to talk about one extreme end of
that continuum. I'm going to tell you how to start Google.
The companies at the Google end of the continuum are called startups
when they're young. The reason I know about them is that my wife
Jessica and I started something called Y Combinator that is basically
a startup factory. Since 2005, Y Combinator has funded over 4000
startups. So we know exactly what you need to start a startup,
because we've helped people do it for the last 19 years.
You might have thought I was joking when I said I was going to tell
you how to start Google. You might be thinking "How could we
start Google?" But that's effectively what the people who did start
Google were thinking before they started it. If you'd told Larry
Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, that the company they
were about to start would one day be worth over a trillion dollars,
their heads would have exploded.
All you can know when you start working on a startup is that it
seems worth pursuing. You can't know whether it will turn into
a company worth billions or one that goes out of business. So when I
say I'm going to tell you how to start Google, I mean I'm going to
tell you how to get to the point where you can start a company that
has as much chance of being Google as Google had of being Google.
[1]
How do you get from where you are now to the point where you can
start a successful startup? You need three things. You need to be
good at some kind of technology, you need an idea for what you're
going to build, and you need cofounders to start the company with.
How do you get good at technology? And how do you choose which
technology to get good at? Both of those questions turn out to have
the same answer: work on your own projects. Don't try to guess
whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the
most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that.
Just work on whatever interests you the most. You'll work much
harder on something you're interested in than something you're doing
because you think you're supposed to.
If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at
programming. That has been the source of the median startup for the
last 30 years, and this is probably not going to change in the next
10.
Those of you who are taking computer science classes in school may
at this point be thinking, ok, we've got this sorted. We're already
being taught all about programming. But sorry, this is not enough.
You have to be working on your own projects, not just learning stuff
in classes. You can do well in computer science classes without
ever really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a
degree in computer science from a top university and still not be
any good at programming. That's why tech companies all make you
take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you
went to university or how well you did there. They know grades and
exam results prove nothing.
If you really want to learn to program, you have to work on your
own projects. You learn so much faster that way. Imagine you're
writing a game and there's something you want to do in it, and you
don't know how. You're going to figure out how a lot faster than
you'd learn anything in a class.
You don't have to learn programming, though. If you're wondering
what counts as technology, it includes practically everything you
could describe using the words "make" or "build." So welding would
count, or making clothes, or making videos. Whatever you're most
interested in. The critical distinction is whether you're producing
or just consuming. Are you writing computer games, or just playing
them? That's the cutoff.
Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, spent time when he was a teenager
studying calligraphy — the sort of beautiful writing that
you see in medieval manuscripts. No one, including him, thought
that this would help him in his career. He was just doing it because
he was interested in it. But it turned out to help him a lot. The
computer that made Apple really big, the Macintosh, came out at
just the moment when computers got powerful enough to make letters
like the ones in printed books instead of the computery-looking
letters you see in 8 bit games. Apple destroyed everyone else at
this, and one reason was that Steve was one of the few people in
the computer business who really got graphic design.
Don't feel like your projects have to be serious. They can
be as frivolous as you like, so long as you're building things
you're excited about. Probably 90% of programmers start out building
games. They and their friends like to play games. So they build
the kind of things they and their friends want. And that's exactly
what you should be doing at 15 if you want to start a startup one
day.
You don't have to do just one project. In fact it's good to learn
about multiple things. Steve Jobs didn't just learn calligraphy.
He also learned about electronics, which was even more valuable.
Whatever you're interested in. (Do you notice a theme here?)
So that's the first of the three things you need, to get good at
some kind or kinds of technology. You do it the same way you get
good at the violin or football: practice. If you start a startup
at 22, and you start writing your own programs now, then by the
time you start the company you'll have spent at least 7 years
practicing writing code, and you can get pretty good at anything
after practicing it for 7 years.
Let's suppose you're 22 and you've succeeded: You're now really
good at some technology. How do you get
startup ideas? It might
seem like that's the hard part. Even if you are a good programmer,
how do you get the idea to start Google?
Actually it's easy to get startup ideas once you're good at technology.
Once you're good at some technology, when you look at the world you
see dotted outlines around the things that are missing. You start
to be able to see both the things that are missing from the technology
itself, and all the broken things that could be fixed using it, and
each one of these is a potential startup.
In the town near our house there's a shop with a sign warning that
the door is hard to close. The sign has been there for several
years. To the people in the shop it must seem like this mysterious
natural phenomenon that the door sticks, and all they can do is put
up a sign warning customers about it. But any carpenter looking at
this situation would think "why don't you just plane off the part
that sticks?"
Once you're good at programming, all the missing software in the
world starts to become as obvious as a sticking door to a carpenter.
I'll give you a real world example. Back in the 20th century,
American universities used to publish printed directories with all
the students' names and contact info. When I tell you what these
directories were called, you'll know which startup I'm talking
about. They were called facebooks, because they usually had a picture
of each student next to their name.
So Mark Zuckerberg shows up at Harvard in 2002, and the university
still hasn't gotten the facebook online. Each individual house has
an online facebook, but there isn't one for the whole university.
The university administration has been diligently having meetings
about this, and will probably have solved the problem in another
decade or so. Most of the students don't consciously notice that
anything is wrong. But Mark is a programmer. He looks at this
situation and thinks "Well, this is stupid. I could write a program
to fix this in one night. Just let people upload their own photos
and then combine the data into a new site for the whole university."
So he does. And almost literally overnight he has thousands of
users.
Of course Facebook was not a startup yet. It was just a... project.
There's that word again. Projects aren't just the best way to learn
about technology. They're also the best source of startup ideas.
Facebook was not unusual in this respect. Apple and Google also
began as projects. Apple wasn't meant to be a company. Steve Wozniak
just wanted to build his own computer. It only turned into a company
when Steve Jobs said "Hey, I wonder if we could sell plans for this
computer to other people." That's how Apple started. They weren't
even selling computers, just plans for computers. Can you imagine
how lame this company seemed?
Ditto for Google. Larry and Sergey weren't trying to start a company
at first. They were just trying to make search better. Before Google,
most search engines didn't try to sort the results they gave you
in order of importance. If you searched for "rugby" they just gave
you every web page that contained the word "rugby." And the web was
so small in 1997 that this actually worked! Kind of. There might
only be 20 or 30 pages with the word "rugby," but the web was growing
exponentially, which meant this way of doing search was becoming
exponentially more broken. Most users just thought, "Wow, I sure
have to look through a lot of search results to find what I want."
Door sticks. But like Mark, Larry and Sergey were programmers. Like
Mark, they looked at this situation and thought "Well, this is
stupid. Some pages about rugby matter more than others. Let's figure
out which those are and show them first."
It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup.
It wasn't obvious at the time. It's never obvious. If it was obviously
a good idea to start Apple or Google or Facebook, someone else would
have already done it. That's why the best startups grow out of
projects that aren't meant to be startups. You're not trying to
start a company. You're just following your instincts about what's
interesting. And if you're young and good at technology, then your
unconscious instincts about what's interesting are better than your
conscious ideas about what would be a good company.
So it's critical, if you're a young founder, to build things for
yourself and your friends to use. The biggest mistake young founders
make is to build something for some mysterious group of other people.
But if you can make something that you and your friends truly want
to use — something your friends aren't just using out of
loyalty to you, but would be really sad to lose if you shut it down
— then you almost certainly have the germ of a good startup
idea. It may not seem like a startup to you. It may not be obvious
how to make money from it. But trust me, there's a way.
What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something
your friends actually want. And those ideas aren't hard to see once
you're good at technology. There are sticking doors everywhere.
[2]
Now for the third and final thing you need: a cofounder, or cofounders.
The optimal startup has two or three founders, so you need one or
two cofounders. How do you find them? Can you predict what I'm going
to say next? It's the same thing: projects. You find cofounders by
working on projects with them. What you need in a cofounder is
someone who's good at what they do and that you work well with, and
the only way to judge this is to work with them on things.
At this point I'm going to tell you something you might not want
to hear. It really matters to do well in your classes, even the
ones that are just memorization or blathering about literature,
because you need to do well in your classes to get into a good
university. And if you want to start a startup you should try to
get into the best university you can, because that's where the best
cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are. When Larry
and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest
people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a real advantage for
them.
The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the
largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much
the same as the list of the most selective universities.
I don't think it's the prestigious names of these universities that
cause more good startups to come out of them. Nor do I think it's
because the quality of the teaching is better. What's driving this
is simply the difficulty of getting in. You have to be pretty smart
and determined to get into MIT or Cambridge, so if you do manage
to get in, you'll find the other students include a lot of smart
and determined people.
[3]
You don't have to start a startup with someone you meet at university.
The founders of Twitch met when they were seven. The founders of
Stripe, Patrick and John Collison, met when John was born. But
universities are the main source of cofounders. And because they're
where the cofounders are, they're also where the ideas are, because
the best ideas grow out of projects you do with the people who
become your cofounders.
So the list of what you need to do to get from here to starting a
startup is quite short. You need to get good at technology, and the
way to do that is to work on your own projects. And you need to do
as well in school as you can, so you can get into a good university,
because that's where the cofounders and the ideas are.
That's it, just two things, build stuff and do well in school.
Notes
[1]
The rhetorical trick in this sentence is that the "Google"s
refer to different things. What I mean is: a company that has as
much chance of growing as big as Google ultimately did as Larry and
Sergey could have reasonably expected Google itself would at the
time they started it. But I think the original version is zippier.
[2]
Making something for your friends isn't the only source of
startup ideas. It's just the best source for young founders, who
have the least knowledge of what other people want, and whose own
wants are most predictive of future demand.
[3]
Strangely enough this is particularly true in countries like
the US where undergraduate admissions are done badly. US admissions
departments make applicants jump through a lot of arbitrary hoops
that have little to do with their intellectual ability. But the
more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of mere determination
and resourcefulness. And those are the two most important qualities
in startup founders. So US admissions departments are better at
selecting founders than they would be if they were better at selecting
students.
Thanks to Jared Friedman, Carolynn Levy, Jessica Livingston, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.
2024-03-01 00:00:00
March 2024
I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they
were one of the reasons we started it.
YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the
undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone
else in the audience was probably local, but Steve and Alexis came
up on the train from the University of Virginia, where they were
seniors. Since they'd come so far I agreed to meet them for coffee.
They told me about the startup idea we'd later fund them to drop:
a way to order fast food on your cellphone.
This was before smartphones. They'd have had to make deals with
cell carriers and fast food chains just to get it launched. So it
was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later.
But I was impressed with their brains and their energy. In fact I
was so impressed with them and some of the other people I met at
that talk that I decided to start something to fund them. A few
days later I told Steve and Alexis that we were starting Y Combinator,
and encouraged them to apply.
That first batch we didn't have any way to identify applicants, so
we made up nicknames for them. The Reddits were the "Cell food
muffins." "Muffin" is a term of endearment Jessica uses for things
like small dogs and two year olds. So that gives you some idea what
kind of impression Steve and Alexis made in those days. They had
the look of slightly ruffled surprise that baby birds have.
Their idea was bad though. And since we thought then that we were
funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt
bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected the muffins. And
it seemed wrong to me to turn down the people we'd been inspired
to start YC to fund.
I don't think the startup sense of the word "pivot" had been invented
yet, but we wanted to fund Steve and Alexis, so if their idea was
bad, they'd have to work on something else. And I knew what else.
In those days there was a site called Delicious where you could
save links. It had a page called del.icio.us/popular that listed
the most-saved links, and people were using this page as a de facto
Reddit. I knew because a lot of the traffic to my site was coming
from it. There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but
designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving
them.
So I called Steve and Alexis and said that we liked them, just not
their idea, so we'd fund them if they'd work on something else.
They were on the train home to Virginia at that point. They got off
at the next station and got on the next train north, and by the end
of the day were committed to working on what's now called Reddit.
They would have liked to call it Snoo, as in "What snoo?" But
snoo.com was too expensive, so they settled for calling the mascot
Snoo and picked a name for the site that wasn't registered. Early
on Reddit was just a provisional name, or so they told me at least,
but it's probably too late to change it now.
As with all the really great startups, there's an uncannily close
match between the company and the founders. Steve in particular.
Reddit has a certain personality — curious, skeptical, ready to
be amused — and that personality is Steve's.
Steve will roll his eyes at this, but he's an intellectual; he's
interested in ideas for their own sake. That was how he came to be
in that audience in Cambridge in the first place. He knew me because
he was interested in a programming language I've written about
called Lisp, and Lisp is one of those languages few people learn
except out of intellectual curiosity. Steve's kind of vacuum-cleaner
curiosity is exactly what you want when you're starting a site
that's a list of links to literally anything interesting.
Steve was not a big fan of authority, so he also liked the idea of
a site without editors. In those days the top forum for programmers
was a site called Slashdot. It was a lot like Reddit, except the
stories on the frontpage were chosen by human moderators. And though
they did a good job, that one small difference turned out to be a
big difference. Being driven by user submissions meant Reddit was
fresher than Slashdot. News there was newer, and users will always
go where the newest news is.
I pushed the Reddits to launch fast. A version one didn't need to
be more than a couple hundred lines of code. How could that take
more than a week or two to build? And they did launch comparatively
fast, about three weeks into the first YC batch. The first users
were Steve, Alexis, me, and some of their YC batchmates and college
friends. It turns out you don't need that many users to collect a
decent list of interesting links, especially if you have multiple
accounts per user.
Reddit got two more people from their YC batch: Chris Slowe and
Aaron Swartz, and they too were unusually smart. Chris was just
finishing his PhD in physics at Harvard. Aaron was younger, a college
freshman, and even more anti-authority than Steve. It's not
exaggerating to describe him as a martyr for what authority later
did to him.
Slowly but inexorably Reddit's traffic grew. At first the numbers
were so small they were hard to distinguish from background noise.
But within a few weeks it was clear that there was a core of real
users returning regularly to the site. And although all kinds of
things have happened to Reddit the company in the years since,
Reddit the site never looked back.
Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing
that it's almost unkillable. Which is why, despite a long stretch
after Steve left when the management strategy ranged from benign
neglect to spectacular blunders, traffic just kept growing. You
can't do that with most companies. Most companies you take your eye
off the ball for six months and you're in deep trouble. But Reddit
was special, and when Steve came back in 2015, I knew the world was
in for a surprise.
People thought they had Reddit's number: one of the players in
Silicon Valley, but not one of the big ones. But those who knew
what had been going on behind the scenes knew there was more to the
story than this. If Reddit could grow to the size it had with
management that was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve
came back? We now know the answer to that question. Or at least a
lower bound on the answer. Steve is not out of ideas yet.
