A Local Revolution?
April 2009 Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined. The first is that startups may represent a new economic phase, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I'm not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it's true. People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups—imagine how much less Larry and Sergey would
Relentlessly Resourceful
March 2009 A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called
Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
February 2009 A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask "How could we make something like that happen here?" The organic way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live. That's how Silicon Valley happened. But could you shortcut the process by funding startups? Possibly. Let's consider what it would take. The first thing to understand is that enc
What I've Learned from Hacker News
February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned so much from working on it. Growth When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way.
A Fundraising Survival Guide
August 2008 Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they didn't do that. But the second biggest cause of death is probably the difficulty of raising money. Fundraising is brutal. One reason it's so brutal is simply the brutality of markets. People who've spent most of their lives in school
Some Heroes
April 2008 There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes. I'm not claiming this is a list of the n most admirable people. Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to? Einstein isn't on the list, for example, even though he probably deserves to be on any shortlist of admirable people. I once asked a physicist friend if
How to Disagree
March 2008 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts. Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You coul
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss: The Cliffs Notes
Some people seem to have interpreted You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss as putting down programmers who work for big companies. Jeff Atwood reproduced one quote summarizing it as saying: Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck. In fact the thesis of the essay is exactly the opposite: that although the press treats startup founders as gods, the differences between them and other programmers are
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
March 2008, rev. June 2008 Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically. I began to suspect this after spending several years working with
Six Principles for Making New Things
February 2008 The fiery reaction to the release of Arc had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy. The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. After years of working on it, all I had to show for myself were a few thousand lines of macros? Why hadn't I worked on more substantial problems? As I was mulling over these remarks it st
Take the Arc Challenge
February 2008 Arc's been out for a few days now. Everyone seems to have an opinion about it. The low end are much the same as the low end of opinions about anything online. There's no high end yet, because no one has had enough time yet to be able to speak from experience about what it's like to program in Arc. Those are the responses I'm really interested in. But in the meantime, we have the medi
Arc's Out
29 January 2008 We're releasing a version of Arc today, along with a site about it at arclanguage.org. This site will seem very familiar to users of Hacker News. It's mostly the same code, with a few colors and messages changed. Arc is still a work in progress. We've done little more than take a snapshot of the code and put it online. I spent a few days cleaning up inconsistencies, but it's still
The Future of Web Startups
October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very expensive and made in small quantities. Then someone discovers how to make them cheap
News from the Front
September 2007 A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college. For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up. What was I? A student. To do that well meant to get good grades. Why did one have to get good grades? To get into a good co
How Not to Die
August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk. I didn't mean this as an essay; I wrote it down because I only had two hours befo
Holding a Program in One's Head
August 2007 A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory
Stuff
July 2007 I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars. It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms
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Arc Lessons