hello hello,
one of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. imagine a cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. the resulting four quadrants define four types of people. starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.
enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. so instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned.
the first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. all the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. and when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you need to leave a margin for error. which in this case means you need to ban fewer ideas than you'd like to. but that's hard for the aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy seeing people punished, as they have since they were children, and partly because they compete with one another.
the conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones. you'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a dangerous game they're playing. but i'll spell it out. there are two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad" ideas.
i'm biased, i admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs we've evolved since the enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from them. in particular, the retirement of the concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freely debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try them out to see if they work.
why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? because they have all the new ideas. to be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. you have to be right when everyone else is wrong. conventional-minded people can't do that. for similar reasons, all successful startup ceos are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. so it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay.
on the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. people who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. now they can become quants or start startups. you have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. if these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. so perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left.
steve jobs by walter isaacson
some people say, "give the customers what they want." but that's not my approach. our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. i think henry ford once said, "if i'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'a faster horse!'" people don't know what they want until you show it to them.
if you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. you have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “bye. i have to go. i’m going crazy and i’m getting out of here.” and they go and hibernate somewhere. maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.
sometimes i believe in god, sometimes i don’t. i think it’s 50/50, maybe. but ever since i’ve had cancer, i’ve been thinking about it more, and i find myself believing a bit more, maybe it’s because i want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. the wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it lives on.” then he paused for a second and said, “yea, but sometimes, i think it’s just like an on-off switch. click. and you’re gone.”
do things that don't scale by paul graham
recruit
the most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. nearly all startups have to. you can't wait for users to come to you. you have to go out and get them. value networks strongly define and delimit what companies within them can and cannot do. the organization’s structure and the way its groups learn to work together can then affect the way it can and cannot design new products.fragile
airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure. that initial fragility was not a unique feature of airbnb. almost all startups are fragile initially. and that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them.delight
you should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy. for as long as they could (which turned out to be surprisingly long), wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note. your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made. and you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways to delight them.experience
i was trying to think of a phrase to convey how extreme your attention to users should be, and i realized steve jobs had already done it: insanely great. steve wasn't just using "insanely" as a synonym for "very." he meant it more literally — that one should focus on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological.
fire
sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. it's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs.thats what facebook did. at first it was just for harvard students. in that form it only had a potential market of a few thousand people, but because they felt it was really for them, a critical mass of them signed up. after facebook stopped being for harvard students, it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while. when i interviewed mark zuckerberg at startup school, he said that while it was a lot of work creating course lists for each school, doing that made students feel the site was their natural home.
zero to one by peter thiel
indefinite pessimism every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. an indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. the indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. all he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence europe’s famous vacation mania.
as a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage
a new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.
zero to one is about how to build companies that create new things.
perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular.
that’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. part-time employees don’t work. even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. if you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. ken kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
once you’re 10x better, you escape competition.
paul graham essay - how to do great work
great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem.
the way to figure out what to work on is by working. if you're not sure what to work on, guess. but pick something and get going. you'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. it's good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields.
don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. if you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. it may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it.
when in doubt, optimize for interestingness. fields change as you learn more about them. but fields aren't people; you don't owe them any loyalty. if in the course of working on one thing you discover another that's more exciting, don't be afraid to switch.
what are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? that's what you're looking for. Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step
is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.
there's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. by letting your mind wander a little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack. you have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this phenomenon, though. you can't just walk around daydreaming. the daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds it questions.
the innovator's dilemma by clayton christensen
it is very difficult for a company whose cost structure is tailored to compete in high-end markets to be profitable in low-end markets as well.
value networks strongly define and delimit what companies within them can and cannot do. the organization’s structure and the way its groups learn to work together can then affect the way it can and cannot design new products.
scoping with the relentless onslaught of technology change was akin to trying to climb a mudslide raging down a hill. you have to scramble with everything you’ve got to stay on top of it, and if you ever once stop to catch your breath, you get buried.
unfortunately, companies that become large and successful find that maintaining growth becomes progressively more difficult. the math is simple: a $40 million company that needs to grow profitably at 20 percent to sustain its stock price and organizational vitality needs an additional $8 million in revenues the first year, $9.6 million the following year, and so on; a $400 million company with a 20 percent targeted growth rate needs new business worth $80 million in the first year, $96 million in the next, and so on; and a $4 billion company with a 20 percent goal needs to find $800 million, $960 million, and so on, in each successive year.
a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches. As he points out, the negative trumps the positive in many ways, and loss aversion is one of many manifestations of a broad negativity dominance.