Big Ideas from the Computer Age
by Paul Graham, 2004
PG explores the intellectual wild west of computers being ingrained into every aspect of our lives.
- "This book is an attempt to explain to the world at large what goes on in the world of computers."
- "You may have noticed that a lot of the people getting rich in the last thirty years have been programmers."
- "The money in software is one instance of a more general trend, and that trend is the theme of this book. This is the Computer Age."
- "Everything around us is turning into computers."
- "And since the purpose of this book is to explain how things really are in our world, I decided it was worth the risk to use the words we use."
- "Computer programs are all just text. And the language you choose determines what you can say. Programming languages are what programmers think in."
- "Programmers tend to be divided into tribes by the languages they use."
- "Why do hackers care so much about free speech? Partly, I think, because innovation is so important in software, and innovation and heresy are practically the same thing. Good hackers develop a habit of questioning everything."
- "The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, where you can think anything you want, if you're willing to risk the consequences."
- "Though hackers generally look dull on the outside, the insides of their heads are surprisingly interesting places."
- Chapters are independent
Their minds are not on the game.
Hackers are makers, like painters or architects or writers.
How to think heretical thoughts and what to do with them.
Like Americans, hackers win by breaking rules.
Web-based software offers the biggest opportunity since the arrival of the microcomputer.
The best way to get rich is to create wealth. And startups are the best way to do that.
- startup: a small company solving a hard technical problem
- starting / joining one is the best way to get rich because successful startups make money by creating wealth
- "The word "startup" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages."
- "Lots of people get rich knowing nothing more than that. You don't have to know physics to be a good pitcher. But I think it could give you an edge to understand the underlying principles."
- economically, startups compress your working life into less (but more intense) years
- he accumulates factors to arrive at a ~36x productivity multiplier in a startup (e.g., work more hours, focus more, remove unnecessary management, how much smarter you are than your current job requires, etc.)
- re: interruptions in startups
- "One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is uninterruptability."
- "The mere possibility of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. This is why they tend to work late at night, and why it's next to impossible to write great software in a cubicle (except late at night)."
- "Combine all these multipliers, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate job. If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year."
- hypothesis: a company that could pay each person in proportion to the wealth they generate would be the most profitable
- "Startups are not magic. They don't change the laws of wealth creation. They just represent a point at the far end of the curve. There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars' worth of pain."
- the press writes about outliers: the richest, famous people
- everyone's smart and dedicated, but luck is a part of every successful co.
- ex. microsoft was "the beneficiary of one of the most spectacular blunders in the history of business: the licensing deal for DOS"
- "Instead IBM ended up using all its power in the market to give Microsoft control of the PC standard. From that point, all Microsoft had to do was execute. They never had to bet the company on a bold decision. All they had to do was play hardball with licensees and copy more innovative products reasonably promptly."
- "Wealth is not the same thing as money. .... Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money."
- in a specialized society, you can't make everything for yourself, so trade becomes a two-step process
- "The intermediate stuff—the medium of exchange—can be anything that's rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government."
- businesses make wealth by doing something people want (money is intermediate)
- re: giving people what they want, not what you like
- "When you're starting a business, it's easy to slide into thinking that customers want what you do. During the Internet Bubble I talked to a woman who, because she liked the outdoors, was starting an "outdoor portal." You know what kind of business you should start if you like the outdoors? One to recover data from crashed hard disks.
- What's the connection? None at all. Which is precisely my point. If you want to create wealth (in the narrow technical sense of not starving) then you should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing."
- the amount of wealth in the world is not fixed -- wealth is created, not distributed
- "This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you're planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy."
- "You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history."
- ex. if you restore an old car, you've made yourself richer without making someone else poorer
- "A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth."
- "It's also obvious to programmers that there are huge variations in the rate at which wealth is created. At Viaweb we had one programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity [presumably Trevor Blackwell]. I remember watching what he did one long day and estimating that he had added several hundred thousand dollars to the market value of the company. A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs)."
- scientists create wealth but effectively donate it instead of selling it; hackers open sourcing is similar
- people in industrialized countries become institutionalized to "belonging to a group of people who all get up in the morning, go to some set of buildings, and do things that they do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing."
- after school, we're expected to get a job --> joining another institution, but really it's doing something people want that matters and you can do that without joining the group
- the problem in a company is that your work is averaged with that of many others
- averaging becomes a problem -- big cos. can't assign a value to each person's work
- "economies of scale in how much of your life you devote to your work"
- "Companies are not set up to reward people who want to do this. You can't go to your boss and say, I'd like to start working ten times as hard, so will you please pay me ten times as much? For one thing, the official fiction is that you are already working as hard as you can. But a more serious problem is that the company has no way of measuring the value of your work."
- performance can be measured for some roles: ceo, top management, sales
- "The CEO of a company that tanks cannot plead that he put in a solid effort. If the company does badly, he's done badly."
- "A company that could pay all its employees so straightforwardly would be enormously successful. Many employees would work harder if they could get paid for it. More importantly, such a company would attract people who wanted to work especially hard. It would crush its competitors. Unfortunately, companies can't pay everyone like salesmen. Salesmen work alone. Most employees' work is tangled together."
- "If you want to go faster, it's a problem to have your work tangled together with a large number of other people's. In a large group, your performance is not separately measurable—and the rest of the group slows you down."
- to get rich you need:
- measurement - be in a position where your performance can be measured
- leverage - "decisions you make have a big effect"
- working in a sweatshop has measurement but not leverage (measurement by itself doesn't matter)
- CEOs have both: their performance = performance of the company
- "A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure. Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss."
- people in safe jobs don't get rich -- no leverage without danger
- "One level at which you can accurately measure the revenue generated by employees is at the level of the whole company."
- "Starting or joining a startup is thus as close as most people can get to saying to one's boss, I want to work ten times as hard, so please pay me ten times as much."
- "Except in a few unusual kinds of work, like acting or writing books, you can't be a company of one person. And the people you work with had better be good, because it's their work that yours is going to be averaged with."
- in a big co, individuals don't see results from working harder b/c of this
- but take the 10 best rowers out of a 1000-man boat and put them together, then they'll have extra motivation and you have an all-star team
- "startups tend to get founded by self-selecting groups of ambitious people who already know one another (at least by reputation)"
- "Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees."
- "Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. They allow measurement because they're small, and they offer leverage because they make money by inventing new technology."
- technology is technique: discovering new ways to do things
- "The leading edge of technology moves fast. Technology that's valuable today could be worthless in a couple years. ... Also, technical advances tend to come from unorthodox approaches, and small companies are less constrained by convention."
- "Big companies can develop technology. They just can't do it quickly. ... So in practice big companies only get to develop technology in fields where large capital requirements prevent startups from competing"
- McDonald's grew huge by developing the McDonald's franchise, a system controlled by precise rules that could be reproduced everywhere, like software
- "Ditto for Wal-Mart. Sam Walton got rich not by being a retailer, but by designing a new kind of store."
- "Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way."
- deliberately seek hard problems and implement more difficult features even if equally valuable [seems counterintuitive to me] because it will be harder/impossible for bigger, slower competitors to follow (barriers to entry)
- this is when a VC ask, "How hard would this be for someone else to develop?"
- otherwise big companies will copy you with their greater distribution and steal your market
- patents are another barrier, but competitors may just violate knowing that they can make suing them slow and expensive
- re: companies that invent things vs. make money from them
- "Few technologies have one clear inventor. So as a rule, if you know the "inventor" of something ... it is because their company made money from it, and the company's PR people worked hard to spread the story."
- "Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice." [not sure how literally one can really take this advice]
- this is good advice for life: it tricks you into acknowledging what you know is right in the back of your mind
- it's not as simple as: start a startup, work harder, get paid more
- you can't decide how much harder you'll work - your competitors do... as hard as possible
- payoff is only proportionate to productivity on average - "you're 30 times as productive, and get paid between zero and a thousand times as much. If the mean is 30x, the median is probably zero."
- "A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score."
- "Viaweb's hackers were all extremely risk-averse. ... We would have much preferred a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, even though theoretically the second is worth twice as much. Unfortunately, there is not currently any space in the business world where you can get the first deal."
- "The closest you can get is by selling your startup in the early stages, giving up upside (and risk) for a smaller but guaranteed payoff."
- "It would have been a bargain to buy us at an early stage, but companies doing acquisitions are not looking for bargains. A company big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to be fairly conservative... They would rather overpay for a safe choice. So it is easier to sell an established startup, even at a large premium, than an early-stage one."
- "I think it's a good idea to get bought, if you can. Running a business is different from growing one. It is just as well to let a big company take over once you reach cruising altitude."
- "It's also financially wiser, because selling allows you to diversify."
- "How do you get bought? Mostly by doing the same things you'd do if you didn't intend to sell the company."
- "Potential buyers will always delay if they can. The hard part about getting bought is getting them to act."
- their two biggest fears are:
- their competitor buying you
- you continuing to grow driving up the price later or competing with them
- "In effect, acquirers assume the customers know who has the best technology. And this is not as stupid as it sounds. Users are the only real proof that you've created wealth."
- one red flag for VCs is a startup obsessed with interesting technical problems instead of solving problems that users care about
- "Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users. As anyone who has tried to optimize software knows, the key is measurement." [but is this really the right way to think or oversimplified?... not all users are equally valuable]
- ship v1 asap: "Until you have some users to measure, you're optimizing based on guesses."
- "You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate."
- "Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of human history it has not even been the most common."
- but two things changed:
- law - starting in medieval Europe, if you made a fortune, it wouldn't be stolen by the rulers
- industrialization - hand production replaced by modern machines
- "Remember what a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work faster. Instead of accumulating money slowly by being paid a regular wage for fifty years, I want to get it over with as soon as possible. So governments that forbid you to accumulate wealth are in effect decreeing that you work slowly."
- "The problem with working slowly is not just that technical innovation happens slowly. It's that it tends not to happen at all."
- "Without the incentive of wealth, no one wants to [develop new technology]. Engineers will work on sexy projects like fighter planes and moon rockets for ordinary salaries, but more mundane technologies like light bulbs or semiconductors have to be developed by entrepreneurs."
- "Startups are not just something that happened in Silicon Valley in the last couple decades. Since it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, everyone who has done it has used essentially the same recipe: measurement and leverage, where measurement comes from working with a small group, and leverage from developing new techniques. The recipe was the same in Florence in 1200 as it is in Santa Clara today."
- "The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world."
Could "unequal income distribution" be less of a problem than we think?
Till recently most experts thought spam filtering wouldn't work. This proposal changed their minds.
How do you make great things?
http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
- more than being a maker, you need good taste
- taste: the ability to design beautiful things
- taste can be objectively better than others; improves the more you design
- the principles of good design (i.e., beauty) persist across fields
- in math, shorter proofs are better
- in architecture, a few key structural elements >> ornament
- simple should be the default; when people try to be creative they embellish
- this is evasion -- force yourself to be simple & deliver substance
- "Aiming at timelessness is a way to make yourself find the best answer: if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself."
- stove
- 4 knobs in a row is simple, but 4 knobs in a grid is better
- it matches the burners → people don't have to think
- fonts
- sans-serif is purer but less legible
- abstract
- problems can improved too -- ex. replacing an intractable one with an easier one
- jane austen novels don't describe, they let you envision the scene
- suggesting is more engaging than telling -- a well designed object will let you use it as you want
- in software, give people basic elements to combine like legos
- humor is strength (shrug off misfortunes)
- the confident will seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly -- don't take yourself too seriously
- "If you're not working hard, you're probably wasting your time."
- hard problems require ingenuity and lead to interesting solutions
- you want hard problem hard, not fickle client or unreliable materials hard
- "When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's 'form follows function,' what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it."
- good writing flows conversationally only after many rewrites
- "In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with practice. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought."
- 2 kinds of symmetry
- repetition
- recursion: repetition in subelements
- compositional symmetry: when two halves react to each other (ex. american gothic)
- the eiffel tower is recursive: a tower on a tower
- nothing intrinsic; nature has just worked on the problem for a long time
- boats are like animal ribcages with ribs and spines
- early aircraft were designed to fly like birds, but lacked light materials and sophisticated controls
- "Now that we have enough computer power, we can imitate nature's method as well as its results. Genetic algorithms may let us create things too complex to design in the ordinary sense."
- experts expect to throw away early work because things change, and everything's probably not right the first time
- "It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there's more where that came from."
"Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix. Leonardo more or less invented the sketch, as a way to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration. Open source software has fewer bugs because it admits the possibility of bugs."
- a novice (progression):
- imitates unknowingly
- tries to be original
- accepts just being right over originality
"I think the greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that's no reason not to use it. They're confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process."
- some great designs are strange - euler's formula, lisp
- the other qualities can be cultivated, but not strangeness
- "At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted most of all to develop a personal style. But if you just try to make good things, you'll inevitably do it in a distinctive way..."
- "The only style worth having is the one you can't help."
- i'm taking "chunks" here to mean "clusters"
- why did so many great painters came from florence in the 15th century but none from milan, which was just as big?
- "Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence."
- same idea as "find a scenius" in austin kleon's show your work
- physicists at first found Einstein's theory of relativity ridiculous
- pay attention to the gaps b/t conventional wisdom & truth
"In practice I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks I could do better than that."
- intolerance for ugliness is necessary but not sufficient -- you also need to understand the field to see the problems that need fixing; when something feels hacky, cultivate those voices
- "The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it."
What a programming language is and why they are a hot topic now.
How will we program in a hundred years? Why not start now?
For web-based applications you can use whatever language you want. So can your competitors.
In technology, "industry best practice" is a recipe for losing.
A good programming language is one that lets hackers have their way with it.
Research has to be original. Design has to be good.