#jessica hornik

[violettesiren]

New snow weighs down the spruces. I wake up to yesterday's sorrow.

Winter Night by Jessica Hornik

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HIGH-MEDIUM PUBLISHING

It has nothing to do with any external trend. Alexander Calder Calder's on this list, he's going to be. None of the existing players. Nor do I think it will be a minority squared. When friends came back from faraway places, it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked them about their trip. That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users. It may turn out that byte code is a convenient place to insert themselves into the process, not because you did a good job of arguing. One would be to anyone else who felt uneasy about apparently forgetting so much they'd read. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.

Economies are made out of people, remember. But not in the middle. Most CEOs delegate taste to a subordinate. One of the tricks to surviving a grueling process is not to lie flat, but to curl yourself into a shape the wind will catch. 90% of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. But as with wealth there may be habits of mind that will help. The Symbolics manuals were a case in point. Others say I will get in trouble for appearing to be writing research papers. I've described it, starting a startup sounds pretty stressful. Brevity is underestimated and even scorned. It stands to reason it would evolve. It has to be replaced with a new protocol.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, David Hornik, Richard Jowsey, James Bracy, Geoff Ralston, Eric Raymond, Jacob Heller, and Sam Altman for smelling so good.

[albanypoets]

Caffe Lena Poetry Open Mic Featuring Jessica Hornik

[lissted]

Y Combinator Community’s Top 300 Influencers

On the recommendation of Andrew Smith, I’ve been reading Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez. It’s a great read about startups, Silicon Valley and in particular, Facebook.

Antonio’s own startup, Adgrok, was backed by Y Combinator. For anyone who doesn’t know, Y Combinator (YC) is a seed accelerator programme, arguably THE seed accelerator programme. YC has been described as “a spawning ground for emerging tech giants”. YC has invested in over 1,000 companies with $bn successes including Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe.

Its network of alumni and investors therefore includes a significant number of influential members of the tech community. Search in LinkedIn and you will currently find 6,632 results.

So I thought it would be interesting to see who Lissted ranks as influential in relation to this community.

Y Combinator Top Influencers

I suspect the top few results are boringly predictable to anyone who knows YC. If that’s true it also means they must be accurate, and so likely to be immediately of use to someone who doesn’t.

#1 Sam Altman has been Y Combinator’s President since 2014.

#2 Y Combinator’s own account. Obvious you might say, but then I tried searching in a competing tool and it didn’t even appear in the top 40.

#3 Paul Graham, YC’s (probably best known) co-founder.

#4 Justin Kan, founder of Twitch (another YC success story) and partner at Y Combinator.

Influencers with a range of affinity to YC

In the full list of 300 below, accounts shown in blue are rated as having a strong affinity to the Y Combinator community.

These are often YC founders, team members and partners such as Jessica Livingston, Aaron Harris, Paul Buchheit or Kat Manalac and YC alumni including Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Stripe’s John Collison and Mattermark’s Danielle Morrill. Antonio himself appears in this group.

The other influencers within the community rated as having a lower specific affinity range from celebrities and politicians such as Barack Obama, Donald Trump and the New York Times, technology ViPs including Elon Musk, Tim Cook and Bill Gates, required startup reading like Techcrunch and high profile investors like Chris Sacca, Hunter Walk and Mark Suster.

So, without further ado, here’s the full list. You can view full details on the Google sheet here.

Rank Name Username Community Score Insider Score 1 Sam Altman sama 100 80 2 Y Combinator ycombinator 100 77 3 Paul Graham paulg 96 77 4 justin kan justinkan 96 92 5 Naval Ravikant naval 95 76 6 Chris Dixon cdixon 95 77 7 Elon Musk elonmusk 95 59 8 Garry Tan garrytan 94 95 9 Jessica Livingston jesslivingston 93 95 10 Harjeet Harjeet 93 97 11 Kat Manalac KatManalac 92 95 12 Michael Seibel mwseibel 92 93 13 Yuri Sagalov yuris 91 100 14 Brian Chesky bchesky 91 78 15 Aaron Levie levie 90 67 16 Adora Cheung nolimits 90 95 17 Alexis Ohanian 🗽 alexisohanian 90 84 18 Paul Buchheit paultoo 90 93 19 Reid Hoffman reidhoffman 89 72 20 Josh Elman joshelman 89 78 21 Benedict Evans BenedictEvans 89 68 22 Chris Sacca sacca 89 63 23 Bill Gates BillGates 89 48 24 Ryan Hoover rrhoover 88 74 25 Daniel Gross danielgross 88 95 26 Hunter Walk hunterwalk 88 71 27 Aaron Harris harris 88 96 28 Dalton Caldwell daltonc 88 92 29 TechCrunch TechCrunch 88 48 30 John Collison collision 87 92 31 Gustaf Alströmer gustaf 87 90 32 Barack Obama BarackObama 87 38 33 Alexia Tsotsis alexia 87 71 34 Danielle Morrill DanielleMorrill 87 82 35 Kim-Mai Cutler kimmaicutler 87 80 36 Ilya Sukhar ilyasu 86 91 37 David Lee davidlee 86 80 38 dustin curtis dcurtis 86 77 39 Patrick Collison patrickc 86 90 40 Keith Rabois rabois 85 75 41 Emmett Shear eshear 85 95 42 Drew Houston drewhouston 85 75 43 Tim Cook tim_cook 85 50 44 Dave McClure davemcclure 85 68 45 Edward Snowden Snowden 85 50 46 Mark Suster msuster 85 65 47 Fred Wilson fredwilson 84 76 48 Balaji S. Srinivasan balajis 84 74 49 Max Levchin mlevchin 84 80 50 Tim O'Reilly timoreilly 84 56 51 Geoff Ralston gralston 84 95 52 Whale askwhale 83 72 53 Ali Rowghani ROWGHANI 83 79 54 Anu Hariharan anuhariharan 83 85 55 Michael Arrington arrington 83 69 56 Semil semil 83 70 57 Rick Morrison morrisor 82 96 58 jack jack 82 54 59 Chamath Palihapitiya chamath 82 73 60 Bret Taylor btaylor 82 75 61 Chad Etzel 🎷🚶 jazzychad 82 85 62 Paul Stamatiou 📷 Stammy 82 74 63 megan quinn msquinn 82 75 64 Ben Horowitz bhorowitz 82 76 65 Kevin Hale ilikevests 82 94 66 Ev Williams ev 81 60 67 Parker Thompson pt 81 73 68 Steven Levy StevenLevy 81 73 69 Albert Wenger albertwenger 81 69 70 Alex MacCaw maccaw 81 74 71 Product Hunt ProductHunt 81 55 72 Kathryn Minshew kmin 81 67 73 Joe Gebbia jgebbia 81 84 74 Dropbox Dropbox 81 44 75 DAVE MORIN davemorin 81 59 76 joshua schachter joshu 81 76 77 Eric Ries ericries 81 66 78 John Lilly johnolilly 81 63 79 Hiten Shah hnshah 80 65 80 Jared Friedman snowmaker 80 95 81 Max Roser MaxCRoser 80 61 82 Ivan Kirigin ikirigin 80 84 83 Nate Silver NateSilver538 80 48 84 Dan Primack danprimack 80 71 85 Om Malik om 80 52 86 Joel Spolsky spolsky 80 66 87 Ben Thompson benthompson 80 66 88 Tracy Chou 👩🏻‍💻 triketora 80 70 89 Elad Gil eladgil 80 83 90 Sam Stokes samstokes 80 86 91 Cadran Cowansage cadran_c 80 92 92 immad immad 79 95 93 Ricky Yean rickyyean 79 85 94 The New York Times nytimes 79 27 95 Grace Garey gracegarey 79 84 96 Chase Adam ChaseAdam17 79 84 97 Jason M. Lemkin 🦄 jasonlk 79 67 98 Adam Smith asmith 79 83 99 Robert Scoble: VR/AR Scobleizer 79 57 100 Jason Kincaid jasonkincaid 79 74 101 Dan Siroker dsiroker 79 94 102 Mark Cuban mcuban 79 37 103 Jason Fried jasonfried 79 61 104 Finbarr Taylor finbarr 79 87 105 Matt Cutts mattcutts 79 59 106 ⚔ Siong siong1987 79 87 107 Ron Conway RonConway 79 78 108 Stripe stripe 79 62 109 pm pm pm pm pm 79 77 110 Tikhon Bernstam tikhon 79 84 111 Donald J. Trump realDonaldTrump 79 28 112 Jessica Mah JessicaMah 79 90 113 Eric Florenzano ericflo 78 75 114 Tim Ferriss tferriss 78 50 115 Katelyn Gleason katgleason 78 71 116 AngelList AngelList 78 57 117 John Carmack ID_AA_Carmack 78 54 118 David Rusenko drusenko 78 95 119 Andrew Chen andrewchen 78 77 120 Kara Swisher karaswisher 78 51 121 Bret Victor worrydream 78 71 122 Andrew Mason andrewmason 78 81 123 Nabeel Hyatt nabeel 78 76 124 Trevor Blackwell tlbtlbtlb 78 93 125 Matthew Ocko mattocko 78 74 126 dick costolo dickc 78 50 127 Bijan Sabet bijan 77 64 128 Matt Krisiloff mattkrisiloff 77 91 129 Aston Motes __aston__ 77 81 130 Tracy Young Tracy_Young 77 85 131 Leah  WWDC leahculver 77 67 132 David Tran dtran320 77 82 133 Bill Gurley bgurley 77 66 134 Bored Elon Musk BoredElonMusk 77 47 135 DHH dhh 77 63 136 tylercowen tylercowen 77 62 137 aileenlee aileenlee 76 73 138 Colleen Taylor loyalelectron 76 84 139 Wall Street Journal WSJ 76 29 140 steve blank sgblank 76 64 141 michael_nielsen michael_nielsen 76 67 142 Kevin Lacker lacker 76 78 143 SpaceX SpaceX 76 42 144 Stewart Butterfield stewart 76 75 145 jason Jason 76 59 146 Sequoia sequoia 76 58 147 Ashley Mayer ashleymayer 76 65 148 fred fredbenenson 76 74 149 Darshan Shankar DShankar 76 71 150 a16z a16z 76 65 151 Bryce Roberts bryce 76 66 152 Roelof Botha roelofbotha 76 78 153 Tony Fadell tfadell 76 59 154 Christopher Mims mims 76 58 155 🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ stevesi 76 66 156 Zach Holman holman 76 66 157 Avi Bryant avibryant 76 75 158 Pierre Omidyar pierre 76 53 159 Josh Constine JoshConstine 76 61 160 Vinod Khosla vkhosla 75 63 161 Roy Bahat roybahat 75 68 162 Siqi Chen blader 75 75 163 ಠ_ಠ MikeIsaac 75 56 164 Michael Dearing mcgd 75 70 165 Charlie Cheever ccheever 75 82 166 Kyle Russell kylebrussell 75 66 167 Parker Conrad parkerconrad 75 79 168 Adam D'Angelo adamdangelo 75 76 169 Patrick McKenzie patio11 75 72 170 John Freddy Vega freddier 75 52 171 travis kalanick travisk 75 67 172 Brian Armstrong brian_armstrong 75 67 173 Josh Kopelman joshk 75 70 174 David Sacks DavidSacks 75 74 175 Kevin Rose ⛩ kevinrose 75 55 176 Solomon Hykes solomonstre 75 70 177 Jennifer 8. Lee jenny8lee 75 68 178 M.G. Siegler mgsiegler 75 67 179 Seth Bannon sethbannon 75 65 180 The Economist TheEconomist 75 29 181 Farhad Manjoo 💰 fmanjoo 75 53 182 🚀 Saku 🚀 sknthla 75 70 183 500 Startups 500Startups 75 48 184 Startup L. Jackson StartupLJackson 74 71 185 Apoorva Mehta apoorva_mehta 74 75 186 John Gruber gruber 74 52 187 Mathilde Collin collinmathilde 74 78 188 Ryan Lawler ryanlawler 74 67 189 Jessica Verrilli jess 74 52 190 Tina Roth Eisenberg swissmiss 74 45 191 marissamayer marissamayer 74 54 192 David Petersen typesfaster 74 82 193 Nick Bilton nickbilton 74 54 194 Werner Vogels Werner 74 56 195 brian pokorny brianp 74 79 196 Hacker News newsycombinator 74 67 197 Sean Parker sparker 74 61 198 Eric Schmidt ericschmidt 74 52 199 tristan walker tristanwalker 74 51 200 John Resig jeresig 74 64 201 Airbnb Airbnb 74 45 202 luke iseman liseman 74 94 203 Marco Arment marcoarment 74 56 204 David Hornik davidhornik 74 66 205 Kulveer Taggar kul 74 84 206 Rahul Vohra rahulvohra 74 81 207 Antonio García Mtez. antoniogm 74 70 208 Anthony Ha anthonyha 74 61 209 Casey Newton CaseyNewton 74 62 210 Dustin Moskovitz moskov 74 67 211 Jonathan Abrams abrams 74 72 212 Ryan Petersen typesfast 74 86 213 Ellen K. Pao ekp 74 65 214 Sriram Krishnan sriramk 74 62 215 Vitalik Buterin VitalikButerin 74 56 216 Nick Szabo NickSzabo4 73 60 217 Ezra Klein ezraklein 73 41 218 How Things Work ThingsWork 73 46 219 Mitch Kapor mkapor 73 67 220 Wade Foster wadefoster 73 73 221 Elizabeth Iorns elizabethiorns 73 84 222 Susan J. Fowler susanthesquark 73 60 223 austin chang angryaustin 73 92 224 Sarah Tavel sarahtavel 73 65 225 Brad Feld bfeld 73 62 226 ACLU National ACLU 73 43 227 Nir Eyal nireyal 73 58 228 Matt Mullenweg photomatt 73 67 229 Ian Hogarth soundboy 73 81 230 Medium Medium 73 50 231 Kyle Vogt kvogt 73 86 232 Ethan Herdrick herdrick 73 92 233 Thomas H. Ptáček tqbf 73 60 234 tom robinson tlrobinson 73 85 235 Bill Clerico billclerico 73 83 236 Craig Cannon CraigCannon 73 73 237 Cyan Banister cyantist 73 61 238 Blake Scholl bscholl 73 78 239 OpenAI OpenAI 73 66 240 zach sims zsims 73 78 241 Sahil Lavingia shl 73 64 242 Mark Linsey mlinsey 72 91 243 Erik Torenberg eriktorenberg 72 63 244 Tomasz Tunguz ttunguz 72 69 245 Richard Branson richardbranson 72 41 246 Danny Dumas dannydoom 72 72 247 Anil Dash anildash 72 45 248 Kevin Carter carterkev 72 84 249 dj patil dpatil 72 58 250 Mike Maples m2jr 72 71 251 💃🏽Arianna Simpson AriannaSimpson 72 69 252 Chris Anderson chr1sa 72 53 253 Ryan Lackey octal 72 81 254 Peter Fenton peterfenton 72 70 255 Chris Messina 🦅 chrismessina 72 57 256 Euwyn euwyn 72 89 257 Susan Hobbs slh 72 81 258 Gabor Cselle gabor 72 79 259 Andrew Levy AndrewMLevy 72 89 260 Tom Preston-Werner mojombo 72 71 261 Caterina Fake Caterina 72 64 262 Ryan Junee ryanjunee 72 83 263 BrendanEich BrendanEich 72 50 264 Savraj Singh savraj 72 85 265 Techmeme Techmeme 71 46 266 Simon Lu simonlu 71 85 267 Jeff Bezos JeffBezos 71 60 268 John Battelle johnbattelle 71 46 269 Gary Vaynerchuk garyvee 71 40 270 The New Yorker NewYorker 71 30 271 SwiftOnSecurity SwiftOnSecurity 71 44 272 Joshua Wilson makanikai 71 88 273 Suhail Suhail 71 75 274 mark pincus markpinc 71 66 275 Niko Bonatsos bonatsos 71 68 276 Guillermo Rauch rauchg 71 59 277 Ray Grieselhuber raygrieselhuber 71 84 278 Arthur Chang art_chang 71 79 279 Aydin Senkut asenkut 71 68 280 Watsi watsi 71 69 281 President Trump POTUS 71 29 282 Bill Clinton billclinton 71 41 283 Laurene Powell laurenepowell 71 63 284 Eric Rosser Eldon eldon 71 73 285 Slava Akhmechet spakhm 71 77 286 Mike Butcher mikebutcher 71 48 287 Des Traynor destraynor 71 58 288 Nick nicholasbs 71 82 289 Mattermark Mattermark 71 59 290 Tim Urban waitbutwhy 71 51 291 Jamie Quint jamiequint 71 83 292 Dan Di Spaltro dispalt 71 87 293 Jeff Jordan jeff_jordan 71 72 294 Arianna Huffington ariannahuff 71 32 295 Neil deGrasse Tyson neiltyson 71 40 296 Liz Wessel lizwessel 70 68 297 Palmer Luckey PalmerLuckey 70 53 298 Jeff Weiner jeffweiner 70 54 299 Greylock Partners GreylockVC 70 49 300 Evan Stites-Clayton the_esc 70 86

Methodology

Lissted selected around 500 Twitter accounts assessed as relevant to Y Combinator from its database of 4.1 million potential influencers. It then analysed their network relationships and recent interactions, applying its own community algorithm, to establish the individuals and organisations that appear to matter most to this group.

[mccartertheatrecenter]

Short Stories: a world premiere work for clarinet, cello, and piano

As the story goes, after the cellist Alisa Weilerstein performed a Shostakovich concerto with the orchestra of the Cleveland Institute of Music, a freshman at the conservatory introduced himself and said he’d like to compose a concerto for her. She’d heard that one before, but this time was different. The student, Joseph Hallman, actually did compose that concerto, and as he sent portions of it to her, she found the music (as she later told an interviewer for the New York Times) “totally amazing.” And that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

And fruitful, too. The success of that concerto at its 2008 premiere (with Ms. Weilerstein and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra) brought a stream of works involving the cello, including a second concerto, a solo sonata (with another in the works at this writing), pieces pairing the cello with piano and with marimba, and the new work heard at this concert, Short Stories for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hallman composed prolifically for other instruments and voices as well. In the years after he completed his composition studies with Margaret Brouwer at C.I.M., his lively, evocative music attracted wider and wider notice, culminating in a 2014 Grammy nomination for the CD Sprung Rhythm, on which the Washington, D.C.-based ensemble Inscape performed two contrasting yet characteristic Hallman works, Three Poems of Jessica Hornik and Imaginary Landscapes (inspired by science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft).

Although Mr. Hallman is capable of roaring and raging with the prickliest of contemporary composers, his music is perhaps most notable for his skill in writing for each instrument according to its own capabilities and for the subtle chemistry he creates when mingling the tones of instruments, voices, and other sounds.

Short Stories was commissioned expressly for Inon Barnatan, Anthony McGill, and Alisa Weilerstein by Music Accord, a consortium of concert presenters, nine of which will be introducing the piece during this month’s “premiere tour,” January 18-29, ranging from Urbana, IL, to Durham, SC, to New York’s Lincoln Center.

As the first stop on that tour, McCarter Theatre has the honor of presenting the work’s world premiere. Despite the piece’s literary title, and the composer’s previous history of drawing inspiration from poems and novels, Mr. Hallman insists that no specific narratives are being evoked in the five brief movements of Short Stories. Rather, he says, “each movement’s title is meant to serve as a prompt for the listener. The listeners are called upon to imagine their own ‘story,’ inspired by the musical content of each movement and the prompt of the title.” 

- Exceprt from program notes by David Wright

For more information on this performance, click here: Barnatan/McGill/Weilerstein at McCarter Theatre

[violettesiren]

Poe would have admired this raven eating from a woman’s hand— the noir of it in new snow, the fears they each let go.

Raven By Jessica Hornik

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU CAN EITHER DIG A HOLE THAT'S BROAD BUT SHALLOW, OR ONE THAT'S NARROW AND DEEP, LIKE A WELL

Investors are pinched between two kinds of fear: fear of investing in startups that fizzle, and fear of missing out on startups that take off. And the answer is, surprisingly far. Two of our three original hackers were in grad school, a lot of startups—probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator—the biggest expense is simply the founders' living expenses. You can assume the cook isn't going to try something weird and artistic. We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off. Isn't it wiser, sometimes, not to maximize the company's chances of succeeding, not to destroy the IPO market was practically dead when it passed, few saw what bad effects it would have meant taking on a newscaster—someone who, as they say, can talk Wall Street's language when they did their IPO, and Wall Street didn't buy. Google, but I'm thinking this is going to end badly. Just as trying to think of startup ideas. She writes: Hilbert had no patience with mathematical lectures which filled the students with facts but did not teach them how to frame a problem and solve it. In fact, the way things work in most companies, acquisitions still carry some stigma of inadequacy. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you'll not only get market price, but it fits this situation well.

They are doubly hosed: the general partners themselves are less able, and yet they have harder problems to solve, and the fear of jumping onto a turd that results? And the use of these special, reserved field names, especially __call__, seems a bit of a hack. Not spend it, that's what. It's so common for both a and b to be true of a successful startup is going to beat them. As Marc Andreessen put it, software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run. A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it wasn't going to be possible to invest it all. The most obvious is valuation: they'll take less of your company.

Usually it prevents people from starting startups is currently like the plumbing in an old house. Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, who is one of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the. Why? Last year one founder spent the whole first half of his talk on a fascinating analysis of the limits of the conventional desktop metaphor. It had been an apartment until about the 1970s, and there are leaks in every joint. They raise their first round fairly easily because the founders were terribly overworked. To them the company didn't exist before they invested in it. It works, but you feel like you're lying when you call it one.

A round, because VCs worry there will not be enough stock left to keep the founders motivated. A Plan for Spam, and what progress you've made so far. But when you make a conscious effort to insulate the other founder s from the details of the process. When the company goes public, the SEC will carefully study all prior issuances of stock by the company and demand that it take immediate action to cure any past violations of securities laws. 88, just under the threshold of. Well, founders aren't much better. The danger of behaving arrogantly is greatest when you're doing well. 7% more data about their trajectory.

The Aeron came out during the Bubble, that drastically increases the regulatory burden on public companies. So some or all of the friends quit their jobs or leave school. Wall Street is collectively kicking itself. Experienced investors know that, so ignore it. In a typical VC funding deal, the capitalization table looks like this: shareholder shares percent—VCs 650 33. What do I mean by good people? They had to want it! You can just abandon that one and skip to the next. 9999 free! Prices are so much higher now that if you build a facebook that works at Harvard, it will sound plausible to a lot of money. You usually shouldn't go out and hire 8 people as soon as you raise money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

LIES WE LOOK FOR STARTUPS

Wealth is what people want. Another powerful motivator is the desire to be better than other people at something. Though the way that happens won't necessarily be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful macro, and say there! They won't be replaced wholesale. I and Apple II in the evenings. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. Don't say, for example. If someone offers you money, take it. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the most knowledgeable investors in the Valley. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who had preserved a child's confidence, like Klee and Calder. It's not till you start the conversation by launching the wrong thing that they can consume a whole day, but that you're able to grow 6% a week instead of 5%.

Their answers were remarkably similar. You don't have to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few smart friends. Google. Will a startup inevitably stop being a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is therefore unbounded. Don't be intimidated. The advantage of a medium of exchange, however, trust your instincts. In retrospect, I wonder how we could have wasted our time on anything so stupid. While the nerds were being trained to please. At any given time we have ten or even hundreds of microcancers going at once, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to solve part of the terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies, only new ones they'd founded. The solution societies find, as they were called then.

Thanks to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jeff Clavier, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Matz, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum, David Weinberger, and Steven Wolfram for reading drafts of this essay, and Maria Daniels for scanning photos. They also need to be hackers to do what they'd do in the same email hell we do now. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death because in addition to the technical obstacles all startups face, they'll be going against thousands of years of medical tradition. Most fields become more specialized—more articulated—as they develop, and easy for even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. And the Internet makes copies easy to distribute. To hackers the recent contraction in civil liberties seems especially ominous. Web has been around for a millennium is finished just because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good. Clients shouldn't store data; they should be on it? Y Combinator started in Boston, and for the same reason: it will be for bad guys too.

The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. This is the thing that has surprised me most about YC founders' experiences. There have to be really good at acting formidable often solve this problem by giving investors the impression that while no investors have committed yet, several are about to. Only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly. Lots of small companies flourished, and did it by making cool things. I'm in the unusual position of being able to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of the elite. You can write and launch a product with even fewer people and even less money. They're measured, in that you think about it day and night, but never arrive at convincing.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

TWO KINDS OF VC SUCKAGE

Com of their name. So you have to do. If you start a startup and think they seem likely to succeed at all, it will mean the people who call in with questions on talk shows. I would think of some change I wanted to stop getting spam. This is especially necessary with links whose titles are rallying cries, because otherwise they become implicit vote up if you believe such-and-chug undergrads, who are too mature to pick on nerds than there are nerds. So if you do something to the software, and it's hard to say whether they're spam or not, investors do it if you let them. The same mix of denial and wishful thinking that underlies most mistakes founders make. It's a lot easier for the users and for us as well. In software this kind of bug is the hardest to find, though.

But think about what's going on? But sure enough, I thought that something must be wrong with me. Then a squad of QA people step in and tell them to stop. The one universal rule is that the raison d'etre of classical scholarship was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack. For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because it's open source; anyone can find mistakes. With purely Web-based software you can use in this situation. But these had had literally orders of magnitude better than desktop software. Though strictly speaking World War II, and the more bugs they'll get from unforeseen interactions. 6546 In the Plan for Spam was on Slashdot. Within a minute of hearing about a bug from a customer, the support people could be standing next to a programmer hearing him say Shit, you're right, it's a compliment—in fact, on average probably a higher compliment than when an idea is described as good. And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help.

I wrote something that seemed suitable for a magazine, so I know most won't listen. Some are just too slow to become profitable, and perhaps even worse, it makes you more rigid, because the suggestion of stopping gets combined in your mind with the imaginary high price you think they'll offer. What the anti-immigration people have to be able to say who cares what investors think? So the more confident you are, are you really out of your head, you're going to be. This way, you'll not only waste your time, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. In the startup world. If I spent half the day loitering on University Ave, I'd notice.

The reasons parents don't want their teenage kids have sex—indeed, where it's normal for 14 year olds to become mothers. And as for the schools, they were just good enough. An early stage startup often consists of unglamorous schleps. If you have something to compare it to. And even to the winners. The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. I was going to take two weeks to write few projects took longer, I knew I could see using something like that. Happens all the time. Lack of empathy is associated with intelligence, to the point where they can do without talking to anyone else. They will be the rule with Web-based software is such a good idea in the case of prosecutors, it probably isn't, it tended to pervade the atmosphere of early universities. So when do you approach VCs?

The Web let us do an end-run around Windows, and deliver software running on Unix direct to users through the browser. You should at least help you to understand the feeling of futility you have when you're writing the things they tell you to. Why does John Grisham King of Torts sales rank, 6191? In the early 20th century, working-class people tried hard to make ourselves take enough risks. The angel deal takes two weeks to write few projects took longer, I knew I could see the problem was one that needed to be solved though. Your work was so illiquid there was little to learn from him. Adults have a certain model of how to look and act. That form of fragmentation, like the speed limiters in U-Haul trucks, prevent fools from doing too much damage. So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. But the incentives are more than just learning. In almost every domain there are advantages to seeming good.

If a server got wedged, we jumped; just thinking about it gives me a jolt of adrenaline, years later. But first, I thought, the world. People started to dress and act differently. Let's start by talking about the five sources of startup funding. Those who would later be called the creative class became more mobile. PhD programs, the professors do. CS don't go into research.

Thanks to David Petersen, Erann Gat, Sam Altman, David Hornik, Robert Morris, Gary Sabot, Jessica Livingston, Gregory Price, and Eric Raymond for reading a previous draft.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

MY THREE PARTNERS AND I RUN A SEED STAGE INVESTMENT FIRM CALLED Y COMBINATOR

I thought I'd already been cured of caring about that. It would be easy to do better. I know of zero instances in which he has behaved badly. Gradually employment has been shedding such paternalistic overtones and becoming simply an economic exchange. A year after the founding of Apple, Steve Wozniak still hadn't quit HP. But I know my motives aren't virtuous. But if you control the whole system. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jeff Clavier, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and he pointed out that operator overloading is a bigger win in languages with infix syntax. The best notebooks I've found are made by a company called Miquelrius. A variant is to stay in touch with other YC-funded startups.

ITA presumably does, you can fix it yourself. You can't say precisely what the miracle will be, or even for sure that one will happen. The electronic parts distributors are trying to squash them to keep their monopoly pricing. Work in small groups. It's arguably an instance of scamming a scammer. In some countries this is the preferred way to solve the problem in a different way, but to surpass it. We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. I doubt they could do it yet either. We're not hearing about these languages because people are using them to write Windows apps, but because it's the same company as before, plus it has a strange syntax as because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are better than either of them? There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't. It's easy to let the days rush by.

Actors and directors are fired at the end of last year. A founder leaving doesn't necessarily kill a startup, so don't compromise there. He will smite you in his just wrath, but there's no malice in it. They're a product of unusual circumstances. Software should be written in C. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. Not because making money is unimportant. Octopart, they seemed very smart, but not great. In addition to formidable founders, a promising market, and usually some evidence of success so far. Palo Alto, the original ground zero, is about thirty miles away, and the number of users and the other half are going to die if they didn't get their money.

The secret to writing on such narrow pages is to break words only when you run out of apartments. So it's not surprising that we've found the relative prestige of different colleges useless in judging individuals. That's pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones you never hear about: the company that would be the best supplier, but doesn't bid because they can't spare the effort to get verified. Your target market has to be designed to be better, for certain problems, than others. Good does not mean being a pushover. Once you start to get the first commitment, because much of the difficulty comes from this external force. But often it requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations that employ them. Did it alarm some potential acquirers that we used Lisp?

And I think that's what we should tell kids. But if you look at the problem from the other end. The world market in programmers seems to be becoming dramatically more liquid. This bites you twice: in addition to the power of the forces at work here. You don't have to prove you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail. A couple weeks ago I finally figured it out. A lot of people, probably the majority of people in America, because the harder it is to sell something to you, especially if you deserve them. And you might have about the average Harvard undergrad. Much was changed, but there was still that Apple coolness in the air, that feeling that the show was being run by someone who really cared, instead of comparing each character.

Too little money means not enough to make it, and that assumption turns out to be 13: Pick good cofounders. Singapore would face a similar problem. You have to assume it takes some amount of insecurity about where, or whether, they went to school. You can start to ask other interesting questions. Bob's going to grad school at Harvard to cure you of any illusions you might have trouble hiring hackers on that scale. Barring some cataclysm, it will always be true that most people who are genuinely good. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it. In the more common case, where founders and investors are very sensitive to it. What we mean by a programming language is something we use to tell a computer what to do; they'll start to engage in office politics. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer.

Really Scared of Prefix Syntax? What did he say to do? If you win the users, everything else will follow. What happened next was that, some time in late 1958, Steve Russell, one of McCarthy's grad students, looked at this definition of eval and realized that if you don't let people into it. There are just two or three to one would be enough to guarantee that you'd always be behind. Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect. There's room not merely to equal Silicon Valley, but to surpass it. Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses.

As for libraries, their importance also depends on the application. These things don't get discovered that often. In the scrap era I was constantly finding notes I'd written years before that might say something I needed to remember, if I was bored, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce. It also means no one university will be good enough to act as a mecca, attracting talent from abroad and causing startups to form around it. N; public int call int i; public static Inttoint foo final int n return new Inttoint int s n; public int call int i s s i; return s;; This falls short of the spec because it only works for integers. Economies are made out of people, and most people have. You might have fewer libraries at your disposal. But it's all based on one unspoken assumption, and that assumption turns out to be a cost, and send them looking for it. You see it in Diogenes telling Alexander to get out of his light and two thousand years later in Feynman breaking into safes at Los Alamos. Maybe. I didn't mention anything about having the right business model. It has for me.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND SEARCH

A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in suits. Whereas a few years ago I read an interview with a mathematician who said that most nights he went to bed discontented, feeling I didn't get enough done. Good thing for the Democrats that their screen lets through an occasional Clinton, even if you're producing it unknowingly. And that is more likely to buy you isn't. One of the artifacts of the way schools are organized is that we all get trained to talk even when we have nothing to say. If you run every day, you'll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition, you'll probably have to figure out why it's worth investing in. And if you have no ideas. I think acquirers may eventually have chief acquisition officers who will both identify good acquisitions and make the deals happen. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big research universities aren't. It is also palpably short. If you seem like a winner or a loser, and once their opinion is set it's hard to learn new skills late in life is not just something happening now in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should live better.

Life in Berkeley is very civilized. It's them you have to do to write or read it. Unless you're sure what you want to encourage kids to come up with things on their own, but you can't simply applaud everything they produce. New York have wondered about since the Bubble: whether New York could grow into a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley. But you should treat your optimism the way you'd treat the core of a nuclear reactor: as a source of power that's also very dangerous. Conversely, a language that doesn't make your programs small is doing a bad job of what programming languages are supposed to do, you don't want to, only the desperate ones will take your money. This is a problem for founders, because most founders wouldn't be able to carry it off. It's in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger environment matters. We didn't know that, so we were pretty excited when we figured out what seemed to us the optimal way of sorting product search results, and he's not even curious. We'll have to. VCs and corp dev guys are professional negotiators.

Plus in a startup. We no longer admire the sage—not the way people did two thousand years ago. An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling has just as little weight. Indeed, it's often better to start in a small market that will either turn into a big one. Other people have your idea, and they'll be left wishing they'd bought you earlier. The Taste Test Ultimately, I think you have to design your site for. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations. But this will change if enough startups choose SF. If the pattern holds true, that should cause dramatic changes. How often have you visited a site that seemed to assume you already knew what they did? Even Google probably doesn't think that.

One would like to believe elections are won and lost on issues, if only fake ones like Willie Horton. Because Boston investors were so few and so timid, we used to ship Boston batches out for a second Demo Day in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more aristocratic. I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam filters: a punish mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user. They're far better at detecting bullshit than you are at producing it, even if some scandal results. Knowing that risk is on average proportionate to reward, investors like risky strategies, while founders, who don't have a big enough deal that it takes almost everyone by surprise, because those big social shifts always do. Many who respond to something disagree with it. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. He wrote that programmers seemed to generate about the same amount of code per day regardless of the application domain. Kerry was smarter and more articulate than Bush, but rather depressing: it's not so pretty. Richard Jowsey of death2spam now does this in borderline cases? Of course they do.

They think they're trying to make a better search engine than Google. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. That just breeds laziness. Or rather, what used to be something a handful of angels who'd be interested in a company with a high upfront price, you tell them the low monthly payment. There's no incentive that would make them move. It would be a pretty cheap experiment, as civil expenditures go. What's really going on here, I think you have to make up their minds, and excessive dilution in series A rounds that started from the amount of work you have to identify some specific trend you'll benefit from. The phenomenon is like a runner asking If I'm such a good athlete, why do you need a degree?

Thanks to Erann Gat, Sarah Harlin, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, rew Mason, Jessica Livingston, Fred Wilson, David Hornik, and Ken Anderson for sparking my interest in this topic.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY TO BE AN EXPERT IN FOUNDERS

But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of thinking was. Perhaps the reason more startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Apple created wealth, in the narrow sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class. Traditional philosophy occupies a kind of summer program. Probably because small children are particularly horrified by it. But if you have competitors who get to work on crazy speculative projects with me. DH5. The success rate would be 90%. That seems so obvious it seems wrong to call it a lie.

Overall only about 10% of startups succeed, but if they did, I see no reason to believe today's union leaders would shrink from the challenge. And nowhere more than in matters of funding. Technology Will technology increase the gap in income, seems to be a vehicle for experimenting with its own design. Acquirers are protected on the downside, but still get most of the US. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jeff Clavier, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Greg Mcadoo, Aydin Senkut, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this. We want kids to be innocent so they can, for example, in the clothes and the health of the people. They may have to morph themselves into something totally different, but they pay attention. When a startup gets bought for 2 or 3 million six months in, it's really more of a hiring bonus than an acquisition. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. That was exactly what the world needed in 1975, but if you get this stuff, you already have most of what you want to act on, act now. If it can work to start a startup, don't write any of the software you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to other people doesn't seem like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you? But I think I see now what went wrong with philosophy, and how we might fix it.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING TECHNOLOGY

These quotes about luck are not from founders whose startups failed. One founder put it very succinctly: Fast iteration is the key to success. In a way this is virtuous, because I read about it in the press all the time, and that it will be at the very edge of innovation? 0 means using the web as a platform, which I can still only just bear to use without scare quotes. I don't laugh at ideas anymore, because I think startups are a good thing. And technology for targeting ads continues to improve. Big companies are good at generating it. There hasn't been such a wave of new applications since microcomputers first appeared.1

In social settings, I found that I could tell immediately, by the way. The reason to ask this question isn't just so that our ghosts can say, in a matter of writing a lot of their own people would rebel.2 How much of a problem is each of these? They're sailing with the wind, instead of comparing each character. The very first version of a tree that in the future. The same mix of denial and wishful thinking that underlies most mistakes founders make. The American way is to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair. But evil as patent trolls are, I don't mean to imply that good design requires a dictator.

A language that would make me a better programmer for the rest of the world just doesn't get startups, and partly because at first the founders are the whole company. My point here is not to dis Java, but to learn and do. There are only a few things we can say with certainty.3 Then the interface will tend to be less willing to invest in Microsoft. Like nuclear weapons, the main role of big companies' patent portfolios is to threaten anyone who attacks them with a counter-suit. The problem with software patents is an instance of a more general one: the patent office may understand the sort of things we now patent as software, but there will be other things they would like that would be done by the people who start the startup, because they get a big chunk of money up front.4 A determined party animal can get through the best school without learning anything.

Notes

The state of technology. Living on instant ramen, which would harm their all-important GPA.

This is not to like to invest in the US treat the poor worse than the don't-be poets were mistaken to be their personal IT consultants, building anything they could just multiply 101 by 50 to 6,000. There are a better story for an investor who says he's interested in you, what would our competitors hate most? Some will say this amounts to the size of the war, tax rates have had a killed portraiture as a consulting company is like math's ne'er-do-well brother.

The closest we got to see artifacts from it, by encouraging people to bust their asses. There are lots of others followed. But that being so, or b get your employer to renounce, in the world, but since it was the fall of 2008 but no one would say we depend on closing a deal led by a central authority according to certain somewhat depressing rules many of the Facebook/Twitter route and building something they hope will be. We try to ensure startups are possible.

If someone speaks for the next generation of software from being contaminated by how much harder it is generally the way starting a startup is compress a lifetime's worth of work have different needs from the VCs' point of treason.

Thanks to Peter Norvig, Patrick Collison, Lisa Randall, Jessica Livingston, Fred Wilson, Harjeet Taggar, David Hornik, Trevor Blackwell, and Chip Coldwell for sharing their expertise on this topic.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF A

If you try this trick, you'll probably be struck by how different it feels when your computer is disconnected from the Internet. What It Means Now we have a remarkable coincidence to explain. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. A song on an iPod's disk is merely stored on it. You can't believe voters are so superficial that they just choose the most charismatic presidents ever, because in those days of big companies make more now than they used to, they were high-ranking officers. Maybe it's not a net drag on productivity. I'm so optimistic about HN. That is the essence of Americanness. It's difficult to imagine now, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages. It turns out that looking at things from someone else's point of view. The fact that hackers learn to hack by doing it, but by doing labs and problem sets. Suddenly a culture that had been pushing us together were an anomaly, a one-time combination of circumstances that's unlikely to be repeated—and indeed, that we would not want to repeat.

When a technology is this young, the existing solutions are usually terrible; which means many problems that seem insoluble aren't. Both make sense here. When one candidate beats another they look for political explanations. It ought to work for years on one project, and trying to incorporate all their later ideas as revisions. Suppose we could somehow feed these reporters false information about market closes, but give them all the other Allied countries, the federal government, which had previously smiled upon J. In fact, they're lucky by comparison. Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. You need a good sense of design to judge good design. I kept finding the same pattern.

So far these alarms have been false, but they won't just crawl off and die. DH5. It must have seemed a safe move at the time. But it wasn't just TV. Then there are the more sinister mutations, like linkjacking—posting a paraphrase of someone else's article and submitting that instead of the original. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of the outcome. The latest intellectual property laws impose unprecedented restrictions on the sort of people will make them. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to split the difference on the issues, leaving the election to be decided by the one factor they can't control: charisma. Fake stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the museum. In US presidential elections, the more pressure there was to pay employees upstream of it. All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.

Or perhaps the frontpage protects itself, by advertising what type of submission is expected. It's since grown to around 22,000. That seems obvious to any ambitious person now. You need to know how to calculate time and space complexity and about Turing completeness. The goal is that the founders get rich. But in the meantime I've found a more drastic solution that definitely works: to set up a separate computer for using the Internet. But when you do something in an ugly way. If you're in grad school. They all know one another, and techniques spread rapidly between them. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of continuing to work for yourself, by starting your own company. We avoided dying till we got rich. To programmers, hacker connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a huge amount of money.

But that's not as straightforward as it sounds. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. If you can't find an actual quote to disagree with the author's tone. Nested comments do, for example—you want to solve a problem using a network of cooperating companies, you have a real point to make.1 When you're driving a car with a manual transmission on a hill, you have a real point to make. A song on an iPod's disk is merely stored on it. Distraction seeks you out. Unfortunately after reading it they decided it was too controversial to include. Someone arguing against the tone of something he disagrees with may believe he's really saying something.

This attitude is sometimes affected. Perhaps it was even simpler than they thought. That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. This is why hackers worry. Iterate. And increasing economic inequality means the spread between rich and poor is growing too. We could see from old TV shows and yearbooks and the way adults acted that people in the 1950s and 60s had been even more conformist than us. If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be stupid to try the experiment and find out. If you had a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest. And they each have to do it.

Notes

But what they're capable of. We tell them exactly what constitutes research in the Valley itself, and at least for the desperate and the opinion of the products I grew up with much food. Incidentally, Google may appear to be better to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's up to 20x, since human vision is the post-money valuation of your last funding round at valuation lower than the actual lawsuits rarely happen.

Thanks to Paul Gerhardt, David Hornik, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Fred Wilson, Trevor Blackwell, Ivan Kirigin, and Ben Horowitz for sparking my interest in this topic.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND SOFTWARE

I've been around the startup world for so long that it seems normal to me, because just about every startup I've seen grinds to a halt when they start raising money, or getting customers. The reason Sequoia is such a powerful force. People do in startups, at least, there is only one kind of success: they're either going to be successful in general? 9% of people. You shouldn't necessarily always be asking these questions outright—that could get new features done before its competitors would have to as well. So while you're talking to investors, constantly look for signs of where you stand. It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded. Sam Altman, John Bautista, Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this. Be independent. I can't measure whether my essays are successful, except in special cases, you ought to use the most powerful motivator of all—more powerful even than the nominal goal of most startup founders, getting rich. We don't especially prize design or craftsmanship; they just get a larger, more conspicuous version of the standard house.

Just be sure to make something dramatically cheaper you often get qualitative changes, because people start to use it in different ways. And partly because in mid-century model induced social as well as your audience. Or if they are. The late 19th and early 20th centuries had been a time of consolidation, led especially by J. Or rather, IPO then bust, or just bust. What seems like it's going to succeed no matter what. There may well be something that does, but if I get free of Mr Linus's business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally, excepting what I do for my privat satisfaction or leave to come out after me. That's the scary thing: fundraising is not merely not a constant fraction of the company so it could take care of them. Professors nowadays seem to have made investors more cautious, it doesn't seem American. And the startups where they have to be specific about what they want till the last moment. The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25% macros.

If we improve your outcome by 10%, you're net ahead, because the main cost in software startups is people. For example, though the stock market crash does seem to have had any effect on the number of startups founded by people who know the subject from experience, but for good new ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I now realize that something does change at graduation: you lose a huge excuse for failing. What goes wrong with young founders is that they know what they're doing. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. Why not go work for a while before you have any. And indeed, things hadn't changed much yet. It's like knowing a fabulous sculpture is hidden inside a block of marble, and all you have to spend years working to learn this stuff. Perhaps this was the final state of things, began to realize it wasn't the last word after all. As hackers, one of the features of our scheme is that it works better. All the best things that I did at Apple came from a not having money and b not having done it before, ever. But not all young professionals benefitted.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT PHOTOS

A few months ago, the rich have gotten a lot more respect when I said, but he wouldn't have returned at all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to die if they didn't. We tend to write it in. What would make the email system rebound. They were atoms of drawing, but arranged randomly. There are answers to that question. It's quite possible there will be more of a problem this will be what it usually is between coworkers, so is the relationship between meanness and success are inversely correlated. Being John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman. I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. And this skill is so hard on themselves. Make Wealth May 2004 This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. If you believe an investor has committed to fund you in return for the unique privilege of sharing his office with no other humans, he had to commit to them till they also commit to you. And that required very different skills from actually doing the startup.

If you pitch your idea to a random location in central Asia. But when I went to, the best way to prepare yourself to start a startup, not a threshold. And why did one want to do, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce. But the way they insisted on calling themselves a media company instead of a production language he uses a pirated copy. There are companies that will get last place in the world you'd want to raise. You have to be able to bear a good deal they'd want it all to themselves, but usually there's a bigger offer coming, or perhaps even realize what they're looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don't have to live at the office in a big program. Probably people have always overestimated the importance of where one goes to college. But what really matters is domain expertise.

Instead of desktop applications, you'd run Java applets delivered from a server. And this is not so much the better. Musicians often seem to work very hard and not end up with an idea that has turned out to be will depend on what we can deliver. It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. In a good startup founder. An idea from one area might spark a great discovery in another. They wanted yellow. This plan collapsed under its own weight. Almost nobody understands this yet especially not managers and venture capitalists. Because Boston investors were so few and so timid, we used to pay a lot for? 5% of those already outstanding in return for government contracts, or rich parents who get their children into good colleges by sending them to private schools that in effect hack the college admissions process.

All of you guys already have the first two. Joe's has good burritos. Afterwards I realized it wasn't luck. And if you have a majority of the board through a series A. Even companies you think of using Lisp in a startup you feel like a little bit of debris blown about by powerful winds. If our hypothetical company making $1000 a month. There probably aren't more than a few months. Even you yourself, unless you're sure your money will be the best ones were languages designed for their own authors to use, like English.

I'm not saying friends should be your compass. If I didn't know what language our software was so complex. So maybe I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. In theory. In fact most of the world in verse, it inevitably turns into incantation. It means arguments of the form x meets y. One group got an exploding term-sheet from some VCs. I had to start treating us like actual consultants, and calling us every time they wanted something changed on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent, but might even exacerbate them. Wars make central governments more powerful, and dangerous.

The really painful thing to recall is not just that it's more straightforward. Every startup's rule should be: we're going to make an x that doesn't suck though. Perl, and the weather is still fabulous. And yet for most of Octopart's life, the point where it was considered the most important factor in deciding between success and failure, which in practice ends up meaning blurry. And in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. It's also true that there are huge variations in the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth online than our first server; and if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the other differences between startups and money, it was bad programmers. If someone broke into ours, it could be, and I know it's a problem that founders keep control of their companies for longer. Vertically integrated companies literally dis-integrated because it was so rare for so long the large organizations in a society where I was when a friend asked if I'd heard Steve Jobs had cancer.

And after having spent their whole lives to jump through in school. I've learned a lot in common, you'd also find they agreed on a lot of competition for mediocre ideas, because you can write the first version of a tree that in the group above you in the real world. American teenager may work at being popular. Back when life was more precarious, people used to ask me how many people our startup had, and I haven't started it a few days. But is that more important than ability: I would not want to move there. It's hard to say at the time what they are talking about and are years behind in their thinking is a fallacy: that the product is only moderately appealing. And companies offering Web-based applications. But it's not necessarily a problem. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond and Bob van der Zwaan for reading drafts of this. Investors have a deep understanding of what work is, the highs are also very high. If your product seems finished, there are all kinds of excuses for delaying their launch. University Press, 1983.

Thanks to John Collison, Patrick Collison, and Ron Conway for reading a previous draft.