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{"context":"This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving [seed funding](http:\/\/ycombinator.com) to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer\u2014so even college students can participate.\n\nWe know from Google and Yahoo that grad students can start successful startups. And we know from experience that some undergrads are as capable as most grad students. The accepted age for startup founders has been creeping downward. We're trying to find the lower bound.\n\nThe deadline has now passed, and we're sifting through 227 applications. We expected to divide them into two categories, promising and unpromising. But we soon saw we needed a third: promising people with unpromising ideas. \\[[1](#f1n)\\]\n\n**The Artix Phase**\n\nWe should have expected this. It's very common for a group of founders to go through one lame idea before realizing that a startup has to make something people will pay for. In fact, we ourselves did.\n\nViaweb wasn't the first startup Robert Morris and I started. In January 1995, we and a couple friends started a company called Artix. The plan was to put art galleries on the Web. In retrospect, I wonder how we could have wasted our time on anything so stupid. Galleries are not especially [excited](http:\/\/www.knoedlergallery.com\/) about being on the Web even now, ten years later. They don't want to have their stock visible to any random visitor, like an antique store. \\[[2](#f2n)\\]\n\nBesides which, art dealers are the most technophobic people on earth. They didn't become art dealers after a difficult choice between that and a career in the hard sciences. Most of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them why they should be on it. Some didn't even have computers. It doesn't do justice to the situation to describe it as a hard _sell_; we soon sank to building sites for free, and it was hard to convince galleries even to do that.\n\nGradually it dawned on us that instead of trying to make Web sites for people who didn't want them, we could make sites for people who did. In fact, software that would let people who wanted sites make their own. So we ditched Artix and started a new company, Viaweb, to make software for building online stores. That one succeeded.\n\nWe're in good company here. Microsoft was not the first company Paul Allen and Bill Gates started either. The first was called Traf-o-data. It does not seem to have done as well as Micro-soft.\n\nIn Robert's defense, he was skeptical about Artix. I dragged him into it. \\[[3](#f3n)\\] But there were moments when he was optimistic. And if we, who were 29 and 30 at the time, could get excited about such a thoroughly boneheaded idea, we should not be surprised that hackers aged 21 or 22 are pitching us ideas with little hope of making money.\n\n**The Still Life Effect**\n\nWhy does this happen? Why do good hackers have bad business ideas?\n\nLet's look at our case. One reason we had such a lame idea was that it was the first thing we thought of. I was in New York trying to be a starving artist at the time (the starving part is actually quite easy), so I was haunting galleries anyway. When I learned about the Web, it seemed natural to mix the two. Make Web sites for galleries\u2014that's the ticket!\n\nIf you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late.\n\nPart of the problem is that big projects tend to grow out of small ones. You set up a still life to make a quick sketch when you have a spare hour, and days later you're still working on it. I once spent a month painting three versions of a still life I set up in about four minutes. At each point (a day, a week, a month) I thought I'd already put in so much time that it was too late to change.\n\nSo the biggest cause of bad ideas is the still life effect: you come up with a random idea, plunge into it, and then at each point (a day, a week, a month) feel you've put so much time into it that this must be _the_ idea.\n\nHow do we fix that? I don't think we should discard plunging. Plunging into an idea is a good thing. The solution is at the other end: to realize that having invested time in something doesn't make it good.\n\nThis is clearest in the case of names. Viaweb was originally called Webgen, but we discovered someone else had a product called that. We were so attached to our name that we offered him _5% of the company_ if he'd let us have it. But he wouldn't, so we had to think of another. \\[[4](#f4n)\\] The best we could do was Viaweb, which we disliked at first. It was like having a new mother. But within three days we loved it, and Webgen sounded lame and old-fashioned.\n\nIf it's hard to change something so simple as a name, imagine how hard it is to garbage-collect an idea. A name only has one point of attachment into your head. An idea for a company gets woven into your thoughts. So you must consciously discount for that. Plunge in, by all means, but remember later to look at your idea in the harsh light of morning and ask: is this something people will pay for? Is this, of all the things we could make, the thing people will pay most for?\n\n**Muck**\n\nThe second mistake we made with Artix is also very common. Putting galleries on the Web seemed cool.\n\nOne of the most valuable things my father taught me is an old Yorkshire saying: where there's muck, there's brass. Meaning that unpleasant work pays. And more to the point here, vice versa. Work people like doesn't pay well, for reasons of supply and demand. The most extreme case is developing programming languages, which doesn't pay at all, because people like it so much they do it for free.\n\nWhen we started Artix, I was still ambivalent about business. I wanted to keep one foot in the art world. Big, big, mistake. Going into business is like a hang-glider launch: you'd better do it wholeheartedly, or not at all. The purpose of a company, and a startup especially, is to make money. You can't have divided loyalties.\n\nWhich is not to say that you have to do the most disgusting sort of work, like spamming, or starting a company whose only purpose is patent litigation. What I mean is, if you're starting a company that will do something cool, the aim had better be to make money and maybe be cool, not to be cool and maybe make money.\n\nIt's hard enough to make money that you can't do it by accident. Unless it's your first priority, it's unlikely to happen at all.\n\n**Hyenas**\n\nWhen I probe our motives with Artix, I see a third mistake: timidity. If you'd proposed at the time that we go into the e-commerce business, we'd have found the idea terrifying. Surely a field like that would be dominated by fearsome startups with five million dollars of VC money each. Whereas we felt pretty sure that we could hold our own in the slightly less competitive business of generating Web sites for art galleries.\n\nWe erred ridiculously far on the side of safety. As it turns out, VC-backed startups are not that fearsome. They're too busy trying to spend all that [money](venturecapital.html) to get software written. In 1995, the e-commerce business was very competitive as measured in press releases, but not as measured in software. And really it never was. The big fish like Open Market (rest their souls) were just consulting companies pretending to be product companies \\[[5](#f5n)\\], and the offerings at our end of the market were a couple hundred lines of Perl scripts."}
{"context":"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.\n\nI think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the beliefs prevalent in their society. \\[[1](#f1n)\\]\n\nYoung children offer some of the best evidence for both points. Anyone who's been to primary school has seen the four types, and the fact that school rules are so arbitrary is strong evidence that which quadrant people fall into depends more on them than the rules.\n\nThe kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.\n\nThe kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.\n\nThe kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probably aren't 100% sure what the rules even are.\n\nAnd the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.\n\nWhen measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.\n\nIn adulthood we can recognize the four types by their distinctive calls, much as you could recognize four species of birds. The call of the aggressively conventional-minded is \"Crush <outgroup>!\" (It's rather alarming to see an exclamation point after a variable, but that's the whole problem with the aggressively conventional-minded.) The call of the passively conventional-minded is \"What will the neighbors think?\" The call of the passively independent-minded is \"To each his own.\" And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is \"Eppur si muove.\"\n\nThe four types are not equally common. There are more passive people than aggressive ones, and far more conventional-minded people than independent-minded ones. So the passively conventional-minded are the largest group, and the aggressively independent-minded the smallest.\n\nSince one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown up in a quite different society.\n\nPrinceton professor Robert George recently wrote:\n\n> I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.\n\nHe's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders.\n\nI'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. \\[[2](#f2n)\\]\n\nWhy 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. \\[[3](#f3n)\\]\n\nIn the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting \ufffd that they haven't been weakened very much, or that they've been weakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I'll dispose of immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always say it's in the service of a greater good. It just happens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time.\n\nAs for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being oversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down that much, you can't judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded. You can't know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped off unless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the ones at the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be very sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas. They're the canaries in this coalmine.\n\nThe conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.\n\nYou'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.\n\nThe 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. 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. \\[[4](#f4n)\\]\n\nThe second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is that ideas are more closely related than they look. Which means if you restrict the discussion of some topics, it doesn't only affect those topics. The restrictions propagate back into any topic that yields implications in the forbidden ones. And that is not an edge case. The best ideas do exactly that: they have consequences in fields far removed from their origins. Having ideas in a world where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that has a minefield in one corner. You don't just play the same game you would have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a much more subdued game even on the ground that's safe."}
{"context":"_(This essay is from the introduction to_ [On Lisp](onlisp.html)_.)_\n\nIt's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as easily as a big city conceals fugitives. Such software will be hard to read, hard to test, and hard to debug.\n\nIn accordance with this principle, a large program must be divided into pieces, and the larger the program, the more it must be divided. How do you divide a program? The traditional approach is called _top-down design:_ you say \"the purpose of the program is to do these seven things, so I divide it into seven major subroutines. The first subroutine has to do these four things, so it in turn will have four of its own subroutines,\" and so on. This process continues until the whole program has the right level of granularity-- each part large enough to do something substantial, but small enough to be understood as a single unit.\n\nExperienced Lisp programmers divide up their programs differently. As well as top-down design, they follow a principle which could be called _bottom-up design_\\-- changing the language to suit the problem. In Lisp, you don't just write your program down toward the language, you also build the language up toward your program. As you're writing a program you may think \"I wish Lisp had such-and-such an operator.\" So you go and write it. Afterward you realize that using the new operator would simplify the design of another part of the program, and so on. Language and program evolve together. Like the border between two warring states, the boundary between language and program is drawn and redrawn, until eventually it comes to rest along the mountains and rivers, the natural frontiers of your problem. In the end your program will look as if the language had been designed for it. And when language and program fit one another well, you end up with code which is clear, small, and efficient.\n\nIt's worth emphasizing that bottom-up design doesn't mean just writing the same program in a different order. When you work bottom-up, you usually end up with a different program. Instead of a single, monolithic program, you will get a larger language with more abstract operators, and a smaller program written in it. Instead of a lintel, you'll get an arch.\n\nIn typical code, once you abstract out the parts which are merely bookkeeping, what's left is much shorter; the higher you build up the language, the less distance you will have to travel from the top down to it. This brings several advantages:\n\n1.  By making the language do more of the work, bottom-up design yields programs which are smaller and more agile. A shorter program doesn't have to be divided into so many components, and fewer components means programs which are easier to read or modify. Fewer components also means fewer connections between components, and thus less chance for errors there. As industrial designers strive to reduce the number of moving parts in a machine, experienced Lisp programmers use bottom-up design to reduce the size and complexity of their programs.\n\n2.  Bottom-up design promotes code re-use. When you write two or more programs, many of the utilities you wrote for the first program will also be useful in the succeeding ones. Once you've acquired a large substrate of utilities, writing a new program can take only a fraction of the effort it would require if you had to start with raw Lisp.\n\n3.  Bottom-up design makes programs easier to read. An instance of this type of abstraction asks the reader to understand a general-purpose operator; an instance of functional abstraction asks the reader to understand a special-purpose subroutine. \\[1\\]\n\n4.  Because it causes you always to be on the lookout for patterns in your code, working bottom-up helps to clarify your ideas about the design of your program. If two distant components of a program are similar in form, you'll be led to notice the similarity and perhaps to redesign the program in a simpler way.\n\nBottom-up design is possible to a certain degree in languages other than Lisp. Whenever you see library functions, bottom-up design is happening. However, Lisp gives you much broader powers in this department, and augmenting the language plays a proportionately larger role in Lisp style-- so much so that Lisp is not just a different language, but a whole different way of programming.\n\nIt's true that this style of development is better suited to programs which can be written by small groups. However, at the same time, it extends the limits of what can be done by a small group. In _The Mythical Man-Month_, Frederick Brooks proposed that the productivity of a group of programmers does not grow linearly with its size. As the size of the group increases, the productivity of individual programmers goes down. The experience of Lisp programming suggests a more cheerful way to phrase this law: as the size of the group decreases, the productivity of individual programmers goes up. A small group wins, relatively speaking, simply because it's smaller. When a small group also takes advantage of the techniques that Lisp makes possible, it can [win outright](avg.html).\n\n**New:** [Download On Lisp for Free](onlisptext.html).\n\n\\[1\\] \"But no one can read the program without understanding all your new utilities.\" To see why such statements are usually mistaken, see Section 4.8._(This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.)_\n\nA couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage.\n\n\"Those guys must have been freezing!\"\n\nThat's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means there's lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. There's a sharper line between outside and inside, and only projects that are officially sanctioned \u2014 by organizations, or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself \u2014 get proper indoor space. That raises the activation energy for new ideas. You can't just tinker. You have to justify.\n\nSome of Silicon Valley's most famous companies began in garages: Hewlett-Packard in 1938, Apple in 1976, Google in 1998. In Apple's case the garage story is a bit of an urban legend. Woz says all they did there was assemble some computers, and that he did all the actual design of the Apple I and Apple II in his apartment or his cube at HP. \\[[1](#f1n)\\] This was apparently too marginal even for Apple's PR people.\n\nBy conventional standards, Jobs and Wozniak were marginal people too. Obviously they were smart, but they can't have looked good on paper. They were at the time a pair of college dropouts with about three years of school between them, and hippies to boot. Their previous business experience consisted of making \"blue boxes\" to hack into the phone system, a business with the rare distinction of being both illegal and unprofitable.\n\n**Outsiders**\n\nNow a startup operating out of a garage in Silicon Valley would feel part of an exalted tradition, like the poet in his garret, or the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to wear a beret indoors. But in 1976 it didn't seem so cool. The world hadn't yet realized that starting a computer company was in the same category as being a writer or a painter. It hadn't been for long. Only in the preceding couple years had the dramatic fall in the cost of hardware allowed outsiders to compete.\n\nIn 1976, everyone looked down on a company operating out of a garage, including the founders. One of the first things Jobs did when they got some money was to rent office space. He wanted Apple to seem like a real company.\n\nThey already had something few real companies ever have: a fabulously well designed product. You'd think they'd have had more confidence. But I've talked to a lot of startup founders, and it's always this way."}
{"context":"_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 [Startup School](http:\/\/startupschool.org).)_\n\nThe startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.\n\nWe've now [invested](http:\/\/ycombinator.com) in enough companies that I've learned a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they're the ones I have to keep repeating.\n\nSo I'm going to number these points, and maybe with future startups I'll be able to pull off a form of Huffman coding. I'll make them all read this, and then instead of nagging them in detail, I'll just be able to say: _number four!_\n\n**1\\. Release Early.**\n\nThe thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.\n\nBy \"release early\" I don't mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal. Users hate bugs, but they don't seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there's more coming soon.\n\nThere are several reasons it pays to get version 1 done fast. One is that this is simply the right way to write software, whether for a startup or not. I've been repeating that since 1993, and I haven't seen much since to contradict it. I've seen a lot of startups die because they were too slow to release stuff, and none because they were too quick. \\[[1](#f1n)\\]\n\nOne of the things that will surprise you if you build something popular is that you won't know your users. [Reddit](http:\/\/reddit.com) now has almost half a million unique visitors a month. Who are all those people? They have no idea. No web startup does. And since you don't know your users, it's dangerous to guess what they'll like. Better to release something and let them tell you.\n\n[Wufoo](http:\/\/wufoo.com) took this to heart and released their form-builder before the underlying database. You can't even drive the thing yet, but 83,000 people came to sit in the driver's seat and hold the steering wheel. And Wufoo got valuable feedback from it: Linux users complained they used too much Flash, so they rewrote their software not to. If they'd waited to release everything at once, they wouldn't have discovered this problem till it was more deeply wired in.\n\nEven if you had no users, it would still be important to release quickly, because for a startup the initial release acts as a shakedown cruise. If anything major is broken-- if the idea's no good, for example, or the founders hate one another-- the stress of getting that first version out will expose it. And if you have such problems you want to find them early.\n\nPerhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that it makes you work harder. When you're working on something that isn't released, problems are intriguing. In something that's out there, problems are alarming. There is a lot more urgency once you release. And I think that's precisely why people put it off. They know they'll have to work a lot harder once they do. \\[[2](#f2n)\\]\n\n**2\\. Keep Pumping Out Features.**\n\nOf course, \"release early\" has a second component, without which it would be bad advice. If you're going to start with something that doesn't do much, you better improve it fast.\n\nWhat I find myself repeating is \"pump out features.\" And this rule isn't just for the initial stages. This is something all startups should do for as long as they want to be considered startups.\n\nI don't mean, of course, that you should make your application ever more complex. By \"feature\" I mean one unit of hacking-- one quantum of making users' lives better.\n\nAs with exercise, improvements beget improvements. If you run every day, you'll probably feel like running tomorrow. But if you skip running for a couple weeks, it will be an effort to drag yourself out. So it is with hacking: the more ideas you implement, the more ideas you'll have. You should make your system better at least in some small way every day or two.\n\nThis is not just a good way to get development done; it is also a form of marketing. Users love a site that's constantly improving. In fact, users expect a site to improve. Imagine if you visited a site that seemed very good, and then returned two months later and not one thing had changed. Wouldn't it start to seem lame? \\[[3](#f3n)\\]\n\nThey'll like you even better when you improve in response to their comments, because customers are used to companies ignoring them. If you're the rare exception-- a company that actually listens-- you'll generate fanatical loyalty. You won't need to advertise, because your users will do it for you.\n\nThis seems obvious too, so why do I have to keep repeating it? I think the problem here is that people get used to how things are. Once a product gets past the stage where it has glaring flaws, you start to get used to it, and gradually whatever features it happens to have become its identity. For example, I doubt many people at Yahoo (or Google for that matter) realized how much better web mail could be till Paul Buchheit showed them.\n\nI think the solution is to assume that anything you've made is far short of what it could be. Force yourself, as a sort of intellectual exercise, to keep thinking of improvements. Ok, sure, what you have is perfect. But if you had to change something, what would it be?\n\nIf your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations: (a) it is finished, or (b) you lack imagination. Experience suggests (b) is a thousand times more likely.\n\n**3\\. Make Users Happy.**\n\nImproving constantly is an instance of a more general rule: make users happy. One thing all startups have in common is that they can't force anyone to do anything. They can't force anyone to use their software, and they can't force anyone to do deals with them. A startup has to sing for its supper. That's why the successful ones make great things. They have to, or die.\n\nWhen you're running a startup you feel like a little bit of debris blown about by powerful winds. The most powerful wind is users. They can either catch you and loft you up into the sky, as they did with Google, or leave you flat on the pavement, as they do with most startups. Users are a fickle wind, but more powerful than any other. If they take you up, no competitor can keep you down.\n\nAs a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is not to lie flat, but to curl yourself into a shape the wind will catch.\n\nI like the wind metaphor because it reminds you how impersonal the stream of traffic is. The vast majority of people who visit your site will be casual visitors. It's them you have to design your site for. The people who really care will find what they want by themselves.\n\nThe median visitor will arrive with their finger poised on the Back button. Think about your own experience: most links you follow lead to something lame. Anyone who has used the web for more than a couple weeks has been _trained_ to click on Back after following a link. So your site has to say \"Wait! Don't click on Back. This site isn't lame. Look at this, for example.\"\n\nThere are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about. How often have you visited a site that seemed to assume you already knew what they did? For example, the corporate site that says the company makes\n\n> enterprise content management solutions for business that enable organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership.\n\nAn established company may get away with such an opaque description, but no startup can. A startup should be able to explain in one or two sentences exactly what it does. \\[[4](#f4n)\\] And not just to users. You need this for everyone: investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and even current employees. You probably shouldn't even start a company to do something that can't be described compellingly in one or two sentences."}
{"context":"When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?\n\nThe startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.\n\nIf you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy [calculator](http:\/\/growth.tlb.org\/#) you can use to find out.\n\nThe reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends badly. How can they get off that trajectory?\n\nWhy do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that. It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people by surprise.\n\nI propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to start worrying too late.\n\nThe reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the [fatal pinch](pinch.html). The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.\n\nThere is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.\n\nMaybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components. Say \"We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us.\" Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your head that it does in mine. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.\n\nIt would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not profitable. \\[[1](#f1n)\\] But investors are so fickle that you can never do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your business will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.\n\nIn any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful.\n\nIf you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money. \\[[2](#f2n)\\]\n\nFounders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.\n\nPlus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect. VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other. But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all to survive. \\[[3](#f3n)\\]\n\nHere's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.\n\nWhat the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be \"built out,\" and that's usually easier with fewer people. \\[[4](#f4n)\\]\n\nAsking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by [doing things that don't scale](ds.html), or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.\n\nAirbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y\u00a0Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.\n\n**Notes**\n\n\\[1\\] Steep usage growth will also interest investors. Revenue will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a higher growth rate to impress investors.\n\n\\[2\\] Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic.\n\n\\[3\\] I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number.\n\n\\[4\\] After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:\n\n\"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great founder is being able to resist this urge."}
{"context":"I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.\n\nThe two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.\n\nThe first rule I knew intellectually, but didn't really grasp till it happened to us. The total value of the companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it.\n\nIn startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don't know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.\n\nThat yields all sorts of strange consequences. For example, in purely financial terms, there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business. \\[[1](#f1n)\\] I haven't really assimilated that fact, partly because it's so counterintuitive, and partly because we're not doing this just for financial reasons; YC would be a pretty lonely place if we only had one company per batch. And yet it's true.\n\nTo succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. \\[[2](#f2n)\\] You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.\n\nIt's a constant battle for us. It's hard to make ourselves take enough risks. When you interview a startup and think \"they seem likely to succeed,\" it's hard not to fund them. And yet, financially at least, there is only one kind of success: they're either going to be one of the really big winners or not, and if not it doesn't matter whether you fund them, because even if they succeed the effect on your returns will be insignificant. In the same day of interviews you might meet some smart 19 year olds who aren't even sure what they want to work on. Their chances of succeeding seem small. But again, it's not their chances of succeeding that matter but their chances of succeeding really big. The probability that any group will succeed really big is microscopically small, but the probability that those 19 year olds will might be higher than that of the other, safer group.\n\nThe probability that a startup will make it big is not simply a constant fraction of the probability that they will succeed at all. If it were, you could fund everyone who seemed likely to succeed at all, and you'd get that fraction of big hits. Unfortunately picking winners is harder than that. You have to ignore the elephant in front of you, the likelihood they'll succeed, and focus instead on the separate and almost invisibly intangible question of whether they'll succeed really big.\n\n**Harder**\n\nThat's made harder by the fact that the best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas. I've written about this before: if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.\n\nThe first time Peter Thiel spoke at YC he drew a Venn diagram that illustrates the situation perfectly. He drew two intersecting circles, one labelled \"seems like a bad idea\" and the other \"is a good idea.\" The intersection is the sweet spot for startups.\n\nThis concept is a simple one and yet seeing it as a Venn diagram is illuminating. It reminds you that there is an intersection\u2014that there are good ideas that seem bad. It also reminds you that the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad.\n\nThe fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners. It means the probability of a startup making it really big is not merely not a constant fraction of the probability that it will succeed, but that the startups with a high probability of the former will seem to have a disproportionately low probability of the latter.\n\nHistory tends to get rewritten by big successes, so that in retrospect it seems obvious they were going to make it big. For that reason one of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time? It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site (1) for a niche market (2) with no money (3) to do something that didn't matter.\n\nOne could have described Microsoft and Apple in exactly the same terms. \\[[3](#f3n)\\]\n\n**Harder Still**\n\nWait, it gets worse. You not only have to solve this hard problem, but you have to do it with no indication of whether you're succeeding. When you pick a big winner, you won't know it for two years.\n\nMeanwhile, the one thing you _can_ measure is dangerously misleading. The one thing we can track precisely is how well the startups in each batch do at fundraising after Demo Day. But we know that's the wrong metric. There's no correlation between the percentage of startups that raise money and the metric that does matter financially, whether that batch of startups contains a big winner or not.\n\nExcept an inverse one. That's the scary thing: fundraising is not merely a useless metric, but positively misleading. We're in a business where we need to pick unpromising-looking outliers, and the huge scale of the successes means we can afford to spread our net very widely. The big winners could generate 10,000x returns. That means for each big winner we could pick a thousand companies that returned nothing and still end up 10x ahead.\n\nIf we ever got to the point where 100% of the startups we funded were able to raise money after Demo Day, it would almost certainly mean we were being too conservative. \\[[4](#f4n)\\]\n\nIt takes a conscious effort not to do that too. After 15 cycles of preparing startups for investors and then watching how they do, I can now look at a group we're interviewing through Demo Day investors' eyes. But those are the wrong eyes to look through!\n\nWe can afford to take at least 10x as much risk as Demo Day investors. And since risk is usually proportionate to reward, if you can afford to take more risk you should. What would it mean to take 10x more risk than Demo Day investors? We'd have to be willing to fund 10x more startups than they would. Which means that even if we're generous to ourselves and assume that YC can on average triple a startup's expected value, we'd be taking the right amount of risk if only 30% of the startups were able to raise significant funding after Demo Day.\n\nI don't know what fraction of them currently raise more after Demo Day. I deliberately avoid calculating that number, because if you start measuring something you start optimizing it, and I know it's the wrong thing to optimize. \\[[5](#f5n)\\] But the percentage is certainly way over 30%. And frankly the thought of a 30% success rate at fundraising makes my stomach clench. A Demo Day where only 30% of the startups were fundable would be a shambles. Everyone would agree that YC had jumped the shark. We ourselves would feel that YC had jumped the shark. And yet we'd all be wrong.\n\nFor better or worse that's never going to be more than a thought experiment. We could never stand it. How about that for counterintuitive? I can lay out what I know to be the right thing to do, and still not do it. I can make up all sorts of plausible justifications. It would hurt YC's brand (at least among the innumerate) if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out. It might dilute the value of the alumni network. Perhaps most convincingly, it would be demoralizing for us to be up to our chins in failure all the time. But I know the real reason we're so conservative is that we just haven't assimilated the fact of 1000x variation in returns."}
{"context":"Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear.\n\nFew startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few are overfunded, which is like trying to start driving in third gear.\n\nI think it would help founders to understand funding better\u2014not just the mechanics of it, but what investors are thinking. I was surprised recently when I realized that all the worst problems we faced in our startup were due not to competitors, but investors. Dealing with competitors was easy by comparison.\n\nI don't mean to suggest that our investors were nothing but a drag on us. They were helpful in negotiating deals, for example. I mean more that conflicts with investors are particularly nasty. Competitors punch you in the jaw, but investors have you by the balls.\n\nApparently our situation was not unusual. And if trouble with investors is one of the biggest threats to a startup, managing them is one of the most important skills founders need to learn.\n\nLet's start by talking about the five sources of startup funding. Then we'll trace the life of a hypothetical (very fortunate) startup as it shifts gears through successive rounds.\n\n**Friends and Family**\n\nA lot of startups get their first funding from friends and family. Excite did, for example: after the founders graduated from college, they borrowed $15,000 from their parents to start a company. With the help of some part-time jobs they made it last 18 months.\n\nIf your friends or family happen to be rich, the line blurs between them and angel investors. At Viaweb we got our first $10,000 of seed money from our friend Julian, but he was sufficiently rich that it's hard to say whether he should be classified as a friend or angel. He was also a lawyer, which was great, because it meant we didn't have to pay legal bills out of that initial small sum.\n\nThe advantage of raising money from friends and family is that they're easy to find. You already know them. There are three main disadvantages: you mix together your business and personal life; they will probably not be as well connected as angels or venture firms; and they may not be accredited investors, which could complicate your life later.\n\nThe SEC defines an \"accredited investor\" as someone with over a million dollars in liquid assets or an income of over $200,000 a year. The regulatory burden is much lower if a company's shareholders are all accredited investors. Once you take money from the general public you're more restricted in what you can do. \\[[1](#f1n)\\]\n\nA startup's life will be more complicated, legally, if any of the investors aren't accredited. In an IPO, it might not merely add expense, but change the outcome. A lawyer I asked about it said:\n\n> 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. Those remedial actions can delay, stall or even kill the IPO.\n\nOf course the odds of any given startup doing an IPO are small. But not as small as they might seem. A lot of startups that end up going public didn't seem likely to at first. (Who could have guessed that the company Wozniak and Jobs started in their spare time selling plans for microcomputers would yield one of the biggest IPOs of the decade?) Much of the value of a startup consists of that tiny probability multiplied by the huge outcome.\n\nIt wasn't because they weren't accredited investors that I didn't ask my parents for seed money, though. When we were starting Viaweb, I didn't know about the concept of an accredited investor, and didn't stop to think about the value of investors' connections. The reason I didn't take money from my parents was that I didn't want them to lose it.\n\n**Consulting**\n\nAnother way to fund a startup is to get a job. The best sort of job is a consulting project in which you can build whatever software you wanted to sell as a startup. Then you can gradually transform yourself from a consulting company into a product company, and have your clients pay your development expenses.\n\nThis is a good plan for someone with kids, because it takes most of the risk out of starting a startup. There never has to be a time when you have no revenues. Risk and reward are usually proportionate, however: you should expect a plan that cuts the risk of starting a startup also to cut the average return. In this case, you trade decreased financial risk for increased risk that your company won't succeed as a startup.\n\nBut isn't the consulting company itself a startup? No, not generally. A company has to be more than small and newly founded to be a startup. There are millions of small businesses in America, but only a few thousand are startups. To be a startup, a company has to be a product business, not a service business. By which I mean not that it has to make something physical, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than doing custom work for individual clients. Custom work doesn't scale. To be a startup you need to be the band that sells a million copies of a song, not the band that makes money by playing at individual weddings and bar mitzvahs.\n\nThe trouble with consulting is that clients have an awkward habit of calling you on the phone. Most startups operate close to the margin of failure, and the distraction of having to deal with clients could be enough to put you over the edge. Especially if you have competitors who get to work full time on just being a startup.\n\nSo you have to be very disciplined if you take the consulting route. You have to work actively to prevent your company growing into a \"weed tree,\" dependent on this source of easy but low-margin money. \\[[2](#f2n)\\]\n\nIndeed, the biggest danger of consulting may be that it gives you an excuse for failure. In a startup, as in grad school, a lot of what ends up driving you are the expectations of your family and friends. Once you start a startup and tell everyone that's what you're doing, you're now on a path labelled \"get rich or bust.\" You now have to get rich, or you've failed.\n\nFear of failure is an extraordinarily powerful force. Usually it prevents people from starting things, but once you publish some definite ambition, it switches directions and starts working in your favor. I think it's a pretty clever piece of jiujitsu to set this irresistible force against the slightly less immovable object of becoming rich. You won't have it driving you if your stated ambition is merely to start a consulting company that you will one day morph into a startup.\n\nAn advantage of consulting, as a way to develop a product, is that you know you're making something at least one customer wants. But if you have what it takes to start a startup you should have sufficient vision not to need this crutch.\n\n**Angel Investors**\n\n_Angels_ are individual rich people. The word was first used for backers of Broadway plays, but now applies to individual investors generally. Angels who've made money in technology are preferable, for two reasons: they understand your situation, and they're a source of contacts and advice.\n\nThe contacts and advice can be more important than the money. When del.icio.us took money from investors, they took money from, among others, Tim O'Reilly. The amount he put in was small compared to the VCs who led the round, but Tim is a smart and influential guy and it's good to have him on your side.\n\nYou can do whatever you want with money from consulting or friends and family. With angels we're now talking about venture funding proper, so it's time to introduce the concept of _exit strategy_. Younger would-be founders are often surprised that investors expect them either to sell the company or go public. The reason is that investors need to get their capital back. They'll only consider companies that have an exit strategy\u2014meaning companies that could get bought or go public.\n\nThis is not as selfish as it sounds."}
{"context":"When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be better off if they let their startup do the work \u2014 if they started by understanding why their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this well to investors.\n\nInvestors are looking for startups that will be very successful. But that test is not as simple as it sounds. In startups, as in a lot of other domains, the distribution of outcomes follows a power law, but in startups the curve is startlingly steep. The big successes are so big they [dwarf](swan.html) the rest. And since there are only a handful each year (the conventional wisdom is 15), investors treat \"big success\" as if it were binary. Most are interested in you if you seem like you have a chance, however small, of being one of the 15 big successes, and otherwise not. \\[[1](#f1n)\\]\n\n(There are a handful of angels who'd be interested in a company with a high probability of being moderately successful. But angel investors like big successes too.)\n\nHow do you seem like you'll be one of the big successes? You need three things: formidable founders, a promising market, and (usually) some evidence of success so far.\n\n**Formidable**\n\nThe most important ingredient is formidable founders. Most investors decide in the first few minutes whether you seem like a winner or a loser, and once their opinion is set it's hard to change.\u00a0\\[[2](#f2n)\\] Every startup has reasons both to invest and not to invest. If investors think you're a winner they focus on the former, and if not they focus on the latter. For example, it might be a rich market, but with a slow sales cycle. If investors are impressed with you as founders, they say they want to invest because it's a rich market, and if not, they say they can't invest because of the slow sales cycle.\n\nThey're not necessarily trying to mislead you. Most investors are genuinely unclear in their own minds why they like or dislike startups. If you seem like a winner, they'll like your idea more. But don't be too smug about this weakness of theirs, because you have it too; almost everyone does.\n\nThere is a role for ideas of course. They're fuel for the fire that starts with liking the founders. Once investors like you, you'll see them reaching for ideas: they'll be saying \"yes, and you could also do x.\" (Whereas when they don't like you, they'll be saying \"but what about y?\")\n\nBut the foundation of convincing investors is to seem formidable, and since this isn't a word most people use in conversation much, I should explain what it means. A formidable person is one who seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way. Formidable is close to confident, except that someone could be confident and mistaken. Formidable is roughly justifiably confident.\n\nThere are a handful of people who are really good at seeming formidable \u2014 some because they actually are very formidable and just let it show, and others because they are more or less con artists. \\[[3](#f3n)\\] But most founders, including many who will go on to start very successful companies, are not that good at seeming formidable the first time they try fundraising. What should they do? \\[[4](#f4n)\\]\n\nWhat they should not do is try to imitate the swagger of more experienced founders. Investors are not always that good at judging technology, but they're good at judging confidence. If you try to act like something you're not, you'll just end up in an uncanny valley. You'll depart from sincere, but never arrive at convincing.\n\n**Truth**\n\nThe way to seem most formidable as an inexperienced founder is to stick to the truth. How formidable you seem isn't a constant. It varies depending on what you're saying. Most people can seem confident when they're saying \"one plus one is two,\" because they know it's true. The most diffident person would be puzzled and even slightly contemptuous if they told a VC \"one plus one is two\" and the VC reacted with skepticism. The magic ability of people who are good at seeming formidable is that they can do this with the sentence \"we're going to make a billion dollars a year.\" But you can do the same, if not with that sentence with some fairly impressive ones, so long as you convince yourself first.\n\nThat's the secret. Convince yourself that your startup is worth investing in, and then when you explain this to investors they'll believe you. And by convince yourself, I don't mean play mind games with yourself to boost your confidence. I mean truly evaluate whether your startup is worth investing in. If it isn't, don't try to raise money. \\[[5](#f5n)\\] But if it is, you'll be telling the truth when you tell investors it's worth investing in, and they'll sense that. You don't have to be a smooth presenter if you understand something well and tell the truth about it.\n\nTo evaluate whether your startup is worth investing in, you have to be a domain expert. If you're not a domain expert, you can be as convinced as you like about your idea, and it will seem to investors no more than an instance of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Which in fact it will usually be. And investors can tell fairly quickly whether you're a domain expert by how well you answer their questions. Know everything about your market. \\[[6](#f6n)\\]\n\nWhy do founders persist in trying to convince investors of things they're not convinced of themselves? Partly because we've all been trained to.\n\nWhen my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell were in grad school, one of their fellow students was on the receiving end of a question from their faculty advisor that we still quote today. When the unfortunate fellow got to his last slide, the professor burst out:\n\n> Which one of these conclusions do you actually believe?\n\nOne 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 have a ten page paper due, then ten pages you must write, even if you only have one page of ideas. Even if you have no ideas. You have to produce something. And all too many startups go into fundraising in the same spirit. When they think it's time to raise money, they try gamely to make the best case they can for their startup. Most never think of pausing beforehand to ask whether what they're saying is actually convincing, because they've all been trained to treat the need to present as a given \u2014 as an area of fixed size, over which however much truth they have must needs be spread, however thinly.\n\nThe time to raise money is not when you need it, or when you reach some artificial deadline like a Demo Day. It's when you can convince investors, and not before. \\[[7](#f7n)\\]\n\nAnd unless you're a good con artist, you'll never convince investors if you're not convinced yourself. They're far better at detecting bullshit than you are at producing it, even if you're producing it unknowingly. If you try to convince investors before you've convinced yourself, you'll be wasting both your time.\n\nBut pausing first to convince yourself will do more than save you from wasting your time. It will force you to organize your thoughts. To convince yourself that your startup is worth investing in, you'll have to figure out why it's worth investing in. And if you can do that you'll end up with more than added confidence. You'll also have a provisional roadmap of how to succeed.\n\n**Market**\n\nNotice I've been careful to talk about whether a startup is worth investing in, rather than whether it's going to succeed. No one knows whether a startup is going to succeed. And it's a good thing for investors that this is so, because if you could know in advance whether a startup would succeed, the stock price would already be the future price, and there would be no room for investors to make money. Startup investors know that every investment is a bet, and against pretty long odds."}
{"context":"Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them.\n\nOnce you publish something, the convention is that whatever you wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your ideas, and now you've expressed them. But you know this isn't true. You know that putting your ideas into words changed them. And not just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.\n\nIt's not just having to commit your ideas to specific words that makes writing so exacting. The real test is reading what you've written. You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing of what's in your head, only what you wrote. When he reads what you wrote, does it seem correct? Does it seem complete? If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger, and when you do the news is usually bad. It takes me many cycles before I can get an essay past the stranger. But the stranger is rational, so you always can, if you ask him what he needs. If he's not satisfied because you failed to mention x or didn't qualify some sentence sufficiently, then you mention x or add more qualifications. Happy now? It may cost you some nice sentences, but you have to resign yourself to that. You just have to make them as good as you can and still satisfy the stranger.\n\nThis much, I assume, won't be that controversial. I think it will accord with the experience of anyone who has tried to write about anything nontrivial. There may exist people whose thoughts are so perfectly formed that they just flow straight into words. But I've never known anyone who could do this, and if I met someone who said they could, it would seem evidence of their limitations rather than their ability. Indeed, this is a trope in movies: the guy who claims to have a plan for doing some difficult thing, and who when questioned further, taps his head and says \"It's all up here.\" Everyone watching the movie knows what that means. At best the plan is vague and incomplete. Very likely there's some undiscovered flaw that invalidates it completely. At best it's a plan for a plan.\n\nIn precisely defined domains it's possible to form complete ideas in your head. People can play chess in their heads, for example. And mathematicians can do some amount of math in their heads, though they don't seem to feel sure of a proof over a certain length till they write it down. But this only seems possible with ideas you can express in a formal language. \\[[1](#f1n)\\] Arguably what such people are doing is putting ideas into words in their heads. I can to some extent write essays in my head. I'll sometimes think of a paragraph while walking or lying in bed that survives nearly unchanged in the final version. But really I'm writing when I do this. I'm doing the mental part of writing; my fingers just aren't moving as I do it. \\[[2](#f2n)\\]\n\nYou can know a great deal about something without writing about it. Can you ever know so much that you wouldn't learn more from trying to explain what you know? I don't think so. I've written about at least two subjects I know well \u2014 Lisp hacking and startups \u2014 and in both cases I learned a lot from writing about them. In both cases there were things I didn't consciously realize till I had to explain them. And I don't think my experience was anomalous. A great deal of knowledge is unconscious, and experts have if anything a higher proportion of unconscious knowledge than beginners.\n\nI'm not saying that writing is the best way to explore all ideas. If you have ideas about architecture, presumably the best way to explore them is to build actual buildings. What I'm saying is that however much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you'll still learn new things from writing about them.\n\nPutting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal sequence of words. Less can go unsaid when you don't have tone of voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem excessive in conversation. I'll often spend 2 weeks on an essay and reread drafts 50 times. If you did that in conversation it would seem evidence of some kind of mental disorder. If you're lazy, of course, writing and talking are equally useless. But if you want to push yourself to get things right, writing is the steeper hill. \\[[3](#f3n)\\]\n\nThe reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.\n\nIt feels to them as if they do, especially if they're not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.\n\nPutting ideas into words is certainly no guarantee that they'll be right. Far from it. But though it's not a sufficient condition, it is a necessary one.\n\n**Notes**\n\n\\[1\\] Machinery and circuits are formal languages.\n\n\\[2\\] I thought of this sentence as I was walking down the street in Palo Alto.\n\n\\[3\\] There are two senses of talking to someone: a strict sense in which the conversation is verbal, and a more general sense in which it can take any form, including writing. In the limit case (e.g. Seneca's letters), conversation in the latter sense becomes essay writing.\n\nIt can be very useful to talk (in either sense) with other people as you're writing something. But a verbal conversation will never be more exacting than when you're talking about something you're writing.\n\n**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this._(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.)_\n\nI wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet?\n\nI'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I have no way to test them. The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every 6 months.\n\nSo I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about starting a startup. This amounts to asking what I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them.\n\nI'm proud to report I got one response saying:\n\n> What surprised me the most is that everything was actually fairly predictable!\n\nThe bad news is that I got over 100 other responses listing the surprises they encountered.\n\nThere were very clear patterns in the responses; it was remarkable how often several people had been surprised by exactly the same thing. These were the biggest:\n\n**1\\. Be Careful with Cofounders**\n\nThis was the surprise mentioned by the most founders. There were two types of responses: that you have to be careful who you pick as a cofounder, and that you have to work hard to maintain your relationship.\n\nWhat people wished they'd paid more attention to when choosing cofounders was character and commitment, not ability. This was particularly true with startups that failed. The lesson: don't pick cofounders who will flake.\n\nHere's a typical reponse:\n\n> You haven't seen someone's true colors unless you've worked with them on a startup."}
{"context":"A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.\n\nThat's particularly valuable at the start of a project, because initially the most important thing is to be able to change what you're doing. Not just to solve the problem in a different way, but to change the problem you're solving.\n\nYour code is your understanding of the problem you're exploring. So it's only when you have your code in your head that you really understand the problem.\n\nIt's not easy to get a program into your head. If you leave a project for a few months, it can take days to really understand it again when you return to it. Even when you're actively working on a program it can take half an hour to load into your head when you start work each day. And that's in the best case. Ordinary programmers working in typical office conditions never enter this mode. Or to put it more dramatically, ordinary programmers working in typical office conditions never really understand the problems they're solving.\n\nEven the best programmers don't always have the whole program they're working on loaded into their heads. But there are things you can do to help:\n\n1.  **Avoid distractions.** Distractions are bad for many types of work, but especially bad for programming, because programmers tend to operate at the limit of the detail they can handle.\n\nThe danger of a distraction depends not on how long it is, but on how much it scrambles your brain. A programmer can leave the office and go and get a sandwich without losing the code in his head. But the wrong kind of interruption can wipe your brain in 30 seconds.\n\nOddly enough, scheduled distractions may be worse than unscheduled ones. If you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don't even start working on something hard.\n\n2.  **Work in long stretches.** Since there's a fixed cost each time you start working on a program, it's more efficient to work in a few long sessions than many short ones. There will of course come a point where you get stupid because you're tired. This varies from person to person. I've heard of people hacking for 36 hours straight, but the most I've ever been able to manage is about 18, and I work best in chunks of no more than 12.\n\nThe optimum is not the limit you can physically endure. There's an advantage as well as a cost of breaking up a project. Sometimes when you return to a problem after a rest, you find your unconscious mind has left an answer waiting for you.\n\n3.  **Use succinct languages.** More [powerful](power.html) programming languages make programs shorter. And programmers seem to think of programs at least partially in the language they're using to write them. The more succinct the language, the shorter the program, and the easier it is to load and keep in your head.\n\nYou can magnify the effect of a powerful language by using a style called bottom-up programming, where you write programs in multiple layers, the lower ones acting as programming languages for those above. If you do this right, you only have to keep the topmost layer in your head.\n\n4.  **Keep rewriting your program.** Rewriting a program often yields a cleaner design. But it would have advantages even if it didn't: you have to understand a program completely to rewrite it, so there is no better way to get one loaded into your head.\n\n5.  **Write rereadable code.** All programmers know it's good to write readable code. But you yourself are the most important reader. Especially in the beginning; a prototype is a conversation with yourself. And when writing for yourself you have different priorities. If you're writing for other people, you may not want to make code too dense. Some parts of a program may be easiest to read if you spread things out, like an introductory textbook. Whereas if you're writing code to make it easy to reload into your head, it may be best to go for brevity.\n\n6.  **Work in small groups.** When you manipulate a program in your head, your vision tends to stop at the edge of the code you own. Other parts you don't understand as well, and more importantly, can't take liberties with. So the smaller the number of programmers, the more completely a project can mutate. If there's just one programmer, as there often is at first, you can do all-encompassing redesigns.\n\n7.  **Don't have multiple people editing the same piece of code.** You never understand other people's code as well as your own. No matter how thoroughly you've read it, you've only read it, not written it. So if a piece of code is written by multiple authors, none of them understand it as well as a single author would.\n\nAnd of course you can't safely redesign something other people are working on. It's not just that you'd have to ask permission. You don't even let yourself think of such things. Redesigning code with several authors is like changing laws; redesigning code you alone control is like seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image.\n\nIf you want to put several people to work on a project, divide it into components and give each to one person.\n\n8.  **Start small.** A program gets easier to hold in your head as you become familiar with it. You can start to treat parts as black boxes once you feel confident you've fully explored them. But when you first start working on a project, you're forced to see everything. If you start with too big a problem, you may never quite be able to encompass it. So if you need to write a big, complex program, the best way to begin may not be to write a spec for it, but to write a prototype that solves a subset of the problem. Whatever the advantages of planning, they're often outweighed by the advantages of being able to keep a program in your head.\n\nIt's striking how often programmers manage to hit all eight points by accident. Someone has an idea for a new project, but because it's not officially sanctioned, he has to do it in off hours\u2014which turn out to be more productive because there are no distractions. Driven by his enthusiasm for the new project he works on it for many hours at a stretch. Because it's initially just an experiment, instead of a \"production\" language he uses a mere \"scripting\" language\u2014which is in fact far more powerful. He completely rewrites the program several times; that wouldn't be justifiable for an official project, but this is a labor of love and he wants it to be perfect. And since no one is going to see it except him, he omits any comments except the note-to-self variety. He works in a small group perforce, because he either hasn't told anyone else about the idea yet, or it seems so unpromising that no one else is allowed to work on it. Even if there is a group, they couldn't have multiple people editing the same code, because it changes too fast for that to be possible. And the project starts small because the idea _is_ small at first; he just has some cool hack he wants to try out.\n\nEven more striking are the number of officially sanctioned projects that manage to do _all eight things wrong_. In fact, if you look at the way software gets written in most organizations, it's almost as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong. In a sense, they are. One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable. And that's what programs are: ideas."}