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Principles for Making New Things (2008)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Principles for Making New Things (2008)

#2

Post by Jun8 »

"I'd noticed, of course, that people never seemed to grasp new ideas at first. I thought it was just because most people were stupid. Now I see there's more to it than that. Like a contrarian investment fund, someone following this strategy will almost always be doing things that seem wrong to the average person."

For me, this was the most important point. True entrepreneurial genius is being able to differentiate between ideas that seem wrong/impossible to the masses but are right and those that are plain wrong in the business sense.

Re: Principles for Making New Things (2008)

#3

Post by carbocation »

> I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

By happy coincidence, I believe pg has coined a new term: fiterating: iterating until you find product-market fit.

Re: Principles for Making New Things (2008)

#4

Post by unboxed-value »

People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it

I totally understand the difficulties reddit faced (chicken&egg) but I don't understand "pushing hard against the current" part. What current? People love wasting time online and keep looking for new ways of doing it. Yes, getting their attention (or even noticing you) may be hard, but pushing against the current?

Re: Principles for Making New Things (2008)

#5

Post by pinkode »

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Ughh, easier to say than find! :) There are thousands of very, very, very smart people running around looking for "simple solutions to overlooked problems". I like to ask entrepreneurs what are their thoughts on this intense cutthroat competition. The best answer/advice I've got so far was "Watch those who almost succeeded and learn from them".

Now I need to learn to distinguish between "failed" and "almost succeeded". :)

Also, can this be related to "idea vs execution" question? Finding an overlooked problem is an idea (very hard) and coming up with a _simple_ solution is "execution". Both are overwhelmingly hard to crack.

Re: Principles for Making New Things (2008)

#6

Post by vsingh »

Is Arc a success on the same scale as Viaweb or Y Combinator?

In the academic sense ("was it a design that influenced others?") I think the answer is yes. pg's essays about Arc and the language itself got a lot of people thinking about how to improve Lisp. Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, was influenced to some extent by Arc.

In the practical sense ("is the community active and thriving?") I think the answer is no, so far. #arc on freenode is dead quiet and nearly empty, and there are only 20 new posts on arclanguage.org in the last 40 days. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not "on fire", that's all. Not yet, anyway.

But it's only fair to give it time. pg said:

"Number one, expect change. Arc is still fluid and future releases are guaranteed to break all your code. It was mainly to aid the evolution of the language that we even released it."

So it's not surprising that an active, thriving community of library creators hasn't sprung up yet.

Re: Principles for Making New Things (2008)

#7

Post by CapitalistCartr »

unboxed-value wrote: post #4

People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it I totally understand the difficulties reddit faced (chicken&egg) but I don't understand "pushing hard against the current" part. What current? People love wasting time online and keep looking for new ways of doing it. Yes, getting their atten…

When I'm in the midst of a project, the current is easy to spot. All the people who wouldn't take a stake in the project are now telling me what I should do, that they wouldn't. That's the current.

As for pushing back, every day I wake up and face the battle. Not easy, not fun at times, but the key isn't some great scheme, or brilliant pattern, or ruleset; it's just getting up and fighting, over and over, each and every day.

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