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Why are you all upvoting this shit? Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Usually the opposite, in fact. You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be him, or whatever.
Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
Yeah. Also, Suhail Doshi, the founder of Mighty, is mentioned as one of the people who draft read this essay.
"Essay is french for attempt." There are good and there are bad attempts, of course.
Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up. What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initi…
Indeed. Venture capitalism is still capitalism, with all its abuse and exploitation.
This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin. 1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progressi…
This is survivorship bias. He is not wrong in that yes, we should consider ideas from domain experts carefully and not be overly dismissive. But it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe that every crazy idea from a domain expert worked out.
In the realm of entrepreneurship, I think domain experts who also risk tons of their cash on crazy ideas should be looked at even closer. Y Combinator and Tesla were seen as stupid and crazy for a long time. Meanwhile I’ve seen a lot of domain expert entrepreneurs do really crazy things that lead nowhere when it’s VC money instead of theirs.
There are too many factors that'll decide whether it'll be success or not. I believe timings and luck are often overlooked. iPhone certainly not the first touch screen display, Microsoft did have one, I believe. However Apple's timing was perfect, there was increasing adaptation of wifi connectivity and 3g, making it able to browse anywhere. Of course smoother interface and beautiful design also contribute big. Among…
The reference to the Copernican Model of the solar system is an interesting one since it produced less accurate predictions than the Ptolemaic Model. Improving the predictions of the Copernican model initially involved the introduction of epicycles, diminishing the value of the crazy new idea. It took the work of Kepler (elliptical orbits) and Newton (a physical basis for elliptical orbits) to elevate the heliocentri…
Graham has a tendency to use hindsight to show that, yes, indeed he is contrarian and genius. The Ethereum people do it, too. They use the example of old massively successful tech to prove that Eth too can catch on, but they don't cite all the failures.
I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box. Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com didn't invent Tinder. It's…
However, for everyone of those examples there are many counter-examples: Intel came out of Shockley, ex-IBMers went onto found several other companies (SAP, Peoplesoft,...)... So Im skeptical of this outsider/insider characterization, IMHO it's almost always the individuals.
Why are you all upvoting this shit? Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Usually the opposite, in fact. You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be him, or whatever.
You created an account just to say this? Damn, commitment.
Interesting. Do VCs outperform the S&P 500 in general?