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Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston Interview [video]

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Re: Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston Interview [video]

#62

Post by personjerry »

EGreg wrote: post #58
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had really understood this 20 years ago. And I wasn't even in a startup. I just had things I wanted to work on that took time. Good things, useful things, but I put time/energy/thought into them that should have been spent on my kids.

Those things are like your baby but when you have a real baby then thats your BABY! I think all people want to transcend their own death and for men, it's through creating useful things and for women the instinct is more for raising good children.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you may want to be careful with the generalizations.

Re: Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston Interview [video]

#63

Post by EGreg »

personjerry wrote: post #62
EGreg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those things are like your baby but when you have a real baby then thats your BABY! I think all people want to transcend their own death and for men, it's through creating useful things and for women the instinct is more for raising good children.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you may want to be careful with the generalizations.

I usually throw them out there because if someone disagrees I may learn something. I imagine I gain more than I lose from that.

Re: Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston Interview [video]

#64

Post by gus_massa »

trevmckendrick wrote: post #33
patio11 wrote: post #31

An exchange, picked mostly because it made me smile. PG: "Since all of the money is in a few big hits, we own about 3% of [the $30 billion portfolio]. I haven't done the math on how much that is." Interviewer: "One billion dollars." PG: "Well, $900 million."

Made you smile because you think he actually had already done the math? Or because he did it fast right there and corrected her? I smiled too, because of the latter.

I think it was the nitpicking instinct.

It's easy to get the first digit if you ignore the decimal exponents. If you have the 3 * 10^? part of 3 * 10^? dollars, then you have 3 * 3 * 10^? * 10^? = 9 * 10^? dollars. Perhaps $90, perhaps $9000, perhaps $9000000, ... something that starts with a 9.

Now, if someone tells you that the amount is close to 10^9 then it's easy to complete the information and realize that you have $9 * 10^8.

Re: Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston Interview [video]

#65

Post by SamReidHughes »

gus_massa wrote: post #64
trevmckendrick wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Made you smile because you think he actually had already done the math? Or because he did it fast right there and corrected her? I smiled too, because of the latter.

I think it was the nitpicking instinct. It's easy to get the first digit if you ignore the decimal exponents. If you have the 3 * 10^? part of 3 * 10^? dollars, then you have 3 * 3 * 10^? * 10^? = 9 * 10^? dollars. Perhaps $90, perhaps $9000, perhaps $9000000, ... something that starts with a 9. Now, if someone tells you that the amount is close to 10^9 then it's easy to complete the information and realize that you…

You can just divide by a hundred and multiply by 3.

Edit: You'd be surprised how good at calculating percentages you can be if you do them a lot. It just becomes automatic. Source: binged-watched Shark Tank, got real good at multiplying by percentages and their reciprocals in the process.

Re: Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston Interview [video]

#67

Post by yeukhon »

serf wrote: post #32
techtivist wrote: post #18

I was really touched that PG's greatest regret was something related to his family, and not YC or his larger professional career. As young founders we tend to forget (or are expected to anyways) where our real long term priorities should be, and I hope PG's own regret reminds us to think about it from time to time.

I had a difficult time watching this video from a technical aspect, so to save others the trouble : PGs biggest regret has to do with not with business or entrepreneurship, but that he wishes that he had told his parent(s) to have more frequent colon cancer screenings. Jessica's biggest regret was squandering her time in college, not learning as much as she wishes she had.

> Jessica's biggest regret was squandering her time in college, not learning as much as she wishes she had.

This is also my regret. As much as I want to say doing more internship and building more personal projects and contributing to more open source projects are useful today, dedicate more time on studying the material instead of saying "no one will care if you know how to write quicksort" or "I will learn them in my job anyway" is absolutely a requirement.

I also regret not able to do more internships...

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