Paul Graham is an programmer, essayist, and entrepreneur. He co-founded ViaWeb, which developed the first web-based application and was later acquired by Yahoo! for $49MM. Currently, he's a partner at an innovative early-stage venture capital firm Y Combinator.
Check out this collection of fascinating essays.
Here's a couple recommendations to get you started:
Cities and Ambition
Graham discusses different cities' "message" (e.g. Graham says New York's is "you should be richer" and Silicon Valley's is "you should be more powerful")
What is your city's message?
(per @NickSeguin who just launched his blog at www.NickSeguin.com)
How to Start a Startup
Here's some notes from reading this essay:
-Look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.
-What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
-What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal?
Call the person's image to mind and imagine the sentence "so-and-so is an animal." If you laugh, they're not. You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a startup.
-When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart.
-It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet.
-When you work on making technology easier to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.
-It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does.
-Your first batch of users are the ones who were smart enough to find you by themselves. There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you.
1 comments: