Entrepreneurial Essays - www.PaulGraham.com

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.

QUOTE: daily habits + living well

"If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.

Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more.

There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.

Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t."

-- Christopher Alexander

(per Ben Casnocha - an entrepreneur and blogger)

TED Talks: Jonathan Haidt - The real difference between liberals and conservatives

Jonathan Haidt studies how - and why - we evolved to be moral. In this TED Talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.


The "first draft" of the moral mind:
"The initial organization of the brain does not rely that much on experience... Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises... 'Built-in' does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience."
Gary Marcus

5 foundations of morality:
1. Harm/care
        -bond w/ others and care for others
        -strong feelings about those who cause carm
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
        (n.b. the Ohio State Buckeyes reference!)
4. Authority/respect
5. Purity/sanctity

"If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease."
- Sent-ts'an, c. 700 C.E.

"A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are; understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we are right. And then...step out of the moral matrix and try to see it as a struggle playing out in which everybody does think they're right and everybody at least has some reasons, even if you disagree with them, for what they're doing. And if you do that, that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility."
Jonathan Haidt

The Moral Mind
Jonathan Haidt's fascinating website where you can take anonymous moral studies and questionnaires.

TED Talks
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). www.TED.com makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free

VIDEO: Guy Kawasaki - Make Meaning in Your Company

Guy Kawasaki encourages entrepreneurs to make meaning with their ventures.



Guy's 3 ways to make meaning:
- Increase the quality of life
- Right a wrong
- Prevent the end of something good

Guy Kawasaki:
Blog: How to Change the World
Website
Twitter

Stanford YouTube Channel