@paulg
Trial lawyers are lobbying against self-driving cars because they're too safe. They need people to be killed and injured so that they have material for lawsuits.
Jessica: Imagine what it was like when there were no ATMs. 17 yo: I've never used an ATM in my life.
If your startup's revenue is affected by seasonality, adjust for it in the graphs you look at. It's straightforward to do, even the first year, and until you do it you don't really know how you're doing.
One of the more subtle pitfalls of starting a startup when you're too young is that you can't hire well, because you haven't had enough experience to be a good judge of people. You can judge technical ability but not character, so you end up hiring smart jerks.
How do you solve this problem? 1. Learn to be a better judge of character. 2. Find someone who is a good judge of character, and have them vet potential hires. I'd never hire someone Jessica disapproved of, for example.
After going on three campus tours in three days, Jessica has started to slip unknowingly into uptalking.
No matter which party is power, they can't stop spending.
17 yo says I am his second favorite Cornell alum after Andy Bernard. I'll take that actually. IY(have a 17 yo)YK.
Visiting Cornell. One of the biggest surprises was the view. I don't think I ever once stopped to look at it when I was a student here. I was always on my way to do something. It was like how New Yorkers never look up at the tall buildings.
Finally, sudo make me a sandwich is reality. x.com/andyfang/statu…
The danger of continuing to act like a third world country is that you might actually become one. x.com/SecScottBessen…
Getting dressed: Me: How do I look? Jessica: You look like PG.
Since no one likes "hydration breaks," let's boycott any advertiser that sponsors them, starting with Powerade.
Went to see Spain vs France with 17 yo. About 10 minutes in I asked who seemed to him to have the upper hand so far, because it wasn't who we'd been expecting. They kept it the whole match.
Before vibe coding became a thing, programming was already evolving in that direction. It already increasingly consisted of installing and configuring stuff other people wrote, without reading the source.
It's interesting in this case how well AI fits into existing trends. Programming wasn't evolving in this direction because AI was coming. No one knew it was. And yet we end up with what looks like a smooth acceleration along much the same path.
@heysamir_ And incidentally when I talk about wokeness, it's not vaguely defined. I defined it very precisely here: paulgraham.com/woke.html
An initial startup idea can't usually be both grand and precise. In practice they're usually either grand and vague or precise and small. Precise and small is better. You know who your initial users are, and you expand outward. With grand and vague you can't even get started.
This is yet another reason it's good for young founders, especially, to start by building something they themselves want. If you're the intended user, you're not going to be satisfied with vague. (Nor is any user, but at least this way you're forced to see it.)
We ran into Amit from the winter 2007 batch. We still remember him vividly, because after I told him in rehearsals that he had to speak louder, the first sentence of his Demo Day presentation was probably the most emphatic ever delivered.
The reason people think premonitions are meaningful is that they don't remember the false ones. So when I have a premonition I make a point of remembering it. And not surprisingly, they all turn out to be false.
The biggest mistake young founders make is a variant of this: to build something you imagine people want, instead of studying them and figuring out what they actually do want. But the hack for beating this is to roll with your solipsism and make something for yourself. x.com/robinhanson/st…
This would not ordinarily work, but it happens to work with technology because the young are also the bellwethers. So if you make something you want, other people will magically turn out to want it too.
The rise and fall of wokeness: DEI commitments in corporate securities disclosures filed with the SEC. To me this seems a trailing indicator; most other measures of wokeness take off well before 2019 and peak in 2020 or 2021. But the shape! That's what a moral fashion looks like.
The graph is from "The Political Economy of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" by McCarty and Steel. osf.io/preprints/soca…
Today in investor updates: Startup apologizes for growing a mere 36% in June, because they were focused mostly on fundraising.
It slows down between 1890 and 1940 as industry concentrates in what is now the rust belt, then after World War II, bang, it shoots westward. x.com/Civixplorer/st…
One of the weird constants about YC is that the disses are always the same. Investors always claim valuations have become impossibly high. Competitors always claim we've jumped the shark because the batch sizes are now too big. Historically both have always been mistaken.
Explained derivatives to 14 yo on the way back from breakfast, but before I could do integrals he diverted the conversation by asking about the Denver Nuggets.
Robert Scoble interviews me outside YC after the summer 2010 Demo Day. By that point we'd funded what seemed the enormous number of 208 startups, including 36 in that batch. youtube.com/watch?v=UacbJ7…
It's so strange reading people saying that soccer is boring when I feel worn out from the stress of watching the last two England matches. Frankly I would have preferred them to be a bit more boring.
My son asked what my first tweet was. It was me thanking Avi Bryant for getting me paulg. This is my second, a day later, complaining about the inability to edit tweets after I got his username wrong in the first. x.com/paulg/status/2…
This is like someone who can bench press 30 pounds writing about what it takes to bench press 600. x.com/Cobratate/stat…
Something I told 14 yo: People are going to stop reading books. I wish this wasn't so, but I fear it is. The silver lining in this cloud is that if you're one of the few people who still read, you'll have a huge advantage over everyone else.
The people who still read won't just be better informed. They'll be (with a couple exceptions) the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.
A lawyer friend on Legora: "Legora really helped with this latest motion, which was dense with past issues in the case. Now my paralegal says she cannot live without it. It is just too remarkable and timesaving."
The market interprets unions as damage and routes around them. x.com/ReemAmirIbrahi…
Someone sent me an email that used "it's" for the possessive and I thought "At least it's not AI."
Congratulations to Don Knight, who just won the American Bar Association's Guiding Hand of Counsel award. No one has worked harder — or more ingeniously — to defend the innocent.
17 yo says his policy for hugs is to stop short of Paraguayan defenders during a corner kick.
A British surgeon tells the BBC what he saw in Gaza. "I can remember one child for example who was 7, Amir... He heard a drone above him, turned round, and then it fired on him. And we had many many reports like that from children and adults."
I took an SAT English practice test. I got two questions wrong, which meant my score was 760. One was a grammar mistake I might have caught if I'd checked my answers. The other was about a fictional character's state of mind and there were two answers that seemed reasonable.
A Brown professor gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The orange dots are the midterm scores and the gray dots are the final scores. Looks like all but 3 cheated on the midterm.
This 1952 IWC is one of my favorite watches. Timeless design: it's 74 years old and looks like it could have been made yesterday. And timeless engineering: it still runs at +1 sec/day (dial up).
Jessica decided 14 yo and I needed haircuts and made appointments for us. A traffic jam made us late, so only he actually got a haircut. When I got home I asked Jessica if she liked my hair, and she said yes, so everyone's happy.
The test of a description of a product is how much closer I am after hearing it to being able to reproduce it. So e.g. "transform the way people interact with images" has almost zero descriptive value. If I had to make this, where would I even start?
Imagine what it will be like if 5 years from now models have improved on Fable as much as Fable has improved on GPT3. x.com/snowmaker/stat…
If you want to start a startup, don't learn "entrepreneurship." Learn how to build things. The hard part of startups is not "entrepreneurship" but product: to know what to build, and to be able to build it.
Looks legit.
"No one can beat death. The best you can hope for is a tie after extra time." — Jan Houtema
AI companies are making a lot of money. Apparently the revenues from this wave of technology are growing "roughly three times more rapidly than the mobile or Internet waves." x.com/azeem/status/2…
There is an interesting implicit claim here: that mobile and internet revenues grew at the same rate. It would be interesting to know if that is in fact true.
Man do I want Paraguay to lose. Not just because they deserve to, but because I don't want to have to watch any more of them.
The problem with black dials: less light bouncing up off the dial makes the crystal seem more reflective. It's like the way windows in a house, from the inside, seem more reflective at night.
A friend came over to look at some old watches. But he showed up at the worst possible time: 2:11.
Someone asked if the US economy could be damaged by the high valuations startups get now, and I realized there's a natural protection against this. All the growth is concentrated in the big hits, and they are exactly the companies most able to grow into an "excessive" valuation.
It's certainly true that a startup can be damaged by raising too much and/or at too high a valuation. Raising too much makes you spend too much. And a high valuation increases the chance of a catastrophic down round later on.
"So you're saying <enormously elaborate thing you didn't even suggest>?"
Did any human ever actually use the phrase "hits different" before AIs picked it up? And why do AIs like it so much?
People are taking this a bit literally (obviously someone must have) so I'll save us all some time and delete it.
The history of golden age watch case and face design consists of designers wishing they hadn't already known the right answer since the 1940s. They orbited it for the next 30 years, but couldn't escape it.
If you're curious about this watch, it's not only beautiful but accurate to -2 sec/day dial up. This particular one is long since sold, but they made a lot of these. goldammer.me/products/iwc-c…
What's interesting about these questions is the ratio of how important they are to how often you think about them. Every company probably could and should do its own version of this. In fact it would be a useful exercise just to decide what the questions are. x.com/DellAnnaLuca/s…
I didn't realize this till recently, but the math section of the SAT is a de facto second English section. For whatever reason they can't give you problems that are mathematically difficult, so the only way to add difficulty is to make the problems hard to read.
I wonder if they did this deliberately because making the math section of the SAT actually about math would have demographic consequences they don't want to see, or if it just happened by accident due to other random constraints.
Someone asked why I like Boom so much. Partly because they're building supersonic jets! Partly because they're doing it so well. And partly because we've been through so much together; it was so hard for so many years.
There is something to this. There's definitely a "buck stops here" element to being a founder. But I think it's going slightly too far to say it's your number one job. Your number one job is to solve the important problems, and pain and importance are not perfectly correlated. x.com/ivanburazin/st…
14 yo asked me if I leaned more to the left or right. I was pleased to be asked this, because if there's no visible trend in over a decade of data, it means I must not lean too obviously either way.
There are two ways to get no overall lean: to pick a middle position on every issue, and to lean left on some questions and right on others. Obviously the latter is what you want. (I wrote about this here: paulgraham.com/mod.html.)
There are two ways to get no overall lean: to pick a middle position on every issue, and to lean left on some and right on others. Obviously the latter is what you want. (I wrote about this here: paulgraham.com/mod.html.)
Good portrait. Lawrence was at the height of his powers when he painted this, and he put a lot of effort into it.
I just talked to another investor about this startup. I asked how fundraising went for them. "He started his fundraising calls at 9:00 and he was done by 10:30." x.com/paulg/status/2…
Y Combinator makes something people who make something people want want.
My watch has π on its face.
The two problems with legs in portraits: too big, and too small.
Explained to 14 yo how you can multiply numbers by adding their logarithms (and divide by subtracting them), and how before calculators this was a critical hack for doing calculations.
I unintentionally illustrated one of the dangers of buying watches at auction here: Redials, meaning watches whose dials have been repainted. I should have caught this; it's not even close to authentic; but I didn't. I thought of deleting this tweet, but left it as a warning.
I was suspicious of the dial, so I emailed the people at the auction house, who said they thought it was likely in original condition. I took their word for it. But if they or I had bothered to look at images of this reference, we'd have seen it wasn't.
Behold the amazing Heuer Calculator of 1975. The bezel is a slide rule! And it's in the process of doing an infinite number of calculations simultaneously: everything times 23. 17 times 23, for example, as you can see is 391.
Here's where you can see that 23 * 17 = 391. Actually all you can see is that it's a little over a number whose first two digits are 3 and 9. But it can't be 3.9 or 3900. And you know the last digit has to be a 1. So 391.
This amazing WW II painting by Laura Knight is effectively a combination of a still life and figures in a landscape, because that huge barrage balloon works like, and is painted like, an object in a still life.
The Birth of Pete Davidson.
"I feel like a spider who's caught an insect in its web." — Jessica after teaching a visiting friend to play Rummikub
@Noahpinion If they were so modest as to say "We can't let people as dumb as me in," that would be more excusable. But they never say that. Rather the opposite; they seem mostly unaware that they wouldn't make the cut.
@RegulusHale Actually, what was I thinking? You're probably already in Russia.
14 yo was sent to my office to tell me "Dinner's ready." But I'm cooking dinner. (Lentils are boiling slowly on the stove.) So what this really means is that Jessica's ready to eat it.
Nearly all those who say the US should only admit the most talented immigrants would not themselves clear the bar they're proposing. They're effectively saying "Immigration is ok so long as you keep out people like me."
It would be charmingly candid if they actually put it that way. But I don't think any of them are consciously aware that this is what they're saying.
In the future people won't believe it ever got this bad. But it did. x.com/David_J_Bier/s…
I'm of two minds about whether to mention this, but a teenager who built something his friends could use to circumvent the UK's social media ban would probably end up with a very rapidly growing startup.
Indeed, maybe the social media ban will turn out to be the policy to encourage the founding of startups that governments dream of. Stranger things have happened.
This turned out to be horribly prescient. x.com/paulg/status/1…
The banned uses of AI will usually have to be prevented. Otherwise students will just cheat. This will change the way a lot of classes work, but there is no alternative.
