As a counter-point, PG had this to say about startups: "The surprising thing here is that you can safely hill climb. If you guys are programmers... What percen

As a counter-point, PG had this to say about startups: "The surprising thing here is that you can safely hill climb. If you guys are programmers... What percentage of the people here are programmers? Ok, a lot of programmers, so you all know what hill climbing is. You just do this simplest growth algorithm, you just go wherever it leads up from here. And you don't plan for the future, you don't try and think about the global picture, you just think what's going to grow this week. The surprising insight there is that that is safe to do in a startup, that you can hill climb your way into something big. It turns out the space of startup ideas--I didn't know this, this is something I learned empirically--but it turns out that there are not dangerous local maxima. You can safely hill climb without really thinking that much ahead, and you will grow. You won't even know what you'll grow into, right? Just week by week you see. And this works for a lot of things besides starting companies too. This would work for writing. You know, you just like work on whatever interests you and every week you try and do something more interesting, and eventually you'll look back and say "Holy cow, look, we started out way down there." You know? So who would it not work for? It's very dangerous but there are some startups where you have to go off and build something for some number of months before you can start this sort of cycle of interacting with users. Like if you want to build a new database company, you can't just like write a version 1 in a week." It's a passage that comes to mind from time to time. I've found that it can apply outside of the startup world, too. Interesting and easy directions in research often give insights that make harder problems easier, too. Source: http://www.bnjs.co/transcript-paul-graham-in-conversation-with-nathan-blecharczyk/ http://www.bnjs.co/transcript-paul-graham-in-conversation-wi...