9 ms·

Brown Political Review Interviews Paul Graham

110 points by davnicwil 7y ago

davnicwil 7y ago
> At the time I worried all of life might be a similarly pointless jumping through hoops, but fortunately in college I discovered there was a thin stream of people in the world who were interested in ideas and making new stuff, and I’ve tried to stay in that stream ever since This really stood out to me - what an excellent articulation of the intrinsic reason why founders want to be founders.
- itronitron 7y ago
  It strikes me as rather pretentious for someone to think that the 'stream of people that are interested in ideas and make new stuff' is thin
  - cgrealy 7y ago
    You could probably rephrase that into the 'stream of people that are interested in ideas and make new stuff and then actually do something about it' is thin.
    - zimpenfish 7y ago
      And you could retort "because of systemic unfairness in the US" since being able to do something about your ideas requires free time, money, etc. which many people just don't have rather than any intrinsic holy goodness in "founders".
      - tasogare 7y ago
        > And you could retort "because of systemic unfairness in the US" One could retort that nice conspiracy theory to almost everything, and some people actually specialize into it. Now the thing is, having some constraints is a great way to get aware of a problem and try to solve it. This of course doesn't fit well with the whining mentality that some groups try to implant onto other for their own benefits.
        zimpenfish 7y ago
        > One could retort that nice conspiracy theory to almost everything In what sense is it a conspiracy theory? Look at what COVID-19 is already highlighting over there where people can't get tested[1], get no help for being unable to work, etc. [1] Unless, of course, you're a baseball team and then you can get instantly tested.
        lioeters 7y ago
        Another could retort that systemic inequality, the economic and financial "game" being rigged, is not a conspiracy theory; it's not even a conspiracy - that's why it's called "systemic", behavior exhibited by a system, not necessarily by intentional collaboration of individuals (though that clearly happens also). To that a counter-retort may say, even if we acknowledge the "systemic unfairness" in the US, the country is leading the world as far as entrepreneurship and startups go.
  - choonway 7y ago
    It really is that thin. I'm sure he's talking about new stuff that you can't find by googling.
  - chairmanwow1 7y ago
    How is it at all pretentious. It’s a statement of fact. Most people are not interested in innovating. Most entrepreneurs in the US are merely operating a small business in a well-defined market (restaurants, construction , car repair etc). There is a very small group of people that are thinking about these ideas at a higher level with enough conviction that they will act on it.
    - sanderjd 7y ago
      It is pretentious because being an entrepreneur who is interested in innovation is not the only way to be interested in ideas and making new things. It is placing this one kind of human endeavor on a pedestal above the myriad others. Which is pretentious!
      - hombre_fatal 7y ago
        Meh, people who create things are always going to be a subset of the population because it just takes more effort than the ring below it. And in my experience, it's definitely a thin stream. For all sorts of reasons, no doubt, but that's what it is. I didn't even meet another developer in the wild who actually liked building things on his own until I was in my late 20s and we became co-founders. And I went to a large public university with a good comp sci department. Not everyone is going to be a creator. Not sure what is so controversial about this. Getting hostile over the word "thin" seems a bit silly since it's also completely unquantified. And I wonder what your life circumstance is if you're encountering more of a "thick" stream. Are you a hackathon event planner or something?
        sanderjd 7y ago
        Is it hostile to call an attitude pretentious? I don't think it is... Some attitudes are pretentious. What is pretentious about the quote that started this thread is the apparent belief that the kinds of people that do the things we talk about and admire on this site - building new kinds of software, starting growth-focused companies - are the only people "that are interested in ideas and making new stuff". I agree that there is a fairly thin stream of the building-software / starting-companies hackers that you're thinking of, but I see huge numbers of people from all walks of life being interested in ideas and creating things. Artists, writers, journalists, directors, bureaucrats, other types of business people, on and on and on. I think it is pretentious to look down our noses at pursuits that are not our own, that's all. Your comment about hackathon event planning is illustrative: hackathons are honestly not at all where I would go to find the highest concentration of people creating interesting new things.
  - pritovido 7y ago
    As Mr Graham states, most arguments are about the differences in the meaning and definition of words. Your meaning of "being interested in ideas" and specially "stuff" is different to Graham's. This is not a surprise because both "idea" and "stuff" are just generic placeholders in which you can enter whatever you want. I see that a lot when I write or speak to a big group of people. No matter what I say somebody somewhere interprets it in the worst possible way I could barely imagine myself.
  - blueboo 7y ago
    People mostly aren't interested enough to actually learn how to tackle those problems nor resourceful enough to act on that learning. Ideas are cheap. That long-nursed startup idea you've had has been tried a half-dozen times and discarded even more.
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
    It's quite thin. I grew up surrounded by such people, but after college out in the real world I discovered that the number of people who were truly curious about the world was around 10%. Even more surprising to me: The percentage wasn't very much higher for people who had PhDs.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kick 7y ago
Why do people always ask him the same questions? Is it the easiest way to get an interview with him these days, promising that you'll clone previous interviews? Someone needs to sit him down and do nothing but ask about programming languages for an hour or two at some point. On the other hand, the question about his homepage was neat.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Yeah someone should do a Joe Rogan style interview with PG.
  - beigeoak 7y ago
    "That's crazy Paul. Have you ever done DMT?"
  - arman_ashrafian 7y ago
    I would like to see him on lex fridman's podcast
    - kick 7y ago
      Rogan and Fridman both ask very shallow questions. I want to see him get grilled by someone familiar with the subject matter. Anything less gets questions about the lowest common denominator.
      - chrisco255 7y ago
        How about Eric Weinstein? He asks great questions on The Portal.
        kick 7y ago
        I find him lacking intellectual curiosity, although I've only had limited exposure to him. Do you have something you'd recommend for a "deeper look" into him or his work?
bitwize 7y ago
> Earnestness. This seems a rather Victorian quality to care about, but the founders who end up doing the best are all earnest. They’re not starting a startup because it’s the cool thing to do, or to make a quick buck, but because it’s how they want to work. Ironically, PG accidentally helped create today's phony Silly Valley culture, because after YC's first few big wins with earnest founders, people started smelling money, and gold-rushing douchebags colonized the nascent startup scene in its infancy.
- sombremesa 7y ago
  I heard WeWorks CEO did pretty well for himself. Boy, was he earnest.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- divbzero 7y ago
  Earnestness is difficult to fake indefinitely. At some point, you’ll either be revealed or have acted for so long that you actually become earnest.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    It's pretty important being Earnest, and yes, if you pretend too long and too hard to be Earnest in the end it will turn out you actually were Earnest all along.
- trav4225 7y ago
  Perhaps somewhat true, but I was around SV in the '90s and the same phony startup culture was alive and well back then, perhaps even more than today.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  To me YC seems to be good at funding the proverbial selling of shovels. SaaS and developer tools are some of their wider investment categories.
spencerwgreene 7y ago
Q: "What is the most promising startup idea you’ve heard that didn’t succeed?" PG: "Maybe Pebble. It could have been the next Apple. But hardware startups are a bitch. External factors can kill you in a way that doesn’t happen with software, and you can’t do things as gradually as you can with software." This answer stood out to me the most since many of the other questions are answered somewhat in his essays already.
- asadlionpk 7y ago
  I loved my Pebble. I wore the classic one till it broke. I wish they had stayed around.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- iamwil 7y ago
  Whenever I ask different ex-Pebblers about what killed the company, their perspective is always relative to their area of concern.
- thimkerbell 7y ago
  For fellow ignorami,Pebble was a wristwatch; see https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-tau...
everybodyknows 7y ago
> I studied philosophy because of what it seemed to be. It seemed to promise a direct route to the most general truths. I pursued this illusion for some time as well. Then the first 50-some pages of Sartre's Being and Nothingness started a turn toward my present view that 20th-century academic philosophy is on the whole little more than a sophistical hustle.
- morelisp 7y ago
  > on the whole little more than a sophistical hustle. Funny, this is also what philosophers think about modern tech companies.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    They use the services provided by those companies to smugly advertise this attitude all the time.
    - claudiawerner 7y ago
      That's a good thing - they're using the world as it is to their advantage. The idea that using something means you can't criticize it (or elements of it) has no logical basis.
    - morelisp 7y ago
      This is conversely true also!
      - philwelch 7y ago
        How do you mean?
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  I wonder, then, how many experts in the discipline, and lay people (including me) come away with exactly the opposite conclusion. If you're going to fault Sartre and talk about 20th c. academic philosophy, you may as well also fault Hegel or Nietzche or Marx for their 18th and 19th c. philosophy, and then Heraclitus for his 4th century BC obscurities. Maybe you only meant "continental" philosophy, but you'd probably need metaphilosophy to argue the point as to what is genuine and a "sophistical hustle". Apparently the people who study Sartre come out with some pretty interesting ideas[0]. It's a little tiring to hear people reading 50 pages of a French philosopher known for his difficulty and concluding that 20th c. academic philosophy is sophistry(?!)[1] A non-mathematician might just say the same thing about Erdos. The fact that people feel comfortable making such sweeping judgements on a wide-ranging and deep discipline is frankly shocking. You're not alone, however; the gwern.net guy has done the same. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/ [1] Sartre mostly wrote books on philosophy, rather than publishing in academic journals, alongside plays and novels. If you mean to talk about "academic philosophy", Sartre is certainly not your best example. Neither would Marx or Nietzche be good examples. Heidegger and Hegel maybe.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nancycut10 7y ago
hackers for hire : https://www.hackerslist.co/how-it-works/ https://www.hackerslist.co/how-it-works/
hooande 7y ago
Paul usually doesn't do this many interviews. is he about to publish another book or something?
- jp57 7y ago
  When I see anyone appearing over and over in a short span like this I assume that their publicist is working hard to get them out there for some reason. Like Liz Phair at the 25th anniversary of "Exile In Guyville", when she surfaced out of nowhere and was all over everything for a few months. We already know Paul knows the power of buying good PR: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
rdiddly 7y ago
Interviewer: What important truth do very few people agree with you on? Graham: That the axiomatic approach John McCarthy used when defining Lisp is the optimal way to design general-purpose programming languages. Interviewer (silently): Oh my god what did I get myself into? Next question, quick!
- choonway 7y ago
  If I was the interviewer... Me: Really? what metrics do you make that optimality claim on?
  - ilrwbwrkhv 7y ago
    Length of his staff
  - rdiddly 7y ago
    Yeah I was curious to have his answer explored further.
- lioeters 7y ago
  I love it, that statement so perfectly captures how pg has stayed true to his roots and convinctions. Having read numerous articles and books he's written on Lisp, and the recently published source of his Lisp dialect (written in itself of course) - it's a fascination/obsession spanning decades. I respect that "long-sightedness" and a kind of dogged determination, for better or worse, a conscious or natural inclication to persist in pursuing important truths - even if "very few people agree with you" on them.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
>>> I could probably train someone in a day to narrow a pool of applicants down to 50%, but I wouldn’t hope for more than that. So that (and the 3% thing) interests me - I have always found myself on the wrong side of someone else's line - aorry Paul you cant take that exam / goto that university / get that job / build that software - and it riles me. I wonder how often simply being told no, makes someone do it anyway and how you spot that in a day.
cool-RR 7y ago
I love this guy's face so much.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

110 points by davnicwil 7y ago

> At the time I worried all of life might be a similarly pointless jumping through hoops, but fortunately in college I discovered there was a thin stream of people in the world who were interested in ideas and making new stuff, and I’ve tried to stay in that stream ever since This really stood out to me - what an excellent articulation of the intrinsic reason why founders want to be founders.

itronitron 7y ago
It strikes me as rather pretentious for someone to think that the 'stream of people that are interested in ideas and make new stuff' is thin
- cgrealy 7y ago
  You could probably rephrase that into the 'stream of people that are interested in ideas and make new stuff and then actually do something about it' is thin.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    And you could retort "because of systemic unfairness in the US" since being able to do something about your ideas requires free time, money, etc. which many people just don't have rather than any intrinsic holy goodness in "founders".
    - tasogare 7y ago
      > And you could retort "because of systemic unfairness in the US" One could retort that nice conspiracy theory to almost everything, and some people actually specialize into it. Now the thing is, having some constraints is a great way to get aware of a problem and try to solve it. This of course doesn't fit well with the whining mentality that some groups try to implant onto other for their own benefits.
      - zimpenfish 7y ago
        > One could retort that nice conspiracy theory to almost everything In what sense is it a conspiracy theory? Look at what COVID-19 is already highlighting over there where people can't get tested[1], get no help for being unable to work, etc. [1] Unless, of course, you're a baseball team and then you can get instantly tested.
      - lioeters 7y ago
        Another could retort that systemic inequality, the economic and financial "game" being rigged, is not a conspiracy theory; it's not even a conspiracy - that's why it's called "systemic", behavior exhibited by a system, not necessarily by intentional collaboration of individuals (though that clearly happens also). To that a counter-retort may say, even if we acknowledge the "systemic unfairness" in the US, the country is leading the world as far as entrepreneurship and startups go.
- choonway 7y ago
  It really is that thin. I'm sure he's talking about new stuff that you can't find by googling.
- chairmanwow1 7y ago
  How is it at all pretentious. It’s a statement of fact. Most people are not interested in innovating. Most entrepreneurs in the US are merely operating a small business in a well-defined market (restaurants, construction , car repair etc). There is a very small group of people that are thinking about these ideas at a higher level with enough conviction that they will act on it.
  - sanderjd 7y ago
    It is pretentious because being an entrepreneur who is interested in innovation is not the only way to be interested in ideas and making new things. It is placing this one kind of human endeavor on a pedestal above the myriad others. Which is pretentious!
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Meh, people who create things are always going to be a subset of the population because it just takes more effort than the ring below it. And in my experience, it's definitely a thin stream. For all sorts of reasons, no doubt, but that's what it is. I didn't even meet another developer in the wild who actually liked building things on his own until I was in my late 20s and we became co-founders. And I went to a large public university with a good comp sci department. Not everyone is going to be a creator. Not sure what is so controversial about this. Getting hostile over the word "thin" seems a bit silly since it's also completely unquantified. And I wonder what your life circumstance is if you're encountering more of a "thick" stream. Are you a hackathon event planner or something?
      - sanderjd 7y ago
        Is it hostile to call an attitude pretentious? I don't think it is... Some attitudes are pretentious. What is pretentious about the quote that started this thread is the apparent belief that the kinds of people that do the things we talk about and admire on this site - building new kinds of software, starting growth-focused companies - are the only people "that are interested in ideas and making new stuff". I agree that there is a fairly thin stream of the building-software / starting-companies hackers that you're thinking of, but I see huge numbers of people from all walks of life being interested in ideas and creating things. Artists, writers, journalists, directors, bureaucrats, other types of business people, on and on and on. I think it is pretentious to look down our noses at pursuits that are not our own, that's all. Your comment about hackathon event planning is illustrative: hackathons are honestly not at all where I would go to find the highest concentration of people creating interesting new things.
- pritovido 7y ago
  As Mr Graham states, most arguments are about the differences in the meaning and definition of words. Your meaning of "being interested in ideas" and specially "stuff" is different to Graham's. This is not a surprise because both "idea" and "stuff" are just generic placeholders in which you can enter whatever you want. I see that a lot when I write or speak to a big group of people. No matter what I say somebody somewhere interprets it in the worst possible way I could barely imagine myself.
- blueboo 7y ago
  People mostly aren't interested enough to actually learn how to tackle those problems nor resourceful enough to act on that learning. Ideas are cheap. That long-nursed startup idea you've had has been tried a half-dozen times and discarded even more.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  It's quite thin. I grew up surrounded by such people, but after college out in the real world I discovered that the number of people who were truly curious about the world was around 10%. Even more surprising to me: The percentage wasn't very much higher for people who had PhDs.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kick 7y ago

Why do people always ask him the same questions? Is it the easiest way to get an interview with him these days, promising that you'll clone previous interviews? Someone needs to sit him down and do nothing but ask about programming languages for an hour or two at some point. On the other hand, the question about his homepage was neat.

chrisco255 7y ago
Yeah someone should do a Joe Rogan style interview with PG.
- beigeoak 7y ago
  "That's crazy Paul. Have you ever done DMT?"
- arman_ashrafian 7y ago
  I would like to see him on lex fridman's podcast
  - kick 7y ago
    Rogan and Fridman both ask very shallow questions. I want to see him get grilled by someone familiar with the subject matter. Anything less gets questions about the lowest common denominator.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      How about Eric Weinstein? He asks great questions on The Portal.
      - kick 7y ago
        I find him lacking intellectual curiosity, although I've only had limited exposure to him. Do you have something you'd recommend for a "deeper look" into him or his work?

bitwize 7y ago

> Earnestness. This seems a rather Victorian quality to care about, but the founders who end up doing the best are all earnest. They’re not starting a startup because it’s the cool thing to do, or to make a quick buck, but because it’s how they want to work. Ironically, PG accidentally helped create today's phony Silly Valley culture, because after YC's first few big wins with earnest founders, people started smelling money, and gold-rushing douchebags colonized the nascent startup scene in its infancy.

sombremesa 7y ago
I heard WeWorks CEO did pretty well for himself. Boy, was he earnest.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
divbzero 7y ago
Earnestness is difficult to fake indefinitely. At some point, you’ll either be revealed or have acted for so long that you actually become earnest.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  It's pretty important being Earnest, and yes, if you pretend too long and too hard to be Earnest in the end it will turn out you actually were Earnest all along.
trav4225 7y ago
Perhaps somewhat true, but I was around SV in the '90s and the same phony startup culture was alive and well back then, perhaps even more than today.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
To me YC seems to be good at funding the proverbial selling of shovels. SaaS and developer tools are some of their wider investment categories.

spencerwgreene 7y ago

Q: "What is the most promising startup idea you’ve heard that didn’t succeed?" PG: "Maybe Pebble. It could have been the next Apple. But hardware startups are a bitch. External factors can kill you in a way that doesn’t happen with software, and you can’t do things as gradually as you can with software." This answer stood out to me the most since many of the other questions are answered somewhat in his essays already.

asadlionpk 7y ago
I loved my Pebble. I wore the classic one till it broke. I wish they had stayed around.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
iamwil 7y ago
Whenever I ask different ex-Pebblers about what killed the company, their perspective is always relative to their area of concern.
thimkerbell 7y ago
For fellow ignorami,Pebble was a wristwatch; see https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-tau...

everybodyknows 7y ago

> I studied philosophy because of what it seemed to be. It seemed to promise a direct route to the most general truths. I pursued this illusion for some time as well. Then the first 50-some pages of Sartre's Being and Nothingness started a turn toward my present view that 20th-century academic philosophy is on the whole little more than a sophistical hustle.

morelisp 7y ago
> on the whole little more than a sophistical hustle. Funny, this is also what philosophers think about modern tech companies.
- philwelch 7y ago
  They use the services provided by those companies to smugly advertise this attitude all the time.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    That's a good thing - they're using the world as it is to their advantage. The idea that using something means you can't criticize it (or elements of it) has no logical basis.
  - morelisp 7y ago
    This is conversely true also!
    - philwelch 7y ago
      How do you mean?
claudiawerner 7y ago
I wonder, then, how many experts in the discipline, and lay people (including me) come away with exactly the opposite conclusion. If you're going to fault Sartre and talk about 20th c. academic philosophy, you may as well also fault Hegel or Nietzche or Marx for their 18th and 19th c. philosophy, and then Heraclitus for his 4th century BC obscurities. Maybe you only meant "continental" philosophy, but you'd probably need metaphilosophy to argue the point as to what is genuine and a "sophistical hustle". Apparently the people who study Sartre come out with some pretty interesting ideas[0]. It's a little tiring to hear people reading 50 pages of a French philosopher known for his difficulty and concluding that 20th c. academic philosophy is sophistry(?!)[1] A non-mathematician might just say the same thing about Erdos. The fact that people feel comfortable making such sweeping judgements on a wide-ranging and deep discipline is frankly shocking. You're not alone, however; the gwern.net guy has done the same. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/ [1] Sartre mostly wrote books on philosophy, rather than publishing in academic journals, alongside plays and novels. If you mean to talk about "academic philosophy", Sartre is certainly not your best example. Neither would Marx or Nietzche be good examples. Heidegger and Hegel maybe.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nancycut10 7y ago

hackers for hire : https://www.hackerslist.co/how-it-works/ https://www.hackerslist.co/how-it-works/

hooande 7y ago

Paul usually doesn't do this many interviews. is he about to publish another book or something?

jp57 7y ago
When I see anyone appearing over and over in a short span like this I assume that their publicist is working hard to get them out there for some reason. Like Liz Phair at the 25th anniversary of "Exile In Guyville", when she surfaced out of nowhere and was all over everything for a few months. We already know Paul knows the power of buying good PR: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

rdiddly 7y ago

Interviewer: What important truth do very few people agree with you on? Graham: That the axiomatic approach John McCarthy used when defining Lisp is the optimal way to design general-purpose programming languages. Interviewer (silently): Oh my god what did I get myself into? Next question, quick!

choonway 7y ago
If I was the interviewer... Me: Really? what metrics do you make that optimality claim on?
- ilrwbwrkhv 7y ago
  Length of his staff
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Yeah I was curious to have his answer explored further.
lioeters 7y ago
I love it, that statement so perfectly captures how pg has stayed true to his roots and convinctions. Having read numerous articles and books he's written on Lisp, and the recently published source of his Lisp dialect (written in itself of course) - it's a fascination/obsession spanning decades. I respect that "long-sightedness" and a kind of dogged determination, for better or worse, a conscious or natural inclication to persist in pursuing important truths - even if "very few people agree with you" on them.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

>>> I could probably train someone in a day to narrow a pool of applicants down to 50%, but I wouldn’t hope for more than that. So that (and the 3% thing) interests me - I have always found myself on the wrong side of someone else's line - aorry Paul you cant take that exam / goto that university / get that job / build that software - and it riles me. I wonder how often simply being told no, makes someone do it anyway and how you spot that in a day.

cool-RR 7y ago

I love this guy's face so much.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]