While I'd pick Hackers and Painters, my favorite few paragraphs come from "Why to not not start a startup." http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html http://paulgraham

While I'd pick Hackers and Painters, my favorite few paragraphs come from "Why to not not start a startup." http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html I find the comparison of a job to serfdom to be unsettling. Of course, a modern day cubicle dweller isn't living the kind of life of a medieval serf, but that won't necessarily stop people in the future from looking back on the lives of most people in the early 21st century with pity, wondering how they could have lived with so little personal freedom. It's not just the analogy, it's the optimism. One reason I'm so behind the new tech economy is that it's about more than business and money - this is about changing the rules. Even if you don't start a startup, or work for one, the way you work and live may be changed, much for the better, if startups prove that people who work freely and own their results dramatically outperform the serfdom of the cubicle dweller. I hope that we can prove that there's no hope in running a cubicle dwelling company - you will simply be thrashed and outperformed by more nimble startups.