Sam's use of "animal" in #20 is presumably based on the usage in Paul Graham's essay "How to Start a Startup" (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html http://www.p

Sam's use of "animal" in #20 is presumably based on the usage in Paul Graham's essay "How to Start a Startup" (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html, 2005): 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? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive. In other words, if you might exclaim, "That guy is an animal!", he's a potential hire. Similar terms are monster and beast, and indeed the former makes an appearance in another of pg's early startup essays, "How to Make Wealth" (http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html, 2004): At Viaweb we had one programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity. I remember watching what he did one long day and estimating that he had added several hundred thousand dollars to the market value of the company. So, a startup is a group of animals, beasts, and monsters that tries to grow fast by making something people want. To maximize its chances of success, a startup should have a CEO named "Max" who dresses in a wolf costume and sails to where the wild things are.