11 ms·

Fireside Chat with Paul Graham [video]

194 points by rnc 11y ago

sparkzilla 11y ago
For those interested, I have collected many of PG's interviews (as well as those of Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston): http://newslines.org/paul-graham/ http://newslines.org/paul-graham/
- kelvin0 11y ago
  Also known as the Sermon on the 'Cloud'. Seriously though, good interview, seems like a really great guy.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- wamatt 11y ago
  Nice one. Oh and here's a random thought, you might want to try including the transcripts. This may help with increasing Google organic traffic.
  - sparkzilla 11y ago
    Thanks. Can the transcripts be added automatically from Google?
beartime 11y ago
That white noise sound in the background was extremely annoying. Great interview though, its always fun to listen to him talk. The interviewer was kind of awkward but all in good fun
badloginagain 11y ago
I really like the bits of historical interest that comes out in the interview, naval battles and Archimedes- you get the sense that he just loves learning, even if it's not "useful" knowledge. What I like most is how that just comes out as supplementary asides, reinforcing a point or framing a metaphor. Definitely the kind of guy you could just talk to for hours.
- nodesocket 11y ago
  Completely agree. The most useful advisors I've had in business and startups, always find the perfect analogy for a situation or problem, and break it down. Paul has this amazing ability.
- a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
  The "upwind" and "archimides lever" references are just things I would expect any reasonably cultured person to get.
- baudehlo 11y ago
  He's a very interesting guy who I thoroughly enjoyed interacting with at the anti spam conferences he set up. As a speaker at the conference we got to visit his home where he graciously hosted many anti spam geeks with his own resources. Our conversations were always interesting and funny - he has that smart almost British wit about him. He's been incredibly lucky to be a smart person who managed to make his seed money, and then use it very wisely to turn it into what I guess is now many times what he invested. It is a shame he has become so busy lately that he can't interact as easily with the "common man" any more. I emailed him not long ago and got no reply. I guess that happens when you have hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox every day (a problem he has listed often as one he'd like to see solved by a startup).
- seiji 11y ago
  Always a good re-read: The world was out to dupe and enslave you, but he, Paul Graham, was — disinterestedly, dispassionately — going to get you out of here alive, armed only with Lisp, random facts about medieval Florence, and deep knowledge of Business Things. http://www.evanmiller.org/the-other-money-problem.html http://www.evanmiller.org/the-other-money-problem.html It's scary how many of pg's early startup article titles can be rephrased as "Top 10 secrets VCs don't want you to know!" Establishing brands/personalities is easier when you are sharing elite wisdom with unwashed masses. It makes the reader feel special and in some ways indebted to you (even if that wasn't the intended effect in the first place).
alayne 11y ago
I wish Paul would give posting on hn another shot. I'm sure he's busy, but I always thought he had interesting perspectives even if I didn't always agree.
- brobdingnagian 11y ago
  He doesn't post on the website he moderated for hours daily for years? That's rather ironic.
  - alayne 11y ago
    I think it got a bit toxic here for him, though he didn't say that. pg still communicates via twitter like the sibling post mentions and writes essays. Maybe he just found that to be a healthier communication mechanism for him which is fine.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- arjunnarayan 11y ago
  He still does post interesting things (along with many other smart people like patrick collison, sam altman, etc.). They just post on Twitter instead.
- bane 11y ago
  PG always came across to me as unusually thoughtful and smart and friendly (let's be honest he's a great guy), but never enjoyed the kind of combative debate that goes on in web forums.
  - FlaceBook 11y ago
    > PG always came across to me as unusually thoughtful and smart and friendly (let's be honest he's a great guy) He's also amazing and incredible and handsome and witty and strong and I love him oh so much.
    - 11y ago
yesimahuman 11y ago
Love the idea of owning consumer and then being "upwind" from enterprise. From my experience in the dev tools space, that's exactly the pattern we've been seeing.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
plg 11y ago
"it's that"
bane 11y ago
I really liked his idea that the users teach you about what you've made. That's a really great philosophical point. I think his comments about open source are interesting and how he's never seen anybody open source too much. I humbly disagree, I've definitely seen a few startups get nowhere because they ended up open sourcing their entire product, meaning nobody needed to pay them for anything. There needs to be a strategy for open sourcing your code...for example if dropbox open sourced their client, they'd still own the relationship to their storage back-end and act as the broker for that data. Their client isn't really worth anything anyways...so it doesn't really matter. But let's say Microsoft open sourced Office and Windows. Okay, now where do they make their money? They're pretty much just left with services work, and services and support often only exist if the software has problems. Anybody else can then come along and code away their services business by fixing bugs, making better interfaces etc. Open sourcing needs to have a valid business strategy and it can't just be putting your company's investment up on github because that feels good.
- tectonic 11y ago
  What startups have you seen opensource too much?
  - bane 11y ago
    There was an enterprise cloud company I once worked with. They had built a layer on top of HDFS and some nice admin tools to go along with it. Their customers hired them to build out systems that would provide in-house clouds and their tooling helped make HDFS deployment, management and integration a bit easier. They decided to open source all of their software at some point which meant their model went from: - Provide tools to make deploying HDFS better, this was their secret sauce - Provide services to setup/manage all of this to - Provide services to setup/manage all of this Since everything else in their stack was open-source also, their secret sauce consisted of just being a group of engineers, which isn't much of a secret sauce, except they thought it was because "our guys know the ecosystem and tooling we developed" and so charged more for those service engagements. Their customers realized this, hired cheaper groups of engineers (some of who included previous employees) who then worked with the now free and open sourced tools that "somebody" else had now spent VC money building instead of them. Inside of a year or so they turned from a successful and growing concern into a VC investment black-hole and closed up shop. The tooling and many-man-years of effort that went into developing it all was what the business was about and they simply opened it all up to the world, who then just downloaded it and replaced them.
AlwaysBCoding 11y ago
I've always thought that Apple's horrific App Store approval process was the single biggest threat to the Apple empire. Glad to hear someone else speak out about this. It's seriously absurd that there's an arbitrarily enforced stopgate that prevents you from deploying code. It's a complete disaster. If someone could make a way to instantly deploy code to mobile phones every developer would switch in a second. The Apple App Store approval process is like that one random weak spot on the Death Star. The only question is what replaces it?
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  Plenty of people are OK with the strict curation that the App Store's approval process represents. It's the reason why we don't have to run AV apps on our iPhones and iPads, after all. If there's a Death Star-level weakness to the App Store, IMHO it's the app discovery process. It consistently rewards the loudest marketers rather than the best developers.
  - jfoster 11y ago
    "It's the reason why we don't have to run AV apps on our iPhones and iPads" That's just not true. Android and desktop OSX are counter-examples. It is security measures like sandboxing of apps that prevent mobile devices from needing anti-virus software. On desktop Windows, programs used to have unfettered access to the filesystem, including Windows DLLs that were major parts of the OS. Looking back, it actually seems incredible that it wasn't more of a disaster than it was.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      There has been enough nastyware on Android platforms to at least somewhat justify Apple's approach. Sandboxes have a way of springing leaks. I was 100% on the opposite side of this debate when the iOS SDK first became available. (This was what I had to say about their limitations at the time, if it lends me any street cred: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVkqbycvuKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVkqbycvuKw ). But at this point the restrictions I objected to have mostly been lifted, to the point where they don't interfere with the vast majority of developers who aren't looking to do something slimy. It's very nice to be able to download and install apps without having to wonder what the developer's real agenda is.

194 points by rnc 11y ago

For those interested, I have collected many of PG's interviews (as well as those of Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston): http://newslines.org/paul-graham/ http://newslines.org/paul-graham/

kelvin0 11y ago
Also known as the Sermon on the 'Cloud'. Seriously though, good interview, seems like a really great guy.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
wamatt 11y ago
Nice one. Oh and here's a random thought, you might want to try including the transcripts. This may help with increasing Google organic traffic.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  Thanks. Can the transcripts be added automatically from Google?

beartime 11y ago

That white noise sound in the background was extremely annoying. Great interview though, its always fun to listen to him talk. The interviewer was kind of awkward but all in good fun

badloginagain 11y ago

I really like the bits of historical interest that comes out in the interview, naval battles and Archimedes- you get the sense that he just loves learning, even if it's not "useful" knowledge. What I like most is how that just comes out as supplementary asides, reinforcing a point or framing a metaphor. Definitely the kind of guy you could just talk to for hours.

nodesocket 11y ago
Completely agree. The most useful advisors I've had in business and startups, always find the perfect analogy for a situation or problem, and break it down. Paul has this amazing ability.
a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
The "upwind" and "archimides lever" references are just things I would expect any reasonably cultured person to get.
baudehlo 11y ago
He's a very interesting guy who I thoroughly enjoyed interacting with at the anti spam conferences he set up. As a speaker at the conference we got to visit his home where he graciously hosted many anti spam geeks with his own resources. Our conversations were always interesting and funny - he has that smart almost British wit about him. He's been incredibly lucky to be a smart person who managed to make his seed money, and then use it very wisely to turn it into what I guess is now many times what he invested. It is a shame he has become so busy lately that he can't interact as easily with the "common man" any more. I emailed him not long ago and got no reply. I guess that happens when you have hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox every day (a problem he has listed often as one he'd like to see solved by a startup).
seiji 11y ago
Always a good re-read: The world was out to dupe and enslave you, but he, Paul Graham, was — disinterestedly, dispassionately — going to get you out of here alive, armed only with Lisp, random facts about medieval Florence, and deep knowledge of Business Things. http://www.evanmiller.org/the-other-money-problem.html http://www.evanmiller.org/the-other-money-problem.html It's scary how many of pg's early startup article titles can be rephrased as "Top 10 secrets VCs don't want you to know!" Establishing brands/personalities is easier when you are sharing elite wisdom with unwashed masses. It makes the reader feel special and in some ways indebted to you (even if that wasn't the intended effect in the first place).

alayne 11y ago

I wish Paul would give posting on hn another shot. I'm sure he's busy, but I always thought he had interesting perspectives even if I didn't always agree.

brobdingnagian 11y ago
He doesn't post on the website he moderated for hours daily for years? That's rather ironic.
- alayne 11y ago
  I think it got a bit toxic here for him, though he didn't say that. pg still communicates via twitter like the sibling post mentions and writes essays. Maybe he just found that to be a healthier communication mechanism for him which is fine.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
arjunnarayan 11y ago
He still does post interesting things (along with many other smart people like patrick collison, sam altman, etc.). They just post on Twitter instead.
bane 11y ago
PG always came across to me as unusually thoughtful and smart and friendly (let's be honest he's a great guy), but never enjoyed the kind of combative debate that goes on in web forums.
- FlaceBook 11y ago
  > PG always came across to me as unusually thoughtful and smart and friendly (let's be honest he's a great guy) He's also amazing and incredible and handsome and witty and strong and I love him oh so much.
  - 11y ago

yesimahuman 11y ago

Love the idea of owning consumer and then being "upwind" from enterprise. From my experience in the dev tools space, that's exactly the pattern we've been seeing.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

plg 11y ago

"it's that"

bane 11y ago

I really liked his idea that the users teach you about what you've made. That's a really great philosophical point. I think his comments about open source are interesting and how he's never seen anybody open source too much. I humbly disagree, I've definitely seen a few startups get nowhere because they ended up open sourcing their entire product, meaning nobody needed to pay them for anything. There needs to be a strategy for open sourcing your code...for example if dropbox open sourced their client, they'd still own the relationship to their storage back-end and act as the broker for that data. Their client isn't really worth anything anyways...so it doesn't really matter. But let's say Microsoft open sourced Office and Windows. Okay, now where do they make their money? They're pretty much just left with services work, and services and support often only exist if the software has problems. Anybody else can then come along and code away their services business by fixing bugs, making better interfaces etc. Open sourcing needs to have a valid business strategy and it can't just be putting your company's investment up on github because that feels good.

tectonic 11y ago
What startups have you seen opensource too much?
- bane 11y ago
  There was an enterprise cloud company I once worked with. They had built a layer on top of HDFS and some nice admin tools to go along with it. Their customers hired them to build out systems that would provide in-house clouds and their tooling helped make HDFS deployment, management and integration a bit easier. They decided to open source all of their software at some point which meant their model went from: - Provide tools to make deploying HDFS better, this was their secret sauce - Provide services to setup/manage all of this to - Provide services to setup/manage all of this Since everything else in their stack was open-source also, their secret sauce consisted of just being a group of engineers, which isn't much of a secret sauce, except they thought it was because "our guys know the ecosystem and tooling we developed" and so charged more for those service engagements. Their customers realized this, hired cheaper groups of engineers (some of who included previous employees) who then worked with the now free and open sourced tools that "somebody" else had now spent VC money building instead of them. Inside of a year or so they turned from a successful and growing concern into a VC investment black-hole and closed up shop. The tooling and many-man-years of effort that went into developing it all was what the business was about and they simply opened it all up to the world, who then just downloaded it and replaced them.

AlwaysBCoding 11y ago

I've always thought that Apple's horrific App Store approval process was the single biggest threat to the Apple empire. Glad to hear someone else speak out about this. It's seriously absurd that there's an arbitrarily enforced stopgate that prevents you from deploying code. It's a complete disaster. If someone could make a way to instantly deploy code to mobile phones every developer would switch in a second. The Apple App Store approval process is like that one random weak spot on the Death Star. The only question is what replaces it?

CamperBob2 11y ago
Plenty of people are OK with the strict curation that the App Store's approval process represents. It's the reason why we don't have to run AV apps on our iPhones and iPads, after all. If there's a Death Star-level weakness to the App Store, IMHO it's the app discovery process. It consistently rewards the loudest marketers rather than the best developers.
- jfoster 11y ago
  "It's the reason why we don't have to run AV apps on our iPhones and iPads" That's just not true. Android and desktop OSX are counter-examples. It is security measures like sandboxing of apps that prevent mobile devices from needing anti-virus software. On desktop Windows, programs used to have unfettered access to the filesystem, including Windows DLLs that were major parts of the OS. Looking back, it actually seems incredible that it wasn't more of a disaster than it was.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    There has been enough nastyware on Android platforms to at least somewhat justify Apple's approach. Sandboxes have a way of springing leaks. I was 100% on the opposite side of this debate when the iOS SDK first became available. (This was what I had to say about their limitations at the time, if it lends me any street cred: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVkqbycvuKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVkqbycvuKw ). But at this point the restrictions I objected to have mostly been lifted, to the point where they don't interfere with the vast majority of developers who aren't looking to do something slimy. It's very nice to be able to download and install apps without having to wonder what the developer's real agenda is.