Paul Graham on Conversations with Tyler
conversationswithtyler.com
conversationswithtyler.com
Here's a guess: where it once was possible to be a one person wunderkind in scientific discovery or business, it no longer is.
Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery.
Anyone smart enough to have that kind of ambition is also probably smart enough to realize that it's a huge undertaking, and huge enough that they can't do it themselves.
It also likely comes with the parallel realization (or fear) that what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team.
I know that holds me back in my ambitions. It's hard to convince others you have the right ideas, and that they are worth working on.
Is Paul smart? Or his he smart and he got lucky, and he’s trying to launder that luck into status? I hear lots of “people don’t want to work anymore” from a whole lot of lucky wealthy (“right place right time”) folks, for example. Asking in a first principals sort of way.
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." - Honore de Balzac
I'd also postulate that a complete ignorance of money probably isn't ultimately productive to your goals. You can't work on your business without distractions if you're getting evicted, for example. (This is assuming you're not generationally wealthy.)
The only thing that matters is never, ever saying no.”
Cue Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones
Leaving Viaweb aside (Yahoo was buying all kinds of stuff back then so it’s hard to know how cool-headed finance would have valued it) he clearly saw and exploited a massive opportunity around technology investment. And it’s worth bearing in mind that he drove several of the first few monster batches through an overall market meltdown that had a lot of VCs saying it was the end of the world.
There was a definite luck factor called the iPhone: someone was going to build an army of businesses on the back of a platform revolution like that, but he got there first and executed.
Now the public good component is a more complicated story, I honestly don’t know if replacing one club of secret-handshaking insiders who routinely fail up with a different one is a net win, and I certainly don’t buy the argument that you can measure it by market cap, but at least the new club doesn’t care who your parents are I guess? I think it’s probably a win vs. an admittedly abysmal bar.
I’m not ignoring the varying degrees of skill, education, and intelligence. I’m emphasizing the luck required for all that to be effective.
Great comment, appreciate the history lesson and teachable moment.
It was a very cool time!
This quote reflects a very European attitude towards wealth to me. I believe PG specifically talks about possible origins of this idea.
Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others. While that may have been true of many fortunes for many centuries on earth, it is not true now. The essence of Silicon Valley is the positive-sum game. Paul's at the heart of it.
Paul has done a lot of good for a lot of people, including the founders who went through YC, which is why people pay attention to his opinions.
Giving $10k out to each founding team in the first year of YC wasn't laundering luck into status. (I doubt he cares about status.) It was changing how tech investing worked in order to liberate more tech people to recombine with each other in order to work on hard problems.
Not stolen, but it really pays to be super-ruthless towards your competition and everyone around you really. Just look at Microsoft's history.
They may eventually face competition, and then sure, you have to compete.
To say every great fortune stems from a great crime is self-limiting at best, at worst the germ of socialism.
Not all industries are winner take all. And many industries remain to be invented by founders.
This fortune == crime is part of a scarcity mindset, and it's a shame that limits people.
A lot of science seems highly collaborative yes but that’s not because of a lack of choice. It’s honestly a cop out way of doing it. See the competition between the massive effort of the human genome project and Venter going rounds around them with a small team and in the end they announced together they sequenced the human genome to save face.
Kids don’t come out of college wanting to be corporate or finance bros. That happens after the world grinds them down.
It is also years of PhD and postdocs where you work a lot for a little money while having super large chance to be forced out despite your efforts. And having to move every few years where you get the job, which makes families more complicated.
Plus, competition for those slots is still high. It is not like there would be unfilled PhD or postdocs positions. There is more interests then available slots, leading to all kind of abuse.
From what I've seen developing countries don't have that luxury and they accept everything might kill you. Though driving a car is much more dangerous.
Self-sufficiency and other "simple" things are possible in developed countries, they are just intrinsically hard and this is probably a good limiting factor because basically lots of things (eg foraging) don't generally scale if a lot of people want to do them.
I've been reading about postwar corporate culture recently and its pretty amazing that orgs would just sit on these amazingly talented people - and knew they were talented - but just didn't care. Not only were some of their most skilled workers not promoted, they weren't even paid more. I think WWI and WWII greatly shaped the attitude of corporate leaders from this period that you just simply hired someone to do their job and made sure they did it well and that was that. Very reminiscent of military ranks. Seniority and loyalty each mattered just as much as skill.
I'm not sure I agree with that...
They slurp up ambitious people, put them in charge of something, work hard to convince them it's important, layer endless amounts of bureaucracy on top and around them, and pay them just enough to make sure they don't leave - I think this may be more accurate...
Yes yes yes!! There's this great essay from Stephen Jay Gould on why we haven't had 0.400 hitters in baseball for so long. His argument was that the overall pool of baseball players got too good so you're not seeing strong outliers anymore! I'd say that this is a phenomenon we see across all kinds of life, not just sports.
From a paper reviewing the evidence of Gould, I can't find the original essay online:
>Gould then supposes that the decline in batting average peak (the .400 hitter, the outlier) is due to decreased variation in the population of hitters. In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent (the difference between the best to the worst batting averages) should decrease. Therefore, players in Major League Baseball in more recent period are arguably reaching the “wall” of human performance. Gould’s analysis of the data supports this idea, as the standard deviation of league-wide batting averages has decreased steadily since the early 20th century.
https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theo...
Getting a ball past several defenders and scoring a goal on the other hand can be done in a near infinite number of ways, meaning there is much more room for variation, improvement and evolution.
The closest equivalent I can think of in football is a penalty kick, and I don't think there is any evidence that players are getting significantly better at scoring off penalties.
I agree, with the caveat that football is becoming more and more like baseball and other similar (mostly US) sports which are very heavy on numbers and on stats. The recent Norwegian sensation, Haaland, seems exactly to fit that trend, as he's not particularly super-good at anything but his numbers have just been phenomenal in the last 3-4 years (when he's been fit to play, that is).
We'll see if the future will bring more Kevin De Bruyne-type of players (i.e. a very creative guy) or more Haalands.
Mostly by cracking down on violent play and letting forwards use their skills without being injured.
However, watching any random league game from the big five (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France), the standard is very high. Most players are amazingly fit and skillful, control ball extremely well. Teams play with cohesive plans. A lot of nice team movements. It shows that the standard at the professional level has risen considerably in the last few decades.
The downside of course is that it makes games more mechanical and less emotional, and it's harder to tell one team from another.
> Messi having a decent chance of being named the best football player of all times.
There is no such thing. Being considered by many, yes.
This is based on hearsay, but there's a fairly common sentiment surrounding certain big tech companies that they'll often hire highly skilled engineers to work on fairly mundane problems in order to restrict the available talent pool. Sometimes large companies will acqui-hire full teams just to avoid having to compete with them. Which is to say: I'm not sure that the allocation of talent is in an optimal configuration. But I'm also unsure how this hypothesis could be adequately falsified or measured.
For instance in a parallel world Elon Musk ends up going to work at Boeing and perhaps even gradually works his way up to becoming their chief engineer. But in this world it's unlikely he would have even been able to create fully reusable rockets. That was not only an expensive and extremely high risk venture, but one which many key people, such as Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA - a Boeing/Lockeed partnership), were aggressively dismissive and even mocking of, until SpaceX proved it. Let alone all his other ventures like Tesla or big picture goals like creating human colonies on Mars.
In experimental science, the number of coauthors of a paper has increased, but probably not the number of active coauthors.
Even business is born out of small startups, later expanded into larger teams.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/polymath-proposal-...
> As for upper bounds, de Bruijn showed back in 1950 that {\Lambda \leq 1/2}. The only progress since then has been the work of Ki, Kim and Lee in 2009, who improved this slightly to {\Lambda < 1/2}. The primary proposed aim of this Polymath project is to obtain further explicit improvements to the upper bound of {\Lambda}. Of course, if we could lower the upper bound all the way to zero, this would solve the Riemann hypothesis, but I do not view this as a realistic outcome of this project
To your point, there was some excitement and progress in the beginning, but it remains an unusual approach to mathematics.
I think the 4 day work week is a great step toward enabling people to be ambitious and innovative, in whatever field drives them.
Consider the tsunami of hate and ridicule and "you didn't build that" directed at Elon Musk for having the temerity to think he could build rockets and having the gall to be highly successful at it.
Oh, and also build a competitive electric car company and school all the established car makers.
One of my favorite quotes: "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. ... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - Albert Michelson, 1894
That quote is from from Albert Michelson of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. [1] For some really brief background, before Einstein it was believed that light had to have a medium to travel through in space. Light was seen as a wave, and waves can't propagate in a vacuum. That medium was called the luminiferous (light) aether. Morley set out to experimentally prove the existence of this medium by showing that the speed of light measured from 2 perpendicular directions would be different, given that the trajectory of the aether, and thus the speed of propagation, would be different.
Yet he kept measuring near the exact same value for light. He was so convinced in the correctness of the luminiferous aether (which had dominated scientific thought for centuries, and was imminently logical) that he doubted his own results and would continue to repeat similar experiments for decades. Hence, the context of his quote. But then of course Einstein was soon enough to be on his way and discover relativity, which would not only completely invalidate the aether but completely revolutionize science. And then quantum mechanics was also right on the way.
The point of all of this is that Albert Michelson was convinced science had effectively come to an end in terms of major discoveries, let alone revolutions, let alone those driven by one off thinkers, in much the same way you do. And there's no real reason to think anything has really changed. Science has historically always had long lulls, as well as societies driven to the point of assuming as absolutely true ideas which are ultimately proven to be fundamentally and completely wrong, and whose assumption of truth was actually one of the reasons progress lulled.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...
Assuming you have to pay for schooling, that along with the disproportionately increasing cost of rent and property factors into people being less ambitious due to the necessity of settling for a job that pays enough to support oneself. I'm curious how Paul Graham did it, given that he has multiple higher education degrees in philosophy, attended art school in Italy, and what capital he could rely on from his parents.
It would be disappointing if they both come from money yet miss this point, given the emphasis of progressive politics on socioeconomic or cultural privilege. Of course one doesn't have to agree with it, but shouldn't it at least be discussed?
on one hand he notes that "computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80, in about 1980", but later during his adult years "wanted to go back to RISD, but I was now broke and RISD was very expensive, so I decided to get a job for a year and then return to RISD the next fall."
Which is to say that almost no-one has time for shitty "ambition" that would make some multi-millionaires (angel investors and the like) into multi-multi-millionaires or even into billionaires, people have to live and to pay rent and to purchase very expensive avocados (because that's the only thing that they eat, of course).
But maybe the trust-fund kids who don't have to worry about all of these things will be able to find enough ambition among themselves in order to move things forward.
The best way to get great people to work with you is to build things that people care about. That's something you can do alone, and it's never been more accessible than it is today.
Whether this is true or not depends somewhat on definitions, but I am going to take the counter-argument.
This is just not the case, you won't be able to evidence it that it is, and it might be this assumption that is holding you back.
In our age, momentum is towards large org-charts, and it is not clear that any greatness comes from it. The foundation of unix came from two people. Craigslist has 50 employees. Pre-acquisition, Twitter had 7000. Facebook has nearly ten times that. There is astonishing talent at the big silicon valley firms yet they reliably fall short of greatness. If lots of well-trained minds was the gateway to greatness, those firms would already have it.
Yet the original concept of twitter was great, and it was such a simple thing. If any of us went back in time to 1995, we'd build a first cut of Twitter in a weekend. But it went undiscovered until all those years later.
In this thread, Walter Bright is taking a hammering on votes for his comment. Yet here is someone who is known to have built complete toolchains for C and C++, also a java-to-native compiler, and his own language that is well-regarded, written variety of articles for journals, built applications. Here is someone who can do great things working alone. (He has also held various dayjobs building other stuff.)
"what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team ... holds me back"
Is it possible that your faith in the team sports model is itself what's holding you back? What could you achieve if you role-play that as being false, and consider how you would organise in light of that? What if you stopped spending energy trying to convert the unworthy, and instead put that energy to be broader yourself. You could still work with people with compatible ideas. Your profile says you are a fpga engineer. The building blocks you work with are some of the most flexible humans have had access to. There will be undiscovered twitters in your space.
Maybe there is just as much ambition as there ever was. Maybe people have just shifted their goals. Maybe they have different drives. Instead of aspiring to be the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, maybe people have realised that this is not really what they want in life. Instead of having a strong desire for financial and business success, maybe people in the developed world have started to shift their focus to other things like friendship, family, enjoying life, and learning to be satisfied with less. Maybe in this new world we live in to be ambitious means something else. I don’t know.
Aside: Still waking up and chewing on why the developed world is called out specifically as a thing in this question. Where does the developed world end and the undeveloped world begin?
- he's mentioned learning gliding but I didn't know it was to cure his fear of flying (given how international he is, I would never have thought of that as an issue) - I didn't know pg collected old master paintings (although I did know they've become relatively cheap) - his optimism about fixing SF by simply removing a few bad apples from the supervisors is quite surprising to me, although I suppose he'd know way more about that topic than I do - lol at the Robert Morris anecdote. Well, he wasn't wrong, exactly... - the comments on fame ring true to me - this does seem oddly short to me, and like Cowen could've interrupted less (especially in the ambition section where Cowen diverts pg onto the shuffling-networks topic and pg never gets to finish). Maybe there was some scheduling constraint so Cowen was rushing through his usual list? I notice many of the usual tactics like overrated/underrated are absent.
I also recently moved from California to England, so would be fascinated to learn more about the genesis of PG's move. (As an aside: I sometimes hear my kids late at night trying to convince their friends back in California to ask their parents to move here. Anecdotally it does feel like many families are considering it. Of course I have an availability bias here.)
Does anyone know of any essays or interviews where PG discusses his decision to emigrate?
He's also American, so moving between US and UK must feel pretty fluid.
Yeah, he simply went back to where he was born to raise a family.
The salmon move.
Great quote about how to indirectly find co-founders.
The idea that an expert should be able to give a fully-formed answer to a novel question on the spot is not a good one. Thinking takes time, which Cowen doesn’t give his guests. Subsequently most of his interviews are notable for their anecdotes or trivia, not for insightful responses.
PG kept saying how hard the questions were, but I wish he’d instead been more willing to just concentrate and go with the flow as the results would have been even more interesting.
Like, if you have been on a podcast yourself you might prefer Fridman kind of discussion in which you can quite freely lead hence get your agenda across. It is quite clear many visit Fridman because they know they will get to sell their ideas.
"Do you prefer this conductor or this other one?". And the guest has never listened to either of them. Similar questions are asked at every interview, and sometimes several times during the same interviews. To me, it sounds more pretentious than prepared.
I enjoy that he often ventures outside of the common questions you would expect. Usually if you’ve heard someone on one podcast, you’ve heard them on all of them
In here, does whiplashed mean something like being utterly surprised?
2. an abrupt snapping motion or change of direction resembling the lash of a whip.
6. to affect adversely, as by a sudden change: new taxes whiplashing corporate earnings.
Which is pretty accurate. Have you ever been on a roller coaster or similar ride at a theme park and been suddenly jerked in the opposite direction? That's basically what whiplash is.
Also, obligatory clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEdRnBR_Y48
Cowen is not very flexible and clearly just is running through a list of questions, but I would take that over Fridman’s relatively shallow and boring questions like “what is love” any day
(I appreciate his efforts but I don't consider him a geek of any discipline or field, limiting his depth overall.)
What annoys me most about Fridman is that he manages to snag a number of truly excellent guests ... and then produces truly mediocre interviews of them.
That and ... a three-hour ramble is simply too long. Either edit it down or break it up, or both.
Why did we have the best quarter in growth for public companies and why is it taking longer private companies to go public?
More than ambition the rules of the game and the frontier has now changed. I don't think ambitious people don't exist - they just realize this is better realized by being within a larger ecosystem and having influence rather than building everything around oneself.
Would we say Hinton was ambitious? Did he have sufficient impact?
If we look at it from a narrow definition of tech, we realize there aren't many ambitious individual players. The premise becomes hard to justify if we were to include so many teenagers on insta/tiktok/twitch getting a lot of following and making content individually (where in the past it take a full crew to make such stuff) and newer creators wanting to join that club.
I think many people are still ambitious. Just that (for quite a few people) their ambition is no longer to work 10 years to build an everlasting company, or do original research to get themselves a nobel, but just to gain the fame and following that comes with social media. In an abstract sense, for a select set, the end goal of ambition was the adulation and fame you got after doing your thing well. Of course, there is another set where ambition is to build a lasting thing and they continue to work towards that. Just that former set outnumbers the latter easily, and it's never easier for that set to achieve their goal.
IMO this hasn't changed as much as it seems from the outside. The brilliant individual leaders of the past owed most of their success to their team members, and most high-functioning teams today, if you study how they work internally, do actually have a key leader who is aligning everyone around a shared vision. What's changed is that it's no longer seen as a positive to boost the profile of the leader too far the rest of the team.
COWEN: Why and how did so many things here end up undercapitalized? The water utilities, the NHS — it seems to be a consistent pattern. That could make us more pessimistic because the flow numbers don’t reflect the fact that capital maintenance is even worse than we had thought.
GRAHAM: I don’t know. You’re an economist. I don’t know what the term capital maintenance means.
I mean come on instead of "what exactly, in the smallest number of dimensions, are you better at than the other people?", you can just ask, "what are your core strengths"
It’s a tale as old as time, but it’s the inconvenience of upsetting an ingrained personal habit (open podcast player, look for new episodes) and having to add an extra step (open Spotify, look for new episodes).
This is good for Spotify but bad for users. I want to organize my information and optimize my behavior. Not do dumb, unnecessary steps because it makes Spotify more money.
I understand people switching and as much as I’d like to think that I would refuse $100M to switch my HN comments to a different, parallel, crappier internet; I suspect I would fail that test and take the $100M.
I tried a couple of sites online (spotiydown, spotifymate), which both failed.
yt-dlp fails. spotdl fails.
click network bar, look for media file that's currently streaming
should be about 45mb mp3 file: right click, copy as curl
then paste it into a terminal, append " -O" then press enter