My Startup School Europe talk: The Technology
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
I'll highlight one point that I think is really important: Kill all daemon processes. Psychotherapy is a process that is designed to help quiet these menacing internal voices (harmful parent voices, self-doubt etc.). There are different therapy orientations: cognitive-behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, psychodynamic therapy, etc. They approach these outdated programs in different ways. CBT tries to kill them by applying logic (e.g., My startup is going to fail! [what rational evidence do you have for that belief?]) Relational approaches try to better understand the threatening feeling or impulse that triggers the harmful programs. It focuses on the defense used to keep the threatening feeling in check and anxiety at bay (e.g., I'm really afraid of failing [emotion = fear of failing], so I become a driven workaholic to try to avoid this outcome and feel less anxiety [defense]). A relatively recent innovation in the therapy space is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The key insight is that often the attempt to control, diminish, or avoid pain is what keeps you entangled in the pain. Simply making space for the pain, sinking into it, observing it, and feeling it, is what allows it to become disentangled. This, however, is very hard to do, b/c the natural impulse is to avoid pain and the issues that cause pain.
Here is a helpful short video that metaphorically captures the ACT disentanglement process (Demons on a Boat): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-wyaP6xXwE.
Okay, one last point, I'm game for doing my small part to help reach the impossible goal. This is going to be a collaborative project right? : )
>> "We now, for the first time ever, have the technology and resources necessary to make the world a great place for everyone. We can provide adequate food, housing, education, and healthcare for everyone, using only a fraction of our labor and resources. This means that we can put an end to wage-slavery. I don't have to work. I choose to work. And I believe that everyone deserves the same freedom I have. If done right, it's also economically superior, meaning that we will all have more wealth."
This is some deep stuff. This would really change everything, and mark a major turning point in human history I think. And the statement that providing these things to everyone would only require a fraction of our resources I think is actually true. The capitalist in me feels that this could never happen, but the pragmatist in me feels there's nothing better we could do to dramatically improve the lives of just about everyone on the planet.
There are so many questions though... forms of collectivism have been tried and have failed many times. Are things different now?
As is often the case with disruptive innovation, I think the solution is something non-obvious and non-coercive, more bottom-up than top-down.
With more of our lives occurring in the inexpensive digital world, perhaps we'll be less concerned with the expensive physical one and thus less concerned with working for money.
The exact thing missing in pretty much all the worst parts of the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_ass...
Imagine a consultancy that organizes this type of deals. Identify projects worth doing with well defined and easy to reach beneficiaries and offer them this kind of contract. If that's properly done, they would want in and fund it. Then hire someone to execute. Repeat.
Perhaps this would be easier to do with geographically local projects first. Also it seems like the expertise required to organize this type of deals would be very different from the expertise required to execute them when they are funded, hence the separation of jobs. Fortunately, the projects don't have to be very sophisticated, they can be something as simple as a playground in an area that needs one.
What we need is a system that is both holistic and coherent but also componentized and diverse.
There is quite a lot of techno-communist thinking going around that fails to recognize this problem of over-centralization which has numerous times in the past shown how dangerous and repressive it can be. A hierarchical system, like a tree, has vulnerabilities and entrenchment in each root or branch.
The last time I said something like this, a Marxist just told me I was asking for two contradictory things that was impossible, and implied that the answer was Marxism.
How can we have a system that is well-organized, with different parts that are aware of eachother and the big picture without a lot of redundancy and waste or counter-productivity, but at the same time is set up in a way that makes it free to experiment and form new directions and even refactor old ones?
I think that is actually a very hard problem, but one that can be solved. If anyone knows of a good approach let me know.
> We now, for the first time ever, have the technology and resources necessary to make the world a great place for everyone. We can provide adequate food, housing, education, and healthcare for everyone, using only a fraction of our labor and resources. This means that we can put an end to wage-slavery. I don't have to work. I choose to work. And I believe that everyone deserves the same freedom I have. If done right, it's also economically superior, meaning that we will all have more wealth.
Even though I found the whole talk very thoughtful and inspiring, this was the part that resonated with me the most.
> I'm looking for full-stack hackers. People who understand that technology is more than just patterns in silicon. The same patterns and systems of patterns exist everywhere. Capitalism is a technology. Like the internal combustion engine, it's tremendously valuable and transformative, but it's not beyond improvement. The same goes for government, religion, and everything else. We have an incredible future ahead of us, but we won't get there by clinging to obsolete patterns.
I guess I'm a full-stack hacker; I learn incredibly fast and can understand very complex systems. I still have to learn, though, to apply this beyond the world of computers, in ways that leverage technology and have a global impact.
If you think Instagram is just a collection of photo filters, you're missing the big picture. Maybe photo sharing won't lead directly to world peace, but helping people to see the world through the eyes of others looks like a step in the right direction to me. And they grew to over 200 million users in less than four years.
The whole talk was "building the impossible", and I think that's what Silicon Valley used to be about -- about going from 0 to 1 (in Peter Thiel's term) and letting the world go from 1 to n. That's impossible and that's what the valley did for decades.
But now the measurement is, "How many users to do you have today?" It's superficial and meaningless. Instagram is a great success for its investors (and I have nothing against that) but it won't be around in ten years, and more importantly, nothing it brought forth will be around either. Instead of 0 to 1, it's more like 1000 to 1001.
I have no problem with people making money, but you make what you measure, you make what you fund. And we're getting what we make: Flappy Birds and fucking Instagram.
The product may or may not be around in 10 years, but I bet someone somewhere is learning about what it's like on the opposite side of whatever ideological divide by watching instagram pictures. The consequences of that will last way beyond Instagram the product. There's meaning there that goes beyond advertisement dollars.
In fact, if YC is taking feedback on these events, I'd suggest having more talks like this, and less of founders chronologically going through their story. That type of talk is also very interesting, but can get a bit repetitive, especially for people who have seen videos of previous startup school talks.
Imagine a YC where the money and decisions came from a crowd of thousands. If "Show HN" had a "Fund" button. The potential for 100x more Googles is there.
Interestingly, I think that indicates that paul is more of a Woz than a Jobs. I think it's interesting that he chose to use Jobs as an example of someone we need more of (I'm not really in agreement...had he said the world needs more of Woz or Larry or even Elon Musk, I wouldn't have argued).
What is so interesting to me is that Paul said something I'd always thought, but hadn't expressed nor heard before. Imagine how many Steve Jobs are out there who aren't able to thrive like they could have if they were born into a different situation. That doesn't devalue the brilliance of Jobs. It simply demonstrates optimism in a civilization with fewer unnecessary limitations.
The entire talk was great. Thank you for sharing it.
I believe they do so because they're praising the wrong thing. Making money for investors is not all that good of an end in and of itself.
Clearly, this is subjective. But, I don't consider Jobs to have been particularly good for the world, despite his many obvious talents at directing the making and marketing of popular products. I have a quite strong anti-Apple bias, based on my belief that Apple has dragged the tech industry backward rather than forward in terms of providing more access to technology education and more access to the technology economy to more people, particularly the poorest people. Just when Open Source was pushing the world toward freely available source code for everything (and succeeding), Apple's App Store was slicing up the pie, with proprietary software effectively being required to participate (locking out all but the relatively wealthy from participating), and serving the biggest piece of that pie to themselves.
But, that's just my opinion. Many people think Jobs was great, and that Apple is good rather than a negative force.
I'd previously been under-emphasising the AI aspects of what I was attempting, in the worry that people would think an AI-based startup was too difficult or crazy to go for. Now I've just spent the last week rewriting copy and redoing my pitch to deliberately emphasise it. And I feel a whole lot better about it too!
You'll have to watch the video to get that part though...
Another person there commented to me afterwards, "yeah that was a great speech, but I just wish it had more energy, if it did it could have gone viral!" But this person was from California... I think different regions are calibrated to different communication styles, and to someone calibrated to a reserved European temperament (wherein "enthusiasm" often is auto-encoded as "insincere" or "silly") the delivery was perfect :)
On a related note, I feel that some of the things that might be interesting to study/experiment with might be at the intersection between these three items: anthropology, information technology and law.
> I would sometimes force myself to run a few miles because it's supposed to be healthy, but I never liked it. Then I read a book that said we are born to run, and that it can be fun
Quick question - can you refer the book you are talking about above? I too have a distaste for running but the sheer accessibility for fitness (compared to going to gym) makes me want to develop a liking for it.
Thanks!
It's a fun story too. I don't know if we're actually born to run or not, but it's inspiring either way.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/80/tr...
Choose the interesting path resonated as a useful criteria for making some major decisions.