Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston Interview [video]
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
PG answer: 11:53
Q: "Do you have time for private life in Silicon Valley?" A: "What's this?" and then LOL because you know you are doing too little for your personal life...
If you would give only 15% more of your focused time to your spouse, kids, father, mother, friends... they would value it a lot! And it would be your long-term success! Are you ready to make such a small sacrifice for your "private life start-up"?
I think all people want to transcend their own death and for men, it's through creating useful things and for women the instinct is more for raising good children.
PGs biggest regret has to do with not with business or entrepreneurship, but that he wishes that he had told his parent(s) to have more frequent colon cancer screenings.
Jessica's biggest regret was squandering her time in college, not learning as much as she wishes she had.
This is also my regret. As much as I want to say doing more internship and building more personal projects and contributing to more open source projects are useful today, dedicate more time on studying the material instead of saying "no one will care if you know how to write quicksort" or "I will learn them in my job anyway" is absolutely a requirement.
I also regret not able to do more internships...
PG: "Since all of the money is in a few big hits, we own about 3% of [the $30 billion portfolio]. I haven't done the math on how much that is."
Interviewer: "One billion dollars."
PG: "Well, $900 million."
I smiled too, because of the latter.
[+] A totally reasonable sentiment, which makes me smile in about three different ways. Once for not caring about money, once for having the luxury to not care about money because $900 million, and once for that happening to very deserving people.
I like your first point about it not being about the money. I suspect it's more about proving that their new (at the time) approach to startup investing, their new appreciation for founders, their completely differnt model was right and that the conventional wisdom that came before them was wrong. At least that would be my biggest satisfaction.
It's easy to get the first digit if you ignore the decimal exponents. If you have the 3 * 10^? part of 3 * 10^? dollars, then you have 3 * 3 * 10^? * 10^? = 9 * 10^? dollars. Perhaps $90, perhaps $9000, perhaps $9000000, ... something that starts with a 9.
Now, if someone tells you that the amount is close to 10^9 then it's easy to complete the information and realize that you have $9 * 10^8.
Edit: You'd be surprised how good at calculating percentages you can be if you do them a lot. It just becomes automatic. Source: binged-watched Shark Tank, got real good at multiplying by percentages and their reciprocals in the process.
But I got one interesting quote from PG. Funding multiple startups at once gives the startups the benefit of having colleagues. It's nice to have others around while working on your own idea.
Maybe this could be the standard in bigger companies too. Teams working on there own idea approved by management. This way big companies could be like founders.
Sometimes I have to read the source code of the page and change the web address I give it the program, though.
(Your platitude serves as much purpose as this comment, but come on, pg is not a 'god' and this casual idol worship is a bit silly.)
My point wasn't to deify Paul Graham but to give respect where it's due. There is plenty of criticism doled out on HN daily, what's wrong with a little praise?
The folks that could really benefit from a solution are the elderly, physically disabled and young kids. For the life of me, I would find it difficult to see the majority of these folks riding a skateboard.
Even assuming infinite battery life, what's the form factor? A wheelchair won't cut it. A Segway-like thing won't cut it. A unicycle won't cut it. A conventional bicycle won't cut it. A recumbent bike or trike won't cut it. Roller-skates won't cut it. Exoskeletal legs won't cut it. Many of these things are of proven usefulness, but they've never been general-purpose substitutes or augmentors for pedestrianism. A version of some of the above which folds into something unprecedentedly small and light might begin to cut it, but how is that achievable within present-day engineering constraints?
You only need to solve the problem for the majority of people ( >50% ) to be considered a good solution. The solution may prove to be elegantly simple.
As a side note, due to his name, and hearing he had English roots, I did not expect the Pitts-achutsetts accent from him.I was thinking more like a toned down Roger Moore...
Edit: Just saw the comment I was looking for. Apparently it was the editing.