“The point is that thirty (or thirty-two, or thirty-five) is not the age when you want to be practicing serious relationships for the first time. Because learning how to develop a meaningful, sustainable relationship and keep it healthy takes some extended practice. You have to get beyond the basics — the sexual negotiations and the decisions about whose clothes go where and how to talk about exes. You have to figure out how to fight well, how to negotiate major value conflicts (if you can — some are impossible), and how to deal with the inevitabilities that come your way.” — Elizabeth Spiers: Develop Serious Relationships in Your 20s
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I’d like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents. Don’t drop out of college to start a startup. There’s no rush. There will be plenty of time to start companies after you graduate. In fact, it may be just as well to go work for an existing company for a couple years after you graduate, to learn how companies work.
And yet, when I think about it, I can’t imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He’d have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future— that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he’d been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not. […]
So while I stand by our responsible advice to finish college and then go work for a while before starting a startup, I have to admit it’s one of those things the old tell the young, but don’t expect them to listen to. We say this sort of thing mainly so we can claim we warned you. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.
” — Paul Graham: Hiring is Obsolete“
The big change that “experience” causes in your brain is learning that you need to solve people’s problems. Once you grasp that, you advance quickly to the next step, which is figuring out what those problems are. And that takes some effort, because the way software actually gets used, especially by the people who pay the most for it, is not at all what you might expect.
For example, the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. Its real role is to overcome people’s fear of public speaking. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of a bright one looking at you.
” — Paul Graham: Hiring is Obsolete
“If you are in a traditional engineering discipline and are not programming computers to do what you were taught to do, your days are numbered. I recall my computer science peers from college creating a t-shirt for themselves with the slogan, “I’d rather write programs to write programs than write programs.” That ethos of going meta now affects every technical discipline. It now makes more sense for the mechanically talented to write programs to do mechanical engineering than do mechanical engineering.” — Venkatesh Rao: Entrepreneurs are the New Labor
“In 1959, the Netherlands found petroleum on the shores of the North Sea. Money gurgled into the country. To general surprise, the flood of cash led to an economic freeze. Afterward, economists realized that salaries in the new petroleum industry were so high that nobody wanted to work anywhere else. To keep employees, companies in other parts of the economy had to jack up wages, in turn driving up costs. Meanwhile, the surge of foreign money into the Netherlands raised the exchange rate. Soaring costs and currency made it harder for Dutch firms to compete; manufacturing and agriculture faltered; unemployment climbed, except in the oil industry. The windfall led to stagnation—a phenomenon that petroleum cognoscenti now call “Dutch disease.” — Charles C. Mann, The Atlantic: What If We Never Run Out of Oil?
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About six months ago I was in a UN agency and I saw a North Korean watch list. And the watch list was very instructive. You looked at it, and you could see where it was believed the North Koreans were trying to finance and ship [nuclear components] from.
The watch list had three ports in the UAE. Malaysia was on it. Cayman Islands. Cyprus, Lichtenstein, Greece, Taiwan, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Turkey, Mauritania, Thailand, Singapore.
The North Koreans are all over the world, trying to figure out ways to fool export controllers, and export controllers are trying to stay a step ahead of them…
” — Mark Hibbs
How Blogger Begat the Push-Button Publishing Revolution
At the close of 1998, there were 23 known weblogs on the Internet. A year later there were tens of thousands. What changed? Pyra Labs launched Blogger, the online tool that gave push-button publishing to the people. It was a revolutionary web product made by a revolutionary web of people who went on to build much of the modern net. Here’s how Pyra propagated.
“When it comes down to it, the Dutch heart instinctively beats in a transatlantic rhythm. This has always been the case—logically, perhaps, for a seafaring nation. So doing business across the Atlantic is much more natural for The Hague. It immediately went to war in Iraq, for instance, alongside the United States and the UK. In those days, the Dutch ambassador to the UN often had one instruction: “Follow London.” I once asked how “London” was going to vote. He replied: “Oh, I don’t know.” — Caroline de Gruyter: The Dutch Are Trapped in Europe
“A visionary is an implementer of visions, not an acquirer of dollars. And if you consider yourself a visionary, the only honest response to your own acquisition is to admit your failure, dust yourself off, and start building your next company.” — Jake Lodwick: An acquisition is always a failure