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There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you.

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There are ideas that obvious lying around now. The reason you’re overlooking them is the same reason you’d have overlooked the idea of building Facebook in 2004: organic startup ideas usually don’t seem like startup ideas at first.

— Paul Graham

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2011.02.25 Friday ACHK

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The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?

— Paul Graham

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2011.02.16 Wednesday ACHK

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One of the mistakes novice pilots make is overcontrolling the aircraft: applying corrections too vigorously, so the aircraft oscillates about the desired configuration instead of approaching it asymptotically. It seems probable that investors have till now on average been overcontrolling their portfolio companies. In a lot of startups, the biggest source of stress for the founders is not competitors but investors.

— Paul Graham

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2011.02.07 Monday ACHK

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Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.

— Paul Graham

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2011.01.28 Friday ACHK

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Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But as you become expert in a field, you’ll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way. Don’t ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

— Paul Graham

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2011.01.21 Friday ACHK

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But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it’s not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren’t the ones that win. I think the reason Google embraced “Don’t be evil” so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.

— Paul Graham

Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.

Not everything that has gone wrong at Microsoft is due to internecine warfare. Part of the problem is a historic preference to develop (highly profitable) software without undertaking (highly risky) hardware.

It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

— Microsoft’s Creative Destruction, By Dick Brass, New York Times

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2011.01.14 Friday ACHK

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Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

— Warren Edward Buffett

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2011.01.01 Saturday ACHK

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This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness. It’s true even in the smartest companies. I was talking recently to a founder who considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to work for Google instead because he thought he’d learn more there. He didn’t learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn’t—sometimes because the company wouldn’t let him, but often because the company’s code wouldn’t let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a fraction of the things he would have liked to. He said he has learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has to do all the company’s errands as well as programming, because at least when he’s programming he can do whatever he wants.

— Paul Graham

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2010.12.31 Friday ACHK

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If I could only share one piece of personal finance advice to grads or to just about anyone, it would be this:

Only borrow money to pay for things that increase in value.

It’s a short list: your business, your house and your education, mostly.

— Seth Godin

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2010.12.21 Tuesday ACHK

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The key to being a good hacker may be to work on what you like. When I think about the great hackers I know, one thing they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don’t want to. I don’t know if this is cause or effect; it may be both.

To do something well you have to love it. So to the extent you can preserve hacking as something you love, you’re likely to do it well. Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. If you’re worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is.

— Paul Graham

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Hacker here means a highly skilled programmer, not a computer criminal. — Me

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2010.12.17 Friday ACHK