Paul Graham: Lessons for New Start-ups & Products
I am a Paul Graham fan [though I have to say I am not much of a Lisp fan]. He has amazing insights, and even when I disagree with him, I find them valuable. His latest essay The Hardest Lessons for Start-ups to Learn is his best. The lessons are applicable for start-ups or new products. Coming from a company that ships a lot of products, I can personally identify with these lessons.
There is a lot of good advice in that essay. Perhaps my favorite is:
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I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it’s not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence– determination. This is a little depressing. I’d like to believe Viaweb succeeded because we were smart, not merely determined. A lot of people in the startup world want to believe that. Not just founders, but investors too. They like the idea of inhabiting a world ruled by intelligence. And you can tell they really believe this, because it affects their investment decisions. |
This is not just a start-up founder quality. It is the quality needed to succeed in any field in the real world. Just as in his case, I found this through experience and the lesson came as a surprise. I have had the misfortune of being ridiculously over-educated, spending many precious years of my youth in getting a PhD when the real world would have been the better teacher.
And along with fancy degrees came IQ worship, which is actually more damaging than the years wasted in school. Fortunately, real world taught me that success if far more than an IQ score. That is perhaps the most important lesson I have learnt in AdventNet.
That leads me to the one key area of disagreement I have with Paul: Lisp. Lisp is IQ worship distilled into language form. I can point to any number of highly productive, creative software engineers who will never make the cut if mastery of Lisp were required of them.