Many startup founders are people who like to make things. So often the kind of work they do after they have the freedom to do what they they want is to make things where they're not constrained by the need to make money.
Oddly enough, YC itself is an example. We may make money eventually, but our main motive for doing it was that it was a cool idea.
If I remember correctly you once hinted you had more to say about the benefits of having a decent supply of capital, but the generally hostile attitude people had to talk of success made you reluctant to share. I'm sure plenty of news.YCer's who'd like to know a bit more about life post liquidity event.
Is it hard to be motivated when you know that low risk investments could keep you comfortable? Though I'm sure the pleasure of a fancy car wears off, what about a beautiful home or travel etc? Is there life long satisfaction from the achievement (ie not the money but the job well done)?
From what I've seen, getting rich doesn't seem to change most people's level of motivation much. The people who were driven before tend to stay driven.
Getting rich can be a danger to people who aren't very driven. But you don't have to worry about that problem if you're starting a startup. If you're not driven, it's unlikely your startup will make you rich.
> From what I've seen, getting rich doesn't seem to change most people's level of motivation much.
Didn't you write two Lisp books and start Viaweb before you got rich? Would you say you and your co-founders were just as motivated afterward?
As I understand it, the Zenter people darn near killed themselves leading up to the Google acquisition. Realistically, I wouldn't see them continuing at that breakneck pace afterward.
After the Apple II disk drive, Woz took it easy -- really easy. He doesn't even walk anymore, he Segways!
Taking it easy seems to be the norm. The exceptions to this get mega-rich, like Jobs and Gates. I used to wonder why Gates didn't just take his billions and retire somewhere; reading a biography makes it clear that his life IS Microsoft, including his social circle. It's his whole identity; it's not a job. He didn't do it so he could get rich and do something else; he did it because it's the thing he wanted to do the most anyway! And of course Jobs has always been on a transcendental mission to change humanity via consumer technology.
Yes, I'd say in all three of our cases we're just as motivated as before we got rich.
The Zenters worked super hard more because they had a deadline than because they had no money. I'm just as frazzled before deadlines. I worked 16 hour days for about a month straight to get Hackers & Painters in by the deadline.
Demo Day. Like all YC-funded startups they had to demo to investors after 10 weeks. They worked particularly hard because they had nearly zero written when they arrived in January. The two of them wrote 40k LOC in 10 weeks.
> From what I've seen, getting rich doesn't seem to change most people's level of motivation much
That is interesting, because when I lived in Cambridge I worked in a circle of serious lisp/hacker nerds who busted ass to get rich, and then promply retired from doing anything once they cashed out. They are now exactly like what the guy mentions in the first post; they chill on the sofa and read stuff on the internet. Maybe the Harvard grad school hacker scene had a different personality type than the one at MIT.
One of the things I like about this attitude is that in some way, it shows that you can make a lot of money even if you are not one of those people who are always after more more more, which is good news for me.
I didn't mean we'd literally do the same things as Parc. I meant more that YC might be one of those cases where, in retrospect, people were surprised that so many different things came from one place. The phenomenon isn't limited to technology. The New Yorker in the mid 20th century was another.
"It appears to me that nobody is doing blue sky research in the computing field. Rather, it has all become a case of building a better mouse trap."
You don't hang around the Haskell crowd very much. ;-)
Seriously, blue-sky research is alive and well in the computing field. You just don't hear about it much because blue-sky research, by definition, is useless. And usually highly technical as well. Techcrunch gets far more readers by covering the latest Reddit clone than Lambda: The Ultimate gets by covering the latest advances in dependent typing.
I follow LtU not always able to comprehend the points made after all I program in a language worse than blub, I kid you not.
But nothing on there has ever come across as radical more of an evolution and sometimes it's just plain ego stroking.
As for Haskell, it's in danger of losing it's chance for wide spread acceptance. The further they take it away from being a good language for multi-processor machines the further away it is from being useful.
With the death of Von Neumann in sight, at last, Haskell is galloping away from it's biggest selling point to the average pgmr. I'm starting to think Erlang might become a mainstream language instead of Haskell. Would sort of prove the need for a language to have a single designer.
The sort of things I'd hoped to see in research are :-
Genetic design of machines with 1000+ simple cpus with multi level communication and storage.
Proof that the brain works on a quantum level.
Cyc tied into machine learning so that it auto updates it's rules.
Rules for understanding complexity from simple components.
Basically, I want to see the big problems that are just within grasp tackled.
Comments
Many startup founders are people who like to make things. So often the kind of work they do after they have the freedom to do what they they want is to make things where they're not constrained by the need to make money.
Oddly enough, YC itself is an example. We may make money eventually, but our main motive for doing it was that it was a cool idea.
If I remember correctly you once hinted you had more to say about the benefits of having a decent supply of capital, but the generally hostile attitude people had to talk of success made you reluctant to share. I'm sure plenty of news.YCer's who'd like to know a bit more about life post liquidity event.
Is it hard to be motivated when you know that low risk investments could keep you comfortable? Though I'm sure the pleasure of a fancy car wears off, what about a beautiful home or travel etc? Is there life long satisfaction from the achievement (ie not the money but the job well done)?
From what I've seen, getting rich doesn't seem to change most people's level of motivation much. The people who were driven before tend to stay driven.
Getting rich can be a danger to people who aren't very driven. But you don't have to worry about that problem if you're starting a startup. If you're not driven, it's unlikely your startup will make you rich.
> From what I've seen, getting rich doesn't seem to change most people's level of motivation much.
Didn't you write two Lisp books and start Viaweb before you got rich? Would you say you and your co-founders were just as motivated afterward?
As I understand it, the Zenter people darn near killed themselves leading up to the Google acquisition. Realistically, I wouldn't see them continuing at that breakneck pace afterward.
After the Apple II disk drive, Woz took it easy -- really easy. He doesn't even walk anymore, he Segways!
Taking it easy seems to be the norm. The exceptions to this get mega-rich, like Jobs and Gates. I used to wonder why Gates didn't just take his billions and retire somewhere; reading a biography makes it clear that his life IS Microsoft, including his social circle. It's his whole identity; it's not a job. He didn't do it so he could get rich and do something else; he did it because it's the thing he wanted to do the most anyway! And of course Jobs has always been on a transcendental mission to change humanity via consumer technology.
Yes, I'd say in all three of our cases we're just as motivated as before we got rich.
The Zenters worked super hard more because they had a deadline than because they had no money. I'm just as frazzled before deadlines. I worked 16 hour days for about a month straight to get Hackers & Painters in by the deadline.
What was the deadline?
Demo Day. Like all YC-funded startups they had to demo to investors after 10 weeks. They worked particularly hard because they had nearly zero written when they arrived in January. The two of them wrote 40k LOC in 10 weeks.
Heck, with KLOC numbers like that, Google was lucky to avoid an all-out bidding war with IBM.
pregnant wife? http://blogs.business2.com/startups/2007/06/zenter_acquired....
Google launching their presentation product?
> From what I've seen, getting rich doesn't seem to change most people's level of motivation much
That is interesting, because when I lived in Cambridge I worked in a circle of serious lisp/hacker nerds who busted ass to get rich, and then promply retired from doing anything once they cashed out. They are now exactly like what the guy mentions in the first post; they chill on the sofa and read stuff on the internet. Maybe the Harvard grad school hacker scene had a different personality type than the one at MIT.
One of the things I like about this attitude is that in some way, it shows that you can make a lot of money even if you are not one of those people who are always after more more more, which is good news for me.
Are you implying that you haven't made money on YC already?
We're in the black, but not by much.
So you are having Fun doing YC?
Yes. There is an almost palpable buzz of energy at YC. I think it may turn out to be one of those hotspots like Parc was.
That would be a good thing.
The only issue I see is that YC seems to be entirely focused on success in the Web 2.0 and software arenas. PARC had a much broader remit.
It appears to me that nobody is doing blue sky research in the computing field. Rather, it has all become a case of building a better mouse trap.
I didn't mean we'd literally do the same things as Parc. I meant more that YC might be one of those cases where, in retrospect, people were surprised that so many different things came from one place. The phenomenon isn't limited to technology. The New Yorker in the mid 20th century was another.
"It appears to me that nobody is doing blue sky research in the computing field. Rather, it has all become a case of building a better mouse trap."
You don't hang around the Haskell crowd very much. ;-)
Seriously, blue-sky research is alive and well in the computing field. You just don't hear about it much because blue-sky research, by definition, is useless. And usually highly technical as well. Techcrunch gets far more readers by covering the latest Reddit clone than Lambda: The Ultimate gets by covering the latest advances in dependent typing.
I follow LtU not always able to comprehend the points made after all I program in a language worse than blub, I kid you not.
But nothing on there has ever come across as radical more of an evolution and sometimes it's just plain ego stroking.
As for Haskell, it's in danger of losing it's chance for wide spread acceptance. The further they take it away from being a good language for multi-processor machines the further away it is from being useful.
With the death of Von Neumann in sight, at last, Haskell is galloping away from it's biggest selling point to the average pgmr. I'm starting to think Erlang might become a mainstream language instead of Haskell. Would sort of prove the need for a language to have a single designer.
The sort of things I'd hoped to see in research are :- Genetic design of machines with 1000+ simple cpus with multi level communication and storage. Proof that the brain works on a quantum level. Cyc tied into machine learning so that it auto updates it's rules. Rules for understanding complexity from simple components.
Basically, I want to see the big problems that are just within grasp tackled.