Before college, the 2 main things i've been working on worked, outside of school, wrote and programmed. I didn't write essays. I wrote the case that novice writers were forced to write at that time and, most likely, are still writing: short stories. My stories were terrible. They had almost no plot, only characters with strong feelings that i thought made them deep.

The first shows i tried writing were attending an ibm 1401 that our school district used for what was then called "data processing." This restriction was in the 9th grade, so i was 13 or 14 years old. District 1401 ended up in the basement of our high school, and my friend rich draves and i got a license to use it. Down there it looked like a mini-villain's lair from a bond movie, with the whole world of these alien machines - processor, disk drives, printer, card reader - standing on a raised floor under bright fluorescent lighting.

Language , which we used was an early version of fortran. You had to type a field of miracles on punched cards, then store them in a card reader and press a button in order to download the program into the soul and put it on her computer. The result would usually be to print something on an incredibly loud printer.

I was puzzled by 1401. I didn't have time to figure out what to do with it. And looking back, there wasn't much i could do about it. The only form of input into the operating systems was information stored on punched cards, and i also did not have any data available on punched cards. The only other option was to make values that didn't depend on any input, such as calculating approximate pi, but i didn't know enough math to do something advantageous in kind of burning. Given the above, i'm not surprised, but i can't remember a single program i've written, because there wasn't much they could do. My most vivid memory is when i learned that programs might not exit when one of my programs didn't. On a non-time-sharing machine, it was like a social, never a technical error, as the data center manager's expression made clear.

Things have changed with the advent of microcomputers. Now people have a computer sitting right in front of you, on a table, that is able to respond to keystrokes during application, and not just sort through a stack of punched cards, and then stop. [1]

The first of my friends to get a microcomputer built it himself. It remained sold as a heatkit kit. I distinctly remember the impression and envy i felt as he sat in front of him typing programs right into the computer.

Computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of whining before i made sure of it. My father bought one, a trs-80, around 1980. The gold standard back then was the apple ii, but the trs-80 was good enough. That's when i really started programming. I wrote regular games, a program to predict how high my model rockets would fly, and a word processor that my father used to write at least one book. In life there was only room for two pages of text, so he would write two pages in bulk and print them out at the end, but the above was much more optimal than a typewriter.

Although i liked programming i didn't plan to study education in college. In an educational institution, i was going to study philosophy, which was much more convincing. It seemed to my naive school self that this was the study of truths in this instance, in comparison with which things studied in other areas would be just subject knowledge. When i entered the garden, school, i discovered that other areas occupied so much space for options that there was almost nothing left for these supposed ultimate truths. Absolutely all that seemed to be left for philosophy were edge cases, which, according to experts in other fields, were easier to safely ignore.

I didn’t have time to put it into words when i was 18 years. Absolutely everything i knew at that time. Was that i continued to attend philosophy classes, which continued to be boring. So i decided to switch to ai.

Ai was above ground from the inside of the 1980s, but there were two activities that particularly made me work on it: heinlein's novel the moon. Is the harsh mistress, which featured a smart computer named mike, and a pbs movie where terry winograd used shrdlu. I haven't tried re-reading the moon is a harsh mistress, because of that i don't know how she has aged, but when i read it, i was completely absorbed by her world.It seemed like it was only a matter of time before we had mike, and when i saw winograd using shrdlu, i thought it would be the longest time in a few years. All you had to do was teach shrdlu more words.

In the same hour, there were no ai courses at cornell, not even graduate courses, so i started trying to teach myself . That meant learning lisp, because lisp was considered an ai language in those days. The programming languages commonly used then were rather primitive, and, as a rule, the ideas of programmers. The default language at cornell was a pascal-like language called pl/i, and the situation was similar elsewhere. Learning lisp added too much to my knowledge of the program, which took years to complete before i began to know where the new restrictions were. It was more like this, exactly what i expected from college. It wasn't in the classroom as expected, but it was acceptable. For the next couple of years, i was on a roll. I knew what i was going to do.

For my graduation project, i reverse engineered shrdlu. God forbid, i enjoyed working on this editor. It was a nice piece of code, but what made it more exciting, among other things, was my belief—hard to imagine now, but not unique in 1985—that it was already climbing the lower slopes of intelligence.
i enrolled in a program at cornell that didn't require a major. All customers could take the things you liked and choose what you liked for the degree. I, of course, chose "artificial intelligence". When i got a real physics degree, i was dismayed to find that quotes were included, which made them read like scary quotes. It bothered me at the time, but now it seems amusingly accurate for the reasons i was about to find out. Minutes and harvard which i visited as rich draves studied there and was also home to bill woods who invented the type of parser i used in my shrdlu clone. I was only accepted to harvard, so that's where i went.

I don't remember when that moment came, or if there was any favorite moment at all, but in my initial graduate course, i noticed that artificial intelligence as it was practiced at the time was a hoax. By this i mean a type of ai in which a program that says "the dog is sitting on a chair" translates the list into some kind of formal representation and puts it into a list of facts that it knows.

What such programs have really shown is that there is a subset of natural language that is considered a formal language. However, a very correct subset. It was clear that there was an unbridgeable chasm to word what you could do with real natural language understanding. In fact, it was not a primitive thing to teach srdla more words. This whole way of producing ai with explicit data structures representing concepts won't work. Its failure, like a defect it, spawned many ways to write articles about different adhesives that could coincide with graduation, but the above was never going to get us, mike.

So. I looked around to see what useful thing could be salvaged from the wreckage of my plans, and it was all lisp. I knew from experience that lisp was interesting in its own right, but not solely because of its connection to ai, although at that time this limitation was the key reason why many people were interested in it. Wanting to help, i decided to concentrate on lisp. In fact, i decided to write a book about lisp hacking. It's scary to think how little i knew about lisp hacking when i started writing this book. But there is nothing cooler than writing a book about something that will help you learn it. The book on lisp was not published until 1993, but i wrote most of it in graduate school.

Computer science is an uneasy union of two halves: theory and systems. Human theorists prove things, and immigrant systems construct things. I wanted to build things. I had a lot of respect for the theory—in fact, i suspected it was the more wonderful of the several halves—but making something seemed much more fun.

The problem with networking, however, was that it didn't last. Any program you ordered today, no matter how good it may be, will become obsolete in optimal circumstances in a couple of decades. People are ready to mention your operating system in footnotes, but by the way, no one will use it. And quite, at first glance, a very frail job.Only men and women familiar with the history of this area are even able to understand that in its time - this restriction was good.

At some point, a few surplus xerox dandelions floated in the computer lab. Anyone who wanted to play with it could have it. I was briefly seduced, but by modern standards they were so slow; what is the point? No one else unequivocally refused, which is why they left. That's what happened to system work.

I didn't want to create ordinary things, but create things that will live for a long time.

In this unsatisfied state, i went to the end last century to visit rich draves at cmu, where he was a graduate student. One day i went to carnegie, where i spent many minutes as a child. Looking at the picture, i realized something that might have seemed obvious, but was a big surprise to me. There, exactly on the wall, it was possible to make something durable. Tapes are out of date. Some of the best were hundreds of years old.

And on top of that, they were allowed to earn a living. Not as easy as writing software, of course, but i figured that if you're really hardworking and live pretty cheap, then it must be possible to earn enough to survive. And how you could become truly independent as an artist. Or you wouldn't meet a boss and you wouldn't need to get funding to study at all.

I've always enjoyed looking at paintings. Can i make them? I didn't have a clue. I could not even imagine that something could be. Intellectually, i knew that people create art, that the belt doesn't spontaneously appear - but it was as if the students who created it belonged to a different species. They either lived a long time ago or were mysterious geniuses doing strange things in a life magazine account. The idea that i could actually make art if i put that verb before a noun seemed almost miraculous.

I started taking art classes at harvard that fall. Graduate students could go to lectures in every department, and my advisor, tom cheetham, was very easy going. If the site knew about the strange classes that i took, then you must admit, he did not say anything.

So now i graduated from graduate school in computer science, but i planned to become an artist, and i also sincerely like to hack lisp and communicate over on lisp. In other words, like many graduate students, i worked vigorously on several projects that were not my dissertation.

I did not see a way out of this situation. I refused to drop out of graduate school, but how else was i going to get out? I remember when my friend robert morris was kicked out of cornell when he wrote the 1988 internet worm, i was jealous of everything that the player found such an impressive way to get out of graduate school.

Then somehow once in april 1990, a crack appeared in the wall. I ran into professor cheetham who asked if i had progressed enough to graduate this june. I didn't have a single word written for my dissertation, but it must have been the fastest thinking of my life on the application form, i intend to try and write it in the 5 weeks or so that's left before the deadline, reusing parts. On lisp, where i muff and i was able to respond without noticeable delay: "yes, i think so. I'll give you something to read in a few days."

I chose continuation apps as the theme. Looking back, i should have written about macros and built-in languages. There is the whole planet, which was barely explored. But the hassle, what i wanted was to finish graduate school, and my quickly written thesis was enough, with difficulty.

In the meantime, i was submitting papers to art schools. I submitted a paperwork package to a couple: risd in the usa and also to the accademia di belli arti in florence, which i thought would be the oldest art school and would be good. Risd accepted me and i never got a response from the academy, wanting to help i went to providence.

I applied to join the bfa application case in risd, which actually meant i had to leave. Again garden, school. This was not as strange as it sounds, because i was only 25, and art schools are full of patients of any age. Risd thought i was a transfer sophomore and told me that it was a unique summer for me to take a preparatory course. Foundation means courses that everyone should take in fundamental subjects such as drawing, coloring and difficulty.

Toward the end of the summer, i received a big surprise: a letter from the academy, which was delayed due to by sending the premises to cambridge, england, but not outside of cambridge, massachusetts, and inviting me to take the entrance exam in florence this fall. It was only a couple of weeks before that. My sweet landlady allowed me to share my personal belongings in her attic.I had a share of the money saved on consulting for everything i did in graduate school; this would probably be enough for one year if i lived cheaply. Now many things i had to decide on were learning italian.

Only stranieri (foreigners) could take the entrance exam. In retrospect, this may well have been a way to exclude them, because there were too many wanderers attracted by the idea of studying art in florence, and in other circumstances italian students would have been in the minority. I was in decent shape in painting and drawing from the risd foundation that summer, but i still don't know how i managed to pass the written exam. I remember answering the essay question by writing about cezanne and what a useful thing i did to raise my intellectual level so high after i could to make the most of my limited vocabulary. [2]

I am only under 25 years old, and already sometimes i need such conspicuous patterns. Here i was again going to act in some prestigious organization, with the intention of studying some prestigious subject, and again i was ready to be disappointed. The students and teachers in the art department at the academy were the sweetest people you could imagine, but they had long ago come to an agreement that students did not require teachers to teach anything, and in return teachers did not require students to see what -or. And at the same time, all the characters outwardly adhered to the conventions of the atelier of the 19th century. Meanwhile, in our company there was the most promising of those small kindling stoves that you see in studio paintings of the 19th century, and the nude model sat as correctly as possible without burning herself. With the exception of the food, which, besides me, almost no one drew it. The rest of the students spent their time chatting or regularly trying to imitate the values that they saw in american art magazines. Me. She made a living from a combination of modeling and counterfeiting for a local antiques dealer. She copied an obscure old movie from a book, and he took the copy and tortured her to make her look old. [3]

When i was a student at the academy, i started painting still lifes in my own bedroom at night. These tapes were tiny, because the room was small, and because i painted films on the remnants of the canvas, that was all i could afford at that hour. Drawing still life is different from drawing people, because the object, as the name suggests, is not able to move. The stronger sex can't sit for more than 15 minutes at a time, if cartoons do it, our experts don't sit still. Thus the traditional m.O. To draw humanity, it's like drawing a simple layman, which you then modify to fit the particular person you're drawing. And for example, a still life can, if you strive, copy pixel by pixel from what you see. No doubt you don't want to stop there, otherwise you'll just get photographic accuracy and what makes the still life interesting is that it was all done over the head. You'll want to highlight visual cues that tell you, for example, that the reason for the sudden change in color at some point is that the edge of the object is in front of you. Subtly emphasizing quality products, one can design pictures that are more realistic than photographs, not only in some metaphorical sense, but also in a strictly information-theoretical sense. [4]

I liked to paint still lifes because i was interested in the fact that i saw. In life we are not aware of much of what we see. Most visual perception is driven by low-level processes that simply tell your brain "this is a drop of water" without telling you the details, such as where the lightest and darkest points are, or is it a bush, without telling you the blank and slope of each leaf. . This is a feature of the brain, not a bug. In everyday life it would be boring to notice every leaf on any bush. But when you have to draw something, you have to look closely, and when you do, you can see a lot. You can still notice new things after a few days of trying to draw something that users often take for granted, just as you get the opportunity after two or three days of trying to write an essay that humanity usually takes for granted of course.

Is not the only way to draw. I'm not 100%% convinced that this is even a good drawing method. However, it seemed like a good enough bet to try.

Our teacher, professor ulivi, was a good guy. He saw that i was working hard and gave me a good grade, then he wrote it down in a special passport, which we all had as a student.But the academy didn't teach me anything but italian, and my finances were running low, so by the end of my first year, i returned to america.

I wanted to go back to risd, but now i was broke , and risd was very expensive, so i decided to find a position for a year, and then return to risd next fall. I bought the premises together with interleaf, which was engaged in the creation of documents. You mean like microsoft word? Exactly. This is how i learned that low-level special programs have a tradition of absorbing high-performance programs. But interleaf had only ten years to live. [5]

Interleaf acted rather boldly. Inspired by emacs, they added a scripting language to the point of making the scripting language a dialect of lisp. Now they wanted a lisp hacker to write something on it. It was the closest thing i ever had to a previous job, and i fully apologize to my boss and employees because i was a bad employee. Their lisp was the icing on the giant c cake, and since i didn't know c and didn't want to learn it, i definitely didn't understand a serious part of the program. I was also terribly irresponsible. This was done when the job of programming meant showing up every day at certain business hours. This seemed unnatural to me, and in this respect the rest of the world agreed with my thinking, and yet at that time it caused a lot of friction. At the end of the year, i spent a good deal of my time secretly working on on lisp, which i was already under contract to publish. Money, most by art student standards. In florence, after paying my share of the rent, my financial capacity for much more was 7 bucks a day. Now i was paid 4 times more every minute, even when i was just sitting in a meeting. Living cheaply, i not only managed to save enough to join risd, but also paid off the finances for taking courses at school.

I learned a few useful goods through interleaf, although they were exclusively not worth doing. Do. I have learned that it is preferable for technology companies to be led by product people rather than salespeople (although sales is a genuine skill and people who excel at it are really good at it), which leads to errors when the code is edited by too many people. People that cheap office space isn't a deal if it's disheartening, that scheduled meetings are worse than hallway conversations, that large bureaucratic clients are a dangerous source of funds, and that there isn't much overlap between regular office hours and high hacking hours. , Or ordinary offices and the best place for a partner.

But the most important thing that i learned and used in both viaweb and y combinator is that low frequencies absorb high ones: which is good being an "entry level" option, even though it would be less prestigious, due to the fact that if you finish it, someone else will and crush you to the ceiling. Which, in turn, means that prestige is at a premium, a sign of danger.

When i left to return to risd next fall, i arranged for freelance activities for a group that was doing projects for users and this case is how i survived for the next few years. When i later returned to the project, someone told me about a new thing called html, which he described as being derived from sgml. Markup language enthusiasts were an occupational hazard at interleaf and i ignored them, but html later became a big part of my life.

In the fall of 1992, i returned to providence to continue working at risd. The foundation was just introductory material and the academy was a (very civilized) joke. Now i was going to see what a real art school looks like. But unfortunately it was more like an academy than not. Better organized, of course, and much more expensive, but now it became clear that the art school does not have the same attitude to culture as the medical school to medicine. At least not the painting department. The textile department to which my neighbor belonged seemed rather strict. Undoubtedly, illustrations and architecture too. But the painting was post-strict. Art students were forced to express themselves, which for the more down-to-earth students meant trying to come up with some kind of special brand identity.

Corporate direction is the visual equivalent of a fact that is in show business. Known as a "chip": something that immediately identifies the work as yours, but not someone else's. For example, when you look at a picture that looks like a cartoon, you know that the page belongs to roy lichtenstein.So if you can see a big picture of this species hanging in a hedge fund manager's home, know that he paid hundreds of thousands of bucks for it. This did not always mean that the artists have the original style of the company, generated by artificial intelligence female porn (https://aixxxsites.com/), but usually this is why buyers pay a lot for such works. [6]

There were also many serious students: neighborhood kids who "could draw" in high school and now go to what was considered the best art school in the country to learn how to cook ideally. They were, as usual, confused and demoralized by what they found in risd, but continued to work, because drawing was what the heroes were doing. I didn't become one of the kids who could draw in high school, however, in risd i was definitely closer to their tribe than to the brand seeker tribe.

I learned a lot from the color lessons i i took it in risd, while in other things i learned to draw myself, and i could do it for free. So, in 1993, i dropped out. I wandered around providence for a while, and then my college friend nancy parmet did me a great favor. A studio was vacated in an apartment owned by her mother in new york. Did i want it? It wasn't much bigger than my current place, and new york should be where the artists were. So yes i did! [7]

The asterix comics begin by zooming in on a tiny corner of roman gaul that ends up being out of roman control. You have a lot more to draw on the new york map: when you zoom in on the upper east side, there's a little corner of it that isn't rich, or at least didn't go away in 1993. They call it yorkville, and that was my new home. . I was now a new york artist in a strictly technical sense, making paintings and living in new york.

I was nervous about money because i felt that interleaf was coming to bottom. Freelance work hacking lisp was very rare, and i didn't want to program in the next language, which in those days would mean c if i was lucky. So, with my unerring eye for finance, i decided to write another lisp book. It will be a popular book, the kind of book that is used as a textbook. I imagined that i live modestly on royalties and spend all my time painting. (The photograph on the title of this book, ansi common lisp, i drew around the same time.)

The best thing about new york for me was the presence of idel and julian weber. Idel weber was an artist in the forefront of photorealism, and i took her painting classes at harvard. I have never known a teacher in my life more loved by my students. A large number of former students kept in touch with her, including myself. After moving to new york, i actually became her assistant in the studio.

She liked to paint on grandiose square canvases with a side of 4.5 feet. One day after the end of 1994, while i was stretching one of these monsters, there was something on the radio about a famous fund manager. He was not much older than me and very rich. The thought suddenly came to my head: for what reason should i not get rich? Then i can form whatever i want.

In the meantime, i've been hearing more and more about this new thing called information space. Robert morris showed it to me when i visited him in cambridge, where he was now a graduate student at harvard. It seemed to me that the network would be of great importance. I have seen what graphical user interfaces have done for the popularity of microcomputers. It was shown that the network would do everything with the ability to access the internet.

If i wanted to get rich, here is the next train leaving the station. I was right about this part. What i was wrong about was the thought. I decided that our confectioners should create an organization to host art galleries on the internet. I can't honestly say after reading so many y combinator apps that it was the worst startup idea ever, but it ended up there. Art galleries didn't want to be 'the internet' and still forbid themselves not being too trendy. Respectively, do not sell. I wrote the software to set up the gallery websites, and robert wrote the software to set up the image size or set up the http server to fix the pages. Next we tried to register galleries. To call it a difficult sale would be an understatement. It was hard to give up. Several galleries let us organize sites for them without any payment, but none of them paid us.

Then some online stores began to be developed, and i realized that, except for the order buttons, they are identical to the sites we created for galleries. This impressive-sounding thing called "virtual storefront" our experts already knew how to set up.

So, in the summer of 1995, after i sent a camera-ready copy of ansi common lisp to publishers, we started writing client programs for developing online supermarkets. At first it was supposed to be a regular desktop program, which in those days meant windows programs. This was a worrying prospect, since none of us knew how to write windows software and didn't always want to learn. We lived all over the unix world. However, we knew that we would at least try to prototype a store builder on unix. Robert wrote the shopping cart, and i wrote the new store site generator, in lisp, of course.

We worked in robert's apartment in cambridge. His roommate was away for a long time, and at that time i had to rest in his room. For some reason there was no bed frame or sheets, just a mattress on the floor. One morning, as i was lying on this mattress, an idea came to me that made me sit up with a big letter. What if we run the software on the server and let users control it by clicking on links? Then users would not have to write anything to run on users' computers. We are able to create websites on the same server from which we served them. Players don't need anything other than a browser.

Such software, known as a web application, is now widespread, but at that time it was not clear that it was even possible. . To find out what we want to try to make a version of the proposed store builder that could be controlled through a normal browser. A couple of days after the release, on august 12, there was one that functioned. Interface was terrible, but it confirmed that an entire store could be created using a browser, without tedious client software or typing anything on the command line on the site.

Now we felt that we really -what. I had a vision of a new generation of software working in this way. You don't need versions or ports or anything like that. Interleaf had a whole group called release engineering that seemed to be at least as big as the group that practically wrote the software. It was now possible to simply update the software even on the server.

We started a new company called viaweb after our software ran on the internet and we got us$10,000 in seed funding from husband idel julian. In exchange for this, as well as initial legal work and business advice, we gave him 10% of the company. 10 years later, this deal became a model for y combinator. We knew the founders wanted something like this, so we came up with the idea ourselves.

At this stage, i had a negative net worth, because a thousand dollars or so, which i had in a banking institution were more than balanced by the fact that i owed the government like taxes. (Did i set aside a proper portion of the money i earned from consulting for interleaf? No, i didn't.) So even though robert had a graduate student scholarship, i needed that seed funding to live.

Originally we were hoping to launch education in september, but as we worked on the software we got more ambitious. Finally, we created a wysiwyg resource builder in the sense that when the pages were created, they looked exactly like the static pages that would be created later, except that instead of leading to the static pages, the referenced links were very carefully and meticulously checked. On the closures in the hash table on the site.

Learning the art helped, because the key goal of the creator of the virtual store is to make users look legal, and the key to looking legal is are high performance indicators. . If you have to get page layouts, fonts and shades right, you can make the guy running the store from his bedroom look more legitimate than a huge company.

(If you're wondering why my site looks so old fashioned it's because it's still done with said software, it might look clunky today, but in 1996 this restriction was an advanced phrase in slick.)

B september robert rebelled. "We've been doing this for a month now," he said, "and still haven't done it." Looking back, it's funny that he was still working on it almost 3 years later. But i decided that it would be prudent to recruit more programmers, and asked robert who else in graduate school with him turned out to be really good.He recommended trevor blackwell, which at first surprised me, because at this point i only knew trevor according to the specified plan to reduce everything in my being to a stack of cards that he carried with him everywhere. But rtm, as always, was right. Trevor turned out to be a frighteningly efficient hacker.

It was a lot of fun working with robert and trevor. These are the two most independent people i know of, and absolutely not the same. If an observer could look inside rtm's brain, it would look like a new england colonial church, and when a person could look inside trevor's brain, it would look like the worst excess of austrian rococo.

We opened for a start-up, with 6 stores in january 1996. It was still however the visitors waited several months, because although we were worried that we were late, in fact we were almost fatally early. In this case, there was a lot of talk in the media about e-commerce, but in reality, not very many people wanted online supermarkets. [8]

The software consisted of three main parts: an editor that people used to provide platforms that i wrote, a shopping cart that robert wrote, and a manager that kept track of calls, and statistics written by trevor. At one time, the editor was one of the best all-in-one website builders. I kept the code clean and didn't need to integrate it with anything other than robert and trevor's, so it was fun enough to work on. If absolutely all i had to decide on was to work on this software, the next 3 years would be the easiest of my life. Unfortunately, i had to do even more, in which case i was worse than in programming, and the other three years were the most stressful.

There were many startups creating software for e-commerce. In the second half of the nineties. We were ready to be microsoft word, not interleaf. This meant that the partner was easy to operate and inexpensive. We were lucky that the people were poor as it made us make viaweb even cheaper than we thought. We charged $100 a month for a small store and $300 for 30 days for a large one. This special price was a great beauty and a constant thorn in the side of the competition, but it wasn't because of any smart understanding that we set the price low. We had no idea what businesses were paying for things. 300 bucks in 30 days seemed like a lot of money to us.

We did a lot of things right by accident, like that. For example, we created what is now called "make products that don’t scale," although at the time we would have called it so lame that we had to settle for the most desperate measures to get users." A very popular one was building shops for them. This seemed particularly humiliating, since the raison d'être of our software was the fact that users could use it to set up their own stores. But anything, just to attract users.

We learned a lot more about retail than we wanted to know. For example, if you could only have a small image of a man's shirt (and any images back then were small by today's standards), it's better to have a close-up of the collar than an image of the entire shirt. I remember learning about this because it meant i had to rescan at least 30 images of men's shirts. My first set of scans were so beautiful too.

While the risk seemed wrong, it was absolutely right. Creating stores for users taught us about retail and what it's like to use our software. At first, i was puzzled and repulsed by "business" and i thought that every person needs an "entrepreneur" to lead it, but once users began to develop here, i changed, in much the same way that i ever became a father. I had children. Whatever the users wanted, i was totally theirs. Maybe at one point we would have so many users that i wouldn't be able to scan their images for them, but at the same time, there was nothing more important.

One more thing, i didn't realize at the same time that growth urgency is the ultimate test of a startup. Our growth rates have been good. There were about 70 stores at the end of 1996 and about 500 by the end of 1997. I mistakenly thought that the absolute number of visitors mattered. And that's what's important in the sense that it's how much money you make, and if you don't make enough, you'll have a great opportunity to get out of the business. But, in the long run, growth rates take care of the absolute number. If we were a startup that i consulted in y combinator, i would say: stop being so nervous, because personally you are doing well.You grow in 7 from year to year. Just don't hire enough people, and soon you'll start making good profits, and then you'll be in control of your own destiny.

Alas, i hired a lot more people, partly because our investors wanted me. And to some extent because that's what startups did during the internet bubble. A company with a handful of employees would look amateurish. So we didn't break even until about as long as yahoo bought us in the summer of 1998. Which, in turn, meant we were at the mercy of investors throughout the life of the company. And since both we and our investors were new to startups, the result was a mess, even by startup standards.

When yahoo bought us, we were relieved. However, our viaweb shares were valuable. It was a stake in a business that remained profitable and grew rapidly. But this did not seem to me very valuable; i had no idea how to evaluate a case for myself and my family, but i was too keenly aware of the near-death experiences that seemed to happen to us every few months. I also haven't significantly changed my outlook on graduate student life since we started. So when yahoo bought us, it was like going from rags to riches. Because we were going to california, i bought a car, a yellow 1998 vw gti. I remember thinking that his all-leather seats alone were the most luxurious item i've ever owned.

The following year, from summer 1998 to summer 1999, must have been the least productive of the majority. My life. I didn't realize it at the time, but i was exhausted by the effort and stress of managing viaweb. A short time after i was brought to california, i tried to continue my usual way of life. Programming until 3am, but fatigue, combined with the prematurely aged hotmail culture and the gloomy santa clara cube farm, was slowly dragging me down. After a few months, i was not myself how to help in interleaf.

Yahoo provided everyone with many situations in which we were bought. At that hour i thought yahoo was so overpriced that the models would never be worth anything, but to my surprise, the next seeding season, the stock went up 5 times. I held out until the first option package was issued, and at the end of the summer of 1999, i left. I didn't draw so much that i almost forgot why i was doing it. My brain was completely filled with the program and men's shirts for four years. But i did it to get rich, to paint, i reminded myself, and now i'm rich, so it's time for me to paint.

When i said i was leaving, my boss at yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. I told him all about the kinds of pictures that i wanted to paint. Then i was touched by everything that he showed such interest in me. Now i understood what was in front of you because the person thought i was lying. My options at the time were worth about $2 million in 30 days. If i left such a microloan under my desk, it could only be for this site a new startup, and if i did, i could take people with me. This was the peak of the internet bubble, and yahoo was its epicenter. My boss was a billionaire at the time. Leave then, resource you can a new startup, maybe it seemed crazy to him, but at the same time a plausible ambitious plan.

But i really left to draw, and started the first one. There was no time to waste. I already burned 4 years to get rich. Now, when i talk to founders who exit their companies, my advice is always the same: take a vacation. This is all that i was hired to realize just to go somewhere and not do anything for a month or two, but the idea did not come to my head.

So i tried to draw, but i didn’t succeed there seems to be some energy or ambition. Part of the problem was i didn't know much about people in california. I exacerbated this problem by buying a cottage in the santa cruz mountains with a great view, but far from it. I held out for another month, and then, in desperation, i returned to new york, where, if you don't understand rent control, you'll be surprised to know that i still have my apartment, sealed like the tomb of my former life. . At least idel was in new york, and in that place there were illiterate users who tried to draw, although i did not know any of them.

When i returned to new york, i resumed my old life, except that i was rich these days. Strange as it may sound. I resumed all the personal old schemes, apart from the phenomenon that nowadays there are doors in the place where this money was not. Now that i'm tired of walking, all i had to decide on was raise my hand, and if it wasn't raining, a taxi would stop to pick me up.Today, as i passed by charming little restaurants, i could visit and call for lunch. For many years this limitation was exciting. The paint job is getting better. I experimented with a new type of still life: i painted one painting historically, then photographed it and printed it enlarged on canvas, and then used it as an underpainting for a second still life, painted from the same products of human civilization, which, i hope, for now rotted).

In the meantime, i was looking for a property to buy. Now i really could choose in which area to live. Where, i asked myself and various housing agents, was new york's cambridge? Through occasional visits to the real cambridge, i gradually realized that there was no such thing. Ha.

At about this time, in the spring of the very beginning of this millennium, i had an idea. From our experience with viaweb, it became clear that the future belongs to web applications. Why don't you create web software to design web applications? Why not let people edit the code on our server through a browser window, and at the end host the resulting applications for them? [9] you can run any service on the servers that these applications can use by simply making an api call: making and receiving phone calls, manipulating images, accepting credit card payments, etc.
i was so carried away by this idea that i could hardly think of anything else. It seemed obvious what the future was. I wasn't that keen on starting an additional company, but it was clear that this idea would have to be implemented as one, so i decided to move to cambridge and start it. I was hoping to lure robert into formation above him with me, but then i ran into a hitch. Robert was now a postdoc at mit, and although he had made large sums, the last time i lured him into any of my schemes, it was still a huge waste of time. Therefore, although he agreed with the statement that the thought sounded plausible, he resolutely refused to work on it.

Hmm. Well, then i would actually do it. I hired dan giffin, who worked at viaweb, and two undergraduates who needed a summer job and the person went to work, trying to form what is clear in modern times, about twenty manufacturers and several open source projects worthy of software. The language for defining applications will, of course, be a dialect of lisp. But i was not so naive as to assume that i could openly lisp in front of a wide audience; we hid the parentheses, just like dylan did in the diagram.

By that time, there was already a name for the viaweb company - "application service provider" or asp. Such a name did not last long until it was replaced with "software as a service", but the mirror lasted long enough for me to name a new company in such an honor - the new apartment had to be called aspra.

I surrendered on the application builder, dan worked on the network infrastructure, and the two undergraduates worked on the first two services (pictures and their calls). But somewhere in the middle of summer, i realized that i really did not want to run a company - especially a big one, which it was supposed to be. I only started viaweb because i needed money. Now that i no longer needed the money, why did i do it? If it was a vision that was to be realized like this firm, then to hell with that vision. I would create a subset that could be made open source.

To my great surprise, the time i spent working on the metal was not wasted. After we launched the y combinator, i often came across startups working on parts of this new build and it was very rewarding to spend so many minutes thinking about it and any attempt to write most of it.
subset, what i would have created as a free source project was a new lisp in which i wouldn't even have to hide the parentheses now. Many lisp hackers dream of founding a new lisp, partly because an important distinguishing feature of the language is that its use has dialects, and partly, i believe, because our company has in its right mind the platonic form of lisp, to which any existing dialects. If you don't count. I did, of course. So, in august, dan and i switched to working on this new dialect of lisp, which i called arc, in a house i had bought in cambridge.

Lightning struck the following spring. I was invited to give a talk at a lisp conference, so i talked about how people used lisp on the viaweb. I later posted a postscript of this talk online on our website paulgraham.Com, which i created a few years before viaweb but never used for any purpose.In just one day he had 30 thousand rubles of page views. What happened? The referring urls showed that someone posted it on slashdot. [10]

Wow, i thought, there is an audience. If i write it and put it online, anyone can read it. It may seem obvious today, but at the time this limitation was surprising. In the era of printing, there was a narrow channel to readers, guarded by ferocious monsters known as editors. The only way to get an audience for anything you've written is to publish something you can see in a book, media, or magazine. In the new century, anyone could publish whatever they wanted.

In general, this has been possible since 1993, but so far few people have realized this. For most of that time, i was closely involved with the release of the internet infrastructure, and was also a writer, and it took me 8 years to figure it out. Even then, it took me all 5-6 years to understand the consequences. This meant that there would be a whole new generation of essays. [11]

In the age of print, the number of channels for studying essays was vanishingly small. Aside from a few officially anointed thinkers who attended the right parties in new york, the only people who were allowed to publish essays were experts writing about their specialties. There were so many essays that no more were written because there was no chance of them being published. Now they could be, and i was going to address them to. [12]

I worked on several different things, but the turning point when i realized what to work on was the time when i started publishing essays through the world wide web. Since then, i knew that no matter what i did, i would always write essays.

I knew that online essays would be marginal at first. Socially, they would be more like the rants of the nutcases posted on their geocities sites than the elegant and beautifully typed essays published in the new yorker. But i already knew enough about the problem to consider it encouraging, but not discouraging. , For me. Form things that were not fully prestigious. Still life has always been the least prestigious form of painting. Viaweb and y combinator seemed lame when we ran them. I still get a glassy look from strangers when they ask me what i'm writing and i explain that this is an essay i'm about to post on a personal website. Even lisp, though intellectually prestigious, like latin, also seems fashionable.

It's not that non-prestigious types of work are good on their own. At the same time, as soon as you discover that you are drawn to some kind of work, despite its current lack of prestige, percent, this is an indicator of the fact that something real is available there, and that you have the right motives. Impure motives are a great danger to ambitious people. Suddenly something will lead you astray, it is the desire to impress people. So, working on low-profile things won't guarantee that you're on the right track, but at least it will ensure that you're never on the wrong track, which is common enough.

Back over the next many years, i wrote many essays on most different topics. O'reilly republished their flower garden, in the manner of a book titled "hackers and artists" after one of the essays in it. I also worked on spam filters and did some painting. Every thursday night i hosted dinners for a few friends who taught me how to cook for a few. And i bought the last building in cambridge, a former candy factory (and then, as mentioned, a porn studio) to use as an office.

One night in october 2003 to my house. It was a smart idea from my friend maria daniels, she was one of the people who dined on thursdays. Three different hosts invited their friends to the same party. Thus, for every guest, two-thirds of the other guests will be people whom the ladies do not know, but who, perhaps, they would like. One of the visitors was a woman, i did not know, but who, as it turned out, i really liked: a woman named jessica livingston. A couple of days after the release, i invited her to meet with friends.

Jessica was in charge of marketing at a boston investment bank. This bank thought they were doing startups, but over the next year, when she met my startup friends, she was surprised how different the reality was. And how colorful were their stories. So she decided to compile a book of interviews with startup founders.

When the bank had financial difficulties for a long, long, long time ago, and she had to lay off half of the employees, she began to look for a great job.Early in 2005, she had a business meeting for a marketing support job at a boston venture capital firm. It took them weeks to make a decision, and in the intervening time, i started telling her all the things that needed to be fixed about venture capital. They should make more small investments instead of a few giant ones, they should fund younger, more technical founders but not mba, they should be able to let the founders stay as ceo, and so on.

One of my tricks when writing an essay at all times was the ability to make presentations. The prospect of standing in front of a group of people and telling them something that won't take them much time is a great fantasy simulacrum. Startup. Sometimes they can avoid the worst of the blunders we've made.

So i gave this process a talk in which i told them that the best sources of seed funding are successful startup founders, because that they would then also meet as sources of advice. At the same time it seemed that they were all looking at me expectantly. Afraid that my e-mail would be flooded with business plans (if i only knew), i blurted out: "but not me!" And continued talking. But then it hits me in the head that i really should stop postponing angel investing. I've been meaning to join them since yahoo bought us, and it's finally been over seven years and i still haven't made any angel investments.

In the meantime, i've been making plans with robert and trevor about projects. We could work together. I missed working with them and wondered what advantages we could do together.

As jessica and i walked home after dinner on march 11th, on the corner of garden and walker streets, these three strands converged. No use for venture capitalists who have not made a decision like this for several weeks. We opened our own investment corporation, and realized the ideas we talked about. I would fund the risk and jessica could quit her job and collaborate for these purposes, and would also have robert and trevor as partners. [13]

Once again, ignorance played into our hands. We had no idea how to act as angel investors, and in boston in 2005 there was no ron conway to learn from. So we just made what seemed obvious, and a number of products that our confectioners made turned out to be new.

There are several components in y combinator and people did not understand these games. Straightaway. The share that humanity first uses had to be an angel firm. Those two words didn't go together in those days. There were venture capital firms that live in organized organizations with people whose job it was to make investments, but they only made large investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there were angels who invested in a limited dosage, but there were personalities that most often focused on other things and made investments on the side. And none of them helped the founders much - in the beginning. We knew how helpless the founders were in certain ways because we remembered how helpless we ourselves were. For example, one thing that julian did for our organization, and it seemed like magic to us, was that our company prepared the company. We did a great job writing a very complicated software, but in reality we were registered, with a charter, shares and everything, how the hell did you do it? Our plan was not only to make seed investments, but also to do for startups everything that julian did for our professionals.

Yc was not organized as a fund. It was so cheap that we financed this material from our own finances. 99% of readers agreed with this, but professional investors think, "wow, so they got all the profits." But again, this cannot be attributed to any special insight on our part. People didn't try how venture capital firms were designed. It no longer occurred to us to try to raise money, and if it did, we would not figure out how to start. [14]

The most distinguishing feature of yc is the package model: fund several startups at once twice a year, and then, for three months, intensively tune in to trying to help them. We discovered this part by accident, not only indirectly, but also clearly due to our ignorance in investing. We needed to gain experience as investors. We were worried, what better way than to fund a lot of startups all at once? We knew that undergraduates find temporary jobs at tech companies during the summer.Why not organize a summer program where start-ups would be launched instead? Our company wouldn't feel guilty about being fake investors in a sense, because they would be fake founders in that sense. So while we probably won't make a lot of money off of it, we'll at least practice being an investor in them which, on our part, will probably have a more interesting summer than working at microsoft.

We used a building i owned in cambridge as our headquarters. We all dined there weekly on tuesdays as i already cooked for the patrons thursdays and thursdays, and later in the dinner we invited startup experts to speak. So in a matter of days, experienced developers developed what they called the summer founders program, and i posted an ad on a personal resource inviting undergrads to apply. No matter how hard i tried, i didn't think writing essays would be an option to read "trade flow" as investors call it, but it turned out to be the perfect source. [15] we racked up 225 bookings to appear in the founders summer program, here we were delighted to find that many of them were from people who had already graduated from high school or were about to enroll in 2016. This sfp thing is already starting to feel more serious than we thought.

We invited about 20 out of 225 groups for individual interviews, and from those we selected 8 for funding. It was an impressive group. This first group included reddit, justin kahn and emmet shear, who would go on to found twitch, aaron schwartz, who had already helped write the rss spec and over a long period became a martyr to free access, and sam altman, who would later become the second president of yc. I don't think it was luck that the first batch was so good. You had to be pretty brave to sign up for a weird program like the summer founders program instead of a summer activity at a legitimate place like microsoft or goldman sachs.

The startup deal was based on a combination of a deal, that we signed with julian (10 thousand usd in many%), and what, according to robert, students of the massachusetts institute of technology received over the summer period (6 thousand dollars). We invested $6,000 per founder, which is $12,000 in a typical 2-founder scenario, in exchange for 6%. It should have been fair, since it was twice as attractive as the deal we had made ourselves. In addition to that first summer, which was really hot, jessica brought air conditioners to the founders for free. [16]

Quite quickly, i realized that our company looked at the way to scale startup funding. It was more convenient for our florists to fund startups in batches, due to the fact that the help meant that we could do something for all startups at once, but it was also better for startups to be part of a batch. This solved one of the biggest problems the founders faced: isolation. Now you had not only colleagues, but also colleagues who understood the problems where you had already met and could tell you how they solve them.

As yc grew, we began to notice other scale advantages. Alumni have become a tight-knit community, eager to help each other, and even more so the current group, in whose shoes they remember themselves. We also realized that startups became customers mutually. Our company used to be jokingly called "gdp yc", but as yc grows, it becomes less and less comical. Today, start-ups get their initial set of clients almost entirely from a cohort of their peers in the group.

Initially, i did not imagine that yc would become a full-time job. I was going to do three things: hack, write essays and work on yc. As yc grew and i became even more involved with it, it began to take up well over a third of my attention. But for the first few years, i was still able to function on other things.

In the summer of 2006, robert and i began work on a new version of arc. This one was fast enough as it was compiled into scheme. To test this new arc, i wrote hacker news here. Initially, it was conceived as an aggregator of new products for startup founders and was called startup news, but after a few months i got tired of reading only about startups. Besides, you wanted to generate interest not in the founders of startups. These were the future founders of the startup. So i changed the title to hacker news and the subject to anything that provoked intellectual curiosity.

Hn was naturally helpful to yc, but it was also the biggest source of stress for me.If all i had to do was choose founders and promote them, life would be so simple. And listed means that hn was a mistake. By far the most stressful source of office stress can be at least something close to the point. That very moment i became like a body that was in pain while running, not because of the stress of the marathon, but because of the fact that i had a blister from the wrong shoes. When i solved some urgent problem during yc, there was a 60% chance it was related to hn, and a 40% chance it was everything else combined. [17]

Like hn, i wrote all of yc's internal software in arc. But although i continued to work carefully on the arc, i gradually calmed down on the arc, partly due to the fact that i did not have free minutes for such a step, and partly because fiddling with the language, our time, when all this was here, was much less attractive. Infrastructure depends on it. So now my three projects have been reduced to two or three: writing essays and commercializing yc.

Yc was different from other jobs i've done. In addition to deciding for myself what to work on, problems came to me. Every six months, a new batch of startups came along, and their problems, whatever they were, became our problems. It was a very exciting specialty because their problems were widely varied and good founders were very efficient. If you would like to get information about how to get more information about startups right quickly, you cannot choose the best way to organize it.

Some aspects of such earnings i did not perform. Impresses me. Arguments between co-founders, figuring out situations in which people lied to us, fighting people who mistreated startups, and the like. But i worked hard even on the parts that i didn't like. I was haunted by the fact that kevin hale once said of companies, "no one works harder than the boss." He meant both descriptively and prescriptively, and specifically the second part scared me. I wanted yc to be good, so if that, like how hard i worked, set an upper bound on how hard everyone else worked, i it's better to work really hard.

One day in 2010, when he was visiting california for an interview, robert morris did an amazing thing: he gave me unsolicited advice. I can only recall that he has done this once before. Deep in the viaweb, as i doubled over from a kidney stone, he offered to take me to the doctors. It was as a result that rtm was needed to provide unsolicited advice. Given the above, i remember his exact words very keenly. "You know," he said, "you have to make sure the y combinator isn't the last cool thing you do." But in the process of cultivation, it dawned on me that he said that i should leave. This advice seemed strange, because, like yc, things were going great. However, if there was anything rarer than rtm's advice, then we offer the fact that rtm was wrong. So that got me thinking. It's right that for today on my current path yc will be the last thing i'll do, any movie will only take a lot of attention from me. He ate more arc and was going to eat essays. Either yc was my whole life or eventually i would have to leave. And neither would i.

In the summer of 2012, my mother had a stroke, caused by a blood clot caused by colon cancer. The stroke upset her balance and she was placed in a personal nursing gym, but this problem really wanted to leave it and work out for herself at home, and my sister and i were willing to help us with this. I flew regularly to oregon to visit her, and these flights gave me a lot of time to think. At one of them i realized that i was ready to transfer yc to someone else.

I asked jessica if she wants to be president, but she did not want to, because of this we want to try to recruit sam altman. We spoke with robert and trevor and agreed on a full changing of the guard. Until then, yc was controlled by the original llc that the four of us founded. However, we wanted yc to last for a long time, and for that, the founders could not control it. So if sam agrees, we'll let him reorganize yc. Robert and i will retire, and jessica and trevor will become regular partners.

When we asked sam if he wanted to be president of yc, at first he said no. He wanted to launch a startup to develop nuclear reactors. But i resisted, or in october 2013 he finally agreed. We decided that he would take over the management from the winter party of 2014.Until the end of 2013, i more and more handed over control of yc to sam, partly so that he could master this work, and partly due to the fact that i was focused on my mother, and her cancer returned.

She died. January 15, 2014 we knew this was going to happen, but it was tough in every situation when it happened.

I kept working on yc until march to educate this group of startups to have a demo day, later i checked quite completely. (I'm still talking to alumni and modern startups working on the way i'm interested, but it only lasts a few hours a week.)

What should i do next? In the advice of rtma, you will agree about this, nothing was said. I was thinking of doing something completely different, so i decided that i would paint. I wanted to see how good i could be if i really focused on ours. So the next day, as soon as i stopped working on yc, i started painting. I was rusty and it took me a while to get back in shape, but at least it was totally fun to do. [18]

I spent most of 2014 drawing. I had never been able to function like this continuously before, and i was cooler than before. Not good enough, but better. Then in november, right in the middle of the picture, i was exhausted. Up to this point, i had always been curious to see what the painting i was working on would turn out to be, but suddenly finishing that painting became a chore. So i stopped working on it, cleaned up the brushes and haven't painted the joiner since then. Regardless of requirements, bye.

I understand that this sounds rather weak. But attention is a zero-sum game. If you can choose what to work on and the viewer chooses a project that doesn't become great (or at least good) for users, then it interferes with another project. And at 50, pranks were expensive.

I started wr