Founders
Episode 275 #275 Paul Graham
Founders

Episode 275: #275 Paul Graham

Founders

Episode 275

#275 Paul Graham

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading Paul Graham’s essays.

What I learned from reading Paul Graham’s essays.

----

Come see a live show with me and Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like The Best on October 19th in New York City.

Get your tickets here!

----

Support Founders' sponsors:

Tiny: The easiest way to sell your business. Quick and straightforward exits for Founders.

Capital: Banking built for Founders. Raise, hold, spend, and send—all in one place.

Tegus is a search engine for business knowledge that's used by Founders, investors, and executives.

[4:52] My father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it.

[5:49] Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second.

[7:41] To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.

[8:00] You should not worry about prestige. This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow.

[10:22] You have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.

[12:18] Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail.

[16:46] How To Do What You Love by Paul Graham

[16:34] What Doesn’t Seem Like Work by Paul Graham

[17:16] If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.

[17:42] Michael Jordan said what looked like hard work to others was play to him. Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby. (Founders #212) and Driven From Within by Michael Jordan and Mark Vancil. (Founders #213)

[20:53] How Not to Die by Paul Graham

[23:00] All that matters is to survive. The rest is just words. — Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson (Founders #224)

[24:49] You have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I've been there, and that's why I've never done another startup.

[27:31] If a startup succeeds, you get millions of dollars, and you don't get that kind of money just by asking for it. You have to assume it takes some amount of pain.

[28:17] So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand.

So don't get demoralized. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. What did he say to do? Oh, yeah. Don't give up.

[28:45] Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy by Paul Graham

[30:23] If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders.

[31:15] If you're worried about threats to the survival of your company, don't look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.

[34:10] The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.

[35:43] Relentlessly Resourceful by Paul Graham

[35:43] I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.

[37:20] If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I'd tape to the mirror. "Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.

[37:40] The Anatomy of Determination by Paul Graham

[37:45] David’s Notes: A Conversation with Paul Graham

[39:50] After a while determination starts to look like talent.

[42:12] Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.

[43:21] One of the best ways to help a society generally is to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together. (Founders Podcast Conference?)

[45:21] What Startups Are Really Like by Paul Graham

[49:00] The Entire History of Silicon Valley by John Coogan

[49:50] Meet You In Hell: Andrew Carnegie Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America by Les Standiford. (Founders #73)

[55:08] You need persistence because everything takes longer than you expect. A lot of people (founders) were surprised by that.

[57:18] Estee Lauder was a master at doing things that don’t scale. Estée Lauder: A Success Storyby Estée Lauder. (Founders #217)

[58:45] What makes companies fail most of the time is poor execution by the founders. A lot of times founders are worried about competition. YC has founded 1900+ companies. 1 was killed by competitors. You have the same protection against competitors that light aircraft have against crashing into other light aircraft. Do you know what the protection is? Space is large.

[1:01:00] Paul on what he would do if he was strating a company today:

If I were a 22 year starting a startup I would certainly apply to YC. Which is not that surprising, since it was designed to be what I wish I'd had when I did start one. But (assuming I got in) I would not get sucked into raising a huge amount on Demo Day.

I would raise maybe $500k, keep the company small for the first year, work closely with users to make something amazing, and otherwise stay off SV's radar.

Ideally I'd get to profitability on that initial $500k. Later I could raise more, if I felt like it. Or not. But it would be on my terms.

At every point in the company's growth, I'd keep the company as small as I could. I'd always want people to be surprised how few employees we had. Fewer employees = lower costs, and less need to turn into a manager.

When I say small, I mean small in employees, not revenues.

[1:05:07] Against The Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson (Founders #200)

[1:07:00] A Word To The Resourceful by Paul Graham

[1:08:07] We found the startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we'd say "they can take care of themselves." The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll close it, whatever type of lead it is.

[1:09:00] Understanding all the implications of what someone tells you is a subset of resourcefulness. It's conversational resourcefulness.

[1:11:00] Do Things That Don’t Scale by Paul Graham

[1:11:00] Startups take off because the founders make them take off.

[1:16:00] The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time.

[1:16:00] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson (Founders #140)

[1:21:00] The world is complicated. It is noisy. We are not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us. —Steve Jobs

[1:22:00] Any strategy that omits the effort is suspect.

[1:23:00] The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.

Now that there are two components you can try to be imaginative about the second as well as the first. Founders need to work hard in two dimensions.

I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free by going to https://readwise.io/founders/

I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

#275 Paul Graham

Introduction

"How to do what you love? To do something well, you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to just four words: Do what you love. But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states. Some of the time, adults were making you do things, and that was called work.


The rest of the time, you could do what you wanted and that was called playing. Work was pretty much defined as not fun and it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grown-up work. If we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work. And indeed, that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so that they can work on more interesting stuff later.


Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me that I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun, fun like playing, it took me years to grasp that. It was not until I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.


How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents or the desire to make money or prestige, ore sheer inertia. Here is an upper bound.


Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself, he ought to finish what he was working on first. It used to perplex me when I read about people who like what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work that I like that much.


If I had a choice of A, spending the next hour working on something or B, be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no. But the fact is almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Caribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, then work on hard problems.


Doing what you love doesn't mean do what makes you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while, you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something. As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken, which is not to say that you have to spend all your time working.


You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else, even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it. I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You will have to force yourself to work.


And when you resort to that, the results are distinctly inferior. To be happy, I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy but admire. You have to be able to say at the end, 'Wow, that's pretty cool.' What you should not do, I think is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You should not worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.


When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind, though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like and let prestige take care of itself.


The other big force leading people astray is money. The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it, even if they had to work at another job to make a living. With such powerful forces leading us to astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work equals pain. Those who escaped this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money.


How many people even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand perhaps out of billions. It's hard to find work you love. It must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people who are still in denial.


Although great work takes less discipline than people think because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it. Finding work you love does usually require discipline. Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest, always produce. For example, if you have a day job, you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction? However, bad they may be. As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate.


Always produce is also a heuristic for finding work you love. It will automatically push away from things you think you're supposed to work on toward things that you actually like. Always produce will discover your life's work, the way water with the aid of gravity finds the hole in your roof," this may be my favorite line of the entire essay. 'You have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.


One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love." And then he goes into one reason why it's so difficult to find work that you'd love to do is the fact that we usually have to decide what we're going to do way too early. "A friend of mine who is quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell, 'Don't do it,' but she never does.


How did she get into this fix? In high school, she already wanted to be a doctor, and she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way, including, unfortunately, not liking it. Now she has a life chosen for her by a high school kid. When you're young, you're giving the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it."


But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. Your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. That is probably part of the reason I chose computers. You can be a professor, or you can make a lot of money or morph into any number of other kinds of work. It is also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like.


It is harder than it looks, constraints give your life shape, remove them and most people have no idea what to do. Look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want until your 30s or 40s. But if you have the destination in sight, you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch. And if you know what work you love, you're practically there.

That was an excerpt from an essay that changed my life, it's called How to Do What you Love, and it was written Paul Graham. So I've been reading Paul Graham's essays for years. I think they are the most influential writing for technology start-ups ever. And they've had a profound impact on me personally as well. So in case if you don't know who Paul Graham is, he's a programmer, a writer. He founded this company called Viaweb. I think within 2 years, they sold it for close to $50 million to Yahoo. This happened back in the late '90s.

Access the full transcript
Sign in or register to view episode transcripts.

Contact

Get in touch at help@joincolossus.com