Hackers in the Bazaar "blog" posts 😎
Paul Graham begins by introducing startups as a way to create wealth. He defines wealth as our wants, rather than what people typically misunderstand it to be as the intermediate stage, money. I think he overall makes solid points throughout this essay. I don’t particularly like how he explains that working harder yields more wealth, since I feel like this idea can’t apply to everyone in the world, particularly those in more unfortunate circumstances. At one point Graham also mentions how one should be wary of doing something close to what you enjoy, since it could cause you to have some sort of bias that prevents you from seeing what people actually want, which is what he says is the recipe to success in a startup: doing something or creating something that people want. I think this idea of success == do what people want makes tons of sense, though I would not agree to be skeptical of doing something you enjoy, because if you talk about some other kind of product that wouldn’t be able to be replicated by larger companies, this wouldn’t really apply. For example, the biggest thing that connected to me throughout the essay is how I want to (one day) create an indie game. I’d need to grasp a good idea of what people would enjoy. I would have tons of fun making this game (I hope) because I like gaming myself, and to make one is (if not more) just as enjoyable. I don’t think I should be skeptical about making a video game just because I’d really enjoy doing it. And I wouldn’t need to worry about a great idea being stolen by a bigger company when it comes to creating games as long as I’ve executed the game well on the first go (probably thanks to things like Indiegogo/Steam/Kickstarter). I have no expectations for my future game to become successful, but of course it’s natural for me to want it to be. Also as I’ve mentioned in the past, I’d want to work on making this game as a side hobby. So I wouldn’t technically be making a startup according to Graham because this venture would be pretty risk-free. So if my “plan” can’t really apply to Graham’s idea of a startup, then I can’t really say anything more about it, because I have no desire for it otherwise (later, I read how Graham’s Viaweb startup actually started similarly: “if it fails, it fails. No biggie”). Creating a successful startup not related to my game-dev-for-fun plans seems to harbor too much stress and require too much business knowledge I don’t have. And for that, I’d rather start out making money being told what to do, at least for the first few years once I’m out of college.
Next Graham goes further on about wealth. He says, once again, how wealth is not fixed. He also mentions how some people are worth more than others due to their work, and thus how their higher income is justified. This is an awkward point, that I’d only agree under one scenario, which would limit people to their own specialized containers. So that you can only be comparing the worth of one person to another based on their work iff their work belongs in the same field. There’s no way I can say that “…a basketball team (wouldn’t) trade one of their players for 100 random people(.)” but instead would rather say something like “a basketball team wouldn’t trade one of their players for 100 basketball hobbyists.” (A basketball or baseball player literally does not deserve the millions of dollars they make for playing a sport, no matter how hard they work for it or how good they are at the sport. Their pay is just absurd. But that’s unrelated.) And of course, on top of that there’s just the idea of luck. Yes, sure, people’s incomes are based on their individual skill at a certain specialization and how much people are in want or need of benefitting from that specialization, but there’s just some cases where it really doesn’t feel fair. So I guess it’s unfair, but not unjust. It’s not fair how someone can love baseball and become a professional player, get paid millions of dollars for doing what they love and would do for free, while Graham earlier makes a note to be skeptical of doing what we enjoy doing to be successful. The idea of “luck” seems prevalent here again, and it’s pretty trash (unless that luck comes my direct way, of course). I should also mention that I like Graham’s idea that it’s possible to create wealth without taking it away from others. Of course, it’s important to mention how this isn’t always the case, which is probably the reason why we have that pie fallacy misconception about it, but it’s a cool thought. If I wanted to get technical with it, though, I would mention how all resources are finite and how even if we create wealth as Jobs and Wozniak did, they gave something up for it. That could be time and energy, which was acquired by their life and food they ate, and that life and food had to come from somewhere at the very start. So wealth in this view really doesn’t come out of thin-air innovation we have as people. Graham finally brings up the wage gap and how it’s not really that big anymore, because technology has allowed average people to live up to the quality of life as rich people. I can’t get political here, because I know nothing, but this sounds like such a weird claim. How would he know? What does “average” qualify as? It’s like he’s only looking through a window involving the middle class and the rich. It’s weird that he’s making wealthy people seem relatable to whatever he thinks of as the “general” people, under the thought that he qualifies as a rich person himself. And again, he’s making these generalizations that really don’t apply to the real world. And giving some bad examples of how expensive things are worse quality? I don’t even get his point there. They work for the super, extremely specific products he mentioned, but what??
Graham finally talks about server-side applications being the next big thing. He may be right. Well, he’s convinced me so. He gives lots of very strong points about why server-side applications are good, and I can definitely see things heading that way currently (remote everything, if that’s the same thing?). Personally, besides this, mobile may be a very good path for the near future too since literally everyone has a phone, even those in underdeveloped areas. More people have phones/other mobile devices than do desktop computers. He actually almost convinced me to want to make a server-side web application, in combination with knowing cool sites like yld.me and waifupaste.moe. It’d be nice to make my own thing that I’d use myself. Actually having real other users or actually making money off of it would just be absolutely epic. But then comes the biggest problem of finding the perfect idea to chase after.