Interesting read. I’ll share some random thoughts of mine I’m not very confident in.
You give me the overall impression of being stretched pretty thin. You seem aware of this, but it doesn’t seem to me like you’re making the hard decisions you need to about what activities to cut out of your life. The analogy here might be a government that’s currently spending beyond its means and has no way of going in to debt in order to sustain deficit spending. The only way to add something new to the budget is to cut something that exists already. You might make an argument that by taking on more than you can expect to accomplish, you’ll always have something to do and you’ll get pushed beyond your current abilities. This argument might be true, but I think it’s likely enough to be untrue to experiment with scaling your ambitions back to see how that works out. Ultimately stress is bad for your productivity and mental health. I tend to think personal growth comes from optimizing your behaviors at a micro level (e.g. developing a routine that reliably transitions you in to working on personal projects at the end of your workday), not by setting macro level goals and letting the micro level details work themselves out. If I were you, for instance, I would cut learning Chinese (I’m sure we’ll find some EAs with native fluency at some point if we haven’t already) and connecting more with friends (unless this is something you do mainly because it makes you happy and rejuvenates you. I don’t make efforts to keep in touch with old friends beyond being friends on Facebook, and this seems to have worked out fine for me so long as I’m getting my socializing needs met somehow.)
I’ve been playing the startup game off and on for the past four years or so. My current view is that capitalism is a different game than hacking, but still one that’s a lot of fun to play. To be good at capitalism you want to know a lot about how the economy works. Knowledge of how the economy works has a short half-life because the economy is constantly changing. Almost everyone has a decent amount of firsthand knowledge about how the economy works through their experiences as an employee and consumer, but people who try to fit their experiences, and the experiences of businesses they read about, and the stuff you learn in an economics textbook, in to an overall framework that gives them a nose for finding, evaluating, and improving opportunities are rare. There’s a saying in the startup world that ideas don’t matter and execution is everything. I’ve spent lots of time executing and my view is that saying is wrong, but it points to something true. There’s a certain kind of excited wannabee entrepreneur you meet who is convinced that they have a super hot startup idea that’s going to make them rich. Typically they’re wrong about this because they’re not sufficiently knowledgeable capitalists to be very good at evaluating ideas in the first place. For example, maybe their idea is to improve product Y by giving it characteristic Z, when in fact buyers of Y don’t care about characteristic Z. Or maybe their idea only works if thousands of people are users of it, and they don’t have a battle plan to scale things up to that point (example: an acquaintance started a failed YC startup that let users clip/highlight bits of web pages that seemed interesting; the goal was to make it so that when reading a web page, you could easily pick out the good bits based on text that was frequently highlighted/clipped). Or their idea is only a small improvement over the status quo, and no one is going to go to the trouble of using it (example: a friend’s startup would broadcast text messages with your location to friends you were going to meet up with; imploded due to lack of funding). Paul Graham says that the best startup ideas look like bad ideas, and he cites the example of AirBNB, which seemed like a bad idea to him because he was too old to imagine letting strangers sleep in his house. I don’t think this contradicts my point; rather; I think the founders of AirBNB were unusually good at evaluating this idea relative to Paul Graham in the sense that they had a better mental model of young people like themselves than he did. In general, having access to information about the economy (in this case, the preferences of young people with spare rooms in their apartments) gives you a bit of an edge in the same way knowing insider information about a publicly traded company gives you an edge when trading its stock. Anyway, a typical wannabee entrepreneur guards their idea like a delicate vase and doesn’t gather any information (e.g. a simple Google search for what players already exist in this space) that might smash it. The cure is to not get too invested in your ideas; instead, see them as exciting opportunities to do some research in a particular industry to see what opportunities exist there. If I was seriously evaluating a startup idea right now I’d use the Waterloo quiz described in this article: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/entrepreneurship-a-game-of-poker-not-roulette/ It’s been validated in its predictive accuracy quite heavily and seems like it could be a pretty good shortcut to evaluating ideas well without having to gain the necessary expertise. The other thing that’s important for entrepreneurs is sheer personal competence. Even if you don’t have any sustainable competitive advantage in an industry, it’s possible to outdo your competitors just by having great people who work really smart and really hard, like Google or Walmart. It’s unlikely that you’ll have the opportunity to hire anyone more competent than you are to work for your startup. So being personally very competent is important. The typical wannabee entrepreneur is not competent enough to even get started on their idea; they just dream about it. You’ve already passed that bar with flying colors, it sounds like. Still, I would prioritize sleep and exercise over your startup for a while to see if you can get those competence gains locked in. In principle studying R etc. also increases one’s competence, but your startup is probably doing double duty and improving your coding skills to a decent extent as you work on it anyway, so I’m not sure how best to manage that tradeoff. Anyway, the main reason to launch your startup quickly is so you can start collecting data ASAP, especially unique data that no one else would have unless they were running another company of the same sort as yours. For example, part of what inspired Zuck to create Facebook was his observation that Harvard students would spend a lot of time stalking each other on a previous tool he had created that let you see what classes everyone was taking. But often you can cheat and just talk to customers about their needs, or do some research. You always want to be prioritizing the collection of data regarding whichever aspect of your business you’re most uncertain about. If you knew in advance exactly what you needed to build, startups would be pretty easy, just as easy as being an employee, with the same guaranteed payoff. Startups are hard because hacking the economy is not the same as hacking code, and most people don’t realize they need to get good at hacking the economy in order to guide their code hacking efforts (and specifically have lots of detailed knowledge of the economic terrain in whatever industry they’re playing in; you might be surprised by how easy it is to gain an edge on competitors by doing a little homework).
“You give me the overall impression of being stretched pretty thin. [There are] hard decisions you need to about what activities to cut out of your life.”
FWIW, I agree with this and I’d cut Chinese and some/all startups myself. Say if you’d prefer to discuss this in personal conversations Peter!
Interesting read. I’ll share some random thoughts of mine I’m not very confident in.
You give me the overall impression of being stretched pretty thin. You seem aware of this, but it doesn’t seem to me like you’re making the hard decisions you need to about what activities to cut out of your life. The analogy here might be a government that’s currently spending beyond its means and has no way of going in to debt in order to sustain deficit spending. The only way to add something new to the budget is to cut something that exists already. You might make an argument that by taking on more than you can expect to accomplish, you’ll always have something to do and you’ll get pushed beyond your current abilities. This argument might be true, but I think it’s likely enough to be untrue to experiment with scaling your ambitions back to see how that works out. Ultimately stress is bad for your productivity and mental health. I tend to think personal growth comes from optimizing your behaviors at a micro level (e.g. developing a routine that reliably transitions you in to working on personal projects at the end of your workday), not by setting macro level goals and letting the micro level details work themselves out. If I were you, for instance, I would cut learning Chinese (I’m sure we’ll find some EAs with native fluency at some point if we haven’t already) and connecting more with friends (unless this is something you do mainly because it makes you happy and rejuvenates you. I don’t make efforts to keep in touch with old friends beyond being friends on Facebook, and this seems to have worked out fine for me so long as I’m getting my socializing needs met somehow.)
I’ve been playing the startup game off and on for the past four years or so. My current view is that capitalism is a different game than hacking, but still one that’s a lot of fun to play. To be good at capitalism you want to know a lot about how the economy works. Knowledge of how the economy works has a short half-life because the economy is constantly changing. Almost everyone has a decent amount of firsthand knowledge about how the economy works through their experiences as an employee and consumer, but people who try to fit their experiences, and the experiences of businesses they read about, and the stuff you learn in an economics textbook, in to an overall framework that gives them a nose for finding, evaluating, and improving opportunities are rare. There’s a saying in the startup world that ideas don’t matter and execution is everything. I’ve spent lots of time executing and my view is that saying is wrong, but it points to something true. There’s a certain kind of excited wannabee entrepreneur you meet who is convinced that they have a super hot startup idea that’s going to make them rich. Typically they’re wrong about this because they’re not sufficiently knowledgeable capitalists to be very good at evaluating ideas in the first place. For example, maybe their idea is to improve product Y by giving it characteristic Z, when in fact buyers of Y don’t care about characteristic Z. Or maybe their idea only works if thousands of people are users of it, and they don’t have a battle plan to scale things up to that point (example: an acquaintance started a failed YC startup that let users clip/highlight bits of web pages that seemed interesting; the goal was to make it so that when reading a web page, you could easily pick out the good bits based on text that was frequently highlighted/clipped). Or their idea is only a small improvement over the status quo, and no one is going to go to the trouble of using it (example: a friend’s startup would broadcast text messages with your location to friends you were going to meet up with; imploded due to lack of funding). Paul Graham says that the best startup ideas look like bad ideas, and he cites the example of AirBNB, which seemed like a bad idea to him because he was too old to imagine letting strangers sleep in his house. I don’t think this contradicts my point; rather; I think the founders of AirBNB were unusually good at evaluating this idea relative to Paul Graham in the sense that they had a better mental model of young people like themselves than he did. In general, having access to information about the economy (in this case, the preferences of young people with spare rooms in their apartments) gives you a bit of an edge in the same way knowing insider information about a publicly traded company gives you an edge when trading its stock. Anyway, a typical wannabee entrepreneur guards their idea like a delicate vase and doesn’t gather any information (e.g. a simple Google search for what players already exist in this space) that might smash it. The cure is to not get too invested in your ideas; instead, see them as exciting opportunities to do some research in a particular industry to see what opportunities exist there. If I was seriously evaluating a startup idea right now I’d use the Waterloo quiz described in this article: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/entrepreneurship-a-game-of-poker-not-roulette/ It’s been validated in its predictive accuracy quite heavily and seems like it could be a pretty good shortcut to evaluating ideas well without having to gain the necessary expertise. The other thing that’s important for entrepreneurs is sheer personal competence. Even if you don’t have any sustainable competitive advantage in an industry, it’s possible to outdo your competitors just by having great people who work really smart and really hard, like Google or Walmart. It’s unlikely that you’ll have the opportunity to hire anyone more competent than you are to work for your startup. So being personally very competent is important. The typical wannabee entrepreneur is not competent enough to even get started on their idea; they just dream about it. You’ve already passed that bar with flying colors, it sounds like. Still, I would prioritize sleep and exercise over your startup for a while to see if you can get those competence gains locked in. In principle studying R etc. also increases one’s competence, but your startup is probably doing double duty and improving your coding skills to a decent extent as you work on it anyway, so I’m not sure how best to manage that tradeoff. Anyway, the main reason to launch your startup quickly is so you can start collecting data ASAP, especially unique data that no one else would have unless they were running another company of the same sort as yours. For example, part of what inspired Zuck to create Facebook was his observation that Harvard students would spend a lot of time stalking each other on a previous tool he had created that let you see what classes everyone was taking. But often you can cheat and just talk to customers about their needs, or do some research. You always want to be prioritizing the collection of data regarding whichever aspect of your business you’re most uncertain about. If you knew in advance exactly what you needed to build, startups would be pretty easy, just as easy as being an employee, with the same guaranteed payoff. Startups are hard because hacking the economy is not the same as hacking code, and most people don’t realize they need to get good at hacking the economy in order to guide their code hacking efforts (and specifically have lots of detailed knowledge of the economic terrain in whatever industry they’re playing in; you might be surprised by how easy it is to gain an edge on competitors by doing a little homework).
“You give me the overall impression of being stretched pretty thin. [There are] hard decisions you need to about what activities to cut out of your life.”
FWIW, I agree with this and I’d cut Chinese and some/all startups myself. Say if you’d prefer to discuss this in personal conversations Peter!