It's very interesting how when a community reads the same material, various people will have similar responses even though they do not coordinate with each other. You see the same thing many times with inventions: it's not unusual for separate inventors to invent the same thing on opposite sides of the world without either having any idea what the other is up to.
It's a weird feeling to spend time writing an essay, thinking that you are hitting a problem from an unique angle, then see another person who took the same route.
Of course Steve's essay is a lot better.
I think the key thing to note is that the atmosphere that we live in as technologists -- architecture, programming languages, physics, science, engineering, etc -- prepares us in exactly the opposite way required for us to be successful entrepreneurs. Our world is full of information and culture on how to be good performers, not creators. Even when we do our best to share with each other what works or doesn't work, we do it in terms of performance -- exactly the opposite paradigm from what's needed.
Took me a long, long time to figure that out, and I still have a hard time with it. I wished somebody would have helped me with this when I was in my twenties.
EDIT: I want to hit this one more time, just to make sure I got it.
Let's assume we were all great music composers, like Beethoven. We set up an online community and folks drop by to share and talk.
To put it in Steve's terms, the things on the online community would all be about performing, not creating. They'd have to be. That's the nature of how text works. We'd be talking about the various kinds of pianos, oddball musical scales and their effects on voice harmonization, how to deal with agents, controversies and scandals inside the music industry, or what our work habits are like -- exactly the kinds of article you see on HN everyday.
But none of that shit is important -- or maybe it's better to say that _all_ of it is important, but only in how hundreds or thousands of these little pieces comes together to make a greater whole that's uniquely assembled by each entrepreneur, not in themselves. It's all details and shop-talk. People dropping by who also want to be great composers can easily drift into the idea that somehow these ancillary things are critical parts of what it takes to be a great artist. "John Williams was great. Did you see that sequencing tool he is using?" subtly becomes "If you want to write great music, you'll need a great sequencing tool" which then becomes "Top 20 sequencing tools to make your music shine" Then a hundred people read this and drift off and spend 3 months learning sequencing tools instead of learning how to write tunes that people love. This can be very harmful.
We're out in tools, gossip, and implementation-land when the key problem is learning how to create something people want. It's a creation problem, not an implementation problem. Nobody who knows what they are doing cares what kind of stool Beethoven sat on everyday while he was writing his Ninth Symphony. And those who do care either realize how microscopically insignificant it is, or are sadly ignorant of anything to do with composing.
This. This is why HN can only ever have very limited value to a person who wants their own startup. It's not the people, or the Arc program structure, or the even the topics that get submitted and upvoted. It's that you don't teach creativity by sitting around talking and reading about it. In almost every art, it's a mentor-apprentice, tell-share-do-observe-create-influence paradigm, not passive absorption of technical details and performance-related tips. This is one of the reasons the cofounder concept is so powerful, it's the reason that incubators help more than do-it-yourself-guys, it's the reason larger communities like SV end up spawning off so many crazily-unique ideas.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387227
It's very interesting how when a community reads the same material, various people will have similar responses even though they do not coordinate with each other. You see the same thing many times with inventions: it's not unusual for separate inventors to invent the same thing on opposite sides of the world without either having any idea what the other is up to.
It's a weird feeling to spend time writing an essay, thinking that you are hitting a problem from an unique angle, then see another person who took the same route.
Of course Steve's essay is a lot better.
I think the key thing to note is that the atmosphere that we live in as technologists -- architecture, programming languages, physics, science, engineering, etc -- prepares us in exactly the opposite way required for us to be successful entrepreneurs. Our world is full of information and culture on how to be good performers, not creators. Even when we do our best to share with each other what works or doesn't work, we do it in terms of performance -- exactly the opposite paradigm from what's needed.
Took me a long, long time to figure that out, and I still have a hard time with it. I wished somebody would have helped me with this when I was in my twenties.
EDIT: I want to hit this one more time, just to make sure I got it.
Let's assume we were all great music composers, like Beethoven. We set up an online community and folks drop by to share and talk.
To put it in Steve's terms, the things on the online community would all be about performing, not creating. They'd have to be. That's the nature of how text works. We'd be talking about the various kinds of pianos, oddball musical scales and their effects on voice harmonization, how to deal with agents, controversies and scandals inside the music industry, or what our work habits are like -- exactly the kinds of article you see on HN everyday.
But none of that shit is important -- or maybe it's better to say that _all_ of it is important, but only in how hundreds or thousands of these little pieces comes together to make a greater whole that's uniquely assembled by each entrepreneur, not in themselves. It's all details and shop-talk. People dropping by who also want to be great composers can easily drift into the idea that somehow these ancillary things are critical parts of what it takes to be a great artist. "John Williams was great. Did you see that sequencing tool he is using?" subtly becomes "If you want to write great music, you'll need a great sequencing tool" which then becomes "Top 20 sequencing tools to make your music shine" Then a hundred people read this and drift off and spend 3 months learning sequencing tools instead of learning how to write tunes that people love. This can be very harmful.
We're out in tools, gossip, and implementation-land when the key problem is learning how to create something people want. It's a creation problem, not an implementation problem. Nobody who knows what they are doing cares what kind of stool Beethoven sat on everyday while he was writing his Ninth Symphony. And those who do care either realize how microscopically insignificant it is, or are sadly ignorant of anything to do with composing.
This. This is why HN can only ever have very limited value to a person who wants their own startup. It's not the people, or the Arc program structure, or the even the topics that get submitted and upvoted. It's that you don't teach creativity by sitting around talking and reading about it. In almost every art, it's a mentor-apprentice, tell-share-do-observe-create-influence paradigm, not passive absorption of technical details and performance-related tips. This is one of the reasons the cofounder concept is so powerful, it's the reason that incubators help more than do-it-yourself-guys, it's the reason larger communities like SV end up spawning off so many crazily-unique ideas.