Paul Graham Keynote¶
Author¶
- Paul Graham
- YCombinator
Silicon Valley¶
- The center of SV moves around the peopl who make the next generation of stuff * So, this room is right now
- The frightening-ness of big startup ideas
- List of 7 gigantic startup ideas
- Scary, maybe I should do that recipe site instead
Next Google¶
- Start next Google
- Microsoft lost their way when they got into the search business
- Google has been getting into the social network business
- Nostalgic for the right answer from google * Seems based on Scientologist: “What’s true is what’s true for you”
- Find tiny idea that turns big idea * Dinosaur egg
- Search engine for top 10k hackers
- Make the search engine the one you want
- Don’t worry about something that constrains you in the long term
Replace Email¶
- Any big idea has a bunch of people nibbling around it
- Not designed to be used the way it is now * Bell labs “Want to go to lunch?”
- Now a shitty todo list
- Tweaking the inbox is not enough
- Todo list protocol insteayd of messaging protocol
- Sending emails to yourself
- Want to know what they want you to do
- When does it need to be done?
- Whenever powerful people are in pain, that is the way to make lots of money
- Gmail has gotten painfully slow
- People will pay for faster email
Replace Universities¶
- claps
- Last couple of decades, universities seem to have gone down the wrong path
- Expensive country clubs
Kill Hollywood¶
- Hollywood was slow to embrace the internet
- Internet beat cable
- Bolted an iMac to the wall, found it better than a TV
- TV seemed like it was designed by the same people who designed the thermostat
- How do you deliver drama via the internet?
- You kind of want to know what you’re going to get with a show
A New Apple¶
- If Apple won’t make the next iPad, who will? * Empirically, it’s none of the incumbents
- It will be a startup * Not crazy, Apple did it
- Steve Jobs showed us what one person can do
- “Steve Jobs unrolled the future like a carpet”
- The next CEO might not live up to Steve Jobs, but doesn’t need to * Just needs to be better than HP, Samsung, Motorola
Bring Back Moore’s Law¶
- Circuits are going to get twice as dense, not twice as fast
- Hardware would just solve software’s problems
- Need to rewrite it to be parallel
- It would be really great by making a lot of CPUs look like one
- The most ambitious is to do it automatically via a compiler * “Sufficiently smart compiler”
- If not impossible, expected value is really high
- Less ambitious is to start from the bottom * Build programs out of more parallizable lego blocks * Programmer still does a lot of the work
- Middle ground is a semi automatic weapon * Looks like a sufficiently smart compiles, but there are humans in there
- Make a market place, let people do it * Maybe make bots that will do it
Ongoing Diagnosis¶
- Imagine the ways we will seem backwards to people in the future
- Seem barbaric to wait for symptoms to be diagnosed
- Bill Clinton had to wait for arteries to be 90% blocked to find out
- Launch fast and iterate may not work for medical. * Work on pigs first * Sausage company on the side
- The medical profession will be an obstacle to this
- Doctors are alarmed to look for problems that aren’t there
- If you start testing people all the time, you may get a lot of terrifying false alarms
- Think this is an artifact of current limitations
- Going against medical tradition
Tactical Advice¶
- For big problems, don’t make a frontal attack
- “Are we there yet?”, Haters
- Notice that you replaced email when it’s done
- Start with small things, let them get big * Facebook
- Maybe big ambitions are a bad thing * The bigger they are, more likely to be wrong * Don’t identify, just think there is something out there * When the opportunity comes to move, move there
- Blurry vision may be better