Essays
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- Programming Bottom-Up - Страница 1
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications - Страница 3
- Beating the Averages - Страница 6
- Java's Cover - Страница 12
- Being Popular - Страница 14
- Five Questions about Language Design - Страница 24
- The Roots of Lisp - Страница 28
- The Other Road Ahead - Страница 29
- What Made Lisp Different - Страница 44
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented - Страница 45
- Taste for Makers - Страница 46
- What Languages Fix - Страница 52
- Succinctness is Power - Страница 53
- Revenge of the Nerds - Страница 57
- A Plan for Spam - Страница 65
- Design and Research - Страница 72
- Better Bayesian Filtering - Страница 76
- Why Nerds are Unpopular - Страница 82
- The Hundred-Year Language - Страница 90
- If Lisp is So Great - Страница 97
- Hackers and Painters - Страница 98
- Filters that Fight Back - Страница 105
- What You Can't Say - Страница 107
- The Word "Hacker" - Страница 114
- The Python Paradox - Страница 117
- Great Hackers - Страница 118
- The Age of the Essay - Страница 125
- What the Bubble Got Right - Страница 131
- Bradley's Ghost - Страница 136
- Made in USA - Страница 137
- What You'll Wish You'd Known - Страница 140
- How to Start a Startup - Страница 147
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckagepad - Страница 159
- Undergraduation - Страница 161
- Writing, Briefly - Страница 166
- Return of the Mac - Страница 167
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - Страница 169
- The Submarine - Страница 173
- Hiring is Obsolete - Страница 177
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source - Страница 183
- After the Ladder - Страница 189
- Inequality and Risk - Страница 190
- What I Did this Summer - Страница 194
- Ideas for Startups - Страница 198
- The Venture Capital Squeeze - Страница 203
- How to Fund a Startup - Страница 205
- Web 2.0 - Страница 217
- How to Make Wealth - Страница 222
- Good and Bad Procrastination - Страница 233
- How to Do What You Love - Страница 236
- Are Software Patents Evil? - Страница 242
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - Страница 248
- How to Be Silicon Valley - Страница 255
- Why Startups Condense in America - Страница 260
- The Power of the Marginal - Страница 267
- The Island Test - Страница 275
- Copy What You Like - Страница 276
- How to Present to Investors - Страница 278
- A Student's Guide to Startups - Страница 282
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - Страница 290
- Mind the Gap - Страница 297
- How Art Can Be Good - Страница 305
- Learning from Founders - Страница 310
- Is It Worth Being Wise? - Страница 311
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup - Страница 316
- Microsoft is Dead - Страница 324
- Two Kinds of Judgement - Страница 326
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors - Страница 327
- An Alternative Theory of Unions - Страница 336
- The Equity Equation - Страница 337
- Stuff - Страница 339
- Holding a Program in One's Head - Страница 341
- How Not to Die - Страница 344
- News from the Front - Страница 347
- How to Do Philosophy - Страница 350
- The Future of Web Startups - Страница 357
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub - Страница 362
- Six Principles for Making New Things - Страница 364
- Trolls - Страница 366
- A New Venture Animal - Страница 368
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - Страница 371
I think companies that acquire technology will gradually learn to go after earlier stage startups. They won't necessarily buy them outright. The solution may be some hybrid of investment and acquisition: for example, to buy a chunk of the company and get an option to buy the rest later.
When companies buy startups, they're effectively fusing recruiting and product development. And I think that's more efficient than doing the two separately, because you always get people who are really committed to what they're working on.
Plus this method yields teams of developers who already work well together. Any conflicts between them have been ironed out under the very hot iron of running a startup. By the time the acquirer gets them, they're finishing one another's sentences. That's valuable in software, because so many bugs occur at the boundaries between different people's code.
InvestorsThe increasing cheapness of starting a company doesn't just give hackers more power relative to employers. It also gives them more power relative to investors.
The conventional wisdom among VCs is that hackers shouldn't be allowed to run their own companies. The founders are supposed to accept MBAs as their bosses, and themselves take on some title like Chief Technical Officer. There may be cases where this is a good idea. But I think founders will increasingly be able to push back in the matter of control, because they just don't need the investors' money as much as they used to.
Startups are a comparatively new phenomenon. Fairchild Semiconductor is considered the first VC-backed startup, and they were founded in 1959, less than fifty years ago. Measured on the time scale of social change, what we have now is pre-beta. So we shouldn't assume the way startups work now is the way they have to work.
Fairchild needed a lot of money to get started. They had to build actual factories. What does the first round of venture funding for a Web-based startup get spent on today? More money can't get software written faster; it isn't needed for facilities, because those can now be quite cheap; all money can really buy you is sales and marketing. A sales force is worth something, I'll admit. But marketing is increasingly irrelevant. On the Internet, anything genuinely good will spread by word of mouth.
Investors' power comes from money. When startups need less money, investors have less power over them. So future founders may not have to accept new CEOs if they don't want them. The VCs will have to be dragged kicking and screaming down this road, but like many things people have to be dragged kicking and screaming toward, it may actually be good for them.
Google is a sign of the way things are going. As a condition of funding, their investors insisted they hire someone old and experienced as CEO. But from what I've heard the founders didn't just give in and take whoever the VCs wanted. They delayed for an entire year, and when they did finally take a CEO, they chose a guy with a PhD in computer science.
It sounds to me as if the founders are still the most powerful people in the company, and judging by Google's performance, their youth and inexperience doesn't seem to have hurt them. Indeed, I suspect Google has done better than they would have if the founders had given the VCs what they wanted, when they wanted it, and let some MBA take over as soon as they got their first round of funding.
I'm not claiming the business guys installed by VCs have no value. Certainly they have. But they don't need to become the founders' bosses, which is what that title CEO means. I predict that in the future the executives installed by VCs will increasingly be COOs rather than CEOs. The founders will run engineering directly, and the rest of the company through the COO.
The Open CageWith both employers and investors, the balance of power is slowly shifting towards the young. And yet they seem the last to realize it. Only the most ambitious undergrads even consider starting their own company when they graduate. Most just want to get a job.
Maybe this is as it should be. Maybe if the idea of starting a startup is intimidating, you filter out the uncommitted. But I suspect the filter is set a little too high. I think there are people who could, if they tried, start successful startups, and who instead let themselves be swept into the intake ducts of big companies.
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