Essays

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Hackers tend to think business is for MBAs. But business administration is not what you're doing in a startup. What you're doing is business creation. And the first phase of that is mostly product creation-- that is, hacking. That's the hard part. It's a lot harder to create something people love than to take something people love and figure out how to make money from it.

Another thing that keeps people away from starting startups is the risk. Someone with kids and a mortgage should think twice before doing it. But most young hackers have neither.

And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you'll enjoy it more, even if you fail. You'll be working on your own thing, instead of going to some office and doing what you're told. There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as much.

That may be the greatest effect, in the long run, of the forces underlying open source and blogging: finally ditching the old paternalistic employer-employee relationship, and replacing it with a purely economic one, between equals.

Notes

[1] Survey by Forrester Research reported in the cover story of Business Week, 31 Jan 2005. Apparently someone believed you have to replace the actual server in order to switch the operating system.

[2] It derives from the late Latin trepalium, a torture device so called because it consisted of three stakes. I don't know how the stakes were used. "Travel" has the same root.

[3] It would be much bigger news, in that sense, if the president faced unscripted questions by giving a press conference.

[4] One measure of the incompetence of newspapers is that so many still make you register to read stories. I have yet to find a blog that tried that.

[5] They accepted the article, but I took so long to send them the final version that by the time I did the section of the magazine they'd accepted it for had disappeared in a reorganization.

[6] The word "boss" is derived from the Dutch baas, meaning "master."

Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.


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