How to Make Wealth

Paul Graham is fond of a Silicon Valley saying: “You make what you measure.”6 The act of measuring some aspect of performance leads to caring about that one thing and lavishing your attention on it, which, in turn, leads to improving it. He suggests that startups set a specific weekly target for growth, which can be measured in terms of revenue or

The classic startup is fast and informal, with few people and little money. Those few people work very hard, and technology magnifies the effect of the decisions they make. If they win, they win big.

The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.

Wealth is a means to an end: economic security. Put another way, wealth is the absence of economic anxiety. Freed of the pressure to earn, we can choose how we live.