One of the questions I ask startups is how long it's been possible to do what they're doing. Ideally it has only been possible for a few years. A couple days ago I asked this during office hours, and the founders said "since December." What's possible now changes in months.
One of the questions I ask startups is how long it's been possible to do what they're doing. Ideally it has only been possible for a few years. A couple days ago I asked this during office hours, and the founders said "since December." What's possible now changes in months.
Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it's an uphill battle.
Jessica Livingston • Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.
Paul Graham • Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
Wait, it gets worse. You not only have to solve this hard problem, but you have to do it with no indication of whether you're succeeding. When you pick a big winner, you won't know it for two years.
Paul Graham • Black Swan Farming
The default of how you do these things is very powerful, if you've been in the industry for a long time. So we were sort of beneficiaries of our naïveté. We thought, "We don't know how to do this; let's just invent it."