Keynote: Paul Graham, YCombinator

another keynote this morning and then we'll take a break our next keynote is actually Paul Graham of Y Combinator stage is full of robots something's going on here so a lot of you guys may be from out of town boy this is a lot bigger than the last PyCon I talked at know last time I talked at PyCon was in 2003 I think it was the second PyCon um and it was about sort of the front half of that bit over there the true believers um the early converts so those of you guys from out of town are probably wondering what Silicon Valley is like Silicon Valley is a curious thing it doesn't have an architectural center there's no forum that is the center of Silicon Valley the center of Silicon Valley moves around it is wherever there is at this moment the greatest concentration of the people who are going to make the next generation of stuff so you're probably you're probably guessing where I'm leading this is right now the center Silicon Valley you are it so I hope you're not disappointed because this is the center of Silicon Valley right now um in this talk I'm going to demonstrate a curious phenomenon I've observed in all these years I have been working on Y Combinator and not on programming languages um the frightening this of very big start-up ideas very big startup ideas are actually terrifying and the way I'm going to demonstrate this is by frightening you I'm going to give you a list of seven gigantic startup ideas any one of them is so big it could make you a billionaire and at this point those of you who are thinking maybe of one day starting startups are waiting expectantly by the way you don't have to take notes I wrote this all down it's going to be the web is an essay you can just listen um all the ideas are going to be in there but if you're thinking of starting a startup you're probably thinking to yourselves alright here it comes but you'll see when I say them you'll find instead of embracing them expectantly you'll be thinking maybe I should do that recipes site after all um don't worry it's not a sign of weakness in fact arguably it is a sign of sanity um the biggest startup ideas are frightening and not just because they'd seem like a lot of work the biggest start-up ideas threaten your identity um there's a scene in Being John Malkovich anybody know that movie I highly recommend that to hackers we have a Malkovich room in Y Combinator believe it or not there's like this half floor up there that nobody knows about it's the funniest thing um this is this is not like the elevator pass it really exists well there's a scene in Being John Malkovich where our nerdy hero probably difficult for you guys to identify with but imagine um he encounters this very beautiful attractive woman and he's like um and she says to him here's the thing if you ever got me you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me um and that's what these really big ideas say to you um this phenomenon is one of the most important things you can under bet you can understand about startups you'd think really big startup ideas would be attractive but actually they tend to repel you um and so you need to learn how to tack into that wind essentially alright ready ok so suppose you want to start the next Google let's start with the most obvious idea um start the next Google the best ideas are right on just the right side of impossible and it's hard to judge at the point where you have them whether they're on the right side or the wrong side right so I'm telling you a lot of these ideas I'm going to suggest are going to seem seem kind of impossible um so making a new search engine to compete with Google that sounds almost impossible but there are encouraging signs um or discouraging signs if you were a Google user the point where it became clear to me that Microsoft really lost their way was when they got into the search business um so like that was not a natural move for Microsoft why did they do that they did that because they were afraid of Google and Google was in the search business they I think we got to get in the search business search is the future well you probably noticed google has been getting into the social network business lately mmm so maybe that's a sign of something um now the mere fact that Google may have peaked is not by itself doesn't doesn't by itself prove that there's room for a new search engine however just lately like when I'm using Google search I find I'm kind of nostalgic for the old days when Google was true to its own slightly ASPI self and was like designed like a UNIX utility that would just like give you the right answers fast right and now like the search results seem like they're based on the Scientologists principle that what's true is what's true for you I'm like the JavaScript man like I feel like if I put my cursor in the wrong place anything might happen I like I feel like I am like I'm being a be tested on right um so how do you win here the way to win here the way to attack all these really gigantic ideas is to find the tiny thing that turns into the gigantic idea right um find the dinosaur egg the dinosaur egg I just like invented a meme on the spot that was not in the talk um the dinosaur egg is to make a search engine that all the hackers use if you just made a search engine that the top 10,000 hackers used and you got like the first 20 percent of them in this room right if you just made a search engine that the top 10,000 hackers used and nobody else you'd have only 10,000 users right talk about paltry and yet you would be in a very powerful position just as Google was when they had those first 10,000 users so make a search engine for hackers the good news is if you are if you are capable of doing this startup idea you are one of those 10,000 hackers right so the solution is make the search engine you yourself one this is a case where it's it's good to be self-indulgent you want to make your search ends your search queries turing-complete go for it right you want to make it like really good for code search at the expense of everything else fine don't worry about doing something initially that will constrain you in the long term because if you don't win in the short term there won't be a long term anyway so call it hacks or search or something like that and like make the search queries make the UI really hard to use it doesn't matter if you get those first 10,000 people you're like 5% of the way to an IPO just like Facebook was when they got all the Harvard undergrads even though they probably didn't realize it at the time okay number two um replace email by the way a lot of these ideas there are people already nibbling at the round at the edges off any big dia has a bunch of people nibbling at the edges of it they just don't realize how big the piece of cheese they're nibbling at the edges of our um email was not designed to be used the way we use it now it was designed for like guys in a one card we're at Bell Labs to send one another a message saying like want to go to lunch um I hear they have you know sausages in a Bell Labs cafeteria um but email is not a messaging protocol it's a to-do list right or at least my inbox is a to-do list and email is the protocol for putting stuff on it here's the problem it is a shitty to-do list any one of you can put something on my to-do list right and I don't want that so I'm open it's different yeah I'm open to different solutions to this problem but I suspect tweaking the inbox it's not going to be enough you're going to have to make a new protocol it can like degrade to the old protocol but I think you should make a to-do list protocol instead of a messaging protocol and as a messaging protocol it ought to give more power to the recipient I ought to be able to control who can put things in my inbox when someone can't put something in my inbox I should just my server should just say sorry not accepting any more things right not like I send another message back to them using the protocol saying sorry I'm not oh I'm away now right like the away message it's like so obviously a sign that something is wrong more how about like sending emails to yourself um um okay so like I want to know more about this thing not just like who it came from and when I want to know like what somebody actually wants me to do I want to give people different ability to tell me to do different things I want them to tell me you like do they want me to do more than just read some text am I supposed to do something in the physical world when does it have to be done by when at which point can this thing just disappear because it's too late you know God knows how many like conference invitations I have from like 2007 and my deep buried down in my inbox this is one of these ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object on the one hand entrenched protocols are impossible to this place on the other hand I just do not want to believe that people in the future are going to be living in the same email hell that we do now um so if it's going to get replaced eventually why not now right I'm ready um if you do this here's an interesting one friend of mine was an early employee at Google um you know he's rich that's what that means um hey seriously when in the valley if you're not from the valley like early Google employee is like a some sort of code word for rich um so I asked him if he's like if he could still stand working at Google now that he was rich and he didn't have to and he said actually it was pretty he didn't really have any problems except he got so much email right um and this guy is like one of the most powerful people at Google like powerful people are in pain because of email right um and whenever powerful people are in pain that is an opportunity to make lots of money so if you build this thing some of the most powerful people in the world will be the first to use it like they don't care if it interacts well with other protocols they'll say you want to put something on my to-do list you're not sending me email you got to use this um so you don't have to worry about a chicken-and-egg problem right there you have a dinosaur chicken um whatever you build make it fast gmail has gotten painfully slow by the way the original version of that sentence was gmail is painfully slow I owe my partner Paul Buchheit um for correcting me there hmm gmail has become painfully slow if you just made something like the same as Gmail but a lot faster you could start to pull users away from Gmail with just that people will pay for this I would have no problem paying $50 a month in fact when I think about how much time I spend an email like that's probably one of the things I'm most in denial about um like it would probably probably justified paying $1,000 a month for this if you know if it would make me better if it would make my life better that'll be like the probably the lowest hanging fruit and making my life better um all right number three replace universities now this this is an idea people are all over lately boy it just occurred to me this is an instance there of right um hackerspaces yeah with Malkovich rooms I am reluctant to suggest that an institution that's been around for over a millennium is going to disappear just because of some mistakes they have made in the last couple decades but certainly in the last couple decades universities seem to be heading down the wrong path you know they've they're like not fun for the students or the professors they've turned into like expensive country clubs um where you don't learn a lot you study abroad um I don't think universities will disappear I think they'll I don't think they'll be replaced wholesale they'll be replaced by a whole bunch of little things that sort of serve ala carte what those monolithic four years what those monolithic four years did many of them will look different from what universities look like people won't realize they're being replaced like people will learn stuff right and that that's how they will be replaced arguably Y Combinator is one of one instance of this this is this is an instance of it um learning is such a big problem that if you change the way people do it it will also have a wave of secondary effects for example universities are now for better or worse sort of a credential like where you went to college people ask you that fairly early on in conversations if universities go away like maybe credentialing has to be supplied separately you could replace high schools that would probably be even better but with high schools you face all kinds of bureaucratic obstacles and you don't want to do things in a start-up you want to deal with stuff that's going to slow you down so don't go for high schools first go for universities um okay number four kill Hollywood mm I'll give a few more here's a few more details about what that would involve because by the way that whole kill Hollywood thing that was Paul boo kites idea that was not my idea really you guys should give him credit for that um and if there's any hitmen from the RIAA like definitely Paul Buffay that's credit for that one um I just wrote the RFS in fact PV was kind of amused because we were like having lunch one at one afternoon um and he said you know we should like have an RFS for like people to replace the UM the big studios and I said all right and so I wrote this RFS and he's like the next day is like Jesus Christ that was just an idea yesterday and now it's a meme um so Hollywood Hollywood's big mistake well one of many um was to be slow to embrace the internet and that was a big mistake because I think just a you know you can call a winner early sometimes in elections I think we can now call a winner in the delivery mechanism for entertainment and it is the internet not cable um a lot of the reason is the horribleness of cable clients what are popularly known as televisions I did not wait for Apple TV the last TV we had was such a piece of um that I just like got an iMac and bolted it to the wall um like I don't know what how much better Apple TV is going to be like all I need is like some way to see the screen while I'm driving it whether a wireless mouse um it's a little inconvenient but my god it's so much better than that like it was from Samsung you know they should really not have put their brand on it because like every time I was using it I was seeing that Samsung on the bottom of the screen thinking I hate this company it was like it was designed by the same people who designed my thermostat but they had a lot more screen real estate to up all right some of the attention that people currently devote to watching TV can be stolen by completely different things like social networks some can be stolen by similar things like games but there's always going to be this residual demand of people who want to sit and watch some story unfold that part's not going away so how what it comes down to like kill Hollywood comes down to how do you deliver drama via the internet um I'm not sure whatever you make whatever you make will have to be on a larger scale than YouTube clips though because when you think about it when you sit down to watch TV and movies as we probably all still do you you either want to watch a TV show where you have like some characters you already know you can't want to know what you're going to get it has to be a certain predictable length you know what you're going to get you know what the characters are either that or or it's some big movie and you know something about the movie in advance right um there are two ways delivery and payment could play out either some big company like Netflix or Apple will be the app store for entertainment I guess that would be the entertainment store um and you'll reach audiences by just getting your stuff into them or they'll be too overreaching and inflexible and companies will spring up to supply this kind of stuff ala carte to the producers of this this drama if that happens there will be a need for infrastructure companies too so we'll see um alright speaking of Apple um number five a new Apple um now I was talking I was talking recently to someone who knew Apple well um I won't give any more details um and I asked him if the people now running the company would keep being able to like come up with new things the way they used to when Steve Jobs is running it and he said no um now I sort of worried already that that was going to be the answer and I asked him more to see how he would qualify it than what the actual answer was but you will notice there were no qualifications um he just said no there will be no new stuff at least not that's good beyond whatever is currently in the pipeline and even that they'll argue about what to call it um no actually he didn't predict that um so um so how do we do this right um if Apple is not going to make the next iPad who is well empirically the part none of the existing players are going to make it right because none of the existing players are run by product visionaries and empirically the only way to get a product visionary as the CEO of a company is for him to start it and not get fired mmm so what that means like unbelievable as it sounds this is like one of these results where you follow some logical chain of reasoning and end up with this bizarre bizarre consequence what that means is the next Apple is going to have to be a start-up and that sounds preposterous ly ambitious but no more ambitious than it was for Apple they became as big as Apple right um and someone taking on the problem now has an advantage that Apple didn't have they have the example of Apple um which is valuable in two ways one um Steve Jobs showed us like Roger Bannister did what one person can do if you really try you can do a lot better than some soot running some electronics company and like you have like the product manager to decide what the features are and then you give it to a designer no no no you can make things much better than that right um the other way he showed us what's possible is like the way august's did it um if you know what I mean um okay Steve Jobs like there's there's definitely like a gap around here in Silicon Valley Steve Jobs like unrolled the future like a carpet um I don't know about you guys but I had sort of unconsciously signed up for just like whatever they we're gonna make was whatever I would be using in the future which is why it was so shocking when he died because now like who's gonna make the future right um well whoever it is I don't know mmm but please apply to Y Combinator um now that Steve is gone there is a vacuum we can all feel um which means if a new company led the way just like said okay we're going to lead the way into the future of hardware people would follow um because they're used to following now um the CEO of that company the so called next Steve Jobs might not you know he might just not quite live up to Steve Jobs but um he wouldn't have to he would just have to be better than Samsung and HP and Motorola right that doesn't sound quite so hard does it okay number six all right you guys are gonna hate this one um except for the like 30 or so of you who are like oh my god I've been working on um alright number six bring back the old Moore's law mmm the last 10 years have reminded us what Moore's law actually said it didn't say computers we're gonna get twice as fast every 18 months it said circuits we're going to get twice as dense I can remember when it used to seem pedantic to point that out right um but not anymore mmm well this Moore's law is not as good as the old one the old Moore's law used to mean that if your software was slow all you had to do was wait and the inexorable I remember this it was the great as we'd say should we work on optimizing and it like whatever we'll just wait for the next generation of processors um you know hardware would just like solve software's problems well now now we have to work right now if your software is slow instead of just waiting you have to rewrite it to do more things in parallel and that is a lot more work no one knows better than I do mmm it would be great if a startup could give I mean really great um if a start-up could give back something of the old Moore's law by making a lot of CPUs look to the developer like one real big fast CPU there are several ways to do it the most ambitious and I'm not even sure this is possible we'll see it's all going to be a matter of degree but the most ambitious way is to do it automatically by writing a compiler that like takes programs written for written the old way and turns them into programs for the new hardware I mean that is what compilers are supposed to do right so problem is there's a name for this compiler this fishing least smart compiler and it is a byword for impossibility so is it really impossible though is it really the case that no configuration of the memory of the bits in memory of an existing of a present-day computer is this compiler because if you really think that you should by formalizing certain aspects of it you should try to prove it because that would be an interesting result and if it's not impossible but simply very be very hard the expected value of working on it might be pretty high the reason the expected value is so high is Web Services if you could write software that gave programmers the convenience of the way things were in the old days you would get all the users because programmers like convenience just suppose there was a processor manufacturer that had continued to be able to translate increasing circuit densities into increasing clock speeds right now like Intel would be worried they would take all of Intel's business well now in the world of web services you don't see your processors anymore which means if you had this software it would be indistinguishable from the users point of view from you being that manufacturer right that's what's at stake um ok the less ambitious way of approaching this problem is to start from the bottom and instead of like having the compiler do everything for you you build programs out of more parallelizable Lego blocks like Hadoop and MapReduce um that's obviously doable it's happening um then the programmer still does most of the work and there's probably lots of startup ideas even there um there is an intriguing middle ground where you build a semi-automatic weapon um where there's a human in the loop you looked you build something that looks to the user like this efficiently smart compiler but actually there's humans in there optimizing um these people might be your employees but it might be even more exciting if you created a marketplace for optimization now of course suppose there was a marketplace for optimization you guys are probably are some of you guys are probably already thinking about what I'm going to suggest suggest next people would start to write BOTS right to do the optimization and if you ever got to the point where it could all be done by BOTS you would be in the very curious situation of actually having created the sufficiently smart compiler but no one would have a copy of um that would be pretty interesting I mean that would be worth doing just because it would be so interesting um all right so I realize believe me I realize how crazy all this sounds there was division among the Y Combinator partners whether I should even mention this one Robert Morris thought I would sound like an idiot if I even brought it up Paul Buchheit and Aaron Ibis said hey what the hell you know maybe it'll work um but what I like about this idea is all the different ways in which it's wrong the whole idea of focusing on optimization is counter to the general trend in software development for decades right trying to write this efficiently smart compiler is by definition a mistake and even if it weren't compilers are supposed to be this sort of software that's written by open source projects not startups right so the the forum troll which I have by now internalized mmm doesn't even know where to begin in raising objections to this idea um but I'm sure I'll find out this afternoon on Hacker News yeah that is what I call a startup idea um but wait there's one that will face even greater resistance this is my last one on the list number seven ongoing diagnosis um one of my many tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways we will seem backwards to people in the future um and I am pretty sure that 50 or 100 years from now it will seem barbaric to people that we had to wait until we had symptoms to be diagnosed with things like heart disease and cancer for example in 2004 Bill Clinton found he was feeling short of breath and went to his doctors and they said your arteries are over 90% blocked in three days later he had a quadruple bypass now it seems reasonable to assume that Bill Clinton has access to the best medical care available and even he had to wait until his arteries were 90% blocked to learn that the number was 90% right um that can't be that hard to figure out with some kind of non-destructive testing I mean maybe version one could you destructive testing I don't know you have a version one maybe I shouldn't be funding software startups doing medical devices um just get something out quickly launch fast and iterate you could do heart disease for pigs first and you could like run a sausage company on the side to monetize it this is this is not in the talk but like surely at some point in the future we're gonna know this number the way we know our weight right um so why don't you start a startup to do that um cancer - it seems crazy that you have to wait until you have some lump and you go to the doctor and you have the lump and they say oh it's cancer right I think what will happen is pretty soon we'll have some sort of radar screen that cancers will show up on much more quickly um it might not be cancer as we now think that I wouldn't be surprised if at any given time we all have tens or even hundreds of micro cancers going on at any given time and we just don't know about it but like we'll know right but it won't be the end of the world um so one of the obstacles the big obstacles to come from this well if there's so many obstacles some of the big obstacles to come to this idea what will come from the medical profession this is not the way the medical profession has traditionally worked right traditionally you feel symptoms and you go to a doctor and the doctor figures out what's wrong um a lot of doctors were rather alarmed at the idea of doing what lawyers call a fishing expedition and going to look for problems that you don't even know were there um problems you don't even you don't even know what kind of problem you're looking for um they have a name for the things that you discover when you do this incidentalomas mmm and doctors regard them as kind of a pain in the ass for example a friend of mine once had her brain scanned as part of a study and was horrified to discover what appeared to be a large tumor in her brain and after further testing it turned out to be a harmless cyst but she had a couple weeks of Terror there um a lot of doctors worry that if you start testing people all the time this is what you'll get a lot of terrifying a lot of terrifying false alarms that make patients panic and require expensive and possibly dangerous tests to resolve but I think that that is just an artifact of current limitations I think the way it's going to play out is if people are scanned all the time and they will know about these things early and they will realize oh that thing in my brain is just like a birthmark it's always been there there's room for a lot of startups here the obstacles they face will be horrific in addition to the technical obstacles all startups face and the bureaucratic obstacles all medical startups face you'll be going against thousands of years is medical tradition but it will happen and it will be a great thing um and people in the future will feel as sorry for us as we do for generations before you didn't have anesthetic or antibiotics all right so now well I'll give you a little tactical advice how much time do I have left anybody know oh hey um how much enough huh all right um I'm going to conclude with a little tactical advice if you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I have been talking about do not make a direct frontal attack on the problem don't say for example you're going to replace email um where your employees and investors will constantly be saying are we there yet um and haters will be lined up waiting to watch you fail um just say you're building to-do lists software what could be more harmless um they can notice that you've replaced email when it's a fait accompli um just as people will notice about iPads replacing windows um empirically the way to do really big things seem to be to start with small things and row them bigger want to dominate micro computer software for decades start by writing a basic interpreter for a machine with a couple of thousand users want to make the universal website a giant vacuum for people's time from start by building a website where Harvard undergrads can stock one another hmm empirically it's not just for other people's sake that you need to start small you seem to for your own sake - neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew how big their companies were going to get all he knew was that they were on to something maybe it's a bad idea maybe it's a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially because the bigger your ambitions the longer they're going to take to realize and the longer you're projecting into the future the more likely you're going to be wrong there are plenty of examples of that too so I think the best way to do these big ideas is not to try and identify a precise point in the future and say how do I get from here to there like the popular image of a visionary I think a better model is Columbus who thought there's something to the West hey I'll sail westward start with something that works that you know works that's small and then when the opportunity comes to move move westward right um the popular image of the visionary is someone with a very very precise view of the future but empirically it's probably better to have a blurry one so that's my whole talk am I done do I am I out of time or should I take questions or what how much time do I have left no I don't want to do whatever I want I want to do what you want what do you want all right um California yeah whatever you want whatever is true for you um all right nine minutes they say that's what I wanted a number okay um if anybody has any questions I will now answer them anybody have any yes yell I'll repeat the question as long as I can hear you it's cool all right and one of your recent things online you said the answer for the music industry for example is probably to give up insisting on payment for recorded music and focus on licensing licensing and live shows yeah all right I would like I've been talking to Vinton Cerf and some people about this Licensing's exactly what when copyrights mean nothing you know the internet and software and a viable business train only because software enjoys these copyrights so how can you just sort of throw away the music industry's product and copyright and yet tell all these people to work on things that must be protected by copyright trademark a form of copyright and process patents well I don't think you necessarily have to protect your stuff I don't think if you build technology you have to protect it with copyright I mean Amazon Web Services isn't protected with a copyright um I think selling copies of stuff like if you simply do that like you make a copy of stuff and you sell lots of it it's just not practically going to work um you know that the funny thing is I was going to write an essay about this but maybe I'll just like make it up on the fly um the funny thing is like what what is property is actually historically has been somewhat defined by what it's convenient to be property right so like in the days of hunter-gatherers it was not convenient for land to be property right but now it is and Sonia now land his property um if you imagine that we lived like on the moon and everything and you know we had to get like air and pipes and paid for the air right um it was people could charge for smells people could charge for good smells right um and so it seemed reasonable for like smells to be property but now like you walk by you walk by a restaurant and you smell this like delicious smell you get like this free boost for nothing and like someone coming I'd be I think the record labels are like these people who are from the moon right and they used to be able to sell these things because it was so because that was the only way you could the only way you could get them was through their channel but now like files move around like smells and it's just not convenient to charge for them ultimately this stuff is pragmatic um I realized that doesn't sound very principled but historically it seems to be the way things work you just can't charge for copies of stuff anymore you know it just it just it just doesn't practically work anymore and I charge for copies of software um it's the same copyright protection yeah I know I don't think I don't think you same copyright protection so you can't just say that's too inconvenient I don't think it works as well as you used to I mean there are some people who pay for copies of music right and then a lot of people don't and there are some people who pay for copies of software and a lot of people don't right so maybe you you will be able to make some money by making copies of stuff you won't be able to print money the way the label is used to back in the 80s also taking over books and movies well you know as a public as a writer of books I feel like writing books I mean it never made that much money people did it mostly out of vanity Hey and so now the ratio of vanity to money is even higher all right do we have another question yes okay um my question was in regards to your third or fourth idea about killing universities yeah replacing universities not killing we're just gonna go to sleep I feel like um your objections to the university as it stands are missing some actual value they provide to society instead of just being linked certificate you know Mills that you were paying for I feel like it's gonna be very hard to like make you know a group of hackerspaces sit down and parse like all the data from the LHC for years and years or work on theories of post Mars on both of which are you know equally valid whereas in research uh uh and also I feel like a lot of universities their values in the social networks that you create in real life and know just the you know the Facebook ones you have were on I was wondering you know what in a world without physical university it's kind of contributes to a culture of alienation by means of technological abstraction wouldn't a future without physical universities contribute to a what my light friends are complaining about how you know err no way tops anybody else anymore because you're always on Twitter and you know e texting or whatever so the problem is would it be bad if people don't physically meet is that's what you're talking about right that's the physicalness of universities that people all get together at the universities and twitter is not a substitute for that well let me tell you I'm all in favor of people physically meeting every six months I make 150 people move to California and they can't get out of it um so I definitely agree with you things have got to happen in person right um we like to fund startups here and like all you guys have moved here in person right you're not just talking to one another on Twitter you can like shake hands with the person next to you um so definitely I agree with you people have to meet in person um but you can make things that involve people meeting in person alright do you have any more questions you want to yell just yell okay yes it works so um there is a very interesting phenomenon on the universities at the PhD level where a doctoral education is essentially a distributed phenomenon it's not which not so much which University you were you receive your PhD from it's who signed your dissertation the three or four people that were on your PhD committee yeah so a very disruptive idea may in fact be and I guess I'm also given the free idea to everybody in this room is it possible to make a baccalaureate so lower level of lower levels of for university education it is possible to make that a distributed phenomenon as well where your credentials are from your adviser from your lab from your research projects yeah that's an interesting idea that's an interesting idea the idea is instead of getting a degree from a an institution you would get it from a person which is actually if you know about the history of universities that's how it originally used to work I mean universities had a guild system and you would be certified as a teacher by an existing teacher just like you could be certified as a woodworker by an existing woodworker so since it was the way they used to work maybe universities were their replacements will be returning to their roots I'm not saying like get rid of universities just like eat away at that big lump of cheese any more questions yes shout and I'll repeat it yeah I mean the technology my concern what are your principles that very mountain very well may significantly affect like our genetic code Wow um okay so the question was what are my principles on funding something that could affect our genetic code so that's definitely a fundamental question um honestly I hadn't thought about it I try like trying fund founders who seem like they're going to succeed and if the idea seems overtly evil then we don't do it but like affecting our genetic code I mean probably already affecting our genetic code because we make all these people move here and they end up like getting girlfriends and procreating um so a very small number of them I don't know I don't know I surprised where we don't have like I never really thought about that before I mean we haven't funded a lot of people doing medical type stuff um we would just we don't get many applications to do that kind of thing so I don't know we're just trying to play it play it by ear um but ah we have Paul Buchheit Paul Buchheit like invented don't be evil right um so Paul Buchheit is our official morality consultant in the minimally and he he tells us when things are evil um boy you would be surprised um you'd be very surprised um sorry if that's a bad answer yes question does it make it easier to outsource my evil detection well when I said Paul Buchheit was our morality consultant I was actually kind of joking um so I mean but you know although it does turn out it turns out somehow with moral questions you have to ask other people's advice more than technical questions right I don't know maybe I'm morally incompetent and technically competent but with technical questions you can just see what you got to do a lot of the time and moral questions you have to ask other people there's probably an essay there too too bad I don't write them anymore um yes so just an easier question than that one and an easier question showing a direction of alright technical things why does news dot y combinator comm return lines delimited by CR instead of CRLs because like I wanted to write an HTTP server and I didn't read the spec I just like did stuff until my browser could get pages back right um so it's all some early version of Firefox is Fault essentially um when I could see pages on my browser I'm like well seems to work um so see I mean I this may actually get fixed we hired somebody to work on making hacker news faster you'll be happy to hear um and they'll probably fix that in the process there's some line somewhere where I should like add a line feed or a carriage return that's not there or something but like it's never been on my top 100 things to do to go and look in the source and fix that because it like works on my browser right sorry ah thanks a lot well it won't be the first all right yes so you talked about the next Apple and one of the things we've been seeing is Apple have been winning in partly in the price war for the delivery of hardware particularly their their tablet screens because they have such buying power and they can they can buy up the manufacturing capacity yeah and particularly for small startups looking to to make hardware to make innovative and groundbreaking huh yeah manufacturing has to be a really difficult problem to to solve so how are you going to compete Apple when they have such scale is that what you're saying how you gonna write and how do you think is that they're an opportunity for this sort of manalo cake when I say control versus when I say compete against Apple I mean I'm not saying the startups first product should be like a competitor to the iPad um you should probably not even the startup should probably not even do consumer stuff initially they should do something that's like something for hackers you know like the Arduino if those guys had startup ambitions right they make this thing that like wouldn't even seem like a threat to Apple right um and it's just something it's for hackers then they solder this stuff together themselves and ship them out and when they get the money back they buy more parts so you don't think a start-up can make consumer devices it depends on what the device is if it was cheap enough maybe you could maybe you could make some kind of like headset thingy you know jawbone is a start-up I think there's an opportunity to to interface to the sort of the monolithic manufacturing processes and make it I mean we've seen some of the like 3d printers some of the kick starters the way they're making there is no choice there is a startup in the current YC batch doing this there's a startup in the current YC batch that's like the print button for your circuit designs um like you just hit print and like stuff arrives from China finally this this stuff printer so yes there is an opportunity there don't think they haven't launched yet so I can't see what they're called no time for further questions on this we're done I just wanted on the point of information to let you know that you were the first keynote speaker had the very first PyCon Oh was I in 2003 Wow thank you for doing that thank you for coming back this one was way more interesting ladies and gentlemen hologram

Channel: Next Day Video

Views: 115,876

Rating: 4.9124341 out of 5

Keywords: psf, python pycon pycon2012, pycon_2012

Id: R9ITLdmfdLI

Length: 47min 28sec (2848 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 11 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/craigee]

Why do you think Paul Graham believes that making a search engine used by the top 10,000 hackers would be a big idea/successful?

To me, the only reasons he seems to give are:

1. back to a minimalist design
2. getting away from the filter bubble/implicit relevancy feedback from the 'unwashed masses'
3. hacker specific functionality (e.g. code search)

...but why would that lead to a successful search engine?

Is he saying [my interpretation] it would:

1. mimic Google's early success due to proselytizing from hackers/thought leaders; or
2. cut out the noise/lead to better implicit relevancy feedback from having a curated crowd; or
3. give the ability to aggregate and possibly sell insights derived from the search behaviour of 'better informed' searchers?
4. ???
5. profit.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like such a search engine, but why would it be a big idea or commercially successful?

[u/[deleted]]

One of the strange idiosyncrasies of pg is the dichotomy between his spoken and written identities. When speaking, he's friendly, nerdy, and awkward. When writing, he's terse, eloquent, confident, and occasionally mean.

I don't know too many people I can say this of. I can easily read Hitchens in his own voice; so too with most of the SV "celebrities". pg, otoh, is just two completely different people in paper and person.

[u/Thirsteh]

Toastmasters wouldn't hurt, but a very good talk, like his essays.

[u/mvbma]

Without all the huuummms:

http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

[u/bastih01]

Well, I'm going to ask. Is the idea of the spoiler alert to ridicule his style of talking? Many people struggle a lot with getting better at their presentation style and I find such remarks not very helpful and even detrimental to other people considering to speak at conferences.

[u/BenjaminGeiger]

He needs to create that search engine and use it to look up Toastmasters.