Chai's Blog

Today I read the lat­est Paul Gra­ham’s essay that’s lying in my Read Lat­er list.

Before the start­up is a good read even if you have no plans to start up.

Fol­low­ing are few para­graphs that could­n’t be more cor­rect:

Lar­ry Page may seem to have an envi­able life, but there are aspects of it that are unen­vi­able. Basi­cal­ly at 25 he start­ed run­ning as fast as he could and it must seem to him that he has­n’t stopped to catch his breath since. Every day new shit hap­pens in the Google empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he, as CEO, has to deal with it. If he goes on vaca­tion for even a week, a whole week’s back­log of shit accu­mu­lates. And he has to bear this uncom­plain­ing­ly, part­ly because as the com­pa­ny’s dad­dy he can nev­er show fear or weak­ness, and part­ly because bil­lion­aires get less than zero sym­pa­thy if they talk about hav­ing dif­fi­cult lives. Which has the strange side effect that the dif­fi­cul­ty of being a suc­cess­ful start­up founder is con­cealed from almost every­one except those who’ve done it.

…

Mark Zucker­berg will nev­er get to bum around a for­eign coun­try. He can do oth­er things most peo­ple can’t, like char­ter jets to fly him to for­eign coun­tries. But suc­cess has tak­en a lot of the serendip­i­ty out of his life. Face­book is run­ning him as much as he’s run­ning Face­book. And while it can be very cool to be in the grip of a project you con­sid­er your life’s work, there are advan­tages to serendip­i­ty too, espe­cial­ly ear­ly in life. Among oth­er things it gives you more options to choose your life’s work from.

I try not to for­get these lines:

The way to become Lar­ry Page was to become an expert on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be dri­ven by gen­uine curios­i­ty, not some ulte­ri­or motive.

…

So here is the ulti­mate advice for young would-be start­up founders, boiled down to two words: just learn.