I'd like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents. Don't drop out of college to start a startup. There's no rush. There will be plenty of time to start companies after you graduate. In fact, it may be just as well to go work for an existing company for a couple years after you graduate, to learn how companies work.
And yet, when I think about it, I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He'd have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he'd been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.
And yes, while it is probably true that you'll learn some valuable things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years before starting your own, you'd learn a thing or two running your own company during that time too.
The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I'm supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I'm 23? That's four years. That's more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.
And he'd be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we're suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn't have been better for him.
So while I stand by our responsible advice to finish college and then go work for a while before starting a startup, I have to admit it's one of those things the old tell the young, but don't expect them to listen to. We say this sort of thing mainly so we can claim we warned you. So don't say I didn't warn you.
[1] The average B-17 pilot in World War II was in his early twenties. (Thanks to Tad Marko for pointing this out.)
[2] If a company tried to pay employees this way, they'd be called unfair. And yet when they buy some startups and not others, no one thinks of calling that unfair.
[3] The 1/10 success rate for startups is a bit of an urban legend. It's suspiciously neat. My guess is the odds are slightly worse.
Thanks to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this, to the friends I promised anonymity to for their opinions about hiring, and to Karen Nguyen and the Berkeley CSUA for organizing this talk.
What Business Can Learn from Open Source
(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)
Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers. [1]
More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't.
But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them. Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use.
We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating from open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they have a lot in common.
Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for money, and often win. The method of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the audience improves the best work.
Another thing blogging and open source have in common is the Web. People have always been willing to do great work for free, but before the Web it was harder to reach an audience or collaborate on projects.
I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it.
Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture. [2]
This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't.
There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it's staring us in the face. "Amateur" was originally rather a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.
That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it's a better browser.
It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.
I suspect professionalism was always overrated-- not just in the literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.
One of the most powerful of those was the existence of "channels." Revealingly, the same term was used for both products and information: there were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels.
It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals seem so superior to amateurs. There were only a few jobs as professional journalists, for example, so competition ensured the average journalist was fairly good. Whereas anyone can express opinions about current events in a bar. And so the average person expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to a journalist writing about the subject.
On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower. You don't have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in. Millions of people are publishing online, and the average level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is not very good. This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't present much of a threat-- that blogs are just a fad.
Actually, the fad is the word "blog," at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default medium for publication. So I'd like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online. How about "writer?"