The Roots of Lisp (2001)

Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by coder1001 on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:53AM (#22063067)

It amazes me how @pg managed to conquer the business side of startups and started YC given his very technical background!

To me it is not very common for (very) technical people to be good at both tech and business!

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by Nokinside on Thursday January 16, 2020 @07:48AM (#22063973)

I'm electronics and embedded software developer, but I took a pause from that and founded a small web business startup with few guys two years before PG founded Viaweb. The product was very similar to PG 's Viaweb. Viaweb was more general and consumer market oriented. We had narrow focus with b2b trough our connections.

It's hard to describe how easy it was to make money in the late 90's with even little technical skill and tiniest amount of business understanding. We were making money hand over fist knowing next to nothing.

PG sold his company for $50 million, we sold ours for $5 million after we took the mountain of cash out of it (another $5 million). After reading how PG did it, I think his genius was paying $16,000 a month for a PR firm. He understood the value of PR, we didn't. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

His essays, HackerNews and Y combinator are expression of this understanding. He has created expanding self-reinforcing network of affordable PR and connections for startups. That's the real scarcity in the startup scene. Being accepted into a batch is valuable. Instead of hiring PR firm, PR firm accepts you and stamps you with the Y Combinator brand.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by psychoslave on Thursday January 16, 2020 @09:48AM (#22064965)

Does PR stands for Purchase Request here?

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by cercatrova on Thursday January 16, 2020 @09:54AM (#22065016)

Public relations.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by coldtea on Thursday January 16, 2020 @07:19AM (#22063807)

For some counter examples:

Bill Joy co-founded SUN - but also wrote ex, vi, the BSD UNIX tcp/ip stack, and other things.

Marc Andreessen wrote Mosaic and Netscape - and is a famous VC person now (of Andreessen Horowitz fame).

Bill Gates, also very technical (wrote early MS programs, BASIC interpreters etc).

Eric Schmidt (ex Google CEO) wrote Lex (the lexer, now more known by its GNU port, flex) and was SUN's first programmer.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by tabtab on Thursday January 16, 2020 @01:33PM (#22067405)

Early Microsoft tended to clone or buy successful products. They were not really into core R&D, only improvement R&D. They let others be the guinea pigs. Gates was a skilled poker player, which probably helped him be a shrewd business-person. When all was said and done, you would realize he walked away with all your best cards.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by mquander on Thursday January 16, 2020 @03:12PM (#22068374)

Gates was a skilled poker player, which probably helped him be a shrewd business-person. When all was said and done, you would realize he walked away with all your best cards.

That doesn't happen in poker.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by tabtab on Friday January 17, 2020 @12:21PM (#22076768)

Insert better card-game metaphor here.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by fouc on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:06AM (#22063144)

Yet some of the most successful business people seem to be good at tech. I heard that half of the CEOs of the top 500 fortune companies have a STEM degree.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by Hendrikto on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:28AM (#22063257)

My guess: STEM degrees require and foster critical thinking, logic, and abstraction skills, which are all very conducive to being a good business person.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by allenu on Thursday January 16, 2020 @12:17PM (#22066579)

There might be some survivorship bias in there if STEM fields are more successful than others, naturally leading to more STEM leaders, or more opportunities for leaders to form.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by tabtab on Thursday January 16, 2020 @01:28PM (#22067350)

Often times it's a matter of just listening to customers. Even if you don't have a knack for the domain, if you get enough feedback and react to it, you can "organically" fit it well. It's sort of comparable to a genetic algorithm. Of course, having a knack for a domain could mean fewer iterations of rework.

Lisp is ideal for changing on a dime, at least for a small team.

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Re:The Roots of Lisp (2001) by LanceH on Thursday January 16, 2020 @02:24PM (#22067906)

It's not very common for anyone to be good at business. But for some reason when people are good at tech, suddenly that becomes the reason they are bad at business.

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