People

YCombinator is one of the original and most well-known startup “incubators”*, and once a year they host an event at Stanford called Startup School.

This year’s event happened on October 20th, and featured (as usual) a truly remarkable group of speakers, all who have in their own way put a dent in the universe. Some of them are famous only in technology circles, like Tom Preston-Werner, the founder of Github, and others are more widely known, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of you-know-what.

The videos (minus one) are available online now, and if you’re working now on a startup or a startup idea, they are full of tremendously useful advice. Go check them out.

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* Many call it the original incubator, but I’d probably call it an evolution of Bill Gross’ Idealab, although Biz & Ev’s Obvious Corp is probably a better spiritual successor. (return)

Fast on the heels of last week’s discussion of inconsistency is a post from Joel Gascoigne outlining his own rich history of inconsistency and attendant success, where he takes the lesson a step further:

If you’re part of a startup, I believe that your success might actually be defined by whether you are willing to be inconsistent. This means that actually changing your mind is not just a good trait as Jeff Bezos has mentioned, but “staying consistent” might actually be the reason your startup fails.

For a startup, the benefits of mental flexibility may be more immediately obvious and measurable than for larger organizations, but, and I don’t think Joel is implying otherwise, it is just as critical in the leaders at Fortune 500 companies.

The part that I think often goes unmentioned is that you should dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to your convictions. Just allow yourself the room to change those convictions from time to time.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Emerson wrote his essay on Self-Reliance in 1841, and a remarkable amount of it is still relevant today. For example, today’s post from Jason Fried on Signal Vs Noise shares a bit of similar wisdom from Jeff Bezos:

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds.

He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

At the root of this observation and advice is a trait of mental flexibility. If you’re open to the possibility that you’re going to change your mind, if you’re willing to leave the details from time to time and try a new point of view…you might find yourself a luckier person.

No, really.

According to research by UK psychologist Richard Wiseman, a key characteristic of “luckier” people is an ability to remove the blinders. As described on Jonathan Fields’ blog:

He gave both the “lucky” and the “unlucky” people a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell him how many photographs were inside. He found that on average the unlucky people took two minutes to count all the photographs, whereas the lucky ones determined the number in a few seconds.

How could the “lucky” people do this? Because they found a message on the second page that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

Call it luck or call it skill, the ability to be have a flexible mind is a critical component of getting things right.

We often credit visionaries with the ability to conjure up their work. To simply imagine the end product and construct it from the tools they have around them, be it a paintbrush, a chisel, or a team of developers and designers.

What if it weren’t a matter of creating, but an effort of revealing? What if the process were really the reverse?

Michelangelo the sculptor once described his process:

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.

When we think of sculpture we think of something constructed. After all, this is how buildings are built — why not art as well? But of course if you begin with a block of stone, the art is in what you remove, not what you add.

A more modern example is Edwin Land, the creator of the Polaroid camera, who spoke about the invention of the camera:

I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.

And of course Steve Jobs, who felt the same way about the Macintosh:

It’s like when I walk in a room and I want to talk about a product that hasn’t been invented yet. I can see the product as if it’s sitting there right in the center of the table. What I’ve got to do is materialize it and bring it to life

This type of philosophy strongly aligns with the Bauhaus design movement, which has its roots in 1920s and 1930s Germany, and owes its recent resurgence in popularity to Apple’s dedication to many of its basic tenets. Bauhaus philosophy seeks to understand the innate nature of the objects being designed. According to leading Bauhaus designer Walter Gropius:

a subject is defined according to its being. In order that it – a dish, a chair, a house – could be designed in such a mode that it will function well, you have to study its nature to begin with

Which lends an interesting twist to the role of industrial design in general: it elevates the successful design to an almost Platonic ideal.

Plato’s Theory of Forms asserts that for everything in this world, there is an “ideal form.” In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato explains how we see the world as made up of shadows of these ideal forms, cast against the wall of a cave.

the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

Plato’s philosopher, then is today’s visionary. Michelangelo’s lovely apparition is the “nature to begin with” that is sought by Bauhaus designers, and the products brought in to this world by the likes Edwin Land and Steve Jobs are as close to the forms beyond the cave as we are like to encounter.

But it is important to remember that they discover rather than create: a subtle difference which (cynically) allows you to both claim piety and elevate your product near to an object of worship and perfection, or (less cynically) reflects the realities of being a visionary leader — your role is less a creator and more a conduit, and your skill is in revealing something wonderful to other eyes as yours see it.

Some people have it, some people don’t. It’s a blurry line, but if you go through some of the great figures in history you can sort of hold up your thumb and give a ruling as to how much “visionaryness” they display.

In a kind of ironic fashion, many of our great visionaries seems to have earned their titles by being conduits for existing movements as much as (or more than) originating them. Literal revolutionary leaders are great examples for this phenomenon: was Ghandi a great visionary? Yes. Was Indian independence his idea? Probably not.

Martin Luther King, Jr., similarly, is regarded as a visionary leader in the civil rights movement. He is famous for his speeches, and his presence, and his ability to inspire people. Did the civil rights movement begin with him? Again, no.

In other words our approach to visionaryness departs from the meaning of the word: we do not look for leaders who have created visions and sold them to us, rather, we look to those who are best able to identify and communicate to us in the language of the emotions and issues that matter to us at that time. Our visionaries are often the people who can tap into our own zeitgeist.

I first remember FAKEGRIMLOCK from the comments on Fred Wilson’s VC blog, making his points in his unique all-caps grammar. Today I ran across a guest post by FAKEGRIMLOCK on Eric Ries’s Startup Lessons Learned, talking about startups as vision:

VISION IS PUT FIST IN RIGHT PLACE, BREAK WORLD IN HALF.

When I first started thinking about this blog, vision was the word I couldn’t get out of my head.

Vision seems to be critical to every element of putting a dent in the universe: you must be able to see something, fully formed, as it does not yet exist, and then bring it into existence by hacking away at reality until your vision appears.

Go check out FAKEGRIMLOCK’s post.