@JoeyJeff

Here is an essay version of my class notes. Errors and omissions are mine. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s. Thanks to Joel Cazares for helping proof this.

I. Traits of the Founder 

Founders are important. People recognize this. Founders are often discussed. Many companies end up looking like founder’s cults. Let’s talk a bit about the anthropology and psychology of founders. Who are they, and why do they do what they do?

A. The PayPal Origin

PayPal’s founding team was six people. Four of them were born outside of the United States. Five of them were 23 or younger. Four of them built bombs when they were in high school. (Your lecturer was not among them.) Two of these bombmakers did so in communist countries: Max in the Soviet Union, Yu Pan in China. This was not what people normally did in those countries at that time.

The eccentricity didn’t stop there. Russ grew up in a trailer park and managed to escape to the one math and science magnet school in Illinois. Luke and Max had started crazy ventures at Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Max liked to talk about his crazy attributes (he claimed/claims to have 3 kidneys), perhaps even a little too much. His came to the U.S. as sort of a refugee weeks after the Soviet Union collapsed but before other countries were formed. So he liked to say that he was a citizen of no country. It made for incredibly complicated travel issues. Everybody decided that he couldn’t leave the country, since it wasn’t clear that he could get back in if he did.

Ken was somewhat more on the rational side of things. But then again, he took a 66% pay cut to come do PayPal instead of going into investment banking after graduating from Stanford. So there’s that. 

One could go on and on with this. The main question is whether there is a connection—and if so what kind—between being a founder and having extreme traits.

B. Distributions

Many traits are normally distributed throughout the population. Suppose that all traits are aggregated on a normal distribution chart. On the left tail you’d have a list of negatively perceived traits, such as weakness, disagreeability, and poverty. On the right tail, you’d have traditionally positive traits such as strength, charisma, and wealth. 

Where do founders fall? Certainly they seem to be a bit less average and a bit more extreme than normal. So maybe the founder distribution is a fat-tailed one:

But that radically understates things. We can push it further. Perhaps the founder distribution is, however strangely, an inverted normal distribution. Both tails are extremely fat. Perhaps founders are complex combinations of, e.g., extreme insiders and extreme outsiders at the same time. Our ideological narratives tend to isolate and reinforce just one side. But maybe those narratives don’t work for founders. Maybe the truth about founders comes from both sides. 

OBAMA PLAYING BASKETBALL IN BASQUIAT SHIRT, 2012

I spend the morning in an afterglow, swept up in bed sheets, the night on repeat. A little dizzy, a little punch-drunk, lovesick, drug sick, woozy. Headache, heartache, stomach weak and I’ve lost count of how many cigarettes we shared last night, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Blue flame, red lips. Early hours, steal a kiss. I’m fractured, I’m forgetting. Every tiny detail I’ve tried to remember, slipping through my fingers like the vodka tonic I let spill over the bar from my plastic cup and if looks could kill, that soda jerk would be behind steel bars instead.

We spiral through the night, together, apart, the street, a runway and we’re runaways, you and me both. Far from home, far from everything we think we know. Banded together in the smoke, in the smog, in the streetlights. There are no stars in the sky, but there are stars in the city. You and I. My God, I wish you’d hurry up and kiss me.

I replay our encounters, over and over, a brush on the shoulder, a cool touch, a glance. There you were by the bar, in the dark, on the dance floor. There you were walking cool grey pavements, sleepy eyed in the sunrise. There you are in the haze, deep in conversation, voice like honey, sinking into the familiarity of your living room. Do you ever sleep? There you were at my peripherals, looming, living, again and again. Snapshots I store carefully, compartmentalise. No fingerprints, please. Clean, safe, unobscured by wild nights and cheap wine. You look pretty in those Polaroids. You look pretty when you’re high. You look pretty all the time.

Sun’s up, night bus and I fall asleep to the gentle hum of the engine, head heavy on your shoulder. The world is revolving without us, around us. The people are spinning, cars rush, flat white, brief case, pinstripes. Zoom. Another day, another dollar, another cog in the machine. We are far removed for a second. Orbit. Our own private oblivion. We are different, suspended, a new dimension, operating by our own rules and at the tip of my drug-laced tongue I can taste freedom. I can taste the tobacco of a ten pack of menthols and all those things I hate to love and my mouth is full of things I haven’t told you yet. Sweet, ripe, plump, round. Any moment now. I bet your lips taste just like peaches. Everything we like is bad for us.

This happens every weekend, I end up where you are. I catch a glimpse of something new, I take away a piece of you, to gloss over for the week, mind filled up in intrigue and I’m too shy to steal a kiss, too doubtful to read into this. Doe eyed, hopeful, baby doll. You get a little closer, I get a little further away. Always reeling through my mind to find the words to say. Mind blank, body freeze. I think we’re as cold as each other. I think we’ve built our walls too high. I think I’m terrible at reading people. I think I’m terrible with thinking you could feel the same. And I hope you don’t feel my eyes burning through your skin. I am my father’s daughter, I’m sorry, I know I can be intense. Subtext, pretext, squinting past the pretense. Femme fatale, charades, facade. Another line but I can’t read between them. Another drink but I don’t really need them.