You now have ideas, an all-purpose acknowledgments section, and a font. How should you present everything? “Write like you talk,” Paul Graham once said, but he forgot to add: “And talk like an asshole.”
<< You’re joining the movement at a good time. These are golden days for the philosopher-VC. Moore’s Law states that the power of computing doubles every two years. Paul’s Law states that the population of VC intellectuals increases at a similarly exponential rate. This law takes its name, of course, from Paul Graham, the man who has done more than anyone else to make the venture capitalist not simply an investor of other people’s money but a critical thinker on politics and society. From his pithy Twitter feed to his legendary blog, the cofounder of Y Combinator has exhibited an unrivaled capacity to be consistently wrong on all the great questions of the age—or so his critics would have you believe. And this is the man’s special strength: the more the online mob criticizes him, the more right he’s convinced he is, and the stronger he grows. “Counterintuitive as it sounds,” he recently tweeted, “I’m always encouraged when I publish a new essay and get showered with insults. Showered = lots of people saw it, and insults = there were no big mistakes in it for them to refute.” Studying the great man’s Twitter feed—understanding both his obsessions and his style—will offer a sturdy template for you to follow as you embark on your career as a VC intellectual. (Obsessions = the things he is interested in. Style = the way he writes.) But he is not the only peer whose work you should become familiar with. Consider also Sam Altman, who once argued that “we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics”; or Vinod Khosla’s pioneering contributions to the fight against public beach access (sample wisdom from Khosla Ventures website: “We believe change depends on unreasonable people”); or even Keith Rabois, who joined Khosla’s investment firm on the strength of its whiteboards and now knows more about residential real estate than probably anyone in the United States, according to Keith Rabois. >>
