Hacker and painter Part3 Paul Graham

Part3 Paul Graham

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Paul Graham was born in a middle-class family in the outskirts of Pittsburgh in 1964. His father is a physicist at nuclear reactors, and his mother looks after him and his sister again.

In the teenage age, Graham began programming. However, he also enjoys many computer-independent things, which is rare among programming experts. In middle school, he liked to write novels. After Entering Cornell University, he majored in philosophy. Later, he found that philosophy was hard to understand. as a graduate student, he went to the computer department of Harvard University to focus on artificial intelligence.

He was frustrated with his academic career because he was not doing well in this direction. (However, the lisp language, as a research tool, has had a major impact on him in the future .) Half of the doctor's reading, he went to the Harvard Art Department again. After obtaining his doctorate, he signed up for a summer course at the design institute of Rhodes to study painting and dream of becoming a painter.

After his summer vacation, he went to Europe and continued to study painting at the frorensa College of Fine Arts, which has a history of 500. In the second year, when the money was spent, he had to return to the United States as a programmer at a startup company in Boston in 1992.

For the next two or three years, Graham has lived a turbulent life. He lives in a very small apartment in New York and pursues his dream as an artist, however, the income is low and the unstable days are very embarrassing. He often has to program for others and earn some living expenses.

Finally one day, he and Reum thought they could not continue. "I decided not to be a painter. First, I had to completely solve my income problem ." He recalled later.

In the early summer of 1995, he found his friend, Robert Morris, who was studying, and hoped to work together to write a software program to make money. The latter was a very smart hacker who wrote the first worm called the Morris worm in history in 1988 ".

At that time, it was catching up with the first Internet company to go public on the Internet. A large number of promotional advertisements were repeatedly broadcasted in the media, and the entire capital market was crazy about the concept of "Internet. [1] Graham thought that if the vision of Netscape is correct and people will shop on the Internet in the future, someone must develop software for retailers. Therefore, he decided to develop a software for building online stores.

Robert Morris is still studying for graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is only available during the summer vacation. So Graham moved to Morris's apartment. The two used the time to write the product prototype.

In the beginning, their software was completely in the traditional mode, that is, the user first downloads and installs the software, then makes the prototype of the online store on their own hard drive, and finally uploads the software to the server. Later, Graham had a chance: why not let users directly operate the server through a browser! This completely saves the installation and upload steps.

So they changed their direction and decided to turn the software into an Internet program. This is the first software on the Internet in the world. Because of this, they named this product viaweb. Another reason they gave up developing desktop software is that neither of them has learned how to develop Windows programs, and they do not want to learn either.

They took the prototype and found Graham's art teacher's husband, a lawyer who agreed to fund $10 thousand. This is all the funds at that time. They used the money to buy a server and started to complete the prototype program into a demo version that can be demonstrated. As there were more and more things and two people were too busy, Graham asked Morris: "Who is the best programming among your classmates ?" The answer is Trevor Blackwell ). Therefore, viaweb has a third founder.

In early August, they made a demo version available for release. In October, they came to New York and showed two angel investors that they wanted to raise $50 thousand. As a result, both investors expressed their willingness to invest, so they got $0.1 million. In December, viaweb began to develop its customers.

In the summer of 1996, viaweb received a second round of angel investment of $0.8 million. They used the money to hire CEOs and new programmers and rent new offices. Previously, they had been working in the upper floor of Morris apartment. The environment was very simple and there was only one computer. If there were visitors, they had to borrow some computers to "Install the facade ". Now viaweb looks like a company. Since then, some media have reported on viaweb. Graham breathed a sigh of relief, and they finally no longer have to rely on word of mouth to develop their business.

On Christmas Day of 1996, they had 70 customers, including the famous rock magazine Rolling Stone. After one year, the total number of customers has increased by five times, and the company looks very good. In this process, they have been looking for purchasers, because the main purpose of creating viaweb is to be acquired so that they can quickly make money. They had no less than 10 purchase negotiations before and after, but failed for various reasons.

In 1998, the acquisition was successful. Yahoo merged viaweb for $49 million and renamed it Yahoo store, one of Yahoo's earliest acquisitions. On the day of the purchase, Graham pulled Morris to the beauty shop at Harvard Square. Because Morris said at the early stage that he would be willing to make an ear hole if he could earn $1 million from viaweb.

After being acquired, Graham became an employee of Yahoo and continued to engage in programming. He has been working there for a year and a half and always feels uncomfortable and does not adapt to Yahoo's corporate culture. In his own words, he is not used to the bureaucratic environment of large companies. He said: "operating a startup company is like fighting every day. Working for a big company is like struggling with suffocation." So he resigned.

After leaving Yahoo, his life suddenly became idle. He began to write his views on technology and entrepreneurship into a series of articles published on his personal website. These articles are well received and sought after by readers, and their access volume continues to rise. In 2004, the most popular article was published by o'reilly Publishing House and named "hacker and painter". These two words are a portrayal of Graham's life in the first half of life. "Everything in our life is becoming a computer," he wrote in his preface. Therefore, if you want to understand our current world and its future trends, you will be able to learn more about hacker ideas and help you ."

On February 23, March 2005, Graham was invited to give a speech by the Computer Association, an academic group of Harvard University. He chose "how to set up a startup company". "I told them that when selecting an angel investor, we 'd better choose people who have their own entrepreneurial experience ." After that, he found that all the students looked at him with expectation. He quickly added, "I am not an angel investor."

This sentence is clearly early. After the speech, he chatted with his students about coffee and found that some of them had great talents and ideas. He could not help but think that without an angel investor viaweb, there would be no current one. So he decided to create opportunities for these students to see what they could do.

In the summer of 2005, he found Morris again (he is now a computer teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). They held a summer camp together, it aims to help college students with entrepreneurial ideas set up their own companies. The candidates will receive their guidance and $5000 in funding.

There are 227 application forms and they have selected 8 projects. By the end of the summer camp, four projects had already done well. The social geographic Service website loopt.com was subsequently invested $13 million by two venture capital companies, with 2010 million users by the end of 4 million. The user-aggregated website Reddit. COM was acquired in 2006 by Conde Nast, a large-scale publishing group, for $ more than 10 million. Currently, it ranks among the top one hundred million websites in the U.S. market. Its mobile payment service website textpayme was acquired by Amazon in 2006; online calendar website Kiko is a pioneer in this field. Later, due to the launch of similar products by Google, it was forced to put the source code on ebey for auction and sold for $0.258 million.

The results were encouraging, and Graham felt that it could be done to foster a startup company as a career. So he and Morris joined Blackwell and Jessica livers [2] in partnership and established Li ycombinator [3] (YC) in Silicon Valley ). According to Graham's assumption, it is not only an incubator of a startup company, but also a mentor or an intermediary with investors.

YC will hold two training camps in July January and July June each year for a period of three months. Usually there are about 500 applicants each time, and they select 20 projects [4]. Each project will receive an activation fund of $11 thousand, plus a living allowance of $3000 for each project member, on the exchange condition that YC will take 5% of the project's shares [5]. If the project succeeds, 5% of the shares will be very valuable.

YC partners provide individual coaching for each project. They not only provide project suggestions, but also instill methodologies and values. Every Thursday afternoon, entrepreneurs come to YC's office to meet Graham or another partner to report on the progress of the project and discuss how to solve some difficult problems.

After the interview, it is the dinner time. Everyone eats and chats. At the same time, there are also special guests to meet with entrepreneurs. Guests are often top celebrities in the technology industry, such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of fachbook, and Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon.

As the three-month training camp draws to a close, entrepreneurs should come up with an expected outcome. YC held a "presentation day" to allow venture capitalists to directly meet with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs will demonstrate their projects on the stage, and venture capital will evaluate them. If they are interested, the two sides will contact each other in private.

　　

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Hacker and painter Part3 Paul Graham