Perhaps realizing this will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds wisdom in so many people's eyes. The mystery comes mostly from looking for something that doesn't exist. And the reason there have historically been so many different schools of thought about how to achieve wisdom is that they've focused on different components of it.
When I use the word "wisdom" in this essay, I mean no more than whatever collection of qualities helps people make the right choice in a wide variety of situations.
[5] Even in English, our sense of the word "intelligence" is surprisingly recent. Predecessors like "understanding" seem to have had a broader meaning.
[6] There is of course some uncertainty about how closely the remarks attributed to Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions. I'm using these names as we use the name "Homer," to mean the hypothetical people who said the things attributed to them.
[7] Analects VII:36, Fung trans.
Some translators use "calm" instead of "happy." One source of difficulty here is that present-day English speakers have a different idea of happiness from many older societies. Every language probably has a word meaning "how one feels when things are going well," but different cultures react differently when things go well. We react like children, with smiles and laughter. But in a more reserved society, or in one where life was tougher, the reaction might be a quiet contentment.
[8] It may have been Andrew Wiles, but I'm not sure. If anyone remembers such an interview, I'd appreciate hearing from you.
[9] Confucius claimed proudly that he had never invented anything—that he had simply passed on an accurate account of ancient traditions. [Analects VII:1] It's hard for us now to appreciate how important a duty it must have been in preliterate societies to remember and pass on the group's accumulated knowledge. Even in Confucius's time it still seems to have been the first duty of the scholar.
[10] The bias toward wisdom in ancient philosophy may be exaggerated by the fact that, in both Greece and China, many of the first philosophers (including Confucius and Plato) saw themselves as teachers of administrators, and so thought disproportionately about such matters. The few people who did invent things, like storytellers, must have seemed an outlying data point that could be ignored.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Why to Not Not Start a Startup
We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded. Three have been acquired: Reddit was a merger of two, Reddit and Infogami, and a third was acquired that we can't talk about yet. Another from that batch was Loopt, which is doing so well they could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to.
So about half the founders from that first summer, less than two years ago, are now rich, at least by their standards. (One thing you learn when you get rich is that there are many degrees of it.)
I'm not ready to predict our success rate will stay as high as 50%. That first batch could have been an anomaly. But we should be able to do better than the oft-quoted (and probably made up) standard figure of 10%. I'd feel safe aiming at 25%.
Even the founders who fail don't seem to have such a bad time. Of those first eight startups, three are now probably dead. In two cases the founders just went on to do other things at the end of the summer. I don't think they were traumatized by the experience. The closest to a traumatic failure was Kiko, whose founders kept working on their startup for a whole year before being squashed by Google Calendar. But they ended up happy. They sold their software on eBay for a quarter of a million dollars. After they paid back their angel investors, they had about a year's salary each. [1] Then they immediately went on to start a new and much more exciting startup, Justin.TV.
So here is an even more striking statistic: 0% of that first batch had a terrible experience. They had ups and downs, like every startup, but I don't think any would have traded it for a job in a cubicle. And that statistic is probably not an anomaly. Whatever our long-term success rate ends up being, I think the rate of people who wish they'd gotten a regular job will stay close to 0%.
The big mystery to me is: why don't more people start startups? If nearly everyone who does it prefers it to a regular job, and a significant percentage get rich, why doesn't everyone want to do this? A lot of people think we get thousands of applications for each funding cycle. In fact we usually only get several hundred. Why don't more people apply? And while it must seem to anyone watching this world that startups are popping up like crazy, the number is small compared to the number of people with the necessary skills. The great majority of programmers still go straight from college to cubicle, and stay there.
It seems like people are not acting in their own interest. What's going on? Well, I can answer that. Because of Y Combinator's position at the very start of the venture funding process, we're probably the world's leading experts on the psychology of people who aren't sure if they want to start a company.
There's nothing wrong with being unsure. If you're a hacker thinking about starting a startup and hesitating before taking the leap, you're part of a grand tradition. Larry and Sergey seem to have felt the same before they started Google, and so did Jerry and Filo before they started Yahoo. In fact, I'd guess the most successful startups are the ones started by uncertain hackers rather than gung-ho business guys.
We have some evidence to support this. Several of the most successful startups we've funded told us later that they only decided to apply at the last moment. Some decided only hours before the deadline.
The way to deal with uncertainty is to analyze it into components. Most people who are reluctant to do something have about eight different reasons mixed together in their heads, and don't know themselves which are biggest. Some will be justified and some bogus, but unless you know the relative proportion of each, you don't know whether your overall uncertainty is mostly justified or mostly bogus.
So I'm going to list all the components of people's reluctance to start startups, and explain which are real. Then would-be founders can use this as a checklist to examine their own feelings.
I admit my goal is to increase your self-confidence. But there are two things different here from the usual confidence-building exercise. One is that I'm motivated to be honest. Most people in the confidence-building business have already achieved their goal when you buy the book or pay to attend the seminar where they tell you how great you are. Whereas if I encourage people to start startups who shouldn't, I make my own life worse. If I encourage too many people to apply to Y Combinator, it just means more work for me, because I have to read all the applications.
The other thing that's going to be different is my approach. Instead of being positive, I'm going to be negative. Instead of telling you "come on, you can do it" I'm going to consider all the reasons you aren't doing it, and show why most (but not all) should be ignored. We'll start with the one everyone's born with.
A lot of people think they're too young to start a startup. Many are right. The median age worldwide is about 27, so probably a third of the population can truthfully say they're too young.