Blogging Is Probably Not Obsolete

Paul Graham spoke at Soda Hall today. I just got out of his talk "Hiring is Obsolete". I have plans with Wiseman to go see Graham's other talk this Wednesday at PARC as a for-pay ($25) SDForum thing, but cubes (he wants me to add, parenthetically, that he's better known as "Daniel C. Silverstein") was nice enough to let me know he was also speaking today at U.C. Berkeley for free.

The talk was pretty good. I've heard Graham speak before, but not in person, rather via a recording of a talk he gave at the 2004 O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Seeing him in the flesh was different. His speaking style isn't fumbling as it initially came off sounding in the recording. He actually does stand up in front of people with a sheaf of paper, presumably his essay, and reads from it. He takes occasional glances, and otherwise looks at and engages the audience. It explains what I found odd about his meter when I was listening to the OSCON talk.

"Hiring is Obsolete" was mostly a plea and a justification for young people, especially students about to graduate from college, to start start-up companies. I arrived a little late, but got most of it. Thanks to AirBears, I wasn't able to blog live from the talk, but that's okay, since typing can be annoying when someone is speaking and people are listening quietly.

A summary of Graham's points might be the following: Young people (i.e. students) are ideal to start start-up companies. They are young and as such can afford to take on a lot of risk, and you should always take on as much risk as you can afford. Even if they fail, young people do not have much at stake to lose, and indeed much to gain, at least in terms of experience, by having what is likely to be a failure, since at least nine out of ten startups do in fact fail. Graham had gone around to several large tech companies (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) and asked them "if you could hire someone who had tried and failed to launch a start-up company, or someone who had graduated college and went to go work as a developer at a big company (e.g. Microsoft), which would you prefer?" According to him, every single company responded that they would be more interested in the candidate who had tried and failed at a start-up; he included a verbatim quote from the person he talked to at Yahoo! who said he could quote him.

The Q&A part of the talk was also good. One attendee asked what he prefaced was "a nasty question: how this would talk be different had you given it five years ago?" Graham laughed and said that he probably would have been way more negative and cautious in 2000, at the height of the bubble. "Everyone thinks you can just go out and do this, and it's not that easy!"

There were at least a couple Lisp celeb sightings: Franz's Dr. Sheng-Chuan Wu asked what I think was the last question: "when are you going to reprint On Lisp?", which Graham good-naturedly refused to answer, and replied with "you're a plant! You're sitting too close!". I also saw JP Massar walk out of the hall after the talk.

The other Bay Area tech celeb I sighted was HOT or NOT's James Hong, who was sitting against the wall directly across the room from me.

Someone tell Zach Beane that the blog lives anew! I miss my time on Planet Lisp!