Hackers and Painters is Paul Graham’s seminal work. Graham co- founded Viaweb, an early software-as-a-service company. Acquired by Yahoo in 1998, the platform became Yahoo Store. In 2005, he co-founded Y-Combinator (YC), a new model for funding early stage startups. With the motto “Make something people want” YC has gone on to become the most successful startup accelerator in the world. Companies backed include Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, and Twitch.tv.
Graham studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Hackers and Painters is a reconciliation of Graham’s loves of programming and painting.
The Essay
The Essay is one of Graham’s key themes: In 2001 he started publishing essays on paulgraham.com. The first edition of Hackers and Painters came three years earlier.
The word “essay” comes from the French verb “essayer,” which means “to try.” An essay, in the original sense, is something you write to try and figure something out.
For hacking and painting, and evidently in writing, Graham returns again and again to the theme of trying things out:
“The best writing is rewriting,” wrote E. B. White.
Consistent with his theme, many of his key ideas in the book are first explored as essays on his website.
Later in the book, Graham looks to the future though a lens of programming language design. What will we be programming with in a hundred years time? Ever the hacker, Graham has co-designed Arc, a new dialect of Lisp. Arc’s intent is to be the essayists programming language: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. “A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that’s what we’ve aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software.”
Worthy goal, though Arc has yet to take off.
On Beauty
Graham on beauty, how it is achieved, and the importance of good taste for makers and the perils relativism:
Good design is simple…is timeless…solves the right problem…is suggestive…often slightly funny…is hard…looks easy…uses symmetry…resembles nature…..is redesign….can copy…is often strange…happens in chunks…is often daring.
Graham sees beauty in programming and in the languages we use to write code. In the years before starting Viaweb, Graham wrote computer code in Lisp. He also found time to write two of the language’s best known books: On Lisp and ANSI Common Lisp
Viaweb was written in Lisp. The language, in all it’s power, beauty and strangeness, is credited by Graham as being a key reason for the venture’s success. Lisp let them run faster (upstairs), as the competition struggled with Java and “industry standard” languages beloved of the pointy-haired.
On Wealth Creation
On making wealth, Graham explores several ideas that go on to be fundamental to the Y Combinator mission. Creating wealth (as opposed to “making money”, or stealing it, or getting it from bank of Daddy is a worthy societal goal. It’s not about trickle down of wealth, but rather the benefits to society that accrue if craftspeople, nerds and makers are given freedom to make what people want. And if we let them keep enough of their lunch money.
Looking back in history Graham cites examples and counter-examples of where value creation was stimulated (Renaissance Europe, Silicon Valley) or stymied (Soviet Russia, Seventies Britain). The intent was usually to reduce inequality. The outcome was usually a marked step backwards into poverty.
Graham lionizes the hacker and the startup team. He stresses the importance of keeping morale high, of quick wins, and how much further and faster a talented small team can go in the face of more numerous but mediocre competition. The startup is a vehicle that allows founders to compress forty years of plodding labour into four years of intense effort. And just as the results might be achieved in a shorter time, so might be the rewards.
Being small means contribution can be better measured and so more accurately rewarded. Innovation — new technology — can also accelerate results. Stay close to your users, run fast, have fun, run upstairs and create barriers to entry. Don’t be a galley slave.
Remember E.B. White’s cows, says Graham, learning to be afraid of electric fences, even if off:
Rise up cows! Take your liberty while despots snore!
Even in the credits, Graham sticks it to the man…
Microsoft’s PR firm were unable to grant us permission to reproduce any of their photographs of Bill Gates…
On Youth
For me, Graham is at his most thought provoking when discussing youth.
If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither hormones are turning you all into monsters, nor because life is actually awful. It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing to real to do.
Though raised early in the book, you feel it a strong undercurrent throughout, and in the spirit of Y Combinator.
Conclusion
Overall, Hackers & Painters is a very good book. Graham ranges far and wide, but with intelligence and humility.
Y Combinator has been a powerful shaping force in Silicon Valley and beyond. In H&P, Graham explores many of the principles at the heart of YC, and of The Valley’s success. It’s not an easy read. But it’s worth it.
~ SH, Oxford, 21st November 2017
Credits
I’ve been reading more or less a book a week for many years. I thank my Uncle Peter Haigh for setting such a fine example in the discipline of writing, and to Ajit Jaokar for the #BookAWeek inspiration.
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563), Wikipedia.
The Annunciation, with St. Emidius by Carlo Crivelli (1486), National Gallery.
Leonardo da Vinci, Five caricature heads, Wikipedia.
Porsche with model, Capri23Auto
Lisp Cycles, XKCD
Henry Ford, The Independent
Oarsmen after race, Wikipedia
Bill Gates, Wikipedia
Girl in Market, Myanmar, ngd3
Paul Graham, Wikipedia
Text copyright © @seb haigh 2017
