credit: Ashley

Here is an essay version of class notes from Class 5 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine.

Stephen Cohen, co-founder and Executive VP of Palantir Technologies, and Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide fame joined this class as guest speakers. Credit for good stuff goes to them and Peter. I have tried to be accurate. But note that this is not a transcript of the conversation.

I. Company Cultures

Everybody knows that company culture is important. But it’s hard to know exactly what makes for an ideal culture. There are obviously some things that work. Even though they didn’t necessarily look like a winning investment at the time, the early Microsoft team clearly got something right.

Then there are some things that don’t work so well. A cult is perhaps the paradigmatic version of a culture that doesn’t work. Cults are crazy and idealistic in a bad way. Cult members all tend to be fanatically wrong about something big.

And then there is what might be called anti-culture, where you really don’t even have a culture at all. Consulting firms are the classic example here. Unfortunately, this is probably the dominant paradigm for companies. Most of the time, they don’t even get to the point of having culture. People are mercenaries. People are nihilistic.

Picture a 1-dimensional axis from consultant-nihilism to cultish dogmatism. You want to be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. To the extent you gravitate towards an extreme, you probably want to be closer to being a cult than being an army of consultants.

Good company culture is more nuanced than simple homogeneity or heterogeneity. On the homogeneity side, everyone being alike isn’t enough. A robust company culture is one in which people have something in common that distinguishes them quite sharply from rest of the world. If everybody likes ice cream, that probably doesn’t matter. If the core people share a relevant and unique philosophy about something important, you’re onto something.

Similarly, differences qua differences don’t matter much. In strong company cultures, people are different in a way that goes to the core mission. Suppose one key person is on an ice cream only diet. That’s quirky. But it’s also irrelevant. You want your people to be different in a way that gives the company a strong sense of identity and yet still dovetails with the overall mission. Having different kinds of problem-solvers on a team, for example, can make for a stronger culture.

II. Zero Sum vs. Not

A. To Fight or Not To Fight

Generally speaking, capitalism and competition are better seen as antonyms than as synonyms. To compete isn’t what you should set out to do. That doesn’t mean you should slack off. To succeed you probably need to work intensely. But you should work on something that others aren’t doing. That is, focus on an area that’s not zero-sum.

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Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 1 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely. 

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—The Challenge of the Future

Purpose and Preamble

            We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness. Details are well understood; the big picture remains unclear. A fundamental challenge—in business as in life—is to integrate the micro and macro such that all things make sense.

            Humanities majors may well learn a great deal about the world. But they don’t really learn career skills through their studies. Engineering majors, conversely, learn in great technical detail. But they might not learn why, how, or where they should apply their skills in the workforce. The best students, workers, and thinkers will integrate these questions into a cohesive narrative. This course aims to facilitate that process.

I.          The History of Technology

            For most of recent human history—from the invention of the steam engine in the late 17^th century through about the late 1960’s or so— technological process has been tremendous, perhaps even relentless. In most prior human societies, people made money by taking it from others. The industrial revolution wrought a paradigm shift in which people make money through trade, not plunder.

              The importance of this shift is hard to overstate. Perhaps 100 billion people have ever lived on earth. Most of them lived in essentially stagnant societies; success involved claiming value, not creating it. So the massive technological acceleration of the past few hundred years is truly incredible.

             The zenith of optimism about the future of technology might have been the 1960’s. People believed in the future. They thought about the future. Many were supremely confident that the next 50 years would be a half-century of unprecedented technological progress.

              But with the exception of the computer industry, it wasn’t. Per capita incomes are still rising, but that rate is starkly decelerating. Median wages have been stagnant since 1973. People find themselves in an alarming Alice-in-Wonderland-style scenario in which they must run harder and harder—that is, work longer hours—just to stay in the same place. This deceleration is complex, and wage data alone don’t explain it. But they do support the general sense that the rapid progress of the last 200 years is slowing all too quickly. 

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Here is an essay version of class notes from Class 13 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely.

Class 13 Notes Essay— You Are Not A Lottery Ticket

I. The Question of Luck

A. Nature of the Problem

The biggest philosophical question underlying startups is how much luck is involved when they succeed. As important as the luck vs. skill question is, however, it’s very hard to get a good handle on. Statistical tools are meaningless if you have a sample size of one. It would be great if you could run experiments. Start Facebook 1,000 times under identical conditions. If it works 1,000 out of 1,000 times, you’d conclude it was skill. If it worked just 1 time, you’d conclude it was just luck. But obviously these experiments are impossible.

The first cut at the luck vs. skill question is thus almost just a bias that one can have. Some people gravitate toward explaining things as lucky. Others are inclined to find a greater degree of skill. It depends on which narrative you buy. The internal narrative is that talented people got together, worked hard, and made things work. The external narrative chalks things up to right place, right time. You can change your mind about all this, but it’s tough to have a really principled, well-reasoned view on way or the other.

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Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 2 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely. 

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—Party Like It’s 1999?

I.  Late to the Party

History is driven by each generation’s experience. We are all born into a particular culture at a particular time. That culture is like an extended dinner conversation; lots of people are talking, some lightly, some angrily, some loudly, some in whispers. As soon as you’re able, you listen in. You try to figure out what that conversation is about. Why are people happy? Why are they upset? Sometimes it’s hard to figure out.

Take someone born in the late 1960s, for instance. There was a lot going on then, culturally. But a toddler in the late ‘60s, despite having technically lived through them, essentially missed the debates on civil rights, Vietnam, and what the U.S. was supposed to look like. The child, being more or less excluded from the dinner table, would later find it hard to get a sense of what those discussions were like.

There is a keen analogue between the cultural intensity of the ‘60s and the technological intensity of the 1990s. But today’s college and perhaps even graduate students, like the toddler in 1969, may have been too young to have viscerally experienced what was going on back in 1999. To participate in the dinner table conversation—to be able to think and talk about businesses and startups today in 2012—we must get a handle on the history of the ‘90s. It is questionable whether one can really understand startups without, say, knowing about Webvan or recognizing the Pets.com mascot.

History is a strange thing in that it often turns out to be quite different than what people who lived through it thought it was. Even technology entrepreneurs of the ‘90s might have trouble piecing together that decade’s events. And even if we look back at what actually happened, it’s not easy to know why things happened as they did. All that’s clear is that the ‘90s powerfully shaped the current landscape. So it’s important to get as good a grasp on them as possible.

II. A Quick History of the 90s

Most of the 1990s was not the dot com bubble. Really, what might be called the mania started in September 1998 and lasted just 18 months. The rest of the decade was a messier, somewhat chaotic picture.

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