Be Good
May 12th, 2008 by MarkI watched Paul Graham’s talk Be Good last week, and I really enjoyed it. It’s always nice to see benevolence rewarded. It’s also had me thinking about my old school and its success– Ron was always completely focussed on what was best for the kids. “If the education is great, the business side will almost take care of itself,” he said.
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May 12th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Like your blog (especially the video on the kid breakdancing with the mom on the couch).
That said, I noticed your comment on Paul Graham. He is an excellent speaker and has alot of great insights to your points above. As part of my daily study of various leaders (peoples & companies), I did a cliff notes version writeup of his recent webcast @ Startup School 08:
The writeup is good for for those that don’t have 60m to watch it … but are curious on what he emphasized (like my favorite how startups should model cockroaches).
Would be curious on your thoughts on their specific points and my take.
Hope it helps
May 12th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
I’ve got say, Paul Graham is my favorite person when it comes to getting inspiration for start-up ideas. The only problem is that whenever I read a Paul Graham essay, I start to feel invulnerable and ready to forsake my wife and two children to start marketing a hexagonal go game. Or make an airplane controlled by a cell phone powered by Google’s Android platform to take cheap up-to-date pictures for Google Maps Live. Or invent a new efficient method for entering text into a 12-key cell phone (again powered by Android). Or fix password management problems once and for all. Then I snap out of it and realize I need to save more money first.
The other thing I like about Paul Graham is his commentary on programming languages. He’s released the first prototypes for his ‘Arc’ programming language (based on LISP), and it looks promising. One of these days when I get time (after publishing an IEEE key management standard), I’d like to write a programming language heavily focused on security and computational correctness — That’s part of why I still have a beard. Arc works off of a few Axioms started by John McCarthy — I’m hoping to use a slightly different set of axioms. We’ll see….