December 2020Jessica and I have certain words that have special significancewhen we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we canpay to founders is to describe them as "earnest." This is not byitself a guarantee of success. You could be earnest but incapable.But when founders are both formidable (another of our words) andearnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get.Earnestness sounds like a boring, even Victorian virtue. It seemsa bit of an anachronism that people in Silicon Valley would careabout it. Why does this matter so much?When you call someone earnest, you're making a statement about theirmotives. It means both that they're doing something for the rightreasons, and that they're trying as hard as they can. If we imaginemotives as vectors, it means both the direction and the magnitudeare right. Though these are of course related: when people are doingsomething for the right reasons, they try harder.[1]The reason motives matter so much in Silicon Valley is that so manypeople there have the wrong ones. Starting a successful startupmakes you rich and famous. So a lot of the people trying to startthem are doing it for those reasons. Instead of what? Instead ofinterest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root ofearnestness. [2]It's also the hallmark of a nerd. Indeed, when people describethemselves as "x nerds," what they mean is that they're interestedin x for its own sake, and not because it's cool to be interestedin x, or because of what they can get from it. They're saying theycare so much about x that they're willing to sacrifice seeming coolfor its sake.A genuine interest in something is a very powerful motivator — forsome people, the most powerful motivator of all.[3]Which is whyit's what Jessica and I look for in founders. But as well as beinga source of strength, it's also a source of vulnerability. Caringconstrains you. The earnest can't easily reply in kind to mockingbanter, or put on a cool facade of nihil admirari. They care toomuch. They are doomed to be the straight man. That's a realdisadvantage in your teenage years, when mocking banter and nihiladmirari often have the upper hand. But it becomes an advantagelater.It's a commonplace now that the kids who were nerds in high schoolbecome the cool kids' bosses later on. But people misunderstand whythis happens. It's not just because the nerds are smarter, but alsobecause they're more earnest. When the problems get harder than thefake ones you're given in high school, caring about them starts tomatter.Does it always matter? Do the earnest always win? Not always. Itprobably doesn't matter much in politics, or in crime, or in certaintypes of business that are similar to crime, like gambling, personalinjury law, patent trolling, and so on. Nor does it matter inacademic fields at the more bogus end of the spectrum. And thoughI don't know enough to say for sure, it may not matter in some kindsof humor: it may be possible to be completely cynical and still bevery funny.[4]Looking at the list of fields I mentioned, there's an obviouspattern. Except possibly for humor, these are all types of work I'davoid like the plague. So that could be a useful heuristic fordeciding which fields to work in: how much does earnestness matter?Which can in turn presumably be inferred from the prevalence ofnerds at the top.Along with "nerd," another word that tends to be associated withearnestness is "naive." The earnest often seem naive. It's notjust that they don't have the motives other people have. They oftendon't fully grasp that such motives exist. Or they may knowintellectually that they do, but because they don't feel them, theyforget about them.[5]It works to be slightly naive not just about motives but also,believe it or not, about the problems you're working on. Naiveoptimism can compensate for the bit rot that rapid change causesin established beliefs. You plunge into some problem saying "Howhard can it be?", and then after solving it you learn that it wastill recently insoluble.Naivete is an obstacle for anyone who wants to seem sophisticated,and this is one reason would-be intellectuals find it so difficultto understand Silicon Valley. It hasn't been safe for such peopleto use the word "earnest" outside scare quotes since Oscar Wildewrote "The Importance of Being Earnest" in 1895. And yet when youzoom in on Silicon Valley, right into Jessica Livingston's brain,that's what her x-ray visionis seeking out in founders. Earnestness!Who'd have guessed? Reporters literally can't believe it whenfounders making piles of money say that they started their companiesto make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery.How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausiblethey sound?Though those asking this question don't realize it, that's not arhetorical question.A lot of founders are faking it, of course, particularly the smallerfry, and the soon to be smaller fry. But not all of them. There area significant number of founders who really are interested in theproblem they're solving mainly for its own sake.Why shouldn't there be? We have no difficulty believing that peoplewould be interested in history or math or even old bus tickets fortheir own sake. Why can't there be people interested in self-drivingcars or social networks for their own sake? When you look at thequestion from this side, it seems obvious there would be. And isn'tit likely that having a deep interest in something would be a sourceof great energy and resilience? It is in every other field.The question really is why we have a blind spot about business.And the answer to that is obvious if you know enough history. Formost of history, making large amounts of money has not been veryintellectually interesting. In preindustrial times it was never farfrom robbery, and some areas of business still retain that character,except using lawyers instead of soldiers.But there are other areas of business where the work is genuinelyinteresting. Henry Ford got to spend much of his time working oninteresting technical problems, and for the last several decadesthe trend in that direction has been accelerating. It's much easiernow to make a lot of money by working on something you're interestedin than it was 50 years ago. And that, rather than how fast theygrow, may be the most important change that startups represent.Though indeed, the fact that the work is genuinely interesting isa big part of why it gets done so fast.[6]Can you imagine a more important change than one in the relationshipbetween intellectual curiosity and money? These are two of the mostpowerful forces in the world, and in my lifetime they've becomesignificantly more aligned. How could you not be fascinated to watchsomething like this happening in real time?I meant this essay to be about earnestness generally, and now I'vegone and talked about startups again. But I suppose at least itserves as an example of an x nerd in the wild.Notes[1]It's interesting how many different ways there are not tobe earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant,to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, tobe orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make.This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum,but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions.Another thing I notice about this list is that it sounds like alist of the ways people behave on Twitter. Whatever else socialmedia is, it's a vivid catalogue of ways not to be earnest.[2]People's motives are as mixed in Silicon Valley as anywhereelse. Even the founders motivated mostly by money tend to be atleast somewhat interested in the problem they're solving, and eventhe founders most interested in the problem they're solving alsolike the idea of getting rich. But there's great variation in therelative proportions of different founders' motivations.And when I talk about "wrong" motives, I don't mean morally wrong.There's nothing morally wrong with starting a startup to make money.I just mean that those startups don't do as well.[3]The most powerful motivator for most people is probably family.But there are some for whom intellectual curiosity comes first. Inhis (wonderful) autobiography, Paul Halmos says explicitly that fora mathematician, math must come before anything else, includingfamily. Which at least implies that it did for him.[4]Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness evenwhen used as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the opposite.It's not only in actual politics that earnestness seems to be ahandicap, but also in office politics and academic politics.[5]It's a bigger social error to seem naive in most Europeancountries than it is in America, and this may be one of subtlerreasons startups are less common there. Founder culture is completelyat odds with sophisticated cynicism.The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisinglythis is also the region with the highest number of successfulstartups per capita.[6]Much of business is schleps, and probably always will be. Buteven being a professor is largely schleps. It would be interestingto collect statistics about the schlep ratios of different jobs,but I suspect they'd rarely be less than 30%.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, JessicaLivingston, Mattias Ljungman, Harj Taggar, and Kyle Vogt for readingdrafts of this.
