February 2008The fiery reaction to the release of Arc hadan unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a designphilosophy. The main complaint of the more articulate critics wasthat Arc seemed so flimsy. After years of working on it, all I hadto show for myself were a few thousand lines of macros? Why hadn'tI worked on more substantial problems?As I was mulling over these remarks it struck me how familiar theyseemed. This was exactly the kind of thing people said at firstabout Viaweb, and Y Combinator, and most of my essays.When we launched Viaweb, it seemed laughable to VCs and e-commerce"experts." We were just a couple guys in an apartment,which did not seem cool in 1995 the way it does now. And the thingwe'd built, as far as they could tell, wasn't even software.Software, to them, equalled big, honking Windows apps. Since Viawebwas the first web-based app they'd seen, it seemed to be nothingmore than a website. They were even more contemptuous when theydiscovered that Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions (wedidn't for the whole first year). Transaction processing seemedto them what e-commerce was all about. It sounded serious anddifficult.And yet, mysteriously, Viaweb ended up crushing all its competitors.The initial reaction to Y Combinator was almost identical. Itseemed laughably lightweight. Startup funding meant series A rounds:millions of dollars given to a small number of startups founded bypeople with established credentials after months of serious,businesslike meetings, on terms described in a document a footthick. Y Combinator seemed inconsequential. It's too early to sayyet whether Y Combinator will turn out like Viaweb, but judgingfrom the number of imitations, a lot of people seem to think we'reon to something.I can't measure whether my essays are successful, except in pageviews, but the reaction to them is at least different from when Istarted. At first the default reaction of the Slashdot trolls was(translated into articulate terms): "Who is this guy and whatauthority does he have to write about these topics? I haven't readthe essay, but there's no way anything so short and written in suchan informal style could have anything useful to say about such andsuch topic, when people with degrees in the subject have alreadywritten many thick books about it." Now there's a new generationof trolls on a new generation of sites, but they have at leaststarted to omit the initial "Who is this guy?"Now people are saying the same things about Arc that they said atfirst about Viaweb and Y Combinator and most of my essays. Why thepattern? The answer, I realized, is that my m.o. for all four hasbeen the same.Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlookedproblems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver themas informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version1, then (f) iterating rapidly.When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed somethingstriking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuousinitial reaction. Though simple solutions are better, they don'tseem as impressive as complex ones. Overlooked problems are bydefinition problems that most people think don't matter. Deliveringsolutions in an informal way means that instead of judging somethingby the way it's presented, people have to actually understand it,which is more work. And starting with a crude version 1 means yourinitial effort is always small and incomplete.I'd noticed, of course, that people never seemed to grasp new ideasat first. I thought it was just because most people were stupid.Now I see there's more to it than that. Like acontrarian investment fund, someone following this strategy willalmost always be doing things that seem wrong to the average person.As with contrarian investment strategies, that's exactly the point.This technique is successful (in the long term) because it gives youall the advantages other people forgo by trying to seem legit. Ifyou work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to discover newthings, because you have less competition. If you deliver solutionsinformally, you (a) save all the effort you would have had to expendto make them look impressive, and (b) avoid the danger of foolingyourself as well as your audience. And if you release a crudeversion 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from the imaginationof nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful thanyour own.In the case of Viaweb, the simple solution was to make the softwarerun on the server. The overlooked problem was to generate web sitesautomatically; in 1995, online stores were all made by hand by humandesigners, but we knew this wouldn't scale. The part that actuallymattered was graphic design, not transaction processing.The informal delivery mechanism was me, showing up in jeans and at-shirt at some retailer's office. And the crude version 1 was,if I remember correctly, less than 10,000 lines of code when welaunched.The power of this technique extends beyond startups and programminglanguages and essays. It probably extends to any kind of creativework. Certainly it can be used in painting: this is exactly what Cezanne and Klee did.At Y Combinator we bet money on it, in the sense that we encouragethe startups we fund to work this way. There are always new ideasright under your nose. So look for simple things that other peoplehave overlooked—things people will later claim were "obvious"—especially when they've been led astray by obsolete conventions,or by trying to do things that are superficially impressive. Figureout what the real problem is, and make sure you solve that. Don'tworry about trying to look corporate; the product is what wins inthe long term. And launch as soon as you can, so you start learningfrom users what you should have been making.Reddit is a classic example of this approach. When Reddit firstlaunched, it seemed like there was nothing to it. To the graphicallyunsophisticated its deliberately minimal design seemed like nodesign at all. But Reddit solved the real problem, which was totell people what was new and otherwise stay out of the way. As aresult it became massively successful. Now that conventional ideashave caught up with it, it seems obvious. People look at Redditand think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it washarder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against thecurrent that they reversed it; now it looks like they're merelyfloating downstream.So when you look at something like Reddit and think "I wish I couldthink of an idea like that," remember: ideas like that are allaround you. But you ignore them because they look wrong.
