I spent this evening in a big room full of geeks. The room belonged to Y Combinator, Paul Graham's venture/incubator firm, and the geeks were assembled for the Startup School reception. Startup School is a chance for amibitious geeks to get together and learn about business from a number of experienced folks in tech companies, venture capital firms, law firms, etc. It's also not-so-secretly a huge recruiting event for Y Combinator's upcoming Winter Founders Program, which hopes to continue on the success of the just-ended Summer Founders Program. Most of the younger geeks are at Startup School because they want to build and work in startups. Most people over 25 (there aren't lots) — excluding speakers — seem to be there to recruit partners and staff.

The conversations you have in a party filled with geeks are much more challenging than normal party talk. First of all, virtually everyone there is male (maybe 5 women among the crowd of ~150) so flirting doesn't get you by. Secondly, the protocol for meeting a new person is to inquire about what they're doing with the most insightful questions possible. Thirdly, they ask you the same thing and you have to have a spiel about who you are and what you do that keeps interesting people wanting to talk with you.

In case you're wondering, here's my spiel in condesnsed form: today was my last day at a 400-engineer software firm where I started 2 years ago after college. I'm taking a week off and then starting at Renesys, a company that tracks internet router activity around the globe and assembles a minute-by-minute map of how the internet is structured. I'm not a networking expert— at Renesys I'll be working on web application development, making the huge pile of interesting data into valuable visualizations and analyses. This continues to develop my focus on usable, responsive, and pleasant web applications; a focus I've first learned in making Voo2do, a web-based to-do list manager that has grown to 3800 users in 3 months. I'm excited about my new job and also hope to someday found a startup.

Most other people have spiels of comparable complexity and room for conversation. The goal is to listen to what they say, explore those parts that are interesting from a technological or business standpoint, and ask some questions or make suggestions that will twist their brains around. The most interesting people to talk to will not only tell you about a spiffy project, but will also listen when you suggest they automatically extract metadata from RSS feeds and work that into further discussion. The least interesting people tell you how smart they are, and then state that they're finally solving natural language processing without giving any comprehensibly specific examples of what their system actually does. But even those people can be somewhat interesting, if as nothing more than studies in the sort of hubris required to create a company out of nothing but ideas and sweat.

I had about 6 or 7 conversations like this tonight. I met some fun and smart people. I told Joel Spolsky about Voo2do (which is inspired by his technique). And Joel told me how freaking smart my soon-to-be-boss Jim Cowie is. That's a pretty fun little coincidence.

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Jeff Busgang, who writes an excellent blog on venture capital with an entrepreneur's perspective, has a surprisingly lucid explanation of how VCs get paid and how financial tensions and a firm's power structure can affect decisions.

Some interesting articles linked from the Y Combinator resources page:

• Valuation, i.e. how the VC's money is safer
  
• If you want an NDA, you are probably paranoid and perhaps delusional
• Larry and Sergey are the crazy and self-destructive core of Google
• Is that venture capital in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

I've only started reading these but they're an interesting crop. And Y Combinator is an interesting group; I wonder how many applications they got for their summer founders program.

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How VC math works.

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Paul Graham's new early stage venture firm is running a novel kind of summer program for people interesting in starting companies. Just reading their application is pretty educational if you're contemplating that possibility.

My friend Todd wrote about information overload and linked to this Seattle Times article. Is it possible to do good work when there are constant interruptions from inside and outside your head? When there is more interesting stuff in your RSS aggregator than you could possibly read? When friends and coworkers constantly interrupt you?

I would say that if you contrast my average and best work, this is one of the most striking differences.

At my paying work, I sit in a cubicle. I listen to music on headphones continuously because it covers up the noise of people talking around me, which is far more distracting. I believe this environment subtly discourages focused thinking. That is bad because in programming, a well-considered design decision can replace hundreds of lines of code—you can reach an equivalent or better solution with less work for yourself, your testers, and your successors; but not if you're never able to concentrate for more than two minutes. Consequently, there is a subtle, subconscious motivation to be a bad programmer. This reinforces the cultural misperceptions that programming is a rote activity and that programmers are commodity workers.* Another consequence is that any person not content with doing a mediocre job is urged to go into management. This makes the environmental problems self-reinforcing, because managers—whose daily business is primarily communication, not prolonged focus—both favor an interruption-friendly workplace and hold positions of power.

* Although I call the belief that programmers are a commodity a misperception, this isn't always true. In some cases, such as projects for which offshored development is successful, programmers are a commodity. If you are running a software development project, you should be honest with yourself about what you building and whether it's better to have a brilliant team or a cheap, mediocre one.

By contrast, in the programming I do in my spare time, I am rarely interrupted. I would estimate my average time spent focused is on the order of 5 minutes, with peak focus lengths of 30-60 minutes. By contrast, at work average time spent focused is probably about 2 minutes, with peaks of around 10 minutes. I focus more at home for a few reasons:

• I personally love the project.
• I sit alone, in my attic office with nobody around. Or I sit downstairs on the couch, but I can easily ask people to not interrupt me (or to stop interrupting) and they honor my request.
• I never have to wait for my editor or compiler. This means I am not given lots of 30-second gaps perfectly suited to going off and reading stupid websites.
• Because the edit-test-success/failure cycle is so tight, I don't get distracted enough to wonder if I have any email. So I reduce my checking from once every 5 minutes to about once every hour (I just instrumented my mail checker to measure this, so I should have real data to back this up in the near future).
• I don't have to work on it if I'm tired, upset, or preoccupied.
• I know the project better because I did most of it myself.
• Because I designed the software, I can understand its design and I don't feel held hostage to idiotic design or technology decisions. (I.e. I feel more ourness.)

Of course, not all of these are luxuries employers would want, or be able, to afford their employees. All the more reason to push the feasible ones.

Question for audience participation: Businesses are inclined toward productivity improvements that are measurable. I think businesses could realize productivity gains if they understood some of stuff I just wrote, but I don't know how they would measure progress. Can you think of a way?

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Pretty rantastic. See also: 10 Reasons to Shy Away from Venture Capital from Anti Venture Capital.

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Philip Greenspun's classic, originally published in the ArsDigita Systems Journal.

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Interesting, short interview with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Mostly about innovation, and how Amazon prospers because of their focus on improving the customer experience. Innovation makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.