Don’t look at what she said, look at what he did. This is also true for Paul Graham.
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Editor’s note: Paul Graham’s first half of his life is not to mention the ups and downs, but it is also quite exciting. It is not an exaggeration to say that he is the spiritual mentor of a whole generation of young technology entrepreneurs. Many people have drawn motivation, nutrition, and methodology from his articles. He is interested in painting. Like many people, when he was young, he wanted to gain financial freedom first before painting. In 1998, the company he founded Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo and achieved financial freedom. Over the next ten years, he researched the programming language Lisp and founded the venture capital firm Y Combinator. He entered retirement in 2014 and spent most of his time painting, but found that he didn’t want to paint anymore. Original title What I Worked On, author Paul Graham.
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When I was a student in the college, I started painting still lifes in my bedroom at night. These paintings are small because the room is small, and because I used the remaining canvas fragments to paint, which was everything I could afford at the time. Painting a still life is different from painting a person, because the subject cannot move. People can’t sit more than 15 minutes at a time, and when they sit, they don’t sit very firmly. So the traditional method of figure drawing is to know how to draw an ordinary person, and then you modify it according to the specific character you want to draw. And still life painting, if you want, you can copy it pixel by pixel from what you see. Of course, you don’t want to stop here, otherwise you only get the accuracy of photography, and the reason why painting still life is interesting is because it has already passed a head. You want to emphasize the visual cues that tell you, for example, the reason why the color suddenly changes at a certain point is that it is the edge of the object. Subtly emphasize something like this, You can make paintings that are more real than photos, not only in a metaphorical sense, but in a strict information theory sense.
I like painting still lifes because I am curious about what I see. In daily life, we are not aware of many things we see. Most of the visual perception is processed by low-level processes. It only tells your brain “that is a drop of water” without telling you the details, such as where the brightest and darkest points are, or “that is a Bushes” without telling you the shape and position of each leaf. This is a feature of the brain, not a bug. In daily life, if you notice every leaf on every bush, it will make people upset. But when you want to draw something, you have to observe more carefully. When you observe, there will be a lot of things to see. You can still notice new things after the days when you try to draw things that people usually take for granted, just like the days when you try to write an article about things that people usually take for granted, you can still notice new things thing.
This is not the only painting method, and I am not 100% sure that this is a good painting method. But it seems to be a good enough bet to be worth a try.
Our teacher, Professor Ulivi, is a good person. He could see that I worked very hard and gave me a good result. But the college taught me nothing except Italian, and my money was almost running out, so at the end of the first year, I went back to the United States.
I want to return to RISD, but now I have no money and the cost of RISD is very high, so I decided to find a job, work for a year, and then return to RISD in the fall of the next year. I got a job in a company called Interleaf, which is a software for creating documents. You mean like Microsoft Word? That’s right, this is how I learned that low-end software tends to eat up high-end software. But Interleaf can live for a few years.
Interleaf did a very bold thing. Inspired by Emacs, they added a scripting language and even turned this scripting language into a dialect of Lisp. Now they want a Lisp hacker to use it to write things. I apologize to my boss and colleagues, because I am a terrible employee. Their Lisp is the thinnest icing on the huge C language cake. Since I don’t understand C language and don’t want to learn it, I have never understood most of the software. Plus I am very irresponsible. That’s when programming work means appearing in specific working hours every day. This seemed unnatural to me. At this point, other people in the world gradually accepted my way of thinking, but it caused a lot of conflicts at the time. By the end of the year, I spent a lot of time secretly writing On Lisp, and by this time I had already got the publishing contract.
Fortunately, I got itof. This is not always the reason why the artist has an iconic style, but it is usually the reason why buyers pay a lot of money for this kind of work.
There are also many students who study hard: children who “can paint” in high school now come to the best art school in the country to learn how to paint better. They are often confused and frustrated with what they find in RISD, but they still stick to it, because painting is their job. When I was in high school, I was not a kid who knew how to paint, but at RISD, I was closer to the “painting” group than those who pursued distinctive styles.
I learned a lot in the color class on RISD, but other than that, I’m basically learning painting by myself, and I don’t need to pay tuition at all. So in 1993, I dropped out of school. I drove around Providence, and my college friend Nancy Palmet gave me a big favor. A rented apartment in a building owned by her mother in New York was vacant. Do i want it? It is not much more expensive than where I live now, and New York should be a gathering place for artists. So yes, I want it!
The beginning of the comic “The Heroes of Gaul” is to enlarge a small corner of Roman Gaul, and it turns out that it is not controlled by the Romans. You can do something similar on a map of New York City: if you zoom in on the Upper East Side, there is a small corner that is not rich, at least not in 1993. It’s called Yorkville, and it’s my new home. Now I am a New York artist. Strictly speaking, I paint in New York and live in New York.
I am nervous about money because I can feel Interleaf is going downhill. Freelance Lisp work is very rare, and I don’t want to program in another language. In those days, if I was lucky, it meant C++. So with my keen sense of economic opportunity, I decided to write another book on Lisp. This will be a popular book, the kind of book that can be used as a textbook. I imagined myself living a frugal life relying on royalties and spending all my time painting. (The painting on the cover of ANSI COMMON LISP is what I painted during this time).
For me, the best thing that happened in New York was meeting Idele and Julian Weber. Edel Weber was a painter, one of the early photographic realists, and I took her drawing class at Harvard. I have never seen a teacher so beloved by students. A large number of former students keep in touch with her, including me. After I moved to New York, I actually became an assistant in her studio.
She likes to paint on large, square canvases, 4 to 5 feet on each side. One day in late 1994, when I was working in the studio, there was some story about a famous fund manager on the radio. He is not much older than me, and he is super rich. I suddenly thought: Why don’t I become a rich man? Then I can do whatever I want.
At the same time, I heard more and more of this new thing called the “World Wide Web”. Robert Morris showed me this when I visited him in Cambridge. He was a graduate student at Harvard University. In my opinion, web pages will be a big deal. I have seen the effect of graphical user interfaces on the popularization of microcomputers, and it seems that web pages can bring the same effect to the Internet.
If I want to become rich, this is the next train. My judgment on this part is correct. I was wrong with this idea. I decided that we should set up a company and put the art gallery online. After seeing so many Y Combinator applications now, I must say that this is the worst startup idea ever. Art galleries do not want to go online, nor do they do it now, this is not their way of selling. I wrote some software to generate a website for the gallery, Robert wrote some software to adjust the size of the pictures, and set up an http server to serve the web pages. Then we tried to register the gallery. To say that this is a difficult sale is an understatement. It is very difficult to sell. There are a few galleries who let us make websites for them for free, but none of them pay us.
Then some online shops started to appear, and I realized that except for the order button, they were the same as the websites we had been doing for galleries. This impressive thing is called “Internet Store”, and we already know how to build it.
So in the summer of 1995, when I submitted a photocopy of ANSI Common Lisp to the publisher, we began to try to write software to build an online store. At first, this will be an ordinary desktop software, in those days, it meant Windows software. This is a worrying thing, because we don’t know how to write Windows software and don’t want to learn. We live in the Unix world. But we decided to at least try to write a starter store builder on Unix. Robert wrote a shopping cart, and I wrote a new store website generator, of course in Lisp.
We work in Robert’s apartment in Cambridge. His roommate was away most of the time, during which time I slept in his room. For some reason, there is no bed frame or bed sheet in his room, only a mattress on the floor. One morning, when I was lying on this mattress, I had a thought that made me fidget. What if we run software on the server and let users control it by clicking a link? This way we don’t have to write anything to run on the user’s computer. We can generate a website on the same server and provide services for it. The user only needs a browser.
This kind of software known as network applications is very common now, but it was not clear at the time whether it was feasible. In order to find out, we decided to try to make a browserControlled version of shop building tool. A few days later, on August 12th, we have a working one. Although the user interface is terrible, it proves that you can build a complete store through a browser without any client software or typing anything in the command line on the server.
At this time, we felt that we really had some gains. I look forward to a whole new generation of software working in this way. You don’t need to think about the version, you don’t need to port, and you don’t need any nonsense. At Interleaf, there is a group called “Release Engineering”, which is at least as large as the actual software group. Now you can update the software directly on the server.
We established a new company called Viaweb. In fact, our software can work through the Internet. We received $10,000 in seed funding from Idelle’s husband Julian. He also did the initial legal work and gave us Provide business advice, in return, we gave him 10% of the company’s shares. Ten years later, this deal became the model of Y Combinator. We know that founders need something like this, because we also needed it in the first place.
At this stage, my net worth is negative because my more than one thousand dollars in the bank was offset by the taxes I owed the government. (Have I diligently set aside the money for consulting Interleaf in a proper proportion? No, I don’t.) So, although Robert has his graduate allowance, I need that seed money to survive.
We originally hoped to launch it in September, but as our work progressed, our ambitions for the software grew. In the end, we successfully built a WYSIWYG website builder. In a sense, when you create pages, they look exactly the same as static pages generated later, except that the links do not point to static pages, but Points to the closure in the hash table stored on the server.
Translator: Di Kewei
Related articles:
Paul Graham, the Godfather of Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, self-reported: The first half of my life (1)
Paul Graham, the Godfather of Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley: Self-reported by Paul Graham: The First Half of My Life (2)
Paul Graham, the Godfather of Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley: Self-reported: The First Half of My Life (3)
Paul Graham, the Godfather of Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley: Self-reported by Paul Graham: The First Half of My Life (4)