December 2020
When Jessica and I talk about startups, we use certain words and terms. The highest compliment we can give to founders is to call them earnest. This quality alone is not a guarantee of success. You can be serious but incapable of accomplishment. But when founders are formidable (another of our terms) and earnest, they cannot be stopped.
Seriousness seems to be a boring Victorian virtue. The fact that people in Silicon Valley are paying attention to it seems anachronistic. Why is it so important?
When you call someone serious, you are evaluating that person's motives. Seriousness in intentions means that a person is doing something with good intentions and trying his best. If we imagine that motives are vectors, then the direction of efforts and their magnitude will be correct. However, these concepts are related: when people do something with good intentions, they try their best. [1]
The reason motives are so important in Silicon Valley is that many people have them wrong. A successful startup can make you rich and famous, and many are looking to launch them for these very reasons. Instead of what? Instead of being interested in solving a problem. It is in the pure interest in solving the problem that the essence of seriousness of intent lies. [2]
Also, seriousness is the hallmark of nerds. Indeed, when a person is called a "world X nerd," people mean that they are interested in X because of their beliefs, not because X is cool or profitable. Such people are willing to sacrifice for the sake of X something that seems cool.
A genuine interest in something is a very powerful motivator, and for some it is the most powerful motivator of all. [3] This is the quality Jessica and I look for in founders. However, this quality can also be a vulnerability. Engagement can hold you back. Serious intentions do not allow people to easily get rid of ridicule and lead calmly. Such people are too involved in what they do. They are doomed to be straightforward. In adolescencethese qualities can become a real weakness, because of which a person can learn to fend off ridicule and pretend that he does not care. But over the years this quality will become an advantage.
It's no surprise now that kids who were nerds in high school go on to become the bosses of the tough guys. However, people misunderstand why everything happens this way. It's not just that nerds are smarter, they're also more serious. When tasks become more complex than the artificial ones you were taught in high school, engagement begins to play a role.
Does engagement always matter? Does the most serious person always win? No not always. Probably, seriousness of intentions and convictions will not give anything in politics, criminality or some types of business that look like criminals - gambling, insurance fraud, patent trolling and the like. Also, seriousness will not play a role in academic fields close to pseudoscience . And, although I can't say for sure, seriousness and sincerity are probably useless in certain genres of comedy: you can probably be completely cynical, but at the same time very funny.
Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies sincerity, the word "politics" implies the opposite. It seems that being convinced of one's intentions gets in the way not only in real politics, but also in office or academic politics.
Looking at the list of the mentioned fields of activity, you can see an obvious pattern, I would avoid all these jobs like the plague (except perhaps humor). This reasoning can serve as a heuristic for choosing a field of activity and answering the question: how important is seriousness in this area? A conclusion can be made based on how many "nerds" work in this area.
Along with “nerd”, another word is associated with sincerity of intentions - “naivety”. Sincerity often seems naive. It's not just that some people don't share the motives of others. The fact is that sometimes people are not fully aware of the fact that certain motives exist. Or people may know about them intellectually, but not separate at the level of feelings, and as a result, forget. [4]
A small amount of naivety will not only influence your motives, but also your attitude towards the problems you are working on. Naive optimism can compensate for the negative that causes rapid changewell-established beliefs. You immerse yourself in a problem, ask yourself: "how difficult can its solution be?" Then, when you solve it, you will know that until recently this problem was considered insoluble.
Naivety is a hindrance for people who want to appear sophisticated. This is why imaginary intellectuals do not understand what they are talking and thinking about in Silicon Valley. It has been dangerous for such people to say the word "serious" outside of scary quotes since Oscar Wilde wrote "The Importance of Being Earnest" in 1895. And if you start looking into Jessica Livingston's mind, then it is this quality that she is looking for in the founders - the seriousness of intentions! Who would have thought? Journalists really can't believe the words of startup founders who make tons of money when they say they founded their companies to make the world a better place. It seems that this situation is just made for ridicule. How can these people be so naive that they don't even realize how implausible their words sound?
However, those who ask these questions do not understand that they are rhetorical.
Of course, many founders are just pretending. Especially small ones and those that will soon become insignificant for the market. But not everyone pretends. Many people are really interested in the problem they are working on - often for them the whole point of work is in the process of finding a solution.
Why shouldn't such words be true? It's easy for us to believe that people might be genuinely interested in history, math, or old bus tickets. Why can't people be as interested in social media and self-driving cars? If you look at the question from this side, the answer seems obvious - interest can be sincere. Can't such interest be a powerful source of energy that gives people strength and confidence? This happens in all areas.
There is an important question - why does this blind spot exist in business? The answer is obvious if you are familiar with history. Throughout most of the history of civilization, making money was not very interesting from an intellectual point of view. In pre-industrial times, this process was close to robbery (however, this approach is still alive in some industries, only lawyers are now working instead of soldiers).
On the other hand, there are other areas of business that are really interesting to work in. Henry Ford spent most of his working time solving technical problems, and this trend has been gaining momentum over the past few decades. It's much easier to make money doing what you're interested in now than it was 50 years ago.... It's not about the growth rate of startups, but about the changes they represent. However, the interesting work explains why it is done so quickly. [5]
Can you imagine a change more important than a change in the relationship between intellectual interest and money? These two forces are among the most powerful in the world. I think they have become more consistent in my lifetime. How can you not be delighted by watching something like this in real time?
This text was supposed to be about seriousness, and again I'm talking about startups. I think that at least this post will be a source of examples of nerds in various fields around us.
Notes
[1] Interestingly, there are many ways to avoid being serious: witty cynicism, seemingly unblemished reputation, exemplary virtue, indifference, deep-rooted outlook, snobbery, intimidation, indulgence, self-interest. This pattern assumes that seriousness is not an absolute value, but a goal that may not be achieved in certain aspects.
I also noticed that this list is similar to the list of behavior patterns of people on Twitter. Whatever the social media, they are catalogs of ways not to be serious.
[2] Like any other place, people in Silicon Valley have different motives. Even founders who are predominantly motivated by money are usually interested in the problems they solve, and founders interested in problems like the idea of getting rich. However, the proportions of motivation can be very different.
When I speak of "wrong" motives, I do not mean that they are morally wrong. There is nothing wrong with starting a startup to make money. I just want to say that these non-startups are not that good.
[3] Perhaps the most powerful motivator for most people is family. But for some, intellectual curiosity comes first. In his excellent autobiography, Paul Halmos writes that for mathematicians, their scientific field is above everything - including family. At least he implies that this is true in his case.
[4] Being naive in Europe is a much bigger social mistake than in America. Perhaps this is one of the subtle reasons that startups are less prevalent there. The culture of the founders is completely contrary to sophisticated cynicism.
The most serious part of Europe is Scandinavia. Unsurprisingly, this is the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita.
[5] In many ways, business is about difficult and tedious processes. Even the work of a professor is connected with this. It would be interesting to collect statistics on the need to get involved in complex and time-consuming procedures in various positions, but I think that there are less than 30% of such.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Jessica Livingston, Matthias Jungman, Harge Taggar and Kyle Vogt for reading drafts of this text.
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