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I'm very very excited to introduce our next speaker.
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Uh Paul Buhight is a one of my partners at Y Cominator.
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Um he also was one of the very early employees at Google where he's known as u the inventor of Gmail and uh the creator of the don't be evil motto.
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Uh he also started a uh startup shortly after leaving Google uh called Friendfeed which was acquired by Facebook.
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Um my favorite thing about Paul though is that he was an early angel investor in just.
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tv and really helped keep us alive in the early days.
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So please welcome Paul Buhight to the stage. Thank you, Justin. And uh thank all of you.
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I'm very excited to be here.
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London is an amazing city.
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I was uh eager to come speak here just if for no other reason than to visit.
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But uh it's good to talk to all of you.
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So you've heard a lot of great startup advice today and this is going to be something else.
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[Music] So I often advise startups that it's better to seek deep appeal to create something that a few people love even if most people don't get it right away.
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In that spirit, I've decided to share the technology and dreams that matter to me with the hope that it will be very appealing to the right person.
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This is after all a business defined by outliers.
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Someone in this room is going to create something very important.
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That's the person I'm hoping to reach.
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We talk a lot about technology and its ability to transform and improve the world.
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But technology is more than just the transistors and algorithms.
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Those are just patterns on silicon.
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The technology that really drives the world are the patterns in your head.
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Those are the patterns that give rise to the patterns in silicon, the patterns in our society, in our whole concept of reality.
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Change those patterns and you change your world.
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Maybe not overnight, but like steering the rudder on a great ship.
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A small change now makes a big difference later.
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We often sweat life's big decisions, but it's the little decisions that matter the most.
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The ones we make thousands of times a day, often without even realizing it.
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The big decisions are the inevitable result of those small decisions.
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They steered the ship into port, created the conditions that gave rise to the situation, and then perhaps we feel that our hand has been forced.
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the big decision must be made, but really it was made by the thousands of small decisions leading up to it.
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We all know the power of defaults.
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This is about my defaults, the things I try to keep top of mind and return to when I'm stuck, confused, or doubtful.
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It's an effort to tune and improve my patterns, my technology.
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First, I don't know anything. That's a warning.
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If you take this all on my authority, then you're missing the point.
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You must own your own programming.
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Also, it's the first pattern.
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If I believe that I already know the answer and possess the truth, then I'm not genuinely open to learning larger truths.
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This is the danger of experience. We already know better.
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We already know that an idea or business won't work.
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This is one reason that naive young founders are often the ones who start the most successful companies.
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They just don't know any better and they're often too arrogant to listen to those who do.
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I don't want to downplay the value of experience.
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This whole event is about sharing and learning from the experiences of others.
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But don't be limited by our experiences.
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Just because it didn't work in the past doesn't mean it won't work in the future.
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Likewise, what worked before may not work again.
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This is especially important for startup founders.
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The best opportunities live in our collective blind spots.
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To most, they appear to be bad ideas or simply unimportant.
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If everyone could see the opportunity, someone else would have already taken it.
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In 1997, Larry and Sergey tried to sell Google for a million dollars.
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Fortunately, they were unable to find a buyer.
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The conventional wisdom of the time was that search was neither important nor valuable.
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Of course, experience isn't the only danger.
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Dogma and ideology are even worse.
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They provide us with the answers and put boundaries around our thinking.
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Ignoring the dogma invites ridicule or even punishment.
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I suspect that's why more ideological societies are less innovative.
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If we aren't free to wander outside the realms of conventional thinking, then we won't happen upon the opportunities that others have missed. Escaping dogma is hard.
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From the inside, it simply looks like truth and reality.
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Watch out for any belief that limits the range of your thinking and exploration.
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This includes logic and reason.
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They are useful tools, but just as often work to keep us trapped inside of exclusionary belief systems.
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If you believe yourself to be a rational person, then you're in the trap.
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To be innovative in our work, we need to evade the limitations of established thinking.
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Which brings me to the second pattern.
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Kill all demon processes.
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For those of you who aren't familiar with operating system internals, demons are computer programs that run in the background performing various services, often invisible to the user.
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Sometimes they get out of control and start consuming all of the machine's memory, processor, or other computing resources.
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This is one reason why your computer or phone often works better after a reboot.
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I like this analogy for the same kinds of loops that operate in our brains, like when a song gets stuck in your head.
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The more insidious loops are the voices of doubt, anger, and self-loathing that infect our minds.
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Often they are the internalized voices of our parents, peers, the media, or just random people on the internet.
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Other times, they pose as our own voice, possibly one that has been there for as long as we can remember.
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Either way, these loops are often parasitic and limiting.
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Anytime we take a risk or move in a new direction, they are there to doubt and criticize us.
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Anytime we seek to escape dogma, they are there to ridicule and condemn us.
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Creating an innovative new product often means spending years working on something that most people doubt the value of.
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It's hard to do that with a headful of noise.
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Voices telling us that we're being foolish and that we should just cut our losses.
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Before we launched Gmail, many people inside of Google thought that the whole project should be scrapped.
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One notable executive predicted that we would never even get to a million users.
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We can't let those people drag us down.
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In order to grow, be free, and reclaim our mental resources, it helps to clear out those voices.
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It's simple yet very difficult because they'll keep coming back.
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But with practice, we get better.
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Right now, stop, observe your breath, and enjoy a moment of stillness in your mind.
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The voices that keep interrupting the silence are the runaway processes.
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Keep dismissing them until there aren't any left.
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Our days are full of spare moments.
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Instead of filling them with Flappy Bird or Facebook, take the opportunity to find a calm and clear mind.
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Even if you don't always succeed, it's the practice that matters.
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Walking in nature also helps.
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The voices will resist, of course.
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Continuing to assert their own importance is one way they survive.
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My response, yes and thank you.
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That's the third pattern.
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Life rarely goes the way we want it to.
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When we're taking risks and trying something new, we should expect that it often won't work out the way we had planned.
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And even if we try to keep our lives narrow and risk-f free, things still won't work out the way we had planned.
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We can get angry and frustrated and stuck.
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or we can accept and move forward, assuming that whatever happened is somehow for the best.
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I found that this is a great predictor of success among startups.
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They all face setbacks, but some are able to take those setbacks and use them to their advantage.
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Others just keep slamming their head against the same wall, never making any real progress.
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Uber has been rather masterful at this.
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Here in London, they turned the taxi strike into a huge growth opportunity for themselves.
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In my own life, I've observed that many of the best things are rooted in some of the worst events, and that I would not have one without the other.
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But this is about the small decisions more than the big ones.
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Every day is full of setbacks and disappointments.
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But I do my best to say yes and thank you, accepting it as a gift, however improbable that may seem at the time.
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This pattern has an almost magical way of transforming reality and maintaining the forward flow of life.
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The ability to accept a greater range of outcomes opens the door to pattern number four.
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Choose the more interesting path. Oh, you know what? I had [Music] slides.
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I don't know anything clearly.
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I also didn't make these slides. Kevin did it for me.
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Kill all demon processes. Yes. And thank you.
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Choose the more interesting path.
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People often decide people People People often ask how I decide which startups to invest in.
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There's no simple answer, but this is a big part of it.
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When I heard about Justin TV in early 2007, my first response was to laugh and ask if they were serious. They said yes. So, I offered to invest.
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The plan at the time was for Justin Khan, that's Justin who was just up here, to attach a camera to his head and stream it live on the internet 247.
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It seemed a little insane, but I was very curious to find out what would happen.
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I found that kind of interestingness is a very useful signal.
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The immediate answer to what would happen was a lot of people trolling Justin.
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Next, they added the ability for anyone to stream their lives.
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Most of it was boring or possibly illegal, but one thing really caught on, video game streaming.
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Eventually, they changed their name to twitch.
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tv to focus exclusively on competitive gaming.
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They are now one of the most valuable properties on the internet.
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Their average daily viewer watches over 100 minutes per day, and they are the fourth largest source of US internet traffic after Netflix, Google, and Apple.
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I had no idea that would happen.
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I mainly invested because it sounded like an interesting experiment and the founders seem to genuinely believe that they were on to something.
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Interestingness is a sign of unexplored or underexplored territory.
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If I already know what the outcome is going to be, that's not very interesting.
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If it's completely random, like gambling, that's also not very interesting.
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But I find that great startups exist in a space of productive uncertainty.
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Regardless of whether they succeed or fail, I'm likely to learn something interesting.
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That was my logic when joining Google in 1999.
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I expected that they would likely get squashed by the much larger Alta Vista.
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But the people were really smart, so I believe that I could learn a lot in the process.
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In fact, I can guarantee success by simply redefining success to include learning something interesting.
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In this way, I've always succeeded and also learned a lot.
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If your startup has only one defi definition of success, you're then you're setting yourself up for failure.
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It's tragic how many people are sacrificing their lives on some startup that they don't really care about in pursuit of some external success they'll likely never achieve.
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Personally, I think it's a mistake.
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Which leads me to pattern number five. Love what you do.
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It's often said that you should do what you love, but that's mostly bad advice.
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It encourages people to grind away their lives in pursuit of some mostly unattainable goal, such as being a movie star or a billion startup founder.
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And even if they do make it, often reality is nothing like they imagined it would be.
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So, they're still unhappy.
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Do what you love is in the future.
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Love what you do is right now.
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As with the other patterns, it's meant to guide the small decisions that we make every moment of every day.
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It's less ch about changing what you do and more about changing how you do it.
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One of the problems with having a goal-oriented extrinsic mindset is that it treats the time between now and task completion as an annoying obstacle to be endured.
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If you're doing something that's difficult, uncertain, and takes a long time, such as building a new product or company, and you have that mindset, then you're likely gambling away a big chunk of your life.
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Subconsciously, you may also compensate by choosing smaller, more realistic goals, and that's unfortunate. Plus, it's unpleasant.
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When I was working long hours at Google, it wasn't because they were whipping us to work harder. I would have quit.
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I was doing it because I genuinely love building things.
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It wasn't all fun, of course, but I typically enjoyed at least 80% of my day.
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Do what you love treats what you love as a fixed thing, but it's not. I used to hate running.
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I would sometimes force myself to run a few miles because it's supposed to be healthy, but I never liked it.
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Then I read a book that said we were born to run and that it can be fun.
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Inspired, I decided to try running just for fun.
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Focus on the quality of every step and forget about the goal completion aspect of it.
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Very quickly, I learned to enjoy running.
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And over time, I've transformed my entire relationship with fitness and exercise to be oriented more towards enjoyment.
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Naturally, this more intrinsic approach ultimately improves the quality of our efforts, which generally leads to greater extrinsic rewards as well.
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Intrinsic motivation and exttrinsic motivation are best when they are both pointed in the same direction.
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Real work always seems to involve a certain amount of unpleasant grinding effort, though, and startups often have a lot of it. It's like having a baby.
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It's 5% cute, adorable moments and 95% dirty diapers and vomit.
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The key to loving these more unpleasant moments is meaning.
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If we genuinely genuinely care about and believe in our mission, then th those difficult times begin to take on a more heroic quality.
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Although it's critical for a startup to have very immediate and actionable plans such as write code and talk to users, I believe it's also important to maintain a meaningful and inspiring vision.
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The sixth and final pattern for today is one that I borrowed from Google.
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Maintain a healthy disregard for the impossible.
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I think Larry Paige learned this as a kid at summer camp and to me it represents the true innovative spirit of the company.
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Now that Google is huge and many have grown cynical about the company, it's easy to dismiss such things.
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But I remember when it was a tiny startup that nobody had heard of and I had to explain to people that it was like Yahoo minus all the features other than search.
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People would just give me this sad look that seemed to say, "I'm sorry, you can't get a real job."
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But inside the company, there were these absurdly ambitious ideas that made it feel like we were going to take over the world.
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It was an exciting place to be.
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Larry wanted to store and search the whole web in memory even though our machines only had a quarter gigabyte of RAM.
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It was unrealistic at the time, but Mo's law moves fast and very soon we were doing it, but only because everyone's thinking was already oriented in that direction.
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He also wanted self-driving cars that would deliver hamburgers.
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That hasn't happened yet, but I bet it will.
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For me, potentially impossible goals are much more inspiring than realistic ones.
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I'd rather fail at something awesome than succeed at something inconsequential.
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As with many of the other patterns, this one is about continually shedding the limitations of outdated thinking.
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When I decided to write the Gmail interface in JavaScript, pretty much everyone who knew anything about JavaScript or web browsers told me that it was a bad idea.
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It had been tried in the past and always ended in disaster.
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But times change fast and fortunately I was in an environment where doing impossible things was not just permitted but encouraged.
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After we launched the impossible quickly became the new normal completely changing how we think about web apps. That's fun.
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For me startups are more than just a clever way to make money.
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They are machines for harnessing the fire of human self-interest.
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Creating a self-sustaining reaction capable of rapidly transforming the world.
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Self-interest is often treated as if it were dirty or wrong.
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But NASA didn't get to the moon by vilifying gravity.
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It's often assumed that business is all about money, but to me, that's like saying that rockets are all about rocket fuel.
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On some level, it's true.
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You won't even make it off the launch pad without fuel.
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But that myopic view misses out on the larger purpose and mission of the machine.
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Certainly, some businesses really are about nothing more than making money.
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But among the truly significant founders I've known, there's always a larger purpose.
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It's not just a nihilistic pursuit of rocket fuel.
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Before I finish, I want to mention my impossible goal.
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We now for the first time ever have the technology and resources necessary to make the world a great place for everyone.
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We can provide adequate food, housing, education, and healthcare for everyone using only a fraction of our labor and resources.
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This means that we can put an end to wage slavery. I don't have to work. I choose to work.
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And I believe that everyone deserves the same freedom I have.
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If done right, it's also economically superior, meaning that we will all have more wealth.
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We often talk about how brilliant or visionary Steve Jobs was, but there are probably millions of people just as brilliant as he was.
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The difference is that they likely didn't grow up with great parents, amazing teachers, and an environment where innovation was the norm.
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Also, they didn't live down the street from Steve Waznjak.
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Economically, we don't need more jobs. We need more Steve Jobs.
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When we set everyone free, we enable the outliers everywhere.
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The result will be an unprecedented boom in human creativity and ingenuity.
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And now, the impossible part.
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First, we have to learn how to get along with each other and with ourselves.
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I'm looking for full stack hackers.
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People who understand that technology is more than just patterns in silicon.
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The same patterns and systems of patterns exist everywhere.
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Capitalism is a technology.
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Like the internal combustion engine is tremendously valuable and transformative, but it's not beyond improvement.
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The same goes for government, religion, and everything else.
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We have an incredible future ahead of us, but we won't get there by clinging to obsolete patterns.
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As founders, we must start small and work with the grain of what is.
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The path is never obvious, and innovation happens in the most unexpected ways.
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The personal computer was originally dismissed as a toy.
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And if you think Instagram is just a collection of photo filters, you're missing the big picture.
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Maybe photo sharing won't lead directly to world peace, but helping people to see the world through the eyes of others looks like a step in the right direction to me.
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And they grew to over 200 million users in less than four years.
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That's larger than most countries.
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That's the power of a startup.
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As Richard Fineman said, the worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to.
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Don't be discouraged by people who dismiss your efforts as trivial just because you aren't curing cancer or traveling to Mars.
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The patterns I've presented today are about developing an independent mind, unburdened by the limitations of other people's thinking.
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Then you can judge for yourself whether is worthwhile and move forward with the conviction necessary to do something great.
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A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Thank you.