The Start-up Guru: Y Combinator’s Paul Graham

Long Inc. article on Graham, whose, as Jason Kottke says, “essays you either love to hate or hate to love.”

Graham is 44 years old and possesses the combination, often encountered in entrepreneurs, of extreme intelligence and a hint of arrogance. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science and has several years of formal training as a visual artist. Before starting Y Combinator, he founded Viaweb, a dot-com software company that helped retailers sell online; it was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 for $49 million. After leaving Yahoo, Graham won renown as an essayist, the creator of a new programming language, and the guy who invented spam filtering as we know it. Today, he funds more start-ups in a single year than a typical venture capitalist backs in a decade.

Startup 101: Introducing Our Serialized “How to Build a Startup” Book

30 chapters on building a tech startup:

“Startup 101″ is a serialized book about the thrills and spills of starting a Web technology venture. It will be a regular feature in our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. Startup 101 is for first-time entrepreneurs who want to go through the whole startup life cycle – including raising money, building a valuable business, and making a lot of money by selling the venture or taking it public.

The founding entrepreneur is the hero and primary reader of this how-to guide. Most of what we say will be well known to investors and advisers who support entrepreneurs, but we hope they also find some value here.

10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business

Let’s make sure to revisit this in 2 1/2 years… :-)

24/7 Wall St. has come up with 10 ways in which Twitter will permanently change American business within the next two to three years, based on an examination of Twitter’s model, the ways that corporations and small businesses are currently using the service and some of the logical extensions of how companies will use Twitter in the future.

A reminder of how simple business can be when you don’t make it complicated

Not everything can be this simple, but lots of things in business should be:

Yesterday I found a flyer on my front door.

I’ve been staring at a project in my backyard for a few weeks. Staring hasn’t gotten it done. So I figured I’d see what it would cost to have these guys do it.

I called them. 10 minutes later the guy came by. He was down the street on another job. We walked out back. I told him what I needed done. He looked around for 20 seconds and said $300. I said “deal.”

That’s it. No proposal. No “I’ll get back to you tomorrow”. No “Let me see how much the materials will cost and I’ll drop an estimate in your mailbox next week.”

Is Your Agency an Adhocracy?

Not just relevant to ad agencies:

The bureaucratic organizational model thrived during the 20th Century. But is it the right model for advertising agencies in the 21st Century? Could an adhocratic model be better suited for these challenging times? …adhocracy, according to academics, is an organization which is the opposite of a bureaucracy. One that cuts across bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results

The Vendor/Client relationship — in real world situations

How David Beats Goliath

When underdogs break the rules, by Malcolm Gladwell:

When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

Pretty sketchy

I’m not even gonna excerpt this — just go read it!

Evolution of Office Spaces Reflects Changing Attitudes Toward Work

It’s hard to design the perfect office. Different people doing different jobs requiring different kinds of interaction (or none)…

Since the dawn of the white-collar age, office designs have cycled through competing demands: openness versus privacy, interaction versus autonomy. Here’s a brief history of how seating arrangements have reflected our changing attitudes toward work.

Top ten reasons managers become great

Scott Berkun posted another gem yesterday:

As a positive counterpoint to my list of why managers become assholes, and as a counterbalance to my tendency to write cynically, here’s a list of why people become great at managing others, trying as much as possible not to just do the stupid thing and invert my other list.