One of the strange consequences of writing about several mostly unrelated topics is that you pick up readers with quite different interests. Then whatever you write next, the ones not interested in that topic complain that you've jumped the shark. I doubt I've written a single essay since about 2002 when someone didn't say something of the form "pg was ok when he was writing about x, but I wish he would stop writing about y."
And incidentally, it's not the making money aspect of startups that interests me the most. I'm mostly interested in startups as agents of change. We could right now be in the middle of a shift on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. Or not; always hard to tell from so close. But there is certainly something interesting happening.
There's a wonderful quote from Brian Eno about the conservative force that comes from having people who like your work:
"I'm afraid to say that admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism, for consolidation. Of course it's really wonderful to be acclaimed for things you've done - in fact it's the only serious reward, because it makes you think "it worked! I'm not isolated!" or something like that, and it makes you feel gratefully connected to your own culture. But on the other hand, there's a tremendously strong pressure to repeat yourself, to do more of that thing we all liked so much. I can't do that - I don't have the enthusiasm to push through projects that seem familiar to me ( - this isn't so much a question of artistic nobility or high ideals: I just get too bloody bored), but at the same time I do feel guilt for 'deserting my audience' by not doing the things they apparently wanted. I'd rather not feel this guilt, actually, so I avoid finding out about situations that could cause it. The problem is that people nearly always prefer what I was doing a few years earlier - this has always been true. The other problem is that so, often, do I! Discovering things is clumsy and sporadic, and the results don't at first compare well with the glossy and lauded works of the past. You have to keep reminding yourself that they went through that as well, otherwise they become frighteningly accomplished. That's another problem with being made to think about your own past - you forget its genesis and start to feel useless awe towards your earlier self: "How did I do it? Wherever did these ideas come from?". Now, the workaday everyday now, always looks relatively less glamorous than the rose-tinted then (except for those magic hours when your finger is right on the pulse, and those times only happen when you've abandoned the lifeline of your own history)."
"... We could right now be in the middle of a shift on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. Or not; always hard to tell from so close. But there is certainly something interesting happening ..."
I think one problem of the Web is that it can reinforce one-dimensionality in some people. People seek out only the narrow set of things they are interested in instead of taking advantage of the breadth it has to offer. So you get people complaining that pg or Joel Spolsky don't talk about what they used to talk about anymore.
That's a really bad place to put yourself. My business ideas are pretty far from what I see discussed here, but I still get a lot of useful knowledge from hanging around. I'd say that the fact that the startups here are different from what I'm likely to do is valuable in its own way: forces me to see the common technology from another perspective and that itself generates further ideas.
Incidentally, if you had to pick a single rubric by which you could gauge the eventual interestingness of an agent of change, you could do a lot worse than profitability.
I'm guessing a lot of the revolutionaries in the Industrial Revolution weren't thinking so much about causing a revolution. They were "just" trying to get rich.
And incidentally, it's not the making money aspect of startups that interests me the most. I'm mostly interested in startups as agents of change. We could right now be in the middle of a shift on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. Or not; always hard to tell from so close. But there is certainly something interesting happening.