Category: startups

After I introduced Lynn to my friend, she said he seemed intimidating.
“Really?! Why?”
“He’s a CS professor, the CEO of a successful startup, and is too busy to talk with anyone but you.”
“So?”
“…Maybe your power is that you’re not afraid of stuff.”

I was flattered to hear this but it’s not the whole story. I think I was never intimidated by intelligence or wealth, but once upon a time I was intimidated by physical beauty. Here’s how I realized one should never be intimidated, even by hot, rich geniuses:

I was an unkissed nerd for 16 years, then I had boyfriends for 4 years, and then I was single for years. During my senior year at MIT, which was the start of my 2nd phase of monkish devotion to knowledge, I went on 1 date. It was because he was the most beautiful human I’d ever seen in real life. The first time I saw him, he wasn’t wearing a shirt because he was ironing it. Yes, he went to Harvard. His suite mates were probably milling around- I have no idea. I remember I said, “Do you wax your chest because of swimming?” He had the grace to blush. “Mainly because I model.”

After verifying there were no pictures of him on the first Google results (his name is very ungoogleable. What were his parents thinking?), I forgot about him for a week. Then he asked me if I wanted “to hang out.” That night, I found that the shirtless pictures of him were on Facebook (this was many years ago and Facebook was not yet the first place one went to look at people).

That Friday, we walked around Harvard square. I found it hard to not stare at him, but I also evaded touch and felt anxious to be alone. Nothing happened. I can’t “date;” I’m incapable of romantic relationships that aren’t based on a monkish devotion to work. After the most awkward date this kid had ever been on, and the least awkward of the 5 dates I’d ever been on, I went back to East Campus and did a problem set while a black cat rattled my door and freshmen screamed on the thundering roller coaster in the courtyard.

I had expected the date to be really fun, but it wasn’t anything. I’d expected it to be more fun than being with a normal person because he was so much hotter than a normal person, and I realized this logic was wrong. I’m exceedingly grateful to him because it was actually the epiphany that he would ever consider dating *me* despite being so much hotter that allowed me to realize physical beauty doesn’t matter. For me, maturation has been a series of realizing what doesn’t matter.

Intelligence, beauty, and wealth used to seem like notable qualities, but now they’re commoditized by technology. Jesus and Buddha always said beauty and wealth didn’t matter, but for years I was reluctant to conclude intelligence was also irrelevant.

It was in high school that I realized I was in danger of dooming myself to unhappiness if I defined myself by my intelligence. Intelligence seems fundamentally different from beauty, right? Because it’s easier to use intelligence to create something… but it ultimately is just another commoditizable property. There will always be someone more beautiful or intelligent, and now technology elevates everyone to a high level. When headhunters were pimping me out to billionaires, “Her brain is huge and will make you a lot of money,” it was obvious intelligence has been commoditized.

A millennia ago, physical strength was actually useful and prized- the strongest dude was also the richest because he could bop you on the head and take your cow- but now physical strength is useless. Most modern men can run a marathon. One day science and technology will allow everyone will be as strong, healthy, smart, and beautiful as they wish. Technology made many crafts and skills obsolete because it commoditized fine motor skills. Technology is the great equalizer that commoditizes and equalizes everything, taking beauty, information, strength, and health, and giving it to everyone.

When you take away everything that the robots are going to do for us and allow us to be, when we’re all genius supermen, what will be left for us to identify ourselves by? If you put your identity next to beauty, you’ll feel worthless when beauty is commoditized by technology because anyone can purchase your identity. If money is an important part of your identity, you’ll bemoan the fact there’s always someone richer and scuff the wheel of your Tesla every time someone mentions Bill Gates. Instead of forming my identity in a way that allows technology to erode it, I want to form it such that technology would enhance it.

Now when I meet someone with intelligence, beauty, or wealth, which is basically everyone in the post-singularity society of Silicon Valley, I automatically delete those qualities from my perception of their Real Identity. I still recognize intelligence, etc. as a property they possess, but I don’t define them by it. I try to define people by their ambitions, creativity, drive, perspective, attitude, inspirations… that soft gushy core inside the genius billionaire playboy. Love, values, interests, goals. Not where they went to school, how good they look in Lululemon, or how many Lamborghini’s they drive, because eventually we’ll all be downloading MIT OCW straight into our brains using Matrix-style optogenetics tech, have enhanced cyborg bodies, and harvest infinite energy from asteroids so that resource constraints become a purely theoretical problem.

What do you view as the most important aspect of your identity?

Tired of your career? Lost and confused about your next move and unmotivated on your current path? You’re not alone. The only mystery intriguing to modern man is modern man himself: a terrifying labyrinth that often leads nowhere interesting.

In theory, through our every action, we’re constantly continuously deciding our private interpretations of the meaning of life. In reality, humans rely on cached thoughts to avoid decisions. You can easily go your whole life without making a deliberate, researched choice. Big decisions are painful and difficult, so we avoid them unless the default becomes more painful than the agonizing confusion of deciding. Why deviate from what you’re “supposed to do” when you’re already outperforming most humans that ever lived?

People on Quora ask, “I’m 20 or 30-something and don’t know what to do because I haven’t found my passion yet. What is my passion?” As first-world youth, we’re not responsible for anything beyond our own enjoyment, so we think we should simply find a passion and then do that forever. People who excel do seem passionate. Steve Jobs is dogmatic about design; Rowling wrote doggedly for years while waitressing. Leaders and founders are passionate. How do we be like that? What is the meaning of life!?

“Make something people want.”

That is Y Combinator’s motto, and I think that is the meaning of life. Note that it doesn’t say anything about passion. “Make something” is fundamental – people whose work doesn’t result in creation feel they’re wasting their lives. So is “people want” – if no one wants your hand-knitted cat sculptures, you’ll also feel  life is a waste. “Make something” and “people want” are two things I knew before Y Combinator. The unspoken middle is where I learned something new: “people,” as in “OTHER people.”

Most of my life was spent not thinking about other people. I’m an only child, and my primary motivation throughout the first 27 years of my life was very individualistic – I wanted to challenge myself, increase my understanding of nature, prove my own awesomeness, etc. I imagined that if I could live life wandering through a forest of libraries by day, deriving all the secrets of reality by night, I’d be satisfied.

The change came slowly, but one day, I realized that my motivations towards being the best were self absorbed. I imagined being the best trader in the world, and realized I would feel like my life had been a waste of time. I imagined being the smartest person in the world – making scientific discoveries, writing treatises on Proust; winning Nobel prizes; listening to my ex-boyfriend Ryan Gosling beg for a mold of my body so he could always remember how hot I am – and I felt nothing. Was I just not imagining it correctly? Was there some art, like chess or painting, so pure it would make me happy? My conclusion was “No.” I looked at the people who are the absolute best at what they do and, although I admire them, being them doesn’t feel like something I want.

The key to passion and having a useful, non-wasted life is to look beyond yourself. Selfishness and self-searching, what we do to “find ourselves,” hinder us from getting what we want.

Startups are about other people, and successful startups are one of the more selfless things in existence. It’s not about what you want, it’s about your users. Make something OTHER PEOPLE want, however different they are from you. Be passionate about your users, not yourself. (Even in the “startup of you”.)

I no longer think of Superposition Nancy as the main way of motivating myself. It doesn’t seem ambitious enough. I changed my reference frame from Superposition Nancy to Superposition All-Humans-Now-and-Forever. How do I act to make sure we humans collectively outperform our superposition fate? How do we change the fate of mankind? All the things I could do easily would move the needle very little for humanity at large. Money (look at the trillions of dollars the US prints and spends) is nothing compared to an invention like the light bulb, or the Internet, or the kind of thought leadership that came from Martin Luther or the founding fathers.

First I think locally, about the debt I owe to my parents who sacrificed to make my  life possible. Then I think about the debt I owe my community, for making me safe. Then I think back farther: back to the inventors of electricity, of books. I’m sure Gutenberg could have spent his days drinking and loafing instead of inventing the printing press. Because he didn’t, all of us benefit tremendously from his work in ways we can never repay. When I’m sitting at home thinking, “I should lie in bed and re-watch the Matrix and eat pizza and swipe around on Tinder,” then I think about how Gutenberg will punch me in the face in the afterlife. I want to repay some of what I owe all these people, who got off their butts and did something that elevated the rest of mankind, whose genius and labor keeps me safe and snug in bed at night. My parents could’ve raised me by leaving me alone with a TV and boxes of cereal. But they gave me the right food and taught me to be healthy; they took me to the library and taught me to learn. How do you repay something like that? You can’t, but you can try.

Everything we have is because of someone who rose above their self-absorption. I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for people who valued adding something to the world above their own comfort. So when I’m not working, I feel a crushing sense of guilt. If I’m not helping out someone else, somewhere down the line, then I’m failing. Think of the people who are long dead, and those who might never be born. Look at the people around you, and the people on the other side of the earth. Do we leave the earth as if we’d never existed, or do we leave it better?

Ironically, in startups as in life, focusing on others lets you can gain the most for yourself. You learn the most, do the most, grow the most. So if you want to be awesome and productive, join a startup. Make something other people want.

Not unrelatedly, this is exactly what we at Apptimize are doing. What we’ve shown publicly is the tip of the iceberg and we’re looking for the missing members of our band! So, we want to meet the best frontend, iOS, Android, and backend engineers you know. We’re very picky, because it’s so important that we believe in our team, and believe that together we’re going somewhere worth going. By the grace of our Robot Invader friends, our office is on the Mountain View Googleplex, our board game collection is famed throughout the industry, and our technology is not too shabby either. Our investors and users uniformly say, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” We’re excited to be on this adventure together!

So, if you want to be part of a team working on something that affects a lot of people, invents new technologies, believes innovation, science, ideas, and culture can move the needle where material wealth cannot, and are frighteningly ambitious about where we’re going, then message me at nancy at apptimize dot com.

PS. If you can guess our hack house wifi password, we will fly you out for a visit, plus I will tell you the rest of the plot of HPMOR. The network is chaoslegion. Hint: What house am I?

Thanks to Lucas Baker for reading a draft of this post.