Today at work Paul Graham came to speak about startup culture and supposedly how big companies could foster it. I felt the talk was more about startup culture and the problem of creating it within a big company was left to the audience. He did bring up several interesting points though.

Background: Paul recently started Y Combinator, an incubator for startups and many of his observations come from there.

People work harder on their own stuff. This was his first point and is what he saw when watching all the guys working on their startup projects. Related to this was that Hackers like to work at night. Reason is that building software is hard and requires focused uninteruptible time. Notice there is a distiction between uninterrupted and uninteruptible. Even the possibility of being interrupted is disruptive.

Several points centered around releasing software quickly. Allow for a bad version one as it will teach you a lot about how to make version two good. It will generate ideas. What went wrong? What succeeded? Why? Speed is good for morale, begets excitement. Maintaining momentum makes it easier to add new features since the software is constantly being updated anyways.

These are just some of the highlights. To hear Paul speak is a joy as he is full of genuinely funny anecdotes.