[I originally wrote this as a response to a post on Hacker News, which was in response to the keynote given by Phil Libin of Evernote at TNW. It turned out pretty long and sort of looked like good blog material, so here it is on my blog.]

Doing a startup to change the world is the most terrible, most nebulous reason to give people as the only reason to do a startup. Ask anyone if they want to change the world and they'll say yes. But wanting to change the world is so disconnected from doing something that actually would change the world in any meaningful way that it's ludicrous advice. It can be dismissed through a very similar line of reasoning that he gives for doing a startup for money.

Libin says if you want to do it for money, go into banking or finance, you'll make more money and it's a more certain outcome. I say if you want to do it to change the world, go work for an international non-governmental organization or UNICEF. What you do will actually have a greater chance of changing the world through those organizations.

The probability tree looks the same. You only make a lot of money in a startup if you succeed. By the same token, you only change the world in a startup if you succeed. Only 10 percent of startups actually succeed. Ergo, you can, and should take the certain outcome of making a positive impact on the world through a meaningful cause, if your objective is to change the world, just as you would take the certain big paycheck by getting into finance. Trying to achieve either through doing a startup must be illogical, under his line of reasoning, because the probabilities are so low.

Notice his statement that people who get into startups for money are bad at math. Likewise, so are those who get into startups to change the world.

Furthermore, in order to change the world, you would actually have to be one of the rare startups that gets to the sort of scale that it actually has a shot at being world changing. As for the ones that have gotten to that sort of scale, it is open for debate whether they've changed the world at all, and, if they have, whether they've done so in a way that is meaningful or has improved the circumstances of mankind.

The fact is, if your goal is to change the world, it's not at all clear that entrepreneurship is the best vehicle by which to do it. In fact, I would argue that it simply isn't. Perhaps you should go into journalism and bring awareness to important issues affecting the poor. Maybe you should plant trees or study migratory patterns of marine life or dig wells in Africa. 

If you want to do a startup, do it. You'll find out quite quickly whether it's for you. If you're the sort that quits when the going gets rough, well, you'll quit your startup because the going will get rough. It's really that simple. Just don't do a startup because you want to change the world. You almost certainly won't.

In fact, you shouldn't do a startup for any reason that is intrinsically tied to the success of the startup itself.

You should do a startup because it's what you're meant to do, because you can't think of anything else you'd rather do, because you are driven to solve tough problems, and/or you're passionate about the problem you're trying to solve. In my mind, any of these reasons are sufficient and, paradoxically, are better indicators of the likelihood of success of a startup than those reasons that only come to fruition if the startup is ultimately succesful (i.e. changing the world, money, etc).

Why? Because when the rubber meets the road, you'll realize there are better/easier ways to change the world or become rich than doing a startup, so, if you're a rational being, you'll quit the startup and go do those things. What drives you to stick it out when the going gets tough has to be an innate driving force that is intrinsically tied to doing the startup.

Join in the discussion over at Hacker News

I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands:

Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

Paul Graham, "The Top of My Todo List"

"There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ˜crackers" and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word "hacker" to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end... The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them." 

Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker" (http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is)

I drafted a post (to be published at a later time) that discusses how I fell out of love with math and science early on in junior high and high school. In relevant part:

At the end of 8th grade, I was certain I wanted to be an engineer. I was good at math and science. It was even interesting!

In 9th grade, however, I found I hated math and science (beginning of Regents instruction in NY. Coincidence?). I mean, sure, it was generally the same material, but somehow it got stale and boring. Here's some formulas. Here's some problems. Use formulas to find answers to problems.

Staightforward, but it didn't exactly capture my imagination. 

What if we educated students the way hackers educate themselves? What if we gave students real world problems to work through, a project to build, or a puzzle to solve? Not only that, but what if we gave them a set of tools to work with and let their own intuition guide them to a solution?

When you learn to hack, you aren't just given tidy problems that are neatly solved using the formulas provided. You're faced with such a challenge that, to properly call a solution to it a "hack," you have to go out of the realm of your present knowledge and abilities to solve it, and might need to search for new tools to aid you in the task.

To make the process of learning more engaging for students, I would suggest providing them with a challenge that is just beyond their current abilities. To make the process more efficient, I would suggest a finite set of tools with an explanation of their application. To successfully hack the challenge, they'd need to combine their own intuition with the right tool. This would allow students to explore naturally, guided by their own curiosity. Either their intuition would rapidly lead them to the most appropriate tool, or they would learn what to do through a series of failed attempts.

I think the biggest frustrations I had as a student, at least in math, was not knowing the practical application of the material and not having the opportunity to feel like I really solved a problem. Really, math was simply "do this and you'll find the answer." The problem is solved by the procedure, you just have to do the calculations. It would be better to be given the satisfaction of discovering the procedure, especially if it's layered or there is more than one way to a right answer. Hacking on real problems naturally accomplishes these ends, and internalizes what was learned going forward.

In capitalism, every human is either a capitalist, somebody else’s capital, or economically worthless. Today, this abstract point specifically translates to: people who can invest in developers, developers, and everybody else.

This is an excerpt from a recent article in Forbes called The Rise of Developeronomics relating to my blog post Steve Jobs Thinks You Should Learn to Program. The article has more to say, but I thought this quote was telling of the economic necessity of learning to program. What the article misses, however, is that you probably shouldn't "invest" in developers as if they're a commodity. Chances are, they're smarter than you and will think you're a blowhard and tell you to go do bad things to yourself.

This article doesn't do enough to address the fact that the means of production are becoming more democratized. Any kid with a laptop and the willingness to learn can build an app and host the whole thing in the cloud. Therefore, the capitalist (i.e. those who own capital/the means of production) are becoming less necessary.

Even when an infusion of capital is needed to scale a product, what's been built is so far beyond the idea stage that valuations greatly favor the young entrepreneur in a way that wasn't possible even ten years ago. At this point, the entrepreneur has the advantage because they have something that investors want to put their money in, and so they have the power to choose who those investors are. Entrepreneurs get to be picky and tend to pick investors who, first, were themselves successful entrepreneurs and, second, ones that have domain expertise in their market and can advise them on the intracacies of their business.

So what now? Well, potentially, everyone is both the capitalist and the capital. There is an increasing number of (usually quite young) entrepreneurs that are realizing this and building products. This is both economically liberating and incredibly daunting. We now have an environment where young companies are competing not only amongst comparable goods, but also for the attention of users, and (at least for consumer products) it's usually a winner take all game.

A couple of weeks ago, I put a section on my blog called "My Startup Story." It was an effort to document my unlikely journey into startups and how I became a non-technical cofounder.

In version 1.0 of my startup story, I detailed the difficulties that my previous endeavor, Liquid Labs, encountered. What I left out, for various reasons, is that Liquid Labs was done.

After two of our cofounders returned to school, the other remaining cofounder and I gave one last push to see if we could build on what we already had, but were unable to find a new cofounder to replace the NLP expertise of one of our team members that had left. We both knew we were running out of options.

We were courted by another startup here in Boston, and very nearly joined, but the day before we signed on the dotted line, so to speak, my cofounder got a call from his friend in Berlin who asked him to join his startup, ezeep, as CTO. He broke the news to me on the same day, and I emphatically encouraged him to go for it. It's an awesome company and an awesome opportunity.

The Next Chapter

After I wrote my startup story, I posted it to Hacker News and got exactly one response. Awesome.

It turned out to be a good one though. 

Heelhook (on HN, Pablo to the rest of the world) emailed me to guage my interest in possibly joining his startup. Pablo's an experienced entrepreneur and has been building great things for awhile, so I was excited about the possibility of working with him.

Picking a cofounder is risky. You need to know they're committed, will work hard, won't give up, can execute and just make things happen. Some key factors that led Pablo to think I would be a good cofounder are adaptiveness, focus, learning from past mistakes, having worked together twice with the same cofounder in the past, and simply not giving up. Here's the first couple paragraphs of his email:

After quite a bit more back and forth and after I detailed how I thought I could add value, Pablo invited me to be a part of the project he has been working on for some time, which has been dubbed MindCrimp (I wish I could take credit for the name).

It's good to be on to the next adventure and I'm enjoying the simplicity of a startup of two cofounders, one technical and one non-technical.You know what's yours to do. You own it. You ship.

I contacted Senator Gillibrand through the Mozilla initiative to oppose the Protect IP Act. She is a cosponsor of the legislation. Here's her response, which I'm sure is the same one that's sent to everyone:

Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer  should learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think. It's like going to law school. I don't think anybody should be a lawyer, but going to law school can actually be useful because it teaches you how to think in a certain way....I view computer science as a liberal art.   -Steve Jobs

I recently came across this quote in an article about a lost interview with Steve Jobs in 1995. It was sage advice in 1995. It's even more important now. In a world where even the most skilled professional tasks are being replaced by intelligent machines, it makes sense to learn how to work with them. According to a recent article in The Economist,

...sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete.

To try to compete is a losing battle. The article in The Economist takes note of advice of Brynjolfsson and Ford, authors of "Race Against the Machine," that "those threatened most by technology should learn to work with machines, rather than against them." This is especially true if, as speculated, jobs that were lost during the Great Recession are gone for good.

In the words of Douglass Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed, "[t]he real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it?"

I am a non-technical cofounder. The subtitle of this blog says as much. However, I've always had this desire to know how things work and what processes make something come to life. I would often toy with different ideas and dig into them enough to get the gist of how they work or what it would take to make it work. Unfortunately, most of these forays into "getting technical" end when my curiosity is satisfied.

My background is non-technical. This means that I don't code and I'm not an engineer or anything cool like that. I went to law school even though I was good at math and science. It just never came to life in the classroom the way it should. The benefit of having survived law school is that you soon learn that anything you don't know you can figure out. I also read a blog series about how to become you're own technical cofounder (not that I need to) by Vinicius Vacanti, founder of Yipit, that gave me a bit more confidence that I could learn enough to build something meaningful.

I've been unsatisfied with not knowing how to use the tools to learn how things really work in detail or how to deploy them to solve problems. So, while it's a stretch to say that I can just "figure out" how to code, like it's just something that happens overnight, I've spent the past few months doing a lot of reading in my spare time, learning the basics (HTML/CSS) and then played around a little with Javascript and PHP, all the while trying to get a feel for what would be a good, useful language for me to learn. I read many (too many) discussions about what language is best, which one is good to learn to program on, and finally settled on Python. I already heard good things about it and came across something that I had read months earlier, Eric Raymond's How to Become a Hacker. He makes a strong case for learning to program in Python,

It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. (This isn't all he says. The link above is worth the read.)

While his evaluation of Python pretty much sealed the deal, I did a bit more due diligence. I read the introductory material to Learning Python and went over to StackOverflow and Quora to read answers to the timeless "Which is the best programming language for beginners?" question. Python wins (at least for me). What really sealed the deal is that the language is named after Monty Python.  ;-)

So, I settled on the language. Now I just needed the resources. More time spent on Quora and StackOverflow led me to choose one primary resource, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist - Learning in Python, and a few supplementary resources, Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw, and Byte of Python by Swaroop C H (bonus points for cool name). I chose How to Think Like a Computer Scientist as my primary resource because I wasn't merely interested in learning the language, but was more concerned with learning to program. It seemed to put more emphasis on learning to program, or think like a computer scientist, while keeping the language in the proper role of merely being the means to do that. That is not to say that it doesn't provide thorough coverage of the language. It's actually very thorough, in my humble opinion. I'll reference the others as I go to ensure that I benefit from other approaches.

To supplement my learning to think like a computer scientist, I started reading Code by Charles Petzold about a month ago. I just came upon it at the bookstore and started reading through it. It is an excellent book for learning how computers work, starting with the very basics. He assumes nothing of the readers skill level and explains everything thoroughly, while not dwelling too long on anything, as to not torment more knowledgeable readers.

So, while I still don't know nearly enough to actually build anything more than a static webpage (maybe not even that), I am hopefully heading in the right direction as an aspiring hacker. I hope to be able to contribute something meaningful to the community one day. Wish me luck!

There are some who will get this reference. By some, I mean fans of the 1996 Syracuse basketball team.

Now that we've got that out of our system, the real reason for the title is what is going on in the CNY startup scene. This blog has been dormant for awhile and I didn't have any plans for bringing it back (I like to pretend I'm too busy for this sort of thing), but the past few months have been very encouraging for "the 'cuse." Brad Feld, accomplished VC, entrepreneur and cofounder of TechStars made a visit to CNY a couple of months ago and "“came away optimistic about the potential for the Upstate New York region.”

A natural, initial response is to be skeptical. Upstate NY hasn't exactly had it easy. However, there are definitely reasons to be optimistic about the startup scene in Syracuse and other corners of Upstate NY. The Syracuse Tech Garden has just had a recent string of great news coming from some tenant companies. Grafighters has been accepted to General Assembly, a highly touted startup workspace in NYC. Broodr.com has been accepted into the prestigious General Electric incubator program. Brandyourself.com was selected from the crowded demo pit at the LAUNCH Conference in San Francisco in February to present their company on stage. Then there's Coffee Joulies, which I first read about in Uncrate and later found out are produced locally at the old Oneida plant in Sherrill.

These guys crushed it on Kickstarter too. Coffee Joulies was aiming to raise $9500 and raised over $300,000... not bad. GraFighters actually missed their goal of raising $20,000 by a fair margin but were then funded in the amount of $200,000 by a venture capital firm out of Germany that came across their idea while surfing Kickstarter.

"The 'Cuse" will likely never be "The Valley" (Silicon Valley, that is). However, it definitely has shown the ability to generate legitimate startups that, at least among consumer web startups, have generated respectable seed rounds even when compared to companies in bigger startup ecosystems like Silicon Valley, NYC, and Boston. And hey, if Brad Feld is optimistic about Upstate NY and says it has potential, then that's good enough for me. Let's make it happen.