For those interested, I have collected many of PG's interviews (as well as those of Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston): <a href="http://newslines.org/paul-graham/" rel="nofollow">http://newslines.org/paul-graham/</a>
I really liked his idea that the users teach you about what you've made. That's a really great philosophical point.<p>I think his comments about open source are interesting and how he's never seen anybody open source too much. I humbly disagree, I've definitely seen a few startups get nowhere because they ended up open sourcing their entire product, meaning nobody needed to pay them for anything.<p>There needs to be a strategy for open sourcing your code...for example if dropbox open sourced their client, they'd still own the relationship to their storage back-end and act as the broker for that data. Their client isn't really worth anything anyways...so it doesn't really matter.<p>But let's say Microsoft open sourced Office and Windows. Okay, now where do they make their money? They're pretty much just left with services work, and services and support often only exist if the software has problems. Anybody else can then come along and code away their services business by fixing bugs, making better interfaces etc.<p>Open sourcing needs to have a valid business strategy and it can't just be putting your company's investment up on github because that feels good.
I really like the bits of historical interest that comes out in the interview, naval battles and Archimedes- you get the sense that he just loves learning, even if it's not "useful" knowledge. What I like most is how that just comes out as supplementary asides, reinforcing a point or framing a metaphor.<p>Definitely the kind of guy you could just talk to for hours.
I've always thought that Apple's horrific App Store approval process was the single biggest threat to the Apple empire. Glad to hear someone else speak out about this. It's seriously absurd that there's an arbitrarily enforced stopgate that prevents you from deploying code. It's a complete disaster. If someone could make a way to instantly deploy code to mobile phones every developer would switch in a second.<p>The Apple App Store approval process is like that one random weak spot on the Death Star. The only question is what replaces it?
I wish Paul would give posting on hn another shot. I'm sure he's busy, but I always thought he had interesting perspectives even if I didn't always agree.
Love the idea of owning consumer and then being "upwind" from enterprise. From my experience in the dev tools space, that's exactly the pattern we've been seeing.