Paul Graham on choosing hard problems, Linear on quality, and an old poster from Facebook

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Paul Graham on choosing hard problems

Paul Graham makes the counterintuitive recommendation that startups choose to solve hard problems:

“Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way.

What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground. I can remember times when we were just exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical problem. And I'd be delighted, because something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.

This is not just a good way to run a startup. It's what a startup is. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry. If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he'll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop? That is, how much difficult ground have you put between yourself and potential pursuers? And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate.

Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they'll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they'll take away your market overnight.“

Source: How to Make Wealth by Paul Graham

2: Linear on quality

Linear is a project management tool renowned among technologists for its exceptional product craftsmanship. Here are notes about quality from an engineering team offsite:

“From these offsite experiences, two things became clear. The first was that the pursuit of quality is not an individual sport. It’s hard to perceive subtle problems with a UI you yourself have built. Other people need to point out problems, and if you do it as a group, you’ll come closer to gaining a comprehensive view of everything that’s wrong with a product.

The second thing I realized is that I wanted a way to make sure we kept quality top-of-mind in everything we did. At the same time, I knew the team was too busy to drastically reallocate how we were spending our time. We needed quality to be a habit, like brushing your teeth. Something you just do without thinking too much about it. No one ever says they don’t have time to brush their teeth. I wanted our team to begin thinking about quality in the same way.

Over the last two years we’ve completed more than 1,000 small acts of polish... most of these fixes are small on their own, but together they completely change how the product feels. They allow us to push Linear’s extremely high quality bar even higher.“

Source: Quality Wednesdays: How we trained our team to see what doesn’t work

3: An old poster from Facebook

A poster from Facebook’s 2012 office, the year of their IPO:

Source: Facebook updating its mobile apps every 1-2 months from now on

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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