December 2020  
  
Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're
talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to
describe them as "earnest." This is not by itself a guarantee of success. You
could be earnest but incapable. But when founders are both formidable (another
of our words) and earnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get.  
  
Earnestness sounds like a boring, even Victorian virtue. It seems a bit of an
anachronism that people in Silicon Valley would care about it. Why does this
matter so much?  
  
When you call someone earnest, you're making a statement about their motives.
It means both that they're doing something for the right reasons, and that
they're trying as hard as they can. If we imagine motives as vectors, it means
both the direction and the magnitude are right. Though these are of course
related: when people are doing something for the right reasons, they try
harder. [1]  
  
The reason motives matter so much in Silicon Valley is that so many people
there have the wrong ones. Starting a successful startup makes you rich and
famous. So a lot of the people trying to start them are doing it for those
reasons. Instead of what? Instead of interest in the problem for its own sake.
That is the root of earnestness. [2]  
  
It's also the hallmark of a nerd. Indeed, when people describe themselves as
"x nerds," what they mean is that they're interested in x for its own sake,
and not because it's cool to be interested in x, or because of what they can
get from it. They're saying they care so much about x that they're willing to
sacrifice seeming cool for its sake.  
  
A [_genuine interest_](genius.html) in something is a very powerful motivator
� for some people, the most powerful motivator of all. [3] Which is why it's
what Jessica and I look for in founders. But as well as being a source of
strength, it's also a source of vulnerability. Caring constrains you. The
earnest can't easily reply in kind to mocking banter, or put on a cool facade
of nihil admirari. They care too much. They are doomed to be the straight man.
That's a real disadvantage in your [_teenage years_](nerds.html), when mocking
banter and nihil admirari often have the upper hand. But it becomes an
advantage later.  
  
It's a commonplace now that the kids who were nerds in high school become the
cool kids' bosses later on. But people misunderstand why this happens. It's
not just because the nerds are smarter, but also because they're more earnest.
When the problems get harder than the fake ones you're given in high school,
caring about them starts to matter.  
  
Does it always matter? Do the earnest always win? Not always. It probably
doesn't matter much in politics, or in crime, or in certain types of business
that are similar to crime, like gambling, personal injury law, patent
trolling, and so on. Nor does it matter in academic fields at the more
[_bogus_](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hermeneutic+dialectics+hegemonic+phenomenology+intersectionality)
end of the spectrum. And though I don't know enough to say for sure, it may
not matter in some kinds of humor: it may be possible to be completely cynical
and still be very funny. [4]  
  
Looking at the list of fields I mentioned, there's an obvious pattern. Except
possibly for humor, these are all types of work I'd avoid like the plague. So
that could be a useful heuristic for deciding which fields to work in: how
much does earnestness matter? Which can in turn presumably be inferred from
the prevalence of nerds at the top.  
  
Along with "nerd," another word that tends to be associated with earnestness
is "naive." The earnest often seem naive. It's not just that they don't have
the motives other people have. They often don't fully grasp that such motives
exist. Or they may know intellectually that they do, but because they don't
feel them, they forget about them. [5]  
  
It works to be slightly naive not just about motives but also, believe it or
not, about the problems you're working on. Naive optimism can compensate for
the bit rot that [_rapid change_](ecw.html) causes in established beliefs. You
plunge into some problem saying "How hard can it be?", and then after solving
it you learn that it was till recently insoluble.  
  
Naivete is an obstacle for anyone who wants to seem sophisticated, and this is
one reason would-be intellectuals find it so difficult to understand Silicon
Valley. It hasn't been safe for such people to use the word "earnest" outside
scare quotes since Oscar Wilde wrote "The Importance of Being Earnest" in
1895. And yet when you zoom in on Silicon Valley, right into [_Jessica
Livingston's brain_](jessica.html), that's what her x-ray vision is seeking
out in founders. Earnestness! Who'd have guessed? Reporters literally can't
believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their
companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. How
can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they sound?  
  
Though those asking this question don't realize it, that's not a rhetorical
question.  
  
A lot of founders are faking it, of course, particularly the smaller fry, and
the soon to be smaller fry. But not all of them. There are a significant
number of founders who really are interested in the problem they're solving
mainly for its own sake.  
  
Why shouldn't there be? We have no difficulty believing that people would be
interested in history or math or even old bus tickets for their own sake. Why
can't there be people interested in self-driving cars or social networks for
their own sake? When you look at the question from this side, it seems obvious
there would be. And isn't it likely that having a deep interest in something
would be a source of great energy and resilience? It is in every other field.  
  
The question really is why we have a blind spot about business. And the answer
to that is obvious if you know enough history. For most of history, making
large amounts of money has not been very intellectually interesting. In
preindustrial times it was never far from robbery, and some areas of business
still retain that character, except using lawyers instead of soldiers.  
  
But there are other areas of business where the work is genuinely interesting.
Henry Ford got to spend much of his time working on interesting technical
problems, and for the last several decades the trend in that direction has
been accelerating. It's much easier now to make a lot of money by working on
something you're interested in than it was [_50 years ago_](re.html). And
that, rather than how fast they grow, may be the most important change that
startups represent. Though indeed, the fact that the work is genuinely
interesting is a big part of why it gets done so fast. [6]  
  
Can you imagine a more important change than one in the relationship between
intellectual curiosity and money? These are two of the most powerful forces in
the world, and in my lifetime they've become significantly more aligned. How
could you not be fascinated to watch something like this happening in real
time?  
  
I meant this essay to be about earnestness generally, and now I've gone and
talked about startups again. But I suppose at least it serves as an example of
an x nerd in the wild.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Notes**  
  
[1] It's interesting how many different ways there are _not_ to be earnest: to
be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously
virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to
bully, to pander, to be on the make. This pattern suggests that earnestness is
not one end of a continuum, but a target one can fall short of in multiple
dimensions.  
  
Another thing I notice about this list is that it sounds like a list of the
ways people behave on Twitter. Whatever else social media is, it's a vivid
catalogue of ways not to be earnest.  
  
[2] People's motives are as mixed in Silicon Valley as anywhere else. Even the
founders motivated mostly by money tend to be at least somewhat interested in
the problem they're solving, and even the founders most interested in the
problem they're solving also like the idea of getting rich. But there's great
variation in the relative proportions of different founders' motivations.  
  
And when I talk about "wrong" motives, I don't mean morally wrong. There's
nothing morally wrong with starting a startup to make money. I just mean that
those startups don't do as well.  
  
[3] The most powerful motivator for most people is probably family. But there
are some for whom intellectual curiosity comes first. In his (wonderful)
autobiography, Paul Halmos says explicitly that for a mathematician, math must
come before anything else, including family. Which at least implies that it
did for him.  
  
[4] Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness even when used
as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the opposite. It's not only in
actual politics that earnestness seems to be a handicap, but also in office
politics and academic politics.  
  
[5] It's a bigger social error to seem naive in most European countries than
it is in America, and this may be one of subtler reasons startups are less
common there. Founder culture is completely at odds with sophisticated
cynicism.  
  
The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is
also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita.  
  
[6] Much of business is schleps, and probably always will be. But even being a
professor is largely schleps. It would be interesting to collect statistics
about the schlep ratios of different jobs, but I suspect they'd rarely be less
than 30%.  
  
  
  
**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Jessica
Livingston, Mattias Ljungman, Harj Taggar, and Kyle Vogt for reading drafts of
this.  
  

