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The Power of the Marginal

paulgraham.com · 6,108 words · saved by 1 readers

June 2006 (This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.) A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those guys must have been freezing!" That's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means there's lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. There's a sharper line between outside and inside, and only projects that are officially sanctioned — by organizations, or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself — get proper indoor space. That raises the activation energy for new ideas. You can't just tinker. You have to justify. Some of Silicon Valley's most famous companies began in garages: Hewlett-Packard in 1938, Apple in 1976, Google in 1998. In Apple's case the garage story is a bit of an urban legend. Woz says all they did there was

The Power of the Marginal --> Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . June 2006 (This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.) A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those guys must have been freezing!" That's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means there's lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. There's a sharper lin

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