Talks
Keynote
Summarized using AI
Keynote
by Tom Preston-WernerIn this keynote address at the LoneStarRuby Conf 2010, Tom Preston-Werner shares his journey from childhood curiosity to entrepreneurial success. He emphasizes the importance of ignorance as a catalyst for learning and innovation, highlighting how a lack of knowledge can lead to significant discoveries and accomplishments.
Key Points:
- Early Influences: Tom grew up in Iowa, fascinated by items salvaged from burned houses, which sparked his interest in how things work. He developed a passion for learning through books that explained complex systems, fostering a desire to create.
- Ignorance as a Tool: He illustrates that many of his achievements stemmed from not knowing the difficulties of tasks, such as buying and remodeling a house. His naivety led him to undertake projects that expanded his skills, such as home improvement and auto mechanics.
- Experiments in Building: By sharing his experiences with a Jeep rebuild and a house renovation, Tom emphasizes the value of hands-on learning and persistence. Each project taught him practical skills and problem-solving.
- Entrepreneurial Ventures: Tom transitioned to starting his own company, Q6 Media, after recognizing the demand for web design and graphic services. The jump from a steady job to entrepreneurship involved risks but ultimately proved rewarding.
- Creation of Gravatar: He discusses the inception of Gravatar as a side project during his time at Powerset, underlining how he navigated challenges and the eventual sale to Automattic.
- Innovation Mindset: Tom advocates for creating solutions for complex problems and encourages attendees to trust their ideas and collaborate with others to achieve success.
- Focus on Feedback and Learning: He stresses the importance of iterative processes, receiving feedback, and maintaining curiosity in the creative and entrepreneurial journey.
Conclusions:
Tom concludes by encouraging the audience to embrace ignorance and curiosity as essential components of discovery and innovation. He reminds them that every journey begins with small steps and that continuous learning will lead to personal and professional growth. He urges attendees to pursue their passions and emphasizes the importance of networking and collaboration in achieving success.
00:00:10
Thank you, Jim. Can everyone hear me okay?
00:00:15
Excellent. When I was a kid growing up in Iowa, in a small city, there wasn't a lot to do outside of my own home.
00:00:23
My dad was an independent contractor who did all kinds of little jobs on houses. One of the things he would do for money was to take houses that had burned down.
00:00:38
He was contracted to kind of gut them—just get rid of them, wipe them off the face of the earth, so that something new could be built there.
00:00:51
In doing this, he brought home all kinds of cool stuff and put it in our basement. Things like old Transformers, stuff from office buildings that had burned down, circuit breakers, copper tubing, gas meters... just all kinds of amazing items.
00:01:04
As a kid, I would go downstairs and sort through all these wonderful items that he had left there. He got them for scrap; he wanted to disassemble them and get the copper or aluminum out of them, take them to the recycling center, and make a little money on the side. It was a perk of being a guy who takes burned-out things and gets rid of them.
00:01:18
I spent a lot of time doing that and discovering all these wonderful artifacts, with no idea what their origin was. To me, they were just mysterious devices that existed out in the world.
00:01:30
As I got a little bit older, my mom got me a set of books called 'How It Works.' These were kind of like encyclopedias—it's as if you put Wikipedia and printed it onto paper and then read it. I distinctly remember sitting in front of the hot air register in the winter, curled up next to the only source of heat in the entire house while it was 30 degrees below outside, just leafing through these amazing books.
00:02:01
They explained how things like a coal power plant works, with schematics showing where the coal goes in and where the energy comes out. This was knowledge I wasn't born with; it was something I had to learn. And having experimented with and seen all these amazing things in my basement really piqued my interest in how these things were created.
00:02:35
Reading through these books opened my eyes to a world outside of my little house in the small city I grew up in. I just wanted to be like the people who created these fascinating things—I wanted to be one of those people who made something important enough to end up in a book.
00:03:12
Yet, there was so much interesting material in those books that every page I turned seemed to create more questions than it answered. It was a never-ending dive into the unknown, and it's interesting to think that there is so much out there we don't know.
00:03:43
Going through these books instilled a lack of fear in me; I always knew there would be more to learn. Reflecting back on this, I think it's important because all the interesting things I've done in my life have come from ignorance. They come from not knowing what it actually takes to accomplish something. Growing up surrounded by all this stuff led me to that conclusion.
00:04:21
For example, I once bought a house at 25 years old in Oceanside, California, outside of San Diego. It was a pretty large experiment in ignorance. I thought, 'Hey, I should be able to buy a house, right?' That shouldn't be a problem regardless of how much money I had.
00:04:44
The lending companies back then were eager to give loans to people like me. Being blissfully ignorant, I said, 'I would like a house,' and they replied, 'You can have a house!' So I ended up with a house—quite a unique situation back then.
00:05:11
However, having just a house wasn't enough for my wife and me—we decided to remodel it. We completely removed the carpet, the subfloor, and the linoleum in the kitchen. Those 4x8 panels are nailed down with about 300 nails per sheet, and each one took about an hour to get up. Little did I know!
00:05:47
So we decided to redo the flooring: let's put in bamboo flooring, which is known to be one of the most difficult flooring options to install. We thought, ‘Why stop there? Let’s also remove walls because they’re in the way!’ We got out the sledgehammer and just started going at it—what's a building permit? Who cares?
00:06:20
But then it occurred to me, 'Oh right, there’s electrical stuff in there—that's a problem.' But it was fine; Home Depot had books about electricity! So I would go to Home Depot every week or so, buy a new book, and learn how to fix what I had just broken. That was a wonderful thing that you can do today: just jump in and start removing walls—some might be load-bearing, but what's the worst that could happen?
00:07:17
In the end, if you work hard enough and read enough books, along with having some ambition, you can end up with something like this. All it takes is a lot of work, time, and blissful ignorance.
00:07:55
Never do tile work! If you ever have the choice of doing or not doing tile work, always err on the side of avoiding it.
00:08:01
But I think it turned out okay. You have to believe in yourself; you must feel like you can do anything. There are always things to do. All these things I looked at as a kid, like coal power plants and computers, houses... all of these are created by people, people no more special than you and me.
00:08:26
As long as you know that, you can do this kind of stuff without needing to have known how to do it beforehand.
00:08:53
Here's another example of ignorance: I was invited to a party when I lived in Oceanside, and my friend's friend had a Jeep not too unlike this one. It was a 1978 Jeep CJ5, back when the engines were simple enough that mortals could actually understand them. I saw that Jeep and thought it was awesome, so I went out and bought a Jeep for myself to tinker with.
00:09:26
I bought this one; it had been sitting in a bone yard for years. I didn't know anything about cars, and when I went to buy it, the seller asked for $800. I agreed. The catch was, it didn't run—the engine was rusted through, the wheels were flat, and the thing was made of different body parts. I thought, 'Okay, I can make this work!'
00:09:55
My friend Rob and I spent basically every free weekend working on that Jeep. We would go down there, take it apart, and figure out how to put it back together. Of course, I would often find that I didn’t have the wrench I needed to remove the part, so we'd make trips to the store to pick them up. Eventually we ended up completely rebuilding the engine without knowing a damn thing about cars.
00:10:32
But it was okay because just like with the house, we dove in and started asking questions—why are there so many rings? You go online to Jeep enthusiast sites and learn that the rings prevent the exhaust from entering the combustion chamber and screwing things up.
00:11:01
Things got a bit trickier when I reassembled the engine. I found out I had forgotten which way the little ridge on the rings was pointing. Nowhere does it say which way those should go. So I decided, 'The way the pistons go, the oil has to scrape off the wall, so the bevel probably points this way.' What could possibly go wrong? I figured I could worry about that later.
00:11:38
Along the way, I learned to weld and created a garage full of things that I thought were cool. This is how you learn—you attempt to do something you don’t know how to do. I rebuilt the carburetor, got everything hooked up, and when I finally started it, flames shot out of the exhaust. Turns out, putting the exhaust manifold on is crucial when doing engine work.
00:12:19
Eventually, we managed to get it running for 20 seconds, which was a huge accomplishment in itself, just trying something we didn’t know how to do. It's okay to attempt things you aren't familiar with. This is how discoveries are made.
00:12:47
This is what the Jeep looks like today. It's not quite done yet; it's in a storage unit back in San Diego. I live in San Francisco now, and it's just waiting for the day when I can have a garage without needing to be a millionaire.
00:13:12
It's good to reflect on how all of these experiences led me to start my first company, called Q6 Media. I had just been laid off from a job in the San Diego area and was sitting with my two friends from that job. We lamented how badly run the company was and how we’d do things differently if we were in charge.
00:13:40
I worked in Cube Number Six at that company, so I thought it would be ironically fitting that when I started my own company, I named it after the little cube of despair that I had worked in—thus, Q6 Media.
00:14:01
It eventually turned into a sole proprietorship. The other people I started with moved on to other ventures because they weren’t crazy like me. I ended up doing this on my own, starting out as a web design firm building websites for local businesses.
00:14:25
I worked on various projects, including a photography site for a friend, and eventually got into graphic design. It was something else I found interesting but hadn't done before. I started whipping elements together to see if I could sell them.
00:14:55
So I started designing graphics for flyers, pamphlets, and ultimately got into print work by designing business cards and letterheads for various companies. Through this process, I became involved in product photography, taking thousands of pictures of sandals.
00:15:34
All these different elements contributed to starting and running a company. The company was doing okay, making just enough money to scrape by while I was spending on my house and the Jeep.
00:15:59
Eventually, I left this company because I started working with Rails instead of PHP. I noticed companies were doing some really cool stuff with Rails, and I got tired of just working on other people's products; I wanted to invest my time in my own projects.
00:16:25
I ended up working at a company called Powerset in San Francisco. Powerset was doing semantic Wikipedia search—an amazing place. I was employee number 32 there, and the experience was eye-opening.
00:16:54
One of the greatest things about working there was being in San Francisco—a wonderful place. I would go to lunch and overhear people discussing compilers at the next table. This was amazing to me!
00:17:27
I got to meet some of the best Rubyists in the community during my time at Powerset. While I was working full time, I decided to create a side project that would eventually lead to GitHub.
00:18:02
I called it Gravatar, and it was my way of contributing back to the web logging ecosystem that was emerging in 2004-2005. I wanted to create something that allowed people to use their email address as an avatar on forums and blogs.
00:18:20
I created the system out of sheer ignorance—not really knowing what it would mean. I was quite paranoid about inappropriate content appearing on the site and ended up manually rating every Gravatar that was added.
00:18:50
As Gravatar grew larger, I realized it was becoming harder and harder to maintain it that way. All of a sudden, people started using the service, and I was thrilled that it was gaining popularity, but it came with challenges.
00:19:38
There was a period of months where Gravatar didn't work, and I received backlash from users who were upset. I was spending all my time trying to make it work while it cost me money.
00:20:11
Eventually, I sold Gravatar to Automattic. I realized I couldn't keep working on it while being overwhelmed with another full-time job. This experience taught me valuable lessons about building and growing something.
00:20:56
However, selling it left me with a pit of emptiness. I could now work on the Jeep but had already put it in storage. What should I do with my free time now that I wasn't fending off server fires?
00:21:31
I began reflecting on what is valuable in life. There are very personal things, like my house that affects me but doesn't lead to income unless I become a contractor. The full-time employment I had proved rewarding but sometimes felt like just putting in time to make someone else's dream happen.
00:22:23
Then there’s the idea of creating a business on my own, which presents its challenges but also great opportunities. Consulting companies often don't scale well unless you have a lot of bodies.
00:22:56
But building something like Gravatar, where I could create something and share it with the world, was much more captivating.
00:23:23
With that in mind, I started brainstorming ideas. You want to create something that makes hard things easier.
00:23:50
Concepts, like how the Oregon Trail had wheels made of metal and how hard it was to travel 2,000 miles. I want to take that and make it easier for people to achieve their goals.
00:24:29
The beauty is, we live in a time where computers let us create entire businesses with just our brains. You don’t need money, connections, or anything more than a computer and an idea.
00:25:11
I began to ponder—how do we create value with our ideas? Find something hard and make it simple, providing a solution that people will pay for. It started to sink in that my ideas had potential, and it's not as complicated as we often think.
00:25:51
Being around others with similar interests can spark new ideas. You can discuss body parts as well as ideas. I found some wonderful partnerships along the way. Building things often hinges on meaningful conversation.
00:26:23
Create something valuable and desirable, and it becomes easier for early adopters to embrace it. This was true for me. I kept brainstorming and discussing ideas with others.
00:26:49
To succeed, it is essential to find someone to collaborate with who can help take you to the next level.
00:27:20
Through user groups and getting to know others, I found two amazing co-founders: Chris W and PJ H. My previous work experiences lacked this collaborative element; now I had partners to bounce ideas off of.
00:27:44
During my initial processes, trusting the views of others became vital. Feedback is critical; it prevents you from getting too attached to your first ideas.
00:28:10
As a programmer, it’s easy to fall in love with your first concept; but having someone challenge you keeps the project aligned with what it needs to be.
00:28:51
Investors aren’t as important as the collaborators you choose. The strength of your idea lies in having people who support your vision and provide constructive feedback.
00:29:11
Create something that roughly meets your goals but holds potential to grow and develop over time. I began plotting its evolution in my defined journey.
00:29:51
Find opportunities to collaborate, create, and grow in your field. But also always stay curious and venture out to meet like-minded people. Network. Share. Learn.
00:30:02
I spent time in user groups, talking to enthusiastic developers, exchanging ideas and concepts. That energy is contagious.
00:30:32
So, use every opportunity to explore these interactions, whether at parties or other collegial gatherings, to foster the ideas that will help build your company.
00:31:11
Always give yourself room to adjust and be flexible. Sometimes you need to move on from certain concepts to discover something new.
00:31:48
Keep your mind open. Let intentions evolve. It's important not just to build something for its own sake, but to create something meaningful that brings happiness to yourself and others.
00:32:09
In your journey, remember, while you may feel moments of despair when things seem tough, it’s important to keep pushing forward. The results may be fruitful.
00:32:59
Build systems in place that give you continuous feedback, a cadence for delivery that enables you to improve upon your creations. Frequent iteration is critical. It helps fine-tune systems.
00:33:48
It's a proven strategy for companies. Look at trends, and find the spots where your innovation can shine. The creative process is ongoing and should always be harnessed.
00:34:20
The road ahead will have challenges, but with the right mindset and focus, you can continuously reshape what you create.
00:34:54
In conclusion, it is essential to remain passionate about what you do as you embark on your entrepreneurial journey.
00:35:30
Don’t shy away from the difficult tasks in the pursuit of knowledge or the creation of something new. Let your passions guide you through that journey.
00:36:11
Just as my experiences with my dad and the Jeep taught me, every victory matters—focus on those wins and know that there’s always something more to learn.
00:37:02
Take everything you know, and then keep learning and building. Ultimately, your creativity is your limit; you can create something extraordinary.
00:38:12
Remember, every company starts small and grows. Embrace the essence of your journey. So never give up, and know that it’s perfectly okay to pursue the unknown!
00:39:03
As you leave this conference today, I urge you to read this one book—it's a wealth of knowledge about how companies were formed and the journeys they took.
00:39:31
Remember, it’s not what you know that makes life interesting, but what you have yet to discover. Keep that curiosity burning!
00:40:01
Thank you all for your time and attention; I really appreciate it!
Explore all talks recorded at LoneStarRuby Conf 2010
+20