[lquist]

If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here.

Do people really think the fields of essays, LISP or venture funding are fully explored?

[gkoberger]

I think so? They’re all expanding, of course... but none have really changed that much over the past few decades. There’s a ton more VCs than there were a decade ago, but has it really changed as a field? People tweak the formula a bit, but we haven’t seen a shift in the same way YC shifted things. To a lesser extent, pg was one of the first “tech essayists” (now it’s a genre, http://waitwho.is).

I don’t think pg is saying they’re being ignored, but rather that there’s a sense of “yup we figured it out, let’s just iterate slowly on it”.

(I will say I can think of much better examples, but I don’t blame pg for picking the three examples that sum up his entire career. He picked those three things when nobody else cared.)

[leppr]

Cryptocurrency ICOs showed venture funding could be innovated on way more fundamentally than "tweaking a formula". The simple ICO model may arguably have been largely misused, but it kickstarted a lot of promising research and experimentation[1].

[1]: e.g. https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html, https://www.zfnd.org/blog/dev-fund-guidance-and-timeline

[travisjungroth]

Mmm, no. Which is why I really don’t get this post. The advice seems to boil down to something like : “don’t work on something fashionable! Do something like VC funding with a twist, or your own take on essays!” (which seems to be very fashionable).

[Lammy]

He's praising himself. Those are three areas _he_ explored.

[jdminhbg]

I think the meaning is that they were at one time, namely, the time he got started on them.

[diehunde]

I was wondering the same. I get the message from the post but I don't think the examples are good.