To Paul Graham

To Paul Graham,

I am neither a hacker nor a painter, though I’m definitely a maker.

For a long time I was a video producer, and for a while, I was a viral video producer.

Whenever my videos went viral, I would ask myself, why did this go viral? What did I do personally in the creation and execution of this idea to make it spread like a virus?

And whenever I’ve had videos fail, I’d ask myself what went wrong. I’d start with the idea, did I come up with an idea that wasn’t shareable? If so, what caused me to come up with said bad idea? And if I felt that the idea was shareable, I’d ask myself why the video wasn’t executed properly — why the video wasn’t made to the vision of the original idea.

Over the years I came up with a series of theorems on the matter. If I’m being honest, the theories themselves aren’t super revolutionary, however, and hopefully, I believe that the way in which I tell them will be.

These essays are something which I’ve always wanted to write, so it’s my pleasure to finally do so.

I want to do to content creation what you, Mr. Graham, have done to programming and to entrepreneurship and I thank you for having created your own essays, which have been so inspirational to me, and to so many others.

Hopefully, with my musings here, I can inspire people just as you have.

Edward