Paul Graham and Walt Disney

Here's more of an opinion piece than a convention report. Needless to say, everything here is my own opinion alone and I'm not speaking for anybody else running Penguicon. I like to think that Penguicon is an incubator of Imagineers. This is a combination of artistic and literary imagination with engineering know-how, a word coined by one of my lifelong inspirations, Walt Disney:
I think Disney would say that if you're a person with passionate enthusiasms, and you take Graham's advice above, and then you make money but fail to do something cool, you should say "good try everybody, but we failed and we are starting over." If you're not a person of passionate enthusiasms... then do whatever. It is almost a tautology that the reason so many hackers and painters are more interested in the cool than the profitable is that "cool" is another way to say "interesting". Is Paul Graham suggesting that a hunger for wealth is a prerequisite to have sufficient motivation to make the sacrifices necessary to the success of a big idea? (And can such a state of mind be learned?)

No, his advice only applies if your purpose is to found a business. If you're after money, go after money. If you're not, don't found a business around it. If you're starting a convention around everything that's interesting and cool, make it a not-for-profit staffed by the interested and by the cool, instead of one of these Creation Cons that are expensive ripoffs.

I think Paul Graham is teaching the lesson that the volunteer Firefox project illustrates. In either business or not-for-profit, his advice is that it's necessary to care about people's problems and give them what they want. They want a Magic Kingdom so clean and attractive that a team of touch-up painters is deployed after closing every single night. They don't want theme parks full of skill game hucksters trying to suck every last penny out of them, just like they don't want kiosks in every park selling you Disney time-share condos as they now do! This is why his advice complements rather than contradicts the advice of Disney.

So, why is this posted to the blog of a convention that is not a business at all? Of all the ideas that have been contributed, some of them were extremely cool to create, but nobody wanted them. So we stopped. People want some of the same things from a science fiction convention that they want from a park! Keep that staff friendly and helpful. Keep that consuite clean and freshen up that serving bowl. And as Walt Disney did, constantly experiment with risky visions, that people want.