Walking out of Gravity, my cousin Bruce said, “I hate man versus environment, because environment is so stupid.” For most of the movie, Sandra Bullock is the only character on screen, and she’s fighting against space, which nearly kills her over and over and puts obstacle on top of obstacle in between her and getting home. To Bruce, environment has no design or intention, it stupidly just makes whatever can go wrong, go wrong.

For me, the movie was resonant and on point because in starting a company, it does actually feel like whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, and that your environment is conspiring against you. In man vs. environment, it’s that process that makes the character want to give up before reflecting inwardly and finding the strength to overcome. And that’s the story you hear over and over from startup founders: just don’t give up.

I’d contrast that with the PvP...

I’ve been playing a lot of Dots, the free-to-play iPhone/iPad game by Betaworks that involves connecting dots of the same color to get points.

my latest hoop dream is to be the best dots player in the world

— Walter Chen (@smalter) October 15, 2013

It’s sad to say, but one of the best feelings in the world is to make a number go up. It feels awesome to get a high score in Dots. The problem with that is classic – whenever you get a high score, you always want a higher score. While perfecting my Dots skills, I’ve discovered a longer-lasting, deeper pleasure from playing Dots: freedom from dots.

When you start playing Dots, every game feels individual and self-contained. You play a game of Dots with a timer. When the timer is up, the game is over. You start a new game, nothing carries over from the old game. But you quickly learn that’s not the case.

There’s actually a...

I often get asked how I ended up in technology after being a lawyer. I’ve had to answer this question a lot, because when I was a lawyer, I’d get asked all the time how I ended up there after doing math and computer science in college.

People often expect a well thought out narrative which touches on the formative years and how that leads into interests and passions today. If it’s an interview situation, sure, I can describe how a childhood interest in logic / language / systems took me from something abstract like math into something more real-world like law. But I figured here, I’d give the real story on how I make decisions, and it’s not unlike how my initials-sake W does it.

Law school is three years with two summers. The first summer (1L summer) isn’t super important and most people do something public-interest related. The second summer (2L summer) is vital–most people...

I traveled in China the summer after I took the bar exam, and my trip started in Hong Kong. I got in a cab with the vague intention of eating dim sum, and I asked my cab driver for a recommendation. He took me to a dim sum place that he called old fashioned of the sort that you could only find it in Hong Kong.

I arrived confused and somewhat ostracized. I can’t speak Cantonese and my Mandarin is embarrassing. I stood around while no one paid any attention to me. Finally, I just walked up to a random 6 top and took an empty seat.

Sitting on the table in front of me was a big bowl, a little bowl, chopsticks, a small dish, and a pot of tea. I ended up drinking tea out of the bowl that I was supposed to sanitize my eating utensils with. I lifted my head out of the bowl and the other guy at my table pointed at me and with a horrified, incredulous look said to his friend, “What the...

In high school senior English, we had the assignment to write a satire. Our model was Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, where Swift writes with a straight face that poor people should sell their children as food, which, let’s be honest, is a bit too “oh so clever.” I can’t say if it really made an impact on 18th century Ireland, but I’d be surprised if it had. It struck me as quintessential ineffectual intellectual work that was mostly about making the writer sound smart.

I decided that I’d write a satire satire, a satirical take on “modest proposal”-style satire, which basically consisted of me writing stuff like “satire is stupid” and “satire is really really stupid.” My teacher gave me a zero on an assignment that everyone else got a 100 on for writing about how we should use babies as basketballs and that kind of thing. I remember my teacher writing in the margin, “This...

Law school’s nonsensical curriculum and teaching methods are often excused with a simple aphorism: “You’re learning to think like a lawyer.” It’s true, though–there is something to the notion of thinking like a lawyer. Thinking like a lawyer isn’t particularly unique to the legal profession, but I did learn to think like a lawyer in law school from one guy–professor and legend at Michigan, JJ White.

He was a gruff old guy, ex-Air Force, author of the authoritative treatise on commercial law (Uniform Commercial Code with Summers), and he liked to ridicule and mock students. He got away with it because he was incredibly funny. One catchphrase he had stuck with me. He’d ask a student a question of fact or law on a particular case, and as so often happened, the student would go on a verbal walkabout of legal jargon and nonsense. When the student was done, Professor White would start...

It seems like everyone else is amazin’, because when I hear discussion about working remotely vs. at an office, I never hear the admission that I’m about to make.

I am a disgusting, lazy degenerate and I can’t and won’t do any work unless there’s someone around me vaguely watching me, vaguely expecting me to do work. In the absence of that, I will sit around without pants on and watch /r/JusticePorn or play Starcraft for hours.

I blame my dad.

My dad’s the hardest working guy I know. One of my dad’s college friends told me, “If everyone worked as hard as your dad, everyone could be a math professor.” I didn’t take it literally, but I took it as a statement of just how hard my dad worked–because math is hard and super boring actually.

My dad tried to make me into a hard worker, and that’s where he failed. Every summer growing up as a kid, my dad made me do math problems. He had...