As I wrote the other day, don’t constrain your mentors by their availability. Today, I’d like to highlight someone I consider a mentor, who I’ve never met, and now that he’s passed away, I never will, Jim Simons.

I’m mildly obsessed with the culture and results of Renaissance Technologies, Jane Street, Jump Trading, and Two Sigma because I’d like to create the tech and infrastructure version of that at Automattic. Jim Simons reminds me of my Dad, who also never quit smoking and was super-smart. Finally, I love finding obscure YouTube videos with few views but full of great stuff.

In December, 2010, Jim Simons gave a lecture at MIT called Mathmetics, Common Sense, and Good Luck: My Life and Careers. The entire thing, including the introductions, is worth watching, but I’ll call out 

1. Do something new. (This ties well with Kevin Kelly’s “Don’t be the best. Be the only”.)
2. Collaborate with the best people you possibly can.
3. Be guided by beauty.
4. Don’t give up. 
5. Hope for some good luck.

I want to pull out point three, and transcribe directly what he said because it’s quite profound:

Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think, well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that? But it is. What’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Doing it right. Getting the right kind of people and approaching the problem and doing it right and if you feel like you feel like you’re the first one to do it right and I think we were, that’s a terrific feeling and it’s a beautiful thing to do something right. It’s also a beautiful thing to solve a math problem create some mathematics that people hadn’t thought of before, so “Be guided by beauty” is not such a bad principle.

If there’s something I’d add, it’s that there is an art to imitation, copying the masters to further your own work. In jazz, we’d transcribe solos from great musicians, note for note, and try to recreate them perfectly, not because that was what we were going to do when we got on stage, but because that understanding and foundation gave us the mastery to take that work and build on top of it. I think this is also true in open source, which often starts by recreating something that exists in the proprietary world but then goes far beyond.

While Renaissance has its Medallion Fund, Automattic has its A12 stock program, which only employees can access. Both programs share the same idea, and if we’re lucky, A12 will create a ton of wealth over time—I love that a third of RenTech’s employees are registered as having assets of over 5M.

He also lists these points as creating alignment for a great organization:

1. Great people.
2. Great infrastructure.
3. Open environment.
4. Try to get everyone compensated based on the overall performance.

That last point is the hardest. Dan Pink’s book Drive has a great overview of how it’s very difficult to align extrinsic incentive models. This post is a birthday gift to Tim.