Who is Trevor?

I'm working extensively with Trevor Blackwell at Anybots. Trevor cofounded Viaweb (which pioneered the online shopping cart, now Yahoo Stores), and is currently a principal in Y Combinator.

Trevor's an interesting guy. He's an extremely talented programmer, but really a kid at heart. It's clear that, when it gets right down to it, he just wants to work on cool stuff. In this vein, he's also not nearly as philosophical (or social) as Paul Graham.

It isn't that he doesn't have some very innovative and philosophical ideas; it's that he's not interested in taking the time to communicate them to others. It's like, if he were to sit down and write what's going through his head, he would be an order of magnitude less efficient. There doesn't yet seem to be a communication protocol that supports the bandwidth needed to stream his thoughts.

Instead, you can see manifestations of his thoughts in the stuff he does. The more time I spend at Anybots, the more I realize the potential the company has to dramatically change how we interact with the physical world. It's fair to say that the future Trevor envisions is probably different than anything we've ever thought of.

I'm beginning to realize that one of my jobs here will be to crystalize this vision in a format that others will understand.