A Word to the Resourceful
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
January 2012
A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups
we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to.  It felt as if there
was some kind of wall between us.  I could never quite tell if they
understood what I was saying.
This caught my attention because earlier we'd noticed a pattern
among the most successful startups, and it seemed to hinge on a
different quality.  We found the startups that did best were the
ones with the sort of founders about whom we'd say "they can take
care of themselves."  The startups that do best are fire-and-forget
in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll
close it, whatever type of lead it is.  When they're raising money,
for example, you can do the initial intros knowing that if you
wanted to you could stop thinking about it at that point.  You won't
have to babysit the round to make sure it happens.  That type of
founder is going to come back with the money; the only question is
how much on what terms.
It seemed odd that the outliers at the two ends of the spectrum
could be detected by what appeared to be unrelated tests.  You'd
expect that if the founders at one end were distinguished by the
presence of quality x, at the other end they'd be distinguished by
lack of x.  Was there some kind of inverse relation between
resourcefulness
and being hard to talk to?
It turns out there is, and the key to the mystery is the old adage
"a word to the wise is sufficient."   Because this phrase is not
only overused, but overused in an indirect way (by prepending the
subject to some advice), most people who've heard it don't know
what it means.  What it means is that if someone is wise, all you
have to do is say one word to them, and they'll understand immediately.
You don't have to explain in detail; they'll chase down all the
implications.
In much the same way that all you have to do is give the right sort
of founder a one line intro to a VC, and he'll chase down the money.
That's the connection.  Understanding all the implications — even the
inconvenient implications — of what someone tells you is a subset of
resourcefulness.  It's conversational resourcefulness.
Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness
often means doing things you don't want to.  Chasing down all the
implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable
conclusions.  The best word to describe the failure to do so is
probably "denial," though that seems a bit too narrow.  A better
way to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful
founders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness.
They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person
traverses the physical world.
[
1
]
The unsuccessful founders weren't stupid.  Intellectually they
were as capable as
the successful founders of following all the implications of what
one said to them.  They just weren't eager to.
So being hard to talk to was not what was killing the
unsuccessful startups.  It
was a sign of an underlying lack of resourcefulness.  That's what
was killing them.  As well as
failing to chase down the implications of what was said to them,
the unsuccessful founders would also fail to chase down funding,
and users, and sources of new ideas.  But the most immediate evidence
I had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them.
Notes
[
1
]
A YC partner wrote:
My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours,
they've already decided what they're going to do and everything I
say is being put through an internal process in their heads, which
either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something
that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and
creates a rationalization for doing so. They may not even be conscious
of this process but that's what I think is happening when you say
something to bad groups and they have that glazed over look. I don't
think it's confusion or lack of understanding per se, it's this
internal process at work.
With the good groups, you can tell that everything you say is being
looked at with fresh eyes and even if it's dismissed, it's because
of some logical reason e.g. "we already tried that" or "from speaking
to our users that isn't what they'd like," etc. Those groups never
have that glazed over look.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of
this.


@chandanaveli @eleanoir You're right!

https://t.co/6M6wVYBF8J

It shows you how desperate people are for a new TikTok if they're driven to signing up for an app that cancels your account if you post a picture of Winnie the Pooh.

@LandsknechtPike Incidentally, this was a question you definitely couldn't have asked on Twitter in 2020. It would have provoked a firestorm of attacks. Or in the language of the time, you would have been called out for your problematic tweet.

@LandsknechtPike I wonder how well you could predict people's sex from their affinity for cutaway drawings of ships, castles, and aircraft.

When you learn new things that seem like type errors, you know real change is happening.

(A type error is CS lingo for sending code the wrong type of data. E.g. calling a numeric function on text. Unless you're using Perl, in which case this is just business as usual.)

I talked to the CEO of a moderately big tech co who said they'd replaced Figma with Replit. This surprised me because I don't even think of them as being in the same business. But he said Replit is so good at generating apps that they just to straight to prototype now.

@charlesarthur @mrianleslie This is a landmark thread. In fact I quote her on the quotes page of my site. But she's not the editor of Nature, just of Nature Human Behavior.

I'm slightly tempted to write something about the general phenomenon of mistakenness. But only slightly. It would be too depressing, like writing about slavery or the bubonic plague.

Twitter offers an unprecedentedly rich opportunity for studying mistakenness. Before this the best we could do were polls about e.g. what percent of people believe the world is flat, or that the theory of evolution is false. Now we can see mistakenness in detail.

This thread is a perfect sample of Twitter behavior. It's packed with people offering spontaneous, mistaken, often moralizing explanations for why his nose looked that way, when there are already replies in the thread from dermatologists, explaining the real reason.


@iamtomiwa @brianfidler @onyinye_nnenna @Antholeee @elnathan_john No, it isn't.

@daramatoye @Antholeee @elnathan_john No, using formal language in essays and emails is usually a mistake. It just gets in the way.

https://t.co/K1ZWs2v6RF

@MojiDelanoBlog The "repertoire of" is redundant. Your sentence has the same meaning if you take it out.

I assume you didn't intend this as an example of the problem I'm talking about, but it's a pretty good one.

@brianfidler @onyinye_nnenna @Antholeee @elnathan_john Who would presume that? It's just one piece of evidence.

@Antholeee @elnathan_john That's exactly the problem with it. When you're writing an email or an essay, you shouldn't use the sort of language that people would use when addressing a formal gathering.

@onyinye_nnenna @Antholeee @elnathan_john It's a basic word in the US and UK too, in the sense that everyone knows it.

@divineakporaye Actually writing simply would be a decent one to die on, as hills go. You could be fairly sure that it was an important one, and that you were right.

@Antholeee @elnathan_john Not simply because they're complicated. It depends on the words. Apparently ChatGPT specifically likes the word "delve," which is how this conversation started.

@Austen Revenue is a trailing indicator.

@BeeTheLight_ There are many uses of AI. Not all of them are good.


@mattyglesias One wonders if he's stupid enough to believe what he's saying, or just doing his duty as a proxy appealing to the lunatic fringe. What do you think, Matty?

This screenshot is from the National Library of Scotland's new historic parks viewer: https://t.co/PkW2a2Mbkb

You can see how even the distribution of country houses is in England from this map of parks that existed in 1890-1900. (A park in this sense is an area of grazing land dotted with trees. Originally most were for deer. Most country houses had one.) https://t.co/WhExtZpnwb

@jwcreighton3 It's strange to think that I can't tell now if you mean Trump or Biden, and yet to know that I'll be able to tell instantly if I click on your profile.

@RyanNewYork Ah, the faint echo of bygone days. It seems quaint now, but it didn't at the time.

@vitarktark Some otherwise reasonable and upstanding people have done that. Such is the power of tribalism.

@mattschaar YC wouldn't do that. If you're a good founder, they want you.

@michael_nielsen Evolved in multiple locations? What are they saying? That homo sapiens is a hybrid of multiple prior species? Or just that the species had a large range?

@Conanbatt Actually it started with someone else, and she was gone from Reddit by then. But she probably did work the hardest to get attention from it.

@eliasstravik Be careful. You can't get those early years back.


@hari0710 Go to Hay on Wye for three days.

@naval Also the millions of dollars it sucks away from better causes.

@MikeBenzCyber If only the super-rich can buy houses in California, who is buying the median house?

I can't tell if you're merely stupid or deliberately dishonest, but either way it's clearly a waste of time to engage with you, so goodbye.

One the whole I prefer the new right-wing trolls. They're easier to ignore. Being attacked (or as they used to put it, called out) by the left-wing ones occasionally stung a little. Some seemed smart, so I cared a little what they thought. Not these people.

The stupidity of the new right-wing Twitter trolls turns out to be an effective substitute for the intellectual dishonesty of the old left-wing ones. They don't have to resort to willful misinterpretation. They can get enough juice from mere incomprehension.

@MikeBenzCyber If people pay a lot for something when they have other alternatives, it means they want it a lot. Do you really not get that?

@MikeBenzCyber The higher cost of living in California supports my point. Houses in California are more than 2x as expensive as houses in Florida, and houses being more than 2x as expensive = people want to live there more than 2x as much.

@kevinsekniqi You might not realize it, but that's what made you move.

@tunguz The higher price of houses in California proves my point. House prices are higher than in Florida because people want to live in California more than Florida. They're willing to pay more than twice as much to do it.

@piv4law Genius is not a plural. The possessive is genius's.


The Top Idea in Your Mind
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
July 2010
I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the
morning is more important than I'd thought.  I knew it was a good
time to have ideas.  Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to
do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.
Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar
with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing,
and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something
else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to.  I'm
increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful
in solving hard problems, but necessary.  The tricky part is, you
can only control it indirectly.
[
1
]
I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given
time.  That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're
allowed to drift freely.  And this idea will thus tend to get all
the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of
it.  Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the
top one in your mind.
What made this clear to me was having an idea I didn't want as the
top one in my mind for two long stretches.
I'd noticed startups got way less done when they started raising
money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood
why.  The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with
investors.  The problem is that once you start raising money, raising
money becomes the top idea in your mind.  That becomes what you
think about when you take a shower in the morning.  And that means
other questions aren't.
I'd hated raising money when I was running Viaweb, but I'd forgotten
why I hated it so much.  When we raised money for Y Combinator, I
remembered.  Money matters are particularly likely to become the
top idea in your mind.  The reason is that they have to be.  It's
hard to get money.  It's not the sort of thing that happens by
default.  It's not going to happen unless you let it become the
thing you think about in the shower.  And then you'll make little
progress on anything else you'd rather be working on.
[
2
]
(I hear similar complaints from friends who are professors.  Professors
nowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a
little research on the side.  It may be time to fix that.)
The reason this struck me so forcibly is that for most of the
preceding 10 years I'd been able to think about what I wanted.  So
the contrast when I couldn't was sharp.  But I don't think this
problem is unique to me, because just about every startup I've seen
grinds to a halt when they start raising money  or
talking
to acquirers
.
You can't directly control where your thoughts drift.  If you're
controlling them, they're not drifting.  But you can control them
indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get
into.  That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let
become critical to you.  Try to get yourself into situations where
the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.
You don't have complete control, of course.  An emergency could
push other thoughts out of your head.  But barring emergencies you
have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea
in your mind.
I've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth
avoiding  thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push
out more interesting ideas.  One I've already mentioned: thoughts
about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention
sink.
The other is disputes.  These too are engaging in the
wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely
interesting ideas, but without the substance.  So avoid disputes
if you want to get real work done.
[
3
]
Even Newton fell into this trap.  After publishing his theory of
colors in 1672 he found himself distracted by disputes for years,
finally concluding that the only solution was to stop publishing:
I see I have made myself a slave to Philosophy, but if I get free
  of Mr Linus's business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally,
  excepting what I do for my privat satisfaction or leave to come
  out after me.  For I see a man must either resolve to put out
  nothing new or become a slave to defend it.
[
4
]
Linus and his students at Liege were among the more tenacious
critics.  Newton's biographer Westfall seems to feel he was
overreacting:
Recall that at the time he wrote, Newton's "slavery" consisted
  of five replies to Liege, totalling fourteen printed pages, over
  the course of a year.
I'm more sympathetic to Newton. The problem was not the 14 pages,
but the pain of having this stupid controversy constantly reintroduced
as the top idea in a mind that wanted so eagerly to think about
other things.
Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages.
Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury
itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about
it.  If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the
second half.  I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about
nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't
deserve space in my head.  I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten
the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking
about them.  My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my
motives are purely selfish.
I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their
mind at any given time.  I'm often mistaken about it.  I tend to
think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one
that is.  But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower.
What topic do your thoughts keep returning to?  If it's not what
you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.
Notes
[
1
]
No doubt there are already names for this type of thinking, but
I call it "ambient thought."
[
2
]
This was made particularly clear in our case, because neither
of the funds we raised was difficult, and yet in both cases the
process dragged on for months.  Moving large amounts of money around
is never something people treat casually.  The attention required
increases with the amount—maybe not linearly, but definitely
monotonically.
[
3
]
Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or your job will
consist of dealing with money and disputes.
[
4
]
Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard,
Life of
Isaac Newton
, p. 107.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston,
and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.


@lefineder Maybe this was merely a way for judges to avoid hanging someone even though the law required it.

@jasroopdhingra Open source AI is the path forward.

An eloquent manifesto from Zuck:

https://t.co/bB3joOvvxW

@mattyglesias @jam3scampbell @davidmanheim Of course it can be disproven. Do you think historians are unable to separate how charismatic candidates were from whether they won?

It not only can be disproven, but actually failed in 2020, when Trump (barely) lost to Biden despite being more charismatic.

It's good to be reminded of this occasionally if you live in a bubble of rationality. A quarter of people are credulous to the point of insanity. When  you walk through a mall, this is the movie playing inside a lot of those heads.

@vnv_varun I don't know where you got that, but it's not what I wrote. It's been edited. This is what I actually said: https://t.co/2Z9JqfRPz8

@KTmBoyle What? Here's me saying it on June 28:

https://t.co/3WMBpOlmW9

@jonathanwilson @GoldwagNathan Yes, of course. So did the leaders of Trump's own party.

@GoldwagNathan @sarcasticSyzygy You think all the historians and political analysts are so stupid that they can't separate how charismatic a candidate is from whether they won?

What about 1968? Are you claiming that historians believe Nixon was more charismatic than Humphrey?

@jeffehobbs @GoldwagNathan I wrote that essay when I was 39.


A New Venture Animal
March 2008, rev May 2013
(This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure
out what we do.  Even though Y Combinator is now 3 years old, we're still
trying to understand its implications.)
I was annoyed recently to read a description of Y Combinator that
said "Y Combinator does seed funding for startups."  What was
especially annoying about it was that I wrote it.  This doesn't
really convey what we do.  And the reason it's inaccurate is that,
paradoxically, funding very early stage startups is not mainly about
funding.
Saying YC does seed funding for startups is a description in terms
of earlier models.  It's like calling a car a horseless carriage.
When you scale animals you can't just keep everything in proportion.
For example, volume grows as the cube of linear dimension, but
surface area only as the square.  So as animals get bigger they
have trouble radiating heat.  That's why mice and rabbits are furry
and elephants and hippos aren't.  You can't make a mouse by scaling
down an elephant.
YC represents a new, smaller kind of animal—so much smaller
that all the rules are different.
Before us, most companies in the startup funding business were
venture capital funds.  VCs generally fund later stage companies
than we do.  And they supply so much money that, even though the
other things they do may be very valuable, it's not that inaccurate
to regard VCs as sources of money.  Good VCs are "smart money," but
they're still money.
All good investors supply a combination of money and help.  But
these scale differently, just as volume and surface area do.  Late
stage investors supply huge amounts of money and
comparatively little help: when a company about to go public gets
a mezzanine round of $50 million, the deal tends to be almost
entirely about money.  As you move earlier in the venture
funding process, the ratio of help to money increases, because
earlier stage companies have different needs.  Early stage companies
need less money because they're smaller and cheaper to run, but
they need more help because life is so precarious for them.  So
when VCs do a series A round for, say, $2 million, they generally
expect to offer a significant amount of help along with the money.
Y Combinator occupies the earliest end of the spectrum.  We're at
least one and generally two steps before VC funding.  (Though some
startups go straight from YC to VC, the most common trajectory is
to do an angel round first.)  And what happens at Y Combinator is
as different from what happens in a series A round as a series A
round is from a mezzanine financing.
At our end, money is almost a negligible factor.  The startup usually
consists of just the founders. Their living expenses are the
company's main expense, and since most founders are under 30, their
living expenses are low.  But at this early stage companies need a
lot of help.  Practically every question is still unanswered.  Some
companies we've funded have been working on their software for a
year or more, but others haven't decided what to work on, or even
who the founders should be.
When PR people and journalists recount the histories of startups
after they've become big, they always underestimate how uncertain
things were at first.  They're not being deliberately misleading.
When you look at a company like Google, it's hard to imagine they
could once have been small and helpless.  Sure, at one point they
were a just a couple guys in a garage—but even then their
greatness was assured, and all they had to do was roll forward along
the railroad tracks of destiny.
Far from it.  A lot of startups with just as promising beginnings
end up failing.  Google has such momentum now that it would be hard
for anyone to stop them.  But all it would have taken in the beginning
would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong
things for six months, and the company could have died.
We know, because we've been there, just how vulnerable startups are
in the earliest phases.  Curiously enough, that's why founders tend
to get so rich from them.  Reward is always proportionate to risk,
and very early stage startups are insanely risky.
What we really do at Y Combinator is get startups launched straight.
One of many metaphors you could use for YC is a steam catapult on
an aircraft carrier.  We get startups airborne.  Barely airborne,
but enough that they can accelerate fast.
When you're launching planes they have to be set up properly or
you're just launching projectiles.  They have to be pointed straight
down the deck; the wings have to be trimmed properly; the engines
have to be at full power; the pilot has to be ready.  These are the
kind of problems we deal with.  After we fund startups we work
closely with them for three months—so closely in fact that
we insist they move to where we are.  And what we do in those three
months is make sure everything is set up for launch.  If there are
tensions between cofounders we help sort them out.  We get all the
paperwork set up properly so there are no nasty surprises later.
If the founders aren't sure what to focus on first, we try to figure
that out.  If there is some obstacle right in front of them, we
either try to remove it, or shift the startup sideways.  The goal
is to get every distraction out of the way so the founders can use
that time to build (or finish building) something impressive.  And
then near the end of the three months we push the button on the
steam catapult in the form of Demo Day, where the current group of
startups present to pretty much every investor in Silicon Valley.
Launching companies isn't identical with launching products.  Though
we do spend a lot of time on launch strategies for products, there
are some things that take too long to build for a startup to launch
them before raising their next round of funding.  Several of the
most promising startups we've funded haven't launched their products
yet, but are definitely launched as companies.
In the earliest stage, startups not only have more questions to
answer, but they tend to be different kinds of questions.  In later
stage startups the questions are about deals, or hiring, or
organization.  In the earliest phase they tend to be about technology
and design.  What do you make?  That's the first problem to solve.
That's why our motto is "Make something people want."  This is
always a good thing for companies to do, but it's even more important
early on, because it sets the bounds for every other question.  Who
you hire, how much money you raise, how you market yourself—they
all depend on what you're making.
Because the early problems are so much about technology and design,
you probably need to be hackers to do what we do.  While some VCs
have technical backgrounds, I don't know any who still write code.
Their expertise is mostly in business—as it should be, because
that's the kind of expertise you need in the phase between series
A and (if you're lucky) IPO.
We're so different from VCs that we're really a different kind of
animal.  Can we claim founders are better off as a result of this
new type of venture firm?  I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, because
YC is an improved version of what happened to our startup, and our
case was not atypical.  We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money
from our friend Julian.  He was a lawyer and arranged all our
paperwork, so we could just code.  We spent three months building
a version 1, which we then presented to investors to raise more
money.  Sounds familiar, doesn't it?  But YC improves on that
significantly.  Julian knew a lot about law and business, but his
advice ended there; he was not a startup guy.  So we made some basic
mistakes early on.  And when we presented to investors, we presented
to only 2, because that was all we knew.  If we'd had our later
selves to encourage and advise us, and Demo Day to present at, we
would have been in much better shape.  We probably could have raised
money at 3 to 5 times the valuation we did.
If we take 7% of a company we fund, the founders only have to do
7.5%
better in their next round of funding
to end up net ahead.  We certainly manage that.
So who is our 7% coming out of?  If the founders end up net ahead
it's not coming out of them.  So is it coming out of later stage
investors?  Well, they do end up paying more.  But I think they pay
more because the company is actually more valuable.  And later stage
investors have no problem with that.  The returns of a VC fund
depend on the quality of the companies they invest in, not how
cheaply they can buy stock in them.
If what we do is useful, why wasn't anyone doing it before?  There
are two answers to that.  One is that people were doing it before,
just haphazardly on a smaller scale.  Before us, seed funding came
primarily from individual angel investors.  Larry and Sergey, for
example, got their seed funding from Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the
founders of Sun.  And because he was a startup guy he probably gave
them useful advice.  But raising money from angel investors is a
hit or miss thing.  It's a sideline for most of them, so they only
do a handful of deals a year and they don't spend a lot of time on
the startups they invest in.  And they're hard to reach, because
they don't want random startups pestering them with business plans.
The Google guys were lucky because they knew someone who knew
Bechtolsheim.  It generally takes a personal introduction with
angels.
The other reason no one was doing quite what we do is that till
recently it was a lot more expensive to start a startup.  You'll
notice we haven't funded any biotech startups.  That's still
expensive.  But advancing technology has made web startups so cheap
that you really can get a company airborne for $15,000.  If you
understand how to operate a steam catapult, at least.
So in effect what's happened is that a new ecological niche has
opened up, and Y Combinator is the new kind of animal that has moved
into it.  We're not a replacement for venture capital funds.  We
occupy a new, adjacent niche.  And conditions in our niche are
really quite different.  It's not just that the problems we face
are different; the whole structure of the business is different.
VCs are playing a zero-sum game.  They're all competing for a slice
of a fixed amount of "deal flow," and that explains a lot of their
behavior.  Whereas our m.o. is to create new deal flow, by encouraging
hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups
instead.  We compete more with employers than VCs.
It's not surprising something like this would happen.  Most fields
become more specialized—more articulated—as they develop,
and startups are certainly an area in which there has been a lot
of development over the past couple decades.  The venture business
in its present form is only about forty years old.  It stands to
reason it would evolve.
And it's natural that the new niche would at first be described,
even by its inhabitants, in terms of the old one.  But really Y
Combinator is not in the startup funding business.  Really we're
more of a small, furry steam catapult.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris
for reading drafts of this.
Comment
on this essay.


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A year of smoothly exponential growth, and then suddenly it stops working. That has to be demoralizing. But the startup toughs it out, and five months later growth is back. https://t.co/tQM44KNJXY

"I didn't take any notes this time. Everything's going so well."

— Jessica after a YC Board meeting

They get a lot done at Coinbase.

This image looks grim to us, but when Terence Cuneo painted it in 1947 it was a picture of progress. In fact it was commissioned by Ford, whose factory it portrays. https://t.co/q5Li1KnpAN

"You'd look like a wacko old man. And I'm not ready for you to look like a wacko old man."

 — Jessica on why I can't wear Birkenstocks and socks to Demo Day

(I told her it's now fashionable to do this, which might be true, but she seemed skeptical.)

I talked to a startup today that had been forced to take so much from investors and whose expenses were so low that they could put the money in bonds and fund their operations off the interest. I told them they should.

I met with a startup in the current batch who seemed demoralized because fundraising was going badly. Later I learned they'd already raised a million dollars. Fundraising going badly is not what it used to be.

Don't fear competitors who've raised a lot, unless you can say precisely how all that extra money is going to make them beat you. E.g. if ads are the only way to acquire users, and they can buy all the ads, you're in trouble. But money per se is not dangerous.

Notice there's another side to this coin. If you're fundraising yourself, money per se is not dangerous translates to: money per se is not useful. Unless you can say precisely how all that extra money is going to help you beat competitors, don't raise it.

A question that Google AI is never likely to answer well:

"What are the lowest quality products that buy a lot of search ads on Google? Name specific brands."


Two important principles that have a lot in common:

If you make users love you, investors will love you too.

If the people lead, the leaders will follow.

@whstancil She was hurting Stephen Miller I suppose.

@travelingclatt What have you invented?

@FirstSquawk The uppercase and lack of source makes this sound like some kind of breaking news, but you're quoting a Verge article published 12 days ago.

Are they really this clueless about how rocket development works, or do they hate SpaceX because of Elon? As so often happens, it's hard to distinguish incompetence from politics. https://t.co/aiJy0IvYXs

@amasad GMail is no worse at filtering spam than it was a few years ago. Possibly better.

@ThisIsFrag Obviously I mean it will be different specifically with respect to cancer vaccines and therapies.

@threepercent519 YC has been funding biotech cos for over 10 years.

https://t.co/y5tf6LOU3r

@joeykatzen It has been for a long time.

https://t.co/y5tf6LOU3r

Russell's History of Western Philosophy reads like it was written for himself, which on the whole is a good thing.


@mattwridley Me too. To be honest all I remember seeing on the TV was static though.

Incidentally, I didn't support Trump then and I don't now. But it was obviously a terrible idea to start firing people because they supported the wrong presidential candidate.

Stories like this show how far to the left the pendulum had swung in 2016. Now if you were asked to fire someone because they supported the Republican rather than the Democratic candidate, you'd simply refuse. But back then there were news stories about it.

Remember in 2016 when a huge mob tried to pressure Y Combinator into firing Peter Thiel as a part-time partner because he supported Trump rather than Clinton? Seems unimaginable now, and yet at the time we felt very much in the minority in refusing.

@acambridgediary That looks like a painting. But *what* makes it look like a painting?

@peterboghossian Not really. The sort of people who run them now (not the people who started them, but the people who run them now) are among the least resistant to capture.

@Jac5Connor Any candidate who's as charismatic can win. Trump is old too, remember. Not as visibly old as Biden, but a younger candidate could make him look bad.

@hutchike Apparently you haven't been following the news, but the winner of the primary election is about to drop out of the race.

In 12 of the last 13 presidential elections, the more charismatic candidate has won. So that's what we should be asking about potential Democratic nominees: how charismatic are they? Are we nominating Bill Clinton, or Hillary?

https://t.co/yF5TXJlxs8

The Democratic convention needs to be open enough for a people's choice to emerge. Otherwise we'll get a candidate who'll lose in the general election, and leave a nasty feeling in voters' minds that the process was rigged.


How to Work Hard
June 2021
It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard.
Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they
chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And
yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I
was in school, the answer is definitely yes.
One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll
have to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork
varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to
do well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to
do almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard
work through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question.
There isn't.
The reason some subjects seemed easy was that my school had low
standards. And the reason famous adults seemed to do things
effortlessly was years of practice; they made it look easy.
Of course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural ability
too. There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability,
practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to
do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability
and
to have practiced a lot
and
to be trying very hard.
[
1
]
Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business
in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never
took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." It was similar
with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth
coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but
his dedication and his desire to win. P. G. Wodehouse would probably
get my vote for best English writer of the 20th century, if I had
to choose. Certainly no one ever made it look easier. But no one
ever worked harder. At 74, he wrote
with each new book of mine I have, as I say, the feeling that
  this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A
  good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one's toes and
  makes one rewrite every sentence ten times. Or in many cases
  twenty times.
Sounds a bit extreme, you think. And yet Bill Gates sounds even
more extreme. Not one day off in ten years?  These two had about
as much natural ability as anyone could have, and yet they also
worked about as hard as anyone could work. You need both.
That seems so obvious, and yet in practice we find it slightly hard
to grasp. There's a faint xor between talent and hard work. It comes
partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and
partly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. If great talent
and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare
squared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less
of the other. But you'll need both if you want to be an outlier
yourself. And since you can't really change how much natural talent
you have, in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reduces
to working very hard.
It's straightforward to work hard if you have clearly defined,
externally imposed goals, as you do in school. There is some technique
to it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate
(which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and
not to give up when things go wrong. But this level of discipline
seems to be within the reach of quite young children, if they want
it.
What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals
that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll
probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.
The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working
without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm
bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working
hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it
feels awful.
[
2
]
There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little
kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did
something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of
disgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely dateable
landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13.
Several people I've talked to remember getting serious about work
around this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to
find idleness distasteful, he said
I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around
  then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering
  why I was wasting my summer holiday.
Perhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense.
Strangely enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious about
work was probably school, which made work (what they called work)
seem boring and pointless. I had to learn what real work was before
I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because
even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire
departments that are pointless. But as I learned the shape of real
work, I found that my desire to do it slotted into it as if they'd
been made for each other.
I suspect most people have to learn what work is before they can
love it. Hardy wrote eloquently about this in
A Mathematician's
Apology
:
I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any
passion
for
  mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of
  a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in
  terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other
  boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most
  decisively.
He didn't learn what math was really about till part way through
college, when he read Jordan's
Cours d'analyse
.
I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that
  remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians
  of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what
  mathematics really meant.
There are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn to
discount in order to understand what real work is. One is the kind
Hardy encountered in school. Subjects get distorted when they're
adapted to be taught to kids — often so distorted that they're
nothing like the work done by actual practitioners.
[
3
]
The other
kind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of work. Some types
of work are inherently bogus, or at best mere busywork.
There's a kind of solidity to real work. It's not all writing the
Principia
, but it all feels necessary. That's a vague criterion,
but it's deliberately vague, because it has to cover a lot of
different types.
[
4
]
Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many
hours a day to spend on it. You can't solve this problem by simply
working every waking hour, because in many kinds of work there's a
point beyond which the quality of the result will start to decline.
That limit varies depending on the type of work and the person.
I've done several different kinds of work, and the limits were
different for each. My limit for the harder types of writing or
programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running
a startup, I could
work all the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I'd
kept going much longer, I'd probably have needed to take occasional
vacations.
[
5
]
The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a
sensitivity to the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'll
notice if it decreases because you're working too hard. Honesty is
critical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you're
being lazy, but also when you're working too hard. And if you think
there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea
out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but
getting them because you're showing off — if not to other people,
then to yourself.
[
6
]
Finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process,
not something you do just once. Both the difficulty of the work and
your ability to do it can vary hour to hour, so you need to be
constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're
doing.
Trying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though.
There may be some people who do, but I think my experience is fairly
typical, and I only have to push myself occasionally when I'm
starting a project or when I encounter some sort of check. That's
when I'm in danger of procrastinating. But once I get rolling, I
tend to keep going.
What keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working
on Viaweb, I was driven by fear of failure. I barely procrastinated
at all then, because there was always something that needed doing,
and if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing beast
by doing it, why wait?
[
7
]
Whereas what drives me now, writing
essays, is the flaws in them. Between essays I fuss for a few days,
like a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down. But
once I get started on one, I don't have to push myself to work,
because there's always some error or omission already pushing me.
I do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many
problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff
at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the
extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll
only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should
always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.
The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these
problems with a hard core. There are important problems at the
center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at
the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in
working on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to make
big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do.
And the rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward the
center — toward the most ambitious problems.
By center, though, I mean the actual center, not merely the current
consensus about the center. The consensus about which problems are
most important is often mistaken, both in general and within specific
fields. If you disagree with it, and you're right, that could
represent a valuable opportunity to do something new.
The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although
you should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat
difficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do. If you
discover some ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the sense
of being easier for you than other people, either because of the
abilities you happen to have, or because of some new way you've
found to approach it, or simply because you're more excited about
it, by all means work on that. Some of the best work is done by
people who find an easy way to do something hard.
As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out
which kind you're suited for. And that doesn't just mean figuring
out which kind your natural abilities match the best; it doesn't
mean that if you're 7 feet tall, you have to play basketball. What
you're suited for depends not just on your talents but perhaps even
more on your interests. A
deep interest
in a topic makes people
work harder than any amount of discipline can.
It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents.
There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to
be judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is a
subtle thing that may not mature till your twenties, or even later.
The topic may not even exist earlier. Plus there are some powerful
sources of error you need to learn to discount. Are you really
interested in x, or do you want to work on it because you'll make
a lot of money, or because other people will be impressed with you,
or because your parents want you to?
[
8
]
The difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies enormously
from one person to another. That's one of the most important things
I've learned about work since I was a kid. As a kid, you get the
impression that everyone has a calling, and all they have to do is
figure out what it is. That's how it works in movies, and in the
streamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes it works that way
in real life. Some people figure out what to do as children and
just do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlessly
from one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospect we can identify
one as their calling — we can wish Newton spent more time on math
and physics and less on alchemy and theology — but this is an
illusion
induced by hindsight bias.
There was no voice calling to him that he could have heard.
So while some people's lives converge fast, there will be others
whose lives never converge. And for these people, figuring out what
to work on is not so much a prelude to working hard as an ongoing
part of it, like one of a set of simultaneous equations. For these
people, the process I described earlier has a third component: along
with measuring both how hard you're working and how well you're
doing, you have to think about whether you should keep working in
this field or switch to another. If you're working hard but not
getting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple
expressed that way, but in practice it's very difficult. You shouldn't
give up on the first day just because you work hard and don't get
anywhere. You need to give yourself time to get going. But how much
time? And what should you do if work that was going well stops going
well? How much time do you give yourself then?
[
9
]
What even counts as good results? That can be really hard to decide.
If you're exploring an area few others have worked in, you may not
even know what good results look like. History is full of examples
of people who misjudged the importance of what they were working
on.
The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is
whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously
subjective measure, but it's probably the most accurate one you're
going to get. You're the one working on the stuff. Who's in a better
position than you to judge whether it's important, and what's a
better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting?
For this test to work, though, you have to be honest with yourself.
Indeed, that's the most striking thing about the whole question of
working hard: how at each point it depends on being honest with
yourself.
Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated,
dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You
have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind
you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you
can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of
and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can
without harming the quality of the result. This network is too
complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and
clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and
you'll be productive in a way few people are.
Notes
[
1
]
In "The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius" I said the three ingredients
in great work were natural ability, determination, and interest.
That's the formula in the preceding stage; determination and interest
yield practice and effort.
[
2
]
I mean this at a resolution of days, not hours. You'll often
get somewhere while not working in the sense that the solution to
a problem comes to you while taking a
shower
, or even in your sleep,
but only because you were working hard on it the day before.
It's good to go on vacation occasionally, but when I go on vacation,
I like to learn new things. I wouldn't like just sitting on a beach.
[
3
]
The thing kids do in school that's most like the real version
is sports. Admittedly because many sports originated as games played
in schools. But in this one area, at least, kids are doing exactly
what adults do.
In the average American high school, you have a choice of pretending
to do something serious, or seriously doing something pretend.
Arguably the latter is no worse.
[
4
]
Knowing what you want to work on doesn't mean you'll be able
to. Most people have to spend a lot of their time working on things
they don't want to, especially early on. But if you know what you
want to do, you at least know what direction to nudge your life in.
[
5
]
The lower time limits for intense work suggest a solution to
the problem of having less time to work after you have kids: switch
to harder problems. In effect I did that, though not deliberately.
[
6
]
Some cultures have a tradition of performative hard work. I
don't love this idea, because (a) it makes a parody of something
important and (b) it causes people to wear themselves out doing
things that don't matter. I don't know enough to say for sure whether
it's net good or bad, but my guess is bad.
[
7
]
One of the reasons people work so hard on startups is that
startups can fail, and when they do, that failure tends to be both
decisive and conspicuous.
[
8
]
It's ok to work on something to make a lot of money. You need
to solve the money problem somehow, and there's nothing wrong with
doing that efficiently by trying to make a lot at once. I suppose
it would even be ok to be interested in money for its own sake;
whatever floats your boat. Just so long as you're conscious of your
motivations. The thing to avoid is
unconsciously
letting the need
for money warp your ideas about what kind of work you find most
interesting.
[
9
]
Many people face this question on a smaller scale with
individual projects. But it's easier both to recognize and to accept
a dead end in a single project than to abandon some type of work
entirely. The more determined you are, the harder it gets. Like a
Spanish Flu victim, you're fighting your own immune system: Instead
of giving up, you tell yourself, I should just try harder. And who
can say you're not right?
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, John Collison, Patrick Collison,
Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.
Arabic Translation


Ramen Profitable
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
July 2009
Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I ought
to explain precisely what the idea entails.
Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the
founders' living expenses.  This is a different form of profitability
than startups have traditionally aimed for.  Traditional profitability
means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance
of ramen profitability is that it buys you time.
[
1
]
In the past, a startup would usually become profitable only
after raising and spending quite a lot of money.  A company making
computer hardware might not become profitable for 5 years, during
which they spent $50 million.  But when they did
they might have revenues of $50 million a year.   This kind of
profitability means the startup has succeeded.
Ramen profitability is the other extreme: a startup that becomes
profitable after 2 months, even though its revenues are only $3000
a month, because the only employees are a couple 25 year old founders
who can live on practically nothing.  Revenues of $3000 a month do
not mean the company has succeeded.
But it does share something with the one
that's profitable in the traditional way: they don't need to raise
money to survive.
Ramen profitability is an unfamiliar idea to most people because
it only recently became feasible.  It's still not feasible for a
lot of startups; it would not be for most biotech startups, for
example; but it is for many software startups because they're now
so cheap.  For many, the only real cost is the founders'
living expenses.
The main significance of this type of profitability is that you're
no longer at the mercy of investors.  If you're still losing money,
then eventually you'll either have to raise more
or shut down.  Once you're
ramen profitable this painful choice goes away.
You can still raise money, but you don't have to do it now.
* * *
The most obvious advantage of not needing money is that
you can get better terms.  If investors know you need money, they'll
sometimes take advantage of you.  Some may even deliberately
stall, because they know that as you run out of money you'll become
increasingly pliable.
But there are also three less obvious advantages of ramen profitability.
One is that it makes you more attractive to investors.  If you're
already profitable, on however small a scale, it shows that (a) you
can get at least someone to pay you, (b) you're serious about
building things people want, and (c) you're disciplined enough to
keep expenses low.
This is reassuring to investors, because you've addressed three of
their biggest worries.  It's common for them to fund companies that
have smart founders and a big market, and yet still fail.  When
these companies fail, it's usually because (a) people wouldn't pay
for what they made, e.g. because it was too hard to sell to them,
or the market wasn't ready yet, (b) the founders solved the wrong
problem, instead of paying attention to what users needed, or (c)
the company spent too much and burned through their funding before
they started to make money.  If you're ramen profitable, you're
already avoiding these mistakes.
Another advantage of ramen profitability is that it's good for
morale.  A company
tends to feel rather theoretical when you first start it.  It's
legally a company, but you feel like you're lying when you call it
one.  When people start to pay you significant amounts, the company
starts to feel real.  And your own living expenses are the milestone
you feel most, because at that point the future flips state.  Now
survival is the default, instead of dying.
A morale boost on that scale is very valuable in a startup, because
the moral weight of running a startup is what makes it hard.  Startups
are still very rare.  Why don't more people do it?  The financial
risk?  Plenty of 25 year olds save nothing anyway.  The long hours?
Plenty of people work just as long hours in regular jobs. What keeps
people from starting startups is the fear of having so much
responsibility.  And this is not an irrational fear: it really is
hard to bear.  Anything that takes some of that weight off you will
greatly increase your chances of surviving.
A startup that reaches ramen profitability may be more likely
to succeed than not.  Which is pretty exciting, considering the
bimodal distribution of outcomes in startups: you either fail or
make a lot of money.
The fourth advantage of ramen profitability is the least obvious
but may be the most important.  If you don't need to raise money,
you don't have to interrupt working on the company to do it.
Raising money
is terribly distracting.
You're lucky if your
productivity is a third of what it was before.  And it can last for
months.
I didn't understand (or rather, remember) precisely why raising
money was so distracting till earlier this year.  I'd noticed that
startups we funded would usually grind to a halt when they switched
to raising money, but I didn't remember exactly why till YC raised
money itself.  We had a comparatively easy time of it; the first
people I asked said yes; but it took months to work out the
details, and during that time I got hardly any real work done.  Why?
Because I thought about it all the time.
At any given time there tends to be one problem that's the most
urgent for a startup.  This is what you think about as you fall
asleep at night and when you take a shower in the morning.  And
when you start raising money, that becomes the problem you think
about.  You only take one shower in the morning, and if you're
thinking about investors during it, then you're not thinking about
the product.
Whereas if you can choose when you raise money, you can pick a time
when you're not in the middle of something else, and you can probably
also insist that the round close fast.  You may even be able to
avoid having the round occupy your thoughts, if you don't care
whether it closes.
* * *
Ramen profitable means no more than the definition implies.  It
does not, for example, imply that you're "bootstrapping" the
startup—that you're never going to take money from investors.
Empirically that doesn't seem to work very well.  Few startups
succeed without taking investment.  Maybe as startups get cheaper
it will become more common.  On the other hand, the money is there,
waiting to be invested.  If startups need it less, they'll be able
to get it on better terms, which will make them more inclined to
take it.  That will tend to produce an equilibrium.
[
2
]
Another thing ramen profitability doesn't imply is Joe Kraus's idea
that you should put your
business model
in beta when you put your
product in beta.  He believes you should get
people to pay you from the beginning.  I think that's too constraining.
Facebook didn't, and they've done better than most startups.  Making
money right away was not only unnecessary for them, but probably
would have been harmful.  I do think Joe's rule could be useful for
many startups, though.  When founders seem unfocused, I sometimes
suggest they try to get customers to pay them for something, in the
hope that this constraint will prod them into action.
The difference between Joe's idea and ramen profitability is that
a ramen profitable company doesn't have to be making money the way
it ultimately will.  It just has to be making money.  The most
famous example is Google, which initially made money by licensing
search to sites like Yahoo.
Is there a downside to ramen profitability?  Probably the biggest
danger is that it might turn you into a consulting firm.  Startups
have to be product companies, in the sense of making a single thing
that everyone uses.  The defining quality of startups is that they
grow fast, and consulting just can't scale the way a product can.
[
3
]
But it's pretty easy to make $3000 a month consulting; in
fact, that would be a low rate for contract programming.  So there
could be a temptation to slide into consulting, and telling
yourselves you're a ramen profitable startup, when in fact
you're not a startup at all.
It's ok to do a little consulting-type work at first.  Startups
usually have to do something weird at first.  But remember
that ramen profitability is not the destination.  A startup's
destination is to grow really big; ramen profitability is a trick
for
not dying
en route.
Notes
[
1
]
The "ramen" in "ramen profitable" refers to instant ramen,
which is just about the cheapest food available.
Please do not take the term literally.  Living on instant ramen
would be very unhealthy.  Rice and beans are a better source of
food.  Start by investing in a rice cooker, if you don't have one.
Rice and Beans for 2n
olive oil or butter
  n yellow onions
  other fresh vegetables; experiment
  3n cloves garlic
  n 12-oz cans white, kidney, or black beans
  n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon
  n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
  3n teaspoons ground cumin
  n cups dry rice, preferably brown
Put rice in rice cooker. Add water as specified on rice package.
(Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice.) Turn on rice cooker and
forget about it.
Chop onions and other vegetables and fry in oil, over fairly low
heat, till onions are glassy. Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin,
and a little more fat, and stir.  Keep heat low. Cook another 2 or
3 minutes, then add beans (don't drain the beans), and stir. Throw
in the bouillon cube(s), cover, and cook on lowish heat for at least
10 minutes more. Stir vigilantly to avoid sticking.
If you want to save money, buy beans in giant cans from discount
stores.  Spices are also much cheaper when bought in bulk.
If there's an Indian grocery store near you, they'll have big
bags of cumin for the same price as the little jars in supermarkets.
[
2
]
There's a good chance that a shift in power from investors
to founders would actually increase the size of the venture business.
I think investors currently err too far on the side of being harsh
to founders.  If they were forced to stop, the whole venture business
would work better, and you might see something like the increase
in trade you always see when restrictive laws are removed.
Investors
are one of the biggest sources of pain for founders; if they stopped
causing so much pain, it would be better to be a founder; and if
it were better to be a founder, more people would do it.
[
3
]
It's conceivable that a startup could grow big by transforming
consulting into a form that would scale.  But if they did that
they'd really be a product company.
Thanks
to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.
Japanese Translation


@gfodor You must be completely clueless if you think I only started fighting wokeness in 2022. Pmarca and I were the default targets of the original Silicon Valley woke mobs back in 2012/13.

@gfodor You won't find anyone's early tweets if you search for "wokeness" because the pejorative sense wasn't common til 2020/21. In 2019 I had to call it "PC 2.0" for lack of a better name.

https://t.co/0G6FLrjWtP

@Alec_Mazo No, I still feel the same about Trump. That's why I want Elon to take over as much of his brain as possible.

@cfreud @GrowSF The return on that million for the city will be stupendous.

@lisperati For a long time I thought Hercules and Heracles were two different people.

@anammostarac I have a pair of silver sixpences minted during his tenure in my pocket right now. They make a pleasing talisman.

@adityaagashe Ooh, that is bad...

@jasonaholloway Very likely, but the appointments that get made now will persist.

Some journalists seem alarmed that Elon has so much influence over Trump, but this is actually good news. Someone would have Trump's ear if Elon didn't, and it would surely be someone less smart and more politically extreme. Remember Steve Bannon?

@Chris_arnade There's a tanuki too. That's why Tom Nook is called that.