How to Write Usefully
February 2020
What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's
what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can
aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.
To start with, that means it should be correct. But it's not enough
merely to be correct. It's easy to make a statement correct by
making it vague. That's a common flaw in academic writing, for
example. If you know nothing at all about an issue, you can't go
wrong by saying that the issue is a complex one, that there are
many factors to be considered, that it's a mistake to take too
simplistic a view of it, and so on.
Though no doubt correct, such statements tell the reader nothing.
Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made
without becoming false.
For example, it's more useful to say that Pike's Peak is near the
middle of Colorado than merely somewhere in Colorado. But if I say
it's in the exact middle of Colorado, I've now gone too far, because
it's a bit east of the middle.
Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. It's easy to
satisfy one if you ignore the other. The converse of vaporous
academic writing is the bold, but false, rhetoric of demagogues.
Useful writing is bold, but true.
It's also two other things: it tells people something important,
and that at least some of them didn't already know.
Telling people something they didn't know doesn't always mean
surprising them. Sometimes it means telling them something they
knew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may
be the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more
fundamental.
Let's put them all together. Useful writing tells people something
true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them
as unequivocally as possible.
Notice these are all a matter of degree. For example, you can't
expect an idea to be novel to everyone. Any insight that you have
will probably have already been had by at least one of the world's
7 billion people. But it's sufficient if an idea is novel to a lot
of readers.
Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four
components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score
for usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly reductive, but
nonetheless true.
_____
How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and
important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this. I
learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying
anything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure
it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him,
but when you do, they're usually right.
Translated into essay writing, what this means is that if you write
a bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again.
Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes
a whole essay.
You can't ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can
ensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the
ones that aren't.
In the sciences, this is called publication bias, and is considered
bad. When some hypothesis you're exploring gets inconclusive results,
you're supposed to tell people about that too. But with essay
writing, publication bias is the way to go.
My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an
essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting
it very carefully.
I've never tried to count how many times I proofread essays, but
I'm sure there are sentences I've read 100 times before publishing
them. When I proofread an essay, there are usually passages that
stick out in an annoying way, sometimes because they're clumsily
written, and sometimes because I'm not sure they're true. The
annoyance starts out unconscious, but after the tenth reading or
so I'm saying "Ugh, that part" each time I hit it. They become like
briars that catch your sleeve as you walk past. Usually I won't
publish an essay till they're all gone  till I can read through
the whole thing without the feeling of anything catching.
I'll sometimes let through a sentence that seems clumsy, if I can't
think of a way to rephrase it, but I will never knowingly let through
one that doesn't seem correct. You never have to. If a sentence
doesn't seem right, all you have to do is ask why it doesn't, and
you've usually got the replacement right there in your head.
This is where essayists have an advantage over journalists. You
don't have a deadline. You can work for as long on an essay as you
need to get it right. You don't have to publish the essay at all,
if you can't get it right. Mistakes seem to lose courage in the
face of an enemy with unlimited resources. Or that's what it feels
like. What's really going on is that you have different expectations
for yourself. You're like a parent saying to a child "we can sit
here all night till you eat your vegetables." Except you're the
child too.
I'm not saying no mistake gets through. For example, I added condition
(c) in
"A Way to Detect Bias"
after readers pointed out that I'd
omitted it. But in practice you can catch nearly all of them.
There's a trick for getting importance too. It's like the trick I
suggest to young founders for getting startup ideas: to make something
you yourself want. You can use yourself as a proxy for the reader.
The reader is not completely unlike you, so if you write about
topics that seem important to you, they'll probably seem important
to a significant number of readers as well.
Importance has two factors. It's the number of people something
matters to, times how much it matters to them. Which means of course
that it's not a rectangle, but a sort of ragged comb, like a Riemann
sum.
The way to get novelty is to write about topics you've thought about
a lot. Then you can use yourself as a proxy for the reader in this
department too. Anything you notice that surprises you, who've
thought about the topic a lot, will probably also surprise a
significant number of readers. And here, as with correctness and
importance, you can use the Morris technique to ensure that you
will. If you don't learn anything from writing an essay, don't
publish it.
You need humility to measure novelty, because acknowledging the
novelty of an idea means acknowledging your previous ignorance of
it. Confidence and humility are often seen as opposites, but in
this case, as in many others, confidence helps you to be humble.
If you know you're an expert on some topic, you can freely admit
when you learn something you didn't know, because you can be confident
that most other people wouldn't know it either.
The fourth component of useful writing, strength, comes from two
things: thinking well, and the skillful use of qualification. These
two counterbalance each other, like the accelerator and clutch in
a car with a manual transmission. As you try to refine the expression
of an idea, you adjust the qualification accordingly. Something
you're sure of, you can state baldly with no qualification at all,
as I did the four components of useful writing. Whereas points that
seem dubious have to be held at arm's length with perhapses.
As you refine an idea, you're pushing in the direction of less
qualification. But you can rarely get it down to zero. Sometimes
you don't even want to, if it's a side point and a fully refined
version would be too long.
Some say that qualifications weaken writing. For example, that you
should never begin a sentence in an essay with "I think," because
if you're saying it, then of course you think it. And it's true
that "I think x" is a weaker statement than simply "x." Which is
exactly why you need "I think." You need it to express your degree
of certainty.
But qualifications are not scalars. They're not just experimental
error. There must be 50 things they can express: how broadly something
applies, how you know it, how happy you are it's so, even how it
could be falsified. I'm not going to try to explore the structure
of qualification here. It's probably more complex than the whole
topic of writing usefully. Instead I'll just give you a practical
tip: Don't underestimate qualification. It's an important skill in
its own right, not just a sort of tax you have to pay in order to
avoid saying things that are false. So learn and use its full range.
It may not be fully half of having good ideas, but it's part of
having them.
There's one other quality I aim for in essays: to say things as
simply as possible. But I don't think this is a component of
usefulness. It's more a matter of consideration for the reader. And
it's a practical aid in getting things right; a mistake is more
obvious when expressed in simple language. But I'll admit that the
main reason I write simply is not for the reader's sake or because
it helps get things right, but because it bothers me to use more
or fancier words than I need to. It seems inelegant, like a program
that's too long.
I realize florid writing works for some people. But unless you're
sure you're one of them, the best advice is to write as simply as
you can.
_____
I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty +
correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay. But I should
warn you that it's also a recipe for making people mad.
The root of the problem is novelty. When you tell people something
they didn't know, they don't always thank you for it. Sometimes the
reason people don't know something is because they don't want to
know it. Usually because it contradicts some cherished belief. And
indeed, if you're looking for novel ideas, popular but mistaken
beliefs are a good place to find them. Every popular mistaken belief
creates a
dead zone
of ideas around
it that are relatively unexplored because they contradict it.
The strength component just makes things worse. If there's anything
that annoys people more than having their cherished assumptions
contradicted, it's having them flatly contradicted.
Plus if you've used the Morris technique, your writing will seem
quite confident. Perhaps offensively confident, to people who
disagree with you. The reason you'll seem confident is that you are
confident: you've cheated, by only publishing the things you're
sure of.  It will seem to people who try to disagree with you that
you never admit you're wrong. In fact you constantly admit you're
wrong. You just do it before publishing instead of after.
And if your writing is as simple as possible, that just makes things
worse. Brevity is the diction of command. If you watch someone
delivering unwelcome news from a position of inferiority, you'll
notice they tend to use lots of words, to soften the blow. Whereas
to be short with someone is more or less to be rude to them.
It can sometimes work to deliberately phrase statements more weakly
than you mean. To put "perhaps" in front of something you're actually
quite sure of. But you'll notice that when writers do this, they
usually do it with a wink.
I don't like to do this too much. It's cheesy to adopt an ironic
tone for a whole essay. I think we just have to face the fact that
elegance and curtness are two names for the same thing.
You might think that if you work sufficiently hard to ensure that
an essay is correct, it will be invulnerable to attack. That's sort
of true. It will be invulnerable to valid attacks. But in practice
that's little consolation.
In fact, the strength component of useful writing will make you
particularly vulnerable to misrepresentation. If you've stated an
idea as strongly as you could without making it false, all anyone
has to do is to exaggerate slightly what you said, and now it is
false.
Much of the time they're not even doing it deliberately. One of the
most surprising things you'll discover, if you start writing essays,
is that people who disagree with you rarely disagree with what
you've actually written. Instead they make up something you said
and disagree with that.
For what it's worth, the countermove is to ask someone who does
this to quote a specific sentence or passage you wrote that they
believe is false, and explain why. I say "for what it's worth"
because they never do. So although it might seem that this could
get a broken discussion back on track, the truth is that it was
never on track in the first place.
Should you explicitly forestall likely misinterpretations? Yes, if
they're misinterpretations a reasonably smart and well-intentioned
person might make. In fact it's sometimes better to say something
slightly misleading and then add the correction than to try to get
an idea right in one shot. That can be more efficient, and can also
model the way such an idea would be discovered.
But I don't think you should explicitly forestall intentional
misinterpretations in the body of an essay. An essay is a place to
meet honest readers. You don't want to spoil your house by putting
bars on the windows to protect against dishonest ones. The place
to protect against intentional misinterpretations is in end-notes.
But don't think you can predict them all. People are as ingenious
at misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want to
hear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things they
want to do but know they shouldn't. I suspect it's the same skill.
_____
As with most other things, the way to get better at writing essays
is to practice. But how do you start? Now that we've examined the
structure of useful writing, we can rephrase that question more
precisely. Which constraint do you relax initially? The answer is,
the first component of importance: the number of people who care
about what you write.
If you narrow the topic sufficiently, you can probably find something
you're an expert on. Write about that to start with. If you only
have ten readers who care, that's fine. You're helping them, and
you're writing. Later you can expand the breadth of topics you write
about.
The other constraint you can relax is a little surprising: publication.
Writing essays doesn't have to mean publishing them. That may seem
strange now that the trend is to publish every random thought, but
it worked for me. I wrote what amounted to essays in notebooks for
about 15 years. I never published any of them and never expected
to. I wrote them as a way of figuring things out. But when the web
came along I'd had a lot of practice.
Incidentally,
Steve
Wozniak
did the same thing. In high school he
designed computers on paper for fun. He couldn't build them because
he couldn't afford the components. But when Intel launched 4K DRAMs
in 1975, he was ready.
_____
How many essays are there left to write though? The answer to that
question is probably the most exciting thing I've learned about
essay writing. Nearly all of them are left to write.
Although
the essay
is an old form, it hasn't been assiduously
cultivated. In the print era, publication was expensive, and there
wasn't enough demand for essays to publish that many. You could
publish essays if you were already well known for writing something
else, like novels. Or you could write book reviews that you took
over to express your own ideas. But there was not really a direct
path to becoming an essayist. Which meant few essays got written,
and those that did tended to be about a narrow range of subjects.
Now, thanks to the internet, there's a path. Anyone can publish
essays online. You start in obscurity, perhaps, but at least you
can start. You don't need anyone's permission.
It sometimes happens that an area of knowledge sits quietly for
years, till some change makes it explode. Cryptography did this to
number theory. The internet is doing it to the essay.
The exciting thing is not that there's a lot left to write, but
that there's a lot left to discover. There's a certain kind of idea
that's best discovered by writing essays. If most essays are still
unwritten, most such ideas are still undiscovered.
Notes
[1] Put railings on the balconies, but don't put bars on the windows.
[2] Even now I sometimes write essays that are not meant for
publication. I wrote several to figure out what Y Combinator should
do, and they were really helpful.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, and
Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Spanish Translation
Japanese Translation


@jonatanpallesen Do we know that he was fired for this?

@5j0rs Almost everyone. Basic programming is much, much easier than getting a degree in math or physics.

@johpickard Some kinds of programming.

@archiexzzz Fortran II on the IBM 1401. It didn't even have subroutines.

(You can worry about the fact that you think in Blub when you reach that point...)

The only thing that matters about the first programming language you learn is that it get you to the point where you learn your second, and almost every language can do that.

Don't stress over what to learn as your first programming language. If you have a friend who's a programmer and will help you get started, just use whatever language they use.

@levie Would this get counted in productivity statistics @ATabarrok?

@Ander663352 Yes, actually.

@thebrowndipper It's a long story: https://t.co/owrYC46NAb


@Kahlissee I investigated and this is misleading. Their problem with Israel has to do with airport charges.

@FakePsyho That's a good point. It depends how many lines of code are still written by humans. But this multiplier does at least suggest the 10k claim is not insane.

@xavitime That *other people* are more productive.

@unclesam_001 For a given programmer working at a constant level, it's a decent approximation of value.

The other strange thing about the responses to that tweet was that they were only half bitterly angry. The other half were people reporting that they hit similar numbers themselves.

Just a month ago I got a lot of strangely angry responses after reporting that a founder told me he could write 10k lines of code in day with AI. But 10k/20 = 500, and one could easily do that in a long day, on a new project, in a verbose language.

Paris buildings by age. https://t.co/1m5SH2Tl3c

@MacaesBruno By who then?

@SpencerHakimian You're probably not helping by posting things like this.

Dire predictions based on incomplete initial information.

@carl_feynman I keep the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary open. It catches just about everything.


@daltonc I find I'm unable to suggest specific types of work. The future seems too unpredictable. The best I can tell my kids is to go deep into skills that seem interestingly difficult.

@PP_Rubens Yes! Finally I got one right.

@pranavdandekar I have some experience in this: it's because the distributors don't want it to happen.

Since journalists and indignant social media sharers tend to focus on bad news, it's easy to think things are changing for the worse, but this isn't true.

@iam_aditya_m Fancy brands that won't let their stuff be sold on Amazon, and think they're above using Shopify.

@ParthaSundaram Trying to buy something.

@GrugNotes I doubt if the site I just tried to order from used Shopify. They probably think they're above that.

Almost thirty years in, online shopping is still not a solved problem. Big sites like Amazon work, but if you try to order from a manufacturer's site, there's still a good chance it will break. In a very high production value way, with lots of Javascript, but still break.

@perveritatmvita Elon has other things to work on beside this fight. The bureaucrats don't.

Prediction: The bureaucrats will mostly wait out DOGE. I hope I'm wrong. But slow-rolling things they oppose is bureaucrats' number one skill.


@ViktorBunin The depth of moral decline.

This seems a new low.

@ATabarrok There was less CO2 in the atmosphere.

@NikithaRai135 "Has more to do with" needs to be split into "is motivated by" and "will have the effect of."

I.e. the call for "no more billionaires" is motivated by wealth inequality, but will have the effect of suppressing innovators.

@tkanthh @artenpedia I'm pointing out that their relative position helped make the subject acceptable to the Victorians, and that they even had furniture with the same aim.

@SpencerHakimian Or he's simply starting another party.

@angelonuoha7 @ycombinator @ahmxrd Nice shirt.

@charliedavidman That's close but it seems to have one more mast than the ships in the painting.

There's certainly a list of people who wired large amounts to Epstein. Banks keep records of those. Let's start with that.

@ButlerianIdeal @ESYudkowsky @garrytan Not compared to Americans.


@ecomarxi Now we're talking about a very precise proposition. Do you believe it's false? If so do you have any counterexamples from the past that disprove it? If there are any genuine counterexamples, we can use them to refine it further.

@ecomarxi The modification I suggest is that a protest can be successful if it inconveniences people incidentally, but if its purpose is merely to inconvenience people, it will decrease support for your cause among the majority of those inconvenienced.

@ecomarxi When you discover a counterexample that invalidates a proposed rule, the answer is not to dismiss it, but to figure out how the rule has to be modified in order to be valid.

@JillFilipovic That's intellectually dishonest. She says locker rooms and bathrooms, and you're pretending she just said bathrooms.

@megacorpKid Better than the Principia? Seems unlikely.

@matthew_d_green In my experience the most valuable thing about college is the other people there — the faculty and students. And that is inherently constrained. If you want to be among the n smartest collections of people, there are only n places you can go.

@eemaguire It increases the number of applications, but not the number of applicants.

Something Robert Morris taught me that I've since observed repeatedly: the best books are about much more than they claim to be.

He was talking about Kernighan and Ritchie, but the most famous example is probably Gibbon's Decline and Fall.

@mattyglesias If you changed "the classes" to "some majors" you might not be far off.

@boudbeuk It's the US in 1980.


A conversation that's happened 100 times.

Me: What do I have to wear to this thing?

Jessica: You can wear anything you want.

Me: Can I wear <clothes I usually wear>?

Jessica: Come on, you can't wear that.

@cremieuxrecueil Well, you have to build them first. But relatively soon I hope.

@anopenhandle @atrupar On the contrary. This is the President of the United States we're talking about. It's important to have an accurate model of his thinking in order to predict how he'll react. Is he merely Bush dumb, or something below that?

@StefanFSchubert Do the conspicuously huge disc brakes on fancy cars generate proportionately more air pollution?

@jdmccafferty Who does that figure represent?

@atrupar (I went to ask my 13 yo about this, and he pointed out that the price of something can decrease 400 percent. It means the seller pays you 3x the original price to take it.)

@atrupar At what age, on average, do you think a child would know that the price of something can't come down 400 percent? Ten?

@hankgreen Thanks Hank!

@zhil_arf The younger one is still only 13.

@chrishartdev @JohndMeyer @WSJ Thanks! I not only like planes, but funded this one.


Where to See Silicon Valley
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2010
Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl.  At first glance
it doesn't seem there's anything to see.  It's not the sort of place
that has conspicuous monuments.  But if you look, there are subtle
signs you're in a place that's different from other places.
1.
Stanford
University
Stanford is a strange place.  Structurally it is to an ordinary
university what suburbia is to a city.  It's enormously spread out,
and feels surprisingly empty much of the time.  But notice the
weather.  It's probably perfect.  And notice the beautiful mountains
to the west.  And though you can't see it, cosmopolitan San Francisco
is 40 minutes to the north.  That combination is much of the reason
Silicon Valley grew up around this university and not some other
one.
2.
University
Ave
A surprising amount of the work of the Valley is done in the cafes
on or just off University Ave in Palo Alto.  If you visit on a
weekday between 10 and 5, you'll often see founders pitching
investors.  In case you can't tell, the founders are the ones leaning
forward eagerly, and the investors are the ones sitting back with
slightly pained expressions.
3.
The Lucky
Office
The office at 165 University Ave was Google's first.  Then it was
Paypal's.  (Now it's
Wepay
's.)  The interesting thing about it is
the location.  It's a smart move to put a startup in a place with
restaurants and people walking around instead of in an office park,
because then the people who work there want to stay there, instead
of fleeing as soon as conventional working hours end.  They go out
for dinner together, talk about ideas, and then come back and
implement them.
It's important to realize that Google's current location in an
office park is not where they started; it's just where they were
forced to move when they needed more space.  Facebook was till
recently across the street, till they too had to move because they
needed more space.
4.
Old
Palo Alto
Palo Alto was not originally a suburb.  For the first 100 years or
so of its existence, it was a college town out in the countryside.
Then in the mid 1950s it was engulfed in a wave of suburbia that
raced down the peninsula.  But Palo Alto north of Oregon expressway
still feels noticeably different from the area around it.  It's one
of the nicest places in the Valley.  The buildings are old (though
increasingly they are being torn down and replaced with generic
McMansions) and the trees are tall.  But houses are very
expensive—around $1000 per square foot. This is post-exit
Silicon Valley.
5.
Sand
Hill Road
It's interesting to see the VCs' offices on the north side of Sand
Hill Road precisely because they're so boringly uniform.  The
buildings are all more or less the same, their exteriors express
very little, and they are arranged in a confusing maze.  (I've been
visiting them for years and I still occasionally get lost.) It's
not a coincidence.  These buildings are a pretty accurate reflection
of the VC business.
If you go on a weekday you may see groups of founders there to meet
VCs. But mostly you won't see anyone; bustling is the last word
you'd use to describe the atmos.  Visiting Sand Hill Road reminds
you that the opposite of "down and dirty" would be "up and clean."
6.
Castro
Street
It's a tossup whether Castro Street or University Ave should be
considered the heart of the Valley now.  University Ave would have
been 10 years ago.  But Palo Alto is getting expensive.  Increasingly
startups are located in Mountain View, and Palo Alto is a place
they come to meet investors.  Palo Alto has a lot of different
cafes, but there is one that clearly dominates in Mountain View:
Red
Rock
.
7.
Google
Google spread out from its first building in Mountain View
to a lot of the surrounding ones.  But because the
buildings were built at different times by different people,
the place doesn't have the sterile, walled-off feel that a typical
large company's headquarters have.  It definitely has a flavor of
its own though.  You sense there is something afoot.  The general
atmos is vaguely utopian; there are lots of Priuses, and people who
look like they drive them.
You can't get into Google unless you know someone there.  It's very
much worth seeing inside if you can, though.   Ditto for Facebook,
at the end of California Ave in Palo Alto, though there is nothing
to see outside.
8.
Skyline
Drive
Skyline Drive runs along the crest of the Santa Cruz mountains.  On
one side is the Valley, and on the other is the sea—which
because it's cold and foggy and has few harbors, plays surprisingly
little role in the lives of people in the Valley, considering how
close it is.  Along some parts of Skyline the dominant trees are
huge redwoods, and in others they're live oaks.  Redwoods mean those
are the parts where the fog off the coast comes in at night; redwoods
condense rain out of fog.  The MROSD manages a collection of
great walking trails
off
Skyline.
9.
280
Silicon Valley has two highways running the length of it: 101, which
is pretty ugly, and 280, which is one of the more beautiful highways
in the world.  I always take 280 when I have a choice.  Notice the
long narrow lake to the west? That's the San Andreas Fault.  It
runs along the base of the hills, then heads uphill through Portola
Valley.  One of the MROSD trails runs
right along
the fault
.  A string of rich neighborhoods runs along the
foothills to the west of 280: Woodside, Portola Valley, Los Altos
Hills, Saratoga, Los Gatos.
SLAC
goes right under 280 a little bit south of Sand Hill Road.  And a couple miles south of that is the Valley's equivalent of the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign:
The Dish
.
Notes
I skipped the
Computer
History Museum
because this is a list of where to see the Valley
itself, not where to see artifacts from it.  I also skipped San
Jose.  San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley, but
when people in the Valley use the phrase "the city," they mean San
Francisco.  San Jose is a dotted line on a map.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, and Jessica Livingston
for reading drafts of this.


When I was a kid it seemed like America was run by stiffs. But that turned out to be infinitely preferable to having the country run by thugs.

@brianluidog Not in my experience.

@independentabe If you're American, call your member of Congress.

@DarwinianVyas My guess is a Limitless Pendant.

Something I taught 13 yo: When you're in the idea business, there will be times when you stop having them. For the first 20 years or so, every time this happens you'll worry it's permanent. But eventually you'll learn to stop worrying.

@ahistoryinart Wow is that good. He outmotherwells Motherwell.

@dcxStep @jessesingal Seems like it should be.

@TrevMcKendrick @mwseibel Hmm, interesting idea...

(The actual concert was packed. We were just early.)

@davidfelsmann He's 80 and he's still got it.


Subject: Airbnb
March 2011
Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable
post
about missing
Airbnb
.   VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's extraordinarily
rare for one to talk about it publicly till long afterward.  So
that post is further evidence what a rare bird Fred is.  He's
probably the nicest VC I know.
Reading Fred's post made me go back and look at the emails I exchanged
with him at the time, trying to convince him to invest in Airbnb.
It was quite interesting to read.  You can see Fred's mind at work
as he circles the deal.
Fred and the Airbnb founders have generously agreed to let me publish
this email exchange (with one sentence redacted about something
that's strategically important to Airbnb and not an important part
of the conversation).  It's an interesting illustration of an element
of the startup ecosystem that few except the participants ever see:
investors trying to convince one another to invest in their portfolio
companies.  Hundreds if not thousands of conversations of this type
are happening now, but if one has ever been published, I haven't
seen it.  The Airbnbs themselves never even saw these emails at the
time.
We do a lot of this behind the scenes stuff at YC, because we invest
in such a large number of companies, and we invest so early that
investors sometimes need a lot of convincing to see their merits.
I don't always try as hard as this though.  Fred must
have found me quite annoying.
from: Paul Graham
to: Fred Wilson, AirBedAndBreakfast Founders
date: Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 11:42 AM
subject: meet the airbeds
One of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast,
is in NYC right now meeting their users.  (NYC is their biggest
market.) I'd recommend meeting them if your schedule allows.
I'd been thinking to myself that though these guys were going to
do really well, I should introduce them to angels, because VCs would
never go for it.  But then I thought maybe I should give you more
credit.  You'll certainly like meeting them.  Be sure to ask about
how they funded themselves with breakfast cereal.
There's no reason this couldn't be as big as Ebay.  And this team
is the right one to do it.
--pg
from: Brian Chesky
to: Paul Graham
cc: Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia
date: Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 11:40 AM
subject: Re: meet the airbeds
PG,
Thanks for the intro!
Brian
from: Paul Graham
to: Brian Chesky
cc: Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia
date: Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 12:38 PM
subject: Re: meet the airbeds
It's a longshot, at this stage, but if there was any VC who'd get
you guys, it would be Fred.  He is the least suburban-golf-playing
VC I know.
He likes to observe startups for a while before acting, so don't
be bummed if he seems ambivalent.
--pg
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham,
date: Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 5:28 PM
subject: Re: meet the airbeds
Thanks Paul
We are having a bit of a debate inside our partnership about the
airbed concept. We'll finish that debate tomorrow in our weekly
meeting and get back to you with our thoughts
Thanks
Fred
from: Paul Graham
to: Fred Wilson
date: Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 10:48 PM
subject: Re: meet the airbeds
I'd recommend having the debate after meeting them instead of before.
We had big doubts about this idea, but they vanished on meeting the
guys.
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham
date: Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:08 AM
subject: RE: meet the airbeds
We are still very suspect of this idea but will take a meeting as
you suggest
Thanks
fred
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham, AirBedAndBreakfast Founders
date: Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:09 AM
subject: RE: meet the airbeds
Airbed team -
Are you still in NYC?
We'd like to meet if you are
Thanks
fred
from: Paul Graham
to: Fred Wilson
date: Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 1:42 PM
subject: Re: meet the airbeds
Ideas can morph.  Practically every really big startup could say,
five years later, "believe it or not, we started out doing ___."
It just seemed a very good sign to me that these guys were actually
on the ground in NYC hunting down (and understanding) their users.
On top of several previous good signs.
--pg
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham
date: Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 7:15 AM
subject: Re: meet the airbeds
It's interesting
Our two junior team members were enthusiastic
The three "old guys" didn't get it
from: Paul Graham
to: Fred Wilson
date: Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 5:58 PM
subject: airbnb
The Airbeds just won the first poll among all the YC startups in
their batch by a landslide.  In the past this has not been a 100%
indicator of success (if only anything were) but much better than
random.
--pg
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham
date: Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 5:29 PM
subject: Re: airbnb
I met them today
They have an interesting business
I'm just not sure how big it's going to be
fred
from: Paul Graham
to: Fred Wilson
date: Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 9:50 AM
subject: Re: airbnb
Did they explain the long-term goal of being the market in accommodation
the way eBay is in stuff?  That seems like it would be huge.  Hotels
now are like airlines in the 1970s before they figured out how to
increase their load factors.
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham
date: Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:05 PM
subject: Re: airbnb
They did but I am not sure I buy that
ABNB reminds me of Etsy in that it facilitates real commerce in a
marketplace model directly between two people
So I think it can scale all the way to the bed and breakfast market
But I am not sure they can take on the hotel market
I could be wrong
But even so, if you include short term room rental, second home
rental, bed and breakfast, and other similar classes of accommodations,
you get to a pretty big opportunity
fred
from: Paul Graham
to: Fred Wilson
date: Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 12:21 AM
subject: Re: airbnb
So invest in them!  They're very capital efficient.  They would
make an investor's money go a long way.
It's also counter-cyclical.  They just arrived back from NYC, and
when I asked them what was the most significant thing they'd observed,
it was how many of their users actually needed to do these rentals
to pay their rents.
--pg
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham
date: Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 2:21 AM
subject: Re: airbnb
There's a lot to like
I've done a few things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who
were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model
I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like
this a few years ago.
So we are working on it
Thanks for the lead
Fred
from: Paul Graham
to: Fred Wilson
date: Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:00 PM
subject: airbnb already spreading to pros
I know you're skeptical they'll ever get hotels, but there's a
continuum between private sofas and hotel rooms, and they just moved
one step further along it.
[link to an airbnb user]
This is after only a few months.  I bet you they will get hotels
eventually.  It will start with small ones.  Just wait till all the
10-room pensiones in Rome discover this site.  And once it spreads
to hotels, where is the point (in size of chain) at which it stops?
Once something becomes a big marketplace, you ignore it at your
peril.
--pg
from: Fred Wilson
to: Paul Graham
date: Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 4:26 AM
subject: Re: airbnb already spreading to pros
That's true. It's also true that there are quite a few marketplaces
out there that serve this same market
If you look at many of the people who list at ABNB, they list
elsewhere too
I am not negative on this one, I am interested, but we are still
in the gathering data phase.
fred


@aProductCreator Some of the ones I describe in the file I've since written. And there is presumably some duplication, since I never read the file.

@micsolana Funding is down, but founding isn't down as much.

@ashish_pov It varies from minutes to months, but a couple weeks usually.

@micsolana That article looks like nonsense. Their graph is completely implausible.

@JimSkazas I did years ago.

So maybe it was useful to write down the idea when I first thought about it. Maybe that caused me to think about it later. Things you've read can be useful long after you've forgotten reading them (https://t.co/Icj6P7OqHu), and this is probably true for things you've written too.

That's not to say that I don't write the essays described in the file though. I often do. But not because I found them by scrolling through the file. I just ended up thinking about the same topic again.

In practice this file is practically write-only. When I have an idea for an essay but don't have time to write it (e.g. because I'm in the middle of another) I make a note of it in the file. But I pretty much never go back and read them.

I have a file of notes about essays I might write in the future. Typically I'll have about a paragraph about each. I was curious how long the file was. 1792 lines!

@matthewgburgess I'll admit that it's a very attractive flavor for dictators. When the state owns everything, it also tends to control everything.


In fact the hugeness of the outcome explains why it's rational for n to be large. If there were 100 delivery apps, the expected value of starting one would be a founder's share of at least a billion dollars.

The "nth delivery app" is a terrible idea, unless it happens to be Doordash, in which case it's worth 100 billion dollars and no one ever describes it in those terms.

It's an illusion that there was a "bad old days" when Silicon Valley was funding crap startups. Most startups fail, and failed ideas sound bad, even if they could have evolved into something good. So past cohorts of startups will always seem crappy.

@mike_thefounder Following YC's advice does.

@BenjaminPDixon I know, of course, that it originally had a different meaning. But for the last several years the default sense has been the pejorative one.

@staysaasy The web. https://t.co/HDSpTGD5jO

@nikillinit Learn to program, listen to users, make something people want, focus on building instead of fundraising, build something you yourself need.

Journalism was still a thriving industry in 1980. People like Woodward and Bernstein still aspired to work in it. By 2010 you could no longer make either of those claims. That left a gap, and the gap was filled by different people with different motives.

In retrospect one of the things that allowed wokeness to become so powerful, at its peak, was the decline of journalism as an industry. The kind of people who undertook its institutional capture in 2010 mostly couldn't have gotten hired in 1980.

"All those things we tell founders to do, she actually *does* them."

— Jessica on Christina Cacioppo


@winterrose @cremieuxrecueil I find it's good just to talk to them about math.

@kendrictonn I didn't own one till I was about 50.

@metapills @ahistoryinart Ok, I watched a lot of Tim's Vermeer, and he used two devices: a mirror within a camera obscura. (His mirror isn't a camera lucida, which is more complicated, but it can be used in a similar way.)

@LKrauss1 I read a good deal of ancient stuff (in translation). It's reassuring in a way to know that people were as quarrelsome and irresponsible as they are now. But what's not reassuring is how often this ended in disaster.

@SamGichuru This is a gratuitously bizarre way to display a bulleted list...

@skdh Not exactly. I think you were better at math.

@Noahpinion You're contradicted by the next tweet. You just have to follow different people (and set your account to show you only tweets by people you follow). https://t.co/i2tWVMeWwd

@edsull Obviously it depends how they disagree.

@ifulido Actually that's true. I often find myself wondering if they're bots, which I rarely if ever did with left-wing trolls.

@rogteran I think it's a combination of wokeness losing steam, left-wing users leaving, and the ones that remain not wanting to pay Elon for blue checks and thus getting their tweets deprioritized.


The Roots of Lisp
May 2001
(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly
what McCarthy discovered.  You don't need to know this stuff
to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to
anyone who wants to
understand the essence of Lisp  both in the sense of its
origins and its semantic core.  The fact that it has such a core
is one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and the reason why,
unlike other languages, Lisp has dialects.)
In 1960,
John
McCarthy
published a remarkable paper in
which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for
geometry. He showed how, given a handful of simple
operators and a notation for functions, you can
build a whole programming language.
He called this language Lisp, for "List Processing,"
because one of his key ideas was to use a simple
data structure called a
list
for both
code and data.
It's worth understanding what McCarthy discovered, not
just as a landmark in the history of computers, but as
a model for what programming is tending to become in
our own time.  It seems to me that there have been
two really clean, consistent models of programming so
far: the C model and the Lisp model.
These two seem points of high ground, with swampy lowlands
between them.  As computers have grown more powerful,
the new languages being developed have been
moving
steadily
toward the Lisp model.  A popular recipe
for new programming languages in the past 20 years
has been to take the C model of computing and add to
it, piecemeal, parts taken from the Lisp model,
like runtime typing and garbage collection.
In this article I'm going to try to explain in the
simplest possible terms what McCarthy discovered.
The point is not just to learn about an interesting
theoretical result someone figured out forty years ago,
but to show where languages are heading.
The unusual thing about Lisp  in fact, the defining
quality of Lisp  is that it can be written in
itself.  To understand what McCarthy meant by this,
we're going to retrace his steps, with his mathematical
notation translated into running Common Lisp code.
Complete Article (Postscript)
What Made Lisp Different
The Code
Chinese Translation
Japanese Translation
Portuguese Translation
Korean Translation


Learning from Founders
January 2007
(Foreword to Jessica Livingston's
Founders at Work
.)
Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the
blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down.  The winners
slow down the least.  It's that way with most startups too.  The
earliest phase is usually the most productive.  That's when they
have the really big ideas.  Imagine what Apple was like when 100%
of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.
The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different
from most people's idea of what business is like.  If you looked
in people's heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing
"business," you'd get images of people dressed up in suits, groups
sitting around conference tables looking serious, Powerpoint
presentations, people producing thick reports for one another to
read.   Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this.  And
yet they're probably the most productive part of the whole economy.
Why the disconnect?  I think there's a general principle at work
here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they
expend on appearances to compensate.  More often than not the energy
they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance
worse.  A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine
modified the "sports" model of some production car to get the fastest
possible standing quarter mile.  You know how they did it?  They
cut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to
make it
look
fast.
Business is broken the same way that car was.  The effort that goes
into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes
organizations less productive.  Suits, for example.  Suits do not
help people to think better.  I bet most executives at big companies
do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go
downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee.  That's when
you have ideas.  Just imagine what a company would be like if people
could think that well at work.  People do in startups, at least
some of the time.  (Half the time you're in a panic because your
servers are on fire, but the other half you're thinking as deeply
as most people only get to sitting alone on a Sunday morning.)
Ditto for most of the other differences between startups and what
passes for productivity in big companies.  And yet conventional
ideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that
even startup founders are affected by them.  In our startup, when
outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'd
clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a
lot of people were there during conventional office hours.  In fact,
programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks
during office hours.  It got done by badly dressed people (I was
notorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn
with junk at 2 in the morning.  But no visitor would understand
that.  Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize
real productivity when they see it.  Even we were affected by the
conventional wisdom.  We thought of ourselves as impostors, succeeding
despite being totally unprofessional.  It was as if we'd created a
Formula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn't look like a car
was supposed to look.
In the car world, there are at least some people who know that a
high performance car looks like a Formula 1 racecar, not a sedan
with giant rims and a fake spoiler bolted to the trunk.  Why not
in business?  Probably because startups are so small.  The really
dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four people,
so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands
see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.
This book can help fix that problem, by showing everyone what, till
now, only a handful people got to see: what happens in the first
year of a startup.  This is what real productivity looks like. This
is the Formula 1 racecar.  It looks weird, but it goes fast.
Of course, big companies won't be able to do everything these
startups do.  In big companies there's always going to be more
politics, and less scope for individual decisions.  But seeing what
startups are really like will at least show other organizations
what to aim for.  The time may soon be coming when instead of
startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to
seem more like startups.  That would be a good thing.
Japanese
Translation
Founders at Work
There can't be more than a couple thousand
people who know first-hand what happens in the first month of a
successful startup.   Jessica Livingston got them to tell us.
So despite the interview format, this is
really a how-to book.  It is probably the single most valuable
book a startup founder could read.


@WildCat_io And also comes from China...

@notmaitham @tommycollison I was surprised to read that all the Christian kingdoms in the north recognized Abd-ar-Rahman III as their overlord in the early 10th century, so in that sense at least the greatest extent of Muslim control occurred 200 years after the initial invasion.

A good illustration to show kids. You do not want to get anywhere near this stuff. https://t.co/LAxVfeMkbO

@tommycollison Watt and Cachia's History of Islamic Spain.

@kendrictonn I once tried having the photograph of the smaller scale work printed on canvas and using it as an underpainting. It worked well technically. The problem is they use bad quality canvas for this. And the inks aren't lightfast, as you see if you leave any underpainting showing.

@winterrose Wow, really? That makes me very happy to read.

I'd been procrastinating by reading Twitter, but now I'm going to get back to work writing.

@codenamefnatic @dened21 @footballmood I had to keep doing consulting work to pay the rent.

@harjtaggar This memo helped cause it to peak. Lots of people on the far left smugly predicted disaster for Coinbase. In fact they've done great. And that has inspired many other founder/CEOs (in fact, probably most of them) to quietly do the same thing.

@dadiomov This sounds like George Costanza taking his parents for Waymo rides.

@dened21 @footballmood Yes, I wanted to get rich so I could paint.


@Rezsa No, I'm quoting Mandy Patinkin. You clearly did not even watch the video.

@avidseries What Israel is doing to Palestinian civilians in Gaza is not on the scale of the Holocaust. But Patinkin wasn't just talking about the Holocaust. He was talking about the whole long history of pogroms against Jews. And it does resemble those.

@4thewisdom @wideofthepost No you won't.

@avidseries I drew?

@SpencerHakimian I predict @cremieuxrecueil will have something to say about this study.

@atokdase @wideofthepost He's a supporter of the current administration's attack on universities, which I consider one of their most dangerous mistakes.

@jdmccafferty I have this print! I saw it in a Persian restaurant in Cambridge, MA and tracked one down.

@ADerkshan Is Mandy Patinkin?

"How could it be done to you and your ancestors, and you turn around and you do it to someone else?"

@ElijahSchaffer Dissimilar than? You mean dissimilar to.

At least we know you don't use AIs to write your tweets, though. An AI would never make such a mistake.


@jdupl1 That's an encouraging thought! You just might. Probably not, but you might.

@matrixbender69 @michelletandler It's because (a) wokeness has so permeated American universities and (b) because so many are based in the Bay Area.

But startups are less woke now than they were 5 years ago. Founders have cracked down.

@chinmay @michelletandler No. Some political extremists try to start startups, but they tend not to do very well.

@Noahpinion Why was the birthrate so low in China around 2000?

@FilArons Me too!

@michelletandler There aren't many successful founders on the far right or the far left. Nearly all are accidental moderates (https://t.co/ogMaJHrydF). That comes with being independent-minded, which you have to be to succeed as a startup founder.

@markessien Based on the technology used by Neanderthals, I think they'd be smart enough to fit into current society.

@2021Ufo People who want that.

@Algon_33 @benkohlmann @GarettJones Yes. You only turn them off initially, when you're in the first phase of searching for ideas.

@Aella_Girl Our house was one of the first built in what later became a large development, so I had construction sites to play on (and take scrap wood for tree forts from) for my whole childhood.


@rajatsuri He's so old that they'll be picking new leaders soon either way.

@Scholars_Stage The world is full of them, but it's usually hidden. Twitter brings out all the nasty people's hidden nastiness into the open. It's interesting in a way. But not fun.

Looking at old pictures with 12 yo.

Me: Look what a happy childhood you had.

12 yo: I'm still having it. https://t.co/blaVZtrmBO

@NNunnelee Yes. She thought that Jessica and I must be funding these things in order to encourage him.

@0hAims50921 He's not actually starting any of these companies.

At a startup event, someone asked 12 yo if he was working on a startup. He convinced her that he had started a company to make hats out of skunks, a restaurant where everything (even the drinks) was made of bass, and a pest control company that used catapults.

If your university is still paying Elsevier, what do they think they know that MIT doesn't?

I was talking recently to Andy Lapsa of Stoke Space, and at least two of his customers are other YC companies. As another founder observed, even rocket companies can find customers at YC.

"Some things don't change. Ron Conway is one of them."

— Steve Huffman

Plus this phrase tends to signal other undesirable baggage, like professors who want to be founders in the sense of equity but not in the sense of commitment, and university bureaucrats who do nothing but put obstacles in the company's way.


How to Present to Investors
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
August 2006, rev. April 2007, September 2010
In a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded
this summer present to investors.  Y Combinator funds startups twice
a year, in January and June.  Ten weeks later we invite all the
investors we know to hear them present what they've built so far.
Ten weeks is not much time.  The average startup probably doesn't
have much to show for itself after ten weeks.  But the average
startup fails.  When you look at the ones that went on to do great
things, you find a lot that began with someone pounding out a
prototype in a week or two of nonstop work.  Startups are a
counterexample to the rule that haste makes waste.
(Too much money seems to be as bad for startups as too much time,
so we don't give them much money either.)
A week before Demo Day, we have a dress rehearsal called Rehearsal Day.
At other Y Combinator events we allow outside guests, but not at
Rehearsal Day.  No one except the other founders gets to see the rehearsals.
The presentations on Rehearsal Day are often pretty rough.  But this is
to be expected.  We try to pick founders who are good at building
things, not ones who are slick presenters.  Some of the founders
are just out of college, or even still in it, and have never spoken
to a group of people they didn't already know.
So we concentrate on the basics.  On Demo Day each startup will
only get ten minutes, so we encourage them to focus on just two
goals: (a) explain what you're doing, and (b) explain why users
will want it.
That might sound easy, but it's not when the speakers have no
experience presenting, and they're explaining technical matters to
an audience that's mostly non-technical.
This situation is constantly repeated when startups present to
investors: people who are bad at explaining, talking to people who
are bad at understanding.  Practically every successful startup,
including stars like Google, presented at some point to investors
who didn't get it and turned them down.  Was it because the founders
were bad at presenting, or because the investors were obtuse?  It's
probably always some of both.
At the most recent Rehearsal Day, we four Y Combinator partners found
ourselves saying a lot of the same things we said at the last two.
So at dinner afterward we collected all our tips about presenting
to investors.  Most startups face similar challenges, so we hope
these will be useful to a wider audience.
1. Explain what you're doing.
Investors' main question when judging a very early startup is whether
you've made a compelling product.  Before they can judge whether
you've built a good x, they have to understand what kind of x you've
built.  They will get very frustrated if instead of telling them
what you do, you make them sit through some kind of preamble.
Say what you're doing as soon as possible, preferably in the first
sentence. "We're Jeff and Bob and we've built an easy to use web-based
database.  Now we'll show it to you and explain why people need
this."
If you're a great public speaker you may be able to violate this
rule.  Last year one founder spent the whole first half of his talk
on a fascinating analysis of the limits of the conventional desktop
metaphor.  He got away with it, but unless you're a captivating
speaker, which most hackers aren't, it's better to play it safe.
2. Get rapidly to demo.
This section is now obsolete for YC founders presenting
at Demo Day, because Demo Day presentations are now so short
that they rarely include much if any demo.  They seem to work
just as well without, however, which makes me think I was
wrong to emphasize demos so much before.
A demo explains what you've made more effectively than any verbal
description.  The only thing worth talking about first is the problem
you're trying to solve and why it's important.  But don't spend
more than a tenth of your time on that.  Then demo.
When you demo, don't run through a catalog of features.  Instead
start with the problem you're solving, and then show how your product
solves it.  Show features in an order driven by some kind of purpose,
rather than the order in which they happen to appear on the screen.
If you're demoing something web-based, assume that the network
connection will mysteriously die 30 seconds into your presentation,
and come prepared with a copy of the server software running on
your laptop.
3. Better a narrow description than a vague one.
One reason founders resist describing their projects concisely is
that, at this early stage, there are all kinds of possibilities.
The most concise descriptions seem misleadingly narrow.  So for
example a group that has built an easy web-based database might
resist calling their applicaton that, because it could be so much
more.  In fact, it could be anything...
The problem is, as you approach (in the calculus sense) a description
of something that could be anything, the content of your description
approaches zero.  If you describe your web-based database as "a
system to allow people to collaboratively leverage the value of
information," it will go in one investor ear and out the other.
They'll just discard that sentence as meaningless boilerplate, and
hope, with increasing impatience, that in the next sentence you'll
actually explain what you've made.
Your primary goal is not to describe everything your system might
one day become, but simply to convince investors you're worth talking
to further.  So approach this like an algorithm that gets the right
answer by successive approximations.  Begin with a description
that's gripping but perhaps overly narrow, then flesh it out to the
extent you can.  It's the same principle as incremental development:
start with a simple prototype, then add features, but at every point
have working code.  In this case, "working code" means a working
description in the investor's head.
4. Don't talk and drive.
Have one person talk while another uses the computer.  If the same
person does both, they'll inevitably mumble downwards at the computer
screen instead of talking clearly at the audience.
As long as you're standing near the audience and looking at them,
politeness (and habit) compel them to pay attention to you.  Once
you stop looking at them to fuss with something on your computer,
their minds drift off to the errands they have to run later.
5. Don't talk about secondary matters at length.
If you only have a few minutes, spend them explaining what your
product does and why it's great.  Second order issues like competitors
or resumes should be single slides you go through quickly at the
end.  If you have impressive resumes, just flash them on the screen
for 15 seconds and say a few words.  For competitors, list the top
3 and explain in one sentence each what they lack
that you have.  And put this kind of thing at the end, after you've
made it clear what you've built.
6. Don't get too deeply into business models.
It's good to talk about how you plan to make money, but mainly
because it shows you care about that and have thought about it.
Don't go into detail about your business model, because (a) that's
not what smart investors care about in a brief presentation, and
(b) any business model you have at this point is probably wrong
anyway.
Recently a VC who came to speak at Y Combinator talked about a
company he just invested in.  He said their business model was wrong
and would probably change three times before they got it right.
The founders were experienced guys who'd done startups before and
who'd just succeeded in getting millions from one of the top VC
firms, and even their business model was crap.  (And yet he invested
anyway, because he expected it to be crap at this stage.)
If you're solving an important problem, you're going to sound a lot
smarter talking about that than the business model.  The business
model is just a bunch of guesses, and guesses about stuff that's
probably not your area of expertise.  So don't spend your precious
few minutes talking about crap when you could be talking about
solid, interesting things you know a lot about: the problem you're
solving and what you've built so far.
As well as being a bad use of time, if your business model seems
spectacularly wrong, that will push the stuff you want investors
to remember out of their heads.  They'll just remember you as the
company with the boneheaded plan for making money, rather than the
company that solved that important problem.
7. Talk slowly and clearly at the audience.
Everyone at Rehearsal Day could see the difference between the people
who'd been out in the world for a while and had presented to groups,
and those who hadn't.
You need to use a completely different voice and manner talking to
a roomful of people than you would in conversation.  Everyday life
gives you no practice in this.  If you can't already do it, the
best solution is to treat it as a consciously artificial trick,
like juggling.
However, that doesn't mean you should talk like some kind of
announcer.  Audiences tune that out.  What you need to do is talk
in this artificial way, and yet make it seem conversational.  (Writing
is the same.  Good writing is an elaborate effort to seem spontaneous.)
If you want to write out your whole presentation beforehand and
memorize it, that's ok.  That has worked for some groups in the
past.  But make sure to write something that sounds like spontaneous,
informal speech, and deliver it that way too.
Err on the side of speaking slowly.  At Rehearsal Day, one of the founders
mentioned a rule actors use: if you feel you're speaking too slowly,
you're speaking at about the right speed.
8. Have one person talk.
Startups often want to show that all the founders are equal partners.
This is a good instinct; investors dislike unbalanced teams.  But
trying to show it by partitioning the presentation is going too
far.  It's distracting.  You can demonstrate your respect
for one another in more subtle ways.  For example, when one of the
groups presented at Demo Day, the more extroverted of the two
founders did most of the talking, but he described his co-founder
as the best hacker he'd ever met, and you could tell he meant it.
Pick the one or at most two best speakers, and have them do most
of the talking.
Exception: If one of the founders is an expert in some specific
technical field, it can be good for them to talk about that for a
minute or so.  This kind of "expert witness" can add credibility,
even if the audience doesn't understand all the details.  If Jobs
and Wozniak had 10 minutes to present the Apple II, it might be a good plan
to have Jobs speak for 9 minutes and have Woz speak for a minute
in the middle about some of the technical feats he'd pulled off in
the design.  (Though of course if it were actually those two, Jobs
would speak for the entire 10 minutes.)
9. Seem confident.
Between the brief time available and their lack of technical
background, many in the audience will have a hard time evaluating
what you're doing.  Probably the single biggest piece of evidence,
initially, will be your own confidence in it.   You have
to show you're impressed with what you've made.
And I mean show, not tell.  Never say "we're passionate" or "our
product is great."  People just ignore that—or worse, write you
off as bullshitters.  Such messages must be implicit.
What you must not do is seem nervous and apologetic.  If you've
truly made something good, you're doing investors a
favor
by
telling them about it.  If you don't genuinely believe that, perhaps
you ought to change what your company is doing.  If you don't believe
your startup has such promise that you'd be doing them a favor by
letting them invest, why are you investing your time in it?
10. Don't try to seem more than you are.
Don't worry if your company is just a few months old and doesn't
have an office yet, or your founders are technical people with no
business experience.  Google was like that once, and they turned out
ok.  Smart investors can see past such superficial flaws.  They're
not looking for finished, smooth presentations.  They're looking
for raw talent.  All you need to convince them of is that you're
smart and that you're onto something good.  If you try too hard to
conceal your rawness—by trying to seem corporate, or pretending
to know about stuff you don't—you may just conceal your talent.
You can afford to be candid about what you haven't figured out yet.
Don't go out of your way to bring it up (e.g. by having a slide
about what might go wrong), but don't try to pretend either that
you're further along than you are.  If you're a hacker and you're
presenting to experienced investors, they're probably better at
detecting bullshit than you are at producing it.
11. Don't put too many words on slides.
When there are a lot of words on a slide, people just skip reading
it.  So look at your slides and ask of each word "could I cross
this out?"  This includes gratuitous clip art.  Try to get your
slides under 20 words if you can.
Don't read your slides.  They should be something in the background
as you face the audience and talk to them, not something you face
and read to an audience sitting behind you.
Cluttered sites don't do well in demos, especially when they're
projected onto a screen.  At the very least, crank up the font size
big enough to make all the text legible.  But cluttered sites are
bad anyway, so perhaps you should use this opportunity to make your
design simpler.
12. Specific numbers are good.
If you have any kind of data, however preliminary, tell the audience.
Numbers stick in people's heads.  If you can claim that the median
visitor generates 12 page views, that's great.
But don't give them more than four or five numbers, and only give
them numbers specific to you.  You don't need to tell them the size
of the market you're in.  Who cares, really, if it's 500 million
or 5 billion a year?  Talking about that is like an actor at the
beginning of his career telling his parents how much Tom Hanks
makes.  Yeah, sure, but first you have to become Tom Hanks.  The
important part is not whether he makes ten million a year or a
hundred, but how you get there.
13. Tell stories about users.
The biggest fear of investors looking at early stage startups is
that you've built something based on your own a priori theories of
what the world needs, but that no one will actually want.  So it's
good if you can talk about problems specific users have and how you
solve them.
Greg Mcadoo said one thing Sequoia looks for is the "proxy for
demand."  What are people doing now, using inadequate tools, that
shows they need what you're making?
Another sign of user need is when people pay a lot for something.
It's easy to convince investors there will be demand for
a cheaper alternative to something popular, if you preserve
the qualities that made it popular.
The best stories about user needs are about your own.  A remarkable
number of famous startups grew out of some need the founders had:
Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google.  Experienced investors know that,
so stories of this type will get their attention.  The next best
thing is to talk about the needs of people you know personally,
like your friends or siblings.
14. Make a soundbite stick in their heads.
Professional investors hear a lot of pitches.  After a while they
all blur together.  The first cut is simply to be one of those
they remember.  And the way to ensure that is to create a descriptive
phrase about yourself that sticks in their heads.
In Hollywood, these phrases seem to be of the form "x meets y."
In the startup world, they're usually "the x of y" or "the x y."
Viaweb's was "the Microsoft Word of ecommerce."
Find one and launch it clearly (but apparently casually) in your
talk, preferably near the beginning.
It's a good exercise for you, too, to sit down and try to figure
out how to describe your startup in one compelling phrase.  If you
can't, your plans may not be sufficiently focused.
How to Fund a Startup
Hackers' Guide to Investors
Spanish Translation
Japanese Translation
Russian Translation
Image: Casey Muller: Trevor Blackwell at Rehearsal Day, summer 2006


Exception: In some cases a sufficiently formidable person can stamp their personality on a company even if they're not one of the founders. E.g. IBM, Tesla.

The extent to which the Great Man Theory explains history varies a lot from case to case. But it definitely explains the histories of startups. Startups succeed because, and in the way that, their founders make them succeed.

@ahistoryinart There's no Wikipedia page about Peter Kelly. Someone should make one.

@pickover "They used and abused her; they treated her bad!"

— Kyle Beaudette, The Garden Witch

@therabbithole You want critical thinking? Here's some. We have no idea why he was fired, and if we claim we do, we're as bad as the bien pensants we despise. It might not have been for anything he said, but simply for posting a conversation with students online.

@howard This is an instance of the general rule that you should be careful about launching any startup at any time, unless you have something special and know what you're doing.

@amitay1599 These are two different sets of numbers, reported killed and body identified. Obviously the latter is going to be smaller when lots of people are buried under rubble. The Post either doesn't get this or is deliberately lying. Probably the latter.

@jonatanpallesen It's irresponsible to claim he was "fired for merely discussing" something. We don't know he was fired for this video, and even if he was, we don't know it was for what he said rather than, say, the fact that he recorded and published conversations with students.

@stylewarning Surely you can intern a string with a ' in it.

Interesting: numerical evidence for the Great Man theory of history.


@BoyanSlat There's nothing significant about multiples of the product of the number of fingers you have and the time it takes the earth to orbit the sun.

@mattyryze People who use that gag always think they're the first to.

@sanjaypartly There is a real YC alum whose last name is Moriarty and who is a professor.

@nikitabier He's trolling us with the chain at this point.

@MarkMuro1 @MuiChristine @politico @BrookingsMetro Why do you need more silicon valleys? I understand how having more silicon valleys helps the cities in question, but how does it help founders?

Here's a case for @communitynotes. There has been a Snopes entry about this urban legend since 2005.

@DylanMAllman The claim that five signers were tortured is not only false, it's not even original. This text has been recycled for decades. There's been a Snopes entry about it since 2005.

https://t.co/aOH7ATvYhf

@eyeslasho I remember when Twitter was full of left-wing trolls quote-tweeting instances of wrongthink to summon mobs to attack it. Now right-wing trolls are doing it. I'd thought perhaps that this tactic was inherent to the left, but it seems to be a problem with Twitter itself.

@lennysan @jesslivingston AI is torturing my thumb.

@luoxiaxia @gmiller When I decided to retire as president I offered her the job first.