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Weird Languages
August 2021
When people say that in their experience all programming languages
are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about
languages but about the kind of programming they've done.
99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library
functions. All popular languages are e... |
@lacker How interesting. Bing at launch was like South America at the moment Europeans showed up with a lot of new germs.
@lacker Wow, I had no idea Bing was ever better than Google search. Why were they more vulnerable to SEO though?
@KarenAttiah When some people proposed blocking traffic to the 1964 World's Fair, M... |
Having Kids
December 2019
Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I
felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living
virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children.
But did I want them now? No.
If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since
I wa... |
@proales I don't automatically defend YC founders though.
Warning, though: if you do succeed in being politically neutral, you won't be perceived as neutral by the partisan. Instead those on both sides will perceive you as being on the other side.
If you don't want to be made stupider by partisanship, how do you avoi... |
@pdhsu The same thing that's happening with design worldwide. The OUP redesign is particularly painful though...
After visiting the OpenAI schwag depot.
Jessica: I was so coveting that YETI cooler.
Me: Did you get one?
Jessica: No, I didn't want to seem greedy.
@rvivek Read enjoyable things.
@dbasch One reason p... |
@DavidSacks Zero of it is related to your politics. I encouraged Sam to keep Peter Thiel as a part-time partner when it seemed like all of Silicon Valley wanted YC to fire him for supporting Trump. It's entirely due to what you did to Parker Conrad.
@anammostarac This can be changed though, for example by creating net... |
Investor Herd Dynamics
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Y Combinator
.
August 2013
The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the
opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for
exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that
makes other investors want to, which ma... |
@TheBroskiUSA @AliceFromQueens The intellectuals who supported Stalin in the 1930s weren't evil, for the most part, just misguided. And Stalin was way worse than Trump.
@FriendlyWoodsmn @MeghanMcCarthy_ @AliceFromQueens Yes, she was another member of that network of appointees.
@MeghanMcCarthy_ @AliceFromQueens The c... |
@max_nazarati A couple days a year. But we're usually visiting YC in August.
@SleepMoneyMaker In this case it was more like an unexpected pause got filled with unimportant work.
@ee_mc3 Me too.
Organizing books by color is like sorting the pixels in an image by color.
@jdzamfi @leanmediaorg They're all original but... |
Donate Unrestricted
March 2021
The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations.
If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have
heard this phrase before. But if you have been, it probably made
you wince.
Restricted donations mean donations where the donor limits what can
be done with th... |
@riemannzeta @eladgil It is very hard. I didn't say people get good at it, just better.
@riemannzeta @eladgil Definitely. In fact most people probably get better at it as they age.
@abarrallen Foundations of what?
@eladgil This is definitely false. What the quality of someone's friends shows you is merely their abil... |
"Commercializing research" is another way to say that one has a solution in search of a problem. That's not to say that such startups are automatically doomed. Sometimes solutions find problems. But when I hear that phrase, it makes me skeptical rather than excited.
@Austen Airlines should start doing this.
@Sams_Ant... |
Raising too much makes you spend too much, which makes it harder to reach profitability. And a high valuation makes it harder for the next round to be an up round, which both investors and founders prefer.
Believe it or not, it's dangerous for a startup to raise too much at too high a valuation. This sounds like a goo... |
@elonmusk @Agent_IsaacX You think? The P-51 seems to have been main reason the Allies achieved air superiority over Germany in 1944.
The P-51 prototype flew 184 days after the contract signing. https://t.co/x81VrlzHiS
This is a great account to follow if you want to track fake news. It not only helps you avoid being ... |
@garrytan That's what YC's business consists of.
We're in Switzerland. I hear a voice in the next room. It sounds familiar. Wait, it's Ron Conway. How can this be? It's because hard-working Jessica is editing a Social Radars episode even while we're on vacation.
@pitdesi You never had nachos with guacamole?
@umarxra... |
How to Do What You Love
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.
January 2006
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly
novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But
it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is
complicated.
The very idea i... |
@Chebky1 Yes, and all kinds of other things too!
@aktieterminalen When they were little, my kids particularly liked groups of teenagers, because they're so conformist that even the youngest kids can see it, and it also gives little kids a rare opportunity to feel superior to older ones.
One of the best ways to protec... |
If your opponents are opportunists, one way to beat them is to outlast them. Opportunists almost by definition lack staying power.
@balajis It's a historical coincidence.
@ScottAdamsSays @BasedMikeLee If he meant that, he should have said that.
@BasedMikeLee So is there no crime that a politician should be imprisone... |
@Al_speedi Whatever the founders make it look like. They're the ones doing the innovation.
@ahistoryinart Did he paint this then?
To my delight someone asked me this morning how long we'd been doing Y Combinator, and I was able to answer "Exactly 20 years."
@mval Quite what?
@surmoulage @ColmCasey To be fair I thin... |
@michael_nielsen I once noticed the opposite in the body language of someone who'd spent decades in prison: he moved his eyes without moving his head.
@elkelk What would they use for collateral?
@StatisticUrban They probably also gained muscle.
The Rublev recipe for looking insane: simultaneously tilt your head down... |
@PP_Rubens El Greco? But I'm saying it based on the drapery. You really need to give us bigger details. No one can get them based on what you give us now.
@primeurl @librxrian There are so many clues, not just in the interview but the application.
@JohnsonThought1 It's easy to portray a statement like this as somethi... |
Writing and Speaking
March 2012
I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have
to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better
speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I
were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas,
and that's a much bigger pa... |
@agaradecki Outstanding arrest warrants.
@garrytan In some domains there are structural ways of remembering who was early. In science there's publication date. In startups there's the price at which you invested.
@Afri_bull My guess is that it's a lobbying-based reservation.
@kind_inkind This is one of the technolog... |
I just stumbled upon a new technique for dealing with trolls: show that an AI can correctly interpret the phrase they're misinterpreting. Now they have two choices: admit they're deliberately misinterpreting it, or admit they're dumber than an AI.
@parientmango @nikitabier In fact an AI did get it: https://t.co/otItTj... |
@mrcornwell Unless you know the users personally, though, it's hard to be sure about either.
@staysaasy Probably bad ideas, unless your friends are so determined to put you down that they pretend not to want things they do actually want.
@CoreyWriting You guys need to get your story straight. Did Israel block aid in ... |
@broodsugar @buffys It's something that takes a while to learn. Novice writers often get it wrong. But with enough practice you get a good sense of which word is right in which situation.
@vpj @buffys You'd think so, wouldn't you? But apparently not.
One of the most interesting things we've learned from funding nonpr... |
@NAChristakis Because they either were themselves the woke extremists, or were afraid of them.
@NAChristakis Here's a more positive way to view it: There were always a lot of people against extreme woke policies, but till now they kept quiet because they were worried they'd lose their jobs if anyone knew. So this isn'... |
@ShaunMooreUK Do you think this is true of every kind of work people do? Is it also impossible for one person to be a better cook or football player or carpenter than another person? Or is it only writing that's impossible to do well?
@soho_ca I bet it's very close.
@nbaschez It doesn't roll off the table to be eaten... |
Revenge of the Nerds
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.
May 2002
"We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a
lot of them about halfway to Lisp."
- Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec
In the software business there is an ongoing
struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and anothe... |
@tlakomy Indeed, when you phrase it that way it's impressive that it works at all.
@spctrexe @NateSilver538 I live in England. And I just used cal.
People who think that DoorDash costs a lot because of "corporate greed" could not have picked a worse example. Making money in food delivery is hard. Most startups that t... |
@TheBabyMets That certainly helped, but it clearly wasn't necessary to clean up for Xi.
@samdaceo Only a few bits of the Bay Area are bad: certain neighborhoods in downtown SF and Oakland. You'll be fine.
If you don't know PB, he was the guy who created GMail, among other things. He's one of the sharpest thinkers in ... |
@footballmood I consciously started Viaweb to get rich.
@tunguz Whether you get a lot per customer or a little, you still need to get paid in proportion to the number of them.
@GrosuCodrut Good, young programmers inherently do, even if they have no money. They can alway get an ordinary job if they try a more risky st... |
@korgaonkar Not exactly the opposite. The Thiel fellowship isn't to start a startup. It's to work on speculative projects of any kind. And that is what I'm claiming is one of the advantages of college over startups: that you can explore anything that interests you.
@Alessandro90947 You can have both, and in fact you'l... |
"In families, love flows downhill."
@BCalStewardess That livery helps. I don't think I've ever seen a better match between plane and livery.
@shashj @OborneTweets Why do you think he did that?
Good sci-fi writers usually insure themselves against technological progress by not being too specific about how things work... |
"College educated youth still favor Biden quite a bit, however due to Gaza we've seen support levels in some surveys drop as much as 20 points."
— a Democratic party insider
@yusufbirader Physical stores are better for discovery.
@thinkplantgrow I walk past them when they're closed.
@mr_james_c @paultoo People hate... |
If your beliefs are correct, you shouldn't have to post fake news. There should be enough real news supporting them.
So if you post fake news, it means there's insufficient evidence supporting your beliefs.
@sampullara @WallStreetSilv I'd have to see the videos of what he actually did. Apparently you don't need to.
... |
Politicians and activists who try to prevent the use of self-driving cars are trying to increase the number people hurt in car crashes by 12x. https://t.co/asNQIwK96B
@rauchg @GoogleAI You mean in the good sense?
@urivalev @omarsuleiman What's weird about it is that there are dead children in the ruins.
@JasonFebery... |
@garrytan George Soros gets blamed for all these donations, but hasn't it been actually his son for years?
@GarettJones Too much trademark in the logo.
@Xhris57 I don't think that word means what you think it means.
@reidhoffman I do something similar with prewritten answers that are cached on paper.
@danpatcronin ... |
@AntWilson That's impressive even with a normal aspect ratio. https://t.co/mrfAOCnJbj
@chribjel @DudespostingWs You will when you have children.
There's no reason we can't fix this regulation right now. We don't have to wait for the planes.
@JeremyTate41 If that was what "pro-life" actually meant, no one would disag... |
@michael_nielsen Apparently they're hard to catch. I know this seems implausible.
@ahistoryinart One thing I've learned from these pictures is how much 19th century Danes liked symmetry inside their houses.
As I was sitting down with the second cup of tea:
@Rainmaker1973 (In case anyone is wondering, lligators are a... |
@PeterSweden7 "Evans, of Poplar Court, Newcastle, pleaded guilty to violent disorder and assaulting an emergency worker."
Founder Mode: https://t.co/3hOnlKOJBi
Robert Reich wrote in The Guardian that "regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X." Th... |
@growing_daniel It's not because they're woke. It's simply the power of a sitting president. The same thing would be happening if we had a senile Republican president who refused to drop out of the race.
@sarmadgulzar No. I was held back by the fact that no one in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA rode. No one that I knew... |
Why Startup Hubs Work
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2011
If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number
of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude.
Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide.
I wondered about this for years. I... |
The List of N Things
September 2009
I bet you the current issue of
Cosmopolitan
has an article
whose title begins with a number. "7 Things He Won't Tell You about
Sex," or something like that. Some popular magazines
feature articles of this type on the cover of every
issue. That can't be happening by accident. Edito... |
6,631,372
March 2006, rev August 2009
A couple days ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a
patent
.
It issued in 2003, but no one told me. I wouldn't know about it
now except that a few months ago, while visiting Yahoo, I happened
to run into a Big Cheese I knew from working there in the late
nineties. He... |
I support jail terms for protestors who deface famous art to get attention. They're cheating. They're taking advantage of a feature of high-trust societies — art displayed publicly in museums — and violating that trust.
12 yo about to have a character-building experience. https://t.co/Xz1NhT1vj5
@ahistoryinart Remind... |
I told 15 yo that I also started lifting weights at around that age, but that in my case one of my motivations was to be able to defend myself.
(For context here's a photo from my high school yearbook. The guy in front later played defensive end for the Raiders.) https://t.co/VgZFHkvAe5
Time for some Streisand Effec... |
@Spotlight_Abby It sounds like there is some confusion about how AI is involved here. When you talk about "the use of AI to moderate the experiences" of people, are you talking about people's writing being judged by AI or something like that?
@pashadelics YC doesn't get any financial gain. The money it gives to the no... |
@josephjojoe Don't hire stupid people or create bureaucracy. It really is as simple as that.
@ClaudiuDP Yes, I know.
@Austen @patrickc @DanielleFong "School closures explained only 11 percent of the variation."
It's good for any organization to be on the way up rather than the way down, of course, but it's especiall... |
The High-Res Society
December 2008
For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate
to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations.
Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the
largest organizations were the most successful ones.
Things have already changed so m... |
Great Hackers
Want to start a startup?
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Y Combinator
.
July 2004
(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.)
A few months ago I finished a new
book
,
and in reviews I keep
noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say
nothing of "idiotic.''
I didn't mean to make the book controver... |
Inequality and Risk
August 2005
(This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.)
Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality. There are
two ways to do it: give money to the poor, or take it away from the
rich. But they amount to the same thing, because if you want to
give money to the poor, you have to g... |
@Austen That's super easy.
"It's lovely to be useful."
— Jony Ive
@markhumphrys @UEFA What makes you think they're talking about Israel, Mark?
@NathanJRobinson If it makes you feel any better, he doesn't actually believe it.
@joshxhowie You keep pressing that button, and each time you press it, it has less effect.... |
A bold move. I wonder if it will work to own two pieces of the pipeline that are so far apart.
@pitdesi And in particular, that there are a huge number of fake accounts on Twitter.
@acnewsitics Can't have one without the other.
@gdb Which graphs?
I came across something GPT5 is reliably bad at: monograms. It can't ... |
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
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Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
March 2012
One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working
on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup
ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate
this phenomenon by describing some. Any on... |
@synopsi I wrote about this here: https://t.co/Icj6P7OYx2
@tjdada Over 90% of the code being written by the latest batch of startups is written by AI. Sold now?
The lesson of the 2020s, like the 1930s, is how much damage bad leaders can do.
For sure there will be new uses of AI as well, perhaps more important than t... |
Hiring is Obsolete
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
May 2005
(This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.)
The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and
Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty
well established now that grad students can start su... |
If you rarely use other verbs, it will be all the more effective when you do use "whined" or "spluttered." But you should only use different verbs when they mean something different. E.g. you should probably never use "queried", which is merely a synonym for "asked".
Something I taught 11 yo: using "said" in dialogue ... |
@Austen 10 years ago: my younger son discovers foil-wrapped pats of butter. https://t.co/Wxvm4PGCak
@michael_nielsen Science and religion are arguably in the same business, as sources of knowledge, so there is more reconciling to do.
@drewmurrdotcom @micsolana 1°C is roughly how much human carbon emissions have warme... |
@hyetigran @paultoo Or maybe "National"?
@paultoo Also: Watch out for countries with red flags.
@weshanon Here you go: https://t.co/owrYC46NAb
@stevenpeniche @ycombinator Definitely, in first drafts. I just don't like to publish it.
@pievalentin Zero. Reddit got sold to Conde Nast and then spun out again, so this i... |
A Project of One's Own
June 2021
A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son
told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he
was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard him
say — not just because he was excited about his story, but because
he'd discovered this w... |
@ThatChrisRyan What incentive would they have to keep working once they reached that point, if they knew the government was going to take everything from then on? And Bezos hit that mark in 1998.
The existence of this vast literature is ordinarily hidden. Those who create it do not, for the most part, want to draw att... |
@vroe5868 How can you joke about the deaths of three children?
@TheKingOfArnhem How did these children ask to be killed?
@ORohm13240 You love it that three children were killed?
@Jackmac2439 Yes, that's who killed them.
@solnarium Children.
@farhadnoorzay Or joke about it. That's the most shocking thing you see in... |
Now that we have a terrier I really understand the whole "dog ate my homework" thing. I used to think it was funny because it was implausible. I wish. https://t.co/2NXj2S5t76
@elonmusk Surely you of all people know that the head of the FAA is Michael Whitaker, who was unanimously confirmed by the senate in October 20... |
@BillyM2k The way I'd put it is zealots vs louts.
@halalflow Is this accurate? It seems too dramatic to be real, and I notice the sources are different for the two elections.
@kirtipatelmd I liked this because it's a brave thing to say on today's Twitter, but it's strange to read at the same time as I'm being called ... |
Novelty and Heresy
November 2019
If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be
accused of some form of heresy.
To discover new things, you have
to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious; if an idea is
obviously good, other people are probably already working on it.
One common way for a good... |
@robinhanson Someone being "rented" can opt out whenever they want.
@davgomdg @dapppunk Which universities do this and how do they do it? Can you refer me to a source?
People trying to suppress speech are almost always the bad guys. So if you defend freedom of speech you're defending more than that; you're usually al... |
@TimCodesStuff The Palestinians will be better off with Kamala than they would have been with Trump.
@sentientist @StickerYou Do your design as two iron-ons that break the words in the middle. Each half will read to their filter as gibberish.
"The largest cohort of child amputees in modern history." https://t.co/SDQm... |
How to Do Philosophy
September 2007
In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college.
I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the
less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job
training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively
impractica... |
Usually when I do office hours with a startup, there's at least something unresolved at the end. But yesterday with one startup we not only figured out everything they should do, but even found a new domain name. For the last couple minutes we just chatted. That was a first.
@thepriyadarshy I come back and do office h... |
Hypothesis: The whole Greenland thing only started because it looks yuge in a Mercator projection.
A bold experiment by the ~26 year old John Singer Sargent. There's no eyeball in that socket, just shadow. I can imagine e.g. Tintoretto doing this to someone in a crowd scene, but it's a daring thing to do in a portrait... |
News from the Front
September 2007
A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised
me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.
For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good
college was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up.
What was I? A student.... |
@SantiagoPombo Nope. No one has said that. This is the closest I've come to it: https://t.co/hcALxJX1FP
@mmay3r That's one of the biggest attractions of an ideology, the certainty it offers.
@robneal28 @anononchain You were the first to say it, as far as Google can tell, so it would be incorrect not to attribute it t... |
@Noahpinion To be fair, if you're old enough to have grown up when it was run by southern Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, it might be.
@mattyglesias The number for hunter-gatherers is presumably an underestimate, because it ignores infanticide, which was widespread among them.
In school they taught us that one of the ... |
@19651029ab Do you honestly believe that Israel could kill every child in Gaza, and it would still be Hamas's fault?
@arydotexe Usually I keep working on the one I'm in the middle of, but "How To Do Great Work" began as a paragraph in "Superlinear Returns," and since it seemed a much more important topic, I interrupt... |
@SALBcreates What would the startup do?
@eyeslasho You're into statistics. What does n=2 mean to you?
Combine this kind of risk tolerance with high intelligence and you have a startup founder.
@benboehme This is a good way to learn what YC was like early on:
https://t.co/0AX9HnGIDJ
@HarounHickman Sure. The startup... |
How to Fund a Startup
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
November 2005
Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through
several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just
enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next
gear.
Few startups get it quite... |
There seems a bit of a contradiction between the first and last sentences here. If a screwup of this magnitude is not enough to make her resign, what would it take? https://t.co/E99SyQjos9
@synopsi There are some mistakes even second time founders continue to make though, like taking too long to fire people.
@GGCadou... |
As a result Oxford and Cambridge have sunk to fourth place in the latest Times Good Universities Guide. I'm skeptical about this drop, but there's one thing I have definitely noticed. Middle class students, knowing they'll be discriminated against, are now applying to US schools.
A few years ago Oxford and Cambridge s... |
@robinhanson Depends who paid for the ad.
@rohitdotmittal That point was around 2012.
@PalmerLuckey @ZDNET IANAL but deliberately refusing to update an article that they know contains lies seems to me libel in the spirit of US law. If a judge agrees it could be a valuable precedent.
@PalmerLuckey @ZDNET It seems lik... |
@TheBestOfAdam If there are two ways of interpreting something you write, people will assume you meant the one that's less true.
Twitter in 1692: https://t.co/TXkwJNg2UT
@markdono @bobbyb58758961 These children were killed in their home, not in a school, hospital or mosque. So tell me again, who was hiding behind the... |
@stuartbuck1 No, they're supposed to use quotation marks.
@timurkuran @stucchio Perhaps also a bullshit field in which the quality of one's work is impossible to measure?
@matthewgburgess I despise communism, but it's possible that the reason it caused so many deaths was simply that it was the flavor of the month for... |
@yongqianme Depends how far you make it through the application process.
@Mayanktweeted Nothing is too early. It's not too early if you thought of the idea as you were filling out the application.
@warrenbuffing Of course. Lots of people still had their old jobs when they were accepted.
@MovesInShadows Startups are ... |
@jneeley78 Just the final product, so it's a lot more keystrokes.
Since 12 yo started dictating his current series of books in 2021, I've typed 330,882 characters.
@archi_tradition No they didn't. The Dark Ages were roughly 500 to 1000 AD. This was built in the 1240s.
@CburgesCliff It will be if we start calling it ... |
@JoshSchoen @cynthiazhang17 @ycombinator You're right. I'm going to delete my reply.
@whyvert @ModeledBehavior @lymanstoneky According to ChatGPT they did: https://t.co/FafoxMfD7v
@jdmccafferty Their habits are so clearly differentiated that they look like two football teams meeting for the coin toss before a match.
... |
An NFT That Saves Lives
May 2021
Noora Health
, a nonprofit I've
supported for years, just launched
a new NFT. It has a dramatic name,
Save Thousands of Lives
,
because that's what the proceeds will do.
Noora has been saving lives for 7 years. They run programs in
hospitals in South Asia to teach new mothers how to ta... |
@emre3 Many already seem to. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 36% of Americans support Israel's actions in Gaza, and only 18% of Democrats do.
@surjir__ The quote literally speaks of bombing "a family's home."
Remember when we were told children were being killed in Gaza because Hamas was using them as human s... |
The fact that YC partners will give startups new ideas for free doesn't mean startup ideas are worthless. The things that YC gives the startups are valuable. But it does imply they're not worth tens of millions or anything like that.
I've done this several times, and the only reason I don't do it more is that I'd rath... |
@V_arrell Where we live you get those whether you like it or not.
@deepaksgt Maybe 30 or 40?
@TahaRDar @boomsupersonic A MiG-15 and some contemporary French equivalent.
@7ghj566 It's one of the desks we used at Viaweb. They were kitchen tables I bought in Cambridge, MA, in the 1990s.
@XChinaSorrows You're hoping I'... |
Write Like You Talk
October 2015
Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you
write: write in spoken language.
Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write
in a different language than they'd use if they were talking to a
friend. The sentence structure and even the words are di... |
@a_apanasik I mean fundraising after Demo Day.
@TheBestOfAdam I can actually estimate that based on graphs I've seen of past cohorts. I'd guess it happens about 5x faster than it used to. And that's for YC startups, who've always had a much easier time fundraising.
@yacineMTB Ok, I'll ask him.
Yuri's right. Fundrais... |
In the process of giving advice to a startup whose domain I know very little about, I came up with a useful form of qualification: only listen to this advice if you can imagine scenarios where this email comes back to haunt you.
Or in Lisp terms, evaluate this expression containing free variables in your lexical envir... |
What to Do
March 2025
What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not
meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask
before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it
myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I
did, I thought I should at least tr... |
When startups are doing well it's common for them either not to disclose their numbers, or under-report them. Half the time when I get an email with great numbers, it's followed by "but don't tell anyone."
@tarabmatrix @eulerfx Ideally very late, but if they discover problems it may not be as late as I'd hoped.
@talh... |
@ArmandDoma I don't know if "darling" was ever quite the word.
Focusing on users will get you investors, but focusing on investors won't get you users.
@tomlbutler At this stage it won't be a down round. It will be no round.
If you design your startup to appeal to investors instead of users, you may well succeed in ... |
It is even more difficult to get a man to understand something when his identity depends on his not understanding it.
@wispem_wantex They would do unbelievably badly.
@WytPilledCurze Every country is a GDP factory in the sense that GDP per capita is the best predictor of other measures of well-being. So frankly you'r... |
Made in USA
November 2004
(This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of
Hackers
& Painters
.
It tries to explain why Americans make some things well
and others badly.)
A few years ago an Italian friend of mine travelled by train from
Boston to Providence. She had only been in America for a
couple weeks and hadn't... |
@steeve @SpencerHakimian Maybe. I don't think they expected him to tank the economy with tariffs.
@todo_trev Weird how that works.
@steeve @SpencerHakimian The Biden administration attacked crypto.
@Jmizzle212 They mean after that.
@pauljendrasiak Things are always pretty high tech.
16 yo asked me when SUVs became... |
Mind the Gap
May 2004
When people care enough about something to do it well, those who
do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a
huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like
Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the
average writer of detective novels. A t... |
@TheStalwart There are certainly ups and downs in early stage startup valuations, but they're driven mostly by variations in how excited investors are about startups. E.g. valuations are high now because investors are (justifiably in my opinion) excited about AI.
@TheStalwart In practice the effects on early stage val... |
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