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| February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned so m... |
seem just as broken as those that don't. Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to... |
amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it. Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it. Hacker News has two kin... |
being stupid. The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length wou... |
be. For me, as for many users, it's a kind of virtual town square. When I want to take a break from working, I walk into the square, just as I might into Harvard Square or University Ave in the physical world. But an online square is more dangerous than a physical one. If I spent half the day loitering on University Av... |
| May 2008 Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. There may also be a benefit to us. We were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us. So by studying the ways adults lie to kids, we may be able to cle... |
course; when parents do that sort of thing it becomes national news. But you see the same problem on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia. The main purpose of suburbia is to provide a protected environment for children to grow up in. And it seems great for 10 year olds. I liked living in suburbia w... |
what they'd see, and more about what they'd do. I went to college with a lot of kids who grew up in Manhattan, and as a rule they seemed pretty jaded. They seemed to have lost their virginity at an average of about 14 and by college had tried more drugs than I'd even heard of. The reasons parents don't want their teena... |
the most obvious differences is the words kids are allowed to use. Most parents use words when talking to other adults that they wouldn't want their kids using. They try to hide even the existence of these words for as long as they can. And this is another of those conspiracies everyone participates in: everyone knows ... |
because small children are particularly horrified by it. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. One of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of our first cat. Over the years, as we asked for more details, they were compelled to invent more, so the story grew quite elaborat... |
if their parents had chosen the other way, they'd have grown up considering themselves as Ys. One reason this works so well is the second kind of lie involved. The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yoursel... |
fall hopelessly short. They walk around feeling horribly evil for having used a swearword, while in fact most of the adults around them are doing much worse things. This happens in intellectual as well as moral questions. The more confident people are, the more willing they seem to be to answer a question "I don't know... |
we were taught was pretty much pure propaganda. For example, we were taught to regard political leaders as saints—especially the recently martyred Kennedy and King. It was astonishing to learn later that they'd both been serial womanizers, and that Kennedy was a speed freak to boot. (By the time King's plagiarism emerg... |
weren't. But we all arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies. There's never a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. They've forgotten most of them. So if you're going to clear these lies out of your head, you're going to have to do it yourself. Few do. Most people go through lif... |
| November 2008 One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A startup walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over all the time. A big company is more deliberate. The gradual accumulation of check... |
will sell to you are companies that specialize in selling to you. Then you've sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency. Market mechanisms no longer protect you, because the good suppliers are no longer in the market. Such things happen constantly to the biggest organizations of all, governments. But checks instituted ... |
was two weeks. This didn't merely make them less productive. It made them hate working for the acquirer. Here's a sign of how much programmers like to be able to work hard: these guys would have _paid_ to be able to release code immediately, the way they used to. I asked them if they'd trade 10% of the acquisition pric... |
| December 2010 I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general term seems to be "mobile devices," but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't really capture what's distinctive about the i... |
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. --- * * * --- |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call _schlep blindness_. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a t... |
regulations to comply with. It's a lot more intimidating to start a startup like this than a recipe site. That scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In addition to their intrinsic value, they're like undervalued stocks in the sense that there's less demand for them among founders. If you pick an ambitious id... |
| November 2015 A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been a "one-man show." It's sadly common to read that sort of thing. But the problem with that description is not just that it's unfair. It's also misleading. Much of what's most novel about YC is due to Jessica Livingston. If you ... |
critical in making YC what it is. The earlier you pick startups, the more you're picking the founders. Later stage investors get to try products and look at growth numbers. At the stage where YC invests, there is often neither a product nor any numbers. Others thought YC had some special insight about the future of tec... |
is watching you. Another reason attention worries her is that she hates bragging. In anything she does that's publicly visible, her biggest fear (after the obvious fear that it will be bad) is that it will seem ostentatious. She says being too modest is a common problem for women. But in her case it goes beyond that. S... |
startup will do. And startups are in turn the most important source of growth in mature economies. The person who knows the most about the most important factor in the growth of mature economies — that is who Jessica Livingston is. Doesn't that sound like someone who should be better known? ** |
| January 2017 People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked. Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have the charisma to disarm. That was Hillary Clinton's problem. It also tends to be a problem for any CEO who is more of a builder than a schmoozer. And yet the builder-type ... |
| September 2017 The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve. That territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable. Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: eithe... |
| January 2016 One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest. An... |
into the army from behind a mule team in West Virginia didn't simply go back to the farm afterward. Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot like the army. If total war was the big political story of the 20th century, the big economic story was the rise of a new kind of company. And this too tend... |
seeing gruesome images that had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can't show these to families while they're having dinner. I know how pervasive the common culture was, because I tried to opt out of it, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives. When I was 13 I realized, more from internal evidenc... |
to milk economies of scale. Just as startups rightly pay AWS a premium over the cost of running their own servers so they can focus on growth, many of the big national corporations were willing to pay a premium for labor. As well as pushing incomes up from the bottom, by overpaying unions, the big companies of the 20th... |
then join some other prestigious institution and work one's way up the hierarchy. Your prestige was the prestige of the institution you belonged to. People did start their own businesses of course, but educated people rarely did, because in those days there was practically zero concept of starting what we now call a _s... |
whole new categories of products appeared. And last but not least, the federal government, which had previously smiled upon J. P. Morgan's world as the natural state of things, began to realize it wasn't the last word after all. What J. P. Morgan was to the horizontal axis, Henry Ford was to the vertical. He wanted to ... |
inexpensive PC clones. Microsoft now owned the PC standard, and the customer. And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. Basically, Apple bumped IBM and then Microsoft stole its wallet. That sort of thing did not happen to big companies in mid-century. But it was going to happen increasingly ofte... |
I wouldn't discount the possibility. It may be that the refragmentation was driven by computers in the way the industrial revolution was driven by steam engines. Whether or not computers were a precondition, they have certainly accelerated it. The new fluidity of companies changed people's relationships with their empl... |
of big companies make more now than they used to, and I think much of the reason is prestige. In 1960, corporate CEOs had immense prestige. They were the winners of the only economic game in town. But if they made as little now as they did then, in real dollar terms, they'd seem like small fry compared to professional ... |
war was due mostly to external forces, and the Duplo economy was an evolutionary phase. If you want cohesion now, you'd have to induce it deliberately. And it's not obvious how. I suspect the best we'll be able to do is address the symptoms of fragmentation. But that may be enough. The form of fragmentation people worr... |
| January 2012 A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site. I thought it might be interesting to look at one day. The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are. Screens were a lot smaller in 1998. If I remember correctly, our frontpage used to just f... |
for big stores, so it was a little alarming to have users who got lots of traffic. I once calculated how much Frederick's was costing us in bandwidth, and it was about $300/month. Since we hosted all the stores, which together were getting just over 10 million page views per month in June 1998, we consumed what at the ... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- October 2010 _(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.)_ **1\. Determination** This has turned out to be the most important... |
to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant tho... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a st... |
trying to buy into lousy startups, investors in 2009 will presumably be reluctant to invest even in good ones. You'll have to adapt to this. But that's nothing new: startups always have to adapt to the whims of investors. Ask any founder in any economy if they'd describe investors as fickle, and watch the face they mak... |
given technology, the time to act is always now. --- Russian Translation | | Chinese Translation Japanese Translation * * * --- |
| April 2008 _(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)_ About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. Another thing we tell founder... |
probably be quite rich now. There was a window of about two years when spam was increasing rapidly but all the big email services had terrible filters. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it. Notice the pattern here? From either direction we get to the same spot. If you st... |
you can stay big by being mean. You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So "Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I'm sure they find it constraining, but think how val... |
so they were going to keep working on it no matter what, even if they had to move back to Canada and live in their parents' basements. Once they realized this, they stopped caring so much what investors thought about them. They still met with them, but they weren't going to die if they didn't get their money. And you k... |
it acts as a compass. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide? Here's the answer: Do whatever's best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if ... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- Watch how this essay was written. --- February 2009 One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a rep... |
out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see. In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn't scale, because it's a way of learning about your users. **7\. You make what you measure.** I learned this one from Joe Kraus. Merely measuring somethi... |
depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don't, but because it makes them less likely to. Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one. Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth yo... |
| July 2008 At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way. Instead of hoping to get rich by building a valuable company and then selling stock in a "liquidity event," founders should start companies that make money ... |
let's suppose there were management companies that could do it for you. They'd charge a lot, but wouldn't it be worth it? I'd sacrifice a large percentage of the income for the extra peace of mind. I realize what I'm describing already sounds too good to be true, but I can think of a way to make it even more attractive... |
when it happens. You can't assume investors will carry you for as long as you might have to wait. Your company has to make money. Opinions are divided about how early to focus on that. Joe Kraus says you should try charging customers right away. And yet some of the most successful startups, including Google, ignored re... |
| April 2008 There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes. I'm not claiming this is a list of the _n_ most admirable people. Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to? Einstein isn't on the list, for example, even though he probably des... |
stand out, though, is the quality of his ideas. His style is deceptively casual, but there is more in his books than in a library of art monographs. Reading _The Nude_ is like a ride in a Ferrari. Just as you're getting settled, you're slammed back in your seat by the acceleration. Before you can adjust, you're thrown ... |
beautiful. And yet they can hold their own with any work of art ever made. No one else, before or since, was that good when no one was looking. **Robert Morris** Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's surprisingly easy. Don't ... |
Modernism was its freshness. Art became stuffy in the nineteenth century. The paintings that were popular at the time were mostly the art equivalent of McMansions—big, pretentious, and fake. Modernism meant starting over, making things with the same earnest motives that children might. The artists who benefited most fr... |
done many things in their lives, there was one factor above all that connected them: the Spitfire. This is supposed to be a list of heroes. How can a machine be on it? Because that machine was not just a machine. It was a lens of heroes. Extraordinary devotion went into it, and extraordinary courage came out. It's a cl... |
| August 2011 I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government. I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technological progress. When I was a kid I thought they helped. I thought they protected inventors from having their ideas stolen by big ... |
problem of patent trolls. Patent trolls are just parasites. A clumsy parasite may occasionally kill the host, but that's not its goal. Whereas companies that sue startups for patent infringement generally do it with explicit goal of keeping their product off the market. Companies that use patents on startups are attack... |
| | **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 fr... |
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 wheth... |
| 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 idea to be non-... |
| January 2016 Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long? Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped won... |
or a small company, you can do this at the level of individual customers. If you fire or avoid toxic customers, you can decrease the amount of bullshit in your life by more than you decrease your income. But while some amount of bullshit is inevitably forced on you, the bullshit that sneaks into your life by tricking y... |
happen. You take things for granted, and then they're gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her. ... |
| April 2012 A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. Her list seems plausible. I could see myself — _can_ see myself — making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes. If you had to compress them into a single piece of advice, it might be: don't be a cog. The 5 regrets paint a... |
| 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 part of being a good writ... |
rehearse it in my head. But I always end up spending most of the time rewriting it instead. Every talk I give ends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed out and rewritten. Which of course makes me um even more, because I haven't had any time to practice the new bits. Depending on your audience, there ... |
| January 2016 Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Nearly everyone who writes about the topic says that economic inequality should be decreased. I'm interested in this question because I was one of the founders of a company cal... |
makes a dollar only when someone on the other end of a trade loses a dollar. If the rich people in a society got that way by taking wealth from the poor, then you have the degenerate case of economic inequality, where the cause of poverty is the same as the cause of wealth. But instances of inequality don't have to be ... |
that it can expand to accommodate a lot of people. ___ I'm all for shutting down the crooked ways to get rich. But that won't eliminate great variations in wealth, because as long as you leave open the option of getting rich by creating wealth, people who want to get rich will do that instead. Most people who get rich ... |
we've seen since then has been due to bad behavior of various kinds, there has simultaneously been a huge increase in individuals' ability to create wealth. Startups are almost entirely a product of this period. And even within the startup world, there has been a qualitative change in the last 10 years. Technology has ... |
merely being sloppy by speaking of decreasing economic inequality when what they mean is decreasing poverty. But this is a situation where it would be good to be precise about what we want. Poverty and economic inequality are not identical. When the city is turning off your _water_ because you can't pay the bill, it do... |
| November 2019 Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic. To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group of people, and I'm going to choose bus ticke... |
the way great discoveries are made, that's not what happens. Darwin didn't pay closer attention to individual species than other people because he saw that this would lead to great discoveries, and they didn't. He was just really, really interested in such things. Darwin couldn't turn it off. Neither could Ramanujan. T... |
to have been complete wastes of time. He ended up net ahead. His bet on what we now call physics paid off so well that it more than compensated for the other two. But were the other two necessary, in the sense that he had to take big risks to make such big discoveries? I don't know. Here's an even more alarming idea: m... |
your teeth and diligently pursuing what all your peers agree is the most promising line of research, maybe you should try doing something just for fun. And if you're stuck, that may be the vector along which to break out. I've always liked _Hamming's_ famous double-barrelled question: what are the most important proble... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- October 2010 After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of th... |
a typical super-angel investment is currently about $100k. They make investment decisions quickly, like angels. And they make a lot more investments per partner than VCs—up to 10 times as many. The fact that super-angels invest other people's money makes them doubly alarming to VCs. They don't just compete for startups... |
the outcome, the conflict between VCs and super-angels is good news for founders. And not just for the obvious reason that more competition for deals means better terms. The whole shape of deals is changing. One of the biggest differences between angels and VCs is the amount of your company they want. VCs want a lot. I... |
A, as long as things are going well. But that's not the same as just being able to do what you want, like you could before. A third and quite significant advantage of angel rounds is that they're less stressful to raise. Raising a traditional series A round has in the past taken weeks, if not months. When a VC firm can... |
Day because their valuations were too high. This was not a problem for the startups; by definition a high valuation means enough investors were willing to accept it. But it was mysterious to me that the super-angels would quibble about valuations. Did they not understand that the big returns come from a few big success... |
undermine the VCs by acting faster, and the VCs will try to undermine the super-angels by driving up valuations. Which for founders will result in the perfect combination: funding rounds that close fast, with high valuations. But remember that to get that combination, your startup will have to appeal to both super-ange... |
| | **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 could see t... |
optimal state of affairs. As long as you're at a point in your life when you can bear the risk of failure, the best way to find out if you're suited to running a startup is to try it. **Chance** The second component of the antidote is chance meetings with people who can help you. This force works in both phases: both i... |
drives it is the people. Many observers have noticed that one of the most distinctive things about startup hubs is the degree to which people help one another out, with no expectation of getting anything in return. I'm not sure why this is so. Perhaps it's because startups are less of a zero sum game than most types of... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- April 2008 Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world. > Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have > seemed like lucrative interest ... |
means the average good bet is a riskier one, but most existing VC firms still operate as if they were investing in hardware startups in 1985. Howard Aiken said "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." I have a similar feeling when I'm try... |
sums to work. But the startup world is evolving away from their current model. Startups have gotten cheaper. That means they want less money, but also that there are more of them. So you can still get large returns on large amounts of money; you just have to spread it more broadly. I've tried to explain this to VC firm... |
| | **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator. --- August 2008 Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they didn't do that. But the second biggest cause of death is probably the difficulty of rais... |
Combinator is working to fix this. We're trying to increase the number of investors just as we're increasing the number of startups. We hope that as the number of both increases we'll get something more like an efficient market. As t approaches infinity, Demo Day approaches an auction. Unfortunately, t is still very fa... |
choose your pain: either the short, sharp pain of raising money, or the chronic ache of consulting. For a given total amount of pain, raising money is the better choice, because new technology is usually more valuable now than later. But although for most startups raising money will be the lesser evil, it's still a pre... |
the company going. This works better when a startup has 3 founders than 2, and better when the leader of the company is not also the lead developer. In the best case, the company keeps moving forward at about half speed. That's the best case, though. More often than not the company comes to a standstill while raising m... |
to raise?" VCs don't expect you to answer the first question. They ask it just in case. They do seem to expect an answer to the second. But I don't think you should just tell them a number. Not as a way to play games with them, but because you shouldn't _have_ a fixed amount you need to raise. The custom of a startup n... |
we're trying to learn how to pick winners. We've now watched the trajectories of so many startups that we're getting better at predicting them. And when we're talking about startups we think are likely to succeed, what we find ourselves saying is things like "Oh, those guys can take care of themselves. They'll be fine.... |
a problem for VCs, most of whom are not particularly imaginative. VCs are mostly money guys, not people who make things. Angels are better at appreciating novel ideas, because most were founders themselves. So when you get a rejection, use the data that's in it, and not what's not. If an investor gives you specific rea... |
the lawyer could never admit, in front of his client, that he'd screwed up, he instead had to insist on retaining all the draconian terms in it, so the deal fell through. Of course, someone has to take money from novice investors, or there would never be any experienced ones. But if you do, either (a) drive the process... |
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