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0 | What I Wish Someone Had Told Me | 2023-12-21 22:44:25 | Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.
Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short t... |
1 | Helion Needs You | 2022-07-13 15:47:32 | Helion has been progressing even faster than I expected and is on pace in 2024 to 1) demonstrate Q > 1 fusion and 2) resolve all questions needed to design a mass-producible fusion generator.
The goals of the company are quite ambitious—clean, continuous energy for 1 cent per kilowatt-hour, and the ability to manufact... |
2 | DALL•E 2 | 2022-04-06 18:15:13 | Today we did a research launch of DALL•E 2, a new AI tool that can create and edit images from natural language instructions.
Most importantly, we hope people love the tool and find it useful. For me, it’s the most delightful thing to play with we’ve created so far. I find it to be creativity-enhancing, helpful for ma... |
3 | Helion | 2021-11-05 13:39:16 | I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen.
David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense of building fusion machines, in addition to building companies!) I have ever met, and they have done something remarkable. W... |
4 | The Strength of Being Misunderstood | 2020-12-01 18:56:39 | A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn’t have an answer, and after reflecting on it more, I think it's the wrong question.
Almost everyone cares what someone thinks (though caring what everyone thinks is definitely a mistake), and it's probably important. Caring too much makes y... |
5 | PG and Jessica | 2020-09-25 14:45:50 | A lot of people want to replicate YC in some other industry or some other place or with some other strategy. In general, people seem to assume that: 1) although there was some degree of mystery or luck about how YC got going, it can’t be that hard, and 2) if you can get it off the ground, the network effects are self-s... |
6 | Researchers and Founders | 2020-06-19 17:39:12 | I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers.
Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of... |
7 | Project Covalence | 2020-06-16 17:08:44 | Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, rapidly spinning up trials is one of their biggest bottlenecks.
Science remains the only way out of the COVID-19 crisis. Dra... |
8 | Idea Generation | 2020-05-28 19:12:40 | The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup.
But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work. Having ideas is among the most important qualities for a startup founder to have—you will need ... |
9 | Please Fund More Science | 2020-03-30 17:46:36 | Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal.
Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testi... |
20 | Funding for COVID-19 Projects | 2020-03-15 16:31:23 | I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help. I think we will soon have enough testing capacity, so now I’d like to start funding more startups working on:
Producing a lot of ventilators or masks/gowns very quickly. This will require a ... |
21 | The Virus | 2020-03-07 18:58:55 | Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global tragedy—hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.
I hope that society views this as a warning for the future. Covid-19 is bad, but only a warm-up. I think it’s unlikely that this is the worst new pand... |
22 | Hard Startups | 2020-02-26 18:28:47 | The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems ar... |
23 | How To Invest In Startups | 2020-01-13 16:41:14 | There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor.
Before going any further, I should point out that this is a particularly hard time to invest in startups—it’s easier right now to be a capital-taker than a capital-giver. It seems that mo... |
24 | How To Be Successful | 2019-01-24 21:01:07 | I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.
Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is easier to do once you... |
25 | Reinforcement Learning Progress | 2018-06-25 16:10:37 | Today, OpenAI released a new result. We used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization), a general reinforcement learning algorithm invented by OpenAI, to train a team of 5 agents to play Dota and beat semi-pros.
This is the game that to me feels closest to the real world and complex decision making (combining strategy, tacti... |
26 | US Digital Currency | 2018-05-10 17:07:07 | I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There was possibly a time when governments could have totally stopped it, but it feels like that’s in the rearview mirror.
However, I think it’s very possible that ... |
27 | Productivity | 2018-04-10 16:18:00 | I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place.
Compound growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well, and it is magic. A small productivity gain, compounded over 50 y... |
28 | A Clarification | 2017-12-16 19:00:42 | I made a point in this post inelegantly in a way that was easy to misunderstand, so I’d like to clarify it.
I didn’t mean that we need to tolerate brilliant homophobic jerks in the lab so that we can have scientific progress. Although there are famous counterexamples, most of the best scientists I’ve met are unusually... |
29 | E Pur Si Muove | 2017-12-14 17:12:38 | Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home.
That showed me just how bad things have become... |
30 | The Merge | 2017-12-07 16:56:28 | A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075.
People used to call this the singularity; now it feels uncomfortable an... |
31 | American Equity | 2017-11-27 17:24:42 | I’d like feedback on the following idea.
I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP.
I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of us in making the country as successful as possible—the better the country does, the better everyone does—and give more peopl... |
32 | The United Slate | 2017-07-12 14:33:41 | I would like to find and support a slate of candidates for the 2018 California elections, and also to find someone to run a ballot initiative focused on affordable housing in the state. A team of aligned people has a chance to make a real change.
I believe in creating prosperity through technology, economic fairness, ... |
33 | Join the YC Software Team | 2017-05-19 00:25:07 | If you want to get funded by YC as a founder in the future, but you don't have a startup that's ready for that yet, joining the YC software team is a great hack to get there.
The YC software team is a small group of hackers in SF that write the software that makes all the parts of YC work.
As a member of the software... |
34 | Quora | 2017-04-21 13:42:36 | I'm a strong believer in the importance of the internet in helping people to share knowledge and learn from each other. So I’m delighted to share, on behalf of YC Continuity, that we’re investing alongside Collaborative Fund in Quora.
Quora is doing extremely well. They now have more than 190 million monthly unique vi... |
35 | Tech Workers' Values | 2017-03-31 17:46:28 | For good and bad, technology has become a central force in all our lives.
As members of the community, we're interested in ways in which tech companies can use their collective power to protect privacy, rule of law, freedom of expression, and other fundamental American rights.
We’d also like to discuss how tech compa... |
36 | Keep the Internet Open | 2017-03-14 18:36:03 | The FCC has announced plans to roll back policies on net neutrality, and its new head has indicated he has no plan to stop soon.
The internet is a public good, and I believe access should be a basic right. We've seen such great innovation in software because the internet has been a level playing field. People have bee... |
37 | Greg | 2017-03-07 16:01:27 | A lot of people ask me what the ideal cofounder looks like. I now have an answer: Greg Brockman.
Every successful startup I know has at least one person who provides the force of will to make the startup happen. I’d thought a lot about this in the abstract while advising YC startups, but until OpenAI I hadn’t observed... |
38 | What I Heard From Trump Supporters | 2017-02-21 18:03:17 | After the election, I decided to talk to 100 Trump voters from around the country. I went to the middle of the country, the middle of the state, and talked to many online.
This was a surprisingly interesting and helpful experience—I highly recommend it. With three exceptions, I found something to like about everyone I... |
39 | 2017 YC Annual Letter | 2017-02-16 17:37:01 | Dear YC Community:
In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress.
Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone. We believe new technology, economic growth,... |
40 | Time to Take a Stand | 2017-01-28 18:48:17 | It is time for tech companies to start speaking up about some of the actions taken by President Trump’s administration.
There are many actions from his first week that are objectionable. In repeatedly invoking unsubstantiated conspiracy theories (like the 3 million illegal votes), he's delegitimizing his opponents and... |
41 | Affordable Care | 2017-01-13 17:27:57 | The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect–for one thing, I think health insurance should be entirely separate from employment–but I hate the thought of losing it without a replacement for people who will lose insurance. If Congress ends up repealing it, I hope they earnestly try to preserve the best parts, and put in... |
42 | The 2016 Election | 2016-10-17 19:09:02 | I am endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. I've never endorsed a presidential candidate before, but I'm making an exception this year, because this election is exceptional. Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to America, and voting for Hillary is the best way to defend our country against it.
A Trump pr... |
43 | $1 Million VotePlz Sweepstakes | 2016-09-26 17:07:56 | The 2016 US Presidential election feels like the most important one so far in my lifetime. No one able to vote in the US should be sitting this one out—we have a major choice to make.
With some friends, I helped start VotePlz to make it easier for young people to participate—technology has moved forward but registrati... |
44 | Don't Read The Comments | 2016-08-23 20:55:16 | I sent this email to the current YC batch this morning:
I've talked to some of you who are really bummed about negative press coverage or online comments about your company. Often this takes the general form of "ugh, all these new startups suck, everything good has already been started."
It sucks to have haters, but ... |
45 | Trump | 2016-06-20 19:36:08 | I'm going to say something very unpopular in my world: Trump is right about some big things.
He's right that many Americans are getting screwed by the system. He’s right that the economy is not growing nearly fast enough. He's right that we're drowning in political correctness, and that broken campaign finance laws ha... |
46 | 'We're in a Bubble' | 2016-06-15 01:19:58 | A lot of people have been saying we’re in a tech bubble for quite some time. Someday they’ll be right, but in the meantime, I thought it'd be fun to look back at some articles from the last 10 years:
2007, Coding Horror -- Welcome to Dot-Com Bubble 2.0. “You might argue that the new bubble has been in effect since mid... |
47 | Housing in the Bay Area | 2016-05-26 00:42:18 | Jerry Brown has proposed legislation that would allow a lot more housing to be built in the Bay Area, and hopefully significantly reduce the cost of housing here. More supply should lead to lower prices.
I believe that lowering the cost of housing is one of the most important things we can do to help people increase t... |
48 | Cruise | 2016-04-13 17:21:10 | There is a long and sordid history of people coming out of the woodwork with bogus claims when huge amounts of money are on the line. This has just happened to Cruise, which is run by my friend Kyle Vogt. Cruise is a YC company, and I also personally invested in the company last year.
As detailed in a complaint filed ... |
49 | Asana | 2016-03-30 15:08:42 | I’m delighted to finally be investing in Asana, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time.
One of the things I’ve learned about companies is that 1) clear tasks and goals, 2) clearly communicated, and 3) with clear and frequent measurement are very important to success. Most companies fail at all 3 of these, and they be... |
50 | Hard Tech is Back | 2016-03-11 16:19:09 | First of all, congrats to Kyle, Dan, and the rest of the Cruise team. You all have made amazing progress and we look forward to seeing more in the future.
A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technology”. ... |
51 | Before Growth | 2016-01-15 18:23:06 | We tell startups all the time that they have to grow quickly. That’s true, and very good advice, but I think the current fashion of Silicon Valley startups has taken this to an unhealthy extreme—startups have a weekly growth goal before they really have any strong idea about what they want to build.
In the first few w... |
52 | The Tech Bust of 2015 | 2015-11-02 21:26:17 | Maybe instead of a tech bubble, we’re in a tech bust. No one seems to fervently believe tech valuations are cheap, so it’d be somewhat surprising if we were in a bubble. In many parts of the market, valuations seem too cheap. In the part where they seem too high, maybe they aren’t really valuations at all, because the ... |
53 | Airbnb and San Francisco | 2015-09-28 17:22:39 | Airbnb has recently been attacked by San Francisco politicians for driving up the price of housing in the city. San Francisco has tried, and will continue to try, to ban Airbnb in various ways. Last week, this excellent post was published on Prop F—“the Airbnb law”.
I recently reached out to Brian Chesky, the CEO of A... |
54 | Unit Economics | 2015-09-21 18:22:13 | Commentators are looking hard for what’s wrong with startups in Silicon Valley. First they talked about valuations being too high. Then they talked about valuations not really meaning anything. Then they talked about companies staying private too long. Then they talked about burn rates.
But something does feel off, th... |
55 | Financial Misstatements | 2015-08-21 16:25:44 | First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance.
One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator applicants a couple of years ago, but see it now in startups at all stages (including some YC companies).
It is very importan... |
56 | The Post-YC Slump | 2015-08-20 16:47:06 | At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a handful of them do. Most go on to be decent or bad.
These companies have a beautifully exponential growth curve during YC, and t... |
57 | The U.S. Digital Service | 2015-08-14 15:59:37 | A lot of us complain about how the government is not very good at technology. The U.S. Digital Service is actually trying to do something about it, by applying the way startups build products to make government services work better for veterans, immigrants, students, seniors, and the American public as a whole.
This i... |
58 | Projects and Companies | 2015-08-12 16:09:39 | In the early days of my startup, I used to get slightly offended when people would refer to it as a “project”. “How’s your project going?” seemed like the asker didn't take us seriously, even though everything felt serious to us. I remember assuming this would stop after we announced a $5 million Series A; it didn’t. I... |
59 | Energy | 2015-06-29 20:00:19 | I think a lot about how important cheap, safe, and abundant energy is to our future. A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to the energy problem.
I believe that if you could choose one single technological develo... |
60 | The days are long but the decades are short | 2015-04-28 18:57:11 | I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem hollow, but here is a cleaned up version of my answer:
1) Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your ... |
61 | Bubble talk | 2015-03-24 19:17:31 | I’m tired of reading about investors and journalists claiming there’s a bubble in tech. I understand that it’s fun to do and easy press, but it’s boring reading. I also understand that it might scare newer investors away and bring down valuations, but there’s got to be a better way to win than that.
I would much rathe... |
62 | Technology predictions | 2015-03-03 18:03:04 | Some of these are probably apocryphal, but making predictions about the limits of technology is really hard:
Space travel is utter bilge.
Computers in the future may...perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, 1949
X-rays are a hoax.
- Lord Kelvin, ca. 1900
I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orvi... |
63 | Machine intelligence, part 2 | 2015-03-02 22:17:43 | This is part two of a a two-part post—the first part is here.
THE NEED FOR REGULATION
Although there has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of machine intelligence recently, there hasn’t been much discussion about what we should try to do to mitigate the threat.
Part of the reason is that many people are alm... |
64 | Machine intelligence, part 1 | 2015-02-25 18:03:22 | This is going to be a two-part post—one on why machine intelligence is something we should be afraid of, and one on what we should do about it. If you’re already afraid of machine intelligence, you can skip this one and read the second post tomorrow—I was planning to only write part 2, but when I asked a few people to ... |
65 | Startup advice, briefly | 2015-02-20 18:45:37 | This is a very short summary with lots left out—here is the long version: http://startupclass.samaltman.com
You should start with an idea, not a company. When it’s just an idea or project, the stakes are lower and you’re more willing to entertain outlandish-sounding but potentially huge ideas. The best way to start a ... |
66 | The Software Revolution | 2015-02-16 17:31:32 | In human history, there have been three great technological revolutions and many smaller ones. The three great ones are the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the one we are now in the middle of—the software revolution. [1]
The great technological revolutions have affected what most people do ever... |
67 | China | 2015-02-11 18:44:21 | The most important story of 2014 that most people ignored was the Chinese economy overtaking the US economy. (This is using the purchasing power parity metric, which incorporates differences in the price of goods, but the Chinese economy will overtake on other metrics soon enough.)
This shouldn’t have caught anyone by... |
68 | FarmLogs | 2015-02-10 22:22:06 | I recently got to be a guest at a FarmLogs board meeting. I was struck by how much of an impact the company was having on the world, and how just a couple of years ago it seemed like they were doing something so small.
FarmLogs is a great example of a company that started out with a seemingly boring idea--a way for fa... |
69 | Policy for Growth and Innovation | 2015-01-14 17:04:36 | I get asked fairly often now by people in the US government what policy changes I would make to “fix innovation and drive economic growth” [1][2] (for some reason, it’s almost always that exact phrase).
Innovation is obviously important—the US has long been the world’s best exporter of new ideas, and it’d be disastrou... |
70 | A new team at reddit | 2014-11-13 20:27:29 | Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit.
The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t ask or suggest that he resign—he decided to when we didn’t approve the new office plan.
We wish him the best and we’re thankfu... |
71 | A Question | 2014-11-12 18:05:24 | I have a question for all the people that use their iPhone or Android to complain on Twitter, Facebook, or reddit about the lack of innovation…
Or message their friends on WhatsApp or Snapchat about how Silicon Valley only builds toys for rich people in between looking at photos from their family across the world in D... |
72 | Board Members | 2014-11-11 18:52:33 | Over the last five years, there has been an incredible shift in leverage from investors to founders. It’s good in most ways, but bad in an important few. Founders’ desire for control is good in moderation but hurts companies when it gets taken to extremes.
Many founders (or at least, many of the founders I talk to) ge... |
73 | Why Silicon Valley Works | 2014-11-03 18:26:42 | I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here.
The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate. But the density and breadth of the Silicon Valley network does sometime... |
74 | reddit | 2014-09-30 17:46:28 | I’m very excited to share that I’m investing in reddit (personally, not via Y Combinator).
I have been a daily reddit user for 9 years—longer than pretty much any other service I still use besides Facebook, Google, and Amazon—and reddit's founders (Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) were in the first YC batch with me. ... |
75 | Applying to YC | 2014-09-15 19:41:23 | One of the most common misconceptions startups have about applying to Y Combinator is thinking that they are too early or too late.
We have funded companies with only an idea; we’ve funded companies with millions of users, millions of dollars of revenue, and millions of dollars raised. In nearly every case, the founde... |
76 | Stupid Apps and Changing the World | 2014-08-07 18:07:50 | An article came out today in Businessweek about arrogance and Silicon Valley. I thought it was good, but there was one more point I wanted to make.
People often accuse people in Silicon Valley of working on things that don’t matter. Often they’re right. But many very important things start out looking as if they don’t... |
77 | Uber vs Car Ownership | 2014-07-29 00:37:57 | Taking uberX everywhere is now cheaper for me than owning a car (I have an expensive car, so it's not a super fair comparison, but I still think it's interesting).
I first played around with one of those web calculators and was so surprised by the result I sharpened my pencil and did it myself with more precise number... |
78 | Black Swan Seed Rounds | 2014-07-28 18:12:45 | I started seed investing in 2010 (and much more actively in 2012) before becoming a full-time YC partner. In this period, I invested in about 40 companies. So far, five of them are in the “really good” category—a current value of ~100x or more, based on the valuation of the last round or last offer.
I’ve been thinking... |
79 | Net neutrality | 2014-07-14 16:54:15 | When there is a structural reason consumers don’t have freedom of choice, and the free market can’t work, consumers need minimal protection from the government so that they don’t get abused.
We need protection from the cable companies to keep the Internet fair and open.
I think that most people misunderstand the net ... |
80 | The Economy | 2014-06-30 18:27:56 | I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago in which I said macroeconomic collapse “may happen” and a few friends asked me why. To be clear, I don’t think it’s the likely outcome—I think we’ll find a way to address our challenges. But here is what some of the challenges are.
Most of these issues would be not so bad by themse... |
81 | You and Your Research, by Richard Hamming | 2014-06-29 21:26:13 | Richard Hamming gave this talk in March of 1986. [1] It's one of the best talks I've ever read and has long impacted how I think about spending my time.
I mentioned it to a number of people this weekend who, to my surprise, had never heard of it. So I though I'd share it here:
[Addition 5/28/23: see this great annota... |
82 | Valuations | 2014-06-20 18:48:33 | People have been saying that startup valuations are really high for about 3 years now. I myself feel that they are high, but I have no idea when they are likely to change.
It’s mostly investors that talk about valuations being way too high. But they’re the ones that keep willingly paying higher and higher prices. In f... |
83 | Founder Depression | 2014-06-13 21:46:14 | If you ask a founder how her startup is going, the answer is almost always some version of “Great!”
There is a huge amount of pressure as a founder to never show weakness and to be the cheerleader in all internal and external situations. The world can be falling down around you—and most of the time when you’re running... |
84 | Bitcoin Price Pressure | 2014-04-30 18:39:48 | The price of bitcoin keeps trending down. [1] This causes a lot of people to declare the end of bitcoin.
It’s important to understand that the default price pressure of the bitcoin ecosystem is down. There are a lot of reasons for this, so I’ll just give a few examples.
When most merchants take bitcoin for a purchase... |
85 | Employee Equity | 2014-04-18 18:26:47 | Startup employees often do not get treated very well when it comes to stock compensation. New ideas float around occasionally, but lawyers are usually averse to trying new things, and investors don’t feel that they have enough incentive to try something new for employees.
There are four major problems:
1) Employees ... |
86 | The Worst Part of YC | 2014-04-16 01:29:16 | We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and no) before 10 pm PDT tonight.
The worst part of our job at YC is rejecting companies. It leaves me feeling down for many days after our application process. I experienced plenty of rejection from investors while running my own startup, and I rem... |
87 | Startups, Role Models, Risk, and Y Combinator | 2014-03-25 19:02:56 | The YC application deadline is this Friday, and you can apply here.
People often tell us they think they want to start a company but just aren’t sure, so I thought I’d share some thoughts. Although it’s true that most people aren’t well suited to start startups, a lot of people that could be great at it are afraid to ... |
88 | What I've Learned From Female Founders So Far | 2014-03-21 17:39:08 | On the whole, I got a great response to my request for feedback about how YC could encourage female founders. It's clear there are two separate problems:
1) Some women already starting startups aren't interested in doing Y Combinator.
2) Some women who could be great founders don't start startups.
I realize it's alw... |
89 | New RFS -- Breakthrough Technologies | 2014-03-19 19:33:37 | We’d like for Y Combinator to fund more breakthrough technology companies—companies that solve an important problem, have a very long time horizon, and are based on an underlying technological or scientific breakthrough. Not many people try to start these companies, so starting a company that will require a huge amount... |
90 | The Founder Visa (again) | 2014-03-17 23:51:57 | Nearly 5 years ago, Paul Graham first proposed the founder visa. There has been a lot of discussion since, but nothing has happened.
Maybe he was too ambitious in asking for 10,000 startup visas per year. So here is a proposal for the US government: please let Y Combinator help allocate up to 100 visas to founders per... |
91 | Fundraising Mistakes Founders Make | 2014-02-20 19:42:44 | There’s a lot written about what you should do when you raise money, but there hasn’t been as much written about the common mistakes founders make. Here is a list of mistakes I often see:
• Over-optimizing the process
A lot of founders try to get way too fancy with tricks that they think will help them raise money. I... |
92 | AI | 2014-02-19 21:57:29 | Yesterday at lunch a friend asked me what tech trend he should pay attention to but was probably ignoring.
Without thinking much I said “artificial intelligence”, but having thought about that a bit more, I think it’s probably right.
To be clear, AI (under the common scientific definition) likely won’t work. You can ... |
93 | The Engineer Crunch | 2014-02-18 18:13:17 | For most startups in the bay area, the engineer crunch is a bigger problem than the Series A crunch (this somewhat applies to designers as well, but most startups need far more developers than designers). The difference in difficulty between hiring developers and hiring everyone else is remarkable--I frequently hear st... |
94 | Anonymity | 2014-02-10 18:58:50 | I, like everyone else in Silicon Valley, downloaded Secret last week. It's incredibly well done, certainly the best yet of any of the gossip/anonymous apps.
Unlike most others, I deleted it, and have thus far resisted reinstalling it (which has been tough!). Unlike Facebook or Twitter, I felt worse--though entertained... |
95 | Technology and wealth inequality | 2014-01-28 23:45:20 | Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they’ll be able to create more wealth than they can today. Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people. This disparity has probably been growing since the beginning of technology, in the broade... |
96 | Value is created by doing | 2014-01-16 21:19:33 | Value is created by doing.
It’s easy to forget this. A lot of stuff feels like work—commenting on HN, tweeting, reading about other companies’ funding rounds, grabbing coffee, etc [1]—is not actually work. (If you count that as work, think really hard about the value you’re creating in your job.) These activities can ... |
97 | Super successful companies | 2014-01-16 04:57:02 | I spent some time recently thinking about what companies that grow up to be extremely successful do when they are very young. I came up with the following list. It’s from personal experience and I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions. While plenty of non-successful startups do some of these things too, I think there i... |
98 | H5N1 | 2013-12-11 17:48:49 | Most of the time, we worry far too much about tail risk.
We worry about terrorist attacks and necrotizing fasciitis, but not much about heart disease or car crashes. But in 2011, 17 US citizens worldwide died as a result of terrorism and approximately 150 from necrotizing fasciitis. There were nearly 600,000 deaths re... |
99 | Employee Retention | 2013-12-09 19:12:13 | When it comes to everything that's not building a great product and getting users, most founders think fundraising is going to be their biggest challenge. And it is, until they raise money, and then it's hiring. Hiring is so hard that founders think nothing else will be harder.
But then comes a bigger challenge--emplo... |
100 | The Only Way to Grow Huge | 2013-12-03 19:17:10 | All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.
What this means is that if you want to be a great company some day, you have to eventually build something so good that people will recommend it to their friends--in fact, so good that they want to be the... |
101 | Thoughts on Bitcoin | 2013-12-01 19:18:55 | Maybe bitcoin will be the world reserve currency, maybe it will totally fail, or maybe it will survive in some niche capacity. I don’t know how to weight the probabilities (although I think in the immediate term it's likely to go down), but I do have a thought about the metric to watch: growth in legitimate transaction... |
102 | Non-technical founder? Learn to hack | 2013-10-31 17:40:44 | I frequently get asked by non-technical solo founders if I know any potential hacker cofounders they should talk to. These people give a passionate pitch for the idea and a long list of all the hustling they've done, customers they've spoken to, models they've built, provisional patents they've filed, etc. Most of the ... |
103 | The separation of advice and money | 2013-10-08 17:57:54 | One of the most interesting changes in venture capital going on right now is the separation of advice and money. For a very long time, these have been a package deal.
Great advice is really important; some founders don’t appreciate this initially (I was guilty of it) but always learn to. But great advice does not have... |
104 | What to do if a bubble is starting | 2013-09-24 18:10:01 | Maybe now we’re actually in the early stages of a startup bubble. Valuations are trending up again. And no one is talking about a bubble anymore, so it could be happening.
Many companies still feel reasonably priced. Yes, Facebook is up 70% in the last six months, but I think it’s likely still undervalued. Lots of com... |
105 | How to hire | 2013-09-23 18:26:48 | After startups raise money, their next biggest problem becomes hiring. It turns out it’s both really hard and really important to hire good people; in fact, it’s probably the most important thing a founder does.
If you don’t hire very well, you will not be successful—companies are a product of the team the founders bu... |
106 | Electrons and Atoms | 2013-08-28 19:52:48 | A friend recently asked me for my list of current breakout companies. I made it, and noticed that all of them had only one thing in common. I then went back through the last three YC batches and looked at our top-ranked companies (although we get it wrong plenty of times, it’s reasonably predictive). These companies ha... |
107 | How things get done | 2013-07-17 19:03:44 | I’ve heard a lot of different theories about how things get done. I’m interested in this topic, so I pay attention and see how the theories hold up.
Here’s the best one: a combination of focus and personal connections. Charlie Rose said this to Paul Graham, who told it to me.
It seems very accurate. There are lots of... |
108 | Advice for ambitious 19 year olds | 2013-06-25 00:05:26 | “I’m an ambitious 19 year old, what should I do?”
I get asked this question fairly often, and I now have a lot of data on what works, so I thought I’d share my response.
Usually, people are deciding between going to college (and usually working on side projects while they do so), joining a company, or starting their ... |
109 | What happened to innovation? | 2013-06-20 17:15:52 | There’s a lot of debate about whether or not the pace of innovation has slowed, and if so, what that means. After some particularly brutal pitches that felt like Saturday Night Live parodies of startups, I feel compelled to weigh in. This question cannot be answered with a yes or a no; innovation has slowed dramaticall... |
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