@psgeroge We visit the USA every summer to talk to YC startups.

@scottdwitt Indeed not. Zoom is ok for some things, but in-person is much better for talking to early stage startups.

@nrunje I think the most civilized combination would be American speech and British gun laws.

@JohnDCook If anything it seems the opposite. The British are very polite despite having very few guns. Ditto for the Japanese.

"Don't flip people off. They could have guns. We're in America."

— Jessica to 15 yo

@ahistoryinart Wow is that good.

@theflowalker Their initial idea wasn't working. This is not at all unusual. You often can't tell how well an idea will work till you try to build and sell it.

@amit6060 We didn't take a break. We were trying to think of new ideas all through dinner. It just took that long.

@mckaywrigley This time none of my usual questions worked, so we had to try all kinds of new angles.

@mckaywrigley I have a bunch of questions I ask. What would you build for yourself? What did previous companies you've worked for need? What are you an expert in? What have you noticed recently that seemed broken? If you were going to build something just for fun, what would it be?


The Shape of the Essay Field
June 2025
An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But
there are three different reasons people might not know something,
and they yield three very different kinds of essays.
One reason people won't know something is if it's not important to
know. That doesn't mean it will make a bad essay. For example, you
might write a good essay about a particular model of car. Readers
would learn something from it. It would add to their picture of the
world. For a handful of readers it might even spur some kind of
epiphany. But unless this is a very unusual car it's not critical
for everyone to know about it.
[
1
]
If something isn't important to know, there's no answer to the
question of why people don't know it. Not knowing random facts is
the default. But if you're going to write about things that
are
important to know, you have to ask why your readers don't already
know them. Is it because they're inexperienced, or because
they're obtuse?
So the three reasons readers might not already know what you tell
them are (a) that it's not important, (b) that they're obtuse,
or (c) that they're inexperienced.
The reason I did this breakdown was to get at the following fact,
which might have seemed controversial if I'd led with it, but should
be obvious now. If you're writing for smart people about important
things, you're writing for the young.
Or more precisely, that's where you'll have the most effect. Whatever
you say should also be at least somewhat novel to you, however old
you are. It's not an essay otherwise, because an essay is something
you write to figure something out. But whatever you figure out will
presumably be more of a surprise to younger readers than it is to
you.
There's a continuum of surprise. At one extreme, something you read
can change your whole way of thinking.
The Selfish Gene
did this
to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other interpretation of an
ambiguous image: you can treat genes rather than organisms as the
protagonists, and evolution becomes easier to understand when you
do. At the other extreme, writing merely puts into words something
readers were already thinking — or thought they were.
The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking
multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well
at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics.
So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking
a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about
very important ones. But with younger readers the tradeoff shifts.
There's more room to change their thinking, so there's a bigger
payoff for writing about important things.
The tradeoff isn't a conscious one, at least not for me. It's more
like a kind of gravitational field that writers work in. But every
essayist works in it, whether they realize it or not.
This seems obvious once you state it, but it took me a long time
to understand. I knew I wanted to write for smart people about
important topics. I noticed empirically that I seemed to be writing
for the young. But it took me years to understand that the latter
was an automatic consequence of the former. In fact I only really
figured it out as I was writing this essay.
Now that I know it, should I change anything? I don't think so. In
fact seeing the shape of the field that writers work in has reminded
me that I'm not optimizing for returns in it. I'm not trying to
surprise readers of any particular age; I'm trying to surprise
myself.
The way I usually decide what to write about is by following
curiosity. I notice something new and dig into it. It would probably
be a mistake to change that. But seeing the shape of the essay field
has set me thinking. What would surprise young readers? Which
important things do people tend to learn late? Interesting question.
I should think about that.
Note
[
1
]
It's hard to write a really good essay about an unimportant
topic, though, because a really good essayist will inevitably draw
the topic into deeper waters. E. B. White could write an essay about
how to boil potatoes that ended up being full of timeless wisdom.
In which case, of course, it wouldn't really be about how to boil
potatoes; that would just have been the starting point.
Thanks
to Jessica Livingston and Michael
Nielsen for reading drafts of this.


@queeniepen Not in 10 weeks.

@tommycollison I had to do it comparatively fast because we needed the table for a dinner party, but it still took most of a day. In fact to be honest there are still about 25 to go.

@stuartbates It doesn't have to be software. Could be hardware. But the "build" shouldn't get too metaphorical.

@GirkeHanjo @waitbutwhy Not all mistaken opinions prove you're stupid, but that one, explained at that level of detail, does.

I'd rather fund someone who knew zero about startups and had a lot of experience building things. Startup basics are easy enough that you can learn them during YC. But you can't learn to build things.

The point about extracurriculars is a subtle one, but it's a red flag for me too. The best founders don't spend college *talking* about startups. They spend their time working on projects, whether they're meant to be startups or not.

@tommycollison About 100 different books as I shelve my new purchases from Hay on Wye. I know it's a mistake to read books when you're shelving them. It slows things down to a crawl. But I can't help it.

@waitbutwhy I never realized till this moment how stupid Tucker Carlson was. At first I thought he was acting, to curry favor with the religious right, but I gradually realized that he actually believes what he's saying.

@JohnStossel In California this was due to lobbying by the Teamsters. They wanted to capture Uber and Lyft drivers, and to do that they had to be employees. Other freelancers were just collateral damage. Were the Teamsters also behind the federal version?

@msimoni They're a secret reference to the NeXTcube. https://t.co/GzHPXVkNNQ


The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2006
In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made
startups fail.  After standing there gaping for a few seconds I
realized this was kind of a trick question.  It's equivalent to
asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of
failure, you succeed — and that's too big a question to answer on
the fly.
Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem
from this direction.  If you have a list of all the things you
shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just
by negating.  And this form of list may be more useful in practice.
It's easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn't than
always to remember to do something you should.
[
1
]
In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making
something users want.  If you make something users want, you'll
probably be fine, whatever else you do or don't do.  And if you
don't make something users want, then you're dead, whatever else
you do or don't do.  So really this is a list of 18 things that
cause startups not to make something users want.  Nearly all failure
funnels through that.
1. Single Founder
Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by
just one person?  Even companies you think of as having one founder,
like Oracle, usually turn out to have more.  It seems unlikely this
is a coincidence.
What's wrong with having one founder?  To start with, it's a vote
of no confidence.  It probably means the founder couldn't talk any
of his friends into starting the company with him.  That's pretty
alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.
But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company
is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage.  Starting a startup
is too hard for one person.  Even if you could do all the work
yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out
of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.
The last one might be the most important.  The low points in a
startup are so low that few could bear them alone.  When you have
multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way
that seems to violate conservation laws.  Each thinks "I can't let
my friends down."  This is one of the most powerful forces in human
nature, and it's missing when there's just one founder.
2. Bad Location
Startups prosper in some places and not others.  Silicon Valley
dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York.  After
that there's not much.  Even in New York the number of startups per
capita is probably a 20th of what it is in Silicon Valley.  In towns
like Houston and Chicago and Detroit it's too small to measure.
Why is the falloff so sharp?  Probably for the same reason it is
in other industries.  What's the sixth largest fashion center in
the US?  The sixth largest center for oil, or finance, or publishing?
Whatever they are they're probably so far from the top that it would
be misleading even to call them centers.
It's an interesting question why cities
become
startup hubs, but
the reason startups prosper in them is probably the same as it is
for any industry: that's where the experts are.  Standards are
higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing; the kind
of people you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries
are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the
same business.  Who knows exactly how these factors combine to boost
startups in Silicon Valley and squish them in Detroit, but it's
clear they do from the number of startups per capita in each.
3. Marginal Niche
Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common
problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of avoiding
competition.
If you watch little kids playing sports, you notice that below a
certain age they're afraid of the ball.  When the ball comes near
them their instinct is to avoid it.  I didn't make a lot of catches
as an eight year old outfielder, because whenever a fly ball came
my way, I used to close my eyes and hold my glove up more for
protection than in the hope of catching it.
Choosing a marginal project is the startup equivalent of my eight
year old strategy for dealing with fly balls.  If you make anything
good, you're going to have competitors, so you may as well face
that.  You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas.
I think this shrinking from big problems is mostly unconscious.
It's not that people think of grand ideas but decide to pursue
smaller ones because they seem safer.  Your unconscious won't even
let you think of grand ideas.  So the solution may be to think about
ideas without involving yourself.  What would be a great idea for
someone else
to do as a startup?
4. Derivative Idea
Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing
company.  That's one source of ideas, but not the best.  If you
look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in
imitation of some other startup.  Where did they get their ideas?
Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.
Our startup made software for making online stores.  When we started
it, there wasn't any; the few sites you could order from were
hand-made at great expense by web consultants.  We knew that if
online shopping ever took off, these sites would have to be generated
by software, so we wrote some.  Pretty straightforward.
It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you
personally.  Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer,
Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail
because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at
work.
So instead of copying the Facebook, with some variation that the
Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction.
Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems
they solved, look for problems and imagine the company that might
solve them.
[
2
]
What do people complain about?  What do you wish there was?
5. Obstinacy
In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you
want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you
encounter.  Starting startups is not one of them.  The stick-to-your-vision
approach works for something like winning an Olympic gold medal,
where the problem is well-defined.  Startups are more like science,
where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.
So don't get too attached to your original plan, because it's
probably wrong.  Most successful startups end up doing something
different than they originally intended — often so different that
it doesn't even seem like the same company.  You have to be prepared
to see the better idea when it arrives.  And the hardest part of
that is often discarding your old idea.
But openness to new ideas has to be tuned just right.  Switching
to a new idea every week will be equally fatal.  Is there some kind
of external test you can use?  One is to ask whether the ideas
represent some kind of progression.  If in each new idea you're
able to re-use most of what you built for the previous ones, then
you're probably in a process that converges.  Whereas if you keep
restarting from scratch, that's a bad sign.
Fortunately there's someone you can ask for advice: your users.  If
you're thinking about turning in some new direction and your users
seem excited about it, it's probably a good bet.
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
I forgot to include this in the early versions of the list,
because nearly all the founders I know are programmers.  This is
not a serious problem for them.  They might accidentally hire someone
bad, but it's not going to kill the company.  In a pinch they can
do whatever's required themselves.
But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the
e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers.  A lot
of those companies were started by business guys who thought the
way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired
programmers to implement it.  That's actually much harder than it
sounds — almost impossibly hard in fact — because business guys
can't tell which are the good programmers.  They don't even get a
shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job
implementing the vision of a business guy.
In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people
they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that
he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't.  Then they're
mystified to find that their startup lumbers along like a World War
II bomber while their competitors scream past like jet fighters.
This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company,
but without the advantages.
So how do you pick good programmers if you're not a programmer?  I
don't think there's an answer.  I was about to say you'd have to
find a good programmer to help you hire people.  But if you can't
recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
A related problem (since it tends to be done by bad programmers)
is choosing the wrong platform.  For example, I think a lot of
startups during the Bubble killed themselves by deciding to build
server-based applications on Windows.  Hotmail was still running
on FreeBSD for years after Microsoft bought it, presumably because
Windows couldn't handle the load.  If Hotmail's founders
had chosen to use Windows, they would have been swamped.
PayPal only just dodged this bullet.  After they merged with X.com,
the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows — even after PayPal cofounder
Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on
Windows as Unix.  Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead.
Platform is a vague word.  It could mean an operating system, or a
programming language, or a "framework" built on top of a programming
language.  It implies something that both supports and limits, like
the foundation of a house.
The scary thing about platforms is that there are always some that
seem to outsiders to be fine, responsible choices and yet, like
Windows in the 90s, will destroy you if you choose them.  Java
applets were probably the most spectacular example.  This was
supposed to be the new way of delivering applications.  Presumably
it killed just about 100% of the startups who believed that.
How do you pick the right platforms?  The usual way is to hire good
programmers and let them choose.  But there is a trick you could
use if you're not a programmer: visit a top computer science
department and see what they use in research projects.
8. Slowness in Launching
Companies of all sizes have a hard time getting software done.  It's
intrinsic to the medium; software is always 85% done.  It takes an
effort of will to push through this and get something released to
users.
[
3
]
Startups make all kinds of excuses for delaying their launch.  Most
are equivalent to the ones people use for procrastinating in everyday
life.  There's something that needs to happen first.  Maybe.  But
if the software were 100% finished and ready to launch at the push
of a button, would they still be waiting?
One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually
finish
some quantum of work.  Nothing is truly finished till it's
released; you can see that from the rush of work that's always
involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought
it was.  The other reason you need to launch is that it's only by
bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.
Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching:
working too slowly; not truly understanding the problem; fear of
having to deal with users; fear of being judged; working on too
many different things; excessive perfectionism.  Fortunately you
can combat all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself
to launch
something
fairly quickly.
9. Launching Too Early
Launching too slowly has probably killed a hundred times more
startups than launching too fast, but it is possible to launch too
fast.  The danger here is that you ruin your reputation.  You launch
something, the early adopters try it out, and if it's no good they
may never come back.
So what's the minimum you need to launch?  We suggest startups think
about what they plan to do, identify a core that's both (a) useful
on its own and (b) something that can be incrementally expanded
into the whole project, and then get that done as soon as possible.
This is the same approach I (and many other programmers) use for
writing software.  Think about the overall goal, then start by
writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful.  If
it's a subset, you'll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case
you won't be wasting your time.  But more likely you'll find that
implementing a working subset is both good for morale and helps you
see more clearly what the rest should do.
The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant.  They
don't expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has
to do
something
.
10. Having No Specific User in Mind
You can't build things users like without understanding them.  I
mentioned earlier that the most successful startups seem to have
begun by trying to solve a problem their founders had.  Perhaps
there's a rule here: perhaps you create wealth in proportion to how
well you understand the problem you're solving, and the problems
you understand best are your own.
[
4
]
That's just a theory.  What's not a theory is the converse: if
you're trying to solve problems you don't understand, you're hosed.
And yet a surprising number of founders seem willing to
assume that someone, they're not sure exactly who, will want what
they're building.  Do the founders want it?  No, they're not the
target market.  Who is?  Teenagers.  People interested in local
events (that one is a perennial tarpit).  Or "business" users.  What
business users?  Gas stations?  Movie studios?  Defense contractors?
You can of course build something for users other than yourself.
We did.  But you should realize you're stepping into dangerous
territory.  You're flying on instruments, in effect, so you should
(a) consciously shift gears, instead of assuming you can rely on
your intuitions as you ordinarily would, and (b) look at the
instruments.
In this case the instruments are the users.  When designing for
other people you have to be empirical.  You can no longer guess
what will work; you have to find users and measure their responses.
So if you're going to make something for teenagers or "business"
users or some other group that doesn't include you, you have to be
able to talk some specific ones into using what you're making.  If
you can't, you're on the wrong track.
11. Raising Too Little Money
Most successful startups take funding at some point.  Like having
more than one founder, it seems a good bet statistically.  How much
should you take, though?
Startup funding is measured in time.  Every startup that isn't
profitable (meaning nearly all of them, initially) has a certain
amount of time left before the money runs out and they have to stop.
This is sometimes referred to as runway, as in "How much runway do
you have left?"  It's a good metaphor because it reminds you that
when the money runs out you're going to be airborne or dead.
Too little money means not enough to get airborne.  What airborne
means depends on the situation.  Usually you have to advance to a
visibly higher level: if all you have is an idea, a working prototype;
if you have a prototype, launching; if you're launched, significant
growth.  It depends on investors, because until you're profitable
that's who you have to convince.
So if you take money from investors, you have to take enough to get
to the next step, whatever that is.
[
5
]
Fortunately you have some
control over both how much you spend and what the next step is.  We
advise startups to set both low, initially: spend practically
nothing, and make your initial goal simply to build a solid prototype.
This gives you maximum flexibility.
12. Spending Too Much
It's hard to distinguish spending too much from raising too little.
If you run out of money, you could say either was the cause.  The
only way to decide which to call it is by comparison with other
startups.  If you raised five million and ran out of money, you
probably spent too much.
Burning through too much money is not as common as it used to be.
Founders seem to have learned that lesson.  Plus it keeps getting
cheaper to start a startup.  So as of this writing few startups
spend too much.  None of the ones we've funded have.  (And not just
because we make small investments; many have gone on to raise further
rounds.)
The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a lot of people.
This bites you twice: in addition to increasing your costs, it slows
you down—so money that's getting consumed faster has to last
longer.  Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks
explained it in The Mythical Man-Month.
We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a) don't do it if
you can avoid it, (b) pay people with equity rather than salary,
not just to save money, but because you want the kind of people who
are committed enough to prefer that, and (c) only hire people who
are either going to write code or go out and get users, because
those are the only things you need at first.
13. Raising Too Much Money
It's obvious how too little money could kill you, but is there such
a thing as having too much?
Yes and no.  The problem is not so much the money itself as what
comes with it.  As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, "Once you
take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking."
If VCs fund you, they're not going to let you just put the money
in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen.  They
want that money to go to work.
[
6
]
At the very least you'll move
into proper office space and hire more people.  That will change
the atmosphere, and not entirely for the better.  Now most of your
people will be employees rather than founders. They won't be as
committed; they'll need to be told what to do; they'll start to
engage in office politics.
When you raise a lot of money, your company moves to the suburbs
and has kids.
Perhaps more dangerously, once you take a lot of money it gets
harder to change direction.  Suppose your initial plan was to sell
something to companies.  After taking VC money you hire a sales
force to do that. What happens now if you realize you should be
making this for consumers instead of businesses?  That's a completely
different kind of selling.  What happens, in practice, is that you
don't realize that.  The more people you have, the more you stay
pointed in the same direction.
Another drawback of large investments is the time they take.  The
time required to raise money grows with the amount.
[
7
]
When the
amount rises into the millions, investors get very cautious.  VCs
never quite say yes or no; they just engage you in an apparently
endless conversation.  Raising VC scale investments is thus a huge
time sink — more work, probably, than the startup itself.   And you
don't want to be spending all your time talking to investors while
your competitors are spending theirs building things.
We advise founders who go on to seek VC money to take the first
reasonable deal they get.  If you get an offer from a reputable
firm at a reasonable valuation with no unusually onerous terms,
just take it and get on with building the company.
[
8
]
Who cares
if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere?  Economically, startups
are an all-or-nothing game.  Bargain-hunting among investors is a
waste of time.
14. Poor Investor Management
As a founder, you have to manage your investors.  You shouldn't
ignore them, because they may have useful insights.  But neither
should you let them run the company.  That's supposed to be your
job.  If investors had sufficient vision to run the companies
they fund, why didn't they start them?
Pissing off investors by ignoring them is probably less dangerous
than caving in to them.  In our startup, we erred on the ignoring
side.  A lot of our energy got drained
away in disputes with investors instead of going into the product.
But this was less costly than giving in, which would probably have
destroyed the company.  If the founders know what they're doing,
it's better to have half their attention focused on the product
than the full attention of investors who don't.
How hard you have to work on managing investors usually depends on
how much money you've taken.  When you raise VC-scale money, the
investors get a great deal of control.  If they have a board majority,
they're literally your bosses.  In the more common case, where
founders and investors are equally represented and the deciding
vote is cast by neutral outside directors, all the investors have
to do is convince the outside directors and they control the company.
If things go well, this shouldn't matter.  So long as you seem to
be advancing rapidly, most investors will leave you alone.  But
things don't always go smoothly in startups.  Investors have made
trouble even for the most successful companies.  One of the most
famous examples is Apple, whose board made a nearly fatal blunder
in firing Steve Jobs.  Apparently even Google got a lot of grief
from their investors early on.
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
When I said at the beginning that if you make something users want,
you'll be fine, you may have noticed I didn't mention anything about
having the right business model.  That's not because making money
is unimportant.  I'm not suggesting that founders start companies
with no chance of making money in the hope of unloading them before
they tank.  The reason we tell founders not to worry about the
business model initially is that making something people want is
so much harder.
I don't know why it's so hard to make something people want.  It
seems like it should be straightforward.  But you can tell it must
be hard by how few startups do it.
Because making something people want is so much harder than making
money from it, you should leave business models for later, just as
you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2.  In version
1, solve the core problem.  And the core problem in a startup is
how to
create wealth
(= how much people want something x the number
who want it), not how to convert that wealth into money.
The companies that win are the ones that put users first.  Google,
for example.  They made search work, then worried about how to make
money from it.  And yet some startup founders still think it's
irresponsible not to focus on the business model from the beginning.
They're often encouraged in this by investors whose experience comes
from less malleable industries.
It
is
irresponsible not to think about business models.  It's
just ten times more irresponsible not to think about the product.
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
Nearly all programmers would rather spend their time writing code
and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money
from it.  And not just the lazy ones.  Larry and Sergey apparently
felt this way too at first.  After developing their new search
algorithm, the first thing they tried was to get some other company
to buy it.
Start a company?  Yech.  Most hackers would rather just have ideas.
But as Larry and Sergey found, there's not much of a market for
ideas.  No one trusts an idea till you embody it in a product and
use that to grow a user base.  Then they'll pay big time.
Maybe this will change, but I doubt it will change much.  There's
nothing like users for convincing acquirers.  It's not just that
the risk is decreased.  The acquirers are human, and they have a
hard time paying a bunch of young guys millions of dollars just for
being clever.  When the idea is embodied in a company with a lot
of users, they can tell themselves they're buying the users rather
than the cleverness, and this is easier for them to swallow.
[
9
]
If you're going to attract users, you'll probably have to get up
from your computer and go find some.  It's unpleasant work, but if
you can make yourself do it you have a much greater chance of
succeeding.  In the first batch of startups we funded, in the summer
of 2005, most of the founders spent all their time building their
applications.  But there was one who was away half the time talking
to executives at cell phone companies, trying to arrange deals.
Can you imagine anything more painful for a hacker?
[
10
]
But it
paid off, because this startup seems the most successful of that
group by an order of magnitude.
If you want to start a startup, you have to face the fact that you
can't just hack.  At least one hacker will have to spend some of
the time doing business stuff.
17. Fights Between Founders
Fights between founders are surprisingly common.  About 20% of the
startups we've funded have had a founder leave.  It happens so often
that we've reversed our attitude to vesting.  We still don't require
it, but now we advise founders to vest so there will be an orderly
way for people to quit.
A founder leaving doesn't necessarily kill a startup, though.  Plenty
of successful startups have had that happen.
[
11
]
Fortunately it's
usually the least committed founder who leaves.  If there are three
founders and one who was lukewarm leaves, big deal.  If you have
two and one leaves, or a guy with critical technical skills leaves,
that's more of a problem.  But even that is survivable.  Blogger
got down to one person, and they bounced back.
Most of the disputes I've seen between founders could have been
avoided if they'd been more careful about who they started a company
with.  Most disputes are not due to the situation but the people.
Which means they're inevitable.  And most founders who've been
burned by such disputes probably had misgivings, which they suppressed,
when they started the company.  Don't suppress misgivings.  It's
much easier to fix problems before the company is started than
after.  So don't include your housemate in your startup because
he'd feel left out otherwise.  Don't start a company with someone
you dislike because they have some skill you need and you worry you
won't find anyone else.  The people are the most important ingredient
in a startup, so don't compromise there.
18. A Half-Hearted Effort
The failed startups you hear most about are the spectacular
flameouts.  Those are actually the elite of failures.  The most
common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the
one that doesn't do much of anything — the one we never even hear
about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the
side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere
and was gradually abandoned.
Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the
most important thing is to quit your day job.  Most founders of
failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and most founders of
successful ones do.  If startup failure were a disease, the CDC
would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.
Does that mean you should quit your day job?  Not necessarily.  I'm
guessing here, but I'd guess that many of these would-be founders
may not have the kind of determination it takes to start a company,
and that in the back of their minds, they know it.  The reason they
don't invest more time in their startup is that they know it's a
bad investment.
[
12
]
I'd also guess there's some band of people who could have succeeded
if they'd taken the leap and done it full-time, but didn't. I have
no idea how wide this band is, but if the winner/borderline/hopeless
progression has the sort of distribution you'd expect, the number
of people who could have made it, if they'd quit their day job, is
probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who do make
it.
[
13
]
If that's true, most startups that could succeed fail because the
founders don't devote their whole efforts to them.  That certainly
accords with what I see out in the world.  Most startups fail because
they don't make something people want, and the reason most don't
is that they don't try hard enough.
In other words, starting startups is just like everything else.
The biggest mistake you can make is not to try hard enough.  To the
extent there's a secret to success, it's not to be in denial about
that.
Notes
[
1
]
This is not a complete list of the causes of failure,
just those you can control.  There are also several you can't,
notably ineptitude and bad luck.
[
2
]
Ironically, one variant of the Facebook that might work is a
facebook exclusively for college students.
[
3
]
Steve Jobs tried to motivate people by saying "Real artists
ship."  This is a fine sentence, but unfortunately not true.  Many
famous works of art are unfinished.  It's true in fields that have
hard deadlines, like architecture and filmmaking, but even there
people tend to be tweaking stuff till it's yanked out of their
hands.
[
4
]
There's probably also a second factor: startup founders tend
to be at the leading edge of technology, so problems they face are
probably especially valuable.
[
5
]
You should take more than you think you'll need, maybe 50% to
100% more, because software takes longer to write and deals longer
to close than you expect.
[
6
]
Since people sometimes call us VCs, I should add that we're
not.  VCs invest large amounts of other people's money.  We invest
small amounts of our own, like angel investors.
[
7
]
Not linearly of course, or it would take forever to raise five
million dollars.  In practice it just feels like it takes forever.
Though if you include the cases where VCs don't invest, it would
literally take forever in the median case.  And maybe we should,
because the danger of chasing large investments is not just that
they take a long time.  That's the
best
case.  The real danger
is that you'll expend a lot of time and get nothing.
[
8
]
Some VCs will offer you an artificially low valuation to see
if you have the balls to ask for more.  It's lame that VCs play
such games, but some do.  If you're dealing with one of those you
should push back on the valuation a bit.
[
9
]
Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told
them "Google Video is badly designed.  Give us $10 million and we'll
tell you all the mistakes you made."  They would have gotten
the royal raspberry.  Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion
for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves
that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague
thing like that.
I don't mean to be hard on Google.  They did better than their
competitors, who may have now missed the video boat entirely.
[
10
]
Yes, actually: dealing with the government.  But phone companies
are up there.
[
11
]
Many more than most people realize, because companies don't advertise
this.  Did you know Apple originally had three founders?
[
12
]
I'm not dissing these people.  I don't have the determination
myself.  I've twice come close to starting startups since Viaweb,
and both times I bailed because I realized that without the spur
of poverty I just wasn't willing to endure the stress of a startup.
[
13
]
So how do you know whether you're in the category of people
who should quit their day job, or the presumably larger one who
shouldn't?  I got to the point of saying that this was hard to judge
for yourself and that you should seek outside advice, before realizing
that that's what we do.  We think of ourselves as investors, but
viewed from the other direction Y Combinator is a service for
advising people whether or not to quit their day job.  We could be
mistaken, and no doubt often are, but we do at least bet money on
our conclusions.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Greg McAdoo, and Robert Morris
for reading drafts of this.
Japanese Translation
Spanish Translation
Romanian Translation
Chinese Translation
Arabic Translation


@lacker @octal Medieval Technology and Social Change.

@AliceFromQueens Why do you waste your time on this guy?

@shadow5gw This is a verbatim quote from a DoD Twitter account.

@BrooksHalladay How to Think for Yourself: https://t.co/Sqk7Yo82YO

Two Kinds of Moderate: https://t.co/ogMaJHrydF

@JonnyLomond @mtgreenee If so we need to hear her say it explicitly, because this is unprecedented.

@mtgreenee Which shifts are you referring to?

"...the ENTIRE Pentagon is working against you..."

— DoD Twitter account on the Secretary of Defense

@StefanFSchubert Not of smoking, but of manufactured cigarettes. There was plenty of smoking before the appearance of manufactured cigarettes. (I can't believe I actually got to Schubert you.)

@kael_orion @AlecLace Trump is not running the country as if he were in a startup. He's running the country like a mafia boss with dementia.

@AlecLace Exactly. These examples show that, contrary to Trump's claims, it is possible to deport large numbers of people with due process, if you do it in an organized way.


When people end up in popular culture, it's often for some accidental thing. But if I end up being regarded as the bogeyman of inflated diction, I'll take that. You could do a lot worse.

For example, I can't imagine anyone at Google saying this in 2005, or anyone at Microsoft saying it in 1995. They might have hoped it, but they wouldn't have said it. Maybe hardware has more moats. Maybe this guy is just outspoken. But either way, this is a rare type of claim.

I'm retweeting this not because I believe it (or disbelieve it), but as a data point about the level of confidence within NVIDIA. It could well be justified. I don't know enough to say. But 10 year predictions like this are extremely rare in tech.

@SvenSchnieders @mmay3r If it doesn't work and they keep doing it, idiots seems the perfect description, no?

@cxzdeer Define yourself for example by the search for the truth, and if you end up believing the same things as whatever other groups, so what?

@samivogeleins I was thinking of the way the SNP has made Scotland a laughing stock with their Orwellian "hate speech" laws. But it's also true of people who want to avoid "whiteness," and people who think their country's English needs to be different from the UK's.

@zarrasvand It's true of extremists on both sides, but above all it's true of nationalists.

@lexbyanyname But blocking traffic in the name of <cause> doesn't make people demand that their leaders do something about it, does it?

@mmay3r You're restricting yourself too much by looking for logical explanations. I think the people organizing these things are simply idiots, and that what we're seeing is mostly "But <cause> goes up to 11."

@RealTimeWWII Head-faked yet again by reading the tweet before looking at the name of the account.


11 yo: Remember those barbarians who lived on the Scottish border?

Me: You mean our ancestors?

11 yo: Oh, yeah.

From the shadowbanned Miguel de Icaza:

Yes.   This is why once you grasp MMY you pull your hair equally whether a democrat or a republican discuss the economy.

It is all middle-ages bloodlettings as far as the eye can see.

@mikestaub Of course there is. If they turn down a startup, someone else will often fund it, and then they'll see what they missed. This happens *constantly*.

@ESYudkowsky YC invests the earliest of anyone. If anyone should worry about the reactions of later stage investors, they should. But all they care about is how promising the company seems.

@ESYudkowsky Are you sure? It's unlikely that he would say that, because the later the stage of investment, the more all that matters is revenue growth, and surely Peter is experienced enough to know that.

@Charl3sZ @losslandscape This is a useful tweet in the sense that it's perfectly wrong. It explicitly spells out the mistaken belief that so many people have. To consciously discriminate based on race, VCs would have to forego lots of money. But no one who knows VCs finds that plausible.

@joseppudev Unlikely. That was not a growth business. They'd have been investing in manufacturing and railroads.

@veronica_humble At most. More like 18 months.

@bast_i I said in this thread that I have. The way they overcorrect for their previous biases is an instance of bias.

@proales You're changing the meaning of "winner" in the course of your tweet. The first time it means people with the right characteristics to succeed, and the second time it means people who end up winning.


I prefer things that are better when bought used. There are some things that get worse when they get a little use, and others that get better, and I prefer the latter. Books, houses, furniture, paintings, pottery. Even my cars I bought used.

@Smizzyyyy It is.

Today's the last you'll hear of 11 yo incidentally. Tomorrow he becomes 12 yo.

We all go out to play basketball and after 20 minutes everyone has reverted to type: 15 yo is shooting baskets perfectly, I'm giving history lectures, and 11 yo is doing a bit about a gang he's supposedly in and menacing us with a water pistol.

@iotukoya It would depend if the double entendre was intentional or not.

@Charlie533080 Let the guy change his mind. Even if he's a late arrival at reasonableness, he's still, sadly, in the top few percent.

@mstafford Not yet but I plan to.

@dottechdomains I buy used books almost exclusively. The median book in a new bookstore was published in the last 2 or 3 years, but only a small percentage of the best books ever were.

@MacaesBruno If not supporters.

@asciidiego It's a constant background worry where to draw the line.


@DavidSacks What You Can't Say (2004): https://t.co/qF7ab5MsJv

Orthodox Privilege (2020): https://t.co/dPt2rcqE7D

The Four Quadrants of Conformism (2020): https://t.co/bSD3DmjgAK

Heresy (2022): https://t.co/JLU3mAgLcU

@henhaohank @IAPonomarenko I haven't made any predictions about Ukraine as far as I know. I don't post obsessively about it. That's the whole point here. Why does he?

@ColmCasey Of course. Wokeness peaked in 2020, meaning it has been in decline since then, and Democrats have been in power for almost all of that time.

@Suhail At first I read this as you were going to spend the day playing with model trains...

@thackerpd It would be someone who chooses candidates based on charisma. Which is not that uncommon.

@ravroberts @IAPonomarenko And yet I'm mystified. But I'll ask around. Maybe someone knows something...

@tjernlund @IAPonomarenko That seems unlikely. The US government wastes money in so many ways. None of them seem to get this kind of attention.

@IAPonomarenko He's a step below even aspiring to intellectual humility. He's an outright liar. The mystery is why. Why Ukraine? Is he motivated by hope of gain or fear of loss, and if so what does he hope to gain or fear to lose?

@RyanMorey An aggressive, performative advocacy of social justice.

@mattturck There's nothing unusual about this. Young companies with the prospect of high growth are always highly priced. Not all deliver, but a sufficiently large group of them will deliver, on average.


@migueldeicaza Are you shadow-banned again?

@cperciva Of course we do. Think how far back we go.

@cperciva We love you anyway cperciva!

I got 25/36 on this facial expression reading test. I was curious how Jessica would do, so I sent it to her. She got 36/36. She really is the social radar. (via @markessien)

https://t.co/7QQaR9xupB

@shw1nm The number of startups the partners can interview is effectively fixed, but if there are more good startups, they'll accept a higher percentage of those they interview.

@Tomek_Duda I'm more annoyed by problems in my own.

Y Combinator applications for the summer batch were up 12.5% from a year ago. Don't worry, though, this doesn't necessarily mean you have a lower chance of being accepted. If more good startups apply, the partners just accept more.

@jbelevate A lot of successful startups have multiple founders of this type. Nate Blecharczyk is not exactly a slacker for example.

@ruddro29 They each think "I want to be CEO."

@ruddro29 It may be what they claim, but it's not what they think.


@0xluffy Surprising new ideas.

@0xluffy Hype, bogusness, fashion, dishonesty.

@Noahpinion On the other hand I remember being told recently that a focus on correctness was one of the weaknesses, or at least idiosyncrasies, of this group.

@TristanSnell Do you think Biden should stay in the race?

@0xnerdtard I would be extremely surprised if he was a televangelist. He seems completely unsuited for it.

@hamadamahdii I've known Robert since I was 21.

@carolynwilsonSF He doesn't have a Twitter account though.

@burkenbine_mark What username? (I don't have a backup account.)

It's so reassuring to talk to Robert Morris. It reminds me that there's at least one person who likes and dislikes the same things.

@AntonHristov Much better shape.


@itskevinjin It's still worth learning to draw too.

@Rainmaker1973 This seems way off. Here's what OWID says: https://t.co/3Rc5HKtuc2

@MRamirezCal @apurvahendi I wouldn't make them learn programming well enough to do it as a job, but I'd want them to learn at least the basics, in the same way I'd want them to learn to read or do arithmetic.

@Rainmaker1973 Looks rather underpowered with those little sails.

@CallMeOuta Work on ambitious projects of your own.

@apurvahendi Programming is how you control the most powerful machines humans have ever made.

@johnmsteen Wow, thanks, that made my day to read!

@gildner If it were you'd see declining compensation, and boy do you not.

People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason why not to. This time it's AI, last time it was that tech was over because the Internet Bubble burst, the time before that it was that all the programming jobs were going to be outsourced to India.

@Itsjoeco You care about good government, and not just at the activist level, but at the nerd level.


@LifeMathMoney @BasedMikeLee Everyone can see the point he's trying to make. But it's interesting that he's dumb enough to use such an obviously false claim in order to make it, and also interesting that his view of the world is so insular that he'd forget about the existence of dual citizens.

@BasedMikeLee That's not true. Americans who are also citizens of other countries vote in those countries' elections.

How can you be a U.S. senator and not know that?

@MattMoynihan1 @lexfridman @realDonaldTrump How is asking him if he believes he won not a question? I would love to know the answer to this, since as far as I can tell both possible answers seem about equally likely.

@darren_olivier How did it get to South Africa?

@Carnage4Life Sometimes this is true. If you work hard to discover a new field to explore, you then get to explore it.

Good God. And yet this seems possible, the way things are now.

This is why YC digs into founders' technical qualifications.

@lexfridman @realDonaldTrump Ask Trump if he genuinely believes that he won the 2020 election, and if so why the rest of his party didn't support him. Because surely if the Democrats had actually stolen the election, the Republican leadership wouldn't have let themselves just be walked over.

@tommygnr @kayyar1 If the company had assets worth as much as they owed.

@bosmeny To get what they thought would be extra growth. But then there was a market downturn.

@levie I don't know about that. AI seems more disruptive.


Why Twitter is a Big Deal
April 2009
Om Malik
is the most recent of many people
to ask why Twitter is such a big deal.
The reason is that it's a new messaging
protocol, where you don't specify the recipients.
New protocols are rare.  Or more precisely, new
protocols that take off are.
There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP
(the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on.  So any
new protocol is a big deal.  But Twitter is a protocol owned
by a private company.  That's even rarer.
Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter
have been slow to monetize it may in the long run
prove to be an advantage.  Because they haven't tried
to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like
previous protocols.  One forgets it's owned by a
private company.  That must have made it easier for
Twitter to spread.


@hungrysohan Sure, rewrite it in a dialect of Lisp. More powerful language = fewer lines of code = less room for bugs to hide.

@ShaanVP I've been doing office hours with startups the whole time. We come back every summer to check in with YC and talk to the new startups.

@ugamkamat YC went remote during Covid and now has gone back to in-person.

@sarmadgulzar I can't predict anything about the *rate* because it depends on who applies, but the absolute number of startups accepted should increase.

The AI revolution is causing more and more people with technical backgrounds to start their own companies, and the reason is an exciting one: there are more ideas now for things to build. What a great thing to be able to say, that there are more ideas.

YC feels more like early YC now than it has for 10 years. Partly because Garry is doing such a good job, and partly because the founders are more technical than ever, due to AI.

@dwlz Did you paint that?

Today we were trying to come up with a domain name for an enterprise software startup, so to get ideas for good words to use I asked ChatGPT to pretend to be a VP at a big, boring company writing a memo about what this company does. It was revoltingly good at it.

@Suhail This is such a constant pain in the ass.

@paultoo Thanks PB!


@cristianmoreno What can I say, Ron's a great guy.

@sarmadgulzar Left.

@salambus Heavens no.

Can anyone guess who I'm talking to? https://t.co/uDZyQna0kw

@Arbitrary_user That could be. If so, Twitter acts as a sort of magnifying glass.

Why capital punishment is a bad idea: What if you convict someone who's innocent? Then you're committing murder.

You think that's an edge case, that it's rare for innocent people to be convicted? It isn't rare. It happens all the time. All. The. Time.

@Richard_Florida That's definitely part of it, but I've seen people in very legit disciplines like math and medicine doing it too. And observations like Sayre's Law suggest the phenomenon isn't inherently field-specific.

@NAChristakis Actually one of the most dramatic episodes of this type that I've witnessed was when a couple of other Yale professors came after you.

Incidentally, before anyone decides to pretend that I said "all professors," notice that I said "many professors." Obviously not all professors are petty and dishonest. And the proportion who are probably varies dramatically by field.

@0xluffy Many!


The Reddits
March 2024
I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they
were one of the reasons we started it.
YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the
undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone
else in the audience was probably local, but Steve and Alexis came
up on the train from the University of Virginia, where they were
seniors. Since they'd come so far I agreed to meet them for coffee.
They told me about the startup idea we'd later fund them to drop:
a way to order fast food on your cellphone.
This was before smartphones. They'd have had to make deals with
cell carriers and fast food chains just to get it launched. So it
was not going to happen. It still doesn't exist, 19 years later.
But I was impressed with their brains and their energy. In fact I
was so impressed with them and some of the other people I met at
that talk that I decided to start something to fund them. A few
days later I told Steve and Alexis that we were starting Y Combinator,
and encouraged them to apply.
That first batch we didn't have any way to identify applicants, so
we made up nicknames for them. The Reddits were the "Cell food
muffins." "Muffin" is a term of endearment Jessica uses for things
like small dogs and two year olds. So that gives you some idea what
kind of impression Steve and Alexis made in those days. They had
the look of slightly ruffled surprise that baby birds have.
Their idea was bad though. And since we thought then that we were
funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt
bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected the muffins. And
it seemed wrong to me to turn down the people we'd been inspired
to start YC to fund.
I don't think the startup sense of the word "pivot" had been invented
yet, but we wanted to fund Steve and Alexis, so if their idea was
bad, they'd have to work on something else. And I knew what else.
In those days there was a site called Delicious where you could
save links. It had a page called del.icio.us/popular that listed
the most-saved links, and people were using this page as a de facto
Reddit. I knew because a lot of the traffic to my site was coming
from it. There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but
designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving
them.
So I called Steve and Alexis and said that we liked them, just not
their idea, so we'd fund them if they'd work on something else.
They were on the train home to Virginia at that point. They got off
at the next station and got on the next train north, and by the end
of the day were committed to working on what's now called Reddit.
They would have liked to call it Snoo, as in "What snoo?" But
snoo.com was too expensive, so they settled for calling the mascot
Snoo and picked a name for the site that wasn't registered. Early
on Reddit was just a provisional name, or so they told me at least,
but it's probably too late to change it now.
As with all the really great startups, there's an uncannily close
match between the company and the founders. Steve in particular.
Reddit has a certain personality — curious, skeptical, ready to
be amused — and that personality is Steve's.
Steve will roll his eyes at this, but he's an intellectual; he's
interested in ideas for their own sake. That was how he came to be
in that audience in Cambridge in the first place. He knew me because
he was interested in a programming language I've written about
called Lisp, and Lisp is one of those languages few people learn
except out of intellectual curiosity. Steve's kind of vacuum-cleaner
curiosity is exactly what you want when you're starting a site
that's a list of links to literally anything interesting.
Steve was not a big fan of authority, so he also liked the idea of
a site without editors. In those days the top forum for programmers
was a site called Slashdot. It was a lot like Reddit, except the
stories on the frontpage were chosen by human moderators. And though
they did a good job, that one small difference turned out to be a
big difference. Being driven by user submissions meant Reddit was
fresher than Slashdot. News there was newer, and users will always
go where the newest news is.
I pushed the Reddits to launch fast. A version one didn't need to
be more than a couple hundred lines of code. How could that take
more than a week or two to build? And they did launch comparatively
fast, about three weeks into the first YC batch. The first users
were Steve, Alexis, me, and some of their YC batchmates and college
friends. It turns out you don't need that many users to collect a
decent list of interesting links, especially if you have multiple
accounts per user.
Reddit got two more people from their YC batch: Chris Slowe and
Aaron Swartz, and they too were unusually smart. Chris was just
finishing his PhD in physics at Harvard. Aaron was younger, a college
freshman, and even more anti-authority than Steve. It's not
exaggerating to describe him as a martyr for what authority later
did to him.
Slowly but inexorably Reddit's traffic grew. At first the numbers
were so small they were hard to distinguish from background noise.
But within a few weeks it was clear that there was a core of real
users returning regularly to the site. And although all kinds of
things have happened to Reddit the company in the years since,
Reddit the
site
never looked back.
Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing
that it's almost unkillable. Which is why, despite a long stretch
after Steve left when the management strategy ranged from benign
neglect to spectacular blunders, traffic just kept growing. You
can't do that with most companies. Most companies you take your eye
off the ball for six months and you're in deep trouble. But Reddit
was special, and when Steve came back in 2015, I knew the world was
in for a surprise.
People thought they had Reddit's number: one of the players in
Silicon Valley, but not one of the big ones. But those who knew
what had been going on behind the scenes knew there was more to the
story than this. If Reddit could grow to the size it had with
management that was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve
came back? We now know the answer to that question. Or at least a
lower bound on the answer. Steve is not out of ideas yet.


@growing_daniel Most startups have a core of things in common. In fact it's surprising how large this core is. If you have enough data, as YC does from funding 5000 startups, you can get an accurate picture of this core, and you can automate startups to the extent it's possible.

@t_blom There were always extremists on both sides. But if you ignore them and consider only the opinions of the moderates, they're mostly not fans of wokeness.

I don't get why anyone would prefer Zoom for a two-person call. Surely an old-fashioned voice call is better. You can pace and think about what you're talking about instead of focusing on the other person's face. This is why you have better conversations walking side by side.

@waitbutwhy Well, one difference is why people are interested in it. If someone runs a long distance, the people who want to hear about it are motivated by simple admiration. Here the motivations of the people who are interested are mixed with (in fact consist mostly of) something else.

@acambridgediary Reminds me of the way Bruegel always hides people.

@growing_daniel Or more likely the Chinese arranged for another Chinese app to "emerge as an alternative."

@CburgesCliff Ask AI to generate a reply for you. Only fair.

I had a feeling of deja vu waiting for an overloaded ChatGPT to answer me. It was just like waiting for web pages to load in 1996. This is what the future feels like, when the new thing can barely keep up with demand, but people want it so much they endure the delays.

@nic_carter You're so slow-witted that I refuted you before you even posted this.

https://t.co/84VC5Mw9mO

@nathancofnas Come on, you can't deny there is *some* racism in America. I mean there are people who openly claim to be racist. Are you saying we shouldn't take them at their word?


The most striking thing I've noticed so far was the degree to which the atomic theory was an act of faith for Dalton at first. Almost all his numbers were wrong, but he was convinced the basic theory was right because it was so elegant.

Another very surprising thing I noticed is that even as late as 1830 chemists were still undecided about whether to treat oxygen or hydrogen as the unit of atomic weight. Thomson was in the oxygen camp!

Why good comedians tend to be short.

The reason AI coding works so well is that the source code of the median app was already slop before LLMs.

If you haven't heard of Stoke yet, you will. I've seen few startups with their combination of perfect execution and huge market.

Next to my mouse I keep its ancient ancestor, this massive Paleolithic flint handaxe. https://t.co/zJwRTylEY6

I agree that kids should be kids. I dislike the idea of high school students starting startups, let alone 12 year olds. But I disagree that it's impossible. There are some kids who could do it, and saying it's impossible is dangerously encouraging for them.

It's better to tell ambitious young would-be founders the truth. You might well be able to start a successful startup, but that doesn't mean you should. Both you and the startup will be better off if you learn more, and live more, first.

I donated. I don't agree with all his positions, but Massie is a man of principle, and that is what we need more of right now.

Here's a sign of how upstanding this operation is. They refunded half the money I donated because I used a card that wasn't from a joint account, and I was over the limit for a single donor.


@jfleming2870 Do you know *any* of the details of that case? Because I know a lot.

@jfleming2870 Yes, that's exactly how he knows how corrupt the CFPB is.

@LandsknechtPike And only in the more expensive pictures at that.

@ShJavokhir I live in England.

I found this hard to believe, but it's really true. The movement against plastic straws began with a mistaken statistic in a 9 year old boy's school project that went viral. How can plastic straws still be banned anywhere?

@top_jeet_ No, that's not what I was trying to say. The fact that YC itself has a feminine energy doesn't mean the founders it funds do.

A few decades from now, when we really understand AI, what about our current understanding of it will seem quaintly rooted in past ideas?

I hope the answer is not the assumption that our understanding of AI is what matters, rather than AI's understanding of AI.

When a big new thing appears, we tend to think of it initially in terms of the old thing. For example, people thought of cars and trains as mechanized carriages initially, before starting to see them as their own thing. How are we doing this with AI? https://t.co/WE3oAdu4jj

@JDVance It's true that trolls on the internet don't threaten your kids. What threatens your kids, or at least some people's kids, is that he seems like he may well believe the things he said, and if so presumably acts on those beliefs in real life.

@farhip I was decent at programming at 19. I could have truthfully called myself an expert at writing Basic applications for the TRS-80 and the IBM PC.


@jdmccafferty Ouch, very much after.

@incitafusio Can he be recalled?

@Object_Zero_ @StefanFSchubert The answers to those questions are so obvious that I'll leave them to you to answer.

@nicharry @StefanFSchubert Yes, if they're driven and charismatic.

@Object_Zero_ @StefanFSchubert That's easy. All you need is to be more charismatic than your opponent.

@StefanFSchubert Someone who wasn't smart might be ok if they were cautious and reasonable. This is a uniquely bad combination of stupid and impulsive.

@BitcoinTweets2 The growth rates of the most successful startups are faster.

@ntkris Sure, if they tank the whole US (or even world) economy.

@avoanjali Things are much better in crypto now. In general there's good news on the technical fronts.

The economic signals I and other people in the startup business are getting are so weirdly mixed right now. It's half AI generating unprecedented growth, and half politicians making unprecedentedly stupid policy decisions.


@UnicornExit As an essayist I have a professional interest in movements that try to suppress ideas.

@fahad19 @brian_armstrong Possibly. Or the riots.

@johnsw I was surprised too. Earlier versions would have.

@micsolana Set a thief to catch a thief.

@Dylanviaa Yes, it seems to me that it peaked in 2020 or 2021.

@sarmadgulzar Enough people saw how bad it was.

@drmarkhyman @vijaypande @daisydwolf @a16z Apparently no one is getting this, but I'm just joking about the fact that the original post said "two incredible experts."

@vijaypande @drmarkhyman @daisydwolf @a16z Don't worry, I'm just joking about how there are situations where using "incredible" as a synonym for "really good" ends up suggesting the opposite of what you intend.

ChatGPT 4o on when wokeness peaked: https://t.co/uGxwoYOJ7r

@drmarkhyman @vijaypande @daisydwolf @a16z I realize this is a bit of a nit pick, but I really prefer credible experts.


@RatheeJaisal See, it happens to all his fans.

Approaching the Eric Clapton concert venue:

Jessica: It doesn't seem very crowded.

Me: Maybe all the fans have died.

Jessica: Paul!

Me: Were you thinking that too?

Jessica: Yeah.

@Bakri1 Yeah. It was really good. As good as last year if not better.

@ycombinator @xuster When you notice a mistake that big that early, just delete and repost.

Clapton still has it. https://t.co/PR2vaWsaQD

@RobertMSterling At first I misread "Expansive."

@MorePerfectUS That's false, because there would be far less wealth. Who would work their ass off to start Microsoft or Google if they knew they wouldn't get to keep any of the money?

@CcibChris What surprised you about flying it?

@pdhsu It's not high status per se, but it's correlated with high status because people who do it tend to succeed.

@krishan711 @AdameMedia Thanks, it made me smile to read this.


Something I explained to 13 yo: There is no intrinsically fair price for any commodity, just the market price. Most people have no problem understanding that. Until the commodity is labor. Then suddenly it becomes hard to understand.

@jusuf26774430 @THEREALJEW613 I don't think the Mossad would be so incompetent. Replies like this damage Israel's image more than they help it. I think these are real individuals. Which is pretty frightening, when you think about it.

@buckitk0830 Let me just fix that for you.

@0xb7cC3 I live in England.

@tracewoodgrains My God, can you imagine?

@mattyglesias That is exactly right! I am very impressed. Don't take this the wrong way, but I had you down as someone who mostly thinks about politics...

@JonHaidt @LetGrowOrg Riding a bicycle without a helmet. Flying on a 747. Toyshops. McDonald's food that was good. Observation decks at airports.

@mmay3r @daltonc The big thing that happened when factories got electrified was that the sources of motion got distributed. Each lathe had a motor in it instead of them all being driven by one overhead belt. Unlikely the similarity extends that far, but I thought I'd mention it.

@midpackergeek Every Palestinian? Surely you can't really believe that every Palestinian has their own personal Hannibal Directive? That there is not one person in all of Gaza who just wants to raise their kids in peace?

@neemeenoo Many Israelis disagree with Netanyahu's policies. But, yes, judging from these replies, some of his supporters seem to be really bad people.


What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
February 2015
One of the most valuable exercises you can try if you want to
understand startups is to look at the most successful companies and
explain why they were not as lame as they seemed when they first
launched.  Because they practically all seemed lame at first. Not
just small, lame.  Not just the first step up a big mountain.  More
like the first step into a swamp.
A Basic interpreter for the Altair?  How could that ever grow into
a giant company?  People sleeping on airbeds in strangers' apartments?
A web site for college students to stalk one another?  A wimpy
little single-board computer for hobbyists that used a TV as a
monitor?  A new search engine, when there were already about 10,
and they were all trying to de-emphasize search?  These ideas didn't
just seem small.  They seemed wrong.  They were the kind of ideas
you could not merely ignore, but ridicule.
Often the founders themselves didn't know why their ideas were
promising.  They were attracted to these ideas by instinct, because
they were
living in the future
and
they sensed that something was missing.  But they could not have
put into words exactly how their ugly ducklings were going to grow
into big, beautiful swans.
Most people's first impulse when they hear about a lame-sounding
new startup idea is to make fun of it.  Even a lot of people who
should know better.
When I encounter a startup with a lame-sounding idea, I ask "What
Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?"  Now it's a puzzle, and the
burden is on me to solve it.  Sometimes I can't think of an answer,
especially when the idea is a made-up one.  But it's remarkable how
often there does turn out to be an answer.  Often it's one the
founders themselves hadn't seen yet.
Intriguingly, there are sometimes multiple answers.  I talked to a
startup a few days ago that could grow into 3 distinct Microsofts.
They'd probably vary in size by orders of magnitude.  But you can
never predict how big a Microsoft is going to be, so in cases like
that I encourage founders to follow whichever path is most immediately
exciting to them.  Their instincts got them this far. Why stop now?


@jdmccafferty Beautiful too. At first glance I thought that was a painting.

@EduardoZindani @sarmadgulzar Like most human editors, AI will get you to 90th percentile writing. But for 10% of writers that's a step down.

@Chris_arnade I think what people mean by it is a politician specifically pandering to the dumbest part of the electorate.

To this day whenever I see the name Swapnil it reads as a Common Lisp function name. Maybe one of the list manipulation functions it inherited from Maclisp.

The intelligent converse of dismissing all the new AI startups as "GPT wrappers".

@candestra Up to a point.

One good thing about habitually taking super long to write things is that you don't slow down noticeably as you age.

@JohnDCook I meant mistakes in writing about power laws.

@JohnDCook Can you give some examples of common mistakes?

@basedpm An email with a lot of text, describing things they've achieved other than revenue growth.


@shashj Presumably the reason no one asked him what he was doing there was that it was so obvious they didn't need to.

@mhdksafa And the airdrops and airstrikes probably both consist of things made in the US, dropped by planes made in the US. Which shows how ridiculously inconsistent US policy is.

@grantf_sol They're on Substack.

As legacy publications decline, journalism is being reborn.

@leonmakk @dadiomov Depends how much risk you can tolerate and how hard you're willing to work.

@MaxWithNanos You don't have one friend or family member who's used either? I don't believe you.

Though on second thought there is a very plausible way that could be true...

@chrisadet @asemota How would I have even known "delve" was a ChatGPT tell if I hadn't seen data about it?

In fact I tweeted about it on March 30:

https://t.co/qYiyCOuf4t

@mttjon It's also my father's.

@brohmm I already bought a bunch of things at Bartrum's.

@ColmCasey @TK512 I have a couple times.


@whyvert @ZachG932 What's lost in that drop? Can you give some examples of hard words that someone with a score of .05 would know that someone with a score of -.15 wouldn't?

@Carnage4Life @dalmaer No, it isn't.

@lion_india @Carnage4Life Mere meaning strictly a manager, a manager but not the founder.

@robinhanson How Art Can Be Good: https://t.co/aSe6j3jcBE

@Carnage4Life No, it's doing the things a founder can do that a mere manager can't.

@hamiltonchan Thanks, Hamilton, fixed it.

@adamcarley Yeah, I mentioned that in the last footnote.

https://t.co/hzJ0pPLEtG

@mckaywrigley @garrytan No, and not by accident. Talks at YC events are usually off the record in order to encourage candor.

@ShaanVP I didn't use many examples of specific techniques because I didn't want this essay to describe how founder mode should be done, just to make the case that it exists. Describing how it should be done would take a year of research and be a book long.

@elonmusk As usual, this tweet is not the whole story.

"Evans, of Poplar Court, Newcastle, pleaded guilty to violent disorder and assaulting an emergency worker."

https://t.co/Q3PKT3jItA


@bwertz It's the ABE of IRL.

@_JohnWhelan @Jasielinvests I'm British by birth and live in England.

@mbateman English art most definitely had ups and downs. Although if you think Kneller was as good as van Dyck, you can at least save a lot of money.

This guy looks like he's thinking "Dude, we're not supposed to be *photographed* doing this. This kind of deal is supposed to happen behind the scenes, like with Airbnb in New York." https://t.co/u8lTINDBfo

You can tell from a lot of these people's facial expressions that they know they did something wrong.

@thatguybg Sounds familiar...

@AaronPeskin Indeed, who would know better than the main person responsible for the city's problems?

@escliu IRL the sky is not blue. But the books are great.

@TK512 If I go to London, but rarely in the country. Though people in England are so reserved it's hard to say for sure.

@Bradley_Moore None. There are a lot of bookshelves in our house.


Think like Feynman, write like Wodehouse.

@asiyetajwa @Csingh321 That is a very hard question, because most of my favorite writers are English. At the level of sentences definitely English. Possibly American at the level of ideas though; I'm not sure.

@Csingh321 To be honest though most people here are surprised to learn that. I grew up in America and seem American.

@michael_nielsen The rocket industry had a huge effect on the development of silicon chips. I believe it was the biggest source of demand. But it's possible that missiles would have been sufficient, without the space program.

Out my office window. A rare sight in southern England. https://t.co/vHsiAcbA5B

(Before anyone with a guilty conscience starts freaking out, I was explaining how Oswald Mosely managed to get so many followers despite apparently not having been very effective.)

Something I told 12 yo: There are so many people eager to follow Hitler-style leaders that anyone who sets up as one will draw a surprising number of followers.

@WhereHasThisCol You're trying too hard. You have to have a light touch to be funny.

@bscholl @brian_armstrong Then you wouldn't get any tax revenues at all from owners who weren't US citizens.

@HuncleEby It's a new feature available on some TVs where you gesture at the TV and the character on the screen makes the same gesture back at you.


Microsoft is Dead
April 2007
A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead.  I was talking
to a young startup founder about how Google was different from
Yahoo.  I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by
their fear of Microsoft.  That was why they'd positioned themselves
as a "media company" instead of a technology company.  Then I looked
at his face and realized he didn't understand.  It was as if I'd
told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid
80s.  Barry who?
Microsoft?  He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite
believe anyone would be frightened of them.
Microsoft cast
a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years
starting in the late 80s.
I can remember when it was IBM before them.  I mostly ignored this
shadow.  I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me
indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets.  And
because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow
disappeared.
But it's gone now.  I can sense that.  No one is even afraid of
Microsoft anymore.  They still make a lot of money—so does IBM,
for that matter.  But they're not dangerous.
When did Microsoft die, and of what?  I know they seemed dangerous
as late as 2001, because I wrote an
essay
then
about how they were
less dangerous than they seemed.   I'd guess they were dead by 2005.
I know when we started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft
as competition for the startups we funded.  In fact, we've never
even invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to
present to investors.  We invite Yahoo and Google and some other
Internet companies, but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft.
Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email.  They're in a
different world.
What killed them?  Four things, I think, all of them occurring
simultaneously in the mid 2000s.
The most obvious is Google.  There can only be one big man in town,
and they're clearly it.  Google is the most dangerous company
now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word.  Microsoft
can at best
limp
along afterward.
When did Google take the lead?  There will be a tendency to push
it back to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the
terms of the debate then.  I'd say they took the lead in
2005.  Gmail was one of the things that put them over the edge.
Gmail showed they could do more than search.
Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software,
if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And
that was the second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the
desktop is over.  It now seems inevitable that applications will
live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to
Photoshop
.  Even Microsoft sees that now.
Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax.  The x
in Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser
communicate with the server in the background while displaying a page.
(Originally the only way to communicate with the server was to
ask for a new page.) XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s
because they needed it for Outlook.  What they didn't realize was
that it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to
anyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.
The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming
language that runs in the browser.  Microsoft saw the danger of
Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could.
[
1
]
But eventually the open source world won, by producing
Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer
the way a tree grows over barbed wire.
The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet.  Anyone
who cares can have fast Internet access
now.  And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the
desktop.
The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple.
Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way
that is extremely rare in technology.
[
2
]
Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across
a computer running Windows.  Nearly all the people we fund at Y
Combinator use Apple laptops.  It was the same in the audience at
startup
school
.  All the computer people use Macs or Linux now.  Windows is for
grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s.  So not only does the
desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses
Microsoft's anyway.
And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music
too, with TV and phones on the way.
I'm glad Microsoft is dead.  They were like Nero or
Commodus—evil
in the way only inherited power can make you.  Because remember,
the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft.  They got it
from IBM.  The software business was overhung by a
monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about 2005.  For practically
its whole existence, that is.  One of the reasons "Web 2.0" has
such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not,
that this era of monopoly may finally be over.
Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something
broken could be fixed.  Is there some way Microsoft could come back?
In principle, yes.  To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount
of cash Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making
the rounds of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell
the idea for Google for a million dollars, and being turned down
by everyone.
The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant
hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a
company as rich as Microsoft.  They can't
hire
smart people anymore,
but they could buy as many as they wanted for only an order of magnitude
more. So if they wanted to be a contender
again, this is how they could do it:
Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups.  They could get substantially
    all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.
Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by
    lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.
I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it.  Microsoft's
biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they
suck.  They still think they can write software in house.  Maybe they
can, by the standards of the desktop world.  But that world ended
a few years ago.
I already know what the reaction to this essay will be.  Half the
readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable
company, and that I should be more
careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think
in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble.  The other half, the younger
half, will complain that this is old news.
See also:
Microsoft is Dead: the Cliffs Notes
Notes
[
1
]
It doesn't take a conscious effort to make software incompatible.
All you have to do is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which, if
you're a big company, you produce in copious quantities.  The
situation is analogous to the writing of "
literary
theorists
."  Most don't try to be obscure; they just don't make an
effort to be clear.  It wouldn't pay.
[
2
]
In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in
a way that's rare among technology companies.  If Apple's board
hadn't made that blunder, they wouldn't have had to bounce back.
Portuguese Translation
Simplified Chinese Translation
Korean Translation


What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
August 2009
Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office.
Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not
busy with architectural projects.  Though she'd heard a lot about
YC since the beginning, the last 9 months have been a total immersion.
I've been around the startup world for so long that it seems normal
to me, so I was curious to hear what had surprised her most about
it.  This was her list:
1. How many startups fail.
Kate knew in principle that startups
were very risky, but she was surprised to see how constant the
threat of failure was — not just for the minnows, but even for the
famous startups whose founders came to speak at YC dinners.
2. How much startups' ideas change.
As usual, by Demo Day about
half the startups were doing something significantly different than
they started with.  We encourage that.  Starting a startup is like
science in that you have to follow the truth wherever it leads.  In
the rest of the world, people don't start things till they're sure
what they want to do, and once started they tend to continue on their
initial path even if it's mistaken.
3. How little money it can take to start a startup.
In Kate's
world, everything is still physical and expensive.  You can barely
renovate a bathroom for the cost of starting a startup.
4. How scrappy founders are.
That was her actual word.  I agree
with her, but till she mentioned this it never occurred to me how
little this quality is appreciated in most of the rest of the world.
It wouldn't be a compliment in most organizations to call someone
scrappy.
What does it mean, exactly?  It's basically the diminutive form of
belligerent.  Someone who's scrappy manages to be both threatening
and undignified at the same time.   Which seems to me exactly what
one would want to be, in any kind of work.  If you're not threatening,
you're probably not doing anything new, and dignity is merely a
sort of plaque.
5. How tech-saturated Silicon Valley is.
"It seems like everybody
here is in the industry."  That isn't literally true, but there is
a qualitative difference between Silicon Valley and other places.
You tend to keep your voice down, because there's a good chance the
person at the next table would know some of the people you're talking
about.  I never felt that in Boston.  The good news is, there's
also a good chance the person at the next table could help you in
some way.
6. That the speakers at YC were so consistent in their advice.
Actually, I've noticed this too.  I always worry the speakers will
put us in an embarrassing position by contradicting what we tell the
startups, but it happens surprisingly rarely.
When I asked her what specific things she remembered speakers always
saying, she mentioned: that the way to succeed was to launch something
fast, listen to users, and then iterate; that startups required
resilience because they were always an emotional rollercoaster; and
that most VCs were sheep.
I've been impressed by how consistently the speakers advocate
launching fast and iterating.  That was contrarian advice 10 years
ago, but it's clearly now the established practice.
7. How casual successful startup founders are.
Most of the famous
founders in Silicon Valley are people you'd overlook on the street.
It's not merely that they don't dress up.  They don't project any
kind of aura of power either.  "They're not trying to impress
anyone."
Interestingly, while Kate said that she could never pick out
successful founders, she could recognize VCs, both by the way they
dressed and the way they carried themselves.
8. How important it is for founders to have people to ask for advice.
(I swear I didn't prompt this one.)  Without advice "they'd just
be sort of lost."  Fortunately, there are a lot of people to help
them.  There's a strong tradition within YC of helping other YC-funded
startups.  But we didn't invent that idea: it's just a slightly
more concentrated form of existing Valley culture.
9. What a solitary task startups are.
Architects are constantly
interacting face to face with other people, whereas doing a technology
startup, at least, tends to require long stretches of uninterrupted
time to work.  "You could do it in a box."
By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the "normal" world.
It's populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they
work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects
whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust
their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy.
That's also a fairly accurate description of the past.  So startup
culture may not merely be different in the way you'd expect any
subculture to be, but a leading indicator.
Japanese Translation


Fashionable Problems
December 2019
I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though
lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction
of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've
all worked on similar things.
Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly
conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never
dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working
on fashionable problems.
If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the
best places to look is in fields that people think have already been
fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding  you may notice a
pattern here. If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently
played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be
multiplied
by its enormous surface area.
The best protection against getting drawn into working on the same
things as everyone else may be to
genuinely
love
what you're doing.
Then you'll continue to work on it even if you make the same mistake
as other people and think that it's too marginal to matter.
Japanese Translation
Arabic Translation
French Translation


This looks like a shot from a dystopian movie. The symmetry, the shininess, the flags that look like cones, the guards with capes. Everything says dictator. https://t.co/xAzYeulEat

@pronounced_kyle At this point I'd settle for one who was both reasonable and lucid.

@MateuszAtCC @halfmeasures12 @markus_zechner @samdaceo No, because you can do better than random at estimating your chances.

@wealthpotion @JoeBiden I mean is in the sense of becomes. But he's not yet.

You knew both of those things. You're wasting all our time. So goodbye.

@halfmeasures12 @markus_zechner @samdaceo There are more of you than the Collisons, so if you average everyone's failure rate together you get a high number. But that means nothing for individual founders.

@halfmeasures12 @markus_zechner @samdaceo The failure rate for startups isn't constant. It varies depending on the abilities of the founders. If the Collisons started a new startup today it would almost certainly succeed, whereas if you started one it would almost certainly fail.

@markus_zechner @samdaceo 1. Learn to program.

2. Start a startup.

@Gundermgg @CJHandmer I will buy a copy.

@vigrtz It was next on the list.

@mattgreenfield I liked his books on Feynman and Schrodinger, so this is now on my radar.


The Patent Pledge
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 companies.
Maybe that was truer in the past, when more things were physical.
But regardless of whether patents are in general a good thing, there
do seem to be bad ways of using them.  And since bad uses of patents
seem to be increasing, there is an increasing call for patent reform.
The problem with patent reform is that it has to go through the
government.  That tends to be slow.  But recently I realized we can
also attack the problem downstream.  As well as pinching off the
stream of patents at the point where they're issued, we may in some
cases be able to pinch it off at the point where they're used.
One way of using patents that clearly does not encourage innovation
is when established companies with bad products use patents to
suppress small competitors with good products.  This is the type
of abuse we may be able to decrease without having to go through
the government.
The way to do it is to get the companies that are above pulling
this sort of trick to pledge publicly not to.  Then the ones that
won't make such a pledge will be very conspicuous.  Potential
employees won't want to work for them.  And investors, too, will
be able to see that they're the sort of company that competes by
litigation rather than by making good products.
Here's the pledge:
No first use of software patents against companies with less
    than 25 people.
I've deliberately traded precision for brevity.  The patent pledge
is not legally binding.  It's like Google's "Don't be evil." They
don't define what evil is, but by publicly saying that, they're
saying they're willing to be held to a standard that, say, Altria
is not.  And though constraining, "Don't be evil" has been good for
Google. Technology companies win by attracting the most productive
people, and the most productive people are attracted to employers
who hold themselves to a higher standard than the law requires.
[
1
]
The patent pledge is in effect a narrower but open source "Don't
be evil."  I encourage every technology company to adopt it.  If
you want to help fix patents, encourage your employer to.
Already most technology companies wouldn't sink to using patents
on startups.  You don't see Google or Facebook suing startups for
patent infringement. They don't need to.  So for the better technology
companies, the patent pledge requires no change in behavior.  They're
just promising to do what they'd do anyway.  And when all the
companies that won't use patents on startups have said so, the
holdouts will be very conspicuous.
The patent pledge doesn't fix every problem with patents.  It won't
stop patent trolls, for example; they're already pariahs.  But the
problem the patent pledge does fix may be more serious than the
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 attacking innovation at
the root.  Now there's something any individual can do about this
problem, without waiting for the government: ask companies where
they stand.
Patent Pledge Site
Notes:
[
1
]
Because the pledge is deliberately vague, we're going to need
common sense when intepreting it.  And even more vice versa: the
pledge is vague in order to make people use common sense when
interpreting it.
So for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the 25
people have to be employees, or whether contractors count too.  If
a company has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would
violate the patent pledge, it's probably still a dick move.
The Investment That Didn't Happen


@meekro On a forum a thousand people cheering loudly is hard to distinguish from everyone cheering. That's one of the problems with forums.

@iamarsibragimov Not in this case, I think, because wokeness was not itself a pendulum swing to the left. It was a distinct kind of social breakage that spanned several left-right cycles.

@yacineMTB Elon buying Twitter helped, but wokeness was already in decline. For example, most startup CEOs had already quietly and gradually followed Brian's lead.

It seems to me that the probability of a lab leak is high enough that we should just treat it as the default explanation unless the Chinese government can prove otherwise. Then instead of winning by not being transparent, they lose.

@sarmadgulzar A pendulum seems the wrong metaphor. What's swinging is not a point. Some things may have swung too much, but others probably not enough.

@JohnDCook Make sure the solar panel isn't connected.

80% of the "vibe shift" was the end of wokeness. The reason it happened so fast and so thoroughly was that wokeness consisted of a small number of zealots terrifying most moderates into submission. So it ended like a bubble bursting, and there is no going back.

The Victorians showed us how much is too much.

@xavierpladevall @abarrallen It's hard to predict startup outcomes.

Due process. Rule of law. The most important principles sound the most boring.


@marcelolima 1940 version: "It's not about helping Hitler. It's about ending this costly and senseless war."

This is a Republican senator saying this. I'm alarmed too. But also mystified. Why is Trump so eager to help Putin? I wish I could feel sure that this is simply ignorance and impulsiveness and not something more sinister.

@Kasparov63 I truly do not understand how America benefits from siding with Russia. It's so mystifying that I can't help wondering again whether Putin has some kind of hold over Trump.

@TomMatthews972 @akarlin Do you feel you can say with certainty that there are no professors who contributed more through their research  than they would have by focusing on university politics instead? Surely that is extremely unlikely.

@akarlin An outsider who doesn't understand a professor's research sees only one dimension he could be active in. But actually there are at least two.

@akarlin A professor who ignores campus politics to focus instead on important research (e.g. Einstein in Berlin in 1915) is not meekly holding his head down. His head is down because he's doing something that matters more.

@WhileTravelling No. Some of the most valuable moments at universities are the random conversations you have in person with faculty and fellow students.

The people who say that professors deserve to have their universities blown up are forgetting two other groups who will be hurt by the attack on them: our kids, who will be attending them as students, and all of us, who benefit from the research done at them.

@orthonormalist But not interpret them apparently.

@feelsdesperate Future students are innocent bystanders.