How to Convince Investors
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
August 2013
When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually
because they try to lift with their back.  The right way to lift
heavy things is to let your legs do the work.  Inexperienced founders
make the same mistake when trying to convince investors.  They try
to convince with their pitch.  Most would be better off if they let
their startup do the work — if they started by understanding why
their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this
well to investors.
Investors are looking for startups that will be very successful.
But that test is not as simple as it sounds.  In startups, as in a
lot of other domains, the distribution of outcomes follows a power
law, but in startups the curve is startlingly steep.  The big
successes are so big they
dwarf
the rest.  And since there are only
a handful each year (the conventional wisdom is 15), investors treat
"big success" as if it were binary.  Most are interested in you if
you seem like you have a chance, however small, of being one of the
15 big successes, and otherwise not.
[
1
]
(There are a handful of angels who'd be interested in a company
with a high probability of being moderately successful.  But angel
investors like big successes too.)
How do you seem like you'll be one of the big successes?  You need
three things: formidable founders, a promising market, and (usually)
some evidence of success so far.
Formidable
The most important ingredient is formidable founders.  Most investors
decide in the first few minutes whether you seem like a winner or
a loser, and once their opinion is set it's hard to change.
[
2
]
Every startup has reasons both to invest and not to invest.  If
investors think you're a winner they focus on the former, and if
not they focus on the latter.  For example, it might be a rich
market, but with a slow sales cycle.  If investors are impressed
with you as founders, they say they want to invest because it's a
rich market, and if not, they say they can't invest because of the
slow sales cycle.
They're not necessarily trying to mislead you.  Most investors are
genuinely unclear in their own minds why they like or dislike
startups.  If you seem like a winner, they'll like your idea more.
But don't be too smug about this weakness of theirs, because you
have it too; almost everyone does.
There is a role for ideas of course.  They're fuel for the fire
that starts with liking the founders.  Once investors like you,
you'll see them reaching for ideas: they'll be saying "yes, and you
could also do x."  (Whereas when they don't like you, they'll be
saying "but what about y?")
But the foundation of convincing investors is to seem formidable,
and since this isn't a word most people use in conversation much,
I should explain what it means.  A formidable person is one who
seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever
obstacles are in the way.  Formidable is close to confident, except
that someone could be confident and mistaken.  Formidable is roughly
justifiably confident.
There are a handful of people who are really good at seeming
formidable — some because they actually are very formidable and
just let it show, and others because they are more or less con
artists.
[
3
]
But most founders, including many who will go on
to start very successful companies, are not that good at seeming
formidable the first time they try fundraising.  What should they
do?
[
4
]
What they should not do is try to imitate the swagger of more
experienced founders.  Investors are not always that good at judging
technology, but they're good at judging confidence.  If you try to
act like something you're not, you'll just end up in an uncanny
valley.  You'll depart from sincere, but never arrive at convincing.
Truth
The way to seem most formidable as an inexperienced founder is to
stick to the truth.   How formidable you seem isn't a constant.  It
varies depending on what you're saying.  Most people can seem
confident when they're saying "one plus one is two," because they
know it's true.  The most diffident person would be puzzled and
even slightly contemptuous if they told a VC "one plus one is two"
and the VC reacted with skepticism.  The magic ability of people
who are good at seeming formidable is that they can do this with
the sentence "we're going to make a billion dollars a year."  But
you can do the same, if not with that sentence with some fairly
impressive ones, so long as you convince yourself first.
That's the secret.  Convince yourself that your startup is worth
investing in, and then when you explain this to investors they'll
believe you.  And by convince yourself, I don't mean play mind games
with yourself to boost your confidence.  I mean truly evaluate
whether your startup is worth investing in.  If it isn't, don't try
to raise money.
[
5
]
But if it is, you'll be telling the truth
when you tell investors it's worth investing in, and they'll sense
that.  You don't have to be a smooth presenter if you understand
something well and tell the truth about it.
To evaluate whether your startup is worth investing in, you have
to be a domain expert.  If you're not a domain expert, you can be
as convinced as you like about your idea, and it will seem to
investors no more than an instance of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Which in fact it will usually be.  And investors can tell fairly
quickly whether you're a domain expert by how well you answer their
questions.  Know everything about your market.
[
6
]
Why do founders persist in trying to convince investors of things
they're not convinced of themselves?  Partly because we've all been
trained to.
When my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell were in grad
school, one of their fellow students was on the receiving end of a
question from their faculty advisor that we still quote today.  When
the unfortunate fellow got to his last slide, the professor burst
out:
Which one of these conclusions do you actually believe?
One of the artifacts of the way schools are organized is that we
all get trained to talk even when we have nothing to say.  If you
have a ten page paper due, then ten pages you must write, even if
you only have one page of ideas.  Even if you have no ideas.  You
have to produce something.  And all too many startups go into
fundraising in the same spirit.  When they think it's time to raise
money, they try gamely to make the best case they can for their
startup.  Most never think of pausing beforehand to ask whether
what they're saying is actually convincing, because they've all
been trained to treat the need to present as a given — as an area
of fixed size, over which however much truth they have must needs
be spread, however thinly.
The time to raise money is not when you need it, or when you reach
some artificial deadline like a Demo Day.  It's when you can convince
investors, and not before.
[
7
]
And unless you're a good con artist, you'll never convince investors
if you're not convinced yourself.  They're far better at detecting
bullshit than you are at producing it, even if you're producing it
unknowingly.  If you try to convince investors before you've convinced
yourself, you'll be wasting both your time.
But pausing first to convince yourself will do more than save you
from wasting your time.  It will force you to organize your thoughts.
To convince yourself that your startup is worth investing in, you'll
have to figure out why it's worth investing in.   And if you can
do that you'll end up with more than added confidence.  You'll also
have a provisional roadmap of how to succeed.
Market
Notice I've been careful to talk about whether a startup is worth
investing in, rather than whether it's going to succeed.  No one
knows whether a startup is going to succeed.  And it's a good thing
for investors that this is so, because if you could know in advance
whether a startup would succeed, the stock price would already be
the future price, and there would be no room for investors to make
money.  Startup investors know that every investment is a bet, and
against pretty long odds.
So to prove you're worth investing in, you don't have to prove
you're going to succeed, just that you're a sufficiently good bet.
What makes a startup a sufficiently good bet?  In addition to
formidable founders, you need a plausible path to owning a big piece
of a big market.  Founders think of startups as ideas, but investors
think of them as markets.  If there are x number of customers who'd
pay an average of $y per year for what you're making, then the total
addressable market, or TAM, of your company is $xy.  Investors don't
expect you to collect all that money, but it's an upper bound on
how big you can get.
Your target market has to be big, and it also has to be capturable
by you.  But the market doesn't have to be big yet, nor do you
necessarily have to be in it yet.  Indeed, it's often better to
start in a
small
market that will either turn into a big one or
from which you can move into a big one.  There just has to be some
plausible sequence of hops that leads to dominating a big market a
few years down the line.
The standard of plausibility varies dramatically depending on the
age of the startup.  A three month old company at Demo Day only
needs to be a promising experiment that's worth funding to see how
it turns out.  Whereas a two year old company raising a series A
round needs to be able to show the experiment worked.
[
8
]
But every company that gets really big is "lucky" in the sense that
their growth is due mostly to some external wave they're riding,
so to make a convincing case for becoming huge, you have to identify
some specific trend you'll benefit from.  Usually you can find this
by asking "why now?"  If this is such a great idea, why hasn't
someone else already done it?  Ideally the answer is that it only
recently became a good idea, because something changed, and no one
else has noticed yet.
Microsoft for example was not going to grow huge selling Basic
interpreters.  But by starting there they were perfectly poised to
expand up the stack of microcomputer software as microcomputers
grew powerful enough to support one. And microcomputers turned out
to be a really huge wave, bigger than even the most optimistic
observers would have predicted in 1975.
But while Microsoft did really well and there is thus a temptation
to think they would have seemed a great bet a few months in, they
probably didn't.  Good, but not great.  No company, however successful,
ever looks more than a pretty good bet a few months in. Microcomputers
turned out to be a big deal, and Microsoft both executed well and
got lucky.  But it was by no means obvious that this was how things
would play out.  Plenty of companies seem as good a bet a few months
in.  I don't know about startups in general, but at least half the
startups we fund could make as good a case as Microsoft could have
for being on a path to dominating a large market.  And who can
reasonably expect more of a startup than that?
Rejection
If you can make as good a case as Microsoft could have, will you
convince investors?  Not always.  A lot of VCs would have rejected
Microsoft.
[
9
]
Certainly some rejected Google.  And getting
rejected will put you in a slightly awkward position, because as
you'll see when you start fundraising, the most common question
you'll get from investors will be "who else is investing?" What do
you say if you've been fundraising for a while and no one has
committed yet?
[
10
]
The people who are really good at acting formidable often solve
this problem by giving investors the impression that while no
investors have committed yet, several are about to.  This is arguably
a permissible tactic.  It's slightly dickish of investors to care
more about who else is investing than any other aspect of your
startup, and misleading them about how far along you are with other
investors seems the complementary countermove.  It's arguably an
instance of scamming a scammer. But I don't recommend this approach
to most founders, because most founders wouldn't be able to carry
it off.  This is the single most common lie told to investors, and
you have to be really good at lying to tell members of some profession
the most common lie they're told.
If you're not a master of negotiation (and perhaps even if you are)
the best solution is to tackle the problem head-on, and to explain
why investors have turned you down and why they're mistaken.  If
you know you're on the right track, then you also know why investors
were wrong to reject you. Experienced investors are well aware that
the best ideas are also the scariest.  They all know about the VCs
who rejected Google.  If instead of seeming evasive and ashamed
about having been turned down (and thereby implicitly agreeing with
the verdict) you talk candidly about what scared investors about
you, you'll seem more confident, which they like, and you'll probably
also do a better job of presenting that aspect of your startup.  At
the very least, that worry will now be out in the open instead of
being a gotcha left to be discovered by the investors you're currently
talking to, who will be proud of and thus attached to their discovery.
[
11
]
This strategy will work best with the best investors, who are both
hard to bluff and who already believe most other investors are
conventional-minded drones doomed always to miss the big outliers.
Raising money is not like applying to college, where you can assume
that if you can get into MIT, you can also get into Foobar State.
Because the best investors are much smarter than the rest, and the
best startup ideas look initially like
bad ideas
, it's not uncommon
for a startup to be rejected by all the VCs except the best ones.
That's what happened to Dropbox.  Y Combinator started in Boston,
and for the first 3 years we ran alternating batches in Boston and
Silicon Valley.  Because Boston investors were so few and so timid,
we used to ship Boston batches out for a second Demo Day in Silicon
Valley.  Dropbox was part of a Boston batch, which means all those
Boston investors got the first look at Dropbox, and none of them
closed the deal.  Yet another backup and syncing thing, they all
thought.  A couple weeks later, Dropbox raised a series A round
from Sequoia.
[
12
]
Different
Not understanding that investors view investments as bets combines
with the ten page paper mentality to prevent founders from even
considering the possibility of being certain of what they're saying.
They think they're trying to convince investors of something very
uncertain — that their startup will be huge — and convincing anyone
of something like that must obviously entail some wild feat of
salesmanship.  But in fact when you raise money you're trying to
convince investors of something so much less speculative — whether
the company has all the elements of a good bet — that you can
approach the problem in a qualitatively different way.  You can
convince yourself, then convince them.
And when you convince them, use the same matter-of-fact language
you used to convince yourself.  You wouldn't use vague, grandiose
marketing-speak among yourselves.  Don't use it with investors
either.  It not only doesn't work on them, but seems a mark of
incompetence.  Just be concise.  Many investors explicitly use that
as a test, reasoning (correctly) that if you can't explain your
plans concisely, you don't really understand them.  But even investors
who don't have a rule about this will be bored and frustrated by
unclear explanations.
[
13
]
So here's the recipe for impressing investors when you're not already
good at seeming formidable:
Make something worth investing in.
Understand why it's worth investing in.
Explain that clearly to investors.
If you're saying something you know is true, you'll seem confident
when you're saying it.  Conversely, never let pitching draw you
into bullshitting.  As long as you stay on the territory of truth,
you're strong.  Make the truth good, then just tell it.
Notes
[
1
]
There's no reason to believe this number is a constant.  In
fact it's our explicit goal at Y Combinator to increase it, by
encouraging people to start startups who otherwise wouldn't have.
[
2
]
Or more precisely, investors decide whether you're a loser
or possibly a winner.  If you seem like a winner, they may then,
depending on how much you're raising, have several more meetings
with you to test whether that initial impression holds up.
But if you seem like a loser they're done, at least for the next
year or so.  And when they decide you're a loser they usually decide
in way less than the 50 minutes they may have allotted for the first
meeting.  Which explains the astonished stories one always hears
about VC inattentiveness.  How could these people make investment
decisions well when they're checking their messages during startups'
presentations?  The solution to that mystery is that they've already
made the decision.
[
3
]
The two are not mutually exclusive.  There are people who are
both genuinely formidable, and also really good at acting that way.
[
4
]
How can people who will go on to create giant companies not
seem formidable early on?  I think the main reason is that their
experience so far has trained them to keep their wings folded, as
it were.  Family, school, and jobs encourage cooperation, not
conquest.  And it's just as well they do, because even being Genghis
Khan is probably 99% cooperation.  But the result is that most
people emerge from the tube of their upbringing in their early
twenties compressed into the shape of the tube.  Some find they
have wings and start to spread them.  But this takes a few years.
In the beginning even they don't know yet what they're capable of.
[
5
]
In fact, change what you're doing.  You're investing your own
time in your startup.  If you're not convinced that what you're
working on is a sufficiently good bet, why are you even working on
that?
[
6
]
When investors ask you a question you don't know the answer
to, the best response is neither to bluff nor give up, but instead
to explain how you'd figure out the answer.  If you can work out a
preliminary answer on the spot, so much the better, but explain
that's what you're doing.
[
7
]
At YC we try to ensure startups are ready to raise money on
Demo Day by encouraging them to ignore investors and instead focus
on their companies till about a week before.  That way most reach
the stage where they're sufficiently convincing well before Demo
Day.  But not all do, so we also give any startup that wants to the
option of deferring to a later Demo Day.
[
8
]
Founders are often surprised by how much harder it is to raise
the next round.  There is a qualitative difference in investors'
attitudes.  It's like the difference between being judged as a kid
and as an adult.  The next time you raise money, it's not enough
to be promising.  You have to be delivering results.
So although it works well to show growth graphs at either stage,
investors treat them differently.  At three months, a growth graph
is mostly evidence that the founders are effective.  At two years,
it has to be evidence of a promising market and a company tuned to
exploit it.
[
9
]
By this I mean that if the present day equivalent of the 3
month old Microsoft presented at a Demo Day, there would be investors
who turned them down.  Microsoft itself didn't raise outside money,
and indeed the venture business barely existed when they got started
in 1975.
[
10
]
The best investors rarely care who else is investing, but
mediocre investors almost all do.  So you can use this question as
a test of investor quality.
[
11
]
To use this technique, you'll have to find out why investors
who rejected you did so, or at least what they claim was the reason.
That may require asking, because investors don't always volunteer
a lot of detail.  Make it clear when you ask that you're not trying
to dispute their decision — just that if there is some weakness in
your plans, you need to know about it.  You won't always get a real
reason out of them, but you should at least try.
[
12
]
Dropbox wasn't rejected by all the East Coast VCs.  There was
one firm that wanted to invest but tried to lowball them.
[
13
]
Alfred Lin points out that it's doubly important for the
explanation of a startup to be clear and concise, because it has
to convince at one remove: it has to work not just on the partner
you talk to, but when that partner re-tells it to colleagues.
We consciously optimize for this at YC.  When we work with founders
create a Demo Day pitch, the last step is to imagine how an investor
would sell it to colleagues.
Thanks
to Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Ron Conway,
Chris Dixon, Alfred Lin, Ben Horowitz, Steve Huffman, Jessica
Livingston, Greg Mcadoo, Andrew Mason, Geoff Ralston, Yuri Sagalov,
Emmett Shear, Rajat Suri, Garry Tan, Albert Wenger, Fred Wilson,
and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this.


Prediction: LLMs in their current form may not be able to do everything, but AI now has enough momentum that this won't matter. Beam engines couldn't do everything either, but they were enough to set off the Industrial Revolution.

TIL the C in ENIAC was "Computor." https://t.co/ZSGz6kkbeL

It's easier to innovate when you're the original of something. People copying you can only copy a snapshot of your current state. They don't know which aspects of the snapshot are essential and which are random things you'd been about to change anyway.

This is common among the most successful startups. It may seem wasteful, but it's a good idea to have some extra money in the bank as insurance against disasters, and the most successful startups have that luxury.

Wow, tariffs have increased prices dramatically, for domestic goods as well as imported. Obviously, because domestic goods use imported materials and components. But apparently that wasn't obvious to the people who cooked up this policy... https://t.co/oKFcdOANaI

Good cofounder > no cofounder > bad cofounder.

This may seem obvious but a lot of people don't seem to grasp it.

"My plan for dealing with the mornings getting darker is to sleep longer."

— Jessica

The pitch of populist demagogues is always "The country is going to hell, and only I can save it." So one of the best ways to undermine them is to publish evidence that things are getting better, not worse.

Benioff is eccentric and maybe well-meaning but I can't help noticing his oscillations coincide with whatever side has the upper hand.

Pictures of quinces by John Aldridge. https://t.co/hgOgn8RcJZ


He's started calling me "pie boy."

@KO_Sulli @d_hero123 For better or worse I don't think many people do what I do.

@quorlin @d_hero123 I'm an essayist. I think by writing.

@dpachov Any portfolio co of his will get equally fast replies.

12 yo dreamed he was playing Soviet Animal Crossing. The houses were all the same and the villagers wore gray clothes and talked like Trololo. The town hall however was huge and decorated with banners, and Tom Nook was standing outside haranguing a crowd from a podium.

@d_hero123 I write the whole thing out then try to memorize it as well as I can. Which is usually not very well because I'm changing it up till the last moment.

I had a question about something in the talk I'm writing. The talk is tomorrow, but I knew if I asked Ron Conway he'd reply tonight. I was going to tweet predicting this, but he replied before I could.

@mettler @garrytan I've suggested to about 5 different people that they start this company. (Ideally it's a company and not just an agreement.)

@mmay3r Afghanistan probably weakened the USSR, don't you think?

@Nicolaas_Inc We'll eat the pie instead.


@PraveenInPublic @fritzdev I rarely start with an outline. Usually I just start writing.

@jaikishanb_ Try again.

@fritzdev You can watch me write an essay here: https://t.co/y7JeNrx1uw

@m_chirculescu Write programs for yourself and your friends.

When I talk to students they often think that if they want to start a startup one day they should be learning about economics or finance. I tell them they should instead be learning how to build things. Building is the root.

@Itsjoeco That guilty look!

@ShaugMike It's so weird when people say stuff like this and yet turn out to be following me...

Jessica heard the dog whining in the kitchen, and walked in to find he'd gotten his head stuck in a box of pancake mix. https://t.co/WF3rp2lVei

@garrytan Which is why it's good to walk during office hours with startups...

@firasd I think that is now "individuals of middle."


Return of the Mac
March 2005
All the best
hackers
I know are gradually switching to Macs.  My
friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought
themselves Powerbooks.  These guys are not the graphic designers
and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the
mid 1990s.  They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.
The reason, of course, is OS X.  Powerbooks are beautifully designed
and run FreeBSD.  What more do you need to know?
I got a Powerbook at the end of last year.   When my IBM Thinkpad's
hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop.  And when my
friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a
Powerbook
identical
to mine.
For most of us, it's not a switch to Apple, but a return.  Hard as
this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the
canonical hacker's computer.
In the fall of 1983,
the professor in one of my college CS classes got up and announced,
like a prophet, that there would soon be a computer with half a MIPS
of processing power that would fit under an airline seat and cost
so little that we could save enough to buy one from a summer job.
The whole room gasped.
And when the Mac appeared, it was even better than we'd hoped.  It
was small and powerful and cheap, as promised.  But it was also
something we'd never considered a computer could be: fabulously
well
designed
.
I had to have one.  And I wasn't alone.  In the mid to late 1980s,
all the hackers I knew were either writing software for the Mac,
or wanted to.  Every futon sofa in Cambridge seemed to have the
same fat white book lying open on it.  If you turned it over, it
said "Inside Macintosh."
Then came Linux and FreeBSD, and hackers, who follow the most
powerful OS wherever it leads, found themselves switching to Intel
boxes.  If you cared about design, you could buy a Thinkpad, which
was at least not actively repellent, if you could get the Intel and
Microsoft
stickers
off the front. [1]
With OS X, the hackers are back.  When I walked into the Apple store
in Cambridge, it was like coming home.  Much
was changed, but there was still that Apple coolness in the air,
that feeling that the show was being run by someone who really
cared, instead of random corporate deal-makers.
So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple
again?  How big is the hacker market, after all?
Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size.  When it
comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be
doing in ten years.  Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped
displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and
research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world.
I remember telling my father back in 1986 that there was a new kind
of computer called a Sun that was a serious Unix machine, but
so small and cheap that you could
have one of your own to sit in front of, instead of sitting in front
of a VT100 connected to a single central Vax.  Maybe, I suggested,
he should buy some stock in this company.  I think he really wishes
he'd listened.
In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan,
and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would
convert sound to data packets that could be sent over the Internet.
We weren't sure at the time whether this was a proper use of the
Internet, which was still then a quasi-government entity.  What he
was doing is now called VoIP, and it is a huge and rapidly growing
business.
If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers
in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university.
Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing.
In the matter of "platforms" this tendency is even more pronounced,
because novel software originates with
great hackers
, and they tend
to write it first for whatever computer they personally use.  And
software sells hardware.  Many if not most of the initial sales of
the Apple II came from people who bought one to run VisiCalc.  And
why did Bricklin and Frankston write VisiCalc for the Apple II?
Because they personally liked it.  They could have chosen any machine
to make into a star.
If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell
your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves
use.  It's not enough to make it "open."  It has to be open and
good.
And open and good is what Macs are again, finally.  The intervening
years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without
precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but
not in the middle.  My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop.
My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. [2] And yet
Apple's overall market share is still small.
Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary.
So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of
computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system,
and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy.  Yes, the price
to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are
going to want these.
Notes
[1] These horrible stickers are much like the intrusive ads popular
on pre-Google search engines.  They say to the customer: you are
unimportant.  We care about Intel and Microsoft, not you.
[2]
Y Combinator
is (we hope) visited mostly by
hackers.  The proportions of OSes are:
Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%.
The Mac number is
a big change from what it would have been five years ago.
Italian Translation
Russian Translation
Chinese Translation


"Let's get the reader to suspend their disbelief. We'll make some stuff up."

— 12 yo while dictating a story

@TheRealDanSaedi Easy. Prosperity is the derivative of the ability to service debt.

@waitbutwhy Whenever I meet the teachers at a new school, I ask them what mistakes parents make. I heard about this phenomenon from a teacher at a primary school in Silicon Valley.

Don't be fooled by the "venture" in "venture debt." Lenders don't have the same incentives as investors. You don't get how different they are till it happens to you. They're perfectly happy to kill a prosperous company to get their capital back.

@rationalyst I know this wasn't done based on the image if it thought that might be Marc Andreessen.

@skdh Insure you against what?

@y_molodtsov @GoranGligovic I'm familiar with that quote, but how is it related to what I said?

@egrefen @GoranGligovic I'm not saying there are never gimmicks in tech. But (unlike many of the commenters here) I have some idea of the amounts of money that have been expended on different kinds of projects. The amounts going into AI are orders of magnitude bigger than have gone into NFTs.

@GoranGligovic If it was merely a gimmick no one would expend so much on it.

@nfergus Wouldn't military spending have spiked enormously from 1914 to 1918?


Trolls
February 2008
A user on Hacker News recently posted a
comment
that set me thinking:
Something about hacker culture that never really set well with
  me was this  the nastiness. ... I just don't understand why people
  troll like they do.
I've thought a lot over the last couple years about the problem of
trolls.  It's an old one, as old as forums, but
we're still just learning what the causes are and how to address
them.
There are two senses of the word "troll."  In the original sense
it meant someone, usually an outsider, who deliberately stirred up
fights in a forum by saying controversial things.
[
1
]
For example,
someone who didn't use a certain programming language might go to
a forum for users of that language and make disparaging remarks
about it, then sit back and watch as people rose to the bait.  This
sort of trolling was in the nature of a practical joke, like letting
a bat loose in a room full of people.
The definition then spread to people who behaved like assholes in
forums, whether intentionally or not.  Now when people talk about
trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word.  Though
in a sense this is historically inaccurate, it is in other ways
more accurate, because when someone is being an asshole it's usually
uncertain even in their own mind how much is deliberate.
That is arguably one of the defining qualities of an asshole.
I think trolling in the broader sense has four causes.  The most
important is distance.  People will say things in anonymous forums
that they'd never dare say to someone's face, just as they'll do
things in cars that they'd never do as pedestrians  like tailgate
people, or honk at them, or cut them off.
Trolling tends to be particularly bad in forums related to computers,
and I think that's due to the kind of people you find there.  Most
of them (myself included) are more comfortable dealing with abstract
ideas than with people.  Hackers can be abrupt even in person.  Put
them on an anonymous forum, and the problem gets worse.
The third cause of trolling is incompetence.  If you disagree with
something, it's easier to say "you suck" than to figure out and
explain exactly what you disagree with.  You're also safe that way
from refutation.  In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti.
Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence:
people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way
to do it than literally making a mark on the world.
[
2
]
The final contributing factor is the culture of the forum.  Trolls
are like children (many
are
children) in that they're capable of
a wide range of behavior depending on what they think will be
tolerated.  In a place where rudeness isn't tolerated, most can be
polite.  But vice versa as well.
There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to
use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful
people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it.
Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the
dominant culture.  That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by
the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watched
it happen to Reddit.
News.YC
is, among other things, an experiment to see if this fate
can be avoided.  The sites's
guidelines
explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to
face.  If someone starts being rude, other users will step in and
tell them to stop.  And when people seem to be deliberately trolling,
we ban them ruthlessly.
Technical tweaks may also help.  On Reddit, votes on your comments
don't affect your karma score, but they do on News.YC.  And it does
seem to influence people when they can see their reputation in the
eyes of their peers drain away after making an asshole remark.
Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments.
One might worry this would prevent people from expressing controversial
ideas, but empirically that doesn't seem to be what happens.  When
people say something substantial that gets modded down, they
stubbornly leave it up.  What people delete are wisecracks, because
they have less invested in them.
So far the experiment seems to be working.  The level of conversation
on News.YC is as high as on any forum I've seen.  But we still only
have about 8,000 uniques a day.  The conversations on Reddit were
good when it was that small.  The challenge is whether we can keep
things this way.
I'm optimistic we will.  We're not depending just on technical
tricks.  The core users of News.YC are mostly refugees from other
sites that were overrun by trolls.  They feel about trolls roughly
the way refugees from Cuba or Eastern Europe feel about dictatorships.
So there are a lot of people working to keep this from happening
again.
Notes
[
1
]
I mean forum in the general sense of a place to exchange views.
The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.
[
2
]
I'm talking here about everyday tagging.  Some graffiti is
quite impressive (anything becomes art if you do it well enough)
but the median tag is just visual spam.
Russian Translation


@SoVeryBritish Crikey!

In the new essay I'm writing, I found myself talking explicitly about the fact that problem-solving by humans is different from problem-solving in general (e.g. by AIs). That's a first.

@muchsahil When I said talk to users, I didn't mean that kind.

Parenting trick: When you have your kid's friend with you and you want them both to do x, tell the friend to do x. As a guest, the friend has to be good. And once the friend starts doing x, your kid has to as well.

@JagDiogan @micsolana Interesting. And yet there are a lot of things it's illegal to say. Presumably they have some casuistry for explaining this.

@DavidGibbons It was built in 1878.

About a quarter of middle-aged men you see walking in the Alps look like Tim Cook: tall and pale with big beaky noses, designery-looking glasses, and that nameless haircut that's not a crewcut but almost.

Incidentally (or rather, to prove my point) that's not an AI-generated image, but a picture of a Victorian building. It's a detail from a picture of St John's College by @acambridgediary, which I recommend following if you like Cambridge.

I realized something surprising about AI-generated illustrations: they look Victorian. The failure mode of AI illustrations (once they get the number of fingers right) could be described as "bogus profusion." But that's also the failure mode of Victorian design. https://t.co/TUVZbN5B42

This screenshot is from the following Guardian article, which is based on investigative reporting done by the Israeli publication @972mag.

https://t.co/QmaqXoHTTt


@JacobCanfield Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia of course. I loved the Foundation books when I was a teenager but tried rereading one recently and it didn't seem so great...

@CJHandmer I've read it. Excellent book.

@CburgesCliff I've read it and I loved it.

@Chris_arnade It's so weird how "learn to program" is now a kind of slur for reporters.

@_xSoli Here's something he taught me 3 years ago: https://t.co/S61LQyLzcs

@nelsondemandela Buy a Gunter rule and a pair of dividers.

Multiplying numbers using dividers and a Gunter rule is so satisfying. It feels like magic.

@ShriramKMurthi Did you remember the title, or did this turn up in a search?

@timmolendijk My number one trick is used bookshops. I go to Hay on Wye for 3 days at a time to find books. I also have a tiny number of people whose recommendations I trust.

@samdaceo That's an interesting question. I can tell people how to get from lower-middle class American to rich, but I have no idea what it would take if you're starting in the slums of Bombay. It might take two generations, or an amazing mother.


@jasoncrawford No observer would have said that in 1712. The steam engine wasn't good for anything except pumping water out of mines until Watt invented the separate condenser in the late 1760s.

"This is perfect. This looks like crystal meth."

— 12 yo's friend finding a good prop for the movie they're making

@JohnDCook I find it helps to remember that there are huge numbers of real-life Dwight Shrutes, and they're all on Twitter.

"That man should start a startup. I'll convince him with an essay."

— 12 yo's PG routine

@ismurray I bet they'll justify this to themselves by saying they've "raised awareness" even more.

@zestular There are multiple dimensions in which you can be an "A player." So for example you can be smart, but not particularly driven. Google tends to select for that combination, if only because someone who was driven wouldn't be able to stand it.

The number and dedication of Taylor Swift fans is like nothing else I've seen in my life.

Or ignore these fools and focus on things that matter.

@robinhanson Or there are simply more people churning out more papers.

@garrytan @amasad The problem with this layout is that it looks like you and Diana are admiring Amjad, but Harj and Jared are more focused on his haircut.


@anammostarac That would be a mistake, because that includes everyone independent-minded.

https://t.co/qF7ab5MsJv

@Breaking911 You're flat out lying. He never says his uncle was eaten by cannibals, just that he was shot down over a place where there were a lot of them.

@chr1sa This list includes a lot of innocent victims. "Superlinear" for example doesn't mean "growing faster than expected," and what it actually does mean is hard to express well without it.

@William48759211 @Austen The fact that they didn't is a sign that their case was weak, and they knew it.

@SteveHamlin @Austen Or not worth defending. Those are two different things.

Caveat: Though this bottom-up approach does work to some extent in the real world, it works better on tests, because of the way the problems on tests are constrained.

Something I taught 15 yo: If it's not obvious how to solve a math problem, it often works to ask what you *can* calculate or prove from what you're given. These intermediate results will often suggest the path to the answer.

@kane Generation? More like a couple years.

A startup surviving Covid. Four quarters of wondering "how much longer will we have no business?" https://t.co/Vx1mE1T5uc

@ti_morse @nikitabier Ah, ok, never mind.


The proper response: https://t.co/AJLI5tn5aK

Trying to read the titles on the spines in a closed bookshop. A not uncommon scenario. Note self portrait by an amused Jessica at right. https://t.co/avOirZyb7f

There are now so many "accelerators" that I get spam from people making products for them. Very weird. I wrote all YC's original software, so every spam is either offering something I wrote, or something I didn't think was worth writing.

Almost all the images on my desktop are of family. These are some of the few that aren't. https://t.co/waMFfHoquB

One advantage of having many distinct sovereign nations instead of a single world government is that they can try different policies and we can see which work best. https://t.co/txkK3uPt15

I've been rereading Bovill's Golden Trade of the Moors and it's even better than I remembered. Like most great books, it's about way more than its title implies.

We stopped to get some medjool dates in the Ziz valley and they are by a huge margin the best dates I've ever tasted. Apparently the variety originated there.

The reason (good) investors are more optimistic is that, for them, the outcomes are weighted. If you're just measuring percent correct, you win by predicting startups will fail. But if the outcomes are weighted, you look for big wins even at the risk of many small misses.

I was talking to someone renovating a museum in Italy. All the paintings will be under glass when they're rehung, "because people throw soup on them." Those idiot protestors have changed the world permanently for the worse.

A hundred years from now these paintings will still be under glass. The people running the museum then won't even know why. It will just seem normal. So no one except the occasional conservator will ever see them without glass again.


The Anatomy of Determination
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
September 2009
Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to
predict which startups will succeed.  We probably spend more time
thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest.
Prediction is usually all we have to rely on.
We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is
determination.  At first we thought it might be intelligence.
Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups succeed.  It
makes a better story that a company won because its founders were
so smart.  The PR people and reporters who spread such stories
probably believe them themselves.  But while it certainly helps to
be smart, it's not the deciding factor.  There are plenty of people
as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing.
In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly
because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers
an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination
starts to look like talent.
I can't think of any field in which determination is overrated, but
the relative importance of determination and talent probably do
vary somewhat.  Talent probably matters more in types of work that
are purer, in the sense that one is solving mostly a single type
of problem instead of many different types.   I suspect determination
would not take you as far in math as it would in, say, organized
crime.
I don't mean to suggest by this comparison that types of work that
depend more on talent are always more admirable.  Most people would
agree it's more admirable to be good at math than memorizing long
strings of digits, even though the latter depends more on natural
ability.
Perhaps one reason people believe startup founders win by being
smarter is that intelligence does matter more in technology startups
than it used to in earlier types of companies.  You probably do
need to be a bit smarter to dominate Internet search than you had
to be to dominate railroads or hotels or newspapers.  And that's
probably an ongoing trend.  But even in the highest of high tech
industries, success still depends more on determination than brains.
If determination is so important, can we isolate its components?
Are some more important than others?  Are there some you can
cultivate?
The simplest form of determination is sheer willfulness.  When you
want something, you must have it, no matter what.
A good deal of willfulness must be inborn, because it's common to
see families where one sibling has much more of it than another.
Circumstances can alter it, but at the high end of the scale, nature
seems to be more important than nurture.  Bad circumstances can
break the spirit of a strong-willed person, but I don't think there's
much you can do to make a weak-willed person stronger-willed.
Being strong-willed is not enough, however.  You also have to be
hard on yourself.  Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent
would not be called determined.  Determination implies your willfulness
is balanced by discipline.
That word balance is a significant one.  The more willful you are,
the more disciplined you have to be.  The stronger your will, the
less anyone will be able to argue with you except yourself.  And
someone has to argue with you, because everyone has base impulses,
and if you have more will than discipline you'll just give into
them and end up on a local maximum like drug addiction.
We can imagine will and discipline as two fingers squeezing a
slippery melon seed.  The harder they squeeze, the further the seed
flies, but they must both squeeze equally or the seed spins off
sideways.
If this is true it has interesting implications, because discipline
can be cultivated, and in fact does tend to vary quite a lot in the
course of an individual's life.  If determination is effectively
the product of will and discipline, then you can become more
determined by being more disciplined.
[
1
]
Another consequence of the melon seed model is that the more willful
you are, the more dangerous it is to be undisciplined.  There seem
to be plenty of examples to confirm that.  In some very energetic
people's lives you see something like wing flutter, where they
alternate between doing great work and doing absolutely nothing.
Externally this would look a lot like bipolar disorder.
The melon seed model is inaccurate in at least one respect, however:
it's static.  In fact the dangers of indiscipline increase with
temptation.  Which means, interestingly, that determination tends
to erode itself.  If you're sufficiently determined to achieve great
things, this will probably increase the number of temptations around
you.  Unless you become proportionally more disciplined, willfulness
will then get the upper hand, and your achievement will revert to
the mean.
That's why Shakespeare's Caesar thought thin men so dangerous.  They weren't
tempted by the minor perquisites of power.
The melon seed model implies it's possible to be too disciplined.
Is it?  I think there probably are people whose willfulness is
crushed down by excessive discipline, and who would achieve more
if they weren't so hard on themselves.  One reason the young sometimes
succeed where the old fail is that they don't realize how incompetent
they are.  This lets them do a kind of deficit spending.  When they
first start working on something, they overrate their achievements.
But that gives them confidence to keep working, and their performance
improves.  Whereas someone clearer-eyed would see their initial
incompetence for what it was, and perhaps be discouraged from
continuing.
There's one other major component of determination: ambition.  If
willfulness and discipline are what get you to your destination,
ambition is how you choose it.
I don't know if it's exactly right to say that ambition is a component
of determination, but they're not entirely orthogonal.  It would
seem a misnomer if someone said they were very determined to do
something trivially easy.
And fortunately ambition seems to be quite malleable; there's a lot
you can do to increase it.  Most people don't know how ambitious
to be, especially when they're young.  They don't know what's hard,
or what they're capable of.  And this problem is exacerbated by
having few peers.  Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is
mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives,
then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers.  When you
take people like this and put them together with other ambitious
people, they bloom like dying plants given water.  Probably most
ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd
get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.
[
2
]
Achievements also tend to increase your ambition.  With each step
you gain confidence to stretch further next time.
So here in sum is how determination seems to work: it consists of
willfulness balanced with discipline, aimed by ambition.   And
fortunately at least two of these three qualities can be cultivated.
You may be able to increase your strength of will somewhat; you can
definitely learn self-discipline; and almost everyone is practically
malnourished when it comes to ambition.
I feel like I understand determination a bit better now.  But only
a bit: willfulness, discipline, and ambition are all concepts almost
as complicated as determination.
[
3
]
Note too that determination and talent are not the whole story.
There's a third factor in achievement: how much you like the work.
If you really
love
working on something,
you don't need determination to drive you; it's what you'd do anyway.
But most types of work have aspects one doesn't like, because most
types of work consist of doing things for other people, and it's
very unlikely that the tasks imposed by their needs will happen to
align exactly with what you want to do.
Indeed, if you want to create the most
wealth
,
the way to do it is to focus more on their needs than your interests,
and make up the difference with determination.
Notes
[
1
]
Loosely speaking.  What I'm claiming with the melon seed model
is more like determination is proportionate to wd^m - k|w - d|^n,
where w is will and d discipline.
[
2
]
Which means one of the best ways to help a society generally
is to create
events
and
institutions
that bring ambitious
people together.  It's like pulling the control rods out of a
reactor: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people,
instead of being absorbed by the normal people they're usually
surrounded with.
Conversely, it's probably a mistake to do as some European countries
have done and try to ensure none of your universities is significantly
better than the others.
[
3
]
For example, willfulness clearly has two subcomponents,
stubbornness and energy.  The first alone yields someone who's
stubbornly inert.  The second alone yields someone flighty.
As willful people get older or otherwise lose their energy, they
tend to become merely stubborn.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris
for reading drafts of this.
Italian Translation
Portuguese Translation
Russian Translation


@davidasinclair Calling @cremieuxrecueil.

@jdmccafferty That looks 19th century.

"We are, to be blunt, eating too much and probably eating too much of the wrong foods."

https://t.co/IaXvW4fquP

@Niklas_Sikorra Startups do best when they're run by their founders.

@NikHuno Because when they talk about AC, they never talk about possible solutions to the problem. E.g. if AC gets more efficient, or power gets cheaper. You can tell they're offended by AC in principle.

Beware of those who are excited about something that should at most be an unfortunate necessity.

Stephen Miller shares this in common with Europeans against air conditioning. He's excited by deporting people. They're excited by the idea of people being uncomfortable.

It's usually a bad sign when the founder who seems the most natural CEO wants someone else to be CEO. But in the last two days I've talked to two startups where it might not be. Might. It did work for Google.

@clark_aviation Why did they do that?

Boccaccio's gesture in Andrea del Castagno's painting of him gives him an extra edge for 21st century viewers. https://t.co/SmRGGz74q6

@whyvert Like tariffs.


@mogustine @ishand He liked how friendly and energetic people were.

@peteXLarge @ishand I do remember liking the orange when I visited as a child.

@nntaleb Surely this is good? Imagine how much more dangerous he'd be if he did.

@ishand YC wouldn't exist without UIUC. My father went there on a Fullbright in the 1950s and liked America so much that he was determined to return.

@SpencerHakimian My guess is that he prefers the shallowness of cable news. During his first term he often didn't bother to read the President's Daily Brief, because it went into too much detail. Whereas Fox is designed for its 100 IQ median viewer.

@msareika The Bay Area.

@armantsaturian Yes, I do this too.

@mwseibel The enjoyable way to do it is by accident. Work on interesting things and you meet interesting people as a byproduct.

@Austen And whether the left is now supposed to support tech bros rather than attacking them.

@SpencerHakimian Surely 80% would still be disastrous.


Default Alive or Default Dead?
October 2015
When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or
9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same.
Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth
is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to
profitability on the money they have left?  Or to put it more
dramatically, by default do they live or die?
The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know.
Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive
or default dead.
If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy
calculator
you can use to find out.
The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive
or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the
answer.  If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious
new things they could do.  If it's default dead, we probably need
to talk about how to save it.  We know the current trajectory ends
badly.  How can they get off that trajectory?
Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default
dead?  Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that.
It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than
it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support
himself.  But as the company grows older, the question switches from
meaningless to critical.  That kind of switch often takes people
by surprise.
I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too
late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too
early.  It's hard to say precisely when the question switches
polarity.  But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying
too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to
start worrying too late.
The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the
fatal pinch
.
The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough
time to fix it.  And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing
that's where they're headed.
There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're
default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise
more money.  But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the
more you depend on it, the falser it becomes.
Maybe it will help to separate facts from hopes. Instead of thinking
of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components.
Say "We're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save
us." Maybe as you say that, it will set off the same alarms in your
head that it does in mine.  And if you set off the alarms sufficiently
early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.
It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors
saving you.  As a rule their interest is a function of
growth.  If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you
can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not
profitable.
[
1
]
But investors are so fickle that you can never
do more than start to count on them.  Sometimes something about your
business will spook investors even if your growth is great.  So no
matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising
as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you
should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to
survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll
have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.
In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the
sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be.  In practice there
is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends
and how fast it grows.  When a startup grows fast, it's usually
because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big
need straight on.  When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because
the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because
they're wasteful.
If you're paying attention, you'll be asking at this point not just
how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead.
That one is easy: don't hire too fast.  Hiring too fast is by far
the biggest killer of startups that raise money.
[
2
]
Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow.  But
most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than
underestimating it.  Why?  Partly because there's so much work to
do.  Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough
people, it will all get done.  Partly because successful startups have
lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order
to be successful.  In fact the large staffs of successful startups
are probably more the effect of growth than the cause.  And
partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to
face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing
enough.
Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to
overhire by the VCs who funded them.  Kill-or-cure strategies are
optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect.
VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other.
But as a founder your incentives are different.  You want above all
to survive.
[
3
]
Here's a common way startups die.  They make something moderately
appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first
round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea
sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately
appealing, growth is ok but not great.  The founders convince
themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth.
Their investors agree.  But (because the product is only moderately
appealing) the growth never comes.  Now they're rapidly running out
of runway.  They hope further investment will save them. But because
they have high expenses and slow growth, they're now unappealing
to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.
What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem:
that the product is only moderately appealing.  Hiring people is
rarely the way to fix that.  More often than not it makes it harder.
At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be
"built out," and that's usually easier with fewer people.
[
4
]
Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you
from this.  Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the
forces that push you to overhire.  Instead you'll be compelled to
seek growth in other ways. For example, by
doing
things that don't scale
, or by redesigning the product in the
way only founders can.
And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be
the ones that actually work.
Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator
before they hired their first employee.  In the meantime the founders
were terribly overworked.  But they were overworked evolving Airbnb
into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.
Notes
[
1
]
Steep usage growth will also interest investors.  Revenue
will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth
predicts x% revenue growth.  But in practice investors discount
merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a
higher growth rate to impress investors.
[
2
]
Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too
fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should
avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than
that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic.
[
3
]
I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders
to overhire is not even in their own interest.  They don't know how
many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have
done well if they'd survived.  My guess is a significant number.
[
4
]
After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:
"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly.  I think
it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies
have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great
founder is being able to resist this urge."
Paul Buchheit adds:
"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling—founders
take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics,
typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth
numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business
much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really
fast."
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston,
and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.


High Resolution Fundraising
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
September 2010
The reason startups have been using
more convertible notes
in angel
rounds is that they make deals close faster.  By making it easier
for startups to give different prices to different investors, they
help them break the sort of deadlock that happens when investors
all wait to see who else is going to invest.
By far the biggest influence on investors' opinions of a startup
is the opinion of other investors.  There are very, very few who
simply decide for themselves.  Any startup founder can tell you the
most common question they hear from investors is not about the
founders or the product, but "who else is investing?"
That tends to produce deadlocks.  Raising an old-fashioned
fixed-size equity round can take weeks, because all the angels sit around
waiting for the others to commit, like competitors in a bicycle
sprint who deliberately ride slowly at the start so they can follow
whoever breaks first.
Convertible notes let startups beat such deadlocks by rewarding
investors willing to move first with lower (effective) valuations.
Which they deserve because they're taking more risk.  It's much
safer to invest in a startup Ron Conway has already invested in;
someone who comes after him should pay a higher price.
The reason convertible notes allow more flexibility in price is
that valuation caps aren't actual valuations, and notes are cheap
and easy to do.  So you can do high-resolution fundraising: if you
wanted you could have a separate note with a different cap for each
investor.
That cap need not simply rise monotonically.  A startup could
also give better deals to investors they expected to help
them most.  The point is simply that different investors,
whether because of the help they offer or their willingness to
commit, have different values for
startups, and their terms should reflect that.
Different terms for different investors is
clearly the way of the future.  Markets always evolve toward higher
resolution.  You may not need to use convertible notes to do it.
With sufficiently lightweight standardized equity terms (and some
changes in investors' and lawyers' expectations about equity rounds)
you might be able to do the same thing with equity instead of debt.
Either would be fine with startups, so long as they can easily
change their valuation.
Deadlocks weren't the only problem with fixed-size equity rounds.
Another was that startups had to decide in advance how much to
raise.  I think it's a mistake for a startup to fix upon a specific
number. If investors are easily convinced, the startup should raise more
now, and if investors are skeptical, the startup should take a
smaller amount and use that to get the company to the point where
it's more convincing.
It's just not reasonable to expect startups to pick an optimal round
size in advance, because that depends on the reactions of investors,
and those are impossible to predict.
Fixed-size, multi-investor angel rounds are such a bad idea for
startups that one wonders why things were ever done that way.  One
possibility is that this custom reflects the way investors like to
collude when they can get away with it.  But I think the actual
explanation is less sinister.  I think angels (and their lawyers)
organized rounds this way in unthinking imitation of VC series A
rounds.  In a series A, a fixed-size equity round with a lead makes
sense, because there is usually just one big investor, who is
unequivocally the lead.  Fixed-size series A rounds already are
high res.  But the more investors you have in a round, the less
sense it makes for everyone to get the same price.
The most interesting question here may be what high res fundraising
will do to the world of investors.  Bolder investors will now get
rewarded with lower prices.  But more important, in a
hits-driven business, is that they'll be able to get into the deals
they want.  Whereas the "who else is investing?" type of investors
will not only pay higher prices, but may not be able to get into
the best deals at all.
Thanks
to Immad Akhund, Sam Altman, John Bautista, Pete Koomen,
Jessica Livingston, Dan Siroker, Harj Taggar, and
Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.


@sponkostonko @naval And yet you follow me? Why would you do that?

@cwardell @naval A lot of them are fake accounts. And there are a hell of a lot of Dwight Shrutes in the world.

@TrustFundMint @naval Calling Georgia's secretary of state and asking him to "find votes."

https://t.co/dkEynQ21Zl

@naval Trump tried to change the most important rule of all when he refused to concede in 2020. He just didn't succeed.

@sirodoht Because electoral votes decide the election, not the popular vote.

@rmnwski Gensler.

They're wrong, because Kamala isn't anti-crypto. (Neither is Biden; he just didn't realize what would happen after he appointed Gensler as Warren asked.)

@leetful Let's hope not, or we'll be hearing endless complaints about how the election was stolen.

This election looks like it could be very close. The 2000 presidential election was won by just 537 votes. So if you live in a swing state, especially, your vote really matters. Please, please, get out and vote. https://t.co/Qh7AEqG7Nk

If terriers had long enough legs to reach more things, the breed would not have survived.

@ianbremmer We just have to hope America itself can make it into the top half of this list.


How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
April 2016
(This is a talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh.
Much of it will apply to other towns.  But not all, because
as I say in the talk, Pittsburgh has some important advantages over
most would-be startup hubs.)
What would it take to make Pittsburgh into a startup hub, like
Silicon Valley?  I understand Pittsburgh pretty well,
because I grew up here, in Monroeville. And I understand Silicon
Valley pretty well because that's where I live now.  Could you get
that kind of startup ecosystem going here?
When I agreed to speak here, I didn't think I'd be able to give a
very optimistic talk.  I thought I'd be talking about what Pittsburgh
could do to become a startup hub, very much in the subjunctive.
Instead I'm going to talk about what Pittsburgh can do.
What changed my mind was an article I read in, of all places, the
New
York Times
food section.  The title was "
Pittsburgh's Youth-Driven
Food Boom
."  To most people that might not even sound interesting,
let alone something related to startups.  But it was electrifying
to me to read that title.  I don't think I could pick a more promising
one if I tried.  And when I read the article I got even more excited.
It said "people ages 25 to 29 now make up 7.6 percent of all
residents, up from 7 percent about a decade ago."  Wow, I thought,
Pittsburgh could be the next Portland.  It could become the cool
place all the people in their twenties want to go live.
When I got here a couple days ago, I could feel the difference.  I
lived here from 1968 to 1984.  I didn't realize it at the time, but
during that whole period the city was in free fall. On top of the
flight to the suburbs that happened everywhere, the steel and nuclear
businesses were both dying. Boy are things different now.  It's not
just that downtown seems a lot more prosperous. There is an energy
here that was not here when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, this was a place young people left. Now it's a
place that attracts them.
What does that have to do with startups?  Startups are made
of people, and the average age of the people in a typical startup
is right in that 25 to 29 bracket.
I've seen how powerful it is for a city to have those people.  Five
years ago they shifted the center of gravity of Silicon Valley from
the peninsula to San Francisco.  Google and Facebook are on the
peninsula, but the next generation of big winners are all in SF.
The reason the center of gravity shifted was the talent war, for
programmers especially.  Most 25 to 29 year olds want to live in
the city, not down in the boring suburbs.  So whether they like it
or not, founders know they have to be in the city.  I know multiple
founders who would have preferred to live down in the Valley proper,
but who made themselves move to SF because they knew otherwise
they'd lose the talent war.
So being a magnet for people in their twenties is a very promising
thing to be.  It's hard to imagine a place becoming a startup hub
without also being that.  When I read that statistic about the
increasing percentage of 25 to 29 year olds, I had exactly the same
feeling of excitement I get when I see a startup's graphs start to
creep upward off the x axis.
Nationally the percentage of 25 to 29 year olds is 6.8%.  That means
you're .8% ahead.  The population is 306,000, so we're talking about
a surplus of about 2500 people.  That's the population of a small
town, and that's just the surplus. So you have a toehold.  Now you
just have to expand it.
And though "youth-driven food boom" may sound frivolous, it is
anything but.  Restaurants and cafes are a big part of the personality
of a city.  Imagine walking down a street in Paris. What are you
walking past?  Little restaurants and cafes.  Imagine driving through
some depressing random exurb.  What are you driving past?  Starbucks
and McDonalds and Pizza Hut.   As Gertrude Stein said, there is no
there there. You could be anywhere.
These independent restaurants and cafes are not just feeding people.
They're making there be a there here.
So here is my first concrete recommendation for turning Pittsburgh
into the next Silicon Valley: do everything you can to encourage
this youth-driven food boom.  What could the city do?  Treat the
people starting these little restaurants and cafes as your users,
and go ask them what they want.  I can guess at least one thing
they might want: a fast permit process.  San Francisco has left you
a huge amount of room to beat them in that department.
I know restaurants aren't the prime mover though.  The prime mover,
as the Times article said, is cheap housing.  That's a big advantage.
But that phrase "cheap housing" is a bit misleading.  There are
plenty of places that are cheaper.  What's special about Pittsburgh
is not that it's cheap, but that it's a cheap place you'd actually
want to live.
Part of that is the buildings themselves. I realized a long time
ago, back when I was a poor twenty-something myself, that the best
deals were places that had once been rich, and then became poor.
If a place has always been rich, it's nice but too expensive.  If
a place has always been poor, it's cheap but grim.  But if a place
was once rich and then got poor, you can find palaces for cheap.
And that's what's bringing people here.  When Pittsburgh was rich,
a hundred years ago, the people who lived here built big solid
buildings.  Not always in the best taste, but definitely solid.  So
here is another piece of advice for becoming a startup hub: don't
destroy the buildings that are bringing people here.  When cities
are on the way back up, like Pittsburgh is now, developers race to
tear down the old buildings.  Don't let that happen.  Focus on
historic preservation.  Big real estate development projects are
not what's bringing the twenty-somethings here.  They're the opposite
of the new restaurants and cafes; they subtract personality from
the city.
The empirical evidence suggests you cannot be too strict about
historic preservation.  The tougher cities are about it, the better
they seem to do.
But the appeal of Pittsburgh is not just the buildings themselves.
It's the neighborhoods they're in. Like San Francisco and New York,
Pittsburgh is fortunate in being a pre-car city.  It's not too
spread out. Because those 25 to 29 year olds do not like driving.
They prefer walking, or bicycling, or taking public transport.  If
you've been to San Francisco recently you can't help noticing the
huge number of bicyclists.  And this is not just a fad that the
twenty-somethings have adopted.  In this respect they have discovered
a better way to live.  The beards will go, but not the bikes.  Cities
where you can get around without driving are just better period.
So I would suggest you do everything you can to capitalize on this.
As with historic preservation, it seems impossible to go too far.
Why not make Pittsburgh the most bicycle and pedestrian friendly
city in the country?  See if you can go so far that you make San
Francisco seem backward by comparison.  If you do, it's very unlikely
you'll regret it.  The city will seem like a paradise to the young
people you want to attract.  If they do leave to get jobs elsewhere,
it will be with regret at leaving behind such a place.  And what's
the downside?  Can you imagine a headline "City ruined by becoming
too bicycle-friendly?"  It just doesn't happen.
So suppose cool old neighborhoods and cool little restaurants make
this the next Portland.  Will that be enough?  It will put you in
a way better position than Portland itself, because Pittsburgh has
something Portland lacks: a first-rate research university.  CMU
plus little cafes means you have more than hipsters drinking lattes.
It means you have hipsters drinking lattes while talking about
distributed systems.  Now you're getting really close to San
Francisco.
In fact you're better off than San Francisco in one way, because
CMU is downtown, but Stanford and Berkeley are out in the suburbs.
What can CMU do to help Pittsburgh become a startup hub?  Be an
even better research university.  CMU is one of the best universities
in the world, but imagine what things would be like if it were the
very best, and everyone knew it.  There are a lot of ambitious
people who must go to the best place, wherever it is.  If CMU were it, they would all come here. There would be
kids in Kazakhstan dreaming of one day living in Pittsburgh.
Being that kind of talent magnet is the most important contribution
universities can make toward making their city a startup hub.  In
fact it is practically the only contribution they can make.
But wait, shouldn't universities be setting up programs with words
like "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" in their names?  No, they
should not.  These kind of things almost always turn out to be
disappointments.  They're pursuing the wrong targets.  The way to
get innovation is not to aim for innovation but to aim for something
more specific, like better batteries or better 3D printing.  And
the way to learn about entrepreneurship is to do it, which you
can't
in school
.
I know it may disappoint some administrators to hear that the best
thing a university can do to encourage startups is to be a great
university.  It's like telling people who want to lose weight that
the way to do it is to eat less.
But if you want to know where startups come from, look at the
empirical evidence.  Look at the histories of the most successful
startups, and you'll find they grow organically out of a couple of
founders building something that starts as an interesting side
project.  Universities are great at bringing together founders, but
beyond that the best thing they can do is get out of the way.  For
example, by not claiming ownership of "intellectual property" that
students and faculty develop, and by having liberal rules about
deferred admission and leaves of absence.
In fact, one of the most effective things a university could do to
encourage startups is an elaborate form of getting out of the way
invented by Harvard.  Harvard used to have exams for the fall
semester after Christmas.  At the beginning of January they had
something called "Reading Period" when you were supposed to be
studying for exams.  And Microsoft and Facebook have something in
common that few people realize: they were both started during Reading
Period.  It's the perfect situation for producing the sort of side
projects that turn into startups. The students are all on campus,
but they don't have to do anything because they're supposed to be
studying for exams.
Harvard may have closed this window, because a few years ago they
moved exams before Christmas and shortened reading period from 11
days to 7.  But if a university really wanted to help its students
start startups, the empirical evidence, weighted by market cap,
suggests the best thing they can do is literally nothing.
The culture of Pittsburgh is another of its strengths.  It seems
like a city has to be socially liberal to be a startup hub,
and it's pretty clear why. A city has to tolerate strangeness to
be a home for startups, because startups are so strange.  And you
can't choose to allow just the forms of strangeness that will turn
into big startups, because they're all intermingled.  You have to
tolerate all strangeness.
That immediately rules out
big chunks of the US
.  I'm optimistic
it doesn't rule out Pittsburgh.  One of the things I remember from
growing up here, though I didn't realize at the time that there was
anything unusual about it, is how well people got along.  I'm still
not sure why.  Maybe one reason was that everyone felt like an
immigrant.  When I was a kid in Monroeville, people didn't call
themselves American.  They called themselves Italian or Serbian or
Ukranian.  Just imagine what it must have been like here a hundred
years ago, when people were pouring in from twenty different
countries.  Tolerance was the only option.
What I remember about the culture of Pittsburgh is that it was
both tolerant and pragmatic.  That's how I'd describe the culture
of Silicon Valley too.  And it's not a coincidence, because Pittsburgh
was the Silicon Valley of its time.  This was a city where people
built new things.  And while the things people build have changed,
the spirit you need to do that kind of work is the same.
So although an influx of latte-swilling hipsters may be annoying
in some ways, I would go out of my way to encourage them.  And more
generally to tolerate strangeness, even unto the degree wacko
Californians do.  For Pittsburgh that is a conservative choice:
it's a return to the city's roots.
Unfortunately I saved the toughest part for last. There is one more
thing you need to be a startup hub, and Pittsburgh hasn't got it:
investors.  Silicon Valley has a big investor community because
it's had 50 years to grow one.  New York has a big investor community
because it's full of people who like money a lot and are quick to
notice new ways to get it.  But Pittsburgh has neither of these.
And the cheap housing that draws other people here has no effect
on investors.
If an investor community grows up here, it will happen the same way
it did in Silicon Valley: slowly and organically.  So I would not
bet on having a big investor community in the short term.  But
fortunately there are three trends that make that less necessary
than it used to be.  One is that startups are increasingly cheap
to start, so you just don't need as much outside money as you used
to.  The second is that thanks to things like Kickstarter, a startup
can get to revenue faster.  You can put something on Kickstarter
from anywhere.  The third is programs like Y Combinator.  A startup
from anywhere in the world can go to YC for 3 months, pick up
funding, and then return home if they want.
My advice is to make Pittsburgh a great place for startups, and
gradually more of them will stick.  Some of those will succeed;
some of their founders will become investors; and still more startups
will stick.
This is not a fast path to becoming a startup hub. But it is at
least a path, which is something few other cities have.  And it's
not as if you have to make painful sacrifices in the meantime.
Think about what I've suggested you should do.  Encourage local
restaurants, save old buildings, take advantage of density, make
CMU the best, promote tolerance.  These are the things that make
Pittsburgh good to live in now.  All I'm saying is that you should
do even more of them.
And that's an encouraging thought.  If Pittsburgh's path to becoming
a startup hub is to be even more itself, then it has a good chance
of succeeding.  In fact it probably has the best chance of any city
its size.  It will take some effort, and a lot of time, but if any
city can do it, Pittsburgh can.
Thanks
to Charlie Cheever and Jessica Livingston for reading
drafts of this, and to Meg Cheever for organizing Opt412 and inviting
me to speak.


@SayHelloMarcus Not imposed tariffs.

@EV_Trapper Did you? The best-selling Ford car in Europe is not American. It's made by Ford's European subsidiary and is not even available in America.

@AbrahamIsmail12 @StephenM This car was made by a conglomerate that had its own brands tailored to the European market. GM sold Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Buicks, etc in America and Opels and Vauxhalls in Europe.

@amasad If Chamath said this I'd think it was just propaganda, but I think this guy actually could be this dumb, or at least insular.

@IchorousWings I don't know yet.

@ArDeved From what I've seen it's quite good. It's the main reason we stayed. The biggest flaw is that students have to specialize too early.

@eimen0 Usually something strikes me as strange or puzzling.

Notice the date on this. Miguel got it right in 2018. That's why I follow him.

@StephenM Tesla is (or was) the best selling car brand in Norway. Teslas are (or were) also very popular in the UK. The reason other American brands don't sell well in Europe is that they're not good enough to attract European buyers.

In the new essay I'm writing, I just made a point that contradicted the idea I started with. In the model of essay they teach you in school (thesis + supporting points) this would be a disaster, but for me it's good news. I now have an interesting problem to think about.


@NateSilver538 It's more a sign of the age of the writer. Old grumps have always reacted to new technology with this combination of hate-it and never-used-it.

@interchainriley In most cases you should ignore that worry. It will be a beachhead that you expand out of, but at least you'll start with something people want.

@KaraAlykhan Then choose based on your friends' enthusiasm.

@heyrobbb Build systems software.

@yogi__rahul The point of this heuristic is not that it will inspire passion, but that it's a way to be sure you're making something people actually want.

@XTreebs Sure, they need stuff too. Though if you're old (as your tweet implies) you can safely build stuff for people you don't know.

@kevindegods Don't even stop to think about the big players. Just focus on the product and the early users.

@KunchamSathwik @pitdesi Biden took too long to drop out, leaving no opportunity for a popular candidate to emerge from an open convention. So the Democrats got Kamala by default. She was less charismatic than Trump, and in US presidential elections the more charismatic candidate wins.

@pitdesi The ideas aren't random. What almost all of them have in common is that they're movies set in the 1950s.

@jajoosam The Arc Institute is like Bell Labs.


@moiety_actual Everyone rushes toward the exits?

@peterboghossian You should delete it then.

@mattyglesias Whoah, Substack has been working out well.

@AJamesMcCarthy What causes the glow around the edge?

@buhama_ Not after just 6 months.

@KTmBoyle He'll make a lot of great new friends.

@deepsand The best kind of users for a startup are sophisticated early adopters. E.g. for Apple it was the Homebrew Computer Club.

@ai1344718052494 We tried that once and it didn't work well. I think good founders can at least think of one decent idea, even if it's not the one they eventually work on.

@JontyGlaser All YC cares about is how promising the founders are, not where they're from. A significant number of the top YC startups are international.

@serpunketh No. When you fund so many startups so early it's inevitable some will compete.


@slipsnslides It matters if the guy is so messed up that he can't sit still and read.

@byDanM This was one.

@andyjss He didn't push past them. Nor was he trying to approach her.

@rabois @JoeJackson2345 @JTLonsdale Keith, in that video he's clearly not "forcing his way towards Noem." He's standing still at the far side of the room when her security people start pushing him. Here's a screenshot that shows it. https://t.co/QhQZ3UdVzc

For all the people (and fake accounts) claiming that Senator Padilla pushed past security and rushed the podium, here he is, standing still at the side of the room, at the point when Noem's security people started pushing him. https://t.co/9yDWzLMJKf

@andyjss That's because they know he's a senator.

@hiddenmarkov1 I noticed. This feels familiar. I assume many are fake accounts.

@americanahsim No. It's clearer every day that I made the right choice.

@GSchvey Federal officers shouldn't rough up senators. I can't believe I have to say that.

@zachoverhere He did identify himself. And he was never belligerent.


@tomasmenezesp Oh, for sure, yes, you should only believe claims like this from people and organizations you already know to be trustworthy.

@tomasmenezesp It's easy; the Replit corporate account is not going to tweet fake examples.

@ArmandDoma Usually I agree with you, but this is unfair. Sales are down because people are boycotting the brand because he aligned himself with Trump, not because he mismanaged Tesla per se.

@JaredFeldman88 The scary thing is you don't.

@gfodor I think they hate complexity so much that they push for simplicity everywhere, and only learn where it can't be had by how much engineers push back, like Woz famously did about the expansion slots on the Apple II.

@JuniperViews Yeah. Half the reason I posted it is just that I love to see it.

@itsajinkyaraj All the good YC founders push for simplicity. Their companies wouldn't grow so big so fast otherwise. But the most famous example is probably what Brian Chesky did to Airbnb during Covid.

@samarth_ghoslya Y Combinator constantly pushes for simplicity, and not just about engineering. A surprisingly large percentage of the advice given at YC office hours contains the word "just" before some verb.

@jaxtooth They're not lying.

Elon and Steve Jobs are both famous for pushing people to simplify their designs. I don't think this is a coincidence. Large organizations naturally generate complexity, but if you have a CEO who hates it, this tendency is kept in check. https://t.co/MWa81rOWUz


@toonithecreator That's shorter but it's also wrong. There might not be a simple way to say it.

@dara_tobi You seem to have misunderstood. It's not verbose writing generally that's a ChatGPT tell, just certain words.

https://t.co/E3VbegkgMk

@joshnekoff No, it wasn't. It's only a few specific words that are ChatGPT tells, not verbose writing generally.

https://t.co/E3VbegkgMk

@TheSonOfGeorge It sounds like I've convinced you that simpler writing is better. Keep at it!

@pierresbaptiste You're right, brevity is not equal to quality. Which is why I wrote about simplicity rather than brevity.

@imohumoren If they stopped to tweet about it then they stopped to think about it. Which is fabulous. Despite themselves they're doing something that will make their writing better.

@svperfecta No, I didn't mean that. Brevity is not the only kind of simplicity.

@bessiedone Some of it is, but that's what makes it so pleasing. Despite themselves they're doing what I want them to.

@heyadvikkapoor They think they make their writing seem impressive.

@psantloki I used it for the same reason you just did.


Tablets
December 2010
I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general
term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running
Android.  The closest to a general term seems to be "mobile devices,"
but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't really
capture what's distinctive about the iPad.
After a few seconds it struck me that what we'll end up calling
these things is tablets.  The only reason we even consider calling
them "mobile devices" is that the iPhone preceded the iPad.  If the
iPad had come first, we wouldn't think of the iPhone as a phone;
we'd think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.
The iPhone isn't so much a phone as a replacement for a phone.
That's an important distinction, because it's an early instance of
what will become a common pattern.  Many if not most of the
special-purpose objects around us are going to be replaced by apps
running on tablets.
This is already clear in cases like GPSes, music players, and
cameras.  But I think it will surprise people how many things are
going to get replaced.  We funded one startup that's
replacing keys
.
The fact that you can change font sizes easily means the iPad
effectively replaces reading glasses.  I wouldn't be surprised if
by playing some clever tricks with the accelerometer you could even
replace the bathroom scale.
The advantages of doing things in software on a single device are
so great that everything that can get turned into software will.
So for the next couple years, a good
recipe for startups
will be to look around you for things that people haven't realized
yet can be made unnecessary by a tablet app.
In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term
ephemeralization
to
describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced
by what we would now call software.  The reason tablets are going
to take over the world is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co are
industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind
them.  The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that
will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas.  No one
who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate
the power of that force.
I worry about the power Apple could have with this force behind
them.  I don't want to see another era of client monoculture like
the Microsoft one in the 80s and 90s.  But if ephemeralization is
one of the main forces driving the spread of tablets, that suggests
a way to compete with Apple: be a better platform for it.
It has turned out to be a great thing that Apple tablets have
accelerometers in them.  Developers have used the accelerometer in
ways Apple could never have imagined.  That's the nature of platforms.
The more versatile the tool, the less you can predict how people
will use it.  So tablet makers should be thinking: what else can
we put in there?  Not merely hardware, but software too.  What else
can we give developers access to?  Give hackers an inch and they'll
take you a mile.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and
Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.