Keep Your Identity Small
February 2009
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such
uniquely useless discussions.
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates
into a religious argument.  Why?  Why does this happen with religion
and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about
on forums?
What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need
to have any particular expertise to have opinions about
it.  All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have
those.  No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about
religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold
of expertise to post comments about that.  But on religion everyone's
an expert.
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too.  Politics,
like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise
for expressing an opinion.  All you need is strong convictions.
Do religion and politics have something in common that explains
this similarity?  One possible explanation is that they deal with
questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure
on people's opinions.  Since no one can be proven wrong, every
opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with
theirs.
But this isn't true.  There are certainly some political questions
that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy
will cost.  But the more precise political questions suffer the
same fate as the vaguer ones.
I think what religion and politics have in common is that they
become part of people's identity, and people can never have a
fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity.
By definition they're partisan.
Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not
the topic.  For example, a discussion about a battle that included
citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably
degenerate into a political argument.  But a discussion today about
a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't.  No
one would know what side to be on.  So it's not politics that's the
source of the trouble, but identity.  When people say a discussion
has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that
it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities.
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Because the point at which this happens depends on the people rather
than the topic, it's a mistake to conclude that because a question
tends to provoke religious wars, it must have no answer. For example,
the question of the relative merits of programming languages often
degenerates into a religious war, because so many programmers
identify as X programmers or Y programmers.  This sometimes leads
people to conclude the question must be unanswerable—that all
languages are equally good.  Obviously that's false: anything else
people make can be well or badly designed; why should this be
uniquely impossible for programming languages?  And indeed, you can
have a fruitful discussion about the relative merits of programming
languages, so long as you exclude people who respond from identity.
More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic
only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the
participants.  What makes politics and religion such minefields is
that they engage so many people's identities.  But you could in
principle have a useful conversation about them with some people.
And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the
relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't
safely talk about with
others
.
The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that
it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how
to have better ideas.  If people can't think clearly about anything
that has become part of their identity, then all other things being
equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as
possible.
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Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant.  But there
is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not
even to consider yourself an x.  The more labels you have for
yourself, the dumber they make you.
Notes
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When that happens, it tends to happen fast, like a core going
critical.  The threshold for participating goes down to zero, which
brings in more people.  And they tend to say incendiary things,
which draw more and angrier counterarguments.
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There may be some things it's a net win to include in your
identity.  For example, being a scientist.  But arguably that is
more of a placeholder than an actual label—like putting NMI on a
form that asks for your middle initial—because it doesn't commit
you to believing anything in particular.   A scientist isn't committed
to believing in natural selection in the same way a biblical
literalist is committed to rejecting it.  All he's committed to is
following the evidence wherever it leads.
Considering yourself a scientist is equivalent to putting a sign
in a cupboard saying "this cupboard must be kept empty."  Yes,
strictly speaking, you're putting something in the cupboard, but
not in the ordinary sense.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, and Robert
Morris for reading drafts of this.
Russian Translation
Portuguese Translation
Romanian Translation


A Fundraising Survival Guide
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
August 2008
Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup.
The hardest part is making something people want: most startups
that die, die because they didn't do that.  But the second biggest
cause of death is probably the difficulty of raising money.
Fundraising is brutal.
One reason it's so brutal is simply the brutality of markets.  People
who've spent most of their lives in schools or big companies may
not have been exposed to that.  Professors and bosses usually feel
some sense of responsibility toward you; if you make a valiant
effort and fail, they'll cut you a break.  Markets are less forgiving.
Customers don't care how hard you worked, only whether you solved
their problems.
Investors evaluate startups the way customers evaluate products,
not the way bosses evaluate employees.  If you're making a valiant
effort and failing, maybe they'll invest in your next startup, but
not this one.
But raising money from investors is harder than selling to
customers, because there are so few of them.  There's
nothing like an efficient market.  You're unlikely to have more
than 10 who are interested; it's difficult to talk to more.  So the
randomness of any one investor's behavior can really affect you.
Problem number 3: investors are very random.  All investors, including
us, are by ordinary standards incompetent.  We constantly have to
make decisions about things we don't understand, and more often
than not we're wrong.
And yet a lot is at stake.  The amounts invested by different types
of investors vary from five thousand dollars to fifty million, but
the amount usually seems large for whatever type of investor it is.
Investment decisions are big decisions.
That combination—making big decisions about things they don't
understand—tends to make investors very skittish.  VCs are notorious
for leading founders on.  Some of the more unscrupulous do it
deliberately.  But even the most well-intentioned investors can
behave in a way that would seem crazy in everyday life.  One day
they're full of enthusiasm and seem ready to write you a check on
the spot; the next they won't return your phone calls.  They're not
playing games with you.  They just can't make up their minds.
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If that weren't bad enough, these wildly fluctuating nodes are all
linked together.  Startup investors all know one another, and (though
they hate to admit it) the biggest factor in their opinion of you
is the opinion of other investors.
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Talk about a recipe for
an unstable system.  You get the opposite of the damping that the
fear/greed balance usually produces in markets.  No one is interested
in a startup that's a "bargain" because everyone else hates it.
So the inefficient market you get because there are so few players
is exacerbated by the fact that they act less than independently.
The result is a system like some kind of primitive, multi-celled
sea creature, where you irritate one extremity and the whole thing
contracts violently.
Y Combinator is working to fix this.  We're trying to increase the
number of investors just as we're increasing the number of startups.
We hope that as the number of both increases we'll get something
more like an efficient market.  As t approaches infinity, Demo Day
approaches an auction.
Unfortunately, t is still very far from infinity.  What does a
startup do now, in the imperfect world we currently inhabit? The
most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down.  Startups
live or die on morale.  If you let the difficulty of raising money
destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Bootstrapping (= Consulting)
Some would-be founders may by now be thinking, why deal with investors
at all?  If raising money is so painful, why do it?
One answer to that is obvious: because you need money to live on.
It's a fine idea in principle to finance your startup with its own
revenues, but you can't create instant customers.  Whatever you
make, you have to sell a certain amount to break even.  It will
take time to grow your sales to that point, and it's hard to predict,
till you try, how long it will take.
We could not have bootstrapped Viaweb, for example.  We charged
quite a lot for our software—about $140 per user per month—but
it was at least a year before our revenues would have covered even
our paltry costs.  We didn't have enough saved to live on for a
year.
If you factor out the "bootstrapped" companies that were actually
funded by their founders through savings or a day job, the remainder
either (a) got really lucky, which is hard to do on demand, or (b)
began life as consulting companies and gradually transformed
themselves into product companies.
Consulting is the only option you can count on.  But consulting is
far from free money.  It's not as painful as raising money from
investors, perhaps, but the pain is spread over a longer period.
Years, probably.  And for many types of startup, that delay could
be fatal.  If you're working on something so unusual that no one
else is likely to think of it, you can take your time.  Joshua
Schachter gradually built Delicious on the side while working on
Wall Street.  He got away with it because no one else realized it
was a good idea.  But if you were building something as obviously
necessary as online store software at about the same time as Viaweb,
and you were working on it on the side while spending most of your
time on client work, you were not in a good position.
Bootstrapping sounds great in principle, but this apparently verdant
territory is one from which few startups emerge alive.  The mere
fact that bootstrapped startups tend to be famous on that account
should set off alarm bells.  If it worked so well, it would be the
norm.
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Bootstrapping may get easier, because starting a company is getting
cheaper.  But I don't think we'll ever reach the point where most
startups can do without outside funding.  Technology tends to
get dramatically cheaper, but living expenses don't.
The upshot is, you can choose your pain: either the short, sharp
pain of raising money, or the chronic ache of consulting.  For a
given total amount of pain, raising money is the better choice,
because new technology is usually more valuable now than later.
But although for most startups raising money will be the lesser
evil, it's still a pretty big evil—so big that it can easily kill
you.  Not merely in the obvious sense that if you fail to raise
money you might have to shut the company down, but because the
process
of raising money itself can kill you.
To survive it you need a set of techniques mostly
orthogonal to the ones used in convincing investors, just as mountain
climbers need to know survival techniques that are mostly orthogonal
to those used in physically getting up and down mountains.
1. Have low expectations.
The reason raising money destroys so many startups' morale is not
simply that it's hard, but that it's so much harder than they
expected.  What kills you is the disappointment.  And the lower
your expectations, the harder it is to be disappointed.
Startup founders tend to be optimistic.  This can work well in
technology, at least some of the time, but it's the wrong way to
approach raising money.  Better to assume investors will always let
you down.  Acquirers too, while we're at it.  At YC one of our
secondary mantras is "Deals fall through."  No matter what deal
you have going on, assume it will fall through.  The predictive
power of this simple rule is amazing.
There will be a tendency, as a deal progresses, to start to believe
it will happen, and then to depend on it happening.  You must resist
this.  Tie yourself to the mast.  This is what kills you.  Deals
do not have a trajectory like most other human interactions, where
shared plans solidify linearly over time.  Deals often fall through
at the last moment.  Often the other party doesn't really think
about what they want till the last moment.  So you can't use your
everyday intuitions about shared plans as a guide.  When it comes
to deals, you have to consciously turn them off and become
pathologically cynical.
This is harder to do than it sounds.  It's very flattering when
eminent investors seem interested in funding you.  It's easy to
start to believe that raising money will be quick and straightforward.
But it hardly ever is.
2. Keep working on your startup.
It sounds obvious to say that you should keep working on your startup
while raising money.  Actually this is hard to do.  Most startups
don't manage to.
Raising money has a mysterious capacity to suck up all your attention.
Even if you only have one meeting a day with investors, somehow
that one meeting will burn up your whole day.  It costs not just
the time of the actual meeting, but the time getting there and back,
and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it
afterward.
The best way to survive the distraction of meeting with investors
is probably to partition the company: to pick one founder to deal
with investors while the others keep the company going.  This works
better when a startup has 3 founders than 2, and better when the
leader of the company is not also the lead developer.  In the best
case, the company keeps moving forward at about half speed.
That's the best case, though.  More often than not the company comes
to a standstill while raising money.  And that is dangerous for so
many reasons.  Raising money always takes longer than you expect.
What seems like it's going to be a 2 week interruption turns into
a 4 month interruption.  That can be very demoralizing.  And worse
still, it can make you less attractive to investors.  They want to
invest in companies that are dynamic.  A company that hasn't done
anything new in 4 months doesn't seem dynamic, so they start to
lose interest.  Investors rarely grasp this, but much of what
they're responding to when they lose interest in a startup is the
damage done by their own indecision.
The solution: put the startup first.  Fit meetings with investors
into the spare moments in your development schedule, rather than
doing development in the spare moments between meetings with
investors.  If you keep the company moving forward—releasing new
features, increasing traffic, doing deals, getting written
about—those investor meetings are more likely to be productive.  Not just
because your startup will seem more alive, but also because it will
be better for your own morale, which is one of the main ways investors
judge you.
3. Be conservative.
As conditions get worse, the optimal strategy becomes more conservative.
When things go well you can take risks; when things are bad you
want to play it safe.
I advise approaching fundraising as if it were always going badly.
The reason is that between your ability to delude yourself and the
wildly unstable nature of the system you're dealing with, things
probably either already are or could easily become much worse than
they seem.
What I tell most startups we fund is that if someone reputable
offers you funding on reasonable terms, take it.  There have been
startups that ignored this advice and got away with it—startups
that ignored a good offer in the hope of getting a better one, and
actually did.  But in the same position I'd give the same advice
again.  Who knows how many bullets were in the gun they were playing
Russian roulette with?
Corollary: if an investor seems interested, don't just let them
sit. You can't assume someone interested in investing will stay
interested.  In fact, you can't even tell (
they
can't even tell)
if they're really interested till you try to convert that interest
into money.  So if you have hot prospect, either close them now or
write them off.  And unless you already have enough funding, that
reduces to: close them now.
Startups don't win by getting great funding rounds, but by making
great products.  So finish raising money and get
back to work.
4. Be flexible.
There are two questions VCs ask that you shouldn't answer: "Who
else are you talking to?" and "How much are you trying to raise?"
VCs don't expect you to answer the first question. They ask it just
in case.
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They do seem to expect an answer to the second.  But
I don't think you should just tell them a number.  Not as a way to
play games with them, but because you shouldn't
have
a fixed
amount you need to raise.
The custom of a startup needing a fixed amount of funding is an
obsolete one left over from the days when startups were more
expensive.  A company that needed to build a factory or hire 50
people obviously needed to raise a certain minimum amount.  But few
technology startups are in that position today.
We advise startups to tell investors there are several different
routes they could take depending on how much they raised.  As little
as $50k could pay for food and rent for the founders for a year.
A couple hundred thousand would let them get office space and hire
some smart people they know from school.  A couple million would
let them really blow this thing out.  The message (and not just the
message, but the fact) should be: we're going to succeed no matter
what.  Raising more money just lets us do it faster.
If you're raising an angel round, the size of the round can even
change on the fly.  In fact, it's just as well to make the round
small initially, then expand as needed, rather than trying to raise
a large round and risk losing the investors you already have if you
can't raise the full amount.  You may even want to do a "rolling
close," where the round has no predetermined size, but instead you
sell stock to investors one at a time as they say yes.  That helps
break deadlocks, because you can start as soon as the first one
is ready to buy.
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5. Be independent.
A startup with a couple founders in their early twenties can have
expenses so low that they could be profitable on
as little as $2000 per month.  That's negligible as corporate
revenues go, but the effect on your morale and your bargaining
position is anything but.  At YC we use the phrase "ramen profitable"
to describe the situation where you're making just enough to pay
your living expenses.  Once you cross into ramen profitable,
everything changes.  You may still need investment to make it big,
but you don't need it this month.
You can't plan when you start a startup how long
it will take to become profitable.  But if you find yourself in a
position where a little more effort expended on sales would carry
you over the threshold of ramen profitable, do it.
Investors like it when you're ramen profitable.  It shows you've
thought about making money, instead of just working on amusing
technical problems; it shows you have the discipline to keep your
expenses low; but above all, it means you don't need them.
There is nothing investors like more than a startup that seems like
it's going to succeed even without them.  Investors like it when
they can help a startup, but they don't like startups that would
die without that help.
At YC we spend a lot of time trying to predict how the startups we've
funded will do, because we're trying to learn how to pick winners.
We've now watched the trajectories of so many startups that we're
getting better at predicting them.  And when we're talking
about startups we think are likely to succeed, what we find ourselves
saying is things like "Oh, those guys can take care of themselves.
They'll be fine." Not "those guys are really smart" or
"those guys are working on a great idea."
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When we predict good outcomes for startups, the qualities
that come up in the supporting arguments are toughness, adaptability,
determination.  Which means to the extent we're correct, those are
the qualities you need to win.
Investors know this, at least unconsciously.   The reason they like
it when you don't need them is not simply that they like what they
can't have, but because that quality is what makes founders succeed.
Sam Altman
has it.  You could parachute him into an island full of
cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king.  If you're
Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors
that you'll succeed with or without them.  (He wasn't, and he did.)
Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability.  I myself don't.  But
if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you.
6. Don't take rejection personally.
Getting rejected by investors can make you start to doubt yourself.
After all, they're more experienced than you.  If they think your
startup is lame, aren't they probably right?
Maybe, maybe not.  The way to handle rejection is with precision.
You shouldn't simply ignore rejection.  It might mean something.
But you shouldn't automatically get demoralized either.
To understand what rejection means, you have to understand first
of all how common it is.  Statistically, the average VC is a rejection
machine.  David Hornik, a partner at August, told me:
The numbers for me ended up being something like 500 to 800 plans
  received and read, somewhere between 50 and 100 initial 1 hour
  meetings held, about 20 companies that I got interested in, about
  5 that I got serious about and did a bunch of work, 1 to 2 deals
  done in a year.  So the odds are against you.  You
  may be a great entrepreneur, working on interesting stuff, etc.
  but it is still incredibly unlikely that you get funded.
This is less true with angels, but VCs reject practically everyone.
The structure of their business means a partner does at most 2 new
investments a year, no matter how many good startups approach him.
In addition to the odds being terrible, the average investor is,
as I mentioned, a pretty bad judge of startups.  It's harder to
judge startups than most other things, because great startup ideas
tend to seem wrong. A good startup idea has to be not just good but
novel.  And to be both good and novel, an idea probably has to seem
bad to most people, or someone would already be doing it and it
wouldn't be novel.
That makes judging startups harder than most other things one judges.
You have to be an intellectual contrarian to be a good startup
investor.  That's a problem for VCs, most of whom are not particularly
imaginative.  VCs are mostly money guys, not people who make things.
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Angels are better at appreciating novel ideas, because most
were founders themselves.
So when you get a rejection, use the data that's in it, and not what's
not.  If an investor gives you specific reasons for not investing,
look at your startup and ask if they're right.  If they're real
problems, fix them.  But don't just take their word for it.  You're
supposed to be the domain expert; you have to decide.
Though a rejection doesn't necessarily tell you anything about your
startup, it does suggest your pitch could be improved.  Figure out
what's not working and change it.  Don't just think "investors are
stupid."  Often they are, but figure out precisely where you lose
them.
Don't let rejections pile up as a depressing, undifferentiated heap.
Sort them and analyze them, and then instead of thinking "no one
likes us," you'll know precisely how big a problem you have, and
what to do about it.
7. Be able to downshift into consulting (if appropriate).
Consulting, as I mentioned, is a dangerous way to finance a startup.
But it's better than dying.  It's a bit like anaerobic respiration:
not the optimum solution for the long term, but it can save you
from an immediate threat.  If you're having trouble raising money
from investors at all, it could save you to be able to shift
toward consulting.
This works better for some startups than others.  It wouldn't have
been a natural fit for, say, Google, but if your company was making
software for building web sites, you could degrade fairly gracefully
into consulting by building sites for clients with it.
So long as you were careful not to get sucked permanently into
consulting, this could even have advantages.  You'd understand your
users well if you were using the software for them.  Plus as a
consulting company you might be able to get big-name users using
your software that you wouldn't have gotten as a product company.
At Viaweb we were forced to operate like a consulting company
initially, because we were so desperate for users that we'd offer
to build merchants' sites for them if they'd sign up.
But we never charged for such work, because we didn't want them to
start treating us like actual consultants, and calling us every
time they wanted something changed on their site.  We knew we had
to stay a product company, because only
that scales.
8. Avoid inexperienced investors.
Though novice investors seem unthreatening they can be the most
dangerous sort, because they're so nervous.  Especially in
proportion to the amount they invest.  Raising $20,000 from a first-time
angel investor can be as much work as raising $2 million from
a VC fund.
Their lawyers are generally inexperienced too.  But while the
investors can admit they don't know what they're doing, their lawyers
can't.  One YC startup negotiated terms for a tiny round with
an angel, only to receive a 70-page agreement from his lawyer.  And
since the lawyer could never admit, in front of his client, that
he'd screwed up, he instead had to insist on retaining all the
draconian terms in it, so the deal fell through.
Of course, someone has to take money from novice investors, or there
would never be any experienced ones.  But if you do, either (a)
drive the process yourself, including supplying the
paperwork
, or
(b) use them only to fill up a larger round led by someone else.
9. Know where you stand.
The most dangerous thing about investors is their indecisiveness.
The worst case scenario is the long no, the no that comes after
months of meetings.  Rejections from investors are like design
flaws: inevitable, but much less costly if you discover them early.
So while you're talking to investors, constantly look for signs of
where you stand.  How likely are they to offer you a term sheet?
What do they have to be convinced of first?  You shouldn't necessarily
always be asking these questions outright—that could get
annoying—but you should always be collecting data about them.
Investors tend to resist committing except to the extent you push
them to.  It's in their interest to collect the maximum amount of
information while making the minimum number of decisions.  The best
way to force them to act is, of course, competing investors.  But
you can also apply some force by focusing the discussion:
by asking what specific questions they need answered to make
up their minds, and then answering them.  If you get through several
obstacles and they keep raising new ones, assume that ultimately
they're going to flake.
You have to be disciplined when collecting data about investors'
intentions.  Otherwise their desire to lead you on will combine
with your own desire to be led on to produce completely inaccurate
impressions.
Use the data to weight your strategy.
You'll probably be talking to several investors.  Focus on the ones
that are most likely to say yes.  The value of a potential investor
is a combination of how good it would be if they said yes, and how
likely they are to say it.  Put the most weight on the second factor.
Partly because the most important quality in an investor is simply
investing.  But also because, as I mentioned, the biggest factor
in investors' opinion of you is other investors' opinion of you.
If you're talking to several investors and you manage to get one
over the threshold of saying yes, it will make the others much more
interested.  So you're not sacrificing the lukewarm investors if
you focus on the hot ones; convincing the hot investors is the best
way to convince the lukewarm ones.
Future
I'm hopeful things won't always be so awkward. I hope that as startups
get cheaper and the number of investors increases, raising money
will become, if not easy, at least straightforward.
In the meantime, the brokenness of the funding process offers a big
opportunity.  Most investors have no idea how dangerous they are.
They'd be surprised to hear that raising money from them is something
that has to be treated as a threat to a company's survival.  They
just think they need a little more information to make up their
minds.  They don't get that there are 10 other investors who also
want a little more information, and that the process of talking to
them all can bring a startup to a standstill for months.
Because investors don't understand the cost of dealing with them,
they don't realize how much room there is for a potential competitor
to undercut them.  I know from my own experience how much faster
investors could decide, because we've brought our own time down to
20 minutes (5 minutes of reading an application plus a 10 minute
interview plus 5 minutes of discussion).  If you were investing
more money you'd want to take longer, of course.  But if we can
decide in 20 minutes, should it take anyone longer than a couple
days?
Opportunities like this don't sit unexploited forever, even in an
industry as conservative as venture capital.  So
either existing investors will start to make up their minds faster,
or new investors will emerge who do.
In the meantime founders have to treat raising money as a dangerous
process.  Fortunately, I can fix the biggest danger right here.
The biggest danger is surprise.  It's that startups will underestimate
the difficulty of raising money—that they'll cruise through all
the initial steps, but when they turn to raising money they'll find
it surprisingly hard, get demoralized, and give up. So I'm telling
you in advance: raising money is hard.
Notes
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When investors can't make up their minds, they sometimes
describe it as if it were a property of the startup.  "You're too
early for us," they sometimes say.  But which of them, if they were
taken back in a time machine to the hour Google was founded, wouldn't
offer to invest at any valuation the founders chose?  An hour old
is not too early if it's the right startup.  What "you're too early"
really means is "we can't figure out yet whether you'll succeed."
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Investors influence one another both directly and indirectly.
They influence one another directly through the "buzz" that surrounds
a hot startup.  But they also influence one another indirectly
through the founders.
When a lot of investors are interested in
you, it increases your confidence in a way that makes you much more
attractive to investors.
No VC will admit they're influenced by buzz.  Some genuinely aren't.
But there are few who can say they're not influenced by confidence.
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One VC who read this essay wrote:
"We try to avoid companies that got bootstrapped with consulting.
It creates very bad behaviors/instincts that are hard to erase
from a company's culture."
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4
]
The optimal way to answer the first question is to say that
it would be improper to name names, while simultaneously implying
that you're talking to a bunch of other VCs who are all about to
give you term sheets.  If you're the sort of person who understands
how to do that, go ahead.  If not, don't even try.  Nothing annoys
VCs more than clumsy efforts to manipulate them.
[
5
]
The disadvantage of expanding a round on the fly is that the
valuation is fixed at the start, so if you get a sudden rush of
interest, you may have to decide between turning some investors
away and selling more of the company than you meant to.  That's a
good problem to have, however.
[
6
]
I wouldn't say that intelligence doesn't matter in startups.
We're only comparing YC startups, who've already made it over a
certain threshold.
[
7
]
But not all are.  Though most VCs are suits at heart,
the most successful ones tend not to be.  Oddly enough,
the best VCs tend to be the least VC-like.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.
Russian Translation


@roverbober They're already growing fast.

@phl43 People think employees cause revenue, but it's closer to the other way round: revenue enables hiring.

A quote from one of the most promising founders YC has funded recently:

"My goal is to never spend a dime from that extra $4M we just raised."

These guys have the right instincts. A lot of startups spend faster after raising money. They're focusing on cutting costs.

@auerswald Worrying that if the law is too broadly drafted, it might ban whatever she does to her lips.

@EdMekhi Often a mistake, though not always.

@RyanGirdusky More than you'd think. New technologies are interconnected, so when you ban one kind of startup you damage more than just that kind.

@SDAFS56788141 If there's no demand there's no need to outlaw it.

Nicholas Kristof:

"He was preparing to go into the operating room one day when a woman called him over and asked him to photograph her young son, Karam, in his bed in the I.C.U. Sam went over and only then realized that the boy was dead." https://t.co/CcYyvjZ2Zf

@nw3 Hmm good point.

@bparispoker @wanyeburkett I unblocked him. I usually unblock anyone who asks but obviously it's hard to see people asking on Twitter.


@provisionalidea This explains why that happened. The short version is that the unique conditions in the mid 20th century suppressed variation in income (and many other things).

https://t.co/Luw9oajZyu

@R1b11B @MichaelPThelen I'm genuinely somewhat confused. I'm guessing that Michael is saying something fairly vile, but I'm not sure exactly what, and I don't want to assume he 's saying something worse than he is.

That doesn't mean you should let AI take over your life though. For example, you shouldn't let it do your writing for you. Writing is thinking, and you need to be able to do that for yourself.

If you care about money or power, stay close to AI, because for the foreseeable future this will be the big source of change in both.

@MichaelPThelen What are you talking about?

@Suhail Variant: If you let AI do all your writing, how will you learn to do the kind of thinking that can only be done by writing?

Few of them realize it, but people who say "I don’t think that we should have billionaires" are also saying "I don't think there should be startups,"  because successful startups inevitably produce billionaires.

https://t.co/ggPKu1gN8u

I told them this was unlikely, but the uncertainty is enough to deter them. Much as uncertainty about tariffs is enough to discourage US companies from planning future investments. Uncertainty itself has a cost.

Talked to the mother of an English boy who had been planning to go to college in the US. He's not planning to anymore. His family are worried that Trump will ban foreign students.

A friend who does research on smell gave us tests of smelling ability. Jessica scored 100%. It turns out the Social Radar is also the Odor Radar.


@josephkam Here's one: https://t.co/8k3TKMZK40

@AdityaMullick7 I don't have to. I'm not running a company. I can just write about whatever I think is interesting.

@cyberSM7 At the moment, thanks to you, I'm thinking about thinking about thinking.

@FranciscoKemeny Trevor told me about that after he read a draft. I'd heard the phrase but I didn't know what it meant.

@JonErlichman @alexisohanian I think this may have been about their previous idea, not Reddit.

@garrytan Would it be a good idea for someone to create an app to track this publicly? (Not everything would be public obviously. E.g. the victims could hide their personal info if they wanted.)

@_sidmohan You cannot overestimate this.

Robert Morris once told me that the best books were about much more than they claimed to be. Kernighan and Ritchie for example is about more than C; it's about how to program. This book has that quality. It's more like a history of the period.

I've been reading Mark Girouard's Elizabethan Architecture, and it's a strange experience because it's a huge coffee table book you actually want to read instead of just leafing through. I have to sit at a table to read it.

@Mahfund I suspect building stuff out of Lego is good. And being shown how things work.


@2sush It's meant to fly much faster.

@levie This is true, but written this way it sounds like advice to go looking for certain kinds of markets. It's sufficient to try to build something great. To be great, what you've built has to be better than what existed. Ergo its market was constrained by bad tech.

@AlexShulepov7 Yes, for the same reason jets were.

@ixarmad No, I just missed it.

It's not always possible to say, at the time, what was the most important thing that happened on any particular day. But this was very likely the most important thing that happened on March 22, 2024.

https://t.co/kIUxOCgHUW

@Austen Here's the way to answer that: when was the last time she told us anything new and surprising? Off the top of my head I can't remember an instance, but I haven't been paying very close attention.

@Liv_Boeree There are always political extremists, but they only occasionally reach the point where it's part of their core doctrine that the other side should be prevented from speaking. I wrote about the phenomenon here: https://t.co/JLU3mAgLcU

@mikestaub The same pool of candidates? You don't seem to understand what Y Combinator is. It gets on the order of 20,000 applications every 6 months.

@D_Twitt3r @bast_i No. If it's harder for type x founders to get funded than type y founders, then type x founders who do get funded will be better than type y founders who do, and you should see this in their resulting performance.

@IAPonomarenko Do you have a theory about who did it?


@elonmusk This happened almost 3 years ago.

@dpachov @reidhoffman YC admissions are the opposite of arbitrary. They're looking for something very precise (startups that later become valuable) and carefully measure both their false positives and false negatives.

@reidhoffman The fundamental problem here has nothing to do with entrepreneurship. It's the arbitrariness of US college admissions, which distorts ambitious kids' lives into a freakishly unnatural mating dance for most of their teens.

But if you have a good idea that matches the founders' interests and abilities, it doesn't matter where it came from. You could have thought of it the day before, or during the YC interview. Or had it suggested to you the day after, like Reddit.

That said, the kinds of ideas he calls fake do have properties that YC dislikes. For example, they tend not to have much relationship to the founders' lives. YC does filter out ideas with those problems.

The answer is that there's no such thing as fakeness per se. Startup ideas are either good or bad, and the fact that you thought of an idea yesterday doesn't make it bad; every idea is a day old at some point.

@ceo_of_the_moon No it isn't. I'll fund people without that. And so would you. If Zuck wanted to start a new company and hadn't decided yet what it was going to do, would you turn him down?

A high school student told me that at his school a lot of the kids start fake startups and nonprofits for college admissions. He asked how YC filters out fake ideas, and I realized this is a very complicated question.

@sama That big? I'm not saying it has to be human readable, just readable by something.

Books persist well, but you'd have to print out complete sets of weights in single volumes. Otherwise you have to worry about volumes going missing.

@Worker0wned I think about that. And it sucks that I have to.


@Fabiansocialis Real. It's one of the problems I worry about most.

@BasedCapitalist Eventually I would have. I've been writing this one in my head for years.

@aparanjape It's at the bottom of this thread.

@jennyuche That was the original sense of the word, but now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. I talk explicitly in the essay about this, in the first few paragraphs.

@speedprior Good catch! Fixed.

@aewister I talk very explicitly about this in the essay.

@0xbegins To save me time. I can't rely on the essay itself because most attackers don't read it.

Usually I just give people the title and the link. But since the Twitter algorithm now penalizes such tweets, I thought of saying something first. And this seemed an obvious thing to say.

@alantebuev Partly because it started in the US. Partly because Americans tend more to extremes.

@sarmadgulzar Two Kinds of Moderate: https://t.co/ogMaJHs63d

@DudespostingWs A surprisingly large fraction of people in tech are doing it for the love of the game.


One reason Replit's revenue is growing so fast is that they're in the equivalent of a high-performance climb. They weren't just sitting around doing nothing during the preceding years of slower growth. They were building the stuff that's helping them grow fast now.

He's right. Except in a few edge cases, everything good (health, education, rule of law, tolerance) is downstream of economic growth.

Later we'll find it hard to believe that masked thugs were dragging people off the street at gunpoint. At least I hope we will, since the other alternative would be to decline into the kind of country where that's normal.

The animation that this guy made out of the Economist illustration is actually a pretty good representation of the likely effect of EU AI regulations.

If you're running a process that people want to hack, and you're not actively measuring attempts to hack it, it's being hacked.

"Do your best while you're still on this beautiful planet Earth."

A spectacular example of Orwellian doublespeak from the UK Home Secretary:

"Just because you have a freedom doesn’t mean you have to use it at every moment of every day."

In fact the ability do something whenever you want is practically the definition of a freedom.

"I think people should not be coming to the Super Bowl unless they're law-abiding Americans who love this country."

— DHS Secretary Kristi Noem

This amazing portrait by Corneille de Lyon is only 7 inches high. https://t.co/mMO8JY54w2

There's another problem unconsciously hidden in the illustration. Notice the American is wearing a t-shirt and trainers, and the European is wearing a suit.

(Obviously it's not the clothes per se so much as the extra formality they represent.) https://t.co/JqH0XuTpsT


@IDF At first sight I thought this was a map of bombs dropped on Gaza. (I'm not joking. I actually thought that.)

@adaobiadibe_ This is largely due to the difference between voters' opinions and government officials' opinions. The divergence was especially great in the mid 20th century, when the CIA had a great deal of power and little oversight.

@LezPepeCoin They look like they have the same noses. They don't look like they have the same characters.

The same sitter (Bryan Cooke) by Romney and Hoppner. A reminder of how risky it is to judge historic figures' characters by paintings of them. What you're seeing is often more the painter than the sitter. https://t.co/M4az9tRLNa

@markpapadakis I think it must be having North Korea-style military parades.

@thiagogogola Yes. Investment now predicts future revenues. That's why this statistic is the most damning of all.

Trump's tariffs have had exactly the opposite of the intended effect. 40% of American manufacturers have delayed or cancelled investments. https://t.co/8Cdq1uFYcE

13 yo just realized it's "feeder school" and not "theater school."

Makes me wonder what kind of mental model he has of the world if he's heard me apparently talking for years about how aggressively theater schools prep their students, and not stopped me to ask why...

@StefanFSchubert Do you have a link to the article?

@pokerchessman None of them. I'm not disagreeing with anything he said.


A Student's Guide to Startups
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2006
(This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)
Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go
to grad school.  I think there will increasingly be a third option:
to start your own startup.  But how common will that be?
I'm sure the default will always be to get a job, but starting a
startup could well become as popular as grad school.  In the late
90s my professor friends used to complain that they couldn't get
grad students, because all the undergrads were going to work for
startups.  I wouldn't be surprised if that situation returns, but
with one difference: this time they'll be starting their own
instead of going to work for other people's.
The most ambitious students will at this point be asking: Why wait
till you graduate?  Why not start a startup while you're in college?
In fact, why go to college at all?  Why not start a startup instead?
A year and a half ago I gave a
talk
where I said that the average age of the founders of
Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft was 24, and that if grad students could
start startups, why not undergrads?  I'm glad I phrased that as a
question, because now I can pretend it wasn't merely a rhetorical
one.  At the time I couldn't imagine why there should be any lower
limit for the age of startup founders.  Graduation is a bureaucratic
change, not a biological one.  And certainly there are undergrads
as competent technically as most grad students.  So why shouldn't
undergrads be able to start startups as well as grad students?
I now realize that something does change at graduation: you lose a
huge excuse for failing.  Regardless of how complex your life is,
you'll find that everyone else, including your family and friends,
will discard all the low bits and regard you as having a single
occupation at any given time.  If you're in college and have a
summer job writing software, you still read as a student.  Whereas
if you graduate and get a job programming, you'll be instantly
regarded by everyone as a programmer.
The problem with starting a startup while you're still in school
is that there's a built-in escape hatch.  If you start a startup
in the summer between your junior and senior year, it reads to
everyone as a summer job.
So if it goes nowhere, big deal; you return to school in the
fall with all the other seniors; no one regards you as a failure,
because your occupation is student, and you didn't fail at that.
Whereas if you start a startup just one year later, after you
graduate, as long as you're not accepted to grad school in the fall
the startup reads to everyone as your occupation.  You're
now a startup founder, so you have to do well at that.
For nearly everyone, the opinion of one's peers is the most powerful
motivator of all—more powerful even than the nominal goal of most
startup founders, getting rich.
[
1
]
About a month into each funding
cycle we have an event called Prototype Day where each startup
presents to the others what they've got so far.  You might think
they wouldn't need any more motivation.  They're working on their
cool new idea; they have funding for the immediate future; and
they're playing a game with only two outcomes: wealth or failure.
You'd think that would be motivation enough.  And yet the prospect
of a demo pushes most of them into a
rush of activity.
Even if you start a startup explicitly to get rich, the money you
might get seems pretty theoretical most of the time.  What drives
you day to day is not wanting to look bad.
You probably can't change that.  Even if you could, I don't think
you'd want to; someone who really, truly doesn't care what his peers
think of him is probably a psychopath.  So the best you can do is
consider this force like a wind, and set up your boat accordingly.
If you know your peers are going to push you in some direction,
choose good peers, and position yourself so they push you in a
direction you like.
Graduation changes the prevailing winds, and those make a difference.
Starting a startup is so hard
that it's a close call even for the ones that succeed.  However
high a startup may be flying now, it probably has a few leaves stuck
in the landing gear from those trees it barely cleared at the end
of the runway.  In such a close game, the smallest increase in the
forces against you can be enough to flick you over the edge into
failure.
When we first started
Y Combinator
we encouraged people to start
startups while they were still in college.  That's partly because
Y Combinator began as a kind of summer program.  We've kept the
program shape—all of us having dinner together once a week turns
out to be a good idea—but we've decided now
that the party line should be to tell people to wait till they
graduate.
Does that mean you can't start a startup in college?  Not at all.
Sam Altman, the co-founder of
Loopt
,
had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt
is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so
far.  But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy.  Within about three
minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking "Ah, so this is what
Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19."
If it can work to start a startup during college, why do
we tell people not to?  For the same reason that the probably
apocryphal violinist, whenever he was asked to judge someone's
playing, would always say they didn't have enough talent to make
it as a pro.  Succeeding as a musician takes determination as well
as talent, so this answer works out to be the right advice for
everyone.  The ones who are uncertain believe it and give up, and
the ones who are sufficiently determined think "screw that, I'll
succeed anyway."
So our official policy now is only to fund undergrads we can't talk
out of it.  And frankly, if you're not certain, you
should
wait.
It's not as if all the opportunities to start companies are going
to be gone if you don't do it now.  Maybe the window will close on
some idea you're working on, but that won't be the last idea you'll
have.  For every idea that times out, new ones become feasible.
Historically the opportunities to start startups have only increased
with time.
In that case, you might ask, why not wait longer?  Why not go work
for a while, or go to grad school, and then start a startup?  And
indeed, that might be a good idea.  If I had to pick the sweet spot
for startup founders, based on who we're most excited to see
applications from, I'd say it's probably the mid-twenties.  Why?
What advantages does someone in their mid-twenties have over someone
who's 21?  And why isn't it older?  What can 25 year olds do that
32 year olds can't?  Those turn out to be questions worth examining.
Plus
If you start a startup soon after college, you'll be a young founder
by present standards, so you should know what the relative advantages
of young founders are.  They're not what you might think.  As a
young founder your strengths are: stamina, poverty, rootlessness,
colleagues, and ignorance.
The importance of stamina shouldn't be surprising.  If you've heard
anything about startups you've probably heard about the long hours.
As far as I can tell these are universal.  I can't think of any
successful startups whose founders worked 9 to 5.  And it's
particularly necessary for younger founders to work long hours
because they're probably not as efficient as they'll be later.
Your second advantage, poverty, might not sound like an advantage,
but it is a huge one.  Poverty implies you can live cheaply,
and this is critically important for startups.  Nearly every startup
that fails, fails by running out of money.  It's a little misleading
to put it this way, because there's usually some other underlying
cause.  But regardless of the source of your problems, a low burn
rate gives you more opportunity to recover from them.  And since
most startups make all kinds of mistakes at first, room to recover
from mistakes is a valuable thing to have.
Most startups end up doing something different than they planned.
The way the successful ones find something that works is by trying
things that don't.  So the worst thing you can do in a startup is
to have a rigid, pre-ordained plan and then start spending a lot
of money to implement it.  Better to operate cheaply and give your
ideas time to evolve.
Recent grads can live on practically nothing, and this gives you
an edge over older founders, because the main cost in software
startups is people.  The guys with kids and mortgages are at a
real disadvantage.  This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year old
over the 32 year old.  The 32 year old probably is a better programmer,
but probably also has a much more expensive life.  Whereas a 25
year old has some work experience (more on that later) but can live
as cheaply as an undergrad.
Robert Morris and I were 29 and 30 respectively when we started
Viaweb, but fortunately we still lived like 23 year olds.  We both had
roughly zero assets.  I would have loved to have a mortgage,
since that would have meant I had a
house
.  But in retrospect
having nothing turned out to be convenient. I wasn't tied down and
I was used to living cheaply.
Even more important than living cheaply, though, is thinking cheaply.
One reason the Apple II was so popular was that it was cheap.  The
computer itself was cheap, and it used cheap, off-the-shelf peripherals
like a cassette tape recorder for data storage and a TV as a monitor.
And you know why?  Because Woz designed this computer for himself,
and he couldn't afford anything more.
We benefitted from the same phenomenon.  Our prices were
daringly low for the time.  The top level of service was
$300 a month, which was an order of magnitude below the norm.  In
retrospect this was a smart move, but we didn't do it because we
were smart.  $300 a month seemed like a lot of money to us.  Like
Apple, we created something inexpensive, and therefore popular,
simply because we were poor.
A lot of startups have that form: someone comes along and makes
something for a tenth or a hundredth of what it used to cost, and
the existing players can't follow because they don't even want to
think about a world in which that's possible.  Traditional long
distance carriers, for example, didn't even want to think about
VoIP.  (It was coming, all the same.)  Being poor helps in this
game, because your own personal bias points in the same direction
technology evolves in.
The advantages of rootlessness are similar to those of poverty.
When you're young you're more mobile—not just because you don't
have a house or much stuff, but also because you're less likely to
have serious relationships.  This turns out to be important, because
a lot of startups involve someone moving.
The founders of Kiko, for example, are now en route to the Bay Area
to start their next startup.  It's a better place for what they
want to do.  And it was easy for them to decide to go, because
neither as far as I know has a serious girlfriend, and everything
they own will fit in one car—or more precisely, will either fit
in one car or is crappy enough that they don't mind leaving it
behind.
They at least were in Boston.  What if they'd been in Nebraska,
like Evan Williams was at their age?   Someone wrote recently that
the drawback of Y Combinator was that you had to move to participate.
It couldn't be any other way. The kind of conversations we have
with founders, we have to have in person.  We fund a dozen startups
at a time, and we can't be in a dozen places at once.  But even if
we could somehow magically save people from moving, we wouldn't.
We wouldn't be doing founders a favor by letting them stay in
Nebraska.  Places that aren't
startup hubs
are toxic to startups.
You can tell that from indirect evidence.  You can tell how hard
it must be to start a startup in Houston or Chicago or Miami from
the microscopically small number, per capita, that succeed
there.  I don't know exactly what's suppressing all the startups in these
towns—probably a hundred subtle little things—but something
must be.
[
2
]
Maybe this will change.  Maybe the increasing cheapness of startups
will mean they'll be able to survive anywhere, instead of only in
the most hospitable environments.  Maybe 37signals is the pattern
for the future.  But maybe not.  Historically there have always
been certain towns that were centers for certain industries, and
if you weren't in one of them you were at a disadvantage.  So my
guess is that 37signals is an anomaly.  We're looking at a pattern
much older than "Web 2.0" here.
Perhaps the reason more startups per capita happen in the Bay Area
than Miami is simply that there are more founder-type people there.
Successful startups are almost never started by one person.  Usually
they begin with a conversation in which someone mentions that
something would be a good idea for a company, and his friend says,
"Yeah, that is a good idea, let's try it."  If you're missing that
second person who says "let's try it," the startup never happens.
And that is another area where undergrads have an edge.  They're
surrounded by people willing to say that.  At a good college you're
concentrated together with a lot of other ambitious and technically
minded people—probably more concentrated than you'll ever be
again.  If your nucleus spits out a neutron, there's a good chance
it will hit another nucleus.
The number one question people ask us at Y Combinator is: Where can
I find a co-founder?  That's the biggest problem for someone starting
a startup at 30.  When they were in school they knew a lot of good
co-founders, but by 30 they've either lost touch with them or these
people are tied down by jobs they don't want to leave.
Viaweb was an anomaly in this respect too.  Though we were comparatively
old, we weren't tied down by impressive jobs.  I was trying to be
an artist, which is not very constraining, and Robert, though 29,
was still in grad school due to a little interruption in his academic
career back in 1988.  So arguably the Worm made Viaweb possible.
Otherwise Robert would have been a junior professor at that age,
and he wouldn't have had time to work on crazy speculative projects
with me.
Most of the questions people ask Y Combinator we have some kind of
answer for, but not the co-founder question.  There is no good
answer.  Co-founders really should be people you already know.  And
by far the best place to meet them is school. You have a large
sample of smart people; you get to compare how they all perform on
identical tasks; and everyone's life is pretty fluid.  A lot of
startups grow out of schools for this reason.  Google, Yahoo, and
Microsoft, among others, were all founded by people who met in
school.  (In Microsoft's case, it was high school.)
Many students feel they should wait and get a little more experience
before they start a company.  All other things being equal, they
should.  But all other things are not quite as equal as they look.
Most students don't realize how rich they are in the scarcest
ingredient in startups, co-founders.  If you wait too long, you may
find that your friends are now involved in some project they don't
want to abandon.  The better they are, the more likely this is to
happen.
One way to mitigate this problem might be to actively plan your
startup while you're getting those n years of experience.  Sure,
go off and get jobs or go to grad school or whatever, but get
together regularly to scheme, so the idea of starting a startup
stays alive in everyone's brain.  I don't know if this works, but
it can't hurt to try.
It would be helpful just to realize what an advantage you have as
students.  Some of your classmates are probably going to be successful
startup founders; at a great technical university, that is a near
certainty.  So which ones?  If I were you I'd look for the people
who are not just smart, but incurable
builders
.
Look
for the people who keep starting projects, and finish at least some
of them.  That's what we look for.  Above all else, above academic
credentials and even the idea you apply with, we look for people
who build things.
The other place co-founders meet is at work.  Fewer do than at
school, but there are things you can do to improve the odds.  The
most important, obviously, is to work somewhere that has a lot of
smart, young people.  Another is to work for a company located in
a startup hub.  It will be easier to talk a co-worker into quitting
with you in a place where startups are happening all around you.
You might also want to look at the employment agreement you sign
when you get hired.  Most will say that any ideas you think of while
you're employed by the company belong to them.  In practice it's
hard for anyone to prove what ideas you had when, so the line gets
drawn at code.  If you're going to start a startup, don't write any
of the code while you're still employed.  Or at least discard any
code you wrote while still employed and start over.  It's not so
much that your employer will find out and sue you.  It won't come
to that; investors or acquirers or (if you're so lucky) underwriters
will nail you first.  Between t = 0 and when you buy that yacht,
someone
is going to ask if any of your code legally belongs
to anyone else, and you need to be able to say no.
[
3
]
The most overreaching employee agreement I've seen so far is Amazon's.
In addition to the usual clauses about owning your ideas, you also
can't be a founder of a startup that has another founder who worked
at Amazon—even if you didn't know them or even work there at the
same time. I suspect they'd have a hard time enforcing this, but
it's a bad sign they even try.  There are plenty of other places
to work; you may as well choose one that keeps more of your options
open.
Speaking of cool places to work, there is of course Google.  But I
notice something slightly frightening about Google: zero startups
come out of there.  In that respect it's a black hole.  People seem
to like working at Google too much to leave.  So if you hope to start
a startup one day, the evidence so far suggests you shouldn't work
there.
I realize this seems odd advice.  If they make your life so good
that you don't want to leave, why not work there?  Because, in
effect, you're probably getting a local maximum.  You need a certain
activation energy to start a startup.  So an employer who's fairly
pleasant to work for can lull you into staying indefinitely, even
if it would be a net win for you to leave.
[
4
]
The best place to work, if you want to start a startup, is probably
a startup.  In addition to being the right sort of experience, one
way or another it will be over quickly.  You'll either end up rich,
in which case problem solved, or the startup will get bought, in
which case it it will start to suck to work there and it will be
easy to leave, or most likely, the thing will blow up and you'll
be free again.
Your final advantage, ignorance, may not sound very useful.  I
deliberately used a controversial word for it; you might equally
call it innocence.  But it seems to be a powerful force.  My Y
Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston is just about to publish
a book of
interviews
with startup founders, and I noticed a remarkable pattern in them.
One after another said that if they'd known how hard it would be,
they would have been too intimidated to start.
Ignorance can be useful when it's a counterweight to other forms
of stupidity.  It's useful in starting startups because you're
capable of more than you realize.  Starting startups is harder than
you expect, but you're also capable of more than you expect, so
they balance out.
Most people look at a company like Apple and think, how could I
ever make such a thing?  Apple is an institution, and I'm just a
person.  But every institution was at one point just a handful of
people in a room deciding to start something.  Institutions are
made up, and made up by people no different from you.
I'm not saying everyone could start a startup.  I'm sure most people
couldn't; I don't know much about the population at large.  When
you get to groups I know well, like hackers, I can say more precisely.
At the top schools, I'd guess as many as a quarter of the CS majors
could make it as startup founders if they wanted.
That "if they wanted" is an important qualification—so important
that it's almost cheating to append it like that—because once you
get over a certain threshold of intelligence, which most CS majors
at top schools are past, the deciding factor in whether you succeed
as a founder is how much you want to.  You don't have to be that
smart.  If you're not a genius, just start a startup in some unsexy
field where you'll have less competition, like software for human
resources departments.  I picked that example at random, but I feel
safe in predicting that whatever they have now, it wouldn't take
genius to do better.   There are a lot of people out there working
on boring stuff who are desperately in need of better software, so
however short you think you fall of Larry and Sergey, you can ratchet
down the coolness of the idea far enough to compensate.
As well as preventing you from being intimidated, ignorance can
sometimes help you discover new ideas.
Steve Wozniak
put this very strongly:
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having
  money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing
  that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done
  that thing in my life.
When you know nothing, you have to reinvent stuff for yourself, and
if you're smart your reinventions may be better than what preceded
them.  This is especially true in fields where the rules change.
All our ideas about software were developed in a time when processors
were slow, and memories and disks were tiny.  Who knows what obsolete
assumptions are embedded in the conventional wisdom?  And the way
these assumptions are going to get fixed is not by explicitly
deallocating them, but by something more akin to garbage collection.
Someone ignorant but smart will come along and reinvent everything,
and in the process simply fail to reproduce certain existing ideas.
Minus
So much for the advantages of young founders.  What about the
disadvantages? I'm going to start with what goes wrong and try to
trace it back to the root causes.
What goes wrong with young founders is that they build stuff that
looks like class projects.  It was only recently that we figured
this out ourselves.  We noticed a lot of similarities between the
startups that seemed to be falling behind, but we couldn't figure
out how to put it into words.  Then finally we realized what it
was: they were building class projects.
But what does that really mean?  What's wrong with class projects?
What's the difference between a class project and a real startup?
If we could answer that question it would be useful not just to
would-be startup founders but to students in general, because we'd
be a long way toward explaining the mystery of the so-called real
world.
There seem to be two big things missing in class projects: (1) an
iterative definition of a real problem and (2) intensity.
The first is probably unavoidable.  Class projects will inevitably
solve fake problems.  For one thing, real problems are rare and
valuable.  If a professor wanted to have students solve real problems,
he'd face the same paradox as someone trying to give an example of
whatever "paradigm" might succeed the Standard Model of physics.
There may well be something that does, but if you could think of
an example you'd be entitled to the Nobel Prize.  Similarly, good
new problems are not to be had for the asking.
In technology the difficulty is compounded by the fact that real
startups tend to discover the problem they're solving by a process
of evolution.  Someone has an idea for something; they build it;
and in doing so (and probably only by doing so) they realize
the problem they should be solving is another one.  Even if the
professor let you change your project description on the fly, there
isn't time enough to do that in a college class, or a market to
supply evolutionary pressures.  So class
projects are mostly about implementation, which is the least
of your problems in a startup.
It's not just that in a startup you work on the idea as well as
implementation.  The very implementation is different.  Its main
purpose is to refine the idea.  Often the only value of most of the
stuff you build in the first six months is that it proves your
initial idea was mistaken.  And that's extremely valuable.  If
you're free of a misconception that everyone else still shares,
you're in a powerful position.  But you're not thinking that way
about a class project.  Proving your initial plan was mistaken would
just get you a bad grade.  Instead of building stuff to throw away,
you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal
of showing you did a lot of work.
That leads to our second difference: the way class projects are
measured.  Professors will tend to judge you by the distance between
the starting point and where you are now.  If someone has achieved
a lot, they should get a good grade.  But customers will judge you
from the other direction: the distance remaining between where you
are now and the features they need.  The market doesn't give a shit
how hard you worked.  Users just want your software to do what they
need, and you get a zero otherwise.  That is one of the most
distinctive differences between school and the real world: there
is no reward for putting in a good effort.  In fact, the whole
concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to encourage
kids.  It is not found in nature.
Such lies seem to be helpful to kids.  But unfortunately when you
graduate they don't give you a list of all the lies they told you
during your education.  You have to get them beaten out of you by
contact with the real world.  And this is why so many jobs want
work experience.  I couldn't understand that when I was in college.
I knew how to program.  In fact, I could tell I knew how to program
better than most people doing it for a living.  So what was this
mysterious "work experience" and why did I need it?
Now I know what it is, and part of the confusion is grammatical.
Describing it as "work experience" implies it's like experience
operating a certain kind of machine, or using a certain programming
language.  But really what work experience refers to is not some
specific expertise, but the elimination of certain habits left over
from childhood.
One of the defining qualities of kids is that they flake.  When
you're a kid and you face some hard test, you can cry and say "I
can't" and they won't make you do it.  Of course, no one can make
you do anything in the grownup world either.  What they do instead
is fire you.  And when motivated by that
you find you can do a lot more than you realized.  So one of the
things employers expect from someone with "work experience" is the
elimination of the flake reflex—the ability to get things done,
with no excuses.
The other thing you get from work experience is an understanding
of what work is, and in particular, how intrinsically horrible it
is.  Fundamentally the equation is a brutal one: you have to spend
most of your waking hours doing stuff someone else wants, or starve.
There are a few places where the work is so interesting that this
is concealed, because what other people want done happens to coincide
with what you want to work on.  But you only have to imagine what
would happen if they diverged to see the underlying reality.
It's not so much that adults lie to kids about this as never explain
it.  They never explain what the deal is with money.  You know from
an early age that you'll have some sort of job, because everyone
asks what you're going to "be" when you grow up. What they
don't tell you is that as a kid you're sitting on the shoulders of
someone else who's treading water, and that starting working means
you get thrown into the water on your own, and have to start treading
water yourself or sink.  "Being" something is incidental; the
immediate problem is not to drown.
The relationship between work and money tends to dawn on you only
gradually.  At least it did for me.  One's first thought tends to
be simply "This sucks.  I'm in debt. Plus I have to get up on monday
and go to work."  Gradually you realize that these two things are
as tightly connected as only a market can make them.
So the most important advantage 24 year old founders have over 20
year old founders is that they know what they're trying to avoid.
To the average undergrad the idea of getting rich translates into
buying Ferraris, or being admired.  To someone who has learned from
experience about the relationship between money and work, it
translates to something way more important: it means you get to opt
out of the brutal equation that governs the lives of 99.9% of people.
Getting rich means you can stop treading water.
Someone who gets this will work much harder at making a startup
succeed—with the proverbial energy of a drowning man, in fact.
But understanding the relationship between money and work also
changes the way you work.  You don't get money just for working,
but for doing things other people want.  Someone who's figured that
out will automatically focus more on the user.  And that cures the
other half of the class-project syndrome.  After you've been working
for a while, you yourself tend to measure what you've done the same
way the market does.
Of course, you don't have to spend years working to learn this
stuff.  If you're sufficiently perceptive you can grasp these things
while you're still in school.  Sam Altman did.  He must have, because
Loopt is no class project.  And as his example suggests, this can
be valuable knowledge.  At a minimum, if you get this stuff, you
already have most of what you gain from the "work experience"
employers consider so desirable.  But of course if you really get
it, you can use this information in a way that's more valuable to
you than that.
Now
So suppose you think you might start a startup at some point, either
when you graduate or a few years after.  What should you do now?
For both jobs and grad school, there are ways to prepare while
you're in college.  If you want to get a job when you graduate, you
should get summer jobs at places you'd like to work.  If you want
to go to grad school, it will help to work on research projects as
an undergrad.  What's the equivalent for startups?  How do you keep
your options maximally open?
One thing you can do while you're still in school is to learn how
startups work.  Unfortunately that's not easy.  Few if any colleges
have classes about startups.  There may be business school classes
on entrepreneurship, as they call it over there, but these are
likely to be a waste of time.  Business schools like to talk about
startups, but philosophically they're at the opposite end of the
spectrum.  Most books on startups also seem to be useless.  I've
looked at a few and none get it right.  Books in most fields are
written by people who know the subject from experience, but for
startups there's a unique problem:  by definition the founders of
successful startups don't need to write books to make money. As a
result most books on the subject end up being written by people who
don't understand it.
So I'd be skeptical of classes and books.  The way to learn about
startups is by watching them in action, preferably by working at
one.  How do you do that as an undergrad?  Probably by sneaking in
through the back door. Just hang around a lot and gradually start
doing things for them.  Most startups are (or should be) very
cautious about hiring.  Every hire increases the burn rate, and bad
hires early on are hard to recover from.  However, startups usually
have a fairly informal atmosphere, and there's always a lot that
needs to be done.  If you just start doing stuff for them, many
will be too busy to shoo you away.  You can thus gradually work
your way into their confidence, and maybe turn it into an official
job later, or not, whichever you prefer.  This won't work for all
startups, but it would work for most I've known.
Number two, make the most of the great advantage of school: the
wealth of co-founders.  Look at the people around you and ask
yourself which you'd like to work with.  When you apply that test,
you may find you get surprising results.  You may find you'd prefer
the quiet guy you've mostly ignored to someone who seems impressive
but has an attitude to match.  I'm not suggesting you suck up to
people you don't really like because you think one day they'll be
successful.  Exactly the opposite, in fact: you should only start
a startup with someone you like, because a startup will put your
friendship through a stress test.  I'm just saying you should think
about who you really admire and hang out with them, instead of
whoever circumstances throw you together with.
Another thing you can do is learn skills that will be useful to you
in a startup.  These may be different from the skills you'd learn
to get a job.  For example, thinking about getting a job will make
you want to learn programming languages you think employers want,
like Java and C++.  Whereas if you start a startup, you get to pick
the language, so you have to think about which will actually let
you get the most done.  If you use that test you might end up
learning Ruby or Python instead.
But the most important skill for a startup founder isn't a programming
technique.  It's a knack for understanding users and figuring out
how to give them what they want.  I know I repeat this, but that's
because it's so important.  And it's a skill you can learn, though
perhaps habit might be a better word.  Get into the habit of thinking
of software as having users.  What do those users want?  What would
make them say wow?
This is particularly valuable for undergrads, because the concept
of users is missing from most college programming classes.  The way
you get taught programming in college would be like teaching writing
as grammar, without mentioning that its purpose is to communicate
something to an audience.  Fortunately an audience for software is
now only an http request away.  So in addition to the programming
you do for your classes, why not build some kind of website people
will find useful?  At the very least it will teach you how to write
software with users.  In the best case, it might not just be
preparation for a startup, but the startup itself, like it was for
Yahoo and Google.
Notes
[
1
]
Even the desire to protect one's children seems weaker, judging
from things people have historically done to their kids
rather than risk their community's disapproval.  (I assume we still
do things that will be regarded in the future as barbaric, but
historical abuses are easier for us to see.)
[
2
]
Worrying that Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months
also suggests one underestimates how hard it is to start a startup.
You're going to have to put up with much greater inconveniences than
that.
[
3
]
Most employee agreements
say that any idea relating to the company's present or potential
future business belongs to them.  Often as not the second clause could
include any possible startup, and anyone doing due diligence for an
investor or acquirer will assume the worst.
To be safe either (a) don't use code written while you
were still employed in your previous job, or (b) get your employer to
renounce, in writing, any claim to the code you write for your side
project.  Many will consent to (b) rather than
lose a prized employee.  The downside is that you'll have to tell them
exactly what your project does.
[
4
]
Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox ignored
them.  If Xerox had used what they built, they would probably
never have left PARC.
Thanks
to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading
drafts of this, and to Jeff Arnold and the SIPB for inviting me to
speak.
Comment
on this essay.
Chinese Translation
Arabic Translation


@neemeenoo I don't think ChatGPT would produce whacko conspiracy theories unless you explicitly asked it to, which the mom naturally wouldn't.

Now all we need is an OpenAI wearable that can imitate our voice while we move our lips, and we've solved Thanksgiving dinner.

A friend's mom sent her an email full of anti-vax conspiracy theories. She didn't have the energy to refute her point by point, so she asked ChatGPT to write a response, which she said was actually pretty good.

@dwlz e = mc^2 runs both ways, and God has a lot of e.

@ThinkItThroug17 I honestly can't think of an argument justifying the starvation of children. Can you?

@JohnWittle In preindustrial times it was common for armies to commit what are now considered war crimes. Conquering armies would routinely massacre civilians or sell them into slavery. But the armies of civilized countries no longer do such things.

@jetsweepreverse It should be easy to verify for example that the Israelis only let doctors bring in 3 kg of food. And if they had such a rule, its only possible purpose would be to starve civilians. They can't plausibly claim Hamas was going to steal the 4th kg.

@growing_daniel Only because of unbelievably strenuous efforts behind the scenes to avert disaster. It was very nearly the beginning of a cascade of bank runs.

@ziadazj It would be interesting to get a list of the 45 journalists and then do a textual comparison of the things they wrote before and after the trip.

"In the hospital there are kids maimed by airstrikes: missing arms, missing legs, third degree burns. Often there’s not enough pain medication. But the children are not screaming about the pain, they’re screaming: 'I'm hungry! I’m hungry!'"


@WillHaver88 How to Do Great Work: https://t.co/Bs2gq7bkvb

@sarmadgulzar A few things, but surprisingly little.

@AaronAnandji The niche is the Bay Area, so we filled it when we set up in Mountain View.

Y Combinator's 20th birthday is tomorrow. Here's what was happening on March 11, 2005: https://t.co/uEctjPUohb

(Yeah, I know this tweet will get hidden because it has a link in it, and that I'm supposed to put the link in a reply. But that's so stupid that I refuse to do it.)

@MPrinParr No, the problem is that they look wrong.

@MPrinParr Not with those plate glass windows.

Imagine how great it would be to have a president who was neither decrepit nor a lout. It's been so long (8 years) that I can barely remember what it's like. And yet we used to be able to take this for granted. I never thought I'd long for Gerald Ford, but I do.

@GrayConnolly @HoyasFan07 @HumphreyBohun What? I'm not saying Russia is going to conquer all of Europe.

@jonathanchait You're a journalist. Tell us.

@DavidSacks This comparison is more revealing than you intended, because while Covid didn't kill everyone, it did kill quite a lot of people.

How much of Europe do you believe Russia should be allowed to conquer?


I was talking to a startup about how when you first launch you get a spike of interest that then mostly dissipates, and they laughed and showed me their current usage graph. https://t.co/LulvHJaxWp

@zxlava @waitbutwhy For me it's just when I no longer see anything I need to fix.

@waitbutwhy Could you make it two books? Maybe your ideas are already being constrained by the worry that the book is too long, and this would let them grow into their natural shape.

@Liv_Boeree Their fiduciary duty to their LPs would usually forbid it, no matter what they might feel personally.

@sama It must have been a lot of work for the editors to add all those capital letters.

@DavidSacks Do you really want the full story of what you did to Parker to be told publicly? Because it's the worst case of an investor maltreating a founder that I've ever heard, and I've heard practically all of them.

@TylerGriffith11 @parkerconrad I don't need a sixth sense. I know he's an awful person from things he's done.

@bsierakowski Better that than the other way around.

"Speaking of eccentric geniuses, how's Trevor?"

— a YC alum

@parkerconrad (Jessica warned Parker when he first hired David Sacks. Score one for the Social Radar.)


YC has been a magnet for posers almost from the beginning. If you lack substance, you need brand, and YC supplies instant brand. So separating the earnest founders from the posers has always been a big component of the application process.

The founders in recent YC batches seem more serious. There are fewer posers and scenesters. I asked the partners what's happening. They think it's because they've gotten better at picking.

@faizan10114 No, that's not what editors do. Editors focus on one's prose. They're not ordinarily expected to be domain experts as well. Those are reviewers.

@faizan10114 I ask other people to read them and tell me if they notice any mistakes, but I'd never let anyone *edit* one.

@shivatalwar_ So you've solved that problem by saying nothing.

@faizan10114 Yes. In fact I can't imagine letting an editor mangle my writing.

@SignalWardenHQ The fact that you can write x number of LOC in 12 hours doesn't imply that you work 12 hour days every day.

@johnbarker As it turns out I met another startup today that's using AI to do ongoing testing of changing codebases. (He's not using them yet though.)

On the positive side, Trump can presumably claim that he's created an unprecedented number of billionaires, now that we're measuring net worth in Trump dollars, which are only worth .9 Biden dollars.

(I'm joking. This is not positive.)

Unless your dollar-denominated net worth has increased by at least 11% this year, you've become poorer. The dollar has decreased about 10% in value since Trump took office, so your net worth would have to increase by 11% for you to break even.


Don't Talk to Corp Dev
January 2015
Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies
that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp
dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet or not.
It's usually a mistake to talk to corp dev unless (a) you want to
sell your company right now and (b) you're sufficiently likely to
get an offer at an acceptable price.  In practice that means startups
should only talk to corp dev when they're either doing really well
or really badly.  If you're doing really badly, meaning the company
is about to die, you may as well talk to them, because you have
nothing to lose. And if you're doing really well, you can safely
talk to them, because you both know the price will have to be high,
and if they show the slightest sign of wasting your time, you'll
be confident enough to tell them to get lost.
The danger is to companies in the middle.  Particularly to young
companies that are growing fast, but haven't been doing it for long
enough to have grown big yet.  It's usually a mistake for a promising
company less than a year old even to talk to corp dev.
But it's a mistake founders constantly make.  When someone from
corp dev wants to meet, the founders tell themselves they should
at least find out what they want.  Besides, they don't want to
offend Big Company by refusing to meet.
Well, I'll tell you what they want.  They want to talk about buying
you.  That's what the title "corp dev" means.   So before agreeing
to meet with someone from corp dev, ask yourselves, "Do we want to
sell the company right now?"  And if the answer is no, tell them
"Sorry, but we're focusing on growing the company."  They won't be
offended.  And certainly the founders of Big Company won't be
offended. If anything they'll think more highly of you.  You'll
remind them of themselves.  They didn't sell either; that's why
they're in a position now to buy other companies.
[
1
]
Most founders who get contacted by corp dev already know what it
means.  And yet even when they know what corp dev does and know
they don't want to sell, they take the meeting.  Why do they do it?
The same mix of denial and wishful thinking that underlies most
mistakes founders make. It's flattering to talk to someone who wants
to buy you.  And who knows, maybe their offer will be surprisingly
high.  You should at least see what it is, right?
No.  If they were going to send you an offer immediately by email,
sure, you might as well open it.  But that is not how conversations
with corp dev work.  If you get an offer at all, it will be at the
end of a long and unbelievably distracting process.  And if the
offer is surprising, it will be surprisingly low.
Distractions are the thing you can least afford in a startup.  And
conversations with corp dev are the worst sort of distraction,
because as well as consuming your
attention
they undermine your
morale.  One of the tricks to surviving a grueling process is not
to stop and think how tired you are.  Instead you get into a sort
of flow.
[
2
]
Imagine what it would do to you if at mile 20 of a
marathon, someone ran up beside you and said "You must feel really
tired.  Would you like to stop and take a rest?"  Conversations
with corp dev are like that but worse, because the suggestion of
stopping gets combined in your mind with the imaginary high price
you think they'll offer.
And then you're really in trouble.  If they can, corp dev people
like to turn the tables on you. They like to get you to the point
where you're trying to convince them to buy instead of them trying
to convince you to sell.  And surprisingly often they succeed.
This is a very slippery slope, greased with some of the most powerful
forces that can work on founders' minds, and attended by an experienced
professional whose full time job is to push you down it.
Their tactics in pushing you down that slope are usually fairly
brutal. Corp dev people's whole job is to buy companies, and they
don't even get to choose which.  The only way their performance is
measured is by how cheaply they can buy you, and the more ambitious
ones will stop at nothing to achieve that. For example, they'll
almost always start with a lowball offer, just to see if you'll
take it. Even if you don't, a low initial offer will demoralize you
and make you easier to manipulate.
And that is the most innocent of their tactics. Just wait till
you've agreed on a price and think you have a done deal, and then
they come back and say their boss has vetoed the deal and won't do
it for more than half the agreed upon price. Happens all the time.
If you think investors can behave badly, it's nothing compared to
what corp dev people can do.  Even corp dev people at companies
that are otherwise benevolent.
I remember once complaining to a
friend at Google about some nasty trick their corp dev people had
pulled on a YC startup.
"What happened to Don't be Evil?" I asked.
"I don't think corp dev got the memo," he replied.
The tactics you encounter in M&A conversations can be like nothing
you've experienced in the otherwise comparatively
upstanding
world
of Silicon Valley.  It's as if a chunk of genetic material from the
old-fashioned robber baron business world got incorporated into the
startup world.
[
3
]
The simplest way to protect yourself is to use the trick that John
D. Rockefeller, whose grandfather was an alcoholic, used to protect
himself from becoming one.  He once told a Sunday school class
Boys, do you know why I never became a drunkard?  Because I never
  took the first drink.
Do you want to sell your company right now?  Not eventually, right
now.  If not, just don't take the first meeting.  They won't be
offended.  And you in turn will be guaranteed to be spared one of
the worst experiences that can happen to a startup.
If you do want to sell, there's another set of
techniques
for doing
that.  But the biggest mistake founders make in dealing with corp
dev is not doing a bad job of talking to them when they're ready
to, but talking to them before they are.  So if you remember only
the title of this essay, you already know most of what you need to
know about M&A in the first year.
Notes
[
1
]
I'm not saying you should never sell.  I'm saying you should
be clear in your own mind about whether you want to sell or not,
and not be led by manipulation or wishful thinking into trying to
sell earlier than you otherwise would have.
[
2
]
In a startup, as in most competitive sports, the task at hand
almost does this for you; you're too busy to feel tired.  But when
you lose that protection, e.g. at the final whistle, the fatigue
hits you like a wave.  To talk to corp dev is to let yourself feel
it mid-game.
[
3
]
To be fair, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev people are magnified
by the fact that they function as the face of a large organization
that often doesn't know its own mind.  Acquirers can be surprisingly
indecisive about acquisitions, and their flakiness is indistinguishable
from dishonesty by the time it filters down to you.
Thanks
to Marc Andreessen, Jessica Livingston, Geoff
Ralston, and Qasar Younis for reading drafts of this.


@RohanGreyFA 1930, but who? Not quite Stanley Spencer...

@JamesGillespieX Had to keep it under 280 chars.

Overheard in America:

"Tyler, stop teasing Cooper. Go play with Hunter, Chandler, and Fletcher instead. And tell Carter, Sawyer, Harper, and Porter to come back and finish their lunch. Piper! Don't let little Dogcatcher run into the street!"

@cremieuxrecueil That's a good quality in a novelist...

@boseth_h @Johnny2Fingersz I just mean it's a matter of degree.

@shadihamid It's contrarian to believe conspiracy theories, and Americans like the idea of being contrarian so much that if there's nothing true they can be contrarian by believing, they'll believe things that are false.

@boseth_h @Johnny2Fingersz True privacy is a myth period, if powerful enough entities care enough.

@SatoriVerdure That may be what you got from college but it isn't what smart and ambitious people get.

@olivieropinotti If you can get into YC at 18 you can get in at 22.

@kutluokan @Austen People who can't get much from college, perhaps because their college is bad and they can't transfer, or because they're incapable of the kind of learning that happens at colleges.


@isitleehazel Sorry, I thought this was yet another tweet from someone in America asking why I was on Twitter in the middle of the night.

Things got so bad as we were approaching peak woke that you could get in trouble for saying this. A New York Times reporter actually emailed me about it.

@jdmccafferty I was guessing at the date of the plaque.

@isitleehazel I live in England.

"The next morning I found that the road had taken me to a small town called Muckweed. The roads were paved with mud and horse shit. The only townsfolk awake at this hour were drunks."

— from 12 yo's latest story

@dsaezgil It wasn't that hard, to be honest. Even then, when he wanted something, he got it. So if he wanted you to be impressed, you'd be impressed.

@fredgiblet @Empty_America In both the US and the UK, top high schools still are more demanding than the median college education.

@JohnPompliano It's the same for founders worth a thousandth as much. They're all working because they're ambitious and interested in what they're working on, not because they need to.

@robkhenderson There's a variable Ms. Inhorn isn't controlling for...

@AdamMGrant I believe this. Anything long I prefer to read on paper.

Which is odd because I publish essays online. I suppose I should publish a new paper book of them.


@TheStalwart The two main reasons are boring ones:

1. It has been for decades. Once a town is established as a center for x, by default it remains one.

2. 336 million people can move there without needing a visa.

@typesfast You hear that @writesfast?

@BoyanSlat @dynomight7 Interestingly, I don't think this was as true, say, 40 years ago. Somewhat true, but not as true. Polarization has made conversations about political questions more pointless.

Ten years ago I'd have thought the way to automate laundry would have been to make new infrastructure, but it looks like robots will be so good they can use infrastructure designed for humans.

@parsnips451 @ashleevance No I did not. Viaweb made them a lot of money.

@LeightonX13 Ironic considering that you (or more precisely your boss) probably does have an actual hotline to the Kremlin.

@ashleevance I was there at the time. It was because the VC-selected managers then running Yahoo felt they needed to have a "broadband strategy." Analysts kept asking about it.

@synbhwl @eshear This can be surprisingly inexpensive. You can buy great volumes used on Abebooks.

@eshear I deliberately buy books that I think my kids might pick up and read one day. Maybe your parents did too...

@RealTimeWWII And indeed Roosevelt turned out to be a big problem for him.


@yuris You mean like comb as in comb your hair?

@yuris How do they pronounce it?

@yuris What kind of person says "YComb"? I've never heard that one.

@devesh_khare @0xKNL__ There aren't as many woke mobs. I'm not sure why though. It could be because wokeness peaked several years ago, or it could be because that type of user will never pay, so their tweets get deprioritized.

@0xKNL__ I've been a Twitter user for more than twice as long as you, and the experience doesn't seem any worse to me. Slightly better if anything.

It's weird how consistently people who attack Twitter point out that ad revenue has decreased. They don't seem the sort of people who care about companies' revenues, and now they're suddenly amateur stock analysts. I suppose it's because usage hasn't decreased.

@HeyJamesKnight Sometimes the reason is just a sort of organizational senility. But surprisingly often it's that the organization's power and/or wealth makes it a target for people who want to take it over.

@timkiladze VC firms are among the organizations least susceptible to drift, because they have to raise new funds every couple years. If they have poor performance for several funds in a row, they'll find it hard to raise a new one.

@pdhsu Do you say that based on knowledge of what he's planning?

@limits_stop I tried to think of some examples, but I couldn't. Can you?