Copy What You Like
July 2006
When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad
writers.  What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction,
so I assumed that was the highest form of writing.  Mistake number
one.  The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which
people suffered in complicated ways.  Anything funny or
gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to
understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer.  Mistake number two.  The
ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had
quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine
publishing.  But since their size made them perfect for use in
high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the
impression the short story was flourishing.  Mistake number three.
And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you
could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was
considered advanced.  Mistake number four.  The result was that I
wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone
was unhappy in a way that seemed deep.
For most of college I was a philosophy major.  I was very impressed
by the papers published in philosophy journals.  They were so
beautifully typeset, and their tone was just captivating—alternately
casual and buffer-overflowingly technical.  A fellow would be walking
along a street and suddenly modality qua modality would spring upon
him.  I didn't ever quite understand these papers, but I figured
I'd get around to that later, when I had time to reread them more
closely.  In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them.  This
was, I can now see, a doomed undertaking, because they weren't
really saying anything.  No philosopher ever refuted another, for
example, because no one said anything definite enough to refute.
Needless to say, my imitations didn't say anything either.
In grad school I was still wasting time imitating the wrong things.
There was then a fashionable type of program called an expert system,
at the core of which was something called an inference engine.  I
looked at what these things did and thought "I could write that in
a thousand lines of code."  And yet eminent professors were writing
books about them, and startups were selling them for a year's salary
a copy.  What an opportunity, I thought; these impressive things
seem easy to me; I must be pretty sharp.  Wrong.  It was simply a
fad.  The books the professors wrote about expert systems are now
ignored.  They were not even on a
path
to anything interesting.
And the customers paying so much for them were largely the same
government agencies that paid thousands for screwdrivers and toilet
seats.
How do you avoid copying the wrong things?  Copy only what you
genuinely like.  That would have saved me in all three cases.  I
didn't enjoy the short stories we had to read in English classes;
I didn't learn anything from philosophy papers; I didn't use expert
systems myself.  I believed these things were good because they
were admired.
It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things
you're impressed with.  One trick is to ignore presentation.  Whenever
I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how
much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and
frameless, and with no idea who painted it?  If you walk around a
museum trying this experiment, you'll find you get some truly
startling results.  Don't ignore this data point just because it's
an outlier.
Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy
as guilty pleasures.  Many things people like, especially if they're
young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue
in liking them.  99% of people reading
Ulysses
are thinking
"I'm reading
Ulysses
" as they do it. A guilty pleasure is
at least a pure one.  What do you read when you don't feel up to being
virtuous?  What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's
only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half
way through?  That's what you really like.
Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another
pitfall to be avoided.  Be careful to copy what makes them good,
rather than their flaws.  It's easy to be drawn into imitating
flaws, because they're easier to see, and of course easier to copy
too.  For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries used brownish colors.  They were imitating the great
painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown
with dirt.  Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing
brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.
It was painting, incidentally, that cured me of copying the wrong
things.  Halfway through grad school I decided I wanted to try being
a painter, and the art world was so manifestly corrupt that it
snapped the leash of credulity.  These people made philosophy
professors seem as scrupulous as mathematicians.  It was so clearly
a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced
to see the distinction.  It's there to some degree in almost every
field, but I had till then managed to avoid facing it.
That was one of the most valuable things I learned from painting:
you have to figure out for yourself what's
good
.  You can't trust
authorities. They'll lie to you on this one.
Comment
on this essay.
Chinese Translation
Romanian Translation
Spanish Translation
Russian Translation


@PreslavMihaylov @Austen There can be, but most people who think they can time the market are mistaken.

@kevin2kelly I wouldn't say "may be." IMO that's the defining quality of an ideologue.

https://t.co/ogMaJHs63d

@nileshtrivedi If you think this is the first time I've said this, you haven't been paying attention.

@Austen People who should drop out of college ≠ people who could start a successful startup at 18 though.

Anyone who could start a successful startup at 18 could start a more successful one at 22.

@_biggids College will be there for a few more years, but not as long as it takes to make a startup succeed.

@jordanwcjackson It's normal in college not to know what you want to do. And indeed part of the purpose of college is to help you answer that question.

As long as you're working hard and learning a lot, you're heading in a good direction, even if you don't know where it ultimately leads.

@0thernet That would be Garry Tan.

@NunoSempere It's exactly the top 1% of people who benefit most from it. For many it's the first time they've been in a place with a significant concentration of their peers.

@typesfast But he didn't have the same experience he would have. Once you're a couple years older than the other students in your year, it's not the same.

@rabois The Thiel Fellowship isn't to start a startup. You can use it to fund any project you're interested in pursuing. Which is one of the big advantages of college over starting a startup: you can do things just to gratify your curiosity.


@RishfulThinking They call them leavers' books here. I was translating for the international audience.

@mattyglesias I don't think Elon belongs with the other two. I think he has a genuine desire to make things better, but is impulsive and sometimes has bad judgement. Whereas the other two would happily tell any lie, or betray any friend, if it served their purposes.

I was looking through old photos for things to submit to 13 yo's school yearbook and I came across this classic from a couple years ago. https://t.co/j6Yd92ax1t

@JonDishotsky Actually American diction is far more inflated.

Nancy Mitford created a hilarious character called Hector Dexter based on it.

@marcelolima How much time have you spent there?

@nikitabier And the sets too... https://t.co/mAcarIF6ge

@Just4Br0wsing @xlr8harder The word for that is "repressive."

@typesfast It's interesting to think what percentage of people who see this will think it's a burn rather than a joke...

@xlr8harder I recommend you learn more about what authoritarianism means. It doesn't mean having strict laws. It means power is highly concentrated.

https://t.co/G7Ub2NuQDC

@xlr8harder And in any case people are getting arrested for speech crimes in the US too. And worse still, they're getting arrested for criticizing a foreign country.


@LouisLebbos Chris was a founder. The other three were an earlier generation.

@vladyslavua_ Yes, but only at the very beginning, when you're in the phase of finding ideas without consciously looking for them.

@asciidiego If your threshold for good enough = they keep running the startup for decades, but that would be an extreme threshold.

@MandelsonC You need a lot of money to become an LP. VCs get the money from LPs.

Venture capital is an unusual business in the fact that the best VCs get into it by accident. Their goal at 20 was not to become an investor, but to build things, and it was only after starting startups that they ended up investing.

@KarenAttiah "Damn, replying isn't getting me the likes I need. Let's try quote-tweeting to get this in front of my followers. What am I going to say though? There's no substantial counterargument I can offer. Eh, I guess I'll misrepresent what he said. That usually works with my followers."

@mblair I agree. That whole episode was a permanent stain on their reputation.

@DegenRolf @robinhanson Interesting support for the concept of luxury beliefs, @robkhenderson.

@txnftxnf That actually might not be a bad idea. Once it encountered the DEI office, they'd annihilate one another like a particle and its antiparticle, releasing a lot of energy.

@Seikowsky I was there about 6 weeks ago.


The problem with the Gini coefficient is that it can't distinguish between Palo Alto and feudalism.

@BlodgettMFG I bet you didn't.

@rabois @andrewhopper Keith, this supports my point. Markets being up on the news that he plans to pause the implementation of this policy isn't evidence that it's a good policy. It's evidence that it's a bad one.

https://t.co/xQxfTjDi2q

@amasad The problem (and presumably the reason they're planning to ditch it) is not its intended effects, but unforeseen conflicts with AI:

https://t.co/Dy07tbRmzr

@bscholl News to me too.

It would be fabulous if this is true.

@rabois Really? Then why is Bill Ackman worried? He's a powerful Trump supporter. He must have good enough connections to know what Trump's current plans are.

And even then there will be a residue of damage: all the little companies with 30 employees that depend on some component or raw material not produced in the US, but who can't even afford to send someone to buy him off.

But how can he communicate this in time to stop the markets from crashing? And is his administration efficient enough to process a literally global shakedown before doing serious damage to the US economy?

The easiest way out for Trump would be to claim that he never really meant to apply all the tariffs, and that they were just a way to make everyone come to him and offer favors in return for exemptions.


What Startups Are Really Like
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2009
(This  essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.)
I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided
to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded.  What hadn't I
written about yet?
I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write
about startups.  I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I
have no way to test them.  The ones on startups get tested by about
70 people every 6 months.
So I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about
starting a startup.  This amounts to asking what I got wrong, because
if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised
them.
I'm proud to report I got one response saying:
What surprised me the most is that everything was actually
    fairly predictable!
The bad news is that I got over 100 other responses listing the
surprises they encountered.
There were very clear patterns in the responses; it was remarkable
how often several people had been surprised by exactly the same
thing.  These were the biggest:
1. Be Careful with Cofounders
This was the surprise mentioned by the most founders.  There were
two types of responses: that you have to be careful who you pick
as a cofounder, and that you have to work hard to maintain your
relationship.
What people wished they'd paid more attention to when choosing
cofounders was character and commitment, not ability.  This was
particularly true with startups that failed.  The lesson: don't
pick cofounders who will flake.
Here's a typical reponse:
You haven't seen someone's true colors unless you've worked
    with them on a startup.
The reason character is so important is that it's tested more
severely than in most other situations.  One founder said explicitly
that the relationship between founders was more important than
ability:
I would rather cofound a startup with a friend than a stranger
    with higher output.  Startups are so hard and emotional that
    the bonds and emotional and social support that come with
    friendship outweigh the extra output lost.
We learned this lesson a long time ago.  If you look at the YC
application, there are more questions about the commitment and
relationship of the founders than their ability.
Founders of successful startups talked less about choosing cofounders
and more about how hard they worked to maintain their relationship.
One thing that surprised me is how the relationship of startup
    founders goes from a friendship to a marriage.  My relationship
    with my cofounder went from just being friends to seeing each
    other all the time, fretting over the finances and cleaning up
    shit. And the startup was our baby.  I summed it up once like
    this: "It's like we're married, but we're not fucking."
Several people used that word "married."  It's a far more intense
relationship than you usually see between coworkers—partly because
the stresses are so much greater, and partly because at first the
founders are the whole company.  So this relationship has to be
built of top quality materials and carefully maintained.  It's the
basis of everything.
2. Startups Take Over Your Life
Just as the relationship between cofounders is more intense than
it usually is between coworkers, so is the relationship between the
founders and the company.  Running a startup is not like having a
job or being a student, because it never stops.  This is so foreign
to most people's experience that they don't get it till it happens.
[
1
]
I didn't realize I would spend almost every waking moment either
    working or thinking about our startup.  You enter a whole
    different way of life when it's your company vs. working for
    someone else's company.
It's exacerbated by the fast pace of startups, which makes it seem
like time slows down:
I think the thing that's been most surprising to me is how one's
    perspective on time shifts. Working on our startup, I remember
    time seeming to stretch out, so that a month was a huge interval.
In the best case, total immersion can be exciting:
It's surprising how much you become consumed by your startup,
    in that you think about it day and night, but never once does
    it feel like "work."
Though I have to say, that quote is from someone we funded this
summer.  In a couple years he may not sound so chipper.
3. It's an Emotional Roller-coaster
This was another one lots of people were surprised about.  The ups
and downs were more extreme than they were prepared for.
In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next.
And by next, I mean a couple hours later.
The emotional ups and downs were the biggest surprise for me.
    One day, we'd think of ourselves as the next Google and dream
    of buying islands; the next, we'd be pondering how to let our
    loved ones know of our utter failure; and on and on.
The hard part, obviously, is the lows.  For a lot of founders that
was the big surprise:
How hard it is to keep everyone motivated during rough days or
    weeks, i.e. how low the lows can be.
After a while, if you don't have significant success to cheer you
up, it wears you out:
Your most basic advice to founders is "just don't die," but the
    energy to keep a company going in lieu of unburdening success
    isn't free; it is siphoned from the founders themselves.
There's a limit to how much you can take.  If you get to the point
where you can't keep working anymore, it's not the end of the world.
Plenty of famous founders have had some failures along the way.
4. It Can Be Fun
The good news is, the highs are also very high.  Several founders
said what surprised them most about doing a startup was how fun it
was:
I think you've left out just how fun it is to do a startup. I
    am more fulfilled in my work than pretty much any of my friends
    who did not start companies.
What they like most is the freedom:
I'm surprised by how much better it feels to be working on
    something that is challenging and creative, something I believe
    in, as opposed to the hired-gun stuff I was doing before.  I
    knew it would feel better; what's surprising is how much better.
Frankly, though, if I've misled people here, I'm not eager to fix
that.  I'd rather have everyone think starting a startup is grim
and hard than have founders go into it expecting it to be fun, and
a few months later saying "This is supposed to be
fun
? Are you
kidding?"
The truth is, it wouldn't be fun for most people.  A lot of what
we try to do in the application process is to weed out the people
who wouldn't like it, both for our sake and theirs.
The best way to put it might be that starting a startup is fun the
way a survivalist training course would be fun, if you're into that
sort of thing.  Which is to say, not at all, if you're not.
5. Persistence Is the Key
A lot of founders were surprised how important persistence was in
startups. It was both a negative and a positive surprise: they were
surprised both by the degree of persistence required
Everyone said how determined and resilient you must be, but
    going through it made me realize that the determination required
    was still understated.
and also by the degree to which persistence alone was able to
dissolve obstacles:
If you are persistent, even problems that seem out of your
    control (i.e. immigration) seem to work themselves out.
Several founders mentioned specifically how much more important
persistence was than intelligence.
I've been surprised again and again by just how much more
    important persistence is than raw intelligence.
This applies not just to intelligence but to ability in general,
and that's why so many people said character was more important in
choosing cofounders.
6. Think Long-Term
You need persistence because everything takes longer than you expect.
A lot of people were surprised by that.
I'm continually surprised by how long everything can take.
    Assuming your product doesn't experience the explosive growth
    that very few products do, everything from development to
    dealmaking (especially dealmaking) seems to take 2-3x longer
    than I always imagine.
One reason founders are surprised is that because they work fast,
they expect everyone else to.   There's a shocking amount of shear
stress at every point where a startup touches a more bureaucratic
organization, like a big company or a VC fund.  That's why fundraising
and the enterprise market kill and maim so many startups.
[
2
]
But I think the reason most founders are surprised by how long it
takes is that they're overconfident.  They think they're going to
be an instant success, like YouTube or Facebook.  You tell them
only 1 out of 100 successful startups has a trajectory like that,
and they all think "we're going to be that 1."
Maybe they'll listen to one of the more successful founders:
The top thing I didn't understand before going into it is that
    persistence is the name of the game. For the vast majority of
    startups that become successful, it's going to be a
really
long journey, at least 3 years and probably 5+.
There is a positive side to thinking longer-term.  It's not just
that you have to resign yourself to everything taking longer than
it should.  If you work patiently it's less stressful, and you can
do better work:
Because we're relaxed, it's so much easier to have fun doing
    what we do. Gone is the awkward nervous energy fueled by the
    desperate need to not fail guiding our actions. We can concentrate
    on doing what's best for our company, product, employees and
    customers.
That's why things get so much better when you hit ramen profitability.
You can shift into a different mode of working.
7. Lots of Little Things
We often emphasize how rarely startups win simply because they hit
on some magic idea.  I think founders have now gotten that into
their heads.  But a lot were surprised to find this also applies
within startups.  You have to do lots of different things:
It's much more of a grind than glamorous. A timeslice selected
    at random would more likely find me tracking down a weird DLL
    loading bug on Swedish Windows, or tracking down a bug in the
    financial model Excel spreadsheet the night before a board
    meeting, rather than having brilliant flashes of strategic
    insight.
Most hacker-founders would like to spend all their time programming.
You won't get to, unless you fail.  Which can be transformed into:
If you spend all your time programming, you will fail.
The principle extends even into programming.  There is rarely a
single brilliant hack that ensures success:
I learnt never to bet on any one feature or deal or anything
    to bring you success. It is never a single thing.  Everything
    is just incremental and you just have to keep doing lots of
    those things until you strike something.
Even in the rare cases where a clever hack makes your fortune, you
probably won't know till later:
There is no such thing as a killer feature. Or at least you
    won't know what it is.
So the best strategy is to try lots of different things.  The reason
not to put all your eggs in one basket is not the usual one,
which applies even when you know which basket is best.  In a startup
you don't even know that.
8. Start with Something Minimal
Lots of founders mentioned how important it was to launch with the
simplest possible thing.  By this point everyone knows you should
release fast and iterate.  It's practically a mantra at YC.  But
even so a lot of people seem to have been burned by not doing it:
Build the absolute smallest thing that can be considered a
    complete application and ship it.
Why do people take too long on the first version?  Pride, mostly.
They hate to release something that could be better.  They worry
what people will say about them.  But you have to overcome this:
Doing something "simple" at first glance does not mean you
    aren't doing something meaningful, defensible, or valuable.
Don't worry what people will say.  If your first version is so
impressive that trolls don't make fun of it, you waited too long
to launch.
[
3
]
One founder said this should be your approach to all programming,
not just startups, and I tend to agree.
Now, when coding, I try to think "How can I write this such
    that if people saw my code, they'd be amazed at how little there
    is and how little it does?"
Over-engineering is poison.  It's not like doing extra work for
extra credit.  It's more like telling a lie that you then have to
remember so you don't contradict it.
9. Engage Users
Product development is a conversation with the user that doesn't
really start till you launch.  Before you launch, you're like a
police artist before he's shown the first version of his sketch to
the witness.
It's so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of
your initial version not as a product, but as a trick for getting
users to start talking to you.
I learned to think about the initial stages of a startup as a
    giant experiment. All products should be considered experiments,
    and those that have a market show promising results extremely
    quickly.
Once you start talking to users, I guarantee you'll be surprised
by what they tell you.
When you let customers tell you what they're after, they will
    often reveal amazing details about what they find valuable as
    well what they're willing to pay for.
The surprise is generally positive as well as negative. They won't
like what you've built, but there will be other things they would
like that would be trivially easy to implement.  It's not till you
start the conversation by launching the wrong thing that they can
express (or perhaps even realize) what they're looking for.
10. Change Your Idea
To benefit from engaging with users you have to be willing to change
your idea.  We've always encouraged founders to see a startup idea
as a hypothesis rather than a blueprint.  And yet they're still
surprised how well it works to change the idea.
Normally if you complain about something being hard, the general
    advice is to work harder.  With a startup, I think you should
    find a problem that's easy for you to solve.  Optimizing in
    solution-space is familiar and straightforward, but you can
    make enormous gains playing around in problem-space.
Whereas mere determination, without flexibility, is a greedy algorithm
that may get you nothing more than a mediocre local maximum:
When someone is determined, there's still a danger that they'll
    follow a long, hard path that ultimately leads nowhere.
You want to push forward, but at the same time twist and turn to
find the most promising path.  One founder put it very succinctly:
Fast iteration is the key to success.
One reason this advice is so hard to follow is that people don't
realize how hard it is to judge startup ideas, particularly their
own.  Experienced founders learn to keep an open mind:
Now I don't laugh at ideas anymore, because I realized how
    terrible I was at knowing if they were good or not.
You can never tell what will work.  You just have to do whatever
seems best at each point.  We do this with YC itself.  We still
don't know if it will work, but it seems like a decent hypothesis.
11. Don't Worry about Competitors
When you think you've got a great idea, it's sort of like having a
guilty conscience about something.  All someone has to do is look
at you funny, and you think "Oh my God,
they know.
"
These alarms are almost always false:
Companies that seemed like competitors and threats at first
    glance usually never were when you really looked at it. Even
    if they were operating in the same area, they had a different
    goal.
One reason people overreact to competitors is that they overvalue
ideas.  If ideas really were the key, a competitor with the same
idea would be a real threat.  But it's usually execution that
matters:
All the scares induced by seeing a new competitor pop up are
    forgotten weeks later. It always comes down to your own product
    and approach to the market.
This is generally true even if competitors get lots of attention.
Competitors riding on lots of good blogger perception aren't
    really the winners and can disappear from the map quickly.  You
    need consumers after all.
Hype doesn't make satisfied users, at least not for something as
complicated as technology.
12. It's Hard to Get Users
A lot of founders complained about how hard it was to get users,
though.
I had no idea how much time and effort needed to go into attaining
    users.
This is a complicated topic.  When you can't get users, it's hard
to say whether the problem is lack of exposure, or whether the
product's simply bad.  Even good products can be blocked by switching
or integration costs:
Getting people to use a new service is incredibly difficult.
    This is especially true for a service that other companies can
    use, because it requires their developers to do work. If you're
    small, they don't think it is urgent.
[
4
]
The sharpest criticism of YC came from a founder who said we didn't
focus enough on customer acquisition:
YC preaches "make something people want" as an engineering task,
    a never ending stream of feature after feature until enough
    people are happy and the application takes off.  There's very
    little focus on the cost of customer acquisition.
This may be true; this may be something we need to fix, especially
for applications like games.  If you make something where the
challenges are mostly technical, you can rely on word of mouth,
like Google did.  One founder was surprised by how well that worked
for him:
There is an irrational fear that no one will buy your product.
    But if you work hard and incrementally make it better, there
    is no need to worry.
But with other types of startups you may win less by features and
more by deals and marketing.
13. Expect the Worst with Deals
Deals fall through.  That's a constant of the startup world.  Startups
are powerless, and good startup ideas generally seem wrong.  So
everyone is nervous about closing deals with you, and you have no
way to make them.
This is particularly true with investors:
In retrospect, it would have been much better if we had operated
    under the assumption that we would never get any additional
    outside investment.  That would have focused us on finding
    revenue streams early.
My advice is generally pessimistic.  Assume you won't get money,
and if someone does offer you any, assume you'll never get any more.
If someone offers you money, take it. You say it a lot, but I
    think it needs even more emphasizing.  We had the opportunity
    to raise a lot more money than we did last year and I wish we
    had.
Why do founders ignore me?  Mostly because they're optimistic by
nature.  The mistake is to be optimistic about things you can't
control. By all means be optimistic about your ability to make
something great.  But you're asking for trouble if you're optimistic
about big companies or investors.
14. Investors Are Clueless
A lot of founders mentioned how surprised they were by the cluelessness
of investors:
They don't even know about the stuff they've invested in.  I
    met some investors that had invested in a hardware device and
    when I asked them to demo the device they had difficulty switching
    it on.
Angels are a bit better than VCs, because they usually have startup
experience themselves:
VC investors don't know half the time what they are talking
    about and are years behind in their thinking.  A few were great,
    but 95% of the investors we dealt with were unprofessional,
    didn't seem to be very good at business or have any kind of
    creative vision. Angels were generally much better to talk to.
Why are founders surprised that VCs are clueless?  I think it's
because they seem so formidable.
The reason VCs seem formidable is that it's their profession to.
You get to be a VC by convincing asset managers to trust you with
hundreds of millions of dollars.  How do you do that?  You have to
seem confident, and you have to seem like you understand technology.
[
5
]
15. You May Have to Play Games
Because investors are so bad at judging you, you have to work harder
than you should at selling yourself. One founder said the thing
that surprised him most was
The degree to which feigning certitude impressed investors.
This is the thing that has surprised
me
most about YC founders'
experiences.  This summer we invited some of the alumni to talk to
the new startups about fundraising, and pretty much 100% of their
advice was about investor psychology.  I thought I was cynical about
VCs, but the founders were much more cynical.
A lot of what startup founders do is just posturing.  It works.
VCs themselves have no idea of the extent to which the startups
they like are the ones that are best at selling themselves to VCs.
[
6
]
It's exactly the same phenomenon we saw a step earlier.  VCs get
money by seeming confident to LPs, and founders get money by seeming
confident to VCs.
16. Luck Is a Big Factor
With two such random linkages in the path between startups and
money, it shouldn't be surprising that luck is a big factor in
deals.  And yet a lot of founders are surprised by it.
I didn't realize how much of a role luck plays and how much is
    outside of our control.
If you think about famous startups, it's pretty clear how big a
role luck plays.  Where would Microsoft be if IBM insisted on an
exclusive license for DOS?
Why are founders fooled by this?  Business guys probably aren't,
but hackers are used to a world where skill is paramount, and you
get what you deserve.
When we started our startup, I had bought the hype of the startup
    founder dream: that this is a game of skill. It is, in some
    ways.  Having skill is valuable. So is being determined as all
    hell. But being lucky is the critical ingredient.
Actually the best model would be to say that the outcome is the
product
of skill, determination, and luck.  No matter how much
skill and determination you have, if you roll a zero for luck, the
outcome is zero.
These quotes about luck are not from founders whose startups failed.
Founders who fail quickly tend to blame themselves.  Founders who
succeed quickly don't usually realize how lucky they were.  It's
the ones in the middle who see how important luck is.
17. The Value of Community
A surprising number of founders said what surprised them most about
starting a startup was the value of community.  Some meant the
micro-community of YC founders:
The immense value of the peer group of YC companies, and facing
    similar obstacles at similar times.
which shouldn't be that surprising, because that's why it's structured
that way.  Others were surprised at the value of the startup community
in the larger sense:
How advantageous it is to live in Silicon Valley, where you
    can't help but hear all the cutting-edge tech and startup news,
    and run into useful people constantly.
The specific thing that surprised them most was the general spirit
of benevolence:
One of the most surprising things I saw was the willingness of
    people to help us. Even people who had nothing to gain went out
    of their way to help our startup succeed.
and particularly how it extended all the way to the top:
The surprise for me was how accessible important and interesting
    people are. It's amazing how easily you can reach out to people
    and get immediate feedback.
This is one of the reasons I like being part of this world.  Creating
wealth is not a zero-sum game, so you don't have to stab people in
the back to win.
18. You Get No Respect
There was one surprise founders mentioned that I'd forgotten about:
that outside the startup world, startup founders get no respect.
In social settings, I found that I got a lot more respect when
    I said, "I worked on Microsoft Office" instead of "I work at a
    small startup you've never heard of called x."
Partly this is because the rest of the world just doesn't get
startups, and partly it's yet another consequence of the fact that
most good startup ideas seem bad:
If you pitch your idea to a random person, 95% of the time
    you'll find the person instinctively thinks the idea will be a
    flop and you're wasting your time (although they probably won't
    say this directly).
Unfortunately this extends even to dating:
It surprised me that being a startup founder does not get you
    more admiration from women.
I did know about that, but I'd forgotten.
19. Things Change as You Grow
The last big surprise founders mentioned is how much things changed
as they grew.  The biggest change was that you got to program even
less:
Your job description as technical founder/CEO is completely
    rewritten every 6-12 months. Less coding, more
    managing/planning/company building, hiring, cleaning up messes,
    and generally getting things in place for what needs to happen
    a few months from now.
In particular, you now have to deal with employees, who often have
different motivations:
I knew the founder equation and had been focused on it since I
    knew I wanted to start a startup as a 19 year old.  The employee
    equation is quite different so it took me a while to get it
    down.
Fortunately, it can become a lot less stressful once you reach
cruising altitude:
I'd say 75% of the stress is gone now from when we first started.
    Running a business is so much more enjoyable now.  We're more
    confident. We're more patient. We fight less. We sleep more.
I wish I could say it was this way for every startup that succeeded,
but 75% is probably on the high side.
The Super-Pattern
There were a few other patterns, but these were the biggest.  One's
first thought when looking at them all is to ask if there's a
super-pattern, a pattern to the patterns.
I saw it immediately, and so did a YC founder I read the list to.
These are supposed to be the surprises, the things I didn't tell
people.  What do they all have in common?  They're all things I
tell people.  If I wrote a new essay with the same outline as this
that wasn't summarizing the founders' responses, everyone would say
I'd run out of ideas and was just repeating myself.
What is going on here?
When I look at the responses, the common theme is that
starting a startup was like I said, but way more so.  People just
don't seem to get how different it is till they do it.  Why?  The
key to that mystery is to ask, how different
from what?
Once you
phrase it that way, the answer is obvious: from a job.  Everyone's
model of work is a job.  It's completely pervasive.  Even if you've
never had a job, your parents probably did, along with practically
every other adult you've met.
Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and
that explains most of the surprises.  It explains why people are
surprised how carefully you have to choose cofounders and how hard
you have to work to maintain your relationship.  You don't have to
do that with coworkers.  It explains why the ups and downs are
surprisingly extreme.  In a job there is much more damping.  But
it also explains why the good times are surprisingly good: most
people can't imagine such freedom.  As you go down the list, almost
all the surprises are surprising in how much a startup differs from
a job.
You probably can't overcome anything so pervasive as the model of
work you grew up with.  So the best solution is to be consciously
aware of that.  As you go into a startup, you'll be thinking "everyone
says it's really extreme."  Your next thought will probably be "but
I can't believe it will be that bad."  If you want to avoid being
surprised, the next thought after that should be: "and the reason
I can't believe it will be that bad is that my model of work is a
job."
Notes
[
1
]
Graduate students might understand it.  In grad school you
always feel you should be working on your thesis.  It doesn't end
every semester like classes do.
[
2
]
The best way for a startup to engage with slow-moving
organizations is to fork off separate processes to deal with them.
It's when they're on the critical path that they kill you—when
you depend on closing a deal to move forward.  It's worth taking
extreme measures to avoid that.
[
3
]
This is a variant of Reid Hoffman's principle that if you
aren't embarrassed by what you launch with, you waited too long to
launch.
[
4
]
The question to ask about what you've built is not whether it's
good, but whether it's good enough to supply the activation energy
required.
[
5
]
Some VCs seem to understand technology because they actually
do, but that's overkill; the defining test is whether you can talk
about it well enough to convince limited partners.
[
6
]
This is the same phenomenon you see with defense contractors
or fashion brands.  The dumber the customers, the more effort you
expend on the process of selling things to them rather than making
the things you sell.
Thanks:
to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this,
and to all the founders who responded to my email.
Related:
Startups in 13 Sentences
The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
How Not to Die
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
A Fundraising Survival Guide
Russian Translation
Korean Translation
Hebrew Translation


@maciekChmura How to Write Usefully: https://t.co/mY8lgd8e2V

@simonsarris It's hard.

Clowns are 1590 fashion and witches are 1670 fashion. https://t.co/GPWoKQ67Vz

@BabakHosseini A matrix doesn't seem the right model for this situation because only things that are true can be obvious or not.

@mtracey Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion.

@mattyglesias Prediction: Anything enough people want to talk about will turn out to affect the university's core function.

@LandscapeL26502 @ShaanVP No, because how well you do isn't random. And in any case an exit that isn't significant for YC can be a very big deal for the founders.

@ali_moiz No, just that it's an easy (but useless) way to satisfy the truth constraint.

@jdcmedlock The Social Radars. https://t.co/uZgRIwqk1U

If you merely make sure that what you say is true, you'll be way ahead of the median writer. You won't let yourself say things that are obvious. So merely by constraining yourself to say things that are true, you'll get the magical combination of true and non-obvious.


Two Kinds of Judgement
April 2007
There are two different ways people judge you.  Sometimes judging
you correctly is the end goal.  But there's a second much more
common type of judgement where it isn't.  We tend to regard all
judgements of us as the first type.  We'd probably be happier if
we realized which are and which aren't.
The first type of judgement, the type where judging you is the end
goal, include court cases, grades in classes, and most competitions.
Such judgements can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is
to judge you correctly, there's usually some kind of appeals process.
If you feel you've been misjudged, you can protest that you've been
treated unfairly.
Nearly all the judgements made on children are of this type, so we
get into the habit early in life of thinking that all judgements
are.
But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where
judging you is only a means to something else.  These include college
admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the
judgements made in dating.  This kind of judgement is not really
about you.
Put yourself in the position of someone selecting players for a
national team.  Suppose for the sake of simplicity that this is a
game with no positions, and that you have to select 20 players.
There will be a few stars who clearly should make the team, and
many players who clearly shouldn't.  The only place your judgement
makes a difference is in the borderline cases.  Suppose you screw
up and underestimate the 20th best player, causing him not to make
the team, and his place to be taken by the 21st best.  You've still
picked a good team.  If the players have the usual distribution of
ability, the 21st best player will be only slightly worse than the
20th best.  Probably the difference between them will be less than
the measurement error.
The 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged.  But your goal
here wasn't to provide a service estimating people's ability.  It
was to pick a team, and if the difference between the 20th and 21st
best players is less than the measurement error, you've still done
that optimally.
It's a false analogy even to use the word unfair to describe this
kind of misjudgement.  It's not aimed at producing a correct estimate
of any given individual, but at selecting a reasonably optimal set.
One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to
be in a position of power.  That makes him seem like a judge.  If
you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge,
the expectation of fairness goes away.  The author of a good novel
wouldn't complain that readers were
unfair
for preferring a
potboiler with a racy cover.  Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair.
Our early training and our self-centeredness combine to make us
believe that every judgement of us is about us.  In fact most aren't.
This is a rare case where being less self-centered will make people
more confident.  Once you realize how little most people judging
you care about judging you accurately—once you realize that because
of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least
to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the
most effect—you won't take rejection so personally.
And curiously enough, taking rejection less personally may help you
to get rejected less often.  If you think someone judging you will
work hard to judge you correctly, you can afford to be passive.
But the more you realize that most judgements are greatly influenced
by random, extraneous factors—that most people judging you are
more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive
magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the
outcome.
One good place to apply this principle is in college applications.
Most high school students applying to college do it with the usual
child's mix of inferiority and self-centeredness: inferiority in
that they assume that admissions committees must be all-seeing;
self-centeredness in that they assume admissions committees care
enough about them to dig down into their application and figure out
whether they're good or not.  These combine to make applicants
passive in applying and hurt when they're rejected.  If college
applicants realized how quick and impersonal most selection processes
are, they'd make more effort to sell themselves, and take the outcome
less personally.
Spanish Translation
Russian Translation
Arabic Translation


@Richard_Florida I have no idea. On things like who appeals most to voters in swing states, I ask the experts. All I care about is that they nominate the candidates most likely to win.

@micsolana @balajis If you're shocked that I think this is a preposterous claim, you need a refresher on Occam's Razor.

@micsolana @balajis What's dangerous is the false claim that Democratic party insiders somehow deliberately arranged this situation so that they could pick a candidate who wouldn't have won in a primary election.

@balajis Obviously I'm not claiming that a sitting president automatically becomes the nominee, just that in that situation it's customary for other potential candidates not to run. This is as true for the Republicans as it is for the Democrats.

@lacker Time to introduce series...

@danielwchen0 There's nothing mysterious about it. A sitting president is always the nominee if he or she wants to be. So if a sitting president was too old and yet decided to run, this is exactly what you'd expect to happen.

@balajis This is bullshit, and very dangerous bullshit for someone with your influence to be spreading. The reason Biden is the nominee is that a sitting president is always the nominee, if he or she wants to be, and Biden wanted to be.

Biden bombing in the debate is actually good news for the Democrats. It means we'll get a new candidate who can win.

@tedgioia I doubt Socrates said that. Can you find the reference?

@pjux So you're saying that judging character is somehow inferior as a skill to judging business ideas, and that doing it well is not an "actual contribution?"

If you believe that, you're not just dismissing a lot of valuable people; you'll also suck at early-stage investing.


@canermaker Presumably either based on their founders' past achievements or some kind of technical proof of concept.

@LuisAndLearn The best way to learn to program is to work on your own projects.

Obviously the best case is someone who's both driven to build things and technically proficient. But those are far from orthogonal, because building things is the usual way to become proficient.

I should be more precise about what I mean by good at programming. I mean good in the sense of productive, rather than merely proficient. So someone who's driven to build things has less to fear from AI than someone who's competent but indifferent.

@LuisAndLearn Or unemployed ones, depending on how motivated they are.

@robustus There's definitely a lot to be said for talking to users. But good programmers can talk to users too.

@nikooo777 It's a dog whistle for the ones who are going to be good at it.

People who are good at programming will use AI to take the jobs of those who are mediocre at it. So you should study CS iff you're going to be good at it.

@cremieuxrecueil Because if this were the rule, you could hire a botnet to get anyone you disliked banned. (In the email spam world this is called a Joe Job.)

@cremieuxrecueil Maybe if we repackage the consensus of medical experts as some kind of crazy new fad, we can trick Kennedy into doing the right thing.


If Lisp is So Great
May 2003
If Lisp is so great, why don't more people use it?  I was
asked this question by a student in the audience at a
talk I gave recently.  Not for the first time, either.
In languages, as in so many things, there's not much
correlation between popularity and quality.  Why does
John Grisham (
King of Torts
sales rank, 44) outsell
Jane Austen (
Pride and Prejudice
sales rank, 6191)?
Would even Grisham claim that it's because he's a better
writer?
Here's the first sentence of
Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man
in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a
wife.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged?"  Long words for
the first sentence of a love story.
Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard.  Its syntax, or lack
of syntax, makes it look completely
unlike
the languages
most people are used to.  Before I learned Lisp, I was afraid
of it too.  I recently came across a notebook from 1983
in which I'd written:
I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.
Fortunately, I was 19 at the time and not too resistant to learning
new things.  I was so ignorant that learning
almost anything meant learning new things.
People frightened by Lisp make up other reasons for not
using it.  The standard
excuse, back when C was the default language, was that Lisp
was too slow.  Now that Lisp dialects are among
the
faster
languages available, that excuse has gone away.
Now the standard excuse is openly circular: that other languages
are more popular.
(Beware of such reasoning.  It gets you Windows.)
Popularity is always self-perpetuating, but it's especially
so in programming languages. More libraries
get written for popular languages, which makes them still
more popular.  Programs often have to work with existing programs,
and this is easier if they're written in the same language,
so languages spread from program to program like a virus.
And managers prefer popular languages, because they give them
more leverage over developers, who can more easily be replaced.
Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent,
there would be little justification for using any but the most
popular.  But they
aren't
all equivalent, not by a long
shot.  And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's
novels, continue to survive at all.  When everyone else is reading
the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people
reading Jane Austen instead.
Japanese Translation
Romanian Translation
Spanish Translation


The Hacker's Guide to Investors
April 2007
(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit
at Stanford.)
The world of investors is a foreign one to most hackers—partly
because investors are so unlike hackers, and partly because they
tend to operate in secret.  I've been dealing with this world for
many years, both as a founder and an investor, and I still don't
fully understand it.
In this essay I'm going to list some of the more surprising things
I've learned about investors.  Some I only learned in the past year.
Teaching hackers how to deal with investors is probably the second
most important thing we do at Y Combinator.  The most important
thing for a startup is to make something good.  But everyone knows
that's important.  The dangerous thing about investors is that
hackers don't know how little they know about this strange world.
1. The investors are what make a startup hub.
About a year ago I tried to figure out what you'd need to reproduce
Silicon Valley
.  I decided the
critical ingredients were rich people
and nerds—investors and founders.  People are all you need to
make technology, and all the other people will move.
If I had to narrow that down, I'd say investors are the limiting
factor.  Not because they contribute more to the startup, but simply
because they're least willing to move.  They're rich.  They're not
going to move to Albuquerque just because there are some smart
hackers there they could invest in.  Whereas hackers will move to
the Bay Area to find investors.
2. Angel investors are the most critical.
There are several types of investors.  The two main categories are
angels and VCs: VCs invest other people's money, and angels invest
their own.
Though they're less well known, the angel investors are probably
the more critical ingredient in creating a silicon valley.  Most
companies that VCs invest in would never have made it that far if angels
hadn't invested first.  VCs say between half and three quarters of
companies that raise series A rounds have taken some outside
investment already.
[
1
]
Angels are willing to fund riskier projects than VCs.  They also
give valuable advice, because (unlike VCs) many have been startup
founders themselves.
Google's story shows the key role angels play. A lot of people know
Google raised money from Kleiner and Sequoia.  What most don't realize
is how late.  That VC round was a series B round; the premoney
valuation was $75 million.  Google was already a successful company
at that point.  Really, Google was funded with angel money.
It may seem odd that the canonical Silicon Valley startup was funded
by angels, but this is not so surprising.  Risk is always proportionate
to reward.  So the most successful startup of all is likely to have
seemed an extremely risky bet at first, and that is exactly the
kind VCs won't touch.
Where do angel investors come from?  From other startups.  So startup
hubs like Silicon Valley benefit from something like the marketplace
effect, but shifted in time: startups are there because startups
were there.
3. Angels don't like publicity.
If angels are so important, why do we hear more about VCs?  Because
VCs like publicity.  They need to market themselves to the investors
who are their "customers"—the endowments and pension funds and
rich families whose money they invest—and also to founders who
might come to them for funding.
Angels don't need to market themselves to investors because they
invest their own money.  Nor do they want to market themselves to
founders: they don't want random people pestering them with business
plans.  Actually, neither do VCs.  Both angels and VCs get deals
almost exclusively through personal introductions.
[
2
]
The reason VCs want a strong brand is not to draw in more business
plans over the transom, but so they win deals when competing
against other VCs.  Whereas angels are rarely in direct competition,
because (a) they do fewer deals, (b) they're happy to split them,
and (c) they invest at a point where the stream is broader.
4. Most investors, especially VCs, are not like founders.
Some angels are, or were, hackers.  But most VCs are a different
type of people: they're dealmakers.
If you're a hacker, here's a thought experiment you can run to
understand why there are basically no hacker VCs: How would you
like a job where you never got to make anything, but instead spent
all your time listening to other people pitch (mostly terrible)
projects, deciding whether to fund them, and sitting on their boards
if you did?  That would not be fun for most hackers.  Hackers like
to make things.  This would be like being an administrator.
Because most VCs are a different species of people from
founders, it's hard to know what they're thinking.  If you're a
hacker, the last time you had to deal with these guys was in high
school.  Maybe in college you walked past their fraternity on your
way to the lab.  But don't underestimate them.  They're as expert
in their world as you are in yours.  What they're good at is reading
people, and making deals work to their advantage.  Think twice
before you try to beat them at that.
5. Most investors are momentum investors.
Because most investors are dealmakers rather than technology people,
they generally don't understand what you're doing.  I knew as a
founder that most VCs didn't get technology.  I also knew some made
a lot of money.  And yet it never occurred to me till recently to
put those two ideas together and ask "How can VCs make money by
investing in stuff they don't understand?"
The answer is that they're like momentum investors.  You can (or
could once) make a lot of money by noticing sudden changes in stock
prices.  When a stock jumps upward, you buy, and when it suddenly
drops, you sell.  In effect you're insider trading, without knowing
what you know.  You just know someone knows something, and that's
making the stock move.
This is how most venture investors operate.  They don't try to look
at something and predict whether it will take off.  They win by
noticing that something
is
taking off a little sooner than everyone
else.  That generates almost as good returns as actually being able
to pick winners.  They may have to pay a little more than they would
if they got in at the very beginning, but only a little.
Investors always say what they really care about is the team.
Actually what they care most about is your traffic, then what other
investors think, then the team.  If you don't yet have any traffic,
they fall back on number 2, what other investors think.  And this,
as you can imagine, produces wild oscillations in the "stock price"
of a startup.  One week everyone wants you, and they're begging not
to be cut out of the deal.  But all it takes is for one big investor
to cool on you, and the next week no one will return your phone
calls.  We regularly have startups go from hot to cold or cold to
hot in a matter of days, and literally nothing has changed.
There are two ways to deal with this phenomenon.  If you're feeling
really confident, you can try to ride it.  You can start by asking
a comparatively lowly VC for a small amount of money, and then after
generating interest there, ask more prestigious VCs for larger
amounts, stirring up a crescendo of buzz, and then "sell" at the
top.  This is extremely risky, and takes months even if you succeed.
I wouldn't try it myself.  My advice is to err on the side of safety:
when someone offers you a decent deal, just take it and get on with
building the company.  Startups win or lose based on the quality
of their product, not the quality of their funding deals.
6. Most investors are looking for big hits.
Venture investors like companies that could go public.  That's where
the big returns are.  They know the odds of any individual startup
going public are small, but they want to invest in those that at
least have a
chance
of going public.
Currently the way VCs seem to operate is to invest in a bunch of
companies, most of which fail, and one of which is Google.  Those
few big wins compensate for losses on their other investments.  What this
means is that most VCs will only invest in you if you're a potential
Google.  They don't care about companies that are a safe bet to be
acquired for $20 million.  There needs to be a chance, however
small, of the company becoming really big.
Angels are different in this respect.  They're happy to invest in
a company where the most likely outcome is a $20 million acquisition
if they can do it at a low enough valuation.  But of course they
like companies that could go public too.  So having an ambitious
long-term plan pleases everyone.
If you take VC money, you have to mean it, because the structure
of VC deals prevents early acquisitions.  If you take VC money,
they won't let you sell early.
7. VCs want to invest large amounts.
The fact that they're running investment funds makes VCs want to
invest large amounts.  A typical VC fund is now hundreds of millions
of dollars.  If $400 million has to be invested by 10 partners,
they have to invest $40 million each.  VCs usually sit on the boards
of companies they fund.  If the average deal size was $1 million,
each partner would have to sit on 40 boards, which would not be
fun.  So they prefer bigger deals, where they can put a lot of money
to work at once.
VCs don't regard you as a bargain if you don't need a lot of money.
That may even make you less attractive, because it means their
investment creates less of a barrier to entry for competitors.
Angels are in a different position because they're investing their
own money.  They're happy to invest small amounts—sometimes as
little as $20,000—as long as the potential returns look good
enough.  So if you're doing something inexpensive, go to angels.
8. Valuations are fiction.
VCs admit that valuations are an artifact.  They decide how much
money you need and how much of the company they want, and those two
constraints yield a valuation.
Valuations increase as the size of the investment does.  A company
that an angel is willing to put $50,000 into at a valuation of a
million can't take $6 million from VCs at that valuation.  That
would leave the founders less than a seventh of the company between
them (since the option pool would also come out of that seventh).
Most VCs wouldn't want that, which is why you never hear of deals
where a VC invests $6 million at a premoney valuation of $1 million.
If valuations change depending on the amount invested, that shows
how far they are from reflecting any kind of value of the company.
Since valuations are made up, founders shouldn't care too much about
them.  That's not the part to focus on.  In fact, a high valuation
can be a bad thing.  If you take funding at a premoney valuation
of $10 million, you won't be selling the company for 20.  You'll
have to sell for over 50 for the VCs to get even a 5x return, which
is low to them.  More likely they'll want you to hold out for 100.
But needing to get a high price decreases the chance of getting
bought at all; many companies can buy you for $10 million, but only
a handful for 100.  And since a startup is like a pass/fail course
for the founders, what you want to optimize is your chance of a
good outcome, not the percentage of the company you keep.
So why do founders chase high valuations?  They're tricked by
misplaced ambition.  They feel they've achieved more if they get a
higher valuation.  They usually know other founders, and if they
get a higher valuation they can say "mine is bigger than yours."
But funding is not the real test.  The real test is the final outcome
for the founder, and getting too high a valuation may just make a
good outcome less likely.
The one advantage of a high valuation is that you get less dilution.
But there is another less sexy way to achieve that: just take less
money.
9. Investors look for founders like the current stars.
Ten years ago investors were looking for the next Bill Gates.  This
was a mistake, because Microsoft was a very anomalous startup.  They
started almost as a contract programming operation, and the reason
they became huge was that IBM happened to drop the PC standard in
their lap.
Now all the VCs are looking for the next Larry and Sergey.  This
is a good trend, because Larry and Sergey are closer to the ideal
startup founders.
Historically investors thought it was important for a founder to
be an expert in business.  So they were willing to fund teams of
MBAs who planned to use the money to pay programmers to build their
product for them.  This is like funding Steve Ballmer in the hope
that the programmer he'll hire is Bill Gates—kind of backward,
as the events of the Bubble showed.  Now most VCs know they should
be funding technical guys.  This is more pronounced among the very
top funds; the lamer ones still want to fund MBAs.
If you're a hacker, it's good news that investors are looking for
Larry and Sergey.  The bad news is, the only investors who can do
it right are the ones who knew them when they were a
couple of CS grad students, not the confident media stars they are
today.  What investors still don't get is how clueless and tentative
great founders can seem at the very beginning.
10. The contribution of investors tends to be underestimated.
Investors do more for startups than give them money.  They're helpful
in doing deals and arranging introductions, and some of the smarter
ones, particularly angels, can give good advice about the product.
In fact, I'd say what separates the great investors from the mediocre
ones is the quality of their advice.  Most investors give advice,
but the top ones give
good
advice.
Whatever help investors give a startup tends to be underestimated.
It's to everyone's advantage to let the world think the founders
thought of everything.  The goal of the investors is for the company
to become valuable, and the company seems more valuable if it seems
like all the good ideas came from within.
This trend is compounded by the obsession that the press has with
founders.  In a company founded by two people, 10% of the ideas
might come from the first guy they hire.  Arguably they've done a
bad job of hiring otherwise.  And yet this guy will be almost
entirely overlooked by the press.
I say this as a founder: the contribution of founders is always
overestimated.  The danger here is that new founders, looking at
existing founders, will think that they're supermen that one couldn't
possibly equal oneself.  Actually they have a hundred different
types of support people just offscreen making the whole show possible.
[
3
]
11. VCs are afraid of looking bad.
I've been very surprised to discover how timid most VCs are.  They
seem to be afraid of looking bad to their partners, and perhaps
also to the limited partners—the people whose money they invest.
You can measure this fear in how much less risk VCs are willing to
take.  You can tell they won't make investments for their fund that
they might be willing to make themselves as angels.  Though it's
not quite accurate to say that VCs are less willing to take risks.
They're less willing to do things that might look bad.  That's not
the same thing.
For example, most VCs would be very reluctant to invest in a startup
founded by a pair of 18 year old hackers, no matter how brilliant,
because if the startup failed their partners could turn on them and
say "What, you invested $x million of our money in a pair of 18
year olds?"  Whereas if a VC invested in a startup founded by
three former banking executives in their 40s who planned to outsource
their product development—which to my mind is actually a lot
riskier than investing in a pair of really smart 18 year olds—he
couldn't be faulted, if it failed, for making such an apparently
prudent investment.
As a friend of mine said, "Most VCs can't do anything that would
sound bad to the kind of doofuses who run pension funds." Angels
can take greater risks because they don't have to answer to anyone.
12. Being turned down by investors doesn't mean much.
Some founders are quite dejected when they get turned down by
investors.  They shouldn't take it so much to heart.  To start with,
investors are often wrong.  It's hard to think of a successful
startup that wasn't turned down by investors at some point.  Lots
of VCs rejected Google.  So obviously the reaction of investors is
not a very meaningful test.
Investors will often reject you for what seem to be superficial
reasons.  I read of one VC who
turned
down
a startup simply because
they'd given away so many little bits of stock that the deal required
too many signatures to close.
[
4
]
The reason investors can get away
with this is that they see so many deals.  It doesn't matter if
they underestimate you because of some surface imperfection, because
the next best deal will be
almost as good
.
Imagine picking out
apples at a grocery store.  You grab one with a little bruise.
Maybe it's just a surface bruise, but why even bother checking when
there are so many other unbruised apples to choose from?
Investors would be the first to admit they're often wrong.  So when
you get rejected by investors, don't think "we suck," but instead
ask "do we suck?"  Rejection is a question, not an answer.
13. Investors are emotional.
I've been surprised to discover how emotional investors can be.
You'd expect them to be cold and calculating, or at least businesslike,
but often they're not.  I'm not sure if it's their position of power
that makes them this way, or the large sums of money involved, but
investment negotiations can easily turn personal.  If you offend
investors, they'll leave in a huff.
A while ago an eminent VC firm offered a series A round to a startup
we'd seed funded.  Then they heard a rival VC firm was also interested.
They were so afraid that they'd be rejected in favor of this other
firm that they gave the startup what's known as an "exploding
termsheet."  They had, I think, 24 hours to say yes or no, or the
deal was off.  Exploding termsheets are a somewhat dubious device,
but not uncommon.  What surprised me was their reaction when I
called to talk about it.  I asked if they'd still be interested in
the startup if the rival VC didn't end up making an offer, and they
said no.  What rational basis could they have had for saying that?
If they thought the startup was worth investing in, what difference
should it make what some other VC thought?  Surely it was their
duty to their limited partners simply to invest in the best
opportunities they found; they should be delighted if the other VC
said no, because it would mean they'd overlooked a good opportunity.
But of course there was no rational basis for their decision.  They
just couldn't stand the idea of taking this rival firm's rejects.
In this case the exploding termsheet was not (or not only) a tactic
to pressure the startup.  It was more like the high school trick
of breaking up with someone before they can break up with you.  In
an
earlier essay
I said that VCs were a lot like high school girls.
A few VCs have joked about that characterization, but none have
disputed it.
14. The negotiation never stops till the closing.
Most deals, for investment or acquisition, happen in two phases.
There's an initial phase of negotiation about the big questions.
If this succeeds you get a termsheet, so called because it outlines
the key terms of a deal.  A termsheet is not legally binding,
but it is a definite step.  It's supposed to mean that a
deal is going to happen, once the lawyers work out all the details.
In theory these details are minor ones; by definition all the
important points are supposed to be covered in the termsheet.
Inexperience and wishful thinking combine to make founders feel
that when they have a termsheet, they have a deal.  They want there
to be a deal; everyone acts like they have a deal; so there must
be a deal.  But there isn't and may not be for several months.  A
lot can change for a startup in several months.  It's not uncommon
for investors and acquirers to get buyer's remorse.  So you have
to keep pushing, keep selling, all the way to the close.  Otherwise
all the "minor" details left unspecified in the termsheet will be
interpreted to your disadvantage.  The other side may even break
the deal; if they do that, they'll usually seize on some technicality
or claim you misled them, rather than admitting they changed their
minds.
It can be hard to keep the pressure on an investor or acquirer all
the way to the closing, because the most effective pressure is
competition from other investors or acquirers, and these tend to
drop away when you get a termsheet.  You should try to stay as close
friends as you can with these rivals, but the most important thing
is just to keep up the momentum in your startup.  The investors or
acquirers chose you because you seemed hot.  Keep doing whatever
made you seem hot.  Keep releasing new features; keep getting new
users; keep getting mentioned in the press and in blogs.
15. Investors like to co-invest.
I've been surprised how willing investors are to split deals.  You
might think that if they found a good deal they'd want it all to
themselves, but they seem positively eager to syndicate.  This is
understandable with angels; they invest on a smaller scale and don't
like to have too much money tied up in any one deal.  But VCs also
share deals a lot.  Why?
Partly I think this is an artifact of the rule I quoted earlier:
after traffic, VCs care most what other VCs think.  A deal that has
multiple VCs interested in it is more likely to close, so of deals
that close, more will have multiple investors.
There is one rational reason to want multiple VCs in a deal: Any
investor who co-invests with you is one less investor who could
fund a competitor.  Apparently Kleiner and Sequoia didn't like
splitting the Google deal, but it did at least have the advantage,
from each one's point of view, that there probably wouldn't be a
competitor funded by the other.  Splitting deals thus has similar
advantages to confusing paternity.
But I think the main reason VCs like splitting deals is the fear
of looking bad.  If another firm shares the deal, then in the event
of failure it will seem to have been a prudent choice—a consensus
decision, rather than just the whim of an individual partner.
16. Investors collude.
Investing is not covered by antitrust law.  At least, it better not
be, because investors regularly do things that would be illegal
otherwise.  I know personally of cases where one investor has talked
another out of making a competitive offer, using the promise of
sharing future deals.
In principle investors are all competing for the same deals, but
the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of competition.
The reason, again, is that there are so many deals.  Though a
professional investor may have a closer relationship with a founder
he invests in than with other investors, his relationship with the
founder is only going to last a couple years, whereas his relationship
with other firms will last his whole career.  There isn't so much
at stake in his interactions with other investors, but there will
be a lot of them.  Professional investors are constantly trading
little favors.
Another reason investors stick together is to preserve the power
of investors as a whole.  So you will not, as of this writing, be
able to get investors into an auction for your series A round.
They'd rather lose the deal than establish a precedent of VCs
competitively bidding against one another.  An efficient startup
funding market may be coming in the distant future; things tend to
move in that direction; but it's certainly not here now.
17. Large-scale investors care about their portfolio, not any
individual company.
The reason startups work so well is that everyone with power also
has equity.  The only way any of them can succeed is if they all
do.  This makes everyone naturally pull in the same direction,
subject to differences of opinion about tactics.
The problem is, larger scale investors don't have exactly the same
motivation.  Close, but not identical. They don't need any given
startup to succeed, like founders do, just their portfolio as a
whole to.  So in borderline cases the rational thing for them to
do is to sacrifice unpromising startups.
Large-scale investors tend to put startups in three categories:
successes, failures, and the "living dead"—companies that are
plugging along but don't seem likely in the immediate future to get
bought or go public.  To the founders, "living dead" sounds harsh.
These companies may be far from failures by ordinary standards. But
they might as well be from a venture investor's point of view, and
they suck up just as much time and attention as the successes.  So
if such a company has two possible strategies, a conservative one
that's slightly more likely to work in the end, or a risky one that
within a short time will either yield a giant success or kill the
company, VCs will push for the kill-or-cure option.  To them the
company is already a write-off.  Better to have resolution, one way
or the other, as soon as possible.
If a startup gets into real trouble, instead of trying to save it
VCs may just sell it at a low price to another of their portfolio
companies.  Philip Greenspun said in
Founders at Work
that Ars Digita's VCs did this to them.
18. Investors have different risk profiles from founders.
Most people would rather a 100% chance of $1 million than a 20%
chance of $10 million.  Investors are rich enough to be rational
and prefer the latter.  So they'll always tend to encourage founders
to keep rolling the dice.  If a company is doing well, investors
will want founders to turn down most acquisition offers.  And indeed,
most startups that turn down acquisition offers ultimately do better.
But it's still hair-raising for the founders, because they might
end up with nothing.  When someone's offering to buy you for a price
at which your stock is worth $5 million, saying no is equivalent
to having $5 million and betting it all on one spin of the roulette
wheel.
Investors will tell you the company is worth more.  And they may
be right.  But that doesn't mean it's wrong to sell.  Any financial
advisor who put all his client's assets in the stock of a single,
private company would probably lose his license for it.
More and more, investors are letting founders cash out partially.
That should correct the problem. Most founders have such low standards
that they'll feel rich with a sum that doesn't seem huge to investors.
But this custom is spreading too slowly, because VCs are afraid of
seeming irresponsible.  No one wants to be the first VC to give
someone fuck-you money and then actually get told "fuck you." But
until this does start to happen, we know VCs are being too conservative.
19. Investors vary greatly.
Back when I was a founder I used to think all VCs were the same.
And in fact they do all
look
the same.  They're all what hackers
call "suits."  But since I've been dealing with VCs more I've learned
that some suits are smarter than others.
They're also in a business where winners tend to keep winning and
losers to keep losing.  When a VC firm has been successful in the
past, everyone wants funding from them, so they get the pick of all
the new deals.  The self-reinforcing nature of the venture funding
market means that the top ten firms live in a completely different
world from, say, the hundredth.  As well as being smarter, they
tend to be calmer and more upstanding; they don't need to do iffy
things to get an edge, and don't want to because they have more
brand to protect.
There are only two kinds of VCs you want to take money from, if you
have the luxury of choosing: the "top tier" VCs, meaning about the
top 20 or so firms, plus a few new ones that are not among the top
20 only because they haven't been around long enough.
It's particularly important to raise money from a top firm if you're
a hacker, because they're more confident.  That means they're less
likely to stick you with a business guy as CEO, like VCs used to
do in the 90s.  If you seem smart and want to do it, they'll let
you run the company.
20. Investors don't realize how much it costs to raise money from
them.
Raising money is a huge time suck at just the point where startups
can least afford it. It's not unusual for it to take five or six
months to close a funding round.  Six weeks is fast.  And raising
money is not just something you can leave running as a background
process.  When you're raising money, it's inevitably the main focus
of the company.  Which means building the product isn't.
Suppose a Y Combinator company starts talking to VCs after demo
day, and is successful in raising money from them, closing the deal
after a comparatively short 8 weeks.  Since demo day occurs after
10 weeks, the company is now 18 weeks old.  Raising money, rather
than working on the product, has been the company's main focus for
44% of its existence.  And mind you, this an example where things
turned out
well
.
When a startup does return to working on the product after a funding
round finally closes, it's as if they were returning to work after
a months-long illness.  They've lost most of their momentum.
Investors have no idea how much they damage the companies they
invest in by taking so long to do it.  But companies do. So there
is a big opportunity here for a new kind of venture fund that invests
smaller amounts at lower valuations, but promises to either close
or say no very quickly.  If there were such a firm, I'd recommend
it to startups in preference to any other, no matter how prestigious.
Startups live on speed and momentum.
21. Investors don't like to say no.
The reason funding deals take so long to close is mainly that
investors can't make up their minds.  VCs are not big companies;
they can do a deal in 24 hours if they need to.  But they usually
let the initial meetings stretch out over a couple weeks.  The
reason is the selection algorithm I mentioned earlier.  Most don't
try to predict whether a startup will win, but to notice quickly
that it already is winning.  They care what the market thinks of
you and what other VCs think of you, and they can't judge those
just from meeting you.
Because they're investing in things that (a) change fast and (b)
they don't understand, a lot of investors will reject you in a way
that can later be claimed not to have been a rejection.  Unless you
know this world, you may not even realize you've been rejected.
Here's a VC saying no:
We're really excited about your project, and we want to keep in
  close touch as you develop it further.
Translated into more straightforward language, this means: We're
not investing in you, but we may change our minds if it looks like
you're taking off.  Sometimes they're more candid and say explicitly
that they need to "see some traction."  They'll invest in you if
you start to get lots of users.  But so would any VC.  So all they're
saying is that you're still at square 1.
Here's a test for deciding whether a VC's response was yes or no.
Look down at your hands.  Are you holding a termsheet?
22. You need investors.
Some founders say "Who needs investors?"  Empirically the answer
seems to be: everyone who wants to succeed.  Practically every
successful startup takes outside investment at some point.
Why? What the people who think they don't need investors forget is
that they will have competitors.  The question is not whether you
need
outside investment, but whether it could help you at all.
If the answer is yes, and you don't take investment, then competitors
who do will have an advantage over you.  And in the startup world
a little advantage can expand into a lot.
Mike Moritz famously said that he invested in Yahoo because he
thought they had a few weeks' lead over their competitors.  That
may not have mattered quite so much as he thought, because Google
came along three years later and kicked Yahoo's ass.  But there is
something in what he said.  Sometimes a small lead can grow into
the yes half of a binary choice.
Maybe as it gets cheaper to start a startup, it will start to be
possible to succeed in a competitive market without outside funding.
There are certainly
costs to raising money.  But as of this writing the empirical
evidence says it's a net win.
23. Investors like it when you don't need them.
A lot of founders approach investors as if they needed their
permission to start a company—as if it were like getting into
college.  But you don't need investors to start most companies;
they just make it easier.
And in fact, investors greatly prefer it if you don't need them.
What excites them, both consciously and unconsciously, is the sort
of startup that approaches them saying "the train's leaving the
station; are you in or out?" not the one saying "please can we have
some money to start a company?"
Most investors are "bottoms" in the sense that the startups they
like most are those that are rough with them.  When Google stuck
Kleiner and Sequoia with a $75 million premoney valuation, their
reaction was probably "Ouch! That feels so good." And they were
right, weren't they?  That deal probably made them more than any
other they've done.
The thing is, VCs are pretty good at reading people.  So don't try
to act tough with them unless you really are the next Google, or
they'll see through you in a second.  Instead of acting tough, what
most startups should do is simply always have a backup plan.  Always
have some alternative plan for getting started if any given investor
says no.  Having one is the best insurance against needing one.
So you shouldn't start a startup that's expensive to start, because
then you'll be at the mercy of investors.  If you ultimately want
to do something that will cost a lot, start by doing a cheaper
subset of it, and expand your ambitions when and if you raise more
money.
Apparently the most likely animals to be left alive after a nuclear
war are cockroaches, because they're so hard to kill.  That's what
you want to be as a startup, initially.  Instead of a beautiful
but fragile flower that needs to have its stem in a plastic tube
to support itself, better to be small, ugly, and indestructible.
Notes
[
1
]
I may be underestimating VCs.  They may play some behind the scenes
role in IPOs, which you ultimately need if you want to create a silicon
valley.
[
2
]
A few VCs have an email address you can send your business
plan to, but the number of startups that get funded this way is
basically zero.  You should always get a personal introduction—and
to a partner, not an associate.
[
3
]
Several people have told us that the most valuable thing about
startup school
was that they got to see famous startup founders and realized
they were just ordinary guys.  Though we're happy to provide this
service, this is not generally the way we pitch startup school to
potential speakers.
[
4
]
Actually this sounds to me like a VC who got buyer's remorse,
then used a technicality to get out of the deal.  But it's telling
that it even seemed a plausible excuse.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Hutch Fishman, and Robert
Morris for reading drafts of
this, and to Kenneth King of ASES for inviting me to speak.
Comment
on this essay.


@harold_bracy @AOC You're certainly right when it comes to national elections. Charisma is the high bit in national elections. We're mostly talking about the succeeding bits here.

https://t.co/yF5TXJlxs8

@AOC Do you feel this article is mistaken?

https://t.co/zlcPlAgPB1

@andrew_moser I'm not merely guessing.

@andrew_moser It was an election year claim cooked up by some fools on Biden's staff.

@matthewherper Doyle was a good writer but I wouldn't call him particularly smart.

@andrew_moser I did, but that was never going to happen.

@MemoSparkfield The top several thousand rows are already filled with 20th century communist dictators and their minions. No one in Norway is ever going to compete with Pol Pot.

Socialist politicians are as surprised and angry when founders leave their countries as abusive boyfriends are when their girlfriends leave them.

@zackkanter I don't think many people on the far left actually want to drive startup founders out of their countries. That would allow founders to remain rich, which they hate. What they want is for founders to stay, but not to be rich.

@AOC I think a bigger problem might be listening to the Middlebury grads who make up your campaign staffs.


I don't understand why KYC documents ever have to be updated. My identity doesn't change if my driver's license expires.

@michael_nielsen I don't think the B-1 or Tu-160 have ever been used in the way they were designed to be: to fly "below the radar" into the target country.

@Indian_Bronson @kareem_carr @cremieuxrecueil In a disagreement between those two I'd trust @cremieuxrecueil.

@bscholl https://t.co/zFNPSbO49C

A lot of countries have implemented it. But not the US.

The startup visa works. The US should create one.

@RobertJSalvador Those are hedge-fund managers.

@jeanpaulwilson Insurance.

@pickover That's not quite true. If a publisher censors a book you've already bought on the Kindle, by default the version you bought will be replaced by the censored version.

@VlVEK Yes. They might need that money. They hope they won't, but they might.

@fabiospampinato You have to leave some margin for error, and though $4m sounds like a lot, they're in an expensive business.


@hasan_kaiyoum Darwin would not even have a Twitter account.

If Darwin published his theory of natural selection today, the tweet announcing it would be deprioritized because it contained a link, and instead Twitter would show you wisecracks that fit in 280 characters.

"Could the style of a writer be the way they ‘stumble’ through feature space?"

https://t.co/H3wpAQo4Hd

And here's Sam Altman doing office hours. Our architect Kate Courteau's VW beetle convertible is visible through the window. https://t.co/WcTBzGRvxk

The Airbnbs spoke at that batch, as they often do. Here's Garry's portrait of Brian Chesky with both kinds of cereal. https://t.co/r3I0xcuPz6

Here's a picture he took of me doing office hours. Notice the battery of crockpots behind us. We learned crockpots are only available up to a certain size, so unless you want to switch to industrial cookers, you have to use a lot of them. https://t.co/EFRPgLzmxn

Early on Garry Tan was Y Combinator's de facto official photographer. Here's a picture he took of Zuck speaking at a YC dinner in 2011. https://t.co/PvhOGYNX6F

@markessien I don't think anyone, right or left, believes that anyone can achieve anything simply by working hard.

@spaceship_sun Yes, just as making money is.

@Doodelay If you write software, all the money goes to whoever owns the machines? That's great news for AWS.


@Nairebis I'm not talking about SV, just YC.

@ThomasDespin We'd have funded this company in 2005.

I'm bad at feigning enthusiasm, and I think one of the reasons is that there are so many things I'm genuinely enthusiastic about. Why create a fake version of something I already have too much of?

@jairodri No, not even that. It was simply that a cruise missile startup applied and the founders seemed good.

@stats_feed These numbers are way out of date. They are a lot bigger now.

People talk a lot, and justifiably, about bias in the media. But the biggest bias of all is to try to make stories seem more exciting, by reporting about patterns that aren't there.

The same article in the Financial Times says that by funding a startup making cruise missiles YC is "entering a sector it has previously shunned" and yet also contains a quote from a YC partner saying "It's not that we wouldn't have funded this earlier."

@Austen Wing Leader.

https://t.co/EihdbhfVi8

@m0un10_ I don't think so. It seems much more due to something in SF that's attracting founders than something in the EU that's repelling them.

"San Francisco’s AI startup boom is so big, even international founders who don’t run AI startups are relocating there to help their companies grow, according to several founders who recently moved."

https://t.co/t3GgrHvwFi


@HusbandOfAyn @waitbutwhy If you think these people are only found among the Democrats, odds are you're one yourself.

@Varangian_Tagma You can tell what Paulinus was after.

@_Mark_Atwood Of course not. Are you saying I should?

@ReadwiseReader Nice of you to say that, but there are only 4 essays on your list. The second item is not an essay itself, but the list of all the essays.

@AlecStapp Those two events have something in common.

@waitbutwhy Every society has these people. The damage they do is usually local, but occasionally they all get aligned behind some cause, and then they become really dangerous.

@eshear I can attest to this.

@levie A professor at Columbia!

Man, this killing has unearthed a lot of closet psychopaths.

@HJoyceGender They don't sound ridiculous. They sound obscure. Those aren't the same thing.

@jaltma The first step is not to be the cause of the low moments.


I was curious how well I have an essay loaded into my head when I'm working on it, so I tried reproducing the one I'm currently writing from memory. I reproduced it almost perfectly. But the differences suggest I don't have it memorized like lines in a play.

@RickyHale_ If you care about the children, welcome other people who start to, instead of giving them a hard time for taking too long.

If you give such people a hard time, it will make others who think of starting to speak up stay silent instead.

@taufiqintech @NooraHealth On a Mac it's option+shift+dash.

@ilamparithi_ja @eigenrobot I said that he is. I didn't explain why.

@gdb Looks like you got it right, Lightcones:

https://t.co/CQahUs0txe

@eigenrobot I was going to explain why you're mistaken, but then I realized that the places I like to visit would be less crowded if people believed this, and moreover the people who'd stay home would be exactly the ones I'd want to.

@taufiqintech I'll take that bet. Please donate the $10 to @NooraHealth.

@vedantnair__ "Life is Short," just for the second to last paragraph.

@automin I'd been thinking about how SJWs were prigs for almost 8 years before I wrote about it in an essay.

https://t.co/xhbAFrpLSu

@automin I don't do it deliberately but sometimes I end up writing essays about things I've mentioned on Twitter. It would be hard not to. You tweet, and write, about whatever you're thinking about.


@arnavjaitly The miraculous thing is that ticket prices should be about the same as first-class ticket prices now. The trips are so much shorter that you don't need lie-flat beds, so the seat pitch can be like domestic first class.

@StevenIrby I think eventually supersonic aircraft will fly overland. They can be made quieter than people realize. And passengers are going to start insisting once they see how much faster overwater trips become.

@gopricette The first version of the airliner will be a little less than 2x faster. But that's just the first version.

@iamwilliamwang They have good people and they've executed well.

@himbo_sl1ce It's possible to make a plane that's cheaper to operate now (the Concorde was designed in the 1960s), and Pacific routes have much more traffic than they did a few decades ago.

@GentJayson In that case there's good news: flights are going to get a lot shorter.

I invested more in Boom than I've ever invested in a startup before. But this company is important for America. They'll also make a huge amount of money if they succeed. No one else is anywhere near having a supersonic airliner.

@sferik wrench, wrest

@kane Well, except possibly Kennedy to Johnson.

@anammostarac This varies immensely depending on the kind of work. But it is generally true that the more admirable the kind of work, the less cheating helps.


@cremieuxrecueil Can you overlay the curves for IQ? That would immediately show how much correlation there is.

A British couple we know visited SF this past week. They like to walk, and walked all over the city. They said it seemed cleaner and safer than London. So while there is still work to do, SF is now definitely fine to visit. If you feel like visiting the US, that is.

@charlesmiller_7 So it's not an "underrated characteristic" because in fact this characteristic has little or no effect on outcomes. It's the wake made by the boat, not its engine.

@charlesmiller_7 This is true, but true for a boring reason. People who succeed at something tend, obviously, to be good at it. And people who are good at something usually know they are.

It doesn't imply that if you start thinking of yourself as superior, you'll become successful.

@historyinmemes No it didn't. The term "bug" was already long established as a term for technical glitches. That's why they found it funny, and wrote that it was the "first actual case of bug being found."

You should delete this.

@sajidsharif That's a great trick. I wish I'd thought of it. But it looks like I did a fairly good job of avoiding candidates they like.

@internetraj @anjsud I voted for her.

@nntaleb @JDVance Either he gets it and he's pretending not to, or he just doesn't get it. I.e. he's either evil or stupid. There is no third alternative.

@Anthony_Bonato "To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time."

— P. G. Wodehouse, dedication in Heart of a Goof (1926)

@aryanagxl I'm looking at their tweets.


@RuxandraTeslo @elocinationn The reason I'm excited is the conversation I had last weekend with the founder of a company developing a preventative cancer vaccine.

The Apple 1, 1976. https://t.co/HU0nEEREwQ

@ccatalini @erikbryn You're right, it may not be. I'll delete this.

@RemnantMd I know of a preventative vaccine being developed now.

@RuxandraTeslo I know of at least one preventative vaccine being developed.

@VPrasadMDMPH I know of at least one preventative vaccine being developed.

@Noahpinion I know of at least one that's preventative.

@abarrallen There's a YC company working on a preventative vaccine.

When there are working cancer vaccines, I bet a lot of anti-vaxxers will suddenly find that they aren't so against vaccines after all. Let's hope so anyway.

If you're one of the people who think this era is a step down from some previous one, just try putting these two words together: "cancer" and "vaccine." You get a shot and it prevents you from getting cancer.


@pitdesi The Goliath Grouper is probably an example.

(There have presumably been good product and company renames. I'm not talking about that kind of renaming, but about the kind where you rename shared things like places, species, etc.)

Renaming in general is lame. It was lame of the Democrats to try to rename Fort Bragg. It's lame of the Republicans to try to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

@sama Be careful what you wish for. What if he says yes?

@Rasika012 @PalmerLuckey @NAChristakis @davidshor @jk_rowling Yes, I followed her for the same reason.

@JohnDCook I heard it was 85%!

One upside of the cancellation wave of the 2010s was that it acted as a filter for independent-mindedness. When people like @PalmerLuckey and @NAChristakis and @davidshor got cancelled, I would follow them, and I have not been disappointed.

The only downside is that the name Boom is now even more inappropriate. Now it has switched from emphasizing an undesirable aspect of the product to being downright false. But I'll take that deal.

This is a very big deal, because it means it will be possible to fly supersonically over land. And it wouldn't be possible for Overture to do this if Boom hadn't decided to make their own engines. There are several advantages of making their own, but this the most dramatic.

In fact, removing woke stuff could be a sign of increased integrity. Likely as not it's because there were always people who opposed it, but couldn't do so openly. In that case, removing woke stuff isn't blowing with the political wind. It's the ship righting itself.