Weird Languages
August 2021
When people say that in their experience all programming languages
are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about
languages but about the kind of programming they've done.
99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library
functions. All popular languages are equally good at this. So one
can easily spend one's whole career operating in the intersection
of popular programming languages.
But the other .5% of programming is disproportionately interesting.
If you want to learn what it consists of, the weirdness of weird
languages is a good clue to follow.
Weird languages aren't weird by accident. Not the good ones, at
least. The weirdness of the good ones usually implies the existence
of some form of programming that's not just the usual gluing together
of library calls.
A concrete example: Lisp macros. Lisp macros seem weird even to
many Lisp programmers. They're not only not in the intersection of
popular languages, but by their nature would be hard to implement
properly in a language without turning it into a dialect of
Lisp. And macros are definitely evidence of techniques that go
beyond glue programming. For example, solving problems by first
writing a language for problems of that type, and then writing
your specific application in it. Nor is this all you can do with
macros; it's just one region in a space of program-manipulating
techniques that even now is far from fully explored.
So if you want to expand your concept of what programming can be,
one way to do it is by learning weird languages. Pick a language
that most programmers consider weird but whose median user is smart,
and then focus on the differences between this language and the
intersection of popular languages. What can you say in this language
that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others? In the
process of learning how to say things you couldn't previously say,
you'll probably be learning how to think things you couldn't
previously think.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Daniel Gackle, Amjad
Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Japanese Translation


@lacker How interesting. Bing at launch was like South America at the moment Europeans showed up with a lot of new germs.

@lacker Wow, I had no idea Bing was ever better than Google search. Why were they more vulnerable to SEO though?

@KarenAttiah When some people proposed blocking traffic to the 1964 World's Fair, Martin Luther King called it a "tactical error." But perhaps you weren't aware of that?

@aliceseba No, its purpose is to change people's minds in favor of your cause.

@lemonodor It would have to be something that seemed not to work only because we didn't have enough processing power. So what else was in that category?

@RuxandraTeslo Wait! Truth matters for engineers too, even more than it does for journalists. If your designs embody lies, they don't work.

I'd say instead "go become a politician." They're the ones who get things done without worrying about the truth.

@stylewarning This sounds similar to what makes tongue twisters hard.

@tamisawyer The fact that you have difficulty understanding it doesn't make it a word salad. And in fact I doubt you're that stupid. You just don't want to hear what it says, because it shows that your devotion to the cause is fake.

@DrDadabhoy You might want to do a little more research before saying that.

https://t.co/l6EOrh88vz

@TO_BE_US_Pro More like rationality is the tool of the successful.


Having Kids
December 2019
Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I
felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living
virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children.
But did I want them now? No.
If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since
I was a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had
no fun.  And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that,
to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind.
Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids, the kids seemed to be
terrors, and the parents pathetic harried creatures, even when they
prevailed.
When people had babies, I congratulated them enthusiastically,
because that seemed to be what one did. But I didn't feel it at
all.  "Better you than me," I was thinking.
Now when people have babies I congratulate them enthusiastically and
I mean it. Especially the first one. I feel like they just got the best gift in the world.
What changed, of course, is that I had kids. Something I dreaded
turned out to be wonderful.
Partly, and I won't deny it, this is because of serious chemical
changes that happened almost instantly when our first child was
born.  It was like someone flipped a switch. I suddenly felt
protective not just toward our child, but toward all children. As I was
driving my wife and new son home from the hospital, I approached a
crosswalk full of pedestrians, and I found myself thinking "I have
to be really careful of all these people. Every one of them is
someone's child!"
So to some extent you can't trust me when I say having kids is
great.  To some extent I'm like a religious cultist telling you
that you'll be happy if you join the cult too  but only because
joining the cult will alter your mind in a way that will make you
happy to be a cult member.
But not entirely. There were some things
about having kids that I clearly got wrong before I had them.
For example, there was a huge amount of selection bias in my
observations of parents and children. Some parents may have noticed
that I wrote "Whenever I'd noticed parents with kids." Of course
the times I noticed kids were when things were going wrong. I only
noticed them when they made noise. And where was I when I noticed
them?  Ordinarily I never went to places with kids, so the only
times I encountered them were in shared bottlenecks like airplanes.
Which is not exactly a representative sample. Flying with a toddler
is something very few parents enjoy.
What I didn't notice, because they tend to be much quieter, were
all the great moments parents had with kids. People don't talk about
these much  the magic is hard to put into words, and all other
parents know about them anyway  but one of the great things about
having kids is that there are so many times when you feel there is
nowhere else you'd rather be, and nothing else you'd rather be
doing.  You don't have to be doing anything special. You could just
be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing
them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn't trade these moments
for anything. One doesn't tend to associate kids with peace, but
that's what you feel.  You don't need to look any
further than where you are right now.
Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they
were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day.
My other source of data about kids was my own childhood, and that
was similarly misleading. I was pretty bad, and was always in trouble
for something or other. So it seemed to me that parenthood was
essentially law enforcement.  I didn't realize there were good times
too.
I remember my mother telling me once when I was about 30 that she'd
really enjoyed having me and my sister. My god, I thought, this
woman is a saint. She not only endured all the pain we subjected
her to, but actually enjoyed it? Now I realize she was simply telling
the truth.
She said that one reason she liked having us was that we'd been
interesting to talk to. That took me by surprise when I had kids.
You don't just love them. They become your friends too. They're
really interesting. And while I admit small children are disastrously
fond of repetition (anything worth doing once is worth doing fifty
times) it's often genuinely fun to play with them.  That surprised
me too. Playing with a 2 year old was fun when I was 2 and definitely
not fun when I was 6. Why would it become fun again later? But it
does.
There are of course times that are pure drudgery. Or worse still,
terror. Having kids is one of those intense types of experience
that are hard to imagine unless you've had them. But it is not, as I
implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for
the lifeboats.
Some of my worries about having kids were right, though. They
definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some
people get their act together, but if your act was already together,
you're going to have less time to do it in. In particular, you're
going to have to work to a schedule. Kids have schedules.  I'm not
sure if it's because that's how kids are, or because it's the only
way to integrate their lives with adults', but once you have kids,
you tend to have to work on their schedule.
You will have chunks of time to work. But you can't let work spill
promiscuously through your whole life, like I used to before I had
kids. You're going to have to work at the same time every day,
whether inspiration is flowing or not, and there are going to be
times when you have to stop, even if it is.
I've been able to adapt to working this way. Work, like love, finds
a way. If there are only certain times it can happen, it happens
at those times. So while I don't get as much done as before I had
kids, I get enough done.
I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part
of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It
hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But
if there weren't something real there, why would I squirm?  The
fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more
about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum
game. Only one idea at a time can be the
top idea in your mind
.
Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it
will less often be some project you're working on.
I have some hacks for sailing close to this wind. For example, when
I write essays, I think about what I'd want my kids to know. That
drives me to get things right. And when I was writing
Bel
, I told
my kids that once I finished it I'd take them to Africa. When you
say that sort of thing to a little kid, they treat it as a promise.
Which meant I had to finish or I'd be taking away their trip to
Africa.  Maybe if I'm really lucky such tricks could put me net
ahead. But the wind is there, no question.
On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it
won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?
And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't
overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like
before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the
ability to take off for some other country at a moment's notice.
That was so great. Why did I never do that?
See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before
kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used
it.
I had plenty of happy times before I had kids. But if I count up
happy moments, not just potential happiness but actual happy moments,
there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it
on tap, almost any bedtime.
People's experiences as parents
vary a lot, and I know I've been lucky. But I think the worries I
had before having kids must be pretty common, and judging by other
parents' faces when they see their kids, so must the happiness that
kids bring.
Note
[1] Adults are sophisticated enough to see 2 year olds for the
fascinatingly complex characters they are, whereas to most 6 year
olds, 2 year olds are just defective 6 year olds.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris
for reading drafts of this.
Arabic Translation
Slovak Translation


@proales I don't automatically defend YC founders though.

Warning, though: if you do succeed in being politically neutral, you won't be perceived as neutral by the partisan. Instead those on both sides will perceive you as being on the other side.

If you don't want to be made stupider by partisanship, how do you avoid it? By keeping your identity small: https://t.co/UHMSaVtU7x

Which strategy people use depends on their intelligence. Stupid people go for unreasonable, and the smarter ones go for obtuse. This is true on both the right and the left.

Being politically partisan makes you stupid. If someone you perceive as being on the other side says something reasonable, you either have to argue against it (and thus be unreasonable) or misinterpret it (and thus be obtuse).

@MaximeGabella @alexkaplan0 She's from California. I've known about her from way back. It's just about her charisma specifically that I don't have an opinion yet.

"Johnny Sinclair knew about Winston Somerset, the status-seeking industrialist who mistreated his workers and paid them cashews, the worst type of nut."

— from 12 yo's latest story

"Get this off to the Ashmolean! Chop, chop!"

— 12 yo's imperial imitation

@MuchGreenGrass @micsolana Is he funny? Does he make you laugh?

Sounds like you have rather a low bar there.

@micsolana Do you understand the distinction between a necessary and sufficient condition?


@pdhsu The same thing that's happening with design worldwide.  The OUP redesign is particularly painful though...

After visiting the OpenAI schwag depot.

Jessica: I was so coveting that YETI cooler.

Me: Did you get one?

Jessica: No, I didn't want to seem greedy.

@rvivek Read enjoyable things.

@dbasch One reason people might want to write well is that if you can't write well, you can't think well. https://t.co/u0HiFc66TJ

@alchemistocrat Wodehouse.

@_javokhir Some but not as much.

@SpencerHakimian Very few Europeans dream of spending August in the places in Europe that Americans want to visit, like London and Paris.

@mitduckmaster You could, perhaps, if your father was J. R. R. Tolkien. But few are so lucky. Whereas anyone who wants to can read his writing.

This in turn has an interesting implication. It would be very hard to make yourself read a lot if you didn't like reading. Even if you made yourself "read" lots of books, you wouldn't do it with sufficient attention. So only people who enjoy reading will be able to write well.

Something I told 13 yo: If you want to be a good writer, you have to read a lot. Reading trains your ear. There is no shortcut.


@DavidSacks Zero of it is related to your politics. I encouraged Sam to keep Peter Thiel as a part-time partner when it seemed like all of Silicon Valley wanted YC to fire him for supporting Trump. It's entirely due to what you did to Parker Conrad.

@anammostarac This can be changed though, for example by creating networks where you share information about such people.

@reidhoffman If <anything that made you nonnegative amount of money> you would be a billionaire.

@erenbali Yes, exactly, it's hard to be the arrogant investor with someone at the same time as you're making dinner for them.

@Chris_Deeg @gfodor It's Parker's story. But if you listen to the podcast you'll probably hear enough.

I love it that the partners have gone back to cooking dinner for the founders. Cooking for people is just such a fundamentally nurturing thing. That sounds corny, but I'm not going to rewrite it, because it's true.

@VDHanson Damn, for a minute there I thought you were going back to talking about military history. I keep hoping.

@dadiomov Stripe is pretty good.

@gfodor You can probably learn enough about what David Sacks did to Parker to satisfy your curiosity from Parker's Social Radars episode, though Parker omitted a lot of the worst details. Give it a listen and see what you think.

https://t.co/1UeGCqKver

A large part of office hours during the batch is just reassuring startups about things that happen to everyone.


Investor Herd Dynamics
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
August 2013
The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the
opinion of other investors.  Which is of course a recipe for
exponential growth.  When one investor wants to invest in you, that
makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so
on.
Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly conclude that manipulating
these forces is the essence of fundraising.  They hear stories about
stampedes to invest in successful startups, and think it's therefore
the mark of a successful startup to have this happen.  But actually
the two are not that highly correlated.  Lots of startups that cause
stampedes end up flaming out (in extreme cases, partly as a result
of the stampede), and lots of very successful startups were only
moderately popular with investors the first time they raised money.
So the point of this essay is not to explain how to create a stampede,
but merely to explain the forces that generate them.  These forces
are always at work to some degree in fundraising, and they can cause
surprising situations.  If you understand them, you can at least
avoid being surprised.
One reason investors like you more when other investors like you
is that you actually become a better investment.  Raising money
decreases the risk of failure.  Indeed, although investors hate it,
you are for this reason justified in raising your valuation for
later investors.  The investors who invested when you had no money
were taking more risk, and are entitled to higher returns.  Plus a
company that has raised money is literally more valuable.  After
you raise the first million dollars, the company is at least a
million dollars more valuable, because it's the same company as
before, plus it has a million dollars in the bank.
[
1
]
Beware, though, because later investors so hate to have the price
raised on them that they resist even this self-evident reasoning.
Only raise the price on an investor you're comfortable with losing,
because some will angrily refuse.
[
2
]
The second reason investors like you more when you've had some
success at fundraising is that it makes you more confident, and an
investors' opinion of
you
is the foundation
of their opinion of your company.  Founders are often surprised how
quickly investors seem to know when they start to succeed at raising
money.  And while there are in fact lots of ways for such information
to spread among investors, the main vector is probably the founders
themselves.  Though they're often clueless about technology, most
investors are pretty good at reading people.  When fundraising is
going well, investors are quick to sense it in your increased
confidence.  (This is one case where the average founder's inability
to remain poker-faced works to your advantage.)
But frankly the most important reason investors like you more when
you've started to raise money is that they're bad at judging startups.
Judging startups is hard even for the best investors.  The mediocre
ones might as well be flipping coins.  So when mediocre investors
see that lots of other people want to invest in you, they assume
there must be a reason.  This leads to the phenomenon known in the
Valley as the "hot deal," where you have more interest from investors
than you can handle.
The best investors aren't influenced much by the opinion of other
investors.  It would only dilute their own judgment to average it
together with other people's.  But they are indirectly influenced
in the practical sense that interest from other investors imposes
a deadline.  This is the fourth way in which offers beget offers.
If you start to get far along the track toward an offer with one
firm, it will sometimes provoke other firms, even good ones, to
make up their minds, lest they lose the deal.
Unless you're a wizard at negotiation (and if you're not sure,
you're not) be very careful about exaggerating this to push a good
investor to decide.  Founders try this sort of thing all the time,
and investors are very sensitive to it.  If anything oversensitive.
But you're safe so long as you're telling the truth.  If you're
getting far along with investor B, but you'd rather raise money
from investor A, you can tell investor A that this is happening.
There's no manipulation in that.  You're genuinely in a bind, because
you really would rather raise money from A, but you can't safely
reject an offer from B when it's still uncertain what A will decide.
Do not, however, tell A who B is.  VCs will sometimes ask which
other VCs you're talking to, but you should never tell them.  Angels
you can sometimes tell about other angels, because angels cooperate
more with one another. But if VCs ask, just point out that they
wouldn't want you telling other firms about your conversations, and
you feel obliged to do the same for any firm you talk to.  If they
push you, point out that you're inexperienced at fundraising — which
is always a safe card to play — and you feel you have to be
extra cautious.
[
3
]
While few startups will experience a stampede of interest, almost
all will at least initially experience the other side of this
phenomenon, where the herd remains clumped together at a distance.
The fact that investors are so much influenced by other investors'
opinions means you always start out in something of a hole.  So
don't be demoralized by how hard it is to get the first commitment,
because much of the difficulty comes from this external force.  The
second will be easier.
Notes
[
1
]
An accountant might say that a company that has raised a million
dollars is no richer if it's convertible debt, but in practice money
raised as convertible debt is little different from money raised
in an equity round.
[
2
]
Founders are often surprised by this, but investors can get
very emotional.  Or rather indignant; that's the main emotion I've
observed; but it is very common, to the point where it sometimes
causes investors to act against their own interests.  I know of one
investor who invested in a startup at a $15 million valuation cap.
Earlier he'd had an opportunity to invest at a $5 million cap, but
he refused because a friend who invested earlier had been able to
invest at a $3 million cap.
[
3
]
If an investor pushes you hard to tell them about your conversations
with other investors, is this someone you want as an investor?
Thanks
to Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan
for reading drafts of this.
Russian Translation


@TheBroskiUSA @AliceFromQueens The intellectuals who supported Stalin in the 1930s weren't evil, for the most part, just misguided. And Stalin was way worse than Trump.

@FriendlyWoodsmn @MeghanMcCarthy_ @AliceFromQueens Yes, she was another member of that network of appointees.

@MeghanMcCarthy_ @AliceFromQueens The crypto people were genuinely mad. And they're the proverbial single-issue voters; crypto is their world. Plus they have huge amounts of money, even by Silicon Valley standards.

@MeghanMcCarthy_ @AliceFromQueens The root of the problem was the network of appointees that Elizabeth Warren demanded as the price of her support. Biden probably never realized what was happening. But Gary Gensler at the SEC basically trolled the crypto world for four years.

@MeghanMcCarthy_ @AliceFromQueens I think for a handful of Trump supporters in Silicon Valley it's a bit of an act, if there's something they wanted from the administration, but for most it's not. The Biden administration really alienated a lot of people in tech. It was a huge own goal.

@Tracey_YYC @Mylovanov Many if not most are fake accounts run by the Russians.

@StefanFSchubert He didn't have to either. He was just making a point about the difference between a country with rule of law and a complete banana republic.

@AliceFromQueens Neither he nor David is actually dumb. Smart people can believe crazy things as long as they're peripheral to their work. Think of all the brilliant intellectuals who were Stalin fans in the 1930s.

@SpencerHakimian There can't be that many people who have precisely this level of reasonableness. Anyone stupid enough to think they're a good idea at all is probably also stupid enough to think they're a good idea right now.

@DeLossMcKnight @reidhoffman That's not true. The admissions process at elite US universities has always been arbitrary.


@max_nazarati A couple days a year. But we're usually visiting YC in August.

@SleepMoneyMaker In this case it was more like an unexpected pause got filled with unimportant work.

@ee_mc3 Me too.

Organizing books by color is like sorting the pixels in an image by color.

@jdzamfi @leanmediaorg They're all original but different parts of the house  are different ages. In fact different ends of this room are different ages.

@mideenigmA Some of most of them and all of some of them.

@Truthlovingguy Very much. I'm currently reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories for what's probably the fourth time.

@eightmgmt There are so many reasons. It's beautiful, the people are nice, the schools are good, there's a lot of history. Gets dark damned early in the winter though.

Something I taught 12 yo: Contests are often corrupt, because there's nothing them keeping them honest. If a company makes a bad product, no one will buy it, but if the people running a contest for short stories by kids don't pick the best one, nothing will happen to them.

"Is that bragging? Because we are sending this to some English people."

— Jessica wondering what we can say on the (much-delayed) Christmas card


Donate Unrestricted
March 2021
The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations.
If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have
heard this phrase before. But if you have been, it probably made
you wince.
Restricted donations mean donations where the donor limits what can
be done with the money. This is common with big donations, perhaps
the default. And yet it's usually a bad idea. Usually the way the
donor wants the money spent is not the way the nonprofit would have
chosen. Otherwise there would have been no need to restrict the
donation. But who has a better understanding of where money needs
to be spent, the nonprofit or the donor?
If a nonprofit doesn't understand better than its donors where money
needs to be spent, then it's incompetent and you shouldn't be
donating to it at all.
Which means a restricted donation is inherently suboptimal. It's
either a donation to a bad nonprofit, or a donation for the wrong
things.
There are a couple exceptions to this principle. One is when the
nonprofit is an umbrella organization. It's reasonable to make a
restricted donation to a university, for example, because a university
is only nominally a single nonprofit. Another exception is when the
donor actually does know as much as the nonprofit about where money
needs to be spent. The Gates Foundation, for example, has specific
goals and often makes restricted donations to individual nonprofits
to accomplish them. But unless you're a domain expert yourself or
donating to an umbrella organization, your donation would do more
good if it were unrestricted.
If restricted donations do less good than unrestricted ones, why
do donors so often make them? Partly because doing good isn't donors'
only motive. They often have other motives as well — to make a mark,
or to generate good publicity
[
1
]
,
or to comply with regulations
or corporate policies. Many donors may simply never have considered
the distinction between restricted and unrestricted donations. They
may believe that donating money for some specific purpose is just
how donation works. And to be fair, nonprofits don't try very hard
to discourage such illusions. They can't afford to. People running
nonprofits are almost always anxious about money. They can't afford
to talk back to big donors.
You can't expect candor in a relationship so asymmetric. So I'll
tell you what nonprofits wish they could tell you. If you want to
donate to a nonprofit, donate unrestricted. If you trust them to
spend your money, trust them to decide how.
Note
[
1
]
Unfortunately restricted donations tend to generate more
publicity than unrestricted ones. "X donates money to build a school
in Africa" is not only more interesting than "X donates money to Y
nonprofit to spend as Y chooses," but also focuses more attention
on X.
Thanks
to Chase Adam, Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, and Edith
Elliot for reading drafts of this.


@riemannzeta @eladgil It is very hard. I didn't say people get good at it, just better.

@riemannzeta @eladgil Definitely. In fact most people probably get better at it as they age.

@abarrallen Foundations of what?

@eladgil This is definitely false. What the quality of someone's friends shows you is merely their ability to judge character. I know lots of great people who have some dubious friends because they're not great judges of character.

@Noahpinion He doesn't have an army of redneck followers who approve automatically of everything he does.

@avoanjali Engage as closely with customers as you can. Move into their office and do their work for them if they'll let you.

@tigranca I wouldn't go that far.

@chintanjv This will sound arrogant, but it's true: the biggest difference is that the YC startup is better. YC only accepts about 1% of startups that apply, so they'd have to be pretty terrible judges for that 1% not to be a lot better than the rest.

One startup today needed a new name. In ten minutes we found a five-letter .com name that wasn't taken. It felt like 2005.

@chrisdcloud It means doing things the way 20 years and 5300 startups have shown us works.


"Commercializing research" is another way to say that one has a solution in search of a problem. That's not to say that such startups are automatically doomed. Sometimes solutions find problems. But when I hear that phrase, it makes me skeptical rather than excited.

@Austen Airlines should start doing this.

@Sams_Antics Empirically yes. I can't prove it's necessary, but even the smartest people have had to do it.

@yacineMTB 12 hours is long.

Working long hours is not a sufficient condition for doing great things, but it does appear to be a necessary one, especially in the early stages.

@jonathanberger When your kid is in some kind of danger.

@lefineder FWIW I looked up the work of the artists involved, and it's pretty bad. Judging from auction prices, present-day opinion is similar to Kruschev's. https://t.co/kAGA6iyiqn

@EddyRobinson @DanielleFong @spectate_or Is that Cairo?

@dwallacewells I can imagine a rather alarming evolutionary explanation: there's an expiration date at 40 because people didn't have to live past that to have children, and another at 60 because people didn't have to live past that to have grandchildren.

When you start something like Airbnb, people don't just use it to rent existing spaces. It enables them to create new spaces as well.

Starting a marketplace is like making a tool. People will use it in ways you never imagined.


Raising too much makes you spend too much, which makes it harder to reach profitability. And a high valuation makes it harder for the next round to be an up round, which both investors and founders prefer.

Believe it or not, it's dangerous for a startup to raise too much at too high a valuation. This sounds like a good problem to have, but it isn't. Both make your next round harder.

I'm skeptical that technology has advanced so far yet, but I'm retweeting this because McKay is generally trustworthy.

Paradoxically, it's hard to convey this to potential applicants, who often believe that their idea is already perfect. Especially younger founders, who often come to YC for the money and the brand, and then find they get something more valuable than either.

This report from a founder in the current batch is a good example of the sort of evolution startups' ideas undergo during YC. Outsiders think YC is about funding, but actually the main value is in what happens to your company.

@Tippotalli Sorry, problematic.

@viscid A few months ago he preemptively forbade me to say it.

"That's a Sims 4-ass walk."

— 12 yo on a man with a distinctive gait

@danbarker @ahistoryinart It's true that the angle and the cropping are what look most photographic. When I tried converting it to black and white, the values didn't. (That's usually the giveaway.)

@ahistoryinart That looks like a photograph. In fact I thought it was one. Did he ever work from photos?


@elonmusk @Agent_IsaacX You think? The P-51 seems to have been main reason the Allies achieved air superiority over Germany in 1944.

The P-51 prototype flew 184 days after the contract signing. https://t.co/x81VrlzHiS

This is a great account to follow if you want to track fake news. It not only helps you avoid being tricked, but it's also an index of the increasingly sophisticated techniques used by fake news makers.

@ahistoryinart This is one of his best works, indeed one of the best paintings of its time.

I would use Google half as much if ChatGPT weren't so slow. Half the time I use Google, it's because I'm waiting for an answer from ChatGPT, and decide I might as well check Google in the meantime.

YC is like a university in that a lot of applicants are attracted by the brand, but once they get there they realize the real advantage is the people. It's an unbelievably highly concentrated group of ambitious and, perhaps even more important, optimistic people.

@AndrewFeinberg And gets most of their information from Twitter.

"Last year, 33 percent of Americans under 30 said their sympathies lie entirely or mostly with the Palestinian people, versus 14 percent who said the same about Israelis, according to a Pew Research poll published last month."

@robinhanson Interesting! I was thinking the reason might be that it surfaced awkward truths, but the real reason is that markets are smarter than authorities.

@andrewoetting @StatisticUrban That includes TV and video.


@garrytan That's what YC's business consists of.

We're in Switzerland. I hear a voice in the next room. It sounds familiar. Wait, it's Ron Conway. How can this be? It's because hard-working Jessica is editing a Social Radars episode even while we're on vacation.

@pitdesi You never had nachos with guacamole?

@umarxramzan @abarrallen Stripe.

@abarrallen I think it's a good sign. In the past it has generally been investors who pushed companies to go public. There was little upside for the founders. Now some founders are in a strong enough position to resist.

@pdhsu All lettuce, or are you talking about iceberg lettuce?

@mattyglesias How much of this feeling is due to the decay and corruption induced by Trump's victory, and how much is more general?

@mattyglesias This particular guy is a notorious fool though.

@nikitabier @felpix_ That's not good. I had no idea. I'm investigating what happened. (One difference between YC and universities is that when we make mistakes, we notice.)

@devonzuegel I tend to ignore emails like this. I'd rather the sender were simply more concise.


How to Do What You Love
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
January 2006
To do something well you have to like it.   That idea is not exactly
novel.  We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love."  But
it's not enough just to tell people that.  Doing what you love is
complicated.
The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids.  When I
was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition.
Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do
things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could
do what you wanted, and that was called playing.  Occasionally the
things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing
wasn't — for example, if you fell and hurt yourself.  But except
for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as
not-fun.
And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was
tedious
because
it was preparation for grownup work.
The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids.
Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work.  Kids didn't,
but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of
work meant to prepare us for the real thing.  Much as we disliked
school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and
that we had it easy.
Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work
was not fun.  Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of
them.  Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing
dodgeball?  For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of
kids instead of lying on a beach.  You couldn't just do what you
wanted.
I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want.
They may have to be made to work on certain things.  But if we make
kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness
is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason
they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more
interesting stuff later.
[
1
]
Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever
I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it.  I remember that
precisely because it seemed so anomalous.  It was like being told
to use dry water.  Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he
meant work could
literally
be fun — fun like playing.  It
took me years to grasp that.
Jobs
By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon.
Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we
would go to see them at work.  It was always understood that they
enjoyed what they did.  In retrospect I think one may have: the
private jet pilot.  But I don't think the bank manager really did.
The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was
presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed
to.  It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you
despised your job, but a social faux-pas.
Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do?  The first
sentence of this essay explains that.  If you have to like something
to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what
they do.  That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from.
Just as houses all over America are full of
chairs
that are, without
the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed
250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work
are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of
the attitudes of people who've done great things.
What a recipe for alienation.  By the time they reach an age to
think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly
misled about the idea of loving one's work.  School has trained
them to regard work as an unpleasant duty.  Having a job is said
to be even more onerous than schoolwork.  And yet all the adults
claim to like what they do.  You can't blame kids for thinking "I
am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught
to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not
(necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around
them are lying when they say they like what they do.
The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents.  If you take
a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so
many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that
work is boring.
[
2
]
Maybe it would be better for kids in this one
case if parents were not so unselfish.  A parent who set an example
of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive
house.
[
3
]
It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke
free from the idea of making a living.  Then the important question
became not how to make money, but what to work on.  Ideally these
coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in
the patent office) proved they weren't identical.
The definition of work was now to make some original contribution
to the world, and in the process not to starve.  But after the habit
of so many years my idea of work still included a large component
of pain.  Work still seemed to require discipline, because only
hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't
literally be fun.   Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.
If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to
notice if you're doing it wrong.  That about sums up my experience
of graduate school.
Bounds
How much
are you supposed to like what you do?  Unless you
know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most
people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too
early.  You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents,
or the desire to make money, or prestige — or sheer inertia.
Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you
would like to do most
this second
.  Even Einstein probably
had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself
he ought to finish what he was working on first.
It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they
did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do.  There didn't
seem to be any sort of work I liked
that
much.  If I had a
choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b)
be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was
there any sort of work I'd prefer?  Honestly, no.
But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment,
float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious
food, than work on hard problems.  The rule about doing what you
love assumes a certain length of time.  It doesn't mean, do what
will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest
over some longer period, like a week or a month.
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually.  After a while you get tired
of lying on the beach.  If you want to stay happy, you have to do
something.
As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive
pleasure.  You have to like what you do enough that the concept of
"spare time" seems mistaken.  Which is not to say you have to spend
all your time working.  You can only work so much before you get
tired and start to screw up.  Then you want to do something else
— even something mindless.  But you don't regard this time as the
prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn
it.
I put the lower bound there for practical reasons.  If your work
is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems
with procrastination.  You'll have to force yourself to work,  and
when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.
To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only
enjoy, but admire.  You have to be able to say, at the end, wow,
that's pretty cool.  This doesn't mean you have to make something.
If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language
fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least,
wow, that's pretty cool.  What there has to be is a test.
So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is
reading books.  Except for some books in math and the hard sciences,
there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why
merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work.  You have to do
something with what you've read to feel productive.
I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things
that would make your friends say wow.  But it probably wouldn't
start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't
had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.
Sirens
What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of
anyone beyond your friends.  You shouldn't worry about prestige.
Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.  When you can ask
the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it
add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know?
[
4
]
This is easy advice to give.  It's hard to follow, especially when
you're young.
[
5
]
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps
even your beliefs about what you enjoy.  It causes you to work not
on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example.  They
like reading novels.  They notice that people who write them win
Nobel prizes.  What could be more wonderful, they think, than to
be a novelist?  But liking the idea of being a novelist is not
enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're
going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration.  If you do anything well
enough, you'll
make
it prestigious.  Plenty of things we now
consider prestigious were anything but at first.  Jazz comes to
mind — though almost any established art form would do.   So just
do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious.  If you want to
make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do
it is to bait the hook with prestige.  That's the recipe for getting
people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be
department heads, and so on.  It might be a good rule simply to
avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have
had to make it prestigious.
Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more
prestigious, you should probably choose the other.  Your opinions
about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced
by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have
more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.
The other big force leading people astray is money.  Money by itself
is not that dangerous.  When something pays well but is regarded
with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal
injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it.  That
kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to
make a living."  (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say
this.)  The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in,
say, corporate law, or medicine.  A comparatively safe and prosperous
career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting
to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really
like.
The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do
it even if they weren't paid for it — even if they had to work at
another job to make a living.  How many corporate lawyers would do
their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare
time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds
of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect.  Most
good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs
as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of
the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver:
people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies,
and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs.  Math
would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of
English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into
being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity
in the novels of Conrad.  No one does
that
kind of thing for fun.
The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money.  It
seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists
and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors
and whose parents want them to be novelists.  The kids think their
parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily.  All parents tend to
be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves,
simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards.  If
your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage
daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share
in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets
pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.
Discipline
With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising
we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on.  Most people
are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain.
Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige
or money.  How many even discover something they love to work on?
A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do.  So don't
underestimate this task.  And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded
yet.  In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented,
you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial.  If
you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you
find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves.  Not
necessarily, but probably.
Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think — because the way to do great work is to find something you like so
much that you don't have to force yourself to do it —
finding
work you love does usually require discipline.   Some people are
lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just
glide along as if they were on railroad tracks.  But this seems the
exception.  More often people who do great things have careers with
the trajectory of a ping-pong ball.  They go to school to study A,
drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after
taking it up on the side.
Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of
energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness.  Are you dropping
out, or boldly carving a new path?  You often can't tell yourself.
Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments
early on, when they're trying to find their niche.
Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest?  One is to
try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't
like it.  Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction
as an excuse for being lazy.  Perhaps more importantly, you'll get
into the habit of doing things well.
Another test you can use is: always produce.  For example, if you
have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a
novelist, are you producing?  Are you writing pages of fiction,
however bad?  As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not
merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write
one day as an opiate.  The view of it will be obstructed by the all
too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.
"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love.
If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically
push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on,
toward things you actually like.  "Always produce" will discover
your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the
hole in your roof.
Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you
get to work on it.  That's a separate question.  And if you're
ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious
effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated
by what seems possible.
[
6
]
It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe
the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their
expectations.  For example, if you asked random people on the street
if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most
would say something like "Oh, I can't draw."  This is more a statement
of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try.  Because
the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow
got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the
next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far.  But it would require
a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every
day for years.  And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."
Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do
work they love — that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs.  Really?
How do you make them?  In the US the only mechanism for forcing
people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't been
invoked for over 30 years.  All we can do is encourage people to
do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.
If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if society
just has to make do without.  That's what happened with domestic
servants.  For millennia that was the canonical example of a job
"someone had to do."  And yet in the mid twentieth century servants
practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just
had to do without.
So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a good
chance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken.
Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no
one were willing to do them.
Two Routes
There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love"
that's all too true, however.  One has to make a living, and it's
hard to get paid for doing work you love.  There are two routes to
that destination:
The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to
  increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of
  those you don't.
The two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money
  to work on things you do.
The organic route is more common.  It happens naturally to anyone
who does good work.  A young architect has to take whatever work
he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position
to pick and choose among projects.  The disadvantage of this route
is that it's slow and uncertain.  Even tenure is not real freedom.
The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you
work for money at a time.  At one extreme is the "day job," where
you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what
you love in your spare time.  At the other extreme you work at
something till you make
enough
not to
have to work for money again.
The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because
it requires a deliberate choice.  It's also more dangerous.  Life
tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get
sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job.
Worse still, anything you work on changes you.  If you work too
long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain.  And the best paying
jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.
The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over
obstacles.  The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are
walls of varying heights between different kinds of work.
[
7
]
The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you
from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music.
If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you
have more freedom of choice.
Which route should you take?  That depends on how sure you are of
what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much
risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your
lifetime) for what you want to do.  If you're sure of the general
area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to
pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route.  But
if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take
orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand
the risk.
Don't decide too soon.  Kids who know early what they want to do
seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question
before the other kids.  They have an answer, certainly, but odds
are it's wrong.
A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly
about her job.  When people applying to medical school ask her for
advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!"  (But she
never does.) How did she get into this fix?  In high school she
already wanted to be a doctor.  And she is so ambitious and determined
that she overcame every obstacle along the way — including,
unfortunately, not liking it.
Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get
enough information to make each choice before you need to make it.
But this is certainly not so with work.  When you're deciding what
to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information.
Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are
like.  At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs
offer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more about
the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.
In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you
get better results if you use flexible media.  So unless you're
fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a
type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job
career.  That was probably part of the reason I chose computers.
You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it into
any number of other kinds of work.
It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different
things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like.
Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerous
because it teaches you so little about what you like.  If you work
hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll
quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when
you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing
novels?
Most people would say, I'd take that problem.  Give me a million
dollars and I'll figure out what to do.  But it's harder than it
looks.  Constraints give your life shape.  Remove them and most
people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who
win lotteries or inherit money.  Much as everyone thinks they want
financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it,
but those who like what they do.  So a plan that promises freedom
at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as
it seems.
Whichever route you take, expect a struggle.  Finding work you love
is very difficult.  Most people fail.  Even if you succeed, it's
rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or
forties.  But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more
likely to arrive at it.  If you know you can love work, you're in
the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're
practically there.
Notes
[
1
]
Currently we do the opposite: when we make kids do boring work,
like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it's
boring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.
[
2
]
One father told me about a related phenomenon: he found himself
concealing from his family how much he liked his work.  When he
wanted to go to work on a saturday, he found it easier to say that
it was because he "had to" for some reason, rather than admitting
he preferred to work than stay home with them.
[
3
]
Something similar happens with suburbs.  Parents move to suburbs
to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull
and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced
the whole world is boring.
[
4
]
I'm not saying friends should be the only audience for your
work.  The more people you can help, the better.  But friends should
be your compass.
[
5
]
Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so
obsessed with being published.  But you can imagine what it would
do for a 24 year old to get a poem published in
The New Yorker
.
Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet.  Actually he's
no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience
like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the
difference.   So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes.  The
reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people
they want to impress are not very discerning.
[
6
]
This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent
your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how
you wish they were.  Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously.
The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of
that.
[
7
]
A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobs
is not very well connected.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Dan Friedman, Sarah Harlin,
Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig,
David Sloo, and Aaron Swartz
for reading drafts of this.
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@Chebky1 Yes, and all kinds of other things too!

@aktieterminalen When they were little, my kids particularly liked groups of teenagers, because they're so conformist that even the youngest kids can see it, and it also gives little kids a rare opportunity to feel superior to older ones.

One of the best ways to protect your kids against conformism is to point out examples of it. It can also be very funny. Even a four year old can see how ridiculous some of them are.

@amasad That would be the history of mathematics.

@jhertzli Ooh, I forgot bald studies.

@putthekibosh It would be interdisciplinary.

I know there's now a field of fat studies. Are there also fields of short studies and ugly studies, or have those not been invented yet?

@lisperati Puddings haven't vanished in the UK.

Few people know it, because he keeps such a low profile, but Dang is one of the smartest people in Silicon Valley. Very little that goes on escapes him.

"My interest in mental illness predates Hacker News, but it's certainly relevant."

— Daniel Gackle


If your opponents are opportunists, one way to beat them is to outlast them. Opportunists almost by definition lack staying power.

@balajis It's a historical coincidence.

@ScottAdamsSays @BasedMikeLee If he meant that, he should have said that.

@BasedMikeLee So is there no crime that a politician should be imprisoned for?

Of course not.

So yes, you can be pro-democracy and support jailing your opponent.

@pknegten So you feel DEI is at odds with profit?

@Lil_Miss_AM I don't assume that. I've observed empirically that it isn't.

@matthew_d_green If they're merely talking rather than trying to get people fired, that seems a step forward at least.

@uzmabarlaskar It isn't really about that though, any more than medieval religious wars were about serving God.

@dancow I can't remember anyone daring to.

It's an encouraging sign how muted the response to this has been. In 2017 it would have stirred up the mother of all mobs. Further evidence that wokeness peaked several years ago and is still declining.


@Al_speedi Whatever the founders make it look like. They're the ones doing the innovation.

@ahistoryinart Did he paint this then?

To my delight someone asked me this morning how long we'd been doing Y Combinator, and I was able to answer "Exactly 20 years."

@mval Quite what?

@surmoulage @ColmCasey To be fair I think it's always been like this. I wouldn't have wanted to do the stuff you had to do in 1925 either.

@ShubhamKukretii @sushantpandey_ Yeah, man, get a life. He's never going to reply.

@ColmCasey Nice of you to say, but I was born in the UK. I wouldn't be suited for it anyway. I'm not hungry enough for power to put up with all the bullshit you'd have to go through.

@raketstar2 In retrospect it was fun times. Imagine if that was the worst you could say about the current president.

@MPrinParr Presumably the only thing that's traditional about this building is the facade. That's all this conversation is about. So while the choice to have divided lights or not might be a trivial component of a building, it's a nontrivial component of what matters about that one.

@0xb7cC3 YC funds lots of startups from Europe.


@michael_nielsen I once noticed the opposite in the body language of someone who'd spent decades in prison: he moved his eyes without moving his head.

@elkelk What would they use for collateral?

@StatisticUrban They probably also gained muscle.

The Rublev recipe for looking insane: simultaneously tilt your head downward and open your eyes wide. https://t.co/8JYtVbWelw

I dreamed that Pmarca created a YC clone. The first session was in a public place (a hotel I think). Jessica and I were passing by and thought he was giving a talk and sat down to listen. When we realized what it was, we were horrified that he'd think we'd come to spy on it.

@fjcero @johnarnold All new technologies create new jobs. But unlike other technologies, AI will also do the new jobs it creates.

@johnarnold I fear AI will be different.

You'd expect this to happen as societies got richer, since food and housing are more soluble problems than aging. I'm not saying that's why it's happening now, though. https://t.co/aydfQg2h3m

@shweta_ai @BillGates @LisaSu @lucy_guo @JeffBezos @alexisohanian @garyvee @sundarpichai @jack This is my favorite.

Patient: What can I do to be healthier?

Doctor: Eat less and exercise more.

Patient: Er, is there anything else?

Would-be Founder: What should I do if I want to start a startup?

Me: Learn to program.

Would-be Founder: Er, is there anything else?


@PP_Rubens El Greco? But I'm saying it based on the drapery. You really need to give us bigger details. No one can get them based on what you give us now.

@primeurl @librxrian There are so many clues, not just in the interview but the application.

@JohnsonThought1 It's easy to portray a statement like this as something "everyone knows," but I was really struck by how true it is in startups, where opportunists are so common, and playing the long game makes such a big difference.

@egrefen The median VC is an opportunist. That's why the median VC doesn't generate good returns.

@RankedChoiceFTW That's true. He's an interesting case. I think it's because he discovered a huge new vein of credulous people when he went into politics. But I don't think he has an organized plan to mine it. He just keeps feeding upon it in a fairly haphazard way.

@morphiad It depends on the opponent. It works particularly well against opportunists.

@rocketfoxx No they're not. They don't take notes.

@librxrian Exactly the opposite. The key to succeeding in startups is to play the long game. That's why YC tries to filter out opportunists.

@Kundan33_ It works in anything where winning takes time, because no individual opportunist takes enough.

@shaneparrish @ycombinator An opportunist is someone who's looking for something desirable (e.g. money or fame) without putting in the effort that's usually required.

Buffett is the opposite. He's playing the long game.


Writing and Speaking
March 2012
I'm not a very good speaker.  I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have
to pause when I lose my train of thought.  I wish I were a better
speaker.  But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I
were a better writer.  What I really want is to have good ideas,
and that's a much bigger part of being a good writer than being a
good speaker.
Having good ideas is most of writing well.  If you know what you're
talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you'll be
perceived as having a good style.  With speaking it's the opposite:
having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good
speaker.
I first noticed this at a conference several years ago.
There was another speaker who was much better than me.
He had all of us roaring with laughter.  I seemed awkward and
halting by comparison.  Afterward I put my talk online like I usually
do.  As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of the
other guy's talk would be like, and it was only then I realized he
hadn't said very much.
Maybe this would have been obvious to someone who knew more about
speaking, but it was a revelation to me how much less ideas mattered
in speaking than writing.
[
1
]
A few years later I heard a talk by someone who was not merely a
better speaker than me, but a famous speaker.  Boy was he good.  So
I decided I'd pay close attention to what he said, to learn how he
did it.  After about ten sentences I found myself thinking "I don't
want to be a good speaker."
Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas,
but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction.  For example,
when I give a talk, I usually write it out beforehand.  I know that's
a mistake; I know delivering a
prewritten
talk makes it harder to
engage with an audience.  The way to get the attention of an audience
is to give them
your
full attention, and when you're delivering
a prewritten talk, your attention is always divided between the
audience and the talk — even if you've memorized it.  If you want
to engage an audience, it's better to start with no more than an outline
of what you want to say and
ad lib
the individual sentences.  But
if you do that, you might spend no more time thinking about each
sentence than it takes to say it.
[
2
]
Occasionally the stimulation
of talking to a live audience makes you think of new things, but
in general this is not going to generate ideas as well as writing
does, where you can spend as long on each sentence as you want.
If you rehearse a prewritten speech enough, you can get
asymptotically close to the sort of engagement you get when speaking
ad lib.  Actors do.  But here again there's a tradeoff between
smoothness and ideas.  All the time you spend practicing a talk,
you could instead spend making it better.  Actors don't face
that temptation, except in the rare cases where they've written the
script, but any speaker does.  Before I give a talk I can usually
be found sitting in a corner somewhere with a copy printed out on
paper, trying to rehearse it in my head.  But I always end up
spending most of the time rewriting it instead.  Every talk I give
ends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed out
and rewritten.  Which of course makes me um even more, because I
haven't had any time to practice the new bits.
[
3
]
Depending on your audience, there are even worse tradeoffs than
these.  Audiences like to be flattered; they like jokes; they like
to be swept off their feet by a vigorous stream of words.  As you
decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is
increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter.  That's true in
writing too of course, but the descent is steeper with talks.  Any
given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader.
Just as a speaker ad libbing can only spend as long thinking about
each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can
only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear
it.  Plus people in an audience are always affected by the reactions
of those around them, and the reactions that spread from person to
person in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort,
just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones.  Every
audience is an incipient mob, and a good speaker uses that.  Part
of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at
that conference was that everyone else did.
[
4
]
So are talks useless?  They're certainly inferior to the written
word as a source of ideas.  But that's not all talks are good for.
When I go to a talk, it's usually because I'm interested in the
speaker.  Listening to a talk is the closest most of us can get to
having a conversation with someone like the president, who doesn't
have time to meet individually with all the people who want to meet
him.
Talks are also good at motivating me to do things.  It's probably
no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as
motivational speakers.  That may be what public speaking is really
for.  It's probably what it was originally for.  The emotional
reactions you can elicit with a talk can be a powerful force.
I wish I could say that this force was more often used for good than
ill, but I'm not sure.
Notes
[
1
]
I'm not talking here about academic talks, which are a
different type of thing.  While the
audience at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they will (or
at least should) make a conscious effort to see what new ideas
you're presenting.
[
2
]
That's the lower bound.  In practice you can often do better,
because talks are usually about things you've written or talked
about before, and when you ad lib, you end up reproducing some of
those sentences.  Like early medieval architecture, impromptu talks
are made of spolia.  Which feels a bit dishonest, incidentally,
because you have to deliver these sentences as if you'd just thought
of them.
[
3
]
Robert Morris points out that there is a way in which practicing
talks makes them better: reading a talk out loud can expose awkward
parts.  I agree and in fact I read most things I write out loud at
least once for that reason.
[
4
]
For sufficiently small audiences, it may not be true that being
part of an audience makes people dumber.  The real decline seems
to set in when the audience gets too big for the talk to feel like
a conversation — maybe around 10 people.
Thanks
to Sam Altman and Robert Morris for reading drafts
of this.


@agaradecki Outstanding arrest warrants.

@garrytan In some domains there are structural ways of remembering who was early. In science there's publication date. In startups there's the price at which you invested.

@Afri_bull My guess is that it's a lobbying-based reservation.

@kind_inkind This is one of the technologies that startups work on. An aspiring startup hub can't ban some startups and not others. They're all related.

Plus this legislation is a signal of the kind of anti-intellectual populism that the South already has a bad reputation for.

So much for the plan to turn Miami into a startup hub.

@remusrisnov Growth wins if you have enough months of it, then team. Market matters a little.

Unfortunately founders are prone to lie to themselves when answering both questions. Founders often think their startup is more attractive to investors than it is. And they often think money will magically bring growth when the real problem is users don't like the product.

When should a startup raise money? When (a) you need to and (b) you can.

Is lack of money the main thing holding back your growth? Are you an attractive enough proposition that investors will want to invest? Raise iff the answer to both is yes.

@jessegenet If me: https://t.co/yF1V1BOTRN

This is not far off. Time spent has more effect when it's spent working on your own projects. https://t.co/lsNyRzPzsb


I just stumbled upon a new technique for dealing with trolls: show that an AI can correctly interpret the phrase they're misinterpreting. Now they have two choices: admit they're deliberately misinterpreting it, or admit they're dumber than an AI.

@parientmango @nikitabier In fact an AI did get it: https://t.co/otItTjjFZv

@JonErlichman It may not be. You might be able to do better by generating ideas semi-randomly, if you were ok with a high failure rate.

@parientmango @nikitabier To build out x and to build x out of y are distinct idioms.

Curiously enough, I think an AI would have gotten this, whereas you're no better than text search.

@Super_PK_ @nikitabier It implies that this meeting will be a minimal interruption, which no meeting is for people doing real work.

@julien @nikitabier Real builders just say build. Build out is manager talk. It implies the process is just a kind of trivial extrusion.

I love the way this account forces me to focus on details. In theory I could make myself do it, but I haven't, and so I'd never noticed this interesting shape.

@nikitabier Implicit bias

Stakeholders

Grab coffee

Build out

@edsull It's a bad idea but it's not going to happen.

@levie @Austen You are constantly the voice of reason. I don't know where you get the energy, but I'm glad you do it.


@mrcornwell Unless you know the users personally, though, it's hard to be sure about either.

@staysaasy Probably bad ideas, unless your friends are so determined to put you down that they pretend not to want things they do actually want.

@CoreyWriting You guys need to get your story straight. Did Israel block aid in order to put pressure on Hamas, as Smotrich openly claimed, or is it technically-not-a-war-crime on the grounds that Hamas is "diverting" the aid?

@maxxwith2 Of course not.

If you have lots of startup ideas and you're not sure which one to focus on, focus on the one you and your friends are most eager to use.

@VoteRandyFine Do you think it's ethical to starve children in order to put pressure on your enemies?

@noahlt The phrase for this is "kill your darlings."

@Mylovanov When I read "Pastor Burns after meeting with Trump" I thought this was going to be a story about divine retribution...

@ImadTaieb This is somewhat true, but as a rich US citizen I can get away with saying things that a lot of other people can't.

That's another reason I say them: for all the people who would get fired or deported if they dared to.

@johnarnold Among other things, this story is an argument against being public. A company that wasn't publicly traded would never even be tempted to do things like this.


@broodsugar @buffys It's something that takes a while to learn. Novice writers often get it wrong. But with enough practice you get a good sense of which word is right in which situation.

@vpj @buffys You'd think so, wouldn't you? But apparently not.

One of the most interesting things we've learned from funding nonprofit startups is how similar they are to for-profit startups. Not 100%, but probably 90%. And fortunately that 90% includes the speed and efficiency.

From today's NYT article about Noora Health, one of the most effective of all the nonprofits YC has funded. They've already saved tens of thousands of lives. https://t.co/PkHR1dqQc5

@buffys Simple writing is better.

@samorwole It would be better to get good at making it, e.g. by learning to program.

@IaimforGOAT @Aruby_K That's actually pretty accurate. It's probably a waste of time, but I care so much about good writing that I can't help responding even to clearly ill-intentioned replies.

@LewisCTech What makes a word fancy is not length, obviously, but the existence of simpler alternatives.

@scienceisstrat1 @satpugnet As a model of prose style? Wodehouse.

@satpugnet There are of course a few writers who can pull off writing ornately, but very, very few. This thread shows how few. So for nearly everyone the goal should be simplicity.


@NAChristakis Because they either were themselves the woke extremists, or were afraid of them.

@NAChristakis Here's a more positive way to view it: There were always a lot of people against extreme woke policies, but till now they kept quiet because they were worried they'd lose their jobs if anyone knew. So this isn't waffling; it's the end of a reign of terror.

I sometimes dream about a scenario where the people I've blocked are all thrown together in their own separate subTwitter. The far left and far right trolls annihilate one another like electrons and positrons, leaving only the crypto scammers.

@sudoraohacker That ChatGPT screenshot was my community note on the community note (which I notice is now gone).

@ChatPIP I hear they're working on fixing this rapidly in the UK.

@alexandr_wang @scale_AI How do humans do on it?

If anyone wants more details on the specific regulations that cause EU users to get new AI models several months after other users do, here's a summary by ChatGPT. https://t.co/5stwUiSjPa

@mattyglesias That's a good point. I was implicitly assuming that we're measuring efficiency in dollars per important thing done by the government, and that no important things would be cut. But of course they could be if this is done clumsily.

@DKThomp Yes, that's true.

@Addiedesignco The UK is apparently working on fixing this problem for users here.


@ShaunMooreUK Do you think this is true of every kind of work people do? Is it also impossible for one person to be a better cook or football player or carpenter than another person? Or is it only writing that's impossible to do well?

@soho_ca I bet it's very close.

@nbaschez It doesn't roll off the table to be eaten by the dog?

@sweatystartup If everyone takes this advice we're net worse off. It stops working, and school takes a year longer.

@headinthebox The golden age of the mediocre SWE is over. But maybe that's redundant; maybe good programmers don't call themselves SWEs.

One way to understand the subtle tricks used by really great writers would be to give their work to the median editor. The result would be the midwrite version. You could then compare that to the original to see what great writers do differently.

@Scientific_Bird That last parenthetical sentence is the reason I've never liked the word "entrepreneurship." It's too broad.

@SpencerHakimian In our business it's missing out on gains.

@scottastevenson It has been a problem for a long time. YC has had to figure out how to filter out resume padders since 2010 if not earlier. So now they have lots of practice.

A few years ago I wrote something about all the different things I've worked on over the years, and I was amazed how often I'd been tricked by prestige: https://t.co/owrYC46NAb