The Other Half of "Artists Ship"
November 2008
One of the differences between big companies and startups is that
big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves
against mistakes.  A startup walks like a toddler, bashing
into things and falling over all the time.  A big company is more
deliberate.
The gradual accumulation of checks in an organization is a kind of
learning, based on disasters that have happened to it or others
like it.  After giving a contract to a supplier who goes bankrupt
and fails to deliver, for example, a company might require all
suppliers to prove they're solvent before submitting bids.
As companies grow they invariably get more such checks, either in
response to disasters they've suffered, or (probably more often)
by hiring people from bigger companies who bring with them customs
for protecting against new types of disasters.
It's natural for organizations to learn from mistakes.  The problem
is, people who propose new checks almost never consider that the
check itself has a cost.
Every check has a cost.
For example, consider the case of making
suppliers verify their solvency.  Surely that's mere prudence?  But
in fact it could have substantial costs.  There's obviously the
direct cost in time of the people on both sides who supply and check
proofs of the supplier's solvency.  But the real costs are the ones
you never hear about: the company that would be the best supplier,
but doesn't bid because they can't spare the effort to get verified.
Or the company that would be the best supplier, but falls just short
of the threshold for solvency—which will of course have been set
on the high side, since there is no apparent cost of increasing it.
Whenever someone in an organization proposes to add a new check,
they should have to explain not just the benefit but the cost.  No
matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would
at least remind everyone there had to
be
a cost, and send them
looking for it.
If companies started doing that, they'd find some surprises.  Joel
Spolsky recently spoke at Y Combinator about selling software to
corporate customers.  He said that in most companies software costing
up to about $1000 could be bought by individual managers without
any additional approvals.  Above that threshold, software purchases
generally had to be approved by a committee.  But babysitting this
process was so expensive for software vendors that it didn't make
sense to charge less than $50,000.  Which means if you're making
something you might otherwise have charged $5000 for, you have to
sell it for $50,000 instead.
The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company
doesn't waste money. And yet the result is that the company pays
10 times as much.
Checks on purchases will always be expensive, because the harder
it is to sell something to you, the more it has to cost.  And not
merely linearly, either.  If you're hard enough to sell to, the
people who are best at making things don't want to bother.  The
only people who will sell to you are companies that specialize in
selling to you.  Then you've sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency.
Market mechanisms no longer protect you, because the good suppliers
are no longer in the market.
Such things happen constantly to the biggest organizations of all,
governments.  But checks instituted by governments can cause much
worse problems than merely overpaying.  Checks instituted by
governments can cripple a country's whole economy.  Up till about
1400, China was richer and more technologically advanced than Europe.
One reason Europe pulled ahead was that the Chinese government
restricted long trading voyages.  So it was left to the Europeans
to explore and eventually to dominate the rest of the world, including
China.
In more recent times, Sarbanes-Oxley has practically destroyed the
US IPO market.  That wasn't the intention of the legislators who
wrote it.  They just wanted to add a few more checks on public
companies.  But they forgot to consider the cost.  They forgot that
companies about to go public are usually rather stretched, and that
the weight of a few extra checks that might be easy for General
Electric to bear are enough to prevent younger companies from being
public at all.
Once you start to think about the cost of checks, you can start to
ask other interesting questions. Is the cost increasing or decreasing?
Is it higher in some areas than others?  Where does it increase
discontinuously?  If large organizations started to ask questions
like that, they'd learn some frightening things.
I think the cost of checks may actually be increasing.  The reason
is that software plays an increasingly important role in companies,
and the people who write software are particularly harmed by checks.
Programmers are unlike many types of workers in that the best ones
actually prefer to work hard.  This doesn't seem to be the case in
most types of work.  When I worked in fast food, we didn't prefer
the busy times.  And when I used to mow lawns, I definitely didn't
prefer it when the grass was long after a week of rain.
Programmers, though, like it better when they write more code.  Or
more precisely, when they release more code.  Programmers like to
make a difference.  Good ones, anyway.
For good programmers, one of the best things about working for a
startup is that there are few checks on releases.  In true startups,
there are no external checks at all.  If you have an idea for a new
feature in the morning, you can write it and push it to the production
servers before lunch.  And when you can do that, you have more
ideas.
At big companies, software has to go through various approvals
before it can be launched.  And the cost of doing this can be
enormous—in fact, discontinuous.  I was talking recently to a
group of three programmers whose startup had been acquired a few
years before by a big company.  When they'd been independent, they
could release changes instantly.  Now, they said, the absolute
fastest they could get code released on the production servers was
two weeks.
This didn't merely make them less productive.  It made them hate
working for the acquirer.
Here's a sign of how much programmers like to be able to work hard:
these guys would have
paid
to be able to release code immediately,
the way they used to.  I asked them if they'd trade 10% of the
acquisition price for the ability to release code immediately, and
all three instantly said yes.  Then I asked what was the maximum
percentage of the acquisition price they'd trade for it.  They said
they didn't want to think about it, because they didn't want to
know how high they'd go, but I got the impression it might be as
much as half.
They'd have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps
millions, just to be able to deliver more software to users.  And
you know what?  It would have been perfectly safe to let them.  In
fact, the acquirer would have been better off; not only wouldn't
these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done.
So the acquirer is in fact getting worse performance at greater
cost.  Just like the committee approving software purchases.
And just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not
that you overpay but that the best suppliers won't even sell to
you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your
programmers is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that
good programmers won't even want to work for you.
Steve Jobs's famous maxim "artists ship" works both ways.  Artists
aren't merely capable of shipping.  They insist on it.  So if you
don't let people ship, you won't have any artists.


@AsyncCollab For sure I'll write about it some day.

@Charlesvinette It is. This is only a fraction of the Lego.

@ButlerianIdeal One day soon I'll write that essay.

@szymanski_piotr Around 570 years. None of the furniture is that old, and if it was it would be uncomfortable.

@AsyncCollab We don't actually live in a castle. With a handful of exceptions you have to live in Wales or Scotland to do that (because the castles are mostly in disputed border territories).

Our approach to home decor. https://t.co/Uq0cOsPAzL

@joshuamarch @OpenAI This is a common pattern. They also went after Microsoft after its monopoly was already in decline.

"...Crimea was lost years ago under the auspices of President Barak Hussein Obama, and is not even a point of discussion."

— Donald Trump, April 23, 2025

@markojak Although the tariffs are having the most obvious, immediate effects, I'm most worried about the violations of free speech and rule of law. Those are the foundation of everything. Without those you can't vote out people who make economic policy mistakes.

@tlbtlbtlb @Noahpinion I want to know about the 9% who like the black death. How many of those knew what the name referred to?


Stuff
July 2007
I have too much stuff.  Most people in America do.  In fact, the
poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have.  Hardly anyone
is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.
It wasn't always this way.  Stuff used to be rare and valuable.
You can still see evidence of that if you look for it.  For example,
in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms
don't have closets.  In those days people's stuff fit in a chest
of drawers.  Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot
less stuff.  When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I'm surprised
how empty houses look.  As a kid I had what I thought was a huge
fleet of toy cars, but they'd be dwarfed by the number of toys my
nephews have.  All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about
a third of the surface of my bed.  In my nephews' rooms the bed is
the only clear space.
Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't
changed correspondingly.  We overvalue stuff.
That was a big problem
for me when I had no money.  I felt poor, and stuff seemed valuable,
so almost instinctively I accumulated it.  Friends would leave
something behind when they moved, or I'd see something as I was
walking down the street on trash night (beware of anything you find
yourself describing as "perfectly good"), or I'd find something in
almost new condition for a tenth its retail price at a garage sale.
And pow, more stuff.
In fact these free or nearly free things weren't bargains, because
they were worth even less than they cost.  Most of the stuff I
accumulated was worthless, because I didn't need it.
What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition
wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for
it.  It was the value I derived from it.  Stuff is an extremely
illiquid asset.  Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable
thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's
"worth?"  The only way you're ever going to extract any value from
it is to use it.  And if you don't have any immediate use for it,
you probably never will.
Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think
stuff is still valuable.  But it would be closer to the truth to
treat stuff as worthless.
In fact, worse than worthless, because once you've accumulated a
certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other
way around.  I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the town
they preferred because they couldn't afford a place there big enough
for all their stuff.  Their house isn't theirs; it's their stuff's.
And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can
be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits.  One
reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room
full of stuff.  But there's more going on than that.  I think humans
constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's
around them.  And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy
you have left for conscious thoughts.  A cluttered room is literally
exhausting.
(This could explain why clutter doesn't seem to bother kids as much
as adults. Kids are less perceptive.  They build a coarser model
of their surroundings, and this consumes less energy.)
I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy
for a year.  All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff.
The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady's attic back in the US.
And you know what?  All I missed were some of the books.  By the
end of the year I couldn't even remember what else I had stored in
that attic.
And yet when I got back I didn't discard so much as a box of it.
Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone?  I might need that
one day.
The really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated
all this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperately
needed on stuff that I didn't.
Why would I do that?  Because the people whose job is to sell you
stuff are really, really good at it.  The average 25 year old is
no match for companies that have spent years figuring out how to
get you to spend money on stuff.  They make the experience of buying
stuff so pleasant that "shopping" becomes a leisure activity.
How do you protect yourself from these people?  It can't be easy.
I'm a fairly skeptical person, and their tricks worked on me well
into my thirties.  But one thing that might work is to ask yourself,
before buying something, "is this going to make my life noticeably
better?"
A friend of mine cured herself of a clothes buying habit by asking
herself before she bought anything "Am I going to wear this all the
time?"  If she couldn't convince herself that something she was
thinking of buying would become one of those few things she wore
all the time, she wouldn't buy it.  I think that would work for any
kind of purchase.  Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this
be something I use constantly?  Or is it just something nice?  Or
worse still, a mere bargain?
The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don't use much
because it's too good.  Nothing owns you like fragile stuff.  For
example, the "good china" so many households have, and whose defining
quality is not so much that it's fun to use, but that one must be
especially careful not to break it.
Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall
cost of owning it.  The purchase price is just the beginning.  You're
going to have to
think
about that thing for years—perhaps for
the rest of your life.  Every thing you own takes energy away from
you.  Some give more than they take.  Those are the only things
worth having.
I've now stopped accumulating stuff.  Except books—but books are
different.  Books are more like a fluid than individual objects.
It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books,
whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be
a local celebrity.  But except for books, I now actively avoid
stuff.  If I want to spend money on some kind of treat, I'll take
services
over
goods
any day.
I'm not claiming this is because I've achieved some kind of zenlike
detachment from material things.  I'm talking about something more
mundane.  A historical change has taken place, and I've now realized
it.  Stuff used to be valuable, and now it's not.
In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in
the middle of the twentieth century.  As food got cheaper (or we
got richer; they're indistinguishable), eating too much started to
be a bigger danger than eating too little.   We've now reached that
point with stuff.  For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become
a burden.
The good news is, if you're carrying a burden without knowing it,
your life could be better than you realize.  Imagine walking around
for years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly having them
removed.
Spanish Translation
Russian Translation
Italian Translation
Polish Translation
Turkish Translation
French Translation
Slovak Translation
Romanian Translation
German Translation


@marcelolima @elonmusk @NoahCarl90 Here you go: https://t.co/5i1oSBOjpC

@parkergins I think this "appropriation" was entirely innocent. People needed some name to refer to the second wave of political correctness, so they just used the term its proponents had been using for themselves.

@robinhanson Like Doyle wasting his time writing anything except Sherlock Holmes stories, and even killing off Holmes at one point to escape him.

@timhwang If your test is brevity, you're going to bump up against the fact that there's no lower limit for the length of a book, and then you're talking about things like essays and mathematical proofs. Or this. https://t.co/VOEaqEaZ6p

@theovonscousin @elonmusk @NoahCarl90 The queen would have been the last person in the world to say such a thing in 1930.

@jasonjones_jjj Do you have more recent data? This would be interesting to see.

Pronouns peaked in 2021. I was surprised to see how late they took off though. People were so insensitive before 2018...

@davidu How Not to Die: https://t.co/d06tAp9cLJ

@yuris Do they have venture capital clubs? Ugh.

@kevin97642887 Depends what their specialty is.


Billionaires Build
December 2020
As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find
that two separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually
the same.
The first is about how to ace your Y Combinator interview. There
has been so much nonsense written about this topic that I've been
meaning for years to write something telling founders the truth.
The second is about something politicians sometimes say  that the
only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people  and why
this is mistaken.
Keep reading, and you'll learn both simultaneously.
I know the politicians are mistaken because it was my job to predict
which people will become billionaires. I think I can truthfully say
that I know as much about how to do this as anyone. If the key to
becoming a billionaire  the defining feature of billionaires
was to exploit people, then I, as a professional billionaire scout,
would surely realize this and look for people who would be good at
it, just as an NFL scout looks for speed in wide receivers.
But aptitude for exploiting people is not what Y Combinator looks
for at all. In fact, it's the opposite of what they look for. I'll
tell you what they do look for, by explaining how to convince
Y Combinator to fund you, and you can see for yourself.
What YC looks for, above all, is founders who understand some group
of users and can make what they want. This is so important that
it's YC's motto: "Make something people want."
A big company can to some extent force unsuitable products on
unwilling customers, but a startup doesn't have the power to do
that. A startup must sing for its supper, by making things that
genuinely delight its customers. Otherwise it will never get off
the ground.
Here's where things get difficult, both for you as a founder and
for the YC partners trying to decide whether to fund you. In a
market economy, it's hard to make something people want that they
don't already have. That's the great thing about market economies.
If other people both knew about this need and were able to satisfy
it, they already would be, and there would be no room for your
startup.
Which means the conversation during your YC interview will have to
be about something new: either a new need, or a new way to satisfy
one. And not just new, but uncertain. If it were certain that the
need existed and that you could satisfy it, that certainty would
be reflected in large and rapidly growing revenues, and you wouldn't
be seeking seed funding.
So the YC partners have to guess both whether you've discovered a
real need, and whether you'll be able to satisfy it. That's what they
are, at least in this part of their job: professional guessers.
They have 1001 heuristics for doing this, and I'm not going to tell
you all of them, but I'm happy to tell you the most important ones,
because these can't be faked; the only way to "hack" them would be
to do what you should be doing anyway as a founder.
The first thing the partners will try to figure out, usually, is
whether what you're making will ever be something a lot of people
want. It doesn't have to be something a lot of people want now.
The product and the market will both evolve, and will influence
each other's evolution. But in the end there has to be something
with a huge market. That's what the partners will be trying to
figure out: is there a path to a huge market?
[
1
]
Sometimes it's obvious there will be a huge market. If
Boom
manages
to ship an airliner at all, international airlines will have to buy
it. But usually it's not obvious. Usually the path to a huge market
is by growing a small market. This idea is important enough that
it's worth coining a phrase for, so let's call one of these small
but growable markets a "larval market."
The perfect example of a larval market might be Apple's market when
they were founded in 1976. In 1976, not many people wanted their
own computer. But more and more started to want one, till now every
10 year old on the planet wants a computer (but calls it a "phone").
The ideal combination is the group of founders who are
"living in
the future"
in the sense of being at the leading edge of some kind
of change, and who are building something they themselves want.
Most super-successful startups are of this type. Steve Wozniak
wanted a computer. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to engage online with his
college friends. Larry and Sergey wanted to find things on the web.
All these founders were building things they and their peers wanted,
and the fact that they were at the leading edge of change meant
that more people would want these things in the future.
But although the ideal larval market is oneself and one's peers,
that's not the only kind. A larval market might also be regional,
for example. You build something to serve one location, and then
expand to others.
The crucial feature of the initial market is that it exist. That
may seem like an obvious point, but the lack of it is the biggest
flaw in most startup ideas. There have to be some people who want
what you're building right now, and want it so urgently that they're
willing to use it, bugs and all, even though you're a small company
they've never heard of. There don't have to be many, but there have
to be some. As long as you have some users, there are straightforward
ways to get more: build new features they want, seek out more people
like them, get them to refer you to their friends, and so on. But
these techniques all require some initial seed group of users.
So this is one thing the YC partners will almost certainly dig into
during your interview. Who are your first users going to be, and
how do you know they want this? If I had to decide whether to fund
startups based on a single question, it would be "How do you know
people want this?"
The most convincing answer is "Because we and our friends want it."
It's even better when this is followed by the news that you've
already built a prototype, and even though it's very crude, your
friends are using it, and it's spreading by word of mouth. If you
can say that and you're not lying, the partners will switch from
default no to default yes. Meaning you're in unless there's some
other disqualifying flaw.
That is a hard standard to meet, though. Airbnb didn't meet it.
They had the first part. They had made something they themselves
wanted. But it wasn't spreading. So don't feel bad if you don't hit
this gold standard of convincingness. If Airbnb didn't hit it, it
must be too high.
In practice, the YC partners will be satisfied if they feel that
you have a deep understanding of your users' needs. And the Airbnbs
did have that. They were able to tell us all about what motivated
hosts and guests. They knew from first-hand experience, because
they'd been the first hosts. We couldn't ask them a question they
didn't know the answer to. We ourselves were not very excited about
the idea as users, but we knew this didn't prove anything, because
there were lots of successful startups we hadn't been excited about
as users. We were able to say to ourselves "They seem to know what
they're talking about. Maybe they're onto something. It's not growing
yet, but maybe they can figure out how to make it grow during YC."
Which they did, about three weeks into the batch.
The best thing you can do in a YC interview is to teach the partners
about your users. So if you want to prepare for your interview, one of the best
ways to do it is to go talk to your users and find out exactly what
they're thinking. Which is what you should be doing anyway.
This may sound strangely credulous, but the YC partners want to
rely on the founders to tell them about the market. Think about
how VCs typically judge the potential market for an idea. They're
not ordinarily domain experts themselves, so they forward the idea
to someone who is, and ask for their opinion. YC doesn't have time
to do this, but if the YC partners can convince themselves that the
founders both (a) know what they're talking about and (b) aren't
lying, they don't need outside domain experts. They can use the
founders themselves as domain experts when evaluating their own
idea.
This is why YC interviews aren't pitches. To give as many founders
as possible a chance to get funded, we made interviews as short as
we could: 10 minutes. That is not enough time for the partners to
figure out, through the indirect evidence in a pitch, whether you
know what you're talking about and aren't lying. They need to dig
in and ask you questions. There's not enough time for sequential
access. They need random access.
[
2
]
The worst advice I ever heard about how to succeed in a YC interview
is that you should take control of the interview and make sure to
deliver the message you want to. In other words, turn the interview
into a pitch. ⟨elaborate expletive⟩. It is so annoying when people
try to do that. You ask them a question, and instead of answering
it, they deliver some obviously prefabricated blob of pitch. It
eats up 10 minutes really fast.
There is no one who can give you accurate advice about what to do
in a YC interview except a current or former YC partner. People
who've merely been interviewed, even successfully, have no idea of
this, but interviews take all sorts of different forms depending
on what the partners want to know about most. Sometimes they're all
about the founders, other times they're all about the idea. Sometimes
some very narrow aspect of the idea. Founders sometimes walk away
from interviews complaining that they didn't get to explain their
idea completely. True, but they explained enough.
Since a YC interview consists of questions, the way to do it well
is to answer them well. Part of that is answering them candidly.
The partners don't expect you to know everything. But if you don't
know the answer to a question, don't try to bullshit your way out
of it. The partners, like most experienced investors, are professional
bullshit detectors, and you are (hopefully) an amateur bullshitter.
And if you try to bullshit them and fail, they may not even tell
you that you failed. So it's better to be honest than to try to
sell them. If you don't know the answer to a question, say you
don't, and tell them how you'd go about finding it, or tell them
the answer to some related question.
If you're asked, for example, what could go wrong, the worst possible
answer is "nothing." Instead of convincing them that your idea is
bullet-proof, this will convince them that you're a fool or a liar.
Far better to go into gruesome detail. That's what experts do when
you ask what could go wrong.  The partners know that your idea is
risky. That's what a good bet looks like at this stage: a tiny
probability of a huge outcome.
Ditto if they ask about competitors. Competitors are rarely what
kills startups. Poor execution does. But you should know who your
competitors are, and tell the YC partners candidly what your relative
strengths and weaknesses are. Because the YC partners know that
competitors don't kill startups, they won't hold competitors against
you too much. They will, however, hold it against you if you seem
either to be unaware of competitors, or to be minimizing the threat
they pose. They may not be sure whether you're clueless or lying,
but they don't need to be.
The partners don't expect your idea to be perfect. This is seed
investing. At this stage, all they can expect are promising hypotheses.
But they do expect you to be thoughtful and honest. So if trying
to make your idea seem perfect causes you to come off as glib or
clueless, you've sacrificed something you needed for something you
didn't.
If the partners are sufficiently convinced that there's a path to
a big market, the next question is whether you'll be able to find
it. That in turn depends on three things: the general qualities of
the founders, their specific expertise in this domain, and the
relationship between them. How determined are the founders? Are
they good at building things? Are they resilient enough to keep
going when things go wrong? How strong is their friendship?
Though the Airbnbs only did ok in the idea department, they did
spectacularly well in this department. The story of how they'd
funded themselves by making Obama- and McCain-themed breakfast
cereal was the single most important factor in our decision to fund
them. They didn't realize it at the time, but what seemed to them
an irrelevant story was in fact fabulously good evidence of their
qualities as founders. It showed they were resourceful and determined,
and could work together.
It wasn't just the cereal story that showed that, though. The whole
interview showed that they cared. They weren't doing this just for
the money, or because startups were cool. The reason they were
working so hard on this company was because it was their project.
They had discovered an interesting new idea, and they just couldn't
let it go.
Mundane as it sounds, that's the most powerful motivator of all,
not just in startups, but in most ambitious undertakings: to be
genuinely interested
in what
you're building. This is what really
drives billionaires, or at least the ones who become billionaires
from starting companies. The company is their project.
One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them
could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found
someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who
become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes
them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the
same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if
they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do.
That, not exploiting people, is the defining quality of people who
become billionaires from starting companies. So that's what YC looks
for in founders: authenticity. People's motives for starting startups
are usually mixed. They're usually doing it from some combination
of the desire to make money, the desire to seem cool, genuine
interest in the problem, and unwillingness to work for someone else.
The last two are more powerful motivators than the first two. It's
ok for founders to want to make money or to seem cool. Most do.
But if the founders seem like they're doing it
just
to make money
or
just
to seem cool, they're not likely to succeed on a big
scale. The founders who are doing it for the money will take the
first sufficiently large acquisition offer, and the ones who are
doing it to seem cool will rapidly discover that there are much
less painful ways of seeming cool.
[
3
]
Y Combinator certainly sees founders whose m.o. is to exploit people.
YC is a magnet for them, because they want the YC brand. But when
the YC partners detect someone like that, they reject them. If bad
people made good founders, the YC partners would face a moral
dilemma. Fortunately they don't, because bad people make bad founders.
This exploitative type of founder is not going to succeed on a large
scale, and in fact probably won't even succeed on a small one,
because they're always going to be taking shortcuts. They see YC
itself as a shortcut.
Their exploitation usually begins with their own cofounders, which
is disastrous, since the cofounders' relationship is the foundation
of the company. Then it moves on to the users, which is also
disastrous, because the sort of early adopters a successful startup
wants as its initial users are the hardest to fool. The best this
kind of founder can hope for is to keep the edifice of deception
tottering along until some acquirer can be tricked into buying it.
But that kind of acquisition is never very big.
[
4
]
If professional billionaire scouts know that exploiting people is
not the skill to look for, why do some politicians think this is
the defining quality of billionaires?
I think they start from the feeling that it's wrong that one person
could have so much more money than another. It's understandable
where that feeling comes from. It's in our DNA, and even in the DNA
of other species.
If they limited themselves to saying that it made them feel bad
when one person had so much more money than other people, who would
disagree? It makes me feel bad too, and I think people who make a
lot of money have a moral obligation to use it for the common good.
The mistake they make is to jump from feeling bad that some people
are much richer than others to the conclusion that there's no
legitimate way to make a very large amount of money. Now we're
getting into statements that are not only falsifiable, but false.
There are certainly some people who become rich by doing bad things.
But there are also plenty of people who behave badly and don't make
that much from it. There is no correlation  in fact, probably an
inverse correlation  between how badly you behave and how much
money you make.
The greatest danger of this nonsense may not even be that it sends
policy astray, but that it misleads ambitious people. Can you imagine
a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids
that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich
kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how
it's really done?
I'll tell you how it's really done, so you can at least tell your
own kids the truth. It's all about users. The most reliable way to
become a billionaire is to start a company that
grows fast
, and the
way to grow fast is to make what users want. Newly started startups
have no choice but to delight users, or they'll never even get
rolling. But this never stops being the lodestar, and bigger companies
take their eye off it at their peril. Stop delighting users, and
eventually someone else will.
Users are what the partners want to
know about in YC interviews, and what I want to know about when I
talk to founders that we funded ten years ago and who are billionaires
now. What do users want? What new things could you build for them?
Founders who've become billionaires are always eager to talk about
that topic. That's how they became billionaires.
Notes
[
1
]
The YC partners have so much practice doing this that they
sometimes see paths that the founders themselves haven't seen yet.
The partners don't try to seem skeptical, as buyers in transactions
often do to increase their leverage. Although the founders feel
their job is to convince the partners of the potential of their
idea, these roles are not infrequently reversed, and the founders
leave the interview feeling their idea has more potential than they
realized.
[
2
]
In practice, 7 minutes would be enough. You rarely change your
mind at minute 8. But 10 minutes is socially convenient.
[
3
]
I myself took the first sufficiently large acquisition offer
in my first startup, so I don't blame founders for doing this.
There's nothing wrong with starting a startup to make money. You
need to make money somehow, and for some people startups are the
most efficient way to do it. I'm just saying that these are not the
startups that get really big.
[
4
]
Not these days, anyway. There were some big ones during the
Internet Bubble, and indeed some big IPOs.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.


The Equity Equation
July 2007
An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of
your startup.  Should you take it?  You're about to hire your first
employee.  How much stock should you give him?
These are some of the hardest questions founders face.  And yet
both have the same answer:
1/(1 - n)
Whenever you're trading stock in your company for anything, whether
it's money or an employee or a deal with another company, the test
for whether to do it is the same.  You should give up n% of your
company if what you trade it for improves your average outcome
enough that the (100 - n)% you have left is worth more than the
whole company was before.
For example, if an investor wants to buy half your company, how
much does that investment have to improve your average outcome for
you to break even?  Obviously it has to double: if you trade half
your company for something that more than doubles the company's
average outcome, you're net ahead.  You have half as big a share
of something worth more than twice as much.
In the general case, if n is the fraction of the company you're
giving up, the deal is a good one if it makes the company worth
more than 1/(1 - n).
For example, suppose Y Combinator offers to fund you in return for
7% of your company.  In this case, n is .07 and 1/(1 - n) is 1.075.
So you should take the deal if you believe we can improve your
average outcome by more than 7.5%.  If we improve your outcome by
10%, you're net ahead, because the remaining .93 you hold is worth
.93 x 1.1 = 1.023.
[
1
]
One of the things the equity equation shows us is that, financially
at least, taking money from a top VC firm can be a really good deal.
Greg Mcadoo from Sequoia recently said at a YC dinner that when
Sequoia invests alone they like to take about 30% of a company.
1/.7 = 1.43, meaning that deal is worth taking if they can improve
your outcome by more than 43%.  For the average startup, that would
be an extraordinary bargain.  It would improve the average startup's
prospects by more than 43% just to be able to
say
they were funded
by Sequoia, even if they never actually got the money.
The reason Sequoia is such a good deal is that the percentage of
the company they take is artificially low.  They don't even try to
get market price for their investment; they limit their holdings
to leave the founders enough stock to feel the company is still
theirs.
The catch is that Sequoia gets about 6000 business plans a year and
funds about 20 of them, so the odds of getting this great deal are
1 in 300. The companies that make it through are not average startups.
Of course, there are other factors to consider in a VC deal.  It's
never just a straight trade of money for stock.  But if it were,
taking money from a top firm would generally be a bargain.
You can use the same formula when giving stock to employees, but
it works in the other direction.  If i is the average outcome for
the company with the addition of some new person, then they're worth
n such that i = 1/(1 - n).  Which means n = (i - 1)/i.
For example, suppose you're just two founders and you want to hire
an additional hacker who's so good you feel he'll increase the
average outcome of the whole company by 20%.  n = (1.2 - 1)/1.2 =
.167.  So you'll break even if you trade 16.7% of the company
for him.
That doesn't mean 16.7% is the right amount of stock to give him.
Stock is not the only cost of hiring someone: there's usually salary
and overhead as well.  And if the company merely breaks even on the
deal, there's no reason to do it.
I think to translate salary and overhead into stock you should
multiply the annual rate by about 1.5.  Most startups grow fast or
die; if you die you don't have to pay the guy, and if you grow fast
you'll be paying next year's salary out of next year's valuation,
which should be 3x this year's.  If your valuation grows 3x a year,
the total cost in stock of a new hire's salary and overhead is 1.5
years' cost at the present valuation.
[
2
]
How much of an additional margin should the company need as the
"activation energy" for the deal?  Since this is in effect the
company's profit on a hire, the market will determine that: if
you're a hot opportunity, you can charge more.
Let's run through an example.  Suppose the company wants to make a
"profit" of 50% on the new hire mentioned above.  So subtract a
third from 16.7% and we have 11.1% as his "retail" price.  Suppose
further that he's going to cost $60k a year in salary and overhead,
x 1.5 = $90k total.  If the company's valuation is $2 million, $90k
is 4.5%.  11.1% - 4.5% = an offer of 6.6%.
Incidentally, notice how important it is for early employees to
take little salary.  It comes right out of stock that could otherwise
be given to them.
Obviously there is a great deal of play in these numbers.  I'm not
claiming that stock grants can now be reduced to a formula.  Ultimately
you always have to guess.  But at least know what you're guessing.
If you choose a number based on your gut feel, or a table of typical
grant sizes supplied by a VC firm, understand what those are estimates
of.
And more generally, when you make any decision involving equity,
run it through 1/(1 - n) to see if it makes sense.  You should
always feel richer after trading equity.  If the trade didn't
increase the value of your remaining shares enough to put you net
ahead, you wouldn't have (or shouldn't have) done it.
Notes
[
1
] This is why we
can't believe anyone would think Y Combinator was a bad deal.  Does
anyone really think we're so useless that in three months we can't
improve a startup's prospects by 7.5%?
[
2
] The obvious choice
for your present valuation is the post-money valuation of your last
funding round.  This probably undervalues the company, though,
because (a) unless your last round just happened, the company is
presumably worth more, and (b) the valuation of an early funding
round usually reflects some other contribution by the investors.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit,
Hutch Fishman, David Hornik, Paul Kedrosky, Jessica Livingston, Gary Sabot, and
Joshua Schachter for reading drafts of this.


@Mayanktweeted It's in very good shape lately. Garry and the other partners have been doing all the right things.

@amit_bhalesha I live in England. But I am delighted you think I'm 40.

@exigentveracity I have kids.

@NedNguyen God no.

@replyguy888888 The FBI warnings at the start of movies made in the 1980s are still there, so this seems less likely. But maybe if someone pushes them.

@kendrictonn They're common enough in SV that you get used to them, and (unlike old 911s for example) they stop looking interesting once you're used to them.

Prediction: Disney movies will get a lot less woke. They were already at the limit of audiences' tolerance.

@harjtaggar Any sufficiently good startup will expand its market. Which is why in the best cases even the most optimistic estimates of the market size turn out to be underestimates.

Current YC, I'm happy to say, hasn't drifted much. If anything it's closer to its original spirit than it was in 2017. The partners even started cooking the dinners for the founders again, like I did in the very beginning. https://t.co/dK6XlA6nUi

I just reread this essay I wrote in 2017 about Y Combinator's founding principles. It sounds like it's written to explain YC to the world, but in fact I wrote it in case some future YC, decades from now, has drifted from its original purpose.

https://t.co/tHmmnoS1Y9


@shw1nm Many, not just during the batch but well after it.

@umerhaidr Thinking about whether there were other things that were like Stripe in that you could sell them to the startups in the current batch, and then grow with them.

The startup in my last office hours today needed a new idea and we still hadn't thought of one by the end of the 45 minute slot, so we all went out to dinner and finally about 2 hours later came up with one. We went for ice cream to celebrate.

@Itsjoeco It's never slow in portrait mode.

@ashleevance There are organizations that can keep secrets.

@zkart_eth Occasionally, if something goes terribly wrong.

@dfrade Ugh, never.

@sinecanswork Yes, could be.

@mattyglesias Or: they both won because they were more charismatic than their opponents.

@BillyLincoln10 No, I'm not saying that. I explicitly qualify this as a statement about what happens when you complain about something bad, not merely when you complain about something.


@_kahoor Yes, that would be a good one too.

In California we lived right on the flight path to SFO, and when he was really little my younger son thought the word "it" meant a plane.

This week's winner for looks like it's AI, but it's real.

I've always said that @cjoneslevy (who invented the SAFE) is the most important person in Silicon Valley that most people haven't heard of. Though maybe now that she's co-host of The Social Radars, more people have.

@monkeybraincap I wouldn't want it to be a blacklist. Nothing should actually be done to these people. It would just be interesting to see the scale of the change, and what the new titles were.

Another interesting suggestion from @BFoim: a log of people removing pronouns from their bios. You'd need the Wayback Machine to do a thorough job of this though, because I believe it's well underway.

@BFoim Ooh, yes, that would be very interesting.

Someone should create a web site to keep a log of bureaucrats whose job titles change from mentioning DEI to saying something else.

@EricWollberg @simonsarris Nothing was funded from there. The Morgan Library was something he built to house his book collection. This is his office. https://t.co/Bf7ikNA78D

@Noahpinion It would be interesting to know how much of the change is simply due to fewer people smoking. I bet that's the single biggest factor.


@jefflewis I'm talking mostly about what I get in replies and retweets.

The interesting thing is, we don't know yet. Forums of this size are still so new. We only have these two data points about Twitter. And even these may be illusions; it may be that a lot of the troll accounts are fake.

I remember the days when Twitter felt like a wasteland of left-wing trolls. Now it's a wasteland of right-ring ones. I wonder if this is the inevitable fate of sufficiently large forums. Do extremists of one sort or another always drown out the thoughtful people?

When you say any other Trump policy is mistaken, his supporters defend it, but when you say the tariffs are mistaken, they merely say you have a bad attitude for pointing it out. Everyone knows this policy is a disaster.

@usgraphics Relax, it's just an example. It doesn't mean no one cares about simplifying software. In fact I understand and care far more about simplifying software than hardware.

@typesfast @SpencerHakimian Do companies have some amount of inventory that they've already paid tariffs on and thus would have to sell for more in order not to lose money? Or did the tariffs mostly cause them just not to order stuff?

@bihanmahadewa They're high up and he's short.

@dudethatscool_ These are all his in fact.

@Ranicket Defeat.

@sAasom @lehoho248 That's great.


@amitisinvesting In that case they should have no problem publicly promising not to build things to help the government violate the constitution, right?

Unless you think wanting to obey the constitution is "ideology"?

And if you were thinking of replying that the constitution only grants rights like free speech and due process to citizens, please do at least one minute of research first to learn why you're mistaken.

Incidentally, I'll be happy to delete this if Palantir publicly commits never to build things that help the government violate the US constitution. And in particular never to build things that help the government violate anyone's (whether citizens or not) First Amendment rights.

@leerob Judging from Replit's numbers, vibe coding seems to have been born in September 2024, though there was no name for it then.

@RomanGuy20 Just include the text you omitted after "individuals flagged for removal" and it will be obvious to everyone.

@_BRCooper As well as being an asshole, you have no idea what you're talking about. I remember London in the early 1970s. It's much nicer now.

@SebastianCaliri What are you talking about? There are other organizations working on all those things.

@feistonaut Maybe the more principled ones will start to leave.

@enthrighte Not the kind of "control" that violates the US constitution on behalf of another country. https://t.co/UDAg5BbUlV

It's a very exciting time in tech right now. If you're a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state.


@typesfast That's interesting. I'd completely forgotten. What was it like? IIRC I had to be pretty draconian. It was basically: we don't have time to have a normal conversation, so I'm going to interview your Demo Day presentation out of you.

Encouraging thought: I know more than I did in 2014, so although I might not be able to meet the same number of startups per day, I can help those I meet more. Maybe the aggregate output is the same or higher.

He's super honest. One of the most honest people I know. But a law that isn't enforced just stops being a law, like those obscure but unrepealed laws you read about banning singing to fish or taking a bath with a hat on or whatever.

Interesting data point about how lawlessness spreads: a friend of mine who lives in SF says he now just makes U-turns whenever he wants, no matter what the signs say. If they never ticket anyone, why should he worry about the signs?

@nw3 The YC partners send me the startups they think I can help most. So maybe some want to meet me, but that's never the main reason I'm talking to them.

Interesting. The reason flying burns so much fuel is not the fuel efficiency, but the length of the trips.

@denismars No, I don't miss that. Ordinary office hours are interesting if you don't have too many, but Demo Day prep was a factory.

I was curious how many office hours I used to be able to do in a day, so I did a search. Jesus Christ. I could never do this now.

@peterboghossian By trying to solve problems and studying what other people had figured out. You don't only learn from disagreeing.

@ahistoryinart He was so visually imaginative. He seems to have about 30 different styles.


@im_imrich No. They couldn't imagine the country becoming more conservative. Just as presumably the conservatives doing the cancelling now can't imagine the country becoming more liberal.

I used to get so much grief back in the day for telling SJWs trying to cancel people that this was a mistake — that one day the country could shift rightward and then they'd be the ones getting cancelled. And now it's happening.

@GabrielValles Polling data shows this "ecosystem" is worse on the right than on the left. https://t.co/7IuzYzZf2r

@ScottAdamsSays Here's the actual data about which side's bubble has most support for political violence: https://t.co/2HbfjADMKo

@shaunmmaguire Here's the article. Can you quote any specific sentence or passage from it that you believe is false, and give evidence for your claim?

https://t.co/HmmtXDO7tK

@eoghan Is what I wrote true? If it's false, what part of it is false?

@shaunmmaguire George Floyd was killed by the police, obviously.

@andreasklinger A parabola of bullshit actually would have a focus.

@Kaimandante Both kinds of wingers get to do that.

@LifeMathMoney You could use to the same argument to "prove" that anyone committing atrocities in any past war didn't actually do it.

You should go read the article. It's very thorough and well documented.


The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
July 2008
At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a
talk
in which he suggested that startup founders
should do things the old fashioned way.  Instead of hoping to get
rich by building a valuable company and then selling stock in a
"liquidity event," founders should start companies that make money
and live off the revenues.
Sounds like a good plan.  Let's think about the optimal way to do
this.
One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that
you have to keep running it.  And as anyone who runs their own
business can tell you, that requires your complete attention.  You
can't just start a business and check out once things are going
well, or they stop going well surprisingly fast.
The main economic motives of startup founders seem to be freedom
and security.  They want enough money that (a) they don't have to
worry about running out of money and (b) they can spend their time
how they want.  Running your own business offers neither.  You
certainly don't have freedom: no boss is so demanding.  Nor do you
have security, because if you stop paying attention to the company,
its revenues go away, and with them your income.
The best case, for most people, would be if you could hire someone
to manage the company for you once you'd grown it to a certain size.
Suppose you could find a really good manager.  Then you would have
both freedom and security.  You could pay as little attention to
the business as you wanted, knowing that your manager would keep
things running smoothly.  And that being so, revenues would continue
to flow in, so you'd have security as well.
There will of course be some founders who wouldn't like that idea:
the ones who like running their company so much that there's nothing
else they'd rather do.  But this group must be small.  The way you
succeed in most businesses is to be fanatically attentive
to customers' needs.  What are the odds that your own desires would
coincide exactly with the demands of this powerful, external force?
Sure, running your own company can be fairly interesting.  Viaweb
was more interesting than any job I'd had before.  And since I made
much more money from it, it offered the highest ratio of income to
boringness of anything I'd done, by orders of magnitude.  But was
it
the
most interesting work I could imagine doing?  No.
Whether the number of founders in the same position is asymptotic
or merely large, there are certainly a lot of them.  For them the
right approach would be to hand the company over to a professional
manager eventually, if they could find one who was good enough.
_____
So far so good.  But what if your manager was hit by a bus?  What
you really want is a management company to run your company for
you.  Then you don't depend on any one person.
If you own rental property, there are companies you can hire to
manage it for you.  Some will do everything, from finding tenants
to fixing leaks.  Of course, running companies is a lot more
complicated than managing rental property, but let's suppose there
were management companies that could do it for you. They'd charge
a lot, but wouldn't it be worth it?  I'd sacrifice a large percentage
of the income for the extra peace of mind.
I realize what I'm describing already sounds too good to be true, but I
can think of a way to make it even more attractive.  If
company management companies existed, there would be an additional
service they could offer clients: they could let them insure their
returns by pooling their risk.  After all, even a perfect manager can't save a company
when, as sometimes happens, its whole market dies, just as property
managers can't save you from the building burning down.  But a
company that managed a large enough number of companies could say
to all its clients: we'll combine the revenues from all your
companies, and pay you your proportionate share.
If such management companies existed, they'd offer the maximum of
freedom and security.  Someone would run your company for you, and
you'd be protected even if it happened to die.
Let's think about how such a management company might be organized.
The simplest way would be to have a new kind of stock representing
the total pool of companies they were managing.  When you signed
up, you'd trade your company's stock for shares of this pool, in
proportion to an estimate of your company's value that you'd both
agreed upon.  Then you'd automatically get your share of the returns
of the whole pool.
The catch is that because this kind of trade would be hard to undo,
you couldn't switch management companies.  But there's a way they
could fix that: suppose all the company management companies got
together and agreed to allow their clients to exchange shares in
all their pools.  Then you could, in effect, simultaneously choose
all the management companies to run yours for you, in whatever
proportion you wanted, and change your mind later as often as you
wanted.
If such pooled-risk company management companies existed, signing
up with one would seem the ideal plan for most people following the
route David advocated.
Good news: they do exist.  What I've just
described is an acquisition by a public company.
_____
Unfortunately, though public acquirers are structurally identical
to pooled-risk company management companies, they don't think of
themselves that way.  With a property management company, you can
just walk in whenever you want and say "manage my rental property
for me" and they'll do it.  Whereas acquirers are, as of this
writing, extremely fickle.  Sometimes they're in a buying mood and
they'll overpay enormously; other times they're not interested.
They're like property management companies run by madmen.  Or more
precisely, by Benjamin Graham's Mr. Market.
So while on average public acquirers behave like pooled-risk company
managers, you need a window of several years to get average case
performance.  If you wait long enough (five years, say) you're
likely to hit an up cycle where some acquirer is hot to buy you.
But you can't choose when it happens.
You can't assume investors will carry you for as long as you might
have to wait. Your company has to make money.  Opinions are divided
about how early to focus on that.
Joe Kraus
says you should try
charging customers right away.  And yet some of the most successful
startups, including Google, ignored revenue at first and concentrated
exclusively on development.  The answer probably depends on the
type of company you're starting.  I can imagine some where trying
to make sales would be a good heuristic for product design, and
others where it would just be a distraction.  The test is probably
whether it helps you to understand your users.
You can choose whichever revenue strategy you think is best for the
type of company you're starting, so long as you're profitable.
Being profitable ensures you'll get at least the average of the
acquisition market—in which public companies do behave as pooled-risk
company management companies.
David isn't mistaken in saying you should start a company to live
off its revenues.  The mistake is thinking this is somehow opposed
to starting a company and selling it.  In fact, for most people the
latter is merely the optimal case of the former.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Michael
Mandel, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.
Russian Translation


@RobImbeault Much as in Poland in 1941.

@guenard I can imagine plenty of legitimate things that politicians or bureaucrats could ban by classifying as one of those, yes.

@damian_soong The Warsaw Ghetto.

"The cases reaching us are of people who collapsed in the streets from lack of nutrition." https://t.co/0CwO0x6vwf

@analyticsaurabh More like writing Wodehouse. He dictates stories and I type them, and I told him one of his characters was rum.

@lacker You actually score pretty high on the rum scale.

@ajrgd Obviously there are limits to what you can say. The surprising thing here is the lack of self-awareness. They're saying nothing (you can say anything except what you can't), and they not only don't realize it but think they're saying something profound.

I had to explain to 13 yo what it means to describe someone as "rum." It's a subtle word. I finally said it's when someone seems strange, but not simply in a lame way, and in fact you worry it might be because they know something you don't.

@ricanteja I thought it was a parody at first, till I realized this is a real French government account.

So basically you're free to say anything you're not forbidden to say. Right.


@ahistoryinart I don't think I've ever seen a painting or photograph of her that didn't look odd.

When my father was little, his mother used to take him to church with her. Not for the sake of his soul, but to keep her awake, because she snored loudly when slept. "At the first rumble I'd poke her in the ribs."

@whyvert It would be interesting to color the circles by whether the country has at some point had a communist government.

@pickover If they managed to visit Earth from another solar system they'd be so advanced that they could probably know everything we could and more.

@ahistoryinart This just sold at auction a couple days ago.

@JonnyThePhoenix You'd only do this if you were 100% certain that your moral code was perfect, and that it was impossible for someone to do something wrong because they were simply mistaken, rather than evil.

Twitter is such a waste of time...

@matthew_d_green Nor writing or programming.

@Chris_arnade What's your cutoff for major? E.g. what are the major cities in Italy?

@Austen We just went with it: https://t.co/uZ5xhVmMS3

@_xSoli Yes and no. Ultimately it depends on the person, but there are some ideologies that are more jealous, as it were, than others.


Being a Noob
January 2020
When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out.
Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true.
I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking to
some startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or reading
a book about a topic I don't understand well enough, or visiting some new
country where I don't know how things work.
It's not pleasant to feel like a noob. And the word "noob" is
certainly not a compliment. And yet today I realized something
encouraging about being a noob: the more of a noob you are locally,
the less of a noob you are globally.
For example, if you stay in your home country, you'll feel less
of a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything works
differently. And yet you'll know more if you move.
So the feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actual
ignorance.
But if the feeling of being a noob is good for us, why do we dislike
it? What evolutionary purpose could such an aversion serve?
I think the answer is that there are two sources of feeling like a
noob: being stupid, and doing something novel. Our dislike of feeling
like a noob is our brain telling us "Come on, come on, figure this
out." Which was the right thing to be thinking for most of human
history. The life of hunter-gatherers was complex, but it didn't
change as much as life does now. They didn't suddenly have to figure
out what to do about cryptocurrency. So it made sense to be biased
toward competence at existing problems over the discovery of new
ones. It made sense for humans to dislike the feeling of being a
noob, just as, in a world where food was scarce, it made sense for
them to dislike the feeling of being hungry.
Now that too much food is more of a problem than too little, our
dislike of feeling hungry leads us astray. And I think our dislike
of feeling like a noob does too.
Though it feels unpleasant, and people will sometimes ridicule you
for it, the more you feel like a noob, the better.
Japanese Translation
Arabic Translation
French Translation
Korean Translation
Polish Translation
Chinese Translation
Serbian Translation
French Translation


"I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag."

— Molly Ivins

@michael_nielsen Wodehouse above all. Also Raymond Chandler, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford. In general English writers from the mid 20th century, after diction emerged from Edwardian stuffiness.

@GermanyDiplo If it turns out they did it intentionally, will you stop shipping them weapons?

@broukhim @netanyahu Israel's rare and unavoidable errors. Nineteen thousand of them:

https://t.co/E1DwDlEJTP

@MoogRogue It takes a long time to tell. Obviously either of the cancer cures will be if they make it through clinical trials. I believe Ginkgo Bioworks is currently the biggest by market cap.

@ZuckerDating You've just proved by induction that it will never be cured.

@venkymatam In these two startups: not yet, but it will be soon.

@heidar_an These startups grew out of that type of research.

@ParthaSundaram One has a cure, and the other has something that works as both a cure and a vaccine.

@bulhosa One is for lung, pancreatic, and colon cancer. The other is for many different types.


12 yo's school did Beauty and the Beast as their play this year. Was there ever such a source of earworms? I've been whistling "Be our Guest" for months.

@mattyglesias Has it never been disclosed what the loophole was?

@BrennanOwain Photoshop.

@andreslaley In both cases mostly for our kids' sakes.

@candestra This too is an excellent example of a common type of tweet, though in this case I'm not so certain that you're joking.

I assume he meant this as a joke, but this is an excellent example of a common type of tweet.

I'm on a flight. I just described it to Jessica in an email as sunny, which is ridiculous, because all flights are. What this really shows is how not-sunny England in November is.

Warren Buffet has already given away 56.6% of his shares in Berkshire Hathaway. If he still owned them he'd be the richest man in the world.

@ryan_rizzo_ This is talking about the second to last stage. There is a limit on the number of founders YC can interview. But of those who make it to that stage, there's no limit on the number it can fund.

@ronitkhopkar Wouldn't any investor feel the same?


@safa_karaa Writing is what I do.

@STIHILIST @mattmireles People using a lot of complicated words at random is even more tedious. And not particularly individual either, as I've noticed from many examples over the last few days.

@cldbrwszn Sometimes.

@Jules_Art7733 Shakespeare was writing plays and poetry. If you're writing plays and poetry then of course the rules are different.

@FromKulak When the average person tries to dress like that, they don't look like a Regency courtier. They just look ridiculous.

@johnpinnes Then the answer to "is there a way to say this more simply?" is no. But it's still good to ask.

@TPracticalDaily There is: "consider".

@roshanonline Man, these clumsy sentences with "delve" in them are proving my point.

@sansalana If some recondite word is exactly the one you need, then use it, of course. But not otherwise. Misusing beautiful words is not beautiful writing.

@tomfromreallife If I said "you" it would have seemed too bossy.


General and Surprising
September 2017
The most valuable insights are both general and surprising.
F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard
combination to achieve. That territory tends to be picked
clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable.
Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one without the
other: either surprising without being general (e.g.
gossip), or general without being surprising (e.g.
platitudes).
Where things get interesting is the moderately valuable
insights.  You get those from small additions of whichever
quality was missing.  The more common case is a small
addition of generality: a piece of gossip that's more than
just gossip, because it teaches something interesting about
the world. But another less common approach is to focus on
the most general ideas and see if you can find something new
to say about them. Because these start out so general, you
only need a small delta of novelty to produce a useful
insight.
A small delta of novelty is all you'll be able to get most
of the time. Which means if you take this route, your ideas
will seem a lot like ones that already exist. Sometimes
you'll find you've merely rediscovered an idea that did
already exist.  But don't be discouraged.  Remember the huge
multiplier that kicks in when you do manage to think of
something even a little new.
Corollary: the more general the ideas you're talking about,
the less you should worry about repeating yourself.  If you
write enough, it's inevitable you will.  Your brain is much
the same from year to year and so are the stimuli that hit
it. I feel slightly bad when I find I've said something
close to what I've said before, as if I were plagiarizing
myself. But rationally one shouldn't.  You won't say
something exactly the same way the second time, and that
variation increases the chance you'll get that tiny but
critical delta of novelty.
And of course, ideas beget ideas.  (That sounds
familiar
.)
An idea with a small amount of novelty could lead to one
with more. But only if you keep going. So it's doubly
important not to let yourself be discouraged by people who
say there's not much new about something you've discovered.
"Not much new" is a real achievement when you're talking
about the most general ideas.
It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun.  There
are some domains where there's almost nothing new.  But
there's a big difference between nothing and almost nothing,
when it's multiplied by the area under the sun.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, and Jessica
Livingston for reading drafts of this.
Japanese Translation


@atKenNelson They used to be the winners by a mile. But their advantage has gradually eroded, partly due to increasingly harsh right-wing governments, and partly due to social media and camera phones.

@JohnDCook It depends on the field. In math a lot of the best practitioners are professors. In CS, some are. In English literature, very few are.

@vasanthseshadri @JamesDunn9 Name a time when their reputation has been worse.

@vrover_x @yuseftarek People filing fake reports against @migueldeicaza have succeeded in getting him shadowbanned multiple times.

@anammostarac The secret third thing IRL would be a fox.

@skdh By "increasingly likely" what sort of probability do you mean, and why do you think so?

@CassSunstein @tylercowen Wow, blurb text in the wild. I didn't think it occurred naturally.

Something I taught 15 yo: In everyday life, big decisions often occur mixed together with small ones. If you're not careful you'll tend to give them equal weight. So separate decisions as much as you can. There are many techniques for doing this.

We were talking about bad names for a potential new dog. 15 yo suggested "Help."

@JamesDunn9 Small countries that are vulnerable to boycotts.


@karlbitz You don't seem to understand the structure of the argument. It's not claiming an equivalency between Hitler and Trump but between the tactics their defenders would use.

@irachdaoui Always.

For example, if it was 1940 and you complained about what Germany was doing, its defenders (and you know there would be plenty of them) would have to accuse you of being anti-German, or suffering from HDS.

If you complain about something bad, its defenders have to invent fake motives for you. They can't acknowledge your actual motive, because that would mean admitting the thing was bad, so they have to invent some kind of weird bias to attribute it to.

@aaadvani The group partners send me startups they think I can help.

@itsmewaldi No, they came in having changed their idea several times, most recently the day before. We just lucked out. They were really smart though.

@ValaAfshar I don't think it can be correct that character requires suffering. I want my kids to have good characters, but I don't plan to make them suffer.

@monty10x I have a weird knack for coming up with names. It may be related to writing. But I can't think of general rules. It's very specific to each startup.

@BehizyTweets This isn't that surprising. No one including Trump himself would deny that Trump is more polarizing. Trump supporters mostly just dislike the Democrats rather than Harris herself, whereas Harris supporters specifically dislike Trump.

@paulsavage It's not absolutely essential to have a .com domain. But on the other hand there's also no excuse for not having one. When founders are attached to a name with a marginal extension, the reasons are usually just status quo bias and lack of imagination.


@CR_UK If you send me a link when it's fixed I'll use it to donate more.

@inazarova @_karthik Yes. It is for a lot of AI startups, because of the shortage of chips.

@NateSilver538 @JohnDCook I see it was hard to decide about Pittsburgh. It was hard for us to decide living there. Maybe you should just stick the intersection right on it.

@robinhanson Robert Morris.

@erikbryn Simply the increasing number of papers?

When you do bad stuff you leave statistical tracks you don't know you're leaving.

@JeremyNguyenPhD I've never used "delve" in an essay. It has a bad smell to it, like "pen" used as a synonym for "write". https://t.co/ap45Ee4dZz

@SafeerInvests @CR_UK @Charityvest I have one, but you're not going to use a DAF for making online donations.

@robkhenderson This famous cartoon suggests why the correlation between activism and happiness has flipped. Activists used to be cheerful anti-authoritarians but now they're censorious authoritarians. https://t.co/dzaM7ukfjq

@ChefBradSimpson @GaryLineker And people like you, Brad, what do you generally do?


When you hear people say "there is loads of money" it's an unfailing sign that they still have the daddy model of wealth.

https://t.co/EPaJ5TC3sD

@KenRoth They aren't just doing this to defeat individual candidates, but also to send a message to anyone who thinks of crossing them: this is what will happen to you if you do.

Things like Dunbar's number will switch from thresholds that organizations worry about crossing to ones they hope to cross (in the other direction).

As AI increases the productivity of individual workers, it will further increase the difference in productivity between groups that can be small and those that (e.g. due to government regulations or union rules) cannot.

SF supervisors think: This would be progress. How can we stop it?

@robinhanson You're an economist. When will things fall apart, and what form will it take?

@yuris What changed? Interest rates, startup valuations, or AI? Or something else?

@DoD_IG Translation: We're not telling.

How long was the gap between Russia influencing western politics via the far left, like they did when I was a kid, and via the far right like they do now? Twenty years?

@sarmadgulzar I still call Alphabet Google. (Don't you?)