The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
April 2006
(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006
Startup School
.)
The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem
quicker to learn some lessons than others.  I think it's because
some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.
We've now
invested
in enough companies that I've learned a trick
for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones:
they're the ones I have to keep repeating.
So I'm going to number these points, and maybe with future startups
I'll be able to pull off a form of Huffman coding. I'll make them
all read this, and then instead of nagging them in detail, I'll
just be able to say:
number four!
1. Release Early.
The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get
a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.
By "release early" I don't mean you should release something full
of bugs, but that you should release something minimal.  Users hate
bugs, but they don't seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there's
more coming soon.
There are several reasons it pays to get version 1 done fast.  One
is that this is simply the right way to write software, whether for
a startup or not.  I've been repeating that since 1993, and I haven't seen much since to
contradict it.  I've seen a lot of startups die because they were
too slow to release stuff, and none because they were too quick.
[
1
]
One of the things that will surprise you if you build something
popular is that you won't know your users.
Reddit
now has almost half a million
unique visitors a month.  Who are all those people?  They have no
idea.  No web startup does.  And since you don't know your users,
it's dangerous to guess what they'll like.  Better to release
something and let them tell you.
Wufoo
took this to heart and released
their form-builder before the underlying database.  You can't even
drive the thing yet, but 83,000 people came to sit in the driver's
seat and hold the steering wheel.  And Wufoo got valuable feedback
from it: Linux users complained they used too much Flash, so they
rewrote their software not to.  If they'd waited to release everything
at once, they wouldn't have discovered this problem till it was
more deeply wired in.
Even if you had no users, it would still be important to release
quickly, because for a startup the initial release acts as a shakedown
cruise.  If anything major is broken-- if the idea's no good,
for example, or the founders hate one another-- the stress of getting
that first version out will expose it.  And if you have such problems
you want to find them early.
Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that
it makes you work harder.  When you're working on something that
isn't released, problems are intriguing.  In something that's out
there, problems are alarming.  There is a lot more urgency once you
release.  And I think that's precisely why people put it off.  They
know they'll have to work a lot harder once they do.
[
2
]
2. Keep Pumping Out Features.
Of course, "release early" has a second component, without which
it would be bad advice.  If you're going to start with something
that doesn't do much, you better improve it fast.
What I find myself repeating is "pump out features."  And this rule
isn't just for the initial stages.  This is something all startups
should do for as long as they want to be considered startups.
I don't mean, of course, that you should make your application ever
more complex.  By "feature" I mean one unit of hacking-- one quantum
of making users' lives better.
As with exercise, improvements beget improvements.  If you run every
day, you'll probably feel like running tomorrow.  But if you skip
running for a couple weeks, it will be an effort to drag yourself
out.  So it is with hacking: the more ideas you implement, the more
ideas you'll have.  You should make your system better at least in
some small way every day or two.
This is not just a good way to get development done; it is also a
form of marketing.  Users love a site that's constantly improving.
In fact, users expect a site to improve.  Imagine if you visited a
site that seemed very good, and then returned two months later and
not one thing had changed.  Wouldn't it start to seem lame?
[
3
]
They'll like you even better when you improve in response to their
comments, because customers are used to companies ignoring them.
If you're the rare exception-- a company that actually listens--
you'll generate fanatical loyalty.  You won't need to advertise,
because your users will do it for you.
This seems obvious too, so why do I have to keep repeating it?  I
think the problem here is that people get used to how things are.
Once a product gets past the stage where it has glaring flaws, you
start to get used to it, and gradually whatever features it happens
to have become its identity.  For example, I doubt many people at
Yahoo (or Google for that matter) realized how much better web mail
could be till Paul Buchheit showed them.
I think the solution is to assume that anything you've made is far
short of what it could be.  Force yourself, as a sort of intellectual
exercise, to keep thinking of improvements.  Ok, sure, what you
have is perfect.  But if you had to change something, what would
it be?
If your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations:
(a) it is finished, or (b) you lack imagination.  Experience suggests
(b) is a thousand times more likely.
3. Make Users Happy.
Improving constantly is an instance of a more general rule: make
users happy.  One thing all startups have in common is that they
can't force anyone to do anything.  They can't force anyone to use
their software, and they can't force anyone to do deals with them.
A startup has to sing for its supper.  That's why the successful
ones make great things.  They have to, or die.
When you're running a startup you feel like a little bit of debris
blown about by powerful winds.  The most powerful wind is users.
They can either catch you and loft you up into the sky, as they did
with Google, or leave you flat on the pavement, as they do with
most startups.  Users are a fickle wind, but more powerful than any
other.  If they take you up, no competitor can keep you down.
As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is
not to lie flat, but to curl yourself into a shape the wind will
catch.
I like the wind metaphor because it reminds you how impersonal the
stream of traffic is.  The vast majority of people who visit your
site will be casual visitors.  It's them you have to design your
site for.  The people who really care will find what they want by
themselves.
The median visitor will arrive with their finger poised on the Back
button.  Think about your own experience: most links you
follow lead to something lame.  Anyone who has used the web for
more than a couple weeks has been
trained
to click on Back after
following a link.  So your site has to say "Wait!  Don't click on
Back.  This site isn't lame.  Look at this, for example."
There are two things you have to do to make people pause.  The most
important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell
your site is about.  How often have you visited a site that seemed
to assume you already knew what they did?  For example, the corporate
site
that says the
company makes
enterprise content management solutions for business that enable
  organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize
  business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total
  cost of ownership.
An established company may get away with such an opaque description,
but no startup can.  A startup
should be able to explain in one or two sentences exactly what it
does.
[
4
]
And not just to users.  You need this for everyone:
investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and
even current employees.  You probably shouldn't even start a company
to do something that can't be described compellingly in one or two
sentences.
The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you've got,
right away.  If you have something impressive, try to put it on the
front page, because that's the only one most visitors will see.
Though indeed there's a paradox here: the more you push the good
stuff toward the front, the more likely visitors are to explore
further.
[
5
]
In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell
visitors what your site is about by
showing
them.  One of the
standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is "show, don't tell."
Don't say that a character's angry; have him grind his teeth, or
break his pencil in half.  Nothing will explain what your site does
so well as using it.
The industry term here is "conversion."  The job of your site is
to convert casual visitors into users-- whatever your definition
of a user is.  You can measure this in your growth rate.  Either
your site is catching on, or it isn't, and you must know which.  If
you have decent growth, you'll win in the end, no matter how obscure
you are now.  And if you don't, you need to fix something.
4. Fear the Right Things.
Another thing I find myself saying a lot is "don't worry."  Actually,
it's more often "don't worry about this; worry about that instead."
Startups are right to be paranoid, but they sometimes fear the wrong
things.
Most visible disasters are not so alarming as they seem.  Disasters
are normal in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent
that covers what you're doing, your servers keep crashing, you run
into an insoluble technical problem, you have to change your name,
a deal falls through-- these are all par for the course.  They won't
kill you unless you let them.
Nor will most competitors.  A lot of startups worry "what if Google
builds something like us?"  Actually big companies are not the ones
you have to worry about-- not even Google.  The people at Google
are smart, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because
Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails;
and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.
What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players,
but other startups you don't know exist yet.  They're way more
dangerous than Google because, like you, they're cornered animals.
Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of
security.  You should compete against what someone else
could
be
doing, not just what you can see people doing.  A corollary is that
you shouldn't relax just because you have no visible competitors
yet.  No matter what your idea, there's someone else out there
working on the same thing.
That's the downside of it being easier to start a startup: more people
are doing it.  But I disagree with Caterina Fake when she says that
makes this a bad time to start a startup.  More people are starting
startups, but not as many more as could.  Most college graduates
still think they have to get a job.  The average person can't ignore
something that's been beaten into their head since they were three
just because serving web pages recently got a lot cheaper.
And in any case, competitors are not the biggest threat.  Way more
startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors.  There
are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal
disputes, inertia, and ignoring users.  Each is, by itself, enough
to kill you.  But if I had to pick the worst, it would be ignoring
users.  If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die,
here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know
everyone is going to love, and that's what they're going to build,
no matter what.
Almost everyone's initial plan is broken.  If companies stuck to
their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages,
and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards.  In both cases
their customers told them what their business should be-- and they
were smart enough to listen.
As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than
the imagination of man.  You'll find more interesting things by
looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking.
This principle is very powerful.  It's why the best abstract painting
still falls short of Leonardo, for example.  And it applies to
startups too.  No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the
ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam
of users.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what
the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not
what you might think.  The most important quality in a startup
founder is determination.  Not intelligence-- determination.
This is a little depressing.  I'd like to believe Viaweb succeeded
because we were smart, not merely determined.  A lot of people in
the startup world want to believe that.  Not just founders, but
investors too.  They like the idea of inhabiting a world ruled by
intelligence.  And you can tell they really believe this, because
it affects their investment decisions.
Time after time VCs invest in startups founded by eminent professors.
This may work in biotech, where a lot of startups simply commercialize
existing research, but in software you want to invest in students,
not professors.  Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by
people who dropped out of school to do it.  What students lack in
experience they more than make up in dedication.
Of course, if you want to get rich, it's not enough merely to be
determined.  You have to be smart too, right?  I'd like to think
so, but I've had an experience that convinced me otherwise: I spent
several years living in New York.
You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill
you.  But lose even a little bit in the commitment department, and
that will kill you very rapidly.
Running a startup is like walking on your hands: it's possible, but
it requires extraordinary effort.  If an ordinary employee were
asked to do the things a startup founder has to, he'd be very
indignant.  Imagine if you were hired at some big company, and in
addition to writing software ten times faster than you'd ever had
to before, they expected you to answer support calls, administer
the servers, design the web site, cold-call customers, find the
company office space, and go out and get everyone lunch.
And to do all this not in the calm, womb-like atmosphere of a big
company, but against a backdrop of constant disasters.  That's the
part that really demands determination.  In a startup, there's
always some disaster happening.  So if you're the least bit inclined
to find an excuse to quit, there's always one right there.
But if you lack commitment, chances are it will have been hurting
you long before you actually quit.  Everyone who deals with startups
knows how important commitment is, so if they sense you're ambivalent,
they won't give you much attention.  If you lack commitment, you'll
just find that for some mysterious reason good things happen to
your competitors but not to you.  If you lack commitment, it will
seem to you that you're unlucky.
Whereas if you're determined to stick around, people will pay
attention to you, because odds are they'll have to deal with you
later.  You're a local, not just a tourist, so everyone has to come
to terms with you.
At Y Combinator we sometimes mistakenly fund teams who have the
attitude that they're going to give this startup thing a shot for
three months, and if something great happens, they'll stick with
it-- "something great" meaning either that someone wants to buy
them or invest millions of dollars in them.  But if this is your
attitude, "something great" is very unlikely to happen to you,
because both acquirers and investors judge you by your level of
commitment.
If an acquirer thinks you're going to stick around no matter what,
they'll be more likely to buy you, because if they don't and you
stick around, you'll probably grow, your price will go up, and
they'll be left wishing they'd bought you earlier.  Ditto for
investors.  What really motivates investors, even big VCs, is not
the hope of good returns, but the fear of missing out.
[
6
]
So if
you make it clear you're going to succeed no matter what, and the only
reason you need them is to make it happen a little faster, you're
much more likely to get money.
You can't fake this.  The only way to convince everyone that you're
ready to fight to the death is actually to be ready to.
You have to be the right kind of determined, though.  I carefully
chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness
is a disastrous quality in a startup.  You have to be determined,
but flexible, like a running back.  A successful running back doesn't
just put his head down and try to run through people.  He improvises:
if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone
tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in
the wrong direction briefly if that will help.  The one thing he'll
never do is stand still.
[
7
]
6. There Is Always Room.
I was talking recently to a startup founder about whether it might
be good to add a social component to their software.  He said he
didn't think so, because the whole social thing was tapped out.
Really?  So in a hundred years the only social networking sites
will be the Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Del.icio.us?  Not likely.
There is always room for new stuff.  At every point in history,
even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering
things that made everyone say "why didn't anyone think of that
before?"  We know this continued to be true up till 2004, when the
Facebook was founded-- though strictly speaking someone else did
think of that.
The reason we don't see the opportunities all around us is that we
adjust to however things are, and assume that's how things have to
be.  For example, it would seem crazy to most people to try to make
a better search engine than Google.  Surely that field, at least,
is tapped out.  Really?  In a hundred years-- or even twenty-- are
people still going to search for information using something like
the current Google?  Even Google probably doesn't think that.
In particular, I don't think there's any limit to the number of
startups.  Sometimes you hear people saying "All these guys starting
startups now are going to be disappointed. How many little startups
are Google and Yahoo going to buy, after all?" That sounds cleverly
skeptical, but I can prove it's mistaken.  No one proposes that
there's some limit to the number of people who can be employed in
an economy consisting of big, slow-moving companies with a couple
thousand people each.  Why should there be any limit to the number
who could be employed by small, fast-moving companies with ten each?
It seems to me the only limit would be the number of people who
want to work that hard.
The limit on the number of startups is not the number that can get
acquired by Google and Yahoo-- though it seems even that should
be unlimited, if the startups were actually worth buying-- but the
amount of wealth that can be created.  And I don't think there's
any limit on that, except cosmological ones.
So for all practical purposes, there is no limit to the number of
startups.  Startups make wealth, which means they make things people
want, and if there's a limit on the number of things people want,
we are nowhere near it.  I still don't even have a flying car.
7. Don't Get Your Hopes Up.
This is another one I've been repeating since long before Y Combinator.
It was practically the corporate motto at Viaweb.
Startup founders are naturally optimistic.  They wouldn't do it
otherwise.  But you should treat your optimism the way you'd treat
the core of a nuclear reactor: as a source of power that's also
very dangerous.  You have to build a shield around it, or it will
fry you.
The shielding of a reactor is not uniform; the reactor would be
useless if it were.  It's pierced in a few places to let pipes in.
An optimism shield has to be pierced too.  I think the place to
draw the line is between what you expect of yourself, and what you
expect of other people.  It's ok to be optimistic about what you
can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people.
This is particularly necessary in a startup, because you tend to
be pushing the limits of whatever you're doing.  So things don't
happen in the smooth, predictable way they do in the rest of the
world.  Things change suddenly, and usually for the worse.
Shielding your optimism is nowhere more important than with deals.
If your startup is doing a deal, just assume it's not going to
happen.  The VCs who say they're going to invest in you aren't.
The company that says they're going to buy you isn't.  The big
customer who wants to use your system in their whole company won't.
Then if things work out you can be pleasantly surprised.
The reason I warn startups not to get their hopes up is not to save
them from being
disappointed
when things fall through.  It's
for a more practical reason: to prevent them from leaning their
company against something that's going to fall over, taking them
with it.
For example, if someone says they want to invest in you, there's a
natural tendency to stop looking for other investors.  That's why
people proposing deals seem so positive: they
want
you to
stop looking.  And you want to stop too, because doing deals is a
pain.  Raising money, in particular, is a huge time sink.  So you
have to consciously force yourself to keep looking.
Even if you ultimately do the first deal, it will be to your advantage
to have kept looking, because you'll get better terms.  Deals are
dynamic; unless you're negotiating with someone unusually honest,
there's not a single point where you shake hands and the deal's
done. There are usually a lot of subsidiary questions to be cleared
up after the handshake, and if the other side senses weakness-- if
they sense you need this deal-- they will be very tempted to screw
you in the details.
VCs and corp dev guys are professional negotiators.  They're trained
to take advantage of weakness.
[
8
]
So while they're often nice
guys, they just can't help it.  And as pros they do this more than
you.  So don't even try to bluff them.  The only way a startup can
have any leverage in a deal is genuinely not to need it.  And if
you don't believe in a deal, you'll be less likely to depend on it.
So I want to plant a hypnotic suggestion in your heads: when you
hear someone say the words "we want to invest in you" or "we want
to acquire you," I want the following phrase to appear automatically
in your head:
don't get your hopes up.
Just continue running
your company as if this deal didn't exist.  Nothing is more likely
to make it close.
The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting
lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors
and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money in your face.
Speed, not Money
The way I've described it, starting a startup sounds pretty stressful.
It is.  When I talk to the founders of the companies we've funded,
they all say the same thing: I knew it would be hard, but I didn't
realize it would be this hard.
So why do it?  It would be worth enduring a lot of pain and stress
to do something grand or heroic, but just to make money?  Is making
money really that important?
No, not really.  It seems ridiculous to me when people take business
too seriously.  I regard making money as a boring errand to be got
out of the way as soon as possible.  There is nothing grand or
heroic about starting a startup per se.
So why do I spend so much time thinking about startups?  I'll tell
you why.  Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get
rich, but as a way to work faster.  You have to make a living, and
a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it
drag on through your whole life.
[
9
]
We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly
miraculous.  It is also palpably short.  You're given this marvellous
thing, and then poof, it's taken away.  You can see why people
invent gods to explain it.  But even to people who don't believe
in gods, life commands respect.  There are times in most of our
lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a
sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious.  As Ben
Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is
what life is made of.
So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money.  That's
not what makes startups worth the trouble.  What's important about
startups is the speed.  By compressing the dull but necessary task
of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect
for life, and there is something grand about that.
Notes
[
1
]
Startups can die from releasing something full of bugs, and not
fixing them fast enough, but I don't know of any that died from
releasing something stable but minimal very early, then promptly
improving it.
[
2
]
I know this is why I haven't released Arc.  The moment I do,
I'll have people nagging me for features.
[
3
]
A web site is different from a book or movie or desktop application
in this respect.  Users judge a site not as a single snapshot, but
as an animation with multiple frames.  Of the two, I'd say the rate of
improvement is more important to users than where you currently
are.
[
4
]
It should not always tell this to users, however.  For example,
MySpace is basically a replacement mall for mallrats.  But it was
wiser for them, initially, to pretend that the site was about bands.
[
5
]
Similarly, don't make users register to try your site.  Maybe
what you have is so valuable that visitors should gladly register
to get at it.  But they've been trained to expect the opposite.
Most of the things they've tried on the web have sucked-- and
probably especially those that made them register.
[
6
]
VCs have rational reasons for behaving this way. They don't
make their money (if they make money) off their median investments.
In a typical fund, half the companies fail, most of the rest generate
mediocre returns, and one or two "make the fund" by succeeding
spectacularly.  So if they miss just a few of the most promising
opportunities, it could hose the whole fund.
[
7
]
The attitude of a running back doesn't translate to soccer.
Though it looks great when a forward dribbles past multiple defenders,
a player who persists in trying such things will do worse in the
long term than one who passes.
[
8
]
The reason Y Combinator never negotiates valuations
is that we're not professional negotiators, and don't want to turn
into them.
[
9
]
There are two ways to do
work you love
: (a) to make money, then work
on what you love, or (b) to get a job where you get paid to work on
stuff you love.  In practice the first phases of both
consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and in (b) the second phase is less
secure.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Beau Hartshorne, Jessica
Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Romanian Translation
Russian Translation
French Translation
Japanese Translation


@JeffBoyle Wow, ok, I'm glad I asked. We basically just passed the Turing Test there.

That spike in 1960 is the Mao Tower.

@JeffBoyle Surely this is AI-generated?

12 yo said he hated doing comprehensions. Usually when he complains about schoolwork I tell him to reserve judgment, because he's not doing the real version yet. But I told him college English classes are basically the same futile exercise, just done more pretentiously.

@cremieuxrecueil One of the most convincing rebuttals you could do of this technique would be to write something almost identical in structure, rebutting some research no one doubts.

@x14_blnk Yes, 100% sure.

@nicholaswu12 I think we can do even better. Let's give them a 0-hour workweek.

Every picture of JP Morgan published in his lifetime (and thus nearly every picture published since) was heavily retouched. This is what he actually looked like. https://t.co/pYnA7IlHZd

@x14_blnk Not organized the Great Leap Forward.

@Walmart I'm always impressed by companies that pay close attention to trends among their customers.


@SheldonMiller It definitely wasn't. In fact I should possibly have warned parents that if you do this once you're going to be doing it every night...

@tiggreen I retired soon after this video, partly so I could give this one as much attention as his older brother had gotten. So I don't have a lot of useful insights about that. I just hit eject.

@sudoredj @chris_g_csto That would not be an improvement.

@chris_g_csto Thanks! That was the last sentence I wrote, just before I published it this morning.

@EssexgoonerMr He's already invading Europe. Ukraine is in Europe.

@dwlz That should go on a pen, not a hat.

@Chris_arnade That's not a requirement.

@robinhanson Maybe they weren't bragging. Not everything Texans say is bragging.

What to Do: https://t.co/Qz6dnhvYzx

@artist_romney This is not by Romney. Look at that ear.


@Samhanknr @lymanstoneky Presumably it makes engagement numbers better in the short term. But it also leaves room for an alternative to do better, which is dangerous.

@lymanstoneky Not just that. It also makes Twitter more boring, by hiding so much good stuff.

@cryptoartists1 @matthew_d_green If you're driving a flatbed Ford, yes. Otherwise it's optional.

@JonErlichman Notice the rawness of the cuts through the hillsides. That must have been what all superhighways looked like in 1960.

@matthew_d_green In California it does, if they're standing at a corner.

@yuris This is one of the reasons I'm voting for Kamala. Not the main reason, but one of them. Just to have a normal, reasonable person as president again.

@lancergbp I tweet about what I care about.

@XEng They will be able to repost though, by taking a screenshot and posting that.

@roshanpateI Eh, it's pretty harmless. All prestigious types of work have wannabees buzzing around the edges. Imagine what it's like in Hollywood.

When I first saw this tweet I was horrified. Then I read the account name and I was relieved. This is from 1940. Then I remembered that the same things are happening right now, and I was horrified again.


Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2008
The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear
we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.
When Microsoft and Apple were founded.
As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time
to start a startup.  I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time
either.  The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn't
matter much either way.
If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that
they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders.  The
economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success
it's rounding error compared to the founders.
Which means that what matters is who you are, not when you do it.
If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy.
And if you're not, a good economy won't save you.  Someone who
thinks "I better not start a startup now, because the economy is
so bad" is making the same mistake as the people who thought during
the Bubble "all I have to do is start a startup, and I'll be rich."
So if you want to improve your chances, you should think far more
about who you can recruit as a cofounder than the state of the
economy.  And if you're worried about threats to the survival of
your company, don't look for them in the news.  Look in the mirror.
But for any given team of founders, would it not pay to wait till
the economy is better before taking the leap?  If you're starting
a restaurant, maybe, but not if you're working on technology.
Technology progresses more or less independently of the stock market.
So for any given idea, the payoff for acting fast in a bad economy
will be higher than for waiting.  Microsoft's first product was a
Basic interpreter for the Altair.  That was exactly what the world
needed in 1975, but if Gates and Allen had decided to wait a few
years, it would have been too late.
Of course, the idea you have now won't be the last you have.  There
are always new ideas.  But if you have a specific idea you want to
act on, act now.
That doesn't mean you can ignore the economy.  Both customers and investors
will be feeling pinched.  It's not necessarily a problem if customers
feel pinched: you may even be able to benefit from it, by making
things that
save money
.
Startups often make things cheaper, so in
that respect they're better positioned to prosper in a recession
than big companies.
Investors are more of a problem.  Startups generally need to raise
some amount of external funding, and investors tend to be less
willing to invest in bad times.  They shouldn't be.  Everyone knows
you're supposed to buy when times are bad and sell when times are
good.  But of course what makes investing so counterintuitive is
that in equity markets, good times are defined as everyone thinking
it's time to buy.  You have to be a contrarian to be correct, and
by definition only a minority of investors can be.
So just as investors in 1999 were tripping over one another trying
to buy into lousy startups, investors in 2009 will presumably be
reluctant to invest even in good ones.
You'll have to adapt to this.  But that's nothing new: startups
always have to adapt to the whims of investors.  Ask any founder
in any economy if they'd describe investors as fickle, and watch
the face they make.  Last year you had to be prepared to explain
how your startup was viral.  Next year you'll have to explain how
it's recession-proof.
(Those are both good things to be.  The mistake investors make is
not the criteria they use but that they always tend to focus on one
to the exclusion of the rest.)
Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do
exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible.
For years I've been telling founders that the surest route to success
is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world.  The immediate
cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. So the
cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.
And fortunately it has gotten very cheap to run a startup. A recession
will if anything make it cheaper still.
If nuclear winter really is here, it may be safer to be a cockroach
even than to keep your job.  Customers may drop off individually
if they can no longer afford you, but you're not going to lose them
all at once; markets don't "reduce headcount."
What if you quit your job to start a startup that fails, and you
can't find another?  That could be a problem if you work in sales or
marketing.  In those fields it can take months to find a new
job in a bad economy.  But hackers seem to be more liquid.  Good
hackers can always get some kind of job.  It might not be your dream
job, but you're not going to starve.
Another advantage of bad times is that there's less competition.
Technology trains leave the station at regular intervals.  If
everyone else is cowering in a corner, you may have a whole car to
yourself.
You're an investor too.  As a founder, you're buying stock with
work: the reason Larry and Sergey are so rich is not so much that
they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, but that they
were the first investors in Google.  And like any investor you
should buy when times are bad.
Were you nodding in agreement, thinking "stupid investors" a few
paragraphs ago when I was talking about how investors are reluctant
to put money into startups in bad markets, even though that's the
time they should rationally be most willing to buy?  Well, founders
aren't much better.  When times get bad, hackers go to grad school.
And no doubt that will happen this time too.  In fact, what makes
the preceding paragraph true is that most readers won't believe
it—at least to the extent of acting on it.
So maybe a recession is a good time to start a startup.  It's hard
to say whether advantages like lack of competition outweigh
disadvantages like reluctant investors.  But it doesn't matter much
either way.   It's the people that matter.  And for a given set of
people working on a given technology, the time to act is always
now.
Russian Translation
Chinese Translation
Japanese Translation


Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
December 2008
(I originally wrote this at the request of a company producing
a report about entrepreneurship.  Unfortunately after reading it
they decided  it was too controversial to include.)
VC funding will probably dry up somewhat during the present recession,
like it usually does in bad times.  But this time the result may
be different.  This time the number of new startups may not decrease.
And that could be dangerous for VCs.
When VC funding dried up after the Internet Bubble, startups dried
up too.   There were not a lot of new startups being founded in
2003.  But startups aren't tied to VC the way they were 10 years
ago.  It's now possible for VCs and startups to diverge.  And if
they do, they may not reconverge once the economy gets better.
The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that
everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much
cheaper to start a startup.  There are four main reasons: Moore's
law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free;
the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful
programming languages mean development teams can be smaller.  These
changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the
noise.  In a lot of startups—probaby most startups funded by
Y Combinator—the biggest expense is simply the founders'
living expenses.  We've had startups that were profitable on revenues
of $3000 a month.
$3000 is insignificant as revenues go.  Why should anyone care about
a startup making $3000 a month?  Because, although insignificant
as
revenue
, this amount of money can change a startup's
funding
situation completely.
Someone running a startup is always calculating in the back of their
mind how much "runway" they have—how long they have till the
money in the bank runs out and they either have to be profitable,
raise more money, or go out of business.  Once you cross the threshold
of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite.  It's
a qualitative change, like the stars turning into lines and
disappearing when the Enterprise accelerates to warp speed.  Once
you're profitable you don't need investors' money.  And because
Internet startups have become so cheap to run, the threshold of
profitability can be trivially low.  Which means many Internet
startups don't need VC-scale investments anymore.  For many startups,
VC funding has, in the language of VCs, gone from a must-have to a
nice-to-have.
This change happened while no one was looking, and its effects have
been largely masked so far.  It was during the trough after the
Internet Bubble that it became trivially cheap to start a startup,
but few realized it because startups were so out of fashion.   When
startups came back into fashion, around 2005, investors were starting
to write checks again.  And while founders may not have needed VC
money the way they used to, they were willing to take it if
offered—partly because there was a tradition of startups
taking VC money, and partly because startups, like dogs, tend to
eat when given the opportunity.  As long as VCs were writing checks,
founders were never forced to explore the limits of how little they
needed them.  There were a few startups who hit these limits
accidentally because of their unusual circumstances—most
famously 37signals, which hit the limit because they crossed into
startup land from the other direction: they started as a consulting
firm, so they had revenue before they had a product.
VCs and founders are like two components that used to be bolted
together.  Around 2000 the bolt was removed.  Because the components
have so far been subjected to the same forces, they still seem to
be joined together, but really one is just resting on the other.
A sharp impact would make them fly apart.  And the present recession
could be that impact.
Because of Y Combinator's position at the extreme end of the spectrum,
we'd be the first to see signs of a separation between founders and
investors, and we are in fact seeing it.  For example, though the
stock market crash does seem to have made investors more cautious,
it doesn't seem to have had any effect on the number of people who
want to start startups.  We take applications for funding every 6
months.  Applications for the current funding cycle closed on October
17, well after the markets tanked, and even so we got a record
number, up 40% from the same cycle a year before.
Maybe things will be different a year from now, if the economy
continues to get worse, but so far there is zero slackening of
interest among potential founders.  That's different from the way
things felt in 2001.  Then there was a widespread feeling among
potential founders that startups were over, and that one should
just go to grad school.   That isn't happening this time, and part
of the reason is that even in a bad economy it's not that hard to
build something that makes $3000 a month.  If investors stop writing
checks, who cares?
We also see signs of a divergence between founders and investors
in the attitudes of existing startups we've funded.  I was talking
to one recently that had a round fall through at the last minute
over the sort of trifle that breaks deals when investors feel they
have the upper hand—over an uncertainty about whether the
founders had correctly filed their 83(b) forms, if you can believe
that.  And yet this startup is obviously going to succeed: their
traffic and revenue graphs look like a jet taking off.  So I asked
them if they wanted me to introduce them to more investors.  To my
surprise, they said no—that they'd just spent four months
dealing with investors, and they were actually a lot happier now
that they didn't have to.  There was a friend they wanted to hire
with the investor money, and now they'd have to postpone that.  But
otherwise they felt they had enough in the bank to make it to
profitability.  To make sure, they were moving to a cheaper apartment.
And in this economy I bet they got a good deal on it.
I've detected this "investors aren't worth the trouble" vibe from
several YC founders I've talked to recently.  At least one startup
from the most recent (summer) cycle may not even raise angel money,
let alone VC.
Ticketstumbler
made it to profitability on Y Combinator's $15,000 investment and
they hope not to need more.  This surprised even us.  Although YC
is based on the idea of it being cheap to start a startup, we never
anticipated that founders would grow successful startups on nothing
more than YC funding.
If founders decide VCs aren't worth the trouble, that could be bad
for VCs.  When the economy bounces back in a few years and they're
ready to write checks again, they may find that founders have moved
on.
There is a founder community just as there's a VC community.  They
all know one another, and techniques spread rapidly between them.
If one tries a new programming language or a new hosting provider
and gets good results, 6 months later half of them are using it.
And the same is true for funding.  The current generation of founders
want to raise money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically, because
Larry and Sergey took money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically.
Imagine what it would do to the VC business if the next hot company
didn't take VC at all.
VCs think they're playing a zero sum game.  In fact, it's not even
that.  If you lose a deal to Benchmark, you lose that deal, but VC
as an industry still wins.  If you lose a deal to None, all VCs
lose.
This recession may be different from the one after the Internet
Bubble.  This time founders may keep starting startups.  And if
they do, VCs will have to keep writing checks, or they could become
irrelevant.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica
Livingston, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of
this.
Russian Translation


@elonmusk That would be a historic achievement if you can pull it off. In fact it would probably set people to asking all the other governments why they can't do the same...

Apparently EU users don't get new AI versions till several months after US users, because AI companies have to get regulatory signoff first. Was the cost of overregulation ever so clear? Every user in Europe is several months behind, in a field that changes every several months.

@carl_feynman Dementia is always tragic, no matter what you do.

@i_am_brennan Thanks, that made my day to hear!

DOGE is unlike other government departments in that its performance can be precisely measured. How much smaller is the federal budget next year? If Elon can cut the budget by 5% I'll be impressed.

@patio11 What two things with a gap in between?

@EdKrassen The reason they're doing this is presumably because they believe education *does* matter, and the Department of Education makes it worse.

@HarryMoy Wow, I hadn't noticed that.

This is a nontrivial advantage of Twitter: it's a kind of diary your kids can search. And this is of course a big reason I don't want Twitter to go away.

I was just talking to 12 yo about some of the great character names he came up with when he was 6. I still love Leonid Plutron. He didn't remember the whole team, but I remembered that I'd tweeted the list, so I could tell him all he had to do was search Twitter.


How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
December 2014
If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing
confidence in our beliefs.  The more (and more varied) experience
a belief survived, the less likely it would be false.  Most people
implicitly believe something like this about their opinions.  And
they're justified in doing so with opinions about things that don't
change much, like human nature.  But you can't trust your opinions
in the same way about things that change, which could include
practically everything else.
When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an
earlier version of the world.
Is it possible to avoid that?  Can you protect yourself against
obsolete beliefs?  To some extent, yes. I spent almost a decade
investing in early stage startups, and curiously enough protecting
yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do
to succeed as a startup investor.  Most really good startup ideas
look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad specifically
because some change in the world just switched them from bad to
good.  I spent a lot of time learning to recognize such ideas, and
the techniques I used may be applicable to ideas in general.
The first step is to have an explicit belief in change.  People who
fall victim to a monotonically increasing confidence in their
opinions are implicitly concluding the world is static.  If you
consciously remind yourself it isn't, you start to look for change.
Where should one look for it?  Beyond the moderately useful
generalization that human nature doesn't change much, the unfortunate
fact is that change is hard to predict.  This is largely a tautology
but worth remembering all the same: change that matters usually
comes from an unforeseen quarter.
So I don't even try to predict it.  When I get asked in interviews
to predict the future, I always have to struggle to come up with
something plausible-sounding on the fly, like a student who hasn't
prepared for an exam.
[
1
]
But it's not out of laziness that I haven't
prepared.  It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so
rarely correct that they usually aren't worth the extra rigidity
they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively
open-minded.  Instead of trying to point yourself in the right
direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and
try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change.
It's ok to have working hypotheses, even though they may constrain
you a bit, because they also motivate you.  It's exciting to chase
things and exciting to try to guess answers.  But you have to be
disciplined about not letting your hypotheses harden into anything
more.
[
2
]
I believe this passive m.o. works not just for evaluating new ideas
but also for having them.  The way to come up with new ideas is not
to try explicitly to, but to try to solve problems and simply not
discount weird hunches you have in the process.
The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain
experts.  If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea
or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto
worth exploring.
[
3
]
Within Y Combinator, when an idea is described
as crazy, it's a compliment—in fact, on average probably a
higher compliment than when an idea is described as good.
Startup investors have extraordinary incentives for correcting
obsolete beliefs.  If they can realize before other investors that
some apparently unpromising startup isn't, they can make a huge
amount of money.  But the incentives are more than just financial.
Investors' opinions are explicitly tested: startups come to them
and they have to say yes or no, and then, fairly quickly, they learn
whether they guessed right.  The investors who say no to a Google
(and there were several) will remember it for the rest of their
lives.
Anyone who must in some sense bet on ideas rather than merely
commenting on them has similar incentives.  Which means anyone who
wants such incentives can have them, by turning their comments into
bets: if you write about a topic in some fairly durable and public
form, you'll find you worry much more about getting things right
than most people would in a casual conversation.
[
4
]
Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs
is to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Though the nature
of future discoveries is hard to predict, I've found I can predict
quite well what sort of people will make them.  Good new ideas come
from earnest, energetic, independent-minded people.
Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor.
We thought Airbnb was a bad idea, for example. But we could tell
the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded.
(Indeed, almost pathologically so.)  So we suspended disbelief and
funded them.
This too seems a technique that should be generally applicable.
Surround yourself with the sort of people new ideas come from.  If
you want to notice quickly when your beliefs become obsolete, you
can't do better than to be friends with the people whose discoveries
will make them so.
It's hard enough already not to become the prisoner of your own
expertise, but it will only get harder, because change is accelerating.
That's not a recent trend; change has been accelerating since the
paleolithic era.  Ideas beget ideas.  I don't expect that to change.
But I could be wrong.
Notes
[
1
]
My usual trick is to talk about aspects of the present that
most people haven't noticed yet.
[
2
]
Especially if they become well enough known that people start
to identify them with you.  You have to be extra skeptical about
things you want to believe, and once a hypothesis starts to be
identified with you, it will almost certainly start to be in that
category.
[
3
]
In practice "sufficiently expert" doesn't require one to be
recognized as an expert—which is a trailing indicator in any
case.  In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot would
be enough.
[
4
]
Though they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on
e.g. forums and places like Twitter seem empirically to work like
casual conversation.  The threshold may be whether what you write
has a title.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, and Robert Morris
for reading drafts of this.
Spanish Translation
Arabic Translation


@billclerico Or British. It's very common here.

@RZ0812 @mwseibel I live in England.

"Dark energy that has a constant density and pressure would doom our cosmos to expand for all time until unbridgeable gulfs separate every particle from all the others... But dark energy that evolves makes alternative futures possible."

https://t.co/RvDczLSKhr

@LandsknechtPike Did all of them have a hereditary right to these arms, or did they just create them themselves?

@harjtaggar This just reminded me of the cinnamon bun I'd been saving for my elevenses.

@tejasdeore_7 It's a picture I took of a walk/don't walk sign in Paris. I thought it was interesting to see the two extremes of representing a person together.

@McCormickProf Do people do this? Surely not...

@mwseibel Thank you Michael! 1000 companies. You've probably done more than the entire venture business of the median country.

@kerckhove_ts Not this good.

@DuffyEli @nntaleb It is an especially revealing litmus test because the power imbalance between the two sides is so extreme.


Defining Property
March 2012
As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth
century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke.  One of the cases he decided
was brought by the owner of a food shop.  A poor student who could
afford only rice was eating his rice while enjoying the delicious
cooking smells coming from the food shop.  The owner wanted the
student to pay for the smells he was enjoying.
The student was
stealing his smells!
This story often comes to mind when I hear the RIAA and MPAA accusing
people of stealing music and movies.
It sounds ridiculous to us to treat smells as property.  But I can
imagine scenarios in which one could charge for smells.  Imagine
we were living on a moon base where we had to buy air by the
liter.  I could imagine air suppliers adding scents at an extra
charge.
The reason it seems ridiculous to us to treat smells as property
is that it wouldn't work to.  It would work on a moon base, though.
What counts as property depends on what works to treat as property.
And that not only can change, but has changed.  Humans may always
(for some definition of human and always) have treated small items
carried on one's person as property.  But hunter gatherers didn't
treat land, for example, as property in the way we do.
[
1
]
The reason so many people think of property as having a single
unchanging definition is that its definition changes very slowly.
[
2
]
But we are in the midst of such a change now.  The record
labels and movie studios used to distribute what they made like air
shipped through tubes on a moon base.  But with the arrival of
networks, it's as if we've moved to a planet with a breathable
atmosphere.  Data moves like smells now.  And through a combination
of wishful thinking and short-term greed, the labels and studios
have put themselves in the position of the food shop owner, accusing
us all of stealing their smells.
(The reason I say short-term greed is that the underlying problem
with the labels and studios is that the people who run them are
driven by bonuses rather than equity.  If they were driven by equity
they'd be looking for ways to take advantage of technological change
instead of fighting it.  But building new things takes too long.
Their bonuses depend on this year's revenues, and the best way to
increase those is to extract more money from stuff they do already.)
So what does this mean?  Should people not be able to charge for
content?  There's not a single yes or no answer to that question.
People should be able to charge for content when it works to charge
for content.
But by "works" I mean something more subtle than "when they can get
away with it."  I mean when people can charge for content without
warping society in order to do it.  After all, the companies selling
smells on the moon base could continue to sell them on the Earth,
if they lobbied successfully for laws requiring us all to continue
to breathe through tubes down here too, even though we no longer
needed to.
The crazy legal measures that the labels and studios have been
taking have a lot of that flavor.  Newspapers and magazines are
just as screwed, but they are at least declining gracefully.  The
RIAA and MPAA would make us breathe through tubes if they could.
Ultimately it comes down to common sense.  When you're abusing the
legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen
people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws
that would break the Internet if they passed, that's ipso facto
evidence you're using a definition of property that doesn't work.
This is where it's helpful to have working democracies and multiple
sovereign countries.  If the world had a single, autocratic government,
the labels and studios could buy laws making the definition of
property be whatever they wanted.  But fortunately there are still
some countries that are not copyright colonies of the US, and even
in the US,
politicians
still seem to be afraid of actual voters, in sufficient numbers.
[
3
]
The people running the US may not like it when voters or other
countries refuse to bend to their will, but ultimately it's in all
our interest that there's not a single point of attack for people
trying to warp the law to serve their own purposes.  Private property
is an extremely useful idea — arguably one of our greatest inventions.
So far, each new definition of it has brought us increasing material
wealth.
[
4
]
It seems reasonable to suppose the newest one will
too.  It would be a disaster if we all had to keep running an
obsolete version just because a few powerful people were too lazy
to upgrade.
Notes
[
1
]
If you want to learn more about hunter gatherers I strongly
recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's
The
Harmless People
and
The
Old Way
.
[
2
]
Change in the definition of property is driven mostly by
technological progress, however, and since technological progress
is accelerating, so presumably will the rate of change in the
definition of property.  Which means it's all the more important
for societies to be able to respond gracefully to such changes,
because they will come at an ever increasing rate.
[
3
]
As far as I know, the term "copyright colony" was first used
by
Myles
Peterson
.
[
4
]
The state of technology isn't simply a function of
the definition of property.  They each constrain the other.  But
that being so, you can't mess with the definition of property without
affecting (and probably harming) the state of technology.  The
history of the USSR offers a vivid illustration of that.
Thanks
to Sam Altman and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts
of this.
Japanese Translation


@Vishipedia @TheFP @NPR @uberliner What they did to him is the sign that it's not going to come from within.

@TheFP @NPR @uberliner It's time to go for NPR's funding.

Yuval Abraham: "It’s extremely dangerous to be in that psychological place when you have one of the strongest militaries in the world, and you have... killed more children in four months than in all conflicts all over the world for the past four years." https://t.co/ThGj8WevYR

@DanielFSoliman Not in Canada apparently.

@anufella @manipulanda Still grows exponentially.

@coloneldraught @BennettJonah Yes. A good mayor would fix things so fast that the city would feel completely different in a month.

@mattob It's not nearly so bad now though. I think wokeness peaked in 2020.

@PP_Rubens Damn, wrong again. Close though.

@manipulanda Hyphenation isn't a sustainable strategy. The name grows exponentially.

@PP_Rubens Someone Dutch and using a camera obscura, so Vermeer.


This version aligned along the M4 is more evocative to me. https://t.co/dXT1FIOiUD

The sizes of the UK and the Bay Area compared. https://t.co/TbgSsMcf1r

@Axanred @jonatanpallesen Precision metalworking is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

@jonatanpallesen And the most important thing to understand about the Industrial Revolution is that it didn't happen suddenly. It was preceded by centuries of gradual progress in manufacturing, politics, and finance.

They were already making this 150 years before: https://t.co/t4KxYV2RMP

@starsandrobots That isn't the latest HondaJet?

@engineers_feed British university students should be allowed to pick their majors after being admitted, like students in the US.

Want to keep your founding team together? Introduce your mothers.

https://t.co/lOrnKxs9yR

@bcjordan No. It tends not to age well, due to Moore's Law and similar phenomena.

@clark_aviation Why declining visitor numbers? Because kids want to stay home and play video games?

@kadavy Yes, but in different ways. Monochrome subtracts a variable. Using cardboard means I don't have to stretch several hundred canvases.


So the argument should never be "We should change this because it's outdated." It should be "We should change this because it's bad, and the drift in fashion has made its original badness visible." If you can't say that, don't change it.

This bodes ill. Readers used to outnumber non-readers 2 to 1. Now non-readers outnumber readers 3 to 1.

It's hard to imagine a change of that magnitude not having significant effects. https://t.co/1Z4nZPVBfg

We will be shocked later that a US president conducted himself the way he does. We're used to it now, but it truly is an aberration.

I met a man at a party who said he listened to P. G. Wodehouse audiobooks.

Me: I don't think I could do that. I'm very picky about Wodehouse. I don't think I could listen to someone reading him unless it was–

Him: Stephen Fry.

Me: Yes.

It's weird how difficult it is to buy anything at all complicated without making a few mistakes at first. No amount of preliminary research seems to be sufficient. You always end up buying a few lemons before you figure out what you're doing.

I met a startup today whose founders had previously worked at Coinbase and Scale. And Brian Armstrong of Coinbase had himself worked at Airbnb. I bet 3 "generations" is not the record though. Anyone know of a longer chain?

Update: According to the AI that now lets us query YC's database, this is in fact the longest chain of people who've worked for YC startups and then gone on to start their own. There's no 4 generation chain yet.

Update on the update, and how typical of the time it is: Our AI made a mistake! There is a chain of 4 YC startups whose employees have gone on to start their own YC startups: Auctomatic (w07), GoCardless (s11), Duffel (s18), Vizzly (s22).

Someone told me recently that Americans go to parties to meet new people, while the British go to parties to meet people they already know. There may be some truth in this.

On this one I'm definitely British. Most YC events include some people who've been around for years and others who've just moved to SV, and unless I make a conscious effort to talk to the new people, I always find at the end that I talked only to people I already knew.


Jessica Livingston
November 2015
A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on
it had been a "one-man show."  It's sadly common to read that sort
of thing.  But the problem with that description is not just that
it's unfair.  It's also misleading.  Much of what's most novel about
YC is due to Jessica Livingston.  If you don't understand her, you
don't understand YC.  So let me tell you a little about Jessica.
YC had 4 founders.  Jessica and I decided one night to start it,
and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor
Blackwell.  Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor
read applications and did interviews with us.
Jessica and I were already dating when we started YC.  At first we
tried to act "professional" about this, meaning we tried to conceal
it.  In retrospect that seems ridiculous, and we soon dropped the
pretense.  And the fact that Jessica and I were a couple is a big
part of what made YC what it was.  YC felt like a family.  The
founders early on were mostly young.  We all had dinner together
once a week, cooked for the first couple years by me. Our first
building had been a private home.  The overall atmosphere was
shockingly different from a VC's office on Sand Hill Road, in a way
that was entirely for the better.  There was an authenticity that
everyone who walked in could sense.  And that didn't just mean that
people trusted us.  It was the perfect quality to instill in startups.
Authenticity is one of the most important things YC looks for in
founders, not just because fakers and opportunists are annoying,
but because authenticity is one of the main things that separates
the most successful startups from the rest.
Early YC was a family, and Jessica was its mom.  And the culture
she defined was one of YC's most important innovations.  Culture
is important in any organization, but at YC culture wasn't just how
we behaved when we built the product. At YC, the culture was the
product.
Jessica was also the mom in another sense: she had the last word.
Everything we did as an organization went through her
first — who
to fund, what to say to the public, how to deal with other companies,
who to hire, everything.
Before we had kids, YC was more or less our life. There was no real
distinction between working hours and not.  We talked about YC all
the time.  And while there might be some businesses that it would
be tedious to let infect your private life, we liked it. We'd started
YC because it was something we were interested in.  And some of the
problems we were trying to solve were endlessly difficult.  How do
you recognize good founders?  You could talk about that for years,
and we did; we still do.
I'm better at some things than Jessica, and she's better at some
things than me.  One of the things she's best at is judging people.
She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character.
She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately.  Her
nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of
hers was critical in making YC what it is.  The earlier you pick
startups, the more you're picking the founders.  Later stage investors
get to try products and look at growth numbers.  At the stage where
YC invests, there is often neither a product nor any numbers.
Others thought YC had some special insight about the future of
technology.  Mostly we had the same sort of insight Socrates claimed:
we at least knew we knew nothing.  What made YC successful was being
able to pick good founders.  We thought Airbnb was a bad idea.  We
funded it because we liked the founders.
During interviews, Robert and Trevor and I would pepper the applicants
with technical questions.  Jessica would mostly watch.  A lot of
the applicants probably read her as some kind of secretary, especially
early on, because she was the one who'd go out and get each new
group and she didn't ask many questions. She was ok with that.  It
was easier for her to watch people if they didn't notice her. But
after the interview, the three of us would turn to Jessica and ask
"What does the Social Radar say?"
[
1
]
Having the Social Radar at interviews wasn't just how we picked
founders who'd be successful.  It was also how we picked founders
who were good people.  At first we did this because we couldn't
help it.  Imagine what it would feel like to have x-ray vision for
character.  Being around bad people would be intolerable.  So we'd
refuse to fund founders whose characters we had doubts about even
if we thought they'd be successful.
Though we initially did this out of self-indulgence, it turned out
to be very valuable to YC.  We didn't realize it in the beginning,
but the people we were picking would become the YC alumni network.
And once we picked them, unless they did something really egregious,
they were going to be part of it for life. Some now think YC's
alumni network is its most valuable feature. I personally think
YC's advice is pretty good too, but the alumni network is certainly
among the most valuable features.  The level of trust and helpfulness
is remarkable for a group of such size.  And Jessica is the main
reason why.
(As we later learned, it probably cost us little to reject people
whose characters we had doubts about, because how good founders are
and how well they do are
not orthogonal
.  If bad founders succeed
at all, they tend to sell early.  The most successful founders are
almost all good.)
If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize
it?  Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate
attention.  YC's brand was initially my brand, and our applicants
were people who'd read my essays.  But there is another reason:
Jessica hates attention.  Talking to reporters makes her nervous.
The thought of giving a talk paralyzes her.  She was even uncomfortable
at our wedding, because the bride is always the center of attention.
[
2
]
It's not just because she's shy that she hates attention, but because
it throws off the Social Radar. She can't be herself. You can't
watch people when everyone is watching you.
Another reason attention worries her is that she hates bragging.
In anything she does that's publicly visible, her biggest fear
(after the obvious fear that it will be bad) is that it will seem
ostentatious.  She says being too modest is a common problem for
women.  But in her case it goes beyond that.  She has a horror of
ostentation so visceral it's almost a phobia.
She also hates fighting. She can't do it; she just shuts down.  And
unfortunately there is a good deal of fighting in being the public
face of an organization.
So although Jessica more than anyone made YC unique, the very
qualities that enabled her to do it mean she tends to get written
out of YC's history.  Everyone buys this story that PG started YC
and his wife just kind of helped.  Even YC's haters buy it.  A
couple years ago when people were attacking us for not funding more
female founders (than exist), they all treated YC as identical with
PG.  It would have spoiled the narrative to acknowledge Jessica's
central role at YC.
Jessica was boiling mad that people were accusing
her
company of
sexism. I've never seen her angrier about anything.  But she did
not contradict them.  Not publicly.  In private there was a great
deal of profanity.  And she wrote three separate essays about the
question of female founders.  But she could never bring herself to
publish any of them.  She'd seen the level of vitriol in this debate,
and she shrank from engaging.
[
3
]
It wasn't just because she disliked fighting.  She's so sensitive
to character that it repels her even to fight with dishonest people.
The idea of mixing it up with linkbait journalists or Twitter trolls
would seem to her not merely frightening, but disgusting.
But Jessica knew her example as a successful female founder would
encourage more women to start companies, so last year she did
something YC had never done before and hired a PR firm to get her
some interviews.  At one of the first she did, the reporter brushed
aside her insights about startups and turned it into a sensationalistic
story about how some guy had tried to chat her up as she was waiting
outside the bar where they had arranged to meet.  Jessica was
mortified, partly because the guy had done nothing wrong, but more
because the story treated her as a victim significant only for being
a woman, rather than one of the most knowledgeable investors in the
Valley.
After that she told the PR firm to stop.
You're not going to be hearing in the press about what Jessica has
achieved. So let me tell you what Jessica has achieved.
Y Combinator
is fundamentally a nexus of people, like a university. It doesn't
make a product. What defines it is the people.  Jessica more than
anyone curated and nurtured that collection of people.  In that
sense she literally made YC.
Jessica knows more about the qualities of startup founders than
anyone else ever has. Her immense data set and x-ray vision are the
perfect storm in that respect.  The qualities of the founders are
the best predictor of how a startup will do.  And startups are in
turn the most important source of growth in mature economies.
The person who knows the most about the most important factor in
the growth of mature economies — that is who Jessica Livingston is.
Doesn't that sound like someone who should be better known?
Notes
[
1
]
Harj Taggar reminded me that while Jessica didn't ask many
questions, they tended to be important ones:
"She was always good at sniffing out any red flags about the team
or their determination and disarmingly asking the right question,
which usually revealed more than the founders realized."
[
2
]
Or more precisely, while she likes getting attention in the
sense of getting credit for what she has done, she doesn't like
getting attention in the sense of being watched in real time.
Unfortunately, not just for her but for a lot of people, how much
you get of the former depends a lot on how much you get of the
latter.
Incidentally, if you saw Jessica at a public event, you would never
guess she
hates attention, because (a) she is very polite and (b) when she's
nervous, she expresses it by smiling more.
[
3
]
The existence of people like Jessica is not just something
the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something
feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well.  There are successful
women who don't like to fight.  Which means if the public conversation
about women consists of fighting, their voices will be silenced.
There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. If a conversation
reaches a certain level of incivility, the more thoughtful people
start to leave. No one understands female founders better than
Jessica.  But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly
about the topic. She ventured a toe in that water a while ago, and
the reaction was so violent that she decided "never again."
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison,
Daniel Gackle, Carolynn
Levy, Jon Levy, Kirsty Nathoo, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.  And yes, Jessica Livingston,
who made me cut surprisingly little.


The good news is, if you do manage to avoid this mistake, you're almost there. If you succeed in making something people want, the remaining mistakes are edge cases.

My nominee for the industry with the worst consumer-facing software is auction houses. I'm dealing with one now that won't let you change the country field in your address. Have they never had a customer move to another country?

To be fair, this is a Danish auction house. Perhaps all their other users are Danish, and they all like Denmark so much that they'd never move to another country.

Apparently I got the country wrong. I got the date right though.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

This is always true, but it's truer now than usual.

Always? Do you imagine in 100 years trucks will still have to carry humans who do nothing so that some union guy can get paid? That would be a pretty dystopian future.

Man, his minions have even adopted his diction. Assuming he didn't write this himself.

One day there will be some very funny novels and movies that reproduce this distinctive style of bombastic falsehood. Alas for us it's not a novel or a movie, but real life.

It's a novel thing, and not in a good way, to hear the US government sounding like the dictators we used to ridicule in past decades. This is a decline that transcends the battle between left and right. No previous administration has sounded like this.

To bad designers, great designs start to look outdated after a couple decades simply because they're associated with a time in the past. If you're not careful, they'll "update" them.

The truth is there's no such thing as outdated. Bad design was bad when it was first made, even if its alignment with the fashion of its time made that hard for most people to see. And good design doesn't stop being good just because you've seen it for a long time.


Apparently a VC leaked Replit's revenues to the press, which gives me a rare opportunity to post a graph with actual numbers. You very rarely see growth this fast at this scale. https://t.co/lylL4qW72x

@TolkienWonder Moe's. I miss Moe's.

@NickSarafa @garrytan option-shift-dash

@garrytan I've always used it.

@sharmutal @ryangrim So far the people who've starved have been sickly children. If I gave them as examples, you'd claim they didn't count. But that's what every famine looks like at this stage: the first people to die are the weak. It would have been just the same in the Warsaw Ghetto.

@aaadvani Ask your YC partner.

@LandsknechtPike This seems false to me. Many European languages had a word equivalent to "savage" several centuries before that.

@samuelathlan @ryangrim Is what I said false?

@ajoski9 The dollar never began a year so badly under Biden as it has under Trump. In fact, it hasn't begun a year so badly since 1973. https://t.co/nQojXmDIpJ

@ggreenwald This was just a clumsy overreach by local police. The article ends with a clear statement from the government that "Palestine Action’s proscription does not and must not interfere with people’s legitimate right to express support for Palestinians."


@SpencerHakimian @elonmusk @realDonaldTrump Same here.

@yenachar @typesfast That's a great book but it's a memoir, not a history book.

@elbasti @typesfast I like his work a lot.

@StefanBuilds @mattyglesias Obviously, but he can't have meant that. That's a tautology.

@rwlesq @robertwiblin It's not one man one vote.

@MattHausmannAtx @robertwiblin Most linguists wouldn't but good writers would.

@robertwiblin "Informal" is a polite way of saying they're misusing it. I wonder if this dictionary says the same thing about "begs the question."

@talhaliyaqut @typesfast Most of these books are about more than they seem to be, and that one in particular.

@MattBrookes3 @typesfast The Persian Expedition is the Anabasis.

@JohnnyAndAI @typesfast How much reading them changes your thinking.


@curious_founder When it flew, the XB-70 consumed more than the capacity of the Irish power grid.

@_xSoli @ashter_haider I usually leave it in my office. I carry it if I have to meet someone in a complicated way. E.g. if I have to drive someone else's kids to some place I've never been to before.

@levelsio There are multiple mistakes in this calculation. IPO is not the only form of exit; selling is far more common. And if the company fails, it usually fails in way less than 8.5 years.

@ashter_haider I almost never carry a phone so it's always at least a bit afterwards.

Walking around Cambridge (MA). Richer and tidier than it used to be, but more boring. Suddenly the feeling of Cambridge in 1986 came back to me. I could almost smell the old Cambridge. Then I noticed the garbage truck at the end of the block.

@pdhsu By strong sense of aesthetic, do you mean good taste?

@tracewoodgrains @ESYudkowsky Fans and haters are fundamentally the same thing: https://t.co/UZYW65GXUE

@theluk246 If you include a link, Twitter deprioritizes your tweet dramatically. It's a big mistake, but those are the current settings.

@Shadowlytics Effective for what?

@ps5_expert_play I'm saying that Biden will drop out and the Democrats will nominate another candidate.


What I've Learned from Users
September 2022
I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I
could give for getting in, per word, was
Explain what you've learned from users.
That tests a lot of things: whether you're paying attention to
users, how well you understand them, and even how much they need
what you're making.
Afterward I asked myself the same question. What have I learned
from YC's users, the startups we've funded?
The first thing that came to mind was that most startups have the
same problems. No two have exactly the same problems, but it's
surprising how much the problems remain the same, regardless of
what they're making. Once you've advised 100 startups all doing
different things, you rarely encounter problems you haven't seen
before.
This fact is one of the things that makes YC work. But I didn't
know it when we started YC. I only had a few data points: our own
startup, and those started by friends. It was a surprise to me how
often the same problems recur in different forms. Many later stage
investors might never realize this, because later stage investors
might not advise 100 startups in their whole career, but a YC partner
will get this much experience in the first year or two.
That's one advantage of funding large numbers of early stage companies
rather than smaller numbers of later-stage ones. You get a lot of
data. Not just because you're looking at more companies, but also
because more goes wrong.
But knowing (nearly) all the problems startups can encounter doesn't
mean that advising them can be automated, or reduced to a formula.
There's no substitute for individual office hours with a YC partner.
Each startup is unique, which means they have to be advised
by specific partners who know them well.
[
1
]
We learned that the hard way, in the notorious "batch that broke
YC" in the summer of 2012. Up till that point we treated the partners
as a pool. When a startup requested office hours, they got the next
available slot posted by any partner. That meant every partner had
to know every startup. This worked fine up to 60 startups, but when
the batch grew to 80, everything broke. The founders probably didn't
realize anything was wrong, but the partners were confused and
unhappy because halfway through the batch they still didn't know
all the companies yet.
[
2
]
At first I was puzzled. How could things be fine at 60 startups and
broken at 80? It was only a third more. Then I realized what had
happened. We were using an
O(n
2
)
algorithm. So of course it blew
up.
The solution we adopted was the classic one in these situations.
We sharded the batch into smaller groups of startups, each overseen
by a dedicated group of partners. That fixed the problem, and has
worked fine ever since. But the batch that broke YC was a powerful
demonstration of how individualized the process of advising startups
has to be.
Another related surprise is how bad founders can be at realizing
what their problems are. Founders will sometimes come in to talk
about some problem, and we'll discover another much bigger one in
the course of the conversation. For example (and this case is all
too common), founders will come in to talk about the difficulties
they're having raising money, and after digging into their situation,
it turns out the reason is that the company is doing badly, and
investors can tell. Or founders will come in worried that they still
haven't cracked the problem of user acquisition, and the reason turns out
to be that their product isn't good enough. There have been times
when I've asked "Would you use this yourself, if you hadn't built
it?" and the founders, on thinking about it, said "No." Well, there's
the reason you're having trouble getting users.
Often founders know what their problems are, but not their relative
importance.
[
3
]
They'll come in to talk about three problems
they're worrying about. One is of moderate importance, one doesn't
matter at all, and one will kill the company if it isn't addressed
immediately. It's like watching one of those horror movies where
the heroine is deeply upset that her boyfriend cheated on her, and
only mildly curious about the door that's mysteriously ajar. You
want to say: never mind about your boyfriend, think about that door!
Fortunately in office hours you can. So while startups still die
with some regularity, it's rarely because they wandered into a room
containing a murderer. The YC partners can warn them where the
murderers are.
Not that founders listen. That was another big surprise: how often
founders don't listen to us. A couple weeks ago I talked to a partner
who had been working for YC for a couple batches and was starting
to see the pattern. "They come back a year later," she said, "and
say 'We wish we'd listened to you.'"
It took me a long time to figure out why founders don't listen. At
first I thought it was mere stubbornness. That's part of the reason,
but another and probably more important reason is that so much about
startups is
counterintuitive
.
And when you tell someone something
counterintuitive, what it sounds to them is wrong. So the reason
founders don't listen to us is that they don't
believe
us. At
least not till experience teaches them otherwise.
[
4
]
The reason startups are so counterintuitive is that they're so
different from most people's other experiences. No one knows what
it's like except those who've done it. Which is why YC partners
should usually have been founders themselves. But strangely enough,
the counterintuitiveness of startups turns out to be another of the
things that make YC work. If it weren't counterintuitive, founders
wouldn't need our advice about how to do it.
Focus is doubly important for early stage startups, because not
only do they have a hundred different problems, they don't have
anyone to work on them except the founders. If the founders focus
on things that don't matter, there's no one focusing on the things
that do. So the essence of what happens at YC is to figure out which
problems matter most, then cook up ideas for solving them — ideally
at a resolution of a week or less — and then try those ideas and
measure how well they worked. The focus is on action, with measurable,
near-term results.
This doesn't imply that founders should rush forward regardless of
the consequences. If you correct course at a high enough frequency,
you can be simultaneously decisive at a micro scale and tentative
at a macro scale. The result is a somewhat winding path, but executed
very rapidly, like the path a running back takes downfield. And in
practice there's less backtracking than you might expect. Founders
usually guess right about which direction to run in, especially if
they have someone experienced like a YC partner to bounce their
hypotheses off. And when they guess wrong, they notice fast, because
they'll talk about the results at office hours the next week.
[
5
]
A small improvement in navigational ability can make you a lot
faster, because it has a double effect: the path is shorter, and
you can travel faster along it when you're more certain it's the
right one. That's where a lot of YC's value lies, in helping founders
get an extra increment of focus that lets them move faster. And
since moving fast is the essence of a startup, YC in effect makes
startups more startup-like.
Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. YC improves focus.
Why are founders uncertain about what to do? Partly because startups
almost by definition are doing something new, which means no one
knows how to do it yet, or in most cases even what "it" is. Partly
because startups are so counterintuitive generally. And partly
because many founders, especially young and ambitious ones, have
been trained to win the wrong way. That took me years to figure
out. The educational system in most countries trains you to win by
hacking the test
instead of actually doing whatever it's supposed
to measure. But that stops working when you start a startup. So
part of what YC does is to retrain founders to stop trying to hack
the test. (It takes a surprisingly long time. A year in, you still
see them reverting to their old habits.)
YC is not simply more experienced founders passing on their knowledge.
It's more like specialization than apprenticeship. The knowledge
of the YC partners and the founders have different shapes: It
wouldn't be worthwhile for a founder to acquire the encyclopedic
knowledge of startup problems that a YC partner has, just as it
wouldn't be worthwhile for a YC partner to acquire the depth of
domain knowledge that a founder has. That's why it can still be
valuable for an experienced founder to do YC, just as it can still
be valuable for an experienced athlete to have a coach.
The other big thing YC gives founders is colleagues, and this may
be even more important than the advice of partners. If you look at
history, great work clusters around certain places and institutions:
Florence in the late 15th century, the University of Göttingen in
the late 19th,
The New Yorker
under Ross, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC.
However good you are, good colleagues make you better. Indeed, very
ambitious people probably need colleagues more than anyone else,
because they're so starved for them in everyday life.
Whether or not YC manages one day to be listed alongside those
famous clusters, it won't be for lack of trying. We were very aware
of this historical phenomenon and deliberately designed YC to be
one. By this point it's not bragging to say that it's the biggest
cluster of great startup founders. Even people trying to attack YC
concede that.
Colleagues and startup founders are two of the most powerful forces
in the world, so you'd expect it to have a big effect to combine
them. Before YC, to the extent people thought about the question
at all, most assumed they couldn't be combined — that loneliness
was the price of independence. That was how it felt to us when we
started our own startup in Boston in the 1990s. We had a handful
of older people we could go to for advice (of varying quality), but
no peers. There was no one we could commiserate with about the
misbehavior of investors, or speculate with about the future of
technology. I often tell founders to make something they themselves
want, and YC is certainly that: it was designed to be exactly what
we wanted when we were starting a startup.
One thing we wanted was to be able to get seed funding without
having to make the rounds of random rich people. That has become a
commodity now, at least in the US. But great colleagues can never
become a commodity, because the fact that they cluster in some
places means they're proportionally absent from the rest.
Something magical happens where they do cluster though. The energy
in the room at a YC dinner is like nothing else I've experienced.
We would have been happy just to have one or two other startups to
talk to. When you have a whole roomful it's another thing entirely.
YC founders aren't just inspired by one another. They also help one
another. That's the happiest thing I've learned about startup
founders: how generous they can be in helping one another. We noticed
this in the first batch and consciously designed YC to magnify it.
The result is something far more intense than, say, a university.
Between the partners, the alumni, and their batchmates, founders
are surrounded by people who want to help them, and can.
Notes
[
1
]
This is why I've never liked it when people refer to YC as a
"bootcamp." It's intense like a bootcamp, but the opposite in
structure. Instead of everyone doing the same thing, they're each
talking to YC partners to figure out what their specific startup
needs.
[
2
]
When I say the summer 2012 batch was broken, I mean it felt
to the partners that something was wrong. Things weren't yet so
broken that the startups had a worse experience. In fact that batch
did unusually well.
[
3
]
This situation reminds me of the research showing that people
are much better at answering questions than they are at judging how
accurate their answers are. The two phenomena feel very similar.
[
4
]
The
Airbnbs
were
particularly good at listening — partly
because they were flexible and disciplined, but also because they'd
had such a rough time during the preceding year. They were ready
to listen.
[
5
]
The optimal unit of decisiveness depends on how long it takes
to get results, and that depends on the type of problem you're
solving. When you're negotiating with investors, it could be a
couple days, whereas if you're building hardware it could be months.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston,
Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.


The perfect combination of futuristic and retro. Is there such a thing as jetpunk yet? Because this is it. (image via @CcibChris) https://t.co/tANcKM9q7f

@tommycollison How to Win Friends and Influence People is not specifically that, but worth reading for anyone doing sales.

@cixliv The rule of law.

The New York Times now acknowledges that many university professors and administrators have been liberal ideologues rather than seekers of truth. When will they admit that their own reporters and editors have been too?

@arpitrage What? Kids at UK boarding schools use LLMs and phones just as much as other kids.

@rmccoy Tariffs are tremendously destructive. On the other hand AI is progressing at a tremendous rate. Hard to say which force is more powerful, the rate of progress in tech or the destructiveness of the current administration. The stock market seems to think the latter.

Whoah. People aren't buying what Trump's selling. The percentage of people who think business conditions will be worse a year from now is the highest it's been since 1980.

@animated_memory We would get 100% believe me.

Our younger son is a good mimic, and one of his favorite routines is to do impressions of his teachers. So now when we go to parent-teacher conferences we can never remember what his teachers said, because we were too busy observing their mannerisms.

@tracewoodgrains Was there a time in the past where one could say that about anything that could be described as a "show" though?


@jakeottiger @signulll It's not a known tarpit idea. It might work, if done right.

It might be a good idea to focus on the friends of each party who are most closely connected to one another. Not just friends, but mutual friends. Then you approach how things work in small communities.

@fermatslibrary And moreover solved it in one night.

@zoink Many ideas can't wait. But unless you're either very lucky or very stupid, you'll have other ideas that are even better than this one.

@SpencerHakimian Also: Where do the materials in that American made product come from?

@radbackwards What's special about the valley is not the architecture, but the people.

@brianluidog I'm not using it in a novel sense, so any dictionary definition will probably suffice.

@krishnakaasyap Actually I kind of like 70s design.

@TVietor08 Money.

@rajatsuri This is true.

What Daniel says is true, and he is a big part of the reason.


@tracewoodgrains The problem with "centrist" is that it seems to refer to intentional rather than accidental moderates.

https://t.co/ogMaJHrydF

@aryanagxl Is Bluesky rife with cancellation attempts?

@aryanagxl Not this one. It was something I realized I should aim at in the essay I'm currently writing, which is about something controversial.

@amit_bhalesha That's not a big worry. He only pretends to be religious to appeal to voters on the right, and presumably the rest of the administration will take their cue from him.

@HemenJ There are things more dangerous than wokeness.

@guizaoacc No, that was in 2020 or 2021.

If you want to ensure that something you're writing has a sufficiently neutral point of view, imagine that you're an alien from another planet writing a report to your supervisors. But an alien with a sense of humor.

@devahaz @JesperBylund It wasn't directly about him, no. It was a response to all the blank-slatist posts that the controversy inspired.

@tismjj @ErrataRob Not from her. Bizarrely enough this particular reporter seems to have switched to being much more conservative.

@JesperBylund "I'm working on story about the backlash to the women in tech movement, and I'd love to connect.

In the story I'm including some of what you've written about Damore. You posted: "Whether the earth orbits the sun is a question to be determined by research, not church policy.""