Design and Research
January 2003
(This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting
of NEPLS.)
Visitors to this country are often surprised to find that
Americans like to begin a conversation by asking "what do you do?"
I've never liked this question.  I've rarely had a
neat answer to it.  But I think I have finally solved the problem.
Now, when someone asks me what I do, I look them straight
in the eye and say "I'm designing a
new dialect of Lisp
."
I recommend this answer to anyone who doesn't like being asked what
they do.  The conversation will turn immediately to other topics.
I don't consider myself to be doing research on programming languages.
I'm just designing one, in the same way that someone might design
a building or a chair or a new typeface.
I'm not trying to discover anything new.  I just want
to make a language that will be good to program in.  In some ways,
this assumption makes life a lot easier.
The difference between design and research seems to be a question
of new versus good.  Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to
be good.  Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new.
I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design
surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research
solves problems that are not only new, but actually worth solving.
So ultimately we're aiming for the same destination, just approaching
it from different directions.
What I'm going to talk about today is what your target looks like
from the back.  What do you do differently when you treat
programming languages as a design problem instead of a research topic?
The biggest difference is that you focus more on the user.
Design begins by asking, who is this
for and what do they need from it?  A good architect,
for example, does not begin by creating a design that he then
imposes on the users, but by studying the intended users and figuring
out what they need.
Notice I said "what they need," not "what they want."  I don't mean
to give the impression that working as a designer means working as
a sort of short-order cook, making whatever the client tells you
to.  This varies from field to field in the arts, but
I don't think there is any field in which the best work is done by
the people who just make exactly what the customers tell them to.
The customer
is
always right in
the sense that the measure of good design is how well it works
for the user.  If you make a novel that bores everyone, or a chair
that's horribly uncomfortable to sit in, then you've done a bad
job, period.  It's no defense to say that the novel or the chair
is designed according to the most advanced theoretical principles.
And yet, making what works for the user doesn't mean simply making
what the user tells you to.  Users don't know what all the choices
are, and are often mistaken about what they really want.
The answer to the paradox, I think, is that you have to design
for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply
what he says he wants.
It's much like being a doctor.  You can't just treat a patient's
symptoms.  When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure
out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that.
This focus on the user is a kind of axiom from which most of the
practice of good design can be derived, and around which most design
issues center.
If good design must do what the user needs, who is the user?  When
I say that design must be for users, I don't mean to imply that good
design aims at some kind of
lowest common denominator.  You can pick any group of users you
want.  If you're designing a tool, for example, you can design it
for anyone from beginners to experts, and what's good design
for one group might be bad for another.  The point
is, you have to pick some group of users.  I don't think you can
even talk about good or bad design except with
reference to some intended user.
You're most likely to get good design if the intended users include
the designer himself.  When you design something
for a group that doesn't include you, it tends to be for people
you consider to be less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated.
That's a problem, because looking down on the user, however benevolently,
seems inevitably to corrupt the designer.
I suspect that very few housing
projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live
in them.   You can see the same thing
in programming languages.  C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for
their own designers to use.  Cobol, Ada, and Java, were created
for other people to use.
If you think you're designing something for idiots, the odds are
that you're not designing something good, even for idiots.
Even if you're designing something for the most sophisticated
users, though, you're still designing for humans.  It's different
in research.  In math you
don't choose abstractions because they're
easy for humans to understand; you choose whichever make the
proof shorter.  I think this is true for the sciences generally.
Scientific ideas are not meant to be ergonomic.
Over in the arts, things are very different.  Design is
all about people.  The human body is a strange
thing, but when you're designing a chair,
that's what you're designing for, and there's no way around it.
All the arts have to pander to the interests and limitations
of humans.   In painting, for example, all other things being
equal a painting with people in it will be more interesting than
one without.  It is not merely an accident of history that
the great paintings of the Renaissance are all full of people.
If they hadn't been, painting as a medium wouldn't have the prestige
that it does.
Like it or not, programming languages are also for people,
and I suspect the human brain is just as lumpy and idiosyncratic
as the human body.  Some ideas are easy for people to grasp
and some aren't.  For example, we seem to have a very limited
capacity for dealing with detail.  It's this fact that makes
programing languages a good idea in the first place; if we
could handle the detail, we could just program in machine
language.
Remember, too, that languages are not
primarily a form for finished programs, but something that
programs have to be developed in.  Anyone in the arts could
tell you that you might want different mediums for the
two situations.  Marble, for example, is a nice, durable
medium for finished ideas, but a hopelessly inflexible one
for developing new ideas.
A program, like a proof,
is a pruned version of a tree that in the past has had
false starts branching off all over it.  So the test of
a language is not simply how clean the finished program looks
in it, but how clean the path to the finished program was.
A design choice that gives you elegant finished programs
may not give you an elegant design process.  For example,
I've written a few macro-defining macros full of nested
backquotes that look now like little gems, but writing them
took hours of the ugliest trial and error, and frankly, I'm still
not entirely sure they're correct.
We often act as if the test of a language were how good
finished programs look in it.
It seems so convincing when you see the same program
written in two languages, and one version is much shorter.
When you approach the problem from the direction of the
arts, you're less likely to depend on this sort of
test.  You don't want to end up with a programming
language like marble.
For example, it is a huge win in developing software to
have an interactive toplevel, what in Lisp is called a
read-eval-print loop.  And when you have one this has
real effects on the design of the language.  It would not
work well for a language where you have to declare
variables before using them, for example.  When you're
just typing expressions into the toplevel, you want to be
able to set x to some value and then start doing things
to x.  You don't want to have to declare the type of x
first.  You may dispute either of the premises, but if
a language has to have a toplevel to be convenient, and
mandatory type declarations are incompatible with a
toplevel, then no language that makes type declarations
mandatory could be convenient to program in.
In practice, to get good design you have to get close, and stay
close, to your users.  You have to calibrate your ideas on actual
users constantly, especially in the beginning.  One of the reasons
Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to
her family.  That's why she never sinks into self-indulgently arty
descriptions of landscapes,
or pretentious philosophizing.  (The philosophy's there, but it's
woven into the story instead of being pasted onto it like a label.)
If you open an average "literary" novel and imagine reading it out loud
to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too
keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader.
In the software world, this idea is known as Worse is Better.
Actually, there are several ideas mixed together in the concept of
Worse is Better, which is why people are still arguing about
whether worse
is actually better or not.  But one of the main ideas in that
mix is that if you're building something new, you should get a
prototype in front of users as soon as possible.
The alternative approach might be called the Hail Mary strategy.
Instead of getting a prototype out quickly and gradually refining
it, you try to create the complete, finished, product in one long
touchdown pass.  As far as I know, this is a
recipe for disaster.  Countless startups destroyed themselves this
way during the Internet bubble.  I've never heard of a case
where it worked.
What people outside the software world may not realize is that
Worse is Better is found throughout the arts.
In drawing, for example, the idea was discovered during the
Renaissance.  Now almost every drawing teacher will tell you that
the right way to get an accurate drawing is not to
work your way slowly around the contour of an object, because errors will
accumulate and you'll find at the end that the lines don't meet.
Instead you should draw a few quick lines in roughly the right place,
and then gradually refine this initial sketch.
In most fields, prototypes
have traditionally been made out of different materials.
Typefaces to be cut in metal were initially designed
with a brush on paper.  Statues to be cast in bronze
were modelled in wax.  Patterns to be embroidered on tapestries
were drawn on paper with ink wash.  Buildings to be
constructed from stone were tested on a smaller scale in wood.
What made oil paint so exciting, when it
first became popular in the fifteenth century, was that you
could actually make the finished work
from
the prototype.
You could make a preliminary drawing if you wanted to, but you
weren't held to it; you could work out all the details, and
even make major changes, as you finished the painting.
You can do this in software too.  A prototype doesn't have to
be just a model; you can refine it into the finished product.
I think you should always do this when you can.  It lets you
take advantage of new insights you have along the way.  But
perhaps even more important, it's good for morale.
Morale is key in design.  I'm surprised people
don't talk more about it.  One of my first
drawing teachers told me: if you're bored when you're
drawing something, the drawing will look boring.
For example, suppose you have to draw a building, and you
decide to draw each brick individually.  You can do this
if you want, but if you get bored halfway through and start
making the bricks mechanically instead of observing each one,
the drawing will look worse than if you had merely suggested
the bricks.
Building something by gradually refining a prototype is good
for morale because it keeps you engaged.  In software, my
rule is: always have working code.  If you're writing
something that you'll be able to test in an hour, then you
have the prospect of an immediate reward to motivate you.
The same is true in the arts, and particularly in oil painting.
Most painters start with a blurry sketch and gradually
refine it.
If you work this way, then in principle
you never have to end the day with something that actually
looks unfinished.  Indeed, there is even a saying among
painters: "A painting is never finished, you just stop
working on it."  This idea will be familiar to anyone who
has worked on software.
Morale is another reason that it's hard to design something
for an unsophisticated user.   It's hard to stay interested in
something you don't like yourself.  To make something
good, you have to be thinking, "wow, this is really great,"
not "what a piece of shit; those fools will love it."
Design means making things for humans.  But it's not just the
user who's human.  The designer is human too.
Notice all this time I've been talking about "the designer."
Design usually has to be under the control of a single person to
be any good.   And yet it seems to be possible for several people
to collaborate on a research project.  This seems to
me one of the most interesting differences between research and
design.
There have been famous instances of collaboration in the arts,
but most of them seem to have been cases of molecular bonding rather
than nuclear fusion.  In an opera it's common for one person to
write the libretto and another to write the music.   And during the Renaissance,
journeymen from northern
Europe were often employed to do the landscapes in the
backgrounds of Italian paintings.  But these aren't true collaborations.
They're more like examples of Robert Frost's
"good fences make good neighbors."  You can stick instances
of good design together, but within each individual project,
one person has to be in control.
I'm not saying that good design requires that one person think
of everything.  There's nothing more valuable than the advice
of someone whose judgement you trust.  But after the talking is
done, the decision about what to do has to rest with one person.
Why is it that research can be done by collaborators and
design can't?  This is an interesting question.  I don't
know the answer.  Perhaps,
if design and research converge, the best research is also
good design, and in fact can't be done by collaborators.
A lot of the most famous scientists seem to have worked alone.
But I don't know enough to say whether there
is a pattern here.  It could be simply that many famous scientists
worked when collaboration was less common.
Whatever the story is in the sciences, true collaboration
seems to be vanishingly rare in the arts.  Design by committee is a
synonym for bad design.  Why is that so?  Is there some way to
beat this limitation?
I'm inclined to think there isn't-- that good design requires
a dictator.  One reason is that good design has to
be all of a piece.  Design is not just for humans, but
for individual humans.  If a design represents an idea that
fits in one person's head, then the idea will fit in the user's
head too.
Related:
Japanese Translation
Taste for Makers
Romanian Translation
Spanish Translation


One of the most important things I've learned from 20 years of talking to startups at Y Combinator is how few local maximums there are. Founders can just put their heads down and focus on growth, without more than a few months' lookahead, and they'll almost always do well.

@CcibChris Is that a grass strip?

@louismosley So will you publicly commit on behalf of Palantir that the company won't build things that help the US government violate the constitution?

@yacineMTB It's precisely because I want to live in a lawful world that I said this. One of the most important principles in American law is that the constitution takes precedence over the whims of the current administration.

@garrytan The one upside is that we'll now get a kind of natural experiment. Comparing the trajectory of SF and Oakland over the next few years will make it very clear to people what kind of city government they want.

@NateSilver538 You mean times, not Twitter, right?

@amitisinvesting But just to confirm, since you are an expert on their public statements, have they ever explicitly committed not to build things that help the government violate the US constitution?

@amitisinvesting One sentence is exactly the reason I posted today. I suspect they'll build things that help the government violate people's constitutional rights. And a one-sentence promise that they won't will change what I posted. I explicitly promised to delete it if they do.

@amitisinvesting Amit?

@amitisinvesting Can you please quote the passage where they publicly commit not to build things that help the government violate the US constitution?


Schlep Blindness
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
January 2012
There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under
our noses.  One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call
schlep blindness
.  Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has
passed into general use in the US.  It means a tedious, unpleasant
task.
No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them.
Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing
some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching
the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate
with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code.
Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it.
One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is teach hackers about
the inevitability of schleps.  No, you can't start a startup by
just writing code.  I remember going through this realization myself.
There was a point in 1995 when I was still trying to convince myself
I could start a company by just writing code.  But I soon learned
from experience that schleps are not merely inevitable, but pretty
much what business consists of.  A company is defined by the schleps
it will undertake.  And schleps should be dealt with the same way
you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in.  Which is not
to say you should seek out unpleasant work per se, but that you
should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great.
The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much
of it is unconscious.  Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas
that involve painful schleps.  That's schlep blindness.
The phenomenon isn't limited to startups.  Most people don't
consciously decide not to be in as good physical shape as Olympic
athletes, for example.  Their unconscious mind decides for them,
shrinking from the work involved.
The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is
Stripe
, or
rather Stripe's idea.  For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever
had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was.
Thousands of people must have known about this problem.  And yet
when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or
aggregators for local events.  Why?  Why work on problems few care
much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the
most important components of the world's infrastructure?  Because
schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea
of fixing payments.
Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe
site began by asking "should we fix payments, or build a recipe
site?" and chose the recipe site.  Though the idea of fixing payments
was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their
unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.  You'd
have to make deals with banks.  How do you do that?  Plus you're
moving money, so you're going to have to deal with fraud, and people
trying to break into your servers.  Plus there are probably all
sorts of regulations to comply with.  It's a lot more intimidating
to start a startup like this than a recipe site.
That scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable.  In addition
to their intrinsic value, they're like undervalued stocks in the
sense that there's less demand for them among founders.  If you
pick an ambitious idea, you'll have less competition, because
everyone else will have been frightened off by the challenges
involved.  (This is also true of starting a startup generally.)
How do you overcome schlep blindness?  Frankly, the most valuable
antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance.  Most successful
founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were
starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome,
they might never have started it.  Maybe that's one reason the most
successful startups of all so often have young founders.
In practice the founders grow with the problems.  But no one seems
able to foresee that, not even older, more experienced founders.
So the reason younger founders have an advantage is that they make
two mistakes that cancel each other out.  They don't know how much
they can grow, but they also don't know how much they'll need to.
Older founders only make the first mistake.
Ignorance can't solve everything though.  Some ideas so obviously
entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them.  How do you see
ideas like that?  The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of
the picture.  Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask
"what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?"  If someone
who had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that,
Stripe would have been one of the first things they wished for.
It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's plenty still broken in
the world, if you know how to see it.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison,
Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Emmett Shear, and Harj Taggar
for reading drafts of this.


@sophiescott When was the library built? Because that picture looks about 1700, which would have been early for such a large library.

@AdnanHussainMP Of course it does. It means protecting the right to offend anyone.

@psframes Usually your reframings are improvements, but this one makes it look like Antonello is using that cheesy trick of making the frame part of the painting.

Did the College of Cardinals just do the same things as the Canadian electorate?

@StatisticUrban That's a sign that there aren't in fact any leaks.

@Isegoria Obviously. But not like this in recent decades in America.

You'd think someone so cynical would be immune to flatterers, but apparently not. And presumably this will only increase as he ages. So I worry we're heading for another Biden situation, but this time with cognitive decline augmented by aides telling him what he wants to hear.

The people around Trump seem to have learned that the key to power is to flatter him. So they're happy to say things that sound preposterous so long as they sound good to Trump. We are in for a strange four years.

@infobeautiful That would be a lot better without all the :1s.

@Scholars_Stage Sure. The very smartest people in any given year group are very smart.


@ZachAbramowitz Self-identifying as reasonable doesn't make one reasonable. Everyone thinks they're reasonable. The test is how one acts.

@markankcorn @NaderLikeLadder That's exactly what they're advocating in the quote I posted. Did you not even read it?

@TunaMagic_ You remind me of the nutjobs in SF who regard anyone below the 95th percentile of liberalism as far right.

@zackkanter New York Times: https://t.co/ycPfwzn2fc

@SpencerHakimian The first sentence is true and the second is false.

@coopdog___ Do you think he's not doing that too?

@Balle67443Bruce I hope not, but he seems to think it is.

We can't let ourselves get accustomed to this level of corruption, or we'll be stuck with the resulting new, lower moral standards long after Trump is gone.

This is a massive bribe.

I walk into the kitchen. Jessica asks if there's any news. I tell her Trump is being given a 747 by the Qataris. She just stares at me, as if she's unable to parse what I said. Imagine any previous president, Republican or Democrat, doing something like this.

@fresheyeball @joncoopertweets That's not quite true. I don't blame Mexican police arresting drug traffickers for wearing masks. But when people arresting the Mayor of Newark wear masks, they're up to no good.


@ripplebrain The American people overwhelmingly support high-skilled immigration.

@PresentWitness_ My point is not that they're racist (though they may be that too) but that they're wrong.

@Sargon_of_Akkad They don't understand anything about *tech* that the tech types don't. They just have strong feelings. Exactly like the previous generation of woke tech-haters.

@hope_pead It gave you everything you used to express this opinion, just to start with.

@0x49fa98 The anonymous accounts I've been seeing aren't. I know what tech workers are like. These guys seem too dumb.

@sarmadgulzar @visakanv About a week. I'm in the middle of rereading it now.

@visakanv Or reread it.

@jdmccafferty He looks like a jack in the box.

I don't think I've ever seen a Twitter dispute that was so one-sided. All the people who understand tech, on both right and left, are on one side, and the other side is just anonymous accounts and political commentators.

@DrKelpClassic @wispem_wantex They would be lost in a sea of bad investments.


@abarrallen Weather too. Lots of people seem to have been shocked at how hot it is in Austin.

@AntlerAI Really. How did the stock market do under the last administration versus this one?

It's crazy to be seeing tweets that say "How <person> made <large amount> by <doing thing>" that aren't scams. That's how fast the world is changing.

"This isn't just buffoonery. This is chilling."

— Jessica on the latest federal policies

@retroscifiart You can often see the ghosts of specific contemporary aircraft in sci fi illustrations. Here it's a 747.

Ted tried to make it seem like the issue is a complex one. Actually it's 9 words. Will Palantir help the government violate people's constitutional rights? And I'm so willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that I'd have taken Ted's word for if it he said no. But he didn't.

I gave Ted Mabrey two days to respond, but I think we now have to conclude that he has run away. After pages of heroic-sounding doublespeak, the well has suddenly run dry. I was open to being proven wrong about Palantir, but unfortunately it's looking like I was right.

@RMistereggen @grok, what did the Islamic world contribute to European civilization?

@abarrallen This would be a dangerous metric to navigate by. Investors don't understand you as well as customers. I think investor excitement adds nothing but noise to the signal of revenue growth.

@frankgoertzen The stock, bond, currency, and precious metals markets all disagree with you. And they are professionals with skin in the game, not random Twitter commenters.


How to Be an Angel Investor
March 2009
(This essay is derived from a talk at
AngelConf
.)
When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel
investing.  Seven years later I still hadn't started.  I put it off
because it seemed mysterious and complicated.   It turns out to be
easier than I expected, and also more interesting.
The part I thought was hard, the mechanics of investing, really
isn't. You give a startup money and they give you stock.  You'll
probably get either preferred stock, which means stock with extra
rights like getting your money back first in a sale, or convertible
debt, which means (on paper) you're lending the company money, and
the debt converts to stock at the next sufficiently big funding
round.
[
1
]
There are sometimes minor tactical advantages to using one or the
other.  The paperwork for convertible debt is simpler.  But really
it doesn't matter much which you use.  Don't spend much time worrying
about the details of deal terms, especially when you first start
angel investing.  That's not how you win at this game.  When you
hear people talking about a successful angel investor, they're not
saying "He got a 4x liquidation preference." They're saying "He
invested in Google."
That's how you win: by investing in the right startups.  That is
so much more important than anything else that I worry I'm misleading
you by even talking about other things.
Mechanics
Angel investors often syndicate deals, which means they join together
to invest on the same terms.  In a syndicate there is usually a
"lead" investor who negotiates the terms with the startup.  But not
always: sometimes the startup cobbles together a syndicate of
investors who approach them independently, and the startup's lawyer
supplies the paperwork.
The easiest way to get started in angel investing is to find a
friend who already does it, and try to get included in his syndicates.
Then all you have to do is write checks.
Don't feel like you have to join a syndicate, though.  It's not that
hard to do it yourself.  You can just use the standard
series AA
documents Wilson Sonsini and Y Combinator published online.
You should of course have your lawyer review everything.  Both you
and the startup should have lawyers.  But the lawyers don't have
to create the agreement from scratch.
[
2
]
When you negotiate terms with a startup, there are two numbers you
care about: how much money you're putting in, and the valuation of
the company.  The valuation determines how much stock you get.  If
you put $50,000 into a company at a pre-money valuation of $1
million, then the post-money valuation is $1.05 million, and you
get .05/1.05, or 4.76% of the company's stock.
If the company raises more money later, the new investor will take
a chunk of the company away from all the existing shareholders just
as you did.  If in the next round they sell 10% of the company to
a new investor, your 4.76% will be reduced to 4.28%.
That's ok.  Dilution is normal.  What saves you from being mistreated
in future rounds, usually, is that you're in the same boat as the
founders.  They can't dilute you without diluting themselves just
as much.  And they won't dilute themselves unless they end up
net ahead
.  So in theory, each further
round of investment leaves you
with a smaller share of an even more valuable company, till after
several more rounds you end up with .5% of the company at the point
where it IPOs, and you are very happy because your $50,000 has
become $5 million.
[
3
]
The agreement by which you invest should have provisions that
let you contribute to
future rounds to maintain your percentage.  So it's your choice
whether you get diluted.
[
4
]
If the company does really well,
you eventually will, because eventually the valuations will get so
high it's not worth it for you.
How much does an angel invest?  That varies enormously, from $10,000
to hundreds of thousands or in rare cases even millions.  The upper
bound is obviously the total amount the founders want to raise.
The lower bound is 5-10% of the total or $10,000, whichever
is greater.  A typical angel round these days might be $150,000
raised from 5 people.
Valuations don't vary as much.  For angel rounds it's rare to see
a valuation lower than half a million or higher than 4 or 5 million.
4 million is starting to be VC territory.
How do you decide what valuation to offer?  If you're part of a
round led by someone else, that problem is solved for you.  But
what if you're investing by yourself?  There's no real answer.
There is no rational way to value an early stage startup.  The
valuation reflects nothing more than the strength of the company's
bargaining position.  If they really want you, either because they
desperately need money, or you're someone who can help them a lot,
they'll let you invest at a low valuation.  If they don't need you,
it will be higher.  So guess.  The startup may not have any more
idea what the number should be than you do.
[
5
]
Ultimately it doesn't matter much.  When angels make a lot of money
from a deal, it's not because they invested at a valuation of $1.5
million instead of $3 million.  It's because the company was really
successful.
I can't emphasize that too much.  Don't get hung up on mechanics
or deal terms.  What you should spend your time thinking about is
whether the company is good.
(Similarly, founders also should not get hung up on deal
terms, but should spend their time thinking about how to make the
company good.)
There's a second less obvious component of an angel investment: how
much you're expected to help the startup.  Like the amount you
invest, this can vary a lot.  You don't have to do anything if you
don't want to; you could simply be a source of money.  Or you can
become a de facto employee of the company.  Just make sure that you
and the startup agree in advance about roughly how much you'll do
for them.
Really hot companies sometimes have high standards for angels.  The
ones everyone wants to invest in practically audition investors,
and only take money from people who are famous and/or will work
hard for them.  But don't feel like you have to put in a lot of
time or you won't get to invest in any good startups.  There is a
surprising lack of correlation between how hot a deal a startup is
and how well it ends up doing.  Lots of hot startups will end up
failing, and lots of startups no one likes will end up succeeding.
And the latter are so desperate for money that they'll take it from
anyone at a low valuation.
[
6
]
Picking Winners
It would be nice to be able to pick those out, wouldn't it?  The
part of angel investing that has most effect on your returns, picking
the right companies, is also the hardest.  So you should practically
ignore (or more precisely, archive, in the Gmail sense) everything
I've told you so far.  You may need to refer to it at some point,
but it is not the central issue.
The central issue is picking the right startups.  What "Make something
people want" is for startups, "Pick the right startups" is for
investors.  Combined they yield "Pick the startups that will make
something people want."
How do you do that?  It's not as simple as picking startups that
are already making something wildly popular.  By then it's
too late for angels.  VCs will already be onto them.  As an angel,
you have to pick startups before they've got a hit—either
because they've made something great but users don't realize it
yet, like Google early on, or because they're still an iteration
or two away from the big hit, like Paypal when they were making
software for transferring money between PDAs.
To be a good angel investor, you have to be a good judge of potential.
That's what it comes down to.  VCs can be fast followers.  Most of
them don't try to predict what will win.  They just try to notice
quickly when something already is winning.  But angels have to be
able to predict.
[
7
]
One interesting consequence of this fact is that there are a lot
of people out there who have never even made an angel investment
and yet are already better angel investors than they realize.
Someone who doesn't know the first thing about the mechanics of
venture funding but knows what a successful startup founder looks
like is actually far ahead of someone who knows termsheets inside
out, but thinks
"hacker"
means someone who breaks into computers.
If you can recognize good startup founders by empathizing with
them—if you both resonate at the same frequency—then
you may already be a better startup picker than the median professional
VC.
[
8
]
Paul Buchheit, for example, started angel investing about a year
after me, and he was pretty much immediately as good as me at picking
startups.  My extra year of experience was rounding error compared
to our ability to empathize with founders.
What makes a good founder?  If there were a word that meant the
opposite of hapless, that would be the one.  Bad founders seem
hapless.  They may be smart, or not, but somehow events overwhelm
them and they get discouraged and give up.  Good founders make
things happen the way they want.  Which is not to say they force
things to happen in a predefined way.  Good founders have a healthy
respect for reality.  But they are relentlessly resourceful.  That's
the closest I can get to the opposite of hapless.  You want to fund
people who are relentlessly resourceful.
Notice we started out talking about things, and now we're talking
about people.  There is an ongoing debate between investors which
is more important, the people, or the idea—or more precisely,
the market. Some, like Ron Conway, say it's the people—that
the idea will change, but the people are the foundation of the
company.  Whereas Marc Andreessen says he'd back ok founders in a
hot market over great founders in a bad one.
[
9
]
These two positions are not so far apart as they seem, because good
people find good markets.  Bill Gates would probably have ended up
pretty rich even if IBM hadn't happened to drop the PC standard in
his lap.
I've thought a lot about the disagreement between the investors who
prefer to bet on people and those who prefer to bet on markets.
It's kind of surprising that it even exists.  You'd expect opinions
to have converged more.
But I think I've figured out what's going on.  The three most
prominent people I know who favor markets are Marc, Jawed Karim,
and Joe Kraus.  And all three of them, in their own startups,
basically flew into a thermal: they hit a market growing so fast
that it was all they could do to keep up with it.  That kind of
experience is hard to ignore.  Plus I think they underestimate
themselves: they think back to how easy it felt to ride that huge
thermal upward, and they think "anyone could have done it."  But
that isn't true; they are not ordinary people.
So as an angel investor I think you want to go with Ron Conway and
bet on people.  Thermals happen, yes, but no one can predict
them—not even the founders, and certainly not you as an
investor.  And only good people can ride the thermals if they hit
them anyway.
Deal Flow
Of course the question of how to choose startups presumes you
have startups to choose between.  How do you find them?  This is
yet another problem that gets solved for you by syndicates.  If you
tag along on a friend's investments, you don't have to find startups.
The problem is not finding startups, exactly, but finding a stream
of reasonably high quality ones.  The traditional way to do this
is through contacts.  If you're friends with a lot of investors and
founders, they'll send deals your way.  The Valley basically runs
on referrals.  And once you start to become known as reliable,
useful investor, people will refer lots of deals to you.  I certainly
will.
There's also a newer way to find startups, which is to come to
events like Y Combinator's Demo Day, where a batch of newly created
startups presents to investors all at once.   We have two Demo Days
a year, one in March and one in August.  These are basically mass
referrals.
But events like Demo Day only account for a fraction of matches
between startups and investors.  The personal referral is still the
most common route.  So if you want to hear about new startups, the
best way to do it is to get lots of referrals.
The best way to get lots of referrals is to invest in startups.  No
matter how smart and nice you seem, insiders will be reluctant to
send you referrals until you've proven yourself by doing a couple
investments.  Some smart, nice guys turn out to be flaky,
high-maintenance investors. But once you prove yourself as a good
investor, the deal flow, as they call it, will increase rapidly in
both quality and quantity.  At the extreme, for someone like Ron
Conway, it is basically identical with the deal flow of the whole
Valley.
So if you want to invest seriously, the way to get started is to
bootstrap yourself off your existing connections, be a good investor
in the startups you meet that way, and eventually you'll start a
chain reaction.  Good investors are rare, even in Silicon Valley.
There probably aren't more than a couple hundred serious angels in the whole
Valley, and yet they're probably the single most important ingredient
in making the Valley what it is.  Angels are the limiting reagent
in startup formation.
If there are only a couple hundred serious angels in the Valley,
then by deciding to become one you could single-handedly make the pipeline
for startups in Silicon Valley significantly wider.  That is kind
of mind-blowing.
Being Good
How do you be a good angel investor?  The first thing you need is
to be decisive.  When we talk to founders about good and bad
investors, one of the ways we describe the good ones is to say "he
writes checks." That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone.
Far from it.  It means he makes up his mind quickly,
and follows through.  You may be thinking, how hard could that be?
You'll see when you try it.  It follows from the nature of angel
investing that the decisions are hard.  You have to guess early,
at the stage when the most promising ideas still seem counterintuitive,
because if they were obviously good, VCs would already have funded
them.
Suppose it's 1998.  You come across a startup founded by a couple
grad students.  They say they're going to work on Internet search.
There are already a bunch of big public companies doing search.
How can these grad students possibly compete with them?  And does
search even matter anyway?  All the search engines are trying to
get people to start calling them "portals" instead.  Why would you
want to invest in a startup run by a couple of nobodies who are
trying to compete with large, aggressive companies in an area they
themselves have declared passe?  And yet the grad students seem
pretty smart.  What do you do?
There's a hack for being decisive when you're inexperienced: ratchet
down the size of your investment till it's an amount you wouldn't
care too much about losing.  For every rich person (you probably
shouldn't try angel investing unless you think of yourself as rich)
there's some amount that would be painless, though annoying, to
lose.  Till you feel comfortable investing, don't invest more than
that per startup.
For example, if you have $5 million in investable assets, it would
probably be painless (though annoying) to lose $15,000.  That's
less than .3% of your net worth.  So start by making 3 or 4 $15,000
investments.  Nothing will teach you about angel investing like
experience.  Treat the first few as an educational expense.  $60,000
is less than a lot of graduate programs.  Plus you get equity.
What's really uncool is to be strategically indecisive: to string
founders along while trying to gather more information about the
startup's trajectory.
[
10
]
There's always a temptation to do that,
because you just have so little to go on, but you have to consciously
resist it.  In the long term it's to your advantage to be good.
The other component of being a good angel investor is simply to be
a good person.  Angel investing is not a business where you make
money by screwing people over.  Startups create wealth, and
creating wealth is not a zero sum game.  No one has to lose for you
to win.  In fact, if you mistreat the founders you invest in, they'll
just get demoralized and the company will do worse.  Plus your
referrals will dry up.  So I recommend being good.
The most successful angel investors I know are all basically good
people.  Once they invest in a company, all they want to do is help
it.  And they'll help people they haven't invested in too.  When
they do favors they don't seem to keep track of them.  It's too
much overhead.  They just try to help everyone, and assume good
things will flow back to them somehow. Empirically that seems to
work.
Notes
[
1
]
Convertible debt can be either capped at a particular valuation,
or can be done at a discount to whatever the valuation turns out
to be when it converts.  E.g. convertible debt at a discount of 30%
means when it converts you get stock as if you'd invested at a 30%
lower valuation.  That can be useful in cases where you can't or
don't want to figure out what the valuation should be.  You leave
it to the next investor.  On the other hand, a lot of investors
want to know exactly what they're getting, so they will only do
convertible debt with a cap.
[
2
]
The expensive part of creating an agreement from scratch is
not writing the agreement, but bickering at several hundred
dollars an hour over the details.  That's why the series AA paperwork
aims at a middle ground.  You can just start from the compromise
you'd have reached after lots of back and forth.
When you fund a startup, both your lawyers should be specialists
in startups.  Do not use ordinary corporate lawyers for this.  Their
inexperience makes them overbuild: they'll create huge, overcomplicated
agreements, and spend hours arguing over irrelevant things.
In the Valley, the top startup law firms are Wilson Sonsini, Orrick,
Fenwick & West, Gunderson Dettmer, and Cooley Godward.  In Boston
the best are Goodwin Procter, Wilmer Hale, and Foley Hoag.
[
3
]
Your mileage may vary.
[
4
]
These anti-dilution provisions also protect you against
tricks like a later investor trying to steal the company by doing
another round that values the company at $1.  If you have a competent
startup lawyer handle the deal for you, you should be protected
against such tricks initially.  But it could become a problem later.
If a big VC firm wants to invest in the startup after you, they may
try to make you take out your anti-dilution protections.  And if
they do the startup will be pressuring you to agree.  They'll tell
you that if you don't, you're going to kill their deal with the VC.
I recommend you solve this problem by having a gentlemen's agreement
with the founders: agree with them in advance that you're not going
to give up your anti-dilution protections.  Then it's up to them
to tell VCs early on.
The reason you don't want to give them up is the following scenario.
The VCs recapitalize the company, meaning they give it additional
funding at a pre-money valuation of zero.  This wipes out the
existing shareholders, including both you and the founders.  They
then grant the founders lots of options, because they need them to
stay around, but you get nothing.
Obviously this is not a nice thing to do.  It doesn't happen often.
Brand-name VCs wouldn't recapitalize a company just to steal a few
percent from an angel.  But there's a continuum here.  A less
upstanding, lower-tier VC might be tempted to do it to steal a big
chunk of stock.
I'm not saying you should always absolutely refuse to give up your
anti-dilution protections.  Everything is a negotiation.  If you're
part of a powerful syndicate, you might be able to give up legal
protections and rely on social ones.  If you invest in a deal led
by a big angel like Ron Conway, for example, you're pretty well
protected against being mistreated, because any VC would think twice
before crossing him.  This kind of protection is one of the reasons
angels like to invest in syndicates.
[
5
]
Don't invest so much, or at such a low valuation, that you
end up with an excessively large share of a startup, unless you're
sure your money will be the last they ever need.  Later stage
investors won't invest in a company if the founders don't have
enough equity left to motivate them.  I talked to a VC recently who
said he'd met with a company he really liked, but he turned
them down because investors already owned more than half of it.
Those investors probably thought they'd been pretty clever by getting
such a large chunk of this desirable company, but in fact they were
shooting themselves in the foot.
[
6
]
At any given time I know of at least 3 or 4 YC alumni who I
believe will be big successes but who are running on vapor,
financially, because investors don't yet get what they're doing.
(And no, unfortunately, I can't tell you who they are.  I can't
refer a startup to an investor I don't know.)
[
7
]
There are some VCs who can predict instead of reacting.  Not
surprisingly, these are the most successful ones.
[
8
]
It's somewhat sneaky of me to put it this way, because the
median VC loses money.  That's one of the most surprising things
I've learned about VC while working on Y Combinator.  Only a fraction
of VCs even have positive returns.  The rest exist to satisfy demand
among fund managers for venture capital as an asset class.  Learning
this explained a lot about some of the VCs I encountered when we
were working on Viaweb.
[
9
]
VCs also generally say they prefer great markets to great
people.  But what they're really saying is they want both.  They're
so selective that they only even consider great people.  So when
they say they care above all about big markets, they mean that's
how they choose between great people.
[
10
]
Founders rightly dislike the sort of investor who says he's
interested in investing but doesn't want to lead.  There are
circumstances where this is an acceptable excuse, but more often
than not what it means is "No, but if you turn out to be a hot deal,
I want to be able to claim retroactively I said yes."
If you like a startup enough to invest in it, then invest in it.
Just use the standard
series
AA
terms and write them a check.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.
Comment
on this essay.


@aaron_lubeck The bleakness of this building is not due to modern architecture. It's a reflection of the developer who built it.

@rabois Hmm, I wonder if there are any numerical indices of traders' consensus about the likely effects of the tariffs?

@TimothyIvaikin I'm against Putin and the oligarchs.

@WonderMind001 I live in England.

@Dr_TheHistories A reconstruction of the crucified man's face based on his skull: https://t.co/OJGvrir27Q

People used to be afraid to visit San Francisco because the far left Board of Supervisors had mismanaged it so badly. Now SF is largely cleaned up, but people are afraid to visit because the far right executive branch is  mismanaging the country so badly.

@timurkuran Unfortunately the current US president will be among the last to learn these things.

@Itsjoeco Come on. No serious person in tech said it was a bad idea for the federal government to prevent bank runs.

New things are often preceded by partial approximations of them. In retrospect, Kramer and George Costanza were proto-Twitter users. They both seemed very strange when the show first aired, but they seem familiar now, don't they?

@Itsjoeco Where will you store it?


The EU should own it and put a cookie banner on the EU flag.

@gfodor @danheld She inherited that from Biden. It wouldn't actually have happened.

@danheld Wokeness was already retreating. It peaked four years ago. And she would have been able to appoint more competent officials, because personal loyalty would not have been such an overriding consideration with her.

@matthewherper Assuming your measure of slightness was correct, they'd be equally bad.

@abarrallen Allow startup founders into the country.

https://t.co/n99oYhaF5r

@mattyglesias Let's hope she's nothing worse than a dupe.

@iriscompietart @thomaschattwill Thanks, I've been thinking about it.

@Austen He is going to make so much money...

Has anyone else noticed an uptick in spam replies in the last week? It's as if it immediately comes back the moment Elon stops paying attention.

It would be great if we could get wokeness and overregulation swept away without also getting compromised and incompetent people running the government. But I worry that's too much to hope for.


Startup Investing Trends
June 2013
(This talk was written for an audience of investors.)
Y Combinator has now funded 564 startups including the current
batch, which has 53.  The total valuation of the 287 that have
valuations (either by raising an equity round, getting acquired,
or dying) is about $11.7 billion, and the 511 prior to the current
batch have collectively raised about $1.7 billion.
[
1
]
As usual those numbers are dominated by a few big winners.  The top
10 startups account for 8.6 of that 11.7 billion.  But there is a
peloton of younger startups behind them.  There are about 40 more
that have a shot at being really big.
Things got a little out of hand last summer when we had 84 companies
in the batch, so we tightened up our filter to decrease the batch
size.
[
2
]
Several journalists have tried to interpret that as
evidence for some macro story they were telling, but the reason had
nothing to do with any external trend.  The reason was that we
discovered we were using an n² algorithm, and we needed to buy
time to fix it.  Fortunately we've come up with several techniques
for sharding YC, and the problem now seems to be fixed.  With a new
more scaleable model and only 53 companies, the current batch feels
like a walk in the park.  I'd guess we can grow another 2 or 3x
before hitting the next bottleneck.
[
3
]
One consequence of funding such a large number of startups is that
we see trends early.  And since fundraising is one of the main
things we help startups with, we're in a good position to notice
trends in investing.
I'm going to take a shot at describing where these trends are
leading.  Let's start with the most basic question: will the future
be better or worse than the past?  Will investors, in the aggregate,
make more money or less?
I think more.  There are multiple forces at work, some of which
will decrease returns, and some of which will increase them.  I
can't predict for sure which forces will prevail, but I'll describe
them and you can decide for yourself.
There are two big forces driving change in startup funding: it's
becoming cheaper to start a startup, and startups are becoming a
more normal thing to do.
When I graduated from college in 1986, there were essentially two
options: get a job or go to grad school.  Now there's a third: start
your own company.
That's a big change.  In principle it was possible to start your
own company in 1986 too, but it didn't seem like a real possibility.
It seemed possible to start a consulting company, or a niche product
company, but it didn't seem possible to start a company that would
become big.
[
4
]
That kind of change, from 2 paths to 3, is the sort of big social
shift that only happens once every few generations.  I think we're
still at the beginning of this one.  It's hard to predict how big
a deal it will be.  As big a deal as the Industrial Revolution?
Maybe.  Probably not.  But it will be a big enough deal that it
takes almost everyone by surprise, because those big social shifts
always do.
One thing we can say for sure is that there will be a lot more
startups.  The monolithic, hierarchical companies of the mid 20th
century are being
replaced
by networks
of smaller companies.  This process is not just something happening
now in Silicon Valley.  It started decades ago, and it's happening
as far afield as the car industry.  It has a long way to run.
[
5
]
The other big driver of change is that startups are becoming cheaper
to start.  And in fact the two forces are related: the decreasing
cost of starting a startup is one of the reasons startups are
becoming a more normal thing to do.
The fact that startups need less money means founders will increasingly
have the upper hand over investors.  You still need just as much
of their energy and imagination, but they don't need as much of
your money.  Because founders have the upper hand, they'll retain
an increasingly large share of the stock in, and
control of
, their
companies.  Which means investors will get less stock and less
control.
Does that mean investors will make less money?  Not necessarily,
because there will be more good startups.  The total amount of
desirable startup stock available to investors will probably increase,
because the number of desirable startups will probably grow faster
than the percentage they sell to investors shrinks.
There's a rule of thumb in the VC business that there are about 15
companies a year that will be really successful.  Although a lot
of investors unconsciously treat this number as if it were some
sort of cosmological constant, I'm certain it isn't.   There are
probably limits on the rate at which technology can develop, but
that's not the limiting factor now.  If it were, each successful
startup would be founded the month it became possible, and that is
not the case. Right now the limiting factor on the number of big
hits is the number of sufficiently good founders starting companies,
and that number can and will increase.  There are still a lot of
people who'd make great founders who never end up starting a company.
You can see that from how randomly some of the most successful
startups got started.  So many of the biggest startups almost didn't
happen that there must be a lot of equally good startups that
actually didn't happen.
There might be 10x or even 50x more good founders out there.  As
more of them go ahead and start startups, those 15 big hits a year
could easily become 50 or even 100.
[
6
]
What about returns, though?  Are we heading for a world in which
returns will be pinched by increasingly high valuations?  I think
the top firms will actually make more money than they have in the
past.  High returns don't come from investing at low valuations.
They come from investing in the companies that do really well.  So
if there are more of those to be had each year, the best pickers
should have more hits.
This means there should be more variability in the VC business.
The firms that can recognize and attract the best startups will do
even better, because there will be more of them to recognize and
attract.  Whereas the bad firms will get the leftovers, as they do
now, and yet pay a higher price for them.
Nor do I think it will be a problem that founders keep control of
their companies for longer.  The empirical evidence on that is
already clear: investors make more money as founders' bitches than
their bosses.  Though somewhat humiliating, this is actually good
news for investors, because it takes less time to serve founders
than to micromanage them.
What about angels?  I think there is a lot of opportunity there.
It used to suck to be an angel investor.  You couldn't get access
to the best deals, unless you got lucky like Andy Bechtolsheim, and
when you did invest in a startup, VCs might try to strip you of
your stock when they arrived later.  Now an angel can go to something
like Demo Day or AngelList and have access to the same deals VCs
do.  And the days when VCs could wash angels out of the cap table
are long gone.
I think one of the biggest unexploited opportunities in startup
investing right now is angel-sized investments made quickly.  Few
investors understand the cost that raising money from them imposes
on startups.  When the company consists only of the founders,
everything grinds to a halt during fundraising, which can easily
take 6 weeks.  The current high cost of fundraising means there is
room for low-cost investors to undercut the rest.  And in this
context, low-cost means deciding quickly.  If there were a reputable
investor who invested $100k on good terms and promised to decide
yes or no within 24 hours, they'd get access to almost all the best
deals, because every good startup would approach them first.  It
would be up to them to pick, because every bad startup would approach
them first too, but at least they'd see everything.  Whereas if an
investor is notorious for taking a long time to make up their mind
or negotiating a lot about valuation, founders will save them for
last.  And in the case of the most promising startups, which tend
to have an easy time raising money, last can easily become never.
Will the number of big hits grow linearly with the total number of
new startups?  Probably not, for two reasons.  One is that the
scariness of starting a startup in the old days was a pretty effective
filter.  Now that the cost of failing is becoming lower, we should
expect founders to do it more.  That's not a bad thing.  It's common
in technology for an innovation that decreases the cost of failure
to increase the number of failures and yet leave you net ahead.
The other reason the number of big hits won't grow proportionately
to the number of startups is that there will start to be an increasing
number of idea clashes.  Although the finiteness of the number of
good ideas is not the reason there are only 15 big hits a year, the
number has to be finite, and the more startups there are, the more
we'll see multiple companies doing the same thing at the same time.
It will be interesting, in a bad way, if idea clashes become a lot
more common.
[
7
]
Mostly because of the increasing number of early failures, the startup
business of the future won't simply be the same shape, scaled up.
What used to be an obelisk will become a pyramid.  It will be a
little wider at the top, but a lot wider at the bottom.
What does that mean for investors?  One thing it means is that there
will be more opportunities for investors at the earliest stage,
because that's where the volume of our imaginary solid is growing
fastest.  Imagine the obelisk of investors that corresponds to
the obelisk of startups.  As it widens out into a pyramid to match
the startup pyramid, all the contents are adhering to the top,
leaving a vacuum at the bottom.
That opportunity for investors mostly means an opportunity for new
investors, because the degree of risk an existing investor or firm
is comfortable taking is one of the hardest things for them to
change.  Different types of investors are adapted to different
degrees of risk, but each has its specific degree of risk deeply
imprinted on it, not just in the procedures they follow but in the
personalities of the people who work there.
I think the biggest danger for VCs, and also the biggest opportunity,
is at the series A stage.  Or rather, what used to be the series A
stage before series As turned into de facto series B rounds.
Right now, VCs often knowingly invest too much money at the series
A stage.  They do it because they feel they need to get a big chunk
of each series A company to compensate for the opportunity cost of
the board seat it consumes.  Which means when there is a lot of
competition for a deal, the number that moves is the valuation (and
thus amount invested) rather than the percentage of the company
being sold.  Which means, especially in the case of more promising
startups, that series A investors often make companies take more
money than they want.
Some VCs lie and claim the company really needs that much.  Others
are more candid, and admit their financial models require them to
own a certain percentage of each company.  But we all know the
amounts being raised in series A rounds are not determined by asking
what would be best for the companies.  They're determined by VCs
starting from the amount of the company they want to own, and the
market setting the valuation and thus the amount invested.
Like a lot of bad things, this didn't happen intentionally.  The
VC business backed into it as their initial assumptions gradually
became obsolete.  The traditions and financial models of the VC
business were established when founders needed investors more.  In
those days it was natural for founders to sell VCs a big chunk of
their company in the series A round.  Now founders would prefer to
sell less, and VCs are digging in their heels because they're not
sure if they can make money buying less than 20% of each series A
company.
The reason I describe this as a danger is that series A investors
are increasingly at odds with the startups they supposedly serve,
and that tends to come back to bite you eventually.  The reason I
describe it as an opportunity is that there is now a lot of potential
energy built up, as the market has moved away from VCs' traditional
business model.  Which means the first VC to break ranks and start
to do series A rounds for as much equity as founders want to sell
(and with no "option pool" that comes only from the founders' shares)
stands to reap huge benefits.
What will happen to the VC business when that happens?  Hell if I
know.  But I bet that particular firm will end up ahead.  If one
top-tier VC firm started to do series A rounds that started from
the amount the company needed to raise and let the percentage
acquired vary with the market, instead of the other way around,
they'd instantly get almost all the best startups.  And that's where
the money is.
You can't fight market forces forever.  Over the last decade we've
seen the percentage of the company sold in series A rounds creep
inexorably downward.  40% used to be common.  Now VCs are fighting
to hold the line at 20%.  But I am daily waiting for the line to
collapse.  It's going to happen.  You may as well anticipate it,
and look bold.
Who knows, maybe VCs will make more money by doing the right thing.
It wouldn't be the first time that happened.  Venture capital is a
business where occasional big successes generate hundredfold returns.
How much confidence can you really have in financial models for
something like that anyway?  The
big successes only have to get a tiny bit less occasional to
compensate for a 2x decrease in the stock sold in series A rounds.
If you want to find new opportunities for investing, look for things
founders complain about.  Founders are your customers, and the
things they complain about are unsatisfied demand.  I've given two
examples of things founders complain about most—investors who
take too long to make up their minds, and excessive dilution in
series A rounds—so those are good places to look now.  But
the more general recipe is: do something founders want.
Notes
[
1
]
I realize revenue and not fundraising is the proper test of
success for a startup.  The reason we quote statistics about
fundraising is because those are the numbers we have.  We couldn't
talk meaningfully about revenues without including the numbers from
the most successful startups, and we don't have those.  We often
discuss revenue growth with the earlier stage startups, because
that's how we gauge their progress, but when companies reach a
certain size it gets presumptuous for a seed investor to do that.
In any case, companies' market caps do eventually become a function
of revenues, and post-money valuations of funding rounds are at
least guesses by pros about where those market caps will end up.
The reason only 287 have valuations is that the rest have mostly
raised money on convertible notes, and although convertible notes
often have valuation caps, a valuation cap is merely an upper bound
on a valuation.
[
2
]
We didn't try to accept a particular number.  We have no way
of doing that even if we wanted to.  We just tried to be significantly
pickier.
[
3
]
Though you never know with bottlenecks, I'm guessing the next
one will be coordinating efforts among partners.
[
4
]
I realize starting a company doesn't have to mean starting a
startup
.  There will be lots of people starting normal companies
too.  But that's not relevant to an audience of investors.
Geoff Ralston reports that in Silicon Valley it seemed thinkable
to start a startup in the mid 1980s.  It would have started there.
But I know it didn't to undergraduates on the East Coast.
[
5
]
This trend is one of the main causes of the increase in
economic inequality in the US since the mid twentieth century.  The
person who would in 1950 have been the general manager of the x
division of Megacorp is now the founder of the x company, and owns
significant equity in it.
[
6
]
If Congress passes the
founder
visa
in a non-broken form, that alone could in principle get
us up to 20x, since 95% of the world's population lives outside the
US.
[
7
]
If idea clashes got bad enough, it could change what it means
to be a startup.  We currently advise startups mostly to ignore
competitors.  We tell them startups are competitive like running,
not like soccer; you don't have to go and steal the ball away from
the other team.  But if idea clashes became common enough, maybe
you'd start to have to.  That would be unfortunate.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Dalton Caldwell,
Patrick Collison, Jessica
Livingston, Andrew Mason, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading
drafts of this.


@ruibeep This is the original image. https://t.co/zWA4jhcrC7

One of two photographs of Ada Lovelace as an adult, taken around 1843 when she was 28. https://t.co/CfZ7W4ZYK9

@khrachvik Wow, I wonder if there could have been something that artificially depressed Chinese life expectancies in 1945?

@CDMorlock The rate of increase in life expectancy was the same in Hong Kong, which somehow miraculously duplicated Mao's biggest W, but without the dip in the middle due 30 million people starving to death. https://t.co/iK8rgmrJo4

@patrickc I wonder if there's some way to hack this constraint. The probability of that may be low, but the EV could still be high.

@CompSciFact I hadn't thought about this for approximately 45 years.

@patrickc Will pharma companies be disincentivized from working on such drugs?

@ArmandDoma Left, because the language is intellectual sounding.

@sshhafiq The Age of the Essay: https://t.co/c6JW4s7ZT5

@LouisLebbos @TheBestOfAdam That made me laugh out loud. I'd forgotten that.


@staysaasy That the overall pool of founders has become more earnest, perhaps because of AI. That was the other possible explanation. But they don't think this has happened. Whereas they have made several changes recently to the way they pick founders.

@PaulJeffries That would be bad. For the world at least; it would be good for YC.

@CtrlAltDwayne I've known him for several years. I know he's a good programmer, and an expert in AI specifically and thus aware of the pitfalls. You really don't know what you're talking about here.

I'm not trying to change your mind, just explaining why I'm blocking you.

@Niklas_Sikorra I don't think so. The outliers don't resemble posers. Posers are trying to seem like the ideal founder, and the outliers almost by definition don't look like that.

@elkelk The same way you get better at any complex task. Look at mistakes and figure out how not to make them next time.

@iamJonasB Yes, that's the main way.

@HarounHickman Really? If that's true it would be a very encouraging sign.

@cremieuxrecueil Saying what?

@j4nve We did. YC has constantly been improving its ability to pick startups.

YC is always trying to get better at picking startups. It's a  significant part of the work. And if you're not getting better at it, you're probably getting worse. So they're always trying new things. It's encouraging to see evidence that these are working.


"Stop complaining and start building."

— Jessica

@abarrallen It happened a lot during both world wars. https://t.co/uXYrCIZGk6

@AlanLevinovitz @EconAndrew I'm not claiming everyone in the business world is earnest. Who on earth would claim that?

@BigTechAlert @lexfridman I didn't unfollow him. So if I had been following him, he must have removed me as a follower. Odd.

@PandeGG It would be more interesting to meet the guy who owned that car.

@pickover It seems pretty big. I'd guess tweets with quotes get about 1/8 the distribution of those without.

@EconAndrew This is not work done in earnest. This is people playing a game they know is dishonest, in order to get something they want.

"Elon wouldn't want to have to do that. He shouldn't make his users do it."

— Jessica on having to put links in replies

Jessica said that even though she knew she had to post the link in a reply if she didn't want to be penalized by Twitter's algorithm, she couldn't bring herself to do it. It was just too bogus.

@ObiUzi If you think I only started talking about this stuff recently, you haven't been paying attention.


@Restaurant_Kid Yes, of course we consider founders' characters.

@AutismCapital Look at the book. He's reading about a fierce wolf!

@calvinchen I would probably start with AI turned off.

@felpix_ From @dflieb. It's a good test.

The prospect that AI will eventually write most code isn't a sign that you shouldn't learn to program. If anything it's a sign you should. If big waves are coming, it will be better to surf on them than to be hit on the back of the head by them.

I met a 19 year old yesterday who'd been using AI to write code since he was 16. It was not an advance to him. It was just how programming is done. He took it for granted that AI will eventually write most code.

@Ex3NDR No, it wasn't literally invented by Mussolini.

@sudyk To keep them grounded, and (as in this case) to measure what kind of people they are. Imagine Trump reading to a group of little kids.

@moogrogue That's how you read to little kids.

@alexkaplan0 I don't know yet. I almost never watch TV, so I haven't seen her in action.


Here are some people who've passed the test: @Noahpinion, @NAChristakis, @billybinion, @sapinker, @nntaleb, @glukianoff, @McCormickProf, @mattyglesias, @ATabarrok, @cremieuxrecueil, @GarettJones, @nikitabier, @jessesingal, @AlecStapp, @glukianoff, @DKThomp.

Now that America has shifted from left to right, we can see who was genuinely independent-minded, and who was merely on the right. Who has spoken out against both wokeness and authoritarianism?

@TheIshanGoswami But don't take this as a general rule! In matters like this, individual circumstances take precedence over any general principle. You have to strike a balance between spending time on work and keeping people happy.

@TheIshanGoswami That's the age to immerse yourself in work. People's individual situations vary a lot, but ideally parents and siblings and partners will want to let you work if you need to. Whereas kids you can't neglect.

@TheIshanGoswami Do you mean family in the sense of your children, or your parents and siblings?

Especially when you're young, beware of dismissing some things you're curious about as unimportant. You risk pruning off outliers if you do that. A lot of great discoveries have come from investigating things everyone else thought were unimportant.

@petewilz @EricNewcomer @davidu Why do you think they have to be? A company doesn't have to consist of professional ethicists to commit to not being evil. It's just a promise to try.

@Liv_Boeree @Lewis_Bollard People may hate factory farming in principle, but in practice they order the bacon cheeseburger without asking questions.

@ExoMonto @goldman @MabreyTed Or used them as the prompt.

@Banglaphile @MabreyTed You don't have to be a lawyer to care about not violating people's constitutional rights. It's the foundation of American freedom.


@jessegenet @KTmBoyle This was the thing that struck us most at first about the primary school our boys went to in England, which in turn is probably the main reason we stayed here.

@louisjoejordan More like the opposite. Go to college before starting a startup, because a startup will take over your life.

@wjessup @carlcortright WTF? That's literally what a partner would tell applicants who thought they could do both.

@carlcortright Presumably what the partner told them was that they had to choose — that they couldn't both start a startup and remain students. Because that is certainly true; you're lying to yourself if you try to pretend you can do both.

@rajatsuri Getting the actual degree doesn't matter. But *experiencing* college for at least a few years helps enormously.

The founders I met today will probably do alright. They're smart and have a good idea. But the thing they'll do alright at (starting a company) is just a subset of the true problem (having a good life).

I don't approve of that at all. If students decide on their own to drop out of college to start startups, it's fine to help them. But it seems over the line to actively encourage them to drop out, especially at 18.

The AI revolution is causing a lot more founders to drop out of college to start startups. Today I did office hours with a pair of 18 year olds who dropped out to start a startup after some investors offered them $750k based on a paper they'd published.

An interesting, unexpected effect of the AI revolution: big companies seem to be more willing to buy from young founders. I'm not sure why. It could because they expect younger founders to understand AI better (as in fact they do). Or maybe they just need the software more.

@julianmartinez It's not just the startups themselves. Their customers are afraid to buy AI systems that train on user data. So even if the startups ship, the customers can't buy.


@soncharm You really need to do a little more research before you make these clumsy attempts at dunking on YC.

https://t.co/y5tf6LPrSZ

@harold_bracy What research is the British government obstructing?

@avidseries I'm not saying such research is banned, or I would have said banned. Merely that big obstacles are being put in its way, or as one would put it more concisely, that it's being blocked.

@RahbanGhani @SpencerHakimian People who are good at something usually know without needing an audience to tell them. But I don't do it because I think I'm good. I do it because it would feel unnatural not to.

@benlibor The YC logo is still the original one. And in any case I never left. I have a bunch of office hours with startups tomorrow morning.

@mattknox @hthieblot Maybe towards the end, but not at the start, judging from autobiographies I've read.

What's happening in America right now shows why it's good to have a world with multiple sovereign governments. Research on mRNA vaccines, for example, can continue in other countries even though it's being blocked in the US.

@bercankilic @benedictk__ No, there are some great ideas that happen to be easy to copy. It would be a mistake to avoid ideas for this reason.

@benedictk__ Mainly to put some distance between you and competitors. Especially if you're making something that would be easy to copy.

@vixsheikh I mean for example the thrust of a rocket engine. You can measure that very precisely.


@PP_Rubens That must be about 1 square inch of canvas. But I'll say Dutch, 17th century.

@winterrose Norbert Wiener liked to touch walls when walking down halls, and apparently this started a fashion for doing it at MIT.

@joelgrus People who know a lot about biology and whose conclusions aren't warped by any kind of ideology.

@OhHungryArtist What the hell? That's not what I wrote...

@JustinAlexP Maybe I'll get equal numbers of ideologues from both sides, and they'll just annihilate one another like electrons and positrons.

Christians can believe what they like, but they shouldn't be able to change what my kids are taught about biology. The woke can believe what they like, but they shouldn't be able to change what my kids are taught about biology.

@Itsjoeco I looked at the art. Maps of NJ and LI. That's commitment.

We can use this practice as a canary in the coal mine to measure whether Germany is serious about startups. As long as it persists, they're not.

I should also tell him that he now knows something many college students — and some college professors — don't know.

Something I taught 12 yo: The size of a company, in revenues, is distinct from its profit margin. The latter determines whether it could pay its workers more. So "Surely a huge company like Megacorp could afford to pay its workers more" is fallacious reasoning.


@grote_sam The Two Kinds of Moderate: https://t.co/ogMaJHrydF

@mert Her character is known to me. She's from California.

@ScottAdamsSays You can tell from the fact that the leaders of his own party didn't back up his claims. They would not have just let the Democrats steal the election, if that was happening.

@hance_zhang7 I'm really looking forward to the time when we can go back to not paying much attention to politics.

If you haven't decided yet who to vote for, here's why I think you should vote for Harris. https://t.co/ebBMbs1c7r

@TaasinAlvi Write.

@Joebobo2000 I like being the stenographer. It's a great thing to do together.

@heydave7 I started typing stories he dictated when he was about 4. It inspired him to see his stories printed out like the ones in books. When he was 9 he started dictating longer stories, and we got them printed by @tablopublishing.

Halloween is still not very big in the UK, but it will inevitably win because kids love it so much.

@TheDanWaldie It feels natural to him because he's been doing it since before he could write.


Organic Startup Ideas
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
April 2010
The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the
question: what do you wish someone would make for you?
There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically
out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are
going to be necessary to some class of users other than you.  Apple
was the first type.  Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a
computer.  Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design
one, so he did.  And since lots of other people wanted the same
thing, Apple was able to sell enough of them to get the company
rolling.  They still rely on this principle today, incidentally.
The iPhone is the phone Steve Jobs wants.
[
1
]
Our own startup, Viaweb, was of the second type.  We made software
for building online stores.  We didn't need this software ourselves.
We weren't direct marketers.  We didn't even know when we started
that our users were called "direct marketers."  But we were
comparatively old when we started the company (I was 30 and Robert
Morris was 29), so we'd seen enough to know users would need this
type of software.
[
2
]
There is no sharp line between the two types of ideas, but
the most successful startups seem to be closer to the Apple type
than the Viaweb type.  When he was writing that first Basic interpreter
for the Altair, Bill Gates was writing something he would use, as
were Larry and Sergey when they wrote the first versions of Google.
Organic ideas are generally preferable to the made up kind, but
particularly so when the founders are young.  It takes experience
to predict what other people will want.  The worst ideas we see at
Y Combinator are from young founders making things they think other
people will want.
So if you want to start a startup and don't know yet what you're
going to do, I'd encourage you to focus initially on organic ideas.
What's missing or broken in your daily life?  Sometimes if you just
ask that question you'll get immediate answers.  It must have seemed
obviously broken to Bill Gates that you could only program the
Altair in machine language.
You may need to stand outside yourself a bit to see brokenness,
because you tend to get used to it and take it for granted.  You
can be sure it's there, though.  There are always great ideas sitting
right under our noses.  In 2004 it was ridiculous that Harvard
undergrads were still using a Facebook printed on paper.  Surely
that sort of thing should have been online.
There are ideas that obvious lying around now.  The reason you're
overlooking them is the same reason you'd have overlooked the idea
of building Facebook in 2004: organic startup ideas usually don't
seem like startup ideas at first.  We know now that Facebook was
very successful, but put yourself back in 2004.  Putting undergraduates'
profiles online wouldn't have seemed like much of a startup idea.
And in fact, it wasn't initially a startup idea.  When Mark spoke
at a YC dinner this winter he said he wasn't trying to start a
company when he wrote the first version of Facebook.  It was just
a project.  So was the Apple I when Woz first started working on
it.  He didn't think he was starting a company.  If these guys had
thought they were starting companies, they might have been tempted
to do something more "serious," and that would have been a mistake.
So if you want to come up with organic startup ideas, I'd encourage
you to focus more on the idea part and less on the startup part.
Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems
like the problem is important enough to build a company on.  If you
keep pursuing such threads it would be hard not to end up making
something of value to a lot of people, and when you do, surprise,
you've got a company.
[
3
]
Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something
other people dismiss as a toy.  In fact, that's a good sign.
That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea.  The first
microcomputers were dismissed as toys.  And the first planes, and
the first cars.  At this point, when someone comes to us with
something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls
dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.
While young founders are at a disadvantage when coming up with
made-up ideas, they're the best source of organic ones, because
they're at the forefront of technology.  They use the latest stuff.
They only just decided what to use, so why wouldn't they?  And
because they use the latest stuff, they're in a position to discover
valuable types of fixable brokenness first.
There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just
becoming fixable.  If you find something broken that you can fix
for a lot of people, you've found a gold mine.  As with an actual
gold mine, you still have to work hard to get the gold out of it.
But at least you know where the seam is, and that's the hard part.
Notes
[
1
]
This suggests a way to predict areas where Apple will be weak:
things Steve Jobs doesn't use.  E.g. I doubt he is much into gaming.
[
2
]
In retrospect, we should have
become
direct marketers.  If
I were doing Viaweb again, I'd open our own online store.  If we
had, we'd have understood users a lot better.  I'd encourage anyone
starting a startup to become one of its users, however unnatural it
seems.
[
3
]
Possible exception: It's hard to compete directly with open source software.
You can build things for programmers, but there has to be some part
you can charge for.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston
for reading drafts of this.


@KTmBoyle @X This kind of shift will also show us which people are independent-minded: those whose opinions aren't influenced by it.

@campeters4 @KTmBoyle @X You're right, I should have said just "opinions" instead of "expressed opinions." I'll delete and repost.

@davegirouard The younger one was Thing 2 for Halloween one year around then.

My favorite video of all time. https://t.co/YiiYyNRupi

@HumanoidHistory Are you losing lots of followers? @ahistoryinart noticed the same thing...

@clark_aviation I was thinking "wow, he did a really good job on the truck and the white gates."

@GarettJones And maybe some kind of fence to keep any wild animals from getting too close.

@ahistoryinart Wow, that is good. Yet another artist I've learned about from you.

@gerad_t0d @gfodor @danheld I'm a US citizen. I'm still subject to US taxes.

Proposed design by @AriWagen. Looks pretty slick! https://t.co/p6J9DiDcdW


@Ngnghm @headinthebox Weel, it's trivial to *implement* OOP in Lisp, but that doesn't mean it's a good way to organize programs, except in specific domains like simulation.

@CcibChris I was thinking the name was a little too close to "tun," and then I thought maybe it's called that on purpose, and sure enough "tunnan" is the Swedish word for barrel.

@eladgil It's a bad sign that English doesn't have a word for this. But it's a good sign that we didn't have a word for the opposite either, and had to borrow one from German.

@readswithravi If you're going to do this kind of thing, start with copy and paste. Then it's harder for errors to creep in.

@readswithravi These are not bad, but you gave me a grocer's apostrophe. Ouch.

This pattern isn't as bogus as it seems. In fact they're all making the same important point: that determination matters more than most other advantages you might have. Obviously no one is better placed to see this than someone who has a lot of some other advantage. https://t.co/SOduMrzzkN

@sdixitmd Yes, exactly. Move fast and break things doesn't work for everything. No one believes that.

@bsilone I did the same thing when I explained how the appeal of Biden's student debt "cancellation" plans depended on the economic ignorance of his supporters.

@bsilone Insulting them gratuitously would be pointless. But if you have to describe something about his supporters to explain an important situation, then you should, even if describing them accurately amounts to insulting them.

The result will be a bull in a china shop, surrounded by fans who cheer loudly at the sound of breakage, no matter what it is. Every bit of china that can afford a lobbyist will send one to Washington to try to ensure that it, at least, doesn't get broken.


It's alarming to think how many people within how many companies are looking at this and thinking "We need to figure out how to get them to drink more."

Then I tried asking how I seem different from Paul Graham. Apparently I'm like he would be if he'd trained as a historian-linguist, and had a more surgical tone. https://t.co/jocIlOS0my

Inspired by Lev Reyzin's example, I tried asking ChatGPT 4o to "draw a picture that encapsulates what you think of me." Then I asked it to draw one that encapsulated what it thought of Paul Graham. https://t.co/T4SBeJD4kI

Tribalism doesn't make people bad. It reveals the bad character they already had.

@atrupar His connection to reality is Fox News. Which is close to having no connection to reality, but with its own distinct flavor.

That would probably be enough to tell you how big the problem was and what the worst culprits are. You'd be able to watch as specific motorcycles and leaf-blowers woke up your subjects and quantify the effects on their night's sleep.

Someone should do a research project to measure the effect of noise on communities' sleep. A version 1.0 would be easy to organize. All you need is a dB meter on a windowsill, and 5-8 people with Oura Rings living nearby.

@AnandValavalkar @atrupar He'd much rather write.

@PalmerLuckey IIRC the ban was not due to the oil crisis. It was a protectionist measure against the Concorde.

@acnewsitics Indeed, he is remarkably conciliatory, which I've never seen him do with anyone else he got into a fight with.


Running may be better exercise than walking, but walking is better for having ideas. I do get ideas when running, but not nearly as many. Possibly running uses more of your brain, whereas walking uses very little, judging from the fact that people can do it while asleep.

@RealJohnMaher77 I always try to carry paper, but I've found a folded up piece of paper is better than any notebook I've been able to buy.

@VlVEK So I don't forget what I've thought about.

@prem_thakker This quote reminds me of Life is Beautiful.

Ran into some friends and showed them the folded up paper I take notes on while on walks. "Is that some kind of shorthand?" they asked. It was my ordinary handwriting.

Wait till he finds out how much bits cost.

@maxim66876750 I know I do.

@SwishStreet @johnarnold I think that's the theory.

@johnarnold Car seat regulations apparently also cause people to have fewer kids. https://t.co/mSY4HmCazR

You know it's spring in England when you stop crouching over the Aga while cooking in order to warm yourself up.


@shahidkamal I don't understand. Do you mean you got a crazy idea from a peer of similar age? Or is there a typo there somewhere?

@darlucey The idea is a variable part of an otherwise constant application. And it's not that variable, because it was had by a constant person.

@Will_Bunch And now that you do understand what I meant, will you be deleting your original tweet? I don't think you will; I think you were being intellectually dishonest from the start. But prove me wrong. I'd be delighted to be mistaken about that.

@Will_Bunch Obviously I'm talking about quality in the sense of intellectual ability. It's hard to believe you actually thought I was saying students at elite universities are more virtuous. But if you did think that, I hope you understand now what I meant.

@darlucey If 1% of people are over 6' 4" and you measure your height 100 times, will you be over 6' 4" in one of the measurements?

@Will_Bunch If you think there's no correlation between university rank and student ability, the numbers would like a word with you. https://t.co/yTgAeUVzz2

@ramistheraja Upper or lower? There's no upper limit, but if you're under 17 you should probably stay in school.

@bscpredict Acceptance isn't random, so it depends how good you are. If you're really good you should definitely apply. If you suck, then it's definitely a waste of time.

@powerbottomson1 Just apply normally and then marry someone you meet during the batch.

@BLAppleby "The video should be 1 minute long and should contain nothing except the founders talking. This is not the place to submit a demo or promotional video."

https://t.co/BXwW52WzJk


@ryangrim If Twitter existed in 1941, there would have been people posting about how there was plenty of food in the Warsaw Ghetto. We all know there would.

@aiissent @sama No. He was surprisingly effective even then.

@FrankRundatz How does he benefit if I don't say who he is? You're bending over backward to misinterpret this.

@kinolanka Maybe not the very best, but it's certainly not boring.

@mpawlo If I phrased it that way people would mock me, but it does feel like that roughly half the time.

@ndemir It really is the ideas, though maybe for Jessica it's the people.

@brunomvpcosta Startups have a lot in common, but there's always something new.

@StanManWithPlan WTF. I have enough money that I don't need to do boring things.

@dwlz The hardest thing is coming up with completely new ideas for startups that need them. There have been a couple times when we couldn't come up with one in a normal 30 minute office hour slot and we had to keep going.

@ianbremmer Where are all these students going instead?


Orthodox Privilege
July 2020
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
 Einstein
There has been a lot of talk about privilege lately. Although the
concept is overused, there is something to it, and in particular
to the idea that privilege makes you blind  that you can't see
things that are visible to someone whose life is very different
from yours.
But one of the most pervasive examples of this kind of blindness
is one that I haven't seen mentioned explicitly. I'm going to call
it
orthodox privilege
: The more conventional-minded someone is, the
more it seems to them that it's safe for everyone to express their
opinions.
It's safe for
them
to express their opinions, because the source
of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe.
So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone. They literally
can't imagine a true statement that would get you in trouble.
And yet at every point in history, there
were
true things that would
get you in trouble to say.
Is ours the first where this
isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.
Surely it should at least be the default assumption that our time
is not unique, and that there are true things you can't say now,
just as there have always been. You would think. But even in the
face of such overwhelming historical evidence, most people will go
with their gut on this one.
In the most extreme cases, people suffering from orthodox
privilege will not only deny that there's anything true that
you can't say, but will accuse you of heresy merely for saying there is.
Though if there's more than one heresy current in
your time, these accusations will be weirdly non-deterministic:
you must either be an xist or a yist.
Frustrating as it is to deal with these people, it's important to
realize that they're in earnest. They're not pretending they think
it's impossible for an idea to be both unorthodox and true. The
world really looks that way to them.
Indeed, this is a uniquely tenacious form of privilege. People can
overcome the blindness induced by most forms of privilege by learning
more about whatever they're not. But they can't overcome orthodox
privilege just by learning more. They'd have to become more
independent-minded. If that happens at all, it doesn't happen on
the time scale of one conversation.
It may be possible to convince some people that orthodox privilege
must exist even though they can't sense it, just as one can with,
say, dark matter. There may be some who could be convinced, for
example, that it's very unlikely that this is the first point in
history at which there's nothing true you can't say, even if they
can't imagine specific examples.
But in general I don't think it will work to say
"check your privilege" about this type of privilege, because those
in its demographic don't realize they're in it. It doesn't seem to
conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It
just seems to them that they're right. Indeed, they tend to be
particularly sure of it.
Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says
they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite
to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's
impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything.
Imagine how rude that would seem. Similarly, if someone says they
can think of things that are true but that cannot be said, it's
only polite to take them at their word, even if you can't think of
any yourself.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Antonio Garcia-Martinez,
Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, Geoff Ralston, Max Roser, and
Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.