Five Founders
April 2009
Inc
recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most
interesting startup founders of the last 30 years.  How do
you decide who's the most interesting?  The best test seemed
to be influence: who are the 5
who've influenced me most?  Who do I use as examples when I'm
talking to companies we fund?  Who do I find myself quoting?
1. Steve Jobs
I'd guess Steve is the most influential founder not just for me but
for most people you could ask.  A lot of startup culture is Apple
culture.  He was the original young founder.  And while the concept
of "insanely great" already existed in the arts, it was a novel
idea to introduce into a company in the 1980s.
More remarkable still, he's stayed interesting for 30 years.  People
await new Apple products the way they'd await new books by a popular
novelist.  Steve may not literally design them, but they wouldn't
happen if he weren't CEO.
Steve is clever and driven, but so are a lot of people in the Valley.
What makes him unique is his
sense of
design
.  Before him, most
companies treated design as a frivolous extra.  Apple's competitors
now know better.
2. TJ Rodgers
TJ Rodgers isn't as famous as Steve Jobs, but he may be the best
writer among Silicon Valley CEOs.  I've probably learned more from
him about the startup way of thinking than from anyone else.  Not
so much from specific things he's written as by reconstructing the
mind that produced them: brutally candid; aggressively garbage-collecting
outdated ideas; and yet driven by pragmatism rather than ideology.
The first essay of his that I read was so electrifying that I
remember exactly where I was at the time.  It was
High
Technology Innovation: Free Markets or Government Subsidies?
and
I was downstairs in the Harvard Square T Station.  It felt as if
someone had flipped on a light switch inside my head.
3. Larry & Sergey
I'm sorry to treat Larry and Sergey as one person.  I've always
thought that was unfair to them.  But it does seem as if Google was a
collaboration.
Before Google, companies in Silicon Valley already knew it was
important to have the best hackers.  So they claimed, at least.
But Google pushed this idea further than anyone had before.  Their
hypothesis seems to have been that, in the initial stages at least,
all
you need is good hackers: if you hire all the smartest people
and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured,
you win.  All the other stuff—which includes all the stuff that
business schools think business consists of—you can figure out
along the way.  The results won't be perfect, but they'll be optimal.
If this was their hypothesis, it's now been verified experimentally.
4. Paul Buchheit
Few know this, but one person, Paul Buchheit, is responsible for
three of the best things Google has done.  He was the original
author of GMail, which is the most impressive thing Google has after
search.  He also wrote the first prototype of AdSense, and was the
author of Google's mantra "Don't be evil."
PB made a point in a talk once that I now mention to every startup
we fund: that it's better, initially, to make a small number of
users really love you than a large number kind of like you.   If I
could tell startups only
ten sentences
,
this would be one of them.
Now he's cofounder of a startup called Friendfeed.  It's only a
year old, but already everyone in the Valley is watching them.
Someone responsible for three of the biggest ideas at Google is
going to come up with more.
5. Sam Altman
I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in
this list.   But Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules.
If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be.
Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to
most when I'm advising startups.  On questions of design, I ask
"What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition I
ask "What would Sama do?"
What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect
applies to startups.  It applies way less than most people think:
startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the
way you might in a horse race.  But there are a few people with
such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.


@elonmusk I'd start from the principle that countries shouldn't invade their neighbors. It cost a lot to arrive at that principle and I don't want to go back. That would put me on Ukraine's side. But I'd want to consult experts about what I could do that would help them most.

It is surprising, but my guess is that it's not because they like Putin per se, but because they hate the high-handed smugness of the left establishment so much. I.e. this is a reaction in the purest sense.

@nikitabier @bookprotectors I was much more interested when I thought this was going to be a company that made some new kind of cover or case for books.

@Rg2official It would be a mistake to constrain yourself in that dimension early on.

@sarmadgulzar Resign yourself to spending a lot of time doing stuff you don't like.

I would like this to be true. Maybe it is.

@AlpacaAurelius Good design: buildings, furniture, graphics.

Paradoxically, the harder your startup's product is to build, the less of your time you'll get to spend building it. If you start a consumer web app you'll get to spend a lot of time programming. But if you start a fusion company you'll be mostly fundraising.

My heart sinks when a startup sends me a Carta link. Carta clearly has a vision of the world where everything to do with the mechanics of startup funding happens on Carta. But just using email is so much quicker and more flexible.

@DudespostingWs Relief that this time it wasn't you.


One of the things that makes me happiest is how long the lessons that YC teaches continue to work. I'll be talking to an alum from 15 years ago and they'll quote some principle back to me that they learned during the batch and still use today.

Some YC alums are now running public companies. Others have only been working on their product for a couple weeks. I talk to the whole spectrum, and it's remarkable how similar the conversations are. There's always stuff you're trying to figure out.

This one aged so well that I'm surprised it was only 7 months ago.

@DudespostingWs The dog spends 4 seconds in the air, which means he would have reached a height of 64 feet, so presumably not.

@AstroLoay Whoah, you're right. Sounds like they got you. https://t.co/dBt4D4mwNn

@callmehouck You know how you can be sure? It there had been some kind of fraud, Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence would have made an issue of it. Do you think they would have quietly lost the presidency for their party if there was actual fraud?

@callmehouck Don't tell me you're one of those people who actually believe the 2020 election was stolen.

@maxua I'm rooting for you guys too.

Anyone whose m.o. is to be the voice of reason is going to be very busy in the next 6 months.

These people have clearly not thought things through. If a Democratic cabal chooses a candidate they like instead of one that voters like, that *helps* Trump, because this candidate will lose in the general election.


The Submarine
April 2005
"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the
New
York Times
.  Why does this sound familiar?  Maybe because
the suit was also back in
February
,
September
2004
,
June
2004
,
March
2004
,
September
2003
,
November
2002
,
April 2002
,
and
February
2002
.
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back?  Because
PR firms
tell
them to.  One of the most surprising things I discovered
during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry,
lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news.  Of the
stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics,
crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits."  Our startup spent
its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling
our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000
a month.  And they were worth it.  PR is the news equivalent of
search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers
ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories.
[
1
]
Our PR firm
was one of the best in the business.  In 18 months, they got press
hits in over 60 different publications.
And we weren't the only ones they did great things for.
In 1997 I got a call from another
startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company.  I
told him they were PR gods, worth every penny of their outrageous
fees.  But I remember thinking his company's name was odd.
Why call an auction site "eBay"?
Symbiosis
PR is not dishonest.  Not quite.  In fact, the reason the best PR
firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest.
They give reporters genuinely valuable information.  A good PR firm
won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've
worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they
don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.
If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters.  The main reason PR
firms exist is that reporters are lazy.  Or, to put it more nicely,
overworked.  Really they ought to be out there digging up stories
for themselves.  But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and
let PR firms bring the stories to them.  After all, they know good
PR firms won't lie to them.
A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths
(what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same
strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth
favors their clients.
For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web
let small merchants compete with big ones.  This was perfectly true.
But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about this
particular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchants
were our target market, and we were paying the piper.
Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms.
At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of
their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for
free if advertisers would let them.
[
2
]
The average
trade publication is a  bunch of ads, glued together by just enough
articles to make it look like a magazine.  They're so desperate for
"content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim,
if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.
At the other extreme are publications like the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
.  Their reporters do go out and
find their own stories, at least some of the time.  They'll listen
to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically.  We managed to get press
hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed
to crack the print edition of the
Times
.
[
3
]
The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity.
You don't pitch stories to them.  You have to approach them as if
you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it
seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought
of themselves.
Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one.  We estimated, based on
some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the
Web.  We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral
enough.  But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote
it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20%
of the online store market.
This was roughly true.  We really did have the biggest share of the
online store market, and 5000 was our best guess at its size.  But
the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite.
Reporters like definitive statements.  For example, many of the
stories about Jeremy Jaynes's conviction say that he was one of the
10 worst spammers.  This "fact" originated in Spamhaus's ROKSO list,
which I think even Spamhaus would admit is a rough guess at the top
spammers.  The first stories about Jaynes cited this source, but
now it's simply repeated as if it were part of the indictment.
[
4
]
All you can say with certainty about Jaynes is that he was a fairly
big spammer.  But reporters don't want to print vague stuff like
"fairly big."  They want statements with punch, like "top ten." And
PR firms give them what they want.
Wearing suits, we're told, will make us
3.6
percent
more productive.
Buzz
Where the work of PR firms really does get deliberately misleading is in
the generation of "buzz."  They usually feed the same story to
several different publications at once.  And when readers see similar
stories in multiple places, they think there is some important trend
afoot.  Which is exactly what they're supposed to think.
When Windows 95 was launched, people waited outside stores
at midnight to buy the first copies.  None of them would have been
there without PR firms, who generated such a buzz in
the news media that it became self-reinforcing, like a nuclear chain
reaction.
I doubt PR firms realize it yet, but the Web makes it possible to
track them at work.  If you search for the obvious phrases, you
turn up several efforts over the years to place stories about the
return of the suit.  For example, the Reuters article
that got picked up by
USA
Today
in September 2004.  "The suit is back," it begins.
Trend articles like this are almost always the work of
PR firms.  Once you know how to read them, it's straightforward to
figure out who the client is.  With trend stories, PR firms usually
line up one or more "experts" to talk about the industry generally.
In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of
GQ, and a research director at Smith Barney.
[
5
]
When
you get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo,
there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.
Not surprising, considering The Men's Wearhouse was at that moment
running ads saying "The Suit is Back."  Talk about a successful
press hit-- a wire service article whose first sentence is your own
ad copy.
The secret to finding other press hits from a given pitch
is to realize that they all started from the same document back at
the PR firm.  Search for a few key phrases and the names of the
clients and the experts, and you'll turn up other variants of this
story.
Casual
fridays are out and dress codes are in
writes Diane E. Lewis
in
The Boston Globe
.  In a remarkable coincidence, Ms. Lewis's
industry contacts also include the creative director of GQ.
Ripped jeans and T-shirts are out,
writes Mary Kathleen Flynn in
US News & World Report
.  And
she too
knows the
creative director of GQ.
Men's suits
are back
writes Nicole Ford in Sexbuzz.Com ("the ultimate men's
entertainment magazine").
Dressing
down loses appeal as men suit up at the office
writes Tenisha
Mercer of
The Detroit News
.
Now that so many news articles are online, I suspect you could find
a similar pattern for most trend stories placed by PR firms.  I
propose we call this new sport "PR diving," and I'm sure there are
far more striking examples out there than this clump of five stories.
Online
After spending years chasing them, it's now second nature
to me to recognize press hits for what they are.  But before we
hired a PR firm I had no idea where articles in the mainstream media
came from.  I could tell a lot of them were crap, but I didn't
realize why.
Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where
you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether
the author was telling the whole truth?  If you really want to be
a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step
further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth,
but
why he's writing about this subject at all.
Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler.  Most people who
publish online write what they write for the simple reason that
they want to.  You
can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as
you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons,
though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust
bloggers more than
Business Week
.
I was talking recently to a friend who works for a
big newspaper.  He thought the print media were in serious trouble,
and that they were still mostly in denial about it.  "They think
the decline is cyclic," he said.  "Actually it's structural."
In other words, the readers are leaving, and they're not coming
back.
Why? I think the main reason is that the writing online is more honest.
Imagine how incongruous the
New York Times
article about
suits would sound if you read it in a blog:
The urge to look corporate-- sleek, commanding,
  prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve--
  is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace.
The problem
with this article is not just that it originated in a PR firm.
The whole tone is bogus.  This is the tone of someone writing down
to their audience.
Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online
is authentic.  It's not mystery meat cooked up
out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into
molds of zippy
journalese.  It's people writing what they think.
I didn't realize, till there was an alternative, just how artificial
most of the writing in the mainstream media was.  I'm not saying
I used to believe what I read in
Time
and
Newsweek
.  Since high
school, at least, I've thought of magazines like that more as
guides to what ordinary people were being
told
to think than as
sources of information.  But I didn't realize till the last
few years that writing for publication didn't have to mean writing
that way.  I didn't realize you could write as candidly and
informally as you would if you were writing to a friend.
Readers aren't the only ones who've noticed the
change.  The PR industry has too.
A hilarious
article
on the site of the PR Society of America gets to the heart of the
matter:
Bloggers are sensitive about becoming mouthpieces
  for other organizations and companies, which is the reason they
  began blogging in the first place.
PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers
like them.  And that means there may be a struggle ahead.  As
this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we
should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate.
When I think
how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional
media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories
to bloggers, if they can figure out how.
Notes
[
1
] PR has at least
one beneficial feature: it favors small companies.  If PR didn't
work, the only alternative would be to advertise, and only big
companies can afford that.
[
2
] Advertisers pay
less for ads in free publications, because they assume readers
ignore something they get for free.  This is why so many trade
publications nominally have a cover price and yet give away free
subscriptions with such abandon.
[
3
] Different sections
of the
Times
vary so much in their standards that they're
practically different papers.  Whoever fed the style section reporter
this story about suits coming back would have been sent packing by
the regular news reporters.
[
4
] The most striking
example I know of this type is the "fact" that the Internet worm
of 1988 infected 6000 computers. I was there when it was cooked up,
and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about
60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might
have infected ten percent of them.
Actually no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because
the remedy was to reboot them, and this destroyed all traces.  But
people like numbers.  And so this one is now
replicated
all over the Internet, like a little worm of its own.
[
5
] Not all were
necessarily supplied by the PR firm. Reporters sometimes call a few
additional sources on their own, like someone adding a few fresh
vegetables to a can of soup.
Thanks
to Ingrid Basset, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica
Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and Aaron Swartz (who
also found the PRSA article) for reading drafts of this.
Correction:
Earlier versions used a recent
Business Week
article mentioning del.icio.us as an example
of a press hit, but Joshua Schachter tells me
it was spontaneous.
The Web is a Writing Environment
A Sell-Out's Tale
How to Pitch Bloggers
Blogging for Milk
7 Habits of Highly Effective Blog PR
PR People Need To Learn To Deal With New Gatekeepers
Marqui Blogosphere Program
PR Watch
Real Men Exfoliate
How the News is Made
January 2006: The suit is back yet again
The Decline of the Tie
Japanese Translation
If you liked this, you may also like
Hackers & Painters
.


@prasoonds There's little alternative, since there aren't enough retired founders. But this should change. In this respect as in many others, Europe is just a couple decades behind.

@JohnDCook Be careful. He'll do it.

@sorensjorup @ecomarxi No, it's a very useful technique to give counterexamples to general statements, because it helps you figure out how you need to qualify them to make them true.

@ecomarxi It's not enough just to raise awareness if you net alienate people. If you do that, you're worse off. For example, imagine if a group decided to kill puppies as a form of protest. That would certainly cause public discontent. But it would make everyone hate them and their cause.

@indianauthority See, you underestimated your uncle.

@KettlebellDan Competent and benevolent.

@ecomarxi Incidentally, I was *very* tempted to try to draw in some hasbaritans to argue with you, but I decided to just try to explain, yet again, probably in vain, what I actually said about blocking traffic.

We're still very early in the evolution of social apps. We're basically driving cars before seatbelts were invented.

As always I can't help jumping from problem to solution. I wonder if there's a way to reflect "thoughtful people watching quietly" in a social app? For example by having a separate, secret Like button.

When I reply reasonably to zealots, it often feels like trying to hold back the sea. But I don't think it's as futile as it feels. I think there are also lots of thoughtful people watching quietly. Or at any rate I hope so.


@mattyglesias Least surprising news of the day.

@derJamesJackson I wonder if they'll be prosecuted by the German government for this...

@iamtapi @Austen More that they should just be profitable.

@punk_utopian I write all my essays in vim.

@rvivek This is just a screenshot of a text file in vim.

Here's an excerpt from it. Our heroes Artis and Cliggot are visiting Goblandia, the city of the goblins, where they are the guests of Mayor Grimefang. https://t.co/6VDXQ6N2TQ

@RonFilipkowski I wonder if people are paying to have their names redacted from the Epstein files along with Trump's, and if so what the price is.

@ST215 I sit at my desk and type while he paces in circles around it dictating.

@harold_bracy That sounds uncannily like some he wrote then.

@oscarle_x Parents want to spend time with their kids. And when they become teenagers they don't usually want to spend much time with you. So I'm actually ahead of the game by being his secretary.


Why YC
March 2006, rev August 2009
Yesterday one of the founders we funded asked me why we started
Y
Combinator
.  Or more precisely, he asked if we'd started YC mainly
for fun.
Kind of, but not quite.  It is enormously fun to be able to work
with Rtm and Trevor again.  I missed that after we sold Viaweb, and
for all the years after I always had a background process running,
looking for something we could do together.  There is definitely
an aspect of a band reunion to Y Combinator.  Every couple days I
slip and call it "Viaweb."
Viaweb we started very explicitly to make money.  I was sick of
living from one freelance project to the next, and decided to just
work as hard as I could till I'd made enough to solve the problem
once and for all.  Viaweb was sometimes fun, but it wasn't designed
for fun, and mostly it wasn't.  I'd be surprised if any startup is.
All startups are mostly schleps.
The real reason we started Y Combinator is neither selfish nor
virtuous.  We didn't start it mainly to make money; we have no idea
what our average returns might be, and won't know for years.  Nor
did we start YC mainly to help out young would-be founders, though
we do like the idea, and comfort ourselves occasionally with the
thought that if all our investments tank, we will thus have been
doing something unselfish.  (It's oddly nondeterministic.)
The real reason we started Y Combinator is one probably only a
hacker
would understand.  We did it because it seems such a great
hack.  There are thousands of smart people who could start companies
and don't, and with a relatively small amount of force applied at
just the right place, we can spring on the world a stream of new
startups that might otherwise not have existed.
In a way this is virtuous, because I think startups are a good
thing.  But really what motivates us is the completely amoral desire
that would motivate any hacker who looked at some complex device
and realized that with a tiny tweak he could make it run more
efficiently.  In this case, the device is the world's economy, which
fortunately happens to be open source.


@Jah12718 There was no way to the bank. He was already inside it.

@AndrewPGameDev You need it more with startups in the earliest stages, where the founders are often a bit helpless in the beginning, even though they will later become very formidable.

@Abhisennin Sure. Mothers do.

@OrmosBen Almost every VC fund.

@shundeshagen Merely something that could accurately be described using that phrase.

@algoal3x There does happen to be an unstrung longbow in the front hall that I picked up somewhere because it looked cool, but I've never used it.

Now that I think about it, YC definitely has a "feminine energy," but I think in YC's case it's a good kind. It's an incubator after all. It ought to be nurturing. And the fact that it is is largely due to Jessica's influence.

@gfodor There is something to that, but crazy and intellectually dishonest are definitely not mutually exclusive.

TIL if you tweet a frightful looking picture of JP Morgan, your mentions will be full of a frightful looking picture of JP Morgan.

@Rob_Pointon This is really cool. I think you may be onto something here.


@nylonmusq There have been several of those but so far I've fended them all off.

@rafi_talks I wasn't more perceptive. I just had more data at an early stage.

@pdontcontactme @BennettJonah The answer to that is the way supervisors are elected.

@jokull Things get better. So once you have an initial version of some new alternative that's low-end in the sense of being cheaper or easier, it will gradually increase in capability till it eats the high end. Microcomputers are a classic example.

How I explained it to 12 yo: Lucifer thought he was assistant regional manager, but actually he was just the assistant to the regional manager.

@dened21 @anshpay Several prominent tech people have been talking recently about cancellations that happened during that decade.

@tarunyadav9761 I think it enhanced both. It showed that he was strong enough to stand up to a mob, and that he was driven by principle rather than expediency.

@BennettJonah It's simply because Ed Lee died. He had been powerful enough to keep the supervisors at bay. But after he died suddenly, the supervisors took over the city, and they are idiots.

@clairlemon Prediction: this will be a popular way for the less intelligent students to satisfy the math requirement.

@punished_daniel Incidentally, she was lying. YC never had any "relationship" with her organization for her to end. They asked YC to give them some data, and YC agreed. That was it.


@Noahpinion If China has reached the zenith of its power, that implies it will also now start to decline.

@grok @YucelG48889 I love it when people ask you questions clearly meant to score off me, and the answers explode in their faces instead.

@gabriel1 What you're missing is right in the tweet you quote. None of them dropped out to work on an idea that was blowing up, like Zuck did. So they could have had more time in college and still have been just as successful when they did leave.

@takeshiyoung @zfellows That it is not. The person himself isn't compounding. That's how I know I didn't say it; it's nonsense.

@gtconway3d Good God, that guy is a *senator*?

@zfellows I didn't say that. You have a screenshot of the essay right there in your tweet and you can see that this sentence doesn't occur in it.

@zoink That's not an argument for dropping out. Finding an idea that can't wait is no more likely at one time than another. So you have to assume that anyone who did would have been just as likely to if they'd stayed longer in school. More likely to, in fact, since they'd know more.

@zoink Yes. None except arguably Arash dropped out to work on things that had to be done right then.

So the new plan is to release everything in the Epstein files except stuff about Trump and maybe some of his friends, and the story is going to be that this stuff isn't "credible"?

@zoink Most of them would have benefitted from staying longer in school, because most didn't drop out to work on ideas that had to be done that very moment. So they could have had their cake and eaten it too.


@snowmaker You give startups a lot more money, and the partners have a lot more experience.

@peterhartree To be fair that is about the peak of the graph.

@elonmusk Social media DIY Willie Horton.

@yuris And not just because it feels good to the investor. It's a predictor of how well the startup will do.

I saw an earlier version of this a month ago, and it was one of those step-function moments when AI is doing so much that you can't quite believe it.

@CJHandmer @typesfast Of course we all know what their real motive is. I just wonder what motive they claim to have.

@typesfast What is their claimed reason for being against automated terminals? That they are "unsafe"? Or do they openly admit to fighting technology that decreases the number of things humans have to do?

@snowmaker That made me laugh out loud.

The dog has learned how to make its pen walk. https://t.co/nYEGIg3Oiu

@barryeisler It's a way to emphasize one passage in a longer speech.


@shaunmmaguire Nothing surprises me less than to hear that every bad thing he's ever done (or not, but been accused of) has been published in the last few days.

@rickasaurus In this case literally.

@banivibes They didn't have any leverage. IBM just didn't understand microcomputers.

Now we can see why Israel has kept international journalists out of Gaza. If they hadn't, there would be hundreds of Anthony Aguilars telling people in their home countries what was actually happening there.

@anithpatel1 There are so many startup mistakes that I'd be reluctant to say this was *the* classic one. IMO the classic startup mistake is to build something no one wants.

@bercankilic You're not damned if you don't. Just focus on your users.

@grok @hornswoggle567 Why would Y Combinator prioritize Demo Day hype over the actual health of the company? YC doesn't charge fees — it gets "paid" in equity — so YC would only be hurting itself by doing that.

There have been exceptions. The DOS deal with IBM was a shortcut to growth for Microsoft. But that was because they were massively taking advantage of IBM. Unless you're sure you're doing that, you're the mark.

Startups often think a partnership with a big company will be a shortcut to growth. It pretty much never works. Nor does any other apparent shortcut. There are no shortcuts. The way to get growth is to engage closely with your users.

A very common story from a startup's investor update:

"Our partnership with <big company> did not go as expected... It was pretty evident that they were trying to take advantage of us... We’re going to walk away from that situation for now. A lot of hard lessons learned."


@brandonwilson @jesslivingston Biden has been the one exception since 1968.

@TheKevinDalton You'll like this one even better:

Latitude of the Great Pyramid of Giza: 29.9792458°N

Speed of light: 299,792,458 m/s

Coincidence? Yeah, right.

@AndrewYang Their biggest mistake was antagonizing the entire crypto community. And this was entirely unnecessary; there wasn't some other constituency they were trying to win points with by doing it.

@floydc69420 @BrightmindC Maybe not. But I at least like the truth to be out there.

@BrightmindC The NYT investigated the claims that those images were fake, and found that they were false.

https://t.co/JKusRiefCQ

@BrightmindC Can you not even read? "31 Israeli and 3600 Palestinian children" means 31 Israeli children and 3600 Palestinian children.

@johnmcdonnellMP No, that is not the lesson. Trumpism isn't driven by economics. It's driven by cultural disagreements you may be reluctant to acknowledge. It would be a big mistake to remain in denial about this.

@clark_aviation Come back soon!

@chinmay @anammostarac Actually I was thinking of Henry Ford and Howard Hughes.

@mckaywrigley @amasad This seemed quite a claim, so I had a look at the replies.  I have worse replies right now.


@hthieblot Counterexample: The Manhattan Project.

@hirschibar Probably.

@ericadamsfornyc If this wasn't written by ChatGPT, it could have been.

@LuisAndLearn Stripe launched ridiculously early.

@tom__ballard Not just in public, but with the public. Something like a social network has to evolve based on user feedback.

@JoshBobrowsky Err on the side of telling people unless you have a specific reason not to.

The danger of working in secret is inversely proportional to the simplicity and precision of the test. It would be safe to work in secret for a year on a new rocket engine. But if you work in secret for a year on a new social network, it will probably be a flop.

@achhintya @BoyanSlat Maybe a tenth of them.

@KenziesPoolBoy @BoyanSlat Inequality and Risk (2005): https://t.co/qDauL9DAMa

@hanzpo @BoyanSlat Some dialect of Lisp, definitely.


@JasonThorsness @haroonahmadmd Oh yes. I once asked ChatGPT if Cicero had said anything about originality, and it gave me a completely fabricated quote. Fortunately I looked up the reference and found it wasn't there.

@atrupar That first sentence sounds like an over-literal translation from German.

@Waymo @ToyotaMotorCorp Leverage as a verb? Oy.

@vitrupo If AI does everything else, there won't be founders for VCs to pick. All the things that would have been built by founders will already have been built by OpenAI.

@JerseyanUSA I didn't mean this just as a smug joke, but as a semi-serious proposal. I thought of it because I had no trouble explaining this to my 13 yo, and I wondered at what age it would get difficult. Then I realized the implication: that age kids would be Trump's peers.

Idea: Estimate Trump's mental age by explaining why trade deficits don't mean other countries are taking advantage of us to younger and younger children till you hit the age where they can't understand it.

@clark_aviation Looks like an image of a 172 generated by early AI.

@frankgoertzen @naval Sounds Right

@deepaksgt @naval Neither really. It's about writing.

@naval Much of a new essay.


How can he be a "big AI critic" and not have even tried ChatGPT till now? He has less experience of AI than the median teenager, and he feels confident enough to talk about AI policy?

This company is 20 years old and still has the energy of a startup. I don't know how he does it, but it's genuine, because he's always been this way.

I should try to suppress the impulse to make a face whenever I notice someone taking a picture. It means all pictures of me tend to look like this. https://t.co/WkGhxcyo1e

Pretty good clearance on the single eyebrow raise. That's what 20 years of hearing dubious pitches does to you. https://t.co/Q3b1jNr9Tl

A startup told me that one of their investors didn't like it that they were selling to newly founded startups, and wanted them to sell to bigger companies, who have more money. If investors tell you this, write them off as idiots. Selling to startups is the best thing you can do.

Sure, startups have less money, but they decide faster, and growth rate is the thing that matters for you, not the absolute numbers. If you have a good enough growth rate, the absolute numbers will take care of themselves.

Plus startups tend to be smarter, less bureaucratic, and more representative of future trends. So as well as giving you faster growth, they're also a better influence on your product.

As long as all newly founded startups prefer your product, don't worry about competitors who can convince larger customers. You'll own all future cohorts of companies, and that's more than enough. Plus in practice you'll eventually convert the old cohorts too, if you bother to.

This is why Stripe works so aggressively to get all the startups in each YC batch to use it. Once you've picked a solution for payments, if it ain't broke you're not going to fix it. And then their revenues automatically grow at startup rates.

When describing a startup it's usually better to use verbs rather than nouns. Say what you do rather than what you are. Not because it sounds more dynamic, but simply because it's clearer.


@ahistoryinart Very Freudian perspective.

@Austen Well, don't keep us guessing. Add a second tweet to the thread explaining what we should do.

The removal of these statues was meant as a sign that wokeness had won. Let's put them all back to show that it has lost.

It's not about the money, obviously. It's about how painful the signup process will be, the mental load of having another subscription, and knowing that they'll deliberately make it difficult for me to cancel. If I could click a button to pay to read a story, I'd do it.

I have become so resistant to newspapers pushing me to subscribe that at this point if I saw a page saying "Large Asteroid Headed Toward Earth. Subscribe to read the full story." I still might not do it.

@anammostarac One of?

(I was ok giving in on that one, because "mob" is shorter.)

One of the interesting things about Twitter is that old tweets form a dated log of the zeitgeist. One retro sign here is the use of "lynch mob" as a metaphor, which was banned soon after because you were diminishing the victims of actual lynch mobs and thus racist.

@CuriosMuseum Ack, way off. 10th century.

@Chris_arnade (Don't let this make you switch your account back to private. This guy has about a 3:1 following:follower ratio. No one is listening. Or no one would be if you hadn't retweeted it.)


The happy warrior. Don't mistake that smile for weakness. https://t.co/9xxQC9EPJh

@yuseftarek It's more obvious when writing is wrong than when painting is bad. Partly because writing is digital and painting is analog; "I'd have used a different word there" is much more definite than "that's slightly the wrong shape."

@skdh Yes, most writing is bad, so if you're annoyed by bad writing you'll be annoyed by most writing you see.

Maybe that's why I like Wodehouse so much. His books are a refuge.

@johndodds I'm not claiming that annoyance is a sufficient condition, just a necessary one.

@angkasasana The annoyance pushes me.

To be a good writer, you have to be annoyed by bad writing. You're unlikely to get your first drafts exactly right, and unless you're annoyed by what you got wrong, you won't fix it.

@eawosikaa @garrytan Wow, that made my day to read.

@winterrose I lived there in 1986.

@VABVOX It is indeed untrue, which is why I didn't say that.

Most universities have some very smart students, but the most selective universities have the highest concentrations of them.

@sidsomanii @NateSilver538 The University of Chicago seems like it's on a roll.


This would probably seem irresponsible to people in most other industries. But the variation in outcomes in startup investing is so much larger than in most other kinds of work that it's qualitatively different. Existing customs are often no guide.

The returns from startup investing depend far more on which companies you fund than on how good the terms are. I often (probably more often than not) agree to invest in startups without asking what the valuation cap will be.

@MIT_CSAIL McCarthy

@ric_orna @reidhoffman Yes, that's true. It also helps you in filtering applications.

@akomarov @reidhoffman YC is like a school. You can't only help the students that you think will go on to do great things. You have to help them all.

@davidlinjiahao @elonmusk @realDonaldTrump In ordinary English usage there's no difference between those two phrases.

@josephjojoe @reidhoffman Yes, for both kinds.

@elonmusk @realDonaldTrump Well that's not true. Civilization didn't end when the Democrats won 4 years ago. Why would it have ended if they won now?

@Scientific_Bird Also: An English professor using "it's" as the possessive? That is genuinely frightening.

@reidhoffman YC office hours are mostly spent talking to companies that won't affect our returns, but in YC's case I don't think it's a mistake. It's how YC should work.


@sarmadgulzar I don't see it. I have Twitter set just to show me just tweets by people I follow.

@vkryukov Usually being wrong in different areas is correlated, but in politics this is distorted by the association between extreme leftism and universities, where a lot of smart people spend a lot of time.

@Lunens__ I did briefly, but it sounds like a hell of primness and blocking. I'd be happy to try it if this turns out to be false though.

Twitter seems a bit impoverished now that so many leftish users have fled. They may have been wronger on average about politics, but they were more interesting on average about other topics.

@AlecStapp What do you think they are? I'm guessing state tax rates and residential construction policy, but anything else?

@mmay3r Never? Think how long the future is.

@LizWolfeReason You're not required to carry ID when you're just walking around on the street.

The last administration appointed unqualified people to top government jobs because of DEI. The current one is doing it out of... sheer cluelessness?

Cruft breeds cruft.

(If you're not familiar with the word "cruft," it means an accumulation of unnecessary stuff.)

@LandsknechtPike One of my Hacker News sockpuppet accounts has a surname meant to suggest Wendish origin.


What I Did this Summer
October 2005
The first Summer Founders Program has just finished.  We were
surprised how well it went.  Overall only about 10% of startups
succeed, but if I had to guess now, I'd predict three or four of
the eight startups we funded will make it.
Of the startups that needed further funding, I believe all have
either closed a round or are likely to soon.  Two have already
turned down (lowball) acquisition offers.
We would have been happy if just one of the eight seemed promising
by the end of the summer.  What's going on?  Did some kind of anomaly
make this summer's applicants especially good?  We worry about that,
but we can't think of one.  We'll find out this
winter
.
The whole summer was full of surprises.  The best was that the
hypothesis
we were testing seems to be
correct.  Young hackers can start viable companies.  This is good
news for two reasons: (a) it's an encouraging thought, and (b) it
means that Y Combinator, which is predicated on the idea, is not
hosed.
Age
More precisely, the hypothesis was that success in a startup depends
mainly on how smart and energetic you are, and much less on how old
you are or how much business experience you have.  The results so
far bear this out.  The 2005 summer founders ranged in age from 18
to 28 (average 23), and there is no correlation between their ages
and how well they're doing.
This should not really be surprising. Bill Gates and Michael Dell
were both 19 when they started the companies that made them famous.
Young founders are not a new phenomenon: the trend began as soon
as computers got cheap enough for college kids to afford them.
Another of our hypotheses was that you can start a startup on less
money than most people think.  Other investors were surprised to
hear the most we gave any group was $20,000.  But we knew it was
possible to start on that little because we started Viaweb on
$10,000.
And so it proved this summer.  Three months' funding is enough to
get into second gear.  We had a demo day for potential investors
ten weeks in, and seven of the eight groups had a prototype ready
by that time.  One,
Reddit
, had
already launched, and were able to give a demo of their live site.
A researcher who studied the SFP startups said the one thing they
had in common was that they all worked ridiculously hard.  People
this age are commonly seen as lazy.  I think in some cases it's not
so much that they lack the appetite for work, but that the work
they're offered is unappetizing.
The experience of the SFP suggests that if you let motivated people
do real work, they work hard, whatever their age.  As one of the
founders said "I'd read that starting a startup consumed your life,
but I had no idea what that meant until I did it."
I'd feel guilty if I were a boss making people work this hard.  But
we're not these people's bosses.  They're working on their own
projects.  And what makes them work is not us but their competitors.
Like good athletes, they don't work hard because the coach yells
at them, but because they want to win.
We have less power than bosses, and yet the founders work harder
than employees.  It seems like a win for everyone.  The only catch
is that we get on average only about 5-7% of the upside, while an
employer gets nearly all of it.  (We're counting on it being 5-7%
of a much larger number.)
As well as working hard, the groups all turned out to be extraordinarily
responsible.  I can't think of a time when one failed to do something
they'd promised to, even by being late for an appointment.  This
is another lesson the world has yet to learn.  One of the founders
discovered that the hardest part of arranging a meeting with
executives at a big cell phone carrier was getting a rental company
to rent him a car, because he was too young.
I think the problem here is much the same as with the apparent
laziness of people this age.  They seem lazy because the work they're
given is pointless, and they act irresponsible because they're not
given any power.  Some of them, anyway.  We only have a sample size
of about twenty, but it seems so far that if you let people in their
early twenties be their own bosses, they rise to the occasion.
Morale
The summer founders were as a rule very idealistic.  They also
wanted very much to get rich.  These qualities might seem incompatible,
but they're not.  These guys want to get rich, but they want to do
it by changing the world.  They wouldn't (well, seven of the eight
groups wouldn't) be interested in making money by speculating in
stocks.  They want to make something people use.
I think this makes them more effective as founders.  As hard as
people will work for money, they'll work harder for a cause.  And
since success in a startup depends so much on motivation, the
paradoxical result is that the people likely to make the most money
are those who aren't in it just for the money.
The founders of
Kiko
, for example,
are working on an Ajax calendar.  They want to get rich, but they
pay more attention to design than they would if that were their
only motivation.  You can tell just by looking at it.
I never considered it till this summer, but this might be another
reason startups run by hackers tend to do better than those run by
MBAs.  Perhaps it's not just that hackers understand technology
better, but that they're driven by more powerful motivations.
Microsoft, as I've said before, is a dangerously misleading example.
Their mean corporate culture only works for monopolies.
Google is a better model.
Considering that the summer founders are the sharks in this ocean,
we were surprised how frightened most of them were of competitors.
But now that I think of it, we were just as frightened when we
started Viaweb.  For the first year, our initial reaction to news
of a competitor was always: we're doomed.  Just as a hypochondriac
magnifies his symptoms till he's convinced he has some terrible
disease, when you're not used to competitors you magnify them into
monsters.
Here's a handy rule for startups: competitors are rarely as dangerous
as they seem.  Most will self-destruct before you can destroy them.
And it certainly doesn't matter how many of them there are, any
more than it matters to the winner of a marathon how many runners
are behind him.
"It's a crowded market," I remember one founder saying worriedly.
"Are you the current leader?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Is anyone able to develop software faster than you?"
"Probably not."
"Well, if you're ahead now, and you're the fastest, then you'll
stay ahead.  What difference does it make how many others there
are?"
Another group was worried when they realized they had to rewrite
their software from scratch.  I told them it would be a bad sign
if they didn't.  The main function of your initial version is to
be rewritten.
That's why we advise groups to ignore issues like scalability,
internationalization, and heavy-duty security at first. [1] I can
imagine an advocate of "best practices" saying these ought to be
considered from the start.  And he'd be right, except that they
interfere with the primary function of software in a startup: to
be a vehicle for experimenting with its own design.  Having to
retrofit internationalization or scalability is a pain, certainly.
The only bigger pain is not needing to, because your initial version
was too big and rigid to evolve into something users wanted.
I suspect this is another reason startups beat big companies.
Startups can be irresponsible and release version 1s that are light
enough to evolve.  In big companies, all the pressure is in the
direction of over-engineering.
What Got Learned
One thing we were curious about this summer was where these groups
would need help.  That turned out to vary a lot.  Some we helped
with technical advice-- for example, about how to set up an application
to run on multiple servers.  Most we helped with strategy questions,
like what to patent, and what to charge for and what to give away.
Nearly all wanted advice about dealing with future investors: how
much money should they take and what kind of terms should they
expect?
However, all the groups quickly learned how to deal with stuff like
patents and investors.  These problems aren't intrinsically difficult,
just unfamiliar.
It was surprising-- slightly frightening even-- how fast they
learned.  The weekend before the demo day for investors, we had a
practice session where all the groups gave their presentations.
They were all terrible.  We tried to explain how to make them better,
but we didn't have much hope.  So on demo day I told the assembled
angels and VCs that these guys were hackers, not MBAs, and so while
their software was good, we should not expect slick presentations
from them.
The groups then proceeded to give fabulously slick presentations.
Gone were the mumbling recitations of lists of features.   It was
as if they'd spent the past week at acting school.  I still don't
know how they did it.
Perhaps watching each others' presentations helped them see what
they'd been doing wrong.  Just as happens in college, the summer
founders learned a lot from one another-- maybe more than they
learned from us.  A lot of the problems they face are the same,
from dealing with investors to hacking Javascript.
I don't want to give the impression there were no problems this
summer.  A lot went wrong, as usually happens with startups.  One
group got an "
exploding
term-sheet
" from some VCs.  Pretty much all the groups who had
dealings with big companies found that big companies do everything
infinitely slowly.  (This is to be expected.  If big companies
weren't incapable, there would be no room for startups to exist.)
And of course there were the usual nightmares associated with
servers.
In short, the disasters this summer were just the usual childhood
diseases.  Some of this summer's eight startups will
probably die eventually; it would be extraordinary if all eight
succeeded.  But what kills them will not be dramatic, external
threats, but a mundane, internal one: not getting enough done.
So far, though, the news is all good.  In fact, we were surprised
how much fun the summer was for us.  The main reason was how much
we liked the founders.  They're so earnest and hard-working.  They
seem to like us too.  And this illustrates another advantage of
investing over hiring: our relationship with them is way better
than it would be between a boss and an employee.  Y Combinator ends
up being more like an older brother than a parent.
I was surprised how much time I spent making introductions.
Fortunately I discovered that when a startup needed to talk to
someone, I could usually get to the right person by at most one
hop.  I remember wondering, how did my friends get to be so eminent?
and a second later realizing: shit, I'm forty.
Another surprise was that the three-month batch format,
which we were forced into by the constraints of the summer, turned
out to be an advantage.  When we started Y Combinator, we planned
to invest the way other venture firms do: as proposals came in,
we'd evaluate them and decide yes or no.  The SFP
was just an experiment to get things started.  But it worked so
well that we plan to do
all
our investing this way, one cycle in
the summer and one in winter.  It's more efficient for us, and
better for the startups too.
Several groups said our weekly dinners saved them from a common
problem afflicting startups: working so hard that one has no social
life.  (I remember that part all too well.)  This way, they were
guaranteed a social event at least once a week.
Independence
I've heard Y Combinator described as an "incubator."  Actually we're
the opposite: incubators exert more control than ordinary VCs, and
we make a point of exerting less.  Among other things, incubators
usually make you work in their office-- that's where the
word "incubator" comes from.  That seems the wrong model.  If
investors get too involved, they smother one of the most powerful
forces in a startup: the feeling that it's your own company.
Incubators were conspicuous failures during the Bubble.  There's
still debate about whether this was because of the Bubble, or because
they're a bad idea.  My vote is they're a bad idea.  I think they
fail because they select for the wrong people.  When we were starting
a startup, we would never have taken funding from an "incubator."
We can find office space, thanks; just give us the money.  And
people with that attitude are the ones likely to succeed in startups.
Indeed, one quality all the founders shared this summer was a spirit
of independence.  I've been wondering about that.  Are some people
just a lot more independent than others, or would everyone be this
way if they were allowed to?
As with most nature/nurture questions, the answer is probably: some
of each.  But my main conclusion from the summer is that there's
more environment in the mix than most people realize.  I could see
that from how the founders' attitudes
changed
during the
summer.  Most were emerging from twenty or so years of being told
what to do.  They seemed a little surprised at having total freedom.
But they grew into it really quickly; some of these guys now seem
about four inches taller (metaphorically) than they did at the
beginning of the summer.
When we asked the summer founders what surprised them most about
starting a company, one said "the most shocking thing is that it
worked."
It will take more experience to know for sure, but my guess is that
a lot of hackers could do this-- that if you put people in a position
of independence, they develop the qualities they need.  Throw them
off a cliff, and most will find on the way down that they have
wings.
The reason this is news to anyone is that the same forces work in
the other direction too. Most hackers are
employees, and this
molds
you into someone to whom starting a startup seems impossible as
surely as starting a startup molds you into someone who can handle
it.
If I'm right, "hacker" will mean something different in twenty years
than it does now. Increasingly it will mean the people who run the
company.  Y Combinator is just accelerating a process that would
have happened anyway.  Power is shifting from the people who deal
with money to the people who create technology, and if our experience
this summer is any guide, this will be a good thing.
Notes
[1] By heavy-duty security I mean efforts to protect against truly
determined attackers.
The
image
shows us, the 2005 summer founders, and Smartleaf
co-founders Mark Nitzberg and Olin Shivers at the 30-foot table
Kate Courteau designed for us. Photo by Alex Lewin.
Thanks
to Sarah Harlin, Steve Huffman, Jessica Livingston,
Zak Stone, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this.
Romanian Translation
Japanese Translation


Boyan says this is 1-2% of global plastic emissions. If it were only 1% and they were able to keep growing at this rate, they'd capture all emissions in 8 years.

@OfficialBBrooks Ambitious parents.

@josephjojoe That's fine.

@Niklas_Sikorra Sell to everyone else first, then pick up the schools when your product is ubiquitous. E.g. Apple will presumably sell computers to schools, but they could never have gotten started doing that.

The problem with starting a startup to make something for schools is that startups have to begin by selling to early adopters, and schools aren't early adopters of anything.

@elonmusk @XEng Can you please stop penalizing links so much? They're some of the most informative and entertaining content here.

One of the most valuable things you can do for people is to tell them about something interesting they didn't know about. Links are often the best way to do that.

When I was running Viaweb I was puzzled by this kind of graph, with alternating steep growth and flat spots. Then I realized it was just sin(x)-like variability added to a consistently growing function. This is what "ups and downs" look like in a world of overall growth.

@HSB_Lab Not a horse, a mule.

@Noahpinion What is the Palestine gambit?

@Austen He would never have been king.


@JohnDCook Just do three separate repairs of one board each.

Brad Flora explains the rare, impressive thing that one startup did in their YC application.

"It was very clearly written. The language was very plain and simple."

You just have to ask "What counts as progress for this company?" and then do that. There is always some answer. And experienced investors (which are the ones you want anyway) know that this is as much as they can expect.

The truth is that Demo Day investors can't reasonably expect you to have done more in 3 months than you could do in 3 months. Which is a tautology, but nonetheless something I constantly have to remind founders, and which they usually find very liberating.

Someone asked Jessica whether YC would be appropriate for them, since 3 months and $500k wouldn't be enough to finish their product and they thus wouldn't have anything shipped by Demo Day. She explained that YC funded Boom Supersonic.

@DavidSacks Apparently Calcanis tried to avoid publishing the video of Palmer's talk. According to Palmer he published it a month after the other talks. But obviously too many people saw it live for him to conceal it forever. I wouldn't call that courage or character. He just had no choice.

@PavlosProkopeas You followed Jesus? What's his username?

Cancel culture had one upside: There are several people I followed after they got cancelled, to show support for them, and these have turned out to be some of the most interesting people I follow. Not surprisingly, since thinking for themselves was what got them cancelled.

You've heard of DEI hires. Now the NSF brings you: DEI funds.

@ahistoryinart I'm guessing he used photographs. https://t.co/nyyibrYYpx


@MacaesBruno I think the most apt word is reprisals.

@ggreenwald Who is trying to attack you?

@ilyasu Fortunately there are new YC startups every quarter.

@patrickc Roughly as if you had Sheldon Cooper walking by your side?

@cboyack @johnarnold If this (IIRC bogus) graph were the reason, why does it go back down in the 1990s?

@taufiqintech Clicks.

Don't mock the Trump administration when they walk back stupid policies. That's the direction we want them to move, away from stupid.

@johnarnold My guess is: rich people moved to the suburbs. And the reason murder rates went back down in the 1990s is that rich people moved back.

@dadiomov Careful, they might think of something dumber.

@Chris_arnade Does it happen more often in places where they're worse at English?


The Right Kind of Stubborn
July 2024
Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work
at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually
find something that does.
Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate
people are so annoying. They won't listen. They beat their heads
against a wall and get nowhere.
But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are
persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or
are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as
persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be
right or not?
If that's the only difference then there's nothing to be learned
from the distinction. Telling someone to be persistent rather than
obstinate would just be telling them to be right rather than wrong,
and they already know that. Whereas if persistence and obstinacy
are actually different kinds of behavior, it would be worthwhile
to tease them apart.
[
1
]
I've talked to a lot of determined people, and it seems to me that
they're different kinds of behavior. I've often walked away from a
conversation thinking either "Wow, that guy is determined" or "Damn,
that guy is stubborn," and I don't think I'm just talking about
whether they seemed right or not. That's part of it, but not all
of it.
There's something annoying about the obstinate that's not simply
due to being mistaken. They won't listen. And that's not true of
all determined people. I can't think of anyone more determined than
the Collison brothers, and when you point out a problem to them,
they not only listen, but listen with an almost predatory intensity.
Is there a hole in the bottom of their boat? Probably not, but if
there is, they want to know about it.
It's the same with most successful people. They're never
more
engaged than when you disagree with them. Whereas the obstinate
don't want to hear you. When you point out problems, their eyes
glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about
matters of doctrine.
[
2
]
The reason the persistent and the obstinate seem similar is that
they're both hard to stop. But they're hard to stop in different
senses. The persistent are like boats whose engines can't be throttled
back. The obstinate are like boats whose rudders can't be turned.
[
3
]
In the degenerate case they're indistinguishable: when there's only
one way to solve a problem, your only choice is whether to give up
or not, and persistence and obstinacy both say no. This is presumably
why the two are so often conflated in popular culture. It assumes
simple problems. But as problems get more complicated, we can see
the difference between them. The persistent are much more attached
to points high in the decision tree than to minor ones lower down,
while the obstinate spray "don't give up" indiscriminately over the
whole tree.
The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached
to their ideas about how to reach it.
Worse still, that means they'll tend to be attached to their
first
ideas about how to solve a problem, even though these are the least
informed by the experience of working on it. So the obstinate aren't
merely attached to details, but disproportionately likely to be
attached to wrong ones.
Why are they like this? Why are the obstinate obstinate? One
possibility is that they're overwhelmed. They're not very capable.
They take on a hard problem. They're immediately in over their head.
So they grab onto ideas the way someone on the deck of a rolling
ship might grab onto the nearest handhold.
That was my initial theory, but on examination it doesn't hold up.
If being obstinate were simply a consequence of being in over one's
head, you could make persistent people become obstinate by making
them solve harder problems. But that's not what happens. If you
handed the Collisons an extremely hard problem to solve, they
wouldn't become obstinate. If anything they'd become less obstinate.
They'd know they had to be open to anything.
Similarly, if obstinacy were caused by the situation, the obstinate
would stop being obstinate when solving easier problems. But they
don't. And if obstinacy isn't caused by the situation, it must come
from within. It must be a feature of one's personality.
Obstinacy is a reflexive resistance to changing one's ideas. This
is not identical with stupidity, but they're closely related. A
reflexive resistance to changing one's ideas becomes a sort of
induced stupidity as contrary evidence mounts. And obstinacy is a
form of not giving up that's easily practiced by the stupid. You
don't have to consider complicated tradeoffs; you just dig in your
heels. It even works, up to a point.
The fact that obstinacy works for simple problems is an important
clue. Persistence and obstinacy aren't opposites. The relationship
between them is more like the relationship between the two kinds
of respiration we can do: aerobic respiration, and the anaerobic
respiration we inherited from our most distant ancestors. Anaerobic
respiration is a more primitive process, but it has its uses. When
you leap suddenly away from a threat, that's what you're using.
The optimal amount of obstinacy is not zero. It can be good if your
initial reaction to a setback is an unthinking "I won't give up,"
because this helps prevent panic. But unthinking only gets you so
far. The further someone is toward the obstinate end of the continuum,
the less likely they are to succeed in solving hard problems.
[
4
]
Obstinacy is a simple thing. Animals have it. But persistence turns
out to have a fairly complicated internal structure.
One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the
risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than
merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent
must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep
thinking of things to try.
Energy and imagination make a wonderful combination. Each gets the
best out of the other. Energy creates demand for the ideas produced
by imagination, which thus produces more, and imagination gives
energy somewhere to go.
[
5
]
Merely having energy and imagination is quite rare. But to solve
hard problems you need three more qualities: resilience, good
judgement, and a focus on some kind of goal.
Resilience means not having one's morale destroyed by setbacks.
Setbacks are inevitable once problems reach a certain size, so if
you can't bounce back from them, you can only do good work on a
small scale. But resilience is not the same as obstinacy. Resilience
means setbacks can't change your morale, not that they can't change
your mind.
Indeed, persistence often requires that one change one's mind.
That's where good judgement comes in. The persistent are quite
rational. They focus on expected value. It's this, not recklessness,
that lets them work on things that are unlikely to succeed.
There is one point at which the persistent are often irrational
though: at the very top of the decision tree. When they choose
between two problems of roughly equal expected value, the choice
usually comes down to personal preference. Indeed, they'll often
classify projects into deliberately wide bands of expected value
in order to ensure that the one they want to work on still qualifies.
Empirically this doesn't seem to be a problem. It's ok to be
irrational near the top of the decision tree. One reason is that
we humans will work harder on a problem we love. But there's another
more subtle factor involved as well: our preferences among problems
aren't random. When we love a problem that other people don't, it's
often because we've unconsciously noticed that it's more important
than they realize.
Which leads to our fifth quality: there needs to be some overall
goal. If you're like me you began, as a kid, merely with the desire
to do something great. In theory that should be the most powerful
motivator of all, since it includes everything that could possibly
be done. But in practice it's not much use, precisely because it
includes too much. It doesn't tell you what to do at this moment.
So in practice your energy and imagination and resilience and good
judgement have to be directed toward some fairly specific goal. Not
too specific, or you might miss a great discovery adjacent to what
you're searching for, but not too general, or it won't work to
motivate you.
[
6
]
When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn't
resemble obstinacy at all. It's so much more complex. Five distinct
qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and
focus on a goal — combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit
like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But
the way you don't give up is completely different. Instead of merely
resisting change, you're driven toward a goal by energy and resilience,
through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement.
You'll give way on any point low down in the decision tree, if its
expected value drops sufficiently, but energy and resilience keep
pushing you toward whatever you chose higher up.
Considering what it's made of, it's not surprising that the right
kind of stubbornness is so much rarer than the wrong kind, or that
it gets so much better results. Anyone can do obstinacy. Indeed,
kids and drunks and fools are best at it. Whereas very few people
have enough of all five of the qualities that produce the right kind
of stubbornness, but when they do the results are magical.
Notes
[
1
]
I'm going to use "persistent" for the good kind of stubborn
and "obstinate" for the bad kind, but I can't claim I'm simply
following current usage. Conventional opinion barely distinguishes
between good and bad kinds of stubbornness, and usage is correspondingly
promiscuous. I could have invented a new word for the good kind,
but it seemed better just to stretch "persistent."
[
2
]
There are some domains where one can succeed by being obstinate.
Some political leaders have been notorious for it. But it won't
work in situations where you have to pass external tests. And indeed
the political leaders who are famous for being obstinate are famous
for getting power, not for using it well.
[
3
]
There will be some resistance to turning the rudder of a
persistent person, because there's some cost to changing direction.
[
4
]
The obstinate do sometimes succeed in solving hard problems.
One way is through luck: like the stopped clock that's right twice
a day, they seize onto some arbitrary idea, and it turns out to be
right. Another is when their obstinacy cancels out some other form
of error. For example, if a leader has overcautious subordinates,
their estimates of the probability of success will always be off
in the same direction. So if he mindlessly says "push ahead regardless"
in every borderline case, he'll usually turn out to be right.
[
5
]
If you stop there, at just energy and imagination, you get
the conventional caricature of an artist or poet.
[
6
]
Start by erring on the small side. If you're inexperienced
you'll inevitably err on one side or the other, and if you err on
the side of making the goal too broad, you won't get anywhere.
Whereas if you err on the small side you'll at least be moving
forward. Then, once you're moving, you expand the goal.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell,
Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough,
Courtenay Pipkin, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of
this.


The Python Paradox
August 2004
In a recent
talk
I said something that upset a lot of
people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on
a Python project than you could to work on a Java project.
I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb.  I
meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of
work to learn a new programming language.  And people don't
learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it
because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they
already know.
Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers
companies should want to hire.  Hence what, for lack of a better
name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write
its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able
to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those
who cared enough to learn it.  And for
programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language
to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that
people don't learn merely to get a job.
Only a few companies have been smart enough to realize this
so far.  But there is a kind of selection going on here too: they're
exactly the companies programmers would
most like to work for.  Google, for example.  When they
advertise Java programming jobs, they also want Python experience.
A friend of mine who knows nearly all the widely used languages
uses Python for most of his projects.  He says the main reason
is that he likes the way source code looks.  That may seem
a frivolous reason to choose one language over another.
But it is not so frivolous as it sounds: when you program,
you spend more time reading code than writing it.
You push blobs of source code around the way a sculptor does
blobs of clay.  So a language that makes source code ugly is
maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps
would be to a sculptor.
At the mention of ugly source code, people will of course think
of Perl.  But the superficial ugliness of Perl is not the sort
I mean.  Real ugliness is not harsh-looking
syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong
concepts.  Perl may look like a cartoon character swearing,
but there are
cases
where it surpasses Python conceptually.
So far, anyway. Both languages are of course
moving
targets.  But they
share, along with Ruby (and Icon, and Joy, and J, and Lisp,
and Smalltalk) the fact that
they're created by, and used by, people who really care about
programming.   And those tend to be the ones who do it well.
Turkish Translation
Japanese Translation
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French Translation
Telugu Translation
If you liked this, you may also like
Hackers & Painters
.


How to detect Russian fake account farms: they use words that haven't been common in American English for decades.

https://t.co/WbMPf1TU10

@JacobJaber Some, but you lose net.

@IKchmt6jSYhp5I8 Don't I know it!

The Victorians lacked the confidence to do things simply. Their architecture, their writing, their art — everything they made is gratuitously complicated.

@abuibrahim_mm @calvinchen Simple can be beautiful.

@NaMura001 YC does very early stage investing. It's not in competition with venture debt.

@calvinchen Figure out how to say what you want to in the fewest words.

@tom_doerr There are many books about this subject, but it wasn't just WW II.

I didn't realize till I saw this what a huge lead the UK had in industrializing. Even as late as 1925 there's still a massive difference. https://t.co/R0BP17fxDA

We saw a small house in Palo Alto being reroofed and we were happy because this meant it probably wouldn't be demolished to be replaced by a McMansion for a while at least.


@NAChristakis Grades are stressors, but not because they're unequivocal or because they're assigned by someone else. The problem is that (a) they've come to be used for much more than telling students how they're doing, and (b) they're so hackable.

https://t.co/CtgHE32gyR

@mattyglesias @RachelBitecofer Man, the viciousness of these people's attacks on you reminds me how divided the Democrats are, and how much this weakens us.

@TheExiledOne91 @MarkHalperin They have to produce a candidate voters like, or they lose the general election.

@mindthelongterm I was thinking that. It's even more collisonian than the Collisons.

The phrase "co-work with users" sends a thrill of excitement through me. This is a startup that's likely to succeed.

@TheDankInformer @mehran__jalali Sure: https://t.co/9qAByEpvBk

@mehran__jalali Sorry, but now that YC companies have gone public I can no longer do this without violating the principle of not picking favorites among them.

@OptimoPrincipi I can imagine some obscure English regional holiday in which it's traditional to make a Commodus jelly.

@elonmusk No, a new Subaru. (It's a rental.)

@mattyglesias Here's the actual data. It's clear that 1968 was not a landslide in either popular or electoral votes. https://t.co/3VEQbUbj8R


How People Get Rich Now
April 2021
Every year since 1982,
Forbes
magazine has published a list of the
richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to
the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big differences.
In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the
100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10
du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in
half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes.
Why would the percentage of heirs decrease? Not because inheritance
taxes increased. In fact, they decreased significantly during this
period. The reason the percentage of heirs has decreased is not
that fewer people are inheriting great fortunes, but that more
people are making them.
How are people making these new fortunes? Roughly 3/4 by starting
companies and 1/4 by investing. Of the 73 new fortunes in 2020, 56
derive from founders' or early employees' equity (52 founders, 2
early employees, and 2 wives of founders), and 17 from managing
investment funds.
There were no fund managers among the 100 richest Americans in 1982.
Hedge funds and private equity firms existed in 1982, but none of
their founders were rich enough yet to make it into the top 100.
Two things changed: fund managers discovered new ways to generate
high returns, and more investors were willing to trust them with
their money.
[
1
]
But the main source of new fortunes now is starting companies, and
when you look at the data, you see big changes there too. People
get richer from starting companies now than they did in 1982, because
the companies do different things.
In 1982, there were two dominant sources of new wealth: oil and
real estate. Of the 40 new fortunes in 1982, at least 24 were due
primarily to oil or real estate. Now only a small number are: of
the 73 new fortunes in 2020, 4 were due to real estate and only 2
to oil.
By 2020 the biggest source of new wealth was what are sometimes
called "tech" companies. Of the 73 new fortunes, about 30 derive
from such companies. These are particularly common among the richest
of the rich: 8 of the top 10 fortunes in 2020 were new fortunes of
this type.
Arguably it's slightly misleading to treat tech as a category.
Isn't Amazon really a retailer, and Tesla a car maker? Yes and no.
Maybe in 50 years, when what we call tech is taken for granted, it
won't seem right to put these two businesses in the same category.
But at the moment at least, there is definitely something they share
in common that distinguishes them. What retailer starts AWS? What
car maker is run by someone who also has a rocket company?
The tech companies behind the top 100 fortunes also form a
well-differentiated group in the sense that they're all companies
that venture capitalists would readily invest in, and the others
mostly not. And there's a reason why: these are mostly companies
that win by having better technology, rather than just a CEO who's
really driven and good at making deals.
To that extent, the rise of the tech companies represents a qualitative
change. The oil and real estate magnates of the 1982 Forbes 400
didn't win by making better technology. They won by being really
driven and good at making deals.
[
2
]
And indeed, that way of
getting rich is so old that it predates the Industrial Revolution.
The courtiers who got rich in the (nominal) service of European
royal houses in the 16th and 17th centuries were also, as a rule,
really driven and good at making deals.
People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look
back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who
got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into
how
they
got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the
richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural
resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than
a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech
companies?
Why are people starting so many more new companies than they used
to, and why are they getting so rich from it? The answer to the
first question, curiously enough, is that it's misphrased. We
shouldn't be asking why people are starting companies, but why
they're starting companies
again
.
[
3
]
In 1892, the
New York Herald Tribune
compiled a list of all the
millionaires in America. They found 4047 of them. How many had
inherited their wealth then? Only about 20%, which is less than the
proportion of heirs today. And when you investigate the sources of
the new fortunes, 1892 looks even more like today. Hugh Rockoff
found that "many of the richest ... gained their initial edge from
the new technology of mass production."
[
4
]
So it's not 2020 that's the anomaly here, but 1982. The real question
is why so few people had gotten rich from starting companies in
1982. And the answer is that even as the
Herald Tribune
's list was
being compiled, a wave of
consolidation
was sweeping through the
American economy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
financiers like J. P. Morgan combined thousands of smaller companies
into a few hundred giant ones with commanding economies of scale.
By the end of World War II, as Michael Lind writes, "the major
sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed
cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations."
[
5
]
In 1960, most of the people who start startups today would have
gone to work for one of them. You could get rich from starting your
own company in 1890 and in 2020, but in 1960 it was not really a
viable option. You couldn't break through the oligopolies to get
at the markets. So the prestigious route in 1960 was not to start
your own company, but to work your way up the corporate ladder at
an existing one.
[
6
]
Making everyone a corporate employee decreased economic inequality
(and every other kind of variation), but if your model of normal
is the mid 20th century, you have a very misleading model in that
respect. J. P. Morgan's economy turned out to be just a phase, and
starting in the 1970s, it began to break up.
Why did it break up? Partly senescence. The big companies that
seemed models of scale and efficiency in 1930 had by 1970 become
slack and bloated. By 1970 the rigid structure of the economy was
full of cosy nests that various groups had built to insulate
themselves from market forces. During the Carter administration the
federal government realized something was amiss and began, in a
process they called "deregulation," to roll back the policies that
propped up the oligopolies.
But it wasn't just decay from within that broke up J. P. Morgan's
economy. There was also pressure from without, in the form of new
technology, and particularly microelectronics. The best way to
envision what happened is to imagine a pond with a crust of ice on
top. Initially the only way from the bottom to the surface is around
the edges. But as the ice crust weakens, you start to be able to
punch right through the middle.
The edges of the pond were pure tech: companies that actually
described themselves as being in the electronics or software business.
When you used the word "startup" in 1990, that was what you meant.
But now startups are punching right through the middle of the ice
crust and displacing incumbents like retailers and TV networks and
car companies.
[
7
]
But though the breakup of J. P. Morgan's economy created a new world
in the technological sense, it was a reversion to the norm in the
social sense. If you only look back as far as the mid 20th century,
it seems like people getting rich by starting their own companies
is a recent phenomenon. But if you look back further, you realize
it's actually the default. So what we should expect in the future
is more of the same. Indeed, we should expect both the number and
wealth of founders to grow, because every decade it gets easier to
start a startup.
Part of the reason it's getting easier to start a startup is social.
Society is (re)assimilating the concept. If you start one now, your
parents won't freak out the way they would have a generation ago,
and knowledge about how to do it is much more widespread. But the
main reason it's easier to start a startup now is that it's cheaper.
Technology has driven down the cost of both building products and
acquiring customers.
The decreasing cost of starting a startup has in turn changed the
balance of power between founders and investors. Back when starting
a startup meant building a factory, you needed investors' permission
to do it at all. But now investors need founders more than founders
need investors, and that, combined with the increasing amount of
venture capital available, has driven up valuations.
[
8
]
So the decreasing cost of starting a startup increases the number
of rich people in two ways: it means that more people start them,
and that those who do can raise money on better terms.
But there's also a third factor at work: the companies themselves
are more valuable, because newly founded companies grow faster than
they used to. Technology hasn't just made it cheaper to build and
distribute things, but faster too.
This trend has been running for a long time. IBM, founded in 1896,
took 45 years to reach a billion 2020 dollars in revenue.
Hewlett-Packard, founded in 1939, took 25 years. Microsoft, founded
in 1975, took 13 years. Now the norm for fast-growing companies is
7 or 8 years.
[
9
]
Fast growth has a double effect on the value of founders' stock.
The value of a company is a function of its revenue and its growth
rate. So if a company grows faster, you not only get to a billion
dollars in revenue sooner, but the company is more valuable when
it reaches that point than it would be if it were growing slower.
That's why founders sometimes get so rich so young now. The low
initial cost of starting a startup means founders can start young,
and the fast growth of companies today means that if they succeed
they could be surprisingly rich just a few years later.
It's easier now to start and grow a company than it has ever been.
That means more people start them, that those who do get better
terms from investors, and that the resulting companies become more
valuable. Once you understand how these mechanisms work, and that
startups were suppressed for most of the 20th century, you don't
have to resort to some vague right turn the country took under
Reagan to explain why America's Gini coefficient is increasing. Of
course the Gini coefficient is increasing. With more people starting
more valuable companies, how could it not be?
Notes
[
1
]
Investment firms grew rapidly after a regulatory change by
the Labor Department in 1978 allowed pension funds to invest in
them, but the effects of this growth were not yet visible in the
top 100 fortunes in 1982.
[
2
]
George Mitchell deserves mention as an exception. Though
really driven and good at making deals, he was also the first to
figure out how to use fracking to get natural gas out of shale.
[
3
]
When I say people are starting more companies, I mean the
type of company meant to
grow
very big. There has actually been a
decrease in the last couple decades in the overall number of new
companies. But the vast majority of companies are small retail and
service businesses. So what the statistics about the decreasing
number of new businesses mean is that people are starting fewer
shoe stores and barber shops.
People sometimes get
confused
when they see a graph labelled
"startups" that's going down, because there are two senses of the
word "startup": (1) the founding of a company, and (2) a particular
type of company designed to grow big fast. The statistics mean
startup in sense (1), not sense (2).
[
4
]
Rockoff, Hugh. "Great Fortunes of the Gilded Age." NBER Working
Paper 14555, 2008.
[
5
]
Lind, Michael.
Land of Promise.
HarperCollins, 2012.
It's also likely that the high tax rates in the mid 20th century
deterred people from starting their own companies. Starting one's
own company is risky, and when risk isn't rewarded, people opt for
safety
instead.
But it wasn't simply cause and effect. The oligopolies and high tax
rates of the mid 20th century were all of a piece. Lower taxes are
not just a cause of entrepreneurship, but an effect as well: the
people getting rich in the mid 20th century from real estate and
oil exploration lobbied for and got huge tax loopholes that made
their effective tax rate much lower, and presumably if it had been
more common to grow big companies by building new technology, the
people doing that would have lobbied for their own loopholes as
well.
[
6
]
That's why the people who did get rich in the mid 20th century
so often got rich from oil exploration or real estate. Those were
the two big areas of the economy that weren't susceptible to
consolidation.
[
7
]
The pure tech companies used to be called "high technology" startups.
But now that startups can punch through the middle of the ice crust,
we don't need a separate name for the edges, and the term "high-tech"
has a decidedly
retro
sound.
[
8
]
Higher valuations mean you either sell less stock to get a
given amount of money, or get more money for a given amount of
stock. The typical startup does some of each. Obviously you end up
richer if you keep more stock, but you should also end up richer
if you raise more money, because (a) it should make the company
more successful, and (b) you should be able to last longer before
the next round, or not even need one. Notice all those shoulds
though. In practice a lot of money slips through them.
It might seem that the huge rounds raised by startups nowadays
contradict the claim that it has become cheaper to start one. But
there's no contradiction here; the startups that raise the most are
the ones doing it by choice, in order to grow faster, not the ones
doing it because they need the money to survive. There's nothing
like not needing money to make people offer it to you.
You would think, after having been on the side of labor in its fight
with capital for almost two centuries, that the far left would be
happy that labor has finally prevailed. But none of them seem to
be. You can almost hear them saying "No, no, not
that
way."
[
9
]
IBM was created in 1911 by merging three companies, the most
important of which was Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company,
founded in 1896. In 1941 its revenues were $60 million.
Hewlett-Packard's revenues in 1964 were $125 million.
Microsoft's revenues in 1988 were $590 million.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Bob Lesko, Robert Morris,
Russ Roberts, and Alex Tabarrok for reading drafts of this, and to Jon Erlichman for growth data.


@NateSilver538 Good God. I was curious about Bluesky at one point, but lost interest after what they did to Jesse Singal. If this description is accurate, I definitely wouldn't have liked it.

This shows what a tough spot Harvard is in. They've already caved morally in the most shameful way, and yet the administration is still squeezing them for not going further.

Which in turn suggests an organic way for these big organizations to attract startups. Don't be painful to sell to. If you do that, you won't have to create incubators. The startups will come to you.

I'm sure these big organizations usually have the best intentions. They want to get themselves some of that exciting startup mojo they're usually deprived of. But there's a reason the market deprives them of it: they don't deserve it, because they're so slow to decide.

I didn't realize this till recently, but when big, bureaucratic organizations create incubators, the startups that come out of them are damaged from the start by focusing on big customers instead of the scrappy early adopters that successful startups usually sell to.

@M_Schur If you took the time to read the Economist article you'd see that most of these questions are addressed in it, smart guy.

"It is past time for a lasting ceasefire." First the Financial Times, and now The Economist. These are not left-wing publications. This is the consensus of reasonable people. https://t.co/d37Ad4Z6hn

@ewanmakepeace @SpencerHakimian Yes, but 100 low is enough to make my point, so I figured I'd be generous.

@SpencerHakimian Maybe they mean the "little truth" literally, as in there is little truth in their claim.

@rickhouse_Bob @ycombinator @ishand Netscape started there, and Marc Andreessen and Max Levchin went there. What more do you need to know?


@sinclanich You have to be able to get into the US for the batch, but you don't have to be there before or after.

@parthak13 Of course. Your ability matters far more.

@winterrose Do you live in Richland?

@arram @paultoo It may have helped that the first batch was in the summer, so we got recent grads and people who were still in school. In the winter the recent grads would have gotten jobs, and the students would be taking classes.

@toly @NateSilver538 In theory, but Cal Tech is the only place I know that does it.

@arram @paultoo It wasn't cool to start a startup in 2005, and YC had no brand, so zero percent of the people in the first batch were posers.

@GarettJones @SpeechUnion @nathancofnas I just signed up too. Thanks for the tip.

@JoshuaOgundu Not just in tech. Universities have been where smart people find one another since the middle ages.

@energyguy666 Just talk about the problem you're solving and why you know people want your solution. That matters way more than where you went to college.

@SamiahFatimah Or sixth in at least one case.


Office hours with AI startups are qualitatively different. We have to lead the target even when talking about what to do in the next 6 months. And when talking about where to aim long term, we're frankly guessing. It wasn't like this 5 years ago. It has never been like this.

@MichaelAArouet One thing that happened was that the Y axis got truncated.

@corpojozef That's what I just said.

@thundertaph That's what I'm saying.

@CryptoAntonioni I've not only considered it, there have been articles in the press about people doing it to me.

https://t.co/3FJT4asVN7

@cremieuxrecueil No, only what governments call the private sector works this way. But even with government institutions there is not an inverse correlation with wealth. E.g. Switzerland, Singapore.

@cremieuxrecueil Startup founders don't feel this way. They're much if not most of the way societies get richer, and there are more of them than ever.

If an established company degrades through apathy, this makes startup founders excited, because they hope to replace it.

@AJamesMcCarthy Sorry if this is a naive question, but what does the black bit down the middle consist of?

@BillAckman @GenXGirl1994 Every ideologue ever: There is a big difference between sharing political views and <thing I disagree with and have a special word for>.

@anammostarac People often say this sort of thing, but I don't think it's true. What we have now is exactly what you'd get if bureaucrats started with a one-room schoolhouse and evolved it.


@vivek_thakur_81 @Noahpinion The far right seem more like 4th grade bullies.

If you're wondering what an "ASP" is, that was a short-lived name for what eventually came to be called a SaaS company. There was no name for it when we started the first one, just as there was no name for an accelerator when we started YC.

I'd forgotten how informal the first bios I wrote for us were. The reason Jessica was called the Fourth Man (a reference to the Cambridge spy ring) was that she hadn't quit her previous job yet. https://t.co/R57OZCDURu

@abarrallen Yes, there is surprisingly little correlation between how hot a company is at Demo Day and how well they end up doing. Coinbase struggled to raise money after YC but ended up doing the best in their batch.

@Noahpinion The truth is even more damning: when "progressive" "intellectuals" act like their true selves, without the filter imposed by publication, they turn out to be isomorphic to 7th grade bullies.

@CburgesCliff I thought this was a painting.

@duncanparrish Silicon Valley generally. Math and the sciences, where performance can be measured. Elite universities, to the extent their admissions decisions are unbiased.

A report from the front lines of the trade war. As in other wars, the generals don't understand the consequences of their decisions, but the individual soldiers know them all too well.

This is a good example of a subtle but important aspect of Y Combinator. There are certain tunnels in society through which talented outsiders can become insiders much more rapidly than everywhere else, and YC is one of them.

@nickjanapol I think you mean eponym. I wouldn't ordinarily correct you, but I love the word eponym.