The Wisdom Wall

“do not give it access to emails would be my number one piece of advice or probably anything. Um, cause it's not clear how safe it is. And it's probably almost certainly gonna probably a lot of people being prompted injected by it right now”

“the models themselves have incrementally improved this year, but there haven't been like major steps forward that have shaken everything up, which is, has a knock on effect. Many episodes ago, we talked about how it was It felt easier than ever to pivot and find a startup idea, because if you could just survive, if you…”

“AI is going to reduce the cost of, like, producing the time to produce things, and so then the expectations from your users and customers will just go up, and you'll need to keep hiring more people to satisfy, like, the growing expectations. I feel like this year has been more in that second camp, and I think that is…”

“The technical expertise is now actually really like the missing piece for a lot of these things. Um, and we consistently see, at least in YC, that college students are actually at the forefront of this stuff, like actually understanding how to use the models and how to squeeze the performance consistently out of the…”

“there's so much interest from potential customers to like want a co-pilot that it's actually quite easy to start getting like inbound leads if you pitch this. And if it's even easy to get people to pay you money upfront, but what's really hard is to get them to actually like use the co-pilot because they don't actually…”

“So if a founder actually, like, actions on your feedback in sort of like a material way, like, it makes you less than like, if you're a good investor, I think it makes you less than likely to want to invest. You don't want to invest in someone who is relying on you for product insights.”

“literally in any YC batch, I could take every single company and like pick out some like fatal flaw. Um, and like, you know that some of them are going to turn out to be worth like billions of dollars, but you can still do it.”

“Yeah, like, post-series A, it actually largely feels, like, the playbook is the same, and the companies might be smaller for the same amount of revenue, but it Feels it's entirely because they hit the revenue so fast and there's still just bottlenecked on how long it takes to hire people versus they have demand for…”

“if this is actually the last window to make money and get rich, then you're basically implying that, you know, that we're going to get some definition of AGI or ASI, or whatever you want to call it. Um, that's like a necessary condition for that to be true. Like, in which case, we're probably going to have, like,…”

“things that seem like they were niche before AI, you can get people to pay you a lot, lot more money for because they're not just buying software, they're buying like work from you.”

“If you're not an engineer, I don't think you can do this, and I think you should really focus your time on trying to find a great technical co-founder, um, to start the company with.”

“You will have to decide on what the equity split will be, and my default advice here would be you should split the equity equally between yourselves, and the reason is if this startup is successful, you will end up working on it for the next 10 years or more, and so even if someone's been Thinking about the idea for a…”

“another old PG essay about if you, if you're trying to sell technology to someone, and they're not buying, like, see if you can just build a competitor, and so it's like, hey, if you're trying to sell, like, um, uh, fintech company, a copilot, and they're not buying it, well, like, if you are convinced they should have…”

“If it's like, Hey, like throw your data in here and we'll do like automations on top of it, like for everything, that's probably Hard to compete with whatever one of the foundation models might offer, but if it's like, hey, we're our, give us, like, your sales log data, and we'll, like, um, spit back, like, suggested…”

“You might think you could just look at how well someone has done in school or at work and assume success there would lead to success at startups. That's definitely what I thought when I first started working at YC in 2010 and began reading YC funding applications for the first time. After I started working with more…”

“For example, it's become popular to say that you shouldn't start a company just to make money. That's considered a somewhat flimsy motivation, but I actually think it's fine to start a startup to become rich. Startups are one of the few ways to make life-changing amounts of money in a relatively short period of time.”

“Whereas a first time founder, the only way you're getting your first few users is having a really great product and being really great at selling it. And I think you can just get a little bit lazy on that front as a second time founder.”

“And it's like when you're a second time founder, the investors know that you know more people. They don't want to, um, give you bad feedback, right? Like they're incentivized to tell you nice things so that you'll continue being nice to them. Whereas when you're a first time founder, you're less useful to an investor…”

“It's like, I think investors end up knowing just enough to be dangerous. Um, and it's a job where you're often selling, so you're very confident in sort of how you articulate your opinions. Um, but like, yeah, you don't actually get the deep insights because you're not like in it building the thing. Just why investors…”

“developing an intuitive fuel, like a hands-on fuel for The agents, their limitations, their capabilities, and very specifically around what we're talking about here is like, what type of tools the agents work well with? Um, where do they get stuck? And once you sort of have, you have your own mental model from working…”

“now I just think, like, you kind of, like, there's certain types of brains that just have, like, like, 10 branches going in their heads, but you never have enough hours in the day to actually, like, see any of them through, so they're always, like, half complete, and now it's just, like, Claude Code gets you over the…”

“recruiters Can never sell the company as effectively as the founder.”

“I think some of the elite founders, um, that I've worked with, um, throughout the YC career, they are essentially, in a sense, always recruiting, but they're always looking to meet people who they think are really smart and interesting, whether they're available or not. And it's so common to hear stories from them of,…”

“I think our advice to founders would definitely be look for those sorts of opportunities where you understand the technology Deeply enough. You've, you've read the commerce, um, payment protocol paper. You, you know how this all works, but you're looking for like actual problems and the users might not even be aware…”

“It's pretty clear now in the AI world that, like, the AI is very good at following instructions, and it's probably going to be hard for humans to compete with the AI on just, like, Following instructions reliably, in which case people here need to think about what are they going to get out of their college experience…”

“there's almost, like, a sort of, like, an obstinance about, like, the best founders, where they're just, Whatever they're working on, they don't do it at, like, 60 or 70 or even 80%. They're always just, like, a hundred percent, like, committed and have high conviction in what they're doing. And then they just need to…”

“I think again, in 90% of the cases, you should really spend all of your efforts on trying to find a great co-founder to start a company with.”

“In particular, if you're building a software or technology company, there really should be at least one co-founder who's technical and can program.”

“the number one blocker I see to why people Say they're having a hard time finding a co-founder is that they already assume that everybody they know is not available.”

“If that respect breaks down and one co-founder feels they could do the other co-founder's job Better than them. It's very hard to recover from that, and that's usually the single most common reason we see startups break up.”

“The actual titles you give yourselves at the early stages of a startup don't really matter that much because they don't really change the work that you do on a day-to-day basis.”

“And if you and your co-founder have very different work ethic expectations, one of you wants to be working all the time, like eat, work, sleep, but you know, the other co-founder wants to have more work-life balance or just feels differently about how they should be judged. Um, And what their expectations are, those…”

“It doesn't mean that this is a bad idea. It doesn't mean that you need to pivot to something else necessarily, but it does mean that you've made a bad assumption and you need to figure out what that is and develop a new hypothesis about the world.”

“one thing I've just noticed again is the best founders, no matter how smart they are, like they just like dive into that. I think you just got to have that mindset of like, nothing is beneath me. The only thing I care about is like getting to product market fit, serving customers, getting users. Um, And that will,…”

“The stuff that I've seen in the batches are actually taking off is a little bit more mundane. Like it's, um, I mean, I probably say a lot of it's sort of like workflow automation, like, um, It's finding things where there was, like, a human doing some repetitive tasks usually involved, like, searching for things or…”

“What I think a bunch of the companies in the space are seeing is that, like, that's not enough to keep the customers, especially because, like, OpenAI, like, the cost of all of the models is just going down.”

“It turned out that someone could appear very confident initially, but not be resilient when their startup hit roadblocks. Conversely, some of the quietest and least confident-seeming founders at first turned out to be the most resilient founders I'd go on to work with, many eventually taking their companies public.”

“The reason I have conviction that your initial motivations don't matter so much is that I've seen motivation to change over time. I've seen founders who started out a company with a plan to sell it within a year, change their mind as they kept working the company. And they're still working on that same startup a decade…”

“It's probably going to take at least a year for you to have enough data to tell if the startup you're working on is promising enough to keep working on.”

“I'd start by encouraging you to not think of finding ideas and co-founders as two separate tasks. It's hard to think up good ideas yourself. Also, your ideas will start out being vague and fuzzy, more like a hunch or an impulse than a clearly formed idea, and you'll go through seven iterations of fleshing it out into…”

“I think the best environment for this is working at a startup. You both get to see how a startup works from the inside, and your colleagues will be less risk averse than the average FANG employee.”

“A single passionate user of a crude prototype that was hacked together in a weekend means so much more than a million signups on a waitlist for something that doesn't exist yet.”

“first time founders can actually take more risk on the ideas that they pick, because They don't, they don't have other startup friends, or they don't care as much. They're just working on stuff they find interesting.”

“I'll say you find that eventually though, it's a little bit like taking out debt, honestly, where it's like maybe early on as a second time founder, like maybe the seed rounds easier, maybe even a series A is easier, but the later, the longer you work in your startup for, the more people just care about the results.…”

“Another very specific type of startup that seems to be suited to second time founders are capital intensive businesses. Um, and by that I mean, you know, any Any startup where like more money raised or just more money is a strategic advantage. Second time founders who are good at raising money can benefit, right?”

“If a founder can't come back, if I feel like I better understand the user than the founder does, that's a bad sign.”

“They're pattern matching to previous successes and answering the question, like, do you pattern match to founders I've had success with in the past? And then they're stack ranking, like of all the founders I've worked with and are currently pitching me, like, where do you rank? And the truth is you get a no because…”

“one of the pieces of advice I repeat after demo days over, over and over again, is keep a list of the investors that said no, like, who seemed reasonable about it, and like, just keep, like, keep sending them updates. Keep sending an update every month. Um, uh, and stockingly, if things start going well, those same…”

“a very simple way to get started with meta-prompting is to follow the same structure of the prompt as to give it a role and make the role be like, you know, you're an expert prompt engineer who gives really, like, detailed, um, great critiques and advice on how to, um, Improve prompts and give it the prompt that you…”

“one thing I found useful is as you're using it, if you just note down in a Google doc things that you're seeing, just, um, the outputs not being how you want or ways that you can think to improve it, you can just write those in note form and then give Gemini Pro like your notes plus the original prompt and ask it to…”

“I think it's an underrated, um, consequence of Gemini pro having such long context windows is you can effectively use it like a, a rep or go sort of like one by one. I put your prompt on like one example, then literally watch the reasoning trace in real time to figure out like how you can steer it in the direction you…”

“And you really can't do that alone. Like you need someone else there who at a basic level can just get more work done with you, right? Two people is more working hours per day than one, but also having a good co-founder improves the quality of your work. So if you have a co-founder with complimentary skillsets, They…”

“your co-founder ideally should be someone who's all in on the startup in the same way that you are. And when you're having bad moments, they can bring you up and you can do the same for them. And that's an important reason why you can't just sort of hire people or have people join your startup once it's already…”

“Here's one, uh, tactic I also give people, which is once you made the ask, if that person really says that they're not available, is ask them who would they pick to be their co-founder if they were starting a company, and ask for an introduction to that person.”

“And so my tactical advice on this would be set up regular one-on-ones with your co-founder, and that may sound a little formal, but something I did with my startups is I would just put time on the calendar at the end of every month where we would just go for a drink or a meal and Just talk about how we were doing. Like…”