The Wisdom Wall

“I think if you have worked for a large company for 20 years, you might not be a founder, unless you were forced to for visa reasons, because if you were the kind of person that would, that would make a good founder, you wouldn't be able to stand working for a large company for 20 years, right?”

“The outcomes of startups are hard to predict. I think to some degree they're actually indeterminate. There's a huge amount of luck involved, you know, um, and so I think even if, even if Y Combinator were as good at picking startups as you could, as you could possibly get.”

“intelligent people can judge other intelligent people, But trustworthy people cannot judge other trustworthy people. In fact, trustworthy people are often fooled by untrustworthy people.”

“And what do things that don't scale means is do those things early on anyway, because, you know, if you don't do them, you'll never be big. And so you got nothing to lose.”

“and actually it turns out it's not that important to be smart. Um, it's much, much more important to be determined.”

“Ok, so the way you deal with different commitment levels is you ask yourself, um, would I rather have 30% of this person or a hundred percent of some other person? And in my case, I would rather have, like, 10% of Robert Morris's brain than a hundred percent of almost anybody else's.”

“launch as soon as you have a quantum of utility, which means as soon as you're, there's one person in the world who is glad that you launched, because now they can do something that they couldn't do.”

“If we've, if we were looking at someone, someone's application, and they worked for a long time for a large company, That's, that's actually bad to us, because like, the, the best startup founders probably could not stand that.”

“Should I go there? And the answer is the same now as it always is. Yes, you should. You can go there for a bit and then come back, but you should at least go.”

“Silicon Valley is the place where people go from being nobodies to billionaires faster than anywhere else in the world, and so someone who had a taste for being really nice to nobodies, you know, the kind of person who sees the nobody walking along on the street and just wants to pet it on the head as opposed to, like,…”

“You just keep going out there and doing things manually, and as long as your growth rate is good, it doesn't matter how small the number is because a growth, a constant growth rate means exponential growth, and that means The base number will soon take care of itself.”

“There's, oh, by the way, only one person has to be super determined.”

“If you care enough about users, you can just follow what, what, what, what will make users happy the way, the way a scientist follows the truth, and eventually, Without much thinking on your part, um, the need to grow will give you this product idea that's actually the product, that's the result of evolution.”

“You get the best peers, and in fact, the talent pool expands in two dimensions. The people are better, and there's also a lot more of them.”

“when you move to a big pond, you can measure yourself up against known big fish, and you can see how big a fish you are. Surprisingly often, the news is good.”

“There's a pay it forward culture in Silicon Valley. That's different from anywhere else I've been in the world, maybe anywhere else in the world at all.”

“I always hate it when people represent startup ideas as light bulbs, you know, because as well as being the most cliched metaphor imaginable, it's also false. You don't just like have this idea and then realize it, right? No, it's more like you have this sort of inkling that something, you could do something that…”

“I love it when ideas seem implausible in the right way. Over the years, I mean, I already had, just from being a hacker, a sort of a good nose for this sort of thing, but it has become refined over all these years of dealing with startups, and when, when people have, I was talking to some people yesterday, and they…”

“It makes you, you know, if you have a natural hatred for gratuitous schleps, like, um, then what that, that produces elegant solutions, you know?”

“Startups in general are very, very counterintuitive. Um, and so that's actually why C exists. If it was obvious what to do in starting a startup, We wouldn't, YC couldn't really add much by teaching people how to do it, right?”

“We tell people the counterintuitive stuff, not the obvious stuff, and then what counterintuitive means is it sounds wrong, and so they go with their gut and do the wrong thing instead, um, and then hopefully catch the mistake in time.”

“Uh, I think the hardest part is morale. There's no one, there's, like, if you have multiple people, they keep one another going when things are going badly, and there's no one to cheer you up.”

“What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to users. You will have, you will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your vision Um, and then you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision in a cafe by yourself, um, and write, build some elaborate thing without going and…”

“the risk of launching early is not as great as the risk of launching late.”

“If you want to lower your prices, no one's going to complain. Um, and if you want to grant, if you want to raise your prices, you just grandfather your existing users, which if you have exponential growth will always be a tiny subset of your total users, and then no one will complain about that either.”

“find, find people who work at startups, and ask them to introduce you to their investors. That's the way to do it.”

“The concept of formal notation is the single biggest obstacle.”

“one of the big problems about being a parent is, The memories of the current kid overwrite the memories of the more recent, of the sort of recent past.”

“Don't be, don't, like, like, um, over optimize too early. Like, let it grow into whatever it's gonna grow into. Maybe it'll end up being kids are the big thing, or maybe not, who knows. But be empirical about it, and don't, don't, like, wire in some outcome too early.”