"The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent."

"Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers."

"It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower."

"Wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALS and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison."

"Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders."

"There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft."

"In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses."

"A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen."

"Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel."

"Why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it."

"Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So"

"The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about."

"Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work."

"If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage."

"To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy."

"You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs."

"A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing : to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito."

"People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously."

"Empathy doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations - in war, for example - you want to do exactly the opposite."

"Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline."

"In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do."

"If you could replace high-school yearbooks, that could be a lot of money. It's so clearly waiting for someone to come along."

"Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part."

"The standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have."

"One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies."

"If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid."

"You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible."

"If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student."

"It's hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet been duplicated by technology."

"Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy."

"Keep your identity small."

"Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches."

"It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it."

"The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery."

"I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots."

"Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it."

"For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete."

"A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate."

"The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one."

"Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks."

"I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign."

"Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that techincally inept business types are known as suits."

"Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need."

"Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy."

"Across industries and countries, there's a strong inverse correlation between performance and job security. Actors and directors are fired at the end of each film, so they have to deliver every time. Junior professors are fired by default after a few years unless the university chooses to grant them tenure. Professional athletes know they'll be pulled if they play badly for just a couple games. At the other end of the scale (at least in the US) are auto workers, New York City schoolteachers, and civil servants, who are all nearly impossible to fire. The trend is so clear that you'd have to be willfully blind not to see it."

"The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it."

"If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about."

"Get a version 1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to measure, you're optimizing based on guesses."

"You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view."

"People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you'll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don't just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it's really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That's the way the government does things. They do something really big that's really bad, and they think, Well, we'll make it better, and then it never gets better."

"In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called corruption) when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich."

"If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward."

"So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they'll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It's hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it's hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat."

"Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter."

"And for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase."

"Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid wrong as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like negative or destructive.)"

"Looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success."

"When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project."

"When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite."

"We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler."

"What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is."

"I don't predict the demise of object-oriented programming, by the way. Though I don't think it has much to offer good programmers, except in certain specialized domains, it is irresistible to large organizations. Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. Large organizations always tend to develop software this way, and I expect this to be as true in a hundred years as it is today."

"We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30."

"If you disagree with something, it's easier to say 'you suck' than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that way from refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world."

"Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems likes the problem is important enough to build a company on."

"Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired."

"Startups often have to do dubious things."

"When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's form follows function, what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives."

"If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies."

"In the startup world, 'not working' is normal."

"If the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account."

"Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

"I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people."

"The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite."

"The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner,"

"The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work."

"The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going."

"some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields."

"What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for."

"Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted."

"Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find."

"Interest will drive you to work harder than mere diligence ever could."

"The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all."

"Ambition comes in two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what to do."

"when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own."

"you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions."

"One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening."

"If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, this will also get you your initial audience."

"In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it."

"I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach ""staying upwind."" This is how most people who've done great work seem to have done it."

"When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying ""I'll just read over what I've got so far."" Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off."

"Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to be more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise in tidiness or self-discipline. In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage."

"There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in."

"Work doesn't just happen when you're trying to. There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack."

"One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years. Not because their opinions matter more than your contemporaries', but because something that still seems good in a hundred years is more likely to be genuinely good."

"""It's easy to criticize"" is true in the most literal sense, and the route to great work is never easy."

"Great work is consistent not only with who did it, but with itself. It's usually all of a piece. So if you face a decision in the middle of working on something, ask which choice is more consistent."

"Great work will often be tool-like in the sense of being something others build on. So it's a good sign if you're creating ideas that others could use, or exposing questions that others could answer. The best ideas have implications in many different areas."

"Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it."

"Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult."

"Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing."

"a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy. How do you recognize these? You can't with certainty. Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting; they're rich in implications; whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing."

"An overlooked idea often doesn't lose till the semifinals. You do see it, subconsciously, but then another part of your subconscious shoots it down because it would be too weird, too risky, too much work, too controversial. This suggests an exciting possibility: if you could turn off such filters, you could see more new ideas."

"One of the most interesting kinds of unfashionable problem is the problem that people think has been fully explored, but hasn't. Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its latent potential. Durer and Watt both did this. So if you're interested in a field that others think is tapped out, don't let their skepticism deter you. People are often wrong about this."

"if there's an important but overlooked problem in your neighborhood, it's probably already on your subconscious radar screen. So try asking yourself: if you were going to take a break from ""serious"" work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The answer is probably more important than it seems."

"People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question."

"Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before — in your childhood, even — and couldn't stop thinking about. People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it's just as important to keep your youthful questions alive."

"Being prolific is underrated. The more different things you try, the greater the chance of discovering something new. Understand, though, that trying lots of things will mean trying lots of things that don't work. You can't have a lot of good ideas without also having a lot of bad ones."

"perhaps the worst thing schools do to you is train you to win by hacking the test. You can't do great work by doing that. You can't trick God. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut. The way to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself"

"Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones."

"One of the most powerful kinds of copying is to copy something from one field into another. History is so full of chance discoveries of this type that it's probably worth giving chance a hand by deliberately learning about other kinds of work."

"Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will."

"sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights. They can see and do things that you can't. So if you have a handful of colleagues good enough to keep you on your toes in this sense, you're probably over the threshold."

"Morale starts with your view of life. You're more likely to do great work if you're an optimist, and more likely to if you think of yourself as lucky than if you think of yourself as a victim."

"Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. So ""If at first you don't succeed, try, try again"" isn't quite right. It should be: If at first you don't succeed, either try again, or backtrack and then try again."

"Never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than you need to. Corollary: Never abandon the root node."

"If a handful of people genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough."

"Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care."

"Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to."

"It's not enough just to be curious, and you can't command curiosity anyway. But you can nurture it and let it drive you."

"Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity."

"The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?"

"Few people consciously decide not to try to do great work. But that's what's going on subconsciously; they shy away from the question."

"Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company."

"The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less."

"By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in."

"Both the Internet startups and the Procter & Gambles were doing brand advertising. They didn't care about targeting. They just wanted lots of people to see their ads. So traffic became the thing to get at Yahoo. It didn't matter what type."

"As long as customers were writing big checks for banner ads, it was hard to take search seriously. Google didn't have that to distract them."

"the way they made money: by selling ads. In 1995 it was hard to imagine a technology company making money that way. Technology companies made money by selling their software to users. Media companies sold ads. So they must be a media company."

"It would have been a clever move to pretend to be a media company to throw Microsoft off their scent."

"what Yahoo really needed to be was a technology company, and by trying to be something else, they ended up being something that was neither here nor there. That's why Yahoo as a company has never had a sharply defined identity."

"Yahoo treated programming as a commodity. At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers. The job of programmers was just to take the work of the product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code."

"The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers."

"In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery."

"The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the same number Yahoo had when I went to work there. But boy did things seem different. It was still very much a hacker-centric culture."

"In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture."

"Why would great programmers want to work for a company that didn't have a hacker-centric culture, as long as there were others that did? I can imagine two reasons: if they were paid a huge amount, or if the domain was interesting and none of the companies in it were hacker-centric."

"Don't raise money unless you want it and it wants you."

"Such a high proportion of successful startups raise money that it might seem fundraising is one of the defining qualities of a startup. Actually it isn't. Rapid growth is what makes a company a startup."

"Most companies in a position to grow rapidly find that (a) taking outside money helps them grow faster, and (b) their growth potential makes it easy to attract such money."

"The other time not to raise money is when you won't be able to. If you try to raise money before you can convince investors, you'll not only waste your time, but also burn your reputation with those investors."

"When you start fundraising, everything else grinds to a halt. The problem is not the time fundraising consumes but that it becomes the top idea in your mind. A startup can't endure that level of distraction for long. An early stage startup grows mostly because the founders make it grow, and if the founders look away, growth usually drops sharply."

"when you do decide to raise money, you should focus your whole attention on it so you can get it done quickly and get back to work."

"when you're not in fundraising mode, you should take money from investors only if they require no convincing, and are willing to invest on terms you'll take without negotiation."

"If an investor says they're ready to invest, but they need you to come in for one meeting to meet some of the partners, tell them no, if you're not in fundraising mode, because that's fundraising."

"If you get cold-emailed by an associate at a VC firm, you shouldn't meet even if you are in fundraising mode. Deals don't happen that way."

"even if you get an email from a partner you should try to delay meeting till you're in fundraising mode. They may say they just want to meet and chat, but investors never just want to meet and chat."

"Unless you're experienced enough at fundraising to have a casual conversation with investors that stays casual, it's safer to tell them that you'd be happy to later, when you're fundraising, but that right now you need to focus on the company."

"Do you have to be introduced? In phase 2, yes."

"The best type of intro is from a well-known investor who has just invested in you. So when you get an investor to commit, ask them to introduce you to other investors they respect. [7] The next best type of intro is from a founder of a company they've funded. You can also get intros from other people in the startup community, like lawyers and reporters."

"You should always talk to investors in parallel rather than serially. You can't afford the time it takes to talk to investors serially, plus if you only talk to one investor at a time, they don't have the pressure of other investors to make them act."

"an eminent investor who would invest a lot, but will be hard to convince, might have the same expected value as an obscure angel who won't invest much, but will be easy to convince. Whereas an obscure angel who will only invest a small amount, and yet needs to meet multiple times before making up his mind, has very low expected value. Meet such investors last, if at all."

"Doing breadth-first search weighted by expected value will save you from investors who never explicitly say no but merely drift away, because you'll drift away from them at the same rate."

"Never leave a meeting with an investor without asking what happens next. What more do they need in order to decide? Do they need another meeting with you? To talk about what? And how soon? Do they need to do something internally, like talk to their partners, or investigate some issue? How long do they expect it to take? Don't be too pushy, but know where you stand."

"investors who are seriously interested in you will usually be happy to talk about what has to happen between now and wiring the money, because they're already running through that in their heads."

"Getting the first substantial offer can be half the total difficulty of fundraising."

"You have to estimate not just the probability that an investor will say yes, but the probability that they'd be the first to say yes, and the latter is not simply a constant fraction of the former. Some investors are known for deciding quickly, and those are extra valuable early on."

"When you first start fundraising, the expected value of an investor who won't ""lead"" is zero, so talk to such investors last if at all."

"if you're in the inexperienced but earnest majority, the solution is analogous to the solution I recommend for pitching your startup: do the right thing and then just tell investors what you're doing."

"If you're so fortunate as to have to think about the upper limit on what you should raise, a good rule of thumb is to multiply the number of people you want to hire times $15k times 18 months."

"if you'd like to raise $500k, it's better to say initially that you're trying to raise $250k. Then when you reach $150k you're more than half done. That sends two useful signals to investors: that you're doing well, and that they have to decide quickly because you're running out of room."

"You will be in a much stronger position if your collection of plans includes one for raising zero dollars — i.e. if you can make it to profitability without raising any additional money. Ideally you want to be able to say to investors ""We'll succeed no matter what, but raising money will help us do it faster."""

"Though it sounds slightly paradoxical, if you want to raise money, the best thing you can do is get yourself to the point where you don't need to."

"When you raise money, what should your valuation be? The most important thing to understand about valuation is that it's not that important."

"Founders are often competitive people, and since valuation is usually the only visible number attached to a startup, they end up competing to raise money at the highest valuation. This is stupid, because fundraising is not the test that matters. The real test is revenue. Fundraising is just a means to that end. Being proud of how well you did at fundraising is like being proud of your college grades"

"The number one thing you want from phase 2 fundraising is to get the money you need, so you can get back to focusing on the real test, the success of your company. Number two is good investors. Valuation is at best third."

"Dropbox and Airbnb are the most successful companies we've funded so far, and they raised money after Y Combinator at premoney valuations of $4 million and $2.6 million respectively."

"What you can do if you have eager first investors is raise money from them on an uncapped convertible note with an MFN clause. This is essentially a way of saying that the valuation cap of the note will be determined by the next investors you raise money from."

"If your valuation has already been set by a prior investment at a specific valuation or cap, you can tell them that number. But if it isn't set because you haven't closed anyone yet, and they try to push you to name a price, resist doing so. If this would be the first investor you've closed, then this could be the tipping point of fundraising."

"Tell them that valuation is not the most important thing to you and that you haven't thought much about it, that you are looking for investors you want to partner with and who want to partner with you, and that you should talk first about whether they want to invest at all. Then if they decide they do want to invest, you can figure out a price. But first things first."

"A greedy algorithm takes the best of the options in front of it right now. And that is how startups should approach fundraising in phases 2 and later. Don't try to look into the future because (a) the future is unpredictable, and indeed in this business you're often being deliberately misled about it and (b) your first priority in fundraising should be to get it finished and get back to work anyway."

"If someone makes you an acceptable offer, take it. If you have multiple incompatible offers, take the best. Don't reject an acceptable offer in the hope of getting a better one in the future."

"The best investors are also the most selective, because they get their pick of all the startups. They reject nearly everyone they talk to, which means in the average case it's a bad trade to exchange a definite offer from an acceptable investor for a potential offer from a better one."

"Our rule of thumb is not to sell more than 25% in phase 2, on top of whatever you sold in phase 1, which should be less than 15%."

"If you have multiple founders, pick one to handle fundraising so the other(s) can keep working on the company. And since the danger of fundraising is not the time taken up by the actual meetings but that it becomes the top idea in your mind, the founder who handles fundraising should make a conscious effort to insulate the other founder(s) from the details of the process."

"The founder who handles fundraising should be the CEO, who should in turn be the most formidable of the founders. Even if the CEO is a programmer and another founder is a salesperson? Yes. If you happen to be that type of founding team, you're effectively a single founder when it comes to fundraising."

"It's ok to bring all the founders to meet an investor who will invest a lot, and who needs this meeting as the final step before deciding. But wait till that point. Introducing an investor to your cofounder(s) should be like introducing a girl/boyfriend to your parents"

"A lot of the most successful startups we fund never make decks in phase 2. They just talk to investors and explain what they plan to do. Fundraising usually takes off fast for the startups that are most successful at it, and they're thus able to excuse themselves by saying that they haven't had time to make a deck."

"You'll also want an executive summary, which should be no more than a page long and describe in the most matter of fact language what you plan to do, why it's a good idea, and what progress you've made so far. The point of the summary is to remind the investor (who may have met many startups that day) what you talked about."

"Sometimes an investor will ask you to send them your deck and/or executive summary before they decide whether to meet with you. I wouldn't do that. It's a sign they're not really interested."

"When your fundraising options run out, they usually run out in the same way. Don't keep sucking on the straw if you're just getting air. It's not going to get better."

"Fundraising is not what will make your company successful. Listening to users complain about bugs in your software is what will make you successful. And the big danger of getting addicted to fundraising is not merely that you'll spend too long on it or raise too much money. It's that you'll start to think of yourself as being already successful, and lose your taste for the schleps you need to undertake to actually be successful. Startups can be destroyed by this."

"The dangers of raising too much are subtle but insidious. One is that it will set impossibly high expectations. If you raise an excessive amount of money, it will be at a high valuation, and the danger of raising money at too high a valuation is that you won't be able to increase it sufficiently the next time you raise money."

"A company's valuation is expected to rise each time it raises money. If not it's a sign of a company in trouble, which makes you unattractive to investors."

"the money itself may be more dangerous than the valuation. The more you raise, the more you spend, and spending a lot of money can be disastrous for an early stage startup. Spending a lot makes it harder to become profitable, and perhaps even worse, it makes you more rigid, because the main way to spend money is people, and the more people you have, the harder it is to change directions. So if you do raise a huge amount of money, don't spend it."

"Be nice when investors reject you as well. The best investors are not wedded to their initial opinion of you. If they reject you in phase 2 and you end up doing well, they'll often invest in phase 3. In fact investors who reject you are some of your warmest leads for future fundraising. Any investor who spent significant time deciding probably came close to saying yes. Often you have some internal champion who only needs a little more evidence to convince the skeptics. So it's wise not merely to be nice to investors who reject you, but (unless they behaved badly) to treat it as the beginning of a relationship."

"Assume the money you raise in phase 2 will be the last you ever raise. You must make it to profitability on this money if you can."

"Some are just too slow to become profitable. They raise enough money to last for two years. There doesn't seem any particular urgency to be profitable. So they don't make any effort to make money for a year. But by that time, not making money has become habitual. When they finally decide to try, they find they can't."

"A lot of VCs will encourage you to hire aggressively. VCs generally tell you to spend too much, partly because as money people they err on the side of solving problems by spending money, and partly because they want you to sell them more of your company in subsequent rounds. Don't listen to them."

"Avoid investors till you decide to raise money, and then when you do, talk to them all in parallel, prioritized by expected value, and accept offers greedily. That's fundraising in one sentence."

"Fundraising is not what will make you successful. It's just a means to an end. Your primary goal should be to get it over with and get back to what will make you successful — making things and talking to users — and the path I've described will for most startups be the surest way to that destination."

"If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for."

"The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do."

"What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?"

"Explain what you've learned from users."

"That tests a lot of things: whether you're paying attention to users, how well you understand them, and even how much they need what you're making."

"The first thing that came to mind was that most startups have the same problems. No two have exactly the same problems, but it's surprising how much the problems remain the same, regardless of what they're making."

"Another related surprise is how bad founders can be at realizing what their problems are. Founders will sometimes come in to talk about some problem, and we'll discover another much bigger one in the course of the conversation."

"Often founders know what their problems are, but not their relative importance."

"Not that founders listen. That was another big surprise: how often founders don't listen to us."

"another and probably more important reason is that so much about startups is counterintuitive. And when you tell someone something counterintuitive, what it sounds to them is wrong. So the reason founders don't listen to us is that they don't believe us. At least not till experience teaches them otherwise."

"Focus is doubly important for early stage startups, because not only do they have a hundred different problems, they don't have anyone to work on them except the founders."

"the essence of what happens at YC is to figure out which problems matter most, then cook up ideas for solving them — ideally at a resolution of a week or less — and then try those ideas and measure how well they worked. The focus is on action, with measurable, near-term results."

"Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. YC improves focus."

"YC is not simply more experienced founders passing on their knowledge. It's more like specialization than apprenticeship. The knowledge of the YC partners and the founders have different shapes"

"The other big thing YC gives founders is colleagues, and this may be even more important than the advice of partners."

"I often tell founders to make something they themselves want, and YC is certainly that: it was designed to be exactly what we wanted when we were starting a startup."

"great colleagues can never become a commodity, because the fact that they cluster in some places means they're proportionally absent from the rest."

"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup."

"The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth."

"To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That's the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn't scale."

"For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people."

"Most businesses are tightly constrained in (a) or (b). The distinctive feature of successful startups is that they're not."

"The most important thing that the constraints on a normal business protect it from is not competition, however, but the difficulty of coming up with new ideas."

"Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to them."

"What's different about successful founders is that they can see different problems. It's a particularly good combination both to be good at technology and to face problems that can be solved by it, because technology changes so rapidly that formerly bad ideas often become good without anyone noticing."

"as happened with Apple, by the time everyone else realized how important search was, Google was entrenched."

"the real question is not what growth rate makes a company a startup, but what growth rate successful startups tend to have."

"What matters is not the absolute number of new customers, but the ratio of new customers to existing ones. If you're really getting a constant number of new customers every month, you're in trouble, because that means your growth rate is decreasing."

"A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing."

"The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users."

"You don't have to think about what the program should do, just make it faster"

"Having to hit a growth number every week forces founders to act, and acting versus not acting is the high bit of succeeding. Nine times out of ten, sitting around strategizing is just a form of procrastination. Whereas founders' intuitions about which hill to climb are usually better than they realize."

"When Richard Feynman said that the imagination of nature was greater than the imagination of man, he meant that if you just keep following the truth you'll discover cooler things than you could ever have made up. For startups, growth is a constraint much like truth. Every successful startup is at least partly a product of the imagination of growth."

"A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x."

"Growing too slowly is particularly dangerous in a business with network effects, which the best startups usually have to some degree."

"Raising money lets you choose your growth rate."

"acquirers have an additional reason to want startups. A rapidly growing company is not merely valuable, but dangerous. If it keeps expanding, it might expand into the acquirer's own territory. Most product acquisitions have some component of fear."

"If you want to understand startups, understand growth. Growth drives everything in this world. Growth is why startups usually work on technology — because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change."

"What you're really doing (and to the dismay of some observers, all you're really doing) when you start a startup is committing to solve a harder type of problem than ordinary businesses do. You're committing to search for one of the rare ideas that generates rapid growth."

"Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead."

"If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it."

"instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too early."

"The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch. The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it."

"There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes."

"It would be safe to be default dead if you could count on investors saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of growth."

"no matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working."

"When a startup grows fast, it's usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on. When a startup spends a lot, it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful."

"don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far the biggest killer of startups that raise money."

"Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough people, it will all get done. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough."

"Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. But because the product is only moderately appealing, growth is ok but not great. The founders convince themselves that hiring a bunch of people is the way to boost growth. Their investors agree. But (because the product is only moderately appealing) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out of runway."

"What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem: that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder. At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be ""built out,"" and that's usually easier with fewer people."

"Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now."

"a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy."

"the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders."

"the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users."

"the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed."

"Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. Go out of your way to make people happy."

"Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly."

"Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized."

"Even if you get demoralized, don't give up. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up."

"Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that."

"that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he had important new ideas. Being very smart was a necessary precondition for having those ideas, but the two are not identical."

"Intelligence is much easier to measure than the value of new ideas, and you're constantly being judged by it."

"one of the most important: an obsessive interest in a particular topic"

"Another quality you need in order to discover new ideas is independent-mindedness."

"One of the most surprising ingredients in having new ideas is writing ability. There's a class of new ideas that are best discovered by writing essays and books."

"When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized."

"Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!"

"Startups almost never get it right the first time. Much more commonly you launch something, and no one cares. Don't assume when this happens that you've failed. That's normal for startups. But don't sit around doing nothing. Iterate."

"As long as you've made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you're on the right track."

"also it will tell you what to focus on. What is it about you that they love? Can you do more of that? Where can you find more people who love that sort of thing? As long as you have some core of users who love you, all you have to do is expand it. It may take a while, but as long as you keep plugging away, you'll win in the end."

"The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with ""but we're going to keep working on the startup,"" you are in big trouble."

"All of you guys already have the first two. You're all smart and working on promising ideas. Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up."

"Another of our hypotheses was that you can start a startup on less money than most people think."

"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."

"A researcher who studied the SFP startups said the one thing they had in common was that they all worked ridiculously hard."

"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."""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You should give up n% of your company if what you trade it for improves your average outcome enough that the (100 - n)% you have left is worth more than the whole company was before."

"In the general case, if n is the fraction of the company you're giving up, the deal is a good one if it makes the company worth more than 1/(1 - n)."

"One of the things the equity equation shows us is that, financially at least, taking money from a top VC firm can be a really good deal."

"You can use the same formula when giving stock to employees, but it works in the other direction. If i is the average outcome for the company with the addition of some new person, then they're worth n such that i = 1/(1 - n). Which means n = (i - 1)/i."

"you feel he'll increase the average outcome of the whole company by 20%. n = (1.2 - 1)/1.2 = .167. So you'll break even if you trade 16.7% of the company for him."

"Stock is not the only cost of hiring someone: there's usually salary and overhead as well."

"to translate salary and overhead into stock you should multiply the annual rate by about 1.5."

"notice how important it is for early employees to take little salary. It comes right out of stock that could otherwise be given to them."

"If the trade didn't increase the value of your remaining shares enough to put you net ahead, you wouldn't have (or shouldn't have) done it."

"I learned that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a collection of cells that lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I. But there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into different bodies. Imagine waking up after such an operation. You have to imagine being two people."

"The real lesson here is that the concepts we use in everyday life are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard."

"People talk so much about abstractions now that we don't realize what a leap it must have been when they first started to. It was presumably many thousands of years between when people first started describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked ""what is heat?"""

"that words break if you push them too far."

"people who want a deep understanding of something are often driven by curiosity rather than any practical need. But that doesn't mean what they end up learning is useless."

"Knowledge is power. That's what makes theoretical knowledge prestigious."

"while ideas don't have to have immediate practical applications to be interesting, the kinds of things we find interesting will surprisingly often turn out to have practical applications"

"If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students."

"To someone who hasn't learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard (and therefore impressive) as math, yet broader in scope."

"There's a market for writing that sounds impressive and can't be disproven. There will always be both supply and demand. So if one group abandons this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it."

"instead of trying to discover them because they're useless, let's try to discover them because they're useful."

"Once you start using words with precise meanings, you're doing math."

"It gives people with good intentions a new roadmap into abstraction. And they may thereby produce things that make the writing of the people with bad intentions look bad by comparison."

"Anyone can do this. Getting to general plus useful by starting with useful and cranking up the generality may be unsuitable for junior professors trying to get tenure, but it's better for everyone else, including professors who already have it. This side of the mountain is a nice gradual slope."

"You can start by writing things that are useful but very specific, and then gradually make them more general."

"Philosophy is as young now as math was in 1500. There is a lot more to discover."

"It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few."

"she has always been struck both by how consistently successful startup founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as startup founders."

"One is that being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general."

"One is that being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved."

"Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending."

"Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them."

"A mean person can't convince the best people to work for him unless he is super convincing."

"if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money."

"When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading."

"as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. You're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily."

"When you're starting a startup that depends on deals with big companies to exist, it often feels like they're trying to ignore you out of existence."

"The world of startups is so unpredictable that you need to be able to modify your dreams on the fly."

"He's determined to get downfield, but at any given moment he may need to go sideways or even backwards to get there."

"It seems like the type that matters most is imagination. It's not so important to be able to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to come up with surprising new ideas. In the startup world, most good ideas seem bad initially."

"Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good."

"They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."

"Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two or three. And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together."

"I'm sure they argue, like all founders, but I have never once sensed any unresolved tension between them."

"If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant to say ""That will never work."""

"If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't."

"if you can eliminate the theory that the person proposing an implausible-sounding idea is incompetent, its implausibility switches from evidence that it's boring to evidence that it's exciting."

"if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead"

"The wise response to such an idea is not to make statements, but to ask questions, because there's a real mystery here. Why has this smart and reasonable person proposed an idea that seems so wrong? Are they mistaken, or are you?"

"this potential envy propagates back into a conviction that you must be wrong."

"it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever to those who don't understand this asymmetry."

"The lowest form of dismissal is mere factionalism: to automatically dismiss any idea associated with the opposing faction. The lowest form of all is to dismiss an idea because of who proposed it."

"if you want to have new ideas yourself, one of the most valuable things you can do is to learn what they look like when they're born."

"Just look for a reasonable domain expert proposing something that sounds wrong."

"Having new ideas is a lonely business. Only those who've tried it know how lonely. These people need your help. And if you help them, you'll probably learn something in the process."

"What would someone who was the opposite of hapless be like? They'd be relentlessly resourceful."

"Some people are just constitutionally passive, but others have a latent ability to be relentlessly resourceful that only needs to be brought out."

"the limiting factor on the number of startups is the pool of potential founders. Some people would make good founders, and others wouldn't."

"If you want to know whether you're the right sort of person to start a startup, ask yourself whether you're relentlessly resourceful. And if you want to know whether to recruit someone as a cofounder, ask if they are."

"""Make something people want"" is the destination, but ""Be relentlessly resourceful"" is how you get there."

"For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work."

"Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started."

"One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more."

"ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off."

"How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours."

"now that I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem."

"All we ask from those on the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost."

"But the most important thing I learned, and which I used in both Viaweb and Y Combinator, is that the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the ""entry level"" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling. Which in turn means that prestige is a danger sign."

"(If you're curious why my site looks so old-fashioned, it's because it's still made with this software. It may look clunky today, but in 1996 it was the last word in slick.)"

"If we'd been a startup I was advising at Y Combinator, I would have said: Stop being so stressed out, because you're doing fine. You're growing 7x a year. Just don't hire too many more people and you'll soon be profitable, and then you'll control your own destiny."

"Now when I talk to founders who are leaving after selling their companies, my advice is always the same: take a vacation. That's what I should have done, just gone off somewhere and done nothing for a month or two, but the idea never occurred to me."

"One of the most conspicuous patterns I've noticed in my life is how well it has worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren't prestigious. Still life has always been the least prestigious form of painting. Viaweb and Y Combinator both seemed lame when we started them."

"It's not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it's a sign both that there's something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives. Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious. If anything is going to lead you astray, it will be the desire to impress people. So while working on things that aren't prestigious doesn't guarantee you're on the right track, it at least guarantees you're not on the most common type of wrong one."

"One of my tricks for writing essays had always been to give talks. The prospect of having to stand up in front of a group of people and tell them something that wouldn't waste their time was a great spur to the imagination. When the Harvard Computer Society, the undergrad computer club, asked me to give a talk, I decided I would tell them how to start a startup. Maybe they'd be able to avoid the worst of the mistakes we'd made."

"We'd use the building I owned in Cambridge as our headquarters. We'd all have dinner there once a week — on tuesdays, since I was already cooking for the thursday diners on thursdays — and after dinner we'd bring in experts on startups to give talks."

"being part of a batch was better for the startups too. It solved one of the biggest problems faced by founders: the isolation. Now you not only had colleagues, but colleagues who understood the problems you were facing and could tell you how they were solving them."

"To test this new Arc, I wrote Hacker News in it. It was originally meant to be a news aggregator for startup founders and was called Startup News, but after a few months I got tired of reading about nothing but startups. Plus it wasn't startup founders we wanted to reach. It was future startup founders. So I changed the name to Hacker News and the topic to whatever engaged one's intellectual curiosity."

"YC was different from other kinds of work I've done. Instead of deciding for myself what to work on, the problems came to me. Every 6 months there was a new batch of startups, and their problems, whatever they were, became our problems. It was very engaging work, because their problems were quite varied, and the good founders were very effective. If you were trying to learn the most you could about startups in the shortest possible time, you couldn't have picked a better way to do it."

"Kevin Hale once said about companies: ""No one works harder than the boss."" He meant it both descriptively and prescriptively, and it was the second part that scared me. I wanted YC to be good, so if how hard I worked set the upper bound on how hard everyone else worked, I'd better work very hard."

"we wanted YC to last for a long time, and to do that it couldn't be controlled by the founders. So if Sam said yes, we'd let him reorganize YC. Robert and I would retire, and Jessica and Trevor would become ordinary partners"

"attention is a zero sum game. If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that's not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it's getting in the way of another project that is. And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around"

"Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off."

"The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them."

"There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness."

"The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. This can't be how the big, famous startups got started, they think. The mistake they make is to underestimate the power of compound growth."

"if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users manually and then gradually switch to less manual methods."

"Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them."

"It's even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself."

"The question to ask about an early stage startup is not ""is this company taking over the world?"" but ""how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?"""

"If you build something to solve your own problems, then you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward."

"Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that worked well."

"I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy."

"It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that. For a big company it's necessarily the dominant one. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness."

"The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get."

"It's always worth asking if there's a subset of the market in which you can get a critical mass of users quickly."

"The biggest danger of not being consciously aware of this pattern is for those who naively discard part of it. E.g. if you don't build something for yourself and your friends, or even if you do, but you come from the corporate world and your friends are not early adopters, you'll no longer have a perfect initial market handed to you on a platter."

"As long as you can find just one user who really needs something and can act on that need, you've got a toehold in making something people want, and that's as much as any startup needs initially"

"When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later. This lets you launch faster, and when you do finally automate yourself out of the loop, you'll know exactly what to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself."

"I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch."

"why do founders think launches matter? A combination of solipsism and laziness. They think what they're building is so great that everyone who hears about it will immediately sign up. Plus it would be so much less work if you could get users merely by broadcasting your existence, rather than recruiting them one at a time."

"It's not enough just to do something extraordinary initially. You have to make an extraordinary effort initially. Any strategy that omits the effort — whether it's expecting a big launch to get you users, or a big partner — is ipso facto suspect"

"aptitude for exploiting people is not what Y Combinator looks for at all."

"What YC looks for, above all, is founders who understand some group of users and can make what they want. This is so important that it's YC's motto: ""Make something people want."""

"If other people both knew about this need and were able to satisfy it, they already would be, and there would be no room for your startup."

"the YC partners have to guess both whether you've discovered a real need, and whether you'll be able to satisfy it. That's what they are, at least in this part of their job: professional guessers."

"That's what the partners will be trying to figure out: is there a path to a huge market?"

"This idea is important enough that it's worth coining a phrase for, so let's call one of these small but growable markets a ""larval market."""

"The ideal combination is the group of founders who are ""living in the future"" in the sense of being at the leading edge of some kind of change, and who are building something they themselves want."

"A larval market might also be regional, for example. You build something to serve one location, and then expand to others."

"As long as you have some users, there are straightforward ways to get more: build new features they want, seek out more people like them, get them to refer you to their friends, and so on. But these techniques all require some initial seed group of users."

"a single question, it would be ""How do you know people want this?"""

"The most convincing answer is ""Because we and our friends want it."" It's even better when this is followed by the news that you've already built a prototype, and even though it's very crude, your friends are using it, and it's spreading by word of mouth."

"In practice, the YC partners will be satisfied if they feel that you have a deep understanding of your users' needs."

"one of the best ways to do it is to go talk to your users and find out exactly what they're thinking. Which is what you should be doing anyway."

"if the YC partners can convince themselves that the founders both (a) know what they're talking about and (b) aren't lying, they don't need outside domain experts. They can use the founders themselves as domain experts when evaluating their own idea."

"This is why YC interviews aren't pitches."

"if you don't know the answer to a question, don't try to bullshit your way out of it. The partners, like most experienced investors, are professional bullshit detectors, and you are (hopefully) an amateur bullshitter."

"you should know who your competitors are, and tell the YC partners candidly what your relative strengths and weaknesses are."

"This is seed investing. At this stage, all they can expect are promising hypotheses. But they do expect you to be thoughtful and honest."

"If the partners are sufficiently convinced that there's a path to a big market, the next question is whether you'll be able to find it. That in turn depends on three things: the general qualities of the founders, their specific expertise in this domain, and the relationship between them."

"what seemed to them an irrelevant story was in fact fabulously good evidence of their qualities as founders. It showed they were resourceful and determined, and could work together."

"Mundane as it sounds, that's the most powerful motivator of all, not just in startups, but in most ambitious undertakings: to be genuinely interested in what you're building."

"The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do."

"The founders who are doing it for the money will take the first sufficiently large acquisition offer, and the ones who are doing it to seem cool will rapidly discover that there are much less painful ways of seeming cool."

"This exploitative type of founder is not going to succeed on a large scale, and in fact probably won't even succeed on a small one, because they're always going to be taking shortcuts. They see YC itself as a shortcut."

"What do users want? What new things could you build for them? Founders who've become billionaires are always eager to talk about that topic. That's how they became billionaires."

"You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it."

"You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't"

"One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are."

"It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have."

"The founders and early employees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startup wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly outnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, the original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted."

"It also works to go in the other direction: as well as cultivating a small collection of independent-minded friends, to try to meet as many different types of people as you can."

"When I read history I do it not just to learn what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is hard to do, but worth the effort for the same reason it's worth travelling far to triangulate a point."

"The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones."

"at the individual muscles we need to exercise, as it were. It seems to me that it has three components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told what to think, and curiosity"

"In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an active delight in ideas that subvert the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better."

"The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert: fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to fill it."

"if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be ""do what you love"" so much as ""do what you're curious about."""

"An example that will be familiar to a lot of people is arguing online. When someone contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But like a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we now live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life."

"One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future."

"You take things for granted, and then they're gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed."

"Don't wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don't need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. Just don't wait."

"The reason I'm sad about my mother is not just that I miss her but that I think of all the things we could have done that we didn't."

"Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short."

"So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in."

"But pick something and get going. You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. It's good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields."

"Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let ""work"" mean something other people tell you to do."

"always preserve excitingness."

"There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on."

"Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge."

"The next step is to notice them. This takes some skill, because your brain wants to ignore such gaps in order to make a simpler model of the world."

"If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find."

"Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones."

"The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive"

"The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside."

"The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes in two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that grows out of it."

"They don't tell you, but I will: when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own. Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest will find themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid down on the assumption that everyone does."

"When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions."

"When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them."

"Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to find new things if you're looking where few have looked before."

"If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want."

"But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray."

"I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future."

"Ideally those hours will be contiguous."

"Lots of great things began with someone saying ""How hard could it be?"""

"Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie after all."

"One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else."

"The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?"""

"Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem."

"Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come."

"That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing."

"The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve."

"If people consciously realized they could invest in exponential growth, many more would do it."

"Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment."

"Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don't know what you're aiming for."

"Fortunately there's a kind of economy of scale here. Though it might seem like you'd be taking on a heavy burden by trying to be the best, in practice you often end up net ahead."

"Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation."

"The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects."

"To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far."

"Another more subtle component of earnestness is informality. Informality is much more important than its grammatically negative name implies. It's not merely the absence of something. It means focusing on what matters instead of what doesn't."

"Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that's exactly what you need in doing great work. It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood. So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them."

"If you actually want to discover new things, it's better to take the risk of telling people your ideas."

"To beat this ask: If I'd already made the change, would I want to revert to what I have now?"

"Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn from the arts."

"It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it."

"When you're doing work that could be seen as either creation or discovery, err on the side of discovery."

"In the best case you create the field in the process of exploring it."

"it takes a certain amount of ability to see new ideas even once you've learned enough to get to one of the frontiers of knowledge."

"Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks."

"They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult."

"Curiosity is itself a kind of originality; it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers."

"And since questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity at its best is a creative force."

"When you fix a broken model, new ideas become obvious."

"We see the world through models that both help and constrain us."

"But noticing and fixing a broken model is hard. That's how new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover: they're easy to see after you do something hard."

"One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people. Broken models of the world leave a trail of clues where they bash against reality. Most people don't want to see these clues."

"To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead of looking away."

"The other thing you need is a willingness to break rules. Paradoxical as it sounds, if you want to fix your model of the world, it helps to be the sort of person who's comfortable breaking rules."

"Indeed, if you think about it, a good new idea has to seem bad to most people, or someone would have already explored it. So what you're looking for is ideas that seem crazy, but the right kind of crazy."

"There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules: to enjoy breaking them, and to be indifferent to them. I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent-minded."