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There are a few people who start too many new projects, but far more, I suspect, who are deterred by fear of failure from starting projects that…

But that doesn't work with startups. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is whether your product does what they want.…

But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it increases. Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids in that it's like…

In the unlikely case that you're 20 and one of your side projects takes off like Facebook did, you'll face a choice of running with it or not, and it…

Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any conscious effort.…

So strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational version…

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The very best…

A good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent the unsexy filter is to ask what you wish someone else would build, so that you could use it…

I know it's a bad idea the way I know randomly generated DNA would not produce a viable organism. The set of plausible sounding startup ideas is many…

The probability that any group will succeed really big is microscopically small, but the probability that those 19 year olds will might be higher…

It also reminds you that the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad. The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to…

Which means that even if we're generous to ourselves and assume that YC can on average triple a startup's expected value, we'd be taking the right…

Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something…

Introducing an investor to your cofounder(s) should be like introducing a girl/boyfriend to your parents — something you do only when things reach…

When you refuse to meet an investor because you're not in fundraising mode, or slow down your interactions with an investor who moves too slow, or…

The second dimension is the one you have most control over. And indeed, the growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. As…

Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your…

There are a lot of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren't like that. Sheer effort is…

What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they…

It may be the most impressive thing that can be done. And the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is…

Criticism seems sophisticated, and making new things often seems awkward, especially at first; and yet it's precisely those first steps that are most…

It was ok to do certain other kinds of work in one's spare time, but ideally one didn't have any. Cicero's De Officiis is one of the great…

What kinds of new things count? I'd rather leave that question to the makers of them. It would be a risky business to try to define any kind of…

Newton was driven by curiosity and ambition, not by any practical effect his work might have, and yet the practical effect of his work has been…

There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no.…

People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if…

Whereas if you're young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what…

You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out…

Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that…

Notes [ 1 ] These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness. It's…

But it wasn't just decay from within that broke up J. P. Morgan's economy. There was also pressure from without, in the form of new technology, and…

Who are your first users going to be, and how do you know they want this? If I had to decide whether to fund startups based on a single question,…

YC doesn't have time to do this, but if the YC partners can convince themselves that the founders both (a) know what they're talking about and (b)…

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

So that's what YC looks for in founders: authenticity. People's motives for starting startups are usually mixed. They're usually doing it from some…

But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them…

But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode.…

Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them…

And I don't think anyone with knowledge of this world would dispute that. [ 2 ] If the practice of having such retreats became so widespread that…

One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one.…

Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the…

Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against both other…

Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that it's just a sketch…

It can sometimes be hard to get an accurate answer to this question, because people are often embarrassed by their earliest work and make little…

So there's an iron rule that just as you want to start getting worldly wisdom by asking why, why, why, in communicating with other people about…

For example, one great advantage of scale taught in all of the business schools of the world is cost reductions along the so-called experience curve.…

Another advantage of scale comes from psychology. The psychologists use the term social proof. We are all influenced—subconsciously and to some…

That's what happened to The Saturday Evening Post and all those things. They're gone. What we have now is Motocross —which is read by a bunch of nuts…

They also tend to become somewhat corrupt. In other words, if I've got a department and you've got a department and we kind of share power running…

Over the years, we've tried to figure out why the competition in some markets gets sort of rational from the investor's point of view so that the…

For example, if you look around at bottler markets, you'll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many…

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. And most people…

In all cases, the people who sell the machinery—and, by and large, even the internal bureaucrats urging you to buy the equipment—show you projections…

So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don't, you're going to lose.…

And then the track is taking 17% off the top. So not only do you have to outwit all the other betters, but you've got to outwit them by such a big…

How many insights do you need? Well, I'd argue: that you don't need many in a lifetime. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its…

However, I know of no really rich sector rotator. Maybe some people can do it. I'm not saying they can't. All I know is that all the people I know…

However, in all fairness, I don't think a lot of money managers could successfully sell their services if they used our system. But if you're…

But it doesn't work for Berkshire Hathaway anymore because we've got too much money. We can't find anything that fits our size parameter that way.…

So you do get an occasional opportunity to get into a wonderful business that's being run by a wonderful manager. And, of course, that's hog heaven…