Black Swan Farming

I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to…

I haven't really assimilated that fact, partly because it's so counterintuitive, and partly because we're not doing this just for financial reasons;…

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…

Perhaps most convincingly, it would be demoralizing for us to be up to our chins in failure all the time. But I know the real reason we're so…

Some want to take over the world, and some just want that first few million. But we invest in so many companies that we don't have to sweat any one…