In theory, the hard part about finding capital for unproven founders with unproven technologies in unproven markets should be that no one wants the risk. There was a time when that was true, but it isn’t anymore.[1] For a founder, the issue is different: venture capital is abundant, but it’s not very evenly distributed.[2]

There are groups of founders to whom this uneven distribution is an advantage. These founders are well connected or pedigreed and can use their access to capital as an advantage in building their startups. That’s good for them, and they should use every advantage they have.

But the world of startups would be better overall if capital could more easily find great startups. That should be a given, but in looking at the various bottlenecks in the system, it is clear that, at least some of the time, some of the parties involved are actively impeding access and distribution. Other bottlenecks are the result of the fact that venture markets are immature.

Manufactured impedance

Professional investors are in something of a bind when balancing accessibility and exclusivity. On the one hand, the best investors generally believe that returns are driven by significant outliers. These outliers are unlikely to come from an expected source or pattern match precisely on previous outliers. This means that investors would be best served by having the largest possible funnel and the least biased filtering mechanisms. In other words, investors should treat any and all inbound investment opportunities as potentially incredible and equal weight their attention to them.

However, this presents a set of problems. Investors who tout their willingness to look at everything equally and actually do so will lose their auras of exclusivity. This aura is important in convincing founders to contact the investor and later when investors try to win deals - when given the opportunity, most people choose exclusive clubs over inclusive clubs.

Then there’s the practical problem: capital may be abundant, but good people and their time are scarce. Let’s say, for instance, an investor decides to follow the “evaluate all inbound” model. This investor actively markets that she’ll meet every company that emails her. The strategy works and the emails pour in.

That investor will then need the time to meet hundreds of companies each week. Software can help route and filter, an application process can eliminate some number of in person meetings, but the investor will need partners and staff to deal with volume.[3] New partners and staff cost money, which means raising more funds. Larger teams and larger funds start to impact exclusivity, as does the greater numbers of investments dictated by adding people and looking at more companies.[4] Investors who want to pursue the abundance path will get caught in a recursive loop that seems dangerous to their model.

Structural impedance

The other set of barriers to capital distribution exist because venture markets are relatively new and immature. There are many markets without local venture capital investors. Foreign investors may be interested, but face challenges in understanding the nuances of those markets and those founders.[5] This impedes the flow of capital to companies that should get it.

Because venture markets are relatively new, they are also unnecessarily opaque. Information within these markets is rightly viewed as incredibly valuable, and so it is rationed by those who have it. This makes it hard for new entrants with money to figure out where to put that money. Instead, LPs are required to route it through the professional venture investors that have access to information about what companies are raising and which are not. The analogy here would be an equities market which forced university endowments to call hedge fund managers to discover what stocks exist.

There are a number of other structural bottlenecks to evening out the distribution of capital. What is so interesting about these and the manufactured bottlenecks is that they could all be solved by either a new common set of behaviors, or an intermediary that made it significantly easier for startups to access the sources of capital already looking for them.[6]

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[1] See https://blog.aaronkharris.com/abundant-capital

[2] Apologies to William Gibson for bastardizing one of my two favorite quotes about the future and technology. The other is from Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

[3] Operating under the assumption that the investor can successfully generate inbound interest.

[4] Partners at venture funds are primarily evaluated on the quality of their investments. This means they have to actually make investments, especially early in their careers.

[5] When Rappi first launched, US investors failed to understand the radical differences in their economics relative to US counterparts. These differences were driven by dramatically lower employment costs and urban densities that were only apparent if you’d studied Latin America enough.

[6] To some extent, YC’s Demo Day does this for seed stage companies. However this function has not yet been replicated at later stages.

The venture capital industry was built on the premise that both capital and high quality companies are scarce. For most of the history of the industry, this has been true. I remember sitting at demo day in 2011 and marveling at the fact that the combined capital of all the VCs in the room was less than that controlled by the hedge fund at which I had worked. But the model is wrong. Venture capital is abundant, and that fact should fundamentally change how founders fundraise.

This scarcity model has shaped the structure of startups and VCs - most of what an early stage startup does is designed to convince a VC to invest. Companies treat VCs as a limited resource that is both hard to access and hard to convince. Investors do their best to perpetuate this idea because it allows them to retain control of the pitch and fund dynamic.[1]

Something interesting happens, though, whenever a company has a signifier of quality - a YC demo day slot, a high quality angel, pedigreed founders, or, even better, strong growth. In these cases, there are investor feeding frenzies, leading to oversubscribed rounds, ever climbing prices, and investors willing to accept ownership targets they - until recently - would have termed unacceptable.

To be sure, there have always been bidding wars in private equity (of which venture is a subset), but these bidding wars are so frequent now as to be approaching the norm. If capital was actually scarce, this wouldn’t happen, there wouldn’t be enough money to create so many bidding wars.[2]

Bidding wars aren’t the only evidence of capital abundance. The VCs are changing their businesses because of this abundance, whether or not they admit the reason. The evidence is in the new funds that seem to launch on a daily basis, the multi-billion dollar growth funds that have become increasingly common, and the ownership targets at various rounds that continue to drop.

At the same time that capital has become more abundant, founders have become smarter about fundraising. There are now a huge number of blogs, classes, essays, guides, and advisers ready to help founders navigate the previously opaque world of fundraising. As a result, founders can approach each funding event with a clear plan of how to run a process. Running an orderly process further increases the chances that a company will see competitive bids.

As a thought experiment, assume that the abundance model is here to stay. It is also safe to assume that founders will not suddenly forget their newfound knowledge about process. I think this should encourage founders to think about changing fundraising in a few major ways:

1. Founders should approach every fundraising as an auction. This is what each process already is, but the auction is inefficient. There’s lots of language and pseudo-moral arguments about why this is bad, but most of those fall apart if capital is abundant.

2. Founders should expand their funnels beyond the traditional VCs. These VCs hold a marketing and branding advantage, much of which is built around the signal to later rounds. If, however, each round is an auction, this benefit evaporates. YC’s demo day proved this funnel expansion works at seed, and there’s no logical reason it should fail at later rounds.

3. Once a founder has the information produced by this process, she can decide whether to minimize dilution, maximize price, or optimize around the partner. The answer will change based on the situation, but having access to the choice is important.

Founders are hesitant to run this model because they fear that running an auction will create a negative quality signal. Investors encourage this belief because it allows them to keep deal flow proprietary. This is flawed logic. The quality of a company can’t be determined by the investors to whom that company talks when raising money. The quality of a company is determined by whether or not the company is good, and good companies should take advantage of abundant capital markets.[3]

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[1] Perhaps more importantly to the investors’ business model is that this dynamic creates a reason for the existence of VCs. If founders and LPs both internalized how non-scarce capital actually is, they could find one another directly, bypassing VCs.

[2] It’s important to remember that, even though capital is abundant, it remains unevenly distributed. There are companies that struggle to raise money - some of these may be bad investments, but many are good. This is a problem of access rather than capacity, which is a whole different issue.

[3] When a company IPOs, it opens ownership up to anyone who can afford a share. Imagine, for a second, an investor arguing that this is a sign of low quality.

I sent this email to the whole team at YC yesterday:

When I joined YC 7.5 years ago, there weren’t many people around. PG and Jessica were still running things. We had offices in Mountain View, Palo Alto, and on Kearny street, but they were nearly always empty. The only meeting on any calendar was the lunch on Thursdays where we’d talk about companies over takeout or at a table in a crowded restaurant.

The ways in which we’ve changed since then have been amazing to see. YC has grown in every way imaginable. The scope of what YC funds is larger. The team is bigger and more capable. The number of companies is pushing towards some ever receding upper bound. There’s more software, a larger community, and more programming designed to help YC founders build better futures.

I feel a deep sense of pride and honor at the part that I’ve played in that change and growth. I recall the first conversation I had with Aaron King about the Series A for Snapdocs. The questions he and I worked through were the kernel of the Series A program. I am amazed to see the directions in which Janelle is now building YCA. I’m grateful for the part I played in our conversations about growing beyond seed investing - conversations which eventually took shape as YCC. And, of course, there are fifteen batches worth of applications, interviews, dinners, office hours, and demo days rattling around in my head.

I’ve been thinking, recently, about the founders with whom I’ve had a chance to work. I’ve lost count of the number of incredible people I’ve gotten to know over these last years. Thinking back, it’s easy to see how the sheer weight of numbers can drive a person to be jaded about the problems that founders face. But the other night, as I spoke with a founder about a tough situation, I was reminded about how important it is to that individual that she gets the best possible advice. This is a lesson I learned time and again, and is something I hope I’ll never forget.

And then there’s the funny stuff. There were stolen air conditioners, barefoot pitches, robots that did not make sandwiches, update emails pulled from the I Ching, bandages, inhaled jet fuel, and literal blood on the interview floors. These are the things that I’ll remember long after everything else.

The truth is, I only meant to stick around YC for two years. Somehow, that two became two more, and then some more. As meaningfully as I’ve enjoyed my work here, it’s time for me to move onto something different and new and outside the bounds of what YC does. That’s a strange, exhilarating moment, and an important one for me and for my family. The pandemic provided the practical and existential nudge I needed to see the depth of this need.

To my fellow partners - thank you for your tireless work for our founders and for YC. Thank you for everything you’ve taught me, for all the strange conversations we’ve had, and for all the demo day presentations we’ve crafted.

To PG and Jessica and Trevor and RTM - thank you for giving me this opportunity and for making YC the kind of place I could love enough to stay long after I meant to leave.

To Janelle - thank you for building YCA with me and for being the best person I could imagine to take it into the future.

To everyone else - YC’s mission in the world is abstract. It could mean so many things, but it wouldn’t be anything without your work. Whether you are managing founder expectations about housing in the Bay Area, helping someone understand the mysteries of cap tables, talking someone down off the ledge of yelling at a reporter, or making sure that there will one day be an office to come back to, you are what makes YC a viable, vital force in the world.

I’ve never liked goodbye.

aaron

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that good companies are increasingly over-diluting themselves in their seed and A rounds. Counterintuitively, dilution seems to rise along with price. One would expect the opposite correlation. Strong founders who command high prices should be using that higher price to sell less of their companies in exchange for money to grow. As I’ve tried to understand what’s going on, I’ve tried several arguments.

Somewhere in the last week, I’ve come to understand an error I’ve been making when talking to founders about how much money to raise. I realized that the conversation about raising always anchors back to the idea of adding “months of runway.” That always seemed appropriate to me because it was a measure of the amount of time a company had to stay alive. Staying alive seemed good since it increased the time a company had to find product market fit and to grow.

But I now realize that this is the wrong framing because simply staying alive is an inadequate goal for a company.  Founders start companies to find product market fit and grow. Venture capital is designed to speed growth, not to extend runway.

As a result, in recent conversations, I’ve started to ask founders: “How much could you get done in the next 12 months with the amount of capital you are planning to raise? If you’re a good company, you’re either going to raise your Series A - or Series B - in the next 12 months or have significant revenue such that you won’t need more capital.[1] If you’re doing badly, why would you want to keep working on this for 24 or 36 months? That’s a waste of your time.”

Founders who raise too much capital are acting out of fear rather than acting out of confidence. This fear made sense ten years ago when seed financing was relatively scarce. This is when much of the fundraising advice I read as a founder was written. However, the world has changed and so should the advice

Financing is more accessible to good founders than it has ever been.[2] Confident, competent founders should take the risk of running out of money vs. the certainty of over-dilution.

Good founders respond to this framework as it shifts the argument from one in which “winning” is about adding months of runway to the bank to one in which “winning” is fast and high quality execution - as evidenced by hitting milestones. It’s also easy to draw a straight line from this framing to the best companies. When a company raises a Series A nine months after launch - or Demo Day - with 80% of its seed funds in the bank, it’s apparent that those founders sold too much.[3]

A founder’s decision on how much money to raise in any given round is more art than science. It is a fraught decision since it necessarily forces founders to make predictions about the future. There is no perfect answer, and over-optimizing around any single factor is a mistake. However, it seems clear that shifting the goal of fundraising from adding runway to progress would limit both the amount of money companies believe they need and the dilution that founders take in the process of building successful startups.

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[1] And if this is true, investors will chase you anyway.

[2] Even during COVID. I did not expect this to be true, however, this market is one of the most active I've ever seen.

[3] Seeing this dynamic on a regular basis while running YC's Series A program is what led me to realize my mistake. Without fail, the founders raising the most competitive rounds have the most capital left, and thereby the most unnecessary dilution.

Thank you to Daniel Gackle and Michael Seibel for your thoughts and edits.

Small children are great at asking questions. Their questions are simple, direct, and utterly without ego. If you spend time with 2-5 year olds, you’ll find yourself answering a near infinite series of progressively more challenging questions. This is one of the main paths by which children learn about the world.

ex. Child question: “Why is the sky blue?”

Adults are generally bad at asking questions. Adult questions come with long preambles, caveats, and agendas. Adult questions don’t seem to be designed to learn about the world, they seem to be designed to avoid looking dumb.

ex. Adult question: “I know the sky isn’t actually blue, and that if I look up, I know there’s nothing between me and outer space except air and maybe some clouds. Beyond that, there’s outer space. Outer space is effectively black because there isn’t light. Yet the sky often, though not always, appears to be various shades of blue. What triggers that blue? Is it something about how light interacts with air? Or gravity? Magnetic fields?”

The contrast between child questions and adult questions is striking, but it isn’t a function of age, it’s a function of conditioning. At some point, children get social signals that asking questions makes them appear stupid. This can come from a frustrated parent, annoyed teacher, or mocking friend.

Kids internalize this feedback and start to ask fewer questions as they grow up. The scope of things about which adults ask questions get narrower and narrower, shying away from things that are new or hard to understand. At the same time, adult questions get longer and longer. Most of this length isn’t important for the question, it is meant to prevent the audience from thinking the questioner is stupid.

These questions aren’t terribly useful to either the questioner or the questionee. If you’re not sure what this type of question looks like, watch a congressional hearing. The questions are meant to prove points, not produce knowledge.

Adult questions reinforce their own badness. When an adult spends most of a question proving his own intelligence, the question doesn’t produce new knowledge. This reinforces the perception that questions aren’t worth practicing. Without that practice, the questions continue to get worse.

I’ve been thinking about questions because I noticed that I’ve become increasingly self conscious about not knowing things, and cover for that by asking adult questions. Some of this is a function of the fact that I’m older and some of it is a function of the fact that my job involves giving a significant amount of advice. I noticed, as well, that conversations in which I ask simpler questions are more enjoyable and more interesting. These conversations lead to new ideas and better plans.

I’m particularly conscious of this dynamic in conversations with founders. Many founders believe that adult questions are the best questions because of their interactions with investors. On the one hand, investors tell founders that asking questions is a good thing. On the other hand, founders are judged for asking questions that are “too basic.” Founders who do things without asking questions first are generally rewarded for being “fast” whereas those that ask some questions first are derided as being “slow.”

However, successful startups are not defined by the questions that a founder asks. They are defined by what a founder does with the information at hand, and how quickly. Founders who acquire new information quickly and act are more successful. Founders who dither or get caught in infinite loops of ignorant execution generally fail.

Founders and investors would have better conversations if each side dropped the pretense of needing to “look” smart and asked child questions. This isn’t a complex task, but it does require focus.

The way I’m working on this is to stop myself each time I’m about to ask a question and figure out what I actually want to know, and then see if I can just ask that specific question in no more than a single simple sentence. If the question does not produce a satisfying answer, I’ll try to understand if it is because I worded the question poorly, or did not provide enough context. If I need more context, I’ll add one or two sentences of context, and ask the question again.

This strategy does not always work: I don’t always catch myself in time, I sometimes ask poorly worded questions, sometimes the question requires more context than is practical. However, I’ve found that the act of thinking about the question I want to ask and examining it in this child/adult dichotomy has helped me ask better questions, have better conversations, and learn more things. That’s enough of a reason to continue doing it.

Experts are generally right until they're wrong. Unfortunately, it's very easy to get fooled into thinking that experts are always right. This is because they are...experts. They are authoritative and knowledgeable. This is especially true when it comes to trying new things in existing fields. We are biased into believing that knowing a lot about something confers an ability to predict the future.

The problem with expertise is that it doesn't necessarily come paired with an openness to new ideas. Expertise can be used to shut down new ideas and avenues of exploration just as easily as it can aid in invention. I've been guilty of this when hearing about new ideas. In fact, it often feels easier to shut things down than to use what I know to figure out how to make something new actually work.[1] Perversely, being negative may make someone seem like more of an expert than they are, creating a negative feedback cycle.

When you don't know much about a subject, you're free of the constraints of what has been tried. That means people who are inexpert will often have wilder ideas. Sometimes, that's called naive or stupid. However, when those ideas happen to work, then it's called genius or groundbreaking.

That doesn't mean that every problem can be solved by creative ignoramuses. There seems to be a level of expertise which, when paired with the right environment, is conducive to productive creativity. I wish I had a way to know those levels for different areas.

Without a clear set of rules to use in evaluating expertise, I instead try to evaluate founders based on what I can learn from talking to them. This is especially true in areas that I understand fairly well. While there are certain things I might expect a founder to understand about what they're doing, I'm much more interested in how they think and test assumptions. This is part of how I try to figure out if I'm investing in potential (good) or track record (not so good).

One of the tricks in doing this is to see whether or not the tests that founders run cause them to ask increasingly interesting questions. Coming up with questions is a good sign of creativity, while answering them well builds the expertise necessary to actually get something done.

Technology increases the likelihood that a seemingly naive approach to a problem will work because it reduces the iterative cycle of trying that approach. Given enough time and resources, you could try every single solution[2]. In the real world, though, we have to pick solutions to work on. This is where the good founders are separated from the bad ones. The good ones get better and more open as time goes on, while the bad ones get more closed down and start rejecting ideas out of hand.

The same is true for investors. The best ones use new knowledge to open up new ideas, while the worst use it to close out entire categories of ideas.[3] That's short sighted because the world constantly changes, which makes new things possible. Founding and an investing in those new possibilities is what creates the companies that change the world. That creates new areas in which to be expert, starting the cycle all over again.

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[1] https://archive.org/stream/ERIC_ED211573#page/n0/mode/2up

[2] And enough monkeys at enough typewriters will eventually produce Hamlet.

[3] This is different than investors who understand the limits of their expertise and focus on specific sectors. An investor can be sector focused and open to lots of new ideas within that sector, just as an investor can say they'll invest in anything only to shoot down every idea.

Thanks to Craig Cannon for feedback.

Originally posted on the YC blog, here: https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-vcs-sometimes-push-companies-to-burn-too-fast/

In Investors and their incentives, I tried to give a broad breakdown of the incentives that drive the major types of startup investors. I want to dig deeper into a behavior that VCs sometimes exhibit which seems strange from the point of view of founders. Despite praising frugality, VCs sometimes push companies to spend more money, faster. Sometimes this leads to faster growth. More often it leads to empty bank accounts. I've seen a number of companies get killed by this dynamic, and it took me a long time to understand why it happens.

I recently had a conversation with a founder who'd just finished a number of unsatisfying conversations with investors. The founder's company was growing well, had crossed $1mm ARR, but still couldn't raise money. According to conventional wisdom, that should have been enough to open some checkbooks. Unfortunately, that's not how fundraising works.

• $1mm ARR
• 10% weekly growth
• Repeat founders who were previously funded
• 2 Fortune 500 pilots, 5 in pipeline
• Engagement rates that are higher than Facebook

Fundraising is a frustrating process that resists well-meaning attempts to make it into a predictable science. That's actually quite fitting, though, since while much about startups can be measured, that measurement never guarantees success. Success comes from using the unique advantages you have and combining them into a coherent, self-reinforcing story and product.
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[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Parametric_insurance
[2] http://tomtunguz.com/mrr-growth/

Thanks to Craig Cannon, Dalton Caldwell, Sam Altman, and Andy Weissman for your edits.

It is incredibly important to understand the incentives of investors when you are raising money. This used to be fairly easy - you raised money from Venture Capitalists who wanted to see a big return on their investment. The best of these investors were incredibly focused on doing the one thing they did well: investing in technology companies.

Investing in emerging markets such as India, Kenya, and Nigeria isn’t quite what I naively thought it would be. Before I started, I thought that finding a good company in an emerging market would just mean copying models that worked in developed markets. All I’d have to do is figure out how the business would need to be tweaked for a lower price point, identify the best founders working on the problem in the new market, and invest in them. Any structural difference in the new market would just serve as a barrier to other companies from moving in. In the last few years, though, I’ve learned that while this is one way to invest, it’s unlikely to identify the largest companies that have yet to be built. I now think that the better way to invest in startups in the developing world is to ask “How would you solve a problem if you started fresh with today’s technology?”

This probably seems like an obvious question, and one that founders and investors should be asking themselves with any opportunity. But, one of the more surprising things that I've learned is the degree to which the sequence of technological adoption changes the opportunity set available to startups and how we think about them. This isn't something you can actually see when looking at a single market, it's similar to comparative literature where each pair of markets that you examine in tandem illustrate the differences and gaps.

Credit cards and payments are a good way to illustrate this dynamic. We'll use the US as the base case. The US has an extensive and well established financial system, from trustworthy savings banks to a wide array of credit options to standardized and reasonably secure systems for transferring money. When M-PESA, Kenya's mobile money transfer system launched in 2007, Kenya did not have many of these pieces of infrastructure. What they did have was an unmet need to quickly and safely transfer money over long distances. They also had Safaricom, the largest cellular operator in the country. Not only did Safaricom provide the phones and coverage needed to make transfers possible, their network reached more of the population than the branches of any bank. On top of that, the banks lacked the lobbying power to kill off an upstart that was actually being run by a powerful company.[1]

Contrast this situation with the one faced by companies like Venmo on launching in the US. The foundation of the market is different here, with huge amounts of regulation governing money transfer alongside a fairly sophisticated (if not perfect) system to send money. Mobile money is just a convenience in the US and also faces barriers to widespread adoption from entrenched technologies, user behaviors, and regulations. In contrast, mobile money is a solution to a deep and unmet need in Kenya with a relatively green field from competition, regulation, and behavioral norms.

M-PESA wasn’t a startup that investors had access to, but let’s pretend it was. If those investors had focused on how a payments company would ever make significant revenue given the small size of the average transfer, they would have missed the opportunity to invest in a system that was handling 25% of Kenya’s GNP in 2013!

Something similar is currently playing out in India. Imagine if the first credit cards had been created today, with ubiquitous smartphones, rather than in the late 40s. Instead of serial numbers printed on paper[2], you’d probably have an app tied to your phone and some uniquely verifiable identity token. It would be easier and more efficient to create a vertically integrated system that combined the features of multiple players within the payments stack. This is the situation in India, where there are around 20 million credit cards and 220 million smartphones. Credit and debit cards aren’t a big thing there, which is why payment is so often handled in cash. In fact, they have a Cash on Delivery (COD) rate of close to 80% for goods purchased online[3]. That means that there are opportunities to build startups in India that look like credit card processors in the developed world, but there’s an even bigger opportunity to invent a new way for people to pay, and to own all the pieces.

It probably makes sense to always try to identify the optimal solution to a problem no matter where you are investing. However, finding ideal solutions is harder to do in developed markets because there are layers and layers of infrastructure, technology, and regulation that have gradually built up around most big problems. No matter what approach you take to a problem, those factors will influence how you think about it.[4]

It seems to me that the best investors are those that can most clearly articulate this thought process and hold onto it while accommodating the particulars of a given market. This is the underlying logic for investors who talk about the importance of identifying new platforms, or of catching the next wave. The companies that fit these criteria rewrite the rules of how their markets work by building entirely new foundations of infrastructure and user expectations. By doing so, they unlock the types of huge opportunities that you'd otherwise only expect in a developing world market with a clean slate.

While some great founders may think this way, many of the best simply have a vision of the world as it should exist that’s only possible with what they are making. Rather than trying to work around barriers, these founders either ignore them or are naive about their existence. Either way, they end up building things that others would have deemed too hard or pointless because of all the things other people had done. I think that's why so many great companies start as projects without much attention to commercial relevance.[5] When you start thinking about all the million different things that an existing market imposes on a new idea, it can be enough to stop you in your tracks. That's not to say that great founders ignore the market. What they actually do is react rapidly to what their companies encounter on first contact and move quickly to adjust and get better.

Developing markets are a kind of mirror of the future, or maybe of the present if things had happened differently. As such, they're hugely instructive in understanding the types of companies that can be built, and of the founders who can build them. I think it’s clear that there will be huge startups built in the developing world. More importantly, though, thinking about how and where those startups will occur forces us to think about solving problems from first principles. Starting with a clean slate lets founders and investors think about how to change the world as quickly as possible, rather than incrementing their way forward.

While thinking about wiggles (Ignoring the Wiggles ), I looked at when the biggest tech cos in the world started relative to NASDAQ. At first, I thought I'd find no correlation between how well the index was doing and when successful companies were founded.

Startups that do well often follow a set of common principles. These principles influence how they develop products, build teams, raise money, and get customers. The most successful startups, though, are exceptional and often seem to go against these principles in various ways. For founders looking to learn from the experiences and paths of other startups, this can cause confusion and lead to bad decisions.

I think this happens because of how hard it is for outside observers to understand the full context of why given decisions are made in other organizations. It is also nearly impossible to separate causation and correlation, even with perfect understanding of the rationale behind a decision. I've spoken with many founders who point to outcomes at other companies as justification for decisions that they are making with their own companies. These founders rarely give enough weight to to factors like timing, luck, and the impact of particularly skilled employees or founders in producing those outcomes.

That creates a paradox. One of the best ways to learn how to succeed is to follow good examples set by others. At the same time, following those examples can often lead to very bad decisions that harm companies. Figuring out which examples to follow, and how to follow them seems hard.

There is, however, a clear framework for figuring out what to do. First, don't do anything just because you see someone else doing it. For instance, there are many successful jerks, but that doesn't mean you should be a jerk. Some companies succeed while spending huge amounts of money, but you should probably spend as little money as possible to achieve your goals.

Second, when you see a successful company doing things that appear to break from sound principles, look at those examples through the lens of your own company and circumstance. If you take the set of things that exceptional companies do, and overlay it on the set of things that make sense for your business and team, you'll end up with the set of things you can learn from exceptional companies and mimic. You can do this even without perfect knowledge of causation, because simply knowing that something is possible is often enough, given the right people, to achieve it.

You can also look at your existing practices and plans to discover whether or not you have to change them. First is to look at the decisions you are making at your company and ask whether or not you've derived them from the logic of your own business, or if you're doing them only because you saw a successful company do something similar. If it's the latter, you then have to figure out if those decisions make sense in the context of your business without the benefit of outside examples. This is especially hard to do because you can't use your own exceptionalism as a reason for doing something. People and companies aren't exceptional because they say they are. They are exceptional because evidence shows them to be so.

What's really happening when you run this exercise is that you're deriving decisions for your company from first principles. Things other companies do may provide some ideas, but the best decisions come from focusing on what will help your company succeed on its own terms.

As your company grows, you may realize that many of the things you do don't line up with the principles you initially thought would govern your company. That's a good thing, because it means that you've figured out the pieces of your business that are exceptional. While you can't copy exceptionalism, proof that it is possible is everywhere. You can use examples of that proof to help make decisions, but ultimately, you'll have to create it yourself. And if you can create it, you have a good shot at building a great startup.

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Thanks, Geoff Ralston, for your help writing this.

A few months ago, I wrote about things that look like work, but aren't. As I paid more attention to founders doing these things, I started thinking about why they were happening. I realized that the behaviors were largely a function of bad goal setting.

When founders choose bad goals, they create bad metrics around them and try to hit those metrics. This means that those founders are optimizing for things that look like progress, but aren't. This is dangerous for startups because founders that aim for bad goals warp everything they do towards measures of progress that don't help the business grow and succeed.

If you find yourself thinking that these things are progress, you need to examine what you're aiming for.

Things that look like progress but aren't:

• Conversations with large enterprises - This is a big one for companies that rely on enterprise sales. Usually, these "conversations" are non-binding, low level, and scattered. They rarely lead anywhere. There is a type of conversation that is actually progress, but it is generally paired with a clear sales plan, a list of stakeholders, and clear asks met along the way.
• Press mentions - This feels so good, which is why it is tricky. External validation is awesome! But it isn't as awesome as engaged users or paying customers. If you're looking to get press as a means of building SEO, then press mentions can constitute progress. That only makes sense if SEO is part of your strategy and you're measuring things properly. Russ D'Souza talked abut how they do this so well at Seatgeek: http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/how-seatgeek-measures-pr-coverage/.
• Winning awards - This is another one of those pieces of external validation. Certainly helpful when proving to your mother that you're not wasting your time, but not material to the success of your company. Awards may recognize either the progress you've made, or how good you are at PR. Focus on making progress.
• Getting retweeted by someone famous - This is similar to press mentions, but even worse. When a founder is trying to do this, they're usually working on their personal brand at the expense of their startup. That's definitely the wrong thing to do.
• Meeting someone famous - Famous people are really interested in startups these days. It feels good/cool to say you met someone famous. Don't underestimate the value of having great experiences, but don't mistake it for a sign of success.
• "Getting into" elite conferences, like Davos - This is some strange combination of awards and meeting famous people.
• Eyeballs - Had to include this because it's part of what drove valuations in the tech bubble. Turned out this wasn't progress. There's a corollary today: uniques. That can be a good measure of progress if you're a media site generating revenue off of impressions, but in almost all other cases, it's a vanity metric.
• Cumulative registrations - The cousin of eyeballs. People who register for your company but don't use it aren't actually helpful. In fact, this is probably a bad sign because it means that people don't actually want to use your service. (Suggested by Geoff Ralston)
• Hiring - When you hire for the sake of a world class team, that isn't progress. If you're hiring because you can't handle the load on your service or product, then it probably is a good sign and it is progress. (Suggested by Paul Buchheit)
• Fundraising - So many founders confuse raising money with success. That's how the press views it, but it's one of the worst things that founders can tell themselves. Fundraising is just a tool to accomplish your real goals, not a goal in and of itself.
• Getting into an accelerator, even YC - This is a corollary of fundraising and awards. At YC, we'll do our best to help you figure out what your goals are (if you don't already know), and work with you to achieve them, but it's what happens after you get in that counts, not getting in. YC is neither necessary nor sufficient for success.

Starting a company is, in large part, an act of ego. When that business is a startup, the ego component is even larger. This is a good thing.

Ego is what gives the founder the confidence to create something new. Ego powers the belief that the new thing the founder creates will be good enough to change the way that tens, thousands, even millions of people live their lives. Maybe we don’t always call this ego -- maybe we call it vision, or confidence, or passion -- but the idea is the same.

But as important as ego is to the founding of a company, it is also corrosive to the creation of a good culture. Unbridled ego becomes arrogance. It doesn’t allow for other people to achieve and contribute. Founders who do not keep their egos in check are unwilling to acknowledge the help given to them by others, and have a hard time building and retaining great teams.

To start a company founders need ego, but to build a great company, founders need to be modest. Modesty is what allows founders to see all the things that contribute to their success, especially the things over which they have no control. With modesty, founders can see the important role of luck in their success. They can recognize, acknowledge, and reward the part played by cofounders, employees, and customers. They’re resilient when things go wrong because they can see beyond themselves.

The interplay between ego and modesty is obvious when you hear founders talk about their companies. As a company grows, the best founders increasingly talk about “We” and not just “I.” Every discussion about the achievements of the company is a chance to highlight the contributions of other people and of the organization overall.

This isn’t to say that the best founders disappear into the background of their own companies. The “I” still plays a strong part. It remains the founder’s job to consistently set the vision and the example for every employee. When that goes away, a company risks moving into stasis or decline.

Perhaps the most important place to use “I” over the life of a company is when things go wrong. When figuring out what happened, and who bears responsibility for fixing a problem, “We” is insufficient and even dangerous. In that case, modesty doesn’t drive the use of “We,” arrogance does. Arrogance won’t allow a founder to admit that he was wrong, so he slides to “We” to cover for it, to blame the organization. But diffuse blame means that no one figures out what actually happened and how to fix it. Do that often enough, and the badness grows until it kills the company.

It’s tough to balance “I” and “We” and it gets harder as a company grows and becomes more successful. As a company does better, the easiest stories for the press to write are those about the genius of the founders. At the same time, as more and more things happen at a company that the founders don’t directly touch, founders may start to feel disconnected from the thing that they created. This is a hard thing to face, and some founders respond to it by claiming sole credit for successes that are the work of many people. From the other side, as the company grows, some founders fade into the background and stop providing the singular vision and leadership that the company needs to succeed.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy answer as to how to strike the right balance, nor is there a single paradigm for what works best. What does seem clear, though, is that founders need to keep these questions in mind, and, if they find themselves only using “I” or only using “We,” to think long and hard about what they might be missing.

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Thank you, Colleen Taylor, for your edits.

I've noticed a common bias that shows up in some founders: they believe that their competitors are stupid or uncreative. They'll look at other businesses and identify inefficiencies or bad systems, and decide that those conditions exist because of dumb decisions on the part of founders or employees. 

This is a bad belief to hold. In truth, competitors in the market are usually founded and run by intelligent people making smart and logical decisions. That doesn't mean that all the decisions they make are necessarily the right ones, but they're rarely a function of outright stupidity.

Where companies do things that diverge from what seems smart from the outside, it's a much better idea to ask why those companies are doing things from the presumption of intelligence and logic rather than the presumption of stupidity. If you don't ask these questions, you might find yourself making the same decisions, or ending up in the same place with your own set of rationalizations. I see this all the time.

In fact, we made this mistake when we started Tutorspree. We looked at all the local agencies and the way that they acquired customers and charged for packages of lessons. We assumed they asked for so much money up front because they were greedy and not smart enough to figure out a better system. It turned out that packages of lessons were a logical outgrowth of high upfront acquisition costs and the long term dynamic of tutor/student relationships. A large enough subset of customers appreciated the breaks on pricing and commitment created by booking multiple lessons up front that it made sense to model the business that way. It took longer than it should have to realize this because of our bias.

If, instead, you presume intelligence and analyze the reasons a business looks the way it does, you will often see the challenges you might face ahead of time and, as a result, design a solution that is actually better, as opposed to simply looking new. It is a lot harder to think this way because it means that you can't just dismiss the things other people do and assume you'll be better. You actually have to prove that you know how to be better. That can be really scary because, much of the time, you might not be able to figure out how to be better. Everything you think of might lead you to the same place you see your competitors.

That, though, is no reason to stop working on your company. I think it's actually a reason to keep going, and to keep gathering information and generating new ideas. This is part of what's so cool about starting a company, you get to make up new rules as you go along, and you can toss out old ones as you go along. Two founders looking at the same problem can easily come up with multiple solutions. Each solution might look similar from far away, but the small differences add up. Importantly, if you know that other smart people started in a similar place and ended up with the wrong answer, you'll think a lot more critically about each of your decisions and never get lazy about challenging your own assumptions.

Of course, just because you presume intelligence doesn't mean that every decision made was smart. People and organizations make bad decisions for all kinds of reasons. The thing is, you don't learn much by understanding that a call was bad, you learn by understanding the inputs and the organization that enabled the bad decisions.

Even with this framework, there's no guarantee that you'll end up in the right place, no matter how much you analyze those whose decisions have left you with an opportunity. At the end of the day, there's only so much you can learn from looking at competitors. Truly great businesses aren't built as counterpoints to existing companies. They become great because they meet a deep need that isn't being satisfied. That usually requires the kinds of creative and cognitive leaps that no amount of market analysis could possibly give you.

When infrastructure is built, it usually starts out as a large scale project that can only be accomplished by government. It can be built in undeveloped areas for a fairly large amount of money, or in developed areas with massive amounts of cash and even more political capital. That's hard to do in democracies, though seems to work well in places like China.

This dynamic means that we'd expect infrastructure to fail over time as the inertia arrayed against repairs and new construction grows. That seems to be what's happening in the US.

When infrastructure decays and fails, though, it creates a lot of opportunities. Citizens who were meant to be served by the infrastructure become unhappy and are when that unhappiness is great enough, they will spend their own dollars on alternatives. This is a more direct process  than funding infrastructure through tax dollars, though it can produce different types of outcomes.

In the United States today, these opportunities are being exploited by a range of startups and companies who are essentially building private infrastructure, mainly for the relatively wealthy.

Food

Instacart is building new infrastructure to deliver food to homes. In most early use cases, this looks like pure convenience, however, over the long run it could impact and start to eliminate food deserts. By making food available in more places, Instacart has the power to change where people want to live. That process will reshape how cities grow and, eventually, are built. I'll also say that in a place like NY, where supermarkets are small, crowded, and overpriced, it seems clear that the current system only exists because there's no better alternative. Instacart is that alternative.

Transportation

This process is also starting to play out on our roads. Most of our highway system was created by a single gigantic bill, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. It would be hard to imagine today’s Federal government getting its act together or finding enough money to repair roads on a national scale. Harder still would be believing that a place like the Bay Area would figure out a way to install effective and efficient public transportation to ease the stress on our roads and highways which are nearly always gridlocked. Technology is starting to provide ways to bypass those problems by improving throughput on existing systems without changing the physical plant.[1]

Self driving cars are the most extreme example of this trend. If we do actually arrive in a world where self driving cars are ubiquitous and built on the same standard such that they can communicate with one another at long range, congestion gridlock should largely vanish as the cars plan miles ahead and subtly change speeds to clear up slow downs before they start. Even before that future, though, apps like Waze help drivers plan better routes and alleviate some stress on the most crowded points in the system.

Energy

I think the trend is also impacting power generation and consumption in the US. Companies such as  Solar City will install your own power plant on your roof which means you're no longer subject to brownouts or price increases at peak times. In most of the US, this is more of a ‘nice to have’ and cost saving measure, but in the third world, solar power could provide a viable and efficient alternative to the construction of large power plants and electric delivery systems. These systems would be a fraction of the price of the old way of doing things and be significantly more reliable thanks to their distributed architecture.[2]

Private can’t mean wealthy

There is, however, an underlying tension in the rise of this new infrastructure in that the first segments of the population to get it are generally the wealthier ones who can afford to use it. Two tiered systems may be fine when they exist in non-essential parts of our lives. However, when there are two tiers, determined by wealth, for services as basic as energy, we're in a dangerous place.

That's part of why infrastructure exists the way it does. No single piece of the population would spend enough money to build services and systems useful for everyone. I think that's always going to be true for certain projects, such as bridges. But, as technology drops the cost of delivering the types of services we traditionally associate with infrastructure, I think we'll see the market extend its reach farther and farther. There's a huge amount of money to be made by ensuring universal coverage, but it won't be easy to unlock all of it.

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[1] At best, though, this is a partial solution. Throughput is well and good, but if the roads actually start to collapse, we'll need other solutions.

[2] Even though this seems like a good idea, there are still quite a few hurdles, not the least of which would be figuring out the right financing structure to make the installations profitable for the companies doing them. This is harder than it might seem for developing countries without sufficiently developed/ubiquitous banking systems.

I think that the way that employees are getting compensated at startups is starting to break. The old model of relatively low salary and "high" equity only works when there's a healthy public market for that equity in the not too distant future. If IPOs are getting significantly delayed and are potentially at risk of not happening at all,[1] we need to change how compensation is structured.

Options only make sense as compensation when you can draw a clear line from the point at which you get the options to the point at which those options are equivalent to cash. This happens when two conditions are met: 1) the stock price is enough above the strike price on the options to make exercising worthwhile to the employee and 2) there is someone willing to quickly buy the stock. This tends to happen with access to liquid markets, which traditionally means public ones. That's the only place where an employee can sell whenever she wants and can know the price she'll get with a high degree of certainty. It's also the only place where an employee can really hedge out some or all of the risk of her options.[2] That hedging is important if the value of the options rise significantly and lead to an employee having 99% of her net worth in a single illiquid asset.

When shares can only be sold in private transactions on secondary markets, and, increasingly can only be sold with the consent of the company, the options are actually worth less. This is true for three reasons.

The first reason is that control is an important factor in asset pricing. Think about this in a situation where an employee would like to sell stock to fund the purchase of a home. In a public company, that employee could exercise the options, sell the stock quickly and use the cash to buy that home. If that employee instead wants to sell stock in a private company, and the company does not let the employee do so, the employee cannot get the cash to buy the house. Because that employee cannot do what they want with the equity, that employee should discount the value of the options they hold.

The second reason that options are worth less in the absence of robust public markets is that the terms of sale of stock in the future are unclear. An employee being granted options has no idea under what conditions he will be allowed to sell stock in the future. The future sale might be subject to board approval, there might be a heavily restricted set of buyers, the employee could be told that no sales are allowed whatsoever for a variety of reasons. Each of these possibilities adds uncertainty which makes the options harder to value and worth less.

Founders need to account for this change in the value of options when giving them, and employees need to account for the change when evaluating their offers and negotiating. This is, however, hard to do in the absence of information. Without a liquid public market to value stock, it's hard to say what the options are worth. The best guess an employee has in this scenario is to go by the most recent valuation given to the company during a fundraise. The further from that fundraise an employee is, the less relevant the price. Furthermore, without the ability to compare how different employers control and handle the sale of private stock, it's nearly impossible for an employee to know what is standard.

The third reason for why individual options are probably worth less now than they used to be is that both employer and employee need to account for the fact that the time until IPO or liquidity is longer than it used to be. This is a big issue. To get the true value of offered comp, employees need to add their offered salary to the present value of the options offered. When calculating that, the further out the payout, the less it is worth today.[3]

This is an especially important calculation when trying to hire employees away from larger companies who are already public or can offer larger cash packages to employees. Those offers also tend to include options or stock grants which have known price and sale terms. Because of their easy to understand high dollar value, these offers are hard to compete with. Options in early stage startups are much harder to value even without all these new factors. Given uncertainty around the final value of those options, the time until they can be exercised and sold is hugely important. As you move further out on the curve, not only does the discount factor become a larger lever, uncertainty over the final value gets more extreme. You can be pretty sure that a company currently worth $10mm won't be worth $1b in 3 months, so you have a reasonable band of expectation. Once that value calculation moves to years out, nearly anything is possible and needs to be factored into the calculation.

I'm not the only one thinking about this, and, indeed, there are instruments available that let employees take immediate advantage of long term options. Some banks or private investors will provide loans collateralized by options. This can be good, but debt is very different than having cash. Taking advantage of this kind of strategy could also lead to potentially tricky situations where, if the option value as determined by secondary transactions falls (which could happen quickly and dramatically given the lack of liquidity in the system), the creditor could claim the assets before the term is up. Even if the price then recovers, the employee is out of luck and money.

Founders need to deal with these issues, and given how fierce the competition for good employees is, I think someone will do so soon. One response would be to increase overall options packages to account for the fact that they are now less valuable.

Another path would be to create an internal liquidity pool capable of buying shares from employees at predetermined trigger points. Maybe this could be funded by existing investors, or maybe by other employees or existing shareholders. Because the sale points are predetermined and don't provide an open market, the value of options would still be discounted, but not as much as a scenario with no guaranteed access to liquidity.

It may make sense for some companies to start creating revenue share programs as standard practice - especially for companies that never plan to going public (of which there appears to be a rising number). This could be a powerful means of retention, though would only work with companies throwing off enough cash.

I think that something even more basic needs to happen first: companies need to standardize their secondary sale and options repurchase practices. We're living in the wild west right now - each company and each employee is doing things on their own. An employee that wants to sell shares on the secondary market generally starts asking friends if they know anyone who wants to buy those options. Generally, they'll find a broker who offers to matchmake and who then gets a cut of the overall sale in exchange for their work. The price that gets set isn't shared from one deal to another, and the rules around whether or not the company can block the sale aren't standardized. This isn't fair to employees, and will lead to confusion and bad outcomes.

Maybe what we need is two things. The first is a founder pledge that they will do everything in their power to let common holders sell into secondary markets above a certain valuation, say, $500mm. The second is that founders of highly valued private companies need to participate in a robust, standardized, secondary market to allow for the clearance of those shares.

My guess, though, is that there will be a number of different solutions with the market choosing the best one as evidenced by the quality of talent hired and retained by the company using them. Founders should be watching for that and be willing to adopt best practices as soon as they arise.

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[1] There have been a lot of articles and blog posts about this recently, but Andreessen Horowitz's recent "US Tech Funding - What's Going On" is the best analysis I've seen. They note that the average time to IPO is now 11 years vs. 4 in 99, and that the overall number of tech IPOs is plummeting as privately funded companies raise huge late stage private rounds instead.

[2] You can do this a number of different ways and hedge out either your exposure to the company itself or do the overall market. Hedging out this risk probably deserves an entire post as it can get complicated. And, while nearly impossible to do it perfectly, is important to significantly reduce risk.

[3] We'd do this as a lump sum calculation for simplicity. You can play with that calculation here: http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/present-value-investment-calculator.php

There are a lot of party rounds happening right now in early stage investing. Definitions vary, but calling a round with greater than 10 investors a party seems about right. My thought is that party rounds tend to leave companies without an investor who cares enough or has pockets deep enough to bridge the company when necessary. Some rounds do actually have a strong lead, along with a syndicate of smaller, useful investors. Those generally have different dynamics.

What I've been trying to figure out is whether or not party rounds are increasing in frequency or not. Anecdotally, it feels like they are. Has something changed in the valley that party rounds should become preferred? The JOBS Act made it easier for large numbers of small investors to back companies in a way that was not previously legal. Platforms like Angel List reduce the friction required to find investors by creating a central, easily accessibly clearing house for companies looking for money and investors looking to give it to them. Or maybe the growing size and frequency of Demo Day type events (YC's included) have created an environment where party rounds are the new normal.

I took a look at Crunchbase, expecting to see that the overall number of party rounds has been rising uncontrollably. Interestingly, that's not what I found.

What's actually happening is that there are more startups getting funded, and the number of party rounds going to those companies is rising roughly in tandem. What's really surprising is that party rounds as a % of overall rounds actually fell from a peak of 3.7% in 2010 to 2.2% in 2012, though it's now back up to 3.42%.

So it seems that we're not seeing a new normal when it comes to early stage investing. We're actually seeing an overall stable pattern ticking up in the last year after a drop. The real story here is the one about the overall number of startups getting funded as the economy has come out of the Financial Crisis. That number is clearly rising, though 2014 tailed off a bit[1]. More startups mean more innovation, and that's great.

The structure and composition of a single round of funding isn't the most important factor in a startup's success or failure. It's just another piece of the story, and one that doesn't seem to be changing much.[2]

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[1] Not sure why the number would have dropped in 2014. Might be a function of the data available to Crunchbase when this run of the db was pulled on April 3, 2015.

[2] I am still curious about whether or not party rounds are a positive or negative influence, but don't yet have an answer.

Title inspired by: 

Recently, I've had a few conversations with founders who, after YC is over, feel a bit lost about what to do next. During YC, the answer of what to do is pretty simple - we tell them to write code and talk to users. Intellectually, they know the answer after YC is to keep building their businesses, but all of a sudden they're faced with a lot of different opportunities, needs, and demands on their time.

This is a tricky time for founders because it can be easy to confuse things that look like work with actual work. Work may mean more than just writing code and talking to users, but it should only encompass things that make your company grow and get better. It can be easy to convince yourself that doing these other types of things make your company better, but that's wrong. These things are mostly for recreation. Treat them that way if you want to, but don't confuse them with what will actually help your startup.

Things that look like work but aren't:

• Writing blog posts about running startups - This feels good. If it gets onto Hacker News and gets a lot of views, you'll feel really flattered and proud. But don't confuse people reading your post with people knowing and caring about your company.
• Speaking on panels at startup conferences - If your customers are other startups, and the panel is about something specific you do, great. If not, this is a waste of time.
• Going to fancy conferences hosted by investors or media - Feels great because  you get to talk to people about how well you're doing. If you were doing that well, you'd be in your office or talking to customers. Simple test for conferences: Are your customers or users there? If yes, could be worth going, if not, then it isn't.
• Advising other founders - If you know enough to genuinely help, this is a really nice thing to do. It's good to help other founders, but it isn't likely to help your company grow. Make sure you are careful about this and don't let it take up too much time.
• Investing in other startups - Definitely not work, though it might make (or more likely lose) you some money. This is on personal time.
• Being a venture partner for a VC - Opposite of work. This is probably taking time away from your startup because now you're working for someone else.
• Attempting to fix the plumbing in your office - I've done that. Not work. Not the best way to save money. My former cofounders would probably tell me not to insulate the windows myself either.
• Networking happy hours hosted by investors - This is an opportunity to drink free beer. Great to do in moderation.
• Having coffee with investors - This can be confusing, because sometimes you need to meet with investors. If you're gearing up to raise money or need specific advice, this is work. Most of the time, though, this isn't work.

Things that don't look like work but are:

• Writing updates for your investors and meeting with them one on one - I've written about investor updates. These relationships are important, and can be incredibly helpful as you grow. Maintain them.
• Talking to your cofounders and team - Sometimes, this looks like having coffee or grabbing a beer. Invariably, you'll be talking about work and how things are going. This is work because you need to know what's going on, and need to care about how your team is feeling and doing.

It turns out that before founders ever have to manage employees, they have to manage one another. In fact, at the earliest stages of a company, when it's just two or three founders, bad management generally leads to the death of the startup. This kind of management also happens to be really hard.

Despite how important and difficult managing your cofounders is, most of the management advice I've seen is about managing employees or superiors. That's useful, but not at first. What I have read about this stage of management is structured as "treat this as a relationship." That's true, but also general enough as to be only somewhat helpful.

Managing cofounders is hard for a number of reasons:

1. Initially, there are no clear lines of direct reporting amongst cofounding teams. One cofounder may be the CEO, but that doesn't mean that that person is the best manager or the best suited to lead engineering, sales, or product.
2. Cofounders rarely have experience managing anyone or anything. They're learning at the same time as running a startup. There are a lot of good ways to manage, but they take time to learn and practice.
3. Cofounders often think they don't need management because they're all on the same team, working towards the same goals.
4. Startups are high pressure, and pressure makes people make bad decisions and lose their tempers. Small mistakes get magnified 
5. Communication is much harder than you'd expect, even when there's just two people.
6. Deciding to start a company from scratch with the goal of building a billion dollar business takes ego. As a result, founders often have large egos. With every success or piece of publicity, egos get inflated. Failures, public and private can deflate egos, and beat people up emotionally. That roller coaster creates tension, frayed nerves, and fighting.
7. Divisions of responsibility are often unclear. That can result in turf wars, feelings of encroachment and micromanagement.
8. Decision making in small teams of equals can be hard, especially when there are disagreements, which are often passionate.

There are many other factors that can introduce difficulties into cofounder management. Fortunately, the set of solutions is significantly smaller than the problem set. These problems stem from root causes which can be dealt with more simply than addressing the various expressions of those causes.

Open communication is the single most important factor in creating a good working atmosphere and provides the scaffold for everything else. It's significantly more important than cofounders liking one another. It is not enough for cofounders to agree to communicate, and generally inadequate for them to talk when the need arises. Cofounders need to establish regular check ins with one another to talk about issues at the company and with one another.

It is often helpful to have these types of conversations away from the office, especially once there are employees. Moving these conversations away from the office limits interruptions and also takes a lot of the psychological tension out of the conversations, especially the difficult ones. My cofounders and I were lucky here. We had a coffeeshop next door, a restaurant downstairs, and a bar across the street. Each came in handy, depending on the intensity of the conversation. We did, however, realize (a bit later than we should have) that disappearing from a tiny office too frequently during the day was a bad idea and hurt morale for the rest of the company. If you find that you can't have these types of honest talks with your cofounders, even out of the office, you're in trouble.

At the earliest stage of a startup, when an idea is morphing into a company, you'll probably have the first of your difficult conversations: you and your cofounders need to divide responsibilities and assign ownership of goals and the tasks that need to be accomplished to achieve those goals. Final decision authority has to be established for individual areas and for company wide decisions. Some of this will rest with the CEO, some of it with the head of product, engineering, or sales. Those roles might be filled by the the same person, but the responsibility flows through the role, not the person.

Remember that this conversation can get contentious if people feel they are being cut out of decisions they believe they should own. It is really hard to cede authority, but it has to happen in order to create a manageable strucutre.

Talk about these issues early, write down your decisions, and regularly review them.

Part of the reason you need to divide ownership of responsibilities early is to set expectations for yourself and your cofounders. Managing cofounders isn't easy, and you shouldn't expect it to be. When you're fighting over who has final say on product decisions, you'll discover just how hard it can be. One of my cofounders and I used to have shouting matches when I acted unilaterally on product without informing him. While he agreed that I had final say, I had failed to convincingly communicate my reasoning to him, and failed to set the right expectation of how product decisions would be made.

The truth is, finding out just how hard managing can be is one of the biggest shocks of working with other people. Having a reasonable set of expectations about it will help. Knowing, ahead of time, that you'll fight, get pissed off, and struggle, puts each of those events in a context that makes sense. Having strategies to work through each of those events means that those events (hopefully) won't destroy your company.

While you'll find some of your own strategies, it's a waste of time to come up with them completely on your own. Management is as much a repeatable and proven process as it is an expression of personal style. The process aspects can largely be adapted from general management literature, but I've always found it more useful to engage with a trusted mentor. In the best case scenario, this mentor is trusted by all the cofounders so that they're learning the same lessons and can use the mentor as an impartial arbiter when needed.

Finding a good mentor is tricky. Doing YC will give you access to some great ones, but certainly isn't the only way. Ideally, you want to find someone who has been through the situations that you're going to experience. You should also expect to need several mentors at different points in your career. The mentor advising you at the earliest stages might not be the person you want when each founder is responsible for dozens or hundreds of employees. The challenges you'll face will be different, as will the advice.

Even with this framework in place, managing your cofounders is rarely easy and invariably gets harder as the company grows and pressures rise. The pressures get amplified even more when things start going wrong, as they always do. You'll fight about important things, and you'll fight about seemingly inconsequential things. That's all ok and quite mundane. Just make sure you keep talking about it, adapting, and moving your company forward. Your goal shouldn't be to make your relationship with your cofounders easier. Your goal is to make the relationship manageable.

"I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've being doing it that way..."

- Bob Dylan, on Jimi Hendrix's cover of All Along the Watchtower

Most people are very lazy. They don't want to take the time to think through new ideas or look at them in a new light. Once they've made up their minds about something, they don't change them. That's generally why most people don't come up with ideas for new or great things.

This is also true for many venture capitalists. In fact, it's at the root of a very common question that founders get asked: "Well, isn't so and so doing this?" To be fair, this question isn't necessarily sparked by laziness. It's also sparked by ego - the VC wants to show how familiar they are with the market. They say "Look! I know about things and there's someone else who had the same idea you had." The implicit criticism here is that, because someone else had the idea first, your idea is somehow worse.

I think part of the reason that people ask this question as a way of putting founders down is that they assume that startups are zero sum. That's an assumption born in certain models of markets, but it's completely wrong when looking at startups. Because startups create new value, the idea that someone else has done or is doing something similar to what you're doing often acts to broaden or prove the market you're attacking.

That's not to say that directly cloning another company is a great idea. If you have no differentiation and no original thinking on a problem, then you have to fall to one of two arguments: a) the market for a given idea is so large that there's room for multiple players executing well or b) the other company is so bad at executing that they'll self destruct. They're both potentially valid, but they're hard cases to make - especially at the early stages of a company.

Even though the question might seem dumb, it's one of my favorites. It's also a great question to get as a founder. I ask it of almost every founder I meet, because it's very rare to find a truly new idea. The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before." But that's not enough. The question begs for a deeper answer, one that talks about why, even though other people have tried the same idea, they're still leaving billions of dollars on the table. It's an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality. It's that framework of thinking and level of insight that makes greatness.

In April of 2004, Google announced that its Gmail product would give users 1 gigabyte of free storage. At the time, Hotmail offered users 2 megabytes and Yahoo offered 4 megabytes. I'm guessing I initially accessed my invite via PINE, and found the idea of using a full gig of storage for email to be crazy. Unsure what I'd ever do with all that space, I initially used it as a remote backup for my thesis.[1]

Ten years later, I have nearly 12 gigs of saved email - and I delete quite a lot. Like a family in a too large home, I hold on to messages I'll never need again for two reasons: 1) the cognitive energy to decide to destroy something forever is greater than the energy needed to put it out of sight for the time being and 2) Gmail's UX actively pushes me to archive rather than to delete. This principle extends across nearly all the communication mediums with which I interact. It is more difficult to delete pictures than to upgrade storage, more difficult to delete texts rather than keep them, and to accept social connections than deny them. In each case, my desire to save against the future wins out against the knowledge that, in all likelihood, the vast majority of what I save will never be useful to me.

This is a strange place in which to find myself. I don't like keeping extraneous items around. To be sure, part of that is a function of living in a NYC apartment with little room to spare. As opposed to my apartment, though, I can assume that my storage space is effectively infinite. Yahoo already offers infinite storage to its mail customers, and it's likely that the other players will follow suit over time. This makes sense when you consider two factors. First: how cheap storage space has actually become.[2]

Second: the data contained in my communication is more valuable to my email provider than what I'd pay for the space.[3] It is unsurprising that I'm given an ever larger shoebox to fill. With no obvious cost to keeping everything around, that's exactly what I start to do.

And that leads to a paradox. The more of my communication I keep, the less each piece means to me. It feels like I'm losing something as a result, even as I gain a trove with massive potential meaning. My wife's grandfather was in Paris during WWII with the US Army. In the two years he was away, his wife had their first child - an event he only discovered weeks later via mail. The letters they wrote one another are unbelievable historical artifacts that shape their and our understanding of them and the world.[4] Of all the things they could have saved throughout 73 years of marriage (and counting), they made the conscious decision to save these items. That decision is a key part of how we know their importance.

My kids and grandkids won't have the experience of reading letters that my wife and I have saved in the same way, because we save everything by default. It's entirely possible they'll have nothing since my email account will most likely be locked when I die. That doesn't mean that all this communication I generate has no value or meaning. It is hugely valuable, in aggregate, to Google and Apple and Facebook. They'll continue to have access to my information long after I die, and it will continue to feed their algorithms.

I don't properly know what I'm losing by gaining so many individual pieces of communication. I do know, however, that the pace at which we communicate continues to accelerate, and that the forms through which we communicate continue to evolve.[5] The ways that expanding body of communication gets mined for information are proliferating at the same pace, but so far, they're almost entirely geared towards the companies that make money off our data.

I think that leaves something on the table. There's a class of product yet to be successfully created that can sift through all of my communication, across all platforms, that finds what is actually meaningful. I don't just want the first message that said "I love you" to my wife, I want the letter or email that led to that conversation. I want to be able to find the text which, on the surface, was meaningless, but in another time I would have set aside as an important life marker. While I can manipulate my inbox search to find some of these things, I can't really find the meaningful things. Maybe Google already does this to serve me ads, but that doesn't really help me.

Then again, maybe I'm thinking about communication all wrong. Maybe it should only have meaning in the instant it is made because that's a better fit for our brains. Or maybe we haven't figured it out yet. That feels more accurate to me, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.

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[1] Pretty sure I wasn't thinking of "cloud storage" at the time.

[2] Chart courtesy of ZDNent. "Thailand Hard Drive Crisis" is my new favorite chart annotation.

[3] I've talked about this cost/persona data trade off before: http://www.aaronkharris.com/tanstaafl

[4] We're lucky enough to still have Pops and Grandma Lil telling us stories. Grandma Lil also still has some of the perfume Pops bought her with bartered champagne and cigarettes.

[5] I recall being in Scotland in 2005 and being confused at the popularity of texting. It seemed so strange and foreign at the time. Considering the average American 18-24 was sending 3200 texts a month in 2011, I think I got that one really wrong.

At some point the internet tricked us into thinking we could get something for nothing.

More than any other company, Google is responsible for fooling us. It was the first free and legal service to gain ubiquity.[1] Google told us that we didn't have to pay anything for amazing services. It seemed to good to be true. It was and is, in fact, too good to be true.

What Google doesn't come out and say is that you're paying, a lot, just not with cash. Your data is valuable. Apparently, it's more valuable than charging you for services because you cannot choose to pay for personal Google services and avoid the sale of your data.

This means data, at least what we contribute when properly sifted, aggregated, and analyzed, is more valuable than the cash we'd be willing to pay for access to the same services. When the world is based on networks, as ours increasingly is, then the greatest network is the most valuable asset there is. By making network access look free, Google managed to capture a huge user base. Once it had the network, it started to charge. It cleverly adapted an existing model - advertising - but did it by selling data + access, rather than just access (which is the best radio and tv and newspaper essentially could really do).

If that's true, we need to ask if we're getting a fair deal. But most of us won't ask that question[2], and if we do, we have no alternatives of the same quality. The deal also keeps getting re-traded, without our truly informed consent.[3] Every time Google offers a new service, it collects more data about it's users. That data is valuable on it's own, and makes existing data more profitable. Users could get some sense of the data collected and how it will be used by scrutinizing ever longer legal documents - but that's hugely unlikely. And, again, even if users did just that and found the trade wanting, there's not much recourse.

And if we did want to pay? Mary Meeker's 2014 Internet Trends Report tells us how much our favorite services should cost. Google revenues wouldn't change if we each paid $45 for all of our free services.[4] To grow revenue, Google would have to release new services and charge for them.

That probably sounds crazy, but it isn't - it's roughly how Apple works.[5]

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[1] Napster is another important player in this story. It largely convinced a huge portion of internet users that piracy was ok because it was so easy.

[2] There are a lot of causes: laziness, ignorance, fear of complexity or awareness.

[3] Clicking "yes" on new terms and conditions hardly seems to suffice.

[4] This number is broadly indicative though likely skewed by the differences in data value between spenders with different geographies, socio-economic brackets, and histories.

[5] I've been thinking a lot about the way these two businesses work at the opposite ends of this spectrum. It's a fascinating dichotomy.

All investors have pet theories. They may call these theories "theses" or "themes," but they boil down to the same thing - closely grouped sets of ideas which the investors want to be true. Investors will usually fund companies that seem to stand a chance of making these ideas real. At YC, we have quite a lot of pet theories, which end up getting expressed through our RFS.

Knowing the pet theories of the investors with whom you're talking is helpful. They may be more likely to fund startups that fit into pet theories and are likely to know a lot more about those theories than they do about other fields. That's great if you know what you're doing, but dangerous if you're half-assedly working on something. Let's assume you're in the first camp, because the second group shouldn't be talking to investors anyway.

You can learn a lot about the pet theories of investors by reading what they've written or spoken about in the past. Some investors - Fred Wilson, Andy Weissman, Chris Dixon - make this easy by writing blog posts that frequently reference what they think about and why they make the investments that they do. Other investors work at firms dedicated exclusively to particular pet theories. You can learn still more looking at an investor's career and past investments.[1] These are all pieces of information that can teach you about how an investor thinks, which will allow you to prepare better for actually meeting them.

Knowing an investors' pet theories can also help you get a meeting. An email directly referencing something near and dear to an investor's heart will get a response much more easily than something generic.[2] At the same time, the hurdle for getting a meeting on a pet theory is going to be high because the investor has likely seen many teams and ideas in the space.[3]

The really cool thing about meeting with someone who has a pet theory about what you're working on is that you won't really pitch them, you'll have a real conversation focused on the heart of what you're doing. These investors will be unlikely to ask simple, surface level questions. You'll be engaged and thinking the whole time, which should lead to better answers, and the best demonstration of how good you are.

Things will start to get really interesting when you begin to challenge the preconceived notions that an investor has as a result of how much he's thought about a given problem. Chances are that if you're doing something new, this is going to happen. It's where you'll be able to evaluate the quality of the investor. The best of them are flexible. They'll adapt their frameworks in response to new information and knowledge. The worst will be dismissive of ideas they hadn't considered before.[4]

There are also plenty of situations in which someone hasn't thought that deeply about a theory they discuss at length. Maybe they want to sound smart or look cool. Regardless, you should be able to figure that out pretty quickly and move on.

You should learn about an investor's pet theories when deciding if you should talk to them, and when preparing to actually meet. In the end, this is just one of the pieces of information you should have. It isn't as important as building a great business, but understanding the picture will help you pitch better, so spend some time on it.

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[1] Keep in mind, though, that investors generally don't only invest in their pet theories.

[2] This seems so basic, yet I get enough generic emails that I'm convinced it has yet to sink in.

[3] As always, warm intros are an even better bet.

[4] True in all situations, not just those related to pet theories.

I ask for a lot of advice. Maybe too much. Sometimes the advice is great, sometimes it ends up seeming worthless and wrong. Invariably, I attributed the outcome of following advice to the giver - following advice from good people led to good outcomes, and vice versa. In the last few years, I've found myself giving a lot of advice and have realized how wrong I was in attributing cause and effect.

There are two axes that determine the goodness of advice. The first is the obvious one: the quality of the person giving advice. This it the part which most often get discussed. We're told to seek out high quality mentors and advisors. These should be people who think clearly, have experience, have the time to think through problems and help.

While these things might be hard to find in a single person, they're not typically that hard to evaluate. What's much harder, and probably more important, is the other axis: how good you are at describing reality to someone with much less context than you have. It turns out, this is really hard to do for a number of reasons.

1. Honesty is difficult, especially about issues we're facing. When you ask for advice, you are implicitly saying you don't know how to do something. That's hard, but seems to be accepted. What's much tougher is making sure you know the reasons you're having the issues you're having. Often, figuring this out is the point of advice (even if you started asking for something much more surface level).
2. Context is hard because it is vast. Think about how much you know about your company. Think about how little anyone else knows, no matter how involved they've been. At best, they see a series of snapshots and can construct a reasonable amount of context themselves. This is nowhere near what you have rattling around in your head. Being able to rapidly construct necessary context is important for an advisor, but they rely on you to give them relevant details.

If you can't pull off these two inputs when asking for advice, you'll get bad advice no matter how good the person on the side is.[1]

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[1] Yes, this does constitute advice, but I'm pretty sure this is of the type that's good in all situations.

I've recently heard about a number of fundraises in which the company raising has refused to honor pro-rata agreements with early, small investors.[1] The most frequent reason seems to be that newer, larger investors demand a certain percentage in a funding round, and tell founders that it can either come from the founder stake, or by locking out earlier investors. Sometimes they just say "lock out the early investors."

This is bad behavior on a number of levels.

It's bad for the founders to do this because they're violating an existing legal agreement. As a founder, your word is your bond, and going back on a deal is a great way to destroy trust. Unfortunately, there's rarely an immediate/obvious impact because the small investors are unlikely to sue or cause a big stink. They don't want to piss off the big investors or get a reputation for being "troublesome," so they're stuck.

For the early investors, this is really bad. When an early investor negotiates for pro-rata, the money they invest buys equity now, and the opportunity to maintain that equity later. This is critical for early stage investors, especially those investing out of a fund. The cumulative impact of dilution is material and their models and expectations are built with that in mind. Investors would not/should not make certain deals if they knew they were going to get screwed out of their rights. Take a look at this model for a sense of just how important pro-rata rights are to early stage investors.

For the later investors, the behavior is actually pretty smart on several levels. By getting the stake they want from early investors and not the founders they can insure that the founders retain skin in the game (or are given opportunities to sell secondary). They can also weaken the ability of early investors to have a say in the company's future by reducing their combined voting power. Finally, this type of behavior may hasten the end of "super-angel" funds by handicapping their returns. Less competition is a good thing for those left standing.

Given how much competition there is around fundraising at the moment, it's unlikely that this behavior will stop any time soon. At the end of the day, the founders have to make the decision. If you find yourself in this situation, stand up for the agreements you made. If you'd like to discuss how, please reach out.

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[1] Dave McClure recently tweeted that he's seeing the same.

We're currently getting ready for demo day at YC, which means quite a lot of pitch practice. Here are the main points of feedback we tend to give to teams. This advice works for almost any kind of presentation you might give.

Speaking

At YC, we get lots of updates from our alums. There seems to be a correlation between quality and frequency of updates and the goodness of the company and founders. I strongly doubt there's a causal relationship, but I do think it makes sense that the best founders would write good and frequent updates because it reflects their own processes and attention to metrics and consistent growth.

While the act of sending updates is itself valuable, the quality of the update is critical. Writing a good update forces a founder to focus on the right things and keeps your investors engaged and helping.[1] A bad update can reflect the fact that a founder is thinking about the wrong things. When an update is just poorly executed, it doesn't get read, which removes a lot of the value, i.e., getting your investors engaged and staying at the top of their minds when relevant opportunities arise..

Here are some of the most common pieces of advice I give when I see updates that could be improved: