No we are generalist but we are funding crypto projects. I worked with Cedalio last batch for instance. Great devtools co

Haha I dunno, I’m probably not cool enough to know the good ones. Death Note counts right?

Practical use of crypto in day to day marketplaces and social and consumer scenarios. Farcaster is a great example.

I will spend more time here! I had to recently reset my iPhone from scratch and start with zero apps again because my app screens were 20 pages long

Markets trump all. I want it to be the reverse but to use a surf analogy is the rider skill matters but it is the second order bit after the wave and where the wave is going.

VC as an ecosystem and as a business is a pretty amazingly important (and much maligned) part of making startups work Being able to understand intimately the hard parts of that job is useful because there is a lot YC can and should do to make that job easier and more successful.

Believing in founders before they even really believe in themselves. It’s really fun and amazing to help people build the belief and then a religion.

I think I am scared off from the idea of building a new ecosystem. I was so sad to read the recent new biographies on Tony Hsieh for instance. At YC we have discovered that the Bay Area is really something else. By the numbers it is the single biggest thing you can do to improve your chance of being successful.

The SF stuff is just writing about $200K a year in political checks personally and then throwing some events and then haha some mean tweets to people who deserve it. :-) YC fills my week. It is beyond a full time job.

HN is really a totally organic community. YC is interesting because in full transparency the capital structure for new crypto startups is pretty competitive because there is just so much money that is also not valuation sensitive. Also the outliers are bigger and there are fewer of them.

YC is very generalist. Look at our RFS on climate. We do a lot of hard tech. Two of the four space launch companies in the next few years will be YC (Stoke and Relativity) Helion is a YC co There is a lot we can and will do. So it seems right to me.

I think being stalwart is even more important for crypto founders. Basically each crypto project is an extra concentrated version of a startup and you have so many distractions Eg the big money and the fandom and all of that: but the core of it is still nose to the grindstone management, building, leadership.

Do a shitty version of it every day or week and expect it to suck, but try to get feedback and iterate and over the course of years you will go from bad to good to amazing Compounding works

Be thankful. Take care of my body. Say no more.

Solana

Ruben Harris at Career Karma Incredible at sales and good human being

My hope is that the capital scales nicely with the market opportunities and the founders pursuing them. The subtlety is mostly there: eg it sucks that you have to already be rich to fund startups but then again the mechanism to invest needs to be democratized so much it escapes adverse selection on what you invest in.

Yes, we invest using the SAFT. Tokens are just like equity often.

Launching and creating something of great value is important. YC is magical for people who are starting out because it gives you a network that gives you know how, support, and access to capital. It’s shockingly hard to get that outside unless you are already an insider from top schools or top startups.

Dumb answer: had too many apps on my phone. Will spend more time

Yes we do the SAFT but it hasn’t happened in more than a year

I think crypto has developed a parallel capital world to the standard non crypto world. The number one problem an investor has often is to avoid adverse selection. So to the extent that we can select better crypto startups in 2024 then the cycle is proverse selection instead of adverse. I haven’t figured out how.

I feel like I lived many billions of lifetimes to be in this body at this time in human history. I don’t know if reincarnation is true but it is a useful thought experiment. So this morning it is gratitude for being alive and for being present and to serve my communities.

When you try a bunch of stuff to get users and it works. The most important thing to do is to be creating a product people actually want. If it is really too hard maybe you are forcing it. It’s like in basketball even Lebron has to pick his shots.

Coinbase / Base token OP3N on Avax Friend.tech (though people seem to hate it)

It doesn’t seem different to me. All the rules are the same. What do people want? Make that thing. See if it works. Product market fit is the same no matter what product you make.

I think we are so early that we haven’t even seen the killer apps aside from ChatGPT yet. We are struggling with small context windows and RAG. There will definitely be a resurgence in consumer apps. I am most excited about funding consumer AI at the moment.

I enjoy entering a state of flow. Coding, making videos, learning about new things. If you enjoy your day then you never work a day in your life. Doesn’t feel like work, feels like play. Controlling your company and your destiny matters a lot. I was very unhappy working in other people’s systems with no agency.

Smart early stage people haven’t shifted. Same as it ever was. But late stage folks have paused. Far fewer deals and the deals getting done have a lot of structure. There is a new discipline around cash flow. All around this is nature healing.

I think it just lined up. I was surprised that all the decelerationists were also bureaucratic hard leftists. It was ideology vs ideology. Meeting Beff and seeing the e/acc community felt like coming home.

Techne is that which gives humans more control or ability to influence nature. Ultimately this is good.

Delfina in the Mission Though Square Pie Guys is my guilty delight

Saying no to being a cofounder at Palantir was a big one. It seemed like the right move in the moment but it made me realize later how little I understood creating businesses.

The network effects or the incentives must be much stronger to defeat centralized services. It seems possible to me but we also have to see something that is more durable than “number goes up”

I think it is probably still an infra and usability problem. People just want things that work. The best UX is no UX.

Try to be a good dad and husband. Throw fun dinner parties.

Try to diagnose what failed last time and make all new mistakes next time

Daemon by Daniel Suarez Cool sci fi concepts

The go to market just matches the problem and market and price point. Lots of customers? Low price and consumer. SMB? Medium price and SaaS. Few customers with large need? High price enterprise sales.

Yeah Atlas or Clerky are good

What’s the deal, points shut down?

I think these are pretty well tested. The group partners have now funded over 10,000 founders believe it or not. If someone can experience it as a founder each group partner has seen it dozens of times. So there isn’t a ton of debate tbh.

Ah man I need to get back to that

Oh I don’t want to be Sam. I want to be me. I think helping smart founders build things that solve real problems is my life’s work.

I think we used it as counter positioning marketing and in retrospect it would have been better to not. It boxed us in to a thing that didn’t matter in the end. The real war was who would create durable social networks.

Coinbase could pave the way for real apps so solving usability and onboarding and aggregating users and providing infra is all part of that.

It is special in all the world and also the Bay Area is where I learned to code and build startups. It is necessary to protect and keep building a special place no matter what. I grew up here so I wasn’t going to leave.

Have a meal with them. You’ll know.

I’m not really certain physical location matters for public capital markets. If it goes full crypto it’ll just be on the Internet :-)

In n out double double haha

No, at least how I have seen it, either you have cash flow and enterprise value or you don’t How to exit is not the first order bit. Valuable business is first.

I would probably do a lot more political writing and investigative journalism especially locally. All politics is local because it is the level where you can directly see the outcome. It is also very unglamorous.

Could have been designer at Pinterest when it was 10 people. Could have run special projects at Airbnb in 2011 When it rains it pours. It all worked out

Nothing lately. Last big buys were Avalanche. I should have bought back in on Solana but I was scared off by FTX.

I was very hopeful for DAOs since I thought maybe it was possible to create new governance structures but now after seeing the last generation I think orgs are still governed by the same rules of all human orgs. The mechanics matter less than the basic management and communication and holding accountability.

I will be interested to see how the next platform shift affects things. It’s possible there will be brand new platforms.

I had worked with about 200 per year at the end of my last tour of duty in 2015 at YC. We are at 500 now but with 3X more partners! My goal now is to make sure each group partner works with their dozens per year as closely or even closer than when I did when I was working as a seed investor.

I always want real decentralized marketplaces and consumer use cases because when I work backwards from the world we should live in all those end scenarios have real human transactions relying on crypto in some way. It’s pass fail on whether crypto has value aside from store of value.

Oh man maybe not haha

Try workatastartup.com

Every social network decentralized or not has two things to solve. First is retention. Why does someone come and stay forever? What do you make people feel? Can you get them to post? Can you get them to interact with each other. Second is marketing. Top of funnel. If you know they can retain then next get them to try

Sorry to report I think we have zero 👀 Next batch we will get it right