Founders at Work

Sorry, I was mistaken. I looked up the quote: http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence One of my favorite parts of “What You Can’t Say”: > Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist. That's quite a bit different from calling it her favorite. Anyway, I was only curious.

> Are there any hidden details that are usually not mentioned? Yes. In general there are hidden details but what those specifically are, I can't tell you. I can speak freely since I was expelled from YC. # Background I did YC twice, in 2008 and 2009. YC invested ~$15,000 in both startups. I don't keep a close eye on it, but I think nowadays they give you 33.3333x as much money. My first startup we shut down. I didn't know what I was doing. My co-founder was smarter and went on to do multiple successful companies, I think a couple funded by YC. My second company got acqui-hired by Microsoft in 2014. YC got $0 since it was only 3 people and YC was our only investor and it wasn't worth it to do a stock acquisition, especially since the Seahawks had just won the Superbowl and the Microsoft Biz Dev folks were in a good mood. I felt relieved I could at least "pay back" YC, but PG was aghast when I emailed him that: "You don't have to pay back YC. I'd be horrified if I thought you were even thinking about that. We expect to lose money on most of our investments. The small number of big hits compensate-- more than compensate. So don't worry about us at all. Just go work on interesting things. Good luck, --pg" Ignore how he dresses, the guy is a class act. # As to the Hidden Details There's a lot of secrets with YC. Back in the early days when I was just one of the first HackerNews users, I logged into the site and saw I had "One New Message". WTF? HN did not have a…

Jessica Livingston's own words (https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence) """Not surprisingly, the juiciest targets for this sort of willful misinterpretation are organizations and people who are successful. They have power, and power makes them both interesting and envied; I teach founders they all have to be prepared for this as their startups grow. In my blog post, "Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls" I said: You can't prevent yourself from being a target. It's an automatic consequence of being successful. So the best you can do is react in the right way when people attack you. To some extent you have to resign yourself to letting people lie about you. The problem with this is, the most successful people in an industry tend to have some of the most valuable insights about it. So you lose a lot when they are silenced. And also, if they keep those insights to themselves, it makes the powerful more powerful. It means useful information remains amongst insiders, like me, for example."""

You are crazy and this could work. However, if you’re going to run a staffing agency there are multiple ways you can do good with it. There’s only so much money to go round and your customers are not going to pay you more money because you donate a lot of money to charity though it may help with marketing and sales. Ultimately the money is either going to come from you or your employees. You’ve decided it’s going to come from you, which is greasy. You do what you want with your money. Staff are not going to work at below market rates for a company just because the owners donate a lot of money. There is absolutely no way you will be able to skimp on sales and focus on service. Real businesses pay people large sums because they think they’re worth the price, not out of the kindness of their hearts. If you want to donate a lot of money you’re going to be doing the same kind of work as now and donating more money. Services don’t sell themselves. If running a staffing agency and donating money doesn’t sound super rewarding all by itself consider taking on people who need a break, training them and sending them out into the working world until they move on. Look at what Lambda School and Jessica Livingston are doing. http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/women-learn-to-program-this-summer Could you sponsor one person a quarter to do this, to come to your office while doing it and get paid, and then work for you for nine months after? Or you could work for a company or…

Upon further thought, below is relevant context I should've included in my comment: https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/find-your-people Find Your People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 - May 2025

The amount of "let's help women/minorities specifically" programs and scholarships are numerous, but this one caught my eye a few months ago. > I'm going to give 40 women $9000 stipends to cover their living expenses while they take Lambda School's programming course.[0] [0] http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/women-learn-to-program-this-summer

Off topic, but I found this circular reference apt for a post about learning programming, and thus quite amusing too. This post links to "Why I started the Summer Hackers Program" [1] and that post has a link to this one. http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/why-i-started-the-summer-hackers-p…

Here's the blog post explaining why Jessica is doing this http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/why-i-started-the-summer-hackers-p…

In other places YC has described this as bullshitting and their answer is Jessica. They claim (at least publicly) that she significantly shifts the ratio to favor people with real skill over those who are good at advertising it. http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-did-at-y-c…

I'm sorry, are you asking if Paul Graham is comfortable interrupting people and making clarifying statements? https://techcrunch.com/video/paul-grahams-office-hours-tips-for-startu… Jump to 6:20 and tell me with a straight face that PG is concerned about interjection. He literally could have just chuckled and helpfully offered, "well... co-founder!" Here's the thing: I'm a PG fan and I'm not trying to be pedantic. Jessica has frequently written about how her role is misunderstood and unfortunately minimized, even though it's clear to anyone with life experience that she is the heart and soul of the operation. http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/grow-the-puzzle-around-you

"When have you most successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage?", which in my mind neatly translates to "what's the most psychopathic thing you've ever done?" If this is a correct translation, YC would be using it as a no-invest signal more than anything else, given how much the two original founders have talked about the importance of good character and decency in being a successful founder: http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-did-at-y-c… http://www.paulgraham.com/mean.html http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

As someone in this space, I think you're approach this wrong. You find early users by hand, reaching out to people you know have this problem and asking them to use the product (you would typically do this before even making it work properly as a SaaS product). Jessica Livingston says it better than me: http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/why-startups-need-to-focus-on-sale…

Here's an older piece by Jessica herself, on being a social radar, and the "mom" of the family: http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-did-at-y-c… (I posted this partly due to the predictable reaction to PG's use of the word mom.)

"The issue isn't that PearAI did something illegal—it's that they got funded by YC with nothing more than a codebase copied from another YC-backed company. This shows that (1) YC is willing to fund just about anything, (2) they’re not doing any real due diligence, and (3) they don't particularly care about their existing portfolio companies." This shows a fundamental misunderstanding on how YC functions. YCombinator was never a test of how good (or unique) your code was. At its core it was a filter of people, people who can work well together and people who can build something useful. That's it. You can read more about this straight from one of the founders [1]. The fact that you used open-source code (within legal bounds) to get their quicker just shows your resourcefulness, something YC actually optimizes for. More often than not, "good people" tend to be domain experts sometimes really good and unique coders but that, to me, was always a byproduct of the search pattern. You can obviously disagree with this methodology, but it has worked pretty well. [1]: https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-did-at-y-…

This article is so rubbish about YC. There was a very good article about YC's founding and philosophy by Jessica Livingston the other day https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/grow-the-puzzle-around-you I mean, from Vassallo: >...YC wouldn't have a measly 1.25% success rate, or thereabouts. From YCs site "39% of YC companies have raised a Series A". If success is only going over $1bn them him and all his students are failures along with 99.99% of the population. >The biggest indicator YC is a bad deal is that only people who are easily duped take up these deals. Again from YC "Every 6 months over 10,000 companies apply to participate in our accelerator and we typically have a 1.5% - 2% acceptance rate." The main problem with YC would seem to be the difficulty of getting in. Fair enough starting VC style startups isn't for everyone but there's no need to lie about YC to flog his dumb course really.

> It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone. They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble. It seems to me that this stems from two interrelated issues: 1. People defaulting to their tribal position (red/blue in the US) without thinking deeply and engaging in rational discussion of issues. 2. A lack of empathy. What is "currently acceptable to believe" is determined by your ingroup. And rather than trying to understand why someone in the outgroup would hold a different opinion, the ingroup paints all of them as crazy/stupid/X-ist. While the red tribe is generally more criticized in this regard, the blue tribe is just as complicit (look at the smug superiority of John Oliver and other political comedians). While this tribal fighting occurs, power is consolidated. The people with keen insights (that may be construed as controversial) will make them privately, rather than take on public risk. In the words of Jessica Livingston, "I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me." [1] I hope that there is a solution to this problem, so that the internet can reach its potential to democratize access to information and data, rather than becoming a mechanism to virtue signal acceptable tribal beliefs. [1] https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence