Subtle real advantage nobody talks about: if founders can access deeper pools of capital early/quickly, they can get bigger faster without spawning lots of competitors.
If your startup is real, pitching Sand Hill is sometimes like giving away copies of your treasure map
This advice is seldom given because most of the time and for most founders, you are still better off talking about your idea as much as possible to better understand where the dead ends are in the idea maze. Can’t do that in isolation.
Asking investors what is hot is usually less useful than asking what has worked, and what didn’t work and why? That’s how you can skip ahead and avoid death.
“All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.” —Munger
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Larry and Sergey can’t stay in California since the wealth tax as written would confiscate 50% of their Alphabet shares.
Each own ~3% of Alphabet's stock, worth about $120 billion each at today's ~$4 trillion market cap.
But because their shares have 10x voting power, the SEIU-UHW California billionaire tax would treat them as owning 30% of Alphabet (3% × 10 = 30%). That means each founder's taxable wealth would be $1.2 trillion.
A 5% wealth tax on $1.2 trillion = $60 billion tax bill, each.
That's 50% of their actual Alphabet holdings—wiped out by a "5%" tax.
Section 50303(c)(3)(C) of the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act states: "For any interests that confer voting or other direct control rights, the percentage of the business entity owned by the taxpayer shall be presumed to be not less than the taxpayer's percentage of the overall voting or other direct control rights."
This means if a founder holds shares representing only 3% of economic interest but 30% of voting control (through Class B supervoting shares), the tax would presume their ownership stake is at least 30% for valuation purposes, not 3%.
The wealth tax is poorly defined and designed to drive tech innovation out of California.
The law is so poorly written. While the lawyers who drafted it claim it doesn’t apply to publicly traded shares, they designed a legal trap where Class B voting shares would count as private shares and therefore considered ownership.
It’s so dishonest.
The specific tell is this passage in the text: “provisions of this Part shall be liberally construed to effectuate its purposes”
This CA “billionaire” tax is an unrealized gains tax. A unicorn startup founder becomes a paper billionaire around $5B val. At YC we avg 2 to 4 per year (!)
This will kill startups and innovation in California since a founder is illiquid while instantly on the hook for $100M
Fast growing startups grow up to be major tech firms. California benefits from tech creating prosperity massively.
But the money is massively misspent and somehow special interest groups are pushing to kill the golden goose of tech.
This is coming from the same place as SF Supervisor Jackie Fielder who recently tried to ban R&D and laboratories (including cancer research and AI research) in her district.
They hate tech so much they want us to leave. But we will vote them out instead.
Doing YC more than pays for the 7% equity you give up
When you combine that with the clear speed up and community that helps you (and that your % likelihood of success goes up a lot more too) this means YC is clearly worth it
The “avg ARR” stat is completely useless as a metric because the vast majority of YC startups start with just an idea or with no revenue. This means the vast majority of ARR at YC demo day pitches was done in 10 weeks
Your avg non-YC deal has revenue from 10 months not 10 weeks
Objects in motion stay in motion.
Objects at rest stay at rest.
Net net as an investor you want to be in the startup that grows fast (slope) instead of has a high ARR number (y intercept)
In 2019 The Richmond Democratic Club honored her with some kind of award alongside Peter Lauterborn, a manager in the SF Ethics Dept
Having friends in the Ethics dept is awfully handy if your political machine might need the dept to look the other way
This was the same event with a truly rotten cast of corrupt politicians including Allison Collins who was recalled for making instruction worse for kids, removed Algebra from middle schools and merit from Lowell (and calling Asians house n-words)