Most startup founders end up spending their entire careers trying to catch lightning in a bottle even once. I caught it once and lost it myself. It’s hard to hold— so much can go wrong.
When you catch lightning in a bottle, you have to do everything in your power to harness it.
Founders who catch lightning in a bottle find themselves in this common situation: if they sell the company now, they’ll just have to start it again, and it’s that much harder to catch lightning again.
This is the advantage of repeat founders: they know the pain of regret.
This is also why so founders (particularly well-pedigreed serial entrepreneurs) fast-follow. UberX was a fast follow on Lyft.
It is easier to steal lightning than discover it in the wild.
There’s a fog of war when you’re making something nobody else has made. There’s no playbook. Your tools against that? clarity of thought, and resoluteness of action.
Make the best choice you can and adjust. Set a hypothesis and test it, then adjust. Analysis paralysis is death.
Our @initialized view after funding hundreds of companies— there are two phases to every startup. Finding lightning is first, pre-product-market-fit. The second is even harder: keeping it.
Those who do both build multi-billion-dollar companies that put a dent in the Universe.
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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)
The difference between an overhyped startup failure and a valuable real business that makes it the long haul is sometimes as simple as:
Do the founders themselves believe in what they are doing to the point where they will not quit?
This is where definite optimism matters: If startup ideas were people…
an indefinite optimist looks for more optionality, searching around the room at the party for the more interesting person to talk to.
A definite optimist engages deeply and finds themselves engrossed in the person they are talking to now.
For their startup, the problem or way to solve becomes a calling. It isn’t just words to trick people into giving them capital or to come work for them.