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Paul Graham
@paulg
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Optimism, ambition, and recruiting. Will this recipe work for your startup too? Yes. In fact you could make the case that it has been the recipe for all great organizations.

markmcgranaghan.com/lessons-from-s…
Now that I think about it, optimism and ambition are two of the main things YC cultivates in the startups it funds. You have to do it well. You can't just say "think big!" and expect that to work. But doing this effectively is a big part of the value of YC.
(Encouraging startups came naturally to me, because I love optimism and ambition. It doesn't take an effort to encourage startups and help them figure out how to get bigger. It would take an effort not to.)
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Paul Graham
@paulg
If you compare funding offers not by valuation but by the amount of the company you have left afterward (which is what actually matters), you'll be less tempted by higher valuations.
Suppose you have 40% of the co and you raise $1m at a valuation of $10m. Afterward you have 36%. Whereas if you raise $1m at a valuation of $20m, you have 38% afterward. Doubling the valuation only gets you 1/18 more equity.
If you have an offer at a somewhat lower valuation from an investor you like a lot more, take that one.
Read 3 tweets
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Paul Graham
@paulg
Becoming more bureaucratic kills companies. And yet no one who introduces measures that make a company more bureaucratic ever seems to realize they're doing it. All they see is the upside.
Fortunately there is a mechanism for ensuring that the median company isn't too bureaucratic: startups. Companies never become less bureaucratic, but they do get killed by startups that haven't become bureaucratic yet, which amounts to the same thing.
Hypothesis: The degree of bureaucracy in a country's private sector is inversely proportional to the rate of startup formation.
Read 3 tweets
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Paul Graham
@paulg
A simple heuristic that will save inexperienced startup founders from several different types of mistakes: be really cheap. This will save you from hiring too many people, from renting a fancy office, and from growing by buying users instead of making great things.
If you raise from VCs, most will pressure you to spend faster. Partly because, as money people, they think money solves problems. But partly for a more sinister reason: so they can buy more of the company when you burn through this money and need to raise more.
If you're a young founder, VCs have a powerful weapon to convince you to spend faster. They can tell you it's amateurish to be cheap. That you're thinking small. Don't listen to them. Most famous founders were cheap.
Read 4 tweets

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