Too many startup founders are not choosing to consume the advantages of living /working in the Bay Area because they fall victim to arguments about lifestyle, crime, and costs. They hear many of these arguments from founders and investors they see on Twitter.

It seems obvious that as pre product market fit investments grow from 500k-$2m to $10m - $100m - fraud increases. Someone has to teach investors that lots more money in the pre product market stage often creates more problems than is solves.

Thank you to all the investors who are investing in the YC w23 batch. After working with over 800 YC companies over the past 10 years I also wanted to offer 1 piece of advice. It takes time for a startup to find product market fit. In my experience, 1-4 years. Twitch took 5+ years to find it. And it's much easier to do this with a small team, low burn, and extreme focus.

The most important piece of advice I've learned to give to early-stage startup founders is to care for your users. It's much harder to do things that don't scale if you don't care for the people you are trying to help.

In my experience, founders often trigger their own bad moods by not taking the time to appreciate the positives in their lives. It’s too easy to not see any positives when you are struggling to reach product market fit. Founders also too often let other people (investors, cofounders, employees, etc) have way too much indirect power over how they feel day to day.

Smart people fail when they ignore facts. The more someone is publicly revered the more often they fall into this trap. Great leaders often fall short when they stop engaging in the egoless observation / truth seeking that made them great in the first place. When smart people get rich, famous, and stop working hard, they are much more likely to fall into this trap. Past insights are not always an indicator of future insights and the longer you go without working hard, the less sharp your mind gets.

One thing that consistently surprises me is how often rich and powerful people can feel oppressed, lonely, disempowered, and afraid. The more rich and powerful people I meet - the more I’m surprised by how many of them have moments in their lives where they feel under siege. Where they feel like their money and power can’t protect them.

Good leaders are loved and respected. Good leaders build teams full of smart people, who respect one another, have clear goals, and consistently accomplish those goals. Good leaders help their teams operate at near maximum potential. Most leaders are ignored and this isn’t talked about enough. Their good people usually figure out how to lead themselves, their average people accomplish little. These teams have to work hard to accomplish easy goals. The lack of leadership makes them inefficient.

In my experience, smart founders are always hunting for advantages in the early stage because they understand how hard it is to find product market fit. They want to figure out how to slightly bend the odds in their favor. If they are first time founders, they can get confused about which tactics, investors, products, or services can really give them the advantage they seek.

Beware of those who over-embrace secrecy within a startup. Keeping users' secrets is good. Keeping employee secrets is also good. When keeping organizational secrets you should always try to understand the harm you are creating by not being transparent. Legal, finance, product, and engineering teams can all fall victim to keeping secrets that actually reduce productivity and trust within a startup. This is often a cultural holdover from past roles at large companies. Sometimes it's because of their professional training.

One thing clicked when talking to a YC founder this morning. When raising money in many ways the investor is your customer. You shouldn’t do what they say but you should understand their problem and present your company as the solution to their problem. Their problem is that they need to earn money for their investors and often (series A and beyond) an individual VC partner doesn’t get too many investments to accomplish this goal.

So many people want to start lending startups (both in the US and globally)... any interesting thoughts on why? A common format I see for these companies is they have a great idea for who should be given a loan but little idea of how to acquire lending capital.

A recent small medical issue has highlighted how much someone needs to disrupt Google Search. Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories. Health, product reviews, recipes are three categories I searched today where top results featured clickbait sites riddled with crappy ads. I’m sure there are many more. Feel free to reply to the thread with the categories where you no longer trust Google Search results.

I've been trying to figure out how to help founders avoid making decisions based on fear. Strangely a quote from Band of Brothers keeps coming to mind... "The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function" - Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Charles Speirs - 101st Airborne Division, World War II

Some morning thoughts on startups: If you find yourself competing to win the love of of investors remember that you build your company to service your customers and the world. Investors are simple service providers who help you with capital along the way.

Companies slow down when well intentioned people follow best practices without properly considering the cost benefit analysis for all. I think we could all use better tools to understand company wide impact of small decisions. Well intentioned fear drives this process. Some assume bad intentions but really the intentions are almost always good which makes this problem even harder to solve. In isolation, these best practices always appear to be in the long term interest of the company.

A lot of startups ask me for feedback on their startup idea. Most of the time I am not an expert in their field nor a potential user. I believe founders do this because they think that investors are the gatekeepers of the startup world and they want me to "like their idea" and accept them into YC.

As a founder it was hard for me to understand and acknowledge the humanity of an investor. I always wanted to treat them like a SaaS product or API instead. Provide the correct inputs, get cash as an output. I felt so overwhelmed with just my teammates and users that I didn’t want to take any time to build relationships with other people. In fact I lost my friendships during this time as a result.

What do you do in the edge cases when the challenges of coordinating/securing a large population conflict with free speech rights? In government we have courts(and elections) to help. What do private companies have? Also why are free speech rights the third rail in our tech community? In basic civics classes we are taught that you don’t have the right to yell fire in a crowded theatre. Does the internet speech have an equivalent?

What if Facebook/Twitter/Google saw it as their responsibility to keep the public informed or at least to limit the reach of lies and conspiracy theories? Tech folks love to blame journalists but we don’t spend enough time asking who controls their incentives.

I’ve learned a lot about giving advice over the past 5 years at YC (still more to learn). When I started I had a very formulaic / tactical view of how startups succeed. Over time and after seeing over 1000 startups go through YC that has changed. I now spend the most time trying to explain to founders how startups defeat themselves.