Ajinkya Wadhwa

A story, for our purposes, is the complete array of a human’s beliefs—their beliefs around values and morality, their beliefs about their environment and the broader world they live in, their beliefs about what happened in the past and what will happen in the future, their beliefs about the meaning of life and death.

One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't.

To really understand the 500-person community and why it is the way it is, we have to examine each layer of smaller units that make it up and the larger giants that encompass it. To really understand what’s going on with a group of any size, we have to consider how it interacts with all parts of the loaf.

But while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition for a good startup idea, it's not a sufficient one.

Animals are just a hack these outlier genes came up with—temporary containers designed to carry the genes and help them stay immortal.

The unsexy filter, while still a source of error, is not as entirely useless as the schlep filter. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing rapidly, your ideas about what's sexy will be somewhat correlated with what's valuable in practice. Particularly as you get older and more experienced. Plus if you find an idea sexy, you'll work... See more

The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you know a lot about programming and you start learning about some other field, you'll probably see problems that software could solve. 

When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad. 

The very smartphone or laptop you may be using to read this is the result of thousands of minds, all thinking together about what it takes to extract raw materials from the Earth, assemble everything into the singular shape you see now, imbue it with the properties of computational power, and cleverly market the resulting device so your hard-earned... See more