added by Ajinkya Wadhwa · updated 2y ago
Black Swan Farming
- To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.
from Black Swan Farming by Paul Graham
Ajinkya Wadhwa added 2y ago
- In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don't know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.
from Black Swan Farming by Paul Graham
Ajinkya Wadhwa added 2y ago
- This concept is a simple one and yet seeing it as a Venn diagram is illuminating. It reminds you that there is an intersection—that there are good ideas that seem bad. It also reminds you that the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad.
from Black Swan Farming by Paul Graham
Ajinkya Wadhwa added 2y ago
- There's no correlation between the percentage of startups that raise money and the metric that does matter financially, whether that batch of startups contains a big winner or not.
from Black Swan Farming by Paul Graham
Ajinkya Wadhwa added 2y ago
- Except an inverse one. That's the scary thing: fundraising is not merely a useless metric, but positively misleading.
from Black Swan Farming by Paul Graham
Ajinkya Wadhwa added 2y ago
- That's made harder by the fact that the best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas.
from Black Swan Farming by Paul Graham
Ajinkya Wadhwa added 2y ago
- The first time Peter Thiel spoke at YC he drew a Venn diagram that illustrates the situation perfectly. He drew two intersecting circles, one labelled "seems like a bad idea" and the other "is a good idea." The intersection is the sweet spot for startups.
from Black Swan Farming by Paul Graham
Ajinkya Wadhwa added 2y ago
- Meanwhile, the one thing you can measure is dangerously misleading.
from Black Swan Farming by Paul Graham
Ajinkya Wadhwa added 2y ago
- The probability that a startup will make it big is not simply a constant fraction of the probability that they will succeed at all. If it were, you could fund everyone who seemed likely to succeed at all, and you'd get that fraction of big hits. Unfortunately picking winners is harder than that. You have to ignore the elephant in front of you, the ... See more
from Black Swan Farming by Paul Graham
Ajinkya Wadhwa added 2y ago