The Launch Pad

Paul Graham is fond of a Silicon Valley saying: “You make what you measure.”6 The act of measuring some aspect of performance leads to caring about that one thing and lavishing your attention on it, which, in turn, leads to improving it. He suggests that startups set a specific weekly target for growth, which can be measured in terms of revenue or

the distinctive features of its operations—such as the absence of hierarchy and titles among partners—and

The essential nature of a startup is not that it is a new business but that it is a new business set up to grow very quickly—in Paul Graham’s phrasing, it must be “designed for scale.”1 Thus, a programmer who decides to open a consulting business to help clients build Web sites is starting a small business, not a startup.

He says that at the beginning of the summer the Start Fund’s backers, Yuri Milner and Ron Conway, had made $150,000 investments in startups that in almost every case were undeserving.

own actions, or really exist on my own in the real world at all”—would not be found in any lecture hall.

They offered a $150,000 investment to every one of the forty-four members of YC’s winter 2011 batch. The venture capital world had never seen blanket approval of so many companies in one fell swoop.

If you want to, you can spend all of your time refactoring your code or rewriting how you deal with database seeks or something—you could do that and that would be ‘work,’ in some sense of the word. But it wouldn’t be work in the sense of getting you new users or anything that was actually important.”

Graham has his own term but it is a clunker: a “quantum of utility,” which means, in his words, a product that would make the world “one incremental bit better.”

For seed-stage investors, a convertible note is attractive because of its simplicity—there is no wrangling over the valuation of the company.