Early-stage venture capital investments take a long time to come to fruition. These or other YC companies from after Graham’s tenure may yet prove to be economically and culturally important like their forerunners. The evidence so far, however, suggests that their impact is well below that of earlier YC companies of similar age, in spite of their... See more
This is never how it actually happens, but you get the idea. Startups should receive risk capital to literally derisk certain aspects of the business.
However, over the last decade or so, something shifted. Traditional venture funds that specialized in early-stage risk started to add buckets of “growth equity” that were supposed to be utilized for... See more
You and your ragtag team of engineers likely won’t be able to create something that is competitive with any big incumbent product.
However, you can build features, seed content, and brand it in a way that is so obnoxiously relevant for a particular group of people that their only possible reaction is “Well, fuck. You... See more
Idea machines are not new, but the form in which they appear is changing. For most of the 20th century, the home for idea machines was foundations, first popularized by John D. Rockefeller in the 1910s.
We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works fine).
That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation
I think that cycle sometimes happens, but I think it’s more common for a community not to be ruined by sociopaths, but rather too many mops, whose mere presence taints the community and the brand for everyone else.