Luc Cheung

So here's the story of how we missed Airbnb, one of the best startups to come our way in the past few years.

The Airbnb founders came out of the winter 2009 Y Combinator class. They came to see us during their time at YC. They told us about a great stunt they pulled at the Democratic Convention in Denver (in which Obama was nominated). They bought a... See more

For most queries, Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer, like “# of billionaires in the world” or “What is the population of Iceland”. It’s pretty bad at answering questions that require judgment and context like “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?”.

The evidence is... See more

The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.

Filming & Cadence

Alright, let’s make some videos.

First, I think you should aim for two or more videos per day for the first few weeks until you get some hits . That might sound insane, but, it’ll give you a lot of data very quickly on what’s working and what isn’t, and you can slow it down to one video per day once you have a good backlog of... See more

Simplicity is difficult because most of us are overcompensating for uncertainty. Adding something is easy. But removing something is hard, because it requires conviction. It’s easier to hedge against uncertainty, entertain multiple paths, and dilute your focus than to develop a strong opinion about what to exclude.

With more creators , more content , and more choice than ever before, consumers are now being consumed by a state of analysis paralysis. The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention. When it’s impossible to absorb everything from the flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most — or, better yet,... See more

Segment and Amplitude hired a customer success/support person as employee #1. Here’s Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment) on why they did this:

“ There’s something really magical when you write in to a startup and they fix your issue within a few hours. It’s something you’d never, ever expect from a big company, and it was one way for us to

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Falling into the trap of thinking other users will be like you is especially pernicious because the people building the product are usually among that early adopter cohort. The easiest north star for a product person is their own intuition. But if they're working on a product that requires customer segmentation, being in the early adopter cohort... See more