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Writing published from ExternalSoul workspaces.
Fierce Nerds
May 2021 Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary social situations they are — as quiet and diffident as the star quarterback would be if he found himself
vyomkesh · essays · Jul 24
Good Writing
May 2025 There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions
vyomkesh · essays · Jul 11
Superlinear Returns
October 2023 One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear. Teachers an
vyomkesh · essays · Jul 3
What I've Learned from Users
September 2022 I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I could give for getting in, per word, was Explain what you've learned from users.
vyomkesh · essays · Jul 1
Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?
November 2021 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.) When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told me so. Some people like some things, and othe
vyomkesh · essays · Jul 1
The Reddits
March 2024 I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it. YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (
vyomkesh · essays · Jul 1
The Right Kind of Stubborn
July 2024 Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does. Mere obs
vyomkesh · essays · Jul 1
When To Do What You Love
September 2024 There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you shou
vyomkesh · essays · Jul 1
The Brand Age
March 2026 In the early 1970s, disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all ha
vyomkesh · essays · Jul 1
The Control System Revolution
It's a control system revolution. You will be able to build pretty complex machines by just asking "the computer." There is something called the RL loop — you can describe what you
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 26
Startups in 13 Sentences
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. Watch how this essay was written. February 2009
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 20
This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California
November 2016 If you're a California voter, there is an important proposition on your ballot this year: Proposition 62, which bans the death penalty. When I was younger I used to t
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Programming Bottom-Up
1993 (This essay is from the introduction to *On Lisp.)* It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If s
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Lisp for Web-Based Applications
After a link to Beating the Averages was posted on slashdot, some readers wanted to hear in more detail about the specific technical advantages we got from using Lisp in Viaweb. Fo
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Beating the Averages
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2001, rev. April 2003 *(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) *
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Java's Cover
April 2001 This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious. It's not a critique of Java! It is a case study of h
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Being Popular
May 2001 (This article was written as a kind of business plan for a new language. So it is missing (because it takes for granted) the most important feature of a good programming l
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Five Questions about Language Design
May 2001 (These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.) 1. Programming Languages Are for People.
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Roots of Lisp
May 2001 (I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Other Road Ahead
September 2001 (This article explains why much of the next generation of software may be server-based, what that will mean for programmers, and why this new kind of software is a g
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What Made Lisp Different
December 2001 (rev. May 2002) (This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds.) When McCarthy designe
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
There is a kind of mania for object-oriented programming at the moment, but some of the smartest programmers I know are some of the least excited about it. My own feeling is that o
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Taste for Makers
February 2002 "...Copernicus' aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...." Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What Languages Fix
Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. The surprising thing is how many, and how well, lan
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Succinctness is Power
May 2002 "The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their a
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Revenge of the Nerds
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. May 2002 "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A Plan for Spam
Like to build things? Try Hacker News. August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc. An im
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Design and Research
January 2003 (This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting of NEPLS.) Visitors to this country are often surprised to find that Americans like to begin a co
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Better Bayesian Filtering
January 2003 (This article was given as a talk at the 2003 Spam Conference. It describes the work I've done to improve the performance of the algorithm described in A Plan for Spam
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why Nerds are Unpopular
February 2003 When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lun
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Hundred-Year Language
April 2003 (This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.) It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with ce
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
If Lisp is So Great
May 2003 If Lisp is so great, why don't more people use it? I was asked this question by a student in the audience at a talk I gave recently. Not for the first time, either. In lan
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Hackers and Painters
May 2003 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.) When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Filters that Fight Back
August 2003 We may be able to improve the accuracy of Bayesian spam filters by having them follow links to see what's waiting at the other end. Richard Jowsey of death2spam now doe
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What You Can't Say
January 2004 Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Word "Hacker"
April 2004 To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers,
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Make Wealth
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. May 2004 (This essay was originally published in Hackers & Painters.) *
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Mind the Gap
May 2004 When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate c
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Great Hackers
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2004 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Python Paradox
August 2004 In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java projec
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Age of the Essay
September 2004 Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What the Bubble Got Right
September 2004 (This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.) I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble, because I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999. One day, w
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A Version 1.0
October 2004 As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting." I didn't realize this when I was in school. In writing, as in math and science, they only show you the finished produ
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Bradley's Ghost
November 2004 A lot of people are writing now about why Kerry lost. Here I want to examine a more specific question: why were the exit polls so wrong? In Ohio, which Kerry ultimate
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
It's Charisma, Stupid
November 2004, corrected June 2006 Occam's razor says we should prefer the simpler of two explanations. I begin by reminding readers of this principle because I'm about to propose
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Made in USA
November 2004 (This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of Hackers & Painters. It tries to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.) A few years ago an Ita
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What You'll Wish You'd Known
January 2005 (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.) When I said I was speaking at a high scho
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Start a Startup
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A Unified Theory of VC Suckage
March 2005 A couple months ago I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested in being a "technologist in residence" at a new venture capital fund. I think the idea was
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Undergraduation
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. Want a summer job? Why not be a Summer Founder? --> March 2005
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Writing, Briefly
March 2005 (In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23 of writing, and 44
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Return of the Mac
March 2005 All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2005 This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's an experi
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Submarine
April 2005 "Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, Ma
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Hiring is Obsolete
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. May 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What Business Can Learn from Open Source
August 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.) Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft w
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
After the Ladder
August 2005 Thirty years ago, one was supposed to work one's way up the corporate ladder. That's less the rule now. Our generation wants to get paid up front. Instead of developing
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Inequality and Risk
August 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.) Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality. There are two ways to do it: give money to the poor, or take i
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What I Did this Summer
October 2005 The first Summer Founders Program has just finished. We were surprised how well it went. Overall only about 10% of startups succeed, but if I had to guess now, I'd pre
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Ideas for Startups
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Venture Capital Squeeze
November 2005 In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They're already stuck with a seller's market, because of the huge amo
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Fund a Startup
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2005 Y Combinator.)* --> Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, a
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Web 2.0
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2005 Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated.
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Good and Bad Procrastination
December 2005 The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad? Most people who write about procrastination
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Do What You Love
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do wha
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why YC
March 2006, rev August 2009 Yesterday one of the founders we funded asked me why we started Y Combinator. Or more precisely, he asked if we'd started YC mainly for fun. Kind of, bu
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
6,631,372
March 2006, rev August 2009 A couple days ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a patent. It issued in 2003, but no one told me. I wouldn't know about it now except that
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Are Software Patents Evil?
April 29: Free one-day startup school for hackers. --> March 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at Google.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
See Randomness
April 2006, rev August 2009 Plato quotes Socrates as saying "the unexamined life is not worth living." Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, just as
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
April 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 Startup School.) The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than other
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Be Silicon Valley
May 2006 (This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.) Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why Startups Condense in America
May 2006 (This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.) Startups happen in clusters. There are a lot of them in Silicon Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami. A country
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Power of the Marginal
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. June 2006 (This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Island Test
July 2006 I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Copy What You Like
July 2006 "None ever wished it longer than it is." Samuel Johnson on Paradise Lost
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Present to Investors
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2006, rev. April 2007, September 2010 In a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded this summer present
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A Student's Guide to Startups
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How Art Can Be Good
December 2006 I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than anyone else's.
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Learning from Founders
January 2007 (Foreword to Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.) Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing dow
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Is It Worth Being Wise?
February 2007 A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why to Not Not Start a Startup
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2007 (This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Microsoft is Dead
April 2007 A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been war
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Two Kinds of Judgement
April 2007 There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't. W
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Hacker's Guide to Investors
April 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford.) The world of investors is a foreign one to most hackers—partly because investors are so
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
An Alternative Theory of Unions
May 2007 People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. In those days we had a large number of hi
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Equity Equation
July 2007 An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You're about to hire your first employee. How much stock should you give
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Stuff
July 2007 I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a fron
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Holding a Program in One's Head
August 2007 A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer quest
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How Not to Die
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2007 *(This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
News from the Front
September 2007 A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college. For me, as for a lot of middle cla
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Do Philosophy
September 2007 In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock p
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Future of Web Startups
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why to Move to a Startup Hub
October 2007 After the last talk I gave, one of the organizers got up on the stage to deliver an impromptu rebuttal. That never happened before. I only heard the first few sentence
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Six Principles for Making New Things
February 2008 The fiery reaction to the release of Arc had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy. The main complaint of the more articulate critic
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Trolls
February 2008 A user on Hacker News recently posted a comment that set me thinking: Something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this the nastiness. ...
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A New Venture Animal
March 2008, rev May 2013 (This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out what we do. Even though Y Combinator is now 3 years old, we're still trying to understan
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2008, rev. June 2008 Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Disagree
March 2008 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threa
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Some Heroes
April 2008 There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes. I'm not claiming this is a list of the n most ad
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why There Aren't More Googles
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2008 Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they ca
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Be Good
April 2008 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.) About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make someth
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Lies We Tell Kids
May 2008 Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. There may also be a benefit to us. We were
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Disconnecting Distraction
Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work. It would work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet on my work computer. I'm trying
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Cities and Ambition
May 2008 "In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?" Mark Twain
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
July 2008 At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way. Instead of hoping
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A Fundraising Survival Guide
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2008 Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: m
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid s
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Other Half of "Artists Ship"
November 2008 One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A startup wa
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The High-Res Society
December 2008 For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations. Those who bet on economies of sca
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
December 2008 (I originally wrote this at the request of a company producing a report about entrepreneurship. Unfortunately after reading it they decided it was too controversial t
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
After Credentials
December 2008 A few months ago I read a New York Times article on South Korean cram schools that said Admission to the right university can make or break an ambitious young South K
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Keep Your Identity Small
February 2009 I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a r
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What I've Learned from Hacker News
February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combina
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
February 2009 A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask "How could we make something like that happen here?" The organic way to do it is to establish a first-rate university i
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why TV Lost
March 2009 About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Be an Angel Investor
March 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at AngelConf.) When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. Seven years later I still hadn't starte
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Relentlessly Resourceful
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2009 A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Five Founders
April 2009 Inc recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years. How do you decide who's the most interesting? The best test seemed
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Founder Visa
Watch how this essay was written on Etherpad. --> April 2009 I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why Twitter is a Big Deal
April 2009 Om Malik is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal. The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipient
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A Local Revolution?
April 2009 Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined. The first is that startups may represent a new economic phase, on the scale of
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. --> "...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day."
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Ramen Profitable
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2009 Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails.
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Trouble with the Segway
July 2009 The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone rid
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
August 2009 Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects.
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Anatomy of Determination
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2009 Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probab
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The List of N Things
September 2009 I bet you the current issue of Cosmopolitan has an article whose title begins with a number. "7 Things He Won't Tell You about Sex," or something like that. Some pop
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Post-Medium Publishing
September 2009 Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it. In fact consumers never real
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Persuade xor Discover
September 2009 When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is to seem extra friendly. You smile and say "pleased to meet you," whether you are or not. There's noth
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What Startups Are Really Like
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.)
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Apple's Mistake
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009 I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they re
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Organic Startup Ideas
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2010 The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Top Idea in Your Mind
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2010 I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I kne
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Acceleration of Addictiveness
July 2010 What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we d
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Future of Startup Funding
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2010 Two years ago I wrote about what I called "a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:" the growing disconn
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What Happened to Yahoo
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was s
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
High Resolution Fundraising
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2010 The reason startups have been using more convertible notes in angel rounds is that they make deals close faster.
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Where to See Silicon Valley
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2010 Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The New Funding Landscape
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2010 After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by compariso
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What We Look for in Founders
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2010 (I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print th
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Tablets
December 2010 I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Founder Control
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. December 2010 Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain contro
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Subject: Airbnb
March 2011 Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable post about missing Airbnb. VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's extraordinarily rare for one to talk about it publi
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Patent Pledge
August 2011 I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government. I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why Startup Hubs Work
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2011 If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by or
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
January 2012 A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site. I thought it might be interesting to look at one day. The first
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Schlep Blindness
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a ph
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A Word to the Resourceful
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. January 2012 A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It f
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2012 One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious s
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Defining Property
March 2012 As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How Y Combinator Started
March 2012 Y Combinator's 7th birthday was March 11. As usual we were so busy we didn't notice till a few days after. I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on o
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Writing and Speaking
March 2012 I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a bette
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Top of My Todo List
April 2012 A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. Her list seems plausible. I could see myself — can see myself — making at le
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Black Swan Farming
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Startup = Growth
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2012 A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. N
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Hardware Renaissance
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2012 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Get Startup Ideas
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2012 The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably probl
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Startup Investing Trends
June 2013 (This talk was written for an audience of investors.) Y Combinator has now funded 564 startups including the current batch, which has 53. The total valuation of the 287 t
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Do Things that Don't Scale
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2013 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 fo
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Convince Investors
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2013 When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Investor Herd Dynamics
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2013 The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a rec
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Raise Money
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2013 Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Before the Startup
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college s
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Mean People Fail
November 2014 It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few. Meanness isn't rare. In fact, one of the things
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Fatal Pinch
December 2014 Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in the bank, they're also losing a lot each month
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How You Know
December 2014 I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it wo
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
December 2014 If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less likely i
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
December 2014 American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigration people sa
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Don't Talk to Corp Dev
January 2015 Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp dev, that's why, whether you reali
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
January 2015 My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors. He was one of those lucky people who know early on what
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Ronco Principle
January 2015 No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
February 2015 One of the most valuable exercises you can try if you want to understand startups is to look at the most successful companies and explain why they were not as lame as
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Change Your Name
August 2015 If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name. The reason is not just that people can't find you. For companies with
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
August 2015 I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people. I grew up with a cartoon ide
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Default Alive or Default Dead?
October 2015 When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain co
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Write Like You Talk
October 2015 Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A Way to Detect Bias
October 2015 This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing anything about the applicant poo
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Jessica Livingston
November 2015 A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been a "one-man show." It's sadly common to read that sort of thing. But the problem with tha
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Refragmentation
January 2016 One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Economic Inequality
There is also a** shorter version. --> January 2016 Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer.
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Life is Short
January 2016 Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
April 2016 (This is a talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of it will apply to other towns. But not all, because as I say in the talk, Pittsburgh has some impo
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Risk of Discovery
January 2017 Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Charisma / Power
January 2017 People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked. Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have the charisma to disarm. That was
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
General and Surprising
September 2017 The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve. That territory tends to
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
November 2019 Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive inter
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Novelty and Heresy
November 2019 If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy. To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Lesson to Unlearn
December 2019 The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades. When I was in college, a particu
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Fashionable Problems
December 2019 I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Two Kinds of Moderate
December 2019 There are two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose and by accident. Intentional moderates are trimmers, deliberately choosing a position mid-way betwe
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Haters
January 2020 (I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but it applies equally to anyone who becom
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Being a Noob
January 2020 When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true. I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always ta
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Write Usefully
February 2020 What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious:
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Coronavirus and Credibility
April 2020 I recently saw a video of TV journalists and politicians confidently saying that the coronavirus would be no worse than the flu. What struck me about it was not just how
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Orthodox Privilege
July 2020 "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming suc
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Four Quadrants of Conformism
July 2020 One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis run
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Modeling a Wealth Tax
August 2020 Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income and capital gains taxes. Let's try modeling the effects of various levels of wealth tax t
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Early Work
October 2020 One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects g
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Think for Yourself
November 2020 There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to b
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Airbnbs
December 2020 To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. What was special about the Airbnbs was h
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Billionaires Build
December 2020 As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find that two separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually the same. The first is about how
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Earnestness
December 2020 Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them a
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What I Worked On
February 2021 Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed t
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Donate Unrestricted
March 2021 The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations. If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have heard this phrase before. But if you ha
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Write Simply
March 2021 I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engag
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How People Get Rich Now
April 2021 Every year since 1982, Forbes magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty
April 2021 When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty act
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
An NFT That Saves Lives
May 2021 Noora Health, a nonprofit I've supported for years, just launched a new NFT. It has a dramatic name, Save Thousands of Lives, because that's what the proceeds will do. Noo
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Crazy New Ideas
May 2021 There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly. If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded prep
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
A Project of One's Own
June 2021 A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on. This made me as happy
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Work Hard
June 2021 It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Weird Languages
August 2021 When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of progra
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Beyond Smart
October 2021 If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Putting Ideas into Words
February 2022 Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. Th
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Heresy
April 2022 One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy. In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes ab
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Alien Truth
October 2022 If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What You (Want to)* Want
November 2022 Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and the feeling that I could choos
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Need to Read
November 2022 In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes" would load it into
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Get New Ideas
January 2023 (Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Best Essay
March 2024 Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal here is to figure out what the best essay would be like. It would be well-written, but you can write wel
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Start Google
March 2024 (This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do now if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of schools think they should tell students something
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Founder Mode
September 2024 At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they'd ever hear
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Writes and Write-Nots
October 2024 I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write. O
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Origins of Wokeness
January 2025 The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad: A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
What to Do
March 2025 What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big quest
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
The Shape of the Essay Field
June 2025 An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Convert Between Wealth and Income Tax
May 2026 How do you convert between wealth and income tax? If a government imposes a wealth tax of 1%, what's the equivalent in income tax? It's clear from the way most politicians
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Earn a Billion Dollars
June 2026 (This is based on a talk I gave at the Oxford Union.) Since this is apparently the future prime ministers' club, I'm going to tell you about something it would be good if
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Lose Time and Money
July 2010 When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was p
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
Having Kids
December 2019 Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to thin
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19
How to Do Great Work
July 2023 If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly
vyomkesh · essays · Jun 19