Philip Winter

The art of the incredibly well-researched yet still concise cold email is one that 99.9% of people still have not grasped. It is one of the most powerful skills you can learn.

A lot of founders reach out and ask - is @ycombinator worth it? 363 days now from our W23 demo day my confident answer is - yes, it is. In my opinion YC has the best IP in the world on early stage company building. There is no institution that has played a role in helping more teams go from nothing to something. They’ve distilled that experience into concrete, no bullshit, tactical advice that they dish out at scale. The partners are direct and honest, often to an uncomfortable extent. There’s no letting you off the hook. If things aren’t working, they’ll tell you. If you’re focused on things that don’t matter, they’ll tell you. Someone said building a startup is like throwing yourself off a cliff with parts and trying to build the rocket mid flight. Only you can build the rocket ship. But YC tells you timely stories of how the thousands of startups before you either crashed or found flight before hitting ground. Here’s the advice that helped us most: -> Focus on the 90/10 solution. Figure out the key features that can drive the most value. Then build those. Ship it, fast. -> Get real commitments from real customers. Not ‘I’m’ interested’. Not design partnerships with no real skin in the game. -> Focus on early adopters. Even if your idea is good, most companies won’t work with early stage businesses. Find the ones that will. -> Focus on talking to customers, building. Not talking to investors. The best thing for investors is traction - focus there. It’s not just the advice though. There’s no better way to drive urgency and pace of action and decision making than running the gauntlet of YC with other talented founders with the looming threat of demo day lighting a fire under your behind. Should you worry about the dilution? IMO, no. Startups are pretty binary. Either you build a valuable business or you don’t. If you can substantially shift your odds to being something versus nothing, that’s a good trade. And the support from YC didn’t stop at demo day - we still meet every couple months with Gustaf and it’s always impactful time. Big continued thanks to @gustaf, @dflieb (our visiting partner) and all the @ycombinator partners for their support. To the founders in the W24 batch presenting tomorrow - go crush! 💪

Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products “If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful, and Stripe doesn’t embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I’ll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, the world’s just uglier than it needs to be… One can do things well or poorly, and beauty is not a rivalrous good.” Patrick believes a commitment to craftsmanship and beauty played an important role in Stripe’s success: “My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things—and for kind of rational reasons because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well it tells you the person who made it really cared… And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.”

The AI thesis from Silicon Valley’s best VC firm.

Life is a joy at 80% fullness, but a nightmare at 100%. Highways stall to a gridlock. Flights get delayed. Workers burnout. People stress out. Efficiency is absolutely worth striving for, but taking it all the way can suck the oxygen out of life.

Madness, @sama builds a custom GPT using private knowledge in just under 4 minutes. Then he goes on to share it. There will be millions of GPTs.